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EPISODE: 7
BLOCK: 668805
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TOPICS: Self Hosting, Open Source Software, and Freedom
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(00:16:29) The benefits and disadvantages of self-hosting
(00:22:27) The use of Mastodon and Pleroma for social media
(00:45:57) The importance of a pfSense router for network security
(00:49:42) The use of Nextcloud for personal cloud storage
(01:43:31) Assessing risks and taking incremental steps to improve security measures
(01:44:21) Educational resources and guides for Bitcoin security
(01:46:21) Balancing motivation and providing best practices for Bitcoin security
(01:55:09) Taking small steps to improve security and privacy
(01:55:09) The trade-offs and challenges of self-hosting
(01:55:09) The importance of running your own Bitcoin node
[00:00:00]
CNBC Host:
Maybe it's fun, fine. Maybe it's a movement, but be prepared to lose 80 to 90% of it. And if it's still worth it, then have at it. But the biggest loss of capital here will be the human capital of young men who are sitting and staring at their phone and watching the price of Bitcoin or the price of AMC. And ask yourself, would you be better off taking that 1, 2, or 3 hours a day and working out, trying to form relationships with mentors, with with with romantic relationships, with people at work, getting great at something so you can be the person on the other side of the trade. The greatest loss in in capital here is is from young men who are more prone to gambling addiction, who don't understand, the markets. I think we are setting ourselves up similar to how there's a ton of young women out there who became very depressed by sitting in their rooms looking at Instagram, self cutting and self harm skyrocket. I think you are gonna see an explosion in young male depression, and I think a lot of it is gonna be reverse engineered to apps that convince you you're part of a movement or physically addict you to your phone. Ask yourself, would your time staring at Robinhood be be better spent somewhere else? That is the real capital destruction that is taking place here.
[00:01:57] ODELL:
Hey there, freaks. It's your host, Matt O'Dell. That was our good friend, professor Scott Galloway, on MSNBC this week, clearly showing the world that he has short Bitcoin and has yet to cover those calls. I am joined here by my good friends from Australia, Ton and Wizard of Oz, and all the freaks who are also joining us live. What's up, boys?
[00:02:24] Ketan:
Good day, Matt. Good day, Wes. Matt. Good day, everyone.
[00:02:27] Wiz:
Take your time.
[00:02:32] ODELL:
So, you know, I'm I've I I am a very enthusiastic host, but I am a new host. This is Citadel dispatch number 7. This is our 7th Citadel Dispatch, which is that's pretty amazing to me that, we're almost at 2 months here. So that's super exciting. This is a show that started in 2020. Do not forget it. So we've been here for over a year now. And today, we will be talking about very important topics. I feel like every dispatch, we kinda talk about the same things, from different angles, but it's more important than ever now, and and this is kind of what we've dedicated our lives to. So, why the fuck not?
The primary thing that we're gonna start off with, is this this this whole concept of open source versus closed source software. And I think, the crux of this issue is is is one of these things that we've seen, this week. These last 2 weeks has been really enlightening to people and have woken them up to some of the issues with our current system. And I think a lot of it comes down to this these closed systems versus open systems. So, I mean, let's start let's start there. Catan, like, what are your thoughts on on on why is open source so important to us?
[00:03:58] Ketan:
Yeah. So I think open source, represents for us as particularly as Bitcoin as as something that we can look to inspect. And we come in a, I guess, a a a very, I guess, it's a it's kinda like we're we're very paranoid. We're skeptical. I wouldn't call it paranoid. I call it skepticism. We are we we question things. And so to be able to get a satisfactory answer, we need open source software that is code that is available for everyone to look at and inspect. And the guys who have the ability to look at that code, they are able to then, you know, develop on it as well as bring those security benefits. Because something like Bitcoin, for instance, I want to know that my money will not just disappear tomorrow.
And so that is why open source is such a, I guess, an important thing. One of the other great things about open source, and this is what I found, is that you can ask open source developers, to for features that you want, and you can request them. And the chances are of them actually giving getting getting you getting back to a getting back to you and giving you a response is far greater than if you were to call up, I don't know, Bank of America and get your, you know, your app changed in a certain way that you feel is you know, just say you want a dark mode, for instance. I think every every wallet here and everything like, anything that you kinda want to request, a developer will look at it and go, you know what? I think that that's a good feature. Let's let's push push it through. And it just makes a far, far better system. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it makes a better system than what we currently have. So those are my opening thoughts on open source.
[00:05:55] Wiz:
Yeah. I'll add to that, Tom. So, just for a bit of background, so my background's actually as a software dev, and I've spent 35 years working in, in closed source. So, I've worked for banks, insurance companies, government agencies, not the 3 letter ones. And so I have a pretty good idea about how that process works and the strengths of that, and the weaknesses. So very much, a significant part of my life spent working in a closed source environment. And I guess probably prior to Bitcoin, I'd I'd not really understood the value of open source. And having been in Bitcoin for 3 or 4 years now, I'm very much an open source advocate to compare some of the closed source, approaches to open source. From a closed source perspective, it's generally you're looking at a very hierarchical chain of command.
So it's a it's a top down, you know, you're working for an organization. They have a mission. There's usually someone who's driving the vision or the outcome. That's usually a committee, and so it's a set of it's a set of legislation that's passed by the geniuses in parliament. And then it's policy and legislation, and then that gets implemented into business rules, and then you build the code that that builds those systems to enact all that stuff. So those things are often done under tight time pressures despite despite appearances from the inside.
They're inordinately complicated systems. I've worked on, I've worked on some very, very large complicated systems, 10,000,000 lines of code or more, that are 30, 40, some getting up to 50 years old. So there is an incredible amount of, I guess, a lot of people would refer to as legacy debt, but it's also embedded embedded IP or embedded knowledge of the organization. Now you compare that to open source. It's kind of the, the the absolute opposite. So you've got a hive mind that look building building source and building solutions. So you don't have one person's vision or you'd have, you don't have a a mandate, for things like legislation or compliance if in case of, say, banking and insurance.
You've got a group of people who are trying to achieve an outcome with lots of different ideas about how to do that. And open source is very much a meritocracy. So it's, you know, just to and to reiterate, Catan's point, you get all of that scrutiny and that scrutiny, comes back to security. So, you know, Bitcoin is probably Bitcoin Core is probably one of the most heavily scrutinized codes by code bases in the world, and it will continue to be so. And the higher the number goes up, the more and more scrutiny there will be and the more caution there will be about changing it. But on top of that security, perspective, there's also that openness which gives confidence about what the software does, how it's being used, what it could be used for.
And that's where, you know, crystal systems just are never going to engender that type of trust. I think Catan and I saw that, here in Australia, last year. The government, the Department of Home Affairs developed a well, what was it? Kitana? A COVID tracing app that you could put on your phone, and there were a lot of people, including myself who asked for, asked for the department to open source that. And that would have given a lot more confidence about how the data was being secured, what data was being collected, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And whilst they did actually bow to opening the client component, They did not open source the back end risk wise.
So that's that's, I guess, my my perspective and a little bit of background to flush that out.
[00:10:37] ODELL:
Fantastic. Well, first of all, I just wanna thank you guys you're both both of you guys for joining me. On dispatch, I do like to as a freak's may have noticed, I do like to tap guests that maybe have not been on menu appearances before, public appearances. I think, Wiz, this is your first podcast, so I'm pretty excited to be the first, you you know, to pop your cherry, so to speak.
[00:11:05] Unknown:
I know Catan is Be gentle with me, big boy.
[00:11:11] ODELL:
I also you know, even though I might have more experience with this, I do not have much experience being the host. So I do especially, I get a little bit excited in the beginning. I don't like to have all the filler in the beginning, with the shows I listen to. You know, I'm a big, consumer of podcast myself, so I kind of jumped the gun a lot. And I'm not really that good at sometimes I talk too much, and sometimes I just try and treat the mic as a hot potato and just get it off. So I appreciate all the freaks, sitting here with us and and and learning as we go.
That's the fun part. So the one of the reasons I bring this up is because one of the freaks asked in the comments, yes. On dispatch every week, we have the price ticker up. The top price is the evil empire. It's the Coinbase price. It's the compliance pro price. The bottom is bisque. It's the no KYC street price. It's the real price. And I I expect the freaks to pump, the bottom price. As for open source, oh, so we're available, you know, Citadel Dispatch goes out on Twitch. It goes out on Twitter through Periscope, and it goes out on through YouTube. If you're a freak that's come back in in the past and you watch it live, you'll see that I end it with a music video.
YouTube does cut that at the end, and I do spend a lot of time trying to pick out which song I'm gonna put on there. So fuck you, YouTube. But, you know, I am kinda just ripping a music video without the license. So, open source. Yeah. So, anyway, we got Wiz back. He just came back. Welcome back, Wiz. You didn't miss much. I've just been talking too much, and let's fucking go. I wanted to jump into real quick. So the reason is that that I bring up open source is I I feel like we've had this whole craziness that has happened with the stock market, and it's kind of opened people's eyes. Right? We we we have this this memeification of the world, and some people think that memes are that meme that you can meme something into reality.
That's not the case. What what the reality is is memes are a great way of showing reality, and and depicting reality in a simple viral way. And we saw memes just grow in in, like, in almost like an exponential virulent way, this year and last year. And the culmination feels like this, you know, this is the the the latest chapter with the with this stock market stuff. So we had Scott Galloway in the beginning of this episode talking, and he was talking shit about Bitcoiners. He kinda just, like, lumped us in, I guess, with the day traders who are are trying to pump the price of AMC and these other stocks.
And I I I think what it highlights is that so much of our of our lives are these black boxes. Right? And this idea with with open software and open networks and open money is is that everyone can see what's going on. So it doesn't mean that you won't have shenanigans, but at least we know, you know, we at least we know what those shenanigans. You we we can see where the source of the issue was maybe after the fact, if there was a bug after the fact. It's not like there there aren't any bugs in open source quote code. It's not like someone can't put something in their malicious, but maybe someone can find it and afterwards, we could actually diagnose it. Right?
So with that said, I think, like, a a a a easy way for people to understand where we're coming from here is is with the encrypted chat apps. So when we're trying to send a message to someone and we're trying to send a message to someone privately, There's a bunch of different ways you can try and do that, but most of those ways require trust. The only way you can actually prove and and verify that something is is actually end to end encrypted is if they open up the client. This is what Wiz said earlier about I think you were talking about COVID, the COVID tracking. And if if you open up the client, then we're able to verify and prove that there's no malicious things that are going on.
Now what Wiz said was we needed the server client was not open source, and that is okay sometimes. If if the configuration is set up in a way that's end to end encrypted and the client encrypts everything locally before it gets sent to the server, then we can verify that there it's encrypted, and we can verify that the servers can't even if the server was malicious, wouldn't be able to compromise the message. But for other things, we need to self host on the server side as well. And this is where Catan really shines because he's been trying to dog food self hosting his life. And he has this this guide for it atk3ton.com/selfdashhosting.
So I I think I really wanna dive into this guide headfirst. Catan, where do you think we should start here?
[00:16:29] Ketan:
So I think we should start as to what are the benefits and what are the, I guess, the disadvantages to self hosting. You kinda wanna make an assessment of whether or not this is actually something you want to do. So how about we start there? Now, obviously, when it comes to self hosting, you know, you are doing it yourself. There there's no real you know, like, there's no hand holding in terms of you you don't there's no tech support for you. There's forums who will help you, gladly help you. In fact, there's an entire Reddit, for self hosted. So if you look at our self hosted, these guys are basically a community of guys who are self hosting their own stuff.
Now you can learn from them and but in terms of if things go, down, for example, your Internet service provider is is, has shut you off or alternatively has just gone down, which in Australia happens quite often, unfortunately, then, you know, you don't your website's not available anymore, and the things that you are hosting are not available. The other thing that you're beholden to is also your electricity provider, and that is something that some people just don't think about as well. So if if in a blackout, you obviously don't have access to your digital, services anymore.
So those are some of the, I guess, the negative parts of self hosting, but the positives are great as well. You get control over your own data. You aren't subject to being canceled as easily. You aren't, I guess, you know, you aren't being data mined to some to some extent, and the things that you are data being data mined for could, you know, are are things that you probably want public anyway. So it really depends on what the, service that you are doing or or or the service that you are self hosting and what it intends to what what you intend to do with that that particular software. So that is where, I guess, the the the benefits are to to self hosting and also the disadvantages as well.
[00:18:52] ODELL:
Okay. So, I mean, there there's 2 there's to break it down, right, there's 2 main advantages. Right? We have, yeah. To people in the comments, this is a different Wiz. This is Wizard of Oz. He's from Australia. We got both our guests today are from Australia, so they're actually joining us in the morning. It's it's early morning their time, so I appreciate that. And then we have the other wiz, which is, the wiz of Japan. But yeah. So with self hosting, we have two main benefits. Right? You have privacy and sovereignty. Privacy is probably a little bit shakier.
Maybe maybe there's certain situations. There's nuance there, like our favorite word. There's nuance there where you could actually maybe have worse privacy if you fuck up, if you fuck up self hosting. But I think sovereignty is night and day no matter what. You're better off self hosted. Right? Would you agree with that breakdown? Yeah. I I'd agree with that one as well. Yeah. Well articulated there, Matt, particularly with the privacy.
[00:19:55] Ketan:
If someone was to somehow, get into your network remotely, then you have 0 privacy. And so that that that could present a a major problem. But for self hosted, in terms of sovereignty, oh, it is night and day. You cannot be canceled. You're you're not at the whims of somebody else, and and I think that that's a great thing.
[00:20:18] ODELL:
Wizard of Oz, you with us?
[00:20:21] Unknown:
I am indeed, Matt.
[00:20:24] ODELL:
Good to have you with us. So Catan's just explaining to us the, we're we're going over the basic benefits and negatives of self hosting. And then the key the the key here so let's so we have the privacy and we have the sovereignty side. Let's start with the sovereignty side. I think it that's the easier side. So I think in terms of of privacy, I want all the freaks to realize no matter what, you know, when it comes to privacy, you have to be extra cautious all the time, and you just have to always be, like, crossing your t's and dotting your i's. And and and and that goes for this conversation as well. There's no privacy silver bullet here.
So but on on the sovereignty side, there's some really interesting elements. And and and before we get into that, thank you, Freaks, for pumping, the price on Bisq. We're getting going. This is this is exactly how I like to spend my Bitcoin Tuesdays. So on the sovereignty side, I mean, I the key thing, right, is is we've seen we saw the president of the United States while he was sitting in in office. We we saw him get kicked off of Twitter. Right? And just completely removed from Twitter. And I heard some there was, like, some people there's some, like, talking heads that, like, ignore most of it. There's some talking heads that, like, saying, like, oh, he's been surprisingly quiet during the whole transition. It's, like, yeah. You, like, removed his main, loud speaker, and, like, kicked him off the platform.
Catan is using alongside all of us, I actually announced this this show on Mastodon as well as Twitter is using a self hosted alternative to Twitter called Mastodon. Actually, you don't have to use it in a self hosted way. You can use someone else's instance or server, or you can host it yourself. But Catan is hosting it himself. So so Catan is interacting with this global network of individuals on this distributed Twitter clone, and it's it's being hosted on a raspi in his fucking closet. Right, Khitan?
[00:22:24] Ketan:
Yeah. So, yeah, what I am hosting is, it it's actually on my desktop PC, and it it is in a virtual machine. And, basically, it's it's it's an alternative to mastodon, and, it is called Pleroma. It's a lighter version of mass, of mastodon. And, basically, this allows you to communicate and have your own, social media profile, without the need of a centralized server having all of your data and all of your information. So I think, that is something that, is of benefit in the event that you have or you hold views that you may think will get canceled. Then, you know, this is a fantastic option, where you self host your own social media, and we're able to do that now with this thing called the Fediverse.
And, basically, there are, other instances out there, that you can subscribe to, which, I guess, it makes it more decentralized. So what that means is you can sign up to a one of the more popular ones that are in the Bitcoin space is bitcoinhackers.org. That is run by a person, by the name of, well, MBK. He has ownership of that entire instance. You are subject to his moderations, in that in that instance. So if he doesn't like something, he has the ability to sense of that. Now if you don't like what he is doing, you are welcome to go to another instance that treats you better. Kind of like if you go to, a country and you don't like that particular country in the way that, you know, the taxes are too high or you don't like this particular way, well, then you move to another jurisdiction.
It is the same or similar approach, whereby you go to another instance where you think you are, treated better and there is no or or, you know, you you prescribed to their ideals and their beliefs, and you go through with them. And you know what? If you don't like any other instance on the planet, the last thing that you can do is say, you know what? Screw you all. I'm hosting myself, and I'm going to give my views out there using my own server. And anyone who wants to follow me and connect with me can do so. And so I think from a social media perspective, this is great for not being or, well, it makes it difficult to cancel you, and your audience and cut you off from that that your your your audience.
So that is something that is a far, far better outcome than the current, social media platforms that we see today. And so that is why I'm a big proponent of it, and I I I really like it. It it it is it it it is, as as Matt said, a Twitter clone, and it is I I really enjoy it. I think you're able to curate the discussion based on what you want to see, rather than what, you know, someone else wants you to see. And that is powerful in itself,
[00:25:39] ODELL:
and so that's yeah. That's why I like the data. Right? I think a key aspect is, like, you own the data. Like, on Bitcoin Hackers, for instance, I'm on Rodolfo's, NVK's, instance. He can just nuke my account. Right? And I just, like, lose everything. I could the cool thing about Mastodon is you can gracefully move over, which Twitter doesn't have that. Right? Like, you can't move your social graph over to a different server, but you can on Mastodon, but not if the host actually just
[00:26:09] Ketan:
nukes your account. It doesn't give you time to move. Yeah. That's right. That's right. And so Did you Yeah. Go on. You're up to the discretion. Like, they basically own you, and your digital profile,
[00:26:22] ODELL:
But if you don't like that, then you can leave Right. There's competition. There's, like, a free market competition, and you could run your own instance. And I guess if we both ran our own instance, then pretty much no one could really censor us unless they were going hardcore, like, really just trying to fuck hard hard with the Internet like a very sophisticated actor. But but there's also instances where instances cross instances are censoring each other. Right? We saw with Gab moved on to Mastodon and then basically, I guess, like, detached itself from the rest of the Fediverse. Right?
[00:26:56] Ketan:
Yeah. So Gab's, they're they're sitting out in their own, which which is fine, but, like, the fact that they can do that, they're not actually being censored. So, they run their own servers. They run their own infrastructure, and they are creating a gap little community there. And if you want to see that content, then, you know, you have to sign up for within there. But, yeah, that's the kind of the trade off. There's nuances everywhere as as Matt would love to explain. Nuance. Don't own that domain.nuance.com.
[00:27:29] ODELL:
That might be one that, Michael Sailor owns.
[00:27:32] Ketan:
Possibly.
