You don’t need decentralisation... until you do..bitcoin monthly 0019 with BQA and Antomous

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

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

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

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

Welcome back to Bitcoin Monthly. I have Bitcoin Q&A back and Antimus as well. We got to discuss tornado cash on Ethereum and what a clusterfuck that is. We had a reminder of why privacy and decentralization is so important.

And we discussed the updates to border wallets, seed tools, Vulcan 21, and went into the mining month a little bit. I really enjoyed chatting to these guys, and I suggest if you aren't already following Antimus and Bitcoin Q&A, you go and do it now.

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Yeah, that's better, because Antomistade is just lurking in the background. I can see him, but I can't hear him. I can't hear him. Can you see him? Yes. Hmmm. Really lurking. Maybe he's just waiting to do a spectacular entrance or something, he's just kind of stringing this along a little bit.

Oh no, no, he's on Telegram saying, "Can you hear me?" No. Well, I'm sure he'll work it out, new with you, mate. What's new with me? Much of the same really, not a lot has changed. We've still got database hacks, we've still got maxis cancelling people on Twitter, we've still got regulators regulating.

So, yeah, not a lot has changed in the Bitcoin world really, it just seems to be different parties involved, which I'm sure we're going to dive into, obviously, over the next hour or so. Yeah, it's brutal out there.

It's just like... It definitely feels as though things are starting to hot up a little bit, not what you think. Hello. Here we are. That wasn't a spectacular entrance, we were thinking you were going to do something amazing.

Sing us a song or something like that. Oh man, missed it. How you doing, guys? I'm sweating my bollocks off in a little box room. Q&A is doing the same, but he's got air conditioned, he's got a team of people fanning him, keeping him cool, running him drinks, all that kind of rock star stuff.

Ironically, I am drinking a piping hot coffee, which probably wasn't the best idea really in today. Me too. How about you, mate? Yeah, all good, nice early morning, it's a bit cooler here, but it's actually quite good to force yourself to get into the office early, do a bit of work before it gets really hot

here, because they're in a pretty... The last week has been really hot, so the office heated up pretty brutally, so I've got the windows open at night to cool it down, so in the morning it's nice, that's wonderful.

All right, you're still in Dubai. Exactly, like in the 60th floor, so letting the windows open is fine at night, no one's getting in. Did you both have a good trip back from the Wales Weekender?

Oh, that was wonderful, man. In the trip back, I mean, that was fine, had a stay with the family as well in England for another week, and had a bit of time with the nephews and stuff, that was great.

But, yeah, it was wonderful, a week afterwards was just absolutely bliss, of just complete relaxation from the wind and the weather and the sun and all the connections built there, it was wonderful.

You had a bit of a shocker on the way there, did you also have a nightmare on the way back? It was okay, it was actually okay, I mean, it was long, but it was all fine, a bit of jumping backwards and forwards and to get places, just travelling to the airport, it's

quite a hassle, but we had a lot of time, so it was all smooth, that was all fun, wonderful. Yeah, you were missed there, Q and A, not that much, but it sounds like by all accounts, everybody had a really good weekend, and it was a little bit bittersweet listening to

you all on last month's podcast, talking about how awesome it was, so I'm just glad that you've welcomed me back, I thought, once I heard that podcast, I thought that might have been curtains for my regular slot on this month's show, I thought that's it, now he's a goner.

Well, I did consider it, I scheduled black coffee for this morning, but we pushed it later, I was thinking, oh, it might just actually push Q and A out here, we'll have black coffee in, but we couldn't do that to you, mate.

Well, little do you know, is that Artemis and I are going to regra at the end of the month, and we're going to start our own monthly podcast, and you're out, mate, sorry. And that's actually fair enough, that's actually very reasonable, yeah, and I'll like, postpone

my judgement for like mid as September, let it sink in a bit, and then I'll make you both, and then I'll see where I am. Yeah, yeah, that's fair enough. Well, at least I won't have to do the editing anymore, so that's fine.

Before you jumped on, Artemis, being Q and A, we're just sort of, well, before recording, I think it was as well. I was saying, like, just generally out there, it seems like things are hotting up, not just the temperature, not just literally sweating, but all of the stuff that's happening at the

moment, it seems like governments around the world are cranking things up, people are doing more and more clownish things in the space, and yeah, what are your thoughts on everything you're seeing at the moment?

Yeah, I mean, for me, it's like the first time that I'm experiencing, like, the fallout of a big drop, because I wasn't in, like, after the 2017 drop, so, like, over the last few years, that's kind of been the narrative and the expectation I've been hearing, as

well as that, like, if we get another big crash, if things do come down, and there is, there are casualties that, like, there'll be a lot more crackdown on regulation and so on, so I think that's just, like, the beginning now of what we're gonna see, just the size and

the magnitude and the, like, reach that the crash over the last few months has had on the whole financial markets, and just people getting absolutely wrecked in shit-coining with the big, like, over-platterised companies, just going underwater, I think all of that's

coming together for a lot of people to call for regulation, but also for people in those positions to kind of feel a sense of duty to step in, to prevent it from happening again, and then also other people just seeing an opportunity to push through some kind of restrictions

and laws they've been looking to push for quite a while and seeing this opportunity, so I think it was kind of expected and I am expecting a lot more, and it's always something that's, during, like, the pump phases is all a bit in the background and all comes up to

