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

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

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

Welcome back, everyone. I've got Bitcoin Q&A back for our monthly show. We went through all the updates, and we also talked about this Mara stuff, which I now have to actually correct, because since recording this, they have a flip-flopped back.

I don't think we can take credit for it, but we're going to anyway. So, I'll actually retract my "Fuck You" Mara statement. No, still "Fuck You" for doing it, but well done for going back on your stupid ideas.

So, very glad to see that. Before we dive in, I just want to say thanks to Q&A for keeping me and all of us updated. Anyone who has any questions can reach out, and make sure to reach out for the next one if you have any questions as well.

Thanks to Coin Floor UK for sponsoring the show. If you're in the UK and looking to use a KYC service or exchange, and you're looking to pound cost averaging if you're going to buy weekly or monthly, make sure to check them out.

They're a really, really good team, and if you are going to use a KYC service, you really should be making sure it's been one who's been around for a long time, and who's not going to scam you.

Next up is crypto cloaks. Crypto cloaks are my new sponsors. You will know them from Bitcoin Twitter. They 3D print all sorts of things for all your Bitcoin needs, and they do some really fucking cool node cases and other bits.

So if you haven't already checked it out, go to crypto cloaks.com, and you can customize your designs. You can have all different colors and wording and all sorts of things on these things.

So it's really, really cool. And yeah, again, any questions after listening to this, just reach out and enjoy the show.

(upbeat music) - Hello, mate. How are you? - Afternoon, Max. Back again. Back again. These months seem to be flying by faster and faster. I can't believe we're nearly in June now. - I know.

It is absolutely meant. This whole year's gone fucking quickly. It's so weird. But I think that's probably just 'cause it's so busy. Everything has just gone crazy this whole year. - It's nice that the prison that is the UK is slowly starting to open up a bit more.

(laughs) - Not that I've noticed. I haven't barely been outside. - Well, it's, I've not been to the big garden much myself yet, but hopefully if the weather stays the way it is, we can get out in the sunshine a little bit.

- Yeah, exactly. So what have we got this month? We got a fair amount going on. My little bit of updates is I finally got my Ronan Dojo working. Thanks to you and like WoW and many others.

And I'm ecstatic about that. That's my little software update. - Yeah, well, we've got a little bit of an update for Ronan later when we do the software updates. Yeah, for me, the observing listeners out there might have noticed that my website got taken down well twice last week actually.

I've got a tall, self-hosted vision at home, which obviously wasn't affected, but reality is most people access it very clearly. And which is hosted on a virtual private server through Namecheap.

And it seems that about four or five of the guys that are in the matrix chat room that myself and diverter hosts all seem to have got, we all run Unohost, which is like a tool that makes sort of hosting various programs quite easy.

You know, flashy graphical user interface. And my website, the clearnet version of my website hosted through that on the virtual private server. And we all seem to get taken down without warning within about 24 hours one another.

So the weird thing is back up now, I have to do some back and two with support. They just kept saying that there was a network attack, but between the four survivors that got taken down, we still not got to the bottom of what was causing it.

Everybody's back online now, but I think I'm going to be looking for a new hosting provider, really. - Do you say that was Unohost? - Well, Unohost is the program that I run, but it's on a virtual private server that's hosted by Namecheap, which in fairness to them until now, they've been absolutely spot on,

but that I don't really don't know what sort of driven this push for them to be. - All four of you presumably are Bitcoin related stuff, so like yeah, it'd be interesting to know whether anyone else was affected who didn't have Bitcoin websites or whether this is some sort of coordinated attack to take these websites offline.

- Yeah, and my gut feeling, 'cause a couple of the guys that are in there are just like personal users of Unohost, so they don't actually have websites, they've just got it for like hosting a bit more than things like that.

So I don't know whether it's Bitcoin related, it seems to be Unohost related, but we got ahead together to see if there's any common programs that we were all running that might have been causing the issue, but it seems to be very varied.

We're all running different stuff, so we couldn't really pinpoint as to where the culprit was, but it's enough of a shock to me to look for other hosting providers that hopefully don't pry as much into what's going on on the VPS.

- Yeah, we sort of talked about this a few weeks ago, didn't we, of the trade-offs and if you're not hosting it yourself, you can just be switched off, but then you-- - Perfect example, isn't it?

Yeah, and like I said at the start, the tour site, the tour version of my site, which is on a Raspberry Pi in my office next to me now, obviously unaffected, but most people want to access fire cleaner, don't they, unfortunately?

- Yeah, you must have almost all the traffic through that, I don't mind. - Yeah, exactly, and the problem is is doing that from home easily means docs in your IP address, so obviously not desirable.

- I wonder if there's, I'm sure there is a way, like can you not, you know how you can get like a PO box or whatever, is there not a way to sort of rent space in a server room where you put your own hardware and so it adopts the IP of that place, but not, but you're still running your own hardware and have access?

- Yeah, yeah, you can expose, I forget the name now, but you can, I've done it before where you can expose the tour version of your site through a virtual private server so that it shares that IP address, but you're still at the mercy of, if they switch that VBS off, then the clearnet version of your site goes down.

I know Katanda's something through CloudFlare, but he's a networking wizard and I've been asking him lots of questions the last couple of weeks about potentially looking to go that route, but yeah, the whole thing of doing it from home without a tour makes me a bit nervous, to be honest.

- Yeah, no, that's fair enough. Something to think about. - Definitely, but yeah, it was sickening, seeing email pop up and had a couple of DMs in your sites down and it's like having your right arm cut off after all the work that you put into it.

- Yeah, so what have we got as updates? - Right, so yeah, software updates were, like say, a bit of a quieter month this month, but some of the key ones. First one is LND, which is the Lightning Labs implementation of the Lightning Network.

They've got a new beta release candidate, which is basically sort of a run it if you dare type release. The key one to note here is they've added support for atomic multipath sending and receiving.

So atomic multipath receiving and sending, basically it splits your payment up into, well, you can use multiple channels to make a payment, which might be useful in the instance of, let's say you've got two channels for, and they're both 500,000 sets each, and you need to send a million set payment through Lightning.

Before multipath payments, you wouldn't be able to do it because you could only send the total of your largest channel. With multipath payments, you can split that up between those two channels and it would get to the end destination because you could leverage both of those channels in one payment.

Now, that's called multipath payments, and that's been around for, I don't know when it came out, but that's been in Lightning for quite a while. Atomic multipath payments adds a bit of privacy, whereby each piece of that payment to say it's split into two, each of those payments will have a different payment hash,

so anybody who's trying to sort of surveil you on Lightning or have a directed attack at you, if they intercepted both of them, they'd look like two separate payments, when in reality they are the same on, so that's where the improvement comes over just multipath payments.

- That's really clever. - Yeah, very clever, and obviously, stress that this is the beta release at the moment, so it's not, you know, you're not gonna be able to open Zeus tomorrow and leverage this, but it's, obviously, it's coming down the pipe and a bit of an improvement to Lightning privacy, which we've got more on later as well.

- That's, yeah, that's really interesting. So if you're using AMP, can you do something where you split it into more than two? Like, it can be, like, just for example, you have eight channels and you wanna split it across those and it could be all different amounts, but it all adds up to that 100,000 stats

or whatever it is that you're doing. Millions that. - Yeah, I think that's how it works. It just sort of probes your channels, see what's the most appropriate number of channels to split it down based on your local balance in each channel.

I think it also takes into account fee rates as well, because obviously, the more routes that you take, the more nodes that you're hopping through, if they're charging exorbitant fees, then you're gonna get hit with those.

So it might not always be beneficial to route through more channels than you need to, but I'm pretty sure this is smart enough that you can sort of set those parameters to say, keep fees below X amount.

- Okay, I know we're getting onto more privacy stuff at Lightning later, so I'll ask the questions that are in my head now later. - Cool, yeah, my node, they've added balance of satoshis, which is a command line interface for working with your Lightning network node.

