Monerokon + BTC Prague takeaways
Bitcoin tracing is a problem
FCMP++ update
Software updates
Cake Wallet updated to v5.0.0/5.0.1
p2pool updated to v4.8/4.8.1
Haveno/RetoSwap updated with new UI
Stack Wallet updated to v2.2.2
Bitcoin tracing is a problem
- https://x.com/coinbureau/status/1930888638814208107
- https://x.com/metaryuk/status/1938071197163634895
FCMP++ update
[..] we’re pretty happy now with divisors and we let MRL know that this past Wednesday [..] The actual issue was that Monero Research Lab wanted an answer within X number of weeks. [..] That was the whole Twitter scare of like ‘FCMPs has been delayed’. What was actually delayed by the way was the testnet. FCMPs itself was never promised at a particular time.. (Diego @ 27:20)BTCPay CCS making progress
- First update from the guys working on improving Monero support in BTCPay is out now
- Funding still needed!
- https://ccs.getmonero.org/proposals/btcpayserver-plugin.html
- https://monero.observer/deverickapollo-napoly-post-first-progress-report-btcpay-server-monero-plugin-ccs/
Software updates
Cake Wallet updated to v5.0.0/5.0.1
p2pool updated to v4.8/4.8.1
- Primarily bug fixes and some important security updates, time to update if you haven't yet!
- https://monero.observer/schernykh-releases-p2pool-v4.8-security-fixes/
- https://monero.observer/schernykh-releases-p2pool-v4.8.1-security-fixes/
- Fixes a bug with QR code amounts and adds a better translation framework
- https://monero.observer/monerujo-v4.1.7-exolix-released-fixes-translations-update/
Haveno/RetoSwap updated with new UI
Stack Wallet updated to v2.2.2
IMPORTANT LINKS
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(00:00:00) INTRO
(00:01:12) Crypto Conference Craziness
(00:12:23) The Lifestyle
(00:16:15) MoneroKon Insights
(00:30:52) British Tangent
(00:34:17) BTC Pay Monero Plugin
(00:41:41) The Tracing Truth Pt. 2: Intel Hacker
(00:50:19) Cake Wallet 5.0: The BIg UI Update
(00:52:48) P2Pool DDOS Patches
(00:53:25) Monerujo Brings the Translations
(00:53:55) Unstoppable Swap GUI 2.0
(00:55:20) Haveno/RetoSwap New UI
(00:56:02) Stack Wallet Adds Cryptocurrencies
(01:20:05) BOOSTS
[00:00:01]
Unknown:
The business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every last seconds, eleven seconds. I am investigator investigator investigator. And I work supporting Our agenda for today, we're gonna start with just the basics of Monero. What it is, what it is, how it works, how it works. Monero is considered a privacy token.
[00:00:32] Unknown:
The world's most private
[00:00:34] Unknown:
privacy. Which means that in high, virtually all transaction details are exchanged. The world's most private
[00:00:41] Unknown:
privacy. He's back from traveling all the way around the world, hopping from country to country, spreading freedom and privacy. How we doing, mate? The month of craziness. So many planes,
[00:01:24] Unknown:
so many hotels, so many conferences. Four conferences in three weeks was the final count. It was a whirlwind, but Wow. Absolutely fantastic time. Absolutely fantastic. So which were the four? Since we last talked, because I think we recorded right before I went to Vegas. The last one. First up was Bitcoin Vegas. The crazy 30,000 person stay within a hotel and never walk outside Vegas experience, which is, like, the whole conference aside, like, just the reality of staying inside for, like, five days straight and never needing to go outside to do anything, to, like, eat, to chop, to go to the conference is, like, absolutely wild. It's very American. It's a little disgusting.
[00:02:02] Unknown:
It's proper American. It's, like, the most American thing that that I can think of as a British person. It's like everything is just massive and over the top. Like, you're saying you never have to leave. I remember going to, one of the big ones, and I remember being like, oh, fuck. I didn't pack, like, a smart shirt. We can go out to dinner in the fucking hotel. Mhmm. I was like, oh, I need to go and get something. And then they're like, oh, just go to the shop down there. I was like, where? They're like, I would just go take this elevator and go here. And I was like, fucking hell. There's a shopping center
[00:02:33] Unknown:
in the in the hotel.
[00:02:36] Unknown:
It's mad. Uh-huh. A nightclub in there and Jesus. It was unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Cosmopolitan, that was the one.
[00:02:43] Unknown:
Okay. Yeah. This was this was the Venetian, which I learned after arriving. It's the largest hotel complex in the world. Like, it's two hotels connected. This giant shopping mall with river that runs through it, gondolas, and you can take boat rides through a hotel because why not? Yeah. Exactly. Hilarious. It was absolutely absurd. But the conference itself was, I don't know. It was kind of what you expect. I love the guys who organized Bitcoin Vegas, Bitcoin Amsterdam, Bitcoin Asia conferences. A lot of them are good friends, but, like, the main stage content, like, let's just be honest. It's just not for us. It was bullshit. It suits its politicians. It's bankers. It's stable coin stuff. Yeah. It's just what mainstream crypto is now. But I understand they gotta sell tickets, but, obviously, it's not my cup of tea on the main stage. But the parts that are really cool are the open source stage Mhmm. Which they've leaned into even more this last year. They had, by far, the biggest stage I've seen for the open source setup. They had, like, a separate dev stage. Mhmm.
They did a really good job with that. I know a ton of people really enjoyed that. I didn't get to do much conference stuff as is the booth the booth babe way. I was mostly chained to the booth the booth babe. Being the pretty face of cake wallet. No. I didn't see a single presentation, actually. I had a panel and a presentation, so I did those, and then I don't have a chance to see any others. But working at the booth was fun. It it's one of those conferences where you have a lot of people who, like, basically don't even know Bitcoin. Like, tons of people who don't sell custody, tons of people who don't know what a wallet is. Like, very, very basic stuff, which is good from, like, user testing perspective. Had lots of really good conversations.
People love the idea of financial privacy. Yes. But just like I think I've mentioned on here as well before, there's this idea of Bitcoin only. It just it's not reality. At Bitcoin conference, which I know, like, specifically, the Bitcoin, I guess, conference has kind of joked about not being Bitcoin at all. But everyone there, they wanted a multi crypto wallet. They wanted Bitcoin and other stuff. They wanted Monero. Unfortunately, many of them wanted Ripple, which somehow is a cryptocurrency that still exists, and people ask about it. It's unbelievable.
[00:04:42] Unknown:
I think I said to you last time, I met someone here who's, like, a smart guy in every other sense of the word. Like, very smart, very nice guy, multiple very successful businesses. And he was like, yeah. Yeah. I'm into the Bitcoin stuff as well. We're, like, aligned with so much stuff, like, eats the same way, trains the same way, lots of thoughts on, like, how to raise kids, all very similar. And then he's like, yeah. Yeah. I've got Bitcoin. Yeah. But I'm leaning hard into XRP. And I was like, oh, no. Well, I just alright. Okay. I don't argue with people anymore. I'm like, okay. Cool. And then he's like, yeah. Yeah. You must be into it. Like, big platform play or whatever he was saying, like, all the buzzword stuff. And I was like I was like, no. It's not for me. I've just
[00:05:24] Unknown:
have no interest, but it's amazing how they're marketing. Yeah. But it's still like I legitimately, I haven't thought about Ripple in, like, five years. Like, I haven't heard the name. It was the first time it and I had that too. It was like it was like there were, like, three people. And, I mean, I talked to thousands of people. So, like, it's certainly not, like, a majority or anything, but there were, like, three people who were, like, trying to, like, show me on Ripple at the booth. And I'm like, I Oh, gosh. Like, how? How does this how does this still happen in 2025? But
[00:05:50] Unknown:
I could be shield on fiat currencies way better than I could be on Ripple. It's like I've got this thing. It's the great British pound. Let me tell you about it. I'm like, I can I can get on board? Like, I've gotta pay the the occasional bill. At least you can use it. You can work with that. You can actually spend it somewhere. It's it's
[00:06:06] Unknown:
probably more decentralized than Ripple, in all honesty. Yeah. I think you could argue that it is. It's hilarious. Yeah. That's always always insanity, but but really good time at the booth, especially just like being on a show for a new brand for the first time. It was a was a ton of fun. So enjoyed that. And then we had and if you're organizing a small conference out there, please don't overlap it by multiple days with a major conference. Like, I understand why people do this because they wanna be able to, like leech is too negative of a word, but piggyback off. Yeah. Piggyback off Yeah. Yeah. The people who are already attending the major conference. But Yeah. Everyone is, like, overlapping conferences these days. And, like, when I say we did four conferences, that means we did two conferences at a time. Like, I was at two conferences at a time twice over the last three weeks because there was the Litecoin Summit, which was the other conference that we were at, and that one overlapped one or two days with Bitcoin Vegas. So, like, we had to split up the team. I couldn't do much of that. I had to present and, like, go back and forth. Not ideal.
That conference was fine. Like, I'm just gonna be honest as well. Like, I'm just not a Litecoin guy. I think there's some really cool stuff with the privacy tech that they've done. Member Wimble extension blocks implemented in Cake Wallet. We're the only mobile wallet with that. And Mhmm. It's definitely interesting, but it certainly felt a bit dead. The community kind of did not feel lively, which is very different from Monero, which is also relatively small, like, when you compare it to Bitcoin, etcetera. But it feels like there's a lot of energy and, like, shared ethos in the Monero community even at smaller conferences. Whereas, like, when kind of felt it felt a little lost, which is interesting. That doesn't surprise me because you've got very clear path
[00:07:41] Unknown:
and goal with Monero. And I'd say like even more so than Bitcoin because you have so many like splits in community with Bitcoin. Whereas with Monero, it's like, we want the best privacy. This thing is used for certain use cases. We want privacy. That's it. And then with Litecoin, it's like, okay, it's basically Bitcoin with some parameters changed. And then it's kind of like a bit of a test net where you can throw on some extra stuff and no one's that bothered because the value of this thing isn't as big. So I can understand that it's this thing that was meant to be silver to Bitcoin Gold or whatever they used to say, and then it's like, it kinda doesn't make sense. So, okay, we'll pivot and have a bit of privacy thrown on.
But the privacy, I assume, isn't as good as Monero because otherwise, it would be everywhere on all the dot net markets and everything. The same thing with, like, Lightning. People are like, oh, Lightning's fucking the best privacy. It's like, well, it's obviously not because the market would decide. If it was the best privacy for sending, then there would be widespread use of this across all the dot net markets, but it is not. So that can't be true. Yeah. And I think on, like, the lightning thing specifically, I think what's often forgotten is user experience
[00:08:47] Unknown:
matters. The best tech does not always win. In reality, oftentimes, the best tech loses. There are many, many, many examples of this throughout history of just because the best technology doesn't mean it it wins either because it's lacking user experience or it's lacking in marketing or it's lacking in, like, an aligned clear product market fit for lack of a better word. Yeah. There's many times where the better technology doesn't win. And the lightning arguably is not the better technology than Minera anyways when it comes to privacy because there's so many variables. But I know we've talked about that a lot, but I think you nailed it on the head with the Litecoin thing. It's very much like there's not a clear goal. Like, even at the conference, there was, like, people trying to piggyback off the Bitcoin treasury stuff, doing Litecoin treasury stuff.
There was, like, conversations around trying to piggyback off the Bitcoin layer two stuff that's that's happening right now, like, bit b m and others, and there's, like, a a Litecoin variant. It's it's very much, like, still kinda stuck in this silver to Bitcoin's gold thing, like you mentioned, that old, like, that old thing that was, like, the sales pitch back in 2016, 2017, 2018, which is interesting, but really nice people there for sure. Like, when foundation folks been really nice to work with throughout and good reception for what we've been doing at Cake Wallet, but was definitely, like, different than I expected. I expected kind of, like like, my experience in smaller, like, single crypto conferences is that they're very lively and focused and aligned, and that felt very different from something like a MoneroCon, which I didn't expect, but I've never really been involved with the like one community either. So that was really kinda my first taste of things. Those were the two at first. Like I said, those overlaps, so a lot of back and forth. And then just last week, me and most of the cake team were out at Bitcoin Prague, BTC Prague, and then Monero Con, which overlapped by two days with BTC Prague. So, again, I hate the overlapping. I, unfortunately, had to miss most of Monero Con itself, so I I can't give, like, a ton of detail there. But quickly, I'm sorry on both. I think the main thing that I took away from Bitcoin Prague was there are a ton of Manera users there. Like, a ton of Manera users there.
We had I I I can't even count how many people came up to us, and we're already Monero users, already k quality users, or were, like, explicitly interested in Monero and excited when we found out that we supported Monero. Like, it was not what I expected wildly different from the Bitcoin Vegas conference and that the attendees there were, like, quite based. Like, very, very self custody minded already, very much understanding Bitcoin at a base level, a huge interest in privacy. The main things we, like, advertised at our booth were silent payments and paid join for Bitcoin. And everyone who came up really wanted to know what those were. Not just like, oh, their privacy. Okay. Cool. But, like, how do they work? Like, what do they provide for me? Mhmm. Really, really good audience there, which was really awesome because that was my first time attending and our first time sponsoring as a company as well. I've heard that over and over again.
[00:11:30] Unknown:
Everyone who's in the more privacy world who goes there is always like, it's the best conference. Like, I hear it all the time. It's like, that is the place where somewhere like Vegas pulls in, like, newbies, and it's like, oh, Vegas. Yeah. That'd be fun. Let's go there. And then, like, Prague is more like, okay. Let's actually get down to business and, like, the people who really care about it are going it's probably less sort of, like, new
[00:11:53] Unknown:
people just flying in for a bit of a jolly. For sure. And I I think it it also just kind of echoes something I've noticed too and that the American crypto scene is just kind of like garbage. Like, very, very much just investment focused, very little cypherpunk interest or privacy interest. Like, there is some for sure. It's not nonexistent, but it's quite different when you go to an American crypto conference versus a European crypto conference, BDC Prague, or like PaneraCon, like hacker's congress.
[00:12:23] Unknown:
You could say that the American crypto is more like tacky and overweight, whereas Europeans are more sort of, slimmed down and classy. Wow. I I've been talking completely about crypto here.
[00:12:37] Unknown:
Funny you say that actually because one of our, one of our, like, lessons learned after the trip is we need more bigger sizes for American conferences of t shirts when they give them out and, less bigger sizes in Europe. We already, like, down selected intentionally because I predicted that. Like, I I knew that it would be that different, but it was even worse than I thought. It's so sad. Oh, yeah. America's food system and health care system is so broken, like, so so broken.
[00:13:05] Unknown:
To be fair, The UK isn't too far behind. There's some proper fat fat bastards rolling around The UK, so we're catching up. You're like the America of Europe, basically. Yeah. I would say so. We're definitely the America of Europe, and then it's, like, more classy. But if a whole country was, like, New York City's approach to politics and policing, they're just in combo. Yeah. It's weird. The thing is about The UK, you still get stuff done. There's a thing in Europe like once you drop below the olive line then nothing gets done. If you can grow olives don't bother trying to fucking get anything done because it's not gonna happen.
Once you go above the olive line and it starts getting colder things start to get more efficient And the colder it goes, the more efficient it gets, like, generally. And then once you get into, like, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, that sort of area, it's like, okay. They're even more efficient. Germany, efficient. And then it's like Italy, South Of France, Spain.
[00:14:03] Unknown:
Fucking good luck, mate. I will say, like, the lifestyle and vibe of Italy especially is, like Oh, yeah. Much more intriguing from an American perspective of, like, getting a break. It's so nice visiting there, coming from America, and, like, everyone's just slow paced. I know it's terrible if you'd, like, actually need to get something done. Like, actually need to get work done. Time doesn't work the same way as The US or No. A lot of the rest of Europe, but it's, like, I wish that was more the norm. Even I say that as somebody who, like, productivity maxes and tries to be extremely efficient and get a lot done, but there's, like, there is something very refreshing about a society that's not built around always pushing to get the next thing done immediately. Something, like, very refreshing and and nice about that. But it has ups and downs. Six hour lunches and yeah. It's proper. Like, literally, they'll sit for six hours and just like the whole family and just, like, have this long lunch and chat and whine. And
[00:14:56] Unknown:
it's so different. But it's fine if you're working there as a digital nomad. You're working from your laptop with a team abroad. I know a few people who have moved to Italy because they did some, favorable tax stuff for a while, and they love it. Smash out work from a laptop, dealing with other people in another country, close it, and then just go and enjoy some food and drink, and that's the good mix if you can do that.
[00:15:21] Unknown:
For sure. Yeah. That is one thing that I really like over there, but Prague's kind of an in between in what I've seen. Like, you can get stuff done, but it's also still a pretty relaxed atmosphere. Yeah. Just one of the reasons why I really love it out there, and I'm glad that, like, ManeraCon has been out there each year and for the past few years. And BDC Prague is out there because it's definitely, like, out of Europe, it's probably my, like, favorite place to, like, actually be. Like, there's better places to, like, see and be a tourist, but I feel like Prague has such a good mix of things. So it's definitely good. Cool people as well, actually. Very much so. Yeah. A little bit more like they're very different than a lot of Europe as well. Yeah. Much more lax policing and regulations. Yeah. I know they've done some good, like, Bitcoin tax regulation stuff recently and, like, they've got more reasonable gun laws and stuff than most of Europe. So I I know that it's a pretty pretty awesome country that I've heard good things about and It is. Been there five times now. Really enjoy it. But, yeah, circling us back on topic a little bit more. Just back to MoneroCon. Like like I said, I only got to go for the full last day, so I missed a lot of it. So I can't give a ton of insight there. But I would just say, like, it was fantastic to see two things. One is that there's still this, like, very focused energy on how do we keep pushing Monero technically and as a community to be better digital cash, to be better money. So what's the next step? Not just getting complacent with Monero already basically dominating privacy coin space or Monero's adoption increasing, but continuing to look ahead, talking about FCMP plus plus, talking about potential layer two solutions, talking about how do we keep the community aligned, and how do we fight off the trolls that are constantly flooding the Monero community and trying to sow discord. Like, a lot of really good focused effort there was encouraging. I mean, MoneroCon's always been one of my favorite, if not my favorite conference in the crypto space just because of who it attracts is definitely, like, my people. But then the second thing that was really awesome and just encouraging was most of the people there, I didn't know, which I feel like I've been around the Monera community for so long that I'm just used to knowing at least the majority of people who are gonna be at something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Like, maybe not not like best friends, obviously, but, like, knowing the face, knowing the name, having seen them in other conferences. Yeah. And there was definitely still a core of that, but there were a lot of new people there that I had not seen in other conferences who just got into Monero in the last, like, year or two years at most.
And those are really encouraging to see because that's something that I think can be a struggle for a project like Monero is that necessarily I mean, nobody can be, like, a face in this space forever. Like, everyone's just eventually gonna fade out and need to just kinda do things in the background and enjoy a little bit more peaceful life. So necessarily, there's turnover, but a lot of times that just means that a community kind of dies. But it it seemed like there was still a very, very vibrant community around Manera at Manera Con, which is really encouraging to see because I hadn't been there for a couple years. Seemed very lively, so that was pretty awesome. Enjoyed some fascinating talks. I think my favorite was from a a guy who was a member of the Manera Research Lab. Now he's doing some work for CipherStack, the company that does Stack Wallet as well for a while as a researcher, and then now he's doing some Bitcoin layer two magic cryptography stuff. He's a absolute wizard, but Okay. He gave a talk basically breaking down why border wallets are completely broken, which was very interesting to me because I know that they were kind of the rage. Border wallets is in m t c and super far arrows thing. Yeah. I hadn't looked into very much. Initial idea came out a few years ago. It looked interesting.
