Freedom or fold! Monthly bitcoin update EP31. Stay up to date with what matters.

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 to another episode of Bitcoin Monthly. As you can probably hear, I am a bit sick again. This is mainly down to Antimus, his shitty mic, and the having to edit him for the last 48 hours.

Watership bloke. If you follow him on Twitter or any other social media, make sure to give him some abuse. And if you like the show, if you enjoy it, if you get value from it, please do me a favor, send it to friends and family.

You'll probably notice the price of Bitcoin has started to riff. You're gonna have friends and family reach out to you soon, asking you, "Oh, is it a good time to buy Bitcoin?" And you need to tell them, "Listen, you fuck.

Go and listen to ungovernable misfits. Listen to bit by bit, listen to this episode. Understand what Bitcoin's really about, where to get it, how to make sure you stay private, and how to not get fucked by governments."

'Cause this is what this is really about. Share the link and help us grow the show. Before we start, I want to say a thank you to my show sponsors. We'll start with foundation as we did some chilling in this episode.

If you haven't already started using a foundation device's passport, I can highly recommend, especially with their new release on Envoy. It's so slick to set this up. You can run all of this over tour.

You can link to your own node. It has coin control. You have PSPTs with QR scanning, and it is just so fucking slick. It really is nice, and the thing is beautifully designed. Not only that, but it is fully open source and has an incredible team.

If you have any questions about this hardware, you can reach out to me and I will answer any questions. If you want to get three months of VPN free with IVPN, you can use the code "Ungovernable" when you order.

I'd also like to thank SX6.store. SX6.store make steel backup plates. They make them an incredible value from £16.99. They are made from marine grade, steel that will survive fires and floods, and this is the best way to stamp your seeds or passphrase if it's in to steel.

Again, you can use the code "Ungovernable" for a discount and to let them know that I've sent you there. Finally, if you're listening to this and you aren't already running a node, or you're running a node on a shitty Raspberry Pi or using a close source option, you really should consider something better.

To me, the absolute best in the game is Ronan Dojo. Ronan Dojo are kindly supporting this show by giving me a small amount of Satsback and also you a discount if you buy a Tanto. The Tanto is fucking amazing.

It's what I run. I really can't recommend it highly enough. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me. I'll be having Xelco back on the show next month to talk through some of the features and if you use the code "Ungovernable" you will get a discount.

Finally, if you haven't already checked out "Ungovernable misfits.com" you can see our clothing, our articles, artwork, whiskey and much more. Check us out at "Ungovernable misfits.com". Thanks for listening.

I know, we're recording. Live for an evening rip, no coffee in sight. Weird, isn't it? Yeah, I apologise in advance for how shit I'm going to be. Not great in the evenings. The coffee has long since worn off.

I'm on the whiskey now. Oof, could be a spicy one. I have just had a beer actually, if we're all being honest. What about you, Antimus, what you want? Ah, it's just, we hear nothing from him.

We hear nothing from this guy. I guess this is my opportunity to get my own back after the whole NFT debacle. Well, in my absence last month, eh? Yeah, what was going on there, mate? Yeah, just tell yourself that you're going to stay true to your morals and then the next minute you find yourself investing in monkey jpegs.

Well, I hope you made loads of money. I am absolutely minted. Fucking rolling in it. I was debating telling you pet to fuck off, to be honest. I don't need this anymore. (laughing) If you did, if you actually went off and you fucking bought some monkey jpegs and you're like, "Look, mate."

I bought this monkey and now I'm retiring. I would not be concerned. I'd be very happy for you. Well, should that day ever come? I promise I will be open and nice with you and share some of my proceeds.

Oh, we're getting a message now from Antimus. I can't hear you. We can't hear him. Should I just close this out and send another link? I think we might have to, yeah. Okay, right. I'll speak to you in a minute, mate.

All right, fuck's sake. Okay. Take two. We're back after half an hour of waiting for Antimus. Tried one mic, it was shit. Tried another one, it was even worse. Tried another one, it was even worse.

Tried a different operating system. Can't believe it, but even worse. And now it's just gone off comms, so. So the takeaway is don't use Windows, kids. Don't record at Antimus. That's the big takeaway.

That is a very valid point. Just there, something popped into my head around. Obviously I was moaning, but I'm shitting evenings and how I'm crapping when I'm tired and stuff. And I've got a little story, just a very short story to tell you that I'll probably make you giggle.

Just before we sat down to start recording the first time, I was looking for my headphones for about 30 seconds before realizing they were on my head. Amazing. And then obviously you use a specific recording service that only works on Chrome-based browsers.

Yeah. I normally use Firefox, so my default is to go to Firefox. But my Chrome browser that I use when I record with you is Brave. So what I did to open Brave is instead of opening Brave, I open Firefox and then search for Brave in the search box.

In the search box. In the search box, and then it came up with like, obviously the Brave website and I'm like, "What the fuck am I doing?" Amazing. Oh, we have somebody in the green room.

Here he is, right on time. He's gonna fuck us all up now as well. We just waited for 20 minutes, I finally said, "No, I can't wait any longer for this guy." And now he's lurking in the green room about to mess up the whole recording.

Brace yourselves, people. I think we leave this audio in, even if it is terrible, so people can see how bad it is. Yeah. Hi, Antimus. Antimus. Silence. Nothing. Nothing. You could argue that's better than it was before.

Oh. I heard something. It sounded like he's like burping. It sounded like you're having a stroke or something. (laughing) Fuck me. Antimus, if you can hear us, we love you. But this is not good enough.

Yeah, back in a minute, guys. I'm just gonna gouge my own eyes out. I expect more from the Germans. They're engineering prowess. Never been efficient, aren't they? Yeah. Now he's having a beatbox into the mic.

No. We'll carry on. We'll see if we might hear him, but at the moment, Antimus just know that we can't. Oh, God. So it's normally a morning coffee rip today. It is a, what is it? It's nearly fucking nine o'clock at night.

Q&A may have been up since the crack of dawn, slaving away. Q&A to make the Bitcoin space better, me moving around heavy steel. And yeah, it's just not what we need. And then Antimus pops in and he's like, "Yeah, I'm gonna ruin their evening."

He's been at the fucking spa all day. There we are. I heard that. So we can hear your beatboxing. Why only beatboxing though? Why, why no usual high quality content and insight? Nothing, that's what we get.

All right, let's open up the list. Okay, so I'll step into Antimus' shoes for a little bit in the hope that maybe in a couple of hours he fixes his mic. Anyway, on with the list. This is in no particular order, but let's kick off with some lesser happy news, so we say a customer data list has been leaked via the block stream web store.

Yes, not good. So there has been an email sent to everybody essentially that has bought anything from the block stream store to basically try to get people to install a mandatory firmware update for their Jade hardware wallet.

So anybody who has kind of, I guess, been in the space for a couple of years would probably raise a red flag immediately when they see an email like this because number one, hardware wallets almost never issue emails to say you need to do a mandatory firmware update and they certainly wouldn't send an email link

containing that firmware out either. So it was fairly easy to spot and I think the scammers that were doing this did so from an email address that was not even remotely anything like block stream.

Dave's plumbing merchant@hotmail.com. Yeah, exactly. So it wasn't exactly a sophisticated attack, but I guess the take-home here is that anytime that you share your personal information with a Bitcoin company, be that a hardware wallet company or an exchange or anything like that, you are putting a certain level of trust

within that company. I think some information has come to light that this wasn't specifically the block stream store and there's indications that it could be like an email marketing firm that they kind of partner with to help them do their email campaigns and whatnot.

So it may not be that it's block stream themselves that have leaked it, they are responsible for this data and obviously this should fall on them. So yeah, not great, but I put this one in the list to act as a reminder, basically just say look, if you ever get an email from your hardware wallet company

saying that you need to immediately update your firmware, it's almost certainly going to be a scam. If you're in doubt, contact the genuine support for your chosen manufacturer and just validate the email that's come from them if you're unsure.

There is almost never a time where you need to rush out and update the firmware for your hardware wallet and there certainly is never a time where you should be entering the seed words of your hardware wallet into a link that's provided into an email because again, that is almost certainly always going to be a complete scam.

Be aware, be vigilant and keep your wits about you because there's one thing that's always going to be true about the Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency space is that it's going to attract scammers that try to steal your Sats, so take care.

