Seth is VP of Cake Wallet, a self custody bitcoin wallet available on ios, android, and desktop. We discuss their privacy focused features and how they plan to iterate going forward. We also discuss various other developments throughout the wider open source ecosystem.
Seth on Nostr: https://primal.net/sethforprivacy
Seth on X: https://x.com/sethforprivacy
Cake Wallet: https://cakewallet.com/
EPISODE: 162
BLOCK: 899540
PRICE: 959 sats per dollar
(00:00:00) CNBC Intro
(00:03:07) Happy Bitcoin Monday
(00:04:34) Guest Introduction: Seth for Privacy
(00:12:23) Cake Wallet Overview
(00:17:25) Shitcoin Support and Strategy
(00:26:17) Silent Payments Explained
(00:50:51) Lightning Network Integration Challenges
(00:56:31) Payjoin Implementation
(01:09:05) Cashu and Custodial Wallets Discussion
(01:36:12) Nostr and Distributed Social Media
(02:06:42) Seedless Wallets Debate
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[00:00:00]
Unknown:
So what's what's Bitcoin, what is it moving with just risk assets at this point? It got back to an all time high, which which you were forecasting as well. But now I think what are we one zero four this morning? So let's pull back. Yeah. I think it's consolidating. It makes sense. You know, Bitcoin is responding to global liquidity, which is moving up and I think anticipating a dovish Fed next year. So that's a tailwind for Bitcoin.
[00:00:25] Unknown:
But, you know, Bitwise has a great stat. You know, 95% of all Bitcoin's been mined, but 95% of the world doesn't own Bitcoin. So I I just think that there's still a huge demand versus supply imbalance, meaning there's a lot more potential buyers of Bitcoin over the next ten years. And so I think there's a lot of upside into year end. In into your, like, one fifty target? Yeah. One fifty, maybe 200, even two fifty this year. What?
[00:00:51] Unknown:
One fifty to to 200 to even two fifty. And what what's your you don't have a terminal price on that, do you? Well, it's,
[00:01:00] Unknown:
I think at a minimum, it should have the same network value as gold. And if you look at above ground gold, it's probably 23,000,000,000,000. So that would be, you know, 1,200,000.0 for Bitcoin. But I think Bitcoin is more valuable than gold. So, you know, gold I mean, Bitcoin could be 2,000,000, you know, 3,000,000 long term. I mean, even higher.
[00:01:20] Unknown:
Okay. Thank you. And and we're talking years, obviously. But 95% mined. I don't think the last one is is mined till, what, 2150
[00:01:29] Unknown:
or something. Yeah. It's getting harder and harder. Yeah. I mean, depending on how what decimal you wanna use, it's probably, like, you know, twenty, twenty forty or something. But
[00:01:39] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. But it's yeah. If you're cutting if you're having something forever, it'll always So what's your terminal value? That's what we just No. Yeah. I mean, the final final. He said two and a half million. Two and a half million at the end. Yeah. Or may I mean, more maybe higher. I'm sorry. I'm gonna appreciate that point. Yeah. I mean, it could, you know But I guess what I I'm sorry. The way I meant that is does that happen at the end after it's all When it's all mined. When it's all mined?
[00:02:03] Unknown:
Yeah. And there'll be network fees generally. Or does that happen pre before it's mined? It's like as if Berkshire did a buyback and there was only one share left. What would Berkshire's share price be? You know, it'd be it'd probably be the market value per And as you said
[00:03:07] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Monday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro clip was used just for laughs. I think that happened today on CNBC. I don't know what timeline we live in, but that was just pure slop. Even Joe seemed like he was he was tired. He was he was get he was he was he was getting tired. Guys, we have a great discussion lined up. Before we get started, just real quick, dispatch as always is funded by our audience directly.
No ads or sponsors. It is supported by viewers like you supporting the show with Bitcoin donations. There are three main ways of doing that. You can do it with Nasr after the show ends by zapping the video. You can do it in our live chat, which you can find at cildispatch.com/stream, which has Bitcoin enabled. Or you can zap on podcasting two point o apps like Fountain Podcasts. The highest app from last week was from Come Rocket, ride or die freak with 21,069 sats. He said, thank you, sir. He also told me separately that that payment might have failed because of poor liquidity on my node. Thank you for trying. I appreciate the support regardless. Guys, today, I have returned guest, good friend, Seth for privacy here talking about his his new project. He he relatively recently joined Cake Wallet, and, they have some amazing Bitcoin integrations that we'll be talking about today. Seth, how's it going?
[00:04:54] Seth For Privacy:
It is going great, man. Yeah. I, tired after a long Vegas week. I know you you skipped the fun. You abandoned us, but, some of us were out there, you know, presenting, interviewing, chatting with 30,000 people about Bitcoin and, unfortunately, getting asked about Ripple a few times.
[00:05:15] ODELL:
Which Did you talk to all 30,000? So,
[00:05:18] Seth For Privacy:
it feels like it. It feels like it.
[00:05:21] ODELL:
What? They showed Ripple as the on the price chart. Right? They still do that. I don't know whether they Yeah. They they still somehow, it still got some semblance of of relevance pretty set to see. Well It's crazy. I mean, let's start there since you brought it up. First of all, I felt absolutely zero FOMO whatsoever not being in Vegas. How was it? What were the highlights? What were your takeaways?
[00:05:47] Seth For Privacy:
I mean, similar to you, I would think. I wasn't there for the, like, the main stage stuff. Like, Ross' side, there was nothing for me personally, and that's not not to slam the Bitcoin mad guys, but nothing for me personally on the main stage really. But the the open source or open source stage is always just fantastic. There's so many people that get to come together that you don't normally get to have conversations with. And that's something that I really, really appreciate. I mean, unfortunately, like, I was working a booth the whole time. So I was basically talking to people, like, ten hours a day.
I got to do a panel on a presentation, which was a blast as well. But I didn't really get I didn't get to see anybody's,
[00:06:30] ODELL:
talks or anything. On the open source stage?
[00:06:33] Seth For Privacy:
My panel was open source open source stage. The, the presentation was to the the dev zone, which I think was the, like, lava dev zone this year or something. Just like a smaller side stage.
[00:06:43] ODELL:
How was the venue for the open source stage? What do you think the seating capacity was?
[00:06:49] Seth For Privacy:
It was a lot bigger than last year for sure. I think it was probably A thousand people? Probably about a thousand. Yeah. I would say. And pretty well attended. Yeah. I felt like like, again, I didn't see it throughout all the different talks, but being up there from my panel, it felt like it was probably they're probably good five, six hundred people in there at least. That's awesome. Yeah. A lot better attended attended than I expected, honestly, which is good to see. I mean, that's that's the signal there. Like, %, that's the signal there. So it was it was great to be a part of that.
[00:07:19] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, the open source stage has a close close spot in my heart because, for many years there, it was the Odell stage. To the new freaks, I consulted for Bitcoin magazine from 2020 when there were eight employees. 02/20/2023 was my last my last showing. So it was three conferences. It was '21, '20 '2, and '23.
[00:07:49] Unknown:
Mhmm. And
[00:07:50] ODELL:
I will say that, despite, you know, might not people might not just agree with all the decisions made by Bitcoin Magazine. David Bailey and leadership there were always very supportive of the open source initiative. We championed giving developers free tickets. The first one was, like, this tiny dome we had for the open source stage. It was like a sweaty nerd tent. We thought there was air conditioning. There wasn't. They're always good about not putting shit sponsors on the on the stage. Mhmm. It was basically a lost leader, like, never made profit. And it got bigger and bigger, and it was good to see that after I left that they continued the the trend. It was it, you know, it it was not a given. It was not a given. It takes a lot of efforts. It takes a lot of time.
People don't realize their team is absolutely tiny. And then the last piece I will say on that is all these conference centers are union run. So live streams cost way more than they should. So that's why they never live stream that stage. They usually only live stream the main stage. But everything is recorded. So I presume we'll start to see those panels get panels and presentations get released over the next few weeks as they cut up the content and post it. So just keep an eye out for that. I'm sure there was a lot of good stuff there that that I'm not even aware of.
[00:09:24] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't aware of that, but that that makes a lot more sense why that wouldn't be live streamed because it had all the gear and everything there. So
[00:09:30] ODELL:
yeah. Yeah. As soon as you, like, press the live button, it, like, goes up a hundred x. That's crazy. It's crazy. And Internet too. Like, the Internet is all unionized. It's all a fucking it's all a fucking mess. That explains why it's also have Internet. There was no expo Internet. There was no, like There you go. Crazy. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. And, that's also why it's impressive that they accept Bitcoin too because you have to, like you know, it's the unions bought try and block everything, and they've been accepting Bitcoin. I think for all their events, they've accepted Bitcoin, or at least all the ones that I was part of. I think in 2019, they accepted it. It was the only one I wasn't It's before my time. Before. Mhmm.
Anyway, Seth, Cake Wallet. When did you join Cake Wallet?
[00:10:20] Seth For Privacy:
September. So nine months already. It's absolutely flown by. But, yeah, last September.
[00:10:26] ODELL:
And your title is vice president. You're the JD Vance of K Quality. You're not like the you're not like the VP of something. You're just VP.
[00:10:35] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. Yeah. Just VP. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was an awesome an awesome opportunity. I've known Vic for a long time, and I know we were chatting a little bit before before we hit record, but I've known Vic for a long time. He's one of the most, like, generous and kind men that I've ever had the had the privilege of getting to hang out with. Met him a long time ago at, MoneroCon in 2019. So before I before I got more into the Bitcoin scene, that was my first conference I'd ever been to. And we just always have had, like, a loose friendship since then, but, yeah, I mean, the the opportunity came up for really, he needed somebody to run run the business, run the day to day.
And, obviously, I'm deeply passionate about all the things that they've been shipping. Like, they had already shipped silent payments before that. They already kicked off the effort around PayJoin before that. Obviously, started as a Monero only wallet originally, so, a privacy ethos at its core. So there was already a a clear alignment there, and I've gotten to spend a good bit of time with the team as well last year at a conference. I'm just getting to hang out with them at dinners and stuff. And just absolutely fantastic people. So when the opportunity came up, it was a it was a no brainer to to jump over and get to get, really get my hands on a lot more in the privacy space, especially from a Bitcoin perspective, because there's there's so much that you can build today that's really hard to build because no one else is building it, yet, unfortunately.
And it it's, I think just the really the perfect team to to jump into that with. But yeah. Yeah. VP pretty much running the day to day. Vic's still involved and getting more involved now now that a a side business of his is a little more chill. So loving that as well, but, really great to be able to, yeah, just do a lot of the product the product design, help fantastic devs be able to ship more fantastic releases, and been a blast so far.
[00:12:21] ODELL:
I love it. So okay. Where should we start here? First of all, I wanna say that a particular passion of mine, since helping to launch ten thirty one Mhmm. Is the idea of profitable, false, self custody focused businesses. A lot of people say it's not possible. Cake Wallet is one of the exceptions or one of the trailblazers in that front. So it's incredibly impressive that you guys are fully MIT licensed, fully false. Anyone can fork it, but you actually have a sustainable profitable business model. So, I wanna put that out there because Yeah. It's it's an exception to a rule right now. But, hopefully, as we start, you know, charting this path into the future where, we're we'll we'll start to see more more profitable false businesses. Yeah. I see Rob Hamilton in the comments, cofounder of Anchor Watch.
I think ten thirty one is the largest investor in Anchor Watch. He was on the show, and I was trying to get him to, make a self custody wallet, open source. So we had a bit of a back and forth. Well, as you can see, Rob, I see you in the live chat. It's possible someone's doing it. It is. And, commendable. So Cake Wallet, self custody wallet available on Android and iOS. Is it available on desktop?
[00:13:51] Seth For Privacy:
It is. Yeah. Yeah. I would say the the mobile experience is definitely the best right now. But one of our goals for the the second half of this year is revamping the desktop from the ground up, especially for power users, like, trying to bring much better coin control, better hardware, all that support, trying to make something that can grow with you just like the mobile app. But I'd say the the desktop app is kind of a I don't know if I should say this as the VP of the company, but kind of a second class that is in right now, to the mobile app. So mobile is definitely the best experience, but we are on all major desktop platforms as well. And lots of work coming that way over the next six months or so.
[00:14:24] ODELL:
I love it. Okay. So, self custody false wall available on pretty much every platform.
[00:14:32] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[00:14:34] ODELL:
You support you you already stated you supported Monero first, then you added Bitcoin, and you have a bunch of other shit coins in there too. Right? It's like Yeah.
[00:14:43] Seth For Privacy:
Some some that I'm cool with, some that I I'm gonna keep fighting back to remove. So
[00:14:48] ODELL:
there's People use Nano? Like, that is, like, clicking around in there?
[00:14:53] Seth For Privacy:
Surprisingly, yes. I mean, not it's not, like, huge, I would say. So I'll I'll I'll caveat everything I say about usage with the fact that we care deeply about privacy so much so that we have no logging, no analytics, no usage info. We don't know anything about the users of our wallet, who creates a Nano wallet, how much crypto you have, obviously, anything like that. So you don't know how much Nano I own? We I I don't. I don't. I can assume. I think I can make a pretty good assumption. I think the heuristic there is pretty, pretty high about probably a % to to having zero, but, you know, you never know. Maybe you're secretly a nano shell. You're one of those bots in my replies over the last, five or six years. But yeah. Not nano, I don't think, is a huge one. But, yeah.
[00:15:37] ODELL:
So so, I mean, I I have I guess we're starting with the hard hitting questions because I I don't want you to necessarily, like, alienate your user bases. Yeah. But what is the thought process there? Because, like, Nano was something that, like, I was arguing with people on, like, the Nano bot army. I was arguing with them, like, five years ago, six years ago. Yeah. And it's, like, something that I hadn't even considered. I I complete let me put it this way. I completely forgot about them until I was testing out Cake before the show. Yeah. I
[00:16:08] Seth For Privacy:
mean, I'll yeah. I'll say the same. I forgot about them until I started at cake. It's it's never been a concern of mine. A lot of the stuff was obviously added before I joined. So, like, some of the stories there aren't huge. I think the clear one for Nano though is just that it has been something that people actually like to use and spend, but it does seem like it's died out. Like, the idea behind it was always one that was focused on spending, but I just haven't seen much much life there. But we we do definitely get, like like, some of the coins we have, like, literally no one even open support tickets or something. So, like, those are those are ones we probably would remove. But, Nano, we do get some signs of life, some people posting on socials about using it to to do things, but it's certainly not a, like, a a top tier coin or anything.
[00:16:51] ODELL:
Anyway, I'm not gonna ask you, like, shit on specific sets of users. But, Just we can just go cryptocurrency by cryptocurrency. I can just Yeah. You know people I can piss off in one recording. I just I just we we said before the show that I really like this fit for you because both the Monero Maxis and the Bitcoin Maxis hate you, and I just feel like it's just a really ideal situation for you to be in. Mhmm. No. But just big picture, like, is the plan to flood the app with even more shitcoins, or is it maybe reduce it and be a little bit more focused?
[00:17:25] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. I mean, I I think, generally, the plan is reduce it. Obviously, it's that's something you wanna approach carefully as a self custodial wallet. Because, obviously, if those users haven't backed up their seeds properly Right. Or something and you We're kinda locked in to the tech debt. Yeah. It's a it's a little bit painful. Like, I would say it can be done. We removed one recently, that has been coming for a long time. It was called Haven. They've finally shut down the project. They should have. It was like a privacy focused stablecoin, but,
[00:17:54] ODELL:
the desert Was it a fork of Monero?
[00:17:57] Seth For Privacy:
Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was supposed to have, like, this algorithmic stablecoin that you could move back and forth between the, like, the base asset and the different stablecoins. Again, interesting in practice, but they just they got they got hacked. Like, I don't think that's ever happened. Over the years. Yeah. It it I've given up on algorithmic stable coins. The I think they're they're doomed. If someone proves it and it works for, like, five years, maybe I'll be interested. But
[00:18:20] ODELL:
even just Tether year. It's just Tether and then Bitcoin standard, I think. But we'll see.
[00:18:26] Seth For Privacy:
I I think, generally, though, yeah, it's it's reduced. Like, my perspective is, like it or not, we're in a multi crypto world, And people the vast majority of people, not the vocal minority on Twitter or something, but the vast majority of people, use multiple things. Most of them save in Bitcoin. Many of them spend in Monero. Many of them spend in stablecoins or use stablecoins as a an escape from their broken fiat. So, like, my my vision and I won't say necessarily this is exactly what CAKE will do because, obviously, I don't own CAKE. But my vision is that we embrace the tools that people are using for freedom, and focus heavily on those, making it much easier to achieve privacy on Bitcoin, making it much easier to use Monero day to day, making it much easier to use ZTM chains for stablecoins. As painful as that is. I'm still very torn on the whole stable coin topic, because I know it's helping a lot of people while at the same time is basically a CBDC.
So that one's a little bit harder for me, but that's kinda the way that I'm approaching it. And some of the stuff, like, some of the stuff that's been in the in the wallet is, like, very interesting technical approaches or unique unique privacy coins, that sort of thing. That's interesting and doesn't doesn't really cause too many problems. But focus for me is really trying to embrace, like, what what is providing freedom to people around the world, and how can we best serve that? And as I'm sure you know, unfortunately, a lot of times that's not Bitcoin, even though it it should be more, I think.
[00:19:59] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I'm just I'm scrolling through the shit coins. The I I I see you have Tron support. So I assume that also supports Tron Tether. Right? Yep. Yep. Like, that one that one makes the most sense to me because Tether you're just trusting Tether regardless. So it doesn't really matter what it runs on, and the world is running on Tron Tether right now. And true. And then yeah. And the unfortunate reality is that is if you let a bunch of bad wallets be the only ones that support Tron and Tether, then Mhmm. You have, you know, hundreds of millions of people using bad wallets because they want Tron Tether support. And this was something that we struggled with at Strike.
Mhmm. And we eventually just added Tron Tether support. We were like, we support Citibank in America. And, like, in Argentina, like, their dollar rails they want is Tron Tether. And Twitter got really angry at us. And then usage numbers went through the roof. Like, it was just crazy. Like, people wanted to get away from Binance and Trust Wallet and and Yeah. So you kinda had to support it. And I think it's probably a net benefit, but also, probably a corporate bank digital currency and has a lot of the same issues. But
[00:21:29] Seth For Privacy:
It is. It kinda is what it is. Yeah. Yeah. It is. But I I think a lot of people overlook the kind of top of funnel nature that stable coins can be. Or even other cryptocurrencies or maybe they're not ideal. But when they're in a wallet that also heavily pushes things like Bitcoin privacy tech, Bitcoin self custody that pushes Monero for spending, Like, these things act as a funnel. And the little data that we do have, which is basically just from talking to our exchange partners, the the volume between stablecoins into Bitcoin and into Monero is massive. Like, the a lot of the time, people are using these as an on ramp into freedom money. Obviously, sometimes the other way around. Like, I think something that I see a lot in the West is people going, like, basically, locking in their gains by just moving to stable coins from Bitcoin or Monero so that they can they can hold that in stable coins and then get back in later on. But but I think something that people sometimes forget is, like you said, like, obviously, you want people in a good wallet.
You want them in something that is actually open source, that does actually help them to self custody, that does actually provide privacy features. But then you also can act as a funnel to drive them into freedom money. And that's, I think, a lot of the way that I that I envision this as well is, like, if we onboard someone who's just there because they need tether on Tron because that's the escape from their broken fiat, they're gonna get introduced to so many other things that hopefully will be the the start of the rabbit hole for them.
[00:22:56] ODELL:
Yeah. I see, free critters zapped 4,200 sets in the live chat. Thank you. Free critter. He's asking a question about your business model. Is that the majority of the business model is the swaps between the different currencies? Yeah. So how does how does that work? Like, you don't actually do the swaps. You just get, like, you get, like, a referral fee or something when people do it. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a fee share from our our swap partners. We have a couple aggregators.
[00:23:24] Seth For Privacy:
One of whom is Trocador, who we've had a great relationship with for years and years, and, people like ChangeNow, others. We're very cautious with who we implement to make sure that they're they're not the heavy shotgun KYC type. We're very obviously careful with that because that's the main downside of instant exchangers like that. But, we're we're kinda relentlessly keeping an eye on on how they handle swaps and what what support, reports we get, that sort of thing to try and ensure that they're good. But, yeah, I mean, that's that's the subordinate. I think something that a lot of people forget is, like, if we are in a multi crypto world, embracing that does just have a good side for business. Like, people wanna swap between cryptos. Again, like I said, most of what we see is people swapping into Bitcoin or Monero. We do have a heavy Monero user base because we started as a Monero wallet back in the day and have, I would say, the majority of the market share in Monero. So we do still see a lot of Monero movement as well. But, as we've been rapidly growing in the Bitcoin segment as well, we're seeing people use use those crypto swaps to get into the cryptocurrencies they want, which is a a cool use case. But yeah. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. It's essentially crypto to crypto swaps, which is is key to our business.
It is buying and selling cryptocurrencies, but that's much smaller compared to the crypto to crypto swaps. What? Like, dollars to Yeah. Yeah. The normal, like, unfortunately, in KYC. For now, obviously, we're working on some decentralized exchange integrations down the line, but those are just really hard from user experience perspective to to do well. What is that like? People using, like, Apple Pay to buy or something? Yeah. It would be like debit card, ACH. It would depend a lot on the geography because, like, in Brazil, they have picks, and there's there's different ones that are ideal for each geography. But, yeah, the normal stuff, unfortunately, KYC. But that's that's a tiny a tiny percent of our revenue compared to the crypto to crypto swaps.
And then the third is our our gift card and debit card proxy merchant service, basically, called K Pay, where you can you can go and use a crypto, no KYC, no ID, nothing but email address necessary to get gift cards or debit cards you can add to Apple or Google Pay. Oh, that's awesome. It's been growing really quickly. It's directly in the app. We have some really good improvements coming where you'll be able to redeem those cards in the app as well, like gift cards specifically. So you can, like, be in the Lowe's checkout and buy your gift card from Bitcoin and, go ahead and use it at checkout and use it places where you're not just not gonna be able to spend Bitcoin right now. So that's the third piece of it. But yeah.
[00:25:55] ODELL:
Yeah. It's a nice stop gap. I I've used I use the Bitcoin company in the past, which gives you, like, Visa cards.
[00:26:03] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah.
[00:26:04] ODELL:
It's a nice stop gap. Like, if you're trying to live on a Bitcoin standard and they don't accept Bitcoin and you just wanna know KYC Visa prepaid or something like that. That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. For sure. Okay. Let's dive into the novel features you've added on the Bitcoin side. You've added silent payments.
[00:26:26] Seth For Privacy:
Mhmm. So why don't you explain to the listeners what silent payments are, like, why people should care? Yeah. For sure. Have you talked about them at all in previous shows? Like, how how deep should I go?
[00:26:36] ODELL:
Good. Go kinda deep. Okay. Alright. We've talked about it maybe, like, a year ago when it was more in theory. I don't know of any other Bitcoin wallets that have integrated silent payments yet, except for maybe Wasabi on desktop.
[00:26:53] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. There's a couple that have sending support. There's only one other real one that has sending and receiving support, which is built by the people who won the HRF bounty for silent payments. But it's a silent payments only desktop. I think it's called Dana Wallet. Let me just
[00:27:10] ODELL:
pull up the list real quick. Oh, but it's silent payments only, and it's on desktop?
[00:27:15] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. It's silent payments only. I'm just trying to pull it up right now. I think it's mobile. Yeah. It's mobile wallet.
[00:27:22] ODELL:
I haven't tried it yet. To me to me, it was mostly a theoretical conversation until I saw you added it to k Wallet. So why don't you go a little on the deeper side of how it works? Why should people care?
[00:27:34] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. For sure. So, when I approach silent payments, like, I I don't wanna oversell the privacy benefits. So I think the much more useful way to view it is it's a a new Bitcoin address type that brings really good user experience benefits that can also bring privacy improvements. So, basically, what it is is it's it's a static reusable address that you can give out to anybody. You can put in your Twitter bio. You can put in your, email signature. Put it wherever you want. And anytime anyone wants to pay you, instead of, like, a normal Bitcoin address where everybody, whoever pays you, can see the funds received to that address, the sender will actually use three things. There's two public keys in the silent payments address. That's why I see it's much longer than normal Bitcoin address.
And then the sender will use those two public keys plus the inputs to his own transaction that he's sending you, which is obviously a little weird compared to most Bitcoin transactions. But he'll use those inputs, and he'll generate a unique one time tap root address for you. So this flips a lot of things on their heads, especially sync, which I'll explain a little bit later. But what this does is even though I share this wallet broadly, anyone can pay it at any time without knowing anything about other people who have paid and without any worry that someone just copying and pasting that into mimpl. Space or something is gonna see other donations that have happened. So it's a it is a good improvement on the the privacy side.
[00:29:01] ODELL:
It solves it solves it solves the problem that Ross just faced, Ross Ulbricht, because Ross had a static public donation address that he was reusing, just a regular Bitcoin address, and someone sent 300 Bitcoin to it. And then everyone in the world decided to have an opinion on his donation. But if that if that was a silent payment, then maybe a sleuth after the fact would see different outputs combined with each other in a transaction or something. But it wouldn't have been, like, this blatantly obvious, like,
[00:29:37] Seth For Privacy:
his donation address just received 300 Bitcoin. Right? Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And, like, you you could do this today without silent payments, but you have to run a server. You're gonna have to run something BDC pay server. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Which is, like, I freaking love BTC pay. It's something we use every day at Cake. It's vital to what we do. But it's also way too much for the average person to run to have privacy, much less just somebody who wants to accept donations or tips or something like that. So it really, like, that the the core of the privacy that silent payments provides is it allows you to use a single static address, a single string without having to run a server or anything and avoid address reuse. Like, that's the only privacy piece that it does fix. Yeah. And that's obviously very important, but it's not a total solution for privacy.
Like you mentioned, you could you could watch it if, like, this is Ross's silent payment address, and I was a bad actor. I could be dust attacking his silent payment address, dropping some outputs there that I would hope that he would recombine later on with other outputs he had received. And then I would have a pretty good guess that those other inputs use coin control.
[00:30:42] ODELL:
He might include yours transactions in other transactions and then other inputs, and then you could see what was going on there. So it's I would say it's, like, similar to what BTC pay server is trying to solve, but, obviously, you're running a server. And then it's similar to PayNIMs that Samura had, BIP 47. So what's the differences between, silent payments and BIP 47? Like, there's a trade off there in terms of syncing. Right?
[00:31:11] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. So the there's a few differences between BIP 47, which is the underlying stealth address type, the underlies underlying reasonable payment code to PayNMs. PayNMs is really just the wrapper on top that give you the short name, but that short name relied on central server to essentially transfer the code to the name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That but that long payment code that you get as part of a PayN, that's actually your BIP 47 stealth address, basically. They don't perfectly follow the BIP spec because samurai always does their own thing, but it's basically that. So the the main differences are twofold. Both systems have trade offs.
Personally, I think silent payments has a much better set of trade offs, but they they both have trade offs. So silent payments, the big trade off, really the only trade off to me, is that in order to find your payments, it's different than bit 47. So with silent payments, again, you don't know where you're gonna get paid ahead of time. A normal Bitcoin wallet, all you do is you pre generate a bunch of addresses, and you send them off to a third party server to tell you your balance, which is obviously horrible for privacy.
But it is the norm for most Bitcoin wallets in the space. There's a couple of solutions to this, but they also have trade offs, especially around user experience. But that's the norm within Bitcoin wallets is I know what addresses I might get paid at. I'm gonna ask a third party server to tell me if I've gotten paid or not. In silent payments, it's actually flipped on its head. You don't know when you're gonna get paid or what address is gonna be used there. So you can't ask a server, does this address have any balance? Because you don't know the addresses yourself. So instead, you're actually asking a remote server, hey. For these hundred blocks since I last synced, send me the possible outputs that could be mine. And there's a lot of ways this has been optimized already so that, like, we know we don't care about spend outputs, obviously, when we're syncing.
We don't care about anything that's not taproot because silent payments, is only taproot outputs as well. And there's a few other things that we can check-in a transaction to see if it's potentially our payment or not. So we'll ask for all this data for the set of blocks. This would be the same data for anyone who was asking for sync, so there's nothing uniquely identifying about you. You get that data locally, and then you scan through it using your own private key or scan key to see if any of those transactions belong to you. So that takes a lot more time. Like, you're having to download more data, and then you're having to actually do a relatively resource intensive scan process locally. And so that's a very different user experience than the norm in Bitcoin where you just say, do I have balance? I'll reveal all my my privacy to get this data quickly. Versus silent payment says, I'm not gonna reveal any data about myself, and I'm gonna take a little bit longer to scan through this. It's quite quick in practice, but, obviously, if you're, like especially if you haven't synced your wallet, like, a month, six months, it can take quite a while.
On the flip side, bit 47, the way that it that it avoids this problem is that for a bit 47, before someone sends you money, they have to notify you on chain where you're gonna receive that money. And they don't notify you of the address, but rather they notify you of essentially where to look for the addresses so that you can derive all of the addresses that this person could pay you at. And this works to make the sync much easier because now your wallet can just check these opcode these op returns and see if any of the op returns belong to them. And then if they do, you your wallet knows where to look, and it knows where to derive addresses to send off to a third party server just like normal wallet sync. So it's still a little bit more than a normal wallet, but it's just checking up returns, so it's very quick. The major downside is twofold.
One, if you do this, the sender necessarily tells the world that they are paying
[00:34:59] ODELL:
this specific payment code or paying them. It's set up like a network graph almost. It's because you have to have, like, a pairing transaction.
