Reclaim your sovereignty with Foundation Devices

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

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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. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! 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 world. Join me as I speak. Join me as I speak to some of the strongest people in the world.

Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world.

Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world.

Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world.

Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world.

Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world.

Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world.

Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world.

Join me as I speak to some of the biggest people in the world. After listening to this, it pushes you to go and buy one. I suggest you use the code bit by bit. It will get you $10 off your purchase.

And as always, if you have any questions, you can reach out to me and ask it. Before we start, I want to say thank you to my other two sponsors. First up, we have FastBitcoins. FastBitcoins makes it so easy to stack Sats.

And they are all over the world now. They are expanding at a rapid rate. Their team is incredible. I joined them the other day for a spaces. And yes, they are OK why see exchange, but they do everything that they can to make sure that you are kept secure.

And they push as hard as they can to get you to remove your Sats from exchange as quickly as possible. Go to fastbitcoins.com today. And you can ask me if you have any questions. And finally, before we start, Casa.

Casa make it so easy for anyone to have multi-six security. I actually covered this in the last episode with Bitcoin Q&A and Black Coffee. And we went into the trade-offs with using a service like Casa.

The one thing I really love about Casa is with the Gold membership. You can actually do this with a NIMM. So you can set up a separate email address. And you could send post-mix coins there.

And it keeps you pretty private. As long as you're running a VPN and not exposing your IP, this is a brilliant way to have multi-six security and have a company there to hold your hand without having to reveal all the information that you might not want to.

They have an incredible team. And I have a huge amount of respect for them. I'm very proud to have them as sponsors. And if anyone wants to reach out and ask me how to do a setup like this or they have any other questions, I'd love to chat to you.

It's keys.casa. And you can use the code bit by bit10% for 10% off. Enjoy the show. When Zach arrives, it's already going. I've trust you. How are you, mate? Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. Not too bad.

You didn't catch COVID after the London event, no? I know a few people are dead. No, fucking everyone's got it. Like, I swear everyone I speak to, including all of my family, have got it.

I think I must be immune. I'm so hard that I just-- You got to have a pass off me. Yeah, a bounce is off me, mate. I can't see my way from on Zencaster. I'm just checking you can hear me, OK?

Yeah, I can see it. But I'm not sure why you can't. I mean, it should be OK. I've just sent Zach the link anyway, so it should be-- OK. I've pinged it as well. Yeah, any minute. But yeah, so you've avoided it as well.

Have you? I think so, yeah. Yeah, no, no symptoms, so just good. That's good, mate. There he is. There we are. There's my audio, all right, by the way. Yeah, sounds good, mate. It's all coming through clear.

I messaged you on telegram news today about asking what size hoodie you were in that samurai hoodie. I want to order one. I just don't know what size it's best to get. I ordered mediums, but they're slightly, slightly tighter than I'd like.

But then I am a fucking unit, so that's probably why. No, honestly, I think medium's fine if you like a snug fit, but like a slightly snug up. But then maybe large if you want like a relaxed fit.

Cool. All right, I'll get my order in this afternoon. Nice. Hey, guys. Hey, Zach, how you doing? Doing well. Doing well. How about you? Yeah, good thanks. Just talking fashion. Hi, there's new hoodies on the website.

Is that-- Yeah, yeah, yeah. They look good. They look really good. Thank you. Well, nice to have you on again. I cannot believe that we've got this fucking beauty coming out. I've been reading through all the release notes with bits and pieces.

And I was just thinking this morning like when I was getting ready, I was thinking, oh, OK, I've got this pod to do. And I was thinking back to like when I first spoke to you, the first one hadn't been done, like nothing was-- everything was theory.

And where you have come in this short amount of time is fucking incredible. So yeah, I just wanted to say like massive respect to you and all the team for getting this out and ready. I can't wait to get one in my hand.

Thank you. Yeah, we're extremely excited to ship this thing. We think it looks really beautiful, and it's definitely a departure from the kind of industrial designs you see out there. But obviously, it's not just the look, right?

Fixed a lot of issues, not issues, but a lot of things we wanted to improve from the first batch. And then the app, too, we're really excited about. Yeah, well, so we're dive straight in, because I know you guys are really short on time.

And otherwise, I'll waffle on about my dog and all sorts of nonsense. So yeah, I just wanted to get that out of the way. And then first of all, design fucking beautiful. And before we move on to like pass the looks and feel of it, what was the inspiration for this?

Because it's like you said, it's very, very different to sort of the more boring and basic designs that are out there. Like, how did you work towards this? What were you inspired by? And is this a direction that you're going to continue with, do you think?

Yeah, definitely. This is more like taking art deco principles and applying them to computing hardware. Maybe I should say I am kind of sick of the ultra minimalism. Everything looks the same.

Obviously, Passport Founders Edition, I think, looks great. But it looks a lot like everything else in terms of whether you're looking at an Apple laptop or an HP laptop or any of these phones or anything like that.

They all look kind of the same. They have different elements to them. But Apple has really just pushed the entire computing hardware world into this minimalism. One cool thing about Bitcoin is the low time preference.

