Save In Bitcoin, Spend in Monero | THE UNBOUNDED SERIES: Seth For Privacy

Welcome back. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. I hope you got to spend lots of time with friends and family. Some of you might have realized recently that the Unbounded podcast has closed down.

This means they're no longer paying for hosting, and this means, unfortunately, that the great audio that was recorded would be lost. All of the five guests that appeared on that podcast are considered by all of us at Ungovernable Misfits to be part of the family.

Q, Diverter, Seth, Pavel, and Colonial, all privacy advocates, all people we have a lot of respect for. And TBD, who ran the podcast, did a really great job of running through some of these important topics.

So rather than it being lost forever and that audio fading into nonexistence, we decided we would host it here. I'm gonna be releasing one a week, probably. We'll start with Q, then Diverter, then Seth, Pavel, and end with Colonial.

Thank you to TBD for putting in the effort to make these podcasts. Thank you to all the guests. And we're very happy that we can host this audio so that anyone in the future looking into privacy, security, freedom, has some more great audio to listen to. I hope you enjoy these, and stay ungovernable.

Welcome to Unbounded podcast where we explore the intersection of technology, human rights, and the fight for freedom. What if Bitcoin isn't enough? Today, I'm joined by Seth for privacy, educator, builder and one of the most trusted voices in the fight for digital sovereignty.

We dive into the real battle: building privacy that works, confronting the limits of Bitcoin and making the case for Monero when the stakes are the highest. This is practical defiance for those who can't afford to be seen.

Saving Bitcoin, spending Monero. This is unbounded. Seth, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. I'm pumped pumped to be here. I've loved how you've kicked off the podcast, and I know we've we've had some back and forth and chatted a few times in the past. So I'm really excited to be here.

Vital topics to get into as always, and and always love seeing someone else stepping into the the educator

podcaster arena and taking one for the team. So the more you do, the better you do, the less I have to do. So I'm all for it. Trying to trying to do our part here, Seth. First thing I want to jump into with you is you've been on the front lines for years now.

I'm not sure how much you want to admit how long you've in the battle, but I think but you've been pushing for real privacy, you know, self sovereign financial privacy at least since 2017, 2018.

But just from a personal perspective, like, what's that journey been like for you? And kinda what keeps you going and what's the hardest? Oh, man. Yeah. It's a that's a hard one to answer. I mean, it definitely definitely goes back a ways. Like you mentioned, I think I really kind of started

just being vocal in the space around, like, 2018, but I was very, very new, very early. Was just starting to, like, care at all about any sort of personal privacy, care at all about Bitcoin, Monero, and really just honestly waded into X specifically,

formerly known as Twitter, to just be able to ask questions and learn more. Like, I'm a very, very curious person. When I when I find something that I'm passionate about, I go really deep, really fast.

Mhmm. And that that definitely happened. And in these things, specifically with Monero first, and then ultimately, that actually led me to Bitcoin, which I know is a bit backwards for most people. But I think, like, the thing that keeps me going is that I I found that there's this niche that not many people are hitting.

And it's not a niche that is gonna feed the the algorithms of social media, but is a niche that people really desire. And that is just having nuance, like being willing to not take sides necessarily,

to to not make everything black and white, to not engagement bait people, but just being willing to get into the details, to unpack the nuance that is almost always present in all of the debates that are going on on on social media, especially on Bitcoin, Twitter,

and just be able to do that in a way that is nuanced and willing to dive into the gray areas. And that's that's something that is rare. It shouldn't be. It really should not be rare. Well, Seth, they say what social media, like, all nuances just completely lost. Right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And the the the algorithms, I mean, they they

incentivize you to rage bait and engagement bait and angry posts and shit posts. Like, all of these these things that are not usually beneficial for discourse are normally the things that are getting promoted by the algorithm. And so you're definitely kind of battling the algorithm when you take this approach.

But I found that it's just something that people really respect and really desire because as much as we engage with and feed the broken system of angry posts and everyone wanting to dunk on each other, that it doesn't lead to better discourse. It doesn't lead to better conversations. It doesn't lead to people

learning the right way or the better way. And it doesn't lead to better relationships either. It's really just detracts from everything. And so there's this, I think, this core desire for people to really be able to get into the nuance and to understand what's actually going on, not just what influencers and podcasters,

no offense, I am also a podcaster, are talking about, but to actually kind of get into the weeds and unpack it a bit because people really do want to see behind the curtain and understand what's going on and think for themselves. But I think many people think that that's impossible.

So when they see things distilled in a way that's approachable, it, I think, helps to unpack for them that, hey, I can actually dig into this. Like this person is explaining it well. These are the next steps, the next resources.

And that's something that people really desire. Yeah. And that definitely comes across for me and definitely what the attraction is, Whether you're right or wrong, right? I think you've made it really, really clear that people need to do the thinking for themselves at the end of the day, right?

Not get caught up in the kind of the tribalism and all of that. It definitely can get pretty nasty out there. But on the flip educator. You use Twitter X as what seems like one of your main social media platforms out there. What's been the benefit for you from an education perspective?

Yeah, it's a it's a really good question. It's one that I've thought a lot more about with the advent of Noster, which is this Bitcoin adjacent social media platform relay thing can do a lot of things, but mostly people talk about it from a social media perspective.

And it kinda made me rethink, like, why am I on x versus

any other platform? Or social media in general. But Yeah. But we're talking about that. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. What like, why that specifically? And I I very intentionally don't have any other social media. Two reasons. One, One, social media is is the devil. It's really bad for you. And

I do not want to spend any more of my time than absolutely necessary on social media. So I'm not gonna put in the time investment to be on any other other platforms than just one platform.

And honestly, the reason for X is just that I can have a very good reach. I already have an established platform there. And my goal is not being on the the most sovereign platform or doing the best job of making sure that my, like, speech is free. That sounds weird.

But to me, the the most important thing with where I'm going to actually publish the things I'm thinking about, write about what what's top of mind for me, discuss and debate with other people is the platform where more normies, more normal people who are new to this journey or are new to the concept of privacy,

new to the concept of freedom money, of using Bitcoin privately, of Monero. I wanna reach those people. I don't wanna reach the people who are already within this echo chamber. And most of the platforms, like Noster, for instance,

are a, like, a hyper echo chamber. And I don't feel like my voice would be helpful there at all. Sure. Has that changed for you? I think I remember at the Fini Forum, if I'm not mistaken,

I remember you saying that the audience that you're going for, you're not trying to necessarily red pill people on privacy technology and Bitcoin and Monero per se, that you're really focused on people that at least have identified it as a problem,

like, you know, big tech and that kind of thing. Yeah. No. I I think overall, that stayed that stayed exactly the same. Because I think I quickly realized, like, as much as I would love to be able to to evangelize the idea of personal privacy, of self sovereignty, of personal responsibility, it's,

to me, very difficult to impossible to actually convince people of a need that they don't already see themselves for some other reason. They haven't had a kind of a wake up call or a bad incident of kind of getting burned some way or seeing a family member,

struggle because of a data leak or something like that. If they haven't had any of that, like, I'm I don't see much value in trying to convince them. I haven't seen much effectiveness in that. Early on, I would say that was more of my strategy, and I quickly shifted away from that.

But I think also part of that is I'm a terrible evangelist. Like, I'm just not that kind of person to to show you on, like, why you need this thing or why you need to care deeply about it. But rather, I think, like, my specific skill set is much better served

to help people who already understand that. Like, they've already seen, like like, this the system we have on the Internet today is just totally broken. Like, the way money works is totally broken.

I need to change something, but I don't know how. I don't know where to start. That, I think, is the much more useful kind of point in the funnel to to target for me specifically with my skill set. But there are other people out there who are fantastic evangelists, for lack of a better word, that are really good about,

like, engaging with people who have no care or desire for personal privacy, but but unpacking for them why that matters. And there are people better at that than me.

But for me, I think the the most impact that I can have with my time, and I try to be very careful with my time because there's always more that I can do and and less time in the day, the most impact I can have is is capture those people at that that kind of point in the funnel of, I I know there's a problem.

I don't know how to fix it, And then I want to be there with the resources and education and the explanations to help people understand where to go from there. Interesting.

How do you think a Noster? So you said that you're kind of comparing the two platforms. How are you thinking about that today for yourself and for your mission, would you say?

Yeah, I mean, for me right now, I'm fairly notorious in Bitcoin circles for being a nostril hater. So I I think that the the protocol itself is interesting for some very niche things.

