A monthly show where Max and Seth take a trip down memory lane to see what happened in the last 4 weeks of Monero.
General
Monero continuing to be the #1 currency used on crypto-native shops
BasicSwap-bash
SkyLight wallet launched
One million Cake Wallet downloads
Software updates
Monero v0.18.4.4 released
p2pool v4.12 released
General
Monero continuing to be the #1 currency used on crypto-native shops
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1p2cj2r/xmr_1_used_currency_for_october_on_shopinbit_again/
- NanoGPT: https://x.com/NanoGPTcom/status/1985583527329448024
BasicSwap-bash
- https://monero.observer/nahuhh-releases-basicswap-bash-v0.15.1/
- Great tool for more technical users to be able to use BasicSwap on a desktop or laptop computer
- Cake going to be working on mobile support for BasicSwap once they finalize light client tooling
SkyLight wallet launched
One million Cake Wallet downloads
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1opli92/million_downloads_of_cake_wallet_a_personal/
- Thanking the Monero community!
Software updates
Monero v0.18.4.4 released
- https://monero.observer/monero-v0.18.4.4-fluorine-fermi-released/
- Bug fix release, especially focused on Ledger issues
p2pool v4.12 released
- https://monero.observer/p2pool-v4.12-released-full-tor-support/
- Most notable change is that p2pool users can now run entirely behind the Tor network
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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.
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- Batch Transactions: Send multiple payments at once.
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- Proxy Support: Enhance privacy with proxy node options.
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Use code: Ungovernable for $10 off of your purchase
(00:00:56) It Has Come Around Quickly
(00:07:48) Most Used, Least Perused
(00:16:15) Four Funding Proposals
(00:21:08) EVM Based Atomic Swaps
(00:26:27) MAGIC Grants Announces Skylight Wallet
(00:27:29) 1,000,000 Cake Wallet Downloads
(00:33:46) Monero 0.18.4.4 Released
(00:35:36) QUESTIONS
[00:00:00]
Unknown:
IRS CI, ACI. Our agenda for today, we're gonna start with just the basics of Monero. What it is, what it is, how it works, how it works. Monero is considered a privacy token. The world's most private
[00:00:18] Unknown:
privacy. Which means that in high, virtually all transaction details are The world's most private
[00:00:25] Unknown:
privacy.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Which allows cyber criminals criminals criminals which
[00:00:56] Unknown:
And we're back. And we're not going to say that it's come around quickly, even though it has. How are you, mate? You just said it.
[00:01:04] Unknown:
You broke the one rule. It was a clever way of saying it without saying it, wasn't it? It was, but I had to call you out on it. You did. Time has gone so slowly since the last time we recorded. It has. We just had to drag out the recording day for this one. So that's why we're late, guys. Yeah. Sorry about that. It'll be a good one this month. A little bit calmer. I feel like November was a quiet one in the Monero space. I do have to give a shout out. I've said it many times, but monero.observer has been my go to resource to help aggregate and look through this stuff. Escape the raw, escape thera. I don't ask how to pronounce his name.
But the guy who's been doing that fantastic, fantastic work, he's taking a break for a bit, which will be interesting. We'll see what we do for next week's Monero monthly, but we may do something of a New Year's special. But we got some good stuff to go through today. We had some questions. Get into some topics. But, yeah, relatively quiet one. Lots of good chats and boost though, which will take us a while to go through. So looking forward to that. I feel like
[00:02:04] Unknown:
in the Bitcoin world as well as obviously the Monero world, everything slows down towards the end of the year. That's how it's always felt. It's like when we're recording, like, the Christmas specials and things like that. The news is very light. We do shows a bit differently. I don't know if that's people gearing up for Christmas and Thanksgiving and New Year and all the like, it's hard to get shit done, especially if you got family. It's just like there's always something, isn't there? So maybe devs are just like,
[00:02:31] Unknown:
let's just accept it. Start again properly in January. Yeah. I think that's definitely part of it is I mean, you're gonna lose some time Thanksgiving if your company is US related at all. You're gonna lose at least the week of Christmas, basically. So I feel like a lot of the development slows down a little bit. But I feel like, also, it's just been, like, a relatively slow time in terms of price, in terms of industry news. I feel like there just hasn't been a ton even on the Bitcoin side, like you said. So I guess a lot of it is the holiday slowdown stuff, but it's also just so dependent on what's the current thing in the news to push things on the Bitcoin side, which has been relatively quiet.
[00:03:05] Unknown:
Not a lot of news, but first time on the docket, a lot of use, it seems.
[00:03:11] Unknown:
Always. Yeah. I was just reviewing this month. Some of the normal go tos that post stats for usage of Monero have not posted yet. So I definitely have to follow-up with that and maybe throw those in the show notes. But pretty much every month, there are a bunch of different services that post their usage stats on Twitter, on Reddit, somewhere like that, and talk about what percentage of their crypto payments are done in what currency. And it's been really interesting to chart over the years how that percentage has continually increased in Monero and, specifically, how Monero is growing to become the number one payment method on most of these platforms. If they're privacy preserving in any way, pretty much, they're dominated by Monero.
A couple good examples for this month. One of those is Shop n Bit. It's kind of like a concierge service where you chat with them. They help you find whatever it is, whether that's book a vacation, whether that's buy a car, buy a house, or buy something small from Amazon. Like, it can be a ton of different things. But it's built to be a privacy preserving, like, proxy service where they help you to get what you want. Yeah. Some of their services are very geared towards, like, high net worth individuals, the not Seths of the world. The not Seths. But some of their stuff is, like, for the average man, the Seths of the world. So it's a really cool service. It's something we've actually been talking to them about adding into cake.
Basically, letting you just open a chat within cake and directly ask what you want, automatically pay. It's something we will be doing in the new year, but they're a really cool service. Very saverpunk guys. They've actually had Monero supported for a long time, but they don't really get talked about that much in the Monero community. But they posted in November that yet again and they didn't say for how long. It was a little sparse on details, but they said that yet again, Monero is their number one used currency on Shop and Bit. So even something that I I don't see much conversation in the Monero community about it, Monero dominates there. Nano g p t is another interesting one where it's a kind of a privacy focused AI platform where you can use any model you want and you pay per query. It is one of those AI things that's like privacy by trust, not privacy by design. Like, there's no, like, cryptography going on that makes it private, but they're just promising not to log. And you don't have to have an account that has all your personal info, that sort of thing. But they've had Monero support for, I don't know, maybe six, nine months. And Monero is by far their most used currency.
[00:05:23] Unknown:
This last month, it was over 50 percent of their total payments were in Monero. Nothing else was even close to that. Pretty sure I've used that service with Monero myself. As soon as it's an option, it's something that it's like, I don't know why I'd do anything else, even to the extent that now there's a couple of places that I've used where they'll charge more for me to pay in Monero. It's some kind of, because they've got to sell it and they've got to put it through some exchange and some regulatory bullshit, whatever it is. There's, like, a a can't remember how much of a percentage it is, like, a couple of percent or whatever. I'm still like, yeah. I'm still on the pay in this. It's just better. I'll accept the extra charge here.
[00:06:00] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it's just so easy. I think most people love to use it when you can and you have good privacy when using it. Another good example. I don't think we talked about this one yet, but l n VPN added support for Monero, and they've quickly seen its usage take off. But they are one that offers a discount for lightning, but no discount for any other payment method. It is an example of where if you do wanna pay with Monero, you are going to pay slightly more. But, obviously, they have Ellen in the name. Like, they started as a lightning only service that has quickly branched out to accept Monero, which is cool to see. But any of these retailers, if they're privacy centric at all I know we talked about Obscuro last week who Carl Dong, their founder, had talked about how I'd gotten thousands of requests for Monero payment support, and they just added it last month. I'm curious to see if they'll publish any stats around that. Coin cards, Monero's always trading blows with on chain Bitcoin for the number one currency usage there. They're an awesome gift card and debit card proxy service.
My Nimbox, who was run by an awesome guy, they really prefer Monero. I think they had published some stats a while back. I couldn't see them. And they didn't have anything for November, but they had talked about how Monero was their most used currency as well, at least at some point, but I'd be curious to see more recent stats from them. I'm pretty sure from recent conversations that it still is, and definitely the preferred option as well to receive. So there's definitely a pattern there, isn't there? Yes. Yeah. For sure. Cake Pay, obviously, it's a good example as well. We've always been a Monero centric because, obviously, Cake Wallet started Monero only. So we have a huge Monero portion of the community that's using it, but we're always regularly, like, 85% Monero usage at least. Just quickly checking the stats for last month, then, yeah, it's still about that, which is pretty normal for us Even while we've added things like Litecoin and CCash for payments, nothing else really comes close to the Monero usage there. It makes me wonder, like, when there's this much usage,
[00:07:52] Unknown:
why is there not an equivalent amount of talk and podcasts and discussions and, I guess, kind of like hype and excitement around Monero that's public at least, and that's maybe not quite so technical? Like, if you look at the Bitcoin space, which, you know, Bitcoin is being used less, and that's all of what we've talked about is, like, the, like, white market. Also for the dark markets, Monero is, you know, far more used as well. So why then if it's used more and it's everywhere, is it not discussed in the same way that Bitcoin is? Have you got any thoughts on that? Like, it seems we're not alone in doing this show, but there's very few others who are doing any sort of content that, at least that I see, maybe I'm missing it because I'm not following the right people. I think a lot of it comes down to the
[00:08:41] Unknown:
somewhat stupid belief, and I'm just gonna be blunt, that if you want privacy, you can never talk about the things that you use, and that that is a bad idea to talk about using Monero or using X VPN, X not being an actual VPN, but, like, a VPN. You shouldn't talk about the things you do for OPSEC reasons, which, like, yes. Technically, you are making your OPSEC worse if you talk about exactly what your stack is, you're kind of limiting your anonymity set. Someone can be able to tell what things are being used in a specific transaction or something. Like, yes, that could technically be harmful. But I think if you are actually passionate about, a, just spreading human freedom, and, b, if you're actually passionate about improving your privacy by having more people using the privacy tech you're using, growing that at onset Mhmm. I think talking about this stuff publicly is just absolutely vital.
Unless you have a very clear OPSEC reason why you cannot discuss what you use for payments or something like that. It needs to be something where we're spreading the word on how good this stuff is. And I think a great example of that is Yeah. This like, everyone's using Monero for payments on all of these platforms that are in any way privacy preserving. And yet, like you said, there's just not the influencers. There's not all the podcasts. But I I think a lot of that really comes down to Monero being an unfortunate for the marketing perspective, being the, like, imperfect blend of totally decentralized and grassroots, but not having many businesses building around it. There's just not a ton of money pouring into the marketing side of things.
Like, I would suspect that Cake Wallet is by far the largest, quote, unquote, marketing arm for Monero. Yeah. And there's not really many others out there. And I think that's something where, like, Bitcoin, while the project itself is decentralized and grassroots, there are so many companies, and there's so much VC money, and there's so much just capital in the Bitcoin ecosystem that will necessarily flow into marketing that you get a lot more money floating around to fund things like that. Or on the Zcash side, like their recent pump, there's some interesting evidence that they've paid some firms to essentially push influencers to talk about it. Like, Monero couldn't do that. Like, what are we supposed to do? Like, raise donations from the community to do a influencer pump? Like, there's just not that kind of a system. And so I think that's kind of that blend of being decentralized and grassroots, but also not having a massive corporate ecosystem around it where there's just not that much money to flow into funding the podcast, to funding the events, that sort of thing. I suppose
[00:11:08] Unknown:
the corporate side of it is something that people would shy away from regulatory standpoint to some extent, like when you look at how the two of the currencies are viewed Bitcoin more and more is I'm just gonna say it. Like, I love Bitcoin. I've done it for a long time, but, like, the space is quite gay and sooty and gross and boomerie and just not what I care about so much anymore. Mhmm. And I don't see that Monero can be like that anywhere near as easily because the way it's viewed, it's not viewed as as just an investment vehicle. You don't have, like, a Michael Sailor, like, going and speaking to a load of suits and people jumping in for that kind of stuff and ETFs. And, like, if anything's gonna be delisted, it's gonna be Monero. If anything's gonna have shade thrown at it, it's gonna be Monero. And that's because it works and it is private. But I guess that would be the reason that people are not making the content. But if anything, it should make you wanna do it more. And that's obviously what we're trying to do here is, like, bring people in and get them to use this thing and not be like, use this instead of Bitcoin. But, like, if you've got stuff that you care about and you wanna make private payments and you wanna do it in an easy manner, this is a really useful tool. I don't know. I just think sometimes it's a shame. Like, I I I flick on my Twitter, and I just see nonsense, 90% nonsense from the Bitcoin accounts and the influencer accounts and just not anything on the Monero side. So if anyone has any ideas how we can push this movement and bring some more people in and get some more people interested and, like, talking about things, because that's how you learn as well as, like, the whole way through my Bitcoin experience, like, from the very beginning knowing absolutely nothing. Just like having conversations with people and people saying to me, oh, you don't wanna do that. You wanna try this. Or, oh, you're gonna have a problem if you do that, or this project looks promising, or here's my stack. This is how I do things and just tinkering. But if I have a generic question, I'll sort of reach out to you. I'm in a lucky position where I can do that, but not everyone can. So I don't know. Just something I've been thinking about. It'd be nice to get some more participation
[00:13:21] Unknown:
and advice from people who know what they're doing. Yeah. For sure. And I think, like, there, thankfully, is a pretty good amount of that in the Monero community in terms of, like, the communal help, the chats, like, that sort of thing. Matrix has always been good for that. Reddit's always been pretty good for that. Mhmm. But, yeah, I think maybe one other thing to call out on, like, why Monero isn't more talked about. There's also been this, like, weird anti corporate push always throughout the Minera community, at least as long as I've been there, where Mhmm. Anytime any, like, corporation wants to do anything, any company, anything like that, it's just always viewed as, like, evil because it's a company. No matter what that company is or whether it's funded by a sketchy VC or not or it just doesn't matter. If it's, like, a corporation or anything that could be remotely viewed as centralized, it gets viewed as this, like, evil thing. Like, I understand the desire to push back on something that has been part of the problem in the world of, like, corporations and shitifying everything and being greedy and stealing our data. Like, there is a ton of stuff to push back on. But I think part of it would come with the Monero community being more open to pushing and being happy for and helping out good companies that want to build around Monero, that want to build businesses around Monero, good centralized entities that want to use Monero. And I think that's just something that maybe the Monero community can improve on over the years. Maybe there's a middle ground because I think Bitcoin's gone too far one way. And I do think it corrupts
[00:14:42] Unknown:
when the money starts coming in and people are getting funding and people don't want to say certain things. And the culture starts to shift quite a lot from like cipher punk to investment bros. So I kinda respect that there's that pushback. But like you say, it depends on the company. Yeah. If a company like Proton come out and go like, yeah, we're gonna accept Monero, then that should be very much like, fuck. Yeah. This is great. This is really useful. We want you to accept it. It shows more people around the world that they can use it, brings more people in who obviously have a focus on privacy. What that's why they're using that service.