Some of my favorite accounts to look at on Bitcoin Twitter are sharing the architecture, like the fiat architecture versus what it looked like 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago or so on. And things are more ornate, more artistic, more beautiful, I think.

And so we were trying to figure out how can we take some of these elements. We really like the art deco kind of stuff. And how can we bring it into this still modern feel, but make it feel a little bit more ornate, low time preference, maybe you could even say.

And we just started calling it digital deco as our new design language. So that's what we're going to be doing from now on. So our stuff is always going to look really different from everyone else, not just obviously in Bitcoin world, but just in computing hardware world in general.

And our first hire was this amazing guy, Andy. He's our head of design. I describe him as like our libertarian, Johnny Ive. Well, he's fucking absolutely knocked this out of the park. And he really has.

Yeah, I love that idea of the low time preference and the art deco feel. It does definitely stand out. And you're right, everything is the same. I was saying this to my Mrs. The Other Day.

She was like, I really want this new flip phone thing. And I was like, why do you want it? She's just like, because it's different, because every single phone is just a little black rectangle, which is exactly the same as every other black rectangle, just to have something that stands out is exciting and different.

And it's hard to do it and still make it look classy, but you guys have managed it. So yeah, congrats. Thank you, thank you. And then so past that, let's dig in a little bit to what has changed since we last spoke.

So obviously, new hire, Q&A is now on board. And I know you've had another couple of people join as well. You've got Lily and a couple of others. So the team is growing. How's that been? It's been incredible.

I'm seriously pinching myself that people like Q&A and Lily and a bunch of people that aren't so public, right? Some fantastic engineers in the space have decided to join our team. Everyone's really philosophically aligned.

Everyone's really excited about what we're doing. And I just feel like we have this superstar team. Everyone is also what I call really T-shaped and multidisciplinary. Our engineers are working up and down the stack across everything from a same person can do embedded stuff at the device

level up to user interface stuff at the mobile app level. Q&A has actually been really pulling a lot of weight on the design team, which you maybe wouldn't expect. But yeah, he's been working a lot behind the scenes on the actual product stuff, not just doing the support.

And it's really fun to have such an amazing team and pretty small team. We're less than a dozen people, so we're able to do a lot with a relatively small team. Q&A, you dark horse. You didn't tell me you were getting involved with the design side.

What can I say? I'm a man of many talents, some of which I didn't even know existed until I'd sort of dove head first in working with Andy that Zach touched on earlier. He's an incredibly talented guy from a design-- well, from many perspectives, but especially from a design perspective.

And getting the opportunity to broaden my horizons a little bit and support him in putting the building blocks together of the user interface that people are going to be hopefully ecstatic with.

I know we are internally from the flows of different screens to the copy on each screen, just really sort of-- I guess we worked really well as a team in terms of with his design prowess and my sort of experience in dealing with people that are new to the Bitcoin space and knowing what normally trips them up from in terms

of UX or terminology. I think we made a pretty good team and the end product. We're really, really happy with it. And hopefully, everybody listening to this is going to agree as well when they finally get one into the hands.

Yeah, and this is exactly what I wanted, where you take really multidisciplinary engineers and not-- I mean, all of them are into Bitcoin, but then you also take people like Q&A and Lilly and others who are really just like users of these products

and are actively helping other people learn how to use wallets and other nodes and all that kind of stuff. And then you put everyone together, and as you're working on the product side, even people who are not, quote, product designers or anything like that are still participating in the design process.

And the design meetings that we have twice a week are open to the entire team. And so you end up getting a lot of opinions in there, a lot of strong opinions. And you don't confine people to their specific job role, where they just have to do a list of specific tasks.

And then we're able to take all that experience and knowledge that the whole team has and put it into practice when we're making these products. So I think you'll especially see this on the mobile upside with Envoy, because it is probably the most simple, like maybe even boring, like Bitcoin software wallet

that is going to be on the market. And I think that's a good thing. Certainly for onboarding people. And like you were saying, the experience there from like Q&A and Lily, and people who are constantly troubleshooting and helping fuckwits like me sort things out, they start to get a really good feel for where people trip up.

A lot of things are more complicated than they need to be. And so I was really excited to see that you were having this app. And when I saw the announcement, I thought that's really nice, that you're keeping it simple.

And from my understanding, it all connects over Tor and doesn't reveal the IP, which is really nice to see that security and privacy comes first. - Yeah, so we kind of set out with Envoy.

Our main goal was to make it the default choice for people who buy a passport that maybe not add any exposure to some of the other great pieces of software out there, like Spyro or Spectre, or that, you know, the ones that might be, you know, they're very feature rich, but they might be a little less approachable.

We wanted to, you know, previously our documentation was directing people towards Blue Wallet, because, you know, we felt that that was the simplest option, and the easiest way that we could get people started with passport and a watch-only wallet.

But we thought, you know, as good as Blue Wallet is, and it's, you know, incredibly feature rich again. And we thought that we could do a better job that was purpose-built for passport, so that we could not only do we supply them with a beautiful hardware device that's really secure, but we can also hold their hand

through the form of a mobile application to make their onboarding even smoother than it already was. So, you know, Envoy will guide the user from turning the device on, to setting up a pin code, to following the supply chain validation, to updating the firmware.