[00:35:06] Seth For Privacy:
Exactly. That pairing transaction is very bad for privacy, and it also reveals a lot about you as the sender to the recipient. Like, if you're connecting you're paying them to theirs as contacts, it reveals who is actually paying the recipient, which can be a bad thing to the recipient. Sorry. Not to the entire world. I do wanna make that that note clear, but it reveals that specific piece to the person you're paying as well. So that's obviously, that's a privacy downside. You're revealing that you're using PayNIMs or Bit 47. Wait. So in this case, like, if I'm donating to WikiLeaks
[00:35:38] ODELL:
Mhmm. And I do that pairing transaction, like, WikiLeaks knows
[00:35:43] Seth For Privacy:
that me as a user is doing is is making that pairing transaction. Yeah. That plus Odell is the one doing that. Right. Now there are some ways that you could work around that, but that's not currently done with how Samari Wallet had it implemented. Right. But bit 47 has, like, has a lot of alternate ways you could implement it. So I'll just I'll focus specifically on on how it's actually done with with pain ins. But that's the main downside for privacy with bit 47. But the other main downside is if I want to donate to you once, which is probably the majority of the usage for something like this, I have to make two transactions.
Right. So, obviously, that's bad for fees. I'm gonna spend a lot more than I would otherwise. It's bad for a blockchain bloat's not the right term, but inefficient blockchain usage. And it's bad for privacy because I now have to link some output to the fact that I am paying this pain in, and then I am gonna have to send spend another input as well. So in order to make one donation, I'm gonna have to reveal, hopefully, two outputs. Because if I use the same output for the public notification as for the actual payment itself, that could be surveilled as well.
So there's a lot of downsides that you you get you get a better user experience with bit 47, but you actually sacrifice a lot of privacy, and it's much more, block space inefficient. Whereas with with silent payments, you do have the scanning trade off, but there's there's really good ways to work around this. So in silent payments, when it comes to scanning, there's there's two main things you can do. One, which we're doing right now in Cake Wallet, should be out in a couple weeks, is background sync. So instead of just syncing your wallet when you open it up, which is the norm in Bitcoin wallets, we're used to in the Monero space, this whole this whole trainings, this whole scanning trade off of it takes a long time to sync your wallet. So we've already implemented background sync for Monero and other cryptocurrencies, within Cake Wallet. We're gonna enable silent payments. We were just fixing some stuff on the silent payment side. Because right now, it's manual. Right? Like, you click a button to It it depends. You can set it to always be scanning, but it's only always scanning in, when you're when you have the wallet open. So background sync will mean that you can tell your wallet, I wanna sync daily, I wanna sync hourly, or I wanna sync every fifteen minutes. And it'll do that in the background with your scan key. No private keys are hot. And so at worst, you would have one day of blocks to sync, which is, like, five seconds ish to sync through that. And that's the worst case scenario. You could easily do hourly sync and essentially never have any sync trade off. Got it. The the other way you can do it is that scan key that you're using for background sync. You could also just offload to a third party server. Now that does reveal your silent payment, receive transactions to that third party server, but then you're just back at the same privacy from that trusted third party as a normal wallet, but you have all of the privacy benefits versus an outside observer of silent payments. Right. Or best case, and this is what we're pushing for. We're working with Josie Baik right now to to help to build build out better solutions for this, is you're already running a Bitcoin node. You have an Umbrella or start nine or something. Why can't you just run a very lightweight service that you offload scan keys to? And that server is always online. It's always in sync. So then you'll get the sync experience of a regular Bitcoin wallet, but with all of the privacy benefits and user experience benefits of silent payments. And that's really the the end goal there of background sync for those who don't wanna trust an outside observe or a a third party, and then offloading scan key for either someone who's okay with trusting a third party or who runs the the server themselves.
[00:39:20] ODELL:
Makes sense. So then when I mean, I see this comment from Cortic. Like, I'm gonna re we're gonna respond to it, but I would just Cortek, I appreciate you. I'd like, I would rather not get into, like, a massive debate over semantics during this conversation. But Quartek is saying, you guys are wrong. There's no dependencies on any server. BIP forty seven is serverless pay n m R s site is just a directory of reusable codes. I think we said that. Refer to Lauren MT, and you do not need a notification transaction here. Lauren explains the metaphor. The way they had it implemented used a notification transaction. Presumably, you could do it out out of band if you wanted to, But then you can't restore from seed, which is a really nice I actually kind of agreed with their trade off decision there because you wanna be able to restore from seed. So that's why they use a notification transaction because the chain is always there.
So you could get it there instead of out of band. And, yeah, the payment website was, like, plus Odell. Mhmm. But it it pinged to a reusable payment code. So for for years, I would just post my reusable payment code on the didn't have to actually hit their server. But for convenience, you could just type in plus Odell as long as the server was there and do it. Yeah. So with silent payments, I also see NewTonic is asking, does Cake support BIP third 353 for silent payments? I don't know what that means because I don't know what that means. Because I don't know what that means. Because I don't know what that means. The actual BIPs. On my BIPs. Payments. And we we are doing it as as to spec as possible, trying to make sure that it's That's awesome. With everybody else. Mhmm. Because that's the key. Right? It's, like, people can say, Ross shouldn't have done a reusable address.
He I mean, he they shouldn't have done just a regular Bitcoin address. He should have done a BTC pay service. The thing is is if you add friction to a donation, you might never get the donation in the first place. And this is something I saw when we had, Lionel Shriver on the show, author of Mandibles. Mhmm. People told me a million different ways for her to accept donations, and I just posted a single fixed address. And why did I do that? I did that because I wanted any OG to be able to just scan the QR code and pay her. And sure enough, she received over a Bitcoin in donations, and one of the donations was nearly a Bitcoin itself. It was like a single a single dude, like, probably used a old ass wallet and scanned and paid it and and sent sent a Bitcoin.
And by the way, she's still holding it because that has horrible privacy. So you can tell on chain that she's holding it. But also because I talked to her on email and she said, that she's gonna hold it through the apocalypse, and she's very, very excited to Nice. I mean, it's When they come to the ocean, she'll have her stats. She came yeah. She came on the show. She has, like, a hundred and $30,000 worth of Bitcoin now. It's, like, the best podcast appearance she ever made. But so to to my point is I went on a little bit of tangent here. It's really important to be on spec because what we wanna see is as many wallets as possible to be able to send to silent payments. Yeah. Otherwise, it's not really that useful of a tool. Like, that's the hard part of bootstrapping something like this. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And that's that's the part where, like,
[00:42:43] Seth For Privacy:
every wallet should support sending the silent payments today. That part is not is not complex. It doesn't involve any of the sync trade offs. You don't turn on a special server. That part's very straightforward, and I would love to see every wallet support sending because that starts this, like, unstoppable snowball of adoption where if anyone can send to it, then people start to demand receiving to it because they see how well it works. They see how how user how great the user experience is. That's that's the the first step. And, like, that's where, like, like, you mentioned in the beginning with Sabi Wallet. A few other wallets have implemented sending support. I think BlueWallet as well, has sending support to silent payment addresses.
And that's a really good start. But like you mentioned, like, if Ross used a silent payments address and not a static Bitcoin address, basically, the only, like, basically, the only people who could pay them I know, like, BlueWallet has it and we saw BlueWallet has it. I've never heard of anybody using it. You're talking, like, cake wallets, 500,000 users, and that's it. And a lot of our user narrow people, they're not Bitcoin people. That's changing, but you're greatly limiting who can actually pay you. So that's the main downside for now, but that should change that should change very quickly.
[00:43:50] ODELL:
So Nutanix is saying that 353 is the human readable DNS payment instructions. 352 is the silent payment BIP. Yep. I'm ashamed.
[00:43:59] Unknown:
I do. I didn't hold Are you go are you my BIP numbers.
[00:44:02] ODELL:
Are you are you going to support 353? We already do. Yeah. That's So what does that mean? What is that? Is that like a username? Do I have, like, a username that could be paid or something? Yeah. So we support it on the sending side right now.
[00:44:15] Seth For Privacy:
We're still trying to figure out the best thing to do on the receive side. But on the sending side, we absolutely do. So, like, I have a I have a guide for people to set up their own BIP three fifty three username on my blog, and there's an example. But you gotta self host it. Okay there. Well, you don't just self host anything, but it's it's just a DNS entry. So it's very simple. You just need to go to your domain registrar and create the DNS entry in a specific way. But, yeah, right now, we we do support sending for that only to silent payments technically because we're not a lightning wallet yet. So you can't do the bolt 12 side of that. But the best way to use bit three fifty three and one of the reasons why I say satellite payments is such a good user experience improvement is that you can do things like tips at a odel.xyz with only a DNS entry, and you can receive payments via lightning and on chain that are privacy preserving.
And that is A simple text string. You don't you don't need any server code or anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a that's a I mean, that's just a huge user experience breakthrough, and that's something that enables wallets to do usernames in a way that's actually privacy preserving rather than people just, like, sticking a static Bitcoin address there.
[00:45:25] ODELL:
Right. Yeah. Exactly what you just said it, but Nutanix also said it. Like, I could do [email protected]. Mhmm. And then also, like, I could put my bulk 12, which is also supposed to is just a simple text string, and then I can receive lightning payments or on chain payments. No server. I you know, I one step at a time.
[00:45:50] Seth For Privacy:
You'd have to be a cake user, unfortunately. But I we can get you on board. We can get you set up with bit $3.53.
[00:45:57] ODELL:
Dude, like, finally, like, we have some level of kind of frictionless donations with Zaps. And, it's all just and like I was saying earlier, like, the I use my own node, and then I don't have liquidity. And there's we'll figure out Bold 12. We need more wallet support on Bold twelve first. Yeah. And I'm laser focused on that in the back end and in the background Mhmm. Between OpenSats and ten thirty one to try and make that more of a reality. Oh, yeah. But, yes, it will happen. I'm pretty excited about it. Okay. Before we move to page join, actually, because this seems more relevant to the topic, you have a feature that you rolled out called BirdPay
[00:46:39] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah.
[00:46:40] ODELL:
Which is kind of like the grog version of BIP three fifty three. Do you wanna explain what that is?
[00:46:46] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. Yeah. So so BirdPay is one of many ways that you can pay someone using a username or a domain, something like that. Like, we support BIP three fifty three three fifty three. Like I said, we support open alias and open alias v two, which are, like, multi crypto versions of bit three fifty three, basically. But BirdPay was basically us saying, like, how easy can we make it to have as little external dependency as possible for someone to get paid at a username? And a brilliant person on the team, who actually don't know who came up with the idea, it might have been Vic. He probably was Vic because he loves Twitter. Was if you just put an address in your Twitter bio or your pinned tweet, we can easily grab that via an a via the API.
And so you can do things like just enter asset for privacy when you go to send a transaction, and it'll auto populate my Monero address. It just checks your x bio. Yeah. It's super, super simple. There's some cool things too that we were just talking about internally where, like, we can use the location field that, like, no one who cares about privacy puts their location in. But you can put a domain in there, and then we can actually scrape that via the API. So you could, like, put a bit through three fifty three username in your Twitter profile as well, and enable support that way.
But, yeah, it's it's really simple. Let's just paste an address into your bio or to your pinned tweet, and anyone can pay you anytime whether you're awake or not in a privacy preserving way when you're using silent payments or Monero, or Bolt 12 once we have lightning support as well. Yeah. It's it sounds so simple, but it's, like, it's magical when you actually use it. And it's what the future of Bitcoin usernames should be. Like, our our world right now of copying and pasting addresses, verifying addresses, all this garbage is, like, this this has to die for for there to be much more usage of people actually paying each other in Bitcoin. Because people are so used to cash tags. They're used to usernames. They're used to Right. Emails or phone numbers for Venmo, PayPal, etcetera.
If we get there, that user experience looks so much better. And now because of silent payments of Bolt 12, we can actually get there without sacrificing privacy, which is, like, incredible. We need we need every wallet leaning into this and making this the norm because it really is, like, a 10 x to user experience.
[00:48:58] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, so you obviously have the trade off of being dependent on the x API, and you have man in the middle risk if Elon decides to swap out your silent payment address. Address. Yeah. My second from the platform. But but in practice, it actually works really well, and that's actually a really clever it was a clever little hack when I saw it. It is. It is. It's a really easy way to do it. Obviously, Nostra has something similar because it's part of your profile itself. I mean, yeah, that's the ideal. For when I mean, we can get into a Nostra conversation later in the show. But, in that situation, it would be actually be signed, and it it wouldn't require permission.
You wouldn't have to pay for that. Whoever has your private key, which is hopefully you. Yeah. Well, it was signed by someone. It'll be Someone. Better better than unsigned. Okay. We'll have that conversation later. Yeah. And also, you mentioned you're planning on lightning support. How are you thinking about that?
[00:49:51] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. I mean, that's been a tricky one. So, when I started at Cake, actually, we had just launched a public beta for lightning. And Okay. I killed it. It's like the first thing I did when I I joined Cake was, like, I just I wasn't happy. No one internally was happy with what the user experience was like, with how many bugs bugs there were and issues we were running into. So, like, one of the first things I did was just axe our lightning integration, so we could start fresh. So if you if you wanted lightning and cake before this and it hasn't happened, you could definitely blame me. But I just like, when it comes to lightning, if anyone's followed me for a while, heard me talk. Like, I know that I've mentioned this before, but it's just incredibly difficult to do a good user experience that does not sacrifice self custody. And lightning has gotten better in some ways for sure, but there's basically two wallets right now doing good self custodial lightning, and that's Zeus and Phoenix.
Yep. The vast majority have pivoted into giving up custody to the liquid federation or just giving up custody entirely to a single entity in order to give you a good UX. And that does give you a great user experience. Like, we you use Aqua Wallet or, Bull Bitcoin or any of these that use liquid under the hood for for Lightning. It feels great because it's the same thing as Moon. You're using a chain, and you're keeping your funds on chain, and you're just swapping into and out of Lightning when you need to. But, obviously, Liquid is much lower fees and has better privacy than on chain Bitcoin. So you sacrifice custody, but you get a good user experience.
And I'm just like, even though that's the trend and I know that's the easy road, I just I'm not comfortable with that. Like, the the base level of everything we've ever done within Cake Wallet from a wallet perspective is self custodial. We haven't sacrificed on that. I know we could debate some of these cryptocurrencies. Self custody means a little bit less when they're less decentralized. But There's no such thing as self custody nano. But anyway, just kidding. Kind of. Kind of. You have the seed phrase. You have the seed phrase.
But I didn't wanna sacrifice on the self custody bar. Like, I don't wanna go the liquid route even though they're seed backed up. And I don't I also don't wanna sacrifice on the the the user experience side. Like, we could go self custodial lightning, but it's just not like, it's just not there unless we were to dedicate the vast majority of the team's time for a very long time in order to get that done. And, like like it or not, we don't just do lightning. We're not just a lightning wallet. Like, the things that we're pushing the most on right now are Bitcoin on chain things. They're not even lightning things. So I also didn't wanna make it so that we couldn't ship anything else because we're spending so much time on lightning when, unfortunately, it's a very it's gonna be a very small percentage of our users. And But what about, like, what about, like, moon setup?
I mean, it would it would work. We could we could ship that very quickly. Like, it would work for now. But
[00:52:36] ODELL:
when the fees go up, if the fees ever go back up But that but I never under but I never understood this argument. It's like, if it if it's already an on chain wallet, right, you're already dealing with on chain fees. Mhmm. I think, ultimately, what the user wants is just to be able to be able to pay a Lightning invoice on demand. And and you're already a swap wallet. Right? It's like you're already doing swaps left and right. It's the main business model. Yeah. I mean If I wanna pay a lightning invoice, have some additional privacy benefits on the sender side from it, why not just do a swap and do it? Boom. Done. It's definitely it's doable. I mean, the main problem is
[00:53:13] Seth For Privacy:
it only works when fees are low. Yeah. So, I mean, even now, like, it's 5 sat per v byte right now, but Bitcoin's at a hundred thousand dollars. Like, it that's a lot more money that you're spending in fees than it was when it was five sat per v byte and Bitcoin was taken. You're kinda just asking for bust a bunch of customer service issues. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, like, that that would be the easy approach, and, like, that's why the liquid model works so well is because it is the same approach as Moon. It's just liquid instead. But I think, like, for me, the most interesting thing right now is ARC. So, like, I've been talking heavily with ARC labs teams and the second team.
I've also talked at length with the Spark team. We did an early, like, closed, testing group with them, and we're one of the ones that they included in that, which is very kind. And I like, I think that's the the best middle ground. I, like, I do wanna be clear. Arc and Spark are not trustless, but they're trust minimized. Yeah. Specifically, Arc has much better trust assumptions than Spark does. And so in the, like, vast majority of cases, it is trustless. Obviously, there's some very small caveats with Arc, but that's a much better set of trade offs to me than going to liquid. But it also means things things just aren't ready yet. Like, our arc's not not ready yet, and there's a lot to be seen on how arc will play out from a liquidity perspective. And there's a lot still up in the air, but that's that's currently what we're looking at. Like, lightning is still top of our radar.
I would love to get it out by the end of the year, but it's just I don't wanna sacrifice self custody. I don't wanna sacrifice user experience. So I wanna make sure that we can do it in a way that that fits with our ideals, but also doesn't eat up all of our dev's time.
[00:54:51] ODELL:
Oh, yeah. We don't have to dive too deep there. You obviously want lightning support, and you wanna do it in a in a good way. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense to me. I I mean, Phoenix is so it's interesting when you if your first principles is Moon. Right? It's like, okay. So you have Moon Wallet, and then, like, Aqua Wallet is Moon Wallet, but with liquid at rest instead of on chain Bitcoin at rest. And then Phoenix is his Moon Wallet, but in the opposite direction where it's lightning at rest, and then you do a swap you do a swap for, on chain payments.
You go in the opposite direction. That's the cool thing with Phoenix. It's a splice out now. Yeah. You splice. Yeah. So But originally, it was a swap. Yeah. But yeah. No. Actually, the current Phoenix setup is great. There is some privacy and permission issues there. Yes. But I actually quite love how they have have it set up now, and it's not too bad of a trade off. Like, if the on chain payments, you're basically just paying whatever the on chain fee currently is, to send an on chain payment.
[00:55:56] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. I don't think I don't know how those guys ship what they do. They're they're brilliant. Like, it's awesome to see them work and then them to be Well, no. The way they do it is Like, Like, they don't go publicly. They're not speaking at conferences. There's, like, shipping awesome easy to use stuff. It's really cool. But they also just have, like, blinders on and, like, don't really care about, like, interoperability and stuff. It's just, like, they have their
[00:56:17] ODELL:
stack. They ship their stack. They control the whole vertical stack. They have the node, the client, everything, and they just fucking ship. Then there's, like, no debates. It's just like we're doing the thing. We're gonna provide the best user experience. I appreciate it. Pay join. You guys recently had to pay join. I'll just do a quick overview of the beautiful aspect of pay join. With pay join, usually with with a regular Bitcoin transaction, we have the common input ownership heuristic where all inputs are assumed to be owned by the same person. So to our previous, we were using Ross as an example.
If Ross includes multiple inputs, multiple previous transactions in a new transaction, you can assume everything on that input side is all owned by him, and you can combine them together with pay join. The receiver is actually providing an input, so that it breaks that heuristic that all the inputs on the input side you have the input side and the output side of a transaction. All the all the inputs aren't owned by the same person. You don't know which ones are the receivers and which ones are the senders. Now the biggest trade off there, historically, has been that both people need to be online. Mhmm.
How are you guys handling that situation? Like, if I wanna pay you and you're sleeping
[00:57:43] Seth For Privacy:
and I wanna pay with Page one, how does that work? Yeah. So that's where it comes down to Page one v one versus Page one v two. So Page one v one was, like you said, both parties had to be online the entire time throughout the actual transaction for it to work properly. Because, essentially, with page one, like you said, since you're combining inputs, both parties have to sign that transaction and sign off on it before it can be broadcast. So you need to have some sort of collaboration. That's why it seems like there's basically zero page one v one adoption even though transactionally, it's really cool tech. From user experience perspective, it basically meant only a merchant running something like BTC pay server could accept pay joins because only someone like that could have a server online all the time that also had keys hot ready. Like, there there were two stringent of requirements for page one v one for it to gain broad acceptance.
[00:58:32] ODELL:
And especially Or, like, if you were well, like, samurai was like you were in person. Yeah. It's like if you're in person, you both have your wallets out. You can do it. Which they did. I mean, they did add,
[00:58:42] Seth For Privacy:
doing stowaways over over Soroban, which was, like, their tour, like, network Right. For a little while there. But you still had to tell your receiver, like, yo, buddy. Come online. Let's let's make the payment. Yeah. I know me and me and you, I think, tried a few times. I did it with Catan a few times. It was like it would it would always have problems, but it was Well, we we did it because we could. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. We it was worth But it wasn't gonna really scale. No. And that and that was the main problem with v one. V two, which is the latest, proposal that was just merged in a few days ago by Dan Gould, is transactionally the same. Like, on chain, it's gonna look the same as a page on v one, which is the same as any Bitcoin transaction, which is the beauty of of page join is that it has no on chain footprint. It doesn't stand out.
But what's improved in PageJoin v two is that it moved from the synchronous model where you're connected to the other person the entire time or else the transaction just fails or, to now, it's an asynchronous model. So now the two parties use a directory server in the middle. Neither of them need to run it. It doesn't matter who runs it because it's entirely trustless. The directory server, all they see is encrypted blobs, and network privacy is provided for both parties using a blue base HTTP. So even if you're not using a VPN or Tor, you are getting near perfect network privacy from the directory server, and that's from the other peer as well. But you use that directory server. So, like, when I send you a page on URI or QR code, you're getting the location on that directory server where to look for my payload, which is the, like, pre signed information that I need to give to you. So I can give you that. I can go offline. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if I'm there at that time or not. You'll get that payload. You add your inputs, and you sign the transaction, and you send it back to the directory server. And then whenever I come back online, I can sign that and send it off to the network.
So it still does require at some point both parties to be online for the transaction to eventually be sent. But if one of us goes online even for an extended period or goes offline even for an extended period, we can still make that transaction happen. And in practice, when you're usually making a payment like this, the asynchronous nature just makes it so that little, like, network flips and stuff don't ruin your transaction, which is what would happen in the past. So in person is obviously gonna be just perfect, essentially. Not being in person is is pretty damn seamless as well.
And there's some some cool things too where I think we can make it even better. So, like, right now, technically, you do have to come online at some point during that process. But, like, something I thought about is those who are okay with the trade offs of having their private keys go hot at memory on their phone, which is a very low risk. Like, I to me, I would be fine with the trade off if someone is pretty pretty hardcore. You can use the background service that we use for syncing silent payments, syncing Monero, etcetera, to look for and sign any page one transactions that are waiting for you on the directory. So that way, like, if you've just posted the QR and someone paid it, your wallet would immediately be signing that in the background, using that background service.
So that that's another way that you can do that to even further improve the UX. But it's it's pretty sweet. And, honestly, it just it works so so much better than v one. We've done tons of testing internally, done tons of payments for demos. It's obviously not foolproof. And, I mean, we're the second wallet ever implemented, and there's been a lot of, just normal growing pains as the the dev kit improves and as in integrations improve. But the guys over at, PayJoin dev kit, Dan Gould, SpaceBear, others are just doing fantastic work. And the really, the beautiful thing of all this being false is that every time a wallet implements it, it gets easier for every wallet to implement it after that. We did a ton of work with the PDK team that made it well, make it easier for others. The Bold Bitcoin team is working closely with the PDK team to make it easier for us and others. And that stuff, again, just snowballs where it's just gonna be quite trivial to support pay join. And I think we can legitimately get to a place where the default in many really any Cypherpunk wallet will be a pay join for Bitcoin because it's it has essentially no user experience overhead.
[01:02:44] ODELL:
That's awesome. Yeah. I had, Dan Gould, from PayJoin DevKit on dispatch, I guess, six episodes ago. Episode one fifty four. So Freaks, if you haven't listened to it, go listen to it. Bull Bitcoin is the other one that has implemented it. Right? You and then, also, I think with Sabi, you can you can pay too, but they don't have the Not patron be received. I don't think.
[01:03:14] Seth For Privacy:
No. I haven't seen anything about it. I mean, it's Okay. It's certainly possible, but I feel like I consume any mention of PayJoiner or sign up payments these days. Was
[01:03:22] ODELL:
wasabi, you can definitely send to silent payments. I don't think you can receive to silent payments. So maybe they don't have to send to Adrian Viewpoint
[01:03:30] Seth For Privacy:
as well with Wasabi. I think they've had that for a while, but I'll have to look into it.
[01:03:36] ODELL:
Lot of lot of moving pieces. That's awesome. I mean, what I was talking to Dan about this. Like, the dream is that we get like, Bull Bitcoin does it as an exchange, getting exchanges to do it. So, like, you can imagine a situation where a strike, for instance, on on a strike deposit or strike withdrawal, they support it. They actually get massive they can get massive transaction fee savings. So they have a strong incentive to do it from a fee perspective. And then, obviously, like, those services are KYC. You're not you're maybe not getting as much of a privacy benefit as possible. But still, from an external observer point of view, you're clouding the waters in terms of probability analysis that someone who's just just looking at the chain, it is hurting their probability analysis regardless. So I I think it's still a clear net net win,
[01:04:40] Seth For Privacy:
to see that kinda and they're obviously doing massive volumes. Right? Like, so And and that's one of the It really does move. Yeah. It's one of the things I love about PayJoin is that there actually is financial incentive for, like, third parties, especially exchanges, swap providers, etcetera, to implement PayJoin. Like, that's one of the downsides of selling payments is there's no financial incentive to do it. And that's true of most things in Bitcoin. Like, there's there's not a lot of privacy tech specifically that has a financial incentive there. But that financial incentive, is really key because, obviously, it will help just broader adoption and integration. Like, I I don't know if Bull Bitcoin would have done it if they couldn't also do it as an exchange and have it as a fee saving feature. Because I know, like, their long term goal is that will be the way you withdraw. It'll always be a pay join. You'll be using the Real Bitcoin app. You'll withdraw to there, and it will be a pay join because both are gonna be compatible and and speaking the same language. And I would love to see that happen everywhere in this. And it helps everyone's privacy, not just the people participating. That's the other really cool thing with pay join is it breaks that key heuristic and it helps everyone's privacy.
[01:05:41] ODELL:
And the thing too is, like, exchanges like Strike have already they've already normalized the pay a higher fee if you want your withdrawal done right away. But if you're willing to wait up to twenty four hours, it's free. And people gladly choose that option. Usually, they're not waiting twenty four hours. They're waiting four hours or five hours for a big batch transaction to happen. But it's already been normalized in the process. And so then you enter PayJoin into that situation, and you actually have this really cool setup where they're waiting four hours for a big batch transaction. And maybe people that are depositing are basically just paying they're paying directly in a batch payment transaction to people that are withdrawing at the same time. So, like, I've never even hits the hot wallet of an exchange like Strike.
It's just like wins across the board. So I think we could see cautiously optimistic, but I think we can see,
[01:06:39] Seth For Privacy:
significant adoption there in the in the near term. But what we need for that to actually work in practice is easy to use mobile logs that support it. So it's a big it's a big deal that you guys added. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a a no brainer for us. We had one of our best devs, Constantine, working on it and killing it with the the PDK folks. It was it was a ton of fun. Win, win strike page one b two. Let's put the put the pressure on. Put the pressure on.
[01:07:07] ODELL:
We, no pressure needed. I've I've, like I said, I I think it's gonna happen. I think it's gonna happen. I think it would be awesome. I think it would just it's just a like I said, I think it's just a win across the board.
[01:07:25] Seth For Privacy:
It went quick. And then I think once you see an exchange like strike do it, all you need is, like, one or two of the big guys do it, and then everyone, I think, falls in line. Oh, no. Definitely. Yeah. That that first mover of pressure is really huge. Yeah. I'm hoping that will that will kick others in high gear when a a big exchange like Stripe does do it. One quick thing that I wanted to mention on PayJoin that I a lot of people get confused by. You can't receive a PayJoin until you have Bitcoin in your wallet. And Yeah. It pops an error This is very right now. This is very self explanatory when when you remember that you have to contribute an input to a pay join, but this like, people on our team would forget this. People that I've done it with will forget this. And so we we we actually added some stuff to the actual, like, UI to make sure that it's clear to people why
[01:08:11] ODELL:
Well, the current error message doesn't
[01:08:14] Seth For Privacy:
the current error message doesn't say that. Error, but you'll see on the receive screen, it'll just say, you might not be on the latest version. But on the latest version, we just version, we just released on, like, Tuesday or Wednesday of last week. You'll see page one unavailable instead of page one enabled, and it'll have a little tool tip that'll tell you why. Because until you have funds you can actually spend, you can't be the receiver in a transaction, which, again, is a little weird when you're used to Bitcoin, where on chain, you normally don't need like, there's no liquidity requirements or something. But, obviously, if you don't have any inputs to contribute, you can't be a part of a pay join. But one of the beautiful things of pay join is it just falls back to a regular on chain payment. And part of that QR or, thing that you copy and paste will just be a regular on chain Bitcoin address. So you can always use It's a regular no matter what. It just won't be a pay join until you have funds you can contribute. So just an important little thing to keep in mind.
[01:09:05] ODELL:
Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. That's just a messaging issue. I mean, talking about having the benefit of cost savings with privacy, what is your opinion on Cashew?
