Stack sats and build hardware with Seedsigner. Bitcoin

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

-♪ Bitcoin ♪ -♪ Bitcoin ♪

Now, what's the Bitcoin? -The 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 ♪

-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 this space and sliver to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

-Welcome back, everyone. Today's episode is with SeedSiner. SeedSiner was recently featured for "21ism" and you can have a look at the recent recording as well as the amazing article written by MTC.

I've linked in the show notes so you can have a look at that. And as always, if anyone has any questions, please feel free to reach out. I love recording with SeedSiner. I love the project that's being built, and yeah, I really hope you enjoy it as well.

If you are in the UK and looking to stack sat, you can do that with my sponsor, Pointful UK. If you use the link in the show notes, you will get a 30% discount in your auto by fees. If you feel like you've stacked enough sat, which I really don't think is possible, but if that is the way you're feeling,

you're looking to buy something else outside of these beautiful taste you sat, I would suggest you go to priptoplopes.com. Priptoplopes have been sponsoring the show for coming up to six months now, and they do some of the most amazing showcases and the 3D printed products out there.

You really need to check them out if you haven't already, and yeah, get a building, get a personalizing, priptoplopes.com. Enjoy the show. - Could you still hear me? - I can, I can. - Well, welcome back.

Thanks for yesterday and being so patient. I apologize for that. For anyone listening to this, we went through about an hour and a half of my connection breaking, I think eight times. A seed signer was very, very patient.

And yeah, I just wanna welcome you back on the show and to say that we're very, very proud to be featuring seed signer and the product that you've built, which I think is absolutely fantastic.

All of us here are really blown away by it for many different reasons that we'll get into, but for anyone who hasn't already heard my previous discussions with you, I thought it would be a good place to start with how you found Bitcoin and what led you to decide to build seed signer in the first place.

- Yeah, I'm super excited to be talking to you again. So how I found Bitcoin was, it's probably maybe one of them were unique origin stories. I found it at work actually. I am a retired police officer and I was a local cop for 15 years.

And I happened to, the majority of my career was spent doing digital forensic. So I was kind of fortunate in that early in my career, the chief of the police agency where I worked, had knowledge that I had kind of a background in technology and computers.

And he knew of a digital forensic kind of working group in the area that was looking to add personality, asked me if I had an interest in it and of course I jumped at the opportunity. So I had the opportunity to get a lot of training and get a lot of experience doing digital forensics to support local and state and federal prosecution.

So I'm at work and there's another examiner in the lab who's working on a case. And he comes to kind of just talk through the circumstances with me and he says it evolves this thing called Bitcoin that he's never heard of.

I hadn't heard of it before that. And what had happened was there was a local high schooler who had gotten some sort of high end gaming machine. And this is in probably, I think it was late 2012 maybe very early 2013.

So he has a higher end gaming machine than he got for Christmas or his birthday. And instead of instead playing games with it, he is using the high end GPU in this machine to mine Bitcoin.

So he mines Bitcoin and then goes onto the Silk Road and he purchases smallish amounts of marijuana that he has delivered to his doorstep. He breaks those into dime bags or whatever, smaller portions and then takes them to school, selling them to classmates, making a tiny little profit with this kind of enterprise.

And so didn't make sense to me. I started Googling and reading more about Bitcoin and trying to figure out what was the, like why would people be using all of this compute power? At the time it was GPU's kind of transitioning into ASICs and actually FPGAs than ASICs.

But it didn't make sense to me. I was familiar with stuff like SETI and Folding at Home. And I didn't understand why people would use all this energy to support this thing. So I kind of put it down for a while.

And I don't remember what the catalyst was, but a few months later, but it was like in March or April of March or April of 2013, I kind of circled back and started reading about it. And then I started following the price and like a lot of people who listen to this know that's kind of one of the things that gets you hooked.

And in 2013, there was like a kind of like an introductory, small bull run up to like 260, I think, at the time. And I saw the price moving and at that point in my life, I'd kind of been looking for investments.

So it just got my attention. And I started reading more about it. I started mining at home. And at that time, there was an altcoin explosion. And this was like the Gen 1 altcoin. So all of your like Litecoin, Primecoin,

coins you could only mine on GPU, there was like a total shitcoin explosion. And truth be told, I had a GPU rig in my basement. Mine, some of those, mine was some early ASICs that you had to buy that were all sketchy and had to buy with, you know, you put money out, hoping this product,

which has even, the design hasn't even been finished yet. There was a company called Butterfly Labs that was based out of the US. It was one of the earliest ones that wasn't a scam, it was super sketch.

But yeah, so to answer your question, that's kind of my introductory to Bitcoin. And then hung with Bitcoin all the way up until 2017, I, the price started moving and I was not confident with my security setup, but I got shook it out.

Thanks a lot, Roger. Because in 2017, that's when Bitcoin cash, it kind of forked off and there was a lot of uncertainty in the network. And I had always kind of kept in the back of my mind and it seemed like a pipe dream when I started following Bitcoin.

But I always kept in the back of my mind that it said ever got to the point that it looked like I could pay off our house, you know, which is kind of your biggest investment for your life.

I kind of, I told myself I would consider selling, all or at least some. And the price was, this is early in 2017, when the price was like, you know, fairly breaking 2000. And I started to think it through.

And in my mind at the time, I was like, if I lose the ability to live a debt-free life because, you know, some geeks are arguing about parameters and software, like the block size, like I thought, like, I will probably never forgive myself.

