EP88 Bitcoin podcast with @maxtannahill

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

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

Welcome back, everyone. Today's guest is Max Tannehill. I've been wanting to get him on the show for some time. We lurk in a lot of the same telegram groups and we have some friends in common.

It was really cool to actually chat to him in person. It's always different on telegram or things like that. I always sort of struggle to really get to know somebody by text. But yeah, I'm really glad I had him on.

Really great conversation. And yeah, just a proper Bitcoin, a proper bloke. And I really hope you enjoy listening to it. Thank you to my new sponsors, CryptoClokes.com. Really good to have you on board and sponsoring the show.

For anyone who hasn't already checked out their website, go and have a look. They have all sorts on there. A particular favorite of mine is the BlockNet. The BlockNet helps you stamp in your seed words into washers or any sort of metal backups.

A common alchemist has done a really good walkthrough on this, and it's worth checking out. I think you can do it for about $10 or $12 with A2 grade stainless steel. So it's very, very safe.

And yeah, just a great option. Obviously also, they do all of the node cases, a couple that I'm waiting for myself. And you can customize things. You can buy your own spools from there now.

So they're doing all sorts of stuff, and it is well worth checking out. Also, a thank you to Coin Floor UK who have been with me since almost the very beginning of this podcast. They're UK only.

They do dollar cost averaging or pound cost averaging. They're a very good team. I really enjoyed working with them, and they are, I think, the only exchange out there that will actually show they're not re-hypoticating your coins if you're holding them on there.

Like I always say, don't hold your keys on there. Try not to use KYC if you couldn't avoid it, but not everyone's gonna listen. And if you are in the UK and you are gonna use an exchange, you really need to make sure it's a good one.

That's Coin Floor UK. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the show and any questions, feel free to reach out. Hey, Max, can you hear me? - Yeah, how are you? I like Max. - Really well, thank you. Sorry I was a couple of minutes late there.

I was just grabbing myself a tea for a little bit under the weather today. Oh, sorry for myself. - That's interesting, and I don't know if I was a bit kind of a feeling today, so hopefully we'll cheer each other up.

- We will do, we will do. - Awful into a chasm of despair at the world. - No, that's the normal every day. There's a little break from that. - Good stuff. - Yeah, no, it's good to chat to you.

It's good to have you on. I have a feeling we have a lot that we're considering in the same way from what I've seen from previous discussions and the sort of areas that you are lurking are similar to mine, and privacy is obviously something that you care deeply about, and you've got some interesting ideas around it,

so yeah, I was really looking forward to having you on, and great to have you on the show, so welcome. - Thank you very much. No much, I appreciate it. Good to chat, finally. - Where are you joining me from today?

- I'm still based out in Singapore, so I've been out here like 12 years in total now, so obviously originally from East London, kind of Essex way, but been out here a while now, so yeah, it's about 10pm here this time, so it's in the day, but not too bad, and there's a public holiday tomorrow,

so I'm a bit more relaxed than I normally would be, so that's good. - Very nice, and do you miss London at all, or just glad to be out of it? - Yeah, no, I definitely miss it. Yeah, it's funny, there's just certain aspects of it you miss, I think, that kind of hit you on different days, I mean, don't get me wrong,

there are times when I'm kind of glad to be out of it, and you can kind of see what happens on the news, especially with kind of all the lock bands that have been happening in Singapore, as I think felt a bit more reasonable in some ways, although things have gone also to other extremes here, so you kind of go through,

sometimes the grass is greener on the other side, but look, yeah, I've definitely missed, I definitely missed some of the culture, obviously there's a fairly big ex-back unity out here, but yeah, just a miss even like, not that you think it's a pretty big place when you're there, but compared to living in a city state,

you miss it, but you go out for a car, drive and see other areas, and I've grown up, I've always stuck around London, or East London, I only really had interest in the city, but kind of since I've been kind of gone back on holiday, I've gone to see the West Country, been around a bit,

now I'd love to kind of get in a car and drive around there, and of course, here we are stuck, kind of unable to travel anywhere really. - Yeah, it's an odd one, we're sort of looking at going travelling around the UK for the next year or so, and I don't know how possible it's gonna be with everything that's happening at the moment,

we're just sort of playing it by ear, but I wonder what it's like over there in terms of movement, are you restricted in any way, or what's going on? - Oh, so I mean like amongst, I mean, it's kind of, I think we've got what's kind of typical that you see elsewhere, which is kind of some areas where things are kind of quite restricted,

and then the rules feel very strangely applied elsewhere. So I mean, there's no kind of lockdown in terms of areas or anything like that. I mean, last year there was kind of, you know, restaurants, et cetera, were kind of shut, so it was all kind of takeaway, and all that, and that was a pretty kind of depressing time,

obviously, but what's kind of been weird here is the social life is kind of died down quite significantly, and you know, a huge amount of working from home going on, bars kind of closed at 10.30, 'cause obviously at 10.31, people start catching COVID.

Yeah, but like, the major problem, I think, I mean, for a lot of people is, is that a big, you know, everyone's used to kind of being very well connected amongst a region, you know, you can go to Thailand normally, whether it's a city trip like Bangkok or you go to Hong Kong, where you get like a kind of quick beach holiday,

or even like, you know, it's only a few hours to go to Perth, and suddenly, you know, we just can't do that now, and I think there are like, there is the possibility to go out and return, but you know, without having to kind of do what they call a quarantine, you know, two weeks or three weeks now,

locked up in a hotel, but the countries we're allowed to go to don't actually let us in on this residence, whatever. So, yeah, that's kind of the problem we're in now. So it's just very much, you know, once you can get out, you kind of end up being stuck and kind of get back in, which is, you know, a bit of a problem if you've got a job

here and you're living here and you've got other things you want to get done. You know, so that's kind of, you know, really is. And Singapore's fine for living in, but I mean, there's not a huge amount to kind of see in the island or anything, so it's not like somewhere where you can go right on the go and do the equivalent of like,

drive up to Lake District or, you know, go and see a castle kind of around Edinburgh or, you know, go to a, you know, go and have a hike in the mountains and Wales. You know, we've got like a couple of hills, really, and it's the same temperature here as it ever else.

And it's always kind of humid and stuffy and, you know, so you don't really get an awful lot of variation. So I think people are getting on each other's nerves a bit. There's a kind of bit of an undercurrent frustration.

And yeah, people can do it a break, you know, but the other thing is, is like, you know, there's a huge amount of the life here that carries on us but are completely normal. So I mean, like, food halls here where a lot of the locals eat are completely packed.

You don't need to wear masks in there when you're eating. So that's kind of exactly, you know, complete kind of ran number of people. But for some reason that's kind of okay in the social distancing side.

And then, you know, we've also got kind of fairly strict enforcement of wearing masks even outside, which is a bit nuts, obviously you can imagine if that's actually great. - Oh, outside as well.

- Yeah. And that's been the case since like May last year. So I mean, you know, like, yeah. So that's kind of, I think that's the thing that really gets me the most. And you're looking at like 99.99% compliance.

I mean, you know, I regularly walk outside without a mask, obviously, because it's sweaty and disgusting and you can't breathe. It's horrible, but yeah, I mean, you get some pretty glary looks.

Yeah, so it's an absolute bit odd, really. I mean, you don't take a cycle or either I can swim and all that, that's okay. So in that perspective, it feels quite normal. And yeah, it's not all is right with things as well in other aspects.

- It's like self-policing, isn't it? We kind of have the same here in terms of the citizens are doing the policing work for everyone. I mean, you have people who will kick up a fuss about all sorts of different things.

And it's almost like the propaganda has managed to work. It's magic and people are completely fallen for it. And so if you are on that other side and you're not wearing the mask or you're, you know, doing things that you feel you should be allowed to freely, people can get quite funny about it.

It's very odd. - Yeah, I mean, like Singaporeans themselves give themselves a bit of a hard time for being the type to do the self-policing and, you know, the snitch in and all that. But I mean, honestly, I don't think it's anything like you can a majority.

All you need is like a kind of, you know, five to 10%. And already a kind of, you're looking over your shoulder a bit, right? And, you know, it can kind of lead you to some, you know, behavior.

But I think the other thing as well is that it's particularly serious when you're not a citizen here, right? Because, you know, and it's the other big change here in where you feel your freedom's cutting a bit more.

It is if you're in London and whatever, like, I mean, I wouldn't mind, you know, to the same extent, breaking it along or whatever, you know, you can mount back to a police officer wherever it's not too much of a big deal.

And here, you know, it's not even people are very particularly about the fines or even, you know, if I reckon a lot of people be prepared to properly adjust, not in the jail cell to let us abstain, but the property is you lose your work and then you'd be deported and, you know, around the first flight kind of thing.

So that puts in a fair degree of compliance, as you probably imagine. - Wow. And so how does all of what's, well, actually, first question is, can you hear me properly? 'Cause it looks like there might be an issue with my mic and it's showing up as unknown and it's done for you.

- I can hear you. Absolutely fine. So as long as you can hear me, we're all good, yeah. - We're all good, okay. That's fine then. (laughs) So the real question then is, has this shaped the way that you're thinking about things with what's going on around you?

Obviously, you're already a privacy advocate. You are already thinking about this stuff, but it has it adjusted the way that you're doing things or making you sort of extra careful with the way that you're going through it.

- Yeah, definitely. So the kind of the other thing that I didn't really mention, which is actually probably the most egregious and the fact that it runs kind of privacy and rights here is aside from like the mask stuff and the enforcement and social distancing and the ability to, I mean, you have to, I can't remember the name of the law,

but it'd be like something like a public health act, which you could be in breach of if you breach these COVID regulations, right? And aside from that seriousness, we've had a few outbreaks or whatever of COVID.

I mean, you know, I don't quite know the details. I mean, for all we know, it could be just positives on a PCR test, right? But whatever the case is, is, yeah, people see the data and they're reacting to it.

And in Singapore, there's always been a long-term plan of moving towards what they call like a smart nation. And I think as we've both of us have probably realised over the last few years, when anyone says anything like smart something, what they actually mean is surveillance something.

