Latest / Monero Talk / The Fight for Anonymous Digital Cash w/ Nopara EPI #296
Transcript
- Doug All right, nopara. Good morning. Good afternoon. nopara Good morning to you. Doug Thank you for doing this, man. I've known about you for a long time because obviously I'm into the whole privacy thing, as you are as well, obviously. So, very aware of you, but I don't think I've ever managed to get you on a show, on a Monero talk or I don't think I've ever caught you at a conference. So this is super cool that you agreed to jump on. I appreciate this. nopara Yeah. And it might be my last interview for a very long time. Doug Honored by that as well. Before jumping on, you posted on Twitter and you put out a blog saying you are, I guess, "retiring", moving on to other things. What's that all about, man? Jesus, that's some big news. nopara Yeah. Things are happening. Something new, something new. Well, what should I even think of the people listening here? So I've been working on Wasabi Wallet. I created Wasabi wallet, started in 2015, way back. Right? It's eight years, so that's a long time. And a couple of weeks ago, or two weeks ago, I have announced that I left Wasabi wallet. Here we are. Now, I guess your question might be, why did I leave Wasabi Wallet? Right? And as many things in life, there are often multiple reasons for wanting to happen. But my main reason was that the project has got to a place where it can be nicely wrapped up. My contribution. So it happened in 2018 as well. That's when I started working on leaving Wasabi Wallet. That's when I started becoming conscious of the bus factor, like, this whole project is relying on me. And from that time on, I slowly gave the maintainer access, the GitHub maintainers, the code, kept hiring people for the team and grew the team and just started to make myself less and less responsible for things. But there was one last journey, which was the Wasabi wallet 2.0 saga, so to say. And Wasabi wallet 2.0 has come out, and it's out there for a year, and we've been working on it, we've stabilized it. And this is a good time for me to step back from the project and give the work to others who has some more food in them, like more energy. And that's what happened. Doug Yeah, no, I totally respect that. I'm sure a lot of people do. What is it that you're going to move on to? Can you give us any hints to that? Are you going to be continuing to work on privacy related things in the Bitcoin space. nopara Well, you know... Doug Monero? Are you moving on to the Monero project? That would be badass. nopara I'm looking at many things. I'm looking at many things. I have an entry in my to do list to buy some Monero. Let me just ask a question because, okay, so I wanted to buy someone Monero. And what I did, okay, let's just do a sanity check and check the GitHub. And what I noticed is the last three years, the Monero GitHub activity is quite low compared to before the Fluffypony days, I guess. Why is that? Doug That's a good question. I mean, I think one of the issues is there's just less updates these days or there's longer time between updates, but there's no lack of development in Monero right now. I guess you don't follow very closely at all huh? The big thing in Monero now is they're working on adding full membership proofs. nopara Full membership proofs? Doug Full membership proofs to replace ring signatures. nopara Okay, you're replacing ring signatures? Yes, for me. Okay, so why? That's the first question. Why? Doug Because ring signatures have weaknesses. There is an attack that can be done on ring signatures for essentially statistically revealing who the sender is. If you have information from, let's say, exchanges or other third parties that the Monero is being sent to, there's what's called an evalice eve attack. And through that, you can statistically narrow down potentially who a sender is. So despite ring signatures being good at the job, they're not perfect. Monero stealth addresses work very well. There's no known flaws there. Confidential transactions, as I'm sure you know, is pretty foolproof. Ring signatures is the one weakness that Monero has, and it does the job, but it can use improvement. And so the idea is to swap out ring signatures and essentially greatly expand the anonymity set. So rather than being one of 16 outputs using full membership proofs, basically it uses the entire anonymity set of Monero itself. So it becomes kind of more like zcash in that respect. nopara Yeah, I was thinking of, should I throw that in? Is it going to be a bad idea to drop Z-cash? But then I guess... Doug There's no hard feelings here about this, this is just technology at the end of the day, right? I think the Monero community does a good job of being honest with itself and realizing when it needs to improve and making those improvements. I think that's kind of been its M.O. from day one, from the day it launched. So it's always been improving, and this is the largest improvement I think it will ever have in its history once we get there. nopara So may I have a question? I was aware of a scientific paper back in the day, right? When I was working on more like research, is that in Monero there was like the most likely. What was it? Something like the most likely to be the sender is the newest. Whoever spent the latest that you were talking about here with ring signature. Doug Yeah, that would be related. Although that I think was already fixed. That was already fixed. nopara Okay. Doug There was changes made to how the decoys are selected so that they would be less apt to being analyzed in that way. But even that being said, by adding full membership proofs, all those know attacks go away. With regards to ring signatures. Ring signatures has always been known to be a temporary solution. Right. And the idea with using it at the time is that it was the best thing to use in terms of something that was also tested and trusted and vetted, as opposed to using quote unquote moon math at the time. Right. So it was a way to get Monero off the ground as digital cash without kind of taking a risk with the tech at the. nopara Right. All right. Doug That's my understanding. I got to say. nopara Right. Doug I'm not nearly as technical as you. I'm more of an outside observer. Right. I'm a guy who's been watching all this. I'm not a developer I don't want to miss. But that is the overall, and as I'm sure you're aware, Monero has done quite well in terms of actually being adopted for purposes of digital cash. Yeah. That's the most promising thing it's got going for it. nopara The last podcast or a live stream that you put out on YouTube, I just checked out and you started with a shopping with statistics that how many people are using Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum and whatnot. And Monero was quite high, which is interesting because in Wasabi we actually integrated shopping bit. So maybe we are going to change that or they are going to change that. Doug Yeah, I saw that yesterday. I was thinking the same. Right. Because now you've