Latest / Monero Talk / Danny Akston, Paul Puey, Sterlin Luján and Douglas Tuman live at Porcfest 2024 | EPI 317

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Danny Akston, Paul Puey, Sterlin Luján and Douglas Tuman live at Porcfest 2024 | EPI 317 · Monero Talk

• If you haven't heard of the crypto show before we started out in 2014 in the beginning of 2014 and it was a radio show a pirate radio show an anarchist bookstore underneath the Chase Bank and directly underneath the vault was our studio and we were mining Bitcoin so that that made it into our in chops we were undermining the bank and demands because we're literally mining under the bank what you always have a year's was 2014 yeah we had a bunch of miners lines we would have to turn reminders off during the during the show because it would just interfere that the mic yeah we couldn't hear that so these are a lot of guys that old og crypto guys and have a lot to say about privacy and there's been a lot that's been happening lately with tornado cash with some samurai wallet I mean Roger Vare all of these the enemies of the state that if you watched Aaron days presentation the other day he mentioned all these different people there are being attacked by the by the government I'm curious why lightning isn't that that's a whole different story so we have Paul poi who is the CEO of edge previously air beds and Doug two men he does Monero topia which is a really good conference that he's had a couple of different places Mexico being one of them but it's a great information and he does quite a bit for the Monero community as far as making giving access to well XMR bizarre and just making it easier to use and more spendable and Sterling Sterling Luan has been around for quite some time and he's you know ready for multiple publications and he's he's always speaking at different conferences giving philosophical ideas about crypto and crypto energy and now he's got ideas about panarchy which I don't know what that is you'll have to ask him what panarchy is but let's dive into what what we do want to talk about Paul what what do you make of the tornado cache and samurai samurai wallet Yeah, definitely super unfortunate, and I think it's setting a bad precedent, but it does allow us to kind of figure out where the lines are that the government considers, you know, illicit versus not. And in the scope of crypto, Bitcoin, smart contracts, I know that early on there was a lot more paranoia as far as warning infrastructure that could enable something that the government deems illicit. Case in point example, I just gave a presentation on DeFi, and there was a – we call it a prediction market called Augur. They would not deploy a website. They would not deploy an app. They would not deploy an infrastructure. They would instead throw some code out all over the internet that could be easily downloaded a while on your web browser. And that ensured that they weren't in any way facilitating what could be deemed illicit. And I think that paranoia started to go away a little bit over the time, so now we're able to do the borrowing and lending on a website run by a company with a dot -com. And so I think that trend might start shifting in the other direction again, where a lot of the tools start to be a bit more distributed. We don't want to touch the transaction. We don't want to be a lightning node, for example. We don't want to be a mixer with a server. And I think that's probably the first that comes to mind. Maybe that's a little bit too deep for the first person to talk about. But I just think that maybe that trend goes in that direction. Let's make sure that whatever things are order gray line, whether it be mixing, tumbling, privacy, security, securities, and whatnot, we try to stay further away from being an entity of any sort that's facilitating and be more just software. Right. Well, with Samurai, they're they're kind of facilitating that transaction. They're doing the privacy. Well, the privacy is baked in like with Monero and other privacy coins that's that's taken out. There's no one to blame as a middle man. So well, Doug, you have the mic. What I'm because you're doing so good. You're doing XMR Bazaar. And you do have kind of a middle man thing going on with with the multisig. How do you how do you work around that and keep from becoming the next tornado cache or samurai? Well, yes. So first of all, I just want Bazaar is an is an exchange, right? And it's not seeking to be a lot of it's it's a peer to peer, an arrow based marketplace, so you're Craigslist. So people are making listings, but all the transactions are happening between the users. You're not thinking any fees, right? We're holding everybody's mirror. We're just putting buyers and sellers together and they do their transaction to other all group here. The multisig feature. Yes, grow feature. Same thing. XMR Bazaar is not participating in that transaction. We have mediators that are other users that become the third sire. But even beyond that, it's the goal of XMR Bazaar is not to be, you know, a new local Monero or something like that. It's it's really for buying and selling goods and services. People have to use it in accordance with the laws of their jurisdiction, right? But I don't know. I don't know. We don't we don't know what direction things are going to go. And I think you really got straight to the to the point on where the issue really lies. It needs to be we need to have the direction of creating software that does these things in a decentralized way. And that's always been the goal. And I think we're going to see these solutions come about right. We have havino, which is which is really interesting. I think that's going to be a powerful tool for the Monero community for, essentially, people to get in and out of Monero anonymously. We have Sarai DEX. It's also going to be a very powerful tool for those purposes. And then, yeah, Monero itself appears appears to be clearly legal, right? And as long as we continue to follow the Constitution, these things were litigated in the IDs of the PGP during the PGP wars. And it's already been litigated. So it's settled that code is speech, software speech, that people have the right to use encryption tools to communicate. That's really what's at what the legal question of being asked. And Monero