Title: S15 E9: Kevin Loaec on Liana Wallet, Miniscript & Hardware Wallets
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Kevin Loaec (CEO of Wizardsardine, the company behind Liana wallet)
Published: 2023-12-31
Duration: 1:18:32
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2023-12-31_s15_e9_kevin_loaec_on_liana_wallet__mini_script__hardware_wallets.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2023-12-31_s15_e9_kevin_loaec_on_liana_wallet__mini_script__hardware_wallets.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic speaker diarization, reconciled against a full local small.en (int16, VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps and the YouTube auto-captions of the livestream (three-way comparison over the whole episode; 120 disagreement spots reviewed). 20 doubtful, dropped or garbled stretches were re-transcribed locally from short audio clips with medium.en (int16, VAD). The base transcript ended with a hallucinated "That's it for today, see you next time!", which was removed, and it had dropped the pronunciation exchange at 00:01:19-00:01:22 ("Loaec? Loaec?"), which was restored from the small.en pass. Speaker turns were checked with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (TitaNet reference voices for Vlad and Kevin, 1.5 s windows at 0.75 s hop), word-level re-segmentation and hand review, including Kevin's replies at 00:01:21, 00:17:33, 00:37:33, 00:41:16, 00:45:00, 00:52:36 and 00:55:17-00:55:24, Vlad's "Taproot is great" at 00:28:28 and the Supra exchange at 00:51:26-00:53:15. Sponsor reads are labelled "Ad voiceover". Names and jargon were checked against the title, the show notes and the web: Wizardsardine (wizardsardine.com/liana, @KLOAEC), Liana, Revault, Miniscript, timelocks, Breaking Bitcoin, Building on Bitcoin, BTC Azores, BTC++ and Lisa, Chatham House rule, Satoshi Roundtable, Unchained Capital, Casa, Luke Jr., datacarrier / OP_RETURN, Ordinal inscriptions, SegWit discount, sat per vbyte, child pays for parent, speedy trial, soft forks, John Light and sovereign rollups, BitVM, Sergio Lerner and Rootstock, Greg Maxwell, Andrew Poelstra, Schnorr / ECDSA, Ark, Satoshi Dice, Specter DIY, Ledger, Ledger Live and Ledger Recover, Trezor Safe 3, Trezor Model T and Tropic Square, BitBox02, Coldcard (Edge firmware, Q) and Coinkite, Jade, Passport, ATECC608A/B secure elements, AnchorWatch, GreenAddress / Green wallet, Electrum, Sparrow, Wasabi, Firefish, ShopinBit, Toyota Supra, Baltic Honey Badger, BTC Prague and "Dracula Bitcoin"; sponsors Wasabi Wallet (WabiSabi), Cryptosteel, Satochip (Satodime, Seedkeeper) and IVPN (BTCPay Server, trial@ivpn.net). Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; factual slips by speakers are kept as spoken. Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:49] Vlad Costea: Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I am Vlad and I have a very special interview today with one of my favorite Bitcoiners and favorite wallet developers who's actually trying to create something different that doesn't exist on the market right now, which is for inheritance and it has use cases revolving around Taproot transactions, which are underutilized unless you're inscribing ordinals. And his name is Kevin Loaec. He's the CEO. I hope I pronounced that well. Loaec? Loaec?

[00:01:21] Kevin Loaec: Loaec. Yeah, Loaec.

[00:01:22] Vlad Costea: Very good. He's the CEO of Wizardsardine, which is a special company because I once posted something on Nostr about it and someone replied, why are Bitcoiners in charge of picking company names and they don't pay professional marketers because that's the stupidest name ever.

[00:01:37] Vlad Costea: But that's why I like it even more. So it's Wizardsardine, like a wizard and the sardine that you're eating from a can. And he's developing and working doing some infrastructure work on Liana Wallet. And he also did something with Breaking Bitcoin, the conference, which was a big deal. And you do the anti-conference in the Azores. There's a lot that to do, but I hope that this introduction covers most of it.

[00:02:07] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, pretty good. Thank you.

[00:02:08] Vlad Costea: So let's talk about Liana because I'm super excited. I saw you presenting it on stage at BTC Prague this year, and I was thinking, you know, I could have interviewed this guy last year and he could tell me more about this while it was still in development. Since then, I guess you went to lots of other podcasts and spoke about it, but I guess I get to receive a more mature perspective on the development of the wallet. So what's the purpose of it and what does it do right now?

[00:02:36] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, so Liana is a simple Bitcoin wallet, you know, like any normal wallet to spend your Bitcoin and receive Bitcoin to it. It's an open source software. And yeah, the difference with the typical Bitcoin wallet is that it uses timelocks. So you can actually have a multiple set of keys and some of them are only going to be valid in the future. So you can have your normal key that's always valid, you know, from a day to day spending perspective. And then at the setup phase, when you set up the wallet the first time, you can say, for example, well, after six months, I'm going to have a second key that becomes valid in case, for example, I lose my key, my primary key.

[00:03:20] Kevin Loaec: And so then I have to wait six months and the second key will become valid. So that's pretty cool for backup perspective, for example, where you're not scared of someone accessing your backup key and taking all of your money because it's behind the timelock. So as long as you check from time to time that nobody accessed it, you're fine. That also worked for inheritance, as you mentioned at the beginning. So you could say, you know, after these six months, I have another timelock again. And so now it's after one year.

[00:03:46] Kevin Loaec: If I haven't moved my coins at all for one year, then my family will be able to access it, for example. And so that's useful for inheritance. But again, this is trustless, right? It's not like everyone is doing right now, which is like writing your seed phrase on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope and just write on the envelope, just open this in case I die. That's not very secure because you never know. Let's say you can trust your family, but you never know how they are going to secure this mnemonic, right?

[00:04:15] Kevin Loaec: They don't care about your money as much as you do. So possibly this envelope, they are going to leave it somewhere accessible in their house and then somebody is going to steal it, right? That's totally a risk we are facing. And so, yeah, these timelock things are super useful for that. Another thing, and I'm not going to speak for an hour, but another thing about the use case is for companies. So typically at Wizardsardine, we use Liana for our Bitcoins, where typically in a company set up, you use a multisig.

[00:04:50] Kevin Loaec: And without Liana, or at least without timelocks, typically you do a two of three or three of five multisig just because you wouldn't do a three of three, because if you lose a key or anyone loses a key, the funds would be lost forever, right? And so everyone has to take this compromise of reducing the security by doing like a two of three instead, just in case, you know, someone loses their keys and we don't want to lock the funds forever. With Liana, you can actually do a strict multisig, like three of three.

[00:05:20] Kevin Loaec: And let's say if it's stuck for six months, then it becomes a two of three, or it becomes a three of four or whatever you want, right? So this is super useful for this kind of setup as well.

[00:05:31] Vlad Costea: It's really fascinating because the limits of this use case are only given by your own imagination. You can use it for inheritance, you can use it for HODLing if you want to impose on yourself that you're not going to sell for a while. And you can also use it for other types of contracts where the keys become to someone else after a while and it's not enforced only by some legal obligation, it's enforced by something that's immutable on the public blockchain.

