Welcome back to Monero Monthly, where Max and Seth dive into the past month in the world of Monero. They cover key topics, exciting updates, and questions from the community, delivering top-notch information with a touch of misfit flair.
P2P Exchanges
Mediated swaps:
P2P Exchanges
Mediated swaps:
- LocalMonero (may it RIP, will see if something takes it's place)
- Haveno via RetoSwap (fiat <> XMR and crypto <> XMR)
- Bisq (BTC <> XMR)
- Robosats (BTC <> XMR)
- AMMs
- Serai (coming soonTM)
- BasicSwap
- UnstoppableSwap
- Rucknium, a researcher, has released his work on statistical analysis of ring signatures in Monero
At current Monero ring size of 16, the theoretical minimum attack success through completely random guessing would be 1/16 = 6.25%. According to preliminary estimates, an adversary could take advantage of the divergence between the real spend age distribution and the status quo decoy distribution to achieve an attack success probability of 23.5%, on average, since the August 2022 hard fork. This corresponds to an effective ring size of 4.2. The attack success probability prior to August 2022 may be higher, but this was not measured due to time constraints.
- Monero can easily scale to Bitcoin's transaction throughput on-chain
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1iimio0/this_is_how_many_transactions_monero_can_handle/
- Doesn't account for self-custodial Lightning transactions, of course
- Fantastic post on Monero's upcoming addressing scheme update, CARROT
- Monero Core Team posts funding transparency report
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1iixgk9/monero_general_fund_transparency_report_february/
- Explain Monero Core team!
- Cake Wallet releases v4.23.0 and v4.23.2
- Monero passphrase support for new and existing wallets
- https://blog.cakewallet.com/cake-wallet-releases-improvements-to-zano-ledger-ethereum-and-more-v4-23-2-2/
- https://blog.cakewallet.com/cake-wallet-zano-integration-and-monero-passphrases-v4-23/
- Monero v0.18.4.0 is right around the corner
- https://mynymbox.io/
- Monerujo update
- https://docs.cakewallet.com/
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[00:00:01]
Unknown:
The business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every last seconds, eleven seconds.
[00:00:07] Unknown:
I am investigator investigator investigator. And I work supporting Our agenda for today, we're gonna start with just the basics of Monero. What it is, what it is, how it works, how it works. Monero is considered a privacy token.
[00:00:32] Unknown:
The world's most private
[00:00:34] Unknown:
privacy. Which means that in high, virtually all transaction details are exchanged. The world's most private
[00:00:41] Unknown:
privacy. Monero monthly episode three. Still not canceled. Nice to hear from you again, mate. We're not going anywhere.
[00:01:21] Unknown:
Can't cancel us.
[00:01:24] Unknown:
Uncancelable, uncensorable Monero monthly. Uh-huh. It's fitting. It's fitting. So what have we got on this episode? I know we're gonna get into p two p exchanges. We've got an absolute boatload of XMR chats. Anything else?
[00:01:40] Unknown:
Some updates in the space, a few software updates. It was a quieter month for the Monero ecosystem as I feel like most of the dev time has been going into getting ready for this upcoming protocol improvement slash hard fork. It's been relatively quiet, but there's definitely a few good items to go through here. So we'll keep it short and sweet.
[00:01:57] Unknown:
This big update is this ring signature
[00:02:00] Unknown:
thing that you were explaining to me before Cara or something it was called. Is that right? Yeah. So there's two pieces to it. If you want, we can jump into that, or we can do it later. Whatever you feel like. But the two main things that are coming in this upgrade will be full chain membership proofs, which replace ring signatures, and then caret, which is a new addressing scheme that's backwards compatible that adds some really nice features on top of it. But the main one for privacy is Give us the ring signature. Yeah. The FCMP or full chain membership proofs. Just as a recap for me and anyone listening, that was basically
[00:02:31] Unknown:
rather than being is it six or 12? 16. One of 16. Mhmm. This would now be of any. Yeah. One of, like, a hundred million or something right now. Okay. So slightly, slightly better anonymity set. A huge, huge, huge improvement. So that's the basic rundown. You did go into a lot of detail. It was either on the first one or the second one. So any new listeners go back and have a listen to that for a full description.
[00:02:58] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. And one of the updates that we'll get into has to do with ring signatures, and I'll explain a little bit more on FCMP and how it resolves that as well. So I'll do a little TLDR later as well, but we definitely won't get in too in-depth like we did on the episode a few months ago. Okay. Let's go and jump in. So for this one, I thought that diving a little bit more into peer to peer exchanges in Monero would be valuable. Because one of the hardest things when it comes to Monero is how do you actually get it? One of the things that governments have realized very quickly about Monero and something that Monero's led the way in, if you wanna take that as a positive, is that governments have done everything they can to shut down exchange access to Monero.
Before there was any operation choke point two point o, before any of The US exchanges were getting debanked, Monero was already experiencing all of the same approaches. To me, it was kind of the testing grounds for operation choke point two point o, where, essentially, what was happening was exchanges would either have Monero or want to list Monero, and they would be told while being sworn to secrecy that if they listed Monero or didn't delist Monero, they would lose their access to banking services. We don't have solid proof of this explicitly for Monero, but all of the proof run operation choke point two point o lines up perfectly with with thought has been going on with Monero for so long. So it's not on many exchanges, many centralized exchanges around the world. Kraken is one of the very few left, and they're the only one in The US right now. I think there might be two or three other small exchanges internationally, but, generally, it's much more difficult to get Monero than it is to get something like Bitcoin. So I think it's one of those things where, like, you need to understand what you're getting into when you first dive into Monero, especially if you're used to, like, open strike app, click buy 500,000 sets or whatever. It's gonna be a very different experience, but you're also gonna have all of the benefits that come with peer to peer exchanges as well.
[00:04:54] Unknown:
It's funny. It's like the opposite of when I'd first got involved in Bitcoin and other crypto stuff. I remember there being a big thing about listings. It's like, oh, Coinbase is gonna list this coin. Yeah. And then, you know, that would mean that the price was gonna go crazy because it's like, oh, more people can get a hold of it now. And then Monero is the absolute opposite since I've been paying more attention and why I've put in the intro, the delistings.
[00:05:18] Unknown:
Monero, another delisting, another delisting. It seems to be constant. And then rather than people, like, shitting themselves, what I find quite funny is the Monero community that I see is, good. Get it out of their fucking hands. Make this actually ungovernable money. I definitely agree with that sentiment in some ways, but I think that it's a little bit lacking in nuance. Because one of the big downsides to delisting of an arrow on centralized exchanges is that there's just a lot less visibility, and there's a lot less easy access for people. And while I 100% think that people should only be using exchanges that don't collect their personal information, that don't do a full KYC. It does make it far easier for people to get access to something. And when that something is Monero, which provides very strong financial privacy as soon as they withdraw, it is, I think, overall, a net negative to have Monero listed on less exchanges.
But there is a huge positive, which is that the Monero ecosystem and lots of related platforms like BISK have been pushed much harder, much faster than they would have to build out good peer to peer and or decentralized options for buying and selling Monero because there was an actual need. Like, when you talk about Bitcoin, I don't wanna say there's not a need, but there's a very, very low user base that has a need for using something like computer peer exchange. Because you can I mean, there's an exchange in every country, essentially, that you can use if you're willing to give up your KYC and access Bitcoin? Which is most people. Yeah. With 99, I don't know, 5% of people, probably higher than that. So there's not as much pressure as there is in Monero where it's there isn't an exchange in most countries that people can use to buy Monero. So the only way to get it is peer to peer. So if we're not working as a community to build out these tools or to increase the liquidity in these tools, then people just aren't going to be able to access Monero, which is, I think, really the government and regulator in the game for stopping Monero. Because on a technical level, it's practically impossible to stop. On a social level,
[00:07:16] Unknown:
this is really the low hanging fruit. Mhmm. I think you're right. It's overall not so great. But at the same time, I remember there was speech that Andres on Cinnapolis did about if there's a cryptocurrency that's a gecko and governments don't like it and they stamp on that gecko or attempt to stamp on that gecko, eventually, it will evolve into a Komodo dragon and bite their leg off. And that is what I'm getting the vibes from here is, like, well, if you're forced to adapt, you've got no other choices, adapt or die, and that's what's happening. So it just pushes it further to that fuck you money side, which is kind of exciting. For sure. And, I mean, that's what we've really seen. Like, when we look at the different types of peer to peer exchanges,
[00:07:57] Unknown:
it started out in the Monero ecosystem as only these centralized website hosted tools like LocalBitcoins. Local Monero was the LocalBitcoins equivalent in the the Monero space, which are great. They're still peer to peer. They're still connecting you with other individuals and not requiring, like, a central database of KYC, but they are relatively easy to shut down. And, unfortunately, we saw that happen middle of last year where local Monero seemingly was forced to shut down. They've never made any public statement about why they suddenly closed when they seem to be doing very well and gaining popularity, but I think we can all probably guess what happened there. That caused a a trickle effect in pushing even more pressure onto the decentralized approaches. And when you look at the different decentralized or peer to peer exchange options in Monero, there's basically three types with one of them not actually existing yet, but coming really soon. One of those is mediated trades or mediated swaps. This is the bisque model for anybody who's ever used bisque, RoboSats, the same kind of model where you have a central entity who acts as the mediator in case one party doesn't follow through on their trade, and that makes sure that if somebody scams someone else or lies or just makes a mistake, there's a way to be able to to get funds to the party you're supposed to have them.
And those are generally gonna be the best tool for most people because it is helpful to have a mediator, assuming you can trust the mediator, and it can greatly simplify the actual process of trading crypto. The main examples of those, like, I already mentioned, Bisk and Robosats, which which you may not think of when you think of Monero, but both actually are fantastic platforms for buying and selling Monero with Bitcoin. And you'll notice the theme with all of these exchanges that I'll talk about except one is that almost none of them are fiat to Monero exchanges, even peer to peer. All of them except for Havano or RitoSwap, which is an implementation of Havano. They're just crypto to Monero.
For those listening, I would assume that everyone here has crypto. I think that would probably be a reasonable fit. So it's not a big deal, but when thinking about it, that's definitely an important thing to keep in mind. If you already have Bitcoin, it can be quite easy to get Monero, but Bisk and Robosats are both great platforms with, honestly, Robosats, I think, being my favorite now. And it's the main thing I've used to do Bitcoin to Monero trades and vice versa recently. Obviously, the advantages of Lightning are really nice. Phoenix Wallet is self custodial, works really nicely with Robosats. The trades are fast, and I've had really good success with the traders. And it's a really good platform for that. I think a lot of people don't think about Robosats when they think Monero, but it's actually one of the best setups for trading Monero Mhmm. That I've seen and works really well. With Bisk being good for larger amounts, but quite expensive on chain and just quite slow because you have to deal with waiting for confirmations and how the multisigs work. And there's a lot of traceability concerns as well, like we mentioned in the last episode of Yeah. Your trades actually being linked together on chain. So it's generally, I think, to be avoided and use RoboSats instead. But if you need to do larger amounts where, obviously, lightning's not a deal, this can be really good for that as well. And we've seen over the course of the last few years, this be, like, 80% Monero volume with only a little bit Big. Fiat to Bitcoin. I don't know what it is recently. I haven't checked the stats in probably six to twelve months, but for quite a while there, the vast majority of the volume on this was Monero. And what's the trade off, you know, with something like Robosats
[00:11:24] Unknown:
compared to just doing something within k wallet or using trucker door, like one of these swap services? Yeah. Is it fees? Is it privacy? Is it ease of use? Where do these things sort of line up? I mean, I would say the main drawback
[00:11:42] Unknown:
to this approach, and I would say, like, mediated trading platforms are generally the best user experience of the decentralized or peer to peer ones, but they still pale in comparison to something centralized because you just you can't beat the simplicity of a central entity Mhmm. Accepting the crypto and sending back their crypto. You send in Bitcoin, you get back Monero. So it's always going to be drastically faster and easier with the obvious caveat that for a short time, you are giving out custody of funds. It's not as bad as the centralized exchange where your funds are just sitting there when you're not trading them until you withdraw them. They're only gonna be sitting there generally until you get enough confirmations on both chains. So a lot of times, that's, like, ten to twenty minutes. If you're trading, like, Bitcoin to Monero or vice versa, there is that downside of giving up custody. And then the other downside too is, unfortunately, because of the transparency of Bitcoin, there are cases where users use a centralized swap service, and they have tainted Bitcoin, And the funds will get held. Now I will say on the cake side, we work a lot with our partners to try to make sure that unless there's, like, an actual law enforcement request, which, obviously, we can't just ignore. We don't get the law enforcement requests, but our partners do. They can't just ignore that. Like, they're a central company that has legitimate employees. Like, they can't just say, no policemen. We're gonna serve these $50 of Monero.
Yeah. They'll hold funds. And the worst case I've ever seen is that they just require KYC from the person before they'll get the funds back. So what we call shotgun KYC, which is obviously not fun. And that's something you'll never have in a peer to peer swap because it's just another individual who's trading with you. I've never heard of a case of any person not finalizing a trade, and a lot of these platforms ensure that if you send your end, there's no way that you can lose your funds unless the mediator is malicious.
[00:13:30] Unknown:
That's a good point. Because it's Bitcoin to narrow or vice versa, it's not like buying Bitcoin on BISK where I've always said it's cool, it's good, it's better than going to a centralized exchange. But when you're going from fiat to Bitcoin, still giving your banking details to somebody else, and you don't know who that somebody else is. And that's a concern. But, actually, once you're in the Bitcoin ecosystem or Monero ecosystem, you're not then having to give your personal details. You kind of avoid that problem.
[00:14:02] Unknown:
Yeah. Absolutely. It's much less concerning, and that's why, like, I really love centralized exchanges for now that are integrated into cake. Because since you're not dealing with the fiat layer at all, it's just a really seamless experience. And for the vast majority of people, the threat model there, the trust assumptions are totally fine. Now, obviously, the ideal is a decentralized approach that has the same user experience. And, obviously, that's something that that we're working on. That's something where another exchange that's gonna be coming out, hopefully, in the next year or two will have a user experience essentially like that of a centralized exchange, but without the same trust assumptions and without giving up custody in the same ways.
It's called Sarai. That's one that I think we've we've touched on a little bit, I think, in the first Monero monthly, but that will kind of be the, I think, the ideal middle ground once it's available and definitely something that will be leading the way in a cake. We've already talked to the main dev behind it and have committed to integrate it immediately. So it's definitely something like we would love to do that. But for right now, the centralized exchangers, they work really well, and and for most people's needs are great. And like you said, you're not dealing with fiat, so the instant exchange is not learning anything about you as a person. And you can also do those things over tour. We have non native tour support. You can do tour via Orbot on Android and Cake right now. We have native tour support coming up. So you can do that so that you're not even revealing network information about yourself to the exchange. So I think it's a really good option, and that's one of the beautiful things is once you get Bitcoin, getting back and forth from Bitcoin to Monero is quite anonymous. And especially going Bitcoin to Monero,
[00:15:37] Unknown:
you don't even have to worry about, like, tainted funds or anything like that. You're pretty much good to go. The only thing I would just add to that is for anyone thinking about using the centralized exchanges, if your main slash only risk is the potential of funds being frozen and then the potential of shotgun KYC, I would say only exchange at one time the amount that you'd be willing to walk away from to keep your privacy. If I was gonna do a hundred dollars and then I got shotgun KYC'd, they're like, we're gonna keep your funds unless you give all your information. I'd be like, fuck off. Keep the funds then. Yeah. But if it's $10,
[00:16:17] Unknown:
be like,
[00:16:18] Unknown:
okay. We've got a problem here. Maybe be mindful and do a few smaller ones if you have any concerns would be my advice.
[00:16:26] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. I think that's really good advice. I hadn't really thought through that, but that way, worst case, you're just out maybe a couple hundred bucks. Yeah. Whereas if you try to swap all of your Bitcoin from narrow ones or something through an instant exchange, could be problematic unless your funds actually have an illicit history. It's very unlikely that they would be considered tainted by one of these instant exchangers, but it definitely can happen. And that's where something like this could probably be a really good fit. Like, if you are trying to move $10,000 of Bitcoin into Monero, this can really handle that volume quite easily. Mhmm. And you're not having to deal with any instant exchanger that's has some contract with a a chain surveillance company or something. So it's it's definitely a a really good approach for those bigger trades.
