Latest / Monero Talk / Binance delists XMR, BasicSwap steps in as an Atomic Swap-based unstoppable on-ramp w/ Dr. Kapil | Epi #299

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Binance delists XMR, BasicSwap steps in as an Atomic Swap-based unstoppable on-ramp w/ Dr. Kapil | Epi #299 · Monero Talk

• Doug All right. What's going on, guys? Dr. Kopp, CJ, CG, what's up? The basic swap team. Is it the basic swap? I'm sure there's more, right? Dr. Kapil Yeah, yeah, there's more, but they're hiding in the background. Doug I guess that is the first question. Who is the team for basic swap and particle? Obviously, I assume there's just anonymous contributors as well, but give us some insight into that. Dr. Kapil Okay, so our lead developer is a guy called Technovert goes, we call him TV around here. He is a fully anonymous step. I've never met him to this day, but I just want to attach the caveat here that the project is open source. Dr. Kapil So you guys can expect the code at any time. Just let's keep that in mind. After that in front and charge of sort of, and TV does a lot of the kind of backend architectural work that kind of makes basic swap work as an engine. Dr. Kapil In terms of the front end and GUI design, it's CRZ, a guy called Hailoff, who's kind of, both these guys have been with the project since inception. So he kind of leads on the front end type development. Dr. Kapil We've got a couple of other code contributors, notably, I think guys like Huud and there's a couple of others you prefer to kind of keep in the background. Again, you can always have a look in the Git and the repos just to see what they're contributing. Dr. Kapil And it's a community project. So actually recently, we've been getting members of the Monero community now kind of joining us and actively kind of, yeah, they've been actually kind of, making contributions to the code base and identifying bugs and doing fixes. Dr. Kapil So it's really nice to kind of see how we've been progressing since, Monero topia in Mexico city. Thank you once again for just giving us the opportunity to present our vision there. We've had time to kind of develop this and grow. Dr. Kapil So that's our kind of key team. I'm one of the advisors and I'm a very front pacing person for this project. So I'm Dr. Cap and CG, who's also with us today. He kind of leads a lot of the communications side of things as well. Doug Awesome overview. Yeah, so would you say Monero -Topia kind of helped widen the ecosystem and kind of did it have that effect? Because that was certainly our goal. I mean, it helped. Dr. Kapil massively. I think it put us in touch with a lot of different projects. It helped give us an air of legitimacy. It gave us legitimacy, you know, being able to actually present this concept and this vision and giving people the opportunity subsequently to then test it out. Dr. Kapil It's given us a foundation base to build awareness of our platform from. It put us in touch with a lot of great people and has allowed us to explore a number of avenues with regards to the actual overall development basic swap. Dr. Kapil So I'm very grateful for that and it was just a really fun time. Really enjoyed it a lot. Doug Yeah, it was. It was. I actually just rewatched your talk as I was driving over here. Actually, I shouldn't say rewatched it. I didn't get to watch it that day, really, that much, because I was running around, whatnot. Doug So it was nice to go back and listen to it. And it kind of brought me back to Monero Topi. I was like, what a great fucking time we had. That was just really good. And I remember when you were about to go up on stage, you were a little nervous. Doug And whenever I was like, bro, just go up there and do your thing. And you did a great, great job. And I think what people walked away from that talk was, wait, BasicSwap is doing what we've all been talking about, what we're hoping to achieve one day, which is a decentralized marketplace where we're doing atomic swaps. Doug And in the Monero community, we've always been talking about other solutions. But BasicSwap really wasn't discussed that much. And I feel like you guys kind of came out of nowhere with it. And it's not theoretical. Doug It's up and running. It's working. So I feel like it's a bit underrated in the ecosystem. And I'm thinking you're going to start to see a lot more growth as people realize what it is and what it's achieving. Doug You don't need to use particle coin to do it. That's not really. I think maybe that may have, for some people, because as you even said in your talk, everybody's quite, not everybody, but a lot of people are quite tribal with their projects. Doug So there may have been some of that thinking. But BasicSwap is its own monster. It's just a decentralized exchange. What would be your pitch for BasicSwap? How would you describe it and compare it to the other kind of solutions that exist? Dr. Kapil So, when people ask me the elevator pitch, I say it is the world's most private, safe, and secure decks. It's a peer -to -peer decks, and at the time it was essentially the first decks in the world that offered unidirectional and then later the first decks offered bidirectional narrow atomic swaps. Dr. Kapil It's KYC free, it's free of third -party fees, and it's straight swaps between the coins that you want to choose, so it is a means of empowering you to be fully decentralized and independent of centralized exchanges for your liquidity needs. Dr. Kapil That's kind of the short pitch for it. I would say it's the only decks in the world that offers a fully decentralized distributed order book, and that's achieved through an intermediary peer -to -peer data layer called the SMSG network, which encrypts all traffic and messengers between participants, which offers additional levels of privacy. Dr. Kapil We are the first project to have that essentially utilized and implementation of scriptless scripts, essentially adaptive signatures, and that is essentially what allows the underlying bit of technology code that allows us to achieve manero atomic swaps with an incredibly high level of privacy. Dr. Kapil We are an open source project, and we support all communities, particularly those that are dedicated towards privacy. Doug How would you compare it to some of the other solutions that exist out there? Even Samurai's atomic swaps implementation, BISC network, Havino that's being built, Sarai DEX. I know I'm listening off a lot there, but where would you say it sits? Doug If you had a Venn diagram of these kind of different things, where would you say it sits in terms of its differences and similarities among those different solutions that are all trying to essentially achieve the same thing at the end of the day, allowing people to trade crypto peer -to -peer anonymously without a centralized exchange? Dr. Kapil sure. So just to kind of start there, I would say we are, for a beta, we're actually a surprisingly mature ecosystem in a lot of ways. We are not an AMM like Siridex. We are a distributed order book, which is kind of more in keeping, you know, I kind of think of Bisk and Havinos being more like a local Monero peer -to -peer type system. Dr. Kapil What we do is we take the best bits of centralized exchanges, which is the order book whereby you get the price you set for, and then kind of combine that with all the benefits of actually running that on a truly decentralized peer -to -peer architecture. Dr. Kapil So that's really what sets us apart. And in terms of, you know, where we're different, we are more mature. Our swaps are working, and I'm not seeing that, you know, it works for a lot of the other projects too. Dr. Kapil But I would certainly say, you know, I'm thinking more of Siridex in this and, you know, no disrespect to them, because we are a more mature model than Siridex, and that's the one I've been keeping more tabs on. Dr. Kapil And we have a somewhat more simplified architecture than Siridex. I think trying to create an automated market maker system, whilst that has incentives built in for generating liquidity, there is a lot more mechanics to it. Dr. Kapil And I appreciate that's traditionally an issue you would encounter with, you know, order book -based DEXs is, well, where do you drive the incentives for liquidity from? But actually, this is something I was going to get to a bit later, but something that we've now offered in our most recent updates is essentially a liquidity script, whereby with our DEX, rather than you having to just post orders in a very manual fashion, you can basically set a script that specifies which coins you want to trade, what the sort of minimum price, the absolute minimum sell price you will have for them, and then the percentage above or below the kind of market rate that you would be willing to trade them at. Dr. Kapil So it creates the arbitrage opportunities, and it does that by essentially querying CoinGecko as an oracle, or an oracle that you wish to specify. And then it kind of will then publish orders and republish them automatically at a timeframe that you set, which by default is about one hour, but can be set as low as 15 minutes. Dr. Kapil And there's no fee for kind of publishing those orders on the system either. So essentially, we offer now with our DEX, a highly automated way to populate our order book in such a manner that you can essentially be your own market maker. Dr. Kapil And I think, you know, I think that's something that probably sets us apart to an extent, or certainly advances the cause. Doug Explain that a little bit more on how you could be your own market maker. Dr. Kapil Sure. So with basic swap decks, something that we've developed is a script that allows you to automatically create orders. So rather than before this script came along, you'd have to manually create individual orders to populate that book. Dr. Kapil Those orders would have a set expiration date, at which point you would have to then recreate them, essentially republish. This requires a lot of manual labor. And the other thing is those orders don't automatically track across market price. Dr. Kapil So in our prior model, in our older model, you could potentially set yourself up to sudden liquidity changes or being taken advantage of. If you use our liquidity script to essentially be your own market maker, you can essentially, you're basically directly interacting with the basic swap engine, you're bypassing the GUI. Dr. Kapil And you're basically indirectly interacting with the basic swap engine. You're basically saying, this is the coin pairing I wish to trade. I want it to track market price. And I want to publish orders either at a set rate above market price or below market price. Dr. Kapil I want to make sure these orders are republished up to every 15 minutes. So that way that process is automated. So you can essentially set and forget it. And you can then have your own DEX that's running in the background that is automatically publishing order books on, say, Monero to Litecoin. Dr. Kapil And you set, say, oh, I want to make sure these orders are published 2 .5% above the market rate that's shown on the CoinGecko API. So every, say, the price of Monero on CoinGecko's API is $100. My math is terrible. Dr. Kapil Let's say 1% premium. My orders for Monero to Litecoin would be, say, $101. And it would automatically republish that. And every time the market rate on CoinGecko changed, so say the overall market shifted and suddenly Monero was worth $115, then I'd be taking, I guess it would be $116 .5. Dr. Kapil I'd publish orders for $116 .5. And it would just do that in the background. And the price, the maker price would automatically adjust without me having to actually manually do any of this. So that's what I mean by it allows an individual to become their own market maker. Dr. Kapil It certainly allows an individual to automate their own liquidity providing onto the network. So I think in that