Next one, Ronin Dojo, big update from the guys down there. They've introduced their web application, which is a replacement for their desktop app, so that the desktop app is no longer, and they now have all the node functionality accessible via your, well, Tor or your local network, so you could just type in RoninDojo.local

in the same way that you would, Mino.org, or your Umbra, and it just allows you to interact easily with your node, you've got all of the usual functionality that you used to have through the old desktop application, but the kicker here is that now you don't need to visit Dojo maintenance tool separately

to do any wallet imports or anything like that. It's all built within this web application, so it's really sort of the one-stop shop for all of your Ronin needs, really. - Hold it so, 'cause obviously now I'm running this, does that mean when I went into my Dojo maintenance tool to get back all my balances and do that thing

where I look back 100, whatever, could I have done all that in the web app? - Yep, yep, it's all there now, all on the left-hand side. You'll see it, it'll say X-pop tools on the left-hand side, which is basically, it's just a carbon copy of all the functionality that you'd have through your Dojo maintenance tool,

which you used to access through Tor browser, but it's all lumped into one. - Right, I didn't know that, I still went back and did it all the old way, I wasn't-- - No, it's all in one-stop shop now, so it's-- - Oh, that's really good, that's really slick.

- Yeah, big one, and I've had a sneak peek at version two of the web app, this is sort of version one, if you like, and I must say it's looking incredible, so I'm really, I've got no time lines as to when it's gonna come out, but what's coming down the pipe for the second version of their web app is it looked very, very cool, actually.

Lots of new sort of additional toys, but I can't really go too deep in some, otherwise I'll go knocking on my door. (laughing) - Yeah, all right, well we'll look forward to that when it comes out.

- Yep, seed signer, I think we spoke about these guys last month, and I think you've had them on the podcast as well, I mean. - So they've updated big sort of code refactoring update, basically.

So just to recap what seed signer is for anybody that didn't hear us last month is, it's basically like a DIY signing device that you can build yourself through generic hardware, like Raspberry Pi Zero, you get a little screen and you put a camera in it, and it's basically a cool little way that you can use to generate seeds

and use it as a signing device in a multi-sig wallet. So they've updated their code base to basically cut the startup time in half. The version one, which is the one I'm running still, I'm holding my hands up, I haven't updated yet, I'm being a bit lazy, but the version two cuts down the startup time in half,

so I think you're looking at about 30 seconds now, where it used to be over a minute before, to get everything booted up. Obviously you're running this on really cheap low-power hardware, which is why, for anybody out there that's listening, going, well, they all takes over a minute to boot up, but this is something stupid,

like an eight-pound Raspberry Pi, so it's designed to be done on cheap hardware. I believe you've got one on the way, have you? - Yeah, well, I've got the case for one on the way, and also a case for Spectre, the IY as well, so I've got two different ones that I'm going to be working on and building,

but yeah, seed sign is going to be the first one, and really looking forward to that arriving. - Yeah, it's a really unique device, so I really enjoy playing with mine, actually, but I'm building it in the first place, especially for those that are interested in going down the multi-sig path.

- Did you do all the soldering and all of that stuff yourself? - No, I was lucky, really, that I managed to find one of the Pi zeros with the pre-soldered, sort of pin board in it, but I've tried to find them since, and I can't find them anywhere, so I think what's the chat behind seed sign is going to do is he's going to sell the boards

with the pre-soldered pins in, so you can buy the Raspberry Pi ready to go from him, if you wanted to. - Okay. - But obviously that removes a little bit of the DIY-ness of it, if you know what I mean, but obviously some people will find value in that who the thought of soldering might put them off a little bit.

- Yeah, I'll definitely be keen to give it a go. I just don't have a soldering iron, so I need to go and either buy one or borrow one and fuck around, so if I could avoid that, I would. - I heard him say on one of the podcasts that he's been on lately, yeah, there's a tool that you can buy where you can just hammer them,

and it just sort of bends the end of the pin over so that it makes the necessary contact. - He said that to me, but it made me a bit worried because I was thinking, me, a hammer, a little board, it's just going to go fucking so wrong, so I thought it might be better to do it carefully with a solder.

- Yeah, yeah, I think it's a good learning experience as well. So, you know, get your hands dirty, obviously it's not, definitely not geared towards the mainstreamness, it's a bit more of a tinkerer's project, but it's a fun one to get involved with.

And next up, Sparrow Wallet, version 1.4.1, big update, well, there's lots of little updates in this one, the main one being that you can opt to broadcast transactions through an external service like blockstream.info or I believe mempool.space offer it as well.

So if you don't have your own node and you're connected to one of the trusted ones, you can also opt to broadcast the transaction through a different external service, which can have some privacy benefits.

What Craig's done there now, Craig Raw from Sparrow, is he's made the default that if you do multiple transactions in one sort of sitting, it'll create a new tool circuit with each one, so that the transactions can't be correlated by, say, a malicious actor at blockstream.info, if that's where you're using to broadcast your transaction.

- Okay, but you'd only use that to broadcast your transaction if you're not using that with your own node, is that right? - Generally speaking, yes, but there are quite a few people that I speak to, and I think Craig is one of them as well, that does actually see the benefit in occasionally

broadcasting over tour, not through your own node, because it's, well, for the same reason that you're not tying multiple transactions to the same tour address. - Right, okay. - Okay. - 6102 has actually got a tool, I think we may have thought about this before, called TXcast.org, which sort of does the same thing,

but he also adds in some time delays, and random time delays into that, and that uses an external node to broadcast from. So, yeah, there's a growing number of people that are, of the opinion that, potentially sometimes doing it not through your own node might have some benefits.

You're still not losing any of the security in the fact that to receive in the first place before you create that transaction, it's gone through your own node, and you're comfortable that it's been verified and you haven't been sent any fake Bitcoin, et cetera.

- Okay. - On the same thought process specter, version 1.4.0, they've also added this functionality to broadcast to an external service over tour, but the change here is that Specter used the default to do it over-clearnet.

Obviously, not great for privacy, because if you were opted to use, again, say blockchain.info, and you were doing it over-clearnet, then it's trivial to tie that transaction to your IP address.

- Okay, yeah. - They've also added a feature as well, which I've not had chance to play with, so I'm just reading between the lines from the release nodes, but they've added a feature for multiple nodes.

So, if you run to set the desk up and you've got wallets, or you can now connect it to multiple nodes, I'm trying to, I'm sort of thinking out loud as I go along really as to why you might want to do that.

And if you've got any thoughts on it. - So, what you can connect two different nodes to one Specter desktop? - Yes, exactly. - Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I suppose if you had it connected to just do different nodes, you could make sure that everything is the same across both of them, if that makes sense, like that you're seeing the same--

- Yeah, that's a good idea, actually, yeah. You could check that your umbrella is acting as honestly as your Roni Dojo. - Yeah, exactly that. Or like, if you're making a new transaction, you could make sure that the receiving address is actually the correct receiving address, 'cause they've both got your ex-pubs

from your cold card or whatever. So, you would then, I know that doesn't make sense. - No, because it would still be within one. - Specter? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'd still be within, oh, so the perfect setup then would be to have Spectre and Sparrow both connected to two nodes.

And then when you're gonna do a received transaction, they both have your ex-pubs from the same wallet, so you would then check that they both come up with the same and that both nodes are working honestly across both.

So you'd like double and quadruple check everything before you go. - Yeah, possibly, possibly. I might message you then about that one. I might be completely missing the point here, but yeah, you make a valid point.

- Okay, that's fine. (laughs) - Last one of the notable software updates, Umbrell have version 0.3.10. They've added L&D hub for Blue Wallet Lightning. So Blue Wallet is, well, by default, their lightning implementation is a custodial one,

meaning that Blue Wallet and Blue Wallet's lightning node are in control of your funds. You've basically just got an IOU, which is great for onboarding, not great for everything else. So Umbrell, I've added L&D hub, which is basically the ability for you to connect your Blue Wallet lightning instance to your own lightning node.

I believe my node had this for quite some time, but I think the software has had a bit of an update and the Umbrell guys have added it in as well. The kicker here is other than obviously, it becomes non-custodial, which is the way nature intended, but going to be used is that it's a great tool for onboarding friends and family.

