In this episode, we welcome you into the world of Monero, a cryptocurrency renowned for its privacy features. We start by discussing the basics of Monero, its role as a privacy token, and how it compares to Bitcoin. Co-host, Seth for Privacy, joins us as a new member of the Ungovernable Misfits crew, sharing his insights and experiences with Monero. The episode covers the history of Monero, its development, and the significant changes it has undergone to enhance privacy.
2024
Conferences
Monerotopia
On/Off-ramps
Delistings
2025
On/Off-ramps
Launch of Serai?
Technical improvements
2024
Conferences
Monerotopia
On/Off-ramps
- Growing atomic swap usage via UnstoppableSwap and BasicSwap
- https://unstoppableswap.net/
- https://basicswapdex.com/
Delistings
- https://x.com/schmidt1024/status/1867184034368926037
- https://x.com/schmidt1024/status/1854951714152931385
- Gate_IO perps
- FCMP++ protocol development being finished
- https://repo.getmonero.org/monero-project/ccs-proposals/-/merge_requests/448#note_27450
- Rapid funding of technical CCS requests
- Explain how the CCS works, funding in Monero, etc.
- Quickly funded! https://repo.getmonero.org/monero-project/ccs-proposals/-/merge_requests/518
- Work on new addressing schemes that give drastically improved scanning key support
- JAMTIS and CARROT
- CARROT is the prevailing next step
- LinkingLion attacker running fake nodes to MitM real nodes
- https://thehackerblog.com/the-orphaned-internet-taking-over-120k-domains-via-a-dns-vulnerability-in-aws-google-cloud-rackspace-and-digital-ocean/
- https://x.com/monerobull/status/1832807857332330843
- https://b10c.me/observations/06-linkinglion/
- Ban list now available, deployed on all Cake nodes and my node, instructions in show notes
- Cake Wallet DDoS
- https://x.com/sethforprivacy/status/1856311150796804538
- Growing Monero usage for CoinCards, ShopInBit, MyNymBox
- Monerica popularity
- Barnjerky for monero
- UM clothing for monero
- CakePay growing, 4x since the beginning of the year
- Ecosystem growth
- Hardware wallet support for Monero on iOS in the latest Cake Wallet update
- Launch of XMRChat
- https://x.com/xmr_chat/status/1819935254922072144
- Launch of XMRBazaar
- Launch of Cupcake open beta
- Passport Prime announcement
- Cake Wallet app on Prime w/ Monero support in March, GA in June
2025
On/Off-ramps
Launch of Serai?
Technical improvements
- wallet2 improvements, drastically increasing sync speed by making the process of downloading/scanning blocks more async - jberman
- No KYC debit card that can be topped up with Monero in Cake
- Low limits, higher limits with KYC
- Ecosystem growth
- Launch of Cupcake full release
- Background sync for Monero
- Passport Prime shipping in March, Cake working on app w/ Monero support
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(00:01:12) Welcome to the Crew, Seth!
(00:10:45) Monero as Digital Cash and a Privacy Tool
(00:17:33) Monero's History and Development
(00:32:02) Monerotopia Was The Highlight | 2024
(00:37:01) Max the Monero Dev
(00:45:47) The Ramps: Atomic Swap Usage Go Up | 2024
(00:55:19) The Ramps: Delistings Galore | 2024
(01:02:51) Attacks on Monero | 2024
(01:12:49) Technical Improvements & New Projects | 2024
(01:22:16) Monero Adoption Rises | 2024
(01:27:41) Monero Ecosystem Growth | 2024
(01:37:46) Looking Forward to 2025
[00:00:01]
Unknown:
The business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every last seconds, 11 seconds, 11 seconds. I am investigator, investigator,
[00:00:09] Unknown:
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.
[00:00:39] Unknown:
The world's most private privacy.
[00:00:46] Unknown:
Which allows cyber for criminals.
[00:00:48] Unknown:
Criminal is now definitely the most well known privacy point. The world's most private
[00:00:55] Unknown:
privacy. Regulated
[00:01:13] Unknown:
Welcome back, all the Ungovernable Misfits. Welcome into 2025, and welcome to the newest member of the Ungovernable Misfits crew, Seth for privacy. Welcome, Seth.
[00:01:27] Unknown:
Thank you. Thank you, Max. I am absolutely thrilled for this. I know we've been talking off and on about this for quite a while, and I just have the the highest possible respect for for you and the show. So I'm pumped to be able to chat some new things, unveil some some Monero content out there, get some more privacy chats into the world. And, yeah, thanks for having me, man. I'm excited for this. Me too. After we chatted on and off for a while after we did the last episode,
[00:01:54] Unknown:
I kept asking you questions on Monero as I sort of dip my toe in more and more. One day, I was driving to the gym, and I was like, this feels so similar to how it did with q and a when I was first starting to learn about privacy on Bitcoin and wrap my head around things. The way I learned was just chatting with him constantly and doing the shows, and that's kind of how it worked and how everyone in Ungovernable Misfits started getting involved in that. And so many listeners have reached out to me and said how much they've benefited from that because of my stupid questions and him knowing what he's talking about. And so I just thought, right, this could be the perfect show because I'm starting to see, first of all, I'm using Monero more and more. I think that's pretty clear to anyone who is listening to the show. And also a lot of the listeners are using it more and more. And it seems like there's a little bit of a little bit of a change in the air, like, where people were a bit too scared to go up against the maxi mentality.
There's a few more people willing to stand up and say no. Do you know what? I actually care more about freedom and more about people being able to transact than I do being part of a click and a club and a cult. If that means since samurai has gone away and Whirlpool has gone away and that it has got much more difficult to transact privately on Bitcoin, if it means that I've gotta use this new tool, I will.
[00:03:30] Unknown:
Yeah. It it really feels like I don't know. It's a it's a butchering of the original quote, but necessity being the mother of adoption, maybe, is kind of like, what we've seen here. Because it's been it's been interesting over the years since I've had kind of a foot in the Monero camp and a foot in the Bitcoin camp, getting to know that so many Bitcoiners have long had, like, a very high respect for Monero. Like, it's been one of the few that like, legitimate Bitcoiners. Like, there's some people who are crazy, of course. But, like, legitimate Bitcoiners will just not talk about it or just offhand mention, like, yeah. It's it's fine. Because there's not really anything to label it as a shitcoin. A lot of the origin story, a lot of the the technicals are very, very similar to Bitcoin in the the sense that it's targeting freedom money. Mhmm. But interesting to see, like, kinda behind the scenes how many Bitcoiners secretly use Monero or help Oh, yeah. Or run nodes, that kinda thing. And that that tide, I feel like, has shifted. Like you mentioned, many more people are much more willing to talk about this. Like, in the wake of the samurai wallet arrests and indictment, the number of people who I thought would never want to talk about Monero that have hopped into my DMs or replied to posts on Twitter or chatted me up on Telegram, shot me a message on signal suddenly saying, like, hey. So it's Monero stuff.
How do I how do I get it? How do I use it? What does this actually look like? Has been going through the roof. And I think, like, a a a fascinating example of this and something I never expected was actually when I was in Lugano for the plan b forum, which is like a a heavy Bitcoin Maxi event. And I say that as someone who, like, did actually enjoy the event a lot more than I expected. The organizers were fantastic, and there were some really cool people there. In the middle of that event, I presented on Bitcoin. I was not presenting on Monero because it wasn't the focus of the event, and I try to kinda keep things on topic when I can. And I had 2 different people in the audience just specifically say, like, okay. This is cool, but, like, how does Monero fit into this tool kit? And, like, basically saying, we really wanna know how we can use Monero alongside Bitcoin. And then, a third person, Jamieson Lop, sitting in the front asking about Monero and how it fits into the toolkit. Mhmm. And then I went on 2 podcasts after that. I don't think they've been published yet for the the organizers of the plan b forum. And we ended up talking about Monero in both of those as well. And it's like it's that idea to me, like, a year ago, I could have never seen that happening.
Mhmm. There's just a general understanding that we need tools that protect our freedom. Privacy is a core aspect of how we achieve human freedom. And Minero is just a fantastic tool for financial privacy. And it's been awesome to see that kind of wake up happening. And I think the show is gonna fit in just supremely well with helping people to keep up with what's happening in Monero, better understanding how it works technically, how to use it. And I think it's gonna be a a perfect fit at a perfect time when people are waking up to how Monero can fit in alongside Bitcoin. I'm not gonna say that's replacing Bitcoin, that it's gonna topple Bitcoin's, number go up abilities or anything like that, but just being a fantastic tool alongside Bitcoin. So yeah.
[00:06:29] Unknown:
Yeah. I I think it's perfect because I'm certainly not one for the full on maxi camp, like, calling everything a shitcoin. It starts to get silly because it's like, well, is cash a shitcoin? Is everything that you use that isn't Bitcoin for any possible reason a shitcoin? It's perfect to have someone like you who is more in the middle. You're not a crazy Maxi, and you're not a crazy Maxi in the Monero sense either because there are crazies on either side. There are people who are absolutely adamant that they are correct and that everything else is bullshit. And I I like to take the approach that's like, use the right tool for the job. Don't get married to the idea. And when things change, you need to change as well. And so, you know, while Whirlpool was around, for me, I was like, okay. I know how this works. I'm comfortable with it. It fits the needs that I currently have.
I was like, well, I don't have really that much incentive to play around and look at Monero, and I find just using Bitcoin hard enough. I didn't wanna add another thing, like, unnecessarily. But now that it is necessary for me, and we're going to the different ways that it's used, but it has become part of my toolkit. What I'm conscious of is I don't want people who are starting to experiment with it to make mistakes. I know that it's a lot harder to make mistakes than it is on Bitcoin. Like, Bitcoin's very, very easy to shoot yourself in the foot, Monero less so. But I don't want people just going out and going, oh, if I just use Monero, I'm completely private. I don't have to worry about anything and then getting themselves into trouble down the line. So that's something that I really hope the show can do, teach people how to use the 2 of them in tandem, and, yeah, I hope it appeals to people.
[00:08:23] Unknown:
Yeah. I think that's the biggest thing for people to keep in mind is just like any privacy tool. It's not a silver bullet. It doesn't just make you magically invisible because you're using Monero. You gotta worry about other ops tech as well. So that's definitely an important thing to keep in mind as we talk about it as just like when we're talking about Whirlpool on Bitcoin. It didn't fix everything. It fixed a very specific issue, and then you had to be cautious with the rest of your OPSEC of using email aliases, of using encrypted messengers, of, just thinking broadly about OPSEC. But it does nail that financial privacy part really, really well. And so if you're thinking about the way that you approach personal privacy more broadly, it'll enhance everything else that you're doing for sure. Yeah. And we're gonna jump in in a second into, what's coming up in the show. But before we do that, one thing that I have noticed
[00:09:08] Unknown:
for many years, even before I've used Monero or cared about it, really, is that it is used. So, like, friends of mine have used it for many, many years. Half the dark net or more is using it. It is something that's getting delisted more and more. And so these are all things that make my ears prick up and go, this isn't some wanky token bullshit, pump and dump nonsense, what I would call a shitcoin. This isn't just some speculative nonsense. This is something that is established, and it's used. I think if anyone spends even 5 minutes thinking about that and researching that, they will soon realize, okay. No. This is very different to all the other tokens and blockchains that we see out there.
So in the show, first, we're gonna do a recap of Monero. What is it, and why do we care? Then we'll cover some of the most historically important moments in Monero's history. Then we're gonna discuss the highlights and lowlights of 2024. These include Monerotopia, the on and off ramps and atomic swaps, technical improvements and attacks, adoption, growth, and more. Why don't we start with a 5 minute rundown on Monero? How does it work? How does it differ to Bitcoin, and why should anyone care about it?
[00:10:46] Unknown:
For sure. Yeah. So, I know we've talked about it a bit on the show before. So if you're already familiar with how Monero works, feel free to to skip through this a little bit and and jump to the next section. But the kind of TLDR is really that it's similar to Bitcoin in many ways. It has regular blockchain. It has a regular UTXO model where you have separate coins. It has a fair issuance where there's no pre mine. There's no central party that owns the majority of the supply or anything like that. But where it really differs from Bitcoin and what sets it apart is that Monero has stayed focused from day 1 on bringing better financial privacy to the cryptocurrency space. And the way I really like to describe it is that Monero really targets being digital cash, both in the sense of targeting use in circular economies, peer to peer payments, really focusing on actually making transactions, like actually using it. And then the other aspect of cash that is often kind of forgotten is that it's extremely private. If I pay you with cash, no one knows that that transaction happened except the 2 of us. Mhmm. There's no way for anyone to have any visibility into to how much money changed hands, much less who was involved in that transaction, I guess, in the case of cash, unless someone's standing right next to you or something. So Yeah. The analogy falls apart a little bit, but essentially targeting being digital cash. And the way that it does that is financial privacy is insured for all users in the Monero ecosystem. You don't have to care about privacy. You don't have to do any extra steps to gain very strong financial privacy. And, essentially, what that means is that the sender, the receiver, and the amount in every transaction are hidden by default. The sender is hidden by something called ring signatures today. This is gonna change in in FCMP, which we'll we'll chat about later on in the show. But essentially, it means that right now, you hide amongst a group of 16 potential inputs for every input that you have in the transaction and it makes it so that no one can tell who the sender is in the sense of what inputs are actually being spent in a transaction. It also hides the recipient because Monero uses something called stealth addresses for those in the Bitcoin space. If you followed any of the silent payments work and hype over the past couple of years, it's essentially the same concept where there's a an address that you actually give to someone. It's a very long string longer than a normal Bitcoin address because it has 2 keys in it. But then there's a totally separate one time key that ends up on chain when someone actually pays you to that address. So there's no tie between, let's say, the address you post on Twitter and your Twitter bio and any transactions that you actually receive within Monam. So the the recipients will hit in as well. And And then the amount is hidden by something called confidential amounts where, essentially, it's just totally encrypted between the sender and receiver. No one else can see the amount at all. Even Quantum Computers, no matter what's going on, the amount is completely encrypted and only visible to the sender and receiver in a transaction.
So those are the 3 main ways that it provides financial privacy. But, again, really, the goal is how do we enable digital cash for the average person where when you use cash, you don't have to think about how am I gonna make this transaction more private. You just use it, and you gain the natural properties of cash. Same thing with Monero.
[00:13:51] Unknown:
Yeah. This is like proper digital cash. That's not to say that Bitcoin can't be, but there is just a huge amount that has to be done. You have to be pretty knowledgeable, and it is very, very easy to shoot yourself in the fur. Yep. It's very easy for even experienced users to either leak how much Bitcoin they have or leak other information about themselves, which stays on the chain forever. So even if it's not even if it's not immediately, you pay your plumber, but you've got a shit ton of Bitcoin, and then he suddenly sees that you've got that, and he comes and kills you with a wrench and takes your Bitcoin or whatever. You know, it doesn't have to be that. It could be you think you're clever. You think that you've had a boating accident or something like that. You make one mistake, and 10 years down the line, you get a knock at your door.
Suddenly, you're either imprisoned or worse. You know, these are the things that you have to be very careful with with Bitcoin. And as you start to do more transactions, as you start to use it more and more, this becomes pretty clear that there are some issues there. So I think a lot of Bitcoiners now for the privacy side are starting to lean into that a little bit more. And what I have noticed is, since we started accepting donations in Monero with XMR chat, which has been really amazing. We've had some great support with it, and now actually allowing listeners to mine Monero to the show as well. That's really been a trigger point with people coming out of the weeds and saying, oh, yeah. I've been using it for years. I love it. And people who I've spoken to for years years never knew explaining the same things that we are now, so that is cool to see.
[00:15:40] Unknown:
Yeah. It's kind of that hilarious part of the privacy culture where I understand it. Like, you don't wanna tell everyone exactly what you do to gain personal privacy because then, obviously, it makes you more vulnerable to someone seeing, oh, well, if you're using these specific tools, then then maybe maybe I can find out this information about you. So I know I understand the reasoning behind it, but it's one of those things that's, like, really also frustrating because a lot of people aren't willing to talk about it that people don't learn about what tools are out there. Like, how powerful Monero can be for financial privacy or how powerful something like signal can be for encrypted messaging because people want to use it and not talk about it, which, again, I understand. And probably for most people, they shouldn't just be telling everyone exactly what their their kinda OPSEC routine is. But it's one of those kinda chicken before the egg thing. We want more adoption, and so we need to talk about it, but we also need to be cautious that we don't reveal too much because then we're ultimately giving up our own personal privacy to onboard other people. So it is a balancing act, but it is one of those funny things where you you'll just learn that someone you've known for years, like, has been using Monero the whole time, and you have no clue because they don't talk about it. You can't see it. There's no, publicity there, which is a good thing. And it's it's good that they have the choice, but we also need more people chatting about this stuff, especially with, like, trusted entities. Like, not just yelling on Twitter about it, but talking to family and friends, people who you can trust for that information about the tools that are useful to you. Yeah. And,
[00:16:59] Unknown:
also, you know, if you're listening to the show and you think the end of it, you go, I've got some good information here. This actually could be a useful tool. I'm not saying go out on Twitter and go and shout about it. That's not something you need to do. You can quite happily just add this into your toolkit if it fits and start learning, and you can keep it yourself if you want. That doesn't matter. I just want people to understand what they're dealing with and, like I say, not shoot themselves in the foot. So we'll go through some of the, the important things like running a node and other things that would help with that. So we'll go through that shortly. But, before we do, let's go into some of the some of Monero's history because I have very little information on this. I listened, like, early, early days, maybe 2017.
I bought some Monero, and I remember listening to a few interviews with Fluffy Pony and listening to bits and pieces. And I remember actually trying to run a Monero demon or whatever it was, a node, and I fucked that up and couldn't do it and threw my toys out of the pram and just never went back to it. But I knew a little bit of the history then. That's a long time ago. I've forgotten most of it. So I think that would be something that people would like to hear. So what's the kind of the Monero story?
[00:18:15] Unknown:
Man, now that I now that I know that, you're you're more of a Monero OG than I am. Why am I even hearing you? You you should be both sides of this conversation. You you got me beat 2017. You're you're smarter than I am. Yeah. Yeah. Mid mid 2018 was when I first heard about it and just got into it because I I wanted to mine it on GPUs, but that's a that's a story for another day. Here's the difference though is, I tried and failed spectacularly,
[00:18:41] Unknown:
and you tried and succeeded and now know a lot about it. So, I wouldn't take that as a win personally. I just wasted, like, a weekend fucking around and then got annoyed and uninstalled everything. Hey, man. 2017 was early with Monero. There was not,
[00:18:57] Unknown:
there was not a lot of good ecosystem built up then, so I'm I'm not surprised to though at all. We've come a long way in 7 years. But, yeah, the the history of Monero is actually really fascinating. Like, I I feel like we could probably even do, like, a special kind of walking through all of the craziness in the history because Monero there's just there's a lot of wild stuff that happened, especially in the early days. But so yeah. When we're when we're talking about the history of Monero, it actually kind of has a fascinating backstory. Like, we could we could spend a lot of time digging into the the details of what happened with the launch of how it was forked away from the original creator who was named thankful for today. There's a lot of, like, nitty gritty details and fascinating history because Monero was something that was actually new at the time. So like I mentioned before, Monero is based on this crypto note protocol, which was something that was not just a code fork of Bitcoin. Every other altcoin at the time was just a code fork of Bitcoin, and they would change some parameter, like the block time, like the the amount of the supply of whatever the coin was. Little little details of the chain. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It was very minor changes, and that was pretty much how you had altcoins at the time. But crypto note was introduced it seems like around, like, 2011 ish is when the development of the protocol started, and it was introduced in this coin called Bytecoin. But, unfortunately, Bytecoin was a scam. It seems like about 80% of the supply was pre mined before they actually announced it. Oh, wow. They tried to pretend that it had, like, this broad dark net market adoption, and they had a bunch of sock puppets go on Bitcoin talk and talk about how they've been using it for years and a lot of really sketchy stuff. So, unfortunately, like, the first thing using the crypto note protocol was a scam and was problematic. But, immediately, Bitcoiners saw that there was some real value here. Like, there was something immensely useful about having a new protocol that was built from the ground up to be more privacy preserving instead of something trying to take Bitcoin's protocol and add on privacy features later. So, a group of Bitcoiners really came together, and long story short, kind of took over the project from the original person who launched Monero, who's called Thankful for today. He seemed like he may have even been part of the Bitecoin team and trying to figure out a way to get some more users and profits for them. He wanted to do weird things like merge mine Monero with Bitecoin.
He wouldn't let go on a lot of, like, weird issues that should have been fixed or changed. So, eventually, the Monero community, the small community that existed at that time, forked away the project from thankful for today. And that's really the time that Monero started. This is 2014 that it kicked off. And, thankfully, it was fair issuance. Most of the team who actually was the starters of this, including thankful for today, TacoTime was another one. There's a a few other people who are kind of the core group that jumped in and started this project. Totally fair issuance. It was CPU mined at the time, eventually, GPU mined. They wanted to run with this idea of what does it look like to build digital cash on a new protocol that deeply cares about financial privacy. Ultimately, along the way, there's kind of 3 main changes that happened to Monero. There's a bunch more, so I'm definitely skipping over them. But the first and biggest privacy improvement that happened was initially in Monero, there were no hidden amounts. So when you would create a transaction, the way that a ring signature would work there is that you would have to use other inputs that were of the same amount as yours, and you could only spend in certain denominations. Kind of like how Whirlpool worked where you could you could only do these set denominations. 0.0fives and different yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And that was the only way to really gain privacy because if you did just a random amount and you were the only one on chain that did 0.073 Monero, it would stand out. So there are a lot of limitations, but the Monero community used something that had actually been developed for Bitcoin called confidential transactions, or I'll just call them confidential amounts now because confidential transactions is a terrible name. All that it did is it used pretty simple cryptographic tool to encrypt the amounts so that no one would be able to see the amount of any transaction. And that meant that the privacy provided by Monero massively improved overnight after that hard fork and implementation.
So that was a huge first step, and that's essentially the same privacy protocol today as was implemented then with what was called ring CT and implementation of confidential transactions on ring signatures. The other two things I wanna kinda highlight in the historical changes to Monero are Random x, which is the mining algorithm for Monero. Kind of a core piece of what Monero wants to offer is accessibility. So they want everyone to be able to have access to digital cash And a a problem for basically any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin is ASIC mining. So if you have a single company, they're the only ones who can produce ASICs for your specific algorithm. Or if you're a very small currency that uses the same algorithm as something larger like Bitcoin, you're gonna have massive problems with mining centralization.
So Monero wanted to fight that by being ASIC resistant, basically building out algorithms that are harder for ASIC manufacturers to implement and have an advantage over regular miners. That culminated in what's called Random x, which is basically, long story short, it makes the CPU in your laptop and your phone and your desktop an ASIC from an arrow. It's optimized to use as much of the CPU that you just have in regular devices as possible so that if someone makes an ASIC, it has very little performance improvements over a good high quality CPU.
[00:24:04] Unknown:
I see what you meant. So so sorry jumping in and and ruining the history, lesson. But just as you were saying that, I was thinking, is that not an attack surface in the sense that large corporations, data centers, people who have a lot of computer power currently, they already have the infrastructure. So where it's different with Bitcoin, where they'd have to go and spend vast sums of money to go and get the hardware and then the energy to start mining, would that not potentially be an attack on Monero if someone wanted to?
