A Prescription for Privacy | The Confab 30: Vik Sharɱa

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

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.

Welcome back to another Confab episode. I recorded this a couple of weeks ago, and I've sat on it for a while because we've had so much content going out. But this was a really good one. I recorded with Vic Sharma, the founder and CEO of Cake Wallet.

It was really cool to hear his backstory and why he does what he does with cake. I won't spoil it for you now, but this is what the confabs are all about. Before we jump in, I just wanna say a big thank you to everyone who's been sharing these episodes with friends and family, making clips, boosting,

sending XMR chats, and everything else you're doing to support the show. It really is appreciated. Top boost from the last confab episode with the bugle boys was from Chet with 5,021 sats and streamed 70.

He says, banger. Riven Stokes with 1,500 sats. Song was actually good. Max, I have been trying to find an episode you and John, I think, made a while ago about all the super good and honest donations that your friend you've written Jake, but I think you might mean someone else, has made over the years.

I don't know what episode it was, but it was with John. It may have been labeled something appropriate for that. I I think it would have been a PMM episode, and it would have been about a year ago from now. I tell you what, I put a bounty on it. Whoever finds out what that episode is, I'll send you 10,000 stats.

There you go. And then, Riven Stokes, you're gonna know. John might listen to this, and John will know. I'm sure. Stack Jarrow, 1,000 sats. The satire here ain't real. No satire here, mate.

Murdork with 550 sats and streamed 55, no message. Verissimus, 532. Great show. Feel like a fool though. Now going swap call for nuts.

Scylla Thornbrook with a 121. He just says stay free. Scylla Thornbrook, what an absolute legend. Thank you for everything you do. It is appreciated. Prio Hawk with a 101. Be free and have fun playing with your sats.

Gnostagang sent a 100 sats and just said boop. And b t c on board said Bucle Boys are the best. Can confirm. Thank you also to Kerim for carefully going through and editing all the audio and background noise and everything we had in this one. It's not perfect, but he's done an incredible job. So thank you as always to our amazing editor.

Right. Final messages before we jump in. A big thank you to Foundation for supporting the show, and congratulations to them for launching their new device. If you've been living under a rock and you haven't yet seen it, it is prime time.

Go back and have a listen to the Freedom Tech Friday episode we did with Zach and Q and Seth and me, where we go into the device and the launch. Go and check them out at foundation.xyzed.

If you wanna buy one of these incredible devices, you can use the code ungovernable. That will get you, I think, see the 10 or $15 off, but it will get you a discount. I'm very proud to have these guys as a sponsor, and I can't wait to see what they achieve with Prime.

Go and check them out at foundation.xyzed. Thank you also to K Wallet. They help make this show and everything we do at Ungovernable Possible. I hope this confab gives you some insight into why Vic and the team made the decisions they make, why privacy matters so much to them, and why they're always at the forefront.

If you actually use Bitcoin, Monero, and other cryptocurrencies, Kate Wallet genuinely is the Swiss army knife. You can do swaps. You can store your cryptocurrencies. You can spend your cryptocurrencies.

You can buy gift cards. It has endless amount of features. They've now rolled out lightning that actually just works. And the user experience across the wallet is second to none. Any idiot can use this.

I'm walking proof of this. If you haven't already used it, go and download it. Download the APK or go to one of the app stores and join over a million others who have downloaded and used this incredible wallet.

Cakewallet.com.

Hey, Vic. Welcome to the show. Hey. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. How are doing? Yeah. Good. Thanks. Thanks for coming on. It's been a while I've wanted to do this, so good to finally sit down and chat. I forget. Is this live?

It is. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We jump straight into them on the confabs. When I say live, I don't mean that this is a livestream. I just mean it's recording. When I do the confabs, we just go straight in,

like, cold, literally, like we're meeting for the first time because I find that less scripted and kind of, like, podcast y. It annoys me when I hear those type of things. So that's what I mean. So we're not we're not live. Yeah. That's that's wonderful.

Good to have you on, and I wanted to say also thank you so much for supporting what we do here to you and the Cake Wallet team because we've managed to grow quite a lot since you guys started helping and jumping into the Freedom Tech Fridays and all that kind of thing. So it's been really cool.

Well, you're welcome, and that's great to hear that it's helping and that you're growing. We wanna support the message that you're putting out about privacy and self custody and and being ungovernable.

So we're happy to be here. Thank you. And most people, obviously, who listen to this show will know about Cakewallet, especially since Seth has joined the ungovernable family and hosting shows with me and everything else. So I really wanted today just to, since it's our first time speaking, go right back before crypto, before

cake wallet, before any of this madness. What were you doing, and what was your life like? Well, how far back do you wanna go? I guess I should go back to what influenced me in just in tech in general. Right. I'll go back to my teenage years, I guess. Eighties, I taught myself a bunch of different languages. Of course, I got to Apple two.

