Latest / Monero Talk / The Most Useful Tool for Freedom w/ Gabriel Custodiet | EPI #298

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The Most Useful Tool for Freedom w/ Gabriel Custodiet | EPI #298 · Monero Talk

• Doug Alright, Gabriel, welcome to the show. Gabriel Thanks for having me Douglas, happy to be here supporting the Monero community. It's obviously a really good one, very useful tool and happy to be here. Doug in full disclosure to the Monero community and all my listeners, I must admit, this is our second time recording the show. We attempted yesterday and to no fault of my guest at all, there were some technical difficulties and really I just felt like the conversation, fault of my own, I didn't really truly take advantage of the person I'm talking to, I feel like. Doug I didn't really get to delve deep enough into your expertise and I feel like we got hung up on an issue that really was irrelevant to where we should be going. So I greatly appreciate you doing the show again. Doug Shows tremendous amount of dedication on your part. Gabriel Yeah, no problem at all. I'm sure people will speculate if we keep them in the dark like that, but maybe I'll decide to open up. But no, happy. I think, so we were talking about the samurai wallet stuff. Gabriel And I think it's okay to just leave that out of there because regardless of our thoughts on them, they're doing their thing and they are who they are. And we can certainly think of many other things to discuss. Gabriel So, yeah. Doug Yeah, yeah, yeah, especially with the overall goal of not further creating more friction between samurai and other communities, right? And so we don't want to have the opposite effect in having the conversation. Doug I will say though, I do want to give you a chance to comment on nopara, because I think you have you have good knowledge there. And my my intent was always to kind of get the other side me not knowing enough about you know, samurai versus wasabi, the differences technically and nopara's history. Doug So I wanted to give somebody a platform here to kind of retort and bring up what the concerns are. Do you want it? Do you mind just covering those concerns? Because I think you did a really good job at breaking down those reasons yesterday. Gabriel Sure, I'm happy to do so. And what kind of another thing we're discussing was that T dev, who's a developer for samurai wallets, did not want to come on Monero talk because you had no nopara on. And so in Bitcoin privacy, you have to go to extra lengths to take care of your privacy. Gabriel And a kind of an essential thing is a coin join, which is basically using the Bitcoin blockchain against itself. Right. You are putting in a certain you're putting in UTXOs into basically a transaction and it spits out things. Gabriel It spits out transactions back to you that very much confuse the people who analyze the blockchain. So the main two implementations are wasabi wallet and samurai wallet. You also have a joint market, which is kind of a separate thing, not quite as seamless, not built into a wallet. Gabriel So the issue pertaining to nopara. So a couple of years ago, the wasabi wallet tweets out that.. So this is, this is the literal tweet. So ZK snacks. And just to insert here, ZK snacks is the, the legal entity, I believe, who is kind of in charge of wasabi wallet. Gabriel So ZK snacks will start refusing certain UTXOs from registering to coin joins. It was a very vague tweet with a burning candle in the dark. And so people started scratching their heads. Like, what, what does this mean? Gabriel So basically what it meant was that wasabi wallet was now going to partner with a chain analytic company to that Bitcoin that was going into the coin join. And if they were part of, you know, certain lists, they were going to be rejected from using wasabi wallet. Gabriel So this was very confusing for a so -called privacy wallet to be interacting and paying a chain analytics company to do this kind of thing. So immediately many people stopped using wasabi wallet. They stopped, they gave up their sponsorship, all kinds of stuff. Gabriel So this was, this was one thing that happened with wasabi. You have other problems, which many see as more fundamental. Wasabi has a different way of doing coin joining and there have been, and I'll just encourage people to kind of go look into it. Gabriel I have never done so at very great depth because the fact that they're vetting UTXOs is enough for me never to recommend it. But the, there are other problems with their coin joining that has not been airtight. Gabriel Let's just say, and that has, well, people can go look into that. The other thing that the samurai wallet team will point out is that nopara actually doxxed the names of samurai wallet in an article in the last few years, which is really just really slimy behavior. Gabriel So those are some of the things that we need to recognize with wasabi wallet. It's not something that I recommend by any means whatsoever. And yeah, we can kind of just leave it at the facts like that. Gabriel But that's kind of the situation with wasabi wallet. Doug I appreciate you breaking that down, man. And being the voice of, or representing the samurai community here, I know there is, you play an official role there, but you obviously follow these technologies very closely. Doug And there was concern that I gave Nopara a platform, which we won't get into the debate on whether or not there should be concern over me putting people on my so -called platform. But I appreciate you getting the other side of the story out. Doug And just anybody who's out there listening should know, I'm sure they already know, all sides are always welcome on the show, especially when it's regarding digital cash tech debate. So if you're in the samurai community and you ever wanna come on the show, you're more than welcome. Doug But Gabriel, I appreciate you putting that information out there. This leads me, I guess, to now the broader conversation of Bitcoin and Monero. What is your take on these projects? Do you use them both? Doug Do you store your wealth in Bitcoin and then use Monero for transacting? You being a privacy advocate and expert, give us your take there on these projects, on these tools. Gabriel I got into private Bitcoin specifically, which is a very specific thing. It means no KYC. It also means making use of a coin join. And the only one really these days to make use of is Samurai Wallet. Gabriel And so I got into private Bitcoin as a way to make anonymous payments online that were maybe more importantly, evading censorship, not dealing with the absolutely scummy, slimy financial system