made it super easy to use shopping bit, right, through wasabi. Right. You kind of did like a one click button, like a buy now button. That's super cool. nopara Yeah. Yes. It's a chat interface through shopping bit. Right? Anonymous chat. Doug But your insight there with regards to Monero versus private Bitcoin. Right? So like you, in your mind, you went the fixed Bitcoin route, let me try to make Bitcoin fungible, create tools to make it more private and fungible, versus going the Monero route and say, let me work on this protocol that's actually just dedicated from day one to fixing it on the protocol level. What was and is your thinking there between the two approaches? nopara I have a lot of thinking there. I can start from something very abstract here, which is just money, right? What we are really trying to do here, we are trying to deliver a better money than the current money is in this world. And our best theories are the properties of good money, which are portability, fungibility, scarcity, programmability, whatnot. Right? If we boil it down this whole economic theory to a couple of single factors, then what we are going to find is that Bitcoin improved upon the scarcity of the existing financial system, because all this people are like, sitting in a room and printing more money. Like, what kind of madness is that? Anyway? So Bitcoin came and improved upon the scarcity, but it did not do it without sacrifices. And the sacrifices were portability. Right? How fast and how cheap you can send money. And fungibility, which is how private, how anonymous your currency is now, maybe Ethereum people say, and probably I would say that programmability is such a property, but that's up for debate, and let's put that aside. So we have fungibility and portability that we have to improve. Bitcoin is trying in one way and Monero is trying in another way. And something has to work in the future. Something has to bring the scarce currency that will underlie the global economy, and which is going to be, is anyone's guess, anyone's speculation. And I have my own speculation, right? And. And I speculated that it's probably going to be Bitcoin, but who knows? Doug Do you see a scenario where there's Bitcoin and it's kind of doing one use case and not really providing the use case of digital cash, and then something like a Monero, or whatever it is, takes on that use case of being digital cash. Maybe Bitcoin just is the quote unquote digital gold, or digital property. People are storing their wealth in it, using it to, in a very reliable way, send large amounts of digital property back and forth to each other with always clearly knowing who the owner is, because you have this beautiful transparent blockchain. And then something like a Monero takes on the use case of digital cash, which is private by nature, fungible by nature, built to be cheap to send. Do you see that as being a possibility, or do you think Bitcoin will solve digital cash? nopara So we can examine this on two time horizons, right? Like, on the longest time horizon, there will be one unit of account, right? And that unit of account is going to work the longest time frame, but we have a long way to go there. So what happens in the middle? And that's a good question. So I would say possible, but I don't think so because I don't think Monero scales any better than Bitcoin. Maybe if you really want to stretch it. Okay, I don't know much about Monero, but maybe you will enlighten me here. But I believe if you really want to stretch it, Monero scares ten times better than Bitcoin, right? That might be the best, or maybe 100 times, but that's still nothing. We need trillions of times larger, right? Like, I wrote an article back in the day called how do you scale a blockchain? And the article says you can't. Doug That's the article. nopara Because you can stretch it for a couple of orders of magnitude if you're really working at it, but ultimately, you need to handle a lot of financial transactions. And I don't see Monero doing that. And I don't see Bitcoin doing that. I don't see lightning network doing lightning network. Do some, but it's still not going to. Like, if everyone would be using lightning network, that still would end up being a settlement layer or something. So I don't. Doug Think, you know, the thinking is in Bitcoin, I'm sorry, in Monero, is that it can conceivably scale better on the protocol level because of dynamic block mean. Even right now, you go to use Monero, it's super cheap to send, right? It's like a third of a cent to send. It's been that way. It will continue to be that way for a long time. But, yeah, you're right. Even with its dynamics blocks, it's going to run into roadblocks at some point, right? It can only scale so much. But the thinking is there with layer twos, that Monero may be more better suited for a layer two than something like a Bitcoin, because of its dynamic block size and because of its tail emission, so kind of providing continuous security for the base layer. Always giving miners that incentive to mine with this tail emission and that it might just be better built for a layer two. But, yeah, you're right. I don't think anybody in Monero would know. Monero can infinitely scale to handle all the world's transactions. nopara So actually, assuming that Monero is better suited, like, perfectly suited. Let's take the argument to this extreme. It's perfectly suited to a layer two that can hold all the financial transactions on the world. If that's the case, and Bitcoin cannot, then I still cannot see the middle road where Bitcoin is used as big settlement transactions and Monero don't, because then Monero solved the scalability and the privacy, so we would use Bitcoin at that point. Doug That's what I was trying to trick you into going. That I know. So you definitely see it as a one coin, one crypto takes them all. Kind of the austrian thinking there. Austrian economic thinking is just going to be the one best form of money, and it will make everything else essentially worthless and a waste of time. Right. On the long road, your long horizon. Right. But we are seeing. Currently, in reality, we are seeing issues with Bitcoin acting as digital cash. I mean, you've experienced it yourself in your pursuits with building Wasabi. All these things are technologies that you're trying to build, essentially outside of the Bitcoin protocol in an attempt to make it act like digital cash. Tell us more about that. Do you think that at some point, that that's not going to work? Is it futile or it can be solved in that way? Given what you're doing, what samurai has been doing, do you think the Bitcoin protocol itself is going to upgrade? Will it add confidential transactions at some point, or make some other big upgrades that move it towards being more digital cash like? Or is that problem going to continue to be solved by implementations like the things that you've invented? nopara Yeah, it's interesting. When segregated witness soft fork was introduced, then some people started to talk about