Hello, and welcome to the Bitcoin.review podcast, where we explore developments and
projects with the people who actually make them happen.
The show is supported by POD2.0, SAT Streaming, and Coinkite.
If you're a new listener, I'm NVK.
I run Coinkite, where we've been helping people secure their bitcoins for over a decade.
We make the cold card and fun products like the block clock.
You can find more information about it on CoinKite.com.
Hello, and welcome back to the Bitcoin.review podcast.
Today, we have a fun little group here, Mr. Ben the Carman.
Yo, yo, good to be back.
We have Mr. Paul, future Paul, not past Paul.
Hello.
And we have Rob Hamilton.
Hello, hello.
And a new appearance here.
We have Mr. Jameson Lopp.
Hello, sir.
Welcome to the show.
Glad to be here.
All right, quick housekeeping here.
Coinkite is looking for a production manager.
Just email jobs at Coinkite.com.
This is hardware production manager, none of that other stuff.
You know your shit, you know what a bomb is, you know how to handle an Asian supplier.
Ideally, you can speak Mandarin or something.
And, you know, you're used to procuring parts, you know, we can say, hey,
here is a capacitor of this spec, you know, and you find some cool stuff.
Anyways, you know, if you're a hardware production manager, you know, what else?
The other thing is barbecue QR reminder is gaining a little bit of traction
and the people who know that too.
I mean, it's better.
It's 30% better.
Or maybe 50% depending on what you're comparing to.
And what's the name of that guy?
He used to, I think, work for you guys, James.
Rear head, rear heart.
Are we talking about Reardon code?
Reardon code, yes.
Brandon Black.
Weird.
He was bitching about QR's the other day and I'm like, you know,
barbecue QR, he's like, yeah, it's better.
It's, you know, it's better.
But how much better can you really get, right?
Like 50% better.
But what's the maximum throughput?
Isn't it still like one kilobyte per second or something?
No, there is no, there's no time.
Ignore time.
Time is kind of irrelevant for this.
It's more like screen size is a huge deal.
Yeah.
Right.
So, so if you're trying to display a QR on a hardware wallet to scan it with a
potato computer, like a potato screen computer, which like half the laptops
are potato cameras, having that QR being, being of a better compression
matters.
And especially because you avoid animation if, if it's better compressed
and barbecue QR does that in spades.
I saw it's now in Rust as well.
I think the key is my mic.
Yeah.
It's the full Bitcoin team put that together, right?
Yes.
So, so there's Rust and there's Dart bindings and there's a JavaScript one and there's
going to be more.
There's more coming.
That's because it's public domain.
Yes.
I got, I spent way too much time recently playing around with QR code stuff during my
multi-sig performance testing.
And I don't know, you know, maybe part of it is potential improvement on Sparrow's
side, which I was using for testing because they only offer two different density
options.
Maybe we should offer even higher density options, but then it gets tough, I guess,
because it requires so much testing to figure out what each device's camera is capable
of really processing and the frame rate and so on and so forth.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's very early on this technology for Bitcoin too, right?
And, and, you know, there was, there was no like a large install base for that.
So now that there is a bit more like bigger install base happening, I think we're going
to find a lot of shortcomings, you know, like for the barbecue QR, at least there is the
Sparrow, Nunchuck, BTC Pay server, Crooks.
The BoBitcoin thing is coming online.
And yeah, you know, people need to play.
The Sparrow displaying for code card to read is pretty fast.
The Sparrow is using the computer camera and it's a computer camera kind of limitation,
right?
Something new to resolve some of that coming in a few updates of this list today.
There is a new, a new, a new SPAC NFC tap to push.
We'll talk about it.
All right, guys, let's get into the vulnerability disclosures.
Flo and password manager Roboform helps researchers recover 20 character passphrase and locking
access to Bitcoin wallet containing 43.6 Bitcoin.
Encryption is fun when you have the key and not fun when you don't have the key.
So this one, this one was a, it's like great and horrible.
So if you're using Roboform to encrypt things, don't because they have a flo in their encryption
implementation that makes it so that you can break it.
I didn't read the specs of it, but it just looks like it, you know, they just didn't do the either
the stretching, right?
Or, or, you know, the random number is bad.
The thing says they're using like the computer's time to incorporate it.
So you scan through all the number of the last, you know, five years and you're good.
There you go.
Brutal.
Actually, no, there is a birthday date, right?
Like there's a birthday date and there is a died age too for that bug.
So like you can just use the time for that very specific period and you boom, you have
the keys.
Wow.
So yes, don't, don't use computers to generate keys.
Nothing says random, like the passage of time and just being able to guess all the time stamps.
The beautiful thing about this is it looks like it's, this was found by somebody trying
to get his own Bitcoin, like basically hacking a wallet where he lost money.
Yeah.
That's the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that incentivizes finding weaknesses in
all kinds of systems that you might not have presumed would be, you know, Bitcoin related.
It's, you know, this is not the first time that this type of thing has happened.
And of course, mostly it's because people are using systems that weren't designed for
Bitcoin stuff.
And so they're creating these weird incentives to break them.
Yeah.
But yeah, the moral takeaway for me here is choose an insecure way of storing so that
when I lose my key, I can hack it later to get my money back.
Yeah.
Sounds sounds like a great idea.
Go to Raspberry Pi and use that.
The funny one, the, I do have a bunch of electron wallets from the past that, you know, had
changed in them, like nothing that I know if there would be anything that interesting.
But I lost the password for like, you know, probably I have like a folder of electron
wallets that I lost the password for.
I'm sure there will be some sets in them.
And like, you know, I know the passwords are strong.
So it's going to take a couple decades to be able to break those.
Unless somebody finds a flaw in an electron, an electron's either CGN or on their encryption.
I don't think the CGN would have been compromised.
It would be just the encryption of the wallet.
How are you guys doing the entropy for your PWAs?
The browser has like a secure random thing.
So he's called that.
I know it's you have to trust your browser, but I mean, that's kind of the nature of the
entire wallet.
So trust the browser.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's hard to trust those things like, you know, move your mouse around or whatever,
because then you're trusting that, you know, it's taking those inputs.
You can't prove it.
Yes.
It's a little weird.
All right.
Japanese exchange DMM hacked for 4,500 Bitcoin while nothing has been confirmed yet on chain
analysis mononautical has suggested a possible address poisoning attack.
Yeah.
The cool weird thing about that is like, if it's the address poisoning thing, that means
it was like an inside job or like one of like the three signers like tricked one of the
other ones, which is kind of, and then you know who it is probably.
So that's a little sus, but yeah.
I don't know.
It kind of makes you want to go and dust a bunch of your really high balance addresses
and then you have another output with a vanity generated similar address just to see what
could happen.
It would be interesting to see what the ROI on that is.
I mean, it's pretty beautiful, right?
I think it was like, they had like, was the first four and the last four, the first six
and the last six.
I think it was only the last two.
That's it.
You know, it gets exponentially more difficult to match on both ends.
Yeah.
I mean, I was thinking that that would have been a lot for you to get four and four.
I mean, for like $450 million, I'll wait a week to generate an address or four.
Yeah, however much that was.
No, there you go.
It's four and two because the first one you get for free, right?
Really the first two you get for free.
Wow.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it makes sense, right?
I mean, who checks more than the last two?
Like visually speaking, right?
When I'm sending 4,000 Bitcoin, you're darn sure I'm checking the entire thing.
Yeah.
No, don't you just scan the screen and, you know, YOLO?
We had this as a topic at Austin Bitcoin Design Club, the idea of like doing it segmented,
kind of like how you used it, like serial numbers used to show up.
Yeah.
Like so like in chunks instead of one long string.
Yeah.
I mean, the chunks of six are pretty common for keys this size.
That would be helpful, but it's already a long enough thing.
We need more screen real estate 100 wallets that are really like very limited.
Part of this attack too was using this poisoned address and dusting their accounts, right?
To make it look like they had transaction histories with it.
Yes.
We have seen a lot of dusting, doxing dusting into our, some of our shopping cart wallets,
which is kind of interesting.
Yeah.
I can confirm the same thing with our BTC pay.
Yeah.
It seems that, well, you know, like they, they should know that those are going to be donated
straight to, straight to a borne address or, or Tor donation or something.
I take those and I hand them out to our developers for testing.
I mean, you know, they, they should like, this guy's like, they should at least invest
a little more and make those, those ETXOs a little bigger, you know, because that would
make it like me when I spent, it's just too small.
All right.
Next one is GitHub warns of SAML off bypass law in enterprise servers.
I mean, there's a CV for it and all that stuff.
Like this is interesting to me at least because, you know, a lot of Bitcoin projects depend
on, on GitHub as the source of their binaries and, you know, they don't host their own binaries.
They just trust GitHub.
One time, our little bot, what's the bot name?
Binary bot.
The binary watch, right?
Good bot.
Good bot.
Yeah.
Binary watch found that the distribution of joint markets, the, I think was the zip file,
whatever, the, the, the SHASM was being met, metaled with by how the GitHub was putting
it there for download.
I mean, that's the explanation that we found and have.
Not the fact that maybe the Spooks were doing something.
So it is kind of sketchy.
I'm thinking through the attack model though, because a lot of projects, they'll sign their
commits, right?
So you're not going to be able to man in the middle.
Yes, you can.
Oh, can you?
I don't know if you've noticed this, that if you commit from the GitHub UI, you can GitHub
sign that commit.
It shows the same thing on the UI.
This was an exploit when I was on maybe like a month ago, two months ago, where people
were finding ways to break enterprise repos by uploading files and then it looks like
a GitHub URL.
Yeah.
And they were just kind of like sliding stuff in there.
Yeah.
It's a good point.
And remember, right?
Like all, most of the package managers just push it off GitHub too.
So like, you know, it's the, it's the centralized like risk place, right?
Like it's a, it's a critical problem there.
Anyways, it's, I don't have a good answer.
I mean, we essentially host code card binary as ourselves and we have a copy on GitHub.
Is it like a second source of truth?
And the cold card itself checks the signing of the binary, right?
Absolutely.
Yes.
I mean, all hardware wallets should check the firmware before they let you have it.
You need multiple sources, right?
Because if you only have one source of truth or attestation, then, then you have like, you
know, betting incentives for people who just go and break that single one.
Right.
This also deterministic builds are just important too.
So you can just pull it yourself and buy, buy, buy, check it all.