way, it gives us somewhat of an, it gives us an incentive whereby with the AMMs, you typically paid out in tokens. Dr. Kapil With this, you set premiums. I call it the privacy premium. I hope that makes sense. Doug Yeah, no, it's all making sense. Maybe we could have CG jump in here because my next question is, so what is it like using basic swap at this point from the standpoint of a regular Joe like me, what do I need to do to start using basic swap to atomic swap Monero to Bitcoin, Bitcoin to Monero? CG Yeah, sure, I can actually share my screen, and we can go over it and just share. Doug Why he's doing that. OK, go ahead, C .G., you ready? Yeah, can you? Oh, wait, hold up, hold up. Yes. CG Yeah, you see it. So, on... Yep. Dr. Kapil Yes. So on the right -hand panel, you'll see the network order book. That's actually the front -end GUI on the left -hand panel. When you install BasicSwap, you're basically installing a dedicated instance of BasicSwap on your machine. Dr. Kapil So you're creating a node on the network. So what you're seeing here is essentially, I mean, it's built from Linux. So it's actually built this way for that. CG At this point, I'm running a cloud instance of basic swap. So it's not on my local machine for, it's just more convenient, of course, like if you want the top privacy, top decentralization, might not be the best foolproof method to run, you know, like a DEX on the cloud, but just from a usability, for me, it's what works best. CG So for people that want to run the liquidity script, my personal recommendation would be to run it from a cloud instance and then maybe encrypt it because you don't have to keep your DEX running 24 seven. CG You don't have to worry about a power cut or, you know, internet cut. And I do personally run that market making script. And I've found that once it's all set up on a cloud instance, it's a really like hands off approach. CG You don't have to, you know, worry about anything. It's just going to republish your offers automatically. Like Cap was saying at the set premium that you want. So like quickly, it's like, it's coming with the basic swap repo, if you fork the repo or you just clone it on your device, it's going to be under the scripts sub folder. CG And you basically have a little Python script here that you run and it's going to take your create offers .json, which is basically your config file, which is what we see here. If I just like show what's inside. CG So that's what it looks like, or actually I'm going to just open it for real so we can browse it. So this is a typical JSON configuration file and you can set your preferences for each offer. And basically each block is going to be an offer. CG So in this instance, I have, I believe like 20 or so offers and they're just like set up different preferences for each. And we also are working on a automated bid system. That's not really stable yet, or not something that we advertise, but eventually the script is going to be able to also automatically put bids for other offers when they fit a certain criteria. CG And so the configuration file looks like this and you set up your offers. And then once it's set up, you just run the script with the Python command, but on my case, it's already running. So once it runs, it's going to look like that and you're going to have your offers. CG So here on the decks, Dr. Kapil So this goes back to how I'm saying you can interact with the decks without actually having to automatically republish offers without having to go through the GUI at the moment that the front end doesn't offer this functionality. Dr. Kapil It is something that we're prioritizing as part of the inclusion to the front end. But if you kind of go to, you know, our guides on the setup for this, it's pretty straightforward. You know, if you're if you're comfortable, you know, setting up and installing the decks, you'll have a fairly straightforward time doing this. Dr. Kapil But yeah, here you go, you can see all the orders that are being sort of published on the system. And there's no cost to publishing the orders here. So it then there's no third party fees either, you know, someone that takes these offers, or they don't. Dr. Kapil And the only fees on this decks are essentially the transaction fees for the networks themselves. So the transaction fees for getting coin a more getting a coin from Monero address A to address B. And, you know, and then the converse the swap the counterparty trade, you know, the transaction fee, the network transaction fee of getting, you know, say Litecoin from address C to address D. Dr. Kapil So that's kind of what we're getting for here is it allows for a high degree of automation, which makes it a lot easier for people to build liquidity on this decks. And bearing in mind, there's no third party fees, you know, just a quick shout out, you know, I know with the binance D listing, you know, one of the great advantages of this is there are no third party fees, and it automates the building of liquidity without using an AMM model. Dr. Kapil So you're not worrying about pooling your liquidity with other people. And then if the largest provider suddenly pulls out, suddenly the whole average price collapses, it's just that your order is published at that set price and either gets filled or it doesn't. Dr. Kapil So you don't have to worry about that. One of the nice things about this liquidity script that we didn't mention was that, as I said, you can set the absolute minimum sell price. So if there's a sudden dump in liquidity, again, going back to a couple of days ago, when Monero, you know, dumped 36% on the binance D listing, you know, you could set say, you know, that back then, I think the price was $150, and it went almost $150. Dr. Kapil I can't quite remember. But you know, you could have set the absolute minimum prices $140. And then, you know, if it was running on this script, it would have only republished to 140. So you would have protected yourself against that sudden dump in liquidity. Dr. Kapil So this is kind of, you know, where we're going towards is really more control and power for our individuals and more protection against, you know, huge volatility that can be turned on and off at will, you know, it's more choice, basically. Dr. Kapil And that's kind of what we're all about here. And, you know, I appreciate, you know, you've got to go through a couple of steps to set this up. But once you've set it up, you really can just forget about it. Dr. Kapil You know, especially if you do if you do the setup right first time, you can pretty much just leave it running, you know, as CG mentioned, preferably, you know, the ideal is on a cloud, cloud based setup, you know, so you don't need to worry about leaving a machine on all the time. Dr. Kapil Yeah, I think there's like lots of nice little pros to this that are understated. And as you mentioned at the beginning, underrated. Doug For sure, for sure. How was it that day during the delisting? Did you see a lot of offers popping up on BasicSwap? Dr. Kapil we saw a lot of chatter about need for decentralized solutions. So awareness of our project is growing. I think it's interesting, we had a lot more chatter on our private channels about how we set this thing up. Dr. Kapil So yeah, we did see a flurry of new users just coming in and saying, how do we set this up? What is it? How does it work? So that certainly worked to our favor. I think that the binancy listing in the short term whilst being bad for, in the short term being bad for liquidity, and the longer term is brilliant for decentralization. Dr. Kapil It's a shame that Monero had to be the martyr for that, but in a weird kind of way, it works to Monero's advantage because it's forcing people to learn, forcing people to adapt, forcing people who are serious about this to reevaluate actually why we got into this. Dr. Kapil A comment I saw on Twitter in relation to that on the day was, we've ripped the band -aid off now, and that's very much the case. We have ripped the band -aid off of a bleeding wound that over time would have hemorrhaged and killed all privacy coins and one of the solutions is solutions like this, what we're offering here, which is ways to build liquidity in an automated, decentralized, highly secure, private manner. Dr. Kapil And in that sense, I think we're quite a mature ecosystem. Doug So even like right now, what kind of offers are you seeing on there right now? If somebody were to go on to basic swap today. Dr. Kapil a bunch of Monero Litecoin offers, Monero Bitcoin offers, you'd see a couple of Fero offers, a couple of PIVX offers, you'd see part Monero offers as well which is kind of our native coin in relation to our project as well. Dr. Kapil So you'll see a mixture of things but you'll mainly see sort of Litecoin Bitcoin Monero if I'm being completely upfront with you. Doug Yeah, yeah, no, that's fine. CG been the most popular pair for Doug sure. So yes, so describe that even more. If I just want to go on there and, you know, swap Monero to Bitcoin, you know, $5 ,000 worth, is that like reasonable right now? Would that transaction like we go through in a reasonable time? Doug Yeah, it would go through completely. Dr. Kapil If you were to swap, there would be takers, so the orders can be partially filled or completely filled. So if you were to put that large an order in, that could be taken by more than one person for sure. Dr. Kapil So it could be taken by a single individual, so as long as you set those orders to allow partial filming. Again, this platform, if you look at the mechanics, the GUI actually allows you to say, will the order be filled in a whole chunk? Dr. Kapil Will it kind of be filled partially and split into parts? The other thing actually I just want to mention is, you know, it is in the GUI, but it's not super obvious, but this is probably, you know, you could specify when you make that order that actually you could specify on a private order books that's only known to certain other individuals. Dr. Kapil So actually this doubles up as an OTC desk. So yes, there potentially would be takers for that if you put it there. And we would love to see that sort of stuff, although my personal preference is Litecoin rather than Bitcoin, and that's purely because, you know, you're using atomic swaps, so you're dependent on speed and transaction fees. Dr. Kapil So Litecoin has, I'm not here to judge cryptocurrencies, but if you're going to do the swap, my recommendation would be do Litecoin to Monero because Litecoin is faster, cheaper, you know, it's a much and has very good liquidity in its own right. Dr. Kapil So that's my recommendation, particularly if you're going to be running automated scripts, you probably want to use the cheapest, fastest coins as your counterparty trades because you'll wind up saving money on transaction fees. Dr. Kapil So that's the caveat I would say there. You can definitely stick the $5 ,000 Bitcoin in and you could make it your own sort of OTC private to one or maybe a couple handful of individuals, or you could publicly broadcast it on that network and, you know, it could potentially be filled. Dr. Kapil So CG Not that we talked about it actually, I could start a Monero Litecoin swap while we discuss and just see the process Doug Yeah, that would be great. And actually, even if before you can do that. So let's say that right now, I'm listening to this. I'm a big Monero person, but I'm not super technical. And I'm looking for a way to obtain Monero anonymously. Doug Maybe I'm willing to go buy Litecoin on some centralized exchange. And I want to now go use basic swap to swap it into Monero anonymously. What do I got to do? So without even talking about these scripts, just kind of the most basic form, kind of walk us through from the get -go in terms of the software you have to download, the steps you have to take, for a very noobish person to essentially anonymously turn their Litecoin