So we can, we can, sold everything. And then I don't want to give anybody the wrong impression. Like this was very early in 2017. So by no means did I call a top. And for the rest of the year, like, I did not want to hear about Bitcoin from anyone at all.

- That's painful. - Yeah, the prices kept going up and up. And I was like, oh gosh, you just, like it's not mentally healthy to think about that. So the bull run, 2017 plays out. And the price starts to come down.

And it was probably in 2018, you know, it's just coming down through the like 876 kind of range. Like for whatever reason, I start paying attention. And this time it's more from, because there's some of the kind of political things going on here where I am in America.

And I find myself listening to the same podcast and listening to the same people, the same arguments. And this time it's all resonating with me a lot more from like an ideological kind of perspective.

So, you know, I start averaging back in and like, as, you know, I end up buying a lot less Bitcoin back in at a much higher price than what I had sold. So I guess I learned my lesson there.

But I wanted to get my security set up right. And I do think that's back in 2017, I think that was one of the reasons why my hands were weak was because, you know, you start to wonder as the games happen, you start to wonder about your security set up, you start to wonder like are these games that I have on paper like actually real?

And so I wanted, after I'd started recumulating, I wanted to get my security set up right. And Multisig was getting to the point where it was just starting to be accessible to people through like stuff like CASA, stuff like what Unchained is doing with Caravan.

And I happen to listen to a Stefan Lavera podcast where he was talking to Michael Flaxman and he was talking about his 10x Bitcoin security guide. And one of the things that they talked about in that was Spector Desktop and Spector is, you know, this very well done Multisig coordinator software

that was freely available and it was graphically based. And so after kind of listening to that, after listening to that podcast, I knew that I wanted to get to Multisig. I'd been using kind of like a more primitive version of Multisigless Shamir secret sharing where I did have a key that was broken up in different locations,

but I wanted to be Multisig on the protocol. So I downloaded Spector, started playing with it, started reading more about Spector and in their GitHub repo I noticed they also had this Spector do it yourself, signing device or wallet, you might have called it.

But so some of my background is in hardware too. So it didn't seem like a too big of a lift in terms of a project. So I ordered the parts and put it together. And off I was with Spector Desktop and now this Spector DIY signing device and I set up, you know, Multisig wallet and the first time I signed the transaction

with Multisig, I can only compare it to the first time I signed or the first time rather I sent a Bitcoin transaction or the first time I ever sent a lightning transaction. It was just like this magical kind of like light bulb moment where it's like they talk about how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

And that was like, that was the feeling I got. And I instantly knew like, like this is the security setup that I want to pursue. And so I also tinker with 3D printing. And this Spector DIY is just loose hardware components and I saw a tweet from Michael Flaxman that I love this Spector wallet but would somebody try and come up

with some sort of a closure for it. So I kind of put together a sort of primitive case for it that I 3D printed and I started DMing with Michael Flaxman back and forth about this case and started DMing a little bit with Stepan from Spector and as I was talking with Michael Flaxman he also threw out this idea that he'd had

for using a very specific version of the Raspberry Pi, the Raspberry Pi Zero, which is if people haven't heard of it the smaller version of the Raspberry Pi, smaller form factor. And he talked about pairing that with like some sort of display and controls and being able to use it to calculate the final checksum word for a seed

that someone had self-generated at home using something like seedpicker.net where you generate the first either 11 words or with seed picker it's the first 23 words but then that last word of a seed operates as kind of a checksum to the first 23 words.

So you would have maybe some Python code on the Raspberry Pi Zero that you could enter the first 23 words and then it would tell you what the appropriate final word was to make it a valid seed phrase.

I thought that was a compelling idea so I ordered some of the parts and I had a little bit of a background in coding but nothing extensive and I didn't have a background in Python so I just found a Udemy course that was like everything you ever wanted to know about Python started watching videos

and started plonking through just the most basic stuff with this little single board computer and this little display and it looked like a little video game controller had like a little joystick you could operate with your thumb and then a few buttons on the other side of the screen and it was baby steps.

It was first can I get it to run the demo code that the manufacturer provided? Then can I get it to display a picture? Then can I get it to display some text that I've come up with and then can I get it to cycle through letters of the alphabet?

And just through banging my head against the keyboard and baby steps I got it to a point where you could enter 23 words and then it would run some code from a Python library that actually step on Snigra from Spectre had written and maintained and that did the necessary Bitcoin calculations to come up with that 24th word

and it would display the 24th word and wow this is kind of cool. And then based on my experiences with Spectre DIY I just started wondering if I connected an inexpensive camera to this setup with the Pi Zero that I don't think I mentioned it the kind of the kicker for that Pi Zero the reason why it's used is because it doesn't have Wi-Fi

it doesn't have Bluetooth so it doesn't have any way to network with the outside world so it's truly an isolated computer that way. So I sort of wonder if I connect an inexpensive camera to this could I replicate kind of the core signing functionality that Spectre does with the exchange of QR's

being how you move the transaction information between your laptop and a signing device in a more secure way. So that's kind of the non-readers digest version of how I got to what ultimately turned into the Deep Tiner project yeah.

- So I mean, firstly, that is quite a journey for someone who has some coding skills to go out and learn this and start building from scratches is quite something. What was it that made you plattle through?

'Cause I imagine you said, right, I'm whacking my head against a keyboard and just kept going with it and designing this thing and building this thing like were there moments you just thought, oh fuck, I just want to give up on this it's too much hard work or was there something in the back of your mind that was just pushing you?

