The Bitcoin Brief is a biweekly program hosted by Max and QnA that delivers the latest updates and news on Bitcoin and freedom-oriented technologies, keeping you informed and in the loop.
AOB
AOB
- Easter holidays
- Q having a few days off
- Prime/Core shipping updates
- Over a year legal purgatory for Samourai devs
- Twenty One Capital set to launch
- Unchained launches Bitcoin Legacy project
- eXch to close down
- Voltage announces 'Voltage payments'
- Panama city approves BTC for taxes
- Spar supermarket Switzerland now accepts BTC via LN
- Ashigaru fund
- Bitcoin keeper rebrand and v2.2.0
- Fidelity bond calculator
- Erk on Ark
- Awesome CTV + CSFS curation
- Rockstar dev video on BTCPay multisig
- Coinswap v0.1.1
- Aegis signer for Nostr iOS
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(00:00:41) THANK YOU FOUNDATION
(00:01:38) THANK YOU CAKE WALLET
(00:02:44) How've You Been?
(00:06:36) Tariff Tumult
(00:08:58) 1 Year of Legal Purgatory for Samourai Wallet
(00:10:40) NEWS
(00:10:45) The Suitconomy Adds Another Business
(00:14:18) Unchained Launches Bitcoin Legacy
(00:18:25) Voltage Announces Voltage Payments
(00:25:52) Bitcoin Approved for Taxes in Panama City
(00:27:43) Spar Supermarket Accepts LN
(00:33:55) Is Jonny D Okay!?
(00:35:29) BOOSTS
(00:49:12) UPDATES & RELEASES
(00:49:30) Bitcoin Keeper Rebrand with 2.2
(00:51:23) Fidelity Bond Calculator
(01:01:00) Awesome CTV and CSFS
(01:01:29) BTCPay Multisig Video
(01:08:15) QUESTIONS
[00:00:04]
Unknown:
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.
[00:00:11] Unknown:
Bitcoin.
[00:00:16] Unknown:
Now what's the Bitcoin?
[00:00:19] Unknown:
Bitcoin's like rat poison.
[00:00:20] Unknown:
Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Bitcoin will go to fucking zero. Welcome back to The Bitcoin Brief, the show where me and q and a catch up every two weeks to talk about Bitcoin, privacy, open source, keeping your Bitcoin secure, and the news and software updates that matter. I just wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone who's been supporting Ungovernable Misfits and a big thank you to Foundation Devices for supporting the show. If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.x,XYZ. They make cypherpunk tools for fuckwits, and anyone can use this, even me. If you have any questions or you want to reach out, feel free, and I'll be happy to go through things with you. For anything super technical, I'll pass you on to q. If you wanna buy one of these incredible passports, use the code ungovernable. It will get you a discount, and it will let them know that I'm shilling.
I'd also like to say a huge thank you to the k Wallet team. Not only are they supporting this show, but they're also bringing out some incredible features. For those of you who actually use Bitcoin and actually care about their privacy and security, Cake Wallet make it incredibly simple for you to live outside of the traditional financial system. You can use Cake Pay within the app to buy gift cards for food, petrol, and whatever else you might need day to day. You can use silent payments, and, of course, you can use Monero. You can connect both Bitcoin and Monero nodes, use coin control, and this team are constantly innovating.
And I'm really excited to be working with them. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me, but check them out at cakewallet.com. Download the APK or start using this today on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, or of course your Android device. Enjoy the show. Good morning.
[00:02:44] Unknown:
Good morning, sir. How are you doing?
[00:02:47] Unknown:
All the better for speaking to you. I have a, a lukewarm coffee, which is not ideal. But outside of that, everything else is peachy.
[00:02:56] Unknown:
We haven't had a a max coffee intake update for a while. How many cafetiers are you drinking a day at the moment?
[00:03:03] Unknown:
Firstly, I've switched from cafetiere to a what do they call them? It's not a percolator. It's like, you put water in the bottom. It's steel
[00:03:14] Unknown:
or cast iron. Yeah. It's like a stovetop thing. Yeah. I call it a mocha pot, but I don't know if that's the proper term for it.
[00:03:22] Unknown:
Maybe. Whatever that is, I've got one of those because it's the only thing I could travel with really without it getting broken. I took that. I'm probably having so I'm probably drinking less. I'm probably drinking, like, two or three of those a day, something like that, which equates to, like, maybe four cups of coffee a day or something like that.
[00:03:45] Unknown:
Yeah. I I suppose when you wake up and all you can see is snow capped mountains,
[00:03:49] Unknown:
then that would wake you up in itself, wouldn't it? It does. Yeah. And the cold plunge helps. So Yeah. That wakes you up. It's like a like a shot of caffeine. So, yeah, I I'm not really drinking as much. But, you know, when I'm doing a recording, I feel a bit weird if I don't have a drink in hand. I like to have a coffee or something alcoholic if possible if it's recording in the evening. But Nice. Yeah. What about yourself?
[00:04:12] Unknown:
My you're pretty standard. Three, coffees a day. It's pretty, Mhmm. Pretty run of the mill for me at the moment. Lattes? No. Absolutely not. No. Chocolate, marshmallow latte. Yeah. Whipped cream on top. Yeah. How was your Easter? Yeah. It was pretty good, actually.
[00:04:30] Unknown:
Pissed it with rain, which is the only bad thing, but, the rest of it was good. Kids enjoyed it other than being absolutely fucking terrified of an Easter bunny in a costume. She's, like, fucking terrified, which is quite funny, but also a bit sad. Other than that, yeah, it was good. What about you? Yeah. Pretty much the same. Nice to have a couple of days off for the family.
[00:04:53] Unknown:
We did a Easter egg hunt for the kids, and, yeah, it was just good wholehearted family fun. It was pretty nice. It was like finding seed words. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, that. Have you, seen the news this morning that basically the entire country of Spain and Portugal have no power whatsoever?
[00:05:12] Unknown:
Oh, amazing. I haven't seen that. No. There's just, like, the whole
[00:05:16] Unknown:
Southwestern corner of Europe is just dark.
[00:05:20] Unknown:
Like, literally the whole of Spain and Portugal? Of the country. Yeah. What the It's still upholding at the moment.
[00:05:28] Unknown:
It's literally like the story's two hours old right now, and I work with one guy who lives in Spain and he who's trying to, like, share his Oh, I know. They'd come. Yeah. It just seems like the whole of Spain and Portugal are just dark, and I believe it's also parts of France as well. So very weird situation going on. It's
[00:05:46] Unknown:
You know, sometimes you you get, like, maybe a region or something like that, but never an entire country, especially for the size of Spain. No. I've never heard of that. Or you get, like, the sort of unreliable power. Suddenly, the wind isn't blowing, and that means that there's less power on the grid, and they curtail or whatever it is, but not the whole fucking lot. Guess who's driving through Europe later this week?
[00:06:10] Unknown:
Amazing. Yeah. Great timing.
[00:06:14] Unknown:
Oh, I bet I know where you're headed. Yes. You absolutely do. Yes. That's fucking scary. I wonder how long that will last for.
[00:06:24] Unknown:
Hopefully not long. I will, I'll keep you posted, and, well, let's hope it's back online by the next time we record in two weeks.
[00:06:32] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Let's hope so. A couple of,
[00:06:35] Unknown:
business items. Quick update on Passport Prime and core shipping updates. Mhmm. Trump, he's been up to his tricks with the ever unfolding tariff scenario, which is wreaking havoc with US businesses, particularly those that, do dealings with China, which is essentially most of them if you build physical things Yeah. Yeah. Which is causing us some some headaches, let's say, and I bet, some delays, unfortunately. So we're gonna be sending, an update out to all customers, well, today as we record on Monday. So by the time, the listeners hear this, they'll definitely have that in their inboxes. So keep an eye on that for more details. But, it's pushing us back at the moment about three to four weeks on on both devices because we've we've literally got stuff stuck in customs.
We've got, shipments stuck at port in China. It's just wreaking a lot of havoc coming out, and it's causing us some some headaches. So, we're doing everything we can to kind of work around it. But if you've already got stuff built on a ship, it's kind of a sticky situation.
[00:07:38] Unknown:
What a fucking nightmare. Like, I haven't really followed this, tariff stuff too closely. But what does it mean in practice? Is it like no one really knows what the cost of things are gonna be? Exactly. Yeah. You are or you aren't gonna get a bill that is or isn't gonna be make or break for your business. It's just like massive uncertainty, basically.
[00:08:03] Unknown:
Basically that. Yeah. Yeah. Just massive uncertainty, backlogs in China to their supply chains, which obviously, you know, if you're waiting for goods from China to build your product, then obviously that knock on effect flows through to wherever you are. And obviously for us, that's in The US. So it's kinda twofold. Just uncertainty on costs. Like, we don't know whether something's gonna you know, if we buy a part that's normally $8, we wake up and see a tweet from Trump and it might be $24 today, and you're like, well, there goes our profit margins. So, yeah, it's it's twofold. It's it's the costs, uncertainty, and and the knock on effects and the uncertainty in within the supply chain itself.
[00:08:43] Unknown:
So, yeah, interesting times. Trade offs, isn't it? Trade offs because of the trade war. There you go.
[00:08:50] Unknown:
We're looking to begin shipping both devices in around four weeks from today, so looking like the May at the moment. Final piece of, I guess, information or sad piece of information, really. Saw a a a tweet from Economist in this week. It's been over a year now that the samurai devs have been in legal purgatory. There's no real news. I just wanted to once again shine a a light on it to say, you know, this is still unfolding. Yes. In the last year, we had some slightly positive news that may or may not flow through and be a positive impact on the samurai case where that should get to be seen. But, yeah, it it's still ongoing. I can't believe it's been a year already.
And, yeah, if just support in ever whichever way you can to p2prights.org.
[00:09:42] Unknown:
Yeah. Definitely. Definitely do that. We'll continue supporting them through the boosts and in any other way we can as well. We've got the shirts. I literally had the order yesterday come through finally. We'll have those back online, and the funds there from the free samurai T shirts and hoodies will obviously be going to them. And then we've also got Will from the rage coming on in a couple of days. I'm gonna be recording with him. Obviously, they've been doing a lot of really good coverage of this subject, so I'm sure we're gonna be getting into that and just reminding people again. So, yeah, hashtag free samurai. Yeah. Definitely looking forward to that rage recording.
[00:10:19] Unknown:
I'm glad you guys were able to to work that one out, and hopefully, we'll get a bit more exposure. On the case and the proceedings, as you said, the the guys over there have been doing a stellar job of, making sure that the world continues to hear about all of the important updates around the samurai case, the tornado cash case, and all of the similar ones as well. So looking forward to listening to that one. We've got a short list today, so, so let's hit the news, shall we? Let's do it. First one on the list, bank I mean, Jack Mallers has been, up to his, his tricks again.
[00:10:53] Unknown:
Yo.
[00:10:56] Unknown:
He's cofounded or is leading, a new company literally just called twenty one. I wonder where they came up with that name. Backed by Tether, SoftBank Group. They are, from what it seems, looking to basically just copy MicroStrategy or as they're now known strategy, where they're going to be basically just raising debt and buying Bitcoin and obviously marketing that to people who want Bitcoin exposure but dislike the thought of holding Bitcoin itself, which seems very strange to me and something I've never been able to get my head around. The general premise from what I understand is it's just it's just a strategy play again, and they're just gonna be following in the similar sort of of footsteps. There is obviously some jargon around it, you know, pioneering Bitcoin native financial solutions, etcetera, etcetera, capital market instruments, native lending models, future innovations, all of the stuff that makes me want to gouge out my own eyes, basically.
[00:12:00] Unknown:
Yeah. I have to say, I don't really understand what they're doing. Like you say, it just seems like they're raising a load of debt. They're probably getting cheap debt to buy Bitcoin. They'll probably introduce some type of lending where they take people's actual Bitcoin, make them risk it. But I don't think many people who listen to this show are probably gonna be particularly interested in it. But at the same time, like, I haven't got a lot of time for Jack. I mean, I've been saying for many, many years, you can't just wear a hoodie and say, yo, and I think you're a fucking cypherpunk. The difference between when I first heard him speak probably seven years ago or something like that and how he speaks now and what he's doing now. They're two completely different people. It's full on suit mode. It's full on bankster style.
It just is what it is. People are getting very upset about all of this on Twitter and, like, throwing shit at it. It was like, it's a suit. Let them do suit stuff. They're gonna do it. There's nothing that you can do to stop it. Just don't use it if you don't like it, but certainly not for me. Yeah. Likewise.
[00:13:04] Unknown:
Yeah. I always just think these kind of things, like, just like a kinda like a leverage Bitcoin call, essentially. Like, if Bitcoin catches a cold, these things again, it's just like a stock tied to Bitcoin. I just don't see the kind of,
[00:13:18] Unknown:
They can't fail. They're really clever, way more clever than we are. They're, like, they're gonna know stuff and things. And doesn't matter what Bitcoin does. These businesses can't go pop. You are safe and secure.
[00:13:32] Unknown:
Yep. Yeah. Putting my devil's advocate hat on, though. Right? Like, there's been a few pea a few companies now that have copied this play. And Mhmm. To date, every single one of them, like, if you invested at the right time, obviously, that goes without saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All of them have gone up, like, exponentially in terms of, like, your actual investment. So I can see the draw for it, but it's just like Yeah. How long does this type of thing work? Like, I I it works until it doesn't eventually. Because, like, the more and more companies that jump on this bandwagon, surely not every single one of them is gonna go up 500% in the first year, etcetera. I I just don't see it happening. So I think this type of play is having its heyday and might not be for the long term. Well, we'll see. We'll see. We will indeed. Next on the list, Unchained from Unchained Capital. They also had a name change where they just went to Unchained.
Has introduced the Bitcoin legacy project. So the Bitcoin legacy project plans to invest in community infrastructure, which is the kind of thing I can get behind. Mhmm. So they're gonna be doing some, kind of grassroots development stuff. They're gonna be donating to the Bitcoin Policy Institute. They're establishing scholar programs. They're matching grants made to Bitcoin core developers. It's a very good example of a successful Bitcoin native or focused business that's kind of giving back, but giving back in a way that's tangible and not just kind of throwing grants all over the place. That's good to see. Definitely.
Next one on the list. Question for you, Max. Have you ever heard of an exchange, an instant exchange that does kind of cross cryptocurrency exchanges called EXCH?
[00:15:20] Unknown:
Yeah. I actually think I have. Interesting. Saying that, I don't know whether that's just because a lot of these exchanges look similar.
[00:15:27] Unknown:
Mhmm. I don't know anything about it, but I definitely think I know it. Okay. Interesting. Well, the reason I ask is, number one, I haven't heard of it. And number two, sadly, it's shutting down. They did a post on Bitcoin talk. When was this? Last week. Quick quote from the top of the post essentially. EXCH will officially be shutting down its operations effective 05/01/2025. Almost all of you know that EXCH starts a project aimed at demonstrating to the community that alternatives can exist during time when there were none. They never had any financial goals of the project and rather we conducted an experiment that was unexpectedly successful.