that we have today, right? Gabriel All this good stuff, permissionless, person to person transactions. So that's why I got into private Bitcoin a few years ago. And for me, I didn't care about the price. I didn't care about investment. Gabriel I didn't understand the value of it that all these people thought it was going to X dollar amount. And so for me, it was a tool. And then of course, I learned about Monero and it was an even better tool. Gabriel And so really I found in the last year, there's been a huge uptick in acceptance of Monero. I think it was Mullvad that in the last year and a half allowed you to start paying with Monero. And I remember just checking back one day and there it was, it was now accepting Monero. Gabriel So there's been a lot more acceptance of Monero, which makes it a lot more useful tool these days. And yeah, so for me, I find these useful tools. I would much rather use Monero these days, obviously to spend in terms of the saving argument. Gabriel So Seth for Privacy has guests on, who's been on my show, Watchman Privacy podcast. He's fond of saying, save in Bitcoin, spend in Monero. I think there might be something to that. I don't really overthink this and I don't really have any hot takes on what is the intrinsic value of crypto. Gabriel But I think for the Monero listeners who say, well, I would never touch Bitcoin. It's important to realize that it's always good to have a plan B, right? So it's really useful to understand a little bit of private Bitcoin. Gabriel And you can jump in the Ronin Dojo and the Samurai Wallet and the Sparrow Wallet Telegram Groups and start to learn it a little bit because you never know what can happen. And you never know when you might need to use it and it's best to kind of understand how it works so that you can continue to use these as the tools that they were meant to be, which is private or decently private options to transact without any of the scummy intermediaries who want to stop you from just using money. Gabriel So that's kind of how I see it. Doug What do you see as the difference in terms of utility that or value proposition that each of these tools offer? Bitcoin and Monero. Gabriel Yeah, I mean, you can't deny Bitcoin's network effect and the sheer amount of belief that people have in Bitcoin. That is, it's hard to imagine that ever going to zero, though I think that the crazy laser -eyed people are going to find that the price of Bitcoin might go down some day because the more you get regulatory approval, the less useful that tool actually is. Gabriel So Monero has all kinds of utility. It's easier. It settles more quickly. It's much more private. You don't have to worry about all the coin control for the most part and all this other stuff that you would in Bitcoin. Gabriel But Bitcoin has going for it, as I said, the network effect. And we could argue about some of the development decisions that it made. But I tend not to get too far down that again. I want these to be used as tools. Gabriel So I accept anything that I sell in Bitcoin or Monero. And I just want to be part of these circular economies. And I mostly talk about how to use these things because that's the only thing that I'm really interested in with crypto. Doug What advice do you give to people? I mean, you're obviously very much extreme in your privacy. Extreme privacy. I'm sure you've read this book, right? Gabriel Absolutely, of course. Doug I'm sure you've read that. Doug You're very extreme in your personal life, in how you've adopted privacy tech. So what advice do you give people with regards to crypto that want to be private? Do you just tell them Monero or do you also tell them Bitcoin? Doug And if so, why and what do you tell them? Gabriel So the advice that I would give people is anytime Monero is accepted, for goodness sake, use that obviously. It is also in your interest to understand Bitcoin for the instances where only Bitcoin is accepted, maybe you're dealing with somebody who doesn't know Monero, you can't sell them on it and they're only gonna take Bitcoin, so you can do that. Gabriel Maybe you have this sense that Bitcoin has some kind of intrinsic value and you just wanna hold that. But the important thing, Doug, for privacy is to always go about this with the correct operational security, running your own node for any of these is huge. Gabriel Using a VPN is a big deal. I never access the internet outside of a VPN. Tor, anytime you can have something running through Tor or using a web site with a Tor browser, absolutely a must. This is stuff that, you know, we're living in peacetime for crypto right now. Gabriel It's very accepted, but these are incompatible with government currencies, to be honest. And so we need to have this adversarial mindset and to the kind of the Bitcoin privacy people, I'll give them a credit that they kind of understand this adversarial mindset because they know that they're dealing with something that can trip them up. Gabriel That is transparent. So I do find that there's a lot of interesting people in some of the Bitcoin privacy groups who by the way, tend not to have any problem with Monero whatsoever. They're just kind of interested in the technology of Bitcoin and the coin joining and all this kind of interesting stuff. Gabriel And they're obviously very in tune with our operational security. So yeah, I mean, these are kind of the fundamentals. I think that's running your own node, using Tor, using VPNs and just verifying your software, all this kind of good stuff, absolutely essential. Gabriel Address reuse, it's more of a problem in Bitcoin, but you wanna avoid that when it comes to Bitcoin, you have to worry about things like coin control, et cetera. But just always being cognizant of what you're exposing and just minimizing that, if not for the present then for the future. Doug This is where I get caught in the samurai, Monero conversation. You're kind of pulling me in, not no fault of yours, but the adversarial mindset. Do you think the Monero community has even more of an adversarial mindset among the average Monero user as opposed to the Bitcoin privacy community or you see the Bitcoin privacy community as more adversarial? Gabriel Yeah, well, I don't need to poke at the Monero folks whatsoever. Doug I don't really understand why the Bitcoin privacy community has more of that brand when they're actually less adversarial and calculating in their extreme privacy and in, and in, in, in their pursuit of creating a technology and using a technology that can't be coopted or controlled or surveilled in any way. Doug I feel like the Monero people are like to the point of extreme where it's, it almost