That's right.
Except for the, the bytes of the signature that we had to explain to people why it wasn't
just give me a private key.
You have nothing to hide.
Just give me the private key.
It was actually pretty brutal.
Like, you know, when, when the deterministic builds started to become a little more popular,
like there were, there were a lot of those, did all those like crazy accounts on Twitter
that like claim that it, you know, like, oh, you have something to hide or whatever.
You know, you had to explain that I think even wallet, wallet scrutiny was also the
same problem.
Like people couldn't understand that you can't reproduce the signature bytes.
And I'm like, yes, because you don't have the keys.
Anyways, that's, that's, that's a problem there for, for GitHub and for people depending
too much on GitHub.
Do we have anything interesting sort of for, for binary distribution, like coming around
that's a little bit more decentralized.
There's a zap.store.
They're trying to like do it on Nostar, but like, you're not hosting the actual binaries
on Nostar.
It's more the SS stations.
Right.
But yeah.
I mean, decentralized file hosting.
I mean, you could like torrent them, I guess.
Yeah.
I mean, torrent is surprisingly good at that because you can check signatures, right?
Like right on the magnets, I think.
Love, how do you guys handle some of this stuff?
Well, we're, we're not trying to be publicly verifiable, but within our own internal build
systems, you know, we require, of course, you know, full signatures on all of our code
commits and the actual build system itself, as far as I know, we haven't gotten to like
full determinism, but we're, we also, you know, we're not like a public project where
multiple people are trying to prove what we're doing.
Right.
Well, you can't do deterministic builds on iOS store, right?
Cause the binary.
It is.
It is a, it's a crazy rabbit hole where, you know, we've had these arguments before
where people say, oh, if, if you jump through like 10 various hoops, you can do deterministic
builds, but it's never been presented to us in a way that we felt like anybody outside
of the company would even try to do it.
Well, also like, how are you going to prove to the user?
Right.
I mean, like, it's not like you can, you can chop some on your iPhone.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Like I feel like this, this will become bigger problems as, as the, as the honeypot grows.
Right.
I mean, Apple could just take care of the impersonations.
They'll be a really huge one.
All right.
What's up?
Vulnerable to traffic analysis was reported by the intercept.
Yeah.
I mean, just assume that they were, what isn't in order to, I guess, in order to not be vulnerable
to traffic analysis, don't you have to be kind of passively creating traffic in the background
as a kind of noise?
Well, you can do traffic shaping, right?
So you can try to sort of like make it look like it's something else.
That's some of the stuff that they want to do with the, with the new Bitcoin P2P capabilities.
But, you know, like, I think if you have like a state actor that has infinite budgets to
expect your traffic, like it's pretty hopeless.
All right.
Surveiling the masses with Wi-Fi based poisoning positioning system, a new attack shows how
Apple's Wi-Fi based positioning system can be abused, allowing unprivileged attackers
to look at it.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, also assumed this was already happening.
Your device has like 50 radios and they're all broadcasting.
They're all saying, hello, I'm here.
Say hi to me.
Hello, I'm here.
Say hi to me.
You know?
So, so it's pretty, you know, you have to turn off everything, but you really can't.
So you have to put in a fair day bag and carry it around that if you want to not show it.
That's another reason for, you know, like radios and 100 wallets and the trade-offs
that come with that, I guess.
All right.
Lops list of non-physical Bitcoin attacks.
I don't think I brought this list before on the show as a light item.
And there's a good list.
It's a fun list to remind everybody that, you know, you should take your security seriously.
I came to my attention because you had an addition recently, right?
Fun is an interesting word for it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's the thing is there are always additions happening.
I would say we're probably averaging around one a month right now, but it's also because
we're not in a peak bull market FOMO.
There is a very strong correlation between the sort of retail FOMO realization of crypto
market hype cycles and actual physical attacks because, you know, this makes sense.
It's because the criminals who have never really thought about trying to do wrench attacks
for crypto, they start doing the mental math and they're like, hey, you know, why should
I take a big risk of trying to actually rob a bank or some other high value physical brick
and mortar location when I can probably, with a little bit of Googling, find some high net
worth Bitcoiners who I can also find their residents because almost nobody has decent
operational security, especially, well, really in most countries, you own any sort of property
and it's easy to find your address.
You can't.
Yeah.
Many countries, you can't even put a layer, right?
Like a firewall on it.
Well, but you know, like most common law countries, you can set up a trust to buy a house, but
like, you know, it's too easy to get it doxed after the fact too, right?
I mean, like, you have an Amazon account, the ship's there, boom, it doesn't matter
that he gets.
Oh, yeah.
You have to firewall everything.
Everything.
You know, you can't have anything shipped to your address or have any really of your
accounts anywhere tied to you.
And, you know, this is all part of some of the privacy stuff that I've been talking about
for years where the short version is I just lie to a lot of people and organizations, you
know, they ask for my home address and I give them an address that looks like a home address,
but is either completely made up or it's an actual like private mailbox.
But these attacks, I mainly, I keep track of it because I think we just want to see what
the trajectory is and we want to understand are, you know, we as a trigger warning community
doing a halfway decent job of protecting ourselves from wrench attacks.
Because, you know, if 95 or 98% of Bitcoiners have terrible operational security and physical
security, then the criminals are just going to do the math and realize what an easy pay
day it is to get life changing money with one simple threat against the right person.
I mean, you could think about it differently too, right?
Like the more Bitcoiners out there, they have poor security.
The better it is for us, we'll have a slightly better security, right?
Yeah.
Oh, all you have to do is you don't have to be faster than the bear.
You just have to be faster than the other guy, right?
You know, and there is a lot of people that want to be perceived as rich and be famous,
right? So there is always somebody else out there that want to look like a target,
fortunately, but it's pretty brutal, you know, like people, the kind of stuff that
people share publicly, the, you know, like the, especially when it comes to like,
you know, the size of the piles or things like that, it's really bad.
People don't understand how easy it is to dox yourself, even with just something like a photo.
You know, there are autists out there who can find you anywhere in the world from like
one photo. Yes.
But the main thing that I would say is, you know, we have, I think,
over 150 physical attacks that are currently catalogued on here.
And the main point I would get across is this is way undercounting it.
That is way underreported.
Most people don't.
Yes.
Most people would not like go to, because, you know, there's nothing to do really.
It's like they probably wouldn't go out police station and say, hey, I got robbed.
Yeah. But also, I can tell you from my own experience of like working with people who
have come to me because they've been attacked privately seeking advice is that they don't want,
in many cases, to even go to law enforcement because that can create a public record trail
that could get picked up, you know, and end up in the news as that's how I find out about most
of the things on this list is, you know, reporters either find it in police logs or in
court cases or whatever.
And so they're basically afraid that being public about it happening will make you more of a target.
And this actually directly relates to my own personal experience getting swatted in 2017.
I had to do the calculus myself.
And so I got swatted in 2017.
I was public about it happening at the time, but I didn't go into many details about what happened
because I immediately started looking at, okay, how do I actually
improve my privacy and security?
And it wasn't until over a year later when I had burned down my entire life and started it over
again in a more hardened posture that I started releasing all the details of what happened and
started going after the person who attacked at me.
You know, so my wife is a litigator for estate law, right?
And so they often have to find people, right?
Because people die.
You have to do estate stuff.
And, you know, it really takes about two minutes for a PI to find anyone.
It doesn't matter how good their upsec is.
Like, it is fascinating how fast they find people.
You know, they just know how to find them.
I would love for this to become more of a part of the, I mean,
obviously people who know about privacy know that this is a big reason why you want privacy,
but especially as we're like, you know, interacting with governments who don't
want us to have financial privacy, recognizing that like governments by requiring
like financial institutions to collect a ton of information about people and link that with
financial information is creating these honeypots that can potentially lead to these really,
you know, dire physical consequences.
I mean, look at exchanges, right?
I mean, like, you know, they have a, you know, a number of your balance, right?
Or your past balance and your like pictures of your ID or, or, you know,
like your address and all this stuff.
And, you know, it's not an, if it's a when they're going to get hacked, right?
So what I started like requiring in order to have business relationships with the, you know,
exchanges or whatever, any financial institution that's like related to this industry is,
you know, I want to do KYC in paper.
I know they have to do the KYC, right?
But like I required that they do in paper where we don't do business with them.
Because at least on paper, you know, you go to their office, they take a photocopy of everything
and, you know, like they keep it in there safe.
And worst case that happens is, you know, place burns, they need to do it again
or, or they lose it, you know, inside the office and they have to do it again.
But, you know, the chances of a remote attack or a data dump leaking my personal information
are much lower.
It's like a, like a cold offline KYC.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, it's, I don't think there is any other way, like until, you know, we managed to
end KYC and AML laws that, you know, only affect us.
Yeah. I mean, the, the one trend that I will note that seems to be just beginning is that
it looks like there are some savvy groups of criminal actors that are basically starting
to specialize in this.
Yes.
And it's, at least in South America, it's kind of a variation on a scam that criminal groups
have been running against like tourists and expats for a while, where they, they basically
get you on the dating apps and then they have a girl take you home and drug you and, you know,
unlock your phone and, and wipe everything out.
And so now they've just sort of added wiping out your exchange balances and your hot wallet
balances as a part of that.
But we're also starting to see people get extortion and physical threats where they basically get
doxed and they start having weird things happen to them in their real life.
They're not having like someone point a gun in their face, but they're, you know, getting
communications that are very threatening.
And somehow, you know, these groups are getting boots on the ground of people to, to start
doing physical things like in their proximity, starting to like physically test their security.
And it's all remotes too, right?
Like the master bed guys are not even in, you know, in their countries or whatever, right?
Like it'll be, you know, they, I don't know, they are like in Afghanistan or like Nigeria
or, you know, Russia or whatever.
And then they hire people locally.
They hire bed guys locally to go do their bidding.
Exactly.
And the bed guys locally don't even know the extent of what they're doing.
They're just hired to like go drop this letter in front of their house, right?
Like it's like remote hands, which makes it like, you know, extremely,
essentially impossible for law enforcement to even deal with it.
That really brings up like, you know, this, this, you know, things that Rob is working on,
you are working on, some of the stuff that we work on, you know, I still, I still think that,
you know, well, I mean, really the main reason why I went
up vault in CTV so that we can have on-chain vaults to have more preemptive security, right?
More reactive security and, and de-risk ourselves personally, right?
