Latest / What Bitcoin Did / The Plan to Put Bitcoin in Every Conversation | Seth For Privacy

Transcript

The Plan to Put Bitcoin in Every Conversation | Seth For Privacy · What Bitcoin Did

• 0:00
  I think what people don't really understand is no matter how practically strong the protocol is,
• 0:07
  if someone has root level access to your device, it doesn't matter. Because they can just get into
• 0:10
  whatever data exists for that app. So the core of what Radar is, is it's just fixing this idea of
• 0:15
  our money, at least money we actually control, like self-custodial money, Bitcoin, and our
• 0:20
  conversations, especially conversations where we actually have privacy by default, where we know
• 0:24
  that what we talk about is not being used to train AI models, it's not being used to
• 0:29
  to profile us and figure out who we are. Those two things have never collided. We're in a place that
• 0:34
  it's kind of hard to imagine how good the tools have gotten on the Bitcoin side. Like five years
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  ago, if you had told me all the things we would have today and how simple and seamless they would
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  be while still retaining self-custody, like I would not have believed you honestly. Your conversations
• 0:50
  and your money should not have to live in totally separate places and be very disconnected and have
• 0:53
  to do this copy-paste shuffle. If you're coming to Radar because you're a Bitcoiner and that's the
• 0:58
  the only people we draw in, we fail. The goal for us is really that this becomes something where
• 1:03
  people who don't care about Bitcoin and maybe even don't care about privacy are using Radar
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  simply because the user experience of how getting into the platform, how sending and receiving money
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  works, feels better than any competitor. Seth for privacy in Cleveland, man. How are you doing?
• 1:22
  I worked out nicely. I've adopted you there that we're in Cleveland or are you okay for me to say
• 1:26
  we're in cleveland no i'm fine yeah this this street i don't know if it's just this street or
• 1:30
  if it's just cleveland i got in last night i've seen basically nothing here but it feels like
• 1:34
  we're in a horror movie that sounds like a relatively apt description of cleveland let's
• 1:39
  just say it's not my favorite place on earth like uh it's a place it's getting better but it's yeah
• 1:45
  it's it's not the best out there when i went down into the basement to put uh my drying on
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  i wasn't sure i was going to come but how are you doing i am doing well i'm doing well it has been a
• 1:55
  man it's always busy you know you know how it is i mean you're you're you're not only doing all this
• 2:00
  all the time and like 100 podcasts a day but you're flying all over the world to do them
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  same like events i mean i feel like april through june was just nuts events obviously we've had this
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  huge push with radar on top of cake wallet all the things that we're doing there um yeah crazy
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  busy you've been hitting the podcast circuit hard as well i have it has been fun like going back
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  around the circuit like i feel like uh it kind of comes in waves so getting to do more about this
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  talk through a lot more bitcoin privacy stuff talk through spark has been really enjoyable because
• 2:31
  i love this this is my favorite way to do podcasts because you get to do all the hard stuff yeah you
• 2:35
  come up with the questions you do all the production you do all the marketing and i just sit down in a
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  chair and drink some water and talk are you still doing your podcast technically it exists uh it's
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  probably been like a year plus since i've done one that counts as no yeah not really it's like
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  one of those if i'm really inspired i'll uh i'll spin everything back up and do it again it is
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  something i need to do more often i feel like 90 of my workflow now i could just automate and have
• 3:06
  claude do all of the other stuff outside of the actual recording um so i could probably do more
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  than i have been but like it's made me so much more efficient like i do so much with ai i want
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  talk to you about ai but we'll do that a little later um we should talk about radar because this
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  is so this is new it's obviously a new business from k-quallet but the same team right it's you
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  and vic and yeah started by the same team kind of just to get it off the ground leadership team is
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  the same it's like vic's c and co-founder or c and founder uh i'm coo uh and then our same cto omar
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  uh has come into the radar team but outside of that we're working on growing the team right now
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  separately because it is a it's a new business uh a new model venture capital is a first for us for
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  vick and i so it's been fun figuring out that model and a good time getting to work with with
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  ego death capital specifically um but yeah from from the same team is kind of the best way to
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  phrase it because we could we got it off the ground and we'll drive it from a leadership
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  perspective but getting new devs and marketing and all that right now so tell everyone what what
• 4:03
  radar is what have you built yeah it's been a a blast it's it's this crazy thing where the actual
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  concept is stupid simple like i feel like a lot of times you get on to like pitch a new project
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  and it's you gotta you gotta go through like 10 years of history and the super complex problems
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  it's solving and i think something that's really nice about radar is it's just solving something
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  that seems trivial but hasn't been done in the right way in a way that is truly freedom tech
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  from both sides um so so the core of what radar is is it's just fixing this idea of our money at
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  least money we actually control like self-custodial money bitcoin and our conversations especially
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  conversations where we actually have privacy by default where we know that what we talk about is
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  not using being used to train ai models it's not being used to to profile us and figure out who we
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  are um those two things have never collided like we've had signal we have simplex we have other
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  really good messaging platforms right now but none of them fix the money side and we obviously
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  have fantastic tools for bitcoin now like we in a place that it kind of hard to imagine how good the tools have gotten on the Bitcoin side Like five years ago if you had told me all the things we would have today and how simple and seamless they would be while still retaining self like i would not have believed you honestly because
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  feel like the bitcoin wallet space was pretty rough four or five years ago uh at this point
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  but the tools there have gotten so much better that we really just had a wake-up moment when
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  we've deployed spark for lightning and cake wallet like our whole team we're heavy signal users all
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  of our off-topic stuff is in signal signal is our backup for all of our team conversations if we have
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  issues with slack it's all of my primary comms for the business dev side relationships in the space
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  so we've always been huge huge signal users and advocates but the ability to just send money in
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  the place you're already chatting with people is something that is really incredible when you start
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  to use it and the tools on bitcoin got good enough finally that we could do that in a way that didn't
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  you didn't have to sacrifice self-custody to do it and you also didn't have to sacrifice like oh
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  god this user experience is terrible yeah which has been the case for such a long time exactly
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  exactly so it's really bringing those two things together where like your your your conversations
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  and your money should not have to live in totally separate places and be very disconnected and have
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  to do this copy paste shuffle you should just be able to if you're chatting about that meal that
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  you just had last night with a friend and you need to pay them back why do you have to go to
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  venmo or paypal and then what's your username what's your cash tag okay let me send that
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  why do you have to go to phoenix wallet and make the payment from there and get an invoice from
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  them first and hopefully it's the right one and your wallet supports it like get away from all
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  of that complexity but still retain self-custody still retain pretty good privacy on the payment
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  side obviously we can talk about that and do it in a way that's just just stupid seamless it's
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  really good like i think they're probably the closest we've had to that would be sort of zaps
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  on nostr obviously a different use case that's like generally used as like a social media tool
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  having that with inside something as private as signal would be incredible like that's really
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  really cool i use signal for as much communication as i can i try and get absolutely everything over
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  there because it's like great privacy but also it just works like all the other chats that you would
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  use. So how are you using Signal? Yeah. So under the hood, I think the best way to explain it is
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  that we're Signal compatible, like Radar works on the Signal network so that you can still chat with
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  all of your Signal contacts and that anybody who comes over to Radar, you can make payments as well.
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  How does that work? So is the Signal protocol open source and separate to like the Signal app
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  that you download on your phone? Yeah. So the Signal protocol itself is open. The Signal apps
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  themselves are open source specifically agpl v3 for the the open source license nerds out there
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  um the actual network itself is run by signal so like they have their own servers their own
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  infrastructure they run all of that but they have protocol itself is totally open source and the
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  apps are as well um which is good that's always how something like this should be especially at
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  a protocol level it needs to be open source and run by foundations i think signal have done a good
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  job with that and so you can just bolt onto their network and build this on top of it yeah yeah it's
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  it's one of the very nice things about how they built it is it it is quite easy to build around
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  and something that we discovered really early on when we were building this was signal had launched
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  this mobile coin cryptocurrency a while back i think it's like six years ago now they've tried
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  to make everyone forget about it i think yeah it kind of doesn't exist anymore like it technically
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  does um but the cool thing about it is because they built all that out they built out all this
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  all these rails within the signal protocol and the apps themselves to be able to do payments
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  obviously they're built around mobile coin but a crypto payment is a crypto payment we can we can
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  use the same things for lightning or spark to spark payments specifically within radar so that
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  made it also a lot easier because we didn't have to do something that wouldn't be compatible with
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  broader the broader signal network we didn't have to do some custom side channel or something like
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  that we were able to really ride those rails and do it easier than we expected honestly out of the
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  gate because of that so i've got a question that this one it's like a bit of a tricky one yeah i
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  donate to signal um like i do the monthly subscription where you just donate money
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  because they have huge costs in terms of running their servers i think it's an awesome product like
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  i'll give them as much money as they want like every time they come out with a new product i
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  basically buy it even if i don't necessarily need it um so they did their chat backup recently
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  subscribe to that how does this work because you're not paying the server cost like how does
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  the relationship between you and signal work yeah so the the way that we've approached it is that
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  that we understand a we are going to bring some user costs to them if people are using radar and
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  it's using the underlying signal network um and b we understand the value of what they built like
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  like i said like we are very hardcore signal users i've been pushing people to signal for
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  uh almost a decade now all my friends and family are on there i understand the costs that come with
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  So the way we've approached it is that we've already been donating to Signal
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  to make sure that we're far more than covering user costs.
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  And it's something that we're going to ramp up at the same time.
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  Because we want to make sure that it's not just like,
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  we don't want it to be like net neutral.
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  Like, hey, we're just barely going to cover costs.
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  And then you deal with everything else.
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  We understand that they are doing so much more And that the foundation ability especially to continue iterating the Signal protocol and building the network as a whole is something that is really really important So we we we kind of view it like we want it to be a rising tide that lifts all boats Um so donations are
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  core part of that, but also users that get on radar are also getting on signal, uh, as a network,
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  which is, is a, a boon for them at the same time. That's very cool. Um, how do you make money?