And that's definitely happening here. So like now what we're looking at is like a tracking app. I think it's probably fairly similar to your NHS app, right? With Bluetooth tracking and all that and for kind of contact tracing.

But the crucial difference here is, well, I think it's a crucial difference is that it's also tied in with your National Identifier. And we do have like an ID system and it's far more comprehensive in the UK's.

And so cross-referencing with that. With, as you can probably imagine, stuff like phone record, SIM cards and things like that, where you also can't get hold of those SIM cards without giving out your actual National Identifier.

And you've got a huge amount of kind of your movement. So just complete track. I mean, heavily heavy kind of camera surveillance, very similar to London, there. So that's been pretty significant.

But in terms of actually how I've changed my behavior, I mean, a couple of things. Like I think the other thing that's a sobering aspect here is that there's only so much you can do here, right?

Because what we've seen here and what I think a lot of us would have believed before is, look, if it always gets to you bad, I can just get up and leave. And I think it's been a bit of a learning curve and a few things in that.

Like one, it isn't just easy to get up and leave when you've got family, friends, whatever, hearing jobs, so you can't just do that. And secondly, we've seen pretty much a kind of comprehensive application of these rules to just varying degrees, not a huge amount, but like, you know, as they're not varying that much by jurisdiction.

So whereas I think we all thought that we could, you know, move to other countries if something got particularly bad or another. Now we're actually looking at, well, I could go to the UK, but they're probably rolling out pretty much the same stuff.

I mean, Israel and Singapore, most of my test beds to the west and the way the surveillance is working. So, I mean, really, it's just being a kind of a general journey for me anyway to reduce the kind of amount of tech, services, whatever I use that I think are kind of exploiting me from the information and where I'm not kind of paying

for a service just through my own money. And it's actually, my data I'm giving out says, I've accelerated some of that, I'm using cash far more than I used to, I'm avoiding places where the stringent check-ins and things like that.

And just basically, it's not even because I'm trying to be like anonymous. I mean, just you, it gets quite dystopian and grinding to your day to kind of go in and, you know, checkpoint, checkpoint, checkpoint, type thing.

And you feel, you know, you feel like cattle. And so I actually kind of had to have, have like adapted in that respect, just my insanity. And, you know, when I moved out, I was in like a kind of a one-bed apartment, close to the city.

I moved out from the center of town where things were a lot more of a kind of pressure cooker. You know, it's still busy in Singapore. It's still kind of high-density population. But like I'm now in a larger apartment, more space, just trying to keep away from the crowds and people a lot more, which, you know,

for a city boy like me, it was never what I thought I'd do. - Yeah, but I can understand that you do feel like you are cattle. I've got the feeling here. I'm going through a similar thing and disconnecting from as many, you know, old email addresses and phone numbers and anything that I can.

I'm doing it, I would guarantee a much less technical level than what you were doing, but just I'm doing what I can because I do feel that I'm definitely the product. And I'm not sure what the final plan is here.

But I'll give you an example is like, I don't know how much time you use the services in the UK, but the NHS, I've had, I haven't had to use them very often. One time I needed them a few years ago where mentally things were not good at all for me.

And I was in a quite a bad place and I tried and tried and tried to get help, it took me eight months to get an appointment with somebody to try and help me, to try and just like sit and, you know, try and sort some issues out to eight months of constant nagging, like, no one ever getting back to me,

no one ever helping, just, it was absolutely horrific. And then now they won't fucking leave me alone. All I get is phone calls and texts from my doctor's surgery. Come in, get the jab, come in, get the jab.

I'm thinking, fucking mental, like, I was really unwell before, now I'm fit and healthy. I do not need that shit, stop calling me. But what's scary is even though I'm quite like abrasive, generally, I actually self-censored, like I did it today, I was like, they called me again, I was thinking,

I was just telling fuck off, I don't want your jab, I don't believe I need it, just like go away, stop harassing me. But I didn't, 'cause I thought that'll go as a little mark against my name.

I don't want to be dealing with the nightmare stuff, 'cause not everything is necessarily as it should be in my life always. So I thought, nah, I can't be dealing with that. So I just went, yeah, I don't have a car, contact me later, it's like, what am I doing?

- It's, eh, it can catch you of God. And it's, I think sometimes when you react instantly, right, sometimes that's the truth, reaction, that you've got, it gives you a bit of a glimpse into how you're thinking, and internally yourself.

If that's the first thing you're doing, without the chance to kind of necessarily think a bit more kind of how am I gonna play this? But that is a worrying kind of trend, isn't it, really?

Yeah, I mean, I deal a bit within HS when I was in the UK, nothing kind of on a mental health, or anything else that kind of side, but just on physical injury, it's a fairly serious surgery, I have no younger.

And that was fairly okay, but then I was also quite young and was quiet, didn't really have anything to compare it to. But a big kind of shock for me to the system, was when I actually, my first year in Singapore, I joined a football club here, and got myself injured fairly quickly with a fairly serious hair on the ACL.

And I went to the hospital, whatever, and it's a very different approach here. And it's not, you don't treat these people like a charity, you're effectively a customer. So you go in and the doctor there was a very jovial, big kind of Indian guy that was a sports medicine guy, and he trained even in the NHS and being there,

and it kind of said to me, the big grin, oh, you know, once I'd done my kind of quota at the NHS of operations for that month, I'd, you know, no one did any more work. He said, but I can do this operation for you tonight, if you want.

And he actually had like this kind of mentality of he's going to go hammy, hammy ops and I get done in this month. So I can earn more money. It was quite, you know, quite a shock as a Brit, because it's, we have here, although it's kind of fairly heavily privatized system, it's not like in the US

where you've got that kind of heavily litigious aspect and incredibly expensive healthcare. It's actually fairly reasonably priced. You can get insurance at a reasonable level. And, you know, the, you know, they do work for you a bit better.

And I don't think there's kind of quite a level of support on the mental health side though at all here. And at least I'm kind of on the physical. It's a, yeah, it's a, it's a big difference too to the UK.

And it kind of challenges a lot of most truth that you grow up with that, you know, very much kind of embedded in our culture with what we think is the way to do things. And, you know, the only way we think can work.

And, you know, I think it's very typically in the UK that we've talked to be very grateful with the NHS without really questioning, you know, are we getting value for money on it? - Well, yeah, it's, it's taught as if it's not value for money.

It's literally free. You know, everyone's like, oh my God, the NHS is free. And I do, do you know what free means? Like, that's not free. If you're paying taxes to have it, it's not free, is it?

If the money's coming out of your pockets, it's not free. There is a cost to all of this. And I worked in the NHS for seven years, running dental practice and Botox clinics and part of the surgeries I ran was NHS.

And the level of efficiency is so embarrassing. And the level of corruption is disgusting. I had dentists taking all of the details from everyone who had died recently. And then they were taking all their details and whacking them through as full fools and all this dental work, back dating it, claiming all that money from through the NHS.

And because the person's in the ground, no one's going to check it. They're not going to go and dig them up. And it was happening constantly, absolutely constantly. No one did anything about it.

No one cared. And all these guys are turning up in, you know, Ferraris and everything else. And they're NHS dentists coming to these do's and they're all just laughing about it. And you just think, you fuckers, you know, no one sees this corruption.

And it must happen through every single part of the NHS. - I think the, I think it's kind of become clear to me as well, and especially in the last couple of years as well, and it's going to be especially apparent kind of from now on, given that there's been such a dramatic shift in the way things have done

in the last kind of 18 months or so since COVID hit. But, you know, people do go according to incentives. And, you know, without doubt, I mean, you know, I don't want to go too much kind of onto vaccines and things like that, although on, you know, I don't see a need for me to have myself.

I mean, I wouldn't be, you know, I don't think, for example, that the vaccines are all going to be horrendously dangerous or anything. And I think there's an awful lot of, you know, campaigns, information that will look for anything to justify going against vaccines.

And, you know, spread that as well. We see the opposite, whereas anything that's positive towards it, just because it's a vaccine, it's from, you know, it's endorsed by the government, it must be fine.

But I think, you know, what we've got to see is that there have been some very, very big incentives in the last 18 months to get a product to market, which this is all it is. It's just a product and it is a market.

And very quickly, there's a lot of shareholder value to answer to. And those incentives will produce results and that are not what is kind of being advertised to people. The moment there's almost like a lot of countries were almost on the kind of psychological war footing.

We're all in this together, you know, do this for the kind of sake of the community. You know, even if you're not a risk group yourself, you take the vaccine because, you know, you won't then pass it on someone else.

Regardless of kind of arguing over any, you know, the medical validity of all of that. I don't, I think, you know, it's going to be quite clear that it doesn't have to be, you know, I'm not saying all companies, whatever, but there will be things coming out of the woodwork because things are rushed, because of the incentives in place,

because of trying to meet the procurement and the huge demand that people haven't got what they think they've got, they've bought, you know, and it's always a way, you know, it's not about what you necessarily want to kind of happen from a circle of start, it's what's actually, you know, people financially incentivized to do.

- Yeah, and the propaganda arm is rife. I mean, it's like, it's on every bus stop, it's everywhere. And it's got into the hearts and minds of the public. And that, you know, that's a win really is, you know, I've had people literally say to me, oh, so what, you know, if you didn't take the, if you didn't take the vaccine

and then you went home and saw your grandma and she died, how would you feel? And I was like, well, sad, obviously. Like what, I don't understand what the question is. And it's like, did she have the vaccine?

And they're like, well, let's say for argument's sake, she didn't. I'm like, well, let's say for argument's sake, she did, 'cause they're a vaccine, giving vaccine to everyone of that age.

So if that's the case and then she has the vaccine and it doesn't protect her, then I still feel sad, but I wouldn't feel guilty. And it like goes around in circles in this weird kind of way where you'll try and end and just say, look, at the end of the day, surely I can choose what goes in and out of my body.

Like what surely that is a fundamental right that you should be able to have freedom of movement and that you have sovereignty over your own body and speech and try and take all of it. I just don't like that.

