In this episode of The Bitcoin Brief, Max and Q delve into the latest happenings in the world of Bitcoin and privacy.
In this shorter Bitcoin Brief catch‑up, we dive straight into the latest on Passport Prime: Foundation has completed a third‑party security audit for KeyOS, is squashing final bugs, and is testing a bulletproof firmware‑update flow before giving the factory the green light. While early‑access units have slipped from initial estimates, the team stresses security parity with Passport Core, continued transparency, and a no‑questions‑asked refund policy for those who prefer not to wait. We then unpack last week’s NPM supply‑chain scare that briefly impacted Ethereum‑focused flows; despite the rapid containment (netting attackers mere cents), it’s a timely reminder to use hardware wallets for significant funds and to verify amounts, fees, change, and destination addresses on every send.
On policy, we examine the resurfacing “mixer rule” push in the US that would effectively criminalise mainstream privacy behaviours on public blockchains—potentially sweeping up CoinJoin/PayJoin, address freshness, swaps, and simple transaction splitting—highlighting why principled privacy and robust, neutral protocols matter. We field a listener question on making Lightning more accessible, weighing today’s trade‑offs between self‑hosting and managed hubs (e.g., Alby), and the convenience of Phoenix/Zeus, with an eye toward emerging designs like Ark/Spark. Rounding out with releases: Cake Wallet’s Pay Anything (seamless cross‑asset paying), native Tor on iOS, and Cupcake for air‑gapped signing; Craig Raw’s Frigate Electrum server experiment for efficient Silent Payments scanning; and Braiins Deck, a tidy desk display for price, mempool, and mining stats. Boosts, meets, and a reminder: stay vigilant, stay private, and keep building.
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- Batch Transactions: Send multiple payments at once.
- Faster Syncing: Optimized syncing via specified restore heights
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Explore benefits such as No KYC, complete privacy & security, and human support.
[00:00:04]
Unknown:
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.
[00:00:11] Unknown:
Bitcoin. Now what's the Bitcoin?
[00:00:19] Unknown:
Bitcoin's like rat poison.
[00:00:20] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:00:22] Unknown:
Oh. The greatest scam in history.
[00:00:25] Unknown:
Let's get it.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.
[00:00:42] Unknown:
Welcome back to The Bitcoin Brief, the show where me and q and a catch up every two weeks to talk about Bitcoin, privacy, open source, keeping your Bitcoin secure, and the news and software updates that matter. I just wanted say a massive thank you to everyone who's been supporting Ungovernable Misfits and a big thank you to Foundation Devices for supporting the show. If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.x,xyz. They make cypherpunk tools for fuckwits, and anyone can use this, even me. If you have any questions or you want to reach out, feel free, and I'll be happy to go through things with you. For anything super technical, I'll pass you on to q. If you wanna buy one of these incredible passports, use the code ungovernable.
It will get you a discount, and it will let them know that I'm shilling. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to the k Wallet team. Not only are they supporting this show, but they're also bringing out some incredible features. For those of you who actually use Bitcoin and actually care about their privacy and security, Cake Wallet make it incredibly simple for you to live outside of the traditional financial system. You can use Cake Pay within the app to buy gift cards for food, petrol, and whatever else you might need day to day. You can use silent payments, and, of course, you can use Monero.
You can connect both Bitcoin and Monero nodes, use coin control, and this team are constantly innovating. And I'm really excited to be working with them. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me, but check them out at cakewallet.com. Download the APK or start using this today on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, or of course your Android device. Enjoy the show.
[00:02:45] Unknown:
Good morning. Bonjour.
[00:02:47] Unknown:
How are you?
[00:02:48] Unknown:
I'm very well. Thank you. How are you other than screaming at your mouse?
[00:02:53] Unknown:
Doing alright. Yeah. Just I think the battery's dying on my mouse, so it's being a bit temperamental at the moment. But otherwise, if that's the biggest problem I've got in my life right now, then things are going alright. Yeah. You're doing alright if a, mouse running out of battery is the biggest problem. That's not bad at all. Yeah. As things yeah. You still you still fighting fires?
[00:03:11] Unknown:
Yeah. I've got bigger problems than mouse batteries at the moment, but Okay. Hopefully getting to the other side in the next sort of four to six weeks is my hope.
[00:03:20] Unknown:
And I can focus on mouses and other little things that will pee for me. But, yeah, it's annoying because it's like nothing I can talk about. But Yeah. All just one of those things where everything comes at the same time and it's incredibly stressful, but we'll get through it. It's all good. We'll win. Good. Good. Glad to hear it. We're both on a short timescale, tight timescale, should I say. Today, aren't we? We've got, like, forty five minutes tops because I'm on school run duty today, so I need to Nice. Run out the house frantically in about forty five minutes. So, it's gonna be a short one. So let's dive right into it. I've got got one bit of AOB just before we hit the news, and it's a Passport Prime update from Zach. He posted it over on Twitter and on the community forum, but I figured it's not that long of an update. I was just gonna read it out verbatim so people don't need to go and sit and read it just so people know where we're at because the elephant in the room is that, you know, we thought we were gonna be shipping by an hour, and clearly, we are not. There's been many, many hurdles along the way. So, yeah, I'm just gonna read Zach's message just so people they know where we're at. To our Passport Prime early access customers, we appreciate your continued patience as our foundation team works to get the devices into your hands. It's taken longer than we thought it would. And while we still don't have an exact date, we are much closer now and are aiming to begin shipping in the coming weeks.
Below is a detailed update of where we are from a hardware and a software perspective. While Passport Prime will be the third device Foundation has created, it is an entirely new first generation device running a brand new operating system, KiOS, and new hardware architecture. It's the first of its kind personal security platform that will enable open permissionless developer ecosystem for third party apps. It's been an enormous effort to build KeyOS, ensure that it's secure, and create the first party apps that are shipping with Passport Prime from launch. This week, we officially finished our security audit by the guys in KeyLab, who we think are the best in the business. We're gonna publish the final report next week, and I'll finish up implementing the few suggestions that came out from the audit to ensure that Passport Prime is the most secure device on the market. Completing this audit is a major milestone and was one of the items blocking us from being able to finalize the version one point o bootloader as part of the primary keyOS release. In the link that will be in the show notes, Zac shares a screenshot of the conclusion page below. But he also wanted to share the last sentence of the report because I think that's quite a good highlight, really. This results in a highly secure hardware wallet architecture that exceeds industry standards for protecting users' digital assets. With Passport Prime and QoS, we're aiming to not only match industry standards COF ledger, I like that bit, but exceed it. Again, I'm still quoting Zach here. I'm proud to say that we have done that and the security audit backs us up there. Mhmm. So now that the audit is complete, the team is rigorously testing the firmware update process so that when you unbox your Passport Prime and connect it to Envoy via the Quantum Link Bluetooth connection, it will seamlessly update to the latest available KeyOS firmware. And once we've internally deemed that the firmware update is bulletproof, we're gonna give the factory the go ahead to provision the devices with KeyOS and complete the final assembly with packaging. In the meantime, we will, of course, be squashing bugs with the first party apps and working to complete all of the Bitcoin app features. Since this is the early access batch, we do expect that there will be some minor bugs or some incomplete features across apps, but we wanna ensure that, one, there are absolutely no bugs that will affect device security. It goes without saying. And number two, that the Bitcoin app has parity with the Passport core experience, and it supports all the same software wallets, etcetera, etcetera. And Zach signs off to say he's gonna continue to post regular updates and will also publish a video walking through the latest version of QoS, and he asks for comments on the forum. Again, link will be in the show notes. So, yeah, hope that's gonna be a valuable update to people. Again, you know, I appreciate that it might be frustrating that there is no concrete dates at the moment. We've always tried to walk that fine line between giving the most accurate up to date information as we can at any given moment, estimating as best we can based on the available information at the time. But with such a big project where we are literally starting from the ground up from all aspects, like, as we've seen this year, it's a bit of a fool's errand to try and make those estimates. And, you know, maybe that's point of reflection that we need to take from this is that we just need to be more broad with our estimations because a project of this size timelines inevitably split. And, unfortunately, that might mean that some people just won't preorder, which is fine. That's fine. You know, people like to have definitive dates. And at least by going forward, if we don't give specific or more specific shipping targets, that we avoid people preordering and then having to deal with multiple pushbacks and getting disappointed. So no learning curve for us. But, hopefully, by cards on the table update from Zach to say, look. We appreciate that we're behind, but we're doing everything we can in his latest state of play that we're gonna delay any fears that people have that think that there's anything malicious going on here, which couldn't be further if the, you know, the team is grinding fucking hard day and night to get this out. So, looking forward to that video as well. And, obviously, I'll be publishing that from my socials as well as all of the the usual foundation social streams as well. Hopefully, it should be ready by the time that this podcast launch as well. If it is ready before, I'll drop the link for you, Max, and we can include it in the show notes. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Well, I know what it's like when you're waiting for something and you're desperate to get it in your hands. It's frustrating, but I also know that you guys are doing everything that you can. I know that you're working around the clock. They're doing their best, guys. They should be with you. What do you reckon now? We appreciate every everybody's, patience, and, you know, we get why people are frustrated. Just to reiterate, like, I don't wanna push people towards asking for a refund, but just to remind, like, if all of this is not good enough for you, like, from day one, we've had a no questions asked returns policy. So if it ever gets too much for you, just drop us an email, and we'll refund you the full amount. It doesn't matter whether you're paying a fee out of Bitcoin. You'll get the full amount back. Nice. Cool. On to the news.
We had a well, at first glance, it seemed like a large scale supply chain attack that could have affected quite a lot of the crypto industry. It was, I believe, reported by one of the guys at Ledger. And, basically, it's an NPM supply chain attack. So I think this came out last week where, basically, an attacker compromised some packages to do with NPM. I forget what NPM stands for now, but it's kinda like a popular tool used in a lot of software development. And there was a developer essentially that had not got mode access, but, you know, was a publisher of these big NPM packages, and he goes by the name QIX. He was compromised by a a phishing attack where he clicked the link and had some malicious software installed onto his machine.
