In this episode, Max sits down with RandomNym, a long-time supporter and sponsor of the show, to discuss the intricacies of privacy-focused hosting services. RandomNym shares insights into his company's approach to providing secure hosting solutions without compromising user privacy.
They also explore the broader implications of privacy in the tech industry, discussing the legal and ethical considerations of running a privacy-focused business. RandomNym explains the strategic decisions behind choosing the right jurisdictions for hosting services and the importance of decentralization and off-site backups.
VALUE FOR VALUE
Thanks for listening you Ungovernable Misfits, we appreciate your continued support and hope you enjoy the shows.
You can support this episode using your time, talent or treasure.
TIME:
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TREASURE:
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FOUNDATION
https://foundation.xyz/ungovernable
Foundation builds Bitcoin-centric tools that empower you to reclaim your digital sovereignty.
As a sovereign computing company, Foundation is the antithesis of today’s tech conglomerates. Returning to cypherpunk principles, they build open source technology that “can’t be evil”.
Thank you Foundation Devices for sponsoring the show!
Use code: Ungovernable for $10 off of your purchase
CAKE WALLET
https://cakewallet.com
Cake Wallet is an open-source, non-custodial wallet available on Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux.
Features:
- Built-in Exchange: Swap easily between Bitcoin and Monero.
- User-Friendly: Simple interface for all users.
Monero Users:
- Batch Transactions: Send multiple payments at once.
- Faster Syncing: Optimized syncing via specified restore heights
- Proxy Support: Enhance privacy with proxy node options.
Bitcoin Users:
- Coin Control: Manage your transactions effectively.
- Silent Payments: Static bitcoin addresses
- Batch Transactions: Streamline your payment process.
Thank you Cake Wallet for sponsoring the show!
MYNYMBOX
https://mynymbox.net
Your go-to for anonymous server hosting solutions, featuring: virtual private & dedicated servers, domain registration and DNS parking. We don't require any of your personal information, and you can purchase using Bitcoin, Lightning, Monero and many other cryptos.
Explore benefits such as No KYC, complete privacy & security, and human support.
(00:00:41) BOOSTS
(00:08:55) THANK YOU FOUNDATION
(00:09:39) THANK YOU CAKE WALLET
(00:10:30) Welcome to the Show RandomNym
(00:11:33) Go Qubes Or Go Home
(00:17:12) Services Offered by MyNymBox
(00:24:26) The Zero Trust Network Principle
(00:30:43) Why Did You Start The Business?
(00:43:34) Bitcoin, Monero, and Privacy Concerns
(00:48:20) Using Gift Cards and Prepaid Cards for Privacy
(00:51:56) Freedom of Choice in Cryptocurrency
[00:00:04]
Unknown:
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless. Bitcoin. Now what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.
[00:00:42] Unknown:
Welcome back to another confab episode. Today's episode is with Random NIM. Random NIM runs my Nimbox. They have recently become a sponsor, and they offer services for hosting, servers, nodes, VPSs, all sorts of clever, techie stuff. And they host it all without gathering any information on you outside of an email address. They take Bitcoin, Monero, and I think basically every shitcoin there is out there and then convert them. It was really good to finally catch up with random NIM, have a conversation, and go into all sorts of different topics. I didn't necessarily think we would. Company structures, how to run a Bitcoin business, flag theory, all sorts of things like that. So, yeah, I really hope you enjoy it. I wanna say thank you to everyone who messaged in with XMR chats and boosts from the last Confab episode.
The last confab episode was with Kerim and John for Ragnarok. We got a hell of a lot of messages, and I'm just about to start recording with Seth for our Monera monthly. So I'm gonna rattle through these. Doctor Savargo with zero point zero one six x m r says, Max, it is unfortunate that dogs get hard forked. Perhaps that is partly what makes them sweet to be around. Yeah. You're right, mate. Thank you, to everyone who sent me messages after I had to put my dog down. I really do appreciate it. I've been unreasonably sad about it. I really, really love that dog. So, yeah, I did appreciate all the messages. That was very kind.
Doctors of Argo again. Vakarim, Ragnarok, you are on the correct path of discovery. Look into the ethical skeptical at ethical skeptical on x and Ben Davidson at sun weatherman on x. Ethical skeptic has an exo thermic core mantle decoupling, ECDO theory. I don't know what any of that means, mate, but it sounds clever. John with 21,000 sats. I've thought deeply since we recorded this. My thoughts are still the same as I laid out in the spiritual defense chapter. Stay right spiritually. Know God. Love your friends. Love your family.
Prepare both physically and spiritually. Love you all. Wise words as always from John. If you did miss that episode, by the way, make sure to go back and have a listen. It's a little bit different, and let's see. Let's see, how things play out, but it might be worth preparing to some extent. Business cat sends 11,000 sats. The world is waking up to the threats we've had hidden from us. Oh, yeah. I know business cat's into all this stuff. So, I need to speak to you business cat if you're listening to this. We need to, we need to jump on. Have a call.
Eightmith Randir with 7,777 sats says, Somehow I don't think Bitcoin fixes this. Otis Bitmire, thank you for your service, gentlemen. Whether this is the big one or not, the invitation still stands. Let's get busy building our own resilience and the resilience of our communities or die trying. Snick with 4200 says, what a great episode. Thank you for sharing your worries and conclusions. Spiritual protection for the win. Keep it up, guys. Godseth says, Thank you, gentlemen. This is a must listen. Block seven streamed 2,660 sats. Business cat streamed fifteen eighty sats. Nick Toshi streamed thirteen twenty sats.
Chill now one says initializing digital immortality protocol. Kerim based as fuck. Between stars and code, the universe whispers, cycle repeat. The ancients have fortified, plan, prepare, preserve for when the system shatters, to rebuild from the fragments. John knows the way. Heed his words. Will it be a minor glitch or the awakening of a new algorithm? Question mark. Thank you to Block seven for streaming, Chad Farrow for streaming, Riven Stokes, A Thousand Sats, Spain, April 2025, major part of the electrical power, 60% shutdown due to frequency instability, taking out also part of Portugal's grid. Eight or so people died from the shutdowns after a few hours.
We are definitely not prepared. Having said that, most of the security systems on the field that I have installed have protections to lightning SPD breakers and differentials. So maybe that helps TopPod. Richard Grieser streamed 660 sats. Turkey sent in 500 sats. Henipenny k sent 500 sats. Pies says, sorry for your loss of man's best friend, Max. Thank you, Pies. I appreciate it. He also says, y'all are some smart badass motherfuckers. Poopsicle with 300 sats. I hate that Thor movie. No. It's not what this is about. Godseth, to pay or not to pay my credit card bills.
A I b l e. Dang, Max. I'm sorry for the loss of your family. My condolences. Thank you, a I b l e. He also says amazing thought provoking discussion. I can't help but feel there's some parallels between Karim's thesis and Business Cat's discussion of the poll shifts on early rock paper Bitcoin and what that would entail for us. The advice of being well prepared and building community is excellent. Matthew twenty two thirty nine. Saying it's all part of God's plan isn't outlandish. It's very sensible. Thank you. God bless. God bless you, a I b l e. And, yeah, again, business cat or anyone who's in contact with business cat, give me a nudge. Let's jump on a pod.
Jean Everett says, just being honest, it's become quite frustrating using fountain. Fountain is terrible since the nosta comment merge thing. I can't reply to half the comments and things are just buggy too extreme. G never, you are not alone, mate. Many, many, many people are having problems. I, I often have problems myself. It is frustrating. There are other options out there. If you want some suggestions, I'm happy to ping those over, mate. Nostagang, a 101 sats. So, so sorry for your loss. Thank you. John Gold, a 100 sats. I fucking hate that you change the podcast cover all the time. I hate it.
Have lots of podcasts subscribed, and this sucks. Just fucking announce the new episode with the same cover art. Go fuck yourself. Well, go fuck yourself too, John. We'll continue doing what we do. I'm sorry if it, makes things a little bit more difficult for you, but we like the art. We like to have things layered. It's what we're about here, and we do try and have the same theme. We always have the yellow and the same kind of shape, and so hopefully you will be able to find them. Appreciate your stats. Thank you. And the bird the, is that the end? And the bird the sent 100 sets.
Right. That's all the boosts that has gone, we are doing a ten minute intro. Right. So I'll just do a quick thank you to our sponsors. Thank you to Foundation for supporting the show. You've been doing it for many years and also producing the best Bitcoin hardware out there. If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.xyz. Remember to use the code Ungovernable if you're going to buy one of these amazing devices. And if you have any questions, you can reach out to me or to q and a. We do cover a lot of the updates and things on the brief, but fully open source, beautifully designed, simple to use hardware from a great team who really get it. Check them out at foundation.xyzed.
And finally, a big thank you to Cake Wallet. Cake Wallet are one of the newest sponsors, but they have been absolutely on a tear recently. I feel like every week they've got new updates, new features. It's something I lean on very heavily these days, especially using Monero more. They have just an incredible team and our good friend Seth, for privacy, heading things up. If you want a decent mobile wallet or desktop wallet that you can run on Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, I think basically every operating system that just works with a great team, with a great ethos.
Check them out at cakewallet.com. That's it for now. I hope you enjoy the show, and you can reach out to me with any questions. Welcome to the show, Random Nim. We've been speaking behind the scenes for a couple of months now, and you very kindly jumped on as a sponsor to help this. Whatever ungovernable misfits is going, and I massively appreciate that. What I haven't appreciated is the worst audio that I've ever heard in my entire life just before recording. You messaged me. I think it was yesterday. I was in a shitty mood yesterday, and it was like a message came through. I've secured a great headset for tomorrow.
My brain immediately was about to respond and go, oh, fucking hell. That gives me the shivers. Every time someone says they have a great headset, it's terrible. I thought, no. Don't be a cunt. Just don't be like that. Just say great and just be positive. But that little, spidey sense was right. I don't know what happened there, mate.
[00:11:23] Unknown:
Yeah. I've got a gaming headset for my son. It's Razer or something. Okay. Normally, it works really well, I guess, because he uses it on a daily basis. But, yeah, maybe on cubes OS, what I use, it's not the
[00:11:40] Unknown:
best option. Actually, to be fair, I've I've recorded with a couple of people who have used cubes, and we've had problems. That's like the cool, clever one that compartmentalizes everything and almost would it be fair to say it's almost like a a sort of phone in in that it sandboxes everything?
[00:12:00] Unknown:
Yes. Exactly. I use it for many, many things. So for example, I use it for VPNs. I don't have one VPN connection open. I have Mhmm. A lot of VPN connections open, always one connection to my company.
[00:12:18] Unknown:
And, yeah, that's how I use it. And do you use that as, like, an everyday operating system for everything?
[00:12:25] Unknown:
Yes. Yes. I I mean, I have a gaming PC as well, but it's isolated. And then I have my cubes OS workstation with, it's used on daily basis for Okay.
[00:12:39] Unknown:
Everything. Stuff. I'm still, one of these cucked Mac users for most stuff. Like, I I tried Linux. I tried Pop!OS. That's about the most usable thing I've got, and I use that for some, like, Bitcoin and, cryptocurrency related stuff. But I don't know. I find it, like, with all the audio and all the stuff that we do, like, the creative stuff, it's just a fucking pain in the ass. I mean, half of that is just me being retarded, but it's it's still I don't know. The cubes is more for, like, the hardcore privacy. This absolutely matters. It's like you cannot afford there to be any legal issue, especially with the type of work that you're doing. So that's why you would lean on something like that.
[00:13:26] Unknown:
Yeah. I'd say it's not only for privacy, guys. It's only it's also for developers. I know many developers uses Qubes OS for many, many reasons. So you can spin up a virtual box, and if you fucked up, you can delete it and create a new one very fast.
[00:13:50] Unknown:
Okay. Okay. That makes sense. Well, welcome to the show. Sorry for my digs about the audio. No. No. I fucked up, so it's not you. No. No. It's it's all good. No. And as I said, I I really do appreciate you giving us some support. Maybe people who are listening don't know everything that goes into making this show keep running, but the fact that you reached out and firstly said that you liked it and and secondly, that you'd like to support it was, yeah, put a big smile on my face, and it's it's taken a lot of pressure off the running of the thing. So we do appreciate that. It's very cool. And and to have a company you know, we have other companies reach out to us a lot, but we don't wanna work with them because most of these companies go against what we believe in. And Oh, yeah. We're like, okay. Yeah. Money would be helpful, but we're not gonna support you. We're not going to let any of our listeners be fooled or trapped or fucked over potentially by these companies. So when you reached out, I was really happy because it was on my list of, like, okay. Who can we work with?