[00:05:59] Kevin Loaec: Exactly. And there is a lot of things. And as you said, you know, it's only limited by your imagination. It goes really well in combination with other services. So if you take companies that have, for example, a co-signer, typically Unchained Capital, or I don't know, Casa or whoever can, you know, have one key in part of a multisig, you could imagine having multiple ones, you know, one after the other time, so you could say, oh, maybe Unchained is one of my recovery keys, but if Unchained is not, you know, not in business anymore in all of these years, then after a couple of months, I also activate the Casa key or things like that.

[00:06:37] Kevin Loaec: So you can actually do really cool mix and match if you want of existing services. And yeah, that's super cool. And again, yeah, as you were saying, this is on-chain, this is not something I mentioned, there is no third party there. It's really, we're developing a wallet that lets you do this type of scripting on the Bitcoin layer one directly, right? It's not a trusted body or anything like that.

[00:06:59] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I'm looking at the Bitcoin fees right now, and they're higher than the average Silk Road user 10 years ago. So I was thinking, maybe you're also considering doing something on second layers or off-chain in some way?

[00:07:14] Kevin Loaec: So this is always tough. Primarily, we're a Bitcoin security company. And so layers are super interesting to us. But things like Lightning, for example, are also suffering a lot from a security perspective from high fees in the layer one, right? It's not solving the fee problem. It's just kind of moving it in the future. But then you cannot really predict the fees in the future. So you always have this cat and mouse game with the fees. And so it's not easy to do security when you're talking about layer twos.

[00:07:48] Kevin Loaec: I don't know yet if and when Liana will have compatibility on layer two. The fees are definitely something we have to consider. But again, this is not something we can control. So this is layer one in Bitcoin. Yeah, this is mainly my answer is that I don't know how we will mitigate that in Liana. Probably not anytime soon, just because it creates other security issues. And we really want this to be a security wallet, where you can leave significant amounts, which, for example, Lightning is not really recommended, right?

[00:08:23] Kevin Loaec: You wouldn't put many Bitcoins on the Lightning wallet, because it's still a hot wallet.

[00:08:30] Vlad Costea: I think we can also move a bit into the conversation about the fees that are high right now. Because I enjoyed your tweets about it. And I was like, you know, this guy makes sense. Everyone's trying to sell you something either that you should inscribe or that you should filter your node and mine with this new pool launched by Luke Jr. And I was thinking, you know, this actually makes sense, because Bitcoin is supposed to have high fees to sustain that security. And at the end of the day, we should not care.

[00:08:59] Vlad Costea: Because if we start censoring and saying, Oh, this is not a correct use case, and this is the correct use case, it's not permissionless anymore. And you only open the floodgates for further or either self regulations, which become cultural that you should only use Bitcoin in this way, or regulations from the government that's going to step in and say, Oh, it's so nice that you did this, let me also help you and enforce it. And some people are going to be happy about it. But that's how you limit the scope of the project, which is still very young.

[00:09:32] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. What did you want me to say about that? I completely agree. I think it's a big slippery slope, the whole discussion, that it's more like different people are talking about different things, even if they align their opinion. And that's why there is the big drama right now on Twitter. I don't have any problem with people putting whatever mempool policy or relay policy on their node. They can, they do whatever they want. It's their node. Same for the miners, they can choose what they want to mine.

[00:10:02] Kevin Loaec: It doesn't matter if they are trying to cheat on transactions or things like that. They will just not be on the same network. So the things that they can do is, as you were saying, censoring stuff. So restricting which valid transaction they basically don't want to put in their blocks. That's fine up to a point. The problem is really if one day there is some kind of a consensus between the miners, over 50% or 51%, let's say, that then define new rules, stricter rules, that would be basically saying, you know, hey, this type of transaction is not allowed on Bitcoin anymore, although it was before.

[00:10:45] Kevin Loaec: And this is the problem. It's really the slippery slope. It's like, I don't care if you try to prevent JPEGs on going into Bitcoin. For me, it doesn't matter. And as Luke is saying, sure, it could be seen as kind of a bug, or at least it's a bypass of the data limit you should be able to put in the transaction, but hey. But then where does it stop? You know, where does it stop? You've seen some people replying to my tweet with things like, oh, you guys are in a financially privileged position because you can pay transaction fees, but some people in Africa cannot.

[00:11:19] Kevin Loaec: Well, yeah, but that's always going to be the point. That's how Bitcoin works. So then should we also censor people from the West because they have money to pay fees? Or should we give free allowance to people from elsewhere? Who is going to decide these rules? How are we going to enforce it? Can you even do it without KYC? And so, yeah, this never ends, right? So, yeah, just a weird discussion, but it's good to be educating people as well on Twitter. I think these kind of tweets are really good for people to really think and argue deeply.

[00:11:50] Kevin Loaec: So it's good for Bitcoin.

[00:11:52] Vlad Costea: I'm still waiting for someone to propose some sort of subsidy and say, oh, everyone from the West, every Bitcoiner who's an early adopter should put this amount every month into this address that's going to be used for basically paying the fees, maybe doing some child pays for parent for the one sat per vbyte transactions of Africans and be like, yes, we're helping the third world on board. I mean, you know, invent socialism to some degree.

[00:12:21] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, this is something that could happen. I mean, probably not as you described, because, you know, technically it would be pretty impossible to do without KYC. But you can imagine some kind of a very [unclear: woke measures], like all the very old coins that haven't moved for, I don't know, 10 years, they should be erased from existence, or they shouldn't be, you shouldn't be able to transact them anymore. This is possible in a, you know, 51% type filtering. So this kind of stuff where, oh, you were early, so you were lucky, that's not fair.

[00:12:57] Kevin Loaec: You could totally imagine that in the future where, you know, the average person is just angry that they don't have Bitcoin and few people have it.

[00:13:07] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and something that you mentioned twice, and it just sparked my imagination right now. You mentioned 51% of miners twice in different contexts. And I realized that the narrative has been since the activation of SegWit, that miners are not in control, and they have no power because the nodes are the ones that make the policy. But we even gave up on that for activating Taproot. We allowed the nodes to do a speedy trial.

[00:13:37] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, it's a very complex thing, the game theory in Bitcoin. People are very much polarized, like it's either yes or no, but it's often, you know, it depends in between, and everything that's related to, you know, basically soft forks. So for hard forks, we know the nodes decide, right? So if the miners are trying to change the rules, and let's say bypass the 21 million limit, you are fine, you don't need to be a miner. As long as you run your nodes, your node is going to reject their blocks.

[00:14:10] Kevin Loaec: So that's fine. But the soft fork thing, which is basically putting stricter rules on Bitcoin, so you take things that are valid already, but then you reject them. This, you cannot do anything about it as a node. You don't have any power over it. So you know, if there was, and I'm not saying this is reasonable as an attack, but if there was 51% of the miners right now trying to filter transactions somehow, let's say you have to do KYC on them or whatever, I don't know, I don't care, right?

[00:14:41] Kevin Loaec: Any type of filtering, strict filtering, you as a node will have a very hard time, even the community will have a very hard time to, let's say, switch or exclude these miners, because if you cannot really detect which miner is doing this, and how are you even detecting that, then you can't really exclude their blocks. So it's a very complex mechanism. For SegWit, it was more like a signaling problem, or if you don't have SegWit in your blocks, then there is ways to reject them as a node, because you can detect the node is different.

[00:15:17] Kevin Loaec: But there are things that are very difficult. And yeah, and this is always a risk, right? Bitcoin has not been built to be perfect. It cannot be. The limit is the 51%. We know it, this cannot be improved. So as long as 51% of the miners are honest, then we're fine.