Mhmm. The last category of peer to peer exchanges that we have in the Monero ecosystem are atomic swaps. And this is something I think we've also briefly touched on before, but Yeah. It's essentially the technologically perfected version of the mediated swap where you don't actually need a mediator at all. You rely on the chains themselves, in this case, Bitcoin and Monero, to do all of the arbitration itself. Mhmm. So we're able to use Bitcoin to Monero. Unfortunately, Monero has no scripting language, so we use Bitcoin itself to actually handle the atomic swap logic to make sure that if you send your Bitcoin or you send your Monero, you will always either get the corresponding amount of Bitcoin or Monero back or you'll get the funds that you sent refunded back to you. There's no middle ground where that doesn't happen, and there's no trust in a mediator or central entity at all, and it's actually directly peer to peer. If you can communicate with someone, you can do an atomic swap with them. Mhmm. So it's it's definitely, like, the most decentralized and the most resilient option, but that always comes at a cost. When you shift more towards the trust minimized or trustless, you generally are shifting away from the user friendly and the fast.
And that's true of atomic swaps. It's getting better and better. There's been some really good work on a specific Bitcoin and Monero only swap set of tools called unstoppable swap. There's a simple GUI now for desktop. It's getting really good, but it will always be somewhat painful just because you're having to do everything on chain. Yeah. It's getting better and better, and there's also, like, a multi crypto atomic swap platform called basic Swap that have Bitcoin and Monero, of course, but they have other things integrated as well. I view atomic swaps really as not something that most people will use, but rather a on and off ramp that literally cannot be shut down even if every other platform was forced to shut down somehow.
If I could message you in signal, we could do an atomic swap. All we need to do is communicate. It's one of those things that it just always keeps the door open no matter how potentially bad things get in the exchange space. For Monero, atomic swaps will always be there. And as long as you can get Bitcoin, you could always atomic swap into Monero. Mhmm. That's good. That's the main thing when it comes to peer to peer exchanges. I'm definitely curious if people have questions on, like, specifics of using them. But if you're already using peer to peer exchanges in the Bitcoin space, I think you'll be pretty familiar with a lot of how that works. And like I mentioned, Bisk and Robosats are two great platforms that a lot of Bitcoiners have already used anyways, so they're great places to get started with. Ready to get rolling into the updates? Yeah. Definitely. Let's do it. This month, certainly not as much as last month, but there's a couple bigger items to touch on. So the first one, and we mentioned this a little bit in the intro, is piece of research that's come out. There's someone in the Monero community who goes by Rucknium, who's been a a researcher for quite a long time. I think he's been working on this project for two years or so. And to give kind of the TLDR, so we've talked about ring signatures in Monero. We've talked about full chain membership proofs. Ring signatures, like you mentioned, it's relying on decoys. And one thing that a lot of people don't think about with how that works is that when you actually create a transaction, your wallet has to try and find decoys, which are real transactions that have happened, that are plausible inputs for the transaction you're making, that fit the expected block height of when someone would normally spend funds. It's a little hard to explain. But, basically, if you think about how do you spend Bitcoin, you generally are spending Bitcoin that you've received most recently first, and a lot of people are fairly rapidly spending outputs. And it's the same in Monero where most outputs are spent relatively quickly after being received. Most people don't sit on an output for four or five years before they actually spend it. Generally, there's gonna be a pretty quick turnaround there. When actually designing the way that ring signature algorithm works, Monero devs and researchers had to figure out what a time distribution looks like and try to make it as accurate as possible. So let's say you're spending an output that you got six months ago. When you go to spend that, your wallet will fill in decoys that are mostly weighted towards recent blocks and then less and less as you go back in time to try and provide a lot of good plausible deniability spread across time throughout the Monero blockchain.
That works reasonably well. But if you have really weird spending habits or if the way that that time selection is handled isn't perfect, it can reduce the effective privacy that's provided by ring signatures. And it's something we've always known, and there's been a lot of work over the years to improve the decoy selection algorithm to try to make it more and more accurate and more and more effective. But we've known it hasn't been perfect, and Requiem has done a lot of work over the past couple years trying to figure out how bad is it or is it okay. And the summary of his research and I haven't been too active in the actual conversations about the summary of the research, but I've read through it and seen some of the discussions on x and on Reddit, is basically that the ring signatures in Monero, because of the way that the time selection works when picking decoys, are not fully effective.
So theoretically, you would say that if I was just guessing randomly which input in this transaction is the real spend, I would have a one in 16 chance because there's 16 possible inputs. I know one of them is the real one. If I guess randomly, there's a one in 16 chance. But what Rucknium found by doing essentially statistical analysis was that more realistically, if I'm randomly guessing, it's something like 23% chance or one in four that I'm guessing the correct true spend. Again, it's guessing it's not deterministic. It's probabilistic.
So you could guess wrong and just trace the wrong way the entire time. But it does reduce the effective privacy of Monero against a very motivated attacker. And Monero has many motivated attackers. So, obviously, we always wanna keep that in mind when designing systems. So what it means is you could guess as probably one of these four or just over four outputs,
[00:23:20] Unknown:
but I don't know. It's just a guess. So what you're doing is just with everything going is probably one of these four ish, but I don't really know, and there's no way for me to ever know. But I think it might be one of these. It's still unknown. It's a bit like a Whirlpool transaction where it's like, we know sort of one of these would have been linked to one of these because they came in
[00:23:44] Unknown:
from over there, and they've spat out over here, but we don't know which one. It's kind of similar to that. Yeah. Very much so. And, I mean, that if you think about it, that is the way it's always worked. It's just the percentages here are worse than people's expectations. And, like, when you're talking about Whirlpool, it's a one in five. It's a 20% chance that I guess correctly. But also on the Bitcoin side, amounts are visible. Where the funds go next is immediately visible on chain. There's a much easier ways to help improve the guess by seeing what happens with the other outputs in that transaction in a Whirlpool.
Whereas in Monero, even if, let's say, they guess the input correctly, they still don't know the amount, and they still don't know any wallet address of where the funds move next. They can see that the funds are spent, but they don't know the amount. They just maybe have guessed the true spend, and it means that even that guessing process is very, very tricky to confirm because they won't have the ability to gather additional details around that. So it's certainly not like doom and gloom, all is lost kinda situation. It just means that the privacy is not quite as good as expected. But the upside here, as we've already talked about a little bit, full chain membership proofs are already well underway, and it's looking like we're probably gonna have a hard fork to enable them in the next eight to twelve months. And that totally removes this entire attack vector. With full chain membership proofs, you're not picking decoys that you hope are close to the true spend and properly hide it. You're just saying, I am one valid output from every output that's ever existed in the Monero blockchain.
So you won't have to deal with this anymore. The whole problem of trying to set this decoy selection algorithm properly won't exist anymore, and the privacy will be as effective as promised on the sender side. So it's something that we already know how to remedy. It's already a work in progress. Full chain membership proofs are far more effective solution than just bigger ring sizes or reworking the decoy selection algorithm. So we're gonna get it fixed, but it is definitely something for people to keep in mind right now. Are there any arguments around it? Like, if you're hard forking, is there sort of two camps?
[00:25:53] Unknown:
Is there anyone going like, we don't think this is a good idea. We think that what we've currently got is good enough, and this could introduce other problems. You know, like, the typical stuff you get with Bitcoin, like, is war with stuff, any change, really? Or is it just that because the majority of Monero users are very aligned on, like, okay. We have one purpose. Like, we have basically one goal. It's like be fucking private, not with gold, with property, with sort of some people at decentralized money. Some of this does it. Bitcoin is much more varied in its user base, I would say, in terms of what they want. Does that translate to being no arguments?
[00:26:31] Unknown:
I would say for this type of upgrade, there's not really any arguments. And I think a good way to think about it is when you think about what purpose does Monero serve, I think everyone would agree its purpose is privacy preserving digital cash. That's why people use Monero. It's pretty straightforward. Mhmm. And in the same vein, I would say that the vast majority of people in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the monetary properties of Bitcoin are the key value proposition. Mhmm. And so when you think about a constant attack on the privacy of Monero, everyone wants to be able to deanonymize Monero and trace transactions, and there's a lot of money sitting on the line to be able to do that. We're constantly under attack on that. So if you have someone who's actively attacking your project and you have a solution to fix it, it's very unlikely that's gonna be controversial. And I think the same thing is true with Bitcoin. When there was a value overflow bug and someone printed hundreds of millions of Bitcoin, there's no controversy because you're just ensuring that the monetary properties continue. Mhmm. Just like when we're talking about quantum computers, and that's been a a more recent subject of discussion.
I think everyone agrees that some sort of a fix to prevent quantum computers from stealing funds is going to happen. Now exactly how that happens, I'm sure there will be controversy in the Bitcoin ecosystem because there always is. There's always plenty of bike shedding and everything else. But there will be agreement on that idea of the two things that most Bitcoiners hold dear are the monetary properties, the 21,000,000, etcetera, and then that my keys are actually my coins. Mhmm. And so if something is attacking that or breaking that, fixing it is pretty straightforward and not very controversial. And it's the same in Monero. I mean, privacy is constantly being attacked.
The main value prop of Monero, the main usefulness of Monero is the privacy. So when a protocol upgrade that's been extremely well researched, well vetted, in progress for years is presented, it's just not really gonna be controversial.
[00:28:26] Unknown:
But we have had controversial hard forks in the past in Monero. That was my guess. My only thinking why anyone would have a problem with way, way, way better privacy would be like, this introduces some risk because there's an unknown thing here or, you know, whatever, like, something like that. That's the BitCorner way for sure.
[00:28:45] Unknown:
The unknown unknowns. We just won't do anything because Yeah. We don't know what we don't know. Yes. It's definitely something that always comes up. I think it's more a concern whenever we're touching anything that has to do with the way that a bounce are hidden in the narrow. Mhmm. Because, obviously, that's more of the risk when it comes to silently inflating the supply. But Yes. Yeah. I haven't seen much around this one Okay. As far as controversy goes.
[00:29:08] Unknown:
That's good.
[00:29:09] Unknown:
So next up, cool Reddit post that stood out to me. Somebody just ran the math on the throughput that Monero could handle today. And something that's always been interesting is we always just kind of, like, talk about Monero being relatively scalable, but I try to stress that it's still a layer one blockchain, and it's not it's not great at scaling long term. But it was just cool Reddit post. You can drop down into the links below to read more if you want. He ran the numbers and essentially found that with how much cheaper storage gets over time, Monero could handle the same amount of transactional volume as Bitcoin at its height without much problem, which is good confirmation. That's kind of a common question as, well, Monero doesn't scale, so it couldn't handle the same things as Bitcoin. Mhmm. It could handle the layer one traffic that Bitcoin has, but, obviously, that doesn't account for how many of those layer one transactions are actually lightning channels that are being used and how many transactions are thus happening through lightning and not happening on chain. It's not a perfect one to one comparison, but it's just an interesting, thought exercise to see how Monero scales reasonably well at layer one. Yeah. Does not scale infinitely and will need some sort of layer two solution down the line if usage continues to grow.
[00:30:20] Unknown:
I was just about to say that. So, presumably, you can have a layer two. And sometimes with Bitcoin, I feel like not as unnecessary because it does unlock some interesting things, and we use, like, podcasting two point o and the boost and all that stuff. Lightning does some good stuff. But, also, most of the time, on chain is just fine, and it costs very little, and it's not too busy, and we're fine. And because Monero, the spending is already very cheap and quick and easy and everything anyway, I guess there's no stress where you guys are like, Fuck. We need to do something. We need to make a layer two right now. It's like, no. We don't really need to yet.
[00:31:00] Unknown:
It's something that always has to be thought about ahead of time. Mhmm. And so it's something that I think one of my first presentations in the Monero space was actually about layer twos on top of Monero. It was, like, three or four years ago at at MoneroCon. Because if you don't think about it until you actually need it, it's gonna take a very long time to actually influence something like that. I mean, even if you think about lightning has been around for, what, seven years in production now? Twenty eighteen ish. Yeah. Maybe it started somewhere. I think 2018 was the first time it was, like, actually used publicly. Mhmm. And then I think dev for it started, like, 2014, '20 '15. Mhmm. So we're talking, like, a decade, and I feel like even now, lightning is not fully there. Definitely. And a lot of people are still figuring out exactly how do we do the user experience, what are the drawbacks, how do we fix things. Like, there's still some critical problems in lightning that have yet to be fixed.
So, I mean, when you think about, like, how long does it take to go to layer two? It's not like we wake up one day, and we go, oh, Monero's getting too full in layer one. Let's just deploy an l two. It's it's not that simple, and it's even harder because Monero doesn't have any sort of scripting. So you can't just build out an interesting useful layer to relatively simply or copy one from Bitcoin or something like that because you can't do any scripting at all. So it will definitely be more complex. There's some ways where you can essentially do a very simple lightning with unidirectional channels, and that's actually doable today. And Okay. In my understanding, would be much simpler and better with FCMP because you can do transaction chaining after FCMP, which you can't do now in Monero. But it's definitely something that's, I would say, has very little research around it. There's a few papers from, like, four or five years ago that haven't been thoroughly explored, but it is something that I think will need to happen if Monero's usage grows, but we'll see. I'm not sure Monero will become more than a niche thing because the amount of people actually seeking freedom and who desire to transact is not that many, unfortunately, but let's hope that that changes. Let's hope that that changes. Well,
[00:33:02] Unknown:
you you have this pendulum, don't you? And sometimes if you get pushed too hard, we're talking about this off air, you get pushed too hard and you go, no. Fuck this. Done. And it feels like a lot of UK, Europe, a lot of other countries are pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing. Maybe that does spark something where people go, nah. Fuck this. And then they say, okay. Well, there's this thing Monero, and I can have some privacy, and I can use this how I want. And so as bad as it is out there in a lot of places, maybe it becomes less niche.
[00:33:34] Unknown:
Yeah. I think we've seen a lot of that over the last few years, like you mentioned. There is a lot of awakening happening. Mhmm. So, like, I wouldn't say that that won't happen. It's just not enough people right now to warrant, like, we need a layer one today. Yeah. But that can change very quickly. And, again, it needs to be something that's thought about Mhmm. Ahead of time. Thought about in advance. So next up, there's another thing we mentioned in the intro. There's another change that will happen in this upcoming upgrade from Monero alongside FCMP. It has an interesting acronym. It's called carrot. Don't ask me what carrot stands for because I do not remember off the top of my head, and it's a lot of big cryptographic words.
But, Garrett, it's a lot easier to remember and say. So Yeah. We're just gonna stick with carrot. The TLDR for it, it's actually really, really cool. We've been trying to find in the Monroe ecosystem a smart way to improve addresses, mainly to improve the keys that are available to wallets within the Monero ecosystem. When you think about Bitcoin, you have public keys and you have private keys. There's multiple types of public keys, but, generally, the public keys are something you can use in a watch only wallet. You can use them to generate addresses like in PTC pay. That's how you could do all of your hardware wallets. You give over the pub key to the software wallet so that it can track balances, generate addresses. That system works really well. It's very straightforward.
In Monero, we have something similar. We have, obviously, spend keys, but we also have what are called view keys. But the problem is the name view key is kind of a misnomer because view keys can only see incoming transactions. They can't see outgoing transactions. Mhmm. So if you're trying to track your balance with just a view key, it doesn't work at all because you'll never know Yeah. When you spent funds. If you're trying to sync a wallet with just a view key, also not gonna work. You need the private key essentially to be able to do any sort of a watch wallet in Monero, which pretty much invalidates the usefulness of a watch only wallet because your private keys are hot. It's been detrimental to the growth of different types of wallets in the Monero ecosystem and hardware wallets as well.
One thing that we've been trying to do is have better keys available. There's been a lot of different approaches. Long story short, Karat is what we settled on because one of the really cool things with Karat, nothing actually changes. Addresses continue to look and function the same way. Your wallet after the hard fork, even if they don't upgrade to support caret, will continue to function without any problems, without any changes. It's totally backwards compatible, which is really cool and rare in the the things that we upgrade in Monero. It has a lot of benefits that other addressing schemes that have been proposed don't have, and it still brings the improved keys.
It adds a lot of new keys. The short story is that now you can do much better actually useful view only wallets because we'll have a full view key that can actually show incoming and outgoing transactions without being able to spend. So this is gonna make hardware wallets much more useful. This is gonna make watch only wallets actually possible and useful. This will make things like BDC pay and other merchant platforms much more useful because you don't have to have the funds hot unless you actually want to. You'll be able to do a watch only wallet and get everything you need out of that. Mhmm. It's a really useful addition and, like I said, doesn't really have any downsides because if you don't want to use it or if your wallet doesn't upgrade, nothing breaks. You can just keep using current addresses. Mhmm. And there's no privacy downsides either because the addresses look exactly the same on chain and off chain. Nice. So it's a really cool upgrade. The other thing that's a part of that is that it will give forward secrecy to Monero addresses.