I taught myself basic like everybody did, and then assembly language, and even way down to machine language because I really wanted to know how things work. Then I went off to university

where I studied electrical engineering. I actually started off as computer science, but then I switched to electrical engineering. Just I wanted to get my hands on things. Probably the biggest regret of my life, probably should have stayed in computer science.

That was '88. I mean, who knew this Internet thing is just gonna blow up? I mean, no one even had heard of Internet. Mhmm. So I went to a university called Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

And between my freshman year and sophomore year in the summer, they started putting in these fiber optic connections in each dorm room. So and two of them. So, like, I had my own and my roommate had his own, and it was the second university to put in fiber optic to each dorm room and to have Internet for each student, which is just crazy.

And I just thought it was the most amazing thing. And then at that time, of course, I didn't have the Apple two. I had the Mac s e thirty, and they had a tech that would come around each dorm room and install a card in your computer, and boom, you had this text based Internet, which is freaking awesome.

And then I eventually graduated electrical engineering, and I and I joined my dad's business, which was completely different, which was the steel industry. So for the last thirty

three years, I've been in the steel industry. We had an engineering firm. We we designed rolling mills and processing lines for the steel industry, which is fine. I like building stuff.

But during that time, during the thirty five years, I definitely continued to invest in or start little companies. I had a networking company in Pittsburgh in the late nineties, which I sold off in 2002 maybe. So I've always dabbled in IT,

if you if you wanna say Mhmm. In the tech world, and I always kept up with what's happening in the tech world. I was always looking to do something. Then in 2013 I mean, of course, I had heard of Bitcoin before 2013, but it was just kinda, like, keep passing.

And then finally in 2013, the steel industry was just super slow, and I would just sit in my office watching YouTube videos on Bitcoin, and it just clicked for me. I was like, this is the future. You know? This is amazing that you can transfer value around the world in a decentralized and permissionless way,

and I was hooked. That was just amazing. Do you think you were hooked and excited about that because you were I'm making assumptions here, but being in the steel industry, it's like a global business, I assume.

Were you thinking there are problems within the banking system for the things that you were doing, and it was a pain point. And therefore, yeah. Okay. Bitcoin, I see the value. Because most people don't see

that. A lot of tech people, especially then, I don't think really understood why that's so powerful. They're like, yeah. We got banks. It's only when you really use them is the problem. Our steel engineering and machinery business is definitely a global business. I don't think we had any clients in The US.

It was mostly China, India, Middle East, Africa. So that's great. I mean, I I did see the problems with international payments, always getting permission from

banks to collect payment, and then, of course, the customers, our clients, we have to get permission from their banks to to make payments. And, you know, it's definitely a hassle. So, yeah, I I definitely saw the problems with permission to payment, and let's let's call it that, through banks.

I mean, today, I'm making just even a personal wire internationally, I would say one out of six times, it gets blocked, and I have to call this number and be on hold and explain to them why I'm making this payment. It's for my protection. I get it. And there's a lot of victims,

of course, to to fraud, especially when it comes to Wire. But if you know what you're doing, and I think it's an outdated system that just to use and hold and manage and send and receive your money, you need to go through a custodian or a master, if you if you can say. It sounds ridiculous.

And I think Bitcoin was one of those things you didn't know that you needed it until it came out. I was fine working through banks. Yeah. The hassles were there, but it was like, okay. That's that's the system. That's what it is today.

But for somebody to to change the system, to see that inefficiency and lack of control, and to develop something like Bitcoin is just mind blowing. I'm I'm still blown away by it now. It's I've been here for thirteen, fourteen years now, and it still amazes me. It clicked for me. You know? And I and I would talk to people

about it, and exactly what you said, they didn't see they wouldn't get it. They didn't see the problem with the current system. They didn't understand

the problem that Bitcoin's trying to solve. And the other biggest thing I think we're missing in this whole thing is the financial crisis that happened right before Bitcoin was invented or the reason Bitcoin was invented, where the government's just printing money to bail out Goldman Sachs and AIG.

I don't know if the young people even remember that time. And Paulson stood on TV next to next to Bush, and they said, hey. We're gonna we're gonna bail out

Goldman and AIG. And I think a lot of people, including myself, looked at it, hey. Wait a minute. They're ripping us off. That's our money. Not only are they issuing out our money, but they're issuing additional money, and that's devaluing our holdings. And and, frankly, that's why Bitcoin was invented,

because of that financial crisis. They wanted the people's money, get away from a central issuer, get away from a central entity that can screw with our money. So, you know, all those things clicked for me when I read Bitcoin, and when I read about Bitcoin and watching videos and all that. Like you said, you're absolutely right.