It's a pretty short list. There's not many people who are doing things what I deem to be the right way and giving the ungovernable misfits what I think is a really useful service. We had planned that I'd start moving some of my services over to you guys before we recorded, but I know we've both been very busy and just it's not happened yet. But I look forward to that process and just slowly starting to piece together a more secure, more private setup that actually works. And I think as a lot of people who listen to the show are, like, growing and been around for a longer amount of time, they're realizing, like, you need to have a proper setup. You need to be able to have something that's solid to run BTCPay if you're running that, running nodes, VPNs, like, all this kind of stuff that people do. And a lot of the time, unfortunately, they're then paying in fear and giving their details across to companies that they probably shouldn't trust.
And then that creates links, and they can do all the clever shit that they want with Whirlpool and sends on Lightning and using Monero and whatever else they wanna do. But at the end of the day, they're tying their identity. And that's what I really like with you and what you guys are doing is you're creating an option for people to do this in, from my understanding, a very, very private and secure way.
[00:16:18] Unknown:
Yeah. Now our goal, only an email address. Even the email address hasn't to be verified, so you can use anything what you want. But in best case, you use a valid email address because sometimes we need to notify our users for, let's say, invoices or if we get some abuse notifications from our upstream providers, etcetera, etcetera, then a valid email address is very useful. So we don't need anything else. Just email address.
[00:17:03] Unknown:
Which is massive. Like, being able to do that and pay and I I think you you guys basically take all the cryptocurrencies but basically Bitcoin and Monero. And being able to use all of these different services, which I think we should probably jump into a little bit because a lot of people will know who you are, who listen to ungovernable misfits. We've talked about you even before the sponsorship. You're in a lot of the groups that people are in, so they know a little bit. But why don't we cover what exactly are the services that you provide? And then I'd like to hear why you started doing it and then got into, actually running it as a business because that's quite a big step for someone to take.
[00:17:46] Unknown:
It is. Yes. The reason why I started the company was because when you look at the Internet right now, the current state it's very politicized. Big tech companies are trying to remove freedom of expression, freedom of speech. My goal was to offer people Freedom Island. We do not collect any personal details except email, and we do not really care about political thinking. You can post whatever you want as long as it is legal, And we do not care about what you use, what you are doing. It must be legal. So as long as it is a legal framework, we allow everything. And I know many other providers, which are doing the same like we do Mhmm. But they try to push their political agenda to their customers.
So they take down domains Mhmm. If the users, probably some stuff they do not like, etcetera, etcetera. We don't do that. So we leave everything online.
[00:19:00] Unknown:
So that would be for hosting an email for hosting an email. Hosting a domain and running a website.
[00:19:07] Unknown:
Yeah. Hosting and domain.
[00:19:09] Unknown:
So if someone is like, we have on government misfits, there are some companies where you can go and pay with Bitcoin, but most people would go and they'd register and they give all their details and they pay in fiat currency. And what you're saying is that in that particular situation, if someone then sets up what we've got set up here and we say some a lot of things pretty much every day that people most people would probably not agree with, that we would then Yeah. Potentially risk being shut down or the hosting being stopped or whatever else. Whereas with you, that doesn't happen, and we don't have to give our personal details across, which is pretty helpful.
[00:19:53] Unknown:
Exactly. Yes. Even if we don't like the content, we can't always agree with all stuff, but we leave it online because, it's not not our interest to shut something down. We are here for freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and, yeah, everyone should enjoy the service how it is. Yeah.
[00:20:19] Unknown:
And so you do the hosting. People can build a website, host it with you. From my understanding, people can run servers that you host. So things that spring to mind for me would be like running nodes that are stable, either Monero or Bitcoin or maybe lightning nodes. All of those things would be something where it can be a lot more stable. You know, like, we went through a a long time where people were messing around with myself included, like, trying to run nodes on Raspberry Pis and running them at home and having problems. And, like, that's fine if you're doing one or two transactions a month, and it's very low use and you're just tinkering. But when you're running a business, you need the uptime. You need everything to work correctly.
I personally think it's pretty difficult to do it without doing it hosted. Like, we host ours. We, I think we currently use Luna Node, which is kind of like it's been okay. It's been pretty stable. We'll move that across to you guys, but I wouldn't really consider running this stuff myself for the business side. I just I think it's, more pain than I can take and too much tinkering.
[00:21:34] Unknown:
It's there for businesses. It's the uptime is what matters. And we also have I guess, we have a lot of digital nomads. They are not able to run a node at home. So they also need something which is twenty four seven online, and they use our VPS nodes, for example, or some dedicated servers for, older stuff, not only nodes, that they use it for cloud services or email services, etcetera, etcetera.
[00:22:08] Unknown:
Yeah. I I've been thinking about about that a lot, actually. Like, you've got the digital nomads. They can't necessarily run a node unless they've got, like, a a friendly parent or someone that will sit in a in a cupboard or something like that. But then if it goes down, it's like you're trying to talk them through, like, okay. Do this and do that and, like, it could be a bit of a fucking pain in the ass. But not only that, like, the Bitcoin and Monero types are also into this kind of, like, prepping to some extent. Like, not the prepping where you have an underground cave and, like, you take it to the absolute extreme, but just maybe they have a go back. Maybe they think, oh, okay. If things kick off where I'm living, I need to be able to get out of here. Maybe they consider in a disaster situation, how do they make sure they have their seed words and everything they need to just get the fuck out. Exactly. If you're running a node in the same country that you're in, in the same place that you're in, in the house you're in, that you're gonna try and escape, that can potentially be an issue in a in of itself because how do you connect? Where do you get your backups from? Like, all that kind of stuff. I've been thinking about that more recently. It's it's like we talk about decentralization.
That's kind of the opposite.
[00:23:24] Unknown:
Yeah. And another very, very good use case is off-site backup. So even if you self host at home, you should consider some kind of backup solution, and we offer that as well with a VPS server. So you can copy your stuff to our VPS server only for backup reasons, not for daily usage. And this can be a use case as well, or some people are a target for whatever reason, and it's maybe also better to use our services and not do self hosting.
[00:24:14] Unknown:
It's interesting, like, to look at it that way because I guess there's part of my brain that sort of says, if you're into this Bitcoin stuff, you should rely on yourself and you shouldn't outsource responsibility. There's kind of like a conflict there. There's part of my brain which thinks because I'm not technical, I don't really want to trust others or put trust in others with something that really matters to me because I don't understand it deeply enough to know whether I'm leaking information about myself to someone that I don't know. If we take it to the extreme and we say, okay. As a host, you're trying to be malicious.
You're trying to gather data on me. I'm running all these services and, like, worst case scenario, you're a bad guy. How does it work technically to put my mind at rest? And I'm sure others, like, what steps and measures do you take so that if I'm making transactions, I'm running these nodes, I've got websites running, I've got all this stuff that I'm not suddenly potentially shooting myself in the foot.
[00:25:22] Unknown:
Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, there's a concept called zero trust network. So this basically means you shouldn't trust your home network as well. Because even in your home network, there can be some malicious stuff installed or some guy try to enter it every day, etcetera, etcetera. So, basically, you can use us, or all your home network, which is also not really a 100% trusted. But when you use us, you can install a VPS server. It's a virtual private server and use full disk encryption, which means the whole disk is encrypted with your key. And in this situation, we don't have any access to your VPS server. We can't do anything with this.
[00:26:18] Unknown:
Okay. And so any traffic coming in, any traffic going out, you can't see. And if I'm sending a transaction from your service, you can't see that either. You would be unaware of what I'm doing. And
[00:26:35] Unknown:
I guess we have a misunderstanding. We see the traffic, so we can if you use your real IP, we have the real IP. So you should use always VPN with us, or you can use Tor or I two p. So we offer all these ways. So
[00:27:01] Unknown:
What I'm sort of getting at is if I'm accessing my service that you're hosting, anything that I'm doing with that service, sending transactions, whatever else, you can't see within that because that is encrypted. Exactly. Yes. Okay. Alright. Yeah. So in in that case, like, if you were trying to attack your own setup, are there any flaws or trade offs with hosting versus doing it yourself at home with the exception of, I assume, cost? Because my assumption is if you've already got a server or computer at home that could run most of these services, it's going to be cheaper than hosting. Is there anything else where you think there's a trade off there?
[00:27:50] Unknown:
For self hosting or for a service?
[00:27:53] Unknown:
In comparison with the two, if someone's listening to this and they're like, I need a, let's just say, Bitcoin node, Monero node, I need BTCPay, I need a lightning node set up, I host a website, and I don't know what else. Let's call it that for now. Can I run one at home or run one with you guys? There's obviously some great points with hosting with you guys, like uptime, like what we talked about in disaster situations, like having things spread out and decentralized. But outside of cost, is there anything where you think, okay, there is a trade off here?
[00:28:35] Unknown:
I mean, a trade off is it's not really a trade off. But in any case, you should consider how do you manage your backups. So when you do a self hosting solution, you also need backup. So a local copy is maybe not only the not always the best solution. So, maybe off-site backup is needed here as well. For our services, yeah, you have to trust us, and a trade off can be when you use our VPS servers. A VPS server is a slice of a huge server. And let's let's assume some guy does some, stuff which is not really nice and the law enforcement shuts down our whole node, then the trade off here is your node goes down as well. So when you take down the whole machines, this is the biggest trade off, I guess. Yeah. That's where why we always recommend to do a full disk encryption, which when the law enforcement checks the whole server, at least they can't go to your as it is encrypted.
[00:29:34] Unknown:
Okay. In that worst case scenario, you've got full disk encryption. Someone else is also using the same server to do something that law enforcement thinks they shouldn't. The plug gets pulled. Although they can't actually access your data, your node has gone down. In that situation, you would do what? You would take your backup
[00:29:57] Unknown:
Mhmm. And Yeah. We try to restore everything. I mean, normally, the law enforcement is let's I wouldn't say nice, but inform us, hey. You have some malicious guy on the server. We need the copy from his VPS server so they don't come to the data center and take the whole node down the informers in front and say, give us just a copy of the VPS server. So then then it depends on us if we give them the copy or not. When we do not give them the copy, then the chances are pretty high that they will come and shut down the whole server.
[00:30:28] Unknown:
And that would be because that server's hosting a website, which they then think that something is illegal or whatever else.
[00:30:38] Unknown:
Yeah. Maybe darknet markets. They hate darknet markets.
[00:30:43] Unknown:
Yeah. Okay. And so why did you get into running this as a business? Was it something that you were already, like, really heavily into, like, networking stuff and computers and servers and all this kind of clever techy things. Were you always into it?
[00:31:01] Unknown:
Yeah. I've always been, from the hosting scene and, yeah, this was the idea to do it again, to restart my hosting business. I already ran a hosting business years ago. It was an email hosting service, hosting service, which was a very good one, and then I shut it down because it was not that much used and yeah. So now, I guess, it's five years later I started. So I have a lot of knowledge about how the hosting team works, how, providers works, how networking works. I have the connections to some providers, etcetera, etcetera. So and you can't do that as a private person because you need a company set up. So we have a little bit more complicated company set up as the most others, and have we run our own network in The Netherlands. So for that, you need a company as well. It's also not possible when you own your own IP ranges and your own network, so you need to be a company. Yeah. That's all some reasons why you need a company.
[00:31:57] Unknown:
And then I guess, with your involvement with cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Monero, etcetera, that's where that link comes in where you're like, ah, okay. I can actually take these payments without gathering all of these payment details. That's like a massive,
[00:32:13] Unknown:
because how else the how else do you fucking do it? Someone have to send you cash? To be honest with you, we have we run the companies on sand, kids, and navies, if you know that. Yeah. So when you'd be an offshore company, the chances are pretty low that you get a normal bank account. So we have no other chance to other than take cryptocurrencies. We started with Bitcoin only. Then we have the first ticket. Why you don't take Litecoin? We would like to pay you on with Litecoin. So we started with Litecoin and Lightning, and now we take nearly everything, which doesn't mean we like everything, but we take everything.