I mean, I'm not going to act myself, but you know, like the way I have things set up is
like, go take me a month to reconstitute things like, and it requires a lot of
international travel too.
So like, it's like good luck.
That's, that's the only real practical way of securing yourself against
wrench attacks. I wrote an essay about this several years ago where I basically said,
you know, you, if you think about the threat model in a wrench attack scenario is you yourself
become the threat. You have to assume that you are completely compromised.
Yes.
And you are able to authenticate through all of your security system. So the only way to
really secure against that is to make it such that, you know, you have to physically pass through
high security barriers.
Multiple times and they're timed and like, it is like literally a nightmare.
Jamison, for this list, like what percent of these are just like single SIGs on a phone,
right? I'm assuming that's like most, if not like almost all of them.
I'm not aware of a single one that was a multi-SIG setup that was compromised. It was,
it was pretty much always people who had everything on a like mobile app wallet or
they just had like a single signature hardware device at their house that was easily accessible.
Yeah. This is one of the reasons why I hate on SIDQR so much. I love the standard, right?
Mine is the compressed version, but it's the incentives, right? This idea of having a hidden
seed unencrypted in your house is very dangerous. Like having private key material around you
invites violence, right? And if you're doing multi-SIG, but all the keys are in the same
location, they're in the same conundrum, right? And it is incentivized that way, right? Like
people talk about this. Yeah, convenient. Exactly, right? I mean, see, like I've been
trying to push this idea for people to sort of understand that like any savings amount that
are unrequired for you to function day to day should not be accessible by you. Yeah. Period.
Like, you know, like it's just simply inaccessible. Like you don't need it. Like you don't need to
carry around the heart of wallet, right? Like you don't need to have it around you. You don't
have for your savings, right? Have a second one, right? That you use for like your, you know,
like a checking style life, right? Or and you're spending money, keep it on a phone wallet, right?
Like try to segregate the types of spending you have because you're putting yourselves at risk.
I mean, the collaborative multi-sig stuff, like, you know, there are trade-offs,
a lot of them related to privacy, and I hope we can overcome that. I actually want to get to that
since you're here a lot. We do need to remove, like to fix the privacy problem with the
co-signing parties, right? Like if you have an outsider party to do that, because then we can
really sort of like get to a place that's better. My biggest fear of using the collaborative multi-sig
setups, aside from the ones that require KYC, which we're not going to use unless it's a business,
the like, but you know, like having in a way that the co-signing partner doesn't even have
access to balance, right? Like they don't, they cannot see the balance. Have you seen Arbdout
has been working on SIG Bash? No. It's something like this where you actually just buy an XPUB,
and then you just, whenever you want to like redeem your money, you just like dump it like,
here's a PSBT. This is my pre-agreed upon conditions. It's no KYC. You just like pay in
Bitcoin, get an XPUB, and then you can, you know, stash that in your descriptor, and you could use
it. And then whenever you need them to sign, you just present the PSBT and then it'll blind sign,
as long as it follows the conditions, which is like a certain amount of Bitcoin or Bitcoin price
or date in the future. Like you can like upfront, you just agree when you buy the XPUB, here are
the conditions which you're allowed to sign. There were a lot of services like that way back
in the day. I think there's still one that actually comes with Electrum. I think it's called
Trustcoin or something like that. Not the one that God hacked, something else. And what he could do,
it was similar to that, like essentially it works as like two-factor with some condition.
Yeah, like, I don't know, like maybe the solution, at least for now, that we don't have on-chain
primitives that can do this, it's like, it's not an XPUB that you share. You share maybe like a bunch
of sub-private keys, right, with them. And so that you don't de-anonymize the rest of the stuff.
And like, and you have like UTXOs that are specific to some things, I don't know. Like I,
you know, Flaxman had like a crazy setup where, you know, you deterministically generate other
private keys, but you don't tell the path to the...
The blinded XPUBs.
Yes, that was too convoluted. Like, James, like, I'm sure you guys are studying this
shit all the time because, you know, you can make this into a product. Like,
where are you guys at with some of this stuff in this thinking?
Well, there's always pros and cons, right? Is that if you start blindly signing stuff,
then you can no longer have the security of being able to essentially authenticate with the end
client. So, you know, for our top tier clients, we're literally getting on calls with people and
running through various playbooks for authenticating that they are who they say they are and that
their money is going to the place that they want it to go. And it's always going to be trade-offs.
This is the really tricky thing about trying to balance privacy versus having a collaboration
where people are helping you is that there's a lot of times where one of our clients might run
into an issue and in order for us to help them debug it, we need to know more information about
the transactions, the UTXO, the, you know, the state of their wallet. So, this is, you know,
I think it's always going to be the case that if you want the ultimate level of privacy in Bitcoin,
you have to be the lone mountain man who is doing everything on your own. And this is
kind of what we're trying to explore at CASA is, you know, what is a path that we can take that
is kind of navigating these different trade-offs and giving people more usability. But of course,
some of those trade-offs will be at, you know, the privacy and sovereignty level because
we are helping them with some of the heavy lifting.
So, but like, you know, what do you do when you fire an employee? Do you shoot them?
Like the ones that have any information of a customer? Like, you know, like I'm joking,
by the way, because who knows who's going to take this clip. But, you know, those are the concerns,
right? Like it's like oftentimes attacks happen because somebody internally in an organization
is part of the attack, right? So for example, in Brazil, what they love to do is they'll kidnap
the kids of the family of the security guard that guards the front gate of a condo building,
right? And then when the bad guys show up, you know, and these are condo buildings that have
all kinds of security, right? And then the guys show up, right? Like they just open the door,
you know, like, and then they go apartment by apartment, like, you know,
getting everybody naked and locking them in the washroom where they rob everything, right?
Or, you know, like at, at the big goal, remember that the couple, the lady who, who helped
Razzle Khan, prolific rapper, there you go. You know, oftentimes it's internal people, right? And,
and like, yep, we just assume everybody that works for us, including us are spooks, right? So
that's, that's how we run our arc, right? But it comes with a lot of trade-offs.
Pretty much. I mean, you have to build not only your software, but also your organizational
practices so that you don't have single points of failure. So you can't really have a God admin
within your organization. There have to be checks and balances all over the place. And of course,
at the end of the day, you're making a certain assumption that some threshold of employees aren't
going to collude together, usually doing that by making sure that you have really, really strong
audit logging so that, you know, even if that did happen, it would be obvious who did it and you
send, you know, law enforcement after them. And this is where it's also important to know who your
employees are. I mean, there's anyone who's running a company in this space, especially on the
security side, you've got North Korean people who are trying to get hired into your company. You have
adversarial state sanctioned actors that are trying to get in. And you have to, well, you have
to KYC your employees. But that's just one of the trade-offs. Yeah, it is very tricky.
To that point, we're currently looking to hire someone. So I did a post on Bitcoin or Jobs.
And I think I got like five of those like North Korean hacker profiles, like the random GitHub
account that has like no history, but a bunch of emojis. And they experienced in 75 different
languages because they're just trying to get into the system. It's pretty wild out there, for sure.
You have to be very diligent on who you're bringing on board. You know, I highly recommend not
advertising jobs to Bitcoiners. You know, I know it sounds crazy, but there is other people in the
world that would love to work on this kind of software, or especially in the business side
of the business. I agree. I agree. I was just kind of, you know, casting a wide net. For sure.
I think Alex Leishman makes this point about how he would rather hire a good employee engineer
and make them a Bitcoin or overtime than trying to make sure you hire Bitcoiners out of the gate.
Yeah, it's especially now, right? Like the space is maturing. So like, you know, we know what we
need software-wise. Like, so it doesn't have to be somebody specialized from Bitcoin for that.
Well, some of the times it does. Anyways, sorry, I just realized it's not on the list.
Did you want to shout out Graphene just now has a duress pin now? And how did they possibly get
inspired to add a duress pin to their phone? Maybe, yeah, maybe we add to this list now. Yeah. So
there was a case in Australia where the guy was forced to give the password or whatever.
And I was shouting on Twitter that every important device in your life should have a duress pin
or ideally a brick me pin. I don't know for certain if Graphene had followed my shouting,
but yes, like it's very important. Like, and in my opinion, it shouldn't even be a wipe,
it should be a brick. You know, wiping on complex computers doesn't really work
depending on the sophistication of the attacker or how the wiping is done.
So I think just like completely breaking the memory, breaking everything is safer.
You know, who cares if your device is is destroyed when the alternative is you're losing all your
privacy or your Bitcoin. You know, when people say, you know, the brick me pin is going to cost me
a new cold card. Well, you know, it's better to lose the cold card than all your Bitcoin, right?
I did see a fun Reddit thread recently where people were suggesting that cold card brick me
pin is just a sales tactic to sell a lot more cold cards. Yeah. And it's like the kind of
stuff you hear, man, it's always fascinating. There is this sort of like, I almost want to call
it a faction of like, I call it commonist Bitcoiners. It's like, you know, like they're like anti
business. It's weird. It's like anti profit. And, you know, just don't use the feature if you
don't want the feature, right? Like, you know, we're building here for the people who are in it
to win it, not for the people who are sort of like, you know, trying to to larp, right? Like,
and being able to destroy a device in a situation where destroying the device may mean the big
difference, you know, sounds great. It's similar to like, you know, people who hate that we launch
new hardware, because they want to buy that he went like, dude, like, I'm trying to improve the
security. Don't even get me started. There seems to be a decent contingent of people who don't
understand that, you know, there are many different companies and products in this space, and they're
not all targeting the exact same users. And that's okay. They're it's good to have a diversity of
security models, privacy models, usability, and let people, you know, select what works best for them.
Yeah, I mean, you know, and you can even like create rule of thumbs on this, like if you can't
afford a code card, you probably don't have enough Bitcoin that warrants needing a hardware wall.
Like, why are you even bothering with this stuff? Just like, keep it on a phone with a seat, right?
You know, there is a lot of sort of like, very rational rule of thumbs you can create around
this stuff. And, you know, just just don't larp, like that you're going to get like, hurt, robbed,
it's, you know, you're going to screw your own self out of your BTC. It's, it's not a good idea.
Anyways, it's, it's right. All right. So we're starting 45 minutes in the Bitcoin software
release and project updates. Casa announces support for a lot of descriptors. Go ahead, Lop.