into Monero. Dr. Kapil Okay. So the first thing you do is go to basicswapdex .com and you'll get a website that essentially looks roughly like this in the background of my screen. You'll see there, there'll be that, I can't see the background of my own screen, but essentially there'll be a link to the installation guide and the download option. Dr. Kapil If you use a Windows device, we've actually got an EXE installer that automates most of the installation steps. If you're using Mac or Linux, just follow the steps in the installation guide. Once you've got through that, as long if you persist, it actually doesn't take that long. Dr. Kapil It takes around sort of 10 minutes and it will start setting itself up. Once it is set up, when you are setting up, you have to specify the coins that you are interested in trading. So at the moment we support Monero, Bitcoin, Litecoin, PIVX, Fero, Dash, and Particle. Dr. Kapil If you're only interested in trading Monero with Litecoin or Monero with Bitcoin, then you just specify those are the ones I want to set up with. You can always add more coins later and you can always remove coins that you have set up with. Dr. Kapil If you don't want to trade in them anymore, but you specify the coins you want, it will download those blockchains, sync them and it will sync to the network. So once you've done the initial setup, there's a bit of a waiting game. Dr. Kapil You just leave it switched on and then go about your day, do your thing. Once it is on, you'll essentially see that GUI that CryptoGuard showed you with the Office and Order book. So I was wondering if you could kind of flip across to that screen for me, CG. CG you want to split the screen. Dr. Kapil Uh, yeah, if you could just share and then I can just talk through the GUI itself. CG I think I'm sharing right now. Dr. Kapil How are you? Doug I can't see you wait hold up. I think it came back down here. Yeah Dr. Kapil OK, cool. So essentially, once you've done the installation, once it's synced, once it's downloaded the blockchain data for the coins you want to trade and sync the respective nodes, you'll connect to this and you'll connect to the network. Dr. Kapil You can essentially access that network through this front end GUI, which can be run in any web browser, essentially. So that kind of just shows you, you know, where are you. So this is you. It looks like you're about to create. Dr. Kapil That's your Bitcoin wallet, isn't it? Were you about to create? Yeah, so that's just showing the wallets. Like I said, we kind of have a preference for Litecoin and Monero from a liquidity point of view and from, you know, in terms of that kind of pair. Dr. Kapil But like I said, these are the different coins that we support and you can kind of manage your wallets and, you know, see what your recipient addresses are. So if you kind of go to a managed wallet page, it will show you what your recipient address is. Dr. Kapil You simply transfer your coins to that address. They will then appear. Well, they will. Yeah, they will appear here as in, you know, they will appear in your wallet because you're doing a wallet to wallet transfer, essentially. Dr. Kapil And then you'll be able to essentially place offers or create offers and make and take bids on them. So you've got the available bids there. You've got the order book, which is the show order book at the top. Dr. Kapil If you've, you know, made if you've taken some offers, then there's the swaps in progress. You can see the offers that you've made in your own dedicated tab. You can see the available bids. You can see bids that have been sort of received and any bids that have been sent. Dr. Kapil So kind of it will show you essentially step by step what to do. And what we find is, yes, the setup process seem is daunting. It does seem daunting at first. And it does take a bit of time. But once you've gotten through that, actually using the decks is very straightforward. Dr. Kapil It is very much create your offers or accept them, have a look through the order bid or use the liquidity script. Doug Very cool, very cool. CG, you wanna actually start a swap? CG Yes, sure. So you got your offers on the order book, and all you gotta do is basically just find the order that's suitable for you. And you can, of course, like you can, like, you know, filter all the options. CG This is the public order book. As Cap mentioned, you could decide to display a custom order book. So, for example, if you have, like, a liquidity provider that wants to set up their own order book, they can do that. CG And you know that everything you're gonna see is gonna come from the same liquidity provider. We haven't seen or at least we don't know that people reuse this feature yet, but it's definitely something that could be useful as, you know, adoption grows. CG So just gonna make sure the funds that you have. I do have a bunch of particles in my wallet, but I also have, I used to have Monero before the call, but it seems that someone picked up some of my offers while we were discussing. CG So I'll see if there's a reverse Litecoin to Monero. I had some dust, but now it seems to be sitting in Litecoin, but otherwise I'll just do like a particle Monero offer. So yeah, you just make sure that you have enough coins in your wallet, and then you go and see on the order book what you want to swap into. CG My instance is a little bit slow because I'm running it on a cloud instance that's probably, you know, on the limit of the CPU requirement. Typically would run a little bit faster. So I do have some particle. CG And if I wanted, for example, to swap to Monero in the GUI, when you see a edit button, that's because it's one of your offers swap, it means that it's coming from someone else. So let's see here we have a Dr. Kapil So I think in this way. CG Yeah, go ahead, Kevin. Dr. Kapil I was going to say in this way, the order book is in some ways almost like a hybrid between that kind of a local, kind of a local Monero, local Bitcoin style set up where you just see a string of orders and you can actually just take whichever one you want. Dr. Kapil You don't have to just take at the point of the spread. So you can go further up and further down the book as you please. So it does offer that level of choice essentially. CG So let's say, for example, if we take that offer, the person's probably going to be happy, because I'm going to be swapping $80 of Particle for $60 of Monero. Let's consider that a Monero Talk exclusive giveaway. CG Yeah. So you click on the offer. Who's on the lucky side of that? Who knows? Anonymous Swapper. So you click on the offer. It brings you to basically the page that's going to tell you all the information that you want to know about the swap, so the amounts that's going to be swapped, the rate, all that stuff. CG And so the first step that you've got to do is put a new bid on, and then you're given the same page again, but you're just going to be confirming here the bid information. And you can adjust the amount here that you want to send, or actually that you're going to receive. CG So we're just going to be sending the bid as is. Doug Yep. Dr. Kapil There you go. And that is a slow. CG It's just not- Oh, there you go. Oh, it says error send bid failed in valid amount. Let's just try a smarter bid. Dr. Kapil Okay, so you're going to go for a partial bid offer and is that because of the transaction fees, isn't it? CG potentially but now the bid has been sent okay so the other person is gonna receive the bid and they're gonna accept it most probably it's gonna be automatically accepted it's gonna show here eventually Dr. Kapil So essentially this it will propagate across the network and then it will get accepted over here. Yeah. No. Why was it automatically accepted? Doug because the other users are likely to hit it. CG the liquidity provider or the person that posts the offer can either have it being Automatically accepted or that they want to manually accept it. Okay, it's when you post the offer you can you know Decide that because especially with there's an option as well to include partial Like custom rates, so I will put an offer and I will say that I will accept a certain, you know leeway and the rate That I can receive an offer if you do that Obviously, it's recommended that you set it to manually accept in case someone sends you like a very low ball, right? CG Of course, you would probably want to reject it. But mm -hmm in general I just put my own offer is that automatic automatic acceptance and fixed rate Doug Awesome. So what's happening now, then, at this moment? CG the bid has been sent it should be accepted eventually unless the offer is well might not be automatic yeah it says bid accepted Doug Okay CG So it's going to appear here in the swaps and progress shortly. There can be like a few seconds or minutes delay. But the bid has been accepted now. So the process will start to go through. If we click here on details, we're going to be thrown to the bid page. CG And that's where we're going to be seeing here the progress as we keep talking. The states here in the steps will progress through. Doug Very cool. And so what's really the time constraints there with how long it takes? You have to wait for a transaction to confirm on each side? Yeah, there's going to be a- What's happening there? CG There's got to be a few blocks, block confirmations required on each side because they're on chain transactions and data has to be sent between the two parties. But typically the biggest time constraint is the block time. CG So with Monero being relatively fast and particle as well, it's not really going to take a whole lot of time. However, if you do like a Bitcoin to Monero swap, we've all seen at times blocks on the Bitcoin side that can last hours, if not in terrible time days. CG So that happens and that will significantly slow down the swap for obvious reasons. That's why I think the Litecoin to Monero pair is so popular nowadays. It's our probably most used pair now. Dr. Kapil think it's funny in that, you know, so I was going to say you can actually kind of read into the future of, you can kind of predict the future resiliency and robustness of networks just by using this. Dr. Kapil You know, will Bitcoin truly remain decentralized if it can't improve its core block times and can't be used effectively on DEXs? That's a question I'm leaving. I don't want to be the guy that comes in here and spews a ton of hate against Bitcoin. Dr. Kapil But what I'm trying to say is being very pragmatic here. When you use this DEX, the consideration should be given to actually, you know, what is the underlying architecture? You don't, as an end user, you don't need to know that, but it's helpful to be aware because it helps you get the best steals out of the network. Doug Now, when you guys first launched, you were using a different atomic swap implementation than you are now? Dr. Kapil So we actually launched with Monero, we actually launched with adapter signatures. So the hash lock time lock method doesn't work for Monero. The reason for that is because for a coin to be swapped using that method, the hash lock time lock method, you actually need to have programmable inputs on both coins. Dr. Kapil Now, the way the Monero architecture is designed, and it's a credit to security and privacy, it doesn't permit or enable programmable outputs. So up to the point we came along and deployed this, live implementations of Monero atomic swaps weren't really a thing. Dr. Kapil With adapter signatures, that's essentially an implementation of script -to -script. What it basically means is, as long as one coin has programmable outputs, then both coins can be swapped. So that means coins like Monero can be swapped with public Litecoin, public part, Bitcoin, which is a public blockchain, it can be swapped with public coins, is essentially what we're getting at. Dr. Kapil There are a number of features that