And if so, what was it that really made you spend all this time and effort to do it? - So there was a lot of banger heading at the keyboard and a lot of time spent on Stack Exchange and Google trying to figure out what was wrong with the code that I was writing.

So I had also, one part of the story I didn't mention was that I was blessed to be able to step away from my career in 2019, I believe it was. And married guy, I have three kids and super blessed that I was able to step away from my career and it made sense for me to be a stay-at-home dad.

My kids aren't super young anymore but they're still at an age where they can benefit a lot from having a parent around like full-time all the time. So stay-at-home dad, but I'm the kind of guy who likes to have projects and like Bitcoin at that time was kind of my side project and maybe I was living

and breathing technology for more than 10 years when I was doing forensics. So maybe it was like that I had kind of found this new obsession with Bitcoin and a rejuvenated obsession with Bitcoin and I just needed a project.

And so I'm kind of one of these personalities that I'm like a dog with a bone, like I like, when I have something I'm trying to figure out, I kind of almost fixate on it. So I wasn't gonna step away or put the project down until I'd kind of accomplished what I'd set out to do which was challenging but it was gratifying to get there

and it ultimately I think got other people curious about the possibilities with the setup. But I also throw out like I'm a person who's somewhat economical, like a person who believes in economy and efficiency is a big thing with me.

That was when I was doing forensics, that was one of my goals was to be as efficient with my computing resources and my time as I could because in law enforcement you don't have a lot of funds to just buy any sort of equipment.

You have to figure out how to make the things you have work and figure out how to use them as efficiently as possible to get through the casework you have to get through. So I'm an efficiency guy and the Spectre DIY which is an amazing design device.

The two components that I was running with it, I think they add up to like 110, 120 kind of in that range but with the Pi Zero and with the screen I was using and with the camera you're closer to like 35 or $40.

So for me it was kind of a game to see like how low can I drive the price down to get this basic signing functionality where people can use the device to create private keys and then set up a wallet and then actually like transact with the Bitcoin network.

So it was, economy was a part of it too. Like it was a game how far can I drive down the cost of being able to have one of these devices? - Yeah, it's so important to have these price points getting lower so that it gives access to more and more people as we see Bitcoin sort of permeate through society

and also become more necessary for more people with what we see going on in the world to have something where someone can be self-sovereign and someone can build one of these things from parts that can be acquired from most online retailers and different places without giving away the fact

that you are actually holding Bitcoin is really important. So is that something that you were considering when building this as well? Not only the fact that it's gonna be a lower price point but also the fact that it's a little bit more stealthy and less prone to man in the middle attacks or people just knowing that you have Bitcoin

when you might not want them to. - Yeah, I'd love to be able to say yes but no, it was my inner cheapskate kind of guiding me. - I love the honesty. - But after I started reading more about different security attacks and stuff like these are advantages to the approach that we discovered along the way that, you know,

you don't have to kind of signal to other people that you're wanting to build a Bitcoin device because these are things that you can buy off the shelf that have literally nothing to do with Bitcoin that anybody on the outside looking in would be able to tell.

And we kind of know through the ledger hack

that when you buy a hardware wallet, just another entity having your contact information is a security vulnerability, unfortunately. And so especially if you bought a hardware wallet, you know, several years ago, people were gonna make certain assumptions about what device you may be using and how much Bitcoin you may be holding

and that sort of stuff. So yeah, there is definitely advantage from a security posture to being able to build something like this with just off the shelf components. And the neat thing about the lower price point is that to start playing around with multi-sig, if you wanted to use say multiple conventional hardware

wallets to set up multi-sig wallet, you know, you're talking about buying probably a minimum of three, either cold cards or trasars or ledgers or Bitbox O2s. But to get just three of them to start set up like, you know, a basic two of three, I mean, you're gonna spend probably between two and $300 just for that.

And if you wanna go more than three cosigners, you're gonna spend more. So one of the neat things about our design is that seed signers, what you call a stateless device. So it is not engineered to store private keys.

And so you can actually enter multiple private keys into it that are stored temporarily while the device has power. And you can use that one device for multiple cosigners in a multi-sig setup now.

Security best practices, like best practices is that you would want multiple vendors, multiple hardware profiles, you know, kind of in an ideal security setup. But if you just wanna get multi-sig going, play with it, get comfortable with the software, and then start thinking about your ideal setup

based on, you know, your security requirements and the value of what you're trying to protect, et cetera. You can hit the ground running with something like seed sire for less than $50, and it can operate as all the cosigners you need just to start getting familiar with multi-sig.

And then figuring out, you know, what your ideal security setup is from there. - And as you mentioned yesterday, the fact that, you know, in some countries, if you, for example, even $50, maybe a large amount of money for somebody, and in that case, then it can be shared, maybe in a village, or it could be shared between a few families.

And if they're just stacking smaller amounts of Bitcoin, that could be another useful idea with this kind of stateless system. - Right, so we've, so we have the, there are a couple enclosures that I've designed that keep all the components together, and kind of the one that people have seen the project

might be more familiar with is what I call an orange pill enclosure, and it's actually a little gimmicky, it's shaped like a pill, and it looks like kind of a little gaming device where you have a thumbstick on the left, a few buttons on the right, and a small screen in the middle, and then on the reverse side, there's a camera,

and that is how you interact with the multi-sig coordinator using. But I've also designed a second enclosure that's kind of a much simpler design. It's easier to deploy, and it also gives you access to the micro SD card slot.

