Join us for Monero Monthly, your go-to show for a roundup of the latest happenings in the Monero ecosystem. Hosts Max and Seth bring you up to speed on everything from software developments and updates to cutting-edge hardware and emerging businesses.
General
Monero's 11th birthday
Monero v0.18.4.0
v4.25
Monfluo v0.7.0
General
Monero's 11th birthday
- Monero launched on April 18th, 2014 by thankful_for_today
- Code fork of Bytecoin, was basically a scam created from an amazing whitepaper (Cryptonote) and extensively pre-mined/lied about
- Monero has continued to consistently and effectively iterate and improve over those 11y
- Most likely caused by a major theft of 3520 BTC, which was then supposedly swapped entirely to Monero via instant exchangers
- Zachxbt uses Monero for payments "frequently"
- August 10th deadline
- Migration to Cake is their recommended path
- No conspiracy theories that I know of, have worked closely with them on the migration path
- https://monero.observer/exodus-to-end-support-monero-10-august-2025/
- Very antagonistic in the past
- Refused to block or freeze funds from the ByBit hack, broadly used to move funds to other cryptocurrencies, including Monero
- Many centralized services and exchanges marked their funds as tainted immediately after their handling of the ByBit hack, neutering the usefulness of swapping through eXch overall
- Supposedly being targeted by a "transatlantic operation", no real evidence provided but after ByBit hack funds moved through them it's not impossible
- https://monero.observer/exch-instant-exchange-to-shut-down-may-1-2025/
Monero v0.18.4.0
- DoS vulnerability fix
- Was widely deployed via my Docker image and by most popular node operators, including Cake, before this public release
- Background sync w/ view key only
- This is how Cake Wallet is doing background sync
- Drastically improved disk writes necessary when synchronizing a Monero node
- Less wear on disks, slightly faster
- https://monero.observer/monero-v0.18.4.0-fluorine-fermi-released/
v4.25
- New logo
- Talk about new brand
- Drastically improved Monero wallet performance, especially for wallets with extensive history
- Broad UI/UX enhancements
- BIP 39 seeds and wallet groups for Monero
- DFX's OpenCryptoPay
- Open standard for simple integration of Bitcoin/Monero payments into traditional PoS systems
- Rolling out to all Spar stores in Switzerland, getting a ton of publicity
- Only Cake Wallet supports it natively, but Lightning wallets with LN-URL support don't require direct integration
- Drastically improved address display, using the Bitcoin Design guidelines as seen in Trezor and Foundation hardware wallets
- Drastically simplified buying/selling of crypto
- Drastically improved background sync
- Limit to wifi-only, charging-only, inactive-only, etc.
- Supports all cryptos now, except Decred
- Fixes a bunch of edge cases and rare bugs with background sync
- Lots of minor improvements and bug fixes
- Minor improvements and bug fixes, nothing major
- Important steps towards a safer and more usable project
- Loving using Haveno Reto (retoswap.com)
- https://monero.observer/woodser-releases-haveno-v1.1.1-bugfixes/
- https://monero.observer/woodser-releases-haveno-v1.1.0-bugfixes/
- https://monero.observer/woodser-releases-haveno-v1.0.19-fixes-improvements/
- Minor updates overall
- Updated to Monero v0.18.4.0
- Updated integrated Tor + OpenSSL
- https://monero.observer/tobtoht-releases-feather-wallet-v2.8.1/
- https://monero.observer/feather-wallet-v2.8.0-released-fixes-improvements/
- Minor improvements and bug fixes
- Awesome way to get started mining Monero on any computer
- https://monero.observer/cyrix126-releases-gupaxx-v1.9.0/
- Namceoin name purchased and management in-app
- Minor improvements and updates
- https://monero.observer/rehrar-releases-stack-wallet-v2.1.11/
Monfluo v0.7.0
- Dead-simple stripped down wallet
- Focus is on no integrations or features, just send/receive simplicity
- Not my cup of tea, but to each their own
- https://monero.observer/acx-releases-monfluo-beta-v0.7.0/
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[00:00:01]
Unknown:
The business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every last seconds, eleven seconds. I am investigator investigator investigator. And I work supporting Our agenda for today, we're gonna start with just the basics of Monero. What it is, what it is, how it works, how it works. Monero is considered a privacy token.
[00:00:32] Unknown:
The world's most private
[00:00:34] Unknown:
privacy. Which means that in high, virtually all transaction details are exchanged. The world's most private
[00:00:41] Unknown:
privacy. Good morning.
[00:01:15] Unknown:
Morning, Max. Long time no speak. Another month, another eternity in the Bitcoin Monero freedom tech space.
[00:01:21] Unknown:
Yeah. It doesn't feel like that long to me, but I assume it does to you this time because you guys have been extremely busy on the cake side. Q's been the same.
[00:01:32] Unknown:
Yeah. I know they're trying to get Prime out the door ASAP. I cannot wait to get my early access unit. Yeah. Running out of time here on April, but I'm gonna I'm just gonna keep harassing Q until I get it in hand. He's blamed Trump
[00:01:45] Unknown:
and all of his goings on. Yeah. That's what he said. He said, apparently, they've got stuff stuck in ports and Oh, man. I didn't even think about that. Not being released and all sorts of crazy shit and uncertainty, and it's a bit of a nightmare. Yeah. I hadn't thought until he told me. I was like, oh, yeah. Fuck. That actually probably will be quite frustrating.
[00:02:03] Unknown:
Yeah. It's yet another side of the hardware industry that's just, like, insane compared to software. It is. Like, I'm not gonna lie. It's a little refreshing, quote unquote just working on software now because this is just so many other things that come into play with hardware and logistics and shipping and upstream providers and just like so much. Where's the software? We can just build something and ship it and practically I mean, we are still beholden to Apple and Google for most our users, unfortunately, and Apple are idiots, but but it's still better than hardware struggles for sure.
[00:02:36] Unknown:
Well, that is proof in the pudding because I can see you guys have been putting out some big releases, making
[00:02:42] Unknown:
shitload of changes, which we'll get into later in the show. We've also had Monero's eleventh birthday. That's pretty big. It is. Yeah. I I think a lot of people who are newer to Monero don't realize how long Monero has been around. Like, it was one of the very few cryptocurrencies that wasn't just a Bitcoin fork back in 2014 when it launched. Basically, everything that existed outside of Bitcoin was just a tweak of Bitcoin with different issuance or different blocks fee. Slight parameter change. Exactly. Like, you're just changing some little parameters, changing the name, and calling it a day. There were very few that were actually Yeah. Innovating much less that were actually built on a different protocol entirely. So, yeah, it's it's been eleven years. The birthday was technically on April 18. So but midway through the month, the Manera community celebrated in Manera community style, which is that we didn't, but just talked about it on social media because we're all a a non weirdos and don't have in person parties. But we need to fix that one of these times. We'll have to do a big cake wallet party made for, like, the fifteenth or something. We'll get a ton of people together and celebrate. But Yeah. That'd be cool. Yeah. Yeah. That was the the birthday. That was when it was initially announced on BitcoinTalk, which was all the rage back then. I know some people still use the Bitcoin talk forum, but I think it's been dying out a little bit.
[00:03:54] Unknown:
I think we tried. I think this is one of the ones that me and mister Crown used to try and, like, post a few bits on. It was that and the Reddit one. Mhmm. And every single time we posted anything, we'd get banned and blocked, and someone would be like, this is a promotion of something. And we're we're like, we're literally talking about those podcasts we've done or, like Mhmm. A run of clothing that we're doing that's, like, going towards free samurai. We're trying to, like, do something about every time we get blocked, and so we're like, fuck this. Man. Yeah. No kidding. Way too aggressive. But we did, like, keep saying, wait, man. It's hard to remember that I'm not part of the audition anymore. But
[00:04:33] Unknown:
You kind of are in spirit. I am. Yeah. I'm not not totally divorced. But, they do have a thread on there that I know gets pretty good traction. I was a little surprised. Initially, we decided to make a thread there and see if there would be much engagement. There's actually quite a good community around it of, like Okay. OG Bitcoiners. Less of the number go up, less of the people you'd see also on Twitter or something. A lot of it's been Yeah. Been around for a long time. So I know that's still alive, but I feel like most of those communities have moved off to x or Discord, God forbid, or Telegram, those kind of things. So most have moved somewhere else. But, yeah, that was where it was originally announced back in the day when everything was announced on Bitcoin talk on the a and n threads where we would watch for new things to pop up. And that was where we're thankful for today who was basically, like, one of the first Minare community members. He code forked Bytecoin, which was the first thing built on the crypto node protocol. I've gone over the history a little bit. But he code forked to that and started fresh to essentially get away from the premine and the scammy stuff with Bytecoin and just build on the crypto protocol itself and do something the right way. So that was the part of it. And since then, obviously, my nerves continued to iterate and improve over the last eleven years with another big update coming hopefully, this year. Hopefully, within the next twelve months at least. So yeah. It was cool to celebrate that again. I know we there was a lot more around the tenth anniversary last year. Yeah. But a good reminder of how long Monero's been around because I think a lot of people don't realize that. Yeah. That's a decent amount of time for something to survive. That's pretty impressive.
Yeah. On the I guess not not on the birthday, but the April, we had a a very big news event and price increase, which I know isn't, like, what we normally talk about. I'm not here to talk about the price increase itself, but there was a crazy spike of, like, 50% in Monero's price over the course of the last few days. And at first, no one had any idea what in the world was going on. But, eventually, it came out that it seems like and this is from Zach xBT who's, like, the legendary on chain analyst theft scam tracker. Like, he does incredible work. He posted later on that day, well, that price increase was going crazy that someone, apparently, a Bitcoin OG, had lost 3,520 Bitcoin to a theft, which is an incomprehensible amount of money to lose. Oh my lord. Yeah. It was all stolen from one individual. He obviously didn't say who. He gave some signs of, like, how he knew that it was a Bitcoin OG, but obviously, he didn't want a fingerprint exactly who it was. But, yeah, yeah, apparently, that was stolen and immediately sent in a bunch of different orders to instant exchangers across the ecosystem to swap into Monero. And as far as he said, all of it was swapped into Monero, which we're talking like I don't know what that is. So long. $300,000,000 swapped into Monero with no regard to price or anything like that over the course of a few hours. So that's very seemingly was the reason for that price jump and was pretty crazy to see. It's something that's not, like it's not uncommon for stolen funds, obviously, to move into Monero. But a lot of times, it's, like, just little bits and pieces, and then they're moving back into Bitcoin or something like that. But this seems like the person didn't care at all about fees. They didn't care at all about price changes.
They just wanted to move it into something that's privacy preserving. Well, would you, if you've just got $300,000,000
[00:07:40] Unknown:
worth of Bitcoin slash Monero, you don't really care about the fees. Mhmm. It's like Yeah. That that's enough. It's not your money anyways. Yeah. I mean, it goes to show, though, like, that it works. Where do you put Solon funds where you're not gonna be tracked forward as long as you keep it in there and you use it from there? Well, Monero would be the choice rather than fucking around with whatever else. People try and put it onto an exchange, and then it gets flagged and all this silly stuff that people seem to do. I always look at these tests, and I'm like, wow. How the fuck have you pulled that off? Like, you've done some clever code shit that I don't understand. You've hacked some system and done something whatever, whether it's social engineering or code. And you've stolen all this money that's enough to, like, live for a hundred lifetimes. And then you've gone to an exchange and given your KYC details and your address, and then the police have knocked on your jaw and arrested you. Yeah. What was it called? The greatest rapper alive, whatever her name was. The the bit for next hack, I think. Right? The bit for next hack. You know, things like that. And you think, what are you doing? So, yeah, I guess Monero is the place to go. It's what I would probably do if I have $300,000,000
[00:08:50] Unknown:
worth of Bitcoin that I shouldn't have. Yeah. I mean, it seems insane that these people get caught, but it's one of the again, like, I don't want these people to get away with stealing money. So I'm not I'm not trying to imply that. But, like, if you have money that you need to actually live on, to be quite honest, there's not that much you can do with Bitcoin directly or Monero directly as far as, like, you're trying to probably live a very luxurious life somewhere on an island. Yeah. You're not flying into The Caribbean and then just dropping whole Bitcoin for your hotel room or something. Like, they're not gonna accept it directly, so you you need to get to Fiat, and that's obviously that's the easy place where people get caught because there's just not enough that they can use it for. Well, yeah. Once you gotta touch it. Yeah. Or they, like most criminals, they try to live crazy once they make a big heist, and they can't kinda fly under the radar where you could get away with using, like, Bitcoin exchanges, debit cards, gift cards, stuff like that. I think you could probably make it work, but most are trying to to live a little crazy. And so they go to try and get a bunch of Fiat, and, obviously, that raises red flags. It will be interesting with this one. Like, this is one of the particular weak points of Monero is targeted tracing of an individual who you know the withdrawals that they've made. And, obviously, these instant exchangers don't share that data publicly, so we don't know exactly what, like, the on chain Monero transactions were for these. But, inevitably, they're gonna be contacted by law enforcement. Oh, yeah. And we'll most likely share this data. So this is one of those interesting scenarios where if governments and nation states are truly able to track Monero in this, like, very specific weakness, this Eve Alice Eve attack where if this hacker they obviously went through an instant exchange, swapped Bitcoin for Monero.
If they go, like we talked about, to send Monero to a centralized exchange or something that's also working with law enforcement Mhmm. This would be, like, the worst case scenario for Monero privacy and could be traced through. There's a lot of caveats, but could be traced through if they don't do anything else with the funds or if they try to use them on a a collaborating platform, an exchange, or a merchant, or something that is sharing data with the same government or law enforcement agency. So this will definitely be an interesting one to watch and should be one of the better proofs either of Monero being resistant to even a pretty, obviously, very high profile case like this. Or if it'll be traced, it'll be at another reminder of why Fortune membership proofs are so important. And, again, not because I don't like, I would love for these people to be traced. Like, this is one of the this is one of those Monero things where I'm like, it is a little sad that it's as privacy preserving as it is, but it's necessary because if a criminal can't use Monero and have privacy, then it means that you and I definitely cannot use Monero and have privacy.
So it's a little bit of a hard case to, like, reason with, but it'll be a a fascinating one to watch for sure. Yeah. Because there's half of you that's like, I really hope that this
[00:11:30] Unknown:
tech works and that it can't be tracked. And then the other side is like, I really hope that this poor fucker who's had all that Yeah. Bitcoin stolen from them gets it back. So, yeah, it is a little bit but the other thing I was gonna say as you were going through that with the Eve Alice Eve, like, tracking, Didn't you say previously that if someone does churning of any kind, then that breaks that?
[00:11:56] Unknown:
It can. The hard part with churning is that no one really knows exactly what's effective and what's not. It's just it's very hard to actually analyze. Okay. What would be the best way to do churning? Because we can't analyze what normal spin patterns are of users of Monero today. Because ultimately, with churning, what you want to do is you want it to look like any other spend. The timing, the number of inputs and outputs, you want it to be as normal as possible so that it's harder to distinguish what was you actually moving the funds and what was you just having inputs included as decoys by other users.
So that's where it's a little tricky. It's like there's not a clear, this is the way you should do it, or these are the times you should do it at, or these are the number of inputs or outputs. That's never really been settled on because we can't figure that out because of the privacy of Monero for the average Monero user. So it's hard to kinda build a fingerprint of what's the average user and how do you wanna match in with that. So it I mean, churning does help in some ways. Like this user, he's obviously already being watched. So he he already has probably all of these t x IDs in Monero flagged and being surveilled to see if any of the outputs are used in other transactions. Yeah. But because of the way Monero works, other people are gonna be using his outputs as decoys now that those transactions have been made. So he will want to try to blend in with that, but it's just not clear exactly what works the best when it comes to churning. But that's the only, like, only response that we have right now to those kind of targeted tax is when you are moving the funds, you're deducing more and more plausible deniability to if they were actually spent. But the problem that also can happen with churning is if you do it at very weird times, like every tenth minute or something Stands out. It's gonna be clear. This is someone, like, running a script to do churning, or if you're doing it always with 20 inputs every time, or you're always doing, like there's just a lot of different ways that you can kinda give yourself away that aren't hidden by Monero's privacy. Like, obviously, the the time of the transaction is not hidden. The number of inputs and outputs are not hidden.
[00:13:53] Unknown:
So that is because you don't currently have full chain membership proofs, and that means that you are one of 20, was it? Or I can't remember. I keep forgetting. 16. One of 16? Yeah. One of 16. So that means that with every spend or churn, you could be one of these sixteens, and then they're looking for pattern recognition to see, like, oh, this is likely this person, and they're trying to draw conclusions from that. But if this person just waited until FCMP is implemented, then they did a forward spend, then presumably,
[00:14:31] Unknown:
it would not be possible because if it wouldn't be one of 16, it'd be one of all, and then it's like, fucking good luck. Or or is that or is that wrong? No. You're definitely right that that would probably the better scenario for privacy. I think still the tricky thing is they made hundreds of orders to swap Bitcoin to Monero, which means they're gonna have hundreds of Monero outputs that they need to combine. Combine something like a 92 inputs in each Monero transaction. Okay. So let's say, probably, they're gonna have to make several transactions to do this, and it's especially bad right now with ring signatures. Because if you see a transaction, you know some of the the the outputs that are owned by this user because you've talked to these centralized exchanges. And so you're watching those. And then if you see a transaction on chain that has, let's say, a 92 inputs, they've maxed out how many they can combine. And every single one of those input rings happens to have one of the outputs that you know this user controls and 15 other inputs.