doesn't even make sense. Gabriel Yeah, so if this was just about privacy technology, right, if they would, you know, you might say, well, there's always the next one. There's something more to it. And for Bitcoin, you might call it simply the network effect. Gabriel There are a lot of people in these Bitcoin communities, which prefer the, like I said, the economic decisions that Bitcoin makes. I don't know exactly, you know, it kind of varies person to person. What I was simply saying is that I think the Bitcoin people, they kind of wake up and they're hardened, right? Gabriel They have this sense that, okay, we're dealing with something that could be exposing. So we just have to be careful about it. And whereas if you're kind of in Monero land, I, you know, find myself saying sometimes, well, you know, this is private. Gabriel So, you know, do maybe I forget my VPN one time or I don't bother going through tour or something like this. So that was kind of the only minor point. But, you know, it is the case that you can use Bitcoin. Gabriel If you buy Bitcoin in a no KYC manner, you're in pretty good shape. You put that through a coin join and you have some care about your coin control. And, you know, it's very unlikely that that is ever gonna come back to bite you if you're aware of it. Gabriel So, you know, is it better to have something that is automatically private? Absolutely. But these people in the Bitcoin privacy community, in the Bitcoin privacy communities, use Bitcoin quite privately. Gabriel And it's certainly possible to do that. It is, it is some work. But yeah, it's like Bitcoin's a surveillance coin. It's not a surveillance city. If you go out the right way, and so that's why you can kind of have your, you know, your feet in between both worlds, you know, have a plan B, be able to kind of swap back and forth depending on what people are looking for. Gabriel So, yeah, I'm comfortably happy to be in both worlds, even if these days, especially with the bloat in the blockchain recently, or rather in the cost to transact on Bitcoin in the last year because of ordinals, whereas a Monero transaction is pennies to do. Gabriel It's a much better spending tool. And the statistics bear that out. I released an episode with coin cards today. And I think you said that Monero transactions are 28%. Bitcoin was like 39%. Lightning was almost zero. Gabriel So that's pretty impressive for a coin with a much smaller, you know, network effect, market cap, whatever you wanna say. So, yeah, Monero's a vastly superior spending tool, 100%. Doug What is some advice you would give to the Monero community, people that are listening into this show, things that we can do to perhaps be more adversarial? What's some advice you would give to the Monero community? Gabriel Yeah, and again, I'm not trying to pick on anybody. I think things are pretty good. I just would encourage people to always, you know, look into Monero, right? What makes Monero private? What are the technologies? Gabriel Just spend a little bit of time looking at that. Don't just assume, hey, this is private and will forever be private. If that was the case, there wouldn't be, you know, hard forks that were kind of being considered on the horizon. Gabriel So just be cognizant of that. Always have your operational security in check. And yeah, I would just say that. I think when it comes to any advice how I would give for people in either community, I would just say, let's make these, let's use these. Gabriel Let's use these, let's accept these, let's spread the word because the network effect is really what makes a money succeed or not succeed. So that's also a big focus. Doug Any advice, I know it's the million dollar question, but any advice there on how we can grow the usage? I know I'm out here every week on this show and then on the live Monero Topia show telling people, let's use it, let's use it, give any examples of it, pointing people to resources. Doug We're building XMR Bizarre, which tends on being a peer -to -peer, Monero -based marketplace. But anything that you can think of like that would be great advice for anybody that's on board with that notion, what we can do together as a community to help make it happen. Gabriel Well, you would obviously know a lot better than I would, Doug, and you're doing great work to spread that word. The only thing that I might say is, if you're trying to spread the word, try to maybe approach it a little bit of a different way. Gabriel We do know that people don't really care about privacy, but if you sell it as, hey, you're not going, you'll get your PayPal account shut down for no reason whatsoever, that's not gonna happen with Monero. Gabriel So if you change the wording and say, hey, you can transact outside of the government's approval, outside of the banking approval, and you show different scenarios to people who are, let's say, skeptical of the banking system or the government, that can be another just little way to get people into it and just say, hey, look, you can put a Monero address on your website and have people pay you. Gabriel And there's nothing on earth that can stop that. That's another powerful way I've found of trying to convince people to jump on board. Doug Ultimately, big picture, do you feel that we can win? I mean that enough of us can opt out and move into this world of privacy tools and using Monero and Bitcoin privacy tools to transact daily and kind of create our own society? Doug Do you think there's enough momentum there? We're capable of doing this? Or is it a pipe dream? Gabriel It might be possible. I don't think these are ever going to be mass adopted. I don't think we necessarily want them to in some respects, but they're certainly not going to be mass adopted if they are a competition to the state. Gabriel Now you can say, well, maybe if enough people are using the tool, then it kind of tilts the, you know, the culture in one direction or another. That's certainly a possibility, but I don't know. I don't know, Douglas. Gabriel I've gotten this trying to carve out a little bit more freedom and privacy for myself and for the select few who understand these things and try to spread the word, but maybe at the end of the day, it's just going to be one of those things left for the dark alleys of the internet and people like it and want to use it. Gabriel We'll certainly have an avenue. Bitcoin. Satoshi opened Pandora's Box, in the sense that you can have something that has the properties of money and that's easy to transact with. And we're never going to, and of course, the blockchain, the ability to have these entities, these, you know, entries that are non -replicable. Gabriel That was a, in immense technological advance. And so we're always going to have these, but yeah, maybe it will just be a few people using it back and forth and maybe that's okay too. Doug I hear that notion expressed a lot like you know and I guess probably it is from the Bitcoin privacy communities this idea of maybe we don't want it to go mainstream once again I guess this is where I would like question and maybe disagree or try to understand Why why wouldn't we want as many people as possible using Monero? Gabriel Yeah, I think it's just sure as many people using Monero as possible. What happens when the, when everybody gets their hands on it, right? Is that, well, I mean, first of all, people can't get their hands on it, right? Gabriel Because you can't just go to Coinbase and buy your Monero. So already we see Monero is you can only track it down in certain ways. And so all right away, I think we can see that it's, it's only for the people who know how to get a peer to peer or who have their whatever is it still Kraken that, that still has it listed. Gabriel I forget. So it's, it's going to be a word of mouth thing and a person to person thing. And so I don't know that that can, and that's not a bad thing. You know, that's not a bad thing by any means. That just shows that the powers that be, see that it works. Gabriel The IRS can't crack it. And they're very upset about that. They're very displeased by that. And so they're going to ban it. And when you ban it, there's simply not going to be mass adoption. It's hard to imagine that that could be the case, right? Gabriel Are we really going to find people who know how to use websites like KYC not .me? And they're going to have a transaction with somebody who is, and you'll trade some fiat for Monero or something like this. Gabriel I just don't see it happening. And yeah, it requires a certain, a certain amount of expertise in operational security that is just not out there with the masses. So. Doug So you think they're going to bet? You think they'll ban Monero in the US? Gabriel They might, I think it's Dubai that you that I learned from you basically said yeah, you can't use privacy coins in Dubai now Like how can they stop somebody using Monero peer -to -peer? They can't obviously but they can shut down the on and off ramps and that certainly does a a Lot of work for the the normies And yeah, they're just never going to know about it. Gabriel They're never going to get into it I don't want to be too pessimistic. Maybe we can convince people Right, maybe I would love to convince people and you know talk to family and I just did a presentation with a bunch of I guess normies the other week and say hey look look how awesome this is Uh, and yeah, you know, they can get into it too, but it's going to require a lot of work and I don't think it will spread Doug Yeah, I mean, I'm obviously optimistic, right? I wouldn't be here. And I guess you wouldn't be here talking about the things you talk about either, right? If you weren't, I wouldn't have this, whoa, this optimistic imagery in my background, right? Doug I think there is a way. I think ultimately, if it comes down to it, Monero won't be banned in the US. And I don't think there's constitutional grounding there. And obviously, there's a lot of things that are technically unconstitutional that end up coming to pass. Doug But I think it will be a, I think there'd be enough momentum on the side of pro -free speech that they wouldn't be able to ban it. Maybe they could effectively try to ban it, right? By making it difficult for exchanges to interface with it, or people to interface with it. Doug But I don't think there'd actually ever be a ban. And if there is, then obviously, I'm optimistic in the other route where, OK, well, I guess we just have to use it amongst ourselves, similar to how we've seen with other tools and other bans. Gabriel Yeah, for sure. I think you're right about it, all of that. Yeah. And I think if it will survive anywhere, it'll be the United States, which despite all the travesties of American freedoms, it still remains a pretty awesome place in terms of freedom. Gabriel And the Constitution, under assault, is still respected by enough, at least, that it's not going to, you know, be a totalitarian third world country too soon. Doug Yeah, I certainly hope not. Although it's like boiling a frog, right? How about Bitcoin privacy tools? I mean, so do you have a similar concern there that those will also potentially be banned or whatever effectively banned? Gabriel potentially so this is where the crazy laser -eyed maxis who have these just bizarre Cult like Tendencies where they think that's right. I make the joke. It's like You go to a Bitcoin website and they're just talking about how you know 21 million is this magical number that God Hard -coded into the center of the universe for centrifugal stability or some nonsense like this Meanwhile, these people don't even use Bitcoin to transact They just think that has some magical value outside of its ability to transact and the numbers just gonna go up and the thing is The only value that I really see in something like Bitcoin is the fact that you can send it back and forth that you can transact And so at some point that number is gonna come crashing down when you know people realize that it doesn't have value besides that and if it ever got to that point where people Recognize that that was the only value and so they they started using it to transact. Gabriel Well, that's when you could see let's say the government Kind of treat it like Monero and say, okay You know people have stopped believing in Bitcoin as an investment It's back to being a you know a threat to The fiat system so we're gonna ban it like Monero But you know the the weird thing about Bitcoin is that it has all these people it has all this Institutional clout Bitcoin ETFs, etc. Gabriel I don't know what value they see in Bitcoin like these people who are buying ETFs Where you don't even own any Bitcoin. It's absolutely crazy It's just a bubble that that a huge part of Bitcoin is just this crazy crazy bubble that we're in and the actual use case is Used by very few So yeah, maybe I've kind of wandered off the question, but yeah... Doug I guess I was more focused on like right even recently right it's not even theoretical we saw we saw FinCEN proposed rules for Bitcoin mixing and actually yeah we saw that happen right and it hasn't passed yet but that's a very real move that the government is making towards potentially you know looking to ban these things right now they weren't proposing to ban it they're proposing rules where financial institutions