Don't have to read exactly as this, but you know. Yeah, I mean, I think it's
long overdue, but mostly it's surprising how little adoption wallet descriptors have
received thus far. And my main issue with the lack of adoption is I think that if
the rest of the ecosystem keeps just treading water and ignoring this, then it's potentially
going to hinder adoption of the cool stuff that people are starting to want to build, you know,
like Rob, basically taking advantage of tap route, tap scripts, you know, more complex
spending conditions, because we're, we're no longer in the world where you may only have
one single signature wallet or a standard two of three or three or five, and that's the extent
of your spending conditions. Because, you know, for example, I, I want to be playing around with
many scripts and creating, you know, crazy, arbitrarily complex spending conditions. And the,
the standard wallet software that's out there, like even the, the good, highly adopted multi-sig
wallet software that's out there, it doesn't really give you the flexibility. You know, we have,
we have the tooling at the protocol layer, but we don't yet have the software layer tooling
to be able to easily define and, you know, create and back up and recreate these more complex
wallets. So I think that we just, we need to start with descriptor support.
You know, it's funny, you know, when I created the website, output descriptors.org, I think,
was when output descriptors got merged. And we added to cold card because we had a lot of users
trying to use core with cold card way back where there was no GUI for it. So these are only terminal
people, right? And the only way to get in and out of core was with output descriptors when they
were at it. And we, we thought it was going to just be like, boom, like everybody's going to adopt
this because it makes complete sense. And that's the best way to get in and out of wallets,
especially for multi-sig. But what we noticed is that like a lot of client software out there,
right? So the wallets that create the transactions, not the signers, they, they just, a lot of times
don't have the technical chops to do this stuff. And, and that's why adoption is so mediocre.
One good thing though is the software and, and the signers out there that seem to have the,
you know, most of market share do tend to be the ones that are capable.
Absolutely. Yeah. I, for the descriptor stuff, I think it's also just important to be fair in
that, and I don't mean this like in a bad way, but like if you have a system that's working,
working and it's securing people's money today, like if it's not broken, don't fix it. So why touch
it, right? And so like, like it's a form of tech debt, but it definitely in the conservatism of
Bitcoin, it's important to, I guess, keep that context in mind that people don't want to actively
start reworking things. And the output descriptors are great for many scripts, but even if you just
want to use anything in taproot, if you want to use like any sort of more elaborate tap script,
like leads, if you want to be able to do anything with MuSig, there's actually a bit that just got
merged like this morning about MuSig and output descriptor support. So if you want to do anything
that isn't just sorted multi-sig or single-sig, you're going to want the descriptor because
you need to be able to reconstruct these like the Merkel trees, like you need to be able to
defer taproot. Even bread and butter P2SH, like even bread and butter P2SH, that put the
descriptor is a better way for you to have that script. Oh yeah. I agree with that personally.
An example that I gave in the blog post, so I think that CASA is probably more incentivized
than a lot of wallets to have interoperability. This is part of our ethos of not being a single
point of failure. We don't want our app or our company to be a single point of failure, so we
take great efforts to make sure that we are compatible and you can recreate your wallets
in other open-source software and it is a pain for us to tell people how to do that.
It's like we have these lengthy support articles that basically say, you know,
click on this, move the slider over here. It's nearly hopeless. Yeah. And so it should be
a simple either copy paste or QR code operation. And you know, that's the great thing. These
wallet descriptors are compact enough that you can put them in a QR code. And so import, export
is as easy as doing anything else with QR. And I know Rudolfo loves QR, so end of story.
So you know, it's funny. There is actually a conversation with the Cedhammer guys, right?
And there was even a PR or a bit conversation started. There is no easy way for you to transport
the output descriptors right now. So they suggested to Andrew Chao to put the output descriptor as
an optional field on PSBT. So the PSBT is to the transport. That was vetoed. You know,
it can still go on the vendor, define fields, which don't like really, you know, you can do whatever
you want there. But you know, so people listening out there, we do need a standard for output descriptors
to go in and out of things. And, and, and, you know, especially as, you know, manuscript complexity
and this things get bigger, we do need a solution for this. There is, because barbecue QR,
the Cedhammer guys wanted to have to be open the conversation there, to create a seed QR,
QR, sorry, barbecue QR, QR for probably hard types for output descriptors. But, you know,
like, yeah, sure, it's great. We need it. But there is no, there's no proper spec. And I think
everybody's sort of like that. There is like that something commons was trying to do stuff like that.
But people ran away from that because it's like, you know, academic health. So I, I just have one
related gripe related to output descriptors, the way core handles it right now. And a couple other
is that you have an internal branch and an external branch, you have to load two separate
descriptors in to be able to get the entire wallet, which just adds extra friction, like there's like
the wallet policy notation, where you just declare like, Hey, this is going to be change receive.
And to me, like, since 99% of the text is identical, why have two separate descriptors
for interfacing with core? Other wallets have been able to get around this, but it's just
something I've been interfacing with recently. You know, Rob, you might want to participate in
the discussion on the barbecue QR repo because it's possible that that discussion ends up becoming
the spec of like how to go back and forth. So maybe go offer your two cents there.
Yeah, I'll go start right now. I think it's the next thing that we need to sort out.
I mean, look, we need to get away from the common belief that all you need is your seed
phrase. I think that's one of the big issues at play here, like especially as the Bitcoin protocol
continues to evolve. And as we have just a higher variety of script types and derivation paths and
spending conditions is that people, I think, still don't understand that the ability to spend
your Bitcoin is more than just having the private keys, because that seed phrase is
essentially an infinite number of private keys, which of course, if you have to search through
them and search through all the possible spending combinations, it's like expecting someone to be
able to mine a Bitcoin block with a little USB miner. Yeah, the way I view this as a mental
model when I explain this to people is that your private keys are the keys that unlock the treasure
chest, but the output descriptor is the treasure map that gets you to the chest,
because the keys are not enough that you can't even recreate the redemption script on chain.
Part of this is like, there is almost like a tragedy of the commons that happens in spaces
that are not that big with the amount of devs in them. Bitcoin is still sort of narrow,
in that sense, is that everybody in industry embedded with the core work tends to think
that you need one standard to rule them all, and that is not true. As a industry grows and develops
and it has more members, sometimes there may be two or three standards in that industry,
and that's okay. As long as a standard is not just a single player, it is a very viable thing,
because sometimes you have different players that they're so far apart in their requirements,
that you'll make a poor standard if they try to compromise. I think that's what happens to
Lightning, for example. I wish Lightning was more players than maybe the interop.
Instead of making so much compromise, figure out, okay, these are the five, ten sort of
entities that do a lot of business together, there's a lot of interop between them. Maybe the
standard that they use is something that's open, other people can adopt it, other people can suggest
changes and improve it, whatever, but they don't try to completely water down and destroy that standard,
because there is another 50 people with opinions and no users. That's what I found about that
BCQR stuff. It was horrible. It's a terrible standard, and there is not a lot of adoption.
Is it the first one? It has some adoption, absolutely, but it's a terrible standard with
not a lot of adoption, so they're for time for a new standard, and it's okay. Some clients may
support two standards, maybe they come around the fact as a shitty standard, they move on to a new
standard, but I think it's okay in the market to have more options. All right, BTC Pay Server,
version 1.13.2, updated, Spectre DIY 1.9.0, add Taproot MiniScript support, and Bip85 app.
I think that makes the third signing device that supports Taproot MiniScript now,
that would be Coldcard, Ledger, and Spectre DIY. Perfect. When Edge Firmware for the Q?
Didn't we release already? I was given an early build to test around like poke around with,
but if I go to the Coldcard website right now. The download page, let's see. On the download page.
I don't even know because I don't use it much. The MiniScript branch. No, totally. I just,
let's see here. There is no Edge. It's in a different tab and it's only for the MK4.
Okay, no Edge, at least there's no, there's a branch, but there is no. It has rounded corners,
so no Edge. It's very nicely rounded corners. Yeah, so there is no, okay, I'll get on that.
We've been busy. Okay. All right, Spectre desktop, macOS, or macOS, Intel architecture
officially supported. Add support for more languages and things. Electrum version 4.5.5,
update support for latest version of Slip 39 Memonic SPAC. That's interesting.
Because I remember Electrum having some issues with Slip. Anyways, Lightning,
Unify max fee bounds for payments, QML GUI, Android update, and binaries,
app armor profile for tarball and app image. Nunchuck desktop version 1.9.34 and Android
1.9.46, update network settings for easily managing Electrum servers,
ability to subscribe to securely change their email address, update message retention logic
for Byzantine infinite groups. Has there been any work done on creating some form of interop
between collaborative multi-sig companies? I can speak a little bit to some of the discussions
that have happened. And at least most of the discussions that I'm thinking of had to do with
key sharing. And I'm sure Rob has been on a number of those as well. And a lot of it,
the problems come down to a few things. One of them is actually related to the sort of privacy
and blinded ex-pub related stuff you were talking about earlier, which is that cosigners don't
necessarily want to take on the risk of blindly signing without knowing exactly what they're doing.
Another one is just incentivization. How do you get paid for providing that service?
It's a part of the market that hasn't really been specced out.
Yeah, I mean, I'd love to have, especially if we get to the blinded stuff, that would be amazing.
But maybe you have, especially for organizations, it would be nice if you have like,
CASA as a cosigner and Nunchuck as another cosigner. And somehow there is a protocol that,
you know, talks to whatever client you pick to use.
Yeah, I've always been a, I've always, one of the first thoughts I had with when I saw Nostar as
a protocol was that that's a perfect way to start coordinating the stuff where terrible for that.
Do you think it's terrible for coordinating? Because there is no privacy, right? Once we have
Ratchet. Ah, got it, got it, got it. Double Ratchet? Yes. But like, I don't want PSPT because PSPT is
like, it's like zero privacy, right? Like it's like, here's the money. So, so like, you know,
don't like that. But you know, double Ratchet is coming, right? And then he can use it.
I was thinking with like private relays, it wouldn't be like on my main Nostar feed where
everyone could look at it, it would be like a private server, like a private relay. Yeah.
Yeah. The Nunchuck, I think uses a fork or a version of Matrix for their, their comms.
Because it's kind of cool. You can, you can talk to the other signers within the app.