But it doesn't resonate. - No, and I think as well as you see, and I don't know how old you are. But when I look at kind of in here at killing grandma, I mean, I think it's my own grandparents and they're all past now, actually, one pass for her to be recently, but kind of mentally wasn't really there.

So for us, I think most of them, we were concerned, she'd already departed us. But I mean, my grandparents were from the wartime generation and they were made of stern stuff and then generations now.

But when my grandmother was in the home at the end of which she got visited extensively by all the family and we kept in touch and all that. And she also felt that she was also kind of quite, her time had been done.

She had happy, yeah, chef kids, her happy kids, proud of her grandchildren and all that. Her husband had passed a few years earlier. She wasn't interested in surviving our home for survival's sake.

What she wanted was having me, many years she had left was to see her grandkids to see family. And I think there's this huge assumption and again, it all comes down to making choices for other people, is that when we talk about protecting the vulnerable, it's being used in the excuse of tyranny at the moment

because some of these so-called vulnerable people don't necessarily want to be protected and they could be very vulnerable, but they still want to live life with risks that they choose. And that's completely being walked all over.

I think we're sitting on a mental health crisis in multiple countries now in the world with not just older people in homes, but single people in cities that the social life they relied on or the travel they relied on being able to do is just something and cut down.

It's a huge cost, it's really quite frightening. - Yeah, absolutely true. And like you said at the beginning, we always used to think, oh, well, we can just disappear to another country. That doesn't look like that's maybe so realistic now.

So how are you looking at it in terms of if we can't physically move, then I suppose we need to make sure that our digital world is locked down and secure and private as we can because there's only so much we can do in the physical world to protect ourselves.

Do you have any sort of idea of the way things can change and that we can sort of have a little bit of peace and a little bit of privacy, even if it is behind a keyboard? - Yeah, I think I think a big part of it is learning to kind of ignore a lot of the information actually.

And I think prior to this, there was often a lot of advice right to get off Facebook or get off Instagram and these large social media platforms. And obviously we crave these media platforms as well because they provide connections and all that.

And, but I think many of the few things is that, you know, that we need to do, you need to really, I think now more than ever, it becomes clearer which ones are doing you psychologically any good and which ones you're getting any value out of.

I think it should be easier nowadays to just get off like stuff like Facebook. I just don't think there's a good reason to do that. You need to contact family through like video calls or voice calls.

There are just a ton of tools that you can do all of that with without needing to get someone just on their kind of super friendly, large social media thing. I think the other thing as well is, like one of the things I've tried to do as well is that whilst we may lament some of the kind of the lack of privacy

that we get into these tools and all that, we often face right the difficulty of trying to move against stuff with a large network effect. Like what's that recently changed their privacy policy, right?

And, and you know, there's a kind of quite a large push to go on to stuff like Signal or Telegram or kind of other things are a little more, more protective of our privacy.

Personally, one of the things I've done is just be far more ruthless with who I want to chat to. I think I think when, when you're physically in an office or physically in touch with people, I think we actually make more common weaknesses with who we're prepared to spend the time with and deal with.

And actually these not necessarily people that we do. So there's an advantage here with kind of, you know, with the digital world being able to actually have a little more choice there. I think the other thing as well is, is like a major factor here is, and I can't stress it now that it's keeping a sense of humor.

And you, but fundamentally, like we obviously don't want to go to these new platforms that we find that are more privacy-respecting than I are right, because obviously there's no one to chat to.

And there is always a challenge of moving someone off there. I find personally the best way is not to go and tell people, you know, come move to Signal, it's, it's end-to-end encrypted. And, or, you know, it's got, you know, they're very sophisticated because most people don't care.

And I actually in the best way is to, is to relentlessly mock and, and, and show to other people how you're living a more free, more enjoyable life based on essentially different tools and different choices.

You know, when friends do come to you with, you know, frustration that, you know, that their Google account had been deleted or something like that. You know, you know, I've actually had friends kind of with a range of things, you know, that have complained to me about, you know, like, you know, oh, like I'm getting kind of

adverts that are kind of coming through, you know, that are like super invasive. And people are clearing up to it a bit more. And, and actually it's to be, it's to actually show then that you're not bothered and that you're not going to play by other people's rules and you're not going to assume

that everything is pre-ordained and that you have to fit into these large kind of tools. And, and not to push anywhere else into it, but just kind of almost like lead by example. And I find that's kind of, you know, one of the best ways.

And, but it is, it's, how can I say it can be jarring because you can create this little world for yourself. Well, you know, you're speaking to people that are not kind of, you know, sucking up some of the propaganda we're getting now and then you can then take a little walk to the mall

or something or, you know, the tube station or something like that. And then you start hearing the tenoids going with the kind of dystopian, you know, mask up. You know, because of the situation, the worst thing situation, I mean, yeah, it's a supermarket, it's a mall.

It is a, yeah, it's quite, it's quite, quite, it is genuinely very dystopian nowadays in a lot of places. And, but yeah, I mean, yeah, it's, and don't lecture people. I think, you know, some of these genuinely worried and feel like I'm actually not getting a vaccine and yeah, sure go for it. But I think, I think being at ease

with risk and enjoying life where there's risk, I think that's actually a far more powerful message to give people. Yeah, you're right. And the lecturing definitely doesn't work. I know that for sure. And just, I just don't bother anymore. I just just spent the time, like you said, you can be

more picky with who you spend time with, which is something that I've definitely done, sort of cut down on a lot of the interactions that I know are just going to wind me up, because there's just no point, you just think, I've got better stuff to do than just get wound up by this person. So that's

definitely something that I've done. But you know, network effects wise is, is very hard, because there are some people you want to keep in contact with. And it is hard to get them to switch, you know, it's not exactly difficult to download Telegram or download something else and use that. But it does

seem, I think it's because everything's in different sections. So like, you know, you're like, Oh, where did someone message me? Was it Telegram? Was it Instagram? Was it, you know what I mean? It's like, if there was one thing that put them all in one place, it would be a little bit

easier. But yeah, and also like, yeah, the other thing that I found is that I think mentally you get you can actually stress yourself out a little with the online world, because actually, if you get sucked into it a bit, you can actually actually expand that network by quite a large number of

people. I mean, I get DM quite extensively, obviously, because I'm kind of like, you know, present on Telegram groups, obviously, you know, we know each other through like the Bitcoin community. And, and then you kind of find yourself being pinged by people and direct message and tagged and you

get questions, you get people that stuck, you know, anxious out something, you know, people trying to, you know, recover money, they want advice. And, you know, that and you can actually find yourself getting to a point where you're actually quite overwhelmed. And you're actually trying to maintain.

I think, you know, I think it's kind of goes back to that Dunbar number, I think, is it if you heard that one, which is like, yeah, how many people can you track it? I'm sure, right, on a personal level, like online, I'm sure, like, I can give you a breakdown of probably 500 people with a good explanation

of who they are, what the personalities like, where they're located, and, you know, what kind of interactions I've had with them. And that's actually quite overwhelming. And I don't know, you know, and I know that, you know, people that, you know, not even like my position, but people doing like, you know, very

popular podcasts or, you know, some of like a kind of, you know, Matt O'Dell or Lavera or those people, like, those guys have got like, extensive reach, we've got going out. But I didn't make it hit up all the time on Telegram and Twitter and things like that. And, you know, you've also got, you know,

you've got to be able to pull back from that as well, and kind of cut yourself off as well, and make sure you haven't just not physical world. Yeah, because, yeah, it's overwhelming, you kind of find yourself a slave in that respect as well.

Yeah, that's too much. Like, I've said that a few times about people like Matt O'Dell, who have a massive following, and they're sort of helping people with technical stuff. You know, I've reached out a few times, he's helped me with a few bits. He's always got back. And I've always thought like, how the fuck

do you do it? Like, like, like seriously, I mean, I have a podcast. It's tiny. I have like a very small group that that seemed to really enjoy it. And I have some good banter with them. And I enjoy that. But even that is hard to keep on top of it. It does a lot when you're doing other stuff and you're

still working. And and all of that. So someone like that, who's probably got 1000 times or 100,000 times more people listening, how the fuck are they doing it? They must have a little team of elves or something. Yeah, not meant to mention, I'm sure also, you know, the inevitable disappointment

that happens, and the abuse, I'm sure they get at times as well. Like, yeah, you don't even necessarily see that. Yeah, so it's a tough one. But yeah, I mean, I've kind of, I suppose like, I feel I've kind of pulled back off Twitter a bit. I think there's less value in that platform now anyway. I

think it's particularly kind of just a kind of general cryptos become a bit more mainstream, a bit more kind of just everyone's enjoying a bull market. And I feel like love is just pretty cringe. And there's a lot of kind of positive self reinforcement going on. And all that. And actually, I

think personality wise, I kind of like, yeah, I bloody love a bear market. I love, I love the kind of solidarity and in difficult circumstances. I think it brings out kind of harder characters, people that are a bit more robust. And also, I think, you know, it sharpens people's skills a bit more in

terms of thinking a bit more adversarially. I mean, when I first really got into Bitcoin, felt to me like a kind of quite late come up, but I mean, really like, I suppose, 2009, wasn't it?