would essentially have to file reports with FinCEN if it's believed that a Bitcoin or a cryptocurrency mixing tool was was used by a customer right before it was sent to an exchange for example um so yeah I mean knowing that right what what's your thinking there do you think that they effectively try to ban Bitcoin privacy tools Gabriel Yeah, so the best Bitcoin privacy tool is non -custody. And if you use it in that way, what shows up on the blockchain is simply random addresses paying one another. And so you can actually go pretty far with that. Gabriel But yeah, sure, the coin joins are a great tool for confusing the blockchain, right? And making it so that you hit a certain point when you're tracking things on the blockchain where, okay, you can kind of make assumptions like this may have come from here, but you cannot say for 100% certain. Gabriel It has no clear deterministic link. And then you can, of course, keep doing these coin joins and causing confusion. Now, I know that Samurai Wallet has high on their list of things to do, making the coordinator of the coin joins a decentralized sort of thing. Gabriel So I do think that we are close to having kind of all aspects of that. It's already non -custodial. And so I think that we're close, or Samurai Wallet is close to kind of solving the problem of this can't really be regulated feasibly. Gabriel And I know as well that they are, they have in the past Samurai Wallet, this is one reason why I give them tip of the cap because they have left countries that they've been in, in the past when I think it was the UK threatened, was threatening to ban self -custody wallets. Gabriel And so they actually moved out of Britain and maybe they would continue to do that until they can get kind of things completely set up where they're outside of the reach of the regulators. And it's open source, you know, it's free and open source software. Gabriel So if not them, you know, the next people. So I have some faith that the coin joins will be with us in Bitcoin for as long as needed. Doug Let me let me ask you, yes, so you bring up the coin joins and once again, obviously, I don't follow this very closely, right? I just use Monero. I looked back at my old interview that I had with Samurai from two years ago, and it was when they were first announcing that there would be Bitcoin to Monero, Atomic Swaps, and it was actually a fantastic conversation. Doug I recommend people go check that out, actually, if they want to hear a good conversation and Samurai Dev, I don't know what to call it, the Samurai Wallet guy, what his point of view is with regards to Monero, and it was great. Doug But one of the things he had brought up at that time, and I haven't been following the evolution since, is that coin joints are, in fact, identifiable, right? So you're not erasing all the history, so it's known that a coin join happened. Doug Is that no longer the case? And if so, what changed? Gabriel That's still the case, right? When you're surveying the blockchain, you can see, oh, this Bitcoin suddenly now went into a transaction with five or with four other UTXOs, and what got spit out were five UTXOs of identical value. Gabriel And yeah, that's clearly a coin join on the blockchain. Now, it's getting to the point where most or many transactions in Bitcoin, most UTXOs have a history of coin join because it's just, you know, it's like you have your cash and you give it to the person at whatever, Kroger, and maybe the maybe two stops ago, it was in a drug dealer's hands, right? Gabriel And it has traced cocaine on it or something. Well, you know, it's not your responsibility. That's kind of just how, you know, at the end of the day, almost all cash has, you know, traced amounts of cocaine. Gabriel So there's that argument that, you know, good luck starting to discriminate against coin joins when most UTXOs have a history of it. Samurai Wallet has other tools where basically you just send it to a successive amount of single addresses. Gabriel And so on the blockchain, now it just looks like, okay, there was a coin join, but that was five steps ago. Is that really as suspicious as, you know, do you really want to start banning UTXO if it was five, you know, five transactions ago? Gabriel So there's other tools in the in their in their quiver, so to speak. So I'm not too concerned about it, obviously. Monero is a lot simpler, a lot easier. But yeah, for people listening in Monero, and they're like, yeah, what, you know, this stuff sounds weird. Gabriel It is possible to, it is possible to, to have your anonymity in Bitcoin. There's, you know, it's not again, it's not a surveillance coin. And it's actually kind of interesting when you just kind of look at it intellectually, some of the tools that are available to use the blockchain surveillance against itself. Doug Yeah, I often call it a surveillance coin. And I haven't been convinced otherwise. I mean, I respect what Bitcoin privacy tools are doing to try to you know, get around the nature of Bitcoin. But fundamentally, it's a transparent ledger. Gabriel Right, but if I get some NoKYC Bitcoin from somewhere and I buy a Mullvad subscription and buy something else, nobody knows that's me. Nobody in the world knows that that is me. So it's possible to have some anonymity. Doug Definitely as possible, but kind of dangerous. And if you mess up or leave some other kind of breadcrum along the way, the pieces could be put back together. I mean, even with Monero, there's heuristics that can be used, even with cash itself. Doug So the more flaws that the tool has, the harder it is to not be a victim of those flaws. Let's just jump to another topic, just kind of big picture again. So given that we're talking about being adversarial and the need to be aware of what we're up against here, do you think we should be political? Doug Like I ran for Congress here in New York and a big part of really the main reason I ran was because I saw the writing on the wall with regards to where this stuff was going and potential banning. And I wanted somebody to be on the floor of Congress to make the pro free speech money argument, all the reasons why it aligns with the Constitution and aligns with the ideals that the United States has founded upon. Doug Do you think that we should be doing those types of things or we should take more of the cypherpunk approach only? I think we should do a hybrid, but do you think we should take the cypherpunk approach only and kind of just build the tools, make them unstoppable and don't try to even interface with our overlords here? Gabriel Yeah, so obviously I'm a big proponent of routing around the state and just