[00:27:34] ODELL:
So
[00:27:35] Unknown:
I still can't believe it's gonna be here. Yeah. I think there's a there's a couple of things here. The general theme with, self hosting, giving rise to improve sovereignty. It's a little bit like, say weightlifting in the sense that you're not being particularly strong, particularly fit, but you'd like to be. And so you go to the gym and you perhaps get some training or you train out with a buddy and you slowly build your technique and you start, start to do compound lifts. And all of a sudden you can start to do things that you couldn't do before. You actually don't need to ask anyone to pick up the bag of pool salt or to carry a bag of concrete because you're strong enough to do it yourself.
And in the digital world, the issue about self hosting is it's about making yourself more self sovereign. So you can choose to do these things or not. Now, I think one of the, for me, one of the big things that Bitcoin's really made me think about is trade offs, trade offs and incentives. So trade offs the trade off you're making when, you know, to use, used Catan's example, you know, you can join, NVKs, and Bitcoin hackers. And if you don't get if you get canceled from there, you can go somewhere else. And in the end, you can you can run your own if you if you choose. The the making there generally is, the size of the community you're interacting with.
And certainly there's no question that the size of the Mastodon community at the moment, is considerable smaller than Twitter. So this, you know, on the one side, you know, the like Bitcoin hackers, for example, you've got quite a tight community there. We're not there to talk about market to Bitcoin. And that's great for sharpening steel and clarifying your ideas and asking and things that are happening in the water, in the wider world from a Bitcoin perspective. Twitter on the other hand has that broader network effect with people who are on Twitter or a whole range of other ideas and interests and maybe stumble across some thread that refers to bit coin that makes them curious.
And I guess that's that's one of the reasons I've remained on Twitter,
[00:30:17] Wiz:
where a lot of bitcoiners have left Twitter recently,
[00:30:22] Unknown:
Really to, try and amplify, quality signal, like, from Catan and and yourself, Matt, for who are reaching out and trying to understand and searching around, for information about Big fan of, big fan of self hosting, you know, run my own node and starting to run other things as well. And, very grateful for, for both of you and Catan for your guides and, yeah, a lot of a lot of work to do. I always feel like I'm trying to catch up in Bitcoin.
[00:31:00] Ketan:
Look. I think you make some great points there in terms of the differences between Twitter. Like, you're 100% right. If you want an if you want to control your own discussion and, you know, have a really, detailed in-depth discussion, then I think Mastodon is a great place to have that. But if you wanna dunk on shit coins and if you you wanna sort of build an a a bigger audience base, then I think Twitter is still the place to do that. However, over time, maybe that might shift because people you know, you you're still being, sort of, I guess, looked at from the Twitter angle, and so, you know, your your profile can be canceled.
But at the same time, Twitter has that. Like, there is no doubt that there is a huge network effect with Twitter. It is fantastic for tapping into new, new segments, new markets, and you have the ability to, you know, dunk on people, that you otherwise wouldn't have the ability to do if you were to curate your own discussion of the people that you like. So it really depends on what you want here, but I personally, I I really, really like the Mastodon side of things and the and what the Fediverse is doing, and I like the discussion that's happening there. So I tend to go there, but then I'm always, you know, doing like, I'm I'm doing both at the same time.
[00:32:24] ODELL:
And it group versus out group. That's why I'm, like, tweeting like 0 hedge right now. That's right. Alright. It's just, like, all caps lock to to the out group. You need to know if the out group, and then I do, like does anyone does anyone have any nuanced opinions about why Tor is down in in in Mastodon? Yep. I mean, I I think it goes back to a a discussion that we have in Bitcoin a lot of times where, if you choose a centralized path, you're gonna have cheaper transactions, and you're gonna have, more you know, everything will be faster and cheaper. So it goes to reason stands to reason that in an environment where we actually have real competition and we don't have overbearing government regulation, a centralized option will give you more reach at a better cost.
But what happens is the reality is we don't live in that situation, and we can't assume that we'll continue to live in that situation. And and so we have to basically, you know, spend some of that efficiency, spend some of that reach, for censorship resistance and and self reliance and self sovereignty. And that's kind of, you know, where this whole, you know, self hosting concept comes from, backing up your stuff, encrypting your stuff, verifying everything yourself. Don't trust, verify. Yeah. So I mean, so we have Mastodon. Right? So we talked about Mastodon, and you said, pleroma. Right? That's p l e r o m a. Right?
Yep. That's correct. And Pleroma is what you use to host your Mastodon instance and your Relay as well?
[00:34:07] Ketan:
So Pleroma is not a Mastodon on instance. It's a it's a competitor to Mastodon. So it's like, just another implementation of Mastodon. Think of it like, you know, Bitcoin core versus, say, for example, I don't know, Bitcoin, BTCD.
[00:34:23] ODELL:
But it all interact it all interacts in the same Fediverse.
[00:34:26] Ketan:
Itself. Correct. So it it's it's yes. That's right. So you've got a fediverse, and then you've got, different instances of pieces of software. So for example, in the Fetty verse, you can even do YouTube stuff, but they just call it peer tube. And so you can then follow with your, you know, your your social media instance a particular, a particular, channel on on on a peer tube network.
[00:35:01] ODELL:
That's a perfect example, right, of, like, what we were talking about. Right? Like, if you were trying to host on peer tube, I mean, you're gonna melt your Internet connection. Right? That is correct. Yes.
[00:35:11] Ketan:
And that's why I probably haven't gone down the path of hosting my own videos. Like, I have a YouTube channel, and, I I I would like to self host it. It's just that my Internet connection probably won't allow me to do that, for the viewership that I get. So that's kind of the the the, I guess, the difference between a decentralized approach and a centralized approach. That's what I that's what I think people don't realize. Right? It's like so so, like, we we have we have the privilege of saying
[00:35:39] ODELL:
that, you know, we can use Twitter for certain things and use Mastodon for other things. I think the reason we haven't seen censorship resistant tools, open open source tools, just tools that empower individuals used at on en masse yet is because you need to have a reason. You know, you need to be you you need to you need to get burnt. You need you need to have a motivation to go out and deal with the trade offs that are present with it. You know, Donald Trump and a bunch of American conservatives all of a sudden had that happen to them. Right? They they they saw it happen, and and and what did they do? They tried to flock to centralized alternatives first. Right? They tried to flock to Parler, and Parler got deplatformed, and then they learned that just because it's a different platform, if it all runs on AWS, it all runs on Amazon servers, it doesn't matter.
With with money, with Bitcoin, we have to be forward thinking, because there's 1,000,000,000 of dollars on the line, and and and we can't learn after AWS deep platforms Bitcoin. So that's why we have as Bitcoiners, we have all these on the outside, it seems like crazy discussions on theoreticals. Right? But for everyone else that's not dealing with a global distributed 247 financial network, I think they can deal with, I'll host my shit on YouTube. And if YouTube bans me, then I'll figure out a competitor. And if I host it on Vimeo and then AWS takes Vimeo down, then maybe I'll start trying to figure out PeerTube or or BitTorrent or something like that. And then on top of that, we saw the same thing happen again, but this time with stocks. Right? And people seeing that they they were gambling in this casino that's controlled by centralized actors, and they don't play by fair rules.
So it's funny because you have, like, the Mark Cubans of the world are coming out and saying, like, oh, the DeFi is the answer here. DeFi is not the answer. The answer is to having a good money that goes up in value, so you don't have to gamble in a casino to begin with. Gamble in the centralized casino to begin with.
[00:37:49] Ketan:
Matt, I just love that ex like, just the explanations there were fantastic. Go on, Wiz.
[00:37:56] Unknown:
That point about, unfair rules. I don't know if it's unfair rules or if it's just that the incentives are not perhaps as well understood as they should be. Wall Street bets but got a salutary lesson on that. And it goes for all of the big which are devised to build the network effect, make them as big as possible, as quickly as possible, because that's how they monetize. If you are not paying for it, you are the product. That's it. Guess what? You, you got free trade. You signed up for free trading on Robinhood. How did you think it was gonna work? They front run your trades. They sell your data, and they counter It's not a big fucking surprise. If you, if you, if you thought, gee, how does the business model work? Because that would be my question first. If it's free, how am I getting fucked over here?
How am I, how are they going to do it? How are they going to make money? Because if I, if I'm going to use a product or a service, I want the provider of the product or service to remain in business. If it's a good service, because I want to continue to use it. Therefore, I want to understand how they're making money. So in Robin hood's case, you don't have to think too hard before you're going. So if they're not charging me trading fees and it costs them money to trade and they have to and they have to pile the clearing up is they've got a bank roll, the trades, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. That money's coming from somewhere. And the volumes they're talking about, remember, because they're trying to build that network effect. Those are serious amounts of money.
So the fact that Robin hood was cap riding front running and selling the data, was much like the deplatforming of, you know, significant us political figures, a bit of a rude surprise to them. But, you know, I guess from, from exactly what we're talking about here is it's a, it's a trade off, you know, you've got to understand what the incentives of those people are and their incentives to make more money and to grow their network. And if they see things that impede that, they will kick you. Yeah. I mean, when those things happen, they are calls on, on why the why self hosting is so important.
[00:40:34] ODELL:
It's, I mean, maybe it's part of the Bitcoin addiction. And I know you guys are also guilty of it, and, I'm sure that all the freaks a lot of the freaks are guilty of it as well. Pretty much just everything that happens in my day to day life, I bring back to, Bitcoin lessons or Bitcoin metaphors or shitcoin metaphors and shitcoin lessons. And, you know, the this this whole Robinhood business model thing goes right back down to the transaction fees when people talk about transaction fees and Bitcoin and shit coins and stuff. Like, there's no such thing as anything in life being free, including a transaction, and you have to figure out where that cost is. That cost is hidden in all different places in our in our day to day lives, and it's paid by all different people that are it's whole it hidden from view most of the time. And you see that with the shit coin networks. With Bitcoin, it's right in your face. You you send a transaction, how much data? It's it's gonna be at a market rate, and you're gonna pay for that data.
So so it it's it seems more expensive on the surface, but it's really because you have a transparent there's a transparent negotiation going on there. I as for fair rules, like, yeah, I I probably misspoke, a little bit there. I think the key isn't necessarily the rules, especially in a censorship resistant system. The key is who can change the rules and how easy those rules can change. And that's what people don't realize about Bitcoin. The value doesn't come from any specific rule like the 21,000,000 cap. The the the value comes from it being so hard to fucking change, and Bitcoin shares this with self hosted other self hosted options. The difference with Bitcoin is that there's this also this, like, macro game theory that's happening that that keeps people in consensus with each other because there's a financial incentive to stay in consensus. Right? But, no one in the higher ups of Pleroma, like, one of the Pleroma management teams can push a change on Catan's instance without Catan running that change. He has to go out and run that change.
And, yeah, that's a massive change in power. Right? That that gives us a huge massive check on any kind of centralized power.
[00:42:59] Ketan:
Yep. And so you get, you know, a a a nice, I guess, freedom. You get this sovereignty. You get you know, you practically achieve these, you know, buzzwords that we keep, you know, harping on about. It is the practical solutions to these problems, that have been well, now, if you look at it just in the past couple of couple of years, have just been absolutely devastating for people, and, there is something that we can actually do about it now. Whereas, historically, you know, people have just been moaning about it. People have just been going, you know, whatever. But now we actually have built something that we can do something different for a different outcome.
And I think that that is, it's a game changer. It's it's it makes me incredibly bullish, on Bitcoin and on what, the ability of the individual, to do. So that's that's I I I'm just blown away by the amount of, knowledge that I have sort of just found randomly on the Internet, on Reddit and those sorts of things, and then just put that practically into my own home and being able to be a node on the Internet and being able to disclose a part of myself and share with the world what I want through my own website hosted literally with the data that's in my hard drive right now.
I I just I I think that that is an incredible thing, but that is how the Internet first started. We're just going full circle. We are going full circle. So we just you know, like, to say that, you know, you should put your, social media profile on with another server that you don't know, that you don't trust with all this information by Facebook. That is absolutely like, that was, you know, in the, I suppose, the nineties. People were thinking, who the hell is using their real name on the Internet? And then Facebook comes out, and everyone's using their real name. And now you just it's this huge data mining that's happening. And so we've come back now to go, alright. Well, we don't want that. We've met that's that's been a pretty big mistake. So now let's go back to self hosting. It's just gone one massive circle in the span of 20 years, I'd say.
[00:45:16] ODELL:
It's because we could get away with centralization. Centralization was, like, the easy scaling. Right? It gave us, like, these easy benefits of the trade off with censorship resistance, and it didn't really bite us in the ass until recently. We haven't, like and I think it just we needed like, the Internet needed to get so mature to a point where, it's just like the cancel culture turned on it. Right? I I don't even know. It's just like I kinda can't it it feels like it's just gaining steam now, and it's it's it's worse than it has been in the past. But maybe that's just my own, you know, my own bias. But, anyway, let's just I wanna jump right back into actionable shit because that's my favorite part about this show. What else are we running on this on this home server?
[00:46:01] Ketan:
Alright. So we've also got a Nextcloud. Now one of the cool oh, actually, let's start with my router. I think that that is the backbone to, basically, my private world and my, public world. And so the router that I'm using is, pfSense, and that is, hosted basically, you need a computer to run this on, and it just needs 2, network ports. 1, where the Internet goes in, and the other one is where your network comes out of. So that is essentially what and all your devices are stored within in in your LAN, so to speak. So you've got a WAN port and a LAN port. Everything else can come out of there. Now, essentially, what you're able to do with a p f Sense router is you can have your entire network VPN, using just the one connection. So your entire every single one of your devices, as soon as they enter, they will be protected by a commercial VPN.
I know that, Matt, you like to shield Mullvad. There's some other ones out there. There's ProtonVPN and IVPN. Those are the problems.
[00:47:11] ODELL:
But Mullvad, yes. Okay. I I I would agree with
[00:47:14] Ketan:
you. I I I think Mullvad has the best checkout as well in terms of, not having to use an, an email address. You don't have to yeah. It's fantastic. It is absolutely incredible. And I also heard on the grapevine that they are looking to implement natively, accepting lightning payments. So, keep an eye out for that, I suppose. That's on their pipeline, I believe. So, that'll be cool. And so the other thing that you can also do is run ad blockers throughout your entire network. Now what that means is, you you get this huge list of all these malicious or, dodgy trackers, and you can ban them as soon as, it hits your your network. So you don't have to see random garbage on the Internet.
Now the other thing, that you can do with the pfSense router is run your own open VPN server, And what that allows you to do is access your network from anywhere on the planet in a secure way without opening up ports and those sorts of things, and making it a little bit more accessible for others. A a VPN server is what you want to run, and that way, it just sort of makes it the make it makes it as though that your mobile phone or your laptop, even though you're in the middle of nowhere, as long as you've got Internet connection, no matter where you are in the world, you are able to call back to your home, and it will act as though it is just another device on your home network. So you can now access, whatever services that you have hosted at home.
And, of course, you can also do, hosting your own external websites using your, pfSense router, and that is using what's known as a reverse proxy. And, basically, what a reverse proxy does is it it once once some piece of traffic asks for a, a domain, it will say, alright. Well, this is the IP address that I'm asking for, and this is the the the computer that I need to go and access to. So that is basically like a a message to say, alright. Well, can you go and fetch that data from this particular computer, say, for example, a Raspberry Pi if that's where you're hosting it, and it will go out and fetch that and relay it back out to the network and, back out to the person who's requesting that information on that website.
[00:49:31] Unknown:
And so
[00:49:32] Ketan:
those types of things there's plenty more to do with pfSense, but I think having a good router that enables you to do this is something that's worthwhile investing in and having a look in. There are other ways that you can do this. You don't have to have a full blown desktop PC that I have. You can do this on on the cheaper. You can get the, the the official one from Netgate. They they also have this little box that you can use as a router as well. So it just really depends on what you wanna do there. So that is, yeah. It it's p f Sense router. That's the one.
[00:50:08] ODELL:
So I think Wiz made a very important point here, and this is a point that I try and make when we talk about Bitcoin topics and Bitcoin privacy, and Bitcoin in general and everything, is don't get overwhelmed. Like, I it's easy to get overwhelmed when Catan starts dropping knowledge on you. But, you know, one step at a time, little improvements. You know, you don't have to be like a boy wizard and and make it all happen. So, Wiz, I know you've been messing around with some of the items in this guide, But I'm curious on, like, your takeaways, you know, from, from, like, a more normie level. Like, how how are you finding? It? What are you finding with these trade offs here and and getting along?
[00:50:58] Unknown:
Yeah. Look. I I think that's the the the key point that I, you know, once I understood, I was a lot more comfortable and that is that a lot of these things, you know, including understanding Bitcoin, it's a bit of a journey and, I'm a practical sort of person. So I like to do actionable things. And, sometimes that leads to me, getting myself into hot water. But for me, I learned by doing so, the, the, the stuff, the light bulb moment was really on in understanding security and privacy we're two sides of the same coin. And that in a natively digital world, you can't have security without privacy, and convert, especially neither. Can you have private?
So that, that really made me sit up and pay attention, but also just to not get overwhelmed by, oh my god. You know, I'm I'm not at a Jedi level. Okay. But what can I do now? Okay. I can, I can run a VPN for me? All right. So spend a bit of time looking for a good VPN provider, have a little poke around, ask people at Bitcoin meetups, what they're using, why they chose that one. And then use that. Okay. And then next, next, next, next, next. So, you know, things like you know, the basic stuff about, you know, verifying your software downloads. What the fuck is that all about? Okay. It's about hashes. It's about confirming that the build, the developer put up there and, the project put up there is actually the one you've gotten or about to about to deploy, plenty of plenty of, horror stories out there, including in Bitcoin about, downloading the wrong software or downloading software that's been, meddled with, at great cost early bird like that.
So all these things, you know, building your building yourself strength, building your improving your privacy, improving your security. And the thing I love about Catan's guide, just having been through it the other day was this is like, man, this is a gigantic shopping list. What do I wanna start on? PfSense and the, and the reverse proxy, and improve privacy in my home network is probably where I'm gonna go next. So thanks for that one, Kaitan.
[00:53:49] Ketan:
No worries, mate. You're welcome. But, yeah, I I think, in terms of learning and where to start, start small. I I really like that approach, and then slowly build yourself up. It's not going to happen in a day, but, again, nothing Rome wasn't built in a day. It really does sort of, you know, you start small, and then you you you so the way I I would attribute my success to the fact that I have probably failed more times than some people have even tried. And so if you want to see success in some of these self hosting areas, you just have to get out there and try. You will you will screw up. There is no doubt that you will bang your head against the wall a 1000000 times as to why this doesn't work, but you will you you just keep at it. And I have spent thousands of hours on this because I just love doing it. It's just one of my passions. It's just I sit there, I go through GitHub, I find what's good, and I fucking run that shit.
What is this? How does it work? I just get in there, and I do it. Scott Galloway doesn't love you for it. Well, he can go screw himself, mate. That's for sure. But that those are the types of things that I really, really like to do. And so I continued to do that, and I will sort of, just take actionable steps as to, okay, what am I doing here? What's the goal? How can I get better at it? And so that's how you'd start. There are plenty of resources on the Internet. Like, it is crazy the amount of forums, the places that you can go to. Reddit is great as well, and, you know, any links in the sidebar there would be fantastic for places to start and build your own what's known as a home lab as well. So there's guys out there who are building their own home labs, and that is why it is, you know, those are the types of things that you you wanna look for when getting this information.