But you know that one of them in each of those inputs is controlled by the user. It makes it very clear that, like, this user is combining funds. That's one of the specific weaknesses of ring signatures because we have to show that there is a valid input. And so one of the inputs there is valid, and so someone watching the chain can know that for sure. Whereas with, like, FCMP, you would see however many max inputs you can do, which you're still not I think that's still not set in stone with f c and p, but you would see that, but you wouldn't see any of the input data. So you wouldn't know which input are actually being spent. You would just know that a valid input is being spent. Rather than right now, you have one of 16, and they're all real outputs on chain. So that spend case will be much better with FCMP. But especially right now, that's like the combined input common ownership input heuristic kind of applies to Monero in these very specific targeted use cases where if someone knows that you own these 400 outputs, for instance, from all these instant exchangers, and then they see that there's an input that they know you control in each of the inputs in a transaction, it becomes clear that you're the one actually making the spend. Mhmm. So that's where things get a little hairy, but that's where, like, churning can help. Because if you do that, like, yeah, they'll know that you made a transaction.
But then you only have one input. You're not having to deal with combined input heuristic from then on. Mhmm. And you'll blend in much better with the rest of the mineral ecosystem as you go from there. But what we see commonly happen is that people will go through an instant exchanger, get a bunch of manure outputs, combine them all in a transaction to an exchange, and then it's just pretty clear on chain that this was the person who was this hacker because we know on the Bitcoin side how they got in. We know the manure outputs because we subpoenaed the instant exchangers or something, and then we see a transaction combining a hundred inputs that all have one ring member that we know is owned by this user. So, yeah, it kinda breaks through a lot of the privacy of Manero there. Well, I hope that they get cool. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah. Like you said, it's a it's a juxtaposition of I want them to get caught, but I also want Monero's privacy to be proven. So Exactly. We'll see what happens there. There was other like, one other really interesting thing out of that is, Zach xBT in a comment to somebody because, inevitably, someone underneath his tweet about this said, Manero is only used for laundering money. Mhmm. He replied that he uses Manero for payments frequently, which was really cool to see. Mhmm. Because I I think his perspective is almost unique in the space.
Like, he has the same skills and techniques as a chain surveillance company, but as an individual who has a desperate need for privacy. Because, I mean, if you think about he's unveiling a bunch of these crypto hacks and scams, showing the world what evil is being perpetrated. So, like, surely, he has a target on him. So he understands what on chain privacy is and isn't and is a a heavy Monero user, which is really cool to see. I've never seen him comment on this publicly before, but a fascinating example of somebody who they know all the scams and the bad stuff that can happen with Monero, and they're also a heavy daily user for their own privacy and their own payments, which is a really cool example of that in the real world. I'd never really actually given that too much thought. I always see tweets from him and whoever they are. I've always sort of, like, seen the detail that they go into and pretty fucking impressive, but I'd never really thought like, oh, shit. You're actually
[00:18:33] Unknown:
gonna be annoying some people that could be quite dangerous, and you're gonna have a massive target on your back. I'd never really given that too much thought. That's quite a scary position to be in, actually. Yeah. For sure. And is is a understandable reason why I, like, he I don't think he goes on podcasts or anything like that because he has some some serious offset requirements. You're pulling the mask off people who are quite evil and doing very bad things. Like, you don't want to put a target on your back or your families or something like that. So yeah. Definitely agreed. No. But, yeah, telling that they use Monero for their spending because, again, they know it works. And someone of that caliber and, like, that amount of knowledge of on chain tracking and how all this stuff works and the ins and outs and all the tricks of the trade, they're using it obviously speaks for itself.
[00:19:16] Unknown:
Yeah. Absolutely. It's such a good confirmation that it does work because if there were trivial ways to track it, like, obviously, I'm not necessarily saying he's an expert in Monero and would know every possible way to track it. But you think of somebody like that who has such a deep understanding of what on chain privacy looks like is a minority users. Yeah. It's a great proof that Yeah. It's actually a very effective tool, something that is necessary for more people than just paranoid people. Yeah. Cool to see. Shout out to you, whoever you are, for doing what you're doing and putting yourself on the line. It's, it's appreciated. Yeah. I'm sure he'll be keeping an eye on this one, so I'm curious what else he finds out as he digs into the hack. This is right up his alley. So an interesting one to keep an eye on. Yeah. We can we can keep rolling the rest of the news. So this was quite a month. So, like, I I know normally we have a bigger topic that we dive into, and then we get into the updates. But we got a ton of software updates and a few other general news pieces. We're gonna focus on updates this month. Yeah. Let's do it. The other big one is there's a multi coin wallet in the space. It's quite large called the Exodus wallet, and they have decided to drop Monero support entirely from their wallet with an August 10 deadline for people to migrate funds out. I think after the deadline, they'll still let users get the seed phrase, but they won't let user send or receive or anything like that. So that was an interesting piece of news. I I know that there's a lot of conspiracy theories out there about why why they were forced to migrate or why they've chosen to migrate. But I can't say, like, we we actually at Cake worked closely with them on making that migration as seamless as possible. We wrote up the docs that they're using for that. We added some functionality within Cake Wallet to make that migration easier than ever. And so, like, their recommended path is actually using Cake Wallet, which was just really cool and they were great to work with throughout the process. As far as I know, there was no regulatory pressure or law enforcement or anything like that.
Forcing them them to do less than aero, their public statement is basically that they just didn't like the user experience and didn't think it fit their model of user experience for their wallet as a whole, which is somewhat understandable because Monero's user experience is much more difficult to do well than most other coins. Most other coins are just pointing at an API, and that's it. You get everything you need because you're just revealing all of that data to some third party server, whereas Monero sync normally doesn't work like that. But, yeah, that was a big thing because they were one of the larger, Monero wallets in the space. Yeah. They're huge.
[00:21:35] Unknown:
I mean, a lot of people that I know who are into, like, multi coin shitcoin stuff and trading and swapping and all that kind of stuff. Loads of them used to use Exodus when I first got into the Bitcoin world. It was, Exodus was like the one they all used, and it had nice user experience. And
[00:21:56] Unknown:
they could swap in and out of different things, and everyone used it. Yeah. For sure. They've definitely been a big player in the space for years. I definitely remember that as well from, like, I first got in as I feel like they were one of the very early multi coin wallets. Cake wallet has been, but a lot of stuff that we've added has has been in the last, like, three or four years, whereas I think they were around a long time before that and have had a lot of other cryptocurrencies. Yeah. They've been a big player, but that was definitely a a surprising thing. But I'm I'm glad that they handled it well. They could've just dropped Monero and said GTFO to all their all their Monero users, but Yeah. They did make sure that there was a good migration path. They were really helpful with us, making sure that, like, cake had what it needed and given us a heads up and all of that. They were good to work with, but that is definitely an FYI. If anyone listening is an Exodus user, you'll see a pop up in your app and stuff. So hopefully, you've already seen it. But if you haven't, make sure you go ahead and migrate out of Exodus. Obviously, Cake Wallet is an easy migration. We support their 12 word seed phrases to Monero seed phrases for the simplest path, but you can also get your 25 word seed out of Exodus. That was something that we worked with them to make sure that they had before they announced this was that you can just get your 25 word Manero seed and restore high out of Exodus as well and restore it in anything. Any any Manero wallet would support that. So you have a lot of options, but make sure you do that ASAP. Well, that's good. And you got a load of users coming your way, which is good for cake as well. And it's good for the users really because once they've moved across, I don't think they'll really look back. I can't imagine going back and using Exodus now, like, when you have the use of cake. So Yeah. Hopefully, everyone will be happy. I think it will be really a win win for everybody because they'll be served well. Obviously, a cake, we're thrilled to have a bunch more Monero users coming over. And Mhmm. I think also the other really cool thing is, like, one of the things that I really don't like about Exodus, all due respect is that they're not open source.
Some small pieces of their wallet are open source, but the vast majority is not. I think another win here is we're gonna get a lot more users using free and open source software, using wallets that are actually verifiable and open source rather than using something that's closed source, which is also just a win for the false space. So that that's that's another really cool part of this, I think. Definitely. And last general kinda news topic for this month is, I know that you and q kinda touched on this in the Bitcoin. I almost said Bitcoin monthly. Yeah. Bitcoin brief. I still get it wrong all the time. I don't like, honestly. I forget all the show names all the time. That's a lot to keep up with. You got, like, 27 shows under your under your wing at this point. So I know y'all talked about it a little bit, but there was this instant exchanger called e x c h. They have a very interesting past. I'll definitely put some links that I can find into the show notes so that people can dig into it. But, basically, it was an instant exchanger like many others, but they've always been a little, edgy, if you will. Pretty antagonistic towards some other exchanges and, not the most reasonable when it comes to hacked funds flowing through their exchange, which I know there's, like, two use. One view is nobody should censor funds no matter what, which is more the hardcore view, which I understand the reasoning there. But when you're a central exchange and a a company, you can't just ignore law enforcement requests and survive, which has kind of been their approach.
[00:25:08] Unknown:
Yeah. I was gonna say you can until you said and survive. And I was like, yeah. Yeah. That's the that's the caveat there. Yeah.
[00:25:16] Unknown:
Inevitably inevitably will, will lead to a downfall. And they were actually in the the massive buyback hack. I know we talked about, and I know they all talked about on the Bitcoin brief. That hack, a lot of the funds actually I don't I don't remember the final percentage, but a lot of the funds moved through e x c h because they were one of the few instant exchanges that refused to help the Bybit Mhmm. Exchange team freeze and return funds supposedly because of some beef that they had with the Bybit team, like Okay. Being mean to them. It's some, like, really weird stuff, but they basically refused to prevent the hackers from moving funds through e x c h because of some beef they had with the Bybit folks. And as a result, a lot of merchants, exchanges, etcetera, essentially blacklisted e x c h.
So if funds were coming from EXCH, they were categorized as tainted according to chain surveillance tools, according to custom blacklists. There's basically a a broad ban on funds that have flowed through EXCH, which is a really interesting example of why fungibility matters. Because the vast majority of this was Bitcoin. And Yeah. Because it was blacklisted, there were quite a few cases that I know of where users had used e x c h, gotten Bitcoin, and then gone to use it on some other central platform, like another instant exchanger or a merchant, and realized that those funds were not as valuable as normal Bitcoin. At any of these central places, obviously, there's still Bitcoin. There's, I'm sure, still some places you could swap them without those risks. But because those funds are considered so toxic, they were blocked quite broadly.
And as a result of that, EXH is actually just shutting down their operations. It's hard to say exactly what the reason is again because it's hard to figure out, like, what's bluff and bluster from them and what's real. They're saying they're being targeted by, like, a transatlantic law enforcement operation and that they have to shut down to essentially escape. Mhmm. Obviously, that could be true. I mean, they refuse to block the funds from the biggest hack in world history. So, like, obviously, that was what you would think. Not a good life choice. So it's very possible this is happening. It's also very possible that their business just got destroyed because no one wanted to use them because they knew that the funds would be blacklisted and not usable on the other end. So it's hard to say exactly, but their their public statement is that they're they're being targeted by some transatlantic law enforcement operation and and have to have to run, which is also interesting to do and say publicly because you're not allowed to run from law enforcement. So if they do get arrested, that's gonna be even worse for them. But that was an odd piece of news from the Monero world because they were one of the instant exchangers that service Monero. Obviously, not the only one. They're not one that we've had in cake because a lot of their their bad history, but they are one of those that people have used to swap in and out of Monero in the past. So an interesting piece of ecosystem news, I guess. Yeah. That's an interesting one. It's there's a lot of me that respects that because I'm like, you are going by the sort of the freedom ethos of this thing is not part of the financial system. Everyone should be able to use it without it being censored.
[00:28:25] Unknown:
But then when you're a business Mhmm. Presumably, obviously, they have their details attached to easy to track and find who's behind it. And so behaving like that when you're a business is even if you feel it's the right thing to do, it's fucking dangerous, especially if you are dealing with these three letter agencies and everyone else who I would probably tend to believe them. Funds have, gone through your exchange from the biggest hack in history, and you've refused to stop them, and you're a business. I would think you probably do have quite a big target on your back. So I don't know. There's an element of respect from me there, but also a little bit silly maybe. Yeah. That's where it's a little weird because, like, I definitely agree. Like, I feel like the cypherpunk ethos
[00:29:11] Unknown:
is more like stick it to the man. Mhmm. And I think that fits much more when you're, like, you're an individual swapping peer to peer. Like, you're using something like this or have no or Yeah. Robo sets or something, and you're swapping peer to peer. And you don't have the same legal requirements, and you also don't have the same just, like, wisdom requirements, so to speak, of you're not gonna have that that target on your back, and you're also not responsible for what happens with those funds because you're not a a licensed, like, money transmitter or whatever. Mhmm. So on, like, that side, I think it makes much more sense to be more cypherpunk. And, like, I I would agree. Like, generally, you're not I I mean, not only can I not actually do all this chain surveillance on funds that I get through a peer to peer exchange? Like, I don't have access to those tools. They're not open source. I would have to pay a massive amount of money to use chain analysis or something to be able to check if these funds were tainted. But but when you talk about a business, things shift greatly. Like, you have a responsibility to your employees. You are an an entity that is registered somewhere, I would assume. I would assume e x c h wasn't just floating in the ether, but actually had an incorporated business somewhere. And, generally, you're dealing with fiat. Like, you're dealing with bank accounts, which mean that you're in much more, peril if you make some unwise decisions here. Mhmm. Seems like they did. So, yeah, it's definitely weird. Like, I definitely understand when people are, like, they did the right thing. They should just not care about what funds flow through your exchange, but it just gets a lot more hairy when you're a company.
[00:30:36] Unknown:
Just a bit. Yeah. Just a bit. Interesting one, though, because me and Q didn't really I was he was like, yeah. Do you know who they are? And I was like, I definitely recognize their, like, name, but I can't really place why or where or and I haven't used it. I don't really know anything about it. Yeah. It's good to know a little bit more of the background.
[00:30:53] Unknown:
Yeah. It's it's it's definitely a crazy case. So I think that wraps up our our news for the month, which, like I said, it's a really busy month. So that was only the news. We still got some software updates to get through. So we'll dive right into those. The biggest one this month was we finally had the latest release of the core Monero software this month. I feel like we talked about a little bit in February, a little bit in March, and it finally actually dropped this month. There's nothing like massive. This isn't the full chain membership proofs release. This isn't something absolutely huge for the end user, but there were really three major parts of the update that I think people would be interested in. The first and most important is that there was a denial of service attack that was discovered earlier in the year, and that is fully patched in this version.
Entities like Cake Wallet, My Public Node, and others, we had already been running this patch a while before because this was disclosed to us so that we could patch and make sure that we weren't vulnerable to that. But now this is broadly available. The details of it are out. It's resolved. It's not a privacy leak. It's not something like that. But basically, all it meant was that a determined attacker could crash your Monero node relatively easily. It wasn't very complex to actually do the attack. That's resolved now. So if you're running this version, zero dot 18 dot four dot zero, which is the latest now, You're protected against this vulnerability by default. There's a few extra flags that people who are running, like, a a public node for others to use might wanna tweak the values of because part of this DOS vulnerability was patched through limiting how many connections can be open per IP address, per public IP address, per private IP address. Just essentially some, like, sane defaults are set now Mhmm. Which may be a little too low if you're running a node for, like, the community at large to use. If you're running a node just for yourself, you're not gonna need to tweak any of these. Right. Okay. But if you're running one for the community at large or something like that, then there's some some values that would need to be tweaked there. Okay. But that was the biggest thing that just needed to be patched ASAP. So it's great that that's out. Obviously, it's a good reason for everybody to upgrade whatever node system you're running on, roll, etcetera. Make sure that you update as soon as you can to make sure that you're not vulnerable to that. But, obviously, it was most applicable to a public node operator who was serving other people because normally private nodes weren't gonna be a target of this one. The two other things that were big in this, one was just it seems minor, but it's one of those nice quality of life features is, some devs found a way to cut the amount of times that Monero has to write to disk when it's syncing in half. So from two Oh, okay. Two rights to one right per transaction that's being checked. And, obviously, we're talking, like, a hundred million transactions in the history of Monero. So it's a big improvement to the amount of wear and tear that you're you're putting on your hard drive running a Monero node. There's always been somewhat of a concern. Should be slightly faster at sync. I don't know that there will be that much difference. Obviously, there will be more of a difference for someone running on a, like, a very slow spinning hard drive versus someone running on a high speed SSD. But I don't know that there's specific numbers around the time. I I would expect it to be a massive difference, but the most important piece of that is just that it's drastically less wear and tear on your hard drive from running on an arrow node. That's nice. Which means your SSD especially will will last a lot longer. So that was a a good win. And then third thing was something that we've actually already been using Cake Wallet for a month or two now, but, the ability to actually do background sync with only a view key was introduced in this release. Oh, yeah. I remember you saying about that. Yeah. Yeah. It's been, like, the pull request and stuff has been open and complete for quite a while, but, obviously, this release is the first one to actually include this functionality in Monero's core software. I don't think it's actually used at all in, like, the Monero GUI or the Monero CLI wallet. Okay. I could be wrong about that, but the way that it actually works is now in the wallet library that most wallet developers will use, and we've been using that for a while, which is a really important thing. Not only does it allow you to not keep the private keys hot, but has some other improvements to how background sync actually works. And this is really the main driver behind us taking another look at background sync and being able to do it much better this time around. So that's been a a key driver for for the background sync that we have in Cake Wallet, which has been been awesome. Yeah. Nice. I find like it's relatively quick on cake anyway. I don't know if that's like to do with the node I'm connecting to or
[00:34:58] Unknown:
what it is, but it's a lot faster than I've had on a lot of other wallets previously. I don't know how that's possible, whether that's just in my head or what it is, but, like, it feels quicker.
[00:35:10] Unknown:
Yeah. But, like, background sync or just generally syncing?
[00:35:12] Unknown:
Generally syncing. Like, if I haven't used the wallet in a week or something and I jump on and then it's, like, x amount of blocks to update, it, like, feels like it's quite quick. Like, it's a couple of minutes or whatever.