[00:24:42] Unknown:
Yeah. No. You're definitely you're you're thinking about it the right way. That is is one of the risks. It kind of cuts both ways because in the same way that, let's say, Microsoft could start to use spare cycles in their data centers to either just mine Monero to make Monero or to attack Monero. In the same way that they can do that today, anyone with a computer can do the same thing and fight back. So it does allow attacks by someone who has a large amount of compute. A kind of cool thing that we've seen work out, and I say cool in a kind of convoluted sense, is that there's a lot of people who altruistically mine Monero either because they just love Monero and they wanna see it succeed, and you can do that. You don't have to buy specialized hardware to mine Monero. So even if you're not worried about profits, you can mine Monero on your computer when you're just stepping away. Yeah. I'm doing it now as we speak. Oh, that's a bold move. It's more recording. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's how easy it is. Yeah. It's it's really straightforward. So anyone can jump in and do it. So there's there's a balancing act where you want people to be able to quickly jump to the aid of the network or to be able to mine easily without barrier of entry. But, yes, you also want it to be hard for one single entity to gain control over the network or have a large percentage. And, unfortunately, there's no perfect answer because, like, if Monero just said, okay. We're gonna allow ASICs with this specific hash algorithm, what would happen is I mean, probably, if 1 ASIC manufacturer, who knows, maybe 2, would start producing ASICs and they would have sole control over the network if they didn't sell those, if they kept some behind secretly to be able to mine. It's a very tricky kind of catch 22, but I think it's a good middle ground and has proven to be very effective so far. But it does open up, especially when you're talking like nation states. It opens up attacks like where a nation state could tell all of the data centers within their, within their borders that they have to use spare CPU cycles to mine empty blocks for Monero to try to prevent users from being able to get transactions in. Yeah. That that's where my mind goes is like end game.
[00:26:44] Unknown:
That is possible. But then what I quite like is that you have the two options. You have Bitcoin in one direction, which I think works perfectly for Bitcoin and the size of the network and everything else, And then you have Monero working, and it is working currently, and they're different. And that's kind of good. It's not like they both have the same way of mining and nation states can try and attack both. It would be, totally different attack. So it would be very difficult to sort of attack both at the same time, which to me is a good thing. Yeah. For sure. And I think that's yet another reason why I think the the symbiotic relationship between the two is is just so incredible because they do take very different approaches to, I think, targeting the same thing. I think we could definitely argue if Bitcoin is still targeting peer to peer digital cash these days. Some people on it certainly are, but the project as a whole, I think we could have a have a debate around
[00:27:36] Unknown:
that, but there's a loose target towards that, let's say, in both with very different approaches. And especially with Bitcoin's weight with the the amount of people and entities and businesses in the ecosystem, it's great that we have alternatives both ways. That as if if you're primarily a Monero user, what if the choices that we made around mining algorithm are a mistake and a nation state just says or let's just say Amazon just says, suddenly, we're gonna use all of our cloud compute to mine empty blocks in Monero. And Monero, you can no longer get a transaction through. Then I'll be really thankful that we have Bitcoin or vice versa if a nation state gets the majority of the ASR cash rate within it and says, hey. You're gonna mine these compliant blocks or else I can say, okay. Well, I'm really glad that I have access to Monero because now I can make transactions that I wouldn't be able to make otherwise. And that pairing, I think, is most valuable. And that's one of the reasons why I was so excited for the show is, like you said earlier on, there's usually, people are landing on one side or the other of, like, Bitcoin maximalism or Monero maximalism, and I think the most value is finding the right tool for the job. And for most people, I think the right tool is both Bitcoin and Monero. And so I think we'll we'll be able to hit a really good kinda center of the road approach here.
[00:28:45] Unknown:
I totally agree. I just think that neither can perfect. And like you say, that symbiosis and being able to lean on one another is actually very useful. Again, like, you know, we talk about decentralization and all that kind of stuff, and it's like, well, this is a perfect example of that. It's hard to hit both. Someone like me, I just use Monero for, like, transactional stuff. Like, I don't use it for savings like I do for Bitcoin. So I threw us off a little bit there. We were going through the history. I know we can go into a lot more detail, and maybe we'll do that on another show. But are we kind of up to current day up to 2024?
[00:29:26] Unknown:
I think so. Yeah. I mean, there's there's definitely a lot of different things, especially like technical improvements that we could talk through that have happened in Monero over the years. I think maybe the only other one I would mention just because we won't touch on it at all and things that happen in 2024 or that we're looking forward to in in 25 is the way that Monero nodes help to try to protect the source IP of a transaction. It's called Dandelion plus plus. The TLDR is basically the the protocol works to ensure that no node on the network can easily tell which node was the first one that broadcast a transaction to the network. And it's a a really cool technology where there's core issue in Bitcoin, and there's no current solution to this other than just running a node purely behind Tor, where when you make a Bitcoin transaction, if you do it from your own node, it's trivial for anyone running a Bitcoin node or really running quite a few Bitcoin nodes to tell that that transaction originated with that node, which sometimes is fine, but sometimes you don't want, like, let's say, your home IP address. If you're running a node at home, Maybe you don't want your home IP address tied to the TX ID of a transaction that you made to, I don't know, to some random person. It could be Joe Schmo. It could be a a centralized KYC exchange, maybe peer to peer, but there's a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want an IP address of your node tied to it. Especially with amounts.
Exactly. Yeah. There's so much info already in a Bitcoin transaction that you you don't really wanna expose that tying the IP address there as well is problematic. So Dandelion plus plus, like many things that Monero has implemented, was actually developed originally for Bitcoin. The first proposal, which was just called Dandelion, had some issues with denial of service attacks, but later revisions, Dandelion plus plus being the the latest one, fixed those and has been a fantastic tool for, for Monero. I remember listening
[00:31:10] Unknown:
to Antonopoulos. He used to do these, like, q and a session things. Yeah. Yeah. And I listened to them obsessively, like, just all day every day, like, trying to wrap my head around this stuff. And I remember really clearly him going through Dandelion and how that would help privacy and stuff like that, but, you know, haven't heard much more since then. So it was good to see that it's being used somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. It's been a really good fit for Banero. Again, it's not a silver bullet. There have been some note attacks, One of them that we'll talk about today that can nullify some of the privacy that's provided by it. But, again, for
[00:31:43] Unknown:
very little downside, it's fantastic to get a privacy benefit by just running a node. You'd again, you don't have to enable anything. You don't have to do any fancy setup. It's just a default behavior of Monero nodes. So it's a a really cool additional protection that worst case, you're in the same state as a Bitcoin node. Best case, you have much better transactional privacy there as well. Nice. See, I think that I think that covers the history pretty well. You wanna go ahead and get rolling in in 2024,
[00:32:10] Unknown:
start our recap? Yeah. So let's go through a rundown of the most important moments of 2024. Why don't we start with the Monero Topia conference? I know you went there. You had some good things to say about it. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I think we'll we'll definitely
[00:32:28] Unknown:
cover a lot of things here. So I I do also do wanna say ahead of time, I've been a little disconnected from the Monero community until really the last, like, 6 months, so I may have missed some things during this year. So if you have, like, a favorite thing if you're listening to this, you have, like, a favorite thing that I didn't mention, I apologize, but definitely definitely let us know because I I would love to cover more detail about any big things that I did miss, but we'll we'll do my best to cover the things that I remember. I know I asked on Twitter and asked on the cake team as well, but 2024 was, like, most years in Monero, a pretty busy one. The only Monero conference I got out to was Monerotopia. So there's also Monero Con, which we'll talk about a little bit more and what's coming up in 2025, but that's a much more technical conference. There's a lot of academics, cryptography researchers, developers presenting on the, like, technical improvements and changes that are happening.
But Monero Topia is much more focused on, I would kind of say, loosely on adoption of Monero. Something really, really cool this year, and this is put on by by Doug and Sunita who are behind the Monero Talk podcast. Something really cool this year was they actually had a marketplace there as part of the conference. The conference venue was like a it was a weird venue, to be honest. It was all outdoors, and it was, like, in a garden, basically, where it was, like, there were lots of trees and plants and they're, like, recycling water and a really interesting place. It was in Mexico City. Oh, nice. Mexico City, Mexico this year. I think that was the 2nd year that they've done it there. I think they might move it next year, but it was a very unique venue. One of the really cool things that they did was there was this kind of, like, really big covered area as a part of it. And Doug brought in vendors from the local community, like, not Monero people per se, but just vendors from Monero community to come in and Mhmm. Sell whatever they wanted and help them to actually accept Monero directly for what they were selling, using cake wallet. So they had Nice. I don't I don't know how many vendors. I would say probably 50, 60 vendors at least, all selling tons of different things, all for Monero directly, which was a really, really awesome experience. Because, like, even with Bitcoin, like, there's not that many places in person that you can actually buy something with Bitcoin. Like, most of the time, I'm actually buying something in person with Bitcoin or Monero. It's it's at a conference. But this was a really cool way to, not only, like, as an attendee, be able to buy things with Monero to take home, but also to expose people who wouldn't otherwise be exposed to cryptocurrency generally, much less Monero.
So that was honestly probably the highlight for me. I approach conferences differently than I think many people where my my my main goal with conferences is really to get to have FaceTime with friends and people that I really respect in the community. So I usually focus less on the actual presentations than I do on the kinda side conversations. So a lot of the highlights for me were really just getting to talk to some devs that I heavily respect in the Monero ecosystem to connect with the people behind basic swap or doing atomic swaps to get a chat a lot with the people who run Trocador, which is a a centralized swap service that we use at Cake and are good friends with. Just really getting to, like, actually see face to face people who are passionate about Monero was a huge highlight for me. And that's that's kind of how I approach every conference, but I think, especially in this case, it was it was awesome to get plugged back into the Monero community that way and have that kinda be a a reconnecting point as I've been more heavily focused on Bitcoin over the last couple years. So overall, it's a great conference. There were some weird speaker things where Right. Yeah. Just stuff that I feel like is unique to the Minera community where there's just some some oddball people that come out of the woodwork to to speak and try to get a platform. And there was, like, a woman who had just gone through a divorce, like, using her stage time to yell at her husband who was in the audience. It's just like it's ridiculous stuff. Yeah. It's ridiculous stuff. She was using him as an example of, like, what's wrong with decentralized communities. It was it was wild. The the room quickly emptied. We're standing outside with Doug just shaking our heads like
[00:36:25] Unknown:
Fucking hell.
[00:36:28] Unknown:
It was interesting. It's it's never a good moment in in Monero, but, other than that, I I did really enjoy it, especially those vendors like I talked about. That was an awesome experience, and then getting to spend a lot of time with the cake team. With the vendors,
[00:36:40] Unknown:
obviously, I've never been to a Monero conference, been to a few of the Bitcoin ones. You said the vendors were using Cake Wallet. Are they just
[00:36:50] Unknown:
downloading that on their phone, pressing receive, and someone's paying? Yeah. I mean, that's pretty much it. The main thing that made it a little bit easier is we don't have, like, full kind of, like, point of sale in k Wallet. Like, obviously, it's very much focused on just the average person, not a merchant per se. But one feature that makes it really easy to use as a POS is that when you hit receive, you can actually choose what currency you wanna set the amount for in the QR code. So, like, the merchants could just change that to pesos and they could put in the amount, and they never even had to worry about, like, figuring out what amount of Monero was or and all that. Yeah. Yeah. There was none of that headache. So, basically, they would just type in the amount in pesos. The QR code would just immediately update with the amount, and it it just already has the the static Monero address, which is another benefit of Monero is you don't need to do a new address every time because you have a new address on chain every time even if you use the same one off chain.
[00:37:41] Unknown:
And they actually have custody of those funds. You know, that is something that me and Q talk about a lot. It's like when you go to these conferences and people are paying for a coffee or when I went to the Amsterdam one, I had about 50 of these fucking delicious duck burgers with blue cheese. I just couldn't stop eating them. But, like, almost every single person that's making a purchase of, like, less than $50, they're using Willow's Satoshi Yeah. Or some other custodial lightning solution. I'm not someone who takes, like, the absolute hard line on stuff like that because, occasionally, when my lightning stuff doesn't fucking work like the other day, you know, I'll be like, oh, fuck's sake. I'll just use a custodial thing because it actually works.
But that's something that I really appreciate about Monero again for, like, these smaller payments. Like, it can be really small. It can be, like, $5 or whatever. And the fees, as far as I can see, are very reasonable. That was actually something that's done on chain. You actually have custody, and it always works, which I do appreciate.
[00:38:48] Unknown:
Yeah. It's I I think fees are normally less than a cent. It depends, obviously, if there's a lot of congestion at that time, but that's one of the benefits and another kind of technical thing that Monero has done is they have something called dynamic block sizes, which doesn't mean that the block size is just infinite. But basically, that if there are a lot of people at one time who are trying to get transactions and miners can grow the blocks slowly by sacrificing subsidy for the transaction fees. And so you can much better handle on chain growth than something like Bitcoin, which has just static block size, never changes. If there's a lot of demand, you just have to pay a massive fee to get in. There are downsides to that just like with everything else. If you make that trade off, there are some some downsides, but there's a heavy focus on just regular on chain transactions. And for now, fees are very low. But it is still blockchain, which means it doesn't scale well. It's not built to do that. So there's not just this kind of infinite ability for us to use on chain Monero.
But especially for now, and I would say probably for quite a while, making on chain transactions is very low fee, very fast 2 minute block time. So if you don't wanna do 0 conf, you can just wait Yeah. 2 minutes max generally for a confirmation. It's a very clean user experience on that front.
[00:40:00] Unknown:
It definitely is. You know, actually, Bitcoin on chain most of the time these days is pretty reasonable as well. Like Yeah. Yeah. I'm very happy just pay you know, it's like, oh, it's a dollar or something. And I'm like, okay. That's fine. Like, if I'm paying a dollar and the duck burger's 15 quid or whatever it was, you know, and I'm having a drink as well. That's fine. I don't mind paying that. But what's happened is almost no one is accepting Bitcoin. It's only lightning. So you don't generally have the option at these type of places to pay on chain most places. And then, like you say, you have to wait, and then it's like or have you set your fees? Is it gonna be at the next block?
Like, it it's just for those type of things, 2 minute block time and 1 cent or whatever it is is just you know, it just lends itself perfectly for that sort of thing. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a fantastic fit for that, and I think that's one of the things that really helps the kind of circular economy
[00:40:57] Unknown:
peer to peer adoption is there's not nearly as much of an overhead as, like, if you wanna accept payments in lightning. That's not a straightforward process unless you use a custodian or you use some sort of a a middleman. There's some really cool ways to get around that right now if you're okay with some trade offs. Like, Breeze has an SDK that makes a little bit easier and, like, BTC pay, and the Bolt's guys have a swap plug in that makes lightning easier, but both of those also have downsides. So it's it's one of the nice things with Monero is that acceptance is very straightforward. Paying on chain is very straightforward and privacy preserving. And I think in the future, we'll probably see some form of layer 2 on Monero as well. Whether that'll be, like, a simplified lightning or something else remains to be seen, but we definitely can't scale infinitely, but we could probably get to at least the scale of Bitcoin on chain transactions right now and still be quite reasonable in Monero. So it's a nice a nice feature to have for sure. I'd like to see things like I'm taking us off topic again, but I'd be interested to see more things like swapping services
[00:41:58] Unknown:
that work seamlessly in the sense that, like, someone is like, oh, I wanna pay in Bitcoin, but pay this invoice that's actually using Monero, if that makes sense, so they can, like what's the swap service we just mentioned? Trokadore? Trokadore. A very refined kind of way that they do seamlessly work together and almost like people don't it's like Lightning is a layer 2 for Bitcoin. It's gonna piss people off in the Monero community, I'm sure, but I kind of like using Monero a bit like a layer 2 for my Bitcoin. The more that they are interchangeable and work together
[00:42:36] Unknown:
would be really nice for someone like me. Yeah. There there is a service actually right now through Trokadore. It's called a non pay. You can use their website, or it's it's also a feature in Cake Pay or in Cake Wallet. I think we can definitely do some work around making it simpler, but, like, right now, if you want to let's say you wanna receive in Monero, but someone only has Bitcoin, you can actually hit receive and then you can up at the top, you can choose a non pay invoice, and you just choose whatever whatever currency you want. The user, the person that you give the invoice to can pay in that currency, Bitcoin lightning, whatever. And then it gets swapped through Trocador to Monero and ends up in your wallet as Monero. So that concept is already there, but there's definitely some refinement to go so that you is like like, if I'm the sender, I would like to be able to just scan a lightning invoice, and I'm using a Mirror wallet. And it just know okay. Well, I'm gonna have to use a non pay through Trochador. This is how much it's gonna cost you and just let you pay to whatever cryptocurrency.
And I think that's like, that kind of multi crypto world is something that we really embrace a cake, and it's something that has been really interesting to see. I don't know. I just think there's a lot of benefit in the cryptocurrency world where there's just so little friction between cryptocurrencies that we don't have in the fiat world. So a lot of times, we don't think about, like, if I wanna pay you in dollars, but you need pounds or whatever. That process of going back and forth is like a nightmare. But if I wanna pay you in Bitcoin and I only have Banero, it's it's quite straightforward. So I think it's definitely something that we need to grow to make it simpler for people to just get paid in the money that they prefer, and everyone can use what they prefer and then quickly swap between them to settle in anything. And that's definitely a a feature. These get built out more. Because the other way around as well, not only, like, scanning a lightning invoice and that going to a Monero user, someone who wants that on the other side, but the other way around, being able to pay an invoice using Monero that then gets
[00:44:25] Unknown:
sent as a lightning payment to someone who wants lightning, there are a lot of benefits to that, including, obviously, the privacy side. So the more seamless that is, the better. Like, for someone like me who I'm like, oh, I'd like to actually store Bitcoin, but use Monero for my payments to protect my privacy. And if it has to go through one hop to go to someone who wants the Bitcoin or wants Lightning, and I've gotta pay a small fee for doing that, I'm okay with that because I used to pay the fee to put through Whirlpool. It's not like I have a concern with paying the fees. I just want the privacy. So if that was a slick, right, scanner QR code that does it in the back end, sends to their lightning wallet, I'd be very happy with that. You just made the, the wish list for 2025 in Cake Wallet, so congrats. You're gonna you're gonna get full credit when this feature comes out because Oh, yes. I think it's a fantastic idea.
[00:45:17] Unknown:
I've I've added it live, so I'll, I'll harass the dev team. We'll we'll get it plugged in because I think that is a fantastic one. I I had, like, a loosely an idea like that, but I never thought about just doing it through a service like Trokador. Like, kind of my, like, thought about it was let's say you have, like, a Bitcoin wallet and a Lightning wallet and a Monero wallet. If you scan a QR, it should take you to the right wallet to make the payment, but it should be even simpler than that. Both should be an option, but, yeah, it's a good that's a good idea. Look at us. Oh, look. My moment, Dev. I know. You made it. Okay. Well, I I think, yeah, I think we can keep rolling. That's the only conference that I attended, like I said, in 2024. But when we get kinda past the conference space in 2024, some of the really big things that stood out to me were the on and off ramp changes.
And I I can't say they're all well, you could say they're all positive. It depends on how you look at delistings, of Monero from centralized exchanges. Because I know a lot of people in the Monero community cheer them on as just a a way that we're kind of detaching from a broken system. But I think they also do limit how many people see Monero, how many people are exposed to it, and how easy it is to get Monero from Fiat. So I think there are downsides. But on the positive side, this last year, something that's been really awesome to see is the growth in atomic swap usage, specifically between Bitcoin and Monero. There are some other atomic swaps like Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum and stuff, but, obviously, those aren't as interesting to me. But between Bitcoin and Monero, there's 2 main projects that have been working on atomic swaps and quickly gaining popularity.
One of them is called Basic Swap and they're, they're a decentralized exchange where basically, like, you run everything on your computer. Like, you run the nodes for whatever things you wanna be able to swap between. You run the actual web UI on your computer. So it's it's a bit of a technical hurdle right now, but it's a really cool service because you're not trusting any centralized entity, even a website. Like, it's it's very, very decentralized and very much Okay. Peer to peer because you're literally the only one connecting to that peer and communicating with them. No one else is. There's no middleman there at all. So it's a really cool project and they they added Monero. I actually don't know when they added Monero, but I've seen them talking about it a lot more in 2024. So I feel like it's Mhmm. It was this year. That's been growing rapidly. And the like, the way I think about atomic swaps in the space, I know is different than some people. But for me, atomic swaps are kind of always just a fallback.
So for anyone who doesn't know, an atomic swap between something like Bitcoin and Monero, essentially, what it means is that you are swapping Monero for Bitcoin or vice versa, but you're doing it in a way that there is no way that you can not get your funds back or get the Bitcoin that you're trying to swap. Let's say I'm trying to swap Monero for Bitcoin. Either that swap will go through properly and I will get the Bitcoin and it's cryptographically guaranteed by using the tools correctly on Bitcoin and Monero, or the swap will fail and I'll just keep my Monero. There's no central entity that takes custody. There's no way that the other person that you're swapping with can scam you out of your Monero or anything like that. If you're using that protocol, you are guaranteed to either have the swap go through successfully or you keep the funds that you originally had. And it's also basically unstoppable in the sense that if you can talk to a person who has Bitcoin, you can do an atomic swap. You don't need anything advanced. You could even technically do it just, like, using QR codes in person if you wanted to. It would not be easy, but it would be possible. Awesome. But it's a very, very decentralized, very resilient way to swap between cryptocurrencies.
The downside is unlike an exchange, you don't have kind of a pool of liquidity or orders that you can buy whatever amount you want. You need to actually find someone who wants to sell you the amount of Bitcoin that you want or the amount of an error that you want. Connect with them directly and start that swap process. So it's a lot harder to actually, like, swap large amounts or to constantly be swapping back and forth or DCA, something like that. It's like something like Bisc, but without the middleman
[00:49:16] Unknown:
where someone then can put in a complaint and something might not go through, and you have all that faff and and worry and everything. One thing I'm wondering with that is can you if you want to buy Monero with Bitcoin, can you do the swap with Lightning to gain some more privacy? Because a fear of mine when doing a swap from Bitcoin to Monero is I'm now giving Bitcoin that potentially could be I mean, if you do things properly, you're not gonna have it tied to your identity, blah blah blah. But, potentially, that could be tied to your identity, and my fear would be someone does it where it's linked to their KYC stack or something like that, then that Bitcoin gets used in something that is deemed illegal Mhmm. Whatever.
Mhmm. And then somehow that person who is trying to gain privacy by buying Monero is now in a world of trouble. If someone was to use Lightning or a step in between somewhere where there's, like, an extra hop or something, they might mitigate against that.
[00:50:20] Unknown:
Yeah. So the short answer is it is technically possible, but no one supports a lightning to Monero atomic swap. Right. I'm, like, 99% sure that I'm correct on that. You could technically do a swap between lightning and Monero, and I believe that there was a atomic swap protocol called Farcaster that was planning on supporting this, but it never it never went live, and I'm not sure what the status is right now. So I think it is a technical possibility, but I believe it is it is technically more complex than the just on chain to on chain protocol. The other thing I would say is you're definitely right. The downside to really any swap service when you're on either end, honestly, if you're sending the Bitcoin or receiving Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is just it's not fungible. It does not have the guarantee that the money that you get will be valuable or that the money that you send will not be tied back to you at some point in the future.
It's something that people should constantly think about. You don't just magically gain privacy because you sent Bitcoin and you got Monero, and then you use the Monero. The way that you actually got that Bitcoin before, the way that you spent it or moved it around, the transactions that input's been involved in, all of that still matters because, like you said, there's now some person who you don't know who is the next hop in that history, and you have no idea if that'll be tied back to you. And it makes me think of the case against, supposedly, the the operator of a centralized mixing mixing service called Bitcoin Fog. Yep. Exactly.