Even even today, some people don't see that as either don't get it or don't see that as an important characteristic. For sure. Going back to 2008 as well, I remember it distinctly because I think four days before it all really went bad,

I had bought my first home. I walked in, and I said to my boss at the time, I was young, like, really young. I said, is this a problem, Lo? And he went, oh, yeah, mate. You're fucked. For at least give it ten years, you're fucked. You're underwater and and upside down. And I was like, good. The timing.

The the perfect timing. So, yeah, I remember it well. Yep. Alright. So you sat there, and you're in the steel company. You have some time on your hands. You're somewhat primed in the sense that you're already

much more technical than the average person and and interested in technology and how things work, which puts you in a a particularly good position to understand this stuff. Yeah. Exactly.

I stayed in the steel industry, and I'm still in the steel industry today. I bought a couple miners off of eBay, bought some ASIC miners, and I stuck them in the basement of my office building in in Pittsburgh, actually. I mean, I was living in New York. Okay.

Sent the miners off to our to our building in Pittsburgh and stuck them in the server room downstairs, and they're running good. I mean, they're generating, like, 0.2 Bitcoin a day, which was, what, $40 at that time. You know, a year and a half later, you know, the difficulty level kept going up, and eventually something happened.

Maybe there's power or something that stopped working, and I just never turned them back on again. The 2013, I also started hanging out at the Bitcoin Center in New York and just learned a lot from the people there, people who do presentations.

And it was great. You would go there for events, there's, like, six, seven people. It was it was awesome. You can have a lot of one on one conversations.

Learned a lot from that that experience. And, I told him I bought a couple of miner. I think Vlad tweeted about this other day, and he's like, just buy Bitcoin. So and after a year and a half, when my miner shut down, then I just started buying Bitcoin on a daily basis, so which was good. In, like, 2016,

what were we doing with Bitcoin all of us back then? Nothing. We're just collecting. And and, of course, people are doing things with Bitcoin on the darknet market, but I wasn't one of them. Just collecting, and my wife wanted some antibiotics.

See, in The US, it's it's a pain to get antibiotics. You have to go to the doctor and then get a prescription and go to the pharmacy. And she's like, I know what I need. I said, I know the perfect place to get antibiotics.

I got on this dark night market called AlphaBay, and I bought antibiotics. Dark night amoxicillin. Yeah. The amoxicillin or some whatever it was. And foolishly, I sent my Bitcoin directly to the ones on Darknet Market from my Coinbase account, and Coinbase closed my account immediately. That's when I learned about ChainAnalysis.

Right? And I was like, what the hell is going on? How do they know? There must be millions of Bitcoin addresses on the dark market. Right? But somehow they knew, and that same rabbit hole went down in 2013, went down again at the 2016 or '2 early two thousand seventeen. I don't remember. On AlphaBay,

there was this other coin called Monero. And I thought, why? What the heck is this Monero? Why not other popular coins like Litecoin or Ethereum or whatever was hot at that time? Right? And then same rabbit hole I went down to 2013.

I went down again in late two thousand sixteen or early two thousand seventeen, I don't remember. And I thought, what the heck is this Monero? What I experienced with Coinbase and and Bitcoin,

and I realized, okay. That's why this Monero thing is invented to kinda protect you from that. And that led me down the path of, again, about privacy. Oh, and by the way, if I if I could just say something. I mean, it it's just not about Bitcoin and Monero where I got interested in privacy. I was interested in privacy even before 2013.

I had a app on the App Store, which was a email client with a calculator front. So it looked like the, you know, calculator icon, and when you opened it, you got a calculator, and you have to punch in a key.

And you would get an email client, and you could add Gmail and and a bunch of other client email clients on there. So I was always in interested in privacy. And I would say, even with Bitcoin, I mean, you know, I talk about permissionless decentralized payments.

You haven't ordered more amoxicillin, have you? Because I think Coinbase is after you.

I know. The New York City, the siren's over. That's so loud. I think I think the buildings you know, I think the noise bounces out of the buildings. Is amplifying.

So I was always interested in privacy. And, you know, Bitcoin, if you use it the right way, if you never link your addresses or identity to some, you know, centralized KYC exchange, you can still use Bitcoin to some level privately. So that definitely had a huge part in my interest in 2013 in Bitcoin as well. Yeah.

So that led me down the path of Monero and and privacy in general even more and chain analysis

and how that works. I'm an iPhone user, and there was no iPhone wallet or at least not an open source iPhone wallet. And a lot of things I do just because I think I want them. If I want them, there must be other people out there that want them. There must be people like me. That's what motivated me to build Cakewallet.