So if you wanted to onboard a friend onto lightning, you could say write down the Blue Wallet and I guess they send you some stats. Well, previously that would be, you'd basically be sending Blue Wallet the stats and your friend would just hope that they'd be able to spend them one day,

whereas now they can just scan a QR code on your Umbrell and connect, they can use your channels. So they're still trusting, but rather than them trusting Blue Wallet's node, they're trusting you because they're going to sort of piggyback on your channels basically and have their own little account on your lightning node.

Uncle Jim, yes, it's the perfect Uncle Jim model here. That sounds like the sort of Uncle Jim that I feel I could do myself. I'd really love to be an Uncle Jim one day and this feels like this could be the start of it 'cause it's easy enough just to literally a QR code and a new wallet for someone, send them some stats done.

Yeah, definitely. Very cool. And the key thing to note as well is that they can only spend what's in their account. So if you've got, say, two channels and they're both 10 millions out to each, they don't have access to that.

They can only access whatever they receive through that app. It kind of sort of portions it off. It uses your channels, but it portions it off for them so that they can only access what's rightfully theirs and they can't screw anything up for you.

That's cool. Have you run Ambral yet? Yeah, when it first came out actually, I was getting a few questions sort of in DMs about sort of little issues that people are having and having not run one, it was pretty difficult for me to sort of say try this and try that.

So, yeah, I've run it and very smooth, easy setup. You can see why it's gained a lot of traction in the short space of time. What about you? Yeah, I spun one up the other night. It was when I was trying to get my run and dojo sorted and I was like, "Look, I've been doing this "for a million years now.

"Like, if it just doesn't work, "then at least I've got this fucking Ambral thing should work." So, I spun it up and it took maybe three, four minutes. Like, from start to finish, I had a pile set up and built any way that I was running different software on.

I flashed it, clicked next, next, next, pretty much. And then it was done. And then it took three days, four days for the IBD to be done and I've done nothing with it since. It's just, it's running.

It was very, very slick, but I've not used it at all. And I think that comes down back to when you get all these node implementations, adding all the bells and whistles, it's, yeah, I've been there before as well, is that you've got this node that can do all these things and I never use half of them.

I want, you know, I think we've spoken about this before in terms of I like to have sort of specialist nodes and it's absolutely not a requirement. It's just because I'm a turbo nerd and I like to fettle around with stuff, but I like to keep my nodes specialized if you like.

So, I've got my Ronin Dojo, which is my mixing, it backs my samurai wallet and it's my mixed machine, basically. It does that very well. I just set it and forget it, basically. I've got my Raspberry Blitz, that is my Lightning machine.

And again, it does that very well and it does only that. So, I'm a bit dubious as to the kitchen sink approach. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's nice to have bells and whistles, but if you're not gonna use them, then it's just other stuff that can break.

- Yeah, I've got exactly the same. I've got my Raspy Blitz for the Lightning stuff, which, to be honest, I never use. And then I've got, oh, like very rarely, very rarely, a couple of times I've used it, but it is rare.

And then the Ronin Dojo, which is now up and running and I'm very happy and that's mixing away beautifully. And then, yeah, I've got a My node and an Umbral, but literally all I use the My node for is just pointing it at Spectre, that's it, nothing else.

And the Umbral, I've just done it just for the sake of it, pretty much, but I might link it to my Sphinx or do something like that. Just use so that I actually get to play with it, but yeah, it is very, very slick.

Like, that is what I would suggest to anyone who's starting out, like friends or family and stuff, because it was just so simple. - Yeah, good for the normies. It's a good first starter node.

All right, shall we move on to the new releases? - Yes. - Cool. All right, OpenSats.org is an initiative Matt Odell and a few of his pals. I think Catan's one of these on the board. There's a few other people, I forget in the name now.

Is it Ben Price, maybe? - I don't know, I'll just hop ahead to be honest. - Yeah, so this is, I'm gonna have to look that up now. Yeah, it is Ben Price. This is an initiative basically to allow anybody to fund open source development.

Basically, what they're doing is they're sort of gonna be the custodians of a part of Sats. You can also donate in Fiat as well. There's two ways that they're gonna work it. They're gonna have a general fund where you can just say, okay, yeah, I'm gonna give you a 10 pound a month.

And I want you to give it to who you see fit. Or you can also go onto their platform when it's released and fund specific open source developers or contributors. And so I think this has filled a bit of a gap in the market in the fact that sometimes there's people that wanna contribute that are technically inept, a bit like me and you Max.

And they might wanna just be the only way that they can see to support is just to give a little bit of money each month to support some developers. So they've structured it in a way that is tax beneficial for those in the US.

So if you were to donate, anything that you donate, you can do it as a tax write off. I'm unclear at the moment as to whether that is going to be a benefit for people outside of the US. But obviously the nature of Bitcoin is that if you're donating in Sats, you can donate from anywhere in the world, basically.

And so really cool initiative. They've only had this soft launch at the moment, but I believe it's imminent that it's going to come out this, I say this month in June. So I do urge anybody who's feeling that they perhaps can't contribute in other ways to sort of sign up and sort of donate that way and support the open source ecosystem.

I believe you've been chatting to Matt about this, have you? - Yeah, we've got something in the works. I can't give too much away. All I can say is open Sats and 21ism are doing something together soon.

- Interesting, very mysterious, look forward to it. - Yeah. - All right, the next one, side card channels, which I'll be honest, made me laugh when I heard it, is a new addition to the Lightning Network spec from LND again, Lightning Labs.

Which is going to be hopefully a bit of a bonus in terms of onboarding people. So obviously we've spoken at length before now about the inbound liquidity problem that Lightning has, basically that it's difficult to receive when you're just starting out, unless you get somebody to open a channel to you.

So what side card channels does basically is to allow, say, an exchange to open a channel through a routing node on the fly to say, let's say you've just bought on an exchange that supports Lightning withdrawals.

Well, for you to receive your Sats, you'd need somebody to open a channel to you. Well, what these side card channels do is allow, say, Bitfinex or whatever the exchange is, to open a channel to you on the fly through another routing node.

The routing node will pick up some fees for that. And then the end game is that you get a channel to you so that you can receive on Lightning. Very early days yet, I don't know of any sort of live implementations of it.

But hopefully on the surface of it seems like a bit of a good onboarding tool. How scalable it is because obviously there's going to be fees involved in that, which the end user is obviously ultimately going to eat.

So let's say you withdraw a million Sats from the exchange. There's obviously going to be a haircut to that when, because the routing node's going to want to take some fees from that. So how much you'd be left with at the end of it is unclear at the moment, but certainly a promising idea.

Okay, next one, mining pool observer. Have you had a chance to look at this one? It's from the mysterious dev who goes by the catchy name of zero XB10C. Is this the guy that got funding from Lightning Labs or something like it was the first dev who was a Nim to get the funding from them

like a year and a half ago or something? Possibly. I remember there being like a name, something like that. No, yeah. I know who you mean, no, I think this is a different person. Okay, okay.

So this dev is the one who's behind mempool.observo, which is a block explorer which offers some unique looks at sort of recent blocks and you'll have seen me, if anybody follows my Twitter, you'll have seen me posting the screenshots of sort of colorful arrays of transactions and whatnot.

That's from mempool.observo, which is a great alternative to mempool.space as well. Just make sort of easy visualizations of the network. So this dev he/she, they, whoever they are, has made another site called miningpool.observo and which is basically a couple of features on it.

The main one is geared towards being able to tell whether mining pools are sent to in transactions. So the way that they do it is anybody can run a template, a template. Anybody can run a command on their node called get block template, which is what the miners do when they start to try and mine a new block.

Now this website basically does that and then compares it to the block that actually gets mined and confirmed into the block and it compares, is there any extra transactions in it or is there any less transactions in it and then it sort of highlights those transactions that are missing or that have been added

so that we can see if there's any file play going on, which seems quite apt now that we've got this marathon pool, seems to be gaining some hash power at the moment. So. - This is this fucking mallard thing with over the file blocks.