- Amen. - Amen. - Oh, wow. - Ooh. - Here he is. - Can you hear me? - Yes. - We can. - And what's the quality like? - Poor average. (both laughing) - Extremely poor. - Okay. - It's really nice to hear your voice, even if it is distorted too loud and a little bit gruff.

- I've turned up again full on here. - Try turning it slightly down. - Yeah, okay, this is probably like 75. - That'll do. I'll do something in the post edit. But here you are. Why don't you put down on your Christmas list a new mic and say, look, Father Christmas, I've been a really good boy.

I think I deserve to sound as good as I look and feel. (both laughing) - You should see me. - I will and it will be this evening. I'll do that, fucking hell. This is, you should send me some recommendations 'cause this is pissing me off.

- Me and Q&A, neither of us are sponsored by this company but Yeti is what we use. I think I've got the Yeti Pro 'cause I'm just up a class and all that. So I paid like 240 quid for it and then obviously Q&A is Northern and all that.

So you've got the cheap one, I think, 'cause it's like 150 quid or something like that. - Yeah, slightly less when I bought it, I think it's 120 quid, yeah. - Yeah, and listen, listen how crystal clear he is.

- Yeah, beautiful. - Doesn't sound like my microphone is at the bottom of a bin. (both laughing) Nice to hear your voice though at last an hour later. - Exactly, fucking hell. Yeti, are those from Logitech, right?

- Not sure. - Or is the company called Yeti? - The company is called Yeti. - Yeah, anyway, okay, I'll get it done. - Get one of those. - Okay. - Did you hear us talking about blockstream data leak?

- I got the end of it, yeah. I think we retouched on that last time, didn't we? - I think we might have. - That was just on the day that it came out but there was no additional information.

- Yeah. - The shipping company or something was responsible which is pretty shit because that means they didn't just get the email addresses, they actually got the addresses as well. - Yeah, not good.

- Essentially, yeah, yeah. I think while we're on this subject, I'm just gonna bump something further up the list that's in the same vein. There's been a fake Ledger Live application on the official Microsoft App Store.

- Brilliant. - Allegedly stolen 16.8 Bitcoin from users. - Ooh, fuck. - So once again, they all follow the same sort of trajectory where they get themselves into a store or they release this app.

They have a somewhat official looking website or storefront, how this got into the Microsoft Store. I'll never know. It looks and feels like the normal Ledger Live application but they, nine times out of 10, they'll ask you to enter your seed words in there to probably quote unquote verify something.

And obviously as soon as you do that, bye bye Bitcoin and bye bye whatever shit comes, you've got on your ledger as well. - Ooh. - So I believe this has been taken down now at the time of recording, but yeah, it was removed but it was removed on the same day but that just goes to show how quickly you can say bye bye to 17 Bitcoin.

It was only up for one day. - Okay, though. - And it's called Ledger Live Web3 from official dev. I mean, there's quite a few red flags right there. - Web3, all the buzzwords. So yeah, guys, I like a broker record but if in doubt, make sure you download in your shit direct from the manufacturer wherever it's possible.

If you're not sure, ask the manufacturer and just send them an email. It won't cost you anything. Other than five minutes of your time, say look, I'm about to click download on this link from this store, is it you?

It might be the difference between you and your sat. - And don't ever put your seed words in ever when someone asks you. - Yes. There's never a time ever where you should do that, is there?

It's not like, oh, you should probably not. It's like, no, no, you never do it. - Agreed, agreed. And this is where I get so annoyed with the certain models of Trezor where you have to type your passphrase into your computer to interact with it.

- It's retarded. - Yeah, it's retarded shit like that that kind of muddies the water so that when customers do get served these fishing gaps, they think, well, all right, I'll put my passphrase in then it's probably not out of the realms of possibility that they would ask me to enter my seed words for some legitimate reason.

So, yeah, again, just be careful which hardware you use and be very careful what you do with your seed words. - Yeah, I'll probably get shouted at here and I'm probably out of my depth a little bit but I would say to anyone, don't ever fucking use Trezor the times when I have interacted with it in the past.

A, I was opening it up in a browser and like you say, typing things into a computer and plugging it into my computer which all of those things seem wrong to me. On top of that, they're interacting with Wasabi and I just feel like for those reasons, I would rather just have any phone with any fucking mobile wallet on it.

I would feel safer with that than using a Trezor although they did look quite nice at the Bitcoin Amsterdam I think they looked aesthetically quite pleasing but everything else about them, I thought was shit.

- Yeah, so that was the new model with the first ever one they've released with a secure element. So, in my eyes, the first actual hardware wallet that they've produced that has any level of, you know, physical protection with your free of seed.

So, if you are helping on buying a dress and make sure it's that one. But yeah, pretty much echo your thoughts Max, to be honest. - Yeah, come to. - Yeah, and Bitbox had a similar situation, right?

So, I think this was on the 15th of November was over two weeks ago that they had a user who had some kind of malware on their computer that faked the Bitbox app. So, it was a similar model with the Trezor and Ledger so they were like an app that goes along with the Bitbox and they had malware on the computer that kind of doubled.

So, when you plugged in your Bitbox, it like opened up and you thought you were actually interacting with the Bitbox app, but you were actually interacting with the malware, but it looked identical.

And also wanted you to enter the seed words. - Yeah, but that's the key. That's where you should know. - Exactly. - You'd plug it in and then you would go, "Oh, it's asking me to put my seed phrase in here."

But I won't do that then 'cause this is obviously a scam. - Yeah. So, the weird twist in that story is that according to Bitbox, they traced the source of the malicious website that was serving the dodgy version of the Bitbox app.

They reckon that this user had searched for the term wasabi wallet and ended up downloading a malicious installer, they've called it. What the link between a dodgy version of wasabi and a dodgy version of Bitbox is, I don't know, but what's the legitimate one?

- Well, all I was gonna say is the moral of the story is don't use wasabi. (laughing) Yeah, it looks like, I think the real website ends in .io and then the scam one looks like it ends in .app to a layman, you know, that was an easy mistake to make, I guess.

Again, no idea what the link is between why a Bitbox user was searching for wasabi and how it managed to install the Bitbox app, but that's what they said anyway. - Yeah, and only it only pops up when searching via .go.

So apparently not when using Google or something. When I add a look, if I could see it, find anything like none of these, or this website didn't pop up when I searched it. But yeah, apparently as soon as you click on it, it downloads something to your machine.

So be aware there, and if you're downloading any software, I always go to GitHub. And if it's not on GitHub, you probably shouldn't be using the software in the first place. - Do you want to take over the list, Antima?

So I don't want to step on your toes. - No, all good, all good, all good. But it took a few here. So is there anything else on a similar topic? - Yes, there is actually. I used Envoy for the first time ever, and I shouldn't be used to age as a go 'cause they're a sponsor and blah, blah, blah, blah, but I hadn't used it.

And I was very impressed. I wasn't going to bother. I thought, now I've got too many different things I'm interacting with. I don't want to add something else. And I think that's what helped me back, but it was really, really slick.

So well done. - Thank you, sir. I guess now would be a good time to do the Envoy Shield that we have on the list, really. - There we go. - Yeah, it's like it was planned. So this week we released the public beta version, not the main release yet.

So you won't find in your normal app stores of Envoy version 1.4. The main headlines here, we got a couple of new screens. We got the activity center, which gives you a summary of your transactions, notify you of firmware updates if you're a passport user.

And we've also got a new privacy screen where you can toggle off tour, you can connect to your own node, and you can add an application lock. So these are all features that we had, but they were kind of very, very in the setting.

So we've made them a little bit more organized and a bit more forefront. Outside of that, the main addition here is full coin control. So with Envoy, with your mobile wallet or with your passport accounts, you can now do full coin control when doing any spend.

So you can go in, you can give your transactions notes. And we've also added a really cool feature that I'm very, very pleased with in terms of coin organization or categorization, should I say, call tags.

So what you can go and do is look at all of your UTXOs and then you can put them into different categories or tags is what we call them. So you could have tags for your KYC, your NOCO, I say, tags for your wages, tags for your donations, keep them all separate, but within an individual account.

From there, obviously with all the usual coin control stuff, you can lock or unlock these coins to prevent them from being spent. And with us architecting it in this way, we've actually got three different ways that you can kind of spend from Envoy now.