Recently, we received confirmation of information we had previously, thanks to some friends, that we had in the state intelligence sector, red flag, that our project is the subject of an active transatlantic operation aimed at forcibly shutting our project down and prosecuting us for, quote, money laundering and terrorism. There's those buzzwords again. Even though we've been able to operate despite some failed attempts to shut down our infrastructure, we don't see any point in operating in a hostile environment where we are the target of SIGINT.
That's an an abbreviation for something, although I'm not sure what that is. Simply because some people misinterpret our goals. Starting from the day of the merger with a new management team this month, and as a result of some urgent meetings, the majority of his vote is to cease and retreat instead of going against the strong winds because none of us want to cause any harm to innocent people or this forum. So sad to see. I I've got no idea in terms of like the volume that this was doing. I'm gonna say it's maybe not that much comparative to some of the other ones out there because I've never heard of it. But, again, that's purely anecdotal, but,
[00:17:15] Unknown:
sad to see another note here where I see one go down. And it depends because it could be one of these shitcoin to shitcoin exchanges that actually would do a lot of volume because people are trading and jumping all over the place and doing all this stuff. Like, most people who listen to the show probably is more like they've either bought on exchange at one point, and then they've moved across to no KYC or they're just earning it or buying a little bit, and they sort of hold it until they need to use it kind of stuff, I guess. Like, most people aren't, like, big traders. But people I know who are still, like, love their shit coins and yielding and this and that, they're always fucking doing something. They're doing, like, a trade or 10 every day, like, as if that's, like, a normal thing. I'm like so so maybe it was doing a lot of volume because you have all these different assets and things and yields and stuff. So it could be. But either way, it's sad to see it go. I know we're only a couple of days away from the stated deadline of the May 1, but I just clicked the link from BitcoinTalk, and it's already dead. So
[00:18:14] Unknown:
whether or not they've kind of, been taken down early or they've taken it down themselves early, but the the URL is not accessible anymore. So That's fine. Yeah. Gone. Next on the list, the Voltage team have announced Voltage payments. And the Volt this new Voltage platform enables fastest voltage platform enables fastest way wow. Nobody preread this the title of this article before No. I wrote this for them. It's yeah. It looks like you did. I'll read it I'll read it verbatim. New voltage platform enables fastest way to enable Bitcoin and soon stable coin transactions. Okay. Now I've read the whole thing. Maybe it doesn't make us yeah. Maybe it's okay. Yeah.
So what's the headline here? Let's try and cut through all of the buzzwords. Oh, here we go. Enterprises desire a single API that integrates Bitcoin and stablecoin payments with a minimal technical overhead. See, this was the reason it piqued my interest here and wanted to start the conversation off with you, Max, around historically, Voltage, to my knowledge, has been a a kind of Bitcoin only company. You know, you can pay for the services in Bitcoin, and their core business is helping you kind of run a cloud node in a semi secure way so that you, if you have a store, then you can receive and send Bitcoin payments as well without having to manage all of the headaches of that infrastructure.
But it piqued my interest where they've integrated stablecoins into this one. This seems to be a little bit more of a growing trend I've noticed in just generally in the kind of ecosystem where more and more wallets or tertiary kind of projects that operate in and around Bitcoin seem to be being more open to integrating stablecoins. And we obviously, we know that's being driven by demand, but I just feel like it's an interesting kind of data point really that I didn't see coming. And it seems to be not being met with open arms, but it seems to be like nobody's talking about it despite stable coins, generally speaking, being, you know, what's the word I'm looking for, a scapegoat of the typical Bitcoin maximalism rhetoric. And it's just interesting to see these types of companies now are not rolling over because clearly they're a business. They wanna make money. And if they see a need for it, they're gonna meet that need. So just interested, and I just wanted to get your thoughts on it, really. I think that
[00:20:45] Unknown:
whoever has the money in this very small ecosystem, people who actually consistently talk about this stuff in the Bitcoin world is small, and they listen to a few news outlets and podcasts and a very small pool of information that's actually listened to. And they are all controlled by generally who pays them. And there's a lot of money coming in from these stablecoins. I'd have to name them specifically. You can kind of guess some of them. And then people start to tether. And then people speak more favorably about them because they're getting money in their pocket, and then that influences everyone else. It's pretty simple. Like, I I think it is literally that. I think if if all those companies and news outlets and people stopped getting funding from Tether, then very quickly, things would change, and we'd be back to fuck stablecoins, Bitcoin only, that'd be all that stuff. But, personally, I don't really care. Like, I I don't really have a problem with stablecoins.
People can do what they want. Like, it's not something I need or use personally, but, I mean, I don't know. I I don't know if it's just because I've been around for a certain amount of time and, like, I've been bored of just arguing with people, but I just don't care what people do anymore. I I don't know if you feel the same where you're just like, just fucking use stablecoins if you want. Like, if something goes wrong, it's it's on you. They're still a Bitcoin company. They still have Bitcoin payments. Like, I probably care more about people using custodial wallets and then prancing around like they're saving the world. That winds me up more than probably anything else. I care more about that than people using stable coins, I think, because it's more of a lot. I agree.
[00:22:37] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, like, they are one and of the same. Like, you say a custo custodial wallet, but, like, Tether is custodial as well. But, yeah, I agree. I think it's just a sign of the times that we often look at all of this sort of stuff with our kind of Westerner privileged rose tinted glasses where we have a relatively, I'm using air quotes, stable currency. We don't see the need for a stable coin, and we Yeah. Would much rather kind of, look elsewhere. Well, it's quite telling that the overwhelming growth in in kind of cryptocurrency is stablecoins.
So it's just telling that, you know, the overwhelming majority of people who look to this kind of industry aren't all that bothered about censorship resistance. You could argue yet. But what they're more concerned with is stability, and that's why people are looking to Tether, be it on Tron or what other, you know, network you can get access to it on. Yeah. Yeah. It's just been an interesting one that I didn't see come in, you know, maybe three, four years ago, especially the side of things where these somewhat Bitcoin maximalists or more focused companies are now integrating it. It's just an interesting data point to make. Yeah. Just to cap off this voltage payment quickly, it's it's essentially just an API where, you can accept Bitcoin payments without the need to hold Bitcoin itself. You can have USD settlement, and you can deal with its volatility as well. So Mhmm. Pretty interesting because, like, again, most vendors, unless you're or, you know, the person who operates the business is already a Bitcoin maxi.
Mhmm. Most people are kind of not really that interested in holding Bitcoin or in dealing with the headaches of all the taxes again, particularly in Western countries because Yeah. They just don't wanna deal with all of the headache. But if you could open your business up to the growing portion of the world that classifies themselves as Bitcoiners and say, look, we accept Bitcoin, but then not have to deal with any of the headaches involved with it, then seem like a win win to me. And, obviously, I'm sure there'll be some fees involved because at the end of the day, voltage is a business. Yeah. Yeah. I totally understand that. Like,
[00:24:58] Unknown:
if you're just a normal business and you think, you know, this Bitcoin thing is being spoken about, I'd kind of like to accept it or allow people to pay me in it, but I don't want the headache. I can totally see, you know, oh, what have I gotta do? I've gotta set up a BTC pay server, and now I've gotta have these lightning channel things, and I've gotta pay to host that somewhere else. And that costs $40 a month, and then, you know, I have to work out how to do it. And then, you know, and then I have to have my own wallet, and I have to worry about the keys. And you do all of that, and then it's like one or two people a month pays in Bitcoin. Mhmm. And then you've gotta fucking send it all to your account to your accountant, and they're gonna be like, oh, god. You know? Because most accountants are still, like, really not clued up on most of this stuff.
And I I can see that you'd just be like, oh, just outsource that shit. Yeah.
[00:25:50] Unknown:
Solving a problem. More power to them. Next up on the list, Panama City has approved Bitcoin and crypto payments for taxes, fees, and permits. Panama City Council has just voted in favor of becoming the first public institution of government to accept payments in crypto. Citizens will now be able to pay their taxes, fees, tickets, and permits entirely in crypto, starting with Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC, and USDT. There's those stablecoins again. Yeah. I don't have much more to add other than that was the news. Pretty cool. Isn't Panama already like a tax haven?
[00:26:27] Unknown:
I believe so. Yeah. So I don't understand what taxes you're paying there because I might be wrong, but I thought that there was no corporate tax, no income tax, and no capital gains tax. Might just be that you have to set up as a corporation, and then you get the benefits of that, and it's not for, like, private individuals.
[00:26:46] Unknown:
Possibly. It does say fees, tickets, and permits as well. So maybe it's, like, parking permits, parking tickets, parking fines. Property taxes or some sort of like Stuff like that.
[00:26:57] Unknown:
Okay. That's still good. Yeah. Pretty good if you're a whale. Yeah. But it's like it's a good, step in the right direction because I think with a lot of this stuff, it really is. It does come down to people are like, oh, I don't wanna spend because I have the cap gains or I don't wanna use it because it could be a problem here or an it's accounting headache. And I genuinely think that's one of the biggest hurdles. I think we talked about it maybe last month, but it's like for a lot of people, it's like, it's just easier just to spend fiat. It stops people really starting to use it because of the headache. So any step like that, even if it is paying for something gay like taxes or parking tickets, is still good. Absolutely.
[00:27:37] Unknown:
Yep. Couldn't agree more. Yeah. Have you ever been to Panama? I haven't actually. I'd like to. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. It does look cool. Next up on the list, we have Spa Supermarket. I was more shocked about the fact they have Spa in Switzerland, to be honest, than actually what The UK is here. I thought that was just The UK thing, but surely I was wrong. Yeah. Yeah. So the spa supermarket in Switzerland now accepts Bitcoin via lightning, which is pretty cool. Very nice. To the whole of the spa network in Switzerland. I have no oh, here we go.
Oh, they've got 13,900 stores across 48 countries. So there's probably no more than, you know, a hundred in Switzerland. I would have thought it's not exactly a big country, is it? The spa location is one of the first cryptos most supermarkets in Switzerland where you can pay directly at the checkout via Bitcoin using l n URL, thanks to our new open crypto pay solution.
[00:28:36] Unknown:
Okay. I wonder if it actually happens because I'm sure there was talk about this a while ago, and then you could pay with lightning. Because my question would be, like, are they just treating it like cash then? Presumably, they are because all these generally, all these regulations and stuff is as soon as you can spend cash and stuff. But if you wanna even think about spending Bitcoin or anything else, they want a fucking life story about where the funds are from and what you're doing and all your KYC information and blah blah blah. Like, are they just saying, okay. Whereas lightning is like cash.
[00:29:13] Unknown:
Presumably so. I don't I don't know what the capital gains laws are in Switzerland. That's an interesting point, really. Because, like, you don't wanna be paying capital gains tax on a pack of cigarettes, do you? They're already taxed now. Really? No. Yeah. Exactly.
[00:29:28] Unknown:
Yeah. I don't maybe, Switzerland no capital gains? Maybe it is. I think it might be one of those ones like Germany where you have to have held for, like, a year or some sort of some sort of rule like that. And then after that point, it's I don't know. I just don't know how they work that out because, you know, lightning payments are relatively private, and then so they can't really tell any information about you. And unless they're IDing you while you go and buy your packet of cigarettes and pay for them with lightning, then they don't know who you are.
So it's like cash. Lend BT,
[00:30:04] Unknown:
Bitcoin, capital, gains, tax. Let's do some,
[00:30:08] Unknown:
let's take this as a research life on air. Yeah. Here we go. Here we go. Just out of interest, do you use AI when you're searching stuff? Would you still do the old school Google?
[00:30:17] Unknown:
I'm still, yeah, just typing it into the address bar, seeing what comes up. No school like the old school? If it's something, like, I know I'm I'm gonna have to go back and forth a little bit to get, like, multiple piece of information, then I'll use AI. But if it's just like one thing where I need to know what are the capital gains laws in Switzerland, then I'll just type it to the address bar.
[00:30:40] Unknown:
Interesting.
[00:30:41] Unknown:
Yeah. And there is zero. Private investors do not pay capital gains tax on your crypto gains. It's only businesses and self employed traders who pay capital gains. There we are. So there you go. Go to Switzerland for your cigarettes.
[00:30:55] Unknown:
Yeah. Except that Switzerland's extremely expensive. I went there a few years ago, and I was like, okay. Yeah. This is
[00:31:04] Unknown:
this is heavy. So what you're saying is it cheaper to stay in The UK and buy them in in The UK with capital gains tax?
[00:31:13] Unknown:
I'd I'd imagine so. Unless you're I think if you work in Switzerland, you earn a lot more than you do in The UK, and therefore, it, like, balances out. But if you're, like, going from The UK or you have a UK job and you go over there, I'm pretty sure, like, I might be slightly out on this, but getting a sandwich at the airport was, like, £15. Yeah. I remember being there. I went with my missus. We went for a couple of days, and I was like, yeah. This is fucking like, this is probably expensive. So it sort of all levels out, I guess. Indeed.
[00:31:47] Unknown:
Last one on the news, I think you I'll I'll pan this one over to you because I know you mentioned it with John, and you might have a bit more information on it. But, there's a new fund around for the Ashigaru developer team. Is that right?
[00:31:59] Unknown:
Yes. There is. Well, there's a couple of things. There's a new fund for Ashigaru developers that I don't know if I'm supposed to say who set up or what, so I'll I'll kinda keep it brief. But, basically, you can donate directly to support them, and we're gonna put a link in the show notes. I think it's through Geyser. It is. I'm looking at it right now. The last one I saw was a a very generous donation from Black Coffee. So thank you, Black Coffee. You legend. He did a very, kind donation across. We've seen quite a few others. Most of them were anonymous. Anyone who wants to support them, you can do that directly, and that's just good to see. It's an incredible project.
We're also going forward, I think, from this episode forward. 10% of the total pot of all boosts now goes to them. 10% goes to free samurai. Free samurai and Ashigaru are both now being supported with every boost.
[00:32:53] Unknown:
Love to hear it. Yeah. At the time of recording, the fund is currently at 413,000 sats. Wow. With Black Coffee top off the list with a hundred dollars, which at the time of recording is a 13,000 stats. So, let's pump those numbers, people. It doesn't matter whether it's a dollar or a hundred dollars. Just just give what you can because, it's a very important wallet, and, you know, I wanna see it prosper.
[00:33:19] Unknown:
Yeah. Definitely. And final point on that is for everyone who is whinging and moaning about open sats or any of these other companies and the KYC and all that stuff, which I don't agree with either. I don't think it's great, obviously. But if you want change and you wanna actually see devs that won't dox themselves, and they would be stupid to dox themselves to get that grant money, you wanna see them supported, and you wanna carry on this cypherpunk ethos and do things properly, then here's your chance. Don't just whinge about it on Twitter. Get your purse out and, send them a few sats.
[00:33:55] Unknown:
Absolutely. Before we hit the boosts, I was listening to Action News this morning. Is, is Oh, yeah. John okay? Is he okay? Oh, god.