- Can we just touch on it a little bit? 'Cause I try and stay out of this stuff. - But it seems like this is a really fucking cunty thing that's happening. I can't remember another word of the name to describe it.

- That's an accurate description, yes. So basically what they're, their virtue signaling is basically they're saying that any blocks that they mine are quote unquote OFAC compliance. Now OFAC, I can't remember what it stands for, but basically they've got a list of quote unquote bad addresses that are

or allegedly controlled by again quote unquote bad people. So the, these marathon, the mining pool is basically pledged to say we're not going to, we're going to make sure that any transactions that are associated with these addresses, we're going to exclude them from blocks and we're going to, they put in the block header

of each block that they mine. This block is OFAC compliant, which it's just like a fuck you to the network, isn't it basically? Now, obviously Bitcoin is an open system, anybody's free to participate, if you wanted to spin a miner up tomorrow, you could and so could I.

The outrage has come from the fact that obviously this is very anti-Bitcoin.

It's against the sort of ethos of Bitcoin, if you like. And from where I'm sitting as well, is it's completely unnecessary. There's no laws currently that say that that address is illegal.

You can't trans up, you know, you can't trans up with that address. It's, it's, my gut feeling is it's virtue signaling so that they can gain more funding and grow. The suits are going to love the fact that, oh look, there's a compliant mining pool.

So I'm not too worried about it at the moment. I mean, if they start to gain more hash power, it might start becoming an issue. The chances of them gaining a majority of hash power is very, very slim, but something that a lot of people are keeping their eye on.

And obviously a bit disappointing that everybody's fan favorite, Mr. Saylor, came out in support of them. But I say everybody, I use this in everybody loosely. Don't include myself in that.

- Yeah, it's really fucking annoying because you always know, and this is what I can, I never get like the finance guys on this show, even though I'm really interested in a lot of it, like people come in and then people say, "Oh, well, you know, these guys have got lots of money."

And they sort of, they simp for them and say, "Oh, you know, they're going to be great for the space." And it's annoying because a lot of what Saylor says to me, like I've always been on the fence.

I'm like, a lot of what he says is like very smart, like he understands this shit. Like a lot of it financially is like good advice he's giving. He's looking quite deeply into how this is going to change things.

But you always have the sense that like, the guys that come from the traditional background and who already have lots of money and maybe can benefit from this kind of bullshit, eventually seem to.

It's like Raul Powell and all these kind of guys that come in, everyone goes like crazy because they're like, "Oh, okay, they've got knowledge in the traditional system." It's like, well, this isn't a traditional system.

This is the one to replace that bullshit. And it is frustrating. But it also seems to me that it's frustrating, but it's like, first of all, if they're going to block addresses, how hard is it to change a fucking address?

Like it's a bit stupid. How hard is it to actually get around that? It doesn't seem like it would be a challenge for anybody to just send funds from one address to another separate address and then you can just go.

And also, the other question is like, if we all think, well, this is stupid, this marathon, is there not a way to, as a user, not accept it to go into a block mined by them? Or is that something that's not possible?

- You wouldn't be able to exclude a specific miner. - A specific miner or a specific pool, really, would you? There's no, to my knowledge, there's no sort of way that you'd be able to do that.

I mean, currently, the only way that we know who mined the block is because they do, I think it's an opt-return where they just put the, you know, the name of the mining pool. That's how we know which can be gained as well.

They've got no obligation to do that. If they wanted to go dark and just not put anything in there or act as if they were, say, slush pool, then I don't think there's anything that we'll be able to tell that they were doing that.

Which, again, it just comes back to the fact that they're just virtue signaling to the bootlickers at the end of the day, aren't they? And they're just looking for more compliant investment.

- Oh, that's fucking good. - The other ironic thing is as well, is that let's say that they're successful and they don't mine, you know, they exclude a transaction because it's got a quote unquote bad address in it.

So let's say in the next block, it's that transaction that they have not included, gets mined by slush pool. It's confirmed into the network, and then in another half an hour, Marapol mined another block with a completely separate set of transactions.

The very act of them mining that block cements all of the blocks before it and adds to the security all then. So they're still sort of inadvertently supporting those transactions because they're building on top of them.

So it's just complete bullshit. - And presumably, even if, like somehow, they got loads of funding, they get loads of hash power, they're mining loads of blocks. People can still make that transaction and they could just bump the fee up.

Worst case, they could bump the fee up and then Maro will say, oh, well, we're not gonna mine that. We're not gonna take that fee, even though it's a higher fee than the rest of them. So they're just gonna fuck themselves and someone else will mine it.

- Yeah, that's how it feels. - The problem arises is if they get anywhere close to majority of hash power because then there isn't enough hash power willing to mine the, quote unquote, uncompliant transactions.

And I really, really don't think we're gonna get to that. - No. - Something just to sort of be wary of and just keep your eye on who's sort of coming out in support of this shit. - Yeah, that's annoying.

Has Sailor done any sort of backtracking or like reasoning to why he's doing what he's doing? 'Cause I haven't really looked into it. I just saw it and I was like, ah, fucking hell. This looks irritating.

- Nah, I don't think he has to be honest with you. No, not that I've seen, but then again, I don't follow him on Twitter. Also, I just realized that I made a promise last week on Twitter that we weren't gonna mention, the full mentioned Sailor or Mr. Musk and we failed on both parts, so I apologize.

- Oh, we didn't say Musk until-- - I just fucked it now. - Yeah, you fucked it. Musk, Musk, Musk, Musk, Musk, Musk, say, let's say, let's say, let's say, let's say, let's say. Yeah, no, fuck Mara and you say, if you're supporting them, I like something that's got the same, but that is fucking stupid.

We don't like that here. That's not Bitcoin. - No. - Moving on, moving on. - Education, a strong, strong month in education. I just picked out some highlights. Ben from BTC Sessions has done a really long and all-encompassing Lightning Network node guide, set up, he's done it using Umbrell, but he goes through opening channels,

managing your channels, all using Thunder Hub, which comes packaged with every single Lightning node. And not just Umbrell, and it's really a long one, very, very detailed. So anybody who's looking to get started with Lightning, you know, the proper way with your own node, that needs to be your number one protocol.

It's really, really cool. I don't know if you've seen it. - I haven't watched that specific one, but I set up my first ever node because of one of his guides. And we featured him recently on 21 is it when I'm a big fan.

Like he makes it so accessible and so simplified and just like clean, you can just sit down and watch it. And everything is answered down to, you know, what power supply and what this and what that.

And so you just can't fuck it up. So yeah, I haven't seen it, but I know it will be good. - I dread to think the amount of sat-t spent on transaction fees just doing his guides. - Yeah, yeah, 'cause he never uses test net.

It's always, it's always mainnet, so. Yeah, hats off, yeah, really good. And next one, chain code labs have announced, the team at Jane code, they quite often do some of the residencies for people who, developers who are interested in contributing to Bitcoin or the Lightning Network.

Obviously this is generally reserved for the smart people who know what they're talking about. Again, not like me and you. They've now released some online seminars which are like on a weekly basis.

Which I think from what I can sort of gather is geared more towards the interested tinkerer. It is probably the best way to describe it rather than just developers. So they've got one for Bitcoin protocol development and it's a five-week course where they cover segment mining, the peer-to-peer network, wallets and scripts.

And they've also got one for Lightning Network which covers payment channels, HCLC's, routing and future alightness. So again, it's not geared towards beginners, it's geared towards sort of people who are interested to really sort of dig in a little bit and to get underneath it.

And it's, so they're taking applications at the moment and it's once a week for five weeks. There's lots of homework by the luck of it. They're encouraging you to sort of read Master in Bitcoin which is again, is quite a technical book.

I've applied for it. - I've agreed on it. I'll have you. - Yeah, I've applied for it. I posted onto it to say, and obviously, you know, I'm not a developer but I think I fit the bill of people who like to sort of scratch under the surface a little bit more whether I'll get on, I don't know.

I mean, I probably don't have the time to do it to be honest with you but I'm sure this, I can scow off work or a little bit. - Well, if you do get on it, you can borrow my mastering Bitcoin book because I can do it. - Oh, I've got it as well.