And this is my terminology here. We haven't kind of come up with some official terminology here, but you've got the first one, you've got a naive spend where you literally just go into the app, open your account or your hot wallet and go, right, Max's address, paste, send him 25,000 sat to go.

Here's my fee, go. That's the naive, the simple spend, like the easiest way to use Bitcoin. You've always been able to do that and you always will be. The second tier or second sort of level of detail you can get into and spend in is that you can spend from a tag.

So what you can do now is once you've given your coins some tags, you can pop into what we call your tag view. You can just turn on one of them. Let's say my donations tag. And I can say, right, with that tag, construct the spend to Max's address, take 50,000 sat out of it.

I don't care which coins you use, as long as you only choose them from my donations tag. I don't want you to look at any of the other coins, just pick from one of or many of those, depending on obviously the makeup of the wallet and then hit go.

And then the third way you can do it obviously is what we would all consider as full coin control, where you would go to your UTXL list and you pick the individual coin or multiple coins that you want to be included into a transaction so that nothing else is looked at at all, populate the address, give it the amount and then press send.

So we've got basically everybody covered. If you're not bothered about coin control, you can just continue to use the app as you have done before. And if you are a super nerd, like three of us on this call and you like to give all of your UTXL's pet names and spend them one by one because it's super private, then you can do that as well.

But we've got a happy medium in there where we've got the tags and you can just be like, yep, pay onto this from my no KYC stash. So that is in active beta at the moment. Very, very close to release.

We're aiming for release next week. We're recording on the 30th of November, although thanks to Antimas, it's nearly the 1st of December. (laughing) So yeah, very early December, this will be out and you'll be able to get your hands on it.

Well, I personally am very, very proud of this. This has been our longest Envoy release ever. The whole team's put a load of work into this and I'm gonna go out on the limb and put my neck on the line here and say that this is the best coin control experience in a mobile app, bar none.

Ooh, okay. Is this what I'm using at the moment, I presume? If you've downloaded from the Play Store or the App Store, then no, it won't be. It's only available right now from GitHub as an APK download or if you're on the test flight.

No, it won't, it's APK. How can I find out? 'Cause all the things that you've said I've got. If you see the words privacy at the bottom in the tray, then you've got 1.4 'cause that wasn't that before.

Yes, yes, that's what I have. There you go. So I can say, so that's Q&A reading off a load of stuff in his usual way, but like for the retards out there, honestly, I've been using this for maybe a week now and genuinely it's really fucking easy.

Like really, really slick. And when you're talking about this tag thing, sometimes when you go off on one, it's kind of like it's lots of words and it's a little bit technical. So I'm gonna bring this down for the specials.

This tag thing, if you put in like, I don't know, like you're saying KYC or non-KYC, it will clump them all together. So you'll have from the largest UTXOs all the way down to the smallest and it will clump them all.

You have like a nice little slider thing which you can just slide across of what you will or won't use. And then it just has sections which just makes it really fucking simple. And then you might have your normal account and then you might have another account that's got a passphrase on it and another one that has another one.

And you can track as many as you want. I linked it to my run and dojo tanto in like, I don't know, 30 seconds, just scanning a QR code. And what I was using before with foundation, with my passport, I was using it on my laptop, using Sparrow and I love Craig Grall.

Like he's a fucking legend and what he's built is amazing but my laptop is shit and the camera is shit. So when I was scanning the QR codes back and forward it was taking, I'm not exaggerating like 15 minutes to send a fucking transaction, it was ridiculous.

So I was like, this is, I can't be dealing with this. So I then downloaded this and now it is a second, two seconds. I'm doing it from my passport onto my phone and back and it's done and it's really, really slick.

So if anyone listened to Q&A's Waffle and thought, oh, I don't know, I don't know about that. Trust me, go and use this, it's really good. - Appreciate the shield. I've already had a few people that have on the beta program that are helping us with testing and getting paid for it.

I might add, if you want to get involved with that, feel free to open to anybody. And I've already had a few of those people be like, in my DM saying, yep, bye, bye, blue wallet. This was the tipping point once we've got a cutting control where we're almost a feature parity in terms of what most people want, so.

- Well, I'll take that all back now. I didn't get paid for my feedback. - You should have headed into the beta testers group. There are some caveats, you have to be competent with GitHub to make an issue and tell us what's wrong so we can fix it.

- Okay, well, I can tell you one thing that I didn't appreciate if that helps you at all. - I'll take over it. - The one thing that I would like to see is minor, but I would like to see is when I see a sent transaction, I click onto it and I can see status and it will just say confirmed.

I know it's minor and it doesn't really matter, but I actually like to see how many confirmations. It's just like a weird little thing. I really would love to see it. And if it wasn't a massive issue to put that in there, I'd love for that to be added.

- Okay, we, being open to us, have no plans, immediate plans for that. We haven't even talked about it. - The one thing that would potentially achieve that, that we do have planned is you see the transaction ID?

- Yeah, you can click on that. - Yeah, well, it doesn't do anything at the moment. It just opens it out so you can copy it, but in the future, we're gonna allow you to click on that and either open it in a default explorer if you don't run your own node, or you can open it on the explorer on your window or something like that

so you can see all the details there. - I never like clicking on those 'cause I'm like, oh, hold on. Is this actually gonna go over tour? Is this gonna now be linked to my IP? I always like shit myself about six.

I remember that's what happened on Samurai and then I was like, oh, fuck, I don't wanna be doing that anymore. So it's minor, but I just like to see as this had one confirmation, six, 300, and it's just like a nerdy little thing that I like to look at.

I know it doesn't really probably matter that much, but no, no, it's fair. All feedback is welcome. - Everything else though, very nice. - Does it show that like the first few transactions or does it just say confirmed as from the first?

- Confirmed from the first one. - We give a date and a time as well, so you'll know when it was confirmed. Obviously that doesn't tell you whether it's two or six, but obviously as it's more than a date.

- It gives you a rough. - Yeah, you know there's been like at least 144 blocks gone. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. 'Cause I was quite, I mean, I haven't used this BTF, but I was quite like seeing the first few, so I know, okay, there's past four confirmations or whatever.

'Cause it's like 158, if it's 158 or 250, it doesn't really matter anymore. If it just jumps over to confirm that's from like the fourth or sixth or whatever. Yeah, but the tag thing or the whole concept with the tags for coin control is wonderful.

BTC Pay Server has this like tag system as well, but it's not actually integrated with the coin control, which is a shame. But having that, being able to create these buckets from which the spend just saves so much time, even though you could do it manually, obviously, if you do all your notes properly.

- Yeah, internally we've been calling it lazy coin control, which I kind of like, 'cause it is quite descriptive, but obviously it's not great marketing to speak. - Lazy. - On that note, other updates, we've got Zeus, Peter.

I don't know if the full release has come out this week, but it hasn't, has it? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. - Of course you're not used to, if I'm honest. - And there's been, on the third beat, I think, is this is V0.8.0.

We touched on this one and the last as well. I think that was the B2, the whole new rebranding, new languages, and also the embedded node, L&D node on your phone, as well as Olympus. So you're like a zero conf channel service, so this is like their liquidity service to the users.

I've only half kind of followed this, but there's been quite a lot of banter with Mutiny Wallet, and this, I think, ties into their Zeus pay, is that correct? - I can give some background, yeah.

So before we get into the beef and the context, the new branding, guys, what do you think? - I thought it was Ruth Slick. - And Thomas. - Yeah. (chuckles) - I'm glad to be shared the same thought.

- Yeah. - Maybe it's my eyes, I can't read the word Zeus in that logo. - Yeah, I mean, obviously, I know that it's Zeus so that I can see how they kind of came up with the idea, but if I see this logo for the first time, there's nowhere I'm reading Zeus.

- Yeah. - I just saw a yellow picture of Zeus, that's all I saw. - Yeah, it's got some weird hieroglyphic type writing over the top of it that, like, say, if you knew it was Zeus, you knew.

Like, you can see the zed in the ass and... - No, that's not what I saw, though. I saw it was a picture, it was just... Yeah, here we are. If you click on the top left of the website, and there's just like a picture of Zeus, he looks like he's jacks, he goes, Jim's got like a really nice beard, he uses all the products you should only use

to have like that luscious beard and hair. You see the one I mean, like orange and yellow? - On Zeus, what's the website? - ZeusLN.com. - LN.com. - And then you'll see what you're talking about, which is terrible.