What that means is essentially the recipient protection, the one time key that goes on chain from the long string of characters that's your Monero address. Right now, a quantum computer could just collect all of that, see it on the blockchain, and then down the line, they could try and link off chain addresses with the one time keys that are on chain. There's not forward secrecy for those. But what Cara does is it actually adds forward secrecy for those. So even if an attacker is trying to get that and if quantum computers do become reality and are actually usable to attack Monero's privacy, you'll have forward secrecy on the recipient privacy side, on the address privacy side as well no matter what the quantum computer tries to do. So that's another really good advantage of Carrot that comes with no real downsides. It's a really cool upgrade. Mhmm. It'll make it a lot easier for the ecosystem within Monero to build cool things around Monero. So I'm I'm really excited for that. That's nice.
And then last is something that a lot of the Monero community have been begging for for a while. But, essentially, the Monero core team, which I'll explain a little bit more in a minute, they published a transparency report. All that means is that there's a a general fund that people can donate Monero to that gets used for various things to help run the Monero ecosystem. It's managed by a group of people called the Monero core team, and they publish a report that just details exactly how much has come in, how much they've spent, all of the view keys are there to be able to prove what has been spent and what hasn't. And they published that. The full details are in the link, which we don't need to get into, but I thought it'd be good to just quickly explain what the Monero core team is because it sounds a little scary that there's, like, a centralized group of people who have some sort of control.
But what this really is, it's just people who have been around the Monero community for a very long time and are trusted individuals, and they just help with things like, how do you actually pay for and maintain the servers and the domain name for getMonero.org? How do you actually Yeah. Handle paying for all the infrastructure you need for the CCS platform, which is how most funding within the community works? Like, how do you actually do the tasks that require a real person to interact with that entity? And so they've been doing this for, I think, since Monero's inception. I don't know exactly when the Monero core team started, but it's been a group of people. Some have come, some have gone. But, essentially, just trying to help do the things where you just have to have a real person or you have to have a real legal entity as well to be able to actually make things happen. So they don't have any control over Monero. They don't have any say in what code gets included or not included. They have no control over hard forks. They don't have anything like that. It's really just when you need some central entity to do something.
That's what they're there for. Are they generally NIMs, or are they, like, known names? All NIMs. Yeah. I mean, a couple of them have been public facing, like Fluffy Pony or Ricardo Spagni. He was on the Monero core team for a while. He's not and hasn't been for a long time, but Yeah. He was on the core team for a while. But all of them very intentionally are nims. None of them very intentionally know exactly who other people are. There's good separation between each because even though they don't have control over the Monero project or anything, they do have some control over important things like gitmonero.org.
And if gitmonero.org gets pwned and puts out bad binaries, like, that's obviously a a danger to people's funds or something else. So they do a good job of staying in the shadows, but we'll also now publishing another transparency report so people can see how the money is actually being spent. So it's it's a good a good in between.
[00:40:48] Unknown:
Do they run the Monero
[00:40:50] Unknown:
Twitter? We've had a couple of retweets from them. I was quite excited about that. I was like, oh, look at this. I actually have no clue who runs it. I did know who ran it, and I actually was one of the people who ran it for a couple years. It was a group of us. I won't name any other names for obvious reasons, but I don't know who's running it now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All of the people who I knew who used to run it don't anymore Okay. Or I haven't been able to reach. So I'm not sure. But they've been doing a really good job, and that handle has been pretty dormant for a long time. Even when I was helping to run it, we didn't do a whole lot with it. So I I feel like they've been doing a pretty good job recently. I know that everything always makes someone mad, so some people haven't liked some of the things that have been shared or whatever. But I think they've been doing a really good job and actually putting out a lot more Yeah. Content and retweets than we've seen in the Monero space for a long time, which Yeah. That has a big impact. I think a lot of people don't think about it, but there's a a lot of visibility there, and that account has something like five or 600,000 followers. Really good to get some more visibility of what's happening in the Monero ecosystem. So it's been been cool to see.
Well, I appreciated it, and it was nice to have almost like a little nod from whoever's running it. Like Oh, yeah. They liked what we were doing. So, yeah, appreciate that. Couple more quick software updates, and then I'll let you roll through the the copious amount of XMR chats. I think probably by, Monero monthly five or six, we're just gonna be spending, like, 95% of our time in XMR chats at this rate. It's a good problem to have. So I'll wrap up, and I'll let you dive into the chats. Two quick software updates. There hasn't been, again, a lot in the month of February. Manerio Manerio. I never know how to say that name. Esperanto is weird. I think it's Monaruho. Monaruho?
I think. It's hard to pronounce. Monaruho. They shipped a couple minor updates in the January and February around their integration of Exelix who are a an instant exchanger, like we talked about a little earlier in the show. So that's live. Cake wallet, we've been hard at work on a lot of different things. Monero has been less of a focus over the last month, but we did ship full passphrase support for Monero for both creating a wallet with a passphrase and restoring a wallet with a passphrase. So, no, that's something that a lot of the more hardcore users really like to do. I will give the warning I always give where if you lose your passphrase, you lose all your money.
So remember to back up your passphrase, not along with physically, but as well as the seed phrase or else you are going to lose your money. And a lot of people who don't understand how passphrases work make that mistake, think it's just a password, realize that you can't just say forgot password, and they lose their money. So make sure that you back that up properly if you do use passphrases.
[00:43:22] Unknown:
And if you're a new user, I would generally say stay away from passphrases. But if you know what you're doing, it's a great feature to have. Particularly like passphrases, but, yeah, make sure you back them up. Have multiple copies. Keep it separate, obviously, to your seed. Learn what you're doing before you do it, but I love passphrases. I think it's massive benefit.
[00:43:39] Unknown:
The nice thing with passphrases too is, like, you don't have to be as paranoid with storage as with the seed phrase. Yeah. Stamp your seed phrase on steel, but you can also just put the passphrase into a good password manager. You can use Proton pass or Bitwarden or KeePass or something. You can use that for the passphrase. You don't have to. Mhmm. Obviously, it's all your choice, but you can use a much simpler method to ensure that you don't lose the passphrase while you do the seed phrase and the way you would normally with a seed to make sure that that's not lost. And then if someone finds your passphrase, who cares? If someone finds your seed phrase Yeah. Who cares? It is a good system. It's just one that does introduce another single point of failure, so just have to be cautious. It's like physical multisig, isn't it? It is. It's a two of two multisig, which would be a very bad idea for a multisig wallet. But passphrases, specifically because of how they work and how they don't add complexity to the actual process of signing transactions, are an interesting idea. Yeah. Any other updates?
Last one. Got one little tiny one. Okay. It's not technically an update because it's not available yet, but I just wanted people since we won't have another episode out for another month or so after this one, there's another release of Monero, just the core software, like the Monero daemon, the wallet, that sort of thing. That should be coming out probably in the next week or two. And this one has some very, very important bug fixes and vulnerability fixes. Nothing at the level of, like, stolen funds or a flaw in the cryptography. Nothing like that, but something especially for those who run a Monero node, you'll wanna update as soon as possible. So that should be coming out very soon. I've already been running and testing the new release even though it's not released yet, and it's an important one along with some other just good quality of life fixes. So if that does come out, it may even come out around the time that this episode releases. Definitely make sure to update if you're using start nine or whatever platforms have Monero. If you're running Monero node via Docker, go ahead and update as soon as possible. That's all I got. Excellent. XMR chat boosts,
[00:45:31] Unknown:
wild child with 0.14 XMR. For my questions via the contact form on the website well, I'm sorry, wild child. We will not be able to answer those until next month. Mister Crown has set up a separate email from some Dutch server. I can't access it, and it's gonna have to wait until the next one. But I'm sure they're good questions, and I promise you, we will answer them on the next time around. Expatriotic with one XMR. You big baller, expatriotic. Wow. Okay. Big time. Took me a while to find the dollar amount to make one XMR. Glad to be here.
L n is for pussies. With the exception of goats, robots, and Greek gods, Zeus is based for holding down the privacy banner and standing strong during the samurai wallet indictment, unlike Phoenix.
[00:46:29] Unknown:
He's not pulling his punches.
[00:46:31] Unknown:
No. I love it. Too right. My Nimbox, 0.447.
[00:46:38] Unknown:
Thanks for your work. For those who don't know, my Nimbox is a really cool service that accepts Monero. They've got hosting services, email, really good people run it as well. So it's a good one to check out if you've got Monero and you want something to spend it on. I'm pretty sure they're in the TSB group as well. I'm sure I've seen them in there. Yeah. I have to check that out. So they do all types of hosting, basically, and you can pay Yeah. In Monero and Bitcoin. Okay.
[00:47:02] Unknown:
I wonder if thank you, my Nimbox. I wonder if there's any my Nimbox services that we can use for Uncoverable Misfits. I shall look into that. And you can let me know as well if there's anything that I'm missing, and maybe we can, support you like you're supporting us. We shall do that. Fat pie with 00043 q and a sounds like Devo. Do you know who Devo is? I'm I'm Googling, but I'm scared. Devo.
[00:47:28] Unknown:
I'm going in blind. Yeah. What's coming up? MC Devo, a rapper, perhaps, from The UK, I think. MC Devo. And you don't know him? Okay. No. Is it not Devlin? No. Devo. He looks like a he looks like a rapper. From London. Perhaps.
[00:47:45] Unknown:
Some scummy definitely Northerner probably. Okay. I'll check it out after this. I'll go and have a listen. Expatriotic with 0.148 XMR. He sent a long note here. Maths time. Lazarus hack, $1,500,000,000 or 15,000 Bitcoin. Whirlpool's unspent capacity was greater than 10,000 Bitcoin before the DOJ fuckery. L n's capacity is 5,000 Bitcoin. L n is only 0.002 of Bitcoin's total supply. Combined, that's just barely 15,000 Bitcoins, but with Whirlpool defunct, closer to 5,000. Layer one, that's some sort of, like, code stuff. Layer one is not equal to layer two. Yeah. I agree.
Layer one privacy is important. Coin joins can be attacked at the developer level. LN can be attacked at the network level, similar to how Tor Network has snooping exit nodes. TLDR, Lazarus should move their ETH to Bitcoin and then to XMR or directly if they can find the liquidity. Should we walk aim that a little bit? Or would you do it if you were them?
[00:49:07] Unknown:
Yeah. It's an interesting one, and it's one that I tweeted about a few days ago because the logic of it is totally sound. And I would agree. Like, it makes sense that they would move to Monero from purely a privacy perspective. But you have to also realize that they don't operate on the same playing field as we do. I mean, this is a a nation state attacker. This is a North Korean government sanctioned attack by a group that are absolutely brilliant and are one of the primary income sources for an entire country. So they have a very different threat model than the average thief. If Joe Schmo figured out a way to hack Bybit for 1,400,000,000.0, he would probably have much more incentive to move to Monero and probably not cash out to Fiat because that would be too dangerous.
But Lazarus has ways that they can move cryptocurrencies that are not private, like Bitcoin, into Fiat slowly through exchanges that are willing to serve them. Even though they are a sanctioned entity, there's gonna be exchanges throughout the world that are willing to take that risk and serve these users. What they actually have far more than a need for on chain privacy is a need for fast liquidity. They're in a race against time trying to prevent as much as possible these funds from being frozen. If they're moving into something like a stable coin or moving to an exchange, they're really in a race, and they need liquidity. I mean, $1,400,000,000 is just disgusting amount of money that was stolen and is, like, a third of Monero's market cap. So moving that into Monero and then actually selling that for Fiat is just basically impossible. The lower liquidity in Monero is probably the biggest thing that will prevent them from using it heavily. I have seen that they've used it a little bit through some instant exchangers, but I doubt it will be a primary tool. And at most, it'll be something where they try to hop through Monero to gain some privacy even though that's usually very ineffective.
So we'll definitely have to see, but I think they they really need the speed and liquidity of Bitcoin rather than the on chain privacy of Monero.
[00:51:09] Unknown:
Would they not then if there's not the liquidity for Monero and Monero's already not on most exchanges, that presumably will have some effect on the price of Monero. Would they not be able to, like, double dip here effectively by playing some games because they're such whales? I was thinking, could they do something and play around and actually make some money that way because they'd get the privacy, but also they'd push the price up quite easily.
[00:51:37] Unknown:
They could certainly try. It would be interesting to see if they wanted to do that, but I don't know if there's any way for them to go from Monero to Fiat Mhmm. Easily. So they would still have to go back to Bitcoin again, and they would take on the exchange risk. Maybe the price pumps. Maybe it dumps on news that Lazarus is using Monero. It's hard to predict exactly, but that would definitely be a a high risk, high reward move if they wanted to try it. And it's possible. We'll have to see what they do. And the interesting thing here is if they use Monero, we'll know about it because they're getting into Monero through instant exchangers or centralized services from Bitcoin or Ethereum. So it's Yeah. The these funds are going to be surveilled at every step, and we'll know if they're using Monero heavily. So far, they're not, and I think it's mainly due to liquidity constraints.
But Mhmm. We'll see. Interesting one to watch.
[00:52:25] Unknown:
There's gonna be so many eyes on it. Whatever they do on chain is gonna be tracked for Bitcoin. I don't know what the score is with ETH because there was some pretty decent mixing services or things on ETH was my understanding.
[00:52:39] Unknown:
There's still some ways to gain privacy on Ethereum. And, I mean, even Tornado Cash is still accessible and usable by someone who knows how to use Ethereum and actually would run their own node or something, which Lazarus one hundred percent could do. So they could gain privacy there, and I think the fact that they're not Yeah. Continues to show that they primarily just want speed and liquidity. They're gonna be surveilled. You can't move $1,400,000,000 even through Monero and it not be seen because at some point, you're moving into some other asset that is visible. Mhmm. It's gonna be noticed. It's gonna take a while, but they need that liquidity, I think, primarily.
[00:53:16] Unknown:
Interesting case. There's always some exchange hack and something going on, isn't there? But, like, Jesus Christ. It's just so much money. It's just so much.
[00:53:28] Unknown:
It's absolutely insane. I mean, the biggest hack ever of anything. It's wild to think about.
[00:53:33] Unknown:
When we say, oh, we know it's this hacker group from North Korea, is that because they stand there and go, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Like, they tell you, or is it people are just guessing? Because they're like, oh, they're very sophisticated? Like, how do people know? From what I've read so far, primarily the reason that people think it was North Korea is that a lot of the behavior
[00:53:53] Unknown:
just mimics what we would see with Lazarus. The complexity of the attack is much more than, like, Joe Schmo hacker. It looks much more like a nation state actually doing it. Mhmm. They haven't claimed Okay. Responsibility for the attack, and that's not something that Lazarus does as far as I understand it. I don't think I've ever seen them actually claim responsibility publicly, but Okay. It's just that the behavior, the footprint, how they've actually done things resembles all of the the hacks that have happened before in Lazarus. Plus, we already know that Lazarus heavily focuses on the Ethereum ecosystem because of its complexity, and this is another example of that.
[00:54:26] Unknown:
Okay. Schrodinger with 0.0213 XMR. I could have listened endlessly to your conversation with sir Spencer just to what the fuck? This isn't supposed to be in here, Jordan. I could have listened to your listened endlessly to your conversation with Spencer. Just two dudes talking. Great. And he's a really calm and good sounding way to speak. I don't know how to describe it. It was a pleasure. Well, thank you, Schrodinger. I'm very happy that you enjoyed it. That's why it snuck through. Schrodinger and others, if you are doing an XMR boost, please just put the show above. So put, like, confab or whatever show you're listening to just so we know and Jordan doesn't fuck up because he is Canadian.
Cypherpunk Parrish Hilton again. 00218 A broadcasted transaction. Does checking, maybe visible, clear net, in Bitcoin Core's start nine service protects my IP? Does having a VPN on the router help? Do you ever recommend running a node in a VPS? Aren't storage this is a lot of questions. Aren't storage slash bandwidth limits too stringent?
[00:55:51] Unknown:
He's going for maximum bang for his buck there. Just sneak in seven questions into into one XMR chat. Yeah. That's bold.
[00:56:00] Unknown:
Well, we're trying to unpack it. So dot dot dot dot dot, a broadcasted transaction question mark. Does checking visible clear net in Bitcoin calls start line service protect my IP? My understanding is everything is done over tour with start lines, isn't it? Perhaps
[00:56:17] Unknown:
only the way that you reach Bitcoin d is done over Tor. So probably what disable clear net is is it That's correct. Bitcoin d to only use Tor also for the peer to peer connections, I would assume. I don't know that for sure. I've never actually used it, but that would be my assumption. Just a Yeah. Educated guess, perhaps.