But for social media, I think it's a very, very mediocre reason to need something new. There there are some some technical advantages to the way Nostr works. There's also some terrible, terrible disadvantages to the way Nostr works, specifically around privacy.

There's a massive uphill battle around user experience that has to be fought, and none of that's even talking about the network effect of social media platforms like X, like Facebook, like others. And so I I think for me, like, I view Noster as a good fallback.

Like, if Elon goes nuts, if X goes nuts, and they become these highly censored, totally broken platforms,

like, it'll be fantastic to have something else to move off to that is not just shifting trust to another single entity. Like, switching to blue sky or something like that doesn't doesn't resolve the issues that we have on X, even if maybe it improves some of them. So I think it's a fantastic fallback.

For me right now, especially, it's just like a hyper Bitcoin echo chamber.

There's not that much for me on there personally and specifically with how I'm targeting who I wanna reach. Those kind of people are just not on Noster. Like, you have to be really deep down the the Bitcoin rabbit hole to even know what Noster is, much less be on it. So that's not the kind of person I want to target.

Not to say there's no value for someone to be on there, not to say that Noster the hole is totally useless, but I don't view it as extremely valuable

for social media specifically and especially not valuable for me and what I'm trying to use social media for. Got it. So back on the question I asked you earlier, you've been on the front lines for years for a long, long time.

What's one challenge that has really tested your resolve the most, would you say? I think probably I would say, I don't know. Maybe there's two things. I think one that's constantly challenged my resolve is just a lack of a desire for privacy tools within the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Yeah. And that's not to say that there is no one who desires it or no one building it. There are people.

But when you look at what's getting funded in the Bitcoin space, when you look at what's getting airtime and debates in the Bitcoin space, like opera turn drama and changing denomination and the the people who are pushing these things but who aren't talking about or funding new privacy technology around Bitcoin.

It's just it's really a struggle to continue wanting to care about Bitcoin, like, if I'm being completely honest. And I say that as K Qualit, where I'm the VP. We just launched PageOne v two, which is a new privacy tech for Bitcoin.

I love that, but there's so many limitations on what we can actually do for privacy in Bitcoin and so few people and so little funding going into it that it's very hard to want to stay in the Bitcoin conversation, especially.

That's held true when we talk about, like, covenants, which there's some upgrades that could be done to Bitcoin that would make self custody far better, that would allow for better privacy tools, that would improve solutions like Lightning to make them much more user friendly and allow people to use them in more private ways.

And just like none of that stuff is ever gonna happen, I don't think. And so it's it's a little hard to remain engaged. There is something that I've struggled with off and on over the years.

So so, Seth, you're, like, one of the most optimistic people I know in the space. You sound almost pessimistic. I'm teasing when I say that. Yeah. But are you optimistic or pessimistic at the moment and be honest?

Yeah. I think I try to kind of think as a an optimistic pragmatist. Like, I I know that's probably not Realist. Correct English in any way. Pragmatist realist. Yeah. Yeah. All all the all the words. All the words. Yeah. I mean, like, I just try to remain

attached to reality, and I feel like often when we get too optimistic or too pessimistic, we can be very detached from reality and miss the good when we're on the pessimistic side or miss the bad when we're on the optimistic side and ended up wasting a lot of time and effort. So I try as hard as I can to stay attached to reality

and to remain as hopeful as possible. But there's also there's there's limits where, like, if you're if you're too optimistic and too hopeful, you will spend your time on things that are never gonna happen, that are never gonna a positive impact because you're you're detached from the reality of what adoption looks like,

of what product market fit looks like, of what the demand from actual users looks like. And I think this is a a constant issue in the space, the privacy space at large, cryptocurrency as well, is there could be this overoptimistic view of, like, if we build it, they will come. Like, if we build it, it'll happen. It'll gain adoption.

And it's almost never the case. We have we have very specific things that we know that users desire and very

a large set of things that users are never gonna touch because they make their life more difficult instead of easier. And so, yeah, I try to stay attached to reality. And when you've been in the Bitcoin space as long as I have, which is not long compared to a lot of other people I acknowledge, seven years feels like

eight or nine lifetimes. Well, I say if you're in the privacy focused area of the industry, you age by at least a decade more than most people. It's true. It's true. I think seven years is is is seventy years in the Dog years, man. It's dog years.

Yeah. Definitely. And so I I think it's just, like, the longer you spend in it and the less change actually happens, necessarily, the more you start to become pessimistic about some future improvement like covenants happening, some future improvement like lightning becoming very easy to use without giving over self custody.

Those kinds of things that have been promises for years and years in the space and haven't materialized. Like, at some point, you kind of have to write it off and move on. I think that's where I'm currently trying to figure out, like Right. What's reality?

Right. And where and when do you walk away? Like, I feel like

for maybe for a lot of people, I'm just getting the sense, especially those that are very passionate about privacy and really care about these things, you know, from a human rights perspective and and things like that, that we might be getting to a point within the next year or two where

you really have to just kind of make a decision whether these things are really going to happen or not. Right. You know, are we really going to have just good enough, you know, privacy on Bitcoin at all? And is this just like

because when I when I think about it, I spend so much time trying to be, you know, nontechnical person who's very passionate about being a bitcoin, a sovereign bitcoiner, financial freedom as much as I can push that needle

in that direction. But, man, it's a lot of time, a lot of time on the weekend and things like that. But let's let's hold that off because, you know, you've described yourself as a freedom quote unquote, freedom text maximalist,

freedom tech maximalist. What does that actually mean in practice and why does it matter now to you? I think I think at practice, what it really means to me is that I'm I'm not at least as far as I can as a human. I'm not caught up in a tribe. I'm not focused on one solution having to be the way

no matter what, not caught up in a specific cryptocurrency, in a specific privacy app or privacy technology, and rather trying to to maximalize what the actual, like, useful tech stack is for people. And I think, like, a big reason why I use that term is because it's a little bit of a play on the Bitcoin maximalist thing,

where there's this cabal of people within the Bitcoin space who have, for malicious reasons or for I don't know why, have blinded themselves to everything else. Maybe cabal is too aggressive, Lord. They've chosen to write off anything else no matter what, and have thus become very detached from reality.

Do you think So Freedom Tech Maximalist definitely targeted at that. Yeah. Do you think that view can hold much longer? You know, you've talked about that. I think the reality is that everybody can, I think, agree on at this point that we're gonna live in a multi crypto world Mhmm? Whether you like it or not. Mhmm. Right?

And I I feel like holding on to that view, this kind of Bitcoin maximalist view is just not gonna do it. Again, if if you're interested in freedom tech, right, from a freedom perspective

Mhmm. You're interested in building these technologies for dissidents and people living, you know, in Burma and, you know, in The Middle East and these countries that are just being ravaged by inflation and things like that. Right? Like, you have to be more open minded than that, I think.

Yeah. No. I I think the idea and the popular popularity of Bitcoin maximalism has been dead for some time. I think it's a bit of a misunderstanding that people think that there's still this, like, core of Bitcoiners that are extremely antagonistic

towards anything else. There are certainly people like that. It's honestly, I would say probably a handful of people who still stick to that kind of hardline Bitcoin only, everything else is a shitcoin kind of policy. But most of those people have very strong financial incentives to do so and I think are just not being intellectually

honest because it would benefit them to keep this Bitcoin maximalism thing going. I think for the vast majority of people, and I'm talking about many, many publicly Bitcoin only podcasters, influencers, etcetera, Behind the scenes, they already accept it's a multi crypto world. Many of them already use Monero. Many of them use Ethereum.

Many of them are totally fine with other cryptocurrencies and have no problem with them. And it's it just like, again, it comes back to are you attached or detached from reality? Like you said, we we live in a multi crypto world.

These cryptocurrencies are not going away. They cannot be stopped, which is kind of the point of them. Even if they're centralized, we've seen that some of the centralized garbage just keeps on going. There's not a way to stop it. Railing against them on Twitter is not gonna stop it. And people ultimately want tools that best fit the job

that they need to get done. And sometimes that's Bitcoin. Sometimes that's Monero. Sometimes that's Ethereum. Sometimes that's other things. And one of the, like, absolutely most powerful things about cryptocurrency that is very underrated is that unlike fiat currency, we can go back and forth between different cryptocurrencies

very easily, very seamlessly, often in trustless ways where there's no other entity that's being trusted in that process.

And that allows you to really have your cake and eat it too, like really be able to to maximize the benefit to whatever you personally need to achieve from using the right crypto from the job. The same thing in the privacy space. Like, there's not a I mean, there are, like, signal maxis or whatever.