[00:35:23] Unknown:
Whereas previously, I've done it and it's and it, you know, like, thirty minutes or, like, it feels like forever. And I'm like, for fuck's sake. It's taking forever. It feels quick. I I don't know if that's something to do with the background sync or no. It can't be because it would would have already synced. It's not background sync that has to do with that. I mean, there's two main things. One is the the node is definitely the most important piece of that. So if you're connected to a local node or one that's much physically closer to you that has a good network connection, that's gonna be faster because dealing with less latency and Mhmm. Generally gonna have more bandwidth. So that's definitely a win. The other one would be we have very good node infrastructure here at Cake Wallet, and we have nodes in lots of different geographies so that you can automatically get the ones that are closest to you. So that also is probably gonna help as opposed to, like, if a wallet was using only a single remote node that maybe is randomly selected rather than geographically selected, You may get one that's really far away or one that's running on a slow host or something like that. We can be a lot more certain that ours are dependable and as geographically close as possible. Okay. So that's part of it. I mean, the other one is we have just an amazing dev team and one of the premier Monero devs on the Monero team. I've been doing a ton of work on the the Monero back end over the last four or five months for us.
The all of it, obviously, we we upstream what we can, and all of his stuff is completely open source as well. So anyone else can use it. But Nice. He's made a ton of performance improvements to sync, performance improvement, like, in the the latest release we'll talk about in a second. Performance improvements to if you have, like, a really deep wallet, you you have a wallet that has, like, thousands of transactions or something. The way that that works both on the sync side and actually just usability is drastically better. Like, he's made a ton of performance improvements.
[00:37:04] Unknown:
Can we give him a shout out, or is he, like, supernim?
[00:37:08] Unknown:
I think we can. I'll I'll give him a shout out, and, like, we can pull it from the from the recording if necessary. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me if needed. Yeah. Yeah. He goes by Charik, and he's just mental. He's incredibly talented. He's been building, like, mad, super young, but, incredibly experienced and one of the, really, the foremost wallet developers in them in aerospace. And so it's been absolutely awesome getting to work with him here at Cake and see him just continue to ship incredible stuff. He built this background sync in a very short amount of time and
[00:37:36] Unknown:
has greatly iterated on it as well. So, yeah, he's been doing absolutely amazing work for us. It's been it's been awesome to see it. Well, shout out to you, mate. Hopefully, we can keep that in the show. We'll check, but love to see that. I love it when there's young devs as well. Whenever I hear that, it's like, oh, yeah. This young guy, and she's fucking amazing. I'm like,
[00:37:52] Unknown:
we're gonna be alright. There's some smart kids out there. I've been forced to realize by working at cake that I'm I'm one of the old guys on the space. I'm the second oldest person on the cake team, which is is absolutely wild because I I thought I was young, and I've always been the youngest person everywhere I've been before this. But Yeah. Not anymore. Not anymore. I'm the I'm the old guy. That's kinda cool. You can lean into it. It is. It is. I'm trying. I'm balding anyways. So it's just gonna come with the territory. It's gonna shave the head soon and, you know, lean into it. Nice. That was the big news for the Monero project itself. Outside of that, we do have a lot of things, mostly cake wallet stuff, but we have a few others to hit on that were smaller releases, but still good ones. Yeah. On cake wallet, I I tweeted this yesterday because I was just digging through stuff to pull up notes for this, and I hadn't even realized that we had shipped three major releases in the month of April.
So this isn't intentional, so I can steal the spotlight for, the Monero monthly. But accidentally, we have three releases in one month to talk about. So I'll I'll try to condense it as much as possible. Well, the big one that appeals to me was your new logo. Oh, yes. As a general rule, I hate most names
[00:39:04] Unknown:
and logos and designs in the Bitcoin of Monero space. Like, I look at most stuff and I was fucking awful. It's really horrible. So when I saw, are you guys gonna be doing a rebrand? I was like, oh, no. What's gonna be coming? Like, I really hope that I don't hate this. And I saw it, and I was like,
[00:39:21] Unknown:
oh, you guys fucking nailed this one. It's classy and clean and simple and just really, really nice work. It's one of those things that is so hard to do well and was the first logo or brand change in the history of cake wallet. So we're talking since 2018. So it's always I feel like especially hard when you it's not like you've shifted brands a lot, but you have something that's a very consistent established brand. You don't wanna you don't wanna do it for no reason. You wanna make sure that it's a a worthy rebrand and update. So, yeah, we worked with the other life team who are kind of the marketing wing of MoonPay, who are a big on and off ramp in the space and a partner of cake for a very long time. Yeah. We worked with them to create this hours and hours and hours of interviews and discussions about why we do what we do, what the ethos is behind cake to try to get a really good visual brand that matches who we are. And, yeah, I think it turned out really, really well. And that was the bulk of the 04/2025 release for k quality was to get that new logo and brand out there. We don't have, like, a totally revamped UI in the app yet.
That's something we're working on that will have kind of an initial take on, hopefully, by Bitcoin Vegas. That's our target to have ready for that with really just more some some tweaks and improvements across the board. Mhmm. But I think what we're really starting to lean towards is probably a complete redesign of the app targeting more, like, towards the end of the year to really be more in line with the new visual identity that we have. But Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, if anyone listening hasn't been to kqual.com recently, you'll notice it is slightly better than our website used to be. I think our website was pretty rough before and has essentially been static for the better part of five years or so and is drastically improved now with the new brand, new website, way better functionality. So that that's been a ton of fun to launch, and I feel like makes me much more proud of the visual brand of cake wall. Like, obviously, the the core of cake wall has not changed. The the product itself hasn't changed. The team hasn't changed. But I feel like it much better represents who we are and, like, what we're trying to do than it than it has before. So it's been a ton of fun to get out there.
[00:41:23] Unknown:
Yeah. The rebrand is really nice, and that's not just because you guys are sponsoring my shows. Like, me and Q shout all over your your previous design for, like, ten minutes in our
[00:41:35] Unknown:
in our, one of our Bitcoin briefs. That clip is infamous within the cake team. We we definitely have that, and, we we share it every now and then just to remind ourselves. Yeah. For sure. I'm sure what we said. It was like, it looks like a a little girl's birthday party.
[00:41:50] Unknown:
They've gone wild with glitter and and coloring in, and it's a hateful design.
[00:41:54] Unknown:
Something like that. About vomiting from Q as well. Oh, yeah. Vomiting Vomiting works. Yeah. It was it was quite the, the scathing review, which to be fair, I don't like that theme anyways. That theme is going away, which I I am very excited for. But, yeah, that was, it's definitely that's a kind of a highlight of our arcade team that we we bring back up and remind ourselves every now and then who got the clip got the clip saved.
[00:42:18] Unknown:
I like to think that that spurred on this new beautiful design. So, yeah, that is it's really nice now. And, actually It's good fuel to the fire. Exactly. But, you know, the other profiles were nice anyway. It was when I when we first opened it, I was like, oh my god. And then I changed it to I think I've just got, like, the black and the orange or, like, dark gray orange or something. That's what I wrote. Yeah. Yeah. Which is nice. Like, as soon as I changed to that, I was like, oh, yeah. Yeah. This is really nice. It was just that immediate, like, oh, fuck.
[00:42:46] Unknown:
It's it's glaring right now. I'm not gonna lie. You'll notice on the new website that we don't use that theme for the screenshots in there. I can see. Yes. I can see. Very, very intentional. That one's that one's going away, and we have some some much better themes coming that are more like the black and orange, like that kind of rough style, but but improved, I think, over that as well. So that'll definitely be kind of the next stage of the the rebrand to start getting closer and closer to a a unified visual identity. But, yeah, that was that was a ton of work, and there's just so much that goes into that process, goes into the new websites, all of that stuff. So that's been fun to get out there, but that was really the smallest release of the month for us. Yeah. Because then we shipped four dot '26. I don't even know if it was two weeks later, but that one, there were two really big well, honestly, three really big things that were in that release. The first one is kind of related to the Exodus news that we talked about earlier, which is that you can now use a 12 word VIP 39 seed Mhmm. For your Monero wallet. So no longer do you need to have a separate policy or 25 word seed for Monero, but now you can use a single 12 word seed for all of your hot wallets within cake. Now, obviously, don't do this with, like, your hardware wallets 12 word seed. Like, you don't wanna make that seed hot, which I have been asked about. I have to remind people, like, that's not the goal here. Like, the goal here is that all of your hot wallets can be one twelve word seed, so you only have to keep one secret safe.
And then, obviously, keep your your cold wallets separate from that. But that's a a really good quality of life change because before, you'd have to have, at minimum, two seed phrases for your hot wallets and cake. We do do a shared seed kinda wallet group thing for all the currencies that natively support BIP 39. But now we're actually able to deterministically derive a 25 word Monero seed from that 12 word seed. So you can have the one seed. You can create that. Our onboarding flow will be changed a bit soon so that you can much more easily do this as well. But you just create the 12 word seed. You're gonna pick whatever cryptocurrencies you wanna use with that, and you'll get all the wallets you want out of one seed, which is a a huge improvement, just drastically simpler, and saves a lot of time time and trouble for the average user.
[00:44:53] Unknown:
The best way to do it would be have a seed that you create on the passport Mhmm. Then have, like, a a child seed or something like that from there, which you then was it bit 85, is it? Yeah. Yeah. Child seed. Five. And then you put that 12 word bit 85 seed into cake and then derive a Monero 20 5 word from that. So everything's still manageable and saved onto your passport, but you're not exposing any risk to your cold storage side. That's probably, like, the the cleanest way.
[00:45:28] Unknown:
Yeah. That's honestly I hadn't even thought about that. I'm gonna have to do that for my setup. Because, yeah, you if you keep just your one cold seed, you can deterministically derive all of your hot wallets and your Monero hot wallet all from that one seed because bit 80 5 is deterministic. So if you have your seed phrase for your passport, you can always get back those child seeds. And then once you have the child seed from your other one, you can always get back your hot wallets and cake. So you can essentially just save one seed phrase and have all of your hot and cold wallets in a secure way. One seed rule them all. Which is yeah. That's a really cool use case. I'm gonna have to do that. I'd forgotten somehow, I'd forgotten about bit 85 because I never bothered because I couldn't do Monero before now. So I just done a different seed phrase. But now that I can, you'll have to migrate over to that because that'll be Yeah. That'll be even easier
[00:46:13] Unknown:
to to keep have one on steel, and you can restore everything from that if if shit hits the fan. Yeah. Exactly. The same. Like, I haven't done everything perfectly. It's just, you know, q absolutely loves BIP 85 and always talks about how good it is. And it it is really clever, but I'm not as I'm not clever enough to use what's really clever. I still have billions of different fucking seed phrases written everywhere and from testing different wallets and different stuff. And
[00:46:38] Unknown:
Mhmm. It's an absolute headache. So if you wanna be smart, that's the way to do it. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It's a great call up. That'll be kind of the ideal path forward for people. So glad that we support that now. And then the other two things in four dot twenty six that were big. One is it's called Open Crypto Pay. It's by a Swiss exchange or Swiss company who also runs an exchange called DFX. It's a really cool system. It's been getting a lot of buzz in the, like, the Bitcoin side of the news world recently because it's a a way for merchants to implement Bitcoin lightning monero as well and other cryptocurrency payments. I think it might just be Bitcoin lightning in an era right now, but they can implement that into their existing POS system much more simply than something like BTC pay or others. And then they just get a static sticker that they can stick up on the the window or whatever right by their payment terminal. And when you go to pay for something, they just choose that open crypto pay payment method on their POS.
You scan the QR code and everything else happens by magic. So if you have a a lightning wallet supports l n u r l, that's actually the the base of the spec that they built out is l n u r l. So you can pay that directly via lightning. Outside of that, the only wallet right now that supports natively is cake wallet, and you can pay directly in on chain Bitcoin or Monero, any store that supports this. Interesting. And right now, it it is like it's Switzerland focused. The biggest supermarket chain in Switzerland is rolling out support for this across their stores.
[00:48:01] Unknown:
This is Yeah. This is yeah. We so that's interesting. So we talked about this yesterday, and we were like first, we were shocked that there's a spa in Switzerland because in The UK, spa is like one of the shittest, like, mini supermarkets you could go to. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Like, if you go to quite a shit area, there's gonna be a spa. So we were like, I can't believe that's in Switzerland because Switzerland's, like, really nice generally. Mhmm. And then we were asking, like, you can pay with lightning. We didn't know about the Monero side at that point. You can pay in lightning. Are they just treating these payments like cash? Like, how does that work on the regulation side? Because, presumably,
[00:48:39] Unknown:
they have to comply with all this bullshit, KYC, AML, blah blah blah blah blah because it's, like, crypto, or are they just saying, well, it's cash. So if it's under x amount, then you can just spend. Yeah. So this is different than, like, a v t c pay. They're not receiving the crypto directly. They're receiving the crypto into their d f x exchange account. Which swaps it for Yeah. Which swaps it for for the fiat that they want. And so, like, obviously, it's not, I think, the ideal, like, cypherpunk use case, but it's a really easy way for merchants that don't want to hold crypto directly, which if we're honest, unfortunately, is the vast majority of merchants. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really easy way for them to do this. And d f x is, like, very light k y c as well. I I think for, like, the business side, it's gonna be pretty normal KYC there, but they're a very cyberpunk, really cool company. I know it's a weird to mix that with, like, KYC exchange, but they have no KYC under a certain limit. Everything that they make is entirely open source.
Other websites, their exchange services, that kind of thing, all open source. And then open crypto pay, as the name suggests, is a an open protocol. So right now, yes, it's only a DFX account back end, but anyone could use this to build on, like, I I don't know. Maybe this could be something that could be integrated into BTC pay just to simplify the experience. So you don't need, like, an active POS terminal, but Mhmm. You can just use this static sticker, which is a bit simpler, and get paid in it. Maybe other exchanges can directly integrate this, like strike or others that are are centralized and are already doing the conversion, which is what a lot of merchants want. It can be used by anyone. But right now, it is essentially the crypto is going to the d f x exchange on the back end and being converted.
I'm not sure what customizability there is, like, if it has to be converted to fiat or if it they can have it just in their exchange account as the actual native crypto. I assume they they have that optionality, but it's it's a really cool system. Very simple. Like I said, works. The lightning side works with any lightning wallets that supports l n r l, which is the vast majority. Yeah. But beyond that, the only wallet that supports the integration natively is k wallet, which means you can pay on chain Bitcoin or Monero at any place that supports this. And Spar apparently is really big in Switzerland. It has, like Wow. Thousands of of stores. So they're rolling it out to those pretty steadily now, which is is cool to see. Yeah. That's cool. And then the last main thing at a four dot 20 six is something that the foundation guys did a long time ago, but it's this idea of making it a lot easier to visually verify addresses by breaking the addresses into chunks and kind of shifting the contrast between those chunks. Some are more bold. Some are lighter. Just to make it way easier to actually, like, go through bit by bit and verify or just verify the first chunk and the last chunk, which most most people use. That's something, like, Foundation has had for a long time in Envoy and Passport.
Mhmm. But Cake Wallet, we did it a little bit in an earlier release, I think '4 dot '24. But in 04/1926, we rolled it out to everywhere you find an address in the app. So now you have that really nice formatting for every cryptocurrency, Monero, obviously, as well with some customizations for Monero so that it looks a little better because Minero does have very, very long addresses. So we had to tweak it a little bit for, like, how big each chunk is, that kind of thing. But Mhmm. Looks way better, much, much easier to verify. Yeah. That's, like, just a really nice quality of life thing that, yeah, doesn't, like, completely change the game, but just makes it much more user friendly on the address side, which I was I was excited to get that out. Nice. Yeah. It definitely does. I like that. And I won't won't bore everyone with cake while it's tough forever. I promise. But the last update was 4Dot27, which is just going live. I think the day we're recording this, it should be going live definitely before we release. The main thing with that one is just that we we drastically improved background sync that we've talked about before. So now you can do things like limit it to only when you're on an unmetered network or Wi Fi, limit it to only when you're charging, limit it to only when you're not actively using your phone. You have a lot more control over when it runs alongside what we already had, which is you can choose let to let it run daily, which is, like, roughly every eighteen to twenty four hours, hourly, which is roughly every hour, like, it suggests or aggressive, which is, our insane mode, which basically tries to sync as frequently as it possibly can Yeah. Which is usually every 15 minutes, but depends on the OS how often it'll be. Most people should not use aggressive. It's like it's way overkill. But Yeah. I'm a very active user. I'm using hourly right now. For the vast majority of people, the default daily is plenty. Mhmm. And this is now also all cryptocurrencies within Cape Wallet. So it's not just Monero now. It's specifically helpful with things like Bitcoin silent payments, with Litecoin, membo extension blocks, and web, things that take longer to sync. And then, obviously, Monero, like, we talked about in previous, Monero monthlies. It's just I mean, like, it just totally changes the game when it comes to mineral usability because I've never have to wait my wallet to sink now, which is just some something I have never experienced in the space. It makes me much more subconsciously willing to make a narrow payment no matter what, because I know I'm never gonna have to wait for that. And even better is really key at these in person events where I constantly see people struggle with they hadn't opened their wallet in six months since they were last in an event or something, and then they open their wallet, realize they have to sync six months of wallet history, and it's never gonna happen. And they give up in the open scenario. And, like, that world is pretty much gone now, which is it's pretty fantastic. It's not default in cake yet. Mhmm. I think probably in an upcoming release, we will make make this part of the onboarding so that users can enable it very easily when they create a mineral wallet because it's to me, it's ready for everyone to use it regardless. Just tweak the settings to what makes the most sense for you, and you're gonna have a much better time. But it is something you have to go into the settings themselves to enable. It's under connection and sync and cake, and you can just quickly enable it, toggle the settings as you see fit, and enjoy a drastically drastically better Monero user experience.
