good afternoon everybody as you probably know this is going to be an English panel I looked at
the agenda and we're very well honored we're one of the few big panels today all the other panels
have three people today we are sitting here with the four of us my name is Emmanuel Rodolfo I am
the content manager for bitcoin magazine Netherlands I have the honor of sitting here with three
distinguished gentlemen in the crypto space and we're going to be discussing security of bitcoin
and the future of bitcoin so in the beginning I'll introduce the three of them and then afterwards
we'll be having a few questions that we are going to discuss on the topic I'm hoping at the end
we'll still have some time so we could throw it to you guys as well at the end of the day I won't
have every single question that will cover what you guys want to know so we'll pass it to you and
hopefully get some questions from the public as well that's the whole idea of the breakout room
a little bit more closer to us and get more information okay I'm happy you all are here today
so I'll start over there we got Mr Ruben right here there's a Ruben as a Belgian entrepreneur
he is career spans from finance and technology he compounded n-grave in 2018 and prior to that he
worked on several projects several tech project investment projects including one of Belgium's
early automated investment platforms to be honest I didn't know that and my research I found that
that was very very cool so n-grave operates completely in an offline ensuring users of
private keys are never exposed to online threats and he sets himself apart from the competition
with a wallet that does not require online interaction so that's Mr Ruben moving on from
Boundain we're gonna stick with that okay no problem Mr Boundain is from France
Belgium as well Belgium Belgium to Belgium to the French French speaking part of Belgium
okay he's the confounder and CEO of sato chip hardware law company offering security through an
innovative smart card format at the end of the side chip will support multiple cryptocurrencies
and integrated widely used software as well making for a smooth bitcoin management
at the end of the day the whole point of sato chip is to make it easy and affordable to manage
your bitcoin Mr Jameson we've already heard him speak at the main stage one of the best
comments I've heard today at the end of the day this is one of the most beautiful buildings we've
ever sat in when it comes to cryptocurrency events and I have to agree with you thank you very much
for that comment Mr James has been in this space longer and most of us I think he's been here for
a while you can see it by his beard that's why his beard is so long he's been around for a while
so at the end of the day CEO of Casa he focused his problem primarily on multi-stake wallets
he is the father of security and his ideal solution is the long-term bitcoin holder approach so a lot
of the long-term bitcoin holder and high network individuals are using the solution that he's using
Casa solutions are aimed at providing sovereign control that was one of the points that I came
across in my research review sovereign control for bitcoin assets while maintaining a user
friendly experience was everything I said correct yes yes I hope so ladies and gentlemen we have
three really master's here and and on that point I would like to start right off the bat with with
a simple question for all three of you bitcoin adoption keeps moving forward at the end of the
day we are going to be dealing with a completely new set of users I love the people in here have been
in the space for a long period already so we know what we're doing but with the new users coming in
how do you keep providing security at the level for us at an advanced level but at the same time
making it user friendly for those adopting bitcoin now right now let me start with you Roman
yes so let me get to the question sink in a bit yeah
so I guess one of the things that we've been working on for the last two years with Engraves
is on how do we make sure that all of these retail banks out there will already have all
the users all users in web two how do we make sure that they offer
let's say that they offer crypto solutions to these people but in a way that it's still
in line with ethos of crypto itself so for me the way I look at this is Engraves is all about
start truly owning what is yours it's your keys it's your money it's your assets it's your crypto
and bitcoin but it also means that you have to manage the key so web two users don't want to
have anything to do with keys for a bank trying to offer something today to the end user it has to
be keyless one way or another but you still want to make sure that the bank doesn't own your keys
because if we do that we just go back in time before bitcoin even existed and we haven't
progressed at all so the last two years we as Engraves we've actually worked together with some
of these large players in the market to build such a solution so a solution that is essentially
keyless and it all starts from the app a solution that thinks about how can these trusted parties
as they are I mean like a black rock for example has been around for a long time and has a lot of
trust to the track records but of course doesn't come with the trust from the immutable ledger
so what I'm trying to say is that it is possible to actually offer the best of both worlds and
that's what we have been trying to do with Engraves now essentially you can start with the keyless
app that you can decide who can become your recovery points so for example you could say
black rock becomes one of your recovery partners they have a piece of your key but they never have
your key so they can never access your money you can add points like let's say your gmail account
could be a point your Apple ID could be a point but also at some point what happens is you have a
lot of money on that app you may even have a house deed on that app you may have everything
that's digitally relevant to you in that app so then it makes sense to sort of upsell this person
this client to a cold world and obviously there our approach is hardware first security first
software doesn't exist without hardware so to then actually offer the second layer as well
so you sort of seamlessly onboard people and you can do that as a bank you can offer the