And then the NPM packages, when they were published from his machine, anybody that then used those NPM dependencies to build their software of which there are a fucking shit ton, not just in the crypto industry. Like, this is a lot of software packages. We're using this type of thing. Basically, the malware that was getting pushed was I think it was targeted mainly Ethereum. So the Steeler was not designed for desktop environments and does not attempt to read any files or install any malware. Rather, it checks if, quote, window dot ethereum exists. And if so, it installs hooks or listeners for basically when you're within your app or your website are doing any kind of Ethereum send or receive functionality.
The malware would listen for that and then insert malicious addresses and change things. So node package manager. Thank you very much. Yes. I should have known that, but thank you for fact checking me live on air. That's very helpful. That's fine. This, vulnerability was picked up. The whole crypto industry, like, kinda went wild, and every man and his dog in terms of Bitcoin and crypto people were saying, look. We've checked. We're not vulnerable to this. It transpired after the fact that this was caught within an hour and then patched immediately, I presume. And the attack only managed to steal 5¢ worth of Ethereum, so it wasn't a very successful That's half the network. Yeah. Probably due to the fact of how quickly it was caught. So, yeah, despite the magnitude of the breach, the attacker appears to have only stolen around 5¢ of ETH, 20 USD of a meme coin, oh, and a whopping 588 US dollars that had a whopping 588 USD of trading volume. So, yeah, they got away with basically nothing.
But it is the reason I've included it because I know it pertains mainly to Ethereum and all the meme coin crap that most people listening to this are not that interested in myself and and I'm sure yourself included, Max, is that it's a stark reminder of the potential vulnerabilities of online wallets, essentially. Like, if you're using something that maybe something like MetaMask or a software based wallet that did have this NPM dependency that and it wasn't caught for a number of days or even just a number of hours and it was more widespread, then there could have been a real risk for a significant amount of loss of funds. If you're just blind signing from a hot wallet and you're just not paying attention and you can without paying attention, addresses are being swapped out, etcetera, etcetera, then this is still a real risk. But, thankfully, that wasn't the case in this scenario. But, yeah, to some takeaway as I guess that that you can learn from this in the future is number one, use a hardware wallet for any significant amounts of funds. They do a lot of these checks for you. Admittedly, the hardware wallet wouldn't protect you if it was the destination address that's being swapped out because, obviously, the hardware wallet can't kind of verify that. That would be something that would be displayed to you on the software side of things and that you'd have to have a visual check of. But the hardware side of things will obviously keep an eye on where the change is going and the change amounts and the fees that are being spent, etcetera.
So there is a protection there from a hardware side of things, but also just pay attention when you're sending Bitcoin or crypto indeed because, like, just have a double check of those addresses. Because, again, even if you were running this attack, I believe what they were doing was just swapping addresses. So just having a double check of is the destination address the one that I pasted in, or is it relevant to the QR code that I scanned? Is the change address one of my addresses? Is does the fee look correct? Does the amounts look correct, etcetera. Just use it as a reminder to take a step back. And you might have done a 100 transactions in the last couple of weeks, but that doesn't mean to say that this one isn't the one that gets you pwned. So Yeah. Yeah. Always remain vigilant. Yeah. Next on the list, we covered this a little bit when it first came out, I believe, back in July, but it's read its very, very ugly head once again. There has been a reminder about the expansion of the Patriot Act over in The US. But as we know Mhmm. When The US sneezes, the world catches a cold. So quick reminder on what's going on here. So the Patriot Act was signed into law after September 11 by judge Bush. It effectively grants the US government special powers to bypass constitutional protections in the face of terrorism, including warrantless surveillance and the suspension of due process rights that have led to the unjust imprisonment and relentless torture of hundreds of people around the world. Since 02/2001, Patriot Act has significantly shaped the financial world, basically mandates the strict application of KYC frameworks, tightening AML laws, increasing the sharing of sensitive information between both private and public entities. Again, we talk about all this stuff all the time, and the patriarchy was a big catalyst for that way back when. But the kind of update to this new piece this week is that the FinCEN director, Andrea Gacke, confirmed during a recent FinCEN hearing of leaving congress that the Treasury is working on finalizing the so called mixer rule, which uses the Patriot Act to prohibit private transactions in cryptocurrency.
And at the same time, the during this hearing, their representative, Nunn of Iowa, let slip that the house appears to continue on the special measures to fight modern threats act. Oh, catchy. A Patriot Act digital asset legislation that's long been thought dead, which would solidify the treasury's use of section three one one to prohibit specific transactions. Quick recap of the back in July thing. The White House has asked the treasury to finalize this so called mixer rule, which was, I believe, from the Biden era regulation piece that would outlaw pretty much every mechanism for privacy on any public blockchain for US Americans.
Yeah. And in this week's FinCEN oversight hearing, Gaki confirmed that the treasury is currently working on finalizing the rule. Some nice quotes here. You won't be surprised to hear these. We are seeing more and more illegal transactions being done in crypto. Representative Liccardo claimed in the hearing, citing a study which found that of 111 examined fraud cases, 91% allegedly involved so called decentralized finance, quote, DeFi. The concern here, according to Locardo, arrives from the pseudonymity of the transactions. This is a quote. How exactly are you going to do your job when transactions move through DeFi? So here's where it gets really crazy. I just wanna pass a quick reminder on this mixer rule.
Basically, the treasury's mixer rule is not so much a mixer rule rather A usage rule. Yeah. Exactly. An all encompassing blanket ban on any software or behavior that grants users of public blockchains any form of transactional privacy. As such, the rule would deem the following software and behaviors a primary money laundering concern, meaning that such transactions will end up blocked by centralized intermediaries and could put an end to the development of privacy software even for noncustodial wallets under the threat of criminal liabilities. These include make sure you're sitting down for these guys and make sure you haven't got anything breakable nearby. Number one, the pooling or aggregating of cryptocurrency from multiple persons, wallets, addresses, or accounts.
So coin joins or pay joins, anything like that. Stonewall, Stonewall x two, all of that would be deemed banned, essentially. Number two, using programmatic or algorithmic code to coordinate, manage, or manipulate the structure of a transaction. Again, could be any form of CoinJoin, any form of collaborative transaction. Splitting cryptocurrency for transmittal and transmitting cryptocurrency through a series of independent transactions. What? That's literally
[00:17:28] Unknown:
every single fucking spend unless you're spending an entire UTXO.
[00:17:33] Unknown:
Exactly. You're starting to see the complete absurdity of this, Max. I'm glad you pointed that out. Amazing rule. It gets worse. Number four, creating and using single use wallets, addresses, or accounts and sending cryptocurrency through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions, e g using a Bitcoin wallet. So, okay. That's fine. That is not fine, Peter. That is not fine at all. That is the opposite of fine. Completely crazy. I'll just finish the list. Number five, exchanging between types of cryptocurrency or other digital assets, any form of swap. And finally, number six, facilitating user initiated delays in transactional activity. So that could be anything like Pando TX that we talked about Mhmm. On the last brief. It could be Ricochet.
It could just be broadcasting a transaction later on because I don't know. For whatever reason. It's just completely bonkers, mate. There's one final quote here which I think will cut this off nicely. Notably, the mixers rules suggestion on cryptocurrency swaps, transaction delays, splitting, and the creation of single use wallets or accounts would even put users under suspicion with authorities potentially ending in criminal liability. Similar to how transaction structuring, sometimes known as smurfing, is deemed a federal crime in traditional finance, referring to the intentional breakup of transactions that fall below the $10,000 currency transaction reporting requirement. In traditional finance, smurfing carries federal prison sentence of up to five years even if the money transfer did not stem from illicit transactions.
[00:19:10] Unknown:
Amazing.
[00:19:10] Unknown:
So, basically, yeah, if this passes and you use a modern Bitcoin wallet that gives you a fresh address each time, you are a fucking criminal straight to jail.
[00:19:18] Unknown:
No smurfing. Interesting times ahead. You must fill in the forms. You will give us your details. It's also gross. Yeah. Gross is a great way to decipher that, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. It's just completely bonkers. Me and John were talking about this quite recently. It's like a lot of the time, I wanna just switch off from most of the Bitcoin world and everything that's going on because it's all so pointless and childish and pathetic at the moment. The arguments and the conversations that are being had are so dull to me that I think you could only be interested if you have nothing else going on in life. You have no other work. You have no children. You have no family. You have nothing. You live in a basement. You sit eating Cheetos, and you sit on Twitter arguing about what fucking node software to run or something like that. It's so pathetic. It makes me wanna walk away. But then I hear this type of thing, and I'm like, actually, we do have something to fight for. We do have a reason that we keep sitting down and shuffling our lives around to have these conversations and keep people updated. Because if you spend any time in the traditional fiat world and try and do anything with any level of privacy without somebody sniffing up your asshole just trying to get every bit of information and disrupting your life.
You realize how important Bitcoin really is, and it's such a stark contrast when you use it the way that we use it, where you can send any amount to anyone without any interference and no one can stop it. When you contrast that to the rest of the way that the world works, it is bliss. It's such a lovely and powerful and amazing thing when that's trying to be taken away from not just us, but our children. That's why you've gotta keep sitting down. That's why you've got to keep fighting for this and doing what we can rather than just walk away. Because I think a lot of people are in that stage where they're like, fuck this.
