Title: S17 E47: Tabconf 8 Livestream with Kevin Loaec, Ekrem Bal, Spaces Protocol & The Bitcoin Pivot (Bonus: Peter Todd) Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea) Guest(s): Ekrem Bal (Chief Scientist, Citrea / Chainway Labs); Kevin Loaec (WizardSardine, Liana Wallet); Stu (StuTXO, Bitcoin Red team); Andrew ("Phaedrus", Spaces protocol community, Bitcoin Curious YouTube channel); Buffer (lead developer, Spaces protocol); Jesse Markowitz and Kyle Shurtness (The Bitcoin Pivot); Peter Todd (bonus: Zcash Sprout ceremony laptop unboxing); plus brief unidentified passers-by Published: 2026-10-18 Duration: 3:40:14 Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2026-10-18_s17_e47-_tabconf_8_livestream_with_kevin_loaec_ekrem_bal_spaces_protocol_the_bitcoin_pivot.mp3 Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2026-10-18_s17_e47-_tabconf_8_livestream_with_kevin_loaec_ekrem_bal_spaces_protocol_the_bitcoin_pivot.mp3 Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic diarization, reconciled against a second independent local Whisper transcript of the YouTube livestream audio, with 56 doubtful stretches re-transcribed locally from short audio clips (medium.en). Speaker labels fixed by hand (Vlad Costea, Ekrem Bal, Kevin Loaec, Stu, Andrew, Buffer, Jesse Markowitz, Kyle Shurtness, Peter Todd). Names and jargon checked against the show notes and the web (Citrea, Chainway Labs, Crest, Clementine v2, BitVM2/BitVM3, garbled circuits, Glock/Alpen, Argo, Liam Eagen, RISC Zero, Groth16, STARKs, Great Script Restoration, OP_CAT/OP_CTV/OP_TX/OP_TEMPLATEHASH, OP_RETURN, Bitcoin Knots, BIP 110, eCash, Railgun proof of innocence, Liana, Revault, Coldcard, AnchorWatch, Sapio, Bark, Spaces protocol, spacesd, Nacho, cert relays, nsite, Blossom, Start9, NIP-05, atbitcoin.com, Bitplication/Jobtober, Shielded CSV, Zark, Twetch, NCUA, Aave, Fedimint, Zooko, Sean Bowe, Tachyon, Zashi/Zodl, OpenTimestamps, LADA/Car for Ukraine, Emin Gün Sirer). Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; factual slips by speakers are kept as spoken (one editorial note in square brackets marks the livestream break). Noisy conference-hallway livestream with crosstalk: remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess], and lines whose speaker could not be identified are labeled [unclear speaker]. ================================================================================ [00:00:47] Vlad Costea: Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 17, Episode 47, live from TABConf. I'm joined by Ekrem, who is the CEO, right? [00:00:47] Ekrem Bal: No, Chief Scientist. [00:00:47] Vlad Costea: Chief Scientist of Citrea. [00:00:47] Ekrem Bal: Yes, hello. Orkun is the CEO. [00:00:47] Vlad Costea: Orkun is the CEO. And he has a lot of interesting stuff to say about what's been happening with Citrea. It launched earlier this year. I was part of the ceremony. I destroyed a computer to make that happen. Thank you for that. And now you guys are pivoting to privacy. [00:01:23] Ekrem Bal: So, hello everyone and thank you for having me, Vlad. So, we just announced an acquisition of Crest, which is the simplest Bitcoin privacy wallet. It's based on Zcash-style privacy, where there's a pool and then every transaction hides the amount, the address, everything about it, mostly, except that the transaction happens. [00:01:54] The app has easy deposit withdrawals, so you can deposit from Bitcoin L1, Lightning and other chains as well. And then you can withdraw to other chains as well. [00:02:09] Vlad Costea: So that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. I was thinking that you guys have basically the best marketing ever. You're in the mailing lists. You're in the tweets of the BIP 110ers. You're basically part of a great conspiracy for changing Bitcoin, the OP_RETURN limit. And you're not even using that. That's the fun part. Like, there was a change in Bitcoin Core v30, which some of the BIP 110ers really disliked. And they started running Knots and now they're on a separate chain. But you guys never actually... [00:02:46] This, I think, wait, I think this is the Luke chain. Or the last page. Go to the last page, yes. It's the one that shows Luke with a laptop. I'm not sure if it's visible on camera. That chain doesn't allow large OP_RETURNs. [00:02:58] Ekrem Bal: That chain doesn't allow large OP_RETURNs. Yes. So we don't use it. We actually [unclear: urged] the PR for using large OP_RETURNs instead of unspendable outputs. So when we were first designing the protocol, we needed to find a way to do a challenge response. So like there are watchtowers who challenge about the longest chain of Bitcoin to be able to prove things about Bitcoin. In Bitcoin, we need to reason about the Bitcoin chain. [00:03:34] And to do so, there needs to be challengers. And these challengers are providing a longest chain proof. So the proof is basically a ZK proof, SNARK proof, and total work. And that's it. It proves that there exists a Bitcoin chain that has this total work. And we need to put this challenge in a transaction some way so that operators can say, okay, these were the challenges that challenged me. And I know a chain that has more work. And in this chain, I was honest. So initially, we knew that the OP_RETURN limit was 80 bytes, but the proofs are 144 bytes, including the total work, 16 bytes. [00:04:24] So we said, okay, this transaction will happen rarely only if there is a malicious operator. So let's just use the unspendable output. So each Taproot output would give 32 bytes. So we would have two unspendable outputs. And I was talking about this with some core devs, like, oh, this works like this. And we also have these zero-sat outputs, [unclear: round] transactions to make it more efficient and have more throughput than [unclear: TBL] possible. And then they said, okay, don't do this. Don't use unspendable outputs. And then they created the mailing list posts and so on. [00:05:06] And then it got merged. We still haven't encountered a malicious operator, so we haven't still used any unspendable outputs or large OP_RETURNs. But it's good for having these kind of limits relaxed, because now people can design better and more beautiful protocols. The transaction size for us doesn't change that much. Unspendable outputs adds a total of 660 sats. It's nothing. But if it can be represented in a single OP_RETURN, I believe it's more beautiful and also less harmful to Bitcoin, because unspendable outputs will be in the UTXO set forever. [00:05:57] Vlad Costea: So what would you say is the main benefit that Citrea brings to Bitcoin? And I'm actually going to ask the other question later. So let's start with this. [00:06:06] Ekrem Bal: So the main benefit is we bring programmability to Bitcoin and also scalability, because every transaction on Citrea is actually a Bitcoin transaction. And then our batch proofs are picking up those transactions, compressing it with ZK proofs, and writing it on Bitcoin. And this gives us good scalability. Actually, I tried, for example, Lightning-style payment channels. And it's more efficient than Lightning, opening a Lightning channel, actually, because the state diffs are compressing the data that's put on Bitcoin. And also it gives programmability, like now you can have smart contracts, you can have multiple kind of multisigs that uses different kind of curves. [00:06:53] For example, curves that you can use from your iPhone's enclave. And also you can have ZK-style privacy. Right now, as of now, as far as I know, the only privacy protocol on Bitcoin is CoinJoins, which gives you some privacy because it mixes the inputs and outputs of large input-output transactions. But there are still some problems around fingerprinting. Whenever the output spends another Bitcoin transaction, that fingerprint might get linked to the input transaction. But ZK-style privacy gives you better design because now you can hold your funds inside the pool, and whenever you are doing a purchase or sending money to someone, you can just exit and do that. [00:07:43] And that would give you better [00:07:44] Vlad Costea: Privacy. That's really cool. And I very much like the fact that you are pivoting to privacy. It's very similar with what Ethereum had with Tornado Cash, but this is on Bitcoin. I think the benefit is that, let's say that you have some coins and you want to break the link of your previous transactions. For various reasons, like Bitcoin is this panopticon where you can see all the previous transactions prior to an UTXO. And maybe you want to just stay in this shielded pool for a while, while others are joining, and then withdraw small chunks of it. [00:08:19] It's a very good use case for whales and for people who don't want everyone to see how much Bitcoin is being held. They're only going to be able to see how much is held in that pool, but not how much every user is holding. And then you can just exit with the amounts that you want. The only way you can actually make this privacy pointless is if you join with, let's say, one Bitcoin and you leave with the same one Bitcoin minus the transaction fee. That sort of makes it obvious. [00:08:48] But if more people do this, you actually have at least some deniability. If you join with one Bitcoin and then you leave with 0.1 Bitcoin in 10 different transactions across a year or something, that's going to give you very good privacy. And I think that's an excellent use case for Bitcoin. And it's not just, of course, people think of criminal activity or whatever when they hear about privacy. I think the geopolitical argument is that if you're American, you don't want North Korean hackers to target you. [00:09:19] And if you are part of some large corporation or whatever that's holding Bitcoin on the balance sheet, you don't want that to be visible to everyone because it's a honeypot for hackers. They're going to try to target that. That's one way where privacy is useful and part of the reason why I'm so excited about you guys doing this because it's Zcash style privacy on Bitcoin with the BTC that you have. Of course, people say, well, you can just swap into Zcash and you have the same benefit. [00:09:49] But the price is different and there's more risk in terms of volatility for holding Zcash. [00:09:55] Ekrem Bal: Exactly. I think holding Bitcoin and still being in a private pool is really useful. And also, I want to add, not only whales, I think everybody would benefit from this. For example, I always think whenever I'm suggesting using crypto for people, I need to explain every transaction you make is public, actually. They can trace you. And it's physical attacks happening all the time around the world. And privacy, to me, is a solution for that, in a way, not the silver bullet, but it helps because, imagine, you want to pay something with your Bitcoin, you pay it. [00:10:39] And if some outsider, some adversary can see that transaction and can see all of your funds, then it's really bad. How are we going to make people use this if there are risks like this? There's that. And also, using Bitcoin L1 privately is also really hard. You need to deal with UTXO management and all that stuff, hygiene. But with ZK-style privacy, it's just more convenient. You just don't need to care about these things. And also, if you deposit 1 BTC, withdraw 1 BTC, that leaks your privacy. [00:11:22] But, yeah, if the pool gets better, that can be solved. And also, I saw some people doing like, oh, someone deposits 1 BTC, and another person exactly withdraws 1 BTC, so that it tricks the system, basically. But yeah, I think there are a lot of benefits of privacy. [00:11:41] Vlad Costea: I'm also proud because in the beginning, you guys were not sold on privacy. You're like, yeah, we can do this, but someone can deploy it. I remember I had this conversation with, I don't think it was Orkun, or maybe it was, but definitely Talip. I've asked them if Citrea is going to focus on privacy and said, well, it's just one of the use cases. But now you're sort of doubling down on it, which I really like. [00:12:05] Ekrem Bal: Yes, yes, I think the privacy is one of the best use cases of ZK rollups on Bitcoin. And also like multisigs and other kind of use cases are that I like, and lending borrowing is also one of the great use cases. But yeah, I mean, before Citrea, we were working on privacy, we did proof of innocence on top of Tornado Cash, after the sanctions, we created a ZK circuit where you can prove that your withdrawal is not coming from one of the hackers like North Korean, those are hackers that we know of, without losing your anonymity. [00:12:40] So we always loved privacy. And it's great to be building privacy on Bitcoin now. [00:12:40] Vlad Costea: So that was Chainway, right? [00:12:40] Ekrem Bal: Yes, yes. Chainway is still the [unclear: big] building company. Citrea is the ZK rollup. Crest is the simplest Bitcoin wallet. [00:12:57] Vlad Costea: I saw this guy's t-shirt. Would you like to be on camera? I want to record your t-shirt. You can cover your face. I just like your t-shirt. The camera is here. [00:13:11] You don't want to put your face. [00:13:19] She's wearing a t-shirt that says Bitcoin is literally a cult of retarded people, which is a quote from Shinobi. And I really like it. [unclear: Did you see that one I was wearing on Monday?] Just hold this. Your face is not on camera, so you can say your name or whatever. [00:13:37] [unclear speaker]: No, no. I have a t-shirt that has JW Weatherman added me to their list of supporters of Entropy Lab. There's a whole beef going on between JW Weatherman and Mr. Hodl about Entropy Lab, which is a direct response to Coldcard shenanigans and trying to give people a few more ways that they can actually engage directly with the entropy and the seed creation and shore up their understanding, but also give them some tools so that they don't have to trust hardware that's manufactured for that process. [00:14:18] Anyways, Twitter beef evolves from that, and some of it's quite comical. I had a t-shirt with a little just the notification that JW Weatherman had added me to his list of supporters of Entropy Lab. Kind of goes with the Shinobi quote t-shirt. [00:14:34] Vlad Costea: Thank you very much, sir. Nice t-shirt. I should make one of those. I want to ask you, how would you compare Citrea with other ZK rollups launching on Bitcoin? I know that Alpen Labs is working on something, but they haven't shipped mainnet. You guys have been around for almost one year in terms of having live network and whatever. And what are the lessons that you learned from being live for almost one year? [00:15:02] Ekrem Bal: Oh, I think being live helps a lot on like seeing what people want, what people want to use this for, and also understand some things around like how things work and also improving on hardening the system as well. We have done a lot of hardening on our infra as well. So yeah, if comparison wise, I think it's really similar. Alpen and Citrea are doing similar things. They use BitVM3 garbled circuits based on [unclear: Glock] as far as I know. We shipped with BitVM 2, which is based on ZK verifier script written on Bitcoin scripts, where these proof scripts are huge. [00:15:52] But we also recently completed, and we're going to hopefully ship it early next year, Clementine v2, which is based on garbled circuits, succinct garbled circuits, which is based on Argo, which Liam Eagen found. It's much more efficient way of verifying ZK proofs on Bitcoin. Yeah, that's cool. [00:16:22] Vlad Costea: So did you get any complaints or major bug fixes since you came into production? Or was everything smooth from the beginning? Because you spent also a lot of time in testing and alpha nets, whatever, signets. [00:16:35] Ekrem Bal: Signet, testnet, we did a lot of testnet. Actually, testnet helps us a lot on hardening the system a lot. We still run the same testnet with almost no downtime since the beginning when we started testnet. And it shows what happens if the state gets bigger or block numbers get bigger. We did some bug fixes around Clementine and Citrea. And yeah, we have our bug bounty. We recently started to receive a lot of like slop findings, AI findings that are incorrect, but some are bugs that we fix. [00:17:26] So yeah, I think it helps being on mainnet and having people try to poke things and then you fix those. And then at the end, we get this hardened network that is capable of doing these kind of things. [00:17:45] Vlad Costea: But what was the user feedback like? What did the users say once they started using? I remember possibly the first pitch for Citrea is that it was going to take some of that WBTC liquidity for DeFi stuff. It seems like DeFi is not as popular anymore. [00:18:02] Ekrem Bal: Yes, Bitcoin DeFi is not popular anymore. But I think one of the user feedbacks. Mostly the user feedback was around like the bridging is hard and all that stuff. Like when we shipped first Clementine, we started with Clementine CLI. It was a CLI to the deposit and withdrawals, but it was hard to use. And then we shipped the Clementine web app, which from the web app you can deposit and withdraw. And so those kinds of UX improvements helped us a lot. So yeah, that's basically improving the UX. [00:18:47] And also, we realized like we need a flagship app for Citrea. So then we decided, okay, we're doing privacy. And then we started doing Crest. [00:19:03] Vlad Costea: Right now Alpen is trying to make their proofs more efficient with garbled circuits and stuff like this. And it's gonna be a while until their launch. Do you think it's possible for you guys to just steal their homework and upgrade Citrea to whatever it is that they've been doing? And you already have the users and they will launch basically without you. They will be late and also they will not have any users. Like is that possible or do you think that the design for Citrea is kind of final? [00:19:32] Ekrem Bal: Well, like in terms of bridge, the trust assumptions are even if you use BitVM3 or BitVM2 are the same. It's like trust minimized. What the garbled circuits or BitVM3 helps with is the collateral requirements to be an operator. So yeah, with Clementine v2, we already have an implementation of it, which makes the operator collateral requirements like 100x cheaper. So that would make being an operator cheaper, thus improving the liveness assumptions of the withdrawals, because now we can have more operators cheaply. [00:20:25] Vlad Costea: Okay, so after privacy, what do you think is the next big use case for Citrea? [00:20:30] Ekrem Bal: After privacy, what's the next big use case? I mean, lending borrowing and DeFi is a good use case. What else? Also like multisigs where you can have like everybody wants covenants on Bitcoin. It's like you can have vaults where you can have other spending paths that gets activated after timelock and stuff. You can do these on Citrea. And I think these are good use cases. Agentic payments are also good use cases. I believe like having a kind of like a multisig where you're, for example, a hardware wallet is the authorizer and you can give your agents like spending limits. [00:21:15] I tried doing this, like I gave my agent spending limit of $10 per day and then can use my wallet. It cannot spend all of it or accidentally make it zero, but it can play with it. So these are also good use cases. I think there are also maybe other use cases that we didn't think of. [00:21:36] Vlad Costea: I think what's really fashionable nowadays is quantum resistance, just to have the kind of pools or addresses which are quantum resistant. Are you guys working on that or you're working for other teams to figure something out before you implement it? [00:21:52] Ekrem Bal: No, we did some research around how to make Citrea post-quantum resistant. So the proof we use is, the zkVM uses RISC Zero. The STARK proofs are post-quantum, but we actually compress them with Groth16 and write it on Bitcoin like that. And that Groth16 proof is not post-quantum secure. But we can easily switch it to using STARKs. That would make the batch proof slightly larger, but it will still work. It's a small change. On the bridge side, on the Clementine side, we have two things. [00:22:29] One is the pre-signing path, where we do a lot of pre-signing, all the n-of-n signer sets as pre-signs, the virtual transaction paths for all of the operators, and these signatures are not post-quantum safe. And also, Bitcoin doesn't have a post-quantum signature scheme that's on the protocol right now. So without a Bitcoin soft fork, I think it's not possible, maybe possible, but really hacky and maybe not practical. We did research on the doing post-quantum garbled circuits, meaning that being able to verify post-quantum snarks on Bitcoin using BitVM3. [00:23:23] And the size gets huge. For instance, right now, it's around four kilobytes