[01:09:26] Seth For Privacy:
I love the privacy, from the Mint operator. I think that there's not enough discussion about the privacy issues when depositing to a Mint or withdrawing from a Mint, especially small mints. Why? Because your anonymity set of Bitcoin going into or out of a mint can be quite small, especially if mints aren't growing But it's lightning. Sorry. I mean, on to me. But, yeah, if it's lightning only, I guess that's true. Yeah. If it's Lightning. Like, so yeah. Cashew specifically is Lightning only,
[01:09:59] ODELL:
which is a bigger UX issue because that means they need to have a Lightning wallet to begin with. Yeah. I know it's a good But I get it. And and so that that was Cali's that was Cali's hard line stance that he didn't want the Mint operator to even have the liability of knowing on chain history. Because Lightning does have pretty good privacy for sender where the receiver doesn't know which UTXO front of the transaction. No. No. You're definitely right. Yeah. I mean, that that's definitely a good You still you still technically have that issue if it's a really small mint.
[01:10:35] Seth For Privacy:
Right? If someone Depending on who you're connected. You can still do timing analysis. A lot depends on if there's multiple hops between you and the mint or if you're paying directly from something like Phoenix. You could have essentially zero privacy, on the sender side. But, normally normally, that's true. You would have pretty good privacy because of lightning. But, I mean, to me, like, there's two main things that stand out. One is I just self custody is just a hard line for me. Like, I think the only the only reasonable use case for something like, cashew or, fetamins for the average person, not for, like, the kind of village custody thing that I know, Obi and others talk about. But, like, the average Bitcoiner today, the only use case for something like this is amounts that are literally too small to publish on chain.
So I'm talking, like, below the dust limit or below the dust limit plus whatever the current fee rate is. And that amount makes sense because you literally cannot self custody less than that. Like, you cannot custody one sat on chain. You cannot custody probably we're probably about, like, I don't know, 600 sat 700 sat would be really the limit of what you could self custody today because you couldn't move that amount on chain without it being below the dust limit, with fees. That is, like anything above that, I think we cannot compromise on. I think we have to make sure that people can self custody at one way or another. And that's where, like, things like ARC and others come into play. But yeah.
So the, If you say the term graduated wallets, I'm gonna lose my mind.
[01:12:13] ODELL:
First off, the term village custody is a new one that I actually I like it. I knew exactly what you meant, which is, like, Obi talks about this with Fedimint where, like, the elders in the village are, like, the community banking or whatever. There might be a use case there at least with Fedimint. I will say that Fedimint has been slow to iterate, but recently has started to get some real traction, which is good to see. The Fedimint open source project, not Fedi, the for profit business. These are two separate things. Fedi builds on top of Fedimint. But the Fedimint open source project has started to make some really significant developments in terms of making it easier to to run a Fedimint, which is, I think, one of the key aspects here is that you need it needs to be easy to as you have to reduce the friction to spin up one of these instances privately because, obviously, the custodian has a lot of liability on their hands. And you it kind of becomes like a whack a mole game.
And then I guess this the second piece you said was graduated custody, which is actually where I was going. I had never heard the term graduated custody. So Zeus, I had I've included this on. And you mentioned it as two of the good self custody wallets. Well, I mean, it like, I put Zeus in I mean, Phoenix is awesome. It's it's own little kind of niche in terms of spending mobile lightning first kind of lot. But I would put Zeus in a category of, like, there's, like, Sparrow wallet and Zeus. And, like, I heavily rely on them. And then just, like, no one else even comes close in terms of functionality with Sparrow being unchained. And and, yeah, power user friendly. But but Kaludis was like of Zeus, he was a hardliner, self custody all the way.
And he added Cashew, and that's for for two reasons. Right? Well, first of all, for the small amounts. Right? We're onboarding someone. And, I mean, we could talk about Nasr later, but you're onboarding someone to receive payments. And at the end of the day, like, if they have to pay an on chain fee, in the beginning, it's it's cost prohibitive. It's cost prohibitive. And, also, they can make significant privacy mistakes in the beginning, if they don't really understand, you know, what outputs are and what their chain footprint is. So receiving right in the beginning, custodial is nice. And if they're gonna do custodial, it probably should be Cashew because it's incredibly private and offers strong privacy guarantees and also gives you offline payments and gives you programmable payments. You can lock things to public key, stuff like that.
So it gives you if you're gonna do custody, it gives you a lot of benefits. And then second of all, it means that you basically have an interoperable custody protocol where Zeus doesn't have to be the custodian. Right? Like, Evan doesn't wanna be the custodian. Cakewalk doesn't wanna be custodian. He can just plug and play into a wider net of other people running the custodians and taking on the liability. And then the second piece is, like, he built into his flow I think it's, like, touch you're touching the stove while it's hot. Right? Like, it heats up. And as it gets higher and higher, he pushes you into a self custody sovereign lightning channel. Right? And, obviously, he believes in user sovereignty, so he doesn't auto push you even though you can set that in settings. But it's like, you should really please open the lightning channel and and move these, funds in.
Now I there could be something here, I mean, with just on chain only. Like, you could get to a point where, you know, you hit 50,000 sats and you sweep it into an on chain output and then the user's on chain, they're in self custody. Like, I've is that model that horrible? Like, what? They're at, like, $50? They lose $50 in a mint? Like, is it the end of the world before they get to an on chain output? And what they would get significant privacy gains in that situation. I don't know if that's the worst trade off in the world. Like, that would kinda be a cool feature on on QM. I think
[01:16:34] Seth For Privacy:
so to me, the main thing or the main issue, I guess, I would say I have with Cashew is twofold. One, it diverts resources away from self custodial tools. Now, obviously, I'm not here to tell people Okay. Who like, what they can work on. Like, obviously, I don't want that to be taken as telling any devs working on Cashew that they have to or should be working on anything else, but it diverts resources away from self custodial tooling, which I think is a downside. The other one is, and I'll I'll get to the graduated wallet concept, which is kind of the term that's being thrown around for this this type of thing that Zeus is doing and and others are gonna start doing soon. But the other main problem that I have with
[01:17:16] ODELL:
I like the term. I just wanna say it. It It works. Yeah. It works. I don't know if it's Steve Lee. I think It explains what it it explains what it is. But, anyway, continue.
[01:17:25] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. My other issue with cashew is just, like, the the incentives are just very broken from the ground up. And I know I'm gonna say some things that are gonna piss some people off, but I'm just gonna roll with it. The the real the only two options you really have in your Mint operator are either they are someone you know and trust, which there's not gonna be many people running cash payments. But okay. You you know someone, they're a public entity, and they run a cash payment. That's great. But running a cash payment is a custodian, and I'm saying the quiet part out loud, but, like, if samurai wallet can be taken down for making money off privacy tools but not taking custody, a custodian a custodial mint that's providing privacy is just, like, low hanging fruit. That's a it's a terrifying situation to be in. And I I wish that was not the case.
Like, obviously, very clearly, it's idiotic that that is the case of where we're at today, but that's an extremely dangerous place to be in. So okay. We don't do trusted people. We don't do public entities running our cashier events because we like those public entities not being in jail. So instead, we do fully non events. They're people we don't know. We just trust them with the sets, and maybe there's a trust system, like a reputation system that gets built out or something. But we trust them with the sats, and we hope they don't rug us, which is fine until that grows to a certain size. And then why as in anon unless you're just hardcore cypherpunk, bro. Why as an anon are you not just rug pulling for $2.03 Bitcoin? Because you're collecting Well, you collect fees.
[01:19:03] ODELL:
You can still there's a there's there's an argument. So, like, right now, you know, one of the longest standing cashew mints is MiniBits. I don't know who runs the MiniBits cashew mint, but they haven't rugged yet. Now I think there's an argument that if they continue to not rug, they stand to make more in fees. And I think you could probably charge a decent amount in fees. Like, I think it's, like, one, two, three percent in fees you could get away with probably. If you're long standing and ready a lot of fees. If if this stuff actually works, the competition on fees is gonna try But you have to remember that these are for trans but but these are for transactions
[01:19:50] Seth For Privacy:
that you wouldn't receive otherwise. But people already don't like Phoenix's. Like, it's what? Point 4% on the send side and, like, something a little bit more, I think, on the send. I mean, but what are aqua wallets fees are ridiculous.
[01:20:04] ODELL:
Oh, I guess, because you have them. When you, like, mix in the swaps and everything?
[01:20:08] Seth For Privacy:
It's like Yeah. I mean, that that is the, like, that's the only incentive really for an Anan not to rug is that the long term incentives have to be better for him to keep running it, to take on the risk, but to collect the fees. So fees would have to be at a pretty high state, I think, to incentivize that. Yeah. I mean, there would also be some kind of idealized For sure. For sure. And I like, I know that that that's probably why people are running the mens that they're running right now. Like, I think the only No one's running them for a few years. Exactly. Exactly. And I I would be hesitant to think that they'll ever be able to charge enough fees to incentivize that because, like, then just use a custodian doesn't charge fees at that point. If you'd if it would have to be ideological for you to be using the cash you meant. But that's where, like, I think those incentives are kind of broken, where either it's a an entity we know and trust, but now they're liable for a lot of things that they shouldn't be liable for, but they just are if we're honest. Or it's that they are not meant. You have to hope that the financial incentives are good enough that you don't lose money. And that's where, like, this idea of graduated wallets is reasonable.
I still disagree with how far I think it's gonna be taken and is being taken, but it's reasonable because if you have you're not just a Cashew wallet, but you're a Cashew and a lightning and an on chain wallet, you can do things that actively protect the user. And I think we would you would have to be very aggressive to do this correctly so that users don't get burned. Because, like, users like what what's easy. Necessarily, this graduated well concept is pushing them from best UX to worst UX over time. And those Right. Like, obviously, the the UX of good lightning, especially with something like Arc or Spark can be pretty solid.
The UX of Unchained can also be quite straightforward, especially in low fee environments. But it's still gonna be drastically worse than a custodial ecashment because it's just you're not doing anything. You're just signing a message. Like, it's it can't get easier than that. So, like, that that concept, I think, will be interesting to see how it plays out because then you're you're trusting that users will actually be okay with the worst UX, and some will move with it. And that's where I think, like, that's the only reasonable way to use something like Cashew is where you do support the other methods. You are pushing users, even automatically moving funds. I mean, you're like they're the you're like they're using a custodian anyways. I don't know why they would be upset that you moved their money from a custodian into their own self custody for them, especially if you were smart about it and you, like, looked at when on chain fees were very low and you automatically did it even when it was when they were sleeping or something. Maybe you force them in the onboarding to choose the amounts that they will set as the limits to their, like, their cashew balance or something. I think, like, there's ways where it can be interesting, but there's also just there's such a low limit, especially in relatively low fee environments of what could be self custody that why then wouldn't we just use an all in one solution like ARC, for instance, where amounts that you can't exit on chain unilaterally, like below the dust limit or something like that, you you couldn't you can't actually self custody, which is something that I think a lot of it So what do you mean?
[01:23:16] ODELL:
I mean okay. I respect all of these arguments. I think you could and I talked to this about with Evan too. I mean, you could also to reduce risk, you could do, like, you could do group submits. Right? So you can push the user into, like, four custodians. So, like, the Titanic model, which I just love the irony because the Titanic suck. But the idea that if one if one compartment filled up with water, the boat doesn't sink. Right? You just lose one compartment. Now in the Titanic, multiple apartments filled up. Yeah. Well, there's a banking conspiracy involved. It's it's it's more complicated than that. But anyway, you have that. But okay. So but if your argument is that a graduated wallet makes more sense with something like ARC, that's a little bit of a different argument.
Now I personally have been in Bitcoin long enough that I just unless I can actually use something and see how it works in practice like, I'm not reading your white paper. Like, let me put it that way. Like like, I have a family now. Like, life's busy. I'm not reading your white paper. I guess Arc has released
[01:24:32] Seth For Privacy:
some kind of is are they are they Mainnet now? Like, are they actually Technically, they have released a few Mainnet demos. So it definitely works on Mainnet. I've used it. Others have. But it's they don't have, like, a public ongoing Mainnet beta. I think they're aiming for that. I'm this But is
[01:24:49] ODELL:
but so is that your response? Your response is we're we're not gonna spend time doing cash you because we'll do a graduated wallet with ARC instead.
[01:24:57] Seth For Privacy:
And then so you start on ARC, and then, ideally, you move to on chain at some point. I think that's the best potential solution. But you are making a great point that I mean, if you've been in Bitcoin this long, I'm the same way. I just assume something's not happening until it actually does. So, like, I I also don't wanna bet the farm on Arc because maybe the plan doesn't really work as well as we think. Maybe the liquidity requirements for Arc service providers are too extensive. Like, it certainly could fail, but but we're also not at a place right now where we're just, like, dying for small amount custodians.
Like, you can you can transact on chain for quite low fees.
[01:25:36] ODELL:
I won't let you concern yeah. But the concern I mean, you said this with Moon when I said the Moon model. Like, the concern is that you're not making the decision for today. Like, if the fee like, if they're sitting in your wallet and then the fees go up, you can end up in a situation. And maybe the fees I I'm a strong believer that the fees are gonna go up. But it is like, I mean, we have men pull that space, like, on screen. Like, if the fees are gonna go up, they haven't gone up yet. So maybe that's a re maybe we shouldn't be building in that direction, but I I think that should brings me to my original point of problems I have with Cashew
[01:26:18] Seth For Privacy:
is Cashew is a really great coping mechanism, but it's not a solution. It doesn't solve any of these problems. It doesn't build tools that are better in adversarial adversarial environments. It kind of copes with current problems that exist in Bitcoin today, And it it deals with them today, but it doesn't solve them in ways that could better improve things in the future, if that makes sense. I feel like that I worded that very weirdly. But, essentially, all of the time investments we're putting into Cashew, which to me is kind of like a coping mechanism with the failures of lightning and the failures of self custodial self custodial UX and lightning.
The time and resources we put into that is time and resources that isn't going into something like an arc or something like a spark or something like No. But covenants or who knows what. Like, you could name whatever it is. But that that time could be going into that, but instead, it's going to something that becomes this coping mechanism that works today, maybe. But if we enter another adversarial environment definitely works today. But well, as long as you don't get robbed or your meant doesn't mess up their DNS and lose all their money or something like that. But
[01:27:26] ODELL:
But then you lose $50.
[01:27:28] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. But also for these people you're onboarding, if they're losing money, that's kinda bad UX as well.
[01:27:36] ODELL:
Look, you're a friend, so I'm gonna feel like a dick before I say this. But, like, you're also you support Nano. Right? So it's like you're onboarding them to Nano. So, like, I feel like you can't really
[01:27:47] Seth For Privacy:
I do not personally support Nano. Just just so we're clear, Cake Wallet does support Nano. But
[01:27:54] ODELL:
I feel like I feel like that argument the it's a little bit paternalistic. You know? Like, it does there are real benefits. And to me, like, it's it's more comparable to something like a bird pay. Right? Which is you're operating in the world we're in today, and you're providing a useless feature, a a useful feature to people today that they are in demand of, which is to be able to easily accept payments without having an on chain fee burden, without having any complexity of channel operations, or you just you just have a professional routing operator that is, you know, effectively running in a mint. You have programmable offline payments, which, like, when you start to talk about, like, having the type of tap to pay, Apple Pay functionality, you, you know, the ideal situation is to be able to do that offline because if you know, people don't realize, like, part of the reason why offline, but how often are you offline? You can't do it offline.
[01:28:57] Seth For Privacy:
It's twenty twenty five.
[01:28:58] ODELL:
I mean, I well, I I think, like, if you're in the if you're in Costa Rica, for instance, like, Apple Pay works amazing. And the one of the reasons it works amazing is because the payer doesn't have to be online. That's good point. And I think people skip that. Like, if you're sitting there for even ten seconds, like, the UX is miserable.
[01:29:19] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. That's a good point.
[01:29:22] ODELL:
So and then, of course, you have the village custody, but I'm not gonna pretend like the village custody is, like, a real it's it it it's happening. Supposedly, there are villages, but that's not I'm not gonna sit here and do that argument anyway.
[01:29:36] Seth For Privacy:
I think you have reasonable concerns. I think you're thinking about it the right way. Yeah. I know like, I know I I feel like old man yelling at clouds talking about this stuff because it feels like, I don't know, I feel like sometimes I'm too hardcore with this, but I it also just feels like a line that is very dangerous to cross from a a Bitcoin culture perspective. And I feel like once we cross it, it gets very hard to uncross it. Well, we've already crossed. I know. I know. I know. That's why I'm I, like, am pretty, like, bold about the things I say with this because I like, once people get that taste of the custodial user experience, it's very hard to move away from that. It's very hard to move away from that. And we've seen that in lightning.
We've seen that in people being totally fine with using exchanges for custody, and I'm worried that this will be that same type of, like, gateway drug to being fine with custodial solutions for a lot of Bitcoiners. But I also understand the practical concerns of, like, I want something that I can use today that's simple and easy and provides good privacy, and Cashew is that. So, like, I totally understand both sides, but I I do feel like I'm, like, more on the hardcore side. I do I've did have one more thought. And I I don't know. I'm sure someone's thought through this before. But, like, the only thing that I really would want to make it easier to onboard people is like, when I onboard someone like, I onboarded a couple people to Phoenix this week just so they could buy steak and shake, while we were in Vegas.
And, like, as a Bitcoiner who wants to onboard more people, I would be more than happy to just pay the channel open fee for the end user. Like, a way But you could do that. Just send them more I know. But it's it's like I wanted to send them $25, and then they end up getting, like, 21 or something. Like, I have to, like, I have to, like, manually compute how much is the on chain fee gonna be, how much is the panel. Just send them $50. Just just keep sending more money. There you go. That is an approach. That is an approach. But I feel like even if just, like, every lightning wallet had, like, a an onboarding mode or something where, like, you hit a switch on their screen and then I mean, Phoenix could just put the fee Phoenix could just put the on chain fee in the invoice. Yeah. That that would be the idea. That suit. Right? I I don't know if you actually
[01:31:52] ODELL:
Like, the user could put $25 in their invoice, and then Phoenix could really charge $26
[01:31:58] Seth For Privacy:
in the invoice. Like, that would be my my ideal. Because to me, that would really solve both worlds. I feel like, hopefully, most Bitcoiners out there who are onboarding people would be fine with parting with some stats to get them up and running with a good self custodial UX. And, like, that's something I would be more than happy to do, but isn't really supported by any wallets out there that I know of of, like, expecting the the payer the payer? I don't know. I can always get those backwards. The payer to front the cost for the channel open so that user doesn't have to deal with those initial self custody costs. And then they just make payments, and they're on the lighting network, and they don't feel that I mean,
[01:32:35] ODELL:
the real controversial statement is when I onboard someone to Phoenix Wallet, like my nanny, I have them I first of all, I send them a larger amount. Right? So, like, I send them a hundred plus dollars. So, like, you get away from those constraints. And then the second thing is I enable cloud backups.
[01:32:58] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah.
[01:33:00] ODELL:
And I just pop them to the cloud. It's like, yes. Like, Apple and the NSA can, like, rug them. Yeah. But
[01:33:06] Seth For Privacy:
for most people, that threat model is fine. Right.
[01:33:10] ODELL:
At least in the beginning.
[01:33:12] Seth For Privacy:
Right? And we're comparing it to something like Cashew or comparing it to something like Primal's Custodial Wallet or Strike's Custodial Wallet. Like, those trade offs are weird. The caveat I'll say is if if done right I don't know how Phoenix does their cloud backups right now. But if done right, you can do it to iCloud keychain or Android auto backup, which are both end and encrypted. So Google or Apple could not rug you unless, obviously, they have Yeah. I don't know how to where and how it works. But if you do it right, you can do it in a way where only the user can recover funds or someone who hacks their account, obviously, which is that's the main downside to me. But that's something that, like, the foundation guys have done with Envoy is for just the hot wallet component, obviously.
You can do it in a way where you would just rely on your Apple or Google account being secure. And I think that's actually a very normal But my understanding
[01:33:57] ODELL:
with Apple iCloud backups, like, you have to optionally separately in your Apple iCloud settings, go create end to end encrypted and, like, write down the seed like, there's a different it's not a seed phrase. It's, like, numbers So that's the distinction. ICloud or iCloud Drive, whatever they call the drive portion,
[01:34:13] Seth For Privacy:
isn't intended encrypted by default, but can be if you use advanced data protection. But iCloud keychain is always intended encrypted by default. That's where your passwords is where your password Well, what is it encrypted by? What is the secret? Your Apple login. So anyone who can get into your Apple account can get it.
[01:34:32] ODELL:
Okay. Got it. I will say that Phoenix does a really good job that it scares the shit out of the user when they enable all cloud backups. It's like Apple and the NSA will bug you. And, like, you have to press okay, and then it goes through which I like, if you're gonna do it, like, I appreciate that aspect to it. Okay. That was a lively discussion on onboarding and custodial. By the way, Steak and Shake, the the buns have seed oils in them. The fries do too. And the fries still have
[01:35:07] Seth For Privacy:
yeah. The fries come with seed oils. They just don't fry. Speaking of being rugged. They fry them. I didn't learn until we were I was standing in Steak and Shake's line, and then someone I was with was like, oh, by the way, the fries are initially fried in seed oils. And then they freeze them. And then they send them and then they fry them into the milk. Send them. Like, what? It's a scam. Everyone's a scammer. But at least it's a good you know, it's marketing, but at least that's a marketing thing now that people want to be seed oil free. That's true. That's true.
[01:35:36] ODELL:
Slow slow and steady. We don't live in a vacuum and little benefits are I see the purpose of saying Breeze has next cloud support. I mean, that's great. But, like, if you're running a Nextcloud self hosted instance, like, just use a seed phrase. As hardcore as they come at that point. Like, I feel like you can use a seed phrase, but that's good. I see Phoenix is extremely expensive. Yeah. I mean, I think I think the fees are kinda reasonable on Phoenix. I I get it. I understand it. What else do we wanna talk about while I have you here? You wanna talk about Nostr?
[01:36:15] Seth For Privacy:
Why not? Piss off some more people. It's my way.
[01:36:23] ODELL:
So, I mean, can we, can we at least get BirdPay
[01:36:27] Seth For Privacy:
for Nostra? I think it already works. I need to double check, but the, I mean, the the main problem right now is we'd like, we talked about, we don't have lightning. So if you're just doing, like, l n URL or something, obviously, that's not gonna work within cake. I think if you put a silent payment address in your Nostra profile, it does work or Monero address. But what username would I type in? My nip five? Yeah. Your nip five should work. I guess your nip five as well. I'm I'm, like, 99% sure this works today. I just don't use Nostra, so I I haven't tested it in a long time. But I'm pretty sure that's what But so you're
[01:37:02] ODELL:
you're a Nostra bear. Like, you're you're done with Nostra. It's a dead project to you. It's over. Before I answer that, I'm gonna I wanna interview you.
[01:37:11] Seth For Privacy:
So you you made the switch. You cut all ties to Yes. The the modern world. Yes. You switched to to Nasr and and burned your, however many hundred hundreds of thousands of followers. What is that like? 250,000. Real talk. How has engagement been compared to what you're used to? Do you feel like it's been good for your overall reach to the audience you want? Has it been bad? Like, I'm just kinda curious your thoughts on what that has been like. Because very few people have actually made the % switch from Twitter to Noster.
[01:37:45] ODELL:
There's a few of us. There's, like, there's Gigi has. Pablo has. I don't know of any other larger accounts. Company. Obviously, I think I was the largest account that did it or at least voluntarily did it. Like, I was at, like, probably about 250,000 followers. Like, at this point, I'd probably be at, like, 400,000 followers. Like, it was growing pretty fast. Even without me posting, it was growing, just from, like, the backlog of, like, ten years of proof of work on that closed platform. I mean, it was strictly a horrible financial decision. Like, just really bad career wise.
It's definitely not it definitely it was not a positive for ten thirty one as a business. It's good for the soul. Okay. So it's weird. But Twitter's I won't I won't But but but financially, definitely was was should've kept the account. I do think that it was good for my family. Right? Like, I think I have first of all, I never wanted to be an influencer. Right? Like, I never I kinda like, people think influence, like, Bitcoin large accounts of Bitcoin are bad today. Like, they were way worse in 2017, I think. I don't know. They've always been bad. Let me put it that way. They've always been bad. And I felt I was young. I was unmarried.
I didn't have a family. I felt like I could improve the situation or I could add something of value to the discussion. Right? And I slowly hurt my own personal privacy, and went into it. And it it got to the point. And then so then I started and I used it to bootstrap everything. Right? Like, Twitter is where I bootstrapped my whole network, all my friends, like, all my good friends I met through there. It's where we bootstrapped OpenSats. It's where we bootstrapped 1031. It's where we bootstrapped Siddle dispatch and rapid all recap. But we're I was getting to the point where it was like like, a decision had to be made. Right? And a decision had to be made.
And, like, I was getting to the point where I was becoming kind of a niche celebrity. Right? Like, I was like, I would go if I went to a conference, for instance, like, I couldn't walk around, especially once money got involved. Like, once people thought they could get a check from ten thirty one or Open Stats, it was, like, it was like every other conversation was someone asking me for money. And the question really in the back of my head was, like, are they gonna ask it for an open source project, or are they gonna try and get funded through ten thirty one? It's like, which angle are they gonna get it from? And the only time I would get ignored was if I was walking with either of the jacks. Like, if I was walking with Dorsey or if I was walking with Mallers, they would the moths would go to that flame instead.
And, of course, like, there it's awesome. Like, I love the freaks and was like, there was a lot of love that was happening. Like, thank you so much. Like, you helped out my family so much, like, blah blah blah. But there was, like, also a bad bad element to it. Then there was, like I mean, I remember, like, a month before I deleted, like, two months before I deleted, I was in Costa Rica, and I was sitting at lunch in the middle of nowhere, Costa Rica. And if you're listening to this right now, like, bless your heart. I appreciate you. But still, some random freak walked up, interrupted our lunch, was like, Odell, so grateful for you. Thank you so much. We're in the middle of fucking nowhere, like, with my family.
So I did come at it from, like, a point of view that I had nothing to lose and that I needed to lower my Profile. My profile a bit. And I didn't wanna do that by, like, destroying my reputation, shilling a shit coin, like, again, taking one last rug pull out. And instead, in this way, it could be a positive way. Like, if I could bootstrap, if if me doing it could help bootstrap something that I think needs to happen, which is digital comms is too important to have in control of a proprietary closed source big tech company, let's do it. And I had so I I felt like I had nothing to lose.
I've definitely seen since then, like, from a financial perspective that there has been some negative consequences that maybe I should've waited a little bit longer. But then also at the same time, like, I was addicted. Right? And I've seen it happen to other people. I mean, I'll use Dorsey as an example again. Like, Dorsey was Noster only for a bit, but he had the account there. And because he had the account, the stock price goes down, and he goes back to Twitter. You know? And he goes back goes back to Twitter and starts posting on there because you you can't you can't help yourself. I literally can't go back. Like, I if I did go back, I would have to create, like, a fresh account and start from zero or whatever and do the You you burn the boat. So it does from a self control point of view, it helps. Now I do think, it's gonna be a long grind.
I don't think Nasr is inevitable by any means. I mean, I don't I still don't even think I think Bitcoin is more or less inevitable, but I don't think Bitcoin is free to money is inevitable. I think there's still a lot of work to be done. But I I I think we need something like Nasr for so many reasons. And we need it from a permission point of view. We need it from a censorship point of view. And we need it from a verifiability point of view. Like, the amount of AI slop and stuff we're gonna start to see and, like, psy ops on a whole another level is crazy.
And to have that all happening, you know, with puppet masters and and and unverify like, you don't you never know if you're shadowbanned or not. Right? We were talking about earlier on YouTube. Like, I'm pretty sure I'm shadowbanned on YouTube. There's no way for me to verify it. Yeah. That must work. Like, there's I have no idea what's happening there. You you don't control your destiny. So I think it's a noble cause. I mean, I think it's something that would benefit humanity. And I think I probably only have so many more years in the public eye, so I'm gonna try and I'm gonna try and throw as much weight behind it as possible is kind of the calculation. But, yes, to your answer, if you're asking me as a friend if it's financially prudent, for you to delete your ex account, I would say no. Yeah.
[01:44:49] Seth For Privacy:
I would say I would say don't do that. Sense. And it makes I mean, like, I always knew, like, you you knew there were consequences to deleting your Twitter, but, like, you you're Yep. You're that guy who actually has scruples and actually has integrity and actually has, like, an ethos that wants to push this stuff forward. So, like, your willingness to do that was crazy, honestly. Like, that that was a that was an immense move, and I think is something that has been a huge driver behind Dynastar so far, has been that you were willing to do that and brought so many people with you, and they're spreading good content there as well. So I definitely I definitely understand that. And, I mean, like like, when it comes to Nostr for me, like, I I agree on all of the human good stuff around it. Like, I definitely agree we cannot rely on something like a Twitter as our, like, place for social discourse. Like, the I mean, that that has been proven so many times of how easy to manipulate it is, of how harmful social media as it is today is. Like, the the psychology of it is is very broken.
So I got I I I definitely echo that, and I I think Noster is a is a good fallback. I think, like, there are some things about how Noster is built that I think are not great for social media, and it provides a lot of value in other ways as a protocol. Like, again, that's where it can get a little confusing. It's like Nostr is a protocol. Social media on Nostr is its own separate thing. And Nostar is a protocol is is very fascinating, especially just that it has this native understanding of key pairs that can be really useful for verification and other things. For social media, it's a little weird mainly because of the privacy concerns that come into play with how you actually transmit and get post by other people within the social media network.
[01:46:35] ODELL:
Yeah. But how are you gonna ever get rid of that? Like, that's just an Internet thing.