the surface when we plunge, so I don't expect more to come now over the next half year or so. Yeah, it's been something we've been talking about for ages, and it's, like you said, it's expected, but it definitely feels like it's heating up, and then you've also got all

the bitching and infighting and everything else, because everyone's wrecked and feeling a bit down and everything else, so it's an interesting one. I've spent a lot less time on Twitter over the last few months, just because I really just can't be bothered with that sort of stuff, but as long as we've got the tools to get

us out the other side, that's what matters, whereas I think, was it Q&A you just sent through this tornado cash thing that looks like maybe they don't have the tools anymore? Yeah, so this is a really interesting one, and it's kind of hot off the press within

the last three or four days maybe, so tornado cash is an Ethereum coin-join protocol, so people listening to this might be thinking, "Why the hell are we talking about this?" For the simple reason being the ramifications that it's almost certainly going to have into

the Bitcoin and I'm sure it's certainly the wider crypto ecosystem, I'm sure, in years to come, so yeah, tornado cash is essentially the largest by far privacy protocol/smart contract on the Ethereum network.

Basically if you want privacy on Ethereum, which generally speaking is terrible because they use an account system, so if you know your account, anybody can see all of the assets and what not that you hold, so tornado cash was like the de facto service that people

use to gain some privacy when they're using Ethereum, and I think it's done something to the tune of like $7 billion since the time it's been active, so this week, I should also caveat the fact that it's non-custodial and it's also, I'm using air quotes here, decentralized,

so as far as something on Ethereum can be decentralized. But what I mean by that is it's at the protocol level, it's a smart contract, it's not kind of ran by a company, etc, so it is sort of in air quotes, decentralized, and that's what makes this piece of regulation all the more staggering and why we all should be paying

close attention to it. So the US Department, the Treasury Department has added basically the whole tornado cash smart contract or anything to do with it to the OFAC sanctions list, which essentially prohibits anybody in the US and anybody in a jurisdiction that complies with the US, which unfortunately is most of the world at the moment.

From having any dealings with the tornado cash smart contract address, so this is the first of its kind. So we've seen OFAC sanctions before on Bitcoin addresses, Ethereum, individual addresses, Monero addresses, it's not uncommon to see that.

We've also seen it for custodial mixers, so I forget the names of them now, but there's been multiple custodial Bitcoin and Ethereum mixers before now where you send your Bitcoin in, you lose custody of it and you get sent somebody else's Bitcoin back, that's very

much a custodial relationship, they've been sanctioned before now and it's hardly surprising because they are sort of money transmitters if you like. Tornado cash is very different to that, like I say, decentralized non-custodial, it's just software.

This is the first time that something like this has been added to the sanctions list and unfortunately may, hopefully may not, but we don't know yet, be set in a precedent for all the similar or the protocols that take similar approaches, something like Samurai,

maybe Wasabi or anything that runs on different chains as well, they're all just software, they're all non-custodial, so I can very much see protocols like that being tied with exactly the same brush.

There are some nuances, like I said before, Ethereum runs on the account system where it's far easier to see who's had dealings with what, whereas something like Samurai's Whirlpool, it's much more difficult, there isn't a smart contract address that you can

kind of sanction and say anybody's touching or having any dealings with that contract or whatever, is in violation of the OFAT list, the UTXO model of Bitcoin and the way that Whirlpool and similar protocols are set up are going to make, certainly make enforcement

all that more difficult, but would also make the sort of guidelines of how the OFAC violation might be categorized I guess is probably the best way I can put it would be sort of enforced, so it's not going to be as simple as telling it with the same brush, but the key bit here

is the fact that it's a non-custodial decentralized piece of software that is essentially just been broadly added to the OFAT list and basically saying that you can't deal with this piece of software.

So a little bit scary, Bitcoiners should be worried about this in my opinion, because it's still set up pretty dangerous precedent, but yeah it's the first of its kind and something that I'm going to be watching fairly closely, I don't know if you guys have anything to add to that or thoughts on it.

Yeah, I mean it's definitely brutal, I read into a bit yesterday evening and how quickly this all went now, I mean I don't know how long they've been working on this, but I mean it went out I think the sanction on Monday and yesterday Git Hub closed down everything.

Their domain has been shut down and even and that's the most shocking part is that Git Hub even decided to block three of their developers, so the main contributors accounts were blocked

on Git Hub, which was not part of the sanctions, so they went over and above what was asked of them by the OFAT. Yeah, just to add to that I think it's worse than that, you are right, the main maintainers of that Git Hub repository, the Git Hub repo was deleted, they had their accounts deleted

but they also went as far as anybody that's ever contributed to that code base in the past, has either had some level of restriction put on their Git Hub account or they've had that deleted as well and any subsequent works that are affiliated with or similar to Tornado

cache that have also been contributed to by the same people who contributed to tornado cache, that stuff's already also been removed as well, so a massive, massive overreach and obviously Microsoft have just taken it upon themselves, I suppose if I was to put myself in their shoes, why would they deal with it?