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  So right now there's not a, a built-in profit model into radar. Um, obviously we have plans
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  for that. The goal right now was just to get a really clean payments experience out. We didn't
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  want to complicate it with anything else at the moment. And the goal long term is always to keep
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  it very simple and very clean. Like we're not, CakeWallet lets you do a million things like
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  silent payments, page one, B2, you can use Spark, on chain, like there's so many different options
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  for what you do in there. We will not make radar that. Like very intentionally radar is supposed to
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  be simple and intuitive and easy to use so we'll keep it like that uh in terms of profit model
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  long term the simple one is just obviously if if you're not a bitcoiner already like we we envision
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  radar being something where bitcoin native people are just the like the tier one audience like that's
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  where we start that's obviously where we already have reach those are the people who are likely
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  already using signal in some way yeah and they're using bitcoin so they can onboard by just sending
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  in a lighting payment and they're done when we get past that tier one audience obviously we need
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  people to be able to top up just like they would top up cash app venmo paypal whatever and so
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  they'll be just sending dollars and stable coins and things like that yeah yeah so it'll be primarily
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  topping up with dollars getting in that way obviously we'll take a small fee on that um and
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  then stable coin support is something that we're we're already working on already have kind of the
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  bones of that in place behind the scenes um to let people not only top up from other stable coins
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  and just have it auto converted to stable coins on spark which is a really nice feature and one of
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  the reasons why we wanted to go with spark specifically under the hood for this um but
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  then also let people if they need to to make external payments to other stable coin uh stable
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  coins on other chains at the same time um and then those swaps obviously will take a small fee on as
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  well so simple profit model in the short term i would say have some bigger plans on other ways that
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  we can we can approach this on the long term as well it definitely makes sense to start with
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  bitcoin is like when i speak to anyone if they're in bitcoin they probably have signal anyone else
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  probably doesn't like it's getting better and i feel like yeah like i mean me personally i'm
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  pushing everyone i know to use it because it's just where i want all my conversation to be
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  and i want to install it and and see how it all works do it live just quickly before we do that
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  though um can we talk about the tucker carlson signal telegram thing because that's one of the
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  the few when i do talk to normal people about trying to get them on signal and stuff that is
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  still a hangover i think yeah i thought it was hacked yeah exactly people saying that the security
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  model and signal is not actually as good as people think it is. And then offering telegram as a
• 13:13
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• 16:16
  Yeah, I mean, the TLDR, not to spend too much time on it,
• 16:20
  was that, like, obviously Tucker Carlson, very high profile journalist,
• 16:25
  almost politician at this point, honestly, like with how he approaches what he does,
• 16:29
  has been a heavy signal user as most people in high profile potentially targeted environments are
• 16:37
  like signals first adopters were really that that type of user and it's branched out far beyond that
• 16:42
  um i thought it was funny the other day i was listening to like a basketball podcast that i
• 16:47
  like and they were talking about that they should move their group chat over to signal because they
• 16:51
  were talking about things that they didn't want in the public about basketball players like i just
• 16:56
  thought that was like funny i think we're kind of through the only hardcore people use it idea well
• 17:00
  that's as chat gets completely cracked down upon by states all over the world yeah yeah that helps
• 17:05
  push people for sure um but yeah so tucker carlson really heavy user he was using it for all of the
• 17:10
  people who wanted to be like whistleblowers that sort of thing they're reaching out to him to him
• 17:14
  on signal and it came out that some of his chats had been revealed some info about what he'd been
• 17:20
  chatting about had been revealed i think this was around the time of the putin interview is that
• 17:24
  right i think so yeah it was like right after that that he broke this story that about what
• 17:28
  had happened but i think the the common confusion is always that people assume what data was leaked
• 17:34
  was the source of the leak and they tie those things together always and that's almost never
• 17:39
  the case i mean if you look at like he was using signal on ios specifically if you are a high
• 17:44
  profile journalist and you're using any sort of device you need to assume that you are actively
• 17:49
  trying to be compromised hopefully he was using lockdown mode on his iphone i wouldn't be
• 17:53
  surprised if he wasn't and he was targeted by something like pegasus where they they did an os
• 17:58
  level attack some i message zero day or something like that got access to his device and then i think
• 18:05
  what people don't really understand is no matter how how practically strong the protocol is if
• 18:10
  someone has root level access to your device it doesn't matter because they can just get into
• 18:14
  whatever data exists for that app whenever you open the app they can screenshot the screen as
• 18:19
  you go even if they can't exfiltrate the data specifically so it's i think it's overwhelmingly
• 18:24
  likely that that's what happened and they had an os level breach of his device and they were able
• 18:30
  to get those chats from there the other alternative is things we've seen like the u.s government where
• 18:34
  they add the wrong person to a chat and yeah that person leaks the info and it's like if you add
• 18:40
  someone who's not good into your chats it is end-to-end encrypted but one of the ends is that
• 18:45
  person who maybe is not trustworthy. They can screenshot the app. They can exfiltrate whatever
• 18:49
  they want from the chats that they're in. That's another possibility. But I think an OS level attack
• 18:53
  is most likely. There's absolutely no evidence that there is a breach of Signal's protocol in
• 18:58
  any way. And it's very cutting edge, very complex from how it provides privacy, but extremely well
• 19:06
  vetted from how the protocol itself actually works. And no reason to think that there actually
• 19:11
  was a compromise. But obviously it's a much better story to talk about Signal compromise than,
• 19:15
  oh i was just one of thousands of journalists this year that got hit with pegasus or something
• 19:19
  like that that just breached my i did a long interview with jsr about pegasus and it seems
• 19:24
  like the most obvious like possible thing it's probably the most controversial interview in a
• 19:29
  decade with one of the most controversial people in the world like to think that they're not trying
• 19:33
  to infiltrate your phone and get information like of course of course they are and what about the
• 19:38
  desktop side though because there were desktop security issues with signal not that long ago
• 19:43
  Yeah, it's interesting.
• 19:49
  You have to treat the desktop apps a little bit differently.
• 19:52
  Obviously, they're using the same NTN encrypted protocol.
• 19:56
  A lot of what people think about security is that desktops are more secure and safe,
• 20:02
  and mobile devices are less secure and safe.
• 20:04
  Because you do so much on your mobile phone and maybe you don't on your desktop,
• 20:07
  I think a lot of people have a false sense of security on their desktop.
• 20:10
  While the opposite is definitely true.
• 20:12
  like yes we just talked about attacks on ios pegasus but those are nation state level undisclosed
• 20:19
  incredibly complex zero days that they would never use on a regular person yeah your desktop
• 20:24
  being pwned is something that happens to regular people all the time because desktop os is outside
• 20:29
  of mac os mac os is probably the only exception to that are much much easier to uh to attack and
• 20:35
  hack into that's why i think signal have made a good decision in that the the desktop apps
• 20:41
  themselves are much simpler and they're really just a relay for messages.
• 20:45
  Like the way that they work under the hood is they're just a linked device
• 20:48
  with your signal or radar app.
• 20:50
  and they just pass messages back and forth and you can send messages from them,
• 20:54
  but they work a little bit differently. But you do need to, if you, if the actual
• 20:58
  info in the messages that you're sending is that critical, that you need to make sure that a device
• 21:04
  breach on your desktop does not reveal that information, then it would probably be best
• 21:09
  just not to use the desktop apps at that point. They're really just a convenience thing too.
• 21:12
  Like you can't use just the desktop app anyways. You have to use the mobile app and link it to the
• 21:16
  desktop app so again if you're a very high profile actor you should be using something like ios in
• 21:21
  lockdown mode with signal only on that one device and don't link it to any other devices but they
• 21:26
  really are like the the more edge cases um because was the problem that they were keeping chats in
• 21:31
  sort of plain text format on your desktop yeah it was the way that they actually stored the
• 21:35
  the database behind the scenes like normally you would think of vulnerabilities or something like
• 21:41
  that being if i have the app open and someone has a a hack into my device that i have malware or
• 21:46
  like that, then they have access to what I've been chatting about, or they can screenshot it as I go,
• 21:50
  or they can, they can key log and see what I type out or what I copy and paste, that sort of thing.
• 21:55
  Um, but yeah, the, the, the main issue was, and I, I'm a little fuzzy on the details because it was
• 22:00
  quite a long, quite a long time ago, was the actual database, even when the app was closed,
• 22:04
  was something that other apps could read easier than they were supposed to. Um, that has been
• 22:08
  resolved as of a long time ago. I think that's probably a year plus since they resolved that,
• 22:12
  at least. But it was one of those downsides. I will give them a little bit of a break as well,
• 22:19
  though, in that the ability to securely store data on desktop apps is quite poor. You essentially
• 22:26
  have to always roll your own and do it yourself. Whereas if you're using something on iOS or
• 22:30
  Android, there's really good native tooling to use the secure enclaves that mobile phones have
• 22:35
  that desktops and laptops generally don't have access to. And so actual secure data storage on
• 22:41
  mobile os is is much easier and essentially built in whereas on desktop you have to roll your own
• 22:47
  and you have to make sure that you do it in a very careful very cautious way we've run in the same
• 22:51
  thing with cake wallet where like we we can't rely on the desktop level security in any way
• 22:55
  so even if there is something like a secure enclave we can't build around just that because
• 22:59
  what about a user who's using a 10 year old laptop that doesn't have that you have to take very
• 23:03
  different assumptions when you're talking about desktop level security than mobile security so
• 23:07
  will you guys not be doing a desktop app uh the planet's definitely specifically obviously for
• 23:12
  radar yeah yeah the plan is definitely to do and i mean the the low-hanging fruit is mac os um like
• 23:18
  technically we could ship that right now we want to polish it a bit more uh just make the the ui a
• 23:24
  little bit better but mac os is the easiest one um the nice thing right now that we realized is uh
• 23:31
  like it again because we're compatible with the signal network and protocol you can link radar
• 23:35
  with the Signal desktop apps.
• 23:37
  So just for the messaging side,
• 23:38
  you can use that right now.
• 23:39
  Oh, that's cool.
• 23:40
  Yeah, that works totally out of the gate.
• 23:42
  Like I've been using Radar behind the scenes
• 23:44
  for at least six months now,
• 23:47
  all linked to the Signal desktop app,
• 23:49
  which is where I do a lot of the chatting
• 23:50
  because obviously when I'm working,
• 23:51
  I'm using Signal a lot for work.
• 23:53
  So that works right now.
• 23:54
  So we don't like have to ship something,
• 23:56
  but obviously the downside is Signal's desktop apps
• 23:58
  don't support payments at all.
• 24:00
  So we would like for users to be able to have
• 24:02
  that full functionality directly from the desktop
• 24:04
  and not have to go to their phone to actually send or receive a payment got you i've got some
• 24:08
  feature requests for you so i've got i'm on radar now i just sent you 10 000 sats i mean it it looks
• 24:14
  very very similar to signal uh obviously slightly different but very cool um two you said 10 000
• 24:21
  it's only a thousand oh sorry short short i'll send you another 9 000 now um i was trying to do
• 24:28
  a podcast at the same time to be fair and so some of the things that i do use on signal like i use
• 24:33
  the chat back up um this is we have like a group chat with my family where all the baby pictures go
• 24:38
  yeah um they're important pictures so i don't want to lose those um can does my backup on signal
• 24:45
  still work if i'm using radar it does yeah um yeah i mean for clarity so we we're using the
• 24:52
  open source mobile apps ag built agpl v3 like i mentioned before and modifying them to add in
• 24:58
  payments so we've we've kept as much as we can the same for now uh of the rest of the mobile app
• 25:03
  so it does still work with their encrypted backups um it works best with their cloud backups the
• 25:08
  thing that they've been rolling out over the last year roughly yeah um that you can pay for you don't
• 25:12
  have to pay for i think a lot of people are a little confused about that one as well but yeah
• 25:16
  i'll pay them it's like two dollars a month yeah it's worth paying for just to support them yeah
• 25:20
  exactly so i do recommend paying for it the difference is i think the free plan you get like
• 25:25
  45 days of data and chat backups uh and the paid plan it's unlimited so you'll get all of your chat
• 25:32
  history back immediately. But yeah, those are fully compatible. Obviously, we worked really
• 25:36
  hard to make sure that we kept up with compatibility there. So when you go and you actually install
• 25:41
  radar, you'll have like a migrate to signal option. You choose that. You'd say, I have a backup.
• 25:46
  And then we'll be able to see that backup, ask for your recovery key, which is what decrypts it.