to send the proof on-chain using garbled circuits, but with STARKs, that would take around a few blocks to even send the proofs on-chain. And so I think the solution of post-quantum L2s is to have more opcodes available on Bitcoin scripts so that we can implement STARK verifiers on Bitcoin. For example, GSR is a great example. You can implement a STARK verifier in GSR. I have vibe-coded a STARK verifier in GSR, and it works. [00:24:12] You can have both trustless and post-quantum rollups using these kind of upgrades. And also, GSR also helps with implementing post-quantum signature schemes as well. So it's like one stone, two birds, I don't know, something like that. And then you both get post-quantum rollups and also post-quantum signature schemes using more script expressivity. And I think that would be great. I feel like without Bitcoin having a post-quantum signature scheme, I mean, we know how to make a post-quantum, but first Bitcoin needs to have either post-quantum signature scheme or GSR-like scripts so that we can make the whole system both post-quantum and also trustless. [00:25:07] Vlad Costea: That's beautiful. I was going to ask you about this anyway. You mentioned the great script restoration, and that is like a package that includes a lot of opcodes that are maybe going to come to Bitcoin if we reach consensus on that. If we don't get that, is Citrea still fine? Let me frame this differently. If we're going to get the great script restoration, what is the percentage of efficiency increase that Citrea is going to get from that? Efficiency. [00:25:39] Ekrem Bal: I mean, the main benefit would be the trust assumptions. We can get rid of the operators, signer set, and then make the whole system work without any trust required except the usual trust assumptions around Bitcoin and also some finality. The efficiency, I think the way we represent state, the way we compress things and then write it on Bitcoin is kind of like optimal. Maybe not optimal, but Bitcoin so far wouldn't improve that much, but it would improve the trust assumptions around the bridge and the rollup itself. [00:26:28] Vlad Costea: Okay, so it's more about increasing the security of the system, not necessarily making the proofs better or making it... Okay, I get that. So you really have no preference when it comes to covenants, right? Or would you say that there are some that are better than others? [00:26:45] Ekrem Bal: Yes, yes, yes. So some covenants... Okay, so some soft forks allow you to implement a ZK verifier in script directly. That's the best. In that way, you can implement trustless rollups. This is the most preferable one. There are some opcodes or covenants where it allows you to do a sibling commit, which I mean by is like... So in Clementine, like the deposits are pre-signed with another connector output so that you can only spend this output along with that input and the output will be the operator. [00:27:30] So this way, this is a connector output. So if the operator behaves maliciously, that output is spent, so the deposit stays there. And some covenant opcodes like OP_TX or OP_CTV allow you to do this. You can commit the sibling output. This would improve the signer set. So we can get rid of the signer set. So deposits become non-interactive. And also, safety assumptions are now much better because right now the n-of-n pre-signs it, so you need interactivity of all signers. And also, you need one of the signers, to be honest, to not sign something else, something malicious. [00:28:13] But with sibling commits, covenants, we can get rid of the signers and we can also work more on optimizing the operator set. So let's say you can have 100 operators providing withdrawals to the users and there's no signer set at all. [00:28:30] Vlad Costea: That's beautiful. But can you name them? Like, would you like to have OP_CAT or would you rather have CTV? [00:28:37] Ekrem Bal: I would rather OP_CAT because with OP_CAT you can do both covenants and also you can verify a STARK proof in a single script, so OP_CAT is the best. CTV is a hacky way to do a sibling commit. It doesn't allow you to verify a ZK proof on Bitcoin, but it's a hacky way of doing a sibling commit, which is not the best way to do these kind of things. I would prefer more opcodes like OP_TX or OP_TXHASH where you can more beautifully and in a standard way use the sibling commits. [00:29:15] OP_TEMPLATEHASH doesn't work. OP_TEMPLATEHASH is like CTV, but they removed the ability to do a sibling commit, so it wouldn't improve the BitVM bridges. Robin has a paper of BitVM bridge using template hash, but I don't think that's a really concrete improvement. It's a different part in the trade-off space because now it introduced exponential signing requirements, which isn't that beautiful, I think. [00:29:55] Vlad Costea: Okay. Is there anything about Citrea that you haven't mentioned but you really want to? [00:30:02] Ekrem Bal: So, Crest is coming out soon. If you go crestapp.xyz, you can join the waitlist. So yeah, join the waitlist and fix the money, fix the world. [00:30:14] Vlad Costea: For the record, how is Crest different from Tornado Cash? [00:30:22] Ekrem Bal: So, it's different in the sense that first, it's on Bitcoin, it's on Citrea, it has Bitcoin. Second, it has a kind of like a proof of innocence compliance system where if a hacker tries to deposit, they can get flagged and then they would need to withdraw their funds. So, their funds are not frozen, it's self-custodial. [00:31:00] But as a user, you don't want to help the anonymity or privacy of terrorists or bad actors, so they don't enter the system. They exit and then they can't use the pool. So, there's this difference. [00:31:19] Vlad Costea: Oh, so that's the thing. You have a mechanism to blacklist some UTXOs [unclear: from entering] your anonymity pool. [00:31:19] Ekrem Bal: Yes, so that we don't share the same pool with hackers or bad actors. [00:31:19] Vlad Costea: So, how are you going to get that list? [00:31:42] Ekrem Bal: I think it would be great to wait for the app launch to announce this. We would have a documentation around this, but yeah, these are all that I can share now. [00:31:56] Vlad Costea: So, it's more like Railgun than Tornado Cash? [00:32:02] Ekrem Bal: Yes, like Chainway Labs, we got a grant from Railgun three years ago or something like that to implement proof of innocence. I actually implemented Railgun's proof of innocence circuits and those circuits actually help catch a criminal. Like, some hacker tried to deposit funds into Railgun and they didn't pass the proof of innocence check and then they were able to trace the funds. And I think this is great. This is great for privacy and also not for helping bad actors. [00:32:41] Vlad Costea: I remember three years ago when I first interviewed Orkun and he was coming from Ethereum to Bitcoin with this idea of a ZK rollup. There were a lot of Layer 2s being announced for Bitcoin at the time. I think you guys are the only ones who survived and also are still live and actually launched as opposed to lots of others that only raised money and are not live today. And I want to ask you this, do you think you would have been better off if you just stayed on Ethereum and continued building there? [00:33:13] Or do you think that you're going to reach much more success on Bitcoin and you're doubling down on this? [00:33:21] Ekrem Bal: Good question. So, I like Ethereum, I like Ethereum people as well, but I think Bitcoin has this potential to be money and we want to have a part in that. We want to make Bitcoin money. And also, I think Bitcoin is really interesting. Working with all these bridging systems is really fun and also rewarding. But I think Bitcoin kind of bridges are not the end goal, not the thing we want at the end. It's having trustless bridges so that we can have better scalability on Bitcoin. Bitcoin kind of bridges are the way around until we can prove that there is a demand for this and we can scale Bitcoin actually. [00:34:22] Vlad Costea: That's beautiful. That's what I want to hear, that we can scale Bitcoin for payments and we can make it private and fungible as a currency because that's the goal. So, do you see yourself still working on Bitcoin many years from now? [00:34:22] Ekrem Bal: Yes, that's a simple answer. [00:34:22] Vlad Costea: You're also very young, you're much younger than most people in this room. So, yeah, you're going to outlive us and get to see the dream of paying for everything in Bitcoin, hopefully. Unless Michael Saylor keeps us as this store of value thing forever. [00:34:59] Ekrem Bal: Yeah, I think Bitcoin needs to be money. We need to use it for day-to-day payments and for that we need privacy and also store of value is also good as well. It's great. [00:35:11] Vlad Costea: I made this magazine about forks and I want to ask you which fork of Bitcoin is your favorite? And you can mention soft forks, hard forks and codebase forks. It's up to you. [00:35:22] Ekrem Bal: Which soft fork is my favorite? Oh, I think I need to say Taproot because without Taproot all these BitVM things wouldn't be possible. So, that would be my best soft fork, my favorite soft fork. [00:35:40] I think, yeah, is that a satisfying answer? [00:35:44] Vlad Costea: It's a fine answer. I like Zcash. It's really cool. I wish some of that energy with all the developers creating cool stuff was still on Bitcoin. [00:35:55] Ekrem Bal: I think it's coming to Bitcoin. There are other projects building on privacy. I love that. I think as a community we need to think more on how to get better privacy on Bitcoin and we need to show demand for it so that we would get better privacy on Bitcoin. [00:36:14] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that's the thing. Demand. If you're listening to this, try something. Just download the wallet, give it a try, see if it works for you, see if you like it. Don't just hodl. I mean, it's fine to hodl some coins but don't hodl with everything. Use it for something because supply and demand are intertwined for the success of a currency. If there's just the supply with no demand and nobody wants your coins or you only sell them to exchanges or institutions, it's not as fun as paying for stuff or making it useful. [00:36:46] And you can have some of the smartest people building on Bitcoin and creating cool stuff. If there are no users for that, it's pointless. Like really, why bother? Might as well just create hard forks like this one. Actually, I want to ask you, do you have a plan for your eCash? Are you going to claim it? Are you going to dump it? Are you going to hold it? [00:37:08] Ekrem Bal: Ah, I just learned about the trick eCash uses for replay protection. It's a cool trick. I might try to claim it. I don't know. [00:37:18] Vlad Costea: So what's the trick? Are you going to share it with people or do you want to keep it for yourself? [00:37:26] Ekrem Bal: I think the trick is public, right? If you put the lock time as the maximum, then that transaction would take maybe ages or infinite years on Bitcoin to get in. But on eCash, it's set to zero so you can get those transactions in eCash. [00:37:49] Vlad Costea: So is it the trick about depositing to exchanges to withdraw fresh coins that let you claim new eCash? [00:37:55] Ekrem Bal: No, not that trick. If you have UTXOs on Bitcoin, if you sign a transaction that spends those but with a lock time that is the max lock time, then that transaction cannot get confirmed on Bitcoin because it has a really large lock time. So it's a time lock basically. I don't know the max lock time, but it's really far in the future. But on eCash, it means zero lock time and then it will get confirmed on eCash. I think it's a good trick. [00:37:55] Vlad Costea: So the good trick helps you make more eCash or what's the point? [00:38:32] Ekrem Bal: It helps you spend your BTC that's forked onto the eCash. You can then sell it somewhere, but you still hold your Bitcoins on the Bitcoin L1. [00:38:32] Vlad Costea: Oh, that's incredible. Did this not work with the Luke fork? [00:38:32] Ekrem Bal: I don't think they had any replay protection. I'm not sure. Didn't they only mine two blocks or something? I don't know. Were you able to spend? What happened? [00:39:01] Vlad Costea: Oh, I guess you haven't followed the drama. They fired the miners. They switched to BLAKE2b. And then they also decided that they want miners to hold longer until they can spend their rewards. So they increased the amount of blocks that are required for them to be able to use the coins. And I think it's like $500 per coin today. It's trading on only a couple of exchanges. But there's not much liquidity. So most people, if they want to sell, they will not be able to sell because there is not anyone on the other side buying them. [00:39:37] Ekrem Bal: I see. I didn't follow that much. I didn't follow that much. I was busy with work, but it's okay. [00:39:44] Vlad Costea: But you're right. It has no replay protection. I guess people can make a lot of mistakes because of that. Yeah. [00:39:51] Ekrem Bal: And also, I want to say... To spend your coins on a fork, I would advise if you don't know what you're doing, don't risk your coins on the Bitcoin L1. It's okay to just hold Bitcoin L1. Yeah. [00:40:13] Vlad Costea: When you're not coding and you're not working on Bitcoin, what do you do, Ekrem? Would you have any hobbies? [00:40:19] Ekrem Bal: I'm really excited for the ski season this year. Hopefully, I will go to Turkey and ski a lot. In the summer, I travel, I swim a lot. Not a lot, but yeah, I try to swim. I think I did mountain skiing a while. I couldn't do it this year. So yeah, these are mostly it. [00:40:42] Vlad Costea: You're a very outdoorsy guy. I like that. Most of us nerds just like reading, collecting stuff, playing video games, whatever. [00:40:52] Ekrem Bal: Yeah. I also these days vibe code a lot, like vibe coding games and also interesting things with Bitcoin. So it's kind of becoming my hobby as well. [00:41:06] Vlad Costea: Okay. Anything exciting that's happening at Citrea that you haven't said already? [00:41:11] Ekrem Bal: I think I said it all. Clementine v2 is really exciting and also Crest obviously is exciting. These are all. [00:41:21] Vlad Costea: Join the waiting list for Crest. You said it's crestapp.xyz. [00:41:21] Ekrem Bal: Yes. [00:41:21] Vlad Costea: And also check out Citrea. You can try it today. It's interesting. It's a layer two for Bitcoin. Do you keep metrics of how many Bitcoins are on the layer two? [00:41:37] Ekrem Bal: Yes. Right now it's 110 Bitcoins and you can check out app.citrea.xyz to check out other like lending, borrowing, bridging, and also how to use Clementine for you to use canonical bridges. And like basically, app.citrea.xyz is all the things you can do, not all the things, but a lot of things you can do with Citrea and the Crest is the privacy app. [00:42:05] Vlad Costea: Maybe that 110 Bitcoin doesn't sound a lot, but it's 110 Bitcoin more than you can use on Liquid today because they got hacked and now they're frozen. It's useless. So congratulations on that. I wish you all the best in the future. Thank you. And let's get someone else to join us. Do you have any preference when you're looking around? Maybe we can get Kevin. Kevin from Liana Wallet. WizardSardine, which I think is one of the worst names. [unclear: Should I sit?] Do you want to be on camera? [00:42:39] Kevin Loaec: Hi. Was there a question? [00:42:39] Vlad Costea: The question is if you want to join to do a quick interview. You get the microphone from Ekrem. I want to remind everyone that this stream is sponsored by Cake Wallet, SideShift, Braiins Hashpower, Orange Rock, and LayerTwo Labs. And we are joined right now by Kevin Loaec. Ekrem is waving at the camera because he's leaving. You can also hold it in your hand. Yeah, that's very good. [00:42:39] Kevin Loaec: Hey, hey, hey. What's up, what's up, what's up, what's up? TABConf 8. [00:42:39] Vlad Costea: Yeah, my first. [00:42:39] Kevin Loaec: And the last one. [00:43:22] Vlad Costea: It's also my first, but it's the last one, apparently, that will happen. [00:43:26] Kevin Loaec: Apparently, yeah. Great event. Very different from any other conference I've attended so far, and I've attended a lot of them. [00:43:35] Vlad Costea: And you organized one, like the anti-conference. [00:43:38] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, I organized the [unclear: BTC users], I organized Breaking Bitcoin back in the days. But yeah, like even my kind of unconference seems more organized in a way. As in like here it's very organic. People just go to table, do their things. It's, yeah, like I just arrived, didn't get any explanation of how it works, and you just see all these tables around. It's kind of, yeah, crazy. I just don't know where to go. [00:44:07] Vlad Costea: Yeah, and there are two stages where there's stuff happening. You just join whatever you want, you talk with people you want. It's a small event, maybe 200, 300 participants. [00:44:20] Kevin Loaec: I think less this year at least. It doesn't feel like 300 for sure. Maybe yesterday, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. How many you can fit in the big room? I don't even know. 100 something, not more. Yeah, so I don't know. He said 300 tickets sold, I think, if I remember. But I'm not sure. [00:44:37] Vlad Costea: For me it was funny because they asked me to buy a ticket at the desk, and I was like, no, I'm a speaker. And they said, yeah, you have to pay for your ticket. [00:44:37] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, you do, yeah. [00:44:37] Vlad Costea: Really? It's the first time this happened to me. And the answer that they gave is that basically almost everyone is a speaker. We're just speakers listening to each other's talks and talking together. [00:44:54] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, for the unconference it's the same, the one I organized. Because basically everyone can be a speaker, it's an unconference, so you have to have a ticket. It cannot run otherwise. It gets too messy. [00:45:08] Vlad Costea: Kevin, it's been like two and a half years since you were on the show. At the time you had just launched Liana. [00:45:08] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, maybe more than that even, yeah. [00:45:08] Vlad Costea: And we also talked about Ledger, and at the time they had an issue, I don't even remember which one it was. [00:45:08] Kevin Loaec: Me neither. They had a lot of issues. [00:45:08] Vlad Costea: Now there's also the Coldcard situation, the Liquid situation, it's been a very bad year for Bitcoin. [00:45:36] Kevin Loaec: And as I keep saying, you know, the year is not finished, so we never know. Could be an inflation bug in Bitcoin Core, who knows, you know, we'll see. [00:45:45] Vlad Costea: But basically you have the solution that nobody wants to talk about. [00:45:45] Kevin Loaec: People talk about it. They just don't use it. No, but like, yeah, like Liana, the wallet I'm working on, is pretty much built to make sure this kind of, like, bugs affecting or attacks affecting one single device don't affect you, right? So multisig in general helps with that. What we do is that we use time locks to add like recovery keys and things like that so you can have a more secure setup than you would in a normal multisig. But yeah, it's all cool, but at the end of the day... [00:46:25] Vlad Costea: Join us. You can join us too. Grab a chair or something. [00:46:25] [unclear speaker]: Nice. That's cool. [00:46:32] Kevin Loaec: And yeah, at the end of the day, the problem is that users, they just don't care that much. They, you know, they try things, but at the end of the day, a lot of people are still using single sig. And you're like, why? It's 2026, like, yeah. [00:46:48] Vlad Costea: We're also joined by Stu, who is part of the Bitcoin Red team. Hi, Stu, you're doing amazing videos on Twitter. [00:46:55] Stu: Thank you very much. Yeah, I'm trying. You know, software engineering is over now. So I'm pivoting to jester-maxxing. [00:47:03] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, that's, you know, you have to diversify. [00:47:03] Stu: Yeah, this is all I have now. So, yeah. [00:47:10] Stu: How's it going over here? [00:47:10] Vlad Costea: Pretty good. I was just telling Kevin that he has the solution that nobody really talks about. Like, we're complaining, oh, we wish we had vaults and whatever, and I'm not saying we shouldn't. They're cool. But he has something that's actually useful until we get vaults. Just Liana Wallet. [00:47:28] Stu: Don't vaults make Liana Wallet even better? [00:47:28] Vlad Costea: Sure, but there is always something, right? There always will be something that makes things better. [00:47:28] Stu: But with the Liana Wallet, if you had vaults, you wouldn't have to worry