The easiest thing for Microsoft to do is to just remove all of this stuff and they don't have to worry about any potential infringements or any, they don't have to worry about being in violation of OFAT or being complicit in any way, it's not going to hurt their bottom

line is it, they're a massive tech conglomerate, so removing a few accounts is absolutely no skin off their nose but again another reason why Bitcoin should be worried about this sort of stuff because where is the Bitcoin, the main co-base hosted, it's on GitHub, so it

could be removed in an instant, now of course that's not going to mean that Bitcoin falls over and obviously there's millions of hundreds of thousands of copies of the Bitcoin co-base everywhere and the way that the underlying system that GitHub is built on which is called

Git is was designed to be like a decentralized system and the way that most people use it is that they have the co-base on their local computer, they propose the changes and then they push it to GitHub mainly, so if GitHub was to take down the Bitcoin repository, you

know, Bitcoin would live on, it's just going to have more of a social consensus hurdle to get over because it's not just of where the code is hosted and where it's maintained but a lot of the social aspect of making changes or code review and all that is all done on

GitHub, all of the comments, all of the pull requests, all of the discussion around the potential next soft forecard for any change of the code base no matter how trivial, all of that chat is done within GitHub, there are alternative channels like IRC, et cetera but

all of the sort of stuff that's tightly code based is generally done on GitHub so it would be a big hurdle if they were to take the same approach and go more broadly and start taking down things like the Bitcoin repository, so I think again it's just another start warning

that the privacy circles have been warning about for years, trusted third parties or security holes, GitHub is a trusted third party and decentralization, absolutely matters and we've seen that with another fallout from this, these OFAC lists is that any, was it USDC,

the Circle Stablecoin, though any USDC coins that have also interacted loosely with Tornado Cash or been instantly frozen, so again just talking back to some decentralization, obviously USDC is absolutely not decentralized and that's clearly evident by the fact that Circle have

been able to see which of those USDC coins have been through or near Tornado Cash and they're instantly frozen and whoever had those assets or thought they had those assets now no longer is able to transact and they've presumably lost that money, so again decentralization

doesn't matter until it does so you know this is why, this is why we Bitcoin, this is why we harp on about holding our own keys and using decentralized protocols so that we are resistant to attacks like this and you know I'm sure this is just very much the beginning.

Yeah it's pretty worrying like the two things I'm thinking there are obviously with GitHub is like is there not an option you said that you have Git rather than GitHub and that push it, that's going to be decentralized and then you push on to the main hub, is there not

a way that something can be run where you don't use Microsoft or is it just that there's this massive network effect a bit like Twitter, you can spin something off but it's like well no one cares.

Yeah there's alternatives, you have GitLab which the Samurai guys use and again you know they're the head of the curve here, they've been self-hosting their own GitLab for a couple of years now purely because they knew that they eventually somebody's going to come after

the privacy guys and they can't be deplatformed, they're running their own GitHub alternative on their own servers but yeah you're absolutely right GitHub has the network effect, it is the de facto Git the way that you interact with the Git protocol but it doesn't have

to be that way so I would love to see like the Bitcoin repository on a self-hosted alternative but then the problem is well the person who's doing the hosting is kind of another trusted third party then aren't they?

So it's you know and I don't know if there's a way to sort of like decentralize the ownership of one master repository that's self-hosted if that makes sense. That's what I was just always thinking that I was like I don't know how the fuck you'd do it technically but if you had everyone has the same copy on their little Raspberry

Pi or whatever it is they're running and you have a certain amount of people who run that and it checks against each other to make sure that nothing's you know nothing's changed. That seems as though that would be a good idea but I don't know how much data it needs

to move and store and everything else because if it wasn't masses could you not just have it running on all the Bitcoin node implementations could you not have it the fuck's sake did you just hit that drop something?

Yep. Yep. Do you know what I mean like that must be something that's possible unless it is masses of data you know if someone's running their Bitcoin node and it's like oh do you want to download this extra app and then that app is the thing that runs this what was it called GitLab or whatever it was?

Yeah so stuff like that does already exist and I think even Umbrell's got like I think it hosts Git here and that bit's not the issue you know everybody could run their own GitLab or alternative on their own computers the problem is that that has to be one kind of central

hub that's managed as to be official this is where the official Bitcoin code base is because anybody that downloads it has to get it from a single semi trusted source don't they so the bit of people having their own copies of it is the easy bit it's having that one

place where it is the recommended place that you go to download it and that where all of the you know it's the de facto location if that makes sense that's the difficult bit. I know what you mean it just seems like there must be a way that could be done because Bitcoin

can do it so well that's exactly the thing I mean that's why Bitcoin I had something the whole proof of work mining I mean that's to be able to like verify changes and to keep everything in sync isn't it?

So if you have like a whole network of people working on a code base and it's completely decentralized you'd need some kind of system of like getting everyone in sync and verifying each change and so on so I think you do kind of need some kind of central point but it

could be even multiple probably that then coordinate so that you are not relying on one specific thing and I think those are all issues that can be solved just like diverging to one of those and getting like consensus on what to use that's going to be a huge issue

especially if like something like you have mentioned Q&A that GitHub would take down Bitcoin the whole Bitcoin repository if that if like a decision like that would have to be made like on the fly in like a shock moment like that that would be a huge a huge problem

to work through and yeah I mean as we were talking about samurai as well obviously I was thinking of that as well that they have their own version and are not using GitHub what they are using is a they have a registered domain for their site I mean that was something

that was taken down for tornado cash as well but I presume samurai will have a tour and like an onion address to to get to through to that but still there are a lot of different attack vectors that can and will be used to make it extremely difficult for people to

access it and if they don't know exactly where to go and how to get the stuff so I think it's really important that especially these projects that maybe are somewhere in the in the crosshairs to to think about that what would happen in these situations how would

they react how would they stay accessible and operational to and also just think about if you're contributing as well to one of these projects maybe do that under a different name that you do for other projects just so that you don't mix that up stay conscious