• 25:50
  You'll enter that. And then all your chats will be back exactly as they were before.
• 25:54
  Obviously with the limitation of if you chose the free plan you only have the last 45 days If you doing the paid plan you have all of it The one caveat that we noticed is for some reason they locked down the paid backups for like making paid backups to their
• 26:10
  actual app id so we can't offer you paying signal for backups in radar which is a little frustrating
• 26:16
  because like we wanted to keep that monetization method for them yeah like we we don't want to take
• 26:20
  that money like the goal was to keep that if you ever hit donate or support or anything within radar
• 26:25
  it's all going to signal like we have no interest in that we want to make sure people are still
• 26:29
  supporting signal the underlying foundation um but you can't sign up for and pay for paid backups
• 26:36
  in radar because they've locked it down to their app id but you can still restore paid backups in
• 26:40
  radar and you can use the free backups at the same time um within radar so that that still works very
• 26:45
  cool um so my feature request that you can't do in signal and this is most likely a privacy thing
• 26:50
  i would imagine but i would really like it is the ability to automatically download like to my photos
• 26:56
  folder from certain groups like i definitely don't want it for everything yeah like when i talk about
• 27:01
  that like the baby pictures in that with my family group like i would love them just to automatically
• 27:05
  download my photos can we add that yeah yeah i mean definitely could do that i hadn't thought
• 27:10
  about that but that would be good for us too because like the the only privacy or freedom
• 27:16
  tech thing i've been able to convert my family to is signal so like all of my family chats are all in
• 27:19
  signal. One of my favorite things that we've done is we basically replaced social media,
• 27:24
  which used to be like how my parents would keep up with us and we'd keep up with my parents. And
• 27:28
  all of that would happen on Facebook. And I got off Facebook six, seven years ago at this point,
• 27:33
  deleted it and totally done with it. And finally got everybody migrated over. So it's really cool
• 27:38
  because we have a family chat that is what social media should be. We talk about what we're doing,
• 27:44
  we share pictures, but it's just our family. And it's not like me posting what I'm doing.
• 27:48
  So my family will see it.
• 27:49
  And then like the world can see it for some reason.
• 27:51
  It never made any sense.
• 27:52
  Like here's a baby picture.
• 27:53
  And like your mom likes it and comments on it.
• 27:55
  I'm like, what, what world are we living in?
• 27:57
  Like, why is this not directly happening?
• 27:59
  Um, so that is, uh, that feature would be awesome there too.
• 28:02
  Cause that's, that's pretty much how, how our family does everything as well.
• 28:05
  Like all the baby pictures, pictures of like my kids, cousins and all that are happening
• 28:09
  in there.
• 28:09
  So that'd be nice to be able to have that.
• 28:11
  I'll wait for that one to drop then.
• 28:12
  Doing it live.
• 28:12
  I'm doing it live.
• 28:13
  so maybe a better example for what you're trying to do here with radar would be like x money because
• 28:19
  they're obviously i think they've made their chats end-to-end encrypted i think it's not open source
• 28:24
  so we don't really know what's happening there but now they're bringing x money along kind of
• 28:28
  trying to do what you're doing essentially with radar but on keeping everyone on platform and x
• 28:31
  and they're also doing things like i think they're offering six percent on cash deposits which i don't
• 28:36
  know how they're doing that seems pretty high um but like how do you compete against a company like
• 28:41
  that because network effect is obviously huge there yeah i mean it definitely it definitely
• 28:47
  will be tricky because you end up having a similar problem to like how does bitcoin compete with
• 28:54
  paypal which obviously has been like the conversation for 15 years now yeah and the
• 28:58
  reality is that like unless a huge a user is either ideologically driven or forcibly removed from the
• 29:06
  legacy financial system they're probably not gonna switch to something that is more self-sovereign
• 29:14
  unless it is better in some other clear critical way yeah um and i think like an example of that
• 29:21
  would be as x seems to get more and more regulated and starts to implement more and more id requirements
• 29:30
  and starts to i mean them doing x money i think is going to continue to push them into having to
• 29:34
  to actually identify users who, especially if you want to do X money, you will have to give up your
• 29:40
  idea. Like it's, it's a bank. Um, I think that will push a lot of people out just purely because
• 29:45
  of the friction that comes with that. Yes. Once you're in that system, I think the ability, like
• 29:49
  you'll, you'll be able to, I'm sure tip people's tweets and all of that stuff that's going to come
• 29:52
  later on. That will be nice. But if you have to do all the KYC friction just to get into the system
• 29:57
  and use it, I think that friction will push people to something like radar. But I think the, the
• 30:02
  reality is the onus is on us as builders to make it where it's an actually better experience.
• 30:08
  Like if you're coming to Radar because you're a Bitcoiner and that's the only people we draw in,
• 30:13
  we fail. Like quite honestly, yes, it will still be a good tool. But the goal for us is really that
• 30:18
  this becomes something where people who don't care about Bitcoin and maybe even don't care
• 30:23
  about privacy are using Radar simply because the user experience of how getting into the platform,
• 30:29
  how sending and receiving money works feels better than any competitor and i think the the vision has
• 30:36
  already been laid out by how incredibly well signal have done with that where absolutely the
• 30:40
  vast majority of their users i would argue have no interest in user privacy and have no clue what
• 30:45
  the protocol is they don't know anything about that they just use it because it's a really good
• 30:49
  user experience do you think it is the best example of freedom tech reaching sort of the broad world
• 30:53
  yeah yeah i think it's undeniable i mean you could you could obviously argue that bitcoin is but
• 30:58
  but I would expect there are many orders of magnitude
• 31:02
  more signal users than there are self-custodial Bitcoin users
• 31:05
  who use it for payments regularly at least.
• 31:08
  Yeah I think it is the best example because they made decisions that were really controversial like keeping the phone number requirement because they understood that the thing that they needed to build was not the
• 31:21
  most hardcore solution possible it was not the maybe maybe poor phrasing but it wasn't the most
• 31:28
  freedom tech freedom tech that they could build like that would be a simplex or something but
• 31:32
  you see how successful signal been because they've kept it very simple yeah yeah and like they've
• 31:37
  obviously they've taken a lot of crap for keeping phone number requirement in for other choices that
• 31:42
  they've made over the years for how the foundation is run and yet they've been sustainable they've
• 31:46
  built something that has a lot of users that don't care about the underlying ideology or concept
• 31:51
  and it's because of that like that ability to decide where is compromise actually beneficial
• 31:58
  to the end goal and where do we stop the compromise is really really important like
• 32:03
  Like something that stuck with me is Francis from BullBitcoin.
• 32:07
  I don't know.
• 32:08
  I'm bringing up BullBitcoin so much on this one.
• 32:09
  But Francis from BullBitcoin did a presentation, I think two years ago at BTC Prague.
• 32:13
  And it was basically about this idea of like when we're building Bitcoin services and tools,
• 32:19
  how do we know what to compromise on and how far we can go?
• 32:22
  And he had this really, really interesting chart to me that talked about how like the
• 32:24
  user experience, you can compromise up to a certain point and then you can keep compromising
• 32:28
  and get better user experience, but you'll lose all of the freedom that comes with it.
• 32:31
  but there is this little bit that we have to be willing to figure out what can we compromise on
• 32:35
  and not be in this mindset of it has to be the most hardcore most technically superior tool we
• 32:41
  need a bike shed until we get to the most perfect solution but rather like what's the thing that we
• 32:46
  can we can do to make this work and like the phone number requirement for instance it's in signal
• 32:50
  it seems terrible until you actually think through and you start figuring out how are we going to
• 32:54
  address spam within a protocol like this how are we going to address malicious users and
• 33:00
  no one else has solved that i think there are some interesting ways we can solve that and
• 33:04
  bitcoin is honestly the best solution for that especially now that bitcoin lightning is so
• 33:09
  approachable you can do spam prevention with micro payments which is something that we've
• 33:13
  been digging into just in case um but that is a really good example of that and i think they're
• 33:19
  they're by far the best solution the best example of freedom tech that is kind of gone more mainstream
• 33:25
  as the one i always bring up at the same time yeah and i totally agree that if it's just bitcoin
• 33:28
  is like it's not done enough like we need this this to get broader um why do you think the companies
• 33:34
  like x have haven't looked or maybe they have looked at it but haven't implemented anything
• 33:37
  with bitcoin in terms of especially if like if the goal of x money or part of the goal of x money is
• 33:41
  to have tipping on tweets and stuff which i think it is it's to build that like circular economy sort
• 33:45
  of thing like i'm sure elon's looked at nostor and i think he probably has because of jack um sure
• 33:52
  and he must see that as like a huge revenue option like if he's taking a small percentage of every
• 33:56
  you know tip tweet like that's a lot of money yeah why not just use bitcoin why go through the
• 34:01
  rigmarole of doing x money i think the biggest reason over the years has just been that if you
• 34:06
  actually like if you just wanted to do custodial bitcoin obviously they could they could do that
• 34:10
  that's just as easy for them as x money may be easier it depends on how you look at it on there
• 34:16
  from their perspective but if you wanted to do self-custodial payments in a way that was not
• 34:23
  like extremely painful for users on bitcoin i just don't think that was really possible until
• 34:28
  about six months ago until spark really until spark and now arcade and second are there as well
• 34:35
  um there's some caveats there in terms of user experience but they can you can paper over a lot
• 34:40
  of those and i think it was that like we had kept thinking about lightning as like we're just going
• 34:44
  to iterate on top of the way that the tech works as a whole and we'll get to the point where it's
• 34:48
  good enough and thankfully finally we like the community said like we we have to shift perspectives
• 34:54
  what's another way that we can do this and work around the pain points that are coming with
• 34:58
  lightning so i think part of the problem is like if you talk about x money i'm sure this has been
• 35:03
  in the works for years yeah since he took over probably maybe even before that who knows if that
• 35:10
  was a thing that was already in the works before he even took over x and when you're talking about
• 35:15
  that like they're not going to work on something for three years or whatever and then a new
• 35:19
  technology built around bitcoin comes out they're not going to ship that yeah like there's no way
• 35:24
  so i think that is the biggest problem has been that there was just no real way for them to do
• 35:28
  a user-friendly self-custodial bitcoin approach that would have been something that they would
• 35:32
  have wanted to ship to their users until very recently but that was the the huge breakthrough
• 35:38
  for us was like we were approaching two million users in k-quallet now uh we're well over half a
• 35:44
  million lightning users at this point from what we can tell the only visibility we have is just
• 35:48
  how many lightning usernames people have created custom ones um and like my lightning ptsd i was
• 35:56
  terrified of what that launch was gonna look like uh and spark obviously has other trade-offs which
• 36:01
  we can get into if you want but still to me ticks the box of self-custody unilateral exit things that
• 36:06
  are really important for that and it was just incredibly smooth compared to what everything
• 36:12
  has always been when you talk about deploying Lightning
• 36:16
  and you talk about being able to do micropayments,
• 36:19
  stable coins as well on Bitcoin using Spark.
• 36:22
  And that was just a wake up moment of like we actually gotten there finally We talked about that we there but we only really had like one wallet that was user friendly that could do lightning and even it had a ton of drawbacks phoenix um and so that shift i think will will now enable people to build
• 36:37
  things like x money even when they're not ideologically bitcoiners but because of the ux
• 36:42
  that can bring but it's going to be sort of a long tail because if you're building something
• 36:46
  like that for a platform with however many users x has at this point you're not going to implement
• 36:51
  some cutting edge tech on Bitcoin.