[01:46:39] Seth For Privacy:
You mean, like, IP address leaks? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the main the main difference is that instead of having a single known trusted third party, which is still a trusted third party, still problematic, you have a lot more unknowns, especially when it comes to media hosting with the Nasr.
[01:46:54] ODELL:
And there's a lot of But you could do that with you could you could you could do that with Nasr on you could if that's the trade off model you want, you can do that with Nasr while still embracing the interoperability and giving people the choice of opting out and moving apps without losing their their their network graph, their connections. Like, I mean, that's what we're doing with Primal, and it's controversial within Nasr. Right? But we with Primal, Primal's hosting a caching server, which you can think about, like, a super relay that's pulling all the notes from the relays. So when you're reading if I mean, look. 99% of people are lurkers. When you're reading, you're not exposing your IP address to different people's media servers or different people's you're just trusting Prime. Now, obviously, Primal is a trusted third party in that situation.
The but that that caching server is false. Anyone can run one. In the UI, we allow people to switch. You can obviously switch apps to a pure one. Now on the sending side, you still expose your IP address, but we have a there's a toggle in because we were talking to activists who trust the US government, they're, like, anti US enemies. They're, like, anti US enemies activists. Right? It's like, so, like, they're fine with x. Right? Because they trust Elon, and they're fine with the US government knowing their information. But they don't want their government to know. And so there's a feature in primal where you can have us sit in between you and your broadcasts, and then you're not exposing your IP. Now that offers a that's a censorship trade off because Primal can stop your post from going out. Right? But you can always toggle it off or you can switch apps. So you can build these things on top.
I think the biggest issue we have right now is, like, however you wanna solve it, key rotation, key security. You know, your key gets compromised. You're you're screwed. And I think, once again, I think that's I think that's solvable. We could easily solvable solve it on a centralized proprietary way. If I mean, look. But if we're arguing against the status quo. Right? Like, if you're arguing against that you could reach out to x support and they can save you, like, I we could do that tomorrow. Like, I we could push that feature live and just hold your fucking NSEC for you and make sure no one else takes it. And if you get compromised, you know, switch your password.
I don't think I think there's more elegant ways we could do that without having that trade off, and that'll take more time. Yeah. And and I think on, like, the insect side, the, like, the easy route is
[01:49:28] Seth For Privacy:
use something like we talked about for seeds, iCloud keychain, Android auto backup. There's, like, each of the main mobile platforms has an Internet access. So you you already trust Apple and Google with the vast majority of your life. Most people, unfortunately, trust Apple or Google with the vast majority of your online personas anyways. And if you're using Internet encryption and you have good two factor, it's actually really good security, but it is a little frightening that there's just there's no going back. Like, if you lose your insect, there's no going back. You cannot do anything with it. So
[01:50:02] ODELL:
Yeah. But, I mean, Elon can just hit you with a ban hammer. Right? Like, we're not in like, the the status quo is not great. I mean, American Huddl has had eight accounts on on Twitter. And, like, there's no there's no cryptographic verification. He's not signing a PGP message when he he's just like, yo. I'm back. American Huddl two. American Huddl three. It's just like just fucking post. And, like, that's the current status quo. But I think also too much has been played on the censorship resistance side, which I do think Nasr offers a lot of promise there, particularly for, quote, unquote, high value accounts that you can't quantify. Like Kanye, for instance. If Kanye came on to Nasr, first of all, I don't know if we're ready. But if he came on to Nasr, there would be, like, 500 servers that were just dedicated to storing his content.
Like, literally, every note he sent would be signed, and they would just be saved by a bunch of people, because it's Kanye. Or, like, if it was Donald Trump. Right? Like, the president of The United States. The, like, the the super sensitive accounts that are most prone to types of censorship and shadow banning and stuff, in a non quantifiable it's like a Streisand effect kind of situation. I think they I think they get saved. But, anyway, my point is that a lot has been pointed out on the censorship resistance side. But I think just the simple idea that everything is signed, and so you can verify the integrity of it. And now we're doing it with media too where all media is hashed and signed. So you know, like when I'm gonna post this, right, it's on YouTube because YouTube has all the apps.
Right? And people wanna watch on their TV and stuff. So we still post to YouTube even though You're shadow pan. There's not many yeah. There's not many viewers on YouTube, because I refuse to turn on monetization or put the clickbait headlines or anything like that and play the Algo game. We stream to x through the ten thirty one account because my partner, Jonathan, insisted on blue checking that account, and so it was blue checked anyway. So I might as well just stream out through that. So when the inevitable x dump happens, that's his phone number that's attached to that account, just FYI, everybody, and his billing address.
But the only place where I post where you know it hasn't been modified after the fact is not. And I think that becomes more and more important. It was like, you actually have a source of truth. And to not delve into, like, the opp return wars too much, you could then use if you wanted to, you could use open time stamps, and I can prove that this happened at this time. I have cryptographic proof that it hasn't been changed because it's gonna get wild. Like, I think people don't realize, like, we've done both of us have done thousands of hours of video content.
They can make us say anything. They can make us say absolutely anything. And, like, so to have a source of truth. And how where is that source of truth gonna come from? It's not gonna come from a proprietary business. Like, it's not gonna come from a big tech company. What they're gonna do is they're gonna KYC everyone. I'm almost positive. Like, Palantir is the back end. X, TikTok, Facebook, they're the front end. Like, we talk a lot about x. I talk a lot about x, but that's because Elon is the most he's the best of the big techs in terms of free speech and stuff. And he's still bad. Right? Like, he talks one way and then bans a bunch of people in India, bans people in Turkey and stuff, and shadow bans them. So, like, you can see them in The US, but you can't see them where it matters.
But, like, Facebook has 5,000,000,000 users. Like, it's not gonna be Facebook that offers cryptographic verifiability. They're gonna KYC people. They're gonna be like, we proved it behind the scenes. You can trust us that it hasn't been changed. And I don't know I don't want that to be the status quo. Like, I I think that's a bad world to live in. And I think it's gonna be rough to get there, but it's doable. It's doable. And I think for me personally, what do I care the most about? It's like, I care about, like, Bitcoin and false discussion. And how many accounts matter?
Like, I we we need, like, 15 people, a hundred people to actually put time in, and then then it's actually useful because you have a chicken and the egg problem on the content side. Anyway, I'm ranting, but I bootstrapped Twitter Bitcoin Twitter. I was one of the hundred accounts that bootstrapped Bitcoin Twitter. And what did I get out of it? Nothing. They just sold me to someone else. They sold all my shit. Like, Dorsey wasn't great when he was running Twitter. But still, at the end of the day, he just, like Moved on. Sold me off. Him and the shareholders sold me off, and then he can do like, it's not my property.
So, like, maybe we can build something better. Maybe we can't, but that's how I think about it. No. I'm I'm hopeful. I think, like
[01:55:15] Seth For Privacy:
like, I'm bearish on the idea of Nostr becoming this, like, normal mass market product as social media, but that's also Yeah. I mean, if you ask me about Bitcoin as freedom money or Monero or any privacy tech generally, any freedom tech generally, I'm generally pretty bearish on it becoming a mass market tool. Like, unfortunately, many people are more than happy to live lives with blinders on, and they don't wake up until very late if they wake up at all to how broken the system is. So, like, again, I the vast majority of what I care about are things that are probably gonna remain relatively niche. So Nosta remaining relatively niche isn't the end of the world if it does serve human freedom. Like, I don't think it's gonna replace Twitter, but if it remains a platform that people The bull case is like That's great.
[01:56:04] ODELL:
The bull case is like 5% of people. Yeah. Right? And, like, that's, like, overly optimistic. For all of these things, like, Bitcoin is free to money. It's, like, 5% of people. And the ability for anyone without permission to opt into that. That's the bull case. And then maybe and there's some corollaries with Bitcoin here. You know, I could see a world where you could read nostril notes in x, but you can't read x notes everywhere else. So they, like, pull it into their walled garden. Right? Like, they're like, the central if if you post on Nasr, you can read it on Facebook. But Facebook doesn't return the favor. And you can't you see that. Right? Like, what are the most successful businesses in Bitcoin? It's Binance. It's Coinbase.
Right? And they leverage the open protocol, but they don't contribute back to it. They have their walled gardens that leverage it. They wanna keep you in the system. Right. So I could see a world where that happens. And then all of a sudden, it impacts more than five percent of people in a positive way. Maybe that's the true bull case. And people will complain about it and whatnot
[01:57:17] Seth For Privacy:
just like they do today with the client. It's so has so many similarities to Bitcoin. Like, I think we do need to divorce it from Bitcoin because one of the problems with Nostra I have right now is that it's, like, Bitcoin social media. Like, it it needs to become more than that. We have a good Monero community. Nice. Nice. Glad to see that growing there. I think there was a little bit of that. Did you not see them fighting in the announcements? A little bit. In the in the announcements, it was the Monero bros fighting the Bitcoin. I only saw you fighting the the anti Monero bros.
[01:57:44] ODELL:
The other. No. They came in a little bit later. Think again. We have a decent amount Yeah. In there. I think, like I mean, there's there's nothing stopping anyone from putting Monero's apps in. It already it already exists, actually. There's a third party client that lets you do Monero's apps on Nostra Post. The the problem is is you need this like, the whole point of a Zap is the social signal. Like, everyone wants private zaps or you don't actually want private zaps. Like, people want to be the top zap on the post with their little
[01:58:16] Seth For Privacy:
logo their little base on it. It's, like, part of the That's the whole point, really. I mean, like, a private zap is just a donation, which is fine. Like, donating is awesome, but it's yeah. It's the social value. I mean, just like if you if you wanted private social media, that's just called a group chat. Like, go on signal or something. You don't need Nosta or something like that. But,
[01:58:37] ODELL:
yeah. I don't know. I don't know how we bootstrap it past Bitcoiners. To be frank, me personally, I don't really care. I actually think there's not enough Bitcoin discussion. Like, when people are fighting about Bitcoin, they should be fighting on Master. They're not right now. They're, like, they're fight they're fighting on x, or they're fighting on delving Bitcoin, which, like, I appreciate it exists, but, like, another walled garden platform. Or maybe walled garden is the wrong word, but it's a proprietary centralized platform. You know? Like, they should be fighting on Nasr. And we don't have enough Bitcoin content there, in my opinion.
But, you know, I think I think there's something to be said. Maybe I look at everything from a Bitcoin lens. But in this world today where we stand, where if the average person goes on x and you onboard them to Bitcoin by putting them on x, an overwhelming majority are gonna just buy MSTR or Meta Planet or some shit. And then, like, a second tier will buy and take self custody. A smaller subset will buy and take self custody, and rarely spend it or use it as freedom money. And then an even tinier subset will actually then use it as savings and use it as spending. But if you bring them into somewhere, like, into if you if you onboard them to Primal or you onboard them into Nasr generally, and their first experience is not buying Bitcoin, but it's shitposting and receiving 21 sats, which, by the way, can't receive it on chain, then all of a sudden, their first experience with Bitcoin is receiving it as money.
And and they and it's a different user journey. So even if we get two per 2% of the amount of people are coming into Nasr than they're coming into x, which is probably generous, maybe it's even less, it's a way higher percent that are using Bitcoin as money and coming into it as Bitcoin as money.
[02:00:48] Seth For Privacy:
And so they're thinking about that, and then they start to think about self custody from that direction rather than the opposite. I I like the thought process. I I think it's very optimistic. I like it. I think my main concern is just, like, where how are you getting these people into Nasr and into Bitcoin?
[02:01:04] ODELL:
I well, I deleted my ex account, so I need you to show it. Exactly. That's right. That's like
[02:01:10] Seth For Privacy:
This is this is what I'm doing right now. That's the hard part for me, and, like, I know we've talked about this, and I talked to some other people about it. But, like, the reason I have a Twitter is not because I like Twitter. I freaking hate Twitter. I hate social media. Like you, I would love to just disappear tomorrow and not have to do the influencer shit. I could, but they're not just downsides. They're not just upsides for me. There's also downsides for other people. I know. All the people that I can reach on x, 99.9% of them are never gonna be on Noster or at least not for a very long time. So, like, I think it has to be, like, a multi tiered funnel. Like, I think, also, if there's no Nostr, we're greatly limited in the amount of, like, freedom discussions we can have because there's a central platform that can control that. So we need Nostr.
I view it more as, like, a shit hits the fan, break the emergency glass kinda thing, where we need to catch people higher up in the funnel, show them FreedomTech, show them things like Nostr, show them things like Bitcoin, and catch them before they've been just stuck in that forever or have been in that for ten years before they discover Nostra or whatever. And so that's why, like like, I I'm hesitant myself to leave Twitter and go to Nostra because I feel like it would be I don't have to service it.
[02:02:24] ODELL:
You don't have to. I'm not maybe past Matt was like, delete the trip. Don't delete. Just use Nostra more. That's all I'm saying. I'm a I'm a much friendlier I've moved to a friendlier. That much time, Matt. I'm at a friend house, man. I can't I know. I can't post that. Well, that's why I use not through only. I know. I, so I think we are gonna get to a place on primal where you can post on primal, and then it'll auto post to Twitter as well. Because you can't do it in the reverse because of the way the APIs work, but we can do it in that direction. So maybe that will make it more, interesting for you where you can automatically cross post. Obviously, you'd have to do it within Nasr to do but we'll make it so it doesn't shadow ban you and it looks nice and shit. You know, like, a hootsuite or something. Do that. That would be totally a no brainer. I'd adopt it overnight.
We have that we have that going for you and then, or going for us. And then the other thing I would say is, I respect the thought that it's a shit hits the fan type of situation, and I respect the thought that, you wanna, like, save people or help people. I've that's where I came from as well in the beginning. And I did like, I justify it by saying that I I put in my time. I helped a lot of people. You did. You know, I told them to stack sets at the generational bottom. Now it's a hundred thousand dollars. I, but just know in the back of your head that the reason the shit hits the fan solution will be there when shit hits the fan is because there's a bunch of us building up shit hits the fan thing
[02:04:14] Seth For Privacy:
while other people aren't building it. I'm I'm legitimately grateful. Right. Yeah. I'm legitimately grateful. Because I like I like I said earlier, I know it's We'll be ready for this. And how painful a lot of Denosta user experience has been over the years. It wasn't you know? Like, building that is vital. I delete everything.
[02:04:30] ODELL:
I I delete everything. I delete I've deleted my Facebook way back when. I deleted my LinkedIn. This is just the I deleted my Telegram. That was also a bad one. Yeah. I've there was a point for six months where people didn't know how to contact me because they couldn't DM me on Twitter, and I deleted my Telegram. But the people that figured it out were able to reach me on signal. Get the highest of signal DMs now because
[02:04:55] Seth For Privacy:
there's only, like, two places to reach you. There you go.
[02:04:58] ODELL:
You have to put the proof of work in. But, anyway, I'm not trying to, maybe I am I'm, but I'm not intentionally trying to get you or anything. It's just something that it's something that obvious, like I'm getting tired and I, and, so I'm I I'm throwing things at the wall to see how we boost adoption, and it it has been it has been slower than I expected. And I think part of it is because Elon has done a a pretty decent job. Like, he's clearly, he he x has got a a ton of users. User growth is going up. Functionality is going up. He's mostly at least hidden the censorship behind the bin in the side. You know? Like, people don't really realize what's going on.
And it's gonna take a and then he's obviously friendly with the current administration, so there's not, like, a back and forth.
[02:05:54] Unknown:
But that can change quickly. So, like, there's no
[02:05:57] ODELL:
there's no hot stove pushing people, but maybe it's, that can turn, yeah, that can turn quickly. And also, we live in a global world. Right? Like, so there's people right now in Serbia or India or Turkey or Brazil that actually probably could benefit significantly from it. And maybe we are we're not really getting those users right now. But I think part of that is tooling. Yeah. And, also, that's why I brought you on because I think Cakewal does a really good job of tooling, and we wanna lower the friction as much as possible. Okay. Last piece. We talked about Nasr too much.
[02:06:37] Seth For Privacy:
We were forced. There were too many people asking for it. So
[02:06:42] ODELL:
This debate currently about seedless is safer. Oh my god.
[02:06:47] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah.
[02:06:49] ODELL:
This debate has mostly happened on x. I wish it happened on Noster. You're on x. You're building you're VP of a self custody wallet that gives you your seed words, a nice easy copy button. How do you think about this?
[02:07:05] Seth For Privacy:
It's a I mean, it's a tricky one. Like, I understand the approach that Bitkey is taking because they are kind of taking the make it as easy as possible even if it's compromising on a lot of the things that have been critical to Bitcoin security in the past. And it does it in a way that is very user friendly because you're just removing a lot of what are the traditional barriers of entry. I think the biggest issue for me is that, at least, I only want to build tools that do not rely on me or my company being around long term. Like, obviously, I hope that Cake Wallet is around forever. I hope that we're wildly successful building self custody privacy tools. Like, obviously, that's the hope. But I think all of these things should be built in a way that is the the most standard, the most portable, the least walled garden as possible, and the one that provides the best security possible for the user. Obviously, k wallet is very different from something like Bitkey because we're talking about a hot a hot wallet where key management, like, the the threshold is much lower because we're not talking generational wealth. Whereas when you're talking about hardware wallets, like, the main problem I have with Bitkey is twofold. The portability of not offering a seed to their users makes it much harder to migrate off. I know they have some, like, a emergency access kit or something that they call it.
It works. Possible. I've tested it. It's possible.
[02:08:26] ODELL:
Probably
[02:08:28] Seth For Privacy:
99 of Bitcoin influencers have not tested it, but I've actually tested the entire flow. Yeah. And I I haven't tested it either, to be completely fair. I haven't had that much time with with Bitkey itself. But
[02:08:39] ODELL:
You basically you install an APK that doesn't rely on their servers, and then you have a PDF that's in your automatically put in your cloud backup, which if you lose access to your cloud back, if you don't have that PDF, but you could also save that PDF at will at any time. But only through the So there's a PDF the only way you can get the PDF in short? No. No. No. No. No. No. The PDF is, like, literally just it's an encrypted PDF that's encrypted with your Bitkey hardware that's sitting in your cloud drive automatically as soon as you set up the wallet. It's always sitting there. It's just just sitting there. It says Bitkey break in case of emergency.
But you can also download that and save it separately at will whenever. Now if the time comes, you know, block cancels you or goes out of business. You take that PDF. You download the APK, you scan it with the APK, you tap your Bitkey to decrypt it, and then you have two keys. Then you send all in one transaction out to another wallet. So it's actually, like, relatively clean if you know what an APK is and you still have access to your cloud account. Let's be honest. Pretty much any a big key user in that situation is gonna be in full on panic mode. Yeah.
[02:09:59] Seth For Privacy:
But it works. Yeah. What So that's the current Which is, like, the lowest bar. Like, that's if they didn't have that, that would be terrifying. Like, you gotta be absolutely terrifying. But, like, that is the lowest bar that's absolutely necessary, which I think is fine. I mean, the I don't know. It it really just the user needs to be properly educated about that, but I don't think it's the end of the world for it to be like that. But the main problem I have with it is that for their target demographic, it's essentially a walled garden.
It's very hard for them to move to something else other than sending the stats themselves and from talking to lots of people, hardware wallet users who wanna migrate. Like, that's a terrifying prospect for the vast majority of users and not something they would do unless shit hit the fan. So that's my like, I don't I honestly don't have a huge, like, care in the the fight. I think the only other thing that I don't like is just the screenless approach
[02:10:52] ODELL:
also introduces some trust. Yeah. The screenless is
[02:10:55] Seth For Privacy:
they just need it. They need it. Like it. You could do a really good UX with a screen. Like, I I really don't think it's necessary to be screenless for their target demographic, and it does have some serious compromises in in security. But, again, there's very few people that are gonna be buying a bit kit that are gonna be attacked in the way that a screen would protect them. A bit key. Yeah. Exactly. There's, like, there's a a very small threat model. It is important to know and discuss, but that's why I'm, like, I'm not up in arms about the approach. But I think it is valuable that people understand it, and it also should be a good driver for those of us building things that are more traditionally self custody with seed phrases is how can we continue to make things easier without that full blown trade off of being seedless or full blown trade off of being screenless, that sort of thing.
[02:11:42] ODELL:
I mean, I think it's not it doesn't compete with a typical hardware signer, like, a typical hardware wallet where the hardware wallet is trying to protect you from your hot device, by being able to verify on a secure screen and approve transactions and hold your keys on it. What it's really doing is making a standard mobile wallet more recoverable in more situations. Right? It's like, which is why I see why they didn't add a screen. Right? Because it's if if the screen is if if the phone is compromised, like, the big key is not gonna protect you, if it shows you the wrong information.
Well, it would But if you lose your phone, if you lose You wouldn't have a way to verify what was the correct information. Right. But if you lose your phone, it allows you to easily and sit relatively securely recover. And if you lose your big key, it allows you to easily and securely recover. And if their server goes down, it allows you to ease so it's like a more of a recovery device, a recovery mechanism than a verification mechanism.
[02:12:48] Seth For Privacy:
Does Cake Wallet support hardware wallets right now? Just Ledger right now, but we're working on adding more, throughout the course of the year. You're gonna just do, like, the basic QR support? No. We definitely don't. Like, I feel like we definitely will. I know, like, we had some people asking about Jade, and, I don't know that, like, cold card is our normal demographic. But But but if you add if you add QR PSVT
[02:13:09] ODELL:
standard, then you
[02:13:10] Seth For Privacy:
support Jade, cold card, seed sign, or passport. You support all of them without doing anything. We technically already have it. Just we haven't actually exposed it to people connecting other hardware wallets. Because we we actually have our own app that's not really ready for prime time yet, but will be soon. That is a offline signer app that you install on a second phone, like an old phone or something that you keep offline. And it it works using PSVT over you are, all the same functionality. So we already have actually have all of it there. So that's why I'm saying, like, we we will have broader support because we already have all of the bones of signing PSBTs using UR, the QR back and forth, all of that actually already in place in cake. So it's definitely coming. It's definitely coming.
[02:13:53] ODELL:
So, I mean, last last thing on the seed thing. So when I go to save a seed in cake wallet, you give me, like, the scariest warning. You know, don't lose the seed. Keep it safe. Don't send it to support. I think it's, like, all caps, you will lose your money. From, like, from your from your perspective, like, do you see a lot of fishing and people losing their Bitcoin now or Monero or their Nano or whatever? No. I mean,
[02:14:23] Seth For Privacy:
the the thing that has remained true across working at Foundation, across just being an educator, across working at Cake, is it's just people losing their money because they don't back up their seed. Like, it almost no one is losing their money because someone gets access to their seed because they had it in a a screenshot or something. It definitely
[02:14:42] ODELL:
happens. Like, I think I've heard Well, the phishing app Phishing happens. But Right? Like, people will just send it to support or send it to a fake Telegram contact. Even that is more rare now, actually.
[02:14:52] Seth For Privacy:
I haven't heard of any cases of that within k Wallet. The one that we've had to put in, like, extra protections against and the most common one is on EVM chains. Adding fake stablecoin tokens is, like, the stupidest scam, but it happens and it works so well where an attacker will convince someone to add the contract address for a a fake version of USDT or USDC or something. They'll sell it to them, and they'll keep sending them this fake USDT or USDC. And so they think they'll think that they're wealthy or making money or whatever, and they'll obviously send them extra to make them feel better. But all the while, it's completely useless tokens that they've created. We have all the protections in cake to warn you about this. We don't pull the fiat value of this. Users still keep falling for it despite having to three times confirm that this isn't a scam, that they know what they're doing. That's that's been, like, the the most common. It's still rare. So what you're just checking you're just checking the contract addresses to make sure that Yeah. I mean, we have a we have a white list of the primary ones that are used in this, like, the primary tokens that people are gonna use anyways. So, like, we'll we'll know if this is pretending to be USDT, but it's some token this random scammer created.
But, obviously, we don't want to limit the user's ability to add custom tokens that we don't know about. Like, obviously, we don't wanna we don't want to lock them in a walled garden. So there's always a kind of balance there, but they have to click through, like, three different warnings in three different places on the screen that they're forced to read, like, all of this. But people still fall for it. And that's like, when we think about security for Bitcoin wallets, that's always the lowest common denominator. And that's always gonna be a problem no matter what approach you take. I mean, even if you're talking Bitkey, a user who would do something like that is also just gonna send the money out of Bitkey and sign the transaction and send it because they think that they're getting the deal of a lifetime or something. Like, that there's always these things that we can't prevent. But I I only say that because the vast majority of the times I've seen people lose money over the years, it's either they didn't back up their seat at all, which is an interesting, probably, pro for something like a Bitkey because it makes it much harder to do that because you're not that's not a part of the process. You you keep your hardware wallet or you keep your phone or social recovery, or they're they're having some specific, like, spear phishing campaign that's attacking them. But I think that's where, like, in the space more broadly, we have to lean into and, like, we're not doing this at cake yet. So, like, I'm pointing at myself as well. Yeah. We have to lean into social recovery, I think, much harder because there's a world where you can do both. Like, you can have the seed phrase. You can force people through verification, which I think is something we should continue to do.
But you can also have social recovery done in a very intelligent way. And that's another specific actual use case for Nostr that I think could be really good, is using Nostr for that social recovery without the users having to know that, like, Nostr is a social media platform. Like, maybe you want to do that. But you can just use Nostr under the hood. So let's say three cake users agree to be each other's social recovery contacts. And if any two of them sign off, someone can get their money back despite having lost their seed. Something like that is something where we definitely need to lean into that more. Something I think I I would love for us to do at cake is lean into social recovery because that's the that's, like, the next best solution other than going seedless and just obfuscating all this from the user, which has a lot of other side effects.
You can do social recovery in a way that's very secure, but also much more user friendly than the seed phrase thing.
[02:18:22] ODELL:
By the way, that's how I think we're going to try and do it with, and and with key rotation on masters with social recovery.
[02:18:33] Seth For Privacy:
I like it.
[02:18:35] ODELL:
Which will also we we actually already like, activists already do it in, like, hacky ways for centralized platforms. Like, they share passwords. So, like, if one person if one person gets arrested by the secret police Mhmm. Like, they send out the bat signal and the other person changes the password kinda thing. Yeah. Because once they get one person, they try and get the social graph. It's like a I don't know. I agree with that social recovery. It's hard to do. Right? Yes. It's really hard to do if you don't already have a social network. Like, if you don't already have a network graph because you kinda need them you need to bootstrap the,
[02:19:17] Seth For Privacy:
like, the web of trust a little bit. Yeah. And then the last tier On the last tier social media side. Yeah. On the wallet side, I don't think you need any of that because you can easily just have a You send, like, an invite link. Yeah. You send an invite link, and you have a simple maybe a simplified version of the app or a simplified mode in the app where all it is is the social recovery side. So, like, if my grandma, maybe she's not gonna be a k quality user, but she could be a great social recovery person because she's always around. She's not going anywhere. Like No. That's that's not a problem. So you don't necessarily need it for that side. But for the for the nostr key rotation, obviously, you need a social.
[02:19:51] ODELL:
And then last but not least, it's just hard to test. But, I agree that's the direction to go. Because then you you I need, like, five people to test it with and, like, put funds in and go through the process, see how it works. But it's all solvable. I like social recovery. I think that would be a a big a big feature ad. And then I would just say last but not least, like, the I said it in passing, but just the big ass warning you give people, I think probably saves a lot of people. Like, just don't ever like, a nice piece of education that's built into the UX because let's be honest, they're not gonna watch, like, a two hour YouTube video or something on securing their stuff, I think, is really important.
Yeah. Hopefully, they read it, but it's there. It's there. Okay. Awesome. Well, I told you we were gonna go an hour and fifteen, and it's two hours and twenty. So,
[02:20:42] Seth For Privacy:
I knew you couldn't help yourself. We're getting back to old Citadel dispatch days.
[02:20:47] ODELL:
Seth Seth told me that an hour and fifteen was too short for me. Well, you you we we got to do another long one. It's great. I enjoyed the rip. I'd love to have you back in, you know, like, six months, a year as you guys build out a lot of these features. Do you have any final thoughts for the audience before we wrap?
[02:21:11] Seth For Privacy:
Nothing crazy. I think just, yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. Love love chatting about what we're doing at Geek Wallet, but really just continuing to chat about FreedomTech. I mean, I know I've said it before, but you're the main reason why I'm in this space at all. Main reason why I started a podcast and started to talk about that stuff as well. So it's been awesome to to see that journey and, just cool to keep keep touching base touching base with you over the years. So yeah. I mean, I guess just last little thing, if anyone wants to learn more, add Seth for privacy on x, add Seth for privacy on Noster as well, or I can't remember why I what my nip o five is, but I'm on there. I'll post
[02:21:47] ODELL:
I'll post his x handles and his nostril handle in the show notes. There you go. There you go. But he's not active on nostril, so don't bother with the nostril handle. He will be in the future. If you wanna check out Cake Wallet, it's just available in your favorite app store. Is it cakewallet.com?
[02:22:04] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. Cakewallet.com. Mhmm. Awesome. Nice and easy.
[02:22:09] ODELL:
And it's good to hear that I'm a little with at least a little part of the inspiration for your work. So I'm basically still on Twitter. I just don't have to send the tweets, which is great. Freaks, thank you for joining us, especially those of you who joined us live. You make the show unique and special. Thank you for everyone who's continued to support the show. I'm gonna keep trying to keep the streak up and do a show every week. I don't know when the next episode is, but I'll notify you all on primal.net/odell. Obviously, still dispatch is available in your favorite podcast app.