I didn't dig into it much, but something just, like, for fun that he had done was looked into, like, how exactly does the cryptography and threat model break down? And so he gave thirty minute presentation on basically how border wallets are quite broken Oh, fun. For multiple reasons. It's recorded, so it should be uploaded probably in the next few weeks. So I'll definitely send it to you when I see it. Can you give a synopsis? Because they're both good friends of mine, and I was, like, really hyped about. It's not something I ever used because I'm very set up and comfortable with how I do things. But just as a concept, I was like, this is really cool and different, and I could see use cases. So I'm kinda shocked by that. So I missed the first, like, seven or eight minutes of the talk. He started doing this, so I had to catch up, but I also had some side conversations with him. I may not speak perfectly on this, so I'll definitely point people to go read the video. But I'll just quickly mention what he had talked about, which the two main problems were, one, you need to make sure that you get this grid across somehow that it's not confiscated. You need it on the other side as well to recover your wallet, which is just simply a physical problem. Like, obviously, that's not cryptography or anything, but that's just a a necessity of the border wallet protocol that can be problematic. Like, if everything gets confiscated, you're not gonna be able to restore your wallet even if you know the pattern that you did. But then the cryptography side, those very broken, which obviously is his focus as a cryptographer, is that the entropy that's actually provided by the border wallet itself is very low and not provably beyond any, like, reasonable threshold. So it'd be quite easy for someone to brute force those wallets ahead of time and just sweep them as soon as funds are deposited. So the first point would be the I assume you wouldn't be traveling with
[00:20:17] Unknown:
the border wallet grid. My assumption would always be that that is saved somewhere in a password manager or somewhere digitally or you have, like, another copy somewhere before you leave hidden in whatever way. I guess that could be a problem, but I guess it's no more than, you know, sending a micro SD that's encrypted onto your destination
[00:20:39] Unknown:
or traveling with it in a camera or it's the same kind of thing as saving that encrypted file in some password manager or somewhere online. I guess it's not really different to that in terms of threat in my mind. Yeah. For sure. But I would argue if you can already safely get a password manager across the border, why do you need a border wall? Yeah. Because you could just have the seat in the password manager. Good point. Yeah. If you're not at risk of the password manager itself being compromised or the micro SD card or something. So that was a part of it. And I would definitely recommend people to go back and watch it because he had broken this down in in more detail. And then part of it was he also introduced a new experimental standard that he thinks could be better, but definitely wants more feedback on called emergency, which is basically letting you memorize less words in a unique way that still provides provably secure entropy for short periods. Okay. Alright. So it's kind of like a better version of brain wallet. Brain wallets are totally broken, so don't do a brain wallet. But it's a new approach to that, which I thought was really fascinating. Mhmm. He's done a lot of work on the border wallet thing. He's talked to empty c and super fat arrow before. So, like, I know that they've already had conversations around that. They should be aware of what he's talking about. It's not like some massive breaking vulnerability or something that isn't known by them at the very least, but was something that he just kinda done as a a side project and I thought was really fascinating. Interesting.
[00:21:55] Unknown:
Okay. Well, good to know. And so when you're saying about the entropy part, it's like if someone was to have that grid, they could potentially brute force because the entropy isn't so good. And then it kind of means that the grid is
[00:22:11] Unknown:
not as vulnerable as someone finding your seed words or whatever, but it's still potential issue rather than the way I looked at it. It was like, they have a grid. That's fuck all. But, actually, maybe not. Yeah. Yeah. It would be likely quite trivial to brute force it. Like, obviously, that's still better than a lot of alternatives. Like, it's not to say, like, you should never use it, but it's just that, essentially, he was kind of game planning out. Is there a better way that we can do this? Because, you know, like, this very specific threat model is generally, I need to get across a border. I can't guarantee that anything I have won't be seized, and I can't guarantee I have access to anything on the other side either. Because, like, that's also part of it is if you can already get something across safely or you can send something across to a friend safely. You don't need a border wallet. You don't need emergency. You don't need any of these solutions. But it's, like, this very specific threat model that border wallets are supposed to solve, that emergency theoretically solves, but they'll have trade offs as well. But, yeah, that's the other key part. Because, like, you know about, like, the low entropy dice roll thing that's happened with gold cards where people think that they're creating good wallet, but they don't roll enough times. And the wallets are essentially pre hacked for lack of a better term, and that the entropy is broken ahead of time. So as soon as people move funds in, the funds are stolen. Same kind of thing could happen with border wallets. Or if the border police confiscated the grid and knew what they were looking at, they could definitely brute force it. So it's definitely some concerns there. But it's an interesting topic, and it's a very, like, niche thing. But it is one of those things, especially as some countries get crazier and crazier that it's good to know what alternatives are out there for if if shit hits the fan and you need to get across the border, you need to make sure that you can do it in a way where you're not gonna lose your funds and they're not gonna be stolen. So Yeah. I'll definitely share the video once I have it. Okay. Yeah. That'd be good. That's it from the conference run through.
A a lot of craziness, a ton of people wanting multi crypto not being Bitcoin only, and a ton of people, especially in Prague, wanting or using Monero, Especially a lot of people having swapped to starting to use Monero in the wake of the samurai wall stuff. So it was definitely fascinating and good confirmation of a lot of stuff that we've talked about that I thought was true for a while, but a lot of times you don't get these face to face conversations until these events happen. Yeah. Just kind of confirms a lot of things that seemed true, but now definitely seem like it even more after talking to people. So it's a good time throughout both, but definitely a crazy few weeks. Nice. Open Monero hack. What's this about? Yes. So we'll quickly get through. I've I've like a bigger one I wanna talk through at the end, which has been some news coming out about Bitcoin tracing and Monero potential tracing, but not actually. But before we do that, yeah, let's get into some smaller stuff. So open Monero was essentially someone cloning local Monero, which was a peer to peer Monero exchange that you could use. They would custody your funds while you were actually making trades. They would act as the arbitrator. It was a model that worked really well, but only because Loco Manero was trustworthy. Not something you wanna do with someone you don't trust. It's like the huddle huddle model for the the Bitcoin side of things. When Loco Manero shut down last year, nothing replaced it for a while, and then this new entity popped up called open Monero. There was essentially just a clone of local Monero. Nothing novel or unique.
But despite many warnings to not trust something like this out of the gate because it relies on the reputation and the trustworthiness of the entity running it, you're actually trusting them as a custodian when you're making trades. And if you don't withdraw immediately, you're trusting them for longer after that. They were hacked theoretically. Obviously, in in all of these cases, it's hard to say if it was a hack or an insider job to requisition some free Monero, but they lost quite a bit of Monero. And, I mean, there's nothing crazy. It doesn't seem like some novel hack or anything. It just seems like, at best, they were incompetent on the technical side and, at worst, malicious and just stole the funds themselves and are are lying about it being hacked. Hard to know exactly which it is, but a good reminder that any new thing popping up, especially some sort of exchange or swap provider or swap service, use with caution. Like, don't assume they're gonna be legit just because they're doing Monero. There's even more reason with Monero's privacy for people to create services that they can easily run away with funds from because Monero's privacy makes that a little bit easier as well. So just another reminder on that. Yeah. Definitely. Do we know how much was stolen? I think I saw something like 250.
Oh, for For some reason, they said 50 to 200 Monero. I don't know how they don't know how money was stolen, which makes no sense. That's such a random it's a lot, though. It's not pennies. No. It's not pennies. It's not like hundreds of millions of dollars or anything, but it's not pennies. And each manero is important to the people who used to hold it. Exactly. Now somebody else holds it, unfortunately. But, yeah, definitely a good reminder to be cautious with those sorts of things, especially new services like that that pop up in the near community. Because this has happened many times. It's happened many times with Bitcoin and other spaces too. It's the wild west side of things that is unfortunate. Yeah. The same with dark net markets, isn't it? As well, you, like, have vendor, they build up a certain reputation, and then suddenly it's just bank, they're gone. And it's like everyone's like, fuck. It's the same sort of thing. For sure. For sure. All of those things have to operate on trust. Like, there's no way you should use something until it kinda builds up trust within the community. So definitely not something to be an early adopter of unless you just have an area you're willing to donate. Yeah. Yeah.
To put it nicely. Yeah. Yeah. Something was interesting. The next one that is an important update, we've talked a lot about FCMP plus plus, this idea of migrating Monero from ring signatures where your input is one of 16 possible inputs to full chain membership proofs where your input is one of any output that's ever existed in Monero. So, like, one of a 150,000,000 plus outputs. The Monero community has been building that for years now. Been making good progress. Recently, there was some talk about FCMP being delayed, which is kind of odd or wrong for two reasons. One, there's never been a set date for when full chain membership proofs is going to go live. But then also problematic because there was no actual delay. Basically, what what's been happening is there's been work to build out a test net for full chain membership proofs so that entities like Cake Wallet, entities like Caveno and RideauSwap, like, all of the people within the Monero ecosystem can start to get ready for the update to find issues and flaws with it as you integrate it and scale up. Essentially, just start to get ready for what the migration would look like. That test net was delayed because there was an issue found in the actual cryptography of FCMP. I wouldn't even say an issue rather just like an unknown. Basically, it was discovered that one aspect, one assumption of how full team membership proofs would work wasn't as well proven out as initially thought. So Okay. There just had to be some more research around it, essentially. So there's a really good podcast called Monero Talk that did an episode with Diego who runs Cypher Stack of Stack Wallet fame and to do a lot of research for the community. Basically, he contracts out researchers who work for him. And one of their researchers was working on FCMP. So the researcher joined him for the podcast. They talked about it a lot more, but nothing terrifying or horrible about it. Basically, just some kinks still being worked out, full chain membership proofs, but no no crazy scare or anything. Like, some people are talking about on Twitter. So still encouraging.
Obviously, it's still a work in progress. I'm not wanting to guarantee full chain membership proofs any specific time as it is very, very cutting edge stuff, but still making good progress there. Well, that was a good update. You'd rather
[00:29:07] Unknown:
things like that happen a bit slower, but done right. Yeah.
[00:29:12] Unknown:
Yes.
[00:29:12] Unknown:
At least that would be my approach. Diego's been on Uncomfortable Misfits before. Oh, yes. Nice. It was a while ago. I'm pretty sure it was him, and then he was talking about his wife does a lot of dev work as well. I think, like, he does one side and she does a lot of the UX side of things, and they work together on stuff. Nice. Nice. Yeah. That was maybe a year and a half ago or something. It's not a Powerwall at that, actually. I've used it a bit. It's quite nice. No. No. They've done a good job. They have Stack Duo, which is the more, like, hardcore one. There's Bitcoin and Monero, and then they have That's it. Stack Wallet, which is just a lot of things. They have a lot more cryptocurrencies in there than even Key Wallet does, and they're doing good work. I've only used StackDuo as what I think that was probably my first Monero wallet, StackDuo.
Mhmm. Trader. That was yeah. Well, it was before maybe it was before we even knew each other properly, I think. It must have been Probably was.
[00:30:05] Unknown:
It's a good excuse at least. I think it was 2022,
[00:30:08] Unknown:
maybe.
[00:30:09] Unknown:
Something like that. That was definitely we knew each other well at least. Yeah. But, yeah, I liked him. He was good. And so I was like, how do you do that? Like, working with your wife every day and, like, splitting that kind of work. That's an interesting dynamic. Yeah. Certainly would bring a lot of it would be certainly great, but it's still a lot of interesting dynamics. I'm sure working with the family. I know it's Yeah. Always brings its pros and its cons. But, they seem to do good work together, so that's been cool. Yeah. He he's a fantastic guy. I have known Diego for probably seven years now. He's one of the first people I really talked to in the Monero community, and we used to have these, like, Monero coffee chat things that he was a part of and and I would join way back in the day. So he's a great dude. It's cool that the Monero community
[00:30:49] Unknown:
is a little bit smaller and a little bit more tight knit. It's kind of feels to me as like a kind of like an outsider on the Monero stuff. Like, I I know a few people, and, like, I use it a little bit, but I'm still learning a lot. It kind of feels to me from the outside at least how Bitcoin did, like, eight, nine years ago when I first started getting involved. I felt like it was more tight knit and fun almost. People took themselves a little bit less seriously, but cared deeply about what they did at the same time. It's got a cool feel. I do like that about the Monero community.
[00:31:25] Unknown:
Yeah. I was gonna say there's less infighting in the Monero community than the Bitcoin one, but that isn't true either. So sometimes it feels like there's more. It is definitely one of those, like, getting into the quote, unquote inner circle is much easier when Monero is just much smaller. And if you're if you're aligned and you're vocal, you're gonna be in those conversations, which is really fun. You're gonna be knowing more of the people who are, like, actually involved in the day to day of Monero, which is a blast. But, honestly, on the flip side, though, like, active Bitcoin community that are actually, like, building or doing things is really small is really small. Yeah. There's a big distinction there. I've joked around with, like, Meadow Dell and others of, like, there's probably, like, a 100, a 150 people who are, like, the most involved. Obviously, there's hundreds of thousands of millions that are, like, in Bitcoin and doing things, but just, like, from the perspective of, like, people actually, like, building around, talking around, not in, like, the blind influencer. I'll take whatever money I can get way, but, like, actually well informed. Like, there's not that many people even within Bitcoin. But within an era, obviously, it's it's even drastically smaller than that. So pros and cons.
[00:32:28] Unknown:
Yeah. You have, like, a few heavy hitters like the Craig rules and people like that who just, like, make amazing stuff. And then just, like, outside of that, keep quiet and just do their thing, keep their head down. And then you've got 99% of it is just like squawking fucking Mongoloids who are just screeching
[00:32:46] Unknown:
into the ether with just nonsense. That's pretty much how I see it as well. Maybe, yeah, hundred, two hundred people who, like, really fucking get stuff done. Yeah. Which is crazy to think about. Like, I'd even say in Monero, it's probably 25 to 50 maybe. At any given time, it's probably more talking, like, the lifetime of Monero. It's pretty crazy. On the one sense, it's a little frightening that, like, that few people are the key people building this stuff. But on the other hand, it also should be really encouraging that, like, you as an individual can have massive impact on the world. Yeah. Yeah. You being one of the 20 active people, like, really, really, really involved in an arrow. Like, obviously, there's way more developers than that and other things. But just like being one of the people who's, like, really, really involved in shaping an arrow, you could have a massive impact over the years just like people in Monero. Like you said, Craig, we're all like, why would we be without Sparrow Wallet? It's one dude who just wanted to ship a wallet for himself and basically, like, redefined what it means to have a desktop Bitcoin wallet.
Yeah. It's absolutely wild to think what you can do as an individual if it's something that you're passionate about. So definitely, like, a good takeaway there is getting involved. Yeah. You can easily be one of those people if you're just well meaning, nuanced, and build something you care about. You can change the world. No. You're just making fun of me.
[00:34:00] Unknown:
No. For real, though. Like, you can change the world. You can actually do that. It's just that most people don't have the grit and determination and maybe the, processing power to do it. But if you are someone like that, you really can. You can? Okay. Let's plot through this. We've diverged enough. I'll nail through the the last, That's me chatting about Italy.
[00:34:17] Unknown:
Last few general things. We'll be quick. We'll be quick. Software updates will be quick this week as well. So quick one to call out. We've talked a lot about BTC BTC pay server on this podcast before. If you wanna learn more about it, dive back through others. But there's a CCS, basically, like a community crowdfunding system in the Monero community where you can donate to help other people build things on Monero. They're raising funds for improving the BTC pay server plug in within BTC pay, which is, like, the way that you access Monero as a merchant. Making this easier, obviously, makes merchants' lives much easier, makes them much more willing to accept Monero. It's hugely important. They're still seeking funding, but they did also post their first update.
Basically, they've been doing a lot of, like, behind the scenes work to get the code in a better state, do a lot of tests to make sure stuff isn't broken before shipping updates. Like, a lot of back end stuff. So nothing crazy for, like, the end user of PTZ Pacer yet, but encouraging to see that they've already shipped, an update there. They have a blog where they'll be posting about this as they do their work. If you do have a few Monero lying around and want to donate to make it easier for merchants like Ungovernable Misfits to run and accept Monero as part of b t z pay server, that's a fantastic cause and definitely one I'd recommend people donate to. Yeah. Definitely.
The last kinda general topic I wanted to get into, and I'll kinda combine a few things in this one. There's been some recent news on Bitcoin tracing being pretty problematic and Monero privacy being pretty well proven, which is really, really fascinating. The first one is if anyone's been following the Ross Ulbricht stuff since he was released since he was at Bitcoin Vegas about three weeks ago, he received a, like, $31,000,000.300 Bitcoin. Yeah. A very big donation. $31,000,000 in Bitcoin came out of nowhere to his public donation address. And, of course, it's Bitcoin. So everyone immediately wanted to figure out, like, where did this Bitcoin come from? Who sent this? On the good side of things from a privacy perspective, they don't know exactly who funded this donation, like, exactly where it came from. Even if they don't know the identity of the entity, what is painful is they know essentially where the funds came from. So they were traced back through Yeah. Some centralized mixer back to AlphaBay, which was a dark net market. I think this was, like, twenty sixteen ish was when AlphaBay was around. If I remember right, it was the first one that actually accepted Monero. Yeah. But the funds came from what looks like an AlphaBay vendor, like someone who was actually selling goods and services, if you will. I don't know exactly what they were selling on there.
Probably not good goods. The vendor, theoretically, is the one who donated these funds to Russell. Two problems with that. Obviously, it's not good that someone donating to someone reveals this much about themselves, at least not identity here, but just like a good reminder. The other bad thing is, like, Ross Ulbricht did get pardoned, but the pardon is only retroactive. It doesn't cover anything that happens in the future. And you know, either you may know that many three letter agencies would love an excuse to lock Ross up again. Whatever whatever they could do to make that happen. Oh, yeah. So funds like this being able to be, like, very easily traced back to nefarious beginnings and then sent to Ross. He's gotta be an Isaiah game. I hope he knows how to use coin control and not spend these funds.
There's a lot of sketchy stuff that happens with this. So definitely, like, problematic from that perspective. And then the third thing out of it is just, like, is a really good reminder of why silent payments matter. The idea of accepting donations and having good privacy is quite straightforward, and silent payments essentially solve this. There are still caveats that we've talked about. Like, if he took all the donations and combined them all together into one single transaction, obviously, that would still reveal a lot about himself, and that could reveal the same amount of information here to an outside observer. But if he was careful at all, he could have better privacy. I was just about to say it's, like, either silent payments, bit 47,
[00:37:59] Unknown:
or bolt 12 if it was actually a thing and if anyone could send that sort of amount on lightning or any of the ways that someone can do is everything has trade offs but better than this way that it's been done because whoever it is who's donated this I mean, maybe it's like DRP or whoever is like, cheers, mate. But my assumption would be that the government says, alright. We know where this has come from.
[00:38:22] Unknown:
It's what we deem to be illicit activity. We're ceasing it. I'm surprised if he gets to keep it at all. It It is. As far as I know, it's like he is accepting donations directly into his own wallet. So, like, they would still need some sort of court order to actually seize the funds, like, to force him to give them over, which would be unlikely. Like, I doubt that they would do that. With that amount though? He's not gonna send them to Coinbase and sell them for 31,000,000. Like No. No. No. They're not usable. They're, like, the most tainted of tainted funds in existence right now. Yeah. They're not useful, but I doubt that they would do any confiscation forcing him to give over the keys. But rather if they ever go to an exchange, they're gone. What if he
[00:39:01] Unknown:
used these funds, let's say, to buy a gift card? Presumably, if they're allowing him to keep those funds, which I am shocked by. Like, I'm surprised they're not just being like, wow, if I can take him them. If he did that, where would he stand? It's like you've used funds that we know have come from what we deem to be illicit activity. Mhmm. They've gone through a mix, so they've been donated to you, but we've let you have them. Now you've bought this gift card and you've gone and bought a coffee. What's happening to him then? Like, is is he then guilty because he's using funds that they think came from a certain place? Like, does it just have to sit there forever? Yeah.
[00:39:40] Unknown:
I I would think so. Fucking hell. That's mad. I don't know exactly what they could get him on if he spent these funds. Like, they were theoretically a donation, but I'm assuming the thought process would be, how do we know these weren't Ross's funds originally or something? And he's Right. Right. Right. The stupid joke that's been said frequently was, like, we all know this is just Ross stoning back to himself, which I think is blatantly false That stuff. And also, like, a really harmful joke. But Yeah. That would be, I'm sure, the suspicion of, like, oh, these $31,000,000 come from another dark net market, and now you're gonna go spend them on coffee. We're gonna find some way to pin this on you as some sort of money laundering or failing to properly do AML and these things. Yeah. I don't know on the legal side exactly how it would come back to bite him, but I'm sure that these funds will just sit here. Water waste. Yeah. It is. I'm assuming they're just gonna sit there. I I doubt that he would move those. It is very sad. Maybe someday, he'll be able to use them, or maybe there's some way that he can get them, like, quote, unquote, cleared. Somebody can say that he's allowed to use something. Yeah. Exactly. Get a little holy water sprinkled on him from the from the feds.