And that's another thing like that I really wish was a standard or more adopted by more
clients. You know, huge part of co-signing things is talking to the other party co-signing
and being able to do that, like, you know, privately within that, the confines of that
key space would be huge. Not only privately, but also securely to make sure that, you know,
nobody is man in the middle in you. Well, I mean, if you're using the private key of the,
the co-signing as the key for, for the, the key that generates the key of the, of the chat session,
right? I mean, you have the assurances that like, you know, if the other part is not compromised,
I mean, the only people that can see this is the people that can co-sign this.
I've seen, as in a popular approach, you basically have a difference of keys. You have
keys that are for like communication and keys that are for actually signing. And this always
goes back to, I've been talking about this for a while, the idea of using either a sat's chip or
a tap signer as like your authentication, especially in the world of deep fakes as they're
proliferating, that you can have a quick, easy form factor for initiating comms as like a quick
handshake. And it's a key that if you lose it, it doesn't impact anything with the funds. Like,
you have a different level of security for a tap signer than you would for like actual signing
keys. Yeah, I mean, when cause a tap signer support, we have love here. No, I know, I only
ask because we have requests, user requests. Yeah, I mean, I like NFC in general, like I think that
we should add NFC cold card support while we're at it. Unfortunately, they're two different
SPACs. Yeah, yeah. Because one is NFC five, the other one is NFC four. But yes, you should have
both. I, we're going to have a, I'll give you guys a, a preview of something that we're working on
for NFC that's also going to be very interesting for people. I think NFC is the future. I mean,
QR suck. Yeah, what's the bandwidth on NFC? Like I haven't done any extreme stress testing.
Oh, it's super high. Like it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, I can't remember the numbers now,
but for Bitcoin related things, it's not a big deal. Like it's more sometimes the round trip,
right? Like, so for you sand something, you have to wait for the other thing to sign and then get
it back. That's the bottleneck. The bottleneck is not the sanding. Yeah. Anyways, let's make that
happen up. Let's get NFC on all things, especially because you guys have a good app. Bitcoin Keeper
version 1.2.7 file based communication enabled for supporting all devices and a few other updates.
Green QT version 2.0.6, add QR unlock for Jade as an experimental feature, improve QR code scanning.
Bisk version 2.0.4, Wasabi version 2.0.8. I thought things were dying, but apparently
there is a lot of action happening on Wasabi because people can bring your own coordinator,
right? Is that the, do any of you guys know a lot of about this stuff?
Yeah, they're like doing like you announce, if you want to run your own coordinator, you like
announce it on Nostra and other people can then like pull in and see like, oh, here's a coordinator
I'll connect to. It's pretty interesting. Like since it's on Nostra, like all these events are
time stamped and some of them are like months old. So they've been working on this for a while, I guess.
And that's, apparently there's like over like, it's like in the teens or something,
a number of coordinators announced. So a bunch of people are trying to do it. I mean,
it makes sense. You would make a lot of money if you become the big one.
I mean, it is pretty cool, right? That, you know, maybe this was kind of coordinated, right?
Like, it's like, oh, we're closing down. But, you know, all of a sudden a bunch of coordinators show up.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, it is the only way, right? I mean, like the incentives are horrible when the coordinator
is centralized and has the product, the profit motive, right? That's probably why he held back
samurai from having a decentralized coordinator for so long. They never really got to have
a centralized coordinator, right? And joint markets has UX problems.
Should a joint market switch to Nostra for coordination?
Once we have double ratchet, I'm very, very against having like, see, you know, these are sign
notes, right? And if you get the anonymize is a huge problem, right? Because now you have all
that data there. And it's undeniable that it is yours. So, so anyways, I think, I think it's great.
You know, it's a good place to start as well. The same way we had to use IRC
to find Bitcoin nodes back in the day. You know, we start there, and then we figure out how to
make it better. But like waiting for the right to perfect solution to come is also not a good
approach. Because then it never happens. There is also the simple X protocol, which is like
remarkably amazing for all this stuff. But it's very complex. And I think it's the reason why
none of these coordinators are looking into it. It's like it's heavy. It's like a lot of lift
to get into it. But but you know, it is probably debas most private protocol out there right now
for comms. All right. Install Linux, you'd have rules for hardware wallets. Oh, you'd have rules.
Label Bay's version 2.2.0 derive address feature, efficient address derivation generate Bitcoin
addresses from bit three to nine expub label with ease direct labeling. It's a cool little project.
It's it's fun to see that people are trying to to make labeling proper and also make it sync.
If you ever had to do accounting with like Bitcoin stuff, and you know, you can't find
the labels, it's a problem. So nice to see that. Do you guys use three to nine in any of your
wallets, Ben, Rob or James? No, people have asked, but not enough people for us to spend the time on it.
I guess you guys do low value. Yeah, the the thought too, I was thinking about this was that
it'd be better. I'm just thinking because I know you guys over at Muni are also using BDK. It'd be
nice if there was just a bit 329 like extension within BDK. So then it'd be like a feature you
just turn on as opposed to having to do custom stuff, right? If you just get it in as a part of
the crate, it'd be just more standardized for everyone. Let's let me go to Steve. Yeah, like we
rolled our own like labeling system and it's something like how we do like a lot of our
Nostra contacts and stuff. So even if we did do it, am I confused people because we just be like
UUIDs everywhere instead of like, oh, I paid Future Paul and stuff. So it'll be a little weird.
I just went into not when mandatory DMs and said when BIP 329.
That's how you get things done. You just start just start harassing the devs.
Absolutely. For a look that's new here, we often get wallets and companies to create features by
just bitching on the show, either to each other or the person who maintains the project right here
on the show live. And it seems very effective, very efficient. Especially an hour in. Yes,
no one's awake anyway. Everyone's already fallen asleep listening to this podcast.
So this is where we just do all of our future requests.
Fair enough. It looks like there was an issue open in January.
Yeah, not mandatory says looks like a good spec to add.
That's a classic reply by him.
ESP minor version 2.1.5. All right, project spotlights.
Satsi's zine. Satsi has this cool little new zine that there was a taproot one.
There was what else, a BIPs all about the BIPs and a stratum v2. It's free. It's you can download
it or you can buy it and you can't. Sorry. No, you can't. Can you order copies? Yes.
You can order it and ship it to you. It's S-A-T-S-I-E dot dev slash zines. And you can donate there
too. Yeah, I was privileged to get a physical copy when I was at Boston Bit Devs a few months ago.
And Satsi also a former Casa employee now, full-time mom, but still got some cool Bitcoin
projects that she's working on to help the educational side. Yeah, she mailed one to me.
I was not expecting it with a very huggable note, a private note on it. It's cool to see.
She still likes her bug mug. She's a former receiver of a Kweinkite bug mug. It's a very
special object. You must have found a code card bug in order to get it. Oh, I should have redeemed
that. I've found those before. Really? And you didn't get a bug mug? We got to get your bug mug.
But yeah, get me a bug mug. We'll get your bug one. This might be very subjective, but feels like
a document for learning taproot. It hits me in like a nostalgic way. Like, oh, I remember back
when we tried to learn what goes on. We tried to learn new aspects of how Bitcoin works,
and that was kind of like part of the Bitcoin journey. Like, oh, here's a soft fork I'm going
to read up on it or something like that. I don't know. It doesn't seem like a thing.
We kind of argue. Those are things that either really technical Bitcoiners now are responsible
for having those arguments and those kind of learnings. Or yeah, we just, I don't know.
Just seems like a cool, old-timey thing that we used to do as Bitcoiners and not part of the
current culture. Maybe that's just the subjective view. Yeah. I had a recorder with Levera yesterday,
and I might trigger people who are not technical on that. We were talking about
stakeholders in Bitcoin and things. It's going to be funny. Very related to that topic.
All right. NFC Push TX. This is what I wanted to talk to you guys about. This feature allows
single tap broadcasts of a freshly signed Bitcoin transaction. Okay. So we figured, hey,
if we can lower the trade-offs, lower the bar of privacy and security a little bit,
but offer people a very, very, very convenient feature for the hardware wallet experience.
So what we do here is you take your PSBT however you want, microste, NFC, or QR,
into the code card or USB, and then use signer transaction. And then oftentimes,
the painy ass, you have to put the SD card, take the transaction back to the computer,
load into something that then broadcasts transaction. But you might have an operational
code card with you that you don't care that the device may be connected to the computer
or has an FC enabled or whatever. So what this does is it bundles, so it creates a base 58 package
of your transaction with the settings that you need. Okay. It creates into a URL that then when
you tap with the phone, it essentially uses a GET API from say mempool or the code or codecard.com
to just broadcast the transaction. You essentially do nothing. You just tap
any broadcasts. You know, this is actually like if you use this right, you actually gain privacy,
right? Because you can use a different network to broadcast the transaction than the one
you were searching the UTXOs from to create the transaction. You can set it so it's your own
infrastructure, your own node, or whatever you want. And I think this is going to help people
sign transactions. We've had a wallets a lot more, especially on multi-sig setups where
they're not as concerned about that specific code cards or gapness. Still we're gap-ish,
but you know, you're sending data out of a high security device. So that's the tradeoff.
Pretty excited about this because it's like, it's so simple. It works so well.
And it doesn't need apps or computers. What scenarios does this like reduce the number
of steps? Because like for me, I imagine like typically I'm like, I'm preparing the transaction
in Sparrow that I'm signing with the codecard and then I'm transmitting it with Sparrow, right?
So is this like, instead of transmitting it with Sparrow, I do, I go tap it to my phone?
Is that? So the way I see it is two ways, right? So one is if I need to sign something and this
hardware wallet is in a secure environment or sorry, not secure environment, but like
a geographically separated environment that I'm in, right? So I have my desk where I may be
generating the transaction, right? So I can take the PSBT in an SD card to the location where the
device is without taking the computer with me, right? Can sign it, broadcast it right there
and then right without a computer. That's useful. The other scenario is, you know, I say your QR
preference, right? Because you're using Sparrow on a computer that doesn't have NFC, right? So you
scan the screen, right? Sign the transaction. And then you just tap your phone that's on your desk
and you get the transaction. So, you know, like it's one of those things that like,
once you do it a couple of times, it becomes like second nature. It's like super easy.
But, you know, it does have some privacy trade-offs depending on how you use it and does have some
security trade-offs because it is data out, right? But we think people are going to use this a lot,
especially people using collaborative multi-sig solutions. Because we find that the people who
come back to us from like Casa or Enchain, they contact us and they're like, can you please make
this easier? We don't care about those trade-offs as much because we are in a multi-sig.