25th. Yeah, like, so yeah, I felt really like late the party then. And but and of course, you know, there's like, there's a lot happening around 2017, obviously. And that was a kind of very interesting time to see because you things are splitting off into factions a little more and all that. And but I think kind

of recently, like it's and you know, people arrested on their laurels a bit. And you know, especially what we kind of see now, you know, it's a far more kind of, you know, there's this kind of savings narrative that's popped in, you know, people are kind of treating it a little more, you know, like a kind of

investment. And it's, you know, it hasn't got kind of quite become of the anarchist libertarian edge that it had. When I was first involved. And you know, I think that's, you know, from that perspective, I think we've, the communities that I want to involve myself in, have found their own place now. And

I think, you know, there's, you know, chat groups, whatever, there's a bit of medium for that. And there's also not the same tracing of stuff like retweets and likes and things of that. So you get a more kind of, you know, people less chasing clout. It's more about, you know, quality of chat

conversation and actually trying to get things done. Yeah, I like that. It is difficult with the sort of new comers coming in and people who are not aligned in terms of, you know, sort of what they think this network can do. And I'm sort of somewhere in the middle because I have friends in

both camps. And I sort of came in very much for the money and this is an investment and everything else. And now it's much, much more than that to me. I still understand that this is most probably going to be worth a lot more money. And you know, I get that and that, you know, that is exciting. That is

helpful. It will probably change my life to some extent, give me a bit more freedom and a bit more time, which is, you know, that's fucking awesome. But at the same time, I very much worry about the sort of full KY seeing of everyone, everyone getting really excited about institutional investment, and like, all you

ever hear is, Oh, this company's got in this company's got in it's like, yeah, that is brilliant. And I am excited, but they're all gonna they're not gonna self custody. It's all KY seed stuff. It's all going into the hands of these big corporations. And to me, the exciting bit is when I see

plebs get the hands on something like just a normal person who's just like, do you know what, fuck all this? I want to have like, want to store my value in something else. I want a different network. I want, you know, a completely different system than what I've got. And I don't know, there's, there

seems to be a lot of battle between these two groups. And there shouldn't be really because I just think it's more valuable if it's private. Like, if you don't care about anything, even if you all you care about is number go up, then you should still see that, well, this isn't as useful and

helpful and not as many people are going to want this if it's all trackable. And so I just, I don't understand why, why people aren't getting that. It's a very weird thing to me. I think it's a lot to do with not being able to see several steps ahead in the game. So how can I put it is is that I

think it's like, in fairness to people that are newer to the whole building. And you know, you go in and you might have an idea or you'll see a service wallet or whatever it is or a new coin or whatever even, right? And you know, you see, you see something, it looked great. And then what you actually often

find is this kind of like a, you know, the naysayer type in the corner saying, well, you know, trouble with that is this. And I think one of the things I've seen happen is is that like how I put it is that it kind of comes back to an earlier point about kind of the incentives mattering as well, is

is that if anything, if you come and take a shortcut in the list, I think especially the case of Bitcoin and Ivan, these is that what can go wrong? Like, we'll go wrong and in quite a big way. And, you know, one of the things I've kind of been painless to explain as well is just kind of like the journey

that I've got, like, that I've gone through. And I mean, you know, I had, you know, when I actually when I first came, we had first got involved with Bitcoin, I mean, I was very much from a traditional financial services background. And so I'd seen, you know, this is a kind of era of blockchain, not

Bitcoin. And I was never convinced by that I was still kind of politically interested in what Bitcoin could achieve and all that. But I was also wondering, like, well, you know, maybe this kind of these cryptographic tools, kind of applications elsewhere, you know, would it work in, say,

security settlement, things of that. One of the things I looked at was doing even a custodial service at the time for allowing folk to use Bitcoin network, but hedge to alternative currencies.

And, you know, long story short, but I had money on Bitfinex. And when they got hacked, I took like a 36% haircut, along with all the other people who had money. And I'd been warned, you know, about that being a risk. And you kind of don't think it's going to be a big deal until it until it happens. Right.

And I think kind of one of the things that we're seeing now, which is a far more subtle thing, but like one of the things we seem with lightning is that you've got this very interesting tool, and it's actually a very effective tool. But there's the way it's being sold, not necessarily even by the lightning

protocol developers, you know, this is not to kind of point them out. But people that just, you know, tech orbiters, right, they're ones that just enjoy following on B tweet and they're getting kind of excited by kind of new things coming out, right?

But you've got to look at like, what does, you know, like, what, what, what problem is it really solving? And when, when you're building tools that aren't actually built with an adversarial nature right from the beginning, you know, and if you're building something that's kind of custodial, you know,

anything can go wrong, will go wrong. And like, that's what what, you know, what I've seen just just happened time and time again, you want to take a shortcut with like, and the wallets, or, you know, you want to take kind of personally identified information to make your job easier, then that's

going to be the thing that's going to be the kind of the end of it here. And I think what we're going to see here, right, is that if you go try and like, you know, oh, we're only doing a bit of a KYC, your service, something like that, then you're going to find that that Bitcoin product, the launching starts

resembling a lot like the traditional financial services that we made before, which then brings you back to the point of, so why are we doing Bitcoin again? And a lot of the time that comes back to, well, well, you know, it's new monetary policy, it's 21 million, you know, it's a, you know, sound

on that, but it's not valuable because there's only 21 million of them. It's valuable because you can do the censorship resistant transfer, that's still the core value proposition. So the moment that kind of disappears from it, then you just left with like 21 million baseball cards that are virtual.

So, you know, it's just not the same value. Yeah, I agree. And it also, you know, if you have, you say, Oh, well, I only have the only have 21 million coins. It's like, well, if we go back to a traditional type system and it's rehypothecated, then do you actually know that you have 21

million? Or do you actually have a fractionary reserve system built on top of something that should be sound? But everyone's just having little IOU tokens passed around? Then what's the fucking point? Like, it's just, it really annoys me because there is a system that can actually create freedom. And it

can make changes that are really profound. And people are fucking around with old ways of doing things and NFTs and all this bullshit. And it's like, I know it's hard. Like it, it is hard to use the tools properly. But it's so worth it. And then you get this other sort of in between, which is like the

maximalist ideals, which I only hold Bitcoin. It's the only thing I'm personally interested in. But I'm also open to the other things like, you know, if we can do atomic swaps, if we can have other layers, if we can do whatever, I don't care what it is, I just want to be able to have more privacy and use tools

that are useful. And so, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the arguments where people are pushing back about things like that, I just think you're sort of pushing in the wrong direction, it shouldn't be pushing against things that can give you more privacy and allow you to use this network, it

should be against the KYC and it should be against the sort of normy world, the suits, or just like lurking into this, because it's, it's not a place for them. Yeah, I think I think it becomes clearer when you start using these things kind of in action, right? And I don't even mean

just kind of doing it as a trial trial for kind of once off. I mean, I think I saw her in Twitter recently, there was someone fairly big account that basically said they're super hyped about lightning. Oh, you know, gonna get this rolled out amongst our kind of your company, absolutely super hyped

about it. And actually, funny enough, just two days ago, I went and opened my first lightning channel in about six months. So I have a LND node that basically never really gets used anymore. But I thought, while fees are low, I'm gonna go and set it up. And I actually did it because someone had PM me

with a tool that enabled you to switch lightning direct into Monero using like an API of a quick kind of swap exchange, but it was actually like a no JavaScript browser. So it was kind of, it was a kind of front end or whatever. So I thought, okay, well, I'll give it a shot. I haven't got your light

channels sorted out. And it's kind of interesting, because like in just the last couple of days, right, there's also been quite a good article written about all the kind of privacy issues with lightning as well. And so it's kind of quite interesting because although some of those, some of what I saw in that

article resonated me, there's actually quite a few things that I didn't know. And but also some things that I also felt that they didn't actually spend enough time on, but we can kind of come to that later. But yeah, so I kind of set up these channels and, you know, sort of set a channel to do the payment

and overall, it's actually quite a hassle. You know, one of the things that you kind of realize with lightning is is that, you know, if you just get demoed it, for example, it looks good, you can look quite impressive. You know, you can see a potential potentially some of the wallets have got kind

of quite a nice shiny UI. And you can do a payment and you can be, you can, you can essentially show to someone, look, done a payment, it's only a few sets, it's really cheap. And it was instantaneous. And of course, we all know with Bitcoin is is the, you know, average 10 minute block times, quite

slow, you've got the frustrations dealing with a memo. And you can obviously, we've all had periods when the fee rates get quite high. So you're really basically saying to someone, hey, look, you know, you've got something that actually just alleviates to those issues there. And also

there's some obfuscation with the amounts. So it's actually a great thing to kind of demo and give someone an impression that it's sold a lot of the problems. But what I think is interesting is actually when you start using it to do something, and it can be as simple as, you know, try to

operate a shop and actually do it as a merchant, or even just as a retail individual, trying to use this stuff day to day. And then you find actually the real difficulty of using this stuff. And we're not going into kind of a huge level of detail, but something like lightning, just going to use

onto this for a start, you're always coming from the main chain, pretty much from the get go. So it's not like you can kind of fully forget what it's like to do with Bitcoin. Anyway, because you've got to move funds into a certain place, and have it and, you know, in a position anyway, so you've got to

set stuff up anyway. So you're still not away from all the problems of doing with Bitcoin as it is, because that's where that's your starting point. But the other thing is, is that you've actually got to like actually navigate opening channels. And then if you want to receive money, you've actually

got to actually find someone to open channel back up to you. So right from the get go, you're actually in a world where you're actually asking permission. You've now got particular nodes where their quality of routing is being graded. It's kind of far more kind of centralized. But also the other aspect of

lightning is that the whole thing is, I think one of the best explanations I saw was a bit like using an advocacy and kind of switching beads from one side of another to kind of show where it's like to kind of pay pay amounts of money through a lightning channel. But one of the things that I personally found

right is is that they have to serve a channel saying, let's say between me and you, that sounds great. You know, if you want to pay me some money, you pay and you know, we don't actually have to set one chain and I want to pay you. But in real life, personally, I don't have anyone I deal with that I do that kind

of payment mechanism with. I get paid by one entity, and then I go and I go and, you know, go to maybe a supermarket, and I go to a bar, I go a few restaurants, and they're all the people that I pay. So I've got multiple errors where my money flows out, and one place where I only comes in, and then maybe

I do save on a monthly basis. So you're already looking at this kind of idea that, yeah, you can maybe manage a few payments, but you're actually going to get to a point where all your channels end up with liquidity all on one side, and then you're going to have to go back through and rebalance them. Now,

sure, you could obviously do a number of payments that you know, more than you could with being Bitcoin. But of course, we also know that Bitcoin's highly volatile people are actually managing how much money they're going to keep in Bitcoin potentially, the managing effects rate movements

for that. So what you actually find is you've actually got quite a lot of management of that liquidity to do. Now, that's not something that people like me and you do or will do on a day to day basis. Sure, maybe some software tools will come up and, and, you know, solve those problems for us. But

certainly not the case at the moment. But the kind of entities that do do that are middlemen, you know, and actually, like, that's kind of who I think is going to be the biggest beneficial benefit of something like lightning. They're the people who use it. It's going to be someone like

exchanges. Sure, at the moment, like people are shilling alternative tools, like liquid or wrapped bitcoins and something like that, where you're kind of using a side chain or something like that. But actually, I mean, if you actually look at what lightning is really useful for, it's

useful for managing counterparty risk. And the way I see it is those are the type of entities that will adopt technology like that, because it actually solves a problem that they're trying to do. And whereas when you start using these tools to do your kind of daily, daily purchases and receive money,

lining for me anyway, for a person who says it falls flat in that respect. So that's where I found, I think, where you're seeing as well with the adoption in kind of gray and I kind of, you know, the Xamarin team point is now in darknet markets, where you're seeing like useful currencies like

Monero. And people using those just because essentially, it's actually more akin to how they operate on a day to day basis. So it's kind of, I think that's kind of what's interesting here is, is that now they're kind of what you start off with your initial opinion on what tool seems to be writing for

job. What's actually interesting is when you actually start really using it to achieve something, you very quickly end up with the right tool for the job just through, just from actually working with it.