[00:21:14] Unknown:
Yeah. Agreed. Couldn't put it better myself, really. In fact, this will be linked in the show notes. Marty Bent on his newsletter had some good commentary on this that pivots off what you just said and summarizes it all really well. We shouldn't have to live in a world where standards cater to the lowest common denominator, in this case, criminals, that make things worse off for the overwhelming majority of the population. It's crazy that this even has to be said. The onus is on law enforcement to be so good at their jobs that they are able to prevent crimes from happening before they occur and effectively bring criminals to heal after they commit crimes. It shouldn't be on a neutral protocol, and the industry being built on top of that, when used effectively, provides people with a stable monetary system that respects user privacy and equips them with the tools to receive and spend in a way that provides them with peace of mind. Why should everyone have to suffer because of a few bad apples? Isn't that letting the terrorists win?
Yeah. Yeah. Good shout, Marty. Yeah. It exactly is that. It's letting the terrorists win. The unfortunate truth is that the terrorists are the ones writing the laws. Yeah. Again, amen to that. Cosign that. Onto the boost, like I say, short rip this week. So just a couple of of news at school, so let's hit the boost. First one, x Patriotic 0.02 x m r. Proud of this team and what they've accomplished. It's mind boggling. Sound Coffee, UGMF, and Watchmen Privacy are all I listen to anymore. With work, I can't even keep up with those.
[00:22:40] Unknown:
Well, we appreciate your support as always, sir. Thank you very much. We do. And everything you do in the background, he actually not only is sending in the XMR chats and boost, but he's also gathering them each episode so that we can read them out and putting them all nicely together for us. So thank you, mate. We appreciate
[00:22:56] Unknown:
you. Indeed. He also sent a second one as well, 40.04 XMR. Max, savage mode is and I believe this is in relation to last Friday's FreedomSet Friday. He's put it in the boost list for this one, so I'll read it anyway. Airplane mode on GrapheneOS Pixel paired with a GLINet Moody Maude router, Silent Link SIM, and BlueMerle on GitHub for IMEI spoofing, which sounds complicated. It does. But he said but he did cap it off to say, but I'm not a masochist, so I'd take an iPhone too quick. I
[00:23:28] Unknown:
like that. Agreed and likewise. Yeah. It's good to know what Savage Mode is, though, in case you ever need it. Until then, take your iPhone to work. I like that. Yeah. Web wipe with 0.018 XMR. Thank you, WebWipe. WebWipe is hosting a privacy meetup in Nashville, Tennessee on September 20. Join us at Disc Insider located at 1235 Martin Street from six to 10PM. We'll have presentations and demos on BTC tools, including Ashikaru, Boltzmann,
[00:24:10] Unknown:
and Dex's and more. God, they're nailing it. They're absolutely nailing it. Really are. Yeah. They really are. That sounds like a dreamy night. Nashville, beers on flow. Disc Insider. Country music, talking about Ashigaru
[00:24:24] Unknown:
and privacy shit. Doesn't get any better than that. Have you ever been to Nashville? I've never been to Nashville. I'd like to go, but I've told the story many times. But the last time that I went to America, I was held at gunpoint by their lovely armed forces, and I didn't appreciate that. I haven't been back since. Yeah. That's not something that would make you wanna rush back, I guess. Not particularly. I didn't feel welcomed. Last time I went to Spain, I was welcomed with a beer and and some laughter and hugs. America, a barrel pointed at my face. So maybe one day. If I did go, I think I would go and see John first and all of his family, and I'd go and give them all a big hug. And then I'd probably go to Nashville. Oh, no. I'd go to Lake Satoshi. That would be it. John, Lake Satoshi, Nashville. That'd be it. What state is, Lake Satoshi in? Michigan.
Blangsburg, Michigan, I think it is. Michigan. I don't know where that is. It's in America somewhere. It's all the same, isn't it? Alright. Well, if you're in Nashville, get yourself down to Yeah. Diskinsider
[00:25:20] Unknown:
on September 20, until 10PM. Shadowy Superbadger stream 2,400 sats. Thank you very much, sir. And then late stage HODL says or he boosted with 5,000. Says he's never even heard of Nando's, but you see there are many American locations. Well, I will be damned. Okay. And he says, I bet the menu is shitty here compared to there. Boneless thighs sounded great, but so does hot chicken. Yeah. I struggle with sandwiches and wings slash ribs nowadays with the mustache. Always been a fan of boneless chicken anyway.
[00:25:55] Unknown:
Oh, wings is an amazing thing to eat. It's such a delicious treat.
[00:26:00] Unknown:
What are your thoughts on the wings? I like wings, but I always get a bit frustrated that it's a lot of work for not a lot of meat. It's about how you do it. It's a skill thing. There's a sound bite for you. Yeah.
[00:26:15] Unknown:
It's not the amount of meat. It's how you do it. Yes. It's how you work it. That's how you work it. There's a wing place near me, which has become like a family favorite at the moment. They do this salt and pepper deep fried wings. Oh. No. Sorry. Lemon pepper deep fried wings, and then they do like a teriyaki, like, a spicy teriyaki wing and some other bits. And it's oh, it's fucking outstanding. It's so good. So I'm getting chubby.
[00:26:46] Unknown:
Sounds good. Can't wait to try it one day when I finally get a flight out to Antarctica. Yeah. It will be soon. BTC on board says l enhance
[00:26:54] Unknown:
or CTV. Oh, hashtag l enhance or hashtag CTV.
[00:26:59] Unknown:
I think that's their username.
[00:27:01] Unknown:
Oh, I see. I was thinking, like, is that a I don't know that that's a question.
[00:27:05] Unknown:
That's just their stance on life. They boosted with the thumbs up, but I think what you just read was their username.
[00:27:11] Unknown:
Right. What a prick. Okay. Thumbs up. Thumbs up. Thumbs up. Wartime does, two dynamites. Thank you, Wartime. And Turkey sends 500 sats with no message. So thank you to all of you. Thank you to all the boosters.
[00:27:26] Unknown:
Indeed. Thank you as always. Before we hit couple of releases, I wanted to shoehorn in a quick question that we had. Initially, for Freedom Tech Friday, but as you may have heard from the last brief, we are starting to pick out some of Bitcoin focused questions from that list because, well, if you listen to Freedom Tech Friday, you know that this list is kind of like, it never ends, essentially. So we're trying to pick them off in some of the other shows if they're more kind of focused on Bitcoin or Monero. So I need to pass the mantle over to Seth as well for the Monero monthly to take over some of those questions as well. Yeah. Good idea. We never ever get anywhere near the end of it. No. And I'm gonna fuck it up even more just quickly and push things back even further because BTC wrestle has just sent me through some stats again. He has said, working on getting the stats, eight myth randir is sending me the bisque seven day trade stats.
[00:28:16] Unknown:
Ashigaru Whirlpool summary, unspent capacity, 34.6, unspent value of $4,010,000. Pool count, 254 in the 2,500,000.0 sat pool and a 113 in the 25,000,000 sat pool. This has increased by 0.75 BTC since the last Bitcoin brief. Our Robosatz exchange summary, six online Robosatz coordinators, six enabled coordinators, 16 public buy orders, 56 public sell orders. Book liquidity is 84,642,000 sats. Today's active robots is fourteen twenty. Twenty four hour non KYC premium is 1.88. The twenty four hour contracted volume is 0.1 BTC, which isn't a lot, but interesting to get the stats nonetheless. We'll get you the bisque stuff ASAP.
Followed up with Ape this morning with the bisque stuff. Hopefully, he'll send it. If not, then I'm shit out of luck. Well, we are shit out of luck.
[00:29:22] Unknown:
Thank you to Ape for trying and v t wrestle. Thanks for pulling through and sending us this out. We appreciate you, mate. Cheers, guys. Alright. Back to the question. This one comes from doctor Hacks on Nosta. They say, as a lightning node runner myself, I 100% understand the problems of self hosting. Hosting. What do you think would make it more accessible? Albie's solution of just paying someone to host your node for you. And then he says in brackets, doesn't have to be Albie. Others could get into the same business and provide some competition. So he's referring to basically, like Mine inbox. Yeah. Mine inbox, etcetera. Nice. Then he continues, self hosting platforms like StartNine, Unihost, and others to lower the technical burden question. Do you feel mobile apps like Zeus play a part here? To be clear, I'm referring to the Lightning node running directly on your phone. It can't receive payments unless the app is open, and it doesn't have a lightning address. I believe you can actually do that. But it frequently works well for in person payments and is entirely self custody. And beyond the technical woes of hosting and the technical slash operational issues of falling behind on chain data and the like, There are also the headaches of channel management. Maybe this one is not a big deal, so long as you only open channels with big clearing houses like async, etcetera. I open channels with plebs, and I see channels go inactive sometimes. So far, I've always been able to poke the operator and to get it sorted, but my point is that most people are going to be looking for a payment system, not a hobby. Yeah. Absolutely. I'd love to hear your take on these things. I have my own ideas, but they all have various drawbacks. Plus, I haven't personally tried Alibaba Start nine yet, so I don't have strong opinions about those. I think you kind of, in a roundabout way, kind of summarized and answered your own question. Mhmm. Most people, the most viable alternative is something like Phoenix where it's classified as self custody.
It has some trade offs in terms of privacy. Although, again, we as we've said on previous briefs, like, there are fixes of foot that could fix that with, like, trampoline routes in, etcetera, and blinded paths. But for now, there are trade offs. But, obviously, it makes it easy to have access to self custody lightning with a little bit of trust in Phoenix. Same goes for Zeus. I believe they do the same thing here, and I'm almost certain they have a solution so that you can do offline payments or or so that you don't have to have the app open. But when you kinda think about it, like, for most plebs, if you haven't got a business, if you're gonna be receiving lightning, the chances are you're interacting with somebody at that point. So it's like, hey. Oh, pay me back for dinner. So it's not really that much of an issue to be like, here's an invoice or here's my Lightning address. And if you do need to have your app open, then just have it open at that time.