of your privacy online and and try and think a few steps ahead because that we all want to see these projects being further maintained and developed they are incredibly important for all of us just to have it as a disposal and so everyone who was working on that please

yeah take the time to think this through so that this can be done as long as possible yeah the other thing that I forgot to add just going back to the Ethereum piece just in case anybody had any doubt about the lack of decentralization in Ethereum and the basically

not many people in Ethereum run their own node because it's far more difficult than it is to do so on Bitcoin so what most people do is they plug into an API that is run by a company called Infura which is essentially the the node backend for the vast majority

of Ethereum wallets they as soon as these sanctions came out they essentially blocked all access to the tornado cash URL or tour however however you the wallets were contacting that smart contract instantly just blocked so even if you wanted to try and you know evade

the sanctions and continue using the tornado cash service despite all of the risk of warnings then unless you were running your own Ethereum node which again like I said not many people do Infura basically just took that decision out of your hands and you couldn't do so even

if you wanted to so again I keep saying it decentralization doesn't matter until it does and now it does can they withdraw because I think that the process was kind of that you set up a smart contract saying that if you send to a certain address you'd be able

to withdraw from a different address kind of like a submarine swap kind of system as I understand it from the process itself but they were advised to keep the funds in that address as long as possible because as long as they keep it in there the more difficult

it is to trace back so if you transferred money if you deposited money into the deposit address and waited and now all of this was shut down and you hadn't withdrawn yet is it still possible for the people to access their funds or is this all locked I'm going

to presume yes because I have not seen anything on Twitter about people having funds locked up with the exception of the stablecoins on the circle stablecoins that I was talking about earlier I've not heard of anybody having just pure Ethereum that they cannot access

but obviously I'm not that exposed to Ethereum Twitter so I just see what others retweeting etc but I've not seen that so but again that does come with it you know me hold them hands on saying that this is probably the first time I've ever remotely looked in any level

of detail at anything Ethereum based so it may just be my level of understanding but I've certainly not seen that anybody has had funds locked like to say without with the exception of those circle stablecoins presumably it's the same thing as you're saying with the deposits

as well you'd need to have your own node to even access that and set up that transaction and then you would also rely on miners mining that and I don't know I haven't read anything about miners complying with with these sanctions but also I mean most of the miners on Ethereum

as I've heard are relying on infura anyway so that's kind of a centralizing point. Yeah this is an interesting point that you make actually so Ethereum is currently proof of work just like Bitcoin so it would be easier for currently for miners to ignore the sanctions

if they're running their own node and just process transactions with the highest fee you know as their incentivize to do they're in it to make money. Ethereum is about to move to a proof of stake system so in a not too distant well they're supposed to be moving to it for one time so yeah I know what you're thinking they're

allegedly moving to a proof of stake system where if they do actually pull it off and they move to that as we all know proof of stake systems have tend to heavily centralize over time to you know regulated entities that offer staking rewards their users so people

store their their shit going with said company that company does all the staking and becomes a very powerful actor as a validator node so if this does happen and they do go to proof of stake and there's going to be a few big players that are essentially in control of

the transaction processing then Ethereum just gets even more centralized than it already is so it's just going to become an absolute complete shit show and just an even more cooked network than it already is so potentially going to get even more disastrous and again

harked back to why why we Bitcoin yeah and coming back to Bitcoin like you said this is a dangerous precedent being set and you know I couldn't really give a fuck about Ethereum but the fact that this is happening does sort of prove out that this is the way

things are going to go and then what does that mean I think for me like it feels like we are going to go to this whitelisted and blacklisted coins eventually you are going to have this sort of split where if you're using services to protect your privacy and

keep yourself safe you won't be allowed to interact with the whitelisted coin bases of the world or any of that stuff that touches the legacy system at some point in time because presumably even if you're going into something like world pool and you're coming out and

they don't know that that UTXO is owned by you they still know that it's been through the pool and so presumably they can then say okay this UTXO one hop two hops ago had been through world pool if you want to go and buy this Lamborghini well you can't you're not

allowed the person processing that payment is not going to allow it which is sort of something that I'm comfortable with personally because hey I don't really want to interact with the legacy system be this is about more to me than just number go up and you know the

people who are making these ridiculous fucked up decisions are going to make them forever and they're going to get worse and worse unless we stand up to it and so is this the time now where people see the writing on the wall and just go fuck it I'm going to go to the

dark side I'm not going to allow this yeah well to be fair to your point about you know we're going to kind of see two sides of the network that's in my opinion as already started you know you can't use services like BlockFi or what's the UK one with the mobile app yeah

anyway there's multiple services that already blatantly clear about saying that you can't use our service if you if you use coin join this it's that simple so we've already started to see it to happen and I don't see that slowing down anytime soon these regulated companies

are not going to openly they're going to pander to the regulators is what I'm trying to say and they don't care about the end user they're just going to do what they need to do to stay regulated to stay legal so that they can operate as a regulated business so I think yeah I

don't see any signs of that stopping and I think you know there is a potential for some sort of bifurification of the network that we see white listed coins blacklisted coins however you want to see it and that they can only be spent within their sort of respective

ecosystem but there is a glimmer of hope in all of this and you know we've seen some people are still well starting to wake up to the need for privacy especially with Bitcoin and you know perfect example of that is the world poor unspent capacity keeps going up