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[00:16:36] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and it was also, I think we have a very, we have had a very interesting year in Bitcoin, very eventful. It started with full RBF, which was the biggest debate at the time. Then in February, we had the emergence of Ordinal inscriptions. And from that, there were all sorts of reactions that were directed towards that from filtering your node, which I thought was never going to happen. Because we always said, you know, Bitcoin is permissionless. I don't care what to do. Let's enable everyone to use it however they want.

[00:17:10] Vlad Costea: But then they were like, no, I think this was started by Luke also. He said they are cheating and they are stealing and whatever, because they're using the SegWit discount for, and they're also bypassing the OP_RETURN limits, which was enabled by Taproot. So it was a crossfire from this point of view. And afterwards...

[00:17:33] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, there's a lot of misunderstanding. Yeah, a lot of misunderstanding. And yeah, what Luke is saying is not really understood by, you know, some other people. And it's a very complicated thing. Very, very soft limits into what's right, what's wrong there.

[00:17:49] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I have a lot of respect for Luke. I know that he has been one of the most consistent contributors to the Bitcoin Core project. You can find his name on pretty much every release for the last 12 years or something. But at the same time, when he uses words, you have to ask him to define them, because they don't mean the same that they mean for everyone else.

[00:18:12] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, that's exactly that. So when he's talking about the bug right now, I think this is worth mentioning. The attack or the bug or the cheating or whatever that he's mentioning. It's not really, you know, it's not a bug in term of coding or in term of the program. It's just, it is kind of an attack if you consider something called the datacarrier limit. So the datacarrier limit was basically the way to fill data to Bitcoin was supposed to be OP_RETURN. And then you can define a limit for this OP_RETURN size, which is your datacarrier limit.

[00:18:52] Kevin Loaec: Right. So from a logic perspective, you should not be able to push more data as in like, you know, raw data like JPEGs into Bitcoin than defined by the datacarrier limit. And right now you can because you are not using OP_RETURN to write this data. So that's what he called a bug. But it's more like a logic bug than an actual code bug. But again, as you were saying, really depends on words here. And so a lot of people think there is a bug in OP_RETURN or there is a bypass of the limit of OP_RETURN.

[00:19:24] Kevin Loaec: There is not. It's just the definition of this restriction, datacarrier, can be bypassed by not using OP_RETURN. So, yeah.

[00:19:33] Vlad Costea: Yeah, but something interesting that came out of this original inscription situation, actually there are two of them. First of all, someone figured out how to do rollups and I've interviewed John Light, who's working on that problem right now. And it's pretty interesting. I mean, he calls them sovereign rollups. He took the idea from Ethereum and it can potentially be a way to do zero-knowledge batch transactions that get broadcast off-chain and then they get deployed in large batches. So they have some privacy and scalability benefits.

[00:20:08] Vlad Costea: I think that's pretty cool the way that he thought about this. And then there was the BitVM thing, which at first I didn't get it. I thought it was just silly stuff. But then I spoke with Sergio Lerner from Rootstock. He's the architect of that system. And he told me that he can basically create decentralized and more trustless sidechains using BitVM. And I thought, you know, that's incredible because it doesn't require any sort of soft fork. It doesn't change the rules for everyone else. It only creates something on the basis of something that's entirely off-chain.

[00:20:47] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, these things are really technical, very, very technical. There is very few people who actually can think of this kind of stuff and understand them and code them. And yeah, crazy innovations. This is really cool. And again, they are just building blocks. Then what you can actually do with them, we don't know yet. And this is really cool. And typically BitVM could be impacted if there was some kind of a change in Bitcoin Core or whatever to reduce the transaction size limit because of JPEGs and stuff.

[00:21:25] Kevin Loaec: So this is one of the collateral damage that could happen because of all the arguments right now. So if there is actually a change in Bitcoin Core or if there is an at-scale filtering of large transactions, well, this use case could actually die. And that's not cool. So yeah.

[00:21:44] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And I was thinking that for the first time ever this year, we had this feeling that the innovation no longer comes or is no longer proposed by Blockstream as the past two soft forks have been entirely their creation with some participation from others. But at least Taproot was entirely made by Greg Maxwell and Andrew Poelstra. And who's the third one that I'm missing? I mean, it was entirely Blockstream research. They wanted to add Schnorr signatures and they created this hybrid, which is Taproot. And then it was very easy to convince us because there was a campaign that has been going for the past 10 years that said that Bitcoin should replace ECDSA with Schnorr signatures because the patent was about to expire.

[00:22:34] Vlad Costea: So that has been it. But now we have proposals for innovation, which are not even soft forks, or at least not yet. There's some stuff that might require soft forks and might get deployed like Ark, but it doesn't come from Blockstream anymore. And I think this is part of the maturing of Bitcoin development. We don't need one company or one group of people that we have been trusting for such a long time to come up with something new, because it seems like it's a larger community of developers who come up with crazy great ideas.

[00:23:11] Kevin Loaec: But again, yeah, that depends on the, it's basically a funding problem. It's not really a centralization problem as such, it's just that Blockstream was the only company who managed to really get a ton of cash just to do research and development. And that was incredible. So of course they were just maintaining many or most of the top devs at the time. They still have incredible people doing incredible work. So very glad these guys exist, but now there is much more funding. So there is all of these other open source funds and things like that really allows developers to be funded outside of big organizations.

[00:23:50] Kevin Loaec: And yeah, that really helps with the, let's say, yeah, as you were saying, maybe maturing of the ecosystem, but also having different ideas and different projects that might be in competition with each other that wouldn't really happen in one single company. So yeah, all of that is really cool.

[00:24:07] Vlad Costea: I want to take the time to read this tweet from you, because I very much enjoyed it. It was yesterday, and you said the best way to fix the inscription spam is to use Bitcoin. They aren't stealing block space, they are just willing, you are just not willing to pay for it. They value their spam more than you value your transactions. If the actual problem is that you have is high fees, what do you want? Price controls?

[00:24:36] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, I think I triggered quite a few people with this one, but that was the point, so.

[00:24:41] Vlad Costea: No, it's excellent because a lot of people don't understand, and I think they spend too much time virtue signaling. Maybe 10 years ago, the narrative was that Bitcoin offers free transactions and you don't even have to pay a fee and you can move money around the world at no cost, because the fee was kind of optional and the miners were collecting higher block rewards. But as that one is going down every four years, gets reduced in half, we're going to have to figure out ways to increase the fees.

[00:25:13] Vlad Costea: And this is one of the first use cases that, it's not one of the first, there was Satoshi Dice that was doing something else a few years ago. But it still proves to us that there's enough demand for block space and that the average Bitcoiner is willing to pay this amount of money to get his transaction included in a block, because that's another discussion to be had. If we only had blocks filled with Ordinal inscriptions, we could argue that, yes, we are being spammed and nobody wants to use the network at this high fee, or in this high fee environments, but we see normal transactions being broadcast and normal economic activity happening, despite the storm.

[00:25:58] Vlad Costea: So this proves that people are willing to spend a lot of money to have their transactions added into a block.

[00:26:07] Kevin Loaec: And also we're not competing with just one entity doing inscriptions. And that's also part of the misconception. It's not just like one player, it's a lot of people, different economic actors that are trying to compete, or that are competing with each other. And that could be multiple inscription people that are also outbidding each other, right? So they are participating in the free market. There is no kind of monopoly or specific financial pressure or advantage they have, they compete with each other. They also get outpriced by Bitcoin transactions, of course, when people are willing to pay for fees.

