S15 E9: Kevin Loaec on Liana Wallet, Miniscript & Hardware Wallets

I once posted about Wizardsardine on Nostr and got a reply that still makes me smile: why are bitcoiners in charge of picking company names, and why don’t they pay professional marketers, because that is the stupidest name ever.

That is exactly why I like it more. Wizard. Sardine. Like a mage and a fish you pull from a can. The CEO is Kevin Loaec, the same Kevin who helped build Breaking Bitcoin into a technical security conference when the rest of the circuit was still mostly shilling, and who later helped invent BTC Azores as a Chatham House fight club for Core and wallet people. For S15 E9 I sat him down for about seventy-eight minutes on the wallet that grew out of all that seriousness: Liana (wizardsardine.com/liana), an open-source desktop wallet that treats timelocks as a first-class feature instead of a party trick.

I had watched him present it on stage at BTC Prague. I could have interviewed him a year earlier, while it was still half-finished. By the time we recorded, around the end of 2023, Liana was mature enough that Kevin could talk about what it actually does for inheritance, company treasuries, and safer backups, and also roast the fee drama of the ordinal year without losing the plot.

A Normal Wallet With Extra Clocks

Kevin’s pitch is almost aggressively boring at first. Liana is a simple Bitcoin wallet. You receive. You send. It is open source. The twist is what happens when you set it up.

You keep a primary key that can spend every day. At setup you can also declare recovery keys that only become valid after a timelock: six months, a year, whatever you choose. Lose the primary key and you wait. Someone steals a backup that sits behind a timelock and you still have a window to notice and move coins before the clock expires. Check in from time to time that nobody has triggered the recovery path, and the backup stops being a loaded gun on someone’s kitchen table.

Inheritance is the obvious use case. The envelope-on-a-shelf model (“open this if I die”) asks your family to secure a mnemonic they do not care about as much as you do. Liana encodes the same intention onchain. If the coins have not moved for a year, the family’s recovery key becomes valid. No trusted third party. No lawyer’s vault that can be socially engineered. Just script.

Companies get a subtler upgrade. Without timelocks, a corporate multisig usually settles for two-of-three or three-of-five because a strict three-of-three is terrifying: lose one key and the funds are gone forever. With Liana, Kevin’s team runs Wizardsardine’s own treasury as a strict multisig that relaxes after inactivity. Three-of-three today. If it sits stuck for six months, it can become two-of-three, or three-of-four, or whatever policy you designed. You stop paying a permanent security tax just because someone might lose a laptop.

He is clear that imagination is the only real limit. Hodling with a self-imposed lock. Cascading recovery keys from Unchained (unchained.com) then Casa (casa.io) then a family key, so that if one cosigner disappears as a business you still have a later path. Mix and match existing services as recovery rungs, all enforced on layer one.

I asked about Lightning and other layers, because fees were ugly that winter. Kevin was cautious. Wizardsardine is a Bitcoin security company. Lightning does not erase fee risk so much as push it into the future, and the future fee is hard to price. He would not put significant coins on a Lightning wallet. Liana staying on layer one, for now, is a deliberate security choice, not a lack of ambition.

Fees, JPEGs & the Slippery Slope

This was also the episode where Kevin’s Twitter took a victory lap. His line, which I read back to him on air: the best way to fix inscription “spam” is to use Bitcoin. They are not stealing block space. They are just more willing to pay for it than you are. If the actual problem is high fees, what do you want, price controls?

He does not love paying high fees. Nobody does. He also refuses the moral panic. Inscriptions are many competing actors, not a monopoly. Their transactions are enormous Taproot payloads, so they pay a fortune in absolute terms even with the SegWit weight discount. Every time a normal 200 vB payment lands, they have to outbid it again. Normal economic activity was still clearing despite the storm, which is the free-market answer people keep pretending they want until the free market prices them out of coffee.

The censorship version of the story worries him more. You can set any mempool or relay policy on your own node. Miners can choose what to include. The danger is a durable majority of hash quietly defining stricter rules than the protocol already allows: this valid transaction type is no longer welcome.