Yeah. His he's what it seems like is that he is going to go to jail because he swapped Bitcoin peer to peer with the actual operator of Bitcoin Fog, and Chainalysis theoretically proves that he's the one who bought the domain and used the Bitcoin and ultimately used his his k y c Mt. Gox account. But it seems like what actually happened was that he was someone who concentrated Bitcoin peer to peer at conferences and stuff, and he probably probably sold Bitcoin to the operator of Bitcoin Fog who then used that Bitcoin to buy the domain, and now he's in jail for it. And it's a very harrowing story when you're thinking about swapping Bitcoin with some unknown entity because you don't really want that tied back to you. And that's where the loss of samurai still hurts even if you're starting to use Monero more. And I don't wanna say all this to dissuade you from doing this. You're still better off in most scenarios spending Monero than spending Bitcoin that has a history that's tied to you. But they're just there's always still potential problems because of that lack of privacy in Bitcoin. Yeah. You're certainly better sending Monero than sending Bitcoin.
[00:52:53] Unknown:
I think, a big thing for people to consider is, like, if you are using a swapping service, consider if you have any post mix, certainly use that. If you have maybe, some Bitcoin that you've mined, use that. If you've got some that you've bought in cash from an entity that isn't linked to you in any way, maybe use that. Just be very thoughtful about what you're swapping with because you don't know what happens with that next. And as we've just said, like, you can go to prison for this stuff even if you are completely you haven't done anything wrong. You haven't hurt anyone. It can cause you a world of pain, and it doesn't have to be today or tomorrow or this year. It can be in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years.
That data is gonna be there forever, and they can interpret it any way they like because they write the rules. So, you know, that is a big reason why I think this show is important is, like, as the landscape changes, we have to we have to try and stay one step ahead, and we have to try and protect people.
[00:53:57] Unknown:
Yeah. Absolutely. And the the importance of no KYC Bitcoin doesn't change because Monero exists, especially if the main way that you're getting Monero is by buying it with Bitcoin, which I think will be is already a very, very common way to get Monero. Like, something we see constantly. Cake is we don't have specifics on how people use cake. We have no analytics, no tracking, etcetera. But from our partners who do the swaps, we'll sometimes get data on just, like, what was the top swap pair, that kind of thing. And overwhelmingly, people are swapping into Monero from other things like Bitcoin, Litecoin, but Bitcoin is normally the biggest one. And it's the easiest way to get Monero nowadays with all the delistings. So it's a really common thing, but the best, like, the the ideal path is that you buy Bitcoin no k y c, and then you get your Monero with that no k y c Bitcoin so that there's no direct tie back to your ID. Not because buying Monero is illegal. Far from it. It's not illegal anywhere as far as I know, much less using it, but because, yeah, you never know what's gonna happen with that Bitcoin. I think Roman Sterlingov in the Bitcoin fog case, it was, like, 9 years before he was arrested was when he made that transaction that supposedly tied him to the the Bitcoin fog thing. So 9 years later, it came back to haunt him, which is just absolutely wild. But, yeah, I think that's it's definitely an important thing for people to keep in mind that you still want good privacy on the Bitcoin side when you're swapping to Monero because you never know what's gonna happen with that.
[00:55:20] Unknown:
Yeah. And like you say, a lot of this comes down to to listings as well. People who are listening would have heard in the intro music, there was some talk of delistings. This is obviously making it more difficult for people to get hold of Monero, and they are swapping in these other services and stuff. Obviously, some people will mine as well. What do you think I I think we can probably guess why, but any thoughts on what's happening with the delistings? Because it does seem to be quite aggressive. Yep.
[00:55:49] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it's it's wild. Like, we can definitely put this in the show notes, but, someone on on Twitter who's a a really great follower in the Monero space just goes by Schmidt. He made a list of all the delistings in just in 2024, and I even have to add one because yesterday, I think there was another delisting. But there was OKX in January, Binance in February, Local Monero, which was a fantastic peer to peer fiat to Monero on ramp. Think like LocalBitcoins, what it used to be before it was shut down. Kraken in Ireland and Belgium, delisted in June. Kraken in Germany, delisted in July. Kraken in the EU, delisted in October. Bit to me delisted in October, and then Gate. Io, which is a a smaller exchange, but they delisted Monero as well. It's wild to see because, like I just mentioned a couple minutes ago, there's no law against selling Monero on an exchange. There's some stuff that's coming down the pipe in the EU that would make it more difficult and that some that would potentially make it illegal to or not illegal, but would essentially regulate out the ability to sell cryptocurrencies that have any privacy features on a centralized exchange. But, generally, it is completely legal to sell Monero in these jurisdictions.
But I think what really is happening is this is all behind the scenes. It's really I mean, Bitcoiners have been talking a lot about operation choke point 2.0 over the past month or so, thankfully. Like, I'm I'm really glad that that's coming more to light because that has been happening for years now. And Monero, I think, was a lot of the test bed for how Operation Choke Point 2.0 would work. Because the easiest way that you dissuade people from using a tool is you make it harder to access the tool. If the barrier of entry is high enough, people will wake up to the need for privacy, but they won't actually get there because they'll realize it's just too much effort, and they'll give up. It's a really easy way to dissuade people. And if you delist Monero from exchanges, it makes it much harder for the average person to actually get Monero. What we've really seen is that even though there's no law, there's no regulation that prevents this, even like FATF and Finsen are fine with things like Monero as long as you KYC and do all the normal stuff. It's essentially exchanges being told by their banking partners, hey. If you list Monero, we will cut off banking services.
Or if you don't do list Monero, you'll have these specific regulatory issues. You'll have to do all of this extra paperwork. You'll have to do these extra things. And essentially making it so that even if it's not illegal, the only choice for them as a business is to delist Monero or else they'll lose their business entirely. And this has been a a constant pressure. I mean, this has been going on for years now. It's not anything new in Monero as of 2024. We had a lot of delistings, but it's been a consistent theme throughout Monero's history. It's either big exchanges never list Monero despite listing other things like Zcash that theoretically provide privacy or they get delisted because they realize, hey. If we wanna expand or if we wanna use this new bank or if we wanna be in this new jurisdiction, the banking partner essentially says, we have pressure from our government. If you list Monero, we can't serve you. And it means that people don't get access, don't get easy access to Monero. It definitely has the upside and that less people are doing KYC and buying Monero that way. Yeah. But it means less people are getting exposed to Monero, which I think is a it is a net negative in my book, but it's not purely negative.
[00:59:08] Unknown:
It says something about the usage of Monero. If something like Zcash, in my understanding, is that it's like you can toggle on privacy. It's not it's not like Yeah. Privacy by default, which then makes everyone else's privacy worse. So I can understand that, you know, that isn't as private. It isn't as good, and it's not used. Monero is very widely used. My assumption is they're thinking, well, let's look at how people are actually transacting and how they can actually transact privately and how they can use it on darknet and everything else. And my understanding is that less and less people are accepting Bitcoin on those type of marketplaces, and so they are probably looking and going, well, clearly it works.
[00:59:58] Unknown:
That's a problem. Yep. Yeah. I think that's definitely the root of it. And I think I posted on Twitter earlier today just basically, like, think why would they do less monero? Like, you should just kinda put your thinking cap on and think through it. I think you you just nailed it on the head, but it's because it works. I mean, why why do they target any technology? Why is there this anti encrypted messaging stuff going on constantly in the EU where they wanna ban encrypted messaging or enforce back doors or force scanning for specific types of content that opens the door to massive problems in the future? It's because the things that they're talking about and targeting actually work. Like, they why would they go through the trouble of making exchanges do less Monero if it wasn't an effective tool? It wouldn't make any sense. It's not a tool that's a a massive investment for people. It's not like Bitcoin where there's the potential, like, maybe we're losing the power in our fiat currency or something. I would debate even if that's happening with Bitcoin today, but it's less about that and it's that people are actually using this tool today, both for good, great above board purposes. There's a lot of fantastic causes using Monero. A lot of fantastic projects accepting Monero for donations. A rapidly growing circular economy, which I know touch on a little bit more. But there are also bad actors using it because who are the early adopters of powerful technology?
Unfortunately, criminals. It's people who have the most perceived need for privacy and for safety because their lives depend on it. My life does not depend on my financial privacy right now. Maybe it will in the future, but right now, it doesn't. And, yeah, obviously, I have the perceived need. But most people, until their life depends on it, don't think deeply about these kinds of things, unfortunately. But criminals do because they have a lot a lot on the line. So that's that's another good litmus test of how effective is this tool. And the growth of Monero on darknet markets is a a fantastic one to look at and one where Monero has rapidly taken over. I mean, it's it's the dominant currency right now of the darknet market by far with most of the last I checked, which it has been a little while, the largest dark net market was Monero and Bitcoin. The 2nd and third were Monero only, and most are going Monero only at this point because it has the same simplicity as on chain Bitcoin. Maybe a little bit more simple just due to, like, we talked about lower fees, faster block times can be helpful, but ultimately, it provides strong financial privacy and it actually works. So I I think that's the root of why these delistings happen is they want to prevent the spread of Monero's usage without having to cause as much of a Streisand effect by putting out a law that says Monero is illegal. Because if you actually outlaw something that shouldn't be outlawed, you're gonna wake a lot of people up to that this tool is actually useful. But if you very slowly, silently keep it out of the limelight, push it down, it's a much more effective way of doing things and gotta give it to them. They've they've been pretty smart about how they've approached trying to keep Monero out of the limelight over the years. They certainly have. It's a very clever way to attack it. You were talking to me the other day about some other attacks that Monero is under. Should we jump into those? Yeah. I think that's something that's a good a good next step here.
Yeah. The the two main ones that I wanted to touch on, the big news this year well, first, some context. Minero Minero for many years has been under constant attack. Like, you name it, it has happened against Minero both from a technical perspective, social perspective, from an exchange perspective, like we're just talking about with delistings. Minero has been a, again, because it works, it's getting attacked constantly by entities who want to prevent it from working or wanna find weaknesses and find ways that they can gain some sort of control over it. So there's been a long history of attacks within Monero, things being fixed and improved because of the attacks or being mitigated by our existing technology. And this year is is no exception. So over the last couple of months, it's kinda slowly come out that there was an entity who were essentially pretending to be popular remote nodes in Monero.
And for a little bit more context, Monero nodes work a little bit differently than Bitcoin nodes in that you don't need any sort of other software. You don't need like a Fulcrum or an Elect RS or anything like that to be able to sync your wallet. All you need is just the standard Monero node software. That's it. And you can sync your wallet with it without needing any extra like RPC credentials or anything like that. You just expose the right port and anyone can use your node to sync their Monero wallet. So there's long been this system in the Monero ecosystem of people. If you run a node and you're okay with other people using it, there's even just a flag that you can set that tells the rest of the Monero network, hey. My node is available on this port. Anyone can use it for syncing their wallet. So there's long been this kind of understanding of, like, we can just use someone else's node, which is fine in many cases in Monero because you're not revealing nearly as much information about the transactions that you're submitting to a node. So you have much better privacy than if you're using someone else's Bitcoin node, for instance. But it's not perfect. A lot of the issues with this approach have come to light in the last couple of months when it seems like it's the same attacker as the linking lion attack in Bitcoin. I don't know if you covered this at all. This was probably, like, 8 months ago, maybe more than that, that this came out in the Bitcoin space.
[01:05:09] Unknown:
Q probably would have talked about it on one of our, episodes, but I can't remember the specifics as far as is actually way older than I thought. This is March 2023,
[01:05:19] Unknown:
so I'm way off in timeline. You might have still talked about it, but it was a long time ago. Yeah. I'm sure we would have. Yeah. But the short story is there was this attack on Bitcoin nodes by an entity that was called Linking Lion. And, basically, what the attacker was doing is they were using a weakness in how Bitcoin nodes communicate about transactions to essentially insert themselves into every node's peer list on the Bitcoin network so that when your node saw a new transaction, it would send it immediately to these malicious nodes. And that may seem like not a problem, but like I mentioned earlier, we were talking about dandelion plus plus. What this meant was that this attacker was essentially learning the source IP or at least having a very, very, very good idea of the source IP of every transaction on the network. And they were doing that by running a bunch of malicious nodes pretending to be full Bitcoin nodes, but actually just being essentially a a piece of software that wrapped around a Bitcoin node that lied and forced your Bitcoin node to tell them about your transactions immediately and not follow the normal way that transaction propagation works in Bitcoin.
It was a big deal at the time. Not it didn't get as much publicity as it should have because it was a very it's a very major attack and is still ongoing as of today as far as I know. But that same entity actually has been attacking Monero since before they attacked Bitcoin. And they've come up with a new attack in 2024 against Monero, which essentially is that there was this service in the Monero ecosystem called moneroworld.com, and it was run by a legitimate, really good member of the community. And what it did was it would look at the Monero network, see what nodes allowed other people to sync their wallets with them. And when you use monero world.com, you would just get served a random node on the network to use to sync your wallet. Generally, a bad idea. Not something I ever recommended, but it was an option, and it was something that some people used within the Monero ecosystem. And this attacker basically used a combination of fake Monero node software where they would again lie about actually being a Monero node or thousands of Monero nodes while just probably being a handful of nodes behind the scenes. And then they also used a vulnerability in how DNS works where they're able to lie and pretend to be a node that had long since been shut down. So like, let's say you ran a Monero node. You had the dnsmonaronode.com or something, but you shut down your node. He was able to find a way to essentially pretend to be that node and be in that list of potential remote nodes. And what that meant was if you used monero world.com, almost always, you were getting served a malicious node that was trying to get as much information from your wallet as possible. Thankfully, it is Monero, so they're not just immediately learning everything about your transaction, but it would allow them to do some essentially, to cut out some of the guesswork in what the true input in a transaction is. It wasn't perfect. They didn't deterministically know, but it was a a legitimate attack.
[01:08:13] Unknown:
Is this what some people might have also heard in the intro? There is little cuts from the chain analysis video that we shared Yeah. A few months ago. And they actually specifically talk about running malicious nodes to gather information. Have to say I was quite impressed with the bloke who was going through it. Like, obviously, he is an enemy of this show, but I was quite impressed with his knowledge, and it did open my eyes a bit to be like, oh, these guys are not fucking around. So is it likely that this is linked to that chain analysis stuff?
[01:08:53] Unknown:
Yeah. It's believed that's the same entity. I mean, it is possible that it's someone else, but it's it's most likely the the same entity because this is the Okay. Best way to currently attack how Danny Land plus plus works. Because if you are the majority of nodes on the network and you're able to lie about this, especially to wallets, you can get some more info. Again, not perfect, but it was an an interesting aspect of this. And it's a combination of this linking lion attacker they already knew about and some additional nodes, which we think are most likely chainalysis nodes. Thankfully, there's a relatively simple solution to this. One was that moneroworld.com doesn't exist anymore because it's not really necessary, and it was just way too dangerous of a service for people to use. But the other one is that there's a a ban list that the Monero communities put together of all of the IP addresses that are performing this attack. And, thankfully, it was pretty easy to detect how the attack was happening and find which IP addresses are malicious here. So there's a new ban list that's available. It's a part of the Docker version of Monero daemon that I published, so it's easy to access there. It's deployed on, like, all of the nodes that we run at Cake. My public node, if you use that, automatically bans all of the malicious nodes on the network.
And I'll I'll send you a link to put in the show notes for anybody else who runs a Monero node who wants to enable this ban list. It's not an absolute necessity, but it's better for your node and it's better for the network to prevent communicating with these malicious nodes, obviously. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. The the only other attack this year that I can think of outside of delistings in that node attack was actually a really interesting one that I know I was talking with with you and the the ungovernable team about. So at Cake, we run a lot of infrastructure for the Monero ecosystem. We have Cake Pay. We have Monero Nodes. We have our websites, obviously.
And something very interesting happened where as soon as Monero started pumping, it's maybe not related to price. It's maybe just coincidence. But as soon as Monero started to have a little bit of price appreciation earlier this year and we started to see even more people jumping over to use cake, trying to use our services. We underwent a pretty massive DDoS attack at cake to the tune of, like, 4000% our normal traffic, all happening from tour exit nodes, the normal kind of pattern of what a DDoS attack looks like. But it was interesting to see that as as Monero was really picking up steam, a lot of people were talking about it, that there's there's someone out there. We don't know exactly who it is. I've talked to some other people in this space, and we have we have some ideas on who could be doing this. And it's probably an exchange service within the the ecosystem. But we don't know exactly who, but there's been a sustained DDoS attack against many Monero services over the past 6 months, especially. I know, Monerica, which is like a directory service for merchants who accept Monero, has had constant DDoS issues, which is wild because they're just a directory service. Like, they're not even they're not even a business making money on Monero or something like that. But there's definitely some attacker out there who wants to make it as difficult as possible for people to access Monero related infrastructure and resources. And it's been a a thing that we've been fighting. Thankfully, the mitigations were pretty straightforward. So it didn't actually have any real world impact on cake outside of a short period where we had to just block tour access via exit nodes. You could still access all of our websites via Mhmm. Tour hidden services. But if you're using a tour exit node, you wouldn't have been able to access our services. But other than that, we were able to mitigate it. But, it's just an interesting one to see that has been another kind of constant theme. DDoSs are cheap and easy, and so it's something that is not an unheard of problem for just regular businesses in the space. But, yeah, it was just another interesting one to see this year that seems to have ramped up as a way to just make it a little bit harder for people to learn about Monero, use it, access it. Sneaky fuckers.
[01:12:36] Unknown:
Mhmm. Any other attacks?
[01:12:39] Unknown:
I I don't think so. I think those are the main ones that I could think of from this year. The one that we most deeply dove into, the fake notes is the big one for me. So I think that's it on my end. Okay. Yeah. So maybe we can just go ahead and jump into the the technical improvements. And that's something we can probably be a little briefer on because a lot of this is still kind of like work in progress stuff because a lot of the changes that we're currently looking at in Monero do require a hard fork. And that's another big difference between Bitcoin and Monero is that there is a culture in Monero that if something clearly improves Monero as digital cash, we're fine with cautiously upgrading the network through hard forks to ensure that everyone is using the very latest and greatest in Monero, which I know is anathema to the the Bitcoin space. And no one no one in Bitcoin would even dream of a hard fork, and even a soft fork is seemingly not even an option at this point. But it helps when a community is very much aligned around one specific use case, which is digital cash. And so we've had several hard forks over the years in Monero. Not to change something like the issuance or something like that, obviously, not the monetary policy, but changing the privacy protocol itself to keep improving it over time. Because ultimately, under the hood, like, this stuff is software. And especially when you're trying to achieve strong privacy, as you learn more about attacks, as you learn more about how trans surveillance companies work, as you have new cryptographic primitives come out that you can use for cool, useful, powerful privacy tools, you gotta stay on the cutting edge because it ultimately is an arms race in the privacy space. So I think it's also a little bit different than Bitcoin where the focus in Monero is privacy, which is a a necessary building block for digital cash.
But because of that, we are open to this this concept of hard forks in Monero purely to upgrade that privacy protocol aspect. And so we're we're looking at probably what will be another hard fork in 2025. So this will kinda cross over between 2024 and 2025. But one of the biggest developments that's been happening for a couple of years now and is now finished in the protocol development is something called full chain membership proofs. I know that we talked through this a little bit when I last came on your show. Mhmm. So I won't deep dive too much right now, but the TLDR for that is basically that right now, Monero uses ring signatures like I explained earlier. Your input is 1 of 16, and it's practically impossible for an outside entity to determine which of those 16 inputs is the true spend. But that does mean that anonymity set of 1 transaction is kind of 16. Theoretically, it's much larger because it's cascading. Each input then has its own previous history of 16 potential inputs. And so it gets really hard to actually find the source of funds, but why not just have it be the anonymity set of every input that's ever existed on the chain? And so that's essentially what full chain membership proofs does, where it uses a a really cool cryptographic approach, very similar to the approach that Zcash takes. It's different in how it's actually implemented, but similar in the sense that when you actually spend after full chain membership proofs. Instead of saying, hey. I'm one of 16 and I'm proving that these funds are legitimate, but I'm not gonna reveal which of these 16 I am, you essentially just say this input is a legitimate input from somewhere in Monero's history. And so you go from a an onset and a transaction of 16 to a 100,000,000 where it could potentially be any output that's ever happened in Monero's history. There's no more information about that input available at all. So it's it's a massive improvement for the the hiding of the sender in that privacy protocol, and fixes a lot of the, like, targeted attacks against privacy in Minero that were possible if very difficult. Now even those will be impossible because even if you know I sent this person point o one Minero in a dusting attack, you can never know if it's spent again. All you know is that at some point in the future, it might be spent. It might not be, but you can't even know is the person who has sent that person money in the past. So it's a really, really powerful privacy upgrade. The actual development of the protocol is totally done. And then now looking forward to 2025, we'll start working towards the actual implementation of that protocol into the code, which is well underway, and then hopefully a hard fork maybe like late 2025 or sometime in 2026 at the latest. Yeah. That's definitely the biggest one that's that's been worked on and that's been taking up a lot of the dev resources because it's such a vital upgrade to Monero, and it it touches a lot of the ways that Monero works under the hood. The other one that has been worked on over this past year that is ready now is something called carrot, which is a a strange name, but, essentially, what it is is a it's a new addressing scheme for Monero that doesn't even require a hard fork where, basically, by using a new address type, you can have a new set of keys. So not just the private key that you actually use to, like, back up and spend your funds, which obviously is is vital and exists in Monero and will ever go away, but there's also other keys in Monero because you have strong privacy. Pay a lot of view keys and stuff. I was looking through the other day. Yeah. Right right now, we have a few different kinds of keys, and they get very confusing.
[01:17:39] Unknown:
There's fucking loads. I was setting up BTCPay XMR Wallet, which is now done. Mhmm. Jordan had to help me with this, actually. So thank you, Jordan. But it's now done and working, and we've now sold clothing for Monero. I what I had to do was I had to, get feather wallet, and then feather wallet would show me, like, more I think he used your guide, actually. And then that would show all the different view keys, and there's, like, a private view key and a public view key and then all my other keys. I was like, Jesus Christ. This is confusing.
[01:18:14] Unknown:
It's we kind of have something similar in Bitcoin of, like, the xpriv and xpub concept. So there's, like, there's something kind of similar, but there's definitely more going on in Monero because of stealth addresses specifically. You need extra keys because you need a way to be able to see incoming transactions without giving the ability to spend those transactions. And that's essentially what a view key is right now. So in BTC pay, that's that's how it works right now is you give it a view key so that it can see when transactions are received without actually BTC pay itself having the ability to spend those funds. So it's the same kind of concept as connecting passport to BTC pay where you're essentially exporting the x pub to BTC pay so it can generate addresses and thus see transactions to those addresses without being able to spend them. So it's the same concept. It is different. And the reason that there's so many keys as well is that in your address that you actually give out in Monero, there's 2 keys. It's not just your public key, like you think about in Bitcoin, but it's also another key that's necessary to generate those addresses that'll be the unique one time address on chain. So it gets pretty complex and annoying. And one of the improvements that'll happen in caret is that we won't have less keys, but what will happen is you'll have much more useful keys. So, specifically, with something like caret, you'll have the ability to have a a new kind of key called a scan key. Actually, I don't know if that's what name it will have, but that's just what I'm gonna call it because I think it's most useful. Where right now, if you give over your view key to, like, a 3rd party, they can see all of the transactions that happen. Theoretically, it only shows incoming transactions, but the way the change works, they can basically see outgoing transactions as well. So you don't wanna do that for privacy reasons.