about refreshing your setup, is that right? [00:47:45] Kevin Loaec: Correct. Like, you might have different ways of doing it, but the way Liana works right now with the time lock is a dead man switch. So if you stop using the wallet, after some time, the recovery or inheritance or whatever triggers, so the person can access the funds. If you had covenants, you would go the other way. It's like your heir will try to access the funds, but that will stop the timer from the time they try and then if you don't cancel that action, it will get them the funds. [00:48:15] So instead of being passive, it becomes active. But yeah, at the end of the day, it's kind of similar. You would still have to wait a specific amount of time. [00:48:24] Stu: Yeah, because it is annoying. All the vault constructions, they all do require some kind of cold storage. [00:48:34] Kevin Loaec: You always need keys here. Or some kind of secret, but yeah. [00:48:39] Stu: This is not very cypherpunk-y or Bitcoin-y, but you could have your eventual exit, recovery address just be some kind of exchange or like an AnchorWatch or something. It's kind of sad that that would be the thing. [00:48:58] Kevin Loaec: It's better than just using a custodian all the time. [00:49:03] Stu: Yeah, I believe. So what's next in Liana Wallet? What's the future of Liana Wallet? [00:49:10] Vlad Costea: I do like that he's doing my job right now. But I wanted to tell you guys that you should retweet the stream so your followers can see you talking. So I'm going to send you the link right now. [00:49:10] [unclear speaker]: We're live? [unclear: I'm in the middle of the sea. I'm splitting the sea right now and eCash.] [00:49:10] Vlad Costea: You're the Moses of eCash. [00:49:27] [unclear speaker]: Yeah, right. It's like a halo. [00:49:31] Stu: Did you tag me? [00:49:31] Vlad Costea: No, you didn't. [00:49:31] [unclear speaker]: Halo the protocol, the video game, or the Beyonce song? [00:49:36] Vlad Costea: I was thinking of the song, yeah. Do you know the song? [00:49:36] [unclear speaker]: Of course I know the song. [00:49:36] Vlad Costea: Can you sing a little bit? [00:49:36] [unclear speaker]: Halo, Halo. [00:49:48] [unclear speaker]: [unclear: I didn't think you were actually going to do it], but that was bad. That was good. So bad it's good. [00:49:54] Vlad Costea: I'm trying to find... I retweeted the stream, so... Fuck, 200 people, my god. [00:49:54] [unclear speaker]: Who are watching us? You, Vlad. [00:49:54] Vlad Costea: There are a lot of people who wish they were here, and they can't join another TABConf because this is the last one, so I'm sorry for you guys watching this at home. You're missing out on a lot, but at least there are recordings of the two stages, and... There's not a recording of the people you can actually interact with here? What am I missing right now? What's... He's talking. Do we know? [00:50:26] Kevin Loaec: There will be a Peter Todd talk about private mempools? [00:50:30] [unclear speaker]: I don't know if it's now. Might be now. [00:50:30] Stu: That's alright, I don't want to be anywhere else but here. [00:50:36] Vlad Costea: I love that. That's flattering. Makes me feel good about myself. You're a good diplomat, Stu. [00:50:46] Stu: Thank you, thank you. [00:50:49] So, who's been your most interesting guest so far this week? [00:50:55] Vlad Costea: Oh, I'm the one being interviewed. So, I'm going to be diplomatic right now. I'm going to say that it was Christopher Allen, who's an OG cypherpunk. Like, from the generation of David Chaum, maybe a bit younger than that. Could have been colleagues with Hal Finney. Interesting guy. [00:50:55] Stu: Not Kevin. [00:50:55] Vlad Costea: I mean, Kevin is interesting. [00:50:55] Kevin Loaec: Doing my best, you know. [00:50:55] Vlad Costea: But he just got here. Like, we were only, like, in the beginning of the interview. [00:50:55] Stu: I do have to give him a grade at the end, right? Your interviews go on for, like, eight hours sometimes. [00:51:25] So, Kevin's going to be here for a while. [00:51:25] Vlad Costea: I think my longest was ten hours. [00:51:31] Kevin Loaec: What the fuck? Okay. [00:51:35] Stu: That's nearly longer than Lord of the Rings. What's Lord of the Rings? That's, like, twelve hours. [00:51:35] Vlad Costea: I don't know, but I did, like, this thirteen-hour flight from Istanbul to here, in Atlanta. And I was able to watch the first four Harry Potter movies. [00:51:35] Stu: Okay. I don't do anything on the plane. I just sit there thinking about Bitcoin. [00:51:35] Vlad Costea: And that's a good approach, but it gets, I mean, maybe to you it doesn't get boring, but what do you usually think about during that flight? [00:52:05] Stu: Just, you know, how we can scale to eight billion people. [00:52:05] Vlad Costea: How far did you get? [00:52:05] Stu: I got to about three people. But, we're nearly there. [00:52:21] Kevin Loaec: We're getting there. A few more flights and I'll figure it out. He's probably playing all the characters he's going to do in his next videos, so. [00:52:28] Stu: Right, yeah. I need to film, I was just on my way to find [unclear: Rudin]. He's going to film a video. [00:52:28] Vlad Costea: [unclear: Rudin]? [00:52:28] Stu: [unclear: Rudin], yeah. The creator of [unclear: Bitcoin]. [00:52:28] Vlad Costea: Really? Okay. [00:52:28] [unclear speaker]: [unclear: Who doesn't, Vlad? Who doesn't?] [00:52:43] Vlad Costea: [unclear: Here's your one too.] Take a magazine, Stu. Did I give you one? Do you have one, Kevin? [00:52:43] Kevin Loaec: I have one, I have one. Yep. Thank you. [00:52:43] Vlad Costea: This is the Forks magazine. [00:52:43] Stu: Very cool. [00:52:57] Let's have a look. Who did the art for this? Is this Claude? [00:53:02] Vlad Costea: No, it's Ani. It's my ex-girlfriend. [00:53:02] Stu: Okay. Very cool. [00:53:02] Vlad Costea: But basically, the first article was done by Ani, and the covers, and then the rest of it was designed by a guy who wanted to get paid in Bitcoin Cash. [00:53:02] [unclear speaker]: It's free money, so. Worthless. [00:53:02] Vlad Costea: It's not worthless, it's like $300 per coin, but. Here is this guy. Yes. I mean, he did a good job and I appreciate that he put up with my demands because I pushed him to do everything in one week and he was able to deliver. [00:53:39] Stu: It looks really nice. I like the design. [00:53:43] Kevin Loaec: Oh, there's Luke. [00:53:43] Vlad Costea: There is Luke, yes. [00:53:49] Kevin Loaec: Oh yeah, we forgot to mention that, actually. We were talking about all the shit that happened this year, but. There's Luke as well. [00:53:55] Stu: Yes. Alright guys, I'll leave you to it, so you can get back to your [unclear: energy]. [00:53:58] Vlad Costea: Okay, Stu, how can people follow you? Like, advertise something. [00:53:58] Stu: StuTXO on Twitter. That's where I'm at, so. [00:54:06] Vlad Costea: All along I thought it was "S-T-U-T-X-O", but now I learn it's "Stu-TXO". [00:54:06] Stu: StuTXO, yeah. It's kind of weird to read, yeah. But StuTXO for you, yeah. Or whatever you want it to be. Or just Stu. [00:54:06] Vlad Costea: Thank you very much, Stu. [00:54:06] Stu: Thank you. [00:54:06] Vlad Costea: So what do you work on these days? [00:54:06] Stu: Oh, just making memes, basically. [00:54:06] Vlad Costea: And you're very good at it. [00:54:06] Stu: Okay. [00:54:06] Vlad Costea: You're very good at it. [00:54:06] Stu: But no, I'm doing some Sapio stuff. You know Sapio? [00:54:06] Vlad Costea: Yeah, that's Jeremy Rubin's operating system. [00:54:06] Stu: Yeah, so I added script emulation to Bark. So you can do some fun script emulation with VTXOs and Bark using Sapio emulator. [00:54:06] Vlad Costea: Can you bark? [00:54:51] Stu: No. [00:54:53] Vlad Costea: Woof! Goodbye. Okay, Kevin. So, Liana Wallet. I really like that advertisement that [unclear: Alex Walls] has done for Liana Wallet with the keys. [00:54:53] Kevin Loaec: A long time ago, yeah. [00:54:53] Vlad Costea: Like three or four years ago, but it still holds up. [00:55:09] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, it was pre-AI and it's pretty good. It was a lot of work. We were doing quite a few videos, actually. We've done quite a few over the years, but we stopped doing it recently because, I don't know, lack of time, lack of money, kind of. But yeah, we should get back to it. I think that was one of the unique things about our company. We were doing this actual video, like live-action videos that were pretty cool. [00:55:33] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Are you still running the company that's called Revault? [00:55:33] Kevin Loaec: So Revault is the first product of WizardSardine. So technically the company is WizardSardine, always was. And Revault, we stopped working on it when we switched to Liana, just because of lack of demand. Revault to me is like a really, really cool protocol, but too complex and people slash companies didn't really care. So I think Revault will have a reboot when we have covenants in Bitcoin. Revault is a vault architecture, but it's using pre-signed transactions. And while it could be used today to do like a pretty strong vault system for a large company, it's still pretty complex. [00:56:17] So yeah, covenant will help on that. Yeah. [00:56:20] Vlad Costea: What's your favorite covenant? [00:56:21] Kevin Loaec: I don't have one. I didn't spend enough time reviewing each of them. So I don't have a specific one. I'm kind of like waiting until only like a tiny few stay at the top and are ready to merge. And then I'll give my opinion at that stage. To me, one of the things that I would really like to see in a covenant is that the amounts are not necessarily enforced. So in a vault, in a typical vault, let's say a CTV vault, you have to know in advance when you create your vault, how much money you're going to deposit in it. [00:57:05] And if you fuck up, you might burn money. And that is horrible, in my opinion, like for practicality as a developer or as a company that develops wallets. I don't want to have to tell my users, if you fuck up on the exact amount you're going to send to this vault, maybe you're going to lock your money forever. And so I kind of prefer covenants that lets you select which fields you want to enforce and which fields you don't. And I would like one where the amount is not enforced. [00:57:33] Yeah, at least. Yeah, you can unlock it. [00:57:37] Vlad Costea: Okay, let me run down the list of covenants. What do you think about ANYPREVOUT? [00:57:42] Kevin Loaec: I don't have a specific opinion about, yeah, about the different covenants right now. [00:57:42] Vlad Costea: OP_CAT? Would that be useful? [00:57:42] Kevin Loaec: I think any of them would be useful, but they might be like the amount of the way we apply them would be different. So to me, it's not justifying the time right now to go through each of them to try to see how we would do each of the application. We don't even know which application will have demands. We know vaults don't really have demands, no matter what people say. [00:58:14] We know they would help with all the shit we're seeing this year and all the attacks and whatever. But again, most people don't even use multisig. So what are we talking about vaults, right? It's, yeah. [00:58:28] Vlad Costea: I think you're very much ahead of your time with the concerns about self-custody. And you built a product which once again is ahead of its time. And most people don't understand the value in locking your coins for an amount of blocks to make them unspendable. So even in the situation of a wrench attack, which I understand is very, I wouldn't say popular, but common. [00:58:50] Kevin Loaec: [unclear: In France it's] popular, yeah. [00:58:56] Vlad Costea: But still, I don't see much attention being given to Liana Wallet, and I'm sort of trying to correct it right now. [00:59:02] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. Yeah, thank you. I think we got quite a big exposure during the Coldcard drama because of my involvement around disclosing it and all of that. But yeah, like a lot of people know about Liana, but not that many people use Liana, I believe. Although I have no idea of how many users we have because by design we don't know. But I think we are in the... [00:59:02] Vlad Costea: You don't even count downloads or something? [00:59:02] Kevin Loaec: We are looking at downloads, you know, a few downloads per day, of course. [00:59:33] But it's like probably a few thousands of users. I don't think we have tens of thousands of users. I think we are in the thousands. So it's not a huge number. It is significant, but it's not like, you know, Liana users everywhere. So I know in the room there is quite a few, but it's not the majority. Yeah. [00:59:54] Vlad Costea: The last time you were on the show, I made you talk about hardware wallets and self custody. And you were sort of, so in the case of Ledger, for example, you said, you know, they're doing a good job, but they have these issues. At the time, I think what they did was to leak the client database. [01:00:12] Kevin Loaec: Possibly. Yeah, it wasn't them. It was one of their partners. But yeah, it's still the same thing. It's very difficult. And these kind of leaks are very dangerous, as you can see in France or elsewhere. But again, like, it's really hard to do things properly. And in the reality of things, even if we try to make things perfect for users like me, that really want to do everything the right way, we have to think about the average person that is not a full time Bitcoiner that just wants to have a secure thing. [01:00:43] Of course, they're going to buy something online. Of course, they're going to use their credit card and their home address. Right. And so yeah, it's really hard to tell people, oh, no, you bought a hardware wallet, you should have bought it in person, at a conference, not online. But like, what, how realistic is that? Right. [01:01:00] Vlad Costea: But then it also gets ridiculous, because if you travel and you go to a hotel or whatever, and you're going to put your personal data, and you're going to buy a ticket with your credit card or whatever, like you're still leaving traces that hackers can associate, like at the right time for going to a conference, you sort of bought a ticket, and then you went to a hotel. So if they get access to this data, they're going to guess that, of course, you went there to buy a hardware wallet. [01:01:26] Kevin Loaec: So yeah, possibly. [01:01:28] Vlad Costea: And the chain of information just keeps adding up. [01:01:28] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, no, it's just the lowest-hanging fruit that of course, you ordered a hardware wallet, they're going to hack their customer database. [01:01:28] Vlad Costea: But they can do this with hotels to see who was staying in a hotel near a conference on a certain date. [01:01:43] Kevin Loaec: And we live in a surveillance society, no matter what we say. And so when everything gets breached, and all the cameras, the public cameras, the whatever get breached somehow. [01:01:53] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Some of them are even public. They're live feeds online. So you can watch streets, security cams or whatever. And there are people who do that. I don't know why they do that. But they do it. [01:01:53] [unclear speaker]: Oof. Could have been bad. [01:01:53] Vlad Costea: Something is unplugged. [01:01:53] [unclear speaker]: Yeah, someone hit my extender. [01:01:53] Vlad Costea: But he's welcome on the show, if he wants. Do you want to join, Andrew? [01:02:22] Andrew: Sure. I was looking for my colleague. [01:02:28] Vlad Costea: What do you think about the Coldcard incident? Like, would you have seen that happening? Or would you assume it could be that bad? [01:02:37] Kevin Loaec: We knew it's a risk, right? Like, it's always a risk. But expecting the random number generator to be buggy in one of the known hardware wallets. It's kind of like unthinkable. You're like, must have been reviewed must have been, you know, tested, whatever. And actually, maybe not. So yeah, very, very shocking that this bug was there for five years. [01:03:08] Yeah. Like, bad, very bad. It's, it could have been much, much worse if it was actually, you know, Ledger or something major in terms of users. But still, it's very bad. Yeah. [01:03:19] Vlad Costea: You just called Coldcard small, which I guess they were, but they were like a fashion item for bitcoiners. Yeah. And they were just posting about their calculators all the time. I hope they didn't actually use them. And they were just taking pictures, but I don't know. But my point is that I think the first red flag was when they changed their license to something which was not open source. It annoyed a lot of users and me included. Yeah. But the second red flag was when they did not pay researchers. [01:03:50] Like if someone reported a bounty, they'll try to downplay it and say, well, it's not a big deal. It wasn't severe. [01:03:50] Kevin Loaec: Correct. [01:03:50] Vlad Costea: It wasn't gonna make anyone lose their funds. We just sent them a T-shirt and a mug or whatever. And this led to security people not looking at Coldcard anymore. [01:04:08] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. And yeah, because it's actual work, right? To disclose something, it's not just sending an email, oh, I found a bug. It's when you do it properly. You disclose it. You have a proof of concept. You reproduce the bug. It's a proper report you have to build. You spend time. Typically, you spend at least a full day to do that. You send it to the company and you expect at least a public acknowledgement. At least. And Coldcard never really acknowledged any of that. Yeah. [01:04:34] Vlad Costea: The thing is that if they remained open source, there is a chance that someone created a fork of Coldcard and sold it. And they had an incentive to actually pay researchers to find this issue. And Coldcard could get that for free. But yeah, no, they didn't. They fucked around and they found out. Yeah. Wow. We also have Andrew joining us who is dealing with domain names on the Spaces protocol on Bitcoin. [01:05:00] Kevin Loaec: I can give him my microphone. I think I'm... [01:05:00] Vlad Costea: Are you, you think you're done? [01:05:00] Kevin Loaec: I think I'm done for now. [01:05:07] Vlad Costea: Okay. You can jump in later. [01:05:07] Kevin Loaec: I might jump again later. If you come with some idea or something. [01:05:07] Andrew: Yeah. Want me to come around there? [01:05:07] Vlad Costea: If you want. Right. You can switch places. [01:05:15] Andrew: [unclear: Let's hope for the lead dev, just to step away for a sec.] He'll be right back. [01:05:24] Vlad Costea: Here's your microphone, sir. Once again, this stream is sponsored by Braiins Hashpower, Orange Rock, LayerTwo Labs, and Cake Wallet and SideShift. [01:05:24] Andrew: Oh, it's a magnet. [01:05:24] Vlad Costea: Yeah. It's magnetic. There we go. We should be good. I think your level is decent. Can you talk? [01:05:24] Andrew: Hello. Hello. [01:05:24] Vlad Costea: Yeah. [unclear: I think it's good to have you], Andrew. I put this stuff in my wallet. So for those of you watching, you might actually get a free domain name if you're very fast. [01:05:51] Andrew: Oh no, they're one time use one time use. But if you accidentally dox yourself, I can give you a new one. So, but, there may be other opportunities. There may be other opportunities for folks in your audience to get that. [01:06:10] Vlad Costea: Yeah. So basically I've had Mike Carson on the show about two years ago. Yeah. And he spoke about this Spaces protocol, which is used for registering domain names using inscriptions. [01:06:25] Andrew: So, right. It's a bit... Spaces protocol is a Bitcoin-anchored namespace. So, what we're going for is something that doesn't rely on DNS at all because DNS is something that's centralized and there is a quasi governmental authority that manages it. And, even though it doesn't happen often, you know, it can and does happen where governments and authorities will sometimes exert that control and cancel a top level name or other name resolution mechanisms. And, you know, we feel we're in Bitcoin and we want self sovereign names. We want names that we can control and live forever. [01:07:08] And, so we built, not myself. I'm kind of, I consider myself number one fan of the project, but, we've got Buffer, the lead developer, joining us here in a minute. That's, is kind of the main guy behind it, but Mike obviously is kind of the founding kind of, person that really kicked off the idea. And he comes from a, from a background of managing DNS registries and servers and how all that stuff works. So it's like, you know, I think it's a great sort of project. [01:07:42] I, to kind of admit, I kind of started in the