So that is how I learned and, you know, you just just just do, and then you will get better at it over time. And then you'll start to think, oh, well, look. This thing here, I can, you know, mesh these 2 together and get a really nice, outcome for what I wanna do. And, yeah, that's kind of just how you learn. You just kinda just go out there and you do it, and that's exactly what Wizz is saying as well. Just go out there and and and try it.
[00:56:20] ODELL:
So, I mean, I relate super hard with that. I mean, that's basically my favorite way to learn is just make shit ton of mistakes. Should burn myself a 1000000 times until I realize the stove is hot and how I can boil water, you know? And that's how I learned with Bitcoin, and that's why sometimes I get a little bit worried when some people are, like, oh, I've never lost a sat in my life. Like, I don't know what you're doing, man. Like, I a little concerned you're not pushing yourself hard enough. But, yeah. I encourage the freaks to go out there and take sensible risks and and learn that way. I think it it is the most informative way to learn. I think tangentially along those lines, and Wizz mentioned this, and I know both of you are very involved, down in the local Bitcoin community down there.
Maybe we should talk to the freaks about the importance of local meetups and and and talking to other individuals, like minded individuals that are also going through the same situation. You wanna start us off with and tell us about, your great Bitcoin community down down in Aussieland?
[00:57:33] Ketan:
I think we lost him. Potentially, yeah, or he might be on mute. Who knows? Hassan, why don't you show it to us? Yeah. Okay. So I think having a good community, to sort of bounce ideas and talk about and just relate to somebody, is a fantastic thing. You get to bounce ideas. You get to really, understand at someone, you know, understand with someone and grow with them. So I would strongly recommend finding a bro. Now for me, that bro for me has probably been Stefan. And so we've known each other for a very, very long time, and we've gone through this whole journey sort of together. And that has helped feed each other off, to to to to keep improving, to keep learning, to keep understanding.
And I think that that is really, really important to have. And so when you want to meet somebody with like minded, you know, like minded, ideals and values, what you wanna do is, go to these and attend these that is why, it is kind of important to do those sorts of things.
[00:58:47] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. A 100%, Catan. The, one of the biggest wake ups for me was, getting to go to Badger in 2018. I was working for, customers up in Northern Europe. I would go over to Riga for the weekend. I was a Bitcoin noob, but spending 2 days talking with Bitcoiners, play probably my Bitcoin knowledge a year, and then as well. And it the the local scenes are even more important. So because you find people who are kind of, like, a time was saying, you know, at the same level of you as you're, you know, had the same level of interest. And then you find you've got different things you're and you start sharing that knowledge together. And just this last weekend, there was, 2 of us had got together.
1 of us put together, a, a site where you can look inside a beehive because he's an apearist. And so he's put a, a lightning paywall over the front of that because he wanted to learn how BDC pay server works and how websites work. So that was a and so we spent the whole afternoon looking at how he put that together and then halt into talking about a 1,000 other Bitcoin top. But that that importance of, talking with other Bitcoin is, you know, face I think just super important.
[01:00:43] ODELL:
Fuck. Yeah. I mean, that's where I met you, and and Riga. Riga was great. I think it just it, like, solidifies your conviction too. Like, it gives you that encouragement to take the next step. Yes. Someone in the comments mentioned that they're too paranoid for meetups, Randy McMillan. I respect that. I understand that. I felt that as well, and I was hesitant for a while because of it. But I'm glad I took that risk and took that trade off. Just be cognizant of it, you know, be practical about it. Yeah. I I that that is that is obviously a decision you have to make you know, think hard before you do it. Don't just do it willy nilly, but, you know, life's short, and they're just enjoyable.
[01:01:44] Unknown:
They're super enjoyable, and I think my experience, going to different meetups in different places. The the meetup organizers are always very welcoming and very non intrusive. If you don't wanna give your name, people are absolutely fine with that. If you wanna just start talking about the coin and, whether it's number go up in terms of block height, coin joins, hash rate, difficulty, or the current, the current Twitter drama or whatever the whatever it is that tweaks your interest, you'll find people there who are, yeah, immediately jumping into that. I've I've been down to the Sydney Big Line meet ups not multiple times, but I could probably only name, handful of the people there that I've spoken to, and I've probably spoken to dozens and dozens.
And that's totally fine, and that's been very representative of, going to Bitcoin meet ups everywhere. So I I I'd echo your point, Matt, that yeah. Sure. You know, be if you if you're perhaps cautious about your, your identity and, and so on going to meet ups, life's short. You know, I've I I'm in my mid fifties. I've only got another half a decade, half shit. Not half decade. Half a century, to go. But, yeah. Too short to miss out on talking with Bitcoin and and learning about Bitcoin.
[01:03:23] ODELL:
And the good ones the good ones say no pictures. I know that BitDevs in New York City is a no picture zone. No shit coins and no pictures. And, you know, so you just have to be practical about it. Like, obviously, you come with your own trade offs. If you're meeting people in person, then they could obviously do physical harm to you in a in in a compromising environment. They know the general area that you live in. Alternatively, you know, we've seen with this pandemic, so much conversation move online. Right? And, you know, maybe you have a malicious individual or a spook or something in a small bar in Riga, who is he was listening to your conversation.
But now a shit ton of our conversations have moved to Zoom and shit, where you just have them constantly recorded 247. So there's trade offs everywhere, and I don't necessarily think meetups are the worst, privacy wise.
[01:04:23] Wiz:
Yep.
[01:04:28] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I'm really enjoying this conversation. I want I kinda wanna pivot a little bit, and then I wanna hit some audience questions. So to the freaks that are still with us in the audience, we appreciate you for, carving out this time on your happy Bitcoin Tuesday, to join us. And so if you have if you have audience if you have questions, throw them in the chat, and we will get to them, hopefully. I I love to get to and I think that's the the the coolest part about this show, period. So where do I wanna go with this? I wanna talk about purpose built devices. Do we think is is there a place in the future where, you know, like, is is is is there a middle ground where we see, you know, like, an Apple quality style device that is open source and self sovereign? Or is it always going to be a enthusiast nerd extra thing that has to be done?
[01:05:42] Ketan:
So I I think there's a lot of development that's already happening in the self hosted space. I think if you have a look at for example, there's a a website called why you know host.org. That is a particular, a piece of software that you can download, and it comes with plenty of self hosted tools that are kinda like that one click, where you just put it onto your server and away it goes. And it will, you know, it will download all the software for you. It will do everything for you in the background. And I think that that is something that you could potentially use, as a, I guess, as a stepping stone to something more self sovereign, if you wanna go down that path, or you can just stick with why why you know host because it gets the job done. I think there's just gonna be an array of levels and a different rate based upon people's ability, technical ability, as well as their time and convenience. There's always going to be this array of trade offs. I don't think we're gonna have one perfect solution, that solves everything.
Because the moment you start abstracting details away, that means less sovereignty, potentially. And so if you, you know, if for example, a development team comes out with this great thing, and then, you know, 10, 15 years down the track, they go, you know what? We don't want to do this anymore. Then what do you do with all of that? How does that get maintained? So that is something that you probably want to consider, when you are looking at at, you know, how do you want to play, this? Do you want to, you know, be completely self sovereign from day 1? Well, then you're gonna need to start learning. You're gonna need to start kind of really going down the rabbit hole. Or do you wanna take these incremental steps, which might just be using a self hosted box or a self hosted, VPS server or some sort of kind of, you know, intermediary step, that suits your budget, that suits your time, your learning abilities, those sorts of things. I think that that is, probably the where it may land.
[01:07:54] Unknown:
Yeah. I I I think we're already seeing it happen, Matt. And I think, no packages flat. So, Bitcoin hasn't been the early days. Wasn't the easiest thing to run. Whereas nowadays the technical barriers to running, to running a Bitcoin node are getting lower and lower and lower. You know, there was some of the older, some of the older packages round more established, raspberry blades We've got the newer ones, my note, roll. There's probably a few others, But they make, running coin no. Super simple compared to buying the hardware, setting it up, the operating system, downloading the software, checking the self signing, installing the software.
And then the bit that is underappreciated is integrating the software. So having spent three and a half decades working on integrating large complex systems, it's an underappreciated level of complexity, under, underappreciated task. I think Catan, you, you'd probably echo that some of those thousands of hours you've spent banging your head against, walls running, learning how to run software and configure software. An awful lot of that's with how do I get piece of software a to talk to piece of software b? And whether that's, how do I get LND to talk to Bitcoin Core? How do I get LND to talk to LND, etcetera, etcetera.
And that's where and that's where things like node packages as an example of, you know, more self sovereign software come into play. So do you have the option of buying open source software based around the rock 64 chips and so on, downloading from source, building from scratch? Absolutely. Can you buy the box preconfigured, pre synced? Yep. And then you've got things like node packages, which sit in the middle. And I think we'll start to see that in next cloud is probably another good example. So you've got, you know, the ability to start hosting your own file storage, your own email, your own contacts, your own calendar, things that are all very, exposing of your personal details and privacy.
And you can get that hosted. You can buy a box. You can download software. You can build software. So the the beauty is the increasing choices and, filling out of that middle ground for, to make it to make it more accessible. And and as it becomes more accessible, more people do it. As more people do it, more of those people start to think, yeah. And maybe I'm not quite so comfortable with that, with having done it this way. I'm now gonna take the next step and build it all from scratch myself. And so it's an incremental thing.
[01:11:25] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I I tend to agree with both of you. I think, like, an interesting thing that people should grapple with in terms of ease of use when it comes to sovereignty is auto updates, because if you talk from a security and privacy perspective, from anyone besides the maintainer of the software, you wanna stay up to date. And we see this with routers a lot. And the router is is is in a modern home is is the command center. The router is, like, it all begins and ends with your router, and if your router is compromised, you're fucked. If your router is, yeah, if your router is compromised, you're fucked.
And people don't really put that much thought into that device, And where they usually get fucked is they don't update soon enough. They they're they're running old software that isn't updated and patched for the newest issue. But when you're talking about, trust minimized systems, auto updates are the fucking worst because an auto update could be malicious. So I don't know if we ever can balance that. There'll always be people who will be better off auto updating, and they will have to wholeheartedly trust the supplier of whatever they're using. And then there'll be people that aren't auto updating and are gonna have to actually practice, you know, personal responsibility and make judgment calls on myself where they update and when they update it and be on top of that shit.
But the most important thing is that there's competition and that you have multiple choices and that not everyone's running the same thing. And, I mean, while we started recording the show, I I I only saw it in passing, but, Jeff Bezos dropped he stepped down as CEO, right, and of of Amazon. And AWS, you know, they they run our Internet. Like, so many services and sites do depend on AWS. So we end up in a situation where people are using, you know, 10 different self hosted solutions, and some have different trust levels than others, like, that's still an infinite improvement over just everyone hosting it on on, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
[01:13:49] Unknown:
You know, I I think that's why Jeff stepped down. Jeff Jeff's read the time's guide, and he's gone, fuck.
[01:14:02] Ketan:
Good one, Wiz. I doubt it. But, yeah, I think look. With this, having the options available to you, I think is fantastic. The guys who want to hold their own keys, who want to run their own node, who want to do these things, it is always going to be available for them with multiple options to do that. We're not all running Electrum. We're not all running, you know, a a a particular piece of software, and I think that that is the best part. So, yeah, that is something that, you know,
[01:14:37] ODELL:
should be running Bitcoin Core.
[01:14:39] Ketan:
Well, yes. And I think that you will see over time that implement those implementations may start to, and I think there's already been talks of that of just building out another implementation that obviously talks to each other, and is compatible with one another, but there are other instances out there that you can run. And, you know, like, for example, the Wasabi guys have packaged in, Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean but you know what I mean? Like, they're I I understand that we are all running Bitcoin Core. However, having said that, Bitcoin Core is the one of the most trusted pieces of software and has the most eyes on that code.
[01:15:16] ODELL:
So that's something that we can do. I mean, the key with Bitcoin Core is that there's no auto updates. So we're not all running the same version of Bitcoin Core. I haven't updated Bitcoin Core yet. Yep. That's true. So so I think you you almost get a lot of the benefits that people talk about with multiple implementations you get with just, you know, not auto updating your software and having backwards compatibility. Someone in the comments, surfer Jim or boy in the comments, asked if you have any experience with Start9's private server, Catan.
[01:15:50] Ketan:
So I looked into Start 9. So what they've they they have a business model that, basically, I I haven't been able to run it myself. So, you you need to to get the image to flash onto your Raspberry Pi. You have to pay for that. And, so that's their business model. And if you want, you can compile it from source, but it is a little bit more technical and in-depth. So at that point, I tried to do it. I wasn't really able to to successfully do that, so then I kind of stopped there. But I may go out and buy the actual image and and see what they've got, but that's as far as I've gotten so far.
[01:16:27] ODELL:
But same same with me. I have not used it yet. Wizard of Oz, have you used start 9?
[01:16:34] Unknown:
I was in in, Al's Lacrosse group when Matt Hill was presenting, and it's it's certainly, it's certainly a project I'm super interested in.
[01:16:46] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I I like the concept I like the concept of all these home nodes, these home servers, you know, like the raspi, blitzes, the. Star 9 definitely seems promising to me. I do have some misgivings that it all relies on the SD card. Yeah. Embassy OS is what Randy McMillan said, but I I know they're they're they're working to to make it so that it works on an SSD just like, some of their, you know, competing, packages work on. Yeah. So, I mean, I I think it should just be I I I wanna see a lot of different options in this in this play. I I think, Umbrel is also looks very interesting to me. They put, like, a really slick package together.
And then and you can just Yeah. I like Yeah. Go on. I like
[01:17:38] Unknown:
it from an architecture perspective. So, so the the thing I loved about minor and still is it's this gigantic knife of Bitcoin software. And when I being open for the first time, it's like, oh man, apart from Bitcoin core, what does all this other stuff do? Right. I wanna run lightning. Okay. The way we went. And then there is, you know, on the, which I was more than, there's just software packages that are all integrated work and you can start learning about coin joins. You can learn about VPNs. You can learn about, or you can learn about, RTL and Thunder hub and mempool and, yeah, huge range. Fantastic.
On the other hand, Umbrel has taken a slightly different approach, which architecturally I, I am a big fan of, which is the core here is the core of the platform is Bitcoin core plus LND. Those 2 things, every Bitcoin is running. You can obviously choose whether you're a fan of LND or you want one of the other 2 or 3, 4 implementations of, but you should be running lightning. You should be running Bitcoin call, taken an app store. So using go to the app and choose what it is that you want to deploy on your number. And because they've used, containers to implement and deploy, That's very straightforward and very insulated and isolated.
So it's a very neat solving that. How do you go from balancing wanna put lots of stuff on there because some of them do things that other people won't. So I put it all on the my note approach versus Ambrose approach of saying, we want a solid foundation, and then we want isolated pieces, which each user can choose to deploy according to their needs. And it's a it's a very sweet it's a very sweet balance. Except, it doesn't have dark mode. Fuck's sake.
[01:19:58] Ketan:
Yeah. I think they're working on that, though.
[01:20:02] Unknown:
I've badgered them enough about it.
[01:20:04] Ketan:
Yeah. So have I. When they first sort of started up, I I said, mate, we're we're dark mode. That was the first question I had. I think they're still working on it, so hopefully soon.
[01:20:16] ODELL:
One one pain point I've noticed, with these things is I kinda dove in during the bear market, just dove in head first. I do kind of agree that that this is where things are heading, especially with lightning. And then kind of tangential to our previous conversation, I was talking about lightning I was talking about Bitcoin fees, and I think people don't realize how cool the the the, the interaction is between Bitcoin and lightning fee wise, because on chain Bitcoin, you pay per the data that is stored on chain. So if your transaction is a a small 1,000,000 sats versus, 20,000,000 sats, if if it comes from the same number of inputs and it's the same exact size on chain kilobytes wise, then you're gonna pay the same fee regardless that you're sending way more money. On Lightning, it's based on the amount you are sending.
So it's it's a really cool concept there where where inherently the way the fee structure works on chain is, maybe a little bit more opaque to the average user, harder for them to grasp, but it benefits larger settlement transactions. And then on Lightning, it's not necessarily, it's not not necessarily perfect or ideal for small transactions. I mean, right now, it is. There's a lot of nuance there, but at least it scales up based on the amount you send. And I think that's a very easy thing for someone to register. Oh, I pay, you know, a half a percent or a quarter percent, to send this transaction based on the amount I send.
[01:22:00] Unknown:
But, yeah. I think Bitcoin core, layer layer 1 fees, Matt. And I don't think Bitcoin has talked about this enough, to new coiners is that in in today's the current financial system, like, it's w which I love pointing out is part time. I mean, what the fuck? Yeah. What is it? What is it trading day from 10 to 4 or something or 9 to 3, very part time.
[01:22:33] Ketan:
But you know, in the legacy financial
[01:22:36] Unknown:
system, the money you send, especially internationally is a portion of the value. So it's very much a rent seeking model. So they have the, they have the monopoly on sending money. If I want to send, I wanna send money to you in in the US, Matt, or to Europe, then essentially the slice that gets taken as we bought the bank is a proportion of the value in layer 1 on Bitcoin. That's not the case. It's the complexity of the transaction, the size of the transaction. And as you say, if it's one, if it's one UTXO and you're sending in and out and getting some change back, it's pretty small, simple transaction.
You don't for it. It really just comes down to how busy is the help everyone else on Bitcoin layer. 1 urgent is your, is your transaction need that determines the cost. Whereas lightning at first glance appears to be like the current legacy system in the sense that, you know, the higher, the value, the more fee you will pay. The difference is lightning lightning. No. And not exactly very high. They're the default, or maybe this slightly lifted up to create I actually have to deposit Bitcoin and open channels and I've got skin in the guy. So it's more twice, of each transaction.
It's actually reward for effort and for capital risk. And it's a, it's quite a, it's quite a subtle but important distinction for lightning. Firstly, from layer 2, from layer 1 to the legacy system, and from layer 2 to the legacy system. And, yeah, we don't, we don't really talk about that enough with with new coins, I think.
[01:24:49] ODELL:
Catan, do we talk about fees enough to NewCoins? You you got them all convinced that they can use 1 sapper bite forever. So do you wanna repent?
[01:24:58] Ketan:
Well, we will see. I I'm I I am I am hopeful. I don't think I'm confident, but I am hopeful that one day we will return to the normal stage of the world, maybe, where we will be able to see 1 separate, per buyer transactions go through. Whether that happens within this decade, I I I hope. But, I I think that there is a there is a gang out there that wants to transact in 1 set per byte, and, I ho I I stand with them because, well, I always wanna pay the cheapest amount of fees. Having said that though, I understand that the network does cost money to run, and so I may have to upgrade that to potentially 2 sets at some point.