• 36:53
  You're going to weigh it
• 36:54
  until it's very, very proven.
• 36:55
  But that means that people thinking now
• 36:58
  about how are we going to do payments
• 36:59
  and we want to do them in a way
• 37:00
  that is a little bit more self-sovereign.
• 37:02
  Now they have the building blocks
• 37:03
  and they can start thinking about Bitcoin
• 37:05
  in a very different way.
• 37:06
  If you're already self-custody Bitcoin,
• 37:08
  you know the deal with hardware wallets,
• 37:09
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• 37:11
  and a seed phrase that can be lost,
• 37:13
  stolen, or forgotten.
• 37:14
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• 37:16
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• 37:18
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• 37:20
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• 37:22
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• 37:23
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• 37:26
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• 37:30
  So before you approve something,
• 37:31
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• 37:33
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• 37:36
  It's a big difference.
• 37:37
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• 37:39
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• 37:41
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• 37:44
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• 37:47
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• 37:52
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• 37:55
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• 37:58
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• 38:00
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• 38:41
  you wouldn't reuse a bitcoin address so why does your phone broadcast the same identifier for life
• 38:46
  Every sim has a static ID and carriers, ad networks and bad actors all use it to track you
• 38:51
  The big carriers have been caught selling that data over and over again
• 38:55
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• 39:02
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• 39:10
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• 39:19
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• 39:26
  That's C-A-P-E dot co forward slash WBD.
• 39:31
  So when you talk about the trade-offs of Phoenix, that's like liquidity requirements and all that kind of stuff.
• 39:36
  Yeah, mainly that inbound liquidity requirement and the way that offline payments works.
• 39:42
  The two main hurdles I think that we've seen.
• 39:44
  so you're using spark on the back end to do all of this um let's talk about spark a little bit
• 39:49
  because um how are you using it and then let's get into the trade-offs of of using it yeah i mean
• 39:55
  really simple again the theme of radar is simplicity under the hood all of the payments
• 40:00
  are spark to spark payments so if you let's say you top up initially by sending in a light and
• 40:06
  payment that's being atomically swapped from lightning to a leaf which is essentially the
• 40:11
  the UTXO of Spark and you hold your balance on Spark within radar. So obviously we use the
• 40:18
  terminology lightning. I know it's not technically accurate, but it's the best way to describe it to
• 40:24
  the broader Bitcoin audience. And then we're more specific about Spark and docs. And when we talk
• 40:29
  about it on podcasts and stuff like that for the people who actually know what Spark is.
• 40:33
  So yeah, everything inbound and outbound, if you're making a lightning payment or receiving
• 40:37
  lightning payment that's happening happening via atomic swaps with spark and then every payment
• 40:42
  within radar is actually just spark to spark we could technically do lightning but then you'd just
• 40:47
  be going spark lightning back to spark spending extra fees and making it take longer and there
• 40:53
  was just absolutely no reason to do that so yeah everything within is spark to spark so does that
• 40:56
  mean that you can do both on chain payments and lightning to fund the wallet yeah yeah you can the
• 41:02
  the really nice thing with spark and arc is that you can onboard and offboard directly from on
• 41:08
  chain if you want um and it actually provides the in spark specifically well in arc as well it
• 41:13
  provides the best trust trade-offs if you are onboarding from layer one directly um because it
• 41:20
  means that that you're the one who will get into the trade-offs more there but it gives you a better
• 41:25
  set of trust trade-offs if you do deposit from layer one uh and you can always withdraw to layer
• 41:31
  one at the same time.
• 41:32
  And there's no fee around that either,
• 41:34
  other than obviously the on-chain fee
• 41:35
  that you have to pay for the transaction.
• 41:37
  And that's a really nice point there.
• 41:39
  I think it's definitely going to be rare that that's used.
• 41:42
  Because if you're the tier one audience,
• 41:43
  like you're already a Bitcoiner,
• 41:44
  you're probably already using Lightning.
• 41:46
  It's easiest to just top up from Lightning.
• 41:48
  But it's obviously something we want to support,
• 41:51
  especially if you're using Radar a ton
• 41:53
  and your friends have all paid you back
• 41:54
  and you need some cash.
• 41:56
  You can withdraw to L1 to Coinbase or whatever
• 41:58
  and sell it.
• 42:00
  So you're Seth for privacy, not Seth for UX.
• 42:04
  What are the privacy trade-offs of Spark?
• 42:06
  Because I know these are technically self-custodial wallets,
• 42:09
  but what can they see in the background?
• 42:11
  Like how can they attract payments?
• 42:13
  Like how does that work?
• 42:14
  Yeah.
• 42:14
  So the easiest way to describe Spark's privacy
• 42:17
  is really to view it as like a VPN provider model
• 42:21
  where you're gaining good privacy from outside observers.
• 42:25
  No one else, even your counterparty,
• 42:28
  can see other transactions that you've made
• 42:31
  within the Spark ecosystem.
• 42:34
  There's no block explorer.
• 42:35
  No one can look you up
• 42:36
  and see the transactions that you've made.
• 42:37
  if you send or receive a lightning payment,
• 42:40
  there's no way for them to know
• 42:41
  who the underlying user is.
• 42:43
  They would just see that it's going to Spark's LSP
• 42:45
  and they would know nothing else.
• 42:47
  So it provides very good privacy from outside observers
• 42:49
  as long as Spark do not reveal transaction information.
• 42:54
  So because it's that VPN provider model,
• 42:56
  you're trusting them not to reveal that info.
• 42:58
  They are logging that info.
• 43:00
  They need to keep state.
• 43:01
  So just like Bitcoin,
• 43:02
  everything goes on a blockchain within Spark.
• 43:04
  Everything has state within the Spark system.
• 43:07
  So all of the Spark operators are keeping that state.
• 43:10
  So they know everything about transactions.
• 43:13
  They're just choosing not to reveal that.
• 43:15
  And that's something that we waited to deploy Spark and Cake until that was an option.
• 43:19
  Because at first, like Wallet of Satoshi launched with Spark.
• 43:21
  And for some reason, they chose not to hide any of that information.
• 43:25
  So everybody's transactions got published to a block explorer for Spark.
• 43:28
  And your Spark address was embedded in all of your Lightning invoices.
• 43:32
  So you would reveal everything about yourself every time you received a Lightning payment.
• 43:35
  Not great.
• 43:35
  Yeah, not great.
• 43:36
  and not the way it needed to be that was a poor choice on their part i've no idea why they chose
• 43:41
  that um but now while satoshi fixed that and cake we waited to deploy until we could do that in the
• 43:47
  that vpn provider model and then radar obviously we adopted the same thing so that's the most
• 43:52
  important distinction is the spark operators see everything about transactions obviously they don't
• 43:56
  know your id they don't know anything about that you're even using it within radar they just know
• 44:01
  that it's a spark payment uh and they certainly don't know anything about who you're paying within
• 44:06
  radar like you paid me spark themselves have literally no clue that that that was between
• 44:12
  me and you or that was even radar related which i think is a really important piece here is the
• 44:17
  the kind of the separation of visibility throughout radar is really good where no one entity has
• 44:22
  access to all of the things that are happening with payments and messages and network connections
• 44:27
  so why did you pick this rather than like cashew or something which obviously doesn't have the
• 44:31
  benefit of being self-custodial but it has the privacy benefit yeah i mean it's it's a really
• 44:37
  good really good question and it's something that i've been kind of like battling with of which is
• 44:43
  more important and it's frustrating that we have to choose do i want near perfect privacy that e
• 44:50
  cash as a whole can bring or do i want self-custody and okay privacy which something like spark can
• 44:57
  bring or even like a fedamen yeah but still would be in the e-cash custodial like yes it's a better
• 45:03
  custodian because at least it's not a single custodian it's certainly a better solution
• 45:06
  um but that is the it's really frustrating that we have to make that choice i'm i'm certainly
• 45:13
  hoping to get to a place where we don't have to make that choice like even within spark there are
• 45:16
  ways that uh light spark the people who are designing it can can build it with blind signing
• 45:22
  so that they actually wouldn't know anything about transactions.
• 45:26
  And we've been pushing them really hard to do that.
• 45:28
  They are going to bring some more privacy tech,
• 45:30
  like shielded amounts on transfers at the very least.
• 45:33
  But there are ways we could get there.
• 45:36
  For me, the biggest piece of why it needed to be self-custodial
• 45:40
  over being perfectly private
• 45:42
  is just the sustainability and longevity of something like this.
• 45:47
  I imagine as an American company,
• 45:48
  you probably couldn't run the cashew mint as well.
• 45:50
  You'd have to trust someone else to do that.
• 45:52
  Yeah, I mean, theoretically we could, but it would be dangerous.
• 45:59
  Yeah.
• 45:59
  Like you don't want to be that one, especially when you're talking,
• 46:03
  we're not talking like a vibe-coded cashew wallet
• 46:06
  that's going to ship to 100 people.
• 46:07
  Like the goal here is tens of millions of users,
• 46:10
  which means very high profile.
• 46:12
  When you talk about like,
• 46:13
  like there was this whole Bitcoin for Signal campaign,
• 46:16
  like 12 months ago.
• 46:18
  Yeah.
• 46:18
  Really interesting, really well done.
• 46:20
  Callie kicked that off.
• 46:21
  He's been the main guy behind Cashew, the single custodian approach to eCash.
• 46:26
  And even like Jack Dorsey and tons of others are getting in on trying to push Signal to adopt Bitcoin.
• 46:32
  But the thing that I raised immediately when that campaign went live was the goal of the campaign was to get them to adopt Cashew, eCash within Signal.
• 46:42
  But practically what that would mean would be that Signal would become a custodian for all of their users funds and signal already have by far the highest profile target on their back of any freedom tech provider right now like if you building freedom tech signal are the ones facing the most headwinds
• 47:00
  constantly battling politicians and battling regulators and having to deal with so much stuff
• 47:06
  that comes with just being a privacy preserving chat app like just that is enough if you also add
• 47:11
  in oh now you're also a custodian so you're a money services broker like you're way too much
• 47:17
  risk there's just no way they would ever want to do that so if they didn't want to do that
• 47:21
  then how who are they going to choose to be the custodian for all their users because if that
• 47:25
  person rug pulls or just has an issue and users lose all their money signals reputation goes down
• 47:32
  so like the the core issue for that was it was just never going to be sustainable at at their
• 47:37
  scale, even though the privacy is fantastic. So I'm hoping someday we get to a place where we can
• 47:43
  do something that is still self-custodial like Spark, but has at least much better privacy. Like
• 47:48
  we'll never get e-cash levels of privacy because you necessarily can't. The way that e-cash works,
• 47:52
  you can never do completely in something like Spark, but you could get close to it and get,
• 47:57
  I think, good enough privacy, which would be a fantastic development.