- Oh, you do. - Yeah, yeah. - 'Cause I was gonna say, I have no fucking idea what I'm reading there. So you could have borrowed it. - It's a very, very good book, by the way, by Andreas Antonopoulos and quite detailed.

It is very detailed and the good thing about that is the way it's sort of sectioned off is that what I tend to do. I mean, I've read it from start to finish, like the sad bastard that I am but sometimes the way that it's sectioned off is that you can just sort of go to say, I don't chapter four and just do some more homework

on say, block propagation or something stupid like that that you can just sort of pick out a little bit and brush up on it again. But yeah, it is a technical book but I learned a lot from it and became a little bit more technical from it.

So if there's anybody else out there that is interested in understanding the nuts and bolts of this thing, it's a very, very good start. - Yeah, to see how things actually work and like break it down, it is very good.

It's just a lot of it goes over my head. There are parts where I was reading it and I was like, yeah, like I get the basic idea here but Jesus, this is like fucking technical stuff. - Yeah, self-shield here.

I've updated my spiral wallet guide to include a full multi-six setup and I have also released the multi-six guide which we touched on last month because it had literally just been released the day before and I believe you've got a couple of questions mapped on this one.

- Yeah, so, so you've got your Sparrow 101 and multi-six guide, haven't you? Recently come out. So this is perfect because I'm now going to be setting up Sparrow and I've got obviously the cold cards but then I've got a seed signer on its way.

So I'm looking to set up a little multi-six just to have a play and fuck around and get used to it 'cause we want one for 21ism between all of us and I thought well, at least if I get the basics and understand it, then the setup should be easier.

Any sort of catch me out or what should I be looking at to start, say for example, I've now built my seed signer. I've got another cold card and one other device. I'm actually going to be building one of these spectre DIYs as well.

So if I have those three hardware wallets, now what do I do? Like should I go straight onto Sparrow 101 or multi-six guide or what should I go through first? - So the first thing is if you're going to use Sparrow, it doesn't currently support seed signer.

There is a bit of a hacky way that you can do it which I cover at the back end of my multi-six guide but you won't be able to use it to sign transactions. You could use it to build the wallet, so you could use the cold card, the spectre and the seed signer to create it.

Obviously, I presume you're going to do a two or three, are you? - I was thinking too, yeah. - Yeah, so it's not really a problem. You could just sign with the spectre and with the cold card and the seed signer can just be like the redundant signer.

That's what I've called it in my multi-six guide. If you wanted to do it where you can sign with the seed signer right now, you'd have to use spectre, which again, sell, shield, that's the setup that I've done with my multi-six guide is the URL.

But spectre is also fantastic for it and that's why I've updated my Sparrow, sorry. Yeah, Sparrow is also fantastic for it because that's one of the reasons I've updated my Sparrow 101 is I did a multi-six setup with COBO, cold card and spectre DIY.

But yeah, in terms of advice, obviously read these two guides first and depending on which software you want to use, they're both very capable and the set of flow is just as easy on both of them.

Sparrow will give you more of a sort of technical rundown whereas spectre may sort of, it's a little bit more, sorry, it looks a little bit more polished in terms of the UI, but in terms of functionality, both very, very similar.

So what I probably say is just set it up on both and just see which one you prefer. And can I set up, sorry, cutting you off, can I set up the same multi-six with the same devices across both?

Yes, and that's exactly what I did in my multi-six guide is I use Sparrow, the names are too similar. I use spectre, the spectre setup is the bulk of the guide. But what I also include at the end is how you can recreate that same wallet in Sparrow for two reasons.

Number one, you've sort of, you're comfortable using another piece of software if spectre was ever to disappear, which is unlikely because it's open source software. And also, so that, let's say you create the wallet, spectre gives you an address that ends in one, two, three.

If you recreate that exact same wallet using the same devices in Sparrow and it gives you that same receiving address, you can be sure that spectre is acting honestly because they're both producing the exact same output.

Does that make sense? Yes, the way I'm seeing things now, I'm starting to think that having spectre and Sparrow, whether you are having single or multi-sig, should almost not be the standard, but it seems like that would be logical if you have the time and energy to set it up because you have like the redundancy,

you have the two bits of software, you can check things against each other. It feels like that would be the best way to set it up. So that is what I'm going to try and do. Yeah, definitely.

And again, probably more for the benefit that people are listening is make sure that you verify the software that you download as well. It's covered in both of the guides, the step-by-steps has had to verify them both.

But yeah, I mean, setting up two different coordinators might seem like overkill to some. And if you're not interested in doing that for every reason that you've got the time or whatever it is, just make sure that you verify.

Let's say you pick Sparrow, just make sure you verify it when you download it so that you can be sure that what you're downloading is what's intended by the lead dev of the project that you've chosen.

- With your guide, does it go through verifying on both Linux and with a Mac or is it just Linux? - Well, the commands for Linux and Mac should be the same. It doesn't cover Windows, but I think I linked to how to do it on Windows.

Obviously, I don't have a Windows machine, so I can't give any easy commands on how to do it. But I know Craig from Sparrow has got the step-by-step instructions for all three operating systems on his website to verify it, yeah, yeah.

Are you there?

- It wouldn't be a Q&A and Mac show without Mac's disappearing. - Hello, mate, are you still there? - Yep. - Fucking my computer, just completely fucking died on me. - Oh, you're offline now, are you bastard?

- He's, I can hear it. - Can you see the audio on your side? - What we, what we had before. - I've got local backup 52.92 megabytes and the same on the cloud backup. - Can you try and do your backups for both?

I'm going to stop the recording, I'm going to have to send a new link and just hope that I've got it. Like, laptop just fucking turns itself off, man. - Where do I, how do I do the download?

- Let me stop the recording. - I was going to say it's after the recording stops, isn't it, I think. - Yeah, let me stop it now. Hey, mate, sorry. - Fuck sake. - We're back. - That's exactly the same on the, was it the last one I did with you?

- Yeah, it would, it wouldn't be a Q&A and Mac recording would it without some technical difficulties. - Oh, this laptop, I swear to God, it's fucking drives me insane. Just literally dies on me.

Oh, it's only a couple of years old. It dies on me all the fucking time. - It turns out you need a new one. - I do, if my house sells, that is as tight as I am, I am going to buy myself a new laptop.

- What are you going to get yourself? - I don't know, I sort of quite like, I like the idea of either one of these think pads, but like something that's actually decent and will run properly, or one of those system 76 things everyone keeps saying is pretty good.

I don't know, I don't know what the trade-offs are, whether it's better to get something like system 76 that's like sort of built for the operating system, I'd probably end up putting on it anyway, the pop OS, or just to buy a really beefed up laptop from somewhere else, 'cause they're quite expensive, those system 76 things.

- They are, yeah, just to put the cat amongst the pigeons a little bit, I've just sent you a link to a laptop that I've got on order. - Called Starlabs, or by a company called Starlabs. It's a UK company actually, looked quite a nice-- - Just wait for it to load with my ancient machine, shitty internet, it's just wheel of death.

Oh, that didn't open, you just sent it on-- - Telegram, why is that not opening then? Oh, here we are, I've got it. Mmm, very snazzy, that's pretty reasonable money as well. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, obviously you can spec it up to sort of the internals that you want, you can put big hard drives in it, more RAM, faster processing stuff,

and so I'm just waiting for it to be shipped at the moment, but they're sort of, I don't think it's due to land until the end of June. Weirdly enough, I was looking at them and they were sold out, I saw it on Twitter somewhere, and the very next day, guitar messaged me, said mate, I'm just gonna ward it there,

so then whenever you've seen, you've heard of them. And I was like, well, that's a bit spooky, 'cause he's ordered one as well, and I was like, yeah, I was looking at these, literally yesterday, and they were out of stock.

So yeah, I haven't told my wife yet, but I've ordered one, and I'm just waiting for it to turn up, but it's not due to the end of June, 'cause they sort of build them in batches, so I will work.