And I guess it's also we support with this the freedom of choice because, yeah, everyone can use what he likes to pay.
[00:32:55] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll lean more and more that way as time goes on. Just fucking let people do what they wanna do. People use what they wanna use. Yeah. Exactly. Convert it. Yeah. People look down their nose if If someone says, oh, yeah. We accept all these different currencies or we support all these different currencies. They sort of sit on their high horse about it. And then it's like, well, hang on a minute. You have a business and you accept US dollars and British pounds and everything else. You talk about how terrible they are, but you still accept them. And now you're saying that these other shit coins are, like, terrible, and you won't accept them because they're terrible. It's like, well, it's
[00:33:36] Unknown:
like it it seems a bit silly. I mean, the most shit coins are really terrible for our privacy. So it Yeah. But, yeah, we we accept them and we convert them into Bitcoin or Monero. Mhmm. Because we are lucky enough to we can pay our upstream providers with cryptocurrencies and not with normal bank stuff. So, yeah, we try to build everything around our cryptocurrency world. So yeah. Which works, but it's a harder way.
[00:34:01] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And and Saint Kitts And Nevis, you can't get the bank accounts because it's kind of like a tax haven, isn't it? It's in a gray zone.
[00:34:11] Unknown:
But we can open a bank account, but it would cost us around only to open the bank account, I guess, 10 k. And then I have a bank account. Yeah. And personally, I don't have a bank account. And then I ask myself why I need a bank account for my company when I can pay everything with crypto.
[00:34:27] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. I've I've heard of quite a lot of people using that, because I think there's no income tax. There's no capital gains tax. There's none of that stuff in Yeah. Which then presumably for running a company is actually pretty helpful.
[00:34:40] Unknown:
Yeah. For a privacy company like us, it's also pretty good because they are not required to collect personal details or that we have to collect account statements or anything.
[00:34:52] Unknown:
So that's also very, very good. There's a lot of thought that goes into this kind of stuff. Like, especially when it's companies, it's hard enough to, like, be a private individual who uses cryptocurrencies. But to actually run a business where you're helping others with that privacy and do things in a way where you don't end up in a box, but also you're making sure that people are looked after. It's quite a delicate dance with different company structures and clever ways of doing things. It's probably, I'm guessing, something that you had to sit and really play like a game of chess in your head to work it all out. Yeah. So
[00:35:33] Unknown:
our hardest part was to see which company form. And at first, we thought we will do one in The US because The US still offers very nice privacy setups for companies in Wyoming, for example. LLCs. LLCs. Exactly. And you pay, I guess, $200 a year for the company, and we pay way, way more for our company. But I'm not sure if US is currently the right place for a privacy company. We also thought about, to offer US locations for our servers, and even that idea is on hold right now because I wanna see if The US goes in the right direction, and I don't see that right now.
[00:36:22] Unknown:
Mhmm. My understanding with LLCs, this might be wrong. But if they have to have a lawyer attached to setting up the LLC and then if they get pressed for any reason or they get a request for information, they have to then give your information. So it's kind of like a a loosely private it's much more private than most, but it's still, like, under pressure, it all falls apart very quickly.
[00:36:50] Unknown:
Yeah. But in Nevis, for example, they do all records offline. So there is no way to do an online query if we exist really, blah blah blah. That's not possible.
[00:37:07] Unknown:
It all has to be physical.
[00:37:08] Unknown:
Did you have to travel there ever, or you No. No. No. No. We have a company which our agency has
[00:37:16] Unknown:
Okay. For that stuff. Yeah. It's not a bad place to, visit. I hear it's pretty beautiful. No. No. It's very nice. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:37:24] Unknown:
Exactly. Yeah. There's
[00:37:26] Unknown:
like I say, there's just so much that goes into this stuff, but it's, it's such a useful service. The more I think about trying to be able to move freely and have things that just work when you're running a business, and it just makes more and more sense. I still think people should run their own nodes and do their own things. But for the business side of it, it's so useful. The amount of struggles that I've had with just ungovernable misfits, just running this and dealing with the BCC pay and dealing with all the different bits, like the amount of times I've had things go down and not work and, cause issues and those issues of you of it going down or or the payments failing or whatever, and then you have people DMing and you're letting people down who are your listeners, and you don't want that. So it's not like, oh, I wanna make a payment. My notes down. Alright. Let me just fuck around with it for half an hour, and it would all be fine and, like, nothing's urgent. It's like, no. You'd like people need this to be working. Like, actually,
[00:38:30] Unknown:
it has to work. So what we do is we're also monitoring all our systems. You don't do that at home normally. So when something goes down, we get a notification and we can check it immediately. And in the best case, we get the notification before a customer knows that the service is down. So we can deal with that way before things get worse. Mhmm. We also have a lot of custom setups, which means they need more CPU, more memory, or more disk space, when you run a node, for example. So we are really flexible
[00:39:11] Unknown:
Mhmm. With everything here. And so say someone creates a setup with you guys, like the one I I mentioned previously, the sort of thing that we run currently. If they then expand, they need a bit more memory, they need a bit more storage, or, throw something random out there. They suddenly say, oh, we wanna host our own AI stuff or something like that. What would they do? Would they just message you and say, we wanna make some changes, make some adjustments, and there's a quotation, or is it all sort of managed through the website?
[00:39:44] Unknown:
Normally, you can open a ticket with us. We have a ticket system, and you can say, oh, I ran out of memory. I need more, and we offer you an upgrade. The upgrade is just the better package in most cases. But when we see you are trying to set up AI or need more, then sometimes we offer a dedicated server because we would have to charge much, much more for a VPS server than we would charge for a dedicated server.
[00:40:22] Unknown:
So a dedicated server would be you have a location, someone chooses a spec like they would if they're running at home, would they then buy that equipment or you're buying it and building it and then you're charging them depending on what they're running? For example, if I said to you, oh, I wanna run 10 different services. These are the services, and it's, like, relatively minor compared to I wanna run these 20 services, and they need to have a very powerful computer. Obviously, the charge is gonna be different. But is it rented in both cases? Is there an option for someone to buy it? Like, how does that work?
[00:41:01] Unknown:
It's rented at the moment, but we are thinking about offering a so called colocation service, which means you can send us your hardware or we buy the hardware for you and host it, but that's in the works now. Okay. Alright.
[00:41:20] Unknown:
Yeah. So for something like Uncomfortable Misfits then, maybe a dedicated server would be a smarter option as we sort of continue to grow and add more services on.
[00:41:34] Unknown:
Yes. Maybe. I mean, so when you have a dedicated server and you rung all your services on this server and the server goes down, you have to keep in mind that all your services are down. Sometimes it can be better if you that you wanna separate your BTCPay server, for example. So even if your website is down, someone can still donate with BTCPay.
[00:42:07] Unknown:
Yeah. That makes sense. If that then went down, you then have the backups. I know you have multiple locations. So if, like, one location you had an issue with, our services went down. Would there be a way to then take that back up and move it to another place and get it online relatively quickly?
[00:42:30] Unknown:
For the backups, I have to clarify this point. We do not back up customer stuff normally. So the customer has to to do backups. But when there is a backup, we can move it from Netherlands to Finland or wherever. That's all. No problem. So what we do with our backup, when you order a VPS server, you can also order a backup. So let's say you run a VPS server in Netherlands, and these backups are not stored in The Netherlands. These backups are stored in another off-site location.
[00:43:18] Unknown:
That's what we do. Okay. And those are those are also encrypted?
[00:43:24] Unknown:
Yeah. Those are encrypted with our GPG key, so there's no way to get any data out of it. Very cool.
[00:43:35] Unknown:
So, obviously, being like a a techie guy and into all the networking side and everything else, like, you probably have a quite different perspective with everything that's going on with Bitcoin and Monero. And, like, you mentioned, you might not want to, have services in America with what you're seeing. What's your perspective on what's going on and how happy are you with how Bitcoin's progressing, Monero's progressing, and our chances of having privacy in the future and being able to use these services properly?
[00:44:07] Unknown:
Yep. I guess we can, yeah, extend our services way more if we do it smartly. So that's the way we have to do it. So that's why we crossed out US, for example, and other locations. I mean, we have to check on daily basis which country can get more crazy than the other country. So, yeah, that's always work.
[00:44:39] Unknown:
Do you feel like, as a general rule, do you feel like there's more of an attack on privacy in Europe than there is in a lot of other places, or it sounds like maybe you think America's maybe slightly more difficult to deal with because my view has been and maybe this is wrong, but that Europe's just been a fucking hot mess for anything to do with privacy more so than America.
[00:45:07] Unknown:
I mean, from what I see now in America, we have much better freedom of speech situation Mhmm. Than we have in Europe. So in Europe, you post some strange meme and you go immediately to jail. We saw that in Germany and in, I guess, in UK as well. We don't see that in US. But what we see in The US is when you do some strange stuff with cryptocurrency, which they don't understand, for example. And, yeah, for hosting in The US, maybe they introduced KYC for everyone. At the moment, we don't have that in The US, but this was an idea from Trump when he was president in 02/2020.
He introduced the idea that he wants everyone to KYC for cloud services, which would mean even if you only have a free cloud service from Google, you have to do KYC with Google, which is absolutely crazy. So I'm not sure if Trump will follow-up on this, but if they do, then The US will go down with a lot of services, then Europe is better because in Europe, we do not have to KYC everything.
[00:46:37] Unknown:
And what about just more broadly in terms of Bitcoin and Monero use and development and what you're seeing? How do you feel about it all? Like, are there any things that are concerning you? Are there any things that you're excited about? Obviously, we've just had Whirlpool come back. That's a pretty massive win for for Bitcoin.
[00:46:57] Unknown:
Absolutely. I mean, we need these privacy tools for every coin, Not only for Bitcoin, for everything. And it's always great to see improvements on Bitcoin, Monero, or even Litecoin. Even if you don't use it, it's great to see that everything improves. And I'm not sure about The US right now with cryptocurrencies. I mean, on the public side, we see one thing. We try to to keep privacy. We want to keep our developers. And they're all free to develop non custodial solutions blah blah blah. And in the background, we see Tornado Cash and Samurai. So yeah. The background is the real war, I guess. So I'm really unsure how this will work out for The US.
In Europe, they also have crazy laws introduced now with MICA. I don't know if you follow MICA. So MICA, there's also the travel rule, which basically says when you accept more than €1,000 online, you have to do KYC on your customer, which is also crazy. Mental. But for us as a company on Saint Kitts And Nevis, we do not have to follow these rules. And that's also reason why we started our company on Nevis.
[00:48:20] Unknown:
Yeah. That travel rule is, is mental, especially when when you sort of think, like, a thousand euros. A thousand euros isn't a lot of money in today's money. Like, you know, a thousand euros is like
[00:48:37] Unknown:
A fucking phone. Yeah.
[00:48:39] Unknown:
Yeah. A phone, like, a big shop for the family for a week or two weeks or something if you're, like, eating good quality food. It's and also it's only gonna get worse, you know, as the value of these currencies continues to drop. It's it's just gets less and less. It gets to the point where, like, you pop down to the supermarket to go and grab a meal and that you're like Yeah. Having to do KYC for it. It's it's crazy.
[00:49:09] Unknown:
This is just basic stuff. It's not something complicated or strange.
[00:49:15] Unknown:
It's so weird. It just highlights why you'd need Bitcoin, why you need Monero, why you need services, where you can can use it and spend it. And one thing I've really liked, especially in Europe, it was very easy to do. It's just using all the gift card services and stuff like that. Like, Yeah. Having to use bank accounts less and less because that's something I I really leaned on. You know, my weekly shop, I used gift cards. Me as well. Yeah. You know? Like, I didn't have to go in with cash. That's the other thing. Like, cash is so, especially where I was in The UK, like, if you go in and you go and do any type of shopping for £500, a thousand, whatever, and you, like, hand over cash.
Yeah. Everyone's looking at you. It's like a really weird, Drug dealer. Yes. Literally, like, you pull cash out, and they're like, oh, you're definitely a drug dealer or a hitman or a prostitute. Yeah. You're like That's for sure. I can't know.
[00:50:14] Unknown:
Human trafficker.