[00:26:42] Kevin Loaec: I'm not saying I love paying high transaction fees, I don't, I prefer when it's cheap, like everyone, but it's a free market. So now the decision is, you know, do I want to transact or do I not want or need to transact? Which is a very different question. Sure, I cannot pay my coffee with Bitcoin anymore today. Well, that's fine for me, at least, you know, I don't care. But yeah, these inscription people are paying a fortune and surely there's a lot of drama around, you know, SegWit discount and things like that, but that doesn't mean they are discounted compared to me.

[00:27:15] Kevin Loaec: They are still paying a lot more because their transactions are much larger than my, I don't know, 200 kilo-vbyte, 200 vbyte transaction, you know. So yeah, they are paying a very large amount per transaction. And every time I transact, they actually have to compete with me, so they pay even more. So yeah, just part of a free market. It's just normal things.

[00:27:41] Vlad Costea: What's the most ironic part is that these transactions are all Taproot. So we have a high Taproot adoption because of ordinal inscriptions.

[00:27:52] Vlad Costea: Anyway.

[00:27:52] Kevin Loaec: That's a bit sad, actually, because yeah, Taproot is now, especially the people who developed and reviewed Taproot are being kind of accused of doing a bad job because of the bug. There is no bug, right? It's by design Taproot removed the transaction size limit. That's the bug. It's not a bug. It's a design decision, but it broke the datacarrier thing. So yeah, according to who you ask, it might be considered a bug. So Taproot is getting a lot of bad press, but it shouldn't. It's just amazing.

[00:28:28] Vlad Costea: Taproot is great. Yeah, but that was lifted. I mean, the limit for carrying data was lifted because I guess people like Greg Maxwell were hoping that smart contracts, like something that you're doing, are going to become more popular on the chain, right? Yeah, exactly. It was proven wrong.

[00:28:49] Vlad Costea: I guess this is what happens when you spend too much money, not money, too much time looking at scientific stuff and cryptography, and you don't look at markets because Ethereum has had a similar situation during the past bull market with people adding NFTs. I don't think everything that they were minting was on chain, but the average fee was like twenty dollars and everyone was complaining about it. And this has been sustained for like two or three years.

[00:29:18] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, true. I haven't really looked at Ethereum all these years. But yeah, and they were still transacting, right? Again, even like non-NFT stuff, there was a lot of economic activities with whatever, all the things they are doing. So yeah, just a question of value, not price, maybe just value of the transactions. I don't understand, don't ask me, you know, why people are spending so much money on inscriptions. I have no fucking clue. The only use cases I see are basically tax evasion. And money laundering. So are these use cases?

[00:29:51] Kevin Loaec: I don't know, maybe.

[00:29:54] Vlad Costea: No, I think it's also our fault for promoting Bitcoin as truly immutable and talking shit about Ethereum. Because if we didn't talk to it about Ethereum, and we just let it exist and do its thing, and say, yeah, you can use that for tokens and smart contracts and whatever, but Bitcoin is for money. If we did that, then these people would not have switched from Ethereum to Bitcoin, they would still believe that Ethereum is fine. For this use case, but now they're like, yeah, we can pay this amount of money to inscribe on Ethereum, which is a shitcoin.

[00:30:26] Vlad Costea: Everyone says this. Or we can do it on Bitcoin, which is permanent, which has a very good record of preserving private property, had no rollbacks, has no precedent of taking away coins or removing something. So it's more likely that this is going to exist 10 years from now than on Ethereum. So why would I put my money on something which is experimental? And was rolled back in 2016, when I can put my money on Bitcoin? And I guess all of these narratives that we created around Ethereum not being good enough, have driven them away from Ethereum and brought them to Bitcoin the first chance that they had.

[00:31:07] Kevin Loaec: Could be. To be honest, I really have a hard time with the economic mindset behind it. But yeah, and I suppose it's more expensive right now to inscribe a JPEG on Bitcoin than it would be on whatever shitcoin. But yeah, probably you're right. Probably it's this kind of branding of Bitcoin being the immutable thing. And yeah, maybe we're just paying the cost for that.

[00:31:34] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Anyway, let's talk about Miniscript, because that was a big deal, and it still is. You've convinced a lot of hardware wallet manufacturers to integrate that. I think it started with Ledger. It continued with BitBox02. And right now you're pushing Trezor to also do it. So why is it such a big deal?

[00:31:56] Kevin Loaec: So for us, the story is actually quite old for us. So we created Wizardsardine, the company, to develop a first project that we called Revault. Revault is a very complex Bitcoin vault architecture. It allows you to do very cool stuff, restrictions on how some people can transact and things like that within an organization. But anyways, so Revault was a big deal, but the only way to implement it safely was to actually use this completely new thing that was released at the time that's called Miniscript. So we probably were the first or one of the very, very first Bitcoin project to actually use Miniscript.

[00:32:39] Kevin Loaec: But the problem is, we started building Revault in 2020. I think we had the first demo in like 2021, maybe. And so the issue really was, how do we test it? Because no hardware signer would be accepting Miniscript for signing, basically, securely. And so we were like, oh, so now we have a really cool project, but we cannot say it's a security thing, because no hardware signer would actually understand what we're trying to sign. And that was a massive issue. So we started talking to everyone. The very first hardware wallet to actually support Miniscript was Specter DIY.

[00:33:20] Kevin Loaec: It is not a mass market kind of thing. It's a DIY product. But it was the very first to be implemented. So we were really asking everyone, please integrate Miniscript and Specter DIY was the first one. Ledger has been working on it for quite a while, and they released it in, I don't want to say mistake. It was the end of 2022, so December last year. It's been a year. So Miniscript officially on Ledger has been a year, like a year ago. Then, who was next? Coldcard, no, Jade released a test transaction, like a demo.

[00:34:04] Kevin Loaec: BitBox released the demo, then Coldcard released their Edge firmware, which is like the testing firmware. Then BitBox did their production release. Jade, I'm not sure if the production release is there or if it's just a test firmware as well. But anyway, yeah, everyone is moving towards it, which is great. It's not just because of us. There are other people pushing for Miniscript, which is great. There is Rob from a company called AnchorWatch in America. So yeah, there is different projects now pushing for Miniscript, finally. But yeah, it was not an easy job to try to convince hardware wallet manufacturers.

[00:34:46] Vlad Costea: So what would you say are the advantages of Miniscript as opposed to usual Bitcoin script?

[00:34:54] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, there is many. So let's try to simplify what it really does. So Bitcoin script currently is pretty much like assembly language for a computer. You put opcodes together, and you're executing, and you just kind of hope for the best in terms of they do what you want to do, and they do only what you want to do. Because that's also one of the big issues is that most of the attacks against custom script on Bitcoin are that you might not have seen, but there might be different ways to spend an output than the ones you think it's allowing you to spend.

[00:35:34] Kevin Loaec: And this is why there is very, very few custom scripts on Bitcoin. That's why all of the wallets are either single-sig or multisig, basically. Then you have Lightning. Lightning is a different type of script. Then you have some custom scripts like GreenAddress, so the Green wallet. But all of those are basically hard-coded scripts. So at the time, you had to put the script on paper, basically. You hard-code that, and you just put the keys. But now Miniscript is basically letting you define a policy, so how you want the funds to be spendable.