Very nice. Oh, I should call it that as Android only right now, which is an unfortunate detail. IOS is a pain in the butt when it comes to background process Right. Execution, but we are still working on that. But it is Android only for right now. But Okay. Yeah. I know I know I've kept y'all for a while on the software updates here. It's been a bit of busy month, like I said. But we'll we'll rapid fire through the last few that we have here, because they're they're relatively minor, but just some good software updates. The first one is Havino, which, like, we talked about in the past, is a decentralized exchange for Monero. It's it's based on Monero. It's it works similarly to bisque, but is all Monero under the hood, which gives you obviously the privacy benefits and the speed benefits of Monero as well as the fee savings. So it's it's a fantastic platform. The way you can use it right now is basically a third party implementation of Haveno, which is called Haveno Rito or RitoSwap, and you can use that today. It's been really fantastic in my testing so far, but they released some just minor improvements and bug fixes. Nothing huge, but it's just those important steps that get towards a a safer and more usable decentralized exchange, which is an absolutely key tool for Monero. Another one is feather wallet, which is an absolutely fantastic desktop wallet for Monero, one that I've used for a very long time. They released a couple new versions, two dot eight dot o and two dot eight dot one. And, again, those are relatively minor updates overall with primarily the changes being updating to that latest version of an arrow that we talked about earlier in the show, updating their integrated tour and open SSL, just some good security and and quality of life improvements there, but definitely recommend. It's a it's a great desktop wallet to use for Monero.
Third is an update to the, the p two pool mining software that I recommended in the past on Monero monthly. It's called Goopax, but this one's the adult version, I guess, because it's Goopax with three x's. So, you use at your own peril, but it's a a good fork of goop x that's a little bit more well maintained and has a little bit of extra functionality. But they're released to 1.9.o, which is also just minor improvements and bug fixes. Nothing life changing, but it's a really cool way to be able to easily spin up and get started mining Merrell on any computer. Just a desktop GUI app that's that's really easy to use. So Mhmm.
That's a good one as well. Another is Stack Wallet. They released version two dot one dot 11. Stack Wallet is a a multi crypto wallet like Cake Wallet, and we're good friends with them. Awesome team behind it. They released this version. Again, nothing major, especially for Monero. It was just kind of minor stuff in the background. They added another cryptocurrency I'd never heard of before. So nothing life changing, but another good release there for them. Glad to see them doing well. And then two more. And finally, Cup Rate, which we talked about quite a bit on the last episode, is a a new implementation of Monero's core node and consensus protocol in Rust from the ground up. So it's not a code fork of the current Monero project, but it's a a completely new rebuild that's trying to implement all of the same things, but in Rust. And there's two main reasons for that, like we talked about before I'll briefly mention. One is it's a really helpful check to make sure that all of the core aspects of Monero are implemented properly. And since you're doing it in a different language that has some other benefits over c plus plus, it's a really good way to make sure that, like, the things around, combinational amounts are implemented properly, that the way we do, ring signatures, that all of these things are actually done the right way. And this is a unique chance to get to have, like, a a fresh look and perspective at that in a different language. So it's really good for that purpose.
It also brings some other really cool benefits, like drastically improved sync time. Talked about it on the last episode, but it took me something like four hours to sync Monero from Genesis with cup rate, which is wildly better than syncing on Monero d. Now there are some caveats with how they actually do sync that are a little less thorough maybe than Monero d, but in a sane way, that's fine for most users. That is much, much faster. So they released version zero dot zero dot two. It's still very early days. I wouldn't recommend using it, like, in place up in your d yet as your your main node. And I don't think it even can serve that purpose with a wallet like cake wallet yet. They don't have all the functionality built in there. But, again, just really good to see that it's making progress, continuing to be built out and and getting more and more stable with h release. So a cool one to see this month as well. The last one is a another wallet in the Monero space that's got an update. It's called Monfluo. I'm sure that's Esperanto, and I have no clue what it means. The Monero community loves Esperanto, so I'm I'm assuming that it's it's something in that. They released version zero dot seven dot zero. This is an interesting wallet and is very Monero. Basically, they've removed all integrations, features, functionality.
My understanding is it was a Monero Monero joke fork, but they basically inked out, like, everything except Okay. Sending, receiving transaction history. So it can't do anything except send, receive Monero, which I know for some people, they want it to be as dead simple as possible. No extra integrations or features or anything like that. It's not my cup of tea personally, but I know that that's like, there's some more hardcore people in the American community that like that. So they released version zero dot seven dot zero. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. It's the it's the dumb phone version of of Monero wallets. And you just you don't want anything else. You you just want it to do the basics. Yeah. And it seems to do that well. I've heard good reports from a couple people I know that use it. And the person maintaining it got funded by the mayor community to to keep maintaining it for the next few months at the very least. So, hopefully, this one will stick around longer. There's been three or four of these attempted over the past few years. All of them have died in various ways. So I I wouldn't bet on the longevity here, but we'll see if this one continues and is an interesting, like, hyper minimalist option for Monero wallets. Yeah. I quite like that. Again, it's not something that I would personally use because I like to play around with features and stuff. I can understand maybe if you're onboarding someone who's really, really fucking basic and they just want the most simple, like, all I wanna do is send and receive.
Wouldn't you be the perfect user here then? Well, you would think so, but I
[01:00:11] Unknown:
my capabilities are very different to what I expect of myself. So I try and do all the cool shit and use all the features and be like the big boys, and I consistently fail. But I never give up. I always try and use the good stuff and just fuck it up consistently. So it's not for me. I I like to have something that I can fuck up, so I wouldn't go to this, but other people I think would like this probably.
[01:00:38] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. That's all the updates and news that I had for the the Minera ecosystem, but I I know you've got a a ton of chats and boost to get to. So I'll I'll hand things over to you. Yeah. We've got loads. XMR chats and boosts.
[01:00:51] Unknown:
Notes from Jordan. Doctor Zavargo wants me dead because I forgot to give John the XMR chats for action news. Tut tut tut. Unforgivable. Yeah. I know. You would say unforgivable, but also with Jordan, I'm gonna let him off. He does so much stuff in the background that no one ever knows about. It's true. That, like, probably more than anybody I know, he just does stuff to help people all the time. Never asked for anything back. Never asked, like, never tells anyone about anything. He's, like, crazy busy all the time. So at the moment, I'll, I'll let him off for that. But it sounds like doctor Zavargo won't, and he will actually be killing it. So, that's sad to see, but nice knowing you, mate. Doctor Zavargo says, there's an old saying in Tennessee.
I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says, fool me once, shame on you. Shame on you. You fool me, I can't get fooled again. Isn't that is that bush?
[01:01:58] Unknown:
There's an old saying in Tennessee. I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says fool me once. Shame on shame on you. It fooled me. We can't get fooled again. I was gonna say that's definitely a butchering of the phrase that I know, so I'm assuming that's an intentional butchering.
[01:02:20] Unknown:
Yeah. I I'm pretty sure that's like a a George w Bush. That sounds like a speech. Yeah. That sounds like a And he, like, tried to make a point and and, like, just completely fucked it up. Okay. You fooled me again. Can't can't fool me again. I'm pretty sure it is. This is a slight against my ancestry. Jordan, you may consider Harakiri for your honor. Okay. Wild child with 0.088 XMR. Looks like a sword that he sort of made out of a load of dots and things. And then Monero monthly is a blessing.
[01:02:58] Unknown:
Keep up the fight. Thank you. It's a pretty impressive ASCII samurai sword. I think that's what that is. Yeah. That's what it looks like. Very good. Never seen that before. Yeah.
[01:03:07] Unknown:
Not Snead with 0.044 XMR says, salt fuels life. Heart, nerves, muscles need sodium chloride, refined salts for NPCs, celtic salts keep vital minerals, low salt diets pushed by elites, ignore biology leaving us weak, choose real salt, Choose life. What's your salt regime?
[01:03:36] Unknown:
What's your salt regime? That was not a question I was expecting on the Monero monthly, but
[01:03:42] Unknown:
No. I wasn't either.
[01:03:44] Unknown:
I like it. I like it. I I am definitely against the refined salts. He's, like, good Himalayan stuff, and I think there's one other Pink salts. From, like, Utah or something that's supposed to be special. My wife's the Okay. The holistic person, so she would know the the concrete answer. The only other one is when working out cardio we'll use element, just l m n t, which is like a salt and other minerals, drink mix. I know it's not perfect, but it's one of the better solutions out there and is a good way to get some salt in. Isn't that what Joe Rogan shills a lot element?
[01:04:17] Unknown:
Probably.
[01:04:18] Unknown:
I don't watch enough Joe Rogan to know for sure, but probably they're I feel like pretty big over the last couple of years. I've had some big sponsorships and stuff. So it's good stuff. It tastes reasonably good. It's not disgusting, like some of the salt drinks, and, it's a good way to replenish after a workout. I might try that out. My salt regime
[01:04:36] Unknown:
is similar. I think we use, like, Maldon salt and, like, pink salt occasionally, like Himalayan salt. If I'm at a restaurant or something and it has, like, the shitty table salt, I'll still probably use that. I'm lucky in that I've always, like, my whole life, all my family have said, you eat too much salt because I'd like chuck salt in everything. Like, you eat too much salt, you're gonna die, you're gonna have a heart attack, you're gonna have this, and now it seems like I was right all these years. I needed salt.
[01:05:04] Unknown:
So that makes me feel Right now. You you knew the right way all along.
[01:05:08] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Just always right. BTC wrestler with 0.023 XMR. Really enjoying the show, fellas. I switched away from StackDuo to Monero.com wallet. Really like it. It's got fast sync time compared to Stack. My only critique is the name. Monero.com is kind of gay. Kind of a gay name for a wallet. Hashtag free samurai. I actually agree. It is kind of a gay name. Sorry. I can't refute it. I don't like it either. Yeah. I don't like it either. That's like the just Monero and the cake, isn't it? Yep. I think that needs some work. Like, I'm not gonna be really mean about it like we were about the design stuff, but I just Just don't tell q. We'll get another clip. Yeah. He's gonna listen to this, isn't he? And he's gonna shit on it next episode. But, yeah, it it needs work that. Great wallet,
[01:06:01] Unknown:
not so great name. Yeah. I'm definitely it's something we've been talking about internally for a while now, and it's something that I want to change. There's just a few tricky things. Like, one is the monero.com domain is ours. That was the original reasoning for it was we had the domain. We wanted to lean into that, and it's a good way to push people towards Monero stuff who search for Monero because that's a really good SEO and stuff. And we push people towards Mhmm. Cake Wallet Monero and then also the official Monero website. So that's how it got it, but I agree that, like, a domain name and a wallet name really bugs me. Go another some other options. I'll leak some alpha that I have a preferred name for it. That would be Nura wallet, which is also Esperanto, but it has some cool meanings of being, like basically means only in Esperanto. So it's a good fit for something that's only a Monero wallet. Mhmm. But our team is very split on it. So if anybody has thoughts on that, dump some, some x mark chats or boosts or just shoot me a message and and give feedback because I'm I'm curious what people think, but I definitely do want to change the name. It's just Yeah. Changing a well aim isn't as simple as just changing the name. There's a lot of things that go into it. Yeah. So I'm trying to figure out the best path there. I also don't love that one if I'm honest, but I'll have a think as well. And anyone who has any ideas, just let us know. We'll come up with something. We'll come up with something. We'll crowdsource it. I like it. Hashtag free samurai, and then zero point zero four six XMR
[01:07:22] Unknown:
saying brother rabbit is a legend. I couldn't agree with that statement anymore. I absolutely love brother rabbit. I miss him. I'd like to give him a cuddle. He is, one of the best of the best. So if you're listening somewhere out there, brother Rabbit, just know that we love you very much. Goo says with 0.046XMR. Monero monthly, how is the market price of Monero calculated, and how does this work? When transaction amounts are invisible, who decides the price? One centralized entity or a decentralized network of entities, how do we ensure the price is fair?
I'm pretty sure we went into this a while ago, and we'd said something like, oh, if if someone was to do, like, a massive dump of Bitcoin into Monero, it would wildly change the price of Monero in theory, and then it's just happened.
[01:08:14] Unknown:
Mhmm. So that's kind of interesting to see. The way that it works is just like every other cryptocurrency. Like, yes, transaction amounts are hidden, but the way you find the price is that the market finds the price. So, essentially, you're looking at the order books of centralized exchanges to know what the market price of Monero is, and the reason why all this movement of Bitcoin through instant exchangers move the prices because those instant exchangers source their liquidity from the most common centralized exchanges. So if they're having to send out a bunch of Monero, they're having to buy a ton of Monero from the centralized exchanges, and that's gonna push the price up because it ships the order book. So there's nothing fancy there. It's a very hard thing to decentralize because it's not really possible. Like, you have to have somewhere to find the price from, and you can't just ask people or something. Like I said, most places just use centralized exchange order books. There is a really cool website that is called monero dot boats, and they try to calculate the Monero street price, which is by looking at the going rate for Monero peer to peer, specifically looking at Rideau swap. And Okay. That Which is higher Usually. Preferably. Usually. I think right now for the first time ever is actually street prices below market price. Oh. Normally, it's, like, ten, fifteen, 20 percent above. But right now with that crazy movement in Monero, it seems like the p to p market has been a little bit slow to catch up, which makes sense because a lot of the p to p offers are, like, a statically set price or they have some, like, floating percentage or something.
So it's not as shocking, but that is interesting because it's I just loaded it, and that's the first time I've ever seen it actually negative where the street price is below the market price. But that's, like, the only other indicator of prices. Was the going rate for the decentralized exchanges, but that's a much harder thing to calculate and is not as trustworthy of a number, but an interesting data point nonetheless. I've seen that previously on Bitcoin
[01:10:02] Unknown:
when I've gone to, like, Bisc and p two p places. And it when you've had a big pump over a couple of days, normally, you have, like, plus 2%, plus 3%, plus 1%, whatever it is on top, but some of them go negative in those times. So that happens there too. We said this before, but because liquidity is low in Monero, if you had the funds, it seems like a really relatively simple trade, I guess you would call it. Arbitrage? Yeah. Like, say you had what was this hack? 300,000,000. Say you had a billion dollars. You know, you buy slowly over time. You accumulate half a billion dollar or whatever. You you accumulate as much Monero as you possibly can, and then you take the rest in Bitcoin and you just exchange the shit out of it for Monero on all the exchanges just, like, over the course of a day Mhmm. And push the price crazy, and then you scale out again, you could swap swap back again. Like, you could very significantly move the price. Oh, it's not just Monero. It's any smaller coin you could do that with. But it seems like if you're one of these, like, crazy wealthy people, that would be potentially a move that you could do. It would be hard, especially with something like Bitcoin where the liquidity is just so dense. A lot of these big purchases are happening OTC, and they don't move the price at all. Yeah. So it's definitely harder with those, but the smaller the coin, the smaller the liquidity, the the easier you could actually move that price yourself as you see fit. Yeah. You're gonna really struggle with Bitcoin unless you are, like, basically anyone would struggle with Bitcoin, but Monero or or something with a smaller liquidity, you could do that. I mean, you've seen that. If if that's what $300,000,000 can do in a day it's 50%.
Imagine what you can do if you have a billion. Probably do some crazy stuff there. And, like, 50% isn't to be laughed at, especially when you're talking at those sort of numbers. Yep. So if if anyone has a spare billion dollars lying around, just let us know. We can help you implement this. We'll take a small fee. Everyone will be happy. Pies with 0.0047XMR. Let's fucking go. Chad Farrow with 0.028XMR. Great episode, gents. I love seeing all of these Monero donations coming through. So do we. Thank you, Chad Farrow. Chill now with 0046 XMR.
Monero monthly, number four, finally, a useful Monero podcast that a dumb pleb like me can follow and use some real tips from stay ungovernable and keep them coming. Thank you very much. That's good to hear. Kaz Piland with 0.0037 XMR just says boost. Barn miner with 0.224 XMR. Big baller. Excited to have XMR payments working again on my BTC pay server. Thanks to Jordan and Seth's assistance, barnjerky dot hashroots inc dot I o. There you are. Free and free for you there, mate. Looking forward to interacting and learning more from the Monero community of Misfits Love Barn.
He actually came on for a confab a couple of days ago. I'm just sort of in the middle of editing it. Nice. We talked a lot about Monero and him shitting on lightning and everything else. So that was a fun one. Yeah. I'm definitely gonna have to listen to that one. That dude's been awesome to interact with, and his jerky is absolutely incredible. So all my Monero is going there these days. Well, thank you, Barn, and thank you for the 0.224 XMR. We appreciate you. Boost from Rod Palmer from the Bugle News, hashtag forty hours per week, headphones with 21,000.
New frontiers equals entropy. Well, that is great to hear from such a credentialed journalist. Thank you very much, Rob Palmer. Late stage Huddl with 10,000 sats, the world's most private privacy token. Is that what he says in the intro? Token? Also, that sounds like Jeff Goldblum. Is that Jeff Goldblum? Monero, finds a way. No. That is John McAfee.
[01:14:21] Unknown:
He's basically Jeff Goldblum on cocaine, if you think about it. And everything else.
[01:14:25] Unknown:
I really like, he's one of the most entertaining characters I've ever seen. Like, he is such an interesting creature to study. The things he comes out with, the things like, his life is just fucking unbelievable.
[01:14:41] Unknown:
You keep using present tense, but supposedly, he's dead. Do you know something we don't? Question one?
[01:14:50] Unknown:
No. Unfortunately, I don't. I'd love to actually meet him, but I don't know where he is, but I have a feeling that he might not be dead. Yeah. I think that's a pretty common buzz. It seems unlikely this dude is actually gone. I don't think so. So if you are out there and you are listening, lots of love to you, mate, and, hope you're doing alright. FOMO chronic, 1,001 SATS, T Y M, 350 sats. Anonymous, 350 sats. Pies, one hundred sats. You bloody fucking cunts. That was for saying there was no negative comments from the last show. We knew that was coming. Thank you, Pies. Thank you for bringing us back down to Earth. A hundred sats. I completely disagree with the take on Nosta.