[01:25:54] ODELL:
So the mempool hasn't cleared the mempool hasn't cleared this year yet.
[01:25:58] Ketan:
No. It hasn't.
[01:26:00] ODELL:
And so That was one of my New Year's predictions that the mempool wasn't gonna clear all year. Yep. But it's only been 1 month, Matt. It's only been 1 month. And and I also made the prediction, like, every month leading up to it as well. Okay. Well, let let let's see, Matt. Let's see. What most people don't realize is you could actually do decimals. So so if if your transaction was 1.2 sats per byte, then it confirmed. That's right. Yeah. But the the one satters so sometimes it dives into it, but it doesn't doesn't actually clear the full Full amount. Yeah. So so some of my transactions did go through, and I was like, yep. And they built it. Big news. It still works. Sign the message or I don't believe you.
I mean, so some people think. Right? Like, so so fees are measured in sets. Right? And we believe number goes up. Right? I mean, I I just came up with this on the spot, but I feel like every single person who I have on the show, I should now ask on the record just to have it out there for posterity because, all the good freaks out there are archiving. By the way, you're not a true freak if you don't have an archive of every single episode of Tales from the Crypt, stored locally, in at least one location. And I'd go further than that. I actually have every single episode of Stefan's show also saved locally and noted, because I think, like, that's, like, what you're supposed to do as a Bitcoiner. But anyway, so this is a new segment that I just came up with 2 seconds ago.
Bitcoin is designed to pump forever. Disagree or agree?
[01:27:34] Ketan:
It is designed to pump forever. Yes. I do I do think that it is designed that way. Yes. Whether it will, that's another question.
[01:27:47] ODELL:
That's no
[01:27:50] Unknown:
Bitcoin is designed forever, and it will. So other things. The days that I would on that per bite are over. But the days of one set per byte transactions clearing will become less and less frequent.
[01:28:20] ODELL:
Well, it actually goes it actually goes the opposite way is is is is the reason I thought of this segment, besides the fact that every morning I wake up and I go, Bitcoin's designed to pump forever, was because one of the theories is is we can have this argument all day. These are my arguments to have with big corners and meetups is, is is it bullish or bearish to say that 1 sat per byte will confirm? Because someone could argue that it's bearish because then we don't have a healthy fee market, who are the miners, the miners aren't getting paid increased fees, if if one separate buyer coming through. Maybe it's not, it's not it's not consistent. So we have a if we don't have a backlog and we have a situation where there's, like, weeks where where there's just no fees, then then miners drop off the network, and you just have a a non a a network that's not really secured and block times are are slow versus maybe it's bullish because 1 SAP per byte is just so expensive in terms of purchasing power. Right? Like, maybe, like, we hold on to 1 sat per byte for longer than people think just because the purchasing power gets so fucking strong of the sat. That that's exactly what I'm I that's the camp that I'm thinking about as well is that, hey. What if 1 sat per byte, a a normal, you know, transaction
[01:29:41] Ketan:
might be a 141 sets or something, and that 141 sets represents a $141, then, you know, what is that not enough to incentivize a minor to to put that through?
[01:29:55] Unknown:
Yeah. Sorry. I I didn't realize you guys were talking. So the the you're right, mate. There are the 2 is the Saks is gonna be a reflection of the quantity of transactions on the on on the network. And I'm very bullish on that. Transaction numbers will go up. Mentor will go up. That's per byte as a base trend. To minimum transaction, then it will go up. We'll be at the end of the week One set of what transactions will be a, will be a historical anomaly that, the 3 of us will look back fondly on and talk about those with the days.
[01:30:48] ODELL:
My dogs are eating, food right now. Can you hear them through the mic?
[01:30:54] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah.
[01:30:56] ODELL:
Sorry about that, freaks. Live and learn. Live and learn. So yeah. I mean, I I I tend to agree with the fees. They're they're finished eating now, so we should be good. Low bandwidth guests should be required to upgrade Internet before next appearances on any pod. Well, we are at least live streaming from a cabin in the woods to Australia, which is pretty impressive that we just take that for granted. But I do agree that it is frustrating, when buffering happens and also when we hear dogs in the background. What else do we have? I mean, I have you guys for a little bit longer.
I want you to get on with your day. It seems like the audience doesn't have much more questions. Oh, I have I have one. Do we think, should we be concerned about the issues with Tor lately? Do you have do either of you have a strong opinion on that? Catan, do you have a strong one there?
[01:31:56] Ketan:
No. I I don't think I have a very strong opinion just in that. I think that they've they've released a patch, and it looks like it's up and running again, and people are able to now you utilize that. We're also moving to version 3 on the tool for your Bitcoin node. So that has been implemented, and I've had a look at that. And it looked like it looks like it just straight through upgrades very, very easily. So it looks like it's pretty good, and it's it it, yeah, it seems to be okay at this point in time. It was out for maybe, like, a day or so, or a couple of days, and it's now all returned back to normal as far as what I can tell.
It's not ideal, but it is probably the best way that we have to be able to expose, or host things on the Internet without exposing our IP address. And I think that that that is something that we should continue to protect and support over time.
[01:33:00] ODELL:
That's about it. I mean, that's a failure. That's the the main issue we have when you talk about self sovereignty. Right? Is is is okay. So you're gonna run your server from your home. How do you protect that your home's location? Right? How do you protect that private information of where you're broadcasting from? And the only way to do that in any kind of real bandwidth intensive way is to trust a third party. And if you wanna do it in a low bandwidth way, then you could use Tor. Right? That that's, like, a a key issue that we're in the middle of right now, that is is not solved. It's a not it's a not it's not a solved problem.
[01:33:40] Ketan:
Yeah. No. It's it's definitely not solved yet.
[01:33:44] ODELL:
Some person is asking how much privacy is actually gained by running a full node if it's over Clearnet. I've, this so this come this this this question is an interesting one, because, it depends if you're broadcasting or receiving. If if on the receiving side, if you're looking up balances, running it over clear net still gives you insane amounts of privacy gain. Because if if you're not using a Bitcoin node to to to interact with the network, you have to use a Bitcoin node. And if you're not using your own Bitcoin node, you're using someone else's node. That node you're trusting with 2 things. You're trusting it with your balances, your transactions, and your addresses, and how much Bitcoin you have, and you're trusting them to actually validate the rules, you know, that you've agreed to that it's actual Bitcoin agreed to by the consensus rules that that that you thought you agreed with. So the only way to accomplish both of those things in a trust minimized way is to run your own node.
If you're running your own node, using your own node over Clearnet and you're broadcasting transactions from it, you can end up exposing your IP address. So in terms of broadcasting, you know, and and there's mitigations that are being proposed such as, like, dandelion and stuff, in terms of broadcasting. But but really, you're you're better off using Tor and I the crazy part is you're best using a third party broadcasting service, like, Blockstream dot info's API through their Tor Onion site. Anyone disagree with that?
[01:35:21] Ketan:
Nope. Great analysis there.
[01:35:23] ODELL:
Bam. Bam. Yep.
[01:35:25] Unknown:
Yeah. What's up on this? And I guess if, Janine and Ben, earlier conversation is that the level of communication from the tall foundation, was, left a lot to be resolved.
[01:35:55] ODELL:
Yeah. No. It absolutely left a lot to be desired. There's still there's still no clear communication. They, supposedly, a patch has been issued. I guess not everyone's running it yet, but the issues are intermittent. It's fine. Like, I'd basically, everyone should operate under the assumption that Tor will not be reliable in terms of uptime. I think it's relatively safe assumption that it's pretty private, like, that there's no, like, glaring backdoors or anything in it, to deanonymize you if you stay within the Onion network, and you're not hosting a hidden service. If you're hosting a hidden service from that, we're still not 100% sure.
There's so much fucking nuance here. But in the the key issue that we're discussing here in terms of the recent attacks is reliability. And when we're talking about reliability, we're talking about the issue is is your Tor only hidden services. In in Catan's self hosting guide, if you're not if you're not using, if if if if if you're not using Tor or a third party that you're trusting, the only way to connect back is to expose your IP address. So if you use Tor to connect back and Tor is down, then you're not gonna be able to connect back. And that was the point I was trying to get to earlier, and Randy McMillan actually mentioned it on in the comments, in terms of traveling. And so in the bear market, I tried all these different self note things, particularly because of Lightning and coin joined because you want it running 247.
Now I'm, like, traveling around and and and renting places, and it's way less practical if this this idea of self hosting is way less practical if you're if you're living a more nomadic life. You kinda have to have, like, your citadel that you're you're running it in, because otherwise, you just hit up the, like, like, Internet limits. Like, you just can't have something that's on 247. Right?
[01:37:53] Ketan:
Yeah. That's right. So it it makes it a lot more challenging if you are some sort of, like, a a digital nomad. Yeah. It really I mean, you to do self hosting properly and have a nice stable Internet connection generally requires the use of a home or business broadband connection. And so, yeah, it it it does yeah. If you're a digital nomad, then self hosting, you might need to trust a a, a a a hosting provider to do that for you.
[01:38:27] ODELL:
And if you have to connect back through Tor, then Tor might be down.
[01:38:34] Ketan:
Not ideal.
[01:38:42] Unknown:
Matt?
[01:38:46] ODELL:
Yes. Hit me.
[01:38:49] Unknown:
So if you're a if you're a freak and you're, you're starting what are you what are you top 3 for securities opportunity?
[01:39:08] ODELL:
3 What was that? I lost you at the end.
[01:39:12] Unknown:
Sorry. What what are the top three things you'd recommend for, the new folk who are looking to update them in security and privacy?
[01:39:25] ODELL:
Well, I mean, I think that's what's that's what's difficult about all of this stuff. Right? Is that you have to think, you have to actually use your own, like, you have to use your own judgment based on your own current situation. Like, we have freaks that are looking at an Amazon Alexa right now. If they're if I'm on their TV, maybe I can okay, Google. What's the weather? Like, I don't know if it's just registered or might have just registered in their in their house. They they have a wiretap that's just live in their house. Like, they should get rid of that. Right? Then we have things like Elon Musk. Like, he tweets out use signal.
You know, like, I think, like, if most people, like, if you use signal for most things, like, it'll probably be a a a step up improvement. Right? But it's and then I've been on the Bitcoin side, like, secure your own keys. Right? And even something as simple as using a a phone wallet helps you. I think I I I think there's, like, 2 types of BitCorners. There's a type of BitCorner that's, like, you should go you should only go to cold storage when you're ready, and then there's type of Bitcoin that's like, I'd rather you have it in a hot wallet on your phone, than on an exchange. And I'm the I'm the second type.
But I think you just I I I think I think the most important thing is motivation. I think we could all agree that the most important thing is realizing that there's a need and that you have to fix it. You have to you have to improve your situation. Right?
[01:41:01] Unknown:
Yeah. Definitely. I think too, when we, you know, just to go more specifically on Bitcoin, there's, I know it would fall into the same camp. I mean, Catan's heard me say this before, having Bitcoin is better than not having Bitcoin, having Bitcoin off the exchange better than having it on the exchange, having it in a cold wallet better than having it in a hot wallet and so on and so on. So it's, it's a series of progressions and, you know, there's plenty of hardcore Bitcoiners that will say, no, it should be in a multi sync secure, you know, multi sync secured with, cold card only using PSVT and multiple devices, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's way too far, way too far for new corners. They just want, tell me the next thing I need to do.
And I guess the first few things, I always tend to advise a small practical steps. So I'm firmly convinced that the biggest risk to Bitcoin is security, particularly with regards to Bitcoin, is. You know, it's since the problem sits between the keyboard and the chair, it's you. And it's doing stupid things or doing things that you just not aware of that are a risk not paying attention. So the few things I always, with manager use a VPN, and, yeah, run a run a full node because those are those are really basic things. You know, hold hold your hold your own keys. If you start with those those, then you're a long way forward than 95% of the rest of the population period, who are using Facebook sign on and Google sign on, etcetera, etcetera. So it's it's a step me. What about you, Katan?
[01:43:05] Ketan:
I I think for me, it's probably, yeah, hold your own case and use your own note as well. I think to to just get yourself off the exchange is probably one thing that you should be looking to do. And whether that's, you know, on a hot wallet for a small amount and then in more other cold storage just type solutions. But then also then moving on to using your own full node as well. So those are the things that I would also, you know, echo. But then also, using things like VPN and Tor where if if if it's required. Yeah.
There's there's a thing, like, you have to I I guess what Matt said, you have to assess what you think is a a risk and then move from there. If you've got an Alexa at home, yeah, that those are that's probably the first step. Get rid of that, and then move on to, actually, you know, maybe you might wanna look into your Wi Fi. Right? If you've got a you know, you've got the default usernames and passwords in there, you might wanna change those. If you if your your Wi Fi password is just, you know, password 1 or something like that with a capital p, you you may wanna change that. So those are the types of things that you might wanna look into to just incrementally do better.
So yeah.
[01:44:22] ODELL:
Wait. 100%. I mean, I just wanna show real quickly, Catan's got a educational, program that he's been doing with Stefan Lavera called Ministry of Nodes. I put that in the comments on all the platforms. If you just type in ministry of nodes on YouTube, he's got a bunch of guides there. I mean, this is this is one of the issues, I think, and I go back and forth on it. So I put in the comments bitcoin dash intro.com, which is run by 6102 Bitcoin, maintained by 6102 Bitcoin. I think he's on kind of the right target, in terms of a checklist. Like, it's, like, you start by buying Bitcoin and, like, getting, you know and before you get to actual sovereign proper Bitcoin usage, so called proper Bitcoin usage.
I think in practice, though, it's hard to find a single thing because it depends on the person. And so I try and focus on 2 things recently. I I I focus on, first of all, trying to create the motivation. Right? So privacy is important. Sovereignty is important. You can lose your coins if you keep them on an exchange. Right? Like, motivation. Get them to realize why. You get them to realize why, then people will eventually try and figure it out themselves. Right? Yes. We have node dot guide, from Bitcoin q and a. Bitcoin q and a has got a bunch of great guides. He was also on on sale of dispatch if you wanna check out the earlier episodes. I think his full guides are at bitcoiner.guide.
Bitcoiner.guide should be it, or it's bitcoiners.guide. But anyway, but then at the same time, like, I feel like almost giving them options, giving people options hurts. And this is one of the things that I really liked about your self host guide. This is one of the things that I've been doing at we run bitcoin.com, my Bitcoin guide, is, like, I'm just you just pick best practice. I I think there's there's a place for both. There's a place for motivating people and and having them seek out that knowledge. There's a place for these, like, checklists where, like, you can just send a universal checklist to most types of individuals and they can go down that checklist. And then there's a real place, I think, for just saying this is the best practice. Like, this is how you should be set up. This is your you know, all the trade offs considered. Here are the trade offs. This is probably the best way to run your phone. This is probably the best way to secure your Bitcoins. This is probably the best, you know, VPN provider. Like, we can have, like, a whole conversation about trade offs between VPN providers. I just don't have the time for that.
I would rather just tell them to use MOLVAD. And if MOLVAD, you know, if if MOLVAD fails us, it fails us altogether. Right? And I think more people end up using it that way. It saves you more time. So there's this whole balancing act that you have to fucking always deal with. Right?
[01:47:18] Unknown:
Yeah. It's so so true, man. It it it is a it's a fine line. Yes. But one of the one of the great things about, about Bitcoin is it's got a number go up. And so, you know, for people who maybe took a little bit of a punt on Bitcoin for the first time last year, when it was, when it took a dip, when it took a dip to 3,000 or 3 and a half, you know, we're buying in the bear market in 20 18, 20 19. Maybe they bought a $1,000 that's $1,000. And maybe they took them, took the next step over the, over the last year or 2 and downloaded a software wallet and transferred their coins off the exchange.
That, that $1,000 is now $10,000 and it's sitting there in their phone. They're probably not too comfortable about $10,000 sitting in their phone. Well, you know, in the next year or 2 $1,000 number might be a whole lot more than that. So there is that, that moves people go, yeah, that's probably not the best spot to have. What happens if the phone breaks? What happens if, you know, someone steals the phone and so on. And, and I think, I think NGU technology, Bitcoin's designed to pump forever does help that, does help that learning process.
It incentivize it correctly.
[01:48:46] Ketan:
Yeah, mate. You talked about motivation. And I think, when the number goes up, you start to pay attention a lot a lot more than if it was just the amount that you put in initially. And so that's when you start to see people go, oh, I better pay attention now. So, yeah, I I concur with that. It it really is the motivation. It it that is one big driver to do better. It certainly has been for me. So
[01:49:12] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think I usually, when I talk about, motivate things that create the motivation, usually, it's a negative thing. I think Bitcoin is kind of unique in that it it has a positive motivator involved as well, which is, the amount goes up that you're holding. So it's nice that it's not just all negative, motivation. Usually, I would say in this in this space, it is it tends to be negative. You know, you get burned. You get deplatformed. Goxed, and you learn. So so the number go up element is definitely a nice positive thing. But someone mentioned in the comments Moon Wallet. It kinda hit my radar.
I don't think either of you guys have used it yet. Am I correct on that? Yeah. I haven't had a chance to use that. Yeah. So, I mean, Moon Wallet is one of these, like it's aiming to be to straddle the ground between simple, you know, and self sovereign at the same time. So I do look forward to trying that out. I hope to see more of that. We are we are short on time here. I appreciate you guys joining us. I appreciate all the freaks who joined us. I appreciate both you, Wiz and Catan, for joining us, all the way from Australia in your morning. I I, I know mornings are more difficult, so it it's it's extra cool that you guys joined us for this live show because we do have this hard time set in place for this massive eternity of every episode so far.
So we didn't wanna ruin that. So I appreciate you guys coming on. I hope to see you guys again sometime soon in in person. Well, I haven't met Catan yet in person, but I look forward to seeing you again in person, Wiz. Maybe maybe at Bitcoin 2021 in June in Miami. That would be fucking dope. And I look forward to having you both on the podcast again soon. You know, this is one of those things that they'll dispatch. I want I want to be a thing where we just have almost like a constant rotation, with the same crew just talking about the same topics and evolving on it and all learning together. So, huge thanks to both of you guys. You can follow them on Twitter.
Catan said at underdashk3tan, t a n, and wiz is at atbtcshellingpoint. That's b t c s c h e l l I n g p t. I'm Matt O'Dell, your host. We will be back next week at the same time, 22100 UTC on Bitcoin Tuesday. I will see you on RHR probably, like, early afternoon. We don't have a set time there. Hopefully, that will be a live stream as well. Orange coin good, number go up.
[01:51:49] Unknown:
Thanks, Matt. Thanks. Good time.
[01:51:52] Ketan:
Cheers, Matt. We get a weakness. This. You gotta see this. Yeah. Yeah. Hey. I remember served sandwiches and grandma lounges Vanessa right. I make a play fucking up your whole life. I'm so fucking sick and tired of the photoshop. Show me something natural like Afarone, watch your bra. Show me something natural like ass with some stretch marks. Still a take you down it. Most of y'all be faking. I stay modest about it. She elaborated. This that great coupon that beyond that dead
[01:55:05] ODELL:
Love you freaks. Stay humble and stack.