and up and up we're hitting all time highs literally pretty much every day at the moment we hit 5000 Bitcoin just a week or two ago the samurai team put out the biggest discount code that they've ever done to celebrate with 50% off mixing fees and then within a couple

of days another 600 Bitcoin decided to flow into that post-mix pool so yeah currently sitting at 5612 Bitcoin I believe we have been a little bit higher than that but we you know we're hovering around all time highs so I like to see that as a as a little beacon

of hope that that people are waking up to the need for it and there is some hope in me that if we can and I hate to use their terminology but if we can kind of muddy the waters with enough Bitcoin that all of this regulation and all of this kind of whitelisting

coins becomes absolutely futile because you know if you've got a big portion of the network that is you know in their words blacklisted or dirty coins that have been through collaborative transactions and coin joins that they can't discern the history of then there's going

to come a point where these businesses if they're not choosing not to do business with these people or the people behind these UTXOs that's going to start to hit their bottom line and that's all that they care about ultimately so I think if we can keep this trend going

we can hit a tipping point where we can get to that point where we're going to leave these regulated businesses no option but to at least consider not over regulating because ultimately using services like Whirlpool is not illegal there's no and I'm not aware of any jurisdiction

that outlaws using coin join it's just that these businesses are scared that it might do in the future so they choose not to which is their brogative of course but I'm hopeful that we can hit that tipping point and to see that unspent capacity number rise consistently

is really promising to your point as well Q&A with like if the pool is large enough it's not just the businesses that would be hurt by their bottom line but also just the like amount of political pressure as well if just more people in the respective jurisdiction

have funds in those pools they'll have an incentive to also support more legislation to prohibit restrictions or to include those going forward but there's one point I wanted to get your thoughts on not both of yours was with coin join we have like two different

implementations one being like the way samurai is done with the equal output coin joins that are very visible on chain but then also another implementation that is then more with like a make a take a model that you have the option to decide with every coin join what the outputs

will be so it is not as visible on chain and going forward that might be something that will become more and more relevant if coin join does become outlawed or there are restrictions on that even if you do get your hands on the software and you do choose to use it it will

be a lot more visible on chain my personal view on it is everyone should just fucking ignore that I like the fact that they have the equal output I like the fact that it is visible and as Q&A said it does muddy the waters what are we doing here if we're not

trying to make ungovernable money like if we're just gonna see that you know that could be a problem in the future oh they might whiteness the coins well I better play nice then I better make sure that they can't see it on chain no fuck that everyone should just be doing it

and how are they going to control it because it's like we're not going to accept your money why oh because it's been through a coin join when was it one hop ago two hops ago seven hops ago a year ago five years ago are they saying if it's ever been through we're not

going to touch it and if that is their stance then they're not going to be taking any money because you know as long as people stand up and you have a group of Bitcoiners who are like no fuck that if we do that now then they're not going to be able to touch anything that

would be my view on it I just think if we're gonna cow-tow and be scared and worried at this stage we're already fucked because it's gonna get much worse yeah completely agree you've also got like a new dynamic where more and more exchanges are adding lightning deposits

and withdrawals now we know that lightning is not the privacy utopia that some people paint it out to be and it does have many many pitfalls but certainly from a deposit perspective and you know if I was to go and deposit to I don't know what it cracking or whatever from lightning

fire lightning sorry that they'll they'll have a very very difficult time discerning the history of where those funds have come from just because of the way that lightning transactions are structured you know there's multiple hops so they can't discern which node it's come from etc etc privacy

send the privacy on lightning is pretty good currently so if they were to take the stance that we've just been talking about with coin joins where they don't accept it because they can either see that you've been through a coin during seven hops back or they just can't

discern the history if they start to clamp down on that then they're also going to have to clamp down our lightning because for different reasons the outcome is the same they can't discern the history of it they may not be able to link it to an on-chain UTXO and they don't

know if this person's just hopped into lightning to deposit for a privacy reason or whether you know they don't know the origin of those sats it's exactly the same you know same output so you know do they it's like you were alluded to Max's case of well if we start this where

do we draw the line because we could do ourselves out of business here ultimately if we take it all the way to you know we're not taking coin joins with any history we're not taking lightning deposits well those deposits are quickly going to start to dry up yeah Bitcoin

the worst is like it's a huge middle finger to the system that's what it is it's like you guys fucked up no more we're not doing it anymore and I don't want to see that stop I don't want to like see people starting to worry about oh can I spend my funds when

they're a million pounds oh no you have to make a stand like this is the last stand that you can make and if you don't you're going to be enslaved so it's pretty fucking important yeah I think you're right as well though like if you're using lightning and they can't

trace it back well then you know if someone really does want to spend the funds and it has been through world pool then maybe that's the answer maybe it's just you know send them through lightning bounce them around a little bit and then pull them out the other side

and it's like well how are you going to prove where that came from in the end I think basically it's going to be whatever regulations they make we'll find a way around it and the other thing I was thinking we were talking about these regulated exchanges accepting lightning

is there a case that could be made for an exchange or a business coin joining funds before they send any funds back out to users for privacy reasons so that you could have you know one of these companies saying well to protect our customers we coin join and then we send

the funds out would that be something that they'd just get shut down for immediately or could they make that case because if they could then you know that's a dumb deal like if these exchanges start doing that or a few exchanges start doing that then there's huge

volume going through there could that be something that could be done could be twists and people's arms yeah so I know um ball Bitcoin in which is a Canada based exchange actually does this and pretty much for the reason or what they state public is the exactly reason that you

just said it's to protect their users privacy they're the only ones that I know publicly that do it there may be people in the background that are doing it I'm sure if they were we'd probably see it because obviously everything's on chain and generally speaking exchanges

have you know known clusters of addresses so if they if any of the companies were doing it we'd be able to see it but I my guess is that nobody else will do it because they're you know fearful of what the regulators might say but yeah I know but ball Bitcoin do that

but I don't know if we've lost connection or if everyone's gone quiet no I'm still here I was waiting for Brian Armstrong to come out with a press release saying that he's gonna do it that's what I'm hopeful for yeah one thing with this like ball Bitcoin doing that