make the two -way swap look like a one -way exchange to outside observers. Part of that is the encryption of messaging across the order book. Part of that is to do with the nature of adapter signature swaps, provided the properties of the other coin. Dr. Kapil There are certain technology. CG, I was wondering if you could go into that a bit more, actually. It's quite interesting. CG WishSpark specifically. Dr. Kapil So like with some of these, with some of the coin, with actually a number of the coins, so for instance, Bitcoin has Taproot support and because of that, because of properties inherent to Taproot, if you were to do a straight swap with Monero to an outside observer, it kind of looks like a one, you don't see a swap occurring, it just looks like a one -way transaction for Bitcoin and you don't know necessarily that that Bitcoin's been involved in an atomic swap. Dr. Kapil So it provides an added layer of privacy beyond the inherent privacy of sending Monero from one address to another. So this kind of gives a lot of peripheral privacy to certain other coins, just through the very act of using it for adapter signature type swaps. Dr. Kapil One of the other aspects is with the hash lock, time locked atomic swap methods, you're kind of leaving signatures on both chains that are kind of, can be time linked. So as an outside observer, it's potentially possible for you to look at the traditional atomic swaps, which are hash locked, time locked and actually kind of map out who's swapping with who, because you can see corresponding time signatures on each chain and you can go, oh, that guy may have swapped with that. Dr. Kapil Whereas with adapter signatures on basic swap decks, because a lot of the swap is being essentially carried out off chain and essentially is only using information on one side of the pairing, actually it doesn't really look like a swaps occurred to an outside observer. Dr. Kapil And I think that's one of the fundamental privacy strengths to using adapter signatures or an implementation of scriptless scripts is it makes atomic swaps a lot more private. And that's something that we kind of came out with out the box. Dr. Kapil We do offer hash, locked, unlocked swaps as well, but we generally recommend and advise you default to adapt to signatures to maximize your privacy. Doug How does that differ from the implementation that Samurai Wallet is currently using? Do you guys have any insight into that? Are you familiar with what they're doing? CG Yeah, as far as I know, it's a very similar implementation. I think they use adapter signature as well, and they have linked it with their wallet. So obviously you can do Whirlpool to the atomic swap. CG So getting, you know, mix Bitcoin and returns. That's a feature that I think is cool. I think I've seen some people, you know, with the concept that I'm sure we all not like very much here of colored coins. CG So basically when you get coins from what could be identified as a mixer, some centralized exchanges will ask extra questions or proof of funds because they will consider the Bitcoins to be tainted. So that's been an issue I've seen people talking about with the Whirlpool integration to their adapter signature. CG Once again, it's not a concept that I'm very much a fan of or give credence to, but if you're gonna be carrying your coins to centralized exchanges, it's definitely something you gotta keep in mind. But ultimately, I think we all agree that the end goal here is to do away with centralized exchanges. CG So it's providing an additional, you know, user interface and way for people to protect their privacy. So it's, I think, a good news overall for Monero, same as, you know, Seridex, Avino, Bisk. I think the more options that we have, the more variety of user interfaces as well gonna cater to different types of users. CG So in a way, going back to the Monero delisting from centralized exchanges, I think we've been kind of lucky in a way because regulators have given us the time to build these solutions before they struck down the hammer. CG So in a way, it's not the worst of timing, but yeah, I think from what I know from some Ridex, it's a adapter signature base integration, so it's probably similar. I think they do one -way swaps for the moment. CG I do expect them to eventually allow bidirectional atomic swaps as well, but I'm not 100% sure they offer that right now. Doug Yeah, why is it that they're just doing one way? Because that's why I thought the implementation was different. Because I know sets of privacy was criticizing it because of the implementation they're using that you could potentially be able to identify that a swap has taken place. Doug That's why I thought the implementation was different than what the implementation was. Dr. Kapil Yes, so yes, there is a difference in the way we've implemented adapter signatures on our DEX. And it all boils down to the fact that we utilize an intermediary data layer where a lot of the contract execution occurs. Dr. Kapil So if you kind of look through the process flows for atomic swaps on our DEX, the SMSG network, which is essentially the underlying DSN distributed storage network and data layer that facilitates the swaps on our DEX. Dr. Kapil It's an end -to -end encrypted network, but what it also does is it kind of essentially supports smart contract execution on the network itself rather than on the chain. So what you're actually getting when you look through our process flows, this is a kind of simplification of it, but essentially you're kind of getting a template of the swap parameters on the actual intermediary data layer that gets published. Dr. Kapil And I always get my head spun around when I try to explain this, but essentially it makes with traditional, if you're doing a straight adapter signature swap, it could be taker only. So if you're doing a, if you say doing a Litecoin to Monero atomic swap off not using basic swap, what you're basically doing is you're kind of saying, uh, I have some Litecoin and I would like to exchange it for some, for this, I have this much Litecoin and I would like to exchange it for this much Monero. Dr. Kapil Is anyone going to take me up on the offer? And someone with the required amount of Monero comes along and says, good day, sir, I shall take you up on the offer. And then they agree the swap parameters and it's kind of executed. Dr. Kapil Um, but it can only be done that way. Um, when you create the templates for that swap on an intermediary data layer, you're kind of, how's the best way to say this? You're basically saying you as the person who has Monero says, I have some Monero and I would like to swap it for some Litecoin. Dr. Kapil Um, but what I'm going to do is place an offer on this book that says good day to any sirs that have Litecoin and wish to swap Monero for it. Good day to any sirs that have so much Litecoin and wish to swap so much Monero. Dr. Kapil We're putting it as a pre -formatted template. So kind of it, by having this intermediary data layer, you can create these templates that get around the restriction that a tap to signatures provide. Uh, and it all comes down to, it all comes down to only one, one side has to have a programmable output and that creates the limitation unless you on, on it, it kind of doesn't permit two way swaps unless you have that intermediary data layer in place to kind of have the work around. Dr. Kapil Now there are some charts that basically go and actually outline what's happening and we can definitely like send the links to, you know, for you guys to go over it or for anyone interested to have a look. Dr. Kapil It is clearer than what I'm saying, but I hope it's clear enough. CG But if you go on the swap page here, you can actually display these diagrams. But yeah, it goes a bit technical. But if that's your kind of stuff, it shows it. But basically, our solution to bidirectionality was we didn't improve the bare protocol itself. CG The improvement was more at the basic swap level. So the protocol -wise, it still works one way. But instead, if you want to swap on the way that typically wouldn't work, instead of putting an offer on the order book, what you basically do is you put an offer request for. CG And someone that's going to accept this, the automated process is going to publish the offer that you're going to take on. But from the end user perspective, we built it in a way that it's seamless. You don't have to know whether you're making an offer request. CG It's just seamless from the graphical interface. But in the background, it's sort of one way. It works natively. And the other way, you cannot trick the system, but it's just that you publish an offer request instead of just an offer. CG So the solution happens at the basic swap level rather than at the protocol. So if, to go back to some right decks, if they only have it one way at the moment, it's probably because they've integrated the protocol as is, and they might be working on a solution to their user interface or messaging layer to build that solution. CG Yeah, and I know there are a lot of questions. Doug They're also using a solution that doesn't use Taproot on the Bitcoin side, but you guys are using Taproot on the Bitcoin side, correct? Thank you. CG not for the swap it's the taproot is is gonna be independent of basic swap itself the particle coin has taproot or you know two of the three items of taproot enable like Bitcoin but you don't you don't need taproot to do a swap the improvement with taproot once it's fully enabled on Bitcoin and particle is kind of more what Cap was saying earlier that even when you do an adapter signature swap there is like a signature on the block that this is not just a regular Bitcoin transaction you can't really tell what it is but you can tell like there was some yeah yeah this this is what I'm getting at right okay so with taproot you would basically has it merges the hashes and signatures on the on the transaction it would look like a regular transaction but that's a bit further out in the future as like future will not buy things because in the first place it needs to be fully enabled on Bitcoin if they're still like I believe is the snore signature signatures that aren't fully implemented yet don't know for sure but there's a critical item that's only partially enabled right now in Bitcoin Doug OK, so basic swap, when you're doing a Monero to Bitcoin atomic swap, Taproot is not being used on the Bitcoin side at this point, at this stage. But you're saying that there is no marker that's currently being left as to whether or not a swap has happened? Doug Or you're saying, theoretically, that there is some kind of indication? CG an indication that a specific thing has happened with the transaction. So it's not like a plain regular A to B transaction without any hash or signature or anything, but it cannot be traced to another block of another chain. CG So the issue with the secret hash or HTLC swaps is that on both chains you would have the same hash inscribed in blocks that are close in time. So for example, of course that's not the case with Monero because it cannot use secret hash, it uses a depth or signature, but let's say I swap Litecoin for Bitcoin, so two transparent coins, you're going to have the same hash on the Bitcoin transaction on the blockchain and the same hash is going to be as well on the Litecoin side. CG So for a passive observer they can just passively trace the two blockchains and they're going to see eventually that two transactions that are very close in time have the same hash, so it becomes quite easy actually to infer that two people have swapped together because of that. Doug But from the from from the Monero perspective, I'm doing Monero to Bitcoin and I receive you don't need to worry about it. Is it is it then known that those bitcoins have gone through a swap? Is that identifiable? Doug Like, you know, if I didn't not if I didn't take that