Obviously, if you're running a web shop or something like that, it's a completely different kettle of fish and you need something like a BCPay server, be that hosted by something like MyInbox or self hosting BCPay server on StartNine or or something similar. Those are the trade offs. It's either you pay with your time and your headaches and you self host it, or you pay with a little bit of trust and you go for something like Zeus Pay or you go for something like Phoenix. That's the state of affairs right now. We've spoken a little bit around some other scaling solutions that have or promise at least to kind of remove some of these limitations, especially around, like, node management and channel management, and and these are things like ARC or Spark.
Again, I'm not saying that they don't have different trade offs, but from where I see it, at least right now in the early days, they seem to make better trade offs than self custody Lightning or semi hosted something Lightning. Well, not semi hosted, but, like, trusted Lightning via something like Zeus Pay or via Phoenix. But, again, you know, that sort of stuff is at the fringe at the moment. We talked about it in Riga. So it's not exactly vaporware. It is actively being built out. But, yeah, hopefully, that kinda summarizes it. It's just a case of trade offs. Lightning is a very complex beast. The trade off is a little bit of trust or with your time. And I don't think, unless there's any significant changes to how lightning operate, I don't really see those coming anytime soon, then it's just a decision to be made by the user. Yeah. I'll just say it's not the setup that I would like to have in the future,
[00:33:22] Unknown:
but Albi has been pretty good. We use the Albi hub for a lot of the ungovernable stuff, and we were using it to take donations for Ashigaru and Free Samurai and a lot of our stuff that we do or trying to do with Nosta and things like that, and I have to give it to them. Like, it's been pretty stable and pretty decent. I think I pay, like, maybe 20,000 stats a month or something like that, so it's not like it's free, but it's been pretty stable and pretty good. Whereas
[00:33:51] Unknown:
most of my stuff that I've been self hosting, no matter how big a channel I open, no matter what I fucking do, I can't send large payments through. It's always a problem. So I don't know. I would say for someone who doesn't want to have any hassle, I can't really say a bad word against AlbieHub. It's been pretty good. I self host their software on my node for a different purpose, obviously, but I've had a good experience with it. They seem to ship updates fairly frequently and seems to have good TBM as well. So, yeah, I would cosign that. Okay. Hope that helps. Doctor Hacks, thank you for your question. Feel free to continue post in the questions. We do like answering on brief and on Freedom Debt Friday. Definitely. Alright. We're coming up close to time, so I'm just gonna quickly rifle through the updates and releases.
Jump in, Max, if Seth covered this on the most recent Monero. Monthly, I don't know when you recorded, but this update is only three days old, so you may not have covered it. No. We haven't. K quality update 5.4 has been released. And this is very cool, actually. The main name of the release is called Pay Anything. So the biggest new feature called Pay Anything basically sends you any address using whatever crypto you have as long as both currencies are supported in Cake Wallet. So, basically, I guess what this does under the hood is that if you've only got Bitcoin and you're paying a merchant that only accepts Monero Does the swap. Yeah. Cake will do the swap magically for you. And I think the reverse is also true as well. Is that right, Max? So if Yeah. If I'm a Cake Wallet user and I only wanna fuck with Bitcoin, somebody's paying me and they only wanna fuck with Monero or anything else that's supported in Cake, so long as they're spending from cake, I always receive what I want to receive. Is that right? Yeah. Sweet. Which is such a nice feature. It's just so slick and seamless. And because they have the swaps and everything all built into their ecosystem,
[00:35:33] Unknown:
it's a nice seamless experience. And I will just say my little claim to fame is on our first Monero monthly, this was my request to Seth. This was my we need to do this. And whatever it is, six months later or eight months later or whatever it is, They've done it. They do not fuck about. They don't. Seriously,
[00:35:53] Unknown:
they don't fuck around. They just get shit done, and I love it. I'm guessing that there will be fees involved in this because you're using a swap provider. Yeah. Hopefully, well, not hopefully. I'm sure they will communicate that to you as part of the sentence so that you're not getting rug pulled on fees when you're unknowingly doing a swap under the hood. Exactly. They'll rip your eyes out on fees, and you're gonna pay for it. I mean, someone has to pay for Seth to have his massages and everything else, but
[00:36:19] Unknown:
they'll tell you what they're doing, and they're making it simple. There's so many times, like, especially when I first took them on as a sponsor where people would, like, write, Yeah. You don't you think it's disgusting that, you know, they charge these fees and you can get better fees elsewhere for swaps and things. It's like, they're a business.
[00:36:36] Unknown:
Exactly.
[00:36:37] Unknown:
They're providing a service which is seamless and really fucking simple. There are places you can get swaps done cheaper, but you're not gonna get pay any invoice, QR scan, someone pays in fucking Monero or Litecoin, and that comes now into your Bitcoin wallet. And it's just, like, all done and easy. You don't have to do anything. Right? If you want to go and fuck around and do everything yourself, like, everything else, you wanna go and get your bathroom tiled. You can do it yourself, or you can pay someone to do it nicely for you, and you don't get your hands dirty. I don't understand people's problem with people having businesses that are trying to be successful. It's a very weird it seems to be only really in the Bitcoin world. And normally, a British thing as well, like, the Americans were always like, yeah. You go, girl. You are in those sats. And, like, in England, it's like, oh, fucking rip my eyes out.
[00:37:27] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it's just like the lightning question we just had. Right? Like, you're paying Phoenix. They they take quite high fees, but you're paying for that convenience. If you wanna go into your own channels, yeah, go for it, but you're paying with your time instead. It's exactly the same here. So Same with Alby. I'm paying because I can't be arsed with the stress and it works. So I pay for it. Pay for specialization. Yeah. Yes. Also within this release, they've now got the iOS build, now has native Tor built in as well. Very cool. And they also ship some silent payments updates or minor updates and stability improvements as well to improve that functionality. They've also released Cupcake, quote, your new secret weapon for crypto security. So Cupcake is basically a separate app that turns a secondary device like an old smartphone or tablet into an air gapped cold storage device. Question the term air gapped here, but I'll let Seth defend that one. Basically, yeah, it's a separate app that you install on an old phone that you can kill all of the connectivity on. Yeah. It holds your private keys. The code of the app is built obviously, is open source, and it has no ability to broadcast transactions on its own. All it does is you give it transaction information.
You sign it on the second phone that has the Cupcake app, and then you pass that back over to the real not the real, but to Cake Wallet to then broadcast that with that app because, obviously, that app is a more generic app with network permissions, etcetera, etcetera. That's a fair quick summary of it. Is that right, Max? Yeah. It's kind of like Sentinel, similar sort of thing. Yeah. Good way to do it. Is it a replacement for hardware wallet? I would say No. No, personally. But does it make sense for people that don't want to to buy hardware wallet or don't need to buy hardware wallet but have old phones lying around like we all do, then, yeah, great. You know, it will be a good alternative. Maybe don't break your life savings in it. If you're using Monero or alternative currencies or you're not using massive amounts or you're in a country where it could be dangerous for you to have a hardware wallet sent to you. And there's lots and lots of reasons why you might use this. For my personal situation, I'm just gonna use a passport. But Mhmm. There are many, many people that will benefit from this, so it's good to see it. Yeah. There'll be a cracking blog post linked from Henry at the Cake Wallet team that'll be linked in the show notes for this. There's lots of videos, images, and stuff. Goes into the ins and outs and best practices of using it as well. So we've done a good job with that release. Well done, guys. Nice work. Number four on the list, Craig Wallet offs Craig Wallet.
Craig Rowe of Sparrow Wallet was what I was about to say, has released a new piece of software called Frigate Electrum Server. Frigate is an experimental election server testing silent payment scanning with ephemeral client keys. It has three goals. Number one, to provide a proof of concept implementation of the remote scanner approach discussed in bit three five two, which is the silent payments. And number two, to propose an Electrum RPC protocol methods to request and return silent payment information from a server, and number three, to demonstrate an efficient in database technique of scanning for silent payment transactions.
This is alpha software and should not be used in production. So this is, again, just to reiterate, this is like a a proof of concept. He's not running this as part of Spiral Wallet, and I don't think he plans to offer this as, like, a public service. It's more a case of, here's how I think people like Cake Wallet that supports silent payments could Yeah. Implement this into their back end to improve user experience. I believe it's not designed to be a replacement for something like Elect RS or Fulcrum. I believe it's supposed to be an additional piece of software that works in tandem with something like that. Okay. Interesting. So hopefully, we get some teams like Cake picking this up and pushing it into the real world where people can get to use it and and iterate on it. But, yeah, hats off to Craig for coming out of the blue and just dropping this one. It's nice. Shout out to Craig Wallet. If that goes any further well, not even just if it goes any further. He would be an amazing guest to have on Freedom Tech Friday. If we did, like, maybe a special where we have him on as well, I think that would be really fun. Yeah. Absolutely. Would love to have him on anytime. He's a Bitcoin royalty in my eyes. Oh, yeah. Best of the best. Alright. Last one on the list. This is pretty cool, and it kind of pulls at my nerdy tech heartstrings a little bit. The Brains Mining team have released Brains Deck.
Did you cover this on the mining show with John? We didn't actually. We were too busy shitting on Dorsey for, like, half an hour, so we didn't get to it. So we'll cover it now. So this is like basically, it's a less shit block clock. Okay. Basically, it's like a little dashboard, similar sort of size to, like, a Bluetooth speaker sort of thing with a screen on the front that can show a clock, obviously, in different formats, but also then loads of different Bitcoin metrics. It's gonna have weather. You can do alarms. So it is like a multifunctional device, but you can also have all of your nerdy. You can have the price, obviously. You can have hash rate of the pool, network hash rate, stock prices, hash prices. Who's it come from? Brains. Oh, from Brains. Okay. Yeah. Are they gonna get sued? You can have stocks and commodities on there. So it's like a little nerdy dashboard that you can have on your desk that can also double as a bit of a alarm clock and statistician. Yeah. Mempool stats as well, network data. Nice. Pretty reasonably priced as well. I believe you can preorder this for a 199 US dollars. Not bad. Not too bad. And it's got a proper LCD screen on it, color screen. Just looks like a nice PC you could have on your desk if you're a turbo nerd like me. Yeah.