Share with friends and family. Click that nice subscribe button. I hate saying it. Just don't click the subscribe button. Click it if you want to. Take your take your friends and family's phones. Open up the podcast app and then subscribe for them. You don't even have to tell them. It doesn't require agency. Awesome. Thank you, Seth, for joining us. And, everyone, love you all. Stay on the Stack Sats. Peace.
So what's what's Bitcoin, what is it moving with just risk assets at this point? It got back to an all time high, which which you were forecasting as well. But now I think what are we one zero four this morning? So let's pull back. Yeah. I think it's consolidating. It makes sense. You know, Bitcoin is responding to global liquidity, which is moving up and I think anticipating a dovish Fed next year. So that's a tailwind for Bitcoin.
[00:00:25] Unknown:
But, you know, Bitwise has a great stat. You know, 95% of all Bitcoin's been mined, but 95% of the world doesn't own Bitcoin. So I I just think that there's still a huge demand versus supply imbalance, meaning there's a lot more potential buyers of Bitcoin over the next ten years. And so I think there's a lot of upside into year end. In into your, like, one fifty target? Yeah. One fifty, maybe 200, even two fifty this year. What?
[00:00:51] Unknown:
One fifty to to 200 to even two fifty. And what what's your you don't have a terminal price on that, do you? Well, it's,
[00:01:00] Unknown:
I think at a minimum, it should have the same network value as gold. And if you look at above ground gold, it's probably 23,000,000,000,000. So that would be, you know, 1,200,000.0 for Bitcoin. But I think Bitcoin is more valuable than gold. So, you know, gold I mean, Bitcoin could be 2,000,000, you know, 3,000,000 long term. I mean, even higher.
[00:01:20] Unknown:
Okay. Thank you. And and we're talking years, obviously. But 95% mined. I don't think the last one is is mined till, what, 2150
[00:01:29] Unknown:
or something. Yeah. It's getting harder and harder. Yeah. I mean, depending on how what decimal you wanna use, it's probably, like, you know, twenty, twenty forty or something. But
[00:01:39] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. But it's yeah. If you're cutting if you're having something forever, it'll always So what's your terminal value? That's what we just No. Yeah. I mean, the final final. He said two and a half million. Two and a half million at the end. Yeah. Or may I mean, more maybe higher. I'm sorry. I'm gonna appreciate that point. Yeah. I mean, it could, you know But I guess what I I'm sorry. The way I meant that is does that happen at the end after it's all When it's all mined. When it's all mined?
[00:02:03] Unknown:
Yeah. And there'll be network fees generally. Or does that happen pre before it's mined? It's like as if Berkshire did a buyback and there was only one share left. What would Berkshire's share price be? You know, it'd be it'd probably be the market value per And as you said
[00:03:07] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Monday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro clip was used just for laughs. I think that happened today on CNBC. I don't know what timeline we live in, but that was just pure slop. Even Joe seemed like he was he was tired. He was he was get he was he was he was getting tired. Guys, we have a great discussion lined up. Before we get started, just real quick, dispatch as always is funded by our audience directly.
No ads or sponsors. It is supported by viewers like you supporting the show with Bitcoin donations. There are three main ways of doing that. You can do it with Nasr after the show ends by zapping the video. You can do it in our live chat, which you can find at cildispatch.com/stream, which has Bitcoin enabled. Or you can zap on podcasting two point o apps like Fountain Podcasts. The highest app from last week was from Come Rocket, ride or die freak with 21,069 sats. He said, thank you, sir. He also told me separately that that payment might have failed because of poor liquidity on my node. Thank you for trying. I appreciate the support regardless. Guys, today, I have returned guest, good friend, Seth for privacy here talking about his his new project. He he relatively recently joined Cake Wallet, and, they have some amazing Bitcoin integrations that we'll be talking about today. Seth, how's it going?
[00:04:54] Seth For Privacy:
It is going great, man. Yeah. I, tired after a long Vegas week. I know you you skipped the fun. You abandoned us, but, some of us were out there, you know, presenting, interviewing, chatting with 30,000 people about Bitcoin and, unfortunately, getting asked about Ripple a few times.
[00:05:15] ODELL:
Which Did you talk to all 30,000? So,
[00:05:18] Seth For Privacy:
it feels like it. It feels like it.
[00:05:21] ODELL:
What? They showed Ripple as the on the price chart. Right? They still do that. I don't know whether they Yeah. They they still somehow, it still got some semblance of of relevance pretty set to see. Well It's crazy. I mean, let's start there since you brought it up. First of all, I felt absolutely zero FOMO whatsoever not being in Vegas. How was it? What were the highlights? What were your takeaways?
[00:05:47] Seth For Privacy:
I mean, similar to you, I would think. I wasn't there for the, like, the main stage stuff. Like, Ross' side, there was nothing for me personally, and that's not not to slam the Bitcoin mad guys, but nothing for me personally on the main stage really. But the the open source or open source stage is always just fantastic. There's so many people that get to come together that you don't normally get to have conversations with. And that's something that I really, really appreciate. I mean, unfortunately, like, I was working a booth the whole time. So I was basically talking to people, like, ten hours a day.
I got to do a panel on a presentation, which was a blast as well. But I didn't really get I didn't get to see anybody's,
[00:06:30] ODELL:
talks or anything. On the open source stage?
[00:06:33] Seth For Privacy:
My panel was open source open source stage. The, the presentation was to the the dev zone, which I think was the, like, lava dev zone this year or something. Just like a smaller side stage.
[00:06:43] ODELL:
How was the venue for the open source stage? What do you think the seating capacity was?
[00:06:49] Seth For Privacy:
It was a lot bigger than last year for sure. I think it was probably A thousand people? Probably about a thousand. Yeah. I would say. And pretty well attended. Yeah. I felt like like, again, I didn't see it throughout all the different talks, but being up there from my panel, it felt like it was probably they're probably good five, six hundred people in there at least. That's awesome. Yeah. A lot better attended attended than I expected, honestly, which is good to see. I mean, that's that's the signal there. Like, %, that's the signal there. So it was it was great to be a part of that.
[00:07:19] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, the open source stage has a close close spot in my heart because, for many years there, it was the Odell stage. To the new freaks, I consulted for Bitcoin magazine from 2020 when there were eight employees. 02/20/2023 was my last my last showing. So it was three conferences. It was '21, '20 '2, and '23.
[00:07:49] Unknown:
Mhmm. And
[00:07:50] ODELL:
I will say that, despite, you know, might not people might not just agree with all the decisions made by Bitcoin Magazine. David Bailey and leadership there were always very supportive of the open source initiative. We championed giving developers free tickets. The first one was, like, this tiny dome we had for the open source stage. It was like a sweaty nerd tent. We thought there was air conditioning. There wasn't. They're always good about not putting shit sponsors on the on the stage. Mhmm. It was basically a lost leader, like, never made profit. And it got bigger and bigger, and it was good to see that after I left that they continued the the trend. It was it, you know, it it was not a given. It was not a given. It takes a lot of efforts. It takes a lot of time.
People don't realize their team is absolutely tiny. And then the last piece I will say on that is all these conference centers are union run. So live streams cost way more than they should. So that's why they never live stream that stage. They usually only live stream the main stage. But everything is recorded. So I presume we'll start to see those panels get panels and presentations get released over the next few weeks as they cut up the content and post it. So just keep an eye out for that. I'm sure there was a lot of good stuff there that that I'm not even aware of.
[00:09:24] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't aware of that, but that that makes a lot more sense why that wouldn't be live streamed because it had all the gear and everything there. So
[00:09:30] ODELL:
yeah. Yeah. As soon as you, like, press the live button, it, like, goes up a hundred x. That's crazy. It's crazy. And Internet too. Like, the Internet is all unionized. It's all a fucking it's all a fucking mess. That explains why it's also have Internet. There was no expo Internet. There was no, like There you go. Crazy. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. And, that's also why it's impressive that they accept Bitcoin too because you have to, like you know, it's the unions bought try and block everything, and they've been accepting Bitcoin. I think for all their events, they've accepted Bitcoin, or at least all the ones that I was part of. I think in 2019, they accepted it. It was the only one I wasn't It's before my time. Before. Mhmm.
Anyway, Seth, Cake Wallet. When did you join Cake Wallet?
[00:10:20] Seth For Privacy:
September. So nine months already. It's absolutely flown by. But, yeah, last September.
[00:10:26] ODELL:
And your title is vice president. You're the JD Vance of K Quality. You're not like the you're not like the VP of something. You're just VP.
[00:10:35] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. Yeah. Just VP. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was an awesome an awesome opportunity. I've known Vic for a long time, and I know we were chatting a little bit before before we hit record, but I've known Vic for a long time. He's one of the most, like, generous and kind men that I've ever had the had the privilege of getting to hang out with. Met him a long time ago at, MoneroCon in 2019. So before I before I got more into the Bitcoin scene, that was my first conference I'd ever been to. And we just always have had, like, a loose friendship since then, but, yeah, I mean, the the opportunity came up for really, he needed somebody to run run the business, run the day to day.
And, obviously, I'm deeply passionate about all the things that they've been shipping. Like, they had already shipped silent payments before that. They already kicked off the effort around PayJoin before that. Obviously, started as a Monero only wallet originally, so, a privacy ethos at its core. So there was already a a clear alignment there, and I've gotten to spend a good bit of time with the team as well last year at a conference. I'm just getting to hang out with them at dinners and stuff. And just absolutely fantastic people. So when the opportunity came up, it was a it was a no brainer to to jump over and get to get, really get my hands on a lot more in the privacy space, especially from a Bitcoin perspective, because there's there's so much that you can build today that's really hard to build because no one else is building it, yet, unfortunately.
And it it's, I think just the really the perfect team to to jump into that with. But yeah. Yeah. VP pretty much running the day to day. Vic's still involved and getting more involved now now that a a side business of his is a little more chill. So loving that as well, but, really great to be able to, yeah, just do a lot of the product the product design, help fantastic devs be able to ship more fantastic releases, and been a blast so far.
[00:12:21] ODELL:
I love it. So okay. Where should we start here? First of all, I wanna say that a particular passion of mine, since helping to launch ten thirty one Mhmm. Is the idea of profitable, false, self custody focused businesses. A lot of people say it's not possible. Cake Wallet is one of the exceptions or one of the trailblazers in that front. So it's incredibly impressive that you guys are fully MIT licensed, fully false. Anyone can fork it, but you actually have a sustainable profitable business model. So, I wanna put that out there because Yeah. It's it's an exception to a rule right now. But, hopefully, as we start, you know, charting this path into the future where, we're we'll we'll start to see more more profitable false businesses. Yeah. I see Rob Hamilton in the comments, cofounder of Anchor Watch.
I think ten thirty one is the largest investor in Anchor Watch. He was on the show, and I was trying to get him to, make a self custody wallet, open source. So we had a bit of a back and forth. Well, as you can see, Rob, I see you in the live chat. It's possible someone's doing it. It is. And, commendable. So Cake Wallet, self custody wallet available on Android and iOS. Is it available on desktop?
[00:13:51] Seth For Privacy:
It is. Yeah. Yeah. I would say the the mobile experience is definitely the best right now. But one of our goals for the the second half of this year is revamping the desktop from the ground up, especially for power users, like, trying to bring much better coin control, better hardware, all that support, trying to make something that can grow with you just like the mobile app. But I'd say the the desktop app is kind of a I don't know if I should say this as the VP of the company, but kind of a second class that is in right now, to the mobile app. So mobile is definitely the best experience, but we are on all major desktop platforms as well. And lots of work coming that way over the next six months or so.
[00:14:24] ODELL:
I love it. Okay. So, self custody false wall available on pretty much every platform.
[00:14:32] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[00:14:34] ODELL:
You support you you already stated you supported Monero first, then you added Bitcoin, and you have a bunch of other shit coins in there too. Right? It's like Yeah.
[00:14:43] Seth For Privacy:
Some some that I'm cool with, some that I I'm gonna keep fighting back to remove. So
[00:14:48] ODELL:
there's People use Nano? Like, that is, like, clicking around in there?
[00:14:53] Seth For Privacy:
Surprisingly, yes. I mean, not it's not, like, huge, I would say. So I'll I'll I'll caveat everything I say about usage with the fact that we care deeply about privacy so much so that we have no logging, no analytics, no usage info. We don't know anything about the users of our wallet, who creates a Nano wallet, how much crypto you have, obviously, anything like that. So you don't know how much Nano I own? We I I don't. I don't. I can assume. I think I can make a pretty good assumption. I think the heuristic there is pretty, pretty high about probably a % to to having zero, but, you know, you never know. Maybe you're secretly a nano shell. You're one of those bots in my replies over the last, five or six years. But yeah. Not nano, I don't think, is a huge one. But, yeah.
[00:15:37] ODELL:
So so, I mean, I I have I guess we're starting with the hard hitting questions because I I don't want you to necessarily, like, alienate your user bases. Yeah. But what is the thought process there? Because, like, Nano was something that, like, I was arguing with people on, like, the Nano bot army. I was arguing with them, like, five years ago, six years ago. Yeah. And it's, like, something that I hadn't even considered. I I complete let me put it this way. I completely forgot about them until I was testing out Cake before the show. Yeah. I
[00:16:08] Seth For Privacy:
mean, I'll yeah. I'll say the same. I forgot about them until I started at cake. It's it's never been a concern of mine. A lot of the stuff was obviously added before I joined. So, like, some of the stories there aren't huge. I think the clear one for Nano though is just that it has been something that people actually like to use and spend, but it does seem like it's died out. Like, the idea behind it was always one that was focused on spending, but I just haven't seen much much life there. But we we do definitely get, like like, some of the coins we have, like, literally no one even open support tickets or something. So, like, those are those are ones we probably would remove. But, Nano, we do get some signs of life, some people posting on socials about using it to to do things, but it's certainly not a, like, a a top tier coin or anything.
[00:16:51] ODELL:
Anyway, I'm not gonna ask you, like, shit on specific sets of users. But, Just we can just go cryptocurrency by cryptocurrency. I can just Yeah. You know people I can piss off in one recording. I just I just we we said before the show that I really like this fit for you because both the Monero Maxis and the Bitcoin Maxis hate you, and I just feel like it's just a really ideal situation for you to be in. Mhmm. No. But just big picture, like, is the plan to flood the app with even more shitcoins, or is it maybe reduce it and be a little bit more focused?
[00:17:25] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. I mean, I I think, generally, the plan is reduce it. Obviously, it's that's something you wanna approach carefully as a self custodial wallet. Because, obviously, if those users haven't backed up their seeds properly Right. Or something and you We're kinda locked in to the tech debt. Yeah. It's a it's a little bit painful. Like, I would say it can be done. We removed one recently, that has been coming for a long time. It was called Haven. They've finally shut down the project. They should have. It was like a privacy focused stablecoin, but,
[00:17:54] ODELL:
the desert Was it a fork of Monero?
[00:17:57] Seth For Privacy:
Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was supposed to have, like, this algorithmic stablecoin that you could move back and forth between the, like, the base asset and the different stablecoins. Again, interesting in practice, but they just they got they got hacked. Like, I don't think that's ever happened. Over the years. Yeah. It it I've given up on algorithmic stable coins. The I think they're they're doomed. If someone proves it and it works for, like, five years, maybe I'll be interested. But
[00:18:20] ODELL:
even just Tether year. It's just Tether and then Bitcoin standard, I think. But we'll see.
[00:18:26] Seth For Privacy:
I I think, generally, though, yeah, it's it's reduced. Like, my perspective is, like it or not, we're in a multi crypto world, And people the vast majority of people, not the vocal minority on Twitter or something, but the vast majority of people, use multiple things. Most of them save in Bitcoin. Many of them spend in Monero. Many of them spend in stablecoins or use stablecoins as a an escape from their broken fiat. So, like, my my vision and I won't say necessarily this is exactly what CAKE will do because, obviously, I don't own CAKE. But my vision is that we embrace the tools that people are using for freedom, and focus heavily on those, making it much easier to achieve privacy on Bitcoin, making it much easier to use Monero day to day, making it much easier to use ZTM chains for stablecoins. As painful as that is. I'm still very torn on the whole stable coin topic, because I know it's helping a lot of people while at the same time is basically a CBDC.
So that one's a little bit harder for me, but that's kinda the way that I'm approaching it. And some of the stuff, like, some of the stuff that's been in the in the wallet is, like, very interesting technical approaches or unique unique privacy coins, that sort of thing. That's interesting and doesn't doesn't really cause too many problems. But focus for me is really trying to embrace, like, what what is providing freedom to people around the world, and how can we best serve that? And as I'm sure you know, unfortunately, a lot of times that's not Bitcoin, even though it it should be more, I think.
[00:19:59] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I'm just I'm scrolling through the shit coins. The I I I see you have Tron support. So I assume that also supports Tron Tether. Right? Yep. Yep. Like, that one that one makes the most sense to me because Tether you're just trusting Tether regardless. So it doesn't really matter what it runs on, and the world is running on Tron Tether right now. And true. And then yeah. And the unfortunate reality is that is if you let a bunch of bad wallets be the only ones that support Tron and Tether, then Mhmm. You have, you know, hundreds of millions of people using bad wallets because they want Tron Tether support. And this was something that we struggled with at Strike.
Mhmm. And we eventually just added Tron Tether support. We were like, we support Citibank in America. And, like, in Argentina, like, their dollar rails they want is Tron Tether. And Twitter got really angry at us. And then usage numbers went through the roof. Like, it was just crazy. Like, people wanted to get away from Binance and Trust Wallet and and Yeah. So you kinda had to support it. And I think it's probably a net benefit, but also, probably a corporate bank digital currency and has a lot of the same issues. But
[00:21:29] Seth For Privacy:
It is. It kinda is what it is. Yeah. Yeah. It is. But I I think a lot of people overlook the kind of top of funnel nature that stable coins can be. Or even other cryptocurrencies or maybe they're not ideal. But when they're in a wallet that also heavily pushes things like Bitcoin privacy tech, Bitcoin self custody that pushes Monero for spending, Like, these things act as a funnel. And the little data that we do have, which is basically just from talking to our exchange partners, the the volume between stablecoins into Bitcoin and into Monero is massive. Like, the a lot of the time, people are using these as an on ramp into freedom money. Obviously, sometimes the other way around. Like, I think something that I see a lot in the West is people going, like, basically, locking in their gains by just moving to stable coins from Bitcoin or Monero so that they can they can hold that in stable coins and then get back in later on. But but I think something that people sometimes forget is, like you said, like, obviously, you want people in a good wallet.
You want them in something that is actually open source, that does actually help them to self custody, that does actually provide privacy features. But then you also can act as a funnel to drive them into freedom money. And that's, I think, a lot of the way that I that I envision this as well is, like, if we onboard someone who's just there because they need tether on Tron because that's the escape from their broken fiat, they're gonna get introduced to so many other things that hopefully will be the the start of the rabbit hole for them.
[00:22:56] ODELL:
Yeah. I see, free critters zapped 4,200 sets in the live chat. Thank you. Free critter. He's asking a question about your business model. Is that the majority of the business model is the swaps between the different currencies? Yeah. So how does how does that work? Like, you don't actually do the swaps. You just get, like, you get, like, a referral fee or something when people do it. Yeah. Yeah. It's just a fee share from our our swap partners. We have a couple aggregators.
[00:23:24] Seth For Privacy:
One of whom is Trocador, who we've had a great relationship with for years and years, and, people like ChangeNow, others. We're very cautious with who we implement to make sure that they're they're not the heavy shotgun KYC type. We're very obviously careful with that because that's the main downside of instant exchangers like that. But, we're we're kinda relentlessly keeping an eye on on how they handle swaps and what what support, reports we get, that sort of thing to try and ensure that they're good. But, yeah, I mean, that's that's the subordinate. I think something that a lot of people forget is, like, if we are in a multi crypto world, embracing that does just have a good side for business. Like, people wanna swap between cryptos. Again, like I said, most of what we see is people swapping into Bitcoin or Monero. We do have a heavy Monero user base because we started as a Monero wallet back in the day and have, I would say, the majority of the market share in Monero. So we do still see a lot of Monero movement as well. But, as we've been rapidly growing in the Bitcoin segment as well, we're seeing people use use those crypto swaps to get into the cryptocurrencies they want, which is a a cool use case. But yeah. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. It's essentially crypto to crypto swaps, which is is key to our business.
It is buying and selling cryptocurrencies, but that's much smaller compared to the crypto to crypto swaps. What? Like, dollars to Yeah. Yeah. The normal, like, unfortunately, in KYC. For now, obviously, we're working on some decentralized exchange integrations down the line, but those are just really hard from user experience perspective to to do well. What is that like? People using, like, Apple Pay to buy or something? Yeah. It would be like debit card, ACH. It would depend a lot on the geography because, like, in Brazil, they have picks, and there's there's different ones that are ideal for each geography. But, yeah, the normal stuff, unfortunately, KYC. But that's that's a tiny a tiny percent of our revenue compared to the crypto to crypto swaps.
And then the third is our our gift card and debit card proxy merchant service, basically, called K Pay, where you can you can go and use a crypto, no KYC, no ID, nothing but email address necessary to get gift cards or debit cards you can add to Apple or Google Pay. Oh, that's awesome. It's been growing really quickly. It's directly in the app. We have some really good improvements coming where you'll be able to redeem those cards in the app as well, like gift cards specifically. So you can, like, be in the Lowe's checkout and buy your gift card from Bitcoin and, go ahead and use it at checkout and use it places where you're not just not gonna be able to spend Bitcoin right now. So that's the third piece of it. But yeah.
[00:25:55] ODELL:
Yeah. It's a nice stop gap. I I've used I use the Bitcoin company in the past, which gives you, like, Visa cards.
[00:26:03] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah.
[00:26:04] ODELL:
It's a nice stop gap. Like, if you're trying to live on a Bitcoin standard and they don't accept Bitcoin and you just wanna know KYC Visa prepaid or something like that. That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. For sure. Okay. Let's dive into the novel features you've added on the Bitcoin side. You've added silent payments.
[00:26:26] Seth For Privacy:
Mhmm. So why don't you explain to the listeners what silent payments are, like, why people should care? Yeah. For sure. Have you talked about them at all in previous shows? Like, how how deep should I go?
[00:26:36] ODELL:
Good. Go kinda deep. Okay. Alright. We've talked about it maybe, like, a year ago when it was more in theory. I don't know of any other Bitcoin wallets that have integrated silent payments yet, except for maybe Wasabi on desktop.
[00:26:53] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. There's a couple that have sending support. There's only one other real one that has sending and receiving support, which is built by the people who won the HRF bounty for silent payments. But it's a silent payments only desktop. I think it's called Dana Wallet. Let me just
[00:27:10] ODELL:
pull up the list real quick. Oh, but it's silent payments only, and it's on desktop?
[00:27:15] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. It's silent payments only. I'm just trying to pull it up right now. I think it's mobile. Yeah. It's mobile wallet.
[00:27:22] ODELL:
I haven't tried it yet. To me to me, it was mostly a theoretical conversation until I saw you added it to k Wallet. So why don't you go a little on the deeper side of how it works? Why should people care?
[00:27:34] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. For sure. So, when I approach silent payments, like, I I don't wanna oversell the privacy benefits. So I think the much more useful way to view it is it's a a new Bitcoin address type that brings really good user experience benefits that can also bring privacy improvements. So, basically, what it is is it's it's a static reusable address that you can give out to anybody. You can put in your Twitter bio. You can put in your, email signature. Put it wherever you want. And anytime anyone wants to pay you, instead of, like, a normal Bitcoin address where everybody, whoever pays you, can see the funds received to that address, the sender will actually use three things. There's two public keys in the silent payments address. That's why I see it's much longer than normal Bitcoin address.
And then the sender will use those two public keys plus the inputs to his own transaction that he's sending you, which is obviously a little weird compared to most Bitcoin transactions. But he'll use those inputs, and he'll generate a unique one time tap root address for you. So this flips a lot of things on their heads, especially sync, which I'll explain a little bit later. But what this does is even though I share this wallet broadly, anyone can pay it at any time without knowing anything about other people who have paid and without any worry that someone just copying and pasting that into mimpl. Space or something is gonna see other donations that have happened. So it's a it is a good improvement on the the privacy side.
[00:29:01] ODELL:
It solves it solves it solves the problem that Ross just faced, Ross Ulbricht, because Ross had a static public donation address that he was reusing, just a regular Bitcoin address, and someone sent 300 Bitcoin to it. And then everyone in the world decided to have an opinion on his donation. But if that if that was a silent payment, then maybe a sleuth after the fact would see different outputs combined with each other in a transaction or something. But it wouldn't have been, like, this blatantly obvious, like,
[00:29:37] Seth For Privacy:
his donation address just received 300 Bitcoin. Right? Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And, like, you you could do this today without silent payments, but you have to run a server. You're gonna have to run something BDC pay server. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Which is, like, I freaking love BTC pay. It's something we use every day at Cake. It's vital to what we do. But it's also way too much for the average person to run to have privacy, much less just somebody who wants to accept donations or tips or something like that. So it really, like, that the the core of the privacy that silent payments provides is it allows you to use a single static address, a single string without having to run a server or anything and avoid address reuse. Like, that's the only privacy piece that it does fix. Yeah. And that's obviously very important, but it's not a total solution for privacy.
Like you mentioned, you could you could watch it if, like, this is Ross's silent payment address, and I was a bad actor. I could be dust attacking his silent payment address, dropping some outputs there that I would hope that he would recombine later on with other outputs he had received. And then I would have a pretty good guess that those other inputs use coin control.
[00:30:42] ODELL:
He might include yours transactions in other transactions and then other inputs, and then you could see what was going on there. So it's I would say it's, like, similar to what BTC pay server is trying to solve, but, obviously, you're running a server. And then it's similar to PayNIMs that Samura had, BIP 47. So what's the differences between, silent payments and BIP 47? Like, there's a trade off there in terms of syncing. Right?
[00:31:11] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. So the there's a few differences between BIP 47, which is the underlying stealth address type, the underlies underlying reasonable payment code to PayNMs. PayNMs is really just the wrapper on top that give you the short name, but that short name relied on central server to essentially transfer the code to the name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That but that long payment code that you get as part of a PayN, that's actually your BIP 47 stealth address, basically. They don't perfectly follow the BIP spec because samurai always does their own thing, but it's basically that. So the the main differences are twofold. Both systems have trade offs.
Personally, I think silent payments has a much better set of trade offs, but they they both have trade offs. So silent payments, the big trade off, really the only trade off to me, is that in order to find your payments, it's different than bit 47. So with silent payments, again, you don't know where you're gonna get paid ahead of time. A normal Bitcoin wallet, all you do is you pre generate a bunch of addresses, and you send them off to a third party server to tell you your balance, which is obviously horrible for privacy.
But it is the norm for most Bitcoin wallets in the space. There's a couple of solutions to this, but they also have trade offs, especially around user experience. But that's the norm within Bitcoin wallets is I know what addresses I might get paid at. I'm gonna ask a third party server to tell me if I've gotten paid or not. In silent payments, it's actually flipped on its head. You don't know when you're gonna get paid or what address is gonna be used there. So you can't ask a server, does this address have any balance? Because you don't know the addresses yourself. So instead, you're actually asking a remote server, hey. For these hundred blocks since I last synced, send me the possible outputs that could be mine. And there's a lot of ways this has been optimized already so that, like, we know we don't care about spend outputs, obviously, when we're syncing.
We don't care about anything that's not taproot because silent payments, is only taproot outputs as well. And there's a few other things that we can check-in a transaction to see if it's potentially our payment or not. So we'll ask for all this data for the set of blocks. This would be the same data for anyone who was asking for sync, so there's nothing uniquely identifying about you. You get that data locally, and then you scan through it using your own private key or scan key to see if any of those transactions belong to you. So that takes a lot more time. Like, you're having to download more data, and then you're having to actually do a relatively resource intensive scan process locally. And so that's a very different user experience than the norm in Bitcoin where you just say, do I have balance? I'll reveal all my my privacy to get this data quickly. Versus silent payment says, I'm not gonna reveal any data about myself, and I'm gonna take a little bit longer to scan through this. It's quite quick in practice, but, obviously, if you're, like especially if you haven't synced your wallet, like, a month, six months, it can take quite a while.
On the flip side, bit 47, the way that it that it avoids this problem is that for a bit 47, before someone sends you money, they have to notify you on chain where you're gonna receive that money. And they don't notify you of the address, but rather they notify you of essentially where to look for the addresses so that you can derive all of the addresses that this person could pay you at. And this works to make the sync much easier because now your wallet can just check these opcode these op returns and see if any of the op returns belong to them. And then if they do, you your wallet knows where to look, and it knows where to derive addresses to send off to a third party server just like normal wallet sync. So it's still a little bit more than a normal wallet, but it's just checking up returns, so it's very quick. The major downside is twofold.
One, if you do this, the sender necessarily tells the world that they are paying
[00:34:59] ODELL:
this specific payment code or paying them. It's set up like a network graph almost. It's because you have to have, like, a pairing transaction.
[00:35:06] Seth For Privacy:
Exactly. That pairing transaction is very bad for privacy, and it also reveals a lot about you as the sender to the recipient. Like, if you're connecting you're paying them to theirs as contacts, it reveals who is actually paying the recipient, which can be a bad thing to the recipient. Sorry. Not to the entire world. I do wanna make that that note clear, but it reveals that specific piece to the person you're paying as well. So that's obviously, that's a privacy downside. You're revealing that you're using PayNIMs or Bit 47. Wait. So in this case, like, if I'm donating to WikiLeaks
[00:35:38] ODELL:
Mhmm. And I do that pairing transaction, like, WikiLeaks knows
[00:35:43] Seth For Privacy:
that me as a user is doing is is making that pairing transaction. Yeah. That plus Odell is the one doing that. Right. Now there are some ways that you could work around that, but that's not currently done with how Samari Wallet had it implemented. Right. But bit 47 has, like, has a lot of alternate ways you could implement it. So I'll just I'll focus specifically on on how it's actually done with with pain ins. But that's the main downside for privacy with bit 47. But the other main downside is if I want to donate to you once, which is probably the majority of the usage for something like this, I have to make two transactions.