[00:34:07] Unknown:
It depends what you mean.
[00:34:09] Unknown:
He's a bit stressed. He's a bit stressed. He's he's a bit fragile. He seems a bit highly strong at the moment. I kind of
[00:34:16] Unknown:
wanna fly over there and just give him a little sweetie just to calm him down. Give him a little cuddle. I'd like to go and give him a little cuddle. I think he needs it. Maybe we could both fly over and both. Just give him a couple at the same time. Should we just turn up to his house? Yeah. Definitely. He has a lot of guns. So I think maybe just before we arrive, we might wanna just say, John, it's us sneaking up on you. But, yeah, I think we should. I think it'd be nice. He's he's a stressed man. I know some of the stuff that he's dealing with at the moment. He's been working, obviously, always really hard, like, running the mesh to Dell and the pleb minor groups and doing the shows with me and getting all the info to let people know everything they need to know about mining and stats and all this kind of stuff. But on top of that, he also has a day job, and he's trying to start something else new and a family. And you know what it can be like. He's just, right now, he's in the thick of it and, dealing with a lot of shit. But, hopefully, in sort of a few months, things will turn around, and some of this hard work that he's putting in will start to pay off. But, yeah, he is, he is stressed.
[00:35:23] Unknown:
Take it easy, John. Take it easy, mate.
[00:35:26] Unknown:
We love you, mate. We do. Yeah.
[00:35:30] Unknown:
Boosts. Top of the shop, as always at the moment, is our good friend late stage HODL with 50,000 sats. Out of The UK. Congrats. I don't need to know where you moved, but I hope to one day meet you in person. Q, I already met you, but maybe in the future, I can buy you both a beer or 10. I would love that.
[00:35:51] Unknown:
I would love that too. I very much look forward to that. And, yeah, I'm not, advertising where I am, but I appreciate the message, mate, and very happy to be gone. Look forward to having a beer with you in queue or 10 very soon. Compliant banana with 11,111 sats. Bitcoin Derby would like to welcome you. Bitcoin Derby would like to welcome you to our next meetup, which will take place at Ye Olde Dolphin D E 13 D L on Saturday, May at 3PM. We will discuss bootstrapping your own Ashigaru wallet and its wide variety of tools. PS, DOJ statement is merely a fart in the wind until the samurai and tornado cache TC cases are dropped.
Hashtag free samurai, hashtag free Roman. Yeah. Completely agree with that, and thank you very much for the boost. And good to see you're gonna be using the, the Ashigaru slides we've been working on. Yeah. I saw those. Very, very cool. Pretty good, aren't they? They are indeed. All these meetups, I've been to a few, and and it's very easy for people just to sort of stand with a beer in their hand and chat about how great Bitcoin is. And we just thought it'd be nice actually to be able to offer full presentations for people to use and actually learn and try things and stuff. So, yeah, Jordan and ex patriotic have been working hard on those and, basically, gonna be available for any meetups to download and use and help educate the people who go there and get them running Ashigaru, and we'll be doing others, very soon as well.
So hopefully people find them useful.
[00:37:42] Unknown:
Love to see it. Next up, eight myth randir, seven thousand seven hundred and 70 seven sats. And he just said congrats on getting out of The UK.
[00:37:50] Unknown:
Thank you, mate. Barnabas, Podverse, six thousand nine hundred and sixty nine sats. Do not update your BTC pay server if you accept Monero, my dudes. Ask Seth or Jordan for deets. Well, I'm glad I didn't. I think we talked about that the other week, didn't we? I was like, yeah. I'm just leaving it alone. I know there's an update, but fuck that. Like, if something is working, I leave it, and there we are. That's why. Well,
[00:38:19] Unknown:
maybe take a note for you and Seth to cover why you wouldn't wanna update on the Monero show because I'm not exactly sure why you wouldn't wanna do it. Clearly, something's broken somewhere, but, because you get some more details so people can be more aware. I'll try and remember that one. I'm recording with him tomorrow morning, so I will try and remember that. Send him my regards.
[00:38:40] Unknown:
I will do. I will do. He's a busy boy as well, isn't he? Yeah. You could say that. Yeah. Shadowy badger, five thousand sats,
[00:38:47] Unknown:
welcoming back the Phoenix Oligarchs. So this is in reference to Phoenix coming back into Mhmm. The USA now that the regulatory landscape looks a little bit more favorable. So good to see. Yeah.
[00:39:02] Unknown:
Shadrach with 3,993 sats. I'm really glad you got off the island max. Hashtag forty hours per week headphone emoji thing. Thank you, mate. It's been nice to have so many positive messages from people. Just, like, well done getting the fuck out of there. It's been nice. A lot of DMs and supportive words and things like that. So thank you to everyone.
[00:39:27] Unknown:
Chad Farrow. It says Chad Farrow and 33 others with 1,111 SATs. But I don't know where the 33 others comes in. I'm a bit confused by that. But, anyway, here's what Chad said. Correct q and a. You can run your own Nostra Relay. I have one locally on my start night and one in the cloud. I should look into downloading my data from other relays and put them on mine. Yes. You should, sir. For me, I use Nostra to see if anything cool can be used in the podcasting two point o. In fact, I've been listening to this episode and streaming sets in Podverse because it uses my own lightning node. This boostogram from Fountain is just so it shows up on Nosta.
Cross app comments have been a hot topic in podcasting two point o for years, so I'm just trying to pump the data into the system to see how it goes. Doing this in Fountain is also the easiest way to do so since the episode in Fountain is the root post for the Nosta comments. I'd love my boostograms from the apps using AlbiHub to be posted to Nosta, but it's not a deal breaker because using Podverse with my own node is already my dream setup so the devs can do whatever they want with their apps. I rambled a little, so my 333 sat boost got upgraded to a satchel of Richards.
Oh, so that here is the aforementioned 333 sat boost where he just said, Nosta users are like vegans, LOL. Your sound bite from the the previous show. And, he also said his buddy at bit point bit punk dot f m is typing calls Nosta the ham radio of social media. That's pretty, yeah, good analogy as well. And then finally, Chad Farrow again with another 333 sats. He said these birds are killing me, but the show must go on. I've seen a lot of comments around the birds on the last show, which was in allegedly the back part of your audio. I didn't hear anything the whole way through the recording.
[00:41:22] Unknown:
But were you on a dog walk walking around with headphones and listening, and therefore, maybe you thought that it was, like, birds where you were walking?
[00:41:32] Unknown:
I've seen multiple people complaining about the the birds. Oh, I've had people complaining.
[00:41:38] Unknown:
I've had people praising it, and then I've had people like Barn who did both. He whinged about it nonstop, like, in messages, giving me his life story about how he was on the phone to someone, and then that was in the background. And there was these bird I was like, honestly, I couldn't care less, mate. And then he jumps on the pod, and then he's like, yeah. Yeah. Why why haven't we got the birds? I really like that. I was like, what the fuck? It feels like that could be a feature edition for fountain. So you know, like, you go on websites and you have, like, dark mode and light mode. You could open up fountain, play on the latest Bitcoin brief, and then turn on bird mode. Oh, bird mode. Yeah. That'd be nice. I've actually sat inside in a bathroom to record this again as I did on the last episode just so everyone can stop fucking whinging about the bird noises. Well, I must admit your, audio is pretty good considering you sat in a a room that's normally quite echoey. Yeah. Yeah. It's not bad.
[00:42:33] Unknown:
I've got a vision now of you you sat on the toilet with your laptop on your knee and a microphone set up on a stand next to the toilet.
[00:42:40] Unknown:
You're not far off, mate. You're not far off. We're not quite at that level in our relationship where I would record a podcast with you watching.
[00:42:49] Unknown:
I don't need proof
[00:42:51] Unknown:
of it either. No. But we're not we're not far off. I could be in the bath. Do you know what? I've actually thought about doing that a few times. I was like, I can't remember which ones they were where I've had a fucking bad headache, like, almost migraine level where I can barely function. I've had to record. And I've really been close to being like, I'll just run a hot bath and then just record from here. Like, who's gonna know? I haven't done it yet, but maybe one day. I look forward to the day I'm listening to one of your shows, and I can just hear, like, a faint splash in the background. Splash the rubber ducky. Yeah.
It'd be quite nice to record from a bath. Should we do it next time? I think we should. I think that'd be quite fun. Just have a little recording for a bath or I mean, a hot tub would be amazing, but we're not at that level in life yet. So let's do bath. Unfortunately, not. Yeah. We need to we need to keep hold it for another twenty years yet. FOMO chronic, 1,001 sats, no message. Gin with seven seventy seven SATs. Cheers to getting out of The UK. Cheers to you, mate. Thank you. Hi, Ken. We're 500 SATs. Thank you for sharing. You're laughing. I'm gonna say that differently. Hi. It was just you're just like, hi. Yeah.
Hi, Ian. Thanks for sharing useful information in the space.
[00:44:11] Unknown:
You're so to me that Probably to do with Hayek, the the economists.
[00:44:16] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Hayekian. Okay. I was reading about your book. Japanese y sort of style. Yeah. But, yeah, I prefer that writing.
[00:44:28] Unknown:
We've got time with 350 sets. No message. Pies, 250 sets. Last boost for a while. Thank you, gentlemen. I wonder where you go in pies.
[00:44:37] Unknown:
I'm intrigued. Yeah. I'd like to know. He said he was, like, going to ground for a bit or something. Interesting. Jinkie's been put on a list. I I think he's on every list knowing pies. I would imagine. They say 500 points. Mate. Yeah. Yeah. Anonymous with 350 sats. No message. W with a 21 sats. Orbot for iOS still sucks. Monkey nuts emojis Drops the connection and restarts every minute or two. Keep complaining till it's better. Salute emoji. Max, your critique of Nostra's private key issue is spot on. Although I bet q is about to explain why it's no longer an issue. Pausing the episode now. It's a problem. Yes. And people are working on it. But since you point out that it's essential essentially, various risk of rug pull and account oh my god, man. I can't read.
Rub pull and account compromise that hold you back. I'd ask what sort of alternatives are instead worth putting in the time and energy. To me, it's the best solution yet for distributed digital information network beyond simply social media use cases, by the way, since basically everything else is centralized. Did I lose you? I just heard, like, a a No. I'm still here. Ping. Okay. Alright. At least on Nosta, there is a pretty good solution. And you can use something like Albie or Nostor to securely store your NSEC in a single app and consign events on your behalf without exposing your private key. Still clunky, but we're still early and all that. I see it as a centrist fuck me.
I see it as a sense. I see it as a censorship resistant communication layer for Bitcoin. If the centralized communication providers were to someday begin censoring all things Bitcoin or Monero. Now unpausing. Okay. Froster. Holy fuck. Multi sync security with key rotation, flexibility and authorized signing convenience. That sounds pretty damn fixed to me. Being meaning to explore frost for Bitcoin means to explore frost for Bitcoin. Isn't that where this came from? Oh, and all bought for iOS still sucks monkey nuts.
[00:47:15] Unknown:
I love that they brought us on a journey and told us when they were pausing it and unpausing it and the realization of, yep, q did answer the question later in the show. So Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. I was it made me chuckle up when I read it. And, yes, you are right. Like, it it stems from, like, the the frost application of Bitcoin, hence the the name.
[00:47:34] Unknown:
Well, great message. Thank you for that, and, thank you for everyone trying to listen through my awful reading. I think anything that's longer than, like, a sentence or two should not be attempted by me in future.
[00:47:47] Unknown:
Fair enough. Next one is up from John, and he said that there are still a few more mesh economy boxes left. What's a mesh con economy box, Max? Tell us. That is what
[00:47:59] Unknown:
we discussed on the last episode. It's a collection of items produced by people in the mesh to del coffee, candles, stickers on this one, and it's to help support the circular economy and actually, buy products from Bitcoiners who make them themselves. So it's pretty cool, and it's just a way for us to, help people find those producers. Pretty sweet. Like it. Yeah. And you can check it out on the website. Final thank you to,
[00:48:30] Unknown:
oh, no. Sorry. Max Wood with two hundred and ten sats. Thanks to Max and Keith for your great work. Explosion emoji. Thank you, sir. Thank you. And final thank you to Poe Jan Mees, two thousand seven hundred and fifty six sat streamed. Cas Peland, one thousand nine hundred and twenty one sat streamed. We all eat streamed 1,183
[00:48:51] Unknown:
sat, and that's it for the top streamers. Thank you very much, guys. Yeah. Thank you, Tovrona. You know, Poe Jan Meeze is the unpronounceable cunt. He's changed his name back, I think. Interesting. Well, that is definitely unpronounceable. Yeah. As you mispronounced it, I was like, I, it all makes sense there. Docs themselves. So bad spelling. Updates and releases.
[00:49:14] Unknown:
Updates and releases. And before, just in case Tickle Me Tummy is listening and thinking, hang on a minute. I boosted on the last show. Yes. We have received your XML. Thank you very much. We're gonna hit your question at the end in the question section, so don't think that we have forgotten that. No. We'd never seen that. Updates and releases here. Bitcoin Keeper has had a bit of a rebrand. New logo, slightly different color, and some different text on the kind of the logo itself. Bitcoin Keeper, new brand, same commitments like that. Obviously, the the link to the blog post will be in the show notes.
They have just continued to kind of iterate and kind of clean up the app and stuff. And I've said it once. I'll say it again, but it seems like Ben is having a a very big impact over there. Ben,
[00:50:00] Unknown:
what's his surname? Ben Ark? Ben Gunn? Ben oh, Ben Kaufman. Ben Kaufman. Yes. Indeed.
[00:50:06] Unknown:
Yes. He went away for a long time, and then he's just come back. He did. Yeah. He, like, took over Bitcoin Twitter and gained all of the followers and then just disappeared. But, nice to see him back and doing good work. They've also released version 2.2, which contains the new branding. They've also now added testnet support. And they've also got something called Bitcoin Keeper private, which I have no idea what that is. So I'm gonna do some more research on it and find out for us all. I like research on it. It's good. My guess is it's for private clients.
[00:50:43] Unknown:
Oh, okay. Which is a weird one because if you have private clients, then you have to gather information on those private clients, which makes them less private.
[00:50:52] Unknown:
Keeper private is a premier end to end concierge service designed to its designed to assist high net worth individuals and institutions in acquiring and holding Bitcoin while ensuring its long term security. It includes setup guidance, hardware wallet kit, reminders and check ins, and inheritance planning.
[00:51:13] Unknown:
Okay.
[00:51:14] Unknown:
So it just seems like a bit of a white glove service essentially for for rich people. So it counts you you and me out, mate, unfortunately.
[00:51:20] Unknown:
Yeah. Unfortunately. There we are.