Okay. I like it. If you're wondering what the hell we're talking about, click the link in the show notes. You'll be able to see what it looks like. But yeah. Kinda like a Bluetooth speaker size, color screen on the front. Just looks good. You can look at all your Bitcoin stats. Okay. Alright, mate. I know you've gotta go and pick up your 15 children from school. So I will let you get on, and I will catch you on Friday. You will indeed, mate. Yep. I'll catch you on Friday. Apologies for the shorter rip and govenable people, but normal service will be resumed next time around. That's fine. Alright. Love you all. Speak to you soon, mate. That's fine.
[00:43:22] Unknown:
Before you go, mineinbox.i0 help keep your online presence hidden. They provide anonymous server hosting solutions, virtual private and dedicated servers, domain registration, and DNS parking. They don't require any of your personal information, and you can purchase using Bitcoin, Lightning, or Monero. No personal information required. None. Zero. Mine in box.io. Stay ungovernable.
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.
[00:00:11] Unknown:
Bitcoin. Now what's the Bitcoin?
[00:00:19] Unknown:
Bitcoin's like rat poison.
[00:00:20] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:00:22] Unknown:
Oh. The greatest scam in history.
[00:00:25] Unknown:
Let's get it.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.
[00:00:42] Unknown:
Welcome back to The Bitcoin Brief, the show where me and q and a catch up every two weeks to talk about Bitcoin, privacy, open source, keeping your Bitcoin secure, and the news and software updates that matter. I just wanted say a massive thank you to everyone who's been supporting Ungovernable Misfits and a big thank you to Foundation Devices for supporting the show. If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.x,xyz. They make cypherpunk tools for fuckwits, and anyone can use this, even me. If you have any questions or you want to reach out, feel free, and I'll be happy to go through things with you. For anything super technical, I'll pass you on to q. If you wanna buy one of these incredible passports, use the code ungovernable.
It will get you a discount, and it will let them know that I'm shilling. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to the k Wallet team. Not only are they supporting this show, but they're also bringing out some incredible features. For those of you who actually use Bitcoin and actually care about their privacy and security, Cake Wallet make it incredibly simple for you to live outside of the traditional financial system. You can use Cake Pay within the app to buy gift cards for food, petrol, and whatever else you might need day to day. You can use silent payments, and, of course, you can use Monero.
You can connect both Bitcoin and Monero nodes, use coin control, and this team are constantly innovating. And I'm really excited to be working with them. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me, but check them out at cakewallet.com. Download the APK or start using this today on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, or of course your Android device. Enjoy the show.
[00:02:45] Unknown:
Good morning. Bonjour.
[00:02:47] Unknown:
How are you?
[00:02:48] Unknown:
I'm very well. Thank you. How are you other than screaming at your mouse?
[00:02:53] Unknown:
Doing alright. Yeah. Just I think the battery's dying on my mouse, so it's being a bit temperamental at the moment. But otherwise, if that's the biggest problem I've got in my life right now, then things are going alright. Yeah. You're doing alright if a, mouse running out of battery is the biggest problem. That's not bad at all. Yeah. As things yeah. You still you still fighting fires?
[00:03:11] Unknown:
Yeah. I've got bigger problems than mouse batteries at the moment, but Okay. Hopefully getting to the other side in the next sort of four to six weeks is my hope.
[00:03:20] Unknown:
And I can focus on mouses and other little things that will pee for me. But, yeah, it's annoying because it's like nothing I can talk about. But Yeah. All just one of those things where everything comes at the same time and it's incredibly stressful, but we'll get through it. It's all good. We'll win. Good. Good. Glad to hear it. We're both on a short timescale, tight timescale, should I say. Today, aren't we? We've got, like, forty five minutes tops because I'm on school run duty today, so I need to Nice. Run out the house frantically in about forty five minutes. So, it's gonna be a short one. So let's dive right into it. I've got got one bit of AOB just before we hit the news, and it's a Passport Prime update from Zach. He posted it over on Twitter and on the community forum, but I figured it's not that long of an update. I was just gonna read it out verbatim so people don't need to go and sit and read it just so people know where we're at because the elephant in the room is that, you know, we thought we were gonna be shipping by an hour, and clearly, we are not. There's been many, many hurdles along the way. So, yeah, I'm just gonna read Zach's message just so people they know where we're at. To our Passport Prime early access customers, we appreciate your continued patience as our foundation team works to get the devices into your hands. It's taken longer than we thought it would. And while we still don't have an exact date, we are much closer now and are aiming to begin shipping in the coming weeks.
Below is a detailed update of where we are from a hardware and a software perspective. While Passport Prime will be the third device Foundation has created, it is an entirely new first generation device running a brand new operating system, KiOS, and new hardware architecture. It's the first of its kind personal security platform that will enable open permissionless developer ecosystem for third party apps. It's been an enormous effort to build KeyOS, ensure that it's secure, and create the first party apps that are shipping with Passport Prime from launch. This week, we officially finished our security audit by the guys in KeyLab, who we think are the best in the business. We're gonna publish the final report next week, and I'll finish up implementing the few suggestions that came out from the audit to ensure that Passport Prime is the most secure device on the market. Completing this audit is a major milestone and was one of the items blocking us from being able to finalize the version one point o bootloader as part of the primary keyOS release. In the link that will be in the show notes, Zac shares a screenshot of the conclusion page below. But he also wanted to share the last sentence of the report because I think that's quite a good highlight, really. This results in a highly secure hardware wallet architecture that exceeds industry standards for protecting users' digital assets. With Passport Prime and QoS, we're aiming to not only match industry standards COF ledger, I like that bit, but exceed it. Again, I'm still quoting Zach here. I'm proud to say that we have done that and the security audit backs us up there. Mhmm. So now that the audit is complete, the team is rigorously testing the firmware update process so that when you unbox your Passport Prime and connect it to Envoy via the Quantum Link Bluetooth connection, it will seamlessly update to the latest available KeyOS firmware. And once we've internally deemed that the firmware update is bulletproof, we're gonna give the factory the go ahead to provision the devices with KeyOS and complete the final assembly with packaging. In the meantime, we will, of course, be squashing bugs with the first party apps and working to complete all of the Bitcoin app features. Since this is the early access batch, we do expect that there will be some minor bugs or some incomplete features across apps, but we wanna ensure that, one, there are absolutely no bugs that will affect device security. It goes without saying. And number two, that the Bitcoin app has parity with the Passport core experience, and it supports all the same software wallets, etcetera, etcetera. And Zach signs off to say he's gonna continue to post regular updates and will also publish a video walking through the latest version of QoS, and he asks for comments on the forum. Again, link will be in the show notes. So, yeah, hope that's gonna be a valuable update to people. Again, you know, I appreciate that it might be frustrating that there is no concrete dates at the moment. We've always tried to walk that fine line between giving the most accurate up to date information as we can at any given moment, estimating as best we can based on the available information at the time. But with such a big project where we are literally starting from the ground up from all aspects, like, as we've seen this year, it's a bit of a fool's errand to try and make those estimates. And, you know, maybe that's point of reflection that we need to take from this is that we just need to be more broad with our estimations because a project of this size timelines inevitably split. And, unfortunately, that might mean that some people just won't preorder, which is fine. That's fine. You know, people like to have definitive dates. And at least by going forward, if we don't give specific or more specific shipping targets, that we avoid people preordering and then having to deal with multiple pushbacks and getting disappointed. So no learning curve for us. But, hopefully, by cards on the table update from Zach to say, look. We appreciate that we're behind, but we're doing everything we can in his latest state of play that we're gonna delay any fears that people have that think that there's anything malicious going on here, which couldn't be further if the, you know, the team is grinding fucking hard day and night to get this out. So, looking forward to that video as well. And, obviously, I'll be publishing that from my socials as well as all of the the usual foundation social streams as well. Hopefully, it should be ready by the time that this podcast launch as well. If it is ready before, I'll drop the link for you, Max, and we can include it in the show notes. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Well, I know what it's like when you're waiting for something and you're desperate to get it in your hands. It's frustrating, but I also know that you guys are doing everything that you can. I know that you're working around the clock. They're doing their best, guys. They should be with you. What do you reckon now? We appreciate every everybody's, patience, and, you know, we get why people are frustrated. Just to reiterate, like, I don't wanna push people towards asking for a refund, but just to remind, like, if all of this is not good enough for you, like, from day one, we've had a no questions asked returns policy. So if it ever gets too much for you, just drop us an email, and we'll refund you the full amount. It doesn't matter whether you're paying a fee out of Bitcoin. You'll get the full amount back. Nice. Cool. On to the news.
We had a well, at first glance, it seemed like a large scale supply chain attack that could have affected quite a lot of the crypto industry. It was, I believe, reported by one of the guys at Ledger. And, basically, it's an NPM supply chain attack. So I think this came out last week where, basically, an attacker compromised some packages to do with NPM. I forget what NPM stands for now, but it's kinda like a popular tool used in a lot of software development. And there was a developer essentially that had not got mode access, but, you know, was a publisher of these big NPM packages, and he goes by the name QIX. He was compromised by a a phishing attack where he clicked the link and had some malicious software installed onto his machine.
And then the NPM packages, when they were published from his machine, anybody that then used those NPM dependencies to build their software of which there are a fucking shit ton, not just in the crypto industry. Like, this is a lot of software packages. We're using this type of thing. Basically, the malware that was getting pushed was I think it was targeted mainly Ethereum. So the Steeler was not designed for desktop environments and does not attempt to read any files or install any malware. Rather, it checks if, quote, window dot ethereum exists. And if so, it installs hooks or listeners for basically when you're within your app or your website are doing any kind of Ethereum send or receive functionality.
