EPISODE: 0.1.7
BLOCK: 679055
PRICE: 1592 sats per dollar
TOPICS: bitcoin nodes, self hosting
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[00:00:00]
Unknown:
Out of left field, but we've got Coinbase coming, with a direct listing. And I looked back when you were on. It was July of 2019. We were talking about Libra, and you didn't like Libra, but you were very positive about Bitcoin, which subsequently went from 7 or 8,000 to where, new high today at 63,000. Coinbase now coming public. When a lot of government types you're you're very rare for someone to be positive about this. And, I don't know if you saw, secretary Yellen and Fed chair Powell talking about it. Do you think that they have a feeling or a good understanding of of of digital currencies or Bitcoin at this point? Or they need a little remedial reading, a a little reading of the Bitcoin standard? What what would you suggest?
[00:00:47] Unknown:
Well, I think I was right then and I'm right now. I think they tried to ignore it to make it go away. I think Jamie Dimon will tell you that from the beginning he was wrong. This is moving towards the future. They should not ignore it. They should not only learn more about it, but the basis is gonna continue to grow. And this is something that those who regulate, those who are in government, they make policy better start understanding what it means for the future because other countries are moving forward, especially China. I do not want America to fall behind. I want the next century to be ours. That's why I wanna look forward not backwards and not keep my head in the sand. Okay.
[00:02:03] Unknown:
Oh, shit. Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. What a fucking day it's been. That that Bitcoin FOMO hitting us fucking hard, the best drug there is. Welcome to another episode of Citadel dispatch. This is episode 17, the interactive live show about Bitcoin distributed systems, privacy, and open source software. To those joining from the audio streams, whether that's our 2 podcast feeds, Tales From the Crypt or Citadel Dispatch dedicated feed, or Sphinx Breeze other podcasting 2 point o apps. That was Joe Kernan or boy Joe Kernan from CNBC Squawk Box, the number one Bitcoin podcaster in the space, speaking with Republican house leader from California, Kevin McCarthy, who basically is sending out a warning shot on CNBC to other house of representatives, members, if you do not support Bitcoin, then you are against America, which is a pretty crazy fucking thing to see on mainstream television.
I want to do a quick shout out to all the freaks who are streaming us sats through podcast 2.0. You helped make this show completely ad free and sponsor free. That is pretty fucking cool. It's just really cool to see the fucking little lightning payments come through, and I appreciate that. That is a special connection, we have, and another big shout out to the rider dive freaks that join us live every week. Without you, this show is is basically nothing. So, appreciate you guys coming in here and being heavy participants in the live chat, whether that is on Twitter, Twitch, or YouTube.
Another reminder that you are able to view the videos after the fact on Telegram and Keybase. All videos are uploaded there in full. On the other platforms, you know, some of the music video material might be removed or muted, per copyright rules. It is what it is. With all that said, I wanna welcome a return guest, a good friend, and the cofounder of The Verge. Future Paul is joining us today. And thank you, Paul. Sorry for not giving you a good break there to to introduce yourself. How are you doing? You doing alright?
[00:04:22] Unknown:
I'm glad you're having me on to talk about my essay, Christianity for Bitcoiners.
[00:04:30] Unknown:
And, and we have proof of Kegs here. Keegan, cofounder of Start9 Labs. I met him at BitblockGoom this year. Cool dude. I built a really cool product that a lot of the freaks seem to love. Welcome, Keegan.
[00:04:43] Unknown:
Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me.
[00:04:46] Unknown:
Absolutely. Thank you for joining. It's been a long time coming. Today, we will be talking about Bitcoin nodes, self hosting, number go up, and all things Bitcoin related. It's gonna be a fucking fun time. I'm really looking forward to this. I think a great place to start, is I kinda like I would I would like Keegan to start with a explanation of what the fuck a Bitcoin note is. I have this poll up to our to the viewers who are coming in through video. Do you use your own Bitcoin note? This is very scientific. This was a Twitter poll. 55100 people responded.
35% said yes. 35 said no. 550 people said what is a node? And, a 1000 people asked to see the answers. So, Keegan, what is a Bitcoin note?
[00:05:41] Unknown:
Yeah. So for the 500 of you that asked what the fuck a Bitcoin note is, that's how, a, you know what the ledger even says. And it is so the the one of the main central properties to Bitcoin is the fact that there is no central authority, but there still is an authoritative state of what the ledger is. That's what tells you how much Bitcoin you have. It tells you, you know, when you've been paid, when you paid other people. And so if you're not looking to an authority to be like, yo, how much is like, how how much does this address have? You have to ask yourself, which is your your Bitcoin node. And the only way to do that is to to basically run the software, verify every transaction from Genesys, which is one of the few things that Bitcoin does that basically know all even purports to do, because, you know, it running a node has been a staple of Bitcoin culture, thankfully, for, like, the last, you know, you know, pretty much since the the block size wars concluded.
So we can, I guess, talk more about that later? But at the end of the day, the only secure way to know whether or not you've been paid and how much money you have is through running a Bitcoin node. Anything if you're not using your own, you're using someone else's. And There we go. So you have to trust that person.
[00:06:54] Unknown:
Paul, what do you think of that explanation?
[00:06:57] Unknown:
Yeah. I I really like that. I it's very helpful, I think, for new people to unders like like, I almost like visualizing Bitcoin as, like, an Excel spreadsheet, or it's like a huge shared doc. You know? And, the like, you you don't ask for that from Google. You just you you can build your own copy. And I don't know. It it's, it's so different than how you normally interact with software that there is a lot to learn about it, but it is it's so beautiful in that it it it answers every gotcha. Like, what do you mean? Like, everybody just agrees that this is what Bitcoin is, and then it works, and then it and then it and it does work. And the node is is like a huge aspect of that.
[00:07:49] Unknown:
Yeah. The crypt logo from the chat is saying asking strangers for how much money you have. Well, is yeah. Like, when you put it like that, it's completely ridiculous that people don't run their own notes. Right?
[00:07:59] Unknown:
Yeah. 100%. So so so to to just distill this because it's a it's a topic that I've had to discuss a lot, I think Keegan nailed it right at the end there is is the key thing is if you use the Bitcoin network, you're gonna you're gonna have to use a Bitcoin node to interact with the network. That's either gonna be your own node or it's gonna be someone else's node. If it's someone else's node, then you're trusting their node. If you're trusting their node, you're trusting their node with your privacy, and you're trusting their node with actually verifying everything's going on, you know, whether that's how much Bitcoin you have or whether that's the consensus rules. What is Bitcoin? So it's absolutely imperative that people exercise the right to use their own node, not only run their own node, but use their own node.
That's what makes Bitcoin different than so many other systems because you're able to use it, in this trust minimized way where you don't have to rely on a third party. In most cases for people, that third party is their node provider.
[00:08:55] Unknown:
Can can you guys contextualize this where you would put it in the priority scale? Like, if I'm if I'm trying to get my funds off of Coinbase, for instance, you know, I've I've I've heard the the not your keys, not your coins. So I've got, like, a cold card now. I'm ready to move my funds. And then everybody's telling me, well, you you you know, you're not really a Bitcoin unless you've got your own nodes to, like, verify these transactions when you're moving your funds off of Coinbase. Like, is it okay that your first time, like, maybe you you use the wallets, like, default, like, whatever it's connecting to, and you just trust this node for starters. Like like, how imperative is it that you are verifying your own transaction?
[00:09:39] Unknown:
Trust is not a death sentence. Right? It really depends on how much of your, you know, financial well-being is tied up in Bitcoin and how much you can afford for whoever you're trusting to cheat you. Right? So if you're dicking around with a, like, a few dollars worth of Bitcoin, right, and, you know, you're largely not really interacting with the network yet. Like, yeah, it's totally fine for you to, have, like, you have other nodes that you're trusting in the in the interim as you sort of get your setup off the ground. But if you're, you know, talking about accepting Bitcoin in order to, like, sell a very large, you know, piece of property, whether it's like a house or a car or something like that, or you're trying to get paid for your, you know, time, which is one of the maybe the most scarce asset that each of us have. Right?
Then now all of a sudden, it's it's a lot more important. So it it really comes to do it comes it comes down to how much exposure you have if it goes wrong.
[00:10:36] Unknown:
Well, like like everything else on the show. Right? There's, like, a shit ton of nuance. Like, I don't think it's very productive that, like, the Luke Juniors of the world, like, scare the shit out of users and tell them that they don't know Bitcoin if they don't use their own node, even though that might be technically true. In practice, at least from the verification side, there's been no large scale cases of people getting duped into thinking they own Bitcoin when they don't own Bitcoin. So the best example would be, Ledger or Trezor. Right? The like, an overwhelming majority of freaks probably use Ledger or Trezor's nodes, and they don't even realize. They just use, you know, they use Trezor's wallet software. They use Ledger's wallet software with their hardware wallet, and they're trusting that that node.
Those nodes have never been known to lie to anybody about which Bitcoin is theirs. That doesn't mean it couldn't happen in the future, but that's never happened. Furthermore, you go and you, like, check maybe, like, blockstream.infoororoxt.meormempool. Space, these other, you know, these blockchain explorers that are running their own nodes, and you verify that there's actually coins in in your address on those services, then all of a sudden you're reducing the trust even if you're not using your own note. Right? Like, it's you you Yeah. You would need you would need, like, those 4 services to to collude to fuck you. Right? And in in practical terms, that probably won't happen. But on the privacy side, I feel like the privacy side is way more tangible because it doesn't matter, like, it's like obvious of course, it matters the verification side, but it it on the privacy side, you're a 100% trusting them with your privacy. They see every transaction you do. They see all of your balance checks. And if you're not using Tor, they see your IP address. Right? So they can connect all that stuff. So I think for for people on the on the node side to see it as a tangible thing on on privacy is a very insightful I I I it's like it's an insightful way to to prove why a node is important. Would you agree?
[00:12:43] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, like, nodes for privacy is definitely something that, it is an improvement than overusing things like ledger and treasures nodes or or whatever. But it's also not a panacea either. Right? If, like, you can spin up a bunch of nodes on something like AWS and try to corner specific nodes that you see. Not that each node identifies itself at all. So it's not like, you know, your node is broadcasting me. Like, you know, I'm proof of Kieck's node. Please corner me. So but, you know, there there are still pieces of analysis that you can do on nodes if you control a decent number of the peers, that are near certain nodes.
So it's it'd probably be even better to to connect to things over Tor if you if you can. But, you know, this is just you're just getting further and further out on the continuum
[00:13:33] Unknown:
of of privacy and and security and sovereignty and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, I guess what I'm trying to say is, like, the the the prerequisite to try and start to use Bitcoin privately is to learn how to use your own node. So if if you have any desire to try and use Bitcoin privately, well, I and I understand that that's not for everyone, but it is probably for most people that listen to the show. It's gonna start with using your own node. Right?
[00:13:59] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure.
[00:14:00] Unknown:
But for the average person, to just go back to what Paul said, are we completely fine with them just moving it to a to, like, to the to not using their own node, but self custody, first as a step, whether that's a mobile wallet or,
[00:14:20] Unknown:
Let's say or, like, a hardware wallet. You got $10 on on on Coinbase or Cash App or whatever.
[00:14:28] Unknown:
Yeah. 10, at $10 a $10 oh, I mean, it depends on how much $10 is for you because it it's really more about how much of your own life can get fucked over. It's less about the amount. Right? If 10 grand is gonna fuck you over, you you need to run your own in order to sort of verify that. If it's not, then, like, I, you know, I I can't tell you what you should or should not do with respect to your own risk profile. But I would say in terms of the ordering of of things, like, I think it's more important that people hold their keys than it is that they run their own node in just in a sort of practical sense. But you should do both.
That's the really the only way to to be sure that you have what you have. If only there was an easy way to run your node. If only. Yeah. I guess that that should segue.
[00:15:18] Unknown:
Yeah. Let's let's fucking go. So so you're the cofounder of Start 9 Labs. What's what's the mission? What is Start 9 Labs? Hit us. So Start 9 Labs' purpose is to increase the sell like, the digital self sovereignty of people on the Internet.
[00:15:33] Unknown:
The sort of short pitch is that, like, the Internet has become an its own force of nature. Like, we've had elections that are swayed by, happenings on the Internet. And so, the Internet is just way more important than it was, like, 20 years ago. And so, as such, it's more important than ever that people are the custodians of their own digital lives. And yet for the last couple of decades, we've been sort of outsourcing more and more and more of that to various large companies who don't have your best interests at heart. They give you but they all involve running your own server software, which is not unlike running your own Bitcoin node. So we just provide a platform to make that as easy as we possibly can while still letting the users retain as much control over their, digital lives as possible.
So the the product started with a one click install of a Bitcoin node. That's why it's pretty relevant to this discussion, but quickly extended to things like lightning nodes as well. And then, you know, we've also deployed, like, a a Google Drive equivalent, like a file a a called file browser, and and various other services that, we deem to be sort of mission critical to a lot of people's lives.
[00:16:59] Unknown:
Awesome. So, I mean, if we're gonna distill it if we're gonna distill it to, like, a marketing pitch, like, the cloud is someone else's computer and Start Nine's goal is to put that computer in your closet.
[00:17:12] Unknown:
Yep. That's exactly right. We we want you to hold we we want you to be in custody of your digital life all the way down to the middle.
[00:17:21] Unknown:
But you can be just a pleb that doesn't know what they're doing.
[00:17:25] Unknown:
Yep. Or we we we try to take you further out. We we try to give you more leverage. Right? Nothing about this is going to absolve you from having personal responsibility of some kind, but we can give you tremendous amounts of leverage where you only have to know a little bit about what you're doing as opposed to tons and tons of extraneous details that it would take to run this software were it not for the product like the embassy.
[00:17:49] Unknown:
Right. So, I mean, one of the things that I really like about the Embassy I mean, so so this idea of self hosting is something that we've talked a lot about on the show so far. It's still a very young show. It's you know, we only started at the end of 2020, and we've talked a lot about self hosting and, you know, running your own shit, whether that's Bitcoin or whether that's whether that's other things. And it seems like in this world of of censorship and and top down moderation from these centralized platforms, there should be, like, a pretty organic push to people basically moving to self hosted alternatives. Right?
When people get burned, they naturally have this incentive to to move. Now what it seems to kind of push back against that incentive model is basically ease like switching costs, like ease of move, And and that's, like, 2 fold. That's not only UX, that's also cost. Right? And I think one of the things you guys have done really well, because you're not the only ones, specifically in the Bitcoin space, you're not the only ones who are working on this kind of model, is you really brought it in at a very competitive price point. Yeah. You wanna talk about, like, the importance of of of that?
[00:19:05] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, well, it just it's a philosophy thing primarily. Like, the price point that we pick we brought it in at I mean, one of the things that my cofounder and brother, a n, Twitter handle doctor Bone said is that, like, if the technology isn't broadly accessible to people, it will be used as an instrument of, sort of inequality and, like, oppression. Right? And so, obviously, there's a certain level at which it becomes unsustainable for us, in which case, this technology does get brought to market at all. But, we're trying to keep it as competitive as humanly possible, in order to get it into as many hands as we physically can.
[00:19:49] Unknown:
I dig it. Paul, what what's going on over there?
[00:19:54] Unknown:
I'm trying to look at I just I just so, I don't know if this is a counterpoint, but a as a alternative solution, I recently bought a pie, got the case, got the hard drive, plugged them all together and put Umbrel on it. And that's been working really well for me. And I was just trying to figure out how much I spent because, like, it looks it looks like you can get the 8 gigabyte embassy for,
[00:20:21] Unknown:
for 300. Like, how big is the hard drive? Well, the the that's what they did. They've they they run it all off the SSD and pruned. I mean, they run it all off the SD card in pruned mode to get the cost down because the SSD is the most expensive part of of these other nodes. Yeah. The SSD is is is comparatively quite expensive. We currently do run everything off of the SD card for now.
[00:20:43] Unknown:
We do have an upgrade in the works. We've talked about this at various points. This shouldn't come as news to anybody who's been following the project. But for anyone who hasn't, the like, one of the forthcoming releases is going to be, moving some of that data to a more reliable, like, storage medium. Because one of the criticisms we've foreseen and rightfully so is that, like, the SD cost reliable as, you know, some of the alternatives. But we have taken already precautions. I know that 6102 is asking in the chat right now how long will the SD survive. The SD cards that we sell, are, like, high endurance models. They're designed to take lots and lots of write cycles. And even when they wear out from a right cycle standpoint, you can still read all of the data off of them.
So it's not like, a tremendous problem, but we would like it to be better. We're constantly trying to improve the product, and one of the ways that we are going to be doing that is allowing external drive support in the near future. It isn't just also necessary to for, like, Electrum personal server?
[00:21:43] Unknown:
Could you say that again? Don't you need the whole blockchain for for to do Electrum, or am I mistaken on that? Yeah. So so I think for
[00:21:51] Unknown:
for EPS, for Electrum personal server, like, Belcher's project, you do need the entire, chain. Actually, no. No. You you might not. I I'd have to actually check on that. And, realistically, I don't know if I can do that at at this exact moment. But either way EPS I think for EPS, you need the whole chain, and for Electromax,
[00:22:13] Unknown:
you can do pruned. And I I don't it's the other way around. Yeah. It looks like I I'm on the Oh, yeah. It is the other way around because Electromax is the server one. It's better for a server.
[00:22:24] Unknown:
Yeah. And so so what we do right now also is that there's we have a a secondary service on the embassy called Bitcoin proxy, which will dynamically fetch blocks. Like, when when it it's asked for a block, it'll dynamically fetch it from up here and then verify it against the headers that you keep. So for people that don't know how, like, the the the pruning system works in Bitcoin Core, it's that the block data itself is erased from the disk, but the header, is kept. And it has to be kept for proof of work reasons, which is how your node is able to know what the most valid, or the with the highest consensus, chain is.
And so, all you would need to do is download the block from up here and then check it against the header that you kept and, you know, you would still know that it was valid even though you didn't have it on disk. But you don't have electrum
[00:23:12] Unknown:
support anyway right now?
[00:23:14] Unknown:
We don't have electrum support at at the moment, but we are working towards getting I I think BWT is something that we were looking at for a bit, which is Shesx project, which is also Electron based. And that works for pruned. I know that works for Pruned node. It's on it's on the service road map on the website. The
[00:23:33] Unknown:
the I mean, the key thing here is is Keegan said the, and and I the reason I'm answering this is because this is the first critique I gave them. But you missed this, Keegan. Is is is it 2 fold with the SD card. Right? You use performant SD cards as performant as possible, and then second of all, you cover your ass with the backups. And whether that's the seed backups or with lightning, you have static static channel backups to a USB drive. Right?
[00:23:59] Unknown:
Yep. Yeah. You can plug in, any any, like, storage medium into the USB port, and then you'll be able to back up the the entire service data and restore it, to another embassy. It's like the we don't do anything fancy necessarily with, like, the the data storage, so you wouldn't necessarily have to recover it to a an embassy. But for obvious reasons, we don't support support one click restores to anything other than the Embassy. Yeah. But lightning, it's risky always. We do do something special for lightning in the case of both LND and c lightning, which is that, we don't actually backup or restore the state that can cause you to get all of your channel funds stolen. It's SCB. Right? A static channel. Just the SCB.
[00:24:45] Unknown:
So they'd automatically closes your channels and restores it to your seed.
[00:24:49] Unknown:
Correct.
[00:24:50] Unknown:
But so so the key here for the freaks is is trade offs are made to keep the cost down, and they were mitigated through these techniques. And an SSD version should be coming relatively
[00:25:04] Unknown:
soon, I guess. Right? Yeah. So, soon TM. It's like the it's it's like They're, not 2 weeks. I can't not really say it'll be longer than that. But, I do know that it is it more than one of our developers
[00:25:18] Unknown:
is working full time on that particular work stream right now as their number one priority, and we try to interrupt them as little as humanly possible. Just to be clear to me, there's not like a Raspberry Pi case that is exactly perfect for making a full note. And if and if there was, it'd probably be a little suspect,
[00:25:37] Unknown:
because it'd be it'd be too much too too too much of a good thing to a little hot honeypot. But but yeah. I feel like a RASPy a RASPy case is, like, a perfect arguing topic for Bitcorners. Like, everyone probably has their favorite RASPy case that's perfect for a node though.
[00:25:53] Unknown:
No. That's the thing. There it it should in it should include because they're they're coming out with ones now that, like, because you can there's this Raspberry Pi compute card. Right? So it doesn't have all it's it doesn't have all the IO broken out. It's just pretty much the chip. And then you can plug it into a board. And so do they have these boards that have their own IO, and they'll, like, put, like, like, an NVMe drive or something like that. Or or, you know, they they can do, like, PCIe expansion from, like, you know, this one tiny little compute card. But I haven't seen one.
[00:26:36] Unknown:
8 pi cluster. Exactly. Maximalist. No. But just you're sidetracking us, Paul. First of all, Keegan, the what were we talking about? We were talking about fuck. I completely forgot.
[00:26:53] Unknown:
Well, I mean, we were talking about various, like, pieces of redundancy and and, like, sort of safety, around these sorts of, pie projects.
[00:27:03] Unknown:
Right.
[00:27:04] Unknown:
I mean, if you don't have something, there's some there's some stuff in the chat that I actually did wanna address. 61 has just a couple of questions that the one, how long will the SD card last? And the the the ones that we sell, not the ones like, if you did the DIY, Embassy project, I can't make any guarantees about the quality of the SD card that you put in your, your DIY. But the ones that we sell from HQ will last as long as you're not doing, like, IBD and then nuking your device and then the IBD again in, initial blockchain download. Because as long as you're not doing that, it'll last for, like, you know, at least 4 years. It's I think that our like, some of our calculations had it at 6. But, you know, obviously, the the more activity you put on it, the shorter the lifetime is. But as I said, also, when you when they when they do fail, they fail to write. They don't really fail to read. So you can actually just copy it over to a new one and sort of keep going.
And then the second question that 60102 or thing that he brought up, which I wanna talk about is, using RAID, which is a redundant, storage medium such that, like, individual drives can fail without having the, the entire file system on the device fail all at once. That is something that we are considering very closely. I have been advocating for it for quite some time. It it's work that has not been scheduled, but, it's very much on our radar and things that I, I ask for one of our I asked I asked my my brother and cofounder, Aidan, weekly for that feature. So
[00:28:47] Unknown:
I think backup is really interesting. Like, I I had a node a little while ago that was just kind of on a, like, kinda old desktop PC that I had sitting around. And I set it all up and I spent all this time, got up and running, and then and it died because it was old bad hardware. And then it's like, well, I'm now I just gotta do every little step that that I this was like preambul. I gotta do every little step all again. So I do like this idea. Like, do do you guys know the concept? They talk about this in, like, DevOps, where your servers should be like cattle, not like pets?
Yep. I have heard that. Like, in cloud computing, you you want the the ideal state is that you could have one tiny little configuration file, and then obviously backups of important state. But but that you could with a touch of a button, spin up spin it up on any server in the world. And it's it's, identical, and it works just the same. Instead of one precious server running somewhere that you're tending to and you're terrified, what if this goes down? Because then I have to get all the way back to my current scenario that I've achieved over years of tending to this pet server.
[00:29:59] Unknown:
Yeah. The so I do I do wanna comment a little bit on that. Like, the the redundancy that you get from having, like from being able to spin these sorts of things up on demand is very helpful in most cases, but what it does is it introduces consistency problems between the data between different, copies of the server. So for things like your file servers, maybe that's not a huge issue. But if you do that with your lightning nodes, you're probably gonna get your funds stolen. So it's not quite as simple as it might sound in order to get things, to be redundant in that way.
[00:30:33] Unknown:
What would be, like, the per like, if you if you are your own bank and you're running lightning and I'm also interested in other services like like Bitwarden you guys have. Yeah. Like, that's something I use, and I pay Bitwarden because they're holding on to my passwords, and I I really don't want this to happen. To your encrypted passwords. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I don't want I don't wanna screw that up. So I'm trusting them, but I would like to get into a place where I trusted myself to run the box that holds my passwords.
But, like, what is Yeah. I mean ideal scenario?
[00:31:06] Unknown:
I mean, like, we we have a bit word in application on the embassy today, and, you know, we do with that same backup system that I was describing earlier works just as well for Bitwarden, and it just replicates the state onto a second storage medium, which could be restored if you ever, like, lose or the the car breaks down and you have to restore it.
[00:31:29] Unknown:
So So you just plug it It's it's just data. You know? You just plug a USB drive in, like like, once a week or something, and you kinda back stuff up. And that's not, obviously, not perfect for lightning, but, you're you're kinda No. No. I mean, you can just have a USB drive plugged in all the time. Right? And all the backup. But no. But you don't you don't well, you don't there's like there's like a rule for this. You don't want backups in the exact same if if if your server catches on fire because Embassy Yeah. Sold you a shitty case. True. You know? And then that's gonna melt the USB right next to you. Yeah. So the it depends on what your primary risk profiles are. Right? Like, all of the discussion around redundancy
[00:32:09] Unknown:
and, security can only be considered in the presence of, like, an actual threat model. So if you're, like, principally worried, like, yes. Put plugging a USB stick into the back of your embassy and leaving it there is not gonna save you from a house fire. Not unless the thing is, like, like, very, very well engineered against heat or whatever, and I don't know of anything that does that. But it will absolutely save you from, like, a, like, data corruption on the card. Right? Right. Or or something like that. So it's it's not a panacea to leave it in the back, but it's also not useless either. Alright. So this is Oh, go ahead, man. This is a this is a like, so so when we're talking about, like, creating user friendly,
[00:32:51] Unknown:
UX, right, in in this type of environment, like, we're trying to we're trying to foster self hosting in a user friendly way, a lot of times that results in you kinda making decisions for your user in terms of what their threat model is most likely. Like, how do you circle that square? Right? Like, just like what you just said. Right? Is and for some people, you have USB plugged in is best, or some people, they do it once a week. But, really, the worst thing UX wise for a new user is almost being expected to make that choice and not even know.
[00:33:27] Unknown:
Yeah. That's that's a great question. I'm not sure I have, like, a great answer for you on that particular on that particular one just yet. We do want to get to a point where, backups are a little bit more automatic because right now they are manual. It does require user intervention. And we do we do sort of show you when your last backup of each individual service was to try to encourage, you know, for so that you know, like, if you're exposed or not. But, you know, the only thing that we'll get to, automatic backups is if we do some sort of cloud service, which we can do, but then that trades off the availability for that trust component. Right? Now don't do, dude, 6102 solve it. Backup buddy.
[00:34:12] Unknown:
Okay. So 6102 spends up an embassy, gives me an onion URL. I copy and paste. And that's my backup URL. And I've got like 5 megabytes or, you know, 5th, you know, like 1 gigabyte of whatever he he's willing to store for me on his embassy. Right? And so I encrypt it locally, back it up to that URL. And and we're we're we're IRL friends. Well, not we're not IRL friends. We're, Internet friends, and and so we just trust each other. And maybe I have a a few backup buddies in case 6102 lets me down.
[00:34:49] Unknown:
Yeah. So we would like we're actually very excited about the prospect of things like that, including not just that, but being able to pay for that hosting, that backup, with, you know, lightning micropayments over time. And as long as you're, like if it depends on whether you do full replicas or partial replicas. But the same way that we use Merkle trees and Bitcoin, you could use Merkle trees to, have very compact proofs that you still actually hold the data. It's but this I I I need to be responsible here. When I talk about that particular thing, that's that's like, we're not even seriously researching that yet. It's more about musing, about things that we'd like to be able to do once we've gotten the stuff out of the way that we need to get done in the interim.
For q q 2? No. Like, you know, we still gotta get the external drive support, done first and stuff like that. And, but, yeah, it's it's definitely stuff that we're very interested in in making happen.
[00:35:59] Unknown:
I just remembered, what I forgot, which is important because that was the first time I actually forgot something, on on Sysl Dispatch and didn't remember, within, like, 15 seconds of of just delaying time while I try and remember. I wanted to tell you, Keegan, that when I made that joke about 2 weeks, it was a joke based on, like, a big it's a Bitcoin curve? No. No. No. It's a Bitcoin it's before flattening the curve. There was there was Butterfly Labs, one of the early ASIC miners that said 2 weeks, you're gonna get your your miners, and also Mt. Gox was perennially 2 weeks away from adding Litecoin, which they never added. So it became like a it became like a Bitcoin meme that, like, every company was was gonna get your dream feature in 2 weeks.
[00:36:47] Unknown:
Yeah. So that was a that's definitely a meme, I think, that even transcends Bitcoin. Back before I actually got into Bitcoin, a lot of companies would be like, yeah. We'll we'll we'll have it in 2 weeks. I think that's just a more of a joke about, like, scrum and agile processes, which is a popular software development project management style, which everything is quantized into 2 week chunks. And so they're like, you'll have it at the next release. And it's like
[00:37:13] Unknown:
I never put 2 into so you think a lot of time these companies think it's just 1 scrum away?
[00:37:20] Unknown:
I don't know if they think that or if they're just trying to appease people. Okay. You know, we're we like, I I try to be responsible. I because here's the thing. I don't really get to dictate these schedules. I, you know, I work at the the pace that I can, and we get them out as fast as we can. But I'm not actually aware of all of the moving pieces at any given moment that causes a particular feature to be able to get delivered by a particular date. All I can tell you with certainty is kind of like what, you know, in the like, people who work at start 9's priorities are right now. That I'm pretty confident in. So, that's why I kinda made claims of that particular flavor.