Ethereum world. I've been a developer my whole life, so I wanted to kind of build on blockchain and it seemed like all the action was in the Ethereum world. And I did a lot of that stuff over there, but I came across this thing called Unstoppable Domains in Ethereum land. And it really kind of, I kind of really latched onto it. It's like, I really liked this idea of having a name that's easy for a human to remember that you can say it. [01:08:13] You can, you can, you know, you don't have to like spell it out. You don't have to say, oh, instead of an E it's a three because you know, you can't find anything available and, it's on the blockchain. It never expires. But the more I studied like the Ethereum consensus mechanisms, staking the fact that a lot of these projects have, you know, huge like developer and, you know, initial buy-in from, capturing a lot of the tokens and stuff. It's like, you know, really, this really needs to live in Bitcoin land. [01:08:45] And, even though Bitcoin from a development platform perspective has kind of been slower to emerge. I always wanted it there. When I ran into Mike's project, I think I read a Bitcoin Magazine article. I reached out to him and said, I really like what you're doing. You know, what, what can I do to help? And so that's what, that's what I've been up to. [01:09:03] Vlad Costea: I want to ask you, are you on Twitter? [01:09:03] Andrew: I am not. Well, technically yes, but I don't. [01:09:03] Vlad Costea: Okay. Because I was going to ask you to retweet the stream so your followers can listen to it. [01:09:13] Andrew: Yeah, I don't have much of a following. [01:09:16] Vlad Costea: Oh, hi. We have Buffer who's joining us. Yeah, come in here. You said he's the lead developer? [01:09:16] Andrew: Yeah, Buffer is the lead developer. [01:09:26] Buffer: Hey guys. Yeah. So I'm the lead developer of the Spaces protocol. We've been working on it for like, since 2024. And, we just launched recently on mainnet about a month ago. [01:09:42] Vlad Costea: Beautiful. So how many names have you registered so far? [01:09:47] Buffer: I don't know. So, the top level spaces, I think there are 3,700 so far. And, @bitcoin, we just started, like issuing handles, which, I think were about like just 120 names for the @bitcoin namespace. [01:10:08] Vlad Costea: I think you gave me, Andrew, something that allows me to register a discounted name during TABConf. I think there's like a very special offer that you're running during this event. And I want to tell the people at home that really missed out on this offer, like by not being here, you have to pay full price. [01:10:26] Andrew: That's right. So, a couple of things, right? One, is, is that, I got very interested in the project. I saw these people were getting top level names and that the numbers were growing and growing. And I kind of thought to myself, I've, I had registered a few myself and I thought, you know what, I need to build a backend so that I can either use them to build communities or monetize them in some way. You know, it's still early days, so we're not quite sure what, how this is going to go. [01:10:59] But since I knew I needed to build a backend anyway, and how would people be typically using these things often in the mobile wallet. So let's make a mobile wallet that understands these names as well as a backend to help kind of manage the top level names. And, so I did that and I can kind of flexibly manage, a lot of names now and kind of give a owner. So say you own a name, maybe takeover or something, @takeover. And you say, okay, I want to sell my name for, you know, so many thousand sats and, but I don't want to manage all the details of it. [01:11:39] The protocol has a mechanism by which you as the owner can delegate the name to me and you don't give up control. You still own it, but it allows me to do the commitment components of adding new names to it. So that way my platform can manage all of that activity. And maybe as a, I take a small cut or a fixed fee or whatever, we figure it out. And, that way you get the benefit of being able to kind of evangelize about the name without having to take on the headache of doing the work yourself. [01:12:13] And, you know, if it works well, then it works well. [01:12:16] Vlad Costea: So what you're saying is that you can rent your domain for someone who wants to create subdomains? [01:12:24] Andrew: Well, there's another context of subdomain in the scheme of things, but what I was just describing is a strict delegation. So you own the name, you delegate it to me, and then I help you build sub names. So in the world, I guess I kind of put this a little low, but it's got the names with the at sign. And, so here the top level name, you're like @bitcoin, like here, but all these names on the left of the at sign, they get created in batches, right? So that's what the operator's doing. [01:12:54] It's, it's accumulating these batches of new submitted names and then deciding based on what you want to do and the period that you want to do it. You collect them under with a zero knowledge proof set, and then the root of that proof set gets committed on the blockchain. So I can do all that for you. It's still your name. It's still your community. And if you ever want to, you know, take it back ownership, then I can, you can re-delegate it to someone else. [01:13:18] So maybe you think, hey, Buffer can do a better job of doing this. Then you can re-delegate it to him. That way I'm not involved anymore. [01:13:26] Buffer: Just to add that, like most users of the protocol don't really need to care about, top level spaces. They could just download the Nacho app and get a handle at payment addresses attached, like their social media, like, Instagram, Twitter handle, et cetera. And then they could resolve it, pay someone, like, let's say Alice's Bitcoin, you could resolve their Bitcoin address, lightning address, et cetera, and just use it normally without having to think about, like, operating a top level space, et cetera. So yeah, I think, we try to make it as simple to use as, like, getting a handle on any, like, social platform, like X or Instagram, et cetera. [01:14:15] So yeah, yeah, it's very simple to use. I hope people, like, maybe, like, download Nacho and, try the app. [01:14:23] Andrew: And just to kind of finish your question about the card, I, in the months leading up to TABConf, I had registered @tabconf because I thought, well, this would be a good opportunity to get people excited about the, project and maybe get a name. And, the more I thought about it, and then it became announced that this was going to be the final TABConf, I thought, well, let's, let's make the name final too. And, let's give away names, to people that came to our workshop, to people that came to TABConf. [01:14:56] That's what was on the card. There's a coupon code. And this again was managed through this platform where I can make the, acquisition of the name essentially free. So it doesn't cost you anything, but you had to be here to get it. So physically, anyway, what we're going to do is after we've, batched up all the names and do the final commit that's legitimate, we're going to actually, next Friday, I think we've decided on, on, on a podcast that, Buffer and I are going to be on. [01:15:25] We're going to actually commit the burning quote unquote commitment that will mean that no new @tabconf names will ever be able to be created. And maybe Buffer can explain why that is. Cause that's kind of an interesting part of it. [01:15:42] Buffer: Okay. So, yeah, so, the @tabconf name, so, when they try to issue like a bunch of handles, they take the root of the tree and commit that on chain. But, Andrew plans to, commit to like a root where it's all zeros so that, no other handle could be issued in the @tabconf namespace, once, he does the final, commitment. And that way, because this is the last TABConf and, that way, to like, sort of get everyone who came here to the conference, like a TABConf handle that they could keep like as a souvenir or like use it, in the future. [01:16:29] Andrew: Kind of commemorate TABConf. [01:16:30] Vlad Costea: So technically, how does your naming service work? You inscribe data on the Bitcoin blockchain? [01:16:40] Buffer: So, the only thing that gets put on Bitcoin is the 32-byte hash, that includes the, which is the root of the tree. So let's say the @bitcoin namespace issues, hundreds of thousands of handles. Each batch is only 32 bytes on chain, and then users get a Merkle proof, which is inclusion to that root that's anchored, on Bitcoin. And then they could use their, inclusion proof, which, is tied to a script pubkey. And, then they could sign records and publish those records on cert relays. [01:17:19] It's completely off chain. So, when you put like, payment addresses or like your Instagram or other social handles, you sign them with your key and you publish them on cert relays, which kind of work like, a Nostr relay. So, when you have like an npub and, your secret key and you could sign posts and, submit those to the relay, that's how cert relays essentially work. So it's, the protocol itself has a very small, on chain footprint. [01:17:53] Vlad Costea: But at the same time, Bitcoin nodes are not aware of what this data means, right? You need like your server, your service to interpret that data. And I want to ask you, how is that censorship resistant? Like did you open source the code and anyone can run a server to interpret this? [01:18:09] Buffer: Yeah. So, what we use is called a client side validation. So, you could run, all of the protocol is open source. The Nacho app is open source. The Spaces wallet is open source. So, you could run spacesd, which connects to a Bitcoin full node and it scans the transactions relevant to the protocol. And then you could verify everything yourself. And, that's how it's, as censorship resistant as Bitcoin can be. [01:18:43] Vlad Costea: Well, as Bitcoin can be, but you need to run your software on top of Bitcoin to be able to understand what this is. [01:18:49] Buffer: Yeah. So, just like you download a Bitcoin core, you download like spacesd and connect it to Bitcoin core. And then you could sync, the protocol states and, be able to like, resolve the root of trust for, for the protocol. [01:19:06] Andrew: Just a point there, because it's some software that's definitely need a node, probably don't want to use somebody else's node. If you want to stay self-sovereign, you then need the indexer and then you need a couple other pieces of software. And because I wanted to make sure that's easy for people that wanted to operate all the software, I packaged it up for Start9. So if you're running a Start9 server and you're running a node, which is easy enough, most people probably are. [01:19:34] It's a one click to install the whole set of software and even participate as a cert relay by virtue of doing it that way. So yeah, you can do it all and it's all open source. You can run it out of Docker containers. You can compile it and run it on a machine directly, but, you know, how maybe not a lot of people are going to want to do that, go to the trouble. So trying to make it as easy as possible, for people to do it. [01:19:58] Vlad Costea: So you guys are making money right now by selling these domains. [01:20:05] Buffer: Yeah. But, so the way we make money is that, so we bid on the top level space, which is, @bitcoin. And, we, won that auction. And then, once you like own a top level space, you could sell handles, by basically taking, users, public keys and the name that they want and including it in the @bitcoin tree. And yes, so, anyone can make money from the protocol, if they get a top level space and then they, they sell handles. [01:20:40] But, like operators don't have any power over the handle owner. So once your name is issued and it's, included in a commitment on Bitcoin, then the operator has nothing that they can do to like revoke your name or, take it away in, in any shape or form. [01:20:59] Vlad Costea: Since the Spaces protocol is open source, this means that anyone can take the code and run something like the cosmos protocol or something and compete with you guys. So what is the incentive for people to still use spaces if they can spin up their own and maybe make the cosmos @bitcoin and say that they can own all the domains? Like what's the incentive to not do that? [01:21:24] Buffer: Yeah. So yes, there is nothing preventing anyone from launching like an alt spaces and registering @bitcoin and doing that. But I think it's like the same arguments with like DNS. How come, like you can't, like create another .com and like, of course you can. I mean, you can, but it's all about consensus and what the people prefer to use. So let's say wallets start to integrate spaces and apps, et cetera, start to integrated. And then, when you type in Alice's Bitcoin, it will resolve to what the app has accepted as the consensus for the protocol. [01:22:08] I think it's also the same, like what stops someone from launching like an alt Bitcoin, coin and then, selling it. It's not Bitcoin. It would be, like something else. [01:22:21] Andrew: Yeah. It's just, it's the network effect, right? I think, this one's well thought out. There's been other attempts at similar things and with different trade-offs, I think this one is like fair and equitable. And, the kind of matches with the ethos of Bitcoin itself. Yeah. You can make another Bitcoin. Sure. Is anybody going to pay attention? Maybe it's, so it's like, it kind of follows that that's, it's all about the network effect, right? [01:22:50] Vlad Costea: On the topic of making another Bitcoin, the first altcoin was actually Namecoin, which was designed specifically for putting domains on the blockchain. Satoshi Nakamoto participated with advice on that one. [unclear: He told] the developers that they should merge-mine it with Bitcoin, which is pretty cool. The issue with Namecoin, I think was squatters. People just using coins that they mined at the time to rent a lot of the domain names. And it sort of seemed pointless for anyone to join that and try to get any sort of domain because they're overpriced. [01:23:24] Or whatever. So it felt unfair. So are you guys doing anything to prevent squatting or are you just accepting the dynamics of the free markets for squatting? [01:23:34] Andrew: Do you want to talk about this? [01:23:34] Buffer: Sure. [01:23:34] Andrew: I'll take this one. So I got, so, so yeah, the protocol is designed and this was an intentional design, design decision that's in order to kind of prevent that, that inevitable land rush kind of effect when something new like this is announced. Is, to make sure that it's kind of rate limited, right? That the protocol itself will not allow more than 10 names to be entered into active, auction process per day. So, think of it like a mempool for the auction process where, yeah, you can queue up a bunch of names, but the protocol only allows the top 10 bidded names to enter into the active phase. [01:24:18] And the protocol puts it in that once it's in that active phase, it's public and for, and everybody can see what names are currently being bid on. So if you pick a really juicy name, you know, and you think you're going to get it for no money and somebody else says, that is a great idea. I like that name. I'm going to overbid. I'm going to be the top bidder. Then you've got 10 days to go through the bidding process and it's all on chain. This is all layer one Bitcoin, the whole auction process. [01:24:48] And whenever you get overbid, your bid gets returned to you. So other than the cost of the transactions, bidding transactions themselves, it doesn't cost you anything other than the bid itself. So, that process takes 10 days and there's another caveat to that. You can't, like in the eBay days, you can't snipe, the thing at the last moment of the auction. Anytime a new overbid comes in, in the last day, it extends the auction period for a day. So the person that just got out bid has now a day to come back with a counter bid if they choose. [01:25:25] And at some point the value of whatever that name was reaches its natural equilibrium for all the people that were interested and the highest bidder wins. So, [01:25:34] Buffer: And also, there's only, like, because they're rates limited, you could only register up to 3,600 spaces a year. And I think so far, since we have launched over a year ago, no one was able to afford it, of course, to like squat names, the number of spaces registered so far are 3,700. And also we have multiple operators and multiple namespaces. So even if @bitcoin, like, gets, like, squatted very heavily, then you have lots of other choices that you could register for. [01:26:13] Vlad Costea: So why should anyone watching and listening to this go to the Spaces protocol and register a name? What's the utility? Is it just vanity or can you actually do something with this? [01:26:24] Buffer: Yeah. So, we launched on mainnet about a month ago and we're trying to like get wallets and apps to integrate it, and then it will be a lot more useful. But for now, the Nacho app itself is very useful because, you could resolve handles, you could even without any wallet support. So on Nacho, when you resolve Alice's Bitcoin, you could, click the, like, pay with Bitcoin button and it will take you to any wallet app with already the address resolved. So you could use that. [01:26:59] And we're also, adding to Nacho something that is similar to what, Keybase used to have, which is like, a social proof. So let's say you own, your handle on X on Instagram, et cetera. You could prove that you, that Alice's Bitcoin is linked exactly to the owner of the X account, linked exactly to the owner of the GitHub account. And so that you have this social proof all linked to your name. So when someone resolves, let's say vlad@bitcoin, and they could see, all of your social handles linked together, they will know for sure it's you. [01:27:39] And then they could pay you. So yeah, Nacho is the first thing that, is sort of like a utility for, for the, these handles. And, as, as apps, like, start to integrate it, then it will become more and more useful. But this is like a challenge with any new, like, naming protocol. It's like getting people to, integrate it and support it in their apps. [01:28:03] Andrew: And since a name itself is, is effectively, like any other Bitcoin key pair, you, you're effectively, you get a taproot address with every name. Now that's bound to that key pair. So you can't change it, but you can, if you, and honestly, I would kind of, I would deter people from trying to send payments to that address. And why is that? Because it's very, it's very dangerous to have a well-known address, especially when that, maybe you could try to have a nym and maybe could try to be super good about keeping your name and your, your personal identity separate. [01:28:46] And you, but all it takes is one, one moment to dox, you know, yourself, and if you can then make yourself physically findable and you've collected a well-known place, you can't change it. Now you have this Bitcoin address. Maybe people have been sending you donations or something. You've accumulated a bit of a stack there. Now you've got this thing with value that's attached to a real [unclear: flesh-and-blood] person that you can't do anything. You can spend it, but that's traceable, right? So it's like now you've basically raised your, kind of vulnerability to a wrench attack. [01:29:20] So I think one of the things I would like to see us kind of build out in the next level for one, you should probably just associate another Bitcoin address that you could then unassociate later if this is a problem. But I think the real value starts coming in the things like creating wallets with that have silent payment, functionality such that you can have a static public payment address. Say, Hey, you know, we're out for drinks with me and buffer. And it's like, let me, let me send you some money, to cover my drinks, you know, I'll send it to buffer@bitcoin. [01:29:55] And, makes it super easy to say, and you could do it in a way that it's not jeopardizing, you know, Buffer's safety. But that's only one, that's one kind of next level, I think, of interaction. It'd be pretty easy to build, that into wallets. But then the other thing is like, okay, how, where do I store these? Like all the people that I want to send to, I need kind of an address book feature where these are the type of people that I have. [01:30:24] I know when I send to that name that it's going to the right person. It's not accidental. So there needs to be kind of some fleshing out of the ecosystem around the whole Spaces protocol. I've got some ideas about kind of an address book that wouldn't particularly live in a single app that needs to be shared and