[00:56:36] Unknown:
Yeah. And then he talks about router level VPN. The way I've set mine up and many other people that I know have done is everything to be set to tool only and then also to have a router level VPN. A lot of us are running these Flint two routers. There's a Flint two group on Signal as well for anyone who wants some help with it, but you can buy them on Amazon. They're not too expensive, pretty simple to use. You can get MOLVAD or iVPN or whatever you're running and just chuck it on there, and then you can run a device level VPN on top of that. You're good for anything really is my understanding.
[00:57:15] Unknown:
A router level VPN is very different here because it protects all of your traffic and has a lot of downsides as well. You could certainly do it, but I think a lot more beneficial would be running a node in a VPS if you can afford it. The problem is, especially in Bitcoin, the storage is expensive because you're gonna need at least a terabyte. And if you're wanting to run fulcrum or something else alongside it, I think we're getting close to maybe if even surpassed one terabyte at this point. So that would definitely be expensive. You could also do VPN on just that individual host in your network, which would be a lot simpler. Like, router level VPN sounds fantastic until you actually do it, and you realize how painful it is to do a lot of things on your home network as a result. I guess it depends on your family. But Really? I don't have any problems.
Like, streaming services, a lot of stuff that my wife does. Oh, no. But I separate it. Okay. You're not doing every host?
[00:58:12] Unknown:
No. No. So what I do is I I have normal ISP and their box and everything. Then I have that going to a second router, and that router just does everything Bitcoin and everything for, like, me and my office and everything like that. And then the rest of the home goes onto a guest network, which doesn't have the rest level VPN. It's just like normal shit, like, separate.
[00:58:36] Unknown:
And I say I haven't had any problems, which is complete bullshit. Like, a month ago, my thing completely stopped working, and I spent, like, a whole day fucking around with it and reflashing firmware and doing all this stuff, and it was an absolute pain in the ass. But other than that, it's worked flawlessly. It's been pretty good. Yeah. I need to circle back to it, honestly. I have two VPN on all the hosts that matter, but it would be simpler in some ways to do router level. But it does take a long time to get it actually set up properly and everything separated out. So it's work, but it is worth it for a lot of things. I wouldn't do it just for a Bitcoin core node. Yeah. Rather, you could just do it on the one host, but for lots of other reasons, it's a good thing to chase. Yeah. Makes sense. For hosting,
[00:59:16] Unknown:
the cost of it, we we have to host some stuff for Uncouple of Misfits and just hosting, like, BTCPay, a couple of little bits and pieces. It's like $50 a month. It's a lot of money. And there may be cheaper services out there than what we're using, maybe. I don't know if it's, like, the best price point, but I would think, you know, somewhere between 30 to $50 a month is roughly where you're gonna end up being. And, you know, it's a lot of money when you compare that to, like, running your own hardware that you can get for a couple of hundred dollars. Like you can run for years and not have issues. I think something that people also a lot of times don't think about is that when you're running your own node, there is very little reason to
[00:59:59] Unknown:
be afraid of clear net. There are some reasons for very specific threat models. But if you're running your own node, you don't care that you reveal your own IP address to your own node when you're syncing your wallet or something like that. That's not a concern at all for you. Potentially, the only thing that you're afraid of then is that other Bitcoin nodes know about your node and reveal your home IP address, which there are certainly reasons why you don't want that, and especially the way that Bitcoin does transaction propagation.
It can reveal to the Bitcoin network to a skilled attacker, but it can still reveal that this IP address sent this transaction. But that's still fine in a lot of threat models. So I would just think through it for anyone listening. Make sure do you actually have a a legitimate need to run everything tour only or to run everything in a VPS? Or if you're in a country that's pretty free and you don't have too many issues, you might be fine just running in Clearnet and using it Mhmm. And not worrying too much.
[01:00:57] Unknown:
You have the initial block download as well, which for me, that was the reason I actually got my router, my separate router was I was setting up the start nine, and I was like, I'm just about to download the chain because I can't use a device level VPN at this point because Yeah. It's do you know what I mean? Like, I'm I'm flashing a new OS, and it takes you through the process. There's no point in which I could add a VPN onto there, like my normal mobile one. So I was like, well, okay. I have to go a step further here if I don't want my ISP to know that I'm downloading Bitcoin, and I live in a pretty fucking terrible country. Like, you can get arrested for a meme. So my thinking was how long until you get a knock on your door? Like, hang on a minute. You're running this freedom money stuff. Right? You go to prison then. So,
[01:01:47] Unknown:
so that was my thinking, but it it does depend where you are a little bit. And that's a much more legitimate reason. And there are countries where that already could be illegal or could very quickly become illegal. So there there are definitely reasons. I just would I feel like sometimes there's this bent of we have to do everything the hard way no matter what, when sometimes that's not applicable to your threat model. But just something to think through, make sure that you actually need the privacy and are actually willing to deal with the user experience hit to doing something tour only.
And also know that there are downsides to that. Like, it's much easier for your node to be civil attacked and lied to about the state of the network when you're using Tor only. There are always pros and cons. Always pros and cons. So make sure that you actually need it before you just jump to doing the more extreme setup. Yeah. Good point.
[01:02:32] Unknown:
Cypherpunk Paris Hilton again. Great podcast. May I recommend you put a giant button that says donate on the Ungovernable Misfits, I guess, website? Also, could you please explain if Bitcoin Core has something like Monero's Dandelion? Wasn't Dandelion originally on Bitcoin or proposal for Bitcoin?
[01:02:55] Unknown:
It was proposed, but never deployed for Bitcoin. Yep.
[01:02:58] Unknown:
Never done. Okay. Alright. If not, how does one avoid linking their IP address with ...dot? We don't
[01:03:07] Unknown:
have the rest. I figured it out. It's connected to the one above. It's just backwards. The puzzle.
[01:03:16] Unknown:
It's just backwards. There we go. So okay. So we've answered that the second bit there and then the donate button. Get on it, Crown. Let's do it. Let's get a donate button. Why not? I think we have it somewhere, like, down at the bottom hidden away, but I'm sure we could have something bigger on there. We're also working on a way to do splits and things with the XMR chats. And for anyone who's boosting sending through the podcasting two point o stuff, we've got some more splits in there as well, including the free samurai split. So everything's gonna go their way. Jordan's done some trickery on the back end and made that possible.
Christ is king with 0.0886 XMR. Thanks for this awesome podcast. Samurai refugee here. Now Monero Schill. Keep up the good work. Question to both hosts, how am I supposed to pronounce aluminium aluminum? How would you say it? He gotcha.
[01:04:18] Unknown:
It's aluminum. Simpler. Straightforward.
[01:04:22] Unknown:
Aluminum.
[01:04:24] Unknown:
Oh, god. We we save our time. We're not wasting on extra vowels. Oh, damn. Aluminum. Just get it out there. Aluminum.
[01:04:32] Unknown:
Oh, It's horrible. It makes me feel physically sick when I hear Americans say things like that. I just think, really? Really?
[01:04:40] Unknown:
Think how much more Americans have created and invented and think about how much is that probably down to just the time savings. Not saying aluminum.
[01:04:50] Unknown:
The time savings. But, also, let's be real. Firstly, I don't care about this country at all, so I'm not gonna try and big it up. We've done fuck all of yous for a long, long time. But we did invent a lot of stuff. You did. You did. Like, pretty much every sport, most things.
[01:05:05] Unknown:
The wrong football, though.
[01:05:10] Unknown:
I don't know. I don't really care about either football, but we did some good stuff, but we are now a a failed state. We are now, an absolute disgrace. So I'll let you have that. Yeah. Also, a samurai refugee. I think a lot of people who are listening to this episode and starting to use Monero, who've been listening to Ungovernal for a while, are in the same boat. Very happy that we have Monero to fall back. Yeah. It's it's one of those times where it's it's nice to have, and I'm glad that Monero,
[01:05:37] Unknown:
as a community, has been building for adversarial environments from day one. Because if no one had, I don't know what we would have done, honestly.
[01:05:44] Unknown:
You'd be fucked. Honestly, it's like the only good tool out there was Whirlpool, in my opinion. Like, other people have different opinions, but in my opinion, it's the only good one for on chain Bitcoin. It was great. Now it's gone for now at least. And everyone who cared about privacy and then who understood this stuff was, like, fucked. You have a load of people going, oh, just use lightning. It's like, shut up. You don't know what you're talking about. So we're very lucky to have this, and sort of a mix of everything is probably the way forward. But, yeah, very, very lucky. Expatriotic again.
0396 Ask XMR chat to let us put in XMR amounts rather than Fiat paid with monero.com wallet. Please change the name to not be a URL.
[01:06:33] Unknown:
The wallet. Yeah. A means. Oh, is this cool? It's it's the worst. Don't worry. We we we agree. It's gonna change. It's gonna change.
[01:06:42] Unknown:
Okay. That's taken on board, Expatriotic. I did mention to XMR chat the other day, I think in another podcast, that you would like to be able to put XMR amounts, not dollar amounts. So I'm sure they'll be working on that for you soon. Even though John thinks you're an absolute retard for asking it, show my blog, expatriotic.me, trying to do shit and get shit done. No more fiat work. Jordan reads this on t bit b p m m and Monero monthly. So
[01:07:15] Unknown:
He got three for the price of one. Then it'll work like that. You just say read this on everything, and you just get everything? Hacks.
[01:07:23] Unknown:
Well, look at this. He's done zero point three nine six XMR. He also did a full XMR, and then he also did another zero point one four eight XMR. That's true. So he's done, like, two XMR in total. So he can kind of do what he wants. I'll let him get away with that. And he's also helping Uncoverable Misfits do a load of material for meetups and doing some guides and all sorts of things in the background, which we've talked about doing for a long time and life and editing and recording and everything else that we do got in the way, and he stepped up and absolutely hammering it out. We'll do what he asks. Yeah. I've been loving his blog too.
Yeah. Yeah. It's great. So xpatriotic.me. Crypto world, 0 point 0 0 1 1 XMR. Nice work. Thank you. Shadrach, zero point zero four seven XMR. Also says thank you. Schrodinger, zero point zero one seven XMR. What the heck is XMR versus Beast question mark question mark question mark implemented in the GooPacks mining bundle under the tab X XVB. I got you. I got you. I have no fucking idea what you're talking about. It's confusing as hell. The Goopax,
[01:08:44] Unknown:
especially the forks, have gotten there just is too much stuff in there. But if you're using Goopax, double x, triple x, whatever the latest variant is, they have implemented this thing called XMRV beast raffle. Basically, there was a small Monero mining pool that when p two pool launched as part of it and wanting to support the network, they switched their pool to essentially be a proxy for p two pool so that any miner could mine on their pool, and then Right. All of their work would actually contribute to mining on p two pool. And as part of that process, they started a raffle where Okay. If you prove that you're actually mining via p two pool and that it's just like a simple web form where you put in the the address you're mining to, which is public anyways when you use p two pool, then it will just check to see if you have shares in p two pool. They'll just award hash rate to you for a certain amount of time randomly. It's a raffle, so you may never get it. You may get it sometimes, And they've kept that going Okay. Ever since then. So all you have to do is register, and then you can enter the, like, registration code or whatever. And by register, I'm not, like, not ID or anything. Like I said, it's just a public address that's on the b two pool chain anyways with them, and then you get this code. You can put that into the the goopax GUI, and it just enters you into the raffle sometimes. I don't remember exactly how it works now. I think it's changed a little bit, and, like, sometimes you have to mine to them to be eligible or something. I think it's changed a little bit since I last looked into it, but that's the rough idea is that you can basically enter into a raffle to get, quote, unquote, free hash rate for a certain period of time, which can earn you some extra.
[01:10:16] Unknown:
Right. Onto the boosts section. So this is everything coming in on Lightning and podcasting two point o. User 33152226 with 6666 I know next to nothing about Monero, so this series is very interesting. Keep it up. Chad Farrow with 2,222. Thanks for the shout out, gents. There has been some talk about adding Monero to podcasting two point o, but for now, I'm just having fun learning how it works. Hashtag value for value. The man, the myth, the legend. Chad Farrow. What a legend. Fomochronic. One thousand and one sats. No message.
Rog at SC Bitcoin UK. What's SC Bitcoin? I always forget. Think it's a meetup. Sounds great, but I've downloaded k wallet, and I can't see how to get going on it. Support guides gives 404 not found. How to get started? Question mark.
[01:11:32] Unknown:
Any ideas there, mate? Yeah. So I think probably what happened is if you had gone on the website and tried to go to the guides from there, the link was broken because we had just migrated all of our docs to a new site and changed the URL. We fixed that redirect, but for those who want to go directly to the new doc site, which now is linked on our websites, it's just docs.cakewallet.com, d 0 c s Cake wallet Com. And that'll have all the guides for how to do everything from the most beginner level things to the more advanced things, like using Cake Wallet via tour with or bot, those sorts of things. So it'll all be there. But if you have questions, jump onto our forum as well, which is just forum.kquality.com.
You can get help there. We have in app support. We're always happy to help with questions around actually using cake. It doesn't have to be some emergency to be worthy of support or just ask on Twitter or somewhere, and we'll see it. We'll respond as we can.
[01:12:25] Unknown:
Nice. And, Rog, you can just reach out to me as well. I'm a retard. I've managed to get it working. So any problems that there can be, I'm sure I've sort of stumbled across them at some point. So I'm also happy to help. Pies with 420, v for v. Biz, mushroom, strong-arm. TYM, 350 sats, no message. Kaz Piland, One hundred sats. Love to hear more about p two p mining of Monero, running nodes, etcetera, on the brink of setting up a p two p thingy versus mining to Monero
[01:13:03] Unknown:
0 c I a n? Yeah. Monero dot ocean is the real euro. It's just typoed.
[01:13:08] Unknown:
I am mining for some heat. Not so much profits. Thanks for the show. Thank you. Paul Allen with a hundred sats, and also thank you to Poe Janmies, the unpronounceable cunt, for streaming 15,400 sats. And thank you to Shadowy Superbadger for streaming 1,820
[01:13:29] Unknown:
sats. Getting a lot of love there, mate. That's just freaking awesome to see. It's also really interesting that we are getting far more XMR chats than boost even though boosting is technically easier because it's in a lot of the v to v apps. So, yeah, just really cool to see. So yet another use case where it's awesome to see people using freedom money and not being stuck on one thing, but using what works best. And it's also just like Xmart chats, a fantastic way to just play around with Monero too. Like, if you've never used it, what better way to do it than send some some Monero to y'all doing fantastic work at Uncomfortable Misfits. Get to ask a question, yell at somebody, throw some obscenities out there, make sure that my grandma can listen to this podcast. You know? It's a good place for that.
[01:14:14] Unknown:
Yeah. Sorry, grandma. Someone messaged me and John the other day sending a boost saying, love the show, but I like to listen to it in the car. And I download it and then edit out all the profanity so I can listen to it with my daughter. He said there's about five minutes left.
[01:14:31] Unknown:
Oh my god. That sounds about right. Yep.
[01:14:37] Unknown:
I'm sorry, but not sorry. There's lots of other podcasts out there that will the case is your non swearing needs, but they will also show you a load of nonsense products and steal from you. So just bear that in mind. You either have the rudeness upfront or on the back end. Well, I think we covered everything there. Another tight rip. I'm learning as we go as per usual. So thanks for everything that you've put into these show notes and everything you guys are doing at Cake. It really is awesome to see people jumping on and using the tools. Anything I missed before we jump off?
[01:15:10] Unknown:
No. I think that's it. No. Thank you, Max. It's awesome to see seeing government will misfits keep growing, see all the content y'all are putting out. I do not understand how you do it as someone who has done content creation on my own. Y'all are just kicking ass. So no. Absolutely loving it. Glad to be a part of it. And, hopefully, it seems like people are are learning from and, enjoying the Monero monthly as well. So we'll keep it up. Keep asking questions. Keep dropping extra more chats. Can't wait for the next one.
[01:15:35] Unknown:
Awesome. Catch you on the next one, mate.
[01:15:38] Unknown:
If you have any questions, please reach out and ask probably Seth, but you can try and ask me as well. And we'll catch you on the next episode a month from now. Before you go, I wanna say thank you for all the support from all the Ungovernable Misfits and the Ungovernable Misfits crew. Also, a big thank you to Cake Wallet and Foundation, not only for supporting this show and everything that Ungovernal Misfits do, but also for the general freedom and open source movement. We hinted to it in this episode, but Foundation have released a new device. I'm very excited about this. If you haven't already listened to my episode, go back and have a listen.