[00:37:59] Unknown:
Fair enough. I'm glad I got that off my chest. That was really bothering me for the last about 20 minutes or so, 15 minutes. Too.
[00:38:09] Unknown:
So Matt. I mean yes? Can I ask you a privacy question?
[00:38:13] Unknown:
Yeah. Okay.
[00:38:14] Unknown:
It says support the show with Ellen URL, and there's a QR code. Right? Yeah. Already I had I didn't even acknowledge it, and 3 freaks already donated through it. Let's say, me me me or a friend has strike.
[00:38:30] Unknown:
Right.
[00:38:32] Unknown:
Does that does that docks you to pay that QR code with strike? Are you are you No. I don't know if strike I don't think strike supports lnurls,
[00:38:41] Unknown:
so I don't think you can.
[00:38:43] Unknown:
Uh-huh.
[00:38:45] Unknown:
V 4 l r 4 v three n is asking if I can move the QR code to block the Coinbase pro price. I I I'm I don't know, man. I, like, I I tried to make this work, like, 45 minutes before the show started. So, it's gonna be a work in progress. I'm gonna try and figure out how to move it around. It's just cool that you could have a static QR code just to the to the freaks that are listening to the audio stream. We have a static QR code up on the screen, using lnurl. Basically, if you scan this with a with a, compatible lightning wallet, it connects to the URL that the QR code is there, and it serves them a unique invoice. So every invoice is different, and it's it's a way to accept payments, in a static way that's more privacy conscious than, let's say, just providing, like, an on chain address.
In this case, it's, you know, it's not it's not my node. It's it's using fiatjaf's, LNTX bot, which is a Telegram bot, that's a custodial lightning wallet that provides you with lnurl functionality. And you can find my static QR code atln10 transactionbot.big sun.xyz/at mattodell, which is a fucking mouthful. So instead, the QR code goes on the top right. Did that answer your question?
[00:40:15] Unknown:
Absolutely.
[00:40:16] Unknown:
In the meantime, we've had 5 freaks. 5 freaks have donated through that. That's pretty cool. And I guess some wallets allow them to provide messages. So I I don't know. It was just something that I think is sorely needed, this idea of providing something that's static for donations, without having, like, a BTC pay server that doesn't and the key here is is maybe my privacy is still kind of not great on the receiver side, but the sender side privacy is significantly better. Right? So, like, if I if I had, like, a static on chain QR code, that would be way you can you could see all the donations come through sending address it came from. Right? Like, right on chain.
You can't do that with this.
[00:41:02] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, that's because Lightning in general does not actually propagate every payment to every node in the network. That's, like, the whole point.
[00:41:13] Unknown:
Yeah. I it's weird. Like, when lightning was starting out, I, like, learned everything about lightning. I was so into lightning. And now I feel like I need, like, I needed to, like, go back to lightning school. Like, I forgot everything I learned about it because I, like, stopped paying attention for, like, a year.
[00:41:32] Unknown:
And that's on me. Yeah. Yeah. There's, I mean, there's definitely, like, different levels of understanding lightning. Right? There's the sort of the the way that you understand it of, like, okay. It's just a series of of bilateral agreements between people. And then there's, like, the okay. Like, what messages actually get passed across the wire? And, like, there's the entire continuum between. And it's it's a very deep hole. Like, I myself actually haven't reached the bottom, and I work in this stuff every day. Right. Like, how how do you do onion routing if you don't
[00:42:02] Unknown:
how do you pick a route if you don't know what all the hops are?
[00:42:08] Unknown:
I mean, you do know every node in the graph and every channel that exists, but you don't know what the relative balances of each counterparty on that, channel are. So if, like, you and I have a channel and, like, we've opened 1, the whole the whole network unless we've made it a private channel. Like, the whole network knows that you and I have a channel together. But if it's like if I have, like, 1 Bitcoin on my side and you have, like, half a Bitcoin on your side, no one's gonna know that that versus, like, if it was the other way around. Like, you can't tell. The only way that you can tell is you can just try to route a payment through it, and it'll either succeed or fail.
[00:42:44] Unknown:
Right. Yeah. I got a lot I got a lot of work to do on this. But the the nuance the nuance there is if you have a private channel
[00:42:53] Unknown:
that is lower if you you could have a channel let's say me and you are routing nodes and we have, like, 14,000,000 sat private channel, we could have, like, a 1,000,000 sat public channel and we could route through that private channel, but people wouldn't know the private channel exists, but the max payment would be 1,000,000 sats. It would be whatever the public channel is showing. But you you could only route through only you can route through a private channel No. Unless you have a mirroring public channel. So sometimes sometimes routing nodes will have a public channel that shows less capacity than their private channel really has in the background, and that private channel can dynamically route through that private channel, if they have a public private situation, which apparently I'm told some of these large, you know, regulated KYC type nodes have shadow private channels amongst their their
[00:43:51] Unknown:
publicly broadcast channels. So so The reason you might wanna do that as well is because, that will gate the the maximum payment size that people will attempt to do. I don't know as much about how c lightning works, but I recently learned that LND will actually pick the, quote, unquote, optimal channel to forward a payment through, even if, the one that was requested by the the source was different. So if you have, like, 3 channels between the same two parties, it'll pick the one that's most likely to work. And so in this case, it might be your really fat private channel even though what was requested was that public one. And if the public one is only 1,000,000 in size and the the private one's 14,000,000 in size, the maximum payment size is gonna be like 1,000,000 and, you know, you're not crushing the entire liquidity of the channel in one shot.
[00:44:39] Unknown:
So just just to rewind a little bit, and I I'm sorry. I'll let you guys keep back on track. This is helpful for me. So, assuming strike supported, lnurl, I'd scan this QR code. My, you know, it was. Okay. Let's assume I actually have it actual lightning node. My lightning node would make a plan for like, I think I know how to get to this destination. And then it would ship it off in an onion or whatever. And then those will get past hop to hop in the hops in the the plan that I started out with. But along the way, those actual nodes could make their own decisions of how they actually routed.
[00:45:23] Unknown:
Correct.
[00:45:24] Unknown:
Nice. Cool.
[00:45:27] Unknown:
This is helpful. And but limit limited decision making. Right? It's not like they can totally change their route. But, like, if and and, Anthony from the chat, correctly points out that c lightning doesn't actually, allow multiple channels between the same pair of peers at the moment. So c lightning cannot do the thing that I described earlier. But l and d, if you have, like, 3 channels between the same two peers and one of them was requested and it won't work, it will actually choose, an alternative one, between the same peer. So from the the source's perspective, the route from a a node's perspective looks exactly the same even though the actual channel points that are being used might be slightly different.
[00:46:09] Unknown:
Cortic in chat asks, it's just scrolled off the screen, but something like, what are the KYC nodes? And and the idea with the KYC node, correct me if I'm wrong, it's it's the idea that, like, if I'm paying from Stripe, Stripe is KYC'd. And so and if I pay Matt, Strike knows, oh, you just paid this destination. So I know where this money went, and I know who it's from. So in some sense, strike is keeping track of who is get you know, not not that they know the name of the person at the other end. But, you know, it if it's publicly advertised, it might be pretty obvious. And so now there's a record somewhere that this this node received funds from this specific government person.
Like, a a government named person. Is that correct?
[00:47:00] Unknown:
I'm not quite sure I understand the scenario being laid out here.
[00:47:04] Unknown:
Like, the the privacy risk of of spending from strike to a a a random lightning node is that strike is keeping track of that payment.
[00:47:16] Unknown:
Right. It's it's it's yes. It's when when you scan when you scan a lightning invoice, a traditional lightning invoice, it includes a your lightning node's public key of the receiver. Okay? That public key does not change. Supposedly, there's work being done to rotate that, but right now that that doesn't change. So that public key can be tied to an individual, and, specifically, if the lightning payment has a memo in it, so I say, Paul is paying me for my baby shower. Right? Then strike knows that Paul is paying his friend to this public key, and that guy just had a baby. Right? Because they know the they know what's in the invoice as well. Now Yep. There's an interesting there's there's 2 interesting exceptions there. The first is a custodial lightning node, which is what the case is here with this lnurl test that we just did, or if you use BlueWallet or if you use Wallet of Satoshi.
These are 2 major custodial lightning nodes. The other one is Moon, actually, Moon Wallet, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite recommendations to noobs on mobile, automatically rotates your public key. So every invoice through Moon Wallet has a different pub key.
[00:48:40] Unknown:
Woah.
[00:48:41] Unknown:
Wow. It's pretty cool. I found that out today. Do they, like, fork,
[00:48:45] Unknown:
like,
[00:48:46] Unknown:
I don't know what to do with this. I have no idea what's happening behind the scenes. They could just be stealing every I I don't I don't think they're stealing people's money, but I have no idea what's happening behind the scenes. I just know that every time, if you go to lightningdecoder.com, you can't yeah. 61 and 2 just spelled it. It's spelled m u u n. Very cool mobile wallet, multiplatform. If you go to lightningdecoder.com, you can put a lightning invoice in, and it will tell you what is being shared by that invoice. And in that invoice, it'll always show a pub key, and usually that pub key should be fixed. If you're just paying someone's lnd on their start 9, you're paying their Umbral node, you're paying their Breeze Wallet, that public key will always be the same. With Moon, it's different every time.
[00:49:39] Unknown:
I think this is something that's really cool. This this is something we'll, like, learn over time. And, obviously, there there could be improvements to lightning as well, or there could be, l 2 or whatever. I don't know what that is. But but the but there is also there's a lot that we think of is what lightning is. It's just based on how it's implemented. So how c lightning chose to do it, or how l and d chose to do it, or how, LDK chooses to do it, or or whoever. It it and then it I think we'll, like, I'm learning more about lightning by, like, trying to differentiate between what the core protocol is and what the implementations do in practice.
[00:50:22] Unknown:
Yeah. Like, the the the different implementations, the some of the the things that we've already talked about are, like, you know, c lightning doesn't allow multiple channels between the same pair of peers. But, you know, l and d doesn't allow dual funding of channels, but cLightning does, like, recently, released experimental support for that. Or, you know, various, decisions made differently is actually quite hard to keep up with. I'm surprised that anyone can. I've tried, and I'm very behind. Some of them don't even define certain things at all, such as, like, LDK. Right? LDK doesn't actually define a, like, a storage medium.
Yeah. They leave that up to the user.
[00:51:09] Unknown:
We're still very early.
[00:51:12] Unknown:
Well, on this mail and URL stuff is built on it's almost like a layer 3. Like, it's built on top, and it's
[00:51:18] Unknown:
It's not really a standard per se. I mean, I guess, like, in this in this distributed world, this is how standards happen just, like, through peer pressure. Yeah. Right? Like, there's if the majority of wallets the majority of wallets fail when they scan that QR code. Right.
[00:51:33] Unknown:
Yeah. Let's give Jack shit about that.
[00:51:36] Unknown:
I mean, how long did it take to get Batch 32 into various wallets? Like, Coinbase didn't support it until, like, rather recently.
[00:51:43] Unknown:
But the cool part about Lightning is we don't have to deal with the consensus bullshit. Right?
[00:51:49] Unknown:
Sort of. I mean, Lightning you don't have to deal with l one consensus bullshit. Right. Like, obviously, there's there's a an l like, there's there's a certain amount of consensus in Lightning if it if only on how the messages are formatted. Right?
[00:52:02] Unknown:
Right. Yeah. There was a yeah. What was it? Like caps caps oh, no. That was back 32 caps addresses. Yeah. But I think wasn't there caps invoices? Wasn't that a thing for a little bit, whether or not we do caps invoices or lowercase?
[00:52:18] Unknown:
Yeah. I don't remember.
[00:52:20] Unknown:
I think we moved to caps. What? You could you could in a similar way to layer 1, you could fork yourself off of the Lightning Network by being incompatible with it. But in a very different way, you would not be creating a new money.
[00:52:36] Unknown:
Correct. Yeah.
[00:52:38] Unknown:
You just wouldn't work. Or or maybe because you had such a good idea, you'd work way better, and everybody would choose your your thing, and and then that's what would happen now.
[00:52:51] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a it's a completely different trade off balance, and it's pretty cool because you can have quicker development on, layer 2, which we're seeing. We're watching it happen in real time.
[00:53:02] Unknown:
Well and and, like, there's different this whole, like there's this tendency to believe that there's, like, a layer a distinct layer 1, a distinct layer 2, etcetera. But even within some of these protocols, there's, sort of a a stratification within layer 1 and within layer 2. And, like, one of the examples, I think is, like, some person just talked about derivation paths for h HD wallets should be standardized, and there's not enough peer pressure around that. Like, it took a long time to get those derivation paths. Like or BIP 32 even. BIP 32 is, like, sort of adjacent to layer 1, but it isn't technically part of it. Addresses don't even show up in the normal Bitcoin protocol rules. Like, if you try to look for any reference to an address in the actual protocol, like, you won't find it. You'll just find certain scripts are standard and certain scripts are not.
So, the the the derivation paths is another is an example of one of those things. It's like adjacent. And so is, like, lnurl. It's not part of the protocol per se.
[00:54:00] Unknown:
Yeah. Like, that's a good way to think about it. Yeah.
[00:54:08] Unknown:
Yeah. I it it is it is definitely a handful for someone who just comes into Bitcoin, for the first time, but, you know, I I I I I think at the end of the day, this is what happens when, you know, you're you're dealing with a protocol that for most accounts, from from what most people expect, is is gonna outlive us all. Right? And, it moves slowly. It is a dinosaur.
[00:54:38] Unknown:
And it needs to be. Right? Yeah.
[00:54:42] Unknown:
This is I think is a good segue. I don't know if you guys wanna talk about Taproot at all. Oh, yeah. I already I have it on the scratch pad. I saw you were in the meeting today.
[00:54:51] Unknown:
Yeah. I was kinda in and out. I was kinda managing some start 9 release stuff and also trying to, like, you know, actually help push that along. But, you know, I think I it's it's scrolled off at this point, but I think Anthony was saying, like, only one implementation matters at the out layer 1. We may we might see that change a little bit. And, actually, it might not it might already not be true because BTCD and Bitcoin Core are 2 different implementations. And they're I I mean, obviously, Bitcoin Core is, you know, widely widely used, but, some of the other implementations don't have trivial user accounts either.
And as we get into this sort of this Taproot,
[00:55:34] Unknown:
Wait. Who doesn't have trivial user accounts?
[00:55:37] Unknown:
BTCD.
[00:55:39] Unknown:
It's trivial. It's still trivial.
[00:55:41] Unknown:
Okay. We might have different definitions of the word trivial, but, it is like the preferred implementation for, LND. Right. Fair. We do we don't use it personally. Did you say Anthony? Yeah. Anthony says, don't get me started on b to c d. Yeah. I haven't used it personally, so I don't really have anything good or bad to say about it. I just know that, you know, it it is that preferred implementation for the l and d team, primarily due to the language homogeneity. They're written in the same same language.
[00:56:16] Unknown:
So so let's talk about Taproot, because I have I have Ben Decarman and Evan Kaludis coming on next week, and we're gonna do, like, a deep dive into Taproot activation. But, like, you can front run them right now, so
[00:56:30] Unknown:
hit the freeze. Yeah. I mean, though those those guys are definitely gonna be more knowledgeable and sort of involved on this topic than I am. But, basically, what's going on right now is everybody has decided they want Taproot, but nobody can agree on exactly how to get it there. And as a result, we don't have Zaprut. And so there's a there's kind of a the main divergence is really how forcefully do we wanna come out the gate on getting it activated. Everybody wants to try something, and the the safest way to do that by far is to let the miners try to activate it. But as we saw with, you know, 2017 and the Segwit and block size wars and stuff, like, the miners can drag their feet and not activate it, and, like, they do need some pressure sometimes. And miners don't control the protocol either.
And so you do you want the users to be able to have a say. And yet, you know, some people think that if you come out with a user activated soft fork out the gate, that that's a very forceful and, and or antagonistic approach towards the mining community. So that's where we're at right now. I think, you know, the the the latest developments are on something called speedy trial, which is, hypothetically designed to fail fast if it fails so that we don't waste a whole bunch of time, and ultimately not end up with, an activated taproot.
[00:57:58] Unknown:
As opposed to Ethereum, which is designed to fail slowly.
[00:58:03] Unknown:
I mean, I What? Maybe. I I thought it failed when the Etsy fork happened, you know?
[00:58:09] Unknown:
What's an example of 22 f? You just pronounced it Etsy. That's interesting. That's incorrect. It's e t c. Right? Okay. Sure. I like Etsy for like, maybe Okay, Paul. What what was your question? I apologize.
[00:58:25] Unknown:
What's what's what would what would be an example of being too agro to minors? Like, the minors are like, woah. This is all moving too fast for me. Like, what would that be be?
[00:58:35] Unknown:
Well, okay. So the What's the extreme case of that? The one of the proposals on the table known as BIP 8 has something that is called forced minor signaling, which means that even without the presence of actual Taproot transactions that they have to verify the rules for, they have to sort of raise their hand and say, yo, I'm I I promise I'm verifying these rules. And they have to say that in every block irrespective of whether Taproot transactions are in it or not. And, and if they don't, then that block is considered invalid, and it would basically cancel their revenue. So in some sense, they're not really doing any wrong because they're not actually After after
[00:59:13] Unknown:
it's activated, it would be that. Right? Correct.
[00:59:17] Unknown:
During what is called the lock in period. Right? So, yeah, a lot of this is enormously complicated stuff, but the the original proposal, the the BitPay proposal basically said, okay, That miners will include a special bit in the in the Coinbase transaction that basically says, hey. We support Taproot. And once a certain threshold of them do so, then it will, involve like, it it'll basically say, okay. Like, Taproot's locked in, and now everybody has to signal for it. And if you don't signal for it, then your, blocks are invalid even if there are no Taproot transactions in it. And then It seems fair. Once it's locked in Yep. And that's that's right. It's it it is locked in, in which case it's definitely fair that if it's once it activates, if they're approving transactions that are invalid under the Taproot rules, that their block should be rejected and that they lose out on the revenue. I guess But the the question is around like the the minor in a coma?
Yeah. It would break it for the the minor in the coma, which, you know, on one hand, you wanna have you don't wanna be, like, ridiculous with how how quickly and how, forcefully you push these things through. But at the same time, you can't let one minor dragging their feet, be a reason to to hold up the rest of the network upgrade either. I know that so so in the chat, v 4 lr4v3n, is asking, is it possible that the lot consensus will not be achieved? So let me let me talk about what lot is for those of you who who don't know. It's this idea that once we we're gonna let miners try to voluntarily activate this for a period of time. And the the most common agreed upon time frame for this is, like, 12 months after the deployment happens. But what happens at the end? Because if we don't we don't have a UASF, then miners effectively get a veto over the protocol or over over the activation of of, the of of Taproot. And the problem with that is that if my if not everybody does mining and it's only you only require, like, an 11% of miners tagging their feet on it in order to sort of veto it indefinitely.
A a a vanishingly small portion of the community can essentially block this upgrade. So we don't necessarily want that. But on the other hand, the only real way to to avoid that scenario is to sort of have a a brick wall UASF at the end that says, alright. You know, we don't really care, Miners, what you were doing in the meantime. We're going to, we're gonna activate this thing anyway, and you can either lose the revenue or you don't. And some people view that as unnecessarily forceful. I don't personally happen to agree, but, that is the other view. And it's actually, you know, of the long long time contributors to Bitcoin Core, that is actually the majority view is that it is too forceful to start with a lot equals like, with a UASF,
[01:02:15] Unknown:
finale, so to speak. It seems like it's you're trying to decide so much upfront. And, like, the whole point would be that you're trying to push this out to the network so that the, like, the network can signal what it wants. If you're like deciding everything all at once, it's just, I don't know. Seems it seems it seems to place so much on the developers to be correct in assessing what they think everybody wants.
[01:02:45] Unknown:
That I think you're right. And and that's actually the impetus behind the the speedy trial initiative that's going on right now. So after there was a lot of debate and argument and largely not coming to consensus on the the lock in on time out parameter, the l o t if you've seen it, People were like, okay. Let's try essentially what is a, no lock in at the end. But let's make the period really short so that if it fails, it fails quickly and we don't lose a an entire year worth of time waiting for something that's not gonna happen. And we can just let the miners activate it early if they want. And if they don't, then we can revisit this discussion in 3 months. So that's kind of the that that has the most consensus behind it right now. And that's hear,
[01:03:31] Unknown:
so so first of all, Keegan, fucking fantastic explanation. Yeah. So Thank you. So the freaks, everything he said, I co cosigned a 100%. Keegan, were you here for 20 seventeen's, war?
[01:03:44] Unknown:
I I I I owned Bitcoin as early as 15, but I didn't really get into the space until the ICO bubble mid You were in part of the war. 2017. Correct. I I kinda I I came in right at the end when no two x was the, like, Twitter that that sort of Twitter signaling. Right. And right before the s two x, New York agreement failed, that's when I sort of came in as a a person as a contributor to the space. So so so the discussion doesn't make a 100%
[01:04:17] Unknown:
sense if you didn't experience that. Because what happened, Paul, is that is basically there's a there's a whole faction of Bitcoiners that that lives with PTSD right now. Like, at least they're rich, but they're they're rich people with PTSD, and, they they they they think the miners are out to fuck them because they we had Bitmain as the main the main miner. They were the main ASIC manufacturer, and they were the main miner, and they were the largest pool. So they were they they controlled probably the most we don't know for sure, but they probably controlled the most hash rate directly themselves. They definitely had the largest pool, and they were definitely the main manufacturer, and they fucked with us. Right? So so what happened? What happened was we had to do, basically, a Mexican standoff where users and devs kind of combined in an alliance to to run to run the UASF.
Right? And and and so now you kinda have this PTSD where people have gone a little bit to the extreme, right, where they just want to they just wanna jump to the Mexican standoff right away, when in fact, we can just probably just have, like, a Mexican brunch. And, like, we can just we can, like, make some eggs and see if the miners wanna eat the eggs, and the miners eat the eggs, and there's no need to point guns at each other.
[01:05:42] Unknown:
I I hear that. At the same time, the thing that the thing that bothers I just feel like so much is being placed on the developers. But the developers are also seem to be the ones that are against giving, like a flag ability to when you run the software, you decide. And I I I just think, like like, you know, if if if it's non controversial, you know, let people run the software and and and flag that they're interested in. Because if if if if you get in this habit, and and it seems unlikely that we're gonna get a hap in a habit of easy soft forks, but we're gonna I mean, that's not happening. That's not happening. Of easy easy soft forks. You know, you you can have sort of the like, oh, I just run whatever the developers
[01:06:29] Unknown:
put in there. And if it changes consensus, it changes consensus. Right. You know? There's a bigger discussion here that I wanted to bring up with Keegan because I know he's super active in the Taproot discussion as well, is is that we have more users now. So so when 2017 happened, we didn't have we didn't have Raspberry Pi Blitz. We didn't have Nava. We didn't have My Note. We didn't have start 9. We didn't have Umbral. Where do you see yourself, Keegan, in terms of like, how does I'm a user. I'm using star 9, right, as my Bitcoin node. How do you provide to that user like, what what is your goal with that user in terms of these types of situations? Right?
[01:07:17] Unknown:
I'm sure you thought about it. Yeah. For sure. I've actually run polls with our customers as well. So, philosophically, we want our users to be able to choose. Because at the end of the day, that's what everyone's doing anyway. Nothing's stopping you from forking Bitcoin Core right now, putting in Taproot activation code, and running that as your node. Right? Obviously, if you're the only one doing that, there's you're you're gonna just fork yourself off the network and and create a coin whose only user is you. But, at the same time, like, you know, node operatorship is political power in Bitcoin, at least to a degree.
And we don't want to make that decision for our users if we can avoid it. Right? So, ideally, what we would like to do is to make this configurable. I'd like it to be in core itself to be a flag about whether or not, you know, if there's no consensus on a particular variable, what I would like is for court to release it in a configurable way. There are technical limitations to that as I've been told, as well as it's not like, there are some people who are genuinely worried that letting users just sort of set a flag when running a piece of software that causes them to get onto the wrong side of a chain split, if you will, that that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And I I sort of understand that as well. But I think that at the end at the end of the day, if that's not what if we're not gonna allow ourselves to be there, then Bitcoin doesn't actually make a lot of sense anyway. Yeah. Because that's the only way you can govern a system with no central authority is this messy way. That's so beautifully put. Because yeah. If if if Bitcoin isn't the sort of thing where you can accidentally
[01:08:53] Unknown:
soft fork yourself out of consensus and now you don't have any money, then what is Bitcoin? Is Bitcoin a thing that that, you know, the Bitcoin core gives us to on a little gold platter and we say thank you, Bitcoin core?
[01:09:08] Unknown:
Yeah. So, like, you know, but, obviously, like, you know,
[01:09:12] Unknown:
chain splits are bad for every user of Bitcoin. Like, that's that's an you know, that is not a controversial statement. So I I understand that for the size of idiot who chain splits himself because he forks it himself. It's especially bad for that guy. And if you Especially bad for that guy. If you win it solo fork Wait. Wait. Paul. If you and, like, 5 of your buddies soft fork Bitcoin, like, yeah, it really sucks for you. I'm so sorry. But it doesn't hurt any of the rest of the Well, let's it's important to make clear here, like, I understand the provocative like, it's fun to be provocative, but it's important to make clear here that if you fork yourself off the network, you're not interacting with anyone else. There's, like, nothing to you're not you have no real threat of lost money,
[01:09:54] Unknown:
as long as you're not, like, also sharing your private key with the world. Like,
[01:10:00] Unknown:
the the the threat of lost money is minimal. You you don't even have anyone to interact with. No one's on your fucking network. Well, you need your 5 months. It's it's lost it's lost income. Right? It's like the only thing that you lose is that in that period where you forked yourself off the network and didn't realize it, if you traded something of value that you had beside like, for for
[01:10:18] Unknown:
supposed Bitcoin and, you know, you didn't, like But that requires a second partner. It requires someone else on the network with you. Could could we make this, like, a little more tangible? Because I I really have been trying very hard to understand soft forks a little bit better. Let's say me and my 5 idiot buddies start a Bitcoin fork that activates Taproot right now. And then we start doing Taproot transaction, like, Schnorr. We were using Schnorr all the time and we're sending Bitcoin back and forth with with each other using Schnorr. You know, like, what what actually happened there?
[01:10:55] Unknown:
So here's the problem. Right? So, well, let's talk about what Taproot naturally is. Let's well, it's actually I I don't think that's true, Matt. Like Well, on the real Bitcoin, nothing happened. That's not true. Because here's the or not not anything happened necessarily. When you when you send money to a Taproot output today, if you if if you were to basically generate something that had Taproot semantics and you sent money to that today, anybody could steal those funds because the way that undefined behavior works in the Segwit script versioning system works Oh, thank you. Is that the semantics of transactions are anyone can spend unless the block is later rejected. So it's
[01:11:34] Unknown:
right now, there's this sort of gentleman's agreement that nobody uses Segwit versions that don't have defined behavior. And, you know, because you'll get your coins stolen. And just to make that clear, like, the if the man in the coma wakes up, right, and and they were they went into the coma in, like, 2015, and they wake up right and they look at Bitcoin right now, they're like, well, what are all these transactions that are totally spendable? Like all these Segwit transactions look spendable to them. Right? Correct.
But they can't spend them because
[01:12:05] Unknown:
So under the soft fork rules, they wouldn't be able to spend them. But under the previous rules, they would. And so as long as the majority hash power is, enforcing the soft fork, then, everything will converge. And the you'll eventually end up on a state where even if you tried to to spend those funds, you wouldn't be able to. So so the man in the coma would wake up
[01:12:27] Unknown:
or sink his node, Look at the blockchain. See all these un like spendable transactions. Like, oh, well, it looks like I could spend that. So he transmit a transaction saying, hey, I own these this money now. But the the the network, which is now on Soft Fork, the Segwit soft fork would would would reject his transaction?
[01:12:49] Unknown:
Correct.
[01:12:50] Unknown:
Okay. So similarly, with the with with Taproot, with the Schnorr, if if somebody started, I'll see now I lost track of it. Well, I have my my 5 friends who soft forked Bitcoin and they started snore transactions with the taproot transactions with each other. So all their, all their spins would look if they transmitted those, those to the Bitcoin network that exists right now, their money would just look spendable to the Bitcoin network that exists right now. So anybody could claim those funds. Is that correct? Correct. That's right.
[01:13:29] Unknown:
The soft fork rules prevent that except for the specific case where you're able to do a taproot witness. Right? And so so that's only one component of it, though. The other problem and this is actually the the bigger source of contention, I think. And that is what happens in the chain split scenario. Right? So let's say that some people are enforcing some of the rule the enforcing these new rules and some people are not. And what that means is that if a miner mines a block where a non Taproot witness is used to spend a Taproot output, then, half of the nodes will accept that because in their minds, anyone can spend this and the other half will not.
And if the majority hash power is actually, following rules that are not, Taproot compatible, then you like, on upgraded nodes can get themselves into this state where they they think the the the heaviest chain that they can see is the valid one. And, they'll that will be one side of the split and then the ones that, are validating Taproot rules will reject that heaviest chain and will take the second heaviest chain, as the alternative. And now all of a sudden there's 2 different ledgers that seem from an economic standpoint to have equal validity, and that's really bad.
[01:14:50] Unknown:
Because it doesn't matter how much hash rate you you have. If you are following the wrong rules, you're not Bitcoin.