[00:50:16] Unknown:
Yeah. Exactly. It's, it's so weird. So just being able to go you know, no one looks at you weird with a gift card, so that's quite nice. And Yeah. Visas, although I haven't tried those yet, Supposedly, that works pretty well, like preloaded Visa cards and stuff like that. Yeah.
[00:50:32] Unknown:
Always had troubles with the Visa cards, with the prepaid Visa cards. Me too. So for example, from the Bitcoin company, at least in Europe, I've heard from guys in US that don't have any issues with them. Mhmm. But in Europe, when I used to live in Europe, I always had troubles with them. Yeah. I have to say I heard that a lot, and that's what put me off from using them. But then set for privacy,
[00:51:02] Unknown:
I was speaking to him about this issue, and I was like, there must be a way that I can do the visas. He was like, you shouldn't have a problem. Like, we've got a really good setup and, you know, it should be fine. But, again, maybe that's because he said The US, but he was pretty confident that they have very little issues with them. So I have to give it a go because not for your services, but for just living life without these kind of things. It it makes it really difficult. It means that you have to then either find an exchange or someone that you can swap with for cash, and that introduces its own risks. So, yeah, they're pretty useful services.
[00:51:38] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. So the gift cards, bit refill is one I used a lot, and,
[00:51:45] Unknown:
coin cards. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the one that they accept, Monero, don't they? Yeah. Coin cards. Yeah. Yeah. I've used those a bit. They're pretty decent.
[00:51:55] Unknown:
Exactly.
[00:51:56] Unknown:
Yeah. So is there any other stuff that in Bitcoin and Monero land that you're particularly looking at, either that potentially is a problem or that you're excited about outside of the the Whirlpool stuff?
[00:52:08] Unknown:
Very good for the Bitcoin, guys. And for Monero, I followed a little bit the full chain membership proof. I guess this is a will be a big improvement for privacy.
[00:52:27] Unknown:
Seth's been explaining it to me a little bit on our Monero monthly. My understanding is rather than being one of nine inputs,
[00:52:36] Unknown:
it's like one of all. One of all. Yes. Yes. Yes.
[00:52:40] Unknown:
I'm no mathematician, but my understanding is the level of privacy there is a massive, massive jump. It's pretty Yeah. Cool. It's pretty awesome.
[00:52:50] Unknown:
Personally, I moved a lot to Monero. Now it's much easier for me. Because I used to try lightning, but it's like the prepaid cards. It doesn't really work for me. Bitcoin. Yeah. There was a problem with the coin join, etcetera. I wasn't sure if this is the smart way for me now. So I moved on to Monero. Mhmm. And Monero works not everywhere, but it works. Yeah.
[00:53:17] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm the same. Ever since, the samurai arrests, I've leaned more and more into it and just become more familiar with it. And I kinda like a combination of both.
[00:53:30] Unknown:
Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, for my savings, I have for my savings or the company savings, we have all in Bitcoin. But for the payments privately, I use Monero.
[00:53:42] Unknown:
Yeah. I still I use lightning a little bit for some payments. If I need to use Bitcoin and, you know, especially in the Bitcoin world dealing with a lot of the people that I deal with, they don't like Monero. I'll pay them in lightning if I can if I can get it to work over paying on chain. But it's just yeah. I don't know. I can probably do it better. Like, I could do my channel management better, or I could make some changes maybe. But, like, yesterday, I was making a load of payments with it, and I wanted to send, like, half a million cents. And I was like, do it. Payment failed. Time out. This problem. This problem. This problem. I sat there for about fifteen minutes trying to make a fucking payment, and then I was like, I'll just do less. Because a lot of the time, if I do a smaller amount, then it somehow works. I was like, right. I'll send 300,000.
And then that went through. And then I was like, okay. Now I'll send 200,000 and then that fails. And I'm like, okay. Now I'll send a 100,000 and then that works. And then two more fifties, that stuff like that. And I'm like, I just, I'm sure there's something I could do here, like having a larger channel or having more or something. But in comparison to just sending on chain, it's fucking
[00:54:51] Unknown:
I have the same with the company lightning node. It's horrible when I try to send something with lightning. I don't know why. When I first started the company, I used to accept only Bitcoin. Then we started with, I guess, it was Monero. Monero was the next one. And then, we got our first tickets. Hey, you fucking shitcoin company. I want a refund because you're not pure.
[00:55:25] Unknown:
Yeah. So funny sometimes. Yeah. There's a lot of that. Do you know what? I I think some of it because I get the odd bit of abuse or people trying to bait me into, like, arguing about it and all this kind of stuff. Yeah. I think a lot of it comes from, like, a either an insecurity where people are concerned about the value of Bitcoin, and they think, oh, everything's competing with it, so we must crush it because they're here for the money. I think if people are honest with themselves deep down, there's a part of that. And then there's also just, like, how much do you actually use cryptocurrency in your daily life? What I find is the people who don't really use it, but they're investing or they're, like, keyboard warriors and that kind of stuff, they're more on the, you know, Bitcoin only, everything else is shit on.
When you start to use this stuff every day, generally, people become a lot more like everything has its use, like you just said, which is exactly the same as me. Anything that we do with ungovernable misfits, any of my private savings is in Bitcoin or 99% of it is in Bitcoin. When I wanna spend and I wanna spend privately, if I can, I use Monero? If I can't, I use Lightning. If Lightning doesn't work, I use on chain because they're the best tools. Just like if I'm going out to my garden and I need to cut down a tree, I'm not gonna pick up a fucking spoon. It's just not smart.
[00:56:48] Unknown:
Exactly. Sometimes when I listen to Bitcoiners, the the real maxis, you hear, I'm an Austrian economics professor, and I'm for freedom. I'm for blah blah blah. And then I think, hey, dude. You're absolutely the opposite because you want to control people's choices. So you are pro currency dictatorship. Real freedom is having freedom of choice. So everyone can use everything for any payment. That's real freedom. It doesn't mean I have to accept it, but I can exchange it or swap it to anything else. So we need to have the choice.
[00:57:32] Unknown:
Yeah. Having the choice is important. And the only caveat I have is, like, some people who are on that, like, Bitcoin maxi camp side and, like, attack everything else. Some of them, I do think, are genuinely doing it to try and protect other people. They've been around and they've seen that, like, okay. 99% of this stuff that people buy and use is either technical garbage, gonna leak privacy and cause you problems, or at least lose you most of your money, and you'd have been much better off keeping it in Bitcoin. And as a general rule, that is kind of I mean, not kind of it is right, and they're potentially trying to protect other people. It's easy to say, oh, everything else is just a scam and bullshit. And then it's hard to be like, well, there are a couple of other things that can be useful. I think most of it comes from a good place. And, you know, I've gone through my stages of it as well where I was like, especially before the samurai arrests, I was like, I don't really need to use something else. Whirlpool's great. I just use that. If I wanna spend, I spend privately like that. This is cool. I don't need to fuck around with anything else. It was really after that that I started to think, okay. No. There are other tools. I need to start looking at the other things. And, also, this isn't a fucking game. There was an element of almost like, oh, this is a fantasy land. Like, yeah, I wanna be private, but, you know, nothing really can happen. You know? Like, we'll probably be fine. It's but it's sort of like a fun almost like a fun game to play.
And then you see good people get arrested for doing something like Whirlpool, which was such a fucking brilliant and necessary tool to be on Bitcoin and very openly doing it, you know, not hiding in the shadows, shadows, and they get arrested. And you're like, oh, okay. No. This isn't a game. And, like, the government around the world do not want this shit to work the way it needs to work. And, without Whirlpool, it was such a massive void. It was just like I was just looking at this whole system. I was like, oh, a a huge and incredibly important piece has just been taken out like that. I need to rethink things. Yeah. I guess the Samwise case changed
[00:59:45] Unknown:
a lot in the thinking of many Bitcoin privacy guys. This is absolutely crazy, the whole case. Because when he followed the Tornado Cash trial, I never used it. And I never used Ethereum, but I follow the case, and it's so crazy when you see the trial and their prosecutors, their proof, etcetera. Yeah. Ridiculous. It's really ridiculous. You really ask yourself, how can we win against such a corrupt system?
[01:00:15] Unknown:
Yeah. It's completely corrupt. We covered all this on the Freedom Tech Friday. I think it was Seth who was saying, like, one of the prosecutors, one of the account the, like, accounting people had done all these pie charts and graphs and what had been spent and where. And, like, none of it fucking added up. Things like that. Like, such basic stuff, like, not being able to add up. There's, like, a a flaw in the argument, like, a basic human rights flaw as well. And it's but it just goes ahead. And I think that's why so many people are drawn to this side of, like, Bitcoin of an era privacy and hosting your own stuff and doing all the stuff that we're talking about is, like, you know, the system's corrupt. You know it is. And you know that if they get you in a courtroom, even though they are the real criminals, there is a large chance that you end up in a box. Whether it's right or wrong, that's the the situation. So it's well, how do we avoid that in the first place? How do we avoid actually going up against a corrupt system?
And that is by using the tools that we've been talking about. And, also, like, outside of that, thinking about you know, it's not very cypherpunk thing to talk about, but, like, company structures. Yes. What type of accounts you have, flag theory. For sure. Yeah. Thinking about where you position yourself physically, that's the shit that you do. Because once you're in the courtroom, you're kind of at the will of the system that you've been trying to avoid anyway.
[01:01:48] Unknown:
Exactly. Yeah. I do the same. I check with a consultant on flag theory, for example. And he gave me also a lot of advice on how to set up my company and how to, store my wealth, etcetera. It's very important these days.
[01:02:08] Unknown:
I think I might know who you're talking about. Do you alright to say the name or not?
[01:02:14] Unknown:
No. You don't. I don't know if it's well known. I can send you the contact later if you're interested.
[01:02:21] Unknown:
I spoke to a guy. I won't say the name either, but I spoke to a guy at the parallel new police, and, I think he'd written a book about all this flag theory stuff. It's,
[01:02:31] Unknown:
Uri. Do you know Uri? No. No. It wasn't him. And there's Pavel
[01:02:38] Unknown:
Luketan. That's yeah. That was it. Pavel. Yeah. Pavel Luketan. I didn't know whether that's something that could be settled or not. But, yeah, it was it was him, Pavel. He seemed like he was pretty clued up. I mean, this was like He's a great guy. Must have been five years ago or more, and we did, like, a live recording at the conference there. And, yeah, he was going into all of it, and it's before I sort of because, you know, I've left The UK now, for many reasons, but the the basically, I just don't think it's a good place to live anymore. That conversation with him was probably the start of a lot of the the cogs turning of, like, yeah, you need to start thinking about where you are physically and where your businesses are and everything else. Yeah. So for me, for example, it's very important where I'm physically located,
[01:03:22] Unknown:
whereas my company's located, whereas my wealth located. So this reduces the risk and the attack point. Mhmm. This is very, very important in your life, and this combined with privacy, it's a good shield. Yeah. Definitely.
[01:03:38] Unknown:
Well, I would urge anybody who hasn't already to check out my Nimbox. You're gonna hear all the info in the ad reads and everything else that we're gonna be doing. I'd say that if anyone has any questions, I sort of tried to cover what you guys do from, like, a retard perspective, but there'll be things that we won't have covered and people will have questions. Where should people reach out if they wanna get in contact? What's the best way?
[01:04:07] Unknown:
So the best way when you're trying to contact us is by email. The address is [email protected]. We also have a signal account, my n y m box dot ten, number ten. And then we have a simple x address, but,
[01:04:28] Unknown:
I can't spell it now, but I can send it to you. We're gonna be moving our stuff over. As I said, we had hoped to do it before so I could give some sort of firsthand experience. But, Yeah. I, I will be doing it very soon, and I can talk to anyone if they wanna reach out to me as well about my experiences. But, I'm very happy that you've got this service running. It's something that we'll be using, and I'd strongly urge people to consider for all the reasons we've talked about not to go giving all of your personal details to all these different companies. It's it's just not smart. Use the tools. This is a very, very useful tool, a box of tools.
[01:05:06] Unknown:
So,
[01:05:07] Unknown:
yeah, definitely check it out. And, again, I just wanna thank you for helping support what we do at Ungovernable Misfits. Really is appreciated. It goes a long way to helping with all the editing and and creative side of things, so I appreciate you.