Maybe it's fun, fine. Maybe it's a movement, but be prepared to lose 80 to 90% of it. And if it's still worth it, then have at it. But the biggest loss of capital here will be the human capital of young men who are sitting and staring at their phone and watching the price of Bitcoin or the price of AMC. And ask yourself, would you be better off taking that 1, 2, or 3 hours a day and working out, trying to form relationships with mentors, with with with romantic relationships, with people at work, getting great at something so you can be the person on the other side of the trade. The greatest loss in in capital here is is from young men who are more prone to gambling addiction, who don't understand, the markets. I think we are setting ourselves up similar to how there's a ton of young women out there who became very depressed by sitting in their rooms looking at Instagram, self cutting and self harm skyrocket. I think you are gonna see an explosion in young male depression, and I think a lot of it is gonna be reverse engineered to apps that convince you you're part of a movement or physically addict you to your phone. Ask yourself, would your time staring at Robinhood be be better spent somewhere else? That is the real capital destruction that is taking place here.
[00:01:57] ODELL:
Hey there, freaks. It's your host, Matt O'Dell. That was our good friend, professor Scott Galloway, on MSNBC this week, clearly showing the world that he has short Bitcoin and has yet to cover those calls. I am joined here by my good friends from Australia, Ton and Wizard of Oz, and all the freaks who are also joining us live. What's up, boys?
[00:02:24] Ketan:
Good day, Matt. Good day, Wes. Matt. Good day, everyone.
[00:02:27] Wiz:
Take your time.
[00:02:32] ODELL:
So, you know, I'm I've I I am a very enthusiastic host, but I am a new host. This is Citadel dispatch number 7. This is our 7th Citadel Dispatch, which is that's pretty amazing to me that, we're almost at 2 months here. So that's super exciting. This is a show that started in 2020. Do not forget it. So we've been here for over a year now. And today, we will be talking about very important topics. I feel like every dispatch, we kinda talk about the same things, from different angles, but it's more important than ever now, and and this is kind of what we've dedicated our lives to. So, why the fuck not?
The primary thing that we're gonna start off with, is this this this whole concept of open source versus closed source software. And I think, the crux of this issue is is is one of these things that we've seen, this week. These last 2 weeks has been really enlightening to people and have woken them up to some of the issues with our current system. And I think a lot of it comes down to this these closed systems versus open systems. So, I mean, let's start let's start there. Catan, like, what are your thoughts on on on why is open source so important to us?
[00:03:58] Ketan:
Yeah. So I think open source, represents for us as particularly as Bitcoin as as something that we can look to inspect. And we come in a, I guess, a a a very, I guess, it's a it's kinda like we're we're very paranoid. We're skeptical. I wouldn't call it paranoid. I call it skepticism. We are we we question things. And so to be able to get a satisfactory answer, we need open source software that is code that is available for everyone to look at and inspect. And the guys who have the ability to look at that code, they are able to then, you know, develop on it as well as bring those security benefits. Because something like Bitcoin, for instance, I want to know that my money will not just disappear tomorrow.
And so that is why open source is such a, I guess, an important thing. One of the other great things about open source, and this is what I found, is that you can ask open source developers, to for features that you want, and you can request them. And the chances are of them actually giving getting getting you getting back to a getting back to you and giving you a response is far greater than if you were to call up, I don't know, Bank of America and get your, you know, your app changed in a certain way that you feel is you know, just say you want a dark mode, for instance. I think every every wallet here and everything like, anything that you kinda want to request, a developer will look at it and go, you know what? I think that that's a good feature. Let's let's push push it through. And it just makes a far, far better system. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it makes a better system than what we currently have. So those are my opening thoughts on open source.
[00:05:55] Wiz:
Yeah. I'll add to that, Tom. So, just for a bit of background, so my background's actually as a software dev, and I've spent 35 years working in, in closed source. So, I've worked for banks, insurance companies, government agencies, not the 3 letter ones. And so I have a pretty good idea about how that process works and the strengths of that, and the weaknesses. So very much, a significant part of my life spent working in a closed source environment. And I guess probably prior to Bitcoin, I'd I'd not really understood the value of open source. And having been in Bitcoin for 3 or 4 years now, I'm very much an open source advocate to compare some of the closed source, approaches to open source. From a closed source perspective, it's generally you're looking at a very hierarchical chain of command.
So it's a it's a top down, you know, you're working for an organization. They have a mission. There's usually someone who's driving the vision or the outcome. That's usually a committee, and so it's a set of it's a set of legislation that's passed by the geniuses in parliament. And then it's policy and legislation, and then that gets implemented into business rules, and then you build the code that that builds those systems to enact all that stuff. So those things are often done under tight time pressures despite despite appearances from the inside.
They're inordinately complicated systems. I've worked on, I've worked on some very, very large complicated systems, 10,000,000 lines of code or more, that are 30, 40, some getting up to 50 years old. So there is an incredible amount of, I guess, a lot of people would refer to as legacy debt, but it's also embedded embedded IP or embedded knowledge of the organization. Now you compare that to open source. It's kind of the, the the absolute opposite. So you've got a hive mind that look building building source and building solutions. So you don't have one person's vision or you'd have, you don't have a a mandate, for things like legislation or compliance if in case of, say, banking and insurance.
You've got a group of people who are trying to achieve an outcome with lots of different ideas about how to do that. And open source is very much a meritocracy. So it's, you know, just to and to reiterate, Catan's point, you get all of that scrutiny and that scrutiny, comes back to security. So, you know, Bitcoin is probably Bitcoin Core is probably one of the most heavily scrutinized codes by code bases in the world, and it will continue to be so. And the higher the number goes up, the more and more scrutiny there will be and the more caution there will be about changing it. But on top of that security, perspective, there's also that openness which gives confidence about what the software does, how it's being used, what it could be used for.
And that's where, you know, crystal systems just are never going to engender that type of trust. I think Catan and I saw that, here in Australia, last year. The government, the Department of Home Affairs developed a well, what was it? Kitana? A COVID tracing app that you could put on your phone, and there were a lot of people, including myself who asked for, asked for the department to open source that. And that would have given a lot more confidence about how the data was being secured, what data was being collected, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And whilst they did actually bow to opening the client component, They did not open source the back end risk wise.
So that's that's, I guess, my my perspective and a little bit of background to flush that out.
[00:10:37] ODELL:
Fantastic. Well, first of all, I just wanna thank you guys you're both both of you guys for joining me. On dispatch, I do like to as a freak's may have noticed, I do like to tap guests that maybe have not been on menu appearances before, public appearances. I think, Wiz, this is your first podcast, so I'm pretty excited to be the first, you you know, to pop your cherry, so to speak.
[00:11:05] Unknown:
I know Catan is Be gentle with me, big boy.
[00:11:11] ODELL:
I also you know, even though I might have more experience with this, I do not have much experience being the host. So I do especially, I get a little bit excited in the beginning. I don't like to have all the filler in the beginning, with the shows I listen to. You know, I'm a big, consumer of podcast myself, so I kind of jumped the gun a lot. And I'm not really that good at sometimes I talk too much, and sometimes I just try and treat the mic as a hot potato and just get it off. So I appreciate all the freaks, sitting here with us and and and learning as we go.
That's the fun part. So the one of the reasons I bring this up is because one of the freaks asked in the comments, yes. On dispatch every week, we have the price ticker up. The top price is the evil empire. It's the Coinbase price. It's the compliance pro price. The bottom is bisque. It's the no KYC street price. It's the real price. And I I expect the freaks to pump, the bottom price. As for open source, oh, so we're available, you know, Citadel Dispatch goes out on Twitch. It goes out on Twitter through Periscope, and it goes out on through YouTube. If you're a freak that's come back in in the past and you watch it live, you'll see that I end it with a music video.
YouTube does cut that at the end, and I do spend a lot of time trying to pick out which song I'm gonna put on there. So fuck you, YouTube. But, you know, I am kinda just ripping a music video without the license. So, open source. Yeah. So, anyway, we got Wiz back. He just came back. Welcome back, Wiz. You didn't miss much. I've just been talking too much, and let's fucking go. I wanted to jump into real quick. So the reason is that that I bring up open source is I I feel like we've had this whole craziness that has happened with the stock market, and it's kind of opened people's eyes. Right? We we we have this this memeification of the world, and some people think that memes are that meme that you can meme something into reality.
That's not the case. What what the reality is is memes are a great way of showing reality, and and depicting reality in a simple viral way. And we saw memes just grow in in, like, in almost like an exponential virulent way, this year and last year. And the culmination feels like this, you know, this is the the the latest chapter with the with this stock market stuff. So we had Scott Galloway in the beginning of this episode talking, and he was talking shit about Bitcoiners. He kinda just, like, lumped us in, I guess, with the day traders who are are trying to pump the price of AMC and these other stocks.
And I I I think what it highlights is that so much of our of our lives are these black boxes. Right? And this idea with with open software and open networks and open money is is that everyone can see what's going on. So it doesn't mean that you won't have shenanigans, but at least we know, you know, we at least we know what those shenanigans. You we we can see where the source of the issue was maybe after the fact, if there was a bug after the fact. It's not like there there aren't any bugs in open source quote code. It's not like someone can't put something in their malicious, but maybe someone can find it and afterwards, we could actually diagnose it. Right?
So with that said, I think, like, a a a a easy way for people to understand where we're coming from here is is with the encrypted chat apps. So when we're trying to send a message to someone and we're trying to send a message to someone privately, There's a bunch of different ways you can try and do that, but most of those ways require trust. The only way you can actually prove and and verify that something is is actually end to end encrypted is if they open up the client. This is what Wiz said earlier about I think you were talking about COVID, the COVID tracking. And if if you open up the client, then we're able to verify and prove that there's no malicious things that are going on.
Now what Wiz said was we needed the server client was not open source, and that is okay sometimes. If if the configuration is set up in a way that's end to end encrypted and the client encrypts everything locally before it gets sent to the server, then we can verify that there it's encrypted, and we can verify that the servers can't even if the server was malicious, wouldn't be able to compromise the message. But for other things, we need to self host on the server side as well. And this is where Catan really shines because he's been trying to dog food self hosting his life. And he has this this guide for it atk3ton.com/selfdashhosting.
So I I think I really wanna dive into this guide headfirst. Catan, where do you think we should start here?
[00:16:29] Ketan:
So I think we should start as to what are the benefits and what are the, I guess, the disadvantages to self hosting. You kinda wanna make an assessment of whether or not this is actually something you want to do. So how about we start there? Now, obviously, when it comes to self hosting, you know, you are doing it yourself. There there's no real you know, like, there's no hand holding in terms of you you don't there's no tech support for you. There's forums who will help you, gladly help you. In fact, there's an entire Reddit, for self hosted. So if you look at our self hosted, these guys are basically a community of guys who are self hosting their own stuff.
Now you can learn from them and but in terms of if things go, down, for example, your Internet service provider is is, has shut you off or alternatively has just gone down, which in Australia happens quite often, unfortunately, then, you know, you don't your website's not available anymore, and the things that you are hosting are not available. The other thing that you're beholden to is also your electricity provider, and that is something that some people just don't think about as well. So if if in a blackout, you obviously don't have access to your digital, services anymore.
So those are some of the, I guess, the negative parts of self hosting, but the positives are great as well. You get control over your own data. You aren't subject to being canceled as easily. You aren't, I guess, you know, you aren't being data mined to some to some extent, and the things that you are data being data mined for could, you know, are are things that you probably want public anyway. So it really depends on what the, service that you are doing or or or the service that you are self hosting and what it intends to what what you intend to do with that that particular software. So that is where, I guess, the the the benefits are to to self hosting and also the disadvantages as well.
[00:18:52] ODELL:
Okay. So, I mean, there there's 2 there's to break it down, right, there's 2 main advantages. Right? We have, yeah. To people in the comments, this is a different Wiz. This is Wizard of Oz. He's from Australia. We got both our guests today are from Australia, so they're actually joining us in the morning. It's it's early morning their time, so I appreciate that. And then we have the other wiz, which is, the wiz of Japan. But yeah. So with self hosting, we have two main benefits. Right? You have privacy and sovereignty. Privacy is probably a little bit shakier.
Maybe maybe there's certain situations. There's nuance there, like our favorite word. There's nuance there where you could actually maybe have worse privacy if you fuck up, if you fuck up self hosting. But I think sovereignty is night and day no matter what. You're better off self hosted. Right? Would you agree with that breakdown? Yeah. I I'd agree with that one as well. Yeah. Well articulated there, Matt, particularly with the privacy.
[00:19:55] Ketan:
If someone was to somehow, get into your network remotely, then you have 0 privacy. And so that that that could present a a major problem. But for self hosted, in terms of sovereignty, oh, it is night and day. You cannot be canceled. You're you're not at the whims of somebody else, and and I think that that's a great thing.
[00:20:18] ODELL:
Wizard of Oz, you with us?
[00:20:21] Unknown:
I am indeed, Matt.
[00:20:24] ODELL:
Good to have you with us. So Catan's just explaining to us the, we're we're going over the basic benefits and negatives of self hosting. And then the key the the key here so let's so we have the privacy and we have the sovereignty side. Let's start with the sovereignty side. I think it that's the easier side. So I think in terms of of privacy, I want all the freaks to realize no matter what, you know, when it comes to privacy, you have to be extra cautious all the time, and you just have to always be, like, crossing your t's and dotting your i's. And and and and that goes for this conversation as well. There's no privacy silver bullet here.
So but on on the sovereignty side, there's some really interesting elements. And and and before we get into that, thank you, Freaks, for pumping, the price on Bisq. We're getting going. This is this is exactly how I like to spend my Bitcoin Tuesdays. So on the sovereignty side, I mean, I the key thing, right, is is we've seen we saw the president of the United States while he was sitting in in office. We we saw him get kicked off of Twitter. Right? And just completely removed from Twitter. And I heard some there was, like, some people there's some, like, talking heads that, like, ignore most of it. There's some talking heads that, like, saying, like, oh, he's been surprisingly quiet during the whole transition. It's, like, yeah. You, like, removed his main, loud speaker, and, like, kicked him off the platform.
Catan is using alongside all of us, I actually announced this this show on Mastodon as well as Twitter is using a self hosted alternative to Twitter called Mastodon. Actually, you don't have to use it in a self hosted way. You can use someone else's instance or server, or you can host it yourself. But Catan is hosting it himself. So so Catan is interacting with this global network of individuals on this distributed Twitter clone, and it's it's being hosted on a raspi in his fucking closet. Right, Khitan?
[00:22:24] Ketan:
Yeah. So, yeah, what I am hosting is, it it's actually on my desktop PC, and it it is in a virtual machine. And, basically, it's it's it's an alternative to mastodon, and, it is called Pleroma. It's a lighter version of mass, of mastodon. And, basically, this allows you to communicate and have your own, social media profile, without the need of a centralized server having all of your data and all of your information. So I think, that is something that, is of benefit in the event that you have or you hold views that you may think will get canceled. Then, you know, this is a fantastic option, where you self host your own social media, and we're able to do that now with this thing called the Fediverse.
And, basically, there are, other instances out there, that you can subscribe to, which, I guess, it makes it more decentralized. So what that means is you can sign up to a one of the more popular ones that are in the Bitcoin space is bitcoinhackers.org. That is run by a person, by the name of, well, MBK. He has ownership of that entire instance. You are subject to his moderations, in that in that instance. So if he doesn't like something, he has the ability to sense of that. Now if you don't like what he is doing, you are welcome to go to another instance that treats you better. Kind of like if you go to, a country and you don't like that particular country in the way that, you know, the taxes are too high or you don't like this particular way, well, then you move to another jurisdiction.
It is the same or similar approach, whereby you go to another instance where you think you are, treated better and there is no or or, you know, you you prescribed to their ideals and their beliefs, and you go through with them. And you know what? If you don't like any other instance on the planet, the last thing that you can do is say, you know what? Screw you all. I'm hosting myself, and I'm going to give my views out there using my own server. And anyone who wants to follow me and connect with me can do so. And so I think from a social media perspective, this is great for not being or, well, it makes it difficult to cancel you, and your audience and cut you off from that that your your your audience.
So that is something that is a far, far better outcome than the current, social media platforms that we see today. And so that is why I'm a big proponent of it, and I I I really like it. It it it is it it it is, as as Matt said, a Twitter clone, and it is I I really enjoy it. I think you're able to curate the discussion based on what you want to see, rather than what, you know, someone else wants you to see. And that is powerful in itself,
[00:25:39] ODELL:
and so that's yeah. That's why I like the data. Right? I think a key aspect is, like, you own the data. Like, on Bitcoin Hackers, for instance, I'm on Rodolfo's, NVK's, instance. He can just nuke my account. Right? And I just, like, lose everything. I could the cool thing about Mastodon is you can gracefully move over, which Twitter doesn't have that. Right? Like, you can't move your social graph over to a different server, but you can on Mastodon, but not if the host actually just
[00:26:09] Ketan:
nukes your account. It doesn't give you time to move. Yeah. That's right. That's right. And so Did you Yeah. Go on. You're up to the discretion. Like, they basically own you, and your digital profile,
[00:26:22] ODELL:
But if you don't like that, then you can leave Right. There's competition. There's, like, a free market competition, and you could run your own instance. And I guess if we both ran our own instance, then pretty much no one could really censor us unless they were going hardcore, like, really just trying to fuck hard hard with the Internet like a very sophisticated actor. But but there's also instances where instances cross instances are censoring each other. Right? We saw with Gab moved on to Mastodon and then basically, I guess, like, detached itself from the rest of the Fediverse. Right?
[00:26:56] Ketan:
Yeah. So Gab's, they're they're sitting out in their own, which which is fine, but, like, the fact that they can do that, they're not actually being censored. So, they run their own servers. They run their own infrastructure, and they are creating a gap little community there. And if you want to see that content, then, you know, you have to sign up for within there. But, yeah, that's the kind of the trade off. There's nuances everywhere as as Matt would love to explain. Nuance. Don't own that domain.nuance.com.
[00:27:29] ODELL:
That might be one that, Michael Sailor owns.
[00:27:32] Ketan:
Possibly.
[00:27:34] ODELL:
So
[00:27:35] Unknown:
I still can't believe it's gonna be here. Yeah. I think there's a there's a couple of things here. The general theme with, self hosting, giving rise to improve sovereignty. It's a little bit like, say weightlifting in the sense that you're not being particularly strong, particularly fit, but you'd like to be. And so you go to the gym and you perhaps get some training or you train out with a buddy and you slowly build your technique and you start, start to do compound lifts. And all of a sudden you can start to do things that you couldn't do before. You actually don't need to ask anyone to pick up the bag of pool salt or to carry a bag of concrete because you're strong enough to do it yourself.