that. Wow, this might be a lost soft fork here, because Bitcoin is going to stone. If I get into stone, and no one will be able to touch it anymore, it's like, are you crazy? Are you talking about. No way. We have to keep developing this thing, but now we don't really have any more soft forks. We had the top route and we didn't have any, and it seems like it's over. Hard fork is obviously unimaginable at this point, but possibly even soft forks. So I was much more optimistic about, actually confidential transactions with bulletproofs back in the day. I talked a lot about that. That's how that can actually change everything. It's kind of like in Monero, you have ring signatures and you have confidential transactions, and that adds up to privacy. Stat addresses are actually just the user experience improvement there, if you think about it. But anyway, in Bitcoin, it would be the same, but with confidential transactions. But instead of ring signatures, we would have coin joins, right? So that would adapt to privacy. But it's not happening. It's not happening. And I don't think it's going to happen. So then what can happen? That's the question. And my vision, when I was at Wasabi, my vision did not extend to the longest time frame, how to bring everyone in the world. But it extended very far, much farther than where we are right now. So Wasabiwala provides perfect privacy. To begin with, 1.2 was enabling perfect privacy, but it was not easy to do that with that. And people are impatient and they did not leave their change alone because that's money. Why would they? So that was not good enough. But in 2.0, it does provide a privacy that cannot be like people's impatience, doesn't affect it anymore. So then we have coin joins with Wasabi wallet. On top of that, we can build a private lightning network integration. There is no private lightning network implementation right now. And my hope. I did not look into the literature. I looked into the literature, but I did not look into really deeply, but my hope, and I'm 80% sure that this is the case, that the lightning network privacy problems can be fixed entirely if there is no on chain privacy leaks to the lightning network. So I think the privacy problems of the lightning networks are because the on chain Bitcoin privacy problems leak onto the lightning network. And of course, they are not using Tor and they are pretty much custodial, these kind of things, which are pretty bad, but it doesn't matter because those can be fixed, right? So now, if you put the lightning network and wasabi wallet together, then you have a fairly cheap and anonymous payment technology on top of Bitcoin. For quite a while. For quite a while. And this is already not a small work, right. I estimated it to take at least five years, right, to get this done. The private lightning network integration. But that's how far I could go. And then the inherent properties of lightning network, like, how do you make it actually scale to billions of people and not even to people. Robots. Doug Yeah. nopara Right? I don't know how to do that. Maybe the only solution is actually an ecache. Right? Ecash. Back in the 90s, David Chow, Chowman e cash, these centralized services, those are completely anonymous. They can steal money, but they are completely anonymous. So at least they don't know who to steal from. So that's better, right? But what's the problem with that? Well, other than they can steal the money, it's regulatory obstacles to that. Right. You are basically building a custody of anonymous system, but otherwise, that's the only technology that I could see that can solve the anonymous money problem for the entire Internet right now. But there are many smart people. They are probably going to come up with some smart things. Doug Has your opinion of Monero changed? Obviously, it sounds like obviously you don't follow it that closely, but has your opinion of Monero changed throughout time, given your dealings with Bitcoin and trying to solve these issues that Bitcoin has, or you're kind of steadfast in your thoughts between Bitcoin and Monero? nopara Oh, no. So it's changed in a way that I had problems with Monero, but people started fixing those problems. I didn't think much about Monero before they had confidential transactions for obvious reasons. Right. Doug Yes. nopara I have some these attack vectors that I've read about how maybe the newest things, maybe which one is the decoy, right. But people are claiming these things are getting resolved. Right. And also, I'm really happy about the stat addresses. Stuff like, I think the user experience, especially this address holder, user, finds another user kind of user experience. These are very important. Anyway, my opinion on Monero is gradually, over the years, got better and better. There is one more thing that I'm. I'm not sure about. You know, I am. I have concerns about which are the. Doug Putting me on the edge of my seat over here. What is it? What is it? nopara Let's take the Tor network. You're using the Tor browser, and you're using it to access Facebook. Now, how anonymous are you? Not very anonymous. Right? Because you expose on a higher layer your entire identity, even if you're using the Tor network and it's intel or completely anonymous. So there are Monero wallets. Those are also not anonymous. I don't have concerns about the Monero client. Right. Like the Monero core full node. I'm not sure how it's called. I don't have conscience about that. But it's like, how many people are using a light wallet versus a full node? Well, 99.99%. Everyone is using a light wallet. I'm using a Bitkai full node, actually, but I know that no one is really using it. So then there are wallets and Monero. Those are like, really don't have the network level privacy down. So that's my only concern there. Doug Yeah, that's valid. I don't know if you can see it on your side, on the bottom, I have Moneronoto.com. So we're starting a project. It's like a plug and play Monero node. We're launching that very soon. We've pretty much finished building it. But yeah, I mean, the reason I started that project is to try to improve the usability of Monero with regards to people running their own nodes. So people can use apps like cake wallet or whatever it is that they already are using, but then very easily connecting to their own node, which they can do today. But trying to simplify to the point where somebody like me can very easily do it, somebody who's non technical. But yeah, I do think that's a problem that needs to be solved in Monero. We need everybody running it in the purest way possible, running their own node. nopara But can you build a private light. Doug A lightweight? It's called a lightwallet server. So Monero nodo, this project that we're building is going to have the lightwall server in it. So you could effectively use, have you heard of, like, my Monero? Right? My Monero is a Monero light wallet, right? So you don't have to wait for. Every time you open up my Monero, it auto loads. You don't have to wait for it to sync