But then maybe don't be so excited if you get a load of, like, VC Fundy, wanky Yeah. Types who are gonna come and corrupt. So it's about being selective rather than it is much like the Bitcoin maxi thing. Like, if it's not Bitcoin, then everything else is absolutely useless, including, like, food and gold and, you know, like, everything that isn't Bitcoin is useless. Maybe that's the same in the Monero community of, like, anything that is SUTI in any way is definitely bad, and that's not true. I mean, look at cake wallet. Like you're saying, you guys are a business, but you do a lot in terms of the marketing. Like, we wouldn't be having this conversation if it wasn't for you guys. So I think there is, like, a fine line, isn't there? Yeah. For sure. Just like everything else, it's about nuance. It's about balance. We don't do nuance around here. I know. I know.
[00:16:11] Unknown:
Being the bad guy. Okay. Alright. That's the run over. That's the run. What else have we got going on? Yeah. I mean, outside of that, just a couple of things to kinda call out for people. It's been really cool seeing the mayor community continue to drive funding good things. So we talked about the community crowdfunding system, the CCS before. There's four proposals that are up for funding right now. There were two that were focused on FCMP plus plus integration and caret and some other big things. Those got funded rather quickly, but there are four more in there that are ready for funding. So, again, totally optional, totally up to you, the individual, what you wanna fund, if anything. But one way to continue to grow the usability and the reach of an arrow is funding that way. Like, we just talked about there's not a lot of corporations pouring money into this stuff. We're doing what we can at cake wallet, but it's really important that the community steps in and is willing to part with some of their hard earned Monero to help fund things that they care about within the community. So jumping into that, just ccs.getmonero.org.
You You can see those ones that are in funding required and donate to any that that kinda peak your interest there. But I do don't just kinda continue to circle back to that so people are aware of what's needed in the space. Yeah. Definitely. Outside of that, a couple quick updates on the atomic swap front. So, like, we talked about in the past, I think atomic swaps are an absolutely vital tool for Monero because they mean that even if, like, the current centralized instant exchanger ecosystem, that's a huge asset for Monero. Even if that were to go away overnight, we can assure that people can swap between other cryptocurrencies at Monero in a way that is literally unstoppable. So two of the approaches that have had some growth over the past month, one is something called Basic Swap. It's basically an atomic swap platform that under the hood uses the Particle Network, which is a cryptocurrency, an old one. It's basically just used for passing the messages necessary for the atomic swap protocol that they use. But they have atomic swaps between Monero, Bitcoin, a bunch of other things, and let you swap between them freely. And they've had some improvements on two fronts. Basically, one is that there's a Monero community member who maintains their it's basically like a set of scripts that helps you to run it on your computer. Just like most atomic swap protocols, it's a little complex and clunky to use, but these scripts make it a little bit easier to use. And there's been an update there. There's nothing massive in the update, but it's called basic swap dash bash, like, basic swap bash with a dash in between. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a good set of tools if you are a little bit more advanced user, but not super technical to be able to get that running on your desktop or laptop laptop computer. And the one thing that's been missing so far in the basic swap ecosystem is they rely purely on full nodes. So, like, right now, if you want to swap between Bitcoin and Monero, you have to have both the Bitcoin and Monero node running on that same computer. Obviously, that's a massive hurdle for most people. On that same computer? Yes. Okay. Yes. On that same computer. You can't just connect to a remote one or anything like that. That has been pretty preventative, obviously, for most users, but they've been working on essentially changing it so that you can actually connect to a remote node and rely on that remote node. The very important thing to understand with atomic swaps is that if the node that you're using lies to you about the transaction or doesn't tell you about a transaction or something like that, the atomic swap could fail and you could lose money. So that's why normally these have relied on using a full node. But if either, a, you have a node that you trust that's run by a community member or something, or, b, if you run a node just not on that computer, this will be a really good change. So they're building out that, like, client functionality. But the other really good part about that is you're never gonna run a full Bitcoin, M and A and particle node on your phone, but you can connect to outside nodes. So something that we have already committed to work on, but we're basically waiting for them to finalize their light client tooling is having basic swap in Cake Wallet so that you can do atomic swaps within Cake Wallet using nodes that are not hosted on your device. So that is something we'll look to build out in the new year that will be a good addition.
[00:19:57] Unknown:
Maybe a stupid question. Would that not be shooting yourself in the foot as a business because you already offer swaps? Yes. And then if someone's using this, then you're not collecting any fees, but you are paying for the infrastructure.
[00:20:16] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it depends on exactly how it's integrated. Probably, we wouldn't charge fees on it, and it would just be something for the more advanced user who wants to be able to use it. I mean, it's never going to come to the same user experience of an instant exchanger. So I still think the vast majority of people would want to go through an instant exchange where we do take that fee like we've talked about before. But, I mean, really, for us, it's more about giving users the option to use this when nothing else works for them for whatever reason and ensuring that people have easy access to this. Like we talked about, if suddenly instant exchangers go dark overnight and don't list an error or whatever, there needs to be fallbacks. Yeah. So this would be one of those potential solutions. I think there is a way that people who integrate this can charge fees, but that's still very, like, not set in stone yet. So we'll see what happens to that. But probably, this would be something we just put in place and don't do fees on so people can use it to get Monero when necessary. That's cool. Yeah.
On the atomic swap front as well, there's someone who is by HBS who's been working on atomic swaps between Monero and EVM networks, the Ethereum's, the the Arbitrons, the Gnosises, the Solanas, that sort of thing. He's working initially on Ethereum support, and he's making really good progress on that. There's still nothing alive for, like, you, the average user to use. Still very much in testing and development. But so far, basically, the first milestone of getting something that actually works is ready, and he's working on improving the UI, improving the actual functionality, improving the smart contracts on the EVM side that make it all happen. And that will definitely be a big one, especially if you think about stablecoins to Monero and vice versa, which are absolutely massive. That's a lot of the volume in the Monero space. People being able to do that and not just atomic swap between Bitcoin or something like that, but actually be able to go directly to and from stables in a way, again, that's trustless and atomic swap
[00:22:02] Unknown:
is really, really awesome. So someone would be able to go from Monero to a USD c or USDT or whatever thing. Would that mean that do you have, like, a lot of people trading in Monero? Like, do you have traders in the same way you do with Bitcoin?
[00:22:19] Unknown:
I'm sure we do, but there's not gonna be that many of them, I would assume. Because my guess
[00:22:25] Unknown:
is that with Monero not being available on many exchanges and spread betting platforms or those type of things, I wonder if that restricts the use for people whether they can do that. Or, like, for example, not even like a trader, like someone who sat there and they hold their wealth in Monero, and then they see a spike in price and they go, do you know what? Over the next three months, I've got some payments I've gotta make and stuff. So I'm gonna take a little bit off the table here. I don't wanna spend it right now. I don't wanna buy the gift cards or do these swaps. So maybe I can keep that in a stablecoin, which I can then convert back or whatever, but I can hold my value in case this is a good time to sell. I'll take a little bit off the top. Yeah. That would then be a very good way for them to do that without having to interact with an exchange. For sure. For sure. And I think that that's something that's really common within Cake Wallet and other places. I think it's the reason for a lot of that stable coin usage is people can
[00:23:19] Unknown:
take profits in stable coins if they are trading or even just if they have a lot of an arrow in savings and they want to make sure, like you said, that they have some for spending the next month or something no matter if the price changes. I think that's a super common flow. So that's one of the reasons why I think that's really useful. I mean, that's something that I do and really appreciate is the ability to quickly go back and forth between stables makes it much easier because, like, going back and forth between fiat, if you can even do it in your jurisdiction with Monero Yeah. Is a pain in the ass and obviously bad for privacy too. Oh my god. So it's really nice when you can just boop straight into whatever stable coin you want straight into your wallet and vice versa. It makes it much, much simpler when you need to move between the two. Yeah. It is like a way to
[00:23:59] Unknown:
derisk to some extent because if you know, you've got bills coming out every month and you do see these peaks and troughs, and it can be very unstable with Monero and Bitcoin to do what we've just seen it, like a massive drop of Bitcoin, being able to do that and just say, okay, I'm good for six months. If the price halves, I'm not then suddenly, like, shitting myself, like, as I'm selling the bottom.
[00:24:21] Unknown:
I can actually take a little bit of risk out of this. So that that's actually really cool. I like that. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it'll be cool because you can do that in a trustless way. Right now, there's no real decentralized exchanges that list Monero. Mhmm. So a lot of it is relying on some centralized entity even though there are really good ones that support Monero. It still is some trust. And you need to gain just under those exchange support, these atomic swaps between EVM chains will be absolutely huge for growing who has access to Monero
[00:24:48] Unknown:
and how useful it is to them. So I definitely am excited for that. Isn't it still decentralized in the sense that if you're going from Monero that is decentralized into a stablecoin, which I think all of them are centralized, then it's still not. That's what I'm trying to say. If you're still Yeah. I do get what you're saying.
[00:25:05] Unknown:
I mean, yes. Technically, especially if you're going to something like Tether or Circle, you are putting a lot of trust that those funds won't be frozen. I mean, one of the beautiful things with Banero is that you do have privacy on that side, so there's not gonna be like, you're less likely if you somehow you got tainted funds or something. You're not gonna be potentially burned in the same way you would be if you swapped to maybe Bitcoin to tether, and then you realized, oh my goodness. Like, these are from a theft or something, and you didn't know. That would be less of a problem for you. Like, that fungibility of Monero is useful. But, yes, I mean, all of those centralized stable coins are problematic. There are ones that are not centralized, but they're more rare. That would be like DAI, d a I, or x DAI, or d euro. Like, there are some examples of ones that can't be frozen in the same way, but definitely the majority are vulnerable to that. So while you are reducing your exposure to price fluctuations, you're increasing your exposure to censorship if you're using something like tether or circle, which is the downside of those, obviously. Basically, everyone uses Tether, don't they? And then so
[00:26:02] Unknown:
you're reducing your risk if you use Monero, though, it sounds like because you don't have the risk of the tainted coins. So you shouldn't really use on chain Bitcoin, then it should be Lightning or Monero to do a swap into Tether, presumably.
[00:26:17] Unknown:
Yeah. It'd be better, but that's true of pretty much everything. If you can swap in a privacy preserving way, you you should be doing it. Yeah. That's gonna help you a lot. Okay. Let's keep rolling. Next up and this is a pretty cool one. So the Magic Grants organization who are a nonprofit of five one three c in the Monero space, they actually launched a new Monero wallet. I think as a kind of a response to my Monero shutting down, there wasn't going to be light wallet available in the space. So they've kinda taken up that mantle. They've launched what they call Skylight, which is a Monero light wallet, which means that it connects to a server that accepts view keys. You send your view key to the server. That server then does all of the syncing and scanning and then just gives you balance and transaction information.
So it does essentially remove your privacy entirely from the node runner, but you get better user experience. Now just like with Cake Wallet, we're we're working to implement light wall support as well. We're not gonna run a server. Skylight's not gonna run a server. So they're relying on you, the user, or maybe trusted community members to run light wallet servers that you can then connect to. There's not gonna be a default set one that's run by magic or something like that. Mostly because I wouldn't want your view keys. I don't wanna know your transaction information. And so I think that will be pretty common, but it will be getting easier to run the light wallet server. We're working on that actually right now at cake. Like, when we launch light wallet support, we're gonna launch it with blogs and guides to help you run the server yourself because that is kind of the vision that we have for that is either you use Monero in the most privacy preserving way if you can't run a light wallet server or use it in the more better user experience way if you can run a light wallet server. And that will be a really good paradigm to allow people to choose. So that will get easier to actually run that, but it's a cool wallet skylight that they launched. It borrows a lot of work that's gone into cake wallet, that's gone into stack wallet, that's gone into I think that's what I mean too, that they're using under the hood. But it's cool to see another wallet launch in the space and a good proof of concept. I'm curious to see how it continues to grow and improve over the coming months and years. How does it work in Monero world
[00:28:14] Unknown:
with open sourcing all of the wallet software and everything else? Do you have the same issues as you do in the Bitcoin world sometimes where people wanna say open source and things aren't actually open source and there's all these arguments. Is it much more clear cut, like, it's open source where it's nothing, or is it much the same? I would say it's much more clear cut. It's common in the space. There's a pretty aggressive
[00:28:37] Unknown:
view on open source, like, much more aggressive Mhmm. Than the most aggressive Bitcoin ones, where in Monero, there's a pretty strong, like, MIT only open source view where basically they believe like, a lot of people in the Monero space believe that everything should be completely permissible. Like, not even copy left, like, g p l v three or something, which is more where I land. Right. But rather that everything should be MIT. So I really, in the Monero community, it's basically completely open source. That's usually almost always MIT. K. Qualities MIT. I believe Skylight is. Stack Wallet is. Like, it's really common to be MIT in the space, or it's completely closed source, and it's something that no one recommends. So there's not really an in between there. Pretty much everything is open source, and there's none of the, like, source viewable, stupid intellectual property moat stuff that we see in the Bitcoin space where people wanna protect themselves against competitors, but be able to pretend that they're open source. Yeah. It's incredibly annoying. So
[00:29:31] Unknown:
when you have new wallets and new software in the Monero world, is there much more of a view than like, okay, this is good for everyone because everyone can use from everyone and there's not, oh, you're a cloner, man, all that shit. Like, it's much more collaborative.