Okay. And another hundred sats. Thank you, gentlemen. Forty hours per week. Thank you, Pies. And thank you also to the streamers, Poe Jan Meeze with 14,600 sats, Cas Pieland with 949 sats, and Shadowy Superbadger with 513 sats. We appreciate you all. Thank you for all the questions and boosts and XMR chats. Alright, mate. Well, I know you have work to do, so I will let you go. But that was another good one. Looking forward to the next one, and we'll catch up soon. Absolutely. I'm I'm loving these, man. Thank you so much for the time that you pour into these and the the rest of the ungovernable
[01:16:14] Unknown:
misfits crew does as well because I know that there's so much. I feel like I'm the lazy guy. I just I just kinda come up with the notes and jump on the pod at the moment and record, and then y'all do all the hard work behind the scenes. So thankful for it and absolutely loving the Monero monthly. It's been a blast. Yeah. Definitely. We have something new coming soon, don't we? So,
[01:16:31] Unknown:
everyone, just just keep your eyes and ears and everything peeled, and very soon, we'll have some more things coming your way. So it never stops. Nothing stops this train, and we'll catch you on the next one. 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 Ungovernal Misfits and the Ungovernal Misfits crew. Also, a big thank you to Cake Wallet and Foundation, not only for supporting this show and everything that Ungovernal Misfits do, but also for the general freedom and open source movement.
We hinted to it in this episode, but Foundation have released a new device. I'm very excited about this. If you haven't already listened to my episode, go back and have a listen. You can check them out at foundation.xyz. You can use my code, Ungovernable, for a discount. It's just Ungovernable. Or you can click the link in the show notes, and it will take you to our own cool page that mister Crowns made all beautiful. Check that out. And also a big thank you to Cake Wallet, which will be having its own application on the Passport Prime. So obviously, Seth has been working hard in the background there and the rest of the team to work with Foundation.
It's very exciting because it's gonna mean people can have cold storage for their Monero along with lots of other cool features, I'm sure. If you haven't already tried 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.
The business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every last seconds, eleven seconds. I am investigator investigator investigator. And I work supporting Our agenda for today, we're gonna start with just the basics of Monero. What it is, what it is, how it works, how it works. Monero is considered a privacy token.
[00:00:32] Unknown:
The world's most private
[00:00:34] Unknown:
privacy. Which means that in high, virtually all transaction details are exchanged. The world's most private
[00:00:41] Unknown:
privacy. Good morning.
[00:01:15] Unknown:
Morning, Max. Long time no speak. Another month, another eternity in the Bitcoin Monero freedom tech space.
[00:01:21] Unknown:
Yeah. It doesn't feel like that long to me, but I assume it does to you this time because you guys have been extremely busy on the cake side. Q's been the same.
[00:01:32] Unknown:
Yeah. I know they're trying to get Prime out the door ASAP. I cannot wait to get my early access unit. Yeah. Running out of time here on April, but I'm gonna I'm just gonna keep harassing Q until I get it in hand. He's blamed Trump
[00:01:45] Unknown:
and all of his goings on. Yeah. That's what he said. He said, apparently, they've got stuff stuck in ports and Oh, man. I didn't even think about that. Not being released and all sorts of crazy shit and uncertainty, and it's a bit of a nightmare. Yeah. I hadn't thought until he told me. I was like, oh, yeah. Fuck. That actually probably will be quite frustrating.
[00:02:03] Unknown:
Yeah. It's yet another side of the hardware industry that's just, like, insane compared to software. It is. Like, I'm not gonna lie. It's a little refreshing, quote unquote just working on software now because this is just so many other things that come into play with hardware and logistics and shipping and upstream providers and just like so much. Where's the software? We can just build something and ship it and practically I mean, we are still beholden to Apple and Google for most our users, unfortunately, and Apple are idiots, but but it's still better than hardware struggles for sure.
[00:02:36] Unknown:
Well, that is proof in the pudding because I can see you guys have been putting out some big releases, making
[00:02:42] Unknown:
shitload of changes, which we'll get into later in the show. We've also had Monero's eleventh birthday. That's pretty big. It is. Yeah. I I think a lot of people who are newer to Monero don't realize how long Monero has been around. Like, it was one of the very few cryptocurrencies that wasn't just a Bitcoin fork back in 2014 when it launched. Basically, everything that existed outside of Bitcoin was just a tweak of Bitcoin with different issuance or different blocks fee. Slight parameter change. Exactly. Like, you're just changing some little parameters, changing the name, and calling it a day. There were very few that were actually Yeah. Innovating much less that were actually built on a different protocol entirely. So, yeah, it's it's been eleven years. The birthday was technically on April 18. So but midway through the month, the Manera community celebrated in Manera community style, which is that we didn't, but just talked about it on social media because we're all a a non weirdos and don't have in person parties. But we need to fix that one of these times. We'll have to do a big cake wallet party made for, like, the fifteenth or something. We'll get a ton of people together and celebrate. But Yeah. That'd be cool. Yeah. Yeah. That was the the birthday. That was when it was initially announced on BitcoinTalk, which was all the rage back then. I know some people still use the Bitcoin talk forum, but I think it's been dying out a little bit.
[00:03:54] Unknown:
I think we tried. I think this is one of the ones that me and mister Crown used to try and, like, post a few bits on. It was that and the Reddit one. Mhmm. And every single time we posted anything, we'd get banned and blocked, and someone would be like, this is a promotion of something. And we're we're like, we're literally talking about those podcasts we've done or, like Mhmm. A run of clothing that we're doing that's, like, going towards free samurai. We're trying to, like, do something about every time we get blocked, and so we're like, fuck this. Man. Yeah. No kidding. Way too aggressive. But we did, like, keep saying, wait, man. It's hard to remember that I'm not part of the audition anymore. But
[00:04:33] Unknown:
You kind of are in spirit. I am. Yeah. I'm not not totally divorced. But, they do have a thread on there that I know gets pretty good traction. I was a little surprised. Initially, we decided to make a thread there and see if there would be much engagement. There's actually quite a good community around it of, like Okay. OG Bitcoiners. Less of the number go up, less of the people you'd see also on Twitter or something. A lot of it's been Yeah. Been around for a long time. So I know that's still alive, but I feel like most of those communities have moved off to x or Discord, God forbid, or Telegram, those kind of things. So most have moved somewhere else. But, yeah, that was where it was originally announced back in the day when everything was announced on Bitcoin talk on the a and n threads where we would watch for new things to pop up. And that was where we're thankful for today who was basically, like, one of the first Minare community members. He code forked Bytecoin, which was the first thing built on the crypto node protocol. I've gone over the history a little bit. But he code forked to that and started fresh to essentially get away from the premine and the scammy stuff with Bytecoin and just build on the crypto protocol itself and do something the right way. So that was the part of it. And since then, obviously, my nerves continued to iterate and improve over the last eleven years with another big update coming hopefully, this year. Hopefully, within the next twelve months at least. So yeah. It was cool to celebrate that again. I know we there was a lot more around the tenth anniversary last year. Yeah. But a good reminder of how long Monero's been around because I think a lot of people don't realize that. Yeah. That's a decent amount of time for something to survive. That's pretty impressive.
Yeah. On the I guess not not on the birthday, but the April, we had a a very big news event and price increase, which I know isn't, like, what we normally talk about. I'm not here to talk about the price increase itself, but there was a crazy spike of, like, 50% in Monero's price over the course of the last few days. And at first, no one had any idea what in the world was going on. But, eventually, it came out that it seems like and this is from Zach xBT who's, like, the legendary on chain analyst theft scam tracker. Like, he does incredible work. He posted later on that day, well, that price increase was going crazy that someone, apparently, a Bitcoin OG, had lost 3,520 Bitcoin to a theft, which is an incomprehensible amount of money to lose. Oh my lord. Yeah. It was all stolen from one individual. He obviously didn't say who. He gave some signs of, like, how he knew that it was a Bitcoin OG, but obviously, he didn't want a fingerprint exactly who it was. But, yeah, yeah, apparently, that was stolen and immediately sent in a bunch of different orders to instant exchangers across the ecosystem to swap into Monero. And as far as he said, all of it was swapped into Monero, which we're talking like I don't know what that is. So long. $300,000,000 swapped into Monero with no regard to price or anything like that over the course of a few hours. So that's very seemingly was the reason for that price jump and was pretty crazy to see. It's something that's not, like it's not uncommon for stolen funds, obviously, to move into Monero. But a lot of times, it's, like, just little bits and pieces, and then they're moving back into Bitcoin or something like that. But this seems like the person didn't care at all about fees. They didn't care at all about price changes.
They just wanted to move it into something that's privacy preserving. Well, would you, if you've just got $300,000,000
[00:07:40] Unknown:
worth of Bitcoin slash Monero, you don't really care about the fees. Mhmm. It's like Yeah. That that's enough. It's not your money anyways. Yeah. I mean, it goes to show, though, like, that it works. Where do you put Solon funds where you're not gonna be tracked forward as long as you keep it in there and you use it from there? Well, Monero would be the choice rather than fucking around with whatever else. People try and put it onto an exchange, and then it gets flagged and all this silly stuff that people seem to do. I always look at these tests, and I'm like, wow. How the fuck have you pulled that off? Like, you've done some clever code shit that I don't understand. You've hacked some system and done something whatever, whether it's social engineering or code. And you've stolen all this money that's enough to, like, live for a hundred lifetimes. And then you've gone to an exchange and given your KYC details and your address, and then the police have knocked on your jaw and arrested you. Yeah. What was it called? The greatest rapper alive, whatever her name was. The the bit for next hack, I think. Right? The bit for next hack. You know, things like that. And you think, what are you doing? So, yeah, I guess Monero is the place to go. It's what I would probably do if I have $300,000,000
[00:08:50] Unknown:
worth of Bitcoin that I shouldn't have. Yeah. I mean, it seems insane that these people get caught, but it's one of the again, like, I don't want these people to get away with stealing money. So I'm not I'm not trying to imply that. But, like, if you have money that you need to actually live on, to be quite honest, there's not that much you can do with Bitcoin directly or Monero directly as far as, like, you're trying to probably live a very luxurious life somewhere on an island. Yeah. You're not flying into The Caribbean and then just dropping whole Bitcoin for your hotel room or something. Like, they're not gonna accept it directly, so you you need to get to Fiat, and that's obviously that's the easy place where people get caught because there's just not enough that they can use it for. Well, yeah. Once you gotta touch it. Yeah. Or they, like most criminals, they try to live crazy once they make a big heist, and they can't kinda fly under the radar where you could get away with using, like, Bitcoin exchanges, debit cards, gift cards, stuff like that. I think you could probably make it work, but most are trying to to live a little crazy. And so they go to try and get a bunch of Fiat, and, obviously, that raises red flags. It will be interesting with this one. Like, this is one of the particular weak points of Monero is targeted tracing of an individual who you know the withdrawals that they've made. And, obviously, these instant exchangers don't share that data publicly, so we don't know exactly what, like, the on chain Monero transactions were for these. But, inevitably, they're gonna be contacted by law enforcement. Oh, yeah. And we'll most likely share this data. So this is one of those interesting scenarios where if governments and nation states are truly able to track Monero in this, like, very specific weakness, this Eve Alice Eve attack where if this hacker they obviously went through an instant exchange, swapped Bitcoin for Monero.
If they go, like we talked about, to send Monero to a centralized exchange or something that's also working with law enforcement Mhmm. This would be, like, the worst case scenario for Monero privacy and could be traced through. There's a lot of caveats, but could be traced through if they don't do anything else with the funds or if they try to use them on a a collaborating platform, an exchange, or a merchant, or something that is sharing data with the same government or law enforcement agency. So this will definitely be an interesting one to watch and should be one of the better proofs either of Monero being resistant to even a pretty, obviously, very high profile case like this. Or if it'll be traced, it'll be at another reminder of why Fortune membership proofs are so important. And, again, not because I don't like, I would love for these people to be traced. Like, this is one of the this is one of those Monero things where I'm like, it is a little sad that it's as privacy preserving as it is, but it's necessary because if a criminal can't use Monero and have privacy, then it means that you and I definitely cannot use Monero and have privacy.
So it's a little bit of a hard case to, like, reason with, but it'll be a a fascinating one to watch for sure. Yeah. Because there's half of you that's like, I really hope that this
[00:11:30] Unknown:
tech works and that it can't be tracked. And then the other side is like, I really hope that this poor fucker who's had all that Yeah. Bitcoin stolen from them gets it back. So, yeah, it is a little bit but the other thing I was gonna say as you were going through that with the Eve Alice Eve, like, tracking, Didn't you say previously that if someone does churning of any kind, then that breaks that?
[00:11:56] Unknown:
It can. The hard part with churning is that no one really knows exactly what's effective and what's not. It's just it's very hard to actually analyze. Okay. What would be the best way to do churning? Because we can't analyze what normal spin patterns are of users of Monero today. Because ultimately, with churning, what you want to do is you want it to look like any other spend. The timing, the number of inputs and outputs, you want it to be as normal as possible so that it's harder to distinguish what was you actually moving the funds and what was you just having inputs included as decoys by other users.
So that's where it's a little tricky. It's like there's not a clear, this is the way you should do it, or these are the times you should do it at, or these are the number of inputs or outputs. That's never really been settled on because we can't figure that out because of the privacy of Monero for the average Monero user. So it's hard to kinda build a fingerprint of what's the average user and how do you wanna match in with that. So it I mean, churning does help in some ways. Like this user, he's obviously already being watched. So he he already has probably all of these t x IDs in Monero flagged and being surveilled to see if any of the outputs are used in other transactions. Yeah. But because of the way Monero works, other people are gonna be using his outputs as decoys now that those transactions have been made. So he will want to try to blend in with that, but it's just not clear exactly what works the best when it comes to churning. But that's the only, like, only response that we have right now to those kind of targeted tax is when you are moving the funds, you're deducing more and more plausible deniability to if they were actually spent. But the problem that also can happen with churning is if you do it at very weird times, like every tenth minute or something Stands out. It's gonna be clear. This is someone, like, running a script to do churning, or if you're doing it always with 20 inputs every time, or you're always doing, like there's just a lot of different ways that you can kinda give yourself away that aren't hidden by Monero's privacy. Like, obviously, the the time of the transaction is not hidden. The number of inputs and outputs are not hidden.
[00:13:53] Unknown:
So that is because you don't currently have full chain membership proofs, and that means that you are one of 20, was it? Or I can't remember. I keep forgetting. 16. One of 16? Yeah. One of 16. So that means that with every spend or churn, you could be one of these sixteens, and then they're looking for pattern recognition to see, like, oh, this is likely this person, and they're trying to draw conclusions from that. But if this person just waited until FCMP is implemented, then they did a forward spend, then presumably,
[00:14:31] Unknown:
it would not be possible because if it wouldn't be one of 16, it'd be one of all, and then it's like, fucking good luck. Or or is that or is that wrong? No. You're definitely right that that would probably the better scenario for privacy. I think still the tricky thing is they made hundreds of orders to swap Bitcoin to Monero, which means they're gonna have hundreds of Monero outputs that they need to combine. Combine something like a 92 inputs in each Monero transaction. Okay. So let's say, probably, they're gonna have to make several transactions to do this, and it's especially bad right now with ring signatures. Because if you see a transaction, you know some of the the the outputs that are owned by this user because you've talked to these centralized exchanges. And so you're watching those. And then if you see a transaction on chain that has, let's say, a 92 inputs, they've maxed out how many they can combine. And every single one of those input rings happens to have one of the outputs that you know this user controls and 15 other inputs.
But you know that one of them in each of those inputs is controlled by the user. It makes it very clear that, like, this user is combining funds. That's one of the specific weaknesses of ring signatures because we have to show that there is a valid input. And so one of the inputs there is valid, and so someone watching the chain can know that for sure. Whereas with, like, FCMP, you would see however many max inputs you can do, which you're still not I think that's still not set in stone with f c and p, but you would see that, but you wouldn't see any of the input data. So you wouldn't know which input are actually being spent. You would just know that a valid input is being spent. Rather than right now, you have one of 16, and they're all real outputs on chain. So that spend case will be much better with FCMP. But especially right now, that's like the combined input common ownership input heuristic kind of applies to Monero in these very specific targeted use cases where if someone knows that you own these 400 outputs, for instance, from all these instant exchangers, and then they see that there's an input that they know you control in each of the inputs in a transaction, it becomes clear that you're the one actually making the spend. Mhmm. So that's where things get a little hairy, but that's where, like, churning can help. Because if you do that, like, yeah, they'll know that you made a transaction.
But then you only have one input. You're not having to deal with combined input heuristic from then on. Mhmm. And you'll blend in much better with the rest of the mineral ecosystem as you go from there. But what we see commonly happen is that people will go through an instant exchanger, get a bunch of manure outputs, combine them all in a transaction to an exchange, and then it's just pretty clear on chain that this was the person who was this hacker because we know on the Bitcoin side how they got in. We know the manure outputs because we subpoenaed the instant exchangers or something, and then we see a transaction combining a hundred inputs that all have one ring member that we know is owned by this user. So, yeah, it kinda breaks through a lot of the privacy of Manero there. Well, I hope that they get cool. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah. Like you said, it's a it's a juxtaposition of I want them to get caught, but I also want Monero's privacy to be proven. So Exactly. We'll see what happens there. There was other like, one other really interesting thing out of that is, Zach xBT in a comment to somebody because, inevitably, someone underneath his tweet about this said, Manero is only used for laundering money. Mhmm. He replied that he uses Manero for payments frequently, which was really cool to see. Mhmm. Because I I think his perspective is almost unique in the space.