is no different than PGP. So if they're going to ban Monero, they're going to ban they're going to have to ban Bitcoin. They're going to have to ban using PGP. They're going to have to just ban the people from using encryption tools. That's how I see it. So I think it is the last bash, right? We try to use these other things out of convenience, like Savaroid, trying to fix Bitcoin, make it more private with these tools, but they're really being viewed as services. And so the kind of last bash is something like Monero on the protocol level. And if it isn't allowed, if it is banned, then all bets are off at that point. I see that they're on SMR Bazaar, that people are selling coins, or they're trading for other cryptos. I don't know, is that good? You see that as a problem? How would that be an issue for us? I see people are gonna have to do what they can legally do, right? There's nothing illegal about me and Paul swapping Monero for Tash. I have Monero. Maybe I had somebody have some cash, I need some cash right now to go use. All I have is Monero. Paul's like, well, I actually need some Monero. All I have is cash. Okay, I have some Monero, he gives me a hundred dollars cash, it's peer to peer. I'm not in the business of selling Monero for Tash. Paul is not in the business of obtaining Monero for selling Tash, but we just both have a need needed. I don't think it has anything illegal about that. So people are using SMR Bazaar, for purposes of finding each other, to exchange it peer to peer for purposes. Exchanging cash for Monero around for business purposes. I noticed that there was a disclaimer, this is for a person we use. Yeah, people need to know that that's the law, right? There's no reason for us to egregiously break the law of what we could achieve or what we wanna achieve by following the law. So there's nothing illegal in most jurisdictions or up in the United States, at least, to exchange, to use Monero for making purchases, peer to peer. All right, Sterling. So me, me, me, that's what I wanted. always do it. How does it my turn to talk? No. So yeah, your money transmitters and you're going to jails. Right about you. So I want to I mean nobody really does right? It's like they keep it purposely gray But I think do you guys agree what I was saying where where I see that's the being the bad out, right? So if they're saying the narrow itself is illegal and they're trying to bat it then it's really a way Litigation of the PGP wars at that way one of the things that I want to know all that you get to it is why is it okay for lightning to do basically the same thing as You know Sam or I am tornado cash by offering, you know, they're transmitting money in pretty much the same way I don't I don't see a lot of difference by why is why is liking not being arrested and all that's to say No, yeah, I mean that might be a target out about right. There's always that concern that the lightning nodes could be considered by a shed Twitter Yeah, with that comment a minute ago, I was, of course, being facetious. There's a book that was written by a guy named Halloween Silverglade called Three Felonies a Day with this idea that you can just go out to the world and you're living your life doing whatever you want to do. And you're probably committing multiple felonies a day, so they just make up crimes that can come after you anyway. I want to discuss this issue for maybe a bit more of a higher level. So what's happening is with crypto right now is the government is actually waging a crypto inquisition, kind of a modern inquisition. I make the reference that the cryptocurrency community, this is absolutely a witch hunt from governments and effectively any kind of laws or regulations that aim to attack crypto. crypto is the malleus maleficarum, the hammer of the witches, come after the witches because they are threatening to the status quo. They seek to undermine the status quo in some way. And I think holistically and thoroughly this is government sending out its death knell, right? I think privacy and anonymity technology specifically represents an existential threat to governments, right? Just because of its existence. This is what Danny mentioned in terms of the samurai wallet guys. They're waiting trial in the U .S. I think one of them is in Portugal, probably waiting extradition. You have the tornado cash situation that happened where they already convicted Alexey Perksis, one of the main developers and coders in the Netherlands. And so he has a prison sentence. You also have Roger Verga directly related to privacy, but is related in the sense that he has been speaking out about the government for a long time. So he's waiting extradition also in Spain to come back to the U .S. So there's a concerted effort to sort and to undermine cryptocurrency activity. And I firmly believe that this is because they sense that this is a threat to the hegemony of the dollar as a U .S. global wizard of currency. And probably just to their ability to continue policing and expropriating the population in terms of the taxation regimens. So this is, I think, why this is happening, and this doesn't, of course, invalidate what these guys were saying about the – sort of the quasi -legal situation there and how we can kind of escape that by not being directly attached to a front end or to some type of exchange environment. So it definitely makes sense that we have to learn to try to play it way more safely. And just to – we don't have to go into all this right now, but a bit of a comment. One of the big problems is we don't have really good infrastructure for protecting our cyber -barillas, our developers, our infrastructure creators. That infrastructure is actually currently in development right now in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Amir Taki and his team at DarkFi have referred to this as a dark forest environment. And this dark forest is – its job is to provide as much anonymity for developers to work within their environments, right? So just specifically, Amir and those guys, what they have is a – it's an online smart contract platform that's currently in development. What will it look like and when will it come to fruition is kind of another question, but there's other things going on as well. Maybe we get into that and maybe we don't. Actually, that's where I