Bitcoin and send it to a centralized exchange, is there a possibility that it looks like you received these Bitcoin, they were these Bitcoin were previously previously went through, you know, an atomic swap. Doug No, you can't. Dr. Kapil you can't definitively say it's been through an atomic swap. CG come from a multi -sig signature, a multi -sig wallet, so it has like extra data on it, but what that data is about cannot really be inferred. Doug Thank you. Right. It could be a number of other things that you may have done with that Bitcoin previously. Yeah. It's a bit like if that Bitcoin's gone. Dr. Kapil an ordinal or some random bit or some random extra bit of text, it could literally just be any random extra bit of indecipherable information, but it doesn't indicate what the nature of that information is. Dr. Kapil So you can't actually tell that it's, you can't definitively say this has been involved in a swap. You can just say, oh, it's just got something slightly different about it, but nothing to just go, oh, this has basically been through a swap. Dr. Kapil It must be blacklisted. And I think that needs to be kept in mind. There are a lot of Bitcoins that go through, have lots of legitimate permutations to them, which are fine. CG Yeah, that's that's a good question, actually, Doug, because the contrary with either a secret hash swaps or the even worse, you know, like Ethereum style swaps on smart contracts, on Ethereum, you can just like I can enter your deposit address in the block explorer, and then I can go over literally all the swaps that you've done with that address, exactly what amount, what coin to what token. CG So it's pretty disastrous from a financial privacy perspective, and I believe that's a big advantage of that their signature swaps in general, not just in basic swap, but in any current future DEXs that will implement them is that it really takes the financial privacy to the next level, specifically in the context of swaps. Doug Awesome, guys, awesome. So give us some insight into where this is going. I know we spoke about this the other times you've been on the show, but if you don't mind rehashing that, what's next for BasicSwap? Doug How do we get it to the point where it can very easily be used in terms of starting it up, right? Perhaps it's an app, a web app on a website. Give us some insight there into where things are going and how usable it's going to get. Dr. Kapil Sure. So the overall roadmap is pretty much designed to achieve that as your own point, which is to have the ability to integrate the basic Swapdex engine into any mobile app or into any website. So what we're currently working towards is firstly, we've got a phased approach for this. Dr. Kapil The current plan is essentially to develop like client support so that people setting this up for the first time don't necessarily have to download full nodes and sync full nodes for different chains rather than, you know, just kind of getting like lines, which is a lot faster in terms of syncing. Dr. Kapil The next thing that we're kind of working on, and we already started work on this after Moneratopia last year, is the web framework, which is basically a means of being able to access basic Swap through a website or a mobile app. Dr. Kapil So it's basically like, okay, I've now developed a website front end that accesses the basic swap that accesses a basic swap node. So rather than end users having to go set up their own nodes, go through the installation process, go through all the steps we're talking about and wait ages for things to sync, they can just go to the website and essentially be they'd be accessing fire a third party, but they'd still be accessing basic Swapdex. Dr. Kapil So that would be kind of the ultimate endpoint. And, you know, that could apply to mobile applications, you know, we did actually approach by Kate while it's saying, could we integrate this? And we basically had to turn around and say to them, yes, but not yet. Dr. Kapil Let's kind of we've got to get through these steps. So in our future, we could see this engine being integrated via front ends into multiple, multiple different mobile apps, and multiple different websites and multiple different front end interfaces by multiple providers. Dr. Kapil And I think that's kind of, you know, a nice way of providing people very easy access to DEXs, be it with whatever caveats the front end provider, you know, chooses to provide. So I think there's room for this to proliferate, we have a long way, I don't want to say we have a long way to get there, what we definitely could use is more developers, more testers, more people from the different coin communities, particularly the Monero community, you guys have been great, you know, in terms of helping us to kind of really, you know, bug, bug, you know, you really kind of test this feel out for any of the bugs, help us out with the fixes, help us out to accelerate the development of this, that would always be, you know, greatly welcome. Dr. Kapil But we certainly see a future in which this engine is the engine of all, I'm not gonna say the engine of all DEXs, but certainly the, it is a, we could see it as a major DEX engine providing a front end to many of the world's digital financial services, or something of this nature, if you want to have a truly decentralized liquidity ecosystem, I think this sort of solution is going to be the way forward. Doug Amazing, awesome. We're, I don't know if you're familiar with the Noto project that we've been working on. We're launching, it's like a plug and play Monero node. Just thinking outside the box here, is there any thoughts on how something like basic swap could be implemented on the Noto to perhaps create a solution where it's pretty seamless for a user, kind of like add an additional app to your Monero Noto, kind of automate the running, because essentially at this stage, you have to run both blockchains, right? Doug I'm just wondering if there's any thoughts there. The Noto is all supposed to be about simplicity, plug and play, tap a few buttons, and you got a full Monero node running. Just wondering if you have any thoughts there. Dr. Kapil We can point to remote nodes with this. So CG, I think you might be best to answer this, but we do support remote node pointing. CG Yeah, for Monero, it's already baked in, but I get the idea of the node is that you would run that locally. I assume that it would depend on the amount of space available on the device because you would need to sink the local chains of the coins that you want to enable unless we work on an integration, for example, whereas the only local node is Monero, and then you can connect to remote nodes for Bitcoin or Litecoin or other options. CG That could certainly be something that's doable. I don't know how much that fits into the philosophy of the product. If you want to have everything locally, obviously, that's going to require a bit more storage space, but maybe having the Monero node locally and connect to other nodes externally, and then that could be a pretty streamlined setup process or pre -installed even. CG That would actually be pretty cool. It would certainly help with the adoption as well of basic swap, and I think just in the grander scheme of things help Monero really break linked with centralized exchanges, which I think is critical because Binance is probably not going to be the only exchange to delist it. CG I think we do need to find ways to drive more adoption to decentralized exchanges in general, so happy to work on this. Doug solution. Awesome, yeah. Maybe I could get you guys in conversation with the devs that we have working on Noto. Maybe there's something there. Maybe there's something there. Yeah, I mean, in my mind, I would think it'd be like, maybe it's even we're running. Doug Obviously, Noto's built to run a Monero node, but maybe you're running a Monero node and a Bitcoin one or even a Litecoin one, right? And just trying to really just simplify the process with Monero first in mind, making it super easy for people to use your swap functionality to effectively obtain Monero anonymously. Doug I like the Litecoin thinking, because that's a simple, easy coin to get. It's very liquid. It's on all centralized exchanges. And like Dr. Kapp was saying, that's probably the best one to use in terms of fees and speed for purposes of getting into Monero. CG Yeah, it's probably the ideal on and off ramp right now for Monero. But in the end, by the way, Basic Supp uses prune chains. So now that I think of it, the storage requirement is not that intense either. Doug Yeah, the device has two terabytes. But it's built to really last in terms of the growth of the Monero chain. So we've got to take that into account. We want it to be something you have to sit on your desk for five years, no worries. Doug Yeah. CG Very cool. I'm happy to collaborate, for sure. Speaking of... Doug Speaking, go ahead, Dr. Kapp. Dr. Kapil No, I was just going to say touching back on the Litecoin thing, I think actually that's probably the ideal pairing with Monero. One of the reasons we'd say why is because we actually are developing support for MimbleWimble swaps on the decks. Dr. Kapil So actually, although you wouldn't be able to do a straight MimbleWimble Litecoin to Monero, you know, certainly people buying Litecoin from exchanges could send it via MimbleWimble to their own wallet, which would obfuscate the origin and then do a Litecoin to Monero swap. Dr. Kapil So it gives you the ability to leverage and utilise multiple privacy layers. We've already sort of built support for nWeb balances. So you can send nWeb Litecoin to your Litecoin wallet on this decks and then convert it into a public Litecoin balance. Dr. Kapil So that's kind of where we're at now. And I think that's kind of the way forward. Sorry, I was interrupting. Doug No, no, no, no, it's great stuff. I was just going to say, speaking of, because we were saying collaboration, what are the odds we get you back at Monerotopia this year in Argentina and Buenos Aires? Doug We'd love to have you guys again. Dr. Kapil Pretty high. I mean, my wife's definitely good with the idea. Doug It's a good excuse to go hang out in Buenos Aires, right? It should have a pretty good vibe this year as well. So yeah, we'd really love to have you guys there. You bring a lot to the ecosystem because you're kind of the node that brings in all the projects, right? Doug And Dr. Kapp, I think you did a good job of expressing that in your talk last year on the importance of these privacy tech projects and cryptos to collaborate, work together, and reasons for why it makes sense for there to be multiple projects, people working on specific little perhaps experimental things on one chain that perhaps gets implemented in another one in the future. Doug So I think you're doing a great job at kind of setting that tone. How do you feel about that right now? Do you feel like progress is being made in that regard? Dr. Kapil Yeah, I think we have very good relationships with other privacy projects. Like I said, we actually having active discussions with Litecoin Foundation now directly. We've been having a lot of active collaboration with Fero, with PIVX. Dr. Kapil We've been reached out to and kind of worked together with Zano. We've explored options with Zano. So, you know, we've certainly been reached out to by Aveeno, sorry, Vail and a couple of other smaller projects. Dr. Kapil What we're finding is, yeah, I hate, this sounds arrogant of me to say it, but the things we predicted are kind of happening, which is, and it's not that we predicted them. They're kind of, they're obvious if you kind of think about it, which is that the regulatory landscape would eventually clamp down on privacy coins. Dr. Kapil They would use them as a scapegoat. And, you know, we're seeing that clamp down in terms of restrictions on liquidity for privacy coins. And, you know, we are