Oh, damn. Yeah. Weird situation, though. There's a lot of silver bullet to solve it. Silent payments are a great one, but 47 could be bolt 12 could be as well, but still some potential problems after that. But that Mhmm. Definitely an interesting case and another reason. Like, he does accept Monero donations. Obviously, no one has any idea how much Monero donations he's received, but Yeah. Yeah. They did add a Monero donation address six months ago, maybe something like that. Okay. But you don't see any news articles because we can't see anything about it. Yeah. Well, listen. If you're a dark net market vendor and you wanna send some funds onto Ross to the tune of $30,000,000,
[00:41:20] Unknown:
maybe just use Monero for now. I think that's gonna be your safest bet. I will
[00:41:24] Unknown:
avoid giving advice to dark net market vendor.
[00:41:27] Unknown:
Yeah. You probably should avoid that. You do you, Max. Yeah.
[00:41:31] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:41:32] Unknown:
And listen, if you wanna send a few million my way as well, we've got donation, addresses, uncouple of misfits. We're happy to take your millions.
[00:41:41] Unknown:
On that note, Monero related, actually, in another case of Bitcoin tracing. So there is a very, very famous hacker, darknet market vendor selling personal information, database leaks, password leaks, that sort of thing called Intel Broker, and they've been active for a very long time. The actual indictment about Intel broker came out. He's arrested. He is a Brit. So your your fellow Brit there. Isn't isn't he like a little British kid from up north? Like, a little 12 year old child. He's in university. I think the picture on the card is, like, when he was really young, which is the
[00:42:15] Unknown:
He looks He looks like a 12 year old for sure. He looks exactly like q and a. I thought it was q and a. I was like, oh, that's 11 year old q and a. It's a robot? A little northern pasty cunt. That's what it looks like.
[00:42:30] Unknown:
Sorry, Q. I love you, really. He is a Brit, but he was apprehended. Indictment's out. People have been reading through it. The most fascinating thing in there, essentially, the way that he was caught was that he accepted a Bitcoin payment for some intel, for, like, a better word that he was selling Mhmm. On a dark net market. The person buying was an undercover agent and was able to trace the Bitcoin payment, connect it to a KYC account through Ramp, which is like an on ramp aggregator that a lot of Bitcoin wallets use, and trace it through Ramp to who he actually was, Coinbase, email accounts, other things. Oh my lord. Why do they do this? Yep. He had it sent to another wallet, but, essentially, he sent a payment from, another wallet that he accepted the payment to, and he connected it to his k y c account. Now like with most Bitcoin tracing, it's not 100%, but this seems like really, really basic wallet clustering heuristics. It seems pretty sure, though, way that Monero comes in, which is really, really fascinating. So normally, this guy only accepted Monero as payments for things that he had sold in the past. And if you read through the indictment, they talk about this, that he had been accepting Monero. It's what he wanted for multiple sales that he had made. The undercover agent had actually used Monero to purchase until previously from this guy. Again, just trying to get a bead on who he was. They mentioned nothing about learning anything about him when they use Monero as the payment rails. But what happens next is that the same guy goes back who had built this kind of relationship. He goes back to him and wants to buy more data from him, but tells him this time instead he wants to pay in Bitcoin instead of Monero, and that's where the Bitcoin tracing happens.
So Monero had been used previously by the undercover agent as part of this operation, and they weren't able to learn anything about him. And then they asked him to swap to using Bitcoin for payments, and that's when everything breaks down. Obviously, I'm not advocating for data sales like this on the dark net, but, like, it's a really good test of is Monero useful. If the undercover agents had to resort to saying, like, I need to get this guy to accept Bitcoin instead of Monero, and that was his route actually tracing him. It's a really good reminder that, like, this is proof that Monero works. If it didn't work, he would have just Yeah. Sent the initial Monero payment, traced him, and it would be over at that point. But he had to get him to swap to Bitcoin to be able to do this. And, obviously, like, then you're pairing it with this guy obviously didn't use Bitcoin well from a privacy perspective. He tied wallets together to his KYC wallet. There's obviously OPSEC failures here as well. But if he was using a KYC
[00:44:53] Unknown:
Yeah. Exchange to do all of this anyways on the Bitcoin side, he probably was on the Monero side as well, and it didn't harm him there. That's mental, though, isn't it? It's fascinating. Isn't that crazy that you have someone who obviously has some technical chops to do the sort of stuff they're doing, I would assume? And then you use the crypto side, payment side, and your knowledge obviously is lacking to a point that's below mine, which is outrageous. And, like, I was saying the same with that massive hack, the Bitfinex one. They're always going to a fucking centralized exchange with their own information.
Like, this guy is selling other people's information. Pretty sure you could set up a fucking fake account at best. Like, if you wanna use a KYC exchange, like, that's not something that's not practiced. Surely, you would do that or do it in a different way where you're spending without actually cashing out to a KYC exchange. It's always these crazy what seems stupid to us, but maybe it's just because we're in such a small bubble. It seems obvious.
[00:45:56] Unknown:
I think it's the same reason why, like, darknet markets have swapped to Monero even though technically there are some better ways to gain privacy within the cryptocurrency space. It's because the lowest bar is very good privacy. Mhmm. And in Bitcoin, I think there's still this assumption that, like, as long as I don't directly give out the wallet that's linked to my KYC, I'll be okay. Like, a hop or two is gonna be fine. And it's like, if you're not in the weeds like we are, like, this guy's not a Bitcoin privacy educator. Like, he's trying to sell stuff on a dark net market. Obviously, also, these people are almost always extraordinarily cocky. Like, they've gotten away with a lot in the past, and so there's a lot of bravado that goes into this. They make stupid mistakes because they just feel uncatchable. I feel like there's just this misunderstanding still somehow that, like, if I'm at least a little bit careful on Bitcoin, I'll be fine. Like, he like I said, he did use a different wallet initially, but then he connected it to his KYC wallet later on, probably on accident, maybe not realizing what he was doing or maybe thinking that was good enough, and that was enough to get him. So it is pretty crazy that people who are, like, very technically talented in other ways still don't understand how to do Bitcoin privacy in a sane way, but yet at the same time are adopting Monero because they don't have to do anything extra to gain that privacy. So it's yeah. It's definitely interesting, but you would expect a lot more from somebody who's, like, literally a criminal on the run using Bitcoin to sell other people's data. Like, you'd think that this guy would spend a little time learning how to use Bitcoin privately, but, shockingly, no. And this is also one of those reasons why governments, in many situations, especially law enforcement, they love Bitcoin. Like, this made their lives so much easier than so many other payment rails could have made it. If he had this guy used cash, if this guy used only Monero, if this guy had used other payment rails, sometimes they'd be a lot harder. Yeah. Good luck. Bitcoin a lot of times actually makes their job really easy. So it's one of those things where, like, people think, like, oh, we're gonna stick it to the man with Bitcoin. I'm like, a lot of times, it's actually just making their lives easier. It's not actually causing problems. It can, but it's not always making their lives harder. And a lot of times, they're more than happy for someone to accept Bitcoin or use it. Yeah. It's certainly in that sense of, like, using the thing for something that they would deem to be criminal activity or for tracing and tracking and stuff. For sure, they're gonna prefer Bitcoin to cash or Monero or or other options, even gold. You know? The only way you stick it to the man is like that you have control over something if you know what you're doing, but not for payments. Yep. No. Not for payments. Yeah. That does bring up I know you and q and a touched on it a ton on the other show, so we don't need to get into much detail. But that does bring up that there at least is, theoretically, a way to gain privacy again in Bitcoin now that Ashigaru, the big balls folks over there, launched Whirlpool again with their own liquidity pool, their own software, which is basically a Spero CLI fork that's specific for Ashigaru.
Really fascinating stuff. I know we were talking a little bit before we went live, and I do urge caution with anything like this. There's a lot of trust involved when you're using a centralized coordinator. A lot of trust both in their implementation and in them being legitimate and not trying to attack people who are actually joining the rounds because you do rely on them for civil resistance. But that being said, like, caution urged, it is pretty awesome to see that there is a way to gain some privacy on Bitcoin again. Like, the loss of Whirlpool last year was absolutely monumental when it came to being able to use Bitcoin in a privacy preserving way. And it did impact also the ability to go back and forth with Monero. We've talked before about when you swap, especially from Monero to Bitcoin, you can get tainted funds that you can't do anything with. You had nothing to do with the source of the funds. You had nothing to do with whatever criminal actions may have happened before on those Bitcoin because they're part of the history. Without Whirlpool, you didn't have a good way to reset that history. Mhmm. Now we do. So it's definitely, like, exciting times that the tooling's back. Definitely gonna be keeping a really close eye on how that unfolds because that makes a useful whirlpool, makes the symbiosis between Bitcoin and Monero much more powerful than when we don't have whirlpool as an option. So I'm I'm really excited for that. I love what the Hashtagra guys have been doing. Definitely gonna be keeping a close eye on that. Definitely also just urge caution, early adopter tax, all that fun stuff that can be problematic, but definitely exciting times. Yeah. For sure. Very exciting to have it back. Huge set of balls
[00:49:52] Unknown:
on whoever's behind that, literally carrying them around in a wheelbarrow. The fact that we've got this now developing and yeah as you say you obviously need to use caution like see how things develop but from my perspective I'm very very excited it's like the loss of Whirlpool is what pushed me towards Monero in the first place because I was just like well, we've got nothing now. Like, we've got nothing that's good enough. So, yeah, we'll see, but very exciting.
[00:50:16] Unknown:
Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely huge news. Definitely gonna be keeping a close eye on that one. Let's jump into our software updates. We're getting to know each other too well, Max. Too much back and forth. Too much chatter. Can't be friends. Gotta get through this stuff. Get through it. Nah. Good times, though. I'm loving the back and forth here. We'll power through the updates real quick. There's nothing absolutely massive this month. We'll roll through them. Cake wallet, technically, we released this update, like, two days before the May, but it was right after we recorded for the May Monero monthly. We launched version five dot o, which no huge new features or anything like that. Some page bug fixes, but the big thing that we did launch in it is a new UI, essentially two new themes, but a ton of UI changes across the board throughout the app that I think make it much much more friendly on the eyes, much nicer to look at. A lot of user experience improvements as part of that, and, ultimately, this is, like, just laying the foundation for a lot of other things that we've been working on. So Mhmm. Really excited for this one. It's, like, one of the things I've been most looking forward to for the past few months launching and really loving the look of Geek Wallet now, leaning more into the new brand and everything. So it was good to get that out. It's much cleaner. Just done the update a couple of days ago, and it yeah. Much, much cleaner. Nice. I know we've talked about it before, but q and a's rant on the other show about, how bad the original default theme was.
It's played constantly throughout our team. I think if we ever have a headquarters, it'll just be looping over the speakers while we're working just to remind us where we came from. You have to share it with I'll make a little video clip. I just can't remember which, you know, I record with you every other week, so I can't remember which one it was. If I can have that clip, I'll make a little video. I'll grab it for you for sure. It's a it's a legendary rant. Okay. It's been inspiration for us as we've reworked the theme. So that theme is dead. Now we're gonna need the opposite rant from q and a about how much he loves the new look. So we'll have to get that recorded as well. Okay. Let's see. But, yeah, that theme is dead. Most of the themes are gone, by the way, but a lot of them are going to come back. Like, I know the most requested one so far has been the kind of Monero orange theme that we used to have, which was a, like, a dark black with an orange accent. It was actually the theme that I used before we launched these new ones. That will come back. Other ones will come back, but a lot of the changes necessary here were basically, like, completely overhauling how we do themes on the back end. It's like nothing you need to know as a user, but it's essentially way, way, way easier for us to do UI stuff now to build out new themes. It's much better from, like, how we're approaching this. So we'll be rebuilding Mhmm. Some of the old themes, bringing them back. If people have specific requests, definitely let us know. But those other ones will be coming back. But right now, just the simple light dark theme. I think they look much better. Yeah. For sure. P two pool, which we talked about a lot on the show, couple updates to that. Nothing major from a feature perspective, but there were a bunch of denial of service attack fixes and pretty critical bug fixes in the last two versions, four dot eight and four dot eight dot one. So if you're running p two pool, like, you're you're mining a home using it or you're running goopax to mine on your desktop, just go and make sure that you update good protection for yourself and for the rest of the p two pool network because p two pool is essentially a side blockchain on its own. So if a ton of the nodes are vulnerable, it could cause some issues with people being able to mine some attacker wanting to take care of those or take advantage of those vulnerabilities. So good time to update, but nothing crazy in those.
Monero Joe, a fantastic Android only Monero wallet. They shipped an update as well, just this last week. Main things are just fixing a bug with how they handled amounts in the QR codes, but also adding a much better translation framework called Weblet, which will make it easier for other people to contribute translation. So if you wanna help out with that, head over to the Manera show website. I know there's some social channels as well that you could probably jump in on, but that'll help them have better translations in the different languages, which is always great to see. Love getting Manera in the hands of people Yeah. Who aren't just English speaking. Glad to see that there. Unstoppable swap. So we talked about atomic swaps a good bit on the show as well. Basically, unstoppable swap are taking the atomic swap protocol that was built out four years ago, five years ago, called Comet, c o m I t. But it was the atomic swap protocol that was initially built between Bitcoin and Monero and kind of stalled when the original people who launched it moved on to other things. But the unstoppable swap guys have gotten funding from the Monero community over the last year to essentially take that over, maintain it, and improve it. And they launched a a big update to version two dot o and subsequent minor point releases as well. That brings a ton of improvements and fixes, especially to how the Bitcoin side of things work. It is a breaking change. So if you were using unstoppable swap before that, make sure you update so that you're on the latest and can actually work with makers and takers who are up to date as well. But it's good updates there. And like we talked about, like, atomic swaps are just one of those things, like, we have to have as a fallback, if nothing else. Like, most people aren't gonna do atomic swaps just because your user experience is much more hardcore than a instant exchanger kinda swap. But it's one of those things where it's literally unstoppable. Like, it is in the name. It's it's aptly named unstoppable swap because there's no way to prevent it as long as both parties can communicate in any way, and this makes it really easy for those parties to communicate. It's it's a really badass. Like, the way atomic swaps work, it's really badass.
But much, Jake. Basically is. Like, if you can send messages back and forth, you can swap Bitcoin and Monero in a way that's completely trustless. It's wild. Yes. Good stuff there. The other side of the decentralized swap world, Haveno or RitoSwap, which is the main implementation of Haveno, shipped a ton of UI improvements. Much easier on the eyes. There's some other bug fixes and stuff. Nothing huge, but the main thing is that the UI looks much better now. Much, much better. So if you haven't yet used Rito swap or you have and you haven't done it in a while, go ahead and make sure you update. Give it a try. It's much nicer now, which is it seems like a small thing, but on the scale of approachability, especially for new people in the monero space, having tools that actually, like, look nice and make sense to use is a massive deal. It's gonna mean that a lot more people actually stick around and actually use Monero rather than get burnt out because everything's burning their eyes out and hard to understand how to use it. So it's an important step. For sure. And the last one that I have, and we can get into the the xmart chats, is Stack Wallet. So we've talked about Diego or he goes by in the space as well, but he ships Stack Wallet as a part of Cypher Stack. They released version two dot two dot two. They added two cryptocurrencies that I have literally no idea what they are. Salvium and Factorn.
Not gonna Oh, yeah. Great currency. Use them all the time. Gonna be completely honest. I have no clue. But alongside that, a couple bug fixes as well. If you have any idea what those cryptocurrencies are, maybe you can can drop an XMR chat or a boost and explain them to me. I feel like an old man now that all these new cryptocurrencies are here, and I don't know what they are. And all honestly, I just don't feel like looking into them. I just don't care. Yeah. We're too old and past it to be looking into dick butts and whatever other things are out there. Just We've been around the space. Don't care. Feel like just the two of us just sitting on our front porch rocking chairs. It feels like how we record these podcasts. That would be nice. Just like there with a drink
[00:56:57] Unknown:
on the terrace. You know, I'd like We need to make it happen. Gray hair blowing in the wind. Alright. XMR chats and boosts. Bird bat. It's just literally two emojis. 006552912 XMR. See no evil, duck, hear no evil, worm. That's such a weird Yeah. Yeah. Good luck interpreting that. That's not a cool one. I have no idea what that means. Thank you for the monero. See no evil duck. Yeah. Thank you very much. Expatriotic, 0.042069XMR plus 0.00316XMR plus another amount. Had to test out the ability to pay specifically for XMR amount. Also, cheers to k wallet team for accepting my XMR chat PR and bringing the release numbers in line for both wallets on GitHub.
Look at you, x patriotic. Doing a little pull requests. Could you go over the use of virtual visas in Cake Pay? Can you use them in brick and mortar stores? Can you tie them to your wife's Apple Pay or her boyfriend's Google Pay?
[00:58:13] Unknown:
Boyfriends or best friends? I think boyfriend. Yeah. Unfortunately.
[00:58:16] Unknown:
You'd hope best friends. I usually get the physical ones from Bitrefill, no XMR as other vendors don't do it. Max, what's the flow for using gift cards in real life at counter? I don't know what that fully means, I'll try and answer the gift cards in real life from my experience. It's been really simple, it's just been purchased the gift card, I had certain stores where I'd go and do my like grocery shopping and stuff, load it up with a certain amount like I used to Aldi quite a lot, Tesco's and Waitrose did it as well and you just go in with the physical card, do your shopping, you go to the bit where you pay and I would just scan it, it was really fucking simple, like literally how you pay gift card, they scan it, it takes that amount off and you get your shopping and it's done. If you were smart about it you'd find out exactly how much you're gonna spend first and then you get one exactly for that amount on your phone and then you do the scan but I didn't do that I would just do like a couple £100 on one use it and then use it the next time if there was any left on, but piss easy. And the same online, like, use it on Amazon, use it on whatever, and just pay. Pretty simple. But the good thing about doing it in store is there's less of a link to you because you're not inputting your details. You're just going to a cashier and you're buying it. Yeah. It's pretty easy right now. It's gonna get easier as well in gig wallet. Like, this is something we've talked about before. We've been working with a new provider gift cards that we can actually do in app redemption for. So, like, a flow that I had done, we had a provider in Kickpay three years ago, I think, that lets you do this where basically you could be at the checkout, get the total, buy the gift card on the spot for exactly that amount, and you just get a barcode
[00:59:56] Unknown:
in your app a few seconds later that you can actually use to pay. Yeah. Nice. So that will be much easier than the current system, especially good for that. Like, I had used it a ton before for, like, restaurants. I just get the total, buy the gift card there, Lowe's, getting home improvement stuff. Like, there were tons of easy places to be able to do that. So that will make it even easier so you don't have to wait for email redemption and all that. But for now, you can definitely do it. What you mentioned as well. And the virtual visas, they're Apple and Google Pay certified, so you can just load them into those. That's definitely the easiest way to do it. You can obviously use the card numbers and stuff online, but in person, most places aren't gonna let you just tell them the card numbers. But Apple and Google Pay work really well. Yeah. That's one of the things that I really miss. I'm on Graphite OS.