available in other places. So, you know, I tell people all the time, it's like, we're, we're just starting to like build out the ecosystem around this. I actually submitted an OpenSats grant request for, for this exact thing. [01:30:56] So we'll see, you know, I, we'll keep building, but, we need help to kind of flesh out some of these useful, use cases. [01:31:07] Vlad Costea: Beautiful. But how are you going to deal with Bitcoin's limited scalability? You mentioned the silent payments address that's on chain. The fees can get very high and maybe there will not be too many transactions. What's the long-term plan? [01:31:23] Buffer: Yeah. So, like you could associate like any kind of address. It doesn't have to be a Bitcoin address. So you could put in like a Lightning address if you want to use Lightning or Ark addresses or whatever kind of address that you want to associate with your name and people to like pay you by. As far as the issuance of the handles is concerned, like you could, you could issue like a hundred thousand name in one transaction. So, it's very cheap to like issue the handles. [01:31:52] And then you could associate whatever kind of address or record that you want, for people to pay you by. So it's not directly, like, linked to the, like the scalability issue of like Bitcoin payments and like, the, seven transaction per second, throughput of Bitcoin. so it depends on what address format you use. If you want to, get paid with Bitcoin only, then yes. If everyone wants to do that, then yeah, that's going to be, hard. [01:32:26] Vlad Costea: Is there any expiration date to these domains or are they permanent for as long as Bitcoin exists? [01:32:33] Andrew: So it's a great question. Yeah, the top-level names like @bitcoin in this case, there's one expiration caveat and that is if you acquire one, you go through the auction process, you're the top bidder, you register it. That's the final action you have to take. Now you are the owner. It's like, if you do not do anything on chain in association with that name, and there's a lot of operations that account for this, that, if you don't do any operation for a year, it will expire. [01:33:04] The protocol will expire it and it allows it to be reentered into the auction process. So why is that? So like, you know, Vlad, you get, you know, at Vlad or something that maybe a lot of other people might want, but Hey, they were slow to the game. You got it. And, then, you know, you got hit by a bus. So, oh no. And, and, or you forgot to put it in your estate planning, you know, or you didn't set up a trust to actually renew it once a year or whatever. [01:33:32] Like a lot of things can happen. People lose their keys, right? And suddenly they can't do anything more. Those, those UTXOs are, are stuck. Right. So it's like, at least this way, for, you know, a top level name isn't necessarily permanently stuck forever. And it could be, reanimated, you know, after the expiration. Now everything else, everything on this side of the at sign is completely, never expires. You own it. It's your sovereign property. No one can take it away. The only thing you have to worry about is making sure your secret key doesn't get away. [01:34:12] It doesn't get disclosed or something. So it's not going to prevent those sorts of attacks. [01:34:16] Buffer: Yeah, exactly. So like if you own vlad@bitcoin, it will never expire. It's yours forever. And, you could even rotate the key if you want to some other key later. So yeah. That's basically what Andrew said. [01:34:31] Vlad Costea: Is there a marketplace today to buy, for example, one character domain names? Like maybe I don't want to be Vlad. I want to be V, but that one is already taken. [01:34:43] Buffer: Yeah. I mean, I think we currently, for @bitcoin itself, I think we limited the one character and two characters, but I'm sure if you want v@bitcoin, I'm sure Mike will give it to you, but, it's up to the operator. Like when they, when they're issuing. Yeah. [01:35:03] Andrew: The operator sets the policy for what they want to do. I mean, it's not all about monetization. I envisioned a lot of these, names might be used to kind of build communities, right? You maybe you want a club, you've got maybe, you know, some sort of, organization that you want to, you know, use this as maybe a way to gatekeep access to certain resources that are associated with that club. This gives you a way to do that where, you know, there's a lot of permanence again, other than that one exception of like, you don't do anything for a year of a top level domain, none of this goes away. [01:35:38] So it's like, you know, you don't have to use or exercise usage of it. You know, it could be something you set up and then come back two years later. It's going to be there. So, you know, it's kind of the land of opportunity for what we can do with this is just, we're just starting to scratch the surface, I think. So we'll, we'll see where we go. But, one of the things I've been playing with, are you familiar with nsites? [01:35:38] Vlad Costea: No, I don't think so. [01:36:05] Andrew: Are you familiar with Blossom servers? So, you're familiar with Nostr and all the messages are on relays. So you associate your client with a bunch of relays and you send it something, a message. Everybody gets that message that's subscribed to that relay. And that's how the messages propagate. Well, what about the images that you see in the Nostr feeds or the links to the movies or the clips or whatever? Those are media, right? So Nostr isn't designed to like shuttle media and replicate media files. And those can be links to like Cloudflare or some hosted something. [01:36:46] But what about distributing the serving of media content? So there's a system called Blossom where it uses very similarly familiar with IPFS. So what we call, like hash, encoded content where you upload a file and it does a hash of it, and then you reference it by the hash. Well, Blossom servers do that sort of serving of content through a network of servers and each server, again, kind of like IPFS, kind of replicates what all the other servers are doing. So you don't have to hit any particular one to get your content. [01:37:22] You just have to be able to point to one of the few that you use. And, this protocol called nsite takes and marries those two things together. So with nsite, you, you publish your static web content. It then divvies it up, sends it to the Blossom servers for all the GIFs and those fonts and the HTML pages themselves. And then broadcasts on the Nostr network messages that are effectively a manifest of where to find all the bits and pieces. Then you have a server called an nsite gateway that's, and that site has itself a public key for that site. [01:38:01] So then you have this component called an nsite gateway that understands when a request comes in for that site key, which is again, like it looks like another Nostr npub, that it sees that. And then it understands how to go look in Nostr, figure out where the manifest is, figure out where all the pieces are, and then query them and then cache them and represent it as the complete website. Now that's a lot of work, but what does it mean? It means that your content is distributed across multiple servers, so it's less vulnerable to attack. [01:38:34] So if you got content and you don't want anybody to take it down, this is a very resilient mechanism. So what I did was I made a browser that understood Spaces protocol and an nsite gateway server that understands Spaces protocol and a web server. Well, the web server is not included, but it's like this way I could use a Spaces name and get nsite to deliver content automatically. And yeah, it looks like another webpage, but the fact is, is that it's very resistant to attack and very little, dependence on any DNS lookups at all. [01:39:09] So, you know, it's a, it was kind of proof of concept, wanted to just see how that worked, but this is kind of the type of things I really want to encourage people to think about. Well, what else can you do with this, in a way that kind of reduces any counterparty risk, any central authority. That's a main premise behind this whole effort. [01:39:30] Vlad Costea: What is... Oh, you wanted to add something? [01:39:33] Buffer: Yeah. So like, we've built a fabric resolver, which we have in like six languages on like React Native, Rust, et cetera. So if you want to build use cases for spaces, you could use the fabric SDKs that we have to build things like nsite, what Andrew has built, and many others. [01:39:54] Vlad Costea: I wanted to ask what's the average price for a domain? How much should users be expected to pay? [01:39:59] Buffer: Yeah, so you mean for like the handle itself or like a top-level? [01:39:59] Vlad Costea: [unclear: Okay.] [01:39:59] Buffer: So for the handle, currently we're selling @bitcoin handles for like $25, like 30k sats or something like that, but it's up to the operator to like decide the pricing. Some operators might offer them for like free, some might want to like, for five dollars, it's up to them. But currently the @bitcoin is 25, and I'm not sure if Andrew is selling anything. [01:40:33] Andrew: I have put some pricing in my platform and I started out as 100,000 sats just to see if I could get any uptake, which is what, 80 bucks now currently or so. It's a lot, but it's like how much you spend for a domain registration other than like the first year is five bucks and after that it renews for 30, 40 dollars. So, and that's a top level domain. And so, but we're talking about something that never expires, that is going, if you use it, it could be very valuable and, you know, it really represents a lot of, you know, sovereign control over the thing that when you tell people, this is how you relate to me, it's like this name that exists on Bitcoin can't be messed with. [01:41:22] So it's early days, nobody knows what the market value of these things and maybe if it's just like a community website, you maybe charge a little bit just to like, just to make sure that you don't get a bunch of spam requests. But if it's something like, you know, an exclusive club where, you know, like a golf club or something where you're spending a hundred thousand dollars just to be a member, you know, maybe it's, you know, a thousand bucks worth of sats. I don't know. I mean, it's hard to say. [01:41:54] The platform I built just allowed for flexibility. You could make a fixed price for any name. You can, you know, make longer names cheaper and shorter names more expensive. Maybe you put an algorithm that's like something that's a proper name like Joe or Fred or something you charge more for. But if it's like NK3821, this you charge less. It's all totally up to the operator. And it's early days. We just don't know what the market for this stuff is yet. We just have to experiment and start finding out. [01:42:26] And part of that is just gaining awareness. It's like if nobody adopts it, then there will be zero market for it. So we'll see. [01:42:34] Vlad Costea: I guess there has to be a balance between making it affordable enough for people to want to participate, but also not, you know, very inclusive. So it gives people, it builds a network effect. That's kind of the point. Yeah. So where can people find out more and register domain? [01:42:54] Buffer: So if you want to find out more about the protocol itself, visit spacesprotocol.org. And if you want to get an @bitcoin handle like this one Andrew is having, you could visit atbitcoin.com. [01:43:11] Andrew: And if you want to acquire any of the names that I have put through my platform, I created a special wallet that just talks to my platform. And you can find out about that at spaceswallet.com. I have iOS and Android play store or app stores already. And that name will change. That list of names right now, it's about a dozen names. I mean, I've got @bitcoin21. Of course, I couldn't get @bitcoin. It was already taken. Yeah. @tabconf, which will not exist here much longer. Just space, @space I got. Some like @tether, @usdc, USDC. [01:43:54] You know, I just tried a bunch of things to see what might... @zap. Maybe that takes off. Maybe people build something around that with Nostr, you know. So it's really, it just depends. And, you know, I'm willing to, I've acquired a bunch of my own, but I want other people to like, get excited about names that they think they can build something around. And if I, if my platform can help them, you know, leverage that, then come visit [unclear: spacesops.com]. That's kind of my platform stuff. [01:44:29] And, but in order to see what's going on with that and reach out to me, one thing I want to make very clear is that I don't necessarily, I don't, if you're a top level name holder, there's a process for signing a message, which then that proves to me that you're the rightful owner of that name. I can onboard you and set things up. I don't have to necessarily communicate with you directly. And I think that's could be important, depends on what people want to do. The goal is eventually, one of the things I want to do next is to set up a Buzz server. [01:45:07] You're familiar with Buzz? [01:45:07] Vlad Costea: Buzz? [01:45:07] Andrew: Buzz? B-U-Z-Z? [01:45:07] Vlad Costea: No. [01:45:07] Andrew: It's like an AI, like collaborative platform where people can come and interact with agents and build and do software development. So what would be nice is to kind of create an environment that knows everything it is about the protocol and all the libraries and how to use them and then make it very easy to like add support, spaces resolution support to existing software and to build new software, you know, because to pull all the pieces together, I mean, AI is making a lot easier for sure, but I think having some, some support to kind of help people figure out, you know, oh, I've got this other thing, piece of software, I would love to add spaces, protocol integration. [01:45:54] What's the easiest way to do it? So we're, we're, we build all the foundational stuff, the tools, the libraries, Buffer's put a lot of effort into it. You know, I, now we just got to get the application and the adoption layers built and that's what we need. [01:46:12] Vlad Costea: There's going to be a hard fork of Bitcoin that's launching in less than 20 days. And I guess the addresses and the names that were registered on the Spaces protocol are going to be relayed on the new network. Are you going to support that too? Or, well, what's the plan? [01:46:28] Andrew: I think safely, there's no plan for that. I don't know. Maybe I, I'm, yeah, I don't think. [01:46:36] Buffer: So you said there is like going to be a hard fork of Bitcoin. I mean, I think we're staying on Bitcoin, but if someone wants to register on the other fork, I mean, I think the protocol will work. Like you could connect your own Bitcoin core or whatever version of the fork is and continue to use it on the fork if you wish. But we're going to continue to be on Bitcoin. [01:47:01] Andrew: So I guess that's a good question. It's like, so everything that exists up to the point of the fork will exist on the new chain just by virtue of it being a fork, right? So yeah, that's, I guess it could diverge from that point. So you'd have to then decide which chain you want to interact with. But yeah, I don't know. What's the, well, there's no liquidity or market for the new chain yet. So we have to yet to decide if it's going to fly. We saw earlier forks a couple months ago that just didn't really go anywhere. [01:47:38] We'll know. [01:47:39] Vlad Costea: Well, the Lukecoin is trading for like $500 right now. [01:47:43] Andrew: So yeah, so there is some of a market. So we'll see. I don't know. No plans. Not that I know of. [01:47:50] Buffer: Like no plans at all. We're staying on Bitcoin [unclear: for now]. [01:47:56] Vlad Costea: Is there anything I haven't asked you about, but you really want to mention? [01:48:03] Buffer: Something you haven't asked. Well, oh, we haven't talked about, I think, no, I think we talked about cert relays a bit. So if you want to run like a cert relay, it's kind of similar to running like a Nostr relay. And you could help the network by like storing records for others. And that so that resolvers get more robust and decentralized over time. So, yeah, I suppose that. [01:48:31] Andrew: And that was one of the components I put in the Start9 packaging to make it easy for people to participate with the cert relay, because it needs to have a certain amount of participation as well, such that it is robust as it can be. So we'll see. I mean, right now we've got about seven relay participants. It's very easy to grow that out. And I guess anything else? I think this could be an important thing to managing just other types of identity. We've already been here at the conference talking to people who have projects with decentralized identity. [01:49:11] So that's another thing. I can imagine applications where using a smart card signing to then help sign information and create applications that are more even require physical presence in order to use them. There's so many things we can do. It's probably more important to get some things going, like kind of what you were describing earlier, which is kind of your own version of like, here are all the social media handles that I can be reached at. I actually had my Telegram account canceled about a month ago. [01:49:48] And, you know, it's kind of pain in the butt to reach out to people and that you only knew how to get a hold of them through Telegram. You have to find some other way to or you just lose that connection. So having a place that nobody can cancel is, you know, I think pretty important. So I think this really follows the ethos of like, you know, Bitcoin is to money. What Nostr is to social media, Spaces protocol is to names, or DNS. [01:50:18] Buffer: Yeah, and we're also submitting a new Nostr NIP soon. It's called NIP-Spaces. And that way, instead of using NIP-05, which is DNS, and it's like [unclear: a third-party custody], it's rented, it's not yours, then you could use something like alice@bitcoin on Nostr and use that as your [unclear: NIP-05]. [01:50:42] Vlad Costea: You guys got a couple of shout-outs. There's curious@bitcoin who says, what's up Andrew. And there's also [unclear: Lady at Lady Monkey] who says Spaces protocol sounds cool. [01:50:55] Andrew: All right. So Curious is my partner in crime on, we have a YouTube channel. If you go to Bitcoin Curious, @BitcoinCurious, I'm pretty sure that's it. If you search Curious and Bitcoin together on YouTube, you'll find it. But we, you know, we're both big enthusiasts for the project. We really believe that it's got some potential. And we were chatting on the Telegram chat. So if you're interested, and also in the what's going on in our community, we have a Telegram chat, go to the spacesprotocol.org website, and there's a link to it. [01:51:34] But the other fellow, Jason, I'll dox him, Jason who's curious. We have the Jason and Andrew show. We just like talk about for about an hour or so every Friday. And, you know, a little bit about the Bitcoin macro kind of world, what's going on, and then any news around Spaces protocol that's something we want to discuss or another aspect of the protocol we kind of want to dive into. We just, we just rip on it for a while. And because we want, you know, as people get curious about this stuff, we want there to be a body of material that they can go, you know, start learning about, you know, and if nobody spent the time put that together, then it doesn't exist. [01:52:14] So that was kind of one of the ways we felt we could give back to the community a little bit. So we'll have a little bit, probably tomorrow we'll do a recap of what's going on at TABConf. And then next Friday, Buffer's going to come on and we're going to do the burning of the @tabconf name in the next Friday show. So Buffer's in Europe, so he's got travel and stuff tomorrow. I'll cover. But maybe tune in next week for the TABConf burning show. [01:52:50] Buffer: Yeah. So I guess I'm going to be on your curious Bitcoin show. Yeah. And yeah, we will, I guess, burn @tabconf. And yeah, and like people will, that would be the last chance to get their handle in like one week. Yeah. [unclear: And then you'll solve this.] [01:53:12] Andrew: Also, just, you know, thanks to Mike Tidwell for putting on this conference for eight years. It's, you know, it's really a great resource. We kind of are sad to see it go. But I've made a lot of great connections here over the years. I've only been three times. But the fact that it's here in Atlanta, my hometown, makes it all the better. And we're gonna miss it. So if Mike hears this podcast, thanks, Mike, for all your efforts. We appreciate it. And yeah, just if you're interested, come check out the