self custody which is a market it will not go away and of course on the other side we can also
help them in doing what they all want to do which is just custody on their assets so if I if I hear
you well you could provide it for an advanced feature and for those who are like we like to call
them noobs to the market and they'll have a complete understanding of it yeah so you really
take them through a very easy journey you start without keys you make them choose recovery points
you offer an upgrade to ultimate security with a cold wallet and even if the user wants that
you can just say sorry I like to outsource things I'm giving it all to you you're the bank you just
keep it but you make sure that both dimensions are covered exist wonderful Baudet from your side
satellite yes I think if you want to onboard the next billion user in Bitcoin we have to have
something very convenient for user and it's probably going to be a mobile solutions first
um because people now are using their mobile more and more uh more than this their desktop some
people don't have a desktop they just have their mobile a lot of people in in africa in south america
also they don't have with desktop they only have mobile and they want something that's easy but still
secure and that's the approach that we have with a set of chip we have something that's open source
and that's just like a smart card so something that's trusted by people in the bank sector
that's already used by billions of people in their sim cards and that can store actually that's
built to store a private key and that's very affordable so we can provide a solution that's
convenient that's mobile with an FC and that's affordable and still offer a very high level
of security and then we have um incremental security for people that are storing more money
maybe they need increasing uh complexity and and maybe a device more adaptive but to start
it's good to have something simple yeah you first saw yeah you first saw my next question how do you
cater to the most advanced user like you said you have scalability and you made a very good
point at the end of the day we have bitcoin magazine we noticed as well that 98 percent
of our traffic comes from mobile devices so everybody is on their mobile very good point
mr luke yeah i mean i agree with all of the points so i'm not gonna repeat them um you know we we
try to abstract away keys because nobody actually wants to manage keys um mobile kasa is mobile
first even though we use other you know hardware key storage solutions as part of it but the the
main interface is mobile uh but from a much higher perspective just zooming out uh there is
some problems that i think are systemic in nature uh one of them is you have to understand that
the default path that people take in software or in in life in general uh is very sticky and
what i mean by that is if you look at how most people get into bitcoin today
they go to an exchange and they buy it and usually that's where their journey ends it stays there
yeah uh you know even asking them to take that next step and withdraw is is too much to ask for
many people so i think that over a long term one of the systemic things we need to change is we
need to stop telling people to buy bitcoin and we need to tell them to earn bitcoin you know
sell your goods sell your services uh for this new hard money and um you know another aspect of
this security stuff is that it's very hard to sell someone on the concept of self custody
and security it's it's a fairly abstract thing it's very much like trying to sell someone on privacy
a lot of people just can't understand it and until they get to the point where they get burned
by it so you know i hope it isn't the case where most people have to end up losing a lot of money
to understand what the ramifications are but once again it's this complicated thing to explain to
people i spent half an hour earlier today trying to explain to a gentleman here that his uh exchange
apps on his phone they're never going to give him the keys like that's just not how it works he will
never actually own that money and and even just trying to get him to understand the difference
in the security models between those two things was very difficult to do at the end of the day
they're so used to the normal financial system that's going to be very difficult for them to
understand but you know that's a good segue to move in the next question i had with the introduction
for example of cbdcs we are moving towards a very centralized surveilled financial system
who's trying to break into our market our space how are you guys preparing to still
offer the level of decentralized security at a centralized surveilled financial system level
with cbdcs you want to start over there you want to start over here let's start over there well i
have no plans of supporting cbdcs uh you know but this is a difficult problem from a regulatory
perspective uh i think we talked about this a little bit but um you know my company and really
all of us we are all non custodial you know we are hardware and software providers yes but the
powers that be definitely in europe there's been a little bit of it in america the the authorities
they want to pull us into their regulatory jurisdiction how will you prevent that well
the all we can really do is educate people make them aware and if you believe in participating
in the political process then of course you're you're free to do that um i personally think that
the most effective way for us to fight against or opt out of the system is to build parallel systems
that simply are not controllable you know this is why you're free and open source you're making
these things available to people without having to go through trusted like regulatory third parties
whatever is an important escape valve if you would very good now from your side you're open source
yes so indeed we provide open source solution all the applications that we do are open source
and the firmware of the smart card is also open source this which means that people actually can
buy smart cards blank smart cards compile the code and load it themselves on the on the card
which means they can build their own hardware wallet and i think with the open source philosophy
which is philosophy behind bitcoin is the way to decentralize and to make it impossible for
governments to to reach out to people and to provider of service if we are sufficiently