wanted to go next. So you have, with Monero's trying to add something down the road as far as smart contracts, Luke Parker's working on that. And then Zanno is already doing things with confidential assets. And now you're talking about DarkFi doing the same thing. Like Darrow has done it, although they're de -anonymized. Paul, where do you see that going? As far as using DeFi within privacy coins. It has been one of the holy grail challenges that nobody has solved yet, although there are quite a few projects working on it. With respect to DarkFi, as a barely developer, now I can look at the docs, and I still write COVID barely. And so I looked at the docs, and I think one of the challenges for some of these platforms is that they can be very, very difficult for a developer to use, especially if they're used to something similar like Ethereum and its smart contracts, which by and large look and feel like developing code for a website. DarkFi looks more like the kind of thing that a PhD candidate would be utilizing to develop these proofs that the code works. So I'm not sure that that's the long -term usable solution. Usually in technology, it can get easier to build, not harder to build. The other projects, unfortunately, when I see other projects, the one that I'm most familiar with, being Diro and Secret Network, take some pretty major compromises from the viewpoint of privacy. Secret Network relies on notes running specific hardware. So you have to run specific hardware, specifically Intel SGX hardware. The problem, and the secrets, basically the decryption of the network that can see the amounts of the transactions are decrypted inside of this hardware. And so the hope is if you run this hardware, you can't get into it. But because it's a network of anybody that can participate, the one entity you hope does not participate is Intel. So if Intel were a participant on this network, you can't tell if they're actually running hardware or if they're running software. And if they're running software, that software you could peek into and say, oh look, these are the amounts and the transactions that are running on the network. So that protocol I've kind of written off as it's not a good privacy solution, needs to be software the way Monero works, right? Anybody can tribute, but we don't care who it is, it could be Intel could handle it, but you still can't peek in into the little transactions. Diro, I know a little bit less about. All I know is that some pretty smart people won't put, including Luke, have determined that the code is flawed. And some of the other projects I know I'm less familiar with, but I'm actually glad to have come across it by coming to here at WorkFest. So it seems to me that I think people aren't trying to tackle because they know that we need this next layer of DeFi on top of just sending and receiving, but I can't put my personal stamp of approval on anything just like. Yeah, you know, Zana was at Benarotopia, remember, with Avril? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chest doctor. You know, I got to interview him. It was, that's what it sounded like, who he was and what they were working on. That was very interesting. I took a little bit of a dive into Zana on a very impressed. Yeah, they'll be at Benarotopia again, and Dark Five will be there. Um, particle team. Giro, I don't think we'll be there this year. Maybe you're rebawning me. Was trying to get somebody from Zcash to attend as well. Um, like, like to have all these projects together and talk about these technologies out in the open is very productive is awesome. We learned a lot about Zana last year. Obviously, I'm most interested in Benarot, simply because I'm just interested in the use case of digital cash and traceable digital cash. So I'm just focused on that utility, but obviously there's interesting things that you do with a kind of a theory on the narrow version of the theory. And right. Um, and so you have projects like Dark Five, Atari that has yet to launch, but has promises of that in terms of something, I think that's the closest to it, right? I do think Zano because it exists and it's working and it's, it's got really good fundamentals is probably the most interesting project in that space. They have a fair confidential assets, so you can very easily spin up like a, uh, a privacy stable coin on Zano, right? Um, they have a multi -sig built into it, so you could easily build like marketplaces and exchanges. So I think that's, that's probably the most interesting. And then there are also proof of, uh, hybrid proof of work and proof of state. And they have implemented, they're the first project to have implemented private proof of state and actually they worked with a Monero developer co on that team to develop all Sarcamium. So I think they're interesting and obviously for the, for the reason that, uh, Andre was the, uh, first one to actually develop the thing. He developed the first implementation of crypto dope. Uh, he went on to create Zano eventually. So I have to give him. I'm very credit there, Richard. Yeah. And that probably literally just because of that, do you, do you have any in insight on, uh, Sarai decks and what, what Luke will be building for Monero as far as the smart, smart contract features and, um, maybe also basic swap, the particle project. I mean, those, they, those things are different than like atomic decks, Tomoto's thing, because atomic decks, from what I understand is you have to same transparent data with it. So it's not actually private transaction on comic decks, but what Luke is working out with Sarai and basic swap. It's, it's a lot more, it's a lot better privacy option. Yeah. I think Sarai is going to use the, uh, the best thing we'll have going for us chosen to be able to get in and out of Monero between Monero and other cryptos anonymously without KOIC in a very liquid and user friendly way. Um, it's like, we've seen the success of Thor chain. I had never really used or say myself, but my understanding is it's quite easy, especially when it's implemented, uh, into a user, like, like cake or edge, and it will feel like you're using a centralize and some exchange, but you're actually changing with these large liquidity pools and out of a slate. So yeah, that, that, that's it. That's Sarai and it's, it's happening and