trying to be off the grid and all these kind of good things. It is the case, though, as you kind of reference their dog, that it would be great if we lived in society where we didn't have to do that stuff. Gabriel Right. So if we lived in the, the early years of America, even, let's say, the first century of America, you had a federal government that didn't really have any power. And you didn't have any restrictions on your gun ownership, and you had very few taxes, and there were no surveying entities for the most part. Gabriel And it was a nice place to be a free human being. And if you have a society like that, you know, we wouldn't need to be talking on, you know, dark corners of the internet about, you know, various, various tools and having Tor and all the rest. Gabriel I don't ever want to get rid of these tools. I think they're essential. But I do recognize that there's a bigger fight here, and that is having a society where privacy is simply acceptable, like it was, let's say, in the United States in the first hundred years. Gabriel And that is a fight. Is that a political fight? Or I tend to think that politics is downstream from culture. So, you know, we need to, I think, just be better humans, be learned to trust our neighbors and have local communities and solve things at the local level. Gabriel And yeah, basically a combination of these things. I'm not giving up the privacy tools. I'll keep using them and teaching people how to use them. But I don't know that, you know, using VPNs and Tor is going to solve kind of the underlying problem, which is cultural and, sure, political. Gabriel Politics is an expression of our cultures. We get the governments that we deserve. So that's kind of how I see it. Doug Yeah, and I love that idea, and you talked about it very eloquently yesterday. So let's get into that a little bit more, if you don't mind. I think that's kind of a great thread to pull upon, and it's a big idea. Doug What do you mean by that? That, you know, we got to change the culture, perhaps even, you know, more so than the politics, right? That politics is downstream from the culture. Culture is where it's at. Doug How do we change the culture? And what does it need to be changed to? Gabriel Yeah, so it's a good question. And there's the argument that it's hard to go back to where we were, but I guess if you just were to rewind, let's talk about America. If you were to rewind America for 200 years, let's say, you have a people who did not have a large government because they were self -sufficient and they were not litiginous, right? Gabriel They solved things in their local community. Let's say they had a religious network where their church or whatever was able to solve problems which today we might offload to the state, the local state or the county and the state and the federal government. Gabriel There are one out of 300 people in the U .S. is a lawyer. So it's, we have abandoned many things that made early Americans, let's say, not need a large federal government. People were not, people were ashamed to be on welfare back then or would be ashamed by the concept of welfare. Gabriel They took care of these things themselves, right? Through their churches and what have you. Whereas today we just assume, yeah, that's the government's responsibility. Meanwhile, the government is happy to take that responsibility and just get larger and larger and larger. Gabriel So I guess I think if we look at any government overreach today, we can track that down to we gave up responsibility for something at some point. And as with any kind of entity with monopolistic power on force, if you give them more power, it's simply going to enlarge and it's going to take more and more power for itself. Doug So, simple solution or obvious solution is opt out, right? Opt out, build our own circular economy, circular society, right? Where we are no longer a part of the quote, unquote matrix, where we're spoon -fed information and propaganda and just kind of rebuild there. Gabriel I'm a big fan of these things and you might just kind of think of all your interactions with the state, right? And see, hey, what if I just did this differently? You have trash, right? That is a city service. Gabriel Well, what would I do with my trash if I didn't have them, right? They're not doing the roads. Well, what if I, you know, patched up the roads myself? My neighbor is causing me a problem. Well, instead of calling the police, why don't I go over there and talk to them and try to work it out ourselves? Gabriel Maybe our, you know, our local area has some solutions that we don't need to rely on on certain utilities. So if you just think about it in that way, I do think ultimately those are just the kind of the philosophical solutions to the predicament we're on. Gabriel But you know, I'm willing to consider all tools because I don't imagine that we're necessarily going to change things. And so let's, let's not give up our Monero and Tor browser or VPNs just yet. Doug And I'm kind of asking the same question again, but do you think it's ultimately futile or there is a chance for us as a society to reinvent our culture and get back to the quote, unquote, good old days when everybody understood the importance of liberty when people understood it was a quote, unquote, God given given concept, right? Doug Where we're not asking government to provide it to us. But we know that it's something that every human is born with. Do you think where it's possible for us to move the needle in that direction to a large enough degree where we actually change things? Gabriel maybe possible, but unlikely. And it's going to require us to give up many of the, yeah, without getting to, without offending too many people... Gabriel Giving up feminism, right? Giving up all kinds of things that are products of the last 100 year cultural things that have, I think, led to the problem. Gabriel De-programming. You know, this idea that we want more and more people to have the vote and younger and younger, was not a product of the original American founders. They despised democracy, in fact, and write nothing about democracy in the founding documents. Gabriel So, yeah, I mean, it would be a serious endeavor. It would require individual responsibility at the end of the day. And yeah, I don't know how to instill that in people, but sure, I'll be somewhat idealistic and say it's possible, but unlikely. Doug And it seems like what we're up against has ultimate power and control at this point. Yes, we have these tools, these amazing new tools that were invented, cryptocurrency and Tor and all these things. Doug But it does seem like what we're up against