I mean it's absolutely amazing that they they are doing it but I don't maybe I'm missing something but I don't quite see the benefit because what other than that they're contributing to to the to just UTX in world porn and liquidity there but to be clear that they're not using

world porn okay do we know what they're using they'll be using wasabi I think I think they used to use wasabi but the owner of ball Bitcoin has been cagey he's eluded the fact that he doesn't use wasabi but he's got allegedly got his own method of doing it I don't know

what it is but it's claims that it's well we know it's not world ball because he hates that he hates summarize guts but he claims not wasabi either okay either way if they're coin joining they are a regulated company so they obviously know the origins of their

own funds they know the inputs they know the outputs so if they are pressured by the government I mean they will have to put out the information so we're not as a user you're not getting privacy in that respect because they obviously know all flows and from the

outside perspective if the company is large enough and the deposits and the withdrawals are just in such a big amount it's from the outside looking in it's kind of like a custodial mixer is it not so if I'm like just monitoring like crackons in and outflows to their known

addresses linking the specific user funds going in and out if they're not the identical amounts will be pretty difficult so I don't quite see where the benefit directly would be for the users other than this just generally good to support coin job I think they do do

it purely from an ideological reason like you say it's for me just looking at their deposits yeah you wouldn't be able to tell even if they didn't do any coin joins absolutely right I think they do do it purely from an ideological standpoint okay yeah because it's because it's

such large funds you know if you get one large exchange showing it it would make a massive difference and I guess my reason I'm questioning it is you have so many of these exchanges that have public figures who say I really care about Bitcoin I'm really here for the

cause they tell everyone that all the time and then with their actions that doesn't follow and so doing something like this if it is legal and they can do it technically if it's possible for them to do it without getting shut down and they want to tell everyone how

much of a Bitcoin company they are and how much they care about this going forward and how much they care about their users and blah blah blah well then fucking do it because it would make a massive difference yeah I agree I think like it's alluded to earlier

I think most of these regulated exchanges are just chit scared of the regulator which is probably for good reason you know the regulator doesn't have a good track record of being making rational decisions or regulations so they so I think most of them are coming from

the standpoint of well if we just do not if we just do nothing of we just do the same as everybody else then we're you know hopefully we won't be targeted okay I mean we maybe shift gears to some updates got not a huge list but few notable ones we've got Raspy Blitz that

was a nice one I think a lot of people have been anticipating the 1.8.0 the most notable change is the new web UI that was something that's been requested by a lot of users over the years I mean I was seeing for everyone who knows like the origins of Raspy Blitz

was like came out like the hack days in like the Berlin circles most notably like Rutsol started that up with the guys from Fulmo and since then my open arms as well has been big in there and it's been very geared towards developers from the beginning but a lot of

just general Bitcoin users have adopted it because it is very powerful but they've only had like a terminal access up till now so they have made it pretty easy so it's a bit like kind of like the MS-DOS kind of visuals so you are guided a bit more than just like

a plain terminal but still it's a lot of people have gotten used to like the flashy UIs from the likes of Umbrell and my node and also Brendan Dojo so yeah they took that to heart and have built a web UI over the last months obviously with the new API to connect

so the browser can call back and it is pretty much plug and play so you just have to as you would usually just flash your SD card plug it in and because the Raspy Blitz has a small display if you choose to use the recommended setup after booting on the display you'll

be shown a URL that you just type into your browser and the web UI will launch if you're in the same local network and then it will guide you through setup there very nice thanks for the reminder actually I need to update mine today I'm a bit slower in the uptake

with that one so yeah thank you yeah so that was a big development there on other updates there's just a small one was call card the 5.0.6 they had a potential vulnerability with

virtual disks so that was patched in that one so anyone who's already updated to v.5.0.5 should definitely update now to 5.0.6 and the other one then we had another release when we spoke briefly about last week or last time with brother rabbit as well retreat was the

border wallets that was a great one maybe because we spoke about it a bit last time Q&A if you had the time to play around with that shamefully no and I say shamefully because I had a front row seat to watch super far out an MTC on Telegram sort of build this from

literally nothing I know Max had MTC on the podcast last week I think so obviously there's a full deep dive in there but yeah I haven't run through it physically run through it to create one but as I say I've got a fairly good understanding of it in terms of I've seen

it be built from the ground up and these guys have put a shit ton of work in to get this to where it is and I think yes it is slightly more complicated than potentially some other more simple solutions but it's I see it's used case for a fairly specific purpose obviously

clues in the name border wallets and I think it's incredibly powerful tool for people that are in that situation that are in a pinch that might need to just to cross a border with their seed that they wouldn't feel comfortable doing so in plain text or any of the alternatives