because it's syncing on their servers. Now, theoretically, you could sync it on your own private lightwild server running on your own node, so you're not sacrificing any privacy so you can get that. nopara Still a heck, it's still not a light wallet. Doug You're running your own node, you're running your own lightwild server. Where's the sacrifice in potential privacy or anything at that point? nopara No, there is no sacrifice, okay? I'm talking about really something that you can download on your phone and it's an application or download to your desktop, right? And just run it. The informat mission theoretical problem here is that here is you, and here is the Monero blockchain. And what you want to know is how much money you have. So you have to somehow figure out from the Monero blockchain what you're interested in. So then the question is, okay, what does the full node do? The full node grabs the entire blockchain, gets it to you, and then picks it up from your local disk. So it's perfectly private, right? So what does, let's say, a hypothetical or any Bitcoin light wallet, almost any Bitcoin light wallet do? The Bitcoin blockchain is on a server, and then the client asks the server, hey, how much money I have. These are my addresses. And the client tells you that, hey, these are your addresses. So the client just exposes everything to the server, and privacy goes in the trash. Right? But there are methods, at least on Bitcoin, and I'm pretty sure it should be possible on Monero. But I don't know how different it is to figure out things from the Monero blockchain without exposing information, without exposing your addresses. And maybe someone did it... Doug Yeah, there are those things, too. Like I said, I'm not super technical, so I don't want to misspeak, but Monero has I2P built into it. Monero has Dandelion++. So in terms of the nodes themselves, right? So when the network does propagate, you don't know what...it's hard to associate the person. So if somebody goes to send a transaction, it's built in a way where you can't see which node it's coming out of. Right? When they go to communicate with the nodes because of Dandelion++ can't see where the transaction originally propagated from. So there's protections there. But, yeah, there's always work to be done. But I think Monero does have a pretty good handle on that, to be honest in my opinion. A lot of people that use Monero, like myself included, use something like a Cake wallet, and they're connecting to a full node, but lots of know they're not even connecting to their own node that they're running. They're connecting to a node that's being provided to them that they could select from a list of nodes. Most likely, it's one of the nodes that Cake is actually providing. So, yeah, what we're trying to solve is give somebody a super easy way to then just add their own node that they can connect to. Does it solve all the problems? No, but I think it's getting there, and I do appreciate that criticism as well. So how about let's talk about - more about, let's take a step back, actually. Right. So, honestly, I never followed Wasabi that closely because I was always just using Monero. I never really used the Bitcoin privacy tools. Tell us a little bit more about that. You talked about some of those things, wasabi 2.0 versus how originally started, and I guess some of the shortcomings of what 1.0 was. I've seen these battles between you and samurai. I'll be honest, I never paid super close attention to it. Can you give us some insight into that and what your overall take is on that whole situation of wasabi versus samurai, like what you guys are doing versus what they're doing. So for the people that are listening, these everybody's kind of like, obviously Monero, but they're also into Bitcoin privacy tech. What is the difference between using something like a samurai solutions versus using wasabi? Are they effectively the same thing at this point? Give us your take on that. nopara Samurai wallet was created in 2015 and, well, it was a blockchain focused products, but then the people who are created it today, they took it, they renamed it to samurai wallet, and then they launched it and started advertising it as a privacy wallet. Now, there were many problems with that. One of the problem is that we just talked about network level privacy here. So what they were doing is they sent the user addresses to blockchain.info. And so they basically exposed all their users entire Bitcoin wallets to blockchain.info. Later on or back. Fast forward to today, they are sending their addresses to their own servers. So now they are in the position of honeypot, not blockchain.info, which is not better at all. But that's samurai wallet. That's the mobile wallet line of development. No, it's not like Wasabi. It has no privacy. Literally. Doug Really? So you're saying samurai, it's a charade because essentially you see it as a honeypot. You view it as a honeypot? nopara Oh, yes, definitely it is. Doug What would they say about you? What's their criticism of you? And essentially what's their argument against what you're saying? nopara Well, they call me fat. Doug Now, I definitely can't trust them because you look pretty fit to me, man. You look like a healthy guy over there. nopara I'm trying. So. So you might heard something about my banana and peeling chains and stuff like that. You know what I'm saying? Doug A little bit, but yeah, give us the whole spiel. nopara So how does the coin join work? I don't want to lose everyone. Doug I know it's a lot, but this is my, like I said, I don't really pay attention to the Bitcoin privacy developments because Monero is there, it works. And this is what I see as part of the problem. It is confusing even for the user. Right? Because it's not as simple as default privacy. There's steps a user needs to take to use Bitcoin in a private way to the point where it becomes, I think, becomes complicated. nopara The problem is the lack of confidential transaction in this case. So I want to coin join. And you want to coin join. We want to coin join with each other. But you have five Bitcoin and I only have two. So what are we doing then? In Monero, you have confidential transactions, so no one knows that I only have two and you only have five. We put together, and we coin join or ring signature, and then no one knows what comes out. Right? So it's perfect. But in coin joins, it's not like that. I put in two, and you put in five, and what comes out is two, two, three. So the peeling chain is the three Bitcoin that goes back to you. And everyone knows that goes back to you because you were the one who put five in it. It couldn't possibly have been me because I only had two. So that's the peeling chain. And Wasabi 1.2 was working in this way. Right? Like, what can you do? Then you have a peeling chain here. Now this. This. So, samurai wallet, I don't know, like, five years ago, acquired a blockchain analysis company, OXT, and later know your CP or something like that. So they have two products. And on the OXT product, they