I don't know if there really are, but there's a lot less maximalism because there's not the financial incentives behind it that there are in the the crypto space. So I think once you see past that, once you talk to most of these people behind closed doors, everyone already admits it's a multi crypto world. This is the reality.

Use the tools that work best for you. And I think this Bitcoin maximalism thing is essentially dead. Interesting. Interesting. Some people haven't gotten the message, but I digress. So how would you describe the moment that we're in right now within the sovereign Bitcoin space, especially when it comes to privacy,

surveillance and the future of digital sovereignty? I would say this is probably the most pivotal fork in the road moment for the sovereign usage of Bitcoin that we've seen, at least in my time in the space, for two reasons.

One of those is that we while technically we're out of an extraordinarily antagonistic, anti crypto, anti privacy administration in The US, a lot of the things that they started have continued. Prosecution against Samurai Wallet, prosecution against Tornado Cash,

things that both destroyed privacy technology that we had available to us, especially like Samurai Wallet and the the Bitcoin privacy space, and, sent shock waves through the broader space and and caused many companies to to bail on providing privacy, caused many developers to pivot to working on other things, understandably.

And so I think, like, that is one of the pieces where there's this legal element that, like, you and I as individuals have very little say in. Obviously, we can can fight the good fight on social media. We can make sure that people understand this.

We can put whatever pressure we can on the legal system, but we don't have really any direct sway in what happens there. But the outcome of those cases is ultimately gonna decide a lot about what can and cannot

safely be done by companies and entities building on Bitcoin, which when we think about Bitcoin from, like, the Cypherpump perspective,

you may think, like, oh, it doesn't matter. Like, we can we can just build it in a decentralized anonymous way. But the reality of Bitcoin privacy is that because there is no privacy on the base layer and quite the opposite, Bitcoin is built to be transparent by design.

Anything that you want to use to gain privacy almost always relies on some central entity to provide it in some way. But there are exceptions to that. Silent payments is an exception. PayJoin is an exception. But those are really tertiary tools and aren't providing

holistic privacy on their own and are really missing the kind of forward looking privacy that something like Semi Wallets, Whirlpool provided that CoinJoin as a tool can provide. So I think that that legal angle is one of those pieces. And And then I think at the same time,

we're also at this pivotal moment where the Bitcoin community is deciding, are we going to have any more changes in Bitcoin or not? And overwhelmingly,

it seems like there is great support within the developer community of wanting something like covenants, something simple that helps us to build much better tools that can lead to better self custody, better privacy, better lightning wallets, etcetera.

There's great consensus there. But amongst the the podcasters and influencers and Bitcoin Twitter folks, there's still a lot of debate on that. And I think with the opera turn drama, which I assume we don't wanna get into today, and it's not not worth getting into from a time perspective, I don't think.

I think that changed in a lot of people's minds a willingness to to change Bitcoin in any way and made it much harder to get anything across the line. And I think if that doesn't happen, the ability to actually build good privacy tools, to build good self custody solutions, to build good Lightning wallets will be greatly diminished,

and the openness to any future improvement to privacy at the base layer will be closed off as well. Wow. The stakes seem like they couldn't be higher. It's really, really interesting. I mean, these cases, obviously, a lot of people understand

the implications, but I think a lot of people still don't, especially the average number go up person who's, you know, just waiting for Bitcoin to explode or whatever they think. So just taking a a step back. So are we winning or are we losing the freedom money privacy wars,

Seth? It's a good question. I think in a broad sense, I think we are winning in that the tools available to us are better than ever in most areas. And there are exceptions to this, like Samurai Wallet that I just mentioned. But

overall, there is really cool things happening that if they gain adoption, can have a serious impact in the Bitcoin space. Silent payments and PayJoin are are two examples of that. The tech is there. The code is there. There's implementations live now.

We just need more people, more exchanges, more entities to actually adopt and use them. And I think at the same time, the availability and access to things like Monero well, to to Monero, I would say things like, to Monero is ensuring that we have a hardcore

freedom money available to us no matter what. Like, there's no way to shut down Monero. There's no way to prevent people from swapping Bitcoin for Monero. Those things are just going to be able to happen no matter what happens from a a legal or regulatory perspective.

And the tooling around Monero specifically has gotten so much better over the years. So I think, like, in the broad sense, I really do feel like we are winning, but that doesn't mean that we've won. And I think that's a lot of the distinction that falls apart quickly as people think

that Bitcoin is inevitable or that freedom money is inevitable or that these things are gonna happen just because there's overwhelming momentum or or pressure for them to happen. But that's just simply not the case. There's still a lot of ways in which Bitcoin could fail.

There's a lot of ways in which Bitcoin could be co opted or censored. There's a lot of centralization risks, like with mining right now. So it's certainly not like we we shouldn't be doing victory laps. But I do think that that there have been some really good developments across the space. Just generally,

privacy tech is getting a lot easier to use. Like, the user experience aspect of things is just immensely better than it was four or five years ago across the space, which is a huge deal because that means that the average individual can actually achieve these things rather than it being just for the highly technical developer

code line guy. It's something where the average person can actually achieve them. So I would say, like, I know some of what I've said so far can can sound very pessimistic and

doomsday. But I would say overall, I do feel like we're winning. I just feel like we need to be careful to make sure that we we keep up in the arms race and that we keep winning. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's kind of the fog of war at the at the moment. You know, I think it's going to be another five or so years maybe

before we can kind of look back and say definitively whether we won the battle or not. But what's what's your honest take on the state of Bitcoin privacy today? Is it improving? Is it stagnating?

Is it just more kind of performative than practical at this point? What's what's your high level overview on that? Yeah, I think it's another tricky one to answer because like pre Samurai Wall and Diagonal Seth, people will listen to this and flame you on X.

I'm sure I'm sure it's inevitable, it's no matter what I say. So I've learned to learn to distance myself from caring about what people say on Twitter for for better or worse. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I would say generally, it certainly is improving, but is not is not at the,

like, minimum barrier for me of recommendation, which is that a normal person can achieve good enough privacy. I would argue that before Samurai Wallet was taken down and before some other some other fallout happened around that, I would say that we were at that good enough state where you could get good enough privacy

without being extremely technical even if it wasn't straightforward or super easy, and that was that was achievable. I would say we we kind of had to start over after that, and there are some some benefits and some some drawbacks to that. I think the the benefit has been there as

from some in the space been a renewed effort around privacy and Bitcoin to to drive other options that don't rely on a central entity. Things like silent payments, which are a massive improvement to user experience first and foremost, but also privacy from a receiving perspective in Bitcoin.

That effort has really taken off. Cakewallet's been leading the way, but I'm hopeful that others will jump in on that effort

effort soon as well. That has really, I think, gotten more attention and focus because of the the loss of other privacy tools. People realize, hey. We need to build things that aren't gonna be shut down with one indictment or with one person going to jail. We can't be that vulnerable to to adversarial environments.

And then pay join is another really good example of this. Pay join v two is a massive improvement over the old The old way to do pay join, for those who don't know, a pay join is essentially a way for you to work with the person you're sending money to, to both contribute inputs to that transaction.

And it breaks a lot of the normal chain surveillance that companies like Chainalysis can do and can rely on, where they can no longer assume that the inputs in a transaction are owned by the same person. They can no longer assume that the value of an output in that transaction is the amount that's being sent from person A to person B.

It breaks a lot of the basic heuristics and, again, doesn't require any central entity to work. It relies on a a server for the two users to coordinate, but that server can be run by anybody. It's completely agnostic. It never takes custody of funds or anything like that and has good network level privacy.

So things like that are growing in both the simplicity of use and the the breadth of adoption, which is a really good thing.

So there's, like, bits and pieces, but I think a lot of people get caught up and think, like, oh, well, we have silent payments now. Like, Bitcoin privacy is fixed. Or we have PayJoin now. Bitcoin privacy is fixed. We can kind of of dust off our hands and move on.

But these are just, like, very small pieces that do help user privacy, but on their own, do not solve the overall core issues with Bitcoin's transparency. Man, the nuances get lost big time on X on this on this topic. Yeah, unfortunately.

So you've used the phrase good enough privacy. I've heard you use that quite a bit. Where where is that line between privacy that protects and privacy that's just kind of a, you know, checks off a box?

I think the line for me is when we're talking about personal privacy, think we have to look at it in two different ways, like two different basic threat models. There's a lot of in between, but the two basic threat models, I think, are

a person who just wants to or needs to avoid mass surveillance. Like, you don't want chain analysis just happening to figure out exactly who you are and how you use Bitcoin.