Right. So, obviously, that's bad for fees. I'm gonna spend a lot more than I would otherwise. It's bad for a blockchain bloat's not the right term, but inefficient blockchain usage. And it's bad for privacy because I now have to link some output to the fact that I am paying this pain in, and then I am gonna have to send spend another input as well. So in order to make one donation, I'm gonna have to reveal, hopefully, two outputs. Because if I use the same output for the public notification as for the actual payment itself, that could be surveilled as well.
So there's a lot of downsides that you you get you get a better user experience with bit 47, but you actually sacrifice a lot of privacy, and it's much more, block space inefficient. Whereas with with silent payments, you do have the scanning trade off, but there's there's really good ways to work around this. So in silent payments, when it comes to scanning, there's there's two main things you can do. One, which we're doing right now in Cake Wallet, should be out in a couple weeks, is background sync. So instead of just syncing your wallet when you open it up, which is the norm in Bitcoin wallets, we're used to in the Monero space, this whole this whole trainings, this whole scanning trade off of it takes a long time to sync your wallet. So we've already implemented background sync for Monero and other cryptocurrencies, within Cake Wallet. We're gonna enable silent payments. We were just fixing some stuff on the silent payment side. Because right now, it's manual. Right? Like, you click a button to It it depends. You can set it to always be scanning, but it's only always scanning in, when you're when you have the wallet open. So background sync will mean that you can tell your wallet, I wanna sync daily, I wanna sync hourly, or I wanna sync every fifteen minutes. And it'll do that in the background with your scan key. No private keys are hot. And so at worst, you would have one day of blocks to sync, which is, like, five seconds ish to sync through that. And that's the worst case scenario. You could easily do hourly sync and essentially never have any sync trade off. Got it. The the other way you can do it is that scan key that you're using for background sync. You could also just offload to a third party server. Now that does reveal your silent payment, receive transactions to that third party server, but then you're just back at the same privacy from that trusted third party as a normal wallet, but you have all of the privacy benefits versus an outside observer of silent payments. Right. Or best case, and this is what we're pushing for. We're working with Josie Baik right now to to help to build build out better solutions for this, is you're already running a Bitcoin node. You have an Umbrella or start nine or something. Why can't you just run a very lightweight service that you offload scan keys to? And that server is always online. It's always in sync. So then you'll get the sync experience of a regular Bitcoin wallet, but with all of the privacy benefits and user experience benefits of silent payments. And that's really the the end goal there of background sync for those who don't wanna trust an outside observe or a a third party, and then offloading scan key for either someone who's okay with trusting a third party or who runs the the server themselves.
[00:39:20] ODELL:
Makes sense. So then when I mean, I see this comment from Cortic. Like, I'm gonna re we're gonna respond to it, but I would just Cortek, I appreciate you. I'd like, I would rather not get into, like, a massive debate over semantics during this conversation. But Quartek is saying, you guys are wrong. There's no dependencies on any server. BIP forty seven is serverless pay n m R s site is just a directory of reusable codes. I think we said that. Refer to Lauren MT, and you do not need a notification transaction here. Lauren explains the metaphor. The way they had it implemented used a notification transaction. Presumably, you could do it out out of band if you wanted to, But then you can't restore from seed, which is a really nice I actually kind of agreed with their trade off decision there because you wanna be able to restore from seed. So that's why they use a notification transaction because the chain is always there.
So you could get it there instead of out of band. And, yeah, the payment website was, like, plus Odell. Mhmm. But it it pinged to a reusable payment code. So for for years, I would just post my reusable payment code on the didn't have to actually hit their server. But for convenience, you could just type in plus Odell as long as the server was there and do it. Yeah. So with silent payments, I also see NewTonic is asking, does Cake support BIP third 353 for silent payments? I don't know what that means because I don't know what that means. Because I don't know what that means. Because I don't know what that means. The actual BIPs. On my BIPs. Payments. And we we are doing it as as to spec as possible, trying to make sure that it's That's awesome. With everybody else. Mhmm. Because that's the key. Right? It's, like, people can say, Ross shouldn't have done a reusable address.
He I mean, he they shouldn't have done just a regular Bitcoin address. He should have done a BTC pay service. The thing is is if you add friction to a donation, you might never get the donation in the first place. And this is something I saw when we had, Lionel Shriver on the show, author of Mandibles. Mhmm. People told me a million different ways for her to accept donations, and I just posted a single fixed address. And why did I do that? I did that because I wanted any OG to be able to just scan the QR code and pay her. And sure enough, she received over a Bitcoin in donations, and one of the donations was nearly a Bitcoin itself. It was like a single a single dude, like, probably used a old ass wallet and scanned and paid it and and sent sent a Bitcoin.
And by the way, she's still holding it because that has horrible privacy. So you can tell on chain that she's holding it. But also because I talked to her on email and she said, that she's gonna hold it through the apocalypse, and she's very, very excited to Nice. I mean, it's When they come to the ocean, she'll have her stats. She came yeah. She came on the show. She has, like, a hundred and $30,000 worth of Bitcoin now. It's, like, the best podcast appearance she ever made. But so to to my point is I went on a little bit of tangent here. It's really important to be on spec because what we wanna see is as many wallets as possible to be able to send to silent payments. Yeah. Otherwise, it's not really that useful of a tool. Like, that's the hard part of bootstrapping something like this. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And that's that's the part where, like,
[00:42:43] Seth For Privacy:
every wallet should support sending the silent payments today. That part is not is not complex. It doesn't involve any of the sync trade offs. You don't turn on a special server. That part's very straightforward, and I would love to see every wallet support sending because that starts this, like, unstoppable snowball of adoption where if anyone can send to it, then people start to demand receiving to it because they see how well it works. They see how how user how great the user experience is. That's that's the the first step. And, like, that's where, like, like, you mentioned in the beginning with Sabi Wallet. A few other wallets have implemented sending support. I think BlueWallet as well, has sending support to silent payment addresses.
And that's a really good start. But like you mentioned, like, if Ross used a silent payments address and not a static Bitcoin address, basically, the only, like, basically, the only people who could pay them I know, like, BlueWallet has it and we saw BlueWallet has it. I've never heard of anybody using it. You're talking, like, cake wallets, 500,000 users, and that's it. And a lot of our user narrow people, they're not Bitcoin people. That's changing, but you're greatly limiting who can actually pay you. So that's the main downside for now, but that should change that should change very quickly.
[00:43:50] ODELL:
So Nutanix is saying that 353 is the human readable DNS payment instructions. 352 is the silent payment BIP. Yep. I'm ashamed.
[00:43:59] Unknown:
I do. I didn't hold Are you go are you my BIP numbers.
[00:44:02] ODELL:
Are you are you going to support 353? We already do. Yeah. That's So what does that mean? What is that? Is that like a username? Do I have, like, a username that could be paid or something? Yeah. So we support it on the sending side right now.
[00:44:15] Seth For Privacy:
We're still trying to figure out the best thing to do on the receive side. But on the sending side, we absolutely do. So, like, I have a I have a guide for people to set up their own BIP three fifty three username on my blog, and there's an example. But you gotta self host it. Okay there. Well, you don't just self host anything, but it's it's just a DNS entry. So it's very simple. You just need to go to your domain registrar and create the DNS entry in a specific way. But, yeah, right now, we we do support sending for that only to silent payments technically because we're not a lightning wallet yet. So you can't do the bolt 12 side of that. But the best way to use bit three fifty three and one of the reasons why I say satellite payments is such a good user experience improvement is that you can do things like tips at a odel.xyz with only a DNS entry, and you can receive payments via lightning and on chain that are privacy preserving.
And that is A simple text string. You don't you don't need any server code or anything like that. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a that's a I mean, that's just a huge user experience breakthrough, and that's something that enables wallets to do usernames in a way that's actually privacy preserving rather than people just, like, sticking a static Bitcoin address there.
[00:45:25] ODELL:
Right. Yeah. Exactly what you just said it, but Nutanix also said it. Like, I could do [email protected]. Mhmm. And then also, like, I could put my bulk 12, which is also supposed to is just a simple text string, and then I can receive lightning payments or on chain payments. No server. I you know, I one step at a time.
[00:45:50] Seth For Privacy:
You'd have to be a cake user, unfortunately. But I we can get you on board. We can get you set up with bit $3.53.
[00:45:57] ODELL:
Dude, like, finally, like, we have some level of kind of frictionless donations with Zaps. And, it's all just and like I was saying earlier, like, the I use my own node, and then I don't have liquidity. And there's we'll figure out Bold 12. We need more wallet support on Bold twelve first. Yeah. And I'm laser focused on that in the back end and in the background Mhmm. Between OpenSats and ten thirty one to try and make that more of a reality. Oh, yeah. But, yes, it will happen. I'm pretty excited about it. Okay. Before we move to page join, actually, because this seems more relevant to the topic, you have a feature that you rolled out called BirdPay
[00:46:39] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah.
[00:46:40] ODELL:
Which is kind of like the grog version of BIP three fifty three. Do you wanna explain what that is?
[00:46:46] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. Yeah. So so BirdPay is one of many ways that you can pay someone using a username or a domain, something like that. Like, we support BIP three fifty three three fifty three. Like I said, we support open alias and open alias v two, which are, like, multi crypto versions of bit three fifty three, basically. But BirdPay was basically us saying, like, how easy can we make it to have as little external dependency as possible for someone to get paid at a username? And a brilliant person on the team, who actually don't know who came up with the idea, it might have been Vic. He probably was Vic because he loves Twitter. Was if you just put an address in your Twitter bio or your pinned tweet, we can easily grab that via an a via the API.
And so you can do things like just enter asset for privacy when you go to send a transaction, and it'll auto populate my Monero address. It just checks your x bio. Yeah. It's super, super simple. There's some cool things too that we were just talking about internally where, like, we can use the location field that, like, no one who cares about privacy puts their location in. But you can put a domain in there, and then we can actually scrape that via the API. So you could, like, put a bit through three fifty three username in your Twitter profile as well, and enable support that way.
But, yeah, it's it's really simple. Let's just paste an address into your bio or to your pinned tweet, and anyone can pay you anytime whether you're awake or not in a privacy preserving way when you're using silent payments or Monero, or Bolt 12 once we have lightning support as well. Yeah. It's it sounds so simple, but it's, like, it's magical when you actually use it. And it's what the future of Bitcoin usernames should be. Like, our our world right now of copying and pasting addresses, verifying addresses, all this garbage is, like, this this has to die for for there to be much more usage of people actually paying each other in Bitcoin. Because people are so used to cash tags. They're used to usernames. They're used to Right. Emails or phone numbers for Venmo, PayPal, etcetera.
If we get there, that user experience looks so much better. And now because of silent payments of Bolt 12, we can actually get there without sacrificing privacy, which is, like, incredible. We need we need every wallet leaning into this and making this the norm because it really is, like, a 10 x to user experience.
[00:48:58] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, so you obviously have the trade off of being dependent on the x API, and you have man in the middle risk if Elon decides to swap out your silent payment address. Address. Yeah. My second from the platform. But but in practice, it actually works really well, and that's actually a really clever it was a clever little hack when I saw it. It is. It is. It's a really easy way to do it. Obviously, Nostra has something similar because it's part of your profile itself. I mean, yeah, that's the ideal. For when I mean, we can get into a Nostra conversation later in the show. But, in that situation, it would be actually be signed, and it it wouldn't require permission.
You wouldn't have to pay for that. Whoever has your private key, which is hopefully you. Yeah. Well, it was signed by someone. It'll be Someone. Better better than unsigned. Okay. We'll have that conversation later. Yeah. And also, you mentioned you're planning on lightning support. How are you thinking about that?
[00:49:51] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. I mean, that's been a tricky one. So, when I started at Cake, actually, we had just launched a public beta for lightning. And Okay. I killed it. It's like the first thing I did when I I joined Cake was, like, I just I wasn't happy. No one internally was happy with what the user experience was like, with how many bugs bugs there were and issues we were running into. So, like, one of the first things I did was just axe our lightning integration, so we could start fresh. So if you if you wanted lightning and cake before this and it hasn't happened, you could definitely blame me. But I just like, when it comes to lightning, if anyone's followed me for a while, heard me talk. Like, I know that I've mentioned this before, but it's just incredibly difficult to do a good user experience that does not sacrifice self custody. And lightning has gotten better in some ways for sure, but there's basically two wallets right now doing good self custodial lightning, and that's Zeus and Phoenix.
Yep. The vast majority have pivoted into giving up custody to the liquid federation or just giving up custody entirely to a single entity in order to give you a good UX. And that does give you a great user experience. Like, we you use Aqua Wallet or, Bull Bitcoin or any of these that use liquid under the hood for for Lightning. It feels great because it's the same thing as Moon. You're using a chain, and you're keeping your funds on chain, and you're just swapping into and out of Lightning when you need to. But, obviously, Liquid is much lower fees and has better privacy than on chain Bitcoin. So you sacrifice custody, but you get a good user experience.
And I'm just like, even though that's the trend and I know that's the easy road, I just I'm not comfortable with that. Like, the the base level of everything we've ever done within Cake Wallet from a wallet perspective is self custodial. We haven't sacrificed on that. I know we could debate some of these cryptocurrencies. Self custody means a little bit less when they're less decentralized. But There's no such thing as self custody nano. But anyway, just kidding. Kind of. Kind of. You have the seed phrase. You have the seed phrase.
But I didn't wanna sacrifice on the self custody bar. Like, I don't wanna go the liquid route even though they're seed backed up. And I don't I also don't wanna sacrifice on the the the user experience side. Like, we could go self custodial lightning, but it's just not like, it's just not there unless we were to dedicate the vast majority of the team's time for a very long time in order to get that done. And, like like it or not, we don't just do lightning. We're not just a lightning wallet. Like, the things that we're pushing the most on right now are Bitcoin on chain things. They're not even lightning things. So I also didn't wanna make it so that we couldn't ship anything else because we're spending so much time on lightning when, unfortunately, it's a very it's gonna be a very small percentage of our users. And But what about, like, what about, like, moon setup?
I mean, it would it would work. We could we could ship that very quickly. Like, it would work for now. But
[00:52:36] ODELL:
when the fees go up, if the fees ever go back up But that but I never under but I never understood this argument. It's like, if it if it's already an on chain wallet, right, you're already dealing with on chain fees. Mhmm. I think, ultimately, what the user wants is just to be able to be able to pay a Lightning invoice on demand. And and you're already a swap wallet. Right? It's like you're already doing swaps left and right. It's the main business model. Yeah. I mean If I wanna pay a lightning invoice, have some additional privacy benefits on the sender side from it, why not just do a swap and do it? Boom. Done. It's definitely it's doable. I mean, the main problem is
[00:53:13] Seth For Privacy:
it only works when fees are low. Yeah. So, I mean, even now, like, it's 5 sat per v byte right now, but Bitcoin's at a hundred thousand dollars. Like, it that's a lot more money that you're spending in fees than it was when it was five sat per v byte and Bitcoin was taken. You're kinda just asking for bust a bunch of customer service issues. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, like, that that would be the easy approach, and, like, that's why the liquid model works so well is because it is the same approach as Moon. It's just liquid instead. But I think, like, for me, the most interesting thing right now is ARC. So, like, I've been talking heavily with ARC labs teams and the second team.
I've also talked at length with the Spark team. We did an early, like, closed, testing group with them, and we're one of the ones that they included in that, which is very kind. And I like, I think that's the the best middle ground. I, like, I do wanna be clear. Arc and Spark are not trustless, but they're trust minimized. Yeah. Specifically, Arc has much better trust assumptions than Spark does. And so in the, like, vast majority of cases, it is trustless. Obviously, there's some very small caveats with Arc, but that's a much better set of trade offs to me than going to liquid. But it also means things things just aren't ready yet. Like, our arc's not not ready yet, and there's a lot to be seen on how arc will play out from a liquidity perspective. And there's a lot still up in the air, but that's that's currently what we're looking at. Like, lightning is still top of our radar.
I would love to get it out by the end of the year, but it's just I don't wanna sacrifice self custody. I don't wanna sacrifice user experience. So I wanna make sure that we can do it in a way that that fits with our ideals, but also doesn't eat up all of our dev's time.
[00:54:51] ODELL:
Oh, yeah. We don't have to dive too deep there. You obviously want lightning support, and you wanna do it in a in a good way. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense to me. I I mean, Phoenix is so it's interesting when you if your first principles is Moon. Right? It's like, okay. So you have Moon Wallet, and then, like, Aqua Wallet is Moon Wallet, but with liquid at rest instead of on chain Bitcoin at rest. And then Phoenix is his Moon Wallet, but in the opposite direction where it's lightning at rest, and then you do a swap you do a swap for, on chain payments.
You go in the opposite direction. That's the cool thing with Phoenix. It's a splice out now. Yeah. You splice. Yeah. So But originally, it was a swap. Yeah. But yeah. No. Actually, the current Phoenix setup is great. There is some privacy and permission issues there. Yes. But I actually quite love how they have have it set up now, and it's not too bad of a trade off. Like, if the on chain payments, you're basically just paying whatever the on chain fee currently is, to send an on chain payment.
[00:55:56] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. I don't think I don't know how those guys ship what they do. They're they're brilliant. Like, it's awesome to see them work and then them to be Well, no. The way they do it is Like, Like, they don't go publicly. They're not speaking at conferences. There's, like, shipping awesome easy to use stuff. It's really cool. But they also just have, like, blinders on and, like, don't really care about, like, interoperability and stuff. It's just, like, they have their
[00:56:17] ODELL:
stack. They ship their stack. They control the whole vertical stack. They have the node, the client, everything, and they just fucking ship. Then there's, like, no debates. It's just like we're doing the thing. We're gonna provide the best user experience. I appreciate it. Pay join. You guys recently had to pay join. I'll just do a quick overview of the beautiful aspect of pay join. With pay join, usually with with a regular Bitcoin transaction, we have the common input ownership heuristic where all inputs are assumed to be owned by the same person. So to our previous, we were using Ross as an example.
If Ross includes multiple inputs, multiple previous transactions in a new transaction, you can assume everything on that input side is all owned by him, and you can combine them together with pay join. The receiver is actually providing an input, so that it breaks that heuristic that all the inputs on the input side you have the input side and the output side of a transaction. All the all the inputs aren't owned by the same person. You don't know which ones are the receivers and which ones are the senders. Now the biggest trade off there, historically, has been that both people need to be online. Mhmm.
How are you guys handling that situation? Like, if I wanna pay you and you're sleeping
[00:57:43] Seth For Privacy:
and I wanna pay with Page one, how does that work? Yeah. So that's where it comes down to Page one v one versus Page one v two. So Page one v one was, like you said, both parties had to be online the entire time throughout the actual transaction for it to work properly. Because, essentially, with page one, like you said, since you're combining inputs, both parties have to sign that transaction and sign off on it before it can be broadcast. So you need to have some sort of collaboration. That's why it seems like there's basically zero page one v one adoption even though transactionally, it's really cool tech. From user experience perspective, it basically meant only a merchant running something like BTC pay server could accept pay joins because only someone like that could have a server online all the time that also had keys hot ready. Like, there there were two stringent of requirements for page one v one for it to gain broad acceptance.
[00:58:32] ODELL:
And especially Or, like, if you were well, like, samurai was like you were in person. Yeah. It's like if you're in person, you both have your wallets out. You can do it. Which they did. I mean, they did add,
[00:58:42] Seth For Privacy:
doing stowaways over over Soroban, which was, like, their tour, like, network Right. For a little while there. But you still had to tell your receiver, like, yo, buddy. Come online. Let's let's make the payment. Yeah. I know me and me and you, I think, tried a few times. I did it with Catan a few times. It was like it would it would always have problems, but it was Well, we we did it because we could. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. We it was worth But it wasn't gonna really scale. No. And that and that was the main problem with v one. V two, which is the latest, proposal that was just merged in a few days ago by Dan Gould, is transactionally the same. Like, on chain, it's gonna look the same as a page on v one, which is the same as any Bitcoin transaction, which is the beauty of of page join is that it has no on chain footprint. It doesn't stand out.
But what's improved in PageJoin v two is that it moved from the synchronous model where you're connected to the other person the entire time or else the transaction just fails or, to now, it's an asynchronous model. So now the two parties use a directory server in the middle. Neither of them need to run it. It doesn't matter who runs it because it's entirely trustless. The directory server, all they see is encrypted blobs, and network privacy is provided for both parties using a blue base HTTP. So even if you're not using a VPN or Tor, you are getting near perfect network privacy from the directory server, and that's from the other peer as well. But you use that directory server. So, like, when I send you a page on URI or QR code, you're getting the location on that directory server where to look for my payload, which is the, like, pre signed information that I need to give to you. So I can give you that. I can go offline. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if I'm there at that time or not. You'll get that payload. You add your inputs, and you sign the transaction, and you send it back to the directory server. And then whenever I come back online, I can sign that and send it off to the network.
So it still does require at some point both parties to be online for the transaction to eventually be sent. But if one of us goes online even for an extended period or goes offline even for an extended period, we can still make that transaction happen. And in practice, when you're usually making a payment like this, the asynchronous nature just makes it so that little, like, network flips and stuff don't ruin your transaction, which is what would happen in the past. So in person is obviously gonna be just perfect, essentially. Not being in person is is pretty damn seamless as well.
And there's some some cool things too where I think we can make it even better. So, like, right now, technically, you do have to come online at some point during that process. But, like, something I thought about is those who are okay with the trade offs of having their private keys go hot at memory on their phone, which is a very low risk. Like, I to me, I would be fine with the trade off if someone is pretty pretty hardcore. You can use the background service that we use for syncing silent payments, syncing Monero, etcetera, to look for and sign any page one transactions that are waiting for you on the directory. So that way, like, if you've just posted the QR and someone paid it, your wallet would immediately be signing that in the background, using that background service.
So that that's another way that you can do that to even further improve the UX. But it's it's pretty sweet. And, honestly, it just it works so so much better than v one. We've done tons of testing internally, done tons of payments for demos. It's obviously not foolproof. And, I mean, we're the second wallet ever implemented, and there's been a lot of, just normal growing pains as the the dev kit improves and as in integrations improve. But the guys over at, PayJoin dev kit, Dan Gould, SpaceBear, others are just doing fantastic work. And the really, the beautiful thing of all this being false is that every time a wallet implements it, it gets easier for every wallet to implement it after that. We did a ton of work with the PDK team that made it well, make it easier for others. The Bold Bitcoin team is working closely with the PDK team to make it easier for us and others. And that stuff, again, just snowballs where it's just gonna be quite trivial to support pay join. And I think we can legitimately get to a place where the default in many really any Cypherpunk wallet will be a pay join for Bitcoin because it's it has essentially no user experience overhead.
[01:02:44] ODELL:
That's awesome. Yeah. I had, Dan Gould, from PayJoin DevKit on dispatch, I guess, six episodes ago. Episode one fifty four. So Freaks, if you haven't listened to it, go listen to it. Bull Bitcoin is the other one that has implemented it. Right? You and then, also, I think with Sabi, you can you can pay too, but they don't have the Not patron be received. I don't think.
[01:03:14] Seth For Privacy:
No. I haven't seen anything about it. I mean, it's Okay. It's certainly possible, but I feel like I consume any mention of PayJoiner or sign up payments these days. Was
[01:03:22] ODELL:
wasabi, you can definitely send to silent payments. I don't think you can receive to silent payments. So maybe they don't have to send to Adrian Viewpoint
[01:03:30] Seth For Privacy:
as well with Wasabi. I think they've had that for a while, but I'll have to look into it.
[01:03:36] ODELL:
Lot of lot of moving pieces. That's awesome. I mean, what I was talking to Dan about this. Like, the dream is that we get like, Bull Bitcoin does it as an exchange, getting exchanges to do it. So, like, you can imagine a situation where a strike, for instance, on on a strike deposit or strike withdrawal, they support it. They actually get massive they can get massive transaction fee savings. So they have a strong incentive to do it from a fee perspective. And then, obviously, like, those services are KYC. You're not you're maybe not getting as much of a privacy benefit as possible. But still, from an external observer point of view, you're clouding the waters in terms of probability analysis that someone who's just just looking at the chain, it is hurting their probability analysis regardless. So I I think it's still a clear net net win,
[01:04:40] Seth For Privacy:
to see that kinda and they're obviously doing massive volumes. Right? Like, so And and that's one of the It really does move. Yeah. It's one of the things I love about PayJoin is that there actually is financial incentive for, like, third parties, especially exchanges, swap providers, etcetera, to implement PayJoin. Like, that's one of the downsides of selling payments is there's no financial incentive to do it. And that's true of most things in Bitcoin. Like, there's there's not a lot of privacy tech specifically that has a financial incentive there. But that financial incentive, is really key because, obviously, it will help just broader adoption and integration. Like, I I don't know if Bull Bitcoin would have done it if they couldn't also do it as an exchange and have it as a fee saving feature. Because I know, like, their long term goal is that will be the way you withdraw. It'll always be a pay join. You'll be using the Real Bitcoin app. You'll withdraw to there, and it will be a pay join because both are gonna be compatible and and speaking the same language. And I would love to see that happen everywhere in this. And it helps everyone's privacy, not just the people participating. That's the other really cool thing with pay join is it breaks that key heuristic and it helps everyone's privacy.
[01:05:41] ODELL:
And the thing too is, like, exchanges like Strike have already they've already normalized the pay a higher fee if you want your withdrawal done right away. But if you're willing to wait up to twenty four hours, it's free. And people gladly choose that option. Usually, they're not waiting twenty four hours. They're waiting four hours or five hours for a big batch transaction to happen. But it's already been normalized in the process. And so then you enter PayJoin into that situation, and you actually have this really cool setup where they're waiting four hours for a big batch transaction. And maybe people that are depositing are basically just paying they're paying directly in a batch payment transaction to people that are withdrawing at the same time. So, like, I've never even hits the hot wallet of an exchange like Strike.
It's just like wins across the board. So I think we could see cautiously optimistic, but I think we can see,
[01:06:39] Seth For Privacy:
significant adoption there in the in the near term. But what we need for that to actually work in practice is easy to use mobile logs that support it. So it's a big it's a big deal that you guys added. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a a no brainer for us. We had one of our best devs, Constantine, working on it and killing it with the the PDK folks. It was it was a ton of fun. Win, win strike page one b two. Let's put the put the pressure on. Put the pressure on.
[01:07:07] ODELL:
We, no pressure needed. I've I've, like I said, I I think it's gonna happen. I think it's gonna happen. I think it would be awesome. I think it would just it's just a like I said, I think it's just a win across the board.
[01:07:25] Seth For Privacy:
It went quick. And then I think once you see an exchange like strike do it, all you need is, like, one or two of the big guys do it, and then everyone, I think, falls in line. Oh, no. Definitely. Yeah. That that first mover of pressure is really huge. Yeah. I'm hoping that will that will kick others in high gear when a a big exchange like Stripe does do it. One quick thing that I wanted to mention on PayJoin that I a lot of people get confused by. You can't receive a PayJoin until you have Bitcoin in your wallet. And Yeah. It pops an error This is very right now. This is very self explanatory when when you remember that you have to contribute an input to a pay join, but this like, people on our team would forget this. People that I've done it with will forget this. And so we we we actually added some stuff to the actual, like, UI to make sure that it's clear to people why
[01:08:11] ODELL:
Well, the current error message doesn't
[01:08:14] Seth For Privacy:
the current error message doesn't say that. Error, but you'll see on the receive screen, it'll just say, you might not be on the latest version. But on the latest version, we just version, we just released on, like, Tuesday or Wednesday of last week. You'll see page one unavailable instead of page one enabled, and it'll have a little tool tip that'll tell you why. Because until you have funds you can actually spend, you can't be the receiver in a transaction, which, again, is a little weird when you're used to Bitcoin, where on chain, you normally don't need like, there's no liquidity requirements or something. But, obviously, if you don't have any inputs to contribute, you can't be a part of a pay join. But one of the beautiful things of pay join is it just falls back to a regular on chain payment. And part of that QR or, thing that you copy and paste will just be a regular on chain Bitcoin address. So you can always use It's a regular no matter what. It just won't be a pay join until you have funds you can contribute. So just an important little thing to keep in mind.
[01:09:05] ODELL:
Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. That's just a messaging issue. I mean, talking about having the benefit of cost savings with privacy, what is your opinion on Cashew?
[01:09:26] Seth For Privacy:
I love the privacy, from the Mint operator. I think that there's not enough discussion about the privacy issues when depositing to a Mint or withdrawing from a Mint, especially small mints. Why? Because your anonymity set of Bitcoin going into or out of a mint can be quite small, especially if mints aren't growing But it's lightning. Sorry. I mean, on to me. But, yeah, if it's lightning only, I guess that's true. Yeah. If it's Lightning. Like, so yeah. Cashew specifically is Lightning only,
[01:09:59] ODELL:
which is a bigger UX issue because that means they need to have a Lightning wallet to begin with. Yeah. I know it's a good But I get it. And and so that that was Cali's that was Cali's hard line stance that he didn't want the Mint operator to even have the liability of knowing on chain history. Because Lightning does have pretty good privacy for sender where the receiver doesn't know which UTXO front of the transaction. No. No. You're definitely right. Yeah. I mean, that that's definitely a good You still you still technically have that issue if it's a really small mint.