Google Pay is something that you'll probably never be able to do on Graphite OS. Yeah. So I don't really have a way to use these, unfortunately, but I'm hoping at some point that will change. I know some people who literally just run an iPhone as a secondary phone or something, an old one, so that they can have Apple Pay. They just use it for that. So it's definitely an option as well, but it's a little painful. Obviously, there's nothing we can do about that at a cake, but that's something where, like, if you do have a regular Android phone or an iPhone,
[01:01:00] Unknown:
using them in Apple or Google Pay are definitely the best approach. Really straightforward. Yeah. I've never used that, actually. I've never had luck with the Visa stuff previously. I've, like, bought a couple of Visa card things, top up Visa cards, and then tried to then use them to
[01:01:17] Unknown:
pay for, like, Twitter premium or whatever you call it, and it just wouldn't work, wouldn't let me do that. I used it for something else that didn't work, and I was like, oh, fuck this. I'll just stick to gift cards. I can't be asked for this. Maybe it's easier if it's in Apple Pay or Google Pay. Maybe that just works a bit more seamlessly. In store is generally better anyways. Like, they're gonna be more accepting of those kinds of cards. The prepaid card spaces is just really difficult. Obviously, a lot of fraud, not thought through cake pay, but just in that industry in general. So Yeah. I'm sure. Vendors are a lot more hesitant to accept those cards unless they have a very good track record. So it's generally gonna be a little bit trickier. The other place where people normally run into problems is if you use a VPN and lie about where you're actually at and you buy a card that's not for the country where you're in and actually gonna be spending it, you are going to have problems. Yeah. That might be more. It is. Like, this happens all the time. And, like, people, sometimes they freak out. Like, we have, like, a thing that says, like, I'm not using a VPN to redeem this. We don't do that because we want to know anything about you. We do that because if you use a VPN and lie about where you're at, you're gonna get a card that only works in the jurisdiction you bought it for, and you're gonna lose your money. We can't refund in those cases because we lose the money as well because you got bought a card that Yeah. We can't reclaim either. So make sure, like, if you need to use these cards, actually be honest about what jurisdiction you're going to be using these in and obey the prompts when they tell you what you need to do to redeem them. Use them the right way because there is just so much fraud in that industry Mhmm. That there's a lot of protections around it. So if you try to pretend that you're from, like, The US and you're in Europe and you buy a US card, it's it's not gonna work. Again, there's nothing we can do, but that's just the reality of that space. You could still run a VPN and just have yourself positioned in the country where Yeah. You're gonna be buying and using it. Be in The US, but still run your US VPN
[01:02:58] Unknown:
in a different state, whatever, and you could still buy the gift card and then spend it in The US, and you wouldn't have any issues.
[01:03:05] Unknown:
For sure. Sometimes there still can be issues when redeeming while you have a a VPN active no matter what the country is. And, again, that's fraud prevention stuff, which is really, really frustrating with the reality. But, yes, if you're going to use a VPN, definitely do the actual country that you're in for the VPN and what country you're saying you're in. I kept having problems with gift cards when I was doing it on the tool browser,
[01:03:25] Unknown:
redeeming them, and it kept, like, not loading. And I was having all sorts of problems, so I had to go to a normal browser. So I guess that's just another part of that same thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's generally not as bad on the gift card side, but, yeah, it's unfortunately one of the side of things. But we're constantly trying to find ways where we can improve that and make it easier. And especially with the new vendor that we're gonna be launching soon, it should be much better on the redemption flow. Do you know what I just thought of something that'd be so cool? I don't again, this is probably not something that's gonna happen tomorrow, but, you know, you were saying about your go to pay, it's $54.20. And then you could just input that in $54.20.
It'd be cool if there was some way that you could have a bit like how you have Apple Pay or tap and go on your phone, where you can almost tap it and it would just come up with the amount and it would instant change to buy the gift card and then pay it, take all the middle bit out. So it's like From the checkout computer or whatever? Yeah. So, like, you press pay. Like, if I'm paying on Apple Pay, for example, tap the card, and it just uses whatever card you've got set up, your credit card, whatever, and then it is like, and it does it. If there was a way that you could have some sort of extension or some I'm not gonna be using the right terminology, but something in your Google or Apple Pay wallet that then talked to your cake pay. So taps, it says we need to swap $54.20.
Cake pay goes, okay, let's swap it. That gives it the permission to do it. Ding, ding, and then it pays it. Yeah. I think sadly, there's just Apple and Google, and the merchant would have to support that, basically.
[01:05:05] Unknown:
So there's not yeah. There's not a way we can do that. Okay. Because they'd have to have some, like, API that we could deep link into to say, like, hey. You don't have enough to pay on this card. You need to top it up. Got you. It would be nice. It would make more sense especially for cards that you can actually top up and reuse, which is something that is on our road map. Yeah. But even then, like, there's nothing as far as I know within the Apple Pay or Google Pay ecosystem to say, like, we need more money on this. Where do we go to get more money on this kind of thing? But it'd be nice if possible. It makes sense. Like, the technical side, I have no fucking idea. But just thinking through, I was like but it's pretty simple anyway. Honestly, I lived on gift cards for a long time, and it was, like, never an issue so the visa stuff may be slightly different but just having that as an option
[01:05:48] Unknown:
being able to use your cryptocurrency in the fiat world without having to go to fucking coinbase and swap and have all the bullshit in between like you're pretty awesome. For sure. Fruits, zero point zero one seven four XMR and zero 0.0174XMR. Will gift card purchases with the same email address be linked to each other? Seth mentioned an upcoming feature where gift cards will arrive directly in the app without requiring an email address. Will these gift cards still be linked to an identifier? Please explain how cake pay slash coin cards work and how to use them anonymously.
Do the middlemen or the merchant obtain or retain any information? How can one get and activate a Visa slash it's literally the same question. Visa slash master debit card anonymously without KYC verification VPNs are blocked.
[01:06:44] Unknown:
We've covered a lot of this. The first one is definitely new, but the second one, I think we mostly covered basically, like, yes. We need an account system within Cakepay to know to essentially let you get the cards delivered to you. Right now, they're all email delivery, so obviously we have to have an email to do that. In the future, when we have this new reseller where you can buy the cards and have them delivered in app, we'll still use an account, which will be an email, but there's no other identifying information about you. And that email should be an alias. So something through simple login, proton pass, anon, Addy, I think is is another one of them. Like, you should be using Anima alias. You can reuse the same one. You can use new ones each time. We have no prevention to stop you from using new ones each time, so feel free to go for that. But it does make it a little bit of a pain, especially when we have cards that you can redeem directly to your account. You'll probably want to use the same email so that you can access cards that you haven't spent yet, see the balances, all of that kind of thing. So it would be easier to do a single email account. But I think a lot of people, like, really overthink the threat model here. If you're not being hunted by, like, the NSA, think of how much information you're revealing here at worst. Like, at worst, you're revealing an IP address, which could be VPN or Tor. You're revealing an email address, which hopefully is an email alias that isn't, at least for us, linkable back to you. And then you're at worst revealing a Monero or Bitcoin transaction ID. That's Yeah. Basically nothing. And the end merchant where you're paying with the gift card doesn't even know that the gift card was purchased with crypto, much less any of that information. Like, for the vast majority of people, like, just don't overthink it. Use these. Enjoy them. It's just it's not that serious as people make these threat models out to be. Like, obviously, if you need to be super anonymous, you're honestly just not going to be able to do this in the most hardcore way. Like we talked about, VPNs and Tor are usually blocked when you're redeeming these because they need a way to prevent fraud, which is rampant in the system. We do need an email address, but you could use a throwaway email every time. You could use a different email each time. Like, there are ways you can go more hardcore, but for the vast majority of people, that's, like, absolutely unnecessary.
[01:08:41] Unknown:
You're just making your life harder for no reason. So I would definitely say, like, keep it simple. If you're going on and you're making an email alias that is not linked to your identity, you're running a VPN, you then buy a gift card with Monero, and then you physically use it in a shop to go and buy your milk and eggs, you're probably alright. Yeah. You're ahead of 99.99999%
[01:09:04] Unknown:
of people in terms of your level of privacy there. And unless you are literally being hunted, you're fine. Not to mention, you're not doing anything illegal, and you're buying things in a proper way from a real merchant. Yes. Yeah. It's just not as extreme as people make it out to be. So take it easy for most people. Obviously, do your own threat modeling yourself. If you have a reason to need to be far more private than even this allows, then there are other ways to do it. But for the vast majority of people, like, this is already going far above and beyond, and it's a fantastic step for privacy. Even if you're doing it in the quote, unquote worst way, it's still fantastic. Agreed. Chad Farrow, the legend,
[01:09:37] Unknown:
001445 XMR. Another great episode. The amount of XMR messages you guys get still amazes me. It amazes me as well. It is pretty awesome. I love seeing it every episode. I think we get more XMR chat messages than we do boost these days. That's the Monero community for you. They actually like spending Monero. They certainly do. Thank you to everyone who has been sending these through. Schrodinger with zero point zero two XMR. The latest Monero monthly was very informative. Melvin and Cupcake, l m f a o, a laughing face.
[01:10:16] Unknown:
That was my education as well. There are new things every day from you, Max. I know. That's what I'm here for, mate. Doctor Zavargo,
[01:10:22] Unknown:
Max, heard you say foot gun. Did not know you, queen loving pussy cunts, knew about firearm expressions. Queen loving. I love the band Queen, I actually really love Queen but I don't love the crown wearing type. Maybe you're learning how to be a man on the Virgin Island. You know what they say, you can take the cunt out of Britain, but Brits are still gay. Yeah. I've heard that term before, actually. Very common. Yeah. Very common. You can take the cunt out of Britain, but Brits are still gay. I appreciate you, mate. Thank you very much. These ex march hats make me blush every time. They're hard to read. Mom, if you're listening, I'm sorry. Yeah. Seth's mom, I'm sorry about these. That's why I read them. You read them for my mom? For your mom. Yeah. I do. She loves the XMR chats.
Vietnamese. Has anyone at Cake started testing multi recipient URI URL? URI. URI. Having wallet support for this is a big step towards making split payments work and Monero being used for podcasting two point o. Great question, which I can't answer, obviously. Yes.
[01:11:38] Unknown:
I'm gonna have to look into it more. I looked into it when initially sent, and I thought I opened a ticket for it internally, but I must not have. So I will I'll get a ticket opened, and we can start working on it. It seems like it should be something that's very straightforward for us to integrate. So it should be low left. It'd be so cool. I'll add that in. Obviously, like we talked about, we can already do multi recipient, but you can't scan a single QR and get multiple recipients out of it. So that's what this piece would add is allowing you to just scan a single QR, paste a single thing, and get all the recipients with separate outputs being sent to them, a balance, all of that in one. So should be very straightforward, though, but I'll dig into it. We could do stuff for every XMR chat that comes through. We could give a little portion to donate to the BTC pay fund to help fund that or do do some cool things with splits, couldn't we? I guess so. XMR chat would have to integrate it, and you'd have to have a way to, like, specify the split and everything. But in theory, you could do that Okay. In theory. Alright. In theory. Ungov
[01:12:35] Unknown:
with 0.00656XMR. Loving the Monero show, How does Monero's energy use compare to Bitcoin? I saw Ethereum change their mining protocol and reduced energy use by 99%. Is that something Monero could slash would do? Is strong privacy compatible with low energy use? I sort of half feel like, is this a troll, the energy use stuff? I don't think so. But then they've got the uncoff thing. Okay. Well, if it is genuine, fair enough. Glad you like the show. There's reasons that energy use is high, but I don't know with Monero. I mean, presumably, it's quite different actually to Bitcoin in that sense.
[01:13:19] Unknown:
It is. Yeah. The energy use is gonna be less than Bitcoin just because there's less people mining Monero or less energy, I should say, being used for mining Monero than for mining Bitcoin. So, technically, yes, it will be less. Obviously, if Monero had as much security as Bitcoin did from a a pure, like, energy use perspective, it would be the same amount of energy use. Like, energy is is obviously comparable. But the key differentiators for me, first, proof of stake on Benjara would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, from a technical perspective because it's very, very hard to do that without sacrificing privacy. Even if you can do it in a way that technically protects privacy, it adds a lot of potential issues. Like, for instance, CNO is a Monero fork that does proof of stake. They just had their staking system essentially de anonymized so that people can see the amounts of every person who's staking. And, obviously, you would not want that with a Monero. And proof of stake necessarily does rely on some way to validate that the people staking are staking the right amounts, but without revealing that to the world. It it just gets very tricky. So, like, from a technical perspective, it's really hard even if you wanted to do it. Personally, I actually think a hybrid proof of work proof of stake system is probably the best combination in the cryptocurrency space. Projects like Decred do this Project called Darkfy will probably do this long term. There's some real benefits to doing both. But, again, in a privacy framework, it's very difficult to do that in a way that's good and that doesn't harm the overall system's privacy or harm individual users' privacy.
But outside of that, the one thing that I would say about Monero's proof of work mining that is much better than Bitcoin's proof of work mining is that the e waste in Monero's is drastically less. So one of the key problems with Bitcoin is we have ASICs, obviously. These a six are constantly improving in efficiency, and most of the people mining Bitcoin are these huge corporate scale miners. They need to be pushing efficiency, and they're gonna e waste out these a six every, like, three, four, five years at most. And e waste meaning they're just gonna, like, dump them. Maybe they sell them. Most of them are just gonna get dumped because they're gonna be low in efficiency at that point compared to what's available. And so there's a way more e waste on the Bitcoin side than on the Monero side where Monero is mined with just commodity hardware, regular computers. Arguably, Monero is actually probably improving the UA situation rather than adding to it because you can use an old computer or an old smartphone or an old server to mine Monero and get some use out of it that you wouldn't otherwise get. Like, I've done this in the past. I've used e waste rack mounted servers to my Monero for years, and those would have been just in a dump somewhere. But instead, I was mining Monero with them. So it actually can be beneficial to that, and it doesn't generate any e waste because, like, no one's building specialized hardware for mining Monero. So that is an advantage to Monero's a sick resistant proof of work algorithm that doesn't exist for Bitcoins. But, essentially, just proof of work works much better. It's much simpler, especially in something like Monero. It's just we're not gonna go proof of stake. Honestly, it's just not gonna happen. No. Bitcoin Derby. 0.03172
[01:16:10] Unknown:
XMR. Bitcoin Derby came back in July after the great defeat of naughties by corniness. This month, we discuss running Tails OS as well as other great software. Saturday, July at 3PM, ye old dolphin, d e one three d l. Anyone is welcome. Hashtag free samurai. I love Bitcoin Derby. If I was still in The UK, I think I'd actually travel to that. That sounds pretty badass. Discussion around Tails OS at a meetup. I love it. Yeah. These guys do it properly. They're fucking awesome. So thank you for the support and yeah if you are anywhere near that I suggest you go and check it out. Nobote 0.003 XMR. This is a good idea. Is it a good idea to run a Monero node on your phone? There's this tutorial on Reddit.
[01:17:08] Unknown:
Is it safe? Is there a better way? It sounds like a bad idea to me, but you you can tell me. It's not a bad idea. In theory, it can actually be really nice because the storage requirements aren't crazy. Like, if you have a 256 gig phone, you could run a requirements aren't crazy. Like, if you have a 256 gig phone, you could run a pruned Monero node on it. The main problem is that running any sort of cryptocurrency node, Bitcoin Monero, etcetera, but even a little bit worse than Monero is the amount of wire that it puts on the storage is quite high. And running it on internal storage, especially, will probably kill your phone much faster than it normally would die. You'll have storage problems eventually. Like, I'm not saying, like, in, like, three months, but a lot of additional wear on the storage itself that wouldn't be there if you were not running that on your phone. You could run it on a micro SD card, but micro SD cards are also really bad for high wear environments like that. So you will kill micro SD cards as well doing that, but you definitely can do it. It's like it's not impossible, especially on Android. Good ways to do it within something like termux, but it's not necessary. I've done it before multiple times on multiple phones. It's really overkill for the vast majority of people, but it is a cool little tech thing to play with and just see that it's possible to do it. Ideally, it would get easier in the future because just an old phone is something that a lot of people have lying around and can make reasonably good node hardware if it's already an old phone. Like, it's I wouldn't run it on, like, your daily driver, but if you have an old Android phone or something, it's a cheap, effective way to get a simple Monero remote note to use for yourself.
[01:18:33] Unknown:
Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. That phone that sits in the drawer and you think that you're gonna sell and you never do, and then eventually it just gets old enough that you just throw away. That's a good point. P p p with 0.003 XMR. Monero monthly in Monero dot com wallet. Why use accounts in a single wallet instead of separate wallets? Is it quicker, less syncing, or easier to restore, or better privacy or something else? With quantum computers, aren't multiple wallets safer than accounts?
[01:19:09] Unknown:
Just like in Bitcoin, it's really user experience thing. Rather than having to store in multiple seed phrases, you can just store one twelve word or 16 word seed, 16 word seed, and you can restore that, and you're always gonna get the accounts back as well. It's really just user experience. It's not better for privacy. It's not worse for privacy. It is better from a sync and restore perspective because, again, you only have to sync one wall at one time, and that syncs all of your accounts versus having to sync multiple wallets. So, like, for most people, you do not need two Monero wallets. You only need one, and then you can use separate accounts. Let's say you're buying Monero KYC and you're also buying it in OKC. Have a separate account for the KYC Monero if you want a little bit of extra protection. It's less necessary in Monero, but it is something that you can do. Or, like, for instance, you're accepting donations.
Maybe you want those going into a separate account, so you're not spending those donated funds with other funds. But for most people, you don't need another wallet, and it just adds complexity, increases the risk of losing money. You just use the same one, use accounts. Okay. Late stage Huddl with 5000¢.
[01:20:08] Unknown:
Definitely know what a cup check is, and a cupcake is one of the many things keeping me fat. I've never farted into my hand before though, sick face emoji and eyes.
[01:20:24] Unknown:
Me neither. I'm not planning on trying, but at least now I know what it is. If someone offers me a cupcake, I'm more wary than I used to be. You're more wary. It's also like the other type of cupcake is not something you should sort of take up doing at this stage of life.
[01:20:38] Unknown:
It's more something like you've either done it as, like, an eight year old kid or it's past it. Don't take it out now at this stage in life. It's not necessary.
[01:20:47] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah.
[01:20:51] Unknown:
Richard Grieser with 1,230 sats streamed, Caspeeland with 620 sats streamed, Turkey with 500 sats streamed, Jean Everett, my bad. I thought the sarcasm would have come through on my last boost. Love y'all, and I enjoy this Monero series. Jean Everett, 100 sats. We love you too, Jean. And, yeah, it wasn't easy to know about the sarcasm. You can be pretty tough on people, and and we like that about you, but we thought you were coming at us. So We fought back. We fought back. I think in a nice way. Yeah. Yeah. We basically said you were wrong, which you were. But if it was sarcasm, then sorry it went over our heads. TYM with 250 sets streamed. Pies
[01:21:37] Unknown:
Hey. Chingy di Ching.
[01:21:40] Unknown:
With 200 sats. Thank you, gentlemen. And chief monkey with a 170 sats streamed. I have a chief monkey piece of artwork on my wall that I won. Is this a a queen thing? Yeah. Chief monkey. If you haven't seen him before, he's he's a great artist and a really nice guy. I won a a bit of his artwork four years ago or something like that at the Bitcoin Beach Retreat in North Wales. Yeah. Have it hanging on my wall. So thank you chief monkey for donating that. Very, very nice. That is everything.
[01:22:13] Unknown:
We ran a little bit long because I was dreaming about pasta and everything else, but I think that was a good one. It was. It was. We got through a lot. I always think they're gonna be short. But you Brits, he drag on and on, droning. Sometimes I get a word on edgewise, but, you know, this is the Mac show. That's it.
[01:22:31] Unknown:
This is the this is the Mac show. Alright. Well, I appreciate all the boosts and XMR chats and all the questions. It really does make this show is is the best bit. I I love going through those. So thank you to everyone who's been supporting. Thank you to everyone who's been sharing the show. A lot of people, sharing and and messaging me, letting me know in private messages as well how much they enjoy it. So, that's awesome. I'm very happy to see where this show's gone. Thank you, Seth, for putting up with my stupid ideas and holding my hand through this new Monero stuff. I appreciate it. Yourself enough credit. No. You're a huge part of this too. Thank you for your ex. I'm I'm loving this. Can't wait to get to next month's. Catch you on the next one. See you. Thanks for listening, and a huge thank you to everyone who's been sharing Ungovernable Misfits with their friends and family, boosting the shows, sending in XMR chats or questions.
All of this really helps us grow and we really do appreciate it. I also wanna say a huge thank you to our sponsors, Foundation, k Wallet, and our new sponsor, MyInbox. MyInbox offers virtual private servers, domain registration, web hosting, email hosting, dedicated servers, help you run nodes for Bitcoin or Monero, and you can pay for all of their services completely privately with no details, and you can pay in Bitcoin, Monero, or I think pretty much any other cryptocurrency if you wanted to. Just get in touch with them. Go to my nimbox.io, and if you have any questions, you can reach out to me or them, and we'll have someone on very soon to answer any of your questions.