You can check them out at foundation.xyz. You can use my code, Ungovernable, for a discount. I think just for the passport, not for the Passport Prime as it stands. But either way, give it a go. It's just Ungovernable, or you can click the link in the show notes, and it will take you to our own cool page that Mr. Crown's made all beautiful. Check that out and also a big thank you to Cake Wallet which will be having its own application on the Passport Prime. So obviously Seth has been working hard in the background there and the rest of the team to work with Foundation. It's very exciting because it's gonna mean people can have cold storage for their Monero along with lots of other cool features, I'm sure.
If you haven't already tried k Wallet, give it a go. You can use this on Mac, Linux, Windows, iPhone, and Android. I've been using it now for probably about six months, and I really like it. It's got some great Bitcoin features, great Monero features. You can link this to your own node on both. It's got swap services, payment services, all sorts of things in there that help people who actually use Bitcoin and Monero. And if you have any questions while using it, you can just send in to our own little tech support here, and me and Seth will go through it in the next episode. Thanks for listening, and stay ungovernable.
The business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every last seconds, eleven seconds.
[00:00:07] Unknown:
I am investigator investigator investigator. And I work supporting Our agenda for today, we're gonna start with just the basics of Monero. What it is, what it is, how it works, how it works. Monero is considered a privacy token.
[00:00:32] Unknown:
The world's most private
[00:00:34] Unknown:
privacy. Which means that in high, virtually all transaction details are exchanged. The world's most private
[00:00:41] Unknown:
privacy. Monero monthly episode three. Still not canceled. Nice to hear from you again, mate. We're not going anywhere.
[00:01:21] Unknown:
Can't cancel us.
[00:01:24] Unknown:
Uncancelable, uncensorable Monero monthly. Uh-huh. It's fitting. It's fitting. So what have we got on this episode? I know we're gonna get into p two p exchanges. We've got an absolute boatload of XMR chats. Anything else?
[00:01:40] Unknown:
Some updates in the space, a few software updates. It was a quieter month for the Monero ecosystem as I feel like most of the dev time has been going into getting ready for this upcoming protocol improvement slash hard fork. It's been relatively quiet, but there's definitely a few good items to go through here. So we'll keep it short and sweet.
[00:01:57] Unknown:
This big update is this ring signature
[00:02:00] Unknown:
thing that you were explaining to me before Cara or something it was called. Is that right? Yeah. So there's two pieces to it. If you want, we can jump into that, or we can do it later. Whatever you feel like. But the two main things that are coming in this upgrade will be full chain membership proofs, which replace ring signatures, and then caret, which is a new addressing scheme that's backwards compatible that adds some really nice features on top of it. But the main one for privacy is Give us the ring signature. Yeah. The FCMP or full chain membership proofs. Just as a recap for me and anyone listening, that was basically
[00:02:31] Unknown:
rather than being is it six or 12? 16. One of 16. Mhmm. This would now be of any. Yeah. One of, like, a hundred million or something right now. Okay. So slightly, slightly better anonymity set. A huge, huge, huge improvement. So that's the basic rundown. You did go into a lot of detail. It was either on the first one or the second one. So any new listeners go back and have a listen to that for a full description.
[00:02:58] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. And one of the updates that we'll get into has to do with ring signatures, and I'll explain a little bit more on FCMP and how it resolves that as well. So I'll do a little TLDR later as well, but we definitely won't get in too in-depth like we did on the episode a few months ago. Okay. Let's go and jump in. So for this one, I thought that diving a little bit more into peer to peer exchanges in Monero would be valuable. Because one of the hardest things when it comes to Monero is how do you actually get it? One of the things that governments have realized very quickly about Monero and something that Monero's led the way in, if you wanna take that as a positive, is that governments have done everything they can to shut down exchange access to Monero.
Before there was any operation choke point two point o, before any of The US exchanges were getting debanked, Monero was already experiencing all of the same approaches. To me, it was kind of the testing grounds for operation choke point two point o, where, essentially, what was happening was exchanges would either have Monero or want to list Monero, and they would be told while being sworn to secrecy that if they listed Monero or didn't delist Monero, they would lose their access to banking services. We don't have solid proof of this explicitly for Monero, but all of the proof run operation choke point two point o lines up perfectly with with thought has been going on with Monero for so long. So it's not on many exchanges, many centralized exchanges around the world. Kraken is one of the very few left, and they're the only one in The US right now. I think there might be two or three other small exchanges internationally, but, generally, it's much more difficult to get Monero than it is to get something like Bitcoin. So I think it's one of those things where, like, you need to understand what you're getting into when you first dive into Monero, especially if you're used to, like, open strike app, click buy 500,000 sets or whatever. It's gonna be a very different experience, but you're also gonna have all of the benefits that come with peer to peer exchanges as well.
[00:04:54] Unknown:
It's funny. It's like the opposite of when I'd first got involved in Bitcoin and other crypto stuff. I remember there being a big thing about listings. It's like, oh, Coinbase is gonna list this coin. Yeah. And then, you know, that would mean that the price was gonna go crazy because it's like, oh, more people can get a hold of it now. And then Monero is the absolute opposite since I've been paying more attention and why I've put in the intro, the delistings.
[00:05:18] Unknown:
Monero, another delisting, another delisting. It seems to be constant. And then rather than people, like, shitting themselves, what I find quite funny is the Monero community that I see is, good. Get it out of their fucking hands. Make this actually ungovernable money. I definitely agree with that sentiment in some ways, but I think that it's a little bit lacking in nuance. Because one of the big downsides to delisting of an arrow on centralized exchanges is that there's just a lot less visibility, and there's a lot less easy access for people. And while I 100% think that people should only be using exchanges that don't collect their personal information, that don't do a full KYC. It does make it far easier for people to get access to something. And when that something is Monero, which provides very strong financial privacy as soon as they withdraw, it is, I think, overall, a net negative to have Monero listed on less exchanges.
But there is a huge positive, which is that the Monero ecosystem and lots of related platforms like BISK have been pushed much harder, much faster than they would have to build out good peer to peer and or decentralized options for buying and selling Monero because there was an actual need. Like, when you talk about Bitcoin, I don't wanna say there's not a need, but there's a very, very low user base that has a need for using something like computer peer exchange. Because you can I mean, there's an exchange in every country, essentially, that you can use if you're willing to give up your KYC and access Bitcoin? Which is most people. Yeah. With 99, I don't know, 5% of people, probably higher than that. So there's not as much pressure as there is in Monero where it's there isn't an exchange in most countries that people can use to buy Monero. So the only way to get it is peer to peer. So if we're not working as a community to build out these tools or to increase the liquidity in these tools, then people just aren't going to be able to access Monero, which is, I think, really the government and regulator in the game for stopping Monero. Because on a technical level, it's practically impossible to stop. On a social level,
[00:07:16] Unknown:
this is really the low hanging fruit. Mhmm. I think you're right. It's overall not so great. But at the same time, I remember there was speech that Andres on Cinnapolis did about if there's a cryptocurrency that's a gecko and governments don't like it and they stamp on that gecko or attempt to stamp on that gecko, eventually, it will evolve into a Komodo dragon and bite their leg off. And that is what I'm getting the vibes from here is, like, well, if you're forced to adapt, you've got no other choices, adapt or die, and that's what's happening. So it just pushes it further to that fuck you money side, which is kind of exciting. For sure. And, I mean, that's what we've really seen. Like, when we look at the different types of peer to peer exchanges,
[00:07:57] Unknown:
it started out in the Monero ecosystem as only these centralized website hosted tools like LocalBitcoins. Local Monero was the LocalBitcoins equivalent in the the Monero space, which are great. They're still peer to peer. They're still connecting you with other individuals and not requiring, like, a central database of KYC, but they are relatively easy to shut down. And, unfortunately, we saw that happen middle of last year where local Monero seemingly was forced to shut down. They've never made any public statement about why they suddenly closed when they seem to be doing very well and gaining popularity, but I think we can all probably guess what happened there. That caused a a trickle effect in pushing even more pressure onto the decentralized approaches. And when you look at the different decentralized or peer to peer exchange options in Monero, there's basically three types with one of them not actually existing yet, but coming really soon. One of those is mediated trades or mediated swaps. This is the bisque model for anybody who's ever used bisque, RoboSats, the same kind of model where you have a central entity who acts as the mediator in case one party doesn't follow through on their trade, and that makes sure that if somebody scams someone else or lies or just makes a mistake, there's a way to be able to to get funds to the party you're supposed to have them.
And those are generally gonna be the best tool for most people because it is helpful to have a mediator, assuming you can trust the mediator, and it can greatly simplify the actual process of trading crypto. The main examples of those, like, I already mentioned, Bisk and Robosats, which which you may not think of when you think of Monero, but both actually are fantastic platforms for buying and selling Monero with Bitcoin. And you'll notice the theme with all of these exchanges that I'll talk about except one is that almost none of them are fiat to Monero exchanges, even peer to peer. All of them except for Havano or RitoSwap, which is an implementation of Havano. They're just crypto to Monero.
For those listening, I would assume that everyone here has crypto. I think that would probably be a reasonable fit. So it's not a big deal, but when thinking about it, that's definitely an important thing to keep in mind. If you already have Bitcoin, it can be quite easy to get Monero, but Bisk and Robosats are both great platforms with, honestly, Robosats, I think, being my favorite now. And it's the main thing I've used to do Bitcoin to Monero trades and vice versa recently. Obviously, the advantages of Lightning are really nice. Phoenix Wallet is self custodial, works really nicely with Robosats. The trades are fast, and I've had really good success with the traders. And it's a really good platform for that. I think a lot of people don't think about Robosats when they think Monero, but it's actually one of the best setups for trading Monero Mhmm. That I've seen and works really well. With Bisk being good for larger amounts, but quite expensive on chain and just quite slow because you have to deal with waiting for confirmations and how the multisigs work. And there's a lot of traceability concerns as well, like we mentioned in the last episode of Yeah. Your trades actually being linked together on chain. So it's generally, I think, to be avoided and use RoboSats instead. But if you need to do larger amounts where, obviously, lightning's not a deal, this can be really good for that as well. And we've seen over the course of the last few years, this be, like, 80% Monero volume with only a little bit Big. Fiat to Bitcoin. I don't know what it is recently. I haven't checked the stats in probably six to twelve months, but for quite a while there, the vast majority of the volume on this was Monero. And what's the trade off, you know, with something like Robosats
[00:11:24] Unknown:
compared to just doing something within k wallet or using trucker door, like one of these swap services? Yeah. Is it fees? Is it privacy? Is it ease of use? Where do these things sort of line up? I mean, I would say the main drawback
[00:11:42] Unknown:
to this approach, and I would say, like, mediated trading platforms are generally the best user experience of the decentralized or peer to peer ones, but they still pale in comparison to something centralized because you just you can't beat the simplicity of a central entity Mhmm. Accepting the crypto and sending back their crypto. You send in Bitcoin, you get back Monero. So it's always going to be drastically faster and easier with the obvious caveat that for a short time, you are giving out custody of funds. It's not as bad as the centralized exchange where your funds are just sitting there when you're not trading them until you withdraw them. They're only gonna be sitting there generally until you get enough confirmations on both chains. So a lot of times, that's, like, ten to twenty minutes. If you're trading, like, Bitcoin to Monero or vice versa, there is that downside of giving up custody. And then the other downside too is, unfortunately, because of the transparency of Bitcoin, there are cases where users use a centralized swap service, and they have tainted Bitcoin, And the funds will get held. Now I will say on the cake side, we work a lot with our partners to try to make sure that unless there's, like, an actual law enforcement request, which, obviously, we can't just ignore. We don't get the law enforcement requests, but our partners do. They can't just ignore that. Like, they're a central company that has legitimate employees. Like, they can't just say, no policemen. We're gonna serve these $50 of Monero.
Yeah. They'll hold funds. And the worst case I've ever seen is that they just require KYC from the person before they'll get the funds back. So what we call shotgun KYC, which is obviously not fun. And that's something you'll never have in a peer to peer swap because it's just another individual who's trading with you. I've never heard of a case of any person not finalizing a trade, and a lot of these platforms ensure that if you send your end, there's no way that you can lose your funds unless the mediator is malicious.
[00:13:30] Unknown:
That's a good point. Because it's Bitcoin to narrow or vice versa, it's not like buying Bitcoin on BISK where I've always said it's cool, it's good, it's better than going to a centralized exchange. But when you're going from fiat to Bitcoin, still giving your banking details to somebody else, and you don't know who that somebody else is. And that's a concern. But, actually, once you're in the Bitcoin ecosystem or Monero ecosystem, you're not then having to give your personal details. You kind of avoid that problem.
[00:14:02] Unknown:
Yeah. Absolutely. It's much less concerning, and that's why, like, I really love centralized exchanges for now that are integrated into cake. Because since you're not dealing with the fiat layer at all, it's just a really seamless experience. And for the vast majority of people, the threat model there, the trust assumptions are totally fine. Now, obviously, the ideal is a decentralized approach that has the same user experience. And, obviously, that's something that that we're working on. That's something where another exchange that's gonna be coming out, hopefully, in the next year or two will have a user experience essentially like that of a centralized exchange, but without the same trust assumptions and without giving up custody in the same ways.
It's called Sarai. That's one that I think we've we've touched on a little bit, I think, in the first Monero monthly, but that will kind of be the, I think, the ideal middle ground once it's available and definitely something that will be leading the way in a cake. We've already talked to the main dev behind it and have committed to integrate it immediately. So it's definitely something like we would love to do that. But for right now, the centralized exchangers, they work really well, and and for most people's needs are great. And like you said, you're not dealing with fiat, so the instant exchange is not learning anything about you as a person. And you can also do those things over tour. We have non native tour support. You can do tour via Orbot on Android and Cake right now. We have native tour support coming up. So you can do that so that you're not even revealing network information about yourself to the exchange. So I think it's a really good option, and that's one of the beautiful things is once you get Bitcoin, getting back and forth from Bitcoin to Monero is quite anonymous. And especially going Bitcoin to Monero,
[00:15:37] Unknown:
you don't even have to worry about, like, tainted funds or anything like that. You're pretty much good to go. The only thing I would just add to that is for anyone thinking about using the centralized exchanges, if your main slash only risk is the potential of funds being frozen and then the potential of shotgun KYC, I would say only exchange at one time the amount that you'd be willing to walk away from to keep your privacy. If I was gonna do a hundred dollars and then I got shotgun KYC'd, they're like, we're gonna keep your funds unless you give all your information. I'd be like, fuck off. Keep the funds then. Yeah. But if it's $10,
[00:16:17] Unknown:
be like,
[00:16:18] Unknown:
okay. We've got a problem here. Maybe be mindful and do a few smaller ones if you have any concerns would be my advice.
[00:16:26] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. I think that's really good advice. I hadn't really thought through that, but that way, worst case, you're just out maybe a couple hundred bucks. Yeah. Whereas if you try to swap all of your Bitcoin from narrow ones or something through an instant exchange, could be problematic unless your funds actually have an illicit history. It's very unlikely that they would be considered tainted by one of these instant exchangers, but it definitely can happen. And that's where something like this could probably be a really good fit. Like, if you are trying to move $10,000 of Bitcoin into Monero, this can really handle that volume quite easily. Mhmm. And you're not having to deal with any instant exchanger that's has some contract with a a chain surveillance company or something. So it's it's definitely a a really good approach for those bigger trades.
Mhmm. The last category of peer to peer exchanges that we have in the Monero ecosystem are atomic swaps. And this is something I think we've also briefly touched on before, but Yeah. It's essentially the technologically perfected version of the mediated swap where you don't actually need a mediator at all. You rely on the chains themselves, in this case, Bitcoin and Monero, to do all of the arbitration itself. Mhmm. So we're able to use Bitcoin to Monero. Unfortunately, Monero has no scripting language, so we use Bitcoin itself to actually handle the atomic swap logic to make sure that if you send your Bitcoin or you send your Monero, you will always either get the corresponding amount of Bitcoin or Monero back or you'll get the funds that you sent refunded back to you. There's no middle ground where that doesn't happen, and there's no trust in a mediator or central entity at all, and it's actually directly peer to peer. If you can communicate with someone, you can do an atomic swap with them. Mhmm. So it's it's definitely, like, the most decentralized and the most resilient option, but that always comes at a cost. When you shift more towards the trust minimized or trustless, you generally are shifting away from the user friendly and the fast.