• 48:00
  Is there a weird thing here where your success could almost mean the end of your business in
• 48:05
  some ways like because if signal watch what you do you you get a load of users people are using
• 48:10
  bitcoin on there a lot they could just implement the same thing yeah is that a win depends on if
• 48:17
  you're asking me or if you're asking rbc investors i don't know like for me the the ideologue part of
• 48:23
  me would count that as a win yeah for sure like i'm not in this for the money like the thing that
• 48:30
  i love about being able to work at cake and being able to work at radar is like we're actually able
• 48:33
  build cutting edge freedom tech and ship it to a lot of users and that is just invigorating to me
• 48:37
  to build something that's really being used and if we could push like give them incentive and
• 48:43
  motivation to ship bitcoin payments that are self-custodial within signal i would be happy
• 48:49
  with that like i would definitely see it as a way yeah i mean to me that would be a huge win
• 48:53
  if 150 million monthly active users woke up one day and they saw hey do you want to use bitcoin
• 48:59
  payments and one tap enable it and top up from debit card like that that would be a win in my
• 49:04
  opinion in terms of human freedom which is more important to me than the companies i'm building
• 49:09
  honestly um which i probably shouldn't say as someone who's building companies i think you should
• 49:13
  i think they could be happy that you said yeah it's it's yeah that would be a win for me obviously
• 49:17
  it would be frustrating because of all the time that we've spent building it but what better way
• 49:21
  to to drive a company to do something that i think they need to do anyways yeah um then by proving out
• 49:27
  the model itself so it would be a win it would be sad for some for some reasons but overall yeah
• 49:33
  that'd be awesome um it's a win for humanity so you're using spark the other big question around
• 49:38
  spark i see people talking about a lot is is the unilateral exit um like it's obviously available
• 49:42
  but i've seen people having issues with it and finding it hard um i've never tried i don't i
• 49:48
  don't know how it even works so how is that a problem that we have yeah so there's there's a
• 49:55
  broader issue that people need to understand about unilateral exit in any of these systems,
• 49:59
  Spark or ARK, and then there's a specific one for Spark. So I think the first one to raise is
• 50:04
  the most important one, where unilateral exit simply means that you can exit without anyone's
• 50:10
  permission. It does not mean that you exiting on chain will be economically viable. In all of these
• 50:18
  systems, it will always be drastically more expensive to unilaterally exit than it would
• 50:23
  be to naturally withdraw because you're having to submit massive amounts of transactions just to get
• 50:29
  back single UTXO, single leafs from Spark. Like an example I saw, and I'm probably going to misquote
• 50:36
  the number, but someone exiting from Spark to get like 18 leafs back had to make 90 transactions
• 50:43
  on chain because you're having to unroll the whole tree of how these leaves are stacked on top of
• 50:49
  each other and the chain of how they've been spent between users. And so it gets very expensive. It is
• 50:54
  possible. And like, even for that example, basically his findings were some of his leaves,
• 50:59
  there was just, it would cost more to exit them than to just give up on them. Yeah. So a lot of
• 51:05
  the decision-making and how the process works has to happen behind the scenes on the designer's
• 51:10
  side, the app builder side, to figure out what is actually worth exiting and what's not. But that is
• 51:15
  always a caveat with any of these systems. The same is true of ARK. Spark is more expensive in
• 51:20
  the way that it's built to unilaterally exit, but it's definitely possible. That being said,
• 51:25
  even if it's more expensive, it has to be possible because obviously if you, especially if you put
• 51:30
  larger amounts into there and the Spark operators wake up one day and just decide, I don't want to
• 51:35
  do this anymore, or they have an issue and all of them get deleted or a nation state comes after
• 51:40
  them and shuts them down, you obviously need to get your money back. And that's where this is very
• 51:44
  important. The specific caveat with Spark right now is you can do it, but you have to do it via
• 51:48
  a CLI app. Like you have to go into the CLI, import your seed. It downloads the state that
• 51:54
  you need to be able to do that from one of the Spark operators. So in practice, it's not really
• 51:58
  unilateral exit yet I just be completely honest It the ability to exit as long as any of the Spark operators are up and there three of them right now That okay Obviously that not ideal We were supposed to have full unilateral exit months ago
• 52:12
  and it's very complex in both Spark and Arc.
• 52:14
  So they've been working on it.
• 52:16
  We're probably...
• 52:17
  I'm going to say the meme because it's actually the right amount of time.
• 52:20
  We're probably two weeks out from proper unilateral exit
• 52:23
  that actually keeps all the state that you need,
• 52:25
  that doesn't rely on any Spark operator to get the information you need,
• 52:28
  and also does all those calculations about what can I exit, what can't I exit to maximize the
• 52:34
  amount I get out rather than to maximize the amount of leaves I get out. I just want to maximize
• 52:38
  the amount of sats I get out. So that will be coming. So it's not in radar right now,
• 52:42
  just like it's not in KQALA right now, but you can do it through the CLI app with that one,
• 52:48
  one caveat at the moment. So is it fair enough to say that it's okay for now,
• 52:52
  needs to get a lot better? Yeah, I would. Yeah. Even okay for now feels like maybe a little bit
• 52:58
  too generous like obviously it's not the way that i want it to be and not the way it should be but it
• 53:02
  just is the reality right now and i think it for the for the most likely solution which would be
• 53:07
  that some spark operator has a problem unless the systems can't send payments but you still want to
• 53:11
  exit which is the most common or the most possible one right now it's it's fine for now but certainly
• 53:17
  needs to get better we've been pushing really hard on spark and breeze to to ship that and like i said
• 53:22
  they are actually getting really close we're watching the prs right now a lot of the building
• 53:25
  blocks are already in place so is um is spark like your final destination with this is this
• 53:30
  what the bitcoin payments will always look like on radar obviously it depends i mean like we've
• 53:37
  always been willing and able to implement cutting edge tech in in cake and now in radar so like
• 53:45
  obviously we're open to shifting to something else um i've been very closely monitoring both
• 53:50
  ARK implementations for a long time. Um, like we were initially going to ship arcade in cake.
• 53:56
  And then once I actually did a really deep dive into ARK versus spark, it became clear to me that
• 54:00
  just spark is the better, more probiotic solution right now for the average user, but that could
• 54:05
  change. I think the, the one specific way that that would change would be that if we got covenants
• 54:09
  in Bitcoin, which I don't think is ever going to happen, unfortunately, but if we did, let's just
• 54:14
  say in this, this mythical, anything again in Bitcoin. Yeah. I don't think, I don't think we are.
• 54:18
  uh there's a reason i don't really bother talking about them that much but if we got covenants
• 54:23
  they would essentially solve all of the the remaining ux hurdles that exist in arc and would
• 54:30
  make it where arc is just the better solution because you'd have slightly better trust trade
• 54:35
  offs with the same ux where right now in reality spark has slightly better trust trade-offs than
• 54:41
  arc does with a better ux as well but that would flip if we got covenants and we're able to do
• 54:45
  to do the things that ARK needs in a little bit cleaner of a way. So always open to that. And one
• 54:51
  of the beautiful things about this is it's Bitcoin under the hood. So if we woke up one day and ARK
• 54:57
  was clearly the better solution or whatever the next thing is, is a better solution, we could build
• 55:03
  that out and migrate our users by just sending a Lightning payment from their old wallet to their
• 55:06
  new wallet and done. There's no vendor lock-in in any way. There's not even layer two lock-in
• 55:13
  in reality because you can always get out you know lateral exit you can always exit on chain if
• 55:18
  they're still online or you can just make a lightning payment and migrate users balance
• 55:21
  with their consent of course very cool i i'm definitely going to use this i'll uh i'll be
• 55:27
  your bug checker i'll see see if we find anything please bring me in my new features as well that'd
• 55:32
  be awesome yes um let's talk a little bit more about sort of bitcoin privacy and chip coin privacy
• 55:37
  yeah um zcash has had a lot of hype so i i was saying to you before we started this show
• 55:43
  i really struggle i don't really pay any attention to other spaces like i just don't have the time
• 55:48
  but i obviously saw like the silicon valley pushed for zcash over the last 12 months or however long
• 55:52
  it's been yeah can you just fill me in like everything that's happened like i i know that
• 55:56
  the the vcs have been pushing this hard i know that there was then a floor in zcash that was
• 56:00
  found like what's happened oh man yeah i quite honestly i thought zcash was kind of like done
• 56:07
  i did too i thought i did too we had moved on like the world had simplified we just understood like
• 56:13
  you have your bitcoin you have your stable coins you have your monero like we're we're good guys
• 56:17
  we're good and then yeah they were resurrected and suddenly every influencer and meme coiner on the
• 56:23
  planet woke up one day and loved zcash yep um and started talking about it completely organically
• 56:29
  of course yeah completely organically just stumbled upon it again after 10 years and
• 56:34
  discover this new newfangled project it wasn't in some pump and dump group chat there's no way yeah
• 56:39
  there was no there was definitely no coordinated paid uh kol campaign going on behind the scenes
• 56:43
  um that honestly that was the kickstart of it like i don't know what it was that drove
• 56:50
  like why suddenly there was a desire from zcash companies because there's not really that big of
• 56:56
  a zcash community there is one but they're not that huge it's really the companies behind them
• 57:00
  Gemini, the Zcash actual company.
• 57:05
  It's those players that are the ones
• 57:07
  that have been driving this.
• 57:09
  And it seems like they just decided,
• 57:11
  let try one more time and see if we can revive Zcash And the pump at so far um price went up it it stayed up relative to where it was before that was really interesting to see
• 57:24
  everything that i can see behind the scenes was that it was just absolutely a paid marketing
• 57:27
  campaign um even know the the amount technically that was was spent on it but the interesting thing
• 57:34
  that happened after that obviously was there was this big push everybody wanted zcash again suddenly
• 57:39
  it got into the limelight and then what two months ago yeah two months ago
• 57:46
  one of their researchers who they put to put to work looking for vulnerabilities within the zcash
• 57:52
  protocol um vibe pin tested uh the protocol and apparently with very little effort very little
• 58:00
  prompting but with his expertise in the security field like he has a he's a brilliant security
• 58:04
  researcher and cryptographer discovered that there was a very critical issue within the orchard
• 58:10
  shielded pool so a little bit of context for this the way that zcash works is it has the transparent
• 58:15
  bitcoin fork side like zcash at its core is a bitcoin fork so under the hood it works exactly
• 58:20
  the same way that's like the non-shielded address yeah yeah non-shielded that's the vast majority of
• 58:24
  the way that people use zcash today uh vast majority of exchanges only support transparent
• 58:29
  addresses um that is the the normal side so there's this totally transparent simple side
• 58:34
  There's nothing complex or interesting to talk about with that.
• 58:36
  And then they have these shielded pools where you can choose to move your money into a shielded pool,
• 58:42
  gain privacy, and then hopefully make payments within that shielded pool and not go back to transparent addresses.
• 58:49
  They've gone through iterations of what that looks like.
• 58:51
  Sapling was the primary one.
• 58:52
  And then Orchard was a huge and important migration because that allowed them to remove the trusted setup that existed for Zcash before.
• 59:00
  Basically, the way they had had to set up the cryptography for earlier versions of the shielded pool.