The malware would listen for that and then insert malicious addresses and change things. So node package manager. Thank you very much. Yes. I should have known that, but thank you for fact checking me live on air. That's very helpful. That's fine. This, vulnerability was picked up. The whole crypto industry, like, kinda went wild, and every man and his dog in terms of Bitcoin and crypto people were saying, look. We've checked. We're not vulnerable to this. It transpired after the fact that this was caught within an hour and then patched immediately, I presume. And the attack only managed to steal 5¢ worth of Ethereum, so it wasn't a very successful That's half the network. Yeah. Probably due to the fact of how quickly it was caught. So, yeah, despite the magnitude of the breach, the attacker appears to have only stolen around 5¢ of ETH, 20 USD of a meme coin, oh, and a whopping 588 US dollars that had a whopping 588 USD of trading volume. So, yeah, they got away with basically nothing.
But it is the reason I've included it because I know it pertains mainly to Ethereum and all the meme coin crap that most people listening to this are not that interested in myself and and I'm sure yourself included, Max, is that it's a stark reminder of the potential vulnerabilities of online wallets, essentially. Like, if you're using something that maybe something like MetaMask or a software based wallet that did have this NPM dependency that and it wasn't caught for a number of days or even just a number of hours and it was more widespread, then there could have been a real risk for a significant amount of loss of funds. If you're just blind signing from a hot wallet and you're just not paying attention and you can without paying attention, addresses are being swapped out, etcetera, etcetera, then this is still a real risk. But, thankfully, that wasn't the case in this scenario. But, yeah, to some takeaway as I guess that that you can learn from this in the future is number one, use a hardware wallet for any significant amounts of funds. They do a lot of these checks for you. Admittedly, the hardware wallet wouldn't protect you if it was the destination address that's being swapped out because, obviously, the hardware wallet can't kind of verify that. That would be something that would be displayed to you on the software side of things and that you'd have to have a visual check of. But the hardware side of things will obviously keep an eye on where the change is going and the change amounts and the fees that are being spent, etcetera.
So there is a protection there from a hardware side of things, but also just pay attention when you're sending Bitcoin or crypto indeed because, like, just have a double check of those addresses. Because, again, even if you were running this attack, I believe what they were doing was just swapping addresses. So just having a double check of is the destination address the one that I pasted in, or is it relevant to the QR code that I scanned? Is the change address one of my addresses? Is does the fee look correct? Does the amounts look correct, etcetera. Just use it as a reminder to take a step back. And you might have done a 100 transactions in the last couple of weeks, but that doesn't mean to say that this one isn't the one that gets you pwned. So Yeah. Yeah. Always remain vigilant. Yeah. Next on the list, we covered this a little bit when it first came out, I believe, back in July, but it's read its very, very ugly head once again. There has been a reminder about the expansion of the Patriot Act over in The US. But as we know Mhmm. When The US sneezes, the world catches a cold. So quick reminder on what's going on here. So the Patriot Act was signed into law after September 11 by judge Bush. It effectively grants the US government special powers to bypass constitutional protections in the face of terrorism, including warrantless surveillance and the suspension of due process rights that have led to the unjust imprisonment and relentless torture of hundreds of people around the world. Since 02/2001, Patriot Act has significantly shaped the financial world, basically mandates the strict application of KYC frameworks, tightening AML laws, increasing the sharing of sensitive information between both private and public entities. Again, we talk about all this stuff all the time, and the patriarchy was a big catalyst for that way back when. But the kind of update to this new piece this week is that the FinCEN director, Andrea Gacke, confirmed during a recent FinCEN hearing of leaving congress that the Treasury is working on finalizing the so called mixer rule, which uses the Patriot Act to prohibit private transactions in cryptocurrency.
And at the same time, the during this hearing, their representative, Nunn of Iowa, let slip that the house appears to continue on the special measures to fight modern threats act. Oh, catchy. A Patriot Act digital asset legislation that's long been thought dead, which would solidify the treasury's use of section three one one to prohibit specific transactions. Quick recap of the back in July thing. The White House has asked the treasury to finalize this so called mixer rule, which was, I believe, from the Biden era regulation piece that would outlaw pretty much every mechanism for privacy on any public blockchain for US Americans.
Yeah. And in this week's FinCEN oversight hearing, Gaki confirmed that the treasury is currently working on finalizing the rule. Some nice quotes here. You won't be surprised to hear these. We are seeing more and more illegal transactions being done in crypto. Representative Liccardo claimed in the hearing, citing a study which found that of 111 examined fraud cases, 91% allegedly involved so called decentralized finance, quote, DeFi. The concern here, according to Locardo, arrives from the pseudonymity of the transactions. This is a quote. How exactly are you going to do your job when transactions move through DeFi? So here's where it gets really crazy. I just wanna pass a quick reminder on this mixer rule.
Basically, the treasury's mixer rule is not so much a mixer rule rather A usage rule. Yeah. Exactly. An all encompassing blanket ban on any software or behavior that grants users of public blockchains any form of transactional privacy. As such, the rule would deem the following software and behaviors a primary money laundering concern, meaning that such transactions will end up blocked by centralized intermediaries and could put an end to the development of privacy software even for noncustodial wallets under the threat of criminal liabilities. These include make sure you're sitting down for these guys and make sure you haven't got anything breakable nearby. Number one, the pooling or aggregating of cryptocurrency from multiple persons, wallets, addresses, or accounts.
So coin joins or pay joins, anything like that. Stonewall, Stonewall x two, all of that would be deemed banned, essentially. Number two, using programmatic or algorithmic code to coordinate, manage, or manipulate the structure of a transaction. Again, could be any form of CoinJoin, any form of collaborative transaction. Splitting cryptocurrency for transmittal and transmitting cryptocurrency through a series of independent transactions. What? That's literally
[00:17:28] Unknown:
every single fucking spend unless you're spending an entire UTXO.
[00:17:33] Unknown:
Exactly. You're starting to see the complete absurdity of this, Max. I'm glad you pointed that out. Amazing rule. It gets worse. Number four, creating and using single use wallets, addresses, or accounts and sending cryptocurrency through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions, e g using a Bitcoin wallet. So, okay. That's fine. That is not fine, Peter. That is not fine at all. That is the opposite of fine. Completely crazy. I'll just finish the list. Number five, exchanging between types of cryptocurrency or other digital assets, any form of swap. And finally, number six, facilitating user initiated delays in transactional activity. So that could be anything like Pando TX that we talked about Mhmm. On the last brief. It could be Ricochet.
It could just be broadcasting a transaction later on because I don't know. For whatever reason. It's just completely bonkers, mate. There's one final quote here which I think will cut this off nicely. Notably, the mixers rules suggestion on cryptocurrency swaps, transaction delays, splitting, and the creation of single use wallets or accounts would even put users under suspicion with authorities potentially ending in criminal liability. Similar to how transaction structuring, sometimes known as smurfing, is deemed a federal crime in traditional finance, referring to the intentional breakup of transactions that fall below the $10,000 currency transaction reporting requirement. In traditional finance, smurfing carries federal prison sentence of up to five years even if the money transfer did not stem from illicit transactions.
[00:19:10] Unknown:
Amazing.
[00:19:10] Unknown:
So, basically, yeah, if this passes and you use a modern Bitcoin wallet that gives you a fresh address each time, you are a fucking criminal straight to jail.
[00:19:18] Unknown:
No smurfing. Interesting times ahead. You must fill in the forms. You will give us your details. It's also gross. Yeah. Gross is a great way to decipher that, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. It's just completely bonkers. Me and John were talking about this quite recently. It's like a lot of the time, I wanna just switch off from most of the Bitcoin world and everything that's going on because it's all so pointless and childish and pathetic at the moment. The arguments and the conversations that are being had are so dull to me that I think you could only be interested if you have nothing else going on in life. You have no other work. You have no children. You have no family. You have nothing. You live in a basement. You sit eating Cheetos, and you sit on Twitter arguing about what fucking node software to run or something like that. It's so pathetic. It makes me wanna walk away. But then I hear this type of thing, and I'm like, actually, we do have something to fight for. We do have a reason that we keep sitting down and shuffling our lives around to have these conversations and keep people updated. Because if you spend any time in the traditional fiat world and try and do anything with any level of privacy without somebody sniffing up your asshole just trying to get every bit of information and disrupting your life.
You realize how important Bitcoin really is, and it's such a stark contrast when you use it the way that we use it, where you can send any amount to anyone without any interference and no one can stop it. When you contrast that to the rest of the way that the world works, it is bliss. It's such a lovely and powerful and amazing thing when that's trying to be taken away from not just us, but our children. That's why you've gotta keep sitting down. That's why you've got to keep fighting for this and doing what we can rather than just walk away. Because I think a lot of people are in that stage where they're like, fuck this.
[00:21:14] Unknown:
Yeah. Agreed. Couldn't put it better myself, really. In fact, this will be linked in the show notes. Marty Bent on his newsletter had some good commentary on this that pivots off what you just said and summarizes it all really well. We shouldn't have to live in a world where standards cater to the lowest common denominator, in this case, criminals, that make things worse off for the overwhelming majority of the population. It's crazy that this even has to be said. The onus is on law enforcement to be so good at their jobs that they are able to prevent crimes from happening before they occur and effectively bring criminals to heal after they commit crimes. It shouldn't be on a neutral protocol, and the industry being built on top of that, when used effectively, provides people with a stable monetary system that respects user privacy and equips them with the tools to receive and spend in a way that provides them with peace of mind. Why should everyone have to suffer because of a few bad apples? Isn't that letting the terrorists win?
Yeah. Yeah. Good shout, Marty. Yeah. It exactly is that. It's letting the terrorists win. The unfortunate truth is that the terrorists are the ones writing the laws. Yeah. Again, amen to that. Cosign that. Onto the boost, like I say, short rip this week. So just a couple of of news at school, so let's hit the boost. First one, x Patriotic 0.02 x m r. Proud of this team and what they've accomplished. It's mind boggling. Sound Coffee, UGMF, and Watchmen Privacy are all I listen to anymore. With work, I can't even keep up with those.