were following these five Bitcoins, these unmixed Bitcoins. Right, sorry. These three Bitcoins. That goes back to you, the peeling chain. They created a very nice visualization that, hey, here is the peeling chain. Like, it goes into this coin join, and then from this coin join, it goes into this, and from this, it goes into this. Right? These were the non mixed Bitcoins that wasabi 1.0 couldn't mix. So this was the criticism in Wasabi 2.0. We don't have this anymore. I did not actually think this problem can be solved, but we did somehow, and we don't have this anymore. So it's like many people brings together very different amounts, and very different amounts comes out. And there is mathematical and computational defense against. So this peeling chain does not exist in 2.0. But the funny thing here is that, sure, you could follow these through the OXT blockchain analysis software through Bitcoin transactions. And very nice graphs came out. But what did samurai wallet do? They had a TX zero. Transaction zero. So before they put coins into a coin join, they create a zero transaction that breaks your coins down to one Bitcoins. No, let's go with the same example. Your coins down to a two Bitcoin and a two Bitcoin. And the one Bitcoin, and then my coins down to two Bitcoin. Whatever. And then we coin join. After that takes zero. But your peeling chain doesn't go away there because it's in the TX zero. So the change of the coin join is in the TX zero. So what they did is like a magic trick where in wasabi wallet, we put everything right into the code, in wasabi wallet 1.0. Okay, we are talking about back in the days, we put everything back into the coin join right away. But what they did is that before they put anything into the coin join, they created a zero transaction. And for us, the coin join contained the change. And for them, the zero transaction contained the change. But if the coin joins have the change, then you can be very misleading about that, because look at that coin join and look at this thing, and you can see that this has no privacy. And of course you don't. But, you know. So that was one of the main criticism for the 1.2. For 2.2, I'm not sure they have any criticism. Doug Yeah. Are they still criticizing 2.0 or it's like... nopara They are still criticizing, but I don't recall having any, other than it's a "broken system", like putting that in without any argument. So I don't recall any. Doug Wasn't there some criticism with essentially censorship? Because you guys control the transactions that can go in. nopara Yeah, but that's not privacy. But yes, they made it privacy. It's not a privacy issue in Wasabi. It's, well, a censorship issue. Right? Like, there is not everyone who. Not everyone is able to use Wasabi wallet. And that's a very valid criticism, and we are very not happy about that. And we have our reasons. Doug Right. It's essentially not permissionless, you could say. nopara Well, then it wouldn't be a criticism from them because they have the same system. So they are not permissionless either, from an architectural point of view. Right? But wait, that could be a criticism from the Monero point of view. Right? Because Monero is permissionless and wasabi wallet or samurai wallet is not permissionless. Right. That's an architectural difference there. Yes. Doug But explain to us what the issue was. So essentially, you guys, because of regulations, and you have to control who can enter into these mixing transactions, right? Explain to us what the issue is there with the censorship. nopara So you already explained it. Right? Controlling who gets into coin join transactions. What else can you say about that? Doug And why did you guys have to implement that? It was because you were receiving pressure? nopara So I started this. Let's just leave it with the short answer there. Yes, regulatory pressure. That's correct. Doug And now, how has samurai avoided this once again, I don't follow all this too closely. I haven't talked to the samurai guys in a long time either. So if they're willing to come up on here one day, I'm sure we'll rehash the conversation. So please get as much info as you want out there with regards to your point of view of all this so we could hear both sides of the story. nopara So our strategies are different. So there are two kinds of strategies here. Our strategies, okay. Their strategy is that when they receive a letter, they don't open it. Our strategy is when we receive a letter, we open it. What that leads to is a different information. So if we are reading what we are getting and we are not happy about it, I don't want to get Wasabi into a bad position here, but there is a reason why Wasabi has to move from time to time to other places. And, yeah. It's better if I don't talk about everything that's going on, right? Because things are ongoing. Doug Understandable. nopara Okay. In the beginning, let me go with my original answer that I didn't want to say because that's better. In the beginning you were asking me why did I leave Wasabi? And I told you that there are multiple reasons. And I told you the main reason. But there is also another reason that if you think about it, in the entire cryptocurrency space, I am the largest non scammer target in the entire cryptocurrency space since the tornado cash people got shut down. Oh, yeah. Just to say something here, wasabi wallet is ten times larger than samurai wallet in terms of volumes. Doug Really? I didn't realize. nopara It doesn't seem like that from Twitter, but if you look at the actual statistics, you can see that how many people are using both. But Tornado Cash was another ten times larger than Wasabi wallet was. Right? So Tornado Cash was the largest and the first non custodial service, too. Well, they got some heat. Are they still in jail? I don't know. Some of them possibly still in jail. Right? Doug Yeah. I think they're going through the processes right now. I haven't been keeping up with what the current status is. nopara Yeah. So then. Then, look, I am next in line in that sense. In Monero... it's not like in Monero where there is a Monero developer. If someone fucks this Monero developer, if the matrix comes for it, then nothing happens. There is another Monero developer to take its place. Right? But if I would have been taken out, and there were things, but if I would have been taken out, then that could have jeopardized the entire progress of Wasabi and by extension, Bitcoin privacy. So where was I going with it? Where I was going with it is that the risk that we were taking is possibly the largest in the space then the non-scammer part of it. Right? No, I shouldn't even say that because there is CZ, who, I don't consider him a scammer. Doug What do you mean, scammer? Scammer. Wait, why are you labeling it? I'm not understanding it. What do you mean, a known scammer? nopara No, not scammer. Because there are many people, they are doing, like, ultra scamming in Bitcoin. Doug Okay, so you're saying somebody who's not a scammer, but is under the eye, is being