decentralized and if people are able to bypass and and and to to have the possibility to to
build their own stuff it will be increasingly difficult for a government to act if they don't
have a central point of failures very good and from the engraved side decentralizes at the core
what you do so how do you keep pushing that forward um so when we started in grave um we said
in the end of the day c-fi is coming but you have to but we are going to start from the
most decentralized part of the spectrum as we can so what we did is we reviewed the end to end
journey was a user trying to be centralized which obviously starts with your keys we realized
there are no good keys on in this world um or let's say there weren't any good keys in the world
2018 so we even decided to fully innovate and revamp the key concept which led to our patented key
which is called the n-wave perfect key um and we did that for every single step of what the user
needs to do um so ultimately of course everything will converge a bit to centralization we just
wanted to make sure that we don't go from centralized to decentralized but from decentralized to
decentralized um if i think about your initial question how do we remain off the grids in this
whole setup then it starts there it starts with an offline device that can create keys that you
know for a fact have no trace whatsoever online there is no database where they may potentially
be kept any hot wallet that you use only comes with the questions of did anybody see my key
did they put it in a database was the software process good enough harder is better um and
ultimately you're creating in tin air in the ether one of the billions of possibilities
of keys that is linked to so public key and therefore it's wallet so i think when bitcoins
came out it actually said something borderless and boundless that we cannot go back back to
from and i hope we never do exactly um and so there are things today that are called darkfire
that go very deep into okay we will no longer know who sent the transaction where it was sent to
what was sent everything becomes abstracted and all of these buzzwords like zero knowledge
proofs and all yeah are all parts of that um but in so in the end i think there will always be a way
to remain off the grid if that's what you want to do and let's play like that just for me to
collaborate on what you said you said something very important user experience with user experience
comes usability because that is the core of user experience but usability comes at the expense
of security it's always been like that the more availability and the more usability you create
within the security framework the more insecure it becomes james from your side where do you think
it should stop when it comes to usability especially with mainstream where everybody's
used to having this huge dashboard where they can press button and accomplish so much where should we
stop well usability or another i think another way of looking at that at least when it comes to
self-custody is how much complexity can you abstract away and hide from the user uh you know
inevitably you will hit a limit at some point um but you know for us the real
point at which we're not going to go any further is we're not going to hold
your keys for you or at least in in kasa's perspective we're willing to hold one out of
five or one out of three keys we never want to be in a position where we become a single
point of failure so that's the hard line for us is we're not going to make compromises in the
name of usability if it creates a weakness like that wonderful love it saddler yeah i'm not sure
that um convenience is always opposed to security because if if security um increase complexity
people will take uh shortcuts and they will decrease their security or they will use to to secure
product in an insecure way so convenience and ease of use can also help security by helping the user
use the hardware wallet correctly um and so so that's the approach that we also try to to to
develop with seto chip is to have something very very easy to use um where the user
can set up a hardware wallet in like 60 seconds maybe it's not perfect a setup but there is also
incremental step that they can do if they feel more comfortable they can increase their security by
adding more steps but in an incremental way in other words you have a learning curve
when it comes to creating exactly i understand and grave yeah i i get the maximum of that there will
always be a trade-off between security and convenience but i think it's more about the context and when
it comes about context it actually becomes quite straightforward if you want to go to the the shop
and you want to pay with your hot wallet and you have 100 euros on your hot wallet it can be one
click pay and you're done but if you're talking about a billion dollars you need a much more
secure infrastructure so it all just depends on the context what kind of risk you are okay to have
for a certain amount of money which is again contextual for every person as well so i see it
more like that rather than that you have to give up security second for us like engraved our first
promise to every user we have is we will never compromise in your security that's rule number one
the second thing for us it was important was to make it as easy to use as possible
so we always try to follow in our heads how would apple build this device
and i think the best way to see that is for yourself we have a workshop today where we actually
pack it back out to zeroes and you can see it for yourself that you can actually combine
usability and security exactly i understand you want to say something go ahead i was just
going to mention you know like one of our design mantras at kasa is that usability is security and
what we mean by that is you can build the most incredibly secure system out there but if it's
so difficult to use then you have theoretical security nobody using it therefore no practical
security so it is about striking these balances to actually get people into a somewhat secure system
keyword there is balance i like that one now moving from there you've all innovated in a
different way air gapped multi-sig smart card so at the end of the day where are you going
have you reached the point where you're comfortable where you are are you comfortable jameson where