- It looks slick, actually. - Yeah, it looks really cool, doesn't it? - It looks like a nice matte black sort of look. Maybe I'll post the thing in the show. - Yeah, yeah, but it, they've still got some in stock, 'cause I thought they were gonna sell out really, really quickly.

So once I've got a report back, and I'll do a full report on it to see whether it's worth recommending to others, but my gut feeling is that if Catan's got one, he's my gauge of whether something's worth going after or not, and it was just a bit spooky, the fact that I looked at it for all I really got,

I went to order it, and it was out of stock, and then they must have got a new batch in, so. - Nice, I'm gonna check one out. Yeah, if this house sells, that'll be my treat to myself. It's a laptop that actually fucking works, 'cause I'm in front of it all day.

- I was just about to say, yeah, it's an initial livelihood, so. - Yeah, exactly. So before my laptop let me down, and I let you down, where were we? - I think we were talking about multi-sig, and Sparrow Inspector, and verifying this download and stuff.

I think we kind of got to the end of it, to be honest with you, it was just a case of, like the guide tells you to do, create the wallet, verify you receive addresses, try and create the wallet in another piece of software, check that the address is match, send a very small amount in, and then practice sending a transaction back out again

before you do anywhere near any sort of real amount of stats. - And again, this is more for anybody else listening, rather than just yourself who's going down that rabbit hole, is don't jump into multi-sig, just because somebody on Twitter said so.

Single-sig, still very, very, very good enough for most people, and yeah, just don't jump in with both feet, 'cause you're more likely to fuck yourself with multi-sig than you are with single-sig.

- Yeah, I agree, and I'm only doing it just out of curiosity, really. - Same here, same here, yeah. - And just to see, and because we do need a solution for 21ism, so we can all access funds to do projects and stuff, so I will eventually have to use it, but I'm very comfortable with my single-sig

the way it's set up, so I don't feel I need to, other than just to see what it's all about. - Yeah, I will say as well, for the intermediate sort of Bitcoin who's been around for longer than 12 months, that like yourself that's got used to single-sig, multi-sig isn't as difficult as I thought it was, but there's still a lot more

foot guns that you can squeeze off over than there is with single-sig, so just tread carefully. - We'll do. - Right, on to a couple of articles, a very, very good one on Lightning Network Privacy, literally called the current state of Lightning Network Privacy.

This is by a chap called Anthony Ronning, or Ronning, I'm not sure how he's pronounced that, so if you're listening, I apologize. And yeah, very all-encompassing article on, well, clues in the name, the current state of privacy and Lightning.

It very much needed this one, I think, because there's quite a lot of people, Lightning seems to be sold as the privacy silver bullet. I think a lot of people used to think that I can just open the channel and then anybody that I pay and anybody that receives to me, 'cause it's not on the chain, I'm just private,

so I don't need to coin-join, I don't need to manage my coin control or anything like that, I'm just gonna use Lightning, it's private, it's easy, which is obviously not true, and this guide by Anthony goes through all of the nuances around that and how there are, again, multiple foot guns as to where you can leak lots of privacy

when interacting with Lightning. Have you had a chance to read through this one? It's a long one. - No, I haven't, I wait until Guy Swan reads it for me and listen, but I have heard a little bit about it and I have to say, I was surprised when he said a lot of people sort of think that it's the silver bullet

for privacy and a lot of people assume that even without opening channels with coin-join funds that they're gonna be private, I didn't actually know that that was the general consensus, like I thought that most people understood that this was not gonna be perfect for your privacy and that more people were just using it

to keep their fees down when making smaller transactions, I didn't actually know that was what people were thinking. I've never, I've never, I've always assumed like I look at Lightning Network as something I know a lot less about than literally like than Layer One, I feel a lot less comfortable with it and so I've always assumed, well,

I don't understand what's going on here so I'm probably gonna fuck myself. I thought most people wouldn't have the same thought with it. - Yeah, I think some of the wording that is used by the implementation doesn't help.

So for instance, private channels, they're not really private and he, Anthony in the article describes them quite accurately as unannounced channels but if you hear the word private channel, you think that's absolutely private.

In actual fact, what it means is that it's not announced to the network. Obviously if you wanted to receive a payment from, let's say from me, you've got a private channel with, I don't know, a bit refill and I owe you 100,000 Sats.

For me to pay you, you need to give me an invoice. Within that invoice, it tells me your node. With that node then you can, if I pay through a certain channel, I can then see which UTXO opened that channel so I can see your channel open transaction so then I can sort of link your private channel to some of your on-chain activity

but the word private channel doesn't really tell you that, does it? I think some of the wording lulls you into a false sense of security unfortunately. And so what I would say is to everybody to go and have a read of this article and tread a bit more carefully when you're using lightning,

you know, there's some easy steps that you can take to get a good base level of privacy. The obvious one is open channels with a single, larger mixed UTXO, don't create any change. If you do create change, just leave it where it is and don't create another channel with it.

If you're gonna create another channel with a change, make sure you go through another random mixing first so that those channels can't be linked together. Spending on lightning is inherently more private than it is receiving because when you spend, you don't really need to give away any of your info.

Whereas receiving, you basically, everybody can see which node that they're paying to and obviously you can quite easily go onto oneml.com which is like a lightning network explorer. You can punch in anybody's public key from their lightning node and see all of their public channels.

And from that then, if there was a targeted attack who, you know, sophisticated attacker that wanted to sort of gather a picture of how much money you've got on lightning, they can do things like probing attacks where they can go and look at your, they can sort of send spoof payments to your node

or through your node to try and gain a picture of. If you've got a channel with BitRefill, they can sort of send test payments until one actually goes through and that will give them a sort of picture of the size of that channel and also where the funds lie, who's got, you know, how much of the funds are yours

and how much of the funds are BitRefills. So yeah, it's a very, like say, all encompassing article, but we'll hopefully make a few more, try a bit more carefully with lightning. - Hmm, interesting.

Yeah, it's, it would be so cool if there was a way to open a channel using coin joined funds and then you just, that it was private from that point. And like, I guess a lot of people were just hoping that that was gonna be possible, but it sounds very much like it's not or if it is,

it's really not something that's easy or accessible for most people. You have to re-know what you're doing to do things privately, especially if you're using it a lot. - Yeah, I think, just so it's not all doom and gloom.

At the end of the article, he talked about some additional tech that's either coming or is already in, which hopes to mitigate some of the sort of foot guns that he talks about in the article.

So I won't go into, in detail, but he's got obviously multi-path payments, which he talked about before. Rondezvous, routing, trampoline routing, and then new implementations called Immorton.

Channel factories that are enabled by tap routes. So there's lots of things coming down the pipe that allegedly will help with some of the stuff that he talks about. So I'm fairly hopeful on the future of the lightning network, but this is a good one to rein back in the bullishness a little bit.

- What was that thing that was talked about when you were just mentioning trampoline routing and all this kind of stuff? There was something that was talked about ages ago. I think it was Andreas talking about it.

There was like dandelion or something like that. - Yeah, I've heard about it, but I don't really know much about it to be honest. It was something like, if you have a dandelion and then all the seeds blow all over the place, I think it was ever seeds blow all over the place.

It was something like you'd have a transaction and then that would be split into loads and loads of tiny payments and sent through as many random loads as possible. And then they end up in one place after that or something weird like that.

Remember listening and being like, "Oh, that sounds pretty cool." But I just wondered if you knew anything about that. - Well, not specifically, but like say Anthony touches on quite a lot of stuff that's coming down the pipe at the end of the article.

So definitely worth a read that one. - Okay, cool. - Right, these last two are slightly more technical. So I'm going to hold my hands up and say I'm going to gloss over them a little bit, but they're worth a read for those that want to sort of dig in a little bit more.

There is a new website called, anypreveout.xyz, which is an explainer on a previous proposal for Bitcoin called SIGCHASH Any Preve Out. Now, this is a soft fork, basically, that allows a transaction to be signed without any specific reference to a previous output, which is the way is the crux

of how a transaction works at the moment. So it's going to be a soft fork that enables that functionality. Now, when, or if, should I say, if this BIP gets merged and we have a soft fork for it, that's what's going to enable things like L2, which is like a massive improvement to the Lightning Network.