- Yeah. - That is not good. But if you click on it, in the top left, and then you'll see there's like the orange and yellow image. - Yeah. - That's what I saw, and I was like, that's fucking cool.

I like that, it's a nice bit of art. - So now we thought that the really important stuff, like the logo. - Yeah, so a little bit of context. So yeah, with version 0.8 of Zeus, they have entered the LSP, the lightning service provider realm, I guess, where you don't actually need your own node to use Zeus.

Now you can operate it in a very similar way, as you can with Breeze or with Phoenix, where there is a lightweight node running on your phone that connects only to the LSP presumably run by Zeus.

Yeah, which is what they've called Olympus. So they will do all of your channel routing and stuff like that for you. But done in such a way that they can't steal your funds, the worst they can do is kind of deny your payments to go through essentially, but the crucial bit is, it is technically non-gustodial.

As well as that as part of V0.8, they've released what they're calling Zeus Pay, which is a self-custodial lightning address, which uses a service called Zapplocker, or a protocol called Zapplocker, which we have talked about ages ago.

And basically the way it works is, as we've talked about before, with lightning address, you need a web server and you need an always on computer that is able to listen out for payments that go and then redirect them to your node, basically to requesting voices and stuff.

So what most people do is go fuck that, I'm not running a web server because I don't know how, I'm just gonna use Wallace Satoshi, which is obviously fully custodial and more on that later.

Zeus has come up with a or integrated a unique approach where they run the web server for you and give you like, you know, Max@zeuspay.com. So you have the easy, you know, on all the fun bits of lightning address without the overhead of running the web server itself.

But because they've used this Zapplocker service, under the hood that uses something called HODL invoices, where basically they'll hold the payment in transit for you whilst you're not online.

And then they either, I'm not sure on the specifics of this part, they'll either just hold it until you come back online or they will somehow send a notification to you to say, hey, there's something waiting for you here.

Do you wanna come back online so that you can complete the payment? Once again, the crucial bit here is that they are literally just holding the payment. The way it's structured with lightning is that they can't kind of steal that.

They are just in intermediary and once again, all they can do is stop it from going through, they can't steal the funds. So it is an improvement for those that don't wanna run a web server, but still want to use lightning address and once again, have some principles and don't wanna use wallet Satoshi.

But this has caused some difficulties in the lightning network because naturally a lot of people have gravitated towards this and started to use this Zoospace service. And that has resulted in a lot of lightning payments being kind of paused in transit and locking up a lot of liquidity

and basically causing a lot of havoc with any other node that has connections with the Zoos LSP. One of those companies is the guys from Mutiny who also operate their own PWA lightning application.

And basically the guys at Mutiny have essentially just disabled sending these types of payments to any Zoos wallet user because it's causing havoc with their nodes and their customers have been getting forced channel closures which in the current fee rate or recent fee rate spikes where we've been up to like three, 400 sat per byte

just to get into the next block. If you get forced closed in a fee rate like that, that could wipe out the entire balance of your channel if it's a small channel. So I see where the mutiny guys are coming from and why they're doing that to kind of protect their users.

So yeah, it's at the time of writing, I don't think there's been any resolution to it. Zoos seems to be sticking to their guns and say, we have come up with a solution. Yes, it might not be perfect, but this is distinctly better than, let's say, somebody just given all assets to wallet Satoshi.

I would tend to agree, but I don't have a lightning router node pointed at Zoos that is having any issues with this. And I'm sure the guys from mutiny will have a much harsher take on this.

So hopefully that was a good summary of it anyway. This, like say, no resolution yet. And it's going to be interesting to see how this one unfolds. So I don't quite understand like how it actually gets to their forced closes.

Like, is it that just at some point because it's stuck in transit that the operator of that channel just says, okay, I've got to force close this so that I can kind of regain control over that liquidity.

Or is there some kind of mechanism that like after a certain period of time, if a transaction hasn't gone through, there's an automatic force close? I don't think it's automatic. I think it's the fact that it's locking up a large amount of liquidity within these channels that maybe there is a force close.

I'm not sure, they're definitely used to turn force close. So perhaps there is certain no implementations might have like a fail safe basically to think, you know, if I'm getting attacked and I've got a lot of stuck HTLCs which are basically these poddling voices, then maybe they are doing it as a safety mechanism.

I'm not sure. - They are using different implementations. I think Zeus is LND and... - Yeah, mutiny uses LDK. - LDK, so it could be that. It's all going a bit over my head all this, if I'm honest.

The last year in Lightning World has made me sort of step back and pay less attention 'cause I'm just like, this is all just stressful. I haven't got time for it. It's too much for me. I'm sure it's fine if you're doing this all day every day and balancing channels and worrying about what implementation

and blah, blah, blah, blah, but it's just someone who's not that technical and just wanted to make payments in a self-sovereign way, it seems to be relatively difficult and the only thing I'm doing now on your advice is using Phoenix and it's pretty okay, but I rarely use it when I was away in Amsterdam.

I bought a couple of duck burgers and they were delicious and it was good for that, but other than that, I don't know, I don't know about YouTube, but I'm just a bit tired of it. - Yeah, I don't use it a lot, to be honest with you.

I do use Zeus connected to an LND node. Now that I have it set up through VPNs and not using Tor, it's pretty good actually, it's very robust and I'm even shocked running it on a Raspberry Pi.

So it seems that for me personally, at least it was Tor, was most of my issues and now that I've been that off, it seems pretty good. But again, I'm a very, very, very light user of lightning.

It only gets any moderate usage when I go to a conference or something, which is like maybe three or four times the year outside of that. It just kind of sits there and I might get some zaps on Noster or something, but other than that, it's pretty much just a play toy for me.

- Yeah, likewise here, I mean, at least privately, with Vulcan21, we've got the BDC pay server with a lightning node, which obviously needs quite a bit of attention, rebalancing channels and stuff like that.

But that's pretty straightforward, like once you've got a few channels open, especially like playing around with all these different nodes and then like what implementation do you want to choose?

And it's just not something that you can set and forget. You have to kind of keep doing the research and like staying on the pulse of what's going on in the whole industry and there's so much back and forth and just internal fights that it's pretty exhausting, trying to keep up with it all.

- But on the other hand, there's progress being made and I think that's also important, that different ideas kind of fought out to see like what direction the whole ecosystem goes and hopefully they can converge again at some point.

- And there is useful stuff, like I'm not in the camp from like, oh, I don't want to just like completely slug off lightning because that is useful stuff. The podcasting 2.0, I think has promised, it's certainly been good for my show, it has helped me a lot.

So I don't want to like throw the baby out of the bath water. All I'm saying is to use it in a proper self-solving way seems like a fucking second job at the moment to keep on top of things and I haven't got time for it.

And so I just like using the base layer as much as I possibly can. There's never any dramas with it and I like that. - I've got to say, it's quite a good like pressure valve for like the fees, seeing like the payments for the orders over the last month.

I think there was one order that was paid on sale and everything else was, all the other Bitcoin payments were came in by lightning. - Really, we've seen the opposite. - Really, with the high fees.

- Yeah, well, I think we've had one lightning payment and everything else is on chain. - Shit, okay. - What about you Q&A? Can you divulge or? - Weird, you should ask that. I'm literally just looking at it right now.

Since April, let me work out the quick percentage, nearly 30% of our sales have been lightning. Of the Bitcoin sales, that is not total sales, that's just of Bitcoin we receive, I'd say about 30% of it is-- - Sounds pretty high.

- Is via lightning. But what that doesn't tell you is 90% of that 30% could be just paying us directly from strike and just basically essentially paying us in dollars, if that makes sense.

Or use a debt dollars. So they're not technically using lightning, but obviously we receive lightning. So please don't read too much into that. It could be coming from anywhere. - Can you see how that's changed over the last month, like with the high fees, if that's like shifted?

- I can have a quick look now, if you want to fill for 30 seconds. - While he's doing that, Antimus, you're like this, just how put down and sad Q&A made me feel. I went out to go and buy a passport and I went up to Q&A and I said, "Look at this, mate, I sort of see him as my mentor, you know?"