[01:05:22] Unknown:
Thank you. I really appreciate what you do at, Ungovernable Misfits. So it's a pleasure to be a sponsor, and it was a pleasure to be here. Hopefully, we'll do this again, and, I'll speak to you soon. I'd love to, speak soon.
[01:05:39] Unknown:
Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed that one. It was great chatting to RandomNim. If you haven't already checked out their services at myNimbox, go and have a look. We've got the links in the show notes. It's important that you don't give away all your details to all these different companies that don't necessarily secure your details safely or securely. You can pay in Bitcoin give nothing but an email address. That can be a burner. Just make sure that you have access to it in case they need to contact you. I've really enjoyed getting to know Random Nim. He's been extremely helpful.
And if you have any questions, any technical questions, reach out to him. Just ask. Just see what they can do. I think, basically, they can, they can be pretty flexible and do a lot of very clever and cool stuff. If you have any nontechnical questions, you can reach out to me. And I just wanna say a big thank you to all the listeners, everyone who's been sharing the episodes with friends and family, everyone who's been boosting and supporting the shows, and to the whole Ungovernable crew. This wouldn't be possible without you. If you haven't already checked out ungovernablemisfits.com, go and have a look. We have clothing, artwork, articles, all sorts on there, and that is all thanks to the incredible Mr. Crown.
Catch you on the next one, and stay ungovernable.
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless. Bitcoin. Now what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.
[00:00:42] Unknown:
Welcome back to another confab episode. Today's episode is with Random NIM. Random NIM runs my Nimbox. They have recently become a sponsor, and they offer services for hosting, servers, nodes, VPSs, all sorts of clever, techie stuff. And they host it all without gathering any information on you outside of an email address. They take Bitcoin, Monero, and I think basically every shitcoin there is out there and then convert them. It was really good to finally catch up with random NIM, have a conversation, and go into all sorts of different topics. I didn't necessarily think we would. Company structures, how to run a Bitcoin business, flag theory, all sorts of things like that. So, yeah, I really hope you enjoy it. I wanna say thank you to everyone who messaged in with XMR chats and boosts from the last Confab episode.
The last confab episode was with Kerim and John for Ragnarok. We got a hell of a lot of messages, and I'm just about to start recording with Seth for our Monera monthly. So I'm gonna rattle through these. Doctor Savargo with zero point zero one six x m r says, Max, it is unfortunate that dogs get hard forked. Perhaps that is partly what makes them sweet to be around. Yeah. You're right, mate. Thank you, to everyone who sent me messages after I had to put my dog down. I really do appreciate it. I've been unreasonably sad about it. I really, really love that dog. So, yeah, I did appreciate all the messages. That was very kind.
Doctors of Argo again. Vakarim, Ragnarok, you are on the correct path of discovery. Look into the ethical skeptical at ethical skeptical on x and Ben Davidson at sun weatherman on x. Ethical skeptic has an exo thermic core mantle decoupling, ECDO theory. I don't know what any of that means, mate, but it sounds clever. John with 21,000 sats. I've thought deeply since we recorded this. My thoughts are still the same as I laid out in the spiritual defense chapter. Stay right spiritually. Know God. Love your friends. Love your family.
Prepare both physically and spiritually. Love you all. Wise words as always from John. If you did miss that episode, by the way, make sure to go back and have a listen. It's a little bit different, and let's see. Let's see, how things play out, but it might be worth preparing to some extent. Business cat sends 11,000 sats. The world is waking up to the threats we've had hidden from us. Oh, yeah. I know business cat's into all this stuff. So, I need to speak to you business cat if you're listening to this. We need to, we need to jump on. Have a call.
Eightmith Randir with 7,777 sats says, Somehow I don't think Bitcoin fixes this. Otis Bitmire, thank you for your service, gentlemen. Whether this is the big one or not, the invitation still stands. Let's get busy building our own resilience and the resilience of our communities or die trying. Snick with 4200 says, what a great episode. Thank you for sharing your worries and conclusions. Spiritual protection for the win. Keep it up, guys. Godseth says, Thank you, gentlemen. This is a must listen. Block seven streamed 2,660 sats. Business cat streamed fifteen eighty sats. Nick Toshi streamed thirteen twenty sats.
Chill now one says initializing digital immortality protocol. Kerim based as fuck. Between stars and code, the universe whispers, cycle repeat. The ancients have fortified, plan, prepare, preserve for when the system shatters, to rebuild from the fragments. John knows the way. Heed his words. Will it be a minor glitch or the awakening of a new algorithm? Question mark. Thank you to Block seven for streaming, Chad Farrow for streaming, Riven Stokes, A Thousand Sats, Spain, April 2025, major part of the electrical power, 60% shutdown due to frequency instability, taking out also part of Portugal's grid. Eight or so people died from the shutdowns after a few hours.
We are definitely not prepared. Having said that, most of the security systems on the field that I have installed have protections to lightning SPD breakers and differentials. So maybe that helps TopPod. Richard Grieser streamed 660 sats. Turkey sent in 500 sats. Henipenny k sent 500 sats. Pies says, sorry for your loss of man's best friend, Max. Thank you, Pies. I appreciate it. He also says, y'all are some smart badass motherfuckers. Poopsicle with 300 sats. I hate that Thor movie. No. It's not what this is about. Godseth, to pay or not to pay my credit card bills.
A I b l e. Dang, Max. I'm sorry for the loss of your family. My condolences. Thank you, a I b l e. He also says amazing thought provoking discussion. I can't help but feel there's some parallels between Karim's thesis and Business Cat's discussion of the poll shifts on early rock paper Bitcoin and what that would entail for us. The advice of being well prepared and building community is excellent. Matthew twenty two thirty nine. Saying it's all part of God's plan isn't outlandish. It's very sensible. Thank you. God bless. God bless you, a I b l e. And, yeah, again, business cat or anyone who's in contact with business cat, give me a nudge. Let's jump on a pod.
Jean Everett says, just being honest, it's become quite frustrating using fountain. Fountain is terrible since the nosta comment merge thing. I can't reply to half the comments and things are just buggy too extreme. G never, you are not alone, mate. Many, many, many people are having problems. I, I often have problems myself. It is frustrating. There are other options out there. If you want some suggestions, I'm happy to ping those over, mate. Nostagang, a 101 sats. So, so sorry for your loss. Thank you. John Gold, a 100 sats. I fucking hate that you change the podcast cover all the time. I hate it.
Have lots of podcasts subscribed, and this sucks. Just fucking announce the new episode with the same cover art. Go fuck yourself. Well, go fuck yourself too, John. We'll continue doing what we do. I'm sorry if it, makes things a little bit more difficult for you, but we like the art. We like to have things layered. It's what we're about here, and we do try and have the same theme. We always have the yellow and the same kind of shape, and so hopefully you will be able to find them. Appreciate your stats. Thank you. And the bird the, is that the end? And the bird the sent 100 sets.
Right. That's all the boosts that has gone, we are doing a ten minute intro. Right. So I'll just do a quick thank you to our sponsors. Thank you to Foundation for supporting the show. You've been doing it for many years and also producing the best Bitcoin hardware out there. If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.xyz. Remember to use the code Ungovernable if you're going to buy one of these amazing devices. And if you have any questions, you can reach out to me or to q and a. We do cover a lot of the updates and things on the brief, but fully open source, beautifully designed, simple to use hardware from a great team who really get it. Check them out at foundation.xyzed.
And finally, a big thank you to Cake Wallet. Cake Wallet are one of the newest sponsors, but they have been absolutely on a tear recently. I feel like every week they've got new updates, new features. It's something I lean on very heavily these days, especially using Monero more. They have just an incredible team and our good friend Seth, for privacy, heading things up. If you want a decent mobile wallet or desktop wallet that you can run on Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android, I think basically every operating system that just works with a great team, with a great ethos.
Check them out at cakewallet.com. That's it for now. I hope you enjoy the show, and you can reach out to me with any questions. Welcome to the show, Random Nim. We've been speaking behind the scenes for a couple of months now, and you very kindly jumped on as a sponsor to help this. Whatever ungovernable misfits is going, and I massively appreciate that. What I haven't appreciated is the worst audio that I've ever heard in my entire life just before recording. You messaged me. I think it was yesterday. I was in a shitty mood yesterday, and it was like a message came through. I've secured a great headset for tomorrow.
My brain immediately was about to respond and go, oh, fucking hell. That gives me the shivers. Every time someone says they have a great headset, it's terrible. I thought, no. Don't be a cunt. Just don't be like that. Just say great and just be positive. But that little, spidey sense was right. I don't know what happened there, mate.
[00:11:23] Unknown:
Yeah. I've got a gaming headset for my son. It's Razer or something. Okay. Normally, it works really well, I guess, because he uses it on a daily basis. But, yeah, maybe on cubes OS, what I use, it's not the
[00:11:40] Unknown:
best option. Actually, to be fair, I've I've recorded with a couple of people who have used cubes, and we've had problems. That's like the cool, clever one that compartmentalizes everything and almost would it be fair to say it's almost like a a sort of phone in in that it sandboxes everything?
[00:12:00] Unknown:
Yes. Exactly. I use it for many, many things. So for example, I use it for VPNs. I don't have one VPN connection open. I have Mhmm. A lot of VPN connections open, always one connection to my company.
[00:12:18] Unknown:
And, yeah, that's how I use it. And do you use that as, like, an everyday operating system for everything?
[00:12:25] Unknown:
Yes. Yes. I I mean, I have a gaming PC as well, but it's isolated. And then I have my cubes OS workstation with, it's used on daily basis for Okay.
[00:12:39] Unknown:
Everything. Stuff. I'm still, one of these cucked Mac users for most stuff. Like, I I tried Linux. I tried Pop!OS. That's about the most usable thing I've got, and I use that for some, like, Bitcoin and, cryptocurrency related stuff. But I don't know. I find it, like, with all the audio and all the stuff that we do, like, the creative stuff, it's just a fucking pain in the ass. I mean, half of that is just me being retarded, but it's it's still I don't know. The cubes is more for, like, the hardcore privacy. This absolutely matters. It's like you cannot afford there to be any legal issue, especially with the type of work that you're doing. So that's why you would lean on something like that.
[00:13:26] Unknown:
Yeah. I'd say it's not only for privacy, guys. It's only it's also for developers. I know many developers uses Qubes OS for many, many reasons. So you can spin up a virtual box, and if you fucked up, you can delete it and create a new one very fast.
[00:13:50] Unknown:
Okay. Okay. That makes sense. Well, welcome to the show. Sorry for my digs about the audio. No. No. I fucked up, so it's not you. No. No. It's it's all good. No. And as I said, I I really do appreciate you giving us some support. Maybe people who are listening don't know everything that goes into making this show keep running, but the fact that you reached out and firstly said that you liked it and and secondly, that you'd like to support it was, yeah, put a big smile on my face, and it's it's taken a lot of pressure off the running of the thing. So we do appreciate that. It's very cool. And and to have a company you know, we have other companies reach out to us a lot, but we don't wanna work with them because most of these companies go against what we believe in. And Oh, yeah. We're like, okay. Yeah. Money would be helpful, but we're not gonna support you. We're not going to let any of our listeners be fooled or trapped or fucked over potentially by these companies. So when you reached out, I was really happy because it was on my list of, like, okay. Who can we work with?
It's a pretty short list. There's not many people who are doing things what I deem to be the right way and giving the ungovernable misfits what I think is a really useful service. We had planned that I'd start moving some of my services over to you guys before we recorded, but I know we've both been very busy and just it's not happened yet. But I look forward to that process and just slowly starting to piece together a more secure, more private setup that actually works. And I think as a lot of people who listen to the show are, like, growing and been around for a longer amount of time, they're realizing, like, you need to have a proper setup. You need to be able to have something that's solid to run BTCPay if you're running that, running nodes, VPNs, like, all this kind of stuff that people do. And a lot of the time, unfortunately, they're then paying in fear and giving their details across to companies that they probably shouldn't trust.
And then that creates links, and they can do all the clever shit that they want with Whirlpool and sends on Lightning and using Monero and whatever else they wanna do. But at the end of the day, they're tying their identity. And that's what I really like with you and what you guys are doing is you're creating an option for people to do this in, from my understanding, a very, very private and secure way.