You know, one of the key features of Envoy is that if you buy a batch 2 passport, we will be shipping with adapters for iPhone and any other USB-C port phone, so that you can do firmware updates direct from your phone, you know, Envoy will notify you when there's an update for your passport.

You can download that automatically straight to your phone, pop the SD card directly into the adapter, which you've plugged into your phone, and you can update the firmware in a completely guided fashion free from the need to mess about with any laptop or desktop.

So, there was just little increment steps like that that we thought, you know, we could just really iron out any little kinks in the onboarding process to make it as much of an approachable process as possible.

And again, my personal opinion, we've done an incredible job. And, you know, over time, I'm sure we'll be, we add in more features, but we are sort of hyper critical of what features we add and when we add them, so as not to be detrimental towards that simple onboarding a new X process.

- It's a big thing, actually, not having to have a laptop, because, you know, a lot of people who are getting into Bitcoin don't really use the laptop, like most people use their phones all the time and they like to use it.

They feel more comfortable using it. And so, if you have this really slick app that you can use on either iOS or Android and interact with the hardware, wall it that way, and from my understanding the way that you've done it, it seems to be very secure as well from what I can understand.

There's no data being passed on charging and these sort of things as well. So, I don't know, I think that it's gonna be very appealing to a lot of people. And it seems like you can attract a bigger audience and pull more people in and make Bitcoin exciting and fun for people who aren't sort of nerdy Twitter dwellers like us.

- Yeah, we built Envoy with, you know, with the, we kept our company principles at heart, you know, in terms of privacy and sovereignty. So, as you touched on, you know, the default connection to the default server, which it will be run by us, is over tall, so we don't get any IP address information.

Equally, if you're a slightly more advanced user that already runs your own node, fantastic. We will allow you to connect directly to that as well, so you can completely cut our servers out of the equation whatsoever.

And again, just, you know, we try to keep the jargon to a minimum, make all of the, you know, menu options and everything flow really nicely and not to overwhelm the new user. So, we sort of ensure by building the guide rails as high as we could that the users are taking what we perceive to be, you know, best practices.

So, what they're doing that without even kind of thinking about it, it's just the default within the app. - Yeah, and there's almost, just like diving a little bit into more detail, there's like almost no decisions or settings or anything that you have to do with Envoy, which is something that's really important to us.

You know, oftentimes you go into like a wallet and there's like multiple menus of settings. And so, if you're new to Bitcoin, you're just like, what is all this stuff, right? So, like our settings menu is you can choose the currency conversion, you know, you say if you want to be in USD,

then you can denominate, you know, your balance in USD. I think we're starting with like seven currencies and an option, you know, just to do Bitcoin only. You can choose whether you want to turn off tour, which is enabled by default.

Sometimes there may be a reason why you want to do that. Like if you're in a jurisdiction that blocks tour and you may want to connect to a VPN or something, but it's on by default. And then you can choose to connect to your own node.

And then I think the final setting is to toggle between just Bitcoin and Sats as the unit. And like that's it for right now. So it's like an extremely zen-like experience 'cause there's really nothing to configure.

And then within the wallet, there's like nothing to do. So the only decision you have to make when sending a transaction is whether you want to pay a higher fee to get it there faster. And we just call that a boost.

Otherwise there's no like fee selection. It just it defaults to the low fee. And it gives you an option to pay a little bit more. There's no like choose between these three different fees and during a custom fee, nothing like that.

And the reason for this is because like, we're not pushing the envoy wallet on any of our users. You are more than welcome to use Passport with the wallet of your choice. You can use it with Sparrow, Spectre, Blue Wallet, and virtually every single wallet today that supports connecting to a hardware wallet supports Passport now.

So like we're still supporting this first class, you know, best in class experience with Passport for pairing with these different software wallets on desktop and mobile. And so we encourage you to do that.

We almost feel like it's perfect to start out with this really simple single-sig watch-only wallet inside of Envoy. And then once you get up to speed, once you use Bitcoin for some time, you then may want to switch to a different software wallet and we encourage that.

And so it's a very different mindset than some of the other, you know, hardware wallet makers where they want to keep you in their software ecosystem, you know, where it feels very much like a walled garden.

You know, we're not like that at all. The mobile companion app features the Passport, like the ability to do the onboarding, the firmware updates, get important notifications and app if there's like a new firmware update or especially if there's one where there's like a vulnerability reported, it's nice to be able to get that out

to the user base immediately. Like you can do all that, it works really well. You can do all that and then not use Envoy as your wallet. Or you can just say, "I don't want to use any of it."

And you're still more than welcome to use, you know, download the firmware from our GitHub. The support site is up and maintained with all the links and the onboarding. So you can just opt to not use it at all.

And so we want to make sure that like we're offering this really zen-like, simple experience to new users, but then we also preserve all the power user, you know, features and all the stuff they want because the last thing you want to do is say, you know, you have to use this app.