website. [01:53:45] Check out the Telegram. Ask questions. We're happy to answer any questions that you have. And it's new stuff. So it's fun. [01:53:56] Vlad Costea: Thank you very much, guys. It was very informative. And I feel like I've learned a lot. I think people are gathering for Peter Todd's presentation on private mempools, I think. I'm not sure about the schedule, actually. Should look it up. But yeah, will I be able to get someone else on this stream? Do they still have sandwiches down the hall? I don't know. But there's a chance. Maybe I should grab lunch and get ready for when the crowd gets out of that main stage hall. [01:53:56] Andrew: Alrighty. Vlad, thanks so much for having us. [01:54:32] Vlad Costea: Thank you very much, Andrew. And thank you very much. Very nice to meet you. Can you tell me your name again? [01:54:32] Buffer: Buffer. [01:54:32] Vlad Costea: Is that really your name? [01:54:42] Buffer: It's more like a [unclear: sort of] name. [01:54:46] Vlad Costea: I don't want to know your real name, for the record. I was just curious. [01:54:48] Buffer: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just used that a couple of years ago when I started working on this stuff and it just sort of caught on and I just kept using it. [01:55:01] Vlad Costea: Okay, Buffer and Andrew, check out the Spaces protocol. You heard about it first on Bitcoin Takeover like two and a half years ago with Mike Carson. And it really took off right now, like 3000. How many registrations? [01:55:17] Buffer: Oh, like the top-level spaces? I think about 3700. [01:55:22] Andrew: Yeah. And on the Telegram channel, I'm Phaedrus, P-H-A-E-D-R-U-S, which is a character from a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance if you're curious about that. So look it up. [01:55:35] Buffer: Oh, and also we have about 1.5 Bitcoins already burned through the auctions to get the 3700 Spaces. [01:55:45] Vlad Costea: Wait, so you guys are diminishing the supply of Bitcoin? [01:55:50] Buffer: Yeah, sort of. It's like a donation to everyone. Like everyone's coins will be worth just a bit more because we're burning it. And it's like the most fair way so that the money from the auctions doesn't go to like some centralized foundation, etc. So this is like, it was like the cleanest way to do it on Bitcoin. [01:56:15] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I'm looking at the schedule. What else do we have today? So much happening and we're close. Get close to the end. Yeah, unfortunately, I don't know why they had the funeral yesterday. [01:56:30] Andrew: Yeah, the last send off was yesterday, which I think they wanted to make sure everybody that wouldn't make it past the party got to hear the final words. [01:56:42] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so there is my live stream. There's one from Stacker News, but I guess they're not doing it anymore. There's a Smash Bros. Melee competition there, like a tournament. That's ongoing. And Builder Days project. There's a jobs board that's circulating with someone who's offering $100 in prize for something I can't read. [unclear: Do you have a share of that?] There is an arcade booth in the expo area, which I don't see. [01:57:13] Andrew: So actually, the job board was my helping out with that. So I'm in a group called Bitplication. It's a group that helps people in the Bitcoin space find jobs. [01:57:27] And we could find it on LinkedIn and also Telegram. And there's an ongoing campaign called Jobtober. So it's kind of helping people raise their visibility online that are interested in working in the Bitcoin space. [01:57:50] Vlad Costea: This is actually a lot of fun. It's confusing at first. You don't know where you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to be doing. There are two stages that are happening at the same time. And then I think there are more people outside just on their laptops, collaborating, doing stuff, but also participating in all sorts of events. [01:58:10] Andrew: We've got a great group of volunteers here in Atlanta. And just to plug one more thing, I guess if you're in the Atlanta area, any given Wednesday night, we probably have a Bitcoin meetup going. We have four a month and two afternoon meetings a month. One's Nostr, one's AI stuff. We talk a lot about Bitcoin. Sometimes it's technical deep dive. Sometimes it's more plebs, more just macroeconomic. And hey, you have questions about Bitcoin, come out and ask them. So we're always happy to help. So great, great active community here in Atlanta. [01:58:44] Vlad Costea: Where are you from, by the way? Can you mention? [01:58:49] Buffer: Well, I can say that I'm currently based in Paris and I've lived in the U.S. before for like over a decade. So that's as far as I'll go. [01:58:59] Vlad Costea: Paris is a beautiful place to live. Congratulations on that. I'm offering you my Forks magazine for being in my podcast. You got one already, right? [01:58:59] Buffer: Not yet. [01:58:59] Vlad Costea: A magazine. I didn't give you one. [01:58:59] Buffer: Not yet, but that's all right. I'll take it. [01:58:59] Vlad Costea: This is for you. [unclear: Where's your mic back?] Yes. You're going to want that. Thank you. Thank you for being part of Bitcoin Takeover. [01:58:59] [unclear speaker]: Thanks, everyone. Nice to meet you. [01:58:59] Vlad Costea: Now we got to look for the next guest. Can you let me know if there are sandwiches outside? [01:59:30] I might take a lunch break. [01:59:30] [unclear speaker]: They're gone. [01:59:30] Vlad Costea: OK, my hopes of actually having lunch are gone. So now I need to find another guest. [01:59:41] In the meantime, this show is sponsored by Cake Wallet and LayerTwo Labs and SideShift and also Braiins Hashpower and Orange Rock. Check them out. I want to thank them for participating and making this happen. Christian, do you want to join the stream? [02:00:03] Not now? Yeah. Can you do it later? Yeah, please. [02:00:12] I need to find someone else to join. It seems like a lot of people went inside to watch talks. I also see [unclear: Alex Lee] from the Human Rights Foundation. And I'm not sure if I can dox that guy. If he wants people to know that he's here. [02:00:33] Kevin, do you want to do a part 2? Kevin is the hero who's saving the stream. I was going to maybe try to have lunch, but now I'm not going to have lunch. [02:00:33] Kevin Loaec: I'm sorry. [02:00:48] I was just trying to help, you know. [02:00:51] Vlad Costea: No, it's fine. It's good for the show. So, what do you like nowadays for self-custody? What do you think is a very good solution for both [unclear: AI] attacks and maybe Quantum? Oh, Quantum. [02:01:06] Kevin Loaec: No, I don't think there's anything against Quantum right now. I also believe that's part of the threat model of Bitcoin. So, as long as there is no Quantum, we are good. When there is Quantum, we need to be ready and ready to fix it. But right now, you can't self-custody thinking about Quantum. I think it's too early and it doesn't really make sense. What makes sense, though, is to try to optimize your self-custody. And I think like, let's say using Liana again. I'm sorry, I'm shilling. [02:01:39] But using Liana, you can choose SegWit or Taproot. And we have a lot of users asking us like, hey, should I use SegWit because it has this hash on the addresses? Or should I use Taproot? But that is less Quantum resistant or vulnerable because you have no hash. And I do recommend my users to use Taproot because Quantum is not a risk right now. The main risk is privacy. The main risks are like, yeah, [unclear: different costs]. And how your anonymity set on chain just fucks everything up. [02:02:07] So Taproot really helps on that. Your question was, what's the best custody? Yeah, Liana is the best, always. It depends on who you are, how you spend your coins. You have to be realistic about if you spend it often, it's useless to have a 10 of 10 multisig. You're going to just skip the steps because you're using it so often. The UX is shit for you. If you actually never use your coins, don't go single-sig. Do something more complex because if you don't need to access it that often, it's okay to have a bit harder experience when you spend because it's not often. [02:02:42] So yeah, it depends on who you are. [02:02:46] Vlad Costea: Is there anything else outside of Liana that you like and that has cool features for, features not futurists, for Bitcoin self-custody? [02:02:55] Kevin Loaec: Huh, that's a good question. Right now I use Liana for everything. I use Liana for myself. I use Liana for the business, et cetera. So I'm not really using the other software. I'm a fan of Sparrow. I think Sparrow is a really cool wallet. But again, right now it doesn't support many scripts. So it's limited to like multisig. You can use collaborative custody. Something like, you know, Casa, Unchained, AnchorWatch, Nunchuk, whatever you want. This is cool because you have kind of a cosigner that can enforce spending limits or whatever you want with them. [02:03:34] And that's nice. But yeah, it kind of start playing with regulation, which I don't really like. I hope to be able to bring a self-hosted cosigner in the future where like you can just buy a machine or rent a machine or whatever, where you control the machine and you set the rules and everything. But it's not a third party company that controls it. And I think this is very important. We might be able to do the same thing as you would do with a covenant, without needing covenants. [02:04:06] So enforcing spending limits, you know, how much you can spend per day, kind of velocity, whitelist of addresses, things like that. And we don't need to change the Bitcoin protocol to make that work. We just need to have secure cosigners for that. And yeah, this is probably coming soon, like next year. Probably some companies are going to offer that or more companies are going to offer that just because of all the shit show we've been seeing this year. So it forces people to rethink custody. How can I protect myself even if my keys are compromised, et cetera? [02:04:40] Vlad Costea: Let me ask you something else, which I have been meaning for a long time. You launched so many open source projects that have no monetization scheme. It's possible that you just built them for yourself. So how do you make money? [02:04:56] Kevin Loaec: I don't know. I don't make money right now. The money we are using is still investors' money. So WizardSardine is a VC-funded company. Our VCs are Bitcoiners, so they really understand what we're doing. They are very happy that we are producing stuff. We're not scamming anyone. We are producing very valuable software. But yeah, I need to monetize at some point. This is not donations. They are expecting a return. So I really need to fix my monetization problem. So if anyone on the stream is a very good salesperson and would like to become the head of sales at WizardSardine, please let me know. [02:05:37] I'm looking for someone to do it because I'm terrible at it. Yeah, we don't really make money, but our monetization right now for Liana is B2B. So if you are a business into Bitcoin or holds Bitcoin or holds Bitcoin for your users, if you are a bank, whatever, you can talk to us. We can basically help you run Liana as an infrastructure product for no matter how big you are. Like, you could have tens of thousands of BTC. Liana is a very good fit for that, and we monetize this way. [02:06:10] So for companies, we can monetize the infrastructure of Liana. For individuals, not really. People don't really like to pay for software like Liana, yeah. [02:06:19] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's always difficult with open source products because, of course, they're free. Anyone can download. Nobody wants to donate, really, unless there's like a critical situation where the developers are starving or they're about to close down the service or not support it anymore. [02:06:37] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, and that's a good point as well. It's really something I don't want to do. I don't want to start crying to my users. I don't want to be begging to my users. I really believe... [02:06:47] Vlad Costea: I'm going to tell you what to do. You edit your GitHub page, and you mention if you give me $10 per month, I'm going to eat one steak. If you give me $20 per month, I'm going to be able to have clean water because clean water is important. If you give me $100 per month, I'm going to be able to offer healthcare to one of my 10 kids. And you just keep going like this and... [02:07:12] Kevin Loaec: That's exactly what I was thinking when you started that. So yeah, I remember. And it's still there, I think. He still has it. But anyways, yeah, I don't want to be begging. [02:07:26] Vlad Costea: But you did tell me that at some point you sent some Bitcoin to Luke, and apparently he lost 200 Bitcoin and you were broke when you sent him some Bitcoin. [02:07:37] Kevin Loaec: So it's usually the same problem. I know, especially in the early days, I know many developers in Bitcoin were not making any money and they were working just really out of good heart because they love Bitcoin and kind of like what I'm doing. And so, yeah, it's very important to like not assume everyone that was there early is rich because a lot of them were just doing it for free, like working for free on Bitcoin. And yeah, of course, like I wanted to support people. And yeah, it's kind of shit when you see hundreds of Bitcoin [unclear: lost by] someone you donated to when, you know, it's a number that I cannot even fathom. [02:08:21] I will never, ever approach this kind of number. And yeah, it's just kind of feel like shit when it's like that, you know, like. But yeah, it's a donation. So kind of my bad, I guess. [02:08:34] Vlad Costea: Yeah, 200 Bitcoin is not something that most of us will ever touch unless Bitcoin goes to zero or something. [02:08:42] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, which is not necessarily a good thing either if it goes to zero. Yeah, so monetization, as we were saying, B2B, I think, is the way. Individuals don't really like to pay. I don't want to be begging. There are grants in the Bitcoin space. And what I do is open source, but it's still not something I really want to pursue right now. Just again, because I don't want to be begging. I think I'm producing value, so I should be able to monetize it. You know, I'm a capitalist at heart. [02:09:10] So I believe if there is value, I should be able to monetize it. [02:09:13] Vlad Costea: And then now you're talking like the guy who built this and decided to not open source it anymore. [02:09:20] Kevin Loaec: If one day I stop open sourcing stuff. Yeah, it's bad. It means I really lost a big belief of like things I've done all my life. But at the same time, AI is doing a good job as making sure that even if it's closed source, you can't defend it anyway. So at least we're leveling the playing field here with AI where nobody will want to pay for shit instead of just not paying for open source. But yeah, I don't think it solves the problem. But hey, you know. [02:09:51] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And you've been around for such a long time. I remember I don't want to dox the conversation or the context, but you're complaining at some point that the speakers on the stage don't speak good English. And I know that for you as a French person, it's kind of an effort to change your accent. Most French people still speak English with their French intonation and their pronunciation and whatever. And you've been doing Breaking Bitcoin, right? [02:10:21] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, a long time ago. Breaking Bitcoin was 2017 and 2019, I think. Yeah. And I mean, of course, like, it's fair, like everyone, you know, come from different places, whatever. There are also now conferences, we start seeing more conferences that are not in English at all, which is also interesting, where if you are invited there, it's going to be translated in the back or something. So quite interesting. But yes, sometimes it's just difficult as well, as an organizer or whatever, to be able to invite the right people or not be blamed to not invite the right people or, oh, why is this guy on stage and not that guy? [02:11:07] And then like, well, you know, an event is an event. It has to run. You can't. Yeah. Like you have to think about the attendees. You have to think about so many things. So people are always going to complain about something. And it is what it is. Yeah. [02:11:22] Vlad Costea: This year has been kind of horrible for Bitcoin. And it's not just because of the hacks. It's also because of the forks. I think that the community is splitting in different ways. We have the BIP 110ers who decided that they don't like spam and they would rather have this authoritarian situation where they pretend to be voting on Discord, but they vote on issues which are already established by someone who's managing and maintaining the code by himself. And they do seem to have like a few hundred users. [02:11:53] And they're on a couple of exchanges where the price right now is like five hundred dollars, which is so good on them. The liquidity on the order book is very thin. So I guess if you sell a couple of Bitcoin, we're going to tank the price by a lot. And there's also the eCash fork, which is like the more nerdy and developer focused. I think that it's quite ironic, right, because the Luke fork is very reductionist and they say we're going to make the block size smaller and we're going to reduce the ways in which you can use this. [02:12:27] And then Paul's fork says we're going to make we're going to give everyone what they want. We're going to make a sidechain for every use case. [02:12:36] Kevin Loaec: Yes. My view on this is that Bitcoin as a system is alive, right? Bitcoin has to follow what the crowd wants, but the crowd is not a democracy and the crowd is not absolutely everyone has a vote or things like that. It's really a it's alive. It's a thing that moves very slowly and adapts. And I think if you want to accelerate things to a point that you need to fork, it's just it's kind of sad. I mean, good for you, I guess. It's just like. [02:13:10] Vlad Costea: I hope you get rich. That's the answer. [02:13:12] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. I mean, yeah. When you look at BIP 110 and all the bullshit around it and not like spam, whatever, and now they are in a completely centralized system. You're like, what the fuck is this? Like, you never wanted Bitcoin in the first place if you're trying to find a centralized system like how were you in Bitcoin in the first place? And yeah, I mean, it's not new. Forks are not new. It's just that right now it's the trend again to fork Bitcoin instead of doing a shitcoin. [02:13:37] It's like every decade you gotta have this. Yeah, [02:13:41] Vlad Costea: I think so as well. [unclear: We'll be 60,] sitting here and be like, oh, do you remember Bitcoin Cash? Now we're getting something else. [02:13:48] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. And I mean, we're from the time where, you know, you might have had like 10 coins in total. You had Bitcoin and maybe less than nine shitcoins. And then it became thousands of shitcoins. And they were like, I mean, some of them were forks. So at least copy paste of Bitcoin was just a tiny thing changing. And then you had completely different shit. And now it's back to like people are forking Bitcoin for some reason. I don't think any of these like are going to be around in the future. [02:14:14] I mean, maybe it's hard to turn them off. So not maybe like not be around, but have any kind of significant use. I mean, I was shocked when you told me something like your designer or something wanted to be paid in Bcash. Like to me, this is crazy. Why would you like... [02:14:28] Vlad Costea: They have a community in Korea. But I think also the rationale is that maybe the Bitcoin Cash is going to do a 10x, but it's harder for BTC to do a 10x. So maybe they're thinking, oh, maybe it's... [02:14:39] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. Well, yeah. But like, why not investing in Nvidia instead? You know, I'm like, I just don't get it. I mean, like if you want money, like to use money, I think Bitcoin is that. It's not perfect, but Bitcoin is the best we have. And if you need to fork it, you're going to give up on some of the things, either centralization or control or whatever. And yeah, Bitcoin is just the best we have. And I believe as long as we have people working on it who believe in it, it's going to keep moving the right way. [02:15:14] And of course, they're going to be arguments. This is also part of Bitcoin. We like arguing with each other. But I don't believe anyone can just like fork