[00:29:48] Unknown:
Yeah. Very much so. I think much more collaborative overall. I think part of that is just because it's smaller. There's more of the idea of, like, we need the rising tide to lift all boats kind of thing Yeah. Rather than, like, I need my piece of the pie. Okay. But I think also it's just when you are smaller, you're gonna be a little bit more aligned in terms of community, and that ethos is gonna hold a little bit stronger. So I think that has been true of my narrative. There's a purer culture. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. As it grows to a larger percentage of people across the world,
[00:30:18] Unknown:
you're gonna have much more of a diverse kind of thought on things. And so Monero being smaller means that it's more pure in that sort of like cypherpunk open source ethos.
[00:30:28] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. For sure. Okay. So far. But as it grows, I'm sure that will change, which is okay. Yeah. We'll see. Good question. Last quick kinda general update, and then we'll go through a couple software updates to jump into a few questions. But just just the last kinda general update. Vic posted this on Reddit, but I wanted to call it out here as well. But we passed a million total cake wallet downloads in November. And I don't say that to, like, brag on cake wallet, even though, like, that is an awesome milestone that we're pumped about. But rather to, like, thank the Monero community, we started as a Monero only wallet back in 2018. Monero was still by far our largest user group in the space, and the Monero community has been super supportive and also critical in a good way most of the time, helping us stay honest, helping us to stay focused on what matters.
Like I've said many times, Monero and the community specifically is the reason why I'm in this space at all. I was totally viewing crypto as this pump and dump thing that maybe I should jump in on and useless. And it's the Monero community that opened my eyes to what use it can have for human freedom. It's the Monero community that opened my eyes to why personal privacy matters. And, like, literally, nothing I've done and nothing Cake Wallet has done would exist without the Monero community. So just a huge thank you to everybody who has been around over the years, who's helped to promote Monero, who's helped to talk to merchants about accepting it. All of those little things add up. It's been really cool to see that massive growth in Monero usage across the board, and hopefully, we'll see a lot more of that. But, yeah, I just wanted to say a quick thank you. If you wanna see Vic's full thank you, I'll post that in the show notes as well. But he had a a long heartfelt message that he posted for the Monero community, which I think is great. It's exciting that the Monero community has pushed us this far and is continuing to push others in the space far as well. We were just talking about growth and numbers. I mean, a million downloads is pretty serious. I'm sure that it was only, like, a few months ago I saw something about half a million. Yes. Maybe I'm imagining it. It wasn't that long ago. No. No. We've pretty much doubled in downloads in the last year. Like, in 2025,
[00:32:23] Unknown:
we've doubled in downloads from before that. So that's yeah. That does make sense, to be fair, because we did start talking about you guys about a year and a half ago in queue. And, obviously, we were saying, why is there this kind of Monero wallet as far as we could generally see it? Like, doing more cool stuff on the privacy stuff on Bitcoin than almost anybody else. And it kept coming up and kept coming up. And then, obviously, you guys sponsored Uncomfortable Misfits and bam, doubled.
[00:32:54] Unknown:
It's just how it goes. It is. It is. That sponsorship paying off, man. I'm sure the devs did something and cake wallet team did something, but, you know, me and Q are gonna take most of the thanks for that. Yeah. I don't think we had any releases over the last few years. So I think that's mostly just the ungovernable misfits marketing wing as we just we sit on our hands.
[00:33:15] Unknown:
You've done you've done very little. No. Congratulations. A million downloads for any type of application is fucking huge. But for a cryptocurrency
[00:33:29] Unknown:
wallet who's, like, heavy on the Monero side, that's extremely impressive. So yeah. Congrats. Thank you. Thank you. Definitely exciting. And just another good example of, like, we're winning really good privacy tech is winning. There's massive interest in privacy, like, massive, massive interest. Yeah. Good to see that continue growing. A few quick software updates we'll run through, and then we can answer these questions quickly. But nothing crazy this month. Monero had a bug fix release, zero dot 18 dot four dot four. I'm begging that we go to version one dot zero with FCMP plus plus. I'm tired of reading off these zero dot releases when Monero is the most used privacy coin, the most used coin on many places, and we're, like, we're pretending like it's not ready for prime time yet with a zero dot versioning.
So hopefully, we'll get It's humble. It is. Yes. It's too humble, I think. But, yes, zero dot 18 dot four dot four was released this month. Nothing crazy. Basically, it was a bug fix release. There were some issues with the ledger. If you're using the Monero CLI or Monero GUI. And so they fixed those a few other things as well. Nothing huge, but always important to update when you can. Goo packs with two x's because why not? Version one dot 12 was released as well this last month, which has some really good improvements. We've talked about it many times, but if you wanna mine Monero, Goopex is pretty much the best way. It's a desktop app that you can run that handles all the software for you. It makes it really simple to just click start and get off to the races mining Monero on an extra computer that you have lying around.
And related p two pool v four dot 12 was released. Again, a lot of, like, minor changes, but the one big one was that it now has proper full support for the tour network. So you can run it entirely behind tour if you want to have even more privacy preserving mining of Monero, which is a a good improvement. The Monero core software, like Monero, Daemon, etcetera, have always been able to be run purely behind Tor, but that hasn't worked quite right for p two pool yet. So this is a good step for where you can run the entire Monero stack entirely behind Tor if you so desire. For most people, don't do that. It's gonna make your user experience a bit more painful. But for those users to have a specific need, it's very, very important that it is possible. Awesome. We've stolen some questions this week, haven't we? Yes. I greedily took them from Freedom Tech Friday. I figured we'd yank out some of the narrow specific questions and jump on those this month. So we'll get some of those answered and leave queue to find some others. Well, we never ever ever get to the bottom of the list for Freedom Tech Friday with questions, so I think it's okay. Yeah. I think it's fine. Alright. So let me jump into these. Stolen question number one is from, sir, Jamsela.
[00:36:02] Unknown:
How about a good explainer on using the Monero blockchain explorer? Also, is there an explorer that can be self hosted a la mempool space? Good question. I don't know the answer to this. This is a great question.
[00:36:17] Unknown:
So basically, Monero blockchain explorers are crap. They work, but they're very limited. There's two reasons for that. One is just no one has really put a lot of time and effort into making a good one that's reliable. And by far, the most common one over the years has been xmrchain.net, which technically works. It has been dependable, but is, like, text only, hideous to look at, and just not something I would ever tell someone to use unless they're more technical. The way it presents information, etcetera, is just is way too complex for the average person. But that one has been by far the most common one. We also have one that we run that's a part of monero.com, which basically is using the same data under the hood as XMR chain, but it's presenting it in a little bit more approachable way. It works.
It's not great. I'll be totally honest. Like, you know me. I'm the brutally honest guy Yeah. We like that. In this space. So, like, it's fine. But one thing that I really liked years and years and years ago, I think it was four or five years ago, it was just launched out of nowhere. It was an explorer called Explore Monero. Exploremonero.com is where it's hosted right now. It was the first explorer from Monero that, like, actually looked nice. It actually worked. It had good visual representation of the size of transactions, the size of blocks. Like, it just looks like something that a regular human would actually want to use. But when it was launched, it was not open source. Thankfully, that actually changed a couple months back. And the person who created it, who actually is the founder or one of the founders of the Bitcoin design community, goes by Christophe Ono or GHBS or or GBS or something like that. He created this years and years ago. He also contributed to the Monero GUI and was a key participant in making the Monero GUI much better when that was revamped three or four years ago. He built this. Just didn't have the time to really work on it. I've been harassing him for years about open sourcing it, and he finally had the time to fix a lot of problems. Like, he didn't open source it originally because it just wasn't complete. It was really proof of concept, and he wasn't thinking people would want it. And yet it was actually a really good tool. So he did open source that, and we actually just hired somebody at KQL. It's gonna be doing a lot of stuff like this. And one of his first tasks is to take over maintaining that explorer, continue to make it more useful, easier to host, and, obviously, for us to host an instance of this for people to use, kind of replacing the monera.com/explorer one that we use right now. So that, I think, will be the best. Like, as it is, it's not quite mempool dot space level of nice. I think something I've thought about for a long time is forking mempool dot space and making something like minero.space or something. But it's also just very different because there's not nearly as much that we can display about monero transactions, Whereas mempool dot space heavily relies on how much
[00:38:54] Unknown:
data about a transaction is published to do a lot of their visualizations, to do a lot of the cool stuff that they do. Well, yeah, a lot of what makes Monero great makes the explorer not so great. That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? But in terms of the design, mempool dot space, I think they've absolutely nailed that the way that even a nontechnical person can work their way around it. And it's very visual. It's really nice. So if that could be thought that'd be cool. And then the self hosting part of the question, is that something that if you have someone working on from k wallet on this, will people be able to self host this as well, or is this just something they have to access running on someone else's server? Yeah. I mean, it it definitely will be self hostable. I think, obviously, initially, our focus will be on cleaning up and maintaining the code and then running an instance ourselves for people to use.
[00:39:41] Unknown:
But with the way it's actually built out and one of the main changes that Christophe did to it when he open sourced it was to change it from relying on a, like, a more convoluted API to be able to just call a Monero node. I think it will make it much easier for you to run this alongside a Monero node and just have it point to the local Monero node to get all the data that it needs. So that's definitely something, like, I want to do and we will do down the line. I can't promise, like, when the docs and stuff will happen, but probably like most things that I touch, I'll dockerize it and make it easier to run using Docker alongside Monero d and other things that I maintain or that others maintain in the docker space. Trying to make it straightforward, that definitely will be the goal. You can technically run the xmrchain.net explorer right now, but it's a little rough, especially if you're using Docker, which most people who are self hosting are using Docker or some version of Docker, essentially. It's just a little bit painful right now. So definitely hope to improve that. Technically, you can self host the xmrchain.net one right now. I think it's called Monero blocks on GitHub, but it it's definitely a little bit tricky at the moment. Good question, sir James a lot. O x bad hash.
[00:40:42] Unknown:
Could be good to diffuse the FUD about Monero 51% attack, which never worked.
[00:40:49] Unknown:
I think we did do this, didn't we? Because we sort of covered all the ifs and buts and maybes and how it could and how it couldn't and what are the options to try and stop it and will it happen? And then I think we did cover that it didn't really go as planned, but I guess we can do a recap. Yeah. I mean, I I meant to forewarn you about this and didn't do my job. There's not much to cover in terms of, like, what it was that happened. The only thing I wanted to touch on here is just they stopped. They pivoted to something else. They're not attacking Monero anymore, and no one else is. So we haven't had any of those issues for the last two months, three months, two months, I think. So just to call out, that totally went away. The Monero community, obviously, will continue to work on solutions to make that more difficult for someone else to do. But just like we expected, they ran out of funding, essentially. They're having and other stuff happened, and they couldn't keep dumping their coin for Minero. And they pivoted to something else. I think they said they were gonna attack, like, coin or something. I don't care. They're just affinity scammers, so I didn't wanna focus on it too much. Yeah. But they pivoted to something else, and that has been interesting. But Monero has been totally fine since then. No attacks. No reorgs. No one else is trying this, which is good to see, and things have just been operating as normal since then. So that was the only reason I left this one in there. I just wanted to kinda give that quick update. It burned some scammers money. It achieved
[00:42:03] Unknown:
practically nothing other than a few people getting slightly worried in terms of negative stuff, but it also on the positive side, it did start conversations about how somebody more sophisticated could attack. Mhmm. Which is a good thing as we covered as well. So thanks, guys. Thanks for burning your money, fucking retails. It's a good, stress test. We'll come way stronger at the end. Yeah. Exactly. Filthy Fiat wallet from Nosta. Seth, really love the idea of cupcake wallet. Thank you. I've been messing around with it on iOS using a passphrase. Couple of questions.
Is there a 24 word option? We'll go through them. Is there a 24 word option?
[00:42:41] Unknown:
Not right now, but I think that there will be. I'll preface a lot of these questions with Cupcake is new, and we're focusing on making it something that's extremely useful to the average person, not something targeted at, like, these super advanced use case. So I do wanna just kinda call that out before I answer all these. I think we definitely want to add more advanced things into Cupcake as we go, but you'll see that my answer to most of these will be no because we're really, like Cupcake isn't targeted at Super Hacker Man. The goal is to get close to hardware wallet security in the hands of people who normally would not have access to hardware wallets or to allow people to use it as a companion in, like, a multi vendor, multi sig, or something like that. Neither of which normally need more advanced stuff, but we can also quickly roll through. But, yeah, 24 word option, not right now. We're leaning on 12 words like we have on others, but we can definitely add that. That's probably something we should either way just for those people who have, maybe a seed phrase from an old hardware wallet they wanna import or something like that. Is there a way to see master fingerprint? There is not right now. We are gonna add this into Cake Wallet. So even if we don't put it into Cupcakes specifically, you'll be able to see it when you connect it to Cake Wallet soon. So we will have that down the line. Cool. Assuming air gapped, no outside communications,
[00:43:55] Unknown:
would you feel comfortable placing generational wealth in a cupcake wallet? Oh, this is always one where it's just impossible to answer, isn't it? Like, would you hear?
[00:44:06] Unknown:
I mean, if it's the best thing that's available to you, yes. Like, if your choices would be I stored in a hot wallet because I can't get a harder wallet or I use cupcake, then, like, absolutely. Cupcake would be way better than using a hot wallet to store generational wealth. But I think, again, I wanna call people to, like, with the focus of this. Well, no. I'm I'm gonna shift the shift the answer a bit. Generational wealth means something totally different to each person. So for you, maybe generational wealth is a $100,000. To someone who's in the global South, maybe generational wealth is a thousand dollars, and they want to be able to save that. But spending $200 in a hardware wallet to save their thousand dollars in Bitcoin would be idiotic. Like, you're gonna spend 20% of your stack Yes. To be able to save this. So something like Cupcake Wallet is an absolutely perfect fit there. If you're storing, like, $100,000 or a million dollars, you should probably be thinking about other solutions or Cupcake as a part of your solution rather than it being your sole solution. Unless, again, you can't get a hardware for some reason or for OPSEC reasons, you need to make sure that there's no tie between you and a hardware wallet. I'm not saying that because I don't think Cupcake is secure. Obviously, I do think it's secure. It's been audited.