I went, "Q&A, look at this. "Do you like how I've paid you in lightning?" And I opened this lightning channel using one single UTXO post-mix that's gone through Whirlpool. How'd you like that privacy?

And I was thinking, "Keep go, son, I'm so proud of you." You've really grown up to be a good and strong and principled man. Give me a hug. And instead it just went, "Yes, all right, mate."

- Fuck. Dude. - I was like, "Oh, mate, he's gonna be so fucking proud of me. "He's gonna be, he's gonna be so proud, look at this." And then he just goes, "Yeah, all right." - Mate, Mate asked, did not touch the floor in Amsterdam.

I can't even remember. I can't even remember which one you eat. The whole thing's just a blur. (laughing) Antimus, do you want to answer your question? Since the start of September, it's about 50% lightning.

So yes, that has increased. - Okay. - Okay. - Well, I wonder why it's not happening, we lost them. - Well, I mean, I presume it may be like the customer base. - Maybe. - We need more kids towards like the samurai.

- I was going to say, I can't imagine there are many strike users that listen to it by bit. - Zero. (laughing) - I would think zero, right? - I mean, we have had some more pain lightning, but it's been almost all of it, yeah.

All of it on chain, even with really high fees, even when we were sat, like 300 sats per bite, it was still orders coming through. - Yeah, we'll see how this one plays out. That's for further updates.

We've also got one second, I've just got to navigate back to our other computer. Here we go. - Start nine, start OS. This is, was definitely wonderful news for those who follow along with the whole saga and discussions and fights on Twitter and various podcasts about the different licensing models

and what can be designated as FOS software or just source viewable or whatever. - Identifying as FOS. - Exactly. - Hello. - Did you see that by the way? (laughing) - For context, for anybody listening, the Bitcoin bugle which is like a parody news source for Bitcoin news basically dropped the story yesterday,

basically saying that call card is now, it's not open source, but they identify as free and open source. - Wow. - And they did like this full article about it and how this is what they identify as now, which I just, that found very, very funny.

- I see you people. - Sorry to interrupt. - We feature them every plebmon a monthly. - We love the people. - It's brilliant. - Anyway, we can't say that about Start9 now because they are truly free.

- It's truly awesome. - They come with an MIT license, so hats off guys. The weird thing for me is that they, or at least I've not seen it, they haven't really given any, it was all very quiet, they just kind of did it and somebody found the license change.

It was like, hey, this is really good. I don't see any big rationale from them or anything that's driven the decision. - They did always say they were gonna do it. - Exactly. - I remember listening years ago, they said, but, you know, I listened to it years ago and I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fucking,

that's talk mate, let's actually see you walk. And then they've done it, so congrats. - Yeah, I think at some point on Citadel Dispatch, they had like a whole map, held like a pod with four or five different lead maintainers from the different node projects and there they had a big discussion about the licensing models and that was right,

pretty close to the beginning of flight stuff. - I remember that. - That was a couple of years ago, wasn't it? - Exactly, yeah, and there he said, I mean, that they ultimately want to go to an MIT license, but at the beginning he wants to protect the company and apparently they got to that point, 'cause I didn't see a lot of pressure

like over the last months that they just like folded at some point. - No. - Did kind of seem like a genuine move and something that they planned for a longer time. - Yeah, well, however it's come about, it's good to say.

- 100%. Did you see that they've started selling refurbished mini desktops now with things that I was installed? - I've not seen that. - I thought that was a bit of a weird move for a VC back company to start selling second-hand stuff.

Maybe it's just me, especially 'cause it massively undercuts their main flagship hardware by like 50%. Just thinking like are they gonna scouple themselves here, but they've obviously put a lot more thought into it than I have, but yeah, they now sell like old HP laptops that have been refurbished, they've got to start OS on.

So, that's strange. - You could see it that way or you could see it as like, well, it might be an easier way for someone to enter and start using the software. And then if they like it, they're like, oh, hold on, they've actually sold me this hardware a bit cheaper than I would have otherwise been able to get it.

It's made it really easy for me. I really like it. And now we've had a bull run or whatever's happened and life's easier and fuck it. I really appreciate what they've done. So then they'll go and spend money with them.

I certainly think like that when there's companies in the Bitcoin space who I respect and I think, yeah, I just like how you do things. I'll spend money with them. - Yep, fair. - Next on the list, we've got a Sparrow wallet.

So they've actually had two updates since the last part. So this was V1.8.0 and 1.8.1. - Good to see Craig's finally pulled his finger out. (laughing) - Yeah, yeah, yeah, loads of it. There's probably a new one since last week.

- No, I did. (laughing) - Yeah, so V1.8.0. This is a transaction diagram, captions, as well as open wallets, search and more. So especially the open wallets, search is great. So you can actually search through all open wallets.

If you're not quite sure exactly from which wallet you did a certain transaction, you can actually search and it will go through all the open wallets, which is, I'm safer. - Yeah, very cool.

My favorite Sparrow update from this month is from 1.8.1 though. - Go on, what's that? - So the monkey JPOP people have congested the chain that much that Craig is at to make the fee slide a bigger on Sparrow.

(laughing) Brilliant. - They're all on Sparrow on there as well. - Yeah, because it has good coin control and that's what you need when you're fucking about with this crap, apparently. Maybe they'll all move to Envoy, who knows.

- Oh, it's gonna say. - Yeah. - You better fucking hope not, 'cause you're getting no work done. - I was gonna say I need like 50 more people in the support team with me. (laughing) I haven't actually checked how far the slider goes now.

The header image for the release goes up to 8,000. - Sounds per bike. - Oh, wow. (laughing) - Ouch. - Seems like they've calmed down a bit now though. - Yes. - The downs are like 25 or something, right?

- Yeah, that's right. I mean, it is later in the day, I suppose so. - It's 32 at the moment. - Yeah. - High priority, 32 sets per bike. When I was sat here a week ago, it was like 10 times that.

- Yeah, yeah. - There's still ridiculous fee rates getting into recent blocks though. - Well, yeah, and one was especially brutal, right? This was 83 BTC transaction fee. (laughing) What was that?

That must have been an absolute record, right? - Wow. - New record in fiat terms at least. So there was a larger Bitcoin fee at some point. - Yeah, but wasn't someone saying they got hacked and then did anyone else see this?

They'd set up like a Twitter profile saying like, I was hacked for 140 Bitcoin and 83 was this and then I kept seeing it in like sovereign Bitcoin or group and a few other of the privacy groups where it was like, this is bullshit or we think it is.

And then I carried on with my life and I didn't look any further. - You are correct that this 83 Bitcoin in fees was allegedly part of a cold wallet hack where apparently a user lost 139 Bitcoin.

Again, the user is somewhat unknown. The details are still pretty loose on what happened. We don't know what cold wallet it is or how they generate the seed or where the seed was saved. You know, we've got another story on seed stories coming up as well on the list.

But yeah, as you said Max, allegedly the victim here has made an anonymous Twitter account saying that they are the owner of or were the owner, should I say, of this Bitcoin? And they've actually signed a Bitcoin message with it to say it was me.

Now that doesn't really prove much other than that they have the private keys. Obviously we still don't know who this person is. We do have a little shred of kind of social proof, I guess.

We have Nifty Nay. Her real name is Lisa Sumon. She runs base 58 and is a core lightning dev. Pretty well respected in the industry and has been around for a long time who says that she knows this person that's behind the anonymous Twitter account and saying that it is legit.

So the lucky miner that mined the block containing the 83 Bitcoin fees was Antpool. And I think literally today, so this is hot off the rest, they've actually realized that it's in their funds and they've kind of put it on hold and they're trying to work out what to do with it.

I don't like that. I believe they have sent out some requirements of whoever it is, you know, the victim needs to do to get this back. So it seems like they're open to giving it back. But again, it's still an unfolding issue at the moment.

So that's all of the details we have at the moment. The crucial bit for me is trying to learn more about what they were doing with their seed because is it a low entropy seed? Is it another instance of them rolling dice or not rolling enough dice?

Is it them storing their seed on a password manager or something like that? It all remains to be seen. So hopefully next month we'll have a bit more clarity, but absolutely fucking wild to see 83 Bitcoin fees.

- The other open question I have is like, if somebody seed was compromised then there was 140 Bitcoin in there. - Why pay that massive fee? - Yes, yeah, exactly. - It's the obvious question.