• 59:04
  relied on people deleting data and if they didn't delete data they could print as much zcash as they
• 59:10
  wanted obviously not a good long-term solution it worked for what it was as far as we know nobody
• 59:16
  printed any zcash um and that was fine for them thankfully the cryptography got way better and
• 59:21
  one thing that i will applaud zcash for is the money that they poured into research for
• 59:27
  zero knowledge proofs in general poured into or taken from the block reward i just said the money
• 59:34
  i didn't say where the money came from mostly yes from the block word from them printing money for
• 59:40
  themselves but if someone wants to print money and improve privacy tech with it like i don't really
• 59:45
  i'm honestly that's that's fine with me community community like 40 people were okay with the
• 59:50
  ongoing dev tax and all of that so um they chose to spend it that way but the research that they've
• 59:56
  actually generated out of that has massively advanced the whole world of zero knowledge
• 1:00:01
  proofs. Like a lot of the cutting edge research and possibilities within that space have come from
• 1:00:06
  Zcash cryptographers and researchers. Hey, I'm not mad at that. I'm just never going to hold it.
• 1:00:11
  Oh yeah. Me neither. Me neither. But they had a breakthrough. They were able to remove the
• 1:00:15
  trusted setup. They deployed Orchard. It was a huge step forward in terms of how Zcash worked
• 1:00:20
  in the trust model. The problem that was discovered was that something within that
• 1:00:25
  shielded pool would essentially allow user to print as much zcash as they wanted and because
• 1:00:32
  it's within the shielded pool there would be no way for anyone to know that that had been printed
• 1:00:36
  that that the supply of zcash had been inflated yeah um and the specifically this vulnerability
• 1:00:43
  from what i can tell and what others have talked about there would be no way to detect that it was
• 1:00:47
  exploded either like there's there's a little confusion where people normally think that okay
• 1:00:51
  well it's in the shielded pool so we can never know if it happened depending on the way it's
• 1:00:55
  actually exploited that sometimes isn't true. Like there has been one potential inflation exploit in
• 1:01:01
  Monero, but the way it would have to be exploited actually could be seen on chain. So we know for
• 1:01:05
  sure that that one had not happened. It was a much simpler, like Monero's much simpler cryptography
• 1:01:09
  helped in that scenario where we could know for sure that that was never exploited. The Zcash one,
• 1:01:14
  there is no way to know for sure if it was exploited or not outside of just seeing like
• 1:01:19
  did an exchange suddenly receive the supply of Zcash in one transaction or something.
• 1:01:22
  but a smart attacker if they were able to inflate the supply of zcash they're going to trickle it
• 1:01:27
  out yeah you're just going to sell under zcash at a time or whatever and just look like a regular
• 1:01:31
  trader you're going to be wise about how you get that money out um so they discovered that
• 1:01:36
  vulnerability they rushed to patch it and hard fork the network in like four days uh which as
• 1:01:44
  someone who supports zcash in cake wallet was an absolute nightmare it was actually at the oslo
• 1:01:49
  freedom forum sitting in sessions having to work with the team to get a hard fork patch out for
• 1:01:56
  cake wallet to make that work the fact that they were also able to just like tell mining pools stop
• 1:02:00
  mining these transactions so decentralized like it was literally one organization talking to two
• 1:02:05
  mining pools and they just decided what the network was going to do like obviously that's
• 1:02:09
  horrific it's nice when you have a security issue when you can just say like hey guys could you
• 1:02:12
  please stop mining and they they do and you you you don't have the ability for someone to continue
• 1:02:17
  exploiting that bug.
• 1:02:18
  But they patched it hard forked,
• 1:02:21
  theoretically that cannot be exploited anymore,
• 1:02:24
  but the money is still there.
• 1:02:27
  Even if it was inflated, that money could still be there.
• 1:02:29
  So the way that they're fixing that is they deployed a new pool that doesn't have that
• 1:02:33
  vulnerability called Ironwood and every user will be forced to migrate to the new pool,
• 1:02:39
  but you have to do it through a transparent, what they call turnstile.
• 1:02:42
  So everyone's privacy is balked.
• 1:02:44
  Yes.
• 1:02:45
  Yeah.
• 1:02:45
  You'll, you'll reveal the amounts of every, uh, transaction you make in that migration.
• 1:02:51
  There are some ways that we can try to mitigate that.
• 1:02:53
  Like with CakeWallet, the way we'll do it is we'll slowly migrate your funds over automatically
• 1:02:58
  in the background.
• 1:02:59
  at random intervals with amounts that will be uniform so that they'll blend in with other
• 1:03:04
  people's.
• 1:03:05
  But you're still going to have to go through that transparent turnstile to get to the new
• 1:03:09
  one.
• 1:03:10
  And the benefit of that is they can make sure that no more than the supply of Zcash goes
• 1:03:14
  out of that.
• 1:03:16
  But the caveat is, again, if you're the attacker, you have the inflated funds.
• 1:03:21
  As soon as the turnstile is enabled, if you do want to, you just move the entire supply
• 1:03:26
  of the orchard pool into the ironwood pool and then no one else gets through the turnstile and
• 1:03:30
  all of their money is gone um so it doesn't solve the problem it just gives the assurance that there
• 1:03:35
  is no more zcash than they're supposed to be but it might all be the attackers zcash that's the one
• 1:03:40
  thing we can't know until the actual turnstile happens which is tuesday tomorrow so yeah it won't
• 1:03:44
  be long so they're in a they're in a bit of a mess um yes that will have happened this year probably
• 1:03:49
  won't go out for a couple weeks so that will have definitely happened we'll see we'll see if it was
• 1:03:53
  exploited um because we don't know if it's exploited right now right no no there's no way to
• 1:03:57
  know for sure um what about monero like i i have held this opinion for a while and i still hold the
• 1:04:03
  opinion that there's like bitcoin shit coins and monero is kind of a bit different yeah um i i don't
• 1:04:08
  think i've ever used monero but i don't mind monero we'll have to do that live after this
• 1:04:15
  yeah i mean monero is the the nice quiet thing that just keeps on working behind the scenes like
• 1:04:20
  Obviously, there's not all the fluff. There are no paid KOL campaigns for sure.
• 1:04:25
  And I know that for sure. But it's been just continuing to iterate and improve over the years
• 1:04:31
  and working really smoothly. Like right now, the big push within the community is we're working on
• 1:04:36
  deploying full chain membership proofs, which essentially will fix the only remaining
• 1:04:40
  imperfect piece of privacy with how the protocol works right now.
• 1:04:44
  Where right now, when you send a transaction, your input could be one of 16
• 1:04:48
  uh in that ring signature and so you're kind of hiding in a group of 16 and the anonymity set was
• 1:04:54
  always the big question about monero yeah yeah which it's good enough for most people but it's
• 1:04:59
  obviously not the the end state where we want it to be so full chain member membership proofs right
• 1:05:04
  now everything's being audited i expect it to go live probably in like six to eight months um that
• 1:05:09
  will move it from one of 16 to one of every output that's ever existed on maros chain so like one of
• 1:05:15
  150 million. You'll just be an output that is real and no one will be able to know anything
• 1:05:20
  else about it. So that combined with the perfect amount privacy and the receiver privacy using
• 1:05:25
  stealth addresses will make it basically as perfect of a privacy protocol as we can have
• 1:05:31
  today. And is much, much simpler cryptography as well than Zcash is at the same time. Because
• 1:05:38
  obviously we want to be cautious. We don't have the same vulnerability that auditors can catch
• 1:05:42
  things like that and we'll go through multiple rounds of audits at the same time so monero is in
• 1:05:46
  a good spot it is i mean usage has been going through the roof like an interesting thing
• 1:05:52
  being at cake wallet is we're probably like 80 to 90 percent of monero users at this point wow
• 1:05:59
  and the demand for monero is insane especially the demand to to buy monero i was gonna say how
• 1:06:07
  do you buy monero because like almost every exchange got rid of it yeah yeah that's one of
• 1:06:11
  really interesting things that like when that used to happen like i mean the whole operation choke
• 1:06:16
  point 2.0 thing like people think that was bitcoin was where that was first played out that first
• 1:06:21
  played out with monero like we we had delistings through banking back channel pressure years and
• 1:06:29
  years before bitcoin i think that model was really tried with monero and then brought to bitcoin with
• 1:06:34
  operation choke point 2.0 so i mean monero has been delisted or refused to be listed by the vast
• 1:06:40
  majority of exchanges for a very long time. Essentially the only the last man standing right
• 1:06:46
  now is Kraken in the US and some smaller exchanges in the EU. And who knows how long that will be.
• 1:06:53
  I used to freak out about that. It's like how are people going to discover Monero? How are they going
• 1:06:57
  to get it? And then the thing that I realized once I became maybe not as a Bitcoin maximalist or a
• 1:07:03
  Monero maximalist was one of the real beautiful things about cryptocurrency is that you can move
• 1:07:10
  with essentially no friction between cryptocurrencies in a way that just simply is not possible and
• 1:07:15
  whenever it'd be possible with fiat. And I think people think of these things as very siloed of
• 1:07:19
  like Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum. What do you mean by that though? Is that like atomic swaps and
• 1:07:23
  things like that? Yeah. The, the hardcore model is atomic swaps where you're, you're swapping
• 1:07:28
  directly with another peer and you're doing it in a way that is perfectly trustless where either
• 1:07:33
  the trade goes through or it does not. And no one is, is able to mess with that or prevent it. Like
• 1:07:37
  Those are literally unstoppable Yeah Nothing can be done to prevent it Do it over Tor Those are more the hardcore model which certainly needs to exist but won be the way that most people do it
• 1:07:47
  The in-between model now is the cross-chain
• 1:07:51
  to centralized exchanges supporting Monero.
• 1:07:53
  So things like Thor Chain, things like InstaSwap,
• 1:07:56
  things like NIR,
• 1:07:57
  allowing you to swap between Bitcoin, stable coins,
• 1:08:02
  whatever you want, and Monero
• 1:08:03
  in a way that is trust minimized, I would say.
• 1:08:07
  certainly not trustless but trust minimized uh and to do it in like literally seconds and with
• 1:08:14
  almost zero fees it's a it's a really magical experience once you once you try it and see how
• 1:08:20
  simple it is um and the demand for that is just absolutely off the charts like that is it's almost
• 1:08:26
  always 75 plus of the volume that we see every month obviously we don't see anything on individual
• 1:08:32
  trades or anything like that but in just the the revenue that we get back from our partners we see
• 1:08:37
  the volume that goes through and what chains are the most popular. And Monero is just,
• 1:08:42
  there's immense demand in those areas, the DEXs and the centralized swap services at the same time.
• 1:08:49
  And that frictionless ability to move between them means that you can actually let each
• 1:08:54
  cryptocurrency be good at what it's good at and not need one to do everything. Like Bitcoin can
• 1:08:58
  be really good at what it is, which is store of value. And now a really good method of exchange.
• 1:09:02
  Monero can be good at what it is, which is just digital cash, nothing else.
• 1:09:07
  Ethereum can be good at what it does, which is DeFi, stable coins, things that right now
• 1:09:10
  are important.
• 1:09:11
  I wish they weren't, but right now they're important.
• 1:09:14
  And it also doesn't have to be fully Monero or fully Bitcoin.
• 1:09:18
  And yet you can use them all when you need them and swap between them quite seamlessly.
• 1:09:22
  And so that's what makes it so that, yes, you can't buy Monero on almost any fiat centralized
• 1:09:28
  exchange, but it doesn't really matter.