We've put in a ton of effort to make sure that it's good. Obviously, a little bit limited in security compared to a full fledged good quality open source hardware wallet. It's not about replacing those. But I think that for many people putting generational wealth in Cupcake, well, yeah, I would recommend it. But it all comes down to you specifically. How much is generational wealth? What percentage of your stock would you have to spend on a hardware wallet set up to secure that properly? Can you get a hardware wallet? And a lot of times, it comes down to if your stack is relatively small versus the cost of a hardware wallet or you can't get one for some reason, Cupcake is gonna be an amazing solution because it gives you security you would never have in a hot wallet otherwise. I'm just gonna throw in some old man dad advice here. It's non technical side is don't put all your eggs in one basket.
[00:45:57] Unknown:
Just never put all your eggs in one basket. Even if you've got some clever multi sig solution that you think is the best and it's doing all this clever stuff in the background and you've got this whole thing mapped out, everyone can make mistakes. There can be flaws in any software. There could be certainly flaws in the way that you talk about things or revealing information about a setup to people. There can be all sorts of things that can go wrong. So if you really care about this amount of money, whether it be a thousand or whether it be a million or 10,000,000 or whatever,
[00:46:30] Unknown:
I would never just have one set up personally. I just don't think it's a good idea. So split your risk. Yep. Definitely agreed. Very much depends on the individual, but try things. Find what solution works for you. And also something that we haven't mentioned here, but also just make sure that loved ones can actually recover those funds if something were to happen to you. Something that I think everyone needs to think about unless you're single and have no family or friends, but, yeah, that's that's fair. So I'm sorry. But if you have anyone you love and you don't want your Bitcoin or Banero or Litecoin to be just burned, if something were to happen to you, it's important to think about how they can recover that. And I do think Cupcake would be one of the easiest by far. They're not actually gonna think about finding a different hardware wallet or trying to source a ledger or fiddling with little keys that just install an app on a second phone. Yeah. Rock and roll. So I think that is one thing that this does make easier, but something that just kinda always has to be in the back of your mind as you're planning out your cold storage approach is how will my loved ones recover this, and how easy will it be for them to do that potentially in the middle of, like, deep grief. Like, you have to think about things in an an unfortunate, hard, and sad way, but making sure that your loved ones could benefit from all of the work you've put in if something were to happen to you is a really important part of that. I have my own question in the middle of this question from what you just said.
[00:47:45] Unknown:
You know, with Bitcoin, we have this with mini scripts and things you have, like, degradating, multi sig, and all these sort of clever solutions that are starting to come out or at least be talked about. Are those same things possible with Monero where if you don't sign for a certain amount of time or things go down to a single sig, which wouldn't access all the funds unless something hasn't been signed for, say, five years, whatever it is. Are those type of clever solutions that would cut out the need for trust where you might otherwise have to trust a lawyer or another person outside the family, or you're not giving full access to your family in case one of your kids suddenly rubs you and goes off on a Coke spree or something stupid like that. You're protecting yourself using the abilities of Bitcoin or the abilities of Monero. Is something like that possible or could it be possible? It is definitely not possible today and probably won't be possible
[00:48:42] Unknown:
at least in the short to long term. Monero has just has no scripting at all, much less advanced scripting like mini script essentially is. So nothing like that really works right now. Even multisig in Monero is pretty painful even though it's gotten better over the past few years. So now, unfortunately, that's the kind of functionality that just doesn't really exist in Monero and and can't because of how Monero is built at the moment. But that's not to say that won't change, and theoretically, FCMP
[00:49:07] Unknown:
could open up some things like that down the line in ways it can be used, but I would just kind of assume that it won't be possible at least in the next few years. Fair enough. It's just something I think about a lot as it when me and Q talk about a lot of updates, I'm like, yeah. I've never used that. I don't care. Like, it's it's fine for someone, but it doesn't make a difference to me. This is one of the first things where I'm like, that actually makes or can make a meaningful difference to a security setup and something that I've been very interested in seeing how it progresses. So that's why I ask. I definitely agree. What are the potential attack factors on iOS?
If it accidentally connects, Will backups be sent to Apple and or will any automatic communications occur? I would write to recommend this to family and friends, but not sure how much weight I can put on it. Thanks a ton for all you do in the space.
[00:49:58] Unknown:
Yeah. That's essentially focused on how secure is iOS. I think there's kind of two main things to keep in mind. There's a very clear reason why we built this on mobile only and not desktop. It's because most mobile platforms like iOS, like some forms of Android, are incredibly secure at the hardware and software level and are much, much better than desktops. I think a lot of people feel safer using a desktop with their Bitcoin or Monero or something, but it's actually the inverse of what's true. And keeping your money on, like, a hot wallet on a desktop is way more dangerous than a hot wallet on a mobile platform, much less using something like Cupcake on a mobile platform.
Again, there are caveats, what version of Android, what device you're using? What version of iOS? You'll have different protections against specific attacks. But for the vast majority of attacks, which would be the kind of evil made attack where someone just scoops up your device and tries to brute force the pen or something, they're gonna be incredibly secure and essentially impervious to the the normal attacks. And if you're running a fairly recent device, like a Pixel or an an iPhone that's up to date fully against vulnerabilities, it's gonna be pretty much impossible for an attacker to break into. The real only attack factor would be if you are running on a really old device that doesn't have a secure element or you're running a really old iPhone that is way out of date and there's some sort of an iOS vulnerability that allows brute forcing the pin or somehow hacking the secure enclave, but there's just not you're talking super niche, super advanced.
Something that I think, especially for a cupcake user, is just not really a concern. There's a reason why we really cared about doing this on mobile, and that's because they're really good platforms overall. As far as the, like, reconnections, what would be sent to Apple, etcetera, that's why there's no code and there's no permissions for the app to have any network access. No matter what you do on your phone, Cupcake itself cannot access the network. So, again, that would require some, like, break of the OS itself. Cupcake itself cannot access the network, has no code, has no permissions to be able to do so. So no matter what you do, there's not gonna be any network connections that happen. If you were to keep your device offline, the the main goal is to protect you from some network level attack against your device, not against Cupcake itself. And, no, no backups will be sent to Apple. Again, there's no code or anything like that to allow backups of the app or of the critical data in there. Very nice. I think that's all the questions. So
[00:52:21] Unknown:
XMR chats and boosts. XMR chats, cowboy Cassidy with zero point zero one five XMR says, thank you, gents. Thank you, cowboy Cassidy. Expatriotic says with zero point five XMR, free samurai. I assume that's going to free samurai. I think we had some sort of setup where if they do that hashtag, it goes to them. Good. Schrodinger 0.05 XMR hashtag free samurai. Yes. I think that is why. Anon with zero point zero zero one XMR. If your followers care about digital freedom, this uses real cryptography to hide messages in plain sight, not fake privacy. And then a link. I don't know what that is. Do you know what that is? Rune cipher? I have never heard of it, so I would not recommend
[00:53:13] Unknown:
anyone use it until they actually dig into it. I was just quickly looking up the domain because I was curious if it was recently registered or not. Yeah. Don't go out and use that. Yeah. Do your own research. We haven't used it. But thank you, Anon, if it is something good.
[00:53:28] Unknown:
Jimmy Spend with zero point zero zero one XMR, Lightning, Nostra, and BitAxes
[00:53:36] Unknown:
are gaming. Like BitAxes.
[00:53:37] Unknown:
I
[00:53:38] Unknown:
yeah. I like Lightning. I don't like Nostra. I'll leave Nostra in there. Yeah. I actually like Lightning,
[00:53:44] Unknown:
especially when it works, and I like the idea of Bitaxes, although they don't make a lot of sense most of the time. So but, yeah, Nostra, I am I'm with you then, mate. It's quite okay. Jimmy Speddon, 00010110101, XMR. He says gangster gangster. That's what they yell in. Monero is the best layer two. It's just right. I have to agree, mate. Yeah. Monero enthusiast. Jimmy Spedden is a g. I reckon that's Jimmy Spedden again. It's gotta be, hasn't it? Jimmy Spedden is a g.
[00:54:20] Unknown:
We got four straight from either Jimmy Spedd, Jimmy Spedden, or quote unquote Monero enthusiast bragging on Jimmy Spedden. So, yeah, I think we can guess who that is. And
[00:54:31] Unknown:
then we have Jimmy Spedden again with zero point zero zero one XMR saying XMR chat for the win.
[00:54:38] Unknown:
Yeah. Agree. It's been absolutely incredible. We're being doused by Jimmy Spend, but, hey, he's paying Monero to do it. So who would judge? It's okay. It's okay.
[00:54:47] Unknown:
It's alright. This all goes to the hosting, so thank you to everyone who's donating. I appreciate it. Monero enthusiast, zero point zero one three XMR. Enshitification? I thought it was just dead Internet theory. What does that mean? Enshitification?
[00:55:04] Unknown:
You haven't been listening to our podcast?
[00:55:07] Unknown:
I don't know, mate. I don't know. What did I miss? We talked about this, I think on
[00:55:12] Unknown:
Friday a couple of weeks ago.
[00:55:15] Unknown:
Was this the one while I was like vomiting and shitting myself and shivering and sweating and dying? Because that might explain why I was missing it. Probably.
[00:55:25] Unknown:
Probably. Yeah. It's it's basically a term that talks about how everything on the Internet, especially online platforms, just get worse and worse over time as companies switch from focusing on the user to focusing on profit. We talked specifically about, like, Google as a great example of that, where originally, it was just search for you. Like, they just cared about your search. Yeah. And then it shifted to where all they care about right now is the ad companies that they serve. And so you're, like, the last person on their mind because the money they get is from the ad companies, not from you. Yeah. I actually have heard the term dead Internet theory, but I haven't looked into it. So I have to dig into that. You're broadening my horizons. I like in shitification. Jimmy spend. I mean, Monero enthusiasts. Yeah. Monero enthusiasts. You're definitely different people.
[00:56:09] Unknown:
Jordan sends 0.001XMR and says testing chat colors. Okay. Thank you, mate. You're obviously doing something in the background, something useful. A Syrian king with 0.002, just testing out my dirty little shit coin donation. Well, I can tell you, king, that it worked. Congrats, and thank you. NMVD0.002XMR. When running a Monero community start nine service, is it possible to connect iOS cake wallet to my own node? Just found a guide for Android on the Monero d start OS GitHub page.
[00:56:49] Unknown:
I think it is. Isn't it? I've not tried it on the y iOS, but you should. Yeah. You definitely can. Yeah. I can't remember how start nine presents it if it actually gives you a QR code or not. But whether it does or not, you can definitely connect. You just may have to manually copy and paste in the address and port that it gives you. Or if there is a QR, which I think that there is, I just I don't actually start on myself. You can just scan the QR and add the node directly that way. But, yeah, you can definitely do that on iOS.
[00:57:13] Unknown:
V m v d. Can you let me know if your Monero node is working on start nine, please? Because I packed it in a year ago because it just kept completely destroying my whole setup, and I had to start from fresh. And then the same happened to other much more technical people that I knew, and I was like, okay. It's not just me. And I just went, fuck it. I'm not running this anymore. But if it is working now, I'd like to know because I'd like to run it again. So let us know, please, mate. Shortwave surfer 2,009. 0 point 00 1 XMR. Monero monthly.
Seth, the first batch of Monero no dose did go out. The preorder is for the second batch. This is we were talking about was it last Monero monthly or the one before? I think last one. Yeah. Yeah. Monero enthusiast, 0.002. Barn miner equals Barn China. Okay. Expatriotic zero point zero zero one XMR says hashtag free samurai. The privacy designer with 0.1 XMR, anyone managed to donate privately to Roman storm. Only way I could find, email justice d a o and fill in a donor form asking for name, address, country, wallet address, source of funds, signature. Is this the only way, or am I missing something? Yeah. This is a problem, this sort of stuff. Is there another way, sir? I mean, I know you can donate
[00:58:44] Unknown:
Ethereum. So in theory, if you had some private Ethereum or you were able to use something like Tornado Cash or Railgun or something to gain some privacy, you could donate that way. I think the main problem is that depending on how they're doing the collection, if they're doing it in a way that requires them to be, like, tax exempt, they have to know who's donating. They can't really take anonymous donations. But I don't know exactly how that how that's set up. But the way he's describing the form makes it sound like they have some sort of a a tax free status that they need to maintain, so they have to know where the donations come from. That's also often true with legal defense funds is you can collect money anonymously, but you can't actually use that directly to fund the defense. Like, it has to be money that's coming from, like, clearly approved sources, which makes sense. I mean, you don't want, like, a mob boss using, like, drug money to fund a crazy defense to get out of things. Like, there's understandable reasons for that, but, obviously, when it's an actual good guy, like, you wanna be able to fund him anonymously. So it's a little bit outside of my legal domain to know why that is. I know that you can donate just Ethereum and Ethereum, like, things directly. So if you do have a way to get that privately or make it private, you could donate that way. Yeah. Okay. Fountain boosts
[00:59:55] Unknown:
late stage Huddl with 6,006 stats says, sending this boost just to talk shit to you fuckers. Oh, thank you, mate. I appreciate that because we didn't have any last month. So thank you for stepping up to the plate. I do appreciate it. Eric PP streamed 2,640 sats with no message and pies
[01:00:16] Unknown:
Hey. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Ch
[01:00:18] Unknown:
With a 121 sats with his classic salute, mushroom, and strong-arm. Thank you to everyone who's been sending in boosts, XMR chats, the hashtag free samurai stuff. I'll speak to Jordan on this, but I'm pretty sure that is going across to them. Anything else we want to cover?
[01:00:36] Unknown:
I think that's it. I think, like, we said at the top of the show, keep an eye out for announcements about the next episode. We'll probably do something a little bit different, a little bit special, that may include a live element, but we'll hash that out. We'll drop some posts on socials about that. But, no, I think that's it for this month. Keep up the good work, everybody. Thank you for your support. Awesome to see the Xmart chats and boost roll in. And keep questions coming too. I know we did a few questions in this one. We haven't always done questions. I love that side of things. Q and a is by far my favorite thing to do in the space. So I'm always happy to answer those if people have questions about the Manera ecosystem at all. Very nice. Alright, mate. Well, I look forward to whatever we do on the next one. Catch up with you then. See you.
[01:01:18] Unknown:
If you have any questions, please reach out and ask probably Seth, but you can try and ask me as well. And we'll catch you on the next episode a month from now. Before you go, I wanna say thank you for all the support from all the Ungovernable Misfits and the Ungovernable Misfits crew. Also, a big thank you to Cake Wallet and Foundation, not only for supporting this show and everything that Ungovernable Misfits do, but also for the general freedom and open source movement. We hinted to it in this episode, but Foundation have released a new device. I'm very excited about this. If you haven't already listened to my episode, go back and have a listen.