[00:51:23] Unknown:
The next one we have is a Fidelity bond calculator, which is just a cool little tool I wanted to to mention, that has popped up. I think we've spoken about Fidelity bonds within joint market before. What quick TLDR is kind of it's a Fidelity bond. There's some Bitcoin that you can elect to lock up for a certain amount of time to show your commitment to be a good actor within the Joy Market ecosystem. This tool essentially, helps potential market makers within Joy Market evaluate how competitive their position would be based on any given load of different parameters. So they can kind of work it out based on their criteria and kind of benchmark that against the current market situation before they, go ahead and lock up those funds. Yeah. The next one we have on the list is a blog post by second dot tech. Link in the show notes. Introducing Erk, e r k, which is ARC without liveness requirements.
The reason I mentioned this one is basically just to be able to have an excuse to talk about ARC. I've had a couple of questions in and around the show on, Nostra and Twitter about it lately, and it's a rabbit hole. I've started to go back down for two main reasons. Number one was the questions, and number two was that, seems to be talked about a lot more often now and seems to be getting towards proof of concept stage, which for me is kind of a green light to start paying something a bit more attention. Yeah.
So what's your basic understanding of of ARC at the moment, Max, if any? Yeah. Fuck all, really.
[00:53:01] Unknown:
I think it's some type of second layer solution that's sort of lightning ish, but, that it's, like, swapping UTXOs on the back end or some sort there's some sort I can't remember. Basically, fuck all. My my first statement is correct. Fuck all. No fuck. So most of that was kind of loosely right where it's like Nonsense. Lightning ish.
[00:53:28] Unknown:
So so Lightning scales by allowing people to do off chain transactions where they'll basically just share a two of two multisig where there's normally a singular UTXO that is kind of shared between the two participants within that channel. And then, you know, it as they transact back and forth, who owns what percentage of that UTXO on chain is kind of updated. Yeah. So that scales for basically means two people could share a UTXO, which is is scaling, but it's not, you know, massive amounts of scaling. And, yes, of course, you know, with Lightning, you have Onion Reason as well. So it's not just a case of, you know, you can only pay who you have a channel with. You can hop through various different nodes.
But that then brings with you all of the headaches that we have in Lightning, like liquidity management, etcetera, etcetera. So ARC, aims to fix kind of two of those things where with ARC, it is it enables more than two people to share a UTXO. I don't actually know if there's any technical limits on how many people can share a UTXO. But in the podcast I've been listening to, they've been talking in the order of thousands as if it's kind of run of the mill. Clearly, an exponential growth in terms of, like, scaling ability. And, also, because there are no channels or the concept of channels within Arc, you don't have any of the liquidity drawbacks that you do with with Lightning. The main two being if you wanna receive straightaway on Lightning, you can't because you've got no inbound liquidity.
And if you want to send larger amounts, you're once again beholden to the liquidity along that payment route. Arc doesn't have any of that. All it does essentially is use the magic of Taproot and Signature Merkle trees to basically say, okay. I'm an ARC provider. I kind of coordinate all of the people that are within my ARC that wanna share this given UTXO. The whole thing obviously is constructed in such a way that every person that is has a part of of that one UTXO has what we call that all important unilateral exit.
Basically, they can go back out on chain without the permission from the service provider as they're called within the Arc ecosystem. So that's the kind of main point here that makes it tangible as possibly becoming a layer two is that just like lightning for all its faults, if you wanna get out of it, you can do so trustlessly, and you can just settle on chain. Again, there's gonna be fees involved with that. But Arc, to my kind of early rudimentary, understanding, seems to be a pretty cool and very, very promising improvement to the scaling that is offered by Lightning by removing two of the main hurdles of it.
Now I'm not gonna sit here and say that I fully understand it, and I'm sure there's gonna be loads of different trade offs, that will come out in the washes as ARC gets closer and closer to being kind of live. But it's definitely something I'm a lot more interested in now now that I've got a bit more of a better understanding for it. The main kind of drawback that I've kind of gained a little bit of an understanding on at the moment is the kind of interactivity requirements. So all of these, state updates where you have basically a share of a singular UTXO, which they call virtual UTXOs, they all require kind of signatures, basically.
And you just hold on to the the part of the transaction tree that means that you can kind of exit out of that unilaterally. That requires a lot of interactivity back and forth, which is obviously not great from for for mobile users. I believe that this could be drastically reduced if we get a covenant style soft fork in Bitcoin, something like CTV. That would reduce that almost to zero, but it's very much possible to achieve without all of that sort of stuff, again, which makes it interesting to me because we're not waiting for some arbitrary point in the future that may or may not ever arrive. So, yeah, I'm quite interested by it at the moment. I'm gonna be paying a bit more attention to the, the kind of proof of concepts that come out and things like that. But, yeah, seems pretty cool. And, hopefully, to the people that have asked for a quick, what is ARC that that's done, you know, a basic 5,000 foot view of it. Any questions that have cropped up in my very simplistic explainer there? Just what do you think is the biggest
[00:57:47] Unknown:
drawback? And do you think this replaces lightning given time, or do you think it's just gonna be an additional or it just worry it won't happen at all? Because it's been talked about for ages.
[00:57:58] Unknown:
Yeah. I think it's complimentary to Lightning. Like, you could exit an arc straight into Lightning. If you're, I don't know, like an exchange or you have a direct channel with somebody that you know for a fact you're gonna be paying backwards and forwards repeatedly over time, then lightning still makes more sense because it's you're already doing that kind of headache, and you know that you're gonna be paying that individual back and forth. Like, you don't need to include an ASP and ARC service provider in that kind of relationship. So I don't think it kind of removes the need for Lightning at all, but it certainly I think this makes more sense for at the edges of the network where people are kind of onboarding where they you know?
Well, we know all of the the headaches that we have with Lightning and, particularly around inbound liquidity, etcetera, etcetera. And, you know, there are already solutions that kind of fix that with different trade offs like the Phoenix model where they just take fees from you and give you just the time channels, etcetera. I think it's definitely gonna be a viable alternative. The other unanswered question I have at the moment, and I'm sure it has been answered, I just haven't found it yet, is, like, if if everybody in the arc wanted to exit at the same time, I'm sure that's gonna cause headaches or problems somewhere along the line. I don't quite know what that looks like, but it feels like there there could be a a risk of, like, a rush, you know, a mass rush for the bank run.
Yeah. Exactly. My guess is that the ARC service provider would need to be, like, over collateralized to be able to deal with multiple runs like that, I'm guessing. And then the other one, which is very similar to Lightning, is that if you're doing this for small amounts where, let's say, you're just testing it out and you've got maybe not small amounts. It depends on the feed market, I guess. Let's say you do do it for you test now with 10,000. Like, if you try to unilaterally exit from an ARC with 10,000 and fees or a hundred sats per byte, like, you're gonna end end up with nothing. So I think it's great for certain I won't say larger amounts because 10,000 sats is not a lot of money. But for, like, amounts approaching the dust limit, like, you essentially, it's not censorship resistant because if you try to exit on your own in an adversarial environment onto the chain, you're just gonna lose everything to fees Yeah. Yeah. In a very same way you would with lightning. Yeah. So, yeah, something I'm gonna keep my eyes on what, seems to be pretty cool and pretty promising and slowly but surely is turning
[01:00:29] Unknown:
into something tangible rather than it me wrongly considering it to be potential vaporware for the past couple of years since it's been announced and talked about. Yeah. Well, I think you I think the safest thing to assume when things like this are talked about is that they are gonna be vaporware and that they probably won't ever happen. You just wait until it gets a bit more substantial. Otherwise, you waste so much fucking time thinking about, like, what might potentially be, but then ends up not. And it's just yeah. It's a massive time sink.
[01:00:59] Unknown:
Yeah. Indeed. Right. We're through the last couple of bits. Link in the show notes for updates on something called Awesome CTV and CheckSig from Stack. Just a software proposal. We've spoken about CTV before, and it's just got lots of resources linked to that as this is, again, something that seems to be gaining a lot of developer, focus, and chatter. Seems to be a a pretty good resource to, you know, go and really dig in and get your turbo nerd on, if you're interested in that sort of stuff. Yeah. BTP server 2.1, we talked about on the last show. Rockstar Dev, the developer, has now released a video tutorial on using the new multisig feature in there, which is pretty interesting to go and check out. And there's also one in there about using, ChildPay for Parent and RBF functionality as well. So they could be pretty useful, particularly if you're a merchant that uses B2C Pay.
Last two, Coinswap version zero point one point one has been released with protocol efficiency, security, and usability improvements. So this was another one that kind of went quiet for quite some time, and then I didn't even know it was still being worked on. And then it looks like somebody has, you know, released a new update for it. So Coinswap was the, Greg Maxwell slash Chris Belcher proposal that Yeah. As a privacy technique where somehow using some cryptographical magic, you were able to swap, essentially private keys to UTXOs trustlessly with other people on the on the chain. Yeah. I never really quite worked out how it worked. But No. Me neither. And, again, this was one I just chalked up to vaporware until I see some, you know, user facing, tools around it. So maybe, once again, we're edging closer to that. A quick TLDR here. This is a good summary. Coinswap is a decentralized protocol for private trustless cryptocurrency swaps. It allows participants to securely swap digital assets without intermediaries using advanced cryptographic techniques and atomic swaps to ensure privacy and security.
This release introduces major improvements to the protocol's efficiency, security, and usability, including custom in memory UTXO indexes, more advanced coin selection algorithms, fidelity bonds, and more. So I believe this is still yeah. The there's a live test net market if you wanna go and test this out. But, once again, I, just keeping an eye on this one. Very complex, and I always Okay. I don't know. I I struggle with getting really enthusiastic about things like this that are really complex until I fully understand them. But with CoinSwap, I'm not sure I'm ever gonna get to that point. So maybe I just need to press some buttons on testnet and see how it works.
[01:03:36] Unknown:
Also, I'm not sure that I like it as a option anyway even if it worked just because you're swapping a UTXO key to a UTXO with somebody else, and then you don't know necessarily who that person is or where they're gonna use your UTXO. So if yours was KYC'd or links to somehow your identity in some way, and then they use it in some way that some government doesn't deem to be legal or whatever bullshit they come up with, I feel like you could just end up landing yourself in more shit. Like, I feel like it could be more of a problem than a solution.
[01:04:18] Unknown:
Yeah. I think we've this has been the main critique of the, of the whole protocol since it was released years and years ago. It's probably been at least four years now or something like that. And I I I agree. Yeah. It's like you you could be inheriting somebody else's unfavorable UTXO history. So for me, it kinda makes sense Yeah. As, like, a Postmates tool or something like that. And clearly, there's a joint market influence here as well because they're talking about joint market they're talking about fidelity bonds, etcetera, as well. So perhaps that is the end goal, and it it is a cool additional to, you know, swap a post mix GTXO.
That makes more sense to me. But, once again, we'll we'll see how things unfold.
[01:05:00] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. You're right. If it's part of doing other things, I just you know, it's no whirlpool is my point. It's like Agreed. It's a big trade off, and it it could be more risky than it is helpful. But,
[01:05:12] Unknown:
yeah, if you use it with other stuff, then maybe. Do you think we'll ever get Whirlpool back? Do you think there's a, 50% chance that we'll get it back in the next five years?
[01:05:23] Unknown:
I have faith that we will. Yeah. I think there are enough people who care, and I don't think there's any solution within the Bitcoin ecosystem that has done the job as well as Whirlpool did. Certainly, I'm I haven't found it if there is. So I think there is a massive need for it. I think maybe there's gonna be someone who's brave enough to do this. I would say within the next five years, I would be fairly confident it happens. Or maybe that's just hope, though. What about you?
[01:05:59] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm again, this is based on absolutely zero, like, insider knowledge or anything like that. This is purely conjecture. But, yeah, I I think somebody will do it within five years. I'm hopeful. Mhmm. I think a lot of it hinges on the outcome of the summary case, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. Do we get somebody rogue that does it anyway?
[01:06:21] Unknown:
Maybe. I mean, maybe. It's just it's such a massive target Oh, yeah. At this point in time that I think also, it doesn't mean that there isn't someone out there working on something, and maybe it isn't implemented in the exact same way that it was previously. Like, it it might be, a similar but slightly different approach because, you know, basically, it's life or death. Like, if someone does this as it currently stands, someone can come in and fucking take your life away, basically, ruin your life because they don't like what you're doing with your software. So I completely understand it's not back at the moment, but, my feeling is that, yeah, at some point.
[01:07:03] Unknown:
Yeah. Last one on the list, we talked about at length about key management in Nosta. Android users have had a wonderful solution for quite some time now called Amber, but iOS users have not had the same luxury until now. There is, a new application that's been released on iOS that essentially does the same thing. It's a dedicated app on your iPhone or iPad that you basically just trust with your Nostra private key, and then it talks over the Nostra network to all of your other Nostra applications to sign all of the events and stuff so that you can just put your singular trust into one app rather than pasting your NSEQ everywhere.
Annoyingly, this is called a GS or Aegis, and there's already a well known app called I never know how to say it, but that for,
[01:07:51] Unknown:
for two FA codes and stuff. A GS, I think, is also like they sponsor or bought what was the Rose Bowl in Hampshire, the Rose Bowl cricket place. And I think a a GEAS who bought that, I think that's like an insurance company or something.
[01:08:06] Unknown:
Bit annoying with the name, but good to see that, iOS fanboys has now got a viable solution with the to deal with their end execs. Very good. We had a question at the end, didn't we? Yeah. We did. We did indeed. It's from Tickle Me Tommy with 0.0479XMR. Thank you, sir. BTC brief question. Full KYC is an obvious no go, but are there uses for services like GetBitter? They seem to be more privacy focused than a centralized exchange. Yeah. So you've already alluded correctly in in the question that GetBitter and similar services are not or should not be classified as no KYC. But are they better than a quote, unquote centralized exchange? Well, I'd still class get better as centralized, but I I I get what you're trying to ask here. You're comparing them to something like Binance or Coinbase.
Are they better? Yes. Absolutely. The reason for that, in my opinion, is that these services, because of where they're domiciled, they only allow you to buy certain amounts of Bitcoin, and they are able by limiting the amount of Bitcoin that you buy, are able to ask you for the bare minimum amount of information. To my knowledge, that is essentially just your banking information, which obviously Yeah. Can be tied to you in an instant. So then then that's the reason I say they shouldn't be considered as no KYC. But is that distinctly better than you signing up to Coinbase and having to give them three month bank statements, a selfie, a video, a picture of your cat's dick, etcetera? Then, yes, of course, it's 10 times better. So if somebody was, like, hell bent on wanting to do recurring buys and things like that and they they kind of weren't that bothered about the whole privacy side of things, would I send them to something like GetBitter versus Coinbase?
Absolutely. 100%.
[01:09:59] Unknown:
Yeah. Is it a Swiss
[01:10:01] Unknown:
company? I believe so. Yeah. Most of these similar type services all seem to be domiciled in Switzerland because I think it's 1,000 Swiss francs a day, a week, or a month or something like that is the limit. And they basically just need banking information. But it's buy only. I don't know that you can sell with them as well.
[01:10:21] Unknown:
No idea. Good point. I'm not sure. Yeah. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if you can or not. And in which case, it's not like a full exchange exchange.