Like, he has the same skills and techniques as a chain surveillance company, but as an individual who has a desperate need for privacy. Because, I mean, if you think about he's unveiling a bunch of these crypto hacks and scams, showing the world what evil is being perpetrated. So, like, surely, he has a target on him. So he understands what on chain privacy is and isn't and is a a heavy Monero user, which is really cool to see. I've never seen him comment on this publicly before, but a fascinating example of somebody who they know all the scams and the bad stuff that can happen with Monero, and they're also a heavy daily user for their own privacy and their own payments, which is a really cool example of that in the real world. I'd never really actually given that too much thought. I always see tweets from him and whoever they are. I've always sort of, like, seen the detail that they go into and pretty fucking impressive, but I'd never really thought like, oh, shit. You're actually
[00:18:33] Unknown:
gonna be annoying some people that could be quite dangerous, and you're gonna have a massive target on your back. I'd never really given that too much thought. That's quite a scary position to be in, actually. Yeah. For sure. And is is a understandable reason why I, like, he I don't think he goes on podcasts or anything like that because he has some some serious offset requirements. You're pulling the mask off people who are quite evil and doing very bad things. Like, you don't want to put a target on your back or your families or something like that. So yeah. Definitely agreed. No. But, yeah, telling that they use Monero for their spending because, again, they know it works. And someone of that caliber and, like, that amount of knowledge of on chain tracking and how all this stuff works and the ins and outs and all the tricks of the trade, they're using it obviously speaks for itself.
[00:19:16] Unknown:
Yeah. Absolutely. It's such a good confirmation that it does work because if there were trivial ways to track it, like, obviously, I'm not necessarily saying he's an expert in Monero and would know every possible way to track it. But you think of somebody like that who has such a deep understanding of what on chain privacy looks like is a minority users. Yeah. It's a great proof that Yeah. It's actually a very effective tool, something that is necessary for more people than just paranoid people. Yeah. Cool to see. Shout out to you, whoever you are, for doing what you're doing and putting yourself on the line. It's, it's appreciated. Yeah. I'm sure he'll be keeping an eye on this one, so I'm curious what else he finds out as he digs into the hack. This is right up his alley. So an interesting one to keep an eye on. Yeah. We can we can keep rolling the rest of the news. So this was quite a month. So, like, I I know normally we have a bigger topic that we dive into, and then we get into the updates. But we got a ton of software updates and a few other general news pieces. We're gonna focus on updates this month. Yeah. Let's do it. The other big one is there's a multi coin wallet in the space. It's quite large called the Exodus wallet, and they have decided to drop Monero support entirely from their wallet with an August 10 deadline for people to migrate funds out. I think after the deadline, they'll still let users get the seed phrase, but they won't let user send or receive or anything like that. So that was an interesting piece of news. I I know that there's a lot of conspiracy theories out there about why why they were forced to migrate or why they've chosen to migrate. But I can't say, like, we we actually at Cake worked closely with them on making that migration as seamless as possible. We wrote up the docs that they're using for that. We added some functionality within Cake Wallet to make that migration easier than ever. And so, like, their recommended path is actually using Cake Wallet, which was just really cool and they were great to work with throughout the process. As far as I know, there was no regulatory pressure or law enforcement or anything like that.
Forcing them them to do less than aero, their public statement is basically that they just didn't like the user experience and didn't think it fit their model of user experience for their wallet as a whole, which is somewhat understandable because Monero's user experience is much more difficult to do well than most other coins. Most other coins are just pointing at an API, and that's it. You get everything you need because you're just revealing all of that data to some third party server, whereas Monero sync normally doesn't work like that. But, yeah, that was a big thing because they were one of the larger, Monero wallets in the space. Yeah. They're huge.
[00:21:35] Unknown:
I mean, a lot of people that I know who are into, like, multi coin shitcoin stuff and trading and swapping and all that kind of stuff. Loads of them used to use Exodus when I first got into the Bitcoin world. It was, Exodus was like the one they all used, and it had nice user experience. And
[00:21:56] Unknown:
they could swap in and out of different things, and everyone used it. Yeah. For sure. They've definitely been a big player in the space for years. I definitely remember that as well from, like, I first got in as I feel like they were one of the very early multi coin wallets. Cake wallet has been, but a lot of stuff that we've added has has been in the last, like, three or four years, whereas I think they were around a long time before that and have had a lot of other cryptocurrencies. Yeah. They've been a big player, but that was definitely a a surprising thing. But I'm I'm glad that they handled it well. They could've just dropped Monero and said GTFO to all their all their Monero users, but Yeah. They did make sure that there was a good migration path. They were really helpful with us, making sure that, like, cake had what it needed and given us a heads up and all of that. They were good to work with, but that is definitely an FYI. If anyone listening is an Exodus user, you'll see a pop up in your app and stuff. So hopefully, you've already seen it. But if you haven't, make sure you go ahead and migrate out of Exodus. Obviously, Cake Wallet is an easy migration. We support their 12 word seed phrases to Monero seed phrases for the simplest path, but you can also get your 25 word seed out of Exodus. That was something that we worked with them to make sure that they had before they announced this was that you can just get your 25 word Manero seed and restore high out of Exodus as well and restore it in anything. Any any Manero wallet would support that. So you have a lot of options, but make sure you do that ASAP. Well, that's good. And you got a load of users coming your way, which is good for cake as well. And it's good for the users really because once they've moved across, I don't think they'll really look back. I can't imagine going back and using Exodus now, like, when you have the use of cake. So Yeah. Hopefully, everyone will be happy. I think it will be really a win win for everybody because they'll be served well. Obviously, a cake, we're thrilled to have a bunch more Monero users coming over. And Mhmm. I think also the other really cool thing is, like, one of the things that I really don't like about Exodus, all due respect is that they're not open source.
Some small pieces of their wallet are open source, but the vast majority is not. I think another win here is we're gonna get a lot more users using free and open source software, using wallets that are actually verifiable and open source rather than using something that's closed source, which is also just a win for the false space. So that that's that's another really cool part of this, I think. Definitely. And last general kinda news topic for this month is, I know that you and q kinda touched on this in the Bitcoin. I almost said Bitcoin monthly. Yeah. Bitcoin brief. I still get it wrong all the time. I don't like, honestly. I forget all the show names all the time. That's a lot to keep up with. You got, like, 27 shows under your under your wing at this point. So I know y'all talked about it a little bit, but there was this instant exchanger called e x c h. They have a very interesting past. I'll definitely put some links that I can find into the show notes so that people can dig into it. But, basically, it was an instant exchanger like many others, but they've always been a little, edgy, if you will. Pretty antagonistic towards some other exchanges and, not the most reasonable when it comes to hacked funds flowing through their exchange, which I know there's, like, two use. One view is nobody should censor funds no matter what, which is more the hardcore view, which I understand the reasoning there. But when you're a central exchange and a a company, you can't just ignore law enforcement requests and survive, which has kind of been their approach.
[00:25:08] Unknown:
Yeah. I was gonna say you can until you said and survive. And I was like, yeah. Yeah. That's the that's the caveat there. Yeah.
[00:25:16] Unknown:
Inevitably inevitably will, will lead to a downfall. And they were actually in the the massive buyback hack. I know we talked about, and I know they all talked about on the Bitcoin brief. That hack, a lot of the funds actually I don't I don't remember the final percentage, but a lot of the funds moved through e x c h because they were one of the few instant exchanges that refused to help the Bybit Mhmm. Exchange team freeze and return funds supposedly because of some beef that they had with the Bybit team, like Okay. Being mean to them. It's some, like, really weird stuff, but they basically refused to prevent the hackers from moving funds through e x c h because of some beef they had with the Bybit folks. And as a result, a lot of merchants, exchanges, etcetera, essentially blacklisted e x c h.
So if funds were coming from EXCH, they were categorized as tainted according to chain surveillance tools, according to custom blacklists. There's basically a a broad ban on funds that have flowed through EXCH, which is a really interesting example of why fungibility matters. Because the vast majority of this was Bitcoin. And Yeah. Because it was blacklisted, there were quite a few cases that I know of where users had used e x c h, gotten Bitcoin, and then gone to use it on some other central platform, like another instant exchanger or a merchant, and realized that those funds were not as valuable as normal Bitcoin. At any of these central places, obviously, there's still Bitcoin. There's, I'm sure, still some places you could swap them without those risks. But because those funds are considered so toxic, they were blocked quite broadly.
And as a result of that, EXH is actually just shutting down their operations. It's hard to say exactly what the reason is again because it's hard to figure out, like, what's bluff and bluster from them and what's real. They're saying they're being targeted by, like, a transatlantic law enforcement operation and that they have to shut down to essentially escape. Mhmm. Obviously, that could be true. I mean, they refuse to block the funds from the biggest hack in world history. So, like, obviously, that was what you would think. Not a good life choice. So it's very possible this is happening. It's also very possible that their business just got destroyed because no one wanted to use them because they knew that the funds would be blacklisted and not usable on the other end. So it's hard to say exactly, but their their public statement is that they're they're being targeted by some transatlantic law enforcement operation and and have to have to run, which is also interesting to do and say publicly because you're not allowed to run from law enforcement. So if they do get arrested, that's gonna be even worse for them. But that was an odd piece of news from the Monero world because they were one of the instant exchangers that service Monero. Obviously, not the only one. They're not one that we've had in cake because a lot of their their bad history, but they are one of those that people have used to swap in and out of Monero in the past. So an interesting piece of ecosystem news, I guess. Yeah. That's an interesting one. It's there's a lot of me that respects that because I'm like, you are going by the sort of the freedom ethos of this thing is not part of the financial system. Everyone should be able to use it without it being censored.
[00:28:25] Unknown:
But then when you're a business Mhmm. Presumably, obviously, they have their details attached to easy to track and find who's behind it. And so behaving like that when you're a business is even if you feel it's the right thing to do, it's fucking dangerous, especially if you are dealing with these three letter agencies and everyone else who I would probably tend to believe them. Funds have, gone through your exchange from the biggest hack in history, and you've refused to stop them, and you're a business. I would think you probably do have quite a big target on your back. So I don't know. There's an element of respect from me there, but also a little bit silly maybe. Yeah. That's where it's a little weird because, like, I definitely agree. Like, I feel like the cypherpunk ethos
[00:29:11] Unknown:
is more like stick it to the man. Mhmm. And I think that fits much more when you're, like, you're an individual swapping peer to peer. Like, you're using something like this or have no or Yeah. Robo sets or something, and you're swapping peer to peer. And you don't have the same legal requirements, and you also don't have the same just, like, wisdom requirements, so to speak, of you're not gonna have that that target on your back, and you're also not responsible for what happens with those funds because you're not a a licensed, like, money transmitter or whatever. Mhmm. So on, like, that side, I think it makes much more sense to be more cypherpunk. And, like, I I would agree. Like, generally, you're not I I mean, not only can I not actually do all this chain surveillance on funds that I get through a peer to peer exchange? Like, I don't have access to those tools. They're not open source. I would have to pay a massive amount of money to use chain analysis or something to be able to check if these funds were tainted. But but when you talk about a business, things shift greatly. Like, you have a responsibility to your employees. You are an an entity that is registered somewhere, I would assume. I would assume e x c h wasn't just floating in the ether, but actually had an incorporated business somewhere. And, generally, you're dealing with fiat. Like, you're dealing with bank accounts, which mean that you're in much more, peril if you make some unwise decisions here. Mhmm. Seems like they did. So, yeah, it's definitely weird. Like, I definitely understand when people are, like, they did the right thing. They should just not care about what funds flow through your exchange, but it just gets a lot more hairy when you're a company.
[00:30:36] Unknown:
Just a bit. Yeah. Just a bit. Interesting one, though, because me and Q didn't really I was he was like, yeah. Do you know who they are? And I was like, I definitely recognize their, like, name, but I can't really place why or where or and I haven't used it. I don't really know anything about it. Yeah. It's good to know a little bit more of the background.
[00:30:53] Unknown:
Yeah. It's it's it's definitely a crazy case. So I think that wraps up our our news for the month, which, like I said, it's a really busy month. So that was only the news. We still got some software updates to get through. So we'll dive right into those. The biggest one this month was we finally had the latest release of the core Monero software this month. I feel like we talked about a little bit in February, a little bit in March, and it finally actually dropped this month. There's nothing like massive. This isn't the full chain membership proofs release. This isn't something absolutely huge for the end user, but there were really three major parts of the update that I think people would be interested in. The first and most important is that there was a denial of service attack that was discovered earlier in the year, and that is fully patched in this version.
Entities like Cake Wallet, My Public Node, and others, we had already been running this patch a while before because this was disclosed to us so that we could patch and make sure that we weren't vulnerable to that. But now this is broadly available. The details of it are out. It's resolved. It's not a privacy leak. It's not something like that. But basically, all it meant was that a determined attacker could crash your Monero node relatively easily. It wasn't very complex to actually do the attack. That's resolved now. So if you're running this version, zero dot 18 dot four dot zero, which is the latest now, You're protected against this vulnerability by default. There's a few extra flags that people who are running, like, a a public node for others to use might wanna tweak the values of because part of this DOS vulnerability was patched through limiting how many connections can be open per IP address, per public IP address, per private IP address. Just essentially some, like, sane defaults are set now Mhmm. Which may be a little too low if you're running a node for, like, the community at large to use. If you're running a node just for yourself, you're not gonna need to tweak any of these. Right. Okay. But if you're running one for the community at large or something like that, then there's some some values that would need to be tweaked there. Okay. But that was the biggest thing that just needed to be patched ASAP. So it's great that that's out. Obviously, it's a good reason for everybody to upgrade whatever node system you're running on, roll, etcetera. Make sure that you update as soon as you can to make sure that you're not vulnerable to that. But, obviously, it was most applicable to a public node operator who was serving other people because normally private nodes weren't gonna be a target of this one. The two other things that were big in this, one was just it seems minor, but it's one of those nice quality of life features is, some devs found a way to cut the amount of times that Monero has to write to disk when it's syncing in half. So from two Oh, okay. Two rights to one right per transaction that's being checked. And, obviously, we're talking, like, a hundred million transactions in the history of Monero. So it's a big improvement to the amount of wear and tear that you're you're putting on your hard drive running a Monero node. There's always been somewhat of a concern. Should be slightly faster at sync. I don't know that there will be that much difference. Obviously, there will be more of a difference for someone running on a, like, a very slow spinning hard drive versus someone running on a high speed SSD. But I don't know that there's specific numbers around the time. I I would expect it to be a massive difference, but the most important piece of that is just that it's drastically less wear and tear on your hard drive from running on an arrow node. That's nice. Which means your SSD especially will will last a lot longer. So that was a a good win. And then third thing was something that we've actually already been using Cake Wallet for a month or two now, but, the ability to actually do background sync with only a view key was introduced in this release. Oh, yeah. I remember you saying about that. Yeah. Yeah. It's been, like, the pull request and stuff has been open and complete for quite a while, but, obviously, this release is the first one to actually include this functionality in Monero's core software. I don't think it's actually used at all in, like, the Monero GUI or the Monero CLI wallet. Okay. I could be wrong about that, but the way that it actually works is now in the wallet library that most wallet developers will use, and we've been using that for a while, which is a really important thing. Not only does it allow you to not keep the private keys hot, but has some other improvements to how background sync actually works. And this is really the main driver behind us taking another look at background sync and being able to do it much better this time around. So that's been a a key driver for for the background sync that we have in Cake Wallet, which has been been awesome. Yeah. Nice. I find like it's relatively quick on cake anyway. I don't know if that's like to do with the node I'm connecting to or
[00:34:58] Unknown:
what it is, but it's a lot faster than I've had on a lot of other wallets previously. I don't know how that's possible, whether that's just in my head or what it is, but, like, it feels quicker.
[00:35:10] Unknown:
Yeah. But, like, background sync or just generally syncing?
[00:35:12] Unknown:
Generally syncing. Like, if I haven't used the wallet in a week or something and I jump on and then it's, like, x amount of blocks to update, it, like, feels like it's quite quick. Like, it's a couple of minutes or whatever.
[00:35:23] Unknown:
Whereas previously, I've done it and it's and it, you know, like, thirty minutes or, like, it feels like forever. And I'm like, for fuck's sake. It's taking forever. It feels quick. I I don't know if that's something to do with the background sync or no. It can't be because it would would have already synced. It's not background sync that has to do with that. I mean, there's two main things. One is the the node is definitely the most important piece of that. So if you're connected to a local node or one that's much physically closer to you that has a good network connection, that's gonna be faster because dealing with less latency and Mhmm. Generally gonna have more bandwidth. So that's definitely a win. The other one would be we have very good node infrastructure here at Cake Wallet, and we have nodes in lots of different geographies so that you can automatically get the ones that are closest to you. So that also is probably gonna help as opposed to, like, if a wallet was using only a single remote node that maybe is randomly selected rather than geographically selected, You may get one that's really far away or one that's running on a slow host or something like that. We can be a lot more certain that ours are dependable and as geographically close as possible. Okay. So that's part of it. I mean, the other one is we have just an amazing dev team and one of the premier Monero devs on the Monero team. I've been doing a ton of work on the the Monero back end over the last four or five months for us.
The all of it, obviously, we we upstream what we can, and all of his stuff is completely open source as well. So anyone else can use it. But Nice. He's made a ton of performance improvements to sync, performance improvement, like, in the the latest release we'll talk about in a second. Performance improvements to if you have, like, a really deep wallet, you you have a wallet that has, like, thousands of transactions or something. The way that that works both on the sync side and actually just usability is drastically better. Like, he's made a ton of performance improvements.
[00:37:04] Unknown:
Can we give him a shout out, or is he, like, supernim?