You can check them out at foundation.xyz. You can use my code, Ungovernable, for a discount. I think just for the passport, not for the ungovernable, or you can click the link in the show notes, and it will take you to our own cool page that mister Crown's made all beautiful. Check that out and also a big thank you to Cake Wallet. If you haven't already tried Cake Wallet, give it a go. You can use this on Mac, Linux, Windows, iPhone and Android. I've been using it now for probably about six months, and I really like it. It's got some great Bitcoin features, great Monero features. You can link this to your own node on both. It's got swap services, payment services, all sorts of things in there that help people who actually use Bitcoin and Monero.
And if you have any questions while using it, you can just send in to our own little tech support here, and me and Seth will go through it in the next episode. Thanks for listening, and stay ungovernable.
IRS CI, ACI. Our agenda for today, we're gonna start with just the basics of Monero. What it is, what it is, how it works, how it works. Monero is considered a privacy token. The world's most private
[00:00:18] Unknown:
privacy. Which means that in high, virtually all transaction details are The world's most private
[00:00:25] Unknown:
privacy.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Which allows cyber criminals criminals criminals which
[00:00:56] Unknown:
And we're back. And we're not going to say that it's come around quickly, even though it has. How are you, mate? You just said it.
[00:01:04] Unknown:
You broke the one rule. It was a clever way of saying it without saying it, wasn't it? It was, but I had to call you out on it. You did. Time has gone so slowly since the last time we recorded. It has. We just had to drag out the recording day for this one. So that's why we're late, guys. Yeah. Sorry about that. It'll be a good one this month. A little bit calmer. I feel like November was a quiet one in the Monero space. I do have to give a shout out. I've said it many times, but monero.observer has been my go to resource to help aggregate and look through this stuff. Escape the raw, escape thera. I don't ask how to pronounce his name.
But the guy who's been doing that fantastic, fantastic work, he's taking a break for a bit, which will be interesting. We'll see what we do for next week's Monero monthly, but we may do something of a New Year's special. But we got some good stuff to go through today. We had some questions. Get into some topics. But, yeah, relatively quiet one. Lots of good chats and boost though, which will take us a while to go through. So looking forward to that. I feel like
[00:02:04] Unknown:
in the Bitcoin world as well as obviously the Monero world, everything slows down towards the end of the year. That's how it's always felt. It's like when we're recording, like, the Christmas specials and things like that. The news is very light. We do shows a bit differently. I don't know if that's people gearing up for Christmas and Thanksgiving and New Year and all the like, it's hard to get shit done, especially if you got family. It's just like there's always something, isn't there? So maybe devs are just like,
[00:02:31] Unknown:
let's just accept it. Start again properly in January. Yeah. I think that's definitely part of it is I mean, you're gonna lose some time Thanksgiving if your company is US related at all. You're gonna lose at least the week of Christmas, basically. So I feel like a lot of the development slows down a little bit. But I feel like, also, it's just been, like, a relatively slow time in terms of price, in terms of industry news. I feel like there just hasn't been a ton even on the Bitcoin side, like you said. So I guess a lot of it is the holiday slowdown stuff, but it's also just so dependent on what's the current thing in the news to push things on the Bitcoin side, which has been relatively quiet.
[00:03:05] Unknown:
Not a lot of news, but first time on the docket, a lot of use, it seems.
[00:03:11] Unknown:
Always. Yeah. I was just reviewing this month. Some of the normal go tos that post stats for usage of Monero have not posted yet. So I definitely have to follow-up with that and maybe throw those in the show notes. But pretty much every month, there are a bunch of different services that post their usage stats on Twitter, on Reddit, somewhere like that, and talk about what percentage of their crypto payments are done in what currency. And it's been really interesting to chart over the years how that percentage has continually increased in Monero and, specifically, how Monero is growing to become the number one payment method on most of these platforms. If they're privacy preserving in any way, pretty much, they're dominated by Monero.
A couple good examples for this month. One of those is Shop n Bit. It's kind of like a concierge service where you chat with them. They help you find whatever it is, whether that's book a vacation, whether that's buy a car, buy a house, or buy something small from Amazon. Like, it can be a ton of different things. But it's built to be a privacy preserving, like, proxy service where they help you to get what you want. Yeah. Some of their services are very geared towards, like, high net worth individuals, the not Seths of the world. The not Seths. But some of their stuff is, like, for the average man, the Seths of the world. So it's a really cool service. It's something we've actually been talking to them about adding into cake.
Basically, letting you just open a chat within cake and directly ask what you want, automatically pay. It's something we will be doing in the new year, but they're a really cool service. Very saverpunk guys. They've actually had Monero supported for a long time, but they don't really get talked about that much in the Monero community. But they posted in November that yet again and they didn't say for how long. It was a little sparse on details, but they said that yet again, Monero is their number one used currency on Shop and Bit. So even something that I I don't see much conversation in the Monero community about it, Monero dominates there. Nano g p t is another interesting one where it's a kind of a privacy focused AI platform where you can use any model you want and you pay per query. It is one of those AI things that's like privacy by trust, not privacy by design. Like, there's no, like, cryptography going on that makes it private, but they're just promising not to log. And you don't have to have an account that has all your personal info, that sort of thing. But they've had Monero support for, I don't know, maybe six, nine months. And Monero is by far their most used currency.
[00:05:23] Unknown:
This last month, it was over 50 percent of their total payments were in Monero. Nothing else was even close to that. Pretty sure I've used that service with Monero myself. As soon as it's an option, it's something that it's like, I don't know why I'd do anything else, even to the extent that now there's a couple of places that I've used where they'll charge more for me to pay in Monero. It's some kind of, because they've got to sell it and they've got to put it through some exchange and some regulatory bullshit, whatever it is. There's, like, a a can't remember how much of a percentage it is, like, a couple of percent or whatever. I'm still like, yeah. I'm still on the pay in this. It's just better. I'll accept the extra charge here.
[00:06:00] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it's just so easy. I think most people love to use it when you can and you have good privacy when using it. Another good example. I don't think we talked about this one yet, but l n VPN added support for Monero, and they've quickly seen its usage take off. But they are one that offers a discount for lightning, but no discount for any other payment method. It is an example of where if you do wanna pay with Monero, you are going to pay slightly more. But, obviously, they have Ellen in the name. Like, they started as a lightning only service that has quickly branched out to accept Monero, which is cool to see. But any of these retailers, if they're privacy centric at all I know we talked about Obscuro last week who Carl Dong, their founder, had talked about how I'd gotten thousands of requests for Monero payment support, and they just added it last month. I'm curious to see if they'll publish any stats around that. Coin cards, Monero's always trading blows with on chain Bitcoin for the number one currency usage there. They're an awesome gift card and debit card proxy service.
My Nimbox, who was run by an awesome guy, they really prefer Monero. I think they had published some stats a while back. I couldn't see them. And they didn't have anything for November, but they had talked about how Monero was their most used currency as well, at least at some point, but I'd be curious to see more recent stats from them. I'm pretty sure from recent conversations that it still is, and definitely the preferred option as well to receive. So there's definitely a pattern there, isn't there? Yes. Yeah. For sure. Cake Pay, obviously, it's a good example as well. We've always been a Monero centric because, obviously, Cake Wallet started Monero only. So we have a huge Monero portion of the community that's using it, but we're always regularly, like, 85% Monero usage at least. Just quickly checking the stats for last month, then, yeah, it's still about that, which is pretty normal for us Even while we've added things like Litecoin and CCash for payments, nothing else really comes close to the Monero usage there. It makes me wonder, like, when there's this much usage,
[00:07:52] Unknown:
why is there not an equivalent amount of talk and podcasts and discussions and, I guess, kind of like hype and excitement around Monero that's public at least, and that's maybe not quite so technical? Like, if you look at the Bitcoin space, which, you know, Bitcoin is being used less, and that's all of what we've talked about is, like, the, like, white market. Also for the dark markets, Monero is, you know, far more used as well. So why then if it's used more and it's everywhere, is it not discussed in the same way that Bitcoin is? Have you got any thoughts on that? Like, it seems we're not alone in doing this show, but there's very few others who are doing any sort of content that, at least that I see, maybe I'm missing it because I'm not following the right people. I think a lot of it comes down to the
[00:08:41] Unknown:
somewhat stupid belief, and I'm just gonna be blunt, that if you want privacy, you can never talk about the things that you use, and that that is a bad idea to talk about using Monero or using X VPN, X not being an actual VPN, but, like, a VPN. You shouldn't talk about the things you do for OPSEC reasons, which, like, yes. Technically, you are making your OPSEC worse if you talk about exactly what your stack is, you're kind of limiting your anonymity set. Someone can be able to tell what things are being used in a specific transaction or something. Like, yes, that could technically be harmful. But I think if you are actually passionate about, a, just spreading human freedom, and, b, if you're actually passionate about improving your privacy by having more people using the privacy tech you're using, growing that at onset Mhmm. I think talking about this stuff publicly is just absolutely vital.
Unless you have a very clear OPSEC reason why you cannot discuss what you use for payments or something like that. It needs to be something where we're spreading the word on how good this stuff is. And I think a great example of that is Yeah. This like, everyone's using Monero for payments on all of these platforms that are in any way privacy preserving. And yet, like you said, there's just not the influencers. There's not all the podcasts. But I I think a lot of that really comes down to Monero being an unfortunate for the marketing perspective, being the, like, imperfect blend of totally decentralized and grassroots, but not having many businesses building around it. There's just not a ton of money pouring into the marketing side of things.
Like, I would suspect that Cake Wallet is by far the largest, quote, unquote, marketing arm for Monero. Yeah. And there's not really many others out there. And I think that's something where, like, Bitcoin, while the project itself is decentralized and grassroots, there are so many companies, and there's so much VC money, and there's so much just capital in the Bitcoin ecosystem that will necessarily flow into marketing that you get a lot more money floating around to fund things like that. Or on the Zcash side, like their recent pump, there's some interesting evidence that they've paid some firms to essentially push influencers to talk about it. Like, Monero couldn't do that. Like, what are we supposed to do? Like, raise donations from the community to do a influencer pump? Like, there's just not that kind of a system. And so I think that's kind of that blend of being decentralized and grassroots, but also not having a massive corporate ecosystem around it where there's just not that much money to flow into funding the podcast, to funding the events, that sort of thing. I suppose
[00:11:08] Unknown:
the corporate side of it is something that people would shy away from regulatory standpoint to some extent, like when you look at how the two of the currencies are viewed Bitcoin more and more is I'm just gonna say it. Like, I love Bitcoin. I've done it for a long time, but, like, the space is quite gay and sooty and gross and boomerie and just not what I care about so much anymore. Mhmm. And I don't see that Monero can be like that anywhere near as easily because the way it's viewed, it's not viewed as as just an investment vehicle. You don't have, like, a Michael Sailor, like, going and speaking to a load of suits and people jumping in for that kind of stuff and ETFs. And, like, if anything's gonna be delisted, it's gonna be Monero. If anything's gonna have shade thrown at it, it's gonna be Monero. And that's because it works and it is private. But I guess that would be the reason that people are not making the content. But if anything, it should make you wanna do it more. And that's obviously what we're trying to do here is, like, bring people in and get them to use this thing and not be like, use this instead of Bitcoin. But, like, if you've got stuff that you care about and you wanna make private payments and you wanna do it in an easy manner, this is a really useful tool. I don't know. I just think sometimes it's a shame. Like, I I I flick on my Twitter, and I just see nonsense, 90% nonsense from the Bitcoin accounts and the influencer accounts and just not anything on the Monero side. So if anyone has any ideas how we can push this movement and bring some more people in and get some more people interested and, like, talking about things, because that's how you learn as well as, like, the whole way through my Bitcoin experience, like, from the very beginning knowing absolutely nothing. Just like having conversations with people and people saying to me, oh, you don't wanna do that. You wanna try this. Or, oh, you're gonna have a problem if you do that, or this project looks promising, or here's my stack. This is how I do things and just tinkering. But if I have a generic question, I'll sort of reach out to you. I'm in a lucky position where I can do that, but not everyone can. So I don't know. Just something I've been thinking about. It'd be nice to get some more participation
[00:13:21] Unknown:
and advice from people who know what they're doing. Yeah. For sure. And I think, like, there, thankfully, is a pretty good amount of that in the Monero community in terms of, like, the communal help, the chats, like, that sort of thing. Matrix has always been good for that. Reddit's always been pretty good for that. Mhmm. But, yeah, I think maybe one other thing to call out on, like, why Monero isn't more talked about. There's also been this, like, weird anti corporate push always throughout the Minera community, at least as long as I've been there, where Mhmm. Anytime any, like, corporation wants to do anything, any company, anything like that, it's just always viewed as, like, evil because it's a company. No matter what that company is or whether it's funded by a sketchy VC or not or it just doesn't matter. If it's, like, a corporation or anything that could be remotely viewed as centralized, it gets viewed as this, like, evil thing. Like, I understand the desire to push back on something that has been part of the problem in the world of, like, corporations and shitifying everything and being greedy and stealing our data. Like, there is a ton of stuff to push back on. But I think part of it would come with the Monero community being more open to pushing and being happy for and helping out good companies that want to build around Monero, that want to build businesses around Monero, good centralized entities that want to use Monero. And I think that's just something that maybe the Monero community can improve on over the years. Maybe there's a middle ground because I think Bitcoin's gone too far one way. And I do think it corrupts
[00:14:42] Unknown:
when the money starts coming in and people are getting funding and people don't want to say certain things. And the culture starts to shift quite a lot from like cipher punk to investment bros. So I kinda respect that there's that pushback. But like you say, it depends on the company. Yeah. If a company like Proton come out and go like, yeah, we're gonna accept Monero, then that should be very much like, fuck. Yeah. This is great. This is really useful. We want you to accept it. It shows more people around the world that they can use it, brings more people in who obviously have a focus on privacy. What that's why they're using that service.