is an all powerful thing that is exponentially gaining power by the day because of the way it's built with this constant feedback loop of everybody tuned in and tuned into the, you know, basically plugged into the matrix and being programmed and reprogrammed and controlled. Doug What do you think is what ultimately what do you believe we are up against? Is this just a natural product of evolution that we're just up against technology or is there something more sinister? Is there some force that's looking to control humanity and is using technology to do it? Gabriel And that was a polite way of saying, are you conspiracy theorist or not? That's, I, I, I entertained all. Doug What is your theory? What is your theory? Yeah, so what theories do you have? Gabriel Well, yeah, I don't know that I have anything too profound. I went into this just assuming the absolute worst quote unquote threat model possible. That's why I don't really talk about threat model. I just think should assume the absolute worst and go for broke, basically, whether or not you think that we're controlled by a select group of people or that there's an agenda to purposefully remove testosterone from human males or whatever. Gabriel It doesn't matter in a certain sense because I and my techniques that I talk about on my show and elsewhere and the things I encourage people to do are for the most part acceptable to combat all of those things. Gabriel So yeah, I don't know that I don't know if it's purposefully malicious or if it's an accident. I do know and I have a good episode called privacy and psychopaths that there's a about one percent of the population who maybe makes up 10 percent of the government who literally has the inability to see others as anything but means to an end who literally does not have a conscience and is morally bankrupt and wants to control people and that the influence of these people has increased. Gabriel The more centralization has increased and we see that psychopaths have altered world history, whether that's Stalin, etc. You have a basically a different species of human that's a and this is scientific. Gabriel This is not even conspiracy theory. This is just the basics. I talk about the soft side of the head. Psychopathy. So this is this is a group of people and they do exist and they do exert control and corporations and the government. Gabriel And yeah, I mean, I don't need to look so much at the news these days. I just assume, okay, I know that there are psychopaths. I know that they're drawn to power. I know that they encourage others around them who are not psychopaths to kind of think similarly. Gabriel And yeah, I kind of assume the worst and prepare for the worst. And that's just how I go about it. I would be, you know, I'm very interested in in trying to get to the bottom of all this, but I don't know that we ever will. Gabriel So doesn't mean I won't stop trying, but I don't. Yeah, don't really have very elevated thoughts about what is the. You know, who's the real enemy, basically? Doug Okay, yeah, fair enough. I mean, because it is just conjecture, right? But I guess if we could know, we'd certainly want to know, because I think that would motivate a lot more people to be up in arms about it, which is really what we need. Doug And yeah, I often talk about this concept of psychopaths. It's been around forever since humans were human. There was always a psychopath lurking somewhere. But historically, we've always been able to topple them. Doug But the issue now is they have an amazing amount of power at their fingertips with technology, and like you said, with the centralized systems that they control. So it's a question of can we topple them? Gabriel Um, yeah. So you're right that we've had psychopaths throughout human history. Uh, Shakespeare talks about, um, is it Iago in his, uh, in his play anyway, he calls it a motiveless malignity. And so yeah, psychopaths are a, they're basically a separate species of humans. Gabriel And yeah, um, in our, our current organization where we have such centralization, we have tools like the internet, which on the one hand are freeing, but can also be, um, means for, for control. And we, we know so much more about psychological manipulation, how human minds work, which is on the one hand a blessing, but it also allows people to be controlled as we saw during the, uh, the last three years. Gabriel So yeah, there's so many more means to, to control people. Um, and, uh, yeah, you know, the, the expression, psychopathy is actually an interesting thing for people to look into. And again, I would encourage people to check out my episode first, um, privacy and psychopaths because there is, on the one hand, it is a biological thing. Gabriel Right. They have different, um, basically different chemicals in the brain that ensure that they do not see the world or they do not have the same emotions as, as humans do. Um, but there was also a cultural component to it. Gabriel And, um, for example, they claim that there are many more times the amount of psychopaths in the West as in the East, right? As in Asian countries. And yet the theory behind that, exactly a narcissism and, um, selfishness to a, a negative degree. Gabriel I'm pro selfishness, right? I'm in iron randian, but selfishness to a, uh, kind of a toxic degree. And so there is a cultural expression of, of psychopathy. Um, and yeah, they, they certainly bloom a lot more in the, uh, in, in our current cultural climate, but, uh, yeah. Gabriel Can we rest control from their hands? Uh, I do see a lot of people waking up and, uh, you know, time will tell. Doug Do you think Ayn Rand would be a Monero user? Gabriel Yeah, the one thing about Ayn Rand was that she was not an anarchist. And so she thought, yeah, and so the fiat, the inflation, was not as big a problem in her day. And so she doesn't talk so much about that. Gabriel She's so honed in on individuals who are absolutely on pursuing their purpose. And most of the time, that was architectural or entrepreneurial. That I can see her not really caring. It's kind of hard to imagine her not caring about fiat money, the fiat money scam, but I don't know. Gabriel There's, yeah, it's an interesting question. Doug And so I guess we could kind of bring this full circle here or kind of talk where we probably should have started, which was how did you get into all of this? I mean, you're a privacy guru. Was it that crypto took you down this road or you were already previously going down that road and that's how you bumped into Bitcoin, privacy tools and Monero. Doug What was kind of your arc to getting to this place? Gabriel So it's no mistake that the brand started