it's already proven because we've seen it with Thor chain and it's, it's really no different other than the Papi that's Monero. Uh, no. It requires a multi -sig, the Thor chain. It does require what some people would call a multisig. Multisig, at least in its first instance, is at the protocol level where it's like Bitcoin rules specify who needs to sign, how many keys are needed. Or an Ethereum smart contract has code that people write, and in the code it says here are the keys that need to sign, how many are needed, or other logic. ThorChain uses rules that are at the cryptography level, meaning not their chain agnostic. And the rules are, yes, X number of keys need to sign, and it's called threshold signatures for those who care about the technical jargon. But because they're using threshold signatures, they apply across almost every single chain. It doesn't depend on the rules the chain can implement. It doesn't depend on what kind of programmability the chain has. It just needs to be a signature, and the nice thing about threshold signatures is everything looks like on chain, it just looks like a single key. And you can use it across many chains, and hence why it should be usable with Monero and has been usable with a dozen others. So the coins that don't have multi -seg wouldn't... It would actually still work. It would. Our chain is not using the multisignature feature of Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana. It's purely using threshold signatures, which basically create a single signature that looks like a single -sig transaction, but using multiple keys under the cover, using cryptography, not cryptocurrency. So it's kind of below the level of cryptocurrency programmability, but instead it's using magical cryptography math to be able to create one signature from multiple keys. Do you have anything to add? I am excited, actually, about Sorai DEX. I think the biggest challenge for Monero and Privacy Coins has been getting in and out without using a lot of the centralized services. We have pretty good support for DEXs with tokens and all of Meme Coin, the Jig Coins, Iran, Ethereum, and whatnot, as well as decent support of Cross Chain, especially with the EVM ecosystem. These are the chains that look and feel like Ethereum. Getting between those, you really don't need to go through anything centralized at all. But when it comes to Privacy Coins, think Monero, ZGash, and I think it could probably get a ZGash first and open a great aerotopia, if you want. I'm actively talking to their team, as well. Those almost always need to go through dark centralized exchanges. So I'm super excited about Sorai DEX and any similar products. And yeah, it uses a very similar mechanism. I'm sure Luke has – actually, I'm not sure I know. He has very strong opinions about the way power chain is implemented and wants to tweak and fix some of what he sees are issues. But at the high level, it'll work for a similarly liquidity pool. Actually, a cool thing we don't really talk about is not just getting into and out of Monero. For a lot of people, they haven't had a good reason to hodl Monero. It's the spending currency. Exactly. So now you have a way to earn on Monero. You take your Monero deposit it into a liquidity pool with Sorai DEX and have an opportunity to earn. I don't think this really existed anywhere. So this is a great opportunity and can give people a reason to hodl because it's not just hodl. You're not just gaining the increased price of Monero, but you're also gaining from the fees that are collected from this DEX. And that's a storyline that I think is very unique. We've never had in the privacy coin space as an awesome, unique opportunity that I'm super looking forward to and hoping to add that kind of functionality into our products. or make me regret that I traded all that Badero for goldback sess today. Well, I don't like it over -aggressive transaction and all of a sudden that's not about Dorche, by the way. I think you like it better than most. Yeah, I was under the impression since, well, Dragon X I work with, it is default privacy that it would be necessary to have the multi signature function for that to work on Dorche. So that's not, that's not the case. Yeah, I really don't have much to add. Let's get started. No, I just I was going to come back a little bit to what Paul was talking about in terms of some of these platforms and their The reality that they will actually function the way that we want them to function and that people will actually use them That's certainly true I do so that you know, there's another couple of projects that I will Let you guys know about that represent infrastructure in the space That is actually working right now and and is in the same line of anonymity and privacy type protocols So one of them is called walk who walk who is a peer -to -peer Communication platform that is and in the anonymized on the on the base layer, but it's infrastructure. So people built applications and platforms on top of it and one of those applications is It's called railgun. It's a company by a guy that I'm friends with named Karen so these these put in the example the reason for this example is just to say that there are platforms that are starting to emerge that will allow for this for more anonymity more privacy and Hopefully so we can create more freedom for our developers to do the work We have to do in these this start fullest environment that I had mentioned earlier in terms of the technology Yeah, these guys are gonna be more more on point with that Full membership proofs were obviously very excited about that, that's a tremendous development in Monero. So it's always been known in the Monero community and the Monero community has never sucked it under the rug, but its weakest is the ring signature component of Monero. So, Monero has three primary tools that it uses for obfuscation, so stealth addresses to obfuscate the receiver, and that really does use true encryption, it uses confidential transactions to encrypt the amount, so that uses true encryption. But for the sender, it uses something called break signatures, and that's not really true encryption, it's kind of just using probabilities to your advantage, so you can't really ever guess who the true sender is. And there is this node attack called the EE