But the biggest really hurdle to using Monero right now is that syncing a Monero wallet takes way longer than a Bitcoin wallet. In Bitcoin, generally, the way that wallets work is you just say, hello, remote server. Here are my addresses. What transactions and balance do I have? And it gives you back that information. Obviously, that's awful from a privacy perspective unless it's your node, but it's very quick because all you're essentially asking is a very simple question and getting back very little data. It's quite nice from a user experience perspective. Mhmm. Whereas in Monero, when you sync your wallet, you're asking a remote node, hey. Give me all of the potential payments that I could have received from the last time I synced until now. And what that looks like is you're downloading a lot of the data of each block from the last time you synced until now. So it's it's a very different process, much more data intensive, much more compute intensive than syncing a Bitcoin wallet today. But we can have a very similar user experience to Bitcoin while actually having much better privacy. And what will happen with either Jamtus or Carrot, there's a couple different addressing schemes, but one of them will probably be implemented with FCMP plus plus, is that you'll have a new type of key that you could give to a wallet provider. Like, let's say, if we implemented this in Cake Wallet, you could give us this scan key and we could help you scan your wallet without actually knowing anything about your transactions.
So we could give you a much smaller amount of data and let you still be the one who finds those transactions locally on your device, but we can offload the vast majority of the bandwidth and the compute requirements to the remote node that you're using. Obviously, the ideal use case is that you're running this alongside of an arrow node at your house or on a VPS or something so that there's there's no drawbacks at all. But this approach is much better than a view key where right now, I could have that nice user experience by giving over my view key, but then I'm basically at the same position as if I'm using a remote Bitcoin node in the Bitcoin ecosystem where I'm giving all of the information about my transactions to that remote node as well. But this new key type will will fix that and will essentially give you almost as good of privacy as today in, like, the normal scanning Monero's, situation, but with the user experience, it's very similar to to Bitcoin. So it's gonna be a really big improvement. And I think that's that's about it for the technical improvements.
Like I said, much of the stuff is still kind of in the works and and coming in 2025. But the other area that I think was really fascinating in 2024, and I know you have some things to chime in on here, was just really seeing adoption take off. And just like we talked about the top of the show, the kind of social aspects of this have been clear where way more people are just talking about Monero, talking about using it, asking questions about it, that sort of thing. But also just seeing that people are actually using Monero. And, obviously, Monero is extremely private, so it's very hard to get the same kind of, like, on chain analytics that many people use in the Bitcoin space to do, like, an end of year report on how many lightning transactions there were, how many on chain transactions there were.
That sort of thing is very difficult. So instead, what we have to look at for adoption are things like for a given merchant, what percentage of people are paying in Monero? And over 2024, it was fascinating to see that that market share that Monero has with the merchants that share this data. Not every merchant is talking about how much is perceived in each cryptocurrency, but with the merchants that share that data, there's 3 that come to mind for sharing this. Coin cards, shop and bit. My Nimbox is another one. And then at Cake, we share the data on Cake Pay as well. Monero's usage has skyrocketed throughout this year where at many of these retailers, it's often right up there with Bitcoin usage. And a month, it's even surpassed Bitcoin usage, especially on, like, coin cards, shop and bit for several months. I think just until this last month, shop and bit was primarily Monero being used there even though they're generally Bitcoiners and generally Bitcoin service. And we've seen this really across the board. I mean, on on the cake pay side, obviously, we're a little bit more Monero slanted because a lot of the community around Cake Wallet is Monero centric, but we we usually run somewhere between 80 to 90% Monero usage, and only about, like, 10 to 20% Bitcoin usage. Even though we we are seeing that Bitcoin is growing as we've added lightning and as we've had this kinda this bull run-in Bitcoin, which if the price goes up, we always see people spending that asset more. But that's a really cool thing to see in 2024.
I know that you had some that you added on here that that you wanted to chat about as well. Yeah. So on my side, I've noticed it as well. XMR chat adoption
[01:24:26] Unknown:
from listeners, that has been growing steadily. I was actually surprised how quickly that happened. Like, we added it on as like, yeah. We'll give this a go. And I think even in the first episode, we got more donations in Monero than we did on Bitcoin and Lightning for the whole month. Wow.
[01:24:47] Unknown:
Wow.
[01:24:48] Unknown:
So either the Monero community is just very, very generous, or it's just like massive usage or bit of both really, but that's been pretty cool to see, and I really like that project. I think it's incredibly easy for people to comment and get involved with the show. So I'm really enjoying using that. Ungovernal Misfits is now accepting Monero for clothing. We've done our first, sale for Monero, which is really cool as well, because I think, especially in Ungovernal Misfits, we do have a lot of listeners who use it. A lot of people have asked me in the past as well, and we've done it before, but it's had to be like, okay. You send me Monero to a separate address or or someone else who wants Monero would take it, and then they'd send me Bitcoin. And it was it was like a manual process that was a pain in the ass. But now integrating it onto BTC pay server so anyone can go in and buy arsehole clothing for Monero is is really slick and really cool, so I'm excited about that. And our good friend, Barn Miner as well, selling his barn jerky for Monero.
So, just in our little communities, we are seeing an uptick.
[01:25:58] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's it's such a good crossover. The Monero community loves the circular economy. They love spending Monero. That's, like, one key ethos difference I've found between the broader Bitcoin ecosystem. There are definitely pieces of the Bitcoin ecosystem that are very circular economy focused, but the vast majority of people in Monero want to drive a circular economy very badly and have a clear desire to actually spend and use Monero. So it's, it's definitely something where there's just kind of a natural fit for merchants to offer Monero, and the Monero community wants to spend and use their Monero. There's not this mentality of huddle till I die kind of thing where we're just gonna fix the system by holding it, but actually wanting to use it and use it for payment. So it's a it's a fantastic fit. So I'm not, like, shocked at the adoption growth, but I think it's it's happened a lot faster than I expected in the wake of the samurai wallet stuff. I think it's rapidly accelerated the adoption of Monero throughout the space, and it's been really, really cool to see. It's yeah. I think that for me and many others was like you know, we were sitting around going like, fuck.
[01:27:02] Unknown:
Mhmm. We've just realized how good we had it, and we don't have that anymore. Like, what do we do now? And, you know, Samura and T Dev themselves were very, into Monero. Mhmm. Integrated it in any way so they could, used it, spoke very highly of it. So, a lot of that community and people who were heavy users of samurai, which actually is a large percentage of the listener base of this podcast, were already or if they weren't already viewed it in a more positive light than the sort of, like, Twitter maxi crowd because, different circles, very different circles. The other thing I've been really excited about is outside of adoption is just the ecosystem growth, you know, a massive one Yeah.
Which we've both just done shows on with Passport Prime is a perfect example of something that I think is gonna make a massive difference. Passport Prime integrating with K Qualia is, you know, I mean, it's gonna be huge. It's absolutely massive.
[01:28:09] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm so glad that that announcement happened this year so we can we can talk about it twice. So we can talk about it in 2024, and we can talk about the actual release in 2025. So we get we get double airtime for the foundation guys. But yeah. I mean, that's the hardware wallet space around Monero has always been painful. And, like, one of the things that I highlighted in the ecosystem growth for us to chat through is for the first time now, people on iOS can use hardware wallets. It's unfortunately through Ledger who suck. I hate Ledger. You shouldn't buy Ledger. Even if it's on cake wallet now, I still hate Ledger and don't advise people to to use them. But, unfortunately, in the mineral space, there's been no other option. There is Trezor who I would say are better than Ledger, but they don't have any Bluetooth support. So mobile is impossible on iOS and very difficult on Android. Whereas Ledger has Bluetooth, so it's been more broadly the widely used thing for Monero cold storage. But, obviously, Ledger has massive issues. Ledger recover is a nightmare of a service that they've introduced. Like, the the ethos of Ledger is clearly antithetical to everything that Monero stands for and everything that that real Bitcoiners stand for. So, like, obviously, I don't wanna push people that way, and that's what's made it so exciting. Obviously, I got kind of the inside view of passport prime because I got to help a lot help out a lot with the the planning around it when I was with foundation. And then now that I've I've jumped over to Cake Wallet from foundation, now I get the outside view of seeing them launch it and also act as the primary launch partner for prime where we're gonna be building a cake wall app for prime, which initially will be focused solely on Monero support so that we can finally have an actual open source, good quality hardware wallet with a first party well built Monero app on it. It's gonna be a, a refreshing contrast to how the hardware wallet space has been in the Monero ecosystem because it's it's painful. I mean, even now, like, us doing the development work for Ledger integration and the cake wallet just because Ledger could care less about Monero.
Yeah. There's just a lot of edge cases and issues in the way that it works, and it's problematic. But Prime is gonna be just a fantastic user experience. I'm really excited for that and think it's gonna be a great way for people to it could be your cold storage. Could be maybe it's your warm storage where you just wanna keep a little bit more of an arrow on there in case you have a bigger spend you wanna make when you're on the go and maybe do cold storage somewhere else. But it's gonna be a really cool fit for that, so I'm I'm absolutely pumped for that. And that announcement's huge. And then I think early access ships in March is their target right now. And then the kind of reservations are gonna ship in June. And so we're we're trying to align on the timelines with the k cap with those as well where we'll have a an early beta for the k cap out for the early access people when they get their device in March, and then we're hoping to have the fully done app with Monero support for general availability in June. So it's gonna be a gonna be a fun first half of the year for that for sure. Yeah. So that was a huge one. Launch of XMR chat as well. That was this year. Love that service. It's really fucking cool. Who was that I was speaking to?
[01:31:09] Unknown:
I actually can't share who it is, but a couple of other podcasts I've spoken to recently who are looking to integrate that next year. Nice. We use the podcasting 2.0 stuff. We use fountain. We use these other things, and they've been great for the show. They really have been amazing, especially for, like, the interaction with audience and all that kind of stuff. It's also helped us keep going and grow from donations and things. It's amazing, but not that slick. Doesn't always work. Can be a bit glitchy. For the most part, it is custodial. Yeah. That's how most people are using it. So this has just been very refreshing, but it's just, like, clean, simple, no fucking around. People can just send a message, send some Monero with it, and,
[01:31:53] Unknown:
I love the simplicity of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really badass. I was kinda shocked how well that's gone. I feel like one thing in the Monero ecosystem that you never really know is kind of how how much will the follow through be on a project. Because I feel like the Monero community is just a lot smaller than Bitcoin. So a lot of people have really cool ideas and then they, like, ship the first one and then they just disappear into the ether, and it doesn't get developed. But it's been really awesome with XMR chat to see them pumping out updates, improving, giving a lot of better functionality to streamers and, like, really cool stuff in a use case that is perfect for cryptocurrency and one where Monero fits even better. I think, like, lightning in theory should be better because micropayments a little bit easier. You can do things like streaming sets and it is a cool concept, but like you mentioned, in the vast majority of the ways people are using this, it's custodial because that's the only way to actually achieve it with a good user experience, whereas Monero really enables a lot of similar things without having to make the sacrifices. So it is it has been awesome to see that that rapidly grow. And alongside that, another thing that was launched in 2024 was XMR Bazaar, which is basically a peer to peer marketplace for selling, like, actual things. It can be digital things. It can be physical things. But, essentially, just being able to buy and sell stuff for Monero or buy and sell services for Monero without that person having to, like, have their own store, have their own website, all of that jazz. There was something way back in the day, I think early on when I got started in the Bitcoin space called Open Bazaar. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. It was I think it was basically the same concept, and I'm sure that's where this this name is coming from to kinda hearken back to Mhmm. To that project. But it was a really cool use case. And, again, it's just one of those things that, like, seems like the perfect fit for cryptocurrency.
Like, I I wanna be able to buy something from someone. I don't want the headache of sharing personal details. I want a better user experience. Cryptocurrency fits that really well. And XMR Bazaar launched this year. I think it's still in beta. I've used it a bit, with merchants that I trust who already know from, like, the broader ecosystem. But really cool platform. All of the communication is PGP encrypted where you hold your own PGP keys on there. So make sure you back up everything it tells you when you set up your account if you do use it. Yeah. But a really cool way to not let even the operators of Exmark Bazaar don't get info on shipping. Like, if you put in your address to get something shipped to you, only the seller can actually see the shipping info that you share with them, the managerial payments. They are testing out an escrow system right now. I think it's limited to smaller amounts, but for right now, the vast majority of trades are just you're sending them Monero directly to the merchant, and then they're sending you the good or service, whatever it is. So it's just a really cool way to be able to kind of have, like, a Craigslist like place without the spammers and use Monero in the real world to actually buy and sell things. Again, just building out that circular economy in a way that uses technology to enable it to make it a little bit easier than having to just find someone on a forum or find someone on Twitter who wants to sell something, that sort of thing. I'm sure I saw Vic selling his car on there a couple of months ago. I think it was it was someone else selling a car on there for Monero. Yeah. I think Vic just shared the ad. I don't think it was actually his personal car, but I wouldn't put it past Vic. It could be. I thought it might have been. But, yeah, I mean, like, ideal situation being able to sell stuff on there, like, it's the sort of thing where we might say, oh, actually, maybe we'll, put adverts up there for our clothing and our artwork because, you know, it might pull in another audience. So that's maybe something that we do. Yeah. Another place where you can get that kind of exposure. The last thing I have on the ecosystem side is kind of similar to the hardware wallet space. I know there's been a similar thing put out by the Monair community. Essentially, the idea is kind of similar to what was it called? Sentinel was the samurai wallet idea where you could have, like, a your wallet on an offline old Android device, have the private keys there, and just publish the transaction using some sort of an online device, like using your phone, using a desktop.
A similar idea is something that we've run with at Cake. We're calling it Cupcake because we like dessert related names, I guess. But, basically, the concept is on let's say you have, like, a Pixel 6 or something that you you upgraded to a Pixel 8 or Pixel 9. You could either just use stock Android on that or better run Graphene OS on that old Android phone. You can install Cupcake and then you use that phone as if it's a hardware wallet. So the keys Yep. Stay offline. The app has no Internet access even if your phone is connected to the Internet. Obviously, best case probably would be to also have the phone in airplane mode, but we have no code in there to even connect to the network even if you were connected. And then you do kind of the QR code shuffle that you're used to if you've ever used Yeah. Passport, if you've ever used any kind of QR code, air gapped wallet. It's the same concept. So there's nothing like crazy novel in what it does. It's Sentinel, but for Yeah. Monero. Yeah. Basically, that concept. It's a little bit different in the fact that Sentinel could also be just a an online watch only wallet where Cupcake is not. So Cupcake's sole purpose is actually keeping the private keys on a separate device and signing transactions. But one of the ways you could use Sentinel was like that. So, yeah, it's a it's just a a cool way that if you don't have a hardware wallet or maybe you don't want to have to buy a hardware wallet and get it shipped to your house, which is a totally legitimate concern with all the leaks that have happened, especially with Ledger.
It's a cool way to be able to have a lot of the benefits of a hardware wallet. I wouldn't say it's quite as good in my opinion, but it has a lot of the advantages without many of the drawbacks. So it's a really cool way to be able to take more secure custody of your Monero. Right now, it's really in an open beta. We put it on initial release because we wanted it out for Monero Topia so we could show people what we were working on, but we're working on a lot of improvements and enhancements. So I'm hoping we can get a a full public release probably in the next month or so.
[01:37:46] Unknown:
Cool. I think that covers our updates of 2024. This is gonna be released early 2025, so that was kind of a look back on the last year. What have we got to look forward to in 2025?
[01:38:01] Unknown:
A lot of the main things I've already mentioned, so I'll kind of, like, quickly recap the ones that I've already touched on. But a lot of the stuff that's been announced or been worked on in 2024 should be live and actually out in 2025. So like we just talked about, Passport Prime will be shipping in in March or June depending on what Mhmm. Kind of batch you order. Monero Con is the biggest conference I'm looking forward to this year. I know Monero Topia will also be in 2025, but I'm not sure what, what dates their location yet. So I haven't haven't planned out specifically that, but Monero Con's gonna be a a blast this year. It's gonna be actually the same week as BTC Prague. So if anybody's going out to BTC Prague, you can just pair those together and hop right on over still in Prague to Monero Con and knock out both events back to back. I think they even have a day of overlap, which is a little odd, but you can kinda knock out 2 conferences there on the Bitcoin side and the Monero side in 1 week, which will be will be awesome so you don't have to travel as much, but still get your your conferences in.
And so, yeah, that's the big the big conference I'm looking forward to this year. On the technical side, the big one is definitely full chain membership proofs like we talked about. I don't know if that'll actually go live this year. The actual, like, planning process and cautious path towards a hard fork is a slow one. So I'm not sure if that will actually go live in 2025. So I'll kind of tentatively say, I don't know, maybe late 2025 we can have this since the underlying protocol is totally done in development. I'm hopeful that it will be. That will be a huge step forward for Monero and really make it, from my perspective, feature complete as a privacy protocol. Like, I would kind of view that as the 1 point o of Monero where we actually are on for some reason, we're still in 0 dot versions. So, like, the latest Monero software version is 0.18.3.4, but it's been around for a decade. So I don't know if we can convince the Monero guys to actually make this the the one that will release.
But that will be fantastic if it does make it in. If it doesn't, there's some other things that are still gonna be happening on the technical side, especially around improving sync that'll come out this year. One of them is a improvement by a fantastic dev called Justin Berman where he found a way that basically we can make that bandwidth and compute intense sync process drastically more efficient. So it won't cut down on bandwidth, but it'll make the the actual speed, the time that it takes to do that synchronization, much shorter. So that will be a big user experience improvement to Monero, and that doesn't require a hard fork or anything like that. So I know that that's very close to being ready. We'll definitely be working on that at cake as soon as it's it's ready in the Monero code base. And then another one on the cake side is that, again, trying to work around this kind of sync user experience hurdle in Monero. We've been working on background sync so that you can have cake wallet, you can have your Monero wallet there, and then it can just be syncing in the background when you're on Wi Fi, when you're plugged in, when you close the app and go to multitask and do something else. If you enable the service, obviously, you'll you'll have to opt into it. It can sync your Monero wallet in the background without you having to do anything extra while using only the keys necessary to sync without having the actual, like, spend key hot and RAM the whole time you're syncing. So in theory, you'll then never have to wait for your wallet to sync when you open it. It'll just be syncing in the background constantly.
Or down the line, probably not at launch, but down the line, we'll have the ability for you to say, like, hey. When my phone is charging and on Wi Fi, go ahead and sync all of my wallets up. And it can do every wallet that's in cake wallet, not just it can do also your Bitcoin wallet, especially if you're doing something like silent payments which have a little bit more intense sync process. You can do that in the background. So that's gonna be a huge, huge improvement, on the Monero side, on the silent payment side, and Bitcoin as well to be able to just sync in the background and not have to you you wanna spend, you open up kQuil, and then you realize, oh, I gotta sync 10,000 blocks or whatever. We'll we'll be doing our best to work around that. So that'll be an exciting one as well for 2025 on the technical side. But I think those are the main things. I'm like I said, I'm sure I'm missing things. I'm kind of really getting reconnected in the Minero community in the last, like, 6 months or so, but those are the big things that jump out to me. Oh, one more, actually. One more that I forgot, and one I didn't mention for 2024 either.
So a friend of mine, someone I know really well in the space who's been the lead dev for Monero on full chain membership proofs, He also has been working on his own decentralized exchange that will have Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero support. And the idea is that it will be basically the user experience of these centralized swap providers. Things like change now or SimpleSwap or whatever the swap provider that you've used in the past, fixed float, those kinds of things. It'll have a similar user experience, but it will be totally decentralized. There will be many operators running the swap service. They won't be have the unilateral bill unilateral ability to seize funds or hold on to them, and you won't be giving up custody in the same sense as to a centralized swap service. No KYC. All of the benefits of decentralization here because we can do it all with technology and just swap directly between these cryptocurrencies.
So it's gonna be a really, really good user experience, but drastically more decentralized and resilient than decentralized swap services that we have to use today. So that probably will go live in 2025. Again, I don't wanna I don't wanna tie down the, the main dev behind it to to force him into a a timeline, but I know that he's done a lot of work on it in 2024. Was originally targeting a launch in 2024, but pushed it back to 2025. So I'm hopeful that that will go live. That will be a huge addition to make it even easier for you to go from Bitcoin to Monero and back again. Very cool.
[01:43:39] Unknown:
I was gonna ask you a question to break down something, but we're a fair way through now. I think that maybe we save that for next episode. And Yeah. What we can do is anyone who has any questions, maybe breaking down, like, a key component of Monero or any questions that people have on the privacy side, the security side, or I see quite often people asking about verifiability and all these kind of things. Mhmm. Any of those questions, if you send them through either on XMR chat or you can do it on Fountain or however you wanna do it, but, send those through, and we can answer those next time around.
Anyone who does wanna support the show, XMR chat would probably be the coolest for this specific show. We'd like to see that grow and support them. And there's also this bird pay function, which you can probably explain a little bit better than me because I haven't yet used it. But it seems as though you can just pay directly by using someone's Twitter handle. Is that right?
[01:44:42] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really straightforward. So if you have a Monero address in your bio or in your pinned tweet, All someone using Kekola has to do is just type in your Twitter username, and it'll pull that address. Show the user the Twitter profile to make sure that they don't actually accidentally ping the wrong person, obviously, and then you can pay them directly using that. So they don't have to manually type in the address or find it on some other website like your own or find it in the show notes even. They can just type in the Twitter username, and it'll pop right up. So it's it's pretty sweet. You do have to have that Monero address in the bio or in the pinned tweet, which can be a little tricky with the character limits. Yeah.
[01:45:20] Unknown:
Yeah. That's true. The character limits. So, well, I'll try and do that on the Ungovernable Misfit 1. If I can't, then we'll just put it in the show notes. But that's a cool feature. I like that. Outside of that, yeah, just any questions would be great. We're also gonna put a link in the show notes to how to mine to the show. I set that up in, like, 2 minutes with Jordan. It was so easy, which is a really cool way to do it. And we've already got, I think, 4 or 5 people who are contributing to this show that way. So anytime they have any extra computing power, they're just mining to show, which is absolutely incredible. And if anyone has any art or jingles or anything that they can share with the show would be much appreciated.
So, get in touch for anything like that. That would be really cool as this show grows and develops. Anything on your side, Seth, that you'd like to,
[01:46:14] Unknown:
anyone you'd like to hear from? Any questions or anything like that? No. I think the biggest thing to me is, like you've been doing with with q and a. I love the the concept of people being able to ask ask questions and get them answered here. So that's definitely something I'm looking forward to in future episodes. I know this one was more review of 2024. Looking forward to 2025, but, it'll be it'll be awesome in the the next monthly episodes to be able to actually talk through your questions. And I'm I hope we'll have a lot because especially if you're coming from Bitcoin and new to Monero, there's just there's a lot of differences even if the core kinda ethos is similar. There's a lot of technical differences, especially in use case differences, user experience differences. So that's something I love doing. I I love doing the the q and a side of things. If you do have questions, no matter how simple or complex,
[01:47:00] Unknown:
I'd love to get into them. Awesome. Well, I think that is everything, mate. Thank you for joining the Ungovernal Misfits. We're very, very happy to have you on board, and I'm very excited for the show. It's a good chance for me to learn about something I know practically fuck all about. And if the listeners don't have any questions, I will do. So, I look forward to the next one, mate. Me too. Thanks so much for having me, Max. Alright. We'll speak next month. That was a long first episode, but I enjoyed listening to some of the history of Monero. It's really cool to have Seth on board and part of the Ungovernal Misfits crew. I'm really looking forward to learning more and using these tools more, and I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, please reach out and ask, probably Seth, but you can try and ask me as well. And we'll catch you on the next episode a month from now. Before you go, I wanna say happy New Year. Thank you for all the support from all The Ungovernable Misfits and The Ungovernable Misfits crew. Also, a big thank you to Cake Wallet and Foundation, not only for supporting this show and everything that Ungovernal Misfits do, but also for the general freedom and open source movement.