[00:37:08] Unknown:
I think we can. I'll I'll give him a shout out, and, like, we can pull it from the from the recording if necessary. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me if needed. Yeah. Yeah. He goes by Charik, and he's just mental. He's incredibly talented. He's been building, like, mad, super young, but, incredibly experienced and one of the, really, the foremost wallet developers in them in aerospace. And so it's been absolutely awesome getting to work with him here at Cake and see him just continue to ship incredible stuff. He built this background sync in a very short amount of time and
[00:37:36] Unknown:
has greatly iterated on it as well. So, yeah, he's been doing absolutely amazing work for us. It's been it's been awesome to see it. Well, shout out to you, mate. Hopefully, we can keep that in the show. We'll check, but love to see that. I love it when there's young devs as well. Whenever I hear that, it's like, oh, yeah. This young guy, and she's fucking amazing. I'm like,
[00:37:52] Unknown:
we're gonna be alright. There's some smart kids out there. I've been forced to realize by working at cake that I'm I'm one of the old guys on the space. I'm the second oldest person on the cake team, which is is absolutely wild because I I thought I was young, and I've always been the youngest person everywhere I've been before this. But Yeah. Not anymore. Not anymore. I'm the I'm the old guy. That's kinda cool. You can lean into it. It is. It is. I'm trying. I'm balding anyways. So it's just gonna come with the territory. It's gonna shave the head soon and, you know, lean into it. Nice. That was the big news for the Monero project itself. Outside of that, we do have a lot of things, mostly cake wallet stuff, but we have a few others to hit on that were smaller releases, but still good ones. Yeah. On cake wallet, I I tweeted this yesterday because I was just digging through stuff to pull up notes for this, and I hadn't even realized that we had shipped three major releases in the month of April.
So this isn't intentional, so I can steal the spotlight for, the Monero monthly. But accidentally, we have three releases in one month to talk about. So I'll I'll try to condense it as much as possible. Well, the big one that appeals to me was your new logo. Oh, yes. As a general rule, I hate most names
[00:39:04] Unknown:
and logos and designs in the Bitcoin of Monero space. Like, I look at most stuff and I was fucking awful. It's really horrible. So when I saw, are you guys gonna be doing a rebrand? I was like, oh, no. What's gonna be coming? Like, I really hope that I don't hate this. And I saw it, and I was like,
[00:39:21] Unknown:
oh, you guys fucking nailed this one. It's classy and clean and simple and just really, really nice work. It's one of those things that is so hard to do well and was the first logo or brand change in the history of cake wallet. So we're talking since 2018. So it's always I feel like especially hard when you it's not like you've shifted brands a lot, but you have something that's a very consistent established brand. You don't wanna you don't wanna do it for no reason. You wanna make sure that it's a a worthy rebrand and update. So, yeah, we worked with the other life team who are kind of the marketing wing of MoonPay, who are a big on and off ramp in the space and a partner of cake for a very long time. Yeah. We worked with them to create this hours and hours and hours of interviews and discussions about why we do what we do, what the ethos is behind cake to try to get a really good visual brand that matches who we are. And, yeah, I think it turned out really, really well. And that was the bulk of the 04/2025 release for k quality was to get that new logo and brand out there. We don't have, like, a totally revamped UI in the app yet.
That's something we're working on that will have kind of an initial take on, hopefully, by Bitcoin Vegas. That's our target to have ready for that with really just more some some tweaks and improvements across the board. Mhmm. But I think what we're really starting to lean towards is probably a complete redesign of the app targeting more, like, towards the end of the year to really be more in line with the new visual identity that we have. But Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, if anyone listening hasn't been to kqual.com recently, you'll notice it is slightly better than our website used to be. I think our website was pretty rough before and has essentially been static for the better part of five years or so and is drastically improved now with the new brand, new website, way better functionality. So that that's been a ton of fun to launch, and I feel like makes me much more proud of the visual brand of cake wall. Like, obviously, the the core of cake wall has not changed. The the product itself hasn't changed. The team hasn't changed. But I feel like it much better represents who we are and, like, what we're trying to do than it than it has before. So it's been a ton of fun to get out there.
[00:41:23] Unknown:
Yeah. The rebrand is really nice, and that's not just because you guys are sponsoring my shows. Like, me and Q shout all over your your previous design for, like, ten minutes in our
[00:41:35] Unknown:
in our, one of our Bitcoin briefs. That clip is infamous within the cake team. We we definitely have that, and, we we share it every now and then just to remind ourselves. Yeah. For sure. I'm sure what we said. It was like, it looks like a a little girl's birthday party.
[00:41:50] Unknown:
They've gone wild with glitter and and coloring in, and it's a hateful design.
[00:41:54] Unknown:
Something like that. About vomiting from Q as well. Oh, yeah. Vomiting Vomiting works. Yeah. It was it was quite the, the scathing review, which to be fair, I don't like that theme anyways. That theme is going away, which I I am very excited for. But, yeah, that was, it's definitely that's a kind of a highlight of our arcade team that we we bring back up and remind ourselves every now and then who got the clip got the clip saved.
[00:42:18] Unknown:
I like to think that that spurred on this new beautiful design. So, yeah, that is it's really nice now. And, actually It's good fuel to the fire. Exactly. But, you know, the other profiles were nice anyway. It was when I when we first opened it, I was like, oh my god. And then I changed it to I think I've just got, like, the black and the orange or, like, dark gray orange or something. That's what I wrote. Yeah. Yeah. Which is nice. Like, as soon as I changed to that, I was like, oh, yeah. Yeah. This is really nice. It was just that immediate, like, oh, fuck.
[00:42:46] Unknown:
It's it's glaring right now. I'm not gonna lie. You'll notice on the new website that we don't use that theme for the screenshots in there. I can see. Yes. I can see. Very, very intentional. That one's that one's going away, and we have some some much better themes coming that are more like the black and orange, like that kind of rough style, but but improved, I think, over that as well. So that'll definitely be kind of the next stage of the the rebrand to start getting closer and closer to a a unified visual identity. But, yeah, that was that was a ton of work, and there's just so much that goes into that process, goes into the new websites, all of that stuff. So that's been fun to get out there, but that was really the smallest release of the month for us. Yeah. Because then we shipped four dot '26. I don't even know if it was two weeks later, but that one, there were two really big well, honestly, three really big things that were in that release. The first one is kind of related to the Exodus news that we talked about earlier, which is that you can now use a 12 word VIP 39 seed Mhmm. For your Monero wallet. So no longer do you need to have a separate policy or 25 word seed for Monero, but now you can use a single 12 word seed for all of your hot wallets within cake. Now, obviously, don't do this with, like, your hardware wallets 12 word seed. Like, you don't wanna make that seed hot, which I have been asked about. I have to remind people, like, that's not the goal here. Like, the goal here is that all of your hot wallets can be one twelve word seed, so you only have to keep one secret safe.
And then, obviously, keep your your cold wallets separate from that. But that's a a really good quality of life change because before, you'd have to have, at minimum, two seed phrases for your hot wallets and cake. We do do a shared seed kinda wallet group thing for all the currencies that natively support BIP 39. But now we're actually able to deterministically derive a 25 word Monero seed from that 12 word seed. So you can have the one seed. You can create that. Our onboarding flow will be changed a bit soon so that you can much more easily do this as well. But you just create the 12 word seed. You're gonna pick whatever cryptocurrencies you wanna use with that, and you'll get all the wallets you want out of one seed, which is a a huge improvement, just drastically simpler, and saves a lot of time time and trouble for the average user.
[00:44:53] Unknown:
The best way to do it would be have a seed that you create on the passport Mhmm. Then have, like, a a child seed or something like that from there, which you then was it bit 85, is it? Yeah. Yeah. Child seed. Five. And then you put that 12 word bit 85 seed into cake and then derive a Monero 20 5 word from that. So everything's still manageable and saved onto your passport, but you're not exposing any risk to your cold storage side. That's probably, like, the the cleanest way.
[00:45:28] Unknown:
Yeah. That's honestly I hadn't even thought about that. I'm gonna have to do that for my setup. Because, yeah, you if you keep just your one cold seed, you can deterministically derive all of your hot wallets and your Monero hot wallet all from that one seed because bit 80 5 is deterministic. So if you have your seed phrase for your passport, you can always get back those child seeds. And then once you have the child seed from your other one, you can always get back your hot wallets and cake. So you can essentially just save one seed phrase and have all of your hot and cold wallets in a secure way. One seed rule them all. Which is yeah. That's a really cool use case. I'm gonna have to do that. I'd forgotten somehow, I'd forgotten about bit 85 because I never bothered because I couldn't do Monero before now. So I just done a different seed phrase. But now that I can, you'll have to migrate over to that because that'll be Yeah. That'll be even easier
[00:46:13] Unknown:
to to keep have one on steel, and you can restore everything from that if if shit hits the fan. Yeah. Exactly. The same. Like, I haven't done everything perfectly. It's just, you know, q absolutely loves BIP 85 and always talks about how good it is. And it it is really clever, but I'm not as I'm not clever enough to use what's really clever. I still have billions of different fucking seed phrases written everywhere and from testing different wallets and different stuff. And
[00:46:38] Unknown:
Mhmm. It's an absolute headache. So if you wanna be smart, that's the way to do it. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It's a great call up. That'll be kind of the ideal path forward for people. So glad that we support that now. And then the other two things in four dot twenty six that were big. One is it's called Open Crypto Pay. It's by a Swiss exchange or Swiss company who also runs an exchange called DFX. It's a really cool system. It's been getting a lot of buzz in the, like, the Bitcoin side of the news world recently because it's a a way for merchants to implement Bitcoin lightning monero as well and other cryptocurrency payments. I think it might just be Bitcoin lightning in an era right now, but they can implement that into their existing POS system much more simply than something like BTC pay or others. And then they just get a static sticker that they can stick up on the the window or whatever right by their payment terminal. And when you go to pay for something, they just choose that open crypto pay payment method on their POS.
You scan the QR code and everything else happens by magic. So if you have a a lightning wallet supports l n u r l, that's actually the the base of the spec that they built out is l n u r l. So you can pay that directly via lightning. Outside of that, the only wallet right now that supports natively is cake wallet, and you can pay directly in on chain Bitcoin or Monero, any store that supports this. Interesting. And right now, it it is like it's Switzerland focused. The biggest supermarket chain in Switzerland is rolling out support for this across their stores.
[00:48:01] Unknown:
This is Yeah. This is yeah. We so that's interesting. So we talked about this yesterday, and we were like first, we were shocked that there's a spa in Switzerland because in The UK, spa is like one of the shittest, like, mini supermarkets you could go to. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Like, if you go to quite a shit area, there's gonna be a spa. So we were like, I can't believe that's in Switzerland because Switzerland's, like, really nice generally. Mhmm. And then we were asking, like, you can pay with lightning. We didn't know about the Monero side at that point. You can pay in lightning. Are they just treating these payments like cash? Like, how does that work on the regulation side? Because, presumably,
[00:48:39] Unknown:
they have to comply with all this bullshit, KYC, AML, blah blah blah blah blah because it's, like, crypto, or are they just saying, well, it's cash. So if it's under x amount, then you can just spend. Yeah. So this is different than, like, a v t c pay. They're not receiving the crypto directly. They're receiving the crypto into their d f x exchange account. Which swaps it for Yeah. Which swaps it for for the fiat that they want. And so, like, obviously, it's not, I think, the ideal, like, cypherpunk use case, but it's a really easy way for merchants that don't want to hold crypto directly, which if we're honest, unfortunately, is the vast majority of merchants. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really easy way for them to do this. And d f x is, like, very light k y c as well. I I think for, like, the business side, it's gonna be pretty normal KYC there, but they're a very cyberpunk, really cool company. I know it's a weird to mix that with, like, KYC exchange, but they have no KYC under a certain limit. Everything that they make is entirely open source.
Other websites, their exchange services, that kind of thing, all open source. And then open crypto pay, as the name suggests, is a an open protocol. So right now, yes, it's only a DFX account back end, but anyone could use this to build on, like, I I don't know. Maybe this could be something that could be integrated into BTC pay just to simplify the experience. So you don't need, like, an active POS terminal, but Mhmm. You can just use this static sticker, which is a bit simpler, and get paid in it. Maybe other exchanges can directly integrate this, like strike or others that are are centralized and are already doing the conversion, which is what a lot of merchants want. It can be used by anyone. But right now, it is essentially the crypto is going to the d f x exchange on the back end and being converted.
I'm not sure what customizability there is, like, if it has to be converted to fiat or if it they can have it just in their exchange account as the actual native crypto. I assume they they have that optionality, but it's it's a really cool system. Very simple. Like I said, works. The lightning side works with any lightning wallets that supports l n r l, which is the vast majority. Yeah. But beyond that, the only wallet that supports the integration natively is k wallet, which means you can pay on chain Bitcoin or Monero at any place that supports this. And Spar apparently is really big in Switzerland. It has, like Wow. Thousands of of stores. So they're rolling it out to those pretty steadily now, which is is cool to see. Yeah. That's cool. And then the last main thing at a four dot 20 six is something that the foundation guys did a long time ago, but it's this idea of making it a lot easier to visually verify addresses by breaking the addresses into chunks and kind of shifting the contrast between those chunks. Some are more bold. Some are lighter. Just to make it way easier to actually, like, go through bit by bit and verify or just verify the first chunk and the last chunk, which most most people use. That's something, like, Foundation has had for a long time in Envoy and Passport.
Mhmm. But Cake Wallet, we did it a little bit in an earlier release, I think '4 dot '24. But in 04/1926, we rolled it out to everywhere you find an address in the app. So now you have that really nice formatting for every cryptocurrency, Monero, obviously, as well with some customizations for Monero so that it looks a little better because Minero does have very, very long addresses. So we had to tweak it a little bit for, like, how big each chunk is, that kind of thing. But Mhmm. Looks way better, much, much easier to verify. Yeah. That's, like, just a really nice quality of life thing that, yeah, doesn't, like, completely change the game, but just makes it much more user friendly on the address side, which I was I was excited to get that out. Nice. Yeah. It definitely does. I like that. And I won't won't bore everyone with cake while it's tough forever. I promise. But the last update was 4Dot27, which is just going live. I think the day we're recording this, it should be going live definitely before we release. The main thing with that one is just that we we drastically improved background sync that we've talked about before. So now you can do things like limit it to only when you're on an unmetered network or Wi Fi, limit it to only when you're charging, limit it to only when you're not actively using your phone. You have a lot more control over when it runs alongside what we already had, which is you can choose let to let it run daily, which is, like, roughly every eighteen to twenty four hours, hourly, which is roughly every hour, like, it suggests or aggressive, which is, our insane mode, which basically tries to sync as frequently as it possibly can Yeah. Which is usually every 15 minutes, but depends on the OS how often it'll be. Most people should not use aggressive. It's like it's way overkill. But Yeah. I'm a very active user. I'm using hourly right now. For the vast majority of people, the default daily is plenty. Mhmm. And this is now also all cryptocurrencies within Cape Wallet. So it's not just Monero now. It's specifically helpful with things like Bitcoin silent payments, with Litecoin, membo extension blocks, and web, things that take longer to sync. And then, obviously, Monero, like, we talked about in previous, Monero monthlies. It's just I mean, like, it just totally changes the game when it comes to mineral usability because I've never have to wait my wallet to sink now, which is just some something I have never experienced in the space. It makes me much more subconsciously willing to make a narrow payment no matter what, because I know I'm never gonna have to wait for that. And even better is really key at these in person events where I constantly see people struggle with they hadn't opened their wallet in six months since they were last in an event or something, and then they open their wallet, realize they have to sync six months of wallet history, and it's never gonna happen. And they give up in the open scenario. And, like, that world is pretty much gone now, which is it's pretty fantastic. It's not default in cake yet. Mhmm. I think probably in an upcoming release, we will make make this part of the onboarding so that users can enable it very easily when they create a mineral wallet because it's to me, it's ready for everyone to use it regardless. Just tweak the settings to what makes the most sense for you, and you're gonna have a much better time. But it is something you have to go into the settings themselves to enable. It's under connection and sync and cake, and you can just quickly enable it, toggle the settings as you see fit, and enjoy a drastically drastically better Monero user experience.
Very nice. Oh, I should call it that as Android only right now, which is an unfortunate detail. IOS is a pain in the butt when it comes to background process Right. Execution, but we are still working on that. But it is Android only for right now. But Okay. Yeah. I know I know I've kept y'all for a while on the software updates here. It's been a bit of busy month, like I said. But we'll we'll rapid fire through the last few that we have here, because they're they're relatively minor, but just some good software updates. The first one is Havino, which, like, we talked about in the past, is a decentralized exchange for Monero. It's it's based on Monero. It's it works similarly to bisque, but is all Monero under the hood, which gives you obviously the privacy benefits and the speed benefits of Monero as well as the fee savings. So it's it's a fantastic platform. The way you can use it right now is basically a third party implementation of Haveno, which is called Haveno Rito or RitoSwap, and you can use that today. It's been really fantastic in my testing so far, but they released some just minor improvements and bug fixes. Nothing huge, but it's just those important steps that get towards a a safer and more usable decentralized exchange, which is an absolutely key tool for Monero. Another one is feather wallet, which is an absolutely fantastic desktop wallet for Monero, one that I've used for a very long time. They released a couple new versions, two dot eight dot o and two dot eight dot one. And, again, those are relatively minor updates overall with primarily the changes being updating to that latest version of an arrow that we talked about earlier in the show, updating their integrated tour and open SSL, just some good security and and quality of life improvements there, but definitely recommend. It's a it's a great desktop wallet to use for Monero.
Third is an update to the, the p two pool mining software that I recommended in the past on Monero monthly. It's called Goopax, but this one's the adult version, I guess, because it's Goopax with three x's. So, you use at your own peril, but it's a a good fork of goop x that's a little bit more well maintained and has a little bit of extra functionality. But they're released to 1.9.o, which is also just minor improvements and bug fixes. Nothing life changing, but it's a really cool way to be able to easily spin up and get started mining Merrell on any computer. Just a desktop GUI app that's that's really easy to use. So Mhmm.