[01:10:35] Seth For Privacy:
Right? If someone Depending on who you're connected. You can still do timing analysis. A lot depends on if there's multiple hops between you and the mint or if you're paying directly from something like Phoenix. You could have essentially zero privacy, on the sender side. But, normally normally, that's true. You would have pretty good privacy because of lightning. But, I mean, to me, like, there's two main things that stand out. One is I just self custody is just a hard line for me. Like, I think the only the only reasonable use case for something like, cashew or, fetamins for the average person, not for, like, the kind of village custody thing that I know, Obi and others talk about. But, like, the average Bitcoiner today, the only use case for something like this is amounts that are literally too small to publish on chain.
So I'm talking, like, below the dust limit or below the dust limit plus whatever the current fee rate is. And that amount makes sense because you literally cannot self custody less than that. Like, you cannot custody one sat on chain. You cannot custody probably we're probably about, like, I don't know, 600 sat 700 sat would be really the limit of what you could self custody today because you couldn't move that amount on chain without it being below the dust limit, with fees. That is, like anything above that, I think we cannot compromise on. I think we have to make sure that people can self custody at one way or another. And that's where, like, things like ARC and others come into play. But yeah.
So the, If you say the term graduated wallets, I'm gonna lose my mind.
[01:12:13] ODELL:
First off, the term village custody is a new one that I actually I like it. I knew exactly what you meant, which is, like, Obi talks about this with Fedimint where, like, the elders in the village are, like, the community banking or whatever. There might be a use case there at least with Fedimint. I will say that Fedimint has been slow to iterate, but recently has started to get some real traction, which is good to see. The Fedimint open source project, not Fedi, the for profit business. These are two separate things. Fedi builds on top of Fedimint. But the Fedimint open source project has started to make some really significant developments in terms of making it easier to to run a Fedimint, which is, I think, one of the key aspects here is that you need it needs to be easy to as you have to reduce the friction to spin up one of these instances privately because, obviously, the custodian has a lot of liability on their hands. And you it kind of becomes like a whack a mole game.
And then I guess this the second piece you said was graduated custody, which is actually where I was going. I had never heard the term graduated custody. So Zeus, I had I've included this on. And you mentioned it as two of the good self custody wallets. Well, I mean, it like, I put Zeus in I mean, Phoenix is awesome. It's it's own little kind of niche in terms of spending mobile lightning first kind of lot. But I would put Zeus in a category of, like, there's, like, Sparrow wallet and Zeus. And, like, I heavily rely on them. And then just, like, no one else even comes close in terms of functionality with Sparrow being unchained. And and, yeah, power user friendly. But but Kaludis was like of Zeus, he was a hardliner, self custody all the way.
And he added Cashew, and that's for for two reasons. Right? Well, first of all, for the small amounts. Right? We're onboarding someone. And, I mean, we could talk about Nasr later, but you're onboarding someone to receive payments. And at the end of the day, like, if they have to pay an on chain fee, in the beginning, it's it's cost prohibitive. It's cost prohibitive. And, also, they can make significant privacy mistakes in the beginning, if they don't really understand, you know, what outputs are and what their chain footprint is. So receiving right in the beginning, custodial is nice. And if they're gonna do custodial, it probably should be Cashew because it's incredibly private and offers strong privacy guarantees and also gives you offline payments and gives you programmable payments. You can lock things to public key, stuff like that.
So it gives you if you're gonna do custody, it gives you a lot of benefits. And then second of all, it means that you basically have an interoperable custody protocol where Zeus doesn't have to be the custodian. Right? Like, Evan doesn't wanna be the custodian. Cakewalk doesn't wanna be custodian. He can just plug and play into a wider net of other people running the custodians and taking on the liability. And then the second piece is, like, he built into his flow I think it's, like, touch you're touching the stove while it's hot. Right? Like, it heats up. And as it gets higher and higher, he pushes you into a self custody sovereign lightning channel. Right? And, obviously, he believes in user sovereignty, so he doesn't auto push you even though you can set that in settings. But it's like, you should really please open the lightning channel and and move these, funds in.
Now I there could be something here, I mean, with just on chain only. Like, you could get to a point where, you know, you hit 50,000 sats and you sweep it into an on chain output and then the user's on chain, they're in self custody. Like, I've is that model that horrible? Like, what? They're at, like, $50? They lose $50 in a mint? Like, is it the end of the world before they get to an on chain output? And what they would get significant privacy gains in that situation. I don't know if that's the worst trade off in the world. Like, that would kinda be a cool feature on on QM. I think
[01:16:34] Seth For Privacy:
so to me, the main thing or the main issue, I guess, I would say I have with Cashew is twofold. One, it diverts resources away from self custodial tools. Now, obviously, I'm not here to tell people Okay. Who like, what they can work on. Like, obviously, I don't want that to be taken as telling any devs working on Cashew that they have to or should be working on anything else, but it diverts resources away from self custodial tooling, which I think is a downside. The other one is, and I'll I'll get to the graduated wallet concept, which is kind of the term that's being thrown around for this this type of thing that Zeus is doing and and others are gonna start doing soon. But the other main problem that I have with
[01:17:16] ODELL:
I like the term. I just wanna say it. It It works. Yeah. It works. I don't know if it's Steve Lee. I think It explains what it it explains what it is. But, anyway, continue.
[01:17:25] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. My other issue with cashew is just, like, the the incentives are just very broken from the ground up. And I know I'm gonna say some things that are gonna piss some people off, but I'm just gonna roll with it. The the real the only two options you really have in your Mint operator are either they are someone you know and trust, which there's not gonna be many people running cash payments. But okay. You you know someone, they're a public entity, and they run a cash payment. That's great. But running a cash payment is a custodian, and I'm saying the quiet part out loud, but, like, if samurai wallet can be taken down for making money off privacy tools but not taking custody, a custodian a custodial mint that's providing privacy is just, like, low hanging fruit. That's a it's a terrifying situation to be in. And I I wish that was not the case.
Like, obviously, very clearly, it's idiotic that that is the case of where we're at today, but that's an extremely dangerous place to be in. So okay. We don't do trusted people. We don't do public entities running our cashier events because we like those public entities not being in jail. So instead, we do fully non events. They're people we don't know. We just trust them with the sets, and maybe there's a trust system, like a reputation system that gets built out or something. But we trust them with the sats, and we hope they don't rug us, which is fine until that grows to a certain size. And then why as in anon unless you're just hardcore cypherpunk, bro. Why as an anon are you not just rug pulling for $2.03 Bitcoin? Because you're collecting Well, you collect fees.
[01:19:03] ODELL:
You can still there's a there's there's an argument. So, like, right now, you know, one of the longest standing cashew mints is MiniBits. I don't know who runs the MiniBits cashew mint, but they haven't rugged yet. Now I think there's an argument that if they continue to not rug, they stand to make more in fees. And I think you could probably charge a decent amount in fees. Like, I think it's, like, one, two, three percent in fees you could get away with probably. If you're long standing and ready a lot of fees. If if this stuff actually works, the competition on fees is gonna try But you have to remember that these are for trans but but these are for transactions
[01:19:50] Seth For Privacy:
that you wouldn't receive otherwise. But people already don't like Phoenix's. Like, it's what? Point 4% on the send side and, like, something a little bit more, I think, on the send. I mean, but what are aqua wallets fees are ridiculous.
[01:20:04] ODELL:
Oh, I guess, because you have them. When you, like, mix in the swaps and everything?
[01:20:08] Seth For Privacy:
It's like Yeah. I mean, that that is the, like, that's the only incentive really for an Anan not to rug is that the long term incentives have to be better for him to keep running it, to take on the risk, but to collect the fees. So fees would have to be at a pretty high state, I think, to incentivize that. Yeah. I mean, there would also be some kind of idealized For sure. For sure. And I like, I know that that that's probably why people are running the mens that they're running right now. Like, I think the only No one's running them for a few years. Exactly. Exactly. And I I would be hesitant to think that they'll ever be able to charge enough fees to incentivize that because, like, then just use a custodian doesn't charge fees at that point. If you'd if it would have to be ideological for you to be using the cash you meant. But that's where, like, I think those incentives are kind of broken, where either it's a an entity we know and trust, but now they're liable for a lot of things that they shouldn't be liable for, but they just are if we're honest. Or it's that they are not meant. You have to hope that the financial incentives are good enough that you don't lose money. And that's where, like, this idea of graduated wallets is reasonable.
I still disagree with how far I think it's gonna be taken and is being taken, but it's reasonable because if you have you're not just a Cashew wallet, but you're a Cashew and a lightning and an on chain wallet, you can do things that actively protect the user. And I think we would you would have to be very aggressive to do this correctly so that users don't get burned. Because, like, users like what what's easy. Necessarily, this graduated well concept is pushing them from best UX to worst UX over time. And those Right. Like, obviously, the the UX of good lightning, especially with something like Arc or Spark can be pretty solid.
The UX of Unchained can also be quite straightforward, especially in low fee environments. But it's still gonna be drastically worse than a custodial ecashment because it's just you're not doing anything. You're just signing a message. Like, it's it can't get easier than that. So, like, that that concept, I think, will be interesting to see how it plays out because then you're you're trusting that users will actually be okay with the worst UX, and some will move with it. And that's where I think, like, that's the only reasonable way to use something like Cashew is where you do support the other methods. You are pushing users, even automatically moving funds. I mean, you're like they're the you're like they're using a custodian anyways. I don't know why they would be upset that you moved their money from a custodian into their own self custody for them, especially if you were smart about it and you, like, looked at when on chain fees were very low and you automatically did it even when it was when they were sleeping or something. Maybe you force them in the onboarding to choose the amounts that they will set as the limits to their, like, their cashew balance or something. I think, like, there's ways where it can be interesting, but there's also just there's such a low limit, especially in relatively low fee environments of what could be self custody that why then wouldn't we just use an all in one solution like ARC, for instance, where amounts that you can't exit on chain unilaterally, like below the dust limit or something like that, you you couldn't you can't actually self custody, which is something that I think a lot of it So what do you mean?
[01:23:16] ODELL:
I mean okay. I respect all of these arguments. I think you could and I talked to this about with Evan too. I mean, you could also to reduce risk, you could do, like, you could do group submits. Right? So you can push the user into, like, four custodians. So, like, the Titanic model, which I just love the irony because the Titanic suck. But the idea that if one if one compartment filled up with water, the boat doesn't sink. Right? You just lose one compartment. Now in the Titanic, multiple apartments filled up. Yeah. Well, there's a banking conspiracy involved. It's it's it's more complicated than that. But anyway, you have that. But okay. So but if your argument is that a graduated wallet makes more sense with something like ARC, that's a little bit of a different argument.
Now I personally have been in Bitcoin long enough that I just unless I can actually use something and see how it works in practice like, I'm not reading your white paper. Like, let me put it that way. Like like, I have a family now. Like, life's busy. I'm not reading your white paper. I guess Arc has released
[01:24:32] Seth For Privacy:
some kind of is are they are they Mainnet now? Like, are they actually Technically, they have released a few Mainnet demos. So it definitely works on Mainnet. I've used it. Others have. But it's they don't have, like, a public ongoing Mainnet beta. I think they're aiming for that. I'm this But is
[01:24:49] ODELL:
but so is that your response? Your response is we're we're not gonna spend time doing cash you because we'll do a graduated wallet with ARC instead.
[01:24:57] Seth For Privacy:
And then so you start on ARC, and then, ideally, you move to on chain at some point. I think that's the best potential solution. But you are making a great point that I mean, if you've been in Bitcoin this long, I'm the same way. I just assume something's not happening until it actually does. So, like, I I also don't wanna bet the farm on Arc because maybe the plan doesn't really work as well as we think. Maybe the liquidity requirements for Arc service providers are too extensive. Like, it certainly could fail, but but we're also not at a place right now where we're just, like, dying for small amount custodians.
Like, you can you can transact on chain for quite low fees.
[01:25:36] ODELL:
I won't let you concern yeah. But the concern I mean, you said this with Moon when I said the Moon model. Like, the concern is that you're not making the decision for today. Like, if the fee like, if they're sitting in your wallet and then the fees go up, you can end up in a situation. And maybe the fees I I'm a strong believer that the fees are gonna go up. But it is like, I mean, we have men pull that space, like, on screen. Like, if the fees are gonna go up, they haven't gone up yet. So maybe that's a re maybe we shouldn't be building in that direction, but I I think that should brings me to my original point of problems I have with Cashew
[01:26:18] Seth For Privacy:
is Cashew is a really great coping mechanism, but it's not a solution. It doesn't solve any of these problems. It doesn't build tools that are better in adversarial adversarial environments. It kind of copes with current problems that exist in Bitcoin today, And it it deals with them today, but it doesn't solve them in ways that could better improve things in the future, if that makes sense. I feel like that I worded that very weirdly. But, essentially, all of the time investments we're putting into Cashew, which to me is kind of like a coping mechanism with the failures of lightning and the failures of self custodial self custodial UX and lightning.
The time and resources we put into that is time and resources that isn't going into something like an arc or something like a spark or something like No. But covenants or who knows what. Like, you could name whatever it is. But that that time could be going into that, but instead, it's going to something that becomes this coping mechanism that works today, maybe. But if we enter another adversarial environment definitely works today. But well, as long as you don't get robbed or your meant doesn't mess up their DNS and lose all their money or something like that. But
[01:27:26] ODELL:
But then you lose $50.
[01:27:28] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. But also for these people you're onboarding, if they're losing money, that's kinda bad UX as well.
[01:27:36] ODELL:
Look, you're a friend, so I'm gonna feel like a dick before I say this. But, like, you're also you support Nano. Right? So it's like you're onboarding them to Nano. So, like, I feel like you can't really
[01:27:47] Seth For Privacy:
I do not personally support Nano. Just just so we're clear, Cake Wallet does support Nano. But
[01:27:54] ODELL:
I feel like I feel like that argument the it's a little bit paternalistic. You know? Like, it does there are real benefits. And to me, like, it's it's more comparable to something like a bird pay. Right? Which is you're operating in the world we're in today, and you're providing a useless feature, a a useful feature to people today that they are in demand of, which is to be able to easily accept payments without having an on chain fee burden, without having any complexity of channel operations, or you just you just have a professional routing operator that is, you know, effectively running in a mint. You have programmable offline payments, which, like, when you start to talk about, like, having the type of tap to pay, Apple Pay functionality, you, you know, the ideal situation is to be able to do that offline because if you know, people don't realize, like, part of the reason why offline, but how often are you offline? You can't do it offline.
[01:28:57] Seth For Privacy:
It's twenty twenty five.
[01:28:58] ODELL:
I mean, I well, I I think, like, if you're in the if you're in Costa Rica, for instance, like, Apple Pay works amazing. And the one of the reasons it works amazing is because the payer doesn't have to be online. That's good point. And I think people skip that. Like, if you're sitting there for even ten seconds, like, the UX is miserable.
[01:29:19] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. That's a good point.
[01:29:22] ODELL:
So and then, of course, you have the village custody, but I'm not gonna pretend like the village custody is, like, a real it's it it it's happening. Supposedly, there are villages, but that's not I'm not gonna sit here and do that argument anyway.
[01:29:36] Seth For Privacy:
I think you have reasonable concerns. I think you're thinking about it the right way. Yeah. I know like, I know I I feel like old man yelling at clouds talking about this stuff because it feels like, I don't know, I feel like sometimes I'm too hardcore with this, but I it also just feels like a line that is very dangerous to cross from a a Bitcoin culture perspective. And I feel like once we cross it, it gets very hard to uncross it. Well, we've already crossed. I know. I know. I know. That's why I'm I, like, am pretty, like, bold about the things I say with this because I like, once people get that taste of the custodial user experience, it's very hard to move away from that. It's very hard to move away from that. And we've seen that in lightning.
We've seen that in people being totally fine with using exchanges for custody, and I'm worried that this will be that same type of, like, gateway drug to being fine with custodial solutions for a lot of Bitcoiners. But I also understand the practical concerns of, like, I want something that I can use today that's simple and easy and provides good privacy, and Cashew is that. So, like, I totally understand both sides, but I I do feel like I'm, like, more on the hardcore side. I do I've did have one more thought. And I I don't know. I'm sure someone's thought through this before. But, like, the only thing that I really would want to make it easier to onboard people is like, when I onboard someone like, I onboarded a couple people to Phoenix this week just so they could buy steak and shake, while we were in Vegas.
And, like, as a Bitcoiner who wants to onboard more people, I would be more than happy to just pay the channel open fee for the end user. Like, a way But you could do that. Just send them more I know. But it's it's like I wanted to send them $25, and then they end up getting, like, 21 or something. Like, I have to, like, I have to, like, manually compute how much is the on chain fee gonna be, how much is the panel. Just send them $50. Just just keep sending more money. There you go. That is an approach. That is an approach. But I feel like even if just, like, every lightning wallet had, like, a an onboarding mode or something where, like, you hit a switch on their screen and then I mean, Phoenix could just put the fee Phoenix could just put the on chain fee in the invoice. Yeah. That that would be the idea. That suit. Right? I I don't know if you actually
[01:31:52] ODELL:
Like, the user could put $25 in their invoice, and then Phoenix could really charge $26
[01:31:58] Seth For Privacy:
in the invoice. Like, that would be my my ideal. Because to me, that would really solve both worlds. I feel like, hopefully, most Bitcoiners out there who are onboarding people would be fine with parting with some stats to get them up and running with a good self custodial UX. And, like, that's something I would be more than happy to do, but isn't really supported by any wallets out there that I know of of, like, expecting the the payer the payer? I don't know. I can always get those backwards. The payer to front the cost for the channel open so that user doesn't have to deal with those initial self custody costs. And then they just make payments, and they're on the lighting network, and they don't feel that I mean,
[01:32:35] ODELL:
the real controversial statement is when I onboard someone to Phoenix Wallet, like my nanny, I have them I first of all, I send them a larger amount. Right? So, like, I send them a hundred plus dollars. So, like, you get away from those constraints. And then the second thing is I enable cloud backups.
[01:32:58] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah.
[01:33:00] ODELL:
And I just pop them to the cloud. It's like, yes. Like, Apple and the NSA can, like, rug them. Yeah. But
[01:33:06] Seth For Privacy:
for most people, that threat model is fine. Right.
[01:33:10] ODELL:
At least in the beginning.
[01:33:12] Seth For Privacy:
Right? And we're comparing it to something like Cashew or comparing it to something like Primal's Custodial Wallet or Strike's Custodial Wallet. Like, those trade offs are weird. The caveat I'll say is if if done right I don't know how Phoenix does their cloud backups right now. But if done right, you can do it to iCloud keychain or Android auto backup, which are both end and encrypted. So Google or Apple could not rug you unless, obviously, they have Yeah. I don't know how to where and how it works. But if you do it right, you can do it in a way where only the user can recover funds or someone who hacks their account, obviously, which is that's the main downside to me. But that's something that, like, the foundation guys have done with Envoy is for just the hot wallet component, obviously.
You can do it in a way where you would just rely on your Apple or Google account being secure. And I think that's actually a very normal But my understanding
[01:33:57] ODELL:
with Apple iCloud backups, like, you have to optionally separately in your Apple iCloud settings, go create end to end encrypted and, like, write down the seed like, there's a different it's not a seed phrase. It's, like, numbers So that's the distinction. ICloud or iCloud Drive, whatever they call the drive portion,
[01:34:13] Seth For Privacy:
isn't intended encrypted by default, but can be if you use advanced data protection. But iCloud keychain is always intended encrypted by default. That's where your passwords is where your password Well, what is it encrypted by? What is the secret? Your Apple login. So anyone who can get into your Apple account can get it.
[01:34:32] ODELL:
Okay. Got it. I will say that Phoenix does a really good job that it scares the shit out of the user when they enable all cloud backups. It's like Apple and the NSA will bug you. And, like, you have to press okay, and then it goes through which I like, if you're gonna do it, like, I appreciate that aspect to it. Okay. That was a lively discussion on onboarding and custodial. By the way, Steak and Shake, the the buns have seed oils in them. The fries do too. And the fries still have
[01:35:07] Seth For Privacy:
yeah. The fries come with seed oils. They just don't fry. Speaking of being rugged. They fry them. I didn't learn until we were I was standing in Steak and Shake's line, and then someone I was with was like, oh, by the way, the fries are initially fried in seed oils. And then they freeze them. And then they send them and then they fry them into the milk. Send them. Like, what? It's a scam. Everyone's a scammer. But at least it's a good you know, it's marketing, but at least that's a marketing thing now that people want to be seed oil free. That's true. That's true.
[01:35:36] ODELL:
Slow slow and steady. We don't live in a vacuum and little benefits are I see the purpose of saying Breeze has next cloud support. I mean, that's great. But, like, if you're running a Nextcloud self hosted instance, like, just use a seed phrase. As hardcore as they come at that point. Like, I feel like you can use a seed phrase, but that's good. I see Phoenix is extremely expensive. Yeah. I mean, I think I think the fees are kinda reasonable on Phoenix. I I get it. I understand it. What else do we wanna talk about while I have you here? You wanna talk about Nostr?
[01:36:15] Seth For Privacy:
Why not? Piss off some more people. It's my way.
[01:36:23] ODELL:
So, I mean, can we, can we at least get BirdPay
[01:36:27] Seth For Privacy:
for Nostra? I think it already works. I need to double check, but the, I mean, the the main problem right now is we'd like, we talked about, we don't have lightning. So if you're just doing, like, l n URL or something, obviously, that's not gonna work within cake. I think if you put a silent payment address in your Nostra profile, it does work or Monero address. But what username would I type in? My nip five? Yeah. Your nip five should work. I guess your nip five as well. I'm I'm, like, 99% sure this works today. I just don't use Nostra, so I I haven't tested it in a long time. But I'm pretty sure that's what But so you're
[01:37:02] ODELL:
you're a Nostra bear. Like, you're you're done with Nostra. It's a dead project to you. It's over. Before I answer that, I'm gonna I wanna interview you.
[01:37:11] Seth For Privacy:
So you you made the switch. You cut all ties to Yes. The the modern world. Yes. You switched to to Nasr and and burned your, however many hundred hundreds of thousands of followers. What is that like? 250,000. Real talk. How has engagement been compared to what you're used to? Do you feel like it's been good for your overall reach to the audience you want? Has it been bad? Like, I'm just kinda curious your thoughts on what that has been like. Because very few people have actually made the % switch from Twitter to Noster.
[01:37:45] ODELL:
There's a few of us. There's, like, there's Gigi has. Pablo has. I don't know of any other larger accounts. Company. Obviously, I think I was the largest account that did it or at least voluntarily did it. Like, I was at, like, probably about 250,000 followers. Like, at this point, I'd probably be at, like, 400,000 followers. Like, it was growing pretty fast. Even without me posting, it was growing, just from, like, the backlog of, like, ten years of proof of work on that closed platform. I mean, it was strictly a horrible financial decision. Like, just really bad career wise.
It's definitely not it definitely it was not a positive for ten thirty one as a business. It's good for the soul. Okay. So it's weird. But Twitter's I won't I won't But but but financially, definitely was was should've kept the account. I do think that it was good for my family. Right? Like, I think I have first of all, I never wanted to be an influencer. Right? Like, I never I kinda like, people think influence, like, Bitcoin large accounts of Bitcoin are bad today. Like, they were way worse in 2017, I think. I don't know. They've always been bad. Let me put it that way. They've always been bad. And I felt I was young. I was unmarried.
I didn't have a family. I felt like I could improve the situation or I could add something of value to the discussion. Right? And I slowly hurt my own personal privacy, and went into it. And it it got to the point. And then so then I started and I used it to bootstrap everything. Right? Like, Twitter is where I bootstrapped my whole network, all my friends, like, all my good friends I met through there. It's where we bootstrapped OpenSats. It's where we bootstrapped 1031. It's where we bootstrapped Siddle dispatch and rapid all recap. But we're I was getting to the point where it was like like, a decision had to be made. Right? And a decision had to be made.
And, like, I was getting to the point where I was becoming kind of a niche celebrity. Right? Like, I was like, I would go if I went to a conference, for instance, like, I couldn't walk around, especially once money got involved. Like, once people thought they could get a check from ten thirty one or Open Stats, it was, like, it was like every other conversation was someone asking me for money. And the question really in the back of my head was, like, are they gonna ask it for an open source project, or are they gonna try and get funded through ten thirty one? It's like, which angle are they gonna get it from? And the only time I would get ignored was if I was walking with either of the jacks. Like, if I was walking with Dorsey or if I was walking with Mallers, they would the moths would go to that flame instead.
And, of course, like, there it's awesome. Like, I love the freaks and was like, there was a lot of love that was happening. Like, thank you so much. Like, you helped out my family so much, like, blah blah blah. But there was, like, also a bad bad element to it. Then there was, like I mean, I remember, like, a month before I deleted, like, two months before I deleted, I was in Costa Rica, and I was sitting at lunch in the middle of nowhere, Costa Rica. And if you're listening to this right now, like, bless your heart. I appreciate you. But still, some random freak walked up, interrupted our lunch, was like, Odell, so grateful for you. Thank you so much. We're in the middle of fucking nowhere, like, with my family.
So I did come at it from, like, a point of view that I had nothing to lose and that I needed to lower my Profile. My profile a bit. And I didn't wanna do that by, like, destroying my reputation, shilling a shit coin, like, again, taking one last rug pull out. And instead, in this way, it could be a positive way. Like, if I could bootstrap, if if me doing it could help bootstrap something that I think needs to happen, which is digital comms is too important to have in control of a proprietary closed source big tech company, let's do it. And I had so I I felt like I had nothing to lose.
I've definitely seen since then, like, from a financial perspective that there has been some negative consequences that maybe I should've waited a little bit longer. But then also at the same time, like, I was addicted. Right? And I've seen it happen to other people. I mean, I'll use Dorsey as an example again. Like, Dorsey was Noster only for a bit, but he had the account there. And because he had the account, the stock price goes down, and he goes back to Twitter. You know? And he goes back goes back to Twitter and starts posting on there because you you can't you can't help yourself. I literally can't go back. Like, I if I did go back, I would have to create, like, a fresh account and start from zero or whatever and do the You you burn the boat. So it does from a self control point of view, it helps. Now I do think, it's gonna be a long grind.
I don't think Nasr is inevitable by any means. I mean, I don't I still don't even think I think Bitcoin is more or less inevitable, but I don't think Bitcoin is free to money is inevitable. I think there's still a lot of work to be done. But I I I think we need something like Nasr for so many reasons. And we need it from a permission point of view. We need it from a censorship point of view. And we need it from a verifiability point of view. Like, the amount of AI slop and stuff we're gonna start to see and, like, psy ops on a whole another level is crazy.
And to have that all happening, you know, with puppet masters and and and unverify like, you don't you never know if you're shadowbanned or not. Right? We were talking about earlier on YouTube. Like, I'm pretty sure I'm shadowbanned on YouTube. There's no way for me to verify it. Yeah. That must work. Like, there's I have no idea what's happening there. You you don't control your destiny. So I think it's a noble cause. I mean, I think it's something that would benefit humanity. And I think I probably only have so many more years in the public eye, so I'm gonna try and I'm gonna try and throw as much weight behind it as possible is kind of the calculation. But, yes, to your answer, if you're asking me as a friend if it's financially prudent, for you to delete your ex account, I would say no. Yeah.
[01:44:49] Seth For Privacy:
I would say I would say don't do that. Sense. And it makes I mean, like, I always knew, like, you you knew there were consequences to deleting your Twitter, but, like, you you're Yep. You're that guy who actually has scruples and actually has integrity and actually has, like, an ethos that wants to push this stuff forward. So, like, your willingness to do that was crazy, honestly. Like, that that was a that was an immense move, and I think is something that has been a huge driver behind Dynastar so far, has been that you were willing to do that and brought so many people with you, and they're spreading good content there as well. So I definitely I definitely understand that. And, I mean, like like, when it comes to Nostr for me, like, I I agree on all of the human good stuff around it. Like, I definitely agree we cannot rely on something like a Twitter as our, like, place for social discourse. Like, the I mean, that that has been proven so many times of how easy to manipulate it is, of how harmful social media as it is today is. Like, the the psychology of it is is very broken.
So I got I I I definitely echo that, and I I think Noster is a is a good fallback. I think, like, there are some things about how Noster is built that I think are not great for social media, and it provides a lot of value in other ways as a protocol. Like, again, that's where it can get a little confusing. It's like Nostr is a protocol. Social media on Nostr is its own separate thing. And Nostar is a protocol is is very fascinating, especially just that it has this native understanding of key pairs that can be really useful for verification and other things. For social media, it's a little weird mainly because of the privacy concerns that come into play with how you actually transmit and get post by other people within the social media network.
[01:46:35] ODELL:
Yeah. But how are you gonna ever get rid of that? Like, that's just an Internet thing.
[01:46:39] Seth For Privacy:
You mean, like, IP address leaks? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the main the main difference is that instead of having a single known trusted third party, which is still a trusted third party, still problematic, you have a lot more unknowns, especially when it comes to media hosting with the Nasr.
[01:46:54] ODELL:
And there's a lot of But you could do that with you could you could you could do that with Nasr on you could if that's the trade off model you want, you can do that with Nasr while still embracing the interoperability and giving people the choice of opting out and moving apps without losing their their their network graph, their connections. Like, I mean, that's what we're doing with Primal, and it's controversial within Nasr. Right? But we with Primal, Primal's hosting a caching server, which you can think about, like, a super relay that's pulling all the notes from the relays. So when you're reading if I mean, look. 99% of people are lurkers. When you're reading, you're not exposing your IP address to different people's media servers or different people's you're just trusting Prime. Now, obviously, Primal is a trusted third party in that situation.