kasa is right now no there's a lot of room for improvement uh you know and we're always paying
attention to what's happening at the protocol level there are things that we would love to
implement that are already in the bitcoin protocol but you know we have dependency issues because
unlike them we are not a hardware manufacturer and this is by design we want people to use
multiple different hardware vendors that's kind of part of our reduction of single points of failure
security model and the downside to that is that we are we're giving up a lot of control over the
user experience when you're using those devices we're giving up the ability to do certain things
where you know if hardware manufacturers have not added for example support for like snore
signature like aggregated signing stuff that's one of the things that we want to be able to do
we can't do that until all of our supported hardware vendors uh are supporting that in their
firmware so room for improvement are you happy where you guys are right now oh there's a lot of
stuff to improve i think in the bitcoin is because system uh first uh with the way people can
self-study their bitcoin with the the management of of the secrets the seed there there has been a
lot of improvement with with a b32 b39 mnemonic and so on but it's still very complex for
beginners and of course at Satoshi there is a lot of work that we we still need to do to
improve the usability to have more integration support more uh functionalities of bitcoin
Jamestown uh talk about snore signature that's something that we have
implemented but we still have to to harden it and to make it more easy to use and so
we have still a lot of work room for improve or a lot of work yes i know engryp is doing good
i know you're happy but where you guys want to go where do you want to keep innovating
oh we haven't even started yet we've been working for six years on developing and building but
it's still just the beginning okay wonderful as we were discussing one of those questions
were leading towards the future ruben for you for example um what kind of solutions which
would like banks to develop to still keep you close enough to self custody in the defy aspect
in the crypto aspect when it comes to engrave yeah i think in the first question i answered i
probably gave a bit my answer to that so um i think like if you look at the u.s for example
there was a bill passed which literally says you now have the right to self custody it's a human
right to own your own keys which is something which is a statement that literally opens and
legitimizes the whole market and the u.s is a market of 300 million people so um we as engrave
are now positioning ourselves to actually become one of your trusted partners to build out your
self custodial to custodial offering as a retail bank um so let's say our our mission has always
been to protect 500 million people by 2032 with our technology we can of course do that in retail
but it's one by one which goes pretty slowly or we can partner with really big institutions out
there that have millions or hundreds of millions of customers and then suddenly we are there um
so that's what we're working on now and we're partnering with as we speak to launch solutions
like that where we are the ones to make sure that the retail's institutions out there they actually
respect the core of the ethos of bitcoin which is the key should be on the user side and nobody
should ever be able to tell you you cannot access your money you can only withdraw 50 euros from the
bank today um so that's what we're trying to push from our side as engrave as a as a mission
going forward wonderful from your guys sato chip smart card hard wallets what is missing in the
adoption of bitcoin for you to take the next step in hard to tell but um like if banks uh would start
to propose a bitcoin um management to their user that they could really easily technically uh do it
and and we could for example provide the smart cards to to do that um i think the main limitation
is the regulation at least for the banking sector they they are afraid to to touch everything
related to to crypto and to bitcoin because um they would come across with the regulators
um so so it's probably a more regulatory limitations than than any other factor and
maybe also convince the user to to use it but once the the banks or their trusted financial advisor
present them with this alternative i think that could go quite fast wonderful james from your time
you said a very interesting thing just now if you take part in the political process of choosing
you can effect change what change are you hoping for that will affect taza
really what i want is not change uh and by by that i mean uh at least in america what we're
dealing with is a current administration that is attacking our industry and um they are creating
chaos uh because they're essentially creating rules uh you know from a regulatory enforcement
perspective um there is an argument to be made that one way that we get towards stability at least
in america is by codifying into law some of the things that we all believe are already the case
and so i think there is a there is a bill that has made it through the house of congress that would
do things like you know give people the right to self custody the right to mine and so on and so forth
and and so yeah basically the problem right now is that we don't have legal clarity and therefore
there's this big gray area for regulators to just do whatever they want without much repercussion
that was interesting my partner this morning he had an interview with tour the minister and he asked
them at the end of the day you guys have two choices in the us right now you could vote for one party
or the other party and what does he think about that and his answer was interesting for me because
he said don't listen to what they're saying look at what they're doing some of them have been there
for over three years and they do anything with bitcoin or anything with crypto and the other
one is promising a lot to do with it and he's pushing it so from that perspective do you believe
he would be able to bring a change in the us if elected what the the way that i'm looking at
like the presidential election is i don't want any help from politicians i just want them to
leave us alone and uh is as silly as trump can be you know he's quite an entertainer a character