Baliseeb attack, where if they're really pinpointed to try to go after an individual user and figure out their transactions, they can correlate data from centralized exchanges that are KYC -ing you, and correlate that data with other people that are, if not safe parties, also sending you transactions. And so it's a very specific attack, but it is possible, and with the implementation of full membership, chain membership proofs, which Luke Parker, the same person that has created Sarai, has also invented this, with that implementation, well, Monero will no longer have that weakness, and it will have privacy, kind of equivalent to that of CTASH for purposes of obfuscating who the sender is. So that's very exciting, that's happening in Monero, it's not theoretical, it's going to be implemented within, I mean, I guess there are things that could still go wrong, but it seems pretty cut and dry at this point, in terms of being feasible, so it's like a year out, year and a half, that Monero will have full chain membership. Yeah, well, I had one of our developers explain to me the other day that the difference between Monero and Zcash, or Zcash NARTS projects, one is obfuscation, the other one is encryption. And so now you're adding encryption on top of obfuscation, kind of what Hush and Dragonix did as well, as we're using multiple outputs, we use eight outputs instead of a single output, so we have obfuscation on top of the Zcash NARTS that is inspired from Monero. Yeah, Monero has always used zero knowledge proofs, right, and it's bullet proofs, and there's a lot of confusion out there with all that, but yeah, there was this one weakness, and now, you know, maybe there's other weaknesses that have to be discovered, but this one, no weakness, and zero knowledge proofs will now solve that. I want to give maybe a more down -to -earth analogy of what this full membership proofs feels like versus what Monero does, and actually give Monero a little bit more credit than I think people give it credit for. The anonymity set, this is a term used in privacy, is what's considered the full pool of transactions or users that you can hide in. So with Monero and these ring signatures, every time you make a transaction, the anonymity set is about wealth, other, what I call, funds that are sitting that could be spent. So you have funds that you could spend, but all these other people have funds sitting in their wallet that they could spend. Well, basically, your transaction, your funds, can effectively mix with about, is it 12 right now? Is it 16? 16. It's 18. So 16 decoys, which means 17 total. So your anonymity set is 17. And so what are you getting with, quote unquote, full membership proofs? You're getting the anonymity set of everyone who has money sitting ready to be spent. However, if everyone is one other person, then your anonymity set is actually worse than Monero. I'm not saying that decash is an entity set of one other person. It obviously has hundreds of thousands of other addresses. But I wanted to shed light into, it's not that it's encrypted and it's bulletproof. You need the network to have other people. Exactly. You need users. And the more users you have with funds ready to go and also funds that have been actively moving and shifting hands over time, the greater anonymity set. So ironically, while Monero may have only 16 decoys, it has a high velocity of transaction volume. So those decoys potentially keep changing. You're not the only one making transactions that keep changing the network while all those decoys sit there. They're actively moving as well. In contrast, and the Zcash, I hate hearing those screens out to them, but I'm being honest, is there's just less activity on the privacy layer of Zcash because it's optional privacy. And so it's optional privacy. People are transacting on the transparent side of Zcash than the shielded or the private layer of Zcash has less transactions and there's less money sitting in the anonymity set. And so when you make a transaction, even though it's quote unquote, full membership proofs, it's still a significantly smaller set than you would get with full membership proofs on a chain work. There's a lot of transactions and all of those transactions are private. So I just wanted to make people aware that it's not this magic bullet of encrypted. No, it's not that magic bullet. You need that, plus you need utility. You need people using it. Is there a difference? But on those Z -transactions that are not organic, are those weaker than, and what I mean by that is the spam attack. So with Z -cache, 90 -something percent of all our transactions are actually transparent. So those don't add anything to the anonymity set. But whenever there's a spam attack, their anonymity set skyrocketed. You know, what it was before. The same thing happened with pirate on the spam attack. I was told that those are easier to decipher. Is this because there was a lower amount of money that was in there? Can you explain how that works? So with the spam attack, they notably didn't look like normal transactions. A normal transaction may have a little bit of money coming from one input and a little bit of money going to another input and maybe some change. A lot of the spam attacks looked like a blast, money that came from one input that went to thousands of outlets. How often do people really do that? Maybe an exchange does that where they batch withdrawals. So when you want to withdraw your money from an exchange, the exchange is, well, let me wait for a few other people to withdraw. Right now, there's a hundred people to withdraw. They then send one batch transaction out. In the case of the end of the mining, when— your mining is transparent so when you put all your mining into the Z addresses that would that would go done But it wouldn't look like a spam attack. It wouldn't look like a spam transaction. So you're right in the sense that the spam attack went and created a lot of transactions, but it didn't create as many transactions as it created dust that hit people's addresses. And so those look like a few transactions with a whole lot of addresses receiving money. We couldn't tell how much money we could tell which addresses, but we just needed, there was, for example, hundreds of addresses that received some amount of money in this one