We hinted to it in this episode, but Foundation have released a new device. I'm very excited about this. If you haven't already listened to my episode, go back and have a listen. You can check them out at foundation dot x y zed. You can use my code Ungovernable for a discount, I think, just for the passport, not for the passport prime as it stands. But either way, give it a go. It's just Ungovernable. Or you can click the link in the show notes, and it will take you to our own cool page that mister Crowns made all beautiful. Check that out. And also a big thank you to Cake Wallet, which will be having its own application on the Passport Prime. So, obviously, Seth has been working hard in the background there and the rest of the team to work with foundation.
It's very exciting because it's gonna mean people can have cold storage for their Monero along with lots of other cool features, I'm sure. If you haven't already tried K Wallet, give it a go. You can use this on Mac, Linux, Windows, iPhone, and Android. I've been using it now for probably about 6 months, and I really like it. It's got some great Bitcoin features, great features. You can link this to your own node on both. It's got swap services, payment services, all sorts of things in there that help people who actually use Bitcoin and Monero.
And if you have any questions while using it, you can just send in to our own little tech support here, and me and Seth will go through it in the next episode. Thanks for listening, and stay ungovernable.
The business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every last seconds, 11 seconds, 11 seconds. I am investigator, investigator,
[00:00:09] Unknown:
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.
[00:00:39] Unknown:
The world's most private privacy.
[00:00:46] Unknown:
Which allows cyber for criminals.
[00:00:48] Unknown:
Criminal is now definitely the most well known privacy point. The world's most private
[00:00:55] Unknown:
privacy. Regulated
[00:01:13] Unknown:
Welcome back, all the Ungovernable Misfits. Welcome into 2025, and welcome to the newest member of the Ungovernable Misfits crew, Seth for privacy. Welcome, Seth.
[00:01:27] Unknown:
Thank you. Thank you, Max. I am absolutely thrilled for this. I know we've been talking off and on about this for quite a while, and I just have the the highest possible respect for for you and the show. So I'm pumped to be able to chat some new things, unveil some some Monero content out there, get some more privacy chats into the world. And, yeah, thanks for having me, man. I'm excited for this. Me too. After we chatted on and off for a while after we did the last episode,
[00:01:54] Unknown:
I kept asking you questions on Monero as I sort of dip my toe in more and more. One day, I was driving to the gym, and I was like, this feels so similar to how it did with q and a when I was first starting to learn about privacy on Bitcoin and wrap my head around things. The way I learned was just chatting with him constantly and doing the shows, and that's kind of how it worked and how everyone in Ungovernable Misfits started getting involved in that. And so many listeners have reached out to me and said how much they've benefited from that because of my stupid questions and him knowing what he's talking about. And so I just thought, right, this could be the perfect show because I'm starting to see, first of all, I'm using Monero more and more. I think that's pretty clear to anyone who is listening to the show. And also a lot of the listeners are using it more and more. And it seems like there's a little bit of a little bit of a change in the air, like, where people were a bit too scared to go up against the maxi mentality.
There's a few more people willing to stand up and say no. Do you know what? I actually care more about freedom and more about people being able to transact than I do being part of a click and a club and a cult. If that means since samurai has gone away and Whirlpool has gone away and that it has got much more difficult to transact privately on Bitcoin, if it means that I've gotta use this new tool, I will.
[00:03:30] Unknown:
Yeah. It it really feels like I don't know. It's a it's a butchering of the original quote, but necessity being the mother of adoption, maybe, is kind of like, what we've seen here. Because it's been it's been interesting over the years since I've had kind of a foot in the Monero camp and a foot in the Bitcoin camp, getting to know that so many Bitcoiners have long had, like, a very high respect for Monero. Like, it's been one of the few that like, legitimate Bitcoiners. Like, there's some people who are crazy, of course. But, like, legitimate Bitcoiners will just not talk about it or just offhand mention, like, yeah. It's it's fine. Because there's not really anything to label it as a shitcoin. A lot of the origin story, a lot of the the technicals are very, very similar to Bitcoin in the the sense that it's targeting freedom money. Mhmm. But interesting to see, like, kinda behind the scenes how many Bitcoiners secretly use Monero or help Oh, yeah. Or run nodes, that kinda thing. And that that tide, I feel like, has shifted. Like you mentioned, many more people are much more willing to talk about this. Like, in the wake of the samurai wallet arrests and indictment, the number of people who I thought would never want to talk about Monero that have hopped into my DMs or replied to posts on Twitter or chatted me up on Telegram, shot me a message on signal suddenly saying, like, hey. So it's Monero stuff.
How do I how do I get it? How do I use it? What does this actually look like? Has been going through the roof. And I think, like, a a a fascinating example of this and something I never expected was actually when I was in Lugano for the plan b forum, which is like a a heavy Bitcoin Maxi event. And I say that as someone who, like, did actually enjoy the event a lot more than I expected. The organizers were fantastic, and there were some really cool people there. In the middle of that event, I presented on Bitcoin. I was not presenting on Monero because it wasn't the focus of the event, and I try to kinda keep things on topic when I can. And I had 2 different people in the audience just specifically say, like, okay. This is cool, but, like, how does Monero fit into this tool kit? And, like, basically saying, we really wanna know how we can use Monero alongside Bitcoin. And then, a third person, Jamieson Lop, sitting in the front asking about Monero and how it fits into the toolkit. Mhmm. And then I went on 2 podcasts after that. I don't think they've been published yet for the the organizers of the plan b forum. And we ended up talking about Monero in both of those as well. And it's like it's that idea to me, like, a year ago, I could have never seen that happening.
Mhmm. There's just a general understanding that we need tools that protect our freedom. Privacy is a core aspect of how we achieve human freedom. And Minero is just a fantastic tool for financial privacy. And it's been awesome to see that kind of wake up happening. And I think the show is gonna fit in just supremely well with helping people to keep up with what's happening in Monero, better understanding how it works technically, how to use it. And I think it's gonna be a a perfect fit at a perfect time when people are waking up to how Monero can fit in alongside Bitcoin. I'm not gonna say that's replacing Bitcoin, that it's gonna topple Bitcoin's, number go up abilities or anything like that, but just being a fantastic tool alongside Bitcoin. So yeah.
[00:06:29] Unknown:
Yeah. I I think it's perfect because I'm certainly not one for the full on maxi camp, like, calling everything a shitcoin. It starts to get silly because it's like, well, is cash a shitcoin? Is everything that you use that isn't Bitcoin for any possible reason a shitcoin? It's perfect to have someone like you who is more in the middle. You're not a crazy Maxi, and you're not a crazy Maxi in the Monero sense either because there are crazies on either side. There are people who are absolutely adamant that they are correct and that everything else is bullshit. And I I like to take the approach that's like, use the right tool for the job. Don't get married to the idea. And when things change, you need to change as well. And so, you know, while Whirlpool was around, for me, I was like, okay. I know how this works. I'm comfortable with it. It fits the needs that I currently have.
I was like, well, I don't have really that much incentive to play around and look at Monero, and I find just using Bitcoin hard enough. I didn't wanna add another thing, like, unnecessarily. But now that it is necessary for me, and we're going to the different ways that it's used, but it has become part of my toolkit. What I'm conscious of is I don't want people who are starting to experiment with it to make mistakes. I know that it's a lot harder to make mistakes than it is on Bitcoin. Like, Bitcoin's very, very easy to shoot yourself in the foot, Monero less so. But I don't want people just going out and going, oh, if I just use Monero, I'm completely private. I don't have to worry about anything and then getting themselves into trouble down the line. So that's something that I really hope the show can do, teach people how to use the 2 of them in tandem, and, yeah, I hope it appeals to people.
[00:08:23] Unknown:
Yeah. I think that's the biggest thing for people to keep in mind is just like any privacy tool. It's not a silver bullet. It doesn't just make you magically invisible because you're using Monero. You gotta worry about other ops tech as well. So that's definitely an important thing to keep in mind as we talk about it as just like when we're talking about Whirlpool on Bitcoin. It didn't fix everything. It fixed a very specific issue, and then you had to be cautious with the rest of your OPSEC of using email aliases, of using encrypted messengers, of, just thinking broadly about OPSEC. But it does nail that financial privacy part really, really well. And so if you're thinking about the way that you approach personal privacy more broadly, it'll enhance everything else that you're doing for sure. Yeah. And we're gonna jump in in a second into, what's coming up in the show. But before we do that, one thing that I have noticed
[00:09:08] Unknown:
for many years, even before I've used Monero or cared about it, really, is that it is used. So, like, friends of mine have used it for many, many years. Half the dark net or more is using it. It is something that's getting delisted more and more. And so these are all things that make my ears prick up and go, this isn't some wanky token bullshit, pump and dump nonsense, what I would call a shitcoin. This isn't just some speculative nonsense. This is something that is established, and it's used. I think if anyone spends even 5 minutes thinking about that and researching that, they will soon realize, okay. No. This is very different to all the other tokens and blockchains that we see out there.
So in the show, first, we're gonna do a recap of Monero. What is it, and why do we care? Then we'll cover some of the most historically important moments in Monero's history. Then we're gonna discuss the highlights and lowlights of 2024. These include Monerotopia, the on and off ramps and atomic swaps, technical improvements and attacks, adoption, growth, and more. Why don't we start with a 5 minute rundown on Monero? How does it work? How does it differ to Bitcoin, and why should anyone care about it?
[00:10:46] Unknown:
For sure. Yeah. So, I know we've talked about it a bit on the show before. So if you're already familiar with how Monero works, feel free to to skip through this a little bit and and jump to the next section. But the kind of TLDR is really that it's similar to Bitcoin in many ways. It has regular blockchain. It has a regular UTXO model where you have separate coins. It has a fair issuance where there's no pre mine. There's no central party that owns the majority of the supply or anything like that. But where it really differs from Bitcoin and what sets it apart is that Monero has stayed focused from day 1 on bringing better financial privacy to the cryptocurrency space. And the way I really like to describe it is that Monero really targets being digital cash, both in the sense of targeting use in circular economies, peer to peer payments, really focusing on actually making transactions, like actually using it. And then the other aspect of cash that is often kind of forgotten is that it's extremely private. If I pay you with cash, no one knows that that transaction happened except the 2 of us. Mhmm. There's no way for anyone to have any visibility into to how much money changed hands, much less who was involved in that transaction, I guess, in the case of cash, unless someone's standing right next to you or something. So Yeah. The analogy falls apart a little bit, but essentially targeting being digital cash. And the way that it does that is financial privacy is insured for all users in the Monero ecosystem. You don't have to care about privacy. You don't have to do any extra steps to gain very strong financial privacy. And, essentially, what that means is that the sender, the receiver, and the amount in every transaction are hidden by default. The sender is hidden by something called ring signatures today. This is gonna change in in FCMP, which we'll we'll chat about later on in the show. But essentially, it means that right now, you hide amongst a group of 16 potential inputs for every input that you have in the transaction and it makes it so that no one can tell who the sender is in the sense of what inputs are actually being spent in a transaction. It also hides the recipient because Monero uses something called stealth addresses for those in the Bitcoin space. If you followed any of the silent payments work and hype over the past couple of years, it's essentially the same concept where there's a an address that you actually give to someone. It's a very long string longer than a normal Bitcoin address because it has 2 keys in it. But then there's a totally separate one time key that ends up on chain when someone actually pays you to that address. So there's no tie between, let's say, the address you post on Twitter and your Twitter bio and any transactions that you actually receive within Monam. So the the recipients will hit in as well. And And then the amount is hidden by something called confidential amounts where, essentially, it's just totally encrypted between the sender and receiver. No one else can see the amount at all. Even Quantum Computers, no matter what's going on, the amount is completely encrypted and only visible to the sender and receiver in a transaction.
So those are the 3 main ways that it provides financial privacy. But, again, really, the goal is how do we enable digital cash for the average person where when you use cash, you don't have to think about how am I gonna make this transaction more private. You just use it, and you gain the natural properties of cash. Same thing with Monero.
[00:13:51] Unknown:
Yeah. This is like proper digital cash. That's not to say that Bitcoin can't be, but there is just a huge amount that has to be done. You have to be pretty knowledgeable, and it is very, very easy to shoot yourself in the fur. Yep. It's very easy for even experienced users to either leak how much Bitcoin they have or leak other information about themselves, which stays on the chain forever. So even if it's not even if it's not immediately, you pay your plumber, but you've got a shit ton of Bitcoin, and then he suddenly sees that you've got that, and he comes and kills you with a wrench and takes your Bitcoin or whatever. You know, it doesn't have to be that. It could be you think you're clever. You think that you've had a boating accident or something like that. You make one mistake, and 10 years down the line, you get a knock at your door.
Suddenly, you're either imprisoned or worse. You know, these are the things that you have to be very careful with with Bitcoin. And as you start to do more transactions, as you start to use it more and more, this becomes pretty clear that there are some issues there. So I think a lot of Bitcoiners now for the privacy side are starting to lean into that a little bit more. And what I have noticed is, since we started accepting donations in Monero with XMR chat, which has been really amazing. We've had some great support with it, and now actually allowing listeners to mine Monero to the show as well. That's really been a trigger point with people coming out of the weeds and saying, oh, yeah. I've been using it for years. I love it. And people who I've spoken to for years years never knew explaining the same things that we are now, so that is cool to see.
[00:15:40] Unknown:
Yeah. It's kind of that hilarious part of the privacy culture where I understand it. Like, you don't wanna tell everyone exactly what you do to gain personal privacy because then, obviously, it makes you more vulnerable to someone seeing, oh, well, if you're using these specific tools, then then maybe maybe I can find out this information about you. So I know I understand the reasoning behind it, but it's one of those things that's, like, really also frustrating because a lot of people aren't willing to talk about it that people don't learn about what tools are out there. Like, how powerful Monero can be for financial privacy or how powerful something like signal can be for encrypted messaging because people want to use it and not talk about it, which, again, I understand. And probably for most people, they shouldn't just be telling everyone exactly what their their kinda OPSEC routine is. But it's one of those kinda chicken before the egg thing. We want more adoption, and so we need to talk about it, but we also need to be cautious that we don't reveal too much because then we're ultimately giving up our own personal privacy to onboard other people. So it is a balancing act, but it is one of those funny things where you you'll just learn that someone you've known for years, like, has been using Monero the whole time, and you have no clue because they don't talk about it. You can't see it. There's no, publicity there, which is a good thing. And it's it's good that they have the choice, but we also need more people chatting about this stuff, especially with, like, trusted entities. Like, not just yelling on Twitter about it, but talking to family and friends, people who you can trust for that information about the tools that are useful to you. Yeah. And,
[00:16:59] Unknown:
also, you know, if you're listening to the show and you think the end of it, you go, I've got some good information here. This actually could be a useful tool. I'm not saying go out on Twitter and go and shout about it. That's not something you need to do. You can quite happily just add this into your toolkit if it fits and start learning, and you can keep it yourself if you want. That doesn't matter. I just want people to understand what they're dealing with and, like I say, not shoot themselves in the foot. So we'll go through some of the, the important things like running a node and other things that would help with that. So we'll go through that shortly. But, before we do, let's go into some of the some of Monero's history because I have very little information on this. I listened, like, early, early days, maybe 2017.
I bought some Monero, and I remember listening to a few interviews with Fluffy Pony and listening to bits and pieces. And I remember actually trying to run a Monero demon or whatever it was, a node, and I fucked that up and couldn't do it and threw my toys out of the pram and just never went back to it. But I knew a little bit of the history then. That's a long time ago. I've forgotten most of it. So I think that would be something that people would like to hear. So what's the kind of the Monero story?
[00:18:15] Unknown:
Man, now that I now that I know that, you're you're more of a Monero OG than I am. Why am I even hearing you? You you should be both sides of this conversation. You you got me beat 2017. You're you're smarter than I am. Yeah. Yeah. Mid mid 2018 was when I first heard about it and just got into it because I I wanted to mine it on GPUs, but that's a that's a story for another day. Here's the difference though is, I tried and failed spectacularly,
[00:18:41] Unknown:
and you tried and succeeded and now know a lot about it. So, I wouldn't take that as a win personally. I just wasted, like, a weekend fucking around and then got annoyed and uninstalled everything. Hey, man. 2017 was early with Monero. There was not,
[00:18:57] Unknown:
there was not a lot of good ecosystem built up then, so I'm I'm not surprised to though at all. We've come a long way in 7 years. But, yeah, the the history of Monero is actually really fascinating. Like, I I feel like we could probably even do, like, a special kind of walking through all of the craziness in the history because Monero there's just there's a lot of wild stuff that happened, especially in the early days. But so yeah. When we're when we're talking about the history of Monero, it actually kind of has a fascinating backstory. Like, we could we could spend a lot of time digging into the the details of what happened with the launch of how it was forked away from the original creator who was named thankful for today. There's a lot of, like, nitty gritty details and fascinating history because Monero was something that was actually new at the time. So like I mentioned before, Monero is based on this crypto note protocol, which was something that was not just a code fork of Bitcoin. Every other altcoin at the time was just a code fork of Bitcoin, and they would change some parameter, like the block time, like the the amount of the supply of whatever the coin was. Little little details of the chain. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It was very minor changes, and that was pretty much how you had altcoins at the time. But crypto note was introduced it seems like around, like, 2011 ish is when the development of the protocol started, and it was introduced in this coin called Bytecoin. But, unfortunately, Bytecoin was a scam. It seems like about 80% of the supply was pre mined before they actually announced it. Oh, wow. They tried to pretend that it had, like, this broad dark net market adoption, and they had a bunch of sock puppets go on Bitcoin talk and talk about how they've been using it for years and a lot of really sketchy stuff. So, unfortunately, like, the first thing using the crypto note protocol was a scam and was problematic. But, immediately, Bitcoiners saw that there was some real value here. Like, there was something immensely useful about having a new protocol that was built from the ground up to be more privacy preserving instead of something trying to take Bitcoin's protocol and add on privacy features later. So, a group of Bitcoiners really came together, and long story short, kind of took over the project from the original person who launched Monero, who's called Thankful for today. He seemed like he may have even been part of the Bitecoin team and trying to figure out a way to get some more users and profits for them. He wanted to do weird things like merge mine Monero with Bitecoin.
He wouldn't let go on a lot of, like, weird issues that should have been fixed or changed. So, eventually, the Monero community, the small community that existed at that time, forked away the project from thankful for today. And that's really the time that Monero started. This is 2014 that it kicked off. And, thankfully, it was fair issuance. Most of the team who actually was the starters of this, including thankful for today, TacoTime was another one. There's a a few other people who are kind of the core group that jumped in and started this project. Totally fair issuance. It was CPU mined at the time, eventually, GPU mined. They wanted to run with this idea of what does it look like to build digital cash on a new protocol that deeply cares about financial privacy. Ultimately, along the way, there's kind of 3 main changes that happened to Monero. There's a bunch more, so I'm definitely skipping over them. But the first and biggest privacy improvement that happened was initially in Monero, there were no hidden amounts. So when you would create a transaction, the way that a ring signature would work there is that you would have to use other inputs that were of the same amount as yours, and you could only spend in certain denominations. Kind of like how Whirlpool worked where you could you could only do these set denominations. 0.0fives and different yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And that was the only way to really gain privacy because if you did just a random amount and you were the only one on chain that did 0.073 Monero, it would stand out. So there are a lot of limitations, but the Monero community used something that had actually been developed for Bitcoin called confidential transactions, or I'll just call them confidential amounts now because confidential transactions is a terrible name. All that it did is it used pretty simple cryptographic tool to encrypt the amounts so that no one would be able to see the amount of any transaction. And that meant that the privacy provided by Monero massively improved overnight after that hard fork and implementation.
So that was a huge first step, and that's essentially the same privacy protocol today as was implemented then with what was called ring CT and implementation of confidential transactions on ring signatures. The other two things I wanna kinda highlight in the historical changes to Monero are Random x, which is the mining algorithm for Monero. Kind of a core piece of what Monero wants to offer is accessibility. So they want everyone to be able to have access to digital cash And a a problem for basically any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin is ASIC mining. So if you have a single company, they're the only ones who can produce ASICs for your specific algorithm. Or if you're a very small currency that uses the same algorithm as something larger like Bitcoin, you're gonna have massive problems with mining centralization.
So Monero wanted to fight that by being ASIC resistant, basically building out algorithms that are harder for ASIC manufacturers to implement and have an advantage over regular miners. That culminated in what's called Random x, which is basically, long story short, it makes the CPU in your laptop and your phone and your desktop an ASIC from an arrow. It's optimized to use as much of the CPU that you just have in regular devices as possible so that if someone makes an ASIC, it has very little performance improvements over a good high quality CPU.
[00:24:04] Unknown:
I see what you meant. So so sorry jumping in and and ruining the history, lesson. But just as you were saying that, I was thinking, is that not an attack surface in the sense that large corporations, data centers, people who have a lot of computer power currently, they already have the infrastructure. So where it's different with Bitcoin, where they'd have to go and spend vast sums of money to go and get the hardware and then the energy to start mining, would that not potentially be an attack on Monero if someone wanted to?
[00:24:42] Unknown:
Yeah. No. You're definitely you're you're thinking about it the right way. That is is one of the risks. It kind of cuts both ways because in the same way that, let's say, Microsoft could start to use spare cycles in their data centers to either just mine Monero to make Monero or to attack Monero. In the same way that they can do that today, anyone with a computer can do the same thing and fight back. So it does allow attacks by someone who has a large amount of compute. A kind of cool thing that we've seen work out, and I say cool in a kind of convoluted sense, is that there's a lot of people who altruistically mine Monero either because they just love Monero and they wanna see it succeed, and you can do that. You don't have to buy specialized hardware to mine Monero. So even if you're not worried about profits, you can mine Monero on your computer when you're just stepping away. Yeah. I'm doing it now as we speak. Oh, that's a bold move. It's more recording. I like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's how easy it is. Yeah. It's it's really straightforward. So anyone can jump in and do it. So there's there's a balancing act where you want people to be able to quickly jump to the aid of the network or to be able to mine easily without barrier of entry. But, yes, you also want it to be hard for one single entity to gain control over the network or have a large percentage. And, unfortunately, there's no perfect answer because, like, if Monero just said, okay. We're gonna allow ASICs with this specific hash algorithm, what would happen is I mean, probably, if 1 ASIC manufacturer, who knows, maybe 2, would start producing ASICs and they would have sole control over the network if they didn't sell those, if they kept some behind secretly to be able to mine. It's a very tricky kind of catch 22, but I think it's a good middle ground and has proven to be very effective so far. But it does open up, especially when you're talking like nation states. It opens up attacks like where a nation state could tell all of the data centers within their, within their borders that they have to use spare CPU cycles to mine empty blocks for Monero to try to prevent users from being able to get transactions in. Yeah. That that's where my mind goes is like end game.