And as you know, it was a Monero only wallet when we launched for about a year and a half, two years. My memory is, like, going, like, roughly. That's so funny that the first time not funny for you, but funny that the first time that you use Bitcoin is to buy something completely normal and necessary for your wife

so that she gets better and immediately you get stung. That's quite a abrupt awakening and one that I think a lot of people don't either ever have or don't have for a long time just because their idea of use

is very different to your idea of use there because your idea of use there is I actually want to buy a thing and do a thing that's useful in life and help my wife. And most people's is, I wanna buy it, and then I wanna sell it because that's the uses for you know, it's gone up in value, and that's my use.

And they say on exchanges, never actually use it for what it was intended for. And that is a seriously rude awakening, which is why I totally get it. When you see Monero, you're like, oh, okay. Right. This is a design improvement for what I'm trying to do here. This is solving a problem.

You're ahead of the curve in that sense compared to most people because you're thinking in a different way. And, like, Monero, people don't often wrap their heads around it because they just don't actually understand the problems that you can have with Bitcoin

and how hard it actually is to do things privately. Even if the people we surround ourselves with, like a Seth and a q and, like, all the guys who are privacy people,

even they'll say, like, you really can make a mistake easily. Like, you make one mistake, and it's there forever. So I don't know whether it's spending a lot more time with Seth or just, like, looking into it, but my use of Monero personally has gone through the roof compared to it's gone from, like, zero to now probably,

70% of payments I make in Monero, whereas they used to be pretty much zero. It's if I can, I do for that reason? I know how to use Whirlpool. I I know how to use a lot of the privacy tech. That's pretty much what we talk about on Uncoverable all the time, but still, this works out of the box.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, just using Monero, you just there's no there's no worry here. You're not worrying if that was that coin was linked to some nefarious activity before.

But, you know, look. I'm I'm a Bitcoiner as well. Right? I like Bitcoin. I wanted to succeed. I I support Bitcoin as as you see in Cakewallet we're doing. We did so many experimental things which nobody was willing to do, like silent payments, for example, or paid version two.

Even the lightning thing we did, it was was, you know, Spark is is something new. We wanna build and support things for Bitcoin, and and we'll continue doing it. But I think we live in a multicoin world, and I think it's okay to have options.

You know, just getting back to what you're saying about Bitcoin being used, how it's intended to be used, and, you know, you have the just total bro guys out there mentality.

They say, read the white paper. I'm like, yeah. I read the white paper. It says to use it as a currency. People argue with me on this. I I think the use is what gives it value. Right? The fact that somebody is willing to give you goods or services against it is what gives it value.

And the pizza guy, right, I think we should thank him. I mean, he spent 50,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas. I think it was monumental. It was a huge milestone that somebody is willing to give you food, some goods for some this new made up asset on the Internet

is important, and I think it needs to continue. I'm I'm an avid advocate for for using Bitcoin for payments and and and what have you. Yeah. Definitely. And they don't have to be mutually exclusive.

There's people who are so hard in one camp. Like, you never spend it. Take it to my death. It's it's for my children's children, blah blah blah, all that stuff. Like, well, what about, like, both? Yeah.

That meme. Right? Then why not both? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Literally that. You were thinking, alright. You're you're an iPhone user. You're looking for something where you can use Monero at the time because presumably at that time, there were iPhone wallets for Bitcoin even if there weren't that many or they weren't that good necessarily.

But you looked around. You didn't have anything. And then what? You just you were like, well, okay. I'm gonna have to build something. Yeah. So the developer who helped me build that calculator app who had no crypto experience, I said, hey. Let's let's build a wallet from an arrow. No experience in cryptocurrency.

And and that initial philosophy of Cake Wallet, I think, was quite interesting, which is carried over to today still, is that go ahead and learn it and come back.

And we apply that to our team today. Oh, no one's done this before. And I said, that's okay. Go study it. Take your time. Whether it takes a month, two months, whatever it is, let's experiment. Let's learn. And I'll tell you the team loves that.

They they love having the freedom to do that, that, you know, we don't we don't have to build something and deliver it today. It's okay. Let's let's study it. And that's what happened on day one. You know, we went out, studied it, learned it, and we said, okay. We can do this. I didn't know how the community would take it.

I really wasn't that involved in the community. I never went to Reddit. For example, I think in 2016, '17, and even maybe 1819,

Monero was huge on Reddit. The Monero community is where r slash Monero where is where everything happened. People loved it. I think the first week, we got a thousand downloads, which is insane. I was like, okay. This is real. I need now I need to go out and offer support.

I mean, I was doing support on my own. And then I started doing these meetups on on 40 Wall Street. There's a guy named he's still there. Should say it was. Pat. He was at x cubicle, and he used to do these meetups. And I started doing these meetups with him for Cake Wallet and in Monroe in general.

And we'd have great turnout. You know, good forty, fifty people would show up, and it was interesting. The first few meetups was just me plugging my iPhone into a projector and showing how Cakewell works. Here's how you send. Here's how you receive. Here's how you do this. It's it's fun. It's interesting.