transaction. So those transactions could almost be removed in the attempt at de -anonymizing the set as you go through the spam transactions, whereas real active utility and usage are what truly allow transactions to hide in the anonymity sets. I say this a lot of privacy tools, not just ZCAPs, but like Signal Encryption PGP is your far more private if it was using it. And so I'm the kind of guy that tries to promote certain tools to my friends and family that don't care about privacy. I don't even say it's more private, I just like, hey, it's a better UX signal, it's got a great UX, I still do emojis, and it works between Android and iOS, right? Your green bubble friends, now become blue bubble friends, if anyone on iOS does what I'm talking about. I don't say privacy, because they don't care, and they think it's some weird, wacky tool used by Ericus. But by them using these tools, I benefit. So realize the power of getting your normies in your status using these tools even if they don't care at all, we get the bad fit as well. That's what's Did you have an jail anything the end of that? Oh that no, I think we're probably getting close on time It'll work. Are we on time? to 40 to 40 okay, it's How I'll Go back to you again on this one and unless unless you have a comment on this You see a theory. I'm and everybody else is trying to write and zk everything zk roll up zk this zk that why Why are all these you know clear neck who is going to the privacy? to the dark side Why are these clear quotes going to the dark side, being the bright side, right? Yeah, yeah, okay. So the term ZKs are a knowledge. They incite the impression of privacy and darkness and encryption, but really they're more of a compression tool. They allow us to say, or to ensure that, hey, this money got transferred, all of this money got transferred, but there's a proof. It compresses the ability to know for sure that that money got transferred from an account that actually had it. As opposed to having to see, oh, what is the balance of that account, right? And did it follow the rules? Validate all that. All of that validation is compressed into what's called proofs. Yeah, because they're a knowledge of proofs. So that's compression that happens to benefit privacy. When it comes to compressing, did you have the money in the first place? Are you following the rules? We're compressing that into a small proof. But you could also just compress data that's not private. And that's where Ethereum and ZK rollups are utilizing the technology. They're allowing other chains to do transactions for Ethereum with lower fees, faster finality, but compress the validity of those transactions into a proof. That can then be verified by the Ethereum chain. So the Ethereum chain verifies one proof that could prove that all these thousands of transactions are valid. Doesn't mean you can't see those transactions. They're fully transparent on this other chain, this layer of two, but they're compressed into a proof. So that's why the terminology tends to confuse people like, so, oh, it's great. You don't know anything about me, but it really is a cryptography primitive that can be used in a few different ways. We are seeing the cross -pollination of that interest in Zcash. Zcash obviously is one of the teams behind Zcash electric coin company. Or so as far as people in zero knowledge proofs, they built some of the earliest implementations. And they've closely partnered with a product that has no encryption or privacy file coin because of the interest in these zero knowledge proofs for compression. And for proving that someone, for example, has the data that's sitting on a really a blockchain without IQFS, so creating that proof so that it can be verified in a chain. Two completely different use cases for zero knowledge proofs, but tied together in a very, very tight partnership. The grants program, by the way, for Zcash is one that gets validated by the File Fight Foundation as well as the Zcash Foundation. They actually cross -pollinate, they put money into their grants program. So you basically talk to both organizations to get approved. And it's all tied together. Their interest is entirely because of Zcash. Is this a DAO? They're down on this ice. It's a nonprofit organization's usual foundation or style slot, what I would call a DAO. But that's OK. You have a question idea. This question is. Paul, did I hear you say there's going to be an earned program on Monero within the Edge wallet? I have to be careful what I say around here. I would love for there to be an earned program for Monero in Edge. The technology to build that is in progress, as we know it's Sarai, but it's not deployed yet. So we don't know what the technology will look like, what the development environment will look like to enable it, but I would absolutely love to have that. And I know at least that somebody is going to be earning on Sarai because they'll need to provide the liquidity. So that will probably happen before it comes to Edge, but I would love to add it. It's just amazing, but I will say TAKE is implementing that from day one because they're working with Sarai. They were, I think, a big part of the funding that kind of went into Sarai itself. So learning to have that in the entry base is a way for people to easily lock up their Monero and are just What is the time frame on that? Six months. I don't know. I don't know. I would say eight years ago. It's very close. According to the Lightning Labs, there have been six months away, always. They've never been closer. Can you talk about some of the other features that are in Cake, in Cake Wallet? Because they have a card and some other stuff, but... Yeah, I mean, so they had instant exchanges built into Cake, so it's this very easy way to obtain Monero using instant exchanges and use them anonymously for the most part. Sometimes, if you use the raw ones, you get shot by the KYC, but if you use, like, Trocodor, and some of these other ones that are built in there, you're good to go, and you can... buy light or obtain Litecoin or something else, somewhere else, and instantly, and then, honestly, exchange it into Monero, that then goes into your Cake Wallet, built into it, so that's very nice. They have a gift card feature, which is really nice, so you can seamlessly then use your Monero. Obviously, the