[00:26:44] Unknown:
That is possible. But then what I quite like is that you have the two options. You have Bitcoin in one direction, which I think works perfectly for Bitcoin and the size of the network and everything else, And then you have Monero working, and it is working currently, and they're different. And that's kind of good. It's not like they both have the same way of mining and nation states can try and attack both. It would be, totally different attack. So it would be very difficult to sort of attack both at the same time, which to me is a good thing. Yeah. For sure. And I think that's yet another reason why I think the the symbiotic relationship between the two is is just so incredible because they do take very different approaches to, I think, targeting the same thing. I think we could definitely argue if Bitcoin is still targeting peer to peer digital cash these days. Some people on it certainly are, but the project as a whole, I think we could have a have a debate around
[00:27:36] Unknown:
that, but there's a loose target towards that, let's say, in both with very different approaches. And especially with Bitcoin's weight with the the amount of people and entities and businesses in the ecosystem, it's great that we have alternatives both ways. That as if if you're primarily a Monero user, what if the choices that we made around mining algorithm are a mistake and a nation state just says or let's just say Amazon just says, suddenly, we're gonna use all of our cloud compute to mine empty blocks in Monero. And Monero, you can no longer get a transaction through. Then I'll be really thankful that we have Bitcoin or vice versa if a nation state gets the majority of the ASR cash rate within it and says, hey. You're gonna mine these compliant blocks or else I can say, okay. Well, I'm really glad that I have access to Monero because now I can make transactions that I wouldn't be able to make otherwise. And that pairing, I think, is most valuable. And that's one of the reasons why I was so excited for the show is, like you said earlier on, there's usually, people are landing on one side or the other of, like, Bitcoin maximalism or Monero maximalism, and I think the most value is finding the right tool for the job. And for most people, I think the right tool is both Bitcoin and Monero. And so I think we'll we'll be able to hit a really good kinda center of the road approach here.
[00:28:45] Unknown:
I totally agree. I just think that neither can perfect. And like you say, that symbiosis and being able to lean on one another is actually very useful. Again, like, you know, we talk about decentralization and all that kind of stuff, and it's like, well, this is a perfect example of that. It's hard to hit both. Someone like me, I just use Monero for, like, transactional stuff. Like, I don't use it for savings like I do for Bitcoin. So I threw us off a little bit there. We were going through the history. I know we can go into a lot more detail, and maybe we'll do that on another show. But are we kind of up to current day up to 2024?
[00:29:26] Unknown:
I think so. Yeah. I mean, there's there's definitely a lot of different things, especially like technical improvements that we could talk through that have happened in Monero over the years. I think maybe the only other one I would mention just because we won't touch on it at all and things that happen in 2024 or that we're looking forward to in in 25 is the way that Monero nodes help to try to protect the source IP of a transaction. It's called Dandelion plus plus. The TLDR is basically the the protocol works to ensure that no node on the network can easily tell which node was the first one that broadcast a transaction to the network. And it's a a really cool technology where there's core issue in Bitcoin, and there's no current solution to this other than just running a node purely behind Tor, where when you make a Bitcoin transaction, if you do it from your own node, it's trivial for anyone running a Bitcoin node or really running quite a few Bitcoin nodes to tell that that transaction originated with that node, which sometimes is fine, but sometimes you don't want, like, let's say, your home IP address. If you're running a node at home, Maybe you don't want your home IP address tied to the TX ID of a transaction that you made to, I don't know, to some random person. It could be Joe Schmo. It could be a a centralized KYC exchange, maybe peer to peer, but there's a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want an IP address of your node tied to it. Especially with amounts.
Exactly. Yeah. There's so much info already in a Bitcoin transaction that you you don't really wanna expose that tying the IP address there as well is problematic. So Dandelion plus plus, like many things that Monero has implemented, was actually developed originally for Bitcoin. The first proposal, which was just called Dandelion, had some issues with denial of service attacks, but later revisions, Dandelion plus plus being the the latest one, fixed those and has been a fantastic tool for, for Monero. I remember listening
[00:31:10] Unknown:
to Antonopoulos. He used to do these, like, q and a session things. Yeah. Yeah. And I listened to them obsessively, like, just all day every day, like, trying to wrap my head around this stuff. And I remember really clearly him going through Dandelion and how that would help privacy and stuff like that, but, you know, haven't heard much more since then. So it was good to see that it's being used somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. It's been a really good fit for Banero. Again, it's not a silver bullet. There have been some note attacks, One of them that we'll talk about today that can nullify some of the privacy that's provided by it. But, again, for
[00:31:43] Unknown:
very little downside, it's fantastic to get a privacy benefit by just running a node. You'd again, you don't have to enable anything. You don't have to do any fancy setup. It's just a default behavior of Monero nodes. So it's a a really cool additional protection that worst case, you're in the same state as a Bitcoin node. Best case, you have much better transactional privacy there as well. Nice. See, I think that I think that covers the history pretty well. You wanna go ahead and get rolling in in 2024,
[00:32:10] Unknown:
start our recap? Yeah. So let's go through a rundown of the most important moments of 2024. Why don't we start with the Monero Topia conference? I know you went there. You had some good things to say about it. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I think we'll we'll definitely
[00:32:28] Unknown:
cover a lot of things here. So I I do also do wanna say ahead of time, I've been a little disconnected from the Monero community until really the last, like, 6 months, so I may have missed some things during this year. So if you have, like, a favorite thing if you're listening to this, you have, like, a favorite thing that I didn't mention, I apologize, but definitely definitely let us know because I I would love to cover more detail about any big things that I did miss, but we'll we'll do my best to cover the things that I remember. I know I asked on Twitter and asked on the cake team as well, but 2024 was, like, most years in Monero, a pretty busy one. The only Monero conference I got out to was Monerotopia. So there's also Monero Con, which we'll talk about a little bit more and what's coming up in 2025, but that's a much more technical conference. There's a lot of academics, cryptography researchers, developers presenting on the, like, technical improvements and changes that are happening.
But Monero Topia is much more focused on, I would kind of say, loosely on adoption of Monero. Something really, really cool this year, and this is put on by by Doug and Sunita who are behind the Monero Talk podcast. Something really cool this year was they actually had a marketplace there as part of the conference. The conference venue was like a it was a weird venue, to be honest. It was all outdoors, and it was, like, in a garden, basically, where it was, like, there were lots of trees and plants and they're, like, recycling water and a really interesting place. It was in Mexico City. Oh, nice. Mexico City, Mexico this year. I think that was the 2nd year that they've done it there. I think they might move it next year, but it was a very unique venue. One of the really cool things that they did was there was this kind of, like, really big covered area as a part of it. And Doug brought in vendors from the local community, like, not Monero people per se, but just vendors from Monero community to come in and Mhmm. Sell whatever they wanted and help them to actually accept Monero directly for what they were selling, using cake wallet. So they had Nice. I don't I don't know how many vendors. I would say probably 50, 60 vendors at least, all selling tons of different things, all for Monero directly, which was a really, really awesome experience. Because, like, even with Bitcoin, like, there's not that many places in person that you can actually buy something with Bitcoin. Like, most of the time, I'm actually buying something in person with Bitcoin or Monero. It's it's at a conference. But this was a really cool way to, not only, like, as an attendee, be able to buy things with Monero to take home, but also to expose people who wouldn't otherwise be exposed to cryptocurrency generally, much less Monero.
So that was honestly probably the highlight for me. I approach conferences differently than I think many people where my my my main goal with conferences is really to get to have FaceTime with friends and people that I really respect in the community. So I usually focus less on the actual presentations than I do on the kinda side conversations. So a lot of the highlights for me were really just getting to talk to some devs that I heavily respect in the Monero ecosystem to connect with the people behind basic swap or doing atomic swaps to get a chat a lot with the people who run Trocador, which is a a centralized swap service that we use at Cake and are good friends with. Just really getting to, like, actually see face to face people who are passionate about Monero was a huge highlight for me. And that's that's kind of how I approach every conference, but I think, especially in this case, it was it was awesome to get plugged back into the Monero community that way and have that kinda be a a reconnecting point as I've been more heavily focused on Bitcoin over the last couple years. So overall, it's a great conference. There were some weird speaker things where Right. Yeah. Just stuff that I feel like is unique to the Minera community where there's just some some oddball people that come out of the woodwork to to speak and try to get a platform. And there was, like, a woman who had just gone through a divorce, like, using her stage time to yell at her husband who was in the audience. It's just like it's ridiculous stuff. Yeah. It's ridiculous stuff. She was using him as an example of, like, what's wrong with decentralized communities. It was it was wild. The the room quickly emptied. We're standing outside with Doug just shaking our heads like
[00:36:25] Unknown:
Fucking hell.
[00:36:28] Unknown:
It was interesting. It's it's never a good moment in in Monero, but, other than that, I I did really enjoy it, especially those vendors like I talked about. That was an awesome experience, and then getting to spend a lot of time with the cake team. With the vendors,
[00:36:40] Unknown:
obviously, I've never been to a Monero conference, been to a few of the Bitcoin ones. You said the vendors were using Cake Wallet. Are they just
[00:36:50] Unknown:
downloading that on their phone, pressing receive, and someone's paying? Yeah. I mean, that's pretty much it. The main thing that made it a little bit easier is we don't have, like, full kind of, like, point of sale in k Wallet. Like, obviously, it's very much focused on just the average person, not a merchant per se. But one feature that makes it really easy to use as a POS is that when you hit receive, you can actually choose what currency you wanna set the amount for in the QR code. So, like, the merchants could just change that to pesos and they could put in the amount, and they never even had to worry about, like, figuring out what amount of Monero was or and all that. Yeah. Yeah. There was none of that headache. So, basically, they would just type in the amount in pesos. The QR code would just immediately update with the amount, and it it just already has the the static Monero address, which is another benefit of Monero is you don't need to do a new address every time because you have a new address on chain every time even if you use the same one off chain.
[00:37:41] Unknown:
And they actually have custody of those funds. You know, that is something that me and Q talk about a lot. It's like when you go to these conferences and people are paying for a coffee or when I went to the Amsterdam one, I had about 50 of these fucking delicious duck burgers with blue cheese. I just couldn't stop eating them. But, like, almost every single person that's making a purchase of, like, less than $50, they're using Willow's Satoshi Yeah. Or some other custodial lightning solution. I'm not someone who takes, like, the absolute hard line on stuff like that because, occasionally, when my lightning stuff doesn't fucking work like the other day, you know, I'll be like, oh, fuck's sake. I'll just use a custodial thing because it actually works.
But that's something that I really appreciate about Monero again for, like, these smaller payments. Like, it can be really small. It can be, like, $5 or whatever. And the fees, as far as I can see, are very reasonable. That was actually something that's done on chain. You actually have custody, and it always works, which I do appreciate.
[00:38:48] Unknown:
Yeah. It's I I think fees are normally less than a cent. It depends, obviously, if there's a lot of congestion at that time, but that's one of the benefits and another kind of technical thing that Monero has done is they have something called dynamic block sizes, which doesn't mean that the block size is just infinite. But basically, that if there are a lot of people at one time who are trying to get transactions and miners can grow the blocks slowly by sacrificing subsidy for the transaction fees. And so you can much better handle on chain growth than something like Bitcoin, which has just static block size, never changes. If there's a lot of demand, you just have to pay a massive fee to get in. There are downsides to that just like with everything else. If you make that trade off, there are some some downsides, but there's a heavy focus on just regular on chain transactions. And for now, fees are very low. But it is still blockchain, which means it doesn't scale well. It's not built to do that. So there's not just this kind of infinite ability for us to use on chain Monero.
But especially for now, and I would say probably for quite a while, making on chain transactions is very low fee, very fast 2 minute block time. So if you don't wanna do 0 conf, you can just wait Yeah. 2 minutes max generally for a confirmation. It's a very clean user experience on that front.
[00:40:00] Unknown:
It definitely is. You know, actually, Bitcoin on chain most of the time these days is pretty reasonable as well. Like Yeah. Yeah. I'm very happy just pay you know, it's like, oh, it's a dollar or something. And I'm like, okay. That's fine. Like, if I'm paying a dollar and the duck burger's 15 quid or whatever it was, you know, and I'm having a drink as well. That's fine. I don't mind paying that. But what's happened is almost no one is accepting Bitcoin. It's only lightning. So you don't generally have the option at these type of places to pay on chain most places. And then, like you say, you have to wait, and then it's like or have you set your fees? Is it gonna be at the next block?
Like, it it's just for those type of things, 2 minute block time and 1 cent or whatever it is is just you know, it just lends itself perfectly for that sort of thing. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a fantastic fit for that, and I think that's one of the things that really helps the kind of circular economy
[00:40:57] Unknown:
peer to peer adoption is there's not nearly as much of an overhead as, like, if you wanna accept payments in lightning. That's not a straightforward process unless you use a custodian or you use some sort of a a middleman. There's some really cool ways to get around that right now if you're okay with some trade offs. Like, Breeze has an SDK that makes a little bit easier and, like, BTC pay, and the Bolt's guys have a swap plug in that makes lightning easier, but both of those also have downsides. So it's it's one of the nice things with Monero is that acceptance is very straightforward. Paying on chain is very straightforward and privacy preserving. And I think in the future, we'll probably see some form of layer 2 on Monero as well. Whether that'll be, like, a simplified lightning or something else remains to be seen, but we definitely can't scale infinitely, but we could probably get to at least the scale of Bitcoin on chain transactions right now and still be quite reasonable in Monero. So it's a nice a nice feature to have for sure. I'd like to see things like I'm taking us off topic again, but I'd be interested to see more things like swapping services
[00:41:58] Unknown:
that work seamlessly in the sense that, like, someone is like, oh, I wanna pay in Bitcoin, but pay this invoice that's actually using Monero, if that makes sense, so they can, like what's the swap service we just mentioned? Trokadore? Trokadore. A very refined kind of way that they do seamlessly work together and almost like people don't it's like Lightning is a layer 2 for Bitcoin. It's gonna piss people off in the Monero community, I'm sure, but I kind of like using Monero a bit like a layer 2 for my Bitcoin. The more that they are interchangeable and work together
[00:42:36] Unknown:
would be really nice for someone like me. Yeah. There there is a service actually right now through Trokadore. It's called a non pay. You can use their website, or it's it's also a feature in Cake Pay or in Cake Wallet. I think we can definitely do some work around making it simpler, but, like, right now, if you want to let's say you wanna receive in Monero, but someone only has Bitcoin, you can actually hit receive and then you can up at the top, you can choose a non pay invoice, and you just choose whatever whatever currency you want. The user, the person that you give the invoice to can pay in that currency, Bitcoin lightning, whatever. And then it gets swapped through Trocador to Monero and ends up in your wallet as Monero. So that concept is already there, but there's definitely some refinement to go so that you is like like, if I'm the sender, I would like to be able to just scan a lightning invoice, and I'm using a Mirror wallet. And it just know okay. Well, I'm gonna have to use a non pay through Trochador. This is how much it's gonna cost you and just let you pay to whatever cryptocurrency.
And I think that's like, that kind of multi crypto world is something that we really embrace a cake, and it's something that has been really interesting to see. I don't know. I just think there's a lot of benefit in the cryptocurrency world where there's just so little friction between cryptocurrencies that we don't have in the fiat world. So a lot of times, we don't think about, like, if I wanna pay you in dollars, but you need pounds or whatever. That process of going back and forth is like a nightmare. But if I wanna pay you in Bitcoin and I only have Banero, it's it's quite straightforward. So I think it's definitely something that we need to grow to make it simpler for people to just get paid in the money that they prefer, and everyone can use what they prefer and then quickly swap between them to settle in anything. And that's definitely a a feature. These get built out more. Because the other way around as well, not only, like, scanning a lightning invoice and that going to a Monero user, someone who wants that on the other side, but the other way around, being able to pay an invoice using Monero that then gets
[00:44:25] Unknown:
sent as a lightning payment to someone who wants lightning, there are a lot of benefits to that, including, obviously, the privacy side. So the more seamless that is, the better. Like, for someone like me who I'm like, oh, I'd like to actually store Bitcoin, but use Monero for my payments to protect my privacy. And if it has to go through one hop to go to someone who wants the Bitcoin or wants Lightning, and I've gotta pay a small fee for doing that, I'm okay with that because I used to pay the fee to put through Whirlpool. It's not like I have a concern with paying the fees. I just want the privacy. So if that was a slick, right, scanner QR code that does it in the back end, sends to their lightning wallet, I'd be very happy with that. You just made the, the wish list for 2025 in Cake Wallet, so congrats. You're gonna you're gonna get full credit when this feature comes out because Oh, yes. I think it's a fantastic idea.
[00:45:17] Unknown:
I've I've added it live, so I'll, I'll harass the dev team. We'll we'll get it plugged in because I think that is a fantastic one. I I had, like, a loosely an idea like that, but I never thought about just doing it through a service like Trokador. Like, kind of my, like, thought about it was let's say you have, like, a Bitcoin wallet and a Lightning wallet and a Monero wallet. If you scan a QR, it should take you to the right wallet to make the payment, but it should be even simpler than that. Both should be an option, but, yeah, it's a good that's a good idea. Look at us. Oh, look. My moment, Dev. I know. You made it. Okay. Well, I I think, yeah, I think we can keep rolling. That's the only conference that I attended, like I said, in 2024. But when we get kinda past the conference space in 2024, some of the really big things that stood out to me were the on and off ramp changes.
And I I can't say they're all well, you could say they're all positive. It depends on how you look at delistings, of Monero from centralized exchanges. Because I know a lot of people in the Monero community cheer them on as just a a way that we're kind of detaching from a broken system. But I think they also do limit how many people see Monero, how many people are exposed to it, and how easy it is to get Monero from Fiat. So I think there are downsides. But on the positive side, this last year, something that's been really awesome to see is the growth in atomic swap usage, specifically between Bitcoin and Monero. There are some other atomic swaps like Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum and stuff, but, obviously, those aren't as interesting to me. But between Bitcoin and Monero, there's 2 main projects that have been working on atomic swaps and quickly gaining popularity.
One of them is called Basic Swap and they're, they're a decentralized exchange where basically, like, you run everything on your computer. Like, you run the nodes for whatever things you wanna be able to swap between. You run the actual web UI on your computer. So it's it's a bit of a technical hurdle right now, but it's a really cool service because you're not trusting any centralized entity, even a website. Like, it's it's very, very decentralized and very much Okay. Peer to peer because you're literally the only one connecting to that peer and communicating with them. No one else is. There's no middleman there at all. So it's a really cool project and they they added Monero. I actually don't know when they added Monero, but I've seen them talking about it a lot more in 2024. So I feel like it's Mhmm. It was this year. That's been growing rapidly. And the like, the way I think about atomic swaps in the space, I know is different than some people. But for me, atomic swaps are kind of always just a fallback.
So for anyone who doesn't know, an atomic swap between something like Bitcoin and Monero, essentially, what it means is that you are swapping Monero for Bitcoin or vice versa, but you're doing it in a way that there is no way that you can not get your funds back or get the Bitcoin that you're trying to swap. Let's say I'm trying to swap Monero for Bitcoin. Either that swap will go through properly and I will get the Bitcoin and it's cryptographically guaranteed by using the tools correctly on Bitcoin and Monero, or the swap will fail and I'll just keep my Monero. There's no central entity that takes custody. There's no way that the other person that you're swapping with can scam you out of your Monero or anything like that. If you're using that protocol, you are guaranteed to either have the swap go through successfully or you keep the funds that you originally had. And it's also basically unstoppable in the sense that if you can talk to a person who has Bitcoin, you can do an atomic swap. You don't need anything advanced. You could even technically do it just, like, using QR codes in person if you wanted to. It would not be easy, but it would be possible. Awesome. But it's a very, very decentralized, very resilient way to swap between cryptocurrencies.
The downside is unlike an exchange, you don't have kind of a pool of liquidity or orders that you can buy whatever amount you want. You need to actually find someone who wants to sell you the amount of Bitcoin that you want or the amount of an error that you want. Connect with them directly and start that swap process. So it's a lot harder to actually, like, swap large amounts or to constantly be swapping back and forth or DCA, something like that. It's like something like Bisc, but without the middleman
[00:49:16] Unknown:
where someone then can put in a complaint and something might not go through, and you have all that faff and and worry and everything. One thing I'm wondering with that is can you if you want to buy Monero with Bitcoin, can you do the swap with Lightning to gain some more privacy? Because a fear of mine when doing a swap from Bitcoin to Monero is I'm now giving Bitcoin that potentially could be I mean, if you do things properly, you're not gonna have it tied to your identity, blah blah blah. But, potentially, that could be tied to your identity, and my fear would be someone does it where it's linked to their KYC stack or something like that, then that Bitcoin gets used in something that is deemed illegal Mhmm. Whatever.
Mhmm. And then somehow that person who is trying to gain privacy by buying Monero is now in a world of trouble. If someone was to use Lightning or a step in between somewhere where there's, like, an extra hop or something, they might mitigate against that.
[00:50:20] Unknown:
Yeah. So the short answer is it is technically possible, but no one supports a lightning to Monero atomic swap. Right. I'm, like, 99% sure that I'm correct on that. You could technically do a swap between lightning and Monero, and I believe that there was a atomic swap protocol called Farcaster that was planning on supporting this, but it never it never went live, and I'm not sure what the status is right now. So I think it is a technical possibility, but I believe it is it is technically more complex than the just on chain to on chain protocol. The other thing I would say is you're definitely right. The downside to really any swap service when you're on either end, honestly, if you're sending the Bitcoin or receiving Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is just it's not fungible. It does not have the guarantee that the money that you get will be valuable or that the money that you send will not be tied back to you at some point in the future.
It's something that people should constantly think about. You don't just magically gain privacy because you sent Bitcoin and you got Monero, and then you use the Monero. The way that you actually got that Bitcoin before, the way that you spent it or moved it around, the transactions that input's been involved in, all of that still matters because, like you said, there's now some person who you don't know who is the next hop in that history, and you have no idea if that'll be tied back to you. And it makes me think of the case against, supposedly, the the operator of a centralized mixing mixing service called Bitcoin Fog. Yep. Exactly.
Yeah. His he's what it seems like is that he is going to go to jail because he swapped Bitcoin peer to peer with the actual operator of Bitcoin Fog, and Chainalysis theoretically proves that he's the one who bought the domain and used the Bitcoin and ultimately used his his k y c Mt. Gox account. But it seems like what actually happened was that he was someone who concentrated Bitcoin peer to peer at conferences and stuff, and he probably probably sold Bitcoin to the operator of Bitcoin Fog who then used that Bitcoin to buy the domain, and now he's in jail for it. And it's a very harrowing story when you're thinking about swapping Bitcoin with some unknown entity because you don't really want that tied back to you. And that's where the loss of samurai still hurts even if you're starting to use Monero more. And I don't wanna say all this to dissuade you from doing this. You're still better off in most scenarios spending Monero than spending Bitcoin that has a history that's tied to you. But they're just there's always still potential problems because of that lack of privacy in Bitcoin. Yeah. You're certainly better sending Monero than sending Bitcoin.
[00:52:53] Unknown:
I think, a big thing for people to consider is, like, if you are using a swapping service, consider if you have any post mix, certainly use that. If you have maybe, some Bitcoin that you've mined, use that. If you've got some that you've bought in cash from an entity that isn't linked to you in any way, maybe use that. Just be very thoughtful about what you're swapping with because you don't know what happens with that next. And as we've just said, like, you can go to prison for this stuff even if you are completely you haven't done anything wrong. You haven't hurt anyone. It can cause you a world of pain, and it doesn't have to be today or tomorrow or this year. It can be in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years.