[01:14:56] Unknown:
Correct.
[01:14:57] Unknown:
But maybe not. What are the correct rules? Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. If I broadcast a Tappr transaction today, Tappr is not activated. All the nodes, 99% of the nodes are gonna reject that transaction. They're not even gonna take the transaction. Right? No. That's not true. Oh oh, standardness. Yeah. There there might be a standardness issue. It
[01:15:23] Unknown:
it but if if a Taproot transaction shows up in a block, then it will be spendable by anyone. Now that said, I think that's a lot of stuff. Though, if I did a transaction right now with Taproot? If you mine it yourself or you submit it directly to a miner, it it could. Right? No problem. Because there's nothing there's nothing invalid about the transaction, and that's what makes this a soft fork. If it was fundamentally invalid by the consensus rules, Taproot would be a hard fork.
[01:15:53] Unknown:
Right.
[01:15:54] Unknown:
So what is Anthony saying? There's some nonstandardness too where presegment nodes won't relay those transactions in the first place.
[01:16:02] Unknown:
Yeah. That's that's kinda what I was saying, which is that, nodes that see this transaction and they don't understand it, they might just not relay it. It won't technically be invalid as in if they get a block with that transaction in it, they're not gonna reject the block, but they're not gonna relay the transaction.
[01:16:19] Unknown:
So it's not getting shared around the mempool?
[01:16:22] Unknown:
Correct.
[01:16:23] Unknown:
Interesting.
[01:16:28] Unknown:
Well, that's very confusing.
[01:16:30] Unknown:
It's enormously like, it's it's it's enormously complicated stuff. I think that, like, even the the experts and I don't I don't even consider myself probably, like, in in the most knowledgeable on this particular issue. Right? They're like people like Luke Junior and Matt Corleau, despite being on vehemently opposite sides of this issue, know far more than I do. But it's like even even the experts are still in some sense speculating. Right? This is a a science and an art that is being defined in real time.
[01:17:03] Unknown:
I think that the important thing is the important thing is if you fucking hold your keys, you sell your chairs, you buy Bitcoin, you stack SaaS, you stay humble, you're holding your own keys, you run your own node, Like, you can just send out you can just sit it out. You can just sit it out. You don't have to, you know, worry about it. Like, maybe maybe you're, like, hot you're, like, your your hot funds are at risk if something radical happens. Your your lightning funds are whatever. You're spending shit. But, like, your your cold storage is just whatever. You just you just let it go and and people might get angry at each other, but in 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, like, they'll work it out. Right? I I I want to,
[01:17:47] Unknown:
I'm hold Bitcoin's designed to pump forever is what some people say. Yes. And and and Some people do say that. For that to be true, it has to totally work.
[01:17:59] Unknown:
It has to It shouldn't have to totally work. Nothing totally works, Paul.
[01:18:03] Unknown:
It can't well, it can't have a fatal flaw.
[01:18:06] Unknown:
Right. You don't have to totally work to not have a fatal flaw.
[01:18:10] Unknown:
Here's the thing. Even no no matter what the conclusion of this Taproot thing is, right, even if it results in a a full on chain split, that let me make something abundantly clear. That will set Bitcoin back in terms of adoption enormously, but it will not kill Bitcoin. Bitcoin, the network will still keep pumping out a block every so often. It probably won't be every 10 minutes because hash power will be split, but,
[01:18:36] Unknown:
it will eventually get back to 10 minutes. Hash power is not gonna be split for long. The the the the incentives basically ensure that.
[01:18:45] Unknown:
Yeah. And I think that the sound Yeah. Almost wanna see that happen because I wanna see Bitcoin be able to snap back to, like, like, I yeah. I don't actually wanna see it happen. But, like, I want I want to have governance further fleshed out. Like, governance is not something that Bitcoin necessarily solves. You know? Like, everything that's inside of Bitcoin's purview, Bitcoin solves very well as far as my investigation of it so far.
[01:19:13] Unknown:
But Bitcoin is chaos insured. Like, no one every other every other state of humanity has resulted in chaos being controlled by a few people, resulting in lack of chaos, and Bitcoin just guarantees that chaos will exist forever.
[01:19:31] Unknown:
Yeah. Spend 3 seconds in the Taproot activation discussions, and you'll see that. No one can take control. Yelling at each other. Well, I I I shouldn't say they're yelling at each other. They're just they're just strongly disagreeing with each other. I don't want anybody to be in charge. I want to to better understand why all the incentives work to perpetuate Bitcoin.
[01:19:52] Unknown:
And part of those incentives are how do we do governance.
[01:19:56] Unknown:
I don't want anybody in charge that would suck. And I would leave it. I'm I'm gonna go ahead and say that here's here's the way that I predict things are gonna go. Right? Now either the miners are gonna activate it no problem when a release comes out, and that that that's not gonna be a a thing that doesn't happen. Right? Like, we'll eventually get to a set of parameters we can agree on that doesn't involve a forceful UASF, to start because that seems like the way that core is going to go. And if miners activate, we're gonna get Taproot. No problem. So that's a happy case. No one's really, like, hyper concerned about that because that's the somewhat obvious way that this plays out, in the most probable case. But we're also need to we're talking about the edge cases here. And the way that I see this going is that if the the miners don't activate taproot for whatever reason, right, you will eventually see a UASF movement. The UASF movement will eventually happen.
Too many I have not seen a single person, argue against having Taproot at all. The only disagreement has been on around how we get it there. And, you know, the the intolerant minority is going to be the the UASFers, and they like, whether it's, you know, this year or, you know, several years from now, it's like it's go it's going to happen. The UASF is eventually going to to sort of boil over. So Like, if we if I don't see it going any other way. If Bitcoin is good,
[01:21:21] Unknown:
right, and a bad US UASF shows up, Bitcoin should like, let's say a user activated soft fork shows up that tries to inflate the supply of Bitcoin. Right? Oh, that wouldn't be a soft fork. That'd be a hard fork. User activated hard fork. So you know what? You know what I mean? Like, Bitcoin should theoretically have the right incentives in place to to fend off
[01:21:44] Unknown:
a a very bad UASF. Right? Right. If no one runs the rules, like, it won't, result in any changes. Right? Even if the code got written. So, like, if if you inflate the supply like like, Bitcoin social contract is 21,000,000. Alright? Like, no one's gonna run those rules. The reason that the Taproot rules have a near certainty of going through is that they're noninvasive. Right? The the Taproot outputs, the way that they work is that, look, if you don't wanna use Taproot, you don't have to use Taproot. If you don't wanna even want if you don't even wanna validate the Taproot rules, which I don't recommend, but, like, you actually can leave your node pointed at o.21.0, and it will stay in consensus with the network as long as the majority hash power is not trying to, push through transactions that are invalid under the Taproot rules.
But, otherwise, like, you know, you don't have to interact with the the upgrade at all. It's completely, opt in, noninvasive. And the presence of disagreement.
[01:22:57] Unknown:
The key aspect is is that someone can just pretend that Tapper doesn't exist. They can continue using Bitcoin.
[01:23:04] Unknown:
Right. Right? That's the that's the main difference between And so as a as a result, like, there's not really a disincentive to being, like, hey, okay. You guys really want this upgrade. It doesn't affect me in any way, shape, or form. Like okay. Fine. Add it. Right? There's there's not a strong disincentive to getting it activated. And so the asymmetry of the argument is going to eventually converge on getting it activated. That's not true for something that inflates the supply.
[01:23:30] Unknown:
To be clear here, Freaks, the reason this discussion is being had is because if Bitcoin is easy to change, if you're able to just have, like, an auto update to Bitcoin, that itself is a vulnerability. We can have an auto update that just adds vaccine passports or some shit.
[01:23:49] Unknown:
And and 102 says a a user activated soft work where, it it sends you can only send Bitcoin to a burn address.
[01:23:56] Unknown:
Right. Exactly. Or or, like, you can only send Bitcoin to the feds, and then the feds will will send it to where it needs to go. Right? You can just you can easily see situations where if you have an auto update, it becomes a vulnerability. So everything we talk about here is about being able to upgrade when we need to upgrade, in this case, or when we would like to upgrade at least, without the risk of an upgrade being the vulnerability itself. Right? And to go back a little bit, Keegan, where do you see start 9, like, in this world? Like, how does this
[01:24:41] Unknown:
right? Like, this is so confusing,
[01:24:43] Unknown:
and, like, you have a bunch of users. How do they deal with this, and how do you deal with that with them?
[01:24:49] Unknown:
So what I what I want and this is a very tricky discussion because there's, like, there's a certain level of responsibility we, as the publishers of these things, have to maintain. But what I would like is that should a UASF client materialize? So so first of all, if if Bitcoin Core does a release that includes Taproot activation code, we're just gonna put that as a package upgrade for the the Bitcoin, package that we already have on the embassy. If a UASF client materializes that gets a decent amount of support, we would like to be able to put that on there too. And, it will probably come with a 1,000 warning labels because what by running that software, you're essentially saying, like, these are the consensus rules I'm choosing to abide by. We'll probably have, like, a very long detailed blog post about what running that means or something like that. But, ultimately, I do not want to bar a UASF client from our package registry. But what about the opposite?
[01:25:48] Unknown:
Like, what what is the opposite? The opposite is someone doesn't wanna run it.
[01:25:52] Unknown:
They don't have to upgrade it. Right? They just don't update. Right? Let me make something clear about the embassy in general. There are no forced upgrades in the embassy. Right? The like, it it's a stance that we've taken since the very beginning. It's like if you install a piece of software, that software will not auto update. It might it might inform you that an update exists, right, depending on whether you've opted into the to knowing that or not. But it will not force you to update. And if you if you use a piece of software today, will you it will work the same way tomorrow. It may not be supported necessarily, but it won't be like it won't we won't just break your software ever. So if a UASF client comes out and you don't wanna run it, don't upgrade, period. End of story.
[01:26:35] Unknown:
And do you agree that it's like me personally, like, I'm not concerned about this risk, period at all. And and the reason the main reason for me is because there's so many competitors. Do you agree that the fact that there's, like, so many options for people to be running their nodes on on on least a Raspberry Pi, that it's, it it kinda keeps you all in check that, like, you're not gonna get, like, power hungry?
[01:27:02] Unknown:
Yeah. I think I think competition in general keeps a lot of like like, it keeps organizations honest. But even if we didn't have competition, it's a it's a fundamental ethos thing for us that we do not want people to like, we we do not wanna force upgrades on users. It's like it's like a it's a hard stop in any design discussion that happens at start 9. It's that if it takes away user sovereignty over the ability to run their own software, then it's a nonstarter. We will make all sorts of decisions about whether what things we choose to support indefinitely and what things we choose not to support and, like, dedicate our own resources to. But, we will never force like, for for for as long as I hold an officer position at this company, like, we're not gonna force upgrade on users. I love it. Right? Really like that that
[01:27:51] Unknown:
way of thinking about it. And and I, not to plug my own shit, but, like, a while back, I did a a a podcast episode about, it's called Better Won't Be Easy, and it's about UX. Basically, me being, triggered by, a certain podcaster who always complains about Bitcoin UX. And and the, the the kind of the thing, Oh, somebody. And so the the the idea is that, like, what would the easiest to run Bitcoin node be? Like, you click a button, and now you have a Bitcoin node. Like, congratulations. You know? That would be the best easiest to use Bitcoin note. You click one button and and now you have a Bitcoin note. But, well, what were all the decisions that were made? Like, where is that hosted?
[01:28:42] Unknown:
Who is that?
[01:28:43] Unknown:
Which version of Bitcoin Core, you know, is it running, and will it change underneath your feet? You know, if you if if it was so easy that all you had to do was press a button, you wouldn't be making the decisions that are relevant to running an economic Bitcoin node. I it's kinda similar reasons why people don't really have much care for, like, a nodes running in AWS. Or because you you've kinda lost a little bit of sovereignty. But you if you lost all the sovereignty, you you wouldn't be any there wouldn't be any point to it. And and if Bitcoin nodes were so easy to run that you could do it with a button, then anything that they have to do with, like, these UA these these soft forks and stuff, well, somebody could just spin up, like, 5,000,000 nodes, you know, if they had the money to do it. And and that would matter to the network if if if if those nodes mattered to the network. But it's obvious that they don't matter to the network, at least as far as I'm under I know because nobody's done that to try to, like, change Bitcoin so that they get, you know,
[01:29:51] Unknown:
like money So so yeah. Let me let me talk a a second about how we approach this in in other ways, at least on the embassy. Is that, like so the big, your Bitcoin note as it stands has tons and tons of configuration options, like, all all sorts of stuff that you could change about it. A lot of it can be, is is it spans the the gamut from trivial to, important, but still technical. The what we want our our our goal with the MSCN general is to get the software to a point where the this the only decisions you have to make are the ones that sort of have a consequence to you and that we take care of the rest. So we have a very, sophisticated configuration system that takes the the bitcoin.confile that is I always have to look up the syntax for every time I wanna change something.
And we've turned it into a GUI system where you can just click through all the options and and it will guide you towards, structurally correct answers, but it won't make any decisions for you on what values you put in there. So, obviously, you won't be able to put a word where there's a number where a number belongs or vice versa and then cause your node to to not start up. What we would like and this is kind of why I advocate at least to core to be able to have make this a flag or a config option in the, the in the bitcoin.com file is that that way a user could just say, you know, hey. I wanna run the UASF rules or, no. I don't want you to run the UASF rules. Start the thing and then be done with it. Right?
Obviously, that has a lot of consequences for the network at large, but it's no different than what it does is it reduces it you from having to know how to fork and write code to being able to do it from your home. So, like, we've done a tremendous amount of work to try to bring a lot of that sovereignty and eliminate a lot of the extraneous knowledge or decision making, from the product. And I don't know how the other node products compare in that particular way, but I know it's something that we've poured a lot of effort into.
[01:31:55] Unknown:
Well, I'm looking forward to you guys all fighting over this personally. Yeah. Me too. We will cover it on Rapital recap. I look forward to covering it. I I I think that's what that's what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin. I think it's really cool that we have all these different competitors offering user friendly solutions. And and I think they they like, if if you wanted to if you a 100% believed in Taproot, I would completely support your decision to provide, like, basically, shove that update down people's throats. I mean, I'd I'd prefer if you didn't auto update, but I'd I'd be completely fine with you offering the update without, or, like, with change log notes that are, like, this upgrades Bitcoin and does it better, You know? And I I assume other others would be, like you know, if it was actually contentious, they would be, like,
[01:32:54] Unknown:
this update is bad for Bitcoin, and that's why we're not doing it. Then they would do the opposite, and that's kind of cool. Right? Yeah. The the the that's the other thing is that in insofar as we do make choices that influence or or sort of constrain the number of choices users have, we will usually try to explain like, we we we try very hard to have full transparency on all the changes that go into any sort of package upgrade. But that's that's an ever growing art form. Right? Because, like, trying to distill all the pieces of code that change in order in into sentences that a user can understand, is more art than science. But that that transparency is super important because even if you do have the choice to upgrade or not, if you don't know what you're getting or if we tell you one thing and you get another, then you're kind of back at square 1. So, that's something that's important to us. I have no way to prove that we do that, right, other than, like, we we make we all the the packages are open source code. And if you kinda watch us like a hawk, you can you can see that we're we're doing that. But, other than that, it's something that we just we try to do better every day. Gonna start x-raying your own hardware and
[01:34:03] Unknown:
real get real get real cynical. About that, like, these open source apps, like, you kinda have this idea. You don't call them apps. I think you call them services. I think Umbrel calls them apps. Like, I mean, as far as I mean, on Umbrel, like, I haven't looked deeply in the documentation, but, like, the it's these are basically Docker containers that expect some some they expect probably Bitcoin Core to exist, a lot of them. I guess, obviously, Bitwarden doesn't. But, like, is is there some possibility there for, like, some some standardization or some in some sense, like, you guys could relinquish control over this this thing? Like, is it because it does seem like there's a convergence on this idea that I wanna have Raspberry Pis at my home that are running useful services for me, that are developed by other people. And while I would I I like that you guys are a company that are trying to make this easy, most of the value that you're providing is not, the the actual software that I'm running is not stuff that you all developed from scratch. You know, you're you're developing a a easy to use, easy to maintain, hopefully easy to back up with buddy backup system, trademark 6102.
[01:35:25] Unknown:
He doesn't believe in trademarks, so good luck with that. Yeah. So, like,
[01:35:30] Unknown:
we don't actually have almost any control much to the chagrin of our customer support effort, actually. But the like, yeah, there are certain points where we have influence. Right? Obviously, when you kinda go and download these packages from the, the the marketplace, we get to decide what's listed on the marketplace. And, you know, we will do some curation of that. We will eliminate certain choices because we think that they present harm to the users. But we actually already have engineered into the operating system a way to switch the, the source of package downloads.
We don't yet expose that in the GUI, but that will eventually come.
[01:36:13] Unknown:
Just like on like on Linux, you can add another Like an apps cache. Yeah. Exactly.
[01:36:19] Unknown:
And so yeah. We we have we're aware of the points of trust that Start9, the company,
[01:36:26] Unknown:
has. And we we try to eliminate them over time. It's a it is a it's a growing process. You should have to own them, bro. Yeah. Just own them. Like, what what is like, people's so so I have this service final message dot I out, which I never show. I like, if you wanna use it, fucking use it. I, like, I don't care. And, like, I came to the same fucking conclusion. It was, like, the main negative of the idea of offering a a a a a paid dead man switch is that you have to trust me to send the fucking dead man switch. Yep. And and I could I could I could do the metallic mental masturbation all over again, like, over and over and over again, but, like, it's solved by just having another service offer the same thing. Right? And, like, if you just have competition if you have competition, like, that trust is minimized and, like, that's what it is. You don't have to, like, create, like, some magical trustless system. You just have to make a system that is that is effective, and you have competition, and the competition provides the the needed customized. Right?
[01:37:37] Unknown:
Yeah. Matt, that that that's completely right. But at the same time, that doesn't alleviate us of the responsibility of trying to make things more trust minimized over time. Right. Because I think that's what we're all doing here. And number 2 is we can't control whether or not we have competitors. In fact, we would like to be so good that people don't go for the competitors. You're gonna have competitors. Right? Like, yeah. Obviously, competition is good for the consumer, but, like, we're trying to win. So, like and and so insofar as that's the case, we're not gonna be trying to, like, improve like, we don't wanna, like, shit on our competitors. But We're, like, we're we're focused on delivering the best
[01:38:22] Unknown:
you're right. There is no panacea where it's, like, completely trustless, but it's infinitely easy. Like, you're right that that doesn't Well, that's like shit corners. We can't make it better. The shit corners try and pretend, like, there's a panacea somewhere. Right? But, really, at the end of the day, you kinda just need some competition. You just need some redundant services.
[01:38:40] Unknown:
And you've gotta have, like yeah. You gotta have, trust for anything that you don't understand, or that you don't have the time to to understand. And you you have to have heuristics for how who and how and when you're gonna you're gonna trust. And so, you know, almost any company is is offering some sort of trust as a service. But, like like, aside from, like, the the how can people trust Start9? Like, it's it's for me, a lot of it's like like, I have lived you know, I I have a history as, like, a, like, a technology journalist. And now I'm a software developer, and I'm trying to, like, absolve my sense. But, but, like, like, the all of almost all the products in my life are preside provided to me by companies that want to have a monopoly and want to and and and somehow, it it I don't think it has to go hand in hand, but somehow it does go hand in hand where they kinda wanna rule me. You know?
Like like like they they they want to control how I use their product either as as because they think it'll make me happier or maybe because they think you'll This isn't an authorized application, Paul. Have you considered right clicking open? Yeah. Exactly. And it's so I don't know. It's just so frustrating. So, like, I I see something like start 9. And the fact that you guys are trying to make money on this, half of me is, like, I'm so glad because this is exactly the thing that I want in my home. I want the thing that runs my Bitcoin node that, that has easy to use backups and has bit warden on there. And maybe like, you know, a VPN or, or, or pie hole or all sorts of there's so many possibilities for self hosted services. And it's good that a good company is trying to make that right.
But at the same time, I see a company that's trying to make money selling things that are kind of in some sense, open source. And I think, okay. Well, what are they gonna try to lock down? What are they gonna try to make hard to use? Like, what are they gonna how are they gonna fuck me? That's what I'm not not even in, like I don't think you're gonna try to steal my UTXO's. He's a 100% going to. I think you're trying like, when I see that you're a business, I think you're going to you're trying to ruin my life in some subtle, prolonged apple style way.
Right. I mean like, fall in love with your product. It's a long con. In 20 years, you're gonna fuck you with the Apple Watch. Yeah. It'll be like it'll be like Imessage. It'll be like Imessage where, like, it starts out like, oh, wow. We got read receipts and, like, emoji reactions and, like, we're having a wonderful time and we're growing closer as a family. And now it's like, oh, Imessage means that if one person has Android, they're not not they're not your friend anymore.
[01:41:41] Unknown:
You know? That kinda that kinda fuck me. Yeah. The store the walled garden thing is is not necessarily something that we want to do. Right? Like, my my personal philosophy and and, you know, this is me speaking as myself and not to compete and they're rewarded for competing well, but that the protocols are open and permissionless so that if a customer is dissatisfied with someone's service, that they can easily take it to a competitor. Right? And and to to Matt's point, right, the existence of competitors is important there, and the the protocol openness is important. Right? I wouldn't be so angry at the way that their our bank situation was if I could very easily just like if if bank if banks were easily being able to be started, like, from 0, then we wouldn't have nearly the same, like, crony corruption that we do in the United States today. Right?
That that barrier to entry and that's intrinsically related to the protocol openness. So, yeah. Like, you're you're right to say that there are these sort of, like, odd incentives, but the the the upside is that the incentives to compete also are what brings, investment into the space that actually improve the the products and services that we have. And so there is this fundamental trade off between the totally open source. In fact, it's probably even a good thing that, you know, these like, these nodes need to be able to be run by a person who's just a hobbyist in their basement building it from scratch from themselves. Right? So, like, it's good that that exists. It needs to continue to exist because it keeps the rest of us honest.
But at the same time, right, like, there is there is real value to be created by, making these these things streamline and and investing individuals' time who need to eat and sleep and, you know or, like, they need they need food and shelter and things like that for them to take their time and trade it, to be able to invest in these spaces. So, like, it's it's a tough question.
[01:43:54] Unknown:
Yeah. I think streamline is a really good word for it because, like like, 95% or or, I don't know, 78% of what Apple does is make my life more streamlined. And then the other Fuck you. Other 22% is, like, making my life harder exactly because they're trying to protect their, like, their moat. You know? Yeah. So, like like, they they they have, like, the incentive to do both things. They wanna delight me, but they also they don't want me to leave. Like so, like, you guys have, like, like, cups. Right? You guys have your own, messaging service. And it always kinda bugs me because, like, it seems like peer to peer messaging should be more of a thing. Like, I remember at work, like, the Internet would go out. Back when we had offices, Internet would go out and Slack would be down. And so, like, you couldn't, like, chat with people who are, like, literally, like, a table away from you.
You know? And it's so so dumb that we don't have, you know, like, more, like, direct message. Anyways, so, like, you guys have cups, but, like, a lot of people are real into, like, like, sphinx right now. Like, like, how do how do those When sphinx? When sphinx?
[01:45:08] Unknown:
2 weeks? I public I published it to our beta channel yesterday. Oh, that's dumb. So it's imminent. Good answer. I am not going to reveal how you get to the beta channel on this cast because I I will get in trouble with a handful of people. But the point is is that the work has been done,
[01:45:27] Unknown:
and it's, you know, it's it's it's coming imminently. Who in the live chat is gonna tell us how to get to the beta channel?
[01:45:33] Unknown:
Yeah. I don't think anyone can. Well, actually, that's not true. They they absolutely can. If you if you go and run look. Look. Look. The operating system code, you can figure it out. Alright. I appreciate that. Puzzle. But but here's the thing. If you if you're if you are, like, if you are skilled enough to be able to figure it out, I'm not worried about, you doing it because it it's it's just fine. We do that because, like, things that we don't have the customer support, like, ability to do or things aren't refined enough that they're gonna generate a bunch of support load, we don't necessarily wanna publish it to, you know, a whole bunch of people who are gonna immediately ask us a ton of questions. But if you are skilled enough to figure out how to point yourself at the beta channel, you're skilled enough to answer your own questions.
[01:46:16] Unknown:
So Sphinx chat is pretty cool. Sphinx chat is a lightning based, encrypted messaging services that allows you to send, lightning payments. It every message is a lightning payment. So it's it's lightning payment native, and we have tribes for both Scylla Dispatch and Tales from the Crypt. So if you go to tribes dot sphinx.chat, you can find those. If you go to cidl dispatch.com, you can also find the join code for our our specific tribe. Just to be clear, like, that's such a stupid idea
[01:46:51] Unknown:
in the long run.
[01:46:53] Unknown:
Like,
[01:46:54] Unknown:
you should use lightning for discover if you know, like, somebody's public key, you can use lightning to, like, find where they are. But once you know where they are and, like, have exchanged some messages with them, like, encrypted it or whatever Yeah. I mean, I'm You should just you should DM, like, over Right. The Internet still works. Like, you know, the It lightning is a layer. The lightning is a layer on top of of of the Internet. And once you once you find somebody on the Internet, you should just direct message them. So so I think there's some nuance here, Paul. I think that it makes sense,
[01:47:31] Unknown:
that, like, why would I use a private chat through lightning with you? Right? You're my boy. I we message through Keybase or Matrix. Right? Like, we have we already have an existing channel to talk. Why am I gonna pay lightning payments for it? For a group chat, it makes more sense because for a group chat, you're able to well, with civil dispatch specifically, right, is is what am I trying to build over at Siddle dispatch Sphinx chat? Right? I'm trying to build a a place where you can have at where you can have actionable Bitcoin discussion. Right? And and and you can you can talk about things that are important for Bitcoin.
And because of the way it's set up, I can set it up so it costs you SATs to send a message. So we don't have spam, and it costs you SATs to join. So there's a there's a level exclusivity. Right? So you have, like, this kind of exclusive group that is encrypted that like, if if you're a spook, you have to pay the sats to be the spook. Right? Like, there there's there's an it's an interesting concept in in for group chats or so than for individual chats. Would you agree?
[01:48:46] Unknown:
Wait. And so well, I don't know how their group chat works. It is a very interesting concept, and it has a lot of good benefits. As separate routing to every single participant in the group chat chat. My understanding is yes. So when a if if there's a 100 people in a group chat, I'm sitting a 100 lightning transactions?
[01:49:11] Unknown:
Yeah. I yes. That's my understanding. It states to the it's to the tribe host as well. Tribe host is then sending the messages out. Isn't aren't they?
[01:49:23] Unknown:
That's actually that's a that's a great question. I'm I'm not actually sure That's what I'm saying. That's that's what would be stupid.
[01:49:29] Unknown:
I'm pretty sure that the try post is then relaying it out.
[01:49:36] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm I'm not I'm not well versed enough in it to be able to to comment authoritatively.
[01:49:41] Unknown:
I don't think they're lightning they're not lightning they're not lightning payments out, but they're relaying the message out via the Internet.
[01:49:51] Unknown:
Right. Exactly.
[01:49:52] Unknown:
And so they're they're taking on that cost, so they get the payment. Does that make sense?
[01:50:02] Unknown:
You should get Paul on here and have him explain it. I guess Oh, nice. But, yeah, I I I couldn't tell you.
[01:50:11] Unknown:
Okay. Well, anyway, it's pretty cool. I think it's cool. It's fun. The the the cool the coolest part is the streaming value, but that's that's podcast only. I mean, that that it's a very cool concept. I mean, fuck podcast ads. Right? Like, we're all fucking sick of that shit.
[01:50:29] Unknown:
I mean, yeah. I think a lot of us well and and, actually, this kinda ties into what what, Paul was saying earlier is that, you know, the the the downside of free products is that they the creators and maintainers of those either have to do maintain it through altruism, which may not scale, or they have to get paid for their work. And the nice thing is that if you pay someone to do a thing, you're they're much less likely to to sort of screw you out out the back door. Right? Like, in the case like, the the the most egregious violations of people's privacy and sovereignty come from, like, companies like Google who you're not paying a dime to use any of their products. Right?
Right. Apple is an interesting case because by and large, they actually don't screw you over. Right? They do try to create this walled garden that keeps you in, but a lot of times they're not, like, strip mining your data and stuff like that. At least not not anywhere remotely at the scale that, like, Google and Facebook are, which are no notably free services. So the, you know, the the goal that we have, like, at start 9 generally is to is to try to get paid when we do provide value and then, you know, not get paid when we're not. And that try that that keeps us honest. Right?
And I think that that's a good model for a lot of these things, whether it's podcasting and you're streaming SaaS for for, you know, seconds of audio feeds or or whatever. Because then you're not you don't have podcasters who are selling out to various companies who have misaligned incentives. Like, a lot of people just wanna pay for good stuff.
[01:52:06] Unknown:
Ty and Chad, I I couldn't read it for a while because it was behind Matt's stupid QR code. It's not stupid, bro. It's the future. Are you you wanna talk about stupid QR codes? Are you happy? Are you happy now? I can't read it. Something about nudes behind the paywall and sphinx chat. Thanks, Ty. I'm sorry that Matt hates you.