[01:10:29] Unknown:
But, yeah, it's definitely better. Just looking at the Bitter website now, and it only has a buy button. So, yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is only buy, but it's definitely, yeah, definitely better.
[01:10:40] Unknown:
If someone wants to or a government wants to cause problems, they can easily do that with your banking details and find you and track you and everything. So don't treat it like it's peer to peer or anything like that, but it's it's a good middle ground. It's certainly better than a a full on exchange.
[01:10:56] Unknown:
Agreed. Right. Brings us to the end of the list. So any final business before I go and piss my pants and grab a coffee?
[01:11:05] Unknown:
Are you gonna piss your pants first and then grab a coffee, or are you gonna piss your pants while having a coffee? What I was probably gonna do is just go to the toilet first, not piss my pants, and then make your coffee. Okay. Then, no, I will let you go and, piss in peace, and I'll catch you on the next one, mate. Thanks, mate. See you later.
Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.
[00:00:11] Unknown:
Bitcoin.
[00:00:16] Unknown:
Now what's the Bitcoin?
[00:00:19] Unknown:
Bitcoin's like rat poison.
[00:00:20] Unknown:
Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it.
[00:00:27] Unknown:
Bitcoin will go to fucking zero. Welcome back to The Bitcoin Brief, the show where me and q and a catch up every two weeks to talk about Bitcoin, privacy, open source, keeping your Bitcoin secure, and the news and software updates that matter. I just wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone who's been supporting Ungovernable Misfits and a big thank you to Foundation Devices for supporting the show. If you haven't already checked them out, go to foundation.x,XYZ. They make cypherpunk tools for fuckwits, and anyone can use this, even me. If you have any questions or you want to reach out, feel free, and I'll be happy to go through things with you. For anything super technical, I'll pass you on to q. If you wanna buy one of these incredible passports, use the code ungovernable. It will get you a discount, and it will let them know that I'm shilling.
I'd also like to say a huge thank you to the k Wallet team. Not only are they supporting this show, but they're also bringing out some incredible features. For those of you who actually use Bitcoin and actually care about their privacy and security, Cake Wallet make it incredibly simple for you to live outside of the traditional financial system. You can use Cake Pay within the app to buy gift cards for food, petrol, and whatever else you might need day to day. You can use silent payments, and, of course, you can use Monero. You can connect both Bitcoin and Monero nodes, use coin control, and this team are constantly innovating.
And I'm really excited to be working with them. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me, but check them out at cakewallet.com. Download the APK or start using this today on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, or of course your Android device. Enjoy the show. Good morning.
[00:02:44] Unknown:
Good morning, sir. How are you doing?
[00:02:47] Unknown:
All the better for speaking to you. I have a, a lukewarm coffee, which is not ideal. But outside of that, everything else is peachy.
[00:02:56] Unknown:
We haven't had a a max coffee intake update for a while. How many cafetiers are you drinking a day at the moment?
[00:03:03] Unknown:
Firstly, I've switched from cafetiere to a what do they call them? It's not a percolator. It's like, you put water in the bottom. It's steel
[00:03:14] Unknown:
or cast iron. Yeah. It's like a stovetop thing. Yeah. I call it a mocha pot, but I don't know if that's the proper term for it.
[00:03:22] Unknown:
Maybe. Whatever that is, I've got one of those because it's the only thing I could travel with really without it getting broken. I took that. I'm probably having so I'm probably drinking less. I'm probably drinking, like, two or three of those a day, something like that, which equates to, like, maybe four cups of coffee a day or something like that.
[00:03:45] Unknown:
Yeah. I I suppose when you wake up and all you can see is snow capped mountains,
[00:03:49] Unknown:
then that would wake you up in itself, wouldn't it? It does. Yeah. And the cold plunge helps. So Yeah. That wakes you up. It's like a like a shot of caffeine. So, yeah, I I'm not really drinking as much. But, you know, when I'm doing a recording, I feel a bit weird if I don't have a drink in hand. I like to have a coffee or something alcoholic if possible if it's recording in the evening. But Nice. Yeah. What about yourself?
[00:04:12] Unknown:
My you're pretty standard. Three, coffees a day. It's pretty, Mhmm. Pretty run of the mill for me at the moment. Lattes? No. Absolutely not. No. Chocolate, marshmallow latte. Yeah. Whipped cream on top. Yeah. How was your Easter? Yeah. It was pretty good, actually.
[00:04:30] Unknown:
Pissed it with rain, which is the only bad thing, but, the rest of it was good. Kids enjoyed it other than being absolutely fucking terrified of an Easter bunny in a costume. She's, like, fucking terrified, which is quite funny, but also a bit sad. Other than that, yeah, it was good. What about you? Yeah. Pretty much the same. Nice to have a couple of days off for the family.
[00:04:53] Unknown:
We did a Easter egg hunt for the kids, and, yeah, it was just good wholehearted family fun. It was pretty nice. It was like finding seed words. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, that. Have you, seen the news this morning that basically the entire country of Spain and Portugal have no power whatsoever?
[00:05:12] Unknown:
Oh, amazing. I haven't seen that. No. There's just, like, the whole
[00:05:16] Unknown:
Southwestern corner of Europe is just dark.
[00:05:20] Unknown:
Like, literally the whole of Spain and Portugal? Of the country. Yeah. What the It's still upholding at the moment.
[00:05:28] Unknown:
It's literally like the story's two hours old right now, and I work with one guy who lives in Spain and he who's trying to, like, share his Oh, I know. They'd come. Yeah. It just seems like the whole of Spain and Portugal are just dark, and I believe it's also parts of France as well. So very weird situation going on. It's
[00:05:46] Unknown:
You know, sometimes you you get, like, maybe a region or something like that, but never an entire country, especially for the size of Spain. No. I've never heard of that. Or you get, like, the sort of unreliable power. Suddenly, the wind isn't blowing, and that means that there's less power on the grid, and they curtail or whatever it is, but not the whole fucking lot. Guess who's driving through Europe later this week?
[00:06:10] Unknown:
Amazing. Yeah. Great timing.
[00:06:14] Unknown:
Oh, I bet I know where you're headed. Yes. You absolutely do. Yes. That's fucking scary. I wonder how long that will last for.
[00:06:24] Unknown:
Hopefully not long. I will, I'll keep you posted, and, well, let's hope it's back online by the next time we record in two weeks.
[00:06:32] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Let's hope so. A couple of,
[00:06:35] Unknown:
business items. Quick update on Passport Prime and core shipping updates. Mhmm. Trump, he's been up to his tricks with the ever unfolding tariff scenario, which is wreaking havoc with US businesses, particularly those that, do dealings with China, which is essentially most of them if you build physical things Yeah. Yeah. Which is causing us some some headaches, let's say, and I bet, some delays, unfortunately. So we're gonna be sending, an update out to all customers, well, today as we record on Monday. So by the time, the listeners hear this, they'll definitely have that in their inboxes. So keep an eye on that for more details. But, it's pushing us back at the moment about three to four weeks on on both devices because we've we've literally got stuff stuck in customs.
We've got, shipments stuck at port in China. It's just wreaking a lot of havoc coming out, and it's causing us some some headaches. So, we're doing everything we can to kind of work around it. But if you've already got stuff built on a ship, it's kind of a sticky situation.
[00:07:38] Unknown:
What a fucking nightmare. Like, I haven't really followed this, tariff stuff too closely. But what does it mean in practice? Is it like no one really knows what the cost of things are gonna be? Exactly. Yeah. You are or you aren't gonna get a bill that is or isn't gonna be make or break for your business. It's just like massive uncertainty, basically.
[00:08:03] Unknown:
Basically that. Yeah. Yeah. Just massive uncertainty, backlogs in China to their supply chains, which obviously, you know, if you're waiting for goods from China to build your product, then obviously that knock on effect flows through to wherever you are. And obviously for us, that's in The US. So it's kinda twofold. Just uncertainty on costs. Like, we don't know whether something's gonna you know, if we buy a part that's normally $8, we wake up and see a tweet from Trump and it might be $24 today, and you're like, well, there goes our profit margins. So, yeah, it's it's twofold. It's it's the costs, uncertainty, and and the knock on effects and the uncertainty in within the supply chain itself.
[00:08:43] Unknown:
So, yeah, interesting times. Trade offs, isn't it? Trade offs because of the trade war. There you go.
[00:08:50] Unknown:
We're looking to begin shipping both devices in around four weeks from today, so looking like the May at the moment. Final piece of, I guess, information or sad piece of information, really. Saw a a a tweet from Economist in this week. It's been over a year now that the samurai devs have been in legal purgatory. There's no real news. I just wanted to once again shine a a light on it to say, you know, this is still unfolding. Yes. In the last year, we had some slightly positive news that may or may not flow through and be a positive impact on the samurai case where that should get to be seen. But, yeah, it it's still ongoing. I can't believe it's been a year already.
And, yeah, if just support in ever whichever way you can to p2prights.org.
[00:09:42] Unknown:
Yeah. Definitely. Definitely do that. We'll continue supporting them through the boosts and in any other way we can as well. We've got the shirts. I literally had the order yesterday come through finally. We'll have those back online, and the funds there from the free samurai T shirts and hoodies will obviously be going to them. And then we've also got Will from the rage coming on in a couple of days. I'm gonna be recording with him. Obviously, they've been doing a lot of really good coverage of this subject, so I'm sure we're gonna be getting into that and just reminding people again. So, yeah, hashtag free samurai. Yeah. Definitely looking forward to that rage recording.
[00:10:19] Unknown:
I'm glad you guys were able to to work that one out, and hopefully, we'll get a bit more exposure. On the case and the proceedings, as you said, the the guys over there have been doing a stellar job of, making sure that the world continues to hear about all of the important updates around the samurai case, the tornado cash case, and all of the similar ones as well. So looking forward to listening to that one. We've got a short list today, so, so let's hit the news, shall we? Let's do it. First one on the list, bank I mean, Jack Mallers has been, up to his, his tricks again.
[00:10:53] Unknown:
Yo.
[00:10:56] Unknown:
He's cofounded or is leading, a new company literally just called twenty one. I wonder where they came up with that name. Backed by Tether, SoftBank Group. They are, from what it seems, looking to basically just copy MicroStrategy or as they're now known strategy, where they're going to be basically just raising debt and buying Bitcoin and obviously marketing that to people who want Bitcoin exposure but dislike the thought of holding Bitcoin itself, which seems very strange to me and something I've never been able to get my head around. The general premise from what I understand is it's just it's just a strategy play again, and they're just gonna be following in the similar sort of of footsteps. There is obviously some jargon around it, you know, pioneering Bitcoin native financial solutions, etcetera, etcetera, capital market instruments, native lending models, future innovations, all of the stuff that makes me want to gouge out my own eyes, basically.
[00:12:00] Unknown:
Yeah. I have to say, I don't really understand what they're doing. Like you say, it just seems like they're raising a load of debt. They're probably getting cheap debt to buy Bitcoin. They'll probably introduce some type of lending where they take people's actual Bitcoin, make them risk it. But I don't think many people who listen to this show are probably gonna be particularly interested in it. But at the same time, like, I haven't got a lot of time for Jack. I mean, I've been saying for many, many years, you can't just wear a hoodie and say, yo, and I think you're a fucking cypherpunk. The difference between when I first heard him speak probably seven years ago or something like that and how he speaks now and what he's doing now. They're two completely different people. It's full on suit mode. It's full on bankster style.
It just is what it is. People are getting very upset about all of this on Twitter and, like, throwing shit at it. It was like, it's a suit. Let them do suit stuff. They're gonna do it. There's nothing that you can do to stop it. Just don't use it if you don't like it, but certainly not for me. Yeah. Likewise.
[00:13:04] Unknown:
Yeah. I always just think these kind of things, like, just like a kinda like a leverage Bitcoin call, essentially. Like, if Bitcoin catches a cold, these things again, it's just like a stock tied to Bitcoin. I just don't see the kind of,
[00:13:18] Unknown:
They can't fail. They're really clever, way more clever than we are. They're, like, they're gonna know stuff and things. And doesn't matter what Bitcoin does. These businesses can't go pop. You are safe and secure.
[00:13:32] Unknown:
Yep. Yeah. Putting my devil's advocate hat on, though. Right? Like, there's been a few pea a few companies now that have copied this play. And Mhmm. To date, every single one of them, like, if you invested at the right time, obviously, that goes without saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All of them have gone up, like, exponentially in terms of, like, your actual investment. So I can see the draw for it, but it's just like Yeah. How long does this type of thing work? Like, I I it works until it doesn't eventually. Because, like, the more and more companies that jump on this bandwagon, surely not every single one of them is gonna go up 500% in the first year, etcetera. I I just don't see it happening. So I think this type of play is having its heyday and might not be for the long term. Well, we'll see. We'll see. We will indeed. Next on the list, Unchained from Unchained Capital. They also had a name change where they just went to Unchained.
Has introduced the Bitcoin legacy project. So the Bitcoin legacy project plans to invest in community infrastructure, which is the kind of thing I can get behind. Mhmm. So they're gonna be doing some, kind of grassroots development stuff. They're gonna be donating to the Bitcoin Policy Institute. They're establishing scholar programs. They're matching grants made to Bitcoin core developers. It's a very good example of a successful Bitcoin native or focused business that's kind of giving back, but giving back in a way that's tangible and not just kind of throwing grants all over the place. That's good to see. Definitely.
Next one on the list. Question for you, Max. Have you ever heard of an exchange, an instant exchange that does kind of cross cryptocurrency exchanges called EXCH?
[00:15:20] Unknown:
Yeah. I actually think I have. Interesting. Saying that, I don't know whether that's just because a lot of these exchanges look similar.
[00:15:27] Unknown:
Mhmm. I don't know anything about it, but I definitely think I know it. Okay. Interesting. Well, the reason I ask is, number one, I haven't heard of it. And number two, sadly, it's shutting down. They did a post on Bitcoin talk. When was this? Last week. Quick quote from the top of the post essentially. EXCH will officially be shutting down its operations effective 05/01/2025. Almost all of you know that EXCH starts a project aimed at demonstrating to the community that alternatives can exist during time when there were none. They never had any financial goals of the project and rather we conducted an experiment that was unexpectedly successful.
Recently, we received confirmation of information we had previously, thanks to some friends, that we had in the state intelligence sector, red flag, that our project is the subject of an active transatlantic operation aimed at forcibly shutting our project down and prosecuting us for, quote, money laundering and terrorism. There's those buzzwords again. Even though we've been able to operate despite some failed attempts to shut down our infrastructure, we don't see any point in operating in a hostile environment where we are the target of SIGINT.