So it's designed with something like Bitcoin beach in mind, where you have this one 3D printed part that you can kind of snap all three components in, and very quickly and cheaply deploy these devices, but also the part of the reasoning behind giving access to micro SD card is, if you had people that wanted to be

a little bit more security conscious, they could swap out the memory card if they were sharing the device between households, technically not necessary, but it might give people a little bit more of a secure feeling when they're using it.

- And as you were talking about the physical design, the orange pill design, it's really cool. I really like it, and I like the joysticks, and I'm enjoying seeing people come up with different designs and all the different color combinations.

Our mutual friend Richard is sending me out a couple of bits so I can build my own, and I'm really excited to have that in my hands, 'cause it looks really cool. And it's, yeah, it's just, it's a nice thing to see these things evolve.

Have you just got the orange one yourself, or have you got a few of these things? What have you gone for design-wise? - I mean, in terms of like other cases, other projects and stuff? - Yeah.

- So I don't have a ton of hardware wallets, but as it's like mentioning before Spectre, I've designed a couple things for the guys over at Spectre for their, they have a couple hardware profiles for theirs.

So I have a Spectre DIY, and then I have a Spectre Shield, which is kind of their more advanced kind of enterprise grade device floating around. But yeah, I just love tinkering with stuff.

I've been wanting to design 3D print and enclosure for some of the block clock projects I've seen coming up. There's like the official block clock, which you've seen that I think NDK or people with Colt.

Yep, have come up with it. - Yeah, we featured in for design. I think it was it last month or the time before for that. It's very cool. But yeah, lots of other ones coming out. - Yeah, there's a lot of that are designed to work with either a regular Raspberry Pi or a Zero W that are using various different screens and stuff.

I'd love to have a block clock, but it's one of these things like, you can't have time for everything. So I think I'll get good eventually, but right now, seats on are keeping me busy. - Have you seen a bit of a tangent here, but have you seen the ones made by Voltage Goat?

- No, what are those like? - Oh, you have to check these things out. So we featured a couple of blocks ago and they're like old school neon light with like proper gas cylinders in there. - Oh, really?

- They're so, so cool. All handmade glass components and it's like proper cypherpunk feel to it. - Oh, of course. - I'll send you the link anyway. It's the sort of thing you probably like, if you like to tinker.

- Oh yeah, check it out. - But it's cool, like all this stuff within Bitcoin, like the design part is something that I find is very interesting because as we said before, the having something in the physical world, when everything else is digital in Bitcoin is really nice.

And I love the design that you guys have. Like it's simple, but it's really cool. And the other thing I think is you were saying, oh, it's similar to like a gaming device. I think unless you're like a proper player on Bitcoin, Twitter and you're really into this stuff, if someone found one of these devices,

I don't think they're gonna know what it is. I think they're gonna think it is a game. - Yeah, and that's actually something we've explored in terms of having either a setting or a default mode where when you first turn the device on, maybe it brings up like some sort of snake game or like a Pac-Man type game.

And you have to do some sort of button combination or something to get through the game into the actual signing device functionality. - That's a great idea. - Yeah, that's something that, like I said, we're exploring.

It's not going to be implemented real soon, but I think it's a good idea and as we kind of refine the product, it's something that we'll revisit. But you were talking about if I can circle back on the design bit, I'm not a designer.

Like I said, I just take her with 3D designs and printing. But when I was starting to set out to create the orange fill design, I had kind of a proof of concept. That's the stage I was at with SceneSiner to where I had, you know, clunkly enough coated things together so that you could actually do the full signing process

where you use the camera to ingest transaction information. It'll display some very basic transaction details on the screen. You opt to approve the transaction and then it generates QR codes that you show back to your laptop that include the signatures necessary to make the transaction.

I had it to that kind of proof of concept stage and then I wanted some sort of enclosure to hold everything together. But I was looking for something that people, something that would resonate with people that would get them maybe a little bit more interested in wanting to build one themselves.

And it's kind of funny, you think it's like an open source project, like what do you need marketing for? But I would kind of argue it's actually harder than marketing something that you're just selling to people, like you have to come up with a design and a concept and not just for the case but for the whole project.

You have to come up with an idea that gets people excited enough that they feel interested enough to be able to wanna go out order parts that they're not familiar with. Maybe if you're gonna build a seed sander from scratch parts, there is a little bit of soldering involved.

So maybe people haven't soldered, they have to take the leap to get a soldering iron and learn that basic skill and put all these parts together, not a hundred percent sure that they're gonna do things correctly and that it's gonna work in the end.

So it's like it's a little bit of a tough sell. So the design challenge in this was coming up with something that would resonate with Bitcoiners and would get them excited enough to try to like to find the functionality of seed sander and the look of the case itself compelling enough

to want to embark on maybe something a little uncomfortable or unknown. So it was kind of a unique sort of design challenge to take on and the Orange Pill is kind of where things landed. - Yeah, and it's obviously worked because I mean, the community around this is pretty impressive.

I see on my Telegram group, it's constantly popping off. There's people who are really into this stuff. There's people who are loving coming up with their own designs for the housings. There's all sorts of people getting involved and from our conversations before it sounds like you've also had a lot of people who love this project

so much that they're now helping with the development as well. So how did that meet or exceed your expectations when you started with this? Like, did you ever imagine that it would be as successful as it has become?