best way to use it is if you're using it peer -to -peer or paying people, but sometimes you can't find everything you need with Monero peer -to -peer, so you can buy a gift card, and you can do it pretty much anonymously as well. All you need to do is provide a new balance so you can buy inside of the dollar, hold Depot, a gift card, and obviously, with Monero through Takes, so things like that. I'd say those are... While you're on that topic, if you need to talk about Monero's on. Monero's on, I don't know much about it. Basically, there's been other types of this. I think it's a way to, essentially, buy people goods off the Amazon for them and get paid to do it. There's been other types of this in the past. I think they have a pretty nice user interface. They're getting some traction. So it's a way to earn Monero, right? You want... You can go on here, you can see the listings, and somebody has on their wish list a Brito order filter. You can buy that further on Amazon and have it shipped to where they're asking it to be shipped, and then they take you to Monero and do so. That's what that is. Oh, yeah. Like that was the platform like that was like purse .io. Yeah. Yeah, I don't see even on XMR Bazaar people are putting up post like yeah, this is where it's an agile tendency But they and I think they've kind of solved a usability issue It might be pretty slick any and you know I wanted to go back to Paul on the the features from edge because you have a built -in exchange and and multiple different features in edge Are there DEX's? What are the different options of buying buying and selling? boards of energy Yeah, so Edge is really, we like to not only so much call it a wall, but an exchange, or an exchange wall. Its focus is around being able to convert currency, so you could buy from fiat, bank account, debit card, if there are other countries, we have payment methods around the world, native to Canada, to Mexico, to different parts of Europe, getting into crypto and the stablecoins, ETH, Monero, Zcash, you name it. And so if you also need to exit out of the crypto world into fiat, gift cards are integrated, much like was mentioned in cake wallets, you can go into gift cards, but as well, you can go right into bank accounts through a debit card. And we are also, we had at least, we may be launching again, the ability to go into like credit cards, basic top of your own card, your own credit card, basic pay for your credit card. And as well, the crypto to crypto, this is where it's super rich, we have about eight or nine different DEXs slash CFI exchange hardware is integrated. And the app will automatically find your best price across all of them. So fortune, as I mentioned, they're integrated for, gosh, Binance, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, BCH, Ethereum, Avax, as well as some of the tokens. We also have bridges to cross over many of these chains. It's almost like what isn't supported that by the viewer and a ton of supporting that regard. but Sterling works with a project very similar called CryptoMax, which used to be crypto space. You want to give us a breakdown of what are the advantages of using CryptoMax? Yeah, to be fair, I haven't worked as closely with crypto next recently, but one of them, I could be a little bit of backstory. So crypto max was an exchange in the US called crypto space. And what crypto space was doing at a point was doing cryptocurrency trades in a more peer to peer fashion. But it was still a central organization had a KYC protocol. But one of the really good things about crypto space is that wasn't centralized, that you could buy cryptocurrency in a peer to peer fashion at super high volumes and then get that cryptocurrency back in the same day. Now, Ernesto still does, he still runs crypto max in Mexico, and they still do run the same type of business. So the only problem is, of course, they can't and won't use American citizens or fear that the government will go after them. But if you are in Latin America or a number of other places around the world, one of the things you could do if you wanted to do millions of dollars for Bitcoin or for a cryptocurrency, if you're a high net worth individual, if you're someone who's trying to exit the fiat system, this is the kind of service that's for you. And of course, in Mexico, the KYC requirements are still there. They still exist, but they're not nearly as onerous as they are in the United States. So that's one of the things and one of the big advantages about using something like crypto max. I can't find a peer to peer exchange where you can hold your own crypto, hold your own keys as a huge benefit. But one of the real tragedies of this day and age is that there are less and less of those types of services because the governments tend to try to push those businesses out by using different kinds of backroom pressure, choke points, bottlenecks, et cetera. It's this idea in the U .S. is called choke point 3 .0, where the government has actually rallied a backroom pressure campaign against crypto with their banker cronies. Right. So this is so that they don't have to outright ban crypto. Instead, they can just go after people through the back door without having any kind of legal precedent. ATM operators, bank accounts, and on Vista. The card, the crypto -mex card, can you explain how that works? It's really interesting. Yeah, so one of the things if this is one of my, this is my own personal opinion, this has nothing to do with an Insta or, or, or, or crypto max or how he runs his business. But one of the cool things that I see about the card is that getting a, it's effectively a visa card, right? It's a credit card that is where you're able to load your, your cryptocurrency up onto it and really, really high volume. It's one of the highest volume cards I've ever seen. Don't ask me what the numbers are right now, but I know it's really high for a loadable cryptocurrency credit card. Now, the real benefit here is around the KYC piece and still up to KYC, the KYC requirements for a credit card are quite a bit lower than if you were trying to open up a bank account, even in somewhere like Mexico. So that's what I would say is a big benefit. The fees can get pretty high, but really these cards are for this continued idea of exiting people out of the fiat