And then you have the the alternate, which is you are a a person who is extremely at risk, be it a dissident, a journalist, a freedom fighter, like, whatever it is that your role is.

You are a targeted individual. You know that nation states, chain surveillance companies, law enforcement, etc, are going to be targeting you specifically and trying to pierce through any privacy steps that you take. And those two basic camps are kind of how I they're helpful framework to look at how useful is a privacy technology.

For most people, if they can avoid mass surveillance, that's what I would call good enough privacy, where you you know that if you're not explicitly targeted and you know that you're a relatively low risk, this is gonna provide good enough privacy so you don't have to worry about the the more common things, the things where

KYC data being leaked from Coinbase, for instance, reveals not only your Coinbase identity, but because you withdrew to a single address and didn't use any privacy tools, it reveals everything about your on chain activity too. You can avoid that by using good enough privacy tools to get there.

Whereas, like, for the targeted individual, a lot of these things are just not gonna fly when they're actually being individually surveilled. A lot of this technology is is good and useful,

but could be seen through by someone who's determined and has enough resources. But for most people, I think that good enough line is it's in the words. Good enough for them is is all that is absolutely necessary for, like, the the initial steps towards personal privacy and the common threat model.

And so that's kind of my, like, my lowest bar of I I don't really wanna recommend anything unless the average individual can get good enough user privacy. I think Monero is a fantastic example of this right now because it's near perfect at preventing mass surveillance.

Arguably, you could even say perfect at preventing mass surveillance, but does have some very specific edge cases where individual

targeted surveillance could cause problems through Monero. Now that is gonna change. Even targeted surveillance will be much more difficult to impossible after an upgrade to Monero that'll go live soon. But but generally, that's kind of how I think about things and is the the lowest barrier I find.

If, like, if it can't provide good enough privacy, I'm not gonna recommend it because I don't want people getting burned. So what's the bar for you? You? Is it the lower bar? Are you more focused? What level are you trying to get at? Are you trying to cover both use cases,

essentially? Yeah, I mean, like we talked about, like my kind of target audience is normally someone who would just need good enough privacy. So a lot of times that is the most common bar for me, and that's why, like, Bitcoin with Samurai Wallet in the in the ecosystem,

I felt like was good enough for the average person and even had some reasonably good protection against individual, like, targeted surveillance.

Mhmm. That being said, like, the the other side of things is I I'd love to do what I can at least to help educate dissidents, journalists, people who are at risk and who could reasonably face targeted surveillance on what those more hardcore tools are. And that's where, like, understanding what the

what the privacy of Minero brings versus the privacy of Bitcoin brings is really, really vital. Because for many, like, for many dissidents and journalists, they can get by with Bitcoin and its lackluster privacy

because of a lack of resources of the nation state that they're being targeted by amongst other things. Right. But for many, they can't get by with that, and they have serious issues because of that.

There's some, like, some evidence of this in the opposition in Russia to Vladimir Putin where their their Bitcoin usage was being tracked and surveilled quite easily by by Russian federal agents, and that was causing problems for them. They needed a deeper level of privacy,

and so they started using Wasabi Wallet, which I generally don't recommend for lots of other reasons. But that was their solution to that, because they did realize, hey, we actually are being targeted here, and we are suffering because of the lack of privacy.

So which tool do you think offers more kind of practical protection in the real world? Bitcoin or Monero? I mean, I think the question, the answer is undoubtedly Monero for two reasons. One is that the lowest bar of privacy that's provided by Monero is vastly better than the best possible scenario for Bitcoin privacy, and

that that is achievable by literally anyone because you just use any Monero wallet, and you gain incredibly strong protection, especially against mass surveillance. You don't have to do anything extra. You don't have to spend any time learning about anything.

You can just use it and you gain very strong privacy. The only reason why I would recommend people to ever look at Bitcoin is because it does have a bigger network effect. It does have more merchant adoption.

It does have more, real world usefulness for specific people. And so there might be some reasons why why you'd need to use Bitcoin, especially for payments over something like Monero. But when we're talking about, like, what provides the best privacy, it's it's hands down Monero. Monero is by far the most useful and most used privacy

cryptocurrency anyways, but it's definitely the the better solution to Bitcoin. But the reason why I continue to be invested in Bitcoin and want to see the privacy tooling improve is because of that greatly expanded reach. Lots of people are gonna come in. They're going to learn about Bitcoin first. They're going to use Bitcoin heavily

before they ever hear about Monero. Now, and I wanna make sure that those people have access to privacy tooling and that those people who have a specific need for Bitcoin have the ability to use good privacy tools at the same time. Interesting.

Yeah, there was a blog post that you did a couple of years ago where you said if I had to recommend a financial tool without the chance to deeply, quote unquote, educate,

it would continue to be Monero. So it seems like that hasn't changed over the last couple of years. What what do you mean by that? If I had to recommend a tool, a financial tool without the chance to, quote, unquote, deeply educate. I think I know what you mean. But Yeah. What do you mean by that?

Yeah. I mean, basically, just the achieving privacy on Bitcoin is not something where you just pick up a wallet and you you do it. Like, I I say that as someone building a Bitcoin wallet that has cutting edge privacy features.

It's it's achievable, but holistic privacy within Bitcoin is very, very difficult to achieve for the average person. And so, like,

especially if I know that you have any chance of having a a targeted threat model in the future, I I would feel very hesitant to recommend Bitcoin unless I had a lot of time to sit down with you and walk through these things. Unless I had a lot of resources, you had a lot of time and willingness to dig into

how to solve all of these problems with Bitcoin, all the different tools you need to use. And, I mean, honestly, even right now in Bitcoin, it's not as much an education problem as it is a technology problem where without Whirlpool, so without Samurai Wallet Whirlpool, and without a really good alternate CoinJoin implementation,

there are some serious limits to the privacy that can be achieved no matter how educated you are. So that's that's really what I mean. It's like, I I can I can freely and happily recommend Monero to anyone no matter the the threat model because I know that it's going to be

a fantastic tool to protect their user privacy, and then I can go deeper with them if they have an extremely targeted threat model? But that's gonna be the very, very, very rare, like, zero zero zero one percent of people.

Whereas for the average person, I mean, I was just gonna solve all the privacy needs that they have at the financial level. There's obviously other other things that go into personal privacy, but at the financial transactional privacy level, it's gonna solve that. So, yeah, that's that's the core of what I mean.

It's there's a reason that I think a lot of YouTubers and podcasters stick with Bitcoin because there's just so much education necessary for a lot of the basic stuff, like, especially around privacy. Like, you can't make that much content around using Monero because you just you just use it.

But when you talk about Bitcoin privacy, like, famously, I think Matt O'Dell had, like, a thirty seven hour course learning how to do, like, basic Bitcoin privacy stuff. I mean, I've spent hundreds of hours, you know, as as a nontechnical person who's deeply motivated to to try to make it happen. I spent

hours and hours. And then when, you know, the Samurai incident happened, it was like the rug was completely pulled. All that investment, all that time, and then trying to figure out, you know, how to recover from that. It's just it's unbelievable,

the amount of time that I put into it. But, you know, I still I still I I think I'm starting to I I blame you for red pilling me on on Monero. I mean, if if you're passionate about privacy from a human rights perspective, you have to look at Monero. I mean Yeah. And I and I've looked at a lot of the different crypto,

you know, stuff out there, and it's it's the real deal, and it's not going away any anytime soon. But what have you seen or heard from people using Monero, for example, under pressure in these dictatorships or authoritarianism?

Whether it's like Bitcoin or Monero. Like, what are you hearing from people who are actually using these tools or on the ground? For example, in Burma, you've got a civil war going on there. People are desperately trying to fund a resistance.

What do you have any insights into things like that and what you're hearing from people? Yeah. And I actually got the chance to go to the the Human Rights Forum. Oslo. At the Oslo Freedom Forum put on by the Human Rights Foundation, the HRF, last year.

That was a fascinating insight into how different my thoughts around what people needed was from the reality. As a serious privacy advocate and someone who pushes really hard for the more hardcore solutions, it was a wake up call to learn that the vast majority of people using something like Bitcoin

actually aren't even using Bitcoin, and they're generally using stablecoins on Tron or other very centralized, very controlled networks because their their threat model, strangely enough, and you wouldn't think it without talking to them, is generally not one that surveillance is a problem for them. It's generally not one that

Yeah. They just need a friendly government. Right? Like, they they just Or or an incompetent government or incompetent. And I think normally, that's the reason why they're able to get by with Bitcoin or with USDT on Tron is that a lot of these places,

government the just does not have the resources or manpower to put into chain surveillance and put into actually like, they don't have the leverage over exchanges that aren't in their country. They don't have

the kind of tools available to actually change how people are using these tools, even if they know that they're being used, even if they can surveil those payments. A lot of times, that's actually not a big deal for people, which is is fascinating.