[01:52:29] Unknown:
Ty's the boss. He's talking about nudes. Wonderful person. Yeah. So, I mean, I think Sphinx chat, I love Sphinx chat. I think Sphinx chat is the the the key value prop of it is going to be OnlyFans. It's gonna be only sats. Yeah. Yeah. I I think it is is a fantastic messaging service, to do permissionless payments for nudes. 100%. And porn kills everything. Like, look look, at the end of the day, porn made every single major technological advancement we've ever had. That's that's overblown. You can go no. No. It's not overblown. You can go back to 1918 when they, like, had the first phone call. It was like a sexy chat, and you and you know it. You know it's true. The first phone call was a sexy chat. Well, like, the third one was. You know it was. Not the first one. The first one was, like, a public test. The first one. The first one's always a public test, but the one that made it matter, like, 17th call was the sexy chat. Right. The first one for money. The first one for money.
[01:53:30] Unknown:
It's always it's it's always sex Excel. It's in it's interesting because, like, even with developer you know, like, there's some there's some efforts to, like, support, like, developers, like like, for, Pierre has what is it? It's like for, actual for a pull request? Is it for an issue? Like, can you sponsor an issue or something?
[01:53:52] Unknown:
No. Bitcoin axe. Bitcoin axe.com. Very hard to pay developers.
[01:53:56] Unknown:
And I say this as a developer. You have bitcoindev list.com? Because, like, you you if you're if you're a developer and you think you can do something, you may be right or you may be wrong. And so so when someone asks you, hey, could you do this? And then you quote them a price. Like, the thing might be the hardest thing in the world or the easiest thing in the world. And and unless you've done the exact same thing before, you you're not even sure upfront. So, like, it is very hard to pay for development work. So, I don't know. I it makes sense that there's all these scammy startups that are trying to ruin my life. Well, I mean, this has nothing to do with development work. Like, no one's gonna use Sphinx to pay for development work, but they're gonna use it for to pay for, like, porn esque things. No. We were just I was just bringing it back to, like we were talking about how we're monetizing
[01:54:46] Unknown:
start We have we have Hamish Umbral. We have Hamish in the comments, Hamish McEwen. And he's talking about a VHS one because it had porn. BBS was porn. Internet was made for porn. It's always freedom of expression. And then Ty also wanted everyone to know that I'm a porno historian. So that's that's true. It's true. Right? What? The porn connection to technological
[01:55:16] Unknown:
advancements was, like, kinda overblown, but, like, I I'm not here coming with facts. So, like, I'm losing I'm losing. Look. The the killer in this case, Bitcoin is going to be to pay your VR fucking prostitute.
[01:55:30] Unknown:
It's just Yeah. We haven't hit that yet. Like, that's what it's gonna be. You're not gonna pay them in Libra. You're not gonna pay them in USD coin or whatever the fucking regulated coin is because you're not gonna wanna fucking do that. That doesn't make any sense. You're gonna need digital cash. You're gonna need real money. I miss Libra so much.
[01:55:49] Unknown:
That was some of the best times that I ever had in my life. Was, like, reading the Libra white paper and, like, watching Libra explain Libra to congress.
[01:55:59] Unknown:
That was that was so much fun, and they need to I just want Libra back. Dude, I just wanna say that I loved having you on a mainstream technology podcast. It was, like, really special that we had you for a little bit there. You're a you're a you're a Joe Kernan insider. You know, it's huge. You. I tried my best. I mean, I I I think our time is running out. So I want to hit some big points with you, Keegan, before we end this. First of all, what are your thoughts on Bitcoin being designed to pump forever? Do you do you think it's designed to pump forever, or you're just trying to have fun staying poor?
[01:56:43] Unknown:
So I'm I'm, like, famously the bearable. Like, so so full disclosure, I I work in Bitcoin daily through Start9. I like, my even just among the people who work at Start 9, my focus is particularly on Bitcoin. The vast majority of my net worth is in Bitcoin, and yet I always seem to be the bearish one one in any given room. So I I do think that it is designed to pump forever. I think that the rate at which it will pump forever is actually going to I mean, it has to decline, and it will converge something along the lines to to to something like what economic growth is.
But I also had this interesting exchange this morning on Twitter with Hector, who, plotted this very, interesting graph of the GDP versus the m two money supply. And, what it showed was that the m two money supply was expanding at a much faster rate than GDP. And I came to the the interesting realization that it's possible that as economies get more complex and the trade cycles elongate because that's why we have money is to be able to trade, you know, various goods and services between each other without having to come up with a a barter. And so as economies get more complex, people specialize more goods and services, the need for money, the need for liquidity in general goes up. And if it goes up in a nonlinear way, it actually might pump a lot more than I originally expected, which is because, you know, if the the economy gets super complex, then that means that you need you know, if the the economy is twice as complex for whatever, metric you wanna use and that requires 4 times as much liquidity, well, of course, that might in the fiat world, that'll involve an expansion of the m two money supply. But in a Bitcoin world, we can't expand the money supply. So the only thing that can happen is that the money itself will be more and more valuable in in response to that needed liquidity.
So I don't know where I actually stand on that, but that was a very that was an epiphany I had this morning that I haven't totally digested yet. So short answer is, yes. It's designed to pump forever. The jury's out on by how much.
[01:59:00] Unknown:
I mean, I think even in, like answer I've heard on this this stupid show so far. No. Oh, it was stupid show. You fucking listen to every fucking episode. That's stupid. I I, thank you for joining, guys, on this stupid show. I I 2 hours in. I I just want to in a post fiat world, Bitcoin still pumps forever. Yeah. Relative to goods and services, but by how much? But, like, the purchasing power the purchasing power is gonna increase forever. Yes. But not like a 200
[01:59:37] Unknown:
I I like this distinction. It's not it's not gonna do 200%.
[01:59:41] Unknown:
No. No. Definitely not. Don't. No one thinks that. Does anyone think that?
[01:59:46] Unknown:
But but and I haven't heard that. No. But it's it's gonna pump differently.
[01:59:52] Unknown:
But It'll pump it'll pump decently, like, you'll still you'll you'll have purchasing power increases. If we're gonna talk like a proper, you know, glasses on economist, economist, like Economics. You're talking Economics.
[02:00:06] Unknown:
You're talking you're talking just like increased purchasing power. Like every every year, you're just like your houses get cheaper. No no joke. That was one of, like, the biggest things, like, for me to, like when I went from someone who's, like, interested in Bitcoin and just live listening to rabbit hole recap and just like, oh, what what is this thing? You know? To, like, oh, I'm a Bitcoiner. Was that that realization, like, at minimum, it's GDP percent forever. Right? Yeah. It Yeah. It's store it's it's where we With variations. It's where we it's where we store our wealth. So however much wealth we create in a year, it's it's at least goes up that much. I don't totally understand what you're saying with these complex financial
[02:00:53] Unknown:
things. It's not complex, bro. Right. Right. What I what I meant by that is that, like, in a in a primordial economy where, like, you have fish, clothing and, I don't know, like, spears or something like that, The need for liquidity is much lower than in a an economy where you could buy, like, a 1000 or 10000 different things. So as the economy improves and people specialize more, that there will and there are more different things to buy, the need for liquidity goes up. But if the actual units of money that you have remains finite and the liquidity needs go up, then money becomes a more attractive asset to hold, which causes it to pump even more.
[02:01:32] Unknown:
So that was the realization that I had this morning. So, like, in a simple economy, I go to the convenience store. There's only one Twinkie. So I I only need so much liquidity. But in a more complex economy, there's like the the the convenience store could like 3 d print me 10,000 Twinkies on demand. So I need the liquidity to be able to handle that kind of
[02:01:53] Unknown:
Right. It it yeah. And it has to do more with, like, how how many different people have to be able to trade with each other until if you like, such that if you remove the money, all their needs would be satisfied. And that is,
[02:02:10] Unknown:
like, that explodes very quickly. I like that way of thinking of it because, like, the other way to go is, like, well, when do we introduce debt into this equation? And and I that just gets, like debt has has done so much horrible stuff to, like, my generation and the previous generation. Like, I all I almost don't wanna think about it right now. You know? I wanna stay so far away from it because I just want, like, real settlement, a real money, real value for, you know, for work.
[02:02:41] Unknown:
Well, so the thing about debt is that debt debt, when used for bad things, is bad sort of axiomatically, I guess. Right? But, having society in debt is actually very, very bad, and that's what we're noticing and we have been living through for the last decade or, I guess, longer than that. But, you know, having debt at all is not necessarily a bad thing. It helps finance a lot of projects that are basically that that they're they are net productive to society. They're net productive to the parties involved, but the order of events are not such that they can actually happen. So I think we'll still continue to have debt. But the nice thing about Bitcoin's finite and pump forever quality is that it sets a minimum interest rate floor. Pump forever. You have to you you have to beat, the what are the average investment, so to speak, in order for something to to work out. Because think about this. Right?
If nobody's lending any money and lending is, like, the only way that that projects are gonna get financed, then eventually GDP effectively goes to 0. Like, no net new productivity happens. And if that's the case, then you need point 001% interest, and then you're you're profitable. But if the economy is going at, like, 2% a year, right, in terms of the amount of output that it's generating, then you have to beat 2%.
[02:04:01] Unknown:
My favorite part about this show is is is I just had a bunch of smart people talk about Bitcoin being designed to pump forever as Bitcoin's design pumping forever. Like, it's just going up. Like, it's just every episode just the price is higher, which is gonna be hilarious looking back. Like, people are gonna be we're gonna be at sad stem parity, and people are gonna be, like, I don't fucking care what Keegan said about Bitcoin pumping forever. He was talking about it at point 6.
[02:04:29] Unknown:
Yeah, dude. I'm just like I
[02:04:31] Unknown:
Come come back to me when when debt is a has a free market price. When there's interest rates are are decided on the free market, come back to me, and let's let's figure out how how good debt is for us then. Like, when it when it's 20 20%, you know, for for a house loan, people aren't gonna be such a big fan anymore. And I I think that's gonna be real good real good for us. I just don't know why you brought premiums. Clear, I agree. Right? I just think that the the the financial instrument of debt is too useful to uninvent.
[02:05:01] Unknown:
But the fact that it's been abused for decades on end, or actually probably the entirety of human history, most likely Or I guess it's really since the invention of fiat money. So post 1971. If that's when things get just absolutely out of control. Right? Like, I'm not gonna sit here and try to say that what we're doing at at the US Federal Reserve is, like, good. It's I unambiguously think it's terrible. But I don't think that even in a sound money system that, Bitcoin promises, do we have no debt? I think that it will still exist. No. There's a 100% could still be debt.
[02:05:39] Unknown:
I mean, look. I'm a like, Paul, I'll still lend you money.
[02:05:44] Unknown:
I thought you're the guy that, like, turns people away when they want water.
[02:05:47] Unknown:
No. What the fuck, bro? You don't think I'm gonna fucking provide you and your family water? You've explained this to Marty a number of times. Like, I'm worried about all these people that they're gonna want water post post Yeah. But Paul, Paul, you and you you and yours are gonna get water. Like, I'm not gonna turn you guys away. Oh, I'm like the the cantillon. The You're in the inside. You're in the inside. You came on you came on dispatch. You were a cohost on dispatch. Batch. Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah. Any any any of the guests on dispatch, any of the ride or dive freaks in the chat, like, they'll get preferential water treatment. But everyone else, you know, it's gonna be on a 1st come, 1st serve basis. It is what it is. It's like, I can't manufacture water. Yeah. Exactly. We can do it. Keegan, we have we have, like, we have about 20 minutes left.
It would be who of me to ignore this topic. It is probably one of the most fun topics in Bitcoin. Your so called open source license does not allow commercialization of that license.
[02:06:52] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[02:06:53] Unknown:
You wanna defend yourself and why that is important that you have commercial protection on that license and why that still is open source
[02:07:03] Unknown:
by your razor? So we've gone back and forth on this, plenty of times. So I I will say that it's not it's not something that we are, unambiguously sort of, gonna or it's not necessarily a hill we're gonna die on, but the what fed into some of the decision making is that in a world where we're selling, here's the thing. This what what we're selling what we're we're helping provide is trustware. It's like a a piece of software that you have to be able trust. And in order to trust it, you need to be able to know what you're running. So we we want we definitely the entire company is in agreement that we want the the source code to be out there so that people can audit it. The question is around whether we want to sort of finance our competitors with our own hard efforts, to be able to, sort of essentially copy our business and and and move on.
So that's that's the essential tension. And the way that we came down on it was like, look, we're we're a young company. A lot of us are really like, we're we're working full time without pay. And what we don't want is to get, you know, 2 years down the road and someone to just, like, with larger financing be able to come in, copy everything, and and just, basically steal our work for the last, couple of years. Right. But, you know, obviously, that presents different issues with, you know, people being able to to, you know, fork it and and, you know, like, modify it, use it for personal use, etcetera.
So what we tried to do is strike a balance between allowing users like, anybody who wants to to build it from source, use it, for free, they can do so. At least that's the way we intended it to write. And if there are any, like, expert legal, folks who, like, look at our license and are like, oh, that license doesn't say you could do that. We'd love to hear from you because we're we're software developers first. And, yes, we do have some legal counsel. But, like, if the the license doesn't reflect the intent, it's not like we're gonna stay married to the license. But the intent is if you're gonna build from source and use it for yourself, you should be able to do that free of charge. No problem. You should be able to, like, you know, if you wanna be make modifications for personal use, that should be, for you. Like like, you should be able to do that without intervention.
We the only thing that we're trying to avoid is various other people just being like, yo. Oh, Start 9 is selling a bunch of devices with this operating system. Let's let's let's just steal it, put it on our own devices You don't want me. And sell right? You don't want me and Paul to just start start 10
[02:09:40] Unknown:
or whatever. Yeah. Or 10. Exactly.
[02:09:42] Unknown:
Right. And and that's 10 letters of It's the future of self hosting. There there's a really good example of this with with GrapheneOS, and what is it? Copperhead?
[02:09:52] Unknown:
But no. That's not a good example, but it it kind of is an example.
[02:09:56] Unknown:
Well, I'm I I I'm I'm playing the devil So you wanna talk about that? I'm saying the devil being the person who would try to use the government to enforce intellectual property. That was a that was an anger between parties. A better example is the is
[02:10:12] Unknown:
is, the fight that's going because that was just they were they were business partners
[02:10:18] Unknown:
And Right. But I but I'm but I'm just agreed. Right? You have this you have this scenario where there's a free and open source project, and someone else is trying to sell it and trying to monetize it, And they're kind of being an asshole to the people who made it free and open source to the point where you'd think, oh, man, I regret making this free and open source. You know? Right. But, like, I I I and I I said this to MBK as well. It's like
[02:10:43] Unknown:
He's the best example. He's the best so his because it happened to him. Right? He had a non he had a non partner completely fork his work, take investment based off of it, take preorders based off of it, and he commercialized his work, right, Foundation Devices. We we still don't have a hardware wallet from them yet. They have not shipped anything. And they took they they took investment, and they took preorders off of off of off of the work that him and Peter did over at CoinKite. But it it was open source. It was GPL.
[02:11:16] Unknown:
Right? So so I'm just saying put don't use GPO. Use MIT, and then add something No. No. Fuck MIT. Add something that to MIT that says, if I copy this, and I sell it, and I pretend like this was my identity. I disagree with MIT. So MIT
[02:11:32] Unknown:
MIT says that anyone can use your source whatever the fuck they wanna do. Okay? GPL says anyone can use your source, but if they use your source, it has to be open source. So what Star 9 does what's Oh, we're working on that. Yeah. What Star 9 does and what other organizations do is is they have a separate one that is that is you can do whatever the fuck you wanna do with it, but if you wanna sell the software, then you have to get it licensed. Those are the, like, the three levels.
[02:12:02] Unknown:
So it's like soft software open source. Joe Biden. It's like software plus the executive branch of the US The problem the problem with MIT
[02:12:11] Unknown:
is you could have a private corporation come in and hoove up all of your fucking things, all of your fucking code But they can't steal it. And they can sell it. They can sell it. But but they can sell it as closed source. MIT, they can sell it as closed source. Go for it. They're the asshole. No. No. No. But but with GPL, they're forced with GPL, they're forced to at least keep it open. And Who forces So if you're gonna if you're gonna do them. The I mean
[02:12:40] Unknown:
The government.
[02:12:41] Unknown:
So you're just, like, you're just saying, hey, but I'm saying if you live in a government world, you might as well go GPL instead of MIT. You don't wanna go MIT because MIT, you just allow MIT, you're just allowing them to just take your fucking software and just create AWS. AWS is all fucking MIT software that they just kept closed, and they just didn't open up. I'm a software developer. I avoid GPL
[02:13:03] Unknown:
like the plague. Because GPL is designed to be it's designed to be a virus. It's designed to ruin or not to ruin. It's designed to turn everything it touches into GPL.
[02:13:14] Unknown:
And that's the beauty of it. It's gorgeous. No. It's it's disgusting. It's trying to use government power to force people to gain this money. Way worse. I don't want fucking BlueWallet to be MIT and then just have, like, the fucking cash app just, like, releases blue wallet closed source and just takes their fucking code. Who cares? Then they're the asshole. If someone copies something, and they're obviously not contributing It should still be fucking open source at that point, and that's what GPL does. If if you live in a world that has fucking law and shit. GPL's for communist,
[02:13:48] Unknown:
and my fee's for anarchists.
[02:13:53] Unknown:
Are you calling me Matt? Matt?
[02:13:56] Unknown:
Are you calling me? I'm I'm trying not to interrupt. You guys both talk. V 4LR was upset with me that I interrupted you guys. So you guys just you guys let let us know what you think about the open source licenses.
[02:14:09] Unknown:
I I I will say this, is that we GPL is the only other model that I think that we would try to consider. Right? And, you know, that I I I actually can't say anything definitively about where we're gonna be going with this, but I will say that things like the MIT are pretty much off the table, at least for now. The unlicensed 61 dot 2 talked about is off the table for now. And, you know, that just has to do with the fact that, like, we're you're you're we're committing all of our effort to to do this on a daily basis, and that has to get financed somehow. Look. If someone has a better idea for how to finance this, like, this work, because we like, this value creation indefinitely, like, I I'm I'm not gonna sit here and say that this is the only way we're ever gonna make this work. It's just we haven't figured out a better way, and we would like to be able to keep doing this. We think it's valuable. We think other people think it's valuable.
And,
[02:15:07] Unknown:
you know, that's that's kinda where we're at right now. I I totally feel that. And and and like I I was saying early on, I guess that tension between, I'm so glad that there's a company that I can give money to that is trying to make the thing that I want. You know? How exciting is that? But from the software side, I see a license that's not, that's not MIT. And it's it's it's it's not useful to me as, like, from a development perspective. I'm glad it's I I I look at you. You have you have source viewable. You know? I I'm glad that myself and other people can inspect what you're trying to ship and and make sure that you're not, like, stealing funds with it. You know? But it's not something that's interesting to me as part of the the the canon of open source software. You know? Which is what is very important is it's something that I feel like we're slowly building software that allows that really empowers us. It makes us private. It makes us, able to communicate.
It makes us able to transact, you know, with money. But, the the this is not that. You know? This is a product that you're selling that then you're also showing us the code that you Yes. Ship to people. And I'm glad for that. But but it's not it's doesn't feel like open source to me.
[02:16:28] Unknown:
Yeah. It's it's like it's open source code in the sense that, like, you can see the code. It's not open source code as in, like, it's, like, oh, like, owned by everyone, so to speak.
[02:16:40] Unknown:
Yeah.
[02:16:44] Unknown:
But it's 2 things. Right? And, like, I think feel like it's important that we don't conflate the 2 things. Like, it's very important that people are able to view the source. And and for the average person, the ability to manipulate the source and do whatever the fuck they wanna do with it is important. And for most people, the fucking license doesn't matter in that effect because no one's gonna enforce, you know, Paul or John or some random schmuck, like, changing the code for his own
[02:17:13] Unknown:
whatever he wants to do. And and and not only that, but, like, our license in theory shouldn't even, like, bar you from manipulating the code and using it however you want with the exception of if you try to then turn around commercialize it. But then you have something different, which is this idea of the code surviving
[02:17:29] Unknown:
virally. Right? And that idea revolves around a permissive license so that a user doesn't have to worry about it. Like, for a a perfect example I don't know if it's a perfect example. It's actually probably not a perfect example, is that every episode of Citadel dispatch ends with copyrighted content that gets taken down from a bunch of different, service providers. Right? And and the reasoning is because of the licensing. Right? So the licensing doesn't allow that information to be free. And and you have the same effect with software, so you don't have, you don't have the hive mind working on things if if it's only source viewable and it's not proper open source. Right?
[02:18:15] Unknown:
Something Anthony points out, in chat. Umbrel has a very similar license. It's like Creative Commons. Right. No And that has not been controversial at all. It sucks. And and I I've been so bad. Something with something with, like, a really good license is, Nick's Bitcoin. And I and I really like it, conceptually. It's got MIT license. And I and I like the idea of of NICS in general. But I've tried to run NICS, and I completely failed.
[02:18:45] Unknown:
NICS is a very expert piece of technology. I'm not, yeah, I'm not smart enough. Go is very easy to run.
[02:18:53] Unknown:
So so I I see how how hypocritical I am with this.
[02:18:58] Unknown:
No. So MIT is wrong, though, still. I'm still against MIT. I think MIT is just MIT is us lowering our shields. MIT is us being, like, oh, we're about to line up for war, but war doesn't matter. It's fine. We're all in this together. We're humans. So and GPL is like, hey. Let's line up for a war, and I hope No. GPO is like my team. Is like, if you're gonna take this, I will be angry at you unless you line up next to me.
[02:19:29] Unknown:
That's what I'm saying. MIT plus, you're an asshole if you commercialize this against my will. That's that's the license that I'm promoting.
[02:19:37] Unknown:
But that's exactly what Matt is saying though with the lower That's what GPL is.
[02:19:41] Unknown:
No. GPL involves the government.
[02:19:44] Unknown:
No. No. We have to figure out all all licenses involve the government. Who's enforcing whatever the fuck you want them to enforce? We have to figure out intellectual property if there is such a thing,
[02:19:55] Unknown:
sans government, if we're gonna if we're gonna have this bright, beautiful future that we're all planning on. The cool part about GPL is that gives us water. The cool part about GPL is it forces corporations
[02:20:08] Unknown:
to fucking keep it open source, and and MIT doesn't. So you can just have with MIT, it's so loose of a license that you could just have and this is what happened with AWS. AWS just Who forces? The license doesn't AWS Who forces them to do it? Who forces them? Oh, we ended up in a situation where AWS, like, runs a shit ton of the Internet, and they're doing it on open source software that is closed source on their side because they took MIT software. And they're a public company, so they have people that they have to respond to. They can't just, like, hide it. You know? They they're they're aware of it. They're well aware of it. I we have Thai in here. There's no IP. I understand. Okay?
Like, if if we wanna be NCAPs, I understand. Okay? But Amazon's not being NCAP. They're using the MIT license in a cap world. If if In a non Ancap world, and they're they're they're using it to their advantage. If Ancap doesn't work while people are being
[02:21:09] Unknown:
no no am. I don't know what while status exist, if ANCAP cap doesn't work while status still exist, then ANCAP doesn't work.
[02:21:21] Unknown:
I'm not I'm not defending ANCAP. I'm just saying that in an NCAP world, licenses don't matter. It's it's the licenses are all coming down to government enforcement, period. And the the the It's embedded in the concept of a license at all. Amazon is admitting to Amazon admits that they took all of this open source software. They just took it and was m I MIT. Wait. Wait. Daddy Warbits, you're leaving. Don't leave yet. Daddy Warbits has 2 tickets, for Bitcoin 2021 that he wants to either auction off or raffle off on the next civil dispatch because we did not communicate together about how we're gonna fucking do that. So tune in next week for that. Thank you, daddy Warbits. We appreciate you.
Cheers. All these other conversations, I appreciate this is this is a great conversation. I think this is very good. I I appreciate both of you, jumping in here. I appreciate 6102 saying that IP is the biggest fraud. Doesn't work. And NCAP doesn't work does work. NCAP does work. Look at torrents.
[02:22:39] Unknown:
That's interesting. Don't solve who makes the movies.
[02:22:43] Unknown:
Exactly.
[02:22:45] Unknown:
So I I've tried to be very sympathetic in a to what what you you guys are doing, what the way MVK is doing, what Umbral is doing. But I personally am going to try to trend in the direction of, of software that I can, that I feel comfortable with the the that it's part of the canon of software, and it's not someone's product. You know?
[02:23:09] Unknown:
I mean, yeah. Like, yeah, that is that is certainly your prerogative and choice. Right? Like I said, the we made the we made choices that we did because that was what we saw, being able to allow us to continue to do work and to to help create value for the ecosystem. And the the the day we find a better way to create a sustainable, arrangement where people can get can can create value and then get paid for it, then, like, we'll we'll do that. And so I I don't I I'm neither going to apologize for the decisions we've made and nor and nor am I going to die on the hill saying that we're going to do this in perpetuity and everybody can go fuck themselves for telling us not to do it. Like, I'm I'm like, to me, this is a it's it's like it's like a work in progress. And, like, I'd like to, you know, I'd like to understand, you know, better models or or whatever. So I think I can get one of these and just run Bitwarden
[02:24:05] Unknown:
and Mastodon.
[02:24:06] Unknown:
I already got Umbrel synced, so I don't even need to I think I think if you really care about open source, like, you should just fight about this till you die. Like, I think that's just like the we we should just, like, we should just constantly argue about this and just fluctuate our opinions. Like, our opinion should change dramatically from until, like, 30 years from now, but we should just argue it the whole fucking time. And I think that's, the important part with open source. Yep. But I I I do I I a 100% like, I'll I will defend you guys. I will defend your license, until the end of the show.
Not the end of this show, like, this episode, like, to the end of of until I leave. Well, we appreciate that. Back and forth because I I I I I completely understand the concept. It makes sense to me. It's capitalism at its finest.
[02:24:57] Unknown:
Yeah. And and the the thing is, like, we we don't expect everyone to agree, but, we're also not like, it's not a position that I think all needs a ton of defending. Right? It's like, I think it's a it's a reasonable position even if you don't agree with it.
[02:25:12] Unknown:
My optimism Well, I mean, if you don't think it needs defending, then I won't defend it. What
[02:25:17] Unknown:
My my hope is that in the long run, like, it it it isn't a trade off. Like, my my dream would be that you guys would move to MIT and that you, like, your profits would improve. And I can't prove that that would actually happen, but that would be awesome for me. The
[02:25:33] Unknown:
the the secret, Paul Paul, the secret is as long as the source is viewable, none of this fucking matters unless you're trying to fucking be Tim Tim Apple on this. Like, you're just trying to make money off of them. If you're not trying to make money off of them, they can't enforce any of this shit, And that's the beauty of source viewable. Like, you should just be able to see the source. As long as you can see the source,
[02:25:54] Unknown:
I'm done. What if I'm what if I'm just come what if I'm just building something interesting
[02:25:59] Unknown:
Build it as a NIM, bro. Then I wanna copy and paste some of their Build it as a NIM, and if they try and shut you down if they try and shut you down, it'll be the best advertisement ever for what you're building. Like, that's the case. Like, it doesn't fucking matter. Keegan, it's been a fucking pleasure. Thank you for joining us. It's been a long time coming. It's been a lot of fun,
[02:26:20] Unknown:
times to, like, really flu. So
[02:26:23] Unknown:
Yeah. It was it was great to meet you. It was great to have you back on the show, but it was great to meet you in Big Block Boom. Do you have any any final thoughts for, Zito, she's upset with me in the comments. Do you have any final thoughts for the freaks before we end this?
[02:26:43] Unknown:
Just keep building, man. Right? Build whatever you can. Like, it doesn't none of this happens without everyone. So
[02:26:52] Unknown:
that's all I have to say. A 100%. Zytoshi, I agree with you. If someone's gonna, like, fuck around with me for manipulating things, then they can go fuck themselves. I a 100% agree on that. Future Paul,
[02:27:08] Unknown:
what's up? But final thoughts before we end this. Everybody should read my, piece called Christianity for Bitcoiners, where I try to shill you on Christianity from a Bitcoiner perspective. Basically call everybody shitcoiners for believing in more than one God. I love it. So just check that out.
[02:27:29] Unknown:
I'm looking forward to seeing Paul this weekend. We're gonna have a fantastic barbecue together. It's gonna be a good time. It's gonna be all open source licensed. All open source. Like, people can just compete with us, not not commercially, and it'll it'll be a fun time. I I appreciate all you freaks for joining us. This was fucking awesome. Consider using your own Bitcoin node. Check out star 9labs.com. If you haven't heard about The Verge, it's a great, publication. Go follow both of these guys, and, I love you all. Thank you for joining. Peace.
Cheers, freaks. You're the fucking best. Thank you for staying till the end, and, I love you all. We'll see you for rabbit hole recap on Thursday, and we'll see you for another fucking great, Seal Dispatch rip on Tuesday. That's gonna be Ben Decarment and Evan Kaludes. It's gonna be fucking dope. We're gonna talk about Taproot. I'll fucking grill them on all the bullshit, and it'll be a good time. Love you all. Have a good time. Peace.