watched by the authorities, right? nopara Yes. I should be so much clearer. Doug You've been clear, other than that. Doug No worries, I think you've been quite clear, actually. nopara I made clear that I'm a scammer. That's what you are going to get from the samurai people. They are going to take that. I am a known scammer, the largest known scammer in Bitcoin. Let's not give them ideas. Doug Oh, man. Yeah. So you saw yourself as a target. And do you think in general, Wasabi and Samurai are potentially susceptible to governments coming in and making rules that you can't use these tools anymore? Obviously, Monero potentially susceptible to that as well. What's your whole take on that? You know, governments starting to crack down trying to ban things like Monero and Bitcoin privacy tools. nopara What you explained, that would be the best case scenario. That they create rules and they will have to shut down. Right? Now, what's more like happening is they are taking away your bank accounts. They are taking away your family's bank accounts. You won't be able to really exist. I don't know if, we probably haven't, but people who got debanked, they cannot live entirely on Bitcoin. That's just not how it works. Bitcoin is very good, or Monero is very good for a couple of things, but if you want to put your entire lives on it, that's not that easy unless you live alone without a family. Right? I debanked myself before when I didn't have anyone, but I couldn't do it anymore. I was forced to figure these things out. Luckily, I found solutions. But what was your question here? Yeah, what can happen? Yes. Exchanges and what kinds of services are going to refuse dealing with Monero or other kinds of privacy services. Definitely possible and definitely happening right now. How sustainable it is? I'm not sure, because ultimately if they would really want to push this norm that, hey, privacy transactions are illegal - that's just madness that leads to nowhere. Like what kind of society are we going to live in if that's happening? But there are also some hopeful trends as well. What you see in Argentina. Viva la liberta cara. Right? There are hopeful trends in the long term, liberty is going to win, but what's going to happen in the middle term is questionable. Maybe we can survive until liberty triumphs. Doug Yeah, hopefully there won't be too many martyrs along the way, right? We've already seen some, yes. nopara Okay, one more thing. It's my speculation here, but you might know more about this. This might be the perfect time to ask. So one thing I've noticed is a trend that people working on privacy are getting attacked for completely different things. So I saw what they did with Cody Wilson. He hired a girl on the internet. On an Internet website you can hire girls to come to you and that girl ended up being underage. Doug Cody Wilson. Cody Wilson you're talking about? nopara Cody Wilson. Yes. So then they got him into jail. Right? It had nothing to do with his privacy work. Right? But they got him for something else. Now, I saw the exact same thing happened. Let's not even talk about Julian Assange here because the exact same thing happened. And this is my question to Fluffypony, you, can you give some context on that? Are you familiar with the story I would be interested in? Doug Well, I mean, he's going through the case right now, so I don't really know what happened. But it was bizarre because it was something that happened, I think at the time when he got accused, it was like ten years ago, right? And it was a little bizarre that the South African government got so involved to the point where they extradited him from the US for what, if he is guilty of it, is a crime. But it wasn't something that you think would go to the national level where governments would be extraditing somebody for mean, unless I don't understand the law well enough. So that was a little bizarre, but I can't really say much more than that. Nobody really knows what's going on. So yeah, I don't know if that was big daddy government or looking for a way to punish or take away his ability to be a part of the project, or if it really was he just had these legal issues. I don't know. But there could be something there. I think like you, right? Like you with your concerns, I think Fluffy had similar concerns. He didn't want to be labeled as the CEO of Monero. Right? He didn't want to be the guy. The fall guy, right? He didn't want to be the face. He didn't want to be the face of Monero. And we really shouldn't have a face of Monero. It's like Bitcoin, right? There's Satoshi. So he was already moving himself away from the project before that, even any of that went down for those reasons. But I agree. I do think there's some concern there that they might be using other tactics to push people out of this arena. nopara There is a saying in Hungary, there is a racist and a non racist version. Let's go with a non racist one. How do people steal bicycles in Hungary? It actually takes three of them. The first one cuts the lock. The second one grabs the bicycle and throw it in the bushes, and the third one finds a bicycle. So what you do here is something similar, like what Satoshi was doing, right? Like, he was the one who cut the lock there. And then we picked up the bicycle and brought Bitcoin to a different level. And this is kind of what decentralization is all about, right? This is how this should work. This is how you can fight against tyranny. This is the way you can do everything by yourself. Doug So you think very adversarially, right? I mean, that's how you got into Bitcoin to begin with and into Bitcoin privacy. You saw the flaws with Bitcoin's lack of fungibility. So when you continue to think about these things, and I'm sure you think about them all the time, does that draw you closer to something like Monero? Because its whole ethos is to that thorn in the side of the state system and in a way where it can't be stopped, right? And it's not just its default privacy, but it's also the way it's mined with CPUs instead of Asics. It's the tail emission. All these design decisions it makes is towards being unstoppable digital cash that's headless with no head to chop off. Do you think about things in that way and consider Monero interesting for those purposes? nopara You know, whatever works. Whatever brings down tyranny. Doug Thinking as an adversarial thinker. I mean, obviously you think about Bitcoin and you're like, wait a minute, there's this that can go wrong. There's this that can go wrong. There's this attack surface because it's fundamentally transparent. Take us through some of your thinking there in terms of how you look at Bitcoin and whether or not governments can co opt it, right? I often talk about Bitcoin in those terms. That's my concern, that it could effectively be co opted because of its transparent chain, because of the fact the way it's mined, right? All the miners, it's a handful of large companies that do all the mining that can get approached by regulators, by governments, things like that. Take