seeing the emergence of a two -tier liquidity system. Dr. Kapil I talk about the public liquidity ecosystem and the private liquidity ecosystem and the public liquidity ecosystem, which is probably gonna be Bitcoin and CBDCs and other public blockchains. They are probably going to facilitate a surveillance state, you know, certainly a financial surveillance state. Dr. Kapil That is what they will do. And yes, some of them may be permissioned and within some of these permissioned entities, you may have privacy inverted commas. But in order to clear the way for that framework, we are seeing pressure being put on pure privacy coins, true privacy coins, which are being excluded from that. Dr. Kapil I think we are building a bridge technologically, I was gonna say metaphorically, but we are, you know, certainly in terms of trying, helping to build some of that sort of social capital to try and bring the various privacy projects together and we wanna facilitate that. Dr. Kapil And I think we are, and they are coming together. You know, actually, we, for the last year, have been running a series called The Privacy Roundtable, and Doug, you know, we'd love to have you on as a guest at some point if you're available. Dr. Kapil You know, we've talked about some fairly heavy topics in this space and, you know, I'd love to have you on as a guest for that. And yeah, I think it's been a great way to bring people together to talk about, you know, subjects that we care about, which is privacy, freedom of information, you know, protection from the abuses of state power and from the abuse of power. Dr. Kapil And it's essentially what privacy is about. It's what, you know, first interview, I basically said that to you. So I think, you know, I think the future is actually good. And I think what we've got right now is a temporary blip that may look and may feel like a larger blip than it really is, but it will ultimately take us back to the original Cyberpunk vision, which is a truly free state. Doug Yeah, it's an exciting crossroads that we're at, right? And we were pushed off the highway to now make our own path. What are some things in your mind that you think we need to see get done for us to successfully opt out and build a liquidity outside of the centralized system? Doug What are some of the other things you're thinking in your mind as terms of utilities, resources that we're going to need in this ecosystem? Dr. Kapil we need to build convenience. So the million dollar question is, how do we bring convenience to privacy? A lot of the core architecture that we're building, the way we've taken this is, let's just get the core architecture right first, so that as we build up the layers of convenience, they don't compromise the underlying core. Dr. Kapil So I think the first thing is, don't compromise your values, don't compromise your underlying core, because everything you build from that foundation, if you've got a rotten foundation, ultimately a fall apart, I could get critical of Ethereum here, because that's essentially what brought me into a cryptocurrency as a speculator in 2016. Dr. Kapil And I remember their website was like, censorship -proof, censorship -resistant, it's a public blockchain, it's not ever going to be censorship -proof or resistant. All of the fundamental selling points for Ethereum, I really hate to say this, and F Maxis are going to go nuts on me, because it's a fraud, like you can't have true financial freedom without privacy, and you can't have privacy on a public blockchain, that is not a good foundation. Dr. Kapil So I think that's important is to acknowledge the role of purely private blockchains in providing that solid foundation, it's to acknowledge the role of technologies that take privacy very seriously at a very core level, and then solving that million dollar question, which is providing convenience with an acceptable level of trade -offs. Dr. Kapil And that's the thing, every time you create convenience, you do create some trade -offs, if we do the web framework, that will allow someone to create a website, which you could access basic swap decks from, but that person would still be a gateway provider who could then set their terms. Dr. Kapil They may not be able to monitor, they may not be able to control the flow of transactions, but there's always, depending on how, every time you create a third -party provider, you gain convenience, but you sacrifice some degree of privacy. Dr. Kapil So it's about finding that right balance for people, and for individuals to decide for themselves what the right balance they need is, and for giving those individuals the choice of options to engage at the level they want to. Dr. Kapil I think that's very important. I think in terms of achieving the privacy liquidity ecosystem, we will need to develop fully decentralized e -commerce solutions. Again, what brought me to basic swap decks was the Particle Project, and the Particle Project have developed a fully decentralized KYC free, peer -to -peer e -base style e -commerce solution. Dr. Kapil And I'm not gonna lie to you, we've had challenges with adoption of that. We came out running it on the part token, which it's a RingCT coin, so you have to do the transactions to settle on that, but it enables programmable outputs because it has multi -state privacy layers, so it has public states, a CT state and a RingCT state. Dr. Kapil But at the end of the day, that's a coin that was listed on centralized exchanges, and if you're telling people to go buy goods on our marketplace, but they have to get the coin off a centralized exchange, it defeats the point and it creates layers of friction. Dr. Kapil What we need to do is make access to these coins easy, instant, and then we need to provide fully decentralized platforms for people to buy and sell goods on. The end game for me is actually e -commerce. Dr. Kapil No, scratch that. The end game for me is decentralized. governance, you know, a direct democracy, that's one person, you know, one issue, one vote, that's actually my endgame. But to get to that, before we get to that, we need to have decentralized ecommerce. Dr. Kapil And in order to get decentralized ecommerce, we need to have decentralized liquidity. And underpinning all of those steps has to be privacy, because I said to you, you know, a private thought is the most secure thought. Dr. Kapil And that permits true freedom of speech between two parties. So you need to have a truly private liquidity ecosystem. Manero has achieved that. You need to then have a truly private means of swapping and exchanging and sharing that liquidity, which is in part what we're doing through basic swap decks. Dr. Kapil And as you've mentioned, there are many several other solutions, which I think are very robust, and worth looking into. And then we need to link those into decentralized ecommerce platforms, because if you're relying on centralized commerce providers, you know, the owners, the gatekeepers of those services can always shut down individual vendors, they can always spy on individual vendors, they can always censor individual vendors, they can always enforce variable and arbitrary third party fees, you know, and they can punish the end users as well. Dr. Kapil So I think we need to build that. And actually, if you really want to get into it, then we need to build decentralized shipping solutions that are privacy focused. So there is a lot of work that needs to be done to get to that input endpoint of a decentralized privacy focused nation state that permits true freedom of information through true freedom of speech. Dr. Kapil But we need to go in a stepwise manner. It's why I'm partly critical of DAOs at the moment, because you're kind of jumping several steps ahead of where we should be, you cannot have a governance system, or a mature governance system that people want to adopt without having a mature economy in place. Dr. Kapil And you can't have a mature economy in place without mature commerce in place. And you can't have that in place without mature liquidity and fungibility. So you know, that's my take on it. I'm so sorry, you've just suddenly muted. Doug Oh, I'm sorry. That was I'm sorry. I was muting because there's a little noise back here. I was just saying you are. We are brothers in this mission. I completely align with your vision and what we need to do. Doug And, you know, the ultimate goals here. So, yeah, beautiful to see, beautiful to hear. I actually worked on a prop before Bitcoin back in the day. I worked on a project called GovTogether, and it was it was trying to move towards that one person, one vote concept. Doug Although I don't want to get into that, have that discussion. Dr. Kapil If you get some time, have a look at Kialo, I don't know if you've ever played around with that website, kialo .com. I think when we kind of talk about decentralized models for one person, one vote, one issue debate, I think that that combined with something like, I could go, sorry, this could be a different topic altogether. Dr. Kapil I really appreciate it. Doug This is a whole different topic. We got to talk about it one of these days. I would love to get your full take on it. I think true direct democracy could be a dangerous thing. Do you want to quickly comment on that? Dr. Kapil I think if you have, so if I were to do a separate talk on this, I would take you to a website called kialo .com, and I'd go through their debating platform, and it basically it's not decentralized in the underlying architecture, but it's decentralized in the sense that anyone can go there, ask a question, and then anyone else can look at that question and then create pros and cons for that, and then anyone could put pros and cons for the pros and cons, and anyone can put pros and cons for that, so you can follow a train of thought all the way down. Dr. Kapil It's a bit like having Reddit, but in a mind map view, and you can actually upvote and downvote things. One of the things I think is, if we're saying democracy is dangerous, thoughts can hurt people. Dr. Kapil One of the best features I find on Twitter is the mute button. If people are irritating me, I don't block people on Twitter. I don't actually believe in, I don't like blocking people, I don't really believe in blocking people, because it denies them their right to engage with me. Dr. Kapil But if I mute someone, you can speak into the wind all you like, I'm just not listening. I think that's the thing here is that, I could get into a whole system about how you could probably design this thing, so that it preserves the freedom of speech without denying any one individual their given right to speak. Dr. Kapil You don't want to... Doug tyranny by the majority situation, right? No, actually, when I ran for Congress here in New York, one of the things I did was pledge that if elected, I was going to use the system to allow all my constituents to vote directly on every issue. Doug And then I would then use that as a poll to then vote in Congress, right? So with maintaining that, at the end of the day, I would be the representative, I would be the final decision -maker if I felt like there were some, you know, some wrong that need to be corrected in terms of some minority viewpoint getting silenced that I would then, you know, do so. Doug But the idea would be to use this direct democracy tool to get insight into how my constituents would want me to vote, but still maintain a representative at the end of the day. Dr. Kapil See, I wish that's how representative democracies would work. I really do. Yes, I tried to... Doug implemented through the running of Congress and thinking, you know, then this could be something that would catch on and it by through force other representatives would essentially be forced to do it because their constituents would expect the same thing. Dr. Kapil I think, so it's an interesting when you say this, I think the things you've got to factor why