I'm probably not going to go any more deeper than that because I'm just going to make myself out to sound like a complete oath. But, want to watch out for it. And I think this SIGCHASH Any Preve Out will probably be the next down the pipe after, sorry, I thought that's optimistic of me, if we get tap-roofing.

- Tap-roof, yeah. - Which, again, is looking more likely. We've just started the new signaling period. Have you been keeping tabs on this, Max? We're looking pretty good so far. - I didn't, someone says it was like 98% or something like that.

- Yeah, we are, we've had 215 possible signaling blocks in this period and 208 of them have all signaled for tap-roof. So if we continue on the current path, then we're going to get tap-roof locked in on this difficulty period.

- And that's like a two-week period. - It is, yeah. - That almost seems like it would be too easy to me. Like, with all the hype and all the chat that's been going on for so long for it to just like a couple of weeks from now, be like, oh yeah, that's done.

That's so easy. - Yeah, so if at the end of this 2016 blocks or two weeks that we've got 90% signaling from confirmed blocks, which it looks like we're probably going to get on the current trajectory, it doesn't, you know, nothing changes immediately.

It just means that it's locked in and takes effect from November, it is. So there's not going to be an immediate change, but once it's locked in, it's locked in. So if the mind has stopped fucking about after that, it's already too late, basically.

It's locked in and we're good to go. - So you think this is going to, just seems too easy to me. Nothing's ever this easy where it's just like, all right, that's done. Like it feels like there needs to be battle and tears and blood and shouting and screaming and scams and bullshit.

- I mean, I appreciate and admire your adversarial thinking here and perhaps I am being a little bit naive and I'm just looking at all these green blocks on taproot.watch and thinking it's going to be easy.

But what do you foresee happening that's going to trip at all? - I don't know, it's just, I just from experience, like whenever something seems too easy and it's not within the pattern that you normally see, then it's going to fuck you up somehow.

Like it's when people get complacent and they're like, oh yeah, we're that's going to go ahead and like, it's always just something will happen. Like fucking Mara are going to come and do something dirty.

I mean, I don't know. - They are pretty much the only people that are mining blocks at the moment that are not signaling, which is obviously getting them quite a lot of, quite a lot of hate.

I'm just looking now, we've got five red blocks. One, two, two of them are Mara. One's unknown, which is probably going to be Mara again. There's one called Arcpool and one called BTC.com.

BTC.com, I've been signaling for most of their blocks. In actual fact, the block before the one where they didn't signal was mined by them again and they did signal. So maybe they're having some technical difficulties which might lend itself to your theory but it might not be please sailing perhaps.

- Yeah, I don't know what's going to fuck it. It just seems too easy. I don't have anything more than that. Just like, I hope it goes through. It just, it never seems like that in Bitcoin world.

There's always someone fucking around, isn't there? - Mm-hmm, yeah, all right. - Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed indeed. Well, the next time we record, hopefully, well, one of us will be right.

Right, last piece on the articles, "Bitmap Research" have done a test with U3XO. Bit of background, U3XO is a proposal that where basically it makes block downloads 10 times faster, I say 10 times faster.

That's a lot faster than they currently are which makes obviously onboarding into your own node a lot easier, I could give you some headlines of what it's allegedly going to achieve. It can achieve a full node of several kilobytes rather than multiple gigabytes.

That's comparing to a prune node. And that's just because of the way that it stores the data. It also allows for parallel processing of initial block downloads. And this is an interesting one.

So if you have a Raspberry Pi, and you want to do the initial block download on it, and you also have a MacBook Air, U3XO, if implemented, will allow you to split the work between the two devices, but still have one block download.

So you're sharing the load. Now, U3XO has been talked about quite a while. I've never really put into it, but I was reading about it before we record it. And that seems like a massive thing, don't you?

Because you get the benefit of a really cheap single world computer that's low powered and cheap to run and cheap to buy, that's your node. But you also get the benefit of, if you've got a more powerful personal computer, you can leverage the power that that's got for, say, I don't know, a day maybe.

Do some of the block download and the verification on the more powerful machine in parallel with the Raspberry Pi. And then once it's all done, you can just sort of hand off to the Raspberry Pi and go, right there you go, you've got your block download, you can just keep up with the chain now.

- So... - Incredible. - Yeah, yeah, very good, very good. And I don't know what needs to happen really to get this in, but going back to the Bitmap research, they did some benchmarking where they've tested doing what I've just discussed versus a standard block download.

So they used a fairly powerful machine, but I suppose the net result would be fairly similar. It's gonna scale up or down based on the hardware that you use. So they used a computer with 32 gigabytes of RAM, which is a fair chunk.

And to download Bitcoin Core, the standard way, took 175 minutes on this machine, to download it using UTXO took 128 minutes. So that is a 36% increase in block download time, which is pretty cool.

- That's really impressive, yeah. - Yeah, so again, I'm gonna do some more homework on this one to see what needs to happen to get this implemented, but for me, it doesn't seem like there's much of a downside to it.

Well, I tell her why, actually, and the way that it works is it increases bandwidth usage. So for 90% of the people that are interacting with Bitcoin, they're probably gonna be on unmetered internet connections.

- Yeah. - Yeah, so what it does increase the bandwidth usage when you're doing the initial block download by about 20%. So this probably isn't gonna work for people who are on, say, yeah, lower powered internet or anything like that.

So an interesting one to keep your eye on, really, but I just thought that the benchmark and the Bitmex have done to sort of demonstrate the benefits of it really hits home. And I think as well, I'm just looking at some of the images.

If you want to split the work of that initial block download, you can do it with more than one machine as well. So in theory, you could say have like the coordinating machine, like your Raspberry Pi, but then you could have, if you've got multiple computers, you could share it with all of them.

So the benefits and speed of the block download compared to just doing it through your Raspberry Pi, which takes, you know, nine times out of 10, it's something, you know, I've done it five, six times now, and it takes about a week for me.

If you could share that with a more powerful computer than massive, massive gains. It's unlimited, how many you can split it across. So, for example, you could say, oh, well, okay, it takes, you know, five days to a week on a standard Pi with a normal broadband internet connection in the UK.

If you say we're in an office and you had 20 PCs, you could split it across those 20 PCs in a Raspberry Pi, and you could run those overnight when no one's using them and it would probably be done.

I mean, in theory, that's the way that it's presented. Yeah, I mean, they don't talk about numbers that high. I'm just looking at one of the images now. They've got the coordinator and they've got three other workers.

So they're demonstrating there that there's four different devices all going at the same initial block download working together. - Wow. Yeah, that's really, really cool. I like that. - Yeah, yeah.

So that was a piece by Bitmec Research. It's a really good blog, actually, the Bitmec's one. Most of it's quite technical. But if you're not scared about getting stuck in and reading some big words, it's a good one to follow.

- Right. - Excellent. - I think we've only got the one question this month. - Do you want to have a stab at answering it first, Max? - Yeah, let me just bring it up. So this one came to you from John Trumpet question name.

- We do seem to have some good names when we do get questions. - Yeah, that is a good name, John Trumpet. Question for Sunday. When do we stop pricing in fear and value things in SATs? Whatever the exchange rate.

I think this could be several years, but how, where, and when do we start? Do you want to try and answer that one or do we take it? - So I don't think there's going to be a particular selling point on this one.

I think it depends on your personal situation. So for, I'll use myself as an example, I've still got a dirty fear at nine to five job. That is the, well, it's 99% of my income. So it's difficult for me to say price my food shop when I go down to Tesco to say, wow, those pack of beers equated to 50,000 SATs.

I mean, I'm just not there yet. Whereas if you compare me with somebody like the Samurai Lee Dev maybe who works in Bitcoin and he gets paid in Bitcoin, that's his livelihood. That's going to be a lot easier for him to do because he's having that interaction between the two, between the two currencies a lot more often.