On a somewhat related note, because I know Rodolfo loves weird ways of broadcasting transactions,
and I hadn't seen anybody mention it, someone wrote a mesh-tastic Bitcoin core bridge recently
for, I guess, basically broadcasting over this mesh-tastic network. It's kind of like a,
what, Gotenna-based network. But yeah, more ways of broadcasting is always better.
Yeah, no, absolutely. It's like, we want to make it, see, it's like the reason why I did the whole
ham radio stuff. It's like, it's not because you're going to do it, it's because you can do it,
right? You want to have all these avenues of can-do proven publicly because that sort of stays off
bad actors that may try to co-opt the channels that are more efficient and are more convenient
to us, right? Yeah, the mesh-tastic stuff is interesting. The Gotenna, not so much because
it's all closed in their full military company now, but yeah, there is, I think it can be helpful to
people to have the solutions out there. Yeah, I think this is pretty cool. My one fear would be
like privacy, if now your phone IP address is attached to your transaction, and if it's going
to coldcard.com, push TX, then it's like, you guys kind of have a record of every cold card
or every cold card transaction that uses this. So using mempool space might be better because
seems like fucking everyone just broadcasts to them. We do that, right? So you choose the
setting, and I think we're going to make mempool the default. So it goes there, you can use VPN
on your phone. Also, you can point it to your own local network. It's even better, right? I
pinged the guys from start nine, hopefully they added soon, and then you just point to your own
local network box, and it does it, right? It's optionality. Yeah, you should be able to also
configure it right to your own personal electron server too. Yes. You just pick that IP address,
drop it in there, yeah. And I have a feeling that once people start using, you're going to get some
interesting sort of suggestions or improvements to this, and maybe there's clever shit they can do.
Yeah, I wonder if people want something like, I signed like five transactions,
and then I want to broadcast them delayed over the next few hours.
Yep. You can do, remember, there was a website that did, I think was pushed here, no,
something else. There was a website that could do random delay transaction broadcast. Another
cool thing too that we want to do it, we're going to do it on the coldcard.com if you push it through
there, is we're going to use different nodes in different locations to broadcast at the same time.
So you break some of the timing analysis. So like the rest of the network doesn't know it's a coldcard
transaction? That's right. There's a lot of stuff you can do. And because we do this chain PSBT
thing as well. So on coldcard, you can load multiple PSBTs in the same
session, right? So you put in a micro-c card, and then you can chain sign them.
And then you can chain, you know, broadcast them too. So that's sort of like more
usability improvement there.
Is there like a, like you're playing the raw transaction in the URL. So is there like a URL
limit where you could like, your transaction is too big too?
I'm sure there is a limit per spec of W3C. However, by the size of the websites nowadays
and the things that they do, I imagine, you know, unlikely we will ever bump into that.
Plus remember, like the majority of the transactions are not like that big.
The PSBTs may be, but the transactions sometimes are not.
All right. Ginger wallet, Bitcoin privacy solution with active coin drain service.
Interesting. And it's from the devs of coordinators maintained by former CTO head of
Wasabi wallet. There you go.
Yeah, I was trying to like verify that. And but like for Ginger wallet, it's all like fresh
GitHub accounts. So you got to trust there, but
and their website is also blocked for USIPs. So there's some old Wasabi stuff there, but
Okay. Yeah.
Wait for this, for the dust to settle, let the technical people experience first hand first.
Yeah.
Cargo check CT open source development to counter time attacks by Don John.
Oh, cool. Privacy. I just talked about simple acts. They have an update.
And I think the latest update like doesn't even have an identifier anymore or something like that.
Like they had some crazy new stuff.
Private message routing to protect IP addresses, protect IP address when receiving files,
chatting while papers groups. I highly recommend people checking this project out,
especially if they're looking for a protocol that's private to do things.
It's it's absolutely insane of how private it is.
Okay. So there is another project called push the X privacy focus Bitcoin transaction broadcast
tool. I guess we have a name conflict, but it's okay. We'll survive. There you go.
So the rest program broadcast Bitcoin transaction directly into PDP network by
connecting to a set of random Bitcoin notes. Nice.
It looks like a default to tour as well. So yeah, it's great. Yeah.
Hello, loft extra local first expense tracker,
a full ownership of your data securely and privately E2E encrypted updates between devices
using memonic passphrases, as key to your account, no registration or emails, no password works
offline. Cool. I don't know if I mentioned, but Steve got back here on DMs. I have discussed
the focus on getting our 1.0 beta out the SAP will make sure it's on a roadmap for 1.0,
post 1.0. Excellent. I'm also eagerly waiting for the 1.0 release. They're on alpha 12 right
now. Every two weeks, they're printing out an alpha with some good meaningful updates,
like they just added postgres support, like natively within the app, which is great.
Just for managing applications and databases for all the wallet data.
That said, I have a t-shirt that Steve gave me in February of last year that says BDK 1.0 2023
world tour. And I wear it to the park sometimes just to remind him that it is 2024 and we still
do not have BDK 1.0. All right. Lightning and L2 plus. Let's talk about some software updates
here. Why don't we start mutiny node and harbor? Go ahead, guys. For me, there's not been much.
Should we fix some bugs and people out of translations? Yeah, we announced harbor.
Basically, the idea is like a Fedium and desktop wallet to hopefully help with all the privacy
apps disappearing. We can have a new competitor with like a different set of trade offs. That's
not coin join, but Fedium based. It's not ready to download yet, but once people tried and it's
kind of works, but we got a bunch of good feedback and stuff. So hopefully have it out soon-ish.
Yeah. When's it download button? Pile only. That's right. That's a milestone. But yeah,
it's nice that it's cool how many people hopped into the GitHub and started. A lot of Fetima is
all Rust and harbor is all Rust like front to back. It's like a front-end written in Rust.
And obviously it's just one single solid desktop binary. It's kind of like the software I would
like to have more of on my computer, basically. So I think that was pretty attractive to
existing Fetima devs. So a bunch of them have shown up in the repo, which is exciting.
So you guys here first, Mutiny is a hipster language shop. If you're looking for a Rust job,
go talk to them. When Cashew? Because I don't really care much about Fetima at this point.
I really want Cashew. Cashew Maxi. We want to add Cashew support. That's like one of our plan
things. Something we were talking to Hong Kim, the Bitwise guy. And he was like kind of incepting
of us. He gets the idea of BitTorrent succeeded because every user is not just a leacher but
also a cedar where you're default helping everyone. He wants to try to figure that out for
Bitcoin privacy. His idea was having every client also be a Cashew mint. So everyone is creating
their own mints and it's impossible to shut down any mints. I like the idea, but I think
everyone running a mint might not work, but we're trying to figure out different ways of
doing stuff like that where we can get like... Well, for Cashew, that's possible. For Fetty,
that would be complicated. For Cashew, that's... And you need to run a lightning node.
What that would be, it'd be like a Cashew mint backed by a Fetima mint backed by a lightning node.
Why not, right? I really like this idea of, and yeah, we definitely haven't quite figured out
exactly how to do it, but the person who's like, I'm doing my part guy, I bought a Raspberry Pi
despite NVK's dire warnings to how it would kill my family and... And more. Yeah, add more. I installed
a bunch of software on there that I didn't quite understand, but it seems to work and I got a
lightning node and I opened two channels and now I'm helping the lightning network. That's kind
of like the mindset and it turns out that doesn't actually improve payments for most people in the
world, but that enthusiasm and that willingness to operate machinery in order to help the network.
It'd be really cool to capture that and lean on that. The BitTorrent incentive model is even
better. It's like, I'm going to seed this so that I get better downloads now and in the future.
Either way, that would be pretty cool to add, to bring stuff like that into payment networks.
I love Raspberry Pi's for that, for education and that's great. Just don't use it as a harder
wallet. And I also do think there are a lot of people who would like to run a mint for their
family. Yes, there's nothing illegal about that. It's totally kosher. The communism of your own
house, right? A little at-home communism in Cashew. Families is communism. It really is.
Back that up with some fedamint for some good multi-party rugging. And then back that up with
the actual lightning network, which is backed by actual Bitcoin. So many cool layers.
No, I mean, I've been sort of beating at this on thing for a while. Bitcoin doesn't scale to
everybody. So get over it. And eCash, maybe it's not going to be eCash, but eCash is a
extremely good contender to be the sort of solution that clears back to Bitcoin,
either to lightning or directly base. But it is a fantastic sort of solution because of Bitcoin
to resolve the small payment or global solve between quotes, Bitcoin ownership problem.
The way I'm going to see it right now is like there's a... I think Safedin is kind of like
popularized this line of thinking. I don't know how many people adhere to it, but it's basically,
I don't have to worry about Bitcoin scaling because eventually Visa will figure that they
should get involved in Bitcoin and they'll scale Bitcoin for me. I just need to ensure the sound
money part. In some instances, I agree that the sound money part is foundational and cannot be
fucked with. But we also still have an opportunity to front-run Visa on this scaling
payments thing and do it in a better, more privacy, more cyberpunk, more self-solving way.
How far can we get along that path before they wake up?
I think the key is people need to figure the shit out without needing any changes to Bitcoin
consensus. Because if you need a Bitcoin change consensus for whatever you want to do next,
you're going to be sitting and waiting for a while. And it may not never come, and it may come in a
way that doesn't work for you. You can't depend on that. You can't hold your breath for that.
That's part of the reason why I love the cashew and Feddy stuff so much. They went there without
needing a change to Bitcoin to try to do things. It's a lot healthier approach to this.
I almost kind of see it. We see something like Wall of Satoshi demonstrates here's the UX you
have to achieve before people will want to use your wallet. And then our goal right now is like,
okay, well, can we get Wall of Satoshi UX with better self-sovereignty,
but closer to self-custody with Feddermint? And then in the future, I would hope that there would
be Bitcoin soft forks. One of the ways we evaluate those is like, okay, we've gotten this UX we like.
Can we actually improve how self-custodial it is through a soft fork? Can we make Feddermint less
less trust required? Yep. All right, guys. So we're trying this new approach now where we're not
going to read every single item on the on the list below. Nothing's happening anyway. Yeah,
there's like, you know, the people who get the newsletter get all these notes and get all the
links anyway. So you should subscribe to the newsletter. It's on Substack. So if you guys see
anything here that you want to talk about or mention, skimmed that Lightning L2 updates there.