Go to my nimbox.i0 for any of your hosting needs, and go to foundation.xyz if you want hardware that isn't shitty, that's designed beautifully, that's fully open source, that has a proper team behind it, where you can actually store your Monero, not on a ledger, but on a proper, well built, beautifully designed device. Foundation.xyz, and use the code Ungovernable for a discount. And finally, before you go, if you aren't already using Cake Wallet and you're in the Monero world and listening to this episode, what the fuck are you doing? Go and check them out. Cake wallet dot com.
They have over half a million users. You can use this wallet on pretty much, I think, any device, whether it's Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android. You can download the APK. You can do swaps. You can buy gift cards. You can buy Visa cards. You can actually live on your cryptocurrency. And if you use this and you have any questions, you can reach out to me and Seth on each Monero monthly and badger us. I've known Seth for a few years now, and I know he does everything that he can to keep users safe, secure, and private. I love using Cake Wallet, and they look awesome after their rebrand.
As always, if you have any questions, please do reach out, and we'll catch you on the next one. Stay ungovernable.
The business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every last seconds, eleven seconds. I am investigator investigator investigator. And I work supporting Our agenda for today, we're gonna start with just the basics of Monero. What it is, what it is, how it works, how it works. Monero is considered a privacy token.
[00:00:32] Unknown:
The world's most private
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privacy. Which means that in high, virtually all transaction details are exchanged. The world's most private
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privacy. He's back from traveling all the way around the world, hopping from country to country, spreading freedom and privacy. How we doing, mate? The month of craziness. So many planes,
[00:01:24] Unknown:
so many hotels, so many conferences. Four conferences in three weeks was the final count. It was a whirlwind, but Wow. Absolutely fantastic time. Absolutely fantastic. So which were the four? Since we last talked, because I think we recorded right before I went to Vegas. The last one. First up was Bitcoin Vegas. The crazy 30,000 person stay within a hotel and never walk outside Vegas experience, which is, like, the whole conference aside, like, just the reality of staying inside for, like, five days straight and never needing to go outside to do anything, to, like, eat, to chop, to go to the conference is, like, absolutely wild. It's very American. It's a little disgusting.
[00:02:02] Unknown:
It's proper American. It's, like, the most American thing that that I can think of as a British person. It's like everything is just massive and over the top. Like, you're saying you never have to leave. I remember going to, one of the big ones, and I remember being like, oh, fuck. I didn't pack, like, a smart shirt. We can go out to dinner in the fucking hotel. Mhmm. I was like, oh, I need to go and get something. And then they're like, oh, just go to the shop down there. I was like, where? They're like, I would just go take this elevator and go here. And I was like, fucking hell. There's a shopping center
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in the in the hotel.
[00:02:36] Unknown:
It's mad. Uh-huh. A nightclub in there and Jesus. It was unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Cosmopolitan, that was the one.
[00:02:43] Unknown:
Okay. Yeah. This was this was the Venetian, which I learned after arriving. It's the largest hotel complex in the world. Like, it's two hotels connected. This giant shopping mall with river that runs through it, gondolas, and you can take boat rides through a hotel because why not? Yeah. Exactly. Hilarious. It was absolutely absurd. But the conference itself was, I don't know. It was kind of what you expect. I love the guys who organized Bitcoin Vegas, Bitcoin Amsterdam, Bitcoin Asia conferences. A lot of them are good friends, but, like, the main stage content, like, let's just be honest. It's just not for us. It was bullshit. It suits its politicians. It's bankers. It's stable coin stuff. Yeah. It's just what mainstream crypto is now. But I understand they gotta sell tickets, but, obviously, it's not my cup of tea on the main stage. But the parts that are really cool are the open source stage Mhmm. Which they've leaned into even more this last year. They had, by far, the biggest stage I've seen for the open source setup. They had, like, a separate dev stage. Mhmm.
They did a really good job with that. I know a ton of people really enjoyed that. I didn't get to do much conference stuff as is the booth the booth babe way. I was mostly chained to the booth the booth babe. Being the pretty face of cake wallet. No. I didn't see a single presentation, actually. I had a panel and a presentation, so I did those, and then I don't have a chance to see any others. But working at the booth was fun. It it's one of those conferences where you have a lot of people who, like, basically don't even know Bitcoin. Like, tons of people who don't sell custody, tons of people who don't know what a wallet is. Like, very, very basic stuff, which is good from, like, user testing perspective. Had lots of really good conversations.
People love the idea of financial privacy. Yes. But just like I think I've mentioned on here as well before, there's this idea of Bitcoin only. It just it's not reality. At Bitcoin conference, which I know, like, specifically, the Bitcoin, I guess, conference has kind of joked about not being Bitcoin at all. But everyone there, they wanted a multi crypto wallet. They wanted Bitcoin and other stuff. They wanted Monero. Unfortunately, many of them wanted Ripple, which somehow is a cryptocurrency that still exists, and people ask about it. It's unbelievable.
[00:04:42] Unknown:
I think I said to you last time, I met someone here who's, like, a smart guy in every other sense of the word. Like, very smart, very nice guy, multiple very successful businesses. And he was like, yeah. Yeah. I'm into the Bitcoin stuff as well. We're, like, aligned with so much stuff, like, eats the same way, trains the same way, lots of thoughts on, like, how to raise kids, all very similar. And then he's like, yeah. Yeah. I've got Bitcoin. Yeah. But I'm leaning hard into XRP. And I was like, oh, no. Well, I just alright. Okay. I don't argue with people anymore. I'm like, okay. Cool. And then he's like, yeah. Yeah. You must be into it. Like, big platform play or whatever he was saying, like, all the buzzword stuff. And I was like I was like, no. It's not for me. I've just
[00:05:24] Unknown:
have no interest, but it's amazing how they're marketing. Yeah. But it's still like I legitimately, I haven't thought about Ripple in, like, five years. Like, I haven't heard the name. It was the first time it and I had that too. It was like it was like there were, like, three people. And, I mean, I talked to thousands of people. So, like, it's certainly not, like, a majority or anything, but there were, like, three people who were, like, trying to, like, show me on Ripple at the booth. And I'm like, I Oh, gosh. Like, how? How does this how does this still happen in 2025? But
[00:05:50] Unknown:
I could be shield on fiat currencies way better than I could be on Ripple. It's like I've got this thing. It's the great British pound. Let me tell you about it. I'm like, I can I can get on board? Like, I've gotta pay the the occasional bill. At least you can use it. You can work with that. You can actually spend it somewhere. It's it's
[00:06:06] Unknown:
probably more decentralized than Ripple, in all honesty. Yeah. I think you could argue that it is. It's hilarious. Yeah. That's always always insanity, but but really good time at the booth, especially just like being on a show for a new brand for the first time. It was a was a ton of fun. So enjoyed that. And then we had and if you're organizing a small conference out there, please don't overlap it by multiple days with a major conference. Like, I understand why people do this because they wanna be able to, like leech is too negative of a word, but piggyback off. Yeah. Piggyback off Yeah. Yeah. The people who are already attending the major conference. But Yeah. Everyone is, like, overlapping conferences these days. And, like, when I say we did four conferences, that means we did two conferences at a time. Like, I was at two conferences at a time twice over the last three weeks because there was the Litecoin Summit, which was the other conference that we were at, and that one overlapped one or two days with Bitcoin Vegas. So, like, we had to split up the team. I couldn't do much of that. I had to present and, like, go back and forth. Not ideal.
That conference was fine. Like, I'm just gonna be honest as well. Like, I'm just not a Litecoin guy. I think there's some really cool stuff with the privacy tech that they've done. Member Wimble extension blocks implemented in Cake Wallet. We're the only mobile wallet with that. And Mhmm. It's definitely interesting, but it certainly felt a bit dead. The community kind of did not feel lively, which is very different from Monero, which is also relatively small, like, when you compare it to Bitcoin, etcetera. But it feels like there's a lot of energy and, like, shared ethos in the Monero community even at smaller conferences. Whereas, like, when kind of felt it felt a little lost, which is interesting. That doesn't surprise me because you've got very clear path
[00:07:41] Unknown:
and goal with Monero. And I'd say like even more so than Bitcoin because you have so many like splits in community with Bitcoin. Whereas with Monero, it's like, we want the best privacy. This thing is used for certain use cases. We want privacy. That's it. And then with Litecoin, it's like, okay, it's basically Bitcoin with some parameters changed. And then it's kind of like a bit of a test net where you can throw on some extra stuff and no one's that bothered because the value of this thing isn't as big. So I can understand that it's this thing that was meant to be silver to Bitcoin Gold or whatever they used to say, and then it's like, it kinda doesn't make sense. So, okay, we'll pivot and have a bit of privacy thrown on.
But the privacy, I assume, isn't as good as Monero because otherwise, it would be everywhere on all the dot net markets and everything. The same thing with, like, Lightning. People are like, oh, Lightning's fucking the best privacy. It's like, well, it's obviously not because the market would decide. If it was the best privacy for sending, then there would be widespread use of this across all the dot net markets, but it is not. So that can't be true. Yeah. And I think on, like, the lightning thing specifically, I think what's often forgotten is user experience
[00:08:47] Unknown:
matters. The best tech does not always win. In reality, oftentimes, the best tech loses. There are many, many, many examples of this throughout history of just because the best technology doesn't mean it it wins either because it's lacking user experience or it's lacking in marketing or it's lacking in, like, an aligned clear product market fit for lack of a better word. Yeah. There's many times where the better technology doesn't win. And the lightning arguably is not the better technology than Minera anyways when it comes to privacy because there's so many variables. But I know we've talked about that a lot, but I think you nailed it on the head with the Litecoin thing. It's very much like there's not a clear goal. Like, even at the conference, there was, like, people trying to piggyback off the Bitcoin treasury stuff, doing Litecoin treasury stuff.
There was, like, conversations around trying to piggyback off the Bitcoin layer two stuff that's that's happening right now, like, bit b m and others, and there's, like, a a Litecoin variant. It's it's very much, like, still kinda stuck in this silver to Bitcoin's gold thing, like you mentioned, that old, like, that old thing that was, like, the sales pitch back in 2016, 2017, 2018, which is interesting, but really nice people there for sure. Like, when foundation folks been really nice to work with throughout and good reception for what we've been doing at Cake Wallet, but was definitely, like, different than I expected. I expected kind of, like like, my experience in smaller, like, single crypto conferences is that they're very lively and focused and aligned, and that felt very different from something like a MoneroCon, which I didn't expect, but I've never really been involved with the like one community either. So that was really kinda my first taste of things. Those were the two at first. Like I said, those overlaps, so a lot of back and forth. And then just last week, me and most of the cake team were out at Bitcoin Prague, BTC Prague, and then Monero Con, which overlapped by two days with BTC Prague. So, again, I hate the overlapping. I, unfortunately, had to miss most of Monero Con itself, so I I can't give, like, a ton of detail there. But quickly, I'm sorry on both. I think the main thing that I took away from Bitcoin Prague was there are a ton of Manera users there. Like, a ton of Manera users there.
We had I I I can't even count how many people came up to us, and we're already Monero users, already k quality users, or were, like, explicitly interested in Monero and excited when we found out that we supported Monero. Like, it was not what I expected wildly different from the Bitcoin Vegas conference and that the attendees there were, like, quite based. Like, very, very self custody minded already, very much understanding Bitcoin at a base level, a huge interest in privacy. The main things we, like, advertised at our booth were silent payments and paid join for Bitcoin. And everyone who came up really wanted to know what those were. Not just like, oh, their privacy. Okay. Cool. But, like, how do they work? Like, what do they provide for me? Mhmm. Really, really good audience there, which was really awesome because that was my first time attending and our first time sponsoring as a company as well. I've heard that over and over again.
[00:11:30] Unknown:
Everyone who's in the more privacy world who goes there is always like, it's the best conference. Like, I hear it all the time. It's like, that is the place where somewhere like Vegas pulls in, like, newbies, and it's like, oh, Vegas. Yeah. That'd be fun. Let's go there. And then, like, Prague is more like, okay. Let's actually get down to business and, like, the people who really care about it are going it's probably less sort of, like, new
[00:11:53] Unknown:
people just flying in for a bit of a jolly. For sure. And I I think it it also just kind of echoes something I've noticed too and that the American crypto scene is just kind of like garbage. Like, very, very much just investment focused, very little cypherpunk interest or privacy interest. Like, there is some for sure. It's not nonexistent, but it's quite different when you go to an American crypto conference versus a European crypto conference, BDC Prague, or like PaneraCon, like hacker's congress.
[00:12:23] Unknown:
You could say that the American crypto is more like tacky and overweight, whereas Europeans are more sort of, slimmed down and classy. Wow. I I've been talking completely about crypto here.
[00:12:37] Unknown:
Funny you say that actually because one of our, one of our, like, lessons learned after the trip is we need more bigger sizes for American conferences of t shirts when they give them out and, less bigger sizes in Europe. We already, like, down selected intentionally because I predicted that. Like, I I knew that it would be that different, but it was even worse than I thought. It's so sad. Oh, yeah. America's food system and health care system is so broken, like, so so broken.
[00:13:05] Unknown:
To be fair, The UK isn't too far behind. There's some proper fat fat bastards rolling around The UK, so we're catching up. You're like the America of Europe, basically. Yeah. I would say so. We're definitely the America of Europe, and then it's, like, more classy. But if a whole country was, like, New York City's approach to politics and policing, they're just in combo. Yeah. It's weird. The thing is about The UK, you still get stuff done. There's a thing in Europe like once you drop below the olive line then nothing gets done. If you can grow olives don't bother trying to fucking get anything done because it's not gonna happen.
Once you go above the olive line and it starts getting colder things start to get more efficient And the colder it goes, the more efficient it gets, like, generally. And then once you get into, like, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, that sort of area, it's like, okay. They're even more efficient. Germany, efficient. And then it's like Italy, South Of France, Spain.
[00:14:03] Unknown:
Fucking good luck, mate. I will say, like, the lifestyle and vibe of Italy especially is, like Oh, yeah. Much more intriguing from an American perspective of, like, getting a break. It's so nice visiting there, coming from America, and, like, everyone's just slow paced. I know it's terrible if you'd, like, actually need to get something done. Like, actually need to get work done. Time doesn't work the same way as The US or No. A lot of the rest of Europe, but it's, like, I wish that was more the norm. Even I say that as somebody who, like, productivity maxes and tries to be extremely efficient and get a lot done, but there's, like, there is something very refreshing about a society that's not built around always pushing to get the next thing done immediately. Something, like, very refreshing and and nice about that. But it has ups and downs. Six hour lunches and yeah. It's proper. Like, literally, they'll sit for six hours and just like the whole family and just, like, have this long lunch and chat and whine. And
[00:14:56] Unknown:
it's so different. But it's fine if you're working there as a digital nomad. You're working from your laptop with a team abroad. I know a few people who have moved to Italy because they did some, favorable tax stuff for a while, and they love it. Smash out work from a laptop, dealing with other people in another country, close it, and then just go and enjoy some food and drink, and that's the good mix if you can do that.
[00:15:21] Unknown:
For sure. Yeah. That is one thing that I really like over there, but Prague's kind of an in between in what I've seen. Like, you can get stuff done, but it's also still a pretty relaxed atmosphere. Yeah. Just one of the reasons why I really love it out there, and I'm glad that, like, ManeraCon has been out there each year and for the past few years. And BDC Prague is out there because it's definitely, like, out of Europe, it's probably my, like, favorite place to, like, actually be. Like, there's better places to, like, see and be a tourist, but I feel like Prague has such a good mix of things. So it's definitely good. Cool people as well, actually. Very much so. Yeah. A little bit more like they're very different than a lot of Europe as well. Yeah. Much more lax policing and regulations. Yeah. I know they've done some good, like, Bitcoin tax regulation stuff recently and, like, they've got more reasonable gun laws and stuff than most of Europe. So I I know that it's a pretty pretty awesome country that I've heard good things about and It is. Been there five times now. Really enjoy it. But, yeah, circling us back on topic a little bit more. Just back to MoneroCon. Like like I said, I only got to go for the full last day, so I missed a lot of it. So I can't give a ton of insight there. But I would just say, like, it was fantastic to see two things. One is that there's still this, like, very focused energy on how do we keep pushing Monero technically and as a community to be better digital cash, to be better money. So what's the next step? Not just getting complacent with Monero already basically dominating privacy coin space or Monero's adoption increasing, but continuing to look ahead, talking about FCMP plus plus, talking about potential layer two solutions, talking about how do we keep the community aligned, and how do we fight off the trolls that are constantly flooding the Monero community and trying to sow discord. Like, a lot of really good focused effort there was encouraging. I mean, MoneroCon's always been one of my favorite, if not my favorite conference in the crypto space just because of who it attracts is definitely, like, my people. But then the second thing that was really awesome and just encouraging was most of the people there, I didn't know, which I feel like I've been around the Monera community for so long that I'm just used to knowing at least the majority of people who are gonna be at something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Like, maybe not not like best friends, obviously, but, like, knowing the face, knowing the name, having seen them in other conferences. Yeah. And there was definitely still a core of that, but there were a lot of new people there that I had not seen in other conferences who just got into Monero in the last, like, year or two years at most.
And those are really encouraging to see because that's something that I think can be a struggle for a project like Monero is that necessarily I mean, nobody can be, like, a face in this space forever. Like, everyone's just eventually gonna fade out and need to just kinda do things in the background and enjoy a little bit more peaceful life. So necessarily, there's turnover, but a lot of times that just means that a community kind of dies. But it it seemed like there was still a very, very vibrant community around Manera at Manera Con, which is really encouraging to see because I hadn't been there for a couple years. Seemed very lively, so that was pretty awesome. Enjoyed some fascinating talks. I think my favorite was from a a guy who was a member of the Manera Research Lab. Now he's doing some work for CipherStack, the company that does Stack Wallet as well for a while as a researcher, and then now he's doing some Bitcoin layer two magic cryptography stuff. He's a absolute wizard, but Okay. He gave a talk basically breaking down why border wallets are completely broken, which was very interesting to me because I know that they were kind of the rage. Border wallets is in m t c and super far arrows thing. Yeah. I hadn't looked into very much. Initial idea came out a few years ago. It looked interesting.
I didn't dig into it much, but something just, like, for fun that he had done was looked into, like, how exactly does the cryptography and threat model break down? And so he gave thirty minute presentation on basically how border wallets are quite broken Oh, fun. For multiple reasons. It's recorded, so it should be uploaded probably in the next few weeks. So I'll definitely send it to you when I see it. Can you give a synopsis? Because they're both good friends of mine, and I was, like, really hyped about. It's not something I ever used because I'm very set up and comfortable with how I do things. But just as a concept, I was like, this is really cool and different, and I could see use cases. So I'm kinda shocked by that. So I missed the first, like, seven or eight minutes of the talk. He started doing this, so I had to catch up, but I also had some side conversations with him. I may not speak perfectly on this, so I'll definitely point people to go read the video. But I'll just quickly mention what he had talked about, which the two main problems were, one, you need to make sure that you get this grid across somehow that it's not confiscated. You need it on the other side as well to recover your wallet, which is just simply a physical problem. Like, obviously, that's not cryptography or anything, but that's just a a necessity of the border wallet protocol that can be problematic. Like, if everything gets confiscated, you're not gonna be able to restore your wallet even if you know the pattern that you did. But then the cryptography side, those very broken, which obviously is his focus as a cryptographer, is that the entropy that's actually provided by the border wallet itself is very low and not provably beyond any, like, reasonable threshold. So it'd be quite easy for someone to brute force those wallets ahead of time and just sweep them as soon as funds are deposited. So the first point would be the I assume you wouldn't be traveling with
[00:20:17] Unknown:
the border wallet grid. My assumption would always be that that is saved somewhere in a password manager or somewhere digitally or you have, like, another copy somewhere before you leave hidden in whatever way. I guess that could be a problem, but I guess it's no more than, you know, sending a micro SD that's encrypted onto your destination
[00:20:39] Unknown:
or traveling with it in a camera or it's the same kind of thing as saving that encrypted file in some password manager or somewhere online. I guess it's not really different to that in terms of threat in my mind. Yeah. For sure. But I would argue if you can already safely get a password manager across the border, why do you need a border wall? Yeah. Because you could just have the seat in the password manager. Good point. Yeah. If you're not at risk of the password manager itself being compromised or the micro SD card or something. So that was a part of it. And I would definitely recommend people to go back and watch it because he had broken this down in in more detail. And then part of it was he also introduced a new experimental standard that he thinks could be better, but definitely wants more feedback on called emergency, which is basically letting you memorize less words in a unique way that still provides provably secure entropy for short periods. Okay. Alright. So it's kind of like a better version of brain wallet. Brain wallets are totally broken, so don't do a brain wallet. But it's a new approach to that, which I thought was really fascinating. Mhmm. He's done a lot of work on the border wallet thing. He's talked to empty c and super fat arrow before. So, like, I know that they've already had conversations around that. They should be aware of what he's talking about. It's not like some massive breaking vulnerability or something that isn't known by them at the very least, but was something that he just kinda done as a a side project and I thought was really fascinating. Interesting.