I know that can rub people, including myself and Q&A the wrong way. So that's kind of, you know, that's kind of why we made Envoy. And then I know I'm pretty sure I sit on the past podcast with you early on is like, we really wanted to get passport to the point where you can just give passport to a friend

or a family member who's new to Bitcoin. And then you don't need to stand there over their shoulder for three hours, you know, guiding them through the setup. I think we're much closer now than we were last year with the Envoy app and passport batch two.

- Oh, definitely. I mean, I was literally having this conversation with a couple of family members the other day because they've decided they are now going to take their sets off exchange because I've annoyed them to the point where they're just like, I just can't bear to hear him say it one more time.

And so they are going to do it. And to be honest, I was thinking like, I don't know what to do here. Like obviously I would like to get them set up with a passport and I'd like to get them connected to Sparrow and I'd like to do this.

I was like, it's going to be such an assay and I'm struggling for time. Whereas as you were explaining that I was thinking, well, I probably could literally give them that box and I could just wait with them for 10, 15 minutes and just answer any questions and everything should be pretty smooth and I feel pretty comfortable

that they're going to be secure and safe and everything's going to go, okay. And so that's really reassuring like knowing that you can just give them a box, pretty much walk away and you have these guide rails up because it's stressful otherwise.

Like I'm not the most technical person I can get by with a little help from my friends, but I certainly don't like onboarding people to complex systems where if they fuck up, they lose everything because it's probably going to then be me who's out of pocket because they're going to win and say, oh, you forced us to do this

and now we've lost everything. So I think it's really encouraging. And I think that like you say, it's just like, it's a gateway. And once they start using this for a while and get comfortable, then maybe they move on to something else.

But it just makes the whole process so much more simple. - For sure. And we actually launched, we haven't formally announced it, but it's available to purchase on our website. We launched a new service called Comseer's onboarding that can make that even easier for friends and family that are new to Bitcoin.

It's Q&A's service. So I can let him explain it a little bit more. - It's funny you should bring that up, actually, because Max was probably one of my first unofficial Comseer's customers, I would like to say.

(laughing) But a hotline for support. So yeah, Comseer's setup is essentially an add-on service that when you are buying a passport, if you've already bought a passport, you can purchase from our website.

And what it essentially is, is an hour to sit down with me on a call, and I will hold your hand to go from literally zero. You know, you haven't even opened the box to having your passport set up with a pin updated the firmware, generated or imported your seed words, and paired that with a software wallet,

you know, be that envoy or software wallet of your choice. And obviously, you'll also have the opportunity to ask any questions along the way. So again, it kind of harks back to what we were saying before around, you know, offering the sort of tallest guide rails that we can.

So we think we've done a really great job in terms of the sort of autonomous onboarding, you know, the default of, you know, you buy a passport, you download envoy and you follow the instructions.

Most people are gonna be, you know, are gonna have a really great time with that. But there's some people that, you know, maybe they're not sort of a visual learner or they need to sort of speak to people one-on-one to kind of, you know, hash out ideas or answer any questions as they're doing the process.

So this, the Contières service is for those type of people that just want that extra helping hand, really, to bounce ideas or questions off somebody when they're actually physically doing the setup process and, you know, pairing with the wallet of their choice.

So I think it's gonna be a really valuable service for some customers. And I'm really looking forward to getting started with that. - That's really cool. And what's the cost for someone who, you know, wants a bit of hand-holding?

- The Contières setup is $99. - Okay, that's very reasonable. - We're not trying to make any money off of that, right? We're trying to more like cover costs. And if it's successful, you know, we've already had, you know, a nice, I think, percentage of customers in the last several days add concierge setup to their order,

which we're really excited about. But it's something that, you know, we'll have to hire more people on the support side for Q&A to work with and train if concierge setup is successful. And this actually, this takes my first job at a high school was at the Apple Store.

And one of the main things that I saw extremely successful with them trying to get people to switch over to a Mac was offering this $99 one-on-one setup where you would get the computer. And then in the story, they say, you know, bring your Windows computer.

We'll sit down with you for an hour. So we'll help you move everything over to it. So this is kind of a similar vein where, you know, it's not to make money, it's to lower the barriers to getting onboarded with Bitcoin self custody, with passport, right?

So some people really benefit from the extra help. And it can be scary when you're doing this. Even if you have a great guide to follow or a great app that's walking you through it, sometimes just knowing that an expert like Q&A is there to answer any questions and guide you through the process, you know,

make sure you're not making any kind of rookie mistakes. Sometimes that's enough to give you that final push to pull your coins, you know, off of an exchange and get set up securely with a hardware wallet.

And so that's what we're hoping it will accomplish. And we're actually hoping that we'll be able to bring on more support people because there's so many great people in the Bitcoin space who are just doing this already, you know, for fun.

And I think Q&A is probably the most famous of them. But there's a lot more who are kind of acting as Uncle Jim, right? And helping their friends and family get onboarded. And if we can give them an opportunity to do that at a larger scale, I think it's just gonna be really beneficial for the space.

- Definitely. I mean, confidence is the key word there. It's like 90% of the time where people are unsure and they're like, they're worrying about, "Oh, am I doing this right?" Like 90% of the time, they're actually doing the right thing.