[00:22:40] Unknown:
Well, we appreciate your support as always, sir. Thank you very much. We do. And everything you do in the background, he actually not only is sending in the XMR chats and boost, but he's also gathering them each episode so that we can read them out and putting them all nicely together for us. So thank you, mate. We appreciate
[00:22:56] Unknown:
you. Indeed. He also sent a second one as well, 40.04 XMR. Max, savage mode is and I believe this is in relation to last Friday's FreedomSet Friday. He's put it in the boost list for this one, so I'll read it anyway. Airplane mode on GrapheneOS Pixel paired with a GLINet Moody Maude router, Silent Link SIM, and BlueMerle on GitHub for IMEI spoofing, which sounds complicated. It does. But he said but he did cap it off to say, but I'm not a masochist, so I'd take an iPhone too quick. I
[00:23:28] Unknown:
like that. Agreed and likewise. Yeah. It's good to know what Savage Mode is, though, in case you ever need it. Until then, take your iPhone to work. I like that. Yeah. Web wipe with 0.018 XMR. Thank you, WebWipe. WebWipe is hosting a privacy meetup in Nashville, Tennessee on September 20. Join us at Disc Insider located at 1235 Martin Street from six to 10PM. We'll have presentations and demos on BTC tools, including Ashikaru, Boltzmann,
[00:24:10] Unknown:
and Dex's and more. God, they're nailing it. They're absolutely nailing it. Really are. Yeah. They really are. That sounds like a dreamy night. Nashville, beers on flow. Disc Insider. Country music, talking about Ashigaru
[00:24:24] Unknown:
and privacy shit. Doesn't get any better than that. Have you ever been to Nashville? I've never been to Nashville. I'd like to go, but I've told the story many times. But the last time that I went to America, I was held at gunpoint by their lovely armed forces, and I didn't appreciate that. I haven't been back since. Yeah. That's not something that would make you wanna rush back, I guess. Not particularly. I didn't feel welcomed. Last time I went to Spain, I was welcomed with a beer and and some laughter and hugs. America, a barrel pointed at my face. So maybe one day. If I did go, I think I would go and see John first and all of his family, and I'd go and give them all a big hug. And then I'd probably go to Nashville. Oh, no. I'd go to Lake Satoshi. That would be it. John, Lake Satoshi, Nashville. That'd be it. What state is, Lake Satoshi in? Michigan.
Blangsburg, Michigan, I think it is. Michigan. I don't know where that is. It's in America somewhere. It's all the same, isn't it? Alright. Well, if you're in Nashville, get yourself down to Yeah. Diskinsider
[00:25:20] Unknown:
on September 20, until 10PM. Shadowy Superbadger stream 2,400 sats. Thank you very much, sir. And then late stage HODL says or he boosted with 5,000. Says he's never even heard of Nando's, but you see there are many American locations. Well, I will be damned. Okay. And he says, I bet the menu is shitty here compared to there. Boneless thighs sounded great, but so does hot chicken. Yeah. I struggle with sandwiches and wings slash ribs nowadays with the mustache. Always been a fan of boneless chicken anyway.
[00:25:55] Unknown:
Oh, wings is an amazing thing to eat. It's such a delicious treat.
[00:26:00] Unknown:
What are your thoughts on the wings? I like wings, but I always get a bit frustrated that it's a lot of work for not a lot of meat. It's about how you do it. It's a skill thing. There's a sound bite for you. Yeah.
[00:26:15] Unknown:
It's not the amount of meat. It's how you do it. Yes. It's how you work it. That's how you work it. There's a wing place near me, which has become like a family favorite at the moment. They do this salt and pepper deep fried wings. Oh. No. Sorry. Lemon pepper deep fried wings, and then they do like a teriyaki, like, a spicy teriyaki wing and some other bits. And it's oh, it's fucking outstanding. It's so good. So I'm getting chubby.
[00:26:46] Unknown:
Sounds good. Can't wait to try it one day when I finally get a flight out to Antarctica. Yeah. It will be soon. BTC on board says l enhance
[00:26:54] Unknown:
or CTV. Oh, hashtag l enhance or hashtag CTV.
[00:26:59] Unknown:
I think that's their username.
[00:27:01] Unknown:
Oh, I see. I was thinking, like, is that a I don't know that that's a question.
[00:27:05] Unknown:
That's just their stance on life. They boosted with the thumbs up, but I think what you just read was their username.
[00:27:11] Unknown:
Right. What a prick. Okay. Thumbs up. Thumbs up. Thumbs up. Wartime does, two dynamites. Thank you, Wartime. And Turkey sends 500 sats with no message. So thank you to all of you. Thank you to all the boosters.
[00:27:26] Unknown:
Indeed. Thank you as always. Before we hit couple of releases, I wanted to shoehorn in a quick question that we had. Initially, for Freedom Tech Friday, but as you may have heard from the last brief, we are starting to pick out some of Bitcoin focused questions from that list because, well, if you listen to Freedom Tech Friday, you know that this list is kind of like, it never ends, essentially. So we're trying to pick them off in some of the other shows if they're more kind of focused on Bitcoin or Monero. So I need to pass the mantle over to Seth as well for the Monero monthly to take over some of those questions as well. Yeah. Good idea. We never ever get anywhere near the end of it. No. And I'm gonna fuck it up even more just quickly and push things back even further because BTC wrestle has just sent me through some stats again. He has said, working on getting the stats, eight myth randir is sending me the bisque seven day trade stats.
[00:28:16] Unknown:
Ashigaru Whirlpool summary, unspent capacity, 34.6, unspent value of $4,010,000. Pool count, 254 in the 2,500,000.0 sat pool and a 113 in the 25,000,000 sat pool. This has increased by 0.75 BTC since the last Bitcoin brief. Our Robosatz exchange summary, six online Robosatz coordinators, six enabled coordinators, 16 public buy orders, 56 public sell orders. Book liquidity is 84,642,000 sats. Today's active robots is fourteen twenty. Twenty four hour non KYC premium is 1.88. The twenty four hour contracted volume is 0.1 BTC, which isn't a lot, but interesting to get the stats nonetheless. We'll get you the bisque stuff ASAP.
Followed up with Ape this morning with the bisque stuff. Hopefully, he'll send it. If not, then I'm shit out of luck. Well, we are shit out of luck.
[00:29:22] Unknown:
Thank you to Ape for trying and v t wrestle. Thanks for pulling through and sending us this out. We appreciate you, mate. Cheers, guys. Alright. Back to the question. This one comes from doctor Hacks on Nosta. They say, as a lightning node runner myself, I 100% understand the problems of self hosting. Hosting. What do you think would make it more accessible? Albie's solution of just paying someone to host your node for you. And then he says in brackets, doesn't have to be Albie. Others could get into the same business and provide some competition. So he's referring to basically, like Mine inbox. Yeah. Mine inbox, etcetera. Nice. Then he continues, self hosting platforms like StartNine, Unihost, and others to lower the technical burden question. Do you feel mobile apps like Zeus play a part here? To be clear, I'm referring to the Lightning node running directly on your phone. It can't receive payments unless the app is open, and it doesn't have a lightning address. I believe you can actually do that. But it frequently works well for in person payments and is entirely self custody. And beyond the technical woes of hosting and the technical slash operational issues of falling behind on chain data and the like, There are also the headaches of channel management. Maybe this one is not a big deal, so long as you only open channels with big clearing houses like async, etcetera. I open channels with plebs, and I see channels go inactive sometimes. So far, I've always been able to poke the operator and to get it sorted, but my point is that most people are going to be looking for a payment system, not a hobby. Yeah. Absolutely. I'd love to hear your take on these things. I have my own ideas, but they all have various drawbacks. Plus, I haven't personally tried Alibaba Start nine yet, so I don't have strong opinions about those. I think you kind of, in a roundabout way, kind of summarized and answered your own question. Mhmm. Most people, the most viable alternative is something like Phoenix where it's classified as self custody.
It has some trade offs in terms of privacy. Although, again, we as we've said on previous briefs, like, there are fixes of foot that could fix that with, like, trampoline routes in, etcetera, and blinded paths. But for now, there are trade offs. But, obviously, it makes it easy to have access to self custody lightning with a little bit of trust in Phoenix. Same goes for Zeus. I believe they do the same thing here, and I'm almost certain they have a solution so that you can do offline payments or or so that you don't have to have the app open. But when you kinda think about it, like, for most plebs, if you haven't got a business, if you're gonna be receiving lightning, the chances are you're interacting with somebody at that point. So it's like, hey. Oh, pay me back for dinner. So it's not really that much of an issue to be like, here's an invoice or here's my Lightning address. And if you do need to have your app open, then just have it open at that time.
Obviously, if you're running a web shop or something like that, it's a completely different kettle of fish and you need something like a BCPay server, be that hosted by something like MyInbox or self hosting BCPay server on StartNine or or something similar. Those are the trade offs. It's either you pay with your time and your headaches and you self host it, or you pay with a little bit of trust and you go for something like Zeus Pay or you go for something like Phoenix. That's the state of affairs right now. We've spoken a little bit around some other scaling solutions that have or promise at least to kind of remove some of these limitations, especially around, like, node management and channel management, and and these are things like ARC or Spark.