• 1:09:30
  because if you can buy anything if you can buy bitcoin if you can buy usdt you can swap to
• 1:09:34
  monero in seconds and be done and there's no uh direct link between that either there's no your
• 1:09:39
  idea is not associated to that swap that sort of thing there's people that might hear that and think
• 1:09:43
  seth's shitcoiner but i actually think that's a really good a good sign in that like that is the
• 1:09:48
  bitcoin differentiating itself from the rest of crypto world like bitcoin is obviously the king
• 1:09:53
  and like if you want to use it for these other things like that's that's fine they can go off
• 1:09:56
  undo it but like i think the idea of bitcoin being mixed in with crypto i think it's over
• 1:10:01
  yeah it is and i think like at least in the circles that matter right now it's basically
• 1:10:08
  down to just bitcoin mineral and stable coins like i think that is kind of the trifecta of
• 1:10:12
  solving all of the different needs that people have uh right now obviously the hope is that the
• 1:10:19
  stable coins piece disappears and we can move on with actual freedom money but the reality is the
• 1:10:24
  vast majority of the world that actually needs this stuff would prefer to have stable coins right
• 1:10:28
  now even the human rights activists and other people who are doing things where you wouldn't
• 1:10:31
  think that those would work they're more useful so right now they have their place but yeah i
• 1:10:37
  think that those those can solve the vast majority of needs and bitcoin's place is not going anywhere
• 1:10:41
  but it also is really freeing from a like bitcoiner perspective because it also means bitcoin doesn't
• 1:10:46
  have to become all of these other things yeah like there's been this like how do we do defy
• 1:10:50
  on bitcoin thing and we have these four it's not forks these chains like citria that are kind of on
• 1:10:56
  bitcoin there's no demand no one's ever going to use that because there are if they want defy they're
• 1:11:01
  already using ethereum or solana or something like that and it's freeing because we can we can
• 1:11:06
  let bitcoin be simple let it do what it does best and let other chains do the other things and if a
• 1:11:11
  user wants both they can swap back and forth and we just don't have to do everything all at once and
• 1:11:16
  make Bitcoin the one size fits all chain. Yeah. I think that's probably a good thing. Yeah. Um,
• 1:11:21
  all right. More importantly, at least to me, like what about Bitcoin privacy? Like,
• 1:11:24
  like, where are we at with that? Obviously Samurai gone closed down. Wasabi had a huge change. Um,
• 1:11:30
  you've been one of the loudest voices on sort of the silent payment side. Like what,
• 1:11:33
  what do you think of the state of Bitcoin privacy right now?
• 1:11:37
  The, the honest answer is it still sucks. Like it's not, I won't say that we're in a good place
• 1:11:45
  right now. The caveat for me though is that we're starting to piece the puzzle together
• 1:11:54
  in a way that is becoming more holistic than it has ever been while certainly not being perfect.
• 1:11:59
  I think the clear missing gap is still a really reliable coin join protocol. I'm okay with Wasabi
• 1:12:08
  now with the decentralized coordinator approach, but there's some other issues that come with that
• 1:12:13
  obviously some historical privacy potential issues i need to get into all of that today but
• 1:12:18
  that is the only solution we have left really right now for breaking the links of what happened
• 1:12:22
  to your bitcoin before and what happens to it after and you need that piece really really uh
• 1:12:27
  set in stone for the rest of it to work but we also have things that we just did not have like
• 1:12:32
  back in the samurai versus wasabi stupidity days um where we have the ability to receive privately
• 1:12:38
  with silent payments.
• 1:12:40
  And that has gone from what really was a proof of concept,
• 1:12:43
  like Cakewallet were the first to launch that.
• 1:12:45
  We've been pushing really hard,
• 1:12:46
  helping to fund people to build around that.
• 1:12:49
  And it was yeah it was really just a proof of concept early on It worked but the user experience was not fantastic and no one else supported it so it wasn like if you were a cake wallet user
• 1:13:00
  and the other person was a cake wallet user that's great um but if you can't use it anywhere
• 1:13:04
  you can't withdraw from exchange to it like obviously it's very limited in its use that is
• 1:13:08
  really shifting now finally uh i've probably said that in the past but this like the last like three
• 1:13:14
  months it's it's starting to become something where more and more wallets are integrating it
• 1:13:19
  uh the actual backend that you can run to get a better user experience has been coming a really
• 1:13:26
  long ways like craig raw from sparrow wallet he built up frigate which is a a backend server or
• 1:13:32
  basically with silent payments similar to monero or zcash you have this one-time reusable address
• 1:13:39
  you can reuse it over and over again on chain that payment cannot be linked back to the the
• 1:13:44
  reusable address that you've shared so it's really good for like accepting donations yeah uh
• 1:13:49
  putting behind like a bitcoin username a bit 353 username lots and lots of really really good
• 1:13:55
  important use cases for that and just a better user experience where your address doesn't rotate
• 1:13:58
  and change every time like we've gotten very used to my address changes every time but hand someone
• 1:14:02
  a bitcoin wallet for the first time and have them hit receive a few times and see that their address
• 1:14:06
  changes and they'll lose their mind thinking they're going to lose their money or something
• 1:14:10
  like that so a really good overall improvement with silent payments though the downside is
• 1:14:15
  we have this one reusable address but because the sender is actually the one generating the
• 1:14:21
  on-chain address for me as the receiver i don't know where i'm going to receive funds
• 1:14:25
  i have to go through and check essentially every potential payment so every payment that's two tap
• 1:14:31
  root that has an unspent transaction output that meets these certain criteria i have to check is
• 1:14:37
  that mine and do a little bit of cryptography against every potential output to see is that
• 1:14:42
  mine? Is that mine? Is that mine? And that process is, it's just a really bad user experience. Like
• 1:14:49
  we tried to do the hardcore approach at Cake and it works, but it means that you're waiting for a
• 1:14:54
  long time to sync your wallet on the silent payment side. Every time you open it, if you
• 1:14:58
  haven't opened it in a month, it's going to take a while to sync. We've done all the optimizations
• 1:15:01
  you can essentially do there. The nice thing with that approach is that you get perfect privacy,
• 1:15:05
  even from the node. Like the node that you're connected to has no idea which payments are yours,
• 1:15:09
  which is a huge departure from Bitcoin wallet sync regularly, where sync right now is when you
• 1:15:16
  launch your wallet, your wallet goes, hello server, here are all my addresses. Can you tell me if I've
• 1:15:21
  received any payments to them? So you reveal everything about your wallet's balance, transaction
• 1:15:25
  history, et cetera, to the node that you use. Silent payments in the hardcore way reveals nothing to
• 1:15:30
  the node. That UX though, I think is just something where it's never going to be good enough for the
• 1:15:35
  mainstream for even just regular Bitcoiners, it's not gonna be good enough. So Craig Raw from Sparrow,
• 1:15:40
  he works really closely with 2140, which is a Bitcoin dev funding foundation that they started
• 1:15:47
  a year, year and a half ago, to build out like what is the best compromise, the best middle ground
• 1:15:55
  of silent payments, user experience and privacy. So basically what happens with Frigate is that
• 1:15:59
  your silent payment address, you have a separate view key where you can hand this key to someone
• 1:16:04
  else and they can scan for you but they can't spend any transactions for you so with frigate
• 1:16:08
  what you'll do is your wallet will connect to a frigate server it'll hand your scan key to the
• 1:16:13
  frigate server it'll scan it very rapidly in a way that you could not do on your wallet tell you
• 1:16:17
  about your payments and then it will delete your scan key so it keeps it ephemeral obviously you're
• 1:16:21
  trusting that that happens you're trusting it doesn't log but even in that case yes you don't
• 1:16:25
  have privacy from the node operator but you still have the perfect received privacy from outside
• 1:16:31
  side observers which is the more important piece you generally trust your node provider or you can
• 1:16:34
  run your own if you really if you really need to but so this sounds like bitcoin payments like
• 1:16:39
  standard bitcoin payments as we know them ux is getting incredibly good we've kind of solved a lot
• 1:16:43
  of those issues on the privacy side it's a mess still it is it is but it really has improved
• 1:16:49
  drastically and i think like like we're exploring using fric as the default very soon in cake wallet
• 1:16:54
  that will be i think the go-to for that and we'll make it feel basically like a regular bitcoin
• 1:16:59
  wallet sync but will give you privacy from outside observers in a way that you wouldn't normally have
• 1:17:03
  and then you get to pair it with things like page one b2 which has been a really good advancement
• 1:17:09
  is page one the thing that chris belcher was working on like eight years ago or something
• 1:17:13
  he did coin swap coin swap that's right okay yeah he did coin swap which actually someone else is
• 1:17:18
  is building around again now um it kind of died out when he stepped away but someone else is
• 1:17:25
  building around coin swap coin swap has its own set of issues basically you're just you're literally
• 1:17:28
  just swapping utxos with another person which is fine if the history of their utxo is good
• 1:17:34
  but if you're swapping a nice untainted bitcoin utxo with somebody who i know this utxo is bad so
• 1:17:41
  i'm gonna find somebody who has a good one and i'm gonna swap with them uh it gets really
• 1:17:45
  problematic really quickly yeah so i don't i don't see coin swap as being a useful tool unless you
• 1:17:49
  pair it with coin join like if you did like wasabi and then you're only doing coin swaps with post
• 1:17:55
  mixed funds and you can guarantee that the other person is also only using post
• 1:17:59
  mixed funds so that you getting a good untainted Bitcoin back that would work but it just has a lot of downsides Pay join is much simpler So pay join is basically just if both wallets support it and if the receiver already
• 1:18:14
  has Bitcoin, when I go to pay you, I don't do anything different. As a receiver, you don't do
• 1:18:18
  anything different. In the QR code that you give me or in the URI that you give me, there will just
• 1:18:23
  be a pay join endpoint that I can use. And when I go to pay you, you as the receiver actually
• 1:18:28
  contribute inputs as well. So the sender and the receiver both contribute inputs. And then all of
• 1:18:34
  the money goes back to the right person. So you get the right amount as the receiver that I want
• 1:18:37
  to send you. You get everything else that you sent in the transaction back exchange. The beautiful
• 1:18:43
  thing about it is that on-chain, there is no footprint for pay join. Just like with silent
• 1:18:46
  payments, you can't tell any transaction on-chain is a silent payment payment. With pay join, you
• 1:18:51
  can't tell on-chain that it's a pay join in any way. It looks like a regular one person, two input,
• 1:18:57
  however many outputs spend. It looks like regular change going back. But in reality,
• 1:19:02
  you hide the sender because you don't know which input is the actual true sent input.