[00:16:18] Unknown:
Yeah. Now our goal, only an email address. Even the email address hasn't to be verified, so you can use anything what you want. But in best case, you use a valid email address because sometimes we need to notify our users for, let's say, invoices or if we get some abuse notifications from our upstream providers, etcetera, etcetera, then a valid email address is very useful. So we don't need anything else. Just email address.
[00:17:03] Unknown:
Which is massive. Like, being able to do that and pay and I I think you you guys basically take all the cryptocurrencies but basically Bitcoin and Monero. And being able to use all of these different services, which I think we should probably jump into a little bit because a lot of people will know who you are, who listen to ungovernable misfits. We've talked about you even before the sponsorship. You're in a lot of the groups that people are in, so they know a little bit. But why don't we cover what exactly are the services that you provide? And then I'd like to hear why you started doing it and then got into, actually running it as a business because that's quite a big step for someone to take.
[00:17:46] Unknown:
It is. Yes. The reason why I started the company was because when you look at the Internet right now, the current state it's very politicized. Big tech companies are trying to remove freedom of expression, freedom of speech. My goal was to offer people Freedom Island. We do not collect any personal details except email, and we do not really care about political thinking. You can post whatever you want as long as it is legal, And we do not care about what you use, what you are doing. It must be legal. So as long as it is a legal framework, we allow everything. And I know many other providers, which are doing the same like we do Mhmm. But they try to push their political agenda to their customers.
So they take down domains Mhmm. If the users, probably some stuff they do not like, etcetera, etcetera. We don't do that. So we leave everything online.
[00:19:00] Unknown:
So that would be for hosting an email for hosting an email. Hosting a domain and running a website.
[00:19:07] Unknown:
Yeah. Hosting and domain.
[00:19:09] Unknown:
So if someone is like, we have on government misfits, there are some companies where you can go and pay with Bitcoin, but most people would go and they'd register and they give all their details and they pay in fiat currency. And what you're saying is that in that particular situation, if someone then sets up what we've got set up here and we say some a lot of things pretty much every day that people most people would probably not agree with, that we would then Yeah. Potentially risk being shut down or the hosting being stopped or whatever else. Whereas with you, that doesn't happen, and we don't have to give our personal details across, which is pretty helpful.
[00:19:53] Unknown:
Exactly. Yes. Even if we don't like the content, we can't always agree with all stuff, but we leave it online because, it's not not our interest to shut something down. We are here for freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and, yeah, everyone should enjoy the service how it is. Yeah.
[00:20:19] Unknown:
And so you do the hosting. People can build a website, host it with you. From my understanding, people can run servers that you host. So things that spring to mind for me would be like running nodes that are stable, either Monero or Bitcoin or maybe lightning nodes. All of those things would be something where it can be a lot more stable. You know, like, we went through a a long time where people were messing around with myself included, like, trying to run nodes on Raspberry Pis and running them at home and having problems. And, like, that's fine if you're doing one or two transactions a month, and it's very low use and you're just tinkering. But when you're running a business, you need the uptime. You need everything to work correctly.
I personally think it's pretty difficult to do it without doing it hosted. Like, we host ours. We, I think we currently use Luna Node, which is kind of like it's been okay. It's been pretty stable. We'll move that across to you guys, but I wouldn't really consider running this stuff myself for the business side. I just I think it's, more pain than I can take and too much tinkering.
[00:21:34] Unknown:
It's there for businesses. It's the uptime is what matters. And we also have I guess, we have a lot of digital nomads. They are not able to run a node at home. So they also need something which is twenty four seven online, and they use our VPS nodes, for example, or some dedicated servers for, older stuff, not only nodes, that they use it for cloud services or email services, etcetera, etcetera.
[00:22:08] Unknown:
Yeah. I I've been thinking about about that a lot, actually. Like, you've got the digital nomads. They can't necessarily run a node unless they've got, like, a a friendly parent or someone that will sit in a in a cupboard or something like that. But then if it goes down, it's like you're trying to talk them through, like, okay. Do this and do that and, like, it could be a bit of a fucking pain in the ass. But not only that, like, the Bitcoin and Monero types are also into this kind of, like, prepping to some extent. Like, not the prepping where you have an underground cave and, like, you take it to the absolute extreme, but just maybe they have a go back. Maybe they think, oh, okay. If things kick off where I'm living, I need to be able to get out of here. Maybe they consider in a disaster situation, how do they make sure they have their seed words and everything they need to just get the fuck out. Exactly. If you're running a node in the same country that you're in, in the same place that you're in, in the house you're in, that you're gonna try and escape, that can potentially be an issue in a in of itself because how do you connect? Where do you get your backups from? Like, all that kind of stuff. I've been thinking about that more recently. It's it's like we talk about decentralization.
That's kind of the opposite.
[00:23:24] Unknown:
Yeah. And another very, very good use case is off-site backup. So even if you self host at home, you should consider some kind of backup solution, and we offer that as well with a VPS server. So you can copy your stuff to our VPS server only for backup reasons, not for daily usage. And this can be a use case as well, or some people are a target for whatever reason, and it's maybe also better to use our services and not do self hosting.
[00:24:14] Unknown:
It's interesting, like, to look at it that way because I guess there's part of my brain that sort of says, if you're into this Bitcoin stuff, you should rely on yourself and you shouldn't outsource responsibility. There's kind of like a conflict there. There's part of my brain which thinks because I'm not technical, I don't really want to trust others or put trust in others with something that really matters to me because I don't understand it deeply enough to know whether I'm leaking information about myself to someone that I don't know. If we take it to the extreme and we say, okay. As a host, you're trying to be malicious.
You're trying to gather data on me. I'm running all these services and, like, worst case scenario, you're a bad guy. How does it work technically to put my mind at rest? And I'm sure others, like, what steps and measures do you take so that if I'm making transactions, I'm running these nodes, I've got websites running, I've got all this stuff that I'm not suddenly potentially shooting myself in the foot.
[00:25:22] Unknown:
Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, there's a concept called zero trust network. So this basically means you shouldn't trust your home network as well. Because even in your home network, there can be some malicious stuff installed or some guy try to enter it every day, etcetera, etcetera. So, basically, you can use us, or all your home network, which is also not really a 100% trusted. But when you use us, you can install a VPS server. It's a virtual private server and use full disk encryption, which means the whole disk is encrypted with your key. And in this situation, we don't have any access to your VPS server. We can't do anything with this.
[00:26:18] Unknown:
Okay. And so any traffic coming in, any traffic going out, you can't see. And if I'm sending a transaction from your service, you can't see that either. You would be unaware of what I'm doing. And
[00:26:35] Unknown:
I guess we have a misunderstanding. We see the traffic, so we can if you use your real IP, we have the real IP. So you should use always VPN with us, or you can use Tor or I two p. So we offer all these ways. So
[00:27:01] Unknown:
What I'm sort of getting at is if I'm accessing my service that you're hosting, anything that I'm doing with that service, sending transactions, whatever else, you can't see within that because that is encrypted. Exactly. Yes. Okay. Alright. Yeah. So in in that case, like, if you were trying to attack your own setup, are there any flaws or trade offs with hosting versus doing it yourself at home with the exception of, I assume, cost? Because my assumption is if you've already got a server or computer at home that could run most of these services, it's going to be cheaper than hosting. Is there anything else where you think there's a trade off there?
[00:27:50] Unknown:
For self hosting or for a service?
[00:27:53] Unknown:
In comparison with the two, if someone's listening to this and they're like, I need a, let's just say, Bitcoin node, Monero node, I need BTCPay, I need a lightning node set up, I host a website, and I don't know what else. Let's call it that for now. Can I run one at home or run one with you guys? There's obviously some great points with hosting with you guys, like uptime, like what we talked about in disaster situations, like having things spread out and decentralized. But outside of cost, is there anything where you think, okay, there is a trade off here?
[00:28:35] Unknown:
I mean, a trade off is it's not really a trade off. But in any case, you should consider how do you manage your backups. So when you do a self hosting solution, you also need backup. So a local copy is maybe not only the not always the best solution. So, maybe off-site backup is needed here as well. For our services, yeah, you have to trust us, and a trade off can be when you use our VPS servers. A VPS server is a slice of a huge server. And let's let's assume some guy does some, stuff which is not really nice and the law enforcement shuts down our whole node, then the trade off here is your node goes down as well. So when you take down the whole machines, this is the biggest trade off, I guess. Yeah. That's where why we always recommend to do a full disk encryption, which when the law enforcement checks the whole server, at least they can't go to your as it is encrypted.
[00:29:34] Unknown:
Okay. In that worst case scenario, you've got full disk encryption. Someone else is also using the same server to do something that law enforcement thinks they shouldn't. The plug gets pulled. Although they can't actually access your data, your node has gone down. In that situation, you would do what? You would take your backup
[00:29:57] Unknown:
Mhmm. And Yeah. We try to restore everything. I mean, normally, the law enforcement is let's I wouldn't say nice, but inform us, hey. You have some malicious guy on the server. We need the copy from his VPS server so they don't come to the data center and take the whole node down the informers in front and say, give us just a copy of the VPS server. So then then it depends on us if we give them the copy or not. When we do not give them the copy, then the chances are pretty high that they will come and shut down the whole server.
[00:30:28] Unknown:
And that would be because that server's hosting a website, which they then think that something is illegal or whatever else.
[00:30:38] Unknown:
Yeah. Maybe darknet markets. They hate darknet markets.
[00:30:43] Unknown:
Yeah. Okay. And so why did you get into running this as a business? Was it something that you were already, like, really heavily into, like, networking stuff and computers and servers and all this kind of clever techy things. Were you always into it?
[00:31:01] Unknown:
Yeah. I've always been, from the hosting scene and, yeah, this was the idea to do it again, to restart my hosting business. I already ran a hosting business years ago. It was an email hosting service, hosting service, which was a very good one, and then I shut it down because it was not that much used and yeah. So now, I guess, it's five years later I started. So I have a lot of knowledge about how the hosting team works, how, providers works, how networking works. I have the connections to some providers, etcetera, etcetera. So and you can't do that as a private person because you need a company set up. So we have a little bit more complicated company set up as the most others, and have we run our own network in The Netherlands. So for that, you need a company as well. It's also not possible when you own your own IP ranges and your own network, so you need to be a company. Yeah. That's all some reasons why you need a company.
[00:31:57] Unknown:
And then I guess, with your involvement with cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Monero, etcetera, that's where that link comes in where you're like, ah, okay. I can actually take these payments without gathering all of these payment details. That's like a massive,
[00:32:13] Unknown:
because how else the how else do you fucking do it? Someone have to send you cash? To be honest with you, we have we run the companies on sand, kids, and navies, if you know that. Yeah. So when you'd be an offshore company, the chances are pretty low that you get a normal bank account. So we have no other chance to other than take cryptocurrencies. We started with Bitcoin only. Then we have the first ticket. Why you don't take Litecoin? We would like to pay you on with Litecoin. So we started with Litecoin and Lightning, and now we take nearly everything, which doesn't mean we like everything, but we take everything.
And I guess it's also we support with this the freedom of choice because, yeah, everyone can use what he likes to pay.
[00:32:55] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll lean more and more that way as time goes on. Just fucking let people do what they wanna do. People use what they wanna use. Yeah. Exactly. Convert it. Yeah. People look down their nose if If someone says, oh, yeah. We accept all these different currencies or we support all these different currencies. They sort of sit on their high horse about it. And then it's like, well, hang on a minute. You have a business and you accept US dollars and British pounds and everything else. You talk about how terrible they are, but you still accept them. And now you're saying that these other shit coins are, like, terrible, and you won't accept them because they're terrible. It's like, well, it's
[00:33:36] Unknown:
like it it seems a bit silly. I mean, the most shit coins are really terrible for our privacy. So it Yeah. But, yeah, we we accept them and we convert them into Bitcoin or Monero. Mhmm. Because we are lucky enough to we can pay our upstream providers with cryptocurrencies and not with normal bank stuff. So, yeah, we try to build everything around our cryptocurrency world. So yeah. Which works, but it's a harder way.
[00:34:01] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And and Saint Kitts And Nevis, you can't get the bank accounts because it's kind of like a tax haven, isn't it? It's in a gray zone.