during COVID. And I have my nice little warning on my Amazon listing for my privacy guide about, you know, click here to learn more about COVID. I think it's because I titled one of my chapters, COVID 1984. Gabriel But that's just a theory. So thank you Amazon for having the fact checkers on top of that. But so it's no mistake that the brand started during COVID. And for me, it was simply, I recognized the importance of individual freedom and I finally developed a political spine, right? Gabriel Or a philosophical spine. And I became at the time libertarian, I'm probably even more extreme now. And I thought that privacy was maybe not talked about enough at the time. The people who were talking about privacy were in some cases, oddly communist, especially on the privacy Reddit. Gabriel And that rode me very much the wrong way. They were afraid of Facebook, but not so much their own governments. And so I started the brand as a, honestly, you know, as a way to create something, have a, you know, create something, a business and give people value and, you know, hopefully get some value in return. Gabriel So that honestly, that was kind of the main motivation. In the process, I found that there was a whole lot to talk about in the realm of privacy that others were not talking about, whether that was the philosophy of privacy or I quickly got into the crypto aspect of it, which certain people were not talking about in the privacy sphere, which is silly, you know, at this point in time. Gabriel And yeah, so there wasn't, there wasn't like a triggering event, right? You know, a Batman kind of parent's die event that made me interested in privacy. It was just a slow accumulation. And I, you know, decided one day, you know, I can create stuff that's useful to people. Gabriel So on my, the Watchman Privacy Podcast, I interview people who develop privacy tools and we don't just talk about digital stuff. We talk about physical privacy a whole lot and legal privacy and legal structures and, you know, how to, you know, learn privacy from people who have been homeless and all kinds of interesting things. Gabriel And yeah, now it's just become a kind of, a little bit of an obsession. Maybe I go a little bit too far, but I think a lot of people appreciate my style and that I try to cover all aspects of privacy, not just one aspect of it, and that I lean into the politics and the philosophy. Gabriel And yeah, so it's kind of developed a, Watchman Privacy has developed a personality of its own, for sure. Doug And I'm sure it's been a liberating experience, right? Gabriel Absolutely, yeah, not just to have a, you know, a means to be in some sense independent from all of the financial nonsense in the world, but to, yeah, of course, I practice what I preach. So like the on my Twitter profile right now, the pin tweet is showing some of my statistics, you know, I have, you know, not connected my name to the place that I've been going to sleep at at night for the last four years. Gabriel VPN usage 100% cash only all these kind of things, and it has been liberating the just this year minimalism is another aspect that I talked about pertaining to privacy. You know, it's not about. Yeah, it's it's it's not about having more things having more encrypted messengers. Gabriel It's actually about having fewer. So I have some kind of counterintuitive takes on privacy that I often bring up, but yeah, it's been liberating to kind of escape certain aspects of the system and also to just practice minimalism and realize that you can actually get by with being almost a neo Luddite these days. Gabriel Obviously, I learned the technology, but that doesn't mean I rely on it every day. So yeah, it's been a it's been liberating in many respects. Doug I'm smiling because that's very much my nature as well. We touched on it yesterday. One of the fondest moments in my life was when I broke my cell phone out of college after I graduated. And I just started my first full -time job. Doug And my cell phone broke. I mean, this is many years ago. This is a pre-smart phone. But we're still tethered to our phones at that time, texting and whatnot. And a week went by. I didn't fix it. Two weeks went by, two months. Doug And I ended up going an entire year without it. And it was just great. I was just checking my voicemail to get back. You know, if the call wasn't important enough, they would leave a voicemail. Otherwise, I guess they didn't really need to get to me. Doug And it just gave me so much time and ability to focus on things and to focus on my own thoughts. I've always been the type of guy de -tethered, you know, having had a TV. Well, I have a TV in my house, but kind of like got rid of cable. Doug One of the early people, you know, not have cable or anything, right? Just use the internet and get information from that. And it's definitely liberating. It's kind of ironic that we live in these modern times and we have all these tools that can do these things for us. Doug But it ends up being quite exhausting, right? Because it's so overwhelming. And all of these things are fighting for our time and stealing it. Gabriel I agree. And this is also something I talk about. I talk about lifestyle stuff. I have a couple of good episodes. One to the come to mind. Jason is a private person and escaping the culture industry. Gabriel And we just talk about, yeah, how do we become ends in ourselves as, as human beings and not reliance on all this technology, which in most cases is not actually progressive. Like we don't need all this stuff. Gabriel It's not actually making us better humans. I take more steps without a fitness tracker than if I had one. I'm more productive without productivity software. Yeah, it's a, it, it, in many cases it, it's a trap and we need to be careful about what is actual good technology and what is just a distraction. Doug All right, Gabriel, man, thank you so much. This is fantastic. And I greatly appreciate you letting me have you twice. I think this is a much better product here. Once again, no fault of yours on the first go around. Doug That was all me. And so greatly appreciate it. And thank you, man. Gabriel My pleasure. Watchman Privacy Podcast, and you'll, you know, it's free and you'll find everything else you want to from there. So yeah, it's been my pleasure and hope to talk again. Doug Yeah, cheers. Maybe we could get you to jump on a Monarotopia show one of these days. That would be nice too. Gabriel Absolutely. Looking forward to spreading the word with the Monero. It's a huge tool, a big proponent. Everything I do, I accept Monero and I give back in Monero. So, yep. Doug Thank you, Gabriel. Thank you. Cheers.