That's an an abbreviation for something, although I'm not sure what that is. Simply because some people misinterpret our goals. Starting from the day of the merger with a new management team this month, and as a result of some urgent meetings, the majority of his vote is to cease and retreat instead of going against the strong winds because none of us want to cause any harm to innocent people or this forum. So sad to see. I I've got no idea in terms of like the volume that this was doing. I'm gonna say it's maybe not that much comparative to some of the other ones out there because I've never heard of it. But, again, that's purely anecdotal, but,
[00:17:15] Unknown:
sad to see another note here where I see one go down. And it depends because it could be one of these shitcoin to shitcoin exchanges that actually would do a lot of volume because people are trading and jumping all over the place and doing all this stuff. Like, most people who listen to the show probably is more like they've either bought on exchange at one point, and then they've moved across to no KYC or they're just earning it or buying a little bit, and they sort of hold it until they need to use it kind of stuff, I guess. Like, most people aren't, like, big traders. But people I know who are still, like, love their shit coins and yielding and this and that, they're always fucking doing something. They're doing, like, a trade or 10 every day, like, as if that's, like, a normal thing. I'm like so so maybe it was doing a lot of volume because you have all these different assets and things and yields and stuff. So it could be. But either way, it's sad to see it go. I know we're only a couple of days away from the stated deadline of the May 1, but I just clicked the link from BitcoinTalk, and it's already dead. So
[00:18:14] Unknown:
whether or not they've kind of, been taken down early or they've taken it down themselves early, but the the URL is not accessible anymore. So That's fine. Yeah. Gone. Next on the list, the Voltage team have announced Voltage payments. And the Volt this new Voltage platform enables fastest voltage platform enables fastest way wow. Nobody preread this the title of this article before No. I wrote this for them. It's yeah. It looks like you did. I'll read it I'll read it verbatim. New voltage platform enables fastest way to enable Bitcoin and soon stable coin transactions. Okay. Now I've read the whole thing. Maybe it doesn't make us yeah. Maybe it's okay. Yeah.
So what's the headline here? Let's try and cut through all of the buzzwords. Oh, here we go. Enterprises desire a single API that integrates Bitcoin and stablecoin payments with a minimal technical overhead. See, this was the reason it piqued my interest here and wanted to start the conversation off with you, Max, around historically, Voltage, to my knowledge, has been a a kind of Bitcoin only company. You know, you can pay for the services in Bitcoin, and their core business is helping you kind of run a cloud node in a semi secure way so that you, if you have a store, then you can receive and send Bitcoin payments as well without having to manage all of the headaches of that infrastructure.
But it piqued my interest where they've integrated stablecoins into this one. This seems to be a little bit more of a growing trend I've noticed in just generally in the kind of ecosystem where more and more wallets or tertiary kind of projects that operate in and around Bitcoin seem to be being more open to integrating stablecoins. And we obviously, we know that's being driven by demand, but I just feel like it's an interesting kind of data point really that I didn't see coming. And it seems to be not being met with open arms, but it seems to be like nobody's talking about it despite stable coins, generally speaking, being, you know, what's the word I'm looking for, a scapegoat of the typical Bitcoin maximalism rhetoric. And it's just interesting to see these types of companies now are not rolling over because clearly they're a business. They wanna make money. And if they see a need for it, they're gonna meet that need. So just interested, and I just wanted to get your thoughts on it, really. I think that
[00:20:45] Unknown:
whoever has the money in this very small ecosystem, people who actually consistently talk about this stuff in the Bitcoin world is small, and they listen to a few news outlets and podcasts and a very small pool of information that's actually listened to. And they are all controlled by generally who pays them. And there's a lot of money coming in from these stablecoins. I'd have to name them specifically. You can kind of guess some of them. And then people start to tether. And then people speak more favorably about them because they're getting money in their pocket, and then that influences everyone else. It's pretty simple. Like, I I think it is literally that. I think if if all those companies and news outlets and people stopped getting funding from Tether, then very quickly, things would change, and we'd be back to fuck stablecoins, Bitcoin only, that'd be all that stuff. But, personally, I don't really care. Like, I I don't really have a problem with stablecoins.
People can do what they want. Like, it's not something I need or use personally, but, I mean, I don't know. I I don't know if it's just because I've been around for a certain amount of time and, like, I've been bored of just arguing with people, but I just don't care what people do anymore. I I don't know if you feel the same where you're just like, just fucking use stablecoins if you want. Like, if something goes wrong, it's it's on you. They're still a Bitcoin company. They still have Bitcoin payments. Like, I probably care more about people using custodial wallets and then prancing around like they're saving the world. That winds me up more than probably anything else. I care more about that than people using stable coins, I think, because it's more of a lot. I agree.
[00:22:37] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, like, they are one and of the same. Like, you say a custo custodial wallet, but, like, Tether is custodial as well. But, yeah, I agree. I think it's just a sign of the times that we often look at all of this sort of stuff with our kind of Westerner privileged rose tinted glasses where we have a relatively, I'm using air quotes, stable currency. We don't see the need for a stable coin, and we Yeah. Would much rather kind of, look elsewhere. Well, it's quite telling that the overwhelming growth in in kind of cryptocurrency is stablecoins.
So it's just telling that, you know, the overwhelming majority of people who look to this kind of industry aren't all that bothered about censorship resistance. You could argue yet. But what they're more concerned with is stability, and that's why people are looking to Tether, be it on Tron or what other, you know, network you can get access to it on. Yeah. Yeah. It's just been an interesting one that I didn't see come in, you know, maybe three, four years ago, especially the side of things where these somewhat Bitcoin maximalists or more focused companies are now integrating it. It's just an interesting data point to make. Yeah. Just to cap off this voltage payment quickly, it's it's essentially just an API where, you can accept Bitcoin payments without the need to hold Bitcoin itself. You can have USD settlement, and you can deal with its volatility as well. So Mhmm. Pretty interesting because, like, again, most vendors, unless you're or, you know, the person who operates the business is already a Bitcoin maxi.
Mhmm. Most people are kind of not really that interested in holding Bitcoin or in dealing with the headaches of all the taxes again, particularly in Western countries because Yeah. They just don't wanna deal with all of the headache. But if you could open your business up to the growing portion of the world that classifies themselves as Bitcoiners and say, look, we accept Bitcoin, but then not have to deal with any of the headaches involved with it, then seem like a win win to me. And, obviously, I'm sure there'll be some fees involved because at the end of the day, voltage is a business. Yeah. Yeah. I totally understand that. Like,
[00:24:58] Unknown:
if you're just a normal business and you think, you know, this Bitcoin thing is being spoken about, I'd kind of like to accept it or allow people to pay me in it, but I don't want the headache. I can totally see, you know, oh, what have I gotta do? I've gotta set up a BTC pay server, and now I've gotta have these lightning channel things, and I've gotta pay to host that somewhere else. And that costs $40 a month, and then, you know, I have to work out how to do it. And then, you know, and then I have to have my own wallet, and I have to worry about the keys. And you do all of that, and then it's like one or two people a month pays in Bitcoin. Mhmm. And then you've gotta fucking send it all to your account to your accountant, and they're gonna be like, oh, god. You know? Because most accountants are still, like, really not clued up on most of this stuff.
And I I can see that you'd just be like, oh, just outsource that shit. Yeah.
[00:25:50] Unknown:
Solving a problem. More power to them. Next up on the list, Panama City has approved Bitcoin and crypto payments for taxes, fees, and permits. Panama City Council has just voted in favor of becoming the first public institution of government to accept payments in crypto. Citizens will now be able to pay their taxes, fees, tickets, and permits entirely in crypto, starting with Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC, and USDT. There's those stablecoins again. Yeah. I don't have much more to add other than that was the news. Pretty cool. Isn't Panama already like a tax haven?
[00:26:27] Unknown:
I believe so. Yeah. So I don't understand what taxes you're paying there because I might be wrong, but I thought that there was no corporate tax, no income tax, and no capital gains tax. Might just be that you have to set up as a corporation, and then you get the benefits of that, and it's not for, like, private individuals.
[00:26:46] Unknown:
Possibly. It does say fees, tickets, and permits as well. So maybe it's, like, parking permits, parking tickets, parking fines. Property taxes or some sort of like Stuff like that.
[00:26:57] Unknown:
Okay. That's still good. Yeah. Pretty good if you're a whale. Yeah. But it's like it's a good, step in the right direction because I think with a lot of this stuff, it really is. It does come down to people are like, oh, I don't wanna spend because I have the cap gains or I don't wanna use it because it could be a problem here or an it's accounting headache. And I genuinely think that's one of the biggest hurdles. I think we talked about it maybe last month, but it's like for a lot of people, it's like, it's just easier just to spend fiat. It stops people really starting to use it because of the headache. So any step like that, even if it is paying for something gay like taxes or parking tickets, is still good. Absolutely.
[00:27:37] Unknown:
Yep. Couldn't agree more. Yeah. Have you ever been to Panama? I haven't actually. I'd like to. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. It does look cool. Next up on the list, we have Spa Supermarket. I was more shocked about the fact they have Spa in Switzerland, to be honest, than actually what The UK is here. I thought that was just The UK thing, but surely I was wrong. Yeah. Yeah. So the spa supermarket in Switzerland now accepts Bitcoin via lightning, which is pretty cool. Very nice. To the whole of the spa network in Switzerland. I have no oh, here we go.
Oh, they've got 13,900 stores across 48 countries. So there's probably no more than, you know, a hundred in Switzerland. I would have thought it's not exactly a big country, is it? The spa location is one of the first cryptos most supermarkets in Switzerland where you can pay directly at the checkout via Bitcoin using l n URL, thanks to our new open crypto pay solution.
[00:28:36] Unknown:
Okay. I wonder if it actually happens because I'm sure there was talk about this a while ago, and then you could pay with lightning. Because my question would be, like, are they just treating it like cash then? Presumably, they are because all these generally, all these regulations and stuff is as soon as you can spend cash and stuff. But if you wanna even think about spending Bitcoin or anything else, they want a fucking life story about where the funds are from and what you're doing and all your KYC information and blah blah blah. Like, are they just saying, okay. Whereas lightning is like cash.
[00:29:13] Unknown:
Presumably so. I don't I don't know what the capital gains laws are in Switzerland. That's an interesting point, really. Because, like, you don't wanna be paying capital gains tax on a pack of cigarettes, do you? They're already taxed now. Really? No. Yeah. Exactly.
[00:29:28] Unknown:
Yeah. I don't maybe, Switzerland no capital gains? Maybe it is. I think it might be one of those ones like Germany where you have to have held for, like, a year or some sort of some sort of rule like that. And then after that point, it's I don't know. I just don't know how they work that out because, you know, lightning payments are relatively private, and then so they can't really tell any information about you. And unless they're IDing you while you go and buy your packet of cigarettes and pay for them with lightning, then they don't know who you are.
So it's like cash. Lend BT,
[00:30:04] Unknown:
Bitcoin, capital, gains, tax. Let's do some,
[00:30:08] Unknown:
let's take this as a research life on air. Yeah. Here we go. Here we go. Just out of interest, do you use AI when you're searching stuff? Would you still do the old school Google?
[00:30:17] Unknown:
I'm still, yeah, just typing it into the address bar, seeing what comes up. No school like the old school? If it's something, like, I know I'm I'm gonna have to go back and forth a little bit to get, like, multiple piece of information, then I'll use AI. But if it's just like one thing where I need to know what are the capital gains laws in Switzerland, then I'll just type it to the address bar.
[00:30:40] Unknown:
Interesting.
[00:30:41] Unknown:
Yeah. And there is zero. Private investors do not pay capital gains tax on your crypto gains. It's only businesses and self employed traders who pay capital gains. There we are. So there you go. Go to Switzerland for your cigarettes.
[00:30:55] Unknown:
Yeah. Except that Switzerland's extremely expensive. I went there a few years ago, and I was like, okay. Yeah. This is
[00:31:04] Unknown:
this is heavy. So what you're saying is it cheaper to stay in The UK and buy them in in The UK with capital gains tax?
[00:31:13] Unknown:
I'd I'd imagine so. Unless you're I think if you work in Switzerland, you earn a lot more than you do in The UK, and therefore, it, like, balances out. But if you're, like, going from The UK or you have a UK job and you go over there, I'm pretty sure, like, I might be slightly out on this, but getting a sandwich at the airport was, like, £15. Yeah. I remember being there. I went with my missus. We went for a couple of days, and I was like, yeah. This is fucking like, this is probably expensive. So it sort of all levels out, I guess. Indeed.
[00:31:47] Unknown:
Last one on the news, I think you I'll I'll pan this one over to you because I know you mentioned it with John, and you might have a bit more information on it. But, there's a new fund around for the Ashigaru developer team. Is that right?
[00:31:59] Unknown:
Yes. There is. Well, there's a couple of things. There's a new fund for Ashigaru developers that I don't know if I'm supposed to say who set up or what, so I'll I'll kinda keep it brief. But, basically, you can donate directly to support them, and we're gonna put a link in the show notes. I think it's through Geyser. It is. I'm looking at it right now. The last one I saw was a a very generous donation from Black Coffee. So thank you, Black Coffee. You legend. He did a very, kind donation across. We've seen quite a few others. Most of them were anonymous. Anyone who wants to support them, you can do that directly, and that's just good to see. It's an incredible project.
We're also going forward, I think, from this episode forward. 10% of the total pot of all boosts now goes to them. 10% goes to free samurai. Free samurai and Ashigaru are both now being supported with every boost.
[00:32:53] Unknown:
Love to hear it. Yeah. At the time of recording, the fund is currently at 413,000 sats. Wow. With Black Coffee top off the list with a hundred dollars, which at the time of recording is a 13,000 stats. So, let's pump those numbers, people. It doesn't matter whether it's a dollar or a hundred dollars. Just just give what you can because, it's a very important wallet, and, you know, I wanna see it prosper.
[00:33:19] Unknown:
Yeah. Definitely. And final point on that is for everyone who is whinging and moaning about open sats or any of these other companies and the KYC and all that stuff, which I don't agree with either. I don't think it's great, obviously. But if you want change and you wanna actually see devs that won't dox themselves, and they would be stupid to dox themselves to get that grant money, you wanna see them supported, and you wanna carry on this cypherpunk ethos and do things properly, then here's your chance. Don't just whinge about it on Twitter. Get your purse out and, send them a few sats.
[00:33:55] Unknown:
Absolutely. Before we hit the boosts, I was listening to Action News this morning. Is, is Oh, yeah. John okay? Is he okay? Oh, god.
[00:34:07] Unknown:
It depends what you mean.
[00:34:09] Unknown:
He's a bit stressed. He's a bit stressed. He's he's a bit fragile. He seems a bit highly strong at the moment. I kind of
[00:34:16] Unknown:
wanna fly over there and just give him a little sweetie just to calm him down. Give him a little cuddle. I'd like to go and give him a little cuddle. I think he needs it. Maybe we could both fly over and both. Just give him a couple at the same time. Should we just turn up to his house? Yeah. Definitely. He has a lot of guns. So I think maybe just before we arrive, we might wanna just say, John, it's us sneaking up on you. But, yeah, I think we should. I think it'd be nice. He's he's a stressed man. I know some of the stuff that he's dealing with at the moment. He's been working, obviously, always really hard, like, running the mesh to Dell and the pleb minor groups and doing the shows with me and getting all the info to let people know everything they need to know about mining and stats and all this kind of stuff. But on top of that, he also has a day job, and he's trying to start something else new and a family. And you know what it can be like. He's just, right now, he's in the thick of it and, dealing with a lot of shit. But, hopefully, in sort of a few months, things will turn around, and some of this hard work that he's putting in will start to pay off. But, yeah, he is, he is stressed.