[00:36:10] Kevin Loaec: And the kind of compiler, not really compiler, but the Miniscript job is actually to get you a Bitcoin script. So all of these opcodes that will only make spendable what you want the policy to actually be. So it ensures that there is no way to malleate the thing. There is no way to spend it that you didn't define in your policy, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just a safety mechanism to make sure there is no bug in your script. It also optimizes the cost. So it's very good for finding the best script to do what you want, because there is a different way, for example, to do multisig from script perspective.

[00:36:50] Kevin Loaec: So Miniscript is going to give you the cheapest way to spend your multisig, for example, if you ask it to compile a multisig. It's also something that we call composable. So you can plug Miniscript into each other. So let's say you have a Liana thing with different timelocks. You can have another Miniscript for some multisig, and now you can plug your multisig in one of the paths of the Liana. And in this multisig, you can put another Liana, for example. You can do a lot of weird things like that with Miniscript.

[00:37:25] Vlad Costea: Can I take a break? My cat, I think, wants something, but I'm not sure what.

[00:37:33] Kevin Loaec: Sure.

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[00:38:41] Kevin Loaec: We were talking about Miniscript. Yeah, I was just saying, basically explaining a little bit what it does. But yeah, it's a very kind of abstract concept for people to grasp. It's really for developers. It's just an easier way to deal with Bitcoin scripting. It's safer to use than trying to build your own script by hand. And yeah, and it has a lot of other stuff like the fact that you can plug them into each other. Yeah, it's just an easy way or a good way to do Bitcoin scripting.

[00:39:20] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and you also organize the Breaking Bitcoin conferences, if I'm not mistaken. I can also ask you about BTC Azores, which is the new thing that you're doing and everyone has been praising it. And it's competing, I guess, with BTC++, unless you're collaborating with Lisa also, because she does something similar.

[00:39:42] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, I haven't been to BTC++. I don't think we compete. I think BTC++ is more, as far as I know, my apologies to Lisa if it's not the case. I think it's much more educational, BTC++, while BTC Azores is more like the Fight Club, where you want to complain to the other Bitcoiners, but the mailing list is not the best place to do that. BTC Azores is the place to do it. So, we basically have specific rules that make sure that what you say to people, at least people cannot blame you for saying it, right?

[00:40:26] Kevin Loaec: So, there is this Chatham House rule, which means that you can say what has been said, but you cannot say who said it. So, you can really argue with people. It's very, very technical people attending. So, yeah, very high concentration of core devs and wallet developers and really technical people. We argue about everything from cryptography to whatever random, very obscure stuff in Bitcoin, all things around it. So, yeah, it's a very, very good way to finally get in a room together and be able to say what you think without being afraid of being canceled or anything like that.

[00:41:08] Vlad Costea: It sounds like the early days of Satoshi Roundtable, even though that one has always been somewhat business-oriented.

[00:41:16] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, possibly, yeah. So, I've never been to the Roundtable, but yeah, I've heard of it and maybe the early days were similar to that, yeah.

[00:41:26] Vlad Costea: Now, you have to be a member of a special club to get invited to that. I guess we're not some of the cool kids.

[00:41:35] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, no, we're not. Definitely not.

[00:41:39] Vlad Costea: Anyway, what about Breaking Bitcoin? Why did you not continue with that one?

[00:41:43] Kevin Loaec: Breaking Bitcoin. So, Breaking Bitcoin was a series of three conferences. There was Breaking Bitcoin, Building on Bitcoin and Breaking Bitcoin again. I think it was amazing, for the time at least. The idea with Breaking Bitcoin was that there were a lot of Bitcoin conferences already, but they were very much focused on shilling Bitcoin, not talking about Bitcoin. That was triggering me. I wanted to learn from experts and I wanted to be in a room where we would be talking about the actual things we're working on. What is needed in Bitcoin?

[00:42:29] Kevin Loaec: What are the innovations in Bitcoin? I don't care about hyper-Bitcoinization and shit like that. I was from a technical perspective. So, we were like, okay, let's try to do a security conference on Bitcoin. And that was the very first Breaking Bitcoin. Amazing. People really wanted to participate. Everyone wanted to be doing a talk. We had to refuse. I think maybe just one third of the applications were accepted to speak. Yeah, it was an incredible conference. Then we did the Building on Bitcoin, which was the year after.

[00:43:04] Kevin Loaec: Much more about what's being built, less security. And then we were back to security with the last one that was in Amsterdam.

[00:43:13] Kevin Loaec: It died because of two things, well, three things. But one of them was that the conferences, let's say market, matured a lot. So, Breaking Bitcoin was at the time one of the largest Bitcoin conferences and we had like, what, 300 people, right? 300 attendees. That would be a small conference today. And at the time it was one of the big ones. So, you know, the market being much more mature, very professional organization teams organizing Bitcoin conferences, yeah, can't compete with that, right? That's their full-time jobs.

[00:43:52] Kevin Loaec: They're getting paid for it. Breaking Bitcoin was fully voluntary as well. So, we were a very small team, basically three people at the end. And three people organizing a massive conference just is not. It's not really reasonable. It took us more than six months full-time of our year to get the event together without being paid. Yeah, it's a very heavy cost on your personal life and money and everything. So, you know, it's cool because it's a cool event, but it really needs to justify itself. And finally, there was some drama at the last one and I don't deal that well with drama because we did this amazing t-shirt saying toxic maximalist.

[00:44:37] Kevin Loaec: And some of the sponsors didn't like that and that created drama. And when you are organizing a conference that is at financial loss and the sponsors on top of that are complaining because of your choice of t-shirt, they're like, yeah, maybe I'm going to do something else.

[00:44:54] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I guess this is the villain arc for starting the anti-conference.

[00:45:00] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, exactly.

[00:45:01] Vlad Costea: You can't say what you want to say, you can't make money off of it. It takes too much of your time, so you might as well not do it at all. But what if you want to do it, but you want to do it the exact opposite?

[00:45:16] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, although BTC Azores is also not making money, so that part is not going to change. But yeah.

[00:45:24] Vlad Costea: It's cool to get insights from conference organizers because I'm also thinking about doing a conference in Romania, which would be called Dracula Bitcoin if it succeeds. I'm looking for investors in this project. But the concept is entirely different. I guess this is the first time when I speak about it in the podcast. But basically, I went to a lot of conferences in the last four years and I realized that they're all the same on the inside, meaning that it could take place anywhere around the world. You don't really tell a difference.

[00:45:58] Vlad Costea: It doesn't look like you're in Argentina. It doesn't look like you're in Prague or you're in Amsterdam or you're in Baltic Honey Badger in Riga. I don't know. They all look the same. Same halls, same hotel, conference rooms if it's smaller. There's no identity in it. There's nothing that makes it authentic and gives you the impression that you have traveled to another country and you're getting something cultural out of it. So I was thinking to do something with traditional food, with costumes, basically every ticket. Usually at conferences you have the normal ticket, the general attendance.

[00:46:37] Vlad Costea: You have the VIP one and you also have like a whale pass. Instead of that, I'm thinking to do something like peasants and you become like a village man and you receive a coat or a hat, something that makes you look like a village person from Romania. Something like a noble man for the VIP and you're going to get like a fur coat or something to distinguish you from the rest of the crowd and then you get something for the whale pass, maybe like a vampire cloak.