[00:21:55] Unknown:
Okay. Well, good to know. And so when you're saying about the entropy part, it's like if someone was to have that grid, they could potentially brute force because the entropy isn't so good. And then it kind of means that the grid is
[00:22:11] Unknown:
not as vulnerable as someone finding your seed words or whatever, but it's still potential issue rather than the way I looked at it. It was like, they have a grid. That's fuck all. But, actually, maybe not. Yeah. Yeah. It would be likely quite trivial to brute force it. Like, obviously, that's still better than a lot of alternatives. Like, it's not to say, like, you should never use it, but it's just that, essentially, he was kind of game planning out. Is there a better way that we can do this? Because, you know, like, this very specific threat model is generally, I need to get across a border. I can't guarantee that anything I have won't be seized, and I can't guarantee I have access to anything on the other side either. Because, like, that's also part of it is if you can already get something across safely or you can send something across to a friend safely. You don't need a border wallet. You don't need emergency. You don't need any of these solutions. But it's, like, this very specific threat model that border wallets are supposed to solve, that emergency theoretically solves, but they'll have trade offs as well. But, yeah, that's the other key part. Because, like, you know about, like, the low entropy dice roll thing that's happened with gold cards where people think that they're creating good wallet, but they don't roll enough times. And the wallets are essentially pre hacked for lack of a better term, and that the entropy is broken ahead of time. So as soon as people move funds in, the funds are stolen. Same kind of thing could happen with border wallets. Or if the border police confiscated the grid and knew what they were looking at, they could definitely brute force it. So it's definitely some concerns there. But it's an interesting topic, and it's a very, like, niche thing. But it is one of those things, especially as some countries get crazier and crazier that it's good to know what alternatives are out there for if if shit hits the fan and you need to get across the border, you need to make sure that you can do it in a way where you're not gonna lose your funds and they're not gonna be stolen. So Yeah. I'll definitely share the video once I have it. Okay. Yeah. That'd be good. That's it from the conference run through.
A a lot of craziness, a ton of people wanting multi crypto not being Bitcoin only, and a ton of people, especially in Prague, wanting or using Monero, Especially a lot of people having swapped to starting to use Monero in the wake of the samurai wall stuff. So it was definitely fascinating and good confirmation of a lot of stuff that we've talked about that I thought was true for a while, but a lot of times you don't get these face to face conversations until these events happen. Yeah. Just kind of confirms a lot of things that seemed true, but now definitely seem like it even more after talking to people. So it's a good time throughout both, but definitely a crazy few weeks. Nice. Open Monero hack. What's this about? Yes. So we'll quickly get through. I've I've like a bigger one I wanna talk through at the end, which has been some news coming out about Bitcoin tracing and Monero potential tracing, but not actually. But before we do that, yeah, let's get into some smaller stuff. So open Monero was essentially someone cloning local Monero, which was a peer to peer Monero exchange that you could use. They would custody your funds while you were actually making trades. They would act as the arbitrator. It was a model that worked really well, but only because Loco Manero was trustworthy. Not something you wanna do with someone you don't trust. It's like the huddle huddle model for the the Bitcoin side of things. When Loco Manero shut down last year, nothing replaced it for a while, and then this new entity popped up called open Monero. There was essentially just a clone of local Monero. Nothing novel or unique.
But despite many warnings to not trust something like this out of the gate because it relies on the reputation and the trustworthiness of the entity running it, you're actually trusting them as a custodian when you're making trades. And if you don't withdraw immediately, you're trusting them for longer after that. They were hacked theoretically. Obviously, in in all of these cases, it's hard to say if it was a hack or an insider job to requisition some free Monero, but they lost quite a bit of Monero. And, I mean, there's nothing crazy. It doesn't seem like some novel hack or anything. It just seems like, at best, they were incompetent on the technical side and, at worst, malicious and just stole the funds themselves and are are lying about it being hacked. Hard to know exactly which it is, but a good reminder that any new thing popping up, especially some sort of exchange or swap provider or swap service, use with caution. Like, don't assume they're gonna be legit just because they're doing Monero. There's even more reason with Monero's privacy for people to create services that they can easily run away with funds from because Monero's privacy makes that a little bit easier as well. So just another reminder on that. Yeah. Definitely. Do we know how much was stolen? I think I saw something like 250.
Oh, for For some reason, they said 50 to 200 Monero. I don't know how they don't know how money was stolen, which makes no sense. That's such a random it's a lot, though. It's not pennies. No. It's not pennies. It's not like hundreds of millions of dollars or anything, but it's not pennies. And each manero is important to the people who used to hold it. Exactly. Now somebody else holds it, unfortunately. But, yeah, definitely a good reminder to be cautious with those sorts of things, especially new services like that that pop up in the near community. Because this has happened many times. It's happened many times with Bitcoin and other spaces too. It's the wild west side of things that is unfortunate. Yeah. The same with dark net markets, isn't it? As well, you, like, have vendor, they build up a certain reputation, and then suddenly it's just bank, they're gone. And it's like everyone's like, fuck. It's the same sort of thing. For sure. For sure. All of those things have to operate on trust. Like, there's no way you should use something until it kinda builds up trust within the community. So definitely not something to be an early adopter of unless you just have an area you're willing to donate. Yeah. Yeah.
To put it nicely. Yeah. Yeah. Something was interesting. The next one that is an important update, we've talked a lot about FCMP plus plus, this idea of migrating Monero from ring signatures where your input is one of 16 possible inputs to full chain membership proofs where your input is one of any output that's ever existed in Monero. So, like, one of a 150,000,000 plus outputs. The Monero community has been building that for years now. Been making good progress. Recently, there was some talk about FCMP being delayed, which is kind of odd or wrong for two reasons. One, there's never been a set date for when full chain membership proofs is going to go live. But then also problematic because there was no actual delay. Basically, what what's been happening is there's been work to build out a test net for full chain membership proofs so that entities like Cake Wallet, entities like Caveno and RideauSwap, like, all of the people within the Monero ecosystem can start to get ready for the update to find issues and flaws with it as you integrate it and scale up. Essentially, just start to get ready for what the migration would look like. That test net was delayed because there was an issue found in the actual cryptography of FCMP. I wouldn't even say an issue rather just like an unknown. Basically, it was discovered that one aspect, one assumption of how full team membership proofs would work wasn't as well proven out as initially thought. So Okay. There just had to be some more research around it, essentially. So there's a really good podcast called Monero Talk that did an episode with Diego who runs Cypher Stack of Stack Wallet fame and to do a lot of research for the community. Basically, he contracts out researchers who work for him. And one of their researchers was working on FCMP. So the researcher joined him for the podcast. They talked about it a lot more, but nothing terrifying or horrible about it. Basically, just some kinks still being worked out, full chain membership proofs, but no no crazy scare or anything. Like, some people are talking about on Twitter. So still encouraging.
Obviously, it's still a work in progress. I'm not wanting to guarantee full chain membership proofs any specific time as it is very, very cutting edge stuff, but still making good progress there. Well, that was a good update. You'd rather
[00:29:07] Unknown:
things like that happen a bit slower, but done right. Yeah.
[00:29:12] Unknown:
Yes.
[00:29:12] Unknown:
At least that would be my approach. Diego's been on Uncomfortable Misfits before. Oh, yes. Nice. It was a while ago. I'm pretty sure it was him, and then he was talking about his wife does a lot of dev work as well. I think, like, he does one side and she does a lot of the UX side of things, and they work together on stuff. Nice. Nice. Yeah. That was maybe a year and a half ago or something. It's not a Powerwall at that, actually. I've used it a bit. It's quite nice. No. No. They've done a good job. They have Stack Duo, which is the more, like, hardcore one. There's Bitcoin and Monero, and then they have That's it. Stack Wallet, which is just a lot of things. They have a lot more cryptocurrencies in there than even Key Wallet does, and they're doing good work. I've only used StackDuo as what I think that was probably my first Monero wallet, StackDuo.
Mhmm. Trader. That was yeah. Well, it was before maybe it was before we even knew each other properly, I think. It must have been Probably was.
[00:30:05] Unknown:
It's a good excuse at least. I think it was 2022,
[00:30:08] Unknown:
maybe.
[00:30:09] Unknown:
Something like that. That was definitely we knew each other well at least. Yeah. But, yeah, I liked him. He was good. And so I was like, how do you do that? Like, working with your wife every day and, like, splitting that kind of work. That's an interesting dynamic. Yeah. Certainly would bring a lot of it would be certainly great, but it's still a lot of interesting dynamics. I'm sure working with the family. I know it's Yeah. Always brings its pros and its cons. But, they seem to do good work together, so that's been cool. Yeah. He he's a fantastic guy. I have known Diego for probably seven years now. He's one of the first people I really talked to in the Monero community, and we used to have these, like, Monero coffee chat things that he was a part of and and I would join way back in the day. So he's a great dude. It's cool that the Monero community
[00:30:49] Unknown:
is a little bit smaller and a little bit more tight knit. It's kind of feels to me as like a kind of like an outsider on the Monero stuff. Like, I I know a few people, and, like, I use it a little bit, but I'm still learning a lot. It kind of feels to me from the outside at least how Bitcoin did, like, eight, nine years ago when I first started getting involved. I felt like it was more tight knit and fun almost. People took themselves a little bit less seriously, but cared deeply about what they did at the same time. It's got a cool feel. I do like that about the Monero community.
[00:31:25] Unknown:
Yeah. I was gonna say there's less infighting in the Monero community than the Bitcoin one, but that isn't true either. So sometimes it feels like there's more. It is definitely one of those, like, getting into the quote, unquote inner circle is much easier when Monero is just much smaller. And if you're if you're aligned and you're vocal, you're gonna be in those conversations, which is really fun. You're gonna be knowing more of the people who are, like, actually involved in the day to day of Monero, which is a blast. But, honestly, on the flip side, though, like, active Bitcoin community that are actually, like, building or doing things is really small is really small. Yeah. There's a big distinction there. I've joked around with, like, Meadow Dell and others of, like, there's probably, like, a 100, a 150 people who are, like, the most involved. Obviously, there's hundreds of thousands of millions that are, like, in Bitcoin and doing things, but just, like, from the perspective of, like, people actually, like, building around, talking around, not in, like, the blind influencer. I'll take whatever money I can get way, but, like, actually well informed. Like, there's not that many people even within Bitcoin. But within an era, obviously, it's it's even drastically smaller than that. So pros and cons.
[00:32:28] Unknown:
Yeah. You have, like, a few heavy hitters like the Craig rules and people like that who just, like, make amazing stuff. And then just, like, outside of that, keep quiet and just do their thing, keep their head down. And then you've got 99% of it is just like squawking fucking Mongoloids who are just screeching
[00:32:46] Unknown:
into the ether with just nonsense. That's pretty much how I see it as well. Maybe, yeah, hundred, two hundred people who, like, really fucking get stuff done. Yeah. Which is crazy to think about. Like, I'd even say in Monero, it's probably 25 to 50 maybe. At any given time, it's probably more talking, like, the lifetime of Monero. It's pretty crazy. On the one sense, it's a little frightening that, like, that few people are the key people building this stuff. But on the other hand, it also should be really encouraging that, like, you as an individual can have massive impact on the world. Yeah. Yeah. You being one of the 20 active people, like, really, really, really involved in an arrow. Like, obviously, there's way more developers than that and other things. But just like being one of the people who's, like, really, really involved in shaping an arrow, you could have a massive impact over the years just like people in Monero. Like you said, Craig, we're all like, why would we be without Sparrow Wallet? It's one dude who just wanted to ship a wallet for himself and basically, like, redefined what it means to have a desktop Bitcoin wallet.
Yeah. It's absolutely wild to think what you can do as an individual if it's something that you're passionate about. So definitely, like, a good takeaway there is getting involved. Yeah. You can easily be one of those people if you're just well meaning, nuanced, and build something you care about. You can change the world. No. You're just making fun of me.
[00:34:00] Unknown:
No. For real, though. Like, you can change the world. You can actually do that. It's just that most people don't have the grit and determination and maybe the, processing power to do it. But if you are someone like that, you really can. You can? Okay. Let's plot through this. We've diverged enough. I'll nail through the the last, That's me chatting about Italy.
[00:34:17] Unknown:
Last few general things. We'll be quick. We'll be quick. Software updates will be quick this week as well. So quick one to call out. We've talked a lot about BTC BTC pay server on this podcast before. If you wanna learn more about it, dive back through others. But there's a CCS, basically, like a community crowdfunding system in the Monero community where you can donate to help other people build things on Monero. They're raising funds for improving the BTC pay server plug in within BTC pay, which is, like, the way that you access Monero as a merchant. Making this easier, obviously, makes merchants' lives much easier, makes them much more willing to accept Monero. It's hugely important. They're still seeking funding, but they did also post their first update.
Basically, they've been doing a lot of, like, behind the scenes work to get the code in a better state, do a lot of tests to make sure stuff isn't broken before shipping updates. Like, a lot of back end stuff. So nothing crazy for, like, the end user of PTZ Pacer yet, but encouraging to see that they've already shipped, an update there. They have a blog where they'll be posting about this as they do their work. If you do have a few Monero lying around and want to donate to make it easier for merchants like Ungovernable Misfits to run and accept Monero as part of b t z pay server, that's a fantastic cause and definitely one I'd recommend people donate to. Yeah. Definitely.
The last kinda general topic I wanted to get into, and I'll kinda combine a few things in this one. There's been some recent news on Bitcoin tracing being pretty problematic and Monero privacy being pretty well proven, which is really, really fascinating. The first one is if anyone's been following the Ross Ulbricht stuff since he was released since he was at Bitcoin Vegas about three weeks ago, he received a, like, $31,000,000.300 Bitcoin. Yeah. A very big donation. $31,000,000 in Bitcoin came out of nowhere to his public donation address. And, of course, it's Bitcoin. So everyone immediately wanted to figure out, like, where did this Bitcoin come from? Who sent this? On the good side of things from a privacy perspective, they don't know exactly who funded this donation, like, exactly where it came from. Even if they don't know the identity of the entity, what is painful is they know essentially where the funds came from. So they were traced back through Yeah. Some centralized mixer back to AlphaBay, which was a dark net market. I think this was, like, twenty sixteen ish was when AlphaBay was around. If I remember right, it was the first one that actually accepted Monero. Yeah. But the funds came from what looks like an AlphaBay vendor, like someone who was actually selling goods and services, if you will. I don't know exactly what they were selling on there.
Probably not good goods. The vendor, theoretically, is the one who donated these funds to Russell. Two problems with that. Obviously, it's not good that someone donating to someone reveals this much about themselves, at least not identity here, but just like a good reminder. The other bad thing is, like, Ross Ulbricht did get pardoned, but the pardon is only retroactive. It doesn't cover anything that happens in the future. And you know, either you may know that many three letter agencies would love an excuse to lock Ross up again. Whatever whatever they could do to make that happen. Oh, yeah. So funds like this being able to be, like, very easily traced back to nefarious beginnings and then sent to Ross. He's gotta be an Isaiah game. I hope he knows how to use coin control and not spend these funds.
There's a lot of sketchy stuff that happens with this. So definitely, like, problematic from that perspective. And then the third thing out of it is just, like, is a really good reminder of why silent payments matter. The idea of accepting donations and having good privacy is quite straightforward, and silent payments essentially solve this. There are still caveats that we've talked about. Like, if he took all the donations and combined them all together into one single transaction, obviously, that would still reveal a lot about himself, and that could reveal the same amount of information here to an outside observer. But if he was careful at all, he could have better privacy. I was just about to say it's, like, either silent payments, bit 47,
[00:37:59] Unknown:
or bolt 12 if it was actually a thing and if anyone could send that sort of amount on lightning or any of the ways that someone can do is everything has trade offs but better than this way that it's been done because whoever it is who's donated this I mean, maybe it's like DRP or whoever is like, cheers, mate. But my assumption would be that the government says, alright. We know where this has come from.
[00:38:22] Unknown:
It's what we deem to be illicit activity. We're ceasing it. I'm surprised if he gets to keep it at all. It It is. As far as I know, it's like he is accepting donations directly into his own wallet. So, like, they would still need some sort of court order to actually seize the funds, like, to force him to give them over, which would be unlikely. Like, I doubt that they would do that. With that amount though? He's not gonna send them to Coinbase and sell them for 31,000,000. Like No. No. No. They're not usable. They're, like, the most tainted of tainted funds in existence right now. Yeah. They're not useful, but I doubt that they would do any confiscation forcing him to give over the keys. But rather if they ever go to an exchange, they're gone. What if he
[00:39:01] Unknown:
used these funds, let's say, to buy a gift card? Presumably, if they're allowing him to keep those funds, which I am shocked by. Like, I'm surprised they're not just being like, wow, if I can take him them. If he did that, where would he stand? It's like you've used funds that we know have come from what we deem to be illicit activity. Mhmm. They've gone through a mix, so they've been donated to you, but we've let you have them. Now you've bought this gift card and you've gone and bought a coffee. What's happening to him then? Like, is is he then guilty because he's using funds that they think came from a certain place? Like, does it just have to sit there forever? Yeah.
[00:39:40] Unknown:
I I would think so. Fucking hell. That's mad. I don't know exactly what they could get him on if he spent these funds. Like, they were theoretically a donation, but I'm assuming the thought process would be, how do we know these weren't Ross's funds originally or something? And he's Right. Right. Right. The stupid joke that's been said frequently was, like, we all know this is just Ross stoning back to himself, which I think is blatantly false That stuff. And also, like, a really harmful joke. But Yeah. That would be, I'm sure, the suspicion of, like, oh, these $31,000,000 come from another dark net market, and now you're gonna go spend them on coffee. We're gonna find some way to pin this on you as some sort of money laundering or failing to properly do AML and these things. Yeah. I don't know on the legal side exactly how it would come back to bite him, but I'm sure that these funds will just sit here. Water waste. Yeah. It is. I'm assuming they're just gonna sit there. I I doubt that he would move those. It is very sad. Maybe someday, he'll be able to use them, or maybe there's some way that he can get them, like, quote, unquote, cleared. Somebody can say that he's allowed to use something. Yeah. Exactly. Get a little holy water sprinkled on him from the from the feds.
Oh, damn. Yeah. Weird situation, though. There's a lot of silver bullet to solve it. Silent payments are a great one, but 47 could be bolt 12 could be as well, but still some potential problems after that. But that Mhmm. Definitely an interesting case and another reason. Like, he does accept Monero donations. Obviously, no one has any idea how much Monero donations he's received, but Yeah. Yeah. They did add a Monero donation address six months ago, maybe something like that. Okay. But you don't see any news articles because we can't see anything about it. Yeah. Well, listen. If you're a dark net market vendor and you wanna send some funds onto Ross to the tune of $30,000,000,
[00:41:20] Unknown:
maybe just use Monero for now. I think that's gonna be your safest bet. I will
[00:41:24] Unknown:
avoid giving advice to dark net market vendor.
[00:41:27] Unknown:
Yeah. You probably should avoid that. You do you, Max. Yeah.