Again, I'm not saying that they don't have different trade offs, but from where I see it, at least right now in the early days, they seem to make better trade offs than self custody Lightning or semi hosted something Lightning. Well, not semi hosted, but, like, trusted Lightning via something like Zeus Pay or via Phoenix. But, again, you know, that sort of stuff is at the fringe at the moment. We talked about it in Riga. So it's not exactly vaporware. It is actively being built out. But, yeah, hopefully, that kinda summarizes it. It's just a case of trade offs. Lightning is a very complex beast. The trade off is a little bit of trust or with your time. And I don't think, unless there's any significant changes to how lightning operate, I don't really see those coming anytime soon, then it's just a decision to be made by the user. Yeah. I'll just say it's not the setup that I would like to have in the future,
[00:33:22] Unknown:
but Albi has been pretty good. We use the Albi hub for a lot of the ungovernable stuff, and we were using it to take donations for Ashigaru and Free Samurai and a lot of our stuff that we do or trying to do with Nosta and things like that, and I have to give it to them. Like, it's been pretty stable and pretty decent. I think I pay, like, maybe 20,000 stats a month or something like that, so it's not like it's free, but it's been pretty stable and pretty good. Whereas
[00:33:51] Unknown:
most of my stuff that I've been self hosting, no matter how big a channel I open, no matter what I fucking do, I can't send large payments through. It's always a problem. So I don't know. I would say for someone who doesn't want to have any hassle, I can't really say a bad word against AlbieHub. It's been pretty good. I self host their software on my node for a different purpose, obviously, but I've had a good experience with it. They seem to ship updates fairly frequently and seems to have good TBM as well. So, yeah, I would cosign that. Okay. Hope that helps. Doctor Hacks, thank you for your question. Feel free to continue post in the questions. We do like answering on brief and on Freedom Debt Friday. Definitely. Alright. We're coming up close to time, so I'm just gonna quickly rifle through the updates and releases.
Jump in, Max, if Seth covered this on the most recent Monero. Monthly, I don't know when you recorded, but this update is only three days old, so you may not have covered it. No. We haven't. K quality update 5.4 has been released. And this is very cool, actually. The main name of the release is called Pay Anything. So the biggest new feature called Pay Anything basically sends you any address using whatever crypto you have as long as both currencies are supported in Cake Wallet. So, basically, I guess what this does under the hood is that if you've only got Bitcoin and you're paying a merchant that only accepts Monero Does the swap. Yeah. Cake will do the swap magically for you. And I think the reverse is also true as well. Is that right, Max? So if Yeah. If I'm a Cake Wallet user and I only wanna fuck with Bitcoin, somebody's paying me and they only wanna fuck with Monero or anything else that's supported in Cake, so long as they're spending from cake, I always receive what I want to receive. Is that right? Yeah. Sweet. Which is such a nice feature. It's just so slick and seamless. And because they have the swaps and everything all built into their ecosystem,
[00:35:33] Unknown:
it's a nice seamless experience. And I will just say my little claim to fame is on our first Monero monthly, this was my request to Seth. This was my we need to do this. And whatever it is, six months later or eight months later or whatever it is, They've done it. They do not fuck about. They don't. Seriously,
[00:35:53] Unknown:
they don't fuck around. They just get shit done, and I love it. I'm guessing that there will be fees involved in this because you're using a swap provider. Yeah. Hopefully, well, not hopefully. I'm sure they will communicate that to you as part of the sentence so that you're not getting rug pulled on fees when you're unknowingly doing a swap under the hood. Exactly. They'll rip your eyes out on fees, and you're gonna pay for it. I mean, someone has to pay for Seth to have his massages and everything else, but
[00:36:19] Unknown:
they'll tell you what they're doing, and they're making it simple. There's so many times, like, especially when I first took them on as a sponsor where people would, like, write, Yeah. You don't you think it's disgusting that, you know, they charge these fees and you can get better fees elsewhere for swaps and things. It's like, they're a business.
[00:36:36] Unknown:
Exactly.
[00:36:37] Unknown:
They're providing a service which is seamless and really fucking simple. There are places you can get swaps done cheaper, but you're not gonna get pay any invoice, QR scan, someone pays in fucking Monero or Litecoin, and that comes now into your Bitcoin wallet. And it's just, like, all done and easy. You don't have to do anything. Right? If you want to go and fuck around and do everything yourself, like, everything else, you wanna go and get your bathroom tiled. You can do it yourself, or you can pay someone to do it nicely for you, and you don't get your hands dirty. I don't understand people's problem with people having businesses that are trying to be successful. It's a very weird it seems to be only really in the Bitcoin world. And normally, a British thing as well, like, the Americans were always like, yeah. You go, girl. You are in those sats. And, like, in England, it's like, oh, fucking rip my eyes out.
[00:37:27] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it's just like the lightning question we just had. Right? Like, you're paying Phoenix. They they take quite high fees, but you're paying for that convenience. If you wanna go into your own channels, yeah, go for it, but you're paying with your time instead. It's exactly the same here. So Same with Alby. I'm paying because I can't be arsed with the stress and it works. So I pay for it. Pay for specialization. Yeah. Yes. Also within this release, they've now got the iOS build, now has native Tor built in as well. Very cool. And they also ship some silent payments updates or minor updates and stability improvements as well to improve that functionality. They've also released Cupcake, quote, your new secret weapon for crypto security. So Cupcake is basically a separate app that turns a secondary device like an old smartphone or tablet into an air gapped cold storage device. Question the term air gapped here, but I'll let Seth defend that one. Basically, yeah, it's a separate app that you install on an old phone that you can kill all of the connectivity on. Yeah. It holds your private keys. The code of the app is built obviously, is open source, and it has no ability to broadcast transactions on its own. All it does is you give it transaction information.
You sign it on the second phone that has the Cupcake app, and then you pass that back over to the real not the real, but to Cake Wallet to then broadcast that with that app because, obviously, that app is a more generic app with network permissions, etcetera, etcetera. That's a fair quick summary of it. Is that right, Max? Yeah. It's kind of like Sentinel, similar sort of thing. Yeah. Good way to do it. Is it a replacement for hardware wallet? I would say No. No, personally. But does it make sense for people that don't want to to buy hardware wallet or don't need to buy hardware wallet but have old phones lying around like we all do, then, yeah, great. You know, it will be a good alternative. Maybe don't break your life savings in it. If you're using Monero or alternative currencies or you're not using massive amounts or you're in a country where it could be dangerous for you to have a hardware wallet sent to you. And there's lots and lots of reasons why you might use this. For my personal situation, I'm just gonna use a passport. But Mhmm. There are many, many people that will benefit from this, so it's good to see it. Yeah. There'll be a cracking blog post linked from Henry at the Cake Wallet team that'll be linked in the show notes for this. There's lots of videos, images, and stuff. Goes into the ins and outs and best practices of using it as well. So we've done a good job with that release. Well done, guys. Nice work. Number four on the list, Craig Wallet offs Craig Wallet.
Craig Rowe of Sparrow Wallet was what I was about to say, has released a new piece of software called Frigate Electrum Server. Frigate is an experimental election server testing silent payment scanning with ephemeral client keys. It has three goals. Number one, to provide a proof of concept implementation of the remote scanner approach discussed in bit three five two, which is the silent payments. And number two, to propose an Electrum RPC protocol methods to request and return silent payment information from a server, and number three, to demonstrate an efficient in database technique of scanning for silent payment transactions.
This is alpha software and should not be used in production. So this is, again, just to reiterate, this is like a a proof of concept. He's not running this as part of Spiral Wallet, and I don't think he plans to offer this as, like, a public service. It's more a case of, here's how I think people like Cake Wallet that supports silent payments could Yeah. Implement this into their back end to improve user experience. I believe it's not designed to be a replacement for something like Elect RS or Fulcrum. I believe it's supposed to be an additional piece of software that works in tandem with something like that. Okay. Interesting. So hopefully, we get some teams like Cake picking this up and pushing it into the real world where people can get to use it and and iterate on it. But, yeah, hats off to Craig for coming out of the blue and just dropping this one. It's nice. Shout out to Craig Wallet. If that goes any further well, not even just if it goes any further. He would be an amazing guest to have on Freedom Tech Friday. If we did, like, maybe a special where we have him on as well, I think that would be really fun. Yeah. Absolutely. Would love to have him on anytime. He's a Bitcoin royalty in my eyes. Oh, yeah. Best of the best. Alright. Last one on the list. This is pretty cool, and it kind of pulls at my nerdy tech heartstrings a little bit. The Brains Mining team have released Brains Deck.
Did you cover this on the mining show with John? We didn't actually. We were too busy shitting on Dorsey for, like, half an hour, so we didn't get to it. So we'll cover it now. So this is like basically, it's a less shit block clock. Okay. Basically, it's like a little dashboard, similar sort of size to, like, a Bluetooth speaker sort of thing with a screen on the front that can show a clock, obviously, in different formats, but also then loads of different Bitcoin metrics. It's gonna have weather. You can do alarms. So it is like a multifunctional device, but you can also have all of your nerdy. You can have the price, obviously. You can have hash rate of the pool, network hash rate, stock prices, hash prices. Who's it come from? Brains. Oh, from Brains. Okay. Yeah. Are they gonna get sued? You can have stocks and commodities on there. So it's like a little nerdy dashboard that you can have on your desk that can also double as a bit of a alarm clock and statistician. Yeah. Mempool stats as well, network data. Nice. Pretty reasonably priced as well. I believe you can preorder this for a 199 US dollars. Not bad. Not too bad. And it's got a proper LCD screen on it, color screen. Just looks like a nice PC you could have on your desk if you're a turbo nerd like me. Yeah.
Okay. I like it. If you're wondering what the hell we're talking about, click the link in the show notes. You'll be able to see what it looks like. But yeah. Kinda like a Bluetooth speaker size, color screen on the front. Just looks good. You can look at all your Bitcoin stats. Okay. Alright, mate. I know you've gotta go and pick up your 15 children from school. So I will let you get on, and I will catch you on Friday. You will indeed, mate. Yep. I'll catch you on Friday. Apologies for the shorter rip and govenable people, but normal service will be resumed next time around. That's fine. Alright. Love you all. Speak to you soon, mate. That's fine.
[00:43:22] Unknown:
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