And in the digital world, the issue about self hosting is it's about making yourself more self sovereign. So you can choose to do these things or not. Now, I think one of the, for me, one of the big things that Bitcoin's really made me think about is trade offs, trade offs and incentives. So trade offs the trade off you're making when, you know, to use, used Catan's example, you know, you can join, NVKs, and Bitcoin hackers. And if you don't get if you get canceled from there, you can go somewhere else. And in the end, you can you can run your own if you if you choose. The the making there generally is, the size of the community you're interacting with.
And certainly there's no question that the size of the Mastodon community at the moment, is considerable smaller than Twitter. So this, you know, on the one side, you know, the like Bitcoin hackers, for example, you've got quite a tight community there. We're not there to talk about market to Bitcoin. And that's great for sharpening steel and clarifying your ideas and asking and things that are happening in the water, in the wider world from a Bitcoin perspective. Twitter on the other hand has that broader network effect with people who are on Twitter or a whole range of other ideas and interests and maybe stumble across some thread that refers to bit coin that makes them curious.
And I guess that's that's one of the reasons I've remained on Twitter,
[00:30:17] Wiz:
where a lot of bitcoiners have left Twitter recently,
[00:30:22] Unknown:
Really to, try and amplify, quality signal, like, from Catan and and yourself, Matt, for who are reaching out and trying to understand and searching around, for information about Big fan of, big fan of self hosting, you know, run my own node and starting to run other things as well. And, very grateful for, for both of you and Catan for your guides and, yeah, a lot of a lot of work to do. I always feel like I'm trying to catch up in Bitcoin.
[00:31:00] Ketan:
Look. I think you make some great points there in terms of the differences between Twitter. Like, you're 100% right. If you want an if you want to control your own discussion and, you know, have a really, detailed in-depth discussion, then I think Mastodon is a great place to have that. But if you wanna dunk on shit coins and if you you wanna sort of build an a a bigger audience base, then I think Twitter is still the place to do that. However, over time, maybe that might shift because people you know, you you're still being, sort of, I guess, looked at from the Twitter angle, and so, you know, your your profile can be canceled.
But at the same time, Twitter has that. Like, there is no doubt that there is a huge network effect with Twitter. It is fantastic for tapping into new, new segments, new markets, and you have the ability to, you know, dunk on people, that you otherwise wouldn't have the ability to do if you were to curate your own discussion of the people that you like. So it really depends on what you want here, but I personally, I I really, really like the Mastodon side of things and the and what the Fediverse is doing, and I like the discussion that's happening there. So I tend to go there, but then I'm always, you know, doing like, I'm I'm doing both at the same time.
[00:32:24] ODELL:
And it group versus out group. That's why I'm, like, tweeting like 0 hedge right now. That's right. Alright. It's just, like, all caps lock to to the out group. You need to know if the out group, and then I do, like does anyone does anyone have any nuanced opinions about why Tor is down in in in Mastodon? Yep. I mean, I I think it goes back to a a discussion that we have in Bitcoin a lot of times where, if you choose a centralized path, you're gonna have cheaper transactions, and you're gonna have, more you know, everything will be faster and cheaper. So it goes to reason stands to reason that in an environment where we actually have real competition and we don't have overbearing government regulation, a centralized option will give you more reach at a better cost.
But what happens is the reality is we don't live in that situation, and we can't assume that we'll continue to live in that situation. And and so we have to basically, you know, spend some of that efficiency, spend some of that reach, for censorship resistance and and self reliance and self sovereignty. And that's kind of, you know, where this whole, you know, self hosting concept comes from, backing up your stuff, encrypting your stuff, verifying everything yourself. Don't trust, verify. Yeah. So I mean, so we have Mastodon. Right? So we talked about Mastodon, and you said, pleroma. Right? That's p l e r o m a. Right?
Yep. That's correct. And Pleroma is what you use to host your Mastodon instance and your Relay as well?
[00:34:07] Ketan:
So Pleroma is not a Mastodon on instance. It's a it's a competitor to Mastodon. So it's like, just another implementation of Mastodon. Think of it like, you know, Bitcoin core versus, say, for example, I don't know, Bitcoin, BTCD.
[00:34:23] ODELL:
But it all interact it all interacts in the same Fediverse.
[00:34:26] Ketan:
Itself. Correct. So it it's it's yes. That's right. So you've got a fediverse, and then you've got, different instances of pieces of software. So for example, in the Fetty verse, you can even do YouTube stuff, but they just call it peer tube. And so you can then follow with your, you know, your your social media instance a particular, a particular, channel on on on a peer tube network.
[00:35:01] ODELL:
That's a perfect example, right, of, like, what we were talking about. Right? Like, if you were trying to host on peer tube, I mean, you're gonna melt your Internet connection. Right? That is correct. Yes.
[00:35:11] Ketan:
And that's why I probably haven't gone down the path of hosting my own videos. Like, I have a YouTube channel, and, I I I would like to self host it. It's just that my Internet connection probably won't allow me to do that, for the viewership that I get. So that's kind of the the the, I guess, the difference between a decentralized approach and a centralized approach. That's what I that's what I think people don't realize. Right? It's like so so, like, we we have we have the privilege of saying
[00:35:39] ODELL:
that, you know, we can use Twitter for certain things and use Mastodon for other things. I think the reason we haven't seen censorship resistant tools, open open source tools, just tools that empower individuals used at on en masse yet is because you need to have a reason. You know, you need to be you you need to you need to get burnt. You need you need to have a motivation to go out and deal with the trade offs that are present with it. You know, Donald Trump and a bunch of American conservatives all of a sudden had that happen to them. Right? They they they saw it happen, and and and what did they do? They tried to flock to centralized alternatives first. Right? They tried to flock to Parler, and Parler got deplatformed, and then they learned that just because it's a different platform, if it all runs on AWS, it all runs on Amazon servers, it doesn't matter.
With with money, with Bitcoin, we have to be forward thinking, because there's 1,000,000,000 of dollars on the line, and and and we can't learn after AWS deep platforms Bitcoin. So that's why we have as Bitcoiners, we have all these on the outside, it seems like crazy discussions on theoreticals. Right? But for everyone else that's not dealing with a global distributed 247 financial network, I think they can deal with, I'll host my shit on YouTube. And if YouTube bans me, then I'll figure out a competitor. And if I host it on Vimeo and then AWS takes Vimeo down, then maybe I'll start trying to figure out PeerTube or or BitTorrent or something like that. And then on top of that, we saw the same thing happen again, but this time with stocks. Right? And people seeing that they they were gambling in this casino that's controlled by centralized actors, and they don't play by fair rules.
So it's funny because you have, like, the Mark Cubans of the world are coming out and saying, like, oh, the DeFi is the answer here. DeFi is not the answer. The answer is to having a good money that goes up in value, so you don't have to gamble in a casino to begin with. Gamble in the centralized casino to begin with.
[00:37:49] Ketan:
Matt, I just love that ex like, just the explanations there were fantastic. Go on, Wiz.
[00:37:56] Unknown:
That point about, unfair rules. I don't know if it's unfair rules or if it's just that the incentives are not perhaps as well understood as they should be. Wall Street bets but got a salutary lesson on that. And it goes for all of the big which are devised to build the network effect, make them as big as possible, as quickly as possible, because that's how they monetize. If you are not paying for it, you are the product. That's it. Guess what? You, you got free trade. You signed up for free trading on Robinhood. How did you think it was gonna work? They front run your trades. They sell your data, and they counter It's not a big fucking surprise. If you, if you, if you thought, gee, how does the business model work? Because that would be my question first. If it's free, how am I getting fucked over here?
How am I, how are they going to do it? How are they going to make money? Because if I, if I'm going to use a product or a service, I want the provider of the product or service to remain in business. If it's a good service, because I want to continue to use it. Therefore, I want to understand how they're making money. So in Robin hood's case, you don't have to think too hard before you're going. So if they're not charging me trading fees and it costs them money to trade and they have to and they have to pile the clearing up is they've got a bank roll, the trades, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. That money's coming from somewhere. And the volumes they're talking about, remember, because they're trying to build that network effect. Those are serious amounts of money.
So the fact that Robin hood was cap riding front running and selling the data, was much like the deplatforming of, you know, significant us political figures, a bit of a rude surprise to them. But, you know, I guess from, from exactly what we're talking about here is it's a, it's a trade off, you know, you've got to understand what the incentives of those people are and their incentives to make more money and to grow their network. And if they see things that impede that, they will kick you. Yeah. I mean, when those things happen, they are calls on, on why the why self hosting is so important.
[00:40:34] ODELL:
It's, I mean, maybe it's part of the Bitcoin addiction. And I know you guys are also guilty of it, and, I'm sure that all the freaks a lot of the freaks are guilty of it as well. Pretty much just everything that happens in my day to day life, I bring back to, Bitcoin lessons or Bitcoin metaphors or shitcoin metaphors and shitcoin lessons. And, you know, the this this whole Robinhood business model thing goes right back down to the transaction fees when people talk about transaction fees and Bitcoin and shit coins and stuff. Like, there's no such thing as anything in life being free, including a transaction, and you have to figure out where that cost is. That cost is hidden in all different places in our in our day to day lives, and it's paid by all different people that are it's whole it hidden from view most of the time. And you see that with the shit coin networks. With Bitcoin, it's right in your face. You you send a transaction, how much data? It's it's gonna be at a market rate, and you're gonna pay for that data.
So so it it's it seems more expensive on the surface, but it's really because you have a transparent there's a transparent negotiation going on there. I as for fair rules, like, yeah, I I probably misspoke, a little bit there. I think the key isn't necessarily the rules, especially in a censorship resistant system. The key is who can change the rules and how easy those rules can change. And that's what people don't realize about Bitcoin. The value doesn't come from any specific rule like the 21,000,000 cap. The the the value comes from it being so hard to fucking change, and Bitcoin shares this with self hosted other self hosted options. The difference with Bitcoin is that there's this also this, like, macro game theory that's happening that that keeps people in consensus with each other because there's a financial incentive to stay in consensus. Right? But, no one in the higher ups of Pleroma, like, one of the Pleroma management teams can push a change on Catan's instance without Catan running that change. He has to go out and run that change.
And, yeah, that's a massive change in power. Right? That that gives us a huge massive check on any kind of centralized power.
[00:42:59] Ketan:
Yep. And so you get, you know, a a a nice, I guess, freedom. You get this sovereignty. You get you know, you practically achieve these, you know, buzzwords that we keep, you know, harping on about. It is the practical solutions to these problems, that have been well, now, if you look at it just in the past couple of couple of years, have just been absolutely devastating for people, and, there is something that we can actually do about it now. Whereas, historically, you know, people have just been moaning about it. People have just been going, you know, whatever. But now we actually have built something that we can do something different for a different outcome.
And I think that that is, it's a game changer. It's it's it makes me incredibly bullish, on Bitcoin and on what, the ability of the individual, to do. So that's that's I I I'm just blown away by the amount of, knowledge that I have sort of just found randomly on the Internet, on Reddit and those sorts of things, and then just put that practically into my own home and being able to be a node on the Internet and being able to disclose a part of myself and share with the world what I want through my own website hosted literally with the data that's in my hard drive right now.
I I just I I think that that is an incredible thing, but that is how the Internet first started. We're just going full circle. We are going full circle. So we just you know, like, to say that, you know, you should put your, social media profile on with another server that you don't know, that you don't trust with all this information by Facebook. That is absolutely like, that was, you know, in the, I suppose, the nineties. People were thinking, who the hell is using their real name on the Internet? And then Facebook comes out, and everyone's using their real name. And now you just it's this huge data mining that's happening. And so we've come back now to go, alright. Well, we don't want that. We've met that's that's been a pretty big mistake. So now let's go back to self hosting. It's just gone one massive circle in the span of 20 years, I'd say.
[00:45:16] ODELL:
It's because we could get away with centralization. Centralization was, like, the easy scaling. Right? It gave us, like, these easy benefits of the trade off with censorship resistance, and it didn't really bite us in the ass until recently. We haven't, like and I think it just we needed like, the Internet needed to get so mature to a point where, it's just like the cancel culture turned on it. Right? I I don't even know. It's just like I kinda can't it it feels like it's just gaining steam now, and it's it's it's worse than it has been in the past. But maybe that's just my own, you know, my own bias. But, anyway, let's just I wanna jump right back into actionable shit because that's my favorite part about this show. What else are we running on this on this home server?
[00:46:01] Ketan:
Alright. So we've also got a Nextcloud. Now one of the cool oh, actually, let's start with my router. I think that that is the backbone to, basically, my private world and my, public world. And so the router that I'm using is, pfSense, and that is, hosted basically, you need a computer to run this on, and it just needs 2, network ports. 1, where the Internet goes in, and the other one is where your network comes out of. So that is essentially what and all your devices are stored within in in your LAN, so to speak. So you've got a WAN port and a LAN port. Everything else can come out of there. Now, essentially, what you're able to do with a p f Sense router is you can have your entire network VPN, using just the one connection. So your entire every single one of your devices, as soon as they enter, they will be protected by a commercial VPN.
I know that, Matt, you like to shield Mullvad. There's some other ones out there. There's ProtonVPN and IVPN. Those are the problems.
[00:47:11] ODELL:
But Mullvad, yes. Okay. I I I would agree with
[00:47:14] Ketan:
you. I I I think Mullvad has the best checkout as well in terms of, not having to use an, an email address. You don't have to yeah. It's fantastic. It is absolutely incredible. And I also heard on the grapevine that they are looking to implement natively, accepting lightning payments. So, keep an eye out for that, I suppose. That's on their pipeline, I believe. So, that'll be cool. And so the other thing that you can also do is run ad blockers throughout your entire network. Now what that means is, you you get this huge list of all these malicious or, dodgy trackers, and you can ban them as soon as, it hits your your network. So you don't have to see random garbage on the Internet.
Now the other thing, that you can do with the pfSense router is run your own open VPN server, And what that allows you to do is access your network from anywhere on the planet in a secure way without opening up ports and those sorts of things, and making it a little bit more accessible for others. A a VPN server is what you want to run, and that way, it just sort of makes it the make it makes it as though that your mobile phone or your laptop, even though you're in the middle of nowhere, as long as you've got Internet connection, no matter where you are in the world, you are able to call back to your home, and it will act as though it is just another device on your home network. So you can now access, whatever services that you have hosted at home.
And, of course, you can also do, hosting your own external websites using your, pfSense router, and that is using what's known as a reverse proxy. And, basically, what a reverse proxy does is it it once once some piece of traffic asks for a, a domain, it will say, alright. Well, this is the IP address that I'm asking for, and this is the the the computer that I need to go and access to. So that is basically like a a message to say, alright. Well, can you go and fetch that data from this particular computer, say, for example, a Raspberry Pi if that's where you're hosting it, and it will go out and fetch that and relay it back out to the network and, back out to the person who's requesting that information on that website.
[00:49:31] Unknown:
And so
[00:49:32] Ketan:
those types of things there's plenty more to do with pfSense, but I think having a good router that enables you to do this is something that's worthwhile investing in and having a look in. There are other ways that you can do this. You don't have to have a full blown desktop PC that I have. You can do this on on the cheaper. You can get the, the the official one from Netgate. They they also have this little box that you can use as a router as well. So it just really depends on what you wanna do there. So that is, yeah. It it's p f Sense router. That's the one.
[00:50:08] ODELL:
So I think Wiz made a very important point here, and this is a point that I try and make when we talk about Bitcoin topics and Bitcoin privacy, and Bitcoin in general and everything, is don't get overwhelmed. Like, I it's easy to get overwhelmed when Catan starts dropping knowledge on you. But, you know, one step at a time, little improvements. You know, you don't have to be like a boy wizard and and make it all happen. So, Wiz, I know you've been messing around with some of the items in this guide, But I'm curious on, like, your takeaways, you know, from, from, like, a more normie level. Like, how how are you finding? It? What are you finding with these trade offs here and and getting along?
[00:50:58] Unknown:
Yeah. Look. I I think that's the the the key point that I, you know, once I understood, I was a lot more comfortable and that is that a lot of these things, you know, including understanding Bitcoin, it's a bit of a journey and, I'm a practical sort of person. So I like to do actionable things. And, sometimes that leads to me, getting myself into hot water. But for me, I learned by doing so, the, the, the stuff, the light bulb moment was really on in understanding security and privacy we're two sides of the same coin. And that in a natively digital world, you can't have security without privacy, and convert, especially neither. Can you have private?
So that, that really made me sit up and pay attention, but also just to not get overwhelmed by, oh my god. You know, I'm I'm not at a Jedi level. Okay. But what can I do now? Okay. I can, I can run a VPN for me? All right. So spend a bit of time looking for a good VPN provider, have a little poke around, ask people at Bitcoin meetups, what they're using, why they chose that one. And then use that. Okay. And then next, next, next, next, next. So, you know, things like you know, the basic stuff about, you know, verifying your software downloads. What the fuck is that all about? Okay. It's about hashes. It's about confirming that the build, the developer put up there and, the project put up there is actually the one you've gotten or about to about to deploy, plenty of plenty of, horror stories out there, including in Bitcoin about, downloading the wrong software or downloading software that's been, meddled with, at great cost early bird like that.
So all these things, you know, building your building yourself strength, building your improving your privacy, improving your security. And the thing I love about Catan's guide, just having been through it the other day was this is like, man, this is a gigantic shopping list. What do I wanna start on? PfSense and the, and the reverse proxy, and improve privacy in my home network is probably where I'm gonna go next. So thanks for that one, Kaitan.
[00:53:49] Ketan:
No worries, mate. You're welcome. But, yeah, I I think, in terms of learning and where to start, start small. I I really like that approach, and then slowly build yourself up. It's not going to happen in a day, but, again, nothing Rome wasn't built in a day. It really does sort of, you know, you start small, and then you you you so the way I I would attribute my success to the fact that I have probably failed more times than some people have even tried. And so if you want to see success in some of these self hosting areas, you just have to get out there and try. You will you will screw up. There is no doubt that you will bang your head against the wall a 1000000 times as to why this doesn't work, but you will you you just keep at it. And I have spent thousands of hours on this because I just love doing it. It's just one of my passions. It's just I sit there, I go through GitHub, I find what's good, and I fucking run that shit.
What is this? How does it work? I just get in there, and I do it. Scott Galloway doesn't love you for it. Well, he can go screw himself, mate. That's for sure. But that those are the types of things that I really, really like to do. And so I continued to do that, and I will sort of, just take actionable steps as to, okay, what am I doing here? What's the goal? How can I get better at it? And so that's how you'd start. There are plenty of resources on the Internet. Like, it is crazy the amount of forums, the places that you can go to. Reddit is great as well, and, you know, any links in the sidebar there would be fantastic for places to start and build your own what's known as a home lab as well. So there's guys out there who are building their own home labs, and that is why it is, you know, those are the types of things that you you wanna look for when getting this information.
So that is how I learned and, you know, you just just just do, and then you will get better at it over time. And then you'll start to think, oh, well, look. This thing here, I can, you know, mesh these 2 together and get a really nice, outcome for what I wanna do. And, yeah, that's kind of just how you learn. You just kinda just go out there and you do it, and that's exactly what Wizz is saying as well. Just go out there and and and try it.