We talked about Harvard. We talked about Mutiny, Node, Nostra Primo version 1.7.21, faster rendering,
wide feed layout, top zaps and feeds. That was my request. Thank you, Milian. A notification
facelift, improved app Chrome, improved connectivity. The top zap shit is awesome. I really enjoy it
because you get to be on somebody else's post. It's like you buy real estate. It's very satisfying.
You can buy the rights to be on your post with a thumbs down. It's great. What else here?
Nostra updated. All the clients in Nostra updated their stuff. There's this new thing called SIGIT,
open source and self hostable solution for secure documents signing and verification using Nostra.
It's very cool. I think this has some legs. This is one of the projects that came out of the
Madeira thing that we were a part of. It's cool. It's actually continued to be worked on and stuff.
That's exciting. It's like docu signed, but Nostra and normal cryptography.
Also, another thing that once we have double ratchet can be done with privacy on the end.
All these things can be done in that mode. Once you have double ratchet, if it's done correctly,
you could even do a health record and stuff because it's proper forward privacy.
I see Geysers on this list. We launched Harbor on Geyser. Thank you to everybody who's contributed
so far. They just added this goals feature. We're still trying to figure out how we want to do that.
Do we want to say, hey, fund us this much. Hold features hostage for milestones versus just like,
hey, please donate what you can, and we're going to do our best to make this as good as we can make it.
All right. Get remote Nostra. Get remote helper for Nostra.
Nostra is a great way to host tax data. You really live on everybody else's computer.
Just great. Korney chat, open source audio space built on Jam that integrates Nostra and Lightning.
Is this like ZappStream? Because ZappStream is awesome. By the way, anybody who's looking for
a Twitch kind of replacement where you need nothing to just start streaming
your feed of video with people commenting on it, ZappStream is amazing.
Looks like Korney is more like a Clubhouse Twitter Spaces kind of thing.
Maybe a Twitter, yeah, Twitter Spaces replacement. That would be nice.
Something you left out was title added Nostra login.
That's cool. That's kind of a biggie. I wonder how it got visible to them.
Yeah, who could have possibly told them?
Who sent an email down the chain saying, Hey, guys, can we please add Nostra login to title?
You know, but funny enough, I am a browser hater. So I really think the solution for
Nostra is not to have private keys and extensions to login into things. I hate that. I stop using that.
So I'm waiting for a better solution. Miliano was talking about
using the Nostra Connect thing or the Sike Bunker stuff, right? Sorry, not Sike,
but the Nostra Insec Bunker where the browser uses calls through
knows which app you're using and stores. So the keys store on a phone app.
And then on the desktop, it just talks back and forth, right? So he doesn't have the keys.
It just has, you know, some, some session policy and it goes from there.
So you may do something you don't want to, but at least it doesn't have the private key
to be lost forever. I like that idea.
Yeah. And I just, we had, we had the extension support for a little bit in Mutiny.
And I just, I don't like the UX of it. It's just like this
mysterious, hopeful API that you might get sometimes. It's like my UX as a developer was,
was shitty. So yeah. So, so let's stop using the extensions.
Like that's one good way of going about this. It's like stop using extensions for Nostra
on the browser. And that means the app activity, right? So the web activity on all these apps is
going to go to zero. And then all these devs are not going to have any users.
Copy and paste your private key like a real man. Stop being afraid.
No, the cool thing is if people just stop using it, like the devs are going to have to find
an alternative solution, right? So stop using the web for Nostra with extensions.
All right, we're going up to anything here. You guys want to, you guys want to bring up?
Nope. But I think there was a bit of an overlap, skipping down a bit to the Samurai wallet stuff
with wallet descriptors actually. Where?
So perhaps you can confirm, but with Samurai getting shut down, does the wallet itself
still work? Or is it completely broken because their infrastructure is gone?
If you were relying on their servers, it does not work. If you were hosting your own node
like a dojo, then it still works because you're just talking to your own node.
Gotcha.
And I believe you still can import it into Sparrow. And then if you import it into Sparrow,
you can talk to whatever node you want to then move funds.
Yeah, that's just to recover. You cannot do new mixing, right?
That's right. That's right.
Because Samurai was extremely centralized, like extra centralized, and they had the XPUBs.
Related to this, I've had people reach out to me saying, you know, my Samurai wallet says my
balance is zero and I don't know how to get my money anymore. And so I actually have to send
them to walletrecovery.org to give them the really weird derivation pass that Samurai was using.
Yeah, man, it's too soon. So like, I don't know, that's such a complicated
topic there and a complicated group of people.
And they had a bunch of non-standard derivation paths for post-mix, pre-mix, bad bank. So you
have to have that stuff documented if you're going to try and manually recover stuff.
The wallet and the password, passphrase is not enough. You have to be able to reconstruct all that.
All right. News and not worthy. I mean, we don't have to read all this.
Anything here you guys want to talk about? Talk about, you know, how to block access to land,
to its platform to the Americans. Americans are going to have to fight back or move or
something because shit's getting weird in the US with all this stuff.
You know, no, it's all over. Like, it's not like the US government say you can't do this. It's
just the US government could put this people in prison if they don't do it exactly the way
it's supposed to be done, but nobody knows the way the way it's supposed to be done.
So it's very tricky. I'm not an American. I'm not in America. So I don't know how to relate to some
of this stuff. It's all a bunch of bullshit, but, you know, you have to work around with the hands
of your doubts. I think the ARC Labs is pretty exciting. It's probably like, you know, hopefully,
like, mainnet launch soon. They'll be like the first real competitor is a lightning.
You know, if it works or not, we'll see, but it's cool. It's actually happening.
Cool. Funding peer-to-peer rights fund launched. That's that's cool. Our mission is to safeguard
decentralized spirit. Like, apparently, there's a good people behind it. So, you know, it seems
to be safe to make donations to this. Unchained University of Austin launched first long-term
endowment fund held in Bitcoin. That's cool, too. The HRF has awarded partial bounties to a bunch of
stuff. Spiral supports, newest grantees, Sean Gilligan, Bitcoin Design Foundation grant support
to more contributors. OpenSat's going to have an announcement soon, too, with like a piles and
piles and piles of new applications that got approved. There is a lot of money for open source
development now. Like, people cannot complain about that. Mining concept for Sutterless
ASIC chip modules. I don't know how the SYNC, the heat SYNC is going to work well with that or not,
but it's interesting to see. I think that's it for me here. Any topics we may have forgotten or
things you guys wanted to talk about that we haven't? I didn't want to talk about the ETH ETF
getting approved. ETF.review. Yes. Listen, there is scamier things as ETFs nowadays than even Ethereum.
This thing's all part of the same bag of hurt and shit. ETH is dying, though. We're just kind of fun
to watch. All the ETH people now want to build shitcoins on Bitcoin, and that seems to be the
biggest take from their shitcoin conference in Austin was the fact that they were all talking
about how they're going to build shitcoins on Bitcoin because all the shitcoins are dying, so
winning. First NFT is now just random tokens. When you realize that no one actually really cared
about the decentralized tech in the obfuscation that ETH had, they just wanted to be able to print
tokens, and they want to go to where the liquidity is, which is Bitcoin. Well, they also want the
scam Lindy. They didn't want to be on Bitcoin because the scam Lindy was on Ethereum, so once
this scam Lindy moves to Bitcoin, all the VCs, all the projects, once you get a little bit of
Lindy and network effect on the scams on Bitcoin, it's going to be huge. It's horrible. I don't
like it, but I don't think Bitcoiners are prepared for the amount of scamming and
shittiness that's going to come to Bitcoin. They used to exist in Bitcoin way back in the day.
Is this hyper-Bitcoinization? Yes, it is. Hyper-Bitcoinization, is it all coming home?
It's all going to be Bitcoin's unit of account. Yeah, I mean, can we agree then that it doesn't
really make sense to be a hyper-Bitcoinization maximalist and also a puritan to say we must
do whatever we can to prevent scams from happening on Bitcoin? I don't really see how you try to do
both of those at the same thing. If Bitcoin is going to become the money of the world,
then obviously scammers are going to adopt it too. Yeah, I don't absolutely, but I think there's
a difference between preventing and alerting. We can still go shout on Twitter and call people
scammers. That's not going away while they really have, they don't need our permission to build
scams on Bitcoin. That's what Bitcoin winning looks like. It's like every scam is going to be
dominated in Bitcoin. It's not going to be double your gas. It's going to be double your Bitcoin,
right? With all this crazy stuff going on with ordinals and stuff in the past year,
it hasn't really invaded my safe space as a Bitcoiner. Again, at that sovereign engineering
cohort, I met a guy who got into Bitcoin because of ordinals. He's a class of ordinals,
Bitcoiner, but he wasn't trying to sell me any NFTs. He was just into Bitcoin and Nostra stuff.
Yeah, there's going to be a bit of everything, right? There's going to be people that come
like through the shit coin route to Bitcoin and they're going to have a better money and then
who knows, maybe affects them and they're more interested in building things, they're a bit
more ethically oriented, but there's going to be like, I mean, some of the biggest scams,
like we're in Bitcoin, right? I mean, it's, people are okay with Tether, right? I mean,
Tether is fully captured, fully, they're proud of how many transactions they canceled and blocked
and their treasury is backed, which means backed by the bombs.
Yes, but they're Podconf approved and that's all that matters.
Podconf approved.
Yeah, in a proper anarchic voluntary environment, real anarcho capitalism,
you're going to accept that people you don't like use your money and that's what winning looks like.
I guess related to this. Sorry, Paul, go.
I was just going to make a joke about how I was still waiting for that guy to send me
to Bitcoin. I sent him one Bitcoin.
Oh, it was a Panda? The Bitcoin Panda? Double your Bitcoin?
There's many such cases.
I guess related to all this, like the conversation that's been happening. So I knew this a while
ago, but it seems like it's like breaking news for people who aren't following it closely. But
with just Opcat, if it was activated, I'm not even saying the likelihood of it being activated,
but just like it would enable full zero knowledge rollups happening in Bitcoin,
like using Starks. And all you need is cat and the script would be ugly and horrific,
but it would open up basically that's where you get all of the random tokens issuing
everything sovereignly on Bitcoin. Even if Bitcoin itself will never support first class tokens,
like as a name and like it has with the ERC20s, you're going to be able to do these
abstractions and it's all going to come home if that gets turned on.
You heard it here first. Knock that cat.