system. So my, this has been my whole thing for the longest time. This is, these guys shared a sentiment, I'm sure, but we need to be getting as much adoption, as much adoption and as much transactionality and crypto as possible for the purposes of getting outside the scope of having to deal with the state. And this is my opinion, hopefully lay a death blow to that dollar system that tends to usurp and take off freedoms every step of the way. So that's how I can see the use case for this credit cards. It's just, it's about financial responsibility and financial empowerment. And that is the apotheosis to me of everything that is sacred and decent about freedom. Do you want to go down the line? Anybody else have anything to add? Go ahead. I'll actually just bring up the Noto. Yeah, yeah. So, and also a difference between edge and kick, right? So, I noticed a lot of people at Portfest see that, which is very cool. Paul and I were talking about probably why it happened, because I think the first multi -coin wallet that ever used Monero, is that correct, Paul? So, edge is super user -friendly. Anytime you open it up, your Monero is instantly synced. If you're using something like kick, it's not an instant sync. It has to sync from the last time you opened it up. The difference being that with edge, they use a light -walled server that runs in the background, and you provide review key, and that allows them to essentially sync for you, which is very convenient. It does potentially come at a cost of sacrificing your view key, and there's some input that could potentially be game, and I'm sure Paul could explain why. That might not be an issue from edge's perspective, but there is a trust, potential trust there. We recently created something called the Monero Noto, and it's a plug -and -play Monero Note. It allows you to easily run your own note. You can run your own note on your own computer, by the way, and just tell us up, but it makes it an easier way to do it, and run it reliably 24 -7. As part of that, we built in the Monero light -walled server app, so you can very easily get that up and running, and you can put your view key in there. You're running your own note. You're using edge wallet, as you normally would, but now you've added your own note as the note you're going to use that's running the light -walled server, so now you're getting instantaneous sync like you get with edge normally, but without sacrificing your view key, just so I'm going to throw that out there. Paul, I don't know if you want to give any backup bits or all that. Sorry. Keep it to 30 seconds. Doug's exactly right. There is a privacy compromise. I'm giving up your view key. And Edgy, we're gonna give it up specifically to a company in South Africa called My Monero. They're one of the earliest wall developers of the Monero space, and actually one of their founders was one of the core devs, the biggest recordospending fluffy ponies it goes by. So his company would see the view keys. What does seeing the view key mean? It means, number one, they know which transactions belong to your wallet. So they know the transactions. However, they don't know who you transacted with. They can't see the addresses of who you transacted with, and they can't definitively determine the amounts of the transactions either. So it provides a, what do you call it, high level of privacy for its usability, but it doesn't achieve the highest level that Monero is capable of. So there is that compromise. And we've had people that came to Ed, or even developers that knew Monero very well, but came to it specifically because the usability increase to them was worth the privacy cost. I would sooner rather have everyone in cryptocurrency using this model of Monero than the current pool of Monero users today. If everybody used that model, we would still 10x our privacy with that little bit of a compromise. Obviously, we've got it out full, and actually I was gonna talk with some of the Monero core devs on upcoming changes called ViewTags, which could accomplish like 99% of that privacy, but still have the instant sync experience, meaning you don't have to scan the chain from your phone. You hit a server and it just said, boom, your transaction, but that server knows absolutely nothing about the transactions. So this is a piece that I think I'm very excited about. I'm pushing it with the privacy community. I haven't looked at whether or not any of those other chains, XANL or not, could implement that. But in the interim, the no -do for the people that are willing to run some hardware at home is a great best of both worlds. You get the highest level of privacy in the nearest capability, but when you're wandering around, wanting to spend Monero, it's instant sync experience. Some odd event, I guess we're probably out of time. Can we just run down the line and say who you are and how they can use your servers or get ahold of you? Sure, my name is Paul, and Edge .hath, very simple. Check it out, you can find me on the website, find the product, and invite you to check it out. And, you know, with respect to privacy, part of our privacy initiatives is that we don't have stuff that tracks every button you push in the app. So we don't know what people run into from the viewplanted user experience. So please give us any feedback you might have on the app. We really appreciate that level of insight to what you're running into. So check it out. This is what you think. My name is Douglas Tuman, Douglas Tuman on X. I have a podcast, Monero Talk. Check that out. If you have a conference, Monero Topia, go to Monerotopia .com, recommend you check that out. And if you ever want to contact me with any ideas, anything, you want to come on any of my shows, you want to be, come to our conference, whatever it is, email me, Monerotopia at protommail .com. Cool, you guys can find me on my website, sterlinlujan .com. If you need help spelling that, I'm glad to help you after the talk. And then if you want to learn more about, I was talking about WACU earlier, which is a Peer Care Communications Protocol. That's part of the technology stack that Logos is building. So logos .co, if you have an interest in anonymized infrastructure and network states, which we didn't really get to get into this time, maybe another time. Then check out logos .co.