Out of left field, but we've got Coinbase coming, with a direct listing. And I looked back when you were on. It was July of 2019. We were talking about Libra, and you didn't like Libra, but you were very positive about Bitcoin, which subsequently went from 7 or 8,000 to where, new high today at 63,000. Coinbase now coming public. When a lot of government types you're you're very rare for someone to be positive about this. And, I don't know if you saw, secretary Yellen and Fed chair Powell talking about it. Do you think that they have a feeling or a good understanding of of of digital currencies or Bitcoin at this point? Or they need a little remedial reading, a a little reading of the Bitcoin standard? What what would you suggest?
[00:00:47] Unknown:
Well, I think I was right then and I'm right now. I think they tried to ignore it to make it go away. I think Jamie Dimon will tell you that from the beginning he was wrong. This is moving towards the future. They should not ignore it. They should not only learn more about it, but the basis is gonna continue to grow. And this is something that those who regulate, those who are in government, they make policy better start understanding what it means for the future because other countries are moving forward, especially China. I do not want America to fall behind. I want the next century to be ours. That's why I wanna look forward not backwards and not keep my head in the sand. Okay.
[00:02:03] Unknown:
Oh, shit. Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. What a fucking day it's been. That that Bitcoin FOMO hitting us fucking hard, the best drug there is. Welcome to another episode of Citadel dispatch. This is episode 17, the interactive live show about Bitcoin distributed systems, privacy, and open source software. To those joining from the audio streams, whether that's our 2 podcast feeds, Tales From the Crypt or Citadel Dispatch dedicated feed, or Sphinx Breeze other podcasting 2 point o apps. That was Joe Kernan or boy Joe Kernan from CNBC Squawk Box, the number one Bitcoin podcaster in the space, speaking with Republican house leader from California, Kevin McCarthy, who basically is sending out a warning shot on CNBC to other house of representatives, members, if you do not support Bitcoin, then you are against America, which is a pretty crazy fucking thing to see on mainstream television.
I want to do a quick shout out to all the freaks who are streaming us sats through podcast 2.0. You helped make this show completely ad free and sponsor free. That is pretty fucking cool. It's just really cool to see the fucking little lightning payments come through, and I appreciate that. That is a special connection, we have, and another big shout out to the rider dive freaks that join us live every week. Without you, this show is is basically nothing. So, appreciate you guys coming in here and being heavy participants in the live chat, whether that is on Twitter, Twitch, or YouTube.
Another reminder that you are able to view the videos after the fact on Telegram and Keybase. All videos are uploaded there in full. On the other platforms, you know, some of the music video material might be removed or muted, per copyright rules. It is what it is. With all that said, I wanna welcome a return guest, a good friend, and the cofounder of The Verge. Future Paul is joining us today. And thank you, Paul. Sorry for not giving you a good break there to to introduce yourself. How are you doing? You doing alright?
[00:04:22] Unknown:
I'm glad you're having me on to talk about my essay, Christianity for Bitcoiners.
[00:04:30] Unknown:
And, and we have proof of Kegs here. Keegan, cofounder of Start9 Labs. I met him at BitblockGoom this year. Cool dude. I built a really cool product that a lot of the freaks seem to love. Welcome, Keegan.
[00:04:43] Unknown:
Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me.
[00:04:46] Unknown:
Absolutely. Thank you for joining. It's been a long time coming. Today, we will be talking about Bitcoin nodes, self hosting, number go up, and all things Bitcoin related. It's gonna be a fucking fun time. I'm really looking forward to this. I think a great place to start, is I kinda like I would I would like Keegan to start with a explanation of what the fuck a Bitcoin note is. I have this poll up to our to the viewers who are coming in through video. Do you use your own Bitcoin note? This is very scientific. This was a Twitter poll. 55100 people responded.
35% said yes. 35 said no. 550 people said what is a node? And, a 1000 people asked to see the answers. So, Keegan, what is a Bitcoin note?
[00:05:41] Unknown:
Yeah. So for the 500 of you that asked what the fuck a Bitcoin note is, that's how, a, you know what the ledger even says. And it is so the the one of the main central properties to Bitcoin is the fact that there is no central authority, but there still is an authoritative state of what the ledger is. That's what tells you how much Bitcoin you have. It tells you, you know, when you've been paid, when you paid other people. And so if you're not looking to an authority to be like, yo, how much is like, how how much does this address have? You have to ask yourself, which is your your Bitcoin node. And the only way to do that is to to basically run the software, verify every transaction from Genesys, which is one of the few things that Bitcoin does that basically know all even purports to do, because, you know, it running a node has been a staple of Bitcoin culture, thankfully, for, like, the last, you know, you know, pretty much since the the block size wars concluded.
So we can, I guess, talk more about that later? But at the end of the day, the only secure way to know whether or not you've been paid and how much money you have is through running a Bitcoin node. Anything if you're not using your own, you're using someone else's. And There we go. So you have to trust that person.
[00:06:54] Unknown:
Paul, what do you think of that explanation?
[00:06:57] Unknown:
Yeah. I I really like that. I it's very helpful, I think, for new people to unders like like, I almost like visualizing Bitcoin as, like, an Excel spreadsheet, or it's like a huge shared doc. You know? And, the like, you you don't ask for that from Google. You just you you can build your own copy. And I don't know. It it's, it's so different than how you normally interact with software that there is a lot to learn about it, but it is it's so beautiful in that it it it answers every gotcha. Like, what do you mean? Like, everybody just agrees that this is what Bitcoin is, and then it works, and then it and then it and it does work. And the node is is like a huge aspect of that.
[00:07:49] Unknown:
Yeah. The crypt logo from the chat is saying asking strangers for how much money you have. Well, is yeah. Like, when you put it like that, it's completely ridiculous that people don't run their own notes. Right?
[00:07:59] Unknown:
Yeah. 100%. So so so to to just distill this because it's a it's a topic that I've had to discuss a lot, I think Keegan nailed it right at the end there is is the key thing is if you use the Bitcoin network, you're gonna you're gonna have to use a Bitcoin node to interact with the network. That's either gonna be your own node or it's gonna be someone else's node. If it's someone else's node, then you're trusting their node. If you're trusting their node, you're trusting their node with your privacy, and you're trusting their node with actually verifying everything's going on, you know, whether that's how much Bitcoin you have or whether that's the consensus rules. What is Bitcoin? So it's absolutely imperative that people exercise the right to use their own node, not only run their own node, but use their own node.
That's what makes Bitcoin different than so many other systems because you're able to use it, in this trust minimized way where you don't have to rely on a third party. In most cases for people, that third party is their node provider.
[00:08:55] Unknown:
Can can you guys contextualize this where you would put it in the priority scale? Like, if I'm if I'm trying to get my funds off of Coinbase, for instance, you know, I've I've I've heard the the not your keys, not your coins. So I've got, like, a cold card now. I'm ready to move my funds. And then everybody's telling me, well, you you you know, you're not really a Bitcoin unless you've got your own nodes to, like, verify these transactions when you're moving your funds off of Coinbase. Like, is it okay that your first time, like, maybe you you use the wallets, like, default, like, whatever it's connecting to, and you just trust this node for starters. Like like, how imperative is it that you are verifying your own transaction?
[00:09:39] Unknown:
Trust is not a death sentence. Right? It really depends on how much of your, you know, financial well-being is tied up in Bitcoin and how much you can afford for whoever you're trusting to cheat you. Right? So if you're dicking around with a, like, a few dollars worth of Bitcoin, right, and, you know, you're largely not really interacting with the network yet. Like, yeah, it's totally fine for you to, have, like, you have other nodes that you're trusting in the in the interim as you sort of get your setup off the ground. But if you're, you know, talking about accepting Bitcoin in order to, like, sell a very large, you know, piece of property, whether it's like a house or a car or something like that, or you're trying to get paid for your, you know, time, which is one of the maybe the most scarce asset that each of us have. Right?
Then now all of a sudden, it's it's a lot more important. So it it really comes to do it comes it comes down to how much exposure you have if it goes wrong.
[00:10:36] Unknown:
Well, like like everything else on the show. Right? There's, like, a shit ton of nuance. Like, I don't think it's very productive that, like, the Luke Juniors of the world, like, scare the shit out of users and tell them that they don't know Bitcoin if they don't use their own node, even though that might be technically true. In practice, at least from the verification side, there's been no large scale cases of people getting duped into thinking they own Bitcoin when they don't own Bitcoin. So the best example would be, Ledger or Trezor. Right? The like, an overwhelming majority of freaks probably use Ledger or Trezor's nodes, and they don't even realize. They just use, you know, they use Trezor's wallet software. They use Ledger's wallet software with their hardware wallet, and they're trusting that that node.
Those nodes have never been known to lie to anybody about which Bitcoin is theirs. That doesn't mean it couldn't happen in the future, but that's never happened. Furthermore, you go and you, like, check maybe, like, blockstream.infoororoxt.meormempool. Space, these other, you know, these blockchain explorers that are running their own nodes, and you verify that there's actually coins in in your address on those services, then all of a sudden you're reducing the trust even if you're not using your own note. Right? Like, it's you you Yeah. You would need you would need, like, those 4 services to to collude to fuck you. Right? And in in practical terms, that probably won't happen. But on the privacy side, I feel like the privacy side is way more tangible because it doesn't matter, like, it's like obvious of course, it matters the verification side, but it it on the privacy side, you're a 100% trusting them with your privacy. They see every transaction you do. They see all of your balance checks. And if you're not using Tor, they see your IP address. Right? So they can connect all that stuff. So I think for for people on the on the node side to see it as a tangible thing on on privacy is a very insightful I I I it's like it's an insightful way to to prove why a node is important. Would you agree?
[00:12:43] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, like, nodes for privacy is definitely something that, it is an improvement than overusing things like ledger and treasures nodes or or whatever. But it's also not a panacea either. Right? If, like, you can spin up a bunch of nodes on something like AWS and try to corner specific nodes that you see. Not that each node identifies itself at all. So it's not like, you know, your node is broadcasting me. Like, you know, I'm proof of Kieck's node. Please corner me. So but, you know, there there are still pieces of analysis that you can do on nodes if you control a decent number of the peers, that are near certain nodes.
So it's it'd probably be even better to to connect to things over Tor if you if you can. But, you know, this is just you're just getting further and further out on the continuum
[00:13:33] Unknown:
of of privacy and and security and sovereignty and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, I guess what I'm trying to say is, like, the the the prerequisite to try and start to use Bitcoin privately is to learn how to use your own node. So if if you have any desire to try and use Bitcoin privately, well, I and I understand that that's not for everyone, but it is probably for most people that listen to the show. It's gonna start with using your own node. Right?
[00:13:59] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure.
[00:14:00] Unknown:
But for the average person, to just go back to what Paul said, are we completely fine with them just moving it to a to, like, to the to not using their own node, but self custody, first as a step, whether that's a mobile wallet or,
[00:14:20] Unknown:
Let's say or, like, a hardware wallet. You got $10 on on on Coinbase or Cash App or whatever.
[00:14:28] Unknown:
Yeah. 10, at $10 a $10 oh, I mean, it depends on how much $10 is for you because it it's really more about how much of your own life can get fucked over. It's less about the amount. Right? If 10 grand is gonna fuck you over, you you need to run your own in order to sort of verify that. If it's not, then, like, I, you know, I I can't tell you what you should or should not do with respect to your own risk profile. But I would say in terms of the ordering of of things, like, I think it's more important that people hold their keys than it is that they run their own node in just in a sort of practical sense. But you should do both.
That's the really the only way to to be sure that you have what you have. If only there was an easy way to run your node. If only. Yeah. I guess that that should segue.
[00:15:18] Unknown:
Yeah. Let's let's fucking go. So so you're the cofounder of Start 9 Labs. What's what's the mission? What is Start 9 Labs? Hit us. So Start 9 Labs' purpose is to increase the sell like, the digital self sovereignty of people on the Internet.
[00:15:33] Unknown:
The sort of short pitch is that, like, the Internet has become an its own force of nature. Like, we've had elections that are swayed by, happenings on the Internet. And so, the Internet is just way more important than it was, like, 20 years ago. And so, as such, it's more important than ever that people are the custodians of their own digital lives. And yet for the last couple of decades, we've been sort of outsourcing more and more and more of that to various large companies who don't have your best interests at heart. They give you but they all involve running your own server software, which is not unlike running your own Bitcoin node. So we just provide a platform to make that as easy as we possibly can while still letting the users retain as much control over their, digital lives as possible.
So the the product started with a one click install of a Bitcoin node. That's why it's pretty relevant to this discussion, but quickly extended to things like lightning nodes as well. And then, you know, we've also deployed, like, a a Google Drive equivalent, like a file a a called file browser, and and various other services that, we deem to be sort of mission critical to a lot of people's lives.
[00:16:59] Unknown:
Awesome. So, I mean, if we're gonna distill it if we're gonna distill it to, like, a marketing pitch, like, the cloud is someone else's computer and Start Nine's goal is to put that computer in your closet.
[00:17:12] Unknown:
Yep. That's exactly right. We we want you to hold we we want you to be in custody of your digital life all the way down to the middle.
[00:17:21] Unknown:
But you can be just a pleb that doesn't know what they're doing.
[00:17:25] Unknown:
Yep. Or we we we try to take you further out. We we try to give you more leverage. Right? Nothing about this is going to absolve you from having personal responsibility of some kind, but we can give you tremendous amounts of leverage where you only have to know a little bit about what you're doing as opposed to tons and tons of extraneous details that it would take to run this software were it not for the product like the embassy.
[00:17:49] Unknown:
Right. So, I mean, one of the things that I really like about the Embassy I mean, so so this idea of self hosting is something that we've talked a lot about on the show so far. It's still a very young show. It's you know, we only started at the end of 2020, and we've talked a lot about self hosting and, you know, running your own shit, whether that's Bitcoin or whether that's whether that's other things. And it seems like in this world of of censorship and and top down moderation from these centralized platforms, there should be, like, a pretty organic push to people basically moving to self hosted alternatives. Right?
When people get burned, they naturally have this incentive to to move. Now what it seems to kind of push back against that incentive model is basically ease like switching costs, like ease of move, And and that's, like, 2 fold. That's not only UX, that's also cost. Right? And I think one of the things you guys have done really well, because you're not the only ones, specifically in the Bitcoin space, you're not the only ones who are working on this kind of model, is you really brought it in at a very competitive price point. Yeah. You wanna talk about, like, the importance of of of that?
[00:19:05] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, well, it just it's a philosophy thing primarily. Like, the price point that we pick we brought it in at I mean, one of the things that my cofounder and brother, a n, Twitter handle doctor Bone said is that, like, if the technology isn't broadly accessible to people, it will be used as an instrument of, sort of inequality and, like, oppression. Right? And so, obviously, there's a certain level at which it becomes unsustainable for us, in which case, this technology does get brought to market at all. But, we're trying to keep it as competitive as humanly possible, in order to get it into as many hands as we physically can.
[00:19:49] Unknown:
I dig it. Paul, what what's going on over there?
[00:19:54] Unknown:
I'm trying to look at I just I just so, I don't know if this is a counterpoint, but a as a alternative solution, I recently bought a pie, got the case, got the hard drive, plugged them all together and put Umbrel on it. And that's been working really well for me. And I was just trying to figure out how much I spent because, like, it looks it looks like you can get the 8 gigabyte embassy for,
[00:20:21] Unknown:
for 300. Like, how big is the hard drive? Well, the the that's what they did. They've they they run it all off the SSD and pruned. I mean, they run it all off the SD card in pruned mode to get the cost down because the SSD is the most expensive part of of these other nodes. Yeah. The SSD is is is comparatively quite expensive. We currently do run everything off of the SD card for now.
[00:20:43] Unknown:
We do have an upgrade in the works. We've talked about this at various points. This shouldn't come as news to anybody who's been following the project. But for anyone who hasn't, the like, one of the forthcoming releases is going to be, moving some of that data to a more reliable, like, storage medium. Because one of the criticisms we've foreseen and rightfully so is that, like, the SD cost reliable as, you know, some of the alternatives. But we have taken already precautions. I know that 6102 is asking in the chat right now how long will the SD survive. The SD cards that we sell, are, like, high endurance models. They're designed to take lots and lots of write cycles. And even when they wear out from a right cycle standpoint, you can still read all of the data off of them.
So it's not like, a tremendous problem, but we would like it to be better. We're constantly trying to improve the product, and one of the ways that we are going to be doing that is allowing external drive support in the near future. It isn't just also necessary to for, like, Electrum personal server?
[00:21:43] Unknown:
Could you say that again? Don't you need the whole blockchain for for to do Electrum, or am I mistaken on that? Yeah. So so I think for
[00:21:51] Unknown:
for EPS, for Electrum personal server, like, Belcher's project, you do need the entire, chain. Actually, no. No. You you might not. I I'd have to actually check on that. And, realistically, I don't know if I can do that at at this exact moment. But either way EPS I think for EPS, you need the whole chain, and for Electromax,
[00:22:13] Unknown:
you can do pruned. And I I don't it's the other way around. Yeah. It looks like I I'm on the Oh, yeah. It is the other way around because Electromax is the server one. It's better for a server.
[00:22:24] Unknown:
Yeah. And so so what we do right now also is that there's we have a a secondary service on the embassy called Bitcoin proxy, which will dynamically fetch blocks. Like, when when it it's asked for a block, it'll dynamically fetch it from up here and then verify it against the headers that you keep. So for people that don't know how, like, the the the pruning system works in Bitcoin Core, it's that the block data itself is erased from the disk, but the header, is kept. And it has to be kept for proof of work reasons, which is how your node is able to know what the most valid, or the with the highest consensus, chain is.
And so, all you would need to do is download the block from up here and then check it against the header that you kept and, you know, you would still know that it was valid even though you didn't have it on disk. But you don't have electrum
[00:23:12] Unknown:
support anyway right now?
[00:23:14] Unknown:
We don't have electrum support at at the moment, but we are working towards getting I I think BWT is something that we were looking at for a bit, which is Shesx project, which is also Electron based. And that works for pruned. I know that works for Pruned node. It's on it's on the service road map on the website. The
[00:23:33] Unknown:
the I mean, the key thing here is is Keegan said the, and and I the reason I'm answering this is because this is the first critique I gave them. But you missed this, Keegan. Is is is it 2 fold with the SD card. Right? You use performant SD cards as performant as possible, and then second of all, you cover your ass with the backups. And whether that's the seed backups or with lightning, you have static static channel backups to a USB drive. Right?
[00:23:59] Unknown:
Yep. Yeah. You can plug in, any any, like, storage medium into the USB port, and then you'll be able to back up the the entire service data and restore it, to another embassy. It's like the we don't do anything fancy necessarily with, like, the the data storage, so you wouldn't necessarily have to recover it to a an embassy. But for obvious reasons, we don't support support one click restores to anything other than the Embassy. Yeah. But lightning, it's risky always. We do do something special for lightning in the case of both LND and c lightning, which is that, we don't actually backup or restore the state that can cause you to get all of your channel funds stolen. It's SCB. Right? A static channel. Just the SCB.
[00:24:45] Unknown:
So they'd automatically closes your channels and restores it to your seed.
[00:24:49] Unknown:
Correct.
[00:24:50] Unknown:
But so so the key here for the freaks is is trade offs are made to keep the cost down, and they were mitigated through these techniques. And an SSD version should be coming relatively
[00:25:04] Unknown:
soon, I guess. Right? Yeah. So, soon TM. It's like the it's it's like They're, not 2 weeks. I can't not really say it'll be longer than that. But, I do know that it is it more than one of our developers
[00:25:18] Unknown:
is working full time on that particular work stream right now as their number one priority, and we try to interrupt them as little as humanly possible. Just to be clear to me, there's not like a Raspberry Pi case that is exactly perfect for making a full note. And if and if there was, it'd probably be a little suspect,
[00:25:37] Unknown:
because it'd be it'd be too much too too too much of a good thing to a little hot honeypot. But but yeah. I feel like a RASPy a RASPy case is, like, a perfect arguing topic for Bitcorners. Like, everyone probably has their favorite RASPy case that's perfect for a node though.
[00:25:53] Unknown:
No. That's the thing. There it it should in it should include because they're they're coming out with ones now that, like, because you can there's this Raspberry Pi compute card. Right? So it doesn't have all it's it doesn't have all the IO broken out. It's just pretty much the chip. And then you can plug it into a board. And so do they have these boards that have their own IO, and they'll, like, put, like, like, an NVMe drive or something like that. Or or, you know, they they can do, like, PCIe expansion from, like, you know, this one tiny little compute card. But I haven't seen one.
[00:26:36] Unknown:
8 pi cluster. Exactly. Maximalist. No. But just you're sidetracking us, Paul. First of all, Keegan, the what were we talking about? We were talking about fuck. I completely forgot.
[00:26:53] Unknown:
Well, I mean, we were talking about various, like, pieces of redundancy and and, like, sort of safety, around these sorts of, pie projects.
[00:27:03] Unknown:
Right.
[00:27:04] Unknown:
I mean, if you don't have something, there's some there's some stuff in the chat that I actually did wanna address. 61 has just a couple of questions that the one, how long will the SD card last? And the the the ones that we sell, not the ones like, if you did the DIY, Embassy project, I can't make any guarantees about the quality of the SD card that you put in your, your DIY. But the ones that we sell from HQ will last as long as you're not doing, like, IBD and then nuking your device and then the IBD again in, initial blockchain download. Because as long as you're not doing that, it'll last for, like, you know, at least 4 years. It's I think that our like, some of our calculations had it at 6. But, you know, obviously, the the more activity you put on it, the shorter the lifetime is. But as I said, also, when you when they when they do fail, they fail to write. They don't really fail to read. So you can actually just copy it over to a new one and sort of keep going.
And then the second question that 60102 or thing that he brought up, which I wanna talk about is, using RAID, which is a redundant, storage medium such that, like, individual drives can fail without having the, the entire file system on the device fail all at once. That is something that we are considering very closely. I have been advocating for it for quite some time. It it's work that has not been scheduled, but, it's very much on our radar and things that I, I ask for one of our I asked I asked my my brother and cofounder, Aidan, weekly for that feature. So
[00:28:47] Unknown:
I think backup is really interesting. Like, I I had a node a little while ago that was just kind of on a, like, kinda old desktop PC that I had sitting around. And I set it all up and I spent all this time, got up and running, and then and it died because it was old bad hardware. And then it's like, well, I'm now I just gotta do every little step that that I this was like preambul. I gotta do every little step all again. So I do like this idea. Like, do do you guys know the concept? They talk about this in, like, DevOps, where your servers should be like cattle, not like pets?
Yep. I have heard that. Like, in cloud computing, you you want the the ideal state is that you could have one tiny little configuration file, and then obviously backups of important state. But but that you could with a touch of a button, spin up spin it up on any server in the world. And it's it's, identical, and it works just the same. Instead of one precious server running somewhere that you're tending to and you're terrified, what if this goes down? Because then I have to get all the way back to my current scenario that I've achieved over years of tending to this pet server.
[00:29:59] Unknown:
Yeah. The so I do I do wanna comment a little bit on that. Like, the the redundancy that you get from having, like from being able to spin these sorts of things up on demand is very helpful in most cases, but what it does is it introduces consistency problems between the data between different, copies of the server. So for things like your file servers, maybe that's not a huge issue. But if you do that with your lightning nodes, you're probably gonna get your funds stolen. So it's not quite as simple as it might sound in order to get things, to be redundant in that way.
[00:30:33] Unknown:
What would be, like, the per like, if you if you are your own bank and you're running lightning and I'm also interested in other services like like Bitwarden you guys have. Yeah. Like, that's something I use, and I pay Bitwarden because they're holding on to my passwords, and I I really don't want this to happen. To your encrypted passwords. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, I don't want I don't wanna screw that up. So I'm trusting them, but I would like to get into a place where I trusted myself to run the box that holds my passwords.
But, like, what is Yeah. I mean ideal scenario?
[00:31:06] Unknown:
I mean, like, we we have a bit word in application on the embassy today, and, you know, we do with that same backup system that I was describing earlier works just as well for Bitwarden, and it just replicates the state onto a second storage medium, which could be restored if you ever, like, lose or the the car breaks down and you have to restore it.
[00:31:29] Unknown:
So So you just plug it It's it's just data. You know? You just plug a USB drive in, like like, once a week or something, and you kinda back stuff up. And that's not, obviously, not perfect for lightning, but, you're you're kinda No. No. I mean, you can just have a USB drive plugged in all the time. Right? And all the backup. But no. But you don't you don't well, you don't there's like there's like a rule for this. You don't want backups in the exact same if if if your server catches on fire because Embassy Yeah. Sold you a shitty case. True. You know? And then that's gonna melt the USB right next to you. Yeah. So the it depends on what your primary risk profiles are. Right? Like, all of the discussion around redundancy
[00:32:09] Unknown:
and, security can only be considered in the presence of, like, an actual threat model. So if you're, like, principally worried, like, yes. Put plugging a USB stick into the back of your embassy and leaving it there is not gonna save you from a house fire. Not unless the thing is, like, like, very, very well engineered against heat or whatever, and I don't know of anything that does that. But it will absolutely save you from, like, a, like, data corruption on the card. Right? Right. Or or something like that. So it's it's not a panacea to leave it in the back, but it's also not useless either. Alright. So this is Oh, go ahead, man. This is a this is a like, so so when we're talking about, like, creating user friendly,
[00:32:51] Unknown:
UX, right, in in this type of environment, like, we're trying to we're trying to foster self hosting in a user friendly way, a lot of times that results in you kinda making decisions for your user in terms of what their threat model is most likely. Like, how do you circle that square? Right? Like, just like what you just said. Right? Is and for some people, you have USB plugged in is best, or some people, they do it once a week. But, really, the worst thing UX wise for a new user is almost being expected to make that choice and not even know.
[00:33:27] Unknown:
Yeah. That's that's a great question. I'm not sure I have, like, a great answer for you on that particular on that particular one just yet. We do want to get to a point where, backups are a little bit more automatic because right now they are manual. It does require user intervention. And we do we do sort of show you when your last backup of each individual service was to try to encourage, you know, for so that you know, like, if you're exposed or not. But, you know, the only thing that we'll get to, automatic backups is if we do some sort of cloud service, which we can do, but then that trades off the availability for that trust component. Right? Now don't do, dude, 6102 solve it. Backup buddy.
[00:34:12] Unknown:
Okay. So 6102 spends up an embassy, gives me an onion URL. I copy and paste. And that's my backup URL. And I've got like 5 megabytes or, you know, 5th, you know, like 1 gigabyte of whatever he he's willing to store for me on his embassy. Right? And so I encrypt it locally, back it up to that URL. And and we're we're we're IRL friends. Well, not we're not IRL friends. We're, Internet friends, and and so we just trust each other. And maybe I have a a few backup buddies in case 6102 lets me down.
[00:34:49] Unknown:
Yeah. So we would like we're actually very excited about the prospect of things like that, including not just that, but being able to pay for that hosting, that backup, with, you know, lightning micropayments over time. And as long as you're, like if it depends on whether you do full replicas or partial replicas. But the same way that we use Merkle trees and Bitcoin, you could use Merkle trees to, have very compact proofs that you still actually hold the data. It's but this I I I need to be responsible here. When I talk about that particular thing, that's that's like, we're not even seriously researching that yet. It's more about musing, about things that we'd like to be able to do once we've gotten the stuff out of the way that we need to get done in the interim.
For q q 2? No. Like, you know, we still gotta get the external drive support, done first and stuff like that. And, but, yeah, it's it's definitely stuff that we're very interested in in making happen.
[00:35:59] Unknown:
I just remembered, what I forgot, which is important because that was the first time I actually forgot something, on on Sysl Dispatch and didn't remember, within, like, 15 seconds of of just delaying time while I try and remember. I wanted to tell you, Keegan, that when I made that joke about 2 weeks, it was a joke based on, like, a big it's a Bitcoin curve? No. No. No. It's a Bitcoin it's before flattening the curve. There was there was Butterfly Labs, one of the early ASIC miners that said 2 weeks, you're gonna get your your miners, and also Mt. Gox was perennially 2 weeks away from adding Litecoin, which they never added. So it became like a it became like a Bitcoin meme that, like, every company was was gonna get your dream feature in 2 weeks.
[00:36:47] Unknown:
Yeah. So that was a that's definitely a meme, I think, that even transcends Bitcoin. Back before I actually got into Bitcoin, a lot of companies would be like, yeah. We'll we'll we'll have it in 2 weeks. I think that's just a more of a joke about, like, scrum and agile processes, which is a popular software development project management style, which everything is quantized into 2 week chunks. And so they're like, you'll have it at the next release. And it's like
[00:37:13] Unknown:
I never put 2 into so you think a lot of time these companies think it's just 1 scrum away?
[00:37:20] Unknown:
I don't know if they think that or if they're just trying to appease people. Okay. You know, we're we like, I I try to be responsible. I because here's the thing. I don't really get to dictate these schedules. I, you know, I work at the the pace that I can, and we get them out as fast as we can. But I'm not actually aware of all of the moving pieces at any given moment that causes a particular feature to be able to get delivered by a particular date. All I can tell you with certainty is kind of like what, you know, in the like, people who work at start 9's priorities are right now. That I'm pretty confident in. So, that's why I kinda made claims of that particular flavor.
[00:37:59] Unknown:
Fair enough. I'm glad I got that off my chest. That was really bothering me for the last about 20 minutes or so, 15 minutes. Too.
[00:38:09] Unknown:
So Matt. I mean yes? Can I ask you a privacy question?
[00:38:13] Unknown:
Yeah. Okay.
[00:38:14] Unknown:
It says support the show with Ellen URL, and there's a QR code. Right? Yeah. Already I had I didn't even acknowledge it, and 3 freaks already donated through it. Let's say, me me me or a friend has strike.