Well, so this is me just educating like talking about it because people weren't even aware of it.
No, I know totally.
I think this actually becomes an argument for the great script restoration because it's like
it's cat plus enough op code so that when you do that crazy construction, you don't have to do it
the ugly, gross, all cat way.
I would agree. If you're going to do it, like turning on just cat is like just asking for
really obfuscated, complicated scripts that people can't reasonably discern or understand.
You have to just trust the developer. Whereas if you enable more functionality, at least you
can do things in a much cleaner way.
I think that thing has terrible branding. Anything that sounds like an omnibus bill,
anything that sounds like the great, the big, it's like it's going to get the Patriot script
restoration. Exactly, right? The world economic form.
To save the children, yes. Anything that's named like that is going to probably be
mapped with even more pushback. People should just make PRs that are small,
small as possible, debate them on the PR merit and then go from there instead of creating
these massive things because these massive things really push away economic actors that are not
technical. These op cat shit is going to be a shit show man if he gets proposed for real.
We got Ben the cat man here on the call.
Activate it. Let's do it.
Okay, listen. What if you guys had to make the case for op cat, a quick case for op cat,
and then a steel man against it? What would it be?
Okay, the way I think the best way to ask is if Satoshi instead of disabling op cat had changed
it to max 520 bytes, would Bitcoin be dead today? Or would you be disinterested in Bitcoin because
of it? Probably not. Let's just fix the bug and op cat properly enable all these things that we
could have done initially. Then once it's activated, we'll see, okay, if people are doing this,
if people are doing that, people are doing tokens or whatever the fuck. We can create
targeted op codes of things that are actually, oh, this is a huge ugly script. We can activate
CTV. Now it's a thousand times more efficient, stuff like that.
My argument, at least from a security standpoint, was op cat has been
reactivated in Bitcoin Cash since like 2018 or 2019. If you want to prove that it's a terrible
idea, go destroy Bitcoin Cash, please. I don't think you can destroy Bitcoin Cash more than
destroy. Nobody uses it. One of the ways that somebody brought up at BitDev recently was
you could think of it as some of these op codes. It's like, how much C++ are you adding
to Bitcoin Core to get the functionality you want? There's a real simplicity and beauty
to these op codes that there's minimal amounts of code required to support them, rather than like,
hey, let's put a whole bunch of new C++ into Bitcoin Core to support this specific use case.
It's kind of like the inverse of that. Let's put a very small amount of C++ and let people
who want that specific use case write the scripts that they want to write.
Yeah. This goes to Pulsar's mailing list quote, basically saying that 90% of the time,
if you think of a new use case for Bitcoin script, it could be done with OpCat and that's
where you get ugly, not maybe elegant or clean scripts, but you get things that are functional.
And then from there, you see what's taking up chain space, and then you can dedicate
additional op codes to basically compress that so you're getting more efficiency on chain.
I think originals, which should not have triggered people, which should have triggered
people with the BRC20 tokens, which caused the real problem. But the main issue to me is
I think this, because of the dick butts on chain, the perception that the network has
and Rindel's new endeavor, company's language might actually push, like might cause more harm.
You know, like I think it's going to be very hard to get stuff through right now
when people are so heated and feel like there's high risk of unintended consequences to things,
even though, you know, OpCat is not as bad with the bug fix.
Are the people who are really mad? Do they run nodes?
Yes, there is a lot of people who are like non irrelevant economic actors on Bitcoin that like,
you know, there is a, let's put it this way, I think there is enough,
especially a very quiet majority of people that don't want to fuck with Bitcoin anymore,
because Bitcoin is worth a lot for them. And you know, OpCat is not going to solve
the eight billion people trying to hold Bitcoin either, right? It might help alleviate a little
bit of some more complex scripts, but still like it doesn't solve the problem.
What cat does functionally for other kinds of scaling approaches is that it allows you to
take an abstraction of a Merkle tree and do that on chain. You just take each route, you
hash it, you start cash, like you build Merkle trees. So that's where you get these ideas of
rollups, being able to do state machines, being able to do more advanced spending conditions
when you're doing that with the transaction, like on this, you basically put the transaction on the
stack if you have cat. So those are like the, they're very rough, ugly tools. I think from a
perspective of letting users figure out how they want to use their money is fine. I think
to your point, Rodolfo, there's a lot of people who have, who are holders of Bitcoin,
they are economic actors of Bitcoin and they're very invested in a certain narrative of how
Bitcoin should operate. And this is like a, this is, this is not incremental. This is like
opening everything because once op cat is activated, there's really not a, there's really
not a good reason to say some other use case should not be done. We're going to need the dogs.
Right, right. Op dog. Yeah. But like, if op cat were to be activated, you really lose most space
on like why something else should not be activated at that point. You'll be able to do it with cat.
Yeah, it's everything. You get everything. Yeah. And, and that might be a difficult sell, right?
Like when, you know, we really comes down to it, like, you know, because we have achieved
like a, a fantastic story behind, we really have, right? Bitcoin does that and can do that for the
world. So, so like trying to sell more functionality on Bitcoin is not going to be an easy thing.
You know, if you talk to devs, within devs, yeah, you know, like, of course, engineers,
you know, love to say anything is possible, right? And, and, you know, nothing's going to break.
It's always like that. Don't worry. We can build a bridge. It's not going to fall. And then when
you talk to non economic, like non technical people is the opposite, right? Like they're going to have
the fear or the hope or whatever. Like, and, and like the groups don't talk to each other.
Like, so, so like they just shouted each other on Twitter and then anybody who's a little more
reasonable just removes themselves from the conversation. So I think the contention is way
further than people want. And, and the, the heavy handedness of the conversation in terms of, yes,
of course, there is consensus for this or for that is also a turn off for a lot of economic
actors that just remove themselves from the conversation. And they'll gladly dump the other
fork because everybody loves an airdrop. The thing is, though, the fork will be the people
not activating op cat because op cat is a soft fork. So you'd have to, yes, people would actively
fight that. Yeah. Yeah. People will counter it. Right. So, but yeah, it's either like, if you try
to counter it, you're either doing a separate soft fork or yes, just rejecting blocks, which is like,
like, you're the B cash now, you're not the Bitcoin, like, you know, nor Bitcoin. So it'll
be an interesting fight. The problem is there is a massive economic incentive, right, for you to
try to fuck with that fork too. So because you get an airdrop, if you are original Bitcoin
continues as the longer chain. Yeah. And the thing to think about is the miners too, right. So like,
you have the economic actors, you have the miners, if the majority, like if a lot of the
hash rate is enforcing op cat, you're then putting the miners in a position where you're splitting
the hash rate of the network to reject op cat. Yep. Right. So then it becomes a question of where
the hash power ultimately goes with the economic actors. And that's where your point, Rodolfo,
like, you can just dump the other fork. So what you need to do is like, you basically need to put
your money on the line to tank the economic activity. So the miners stay with the fork that
you want, while you also get an airdrop of the coin you want to keep. Yep. So it's like, skin in
the game to the max. There's nothing like fork politics. Right. And but the thing is like, you
know, it was, it was a delight. Like people, people that that dumped B cash fast got like,
like 20% on that coin. Right. So, so like the incentive is actually quite high. You might even
like op cat a little bit, but like the idea of, of making that airdrop bump in Bitcoin
denominated it is actually quite, quite enticing. Yeah, I think we have the B cash wars over again,
but it'll be flipped of like, yes, the pro mediums exchange people versus pro store value.
And I think it's going to make it even worse by the fact that it's going to be every unsavory
character is going to want cat as well. Yeah, yeah. Like Rindal, the most unsavory. Right.
Rindal is our very regular person here. No, I mean, you know, it's not, it's not even the,
the, the, you know, what's the name of the thing that type of wizards, the wizards? No, it's,
it's like, it's, it's like, you know, the people way worse than that. Like, it's, you know,
yeah, we're going to have the Vitalix laying in being like, I'm pro op cat and then it'll make
people look bad. No, I mean, as soon as Vitalix says it, that's it. Right. Like, I mean,
it's like people, oh, no, I don't want it. That's interesting, though. It's like, what he is in
Vitalix interest for Bitcoin to be a better ETH competitor. No, he wants the opposite, right?
And he has a ton of Bitcoin. He just wants ETH to become a bridge. ETH is going to become a Bitcoin
layer too. He'll just bridge to ETH. No, but that's what I've been hearing now all the time. It's
like, there's all these new projects that want to do EVM with some bridge shit back to Bitcoin.
It's a lot of projects like that. Yeah. It's just like all the liquidity of all the or,
the ordinal circle, the liquidity out of ETH NFTs. If you can just print out tokens on Bitcoin
later too, it's over. I guess it's also coming anyway in the form of RGB and
tab route assets, right? See, that's the thing. All this shit was on Bitcoin back then,
right? Like every scam was done on top of Bitcoin in the early days.
All the fork coins. Yeah. It was just like, hey, I changed four parameters in the Bitcoin code.
Now it's a new coin. No, but we had like name coin. We had Omni. We had Mastercoin.
Counterparty. All those things were on top of Bitcoin, right? Zucco built RBG, RGB.
Just, I guess none of these things went anywhere. I don't know. It's going to be interesting.
And I have a feeling that the push for fork conversation and activation is going to happen
when the price starts to pump. And then you're going to have all this new entrance and it's
going to be extra messy. I can't wait. And the ETS has to decide what fork they support.
Yeah. I mean, by the point of decision, just turn off the internet. You know, go into your bunker
and just hope to wake up the correct fork 10 years later.
All right, guys. This was great. If there is any other topics you guys want to mention now,
otherwise, any final thoughts, Mr. Lopp?
Yeah. As we can see, the Bitcoin space is still incredibly boring. And I can only imagine
it will get even more boring as the market starts to heat up.
Mr. Banda Karmann.
Let's activate Offcat. Even Donald Trump wants it.
I think Trump wants great script restoration if you really thought about it deeply.
Mr. Rob.
Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Again, yeah. It's another boring week in Bitcoin.
I guess, I mentioned it earlier. We are looking to hire, so drop a line at jobs at anchorwatch.com.
We did a full end-to-end mainnet. We're getting ready to launch hopefully in the next
month, hoping to be live. So very excited to actually take this to market.
And nobody's listening anymore. So it's been two hours. So thank you so much for
no one who is now still listening. And I'll see you on the next episode. Take care.
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