[00:35:23] Unknown:
Take it easy, John. Take it easy, mate.
[00:35:26] Unknown:
We love you, mate. We do. Yeah.
[00:35:30] Unknown:
Boosts. Top of the shop, as always at the moment, is our good friend late stage HODL with 50,000 sats. Out of The UK. Congrats. I don't need to know where you moved, but I hope to one day meet you in person. Q, I already met you, but maybe in the future, I can buy you both a beer or 10. I would love that.
[00:35:51] Unknown:
I would love that too. I very much look forward to that. And, yeah, I'm not, advertising where I am, but I appreciate the message, mate, and very happy to be gone. Look forward to having a beer with you in queue or 10 very soon. Compliant banana with 11,111 sats. Bitcoin Derby would like to welcome you. Bitcoin Derby would like to welcome you to our next meetup, which will take place at Ye Olde Dolphin D E 13 D L on Saturday, May at 3PM. We will discuss bootstrapping your own Ashigaru wallet and its wide variety of tools. PS, DOJ statement is merely a fart in the wind until the samurai and tornado cache TC cases are dropped.
Hashtag free samurai, hashtag free Roman. Yeah. Completely agree with that, and thank you very much for the boost. And good to see you're gonna be using the, the Ashigaru slides we've been working on. Yeah. I saw those. Very, very cool. Pretty good, aren't they? They are indeed. All these meetups, I've been to a few, and and it's very easy for people just to sort of stand with a beer in their hand and chat about how great Bitcoin is. And we just thought it'd be nice actually to be able to offer full presentations for people to use and actually learn and try things and stuff. So, yeah, Jordan and ex patriotic have been working hard on those and, basically, gonna be available for any meetups to download and use and help educate the people who go there and get them running Ashigaru, and we'll be doing others, very soon as well.
So hopefully people find them useful.
[00:37:42] Unknown:
Love to see it. Next up, eight myth randir, seven thousand seven hundred and 70 seven sats. And he just said congrats on getting out of The UK.
[00:37:50] Unknown:
Thank you, mate. Barnabas, Podverse, six thousand nine hundred and sixty nine sats. Do not update your BTC pay server if you accept Monero, my dudes. Ask Seth or Jordan for deets. Well, I'm glad I didn't. I think we talked about that the other week, didn't we? I was like, yeah. I'm just leaving it alone. I know there's an update, but fuck that. Like, if something is working, I leave it, and there we are. That's why. Well,
[00:38:19] Unknown:
maybe take a note for you and Seth to cover why you wouldn't wanna update on the Monero show because I'm not exactly sure why you wouldn't wanna do it. Clearly, something's broken somewhere, but, because you get some more details so people can be more aware. I'll try and remember that one. I'm recording with him tomorrow morning, so I will try and remember that. Send him my regards.
[00:38:40] Unknown:
I will do. I will do. He's a busy boy as well, isn't he? Yeah. You could say that. Yeah. Shadowy badger, five thousand sats,
[00:38:47] Unknown:
welcoming back the Phoenix Oligarchs. So this is in reference to Phoenix coming back into Mhmm. The USA now that the regulatory landscape looks a little bit more favorable. So good to see. Yeah.
[00:39:02] Unknown:
Shadrach with 3,993 sats. I'm really glad you got off the island max. Hashtag forty hours per week headphone emoji thing. Thank you, mate. It's been nice to have so many positive messages from people. Just, like, well done getting the fuck out of there. It's been nice. A lot of DMs and supportive words and things like that. So thank you to everyone.
[00:39:27] Unknown:
Chad Farrow. It says Chad Farrow and 33 others with 1,111 SATs. But I don't know where the 33 others comes in. I'm a bit confused by that. But, anyway, here's what Chad said. Correct q and a. You can run your own Nostra Relay. I have one locally on my start night and one in the cloud. I should look into downloading my data from other relays and put them on mine. Yes. You should, sir. For me, I use Nostra to see if anything cool can be used in the podcasting two point o. In fact, I've been listening to this episode and streaming sets in Podverse because it uses my own lightning node. This boostogram from Fountain is just so it shows up on Nosta.
Cross app comments have been a hot topic in podcasting two point o for years, so I'm just trying to pump the data into the system to see how it goes. Doing this in Fountain is also the easiest way to do so since the episode in Fountain is the root post for the Nosta comments. I'd love my boostograms from the apps using AlbiHub to be posted to Nosta, but it's not a deal breaker because using Podverse with my own node is already my dream setup so the devs can do whatever they want with their apps. I rambled a little, so my 333 sat boost got upgraded to a satchel of Richards.
Oh, so that here is the aforementioned 333 sat boost where he just said, Nosta users are like vegans, LOL. Your sound bite from the the previous show. And, he also said his buddy at bit point bit punk dot f m is typing calls Nosta the ham radio of social media. That's pretty, yeah, good analogy as well. And then finally, Chad Farrow again with another 333 sats. He said these birds are killing me, but the show must go on. I've seen a lot of comments around the birds on the last show, which was in allegedly the back part of your audio. I didn't hear anything the whole way through the recording.
[00:41:22] Unknown:
But were you on a dog walk walking around with headphones and listening, and therefore, maybe you thought that it was, like, birds where you were walking?
[00:41:32] Unknown:
I've seen multiple people complaining about the the birds. Oh, I've had people complaining.
[00:41:38] Unknown:
I've had people praising it, and then I've had people like Barn who did both. He whinged about it nonstop, like, in messages, giving me his life story about how he was on the phone to someone, and then that was in the background. And there was these bird I was like, honestly, I couldn't care less, mate. And then he jumps on the pod, and then he's like, yeah. Yeah. Why why haven't we got the birds? I really like that. I was like, what the fuck? It feels like that could be a feature edition for fountain. So you know, like, you go on websites and you have, like, dark mode and light mode. You could open up fountain, play on the latest Bitcoin brief, and then turn on bird mode. Oh, bird mode. Yeah. That'd be nice. I've actually sat inside in a bathroom to record this again as I did on the last episode just so everyone can stop fucking whinging about the bird noises. Well, I must admit your, audio is pretty good considering you sat in a a room that's normally quite echoey. Yeah. Yeah. It's not bad.
[00:42:33] Unknown:
I've got a vision now of you you sat on the toilet with your laptop on your knee and a microphone set up on a stand next to the toilet.
[00:42:40] Unknown:
You're not far off, mate. You're not far off. We're not quite at that level in our relationship where I would record a podcast with you watching.
[00:42:49] Unknown:
I don't need proof
[00:42:51] Unknown:
of it either. No. But we're not we're not far off. I could be in the bath. Do you know what? I've actually thought about doing that a few times. I was like, I can't remember which ones they were where I've had a fucking bad headache, like, almost migraine level where I can barely function. I've had to record. And I've really been close to being like, I'll just run a hot bath and then just record from here. Like, who's gonna know? I haven't done it yet, but maybe one day. I look forward to the day I'm listening to one of your shows, and I can just hear, like, a faint splash in the background. Splash the rubber ducky. Yeah.
It'd be quite nice to record from a bath. Should we do it next time? I think we should. I think that'd be quite fun. Just have a little recording for a bath or I mean, a hot tub would be amazing, but we're not at that level in life yet. So let's do bath. Unfortunately, not. Yeah. We need to we need to keep hold it for another twenty years yet. FOMO chronic, 1,001 sats, no message. Gin with seven seventy seven SATs. Cheers to getting out of The UK. Cheers to you, mate. Thank you. Hi, Ken. We're 500 SATs. Thank you for sharing. You're laughing. I'm gonna say that differently. Hi. It was just you're just like, hi. Yeah.
Hi, Ian. Thanks for sharing useful information in the space.
[00:44:11] Unknown:
You're so to me that Probably to do with Hayek, the the economists.
[00:44:16] Unknown:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Hayekian. Okay. I was reading about your book. Japanese y sort of style. Yeah. But, yeah, I prefer that writing.
[00:44:28] Unknown:
We've got time with 350 sets. No message. Pies, 250 sets. Last boost for a while. Thank you, gentlemen. I wonder where you go in pies.
[00:44:37] Unknown:
I'm intrigued. Yeah. I'd like to know. He said he was, like, going to ground for a bit or something. Interesting. Jinkie's been put on a list. I I think he's on every list knowing pies. I would imagine. They say 500 points. Mate. Yeah. Yeah. Anonymous with 350 sats. No message. W with a 21 sats. Orbot for iOS still sucks. Monkey nuts emojis Drops the connection and restarts every minute or two. Keep complaining till it's better. Salute emoji. Max, your critique of Nostra's private key issue is spot on. Although I bet q is about to explain why it's no longer an issue. Pausing the episode now. It's a problem. Yes. And people are working on it. But since you point out that it's essential essentially, various risk of rug pull and account oh my god, man. I can't read.
Rub pull and account compromise that hold you back. I'd ask what sort of alternatives are instead worth putting in the time and energy. To me, it's the best solution yet for distributed digital information network beyond simply social media use cases, by the way, since basically everything else is centralized. Did I lose you? I just heard, like, a a No. I'm still here. Ping. Okay. Alright. At least on Nosta, there is a pretty good solution. And you can use something like Albie or Nostor to securely store your NSEC in a single app and consign events on your behalf without exposing your private key. Still clunky, but we're still early and all that. I see it as a centrist fuck me.
I see it as a sense. I see it as a censorship resistant communication layer for Bitcoin. If the centralized communication providers were to someday begin censoring all things Bitcoin or Monero. Now unpausing. Okay. Froster. Holy fuck. Multi sync security with key rotation, flexibility and authorized signing convenience. That sounds pretty damn fixed to me. Being meaning to explore frost for Bitcoin means to explore frost for Bitcoin. Isn't that where this came from? Oh, and all bought for iOS still sucks monkey nuts.
[00:47:15] Unknown:
I love that they brought us on a journey and told us when they were pausing it and unpausing it and the realization of, yep, q did answer the question later in the show. So Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. I was it made me chuckle up when I read it. And, yes, you are right. Like, it it stems from, like, the the frost application of Bitcoin, hence the the name.
[00:47:34] Unknown:
Well, great message. Thank you for that, and, thank you for everyone trying to listen through my awful reading. I think anything that's longer than, like, a sentence or two should not be attempted by me in future.
[00:47:47] Unknown:
Fair enough. Next one is up from John, and he said that there are still a few more mesh economy boxes left. What's a mesh con economy box, Max? Tell us. That is what
[00:47:59] Unknown:
we discussed on the last episode. It's a collection of items produced by people in the mesh to del coffee, candles, stickers on this one, and it's to help support the circular economy and actually, buy products from Bitcoiners who make them themselves. So it's pretty cool, and it's just a way for us to, help people find those producers. Pretty sweet. Like it. Yeah. And you can check it out on the website. Final thank you to,
[00:48:30] Unknown:
oh, no. Sorry. Max Wood with two hundred and ten sats. Thanks to Max and Keith for your great work. Explosion emoji. Thank you, sir. Thank you. And final thank you to Poe Jan Mees, two thousand seven hundred and fifty six sat streamed. Cas Peland, one thousand nine hundred and twenty one sat streamed. We all eat streamed 1,183
[00:48:51] Unknown:
sat, and that's it for the top streamers. Thank you very much, guys. Yeah. Thank you, Tovrona. You know, Poe Jan Meeze is the unpronounceable cunt. He's changed his name back, I think. Interesting. Well, that is definitely unpronounceable. Yeah. As you mispronounced it, I was like, I, it all makes sense there. Docs themselves. So bad spelling. Updates and releases.
[00:49:14] Unknown:
Updates and releases. And before, just in case Tickle Me Tummy is listening and thinking, hang on a minute. I boosted on the last show. Yes. We have received your XML. Thank you very much. We're gonna hit your question at the end in the question section, so don't think that we have forgotten that. No. We'd never seen that. Updates and releases here. Bitcoin Keeper has had a bit of a rebrand. New logo, slightly different color, and some different text on the kind of the logo itself. Bitcoin Keeper, new brand, same commitments like that. Obviously, the the link to the blog post will be in the show notes.
They have just continued to kind of iterate and kind of clean up the app and stuff. And I've said it once. I'll say it again, but it seems like Ben is having a a very big impact over there. Ben,
[00:50:00] Unknown:
what's his surname? Ben Ark? Ben Gunn? Ben oh, Ben Kaufman. Ben Kaufman. Yes. Indeed.
[00:50:06] Unknown:
Yes. He went away for a long time, and then he's just come back. He did. Yeah. He, like, took over Bitcoin Twitter and gained all of the followers and then just disappeared. But, nice to see him back and doing good work. They've also released version 2.2, which contains the new branding. They've also now added testnet support. And they've also got something called Bitcoin Keeper private, which I have no idea what that is. So I'm gonna do some more research on it and find out for us all. I like research on it. It's good. My guess is it's for private clients.
[00:50:43] Unknown:
Oh, okay. Which is a weird one because if you have private clients, then you have to gather information on those private clients, which makes them less private.
[00:50:52] Unknown:
Keeper private is a premier end to end concierge service designed to its designed to assist high net worth individuals and institutions in acquiring and holding Bitcoin while ensuring its long term security. It includes setup guidance, hardware wallet kit, reminders and check ins, and inheritance planning.
[00:51:13] Unknown:
Okay.
[00:51:14] Unknown:
So it just seems like a bit of a white glove service essentially for for rich people. So it counts you you and me out, mate, unfortunately.
[00:51:20] Unknown:
Yeah. Unfortunately. There we are.
[00:51:23] Unknown:
The next one we have is a Fidelity bond calculator, which is just a cool little tool I wanted to to mention, that has popped up. I think we've spoken about Fidelity bonds within joint market before. What quick TLDR is kind of it's a Fidelity bond. There's some Bitcoin that you can elect to lock up for a certain amount of time to show your commitment to be a good actor within the Joy Market ecosystem. This tool essentially, helps potential market makers within Joy Market evaluate how competitive their position would be based on any given load of different parameters. So they can kind of work it out based on their criteria and kind of benchmark that against the current market situation before they, go ahead and lock up those funds. Yeah. The next one we have on the list is a blog post by second dot tech. Link in the show notes. Introducing Erk, e r k, which is ARC without liveness requirements.
The reason I mentioned this one is basically just to be able to have an excuse to talk about ARC. I've had a couple of questions in and around the show on, Nostra and Twitter about it lately, and it's a rabbit hole. I've started to go back down for two main reasons. Number one was the questions, and number two was that, seems to be talked about a lot more often now and seems to be getting towards proof of concept stage, which for me is kind of a green light to start paying something a bit more attention. Yeah.
So what's your basic understanding of of ARC at the moment, Max, if any? Yeah. Fuck all, really.