has represented democracy failed. One of the things I think about is if you kind of, I like to use the 1950s as a comparison point because relative populations were a lot smaller and working patterns were very different. Dr. Kapil So in my imaginary head, the 1950s was lots of people, nine to five lifestyle, or even if you go back a bit earlier before light bulbs were around, it was very much nine to five lifestyle with all daylight hours lifestyle with really small populations. Dr. Kapil So back then one representative, they were proportionately representing, it was one to a hundred as opposed to one to 20 ,000. So it was a lot easier to get into the era of that representative and for that representative to really take stock of what was going on around them. Dr. Kapil And the other issue that you've got with representative democracy then is that working hours have changed. So in the United Kingdom where I live, if I work nights nonstop and sleep during the day, at no point will I really have the time to go into my local councilor's office and discuss with my member of parliament issues that are a concern to me. Dr. Kapil I could drop them an email and hope they receive it, but there's no guarantee I'd have to book an appointment with them. And that's dependent on whether they're holding a clinic at all to begin with, because how often these guys hold clinics is pretty much at their discretion. Dr. Kapil So there are lots of human factors there, which I think need to be considered. How convenient can you make the access to that model? So for me, the ideal setup would be if you've got sufficiently tech literate society, the first thing I would do is figure out a way to make sure that those engaging with that system were anonymous. Dr. Kapil So you couldn't necessarily identify the individual, but they were completely free to say whatever they wanted. Now, anyone, you have a given area, a given postcode, and that's a physical domain. And I guess you have your own private key and it kind of plugs in. Dr. Kapil And it just says this individual who we can't identify is now part of this domain. And they're excluded from other domains in terms of governance. And in joining this particular domain, they could see all of the different debates relevant to that physical area. Dr. Kapil And they themselves could propose any topic of debate for discussion so they can participate. And no one knows who's saying what in this system. You just know that people are making arguments for or against things or are proposing things. Dr. Kapil And proposals are either being upvoted or downvoted. And you as an end user, you could read through things and go, I really like what this guy is saying. He seems like a troll, this guy with this random hash ID that keeps appearing. Dr. Kapil But I don't know who he is. And, you know, it's a one way hash, so there's no way of me tracing back to it. So I'm going to mute this guy because he seems to be persistently trolling. So it actually has an incentive built in to stop people from trolling because if you keep trolling, you're just going to get muted by everyone. Dr. Kapil Then no one's going to hear what you have to say and you can't troll anymore. And then you kind of lose your own democratic voice. But if you're making reasonable arguments and engaging with the system in good faith, you're not likely going to get muted. Dr. Kapil You're just maybe going to get downvoted if you disagreed on or someone will say something anonymously. And in that system, you can't, you know, you can't find that if you're hiding the identities of participants, you can't then have a sudden giant corporation or a lobbying firm go, we're going to go after this individual because he's in a select position of power and we can give him money and take up plenty of his time and show him a really good time in order to support our initiative. Dr. Kapil No, they have to engage with the forum directly. They have to put logical, rational debates. And if this is an online forum which you can access, well, that's great for people who are disabled or elderly and sufficiently tech literate to access the forum. Dr. Kapil Plug in my encrypted key. Now I'm into the forums. Now I can kind of look through everything rather than engage with the news. Oh, this bad shit's going on. I can't do anything. Oh, that sucks. Or I'll go to social media, doom scroll for a while and tweet about what I believe in, but not actually have any ability to make a directly engaged difference. Dr. Kapil No, you go straight to the forum as the first thing. Look at the issues immediately relevant to you because they're in your area. That means they're most immediately available for you to make a difference about and then vote on them. Dr. Kapil And if this if stuff goes wrong, then you can't really blame a larger, more abstract authority. You can only go and say, look, we collectively as a community messed up here. We have to take a certain degree of ownership for that. Dr. Kapil So it's kind of like it rewards you for engagement. It rewards you participation for participation. And such a system would punish you for not punish you. if you're disengaging from such a system and in my mind that system is designed to be as passively and freely accessible and convenient to accessible and accessible at all times of day and I'm not saying this is a perfect system I think these are the underlying principles of such a system and I'm sure if you kind of do the thought you know that you could nitpick into it and find lots of loopholes etc but as a fundamental principle I think this is probably the future of democracy I think this is what decentralized movements aim towards you know that's certainly where my interest is Doug Yeah, that's what party keeps. Dr. Kapil me going. You know, that's why I do. Doug Like I said, I mean, I was working on this in like, I think it was 2000, it was called GovTogether. It was in 2009. And then when I did run for Congress in 2020, it was with the thought of trying to implement the system through my running for Congress. Doug But yeah, we could go on this for quite some time. This great discussion. I think it was a nice little sidetrack there. I hope people are interested in it as much as we are. It's interesting, you know. Doug I mean, the goal here is, right? That's what this is all about. This is where the passion comes from, right? It's liberty, it's improving society, it's growing the liberty index in the world, it's reducing the role of governments. Doug That's what it's all about. So yeah, if you're listening to this and you're not excited about these concepts, I guess you probably shouldn't be here anyway and you probably wouldn't be here. But yeah, that's what got me so excited about Monero, right? Doug Because it fulfills that role there in being utility, being digital cash for the internet. And all these things are things that we're going to need in the future to maintain our liberty in spite of growing digital tyranny, as I'm sure you think along the same lines, right? Doug In all of those regards. Dr. Kapil It is a frustrating world to look at in the now. I'll say that much. I think we have a lot of work to do, and it's hard work. And the frustrating thing about it is having the responsibility in the sense that, yeah, having the responsibility, knowing it's there. Dr. Kapil You can't escape it once you've seen it. For me, the options would be, if I were to ignore this, it would be do drink and drugs and live a life of despair. That is, what do I actually have to live for? Dr. Kapil There's a lot I have to live for. Let me just make that clear. There's a lot of stuff in my personal life that makes me very happy. But if I was to look and say, I look at my age, if I get another 30 years left, hopefully I'm lucky. Dr. Kapil But what do I do with all of that time? I do a lot of good now, but I see all of the problems inherent in the world. And it's very apparent to me what some of the underlying root causes of that relate to. Dr. Kapil And they are structural in nature. I could go on another whole topic about psychopathy, empathy, spectrum, all kinds of thought experiments related to that, and how they create behavioral profiles and behavioral types, and how that has significant influence on governance structures and mechanisms. Dr. Kapil That's an entire topic in itself. But once you understand the structural causes of these things, if you start taking yourself down that rabbit hole, it's very hard to go back without losing, without taking some part of yourself from it. Dr. Kapil You can't. You grow as a person, and it is a responsibility. But it's an honor. It leads you to meet the most interesting people who genuinely care about, on a fundamental level, making the world a better place. Dr. Kapil And you do that not just at the local level with the actions you do day to day, trying to help the people you do. You do that as part of the long -term mission, because this is about preventing people from being exploited. Dr. Kapil I have plenty of colleagues. I work still professionally as a doctor. I don't need to, I suppose. But I know plenty of my colleagues who are now being exploited by a mortgage system and a lifestyle that was promised to them that they never had to think about. Dr. Kapil And now, because the rules of the game are changing, and to specify that interest rates have gone up massively in the last year and a half, they're now playing on a completely different financial playing field to me, and they're suffering for it. Dr. Kapil And I don't think people who work hard, who have honest intentions and want to do good for society, should have to suffer. I think they should be supported. And I think if we're living in a society that doesn't enable good people to do the right thing or to help support society, then we've got a problem with society. Dr. Kapil And I think that's what a lot of people see now on some level, all the partisanship, all of all the animosity that we seem to have towards each other. It is this recognition that there are people that want to do good, that really want to make a difference in the world. Dr. Kapil But they're just the opportunities aren't there for them. And that's or the opportunity doesn't seem like it's there for them or it's been taken away or the rug is constantly being pulled. And I can understand that frustration. Dr. Kapil I can see that frustration. And when you get that, you start getting people, you stop believing in society. And when people stop believing in society, they disengage. When they disengage, society falls apart. Dr. Kapil It's it's it's happening in the UK now. I really hate saying that. But it's actively a thing that's happening in the UK. We're seeing the brain drain of had some going on about this. But I've had like four of my consultant colleagues leave within the last year to go to Canada, seeing Canada, the Middle East, et cetera, just because the opportunities are there. Dr. Kapil The quality of life is better because their rug isn't being pulled there. And these are people who've worked 15 years in the system, believing in the promise of the system. And then the system has essentially turned around and screwed them. Dr. Kapil And I think if the system had been different in sense, if it if it had spent more time giving them a financial education, if it spent more time teaching them not to be so passive about their expectations. Dr. Kapil And this is not a criticism of them, not at all. It just comes down to. If you go back into me, I've always had a mistrust of authority. I think it's a health. It's good to have a healthy mistrust of authority, because it is always, you know, once you really you can see all the different ways. Dr. Kapil If you keep yourself abreast of current events over a long period of time, if you're looking wide enough, you can see all the different ways in which authority in some point or form abuses power. And that's a cumulative thing. Dr. Kapil And that affects all areas of life. So I think that's a healthy thing to mistrust. So when you're given a template format for life. and I'm sorry, this is a tangent here, then if you as a society, as a government structure are gonna give a template format for life, then you need to really safeguard that so that people's expectations aren't dashed. Dr. Kapil Otherwise you create instability and that's where we're at. And everything that we're building right now, I see that as a road out of that, as an evolution. I see this as, I think the American Revolution is already re -beginning. Dr. Kapil I think what the founding fathers did, if you look at some of the stuff they were talking about, they had a really advanced knowledge of game theory. 