It's his income. So he's going to be far more adapt at sort of making that comparison. But what I like to do personally is if I've got any bigger purchases to make and if you equate them into sat at the current rate and then weigh up the potential opportunity cost of what happens

if we see another run the way we've just saw for the last X amount of days, weeks, months, whatever. That has already taken effect with me. So we were talking earlier about the laptop and that was a difficult decision for me to make because I equated that into sat and thought, that is a significant amount of sat that I could buy

rather than buying this new laptop. And it certainly makes you think a little bit more before you make bigger purchases. But to sort of loop it back to the question, yeah. Well, from my point of view, I don't think there was a specific one.

I think it depends on your situation really and the way that you interact with Bitcoin because if you are 90% of Bitcoin Twitter you're buying and holding. Other than if numbers going up and you see you're getting less sat for your dollars, pounds, yen, whatever, that's probably the only interaction

that you have if you're never ever spending. So you're probably going to be the one of the last ones to the party to start pricing stuff in sat versus somebody who actually earns them and lives off them.

- Yeah, yeah, like you say, it's different for everyone. I kind of feel like it already is. It's just the market hasn't caught up with it yet. Things kind of already are priced in sat for a lot of people and it's just not caught up.

It's not yet standardized. But everything else is what is volatile against it. Like, so I will, I probably would say I will price my life in sats and the things that I do in sats. And that is the unit of measurement of success for me.

So if I'm seeing my fiat stack go up, it's not the same as seeing my sat stack. Like, I want to be seeing that number always increasing or at least staying the same. And I am, yeah, pricing my sort of success in sats.

And if I'm taking a job or doing some sort of work, I'll be looking at it in terms of, well, what's the current price of Bitcoin? And like, for example, you're saying with your laptop, I'd be much more, I'd be much less comfortable buying a laptop now than I would have a couple of months ago or a month ago, because now I'm like,

well, not only is it that price, but also I could buy a lot more sat at this price point than I could at say a hundred thousand. So I kind of think it's already there. Like it is the only standardized measure, like trying to measure anything in fiat currencies is really fucking stupid because it's moving.

It's like, having a tape measure that changes all the time. How are you meant to measure or price anything when it's constantly moving and changing value? - Yeah, completely agree. And something that's just popped into my head that I think might help particularly Bitcoin rather than sort of the general public is exchanges

using Sats as their unit of account. I think that might help bring Sats as a concept more to the forefront rather than seeing the big unit and comparing everything to that. That might be potentially a shelling point that I alluded to might not happen before, but.

- Yeah, difficult question. I think the answer is just different for everybody, but in case he means like when does he think that globally Sats are gonna be the unit of account for everyone?

- Don't hold your breath. - Yeah, don't hold your breath. And like no one can know that. There's so many moving parts. There's so many things going on. Like you could never guess it. It's too much of a complex system to know what's gonna come next, but if we're thinking it's gonna happen, say it happens within five years,

you've got to have some serious problems in the world. Not that we don't now, but like you've got to see major currencies collapse. You've also got to see countries put this on their balance sheet or countries literally come out and use this as their currency.

You've got to see some pretty big and crazy stuff happen for that to happen. - Yeah, definitely, which, the pessimist in me says we're a long way off. I know you're of a different thought process, Mike.

So we will see how it pans out. - I am of a different thought process. I think in terms of value, like the value that will come to this network is gonna be massive over the coming years, but I still don't think people will price it.

And so that's a still think you're gonna have the majority of the world running on shitty old payment rails. And like things don't change that quickly, but it doesn't mean the value doesn't go crazy.

- Yeah. - But there we are, I hope that answered the question. - Cool, okay. So when we come back next month, you're gonna give us a lowdown on how the multi-sig went, yeah? - I will, no pressure.

- Yeah, it's not gonna be next month. Let's just be realistic. It'll probably be the one after that, but yeah, I'm gonna give it a damn good go. And I might have to be reaching out to you when I have problems sending some sats your way 'cause I know you've now got a new option for people who are struggling with things.

I mentioned to you earlier, I've got someone to send your way. Can you give a little bit of information on it and what you're gonna be doing and how you can potentially help people when it's stuck?

- So I've opened up the optionality for people to have a one-to-one sort of tuition call with me for an hour over Zoom, Jitsi, whatever method suits you best. It just would be a voice call.

Obviously, I'm trying to stay in the shadows in terms of visually, so it would just be a voice call. But it's geared towards newcomers that might need a specific concept explaining to them or they wanna get involved with the Lightning Network, but they don't know where to start or they have just bought all the kit

to build their own node, but they're a bit apprehensive about where to start and they might need a holding hand or they've already got a node and they might wanna get the best out of it. So it's geared towards those sorts of people that find value in a more of a personalized approach.

So basically, I'm just there to answer questions and help them get over a specific hurdle and yeah, it's for people who value that more personal approach. I do stress that most of the answers that people will need are likely either on my website or you will find it in a BTC session video or a Kataan video and the answers are out there.

This is more geared towards people who wanna ask specific questions or just basically just feel more comfortable doing it when somebody's there to help them. So it's done on a value for value basis, which basically means that you pay me after we have the call for the value that you sent for the value,

sorry that you felt that you received. There is a suggested payment on there, but it's just a suggestion. It's just it's done on a trust model, basically, that hopefully I can provide value to whoever it is and they would then sort of send some stats my way through my BTC pay server that relative to the value

they thought they got from the hour with me. - I like it. I'm so glad you're doing this because like I said, I'm sending this guy to you and I'm so used to wanting to say to people, oh yeah, just reach out, if they're setting stuff up and I know the problems that I've had, just I've sent them like, oh yeah,

maybe you can reach out to Bitcoin Q&A, but I always feel bad 'cause I'm like, I know you're so busy with everything else. I don't wanna send these people your way and then they're stuck and they're spending like three, four days pulling their hair out and asking me questions.

And I'm like, well, I don't fucking know. When this stuff breaks, I ask Bitcoin Q&A anyway. So the fact that I can just say, look, call him, have an hour with him, pay him some money so you don't feel bad and make sure that he gets, he's giving out so much value here.

It's gonna save you four days of your life rather than, you can spend an hour rather than having four days of your life wasted and not feeling comfortable 'cause I know like when I set up my coal cards and I was on the phone shoot and I was like, oh my God, how do I make sure that this is that sheet being sent to the right address?

How do I make sure I've got access? And I was so worried, like sweating panicking, but then just knowing that I could chat to you about it and you could go through step by step, then I get off and I'm like, okay, yeah, that's fine.

And that is invaluable to people. Like, I think that is such a useful thing to have. - Yeah, I mean, this idea comes from a place of, I get people DM'ing me on generally telegram every single day with just sort of what I would deem as generally sort of basic questions, but sometimes the conversation then pans into

a different subject or it gets a bit deeper and it's a situation that doesn't really lend itself that well to back and forth on telegram or key base or whatever. So it sort of comes from a bit of frustration for myself in wanting to help people, but it being a very poor use of my time and their time just going back and forth

for hours and hours because I always find that tech-based communications aren't that great at getting your point across without writing war and peace. So hopefully this is, while it's nodes, anything like that, it's hand holding to get people off zero.

So if there's anybody listening who's in sort of interesting, go to bitcoiner.guide/support and just getting touch with me from there. - Love it. - Thank you for the shield, I'm not a big one to sort of come out and be brash about it.

So I appreciate your gentle push. - Yeah, no, I wouldn't chill it if I didn't believe in it. And like I've said to your fair, I really think this is fucking valuable. And there's so many, I know we're mates and I've offered before, I'll send you some stats, you always said no and I really appreciate that, but it takes a lot of your time

and it's so fucking useful. And chucking some stats to save yourself a few days worth of work and all the stress and all the pressure. Not everyone is built to do this stuff. Some of us are better off just mining the fiat and like we have our handheld and it's, we know things are done properly

and we don't pull our hair out, it's, yeah, fuck. I'm very glad you're doing it. - Cheers, man, appreciate that. So I think that wraps it up, doesn't it, for this month? - I think so. So next month, hopefully we won't have the audio problem and I'll be set up with Multi-Sig.

But yeah, it's been a pleasure, mate. Always a pleasure to speak to you. And yeah, look forward to the next one. - Cheers, mate, speak to.