The but that that caching server is false. Anyone can run one. In the UI, we allow people to switch. You can obviously switch apps to a pure one. Now on the sending side, you still expose your IP address, but we have a there's a toggle in because we were talking to activists who trust the US government, they're, like, anti US enemies. They're, like, anti US enemies activists. Right? It's like, so, like, they're fine with x. Right? Because they trust Elon, and they're fine with the US government knowing their information. But they don't want their government to know. And so there's a feature in primal where you can have us sit in between you and your broadcasts, and then you're not exposing your IP. Now that offers a that's a censorship trade off because Primal can stop your post from going out. Right? But you can always toggle it off or you can switch apps. So you can build these things on top.
I think the biggest issue we have right now is, like, however you wanna solve it, key rotation, key security. You know, your key gets compromised. You're you're screwed. And I think, once again, I think that's I think that's solvable. We could easily solvable solve it on a centralized proprietary way. If I mean, look. But if we're arguing against the status quo. Right? Like, if you're arguing against that you could reach out to x support and they can save you, like, I we could do that tomorrow. Like, I we could push that feature live and just hold your fucking NSEC for you and make sure no one else takes it. And if you get compromised, you know, switch your password.
I don't think I think there's more elegant ways we could do that without having that trade off, and that'll take more time. Yeah. And and I think on, like, the insect side, the, like, the easy route is
[01:49:28] Seth For Privacy:
use something like we talked about for seeds, iCloud keychain, Android auto backup. There's, like, each of the main mobile platforms has an Internet access. So you you already trust Apple and Google with the vast majority of your life. Most people, unfortunately, trust Apple or Google with the vast majority of your online personas anyways. And if you're using Internet encryption and you have good two factor, it's actually really good security, but it is a little frightening that there's just there's no going back. Like, if you lose your insect, there's no going back. You cannot do anything with it. So
[01:50:02] ODELL:
Yeah. But, I mean, Elon can just hit you with a ban hammer. Right? Like, we're not in like, the the status quo is not great. I mean, American Huddl has had eight accounts on on Twitter. And, like, there's no there's no cryptographic verification. He's not signing a PGP message when he he's just like, yo. I'm back. American Huddl two. American Huddl three. It's just like just fucking post. And, like, that's the current status quo. But I think also too much has been played on the censorship resistance side, which I do think Nasr offers a lot of promise there, particularly for, quote, unquote, high value accounts that you can't quantify. Like Kanye, for instance. If Kanye came on to Nasr, first of all, I don't know if we're ready. But if he came on to Nasr, there would be, like, 500 servers that were just dedicated to storing his content.
Like, literally, every note he sent would be signed, and they would just be saved by a bunch of people, because it's Kanye. Or, like, if it was Donald Trump. Right? Like, the president of The United States. The, like, the the super sensitive accounts that are most prone to types of censorship and shadow banning and stuff, in a non quantifiable it's like a Streisand effect kind of situation. I think they I think they get saved. But, anyway, my point is that a lot has been pointed out on the censorship resistance side. But I think just the simple idea that everything is signed, and so you can verify the integrity of it. And now we're doing it with media too where all media is hashed and signed. So you know, like when I'm gonna post this, right, it's on YouTube because YouTube has all the apps.
Right? And people wanna watch on their TV and stuff. So we still post to YouTube even though You're shadow pan. There's not many yeah. There's not many viewers on YouTube, because I refuse to turn on monetization or put the clickbait headlines or anything like that and play the Algo game. We stream to x through the ten thirty one account because my partner, Jonathan, insisted on blue checking that account, and so it was blue checked anyway. So I might as well just stream out through that. So when the inevitable x dump happens, that's his phone number that's attached to that account, just FYI, everybody, and his billing address.
But the only place where I post where you know it hasn't been modified after the fact is not. And I think that becomes more and more important. It was like, you actually have a source of truth. And to not delve into, like, the opp return wars too much, you could then use if you wanted to, you could use open time stamps, and I can prove that this happened at this time. I have cryptographic proof that it hasn't been changed because it's gonna get wild. Like, I think people don't realize, like, we've done both of us have done thousands of hours of video content.
They can make us say anything. They can make us say absolutely anything. And, like, so to have a source of truth. And how where is that source of truth gonna come from? It's not gonna come from a proprietary business. Like, it's not gonna come from a big tech company. What they're gonna do is they're gonna KYC everyone. I'm almost positive. Like, Palantir is the back end. X, TikTok, Facebook, they're the front end. Like, we talk a lot about x. I talk a lot about x, but that's because Elon is the most he's the best of the big techs in terms of free speech and stuff. And he's still bad. Right? Like, he talks one way and then bans a bunch of people in India, bans people in Turkey and stuff, and shadow bans them. So, like, you can see them in The US, but you can't see them where it matters.
But, like, Facebook has 5,000,000,000 users. Like, it's not gonna be Facebook that offers cryptographic verifiability. They're gonna KYC people. They're gonna be like, we proved it behind the scenes. You can trust us that it hasn't been changed. And I don't know I don't want that to be the status quo. Like, I I think that's a bad world to live in. And I think it's gonna be rough to get there, but it's doable. It's doable. And I think for me personally, what do I care the most about? It's like, I care about, like, Bitcoin and false discussion. And how many accounts matter?
Like, I we we need, like, 15 people, a hundred people to actually put time in, and then then it's actually useful because you have a chicken and the egg problem on the content side. Anyway, I'm ranting, but I bootstrapped Twitter Bitcoin Twitter. I was one of the hundred accounts that bootstrapped Bitcoin Twitter. And what did I get out of it? Nothing. They just sold me to someone else. They sold all my shit. Like, Dorsey wasn't great when he was running Twitter. But still, at the end of the day, he just, like Moved on. Sold me off. Him and the shareholders sold me off, and then he can do like, it's not my property.
So, like, maybe we can build something better. Maybe we can't, but that's how I think about it. No. I'm I'm hopeful. I think, like
[01:55:15] Seth For Privacy:
like, I'm bearish on the idea of Nostr becoming this, like, normal mass market product as social media, but that's also Yeah. I mean, if you ask me about Bitcoin as freedom money or Monero or any privacy tech generally, any freedom tech generally, I'm generally pretty bearish on it becoming a mass market tool. Like, unfortunately, many people are more than happy to live lives with blinders on, and they don't wake up until very late if they wake up at all to how broken the system is. So, like, again, I the vast majority of what I care about are things that are probably gonna remain relatively niche. So Nosta remaining relatively niche isn't the end of the world if it does serve human freedom. Like, I don't think it's gonna replace Twitter, but if it remains a platform that people The bull case is like That's great.
[01:56:04] ODELL:
The bull case is like 5% of people. Yeah. Right? And, like, that's, like, overly optimistic. For all of these things, like, Bitcoin is free to money. It's, like, 5% of people. And the ability for anyone without permission to opt into that. That's the bull case. And then maybe and there's some corollaries with Bitcoin here. You know, I could see a world where you could read nostril notes in x, but you can't read x notes everywhere else. So they, like, pull it into their walled garden. Right? Like, they're like, the central if if you post on Nasr, you can read it on Facebook. But Facebook doesn't return the favor. And you can't you see that. Right? Like, what are the most successful businesses in Bitcoin? It's Binance. It's Coinbase.
Right? And they leverage the open protocol, but they don't contribute back to it. They have their walled gardens that leverage it. They wanna keep you in the system. Right. So I could see a world where that happens. And then all of a sudden, it impacts more than five percent of people in a positive way. Maybe that's the true bull case. And people will complain about it and whatnot
[01:57:17] Seth For Privacy:
just like they do today with the client. It's so has so many similarities to Bitcoin. Like, I think we do need to divorce it from Bitcoin because one of the problems with Nostra I have right now is that it's, like, Bitcoin social media. Like, it it needs to become more than that. We have a good Monero community. Nice. Nice. Glad to see that growing there. I think there was a little bit of that. Did you not see them fighting in the announcements? A little bit. In the in the announcements, it was the Monero bros fighting the Bitcoin. I only saw you fighting the the anti Monero bros.
[01:57:44] ODELL:
The other. No. They came in a little bit later. Think again. We have a decent amount Yeah. In there. I think, like I mean, there's there's nothing stopping anyone from putting Monero's apps in. It already it already exists, actually. There's a third party client that lets you do Monero's apps on Nostra Post. The the problem is is you need this like, the whole point of a Zap is the social signal. Like, everyone wants private zaps or you don't actually want private zaps. Like, people want to be the top zap on the post with their little
[01:58:16] Seth For Privacy:
logo their little base on it. It's, like, part of the That's the whole point, really. I mean, like, a private zap is just a donation, which is fine. Like, donating is awesome, but it's yeah. It's the social value. I mean, just like if you if you wanted private social media, that's just called a group chat. Like, go on signal or something. You don't need Nosta or something like that. But,
[01:58:37] ODELL:
yeah. I don't know. I don't know how we bootstrap it past Bitcoiners. To be frank, me personally, I don't really care. I actually think there's not enough Bitcoin discussion. Like, when people are fighting about Bitcoin, they should be fighting on Master. They're not right now. They're, like, they're fight they're fighting on x, or they're fighting on delving Bitcoin, which, like, I appreciate it exists, but, like, another walled garden platform. Or maybe walled garden is the wrong word, but it's a proprietary centralized platform. You know? Like, they should be fighting on Nasr. And we don't have enough Bitcoin content there, in my opinion.
But, you know, I think I think there's something to be said. Maybe I look at everything from a Bitcoin lens. But in this world today where we stand, where if the average person goes on x and you onboard them to Bitcoin by putting them on x, an overwhelming majority are gonna just buy MSTR or Meta Planet or some shit. And then, like, a second tier will buy and take self custody. A smaller subset will buy and take self custody, and rarely spend it or use it as freedom money. And then an even tinier subset will actually then use it as savings and use it as spending. But if you bring them into somewhere, like, into if you if you onboard them to Primal or you onboard them into Nasr generally, and their first experience is not buying Bitcoin, but it's shitposting and receiving 21 sats, which, by the way, can't receive it on chain, then all of a sudden, their first experience with Bitcoin is receiving it as money.
And and they and it's a different user journey. So even if we get two per 2% of the amount of people are coming into Nasr than they're coming into x, which is probably generous, maybe it's even less, it's a way higher percent that are using Bitcoin as money and coming into it as Bitcoin as money.
[02:00:48] Seth For Privacy:
And so they're thinking about that, and then they start to think about self custody from that direction rather than the opposite. I I like the thought process. I I think it's very optimistic. I like it. I think my main concern is just, like, where how are you getting these people into Nasr and into Bitcoin?
[02:01:04] ODELL:
I well, I deleted my ex account, so I need you to show it. Exactly. That's right. That's like
[02:01:10] Seth For Privacy:
This is this is what I'm doing right now. That's the hard part for me, and, like, I know we've talked about this, and I talked to some other people about it. But, like, the reason I have a Twitter is not because I like Twitter. I freaking hate Twitter. I hate social media. Like you, I would love to just disappear tomorrow and not have to do the influencer shit. I could, but they're not just downsides. They're not just upsides for me. There's also downsides for other people. I know. All the people that I can reach on x, 99.9% of them are never gonna be on Noster or at least not for a very long time. So, like, I think it has to be, like, a multi tiered funnel. Like, I think, also, if there's no Nostr, we're greatly limited in the amount of, like, freedom discussions we can have because there's a central platform that can control that. So we need Nostr.
I view it more as, like, a shit hits the fan, break the emergency glass kinda thing, where we need to catch people higher up in the funnel, show them FreedomTech, show them things like Nostr, show them things like Bitcoin, and catch them before they've been just stuck in that forever or have been in that for ten years before they discover Nostra or whatever. And so that's why, like like, I I'm hesitant myself to leave Twitter and go to Nostra because I feel like it would be I don't have to service it.
[02:02:24] ODELL:
You don't have to. I'm not maybe past Matt was like, delete the trip. Don't delete. Just use Nostra more. That's all I'm saying. I'm a I'm a much friendlier I've moved to a friendlier. That much time, Matt. I'm at a friend house, man. I can't I know. I can't post that. Well, that's why I use not through only. I know. I, so I think we are gonna get to a place on primal where you can post on primal, and then it'll auto post to Twitter as well. Because you can't do it in the reverse because of the way the APIs work, but we can do it in that direction. So maybe that will make it more, interesting for you where you can automatically cross post. Obviously, you'd have to do it within Nasr to do but we'll make it so it doesn't shadow ban you and it looks nice and shit. You know, like, a hootsuite or something. Do that. That would be totally a no brainer. I'd adopt it overnight.
We have that we have that going for you and then, or going for us. And then the other thing I would say is, I respect the thought that it's a shit hits the fan type of situation, and I respect the thought that, you wanna, like, save people or help people. I've that's where I came from as well in the beginning. And I did like, I justify it by saying that I I put in my time. I helped a lot of people. You did. You know, I told them to stack sets at the generational bottom. Now it's a hundred thousand dollars. I, but just know in the back of your head that the reason the shit hits the fan solution will be there when shit hits the fan is because there's a bunch of us building up shit hits the fan thing
[02:04:14] Seth For Privacy:
while other people aren't building it. I'm I'm legitimately grateful. Right. Yeah. I'm legitimately grateful. Because I like I like I said earlier, I know it's We'll be ready for this. And how painful a lot of Denosta user experience has been over the years. It wasn't you know? Like, building that is vital. I delete everything.
[02:04:30] ODELL:
I I delete everything. I delete I've deleted my Facebook way back when. I deleted my LinkedIn. This is just the I deleted my Telegram. That was also a bad one. Yeah. I've there was a point for six months where people didn't know how to contact me because they couldn't DM me on Twitter, and I deleted my Telegram. But the people that figured it out were able to reach me on signal. Get the highest of signal DMs now because
[02:04:55] Seth For Privacy:
there's only, like, two places to reach you. There you go.
[02:04:58] ODELL:
You have to put the proof of work in. But, anyway, I'm not trying to, maybe I am I'm, but I'm not intentionally trying to get you or anything. It's just something that it's something that obvious, like I'm getting tired and I, and, so I'm I I'm throwing things at the wall to see how we boost adoption, and it it has been it has been slower than I expected. And I think part of it is because Elon has done a a pretty decent job. Like, he's clearly, he he x has got a a ton of users. User growth is going up. Functionality is going up. He's mostly at least hidden the censorship behind the bin in the side. You know? Like, people don't really realize what's going on.
And it's gonna take a and then he's obviously friendly with the current administration, so there's not, like, a back and forth.
[02:05:54] Unknown:
But that can change quickly. So, like, there's no
[02:05:57] ODELL:
there's no hot stove pushing people, but maybe it's, that can turn, yeah, that can turn quickly. And also, we live in a global world. Right? Like, so there's people right now in Serbia or India or Turkey or Brazil that actually probably could benefit significantly from it. And maybe we are we're not really getting those users right now. But I think part of that is tooling. Yeah. And, also, that's why I brought you on because I think Cakewal does a really good job of tooling, and we wanna lower the friction as much as possible. Okay. Last piece. We talked about Nasr too much.
[02:06:37] Seth For Privacy:
We were forced. There were too many people asking for it. So
[02:06:42] ODELL:
This debate currently about seedless is safer. Oh my god.
[02:06:47] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah.
[02:06:49] ODELL:
This debate has mostly happened on x. I wish it happened on Noster. You're on x. You're building you're VP of a self custody wallet that gives you your seed words, a nice easy copy button. How do you think about this?
[02:07:05] Seth For Privacy:
It's a I mean, it's a tricky one. Like, I understand the approach that Bitkey is taking because they are kind of taking the make it as easy as possible even if it's compromising on a lot of the things that have been critical to Bitcoin security in the past. And it does it in a way that is very user friendly because you're just removing a lot of what are the traditional barriers of entry. I think the biggest issue for me is that, at least, I only want to build tools that do not rely on me or my company being around long term. Like, obviously, I hope that Cake Wallet is around forever. I hope that we're wildly successful building self custody privacy tools. Like, obviously, that's the hope. But I think all of these things should be built in a way that is the the most standard, the most portable, the least walled garden as possible, and the one that provides the best security possible for the user. Obviously, k wallet is very different from something like Bitkey because we're talking about a hot a hot wallet where key management, like, the the threshold is much lower because we're not talking generational wealth. Whereas when you're talking about hardware wallets, like, the main problem I have with Bitkey is twofold. The portability of not offering a seed to their users makes it much harder to migrate off. I know they have some, like, a emergency access kit or something that they call it.
It works. Possible. I've tested it. It's possible.
[02:08:26] ODELL:
Probably
[02:08:28] Seth For Privacy:
99 of Bitcoin influencers have not tested it, but I've actually tested the entire flow. Yeah. And I I haven't tested it either, to be completely fair. I haven't had that much time with with Bitkey itself. But
[02:08:39] ODELL:
You basically you install an APK that doesn't rely on their servers, and then you have a PDF that's in your automatically put in your cloud backup, which if you lose access to your cloud back, if you don't have that PDF, but you could also save that PDF at will at any time. But only through the So there's a PDF the only way you can get the PDF in short? No. No. No. No. No. No. The PDF is, like, literally just it's an encrypted PDF that's encrypted with your Bitkey hardware that's sitting in your cloud drive automatically as soon as you set up the wallet. It's always sitting there. It's just just sitting there. It says Bitkey break in case of emergency.
But you can also download that and save it separately at will whenever. Now if the time comes, you know, block cancels you or goes out of business. You take that PDF. You download the APK, you scan it with the APK, you tap your Bitkey to decrypt it, and then you have two keys. Then you send all in one transaction out to another wallet. So it's actually, like, relatively clean if you know what an APK is and you still have access to your cloud account. Let's be honest. Pretty much any a big key user in that situation is gonna be in full on panic mode. Yeah.
[02:09:59] Seth For Privacy:
But it works. Yeah. What So that's the current Which is, like, the lowest bar. Like, that's if they didn't have that, that would be terrifying. Like, you gotta be absolutely terrifying. But, like, that is the lowest bar that's absolutely necessary, which I think is fine. I mean, the I don't know. It it really just the user needs to be properly educated about that, but I don't think it's the end of the world for it to be like that. But the main problem I have with it is that for their target demographic, it's essentially a walled garden.
It's very hard for them to move to something else other than sending the stats themselves and from talking to lots of people, hardware wallet users who wanna migrate. Like, that's a terrifying prospect for the vast majority of users and not something they would do unless shit hit the fan. So that's my like, I don't I honestly don't have a huge, like, care in the the fight. I think the only other thing that I don't like is just the screenless approach
[02:10:52] ODELL:
also introduces some trust. Yeah. The screenless is
[02:10:55] Seth For Privacy:
they just need it. They need it. Like it. You could do a really good UX with a screen. Like, I I really don't think it's necessary to be screenless for their target demographic, and it does have some serious compromises in in security. But, again, there's very few people that are gonna be buying a bit kit that are gonna be attacked in the way that a screen would protect them. A bit key. Yeah. Exactly. There's, like, there's a a very small threat model. It is important to know and discuss, but that's why I'm, like, I'm not up in arms about the approach. But I think it is valuable that people understand it, and it also should be a good driver for those of us building things that are more traditionally self custody with seed phrases is how can we continue to make things easier without that full blown trade off of being seedless or full blown trade off of being screenless, that sort of thing.
[02:11:42] ODELL:
I mean, I think it's not it doesn't compete with a typical hardware signer, like, a typical hardware wallet where the hardware wallet is trying to protect you from your hot device, by being able to verify on a secure screen and approve transactions and hold your keys on it. What it's really doing is making a standard mobile wallet more recoverable in more situations. Right? It's like, which is why I see why they didn't add a screen. Right? Because it's if if the screen is if if the phone is compromised, like, the big key is not gonna protect you, if it shows you the wrong information.
Well, it would But if you lose your phone, if you lose You wouldn't have a way to verify what was the correct information. Right. But if you lose your phone, it allows you to easily and sit relatively securely recover. And if you lose your big key, it allows you to easily and securely recover. And if their server goes down, it allows you to ease so it's like a more of a recovery device, a recovery mechanism than a verification mechanism.
[02:12:48] Seth For Privacy:
Does Cake Wallet support hardware wallets right now? Just Ledger right now, but we're working on adding more, throughout the course of the year. You're gonna just do, like, the basic QR support? No. We definitely don't. Like, I feel like we definitely will. I know, like, we had some people asking about Jade, and, I don't know that, like, cold card is our normal demographic. But But but if you add if you add QR PSVT
[02:13:09] ODELL:
standard, then you
[02:13:10] Seth For Privacy:
support Jade, cold card, seed sign, or passport. You support all of them without doing anything. We technically already have it. Just we haven't actually exposed it to people connecting other hardware wallets. Because we we actually have our own app that's not really ready for prime time yet, but will be soon. That is a offline signer app that you install on a second phone, like an old phone or something that you keep offline. And it it works using PSVT over you are, all the same functionality. So we already have actually have all of it there. So that's why I'm saying, like, we we will have broader support because we already have all of the bones of signing PSBTs using UR, the QR back and forth, all of that actually already in place in cake. So it's definitely coming. It's definitely coming.
[02:13:53] ODELL:
So, I mean, last last thing on the seed thing. So when I go to save a seed in cake wallet, you give me, like, the scariest warning. You know, don't lose the seed. Keep it safe. Don't send it to support. I think it's, like, all caps, you will lose your money. From, like, from your from your perspective, like, do you see a lot of fishing and people losing their Bitcoin now or Monero or their Nano or whatever? No. I mean,
[02:14:23] Seth For Privacy:
the the thing that has remained true across working at Foundation, across just being an educator, across working at Cake, is it's just people losing their money because they don't back up their seed. Like, it almost no one is losing their money because someone gets access to their seed because they had it in a a screenshot or something. It definitely
[02:14:42] ODELL:
happens. Like, I think I've heard Well, the phishing app Phishing happens. But Right? Like, people will just send it to support or send it to a fake Telegram contact. Even that is more rare now, actually.
[02:14:52] Seth For Privacy:
I haven't heard of any cases of that within k Wallet. The one that we've had to put in, like, extra protections against and the most common one is on EVM chains. Adding fake stablecoin tokens is, like, the stupidest scam, but it happens and it works so well where an attacker will convince someone to add the contract address for a a fake version of USDT or USDC or something. They'll sell it to them, and they'll keep sending them this fake USDT or USDC. And so they think they'll think that they're wealthy or making money or whatever, and they'll obviously send them extra to make them feel better. But all the while, it's completely useless tokens that they've created. We have all the protections in cake to warn you about this. We don't pull the fiat value of this. Users still keep falling for it despite having to three times confirm that this isn't a scam, that they know what they're doing. That's that's been, like, the the most common. It's still rare. So what you're just checking you're just checking the contract addresses to make sure that Yeah. I mean, we have a we have a white list of the primary ones that are used in this, like, the primary tokens that people are gonna use anyways. So, like, we'll we'll know if this is pretending to be USDT, but it's some token this random scammer created.
But, obviously, we don't want to limit the user's ability to add custom tokens that we don't know about. Like, obviously, we don't wanna we don't want to lock them in a walled garden. So there's always a kind of balance there, but they have to click through, like, three different warnings in three different places on the screen that they're forced to read, like, all of this. But people still fall for it. And that's like, when we think about security for Bitcoin wallets, that's always the lowest common denominator. And that's always gonna be a problem no matter what approach you take. I mean, even if you're talking Bitkey, a user who would do something like that is also just gonna send the money out of Bitkey and sign the transaction and send it because they think that they're getting the deal of a lifetime or something. Like, that there's always these things that we can't prevent. But I I only say that because the vast majority of the times I've seen people lose money over the years, it's either they didn't back up their seat at all, which is an interesting, probably, pro for something like a Bitkey because it makes it much harder to do that because you're not that's not a part of the process. You you keep your hardware wallet or you keep your phone or social recovery, or they're they're having some specific, like, spear phishing campaign that's attacking them. But I think that's where, like, in the space more broadly, we have to lean into and, like, we're not doing this at cake yet. So, like, I'm pointing at myself as well. Yeah. We have to lean into social recovery, I think, much harder because there's a world where you can do both. Like, you can have the seed phrase. You can force people through verification, which I think is something we should continue to do.
But you can also have social recovery done in a very intelligent way. And that's another specific actual use case for Nostr that I think could be really good, is using Nostr for that social recovery without the users having to know that, like, Nostr is a social media platform. Like, maybe you want to do that. But you can just use Nostr under the hood. So let's say three cake users agree to be each other's social recovery contacts. And if any two of them sign off, someone can get their money back despite having lost their seed. Something like that is something where we definitely need to lean into that more. Something I think I I would love for us to do at cake is lean into social recovery because that's the that's, like, the next best solution other than going seedless and just obfuscating all this from the user, which has a lot of other side effects.
You can do social recovery in a way that's very secure, but also much more user friendly than the seed phrase thing.
[02:18:22] ODELL:
By the way, that's how I think we're going to try and do it with, and and with key rotation on masters with social recovery.
[02:18:33] Seth For Privacy:
I like it.
[02:18:35] ODELL:
Which will also we we actually already like, activists already do it in, like, hacky ways for centralized platforms. Like, they share passwords. So, like, if one person if one person gets arrested by the secret police Mhmm. Like, they send out the bat signal and the other person changes the password kinda thing. Yeah. Because once they get one person, they try and get the social graph. It's like a I don't know. I agree with that social recovery. It's hard to do. Right? Yes. It's really hard to do if you don't already have a social network. Like, if you don't already have a network graph because you kinda need them you need to bootstrap the,
[02:19:17] Seth For Privacy:
like, the web of trust a little bit. Yeah. And then the last tier On the last tier social media side. Yeah. On the wallet side, I don't think you need any of that because you can easily just have a You send, like, an invite link. Yeah. You send an invite link, and you have a simple maybe a simplified version of the app or a simplified mode in the app where all it is is the social recovery side. So, like, if my grandma, maybe she's not gonna be a k quality user, but she could be a great social recovery person because she's always around. She's not going anywhere. Like No. That's that's not a problem. So you don't necessarily need it for that side. But for the for the nostr key rotation, obviously, you need a social.
[02:19:51] ODELL:
And then last but not least, it's just hard to test. But, I agree that's the direction to go. Because then you you I need, like, five people to test it with and, like, put funds in and go through the process, see how it works. But it's all solvable. I like social recovery. I think that would be a a big a big feature ad. And then I would just say last but not least, like, the I said it in passing, but just the big ass warning you give people, I think probably saves a lot of people. Like, just don't ever like, a nice piece of education that's built into the UX because let's be honest, they're not gonna watch, like, a two hour YouTube video or something on securing their stuff, I think, is really important.
Yeah. Hopefully, they read it, but it's there. It's there. Okay. Awesome. Well, I told you we were gonna go an hour and fifteen, and it's two hours and twenty. So,
[02:20:42] Seth For Privacy:
I knew you couldn't help yourself. We're getting back to old Citadel dispatch days.
[02:20:47] ODELL:
Seth Seth told me that an hour and fifteen was too short for me. Well, you you we we got to do another long one. It's great. I enjoyed the rip. I'd love to have you back in, you know, like, six months, a year as you guys build out a lot of these features. Do you have any final thoughts for the audience before we wrap?
[02:21:11] Seth For Privacy:
Nothing crazy. I think just, yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. Love love chatting about what we're doing at Geek Wallet, but really just continuing to chat about FreedomTech. I mean, I know I've said it before, but you're the main reason why I'm in this space at all. Main reason why I started a podcast and started to talk about that stuff as well. So it's been awesome to to see that journey and, just cool to keep keep touching base touching base with you over the years. So yeah. I mean, I guess just last little thing, if anyone wants to learn more, add Seth for privacy on x, add Seth for privacy on Noster as well, or I can't remember why I what my nip o five is, but I'm on there. I'll post
[02:21:47] ODELL:
I'll post his x handles and his nostril handle in the show notes. There you go. There you go. But he's not active on nostril, so don't bother with the nostril handle. He will be in the future. If you wanna check out Cake Wallet, it's just available in your favorite app store. Is it cakewallet.com?
[02:22:04] Seth For Privacy:
Yeah. Cakewallet.com. Mhmm. Awesome. Nice and easy.
[02:22:09] ODELL:
And it's good to hear that I'm a little with at least a little part of the inspiration for your work. So I'm basically still on Twitter. I just don't have to send the tweets, which is great. Freaks, thank you for joining us, especially those of you who joined us live. You make the show unique and special. Thank you for everyone who's continued to support the show. I'm gonna keep trying to keep the streak up and do a show every week. I don't know when the next episode is, but I'll notify you all on primal.net/odell. Obviously, still dispatch is available in your favorite podcast app.
Share with friends and family. Click that nice subscribe button. I hate saying it. Just don't click the subscribe button. Click it if you want to. Take your take your friends and family's phones. Open up the podcast app and then subscribe for them. You don't even have to tell them. It doesn't require agency. Awesome. Thank you, Seth, for joining us. And, everyone, love you all. Stay on the Stack Sats. Peace.
CNBC Intro
Happy Bitcoin Monday
Guest Introduction: Seth for Privacy
Cake Wallet Overview
Shitcoin Support and Strategy
Silent Payments Explained
Lightning Network Integration Challenges
Payjoin Implementation
Cashu and Custodial Wallets Discussion
Nostr and Distributed Social Media
Seedless Wallets Debate