And it's fine, especially if there's guide rails up and you've designed the app this way. But it just means that it's gonna be a more comfortable, more enjoyable experience. And that's what I've found when I've had to reach out to Q&A.

I mean, a million times with all sorts of crazy, stupid problems. But yeah, it's always just like, I'd be overthinking something, "Oh, am I giving away my identity by doing this?" Or, "Am I gonna trip myself up further down the line "because of that?"

And the guides and things like that are great for some people. But then people like me, I can read a guide like 10 times over. It can take me a whole day. And I just get all confused and lost.

I speak to someone like Q&A for literally 10 minutes. And I'm like, "Oh, okay, that answers all my questions." So, it depends how people learn. And that's invaluable to have that as an offer from Foundation.

- Exactly. And just to give a quick anecdote too, from like a privacy perspective, I know you noted that Envoy connects over Tor by default, which is interesting just from like our minimum, like product requirements, you know, for the V1 launch.

Even though the app and the wallet itself is so simple, having the Tor connectivity and the option to connect to your node was just so important to us in a requirement for V1. Likewise, even with concierge setup, like we're keeping privacy at the top of mind.

Our calendar booking solution is self-hosted. The actual call will take place on a self-hosted JITZY call. And so, we actually run a lot of that internally too. Like our company has been running our own JITZY server for all our meetings for at least, you know, six months now.

And so, we're able to provide the really high-end user experience where you're like, oh, I'm booking this thing from a calendar booking. I'm doing this great call with the option to do a screen share or stuff like that.

But it's all self-hosted for us. And so, you're not exposing that information to any other service that maybe would be interested to know that, you know, you're doing a call to get onboarded with your passport, right?

And so, just everything we do, we're thinking about the privacy angle, even if it's something as simple as a one-hour, you know, one-on-one call with Q&A. - Yeah, that's great to hear. And the other things that I've noticed with this is like, you've not just released an app and done an update on the looks of this thing, but it's thinner.

You've got, you've got better battery life. You've got all sorts of extra features that have been worked in here. And yeah, it's obviously been a long slog. Like, what's it been like trying to push this through with all the issues that are going on in the world and, you know, supply chain problems

and everything else that I imagine you've been faced with? Like, are you both okay? I know you've been working around the clock. I know that I'm constantly saying, "How are you Q&A?" I'm working.

I'm like, "Okay, all right, mate." Are you both holding up all right? It sounds like it could have been stressful. - I'll let Q&A start and then I can talk about the supply chain. (laughing) - Yeah, I'm gonna come out with a really cliche quote here, but, you know, the old saying of if, you know,

if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. And I've been quite open and honest about the fact that, you know, landing this job for me was literally a dream come true. So although I work twice as hard as I did in my fiat job, I'm exponentially more happy and enjoying day-to-day life.

So yeah, it's just been thoroughly enjoyable for me from start to finish. And it's the first time I've ever kind of been part of a sort of product launch from start to finish, to, you know, from seeing just hashing out basic ideas on a word document to get into the point where you see the renderings come up that, you know,

anybody listening to this can go and see on the website and then to finally, you know what, well, we're almost there in terms of getting a device in hand has been an incredibly magical journey, but not without a take-up switch, you know, a hand over to SAC to detail on in terms of, you know, supply chain and whatnot.

- Yeah, well, I'm glad to hear the answer though, Kune. (laughs) Yeah, so, I mean, obviously everything's, I mean, you know, we love what we do, right? So we're used to all these kinds of supply chain hiccups and stuff, but the world has been, I think, especially bad in the last few months and even in the last, you know, six months or so

or the last year, fun fact, I don't think I've talked about this anywhere else, but this, so we, this Passport Batch 2 is internally branded as Passport 1.2, there was a 1.1 that we had to completely throw out due to supply chain issues.

Yes, yeah, so originally what we wanted to do was we wanted to just take all the feedback, you know, from our customers and just our internal wish list of things that we wanted to change between the Founders Edition and then the Batch 2 and just make some small tweaks, right?

Just some small tweaks that would make it better but would not require like a large redesign. So what we did was we identified, I think that we were still gonna use a rechargeable battery, if I recall back then.

So that was still something we really wanted to do. So we can talk more about why we switched to the rechargeable lithium ion. But the main point of feedback was that the screen has like a front light on it and sometimes is like uneven in terms of brightness and doesn't like exude the quality that matches

the rest of the device, it was a Founders Edition, it was a monochrome display, so black and white. And so we had, basically we were switching that to a backlight so that it would be really nice and bright and kind of uniformly lit.

It would be better when you're trying to scan a QR code on a computer, for example, 'cause sometimes the webcams can be kind of finicky when you're doing the QR scans to a small screen. And so that's what we were moving towards without any kind of large redesign.

And then the screen maker basically kept pushing out the lead times to the point where I think we wanted to even been getting anything until maybe Q1 of this year, but at the way they were pushing things out, they couldn't even commit to a delivery date.

This was back in the fall of last year. So maybe October or something of 2021. And so we basically said screw it, let's just redesign the whole thing. And so we did all this in not too much time.

Found a screen that's actually a really beautiful, high resolution color IPS display. We have a custom glass that is bonded to the display with a 6H hardness, which is pretty much like Gorilla Glass level.