- There has got on on to us. - Yeah, there's been, actually I'm not 100% sure who that was on Twitter. It could have been Monon out who've done quite a good write up on this. Someone did the math on this and it's exactly 60%.

So this would be presumably an automated system that as soon as like some brute force tool found some funds, they just automatically do a spend with 60% fees just to be sure. Man, it's like a kind of automated tool doing this.

This was kind of the... - No. - No, and you obviously, I mean, I don't know whoever programmed this, if this was the case, no one's really expecting 140 Bitcoin, right? It's coming on, but the other crazy thing is that there was a replaced by fee, right?

So there was an earlier transaction that spent a lot less in fees, but still ungodly amount. - Who's doing 60% fees ever? I don't buy that. - If you rate a software that brute forces different wallets, right, and then you just wanna be sure that if you kind of get into someone's wallet, you wanna get those funds, no.

It's all a gain anyway, right? I don't believe that. I just think if you're smart enough to hack and get in and get someone's seed and make this software, you're also smart enough to say, I'm not a programmer, but like, if it's over this or within this range, then you don't go above this.

Like, you're not just gonna do 60% of any transaction 'cause that's a massive amount, like, I can't think of a time where I've sent a transaction and 60% of what I'm sending is the fee. I can't think of a time.

It's fucking mental. And so if someone's smart enough to do that, they're smart enough to write whatever software they need to write, just be like, do a fucking reasonable fee where it's gonna go into the next block.

Just don't be a stupid cunt. It just doesn't make sense to me that someone would do that. - The crazy thing is here, I just found the tweet. So this is from mononaut and it was posted on the 27th of November.

And he said, I just noticed that the 83.7 BTC fee was exactly 60% of the sole new TXO value. And it's like down to the SAT. So 60% of 139.42495946 equals 83.1. So it's down to the SAT. - Okay, that would be unlikely for it to be exactly 60% in that case.

And the attacker also swept a 100,000 SAT UTXO, 100,000 SAT from the same address paying exactly 60,000 SATs in fees. It's definitely something automated then. - Yeah, interesting. I would have said a minute ago and I did bullshit, but now you've said that I'm like, maybe.

But then if you're the hacker, you'd be like, fuck, fuck. - We should have spent a bit more time on this script or whatever you'd call it. If I were to spend another five minutes just to not be done, I'd be so wealthy.

- Well, on the other hand, you've got 55 Bitcoin. - He's still very wealthy, extremely wealthy. - Yeah, okay. Well, if it is true and this person really did lose that, I feel sorry for them, that shit 100%.

But the miner should never give it back. I think that should be a rule. The miner should never, 'cause I think it sets like a weird precedent and I don't like it. I think it's like, you pay the fee and whatever that fee is, it's done.

And it never comes back. I don't like this whole movement of like, oh, send us in an email and proof and then we might give it back. It just feels to me like that's a bit fierty and bullshit and I don't like it.

- You'd also be pretty pissed if you were putting your hash at Apple and they gave it away. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not right. It reeks a fee out to me. I think it should be massively frowned upon if anyone ever gives sat's back.

- Yeah. I mean, on the other hand, if you're the guy or the girl who had that happen to them. - Yeah, you'd be pissed. - Yeah, and you'll be trying to get it back, right? - This is Bitcoin.

- Yeah. - Speaking of hacks, Artemis, should we roll into the Rick on Twitter with his 25 Bitcoin? - That's also brutal. And there's been a whole bunch of brutal stories this last month. - Yes, be bad.

- Yeah. Yeah, so Rick are messaged. Hat are messaged. He posted on the 11th of November that he had 25 Bitcoin stolen. That was apparently his and his dad's stash. Funnily enough, the coins were actually sent to Binance, right?

If I have this correct. - Yep. - And so there was like a whole thing of like reposting to kind of get some attention from Binance to have this account blocked or frozen or whatever for further and get investigation.

But yeah, as far as I can see nothing much has happened there from Binance. - I don't know if there's been any more information. - Yeah, I mean, it's not gonna catch the attacker because they'll be using stolen KYC credentials but it will at least stop them cashing out on Binance.

- What do you mean? - That doesn't happen. That's what it's there, Texas, isn't it? - Yeah, exactly. So this guy had 25 Bitcoin that he's been holding since 2012 with hit between him and his father.

So I've been in the space a long time. I, well, being put my brutal hat on, I've been in the space long enough to know better than to keep his seed words on a password manager in plain text.

Allegedly, he was using something like key pass where there is no kind of cloud. It's all kind of local. If what he's saying is true, then it looks like his actual machine has been compromised somehow.

And when he's been accessing his password manager somehow, whatever it is that he's got into his machine. - Like a key logger or something. - Key logger or they've been able to record his screen or some shit like that.

So yeah, you know, devastating news. And he actually recorded a video where he talked through it or which is on Twitter as well. He looked like a broken man. I did really feel for him. But again, putting my brutal hat back on.

And he said it himself. Like he was telling all of his friends, make sure that you secure your seed words properly. Make sure you use a hardware wallet and he wasn't following his own advice.

And unfortunately, you know, this is sometimes the outcome and it's really, really tough to hear his story. But again, if I guess if any good can come of it, it's, you know, people listening to this to make sure that they're not doing silly stuff.

Like storing their life savings on internet connected devices in password managers and not using hardware wallets and stuff like that. Like it's, yeah, it's an all too timely reminder. - Yeah, keeping it on a laptop or general purpose computer seems crazy.

I think this guy or his dad was relatively technically savvy. Like he was either a programmer or an IT or something like that. - Yeah, I think he said his dad was a dev, yeah. - Same with like Luke Dash Jr.

And like you see this kind of stuff and you're like, do you make this mistake because you are skilled and you think that you're smarter than the people who are attacking you and therefore you're the one who gets attacked because a normal, like a dumb fuck like me doesn't do that.

Because I'm like, I'm too dumb to do it. So I'm not gonna do it. I just buy dedicated hardware or using offline device or, you know, don't put all my eggs in one basket and spread the risk 'cause I'm not smart enough to know and you're in a better situation.

It seems as it's always those types who, and I don't mean to be rude. I'm sure this guy's really nice and I do feel sorry for him, but like it's almost like a bit of an arrogance of like, oh, we know what we're doing.

Like we can give the advice, but it doesn't really apply to us because we're smart enough. - Yeah, maybe, and it's also like just the time that's passed. You know, there's this saying, obviously, if like don't change your running system and that can work to your disadvantage because if you have like a full sense of security,

like it's been going for five years or seven years, eight years, 10 years, whatever. Like you don't wanna touch it again. You know, you don't wanna change it and it kind of solidifies and people don't update their security model.

And I've no idea what kind of methods we use to generate that seed at the time in 2012, how high that entropy was and how secure that even was. So it's a tough thing to see if someone lose all of that, but it goes to show that you kind of have to keep improving.

You're set up or at least do it right the first time around if you have the knowledge to do that. - Yeah, so a little tiny little bit more information here, I've just been scrolling through the tweets.

Seed was stored in an open-source, self-hosted password manager called KeyPass. The password to access his KeyPass password manager was stored only in his heads, but was very weak, so probably brute forcible.

KeyPass app itself was on his daily driver laptop that he presumably used for work and other stuff and obviously had a shit ton of other applications installed. And it was also backed up to Microsoft OneDrive, so it was essentially online pretty much all the time.

So pretty much all of the bad things you can do. This guy did it unfortunately. Tough. Yep, be vigilant. - Okay, going on to more wonderful news.

- Swan Bitcoin has stopped serving customers that interact with their privacy services. - Hold on, Antiverse, will my ref link still work here or? (laughing) - Yeah, we can cut this out, sorry about that.

- I just wanted to make sure. If anyone's listening, use ref code, rape my privacy. Or fuck my freedom. Either one will work and I'll get some stats back. - Is that all caps? - All caps all the time.

- Awesome, thanks, noted. - Thanks, Swan, for the sponsorship. - Yeah, so apparently they've stated that it was due to new regulations from their custodians that they use for the Bitcoin.

So now you cannot pay directly from something like post-mix samurai, Wellpool, or directly to samurai Wellpool. They'll block those transactions incoming and outgoing, they'll then just freeze your account if they see that it goes into something like Wellpool one hop later.