And that's true of atomic swaps. It's getting better and better. There's been some really good work on a specific Bitcoin and Monero only swap set of tools called unstoppable swap. There's a simple GUI now for desktop. It's getting really good, but it will always be somewhat painful just because you're having to do everything on chain. Yeah. It's getting better and better, and there's also, like, a multi crypto atomic swap platform called basic Swap that have Bitcoin and Monero, of course, but they have other things integrated as well. I view atomic swaps really as not something that most people will use, but rather a on and off ramp that literally cannot be shut down even if every other platform was forced to shut down somehow.
If I could message you in signal, we could do an atomic swap. All we need to do is communicate. It's one of those things that it just always keeps the door open no matter how potentially bad things get in the exchange space. For Monero, atomic swaps will always be there. And as long as you can get Bitcoin, you could always atomic swap into Monero. Mhmm. That's good. That's the main thing when it comes to peer to peer exchanges. I'm definitely curious if people have questions on, like, specifics of using them. But if you're already using peer to peer exchanges in the Bitcoin space, I think you'll be pretty familiar with a lot of how that works. And like I mentioned, Bisk and Robosats are two great platforms that a lot of Bitcoiners have already used anyways, so they're great places to get started with. Ready to get rolling into the updates? Yeah. Definitely. Let's do it. This month, certainly not as much as last month, but there's a couple bigger items to touch on. So the first one, and we mentioned this a little bit in the intro, is piece of research that's come out. There's someone in the Monero community who goes by Rucknium, who's been a a researcher for quite a long time. I think he's been working on this project for two years or so. And to give kind of the TLDR, so we've talked about ring signatures in Monero. We've talked about full chain membership proofs. Ring signatures, like you mentioned, it's relying on decoys. And one thing that a lot of people don't think about with how that works is that when you actually create a transaction, your wallet has to try and find decoys, which are real transactions that have happened, that are plausible inputs for the transaction you're making, that fit the expected block height of when someone would normally spend funds. It's a little hard to explain. But, basically, if you think about how do you spend Bitcoin, you generally are spending Bitcoin that you've received most recently first, and a lot of people are fairly rapidly spending outputs. And it's the same in Monero where most outputs are spent relatively quickly after being received. Most people don't sit on an output for four or five years before they actually spend it. Generally, there's gonna be a pretty quick turnaround there. When actually designing the way that ring signature algorithm works, Monero devs and researchers had to figure out what a time distribution looks like and try to make it as accurate as possible. So let's say you're spending an output that you got six months ago. When you go to spend that, your wallet will fill in decoys that are mostly weighted towards recent blocks and then less and less as you go back in time to try and provide a lot of good plausible deniability spread across time throughout the Monero blockchain.
That works reasonably well. But if you have really weird spending habits or if the way that that time selection is handled isn't perfect, it can reduce the effective privacy that's provided by ring signatures. And it's something we've always known, and there's been a lot of work over the years to improve the decoy selection algorithm to try to make it more and more accurate and more and more effective. But we've known it hasn't been perfect, and Requiem has done a lot of work over the past couple years trying to figure out how bad is it or is it okay. And the summary of his research and I haven't been too active in the actual conversations about the summary of the research, but I've read through it and seen some of the discussions on x and on Reddit, is basically that the ring signatures in Monero, because of the way that the time selection works when picking decoys, are not fully effective.
So theoretically, you would say that if I was just guessing randomly which input in this transaction is the real spend, I would have a one in 16 chance because there's 16 possible inputs. I know one of them is the real one. If I guess randomly, there's a one in 16 chance. But what Rucknium found by doing essentially statistical analysis was that more realistically, if I'm randomly guessing, it's something like 23% chance or one in four that I'm guessing the correct true spend. Again, it's guessing it's not deterministic. It's probabilistic.
So you could guess wrong and just trace the wrong way the entire time. But it does reduce the effective privacy of Monero against a very motivated attacker. And Monero has many motivated attackers. So, obviously, we always wanna keep that in mind when designing systems. So what it means is you could guess as probably one of these four or just over four outputs,
[00:23:20] Unknown:
but I don't know. It's just a guess. So what you're doing is just with everything going is probably one of these four ish, but I don't really know, and there's no way for me to ever know. But I think it might be one of these. It's still unknown. It's a bit like a Whirlpool transaction where it's like, we know sort of one of these would have been linked to one of these because they came in
[00:23:44] Unknown:
from over there, and they've spat out over here, but we don't know which one. It's kind of similar to that. Yeah. Very much so. And, I mean, that if you think about it, that is the way it's always worked. It's just the percentages here are worse than people's expectations. And, like, when you're talking about Whirlpool, it's a one in five. It's a 20% chance that I guess correctly. But also on the Bitcoin side, amounts are visible. Where the funds go next is immediately visible on chain. There's a much easier ways to help improve the guess by seeing what happens with the other outputs in that transaction in a Whirlpool.
Whereas in Monero, even if, let's say, they guess the input correctly, they still don't know the amount, and they still don't know any wallet address of where the funds move next. They can see that the funds are spent, but they don't know the amount. They just maybe have guessed the true spend, and it means that even that guessing process is very, very tricky to confirm because they won't have the ability to gather additional details around that. So it's certainly not like doom and gloom, all is lost kinda situation. It just means that the privacy is not quite as good as expected. But the upside here, as we've already talked about a little bit, full chain membership proofs are already well underway, and it's looking like we're probably gonna have a hard fork to enable them in the next eight to twelve months. And that totally removes this entire attack vector. With full chain membership proofs, you're not picking decoys that you hope are close to the true spend and properly hide it. You're just saying, I am one valid output from every output that's ever existed in the Monero blockchain.
So you won't have to deal with this anymore. The whole problem of trying to set this decoy selection algorithm properly won't exist anymore, and the privacy will be as effective as promised on the sender side. So it's something that we already know how to remedy. It's already a work in progress. Full chain membership proofs are far more effective solution than just bigger ring sizes or reworking the decoy selection algorithm. So we're gonna get it fixed, but it is definitely something for people to keep in mind right now. Are there any arguments around it? Like, if you're hard forking, is there sort of two camps?
[00:25:53] Unknown:
Is there anyone going like, we don't think this is a good idea. We think that what we've currently got is good enough, and this could introduce other problems. You know, like, the typical stuff you get with Bitcoin, like, is war with stuff, any change, really? Or is it just that because the majority of Monero users are very aligned on, like, okay. We have one purpose. Like, we have basically one goal. It's like be fucking private, not with gold, with property, with sort of some people at decentralized money. Some of this does it. Bitcoin is much more varied in its user base, I would say, in terms of what they want. Does that translate to being no arguments?
[00:26:31] Unknown:
I would say for this type of upgrade, there's not really any arguments. And I think a good way to think about it is when you think about what purpose does Monero serve, I think everyone would agree its purpose is privacy preserving digital cash. That's why people use Monero. It's pretty straightforward. Mhmm. And in the same vein, I would say that the vast majority of people in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the monetary properties of Bitcoin are the key value proposition. Mhmm. And so when you think about a constant attack on the privacy of Monero, everyone wants to be able to deanonymize Monero and trace transactions, and there's a lot of money sitting on the line to be able to do that. We're constantly under attack on that. So if you have someone who's actively attacking your project and you have a solution to fix it, it's very unlikely that's gonna be controversial. And I think the same thing is true with Bitcoin. When there was a value overflow bug and someone printed hundreds of millions of Bitcoin, there's no controversy because you're just ensuring that the monetary properties continue. Mhmm. Just like when we're talking about quantum computers, and that's been a a more recent subject of discussion.
I think everyone agrees that some sort of a fix to prevent quantum computers from stealing funds is going to happen. Now exactly how that happens, I'm sure there will be controversy in the Bitcoin ecosystem because there always is. There's always plenty of bike shedding and everything else. But there will be agreement on that idea of the two things that most Bitcoiners hold dear are the monetary properties, the 21,000,000, etcetera, and then that my keys are actually my coins. Mhmm. And so if something is attacking that or breaking that, fixing it is pretty straightforward and not very controversial. And it's the same in Monero. I mean, privacy is constantly being attacked.
The main value prop of Monero, the main usefulness of Monero is the privacy. So when a protocol upgrade that's been extremely well researched, well vetted, in progress for years is presented, it's just not really gonna be controversial.
[00:28:26] Unknown:
But we have had controversial hard forks in the past in Monero. That was my guess. My only thinking why anyone would have a problem with way, way, way better privacy would be like, this introduces some risk because there's an unknown thing here or, you know, whatever, like, something like that. That's the BitCorner way for sure.
[00:28:45] Unknown:
The unknown unknowns. We just won't do anything because Yeah. We don't know what we don't know. Yes. It's definitely something that always comes up. I think it's more a concern whenever we're touching anything that has to do with the way that a bounce are hidden in the narrow. Mhmm. Because, obviously, that's more of the risk when it comes to silently inflating the supply. But Yes. Yeah. I haven't seen much around this one Okay. As far as controversy goes.
[00:29:08] Unknown:
That's good.
[00:29:09] Unknown:
So next up, cool Reddit post that stood out to me. Somebody just ran the math on the throughput that Monero could handle today. And something that's always been interesting is we always just kind of, like, talk about Monero being relatively scalable, but I try to stress that it's still a layer one blockchain, and it's not it's not great at scaling long term. But it was just cool Reddit post. You can drop down into the links below to read more if you want. He ran the numbers and essentially found that with how much cheaper storage gets over time, Monero could handle the same amount of transactional volume as Bitcoin at its height without much problem, which is good confirmation. That's kind of a common question as, well, Monero doesn't scale, so it couldn't handle the same things as Bitcoin. Mhmm. It could handle the layer one traffic that Bitcoin has, but, obviously, that doesn't account for how many of those layer one transactions are actually lightning channels that are being used and how many transactions are thus happening through lightning and not happening on chain. It's not a perfect one to one comparison, but it's just an interesting, thought exercise to see how Monero scales reasonably well at layer one. Yeah. Does not scale infinitely and will need some sort of layer two solution down the line if usage continues to grow.
[00:30:20] Unknown:
I was just about to say that. So, presumably, you can have a layer two. And sometimes with Bitcoin, I feel like not as unnecessary because it does unlock some interesting things, and we use, like, podcasting two point o and the boost and all that stuff. Lightning does some good stuff. But, also, most of the time, on chain is just fine, and it costs very little, and it's not too busy, and we're fine. And because Monero, the spending is already very cheap and quick and easy and everything anyway, I guess there's no stress where you guys are like, Fuck. We need to do something. We need to make a layer two right now. It's like, no. We don't really need to yet.
[00:31:00] Unknown:
It's something that always has to be thought about ahead of time. Mhmm. And so it's something that I think one of my first presentations in the Monero space was actually about layer twos on top of Monero. It was, like, three or four years ago at at MoneroCon. Because if you don't think about it until you actually need it, it's gonna take a very long time to actually influence something like that. I mean, even if you think about lightning has been around for, what, seven years in production now? Twenty eighteen ish. Yeah. Maybe it started somewhere. I think 2018 was the first time it was, like, actually used publicly. Mhmm. And then I think dev for it started, like, 2014, '20 '15. Mhmm. So we're talking, like, a decade, and I feel like even now, lightning is not fully there. Definitely. And a lot of people are still figuring out exactly how do we do the user experience, what are the drawbacks, how do we fix things. Like, there's still some critical problems in lightning that have yet to be fixed.
So, I mean, when you think about, like, how long does it take to go to layer two? It's not like we wake up one day, and we go, oh, Monero's getting too full in layer one. Let's just deploy an l two. It's it's not that simple, and it's even harder because Monero doesn't have any sort of scripting. So you can't just build out an interesting useful layer to relatively simply or copy one from Bitcoin or something like that because you can't do any scripting at all. So it will definitely be more complex. There's some ways where you can essentially do a very simple lightning with unidirectional channels, and that's actually doable today. And Okay. In my understanding, would be much simpler and better with FCMP because you can do transaction chaining after FCMP, which you can't do now in Monero. But it's definitely something that's, I would say, has very little research around it. There's a few papers from, like, four or five years ago that haven't been thoroughly explored, but it is something that I think will need to happen if Monero's usage grows, but we'll see. I'm not sure Monero will become more than a niche thing because the amount of people actually seeking freedom and who desire to transact is not that many, unfortunately, but let's hope that that changes. Let's hope that that changes. Well,
[00:33:02] Unknown:
you you have this pendulum, don't you? And sometimes if you get pushed too hard, we're talking about this off air, you get pushed too hard and you go, no. Fuck this. Done. And it feels like a lot of UK, Europe, a lot of other countries are pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing. Maybe that does spark something where people go, nah. Fuck this. And then they say, okay. Well, there's this thing Monero, and I can have some privacy, and I can use this how I want. And so as bad as it is out there in a lot of places, maybe it becomes less niche.
[00:33:34] Unknown:
Yeah. I think we've seen a lot of that over the last few years, like you mentioned. There is a lot of awakening happening. Mhmm. So, like, I wouldn't say that that won't happen. It's just not enough people right now to warrant, like, we need a layer one today. Yeah. But that can change very quickly. And, again, it needs to be something that's thought about Mhmm. Ahead of time. Thought about in advance. So next up, there's another thing we mentioned in the intro. There's another change that will happen in this upcoming upgrade from Monero alongside FCMP. It has an interesting acronym. It's called carrot. Don't ask me what carrot stands for because I do not remember off the top of my head, and it's a lot of big cryptographic words.
But, Garrett, it's a lot easier to remember and say. So Yeah. We're just gonna stick with carrot. The TLDR for it, it's actually really, really cool. We've been trying to find in the Monroe ecosystem a smart way to improve addresses, mainly to improve the keys that are available to wallets within the Monero ecosystem. When you think about Bitcoin, you have public keys and you have private keys. There's multiple types of public keys, but, generally, the public keys are something you can use in a watch only wallet. You can use them to generate addresses like in PTC pay. That's how you could do all of your hardware wallets. You give over the pub key to the software wallet so that it can track balances, generate addresses. That system works really well. It's very straightforward.
In Monero, we have something similar. We have, obviously, spend keys, but we also have what are called view keys. But the problem is the name view key is kind of a misnomer because view keys can only see incoming transactions. They can't see outgoing transactions. Mhmm. So if you're trying to track your balance with just a view key, it doesn't work at all because you'll never know Yeah. When you spent funds. If you're trying to sync a wallet with just a view key, also not gonna work. You need the private key essentially to be able to do any sort of a watch wallet in Monero, which pretty much invalidates the usefulness of a watch only wallet because your private keys are hot. It's been detrimental to the growth of different types of wallets in the Monero ecosystem and hardware wallets as well.
One thing that we've been trying to do is have better keys available. There's been a lot of different approaches. Long story short, Karat is what we settled on because one of the really cool things with Karat, nothing actually changes. Addresses continue to look and function the same way. Your wallet after the hard fork, even if they don't upgrade to support caret, will continue to function without any problems, without any changes. It's totally backwards compatible, which is really cool and rare in the the things that we upgrade in Monero. It has a lot of benefits that other addressing schemes that have been proposed don't have, and it still brings the improved keys.
It adds a lot of new keys. The short story is that now you can do much better actually useful view only wallets because we'll have a full view key that can actually show incoming and outgoing transactions without being able to spend. So this is gonna make hardware wallets much more useful. This is gonna make watch only wallets actually possible and useful. This will make things like BDC pay and other merchant platforms much more useful because you don't have to have the funds hot unless you actually want to. You'll be able to do a watch only wallet and get everything you need out of that. Mhmm. It's a really useful addition and, like I said, doesn't really have any downsides because if you don't want to use it or if your wallet doesn't upgrade, nothing breaks. You can just keep using current addresses. Mhmm. And there's no privacy downsides either because the addresses look exactly the same on chain and off chain. Nice. So it's a really cool upgrade. The other thing that's a part of that is that it will give forward secrecy to Monero addresses.
What that means is essentially the recipient protection, the one time key that goes on chain from the long string of characters that's your Monero address. Right now, a quantum computer could just collect all of that, see it on the blockchain, and then down the line, they could try and link off chain addresses with the one time keys that are on chain. There's not forward secrecy for those. But what Cara does is it actually adds forward secrecy for those. So even if an attacker is trying to get that and if quantum computers do become reality and are actually usable to attack Monero's privacy, you'll have forward secrecy on the recipient privacy side, on the address privacy side as well no matter what the quantum computer tries to do. So that's another really good advantage of Carrot that comes with no real downsides. It's a really cool upgrade. Mhmm. It'll make it a lot easier for the ecosystem within Monero to build cool things around Monero. So I'm I'm really excited for that. That's nice.