That data is gonna be there forever, and they can interpret it any way they like because they write the rules. So, you know, that is a big reason why I think this show is important is, like, as the landscape changes, we have to we have to try and stay one step ahead, and we have to try and protect people.
[00:53:57] Unknown:
Yeah. Absolutely. And the the importance of no KYC Bitcoin doesn't change because Monero exists, especially if the main way that you're getting Monero is by buying it with Bitcoin, which I think will be is already a very, very common way to get Monero. Like, something we see constantly. Cake is we don't have specifics on how people use cake. We have no analytics, no tracking, etcetera. But from our partners who do the swaps, we'll sometimes get data on just, like, what was the top swap pair, that kind of thing. And overwhelmingly, people are swapping into Monero from other things like Bitcoin, Litecoin, but Bitcoin is normally the biggest one. And it's the easiest way to get Monero nowadays with all the delistings. So it's a really common thing, but the best, like, the the ideal path is that you buy Bitcoin no k y c, and then you get your Monero with that no k y c Bitcoin so that there's no direct tie back to your ID. Not because buying Monero is illegal. Far from it. It's not illegal anywhere as far as I know, much less using it, but because, yeah, you never know what's gonna happen with that Bitcoin. I think Roman Sterlingov in the Bitcoin fog case, it was, like, 9 years before he was arrested was when he made that transaction that supposedly tied him to the the Bitcoin fog thing. So 9 years later, it came back to haunt him, which is just absolutely wild. But, yeah, I think that's it's definitely an important thing for people to keep in mind that you still want good privacy on the Bitcoin side when you're swapping to Monero because you never know what's gonna happen with that.
[00:55:20] Unknown:
Yeah. And like you say, a lot of this comes down to to listings as well. People who are listening would have heard in the intro music, there was some talk of delistings. This is obviously making it more difficult for people to get hold of Monero, and they are swapping in these other services and stuff. Obviously, some people will mine as well. What do you think I I think we can probably guess why, but any thoughts on what's happening with the delistings? Because it does seem to be quite aggressive. Yep.
[00:55:49] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, it's it's wild. Like, we can definitely put this in the show notes, but, someone on on Twitter who's a a really great follower in the Monero space just goes by Schmidt. He made a list of all the delistings in just in 2024, and I even have to add one because yesterday, I think there was another delisting. But there was OKX in January, Binance in February, Local Monero, which was a fantastic peer to peer fiat to Monero on ramp. Think like LocalBitcoins, what it used to be before it was shut down. Kraken in Ireland and Belgium, delisted in June. Kraken in Germany, delisted in July. Kraken in the EU, delisted in October. Bit to me delisted in October, and then Gate. Io, which is a a smaller exchange, but they delisted Monero as well. It's wild to see because, like I just mentioned a couple minutes ago, there's no law against selling Monero on an exchange. There's some stuff that's coming down the pipe in the EU that would make it more difficult and that some that would potentially make it illegal to or not illegal, but would essentially regulate out the ability to sell cryptocurrencies that have any privacy features on a centralized exchange. But, generally, it is completely legal to sell Monero in these jurisdictions.
But I think what really is happening is this is all behind the scenes. It's really I mean, Bitcoiners have been talking a lot about operation choke point 2.0 over the past month or so, thankfully. Like, I'm I'm really glad that that's coming more to light because that has been happening for years now. And Monero, I think, was a lot of the test bed for how Operation Choke Point 2.0 would work. Because the easiest way that you dissuade people from using a tool is you make it harder to access the tool. If the barrier of entry is high enough, people will wake up to the need for privacy, but they won't actually get there because they'll realize it's just too much effort, and they'll give up. It's a really easy way to dissuade people. And if you delist Monero from exchanges, it makes it much harder for the average person to actually get Monero. What we've really seen is that even though there's no law, there's no regulation that prevents this, even like FATF and Finsen are fine with things like Monero as long as you KYC and do all the normal stuff. It's essentially exchanges being told by their banking partners, hey. If you list Monero, we will cut off banking services.
Or if you don't do list Monero, you'll have these specific regulatory issues. You'll have to do all of this extra paperwork. You'll have to do these extra things. And essentially making it so that even if it's not illegal, the only choice for them as a business is to delist Monero or else they'll lose their business entirely. And this has been a a constant pressure. I mean, this has been going on for years now. It's not anything new in Monero as of 2024. We had a lot of delistings, but it's been a consistent theme throughout Monero's history. It's either big exchanges never list Monero despite listing other things like Zcash that theoretically provide privacy or they get delisted because they realize, hey. If we wanna expand or if we wanna use this new bank or if we wanna be in this new jurisdiction, the banking partner essentially says, we have pressure from our government. If you list Monero, we can't serve you. And it means that people don't get access, don't get easy access to Monero. It definitely has the upside and that less people are doing KYC and buying Monero that way. Yeah. But it means less people are getting exposed to Monero, which I think is a it is a net negative in my book, but it's not purely negative.
[00:59:08] Unknown:
It says something about the usage of Monero. If something like Zcash, in my understanding, is that it's like you can toggle on privacy. It's not it's not like Yeah. Privacy by default, which then makes everyone else's privacy worse. So I can understand that, you know, that isn't as private. It isn't as good, and it's not used. Monero is very widely used. My assumption is they're thinking, well, let's look at how people are actually transacting and how they can actually transact privately and how they can use it on darknet and everything else. And my understanding is that less and less people are accepting Bitcoin on those type of marketplaces, and so they are probably looking and going, well, clearly it works.
[00:59:58] Unknown:
That's a problem. Yep. Yeah. I think that's definitely the root of it. And I think I posted on Twitter earlier today just basically, like, think why would they do less monero? Like, you should just kinda put your thinking cap on and think through it. I think you you just nailed it on the head, but it's because it works. I mean, why why do they target any technology? Why is there this anti encrypted messaging stuff going on constantly in the EU where they wanna ban encrypted messaging or enforce back doors or force scanning for specific types of content that opens the door to massive problems in the future? It's because the things that they're talking about and targeting actually work. Like, they why would they go through the trouble of making exchanges do less Monero if it wasn't an effective tool? It wouldn't make any sense. It's not a tool that's a a massive investment for people. It's not like Bitcoin where there's the potential, like, maybe we're losing the power in our fiat currency or something. I would debate even if that's happening with Bitcoin today, but it's less about that and it's that people are actually using this tool today, both for good, great above board purposes. There's a lot of fantastic causes using Monero. A lot of fantastic projects accepting Monero for donations. A rapidly growing circular economy, which I know touch on a little bit more. But there are also bad actors using it because who are the early adopters of powerful technology?
Unfortunately, criminals. It's people who have the most perceived need for privacy and for safety because their lives depend on it. My life does not depend on my financial privacy right now. Maybe it will in the future, but right now, it doesn't. And, yeah, obviously, I have the perceived need. But most people, until their life depends on it, don't think deeply about these kinds of things, unfortunately. But criminals do because they have a lot a lot on the line. So that's that's another good litmus test of how effective is this tool. And the growth of Monero on darknet markets is a a fantastic one to look at and one where Monero has rapidly taken over. I mean, it's it's the dominant currency right now of the darknet market by far with most of the last I checked, which it has been a little while, the largest dark net market was Monero and Bitcoin. The 2nd and third were Monero only, and most are going Monero only at this point because it has the same simplicity as on chain Bitcoin. Maybe a little bit more simple just due to, like, we talked about lower fees, faster block times can be helpful, but ultimately, it provides strong financial privacy and it actually works. So I I think that's the root of why these delistings happen is they want to prevent the spread of Monero's usage without having to cause as much of a Streisand effect by putting out a law that says Monero is illegal. Because if you actually outlaw something that shouldn't be outlawed, you're gonna wake a lot of people up to that this tool is actually useful. But if you very slowly, silently keep it out of the limelight, push it down, it's a much more effective way of doing things and gotta give it to them. They've they've been pretty smart about how they've approached trying to keep Monero out of the limelight over the years. They certainly have. It's a very clever way to attack it. You were talking to me the other day about some other attacks that Monero is under. Should we jump into those? Yeah. I think that's something that's a good a good next step here.
Yeah. The the two main ones that I wanted to touch on, the big news this year well, first, some context. Minero Minero for many years has been under constant attack. Like, you name it, it has happened against Minero both from a technical perspective, social perspective, from an exchange perspective, like we're just talking about with delistings. Minero has been a, again, because it works, it's getting attacked constantly by entities who want to prevent it from working or wanna find weaknesses and find ways that they can gain some sort of control over it. So there's been a long history of attacks within Monero, things being fixed and improved because of the attacks or being mitigated by our existing technology. And this year is is no exception. So over the last couple of months, it's kinda slowly come out that there was an entity who were essentially pretending to be popular remote nodes in Monero.
And for a little bit more context, Monero nodes work a little bit differently than Bitcoin nodes in that you don't need any sort of other software. You don't need like a Fulcrum or an Elect RS or anything like that to be able to sync your wallet. All you need is just the standard Monero node software. That's it. And you can sync your wallet with it without needing any extra like RPC credentials or anything like that. You just expose the right port and anyone can use your node to sync their Monero wallet. So there's long been this system in the Monero ecosystem of people. If you run a node and you're okay with other people using it, there's even just a flag that you can set that tells the rest of the Monero network, hey. My node is available on this port. Anyone can use it for syncing their wallet. So there's long been this kind of understanding of, like, we can just use someone else's node, which is fine in many cases in Monero because you're not revealing nearly as much information about the transactions that you're submitting to a node. So you have much better privacy than if you're using someone else's Bitcoin node, for instance. But it's not perfect. A lot of the issues with this approach have come to light in the last couple of months when it seems like it's the same attacker as the linking lion attack in Bitcoin. I don't know if you covered this at all. This was probably, like, 8 months ago, maybe more than that, that this came out in the Bitcoin space.
[01:05:09] Unknown:
Q probably would have talked about it on one of our, episodes, but I can't remember the specifics as far as is actually way older than I thought. This is March 2023,
[01:05:19] Unknown:
so I'm way off in timeline. You might have still talked about it, but it was a long time ago. Yeah. I'm sure we would have. Yeah. But the short story is there was this attack on Bitcoin nodes by an entity that was called Linking Lion. And, basically, what the attacker was doing is they were using a weakness in how Bitcoin nodes communicate about transactions to essentially insert themselves into every node's peer list on the Bitcoin network so that when your node saw a new transaction, it would send it immediately to these malicious nodes. And that may seem like not a problem, but like I mentioned earlier, we were talking about dandelion plus plus. What this meant was that this attacker was essentially learning the source IP or at least having a very, very, very good idea of the source IP of every transaction on the network. And they were doing that by running a bunch of malicious nodes pretending to be full Bitcoin nodes, but actually just being essentially a a piece of software that wrapped around a Bitcoin node that lied and forced your Bitcoin node to tell them about your transactions immediately and not follow the normal way that transaction propagation works in Bitcoin.
It was a big deal at the time. Not it didn't get as much publicity as it should have because it was a very it's a very major attack and is still ongoing as of today as far as I know. But that same entity actually has been attacking Monero since before they attacked Bitcoin. And they've come up with a new attack in 2024 against Monero, which essentially is that there was this service in the Monero ecosystem called moneroworld.com, and it was run by a legitimate, really good member of the community. And what it did was it would look at the Monero network, see what nodes allowed other people to sync their wallets with them. And when you use monero world.com, you would just get served a random node on the network to use to sync your wallet. Generally, a bad idea. Not something I ever recommended, but it was an option, and it was something that some people used within the Monero ecosystem. And this attacker basically used a combination of fake Monero node software where they would again lie about actually being a Monero node or thousands of Monero nodes while just probably being a handful of nodes behind the scenes. And then they also used a vulnerability in how DNS works where they're able to lie and pretend to be a node that had long since been shut down. So like, let's say you ran a Monero node. You had the dnsmonaronode.com or something, but you shut down your node. He was able to find a way to essentially pretend to be that node and be in that list of potential remote nodes. And what that meant was if you used monero world.com, almost always, you were getting served a malicious node that was trying to get as much information from your wallet as possible. Thankfully, it is Monero, so they're not just immediately learning everything about your transaction, but it would allow them to do some essentially, to cut out some of the guesswork in what the true input in a transaction is. It wasn't perfect. They didn't deterministically know, but it was a a legitimate attack.
[01:08:13] Unknown:
Is this what some people might have also heard in the intro? There is little cuts from the chain analysis video that we shared Yeah. A few months ago. And they actually specifically talk about running malicious nodes to gather information. Have to say I was quite impressed with the bloke who was going through it. Like, obviously, he is an enemy of this show, but I was quite impressed with his knowledge, and it did open my eyes a bit to be like, oh, these guys are not fucking around. So is it likely that this is linked to that chain analysis stuff?
[01:08:53] Unknown:
Yeah. It's believed that's the same entity. I mean, it is possible that it's someone else, but it's it's most likely the the same entity because this is the Okay. Best way to currently attack how Danny Land plus plus works. Because if you are the majority of nodes on the network and you're able to lie about this, especially to wallets, you can get some more info. Again, not perfect, but it was an an interesting aspect of this. And it's a combination of this linking lion attacker they already knew about and some additional nodes, which we think are most likely chainalysis nodes. Thankfully, there's a relatively simple solution to this. One was that moneroworld.com doesn't exist anymore because it's not really necessary, and it was just way too dangerous of a service for people to use. But the other one is that there's a a ban list that the Monero communities put together of all of the IP addresses that are performing this attack. And, thankfully, it was pretty easy to detect how the attack was happening and find which IP addresses are malicious here. So there's a new ban list that's available. It's a part of the Docker version of Monero daemon that I published, so it's easy to access there. It's deployed on, like, all of the nodes that we run at Cake. My public node, if you use that, automatically bans all of the malicious nodes on the network.
And I'll I'll send you a link to put in the show notes for anybody else who runs a Monero node who wants to enable this ban list. It's not an absolute necessity, but it's better for your node and it's better for the network to prevent communicating with these malicious nodes, obviously. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. The the only other attack this year that I can think of outside of delistings in that node attack was actually a really interesting one that I know I was talking with with you and the the ungovernable team about. So at Cake, we run a lot of infrastructure for the Monero ecosystem. We have Cake Pay. We have Monero Nodes. We have our websites, obviously.
And something very interesting happened where as soon as Monero started pumping, it's maybe not related to price. It's maybe just coincidence. But as soon as Monero started to have a little bit of price appreciation earlier this year and we started to see even more people jumping over to use cake, trying to use our services. We underwent a pretty massive DDoS attack at cake to the tune of, like, 4000% our normal traffic, all happening from tour exit nodes, the normal kind of pattern of what a DDoS attack looks like. But it was interesting to see that as as Monero was really picking up steam, a lot of people were talking about it, that there's there's someone out there. We don't know exactly who it is. I've talked to some other people in this space, and we have we have some ideas on who could be doing this. And it's probably an exchange service within the the ecosystem. But we don't know exactly who, but there's been a sustained DDoS attack against many Monero services over the past 6 months, especially. I know, Monerica, which is like a directory service for merchants who accept Monero, has had constant DDoS issues, which is wild because they're just a directory service. Like, they're not even they're not even a business making money on Monero or something like that. But there's definitely some attacker out there who wants to make it as difficult as possible for people to access Monero related infrastructure and resources. And it's been a a thing that we've been fighting. Thankfully, the mitigations were pretty straightforward. So it didn't actually have any real world impact on cake outside of a short period where we had to just block tour access via exit nodes. You could still access all of our websites via Mhmm. Tour hidden services. But if you're using a tour exit node, you wouldn't have been able to access our services. But other than that, we were able to mitigate it. But, it's just an interesting one to see that has been another kind of constant theme. DDoSs are cheap and easy, and so it's something that is not an unheard of problem for just regular businesses in the space. But, yeah, it was just another interesting one to see this year that seems to have ramped up as a way to just make it a little bit harder for people to learn about Monero, use it, access it. Sneaky fuckers.
[01:12:36] Unknown:
Mhmm. Any other attacks?
[01:12:39] Unknown:
I I don't think so. I think those are the main ones that I could think of from this year. The one that we most deeply dove into, the fake notes is the big one for me. So I think that's it on my end. Okay. Yeah. So maybe we can just go ahead and jump into the the technical improvements. And that's something we can probably be a little briefer on because a lot of this is still kind of like work in progress stuff because a lot of the changes that we're currently looking at in Monero do require a hard fork. And that's another big difference between Bitcoin and Monero is that there is a culture in Monero that if something clearly improves Monero as digital cash, we're fine with cautiously upgrading the network through hard forks to ensure that everyone is using the very latest and greatest in Monero, which I know is anathema to the the Bitcoin space. And no one no one in Bitcoin would even dream of a hard fork, and even a soft fork is seemingly not even an option at this point. But it helps when a community is very much aligned around one specific use case, which is digital cash. And so we've had several hard forks over the years in Monero. Not to change something like the issuance or something like that, obviously, not the monetary policy, but changing the privacy protocol itself to keep improving it over time. Because ultimately, under the hood, like, this stuff is software. And especially when you're trying to achieve strong privacy, as you learn more about attacks, as you learn more about how trans surveillance companies work, as you have new cryptographic primitives come out that you can use for cool, useful, powerful privacy tools, you gotta stay on the cutting edge because it ultimately is an arms race in the privacy space. So I think it's also a little bit different than Bitcoin where the focus in Monero is privacy, which is a a necessary building block for digital cash.
But because of that, we are open to this this concept of hard forks in Monero purely to upgrade that privacy protocol aspect. And so we're we're looking at probably what will be another hard fork in 2025. So this will kinda cross over between 2024 and 2025. But one of the biggest developments that's been happening for a couple of years now and is now finished in the protocol development is something called full chain membership proofs. I know that we talked through this a little bit when I last came on your show. Mhmm. So I won't deep dive too much right now, but the TLDR for that is basically that right now, Monero uses ring signatures like I explained earlier. Your input is 1 of 16, and it's practically impossible for an outside entity to determine which of those 16 inputs is the true spend. But that does mean that anonymity set of 1 transaction is kind of 16. Theoretically, it's much larger because it's cascading. Each input then has its own previous history of 16 potential inputs. And so it gets really hard to actually find the source of funds, but why not just have it be the anonymity set of every input that's ever existed on the chain? And so that's essentially what full chain membership proofs does, where it uses a a really cool cryptographic approach, very similar to the approach that Zcash takes. It's different in how it's actually implemented, but similar in the sense that when you actually spend after full chain membership proofs. Instead of saying, hey. I'm one of 16 and I'm proving that these funds are legitimate, but I'm not gonna reveal which of these 16 I am, you essentially just say this input is a legitimate input from somewhere in Monero's history. And so you go from a an onset and a transaction of 16 to a 100,000,000 where it could potentially be any output that's ever happened in Monero's history. There's no more information about that input available at all. So it's it's a massive improvement for the the hiding of the sender in that privacy protocol, and fixes a lot of the, like, targeted attacks against privacy in Minero that were possible if very difficult. Now even those will be impossible because even if you know I sent this person point o one Minero in a dusting attack, you can never know if it's spent again. All you know is that at some point in the future, it might be spent. It might not be, but you can't even know is the person who has sent that person money in the past. So it's a really, really powerful privacy upgrade. The actual development of the protocol is totally done. And then now looking forward to 2025, we'll start working towards the actual implementation of that protocol into the code, which is well underway, and then hopefully a hard fork maybe like late 2025 or sometime in 2026 at the latest. Yeah. That's definitely the biggest one that's that's been worked on and that's been taking up a lot of the dev resources because it's such a vital upgrade to Monero, and it it touches a lot of the ways that Monero works under the hood. The other one that has been worked on over this past year that is ready now is something called carrot, which is a a strange name, but, essentially, what it is is a it's a new addressing scheme for Monero that doesn't even require a hard fork where, basically, by using a new address type, you can have a new set of keys. So not just the private key that you actually use to, like, back up and spend your funds, which obviously is is vital and exists in Monero and will ever go away, but there's also other keys in Monero because you have strong privacy. Pay a lot of view keys and stuff. I was looking through the other day. Yeah. Right right now, we have a few different kinds of keys, and they get very confusing.
[01:17:39] Unknown:
There's fucking loads. I was setting up BTCPay XMR Wallet, which is now done. Mhmm. Jordan had to help me with this, actually. So thank you, Jordan. But it's now done and working, and we've now sold clothing for Monero. I what I had to do was I had to, get feather wallet, and then feather wallet would show me, like, more I think he used your guide, actually. And then that would show all the different view keys, and there's, like, a private view key and a public view key and then all my other keys. I was like, Jesus Christ. This is confusing.
[01:18:14] Unknown:
It's we kind of have something similar in Bitcoin of, like, the xpriv and xpub concept. So there's, like, there's something kind of similar, but there's definitely more going on in Monero because of stealth addresses specifically. You need extra keys because you need a way to be able to see incoming transactions without giving the ability to spend those transactions. And that's essentially what a view key is right now. So in BTC pay, that's that's how it works right now is you give it a view key so that it can see when transactions are received without actually BTC pay itself having the ability to spend those funds. So it's the same kind of concept as connecting passport to BTC pay where you're essentially exporting the x pub to BTC pay so it can generate addresses and thus see transactions to those addresses without being able to spend them. So it's the same concept. It is different. And the reason that there's so many keys as well is that in your address that you actually give out in Monero, there's 2 keys. It's not just your public key, like you think about in Bitcoin, but it's also another key that's necessary to generate those addresses that'll be the unique one time address on chain. So it gets pretty complex and annoying. And one of the improvements that'll happen in caret is that we won't have less keys, but what will happen is you'll have much more useful keys. So, specifically, with something like caret, you'll have the ability to have a a new kind of key called a scan key. Actually, I don't know if that's what name it will have, but that's just what I'm gonna call it because I think it's most useful. Where right now, if you give over your view key to, like, a 3rd party, they can see all of the transactions that happen. Theoretically, it only shows incoming transactions, but the way the change works, they can basically see outgoing transactions as well. So you don't wanna do that for privacy reasons.
But the biggest really hurdle to using Monero right now is that syncing a Monero wallet takes way longer than a Bitcoin wallet. In Bitcoin, generally, the way that wallets work is you just say, hello, remote server. Here are my addresses. What transactions and balance do I have? And it gives you back that information. Obviously, that's awful from a privacy perspective unless it's your node, but it's very quick because all you're essentially asking is a very simple question and getting back very little data. It's quite nice from a user experience perspective. Mhmm. Whereas in Monero, when you sync your wallet, you're asking a remote node, hey. Give me all of the potential payments that I could have received from the last time I synced until now. And what that looks like is you're downloading a lot of the data of each block from the last time you synced until now. So it's it's a very different process, much more data intensive, much more compute intensive than syncing a Bitcoin wallet today. But we can have a very similar user experience to Bitcoin while actually having much better privacy. And what will happen with either Jamtus or Carrot, there's a couple different addressing schemes, but one of them will probably be implemented with FCMP plus plus, is that you'll have a new type of key that you could give to a wallet provider. Like, let's say, if we implemented this in Cake Wallet, you could give us this scan key and we could help you scan your wallet without actually knowing anything about your transactions.
So we could give you a much smaller amount of data and let you still be the one who finds those transactions locally on your device, but we can offload the vast majority of the bandwidth and the compute requirements to the remote node that you're using. Obviously, the ideal use case is that you're running this alongside of an arrow node at your house or on a VPS or something so that there's there's no drawbacks at all. But this approach is much better than a view key where right now, I could have that nice user experience by giving over my view key, but then I'm basically at the same position as if I'm using a remote Bitcoin node in the Bitcoin ecosystem where I'm giving all of the information about my transactions to that remote node as well. But this new key type will will fix that and will essentially give you almost as good of privacy as today in, like, the normal scanning Monero's, situation, but with the user experience, it's very similar to to Bitcoin. So it's gonna be a really big improvement. And I think that's that's about it for the technical improvements.