The guy who helped you build Cake initially and who built the calculator app and email stuff. You said he wasn't interested or involved. Did he become involved? In crypto? Yeah.

I mean, he's still with us. He's he's Oh, he's still with you? Oh, awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I I would say he's not a I I shouldn't say much about him. But, yeah, he's not, like, a big crypto user. Yeah. But he definitely sees the value in it. And Okay.

And the funny thing is he probably understands it much deeper than anyone on this planet.

Maybe why he uses it less than

He's great. He's just amazing. I he was, what, 19 when I hired him. He was just amazing. Very, very brilliant individual. Like like a lot of people on Cake Wallet team, really smart dudes.

It's got an incredible team, and I like the culture. I like that there is some room for nuance. It's really the first time that I've seen willingness to look at other options and then not just for an argument, like, be I'm in this camp and only in this camp. It's like

different things have different use cases like any tools in a tool shed, not everything. You know, just because you have a hammer, not everything's a nail kind of approach. And when I first got Seth on to our shows and, like, started speaking to him, I was like, this is nice to have. Because I'd really only ever seen that kind of

approach from, like, Andreas Antonopoulos and a couple of others where they're like, yeah. This is technology. There's other stuff. And I started to get a little bit sick of the maxi mentality attacking.

If it started to feel like you're actually slowing down progress here. So, yeah, I've always appreciated that about your team specifically. What I find interesting is that in the early days of Bitcoin,

to look into something and understand and accept it, you had to be an open minded person. Right? You had to be open minded to something that's coming in and changing this thousands and thousands of your old banking system.

You had to be forward looking. And when I find Bitcoin Maxis from that era that aren't willing to move past that, I find it quite interesting. I have never done a survey or studied this or whatever, but I believe the early people who got into Bitcoin

would be open minded, continue to be open minded to new technologies and and new thought processes. I'd like to believe that I have no facts or data on this. I mean, live in a multicoin world today, and that's not gonna change. I mean, by bashing other coins, this and that, it's not gonna they're not gonna go away.

There'll always be new things, new technology coming up. So I just ask everyone to be open minded. Well, you can build more interesting things with more tools is is kind of the thing. I I have a sort of loose theory on why people became so tribal. I I think a lot of it just comes down to Scamming.

Yeah. It was kind of like they don't understand the technology or use the technology as much as they say they do for one, because otherwise, they would run up into

the types of issues that you've run into and I've run into and anyone who actually uses it would do. Two, they like to fit in with the tribe because it's easy and comfortable. And three, they probably are overinvested in, a traditional sense. I I don't think you really can be, but they're overinvested emotionally and financially

without the understanding. So they get very defensive. It's like, oh, my whole life is in this thing. So if other people are talking about something that I don't understand, I have to attack it because it attacks me. And so that's the default, unfortunately.

Yeah. I think there's definitely some element to that.

And I think there's some there's some axes out there with good intentions. They believe and a lot of people went through a lot of scams. A lot of people got hurt and crypted over the last ten, twelve years. And they're like, listen. Just buy Bitcoin. It's safe. Yeah. And I I get I get that mindset. I get it. You know?

So It's more right than it's wrong. Yeah. I think there are people out there with good intentions. I mean, the Bitcoin space is so big. Now you're gonna get all sorts of people. And that it's fractured as well?

Yeah. It's fractured as well. I put out a tweet, like, five, I don't know, five, six years ago, and I got really attacked for it. I said, it's not that Bitcoin Maxis don't like Monero because they don't understand Monero. They don't like Monero because they don't understand Bitcoin.

They had murdered for it. That's a lovely rage, Bate. I like that.

That's where the fracturing comes in, though, isn't it? It's like if you're not interested actually in privacy, then you don't see the value. You're saying you're already interested in privacy prior to all of this. You already had developed an application because you cared about privacy. I I don't think that's a normal view

or even something that people even think about. So what made you care about privacy even before this stuff? Was there a a trigger, a reason, the way you were brought up, or, yeah. What what made you like that? Well, I mean, since this was an iPhone app,

and it just was I'm not batching iPhone, but just these devices that you carry around daily, it just made me realize you're putting more and more of your life and data into this electronic square slab that you're carrying around every day. And if somebody gets ahold of it, they'll see your private data or private emails.

And that was the thought process that you're putting your whole life and information and data into this this tiny device, and your friends or enemies or border crossing,

law enforcement, whatever, can just open up your phone and see everything. My little way to protest, I guess, by some some sort of privacy tool. I guess it's just that most people outside of the space don't think

about that or, like, even if they do, they're not thinking about making tooling for it. And most people, I guess, they're like, oh, well, so what if law enforcement get it? They're there to protect me. So what if government have access to my information? You know, they're daddy government. They're here for me. They love me.