[00:38:30] Unknown:
Right.
[00:38:32] Unknown:
Does that does that docks you to pay that QR code with strike? Are you are you No. I don't know if strike I don't think strike supports lnurls,
[00:38:41] Unknown:
so I don't think you can.
[00:38:43] Unknown:
Uh-huh.
[00:38:45] Unknown:
V 4 l r 4 v three n is asking if I can move the QR code to block the Coinbase pro price. I I I'm I don't know, man. I, like, I I tried to make this work, like, 45 minutes before the show started. So, it's gonna be a work in progress. I'm gonna try and figure out how to move it around. It's just cool that you could have a static QR code just to the to the freaks that are listening to the audio stream. We have a static QR code up on the screen, using lnurl. Basically, if you scan this with a with a, compatible lightning wallet, it connects to the URL that the QR code is there, and it serves them a unique invoice. So every invoice is different, and it's it's a way to accept payments, in a static way that's more privacy conscious than, let's say, just providing, like, an on chain address.
In this case, it's, you know, it's not it's not my node. It's it's using fiatjaf's, LNTX bot, which is a Telegram bot, that's a custodial lightning wallet that provides you with lnurl functionality. And you can find my static QR code atln10 transactionbot.big sun.xyz/at mattodell, which is a fucking mouthful. So instead, the QR code goes on the top right. Did that answer your question?
[00:40:15] Unknown:
Absolutely.
[00:40:16] Unknown:
In the meantime, we've had 5 freaks. 5 freaks have donated through that. That's pretty cool. And I guess some wallets allow them to provide messages. So I I don't know. It was just something that I think is sorely needed, this idea of providing something that's static for donations, without having, like, a BTC pay server that doesn't and the key here is is maybe my privacy is still kind of not great on the receiver side, but the sender side privacy is significantly better. Right? So, like, if I if I had, like, a static on chain QR code, that would be way you can you could see all the donations come through sending address it came from. Right? Like, right on chain.
You can't do that with this.
[00:41:02] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, that's because Lightning in general does not actually propagate every payment to every node in the network. That's, like, the whole point.
[00:41:13] Unknown:
Yeah. I it's weird. Like, when lightning was starting out, I, like, learned everything about lightning. I was so into lightning. And now I feel like I need, like, I needed to, like, go back to lightning school. Like, I forgot everything I learned about it because I, like, stopped paying attention for, like, a year.
[00:41:32] Unknown:
And that's on me. Yeah. Yeah. There's, I mean, there's definitely, like, different levels of understanding lightning. Right? There's the sort of the the way that you understand it of, like, okay. It's just a series of of bilateral agreements between people. And then there's, like, the okay. Like, what messages actually get passed across the wire? And, like, there's the entire continuum between. And it's it's a very deep hole. Like, I myself actually haven't reached the bottom, and I work in this stuff every day. Right. Like, how how do you do onion routing if you don't
[00:42:02] Unknown:
how do you pick a route if you don't know what all the hops are?
[00:42:08] Unknown:
I mean, you do know every node in the graph and every channel that exists, but you don't know what the relative balances of each counterparty on that, channel are. So if, like, you and I have a channel and, like, we've opened 1, the whole the whole network unless we've made it a private channel. Like, the whole network knows that you and I have a channel together. But if it's like if I have, like, 1 Bitcoin on my side and you have, like, half a Bitcoin on your side, no one's gonna know that that versus, like, if it was the other way around. Like, you can't tell. The only way that you can tell is you can just try to route a payment through it, and it'll either succeed or fail.
[00:42:44] Unknown:
Right. Yeah. I got a lot I got a lot of work to do on this. But the the nuance the nuance there is if you have a private channel
[00:42:53] Unknown:
that is lower if you you could have a channel let's say me and you are routing nodes and we have, like, 14,000,000 sat private channel, we could have, like, a 1,000,000 sat public channel and we could route through that private channel, but people wouldn't know the private channel exists, but the max payment would be 1,000,000 sats. It would be whatever the public channel is showing. But you you could only route through only you can route through a private channel No. Unless you have a mirroring public channel. So sometimes sometimes routing nodes will have a public channel that shows less capacity than their private channel really has in the background, and that private channel can dynamically route through that private channel, if they have a public private situation, which apparently I'm told some of these large, you know, regulated KYC type nodes have shadow private channels amongst their their
[00:43:51] Unknown:
publicly broadcast channels. So so The reason you might wanna do that as well is because, that will gate the the maximum payment size that people will attempt to do. I don't know as much about how c lightning works, but I recently learned that LND will actually pick the, quote, unquote, optimal channel to forward a payment through, even if, the one that was requested by the the source was different. So if you have, like, 3 channels between the same two parties, it'll pick the one that's most likely to work. And so in this case, it might be your really fat private channel even though what was requested was that public one. And if the public one is only 1,000,000 in size and the the private one's 14,000,000 in size, the maximum payment size is gonna be like 1,000,000 and, you know, you're not crushing the entire liquidity of the channel in one shot.
[00:44:39] Unknown:
So just just to rewind a little bit, and I I'm sorry. I'll let you guys keep back on track. This is helpful for me. So, assuming strike supported, lnurl, I'd scan this QR code. My, you know, it was. Okay. Let's assume I actually have it actual lightning node. My lightning node would make a plan for like, I think I know how to get to this destination. And then it would ship it off in an onion or whatever. And then those will get past hop to hop in the hops in the the plan that I started out with. But along the way, those actual nodes could make their own decisions of how they actually routed.
[00:45:23] Unknown:
Correct.
[00:45:24] Unknown:
Nice. Cool.
[00:45:27] Unknown:
This is helpful. And but limit limited decision making. Right? It's not like they can totally change their route. But, like, if and and, Anthony from the chat, correctly points out that c lightning doesn't actually, allow multiple channels between the same pair of peers at the moment. So c lightning cannot do the thing that I described earlier. But l and d, if you have, like, 3 channels between the same two peers and one of them was requested and it won't work, it will actually choose, an alternative one, between the same peer. So from the the source's perspective, the route from a a node's perspective looks exactly the same even though the actual channel points that are being used might be slightly different.
[00:46:09] Unknown:
Cortic in chat asks, it's just scrolled off the screen, but something like, what are the KYC nodes? And and the idea with the KYC node, correct me if I'm wrong, it's it's the idea that, like, if I'm paying from Stripe, Stripe is KYC'd. And so and if I pay Matt, Strike knows, oh, you just paid this destination. So I know where this money went, and I know who it's from. So in some sense, strike is keeping track of who is get you know, not not that they know the name of the person at the other end. But, you know, it if it's publicly advertised, it might be pretty obvious. And so now there's a record somewhere that this this node received funds from this specific government person.
Like, a a government named person. Is that correct?
[00:47:00] Unknown:
I'm not quite sure I understand the scenario being laid out here.
[00:47:04] Unknown:
Like, the the privacy risk of of spending from strike to a a a random lightning node is that strike is keeping track of that payment.
[00:47:16] Unknown:
Right. It's it's it's yes. It's when when you scan when you scan a lightning invoice, a traditional lightning invoice, it includes a your lightning node's public key of the receiver. Okay? That public key does not change. Supposedly, there's work being done to rotate that, but right now that that doesn't change. So that public key can be tied to an individual, and, specifically, if the lightning payment has a memo in it, so I say, Paul is paying me for my baby shower. Right? Then strike knows that Paul is paying his friend to this public key, and that guy just had a baby. Right? Because they know the they know what's in the invoice as well. Now Yep. There's an interesting there's there's 2 interesting exceptions there. The first is a custodial lightning node, which is what the case is here with this lnurl test that we just did, or if you use BlueWallet or if you use Wallet of Satoshi.
These are 2 major custodial lightning nodes. The other one is Moon, actually, Moon Wallet, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite recommendations to noobs on mobile, automatically rotates your public key. So every invoice through Moon Wallet has a different pub key.
[00:48:40] Unknown:
Woah.
[00:48:41] Unknown:
Wow. It's pretty cool. I found that out today. Do they, like, fork,
[00:48:45] Unknown:
like,
[00:48:46] Unknown:
I don't know what to do with this. I have no idea what's happening behind the scenes. They could just be stealing every I I don't I don't think they're stealing people's money, but I have no idea what's happening behind the scenes. I just know that every time, if you go to lightningdecoder.com, you can't yeah. 61 and 2 just spelled it. It's spelled m u u n. Very cool mobile wallet, multiplatform. If you go to lightningdecoder.com, you can put a lightning invoice in, and it will tell you what is being shared by that invoice. And in that invoice, it'll always show a pub key, and usually that pub key should be fixed. If you're just paying someone's lnd on their start 9, you're paying their Umbral node, you're paying their Breeze Wallet, that public key will always be the same. With Moon, it's different every time.
[00:49:39] Unknown:
I think this is something that's really cool. This this is something we'll, like, learn over time. And, obviously, there there could be improvements to lightning as well, or there could be, l 2 or whatever. I don't know what that is. But but the but there is also there's a lot that we think of is what lightning is. It's just based on how it's implemented. So how c lightning chose to do it, or how l and d chose to do it, or how, LDK chooses to do it, or or whoever. It it and then it I think we'll, like, I'm learning more about lightning by, like, trying to differentiate between what the core protocol is and what the implementations do in practice.
[00:50:22] Unknown:
Yeah. Like, the the the different implementations, the some of the the things that we've already talked about are, like, you know, c lightning doesn't allow multiple channels between the same pair of peers. But, you know, l and d doesn't allow dual funding of channels, but cLightning does, like, recently, released experimental support for that. Or, you know, various, decisions made differently is actually quite hard to keep up with. I'm surprised that anyone can. I've tried, and I'm very behind. Some of them don't even define certain things at all, such as, like, LDK. Right? LDK doesn't actually define a, like, a storage medium.
Yeah. They leave that up to the user.
[00:51:09] Unknown:
We're still very early.
[00:51:12] Unknown:
Well, on this mail and URL stuff is built on it's almost like a layer 3. Like, it's built on top, and it's
[00:51:18] Unknown:
It's not really a standard per se. I mean, I guess, like, in this in this distributed world, this is how standards happen just, like, through peer pressure. Yeah. Right? Like, there's if the majority of wallets the majority of wallets fail when they scan that QR code. Right.
[00:51:33] Unknown:
Yeah. Let's give Jack shit about that.
[00:51:36] Unknown:
I mean, how long did it take to get Batch 32 into various wallets? Like, Coinbase didn't support it until, like, rather recently.
[00:51:43] Unknown:
But the cool part about Lightning is we don't have to deal with the consensus bullshit. Right?
[00:51:49] Unknown:
Sort of. I mean, Lightning you don't have to deal with l one consensus bullshit. Right. Like, obviously, there's there's a an l like, there's there's a certain amount of consensus in Lightning if it if only on how the messages are formatted. Right?
[00:52:02] Unknown:
Right. Yeah. There was a yeah. What was it? Like caps caps oh, no. That was back 32 caps addresses. Yeah. But I think wasn't there caps invoices? Wasn't that a thing for a little bit, whether or not we do caps invoices or lowercase?
[00:52:18] Unknown:
Yeah. I don't remember.
[00:52:20] Unknown:
I think we moved to caps. What? You could you could in a similar way to layer 1, you could fork yourself off of the Lightning Network by being incompatible with it. But in a very different way, you would not be creating a new money.
[00:52:36] Unknown:
Correct. Yeah.
[00:52:38] Unknown:
You just wouldn't work. Or or maybe because you had such a good idea, you'd work way better, and everybody would choose your your thing, and and then that's what would happen now.
[00:52:51] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a it's a completely different trade off balance, and it's pretty cool because you can have quicker development on, layer 2, which we're seeing. We're watching it happen in real time.
[00:53:02] Unknown:
Well and and, like, there's different this whole, like there's this tendency to believe that there's, like, a layer a distinct layer 1, a distinct layer 2, etcetera. But even within some of these protocols, there's, sort of a a stratification within layer 1 and within layer 2. And, like, one of the examples, I think is, like, some person just talked about derivation paths for h HD wallets should be standardized, and there's not enough peer pressure around that. Like, it took a long time to get those derivation paths. Like or BIP 32 even. BIP 32 is, like, sort of adjacent to layer 1, but it isn't technically part of it. Addresses don't even show up in the normal Bitcoin protocol rules. Like, if you try to look for any reference to an address in the actual protocol, like, you won't find it. You'll just find certain scripts are standard and certain scripts are not.
So, the the the derivation paths is another is an example of one of those things. It's like adjacent. And so is, like, lnurl. It's not part of the protocol per se.
[00:54:00] Unknown:
Yeah. Like, that's a good way to think about it. Yeah.
[00:54:08] Unknown:
Yeah. I it it is it is definitely a handful for someone who just comes into Bitcoin, for the first time, but, you know, I I I I I think at the end of the day, this is what happens when, you know, you're you're dealing with a protocol that for most accounts, from from what most people expect, is is gonna outlive us all. Right? And, it moves slowly. It is a dinosaur.
[00:54:38] Unknown:
And it needs to be. Right? Yeah.
[00:54:42] Unknown:
This is I think is a good segue. I don't know if you guys wanna talk about Taproot at all. Oh, yeah. I already I have it on the scratch pad. I saw you were in the meeting today.
[00:54:51] Unknown:
Yeah. I was kinda in and out. I was kinda managing some start 9 release stuff and also trying to, like, you know, actually help push that along. But, you know, I think I it's it's scrolled off at this point, but I think Anthony was saying, like, only one implementation matters at the out layer 1. We may we might see that change a little bit. And, actually, it might not it might already not be true because BTCD and Bitcoin Core are 2 different implementations. And they're I I mean, obviously, Bitcoin Core is, you know, widely widely used, but, some of the other implementations don't have trivial user accounts either.
And as we get into this sort of this Taproot,
[00:55:34] Unknown:
Wait. Who doesn't have trivial user accounts?
[00:55:37] Unknown:
BTCD.
[00:55:39] Unknown:
It's trivial. It's still trivial.
[00:55:41] Unknown:
Okay. We might have different definitions of the word trivial, but, it is like the preferred implementation for, LND. Right. Fair. We do we don't use it personally. Did you say Anthony? Yeah. Anthony says, don't get me started on b to c d. Yeah. I haven't used it personally, so I don't really have anything good or bad to say about it. I just know that, you know, it it is that preferred implementation for the l and d team, primarily due to the language homogeneity. They're written in the same same language.
[00:56:16] Unknown:
So so let's talk about Taproot, because I have I have Ben Decarman and Evan Kaludis coming on next week, and we're gonna do, like, a deep dive into Taproot activation. But, like, you can front run them right now, so
[00:56:30] Unknown:
hit the freeze. Yeah. I mean, though those those guys are definitely gonna be more knowledgeable and sort of involved on this topic than I am. But, basically, what's going on right now is everybody has decided they want Taproot, but nobody can agree on exactly how to get it there. And as a result, we don't have Zaprut. And so there's a there's kind of a the main divergence is really how forcefully do we wanna come out the gate on getting it activated. Everybody wants to try something, and the the safest way to do that by far is to let the miners try to activate it. But as we saw with, you know, 2017 and the Segwit and block size wars and stuff, like, the miners can drag their feet and not activate it, and, like, they do need some pressure sometimes. And miners don't control the protocol either.
And so you do you want the users to be able to have a say. And yet, you know, some people think that if you come out with a user activated soft fork out the gate, that that's a very forceful and, and or antagonistic approach towards the mining community. So that's where we're at right now. I think, you know, the the the latest developments are on something called speedy trial, which is, hypothetically designed to fail fast if it fails so that we don't waste a whole bunch of time, and ultimately not end up with, an activated taproot.
[00:57:58] Unknown:
As opposed to Ethereum, which is designed to fail slowly.
[00:58:03] Unknown:
I mean, I What? Maybe. I I thought it failed when the Etsy fork happened, you know?
[00:58:09] Unknown:
What's an example of 22 f? You just pronounced it Etsy. That's interesting. That's incorrect. It's e t c. Right? Okay. Sure. I like Etsy for like, maybe Okay, Paul. What what was your question? I apologize.
[00:58:25] Unknown:
What's what's what would what would be an example of being too agro to minors? Like, the minors are like, woah. This is all moving too fast for me. Like, what would that be be?
[00:58:35] Unknown:
Well, okay. So the What's the extreme case of that? The one of the proposals on the table known as BIP 8 has something that is called forced minor signaling, which means that even without the presence of actual Taproot transactions that they have to verify the rules for, they have to sort of raise their hand and say, yo, I'm I I promise I'm verifying these rules. And they have to say that in every block irrespective of whether Taproot transactions are in it or not. And, and if they don't, then that block is considered invalid, and it would basically cancel their revenue. So in some sense, they're not really doing any wrong because they're not actually After after
[00:59:13] Unknown:
it's activated, it would be that. Right? Correct.
[00:59:17] Unknown:
During what is called the lock in period. Right? So, yeah, a lot of this is enormously complicated stuff, but the the original proposal, the the BitPay proposal basically said, okay, That miners will include a special bit in the in the Coinbase transaction that basically says, hey. We support Taproot. And once a certain threshold of them do so, then it will, involve like, it it'll basically say, okay. Like, Taproot's locked in, and now everybody has to signal for it. And if you don't signal for it, then your, blocks are invalid even if there are no Taproot transactions in it. And then It seems fair. Once it's locked in Yep. And that's that's right. It's it it is locked in, in which case it's definitely fair that if it's once it activates, if they're approving transactions that are invalid under the Taproot rules, that their block should be rejected and that they lose out on the revenue. I guess But the the question is around like the the minor in a coma?
Yeah. It would break it for the the minor in the coma, which, you know, on one hand, you wanna have you don't wanna be, like, ridiculous with how how quickly and how, forcefully you push these things through. But at the same time, you can't let one minor dragging their feet, be a reason to to hold up the rest of the network upgrade either. I know that so so in the chat, v 4 lr4v3n, is asking, is it possible that the lot consensus will not be achieved? So let me let me talk about what lot is for those of you who who don't know. It's this idea that once we we're gonna let miners try to voluntarily activate this for a period of time. And the the most common agreed upon time frame for this is, like, 12 months after the deployment happens. But what happens at the end? Because if we don't we don't have a UASF, then miners effectively get a veto over the protocol or over over the activation of of, the of of Taproot. And the problem with that is that if my if not everybody does mining and it's only you only require, like, an 11% of miners tagging their feet on it in order to sort of veto it indefinitely.
A a a vanishingly small portion of the community can essentially block this upgrade. So we don't necessarily want that. But on the other hand, the only real way to to avoid that scenario is to sort of have a a brick wall UASF at the end that says, alright. You know, we don't really care, Miners, what you were doing in the meantime. We're going to, we're gonna activate this thing anyway, and you can either lose the revenue or you don't. And some people view that as unnecessarily forceful. I don't personally happen to agree, but, that is the other view. And it's actually, you know, of the long long time contributors to Bitcoin Core, that is actually the majority view is that it is too forceful to start with a lot equals like, with a UASF,
[01:02:15] Unknown:
finale, so to speak. It seems like it's you're trying to decide so much upfront. And, like, the whole point would be that you're trying to push this out to the network so that the, like, the network can signal what it wants. If you're like deciding everything all at once, it's just, I don't know. Seems it seems it seems to place so much on the developers to be correct in assessing what they think everybody wants.
[01:02:45] Unknown:
That I think you're right. And and that's actually the impetus behind the the speedy trial initiative that's going on right now. So after there was a lot of debate and argument and largely not coming to consensus on the the lock in on time out parameter, the l o t if you've seen it, People were like, okay. Let's try essentially what is a, no lock in at the end. But let's make the period really short so that if it fails, it fails quickly and we don't lose a an entire year worth of time waiting for something that's not gonna happen. And we can just let the miners activate it early if they want. And if they don't, then we can revisit this discussion in 3 months. So that's kind of the that that has the most consensus behind it right now. And that's hear,
[01:03:31] Unknown:
so so first of all, Keegan, fucking fantastic explanation. Yeah. So Thank you. So the freaks, everything he said, I co cosigned a 100%. Keegan, were you here for 20 seventeen's, war?
[01:03:44] Unknown:
I I I I owned Bitcoin as early as 15, but I didn't really get into the space until the ICO bubble mid You were in part of the war. 2017. Correct. I I kinda I I came in right at the end when no two x was the, like, Twitter that that sort of Twitter signaling. Right. And right before the s two x, New York agreement failed, that's when I sort of came in as a a person as a contributor to the space. So so so the discussion doesn't make a 100%
[01:04:17] Unknown:
sense if you didn't experience that. Because what happened, Paul, is that is basically there's a there's a whole faction of Bitcoiners that that lives with PTSD right now. Like, at least they're rich, but they're they're rich people with PTSD, and, they they they they think the miners are out to fuck them because they we had Bitmain as the main the main miner. They were the main ASIC manufacturer, and they were the main miner, and they were the largest pool. So they were they they controlled probably the most we don't know for sure, but they probably controlled the most hash rate directly themselves. They definitely had the largest pool, and they were definitely the main manufacturer, and they fucked with us. Right? So so what happened? What happened was we had to do, basically, a Mexican standoff where users and devs kind of combined in an alliance to to run to run the UASF.
Right? And and and so now you kinda have this PTSD where people have gone a little bit to the extreme, right, where they just want to they just wanna jump to the Mexican standoff right away, when in fact, we can just probably just have, like, a Mexican brunch. And, like, we can just we can, like, make some eggs and see if the miners wanna eat the eggs, and the miners eat the eggs, and there's no need to point guns at each other.
[01:05:42] Unknown:
I I hear that. At the same time, the thing that the thing that bothers I just feel like so much is being placed on the developers. But the developers are also seem to be the ones that are against giving, like a flag ability to when you run the software, you decide. And I I I just think, like like, you know, if if if it's non controversial, you know, let people run the software and and and flag that they're interested in. Because if if if if you get in this habit, and and it seems unlikely that we're gonna get a hap in a habit of easy soft forks, but we're gonna I mean, that's not happening. That's not happening. Of easy easy soft forks. You know, you you can have sort of the like, oh, I just run whatever the developers
[01:06:29] Unknown:
put in there. And if it changes consensus, it changes consensus. Right. You know? There's a bigger discussion here that I wanted to bring up with Keegan because I know he's super active in the Taproot discussion as well, is is that we have more users now. So so when 2017 happened, we didn't have we didn't have Raspberry Pi Blitz. We didn't have Nava. We didn't have My Note. We didn't have start 9. We didn't have Umbral. Where do you see yourself, Keegan, in terms of like, how does I'm a user. I'm using star 9, right, as my Bitcoin node. How do you provide to that user like, what what is your goal with that user in terms of these types of situations? Right?
[01:07:17] Unknown:
I'm sure you thought about it. Yeah. For sure. I've actually run polls with our customers as well. So, philosophically, we want our users to be able to choose. Because at the end of the day, that's what everyone's doing anyway. Nothing's stopping you from forking Bitcoin Core right now, putting in Taproot activation code, and running that as your node. Right? Obviously, if you're the only one doing that, there's you're you're gonna just fork yourself off the network and and create a coin whose only user is you. But, at the same time, like, you know, node operatorship is political power in Bitcoin, at least to a degree.
And we don't want to make that decision for our users if we can avoid it. Right? So, ideally, what we would like to do is to make this configurable. I'd like it to be in core itself to be a flag about whether or not, you know, if there's no consensus on a particular variable, what I would like is for court to release it in a configurable way. There are technical limitations to that as I've been told, as well as it's not like, there are some people who are genuinely worried that letting users just sort of set a flag when running a piece of software that causes them to get onto the wrong side of a chain split, if you will, that that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. And I I sort of understand that as well. But I think that at the end at the end of the day, if that's not what if we're not gonna allow ourselves to be there, then Bitcoin doesn't actually make a lot of sense anyway. Yeah. Because that's the only way you can govern a system with no central authority is this messy way. That's so beautifully put. Because yeah. If if if Bitcoin isn't the sort of thing where you can accidentally
[01:08:53] Unknown:
soft fork yourself out of consensus and now you don't have any money, then what is Bitcoin? Is Bitcoin a thing that that, you know, the Bitcoin core gives us to on a little gold platter and we say thank you, Bitcoin core?
[01:09:08] Unknown:
Yeah. So, like, you know, but, obviously, like, you know,
[01:09:12] Unknown:
chain splits are bad for every user of Bitcoin. Like, that's that's an you know, that is not a controversial statement. So I I understand that for the size of idiot who chain splits himself because he forks it himself. It's especially bad for that guy. And if you Especially bad for that guy. If you win it solo fork Wait. Wait. Paul. If you and, like, 5 of your buddies soft fork Bitcoin, like, yeah, it really sucks for you. I'm so sorry. But it doesn't hurt any of the rest of the Well, let's it's important to make clear here, like, I understand the provocative like, it's fun to be provocative, but it's important to make clear here that if you fork yourself off the network, you're not interacting with anyone else. There's, like, nothing to you're not you have no real threat of lost money,
[01:09:54] Unknown:
as long as you're not, like, also sharing your private key with the world. Like,
[01:10:00] Unknown:
the the the threat of lost money is minimal. You you don't even have anyone to interact with. No one's on your fucking network. Well, you need your 5 months. It's it's lost it's lost income. Right? It's like the only thing that you lose is that in that period where you forked yourself off the network and didn't realize it, if you traded something of value that you had beside like, for for
[01:10:18] Unknown:
supposed Bitcoin and, you know, you didn't, like But that requires a second partner. It requires someone else on the network with you. Could could we make this, like, a little more tangible? Because I I really have been trying very hard to understand soft forks a little bit better. Let's say me and my 5 idiot buddies start a Bitcoin fork that activates Taproot right now. And then we start doing Taproot transaction, like, Schnorr. We were using Schnorr all the time and we're sending Bitcoin back and forth with with each other using Schnorr. You know, like, what what actually happened there?
[01:10:55] Unknown:
So here's the problem. Right? So, well, let's talk about what Taproot naturally is. Let's well, it's actually I I don't think that's true, Matt. Like Well, on the real Bitcoin, nothing happened. That's not true. Because here's the or not not anything happened necessarily. When you when you send money to a Taproot output today, if you if if you were to basically generate something that had Taproot semantics and you sent money to that today, anybody could steal those funds because the way that undefined behavior works in the Segwit script versioning system works Oh, thank you. Is that the semantics of transactions are anyone can spend unless the block is later rejected. So it's
[01:11:34] Unknown:
right now, there's this sort of gentleman's agreement that nobody uses Segwit versions that don't have defined behavior. And, you know, because you'll get your coins stolen. And just to make that clear, like, the if the man in the coma wakes up, right, and and they were they went into the coma in, like, 2015, and they wake up right and they look at Bitcoin right now, they're like, well, what are all these transactions that are totally spendable? Like all these Segwit transactions look spendable to them. Right? Correct.
But they can't spend them because
[01:12:05] Unknown:
So under the soft fork rules, they wouldn't be able to spend them. But under the previous rules, they would. And so as long as the majority hash power is, enforcing the soft fork, then, everything will converge. And the you'll eventually end up on a state where even if you tried to to spend those funds, you wouldn't be able to. So so the man in the coma would wake up
[01:12:27] Unknown:
or sink his node, Look at the blockchain. See all these un like spendable transactions. Like, oh, well, it looks like I could spend that. So he transmit a transaction saying, hey, I own these this money now. But the the the network, which is now on Soft Fork, the Segwit soft fork would would would reject his transaction?
[01:12:49] Unknown:
Correct.
[01:12:50] Unknown:
Okay. So similarly, with the with with Taproot, with the Schnorr, if if somebody started, I'll see now I lost track of it. Well, I have my my 5 friends who soft forked Bitcoin and they started snore transactions with the taproot transactions with each other. So all their, all their spins would look if they transmitted those, those to the Bitcoin network that exists right now, their money would just look spendable to the Bitcoin network that exists right now. So anybody could claim those funds. Is that correct? Correct. That's right.
[01:13:29] Unknown:
The soft fork rules prevent that except for the specific case where you're able to do a taproot witness. Right? And so so that's only one component of it, though. The other problem and this is actually the the bigger source of contention, I think. And that is what happens in the chain split scenario. Right? So let's say that some people are enforcing some of the rule the enforcing these new rules and some people are not. And what that means is that if a miner mines a block where a non Taproot witness is used to spend a Taproot output, then, half of the nodes will accept that because in their minds, anyone can spend this and the other half will not.
And if the majority hash power is actually, following rules that are not, Taproot compatible, then you like, on upgraded nodes can get themselves into this state where they they think the the the heaviest chain that they can see is the valid one. And, they'll that will be one side of the split and then the ones that, are validating Taproot rules will reject that heaviest chain and will take the second heaviest chain, as the alternative. And now all of a sudden there's 2 different ledgers that seem from an economic standpoint to have equal validity, and that's really bad.
[01:14:50] Unknown:
Because it doesn't matter how much hash rate you you have. If you are following the wrong rules, you're not Bitcoin.
[01:14:56] Unknown:
Correct.