[00:34:11] Unknown:
But we can open a bank account, but it would cost us around only to open the bank account, I guess, 10 k. And then I have a bank account. Yeah. And personally, I don't have a bank account. And then I ask myself why I need a bank account for my company when I can pay everything with crypto.
[00:34:27] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. I've I've heard of quite a lot of people using that, because I think there's no income tax. There's no capital gains tax. There's none of that stuff in Yeah. Which then presumably for running a company is actually pretty helpful.
[00:34:40] Unknown:
Yeah. For a privacy company like us, it's also pretty good because they are not required to collect personal details or that we have to collect account statements or anything.
[00:34:52] Unknown:
So that's also very, very good. There's a lot of thought that goes into this kind of stuff. Like, especially when it's companies, it's hard enough to, like, be a private individual who uses cryptocurrencies. But to actually run a business where you're helping others with that privacy and do things in a way where you don't end up in a box, but also you're making sure that people are looked after. It's quite a delicate dance with different company structures and clever ways of doing things. It's probably, I'm guessing, something that you had to sit and really play like a game of chess in your head to work it all out. Yeah. So
[00:35:33] Unknown:
our hardest part was to see which company form. And at first, we thought we will do one in The US because The US still offers very nice privacy setups for companies in Wyoming, for example. LLCs. LLCs. Exactly. And you pay, I guess, $200 a year for the company, and we pay way, way more for our company. But I'm not sure if US is currently the right place for a privacy company. We also thought about, to offer US locations for our servers, and even that idea is on hold right now because I wanna see if The US goes in the right direction, and I don't see that right now.
[00:36:22] Unknown:
Mhmm. My understanding with LLCs, this might be wrong. But if they have to have a lawyer attached to setting up the LLC and then if they get pressed for any reason or they get a request for information, they have to then give your information. So it's kind of like a a loosely private it's much more private than most, but it's still, like, under pressure, it all falls apart very quickly.
[00:36:50] Unknown:
Yeah. But in Nevis, for example, they do all records offline. So there is no way to do an online query if we exist really, blah blah blah. That's not possible.
[00:37:07] Unknown:
It all has to be physical.
[00:37:08] Unknown:
Did you have to travel there ever, or you No. No. No. No. We have a company which our agency has
[00:37:16] Unknown:
Okay. For that stuff. Yeah. It's not a bad place to, visit. I hear it's pretty beautiful. No. No. It's very nice. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:37:24] Unknown:
Exactly. Yeah. There's
[00:37:26] Unknown:
like I say, there's just so much that goes into this stuff, but it's, it's such a useful service. The more I think about trying to be able to move freely and have things that just work when you're running a business, and it just makes more and more sense. I still think people should run their own nodes and do their own things. But for the business side of it, it's so useful. The amount of struggles that I've had with just ungovernable misfits, just running this and dealing with the BCC pay and dealing with all the different bits, like the amount of times I've had things go down and not work and, cause issues and those issues of you of it going down or or the payments failing or whatever, and then you have people DMing and you're letting people down who are your listeners, and you don't want that. So it's not like, oh, I wanna make a payment. My notes down. Alright. Let me just fuck around with it for half an hour, and it would all be fine and, like, nothing's urgent. It's like, no. You'd like people need this to be working. Like, actually,
[00:38:30] Unknown:
it has to work. So what we do is we're also monitoring all our systems. You don't do that at home normally. So when something goes down, we get a notification and we can check it immediately. And in the best case, we get the notification before a customer knows that the service is down. So we can deal with that way before things get worse. Mhmm. We also have a lot of custom setups, which means they need more CPU, more memory, or more disk space, when you run a node, for example. So we are really flexible
[00:39:11] Unknown:
Mhmm. With everything here. And so say someone creates a setup with you guys, like the one I I mentioned previously, the sort of thing that we run currently. If they then expand, they need a bit more memory, they need a bit more storage, or, throw something random out there. They suddenly say, oh, we wanna host our own AI stuff or something like that. What would they do? Would they just message you and say, we wanna make some changes, make some adjustments, and there's a quotation, or is it all sort of managed through the website?
[00:39:44] Unknown:
Normally, you can open a ticket with us. We have a ticket system, and you can say, oh, I ran out of memory. I need more, and we offer you an upgrade. The upgrade is just the better package in most cases. But when we see you are trying to set up AI or need more, then sometimes we offer a dedicated server because we would have to charge much, much more for a VPS server than we would charge for a dedicated server.
[00:40:22] Unknown:
So a dedicated server would be you have a location, someone chooses a spec like they would if they're running at home, would they then buy that equipment or you're buying it and building it and then you're charging them depending on what they're running? For example, if I said to you, oh, I wanna run 10 different services. These are the services, and it's, like, relatively minor compared to I wanna run these 20 services, and they need to have a very powerful computer. Obviously, the charge is gonna be different. But is it rented in both cases? Is there an option for someone to buy it? Like, how does that work?
[00:41:01] Unknown:
It's rented at the moment, but we are thinking about offering a so called colocation service, which means you can send us your hardware or we buy the hardware for you and host it, but that's in the works now. Okay. Alright.
[00:41:20] Unknown:
Yeah. So for something like Uncomfortable Misfits then, maybe a dedicated server would be a smarter option as we sort of continue to grow and add more services on.
[00:41:34] Unknown:
Yes. Maybe. I mean, so when you have a dedicated server and you rung all your services on this server and the server goes down, you have to keep in mind that all your services are down. Sometimes it can be better if you that you wanna separate your BTCPay server, for example. So even if your website is down, someone can still donate with BTCPay.
[00:42:07] Unknown:
Yeah. That makes sense. If that then went down, you then have the backups. I know you have multiple locations. So if, like, one location you had an issue with, our services went down. Would there be a way to then take that back up and move it to another place and get it online relatively quickly?
[00:42:30] Unknown:
For the backups, I have to clarify this point. We do not back up customer stuff normally. So the customer has to to do backups. But when there is a backup, we can move it from Netherlands to Finland or wherever. That's all. No problem. So what we do with our backup, when you order a VPS server, you can also order a backup. So let's say you run a VPS server in Netherlands, and these backups are not stored in The Netherlands. These backups are stored in another off-site location.
[00:43:18] Unknown:
That's what we do. Okay. And those are those are also encrypted?
[00:43:24] Unknown:
Yeah. Those are encrypted with our GPG key, so there's no way to get any data out of it. Very cool.
[00:43:35] Unknown:
So, obviously, being like a a techie guy and into all the networking side and everything else, like, you probably have a quite different perspective with everything that's going on with Bitcoin and Monero. And, like, you mentioned, you might not want to, have services in America with what you're seeing. What's your perspective on what's going on and how happy are you with how Bitcoin's progressing, Monero's progressing, and our chances of having privacy in the future and being able to use these services properly?
[00:44:07] Unknown:
Yep. I guess we can, yeah, extend our services way more if we do it smartly. So that's the way we have to do it. So that's why we crossed out US, for example, and other locations. I mean, we have to check on daily basis which country can get more crazy than the other country. So, yeah, that's always work.
[00:44:39] Unknown:
Do you feel like, as a general rule, do you feel like there's more of an attack on privacy in Europe than there is in a lot of other places, or it sounds like maybe you think America's maybe slightly more difficult to deal with because my view has been and maybe this is wrong, but that Europe's just been a fucking hot mess for anything to do with privacy more so than America.
[00:45:07] Unknown:
I mean, from what I see now in America, we have much better freedom of speech situation Mhmm. Than we have in Europe. So in Europe, you post some strange meme and you go immediately to jail. We saw that in Germany and in, I guess, in UK as well. We don't see that in US. But what we see in The US is when you do some strange stuff with cryptocurrency, which they don't understand, for example. And, yeah, for hosting in The US, maybe they introduced KYC for everyone. At the moment, we don't have that in The US, but this was an idea from Trump when he was president in 02/2020.
He introduced the idea that he wants everyone to KYC for cloud services, which would mean even if you only have a free cloud service from Google, you have to do KYC with Google, which is absolutely crazy. So I'm not sure if Trump will follow-up on this, but if they do, then The US will go down with a lot of services, then Europe is better because in Europe, we do not have to KYC everything.
[00:46:37] Unknown:
And what about just more broadly in terms of Bitcoin and Monero use and development and what you're seeing? How do you feel about it all? Like, are there any things that are concerning you? Are there any things that you're excited about? Obviously, we've just had Whirlpool come back. That's a pretty massive win for for Bitcoin.
[00:46:57] Unknown:
Absolutely. I mean, we need these privacy tools for every coin, Not only for Bitcoin, for everything. And it's always great to see improvements on Bitcoin, Monero, or even Litecoin. Even if you don't use it, it's great to see that everything improves. And I'm not sure about The US right now with cryptocurrencies. I mean, on the public side, we see one thing. We try to to keep privacy. We want to keep our developers. And they're all free to develop non custodial solutions blah blah blah. And in the background, we see Tornado Cash and Samurai. So yeah. The background is the real war, I guess. So I'm really unsure how this will work out for The US.
In Europe, they also have crazy laws introduced now with MICA. I don't know if you follow MICA. So MICA, there's also the travel rule, which basically says when you accept more than €1,000 online, you have to do KYC on your customer, which is also crazy. Mental. But for us as a company on Saint Kitts And Nevis, we do not have to follow these rules. And that's also reason why we started our company on Nevis.
[00:48:20] Unknown:
Yeah. That travel rule is, is mental, especially when when you sort of think, like, a thousand euros. A thousand euros isn't a lot of money in today's money. Like, you know, a thousand euros is like
[00:48:37] Unknown:
A fucking phone. Yeah.
[00:48:39] Unknown:
Yeah. A phone, like, a big shop for the family for a week or two weeks or something if you're, like, eating good quality food. It's and also it's only gonna get worse, you know, as the value of these currencies continues to drop. It's it's just gets less and less. It gets to the point where, like, you pop down to the supermarket to go and grab a meal and that you're like Yeah. Having to do KYC for it. It's it's crazy.
[00:49:09] Unknown:
This is just basic stuff. It's not something complicated or strange.
[00:49:15] Unknown:
It's so weird. It just highlights why you'd need Bitcoin, why you need Monero, why you need services, where you can can use it and spend it. And one thing I've really liked, especially in Europe, it was very easy to do. It's just using all the gift card services and stuff like that. Like, Yeah. Having to use bank accounts less and less because that's something I I really leaned on. You know, my weekly shop, I used gift cards. Me as well. Yeah. You know? Like, I didn't have to go in with cash. That's the other thing. Like, cash is so, especially where I was in The UK, like, if you go in and you go and do any type of shopping for £500, a thousand, whatever, and you, like, hand over cash.
Yeah. Everyone's looking at you. It's like a really weird, Drug dealer. Yes. Literally, like, you pull cash out, and they're like, oh, you're definitely a drug dealer or a hitman or a prostitute. Yeah. You're like That's for sure. I can't know.
[00:50:14] Unknown:
Human trafficker.
[00:50:16] Unknown:
Yeah. Exactly. It's, it's so weird. So just being able to go you know, no one looks at you weird with a gift card, so that's quite nice. And Yeah. Visas, although I haven't tried those yet, Supposedly, that works pretty well, like preloaded Visa cards and stuff like that. Yeah.
[00:50:32] Unknown:
Always had troubles with the Visa cards, with the prepaid Visa cards. Me too. So for example, from the Bitcoin company, at least in Europe, I've heard from guys in US that don't have any issues with them. Mhmm. But in Europe, when I used to live in Europe, I always had troubles with them. Yeah. I have to say I heard that a lot, and that's what put me off from using them. But then set for privacy,
[00:51:02] Unknown:
I was speaking to him about this issue, and I was like, there must be a way that I can do the visas. He was like, you shouldn't have a problem. Like, we've got a really good setup and, you know, it should be fine. But, again, maybe that's because he said The US, but he was pretty confident that they have very little issues with them. So I have to give it a go because not for your services, but for just living life without these kind of things. It it makes it really difficult. It means that you have to then either find an exchange or someone that you can swap with for cash, and that introduces its own risks. So, yeah, they're pretty useful services.
[00:51:38] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. So the gift cards, bit refill is one I used a lot, and,
[00:51:45] Unknown:
coin cards. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the one that they accept, Monero, don't they? Yeah. Coin cards. Yeah. Yeah. I've used those a bit. They're pretty decent.