[00:47:05] Vlad Costea: I don't know, something that makes you even higher in your rank. And maybe also some traditional music and food to make you feel like you're in a different place of the world and give you the impression that, okay, you listened to the talks, you did your networking, but you also got something from that place specifically. And that's the idea that started my thought process, but it's hard to find investors, and people have been telling me, you know, wait for the bull market, let's see what happens. I don't know what you think about this. Maybe it's a stupid idea because it only drives up the ticket prices.

[00:47:40] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, no, I don't think it's a stupid idea as such. The conference, like there are way too many conferences, this is not sustainable so it's a cyclical thing, every bull market, everyone decides they're going to organize a conference the next year, at some point it's a bear market so you're in the middle of a bear market and everyone is actually organizing their conferences and then half of the conferences die and then it starts again. So this is how, you know, it's been filtering each other. I think conferences are still, you know, very important and the differentiation is going to also play a part.

[00:48:27] Kevin Loaec: We are starting to see more and more mainstream conferences again so there is very few technical conferences, there is some, right, but less than the very mainstream one. I mean, you have a range of mainstream as well but let's say Baltic Honey Badger is not very technical, right, you could consider that mainstream. BTC Prague, you can consider that pretty mainstream, a lot of those, right. So I don't know, yeah, I guess bull market means that the general attendee probably wants to attend more conferences and can afford it so that's really cool.

[00:49:06] Kevin Loaec: For the technical people, well, we're going to the events where we can actually talk about tech so it's a bit different.

[00:49:14] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I agree with that, it's kind of a crazy market. It's almost as if people have figured out, I mean it's normal, when people discover Bitcoin they think about how they can integrate their other previous business into the Bitcoin space and maybe that some professional organizers have discovered Bitcoin and now they're using their skills for this. I'm not a professional by any means, I'm just a guy who wants to do something fun and I guess you never have fun when you organize the party. That's a general rule so I have to reconsider how this is going to work but it's a wild idea.

[00:49:56] Vlad Costea: I'm trying to get out, maybe someone listening is going to be interested, maybe not, I don't know.

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[00:50:38] Vlad Costea: What about the Supra cycle though? What do you think about the Supra cycle?

[00:50:47] Kevin Loaec: I don't know, I think people expect too much from, like, all of these bull markets and, you know, just the general, oh, there is a block halving and so we're gonna pump by 10x, and then, you know, there's gonna be a bear market, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. I want that to happen. I want my Bitcoin to pump forever, but yeah, I don't know. I wouldn't tell people, oh yeah, sure, this is for sure, we're back in the bull market and it's gonna go to 100k plus. So yeah, I don't know.

[00:51:26] Vlad Costea: I'm not sure if you heard this correctly. I said Supra as in Toyota Supra, not super.

[00:51:31] Kevin Loaec: Sorry, sorry, no, I didn't get it. Okay, yes. How much is a Supra right now? Just one.

[00:51:40] Vlad Costea: $65,000, something like that.

[00:51:43] Kevin Loaec: That's quite a bit.

[00:51:45] Vlad Costea: So the thought process behind it is that we were supposed to get Lambos, I guess. But I don't have enough Bitcoin to get a Lambo and even if I ever did, why spend everything on a Lambo? It's kind of stupid. That thing's gonna break down. It costs a lot for insurance. It's a bad idea overall. It's not gonna get more value in time. It's just a fun little machine that you're getting. But what is the plebs' Lambo? Something that can get you 90% of the experience at 10% of the price. And I looked at sports cars that are still being made and I stumbled upon the Supra by Toyota and I was like, this is cool. It's kind of small for me, I guess, I gotta do a test drive before I make a final decision, but I made up this meme on Twitter, I guess you haven't seen it.

[00:52:36] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, I have seen it. I just misunderstood when you were talking about it.

[00:52:40] Vlad Costea: You get a Supra and you get a girlfriend, and if you already have a girlfriend, then she gets a girlfriend. So I got a girlfriend before the Supra, and I want to make her a Supra girlfriend, which means that she's gonna get someone to take her to the nail salon or whatever, so I can play more video games. That's the goal right now.

[00:53:02] Kevin Loaec: Cool. So are you going to sell your coins to buy a Supra?

[00:53:07] Vlad Costea: That's a good question.

[00:53:09] Kevin Loaec: Are you gonna go with a [unclear: Tata] something?

[00:53:13] Vlad Costea: What coins?

[00:53:15] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, the layer one coins, on-chain transaction, paying high fees and everything.

[00:53:23] Vlad Costea: I mean, of course that's worthwhile, you know, you pay a high fee to get a Supra. I don't, it's a bit silly when you think about it, but at the same time, you can also use services for finance like Firefish or whatever to take a loan. Granted that you pay that back. I don't know. It's a good question. The right question is at which price does it make people willing to spend Bitcoin on a Supra? Now I think there are some cool options right now. And I'm gonna show one of the companies that used to sponsor my podcast. It's called ShopinBit and they have this service where they buy the car for you, you pay five percent fee, they get the papers done and basically they pass the ownership to you.

[00:54:14] Vlad Costea: And this can be very cool if you have a reason to not buy the car under your name. And they also have a service for license plates and they can get the license plates for you and they cover everything, all the paperwork, and all you have to do is drive around and pay your annual fee. I think that's also interesting for someone who wants to have some privacy driving a fancy car.

[00:54:42] Kevin Loaec: All right. And so, just as a leasing, right? So you basically just pay a yearly fee, or you also pay the full price of the car and they just put it at their name?

[00:54:51] Vlad Costea: No, it's not a leasing. It's a way to pay for the car without actually buying the car under your name. So they buy the car, you give them Bitcoin plus five percent of the fiat price, they transfer ownership to you, and then you can also access their service for license plates if you don't want to register it under your name in your country, they can do that for you.

[00:55:17] Kevin Loaec: All right.

[00:55:18] Vlad Costea: But I think it works best in Europe because they're based in Poland, so...

[00:55:24] Kevin Loaec: [unclear: I don't] know the regulation about that, but yeah, cool, why not. It's interesting.

[00:55:28] Vlad Costea: Because you basically buy a car with your Bitcoin. Of course you pay five percent premium, but you don't have to sell the Bitcoin, you spend it. That's interesting. So, what's your opinion on Ledger? Let's get something controversial. You're friends with the guys, you made them do Miniscript, but at the same time they let you down all the time.

[00:56:01] Kevin Loaec: It's a big company now. But yeah, I've known Ledger forever. But again, you know, I've known the Trezor guys about the same time, I guess, so a long time ago. Where do I start? From a hardware guy, because I really into hardware back in the days, I really like the Ledger from a hardware perspective. The security work that goes behind it is really cool. The attack vectors, you know, the threat model is really well thought against physical attackers. So to me that's very important. I assume that when someone very motivated wants to steal your Bitcoin, they might get physical access to the device or they might get access to, you know, your laptop and things like that.

[00:56:59] Kevin Loaec: And you really want the thing that holds your key to be really safe and secure. So I think for that, Ledger, great, great stuff. At least it was back in the days. I suppose they are still doing a very good job today from a hardware perspective. Now, the company grew a lot. There is like 700 employees now there. So it's a very large company. And as far as I know, there is just one person working on Bitcoin. So yeah, one person working on Bitcoin in a 700 employees company is not great, right? So of course, we were great friends with a few of them working there. But yeah, you know, what do you want me to say?