Soft forks tighten the rules. Nodes cannot simply reject a soft-forked chain the way they reject a hard-fork inflation attempt. Filter JPEGs today and you have practiced the muscle memory for filtering something else tomorrow.

Kevin has no patience for the Africa-cannot-afford-fees guilt trip as a censorship argument either. Who decides the subsidy? How do you enforce it without KYC? The slope does not stop where your preferred morality stops.

He still has respect for Luke Dashjr as a long-time Core contributor. He just wants words defined. Calling ordinals a “bug” only works if you redefine the data-carrier limit as a sacred contract that OP_RETURN alone was allowed to fill. Taproot removed a transaction-size limit by design. That broke the old data-carrier intuition. It is not a coding bug. It is a design decision that made some people sad and some researchers very interested in BitVM, sovereign rollups, and other large-script toys that would also die if Core or miners started mass-filtering big transactions to punish JPEGs.

Taproot getting bad press for enabling inscriptions while actually delivering the first serious Taproot adoption numbers is, in Kevin’s understatement, a bit sad. Taproot is great. The market used it weirdly. Markets do that.

Miniscript: From Revault to Hardware Peer Pressure

Then we got to the real product story: Wizardsardine did not start with Liana. The company was founded to build Revault (github.com/revault), a complex Bitcoin vault architecture for organizational spending restrictions. The only safe way to implement it was Miniscript (bitcoin.sipa.be/miniscript), which was brand new at the time. Kevin thinks they were among the very first production projects to lean on it. Demo around 2021. Immediate problem: almost no hardware signer understood Miniscript, so you could not honestly call the system a security product if the device signing the policy was blind.

So they nagged everyone.

Specter DIY shipped first support. Not mass market, but first. Ledger followed with a production Miniscript release around December 2022. Jade showed demos. BitBox shipped demos then production. Coldcard put Miniscript into edge firmware. Rob from Anchor Watch pushed from the US side. Hardware vendors moved because several projects, not just Wizardsardine, kept asking.

Kevin’s Miniscript explainer is the cleanest I have heard on this show. Raw Bitcoin Script is assembly. You stack opcodes and hope you have not left a spend path you did not intend. That is why almost nobody ships custom scripts: the attack surface is “you forgot a way to steal from yourself.”

Most wallets stay single-sig or multisig. Green and Lightning hard-code carefully reviewed scripts. Miniscript lets you write a policy (how funds should be spendable) and compiles that into Script that only allows what you defined.

No unexpected malleation paths. Better fee optimization across equivalent scripts. And it is composable: plug a multisig Miniscript into a Liana timelock path, nest another Liana-like structure inside that, and build weird safe trees without hand-rolling opcodes.

Electrum remains the Swiss army knife. Kevin’s answer to “what does Liana do that Electrum does not” is blunt: Electrum did not support Miniscript. If you want proper timelock policies, that is not the knife you want.

Breaking Bitcoin, Azores & My Dracula Pitch

Kevin’s conference life is the connective tissue. Breaking Bitcoin, Building on Bitcoin, Breaking Bitcoin again: deliberately technical, security-forward, allergic to hyperbitcoinization keynotes. At the peak they were rejecting most talk applications. Amsterdam was the last one. Three unpaid organizers, six-plus months of full-time work, a maturing professional conference market they could not compete with, and drama over a “toxic maximalist” t-shirt that annoyed sponsors of an event that was already losing money.

Kevin does not thrive on that kind of drama. Enter the villain arc: BTC Azores, still not a money printer, but a room where technical people can argue under Chatham House rules without getting canceled for saying the quiet part loud. Not competing with BTC++ so much as being Fight Club to its classroom.

I used the moment to float Dracula Bitcoin, a Romania conference idea I had mostly kept offline. Same talks, different skin: peasant / noble / whale tiers with coats and vampire cloaks, traditional food and music, something that actually feels like you traveled somewhere instead of teleporting into another identical hotel ballroom. Kevin did not call it stupid. He did call the conference market cyclical and oversupplied. Bull markets birth too many events; bear markets kill half of them. Differentiation helps. Technical people will still only go where they can talk shop.