so I think certainly you know people in the third world that you know quickly uprooted from their homes absolutely a very very powerful tool so yeah promising to see that get built out and I know the guys are still working on future improvements which obviously I won't

share publicly just yet I won't steal NTC's thunder but they're not done yet as I'll say yeah I was really impressed with it I was just amazed that MTC managed this to be honest such a weird guy and to put this out I was like fucking hell really done wonders

here yeah it's really funny actually before he'd sort of put or started with the actual build and before he'd even got in touch with with super farro I had a call then was sat the afternoon he just ping me on target and he's like I've got this idea and fancy hearing

me out and seeing what you think I just want some feedback and he had like a little you know rudimentary presentation then he ran me through it I was like this is you know this is definitely got legs and it's definitely gonna be useful to some people to see it go

from that and like an idea in his head to what they've built out you know with a fully functioning tool and a beautiful looking website and to see that all of the chatter around it was really pleasurable you know I don't profess to have had any any valuable input

whatsoever than a couple of comments here and there but just being able to watch it get built from literally zero as an idea was yeah really great to see and thoroughly enjoyable from my perspective and hopefully some people will see some value of it I seen a few people

on Twitter shitting on the idea and didn't like the idea because well presumably because they couldn't see you know themselves every in that situation where they might need to leverage a tool like this so I don't also would just say is this but approach it with

an open mind and think that it might not apply to your specific sort of threat model or you know needs as a as a Bitcoin but there's definitely people out there that are gonna get value from this and they're gonna be able to leverage it as an incredibly powerful tool so kudos

to those guys yeah I think I mentioned that last on the last part as well but I think that like what one of the main selling points for the idea is that the amount of like options and just like variability in the setup is absolutely endless and that is yeah as I said

one of the main selling points but also one of the big pitfalls so I think for a Bitcoin setup generally you need to put a lot of thought into that kind of get a grasp on your threat model and so on and you're just yeah what your surroundings are like what your options

are but in this case if you're actually using it for a long time storage you really have to think through what is is sufficient insecurity and complexity and what is just gonna hurt me long term so I see the main benefit in like short-term stuff as it's called obviously

border wallets so that's their approach too but if you're if you're if you want to do this really think through how you could lock yourself out and kind of what restrictions you want to set on yourself so that you you're sure to to get ax and regain access I think

the way I see this could be leveraged by Western Bitcoin is that potentially aren't gonna certainly in the near future have to run across a border with anything they can carry is like using this as a potential additional backup that's you know potentially could be or has a requirement

to be stored less securely if you like you know that you could have your typical backup of an encrypted SD card backup or your seed word stamped into metal you could also use this as an extra one where you can you can just store your your grid you know in a draw

somewhere and somebody finding that grid is not gonna have a have a complete what the hell it is but it's just one extra thing that you as a as an individual Bitcoin and knows what you're doing I can call upon in an emergency situation but it doesn't have to be the be

all on end all and the only backup for your Bitcoin so I think that could be an approach that some people might be able to to leverage that may not need it for its intended or first primary use case yeah absolutely loving looking forward to to seeing what they'll bring out

more I mean if it tees they're ready so I'm looking forward to big things I know Max is keen to have a quick chat about mining month before we get into that I just want to do a quick self-shill on Cito which is obviously my Cito put clues in the name that's built

with that with super far a week we released version 2.0 a couple of weeks ago just after you guys recorded the last podcast and there's a couple of small updates in there that the main one for me that I just wanted to shout out was the multi-sig address derivation so

we've added the ability now that you can load the public key let's say you've you're setting up a two or three multi-sig in Sparrow and you want to just once you've built that wallet you obviously get a list of addresses and you want to sense check that Sparrow is acting

in good faith and then it's showing you the addresses that actually belong to that wallet we've now added the ability and C tool that you can just paste in the public keys so your x-pub or your z-pub into the tool and set your threshold so again in this instance it

will be two or three and it would then spit out a list of receiving addresses and you can just use that as a quick sense check to check that your chosen coordinator software is acting in good faith which I believe it's the first of its kind that's not physically

a wallet if you like and obviously the beauty of this is that you're when you're doing the check you don't there's no private information being entered into the tool so it's less important that you need to do this on an egg up laptop with no wifi card or anything like that because

you're just pasting in z-pubs so there's no sort of security risk there but it's just a quick check that you can use to check that your chosen coordinator software is acting in good faith so yeah I was quite excited about that one it's one that's been on our hit list

for quite a while and pleased to finally get it in there so yeah I'm done self-shilling now Max so if you want to carry on with yourself yeah yeah I'll do mine after I was just on that so you're saying you're putting the x-pub in to check that the wallet is not feeding you fake addresses which

then they could still funds rather than okay and so then by using that tool the only thing that you have to make sure is that there's no leak for privacy that it doesn't somehow link that to you so someone knows oh okay this is you know this is owned by Q&A and that would be I guess the

only thing it's not actually it's not security it's a privacy correct yeah again I with every release and every tweet information piece of information I say about this seed tool is use it offline that doesn't change just because we're putting z-pubs in instead of seeds you know I'd still use it offline