us through your thinking there. The cipher punk mentality, the crypto anarchist mentality. When looking at Bitcoin, are you thinking about how it can be co opted and then versus looking at something like Monero, is that potentially better suited in terms of being able to maintain its ability to provide its service without being co opted by any state? nopara I'm sure I thought a lot about this, but I think it's not that important. So what we can do is we build a perfect system, and if we do that, everyone's going to use it right away. Like, who can stop ChatGPT? It was so good that everyone started to use it in a month. It didn't happen in five to ten years. And governments weren't holding congressional hearings on it. Of course they were now, but only after everyone was using it at that point. So that's a much better place to have congressional hearing than when you're just starting out like Bitcoin or Monero. So what I'm trying to say here is that we have to fix fungibility and portability, and when we do that everyone is going to use, no matter what governments want us to do. So that's a full frontal attack. And in some sense it's good news because it's development, and we are all developers and we are going to build anything. Trust me, I'm an engineer. But in another sense, it's bad news because it's development, and development is really hard. And if even I don't have a fully fledged plan in my mind, not just Monero, not just Bitcoin, like any cryptocurrency, could actually serve the entire world, then it might actually suggest that we have a long way to go and fuck all the governments. They can mess around, but if we build a perfect system, they don't have much leverage on us anymore. So if Monero would be that good, that I can just download it on my phone, and use it with anyone instantly and it would scale, right, like then, fuck yeah. No one can stop Monero at that point. But neither Bitcoin nor Monero is there. And how can we get there? Because when we get there, then regulations doesn't matter at that point, they are regulating because they have our money, they are printing our money. That's why they can regulate. But when we build the perfect money that is anonymous and portable and scarce, then they cannot regulate anymore. They don't have the power to regulate anymore. That's what we have to do, build better systems because we're failing right now. Doug Right, but are you concerned that the current approach that we're taking with putting, well, not me, but those that are putting all their eggs in the Bitcoin basket saying, let's get this across the event horizon. Are you worried that once it gets across there, that it's a shell of its former self in that, yes, it's achieved mass adoption. Everybody's using it now, but along the way it's been co opted, right? So it's like Chat GPT sure took off. Nobody had time to even do anything. But with Bitcoin, it's like boiling a frog, right? So as we transition, as we move forward, as it levels up in adoption, it also seems to be losing its cipher punkness along the way, right? And as more people adopt it, as governments embrace it more, it's becoming more KYC, all this stuff, to the point where when it finally does get adopted, it's like, is it now just this thing that governments can perfectly track and trace and use to watch over how people use their digital property, perfectly tax how they're using it, and it's like, okay, here you go, guys. You got Bitcoin. nopara Yeah, definitely. I can straw man that. I created this thought experiment and I really don't like it because this almost makes sense. But let's assume we're not going to fix Bitcoin. Nothing changes. Wasabi fails, Bitcoin is going to be what it's going to be. It's going to be the largest surveillance system in the world has ever seen, right? Like, what else could it be? Nothing else. Everything is public, basically. So that's the Bitcoin blockchain. Now, who can use the Bitcoin blockchain? And this takes over the world. Right? Now, at that point, when Bitcoin blockchain takes over the world, what does it mean? We didn't fix the scaling problem. So the only people who are going to be able to use the Bitcoin blockchain are the rich people, the richest ones. They are so rich that they are not even people anymore. They are institutions at that point, right? Because institutions are richer than people. So institutions are going to use the Bitcoin blockchain, and the Bitcoin blockchain is going to be completely transparent. So what do we get there is that the largest money movements in the world are completely transparent. So you see the scenario here, right? And I think it's bad, but it's not like everyone in the world would be completely transparent. It's not like you and me would be using the Bitcoin blockchain. We wouldn't have the money for that. To do that. Doug Right. People are using custodial ln or whatever... nopara Well, I mean, look, I would be okay with an anonymous custodial at this point. That would be perfect. Do you understand why I'm saying that? An anonymous custody is completely doable. It is instant and super cheap, right? Free. Almost free to transfer. The only problem is the freaking regulation there. Doug The Chaumian e-cash is what you're talking about, right? nopara E-cash. Yeah. Doug Man, that guy was ahead of his time huh? Do you know him? nopara I don't know him personally, but I've read too many papers from him. It's funny, he kind of stopped working. He kind of stopped doing anything great ever since the 90s, but he did some really great things there. Doug What do you think of the current state of the lightning network? I feel like now more than ever, people are like, it's not working as intended. It's not fulfilling the promises that have been made. Do you think it needs to be scrapped? And there needs to be something else. I mean, people are talking about using liquid instead. I know they're really trying to push that now in Bitcoin. What are your thoughts on those developments? nopara I think people have over inflated expectations there. My opinion on the lightning network never changed. This is a great technology that we can make it work. And if we would put a lot more work in it, we could make it private. And that's the lightning network. And transactions not getting through and stuff like that, that's just poor software. We can fix it. It's not that big of a deal. It just takes time. So what's their problem? Oh, yeah, because there is custody on the lighting network, right? What's the point of that? Nothing. But the custodial lightning network is the one that fixes the UX issues, the user experience issues. So that's the only reason why we have custodial lightning network. But on the other hand, we can fix the user experience issues non custody way. And then it makes sense. I'm not in the camp that thinks the lightning network is fucked up, and I'm not in the camp that had over inflated expectations either. So in fact, people still don't realize that the lightning network is not going to be able to serve the entire human