So I've taken like a pocket knife to the screen samples and stuff and have been unable to scratch the screen, which is really exciting 'cause we have this vibrant, high resolution, bright display, way better for QR scanning from something like a computer webcam and just more consistent and really matches the quality of the device.

We threw out the AAA's 'cause we were having a lot of issues with like if you were not using lithium AAA's, sometimes the device like depending on what brand you buy, it would behave differently, it could die after minutes or an hour or something like that.

And so we liked the idea of AAA's, but we're like, let's just do a rechargeable because we're gonna be able to provide really accurate battery indicator and we're gonna be able to provide longer battery.

And what we ended up doing was still having the magnetically removable back cover, but using a standard Nokia battery form factor. So you can find these everywhere, you can find them on Amazon, you can find them in local electronic stores, it's the BL5C, it's like the most popular Nokia battery.

And it's much thinner obviously than the AAA's. And so we were able to use that. So we have the benefits of the rechargeable lithium ion, but we have also the benefits of being user replaceable and not proprietary to a foundation.

And so if something goes wrong, if you need a new battery, you don't need to email us and wait for us to send your new one and so on. And so then we also just did this full redesign. And we figured like we take it as an opportunity, we shaved so much cost off of the device that we were able to drop the price point,

from $2.99 to $1.99 for pre-orders. It is going up to $2.29 once we start shipping. But that's still a pretty significant price reduction, especially when you look at how other hardware wallet makers have continuously raised their prices over the last several months.

So that's just a few highlights. And those are kind of the key differences. Obviously, we were able to make it thinner. We did have to put a USB-C port on it to charge the battery, but it's a special and actually cheaper type of port called the Power Only USB-C port.

You can actually look at it visually and see that it only has a very small number of pins. It's missing most of the pins inside the port because it's only meant to carry power, not data. So that was important to us.

We're like, if we're going to put a USB-C port on, we need the user to literally be able to look at it and make sure that it's not like connecting to data or anything like that so that you can still charge the battery in a convenient way.

So I think those are the main differences. But yeah, we actually had this intermediate device that we were planning on shipping sooner. And the supply chain stuff just really screwed with us.

And I don't even know if that screen is available now. And so I think we made the right move by doing the redesign and really thinking about our component selections and sourcing everything.

Now, the only stuff we are still waiting on is some plastic and metal. Everything else is in the factory. We did the first run of the circuit boards, worked great. We're going to be starting the full production at the end of the month.

We're a little nervous about the plastic and the metal because of all the craziness in the world. But hopefully, everything will get here. And then we'll just be able to quickly throw it all together and start shipping out to customers.

And so when you talk about the metal, is that the kind of rose goldy copper? Yes. OK, yeah, because that is not the same as you used previously because that was beautiful. That was one thing that really stood out for me.

I was like, fuck, this is premium. It is. There's a couple of other cool things about it. So we call it the front housing and then the back cover are plastic. We have a nicer finish and a different plastic supplier or a much higher quality, just much higher quality plastic in general.

So that's important because I personally was not fully satisfied with what we ended up shipping. We had a lot of trouble with that plastic supplier. And then the metal, yes, it's the exact same.

It's a zinc alloy. It's plated in real copper. And it looks awesome. We're going for more of a matte copper finish instead of the glossy copper finish. So it's going to look a little different, but it's going to be pretty cool.

And then we now have a power button on the side, just to make it a little bit easier from a UX perspective so you know exactly how to turn it on. And then we also have these main select buttons and a nav button, which are also copper.

We were trying to figure out, do we do those in plastic, the buttons? And do we paint them copper and try to color match the real metal? And then we were like screw it. And so all those buttons are also solid metal.

Oh, nice. Not the number pad, but the main nav buttons and the slot buttons and the power button. It's not color matched. It's legit the same metal casted and plated in the same copper. So it's pretty damn cool.

Very nice. These are the details where you can feel the difference. You can feel quality through weight and touch. And yeah, I'm pleased to hear that because if you're going to be interacting with this thing and people who are storing their wealth on it, like you want the experience to be like a special experience.

I know that sounds like a bit wanky and people are like, oh, it's just a hardware wallet. But it's not like it's the way that you interface with Bitcoin. And for many of us, we spend all our time thinking about Bitcoin.

Like when we interact with it, it should be a nice experience. And packaging wise, who is responsible for that? [LAUGHS] I'll say Q&A now, I'm just kidding. [LAUGHS] No, Andy is our head of design.

It's really nice. Really, really nice. I mean, it's difficult to see completely and get the feel for it, obviously, just through a website. But yeah, I can see that a lot of thought has gone into that.

It is-- so I put out a tweet. And we put out a picture of the packaging because the packaging is done. Actually, I have a box sitting here. And our supplier, I think, just finished all the whole production run this week of the packaging, which is great.

I just like staring at it all the time. It looks so good, especially compared to like an iPhone box or something, something you'd expect. It makes our last stuff just look like total crap, which is funny because I really like the last one.