yeah um he has skin in the game even though he's doing some shady stuff hey that's that's the space
and he has come to multiple bitcoin events you know he's actually spent time doing that
and all that we've really seen uh from the harris side and the current
biden administration is attacks and then some nice promises that we're gonna promote innovation
and the future whatever that means from your side for example for engrave does it matter who
gets elected in the us let's start with engrave would it matter i think it's a very political
question yes it is so it's hard for me to answer that because i thought about it a few times personally
because you could say maybe if one gets elected then the market might or let's say the adoption might
go faster um but if that person gets elected it might be in um it might be against my own
principles so do i want the adoption to go faster because of that i think i'm probably more in the
courts of uh yeah of jameson yeah it's a conundrum what does that is your thing yeah it has probably
a big in it will probably have a big impact uh but i don't really know behind their promise
what these people are gonna do and i don't want to rely on them and somehow i i don't care because
i think bitcoin don't need politicians um especially that kind of politicians um maybe
maybe it's even better if if they go against bitcoin because it will force us to be better
and bitcoin is anti-fragile so actually it's getting better when it's when it's challenged
so the key takeaway i don't care i hope they stay out of it and leave us alone yeah look uh i think
you can make arguments for you know trump maybe better as a short term thing and like short term
adoption and sort of ease a lot of this uh fear of the unknown of what's gonna happen in the space
but i think we can all agree long term both administrations both major political parties
are gonna do the same thing they're gonna keep printing they're gonna keep going into further
debt and so from that macroeconomic perspective you know bitcoin is in the way okay they haven't
kicked us out yet no they haven't kicked us out yet one question per panelist can we agree for that
yes okay no problem is there any um where's someone can help me with the mic so he could
actually say it in the mic robert can you pass him the mic please sir in the orange saptoshi sir
i'll try to do my best uh have you ever been in a situation where you received the signal from
the regulators and that you had to adjust your business strategy and i know it's a sensitive
question maybe but can you maybe elaborate on such a situation if you ever encountered such a
situation ever is there a specific for someone specifically or do you want anybody uh no the
three of you perhaps one of you already had such a well i i suspect like we're all software
providers like we don't talk to regulators and we don't want to talk to regulators we don't want
anything to do with them we hear about proposals and so i think there was the mica proposal uh
here uh which originally may have affected self-custody we had another proposal in america
that may have affected self-custody that would have brought us into the purview of financial
regulators and thankfully uh it sounds like those have been shelved for the time being
any of you want to say something on it so personally i didn't have any discussion with
regulator and never been uh contacted by them so hopefully it stays like this wonderful any other
questions uh question that's of course of course one problem cbdc i would say it's a problem in
search of a solution but no i think it's a way for political politicians to keep control of the money
and it's a response to decentralization with bitcoin so they want to to counterattacks
and they they want to present it like a decentralized uh money but it's it's just
fiat it's a wolf in in these guys as a sheep sometimes wonderful any last questions yes sir
we like i think this conference they said very well i every time i uh meditate that
the war comes you get like every joke that's bad like usually before i think we'll have them up
and it doesn't change anything for the last 10 years yes was uh once he worked he's rather
do you see that it's a necessary step that the working blood don't i have that yes what do you
ruben let's start with ruben ruben you want to go i'm not sure if i understand the question
sorry but do we need me yeah president in short do we need mass adoption do you think we need mass
adoption for once before yeah at the end of the day what he's trying to prove is that we've
been talking about hey bitcoin will grow bitcoin will become self-sustaining if we get more people
in world space for 10 years one reflection i i make i sometimes make myself is think back about
the entity that came with the whole idea which is satoshi akamoto yeah um if he would be seeing
what's going on right now let's say suddenly there are bitcoin ETFs it enters the mainstream would he
turn uh around in his grave or in his bed depending on whether he's alive or not um
um that's that's a question that sometimes goes through my mind um and i think it's it's a question
like that we should also have in our own heads when we're thinking about mass adoption at the end
of the day just to simplify what he's trying to say is the more adoption we get the more further
we step away from the original source of what bitcoin is supposed to be well possibly a bit at
the same time it's more about how is it being adopted if black rock suddenly offers it if
you don't at the offer is it if is that what happens yeah yeah i think james the adoption
use cases don't matter so much as it is the the total number of people who are using bitcoin
in some way it's a network effect problem the larger the network grows the stronger the network
becomes the more doors that have to be kicked down by the authorities in order to affect any
negative change upon it uh and so this is this is why i think we're all concerned for example
about the etfs and big custodians getting too much bitcoin into them because that's actually
making fewer doors that need to get kicked down to have massive consequences wonderful
i would like to thank ruben oh dan jameson um from all of you here thank you very much we were
live on bitcoin magazine and i appreciate for everybody who watched us live thank you very
much for being here with us and thank you to all of you