Like I said, much of the stuff is still kind of in the works and and coming in 2025. But the other area that I think was really fascinating in 2024, and I know you have some things to chime in on here, was just really seeing adoption take off. And just like we talked about the top of the show, the kind of social aspects of this have been clear where way more people are just talking about Monero, talking about using it, asking questions about it, that sort of thing. But also just seeing that people are actually using Monero. And, obviously, Monero is extremely private, so it's very hard to get the same kind of, like, on chain analytics that many people use in the Bitcoin space to do, like, an end of year report on how many lightning transactions there were, how many on chain transactions there were.
That sort of thing is very difficult. So instead, what we have to look at for adoption are things like for a given merchant, what percentage of people are paying in Monero? And over 2024, it was fascinating to see that that market share that Monero has with the merchants that share this data. Not every merchant is talking about how much is perceived in each cryptocurrency, but with the merchants that share that data, there's 3 that come to mind for sharing this. Coin cards, shop and bit. My Nimbox is another one. And then at Cake, we share the data on Cake Pay as well. Monero's usage has skyrocketed throughout this year where at many of these retailers, it's often right up there with Bitcoin usage. And a month, it's even surpassed Bitcoin usage, especially on, like, coin cards, shop and bit for several months. I think just until this last month, shop and bit was primarily Monero being used there even though they're generally Bitcoiners and generally Bitcoin service. And we've seen this really across the board. I mean, on on the cake pay side, obviously, we're a little bit more Monero slanted because a lot of the community around Cake Wallet is Monero centric, but we we usually run somewhere between 80 to 90% Monero usage, and only about, like, 10 to 20% Bitcoin usage. Even though we we are seeing that Bitcoin is growing as we've added lightning and as we've had this kinda this bull run-in Bitcoin, which if the price goes up, we always see people spending that asset more. But that's a really cool thing to see in 2024.
I know that you had some that you added on here that that you wanted to chat about as well. Yeah. So on my side, I've noticed it as well. XMR chat adoption
[01:24:26] Unknown:
from listeners, that has been growing steadily. I was actually surprised how quickly that happened. Like, we added it on as like, yeah. We'll give this a go. And I think even in the first episode, we got more donations in Monero than we did on Bitcoin and Lightning for the whole month. Wow.
[01:24:47] Unknown:
Wow.
[01:24:48] Unknown:
So either the Monero community is just very, very generous, or it's just like massive usage or bit of both really, but that's been pretty cool to see, and I really like that project. I think it's incredibly easy for people to comment and get involved with the show. So I'm really enjoying using that. Ungovernal Misfits is now accepting Monero for clothing. We've done our first, sale for Monero, which is really cool as well, because I think, especially in Ungovernal Misfits, we do have a lot of listeners who use it. A lot of people have asked me in the past as well, and we've done it before, but it's had to be like, okay. You send me Monero to a separate address or or someone else who wants Monero would take it, and then they'd send me Bitcoin. And it was it was like a manual process that was a pain in the ass. But now integrating it onto BTC pay server so anyone can go in and buy arsehole clothing for Monero is is really slick and really cool, so I'm excited about that. And our good friend, Barn Miner as well, selling his barn jerky for Monero.
So, just in our little communities, we are seeing an uptick.
[01:25:58] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's it's such a good crossover. The Monero community loves the circular economy. They love spending Monero. That's, like, one key ethos difference I've found between the broader Bitcoin ecosystem. There are definitely pieces of the Bitcoin ecosystem that are very circular economy focused, but the vast majority of people in Monero want to drive a circular economy very badly and have a clear desire to actually spend and use Monero. So it's, it's definitely something where there's just kind of a natural fit for merchants to offer Monero, and the Monero community wants to spend and use their Monero. There's not this mentality of huddle till I die kind of thing where we're just gonna fix the system by holding it, but actually wanting to use it and use it for payment. So it's a it's a fantastic fit. So I'm not, like, shocked at the adoption growth, but I think it's it's happened a lot faster than I expected in the wake of the samurai wallet stuff. I think it's rapidly accelerated the adoption of Monero throughout the space, and it's been really, really cool to see. It's yeah. I think that for me and many others was like you know, we were sitting around going like, fuck.
[01:27:02] Unknown:
Mhmm. We've just realized how good we had it, and we don't have that anymore. Like, what do we do now? And, you know, Samura and T Dev themselves were very, into Monero. Mhmm. Integrated it in any way so they could, used it, spoke very highly of it. So, a lot of that community and people who were heavy users of samurai, which actually is a large percentage of the listener base of this podcast, were already or if they weren't already viewed it in a more positive light than the sort of, like, Twitter maxi crowd because, different circles, very different circles. The other thing I've been really excited about is outside of adoption is just the ecosystem growth, you know, a massive one Yeah.
Which we've both just done shows on with Passport Prime is a perfect example of something that I think is gonna make a massive difference. Passport Prime integrating with K Qualia is, you know, I mean, it's gonna be huge. It's absolutely massive.
[01:28:09] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm so glad that that announcement happened this year so we can we can talk about it twice. So we can talk about it in 2024, and we can talk about the actual release in 2025. So we get we get double airtime for the foundation guys. But yeah. I mean, that's the hardware wallet space around Monero has always been painful. And, like, one of the things that I highlighted in the ecosystem growth for us to chat through is for the first time now, people on iOS can use hardware wallets. It's unfortunately through Ledger who suck. I hate Ledger. You shouldn't buy Ledger. Even if it's on cake wallet now, I still hate Ledger and don't advise people to to use them. But, unfortunately, in the mineral space, there's been no other option. There is Trezor who I would say are better than Ledger, but they don't have any Bluetooth support. So mobile is impossible on iOS and very difficult on Android. Whereas Ledger has Bluetooth, so it's been more broadly the widely used thing for Monero cold storage. But, obviously, Ledger has massive issues. Ledger recover is a nightmare of a service that they've introduced. Like, the the ethos of Ledger is clearly antithetical to everything that Monero stands for and everything that that real Bitcoiners stand for. So, like, obviously, I don't wanna push people that way, and that's what's made it so exciting. Obviously, I got kind of the inside view of passport prime because I got to help a lot help out a lot with the the planning around it when I was with foundation. And then now that I've I've jumped over to Cake Wallet from foundation, now I get the outside view of seeing them launch it and also act as the primary launch partner for prime where we're gonna be building a cake wall app for prime, which initially will be focused solely on Monero support so that we can finally have an actual open source, good quality hardware wallet with a first party well built Monero app on it. It's gonna be a, a refreshing contrast to how the hardware wallet space has been in the Monero ecosystem because it's it's painful. I mean, even now, like, us doing the development work for Ledger integration and the cake wallet just because Ledger could care less about Monero.
Yeah. There's just a lot of edge cases and issues in the way that it works, and it's problematic. But Prime is gonna be just a fantastic user experience. I'm really excited for that and think it's gonna be a great way for people to it could be your cold storage. Could be maybe it's your warm storage where you just wanna keep a little bit more of an arrow on there in case you have a bigger spend you wanna make when you're on the go and maybe do cold storage somewhere else. But it's gonna be a really cool fit for that, so I'm I'm absolutely pumped for that. And that announcement's huge. And then I think early access ships in March is their target right now. And then the kind of reservations are gonna ship in June. And so we're we're trying to align on the timelines with the k cap with those as well where we'll have a an early beta for the k cap out for the early access people when they get their device in March, and then we're hoping to have the fully done app with Monero support for general availability in June. So it's gonna be a gonna be a fun first half of the year for that for sure. Yeah. So that was a huge one. Launch of XMR chat as well. That was this year. Love that service. It's really fucking cool. Who was that I was speaking to?
[01:31:09] Unknown:
I actually can't share who it is, but a couple of other podcasts I've spoken to recently who are looking to integrate that next year. Nice. We use the podcasting 2.0 stuff. We use fountain. We use these other things, and they've been great for the show. They really have been amazing, especially for, like, the interaction with audience and all that kind of stuff. It's also helped us keep going and grow from donations and things. It's amazing, but not that slick. Doesn't always work. Can be a bit glitchy. For the most part, it is custodial. Yeah. That's how most people are using it. So this has just been very refreshing, but it's just, like, clean, simple, no fucking around. People can just send a message, send some Monero with it, and,
[01:31:53] Unknown:
I love the simplicity of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really badass. I was kinda shocked how well that's gone. I feel like one thing in the Monero ecosystem that you never really know is kind of how how much will the follow through be on a project. Because I feel like the Monero community is just a lot smaller than Bitcoin. So a lot of people have really cool ideas and then they, like, ship the first one and then they just disappear into the ether, and it doesn't get developed. But it's been really awesome with XMR chat to see them pumping out updates, improving, giving a lot of better functionality to streamers and, like, really cool stuff in a use case that is perfect for cryptocurrency and one where Monero fits even better. I think, like, lightning in theory should be better because micropayments a little bit easier. You can do things like streaming sets and it is a cool concept, but like you mentioned, in the vast majority of the ways people are using this, it's custodial because that's the only way to actually achieve it with a good user experience, whereas Monero really enables a lot of similar things without having to make the sacrifices. So it is it has been awesome to see that that rapidly grow. And alongside that, another thing that was launched in 2024 was XMR Bazaar, which is basically a peer to peer marketplace for selling, like, actual things. It can be digital things. It can be physical things. But, essentially, just being able to buy and sell stuff for Monero or buy and sell services for Monero without that person having to, like, have their own store, have their own website, all of that jazz. There was something way back in the day, I think early on when I got started in the Bitcoin space called Open Bazaar. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. It was I think it was basically the same concept, and I'm sure that's where this this name is coming from to kinda hearken back to Mhmm. To that project. But it was a really cool use case. And, again, it's just one of those things that, like, seems like the perfect fit for cryptocurrency.
Like, I I wanna be able to buy something from someone. I don't want the headache of sharing personal details. I want a better user experience. Cryptocurrency fits that really well. And XMR Bazaar launched this year. I think it's still in beta. I've used it a bit, with merchants that I trust who already know from, like, the broader ecosystem. But really cool platform. All of the communication is PGP encrypted where you hold your own PGP keys on there. So make sure you back up everything it tells you when you set up your account if you do use it. Yeah. But a really cool way to not let even the operators of Exmark Bazaar don't get info on shipping. Like, if you put in your address to get something shipped to you, only the seller can actually see the shipping info that you share with them, the managerial payments. They are testing out an escrow system right now. I think it's limited to smaller amounts, but for right now, the vast majority of trades are just you're sending them Monero directly to the merchant, and then they're sending you the good or service, whatever it is. So it's just a really cool way to be able to kind of have, like, a Craigslist like place without the spammers and use Monero in the real world to actually buy and sell things. Again, just building out that circular economy in a way that uses technology to enable it to make it a little bit easier than having to just find someone on a forum or find someone on Twitter who wants to sell something, that sort of thing. I'm sure I saw Vic selling his car on there a couple of months ago. I think it was it was someone else selling a car on there for Monero. Yeah. I think Vic just shared the ad. I don't think it was actually his personal car, but I wouldn't put it past Vic. It could be. I thought it might have been. But, yeah, I mean, like, ideal situation being able to sell stuff on there, like, it's the sort of thing where we might say, oh, actually, maybe we'll, put adverts up there for our clothing and our artwork because, you know, it might pull in another audience. So that's maybe something that we do. Yeah. Another place where you can get that kind of exposure. The last thing I have on the ecosystem side is kind of similar to the hardware wallet space. I know there's been a similar thing put out by the Monair community. Essentially, the idea is kind of similar to what was it called? Sentinel was the samurai wallet idea where you could have, like, a your wallet on an offline old Android device, have the private keys there, and just publish the transaction using some sort of an online device, like using your phone, using a desktop.
A similar idea is something that we've run with at Cake. We're calling it Cupcake because we like dessert related names, I guess. But, basically, the concept is on let's say you have, like, a Pixel 6 or something that you you upgraded to a Pixel 8 or Pixel 9. You could either just use stock Android on that or better run Graphene OS on that old Android phone. You can install Cupcake and then you use that phone as if it's a hardware wallet. So the keys Yep. Stay offline. The app has no Internet access even if your phone is connected to the Internet. Obviously, best case probably would be to also have the phone in airplane mode, but we have no code in there to even connect to the network even if you were connected. And then you do kind of the QR code shuffle that you're used to if you've ever used Yeah. Passport, if you've ever used any kind of QR code, air gapped wallet. It's the same concept. So there's nothing like crazy novel in what it does. It's Sentinel, but for Yeah. Monero. Yeah. Basically, that concept. It's a little bit different in the fact that Sentinel could also be just a an online watch only wallet where Cupcake is not. So Cupcake's sole purpose is actually keeping the private keys on a separate device and signing transactions. But one of the ways you could use Sentinel was like that. So, yeah, it's a it's just a a cool way that if you don't have a hardware wallet or maybe you don't want to have to buy a hardware wallet and get it shipped to your house, which is a totally legitimate concern with all the leaks that have happened, especially with Ledger.
It's a cool way to be able to have a lot of the benefits of a hardware wallet. I wouldn't say it's quite as good in my opinion, but it has a lot of the advantages without many of the drawbacks. So it's a really cool way to be able to take more secure custody of your Monero. Right now, it's really in an open beta. We put it on initial release because we wanted it out for Monero Topia so we could show people what we were working on, but we're working on a lot of improvements and enhancements. So I'm hoping we can get a a full public release probably in the next month or so.
[01:37:46] Unknown:
Cool. I think that covers our updates of 2024. This is gonna be released early 2025, so that was kind of a look back on the last year. What have we got to look forward to in 2025?
[01:38:01] Unknown:
A lot of the main things I've already mentioned, so I'll kind of, like, quickly recap the ones that I've already touched on. But a lot of the stuff that's been announced or been worked on in 2024 should be live and actually out in 2025. So like we just talked about, Passport Prime will be shipping in in March or June depending on what Mhmm. Kind of batch you order. Monero Con is the biggest conference I'm looking forward to this year. I know Monero Topia will also be in 2025, but I'm not sure what, what dates their location yet. So I haven't haven't planned out specifically that, but Monero Con's gonna be a a blast this year. It's gonna be actually the same week as BTC Prague. So if anybody's going out to BTC Prague, you can just pair those together and hop right on over still in Prague to Monero Con and knock out both events back to back. I think they even have a day of overlap, which is a little odd, but you can kinda knock out 2 conferences there on the Bitcoin side and the Monero side in 1 week, which will be will be awesome so you don't have to travel as much, but still get your your conferences in.
And so, yeah, that's the big the big conference I'm looking forward to this year. On the technical side, the big one is definitely full chain membership proofs like we talked about. I don't know if that'll actually go live this year. The actual, like, planning process and cautious path towards a hard fork is a slow one. So I'm not sure if that will actually go live in 2025. So I'll kind of tentatively say, I don't know, maybe late 2025 we can have this since the underlying protocol is totally done in development. I'm hopeful that it will be. That will be a huge step forward for Monero and really make it, from my perspective, feature complete as a privacy protocol. Like, I would kind of view that as the 1 point o of Monero where we actually are on for some reason, we're still in 0 dot versions. So, like, the latest Monero software version is 0.18.3.4, but it's been around for a decade. So I don't know if we can convince the Monero guys to actually make this the the one that will release.
But that will be fantastic if it does make it in. If it doesn't, there's some other things that are still gonna be happening on the technical side, especially around improving sync that'll come out this year. One of them is a improvement by a fantastic dev called Justin Berman where he found a way that basically we can make that bandwidth and compute intense sync process drastically more efficient. So it won't cut down on bandwidth, but it'll make the the actual speed, the time that it takes to do that synchronization, much shorter. So that will be a big user experience improvement to Monero, and that doesn't require a hard fork or anything like that. So I know that that's very close to being ready. We'll definitely be working on that at cake as soon as it's it's ready in the Monero code base. And then another one on the cake side is that, again, trying to work around this kind of sync user experience hurdle in Monero. We've been working on background sync so that you can have cake wallet, you can have your Monero wallet there, and then it can just be syncing in the background when you're on Wi Fi, when you're plugged in, when you close the app and go to multitask and do something else. If you enable the service, obviously, you'll you'll have to opt into it. It can sync your Monero wallet in the background without you having to do anything extra while using only the keys necessary to sync without having the actual, like, spend key hot and RAM the whole time you're syncing. So in theory, you'll then never have to wait for your wallet to sync when you open it. It'll just be syncing in the background constantly.
Or down the line, probably not at launch, but down the line, we'll have the ability for you to say, like, hey. When my phone is charging and on Wi Fi, go ahead and sync all of my wallets up. And it can do every wallet that's in cake wallet, not just it can do also your Bitcoin wallet, especially if you're doing something like silent payments which have a little bit more intense sync process. You can do that in the background. So that's gonna be a huge, huge improvement, on the Monero side, on the silent payment side, and Bitcoin as well to be able to just sync in the background and not have to you you wanna spend, you open up kQuil, and then you realize, oh, I gotta sync 10,000 blocks or whatever. We'll we'll be doing our best to work around that. So that'll be an exciting one as well for 2025 on the technical side. But I think those are the main things. I'm like I said, I'm sure I'm missing things. I'm kind of really getting reconnected in the Minero community in the last, like, 6 months or so, but those are the big things that jump out to me. Oh, one more, actually. One more that I forgot, and one I didn't mention for 2024 either.
So a friend of mine, someone I know really well in the space who's been the lead dev for Monero on full chain membership proofs, He also has been working on his own decentralized exchange that will have Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero support. And the idea is that it will be basically the user experience of these centralized swap providers. Things like change now or SimpleSwap or whatever the swap provider that you've used in the past, fixed float, those kinds of things. It'll have a similar user experience, but it will be totally decentralized. There will be many operators running the swap service. They won't be have the unilateral bill unilateral ability to seize funds or hold on to them, and you won't be giving up custody in the same sense as to a centralized swap service. No KYC. All of the benefits of decentralization here because we can do it all with technology and just swap directly between these cryptocurrencies.
So it's gonna be a really, really good user experience, but drastically more decentralized and resilient than decentralized swap services that we have to use today. So that probably will go live in 2025. Again, I don't wanna I don't wanna tie down the, the main dev behind it to to force him into a a timeline, but I know that he's done a lot of work on it in 2024. Was originally targeting a launch in 2024, but pushed it back to 2025. So I'm hopeful that that will go live. That will be a huge addition to make it even easier for you to go from Bitcoin to Monero and back again. Very cool.
[01:43:39] Unknown:
I was gonna ask you a question to break down something, but we're a fair way through now. I think that maybe we save that for next episode. And Yeah. What we can do is anyone who has any questions, maybe breaking down, like, a key component of Monero or any questions that people have on the privacy side, the security side, or I see quite often people asking about verifiability and all these kind of things. Mhmm. Any of those questions, if you send them through either on XMR chat or you can do it on Fountain or however you wanna do it, but, send those through, and we can answer those next time around.
Anyone who does wanna support the show, XMR chat would probably be the coolest for this specific show. We'd like to see that grow and support them. And there's also this bird pay function, which you can probably explain a little bit better than me because I haven't yet used it. But it seems as though you can just pay directly by using someone's Twitter handle. Is that right?
[01:44:42] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really straightforward. So if you have a Monero address in your bio or in your pinned tweet, All someone using Kekola has to do is just type in your Twitter username, and it'll pull that address. Show the user the Twitter profile to make sure that they don't actually accidentally ping the wrong person, obviously, and then you can pay them directly using that. So they don't have to manually type in the address or find it on some other website like your own or find it in the show notes even. They can just type in the Twitter username, and it'll pop right up. So it's it's pretty sweet. You do have to have that Monero address in the bio or in the pinned tweet, which can be a little tricky with the character limits. Yeah.
[01:45:20] Unknown:
Yeah. That's true. The character limits. So, well, I'll try and do that on the Ungovernable Misfit 1. If I can't, then we'll just put it in the show notes. But that's a cool feature. I like that. Outside of that, yeah, just any questions would be great. We're also gonna put a link in the show notes to how to mine to the show. I set that up in, like, 2 minutes with Jordan. It was so easy, which is a really cool way to do it. And we've already got, I think, 4 or 5 people who are contributing to this show that way. So anytime they have any extra computing power, they're just mining to show, which is absolutely incredible. And if anyone has any art or jingles or anything that they can share with the show would be much appreciated.
So, get in touch for anything like that. That would be really cool as this show grows and develops. Anything on your side, Seth, that you'd like to,
[01:46:14] Unknown:
anyone you'd like to hear from? Any questions or anything like that? No. I think the biggest thing to me is, like you've been doing with with q and a. I love the the concept of people being able to ask ask questions and get them answered here. So that's definitely something I'm looking forward to in future episodes. I know this one was more review of 2024. Looking forward to 2025, but, it'll be it'll be awesome in the the next monthly episodes to be able to actually talk through your questions. And I'm I hope we'll have a lot because especially if you're coming from Bitcoin and new to Monero, there's just there's a lot of differences even if the core kinda ethos is similar. There's a lot of technical differences, especially in use case differences, user experience differences. So that's something I love doing. I I love doing the the q and a side of things. If you do have questions, no matter how simple or complex,
[01:47:00] Unknown:
I'd love to get into them. Awesome. Well, I think that is everything, mate. Thank you for joining the Ungovernal Misfits. We're very, very happy to have you on board, and I'm very excited for the show. It's a good chance for me to learn about something I know practically fuck all about. And if the listeners don't have any questions, I will do. So, I look forward to the next one, mate. Me too. Thanks so much for having me, Max. Alright. We'll speak next month. That was a long first episode, but I enjoyed listening to some of the history of Monero. It's really cool to have Seth on board and part of the Ungovernal Misfits crew. I'm really looking forward to learning more and using these tools more, and I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, please reach out and ask, probably Seth, but you can try and ask me as well. And we'll catch you on the next episode a month from now. Before you go, I wanna say happy New Year. Thank you for all the support from all The Ungovernable Misfits and The Ungovernable Misfits crew. Also, a big thank you to Cake Wallet and Foundation, not only for supporting this show and everything that Ungovernal Misfits do, but also for the general freedom and open source movement.
We hinted to it in this episode, but Foundation have released a new device. I'm very excited about this. If you haven't already listened to my episode, go back and have a listen. You can check them out at foundation dot x y zed. You can use my code Ungovernable for a discount, I think, just for the passport, not for the passport prime as it stands. But either way, give it a go. It's just Ungovernable. Or you can click the link in the show notes, and it will take you to our own cool page that mister Crowns made all beautiful. Check that out. And also a big thank you to Cake Wallet, which will be having its own application on the Passport Prime. So, obviously, Seth has been working hard in the background there and the rest of the team to work with foundation.
It's very exciting because it's gonna mean people can have cold storage for their Monero along with lots of other cool features, I'm sure. If you haven't already tried K Wallet, give it a go. You can use this on Mac, Linux, Windows, iPhone, and Android. I've been using it now for probably about 6 months, and I really like it. It's got some great Bitcoin features, great features. You can link this to your own node on both. It's got swap services, payment services, all sorts of things in there that help people who actually use Bitcoin and Monero.
And if you have any questions while using it, you can just send in to our own little tech support here, and me and Seth will go through it in the next episode. Thanks for listening, and stay ungovernable.