100 years ago, people were, you had the founding fathers were doing game theory before game theory was even defined as game theory. Dr. Kapil They were looking at governance mechanisms and saying, how do people abuse this structure? How do we create a system where we can safeguard against abuses of power? It was a robust democracy that evolved from that. Dr. Kapil And that created the foundation for a superpower because it created the foundation for genuine freedom of speech, information spreading, ideas spreading. You have the smartest financiers in the world. Dr. Kapil That's why you've, you had Bretton Woods. You had Bretton Woods. You literally have the petrodollar. You literally, India could have been the most powerful supernapes. It could have been the most powerful country in the world because petrol was being traded in Indian rupees going back to the 1970s, but the U .S. Dr. Kapil was able to strike the agreement to say petrol will be traded in dollars and the dollar would become the reserve currency. America through pursuing that model of freedom of speech enabled the articulation and facilitation of ideas. Dr. Kapil It just allowed the brightest minds to shoot straight to the top. It was very much a meritocracy. I don't know if that still applies as much, but there's a lot, if you look back at recent history, you can kind of see, okay, well, it's obvious why this happened. Doug Well, that was me. No, fantastic. I guess a final question could be, what do you see as being the next iteration, something like network states, that theory? What's after the United States of America? Doug What is, is it Monerica or something? Like, I mean, what is the next iteration beyond the state? What is the, you know, what do we get to next? Dr. Kapil If you ask me what I fantasize about the stuff that I fantasize about, you know, I look at my heritage as Sri Lankan There's this whole segment of southern Sri Lanka, which is desert and to me I just kind of in my mind I dream of going there buying a ton of land in the desert because he thinks deserts valueless Relatively valueless and then just building a ton of solar farms using the solar farms to mine Cryptocurrencies, you know, Monero Bitcoin use them as data centers and supply the local population But then to use the profits of that to build my own micro society Which would utilize my own governance model the one that I've just outlined to you the whole decentralized governance model and then use that as An example to say look, okay, we can explore this experiment and if it works, perhaps it can be replicated elsewhere It's interesting how we'll go about that. Dr. Kapil I mean, I think the concept of micronations is a very powerful thing I think the reason they probably haven't I think the reason we probably don't have millions of micronations right now is because the technology to facilitate The communication between them hasn't been there until up to now But if you look at you know, really good example, actually, I think Estonia if you look at the stuff they're doing with their digital Sort of digital ID digital citizenship and being able to run a virtual business and stuff a lot of the infrastructure is now in place to permit better communication between micro societies a lot of the infrastructure is in place to permit better currency exchange going back to what I Said about the particle project that particle is a decentralized marketplace. Dr. Kapil If it fully realizes this bit its vision it would be Easily robust easily accessible and would permit full Multi -currency support for the currencies of your choice So I could see a society in which people are using a decentralized commerce platform with a built -in decentralized messaging platform To kind of communicate and trade lists and trade goods between each other in the currents in the digital currencies of their choice And then they in their local areas, they would be debating local issues using their own decentralized governance platform But it would require a fairly tech literate society. Dr. Kapil So it will be the tech literate societies that get there first And you're going to have to have people that are willing to then Build out the respective infrastructure and educate the local population to then get you there. Dr. Kapil So it's not going to happen at once but It will happen. I feel like it's one of those things where it has like a And then it will just snowball And I think we're very much in that kind of halfway through the inertia face That's what it feels like to me like probably early stages Doug Slowly, then suddenly. Yeah. All right, guys. This is fantastic. We covered a lot today. Is there anything else you guys want to bring up that you feel like we should have mentioned with regards to basic swap or any of the other projects, things you're working on? Doug CG? CG Yeah, I don't know if you still see my screen. Doug Oh, I can bring it back. CG Just to follow up on the swap that we undertook a bit earlier, it did complete, so now we see completed that we swapped. You see the screen, right? Doug Mm -hmm. CG yeah okay so we did that we swapped 70 part per point to xmr and that it completed unfortunately it seems that we hit some relatively relatively slow blocks so it took about an hour to complete so it was a bit on the for a mineral particle swap that's a bit on the on the on the higher end of the time usually it would take around 30 minutes i would say but okay yeah this time took a bit longer but as you wait for the sweat to go through you get your steps to complete here and you have like a full timeline of what happened so the steps are all you know marked so that you can see that something is still ongoing because you know when you wait an hour if you have no output or no feedback it can feel like it got stuck or something which was not the case and then we can verify in the wallets page here that we indeed did receive our Monero yeah sometimes you need to just hit the refresh button Dr. Kapil But yeah, in terms of, yeah, in terms of what's upcoming, I think, um, here. CG 0 .2 plus the dust that I had so 0 .22 about right now, but yep completed Dr. Kapil Oh, just to kind of fill in in terms of what's what sort of upcoming CG in terms of the development cycle for us. CG I think you covered it well a bit earlier. This year, last year, actually, we focused more heavily on the code base and the underlying architecture of the decks. Moving forward, as Cap has been saying, we're going to be increasingly focusing on usability. CG So as a first step, connecting to light nodes or remote services and then building a more fleshed out web interface, of course, we'll always have the local basics web available because that's the no compromise option. CG If you really don't want to sacrifice any privacy or decentralization, of course, a web access is probably not what you're looking for. But we're trying to cater to as many users as possible because we still believe that a good web interface for something like basic swap is still a better option than centralized exchanges. CG But you have people that will only want to use something that's super quick to use. So just trying to provide as many options as possible. And then after the web interface, of course, basic swap will become a little bit more integratable. CG So we hope to work with different teams and projects and wallets and whatnot to integrate basic subservices on these platforms, again, just to make it more accessible to the end user. Because the more people that we bring to our platform is essentially less users on centralized exchanges. CG And that's what we're here for. But let's say this year will be more heavily focused on usability. And hopefully, we hope to scale the team as well, the basic swap team. We hope to scale it this year. CG But it's a work in progress. So we'll see as we go. But we're definitely here for the long run. We've been working on this project, either on Particle or Particle since 2017 and basic swap, I believe we started in 2020 or something. Dr. Kapil I actually, I'd say we probably started earlier, but yeah, yeah, properly 2020. CG doing my experimentations with the base swap protocol but I guess what I'm trying to say is that we're definitely here for the long run and if I have one more thing to add I would say big shout out to everybody in the basic swap channel on element or discord or telegram they're linked together big shout out to everybody that's helping us test the system we've seen quite a few pull requests on github from some of the community members in Monero so we're incredibly thankful for everybody's participation and support and I think it's important to keep in mind that we're a small team so it's by any help that we can get in terms of like PR development testing anything is just we're incredibly incredibly thankful for this decentralized team effort Doug Fantastic. Dr. Kapp, any final words? Dr. Kapil I just want to thank you Doug and the production team just for giving us time to speak as always and also for allowing me to tangent. Honestly it's been great. I want to thank all the decentralized communities out there also working towards the same things. Dr. Kapil We have a lot of respect for you so honestly we're really grateful to all the work that you guys do. CG Yeah, honestly. Dr. Kapil Just keep doing them. CG Doug, hearing you talk with Cap, you guys should definitely meet up on the privacy roundtable to discuss these decentralized society topics that would be really useful. Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. For sure. Doug Definitely. Definitely will do. Thank you so much, guys. If you just want to mention any resources, links, or way for people to get in touch with you, if they want to participate or help out in a certain way, or just put all the information out there in terms of resources, links. Dr. Kapil So if you want to download and install basic swap decks, go to basicswapdecks .com, follow us on Twitter at basicswapdecks. You can also follow us at Particle Project, which is the parent project for us. Dr. Kapil We have combined channels for elements, so matrix, telegram, and discord. They're all combined via a bot into one channel. So if you join and you keep seeing messages from Pennyworth, don't worry, that's actually messages from other people, but that's the name of the bot that links our channels. Dr. Kapil Yeah, I would say those are probably the best resources to get in touch. And if you're a developer interested in working with us, either ping us directly via Twitter or send an email to hello at Particle .io, P -A -R -T -I -C -L .io. Dr. Kapil Certainly, if you are looking to help develop or contribute to the project, we would welcome you. Come join us in the basic swap chats and donations are always welcome to help accelerate and further the course. Doug Awesome. Thank you so much, guys. This is great. Yes, thanks to you. Yeah, we'll be in touch, and hopefully I'll see you down in Argentina. Hopefully we can make that happen. For sure. Definitely. All right, guys. Doug Thank you. Cheers. Ciao. Bye -bye. Dr. Kapil Thanks, have a good one. Doug Hold on one second. Hold on one second. Dr. Kapil Oh, oh, yeah.