And then last is something that a lot of the Monero community have been begging for for a while. But, essentially, the Monero core team, which I'll explain a little bit more in a minute, they published a transparency report. All that means is that there's a a general fund that people can donate Monero to that gets used for various things to help run the Monero ecosystem. It's managed by a group of people called the Monero core team, and they publish a report that just details exactly how much has come in, how much they've spent, all of the view keys are there to be able to prove what has been spent and what hasn't. And they published that. The full details are in the link, which we don't need to get into, but I thought it'd be good to just quickly explain what the Monero core team is because it sounds a little scary that there's, like, a centralized group of people who have some sort of control.
But what this really is, it's just people who have been around the Monero community for a very long time and are trusted individuals, and they just help with things like, how do you actually pay for and maintain the servers and the domain name for getMonero.org? How do you actually Yeah. Handle paying for all the infrastructure you need for the CCS platform, which is how most funding within the community works? Like, how do you actually do the tasks that require a real person to interact with that entity? And so they've been doing this for, I think, since Monero's inception. I don't know exactly when the Monero core team started, but it's been a group of people. Some have come, some have gone. But, essentially, just trying to help do the things where you just have to have a real person or you have to have a real legal entity as well to be able to actually make things happen. So they don't have any control over Monero. They don't have any say in what code gets included or not included. They have no control over hard forks. They don't have anything like that. It's really just when you need some central entity to do something.
That's what they're there for. Are they generally NIMs, or are they, like, known names? All NIMs. Yeah. I mean, a couple of them have been public facing, like Fluffy Pony or Ricardo Spagni. He was on the Monero core team for a while. He's not and hasn't been for a long time, but Yeah. He was on the core team for a while. But all of them very intentionally are nims. None of them very intentionally know exactly who other people are. There's good separation between each because even though they don't have control over the Monero project or anything, they do have some control over important things like gitmonero.org.
And if gitmonero.org gets pwned and puts out bad binaries, like, that's obviously a a danger to people's funds or something else. So they do a good job of staying in the shadows, but we'll also now publishing another transparency report so people can see how the money is actually being spent. So it's it's a good a good in between.
[00:40:48] Unknown:
Do they run the Monero
[00:40:50] Unknown:
Twitter? We've had a couple of retweets from them. I was quite excited about that. I was like, oh, look at this. I actually have no clue who runs it. I did know who ran it, and I actually was one of the people who ran it for a couple years. It was a group of us. I won't name any other names for obvious reasons, but I don't know who's running it now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All of the people who I knew who used to run it don't anymore Okay. Or I haven't been able to reach. So I'm not sure. But they've been doing a really good job, and that handle has been pretty dormant for a long time. Even when I was helping to run it, we didn't do a whole lot with it. So I I feel like they've been doing a pretty good job recently. I know that everything always makes someone mad, so some people haven't liked some of the things that have been shared or whatever. But I think they've been doing a really good job and actually putting out a lot more Yeah. Content and retweets than we've seen in the Monero space for a long time, which Yeah. That has a big impact. I think a lot of people don't think about it, but there's a a lot of visibility there, and that account has something like five or 600,000 followers. Really good to get some more visibility of what's happening in the Monero ecosystem. So it's been been cool to see.
Well, I appreciated it, and it was nice to have almost like a little nod from whoever's running it. Like Oh, yeah. They liked what we were doing. So, yeah, appreciate that. Couple more quick software updates, and then I'll let you roll through the the copious amount of XMR chats. I think probably by, Monero monthly five or six, we're just gonna be spending, like, 95% of our time in XMR chats at this rate. It's a good problem to have. So I'll wrap up, and I'll let you dive into the chats. Two quick software updates. There hasn't been, again, a lot in the month of February. Manerio Manerio. I never know how to say that name. Esperanto is weird. I think it's Monaruho. Monaruho?
I think. It's hard to pronounce. Monaruho. They shipped a couple minor updates in the January and February around their integration of Exelix who are a an instant exchanger, like we talked about a little earlier in the show. So that's live. Cake wallet, we've been hard at work on a lot of different things. Monero has been less of a focus over the last month, but we did ship full passphrase support for Monero for both creating a wallet with a passphrase and restoring a wallet with a passphrase. So, no, that's something that a lot of the more hardcore users really like to do. I will give the warning I always give where if you lose your passphrase, you lose all your money.
So remember to back up your passphrase, not along with physically, but as well as the seed phrase or else you are going to lose your money. And a lot of people who don't understand how passphrases work make that mistake, think it's just a password, realize that you can't just say forgot password, and they lose their money. So make sure that you back that up properly if you do use passphrases.
[00:43:22] Unknown:
And if you're a new user, I would generally say stay away from passphrases. But if you know what you're doing, it's a great feature to have. Particularly like passphrases, but, yeah, make sure you back them up. Have multiple copies. Keep it separate, obviously, to your seed. Learn what you're doing before you do it, but I love passphrases. I think it's massive benefit.
[00:43:39] Unknown:
The nice thing with passphrases too is, like, you don't have to be as paranoid with storage as with the seed phrase. Yeah. Stamp your seed phrase on steel, but you can also just put the passphrase into a good password manager. You can use Proton pass or Bitwarden or KeePass or something. You can use that for the passphrase. You don't have to. Mhmm. Obviously, it's all your choice, but you can use a much simpler method to ensure that you don't lose the passphrase while you do the seed phrase and the way you would normally with a seed to make sure that that's not lost. And then if someone finds your passphrase, who cares? If someone finds your seed phrase Yeah. Who cares? It is a good system. It's just one that does introduce another single point of failure, so just have to be cautious. It's like physical multisig, isn't it? It is. It's a two of two multisig, which would be a very bad idea for a multisig wallet. But passphrases, specifically because of how they work and how they don't add complexity to the actual process of signing transactions, are an interesting idea. Yeah. Any other updates?
Last one. Got one little tiny one. Okay. It's not technically an update because it's not available yet, but I just wanted people since we won't have another episode out for another month or so after this one, there's another release of Monero, just the core software, like the Monero daemon, the wallet, that sort of thing. That should be coming out probably in the next week or two. And this one has some very, very important bug fixes and vulnerability fixes. Nothing at the level of, like, stolen funds or a flaw in the cryptography. Nothing like that, but something especially for those who run a Monero node, you'll wanna update as soon as possible. So that should be coming out very soon. I've already been running and testing the new release even though it's not released yet, and it's an important one along with some other just good quality of life fixes. So if that does come out, it may even come out around the time that this episode releases. Definitely make sure to update if you're using start nine or whatever platforms have Monero. If you're running Monero node via Docker, go ahead and update as soon as possible. That's all I got. Excellent. XMR chat boosts,
[00:45:31] Unknown:
wild child with 0.14 XMR. For my questions via the contact form on the website well, I'm sorry, wild child. We will not be able to answer those until next month. Mister Crown has set up a separate email from some Dutch server. I can't access it, and it's gonna have to wait until the next one. But I'm sure they're good questions, and I promise you, we will answer them on the next time around. Expatriotic with one XMR. You big baller, expatriotic. Wow. Okay. Big time. Took me a while to find the dollar amount to make one XMR. Glad to be here.
L n is for pussies. With the exception of goats, robots, and Greek gods, Zeus is based for holding down the privacy banner and standing strong during the samurai wallet indictment, unlike Phoenix.
[00:46:29] Unknown:
He's not pulling his punches.
[00:46:31] Unknown:
No. I love it. Too right. My Nimbox, 0.447.
[00:46:38] Unknown:
Thanks for your work. For those who don't know, my Nimbox is a really cool service that accepts Monero. They've got hosting services, email, really good people run it as well. So it's a good one to check out if you've got Monero and you want something to spend it on. I'm pretty sure they're in the TSB group as well. I'm sure I've seen them in there. Yeah. I have to check that out. So they do all types of hosting, basically, and you can pay Yeah. In Monero and Bitcoin. Okay.
[00:47:02] Unknown:
I wonder if thank you, my Nimbox. I wonder if there's any my Nimbox services that we can use for Uncoverable Misfits. I shall look into that. And you can let me know as well if there's anything that I'm missing, and maybe we can, support you like you're supporting us. We shall do that. Fat pie with 00043 q and a sounds like Devo. Do you know who Devo is? I'm I'm Googling, but I'm scared. Devo.
[00:47:28] Unknown:
I'm going in blind. Yeah. What's coming up? MC Devo, a rapper, perhaps, from The UK, I think. MC Devo. And you don't know him? Okay. No. Is it not Devlin? No. Devo. He looks like a he looks like a rapper. From London. Perhaps.
[00:47:45] Unknown:
Some scummy definitely Northerner probably. Okay. I'll check it out after this. I'll go and have a listen. Expatriotic with 0.148 XMR. He sent a long note here. Maths time. Lazarus hack, $1,500,000,000 or 15,000 Bitcoin. Whirlpool's unspent capacity was greater than 10,000 Bitcoin before the DOJ fuckery. L n's capacity is 5,000 Bitcoin. L n is only 0.002 of Bitcoin's total supply. Combined, that's just barely 15,000 Bitcoins, but with Whirlpool defunct, closer to 5,000. Layer one, that's some sort of, like, code stuff. Layer one is not equal to layer two. Yeah. I agree.
Layer one privacy is important. Coin joins can be attacked at the developer level. LN can be attacked at the network level, similar to how Tor Network has snooping exit nodes. TLDR, Lazarus should move their ETH to Bitcoin and then to XMR or directly if they can find the liquidity. Should we walk aim that a little bit? Or would you do it if you were them?
[00:49:07] Unknown:
Yeah. It's an interesting one, and it's one that I tweeted about a few days ago because the logic of it is totally sound. And I would agree. Like, it makes sense that they would move to Monero from purely a privacy perspective. But you have to also realize that they don't operate on the same playing field as we do. I mean, this is a a nation state attacker. This is a North Korean government sanctioned attack by a group that are absolutely brilliant and are one of the primary income sources for an entire country. So they have a very different threat model than the average thief. If Joe Schmo figured out a way to hack Bybit for 1,400,000,000.0, he would probably have much more incentive to move to Monero and probably not cash out to Fiat because that would be too dangerous.
But Lazarus has ways that they can move cryptocurrencies that are not private, like Bitcoin, into Fiat slowly through exchanges that are willing to serve them. Even though they are a sanctioned entity, there's gonna be exchanges throughout the world that are willing to take that risk and serve these users. What they actually have far more than a need for on chain privacy is a need for fast liquidity. They're in a race against time trying to prevent as much as possible these funds from being frozen. If they're moving into something like a stable coin or moving to an exchange, they're really in a race, and they need liquidity. I mean, $1,400,000,000 is just disgusting amount of money that was stolen and is, like, a third of Monero's market cap. So moving that into Monero and then actually selling that for Fiat is just basically impossible. The lower liquidity in Monero is probably the biggest thing that will prevent them from using it heavily. I have seen that they've used it a little bit through some instant exchangers, but I doubt it will be a primary tool. And at most, it'll be something where they try to hop through Monero to gain some privacy even though that's usually very ineffective.
So we'll definitely have to see, but I think they they really need the speed and liquidity of Bitcoin rather than the on chain privacy of Monero.
[00:51:09] Unknown:
Would they not then if there's not the liquidity for Monero and Monero's already not on most exchanges, that presumably will have some effect on the price of Monero. Would they not be able to, like, double dip here effectively by playing some games because they're such whales? I was thinking, could they do something and play around and actually make some money that way because they'd get the privacy, but also they'd push the price up quite easily.
[00:51:37] Unknown:
They could certainly try. It would be interesting to see if they wanted to do that, but I don't know if there's any way for them to go from Monero to Fiat Mhmm. Easily. So they would still have to go back to Bitcoin again, and they would take on the exchange risk. Maybe the price pumps. Maybe it dumps on news that Lazarus is using Monero. It's hard to predict exactly, but that would definitely be a a high risk, high reward move if they wanted to try it. And it's possible. We'll have to see what they do. And the interesting thing here is if they use Monero, we'll know about it because they're getting into Monero through instant exchangers or centralized services from Bitcoin or Ethereum. So it's Yeah. The these funds are going to be surveilled at every step, and we'll know if they're using Monero heavily. So far, they're not, and I think it's mainly due to liquidity constraints.
But Mhmm. We'll see. Interesting one to watch.
[00:52:25] Unknown:
There's gonna be so many eyes on it. Whatever they do on chain is gonna be tracked for Bitcoin. I don't know what the score is with ETH because there was some pretty decent mixing services or things on ETH was my understanding.
[00:52:39] Unknown:
There's still some ways to gain privacy on Ethereum. And, I mean, even Tornado Cash is still accessible and usable by someone who knows how to use Ethereum and actually would run their own node or something, which Lazarus one hundred percent could do. So they could gain privacy there, and I think the fact that they're not Yeah. Continues to show that they primarily just want speed and liquidity. They're gonna be surveilled. You can't move $1,400,000,000 even through Monero and it not be seen because at some point, you're moving into some other asset that is visible. Mhmm. It's gonna be noticed. It's gonna take a while, but they need that liquidity, I think, primarily.
[00:53:16] Unknown:
Interesting case. There's always some exchange hack and something going on, isn't there? But, like, Jesus Christ. It's just so much money. It's just so much.
[00:53:28] Unknown:
It's absolutely insane. I mean, the biggest hack ever of anything. It's wild to think about.
[00:53:33] Unknown:
When we say, oh, we know it's this hacker group from North Korea, is that because they stand there and go, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Like, they tell you, or is it people are just guessing? Because they're like, oh, they're very sophisticated? Like, how do people know? From what I've read so far, primarily the reason that people think it was North Korea is that a lot of the behavior
[00:53:53] Unknown:
just mimics what we would see with Lazarus. The complexity of the attack is much more than, like, Joe Schmo hacker. It looks much more like a nation state actually doing it. Mhmm. They haven't claimed Okay. Responsibility for the attack, and that's not something that Lazarus does as far as I understand it. I don't think I've ever seen them actually claim responsibility publicly, but Okay. It's just that the behavior, the footprint, how they've actually done things resembles all of the the hacks that have happened before in Lazarus. Plus, we already know that Lazarus heavily focuses on the Ethereum ecosystem because of its complexity, and this is another example of that.
[00:54:26] Unknown:
Okay. Schrodinger with 0.0213 XMR. I could have listened endlessly to your conversation with sir Spencer just to what the fuck? This isn't supposed to be in here, Jordan. I could have listened to your listened endlessly to your conversation with Spencer. Just two dudes talking. Great. And he's a really calm and good sounding way to speak. I don't know how to describe it. It was a pleasure. Well, thank you, Schrodinger. I'm very happy that you enjoyed it. That's why it snuck through. Schrodinger and others, if you are doing an XMR boost, please just put the show above. So put, like, confab or whatever show you're listening to just so we know and Jordan doesn't fuck up because he is Canadian.
Cypherpunk Parrish Hilton again. 00218 A broadcasted transaction. Does checking, maybe visible, clear net, in Bitcoin Core's start nine service protects my IP? Does having a VPN on the router help? Do you ever recommend running a node in a VPS? Aren't storage this is a lot of questions. Aren't storage slash bandwidth limits too stringent?
[00:55:51] Unknown:
He's going for maximum bang for his buck there. Just sneak in seven questions into into one XMR chat. Yeah. That's bold.
[00:56:00] Unknown:
Well, we're trying to unpack it. So dot dot dot dot dot, a broadcasted transaction question mark. Does checking visible clear net in Bitcoin calls start line service protect my IP? My understanding is everything is done over tour with start lines, isn't it? Perhaps
[00:56:17] Unknown:
only the way that you reach Bitcoin d is done over Tor. So probably what disable clear net is is it That's correct. Bitcoin d to only use Tor also for the peer to peer connections, I would assume. I don't know that for sure. I've never actually used it, but that would be my assumption. Just a Yeah. Educated guess, perhaps.
[00:56:36] Unknown:
Yeah. And then he talks about router level VPN. The way I've set mine up and many other people that I know have done is everything to be set to tool only and then also to have a router level VPN. A lot of us are running these Flint two routers. There's a Flint two group on Signal as well for anyone who wants some help with it, but you can buy them on Amazon. They're not too expensive, pretty simple to use. You can get MOLVAD or iVPN or whatever you're running and just chuck it on there, and then you can run a device level VPN on top of that. You're good for anything really is my understanding.
[00:57:15] Unknown:
A router level VPN is very different here because it protects all of your traffic and has a lot of downsides as well. You could certainly do it, but I think a lot more beneficial would be running a node in a VPS if you can afford it. The problem is, especially in Bitcoin, the storage is expensive because you're gonna need at least a terabyte. And if you're wanting to run fulcrum or something else alongside it, I think we're getting close to maybe if even surpassed one terabyte at this point. So that would definitely be expensive. You could also do VPN on just that individual host in your network, which would be a lot simpler. Like, router level VPN sounds fantastic until you actually do it, and you realize how painful it is to do a lot of things on your home network as a result. I guess it depends on your family. But Really? I don't have any problems.