off and be like, oh, I'm the new Bitcoin now. It doesn't work like this. Yeah. [02:15:27] Vlad Costea: I mean, what's different is no, it's not different because Luke's Fork still pretends that it's the real Bitcoin and they wanted the exchange sticker to be BTC and they want to be called as Bitcoin. And BTC to them is what? Spam chain or they... I don't even fucking know. Yeah. Bitcoin or they came up with some names to sort of distinguish between them. But what Paul is doing is just calling it something else, which I think is much more honest and saying I want to do something else. [02:15:56] It's not Bitcoin. Sure. I can [02:15:58] Kevin Loaec: Agree with that. I can agree with that. At least not not co-opting the name or something like that is already a good start. But again, like kind of good luck. I don't think it's going to be used for anything. So I think it's a mistake. But whatever. I mean, I'm not impacted. What's [02:16:13] Vlad Costea: Your plan? Are you claiming your forks? Are you selling them on the market? [02:16:16] Kevin Loaec: No, no. I mean, I guess I'm not holding them to hold them. It's just I don't care. So I'm not going to move my coins to just dump the fork coins. Maybe when I do, like when I refresh my time locks or whatever, I will sell my shitcoins. But where do I sell them? Do I need to go sign up on an exchange again? Like, I want to find a swap service. [02:16:40] Vlad Costea: Yeah, exactly. Swapping services are amazing. [02:16:43] Kevin Loaec: Great. So if you find me a good swap service to dump all of my shitcoins or you build one, you vibe code one. Great. You can even take 10 percent. I don't care. For me, these forks have no value to me. [02:16:43] Vlad Costea: SideShift is going to support eCash. So that's one of the places. [02:16:43] Kevin Loaec: So, yeah, really, these have no value to me. I remember when Bcash was created, I did dump it very quickly. But again, because I was rotating stuff, moving my coins to addresses, et cetera, there was a bunch of changes around the same time. [02:17:17] Vlad Costea: Did you have any regrets in November when the price went for like three thousand dollars? [02:17:19] Kevin Loaec: No, I know I don't have any regrets like this to me. The value of it is not important. I also told people Ethereum was a scam and they shouldn't buy it when it was a few cents to buy an ether. And sure, like financially, like terrible decision. But morally speaking, no, I'm still I'm still right in my opinion, like I don't think Ethereum is worth any of my time and I don't think it's going anywhere. And so, yeah, it's still around. Great. [02:17:50] The value went up from a few cents to quite a lot and great for people. But same with stocks. Same with, you know, yeah, a lot of companies out there not even talking about shitcoins, but talking generally about the value of things. Some people just mispriced things or put value where I don't see any value. And it's not all about money. [02:18:07] Vlad Costea: Lesson of economics, right? That value is subjective. Yeah. Yeah. And someone else is going to find value in something like BSV is still around and some people use it. [02:18:18] Kevin Loaec: Maybe. Do they? I mean, I don't know. What do they use it for? [02:18:21] Vlad Costea: There is a social media app that's called Twetch. [02:18:21] Kevin Loaec: OK. [02:18:21] Vlad Costea: It's a fork of Twitter with some features like, you can zap just like on Nostr, and every interaction costs like a cent [unclear: in direct]. [02:18:21] Kevin Loaec: Sure. [02:18:36] Kevin Loaec: But why don't you use lightning? Why don't you use Bitcoin? I don't know. But it's like to me, it doesn't sound like a use case. [02:18:41] Vlad Costea: They want to make their own bags useful. That's the whole point. Good for them. [02:18:45] Kevin Loaec: I don't see any use case there, right? It's like. [02:18:49] Vlad Costea: Maybe I'm copying this from Ross Ulbricht because he only did a couple of speeches after coming out of prison. But he did say at the Las Vegas conference, I think it was last year, that forks are part of decentralization. And the fact that you can have multiple blockchains for different use cases or just for serving the needs of someone just to be different or just to be a rebel against the larger group. This is part of the decentralization and it makes the main chain more resilient. [02:19:23] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. And I think it's so this is one of the weird thing. We're talking about money in Bitcoin and for money to work. You need a very, very large social consensus. It doesn't mean everyone agrees. It just means like we consider this money and everyone in this room consider Bitcoin money. And that's why it's winning. If you have to fork to create your own money because you don't agree with money as it's accepted by everyone. Good luck with that. You can like different countries have different currencies. [02:19:54] It doesn't mean that they all are worth something to the eye of the average person. Yeah. [02:20:01] So, yeah. Freedom to fork. Sure. You know, go ahead. Like Bitcoin is definitely not an authoritarian system. Join it. Leave it. Whatever. You know, nobody can prevent you from leaving Bitcoin. So if you're not happy with it, just leave it. And if everyone wants to leave, everyone wants to leave and it becomes worthless right now. It's not worthless, meaning people see value in it. And I'm like, cool. Now, why are all that? Why are some shitcoins still worth something? I don't understand. But if some people see value in them, good for them. [02:20:30] I don't know. Yeah. [02:20:33] Vlad Costea: Well, there are lots of reasons. The easiest is speculation. But there's also the fact that they built network effects and they built Lindy effects. For example, Litecoin at this point, it's very hard to argue that. Oh, Andrew Poelstra won $100. Cool. [02:20:51] At the job board. I'm not even aware what that's about. [02:20:55] Kevin Loaec: It's like a Shamir secret sharing or something. And probably a cryptographic challenge. And of course, Poelstra won it. [02:21:06] Vlad Costea: I'm happy for him, but I don't think he needed the money. But what I was saying is that you have some chains that will probably be around forever. [02:21:18] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Maybe they will just, you know, survive as well. Yeah. I just don't know. I don't understand these economics, to be honest. It's kind of weird. [02:21:18] Vlad Costea: Competition is good, to be honest. [02:21:18] Kevin Loaec: Is it competition really? I mean, research, if you want, but is it competition? [02:21:34] Vlad Costea: Like, look at what's happening. What's the trendiest thing right now in Bitcoin? [02:21:34] Kevin Loaec: Trendiest thing right now in Bitcoin? Maybe Ark? [02:21:34] Vlad Costea: Oh, I guess you're stuck in the other bubble. But even in Ark, you have Zark, which is trying to bring Zcash privacy to a construction which is innately Bitcoinish. [02:21:34] [unclear speaker]: So, but actually, no, because it's a rollup. [02:21:34] Vlad Costea: No, it's not a rollup. It's OK. [02:22:04] Kevin Loaec: Privacy is important. We all agree on that. Privacy on Bitcoin is pretty shit. We all agree on that. We need to fix it somehow. Now, how? Yeah, there is work to be done. But absolutely, I agree. Privacy is very important for many reasons, but for security as well. So we have censorship resistance in Bitcoin. So that's a win. We have that. We can't deny that. So privacy is not 100% necessary for censorship resistance. It's necessary if you want to have an exit. Like, let's say through an exchange, because then if your coins are, you know, tainted or whatever, the exchange can just say, oh, no, you're not going to get anything out of it. [02:22:41] Or if you don't KYC, oh, you can't get your money out of it. But if the system is money, like Bitcoin, we can transact, you know, censorship free between you and I. Maybe the exit is a bit difficult, but privacy is still important for you not to know how much money I have for my personal safety. So it's more like this approach that's very important, I think, than privacy being necessary for censorship resistance. I don't think that's the case once the system accepts Bitcoin as kind of money. [02:23:12] Right. Yeah. [02:23:15] Vlad Costea: But I think Zcash is doing something amazing. And I think you remember that there was Zerocoin in 2013 and Zerocash in 2014 as proposals to upgrade Bitcoin's privacy. We didn't get that partially because of people like Greg Maxwell and Peter Todd, who are very much opposed to it. But they went along with trying this. So they launched a hard fork of the protocol, not the UTXO set, which is called Zcash. And they spent the last decade improving it. And I think right now it finally matured to the point where it scales better. [02:23:50] It's also they created a shielded pool that has an auditable supply. So you don't have that concern anymore that you're going to end up creating inflation without knowing about it. [02:23:50] Kevin Loaec: Hopefully. [02:23:50] Vlad Costea: Hopefully, yes. And I think it's really amazing. It's exactly what I signed up for, the kind of technology which lets you have the least amount of metadata to be able to send money and also have the optionality if you want to not have the privacy, like reveal your funds, reveal your addresses and whatever. [02:24:25] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, I don't know what shape it will take in Bitcoin. It's very good that there is research happening right now. There is also sadly quite a bunch of things happening right now around, you know, around that and around quantum and whatever, where some people have a token and therefore they have a financial incentive to get their stuff accepted and not another person's stuff. And so if there is politics like this, it's going to be extremely hard to do any change in the Bitcoin protocol if we believe that someone is doing it specifically to pump their token. [02:25:00] If we find something that looks neat from a protocol perspective and it's not to pump someone's bag specifically, yeah, we have a chance. And so I'm not following all of these. There's too much happening. [02:25:10] Vlad Costea: Right now there is Shielded CSV by Robin Linus and Liam Eagen and Ying Tong. They're called [unclear: the ideal team]. And there's also Shielded Bitcoin, which came up like two weeks ago or something. [02:25:10] Kevin Loaec: [unclear: Ironically, two weeks.] Shielded CSV, right? [02:25:10] Vlad Costea: Yeah. Yeah, there's Shielded Bitcoin. It's another paper. The guy was here, but he didn't want to get on camera. [02:25:38] Kevin Loaec: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then there is the [unclear: I look in it], guys. Yeah. So stuff happening. That's great. I'm sadly not a cryptographer, so it's difficult to know everything about everything. But yeah, super interesting stuff. I don't know if you've got this image on camera, but the T-shirt, the red T-shirt. [02:25:59] Vlad Costea: Che Guevara? [02:26:00] Kevin Loaec: It's not Che Guevara. [unclear: It's Che Guevara.] You should try to get him. [02:26:00] Vlad Costea: Amir Taaki? [02:26:00] Kevin Loaec: No. [02:26:00] Vlad Costea: Who is that? [02:26:13] Kevin Loaec: He printed it today. [02:26:17] Vlad Costea: Who's that supposed to be? [02:26:17] Kevin Loaec: You will see. You will see. [02:26:17] Vlad Costea: Okay. I see it from an angle right now. So maybe prevents me from understanding. [02:26:17] [02:26:28] [02:26:17] Kevin Loaec: It makes me laugh so much. It's so well done. [02:26:17] Vlad Costea: It is, because I can't tell, but there's some text on top, right? [02:26:17] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. BIP 110. [02:26:17] Vlad Costea: Oh, it's Luke. Okay. Yeah. Sort of fitting. Okay. It kind of looks like Luke. It seems like it's the mechanic guy. [02:26:17] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. [02:26:17] Vlad Costea: That's why I didn't guess it at first. Yeah. I never really got into watching his live streams or whatever. I don't get it. [02:27:01] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. This T-shirt is amazing. [02:27:03] Vlad Costea: I just laughed when there was that video circulating where the mechanic guy was saying that he hasn't seen his kids in days because there's spam on Bitcoin. I was like, what the fuck, man? Don't you have a life? It's very weird for me. These people, even Hodlonaut, he lost his mind. [02:27:25] Kevin Loaec: Yep. Yeah, that's another one that donations might not have been feeling the best. [02:27:32] Vlad Costea: How much did you donate to Hodlonaut? [02:27:33] Kevin Loaec: Not much because I don't have much money, but I did. Yeah, of course. I raised. [02:27:37] Vlad Costea: Oh, Eric Lombrozo. Hi. We're doing a live stream here if you want to join. We have a chair. He doesn't want. No. It's fine. He's one of the makers of SegWit. [02:27:50] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. It's not very often to see him around. All right. Who are you going to get to replace me now? [02:28:00] Vlad Costea: I wouldn't want to replace you because I like talking to you. Oh, yeah. But if you have to go, there's not too many people here. It's the last day. [02:28:09] Kevin Loaec: Maybe it's the end speech or something, no? [02:28:09] Vlad Costea: No, not yet. That's a nice watch. What is that? [02:28:09] Kevin Loaec: It's a Citizen. [02:28:09] Vlad Costea: It's pretty. Oh, we're a match. [02:28:09] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. Nice. Automatic. Japanese watch. [02:28:09] Vlad Costea: Mine is orange. [02:28:09] Kevin Loaec: Mine is blue. [02:28:09] Vlad Costea: Is that blue? It looks more like gray. [02:28:09] Kevin Loaec: It's an indigo blue, yeah. Depends on the light. [02:28:09] Vlad Costea: Beautiful. Does it glow in the dark? [02:28:31] Kevin Loaec: It does. [02:28:31] Vlad Costea: Okay. It does. And is it like 300 euro? [02:28:31] Kevin Loaec: About that. Yeah. [02:28:31] Vlad Costea: It's probably the same model, but different color. [02:28:31] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. Nice. [02:28:31] Vlad Costea: All right. What makes you bullish about Bitcoin? [02:28:46] Kevin Loaec: What makes me bullish about Bitcoin? Ah, it's extremely pessimistic as a view, but I think the world is not going too well right now, generally speaking. Like financially speaking, economically speaking, looking at geopolitics and stuff like that. And I think Bitcoin is extremely necessary, especially if you consider people who might want or have to change countries, move borders, move across borders. And yeah, I think Bitcoin is an extremely important tool for that, being able to move around with your wealth without having to carry bags of gold or whatever. [02:29:25] And without having to tell anyone about how much money you have or you don't have or whatever. And yeah, I think it's extremely important. I'm very, very happy we have a tool like Bitcoin today. I probably would feel very scared without such a thing as Bitcoin. I would be like, how do I even move continents if something happens? So, you know, like I'm also in Europe right now. [02:29:52] Vlad Costea: You probably wouldn't want to move continents. You would participate in politics and vote, and hope that's going to change your life. [02:29:58] Kevin Loaec: Maybe. Yeah. Maybe it's a different way as well of thinking. Because of Bitcoin, I'm more like voting with my feet, moving where I'm treated best instead of trying to fix everything. And also, we're both from Europe and in Europe right now, it feels like we're controlled by people that are not elected. [02:30:20] Vlad Costea: What do you mean by that? European Commission or something? [02:30:23] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. And it's getting worse. And in a way that I don't think politics can fix that. I think it's past that. And so, yeah, when these people decide that it's time to, you know, prevent people from leaving, they will very probably restrict your monetary movements, how much money you can withdraw, how much money you can move, like it's happened in many countries, right? [02:30:49] Vlad Costea: And you already, if you want to pay for something, if it's more than, I think, a thousand euro, it has to be by bank, which means that they can restrict any payment whatsoever. Correct. [02:31:00] Kevin Loaec: Yeah. You cannot pay in cash more than a thousand euro now in Europe. Yeah. [02:31:04] Vlad Costea: In Romania, it's 2000, so far. But it was across Europe now. We're going to harmonize. That's what we call it. We're going to harmonize to be in line with the rest of Europe. Yeah. When we say it's more civilized to do it like this, the banking cartel is so powerful. And I'm sort of impressed with what they were able to achieve because they became a branch of the state. [02:31:25] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, totally. Like, who controls who? I don't even know at this stage. But yeah, I'm very glad of Bitcoin for that. So I'm very bullish in that perspective. I don't really care about the price of Bitcoin. So it's not like about the number of users. It's not about the price. It's more about like, what can I do with it? And I think it's a system that I'm amazed that it's still there. I really thought at the beginning what we were building was going to be shut down at some point. [02:31:52] You know, when it grew, because it would be like, as long as we're just kids playing in a corner, it's fine, nobody cares. But as soon as it becomes big enough, they'll just crack down. And they kind of put regulations in place, but they didn't ban it. They didn't crack down like in a terrible way. And so now I think it's too late. Now I really think they can't do shit about it. And so we won. We already won. Of course it's not perfect, but I'm bullish because I think we won. [02:32:19] We created a new form of money that is completely outside of their control. And holy shit, like, can you believe that? A bunch of people, a bunch of nerds just completely reset the system from a monetary perspective. We haven't reset anything. We just created enough space for us to navigate [02:32:40] Vlad Costea: The system. Because so far it doesn't scale for everyone to do this. [02:32:46] Kevin Loaec: And I don't think everyone wants to use it either. So it kind of works as it is. So I'm very happy with where we are right now. Yeah, [02:32:56] Vlad Costea: It's good for us, but I wish it was good for a lot more people. [02:33:01] Kevin Loaec: Can't have everything. Maybe they will join at some point. We can't force them. And yeah, we need to make tools easier, better, simpler, and we're going to get there. [02:33:14] Vlad Costea: I'm also pissed at Tron, but that's my rant, right? Because people were saying, no, Bitcoin has a bad user experience. It's hard to use, whatever. We need designers to make better interfaces. And then you look at Tron and you have to have the gas token to be able to send your USDT. And that's a very bad user experience, but people still choose to use that. [02:33:34] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, I have no clue. I think it's a centralized system anyway. It can be frozen by the Tether company. Kind of like stablecoin. Yeah, all of that. [02:33:44] Vlad Costea: No, I was referring to Tether. [02:33:44] Kevin Loaec: Ah, to Tether. [02:33:44] Vlad Costea: Tron itself, I'm not sure how censorship resistant it is, but I guess it's much better than Western Union. So that's why people use it. [02:33:56] Kevin Loaec: Yeah, yeah. Tether is an interesting experiment as well. They became big enough that if you're in a very small country or whatever, your country has no power over Tether. So it kind of acts as a outside of the system money. But if you are from one of the bigger countries, they might freeze your money. They might have enough power to just talk to Paolo and be like, hey, can you block this guy's money? And then you're screwed. So use Bitcoin instead. Yeah. That's going to be my conclusion for right now. [02:34:30] Vlad Costea: I've heard some applause from there. Do you know who's talking on stage? [02:34:30] Kevin Loaec: I have no idea. I know the closing talk is around five, so it's probably the last one after that one. Right now, I don't know. Yeah. And they removed the agenda. [02:34:47] Vlad Costea: It's on the website, so I did take a look at it. I'm not sure if it's the latest iteration. Maybe they changed some stuff. I think Eric Lombrozo is going to go on stage and do something. [02:34:47] Kevin Loaec: Oh, that'd be nice. [02:35:00] All right. He's a legend. [02:35:00] Vlad Costea: He is. He is indeed. Okay, let's go. Thank you very much, Kevin. I appreciate your contribution. Follow K-L-O-A-R-E-C. [02:35:00] Kevin