And do you think the use of Monero on most darknet markets now is mainly because of privacy reasons? Or is it also, do you think because of fee pressure? Because I've not, I've owned Monero before years and years ago, I tried running a Monero demon or whatever it was called, fucks it up, couldn't

get it to work standard, standard thing for me. And so I've never really used it, but a few friends do. And I'm sure they've said the fees are very low. Yeah, so there's been, there's been quite a lot of scaling work on that. So I mean, so I think I've been using Monero since about 2070. So I mean, I was always interested in it from the

early days, just because, because of the kind of privacy focus. And, but for me, back then, right, a lot of the criticisms in Monero were that like, they were very large transactions. And it was expensive even then, actually, funny, fees were actually read to be high. And, and, you know,

I feel correctly, actually, because the old kind of, I think what they're called the range proofs, which would be for the bullet proof upgrade in terms of the cryptography that has been done and changed. So, and then what I kind of noticed personally was that things improve quite significantly with the core

development team, with the, with the rapid changes they were putting out. And whereas Bitcoin was saying, understandably, and from a conservative project, and the guys on the Monero core team were, were putting more out, I think they're usability wise. And it wasn't just the fees. It's also is that

when a usability perspective, it's, you know, we didn't have necessarily have all the tools that we have now in Bitcoin for privacy. And even now, there's actually still like so much more to do, really, to kind of to feel that you're doing what's required if you want to kind of maintain transactional privacy.

But to put it this way is that, you know, people used to have an account number, right? And then to receive money out and then to give that out. And then you just pay money, you don't have to think about how you mentioned coins. And you don't have to think about labeling or anything like that. So I think the

usability perspective of the Monero is also significant there. You've got that reusable payment code, the address that you can give out that generates self addresses. So you don't have to worry about address reuse. You don't have to worry about where your coins are coming from. You don't have to worry about

actually mixing. You don't have to apply full processes too much to what you're doing there. And then when you pay someone, you know, you've got a relatively kind of fast feedback mechanism with shorter block times, you know, this is a site more the other trade us that there are in Monero. So you know, there's

obviously a lot else. But yeah, I think that is, I think that is going to definitely be on the increase, you know, clearly, I've got no idea on price. This is not a prediction there. But I'm just talking about use. And I don't think it's just going to be on the darknet markets. I think it's going to be more

common as well. And even what I've seen now, and it's not just in my own experience, but actually, if you look at kind of some of the evening kind of like gift card businesses and things like that, Monero's kind of gone higher on use in those type of businesses in terms of what people are willing to pay.

I've seen it on my shop. And I've seen, you know, people more willing to use it, especially when there's like high fee environment. So people that just don't have the capacity to do the work required on Bitcoin to maintain the transactions privately. And so I think, I think one thing I said recently

is, and I'm gonna be careful the way I say is because it's got terrible connotations. But for me, it's become like a Bitcoin layer too. And I'm not suggesting that it is a layer to because I think that's going to be incredibly politically loaded terms. Because it's, it's, yeah, lots of claims to that as a

layer. Because it's obviously a freely floating token, you know, who knows about its monetary property strength, and all that. But the point is, is that if you take it back as a user, which is how I think how do you know, if I don't mind dealing with something like Bitcoin moving larger amounts. And personally,

I'm going to put more of my wealth in something like Bitcoin than I would Monero, because I'm more tried, tested, doesn't have the same volatility. And it's a more conservative protocol, just in terms of kind of luxury safety, and assurances that come from it. But in terms of like, if I'm

going to do smaller payments, I'm going to do payments where I expect a kind of grade degree of privacy, it becomes a bit more like an extra fees and term. It's a bit like silver to gold in that respect. And that's got a horrendous connotation to this scan that is like when, which is just the

laziest kind of fork of Bitcoin there is, because I mean, that's the thing is, you know, whenever it is, it's a different code base. But I think that's what I find genuinely interesting is because these, you know, I think there's a, you know, like, I've never really been into the kind of what's called kind of

maximalism, just because there's, there's, there's so many different trade offs, right? You can think, yes, that things are kind of quite scammy or whatever. But for me, any way is is that, if you're taking like a tech step back, you're taking like a, like Bitcoin using like Bitcoin cash or Bitcoin gold

or something, you just take Bitcoin and just a few parameters and mainly mining algorithm, then pretty much the externality costs of maintaining that blockchain are affected the same as Bitcoin. And that thing is destined to die, you know, not really, like, it's just going to fall back. But if you've got

something that's entirely like a different code base and in case something like Manero, I mean, presently at the moment is asic resistant. And you've actually got something that people can fairly permissionlessly in an egalitarian way, actually get hold of some coins in a way that they can't do something like

Bitcoin. So whether the how long that maintains, who knows, but the point is at the moment, people will use that tool because it offers something that isn't being offered by Bitcoin the moment. And I think for me, I find that interesting. And I'm also interested in stuff I can use right now. And tools I can

use right now to do what I do, because I'm not really that interested, you know, much more than, you know, six months a year to the future, in terms of what potential developments there are, because I've been long enough in Bitcoin to hear all sorts of promises and expectations of certain tools

for them when you actually see them in real life, actually turn out nothing quite what they're advertised with. Like a blind date that goes wrong. It very much so. Yeah. I mean, this is the other thing as well. I mean, there's some really great stuff in theory, right? But even if on the code base and from that perspective,

it sounds great. By the time it's actually implemented in code, if you work in software development, that's an unexpected thing. That's actually implemented. It's entirely different, you know, based at that point. And I think, you know, you can you can really kind of set yourself up for some disappointment.

Yeah, definitely. And let me say use what we have now. I mean, I now have just got to the point where all my sats are well pulled. They've all been through at least once, because I'm never going to send it to an exchange again anyway. So fuck all that. And it makes me feel a little bit more

comfortable knowing that they've been through. But if there was something where I needed to make a payment, and I did want it to be as private as possible. And if there is some atomic swap, and you swap into something like Monero to make that payment more private, I don't see the issue with it

because, look, I mean, when I've suggested that I would look into it, I had loads of people in the comments like, oh, yeah, buy Monero and do, you know, this is this is better than Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah. And I, you know, I'm not interested in that. I'm not really right now interested in spending a load

of time to work out if it's a good investment. I'm very confident on Bitcoin being a good investment. That's where I hope my money. But if I wanted to use Monero, and there was an atomic swap, I can't see the downside other than the volatility, you know, when you actually do the swap into that,

if you if you had some sort of volatility, it could be an issue. But I kind of see what you're saying about it's kind of like a layer two, but it's not a layer two, because if you're going to, from my understanding of something like liquid, you're pegging into liquid, which then gives you another token, which

is basically, you know, like, sap a sap. So you don't have the volatility risk, but then you have other risks, you have other risks there, or you potentially could have other risks there. So did I?

Yeah, so the interesting thing with liquid is like, without rehashing some of the stuff I've said kind of on Twitter, and because it's actually kind of really no need to, obviously, the criticisms of it being what I see is largely a custodial system, which some people would disagree quite extensively.

The other thing that I think is an interesting thing that when we look at kind of adoption of these tools, for example, and is a lot of people draw parallels and allegorical kind of type things. It's not very articulate, but how can I put it is, put it this way, right? And we hear a lot that Bitcoin is

money, you know, and therefore, you know, it's going to be a really, you know, things edge towards kind of one form of money, the central, yeah, people who look for a single unit, the count, all that. But Bitcoin isn't just money, it has, you can be used as money, but it isn't money, it's a, it's a, it's

software, and it actually an open source software project, maintained by fallible people, and voluntarily running it. And the other thing that it is, is, and a lot of people try and pretend it isn't, is it's a payment network. Now, when we talk about stuff like money, and this is actually kind of

worth thinking about now, is is that there isn't just about the store of value, but it's also the media exchange. And there's a lot of criticism that's on the light Roger there back in a few years ago, when he wanted like Bitcoin to be kind of almost used like a PayPal 2.0, I think you've said, which was

kind of famously kind of, you know, hold back at him as a kind of really big criticism. And he was wrong in a lot of ways, obviously, because, you know, if it just, you know, it wasn't, you couldn't obviously scale blockchains to be a level that could process transactions, and that's like these or something

like that. But one thing he was right on, in that respect, well, I don't know if he was right on, but I think one thing that it highlights is, is that there is a network effect anyway to payment mechanisms. And we see that in real life. Now, if we go abroad, for example, I'm sure this might have happened to you, well, not

recently recently, but prior to all the COVID stuff, is that you may be in a position where you're in another country and you don't have a local currency in your pocket. There's actually not an issue because you've got a visa or a mastercard or something in that pocket. Because the actual network effect of that payment

mechanism is so large, is it actually like it's used for itself. Now, the interesting thing about Bitcoin is, is that you're being presented with a Bitcoin address, and like a carcute, in the form of a QR code or similar, right? And in a certain type of market, whether it's like an online market or

grey or a darknet market, those are those are real physical integration points you have to deal with. So one of the things that's always going to be against it, liquid, is that they've actually got to get network effect. So if you're going to use it for actually kind of wanting privacy, say, you're going to

think, well, what am I using for privacy from or who, you know, am I going to be able to use it for spending privately? Well, probably not, because there's pretty much no uptake of liquid at a merchant point of sale. Maybe you could use it as they often as the people that the proponents say, or you can

use it for arbitrage, you can privately move between exchanges. Well, you can do that with Bitfinex. Don't know who else. There's, I think there's a Hong Kong exchange, but anything you do at Kraken, you can't do it with Binance, you can't do it with FTX. You can't do it with OKX, I think. So not really

going to be much use. So you actually need that network effect, right? And I think one of the interesting things, you know, with the Monero, for example, is they've already beaten Bitcoin in a lot of darknet markets already as becoming the de facto payment network. So even if people are storing

Bitcoin, holding Bitcoin, and that's, you know, it's saying not suggesting it's going to fall away because it doesn't maintain the dominant network, payment network effect. The payment network effect is important as well. It shouldn't be overlooked when you're looking at adoption and use of these currencies as well.