[01:14:57] Unknown:
But maybe not. What are the correct rules? Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. If I broadcast a Tappr transaction today, Tappr is not activated. All the nodes, 99% of the nodes are gonna reject that transaction. They're not even gonna take the transaction. Right? No. That's not true. Oh oh, standardness. Yeah. There there might be a standardness issue. It
[01:15:23] Unknown:
it but if if a Taproot transaction shows up in a block, then it will be spendable by anyone. Now that said, I think that's a lot of stuff. Though, if I did a transaction right now with Taproot? If you mine it yourself or you submit it directly to a miner, it it could. Right? No problem. Because there's nothing there's nothing invalid about the transaction, and that's what makes this a soft fork. If it was fundamentally invalid by the consensus rules, Taproot would be a hard fork.
[01:15:53] Unknown:
Right.
[01:15:54] Unknown:
So what is Anthony saying? There's some nonstandardness too where presegment nodes won't relay those transactions in the first place.
[01:16:02] Unknown:
Yeah. That's that's kinda what I was saying, which is that, nodes that see this transaction and they don't understand it, they might just not relay it. It won't technically be invalid as in if they get a block with that transaction in it, they're not gonna reject the block, but they're not gonna relay the transaction.
[01:16:19] Unknown:
So it's not getting shared around the mempool?
[01:16:22] Unknown:
Correct.
[01:16:23] Unknown:
Interesting.
[01:16:28] Unknown:
Well, that's very confusing.
[01:16:30] Unknown:
It's enormously like, it's it's it's enormously complicated stuff. I think that, like, even the the experts and I don't I don't even consider myself probably, like, in in the most knowledgeable on this particular issue. Right? They're like people like Luke Junior and Matt Corleau, despite being on vehemently opposite sides of this issue, know far more than I do. But it's like even even the experts are still in some sense speculating. Right? This is a a science and an art that is being defined in real time.
[01:17:03] Unknown:
I think that the important thing is the important thing is if you fucking hold your keys, you sell your chairs, you buy Bitcoin, you stack SaaS, you stay humble, you're holding your own keys, you run your own node, Like, you can just send out you can just sit it out. You can just sit it out. You don't have to, you know, worry about it. Like, maybe maybe you're, like, hot you're, like, your your hot funds are at risk if something radical happens. Your your lightning funds are whatever. You're spending shit. But, like, your your cold storage is just whatever. You just you just let it go and and people might get angry at each other, but in 2 months, 4 months, 6 months, like, they'll work it out. Right? I I I want to,
[01:17:47] Unknown:
I'm hold Bitcoin's designed to pump forever is what some people say. Yes. And and and Some people do say that. For that to be true, it has to totally work.
[01:17:59] Unknown:
It has to It shouldn't have to totally work. Nothing totally works, Paul.
[01:18:03] Unknown:
It can't well, it can't have a fatal flaw.
[01:18:06] Unknown:
Right. You don't have to totally work to not have a fatal flaw.
[01:18:10] Unknown:
Here's the thing. Even no no matter what the conclusion of this Taproot thing is, right, even if it results in a a full on chain split, that let me make something abundantly clear. That will set Bitcoin back in terms of adoption enormously, but it will not kill Bitcoin. Bitcoin, the network will still keep pumping out a block every so often. It probably won't be every 10 minutes because hash power will be split, but,
[01:18:36] Unknown:
it will eventually get back to 10 minutes. Hash power is not gonna be split for long. The the the the incentives basically ensure that.
[01:18:45] Unknown:
Yeah. And I think that the sound Yeah. Almost wanna see that happen because I wanna see Bitcoin be able to snap back to, like, like, I yeah. I don't actually wanna see it happen. But, like, I want I want to have governance further fleshed out. Like, governance is not something that Bitcoin necessarily solves. You know? Like, everything that's inside of Bitcoin's purview, Bitcoin solves very well as far as my investigation of it so far.
[01:19:13] Unknown:
But Bitcoin is chaos insured. Like, no one every other every other state of humanity has resulted in chaos being controlled by a few people, resulting in lack of chaos, and Bitcoin just guarantees that chaos will exist forever.
[01:19:31] Unknown:
Yeah. Spend 3 seconds in the Taproot activation discussions, and you'll see that. No one can take control. Yelling at each other. Well, I I I shouldn't say they're yelling at each other. They're just they're just strongly disagreeing with each other. I don't want anybody to be in charge. I want to to better understand why all the incentives work to perpetuate Bitcoin.
[01:19:52] Unknown:
And part of those incentives are how do we do governance.
[01:19:56] Unknown:
I don't want anybody in charge that would suck. And I would leave it. I'm I'm gonna go ahead and say that here's here's the way that I predict things are gonna go. Right? Now either the miners are gonna activate it no problem when a release comes out, and that that that's not gonna be a a thing that doesn't happen. Right? Like, we'll eventually get to a set of parameters we can agree on that doesn't involve a forceful UASF, to start because that seems like the way that core is going to go. And if miners activate, we're gonna get Taproot. No problem. So that's a happy case. No one's really, like, hyper concerned about that because that's the somewhat obvious way that this plays out, in the most probable case. But we're also need to we're talking about the edge cases here. And the way that I see this going is that if the the miners don't activate taproot for whatever reason, right, you will eventually see a UASF movement. The UASF movement will eventually happen.
Too many I have not seen a single person, argue against having Taproot at all. The only disagreement has been on around how we get it there. And, you know, the the intolerant minority is going to be the the UASFers, and they like, whether it's, you know, this year or, you know, several years from now, it's like it's go it's going to happen. The UASF is eventually going to to sort of boil over. So Like, if we if I don't see it going any other way. If Bitcoin is good,
[01:21:21] Unknown:
right, and a bad US UASF shows up, Bitcoin should like, let's say a user activated soft fork shows up that tries to inflate the supply of Bitcoin. Right? Oh, that wouldn't be a soft fork. That'd be a hard fork. User activated hard fork. So you know what? You know what I mean? Like, Bitcoin should theoretically have the right incentives in place to to fend off
[01:21:44] Unknown:
a a very bad UASF. Right? Right. If no one runs the rules, like, it won't, result in any changes. Right? Even if the code got written. So, like, if if you inflate the supply like like, Bitcoin social contract is 21,000,000. Alright? Like, no one's gonna run those rules. The reason that the Taproot rules have a near certainty of going through is that they're noninvasive. Right? The the Taproot outputs, the way that they work is that, look, if you don't wanna use Taproot, you don't have to use Taproot. If you don't wanna even want if you don't even wanna validate the Taproot rules, which I don't recommend, but, like, you actually can leave your node pointed at o.21.0, and it will stay in consensus with the network as long as the majority hash power is not trying to, push through transactions that are invalid under the Taproot rules.
But, otherwise, like, you know, you don't have to interact with the the upgrade at all. It's completely, opt in, noninvasive. And the presence of disagreement.
[01:22:57] Unknown:
The key aspect is is that someone can just pretend that Tapper doesn't exist. They can continue using Bitcoin.
[01:23:04] Unknown:
Right. Right? That's the that's the main difference between And so as a as a result, like, there's not really a disincentive to being, like, hey, okay. You guys really want this upgrade. It doesn't affect me in any way, shape, or form. Like okay. Fine. Add it. Right? There's there's not a strong disincentive to getting it activated. And so the asymmetry of the argument is going to eventually converge on getting it activated. That's not true for something that inflates the supply.
[01:23:30] Unknown:
To be clear here, Freaks, the reason this discussion is being had is because if Bitcoin is easy to change, if you're able to just have, like, an auto update to Bitcoin, that itself is a vulnerability. We can have an auto update that just adds vaccine passports or some shit.
[01:23:49] Unknown:
And and 102 says a a user activated soft work where, it it sends you can only send Bitcoin to a burn address.
[01:23:56] Unknown:
Right. Exactly. Or or, like, you can only send Bitcoin to the feds, and then the feds will will send it to where it needs to go. Right? You can just you can easily see situations where if you have an auto update, it becomes a vulnerability. So everything we talk about here is about being able to upgrade when we need to upgrade, in this case, or when we would like to upgrade at least, without the risk of an upgrade being the vulnerability itself. Right? And to go back a little bit, Keegan, where do you see start 9, like, in this world? Like, how does this
[01:24:41] Unknown:
right? Like, this is so confusing,
[01:24:43] Unknown:
and, like, you have a bunch of users. How do they deal with this, and how do you deal with that with them?
[01:24:49] Unknown:
So what I what I want and this is a very tricky discussion because there's, like, there's a certain level of responsibility we, as the publishers of these things, have to maintain. But what I would like is that should a UASF client materialize? So so first of all, if if Bitcoin Core does a release that includes Taproot activation code, we're just gonna put that as a package upgrade for the the Bitcoin, package that we already have on the embassy. If a UASF client materializes that gets a decent amount of support, we would like to be able to put that on there too. And, it will probably come with a 1,000 warning labels because what by running that software, you're essentially saying, like, these are the consensus rules I'm choosing to abide by. We'll probably have, like, a very long detailed blog post about what running that means or something like that. But, ultimately, I do not want to bar a UASF client from our package registry. But what about the opposite?
[01:25:48] Unknown:
Like, what what is the opposite? The opposite is someone doesn't wanna run it.
[01:25:52] Unknown:
They don't have to upgrade it. Right? They just don't update. Right? Let me make something clear about the embassy in general. There are no forced upgrades in the embassy. Right? The like, it it's a stance that we've taken since the very beginning. It's like if you install a piece of software, that software will not auto update. It might it might inform you that an update exists, right, depending on whether you've opted into the to knowing that or not. But it will not force you to update. And if you if you use a piece of software today, will you it will work the same way tomorrow. It may not be supported necessarily, but it won't be like it won't we won't just break your software ever. So if a UASF client comes out and you don't wanna run it, don't upgrade, period. End of story.
[01:26:35] Unknown:
And do you agree that it's like me personally, like, I'm not concerned about this risk, period at all. And and the reason the main reason for me is because there's so many competitors. Do you agree that the fact that there's, like, so many options for people to be running their nodes on on on least a Raspberry Pi, that it's, it it kinda keeps you all in check that, like, you're not gonna get, like, power hungry?
[01:27:02] Unknown:
Yeah. I think I think competition in general keeps a lot of like like, it keeps organizations honest. But even if we didn't have competition, it's a it's a fundamental ethos thing for us that we do not want people to like, we we do not wanna force upgrades on users. It's like it's like a it's a hard stop in any design discussion that happens at start 9. It's that if it takes away user sovereignty over the ability to run their own software, then it's a nonstarter. We will make all sorts of decisions about whether what things we choose to support indefinitely and what things we choose not to support and, like, dedicate our own resources to. But, we will never force like, for for for as long as I hold an officer position at this company, like, we're not gonna force upgrade on users. I love it. Right? Really like that that
[01:27:51] Unknown:
way of thinking about it. And and I, not to plug my own shit, but, like, a while back, I did a a a podcast episode about, it's called Better Won't Be Easy, and it's about UX. Basically, me being, triggered by, a certain podcaster who always complains about Bitcoin UX. And and the, the the kind of the thing, Oh, somebody. And so the the the idea is that, like, what would the easiest to run Bitcoin node be? Like, you click a button, and now you have a Bitcoin node. Like, congratulations. You know? That would be the best easiest to use Bitcoin note. You click one button and and now you have a Bitcoin note. But, well, what were all the decisions that were made? Like, where is that hosted?
[01:28:42] Unknown:
Who is that?
[01:28:43] Unknown:
Which version of Bitcoin Core, you know, is it running, and will it change underneath your feet? You know, if you if if it was so easy that all you had to do was press a button, you wouldn't be making the decisions that are relevant to running an economic Bitcoin node. I it's kinda similar reasons why people don't really have much care for, like, a nodes running in AWS. Or because you you've kinda lost a little bit of sovereignty. But you if you lost all the sovereignty, you you wouldn't be any there wouldn't be any point to it. And and if Bitcoin nodes were so easy to run that you could do it with a button, then anything that they have to do with, like, these UA these these soft forks and stuff, well, somebody could just spin up, like, 5,000,000 nodes, you know, if they had the money to do it. And and that would matter to the network if if if if those nodes mattered to the network. But it's obvious that they don't matter to the network, at least as far as I'm under I know because nobody's done that to try to, like, change Bitcoin so that they get, you know,
[01:29:51] Unknown:
like money So so yeah. Let me let me talk a a second about how we approach this in in other ways, at least on the embassy. Is that, like so the big, your Bitcoin note as it stands has tons and tons of configuration options, like, all all sorts of stuff that you could change about it. A lot of it can be, is is it spans the the gamut from trivial to, important, but still technical. The what we want our our our goal with the MSCN general is to get the software to a point where the this the only decisions you have to make are the ones that sort of have a consequence to you and that we take care of the rest. So we have a very, sophisticated configuration system that takes the the bitcoin.confile that is I always have to look up the syntax for every time I wanna change something.
And we've turned it into a GUI system where you can just click through all the options and and it will guide you towards, structurally correct answers, but it won't make any decisions for you on what values you put in there. So, obviously, you won't be able to put a word where there's a number where a number belongs or vice versa and then cause your node to to not start up. What we would like and this is kind of why I advocate at least to core to be able to have make this a flag or a config option in the, the in the bitcoin.com file is that that way a user could just say, you know, hey. I wanna run the UASF rules or, no. I don't want you to run the UASF rules. Start the thing and then be done with it. Right?
Obviously, that has a lot of consequences for the network at large, but it's no different than what it does is it reduces it you from having to know how to fork and write code to being able to do it from your home. So, like, we've done a tremendous amount of work to try to bring a lot of that sovereignty and eliminate a lot of the extraneous knowledge or decision making, from the product. And I don't know how the other node products compare in that particular way, but I know it's something that we've poured a lot of effort into.
[01:31:55] Unknown:
Well, I'm looking forward to you guys all fighting over this personally. Yeah. Me too. We will cover it on Rapital recap. I look forward to covering it. I I I think that's what that's what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin. I think it's really cool that we have all these different competitors offering user friendly solutions. And and I think they they like, if if you wanted to if you a 100% believed in Taproot, I would completely support your decision to provide, like, basically, shove that update down people's throats. I mean, I'd I'd prefer if you didn't auto update, but I'd I'd be completely fine with you offering the update without, or, like, with change log notes that are, like, this upgrades Bitcoin and does it better, You know? And I I assume other others would be, like you know, if it was actually contentious, they would be, like,
[01:32:54] Unknown:
this update is bad for Bitcoin, and that's why we're not doing it. Then they would do the opposite, and that's kind of cool. Right? Yeah. The the the that's the other thing is that in insofar as we do make choices that influence or or sort of constrain the number of choices users have, we will usually try to explain like, we we we try very hard to have full transparency on all the changes that go into any sort of package upgrade. But that's that's an ever growing art form. Right? Because, like, trying to distill all the pieces of code that change in order in into sentences that a user can understand, is more art than science. But that that transparency is super important because even if you do have the choice to upgrade or not, if you don't know what you're getting or if we tell you one thing and you get another, then you're kind of back at square 1. So, that's something that's important to us. I have no way to prove that we do that, right, other than, like, we we make we all the the packages are open source code. And if you kinda watch us like a hawk, you can you can see that we're we're doing that. But, other than that, it's something that we just we try to do better every day. Gonna start x-raying your own hardware and
[01:34:03] Unknown:
real get real get real cynical. About that, like, these open source apps, like, you kinda have this idea. You don't call them apps. I think you call them services. I think Umbrel calls them apps. Like, I mean, as far as I mean, on Umbrel, like, I haven't looked deeply in the documentation, but, like, the it's these are basically Docker containers that expect some some they expect probably Bitcoin Core to exist, a lot of them. I guess, obviously, Bitwarden doesn't. But, like, is is there some possibility there for, like, some some standardization or some in some sense, like, you guys could relinquish control over this this thing? Like, is it because it does seem like there's a convergence on this idea that I wanna have Raspberry Pis at my home that are running useful services for me, that are developed by other people. And while I would I I like that you guys are a company that are trying to make this easy, most of the value that you're providing is not, the the actual software that I'm running is not stuff that you all developed from scratch. You know, you're you're developing a a easy to use, easy to maintain, hopefully easy to back up with buddy backup system, trademark 6102.
[01:35:25] Unknown:
He doesn't believe in trademarks, so good luck with that. Yeah. So, like,
[01:35:30] Unknown:
we don't actually have almost any control much to the chagrin of our customer support effort, actually. But the like, yeah, there are certain points where we have influence. Right? Obviously, when you kinda go and download these packages from the, the the marketplace, we get to decide what's listed on the marketplace. And, you know, we will do some curation of that. We will eliminate certain choices because we think that they present harm to the users. But we actually already have engineered into the operating system a way to switch the, the source of package downloads.
We don't yet expose that in the GUI, but that will eventually come.
[01:36:13] Unknown:
Just like on like on Linux, you can add another Like an apps cache. Yeah. Exactly.
[01:36:19] Unknown:
And so yeah. We we have we're aware of the points of trust that Start9, the company,
[01:36:26] Unknown:
has. And we we try to eliminate them over time. It's a it is a it's a growing process. You should have to own them, bro. Yeah. Just own them. Like, what what is like, people's so so I have this service final message dot I out, which I never show. I like, if you wanna use it, fucking use it. I, like, I don't care. And, like, I came to the same fucking conclusion. It was, like, the main negative of the idea of offering a a a a a paid dead man switch is that you have to trust me to send the fucking dead man switch. Yep. And and I could I could I could do the metallic mental masturbation all over again, like, over and over and over again, but, like, it's solved by just having another service offer the same thing. Right? And, like, if you just have competition if you have competition, like, that trust is minimized and, like, that's what it is. You don't have to, like, create, like, some magical trustless system. You just have to make a system that is that is effective, and you have competition, and the competition provides the the needed customized. Right?
[01:37:37] Unknown:
Yeah. Matt, that that that's completely right. But at the same time, that doesn't alleviate us of the responsibility of trying to make things more trust minimized over time. Right. Because I think that's what we're all doing here. And number 2 is we can't control whether or not we have competitors. In fact, we would like to be so good that people don't go for the competitors. You're gonna have competitors. Right? Like, yeah. Obviously, competition is good for the consumer, but, like, we're trying to win. So, like and and so insofar as that's the case, we're not gonna be trying to, like, improve like, we don't wanna, like, shit on our competitors. But We're, like, we're we're focused on delivering the best
[01:38:22] Unknown:
you're right. There is no panacea where it's, like, completely trustless, but it's infinitely easy. Like, you're right that that doesn't Well, that's like shit corners. We can't make it better. The shit corners try and pretend, like, there's a panacea somewhere. Right? But, really, at the end of the day, you kinda just need some competition. You just need some redundant services.
[01:38:40] Unknown:
And you've gotta have, like yeah. You gotta have, trust for anything that you don't understand, or that you don't have the time to to understand. And you you have to have heuristics for how who and how and when you're gonna you're gonna trust. And so, you know, almost any company is is offering some sort of trust as a service. But, like like, aside from, like, the the how can people trust Start9? Like, it's it's for me, a lot of it's like like, I have lived you know, I I have a history as, like, a, like, a technology journalist. And now I'm a software developer, and I'm trying to, like, absolve my sense. But, but, like, like, the all of almost all the products in my life are preside provided to me by companies that want to have a monopoly and want to and and and somehow, it it I don't think it has to go hand in hand, but somehow it does go hand in hand where they kinda wanna rule me. You know?
Like like like they they they want to control how I use their product either as as because they think it'll make me happier or maybe because they think you'll This isn't an authorized application, Paul. Have you considered right clicking open? Yeah. Exactly. And it's so I don't know. It's just so frustrating. So, like, I I see something like start 9. And the fact that you guys are trying to make money on this, half of me is, like, I'm so glad because this is exactly the thing that I want in my home. I want the thing that runs my Bitcoin node that, that has easy to use backups and has bit warden on there. And maybe like, you know, a VPN or, or, or pie hole or all sorts of there's so many possibilities for self hosted services. And it's good that a good company is trying to make that right.
But at the same time, I see a company that's trying to make money selling things that are kind of in some sense, open source. And I think, okay. Well, what are they gonna try to lock down? What are they gonna try to make hard to use? Like, what are they gonna how are they gonna fuck me? That's what I'm not not even in, like I don't think you're gonna try to steal my UTXO's. He's a 100% going to. I think you're trying like, when I see that you're a business, I think you're going to you're trying to ruin my life in some subtle, prolonged apple style way.
Right. I mean like, fall in love with your product. It's a long con. In 20 years, you're gonna fuck you with the Apple Watch. Yeah. It'll be like it'll be like Imessage. It'll be like Imessage where, like, it starts out like, oh, wow. We got read receipts and, like, emoji reactions and, like, we're having a wonderful time and we're growing closer as a family. And now it's like, oh, Imessage means that if one person has Android, they're not not they're not your friend anymore.
[01:41:41] Unknown:
You know? That kinda that kinda fuck me. Yeah. The store the walled garden thing is is not necessarily something that we want to do. Right? Like, my my personal philosophy and and, you know, this is me speaking as myself and not to compete and they're rewarded for competing well, but that the protocols are open and permissionless so that if a customer is dissatisfied with someone's service, that they can easily take it to a competitor. Right? And and to to Matt's point, right, the existence of competitors is important there, and the the protocol openness is important. Right? I wouldn't be so angry at the way that their our bank situation was if I could very easily just like if if bank if banks were easily being able to be started, like, from 0, then we wouldn't have nearly the same, like, crony corruption that we do in the United States today. Right?
That that barrier to entry and that's intrinsically related to the protocol openness. So, yeah. Like, you're you're right to say that there are these sort of, like, odd incentives, but the the the upside is that the incentives to compete also are what brings, investment into the space that actually improve the the products and services that we have. And so there is this fundamental trade off between the totally open source. In fact, it's probably even a good thing that, you know, these like, these nodes need to be able to be run by a person who's just a hobbyist in their basement building it from scratch from themselves. Right? So, like, it's good that that exists. It needs to continue to exist because it keeps the rest of us honest.
But at the same time, right, like, there is there is real value to be created by, making these these things streamline and and investing individuals' time who need to eat and sleep and, you know or, like, they need they need food and shelter and things like that for them to take their time and trade it, to be able to invest in these spaces. So, like, it's it's a tough question.
[01:43:54] Unknown:
Yeah. I think streamline is a really good word for it because, like like, 95% or or, I don't know, 78% of what Apple does is make my life more streamlined. And then the other Fuck you. Other 22% is, like, making my life harder exactly because they're trying to protect their, like, their moat. You know? Yeah. So, like like, they they they have, like, the incentive to do both things. They wanna delight me, but they also they don't want me to leave. Like so, like, you guys have, like, like, cups. Right? You guys have your own, messaging service. And it always kinda bugs me because, like, it seems like peer to peer messaging should be more of a thing. Like, I remember at work, like, the Internet would go out. Back when we had offices, Internet would go out and Slack would be down. And so, like, you couldn't, like, chat with people who are, like, literally, like, a table away from you.
You know? And it's so so dumb that we don't have, you know, like, more, like, direct message. Anyways, so, like, you guys have cups, but, like, a lot of people are real into, like, like, sphinx right now. Like, like, how do how do those When sphinx? When sphinx?
[01:45:08] Unknown:
2 weeks? I public I published it to our beta channel yesterday. Oh, that's dumb. So it's imminent. Good answer. I am not going to reveal how you get to the beta channel on this cast because I I will get in trouble with a handful of people. But the point is is that the work has been done,
[01:45:27] Unknown:
and it's, you know, it's it's it's coming imminently. Who in the live chat is gonna tell us how to get to the beta channel?
[01:45:33] Unknown:
Yeah. I don't think anyone can. Well, actually, that's not true. They they absolutely can. If you if you go and run look. Look. Look. The operating system code, you can figure it out. Alright. I appreciate that. Puzzle. But but here's the thing. If you if you're if you are, like, if you are skilled enough to be able to figure it out, I'm not worried about, you doing it because it it's it's just fine. We do that because, like, things that we don't have the customer support, like, ability to do or things aren't refined enough that they're gonna generate a bunch of support load, we don't necessarily wanna publish it to, you know, a whole bunch of people who are gonna immediately ask us a ton of questions. But if you are skilled enough to figure out how to point yourself at the beta channel, you're skilled enough to answer your own questions.
[01:46:16] Unknown:
So Sphinx chat is pretty cool. Sphinx chat is a lightning based, encrypted messaging services that allows you to send, lightning payments. It every message is a lightning payment. So it's it's lightning payment native, and we have tribes for both Scylla Dispatch and Tales from the Crypt. So if you go to tribes dot sphinx.chat, you can find those. If you go to cidl dispatch.com, you can also find the join code for our our specific tribe. Just to be clear, like, that's such a stupid idea
[01:46:51] Unknown:
in the long run.
[01:46:53] Unknown:
Like,
[01:46:54] Unknown:
you should use lightning for discover if you know, like, somebody's public key, you can use lightning to, like, find where they are. But once you know where they are and, like, have exchanged some messages with them, like, encrypted it or whatever Yeah. I mean, I'm You should just you should DM, like, over Right. The Internet still works. Like, you know, the It lightning is a layer. The lightning is a layer on top of of of the Internet. And once you once you find somebody on the Internet, you should just direct message them. So so I think there's some nuance here, Paul. I think that it makes sense,
[01:47:31] Unknown:
that, like, why would I use a private chat through lightning with you? Right? You're my boy. I we message through Keybase or Matrix. Right? Like, we have we already have an existing channel to talk. Why am I gonna pay lightning payments for it? For a group chat, it makes more sense because for a group chat, you're able to well, with civil dispatch specifically, right, is is what am I trying to build over at Siddle dispatch Sphinx chat? Right? I'm trying to build a a place where you can have at where you can have actionable Bitcoin discussion. Right? And and and you can you can talk about things that are important for Bitcoin.
And because of the way it's set up, I can set it up so it costs you SATs to send a message. So we don't have spam, and it costs you SATs to join. So there's a there's a level exclusivity. Right? So you have, like, this kind of exclusive group that is encrypted that like, if if you're a spook, you have to pay the sats to be the spook. Right? Like, there there's there's an it's an interesting concept in in for group chats or so than for individual chats. Would you agree?
[01:48:46] Unknown:
Wait. And so well, I don't know how their group chat works. It is a very interesting concept, and it has a lot of good benefits. As separate routing to every single participant in the group chat chat. My understanding is yes. So when a if if there's a 100 people in a group chat, I'm sitting a 100 lightning transactions?
[01:49:11] Unknown:
Yeah. I yes. That's my understanding. It states to the it's to the tribe host as well. Tribe host is then sending the messages out. Isn't aren't they?
[01:49:23] Unknown:
That's actually that's a that's a great question. I'm I'm not actually sure That's what I'm saying. That's that's what would be stupid.
[01:49:29] Unknown:
I'm pretty sure that the try post is then relaying it out.
[01:49:36] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm I'm not I'm not well versed enough in it to be able to to comment authoritatively.
[01:49:41] Unknown:
I don't think they're lightning they're not lightning they're not lightning payments out, but they're relaying the message out via the Internet.
[01:49:51] Unknown:
Right. Exactly.
[01:49:52] Unknown:
And so they're they're taking on that cost, so they get the payment. Does that make sense?
[01:50:02] Unknown:
You should get Paul on here and have him explain it. I guess Oh, nice. But, yeah, I I I couldn't tell you.
[01:50:11] Unknown:
Okay. Well, anyway, it's pretty cool. I think it's cool. It's fun. The the the cool the coolest part is the streaming value, but that's that's podcast only. I mean, that that it's a very cool concept. I mean, fuck podcast ads. Right? Like, we're all fucking sick of that shit.
[01:50:29] Unknown:
I mean, yeah. I think a lot of us well and and, actually, this kinda ties into what what, Paul was saying earlier is that, you know, the the the downside of free products is that they the creators and maintainers of those either have to do maintain it through altruism, which may not scale, or they have to get paid for their work. And the nice thing is that if you pay someone to do a thing, you're they're much less likely to to sort of screw you out out the back door. Right? Like, in the case like, the the the most egregious violations of people's privacy and sovereignty come from, like, companies like Google who you're not paying a dime to use any of their products. Right?
Right. Apple is an interesting case because by and large, they actually don't screw you over. Right? They do try to create this walled garden that keeps you in, but a lot of times they're not, like, strip mining your data and stuff like that. At least not not anywhere remotely at the scale that, like, Google and Facebook are, which are no notably free services. So the, you know, the the goal that we have, like, at start 9 generally is to is to try to get paid when we do provide value and then, you know, not get paid when we're not. And that try that that keeps us honest. Right?
And I think that that's a good model for a lot of these things, whether it's podcasting and you're streaming SaaS for for, you know, seconds of audio feeds or or whatever. Because then you're not you don't have podcasters who are selling out to various companies who have misaligned incentives. Like, a lot of people just wanna pay for good stuff.
[01:52:06] Unknown:
Ty and Chad, I I couldn't read it for a while because it was behind Matt's stupid QR code. It's not stupid, bro. It's the future. Are you you wanna talk about stupid QR codes? Are you happy? Are you happy now? I can't read it. Something about nudes behind the paywall and sphinx chat. Thanks, Ty. I'm sorry that Matt hates you.
[01:52:29] Unknown:
Ty's the boss. He's talking about nudes. Wonderful person. Yeah. So, I mean, I think Sphinx chat, I love Sphinx chat. I think Sphinx chat is the the the key value prop of it is going to be OnlyFans. It's gonna be only sats. Yeah. Yeah. I I think it is is a fantastic messaging service, to do permissionless payments for nudes. 100%. And porn kills everything. Like, look look, at the end of the day, porn made every single major technological advancement we've ever had. That's that's overblown. You can go no. No. It's not overblown. You can go back to 1918 when they, like, had the first phone call. It was like a sexy chat, and you and you know it. You know it's true. The first phone call was a sexy chat. Well, like, the third one was. You know it was. Not the first one. The first one was, like, a public test. The first one. The first one's always a public test, but the one that made it matter, like, 17th call was the sexy chat. Right. The first one for money. The first one for money.