- No, that was, you know, I just kind of tinker with it thinking like when they say when you're working on something you're kind of scratching your own edge and just trying to bring something that you want to see into existence but having other Bitcoiners, especially people with technical skills that are deeper than mine

taking interest in has been super gratifying. When we first talked the last time, I think, that was at the stage where another developer named Nick was just coming on board. And he is like, that's his, he's a developer by trade, that's his day job.

And so he has a knowledge of programmatic structure and convention that far exceeds mine. And he, I've gotten to know him a little bit and he's a relatively new Bitcoiner. I think he's definitely within the last year or two, not that he hadn't heard of Bitcoin before that, but it's just in the last couple of years

it's something you've taken seriously. And he kind of found the project as someone who wanted to start kind of experimenting with multi-sig but wasn't crazy about spending, you know, two or three hundred rather, sorry, two or three hundred dollars on hardware just to kind of get to the front door.

So he discovered the project on GitHub and started tinkering with it. And our very first interaction was he had forked the code and had come up with a way to make spectra, sorry, not spectra, to make seed signer compatible with Blue Wallet.

And he had done like a little demo video where he showed taking in the QRs with Blue Wallet and then completing a transaction. And like that blew my mind. Not just that he'd implemented that, but that, you know, here's somebody with some skills that took an interest in the project.

So that's been so amazing to see. But we've had another developer who's done some really great work for Spectre Desktop named Heath, who's also kind of within the last couple of months, made some amazing contributions to improve our user interface and add some features and he's working on some amazing stuff.

He's also leading the charge to add multi-language support to seed signer that's hopefully gonna be coming over the next couple of months. But then people with other skill sets kind of have brought their own talents to the project.

There's a guy whose handle online, his nickname is EZ, who is a user interface professional. And so I believe his daytime job is he works on user interfaces for hardware devices to make them more intuitive and more kind of like subconsciously appealing to users.

And so another kind of thing we have coming in, an upcoming version is that we're gonna move away from the kind of very basic interface that I hacked together that's almost DOS-like where you scroll through the menus and it highlights different menu options that are spelled out to a much more polished kind of graphical interface

to where it's more intuitive and it'll be more intuitive visually to people maybe that aren't as familiar with Bitcoin, nomenclature or verbiage. So we've kind of got that cooking in the background and there's another guy who's a Unix kind of systems expert who has some deep knowledge with Linux-based operating systems

and he's helping us put together a customized Linux build for seed signers so that right now we're still working on kind of a stock Raspberry Pi build that the Pi Foundation provides. - Do you want to roast piano, something like that for you?

- Yeah, there's a more streamlined build that's more headless or command line driven that we use but it is, it's a stock Raspberry build. So we're gonna get some new features potentially with his work in terms of the device being able to start up faster but then it's gonna unlock some other kind of very cool security features

such that once that the device boots up, we should be able to pull the operating system off of the memory card and get it fully loaded into memory such that when seed signer starts up and it's fully running, you'll be able to actually remove the memory card after it's up and running.

And just off the top, there's a couple of kind of unique benefits. The first is just kind of a security posture of if you start seed signer up and then you pull your memory card out before you start entering any private key information into it, you can enter your seed phrases into the device with that much more confidence that obviously,

I mentioned before, we don't save the seed phrases onto the memory card but there might be some people in the back of their mind wondering like the memory card's still in there 'cause they'd in some way be kind of leaking onto the memory card so if you're able to pull it, once the device is up and running

and before you've entered any seed information, you can have a little bit more confidence that your seed phrases aren't being leaked onto the memory card coming out of that device in any way.

And another advantage is a lot of the sign devices, currently the way that they move PSBTs or partially signed Bitcoin transactions around is via a memory card. So maybe you could take a secondary SD card that you have and for some of these larger transactions that may require a whole lot of QR frames to get in and out of the device,

some people may prefer to move them with micro SD cards so you can insert a secondary micro SD card into seed signer after it's up and running, copy the PSBT to it that way and then pull the memory card out, insert that in your laptop where you're running your multi-sink coordinator software, be that Spectre desktop

or also compatible with Sparrow and Blue Wallet now and you can move the PSBTs that way. I think there's, it's something that people have asked about, it's not my preference, I prefer the QR exchange, but we listen to people using the software and I think it's something that some people will be interested in, but I'm digressing here.

It's just been amazing to have other people with different skills. You mentioned Richard before who's in the EU and very early on like it's something that he saw the value proposition and got excited about and him and I started collaborating on designs a little bit

and just getting physical cases out to people that were closer over the EU where he's located.

That's kind of the feedback that you get when you, that tells you you're on to something and I'm not entirely sure what it is with seed signer. It probably is like a couple facets of it, but when other people start getting excited about the project and wanting to contribute to it, that communicates to me that there's something here,

there's something to this and that gets me excited to kind of keep the ball rolling and working on the various aspects of the project that I'm working on right now. - Hmm, yeah, it must be an amazing feeling and also it's just such a great way to meet interesting people, you know?

I'm sure a lot of the people that you've been working with now have become good friends and people that you enjoy spending time speaking to and building with and that's one of the things in Bitcoin that I've not experienced elsewhere is working with most of these people is generally an absolute joy.

- Yeah, there's something about Bitcoin that I don't know if that a certain type of person is more drawn to Bitcoin or if it is, you know, like some people say Bitcoin changes you, if it's the kind of people that we are maybe steered towards becoming as we get further down the rabbit hole,

I think that as people learn more about Bitcoin and get deeper into it, I think your time preference changes and I think Bitcoiners are more oriented towards investing in themselves and planning for the future and shaping their own futures.