Do you see any chance of this changing? I mean, you mentioned your shop, you offer both, you offer payments in both. Do you think that this is going to happen possibly on darknet markets at any point? Or do you feel now that that battle has lost? Because it's a big importance in the narrows already

on the way to winning on the darknet markets. It sounds like it's one from everyone that I've spoken to. So I think, I mean, the last I heard is I think on the Russian deck darknet market, they're far more Bitcoin focused. And I don't think they cut these kind of quite the need because they've kind of

got quite the same degree of fear on and off ramps. So the pseudo-animity of Bitcoin is not such a big deal. Plus potentially Bitcoin has got such a large network effect. And I think here in terms of like on the merchants, I think it's going to be an interesting one. And because I think even the

kind of the people that are very keen with Bitcoin and, you know, obviously want to store it as a whole value, they're also worried about exposing their stack when they're going to spend a shop or something like that. I think some of them, I mean, you know, we've heard in kind of podcasts before, some

of them are even spending from exchanges to hide their stack, because they're worried about people who block view through their blockchain analytics. I think if, you know, and I think, you know, Monera will go on the app. And from that perspective, I think, you know, I think a lot will depend,

though, in the kind of the clear net type markets, you know, like shops like mine, that there's a clear legal entity behind it, a lot of that will be affected by what requirements made on people I need to KYCL customers. So at the moment, right, like it's only really on the exchange front, or I think

this is starting to change now. And it may be that when you sell products, the same way that you receive a deposit, you're actually going to find out where that money comes from, but you want to find out who that person is. So I think that what you could actually find, and this is from these kind of

interests, is if I'm in the position where I'm maintaining an online store selling privacy phones, for Bitcoin and Arrow, but I've actually got a KYC, let's say I'm forced to do that KYC to people, then I'm not going to, there's no point in me, personally picking up Bitcoin or Monera, I mean, quite frankly,

it's probably not an awful lot of point doing my shop at that point, you know, you feel that, you know, like, why, why have a private currency, I've got to go and go and like get a load of invasive information of those individuals. Sure, it's not exactly the same, but it's, yeah, it's not saying vain, right?

And I think what will happen then is if you, if it gets too tough, I mean, aside from the novelty factor, what you'll find is it's just easy to use, like a PayPal, a Red for Loop or Wyze or something like that. And then actually, you just find the use of cryptocurrency, like an Arrow Bitcoin actually moves

in further into market types, because it only becomes worth accepting of the hydro currency, we kind of almost come full circle when you're not doing all the other, you know, the other kind of the activities, because otherwise we just recreate the banking system. So I do think that kind of sanity will see its

way through in the end. I think we are in a bit of a transitionary period, where people are kind of both doing a bit of compliance and a bit of non-state money. I think it's going to get in a position where you're just going to go, you know what, I'm going to do one other.

Yeah, well, it's still hard. Like people will get annoyed with me saying that, but I'll fucking know it's not that hard to to use privacy software. It's not that fucking difficult. Well, it is. I find it difficult. I have spent, I've probably spent and this is not an exaggeration, about 150 to 200 hours fucking

around with nodes going down, world pool going down, having to reflash it all. Then my balance doesn't show and I'm shitting myself because I've put too much in because I'm trying to save on the fees and all that stuff. You know, just constantly, I've only just got my world pool up and running again now after it was

down for a couple of weeks, such as downtime to fix it. And like, it works. It's really fucking good when it works. And I'm really, really grateful that we have it. But I am not going to be able to teach this to anyone who I've got into Bitcoin. I've tried. They don't care. And the first time that something goes down, first

time it's something great is to go fuck this, I'm not doing any more. And that's just the truth at the moment. And so, you know, I do think things will improve, but I can understand why people can't be bothered. It is a lot of work.

I agree. I think one of the things that I suppose that comes out of all of this is that the positive way of looking at this is that there's an awful lot of opportunity for services to spring up in the middle here and solve that. And I know, I don't know if this is exactly your last podcast, but the one with

Divertor on it, right? He was talking about you host and all that. And, you know, because that obviously comes from why you know host, but I think yes. And so about a week or two weeks ago, my, you know, host became, you know, work. And I was raging, like, they just stopped work like I couldn't log

into it in the same way before. Like so my master's on server that I set up went down. So my little kind of way of doing independent Twitter, my next cloud went down the backups that I hadn't really worked that well, they didn't seem to kind of work. And, and yeah, it's enormously frustrating, because

you don't really want to spend the time being like a sys admin for all your stuff. But what I will say is, is that I haven't kind of worked out exactly what I want to do. Yeah, I could obviously just restore and, you know, I'm now far better five years later than I was a few years ago, about going through

redoing a server and being up, I'd probably be up and running in no time once I get going. Although I can tell you now, one thing that hasn't stopped is my absolute raging temple and stuff does break. And I've still got all of that really laid in there. But one of the things I also discovered is that there

are services out there that doing something similar to, you know, host, but you're paying for them. And they will manage a bit more of the software that goes out. So you still host your server. But you're actually paid them to get your software. And they basically make sure that what you get is a bit more

stable. You've got some support and all that. So I think a lot of this is, I think one of the things that people like us are going to go through, because we're not developers, whatever, it's learning a bit at times, which service you've gone that's a bit more in the old, you know, science project

type aspects. And you know, it may well be just a bit unlikely, you know, I've got a bad update or something like that. And again, thank you for me. It wasn't actually that serious. But I was also considering putting all my contacts and calendar on the next cloud instance that I set up, you know, thank God I didn't.

But you know what I mean? Like, it's, you kind of get this level where you sometimes kind of go, right, I was almost there with that one. Actually, that was a bit too rickety. But you know, now I've done that, I actually see something a bit more similar, but I pay for this service, I'm willing to take a

bit more ownership on this one, because it's more important to me that I manage that and I'm happy to spend the time on that or as a software stack, that's a bit more usable. I think you just got to concentrate on having an end kind of goal of where you're going to be. And, you know, and focusing on that, but

not really worrying too much about how long it takes to get there or how many scurbs you have as long as you've kind of they're all manageable. I think, you know, make sure you have backups of everything, and make sure that, you know, you got off, you know, a backup on a hard drive, you encrypt everything

and you've got, you've got preferably a backup in the cloud as well. And I think once you've got to go that, you know, you can't go too wrong. But it makes you feel better. I spent, I think years trying to move off Gmail, I'm still on it. I've you know, I've got my own domain. So I'm already I've even paid

for premium and proton mail. I haven't still haven't yet quite been ready to pull the trigger. Just because so much my life. Yeah, so much of my life was like, you know, 10, 15 years worth of email, you're always like used to, yeah, used to the ability to go right, something happened on that date, search

Gmail. And of course, one of the things you get with an encrypted email inbox is like, not really the ability to search it. So, you know, I've got like 15 years and emails and PDFs, which I've exported from Gmail using a tool. So I'm kind of almost there.

But yeah, I've been still not quite ready to pull the plug. But I also know that the day I do have to, it'll probably happen when I don't want to do it, I'm forced to. And like, you know, I've got my Google account can sort of something like that. The moment I am forced to do it, I was almost all the way there anyway.

Yeah, it's a step by step approach. And, you know, yes, it's taken all these hours, but but I am moving forward. It just always seems that it's one, one step forward, two steps back does two, you know, two months without having world pool running. I tried, I sat on four or five evenings, separate

evenings, trying to get it working until like three, four in the morning until I just gave up, finally got it working yesterday. I'd got a nice bottle of whiskey, which seemed to do the job and and worked. And then I was like, yes, I fucking got it working. Not exactly how I wanted it. I've got I've got

this GUI, I've got to have the laptop open, even though I've got the node running, I've still got to do that. But it's working. Yes. And then I go to use my specter. And it's like, Oh, none of my wallets are there anymore. And my backup isn't working. And that's the second time that's happened. So

it's you have one little celebration. And then and you think, yeah, you know, I'm a cypherpunk. I'm fucking awesome. I can do all this stuff. And then you go, no, no, I'm a stupid prick. I've got no idea what I'm doing. And it's broken again.