[00:53:01] Unknown:
I think it's some type of second layer solution that's sort of lightning ish, but, that it's, like, swapping UTXOs on the back end or some sort there's some sort I can't remember. Basically, fuck all. My my first statement is correct. Fuck all. No fuck. So most of that was kind of loosely right where it's like Nonsense. Lightning ish.
[00:53:28] Unknown:
So so Lightning scales by allowing people to do off chain transactions where they'll basically just share a two of two multisig where there's normally a singular UTXO that is kind of shared between the two participants within that channel. And then, you know, it as they transact back and forth, who owns what percentage of that UTXO on chain is kind of updated. Yeah. So that scales for basically means two people could share a UTXO, which is is scaling, but it's not, you know, massive amounts of scaling. And, yes, of course, you know, with Lightning, you have Onion Reason as well. So it's not just a case of, you know, you can only pay who you have a channel with. You can hop through various different nodes.
But that then brings with you all of the headaches that we have in Lightning, like liquidity management, etcetera, etcetera. So ARC, aims to fix kind of two of those things where with ARC, it is it enables more than two people to share a UTXO. I don't actually know if there's any technical limits on how many people can share a UTXO. But in the podcast I've been listening to, they've been talking in the order of thousands as if it's kind of run of the mill. Clearly, an exponential growth in terms of, like, scaling ability. And, also, because there are no channels or the concept of channels within Arc, you don't have any of the liquidity drawbacks that you do with with Lightning. The main two being if you wanna receive straightaway on Lightning, you can't because you've got no inbound liquidity.
And if you want to send larger amounts, you're once again beholden to the liquidity along that payment route. Arc doesn't have any of that. All it does essentially is use the magic of Taproot and Signature Merkle trees to basically say, okay. I'm an ARC provider. I kind of coordinate all of the people that are within my ARC that wanna share this given UTXO. The whole thing obviously is constructed in such a way that every person that is has a part of of that one UTXO has what we call that all important unilateral exit.
Basically, they can go back out on chain without the permission from the service provider as they're called within the Arc ecosystem. So that's the kind of main point here that makes it tangible as possibly becoming a layer two is that just like lightning for all its faults, if you wanna get out of it, you can do so trustlessly, and you can just settle on chain. Again, there's gonna be fees involved with that. But Arc, to my kind of early rudimentary, understanding, seems to be a pretty cool and very, very promising improvement to the scaling that is offered by Lightning by removing two of the main hurdles of it.
Now I'm not gonna sit here and say that I fully understand it, and I'm sure there's gonna be loads of different trade offs, that will come out in the washes as ARC gets closer and closer to being kind of live. But it's definitely something I'm a lot more interested in now now that I've got a bit more of a better understanding for it. The main kind of drawback that I've kind of gained a little bit of an understanding on at the moment is the kind of interactivity requirements. So all of these, state updates where you have basically a share of a singular UTXO, which they call virtual UTXOs, they all require kind of signatures, basically.
And you just hold on to the the part of the transaction tree that means that you can kind of exit out of that unilaterally. That requires a lot of interactivity back and forth, which is obviously not great from for for mobile users. I believe that this could be drastically reduced if we get a covenant style soft fork in Bitcoin, something like CTV. That would reduce that almost to zero, but it's very much possible to achieve without all of that sort of stuff, again, which makes it interesting to me because we're not waiting for some arbitrary point in the future that may or may not ever arrive. So, yeah, I'm quite interested by it at the moment. I'm gonna be paying a bit more attention to the, the kind of proof of concepts that come out and things like that. But, yeah, seems pretty cool. And, hopefully, to the people that have asked for a quick, what is ARC that that's done, you know, a basic 5,000 foot view of it. Any questions that have cropped up in my very simplistic explainer there? Just what do you think is the biggest
[00:57:47] Unknown:
drawback? And do you think this replaces lightning given time, or do you think it's just gonna be an additional or it just worry it won't happen at all? Because it's been talked about for ages.
[00:57:58] Unknown:
Yeah. I think it's complimentary to Lightning. Like, you could exit an arc straight into Lightning. If you're, I don't know, like an exchange or you have a direct channel with somebody that you know for a fact you're gonna be paying backwards and forwards repeatedly over time, then lightning still makes more sense because it's you're already doing that kind of headache, and you know that you're gonna be paying that individual back and forth. Like, you don't need to include an ASP and ARC service provider in that kind of relationship. So I don't think it kind of removes the need for Lightning at all, but it certainly I think this makes more sense for at the edges of the network where people are kind of onboarding where they you know?
Well, we know all of the the headaches that we have with Lightning and, particularly around inbound liquidity, etcetera, etcetera. And, you know, there are already solutions that kind of fix that with different trade offs like the Phoenix model where they just take fees from you and give you just the time channels, etcetera. I think it's definitely gonna be a viable alternative. The other unanswered question I have at the moment, and I'm sure it has been answered, I just haven't found it yet, is, like, if if everybody in the arc wanted to exit at the same time, I'm sure that's gonna cause headaches or problems somewhere along the line. I don't quite know what that looks like, but it feels like there there could be a a risk of, like, a rush, you know, a mass rush for the bank run.
Yeah. Exactly. My guess is that the ARC service provider would need to be, like, over collateralized to be able to deal with multiple runs like that, I'm guessing. And then the other one, which is very similar to Lightning, is that if you're doing this for small amounts where, let's say, you're just testing it out and you've got maybe not small amounts. It depends on the feed market, I guess. Let's say you do do it for you test now with 10,000. Like, if you try to unilaterally exit from an ARC with 10,000 and fees or a hundred sats per byte, like, you're gonna end end up with nothing. So I think it's great for certain I won't say larger amounts because 10,000 sats is not a lot of money. But for, like, amounts approaching the dust limit, like, you essentially, it's not censorship resistant because if you try to exit on your own in an adversarial environment onto the chain, you're just gonna lose everything to fees Yeah. Yeah. In a very same way you would with lightning. Yeah. So, yeah, something I'm gonna keep my eyes on what, seems to be pretty cool and pretty promising and slowly but surely is turning
[01:00:29] Unknown:
into something tangible rather than it me wrongly considering it to be potential vaporware for the past couple of years since it's been announced and talked about. Yeah. Well, I think you I think the safest thing to assume when things like this are talked about is that they are gonna be vaporware and that they probably won't ever happen. You just wait until it gets a bit more substantial. Otherwise, you waste so much fucking time thinking about, like, what might potentially be, but then ends up not. And it's just yeah. It's a massive time sink.
[01:00:59] Unknown:
Yeah. Indeed. Right. We're through the last couple of bits. Link in the show notes for updates on something called Awesome CTV and CheckSig from Stack. Just a software proposal. We've spoken about CTV before, and it's just got lots of resources linked to that as this is, again, something that seems to be gaining a lot of developer, focus, and chatter. Seems to be a a pretty good resource to, you know, go and really dig in and get your turbo nerd on, if you're interested in that sort of stuff. Yeah. BTP server 2.1, we talked about on the last show. Rockstar Dev, the developer, has now released a video tutorial on using the new multisig feature in there, which is pretty interesting to go and check out. And there's also one in there about using, ChildPay for Parent and RBF functionality as well. So they could be pretty useful, particularly if you're a merchant that uses B2C Pay.
Last two, Coinswap version zero point one point one has been released with protocol efficiency, security, and usability improvements. So this was another one that kind of went quiet for quite some time, and then I didn't even know it was still being worked on. And then it looks like somebody has, you know, released a new update for it. So Coinswap was the, Greg Maxwell slash Chris Belcher proposal that Yeah. As a privacy technique where somehow using some cryptographical magic, you were able to swap, essentially private keys to UTXOs trustlessly with other people on the on the chain. Yeah. I never really quite worked out how it worked. But No. Me neither. And, again, this was one I just chalked up to vaporware until I see some, you know, user facing, tools around it. So maybe, once again, we're edging closer to that. A quick TLDR here. This is a good summary. Coinswap is a decentralized protocol for private trustless cryptocurrency swaps. It allows participants to securely swap digital assets without intermediaries using advanced cryptographic techniques and atomic swaps to ensure privacy and security.
This release introduces major improvements to the protocol's efficiency, security, and usability, including custom in memory UTXO indexes, more advanced coin selection algorithms, fidelity bonds, and more. So I believe this is still yeah. The there's a live test net market if you wanna go and test this out. But, once again, I, just keeping an eye on this one. Very complex, and I always Okay. I don't know. I I struggle with getting really enthusiastic about things like this that are really complex until I fully understand them. But with CoinSwap, I'm not sure I'm ever gonna get to that point. So maybe I just need to press some buttons on testnet and see how it works.
[01:03:36] Unknown:
Also, I'm not sure that I like it as a option anyway even if it worked just because you're swapping a UTXO key to a UTXO with somebody else, and then you don't know necessarily who that person is or where they're gonna use your UTXO. So if yours was KYC'd or links to somehow your identity in some way, and then they use it in some way that some government doesn't deem to be legal or whatever bullshit they come up with, I feel like you could just end up landing yourself in more shit. Like, I feel like it could be more of a problem than a solution.
[01:04:18] Unknown:
Yeah. I think we've this has been the main critique of the, of the whole protocol since it was released years and years ago. It's probably been at least four years now or something like that. And I I I agree. Yeah. It's like you you could be inheriting somebody else's unfavorable UTXO history. So for me, it kinda makes sense Yeah. As, like, a Postmates tool or something like that. And clearly, there's a joint market influence here as well because they're talking about joint market they're talking about fidelity bonds, etcetera, as well. So perhaps that is the end goal, and it it is a cool additional to, you know, swap a post mix GTXO.
That makes more sense to me. But, once again, we'll we'll see how things unfold.
[01:05:00] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. You're right. If it's part of doing other things, I just you know, it's no whirlpool is my point. It's like Agreed. It's a big trade off, and it it could be more risky than it is helpful. But,
[01:05:12] Unknown:
yeah, if you use it with other stuff, then maybe. Do you think we'll ever get Whirlpool back? Do you think there's a, 50% chance that we'll get it back in the next five years?
[01:05:23] Unknown:
I have faith that we will. Yeah. I think there are enough people who care, and I don't think there's any solution within the Bitcoin ecosystem that has done the job as well as Whirlpool did. Certainly, I'm I haven't found it if there is. So I think there is a massive need for it. I think maybe there's gonna be someone who's brave enough to do this. I would say within the next five years, I would be fairly confident it happens. Or maybe that's just hope, though. What about you?
[01:05:59] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm again, this is based on absolutely zero, like, insider knowledge or anything like that. This is purely conjecture. But, yeah, I I think somebody will do it within five years. I'm hopeful. Mhmm. I think a lot of it hinges on the outcome of the summary case, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. Do we get somebody rogue that does it anyway?
[01:06:21] Unknown:
Maybe. I mean, maybe. It's just it's such a massive target Oh, yeah. At this point in time that I think also, it doesn't mean that there isn't someone out there working on something, and maybe it isn't implemented in the exact same way that it was previously. Like, it it might be, a similar but slightly different approach because, you know, basically, it's life or death. Like, if someone does this as it currently stands, someone can come in and fucking take your life away, basically, ruin your life because they don't like what you're doing with your software. So I completely understand it's not back at the moment, but, my feeling is that, yeah, at some point.
[01:07:03] Unknown:
Yeah. Last one on the list, we talked about at length about key management in Nosta. Android users have had a wonderful solution for quite some time now called Amber, but iOS users have not had the same luxury until now. There is, a new application that's been released on iOS that essentially does the same thing. It's a dedicated app on your iPhone or iPad that you basically just trust with your Nostra private key, and then it talks over the Nostra network to all of your other Nostra applications to sign all of the events and stuff so that you can just put your singular trust into one app rather than pasting your NSEQ everywhere.
Annoyingly, this is called a GS or Aegis, and there's already a well known app called I never know how to say it, but that for,
[01:07:51] Unknown:
for two FA codes and stuff. A GS, I think, is also like they sponsor or bought what was the Rose Bowl in Hampshire, the Rose Bowl cricket place. And I think a a GEAS who bought that, I think that's like an insurance company or something.
[01:08:06] Unknown:
Bit annoying with the name, but good to see that, iOS fanboys has now got a viable solution with the to deal with their end execs. Very good. We had a question at the end, didn't we? Yeah. We did. We did indeed. It's from Tickle Me Tommy with 0.0479XMR. Thank you, sir. BTC brief question. Full KYC is an obvious no go, but are there uses for services like GetBitter? They seem to be more privacy focused than a centralized exchange. Yeah. So you've already alluded correctly in in the question that GetBitter and similar services are not or should not be classified as no KYC. But are they better than a quote, unquote centralized exchange? Well, I'd still class get better as centralized, but I I I get what you're trying to ask here. You're comparing them to something like Binance or Coinbase.
Are they better? Yes. Absolutely. The reason for that, in my opinion, is that these services, because of where they're domiciled, they only allow you to buy certain amounts of Bitcoin, and they are able by limiting the amount of Bitcoin that you buy, are able to ask you for the bare minimum amount of information. To my knowledge, that is essentially just your banking information, which obviously Yeah. Can be tied to you in an instant. So then then that's the reason I say they shouldn't be considered as no KYC. But is that distinctly better than you signing up to Coinbase and having to give them three month bank statements, a selfie, a video, a picture of your cat's dick, etcetera? Then, yes, of course, it's 10 times better. So if somebody was, like, hell bent on wanting to do recurring buys and things like that and they they kind of weren't that bothered about the whole privacy side of things, would I send them to something like GetBitter versus Coinbase?
Absolutely. 100%.
[01:09:59] Unknown:
Yeah. Is it a Swiss
[01:10:01] Unknown:
company? I believe so. Yeah. Most of these similar type services all seem to be domiciled in Switzerland because I think it's 1,000 Swiss francs a day, a week, or a month or something like that is the limit. And they basically just need banking information. But it's buy only. I don't know that you can sell with them as well.
[01:10:21] Unknown:
No idea. Good point. I'm not sure. Yeah. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if you can or not. And in which case, it's not like a full exchange exchange.
[01:10:29] Unknown:
But, yeah, it's definitely better. Just looking at the Bitter website now, and it only has a buy button. So, yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is only buy, but it's definitely, yeah, definitely better.
[01:10:40] Unknown:
If someone wants to or a government wants to cause problems, they can easily do that with your banking details and find you and track you and everything. So don't treat it like it's peer to peer or anything like that, but it's it's a good middle ground. It's certainly better than a a full on exchange.
[01:10:56] Unknown:
Agreed. Right. Brings us to the end of the list. So any final business before I go and piss my pants and grab a coffee?
[01:11:05] Unknown:
Are you gonna piss your pants first and then grab a coffee, or are you gonna piss your pants while having a coffee? What I was probably gonna do is just go to the toilet first, not piss my pants, and then make your coffee. Okay. Then, no, I will let you go and, piss in peace, and I'll catch you on the next one, mate. Thanks, mate. See you later.