But then maybe don't be so excited if you get a load of, like, VC Fundy, wanky Yeah. Types who are gonna come and corrupt. So it's about being selective rather than it is much like the Bitcoin maxi thing. Like, if it's not Bitcoin, then everything else is absolutely useless, including, like, food and gold and, you know, like, everything that isn't Bitcoin is useless. Maybe that's the same in the Monero community of, like, anything that is SUTI in any way is definitely bad, and that's not true. I mean, look at cake wallet. Like you're saying, you guys are a business, but you do a lot in terms of the marketing. Like, we wouldn't be having this conversation if it wasn't for you guys. So I think there is, like, a fine line, isn't there? Yeah. For sure. Just like everything else, it's about nuance. It's about balance. We don't do nuance around here. I know. I know.
[00:16:11] Unknown:
Being the bad guy. Okay. Alright. That's the run over. That's the run. What else have we got going on? Yeah. I mean, outside of that, just a couple of things to kinda call out for people. It's been really cool seeing the mayor community continue to drive funding good things. So we talked about the community crowdfunding system, the CCS before. There's four proposals that are up for funding right now. There were two that were focused on FCMP plus plus integration and caret and some other big things. Those got funded rather quickly, but there are four more in there that are ready for funding. So, again, totally optional, totally up to you, the individual, what you wanna fund, if anything. But one way to continue to grow the usability and the reach of an arrow is funding that way. Like, we just talked about there's not a lot of corporations pouring money into this stuff. We're doing what we can at cake wallet, but it's really important that the community steps in and is willing to part with some of their hard earned Monero to help fund things that they care about within the community. So jumping into that, just ccs.getmonero.org.
You You can see those ones that are in funding required and donate to any that that kinda peak your interest there. But I do don't just kinda continue to circle back to that so people are aware of what's needed in the space. Yeah. Definitely. Outside of that, a couple quick updates on the atomic swap front. So, like, we talked about in the past, I think atomic swaps are an absolutely vital tool for Monero because they mean that even if, like, the current centralized instant exchanger ecosystem, that's a huge asset for Monero. Even if that were to go away overnight, we can assure that people can swap between other cryptocurrencies at Monero in a way that is literally unstoppable. So two of the approaches that have had some growth over the past month, one is something called Basic Swap. It's basically an atomic swap platform that under the hood uses the Particle Network, which is a cryptocurrency, an old one. It's basically just used for passing the messages necessary for the atomic swap protocol that they use. But they have atomic swaps between Monero, Bitcoin, a bunch of other things, and let you swap between them freely. And they've had some improvements on two fronts. Basically, one is that there's a Monero community member who maintains their it's basically like a set of scripts that helps you to run it on your computer. Just like most atomic swap protocols, it's a little complex and clunky to use, but these scripts make it a little bit easier to use. And there's been an update there. There's nothing massive in the update, but it's called basic swap dash bash, like, basic swap bash with a dash in between. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a good set of tools if you are a little bit more advanced user, but not super technical to be able to get that running on your desktop or laptop laptop computer. And the one thing that's been missing so far in the basic swap ecosystem is they rely purely on full nodes. So, like, right now, if you want to swap between Bitcoin and Monero, you have to have both the Bitcoin and Monero node running on that same computer. Obviously, that's a massive hurdle for most people. On that same computer? Yes. Okay. Yes. On that same computer. You can't just connect to a remote one or anything like that. That has been pretty preventative, obviously, for most users, but they've been working on essentially changing it so that you can actually connect to a remote node and rely on that remote node. The very important thing to understand with atomic swaps is that if the node that you're using lies to you about the transaction or doesn't tell you about a transaction or something like that, the atomic swap could fail and you could lose money. So that's why normally these have relied on using a full node. But if either, a, you have a node that you trust that's run by a community member or something, or, b, if you run a node just not on that computer, this will be a really good change. So they're building out that, like, client functionality. But the other really good part about that is you're never gonna run a full Bitcoin, M and A and particle node on your phone, but you can connect to outside nodes. So something that we have already committed to work on, but we're basically waiting for them to finalize their light client tooling is having basic swap in Cake Wallet so that you can do atomic swaps within Cake Wallet using nodes that are not hosted on your device. So that is something we'll look to build out in the new year that will be a good addition.
[00:19:57] Unknown:
Maybe a stupid question. Would that not be shooting yourself in the foot as a business because you already offer swaps? Yes. And then if someone's using this, then you're not collecting any fees, but you are paying for the infrastructure.
[00:20:16] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it depends on exactly how it's integrated. Probably, we wouldn't charge fees on it, and it would just be something for the more advanced user who wants to be able to use it. I mean, it's never going to come to the same user experience of an instant exchanger. So I still think the vast majority of people would want to go through an instant exchange where we do take that fee like we've talked about before. But, I mean, really, for us, it's more about giving users the option to use this when nothing else works for them for whatever reason and ensuring that people have easy access to this. Like we talked about, if suddenly instant exchangers go dark overnight and don't list an error or whatever, there needs to be fallbacks. Yeah. So this would be one of those potential solutions. I think there is a way that people who integrate this can charge fees, but that's still very, like, not set in stone yet. So we'll see what happens to that. But probably, this would be something we just put in place and don't do fees on so people can use it to get Monero when necessary. That's cool. Yeah.
On the atomic swap front as well, there's someone who is by HBS who's been working on atomic swaps between Monero and EVM networks, the Ethereum's, the the Arbitrons, the Gnosises, the Solanas, that sort of thing. He's working initially on Ethereum support, and he's making really good progress on that. There's still nothing alive for, like, you, the average user to use. Still very much in testing and development. But so far, basically, the first milestone of getting something that actually works is ready, and he's working on improving the UI, improving the actual functionality, improving the smart contracts on the EVM side that make it all happen. And that will definitely be a big one, especially if you think about stablecoins to Monero and vice versa, which are absolutely massive. That's a lot of the volume in the Monero space. People being able to do that and not just atomic swap between Bitcoin or something like that, but actually be able to go directly to and from stables in a way, again, that's trustless and atomic swap
[00:22:02] Unknown:
is really, really awesome. So someone would be able to go from Monero to a USD c or USDT or whatever thing. Would that mean that do you have, like, a lot of people trading in Monero? Like, do you have traders in the same way you do with Bitcoin?
[00:22:19] Unknown:
I'm sure we do, but there's not gonna be that many of them, I would assume. Because my guess
[00:22:25] Unknown:
is that with Monero not being available on many exchanges and spread betting platforms or those type of things, I wonder if that restricts the use for people whether they can do that. Or, like, for example, not even like a trader, like someone who sat there and they hold their wealth in Monero, and then they see a spike in price and they go, do you know what? Over the next three months, I've got some payments I've gotta make and stuff. So I'm gonna take a little bit off the table here. I don't wanna spend it right now. I don't wanna buy the gift cards or do these swaps. So maybe I can keep that in a stablecoin, which I can then convert back or whatever, but I can hold my value in case this is a good time to sell. I'll take a little bit off the top. Yeah. That would then be a very good way for them to do that without having to interact with an exchange. For sure. For sure. And I think that that's something that's really common within Cake Wallet and other places. I think it's the reason for a lot of that stable coin usage is people can
[00:23:19] Unknown:
take profits in stable coins if they are trading or even just if they have a lot of an arrow in savings and they want to make sure, like you said, that they have some for spending the next month or something no matter if the price changes. I think that's a super common flow. So that's one of the reasons why I think that's really useful. I mean, that's something that I do and really appreciate is the ability to quickly go back and forth between stables makes it much easier because, like, going back and forth between fiat, if you can even do it in your jurisdiction with Monero Yeah. Is a pain in the ass and obviously bad for privacy too. Oh my god. So it's really nice when you can just boop straight into whatever stable coin you want straight into your wallet and vice versa. It makes it much, much simpler when you need to move between the two. Yeah. It is like a way to
[00:23:59] Unknown:
derisk to some extent because if you know, you've got bills coming out every month and you do see these peaks and troughs, and it can be very unstable with Monero and Bitcoin to do what we've just seen it, like a massive drop of Bitcoin, being able to do that and just say, okay, I'm good for six months. If the price halves, I'm not then suddenly, like, shitting myself, like, as I'm selling the bottom.
[00:24:21] Unknown:
I can actually take a little bit of risk out of this. So that that's actually really cool. I like that. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it'll be cool because you can do that in a trustless way. Right now, there's no real decentralized exchanges that list Monero. Mhmm. So a lot of it is relying on some centralized entity even though there are really good ones that support Monero. It still is some trust. And you need to gain just under those exchange support, these atomic swaps between EVM chains will be absolutely huge for growing who has access to Monero
[00:24:48] Unknown:
and how useful it is to them. So I definitely am excited for that. Isn't it still decentralized in the sense that if you're going from Monero that is decentralized into a stablecoin, which I think all of them are centralized, then it's still not. That's what I'm trying to say. If you're still Yeah. I do get what you're saying.
[00:25:05] Unknown:
I mean, yes. Technically, especially if you're going to something like Tether or Circle, you are putting a lot of trust that those funds won't be frozen. I mean, one of the beautiful things with Banero is that you do have privacy on that side, so there's not gonna be like, you're less likely if you somehow you got tainted funds or something. You're not gonna be potentially burned in the same way you would be if you swapped to maybe Bitcoin to tether, and then you realized, oh my goodness. Like, these are from a theft or something, and you didn't know. That would be less of a problem for you. Like, that fungibility of Monero is useful. But, yes, I mean, all of those centralized stable coins are problematic. There are ones that are not centralized, but they're more rare. That would be like DAI, d a I, or x DAI, or d euro. Like, there are some examples of ones that can't be frozen in the same way, but definitely the majority are vulnerable to that. So while you are reducing your exposure to price fluctuations, you're increasing your exposure to censorship if you're using something like tether or circle, which is the downside of those, obviously. Basically, everyone uses Tether, don't they? And then so
[00:26:02] Unknown:
you're reducing your risk if you use Monero, though, it sounds like because you don't have the risk of the tainted coins. So you shouldn't really use on chain Bitcoin, then it should be Lightning or Monero to do a swap into Tether, presumably.
[00:26:17] Unknown:
Yeah. It'd be better, but that's true of pretty much everything. If you can swap in a privacy preserving way, you you should be doing it. Yeah. That's gonna help you a lot. Okay. Let's keep rolling. Next up and this is a pretty cool one. So the Magic Grants organization who are a nonprofit of five one three c in the Monero space, they actually launched a new Monero wallet. I think as a kind of a response to my Monero shutting down, there wasn't going to be light wallet available in the space. So they've kinda taken up that mantle. They've launched what they call Skylight, which is a Monero light wallet, which means that it connects to a server that accepts view keys. You send your view key to the server. That server then does all of the syncing and scanning and then just gives you balance and transaction information.
So it does essentially remove your privacy entirely from the node runner, but you get better user experience. Now just like with Cake Wallet, we're we're working to implement light wall support as well. We're not gonna run a server. Skylight's not gonna run a server. So they're relying on you, the user, or maybe trusted community members to run light wallet servers that you can then connect to. There's not gonna be a default set one that's run by magic or something like that. Mostly because I wouldn't want your view keys. I don't wanna know your transaction information. And so I think that will be pretty common, but it will be getting easier to run the light wallet server. We're working on that actually right now at cake. Like, when we launch light wallet support, we're gonna launch it with blogs and guides to help you run the server yourself because that is kind of the vision that we have for that is either you use Monero in the most privacy preserving way if you can't run a light wallet server or use it in the more better user experience way if you can run a light wallet server. And that will be a really good paradigm to allow people to choose. So that will get easier to actually run that, but it's a cool wallet skylight that they launched. It borrows a lot of work that's gone into cake wallet, that's gone into stack wallet, that's gone into I think that's what I mean too, that they're using under the hood. But it's cool to see another wallet launch in the space and a good proof of concept. I'm curious to see how it continues to grow and improve over the coming months and years. How does it work in Monero world
[00:28:14] Unknown:
with open sourcing all of the wallet software and everything else? Do you have the same issues as you do in the Bitcoin world sometimes where people wanna say open source and things aren't actually open source and there's all these arguments. Is it much more clear cut, like, it's open source where it's nothing, or is it much the same? I would say it's much more clear cut. It's common in the space. There's a pretty aggressive
[00:28:37] Unknown:
view on open source, like, much more aggressive Mhmm. Than the most aggressive Bitcoin ones, where in Monero, there's a pretty strong, like, MIT only open source view where basically they believe like, a lot of people in the Monero space believe that everything should be completely permissible. Like, not even copy left, like, g p l v three or something, which is more where I land. Right. But rather that everything should be MIT. So I really, in the Monero community, it's basically completely open source. That's usually almost always MIT. K. Qualities MIT. I believe Skylight is. Stack Wallet is. Like, it's really common to be MIT in the space, or it's completely closed source, and it's something that no one recommends. So there's not really an in between there. Pretty much everything is open source, and there's none of the, like, source viewable, stupid intellectual property moat stuff that we see in the Bitcoin space where people wanna protect themselves against competitors, but be able to pretend that they're open source. Yeah. It's incredibly annoying. So
[00:29:31] Unknown:
when you have new wallets and new software in the Monero world, is there much more of a view than like, okay, this is good for everyone because everyone can use from everyone and there's not, oh, you're a cloner, man, all that shit. Like, it's much more collaborative.
[00:29:48] Unknown:
Yeah. Very much so. I think much more collaborative overall. I think part of that is just because it's smaller. There's more of the idea of, like, we need the rising tide to lift all boats kind of thing Yeah. Rather than, like, I need my piece of the pie. Okay. But I think also it's just when you are smaller, you're gonna be a little bit more aligned in terms of community, and that ethos is gonna hold a little bit stronger. So I think that has been true of my narrative. There's a purer culture. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. As it grows to a larger percentage of people across the world,
[00:30:18] Unknown:
you're gonna have much more of a diverse kind of thought on things. And so Monero being smaller means that it's more pure in that sort of like cypherpunk open source ethos.
[00:30:28] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. For sure. Okay. So far. But as it grows, I'm sure that will change, which is okay. Yeah. We'll see. Good question. Last quick kinda general update, and then we'll go through a couple software updates to jump into a few questions. But just just the last kinda general update. Vic posted this on Reddit, but I wanted to call it out here as well. But we passed a million total cake wallet downloads in November. And I don't say that to, like, brag on cake wallet, even though, like, that is an awesome milestone that we're pumped about. But rather to, like, thank the Monero community, we started as a Monero only wallet back in 2018. Monero was still by far our largest user group in the space, and the Monero community has been super supportive and also critical in a good way most of the time, helping us stay honest, helping us to stay focused on what matters.