[00:57:46] Kevin Loaec: I don't like Ledger Live, so the software you have to use to, you know, set up your Ledger and update your firmware and everything, it's just horrible. It's trying to get you to buy shitcoins all the time. Like, that's the only thing it does, basically, trying to shill your shitcoins. I don't know how the marketing works behind it. Maybe shitcoins pay them money to be advertised there. I really don't know what the model is. So yeah, this question has a lot of things I can say. So I really like what they are doing. Technically, I don't like the very, very heavy shitcoin marketing aspect. I really don't like the Ledger Recover thing they're offering now, or like for 10 bucks a month.

[00:58:34] Kevin Loaec: You can basically send them your private key that's going to be sharded between three providers. Maybe it will save some people to lose money, because they will, you know, lose their keys and then rely on this recovery system, but now the problem is you're basically sharing your private key with other people. That's not great. Yeah, so not cool. That I think is not cool.

[00:59:02] Vlad Costea: I think the interesting part about this situation is that Ledger is still the market leader. So you see people on Twitter mocking them and saying, no, you should stop using it, blah, blah, blah. It did not affect them so much. It somewhat increased the sales for their competitors, but they did not lose their market leader position in spite of that announcement, which proves that they might have been right from a marketing perspective. They know their customers. So this is basically an evolution of where we're at with adoption, with people who are afraid to hold their own keys.

[00:59:40] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, that's a good point. I don't know enough about the hardware wallet market actually. I don't know the percentage of people that actually use let's say Bitcoin and own a hardware wallet or hardware signer. I guess a lot of them now. It took a while though. I know, yeah, Coldcard. So Coinkite sold a lot of Coldcards after the Ledger Recover thing. So that was a great marketing for the other companies than Ledger. Because people don't like to share their private key. That's as simple as that. You shouldn't and people know that.

[01:00:15] Kevin Loaec: But yeah, then, you know, it's just, to me it's a device. I hate the software side of things, but I don't need to access the software side of things. So yeah, if I can choose and buy a device right now, a signer, hardware signer, I don't need one because I have plenty on my desk. But if I needed to buy one, I don't know, I would just look for like the cheap ones. Definitely some of the hardware manufacturers are now very expensive. So you really need to think twice when you recommend it to someone.

[01:00:45] Kevin Loaec: Someone new to Bitcoin is not going to buy a whole Bitcoin. They're going to buy a few hundred bucks. And if you tell them, well, you have to buy a device that costs 200 bucks to put them, they're like, well, so Ledger is doing a good job with that. But they're not the only one. Like Jade from Blockstream is also very affordable. Yeah, you have some affordable devices out there as well. So you're not stuck with Ledger. Marketing wise, I don't even know where they do the marketing.

[01:01:14] Kevin Loaec: But I suppose one of the big things they have is that they are compatible with like 99% of the shitcoins, if that's even possible. And that's probably a very unique thing.

[01:01:26] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and to people who say they're gonna throw their Ledgers in the garbage and get something new because they have to, because of that update, I tell them just use your Ledger with Electrum, with Wasabi, with Specter, with Sparrow or whatever other wallet you like.

[01:01:44] Kevin Loaec: Yes, with Liana, please use it. Yeah, exactly. So because you have a Ledger, it doesn't mean you have to use Ledger Live. It doesn't mean you have to share anything like xpub or whatever with Ledger. Just use it as a device. You can roll your entropy outside of the device. You can put it on the device, use it as a signer. And it works with pretty much like most software wallet, if not all. So yeah, to me, it's not useful to throw it away, except if it's just to make your position, it's more a moral position thing than an actual security thing.

[01:02:24] Vlad Costea: I just realized that you're a hardware guy, so I have to ask you this since I have it on my desk because we're both nerds and we have hardware wallets on our desks. Have you tried the Trezor Safe 3? I just got it last week.

[01:02:37] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, I haven't tried it yet. So that's the one with the secure element, right?

[01:02:41] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's interesting because for years they have been saying that they don't want to have a secure element. And now they added one that they say is at least auditable, but it's not their own. They're working on creating Tropic Square.

[01:02:55] Kevin Loaec: Tropic Square is not going to be used for that either. So the current chip they are doing at Tropic Square is not capable of signing Bitcoin transactions, for example. So it's not going to be used in the Trezor as such.

[01:03:14] Vlad Costea: Are you sure this is the final design and it will never be able to sign Bitcoin transactions?

[01:03:20] Kevin Loaec: So there is no final design as such. It's a company, right? They started a company to do that. But yeah, the current market for their stuff is more like IoT, very edge devices that you throw everywhere in the nature, not hardware wallets for Bitcoin.

[01:03:38] Vlad Costea: That's interesting because I interviewed their CEO in April and he told me that the new Trezor that they're going to release in 2025 is going to be the first device to use their own chip from Tropic Square.

[01:03:50] Kevin Loaec: That's very interesting because as far as I know, it doesn't sign the ECDSA curve we have in Bitcoin. So I would need to read into that because I'm quite sure of what I'm saying.

[01:04:07] Vlad Costea: Interesting. We have one year to figure out if this was only a marketing ploy or they're going to be using this different chip for the rest of their devices. But this is, as far as I understand, like a middle release. It's like something that was launched to mark the 10 year anniversary of the Trezor 1 to improve on the same device. But it's like a release before a bigger one that's going to happen. I don't know. This is what I've been told. I haven't really looked into the Tropic Square development.

[01:04:41] Vlad Costea: It's just that I have heard from the team and I guess you know better and we're going to see next year when they launch.

[01:04:49] Kevin Loaec: But again, it's very hard to develop a new secure element type chip or even secure chip is an incredible amount of work. It's amazing that this company exists and that the guys at Trezor were willing to throw the money to create this company in the first place because that's a very big deal. It will take time, probably decades before we can have proper open source secure elements. But yeah, that's super important for everyone. So very excited about it. On secure elements themselves though, there are a lot of people that are very much against it because currently you don't have open source secure elements.

[01:05:32] Kevin Loaec: So you cannot review what they do. You cannot know if they are actually secure. But there is no non-secure element that's actually secure. So they're like, what do we do? And then there is different design approaches. For example, the one at Coldcard is pretty interesting. Well, I mean, in many of the hardware.

[01:05:56] Vlad Costea: Yeah, the ATECC608A and B, I guess. That's in Coldcard and Passport and BitBox02. Lots of them have it.

[01:06:05] Kevin Loaec: Exactly. So basically, you store the secret on a secure chip, but you don't do any of the math on it. So you don't run any code on the secure chip. You just store the secret there, and then you actually run all of the execution on the general purpose chip. This is good against the attacks on the secure element itself, backdoors and stuff like that. But it is bad. It's a compromise. So it's bad against all of the side channel attacks when your hardware is actually plugged in.

[01:06:37] Kevin Loaec: So if your wallet is offline and somebody takes it, they shouldn't be able to extract the secret. But if you're actually using it, there is a lot of side channel attacks that can be used there. So that's a compromise again. What's your threat model? And yeah, always the same compromises.

[01:06:54] Vlad Costea: Honestly speaking, I don't think you can beat a BIP39 backup with a BIP39 passphrase. I think that one is pretty good, especially if you reset the device and nobody is able to find anything and you recover from seed every time that you use it. That's one of the topics that don't get discussed too much because you should get used to resetting your device often.