base, right? There will be another disappointment along the way. But let's just fix the user experience issues first. Doug All right buddy, this is fantastic. Is there anything else you want to bring up? And you said we might not be hearing from you for a while, right? You're "retiring from Wasabi". Is there any information you want to get out? nopara Yes. I am not the largest known scammer in the world. It's bad if I have to deny it. Doug People will be so confused they won't know what to think there. They're like, wait, what he's a scammer? nopara Thank you very much. Last time I was in a Monero room was an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit. I enjoyed it as well. nopara I like what you guys are doing because ultimately we have the same adversary here. The power structures. Those are unjust. And the only way to actually create a more even playing field is to have anonymous money and anonymous communication. And if we have anonymous money and anonymous communication, then there are many small entrepreneurs, cypherpunk entrepreneurs, those can build anonymous trades for different services. But first we have to have anonymous communication and anonymous money. And Monero is trying to build anonymous money and whoever is succeeding to build the anonymous money that's also portable, right? And that's scalable. Whoever succeeds that, I'm supporting that. And maybe I don't have a huge opinion about Dash, for example, but I still support what they are doing because at least they are trying. So few people are trying. So good luck guys. I hope you will get somewhere with this. Doug Awesome, awesome man. I appreciate that. Means a lot coming from you. Do you think Wasabi would ever add Monero to the wallet as an alternative option? Like we see samurai doing it for their toxic change. Perhaps you're not a decision maker over there anymore, but do you ever foresee that happening? nopara I don't. It's hard enough to build Bitcoin stuff. And there are some very obvious developments for Wasabi wallet. Hardware wallet coin joins. It's a hot wallet, right? Who's storing their Bitcoins in hot wallet anymore? Not many. So hardware wallet coin joins. In fact, many people don't speak English, localizations to many different languages or mobile wallets. Less and less people have desktop wallets anymore. So there are some very basic things that wasabi wallet should be doing. And even when those basic things are done, they should be working on the lightning network. And after that they can think about Monero integration, right? And we're already talking about a decade of development here. I don't see a way. Doug It seems like an easy thing that can be added. The market is demanding it, right? Like you even said, like ShopinBit. You pointed out they accept Bitcoin and Monero, they integrated Wasabi, but a large percentage of their transactions are done in Monero. Like the people, the users they're using Monero so it's often good practice to follow the users right to if they're demanding? Let the market decide. If they're using Monero, then maybe that's something that people want to use for making transactions. nopara Talk about it, but I don't actually believe that. I think what entrepreneurs should do is to listen to their customers, to their users, but only about their problems, and not about what solutions they are suggesting. Never listen to what they are suggesting to how you should solve something. Always try to figure out what their problem is. And what is the problem? The problem is that we don't have an anonymous and fast and cheap money. That's the problem. So if we can solve that now, that's what I want. If Monero would be fast and cheap and scalable and everything, like fuck yeah. I mean, why would you even bother with Bitcoin at that point? But it's not there and I hope you guys get there. And maybe when you get there, I start working on it. Doug Well, I would say it's currently fast and cheap... nopara Fast and cheap, until people started using it... Doug Well, I mean, in theory it should only get cheaper with dynamic block size, because as you put more transactions in each block, their cost to send will go down per transaction. nopara Okay, we are ending this interview, but let's play with that back to the network level privacy here. So firstly, you have to figure out how to build a light wallet that doesn't require downloading the entire blockchain neither. And not in a hacky server way, like, oh, we just have a server here? No, it's like a proper anonymous light wallet integration. And then when you have an anonymous light wallet from a network dimension, on the network level, when you have that then you can figure out how large you can increase the blockchain without that light wallet not becoming too heavy. You see what I'm trying to say here? So as long as you can keep the light wallet light, it's okay to increase the blockchain. As soon as the light wallet starts to become heavy, blockchain increase is not okay anymore. That's what I would say the bottleneck is. I'm not the Bitcoin maximalist who run your own node. And that's why we have to have our blockchain small, because we have to run our own node. I mean, sure, in an ideal word, but come on, the world needs anonymous money. The word needs scarce money. So we can't have everything. But again, we can't have terabytes of blockchain. Not terabytes, many hundreds of thousands of times terabytes of blockchain if we are talking about. Yeah, so I hope. I hope. I was trying to express a lot of things in this interview and I hope at least some things have came across to some people. Doug I think you did a great job. I'll give you also one last chance. If there's anything you feel like you need to say that you didn't say, please do. Anything else? nopara I like your background. Flame of liberty. Doug You should come to Monerotopia conference. We'd love to have you, man, next time is in Buenos Aires. nopara Best place to have a conference now. Doug Yeah, we're going to be doing it in November, so maybe we could get you to come down. That'd be fantastic. nopara I think about it. Doug All right, I'll reach out to you. Nopara, thank you so much. Greatly appreciate your time. Thank you for everything you've done in the space. I know there's that drama that goes on between you and the samurai guys, but I appreciate them. I appreciate you. You guys are trying to do what you can do to add fungibility and privacy to Bitcoin. You've been working on this for many years, right? You started, this was probably what, like 2015? You started working on this. nopara Yes. Doug So much respect to you, man. You were thinking about these problems in the early days, so you had a lot of foresight, and then you took the initiative to try to fix it. So kudos to you and you achieved a lot. Appreciate it, ma'am. Thank you for everything you've done in the space and for continuing to push things forward. And I wish you much luck in whatever it is you end up pursuing and working on. nopara Thank you for having me. Doug Cheers, man. Thank you.