[00:56:20] ODELL:
So, I mean, I relate super hard with that. I mean, that's basically my favorite way to learn is just make shit ton of mistakes. Should burn myself a 1000000 times until I realize the stove is hot and how I can boil water, you know? And that's how I learned with Bitcoin, and that's why sometimes I get a little bit worried when some people are, like, oh, I've never lost a sat in my life. Like, I don't know what you're doing, man. Like, I a little concerned you're not pushing yourself hard enough. But, yeah. I encourage the freaks to go out there and take sensible risks and and learn that way. I think it it is the most informative way to learn. I think tangentially along those lines, and Wizz mentioned this, and I know both of you are very involved, down in the local Bitcoin community down there.
Maybe we should talk to the freaks about the importance of local meetups and and and talking to other individuals, like minded individuals that are also going through the same situation. You wanna start us off with and tell us about, your great Bitcoin community down down in Aussieland?
[00:57:33] Ketan:
I think we lost him. Potentially, yeah, or he might be on mute. Who knows? Hassan, why don't you show it to us? Yeah. Okay. So I think having a good community, to sort of bounce ideas and talk about and just relate to somebody, is a fantastic thing. You get to bounce ideas. You get to really, understand at someone, you know, understand with someone and grow with them. So I would strongly recommend finding a bro. Now for me, that bro for me has probably been Stefan. And so we've known each other for a very, very long time, and we've gone through this whole journey sort of together. And that has helped feed each other off, to to to to keep improving, to keep learning, to keep understanding.
And I think that that is really, really important to have. And so when you want to meet somebody with like minded, you know, like minded, ideals and values, what you wanna do is, go to these and attend these that is why, it is kind of important to do those sorts of things.
[00:58:47] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. A 100%, Catan. The, one of the biggest wake ups for me was, getting to go to Badger in 2018. I was working for, customers up in Northern Europe. I would go over to Riga for the weekend. I was a Bitcoin noob, but spending 2 days talking with Bitcoiners, play probably my Bitcoin knowledge a year, and then as well. And it the the local scenes are even more important. So because you find people who are kind of, like, a time was saying, you know, at the same level of you as you're, you know, had the same level of interest. And then you find you've got different things you're and you start sharing that knowledge together. And just this last weekend, there was, 2 of us had got together.
1 of us put together, a, a site where you can look inside a beehive because he's an apearist. And so he's put a, a lightning paywall over the front of that because he wanted to learn how BDC pay server works and how websites work. So that was a and so we spent the whole afternoon looking at how he put that together and then halt into talking about a 1,000 other Bitcoin top. But that that importance of, talking with other Bitcoin is, you know, face I think just super important.
[01:00:43] ODELL:
Fuck. Yeah. I mean, that's where I met you, and and Riga. Riga was great. I think it just it, like, solidifies your conviction too. Like, it gives you that encouragement to take the next step. Yes. Someone in the comments mentioned that they're too paranoid for meetups, Randy McMillan. I respect that. I understand that. I felt that as well, and I was hesitant for a while because of it. But I'm glad I took that risk and took that trade off. Just be cognizant of it, you know, be practical about it. Yeah. I I that that is that is obviously a decision you have to make you know, think hard before you do it. Don't just do it willy nilly, but, you know, life's short, and they're just enjoyable.
[01:01:44] Unknown:
They're super enjoyable, and I think my experience, going to different meetups in different places. The the meetup organizers are always very welcoming and very non intrusive. If you don't wanna give your name, people are absolutely fine with that. If you wanna just start talking about the coin and, whether it's number go up in terms of block height, coin joins, hash rate, difficulty, or the current, the current Twitter drama or whatever the whatever it is that tweaks your interest, you'll find people there who are, yeah, immediately jumping into that. I've I've been down to the Sydney Big Line meet ups not multiple times, but I could probably only name, handful of the people there that I've spoken to, and I've probably spoken to dozens and dozens.
And that's totally fine, and that's been very representative of, going to Bitcoin meet ups everywhere. So I I I'd echo your point, Matt, that yeah. Sure. You know, be if you if you're perhaps cautious about your, your identity and, and so on going to meet ups, life's short. You know, I've I I'm in my mid fifties. I've only got another half a decade, half shit. Not half decade. Half a century, to go. But, yeah. Too short to miss out on talking with Bitcoin and and learning about Bitcoin.
[01:03:23] ODELL:
And the good ones the good ones say no pictures. I know that BitDevs in New York City is a no picture zone. No shit coins and no pictures. And, you know, so you just have to be practical about it. Like, obviously, you come with your own trade offs. If you're meeting people in person, then they could obviously do physical harm to you in a in in a compromising environment. They know the general area that you live in. Alternatively, you know, we've seen with this pandemic, so much conversation move online. Right? And, you know, maybe you have a malicious individual or a spook or something in a small bar in Riga, who is he was listening to your conversation.
But now a shit ton of our conversations have moved to Zoom and shit, where you just have them constantly recorded 247. So there's trade offs everywhere, and I don't necessarily think meetups are the worst, privacy wise.
[01:04:23] Wiz:
Yep.
[01:04:28] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I'm really enjoying this conversation. I want I kinda wanna pivot a little bit, and then I wanna hit some audience questions. So to the freaks that are still with us in the audience, we appreciate you for, carving out this time on your happy Bitcoin Tuesday, to join us. And so if you have if you have audience if you have questions, throw them in the chat, and we will get to them, hopefully. I I love to get to and I think that's the the the coolest part about this show, period. So where do I wanna go with this? I wanna talk about purpose built devices. Do we think is is there a place in the future where, you know, like, is is is is there a middle ground where we see, you know, like, an Apple quality style device that is open source and self sovereign? Or is it always going to be a enthusiast nerd extra thing that has to be done?
[01:05:42] Ketan:
So I I think there's a lot of development that's already happening in the self hosted space. I think if you have a look at for example, there's a a website called why you know host.org. That is a particular, a piece of software that you can download, and it comes with plenty of self hosted tools that are kinda like that one click, where you just put it onto your server and away it goes. And it will, you know, it will download all the software for you. It will do everything for you in the background. And I think that that is something that you could potentially use, as a, I guess, as a stepping stone to something more self sovereign, if you wanna go down that path, or you can just stick with why why you know host because it gets the job done. I think there's just gonna be an array of levels and a different rate based upon people's ability, technical ability, as well as their time and convenience. There's always going to be this array of trade offs. I don't think we're gonna have one perfect solution, that solves everything.
Because the moment you start abstracting details away, that means less sovereignty, potentially. And so if you, you know, if for example, a development team comes out with this great thing, and then, you know, 10, 15 years down the track, they go, you know what? We don't want to do this anymore. Then what do you do with all of that? How does that get maintained? So that is something that you probably want to consider, when you are looking at at, you know, how do you want to play, this? Do you want to, you know, be completely self sovereign from day 1? Well, then you're gonna need to start learning. You're gonna need to start kind of really going down the rabbit hole. Or do you wanna take these incremental steps, which might just be using a self hosted box or a self hosted, VPS server or some sort of kind of, you know, intermediary step, that suits your budget, that suits your time, your learning abilities, those sorts of things. I think that that is, probably the where it may land.
[01:07:54] Unknown:
Yeah. I I I think we're already seeing it happen, Matt. And I think, no packages flat. So, Bitcoin hasn't been the early days. Wasn't the easiest thing to run. Whereas nowadays the technical barriers to running, to running a Bitcoin node are getting lower and lower and lower. You know, there was some of the older, some of the older packages round more established, raspberry blades We've got the newer ones, my note, roll. There's probably a few others, But they make, running coin no. Super simple compared to buying the hardware, setting it up, the operating system, downloading the software, checking the self signing, installing the software.
And then the bit that is underappreciated is integrating the software. So having spent three and a half decades working on integrating large complex systems, it's an underappreciated level of complexity, under, underappreciated task. I think Catan, you, you'd probably echo that some of those thousands of hours you've spent banging your head against, walls running, learning how to run software and configure software. An awful lot of that's with how do I get piece of software a to talk to piece of software b? And whether that's, how do I get LND to talk to Bitcoin Core? How do I get LND to talk to LND, etcetera, etcetera.
And that's where and that's where things like node packages as an example of, you know, more self sovereign software come into play. So do you have the option of buying open source software based around the rock 64 chips and so on, downloading from source, building from scratch? Absolutely. Can you buy the box preconfigured, pre synced? Yep. And then you've got things like node packages, which sit in the middle. And I think we'll start to see that in next cloud is probably another good example. So you've got, you know, the ability to start hosting your own file storage, your own email, your own contacts, your own calendar, things that are all very, exposing of your personal details and privacy.
And you can get that hosted. You can buy a box. You can download software. You can build software. So the the beauty is the increasing choices and, filling out of that middle ground for, to make it to make it more accessible. And and as it becomes more accessible, more people do it. As more people do it, more of those people start to think, yeah. And maybe I'm not quite so comfortable with that, with having done it this way. I'm now gonna take the next step and build it all from scratch myself. And so it's an incremental thing.
[01:11:25] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I I tend to agree with both of you. I think, like, an interesting thing that people should grapple with in terms of ease of use when it comes to sovereignty is auto updates, because if you talk from a security and privacy perspective, from anyone besides the maintainer of the software, you wanna stay up to date. And we see this with routers a lot. And the router is is is in a modern home is is the command center. The router is, like, it all begins and ends with your router, and if your router is compromised, you're fucked. If your router is, yeah, if your router is compromised, you're fucked.
And people don't really put that much thought into that device, And where they usually get fucked is they don't update soon enough. They they're they're running old software that isn't updated and patched for the newest issue. But when you're talking about, trust minimized systems, auto updates are the fucking worst because an auto update could be malicious. So I don't know if we ever can balance that. There'll always be people who will be better off auto updating, and they will have to wholeheartedly trust the supplier of whatever they're using. And then there'll be people that aren't auto updating and are gonna have to actually practice, you know, personal responsibility and make judgment calls on myself where they update and when they update it and be on top of that shit.
But the most important thing is that there's competition and that you have multiple choices and that not everyone's running the same thing. And, I mean, while we started recording the show, I I I only saw it in passing, but, Jeff Bezos dropped he stepped down as CEO, right, and of of Amazon. And AWS, you know, they they run our Internet. Like, so many services and sites do depend on AWS. So we end up in a situation where people are using, you know, 10 different self hosted solutions, and some have different trust levels than others, like, that's still an infinite improvement over just everyone hosting it on on, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
[01:13:49] Unknown:
You know, I I think that's why Jeff stepped down. Jeff Jeff's read the time's guide, and he's gone, fuck.
[01:14:02] Ketan:
Good one, Wiz. I doubt it. But, yeah, I think look. With this, having the options available to you, I think is fantastic. The guys who want to hold their own keys, who want to run their own node, who want to do these things, it is always going to be available for them with multiple options to do that. We're not all running Electrum. We're not all running, you know, a a a particular piece of software, and I think that that is the best part. So, yeah, that is something that, you know,
[01:14:37] ODELL:
should be running Bitcoin Core.
[01:14:39] Ketan:
Well, yes. And I think that you will see over time that implement those implementations may start to, and I think there's already been talks of that of just building out another implementation that obviously talks to each other, and is compatible with one another, but there are other instances out there that you can run. And, you know, like, for example, the Wasabi guys have packaged in, Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean but you know what I mean? Like, they're I I understand that we are all running Bitcoin Core. However, having said that, Bitcoin Core is the one of the most trusted pieces of software and has the most eyes on that code.
[01:15:16] ODELL:
So that's something that we can do. I mean, the key with Bitcoin Core is that there's no auto updates. So we're not all running the same version of Bitcoin Core. I haven't updated Bitcoin Core yet. Yep. That's true. So so I think you you almost get a lot of the benefits that people talk about with multiple implementations you get with just, you know, not auto updating your software and having backwards compatibility. Someone in the comments, surfer Jim or boy in the comments, asked if you have any experience with Start9's private server, Catan.
[01:15:50] Ketan:
So I looked into Start 9. So what they've they they have a business model that, basically, I I haven't been able to run it myself. So, you you need to to get the image to flash onto your Raspberry Pi. You have to pay for that. And, so that's their business model. And if you want, you can compile it from source, but it is a little bit more technical and in-depth. So at that point, I tried to do it. I wasn't really able to to successfully do that, so then I kind of stopped there. But I may go out and buy the actual image and and see what they've got, but that's as far as I've gotten so far.
[01:16:27] ODELL:
But same same with me. I have not used it yet. Wizard of Oz, have you used start 9?
[01:16:34] Unknown:
I was in in, Al's Lacrosse group when Matt Hill was presenting, and it's it's certainly, it's certainly a project I'm super interested in.
[01:16:46] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I I like the concept I like the concept of all these home nodes, these home servers, you know, like the raspi, blitzes, the. Star 9 definitely seems promising to me. I do have some misgivings that it all relies on the SD card. Yeah. Embassy OS is what Randy McMillan said, but I I know they're they're they're working to to make it so that it works on an SSD just like, some of their, you know, competing, packages work on. Yeah. So, I mean, I I think it should just be I I I wanna see a lot of different options in this in this play. I I think, Umbrel is also looks very interesting to me. They put, like, a really slick package together.
And then and you can just Yeah. I like Yeah. Go on. I like
[01:17:38] Unknown:
it from an architecture perspective. So, so the the thing I loved about minor and still is it's this gigantic knife of Bitcoin software. And when I being open for the first time, it's like, oh man, apart from Bitcoin core, what does all this other stuff do? Right. I wanna run lightning. Okay. The way we went. And then there is, you know, on the, which I was more than, there's just software packages that are all integrated work and you can start learning about coin joins. You can learn about VPNs. You can learn about, or you can learn about, RTL and Thunder hub and mempool and, yeah, huge range. Fantastic.
On the other hand, Umbrel has taken a slightly different approach, which architecturally I, I am a big fan of, which is the core here is the core of the platform is Bitcoin core plus LND. Those 2 things, every Bitcoin is running. You can obviously choose whether you're a fan of LND or you want one of the other 2 or 3, 4 implementations of, but you should be running lightning. You should be running Bitcoin call, taken an app store. So using go to the app and choose what it is that you want to deploy on your number. And because they've used, containers to implement and deploy, That's very straightforward and very insulated and isolated.
So it's a very neat solving that. How do you go from balancing wanna put lots of stuff on there because some of them do things that other people won't. So I put it all on the my note approach versus Ambrose approach of saying, we want a solid foundation, and then we want isolated pieces, which each user can choose to deploy according to their needs. And it's a it's a very sweet it's a very sweet balance. Except, it doesn't have dark mode. Fuck's sake.
[01:19:58] Ketan:
Yeah. I think they're working on that, though.
[01:20:02] Unknown:
I've badgered them enough about it.
[01:20:04] Ketan:
Yeah. So have I. When they first sort of started up, I I said, mate, we're we're dark mode. That was the first question I had. I think they're still working on it, so hopefully soon.
[01:20:16] ODELL:
One one pain point I've noticed, with these things is I kinda dove in during the bear market, just dove in head first. I do kind of agree that that this is where things are heading, especially with lightning. And then kind of tangential to our previous conversation, I was talking about lightning I was talking about Bitcoin fees, and I think people don't realize how cool the the the, the interaction is between Bitcoin and lightning fee wise, because on chain Bitcoin, you pay per the data that is stored on chain. So if your transaction is a a small 1,000,000 sats versus, 20,000,000 sats, if if it comes from the same number of inputs and it's the same exact size on chain kilobytes wise, then you're gonna pay the same fee regardless that you're sending way more money. On Lightning, it's based on the amount you are sending.
So it's it's a really cool concept there where where inherently the way the fee structure works on chain is, maybe a little bit more opaque to the average user, harder for them to grasp, but it benefits larger settlement transactions. And then on Lightning, it's not necessarily, it's not not necessarily perfect or ideal for small transactions. I mean, right now, it is. There's a lot of nuance there, but at least it scales up based on the amount you send. And I think that's a very easy thing for someone to register. Oh, I pay, you know, a half a percent or a quarter percent, to send this transaction based on the amount I send.
[01:22:00] Unknown:
But, yeah. I think Bitcoin core, layer layer 1 fees, Matt. And I don't think Bitcoin has talked about this enough, to new coiners is that in in today's the current financial system, like, it's w which I love pointing out is part time. I mean, what the fuck? Yeah. What is it? What is it trading day from 10 to 4 or something or 9 to 3, very part time.
[01:22:33] Ketan:
But you know, in the legacy financial
[01:22:36] Unknown:
system, the money you send, especially internationally is a portion of the value. So it's very much a rent seeking model. So they have the, they have the monopoly on sending money. If I want to send, I wanna send money to you in in the US, Matt, or to Europe, then essentially the slice that gets taken as we bought the bank is a proportion of the value in layer 1 on Bitcoin. That's not the case. It's the complexity of the transaction, the size of the transaction. And as you say, if it's one, if it's one UTXO and you're sending in and out and getting some change back, it's pretty small, simple transaction.
You don't for it. It really just comes down to how busy is the help everyone else on Bitcoin layer. 1 urgent is your, is your transaction need that determines the cost. Whereas lightning at first glance appears to be like the current legacy system in the sense that, you know, the higher, the value, the more fee you will pay. The difference is lightning lightning. No. And not exactly very high. They're the default, or maybe this slightly lifted up to create I actually have to deposit Bitcoin and open channels and I've got skin in the guy. So it's more twice, of each transaction.
It's actually reward for effort and for capital risk. And it's a, it's quite a, it's quite a subtle but important distinction for lightning. Firstly, from layer 2, from layer 1 to the legacy system, and from layer 2 to the legacy system. And, yeah, we don't, we don't really talk about that enough with with new coins, I think.
[01:24:49] ODELL:
Catan, do we talk about fees enough to NewCoins? You you got them all convinced that they can use 1 sapper bite forever. So do you wanna repent?
[01:24:58] Ketan:
Well, we will see. I I'm I I am I am hopeful. I don't think I'm confident, but I am hopeful that one day we will return to the normal stage of the world, maybe, where we will be able to see 1 separate, per buyer transactions go through. Whether that happens within this decade, I I I hope. But, I I think that there is a there is a gang out there that wants to transact in 1 set per byte, and, I ho I I stand with them because, well, I always wanna pay the cheapest amount of fees. Having said that though, I understand that the network does cost money to run, and so I may have to upgrade that to potentially 2 sets at some point.
[01:25:54] ODELL:
So the mempool hasn't cleared the mempool hasn't cleared this year yet.
[01:25:58] Ketan:
No. It hasn't.
[01:26:00] ODELL:
And so That was one of my New Year's predictions that the mempool wasn't gonna clear all year. Yep. But it's only been 1 month, Matt. It's only been 1 month. And and I also made the prediction, like, every month leading up to it as well. Okay. Well, let let let's see, Matt. Let's see. What most people don't realize is you could actually do decimals. So so if if your transaction was 1.2 sats per byte, then it confirmed. That's right. Yeah. But the the one satters so sometimes it dives into it, but it doesn't doesn't actually clear the full Full amount. Yeah. So so some of my transactions did go through, and I was like, yep. And they built it. Big news. It still works. Sign the message or I don't believe you.