I was just trying to make a point that you know this time to to perform the check you don't need to put any any security sensitive information like private keys into the tool it's just let you say privacy conscious information like you're extended public kit because all's we're

doing is deriving addresses okay cool yeah that's really nice yeah well I'll just do a quick self-shill then mining month pretty fucking exciting actually I've not really lifted my head up for a long time I've been putting out loads of content which is all just stored so every single

day of that month there will be at least one episode that will go out so there'll be bite-sized bitcoins there'll be panels there'll be fudbusters there'll be more long-form conversations prizes and giveaways I think we've got four s9s that are being given away so that people can actually start

mining at home and start learning fan shrouds going out to people a load of other gear and merch and stuff and involvement from the kids so they can ask questions some of them have been doing some bite-sized bitcoins themselves so yeah it's gonna be pretty fucking exciting yeah I

listen to your podcast with with John was it yes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah really interesting guy actually I like listening to him and he's got he should be doing voiceovers that guy he's got a lovely voice hasn't he yeah yeah go on sorry I was just gonna say I've really nailed it there

he's got a great voice loads of ideas on all the mining stuff and knows some of the best miners I've spoken to you know people are really building interesting stuff and they've all jumped into the telegram group with us all helping and also his wife Sarah is incredible like she's been

organizing everything I'm as you know like really really disorganized and there's so much going on for this thing and she's just taking it upon herself to make sure that everyone's lined up every schedule is done properly she's been reaching out and getting sponsors who are going to give

back to anyone who's listening and all this stuff that I would have fucked up completely so the two of those guys have just come in and just made this thing possible and yeah literally could not be doing this without them and it's just amazing to have so many people who have just jumped up and

said yeah we're gonna get involved and this is important and well for all the reasons that we were talking about earlier like having some no KYC SATs is pretty important yeah in fact I mean Q&A just mentioned but everyone go back and listen to that episode with Jon that was amazing and I

now knowing that there'll be a lot more content coming out over a whole month on that topic will be absolutely amazing so really looking forward to that um so like when's that going to be exactly when's it when you're gonna kick that off first of September I've got about 15 episodes backed up

already that I've done and edited and are ready to go and and every day I've got four more recordings today so we're just absolutely planning through so yeah every single day there'll be one or two from the first of September there's some articles being written as well just loads of content and like I

said the giveaways will start on the first of September as well so any sponsorship that we're taking on none of the SATs are going to any of us organizing it's all then going to make sure that all the shipping of fan shrouds and the S9s and any other bits that are going to people that's all

covered and so crypto cloaks have stepped up and said they're going to be helping with a few bits and black coffee is going to be printing those fan shrouds Jon's giving a couple of S9s away himself I think Kaboom racks are getting involved and giving a couple away as well and yeah more to

come fantastic yeah exact time is looking forward to that hope it goes well one thing we are going to need is some help from some of the privacy guys so if anyone has any advice for the miners making sure that they know how to set up world pool making sure that they are not giving away

their location when they're mining any sort of tips and tricks and stuff like that that's been quite a theme in the telegram group is you know a lot of these guys are really thinking seriously about how they can refine things so basically we want involvement from anyone who can give advice

as well as asking questions is it worth putting a link to the telegram room into the show notes i'll be happy to drop in there and throw in my two sets yeah definitely i'll do that good idea cool well that's my shield done Q and A you've done yours and some of you got anything

um well there are a few things coming up now um we just we've got the material sent out so the seed mince will be they're being produced now so that's amazing as a long process took a lot longer than we thought but they'll be they're shortly so they're bringing produced so keep a lookout for that and we've also launched

the small square steel QRs so that you don't have any branding of a seed sign or anything else they're a lot more compact and like more anon style there so yeah for anyone who was waiting for that make sure to check that out and you might if you've been following the site for a while

you might see that we've lowered the prices pretty substantially because with just the amount we've been able to produce now we could go down with the price so we decided to pass that on so anyone who was hesitant because of that fact um you might want to jump in and have a look

around again awesome i just had a thought Max if you've still got my key ring the answer must did for me yeah i've got the key ring and i've got i think a few plates and bits and pieces haven't i answer this yeah yeah yeah there should be a package i just thought it was ironic that um

i'm going to see answer this before i see you Max and we live in the same country yeah well that's your fault because yeah it got sent out to me and you were like oh yeah just bring it along to bitcoin beach and i was like yeah that's good and so i packaged it all nicely and was

ready to give it to you but you didn't arrive so you know it's your fault and then i had a load of stuff come over from SNCC as well which then was given to MTC and then MTC is fucking knick bat as well so he's holding my stuff hostage i'm holding yours hostage no one's got what they're

supposed to but except for me actually because i did win in the prize i won some seed plates so i'm winning here i saw that did you win the what was it a quiz bitcoin history quiz yeah yeah it's just basically the biggest brain there obviously one obviously that's me and just got loads of prizes

wasn't even really paying attention but just smashed it to be honest with you oh well done no i don't know how that happened i think that potentially everyone was hanging from the night before or people had some stroke or i don't know what happened but anyway i uh you were the only

one taking part with you that pretty much yeah yeah one of the kids was as well but um i sabotaged them so they lost is that the one that was doctoring everybody yeah that was so funny uh but yeah anyway guys it's been really good to catch up hopefully we do it again soon and um yeah

we'll speak soon speak soon guys and to miss i'll see you and rega mate looking forward to it have a good day guys later guys bye thanks again for listening we will be back next month with more bitcoin updates in the meantime i just want to thank everyone for reaching out streaming

sats and giving feedback i really do appreciate it if you haven't checked out our content on ungovernable misfits i suggest you do that now it's ungovernable misfits.com any feedback good or bad is appreciated catch you on the next one