I think we should not take it too far and think that, well, then we don't need Monero. We don't need privacy tools. They're they're they're catching up too. Right? Like, I'm thinking of, like Yeah. Places like Vietnam and and Southeast Asia.

You know, when social media came out, it was that same scenario. The governments did not like it. They knew it was going on, and it's taken them years to kind of catch up with the technology.

A lot of that technology is coming from China now, and they're helping these countries kind of build out that infrastructure to shut these things down.

But the same applies here as well. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, they they will continue to catch up. The the knowledge and the tools that are available primarily to countries like The US, primarily to the US government, those tools will become more and more normal and will become more and more will become cheaper and cheaper

as they just become normalized. That it will be something where, like, we are in an arms race. Maybe in these countries, the governments are are far behind the arms race, but we can't get too comfortable with that.

Especially, like, I think there's also the other angle that maybe is under discussed here of, like, journalism dissidents is definitely those are definitely people who need these privacy tools.

But it's also just something the average individual needs, especially in a world where there's a broken Internet that is constantly capturing and collecting data. In a world where cryptocurrency is now a well understood, well known thing and a serious threat vector of theft and kidnapping and murder,

like, there are are serious risks to not taking your financial privacy seriously when it comes to cryptocurrency that often are actually higher for people who aren't dissidents and journalists in remote global South countries, but rather are high profile individuals that are going through Europe or something like that, privacy

is something that can be by far the best security method as well. So I think there's there's always more to consider here, and the average individual absolutely needs these things. But it is fascinating to learn how how little a lot of the current journalists and dissidents depend on decentralization or privacy

for usage and rather just need the thing that will work the best from a monetary perspective. And oftentimes that's stablecoin. Sometimes that's Bitcoin. Very rarely does that involve any kind of privacy technology.

Yeah, I think it's where you reside, right? Like, if you're in China and you're a dissident, that's a very, very different calculation. Right? Like, you need you need to have these privacy tools immediately right out of the gate. I think a lot of these countries,

yeah, they're just not there yet. And and it's really they're just trying to solve an immediate problem. Right? Whether that's I spoke with a dissident from Burma that had to escape. Right. And he's just he's just trying to get out of the country. He'll worry about privacy, you know, later.

So, let's let's move on. You've plainly said it, I think, and tell me if I'm wrong here, but you say saving Bitcoin, spending Monero. You were the first person I believe I heard that from at the Finney Forum a couple of years ago. But why do you think that this kind of dual stack approach is still taboo for so many Bitcoiners?

And what does it break open when we stop treating these as kind of like an either or scenario? I mean, to be completely honest, privately, it is not taboo. This is a very, very common practice that has been common for years. Like, I I first talked about this actually at Guns and Bitcoin in 2020, I think.

Mhmm. Maybe 2021. I can't remember what year that was. And as far as I know, nobody was talking about this concept yet, but it was already something that people weren't doing. Like, most people who have gotten into Monero started as Bitcoiners.

And overwhelmingly, even though just like in Bitcoin, there are Monero people who are maximalists and pretend that we don't need Bitcoin or anything else. Overwhelmingly, most of the people who are into Monero live in a multi crypto world, embrace Bitcoin, embrace Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies for the the value that each provides.

So it's already a common thing, but it has become drastically more common, and the taboo has been completely shattered since the Samurai Wallet indictment. I cannot Yeah. I'm sorry. I just this was a question that I had. Has Monero benefited, for lack of a better way to putting this, from the Samurai Wallet incident?

And to and to what extent? How do you see it? Yeah. I mean, definitely. I I think like we talked about before, this bar of good enough privacy on Bitcoin was completely shattered with Samurai Wallet being indicted, with the fallout that came with that as well.

So the the the vast majority of people who care deeply about privacy on Bitcoin and needed to actually use something to make payments, they started using Monero right away. Like, I I cannot count the number of DMs and messages and conversations that I had with people in the weeks and months following that indictment,

getting them onboard to Monero, helping them to to learn the best tools, getting them onto a a wallet, and showing them how there's just simple stuff works answering common privacy questions that they had around Bitcoin and if they apply or not to Monero.

These conversations are in the hundreds, I don't know, maybe the thousands just for me. And I know that many people are coming to Monero without ever talking to me. So I certainly only have a lower bound to speak to. But there has been a massive shift, that taboo is totally broken.

People who are actually seeking to use these tools for freedom, like I think you mentioned this earlier, like, there's always obviously a group of people who are blinded by financial incentives or just blinded by tribalism. But the vast majority of people are not like that. The vast majority of people,

they are just seeking to use something that helps to empower them, that gives them more freedom with how they transact.

And they've started using Monero over the last year now. That shift has been monumental, and I think that the taboo has really been broken. And I know I've said this on other podcasts and stuff, but even before that, the number of Bitcoin only, Bitcoin Maxis that already used Monero, that already ran Monero nodes,

that already paid for things in Monero before that, but just didn't want to talk about it publicly is wild. Like, this is something that has been a concept for a very long time. And it's a perfect symbiosis.

Like, has proven its store of value. Monero has proven that it is by far the best tool for spending if you care about privacy.

Why would you not get the best of both worlds? Like, I I would rather spend in Monero. And for better or worse, I think Monero absolutely can be a store of value. There are technical reasons to think that it would be an even better store of value. And recently there's been better price How dare

that? You know. I know. Oh, my God. No, I think this is fascinating. And you've really turned me on to this. And I think about this a lot. You know, this multi crypto world, the symbiotic relationship between Bitcoin and Monero.

The more I think about it, the more profound that this just the possibilities. I'm like, wait a minute, maybe maybe this is the killer scenario. Right? But what do you think? What are the opportunities? Do you think it kind of breaks breaks open this dual stack approach, for lack of a better word?

Yeah. What are some of the opportunities, do you think? Do you mean like for the individual or for businesses Yeah, to yeah, for the individual. Yeah. I mean, for the individual, it's the ability to

to kind of mirror what a lot of people, I think, already have in the in the real world for back of a letter, lack of a better term. But this idea, I mean, that's very common, especially among privacy preserving people of you're you're probably not gonna keep all your money at your house, like, much as people talk about that.

Most people are not gonna keep everything in cash or gold at their house. They're gonna have a bank account. They're gonna save that way, and they're going to want to spend. The best way to spend privately is to use cash.

And, unfortunately, this may be a dying thing in much of The US and in in a lot of Europe, but a lot of people still absolutely love to spend cash even though it actually adds a lot of complexity and difficulty to the spending process. To me, Bitcoin and Monero are very similar,

but Monero is drastically superior to both the user experience and the usefulness of cash. So you're getting the savings. Bitcoin has proven itself for savings, like I mentioned before. And the opportunity to open is that you can spend without self censorship.

You can spend without this nagging concern over what will happen if someone finds out about the spend in the future. You can spend without the worry of what will happen if the thing that I'm doing now that is totally legal becomes illegal in the future,

but the history of this transaction is embedded in a blockchain forever. Mental tax, that mental load, that self censorship goes away when you realize you have strong financial privacy without difficulty.

You're not having to jump through other hoops. Swapping between Bitcoin and Monero takes seconds to start, ten, twenty minutes to complete.

It's very, very simple. And the ability to just essentially store your wealth in Bitcoin and keep some Monero on the side for spending whatever you need for the month or for the three month period or whatever, however you wanna you kinda wanna split that up.

It's incredibly free, and it's just it's also a much better user experience than trying to spend privately in Bitcoin than trying to use Lightning. In many scenarios, it's much easier to use Monero. And so it just it simplifies things, it just gives you freedom without all of the hassle. It's a it's a really beautiful pairing.

I love it. I love it. Does Bitcoin need Monero in some sense? I would say yes. And I would say that Monero needs Bitcoin. I think there's a lot of misconceptions around

just like in the Bitcoin community, there's a lot of Monero people who think that, like, Bitcoin shouldn't exist, that it would be best like, it it would be best if the leading cryptocurrency was private by default.

So I I obviously don't wanna argue with that, but that think that Monero would be best on its own, that they shouldn't work with anyone else. They shouldn't care about any kind of Bitcoin bridges, that they should just focus on just Monero stuff and let Monero stand on its own.