Like I've said many times, Monero and the community specifically is the reason why I'm in this space at all. I was totally viewing crypto as this pump and dump thing that maybe I should jump in on and useless. And it's the Monero community that opened my eyes to what use it can have for human freedom. It's the Monero community that opened my eyes to why personal privacy matters. And, like, literally, nothing I've done and nothing Cake Wallet has done would exist without the Monero community. So just a huge thank you to everybody who has been around over the years, who's helped to promote Monero, who's helped to talk to merchants about accepting it. All of those little things add up. It's been really cool to see that massive growth in Monero usage across the board, and hopefully, we'll see a lot more of that. But, yeah, I just wanted to say a quick thank you. If you wanna see Vic's full thank you, I'll post that in the show notes as well. But he had a a long heartfelt message that he posted for the Monero community, which I think is great. It's exciting that the Monero community has pushed us this far and is continuing to push others in the space far as well. We were just talking about growth and numbers. I mean, a million downloads is pretty serious. I'm sure that it was only, like, a few months ago I saw something about half a million. Yes. Maybe I'm imagining it. It wasn't that long ago. No. No. We've pretty much doubled in downloads in the last year. Like, in 2025,
[00:32:23] Unknown:
we've doubled in downloads from before that. So that's yeah. That does make sense, to be fair, because we did start talking about you guys about a year and a half ago in queue. And, obviously, we were saying, why is there this kind of Monero wallet as far as we could generally see it? Like, doing more cool stuff on the privacy stuff on Bitcoin than almost anybody else. And it kept coming up and kept coming up. And then, obviously, you guys sponsored Uncomfortable Misfits and bam, doubled.
[00:32:54] Unknown:
It's just how it goes. It is. It is. That sponsorship paying off, man. I'm sure the devs did something and cake wallet team did something, but, you know, me and Q are gonna take most of the thanks for that. Yeah. I don't think we had any releases over the last few years. So I think that's mostly just the ungovernable misfits marketing wing as we just we sit on our hands.
[00:33:15] Unknown:
You've done you've done very little. No. Congratulations. A million downloads for any type of application is fucking huge. But for a cryptocurrency
[00:33:29] Unknown:
wallet who's, like, heavy on the Monero side, that's extremely impressive. So yeah. Congrats. Thank you. Thank you. Definitely exciting. And just another good example of, like, we're winning really good privacy tech is winning. There's massive interest in privacy, like, massive, massive interest. Yeah. Good to see that continue growing. A few quick software updates we'll run through, and then we can answer these questions quickly. But nothing crazy this month. Monero had a bug fix release, zero dot 18 dot four dot four. I'm begging that we go to version one dot zero with FCMP plus plus. I'm tired of reading off these zero dot releases when Monero is the most used privacy coin, the most used coin on many places, and we're, like, we're pretending like it's not ready for prime time yet with a zero dot versioning.
So hopefully, we'll get It's humble. It is. Yes. It's too humble, I think. But, yes, zero dot 18 dot four dot four was released this month. Nothing crazy. Basically, it was a bug fix release. There were some issues with the ledger. If you're using the Monero CLI or Monero GUI. And so they fixed those a few other things as well. Nothing huge, but always important to update when you can. Goo packs with two x's because why not? Version one dot 12 was released as well this last month, which has some really good improvements. We've talked about it many times, but if you wanna mine Monero, Goopex is pretty much the best way. It's a desktop app that you can run that handles all the software for you. It makes it really simple to just click start and get off to the races mining Monero on an extra computer that you have lying around.
And related p two pool v four dot 12 was released. Again, a lot of, like, minor changes, but the one big one was that it now has proper full support for the tour network. So you can run it entirely behind tour if you want to have even more privacy preserving mining of Monero, which is a a good improvement. The Monero core software, like Monero, Daemon, etcetera, have always been able to be run purely behind Tor, but that hasn't worked quite right for p two pool yet. So this is a good step for where you can run the entire Monero stack entirely behind Tor if you so desire. For most people, don't do that. It's gonna make your user experience a bit more painful. But for those users to have a specific need, it's very, very important that it is possible. Awesome. We've stolen some questions this week, haven't we? Yes. I greedily took them from Freedom Tech Friday. I figured we'd yank out some of the narrow specific questions and jump on those this month. So we'll get some of those answered and leave queue to find some others. Well, we never ever ever get to the bottom of the list for Freedom Tech Friday with questions, so I think it's okay. Yeah. I think it's fine. Alright. So let me jump into these. Stolen question number one is from, sir, Jamsela.
[00:36:02] Unknown:
How about a good explainer on using the Monero blockchain explorer? Also, is there an explorer that can be self hosted a la mempool space? Good question. I don't know the answer to this. This is a great question.
[00:36:17] Unknown:
So basically, Monero blockchain explorers are crap. They work, but they're very limited. There's two reasons for that. One is just no one has really put a lot of time and effort into making a good one that's reliable. And by far, the most common one over the years has been xmrchain.net, which technically works. It has been dependable, but is, like, text only, hideous to look at, and just not something I would ever tell someone to use unless they're more technical. The way it presents information, etcetera, is just is way too complex for the average person. But that one has been by far the most common one. We also have one that we run that's a part of monero.com, which basically is using the same data under the hood as XMR chain, but it's presenting it in a little bit more approachable way. It works.
It's not great. I'll be totally honest. Like, you know me. I'm the brutally honest guy Yeah. We like that. In this space. So, like, it's fine. But one thing that I really liked years and years and years ago, I think it was four or five years ago, it was just launched out of nowhere. It was an explorer called Explore Monero. Exploremonero.com is where it's hosted right now. It was the first explorer from Monero that, like, actually looked nice. It actually worked. It had good visual representation of the size of transactions, the size of blocks. Like, it just looks like something that a regular human would actually want to use. But when it was launched, it was not open source. Thankfully, that actually changed a couple months back. And the person who created it, who actually is the founder or one of the founders of the Bitcoin design community, goes by Christophe Ono or GHBS or or GBS or something like that. He created this years and years ago. He also contributed to the Monero GUI and was a key participant in making the Monero GUI much better when that was revamped three or four years ago. He built this. Just didn't have the time to really work on it. I've been harassing him for years about open sourcing it, and he finally had the time to fix a lot of problems. Like, he didn't open source it originally because it just wasn't complete. It was really proof of concept, and he wasn't thinking people would want it. And yet it was actually a really good tool. So he did open source that, and we actually just hired somebody at KQL. It's gonna be doing a lot of stuff like this. And one of his first tasks is to take over maintaining that explorer, continue to make it more useful, easier to host, and, obviously, for us to host an instance of this for people to use, kind of replacing the monera.com/explorer one that we use right now. So that, I think, will be the best. Like, as it is, it's not quite mempool dot space level of nice. I think something I've thought about for a long time is forking mempool dot space and making something like minero.space or something. But it's also just very different because there's not nearly as much that we can display about monero transactions, Whereas mempool dot space heavily relies on how much
[00:38:54] Unknown:
data about a transaction is published to do a lot of their visualizations, to do a lot of the cool stuff that they do. Well, yeah, a lot of what makes Monero great makes the explorer not so great. That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? But in terms of the design, mempool dot space, I think they've absolutely nailed that the way that even a nontechnical person can work their way around it. And it's very visual. It's really nice. So if that could be thought that'd be cool. And then the self hosting part of the question, is that something that if you have someone working on from k wallet on this, will people be able to self host this as well, or is this just something they have to access running on someone else's server? Yeah. I mean, it it definitely will be self hostable. I think, obviously, initially, our focus will be on cleaning up and maintaining the code and then running an instance ourselves for people to use.
[00:39:41] Unknown:
But with the way it's actually built out and one of the main changes that Christophe did to it when he open sourced it was to change it from relying on a, like, a more convoluted API to be able to just call a Monero node. I think it will make it much easier for you to run this alongside a Monero node and just have it point to the local Monero node to get all the data that it needs. So that's definitely something, like, I want to do and we will do down the line. I can't promise, like, when the docs and stuff will happen, but probably like most things that I touch, I'll dockerize it and make it easier to run using Docker alongside Monero d and other things that I maintain or that others maintain in the docker space. Trying to make it straightforward, that definitely will be the goal. You can technically run the xmrchain.net explorer right now, but it's a little rough, especially if you're using Docker, which most people who are self hosting are using Docker or some version of Docker, essentially. It's just a little bit painful right now. So definitely hope to improve that. Technically, you can self host the xmrchain.net one right now. I think it's called Monero blocks on GitHub, but it it's definitely a little bit tricky at the moment. Good question, sir James a lot. O x bad hash.
[00:40:42] Unknown:
Could be good to diffuse the FUD about Monero 51% attack, which never worked.
[00:40:49] Unknown:
I think we did do this, didn't we? Because we sort of covered all the ifs and buts and maybes and how it could and how it couldn't and what are the options to try and stop it and will it happen? And then I think we did cover that it didn't really go as planned, but I guess we can do a recap. Yeah. I mean, I I meant to forewarn you about this and didn't do my job. There's not much to cover in terms of, like, what it was that happened. The only thing I wanted to touch on here is just they stopped. They pivoted to something else. They're not attacking Monero anymore, and no one else is. So we haven't had any of those issues for the last two months, three months, two months, I think. So just to call out, that totally went away. The Monero community, obviously, will continue to work on solutions to make that more difficult for someone else to do. But just like we expected, they ran out of funding, essentially. They're having and other stuff happened, and they couldn't keep dumping their coin for Minero. And they pivoted to something else. I think they said they were gonna attack, like, coin or something. I don't care. They're just affinity scammers, so I didn't wanna focus on it too much. Yeah. But they pivoted to something else, and that has been interesting. But Monero has been totally fine since then. No attacks. No reorgs. No one else is trying this, which is good to see, and things have just been operating as normal since then. So that was the only reason I left this one in there. I just wanted to kinda give that quick update. It burned some scammers money. It achieved
[00:42:03] Unknown:
practically nothing other than a few people getting slightly worried in terms of negative stuff, but it also on the positive side, it did start conversations about how somebody more sophisticated could attack. Mhmm. Which is a good thing as we covered as well. So thanks, guys. Thanks for burning your money, fucking retails. It's a good, stress test. We'll come way stronger at the end. Yeah. Exactly. Filthy Fiat wallet from Nosta. Seth, really love the idea of cupcake wallet. Thank you. I've been messing around with it on iOS using a passphrase. Couple of questions.
Is there a 24 word option? We'll go through them. Is there a 24 word option?
[00:42:41] Unknown:
Not right now, but I think that there will be. I'll preface a lot of these questions with Cupcake is new, and we're focusing on making it something that's extremely useful to the average person, not something targeted at, like, these super advanced use case. So I do wanna just kinda call that out before I answer all these. I think we definitely want to add more advanced things into Cupcake as we go, but you'll see that my answer to most of these will be no because we're really, like Cupcake isn't targeted at Super Hacker Man. The goal is to get close to hardware wallet security in the hands of people who normally would not have access to hardware wallets or to allow people to use it as a companion in, like, a multi vendor, multi sig, or something like that. Neither of which normally need more advanced stuff, but we can also quickly roll through. But, yeah, 24 word option, not right now. We're leaning on 12 words like we have on others, but we can definitely add that. That's probably something we should either way just for those people who have, maybe a seed phrase from an old hardware wallet they wanna import or something like that. Is there a way to see master fingerprint? There is not right now. We are gonna add this into Cake Wallet. So even if we don't put it into Cupcakes specifically, you'll be able to see it when you connect it to Cake Wallet soon. So we will have that down the line. Cool. Assuming air gapped, no outside communications,
[00:43:55] Unknown:
would you feel comfortable placing generational wealth in a cupcake wallet? Oh, this is always one where it's just impossible to answer, isn't it? Like, would you hear?
[00:44:06] Unknown:
I mean, if it's the best thing that's available to you, yes. Like, if your choices would be I stored in a hot wallet because I can't get a harder wallet or I use cupcake, then, like, absolutely. Cupcake would be way better than using a hot wallet to store generational wealth. But I think, again, I wanna call people to, like, with the focus of this. Well, no. I'm I'm gonna shift the shift the answer a bit. Generational wealth means something totally different to each person. So for you, maybe generational wealth is a $100,000. To someone who's in the global South, maybe generational wealth is a thousand dollars, and they want to be able to save that. But spending $200 in a hardware wallet to save their thousand dollars in Bitcoin would be idiotic. Like, you're gonna spend 20% of your stack Yes. To be able to save this. So something like Cupcake Wallet is an absolutely perfect fit there. If you're storing, like, $100,000 or a million dollars, you should probably be thinking about other solutions or Cupcake as a part of your solution rather than it being your sole solution. Unless, again, you can't get a hardware for some reason or for OPSEC reasons, you need to make sure that there's no tie between you and a hardware wallet. I'm not saying that because I don't think Cupcake is secure. Obviously, I do think it's secure. It's been audited.
We've put in a ton of effort to make sure that it's good. Obviously, a little bit limited in security compared to a full fledged good quality open source hardware wallet. It's not about replacing those. But I think that for many people putting generational wealth in Cupcake, well, yeah, I would recommend it. But it all comes down to you specifically. How much is generational wealth? What percentage of your stock would you have to spend on a hardware wallet set up to secure that properly? Can you get a hardware wallet? And a lot of times, it comes down to if your stack is relatively small versus the cost of a hardware wallet or you can't get one for some reason, Cupcake is gonna be an amazing solution because it gives you security you would never have in a hot wallet otherwise. I'm just gonna throw in some old man dad advice here. It's non technical side is don't put all your eggs in one basket.