There's obviously been a huge outcry on Twitter, which is absolutely justified. They have been pretty clear that they've highlighted the word directly multiple times. So what they're kind of hinting at is use ricochet.

- Yeah, ricochet or just pass on the UTX. So a couple of times from two, three hops maybe before you go in or out to kind of have a bit of plausible deniability and then it will just probably go through their automatic flagging service.

But at the end of the day, it's, yeah, I mean, the outcry was justified but it was absolutely expected as well. So there's not much of a shock here in my opinion. - Yeah, I agree. Regulated entity doing cooked, regulated things.

Yeah, the fact that they highlighted or just do one hop and you'll be fine is neither here nor there. Just completely misses the point. Main headlines here for me is that they are changing the way that they act or their partners are enforcing them to change the way they act due to some proposal.

That is just a proposal. There are no laws, et cetera. So they are preemptively censoring themselves and their users, which is very antithetical to Bitcoin and the way I see Bitcoin personally.

If I was this one user, I would pull my business away from them, obviously I'm not. I'm not in the US and even if I was, I wouldn't be using the KYC out of it anyway. But yeah, disappointed to see that they are saying in the background that they're clubbing together and fighting this, which may or may not be true.

But like you said before, Max, it's about actions rather than words. And this is expected but disappointed nonetheless. - Yeah, I think it's fair to, I've not really done it properly but I think it's fair to attacks one a little bit here more than the others because in a weird way, I respect the hustle of some of the KYC entities

that clearly signal they don't give a fuck about Bitcoin. It's very clear, whereas one kind of has this whole arm that's like, "We're plebe, we care." And they make this big song and dance about freedom money and all this kind of stuff.

And then on the other hand, they do this sort of shit. And that annoys me more pretending to care about privacy when actually all they care about is money than someone who only cares about money and signals they only care about money.

That's fine. This for me is just, it doesn't sit right with me, annoys me and I don't think anyone should be associating with this company. - Here, here. More exchange news on to us. This time in the UK.

- This time in the UK, oh boy, what a shit show. - This has been a doober episode, doesn't it? - Yeah, fuck the bass. - Geez, it's not getting better. - I think it's the whiskey and I apologize, but it's mainly Antomist's fault because I had a few more drinks before he joined because it was my issues.

- Well, to anybody that hasn't thrown themselves off a very tall building, thanks for sticking with us, send me a lightning invoice for 5,000 sats and I'll reimburse you a little bit for your time.

- As long as you're on mutiny. - Yes, yeah, and don't send me a zoo's pay. (laughing) - So Gemini UK, block Bitcoin to transfers to and from non-approved exchanges. So this is kind of a walled garden being set up here of a network of approved exchanges.

So that you, if you have your funds on Gemini UK sponsoring some prominent podcasts, nice. - They, yeah, you can't transfer out of that ecosystem. So you'll only be able to transfer to, just looking for, think it's Coinbase, crypto.com.

- I was really shocked to hear Coinbase on the list. - Mm-hmm, crypto.com, was it? - No, but there must be more than only those two, right? - I think it's anybody that's signed up to this new trust acronym, Travel Rule Universal Solution Technology.

Oof, doesn't that get you fired up? - Changed the world, man. - To enable these changes which are designed to crack down a fraudulent activity in the industry. Yeah, so it's, there's 90 entities in there apparently, so.

- Oh, yeah. - The world you're oyster. - Yeah. - Yet another reason to fuck all these clowns off and just start using Bisk or Huddle Huddle or Peach or Robostat. - Oh, mine at home. - Or mine at home, and if you don't know how to do it, listen to Max's Mining Podcast.

If you want help with NoCoIC, send me a DM. Just don't get involved with all these clowns. - Yeah, and I mean, this is another reminder, get your coins off exchanges. It's not just because of hacks and rug pulls and so on, but at some point, all of these exchanges will be closed off and you will not be able to withdraw.

- And you're feeding the beast. - Exactly, and at the end of the day, you, not your keys, not your coins. You will have no idea if they actually hold Bitcoin to cover whatever you have stored with them.

So, and it's gonna be from one day to the next. They're not gonna give you the time to withdraw, so do it while you serve the chance. - Also do it for any friends and family. I am, for the last like two years, any people who had bought and I'd pushed them to buy, but I didn't have time to set them up with hardware

and didn't have time to fuck around. And I was like, ah, it's too stressful because I felt I'd rather almost them keep it on exchange 'cause then it's not my fault if they take it into self custody, the last like three, four months, I've actually been going around and although I have no time sitting with them

and doing it with them because, yeah, you can't feed this beast. You have to get everyone you know to take this out of exchange and start learning. It is important. - Yep, with every day we get closer to the inevitable regulatory ultimate rug pull.

So take action. - And if you're not going to buy on Robosats or anywhere else like Peach or whatever, then start selling services. Whatever it is and if you're selling services and you're like, ah, I don't know how to do this.

I don't know what to do. I don't know how to get this out to a market. You can reach out to me. I'll get you into our Maystradale or Pledminer monthly groups or any of the other groups that we run and I will try and help you as best I can to sell your goods or services for Bitcoin.

- And if that doesn't work, just sign up for only fans. - I mean, that's the ideal, isn't it? - Have you seen how much some of these girls are earning? - Oh, fucking hell, I don't know. I don't know.

Is that real? - Yeah, I mean, yeah, you see-- - I pay them on schedule. - Lightning or on chin? - They deserve it, mate. - They swipe here. - I don't know. I think they would know what that is.

But no, to be fair, like if they are earning the figures that you see on there, Jesus Christ. I'd sell pictures of my household as well if anyone wanted them, no one does. - No comment. - I've tested the market, no one's interested.

- I mean, at the end of the day, if they're getting at themselves, I mean, more power to them. I just, things with all these kind of stuff, I mean, at the end of the day, you just have like the pimps sitting in between, right?

He just gets most of the cash. - That's what we need to do. We're all working so fucking hard and we're getting nowhere. I think we need to start pimping. - And discuss this afterwards. - Yeah, that's not this good business on earth.

- Yeah, good idea. - Just one more thing to the topic on Gemini and these wall gardens. The one argument I get from a lot of people when I tell them to get their coins off exchanges. I mean, obviously, I know the listener base here were kind of preaching to the choir, but still there's always that argument of like,

at some point I want to buy a house, at some point I want to buy a car, I want to be able to make big purchases and I have to do that on an exchange like it has to be regulated and so on.

If you have it in cold storage and in self custody, you always have, and you in the future as well, will always have the option to pay back into that system if you want to, to cash out for a purchase like that.

If you can trace back your, even if you've been going through Whirlpool, if you save that transaction history, you can prove that at any time in the future, but you won't be able to do this the other round of pulling out of that system at some point in the future.

So just keeping your options open there is a massive benefit. - Yeah, it's like a one-way valve. You can opt back in, but you can't opt out. - Or it's like the Hotel California. (both laughing) - On that, I have a question.

So I've had a few people write to me and I won't divulge names from people saying like, "Look, there's this new, no KYC way of putting up SATs "and getting a load and it's in a multi-sig "and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff."

And I'm like, "No, it's not really for me "and not really interested." But quite often people are writing to me about this. And it did have me wondering, I'm like, "For someone who is fully no KYC, "they're not touching the on or off rams."

But at some point, the purists were like, "Oh, you never say you're Bitcoin, "you want to pass this on to five generations onwards "and blah, blah, blah." But like, some people have lives and families and stuff.

And you might think, "Well, actually I'd like to buy a home "or, you know, I need a car or I need something." Is there anything that you can think that technically could work where someone could, without revealing their identity, dip back into fiat land without using gift cards and stuff for bigger stuff?

Like, if you want to buy a home or something, or is this issue going to be when you're filling out all the forms and buying these properties, they're going to want proof of funds and where it's come from and everything.

And there's just not ever going to be this way to bridge that gap. And you have to have the two separate. I would say certainly where we live, Max. Yeah, you're some sort of correct. Yeah, I'm sure there's probably places in the world where you can set up shell companies and, you know, obfuscate things that way.

But as soon as you start going into, like you said, fiat land, especially for like things that are so heavily not regulated, but like, I guess identity-based, like, yeah, like how, especially houses, of course, when you generally need mortgages and you might be using some sort of down payment.