That's one of the coolest things in terms of like encountering other Bitcoiners is how, I think in maybe in our modern times, like we tend to be a little bit dystopian and you kind of wonder where things are heading with, you know, technology giving the state more and more power to kind of like pry into our private lives

and keep an eye on people and I think that's kind of a sad future and it's neat to see Bitcoiners, you know, kind of like I don't want to bring up Elon, but Elon is dreaming of an exciting future where people are living on, excuse me, people are living on more than one planet, people are expanding to Mars and stuff

and I think Bitcoiners kind of in the same way are dreaming of a more positive, more exciting future that includes technology and, you know, this idea that, you know, we can have a future with a sounder money where people have more control over their future, their finances, they don't have the inflation

of fiat money kind of like working against them. I think it's a hopeful future and I find that kind of same feeling a lot of the people that I interact with this time goes on. So, yeah, like you mentioned it's a really neat part of it to find people that think how you do.

- Bitcoiners hope. - Yeah. - Yeah, I mean, how do you feel this changes things if we're successful, you know, 'cause it often feels that we are such a tiny minority of people who have this vision of more freedom and sound money and the rest of, you know, we're going one way, the rest of the world

is going more towards a dystopian authoritarian nightmare. You know, my personal feeling is that we win this just because of the people that I've seen and spend time with, people like you, people who are building and they are relentless in their quest to push this thing forward.

If we are successful, what do you think's gonna happen with the world and how do you think this is gonna change things for people? - I'm probably gonna butcher this quote but I'm a little bit of a quote person and they say, what is it?

There's nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. And that is one of the ways that I think about Bitcoin in that, like with my personal journey in terms of like, you know, being really into it for the gains with a Z and then falling away but then kind of coming back to it.

Bitcoin works its way into your subconscious and another way that people put it is like, once you see something, you can't unsee it. So once you kind of see the degradation of people's ability to store up their, store up the fruits of their labor

for the future and how that's degraded with inflation, once you become aware of that, you can't really become unaware of it. And I think once you see how Bitcoin is this kind of elegant solution to that, that's again something that a lot of people have trouble unseen, like people who get into Bitcoin

and who are into it not just for the trade or not just for the investment, but for people who are into it for more of the ideological, like it's interesting that those people don't like fall away from it such that, you know, they're like, oh, I was really into Bitcoin last year but it's gonna fall off the radar.

Like you, I don't see that. People learn the Bitcoin, it's like it's some sort of, you know, obsession or compulsion for us. But how it changes the future, like I kind of alluded before, I think it changes people's time horizons.

I think people can work towards improving the world around them and improving themselves with a little more confident in that it's worth doing because, you know, the future isn't kind of like crumbling through your fingers as you're trying to grasp onto it.

Like I'm, I think the sound money element of Bitcoin is a really powerful aspect of the idea. - I guess I'm probably clumsily fumbling to this. But yeah. - No, that makes a lot of sense. Do you think this then actually changes culture?

We've seen certainly from like the 80s and pushing through 2000s and to now that this consumer culture, this high-time preference culture, the things that we, or maybe not we as Bitcoin is, but that most people in society seem to value.

- It doesn't seem it's so much family or long-term thinking or building something that lasts. It is just kind of high-time preference showing our flashing cash. - Instant gratification. - Yeah, instant gratification.

And this, it feels like the whole world is like sick. It's lost its way. And, and that the things that really make you feel good, you know, like you really feel good when you're around people that you love and you're having good food or you're sat around a campfire or, you know, you're doing things

that we would naturally have done a thousand years ago. That's certainly for me is when I feel like really at peace and just really like I'm with my people, I'm enjoying good food. There's music, there's laughter and that makes me feel amazing.

And that's very rare that you really get to spend the time and do those things. And everyone else is chasing after, you know, what new pair of shoes, what car, how can I show off to people?

How can I show that I'm successful and how can I put this online so that everyone sees it and how many likes have I gotten? It would be lovely to see a return of that. It'd be lovely to see a return of people having more time to do what really matters.

- Right, I totally agree that I have a couple of thoughts on it. The first is like, so I talked in a little bit of my origin story about, you know, we can selling everything, but I'm a little bit proud of the fact that, you know, I didn't buy a vacation home at the beach or I didn't, you know, buy a kettle like Escalade

or, you know, whatever, like we legitimately, you know, used the proceeds from selling to pay off our house and start a debt-free life. And the consequence of that was one of us, in my marriage, was able to step away from our career and start to be more present at home, be present in the kids' lives

and start to, you know, the idea of a homemaker is kind of bandied around and a lot of people don't understand kind of the value that that provides. And I'm a big believer, the older I get in that people should plan if you're going to have a family and have children, like, if you can swing it,

having one person present in the home and one person out in the workplace, I think, provides tremendous advantages or families in terms of just the overall happiness. Because when both, when you, and I've been there myself, when you have, you know, both parents working, you just always feel like you're trying to catch up

because then, like, in the evenings and on the weekend, you know, you're trying to do laundry or trying to do grocery shopping, or trying to, you know, do all the yard work and catch up on all the things that you don't have time to do.

And you have so much less time for those, like, the family dinners and the time to spend with your family on the weekend, doing kind of the things you're talking about, of just sitting down, enjoying a meal or going on a day trip on a Saturday or doing things, you know, with your kids, your spouse that you really enjoy.