[01:07:22] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. Again, it's a choice because when you enter your seed and your passphrase and et cetera, then you absolutely need to be in a secure environment. No camera, no maybe no microphone. It depends what type of attacker you have in mind. But side channel attacks are a real thing. You have a, I don't know, you have a Coldcard and you are not using the scrambling. You're typing your PIN with the clicky buttons. Well, a microphone can pretty much figure out which button you're pressing because they all have a different clicky sound.

[01:07:55] Kevin Loaec: So, you know, it's like security never ends, there is always attacks. But yeah, sure. Passphrases, if the passphrase is good, yeah, when your key is not hot, you should be good.

[01:08:11] Vlad Costea: To some extent, you have the Trezor Model T, which I think has the best input experience. You type on this T9 keyboard, the letters on the screen get scrambled. And you also type letters and you can wipe the screen if you're paranoid that someone's going to look at the exact places on the screen where you left your fingerprint. It's not maybe ideal because I would prefer a larger screen for typing. I have thick fingers, but it's the best one that I have used so far for typing passphrases and stuff.

[01:08:47] Vlad Costea: On Ledger, for example, it's a nightmare. It's so annoying.

[01:08:51] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, it's pretty annoying. BitBox, I'm okay with it. It's just not super user friendly. It's very hard to explain to someone that has never used a BitBox how to type a passphrase or even just type a mnemonic or a PIN. But yeah, I do like the BitBox as well as a, you know, as a user experience for typing stuff. Yeah.

[01:09:14] Vlad Costea: Oh, I like that one, too. But my issue with it is that it's a bit slippery. I don't know how I should describe it because it's so easy to make mistakes because of that sliding control.

[01:09:27] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, that's fair.

[01:09:29] Vlad Costea: On Ledger, for example, it's slow, but at least it's more precise. The decision that you're making for one letter or for something that you have chosen in the menu is more clear. But in the case of the BitBox, it can be a bit slippery. Yeah, that's my only issue with it. Because otherwise, if you know what you're doing, you can go very fast. And it's very nice for typing. Yeah. Is there any device that you think is closest to what you expect or makes you happiest in terms of hardware wallets? I know they all have trade-offs.

[01:10:12] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, they all have trade-offs. But what would be the perfect thing? So a lot of people believe in air-gapped hardware wallets. I like the idea, but I hate the user experience. So currently, at least. So for me, I don't really have a problem to plug in my hardware wallet. So let's start with that. I don't need QR code or whatever right now because I don't like the QR code scanning. If we find better ways of doing it, cool. But right now, no.

[01:10:49] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, it's hard to say. For someone like me, of course, Coldcard is great because it has a ton of features. You can do a lot of advanced stuff with a Coldcard. And I really like the idea there.

[01:11:04] Kevin Loaec: Ledger, for what I'm using, let's say using Liana, it's great. The user experience is great. Super simple. Just plug it, access the Bitcoin app, and it will just display you what you're signing, and that's cool. BitBox, same thing. Pretty simple. Once you have typed in your PIN and everything, you're good to go. So I don't really have an issue with any of them. Perfect one? None of them is perfect, I guess. I always have small things that are triggering me. For example, the cables, the choice of cables.

[01:11:39] Kevin Loaec: BitBox, cool. I can plug it in directly in my computer. I like the idea. But then the cable I need needs to be female, male. And you don't find that. You just don't find that. This is not a common type of USB-C cable. Usually, USB-C is just the same connector, both ends. So now that makes it easy to plug in directly, but bad to find a replacement cable. Because the cables break all the time. So that's one thing that's triggering me. Yeah, I don't know.

[01:12:12] Kevin Loaec: That's a very good question. Maybe the new Coldcard stuff, like the Coinkite, the Q1, or now just Q, is going to be interesting. I'm looking forward to see what that looks like. I'm very interested in larger screens because of what I do. So with Liana and any complex Bitcoin wallet, you want to display the descriptor. So you want to display what is actually in this wallet. It's not just an xpub. And so now we're really starting to see the limitations in all of these devices where you have to scroll forever on a BitBox, or you have to press next, next, next, next on a Ledger.

[01:12:50] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, bigger screens for me would be great. So we will see where the industry goes with that.

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[01:14:37] Vlad Costea: Let me ask you this final question. Why should anyone download Liana today?

[01:14:44] Kevin Loaec: I don't think anyone or everyone, I don't think everyone should download Liana today, but anyone? Yeah, sure. So if you're using Bitcoin today, especially if you're using a desktop wallet, probably you should try Liana. I would say there is a very high chance that Liana is actually better for you than other desktop Bitcoin wallets. Now, if you're using a mobile wallet or whatever, you know, it's just desktop for now. You're not going to have the same user experience as a mobile wallet where you just have some funds and you can press, you know, send and receive.

[01:15:27] Kevin Loaec: But otherwise, I would say anyone that's interested in testing safer backups or inheritance stuff on Bitcoin, yeah, just try Liana. It's super easy to use. Go to the website wizardsardine.com/liana, download it, you run it. When you run it will ask you to connect it to a Bitcoin Core node on the same machine. So that's a very big limitation for people right now. So either you already have Bitcoin Core on your machine and in that case, basically it will connect to it or you don't have it.

[01:16:00] Kevin Loaec: And in that case, you can click the button, I want Liana to figure it out. So Liana will download Bitcoin Core, install it on your machine and do the synchronization, but that can take some time. As you know, the IBD is like two days for mainnet right now. So that's kind of the annoying part. But once you have that, you're fully sovereign, you have a proper desktop wallet there, currently compatible with Specter DIY, Ledger and BitBox. We have a Coldcard integration that's coming very soon. But it's currently still stuck because there is an update needed on Coldcards.

[01:16:37] Kevin Loaec: So we are working with them on finalizing it. But I would say maybe in a month or something, we will have Coldcards as well. So yeah, that's mainly that. Just try it. It's a normal Bitcoin wallet. It's just that it does cool stuff in the back for safer backups and inheritance and stuff like that.

[01:16:58] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I very much like your response. I guess if I was more critical, I would have asked you, what does Liana do that Electrum doesn't? Because that's like the Swiss Army knife of Bitcoin wallets. And if I was any smarter, I would have done a live demo with you just to share the screen and show how the wallet works. But I guess there is room for another episode some other time when maybe you're adding more features or something.

[01:17:24] Kevin Loaec: We're always adding more features. That's one thing we're moving forward a lot. We might be releasing a new version tomorrow, actually. We're testing it right now. So making sure everything is fine. Well, Electrum doesn't support Miniscript right now. So that's the first part of the answer. So if you want to do timelock stuff properly, Electrum is not the way to go.

[01:17:50] Vlad Costea: Okay, thank you very much, Kevin. How can people follow you and the Liana project?

[01:17:56] Kevin Loaec: Well, Liana, they can go to the website, first of all, to check it out. So wizardsardine.com. On Twitter. Yeah, Twitter is still the best place for us. So Wizardsardine for the company stuff, including Liana. For myself, it's at KLOAEC. K for Kevin and Loaec for my last name. And yeah, that's mainly that.

[01:18:21] Vlad Costea: Thank you very much, Kevin. I enjoyed this interview, and I look forward to everything that you're going to release.

[01:18:27] Kevin Loaec: Perfect, thank you very much.