Well, yeah, but are you being stupid or some of that software unreliable? And I mean, like, one thing, one thing, there'll be some things you'll never know. And it could be that it's, you know, like, for example, my, I've actually just the last few weeks just stopped running when I'm in error. No, I had an old

map of care. 10 year old map of care, been running when error for about three years, which is like, lead it on screen logs, thing running in the background. In the last, basically, since the kind of I think the network was getting like DDOS or whatever for a while, it never really was quite

the same. I don't know if the hard drive, you know, databases corrupted or whatever. But I just would come to it and just find it stopped constantly. And if you know, you get to point you're like, right, this is getting ridiculous now. And but then to like, my Bitcoin, I bought hardware for that. And

because I didn't want to just, you know, because I also seen what it was like to try and I remember years ago, I tried running a Raspberry Pi because I've been told on Twitter, you could go on a Bitcoin, no problem with a Raspberry Pi. Like, you can't, not really, not like the old one. Anyway, probably

the latest one you can. But there's a lot of people that tell you you can do something, but they're not actually really trying to do it and use it day in, day out. And there's a lot of tech people, right? But we'll do something you can, they're not like us. They'll go and set something up for hours, I spend

all their evenings and I sit up and I get it working, I'll do one transaction, whatever, brilliant, done that. Now I'm going to wipe the system and start again, losing different now. Like me and you, we don't want that. We want like, you know, right, done it. I'm not going to look at it anymore. I

don't want to think with it. I don't want to find the three o'clock in the morning and stop working. I mean, running and all that. Whereas, and we get quite, I think we get a different experience out of it. So, you know, I definitely did trispector. I'm using Sparrow wallet a bit for my desktop

knees, although I actually, even then, not because it's the fault of the guy of the Sparrow wallet dev. But actually, I could never connect it to the Electrum server. And it was terrible for sinking. Turns out there's actually a lot of bugs in that particular Electrum server that I'm running. So

actually, pretty much all the time I'm using Samurai. So it's kind of, it's a bit like, you know, it's a bit like, you know, how does put it? It's a bit, you know, there's a difference between looking at specifications of something like you could be an absolute aviation geek, for example, look at

kind of specifications on how fast a plane can run and do a yoga or so fly and, you know, how many Gs it can pull or whatever. And, you know, you know, that all various statistics and what the range of it is like kind of top trumps. There's another thing for actually a pilot of said plate. And I think

that's where, you know, you've got to be kind of ruthless with if something's not that reliable discard move on to next thing, maybe you can't get exactly what you wanted to, you know, I don't be multi-segan, you know, I did that for a while. I've got five hardware wallets lying around. I don't

need any of them now. Just yeah, practice and discard. Yeah, massively so. And again, especially if you want friends and family to ever access your stash as well. Like, there's just no point doing a lot of the clever stuff. I think so. It's just frustrating when, you know, like I'd, I'd gone through and

then labeled everything. I was like, right, I'll label everything. So I can't, so I can't fuck up. I was like, you know, really specific, like these coins came from here, then they went through Whirlpool, they've had, you know, five mixes, blah, blah, blah, and I had them on the different

wallets and it was like, okay, I know where I've been and I know where I stand now. And then today, I'm like, except that you don't because nothing is fucking safe and you can't access anything and you're gonna have to start from scratch. So it's just one of those things you have to have to accept and that

there are these trade offs. But it is frustrating. I do understand why people give up on it. But at the same time, it's it's worth the hassle because otherwise we're fucked, you know. Yeah, I think I think the other thing, like I'm kind of going back to one of things I said earlier about like, you

know, you got to mock your normal friends and some of this kind of stuff as well. Like, I'm literally, I haven't made that's funny enough, he's a bit of a Google Pixel fan. And, you know, as in like, not putting any kind of Google or SoS on it, he just liked the pixels. And he was telling me like two or

three years ago, I said, great, we buy these, you got to give you limitless storage. I was like, yeah, not really sure if I want my stuff on Google servers, that was kind of my thing. Might want to be careful that. No, it's fine. Mate, they're not gonna go anywhere. They're not gonna go anywhere. That was kind

of what I was told. And then like, you know, about a few months ago, they introduced their limit. And now he's got to pay a load of money every month. And of course, he's got everything trapped on that cloud where it actually quite a lot of bandwidth to even get all these photos off. And he doesn't know where he's

going to put it. Because he's, you know, the guys who've probably forgotten how to use, you know, a hard drive and back up a hard drive, all that, he's had the convenience of Google photos and all that. Meanwhile, he's wondering about, you know, how Google can kind of, you know, send him incredible adverts. It's

like, well, you basically give all your holiday photos and, you know, the photos from, you know, lunch time and brunches and, and, you know, dinners with your girlfriend. They've got all that.

They've kind of, you know, since I saw all that information, they've got profile on you. So now he's kind of quite trapped. And I think that's the other thing is that no matter how much frustrated you feel with your own software setup and some of the tools that we're using, which you've got to remember really

quite cutting edge at the moment. Especially when we're talking about privacy software in Bitcoin, this is not stuff made from that is just take a look at like what your mates are using as defaults when they're logging in. And I think that's the thing as well is that they're that much more exposed, right? You know, they

lose a password or something or, you know, they get hacked. And that one password they probably use for everything else. You know, they're, they're suddenly, you know, they can walk through life being absolutely fine and a lot of things and everything crashes down.

Whereas hopefully for us, you know, one disaster like that where one service gets compromised, we're all right. You know, if your bank gets hacked into, yeah, sure it's inconvenient. But it's not like you then got to go back and beg the bank for your entire life savings now. Because you're not keeping all your money with

them. You know, you're not keeping all your data with one person. Yeah, that kind of thing. I think, you know, that's really, you've got to remind yourself not to overdo it and stress yourself out with it. But at the same time, not to get too lazy and just feel like you're in control. Hmm. Have you found that people

with with your site? It's Mamushi, isn't it? Mamushi? Yeah. Have you found that sort of you've been able to get your normal friends to consider getting one of these devices? Oh, absolutely not.

No, no, not remotely. No. And the the reaction has been an old Mac, so here you run a PEDO phone website. That's that's that's that's the attitude. That's coming there, isn't it? Yeah, it's I won't. The other reaction I had from one former colleague is initially the last message I had from a very old year ago is like,

what the fuck are you doing? Like, you're trying to get yourself arrested? What does that make? I mean, I know Singapore is a little strict in the few things, but there's nothing like, you know, like, they're security software sold in this country, like, I mean, you know, it's not illegal to encrypt your stuff, but like, we are looking at

a mass surrender psychologically amongst a significant chunk of the population. I mean, these are not like, these guys that, you know, are not like, I mean, they're not stupid and they're not, um, uh, the fairly arrogant, actually, in some cases, I mean, they walk around here

like they own the place and they're in kind of, you know, management positions, typing, you know, quite, you know, what you call reputable firms. And, and it's quite scary how much that the, this kind of wished self-compliant and all that. So no, not at all like, and, and I mean,

I've not even tried to sell it to them as well, but then what I will do though is, you know, when, as I kind of say, you know, when, when one of them gets greeted with something they hate on their phone or that, you know, why is this happening? It's like, oh, I don't get any of that.

And, oh, you know, like, how come you can listen to the Joe Rogan podcast without the adverts? Oh, you know, I use this RFS reader, just streams for, um, yeah. Oh, why have I got like this band content in that telegram message you sent me?

Oh, no, that'd be because you're using a cart phone. So you kind of like, it's the only way you're going to get through to it on, on that stuff. Um, it is to kind of treat that way. I mean, and, and to be honest, I actually want them as customers anyway.

I mean, one of the best things that has, has been something like the, you know, doing the movie issue stuff is literally being able to sell to people, but value what you're offering. Um, you know, in the same, so, you know, people are like craving, you know, stuff like everyone's kind of got their own

time. I mean, like, you know, what we do, like here, you know, it's, it's not that difficult to flash a phone. But I also know that the first time I did it when I did graphene OS, I probably about two years ago, I think I spent about four years doing it. Like, so, I mean, I'd, so, I mean, you know, there's all these,

there's all these pitfalls. I think that's part of the problem. It's not the fact that the process is that difficult. There's all these pitfalls. So, like, one of the problems I had, right, was I couldn't, for whatever reason, back then, the instructions were really bad for using, like, Mac, so, and I didn't

have windows. So I was like, well, um, the, oh, the, bento is apparently more reliable. So do that. I didn't have a machine to, like, flash in the front, so I did it in the VM. I need to find out that actually USB passed from the VMs actually appalling and never really works properly for this

kind of stuff. So I had that as an issue. And then I didn't really know what I was doing with, like, the buttons. And then, you know, you can make kind of quite easy mistakes on command line interface with, you know, the terminal.

Um, and there's all these things that can go wrong when you get close to it and you get wrong. And like, hang on, I just spent four nights doing something that should be a quick thing. And then you're only doing it as a once-only anyway. Yeah. So, you know, and so, and even, like, when I was actually doing it

regularly, like, when I was first in the cop headphones, you throw it on to kind of the Cal XOS ones, right? It would actually not be new for me to go, oh, how would I use this again? Like, you're not necessarily doing it out frequently to flash.

So, you know, there's, this, the other thing is, is that, like, with some of this stuff, it's actually, you know, people will pay out, like, you know, an extra kind of 150 bucks wherever it is, you know, in terms of our markup that we have on, like, Sam Pixel, just because, like, you know, like, but I'm going to spend the time,

like, it's people, you know, you are doing the people that are going to value their time, you know, and I haven't got, you know, believe to do that. And I'm personally funny, like, I'm right, you know, you think I told you earlier, like, I've run a Bitcoin node before I've actually pulled on a Raspberry Pi.

But actually, what I use is the one from Keto Minor on the novel, because pretty much by and large, it's robust and it works. And, you know, you know, this makes for a little funky stuff with a VPN, so I can access it remotely and things like that. But, I mean, I couldn't be bothered to go through all the hassle of

setting up a node myself and piecing together with the hardware. And so, you know, they, people are going to find what they're interested in. They want to spend the time on and then other things where they're like, you know, I haven't really got a band with them.

I just want an out-and-box solution. So, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. If I'd have known that you were doing what you were doing, you know, before I'd started, I probably would have given up on night three or four and just ordered one.

Because, yeah, the same thing. I mean, you know, whatever it was, 40 hours or so. And, you know, oh, yeah, same. Couldn't do it on the Mac. Couldn't find any instruction. So, I was like, right, I'll get an old Linux machine. I was like, oh, no, I don't want to spend the money on that.