So I think our society has kind of fallen away from that in terms of this instant gratification. And I, sometimes it gets me down a little bit 'cause I really think we are, at least from what I can't speak for Europe because I'm over here in the States, but I really feel like we are kind of a late stage civilization

at this point where I call it kind of the decadence phase of civilization. And I think back to kind of the final stages of the Roman Empire. And I think there are so many parallels between that and what we see, at least over here, where I met in terms of, you know, in the late stages of the Roman Empire,

there was the debasement of the currency. There was violence as spectacle that you see. And there was kind of all this degradation of kind of the more moral aspects of society. And I don't want to get in, you know, down to that rabbit hole 'cause different people had different ideas.

But I do think we are kind of in a late stage, kind of period of civilization. And what I love about Bitcoin is then whatever comes next doesn't have to be a disaster. It doesn't have to be something that's tragic.

Like I love that, you know, we mentioned it before, but we're building something positive for the future. That aspect of it that really appeals to me. - Definitely. And when your time isn't being stolen constantly, you do get to enjoy those Saturdays, you do get to enjoy your time where you'd otherwise be checking your emails

and you're running over and 'cause your time has been stolen from you. And so you're never really present, you're never really in the moment, but you can be with Bitcoin, you know. If your savings aren't being stolen from you every day and your time isn't being stolen, you can spend that time.

And I think it makes your relationship stronger around you. It makes you respect your own time better. And it also makes you better at making good decisions because you're not in a rush all the time.

It's not like, ah, how can I spend this money as quickly as I can so it doesn't get devised? How can I, you know, I quickly have to make a decision on X, Y and Z, but you know, I haven't got the time and I'm doing three other things at the same time.

And it just spirals out of control to a point where people lose themselves. And this is like a, you know, this is the real great reset. You know, Klaus Schwab and all these fuckers are trying to push another agenda.

But I think Bitcoin really does allow us to have a reset. And that's why I think it's so important to have something accessible, like what you're building and allowing people to, once they realize eventually that, you know, this is how you save your time, well, make sure that they do it in the right way

and make sure that they can keep it to themselves and not have everyone though. Because I think Bitcoin is gonna be attacked hard over the coming years because it gets in the way of some people's sick ideas and it stops a certain few people having control over the masses.

And so we need to fight it in a smart way. So how does that push your thinking in terms of developing the project and continuing to onboard more people, continuing to get seed signers into the hands of more and more people?

What have you got coming and how does it make you think of making changes? - Well, as you kind of talk about the coming fight, you know, if that happens or what does that look like, when it happens, that was another one of these kind of unforeseen benefits of seed signer that wasn't on my radar that took someone else reaching out

to me to kind of help me understand it. There was a person from, I don't know a lot about this person at all, but it was a person who reached out to me privately and said that what they liked most about seed signer, this person apparently lives in the Middle East where Bitcoin has not looked upon favorably

in their particular part of the world. I don't know if there's a ban in place or if the government actively discourages it or what the situation was, but one of the advantages of seed signer was that this person was able to order the components even in the part of the world where they are and they have trouble

getting their hands on technology. They were able to order the components, download the software and build the thing in private without anyone else knowing they were building a signing device to be able to interact with the Bitcoin protocol.

So that's something that has kind of steered

development in terms of making deployment as simple and as fast as possible. And as we explore other hardware profiles, one of the things in the roadmap is being able to support a second hardware profile that includes a touchscreen integration, but making sure that we're careful

about how we select what hardware is involved in an alternative build so that that's something that people can still find easily and is not too expensive, those kinds of considerations. We have kind of some things on the horizon.

I think I alluded to some of them. We have some new features coming. Keith has really brought the fire in terms of some fun new features. In this next version, you know, seed signer, we haven't really talked about it, but one of the intentional decisions with seed signer was that seed signer will not generate

independently like a private key or a seed phrase for you. You have to bring some sort of entropy and introduce that to the device to be able to configure it with a private key to start interacting with the Bitcoin protocol.

So in the beginning, that was you bring 11 words or you bring 23 words and we'll calculate the last word of a seed phrase, and then you can use that seed phrase with the device. And then early on, I developed, you know, a portion of the functionality where you can roll a die 99 times and enter the dice rolls into seed signer

and it'll derive a public key that way. But Keith has come up with this really kind of innovative fun feature where you can use the camera that's already on board with the device to take a picture, the picture, actually a portion of the picture will display on the screen and there's a reason for it just being a portion of the picture.

But from the picture, a hash is generated and then from that hash, a private key is generated. So you can actually take a picture and based on the entropy of what is depicted in the picture, whether that's a tree or a cloud or your favorite person in the world or whatever it is, from the entropy that's present in the picture,

you can generate a private key from that. So it's kind of a fun way to be able to start to set up a new wallet. You know, it's one of those kind of like emotional connections that people make.

So if you're setting aside maybe some money for your kids, like a fun thing is to take a picture of, you know, your kid and the reason why I alluded before that the entire picture is not displayed on the seed sider screen is as a part of the process, if you want to, after you take a picture of whatever you're going to base

that seed phrase on, it's going to appear on the seed sider screen. And if you want to, you can snap a picture of your seed sider like with your phone or whatever to kind of record that moment.

But the edges of the photo are not displayed on the screen. So you don't have to worry about the entropy that comes from that picture being somehow compromised because the entire picture isn't visible.