[00:41:31] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:41:32] Unknown:
And listen, if you wanna send a few million my way as well, we've got donation, addresses, uncouple of misfits. We're happy to take your millions.
[00:41:41] Unknown:
On that note, Monero related, actually, in another case of Bitcoin tracing. So there is a very, very famous hacker, darknet market vendor selling personal information, database leaks, password leaks, that sort of thing called Intel Broker, and they've been active for a very long time. The actual indictment about Intel broker came out. He's arrested. He is a Brit. So your your fellow Brit there. Isn't isn't he like a little British kid from up north? Like, a little 12 year old child. He's in university. I think the picture on the card is, like, when he was really young, which is the
[00:42:15] Unknown:
He looks He looks like a 12 year old for sure. He looks exactly like q and a. I thought it was q and a. I was like, oh, that's 11 year old q and a. It's a robot? A little northern pasty cunt. That's what it looks like.
[00:42:30] Unknown:
Sorry, Q. I love you, really. He is a Brit, but he was apprehended. Indictment's out. People have been reading through it. The most fascinating thing in there, essentially, the way that he was caught was that he accepted a Bitcoin payment for some intel, for, like, a better word that he was selling Mhmm. On a dark net market. The person buying was an undercover agent and was able to trace the Bitcoin payment, connect it to a KYC account through Ramp, which is like an on ramp aggregator that a lot of Bitcoin wallets use, and trace it through Ramp to who he actually was, Coinbase, email accounts, other things. Oh my lord. Why do they do this? Yep. He had it sent to another wallet, but, essentially, he sent a payment from, another wallet that he accepted the payment to, and he connected it to his k y c account. Now like with most Bitcoin tracing, it's not 100%, but this seems like really, really basic wallet clustering heuristics. It seems pretty sure, though, way that Monero comes in, which is really, really fascinating. So normally, this guy only accepted Monero as payments for things that he had sold in the past. And if you read through the indictment, they talk about this, that he had been accepting Monero. It's what he wanted for multiple sales that he had made. The undercover agent had actually used Monero to purchase until previously from this guy. Again, just trying to get a bead on who he was. They mentioned nothing about learning anything about him when they use Monero as the payment rails. But what happens next is that the same guy goes back who had built this kind of relationship. He goes back to him and wants to buy more data from him, but tells him this time instead he wants to pay in Bitcoin instead of Monero, and that's where the Bitcoin tracing happens.
So Monero had been used previously by the undercover agent as part of this operation, and they weren't able to learn anything about him. And then they asked him to swap to using Bitcoin for payments, and that's when everything breaks down. Obviously, I'm not advocating for data sales like this on the dark net, but, like, it's a really good test of is Monero useful. If the undercover agents had to resort to saying, like, I need to get this guy to accept Bitcoin instead of Monero, and that was his route actually tracing him. It's a really good reminder that, like, this is proof that Monero works. If it didn't work, he would have just Yeah. Sent the initial Monero payment, traced him, and it would be over at that point. But he had to get him to swap to Bitcoin to be able to do this. And, obviously, like, then you're pairing it with this guy obviously didn't use Bitcoin well from a privacy perspective. He tied wallets together to his KYC wallet. There's obviously OPSEC failures here as well. But if he was using a KYC
[00:44:53] Unknown:
Yeah. Exchange to do all of this anyways on the Bitcoin side, he probably was on the Monero side as well, and it didn't harm him there. That's mental, though, isn't it? It's fascinating. Isn't that crazy that you have someone who obviously has some technical chops to do the sort of stuff they're doing, I would assume? And then you use the crypto side, payment side, and your knowledge obviously is lacking to a point that's below mine, which is outrageous. And, like, I was saying the same with that massive hack, the Bitfinex one. They're always going to a fucking centralized exchange with their own information.
Like, this guy is selling other people's information. Pretty sure you could set up a fucking fake account at best. Like, if you wanna use a KYC exchange, like, that's not something that's not practiced. Surely, you would do that or do it in a different way where you're spending without actually cashing out to a KYC exchange. It's always these crazy what seems stupid to us, but maybe it's just because we're in such a small bubble. It seems obvious.
[00:45:56] Unknown:
I think it's the same reason why, like, darknet markets have swapped to Monero even though technically there are some better ways to gain privacy within the cryptocurrency space. It's because the lowest bar is very good privacy. Mhmm. And in Bitcoin, I think there's still this assumption that, like, as long as I don't directly give out the wallet that's linked to my KYC, I'll be okay. Like, a hop or two is gonna be fine. And it's like, if you're not in the weeds like we are, like, this guy's not a Bitcoin privacy educator. Like, he's trying to sell stuff on a dark net market. Obviously, also, these people are almost always extraordinarily cocky. Like, they've gotten away with a lot in the past, and so there's a lot of bravado that goes into this. They make stupid mistakes because they just feel uncatchable. I feel like there's just this misunderstanding still somehow that, like, if I'm at least a little bit careful on Bitcoin, I'll be fine. Like, he like I said, he did use a different wallet initially, but then he connected it to his KYC wallet later on, probably on accident, maybe not realizing what he was doing or maybe thinking that was good enough, and that was enough to get him. So it is pretty crazy that people who are, like, very technically talented in other ways still don't understand how to do Bitcoin privacy in a sane way, but yet at the same time are adopting Monero because they don't have to do anything extra to gain that privacy. So it's yeah. It's definitely interesting, but you would expect a lot more from somebody who's, like, literally a criminal on the run using Bitcoin to sell other people's data. Like, you'd think that this guy would spend a little time learning how to use Bitcoin privately, but, shockingly, no. And this is also one of those reasons why governments, in many situations, especially law enforcement, they love Bitcoin. Like, this made their lives so much easier than so many other payment rails could have made it. If he had this guy used cash, if this guy used only Monero, if this guy had used other payment rails, sometimes they'd be a lot harder. Yeah. Good luck. Bitcoin a lot of times actually makes their job really easy. So it's one of those things where, like, people think, like, oh, we're gonna stick it to the man with Bitcoin. I'm like, a lot of times, it's actually just making their lives easier. It's not actually causing problems. It can, but it's not always making their lives harder. And a lot of times, they're more than happy for someone to accept Bitcoin or use it. Yeah. It's certainly in that sense of, like, using the thing for something that they would deem to be criminal activity or for tracing and tracking and stuff. For sure, they're gonna prefer Bitcoin to cash or Monero or or other options, even gold. You know? The only way you stick it to the man is like that you have control over something if you know what you're doing, but not for payments. Yep. No. Not for payments. Yeah. That does bring up I know you and q and a touched on it a ton on the other show, so we don't need to get into much detail. But that does bring up that there at least is, theoretically, a way to gain privacy again in Bitcoin now that Ashigaru, the big balls folks over there, launched Whirlpool again with their own liquidity pool, their own software, which is basically a Spero CLI fork that's specific for Ashigaru.
Really fascinating stuff. I know we were talking a little bit before we went live, and I do urge caution with anything like this. There's a lot of trust involved when you're using a centralized coordinator. A lot of trust both in their implementation and in them being legitimate and not trying to attack people who are actually joining the rounds because you do rely on them for civil resistance. But that being said, like, caution urged, it is pretty awesome to see that there is a way to gain some privacy on Bitcoin again. Like, the loss of Whirlpool last year was absolutely monumental when it came to being able to use Bitcoin in a privacy preserving way. And it did impact also the ability to go back and forth with Monero. We've talked before about when you swap, especially from Monero to Bitcoin, you can get tainted funds that you can't do anything with. You had nothing to do with the source of the funds. You had nothing to do with whatever criminal actions may have happened before on those Bitcoin because they're part of the history. Without Whirlpool, you didn't have a good way to reset that history. Mhmm. Now we do. So it's definitely, like, exciting times that the tooling's back. Definitely gonna be keeping a really close eye on how that unfolds because that makes a useful whirlpool, makes the symbiosis between Bitcoin and Monero much more powerful than when we don't have whirlpool as an option. So I'm I'm really excited for that. I love what the Hashtagra guys have been doing. Definitely gonna be keeping a close eye on that. Definitely also just urge caution, early adopter tax, all that fun stuff that can be problematic, but definitely exciting times. Yeah. For sure. Very exciting to have it back. Huge set of balls
[00:49:52] Unknown:
on whoever's behind that, literally carrying them around in a wheelbarrow. The fact that we've got this now developing and yeah as you say you obviously need to use caution like see how things develop but from my perspective I'm very very excited it's like the loss of Whirlpool is what pushed me towards Monero in the first place because I was just like well, we've got nothing now. Like, we've got nothing that's good enough. So, yeah, we'll see, but very exciting.
[00:50:16] Unknown:
Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely huge news. Definitely gonna be keeping a close eye on that one. Let's jump into our software updates. We're getting to know each other too well, Max. Too much back and forth. Too much chatter. Can't be friends. Gotta get through this stuff. Get through it. Nah. Good times, though. I'm loving the back and forth here. We'll power through the updates real quick. There's nothing absolutely massive this month. We'll roll through them. Cake wallet, technically, we released this update, like, two days before the May, but it was right after we recorded for the May Monero monthly. We launched version five dot o, which no huge new features or anything like that. Some page bug fixes, but the big thing that we did launch in it is a new UI, essentially two new themes, but a ton of UI changes across the board throughout the app that I think make it much much more friendly on the eyes, much nicer to look at. A lot of user experience improvements as part of that, and, ultimately, this is, like, just laying the foundation for a lot of other things that we've been working on. So Mhmm. Really excited for this one. It's, like, one of the things I've been most looking forward to for the past few months launching and really loving the look of Geek Wallet now, leaning more into the new brand and everything. So it was good to get that out. It's much cleaner. Just done the update a couple of days ago, and it yeah. Much, much cleaner. Nice. I know we've talked about it before, but q and a's rant on the other show about, how bad the original default theme was.
It's played constantly throughout our team. I think if we ever have a headquarters, it'll just be looping over the speakers while we're working just to remind us where we came from. You have to share it with I'll make a little video clip. I just can't remember which, you know, I record with you every other week, so I can't remember which one it was. If I can have that clip, I'll make a little video. I'll grab it for you for sure. It's a it's a legendary rant. Okay. It's been inspiration for us as we've reworked the theme. So that theme is dead. Now we're gonna need the opposite rant from q and a about how much he loves the new look. So we'll have to get that recorded as well. Okay. Let's see. But, yeah, that theme is dead. Most of the themes are gone, by the way, but a lot of them are going to come back. Like, I know the most requested one so far has been the kind of Monero orange theme that we used to have, which was a, like, a dark black with an orange accent. It was actually the theme that I used before we launched these new ones. That will come back. Other ones will come back, but a lot of the changes necessary here were basically, like, completely overhauling how we do themes on the back end. It's like nothing you need to know as a user, but it's essentially way, way, way easier for us to do UI stuff now to build out new themes. It's much better from, like, how we're approaching this. So we'll be rebuilding Mhmm. Some of the old themes, bringing them back. If people have specific requests, definitely let us know. But those other ones will be coming back. But right now, just the simple light dark theme. I think they look much better. Yeah. For sure. P two pool, which we talked about a lot on the show, couple updates to that. Nothing major from a feature perspective, but there were a bunch of denial of service attack fixes and pretty critical bug fixes in the last two versions, four dot eight and four dot eight dot one. So if you're running p two pool, like, you're you're mining a home using it or you're running goopax to mine on your desktop, just go and make sure that you update good protection for yourself and for the rest of the p two pool network because p two pool is essentially a side blockchain on its own. So if a ton of the nodes are vulnerable, it could cause some issues with people being able to mine some attacker wanting to take care of those or take advantage of those vulnerabilities. So good time to update, but nothing crazy in those.
Monero Joe, a fantastic Android only Monero wallet. They shipped an update as well, just this last week. Main things are just fixing a bug with how they handled amounts in the QR codes, but also adding a much better translation framework called Weblet, which will make it easier for other people to contribute translation. So if you wanna help out with that, head over to the Manera show website. I know there's some social channels as well that you could probably jump in on, but that'll help them have better translations in the different languages, which is always great to see. Love getting Manera in the hands of people Yeah. Who aren't just English speaking. Glad to see that there. Unstoppable swap. So we talked about atomic swaps a good bit on the show as well. Basically, unstoppable swap are taking the atomic swap protocol that was built out four years ago, five years ago, called Comet, c o m I t. But it was the atomic swap protocol that was initially built between Bitcoin and Monero and kind of stalled when the original people who launched it moved on to other things. But the unstoppable swap guys have gotten funding from the Monero community over the last year to essentially take that over, maintain it, and improve it. And they launched a a big update to version two dot o and subsequent minor point releases as well. That brings a ton of improvements and fixes, especially to how the Bitcoin side of things work. It is a breaking change. So if you were using unstoppable swap before that, make sure you update so that you're on the latest and can actually work with makers and takers who are up to date as well. But it's good updates there. And like we talked about, like, atomic swaps are just one of those things, like, we have to have as a fallback, if nothing else. Like, most people aren't gonna do atomic swaps just because your user experience is much more hardcore than a instant exchanger kinda swap. But it's one of those things where it's literally unstoppable. Like, it is in the name. It's it's aptly named unstoppable swap because there's no way to prevent it as long as both parties can communicate in any way, and this makes it really easy for those parties to communicate. It's it's a really badass. Like, the way atomic swaps work, it's really badass.
But much, Jake. Basically is. Like, if you can send messages back and forth, you can swap Bitcoin and Monero in a way that's completely trustless. It's wild. Yes. Good stuff there. The other side of the decentralized swap world, Haveno or RitoSwap, which is the main implementation of Haveno, shipped a ton of UI improvements. Much easier on the eyes. There's some other bug fixes and stuff. Nothing huge, but the main thing is that the UI looks much better now. Much, much better. So if you haven't yet used Rito swap or you have and you haven't done it in a while, go ahead and make sure you update. Give it a try. It's much nicer now, which is it seems like a small thing, but on the scale of approachability, especially for new people in the monero space, having tools that actually, like, look nice and make sense to use is a massive deal. It's gonna mean that a lot more people actually stick around and actually use Monero rather than get burnt out because everything's burning their eyes out and hard to understand how to use it. So it's an important step. For sure. And the last one that I have, and we can get into the the xmart chats, is Stack Wallet. So we've talked about Diego or he goes by in the space as well, but he ships Stack Wallet as a part of Cypher Stack. They released version two dot two dot two. They added two cryptocurrencies that I have literally no idea what they are. Salvium and Factorn.
Not gonna Oh, yeah. Great currency. Use them all the time. Gonna be completely honest. I have no clue. But alongside that, a couple bug fixes as well. If you have any idea what those cryptocurrencies are, maybe you can can drop an XMR chat or a boost and explain them to me. I feel like an old man now that all these new cryptocurrencies are here, and I don't know what they are. And all honestly, I just don't feel like looking into them. I just don't care. Yeah. We're too old and past it to be looking into dick butts and whatever other things are out there. Just We've been around the space. Don't care. Feel like just the two of us just sitting on our front porch rocking chairs. It feels like how we record these podcasts. That would be nice. Just like there with a drink
[00:56:57] Unknown:
on the terrace. You know, I'd like We need to make it happen. Gray hair blowing in the wind. Alright. XMR chats and boosts. Bird bat. It's just literally two emojis. 006552912 XMR. See no evil, duck, hear no evil, worm. That's such a weird Yeah. Yeah. Good luck interpreting that. That's not a cool one. I have no idea what that means. Thank you for the monero. See no evil duck. Yeah. Thank you very much. Expatriotic, 0.042069XMR plus 0.00316XMR plus another amount. Had to test out the ability to pay specifically for XMR amount. Also, cheers to k wallet team for accepting my XMR chat PR and bringing the release numbers in line for both wallets on GitHub.
Look at you, x patriotic. Doing a little pull requests. Could you go over the use of virtual visas in Cake Pay? Can you use them in brick and mortar stores? Can you tie them to your wife's Apple Pay or her boyfriend's Google Pay?
[00:58:13] Unknown:
Boyfriends or best friends? I think boyfriend. Yeah. Unfortunately.
[00:58:16] Unknown:
You'd hope best friends. I usually get the physical ones from Bitrefill, no XMR as other vendors don't do it. Max, what's the flow for using gift cards in real life at counter? I don't know what that fully means, I'll try and answer the gift cards in real life from my experience. It's been really simple, it's just been purchased the gift card, I had certain stores where I'd go and do my like grocery shopping and stuff, load it up with a certain amount like I used to Aldi quite a lot, Tesco's and Waitrose did it as well and you just go in with the physical card, do your shopping, you go to the bit where you pay and I would just scan it, it was really fucking simple, like literally how you pay gift card, they scan it, it takes that amount off and you get your shopping and it's done. If you were smart about it you'd find out exactly how much you're gonna spend first and then you get one exactly for that amount on your phone and then you do the scan but I didn't do that I would just do like a couple £100 on one use it and then use it the next time if there was any left on, but piss easy. And the same online, like, use it on Amazon, use it on whatever, and just pay. Pretty simple. But the good thing about doing it in store is there's less of a link to you because you're not inputting your details. You're just going to a cashier and you're buying it. Yeah. It's pretty easy right now. It's gonna get easier as well in gig wallet. Like, this is something we've talked about before. We've been working with a new provider gift cards that we can actually do in app redemption for. So, like, a flow that I had done, we had a provider in Kickpay three years ago, I think, that lets you do this where basically you could be at the checkout, get the total, buy the gift card on the spot for exactly that amount, and you just get a barcode
[00:59:56] Unknown:
in your app a few seconds later that you can actually use to pay. Yeah. Nice. So that will be much easier than the current system, especially good for that. Like, I had used it a ton before for, like, restaurants. I just get the total, buy the gift card there, Lowe's, getting home improvement stuff. Like, there were tons of easy places to be able to do that. So that will make it even easier so you don't have to wait for email redemption and all that. But for now, you can definitely do it. What you mentioned as well. And the virtual visas, they're Apple and Google Pay certified, so you can just load them into those. That's definitely the easiest way to do it. You can obviously use the card numbers and stuff online, but in person, most places aren't gonna let you just tell them the card numbers. But Apple and Google Pay work really well. Yeah. That's one of the things that I really miss. I'm on Graphite OS.
Google Pay is something that you'll probably never be able to do on Graphite OS. Yeah. So I don't really have a way to use these, unfortunately, but I'm hoping at some point that will change. I know some people who literally just run an iPhone as a secondary phone or something, an old one, so that they can have Apple Pay. They just use it for that. So it's definitely an option as well, but it's a little painful. Obviously, there's nothing we can do about that at a cake, but that's something where, like, if you do have a regular Android phone or an iPhone,
[01:01:00] Unknown:
using them in Apple or Google Pay are definitely the best approach. Really straightforward. Yeah. I've never used that, actually. I've never had luck with the Visa stuff previously. I've, like, bought a couple of Visa card things, top up Visa cards, and then tried to then use them to
[01:01:17] Unknown:
pay for, like, Twitter premium or whatever you call it, and it just wouldn't work, wouldn't let me do that. I used it for something else that didn't work, and I was like, oh, fuck this. I'll just stick to gift cards. I can't be asked for this. Maybe it's easier if it's in Apple Pay or Google Pay. Maybe that just works a bit more seamlessly. In store is generally better anyways. Like, they're gonna be more accepting of those kinds of cards. The prepaid card spaces is just really difficult. Obviously, a lot of fraud, not thought through cake pay, but just in that industry in general. So Yeah. I'm sure. Vendors are a lot more hesitant to accept those cards unless they have a very good track record. So it's generally gonna be a little bit trickier. The other place where people normally run into problems is if you use a VPN and lie about where you're actually at and you buy a card that's not for the country where you're in and actually gonna be spending it, you are going to have problems. Yeah. That might be more. It is. Like, this happens all the time. And, like, people, sometimes they freak out. Like, we have, like, a thing that says, like, I'm not using a VPN to redeem this. We don't do that because we want to know anything about you. We do that because if you use a VPN and lie about where you're at, you're gonna get a card that only works in the jurisdiction you bought it for, and you're gonna lose your money. We can't refund in those cases because we lose the money as well because you got bought a card that Yeah. We can't reclaim either. So make sure, like, if you need to use these cards, actually be honest about what jurisdiction you're going to be using these in and obey the prompts when they tell you what you need to do to redeem them. Use them the right way because there is just so much fraud in that industry Mhmm. That there's a lot of protections around it. So if you try to pretend that you're from, like, The US and you're in Europe and you buy a US card, it's it's not gonna work. Again, there's nothing we can do, but that's just the reality of that space. You could still run a VPN and just have yourself positioned in the country where Yeah. You're gonna be buying and using it. Be in The US, but still run your US VPN
[01:02:58] Unknown:
in a different state, whatever, and you could still buy the gift card and then spend it in The US, and you wouldn't have any issues.