I think it's kind of, at least in my view, it's completely naive. But for a lot of people, it's like, why wouldn't this data be out there? Why would I care? So what if, you know, all the banks have information to every single payment I make and all this kind of stuff? I think it's normal for most people. Yeah.

I mean, I think they should be worried. Right? I mean, just a simple thing, like, Google looking for brace for my ankle, and I go to Facebook, and I wanna see your ads for ankles you know, braces for my ankle. And especially now with AI, your all your data, they can tell what type of person you are by your searches.

Yep. Things you talk about online, and and AI sees actually sees humans way sharper than we see ourselves. Right? We we think we're very complicated, but in a group setting, we're all pretty much the same. So now with the use of AI, they, whoever they are, government,

authorities, whatever, can create a profile for you and can figure out exactly how you vote, for example, maybe based on your likes and dislikes and and and topic discussions and or even the way you form sentences, words you use, if they're able to figure out what type of person you are and then go ahead and control

voting in your jurisdiction based on your data, people shouldn't be worried. And it's happening today. It's happening today. It feels like there's a real tipping I guess it off often feels like there's a tipping point, but especially with AI stuff. I'm thinking more and more about that. Like, I'm so used to segmenting,

like, okay. I'm gonna manage my UTXOs in a certain way, and this wallet's for spending here, and this one's been through Whirlpool. So it's that. And the the the and this one's KYC. So if I need to actually sell some, I could put it back into the fiat world without having problems and compartmentalization

with all of the stuff with Bitcoin. But now it's happening with AI where I'm going, fuck. We're starting to lean on it more and more for the show for different parts. And I don't want my personal

use of AI to overlap with my business use of AI to overlap with my ungovernable use of AI. And so you start to be like, well, okay. Things have to be run locally, or I have to use different services, or I need something like Maple where it's encrypted for the stuff that matters. And it feels

again like it did eight, ten years ago when I'm talking about Bitcoin privacy

and how important it is and people going, oh, just reuse addresses. That's sort of how I feel most people are using AI now. Like, just blindly putting their whole life on there and just going Mhmm. Yep. Just have it. I'm guilty of it too. I talk to chat with you all the time.

Who knows where all that information is going and how it's being used. Yeah. Well, it's convenient and fun. So It is amazing. It's so cool. But have you started looking into, obviously, being a techie guy, locally run AI and

playing around with agents or any of that kind of stuff, or are you just too busy between the steal and k qual and everything else? I just don't have time, and I finally set up an OpenClaw.

Charik helped me, but, you know, then I linked it to my OpenAI account. Of course, you should run local level m's. So that's the next step. Again, I I want to. It's just just time constraint. I did something fun the other day. On my OpenClaw machine, I installed the Monero CLI, and I got it to control the Monero wallet.

And I use Telegram as the communication channel, of course Mhmm. With OpenClaw.

And now I can just type. It's not good for cake wallet, to be honest with you. But, yeah, I can just type, hey. What's my balance? Send such and such Monero to such and such person. So I just did it for fun. Just to see if it can't be done, and it was done. Even my wife, like, this weekend, you have to set an open clock for me.

I said, like, okay. Okay. That's cool. I mean, this is. Is your wife techy as well? I mean, she's not in program or anything, but she loves it. She loves hearing about it. You know? If I'm watching YouTube videos on OpenCLAR or something, she'll sit there and watch it. She's a huge user of ChatGPT, and she wants to switch to Claude.

She's not a coder by any means, but she's seeing all these videos of people creating apps using Claude. So she's like, oh, I'm gonna try that. So I hope she does. That's so cool.

I love that, like, bridge it's giving with people who aren't software developers. The perfect example that I love talking to people about is Q, who obviously does, like, half the shows with me. I've known him for, like, a decade now. Super productive guy, so good at explaining stuff,

really understands things in-depth. But he would always say to me, I wanna do this and do that, or I don't like this about this, but I'm not a dev. And recently,

now with the use of AI and Claude and, like, all this stuff that he has his, you know, fingers into, he's, like, sending me videos. He's like, oh, yeah. I've just built a mission control. It does this. It checks this. It does and, like, what? How long does that take you to do? He's like, oh, like, did it in an evening.

He's building this stuff that is, like, genuinely amazing. And I'm saying to him, like, you always used to say you're not a dev. You kind of are now, mate. Kind of are with this. It's amazing. Yeah. Like you said, it just makes it so accessible to to nontechies, nontevs.

And I think the last time we did any coding was 1992, which is in c to control motors. You know? Yeah.

But like you said, this gives me confidence now to even, you know, getting the Monero CLI to run, I said, here's what I wanna do. And it would tell me, type this in terminal, then type this in terminal, paste the result here. It was, like, totally brainless. And in the end, it worked. It's freaking amazing.