[00:45:57] Unknown:
Just never put all your eggs in one basket. Even if you've got some clever multi sig solution that you think is the best and it's doing all this clever stuff in the background and you've got this whole thing mapped out, everyone can make mistakes. There can be flaws in any software. There could be certainly flaws in the way that you talk about things or revealing information about a setup to people. There can be all sorts of things that can go wrong. So if you really care about this amount of money, whether it be a thousand or whether it be a million or 10,000,000 or whatever,
[00:46:30] Unknown:
I would never just have one set up personally. I just don't think it's a good idea. So split your risk. Yep. Definitely agreed. Very much depends on the individual, but try things. Find what solution works for you. And also something that we haven't mentioned here, but also just make sure that loved ones can actually recover those funds if something were to happen to you. Something that I think everyone needs to think about unless you're single and have no family or friends, but, yeah, that's that's fair. So I'm sorry. But if you have anyone you love and you don't want your Bitcoin or Banero or Litecoin to be just burned, if something were to happen to you, it's important to think about how they can recover that. And I do think Cupcake would be one of the easiest by far. They're not actually gonna think about finding a different hardware wallet or trying to source a ledger or fiddling with little keys that just install an app on a second phone. Yeah. Rock and roll. So I think that is one thing that this does make easier, but something that just kinda always has to be in the back of your mind as you're planning out your cold storage approach is how will my loved ones recover this, and how easy will it be for them to do that potentially in the middle of, like, deep grief. Like, you have to think about things in an an unfortunate, hard, and sad way, but making sure that your loved ones could benefit from all of the work you've put in if something were to happen to you is a really important part of that. I have my own question in the middle of this question from what you just said.
[00:47:45] Unknown:
You know, with Bitcoin, we have this with mini scripts and things you have, like, degradating, multi sig, and all these sort of clever solutions that are starting to come out or at least be talked about. Are those same things possible with Monero where if you don't sign for a certain amount of time or things go down to a single sig, which wouldn't access all the funds unless something hasn't been signed for, say, five years, whatever it is. Are those type of clever solutions that would cut out the need for trust where you might otherwise have to trust a lawyer or another person outside the family, or you're not giving full access to your family in case one of your kids suddenly rubs you and goes off on a Coke spree or something stupid like that. You're protecting yourself using the abilities of Bitcoin or the abilities of Monero. Is something like that possible or could it be possible? It is definitely not possible today and probably won't be possible
[00:48:42] Unknown:
at least in the short to long term. Monero has just has no scripting at all, much less advanced scripting like mini script essentially is. So nothing like that really works right now. Even multisig in Monero is pretty painful even though it's gotten better over the past few years. So now, unfortunately, that's the kind of functionality that just doesn't really exist in Monero and and can't because of how Monero is built at the moment. But that's not to say that won't change, and theoretically, FCMP
[00:49:07] Unknown:
could open up some things like that down the line in ways it can be used, but I would just kind of assume that it won't be possible at least in the next few years. Fair enough. It's just something I think about a lot as it when me and Q talk about a lot of updates, I'm like, yeah. I've never used that. I don't care. Like, it's it's fine for someone, but it doesn't make a difference to me. This is one of the first things where I'm like, that actually makes or can make a meaningful difference to a security setup and something that I've been very interested in seeing how it progresses. So that's why I ask. I definitely agree. What are the potential attack factors on iOS?
If it accidentally connects, Will backups be sent to Apple and or will any automatic communications occur? I would write to recommend this to family and friends, but not sure how much weight I can put on it. Thanks a ton for all you do in the space.
[00:49:58] Unknown:
Yeah. That's essentially focused on how secure is iOS. I think there's kind of two main things to keep in mind. There's a very clear reason why we built this on mobile only and not desktop. It's because most mobile platforms like iOS, like some forms of Android, are incredibly secure at the hardware and software level and are much, much better than desktops. I think a lot of people feel safer using a desktop with their Bitcoin or Monero or something, but it's actually the inverse of what's true. And keeping your money on, like, a hot wallet on a desktop is way more dangerous than a hot wallet on a mobile platform, much less using something like Cupcake on a mobile platform.
Again, there are caveats, what version of Android, what device you're using? What version of iOS? You'll have different protections against specific attacks. But for the vast majority of attacks, which would be the kind of evil made attack where someone just scoops up your device and tries to brute force the pen or something, they're gonna be incredibly secure and essentially impervious to the the normal attacks. And if you're running a fairly recent device, like a Pixel or an an iPhone that's up to date fully against vulnerabilities, it's gonna be pretty much impossible for an attacker to break into. The real only attack factor would be if you are running on a really old device that doesn't have a secure element or you're running a really old iPhone that is way out of date and there's some sort of an iOS vulnerability that allows brute forcing the pin or somehow hacking the secure enclave, but there's just not you're talking super niche, super advanced.
Something that I think, especially for a cupcake user, is just not really a concern. There's a reason why we really cared about doing this on mobile, and that's because they're really good platforms overall. As far as the, like, reconnections, what would be sent to Apple, etcetera, that's why there's no code and there's no permissions for the app to have any network access. No matter what you do on your phone, Cupcake itself cannot access the network. So, again, that would require some, like, break of the OS itself. Cupcake itself cannot access the network, has no code, has no permissions to be able to do so. So no matter what you do, there's not gonna be any network connections that happen. If you were to keep your device offline, the the main goal is to protect you from some network level attack against your device, not against Cupcake itself. And, no, no backups will be sent to Apple. Again, there's no code or anything like that to allow backups of the app or of the critical data in there. Very nice. I think that's all the questions. So
[00:52:21] Unknown:
XMR chats and boosts. XMR chats, cowboy Cassidy with zero point zero one five XMR says, thank you, gents. Thank you, cowboy Cassidy. Expatriotic says with zero point five XMR, free samurai. I assume that's going to free samurai. I think we had some sort of setup where if they do that hashtag, it goes to them. Good. Schrodinger 0.05 XMR hashtag free samurai. Yes. I think that is why. Anon with zero point zero zero one XMR. If your followers care about digital freedom, this uses real cryptography to hide messages in plain sight, not fake privacy. And then a link. I don't know what that is. Do you know what that is? Rune cipher? I have never heard of it, so I would not recommend
[00:53:13] Unknown:
anyone use it until they actually dig into it. I was just quickly looking up the domain because I was curious if it was recently registered or not. Yeah. Don't go out and use that. Yeah. Do your own research. We haven't used it. But thank you, Anon, if it is something good.
[00:53:28] Unknown:
Jimmy Spend with zero point zero zero one XMR, Lightning, Nostra, and BitAxes
[00:53:36] Unknown:
are gaming. Like BitAxes.
[00:53:37] Unknown:
I
[00:53:38] Unknown:
yeah. I like Lightning. I don't like Nostra. I'll leave Nostra in there. Yeah. I actually like Lightning,
[00:53:44] Unknown:
especially when it works, and I like the idea of Bitaxes, although they don't make a lot of sense most of the time. So but, yeah, Nostra, I am I'm with you then, mate. It's quite okay. Jimmy Speddon, 00010110101, XMR. He says gangster gangster. That's what they yell in. Monero is the best layer two. It's just right. I have to agree, mate. Yeah. Monero enthusiast. Jimmy Spedden is a g. I reckon that's Jimmy Spedden again. It's gotta be, hasn't it? Jimmy Spedden is a g.
[00:54:20] Unknown:
We got four straight from either Jimmy Spedd, Jimmy Spedden, or quote unquote Monero enthusiast bragging on Jimmy Spedden. So, yeah, I think we can guess who that is. And
[00:54:31] Unknown:
then we have Jimmy Spedden again with zero point zero zero one XMR saying XMR chat for the win.
[00:54:38] Unknown:
Yeah. Agree. It's been absolutely incredible. We're being doused by Jimmy Spend, but, hey, he's paying Monero to do it. So who would judge? It's okay. It's okay.
[00:54:47] Unknown:
It's alright. This all goes to the hosting, so thank you to everyone who's donating. I appreciate it. Monero enthusiast, zero point zero one three XMR. Enshitification? I thought it was just dead Internet theory. What does that mean? Enshitification?
[00:55:04] Unknown:
You haven't been listening to our podcast?
[00:55:07] Unknown:
I don't know, mate. I don't know. What did I miss? We talked about this, I think on
[00:55:12] Unknown:
Friday a couple of weeks ago.
[00:55:15] Unknown:
Was this the one while I was like vomiting and shitting myself and shivering and sweating and dying? Because that might explain why I was missing it. Probably.
[00:55:25] Unknown:
Probably. Yeah. It's it's basically a term that talks about how everything on the Internet, especially online platforms, just get worse and worse over time as companies switch from focusing on the user to focusing on profit. We talked specifically about, like, Google as a great example of that, where originally, it was just search for you. Like, they just cared about your search. Yeah. And then it shifted to where all they care about right now is the ad companies that they serve. And so you're, like, the last person on their mind because the money they get is from the ad companies, not from you. Yeah. I actually have heard the term dead Internet theory, but I haven't looked into it. So I have to dig into that. You're broadening my horizons. I like in shitification. Jimmy spend. I mean, Monero enthusiasts. Yeah. Monero enthusiasts. You're definitely different people.
[00:56:09] Unknown:
Jordan sends 0.001XMR and says testing chat colors. Okay. Thank you, mate. You're obviously doing something in the background, something useful. A Syrian king with 0.002, just testing out my dirty little shit coin donation. Well, I can tell you, king, that it worked. Congrats, and thank you. NMVD0.002XMR. When running a Monero community start nine service, is it possible to connect iOS cake wallet to my own node? Just found a guide for Android on the Monero d start OS GitHub page.
[00:56:49] Unknown:
I think it is. Isn't it? I've not tried it on the y iOS, but you should. Yeah. You definitely can. Yeah. I can't remember how start nine presents it if it actually gives you a QR code or not. But whether it does or not, you can definitely connect. You just may have to manually copy and paste in the address and port that it gives you. Or if there is a QR, which I think that there is, I just I don't actually start on myself. You can just scan the QR and add the node directly that way. But, yeah, you can definitely do that on iOS.
[00:57:13] Unknown:
V m v d. Can you let me know if your Monero node is working on start nine, please? Because I packed it in a year ago because it just kept completely destroying my whole setup, and I had to start from fresh. And then the same happened to other much more technical people that I knew, and I was like, okay. It's not just me. And I just went, fuck it. I'm not running this anymore. But if it is working now, I'd like to know because I'd like to run it again. So let us know, please, mate. Shortwave surfer 2,009. 0 point 00 1 XMR. Monero monthly.
Seth, the first batch of Monero no dose did go out. The preorder is for the second batch. This is we were talking about was it last Monero monthly or the one before? I think last one. Yeah. Yeah. Monero enthusiast, 0.002. Barn miner equals Barn China. Okay. Expatriotic zero point zero zero one XMR says hashtag free samurai. The privacy designer with 0.1 XMR, anyone managed to donate privately to Roman storm. Only way I could find, email justice d a o and fill in a donor form asking for name, address, country, wallet address, source of funds, signature. Is this the only way, or am I missing something? Yeah. This is a problem, this sort of stuff. Is there another way, sir? I mean, I know you can donate
[00:58:44] Unknown:
Ethereum. So in theory, if you had some private Ethereum or you were able to use something like Tornado Cash or Railgun or something to gain some privacy, you could donate that way. I think the main problem is that depending on how they're doing the collection, if they're doing it in a way that requires them to be, like, tax exempt, they have to know who's donating. They can't really take anonymous donations. But I don't know exactly how that how that's set up. But the way he's describing the form makes it sound like they have some sort of a a tax free status that they need to maintain, so they have to know where the donations come from. That's also often true with legal defense funds is you can collect money anonymously, but you can't actually use that directly to fund the defense. Like, it has to be money that's coming from, like, clearly approved sources, which makes sense. I mean, you don't want, like, a mob boss using, like, drug money to fund a crazy defense to get out of things. Like, there's understandable reasons for that, but, obviously, when it's an actual good guy, like, you wanna be able to fund him anonymously. So it's a little bit outside of my legal domain to know why that is. I know that you can donate just Ethereum and Ethereum, like, things directly. So if you do have a way to get that privately or make it private, you could donate that way. Yeah. Okay. Fountain boosts
[00:59:55] Unknown:
late stage Huddl with 6,006 stats says, sending this boost just to talk shit to you fuckers. Oh, thank you, mate. I appreciate that because we didn't have any last month. So thank you for stepping up to the plate. I do appreciate it. Eric PP streamed 2,640 sats with no message and pies
[01:00:16] Unknown:
Hey. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Chingy. Ch
[01:00:18] Unknown:
With a 121 sats with his classic salute, mushroom, and strong-arm. Thank you to everyone who's been sending in boosts, XMR chats, the hashtag free samurai stuff. I'll speak to Jordan on this, but I'm pretty sure that is going across to them. Anything else we want to cover?
[01:00:36] Unknown:
I think that's it. I think, like, we said at the top of the show, keep an eye out for announcements about the next episode. We'll probably do something a little bit different, a little bit special, that may include a live element, but we'll hash that out. We'll drop some posts on socials about that. But, no, I think that's it for this month. Keep up the good work, everybody. Thank you for your support. Awesome to see the Xmart chats and boost roll in. And keep questions coming too. I know we did a few questions in this one. We haven't always done questions. I love that side of things. Q and a is by far my favorite thing to do in the space. So I'm always happy to answer those if people have questions about the Manera ecosystem at all. Very nice. Alright, mate. Well, I look forward to whatever we do on the next one. Catch up with you then. See you.
[01:01:18] Unknown:
If you have any questions, please reach out and ask probably Seth, but you can try and ask me as well. And we'll catch you on the next episode a month from now. Before you go, I wanna say thank you for all the support from all the Ungovernable Misfits and the Ungovernable Misfits crew. Also, a big thank you to Cake Wallet and Foundation, not only for supporting this show and everything that Ungovernable Misfits do, but also for the general freedom and open source movement. We hinted to it in this episode, but Foundation have released a new device. I'm very excited about this. If you haven't already listened to my episode, go back and have a listen.
You can check them out at foundation.xyz. You can use my code, Ungovernable, for a discount. I think just for the passport, not for the ungovernable, or you can click the link in the show notes, and it will take you to our own cool page that mister Crown's made all beautiful. Check that out and also a big thank you to Cake Wallet. If you haven't already tried Cake Wallet, give it a go. You can use this on Mac, Linux, Windows, iPhone and Android. I've been using it now for probably about six months, and I really like it. It's got some great Bitcoin features, great Monero features. You can link this to your own node on both. It's got swap services, payment services, all sorts of things in there that help people who actually use Bitcoin and Monero.
And if you have any questions while using it, you can just send in to our own little tech support here, and me and Seth will go through it in the next episode. Thanks for listening, and stay ungovernable.