Somewhere in there we also ruined the “supra cycle” investment thesis by clarifying I meant a Toyota Supra, the pleb Lambo, plus the optional girlfriend-upgrade meme. Kevin had seen the tweet and still heard “supra cycle” first. Fair.

Hardware Wallets, With the Gloves Off

Then I asked him to rate the toys on his desk.

Ledger: from a hardware and physical-attacker threat-model perspective, he still likes the work. The company is another story. Roughly 700 employees and, as far as he knew then, about one person focused on Bitcoin. Ledger Live is, in his words, horrible, mostly a shitcoin storefront.

Ledger Recover, the paid key-sharding recovery product, is a hard no: you are sharing your private key with other people, even if it saves some users from themselves. The Recover backlash sold a lot of Coldcards for CoinKite and did not dethrone Ledger as market leader, which tells you something about who actually buys devices.

Kevin’s advice matches what I tell people: keep the Ledger, throw away Ledger Live, drive it from Electrum, Wasabi, Specter, Sparrow, or Liana. Roll entropy elsewhere if you want. The moral throw-in-the-garbage ritual is mostly theater.

Affordability matters more than Twitter purity tests. Newcomers buying a few hundred dollars of bitcoin will not spend two hundred on a signer. Ledger and Blockstream Jade both compete on that axis. Shitcoin compatibility is probably still Ledger’s quiet marketing moat.

Trezor Safe 3 had just landed on my desk. Secure element after years of Trezor arguing against them. Kevin had not tried that unit yet, and he was skeptical that Tropic Square’s then-current chips could sign Bitcoin’s curve, even while cheering that Tropic Square exists at all. Open-source secure elements will take a long time. Until then every design is a compromise: store secrets on a closed SE and do math on a general-purpose chip (Coldcard, Passport, BitBox02 with the ATECC608 family) and you blunt some SE-backdoor fears while opening side-channel risks when the device is powered and in use. Know your threat model.

Passphrases and BIP39 backups still win a lot of scenarios if you reset devices often and only restore in a clean environment. Clicky Coldcard PIN pads can leak to a microphone. Trezor Model T’s scrambled touch input is Kevin-adjacent to my favorite passphrase UX; Ledger’s is a nightmare; BitBox is fast once you know it and slippery if you do not.

Air-gapped QR wallets: nice idea, UX he personally hates. He will plug a cable. Coldcard wins on advanced features. Ledger and BitBox feel simple once unlocked for Liana-style signing. Nobody is perfect. BitBox’s proprietary cable gendering still triggers him. Larger screens matter more as wallets show full descriptors instead of a lonely xpub; endless scrolling on tiny displays is already a bottleneck for complex Miniscript policies. He was watching CoinKite’s Q with interest for exactly that reason.

Why Download Liana

Final question: why should anyone download Liana today?

Not everyone. Anyone? Sure. If you already live on a desktop wallet, Kevin thinks there is a high chance Liana is simply better for you. Mobile users will not get the same one-thumb send/receive vibe yet. Anyone curious about safer backups or inheritance should try it: grab it from wizardsardine.com, point it at Bitcoin Core on the same machine, or let Liana fetch Core and wait through IBD. Painful once. Sovereign after. At recording time it talked to Specter DIY, Ledger, and BitBox, with Coldcard integration “maybe in a month” pending a firmware update. A new Liana release might have shipped the next day; they were testing as we spoke.

Follow the company as Wizardsardine on Twitter. Kevin is @kloaec.

I cut the interview without a live demo, which I still mildly regret. There is always room for a second episode when the feature list grows again. For one sitting, though, Kevin did what the best wallet people do: he made timelocks feel obvious, Miniscript feel like seatbelts instead of academia, and hardware wallets feel like tools with tradeoffs instead of tribal jerseys. Wizardsardine remains a ridiculous name. The software behind it is not.