That's a good one as well. Another is Stack Wallet. They released version two dot one dot 11. Stack Wallet is a a multi crypto wallet like Cake Wallet, and we're good friends with them. Awesome team behind it. They released this version. Again, nothing major, especially for Monero. It was just kind of minor stuff in the background. They added another cryptocurrency I'd never heard of before. So nothing life changing, but another good release there for them. Glad to see them doing well. And then two more. And finally, Cup Rate, which we talked about quite a bit on the last episode, is a a new implementation of Monero's core node and consensus protocol in Rust from the ground up. So it's not a code fork of the current Monero project, but it's a a completely new rebuild that's trying to implement all of the same things, but in Rust. And there's two main reasons for that, like we talked about before I'll briefly mention. One is it's a really helpful check to make sure that all of the core aspects of Monero are implemented properly. And since you're doing it in a different language that has some other benefits over c plus plus, it's a really good way to make sure that, like, the things around, combinational amounts are implemented properly, that the way we do, ring signatures, that all of these things are actually done the right way. And this is a unique chance to get to have, like, a a fresh look and perspective at that in a different language. So it's really good for that purpose.
It also brings some other really cool benefits, like drastically improved sync time. Talked about it on the last episode, but it took me something like four hours to sync Monero from Genesis with cup rate, which is wildly better than syncing on Monero d. Now there are some caveats with how they actually do sync that are a little less thorough maybe than Monero d, but in a sane way, that's fine for most users. That is much, much faster. So they released version zero dot zero dot two. It's still very early days. I wouldn't recommend using it, like, in place up in your d yet as your your main node. And I don't think it even can serve that purpose with a wallet like cake wallet yet. They don't have all the functionality built in there. But, again, just really good to see that it's making progress, continuing to be built out and and getting more and more stable with h release. So a cool one to see this month as well. The last one is a another wallet in the Monero space that's got an update. It's called Monfluo. I'm sure that's Esperanto, and I have no clue what it means. The Monero community loves Esperanto, so I'm I'm assuming that it's it's something in that. They released version zero dot seven dot zero. This is an interesting wallet and is very Monero. Basically, they've removed all integrations, features, functionality.
My understanding is it was a Monero Monero joke fork, but they basically inked out, like, everything except Okay. Sending, receiving transaction history. So it can't do anything except send, receive Monero, which I know for some people, they want it to be as dead simple as possible. No extra integrations or features or anything like that. It's not my cup of tea personally, but I know that that's like, there's some more hardcore people in the American community that like that. So they released version zero dot seven dot zero. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. It's the it's the dumb phone version of of Monero wallets. And you just you don't want anything else. You you just want it to do the basics. Yeah. And it seems to do that well. I've heard good reports from a couple people I know that use it. And the person maintaining it got funded by the mayor community to to keep maintaining it for the next few months at the very least. So, hopefully, this one will stick around longer. There's been three or four of these attempted over the past few years. All of them have died in various ways. So I I wouldn't bet on the longevity here, but we'll see if this one continues and is an interesting, like, hyper minimalist option for Monero wallets. Yeah. I quite like that. Again, it's not something that I would personally use because I like to play around with features and stuff. I can understand maybe if you're onboarding someone who's really, really fucking basic and they just want the most simple, like, all I wanna do is send and receive.
Wouldn't you be the perfect user here then? Well, you would think so, but I
[01:00:11] Unknown:
my capabilities are very different to what I expect of myself. So I try and do all the cool shit and use all the features and be like the big boys, and I consistently fail. But I never give up. I always try and use the good stuff and just fuck it up consistently. So it's not for me. I I like to have something that I can fuck up, so I wouldn't go to this, but other people I think would like this probably.
[01:00:38] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. That's all the updates and news that I had for the the Minera ecosystem, but I I know you've got a a ton of chats and boost to get to. So I'll I'll hand things over to you. Yeah. We've got loads. XMR chats and boosts.
[01:00:51] Unknown:
Notes from Jordan. Doctor Zavargo wants me dead because I forgot to give John the XMR chats for action news. Tut tut tut. Unforgivable. Yeah. I know. You would say unforgivable, but also with Jordan, I'm gonna let him off. He does so much stuff in the background that no one ever knows about. It's true. That, like, probably more than anybody I know, he just does stuff to help people all the time. Never asked for anything back. Never asked, like, never tells anyone about anything. He's, like, crazy busy all the time. So at the moment, I'll, I'll let him off for that. But it sounds like doctor Zavargo won't, and he will actually be killing it. So, that's sad to see, but nice knowing you, mate. Doctor Zavargo says, there's an old saying in Tennessee.
I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says, fool me once, shame on you. Shame on you. You fool me, I can't get fooled again. Isn't that is that bush?
[01:01:58] Unknown:
There's an old saying in Tennessee. I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says fool me once. Shame on shame on you. It fooled me. We can't get fooled again. I was gonna say that's definitely a butchering of the phrase that I know, so I'm assuming that's an intentional butchering.
[01:02:20] Unknown:
Yeah. I I'm pretty sure that's like a a George w Bush. That sounds like a speech. Yeah. That sounds like a And he, like, tried to make a point and and, like, just completely fucked it up. Okay. You fooled me again. Can't can't fool me again. I'm pretty sure it is. This is a slight against my ancestry. Jordan, you may consider Harakiri for your honor. Okay. Wild child with 0.088 XMR. Looks like a sword that he sort of made out of a load of dots and things. And then Monero monthly is a blessing.
[01:02:58] Unknown:
Keep up the fight. Thank you. It's a pretty impressive ASCII samurai sword. I think that's what that is. Yeah. That's what it looks like. Very good. Never seen that before. Yeah.
[01:03:07] Unknown:
Not Snead with 0.044 XMR says, salt fuels life. Heart, nerves, muscles need sodium chloride, refined salts for NPCs, celtic salts keep vital minerals, low salt diets pushed by elites, ignore biology leaving us weak, choose real salt, Choose life. What's your salt regime?
[01:03:36] Unknown:
What's your salt regime? That was not a question I was expecting on the Monero monthly, but
[01:03:42] Unknown:
No. I wasn't either.
[01:03:44] Unknown:
I like it. I like it. I I am definitely against the refined salts. He's, like, good Himalayan stuff, and I think there's one other Pink salts. From, like, Utah or something that's supposed to be special. My wife's the Okay. The holistic person, so she would know the the concrete answer. The only other one is when working out cardio we'll use element, just l m n t, which is like a salt and other minerals, drink mix. I know it's not perfect, but it's one of the better solutions out there and is a good way to get some salt in. Isn't that what Joe Rogan shills a lot element?
[01:04:17] Unknown:
Probably.
[01:04:18] Unknown:
I don't watch enough Joe Rogan to know for sure, but probably they're I feel like pretty big over the last couple of years. I've had some big sponsorships and stuff. So it's good stuff. It tastes reasonably good. It's not disgusting, like some of the salt drinks, and, it's a good way to replenish after a workout. I might try that out. My salt regime
[01:04:36] Unknown:
is similar. I think we use, like, Maldon salt and, like, pink salt occasionally, like Himalayan salt. If I'm at a restaurant or something and it has, like, the shitty table salt, I'll still probably use that. I'm lucky in that I've always, like, my whole life, all my family have said, you eat too much salt because I'd like chuck salt in everything. Like, you eat too much salt, you're gonna die, you're gonna have a heart attack, you're gonna have this, and now it seems like I was right all these years. I needed salt.
[01:05:04] Unknown:
So that makes me feel Right now. You you knew the right way all along.
[01:05:08] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Just always right. BTC wrestler with 0.023 XMR. Really enjoying the show, fellas. I switched away from StackDuo to Monero.com wallet. Really like it. It's got fast sync time compared to Stack. My only critique is the name. Monero.com is kind of gay. Kind of a gay name for a wallet. Hashtag free samurai. I actually agree. It is kind of a gay name. Sorry. I can't refute it. I don't like it either. Yeah. I don't like it either. That's like the just Monero and the cake, isn't it? Yep. I think that needs some work. Like, I'm not gonna be really mean about it like we were about the design stuff, but I just Just don't tell q. We'll get another clip. Yeah. He's gonna listen to this, isn't he? And he's gonna shit on it next episode. But, yeah, it it needs work that. Great wallet,
[01:06:01] Unknown:
not so great name. Yeah. I'm definitely it's something we've been talking about internally for a while now, and it's something that I want to change. There's just a few tricky things. Like, one is the monero.com domain is ours. That was the original reasoning for it was we had the domain. We wanted to lean into that, and it's a good way to push people towards Monero stuff who search for Monero because that's a really good SEO and stuff. And we push people towards Mhmm. Cake Wallet Monero and then also the official Monero website. So that's how it got it, but I agree that, like, a domain name and a wallet name really bugs me. Go another some other options. I'll leak some alpha that I have a preferred name for it. That would be Nura wallet, which is also Esperanto, but it has some cool meanings of being, like basically means only in Esperanto. So it's a good fit for something that's only a Monero wallet. Mhmm. But our team is very split on it. So if anybody has thoughts on that, dump some, some x mark chats or boosts or just shoot me a message and and give feedback because I'm I'm curious what people think, but I definitely do want to change the name. It's just Yeah. Changing a well aim isn't as simple as just changing the name. There's a lot of things that go into it. Yeah. So I'm trying to figure out the best path there. I also don't love that one if I'm honest, but I'll have a think as well. And anyone who has any ideas, just let us know. We'll come up with something. We'll come up with something. We'll crowdsource it. I like it. Hashtag free samurai, and then zero point zero four six XMR
[01:07:22] Unknown:
saying brother rabbit is a legend. I couldn't agree with that statement anymore. I absolutely love brother rabbit. I miss him. I'd like to give him a cuddle. He is, one of the best of the best. So if you're listening somewhere out there, brother Rabbit, just know that we love you very much. Goo says with 0.046XMR. Monero monthly, how is the market price of Monero calculated, and how does this work? When transaction amounts are invisible, who decides the price? One centralized entity or a decentralized network of entities, how do we ensure the price is fair?
I'm pretty sure we went into this a while ago, and we'd said something like, oh, if if someone was to do, like, a massive dump of Bitcoin into Monero, it would wildly change the price of Monero in theory, and then it's just happened.
[01:08:14] Unknown:
Mhmm. So that's kind of interesting to see. The way that it works is just like every other cryptocurrency. Like, yes, transaction amounts are hidden, but the way you find the price is that the market finds the price. So, essentially, you're looking at the order books of centralized exchanges to know what the market price of Monero is, and the reason why all this movement of Bitcoin through instant exchangers move the prices because those instant exchangers source their liquidity from the most common centralized exchanges. So if they're having to send out a bunch of Monero, they're having to buy a ton of Monero from the centralized exchanges, and that's gonna push the price up because it ships the order book. So there's nothing fancy there. It's a very hard thing to decentralize because it's not really possible. Like, you have to have somewhere to find the price from, and you can't just ask people or something. Like I said, most places just use centralized exchange order books. There is a really cool website that is called monero dot boats, and they try to calculate the Monero street price, which is by looking at the going rate for Monero peer to peer, specifically looking at Rideau swap. And Okay. That Which is higher Usually. Preferably. Usually. I think right now for the first time ever is actually street prices below market price. Oh. Normally, it's, like, ten, fifteen, 20 percent above. But right now with that crazy movement in Monero, it seems like the p to p market has been a little bit slow to catch up, which makes sense because a lot of the p to p offers are, like, a statically set price or they have some, like, floating percentage or something.
So it's not as shocking, but that is interesting because it's I just loaded it, and that's the first time I've ever seen it actually negative where the street price is below the market price. But that's, like, the only other indicator of prices. Was the going rate for the decentralized exchanges, but that's a much harder thing to calculate and is not as trustworthy of a number, but an interesting data point nonetheless. I've seen that previously on Bitcoin
[01:10:02] Unknown:
when I've gone to, like, Bisc and p two p places. And it when you've had a big pump over a couple of days, normally, you have, like, plus 2%, plus 3%, plus 1%, whatever it is on top, but some of them go negative in those times. So that happens there too. We said this before, but because liquidity is low in Monero, if you had the funds, it seems like a really relatively simple trade, I guess you would call it. Arbitrage? Yeah. Like, say you had what was this hack? 300,000,000. Say you had a billion dollars. You know, you buy slowly over time. You accumulate half a billion dollar or whatever. You you accumulate as much Monero as you possibly can, and then you take the rest in Bitcoin and you just exchange the shit out of it for Monero on all the exchanges just, like, over the course of a day Mhmm. And push the price crazy, and then you scale out again, you could swap swap back again. Like, you could very significantly move the price. Oh, it's not just Monero. It's any smaller coin you could do that with. But it seems like if you're one of these, like, crazy wealthy people, that would be potentially a move that you could do. It would be hard, especially with something like Bitcoin where the liquidity is just so dense. A lot of these big purchases are happening OTC, and they don't move the price at all. Yeah. So it's definitely harder with those, but the smaller the coin, the smaller the liquidity, the the easier you could actually move that price yourself as you see fit. Yeah. You're gonna really struggle with Bitcoin unless you are, like, basically anyone would struggle with Bitcoin, but Monero or or something with a smaller liquidity, you could do that. I mean, you've seen that. If if that's what $300,000,000 can do in a day it's 50%.
Imagine what you can do if you have a billion. Probably do some crazy stuff there. And, like, 50% isn't to be laughed at, especially when you're talking at those sort of numbers. Yep. So if if anyone has a spare billion dollars lying around, just let us know. We can help you implement this. We'll take a small fee. Everyone will be happy. Pies with 0.0047XMR. Let's fucking go. Chad Farrow with 0.028XMR. Great episode, gents. I love seeing all of these Monero donations coming through. So do we. Thank you, Chad Farrow. Chill now with 0046 XMR.
Monero monthly, number four, finally, a useful Monero podcast that a dumb pleb like me can follow and use some real tips from stay ungovernable and keep them coming. Thank you very much. That's good to hear. Kaz Piland with 0.0037 XMR just says boost. Barn miner with 0.224 XMR. Big baller. Excited to have XMR payments working again on my BTC pay server. Thanks to Jordan and Seth's assistance, barnjerky dot hashroots inc dot I o. There you are. Free and free for you there, mate. Looking forward to interacting and learning more from the Monero community of Misfits Love Barn.
He actually came on for a confab a couple of days ago. I'm just sort of in the middle of editing it. Nice. We talked a lot about Monero and him shitting on lightning and everything else. So that was a fun one. Yeah. I'm definitely gonna have to listen to that one. That dude's been awesome to interact with, and his jerky is absolutely incredible. So all my Monero is going there these days. Well, thank you, Barn, and thank you for the 0.224 XMR. We appreciate you. Boost from Rod Palmer from the Bugle News, hashtag forty hours per week, headphones with 21,000.
New frontiers equals entropy. Well, that is great to hear from such a credentialed journalist. Thank you very much, Rob Palmer. Late stage Huddl with 10,000 sats, the world's most private privacy token. Is that what he says in the intro? Token? Also, that sounds like Jeff Goldblum. Is that Jeff Goldblum? Monero, finds a way. No. That is John McAfee.
[01:14:21] Unknown:
He's basically Jeff Goldblum on cocaine, if you think about it. And everything else.
[01:14:25] Unknown:
I really like, he's one of the most entertaining characters I've ever seen. Like, he is such an interesting creature to study. The things he comes out with, the things like, his life is just fucking unbelievable.
[01:14:41] Unknown:
You keep using present tense, but supposedly, he's dead. Do you know something we don't? Question one?
[01:14:50] Unknown:
No. Unfortunately, I don't. I'd love to actually meet him, but I don't know where he is, but I have a feeling that he might not be dead. Yeah. I think that's a pretty common buzz. It seems unlikely this dude is actually gone. I don't think so. So if you are out there and you are listening, lots of love to you, mate, and, hope you're doing alright. FOMO chronic, 1,001 SATS, T Y M, 350 sats. Anonymous, 350 sats. Pies, one hundred sats. You bloody fucking cunts. That was for saying there was no negative comments from the last show. We knew that was coming. Thank you, Pies. Thank you for bringing us back down to Earth. A hundred sats. I completely disagree with the take on Nosta.
Okay. And another hundred sats. Thank you, gentlemen. Forty hours per week. Thank you, Pies. And thank you also to the streamers, Poe Jan Meeze with 14,600 sats, Cas Pieland with 949 sats, and Shadowy Superbadger with 513 sats. We appreciate you all. Thank you for all the questions and boosts and XMR chats. Alright, mate. Well, I know you have work to do, so I will let you go. But that was another good one. Looking forward to the next one, and we'll catch up soon. Absolutely. I'm I'm loving these, man. Thank you so much for the time that you pour into these and the the rest of the ungovernable
[01:16:14] Unknown:
misfits crew does as well because I know that there's so much. I feel like I'm the lazy guy. I just I just kinda come up with the notes and jump on the pod at the moment and record, and then y'all do all the hard work behind the scenes. So thankful for it and absolutely loving the Monero monthly. It's been a blast. Yeah. Definitely. We have something new coming soon, don't we? So,
[01:16:31] Unknown:
everyone, just just keep your eyes and ears and everything peeled, and very soon, we'll have some more things coming your way. So it never stops. Nothing stops this train, and we'll catch you on the next one. 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 Ungovernal Misfits and the Ungovernal Misfits crew. Also, a big thank you to Cake Wallet and Foundation, not only for supporting this show and everything that Ungovernal Misfits do, but also for the general freedom and open source movement.
We hinted to it in this episode, but Foundation have released a new device. I'm very excited about this. If you haven't already listened to my episode, go back and have a listen. You can check them out at foundation.xyz. You can use my code, Ungovernable, for a discount. It's just Ungovernable. Or you can click the link in the show notes, and it will take you to our own cool page that mister Crowns made all beautiful. Check that out. And also a big thank you to Cake Wallet, which will be having its own application on the Passport Prime. So obviously, Seth has been working hard in the background there and the rest of the team to work with Foundation.
It's very exciting because it's gonna mean people can have cold storage for their Monero along with lots of other cool features, I'm sure. If you haven't already tried 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.