But it's beautiful how it all nests together. So top comes off really easily. Passport is just sitting there on top. Nicely in like a tray that's molded perfectly for it. You have a little foam on the top inside of the box, which keeps it all snug and secure.

We're going to have the little plastic. You can peel off the screen for yourself when you get it, which I love because being able to have this great glass and then being able to keep the protective cover on from the glass to the point when we get it into customers' hands.

I don't know. I love being able to peel something off right before you start using it. And then underneath, we have stickers. We now actually do include a seed card where you can write down your seed.

We still encourage the microSD backup, but there's a lot of people that want to write down their seed. And so it's nice having the seed card there. We also have-- it's a perforated card. So we have a card where you can write down the numbers.

We're switching from words for the microSD backup before we did like-- it was six words to encrypt the SD card. We're switching to a 20-digit number so that there's less confusion with the seed words.

Because any time you try to tell someone to write down words, if they know anything about Bitcoin, they immediately start thinking, like, wait, is this my seed? Got a lot of questions about that and confusion about that.

So now it's like, if you do the SD backup, you can write down your 20-digit number. And it's really easy to save that. It's so much easier to type that into-- to restore from the SD backup.

But then, of course, you can still write down the seed words. We have like our getting started card in there in the packaging with a QR code you can scan, which takes you right to the website to download the Envoy app or skips you to our support docs if you don't want to use the Envoy app.

Then we have, as Q&A mentioned earlier, microSD adapters for USB-C and lightning so that you can plug the SD card right into your phone. We were trying to figure out, like, can we do a universal adapter, the kind of crappy looking where they have like lightning and USB and SD card.

And they're like triangle shaped. And I don't know. We were trying to figure out what to do. And then we're like, screw it. We're just going to include both adapters. It's a little bit more expensive.

But like, maybe you want to use it on an iPhone and on your computer, or an iPhone and an Android phone. And we're just going to give you both. And then we also have a nice USB-C cable in there.

And then also an industrial grade microSD card in a little protective case. - Very nice. I like that you have everything included. One thing for the future, just to like add to your list of things to do that would be really cool, is like a metal plate or something like that.

Like, I know there's loads of places that people can get it from. I'm just thinking like, if I point people to foundation, I then have to point them somewhere else as well to say, "Go and get one of these stamping kits and go and get a play." I don't know.

It could be quite cool. - Yeah, it's something we talk about. I don't really like, and I don't want to get like cancelled for this from the other companies. I don't really like any of the plates out there right now.

Some of them are good, but they're I think too expensive. And some of them are not too expensive, but I just don't really like, I just feel like it's not, it's not intuitive enough for most people.

- I think to come in on your point, Max, about sort of this kind of piece around additional items and sort of being the one-stop shop, we've just definitely been talking internally around doing stuff like that.

So maybe see plates, if I can twist Zach's arm, you know, branded high quality branded charging cables, additional SD cards, you know, industrial grade SD cards, replacement batteries for, you know, although these are, you know, commoditized batteries that are coming in this device, you

know, you might be of the, if you're anything like me, you wouldn't want to replace it with one that says knock your ring on the back, you'd want a branded one, obviously not a requirement, of course, but just little add-ons like that that we can offer to the customer that, again, will sort of make us the one-stop shop for their kind of

Bitcoin cold storage needs. - Yeah, I think we'll get there once, I think once we pass, so, you know, the first batch was 1,000 units, this batch two is 2,500 units, more like 2,400 because we're going to keep some set aside for any kind of replacements or anything like that, and then I think once we're

consistently at like 10,000 units, you know, for these batch sizes, we're doing over 10,000 units a year, which will probably come pretty soon, then I think we'll expand the focus a little bit to having a bunch of different items on the online store.

It's just we're trying to stay really focused right now, you know, we're very much operating more in like batch form as opposed to consistently shipping units, once we get into a more consistent flow, then I think it makes sense to do that, and I think we can, I mean, there are some great

companies that make seed plates, I think we can either partner with one of them or collaborate or something like that, and do something that's lower cost, and, you know, as intuitive as possible for everyone, because there are some I like, but it blows my mind that these seed plates can be as

expensive, or in some cases, more expensive than the hardware wallet, like that doesn't make any sense to me. No, they are, they are incredibly expensive. That's why I'm so tight. I still use washers and bolt and nut, because I just can't bear to spend the money and it does the job.

But it's just, yeah, I don't know, it's, you know, once you build a reputation and people get the hardware in their hand and they say, oh, you know, this is really nice and I've been using it for a year or two or however long, it's like the same as Apple, people like to go into the Apple shop, they'd

like to buy all the extra accessories and products from there, because they trust it, they know it, and they feel comfortable with it. And so, yeah, I mean, obviously something for the future.

I know you guys have been flat out and got so much any players, just, just a thought. I just splirt these things out as they come into my head. A lot of people have been asking for a case as well.

I would love to be able to do like a nice leather, you know, case or something. So we'll see what we'll see what we can do. Cool. And so I know you guys are tight on time, but is there anything else design wise or changes wise that we didn't cover anything that I've missed?