Oh, I've got a Raspberry Pi lying around. And someone said, why don't you put, why don't you put Ubuntu on there? And then I was going to follow the guide that Matt Adele gave. And so, I did that. And then it didn't fucking work. And Matt was like, oh,

I've just realized you can't do that because you can't do it because it's not an ARM64 or something. I was going to say, I had actually a similar thing. So, I actually, I had an old Raspberry Pi around it lying around. And to again, if you're going to put Ubuntu on it, right, you've, like,

I mean, I wasn't, I couldn't be bothered with the command line purely. So, I actually was like, how did I put it on with a GUI? So, I like did the, with Ubuntu server, whatever. And then you're like, cool, I've got that in. Now I'm going to download, know, whatever it's called to get the UI.

And that was all done. And my intention was to run, like, a work, yes, my other PC, it dies. I was going to use this as a quick one for running, like, Amazon workspaces, like, so I can do a remote session at work and just use it off a Pi because it's like, that's brilliant.

I think just use, like, literally run using my own personal equipment, like, the expensive stuff. Are you saying cheap work? And, you know, some via, it'd be a, it's like a remote access, which, anyway, and of course, because it's arm, not Intel, eight things, whatever, it didn't run.

Yeah. Yeah. You get, but you only, you know, unless you're actually really experienced with this stuff, you don't necessarily think through all of the next steps with all the dependencies that are going to be in place, do you? And it's, and then you're like, it makes respect, it all felt simple,

but then you're like, I should know. You don't know what you don't know. And, and then, yeah, you get to that point. And it's like, Oh, why is this not fucking working? And then, I ended up doing it because I found a walkthrough in Chinese on YouTube that was subtitled. And I did it on

my Mac somehow. But honestly, like you said, if you said, Oh, can you flash one again tomorrow, I'd be like, no, can't remember. Can't remember if I'm doing that. And so I'd, I'd be coming to you.

And so what do you put on these? Is it, is it now graphene or are you using we do we do calics now? So, and it's, yeah, so I mean, I actually kind of, like, it's, yeah, it went through full circle.

So like a lot of the samurai kind of community guys, we're using graphene. And then those kind of a bit of a Twitter fallout or whatever. And then we kind of, you know, I wrote this up on the blog post when we went to use copperhead. And then I, when I was at, so I was actually sending devices

for copperhead and then I fell out with copperhead. And for a variety of reasons. And then what was kind of nice, though, is is that by the time I actually tried calics, it was like, wow, this is actually the first time I'm actually using a so called privacy phone, like something optimized,

it hasn't got Google that I can actually use as my daily driver. And that actually doesn't involve does not like some niche device. And, you know, when I thought about it quite carefully, also the trade offs, it wasn't like it was just doing a bunch of stuff that's the same as a Google

phone. I mean, significant benefit, but then some really good usability stuff. So it was a really kind of good learning journey with the various kind of Android software distributions out there, and how they all differ. And although kind of superficially, they kind of look quite similar

when you kind of first open it, if you look at those phones and flash on your OS, it's only when you're actually starting to use on a day-to-day basis, you actually start really seeing the difference between them. And so calics versus being brilliant, like we've, and yeah, we could,

because we're not paying license fees to, to copperhead to sell them because there's an open source software project. And we can lower the price and fair amount as well. And, you know, it's a really reliable platform and there's a lot more apps it will support. It's also popular with the type of

uses that we have. And so it's actually been, yeah, it's actually been really kind of quite popular in the last couple of months. And I think, and the other thing is, is I don't know if it's necessarily people are paying with Monero because of what Monero is like, but I think there's been a bit of a

feedback in the Monero community. So we've found actually, we've actually got quite a few more customers that actually purchased Monero recently. And I think that's kind of interesting as well, because you potentially got people right that have got some coin. They obviously want a no

fast approach for privacy. So they're using Monero, not Bitcoin. And then they just want, you know, something kind of, you know, they can just fill in some details, putting like even a PO box and they've got like a private phone, they've given no information for. And, you know, and they're from

running them. It's like minimal fast. Yeah, I think I want to try one of these because I don't use my graphene phone as a daily driver. I shame, shame, shame, still use an iPhone. Bitcoin Q&A was saying that the Kali OS or whatever it's called is really good and that you can use it as a daily driver.

So if I do get rid of this iPhone, then maybe that's the way to go rather than graphene. Well, I mean, so my recommendation actually would be, I mean, like, so I'm actually using, like, as my two daily phones at the moment, I'm using an iPhone 10 and a Pixel 3A. And I'm basically able

to use them interchangeably. And so I don't know what model iPhone that you are using or which kind of stuff used to be. Oh, wow. I'm safe. Yeah. I'm very, very tight. Well, I've been fairly tight. I mean, my phone's over three years old now, I think, and the, you

know, the three I got was like, pretty old, even when I bought it. So yeah, I mean, like, it's quite funny. I had like a customer asking today, you know, what case you use for a 4A. I was like, hey, I don't even have a 4A. Yeah, Dave, on a way for free. I don't even have one myself.

But like, so I think kind of one thing is, is it like, that I'd say with Calix, like, versus something like a graphene or copperhead, right, is is that just in the actual speed of the device, it's actually quite a lot snappier because, you know, the copper and the graphene phones,

I mean, we are going to technical detail. I mean, they've effectively got some kind of like, what they call the Android hardening. So they do some stuff with like memory allocation and that, which is in their idea, adds a load of required security to the OS. But personally speaking,

like in use and all that in terms of what the benefit is, I think it's absolutely minimal for a pretty significant performance loss. And Android itself anyway comes with kind of quite a lot of hardening in terms of, you know, being safe to memory exploits and all that anyway. And, you know,

you're actually getting the Android security team themselves doing that stuff. So, you know, even using like hardware that's not top of the range like a 3A actually is pretty decent experience with CalXOS. And the other thing is that they include this thing called MicroG, which spooks

the signature for Google. So it actually means you just get notifications from Google's servers. And that's always been kind of, I think, alarmed a lot of people. The idea might be a bit of a kind of security issue there. But it's been implemented in a way with CalX where it's really just only

that particular program where it's allowed that kind of capability. So it's going to very tight control environment. What it means is that when you're using some like proton mail or you're using three million, you get like instant notifications. And, you know, you're actually finding that you

can also use apps that are expecting to find Google services there. And you're not, but it's, there are no Google Play services at all on the phone. But you're not lacking that whole component there. So it wasn't unusual if you use, like, say, graphene or carpet to download like a

banking app or whatever. And then the whole thing just to crap out and might not work at all. Whereas because these apps can see something they can reference in the code, then they're not going to just crash. So, you know, you might get some variable quality with that. But actually, by

large, I think the only thing that I've not found works out to see fine on CalX would be like, like a, like a Google Maps in terms of it tracking alongside you. So it's analytics. But I'm not like, I mean, rocket chat with instant notifications, proton mail, I can use revolution. And to be

absolutely fine. So you can actually use it as a perfectly normal phone. It's got like, none of that Google bloatware, which, you know, is just a huge benefit. I have to check one of these out, then. And I have to reach out to you because I can't be fucked to build it.

Given it's a hard sell. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, seriously, I mean, there's there'll be no reason why you couldn't like just overwrite the phone you've got wherever you fancy anyway. But like, you know, the kind of thing, like, you know, I suppose I really want to say there is is that with something

like that, you have to go to kind of full blown Edward Snowden phone. But you've, but actually, it's actually a really secure device anyway. And but you've actually got something you can still put a load of apps you're going to need and a basis and use. And it can be, you know,

it doesn't feel like kind of, you know, you having to really make a sacrifice. I think that's a big part of like, you know, what we want out of these tools. We're not looking for something with all the telemetry removed and to kind of be able to kind of move through the shadows here,

right? We're just looking to not like walk around with a spy in your pocket, throwing out all this info. Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, I said to you before, I try and keep these around an hour and a half. I could sit and chat to you all day. It's been fascinating and really, really good to catch

up with you. I wondered if there's anything that you particularly wanted to cover that maybe we haven't, or any sort of shills or anything like that you wanted to do. But yeah, I've really enjoyed it. Really good to actually check in person. No, absolutely. I much appreciated your time.

I think the only thing I would say in terms of like last words, and yeah, there's no need for me to show any projects or software in my lab. I think, you know, anyone that would check out my, you know, Twitter or whatever would see anyway. But I think the kind of thing that I would kind of

just caution everyone with this is that whenever you're on like a Twitter or telling around whatever, be aware that what you see is a lot of kind of there's a lot of networks of people that are good close mates and potentially, you know, shilling software that they've not used, or they're not

using a day basis or that, you know, there's actually other kind of ulterior motives through. What I'd just suggest with all of this is that you give it all a try first, you kind of use it for yourself and really see, you know, make sure you're looking at, you go into this with a certain problem

you're looking to solve and make sure as well that if someone tells you it can solve a problem, they can actually explain it to you in a way that you understand, because none of this actually needs to be that complex or technical, someone should be able to explain to you in a way,

this is the benefit you're getting out from this service, and this is how much are paying for it, this is what you're paying for it with, and this is why we do that, you know, you shouldn't look at any in my, in my kind of all my experience here, you shouldn't look at primsy software and think,

wow, I look back at that, I don't understand what's going on, it must be really clever here, you know, you need to feel that you understand that if someone can't explain it to you, there's a good chance that actually, you know, is not doing really what they're saying it is, so I think, you know,

there's no, you know, whether we're talking like Android security, the efficacy of a coin join or an alt coin or something like that, look for people that aren't trying to sell you that, and if they are trying to see something, just make sure you know what you're buying.

Very good advice, yeah, very good advice. Well, lovely speak to Max, and possibly one of your first podcasts you've had without any accents on it at all. Yeah, I don't know how all that has happened, I'll probably find out now my mic wasn't connected properly or something fucking stupid,

but, and if you stay on the line, just when we close it out to make sure that we have the audio, but yeah, really weird, it must be, it must be your technical abilities, you've done something in the background, because I, yeah, it's, I don't know what it is with me, it's um, Bitcoin Q&A now

calls me Magna hands, and I think it's very fitting, fucking anything that's near me that's electric is broken, but yeah, I really enjoyed it, it's been really cool, and if you ever find yourself back in London, give me a shout, it'd be good to go for a drink or something. Definitely - You know, definitely make a good chat, all right.

- All right, cheers mate, bye bye. - Cheers mate, bye bye.