Like, streaming services, a lot of stuff that my wife does. Oh, no. But I separate it. Okay. You're not doing every host?
[00:58:12] Unknown:
No. No. So what I do is I I have normal ISP and their box and everything. Then I have that going to a second router, and that router just does everything Bitcoin and everything for, like, me and my office and everything like that. And then the rest of the home goes onto a guest network, which doesn't have the rest level VPN. It's just like normal shit, like, separate.
[00:58:36] Unknown:
And I say I haven't had any problems, which is complete bullshit. Like, a month ago, my thing completely stopped working, and I spent, like, a whole day fucking around with it and reflashing firmware and doing all this stuff, and it was an absolute pain in the ass. But other than that, it's worked flawlessly. It's been pretty good. Yeah. I need to circle back to it, honestly. I have two VPN on all the hosts that matter, but it would be simpler in some ways to do router level. But it does take a long time to get it actually set up properly and everything separated out. So it's work, but it is worth it for a lot of things. I wouldn't do it just for a Bitcoin core node. Yeah. Rather, you could just do it on the one host, but for lots of other reasons, it's a good thing to chase. Yeah. Makes sense. For hosting,
[00:59:16] Unknown:
the cost of it, we we have to host some stuff for Uncouple of Misfits and just hosting, like, BTCPay, a couple of little bits and pieces. It's like $50 a month. It's a lot of money. And there may be cheaper services out there than what we're using, maybe. I don't know if it's, like, the best price point, but I would think, you know, somewhere between 30 to $50 a month is roughly where you're gonna end up being. And, you know, it's a lot of money when you compare that to, like, running your own hardware that you can get for a couple of hundred dollars. Like you can run for years and not have issues. I think something that people also a lot of times don't think about is that when you're running your own node, there is very little reason to
[00:59:59] Unknown:
be afraid of clear net. There are some reasons for very specific threat models. But if you're running your own node, you don't care that you reveal your own IP address to your own node when you're syncing your wallet or something like that. That's not a concern at all for you. Potentially, the only thing that you're afraid of then is that other Bitcoin nodes know about your node and reveal your home IP address, which there are certainly reasons why you don't want that, and especially the way that Bitcoin does transaction propagation.
It can reveal to the Bitcoin network to a skilled attacker, but it can still reveal that this IP address sent this transaction. But that's still fine in a lot of threat models. So I would just think through it for anyone listening. Make sure do you actually have a a legitimate need to run everything tour only or to run everything in a VPS? Or if you're in a country that's pretty free and you don't have too many issues, you might be fine just running in Clearnet and using it Mhmm. And not worrying too much.
[01:00:57] Unknown:
You have the initial block download as well, which for me, that was the reason I actually got my router, my separate router was I was setting up the start nine, and I was like, I'm just about to download the chain because I can't use a device level VPN at this point because Yeah. It's do you know what I mean? Like, I'm I'm flashing a new OS, and it takes you through the process. There's no point in which I could add a VPN onto there, like my normal mobile one. So I was like, well, okay. I have to go a step further here if I don't want my ISP to know that I'm downloading Bitcoin, and I live in a pretty fucking terrible country. Like, you can get arrested for a meme. So my thinking was how long until you get a knock on your door? Like, hang on a minute. You're running this freedom money stuff. Right? You go to prison then. So,
[01:01:47] Unknown:
so that was my thinking, but it it does depend where you are a little bit. And that's a much more legitimate reason. And there are countries where that already could be illegal or could very quickly become illegal. So there there are definitely reasons. I just would I feel like sometimes there's this bent of we have to do everything the hard way no matter what, when sometimes that's not applicable to your threat model. But just something to think through, make sure that you actually need the privacy and are actually willing to deal with the user experience hit to doing something tour only.
And also know that there are downsides to that. Like, it's much easier for your node to be civil attacked and lied to about the state of the network when you're using Tor only. There are always pros and cons. Always pros and cons. So make sure that you actually need it before you just jump to doing the more extreme setup. Yeah. Good point.
[01:02:32] Unknown:
Cypherpunk Paris Hilton again. Great podcast. May I recommend you put a giant button that says donate on the Ungovernable Misfits, I guess, website? Also, could you please explain if Bitcoin Core has something like Monero's Dandelion? Wasn't Dandelion originally on Bitcoin or proposal for Bitcoin?
[01:02:55] Unknown:
It was proposed, but never deployed for Bitcoin. Yep.
[01:02:58] Unknown:
Never done. Okay. Alright. If not, how does one avoid linking their IP address with ...dot? We don't
[01:03:07] Unknown:
have the rest. I figured it out. It's connected to the one above. It's just backwards. The puzzle.
[01:03:16] Unknown:
It's just backwards. There we go. So okay. So we've answered that the second bit there and then the donate button. Get on it, Crown. Let's do it. Let's get a donate button. Why not? I think we have it somewhere, like, down at the bottom hidden away, but I'm sure we could have something bigger on there. We're also working on a way to do splits and things with the XMR chats. And for anyone who's boosting sending through the podcasting two point o stuff, we've got some more splits in there as well, including the free samurai split. So everything's gonna go their way. Jordan's done some trickery on the back end and made that possible.
Christ is king with 0.0886 XMR. Thanks for this awesome podcast. Samurai refugee here. Now Monero Schill. Keep up the good work. Question to both hosts, how am I supposed to pronounce aluminium aluminum? How would you say it? He gotcha.
[01:04:18] Unknown:
It's aluminum. Simpler. Straightforward.
[01:04:22] Unknown:
Aluminum.
[01:04:24] Unknown:
Oh, god. We we save our time. We're not wasting on extra vowels. Oh, damn. Aluminum. Just get it out there. Aluminum.
[01:04:32] Unknown:
Oh, It's horrible. It makes me feel physically sick when I hear Americans say things like that. I just think, really? Really?
[01:04:40] Unknown:
Think how much more Americans have created and invented and think about how much is that probably down to just the time savings. Not saying aluminum.
[01:04:50] Unknown:
The time savings. But, also, let's be real. Firstly, I don't care about this country at all, so I'm not gonna try and big it up. We've done fuck all of yous for a long, long time. But we did invent a lot of stuff. You did. You did. Like, pretty much every sport, most things.
[01:05:05] Unknown:
The wrong football, though.
[01:05:10] Unknown:
I don't know. I don't really care about either football, but we did some good stuff, but we are now a a failed state. We are now, an absolute disgrace. So I'll let you have that. Yeah. Also, a samurai refugee. I think a lot of people who are listening to this episode and starting to use Monero, who've been listening to Ungovernal for a while, are in the same boat. Very happy that we have Monero to fall back. Yeah. It's it's one of those times where it's it's nice to have, and I'm glad that Monero,
[01:05:37] Unknown:
as a community, has been building for adversarial environments from day one. Because if no one had, I don't know what we would have done, honestly.
[01:05:44] Unknown:
You'd be fucked. Honestly, it's like the only good tool out there was Whirlpool, in my opinion. Like, other people have different opinions, but in my opinion, it's the only good one for on chain Bitcoin. It was great. Now it's gone for now at least. And everyone who cared about privacy and then who understood this stuff was, like, fucked. You have a load of people going, oh, just use lightning. It's like, shut up. You don't know what you're talking about. So we're very lucky to have this, and sort of a mix of everything is probably the way forward. But, yeah, very, very lucky. Expatriotic again.
0396 Ask XMR chat to let us put in XMR amounts rather than Fiat paid with monero.com wallet. Please change the name to not be a URL.
[01:06:33] Unknown:
The wallet. Yeah. A means. Oh, is this cool? It's it's the worst. Don't worry. We we we agree. It's gonna change. It's gonna change.
[01:06:42] Unknown:
Okay. That's taken on board, Expatriotic. I did mention to XMR chat the other day, I think in another podcast, that you would like to be able to put XMR amounts, not dollar amounts. So I'm sure they'll be working on that for you soon. Even though John thinks you're an absolute retard for asking it, show my blog, expatriotic.me, trying to do shit and get shit done. No more fiat work. Jordan reads this on t bit b p m m and Monero monthly. So
[01:07:15] Unknown:
He got three for the price of one. Then it'll work like that. You just say read this on everything, and you just get everything? Hacks.
[01:07:23] Unknown:
Well, look at this. He's done zero point three nine six XMR. He also did a full XMR, and then he also did another zero point one four eight XMR. That's true. So he's done, like, two XMR in total. So he can kind of do what he wants. I'll let him get away with that. And he's also helping Uncoverable Misfits do a load of material for meetups and doing some guides and all sorts of things in the background, which we've talked about doing for a long time and life and editing and recording and everything else that we do got in the way, and he stepped up and absolutely hammering it out. We'll do what he asks. Yeah. I've been loving his blog too.
Yeah. Yeah. It's great. So xpatriotic.me. Crypto world, 0 point 0 0 1 1 XMR. Nice work. Thank you. Shadrach, zero point zero four seven XMR. Also says thank you. Schrodinger, zero point zero one seven XMR. What the heck is XMR versus Beast question mark question mark question mark implemented in the GooPacks mining bundle under the tab X XVB. I got you. I got you. I have no fucking idea what you're talking about. It's confusing as hell. The Goopax,
[01:08:44] Unknown:
especially the forks, have gotten there just is too much stuff in there. But if you're using Goopax, double x, triple x, whatever the latest variant is, they have implemented this thing called XMRV beast raffle. Basically, there was a small Monero mining pool that when p two pool launched as part of it and wanting to support the network, they switched their pool to essentially be a proxy for p two pool so that any miner could mine on their pool, and then Right. All of their work would actually contribute to mining on p two pool. And as part of that process, they started a raffle where Okay. If you prove that you're actually mining via p two pool and that it's just like a simple web form where you put in the the address you're mining to, which is public anyways when you use p two pool, then it will just check to see if you have shares in p two pool. They'll just award hash rate to you for a certain amount of time randomly. It's a raffle, so you may never get it. You may get it sometimes, And they've kept that going Okay. Ever since then. So all you have to do is register, and then you can enter the, like, registration code or whatever. And by register, I'm not, like, not ID or anything. Like I said, it's just a public address that's on the b two pool chain anyways with them, and then you get this code. You can put that into the the goopax GUI, and it just enters you into the raffle sometimes. I don't remember exactly how it works now. I think it's changed a little bit, and, like, sometimes you have to mine to them to be eligible or something. I think it's changed a little bit since I last looked into it, but that's the rough idea is that you can basically enter into a raffle to get, quote, unquote, free hash rate for a certain period of time, which can earn you some extra.
[01:10:16] Unknown:
Right. Onto the boosts section. So this is everything coming in on Lightning and podcasting two point o. User 33152226 with 6666 I know next to nothing about Monero, so this series is very interesting. Keep it up. Chad Farrow with 2,222. Thanks for the shout out, gents. There has been some talk about adding Monero to podcasting two point o, but for now, I'm just having fun learning how it works. Hashtag value for value. The man, the myth, the legend. Chad Farrow. What a legend. Fomochronic. One thousand and one sats. No message.
Rog at SC Bitcoin UK. What's SC Bitcoin? I always forget. Think it's a meetup. Sounds great, but I've downloaded k wallet, and I can't see how to get going on it. Support guides gives 404 not found. How to get started? Question mark.
[01:11:32] Unknown:
Any ideas there, mate? Yeah. So I think probably what happened is if you had gone on the website and tried to go to the guides from there, the link was broken because we had just migrated all of our docs to a new site and changed the URL. We fixed that redirect, but for those who want to go directly to the new doc site, which now is linked on our websites, it's just docs.cakewallet.com, d 0 c s Cake wallet Com. And that'll have all the guides for how to do everything from the most beginner level things to the more advanced things, like using Cake Wallet via tour with or bot, those sorts of things. So it'll all be there. But if you have questions, jump onto our forum as well, which is just forum.kquality.com.
You can get help there. We have in app support. We're always happy to help with questions around actually using cake. It doesn't have to be some emergency to be worthy of support or just ask on Twitter or somewhere, and we'll see it. We'll respond as we can.
[01:12:25] Unknown:
Nice. And, Rog, you can just reach out to me as well. I'm a retard. I've managed to get it working. So any problems that there can be, I'm sure I've sort of stumbled across them at some point. So I'm also happy to help. Pies with 420, v for v. Biz, mushroom, strong-arm. TYM, 350 sats, no message. Kaz Piland, One hundred sats. Love to hear more about p two p mining of Monero, running nodes, etcetera, on the brink of setting up a p two p thingy versus mining to Monero
[01:13:03] Unknown:
0 c I a n? Yeah. Monero dot ocean is the real euro. It's just typoed.
[01:13:08] Unknown:
I am mining for some heat. Not so much profits. Thanks for the show. Thank you. Paul Allen with a hundred sats, and also thank you to Poe Janmies, the unpronounceable cunt, for streaming 15,400 sats. And thank you to Shadowy Superbadger for streaming 1,820
[01:13:29] Unknown:
sats. Getting a lot of love there, mate. That's just freaking awesome to see. It's also really interesting that we are getting far more XMR chats than boost even though boosting is technically easier because it's in a lot of the v to v apps. So, yeah, just really cool to see. So yet another use case where it's awesome to see people using freedom money and not being stuck on one thing, but using what works best. And it's also just like Xmart chats, a fantastic way to just play around with Monero too. Like, if you've never used it, what better way to do it than send some some Monero to y'all doing fantastic work at Uncomfortable Misfits. Get to ask a question, yell at somebody, throw some obscenities out there, make sure that my grandma can listen to this podcast. You know? It's a good place for that.
[01:14:14] Unknown:
Yeah. Sorry, grandma. Someone messaged me and John the other day sending a boost saying, love the show, but I like to listen to it in the car. And I download it and then edit out all the profanity so I can listen to it with my daughter. He said there's about five minutes left.
[01:14:31] Unknown:
Oh my god. That sounds about right. Yep.
[01:14:37] Unknown:
I'm sorry, but not sorry. There's lots of other podcasts out there that will the case is your non swearing needs, but they will also show you a load of nonsense products and steal from you. So just bear that in mind. You either have the rudeness upfront or on the back end. Well, I think we covered everything there. Another tight rip. I'm learning as we go as per usual. So thanks for everything that you've put into these show notes and everything you guys are doing at Cake. It really is awesome to see people jumping on and using the tools. Anything I missed before we jump off?
[01:15:10] Unknown:
No. I think that's it. No. Thank you, Max. It's awesome to see seeing government will misfits keep growing, see all the content y'all are putting out. I do not understand how you do it as someone who has done content creation on my own. Y'all are just kicking ass. So no. Absolutely loving it. Glad to be a part of it. And, hopefully, it seems like people are are learning from and, enjoying the Monero monthly as well. So we'll keep it up. Keep asking questions. Keep dropping extra more chats. Can't wait for the next one.
[01:15:35] Unknown:
Awesome. Catch you on the next one, mate.
[01:15:38] Unknown:
If you have any questions, please reach out and ask probably Seth, but you can try and ask me as well. And we'll catch you on the next episode a month from now. Before you go, I wanna say thank you for all the support from all the Ungovernable Misfits and the Ungovernable Misfits crew. Also, a big thank you to Cake Wallet and Foundation, not only for supporting this show and everything that Ungovernal Misfits do, but also for the general freedom and open source movement. We hinted to it in this episode, but Foundation have released a new device. I'm very excited about this. If you haven't already listened to my episode, go back and have a listen.
You can check them out at foundation.xyz. You can use my code, Ungovernable, for a discount. I think just for the passport, not for the Passport Prime as it stands. But either way, give it a go. It's just Ungovernable, or you can click the link in the show notes, and it will take you to our own cool page that Mr. Crown's made all beautiful. Check that out and also a big thank you to Cake Wallet which will be having its own application on the Passport Prime. So obviously Seth has been working hard in the background there and the rest of the team to work with Foundation. It's very exciting because it's gonna mean people can have cold storage for their Monero along with lots of other cool features, I'm sure.
If you haven't already tried k Wallet, give it a go. You can use this on Mac, Linux, Windows, iPhone, and Android. I've been using it now for probably about six months, and I really like it. It's got some great Bitcoin features, great Monero features. You can link this to your own node on both. It's got swap services, payment services, all sorts of things in there that help people who actually use Bitcoin and Monero. And if you have any questions while using it, you can just send in to our own little tech support here, and me and Seth will go through it in the next episode. Thanks for listening, and stay ungovernable.