Yeah, I think the only thing we haven't kind of covered in any detail is the new sort of user interface on Passport itself that's going to be shipping alongside when the new device ship sort of obviously will form part of a firmware update for existing, you know, founders edition users, you know, this

everything that we're going to be doing is backwards compatible, aside from where that's not possible from a hardware perspective, but we don't foresee that to be much at all. So the new update is going to be, and we've kind of redesigned the menu structure so that we've floated the important stuff

to the top, so as to remove any sort of decision fatigue, so that, you know, the more kind of advanced stuff, it has been sort of moved down the menu structure a little bit so that we've got kind of, I suppose like a flat menu structure now, it works left to right and there's a lot less things to click for basic usage.

So again, harking back to, you know, high, you know, tour guide rails and simple user interface. So we'll obviously be leveraging the beautiful color display for the batch two device and the batch one device will be getting a monochrome version of exactly the same menu structure so that we're moving to sort of like an account based system

where each time that you wanted to pair with a different software wallet, of which there are many that were compatible with, you know, it's kind of a much more intuitive experience now where you'd sort of just go across to the right hand side of the menu and say, OK, I want to add a new account. And this

time I want to pair with spiral wallet. So we've kind of worked on streamlining that along with a lot of other things to make things more intuitive. Yeah, I like that we have the left to right now. It's going to be pretty cool. You know, we have this four way navpad, but we were only really using like the up and down keys for the

menu navigation. So now you kind of, and you can see this and kind of like the on the renderings on a website, you can see that we have these little dots like at the bottom of the screen on passport. And so you can, you can be able to scroll left to get to your settings. And then you're going to be able

to scroll right to get to a plus button. Then once you're in the plus button, there's a bunch of different things that you'll be able to do. You can add a new account really easily, as Q&A mentioned, and that's important because like we bury the account stuff right now, you know, being able to like

segment your funds for like personal or business or maybe you want a different expub that you use with Sparrow and a different expub that you use with Envoy Wallet just for privacy reasons, right? And so we had it more of like an advanced user setting and less discoverable. And so now you're going to be

able to just really easily go to the plus button and like create a new account and add a label to the account. So it could be, you know, primary, it could be personal, it could be business, it could be, you know, it could be a separate account that you have for, you know, post mix coin joins, right? There's, there's

a lot of different things you can do. And so now we make it like a really easy discoverable feature. But we're also looking to figure out what else we can do with this kind of plus menu that we have now. One thing is we can make it much easier to like apply a passphrase dynamically like there, you can just go

to add kind of like add a passphrase. Another one is that, you know, we're finishing up right now the integration with CASA, which we're excited about. And so we've been trying to see if like we can make it easier to add kind of like custom flows, or like a custom account screen on Passport for

specific apps or integrations that have like a distinct need. So like with CASA, for example, they use some different terminology, like health checks. So if we're able to have, you know, scroll right on the Passport menu, go to the plus button, choose CASA, then you get a customized CASA flow where the menu, the

screen is a little different. Now all of a sudden health check is right there for you. And it says CASA on it. And so that kind of thing can make an enormous difference to Bitcoiners that are trying to use like a user friendly service, where instead of having to follow some like complex tutorial for

their hardware wallet, we're doing the work for them. And just like having these basic, you know, pre designed custom menus for different, you know, different software wallets or services that you're pairing Passport with. It's something that I think right now is going to be a little unexplored, because we're

just shipping everything, you know, the V1 of this new UI. But I'd say in like 12 months, we're probably going to have a healthy number of different things you can add. And these custom like, cut more customized integrations with other software wallets and services. And I think it's going to make

for like a really like a game changing user experience compared to the existing flows that you have to do if you're using like some of the other hardware wallets. That's good to hear. Because that is the other thing I do push a lot of friends and family to use CASA, especially if if they've got, you know, reasonable

amount of funds on there. And so the more integrated, the more simple, the better. So yeah, it's good to hear that you're thinking along those lines. I can I can do a wrap if you want. You can do a wrap. You've got many talents.

Oh, man, what's your was just going to do a beat or something? No, I meant like wrap this up, you know, but with with a W in front of it. But no, I was going to say, you know, just to just to obviously show what we're doing, right? We're out, you know, passport batch two is hopefully shipping, you know, in

April. Like I said, we're starting manufacturing at the end of the month. And so just waiting for two more parts, or I should say two more sets of parts to come in. And then we're going to be packaging everything together. It's available to preorder on our website foundation devices.com for 199. Then once we start

shipping, the price point will jump to 229. And then our Envoy app, which will be available on iOS and Android. And then also the APK will be available. So if you're using like something like, you know, Calix or graphie, and then you want to download that, you know, you'll be able to, that'll all

launch alongside passports. We're just going to kind of time the launch to whenever passport starts shipping. Nice. Well, yeah, thanks for wrapping that up. I know you guys are short on time. So it's been great to catch up. I'm sure we'll speak over the coming weeks anyway. But yeah, congratulations

on what you've achieved here. It's fucking awesome. It's beyond what I expected. And I would encourage anyone who hasn't already to go to foundation devices.com go and have a look and yeah, thanks for coming on guys. Thanks for having us, Max. Yeah, thanks. Pleasure as always.

Speak soon.