[00:51:55] Unknown:
Exactly.
[00:51:56] Unknown:
Yeah. So is there any other stuff that in Bitcoin and Monero land that you're particularly looking at, either that potentially is a problem or that you're excited about outside of the the Whirlpool stuff?
[00:52:08] Unknown:
Very good for the Bitcoin, guys. And for Monero, I followed a little bit the full chain membership proof. I guess this is a will be a big improvement for privacy.
[00:52:27] Unknown:
Seth's been explaining it to me a little bit on our Monero monthly. My understanding is rather than being one of nine inputs,
[00:52:36] Unknown:
it's like one of all. One of all. Yes. Yes. Yes.
[00:52:40] Unknown:
I'm no mathematician, but my understanding is the level of privacy there is a massive, massive jump. It's pretty Yeah. Cool. It's pretty awesome.
[00:52:50] Unknown:
Personally, I moved a lot to Monero. Now it's much easier for me. Because I used to try lightning, but it's like the prepaid cards. It doesn't really work for me. Bitcoin. Yeah. There was a problem with the coin join, etcetera. I wasn't sure if this is the smart way for me now. So I moved on to Monero. Mhmm. And Monero works not everywhere, but it works. Yeah.
[00:53:17] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm the same. Ever since, the samurai arrests, I've leaned more and more into it and just become more familiar with it. And I kinda like a combination of both.
[00:53:30] Unknown:
Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, for my savings, I have for my savings or the company savings, we have all in Bitcoin. But for the payments privately, I use Monero.
[00:53:42] Unknown:
Yeah. I still I use lightning a little bit for some payments. If I need to use Bitcoin and, you know, especially in the Bitcoin world dealing with a lot of the people that I deal with, they don't like Monero. I'll pay them in lightning if I can if I can get it to work over paying on chain. But it's just yeah. I don't know. I can probably do it better. Like, I could do my channel management better, or I could make some changes maybe. But, like, yesterday, I was making a load of payments with it, and I wanted to send, like, half a million cents. And I was like, do it. Payment failed. Time out. This problem. This problem. This problem. I sat there for about fifteen minutes trying to make a fucking payment, and then I was like, I'll just do less. Because a lot of the time, if I do a smaller amount, then it somehow works. I was like, right. I'll send 300,000.
And then that went through. And then I was like, okay. Now I'll send 200,000 and then that fails. And I'm like, okay. Now I'll send a 100,000 and then that works. And then two more fifties, that stuff like that. And I'm like, I just, I'm sure there's something I could do here, like having a larger channel or having more or something. But in comparison to just sending on chain, it's fucking
[00:54:51] Unknown:
I have the same with the company lightning node. It's horrible when I try to send something with lightning. I don't know why. When I first started the company, I used to accept only Bitcoin. Then we started with, I guess, it was Monero. Monero was the next one. And then, we got our first tickets. Hey, you fucking shitcoin company. I want a refund because you're not pure.
[00:55:25] Unknown:
Yeah. So funny sometimes. Yeah. There's a lot of that. Do you know what? I I think some of it because I get the odd bit of abuse or people trying to bait me into, like, arguing about it and all this kind of stuff. Yeah. I think a lot of it comes from, like, a either an insecurity where people are concerned about the value of Bitcoin, and they think, oh, everything's competing with it, so we must crush it because they're here for the money. I think if people are honest with themselves deep down, there's a part of that. And then there's also just, like, how much do you actually use cryptocurrency in your daily life? What I find is the people who don't really use it, but they're investing or they're, like, keyboard warriors and that kind of stuff, they're more on the, you know, Bitcoin only, everything else is shit on.
When you start to use this stuff every day, generally, people become a lot more like everything has its use, like you just said, which is exactly the same as me. Anything that we do with ungovernable misfits, any of my private savings is in Bitcoin or 99% of it is in Bitcoin. When I wanna spend and I wanna spend privately, if I can, I use Monero? If I can't, I use Lightning. If Lightning doesn't work, I use on chain because they're the best tools. Just like if I'm going out to my garden and I need to cut down a tree, I'm not gonna pick up a fucking spoon. It's just not smart.
[00:56:48] Unknown:
Exactly. Sometimes when I listen to Bitcoiners, the the real maxis, you hear, I'm an Austrian economics professor, and I'm for freedom. I'm for blah blah blah. And then I think, hey, dude. You're absolutely the opposite because you want to control people's choices. So you are pro currency dictatorship. Real freedom is having freedom of choice. So everyone can use everything for any payment. That's real freedom. It doesn't mean I have to accept it, but I can exchange it or swap it to anything else. So we need to have the choice.
[00:57:32] Unknown:
Yeah. Having the choice is important. And the only caveat I have is, like, some people who are on that, like, Bitcoin maxi camp side and, like, attack everything else. Some of them, I do think, are genuinely doing it to try and protect other people. They've been around and they've seen that, like, okay. 99% of this stuff that people buy and use is either technical garbage, gonna leak privacy and cause you problems, or at least lose you most of your money, and you'd have been much better off keeping it in Bitcoin. And as a general rule, that is kind of I mean, not kind of it is right, and they're potentially trying to protect other people. It's easy to say, oh, everything else is just a scam and bullshit. And then it's hard to be like, well, there are a couple of other things that can be useful. I think most of it comes from a good place. And, you know, I've gone through my stages of it as well where I was like, especially before the samurai arrests, I was like, I don't really need to use something else. Whirlpool's great. I just use that. If I wanna spend, I spend privately like that. This is cool. I don't need to fuck around with anything else. It was really after that that I started to think, okay. No. There are other tools. I need to start looking at the other things. And, also, this isn't a fucking game. There was an element of almost like, oh, this is a fantasy land. Like, yeah, I wanna be private, but, you know, nothing really can happen. You know? Like, we'll probably be fine. It's but it's sort of like a fun almost like a fun game to play.
And then you see good people get arrested for doing something like Whirlpool, which was such a fucking brilliant and necessary tool to be on Bitcoin and very openly doing it, you know, not hiding in the shadows, shadows, and they get arrested. And you're like, oh, okay. No. This isn't a game. And, like, the government around the world do not want this shit to work the way it needs to work. And, without Whirlpool, it was such a massive void. It was just like I was just looking at this whole system. I was like, oh, a a huge and incredibly important piece has just been taken out like that. I need to rethink things. Yeah. I guess the Samwise case changed
[00:59:45] Unknown:
a lot in the thinking of many Bitcoin privacy guys. This is absolutely crazy, the whole case. Because when he followed the Tornado Cash trial, I never used it. And I never used Ethereum, but I follow the case, and it's so crazy when you see the trial and their prosecutors, their proof, etcetera. Yeah. Ridiculous. It's really ridiculous. You really ask yourself, how can we win against such a corrupt system?
[01:00:15] Unknown:
Yeah. It's completely corrupt. We covered all this on the Freedom Tech Friday. I think it was Seth who was saying, like, one of the prosecutors, one of the account the, like, accounting people had done all these pie charts and graphs and what had been spent and where. And, like, none of it fucking added up. Things like that. Like, such basic stuff, like, not being able to add up. There's, like, a a flaw in the argument, like, a basic human rights flaw as well. And it's but it just goes ahead. And I think that's why so many people are drawn to this side of, like, Bitcoin of an era privacy and hosting your own stuff and doing all the stuff that we're talking about is, like, you know, the system's corrupt. You know it is. And you know that if they get you in a courtroom, even though they are the real criminals, there is a large chance that you end up in a box. Whether it's right or wrong, that's the the situation. So it's well, how do we avoid that in the first place? How do we avoid actually going up against a corrupt system?
And that is by using the tools that we've been talking about. And, also, like, outside of that, thinking about you know, it's not very cypherpunk thing to talk about, but, like, company structures. Yes. What type of accounts you have, flag theory. For sure. Yeah. Thinking about where you position yourself physically, that's the shit that you do. Because once you're in the courtroom, you're kind of at the will of the system that you've been trying to avoid anyway.
[01:01:48] Unknown:
Exactly. Yeah. I do the same. I check with a consultant on flag theory, for example. And he gave me also a lot of advice on how to set up my company and how to, store my wealth, etcetera. It's very important these days.
[01:02:08] Unknown:
I think I might know who you're talking about. Do you alright to say the name or not?
[01:02:14] Unknown:
No. You don't. I don't know if it's well known. I can send you the contact later if you're interested.
[01:02:21] Unknown:
I spoke to a guy. I won't say the name either, but I spoke to a guy at the parallel new police, and, I think he'd written a book about all this flag theory stuff. It's,
[01:02:31] Unknown:
Uri. Do you know Uri? No. No. It wasn't him. And there's Pavel
[01:02:38] Unknown:
Luketan. That's yeah. That was it. Pavel. Yeah. Pavel Luketan. I didn't know whether that's something that could be settled or not. But, yeah, it was it was him, Pavel. He seemed like he was pretty clued up. I mean, this was like He's a great guy. Must have been five years ago or more, and we did, like, a live recording at the conference there. And, yeah, he was going into all of it, and it's before I sort of because, you know, I've left The UK now, for many reasons, but the the basically, I just don't think it's a good place to live anymore. That conversation with him was probably the start of a lot of the the cogs turning of, like, yeah, you need to start thinking about where you are physically and where your businesses are and everything else. Yeah. So for me, for example, it's very important where I'm physically located,
[01:03:22] Unknown:
whereas my company's located, whereas my wealth located. So this reduces the risk and the attack point. Mhmm. This is very, very important in your life, and this combined with privacy, it's a good shield. Yeah. Definitely.
[01:03:38] Unknown:
Well, I would urge anybody who hasn't already to check out my Nimbox. You're gonna hear all the info in the ad reads and everything else that we're gonna be doing. I'd say that if anyone has any questions, I sort of tried to cover what you guys do from, like, a retard perspective, but there'll be things that we won't have covered and people will have questions. Where should people reach out if they wanna get in contact? What's the best way?
[01:04:07] Unknown:
So the best way when you're trying to contact us is by email. The address is [email protected]. We also have a signal account, my n y m box dot ten, number ten. And then we have a simple x address, but,
[01:04:28] Unknown:
I can't spell it now, but I can send it to you. We're gonna be moving our stuff over. As I said, we had hoped to do it before so I could give some sort of firsthand experience. But, Yeah. I, I will be doing it very soon, and I can talk to anyone if they wanna reach out to me as well about my experiences. But, I'm very happy that you've got this service running. It's something that we'll be using, and I'd strongly urge people to consider for all the reasons we've talked about not to go giving all of your personal details to all these different companies. It's it's just not smart. Use the tools. This is a very, very useful tool, a box of tools.
[01:05:06] Unknown:
So,
[01:05:07] Unknown:
yeah, definitely check it out. And, again, I just wanna thank you for helping support what we do at Ungovernable Misfits. Really is appreciated. It goes a long way to helping with all the editing and and creative side of things, so I appreciate you.
[01:05:22] Unknown:
Thank you. I really appreciate what you do at, Ungovernable Misfits. So it's a pleasure to be a sponsor, and it was a pleasure to be here. Hopefully, we'll do this again, and, I'll speak to you soon. I'd love to, speak soon.
[01:05:39] Unknown:
Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed that one. It was great chatting to RandomNim. If you haven't already checked out their services at myNimbox, go and have a look. We've got the links in the show notes. It's important that you don't give away all your details to all these different companies that don't necessarily secure your details safely or securely. You can pay in Bitcoin give nothing but an email address. That can be a burner. Just make sure that you have access to it in case they need to contact you. I've really enjoyed getting to know Random Nim. He's been extremely helpful.
And if you have any questions, any technical questions, reach out to him. Just ask. Just see what they can do. I think, basically, they can, they can be pretty flexible and do a lot of very clever and cool stuff. If you have any nontechnical questions, you can reach out to me. And I just wanna say a big thank you to all the listeners, everyone who's been sharing the episodes with friends and family, everyone who's been boosting and supporting the shows, and to the whole Ungovernable crew. This wouldn't be possible without you. If you haven't already checked out ungovernablemisfits.com, go and have a look. We have clothing, artwork, articles, all sorts on there, and that is all thanks to the incredible Mr. Crown.
Catch you on the next one, and stay ungovernable.