But the beautiful thing about this relationship is that Bitcoin is actually the best on ramp to Monero possible. You can get Bitcoin so many ways at so many places. The network effect is wild for the actual accessibility of Bitcoin.

And if you can get Bitcoin, you can get Monero seamlessly. So no matter what governments do with shutting down on ramps to Monero, which they've been aggressively doing for years now, it doesn't matter because they're not gonna shut down all of the on ramps to Bitcoin, and you can very simply, very privately go from Bitcoin

to Monero. So, like, we need to understand that no matter what Bitcoin is at the very least a vital on ramp to Monero.

And vice versa for Bitcoin, Monero is a fantastic spending tool that allows more people to save in Bitcoin. I think there's many people who probably wouldn't save in Bitcoin if they didn't have the ability to spend privately

one way or another because they don't want to have to deal with the headache of what that looks like within Bitcoin. But Monero enables them to continue saving in Bitcoin because they have specific reasons for that and quickly and seamlessly move some money into Monero every month or whatever to be able to spend from.

So I think they they very much need each other. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need both, and one of them would do everything and have the network effect of both and and would would take control. I've said frequently, best case scenario, Monero wouldn't need to exist. Bitcoin would implement powerful privacy features,

and we could move on from Bitcoin. I have no tribal

attachment to Monero. I don't really care about Monero in the, like, the the it must win sense. I care about it in the terms of what freedom it provides. And if Bitcoin provided that, we could shut down Monero. We don't need it anymore. Like, Bitcoin can do that. But unfortunately, that is not the reality.

So until then, Bitcoin absolutely needs Monero. And I think Monero absolutely needs Bitcoin. Fascinating. Yeah. You've talked about how it's kind of an underappreciated aspect, the pairing between the two. I think I think the smart people are are onto it, and it's definitely, definitely something that I'm going to be continuing to explore

for myself and maybe with the podcast as well. So but changing topics, you've just dropped PayJoin version two point zero. What does this moment represent to you? You know, not just technically, but let's just say maybe philosophically.

Is it about reclaiming something that's been slipping away here or how are you thinking about Yeah. I think I think for me, like, one of the best parts of my job is that we get to bring Bitcoin privacy tools to hundreds of thousands of people.

Like, it can often feel in the privacy space, like, with my podcast, with my platform on X, which are relatively small, it can often feel like there's just not that much. Like, that what I'm doing doesn't reach many people or that what I'm doing isn't gonna cause an any impact because there's not enough reach out there.

And, like, being able to bring a tool like PayJoin to people is really exciting and empowering. Now I'm not gonna say that, like, all 500,000 users of Cake are gonna use PayJoin. Most of them probably well, I don't know if most of them, but many of them I know aren't using Bitcoin anyways.

But it's something where we can we can just really jump start the adoption of privacy tools like PayJoin

by getting it out to a lot of people. There's a lot of smaller wallets out there. Some of them are doing some cool stuff, but there's just not as much reach there. And there's this this massive need for adoption before these tools are really useful.

Like before silent payments is really useful, there's gonna need to be many wallets that support it. There's gonna need to be exchanges and and central entities, merchants, etcetera, support it. Just like that, just like with pay join. It's only useful if the person you're paying or the person who's paying you also supports pay join.

So if there's only one wallet that supports it,

or if it's only a very small wallet, there's very little chance you'll actually gain any benefit from it, and it'll kind of die on the vine. So I think for me, like, the the very exciting part is that we're getting to be on the cutting edge, really getting to show the rest of the Bitcoin ecosystem

how this can work, to get it in the hands of a ton of users, and then hopefully to spur on greater adoption. Like, Cakewallet is free and open source, 100% always will be, always has been. And and ideally, we're we're giving back and we're we're providing better tools for other developers in the space to jump on, like, join dev kit.

We did a lot of work with the pay join dev kit guys to to help improve the SDK while they were also doing the same thing. And that that tooling just makes a lot easier for others. Yeah. What what kind of adoption curve do you expect for for PageRoin version two here over the next, I don't know, year or so? Yeah.

I think we can honestly, I think we could get very quickly ramping up when it comes to adoption of the PageRun v two. It's it's ironed out a lot of the user experience issues that existed with v one. Basically, PageRun v one never happened because the requirement as a receiver was that you had an always online server,

and that meant basically the only people who did who supported pay joins were BTCPay server merchants and a couple other rare exceptions. And so there was just no incentive for wallets to

implement sending to pay join URIs because there was no way to actually use them. Like, if it's kind of a chicken before the egg problem because if no merchants or the people adopt it, if no wallets adopt it, there's no incentive for a wallet to adopt it, and so it never happens.

And I think, thankfully, we can get ahead of that with Page v two, but the really, the user experience is there where my vision for it is that it's a default on for every Bitcoin wallet,

where if you're sending to or receiving from a wallet that supports Page one v two, that just becomes the norm. You don't think about it, you don't do anything extra, you just scan the QR code, copy and paste the URI that they send you just like you would normally for any Bitcoin transaction.

And you do a PageRun, but again, you don't have to think about it. There's no server requirement. There's nothing like that. So I I think that we really can have rapidly ramping adoption with PageRun v two. I know there's some other wallets working on adding it. Bull Bitcoin does support it right now, kind of,

but their long term goal is really cool where they're gonna be doing all their exchange withdrawals using PayJoin v two. So there's some there's some really cool growing adoption around that. And just like silent payments, there are some really good

tertiary benefits, I guess you would say. PayJoin can be an extremely useful tool for batching, for saving on fees, especially for exchanges. That's why Bull Bitcoin wants to use it while also providing better privacy.

Just like silent payments is really a massive user experience improvement for addresses and how you handle addresses in Bitcoin while also being a privacy improvement. And almost always, those are the best privacy improvements where they happen because there's some clear incentive around it. There's a user experience benefit to it.

And the privacy is just kind of a shoo in that people maybe don't even think about. And I think that that's true of both silent payments and page one. So I'm really, really hopeful and optimistic for adoption there. What is the advice that you would give people that are not technical,

that are on X and kind of see these battles going on between the developers. Like, PageRank v two is good. It's a scam. It's it's amazing. Right? You know, there is, like, a lot a lot of craziness out there. Mhmm. Do you have any advice for

just kinda normal people who don't have an axe to grind in that battle. I do find that to be challenging personally. It's like, okay. I'm not quite sure where where to come out on this for for myself. What how do you what's some advice that you might give us?

Yeah. I mean, it sounds very trite, but do your own research. Like, the most common thing that I see is just people aren't actually doing any reading or thinking for themselves. They're not taking the time to look into documentation,

to read the Bitcoin improvement proposal, to read the content that people have put out about how these things work and about what they actually are and what they aren't.

And so instead, they're just consuming whatever their favorite influencer tells them. And so you just get packs of people who don't actually know what they're talking about because the influencer they follow doesn't actually know what they're talking about.

And it leads to just a lot of the brokenness that we see in the conversations around these things. Almost always, the people who actually know what they're talking about are not involved in the discussion at all because it's a very They just don't have time for it. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. They're generally more quiet. And usually when they choose to wait in, there's a ton of people who attack them because they say something that actually has nuance and actually has meaning to it and isn't just the whatever the the topic du jour is at the moment.

So I I think that the biggest thing is really just, like, if you see some sort of debate like this happening, step back, don't wade in to the the morass of of X and and Twitter debates,

but go find good resources on this. Like, I try to share good resources on stuff as soon as I can with any of these big events. There are some really good other people to follow on X. There's some good podcasts and stuff that actually talk through these things in a reasonable way. Like, just take a step back.

Don't feel like you have to engage or make a decision at the moment you first learn about something, but rather take the time to just step back, learn about it, try to come to your own conclusions or read differing viewpoints and try to make sense of what's going on.

That's not maybe the most popular advice or approach, but will be the far more useful one to helping you build out your discernment muscles, helping you build out a better understanding of things, and ultimately allowing you to find ways to contribute as well.

Because the more people actually understand what's going on, the far better the conversations, the far better the discourse will be around these things, because we'll actually be able to have conversations where we learn and we improve and we come up with better solutions and better ideas.

Right. Yeah. And I think just you know your situation better than anybody else. So just everyone's got a different different set of issues that they're trying to trying to deal with. For sure. So what are your red lines, Seth? I think red lines I kind of joke sometimes that every project out there should clearly

state when push comes to shove, you know, what what kind of compromise if if you had to make it that you would just walk away from building privacy tech entirely. Like, for example, so if we have the Samurai case, Right? So that comes down and it doesn't go quite the way that we would want it to go. Does that

I mean, could there be a scenario there where you're just like, Bitcoin just is not where I want it to be to be able to dedicate my life, my time, my career? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there there definitely are. I mean, I I would say kind of more generally from my perspective of Cakewell and what we're building.