I mean, so some people think. Right? Like, so so fees are measured in sets. Right? And we believe number goes up. Right? I mean, I I just came up with this on the spot, but I feel like every single person who I have on the show, I should now ask on the record just to have it out there for posterity because, all the good freaks out there are archiving. By the way, you're not a true freak if you don't have an archive of every single episode of Tales from the Crypt, stored locally, in at least one location. And I'd go further than that. I actually have every single episode of Stefan's show also saved locally and noted, because I think, like, that's, like, what you're supposed to do as a Bitcoiner. But anyway, so this is a new segment that I just came up with 2 seconds ago.
Bitcoin is designed to pump forever. Disagree or agree?
[01:27:34] Ketan:
It is designed to pump forever. Yes. I do I do think that it is designed that way. Yes. Whether it will, that's another question.
[01:27:47] ODELL:
That's no
[01:27:50] Unknown:
Bitcoin is designed forever, and it will. So other things. The days that I would on that per bite are over. But the days of one set per byte transactions clearing will become less and less frequent.
[01:28:20] ODELL:
Well, it actually goes it actually goes the opposite way is is is is the reason I thought of this segment, besides the fact that every morning I wake up and I go, Bitcoin's designed to pump forever, was because one of the theories is is we can have this argument all day. These are my arguments to have with big corners and meetups is, is is it bullish or bearish to say that 1 sat per byte will confirm? Because someone could argue that it's bearish because then we don't have a healthy fee market, who are the miners, the miners aren't getting paid increased fees, if if one separate buyer coming through. Maybe it's not, it's not it's not consistent. So we have a if we don't have a backlog and we have a situation where there's, like, weeks where where there's just no fees, then then miners drop off the network, and you just have a a non a a network that's not really secured and block times are are slow versus maybe it's bullish because 1 SAP per byte is just so expensive in terms of purchasing power. Right? Like, maybe, like, we hold on to 1 sat per byte for longer than people think just because the purchasing power gets so fucking strong of the sat. That that's exactly what I'm I that's the camp that I'm thinking about as well is that, hey. What if 1 sat per byte, a a normal, you know, transaction
[01:29:41] Ketan:
might be a 141 sets or something, and that 141 sets represents a $141, then, you know, what is that not enough to incentivize a minor to to put that through?
[01:29:55] Unknown:
Yeah. Sorry. I I didn't realize you guys were talking. So the the you're right, mate. There are the 2 is the Saks is gonna be a reflection of the quantity of transactions on the on on the network. And I'm very bullish on that. Transaction numbers will go up. Mentor will go up. That's per byte as a base trend. To minimum transaction, then it will go up. We'll be at the end of the week One set of what transactions will be a, will be a historical anomaly that, the 3 of us will look back fondly on and talk about those with the days.
[01:30:48] ODELL:
My dogs are eating, food right now. Can you hear them through the mic?
[01:30:54] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah.
[01:30:56] ODELL:
Sorry about that, freaks. Live and learn. Live and learn. So yeah. I mean, I I I tend to agree with the fees. They're they're finished eating now, so we should be good. Low bandwidth guests should be required to upgrade Internet before next appearances on any pod. Well, we are at least live streaming from a cabin in the woods to Australia, which is pretty impressive that we just take that for granted. But I do agree that it is frustrating, when buffering happens and also when we hear dogs in the background. What else do we have? I mean, I have you guys for a little bit longer.
I want you to get on with your day. It seems like the audience doesn't have much more questions. Oh, I have I have one. Do we think, should we be concerned about the issues with Tor lately? Do you have do either of you have a strong opinion on that? Catan, do you have a strong one there?
[01:31:56] Ketan:
No. I I don't think I have a very strong opinion just in that. I think that they've they've released a patch, and it looks like it's up and running again, and people are able to now you utilize that. We're also moving to version 3 on the tool for your Bitcoin node. So that has been implemented, and I've had a look at that. And it looked like it looks like it just straight through upgrades very, very easily. So it looks like it's pretty good, and it's it it, yeah, it seems to be okay at this point in time. It was out for maybe, like, a day or so, or a couple of days, and it's now all returned back to normal as far as what I can tell.
It's not ideal, but it is probably the best way that we have to be able to expose, or host things on the Internet without exposing our IP address. And I think that that that is something that we should continue to protect and support over time.
[01:33:00] ODELL:
That's about it. I mean, that's a failure. That's the the main issue we have when you talk about self sovereignty. Right? Is is is okay. So you're gonna run your server from your home. How do you protect that your home's location? Right? How do you protect that private information of where you're broadcasting from? And the only way to do that in any kind of real bandwidth intensive way is to trust a third party. And if you wanna do it in a low bandwidth way, then you could use Tor. Right? That that's, like, a a key issue that we're in the middle of right now, that is is not solved. It's a not it's a not it's not a solved problem.
[01:33:40] Ketan:
Yeah. No. It's it's definitely not solved yet.
[01:33:44] ODELL:
Some person is asking how much privacy is actually gained by running a full node if it's over Clearnet. I've, this so this come this this this question is an interesting one, because, it depends if you're broadcasting or receiving. If if on the receiving side, if you're looking up balances, running it over clear net still gives you insane amounts of privacy gain. Because if if you're not using a Bitcoin node to to to interact with the network, you have to use a Bitcoin node. And if you're not using your own Bitcoin node, you're using someone else's node. That node you're trusting with 2 things. You're trusting it with your balances, your transactions, and your addresses, and how much Bitcoin you have, and you're trusting them to actually validate the rules, you know, that you've agreed to that it's actual Bitcoin agreed to by the consensus rules that that that you thought you agreed with. So the only way to accomplish both of those things in a trust minimized way is to run your own node.
If you're running your own node, using your own node over Clearnet and you're broadcasting transactions from it, you can end up exposing your IP address. So in terms of broadcasting, you know, and and there's mitigations that are being proposed such as, like, dandelion and stuff, in terms of broadcasting. But but really, you're you're better off using Tor and I the crazy part is you're best using a third party broadcasting service, like, Blockstream dot info's API through their Tor Onion site. Anyone disagree with that?
[01:35:21] Ketan:
Nope. Great analysis there.
[01:35:23] ODELL:
Bam. Bam. Yep.
[01:35:25] Unknown:
Yeah. What's up on this? And I guess if, Janine and Ben, earlier conversation is that the level of communication from the tall foundation, was, left a lot to be resolved.
[01:35:55] ODELL:
Yeah. No. It absolutely left a lot to be desired. There's still there's still no clear communication. They, supposedly, a patch has been issued. I guess not everyone's running it yet, but the issues are intermittent. It's fine. Like, I'd basically, everyone should operate under the assumption that Tor will not be reliable in terms of uptime. I think it's relatively safe assumption that it's pretty private, like, that there's no, like, glaring backdoors or anything in it, to deanonymize you if you stay within the Onion network, and you're not hosting a hidden service. If you're hosting a hidden service from that, we're still not 100% sure.
There's so much fucking nuance here. But in the the key issue that we're discussing here in terms of the recent attacks is reliability. And when we're talking about reliability, we're talking about the issue is is your Tor only hidden services. In in Catan's self hosting guide, if you're not if you're not using, if if if if if you're not using Tor or a third party that you're trusting, the only way to connect back is to expose your IP address. So if you use Tor to connect back and Tor is down, then you're not gonna be able to connect back. And that was the point I was trying to get to earlier, and Randy McMillan actually mentioned it on in the comments, in terms of traveling. And so in the bear market, I tried all these different self note things, particularly because of Lightning and coin joined because you want it running 247.
Now I'm, like, traveling around and and and renting places, and it's way less practical if this this idea of self hosting is way less practical if you're if you're living a more nomadic life. You kinda have to have, like, your citadel that you're you're running it in, because otherwise, you just hit up the, like, like, Internet limits. Like, you just can't have something that's on 247. Right?
[01:37:53] Ketan:
Yeah. That's right. So it it makes it a lot more challenging if you are some sort of, like, a a digital nomad. Yeah. It really I mean, you to do self hosting properly and have a nice stable Internet connection generally requires the use of a home or business broadband connection. And so, yeah, it it it does yeah. If you're a digital nomad, then self hosting, you might need to trust a a, a a a hosting provider to do that for you.
[01:38:27] ODELL:
And if you have to connect back through Tor, then Tor might be down.
[01:38:34] Ketan:
Not ideal.
[01:38:42] Unknown:
Matt?
[01:38:46] ODELL:
Yes. Hit me.
[01:38:49] Unknown:
So if you're a if you're a freak and you're, you're starting what are you what are you top 3 for securities opportunity?
[01:39:08] ODELL:
3 What was that? I lost you at the end.
[01:39:12] Unknown:
Sorry. What what are the top three things you'd recommend for, the new folk who are looking to update them in security and privacy?
[01:39:25] ODELL:
Well, I mean, I think that's what's that's what's difficult about all of this stuff. Right? Is that you have to think, you have to actually use your own, like, you have to use your own judgment based on your own current situation. Like, we have freaks that are looking at an Amazon Alexa right now. If they're if I'm on their TV, maybe I can okay, Google. What's the weather? Like, I don't know if it's just registered or might have just registered in their in their house. They they have a wiretap that's just live in their house. Like, they should get rid of that. Right? Then we have things like Elon Musk. Like, he tweets out use signal.
You know, like, I think, like, if most people, like, if you use signal for most things, like, it'll probably be a a a step up improvement. Right? But it's and then I've been on the Bitcoin side, like, secure your own keys. Right? And even something as simple as using a a phone wallet helps you. I think I I I think there's, like, 2 types of BitCorners. There's a type of BitCorner that's, like, you should go you should only go to cold storage when you're ready, and then there's type of Bitcoin that's like, I'd rather you have it in a hot wallet on your phone, than on an exchange. And I'm the I'm the second type.
But I think you just I I I think I think the most important thing is motivation. I think we could all agree that the most important thing is realizing that there's a need and that you have to fix it. You have to you have to improve your situation. Right?
[01:41:01] Unknown:
Yeah. Definitely. I think too, when we, you know, just to go more specifically on Bitcoin, there's, I know it would fall into the same camp. I mean, Catan's heard me say this before, having Bitcoin is better than not having Bitcoin, having Bitcoin off the exchange better than having it on the exchange, having it in a cold wallet better than having it in a hot wallet and so on and so on. So it's, it's a series of progressions and, you know, there's plenty of hardcore Bitcoiners that will say, no, it should be in a multi sync secure, you know, multi sync secured with, cold card only using PSVT and multiple devices, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's way too far, way too far for new corners. They just want, tell me the next thing I need to do.
And I guess the first few things, I always tend to advise a small practical steps. So I'm firmly convinced that the biggest risk to Bitcoin is security, particularly with regards to Bitcoin, is. You know, it's since the problem sits between the keyboard and the chair, it's you. And it's doing stupid things or doing things that you just not aware of that are a risk not paying attention. So the few things I always, with manager use a VPN, and, yeah, run a run a full node because those are those are really basic things. You know, hold hold your hold your own keys. If you start with those those, then you're a long way forward than 95% of the rest of the population period, who are using Facebook sign on and Google sign on, etcetera, etcetera. So it's it's a step me. What about you, Katan?
[01:43:05] Ketan:
I I think for me, it's probably, yeah, hold your own case and use your own note as well. I think to to just get yourself off the exchange is probably one thing that you should be looking to do. And whether that's, you know, on a hot wallet for a small amount and then in more other cold storage just type solutions. But then also then moving on to using your own full node as well. So those are the things that I would also, you know, echo. But then also, using things like VPN and Tor where if if if it's required. Yeah.
There's there's a thing, like, you have to I I guess what Matt said, you have to assess what you think is a a risk and then move from there. If you've got an Alexa at home, yeah, that those are that's probably the first step. Get rid of that, and then move on to, actually, you know, maybe you might wanna look into your Wi Fi. Right? If you've got a you know, you've got the default usernames and passwords in there, you might wanna change those. If you if your your Wi Fi password is just, you know, password 1 or something like that with a capital p, you you may wanna change that. So those are the types of things that you might wanna look into to just incrementally do better.
So yeah.
[01:44:22] ODELL:
Wait. 100%. I mean, I just wanna show real quickly, Catan's got a educational, program that he's been doing with Stefan Lavera called Ministry of Nodes. I put that in the comments on all the platforms. If you just type in ministry of nodes on YouTube, he's got a bunch of guides there. I mean, this is this is one of the issues, I think, and I go back and forth on it. So I put in the comments bitcoin dash intro.com, which is run by 6102 Bitcoin, maintained by 6102 Bitcoin. I think he's on kind of the right target, in terms of a checklist. Like, it's, like, you start by buying Bitcoin and, like, getting, you know and before you get to actual sovereign proper Bitcoin usage, so called proper Bitcoin usage.
I think in practice, though, it's hard to find a single thing because it depends on the person. And so I try and focus on 2 things recently. I I I focus on, first of all, trying to create the motivation. Right? So privacy is important. Sovereignty is important. You can lose your coins if you keep them on an exchange. Right? Like, motivation. Get them to realize why. You get them to realize why, then people will eventually try and figure it out themselves. Right? Yes. We have node dot guide, from Bitcoin q and a. Bitcoin q and a has got a bunch of great guides. He was also on on sale of dispatch if you wanna check out the earlier episodes. I think his full guides are at bitcoiner.guide.
Bitcoiner.guide should be it, or it's bitcoiners.guide. But anyway, but then at the same time, like, I feel like almost giving them options, giving people options hurts. And this is one of the things that I really liked about your self host guide. This is one of the things that I've been doing at we run bitcoin.com, my Bitcoin guide, is, like, I'm just you just pick best practice. I I think there's there's a place for both. There's a place for motivating people and and having them seek out that knowledge. There's a place for these, like, checklists where, like, you can just send a universal checklist to most types of individuals and they can go down that checklist. And then there's a real place, I think, for just saying this is the best practice. Like, this is how you should be set up. This is your you know, all the trade offs considered. Here are the trade offs. This is probably the best way to run your phone. This is probably the best way to secure your Bitcoins. This is probably the best, you know, VPN provider. Like, we can have, like, a whole conversation about trade offs between VPN providers. I just don't have the time for that.
I would rather just tell them to use MOLVAD. And if MOLVAD, you know, if if MOLVAD fails us, it fails us altogether. Right? And I think more people end up using it that way. It saves you more time. So there's this whole balancing act that you have to fucking always deal with. Right?
[01:47:18] Unknown:
Yeah. It's so so true, man. It it it is a it's a fine line. Yes. But one of the one of the great things about, about Bitcoin is it's got a number go up. And so, you know, for people who maybe took a little bit of a punt on Bitcoin for the first time last year, when it was, when it took a dip, when it took a dip to 3,000 or 3 and a half, you know, we're buying in the bear market in 20 18, 20 19. Maybe they bought a $1,000 that's $1,000. And maybe they took them, took the next step over the, over the last year or 2 and downloaded a software wallet and transferred their coins off the exchange.
That, that $1,000 is now $10,000 and it's sitting there in their phone. They're probably not too comfortable about $10,000 sitting in their phone. Well, you know, in the next year or 2 $1,000 number might be a whole lot more than that. So there is that, that moves people go, yeah, that's probably not the best spot to have. What happens if the phone breaks? What happens if, you know, someone steals the phone and so on. And, and I think, I think NGU technology, Bitcoin's designed to pump forever does help that, does help that learning process.
It incentivize it correctly.
[01:48:46] Ketan:
Yeah, mate. You talked about motivation. And I think, when the number goes up, you start to pay attention a lot a lot more than if it was just the amount that you put in initially. And so that's when you start to see people go, oh, I better pay attention now. So, yeah, I I concur with that. It it really is the motivation. It it that is one big driver to do better. It certainly has been for me. So
[01:49:12] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think I usually, when I talk about, motivate things that create the motivation, usually, it's a negative thing. I think Bitcoin is kind of unique in that it it has a positive motivator involved as well, which is, the amount goes up that you're holding. So it's nice that it's not just all negative, motivation. Usually, I would say in this in this space, it is it tends to be negative. You know, you get burned. You get deplatformed. Goxed, and you learn. So so the number go up element is definitely a nice positive thing. But someone mentioned in the comments Moon Wallet. It kinda hit my radar.
I don't think either of you guys have used it yet. Am I correct on that? Yeah. I haven't had a chance to use that. Yeah. So, I mean, Moon Wallet is one of these, like it's aiming to be to straddle the ground between simple, you know, and self sovereign at the same time. So I do look forward to trying that out. I hope to see more of that. We are we are short on time here. I appreciate you guys joining us. I appreciate all the freaks who joined us. I appreciate both you, Wiz and Catan, for joining us, all the way from Australia in your morning. I I, I know mornings are more difficult, so it it's it's extra cool that you guys joined us for this live show because we do have this hard time set in place for this massive eternity of every episode so far.
So we didn't wanna ruin that. So I appreciate you guys coming on. I hope to see you guys again sometime soon in in person. Well, I haven't met Catan yet in person, but I look forward to seeing you again in person, Wiz. Maybe maybe at Bitcoin 2021 in June in Miami. That would be fucking dope. And I look forward to having you both on the podcast again soon. You know, this is one of those things that they'll dispatch. I want I want to be a thing where we just have almost like a constant rotation, with the same crew just talking about the same topics and evolving on it and all learning together. So, huge thanks to both of you guys. You can follow them on Twitter.
Catan said at underdashk3tan, t a n, and wiz is at atbtcshellingpoint. That's b t c s c h e l l I n g p t. I'm Matt O'Dell, your host. We will be back next week at the same time, 22100 UTC on Bitcoin Tuesday. I will see you on RHR probably, like, early afternoon. We don't have a set time there. Hopefully, that will be a live stream as well. Orange coin good, number go up.
[01:51:49] Unknown:
Thanks, Matt. Thanks. Good time.
[01:51:52] Ketan:
Cheers, Matt. We get a weakness. This. You gotta see this. Yeah. Yeah. Hey. I remember served sandwiches and grandma lounges Vanessa right. I make a play fucking up your whole life. I'm so fucking sick and tired of the photoshop. Show me something natural like Afarone, watch your bra. Show me something natural like ass with some stretch marks. Still a take you down it. Most of y'all be faking. I stay modest about it. She elaborated. This that great coupon that beyond that dead
[01:55:05] ODELL:
Love you freaks. Stay humble and stack.
The benefits and disadvantages of self-hosting
The use of Mastodon and Pleroma for social media
The importance of a pfSense router for network security
The use of Nextcloud for personal cloud storage
Assessing risks and taking incremental steps to improve security measures
Educational resources and guides for Bitcoin security
Balancing motivation and providing best practices for Bitcoin security
Taking small steps to improve security and privacy
The trade-offs and challenges of self-hosting
The importance of running your own Bitcoin node