[01:03:05] Unknown:
For sure. Sometimes there still can be issues when redeeming while you have a a VPN active no matter what the country is. And, again, that's fraud prevention stuff, which is really, really frustrating with the reality. But, yes, if you're going to use a VPN, definitely do the actual country that you're in for the VPN and what country you're saying you're in. I kept having problems with gift cards when I was doing it on the tool browser,
[01:03:25] Unknown:
redeeming them, and it kept, like, not loading. And I was having all sorts of problems, so I had to go to a normal browser. So I guess that's just another part of that same thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's generally not as bad on the gift card side, but, yeah, it's unfortunately one of the side of things. But we're constantly trying to find ways where we can improve that and make it easier. And especially with the new vendor that we're gonna be launching soon, it should be much better on the redemption flow. Do you know what I just thought of something that'd be so cool? I don't again, this is probably not something that's gonna happen tomorrow, but, you know, you were saying about your go to pay, it's $54.20. And then you could just input that in $54.20.
It'd be cool if there was some way that you could have a bit like how you have Apple Pay or tap and go on your phone, where you can almost tap it and it would just come up with the amount and it would instant change to buy the gift card and then pay it, take all the middle bit out. So it's like From the checkout computer or whatever? Yeah. So, like, you press pay. Like, if I'm paying on Apple Pay, for example, tap the card, and it just uses whatever card you've got set up, your credit card, whatever, and then it is like, and it does it. If there was a way that you could have some sort of extension or some I'm not gonna be using the right terminology, but something in your Google or Apple Pay wallet that then talked to your cake pay. So taps, it says we need to swap $54.20.
Cake pay goes, okay, let's swap it. That gives it the permission to do it. Ding, ding, and then it pays it. Yeah. I think sadly, there's just Apple and Google, and the merchant would have to support that, basically.
[01:05:05] Unknown:
So there's not yeah. There's not a way we can do that. Okay. Because they'd have to have some, like, API that we could deep link into to say, like, hey. You don't have enough to pay on this card. You need to top it up. Got you. It would be nice. It would make more sense especially for cards that you can actually top up and reuse, which is something that is on our road map. Yeah. But even then, like, there's nothing as far as I know within the Apple Pay or Google Pay ecosystem to say, like, we need more money on this. Where do we go to get more money on this kind of thing? But it'd be nice if possible. It makes sense. Like, the technical side, I have no fucking idea. But just thinking through, I was like but it's pretty simple anyway. Honestly, I lived on gift cards for a long time, and it was, like, never an issue so the visa stuff may be slightly different but just having that as an option
[01:05:48] Unknown:
being able to use your cryptocurrency in the fiat world without having to go to fucking coinbase and swap and have all the bullshit in between like you're pretty awesome. For sure. Fruits, zero point zero one seven four XMR and zero 0.0174XMR. Will gift card purchases with the same email address be linked to each other? Seth mentioned an upcoming feature where gift cards will arrive directly in the app without requiring an email address. Will these gift cards still be linked to an identifier? Please explain how cake pay slash coin cards work and how to use them anonymously.
Do the middlemen or the merchant obtain or retain any information? How can one get and activate a Visa slash it's literally the same question. Visa slash master debit card anonymously without KYC verification VPNs are blocked.
[01:06:44] Unknown:
We've covered a lot of this. The first one is definitely new, but the second one, I think we mostly covered basically, like, yes. We need an account system within Cakepay to know to essentially let you get the cards delivered to you. Right now, they're all email delivery, so obviously we have to have an email to do that. In the future, when we have this new reseller where you can buy the cards and have them delivered in app, we'll still use an account, which will be an email, but there's no other identifying information about you. And that email should be an alias. So something through simple login, proton pass, anon, Addy, I think is is another one of them. Like, you should be using Anima alias. You can reuse the same one. You can use new ones each time. We have no prevention to stop you from using new ones each time, so feel free to go for that. But it does make it a little bit of a pain, especially when we have cards that you can redeem directly to your account. You'll probably want to use the same email so that you can access cards that you haven't spent yet, see the balances, all of that kind of thing. So it would be easier to do a single email account. But I think a lot of people, like, really overthink the threat model here. If you're not being hunted by, like, the NSA, think of how much information you're revealing here at worst. Like, at worst, you're revealing an IP address, which could be VPN or Tor. You're revealing an email address, which hopefully is an email alias that isn't, at least for us, linkable back to you. And then you're at worst revealing a Monero or Bitcoin transaction ID. That's Yeah. Basically nothing. And the end merchant where you're paying with the gift card doesn't even know that the gift card was purchased with crypto, much less any of that information. Like, for the vast majority of people, like, just don't overthink it. Use these. Enjoy them. It's just it's not that serious as people make these threat models out to be. Like, obviously, if you need to be super anonymous, you're honestly just not going to be able to do this in the most hardcore way. Like we talked about, VPNs and Tor are usually blocked when you're redeeming these because they need a way to prevent fraud, which is rampant in the system. We do need an email address, but you could use a throwaway email every time. You could use a different email each time. Like, there are ways you can go more hardcore, but for the vast majority of people, that's, like, absolutely unnecessary.
[01:08:41] Unknown:
You're just making your life harder for no reason. So I would definitely say, like, keep it simple. If you're going on and you're making an email alias that is not linked to your identity, you're running a VPN, you then buy a gift card with Monero, and then you physically use it in a shop to go and buy your milk and eggs, you're probably alright. Yeah. You're ahead of 99.99999%
[01:09:04] Unknown:
of people in terms of your level of privacy there. And unless you are literally being hunted, you're fine. Not to mention, you're not doing anything illegal, and you're buying things in a proper way from a real merchant. Yes. Yeah. It's just not as extreme as people make it out to be. So take it easy for most people. Obviously, do your own threat modeling yourself. If you have a reason to need to be far more private than even this allows, then there are other ways to do it. But for the vast majority of people, like, this is already going far above and beyond, and it's a fantastic step for privacy. Even if you're doing it in the quote, unquote worst way, it's still fantastic. Agreed. Chad Farrow, the legend,
[01:09:37] Unknown:
001445 XMR. Another great episode. The amount of XMR messages you guys get still amazes me. It amazes me as well. It is pretty awesome. I love seeing it every episode. I think we get more XMR chat messages than we do boost these days. That's the Monero community for you. They actually like spending Monero. They certainly do. Thank you to everyone who has been sending these through. Schrodinger with zero point zero two XMR. The latest Monero monthly was very informative. Melvin and Cupcake, l m f a o, a laughing face.
[01:10:16] Unknown:
That was my education as well. There are new things every day from you, Max. I know. That's what I'm here for, mate. Doctor Zavargo,
[01:10:22] Unknown:
Max, heard you say foot gun. Did not know you, queen loving pussy cunts, knew about firearm expressions. Queen loving. I love the band Queen, I actually really love Queen but I don't love the crown wearing type. Maybe you're learning how to be a man on the Virgin Island. You know what they say, you can take the cunt out of Britain, but Brits are still gay. Yeah. I've heard that term before, actually. Very common. Yeah. Very common. You can take the cunt out of Britain, but Brits are still gay. I appreciate you, mate. Thank you very much. These ex march hats make me blush every time. They're hard to read. Mom, if you're listening, I'm sorry. Yeah. Seth's mom, I'm sorry about these. That's why I read them. You read them for my mom? For your mom. Yeah. I do. She loves the XMR chats.
Vietnamese. Has anyone at Cake started testing multi recipient URI URL? URI. URI. Having wallet support for this is a big step towards making split payments work and Monero being used for podcasting two point o. Great question, which I can't answer, obviously. Yes.
[01:11:38] Unknown:
I'm gonna have to look into it more. I looked into it when initially sent, and I thought I opened a ticket for it internally, but I must not have. So I will I'll get a ticket opened, and we can start working on it. It seems like it should be something that's very straightforward for us to integrate. So it should be low left. It'd be so cool. I'll add that in. Obviously, like we talked about, we can already do multi recipient, but you can't scan a single QR and get multiple recipients out of it. So that's what this piece would add is allowing you to just scan a single QR, paste a single thing, and get all the recipients with separate outputs being sent to them, a balance, all of that in one. So should be very straightforward, though, but I'll dig into it. We could do stuff for every XMR chat that comes through. We could give a little portion to donate to the BTC pay fund to help fund that or do do some cool things with splits, couldn't we? I guess so. XMR chat would have to integrate it, and you'd have to have a way to, like, specify the split and everything. But in theory, you could do that Okay. In theory. Alright. In theory. Ungov
[01:12:35] Unknown:
with 0.00656XMR. Loving the Monero show, How does Monero's energy use compare to Bitcoin? I saw Ethereum change their mining protocol and reduced energy use by 99%. Is that something Monero could slash would do? Is strong privacy compatible with low energy use? I sort of half feel like, is this a troll, the energy use stuff? I don't think so. But then they've got the uncoff thing. Okay. Well, if it is genuine, fair enough. Glad you like the show. There's reasons that energy use is high, but I don't know with Monero. I mean, presumably, it's quite different actually to Bitcoin in that sense.
[01:13:19] Unknown:
It is. Yeah. The energy use is gonna be less than Bitcoin just because there's less people mining Monero or less energy, I should say, being used for mining Monero than for mining Bitcoin. So, technically, yes, it will be less. Obviously, if Monero had as much security as Bitcoin did from a a pure, like, energy use perspective, it would be the same amount of energy use. Like, energy is is obviously comparable. But the key differentiators for me, first, proof of stake on Benjara would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, from a technical perspective because it's very, very hard to do that without sacrificing privacy. Even if you can do it in a way that technically protects privacy, it adds a lot of potential issues. Like, for instance, CNO is a Monero fork that does proof of stake. They just had their staking system essentially de anonymized so that people can see the amounts of every person who's staking. And, obviously, you would not want that with a Monero. And proof of stake necessarily does rely on some way to validate that the people staking are staking the right amounts, but without revealing that to the world. It it just gets very tricky. So, like, from a technical perspective, it's really hard even if you wanted to do it. Personally, I actually think a hybrid proof of work proof of stake system is probably the best combination in the cryptocurrency space. Projects like Decred do this Project called Darkfy will probably do this long term. There's some real benefits to doing both. But, again, in a privacy framework, it's very difficult to do that in a way that's good and that doesn't harm the overall system's privacy or harm individual users' privacy.
But outside of that, the one thing that I would say about Monero's proof of work mining that is much better than Bitcoin's proof of work mining is that the e waste in Monero's is drastically less. So one of the key problems with Bitcoin is we have ASICs, obviously. These a six are constantly improving in efficiency, and most of the people mining Bitcoin are these huge corporate scale miners. They need to be pushing efficiency, and they're gonna e waste out these a six every, like, three, four, five years at most. And e waste meaning they're just gonna, like, dump them. Maybe they sell them. Most of them are just gonna get dumped because they're gonna be low in efficiency at that point compared to what's available. And so there's a way more e waste on the Bitcoin side than on the Monero side where Monero is mined with just commodity hardware, regular computers. Arguably, Monero is actually probably improving the UA situation rather than adding to it because you can use an old computer or an old smartphone or an old server to mine Monero and get some use out of it that you wouldn't otherwise get. Like, I've done this in the past. I've used e waste rack mounted servers to my Monero for years, and those would have been just in a dump somewhere. But instead, I was mining Monero with them. So it actually can be beneficial to that, and it doesn't generate any e waste because, like, no one's building specialized hardware for mining Monero. So that is an advantage to Monero's a sick resistant proof of work algorithm that doesn't exist for Bitcoins. But, essentially, just proof of work works much better. It's much simpler, especially in something like Monero. It's just we're not gonna go proof of stake. Honestly, it's just not gonna happen. No. Bitcoin Derby. 0.03172
[01:16:10] Unknown:
XMR. Bitcoin Derby came back in July after the great defeat of naughties by corniness. This month, we discuss running Tails OS as well as other great software. Saturday, July at 3PM, ye old dolphin, d e one three d l. Anyone is welcome. Hashtag free samurai. I love Bitcoin Derby. If I was still in The UK, I think I'd actually travel to that. That sounds pretty badass. Discussion around Tails OS at a meetup. I love it. Yeah. These guys do it properly. They're fucking awesome. So thank you for the support and yeah if you are anywhere near that I suggest you go and check it out. Nobote 0.003 XMR. This is a good idea. Is it a good idea to run a Monero node on your phone? There's this tutorial on Reddit.
[01:17:08] Unknown:
Is it safe? Is there a better way? It sounds like a bad idea to me, but you you can tell me. It's not a bad idea. In theory, it can actually be really nice because the storage requirements aren't crazy. Like, if you have a 256 gig phone, you could run a requirements aren't crazy. Like, if you have a 256 gig phone, you could run a pruned Monero node on it. The main problem is that running any sort of cryptocurrency node, Bitcoin Monero, etcetera, but even a little bit worse than Monero is the amount of wire that it puts on the storage is quite high. And running it on internal storage, especially, will probably kill your phone much faster than it normally would die. You'll have storage problems eventually. Like, I'm not saying, like, in, like, three months, but a lot of additional wear on the storage itself that wouldn't be there if you were not running that on your phone. You could run it on a micro SD card, but micro SD cards are also really bad for high wear environments like that. So you will kill micro SD cards as well doing that, but you definitely can do it. It's like it's not impossible, especially on Android. Good ways to do it within something like termux, but it's not necessary. I've done it before multiple times on multiple phones. It's really overkill for the vast majority of people, but it is a cool little tech thing to play with and just see that it's possible to do it. Ideally, it would get easier in the future because just an old phone is something that a lot of people have lying around and can make reasonably good node hardware if it's already an old phone. Like, it's I wouldn't run it on, like, your daily driver, but if you have an old Android phone or something, it's a cheap, effective way to get a simple Monero remote note to use for yourself.
[01:18:33] Unknown:
Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. That phone that sits in the drawer and you think that you're gonna sell and you never do, and then eventually it just gets old enough that you just throw away. That's a good point. P p p with 0.003 XMR. Monero monthly in Monero dot com wallet. Why use accounts in a single wallet instead of separate wallets? Is it quicker, less syncing, or easier to restore, or better privacy or something else? With quantum computers, aren't multiple wallets safer than accounts?
[01:19:09] Unknown:
Just like in Bitcoin, it's really user experience thing. Rather than having to store in multiple seed phrases, you can just store one twelve word or 16 word seed, 16 word seed, and you can restore that, and you're always gonna get the accounts back as well. It's really just user experience. It's not better for privacy. It's not worse for privacy. It is better from a sync and restore perspective because, again, you only have to sync one wall at one time, and that syncs all of your accounts versus having to sync multiple wallets. So, like, for most people, you do not need two Monero wallets. You only need one, and then you can use separate accounts. Let's say you're buying Monero KYC and you're also buying it in OKC. Have a separate account for the KYC Monero if you want a little bit of extra protection. It's less necessary in Monero, but it is something that you can do. Or, like, for instance, you're accepting donations.
Maybe you want those going into a separate account, so you're not spending those donated funds with other funds. But for most people, you don't need another wallet, and it just adds complexity, increases the risk of losing money. You just use the same one, use accounts. Okay. Late stage Huddl with 5000¢.
[01:20:08] Unknown:
Definitely know what a cup check is, and a cupcake is one of the many things keeping me fat. I've never farted into my hand before though, sick face emoji and eyes.
[01:20:24] Unknown:
Me neither. I'm not planning on trying, but at least now I know what it is. If someone offers me a cupcake, I'm more wary than I used to be. You're more wary. It's also like the other type of cupcake is not something you should sort of take up doing at this stage of life.
[01:20:38] Unknown:
It's more something like you've either done it as, like, an eight year old kid or it's past it. Don't take it out now at this stage in life. It's not necessary.
[01:20:47] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah.
[01:20:51] Unknown:
Richard Grieser with 1,230 sats streamed, Caspeeland with 620 sats streamed, Turkey with 500 sats streamed, Jean Everett, my bad. I thought the sarcasm would have come through on my last boost. Love y'all, and I enjoy this Monero series. Jean Everett, 100 sats. We love you too, Jean. And, yeah, it wasn't easy to know about the sarcasm. You can be pretty tough on people, and and we like that about you, but we thought you were coming at us. So We fought back. We fought back. I think in a nice way. Yeah. Yeah. We basically said you were wrong, which you were. But if it was sarcasm, then sorry it went over our heads. TYM with 250 sets streamed. Pies
[01:21:37] Unknown:
Hey. Chingy di Ching.
[01:21:40] Unknown:
With 200 sats. Thank you, gentlemen. And chief monkey with a 170 sats streamed. I have a chief monkey piece of artwork on my wall that I won. Is this a a queen thing? Yeah. Chief monkey. If you haven't seen him before, he's he's a great artist and a really nice guy. I won a a bit of his artwork four years ago or something like that at the Bitcoin Beach Retreat in North Wales. Yeah. Have it hanging on my wall. So thank you chief monkey for donating that. Very, very nice. That is everything.
[01:22:13] Unknown:
We ran a little bit long because I was dreaming about pasta and everything else, but I think that was a good one. It was. It was. We got through a lot. I always think they're gonna be short. But you Brits, he drag on and on, droning. Sometimes I get a word on edgewise, but, you know, this is the Mac show. That's it.
[01:22:31] Unknown:
This is the this is the Mac show. Alright. Well, I appreciate all the boosts and XMR chats and all the questions. It really does make this show is is the best bit. I I love going through those. So thank you to everyone who's been supporting. Thank you to everyone who's been sharing the show. A lot of people, sharing and and messaging me, letting me know in private messages as well how much they enjoy it. So, that's awesome. I'm very happy to see where this show's gone. Thank you, Seth, for putting up with my stupid ideas and holding my hand through this new Monero stuff. I appreciate it. Yourself enough credit. No. You're a huge part of this too. Thank you for your ex. I'm I'm loving this. Can't wait to get to next month's. Catch you on the next one. See you. Thanks for listening, and a huge thank you to everyone who's been sharing Ungovernable Misfits with their friends and family, boosting the shows, sending in XMR chats or questions.
All of this really helps us grow and we really do appreciate it. I also wanna say a huge thank you to our sponsors, Foundation, k Wallet, and our new sponsor, MyInbox. MyInbox offers virtual private servers, domain registration, web hosting, email hosting, dedicated servers, help you run nodes for Bitcoin or Monero, and you can pay for all of their services completely privately with no details, and you can pay in Bitcoin, Monero, or I think pretty much any other cryptocurrency if you wanted to. Just get in touch with them. Go to my nimbox.io, and if you have any questions, you can reach out to me or them, and we'll have someone on very soon to answer any of your questions.
Go to my nimbox.i0 for any of your hosting needs, and go to foundation.xyz if you want hardware that isn't shitty, that's designed beautifully, that's fully open source, that has a proper team behind it, where you can actually store your Monero, not on a ledger, but on a proper, well built, beautifully designed device. Foundation.xyz, and use the code Ungovernable for a discount. And finally, before you go, if you aren't already using Cake Wallet and you're in the Monero world and listening to this episode, what the fuck are you doing? Go and check them out. Cake wallet dot com.
They have over half a million users. You can use this wallet on pretty much, I think, any device, whether it's Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android. You can download the APK. You can do swaps. You can buy gift cards. You can buy Visa cards. You can actually live on your cryptocurrency. And if you use this and you have any questions, you can reach out to me and Seth on each Monero monthly and badger us. I've known Seth for a few years now, and I know he does everything that he can to keep users safe, secure, and private. I love using Cake Wallet, and they look awesome after their rebrand.
As always, if you have any questions, please do reach out, and we'll catch you on the next one. Stay ungovernable.
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