Like, the red lines for me would be if for some reason self custody was outlawed or changed where self custody can only happen if the user was, like, fully KYC ed, if they gave us their personal ID or they had to register somehow with us, that would be a red line for me. Mhmm. Two reasons.

First, the the obvious moral one where I think that would be unethical and would obliterate any freedom usage because everything would be specifically tracked and surveilled down to the specific identity of each person using

a wallet. And then also just for the simple reason of that would be an absolute nightmare from a technical perspective to store and manage and handle all of that data Mhmm. And will make it untenable to actually be a self custodial wallet. So I think that's one. I think the the other would really be more more broadly for Bitcoin if

the privacy tools that we have today, silent payments, Patreon, etcetera, don't take off. And if there's clearly a lack of willingness to change Bitcoin in any way at a fundamental level to improve the privacy,

I think at some point, it would just have to be just give up and move on. Move on to focusing solely on Monero or Monero and other cryptocurrencies where there's more privacy tech possible.

That very well like, that absolutely could happen if, like, there's a very bad ruling in the Samurai wallet or Tornado cash cases because a lot of the technology that's available today,

even something as basic as a self custodial wallet or running a Lightning node or running a Bitcoin node, all of those things could be in the government sites at that point and become something that they target.

So I think we would see another massive round of fallout if there was a bad ruling there and some really bad precedent set that could make it pretty untenable to to be a wallet developer

or to to serve users with any sort of privacy tech at that point. Yeah. That's that's definitely the red line for me. Just Bitcoin. That's why I follow privacy so closely in the space. I feel like that is just so fundamental to everything that I've been sold on, you know, on the positive properties of Bitcoin. If privacy

is just if we just can't get good enough with that, then you got to look at, you know, kind of other solutions. So in 2024, Monero was attacked massively. I think 2023, 2024. It's been delisted from most of the exchanges.

What do you think that means in terms of the resilience of Monero? What is that telling us? Honestly, it's been a fantastic test of the approach that was taken by Monero developers from the very beginning. There's been a very different tactic taken in Monero, where a lot of the focus in Bitcoin has shifted away from more cypherpunk,

more resilient ideas and ideals to ones that are more catering to mass adoption, catering to number go up, catering to

to mass media, catering to all these things. Whereas Monero really started out and has remained extremely laser focused on providing financial privacy even in adversarial environments. A lot of the design decisions in Monero have been ones that were called very extreme in the past by people in other cryptocurrency projects.

A lot of them seem potentially more hardcore than necessary, but the vast majority of them have already been proven out in the resiliency that Monero has had against different attacks in the way that Monero's mining has remained relatively decentralized and has remained very approachable for the average person.

In the way that Monero's focus on building alternate on and off ramps has been a kind of a side hustle, so to speak, for the Monero community for many years. That has paid off. A lot of the work that went into things like Habanau

happened before the last wave of delistings, even though we faced delistings and refusal to list Monero for many years. A lot of the worst of it happened in the last twelve or eighteen months. Mhmm. And this preparedness,

this idea in Monero of, like, we are going to face an adversarial environment. Like, private digital money is not something governments want generally. It's not something that regulators want generally.

We know that there's going to be resistance to this. So we're gonna do things in both the most legally above board way, which is all decentralized, all open source, no central entity with control,

but also doing it in a very technically resilient way. And all of that's been proven out by this. Like, when you look at what Monero is and how successful it is today, despite by far being the most targeted cryptocurrency by regulators, by exchanges, by banks,

it's pretty wild to see because the technology is actually working. The demand is there despite the lack of accessibility of Monero directly on centralized exchanges.

And honestly, the ability to, like we talked about earlier, the ability to on and off rent from Monero and other cryptocurrencies means that it doesn't really matter if they remove it from all the exchanges. Yes. It will limit the amount of people who stumble upon Monero,

who just find it because they're trading other things and see it on exchange. Yes. It will make it a little bit harder for the the non crypto native person to access. But honestly, most people that would understand why they would want to Monero anyways are already crypto native.

Most of them already have Bitcoin or Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies. Yeah, I think I think it's a generational thing, possibly. I mean, the younger people are going to figure this out. Right?

Yeah, I think honestly, they are like, it's it's it's it's already starting to be where, like kids these days, teenagers these days, they love this. Crypto is Yeah, it's it's something that's just a normal part of their life. They've a lot of it, obviously, in the stupid ways, the meme coin ways, all of that, that

interesting side of cryptocurrency, but that also inevitably opens people's eyes to the actual usefulness of it. I think almost everyone I talked to came to this stuff because they wanted to make money,

and then they found out that there's actually some some actual human freedom that can be achieved here. Right. We're like, oh, there's actually something going on here. Do you think that Monero has been truly attacked? Obviously, it's been kicked off. It's been attacked to some degree.

But has it that's kind of the question in my mind, and I'm not deep into Monero. But has it been really, attacked? Because I do feel like when I hear some of the Monero influencers out there, I'm like, be careful with that. Right? Because

they can come after developers. It's not like, you know, they can't find you. They can find you. They can attack it. But what what are your thoughts on on that? Has Monero been truly, truly tested?

I would say it absolutely has, but in the sense of maybe probing attacks is a better way to phrase it, where I don't think that there has been, especially on a technical or legal perspective, an all out war against Monero,

but rather that governments and regulators have done the easy stuff, which essentially is Operation Chokepoint two point zero. Monero was the first the first test bed of that, in my opinion,

where the easy thing for governments and regulators is just force banks to not deal with anyone that touches Monero. And that that takes no effort. It doesn't even take them making a law or going to any government body. Exactly. It's a phone call to say, hey, you really shouldn't do this or an email.

In the case of Operation Chokepoint two point o, the vast majority were. They just emailed a bank and said, you can't touch this, and the bank had to comply.

So I think, like, that was the initial first step and was the obvious one because it requires no technical effort and very little social capital. It's something you can do in the dark and and have really good effectiveness in limiting who can access Monero from the traditional fiat on and off ramps.

But I think beyond that, I think we've definitely seen technical probing attacks as well, where we've seen large scale DDoS attacks against Monero nodes. We've seen

a spam attack, the Black Marble attack that actually was happening when I was at Fini Forum a couple of years ago. We've seen some seemingly legal attacks against Monero developers, specifically Fluffy Pony, where there was a lot of really weird stuff around

why the US government extradited him for some very strange case that eventually went nowhere. There was really odd timing with that. Thankfully, again, the Monero community had preplanned for this. He did not have sole access to anything.

But while he was arrested and while there was some craziness happening there, that was definitely a concern. That's certainly not proven that that was a attack against Monero,

but there were some very suspicious circumstances around that as well. But I think, like, all that said, I would gauge it as, like, the government has been I don't even say the government. I would say adversaries to Monero, because I I don't know if we can even say specifically who it is.

But adversaries to Monero have been probing to find weaknesses for quite a while. But thankfully, especially in America,

the legal precedent for writing and publishing open source code is very, very, very good. And you're you're generally very safe, especially if there's not a direct incentive model where you're profiting from people using the thing.

Obviously, that can change, like the Samurai and Tornado Cache cases will be pivotal in deciding if that is upheld or if they can go after the next tier developer, which would be ones just writing open source code. But for right now, there are very good protections around that.

So it's very hard for them to actually go after the people working on Monero,

but rather on the technical side probing attacks to figure out like if we need to shut this thing down, how do we attack it? And thankfully, every probing attack that they make means that Monero actually gets stronger. We find ways to prevent these things, we find ways to improve it and make it harder to happen in the future.

But that's not to say that there won't be an all at war or that there aren't ways that governments or nation states could attack Monero more effectively. Yeah, that's amazing. What are the metrics that you look to to kind of gauge Monero's popularity or if it's gaining traction?

How do you look at that? Is it just the number of Monero wallets out there? What are you looking to to kind of gauge that? Yeah.

Main things for me, honestly, are just transaction count because we don't have much insight into what people are doing with their Monero, thanks to the the privacy provided. But just transaction count to see what the the overall usage of Monero looks like.

And then looking at merchant adoption, think is by far the most useful metric that we have for Monero. And that's that's one that is relatively easy to track. Merchants obviously want to advertise what cryptocurrencies they support.