[01:53:30] Unknown:
It's always it's it's always sex Excel. It's in it's interesting because, like, even with developer you know, like, there's some there's some efforts to, like, support, like, developers, like like, for, Pierre has what is it? It's like for, actual for a pull request? Is it for an issue? Like, can you sponsor an issue or something?
[01:53:52] Unknown:
No. Bitcoin axe. Bitcoin axe.com. Very hard to pay developers.
[01:53:56] Unknown:
And I say this as a developer. You have bitcoindev list.com? Because, like, you you if you're if you're a developer and you think you can do something, you may be right or you may be wrong. And so so when someone asks you, hey, could you do this? And then you quote them a price. Like, the thing might be the hardest thing in the world or the easiest thing in the world. And and unless you've done the exact same thing before, you you're not even sure upfront. So, like, it is very hard to pay for development work. So, I don't know. I it makes sense that there's all these scammy startups that are trying to ruin my life. Well, I mean, this has nothing to do with development work. Like, no one's gonna use Sphinx to pay for development work, but they're gonna use it for to pay for, like, porn esque things. No. We were just I was just bringing it back to, like we were talking about how we're monetizing
[01:54:46] Unknown:
start We have we have Hamish Umbral. We have Hamish in the comments, Hamish McEwen. And he's talking about a VHS one because it had porn. BBS was porn. Internet was made for porn. It's always freedom of expression. And then Ty also wanted everyone to know that I'm a porno historian. So that's that's true. It's true. Right? What? The porn connection to technological
[01:55:16] Unknown:
advancements was, like, kinda overblown, but, like, I I'm not here coming with facts. So, like, I'm losing I'm losing. Look. The the killer in this case, Bitcoin is going to be to pay your VR fucking prostitute.
[01:55:30] Unknown:
It's just Yeah. We haven't hit that yet. Like, that's what it's gonna be. You're not gonna pay them in Libra. You're not gonna pay them in USD coin or whatever the fucking regulated coin is because you're not gonna wanna fucking do that. That doesn't make any sense. You're gonna need digital cash. You're gonna need real money. I miss Libra so much.
[01:55:49] Unknown:
That was some of the best times that I ever had in my life. Was, like, reading the Libra white paper and, like, watching Libra explain Libra to congress.
[01:55:59] Unknown:
That was that was so much fun, and they need to I just want Libra back. Dude, I just wanna say that I loved having you on a mainstream technology podcast. It was, like, really special that we had you for a little bit there. You're a you're a you're a Joe Kernan insider. You know, it's huge. You. I tried my best. I mean, I I I think our time is running out. So I want to hit some big points with you, Keegan, before we end this. First of all, what are your thoughts on Bitcoin being designed to pump forever? Do you do you think it's designed to pump forever, or you're just trying to have fun staying poor?
[01:56:43] Unknown:
So I'm I'm, like, famously the bearable. Like, so so full disclosure, I I work in Bitcoin daily through Start9. I like, my even just among the people who work at Start 9, my focus is particularly on Bitcoin. The vast majority of my net worth is in Bitcoin, and yet I always seem to be the bearish one one in any given room. So I I do think that it is designed to pump forever. I think that the rate at which it will pump forever is actually going to I mean, it has to decline, and it will converge something along the lines to to to something like what economic growth is.
But I also had this interesting exchange this morning on Twitter with Hector, who, plotted this very, interesting graph of the GDP versus the m two money supply. And, what it showed was that the m two money supply was expanding at a much faster rate than GDP. And I came to the the interesting realization that it's possible that as economies get more complex and the trade cycles elongate because that's why we have money is to be able to trade, you know, various goods and services between each other without having to come up with a a barter. And so as economies get more complex, people specialize more goods and services, the need for money, the need for liquidity in general goes up. And if it goes up in a nonlinear way, it actually might pump a lot more than I originally expected, which is because, you know, if the the economy gets super complex, then that means that you need you know, if the the economy is twice as complex for whatever, metric you wanna use and that requires 4 times as much liquidity, well, of course, that might in the fiat world, that'll involve an expansion of the m two money supply. But in a Bitcoin world, we can't expand the money supply. So the only thing that can happen is that the money itself will be more and more valuable in in response to that needed liquidity.
So I don't know where I actually stand on that, but that was a very that was an epiphany I had this morning that I haven't totally digested yet. So short answer is, yes. It's designed to pump forever. The jury's out on by how much.
[01:59:00] Unknown:
I mean, I think even in, like answer I've heard on this this stupid show so far. No. Oh, it was stupid show. You fucking listen to every fucking episode. That's stupid. I I, thank you for joining, guys, on this stupid show. I I 2 hours in. I I just want to in a post fiat world, Bitcoin still pumps forever. Yeah. Relative to goods and services, but by how much? But, like, the purchasing power the purchasing power is gonna increase forever. Yes. But not like a 200
[01:59:37] Unknown:
I I like this distinction. It's not it's not gonna do 200%.
[01:59:41] Unknown:
No. No. Definitely not. Don't. No one thinks that. Does anyone think that?
[01:59:46] Unknown:
But but and I haven't heard that. No. But it's it's gonna pump differently.
[01:59:52] Unknown:
But It'll pump it'll pump decently, like, you'll still you'll you'll have purchasing power increases. If we're gonna talk like a proper, you know, glasses on economist, economist, like Economics. You're talking Economics.
[02:00:06] Unknown:
You're talking you're talking just like increased purchasing power. Like every every year, you're just like your houses get cheaper. No no joke. That was one of, like, the biggest things, like, for me to, like when I went from someone who's, like, interested in Bitcoin and just live listening to rabbit hole recap and just like, oh, what what is this thing? You know? To, like, oh, I'm a Bitcoiner. Was that that realization, like, at minimum, it's GDP percent forever. Right? Yeah. It Yeah. It's store it's it's where we With variations. It's where we it's where we store our wealth. So however much wealth we create in a year, it's it's at least goes up that much. I don't totally understand what you're saying with these complex financial
[02:00:53] Unknown:
things. It's not complex, bro. Right. Right. What I what I meant by that is that, like, in a in a primordial economy where, like, you have fish, clothing and, I don't know, like, spears or something like that, The need for liquidity is much lower than in a an economy where you could buy, like, a 1000 or 10000 different things. So as the economy improves and people specialize more, that there will and there are more different things to buy, the need for liquidity goes up. But if the actual units of money that you have remains finite and the liquidity needs go up, then money becomes a more attractive asset to hold, which causes it to pump even more.
[02:01:32] Unknown:
So that was the realization that I had this morning. So, like, in a simple economy, I go to the convenience store. There's only one Twinkie. So I I only need so much liquidity. But in a more complex economy, there's like the the the convenience store could like 3 d print me 10,000 Twinkies on demand. So I need the liquidity to be able to handle that kind of
[02:01:53] Unknown:
Right. It it yeah. And it has to do more with, like, how how many different people have to be able to trade with each other until if you like, such that if you remove the money, all their needs would be satisfied. And that is,
[02:02:10] Unknown:
like, that explodes very quickly. I like that way of thinking of it because, like, the other way to go is, like, well, when do we introduce debt into this equation? And and I that just gets, like debt has has done so much horrible stuff to, like, my generation and the previous generation. Like, I all I almost don't wanna think about it right now. You know? I wanna stay so far away from it because I just want, like, real settlement, a real money, real value for, you know, for work.
[02:02:41] Unknown:
Well, so the thing about debt is that debt debt, when used for bad things, is bad sort of axiomatically, I guess. Right? But, having society in debt is actually very, very bad, and that's what we're noticing and we have been living through for the last decade or, I guess, longer than that. But, you know, having debt at all is not necessarily a bad thing. It helps finance a lot of projects that are basically that that they're they are net productive to society. They're net productive to the parties involved, but the order of events are not such that they can actually happen. So I think we'll still continue to have debt. But the nice thing about Bitcoin's finite and pump forever quality is that it sets a minimum interest rate floor. Pump forever. You have to you you have to beat, the what are the average investment, so to speak, in order for something to to work out. Because think about this. Right?
If nobody's lending any money and lending is, like, the only way that that projects are gonna get financed, then eventually GDP effectively goes to 0. Like, no net new productivity happens. And if that's the case, then you need point 001% interest, and then you're you're profitable. But if the economy is going at, like, 2% a year, right, in terms of the amount of output that it's generating, then you have to beat 2%.
[02:04:01] Unknown:
My favorite part about this show is is is I just had a bunch of smart people talk about Bitcoin being designed to pump forever as Bitcoin's design pumping forever. Like, it's just going up. Like, it's just every episode just the price is higher, which is gonna be hilarious looking back. Like, people are gonna be we're gonna be at sad stem parity, and people are gonna be, like, I don't fucking care what Keegan said about Bitcoin pumping forever. He was talking about it at point 6.
[02:04:29] Unknown:
Yeah, dude. I'm just like I
[02:04:31] Unknown:
Come come back to me when when debt is a has a free market price. When there's interest rates are are decided on the free market, come back to me, and let's let's figure out how how good debt is for us then. Like, when it when it's 20 20%, you know, for for a house loan, people aren't gonna be such a big fan anymore. And I I think that's gonna be real good real good for us. I just don't know why you brought premiums. Clear, I agree. Right? I just think that the the the financial instrument of debt is too useful to uninvent.
[02:05:01] Unknown:
But the fact that it's been abused for decades on end, or actually probably the entirety of human history, most likely Or I guess it's really since the invention of fiat money. So post 1971. If that's when things get just absolutely out of control. Right? Like, I'm not gonna sit here and try to say that what we're doing at at the US Federal Reserve is, like, good. It's I unambiguously think it's terrible. But I don't think that even in a sound money system that, Bitcoin promises, do we have no debt? I think that it will still exist. No. There's a 100% could still be debt.
[02:05:39] Unknown:
I mean, look. I'm a like, Paul, I'll still lend you money.
[02:05:44] Unknown:
I thought you're the guy that, like, turns people away when they want water.
[02:05:47] Unknown:
No. What the fuck, bro? You don't think I'm gonna fucking provide you and your family water? You've explained this to Marty a number of times. Like, I'm worried about all these people that they're gonna want water post post Yeah. But Paul, Paul, you and you you and yours are gonna get water. Like, I'm not gonna turn you guys away. Oh, I'm like the the cantillon. The You're in the inside. You're in the inside. You came on you came on dispatch. You were a cohost on dispatch. Batch. Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah. Any any any of the guests on dispatch, any of the ride or dive freaks in the chat, like, they'll get preferential water treatment. But everyone else, you know, it's gonna be on a 1st come, 1st serve basis. It is what it is. It's like, I can't manufacture water. Yeah. Exactly. We can do it. Keegan, we have we have, like, we have about 20 minutes left.
It would be who of me to ignore this topic. It is probably one of the most fun topics in Bitcoin. Your so called open source license does not allow commercialization of that license.
[02:06:52] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[02:06:53] Unknown:
You wanna defend yourself and why that is important that you have commercial protection on that license and why that still is open source
[02:07:03] Unknown:
by your razor? So we've gone back and forth on this, plenty of times. So I I will say that it's not it's not something that we are, unambiguously sort of, gonna or it's not necessarily a hill we're gonna die on, but the what fed into some of the decision making is that in a world where we're selling, here's the thing. This what what we're selling what we're we're helping provide is trustware. It's like a a piece of software that you have to be able trust. And in order to trust it, you need to be able to know what you're running. So we we want we definitely the entire company is in agreement that we want the the source code to be out there so that people can audit it. The question is around whether we want to sort of finance our competitors with our own hard efforts, to be able to, sort of essentially copy our business and and and move on.
So that's that's the essential tension. And the way that we came down on it was like, look, we're we're a young company. A lot of us are really like, we're we're working full time without pay. And what we don't want is to get, you know, 2 years down the road and someone to just, like, with larger financing be able to come in, copy everything, and and just, basically steal our work for the last, couple of years. Right. But, you know, obviously, that presents different issues with, you know, people being able to to, you know, fork it and and, you know, like, modify it, use it for personal use, etcetera.
So what we tried to do is strike a balance between allowing users like, anybody who wants to to build it from source, use it, for free, they can do so. At least that's the way we intended it to write. And if there are any, like, expert legal, folks who, like, look at our license and are like, oh, that license doesn't say you could do that. We'd love to hear from you because we're we're software developers first. And, yes, we do have some legal counsel. But, like, if the the license doesn't reflect the intent, it's not like we're gonna stay married to the license. But the intent is if you're gonna build from source and use it for yourself, you should be able to do that free of charge. No problem. You should be able to, like, you know, if you wanna be make modifications for personal use, that should be, for you. Like like, you should be able to do that without intervention.
We the only thing that we're trying to avoid is various other people just being like, yo. Oh, Start 9 is selling a bunch of devices with this operating system. Let's let's let's just steal it, put it on our own devices You don't want me. And sell right? You don't want me and Paul to just start start 10
[02:09:40] Unknown:
or whatever. Yeah. Or 10. Exactly.
[02:09:42] Unknown:
Right. And and that's 10 letters of It's the future of self hosting. There there's a really good example of this with with GrapheneOS, and what is it? Copperhead?
[02:09:52] Unknown:
But no. That's not a good example, but it it kind of is an example.
[02:09:56] Unknown:
Well, I'm I I I'm I'm playing the devil So you wanna talk about that? I'm saying the devil being the person who would try to use the government to enforce intellectual property. That was a that was an anger between parties. A better example is the is
[02:10:12] Unknown:
is, the fight that's going because that was just they were they were business partners
[02:10:18] Unknown:
And Right. But I but I'm but I'm just agreed. Right? You have this you have this scenario where there's a free and open source project, and someone else is trying to sell it and trying to monetize it, And they're kind of being an asshole to the people who made it free and open source to the point where you'd think, oh, man, I regret making this free and open source. You know? Right. But, like, I I I and I I said this to MBK as well. It's like
[02:10:43] Unknown:
He's the best example. He's the best so his because it happened to him. Right? He had a non he had a non partner completely fork his work, take investment based off of it, take preorders based off of it, and he commercialized his work, right, Foundation Devices. We we still don't have a hardware wallet from them yet. They have not shipped anything. And they took they they took investment, and they took preorders off of off of off of the work that him and Peter did over at CoinKite. But it it was open source. It was GPL.
[02:11:16] Unknown:
Right? So so I'm just saying put don't use GPO. Use MIT, and then add something No. No. Fuck MIT. Add something that to MIT that says, if I copy this, and I sell it, and I pretend like this was my identity. I disagree with MIT. So MIT
[02:11:32] Unknown:
MIT says that anyone can use your source whatever the fuck they wanna do. Okay? GPL says anyone can use your source, but if they use your source, it has to be open source. So what Star 9 does what's Oh, we're working on that. Yeah. What Star 9 does and what other organizations do is is they have a separate one that is that is you can do whatever the fuck you wanna do with it, but if you wanna sell the software, then you have to get it licensed. Those are the, like, the three levels.
[02:12:02] Unknown:
So it's like soft software open source. Joe Biden. It's like software plus the executive branch of the US The problem the problem with MIT
[02:12:11] Unknown:
is you could have a private corporation come in and hoove up all of your fucking things, all of your fucking code But they can't steal it. And they can sell it. They can sell it. But but they can sell it as closed source. MIT, they can sell it as closed source. Go for it. They're the asshole. No. No. No. But but with GPL, they're forced with GPL, they're forced to at least keep it open. And Who forces So if you're gonna if you're gonna do them. The I mean
[02:12:40] Unknown:
The government.
[02:12:41] Unknown:
So you're just, like, you're just saying, hey, but I'm saying if you live in a government world, you might as well go GPL instead of MIT. You don't wanna go MIT because MIT, you just allow MIT, you're just allowing them to just take your fucking software and just create AWS. AWS is all fucking MIT software that they just kept closed, and they just didn't open up. I'm a software developer. I avoid GPL
[02:13:03] Unknown:
like the plague. Because GPL is designed to be it's designed to be a virus. It's designed to ruin or not to ruin. It's designed to turn everything it touches into GPL.
[02:13:14] Unknown:
And that's the beauty of it. It's gorgeous. No. It's it's disgusting. It's trying to use government power to force people to gain this money. Way worse. I don't want fucking BlueWallet to be MIT and then just have, like, the fucking cash app just, like, releases blue wallet closed source and just takes their fucking code. Who cares? Then they're the asshole. If someone copies something, and they're obviously not contributing It should still be fucking open source at that point, and that's what GPL does. If if you live in a world that has fucking law and shit. GPL's for communist,
[02:13:48] Unknown:
and my fee's for anarchists.
[02:13:53] Unknown:
Are you calling me Matt? Matt?
[02:13:56] Unknown:
Are you calling me? I'm I'm trying not to interrupt. You guys both talk. V 4LR was upset with me that I interrupted you guys. So you guys just you guys let let us know what you think about the open source licenses.
[02:14:09] Unknown:
I I I will say this, is that we GPL is the only other model that I think that we would try to consider. Right? And, you know, that I I I actually can't say anything definitively about where we're gonna be going with this, but I will say that things like the MIT are pretty much off the table, at least for now. The unlicensed 61 dot 2 talked about is off the table for now. And, you know, that just has to do with the fact that, like, we're you're you're we're committing all of our effort to to do this on a daily basis, and that has to get financed somehow. Look. If someone has a better idea for how to finance this, like, this work, because we like, this value creation indefinitely, like, I I'm I'm not gonna sit here and say that this is the only way we're ever gonna make this work. It's just we haven't figured out a better way, and we would like to be able to keep doing this. We think it's valuable. We think other people think it's valuable.
And,
[02:15:07] Unknown:
you know, that's that's kinda where we're at right now. I I totally feel that. And and and like I I was saying early on, I guess that tension between, I'm so glad that there's a company that I can give money to that is trying to make the thing that I want. You know? How exciting is that? But from the software side, I see a license that's not, that's not MIT. And it's it's it's it's not useful to me as, like, from a development perspective. I'm glad it's I I I look at you. You have you have source viewable. You know? I I'm glad that myself and other people can inspect what you're trying to ship and and make sure that you're not, like, stealing funds with it. You know? But it's not something that's interesting to me as part of the the the canon of open source software. You know? Which is what is very important is it's something that I feel like we're slowly building software that allows that really empowers us. It makes us private. It makes us, able to communicate.
It makes us able to transact, you know, with money. But, the the this is not that. You know? This is a product that you're selling that then you're also showing us the code that you Yes. Ship to people. And I'm glad for that. But but it's not it's doesn't feel like open source to me.
[02:16:28] Unknown:
Yeah. It's it's like it's open source code in the sense that, like, you can see the code. It's not open source code as in, like, it's, like, oh, like, owned by everyone, so to speak.
[02:16:40] Unknown:
Yeah.
[02:16:44] Unknown:
But it's 2 things. Right? And, like, I think feel like it's important that we don't conflate the 2 things. Like, it's very important that people are able to view the source. And and for the average person, the ability to manipulate the source and do whatever the fuck they wanna do with it is important. And for most people, the fucking license doesn't matter in that effect because no one's gonna enforce, you know, Paul or John or some random schmuck, like, changing the code for his own
[02:17:13] Unknown:
whatever he wants to do. And and and not only that, but, like, our license in theory shouldn't even, like, bar you from manipulating the code and using it however you want with the exception of if you try to then turn around commercialize it. But then you have something different, which is this idea of the code surviving
[02:17:29] Unknown:
virally. Right? And that idea revolves around a permissive license so that a user doesn't have to worry about it. Like, for a a perfect example I don't know if it's a perfect example. It's actually probably not a perfect example, is that every episode of Citadel dispatch ends with copyrighted content that gets taken down from a bunch of different, service providers. Right? And and the reasoning is because of the licensing. Right? So the licensing doesn't allow that information to be free. And and you have the same effect with software, so you don't have, you don't have the hive mind working on things if if it's only source viewable and it's not proper open source. Right?
[02:18:15] Unknown:
Something Anthony points out, in chat. Umbrel has a very similar license. It's like Creative Commons. Right. No And that has not been controversial at all. It sucks. And and I I've been so bad. Something with something with, like, a really good license is, Nick's Bitcoin. And I and I really like it, conceptually. It's got MIT license. And I and I like the idea of of NICS in general. But I've tried to run NICS, and I completely failed.
[02:18:45] Unknown:
NICS is a very expert piece of technology. I'm not, yeah, I'm not smart enough. Go is very easy to run.
[02:18:53] Unknown:
So so I I see how how hypocritical I am with this.
[02:18:58] Unknown:
No. So MIT is wrong, though, still. I'm still against MIT. I think MIT is just MIT is us lowering our shields. MIT is us being, like, oh, we're about to line up for war, but war doesn't matter. It's fine. We're all in this together. We're humans. So and GPL is like, hey. Let's line up for a war, and I hope No. GPO is like my team. Is like, if you're gonna take this, I will be angry at you unless you line up next to me.
[02:19:29] Unknown:
That's what I'm saying. MIT plus, you're an asshole if you commercialize this against my will. That's that's the license that I'm promoting.
[02:19:37] Unknown:
But that's exactly what Matt is saying though with the lower That's what GPL is.
[02:19:41] Unknown:
No. GPL involves the government.
[02:19:44] Unknown:
No. No. We have to figure out all all licenses involve the government. Who's enforcing whatever the fuck you want them to enforce? We have to figure out intellectual property if there is such a thing,
[02:19:55] Unknown:
sans government, if we're gonna if we're gonna have this bright, beautiful future that we're all planning on. The cool part about GPL is that gives us water. The cool part about GPL is it forces corporations
[02:20:08] Unknown:
to fucking keep it open source, and and MIT doesn't. So you can just have with MIT, it's so loose of a license that you could just have and this is what happened with AWS. AWS just Who forces? The license doesn't AWS Who forces them to do it? Who forces them? Oh, we ended up in a situation where AWS, like, runs a shit ton of the Internet, and they're doing it on open source software that is closed source on their side because they took MIT software. And they're a public company, so they have people that they have to respond to. They can't just, like, hide it. You know? They they're they're aware of it. They're well aware of it. I we have Thai in here. There's no IP. I understand. Okay?
Like, if if we wanna be NCAPs, I understand. Okay? But Amazon's not being NCAP. They're using the MIT license in a cap world. If if In a non Ancap world, and they're they're they're using it to their advantage. If Ancap doesn't work while people are being
[02:21:09] Unknown:
no no am. I don't know what while status exist, if ANCAP cap doesn't work while status still exist, then ANCAP doesn't work.
[02:21:21] Unknown:
I'm not I'm not defending ANCAP. I'm just saying that in an NCAP world, licenses don't matter. It's it's the licenses are all coming down to government enforcement, period. And the the the It's embedded in the concept of a license at all. Amazon is admitting to Amazon admits that they took all of this open source software. They just took it and was m I MIT. Wait. Wait. Daddy Warbits, you're leaving. Don't leave yet. Daddy Warbits has 2 tickets, for Bitcoin 2021 that he wants to either auction off or raffle off on the next civil dispatch because we did not communicate together about how we're gonna fucking do that. So tune in next week for that. Thank you, daddy Warbits. We appreciate you.
Cheers. All these other conversations, I appreciate this is this is a great conversation. I think this is very good. I I appreciate both of you, jumping in here. I appreciate 6102 saying that IP is the biggest fraud. Doesn't work. And NCAP doesn't work does work. NCAP does work. Look at torrents.
[02:22:39] Unknown:
That's interesting. Don't solve who makes the movies.
[02:22:43] Unknown:
Exactly.
[02:22:45] Unknown:
So I I've tried to be very sympathetic in a to what what you you guys are doing, what the way MVK is doing, what Umbral is doing. But I personally am going to try to trend in the direction of, of software that I can, that I feel comfortable with the the that it's part of the canon of software, and it's not someone's product. You know?
[02:23:09] Unknown:
I mean, yeah. Like, yeah, that is that is certainly your prerogative and choice. Right? Like I said, the we made the we made choices that we did because that was what we saw, being able to allow us to continue to do work and to to help create value for the ecosystem. And the the the day we find a better way to create a sustainable, arrangement where people can get can can create value and then get paid for it, then, like, we'll we'll do that. And so I I don't I I'm neither going to apologize for the decisions we've made and nor and nor am I going to die on the hill saying that we're going to do this in perpetuity and everybody can go fuck themselves for telling us not to do it. Like, I'm I'm like, to me, this is a it's it's like it's like a work in progress. And, like, I'd like to, you know, I'd like to understand, you know, better models or or whatever. So I think I can get one of these and just run Bitwarden
[02:24:05] Unknown:
and Mastodon.
[02:24:06] Unknown:
I already got Umbrel synced, so I don't even need to I think I think if you really care about open source, like, you should just fight about this till you die. Like, I think that's just like the we we should just, like, we should just constantly argue about this and just fluctuate our opinions. Like, our opinion should change dramatically from until, like, 30 years from now, but we should just argue it the whole fucking time. And I think that's, the important part with open source. Yep. But I I I do I I a 100% like, I'll I will defend you guys. I will defend your license, until the end of the show.
Not the end of this show, like, this episode, like, to the end of of until I leave. Well, we appreciate that. Back and forth because I I I I I completely understand the concept. It makes sense to me. It's capitalism at its finest.
[02:24:57] Unknown:
Yeah. And and the the thing is, like, we we don't expect everyone to agree, but, we're also not like, it's not a position that I think all needs a ton of defending. Right? It's like, I think it's a it's a reasonable position even if you don't agree with it.
[02:25:12] Unknown:
My optimism Well, I mean, if you don't think it needs defending, then I won't defend it. What
[02:25:17] Unknown:
My my hope is that in the long run, like, it it it isn't a trade off. Like, my my dream would be that you guys would move to MIT and that you, like, your profits would improve. And I can't prove that that would actually happen, but that would be awesome for me. The
[02:25:33] Unknown:
the the secret, Paul Paul, the secret is as long as the source is viewable, none of this fucking matters unless you're trying to fucking be Tim Tim Apple on this. Like, you're just trying to make money off of them. If you're not trying to make money off of them, they can't enforce any of this shit, And that's the beauty of source viewable. Like, you should just be able to see the source. As long as you can see the source,
[02:25:54] Unknown:
I'm done. What if I'm what if I'm just come what if I'm just building something interesting
[02:25:59] Unknown:
Build it as a NIM, bro. Then I wanna copy and paste some of their Build it as a NIM, and if they try and shut you down if they try and shut you down, it'll be the best advertisement ever for what you're building. Like, that's the case. Like, it doesn't fucking matter. Keegan, it's been a fucking pleasure. Thank you for joining us. It's been a long time coming. It's been a lot of fun,
[02:26:20] Unknown:
times to, like, really flu. So
[02:26:23] Unknown:
Yeah. It was it was great to meet you. It was great to have you back on the show, but it was great to meet you in Big Block Boom. Do you have any any final thoughts for, Zito, she's upset with me in the comments. Do you have any final thoughts for the freaks before we end this?
[02:26:43] Unknown:
Just keep building, man. Right? Build whatever you can. Like, it doesn't none of this happens without everyone. So
[02:26:52] Unknown:
that's all I have to say. A 100%. Zytoshi, I agree with you. If someone's gonna, like, fuck around with me for manipulating things, then they can go fuck themselves. I a 100% agree on that. Future Paul,
[02:27:08] Unknown:
what's up? But final thoughts before we end this. Everybody should read my, piece called Christianity for Bitcoiners, where I try to shill you on Christianity from a Bitcoiner perspective. Basically call everybody shitcoiners for believing in more than one God. I love it. So just check that out.
[02:27:29] Unknown:
I'm looking forward to seeing Paul this weekend. We're gonna have a fantastic barbecue together. It's gonna be a good time. It's gonna be all open source licensed. All open source. Like, people can just compete with us, not not commercially, and it'll it'll be a fun time. I I appreciate all you freaks for joining us. This was fucking awesome. Consider using your own Bitcoin node. Check out star 9labs.com. If you haven't heard about The Verge, it's a great, publication. Go follow both of these guys, and, I love you all. Thank you for joining. Peace.
Cheers, freaks. You're the fucking best. Thank you for staying till the end, and, I love you all. We'll see you for rabbit hole recap on Thursday, and we'll see you for another fucking great, Seal Dispatch rip on Tuesday. That's gonna be Ben Decarment and Evan Kaludes. It's gonna be fucking dope. We're gonna talk about Taproot. I'll fucking grill them on all the bullshit, and it'll be a good time. Love you all. Have a good time. Peace.
Coinbase direct listing and government understanding of digital currencies
Bitcoin Tuesday and Citadel Dispatch episode introduction
Start9 Labs and self-hosting
Explanation of a Bitcoin node
Using your own node and trust levels
Payment size and channel selection
LNURL and lightning node routing
KYC nodes and privacy risks
Public key exposure and privacy risks
Moon Wallet and rotating public keys
Different implementations and trade-offs
Taproot activation and different approaches
Governance and the Taproot activation process
Competition and keeping organizations honest
The easiest way to run a Bitcoin node
Approach to trust and transparency
Discussion about self-hosting and monetizing open-source projects
Debate on the advantages and disadvantages of using the MIT and GPL licenses
Conversation about the licensing choices made by the speakers