Like, you're almost proof of funds. I'm going to do that in most of the Western world without giving some proof of funds. But the crucial bit here is exactly what Antimus said. It's like, if you've got 100% of your KSC stash up until that point and then you choose, right, I'm going to peel off 20% of it

and use it as a down payment for a house, it's going to be easier for you to prove where that came from. And just because you bought it on BIST doesn't mean that it's illegal. It was just a peer-to-peer transaction.

It's not illegal. They're still right for yours and you're just- I see that as grassing, though. Information. As well, sorry. I see that as grassing. Maybe that's just me, but I'm like, okay.

Say I bought on BIST and then I wanted to buy a house and then they're like, oh, I want proof of funds, okay? Well, you're liquidating some of your assets, which legally you're allowed to do and whatever else.

They're going to say, okay, well, we want to see this transaction ID, which then shows them the person that you've bought off or sold to. So then you're revealing the identity of somebody else who is transacting in Bitcoin.

And to me, I wouldn't ever want to do that. Because I'm like, well, hang on, what if I was on the other side of that trade? Do I want my name in a database? And that's a major issue that I've had with something like this and why I would always do cash or sell a good or service if possible.

Because I wouldn't want to be the other person on the other side of that trade. Because if it's a larger amount and you're saying, well, I'm buying a property and here's 50 grand or 100 grand or whatever it is down on this payment and I've bought it from this person.

Their real name and banking details are on there and you've got to assume that that is going to go into a database. And for me, I'm not doing that. Because that's somebody else who could be me and I'm not going to do that.

- Well, I mean, there are two things there, right? On the one hand, there's the on-chain footprint. When you give up an address or a transaction ID, obviously you link that coin's history to someone else who had it before you.

But it's their responsibility to take care of their on-chain privacy, right? So if they went through well pool responsibly before trading on BISC, they should be fine, right? - No, because they've given you their bank details which is tied to their identity.

So you can have the perfect on-chain privacy and it means nothing if you're trading to their bank. And that's my point is like, if you're doing it for cash and there's no tie to someone's identity, that's a completely separate thing to actually tying to their bank account.

And my issue would be tying somebody else's a trading partner's identity to a financial transaction that's going to go into a database. It's going to be fed to every government agency and could potentially fuck them.

I wouldn't want to do that. - I see your point, Max. And there's a lot of variables at play here. Like you could be divulging transactions that have happened five, six, seven, maybe 10 years ago, maybe from a bank account that you don't even have anymore.

Like you're not always going to be able to come up with this information. Your trade counterpart, they might not even use that service that you used when you did the trade six years ago. But then even if you remove all of that, like that is just a risk of trading peer-to-peer is, there's a certain level of information sharing

and you can't guarantee what's going to happen with that information. But it is still distinctly better. - I'd rather share my information with one likely privacy conscious individual than some regulated business from some suits in London somewhere that, Clay, don't give a fuck about me.

- No, I agree with you. - There's trade officers all the way down, but yeah, completely understand where you're coming from and yeah, it's just a risk that you take when you enter into the peer-to-peer market.

- I agree with you. What I'm saying is as someone who cares about privacy and other people who are in this, I don't know what you call it, but whatever, like movement, whatever, I would just feel, well, not even I would feel, I just wouldn't give their details over because what I'm saying is it never ends

and people have this kind of idea of, oh, well, it might be an old bank account and yeah, it was attached to my identity, but that was years ago and it's probably going to be fine and I'm telling you, the answer is no, it fucking isn't.

Because it isn't a few years and it isn't seven. Like people think about keeping accounts and records. It's forever and they can go back forever and there's no limit. And that's not to scare people.

That's just to say, think about the people that you're trading with. Think about your trading partners and try not to involve anybody in any bullshit that touches government or touches banks because that's not what this is about.

And so, you know, if you have gone to KYC exchanges, if you have bought from them in the past, if you are going to sell some SATs, sell them first. Don't start getting other people who care about freedom involved in your bullshit that touches the old system if you can avoid it.

That's what I'm saying. - Sound advice? - Yeah. - I mean, especially like on these peer-to-peer exchanges, if you're doing bank payments, usually, I mean, they won't be massive. Like you won't have like 100K transactions there, right?

'Cause that won't go through the banking system anyway without raising major flags. So keeping that to pretty low amounts is definitely a good idea. Obviously, that's a whole different story.

Like if you acquired your Bitcoin via no KYC, I can see the hesitation to going into the system at some point later on. But if you bought KYC, right, and that's what we originally talking about, people getting their coins off exchanges, then taking it off the exchange wouldn't be an issue for putting it back on sometime later, right?

Of actually going back into the system to cash out, to buy whatever a house would put down payment for something right. - Makes sense to me, I agree. - So we've got to come full circle. The next company that's yeah, dunked on their users, wallet was Toshi, stopped serving customers in the United States.

So anyone who's using this in the US has probably heard of this, they will not be served any longer. They will be able to withdraw their funds. So they haven't shut down completely, but apparently the regulatory overhead was her.

So large in the US that they had to decided to shut down their services. Otherwise they're still open if you are not in the US. - Yeah, sounds preemptive. They've been loose on details, but the general consensus is that they've had a tap on the shoulder from a regulator, or their lawyer has spoken to a regulator

and they've shipped themselves and aired on the side of caution and pulled out from the App Store to appease the operator. Like you said, you can still, it hasn't wiped it from your phone if you are in the US, but the crucial thing to remember here is that if you are a wallet Stoshi user in the US, if you lose your phone,

you can't reinstall the apps that are gone. Unless you signed up with an email, unless you can restore it on Android presumably. But yeah, just another reminder and another kick up the ask for those of you that do still have some funds on a custodial wallet to look to a open source, which wallet Stoshi is not,

and non-custodial alternative. So my recommendation would be Phoenix if you don't run a node. And if you do, give Zeus a try. But yeah, just don't use custodial shit. - Amen. - Good advice.

- All right, they're wraps up the list, right? - Yeah, I'm ready for bed. - Yeah, we've got there in the end. It's approaching 10 o'clock at night. It's been a very, very long day. - Speak for yourself, it's 11 here.

- Yeah, but you rolled out of bed at fucking midday and went down the spa and had your money petty and all that, me and Q&A have been fucking working hard today. - Exactly. - But it was your fault that it got so late, you see.

- This is true, this is true. - Yeah, actually, no, that's fair. No, it's fair. We had this book for a morning episode about a week ago and that's not what I was talking about. - Oh, well, I was gonna say personal responsibility here.

I fucked up and missed the show. I was very sick and I just completely fucking missed it. And that is on me and this is my fault. So, I apologize. I was talking about my mic. - Well, that's your fault.

(laughing) - Just got you to out yourself there, Max. - Yeah, it was fine. I will own up to my own shit and that was poor from me and I apologize. But your mic is unacceptable, mate. - I'll have a Yeti next time.

- There's levels to this. You need to fucking sort your life out. - Should we do a crowd fun thing on Tallycoin or something like that? - No, fuck that, my. - The answer to us can play for it, he's rolling in it.

(laughing) Well, I appreciate you both. That was a good list. I'm sorry if we brought the mood down and. - Yeah, see, it was a doomer episode but there was some good actionable content in there amongst all of the do.

- Agreed. - Next time, we'll probably, I mean, end of the year, right? And we're gonna do a bit of a recap. - Oh, should we do a long one? Highlight to the year or something? - Yeah, that'd be nice.

- Yeah, that sounds good. - Christmas carols. - Oof. - I'm out. - The boy's head. (laughing) - I thought you'd go all the way then. - Yeah. - Like there's definitely, definitely nobody else listening now, so.

(laughing) - That's us done now. - I'll catch you in a few weeks then. - See ya. - See ya. - Adios. - Bye. - Thanks again for listening. Please remember to share with friends and family if you enjoyed this episode and make sure to check out ungovernablemisfits.com.

We have some really cool clothing, artwork, articles, podcasts, and much more. Oh, we've just dropped some whiskey as well today, so make sure to check that out. Also, if you want to buy hardware from foundation devices, use the code ungovernable.

If you want to buy still backup plates from SX6.store, use the code ungovernable. And if you want to buy a Ronan Dojo Tanto, go to RonanDojo.com. And I'll leave it with you to guess what that code might be.

Stay ungovernable, and we'll catch you on the next one.