But there's been, in my opinion, a massive increase in Monero merchant adoption over the last year or two and a very clear product market fit for Monero, where especially anything that has any desire to cater to the privacy preserving community,

they are going to support Monero. It is essentially inevitable, and the demand for that is massive. When you talk to new VPN providers, when you talk to anonymous eSIM providers, people providing any of these types of services,

they either already support Monero or they're working to support Monero because it it just it is the perfect tool for that ecosystem, and there's massive market demand for that. But even when you talk about random things like potato chips or maple syrup or other things that are Yeah. You get some very innocuous.

Yeah, I do, man. I love I love that dude's maple syrup. Yeah. You get super pumped about that stuff. But I think that's what are you seeing there? Why are these merchants, Monero, like, what's driving that? Is it is it the customers?

What's going on there? I think mostly the customers, honestly. It's one of those situations where just like how people get kind of orange peeled with Bitcoin and then understand the freedom aspects later on, maybe they come to it just for NoMoGoUp.

I think a lot of the same thing happens with merchant adoption for Monero, where there's a very different ethos in the Monero community than the Bitcoin community and many others, where the Monero community is very

pro spending and using the tools. Whereas in Bitcoin and other communities, oftentimes, the focus is heavily on only storing wealth, on only appreciating value,

and that that very much goes against the idea of spending money. And, like, if you think that Bitcoin truly is the best money and you're selfish, you're not gonna spend it. You're gonna keep it for yourself because you wanna hoard that to to preserve wealth for later on.

And in Monero, that's quite the opposite. And so if if you know as a merchant, hey. I'm already in the crypto ecosystem. Like, I already, let's say, support Bitcoin for payments. And there's this rabid community of people who love to spend their cryptocurrency on anything.

I'm gonna want to provide support for that. And if the tools are there to make it easy as they they really are right now and as they're continuing to improve, it's a no brainer, honestly, from a merchant's perspective. Even if they don't care about privacy,

if they have a use for the Monero or if they have an easy way to convert that to another currency they want like Bitcoin, which they do today,

it's pretty much a no brainer to support Monero, and that creates this massive snowball effect. And I think we've really seen that snowball effect hitting on all cylinders over the last year or so. What percentage people use Monero as a savings technology versus

digital cash? Do we have any insight into that at all? I mean, it's very hard to gauge outside of anecdotes precisely because of the privacy of Monero. Like in Bitcoin, you can get a lot of interesting metrics around how long UTXOs

are not moving, where money is stored, how much is withdrawn or deposited to exchanges, etcetera. We have none of that with Monero. So you really kind of have to go off measuring vibes for lack of a better term, just kind of seeing how people talk I about did. I did. Yeah. I don't know how else. It's it's vibe metrics, I guess.

That's, like, the best way I have is talking about the vibe metrics. You know? That's that's why I'm asking a lot of questions on this, and I didn't really quite plan on to get into it. But I'm feeling I'm definitely feeling a vibe shift, you know, especially Absolutely. Yeah. In the last year.

I'm seeing more and more, you know, companies, ecommerce websites, except Monero. Like, clearly, there is something going on. And I worry as someone who's, you know, very passionate about Bitcoin is, I think long term, I'm like, if this is not being used as digital cash, then

what does that say? What are the implications of that? Right? And it's hard. It's hard to say. Like, you know, maybe we'll know in ten years, but what happens to the, you know, to Monero or to Bitcoin and the success of it if it's just not really being used. Right? And it's just a store of value. I don't know.

To me, in my thesis, I think that's, like, a huge huge thing to think about. Absolutely. What is your definition of well, let me take a step back. So Jack Dorsey recently said, quite a few people recently said, I think Zeus, the founder, right? So that if Bitcoin isn't digital cash,

then then we go home. That's kind of their red line. I don't know when we get to that point when they're faced with that reality or not either way. But what do you think? How do you think of it?

I mean, I definitely agree. I think the core reason is that this whole model that's become the prevailing narrative in Bitcoin of store of value of digital gold,

That only works if two things are if at least one of two things are true. If there is not an adversarial environment and you can do whatever you want with your Bitcoin without any repercussions, or if there is a massive set of places and people that you can actually send Bitcoin directly peer to peer with to transact,

that there's a circular economy that you can actually spend this stuff at. Assuming that we will never enter an adversarial environment, especially after we were just in, in my opinion, the the most adversarial two years in the Bitcoin space from a government and regulator perspective.

Assuming that will continue on forever is, I think, pretty dangerous and and asinine to think that we won't ever be in a place where you're restricted in what you're legally able to do with your Bitcoin, especially as Bitcoin becomes more normal, more folded into the legacy financial system, more accepted and understood by governments.

They're gonna want to make sure that that fits into their existing control systems. Now, the second one, if we have a circular economy where we can actually spend Bitcoin, that is practically unstoppable. Like, say what we want about Bitcoin's privacy, say what we want about centralization risks with mining, except in rare circumstances.

If I can pay you directly and get the good or service that I want, that's gonna be very immune to anything but the most stringent attacks by a government or regulator. Mhmm. And so that's what really unlocks the freedom money aspects of Bitcoin.

So I definitely agree that if this digital cash side, if this desire and technical ability to use Bitcoin as digital cash goes away, so does the usefulness of Bitcoin even as a store of value. Because if you can't actually spend or use it anywhere and you have to convert it to fiat to get any benefit from it, you necessarily

are greatly restricted in the usefulness of that money by whoever is in power, by whoever has any say in what you're doing. And that can that can shift very quickly to go from bad to worse.

Mhmm. Definitely. So let's end on this. Thank you, by the way. You are a fascinating individual.

What kind of world are you hoping to shape in the next, let's just say, five, ten, twenty years from now? Yeah, I think honestly, for me, is where the idea and philosophy of crypto anarchy is so inviting because the the real idea for me is like, just want people to be able to use these tools to live the life that they want to live.

Like, I hate seeing people oppressed and repressed. I hate seeing governments and nation states increasing their power and control.

And I love seeing individuals take back control of their own data, take back control over their own lives, take back control of their own money. So really, the future that I see is one where no matter what governments or nation states want to do, the individual who wakes up has the tools available to opt out of a broken system

and to opt into freedom. That might not necessarily look like this hyper Bitcoinization. We all have citadels kind of thing that might not look like a super hardcore crypto anarchist. The world is dystopian, but I can do stuff because of the tools that I have. I hope that it's neither of those things, honestly,

but rather just that people have more freedom because of the technology that I'm able to build, that I'm able to educate on, that others are able to build in the space. And if that is true, that will be a win.

Got it. Awesome. Seth, I think we can end it there. Where can people follow you? What's the best place to do that? On X, I presume?

Yes. Yes. Yeah, you nailed it. Yeah. X is really I mean, that's where I'm generally talking about what I'm working on, what I'm thinking about. SethForPrivacy is where you can find me there. I am technically on Nostra, like we talked about before, but I never post there for time constraints really. And beyond that, Seth for privacy.com,

I have a lot of like random guides and writing and other stuff there that people might find interesting. And then most of my time right now is dedicated to Cake Wallet. We're a self custodial privacy centric multi crypto wallet. I'm the VP there. I just joined in September 2024, and it's been an absolutely fantastic time already.

But we're working really hard to actually make all of this stuff as practically possible as we can. So cakewallet.com is where you can learn more about us. That's amazing. Seth, I can't believe the amount of product that you put out. I'm like, does this guy sleep? I mean, it's like, you know, new feature here, new feature there.

Yeah. You learn two things very quickly. Is one, the amount of time that you have in the day can be used to do a lot more productive things than you realize when you're younger.

I think I thought that there was so little time in the day before and it that took so long to do things and you can be a lot more productive than you think when you're you're pressed. Also just on the kick wallet side, like the team that Vic has built here is absolutely

insanely talented. And it's been amazing to like they're the ones doing the hard work, herding cats and helping to establish good processes and make their lives easier. But the amount that they're able to ship constantly blows me away whenever I look back at the releases that we've made.

So it's been it's been an absolute blast getting to help them with that and champion the work that they're doing. Amazing. Seth, thank you so much. Thank you for all the work that you do. We're rooting for you. We'll be following everything that you do. And thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Absolute blast.

That's it for this episode of the Unbounded Podcast. If you took something away from this conversation, share it. Spread the word. These tools, these ideas, this fight, they only matter if we move them forward together. Big thanks to Seth for privacy for showing up with clarity, nuance and conviction.

Until next time, stay sharp, stay sovereign, stay unbounded.