• 1:19:06
  You hide the recipient because you don't know which address is the one actually receiving funds
• 1:19:10
  or which one's just getting changed back as the sender. And you actually hide the amount
• 1:19:13
  because we can do some tricks with the amounts and the actual outputs and the change
• 1:19:18
  to hide the actual amount that's spent. But because it looks just like a regular Bitcoin
• 1:19:22
  transaction, not only does it give you as the people making that pay join better privacy,
• 1:19:27
  but if we can get the usage of pay join to be regular it actually provides privacy for people
• 1:19:34
  who aren't using it because as a chain surveillance person i can't assume looking at a transaction
• 1:19:40
  this is definitely this like the the two inputs they must be owned by the same person it's like
• 1:19:44
  the oldest heuristic in bitcoin a common input ownership heuristic where i should be able to
• 1:19:49
  assume that any input spent are owned by the same person page one breaks that assumption so even if
• 1:19:53
  you talk about like 10% of Bitcoin transactions being pay joins, it would completely break that
• 1:19:58
  assumption for chain analysis and others and would make it much, much more difficult for them to be
• 1:20:03
  able to surveil Bitcoin at the same time, even for those who don't use pay join, which is a huge,
• 1:20:07
  huge benefit of that. What about the, like, I know you were saying before that maybe there's not
• 1:20:11
  going to be much reason for these sort of ZK roll-up L2 things to exist, but what about on
• 1:20:16
  the privacy side? When I was talking to Max Hillebrand in Oslo, actually, he was quite excited
• 1:20:20
  about this thing yeah i think there's definitely a place for them like i think the best example
• 1:20:26
  well i'll caveat it first but there are a lot of potential ways that we can do this
• 1:20:31
  almost all of them will either have some sort of trusted bridge or they will require a consensus
• 1:20:38
  change to bitcoin okay so it's not not then on that one yeah there is no perfect like there's
• 1:20:44
  never a perfect solution it's always trade-offs the like the most realistic approach right now
• 1:20:49
  would be that we would do something like BitVM,
• 1:20:53
  which would allow you to do a one of in bridge
• 1:20:57
  where basically if any of the bridge operators are honest,
• 1:21:00
  funds are secure.
• 1:21:01
  But if all the operators are malicious,
• 1:21:04
  they would be able to steal funds
• 1:21:05
  that are bridged over to the side chain.
• 1:21:07
  It's an okay model.
• 1:21:10
  It's obviously not ideal, but it's okay.
• 1:21:12
  And you can do that today on Bitcoin.
• 1:21:14
  They've done some really cool cryptographic tricks
• 1:21:16
  to be able to do it in a way that's much more viable
• 1:21:18
  than the original Bitvan proposal was.
• 1:21:21
  So that's the way it would actually work.
• 1:21:22
  What you'd build on top of that right now,
• 1:21:24
  the most promising approach is Shielded CSV,
• 1:21:27
  which basically would allow you to have Zcash style privacy,
• 1:21:33
  but much more scalable.
• 1:21:34
  Because with Shielded CSV,
• 1:21:35
  something that's really interesting
• 1:21:36
  is you don't have a global state.
• 1:21:39
  Like you don't publish all the information
• 1:21:41
  about a transaction, even encrypted,
• 1:21:43
  to a global state that everyone knows.
• 1:21:45
  you actually hand the state pieces of it between sender and recipient. So you hand that around,
• 1:21:52
  it brings some potential downsides with recovery, but you hand that around directly between peers.
• 1:21:57
  And so the amount that actually gets published into the state for the side chain and then back
• 1:22:02
  onto Bitcoin's blockchain is almost nothing. You just publish a nullifier that proves that someone
• 1:22:07
  doesn't double spend funds and you don't have to publish any of the transaction information.
• 1:22:10
  So it's like 64 bytes per transaction, no matter how complex or how large the transaction is.
• 1:22:15
  And because of the way it works, it's essentially Zcash style privacy where you have hidden amounts, hidden sender, hidden receiver at the same time.
• 1:22:24
  And so that would be, I think it would be a really good advancement and it would be worthwhile.
• 1:22:28
  But as someone who's definitely not a Bitcoin maximalist, like why would I, why deal with the trust trade-off of a trusted bridge when I can just use Monero for privacy?
• 1:22:42
  Like I can take full self-custody.
• 1:22:45
  The Monero network has proven its security over 12 years of operating right now.
• 1:22:50
  I think the only reason you would use the trusted bridge,
• 1:22:53
  if you just were so set on Bitcoin as the unit of account,
• 1:22:58
  that you didn't want to touch anything else that could float in value.
• 1:23:01
  That's why I'd want to do it.
• 1:23:02
  Which is reasonable, I think, is reasonable.
• 1:23:05
  To me, the risks of the value changing of my money,
• 1:23:09
  if it's something I'm primarily using for spending and not a store of value.
• 1:23:12
  I'm not storing my wealth at Monero,
• 1:23:14
  even as a huge Monero proponent,
• 1:23:15
  and I've been in Monero for theoretically longer
• 1:23:18
  than I've been in Bitcoin.
• 1:23:19
  I'm not storing my value there.
• 1:23:21
  I would rather deal with the better trust trade-offs of Monero and the potential that
• 1:23:26
  my checking account floats a little bit in value versus the trusted bridge that I would
• 1:23:31
  have to do with something like Shielded CSV.
• 1:23:33
  But I also think we shouldn't not do it just because Monero exists.
• 1:23:36
  Like we should still do it as well.
• 1:23:37
  Yeah, for sure.
• 1:23:38
  And I think one thing that would be really nice about that is if we can prove that out
• 1:23:42
  and if there's actually really high demand for something like Shielded CSV over BitVM,
• 1:23:46
  maybe that will be enough to push the bitcoin community to say okay let's do this right and
• 1:23:52
  let's implement like a zero knowledge proof verifier on bitcoin so that we can do this in
• 1:23:57
  a completely trustless way and everything can be perfectly verified on bitcoin and a lot of that
• 1:24:02
  like i think the only way honestly i don't think there will be any changes to bitcoin ever again
• 1:24:06
  but i think the only way there maybe could be was if someone built something that actually showed
• 1:24:11
  hey there is massive demand for this and hey 90 of monero users switched using shootlet css
• 1:24:16
  and we're doing all of this volume and users clearly want this let's shift to a more trustless
• 1:24:21
  model um that would be a really good side effect of that but yeah i definitely agree like it's not
• 1:24:25
  something you don't do because monero exists it's just i think if you're outside of the bitcoin only
• 1:24:31
  sphere i think for most people it still makes sense to just use something like a monero instead
• 1:24:35
  of the trade-offs that would come with that but it's really cool cutting edge research um like
• 1:24:40
  liam egan robin linus they're doing really really awesome work on on actually building out the
• 1:24:45
  cryptography behind it Who knows when it will actually be reality These things are always like two years away from being two years away So I don know when we actually have something we can use um but there is good research happening around that hopefully we we become a real thing at some point always always i think those are
• 1:25:07
  probably the biggest things honestly you know i mean it's like i said it's a super exciting time
• 1:25:12
  a lot of it gets dwarfed by what the common discussions are it's like treasury companies
• 1:25:19
  which i guess are still a thing even though a lot of them seem to be dying like bit.110 and all the
• 1:25:23
  weirdness around that and the sailor worship and it's true i said i said the spam word the s word
• 1:25:31
  um it gets dwarfed like all the cool stuff that's actually happening the the improvements that have
• 1:25:37
  happen in the space kind of get lost in the shuffle of the more uh if it bleeds it leads
• 1:25:43
  new stuff but that has been a super exciting thing for me as someone who started as an educator
• 1:25:47
  became a builder that we can actually build things that honestly i couldn't have even dreamed of
• 1:25:53
  building and dreamed of how smoothly they would work for real people actually using this stuff
• 1:25:58
  day-to-day for hundreds of thousands millions of users to be able to actually use bitcoin lightning
• 1:26:03
  and not feel pain whenever they try to use it.
• 1:26:07
  Like even just that has been an awesome shift,
• 1:26:09
  but silent payments, seriously picking up steam now,
• 1:26:11
  a lot of really cool things being built on it.
• 1:26:13
  Like, I don't know if you saw the Oslo Freedom Forum,
• 1:26:15
  there was this new project called Agora that was launched.
• 1:26:18
  I did. I don't know much about it though.
• 1:26:20
  It pretty simple in concept It basically a fundraising platform where people in the community can vouch for specific fundraising requests So that instead of just like anyone can say like help
• 1:26:32
  give me a Bitcoin. It's using Duster as a Web of Trust so people can essentially sign off and say
• 1:26:38
  like Seth for Privacy says this is legit and I know this guy and it should be funded. But the way
• 1:26:44
  that they actually do all the funding is really cool because it doesn't go to a central custodian
• 1:26:48
  and then they pay it out if it succeeds it actually goes to the end recipient via a silent payment
• 1:26:54
  so that they can have the static payment address nobody has to worry about hosting a server to do
• 1:26:58
  that but they receive it directly into their wallet rather than it going to that central
• 1:27:03
  custodian so it's like another one of those really good use cases and another way that this is this
• 1:27:08
  is going to grow in adoption same thing with page one v2 like we're seeing it in more and more
• 1:27:11
  wallets the actual underlying tooling has gotten really good now we're like we deployed it really
• 1:27:16
  really early and it was it worked well but it required a ton on the developer side to get it
• 1:27:21
  working that has shifted now where the actual tooling is really good and and those shifts
• 1:27:26
  they feel like they take a long time to actually materialize but the actual developer experience
• 1:27:30
  getting good enough is meaning that people can build bitcoin into things that aren't just bitcoin
• 1:27:33
  wallets as well which is a really important piece of this like radar and that's been the the most
• 1:27:38
  fun thing to me is like i love cake wallet and i love working on wallets but most people in the
• 1:27:43
  in the world are not going to use a crypto wallet.
• 1:27:45
  Let's be honest.
• 1:27:46
  Like long-term, you're not gonna use a separate thing
• 1:27:47
  that is only for storing your cryptocurrency
• 1:27:49
  then you wanna use it elsewhere.
• 1:27:49
  Like we need to get Bitcoin into other places.
• 1:27:52
  And Radar is a really good example and proof
• 1:27:54
  of how Bitcoin can fit into just the regular everyday things that people are using without it feeling like this whole like disconnected piece of my life so it fun that we actually gotten there from the tech we can actually build these things today without having to compromise on self
• 1:28:08
  i love it man oh the other thing i did i was thinking of talking to you about was how ai
• 1:28:13
  vibe coding is pushing forward but maybe we do that another time yeah we'll have another one
• 1:28:18
  this has been awesome thank you so much tell everyone where to find radar cake wallet everything
• 1:28:21
  you do yeah yeah straightforward radar.chat or at radar chat on x you can follow us there download
• 1:28:27
  the app uh get all that good stuff and then cakewallet cakewallet.com at cakewallet on on
• 1:28:32
  x and over their platform trying to make on the cake well outside trying to make self-custody really
• 1:28:37
  easy payments really easy but then privacy really easy like we talked about all the cutting edge
• 1:28:40
  privacy tech on bitcoin we're doing there as well as spark for light and payments um so that has
• 1:28:45
  been a ton of fun there is massive demand for privacy tooling right now that i think a lot of
• 1:28:51
  of people don't realize. But it's been exciting to be able to build and seek growth around something
• 1:28:56
  that is so privacy centric over the last year, 18 months. So it's exciting times. People are waking
• 1:29:02
  up. The privacy tools are actually good enough that they can jump in and use them today. The
• 1:29:06
  self-custodial tools are getting there. So yeah, check out radar.chat. If you want to learn more,
• 1:29:10
  give it a try. Come jump on and make payments as easy as sending a message.
• 1:29:13
  Let's go. Thank you, Seth. That was awesome.
• 1:29:21
  Thank you.