My next goal is to install Bitcoin Core on my claw machine and try running that through my telegram. It could be interesting. Yeah. It's fun seeing the iteration in the Bitcoin Monero world now. Like, seeing people like, literally on the on the last Freedom Tech Friday, we were talking about basically searching and surveilling yourself

with an app that you can have running locally and and checking everything. And and this is a project that had been vibe coded, like, over a hacking weekend. Which one? I'm sorry. It was called Stealth.

It was on our last Freedom Tech Friday. We did, like, a a livestream and talked through the projects and everything. But you can, like, put in your XPUB. It can give you a load of feedback and information on, oh, this is linked to this address.

This is, you know, whatever. Like, gives you, like, a a layout of what you could do and should do and, like, to track yourself, but without giving that information to someone you shouldn't. And these guys had vibe coded it. This is something me and Q have talked about forever.

Like, oh, this would be amazing. This would be so useful. And then because they have this tool,

they're iterating faster. And then Seth is watching it, and he's like, oh my god. This would be amazing to have in cake. Like, we, you know, we could use this part and that part. And then because it's open source, it's like, well, we you can. So

so Yeah. You you're seeing it in front of your eyes, like, much better the tooling can get. Yeah. You know, I was I was at a dinner a few weeks back hosted by MoonPay and CNBC here in New York City. And I sat next to a I don't know if I should say their name, but a very, very popular NFT exchange website.

Okay.

And they said they they've cut down from 300 people to 50 people because of AI, and they've made it a requirement in the company that all code has to be written by AI. And if you don't use AI to write your code, you have to give a report why Oh, wow. Okay. Why that was done. Why did you have to do it manually?

And, of course, the purpose of that report is then to see how that itself, you know, in the future can be done by AI. And then I was at an HRF event at another company there, and they said the exact same thing.

I see that happen in more companies and throughout your personal life and throughout your business life for sure. And how's that changed, like, since, obviously, jumping back a little bit now,

developing cake at the beginning, having that need and saying, okay. Well, I'm gonna have to build it then, and starting with you and one other person and with the tooling you have then with the information on cryptocurrency as it was then, comparing it to now, what you guys do and the way that you iterate and the things that you try are

generally a few steps ahead of what most people are doing. Do you think a lot of that is gonna now accelerate even harder, or are you changing the way that you guys work with the tools that you have now? You know, the last six months seems to have really stepped up with what can be accomplished.

Like, has it changed the way that you're working within Coke? So probably Seth and Omar would answer this better, but I can speak in more general sense. We're pretty lean and mean already, so I'm not looking to we're I'm actually looking to add more people, by the way. So if you're running developers, send send them my way. I'm not a few.

But I can just speak in general. Right? So number one, we're lean and mean already. Number two, I think one should be open minded to tools that are out there.

I'm not involved in the in how the dev team works anymore and what tools they're using, but I think one should whether whatever field you're in, I think you should at least give tools a chance, and you should be using new tools that are out to help you perform better and be more efficient. From a coatings perspective, I don't know.

Checking the PRs, I have no idea. I'll leave that to Seth and Omar to answer or maybe somebody on the dev team. I'm sure they're using AI to help write or to check or to proofread. I don't know. I will find out for you, though. Or ask Seth, and Seth would better answer that. I'll ask Seth. I bug him most days, so I'll

ask him. Now being where you are running probably one of the biggest wallet companies there is, how do you think when you first started getting involved with this stuff, how different is the Bitcoin, crypto, Monero world to where you thought it was gonna be? Were you like me where

you were like, this is gonna absolutely change the world. Everyone's gonna be using this in the next decade. Like, this is like, everyone and their grandma, like, banks are gonna collapse, blah blah blah, like, an unrealistic expectation, or is it kind of bang on where you thought?

I like the state of the crypto world today more than, let's say, four years ago. Okay. I would say

four or five years ago I mean, I thought people would be interested in privacy earlier than they are than they did. Right? But I think now people are more interested in privacy than they were four or five years ago. And, you know, just going back to the Bitcoin maxim mentality of, you know, people getting hurt and, you know, the Solana

meme coins and NFTs where people lost millions and a lot of other bullshit tokens where people lost millions, I'm kinda glad we're past that now. There's definitely more interest in privacy now. I mean, just look at Monero. Just go on Twitter. There's so many individuals and and companies that are building stuff for Monero finally.

Zcash, I know that's a forbidden word word in the, community. But, you know, even that, you know, people are saying, I want privacy, and I use Zcash. Okay. That can be debated. I I don't wanna get into that debate. But you're definitely seeing more interest in privacy

and the need for private transactions today than, let's say, four or five years ago. If you would've asked me this question four or five years ago, my answer would've been that I'm very disappointed that people aren't interested in transactional privacy.