It's kind of a clever, upset kind of awareness on Keith's part when he designed this feature. So anyhow, you take a picture, displays on the screen, you can either deny or approve it. If you approve it, then it's going to do the necessary calculation of a shot some and it's then going to derive

the entropy that the private key generation comes from the background. And then you go from the picture being displayed on the screen to BAM, here's your 24-word seed phrase that you can record for future use.

Another feature that we've just recently integrated into seed sider that is a feature that some people may not be aware of just yet because it's so new is the ability to manually create a QR code so that when you first turn on seed sider, we talked about how it's not stateless.

So it's not going to remember your seed information once power is removed from the device. So one of the challenges with that is every time that you turn the device on, you have to enter your 12- or 24-word seed phrase into it.

That, understandably, if you're using the device for more transactions as opposed to less transactions, like that's a little bit of a barrier is that every time you turn it on, you have to enter your seed phrase.

We think we have a pretty good interface that's getting better and better for how to enter those words. But as a shortcut, if you're willing to invest like 15 minutes of your time, Keith has also come up with a way that once you enter your 12- or 24-word seed phrase, we have an interface where you can manually

with a printed piece of paper and a sharpie. You can transcribe a QR code, meaning you actually physically color in all of the squares. It sounds painful, but it's actually not as bad as it sounds.

And then maybe you have a worksheet that has a space for 24 words, and then it has a grid laid out with kind of like a QR code template. And you step through the QR code that's displayed on the screen in kind of a grid-like fashion so you don't tackle it all at once.

You tackle it kind of like five by five blocks at a time. And like I said, I've done it several times. I'm comfortable having my time within like 12 or 15 minutes, so it seems reasonable.

But what I'm getting at, the neat part is once you've done this once, so you have your 12 or 24 words on the piece of paper and then you have also in the same piece of paper this QR code that you've transcribed that you didn't print, you didn't interact with any sort of online device to do it, just you, a piece of paper, and a Sharpie.

Whenever you power seed signer on in the future, when you go to input a seed into it, there's an option that comes up that says scan a seed QR code. You have your QR code there. You scan it and instantaneously.

You can ingest your seed phrase into seed signer to get you up and running a little bit quicker and kind of reduce that pain point of having to manually enter the words. It's maybe not something that's for everybody, but I encourage anybody with a seed signer like print out the worksheet and try it.

I think it's, we're still kind of refining like what size Sharpie we recommend and what size the QR code template is, but the experience is getting better and better and it's like, you know, I have some wallets that I've set up using this process and it's super, like it's a great experience

being able to open up, you know, the piece of paper where you have your seed phrase and the QR code stored and you just point the camera at it and off you go, you're ready to sign. It's a great experience.

- Yeah, that's really cool. It's just nice, it's nice to have all these different options. It seems that you guys are just giving so many different options, whether it's, you know, PSBT, whether you're doing something with a camera, whether you, when you're creating your seed, you do it from picking words out of a hat

or you're doing it with dice or you're doing it with a photo, it's all different options and it just makes it more accessible to more people because they might, you know, it might put someone off otherwise they might say, oh well, I don't want to be picking things out of a hat or that's the only way I want to do it

and yeah, more options are better. - Yeah, that's the advantage of getting a lot of input from people who see the device and maybe, you know, they've built one and they love using it, but they say like, you know, I'd really love if seed signer could do X or Y and the developers we have working on it

are super great about taking that feedback seriously and if it's a good idea, like we're all for integrating it or people even see seed signer and maybe they're not there yet in terms of wanting to build one and they say like, you know, I'm not there right now but if it could do X, that would be a really compelling feature too.

Those are, that's great feedback that we kind of seriously consider too. So it's, the neat thing about seed signer is it's software and generally software like it's just going to get better over time, we're going to refine the process, squash out the bugs and, you know, hopefully add features that people are excited about.

- Very cool. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Thanks again for bearing with me yesterday and yeah, I'm really looking forward to having this feature all up so everyone can see what it is you guys are doing but was there anything that we didn't cover or any updates or anything before we close out the interview

that you wanted to go through? - First off, I just want to say like, I really appreciate your attention to the project and this opportunity to talk with you again and I'm excited to see the spotlight in 21 isn't.

The only thing I would throw out is just ways to learn more about the project and interact with it. I'm seed signer on Twitter, just @seedsigner, two words both together. Our GitHub is, if you just Google or DuckTuckGo, seed signer GitHub that'll bring you to the project and we have a pretty friendly landing page there

that explains kind of what's going on with the project. There is a website coming, I swear, I promise. I own the seed signer.com domain and we actually have a draft of the website but we're going through tweaking it and getting ready to make it live.

I'm not there yet, we're getting close to the finish line but not quite there yet but I think we're still easy enough to find and interact with it that people who want to learn more and maybe build one can find us and get all the information that they need.

- Awesome. All right, well, thanks again. We'll put all of that in the page as well so people can find you and yeah, just thanks for everything you do and allowing more and more people to be able to be onboarded and save their time and move the world forward into a way that is better for humanity.

So yeah, much appreciated and thanks for everything you do. - Yeah, and I look forward to once all of this COVID stuff fades away, I'm going to get to a conference somewhere over where you are and we're going to sit down and have a couple of beers.

- I look forward to it and some whiskies as well, I'm sure. - Yeah, I'm down with that too. - Cool. All right, thanks again, mate and we'll speak soon. - Sounds good, thanks.