Mhmm. But today, I'm very, very confident. I'm I'm very positive and and hopeful by what I'm seeing happen. Yeah. It does feel like there's a a little bit of an awakening in terms of the need for this and and definitely a little bit less trust in some of the

governments and banks and everything else like it, rightly so, it feels like there is a bit of a change there. So people are focusing on this a little bit more. So given that you are hopeful, what's the most

important things in your head that either you're working on or you're seeing out there that you can see making this change? Like, it doesn't even have to be in Bitcoin, Monero, and crypto. It could be, like, in computing more broadly or or something else.

Is there anything that's grabbing your attention and making you feel more positive that people are gonna wake up to that? I think everything that we've discussed I mean, if we talk crypto, I think I mean, the fact of the matter is people in the Western world, right, in The US, do you really need crypto? You've got pretty good

banking channels and other tools. All those things work pretty well. So people are like, yeah. I don't really need Bitcoin. Yeah. I buy in Coinbase and hold on to it. That's fine. But where crypto

and I think stablecoins are driving this. I'm not a big fan of stablecoins because, you know, of course, they require a central issuer, which defeats the whole purpose of why Bitcoin was invented. But I think that introduces people

in countries and jurisdictions where their local currency is just going to shit, and they can at least get The US stablecoin,

and that'll eventually lead them to other crypto like Bitcoin or Monero and other ones. You're seeing that shift happen, and I'm really positive about that, where, you know, a guy sitting in somewhere in Africa I don't know. I'm not bashing Africa as this backward place. Wherever.

Somebody's sitting in some country where they don't have access to foreign currency or they don't have access to worldwide equities, and now they can access USDT

or USDC or whatever stable coin on whatever network, I think, is is a huge step in the right direction. They wanna buy Apple stock. They can buy whatever x Apple on through Cake Wallet or through Hyperliquid or or through whatever, I I think it's just massive. And this is a train that can't be stopped.

I think worldwide, if if governments try to control and regulate this, people are just gonna find an underground way to do it. Just like it happened with Bitcoin early on. So many try countries tried to ban it or suppress it or regulate it, but people found ways to do it because of its decentralized nature.

So I think this access of banking and currencies and equities in underserved markets, I think, is massive. Right? I mean, everybody wants to talk about global south, global South, global South, and we're actually starting to do it. We're we're gonna be doing more marketing in countries like India

where people do have limitations on accessing foreign currencies. And like I said, even if they use stablecoin to begin with and then switch over to Bitcoin, Monero, Litecoin, Zcash, whatever, that's great. That's a huge change in movement you're seeing now, which is awesome. Then outside of crypto,

as we talked earlier, I think even Elon Musk tweeted this, like, last year that because of AI, UI

doesn't matter anymore. You can just tell your AI what you want. And if you wanted to make a UI for you, it can, or you can just tell it what you want it to do, and it'll do it. Such as me putting Monero CLI on on my OpenClub machine. I don't need UI. I can just say, hey. Send such and such Monero to so and so. Those changes

and those movements in the and I'm not talking years. I'm talking months. It's hard. Does feel like that. Yeah. Yeah. It it'll it'll it'll happen now. It'll happen soon. And I love it. Right? It forces you to be it forces you to innovate and and forces you to incorporate

those tools and and technologies into what you're doing or die or you're gonna die. Yeah. I think those are exciting things, and we have those talks internally all the time. How do how can we use these tools to make our users' lives easier and and give them tools that they never even imagined of using?

So I I love it. Yeah. It's very cool. I am excited to see that and, like you say, that people will find a way around. And if someone's sitting in a country where they don't have the same banking and the same access to things as you do in the West, And they have access to AI, and they have access to Bitcoin, Monero, crypto.

Even if their government shuts them down and they can't buy it, well, they can earn it, and that is a a great leveler and kind of a more exciting future, I think, because

then they're not coming into this as, an investment. They're coming into this as the tool that is, well, I can earn it. I can spend it. I can use it. I can build a business. I can service people who need, like, tooling that I can build with AI. They need consulting work. They need whatever, and it doesn't matter where you are.

You know, as long as they have Internet connection and some type of computing, they can do just as much or more. So it's cool. It does it does stop people being lazy fat cats. And, you know, new new technologies,

new tools, it's gonna hurt some people for sure, but it's also gonna uplift some people as well. And that always happens. Right? Well, exciting stuff,

Vic. I I know you've got other bits you've gotta get on with today. I really appreciate you coming on. And like I said, I really appreciate you helping push the ungovernable message and help us build and keep growing. So thank you for that. It's just been cool to get to know you a little bit and hear the backstory and the why.

As I say, most people who listen to this know about Cakewallet, but they probably didn't know all the other bits. So, yeah, I appreciate it. I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks so much. Before you go, I have an announcement.

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