Loaec: K-Loaec. No R. Loaec. [02:35:00] Vlad Costea: Okay. [02:35:00] Kevin Loaec: Yes, exactly. See you. See you around. [02:35:00] Vlad Costea: Let's see if we can get Keith. Hey, Keith. Okay. Keith from SeedSigner. He's there, but he didn't look at me when I called him. Maybe I should get up. What do you guys think, dude? Do you want me to keep going with this? Is anyone in the chat? There are more than three people who tuned in to the live stream, and I appreciate that. Once again, thanks to the sponsors, LayerTwo Labs, SideShift, Braiins Hashpower, Cake Wallet, and last but not least, Orange Rock. [02:35:59] This would not be possible without their support. Let's see if we can get someone else to join the stream. If we don't get anyone in the next four or five minutes, then I guess I will stop it temporarily. Would you like to join the stream? [unclear: We're going to sit in a roast beef style. Roast beef? I think he's starting now.] Okay. [02:36:27] You're live? Yes, I'm live. I need a guest. I'm in search for one. [02:36:34] [unclear speaker]: I'm too shy. [02:36:35] Vlad Costea: You're too shy? Yes. Okay. [02:36:44] [unclear: You just gotta clean.] Let's see. Would you like to join the stream? I'm live streaming. Would you like to join? No? He has to go. [02:36:58] I see Will, who was on the screen yesterday, talking about the cases of Tornado Cash and Samourai. You gotta check that out if you're listening to this. I don't know why I'm looking down. I'm looking at my laptop screen, but the camera is up there. I see Christopher Allen, who was yesterday on the screen, and also Michael Tidwell, who was there too. They're talking to each other right now. Yeah, do you want to join? [02:37:28] Okay, we have a new guest. Achievement unlocked. Can you talk at the same time? [02:37:28] [unclear speaker]: Yes. [02:37:28] Vlad Costea: Awesome. Can you come around? It seems like this microphone's battery is draining, so let me get another one. [02:37:28] [unclear speaker]: Sure. [02:37:28] Vlad Costea: Hold this, introduce yourself, and I'll do the technical. [02:37:48] Jesse Markowitz: So, I'm Jesse Markowitz. I'm here with Kyle Shurtness. We're with the Bitcoin Pivot. [02:37:55] Kyle Shurtness: Thanks, Jesse. Yep, Kyle Shurtness here with the Bitcoin Pivot. I just spoke today here at TABConf on what the Bitcoin Pivot does, and the topic was credit unions and Bitcoin. Pretty interesting topic, right, Jesse? [02:38:11] Jesse Markowitz: It is. It's a natural fit. It's been really interesting talking to people about it, because we talk about Bitcoin's really unique, credit unions are really unique, and to explain to people about what we're doing with Bitcoin Pivot is really working to bring Bitcoin to a lot more people through credit unions. As we're talking to all these people at TABConf, the initial reaction we get is kind of this, huh, and they think about it, but they go, whoa, that makes a lot of sense. So, it's been a very good response. [02:38:44] Vlad Costea: [unclear: I need soup for the microphone.] [02:38:44] Jesse Markowitz: Gotcha. Okay. No worries. So, that's what we've been doing, and excited to be working with it. Really. [02:38:56] Kyle Shurtness: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's been a really good journey, Jesse. And, you know, I love that the Bitcoin community has, first, I want to thank everybody in the Bitcoin community worldwide that I have been meeting. There has been no pushback whatsoever on this topic of credit unions and Bitcoin. And, you know, because, you know, a lot of perception is TradFi, right? You know, but Bitcoin is about community. It's about peer-to-peer. It's about supporting each other. But the credit union side is the same. I mean, it's about members, and it's about, you know, really supporting those, you know, where it meets you most. [02:39:31] You know, better rates, and you give them back, right? So, it's just a great ethos that's shared, and it's all in the roots. [02:39:31] Jesse Markowitz: It is. [02:39:31] Kyle Shurtness: But I want to hand back over here. [02:39:41] Jesse Markowitz: And I remember talking to you in the hotel and talking to the credit union stuff, and that was your reaction was much the same. Had this moment of, huh, thinking about it. And you're like, kind of makes some sense. [02:39:51] Vlad Costea: Wait, so what's a credit union for those of us who are not from the U.S.? [02:39:55] Jesse Markowitz: Very good. So, the credit unions are basically like a bank, but community-focused and owned by the members. So, the mission of the credit union is to serve the members, and they're very often very focused on not just serving them financially, like better loan rates and stuff like that, but also in terms of financial education and helping them grow their wealth. [02:40:17] Kyle Shurtness: That's true. And you know, those that are not in the United States, I mean, obviously, credit unions have a pretty big presence here. But, you know, Germany was where actually credit unions came out of in the mid 1800s, late 1800s. So, you know, Europe has a lot of them, their financial cooperatives, but this is all over the world. So, look, I don't focus on just one geographic location. This is about the whole globe. If you want practical Bitcoin adoption, I truly believe this is the tipping point. [02:40:46] We're going to work with credit unions, but we're not just going to stop there. We're going to work with all organizations. And that's something I want to make very clear in our efforts. [02:40:55] Jesse Markowitz: So it's a good starting point. Credit unions. But there's a lot more other areas, other financial institutions, everything else for us to work on as well. [02:41:05] Vlad Costea: OK, so what's your project doing more specifically? [02:41:05] Jesse Markowitz: I'll let you take that one. [02:41:05] Kyle Shurtness: That's fine. [02:41:12] All right. So obviously, the Bitcoin Pivot is a bespoke Bitcoin advisory firm, a consulting firm. We are specifically looking to bridge the gap between Bitcoin and the credit union space. One of the reasons for that is I worked in the credit union world for 20 years, and I've identified that, you know, these digitally native generations, I love them to death, the Gen Zs. And, you know, now coming into the world, you know, I've got Gen Alpha. They're not, they don't really know what a credit union is. [02:41:41] I'm trying to bridge that gap of knowledge and bring them back, you know, because I love what credit unions have done for many generations. And I want them to be able to do that. And I want them to be there for future generations. But if you don't have this following from the younger side, you know, they're going to the Venmos and the Cash App... [02:41:41] [Editor's note: the livestream dropped here and resumed after a break; the part of the conversation in between was not recorded.] [02:41:41] Vlad Costea: All right, Kyle, you're on commitment. [unclear: We're right.] We're back. [02:41:41] Kyle Shurtness: So apparently I need to repeat the last [unclear: three C's] of the layer two side of it, which is commitment. [02:42:08] So going from, you know, that connection into commitment. Right. So once you have gone through the culture, we're going to decide what we want this to look like. For our organization, we're going to actually have the courage to do something about it. Then we're going to take our ideas and concepts from everybody in the organization to see what that works is for us. Right. And have the conviction to actually build it. And then from there, you have the connection, which leads into the commitment. Hey, we're going to bring this to the masses. [02:42:38] And so that's really what it's all about. And this is an easier way for executives and board of directors and employees of these organizations to kind of understand what is money. Like that really is like, hey, we haven't talked about money. We're just talking about this other stuff. And then eventually these layer one and layer two starts to become a reality. It's like, OK, I'm starting to understand Bitcoin's distributed ledger technology, the network and the big B versus the little B. And, you know, they just understand now better. [02:43:05] And that's where we got we got to meet people where they're at, folks. We've got to really just bring right education. Right. So. [02:43:12] Vlad Costea: Right. So I guess you're aware that Bitcoin was invented in 2009 at the peak of the financial crisis. Right. And there's like a very political message in the first Bitcoin block that says Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks, which is the headline of The Times, a British publication on the exact same day. And I was wondering, how do you reconcile the fact that Bitcoin was basically created to be an alternative to banks and the fact that you're trying to bring it into the banking system, credit unions more specifically? [02:43:47] Jesse Markowitz: Yeah, I'll take that one. So this is part of the Bitcoin is for everyone. Bitcoin is for anyone. This is the, as Kyle was saying before, this is the credit union infrastructure upgrade. For a very long time, we've been in a system where the only option really is this fiat mindset with concerns about if the system fails, how we have to do bailouts, some things are is it too big to fail, all those types of issues. And Bitcoin gives you really an alternative approach to that. That lets people take a different angle on it. [02:44:22] And from an individual level, people can opt in. But part of the challenge on that right now is there's a lot of people out there that have heard about Bitcoin. But the only thing they hear about Bitcoin is whatever the scary headlines are. And where do they go for trusted financial information? Where do they go for who's their trusted partner in those areas? And for many people today, it's the credit union. Their credit union is where they get a lot of their financial information. That's the person that they trust with a lot of the financial guidance and the way they do things. [02:44:56] So for us, it's a very natural fit to work with the credit unions, educate them on this is how Bitcoin works technology. This is how Bitcoin works monetary policy. Most importantly, this is how Bitcoin can benefit your members and let's help them educate their members and bring it all together. So that's really the current focus on the Bitcoin pivot is Gap. [02:45:20] Kyle Shurtness: Yeah. I just want to add to that. Look, at the end of the day, I've said to executives that, you know, you're the centralized concept of a financial institution. You're now becoming participants in a decentralized world. So as an institution, and this is why I focus on credit unions specifically, is because they're not for profit. They give back to the local communities that they serve. They meet people where they're at. They help them. They're there to support, trusted for many decades. These institutions need to be around for future generations. [02:45:53] And they need to learn that they are participants in a decentralized world, just like you, me and everyone else in this conference are participants in a permissionless [unclear: blockchain], right? It's the same concept. If they don't learn how that works, because, you know, lack of understanding is real. And that's what we focus on is bringing that understanding so that it's not scary. It's just like, hello, we can actually do this. But yeah, we want everybody to be participants. Bitcoin is for everyone. And these institutions just need to understand, like, that is all this is. [02:46:24] It's not scary. And we're just here to help, you know. [02:46:28] Vlad Costea: So in the case of these credit unions, how will they custody the Bitcoin and what are they going to use it for? Is it just for a reserve asset or is it for fractionalizing ownership so that customers can buy a chunk of it but still have it in the custody of the credit union? [02:46:48] Jesse Markowitz: So from a starting point, as you start educating people, it's going to be a buying and it'll be in a custodial situation. So people would just buy. They'd have it in their account. And that would be a starting point. But the goal and the direction that we have is to drive people education wise, both on the credit union side and the member side, to a more assisted self custody and to give them that opportunity to do full self custody when they are comfortable with it. In today's world, self custody is it's a big step for a lot of people. [02:47:23] And we don't want people jumping in before they're ready. We don't want people going in and making mistakes. We want that education out there. And that intermediary step of assisted self custody makes a lot of sense. So working with the credit unions to be able to offer a solution where maybe the credit union has one key, maybe the member has a key, maybe there's somebody else who's going and work with them. So they've got the education, they got the support. And if they make one mistake, they don't lose everything that they've got that support and education. [02:47:53] So that's the direction that we're headed. [02:47:57] Vlad Costea: That sounds good. Did you talk to companies that offer self-custody solutions like BitGo or Casa or something like this? Because they offer these multisigs, which are very convenient for users. And maybe that credit unions will also be more inclined to trust in companies that have a good record of not losing funds. [02:48:18] Kyle Shurtness: So what we are starting to do, obviously, we're an advisory company, a firm. We're consultants. That doesn't mean we can't be vendor coordinators and work with strategic partners, which we are working with right now, multiple strategic partners to find the right fit. And it'll be more of an agnostic view. We're going to have quite a few. Because to your point, there are a lot of builders out there have done wonderful solutions and we want to be able to use those. We're not here to reinvent the wheel. We're just here to understand where from A to Z that these institutions are in their journey and bring the right technology partners, strategic partners in to be able to put the right solution for their institution, for their members. [02:49:02] And how you do that is you got to start asking your members, do surveys, start getting that data collection analysis, say like, what do we actually need to put in here? Where does it meet our people? Because each institution is different. You know, depending where you live in the world and what your needs and I mean, you can't just have a custom. It's bespoke. That's why we're doing this whole bespoke consulting business. I mean, we don't want to just come in with a cookie cutter and say this is the way you should do it for you. [02:49:26] No, we need to help you understand what's right for you and then implement that with the right strategic partners. So we're going through that process now. It's a little overwhelming because every week it seems like I have more meetings with strategic partners. And I'm glad I have these because I'm still learning. I mean, I've been Bitcoin a long time. I'm still learning like, you know, with them, like what is going to be the right fit? But even those builders come back and say, look, we may not always be the right fit. [02:49:51] So it's okay to have more than one to put the right solution. [02:49:55] Vlad Costea: So why is it that you guys chose to come here at TABConf as opposed to a larger event where you could have also found customers? This is like a developer's event. Yet you chose to come here. Why is that? [02:50:11] Jesse Markowitz: TABConf is actually my first Bitcoin conference I ever went to. So from a very sentimental perspective, it's got a special place in my heart. So I definitely wanted to be here. I dragged Kyle here. But it is a great place for a very technical audience who's actually doing the building as we're looking for our partners who are going to help us build solutions. This is a great place to meet the people who are doing that. It's also a very welcoming environment for as technical as it is. [02:50:43] There's a number of people who come here who are like, I was at my and I met one of the guys two nights ago. It's like, well, I was at a Bitcoin meetup two weeks ago. I'm just learning about Bitcoin. And they're here and they're learning. It's very welcoming. So it's also a really great place just to meet regular folks and get feedback about our potential solutions. This is what we're thinking about. What do you think about it and all of that. So it's just been and it's been a great place. [02:51:07] It's been a great experience. We had a great reception. There's been a lot of very positive feedback on all of that stuff. So it's been good. [02:51:15] Vlad Costea: What kind of feedback did you get? And can you name some people who said stuff about the pivot? [02:51:23] Kyle Shurtness: Go ahead, Jesse. You go first. [02:51:26] Jesse Markowitz: So I would not name any names. So I'm not going to do that. But I will tell you the consistent feedback that I got was that's a really great idea. The mixture of credit unions as serving members and being that educational connection and a way for leveraging those credit unions to reach out to a whole new group of people who could learn about Bitcoin, who have some vague interests, but don't really know about it. And to provide them not just the education, but an easy onramp to get started is great. [02:52:02] And I got a lot of positive feedback when I said, and this is actually the topic of our talk. As well as credit unions beyond the buy button, because our goal is not to have them just, oh, I can buy Bitcoin through the credit union, but it's the education and going further than that. So they actually get to the point of assisted self custody, full custody and going in that direction. And obviously at a conference like this, that's where people want to go that direction. [02:52:29] Kyle Shurtness: Yeah, I actually had a really, after I gave the presentation, Bitcoin credit unions beyond the buy button, I had a, I believe a developer because we're a developers conference, but this individual came up, he made it clear he wanted to talk to me and he said, look, this matters to me. I love my credit union, but I have to say my credit union merged into another credit union. So this is a reality, folks, like there's going to be a rate of consolidation of these institutions over the next three years. [02:52:57] I mean, we're probably looking, I mean, this is not my opinion or my factor. This is what, I've gone to multiple conferences in that industry and they are saying that about a third of credit unions could consolidate, merge together by the year 2030. And then over the next decade after that, probably another third. So it's because, you know, liquidity, I mean, there's all these different things that are happening and they have to survive and thrive. Right. So, but this individual made it clear, like I miss, you know, my now part of this other credit union, which is fine. [02:53:26] I still love my credit union. But this is what I'm trying to address. I think Bitcoin has a real solution here to help these financial cooperatives. And I think they're going to be Bitcoin financial cooperatives. You know, they're just going to evolve. I mean, it's no different than any other technology. Right. Evolution is real. And so it's just like kind of like what happened with Blockbuster to Netflix. Right. I always go back to that because it's a huge innovation. And this is kind of what we're looking at with the current financial system. [02:53:53] It's going to be decentralized. And I am excited about it. I get so passionate. And I think that's why this is just amazing. So to hear somebody come out, take the time to come up and share that story about their local credit and how it merged. And I think what you're doing is important. That's validation to me. So, yeah. [02:54:11] Vlad Costea: You guys keep mentioning education. But the question is, who's going to do that? Because I doubt that the credit unions will actually invest in this. And it's actually in their best interest for their customers to never withdraw their Bitcoin from the credit union. So they would treat this like a stock or something where their customers get exposed to the price and they know exactly how much it's worth. But at the same time, why would the credit union want their customers to ever take their Bitcoin out when the credit union can refinance the Bitcoin and leverage it and try to make more money off of it? [02:54:47] Jesse Markowitz: Well, that's actually where it's really interesting, where the credit unions are very different than the banks and the other financial types of institutions because they are very interested in education. I actually got an email just two weeks ago from one of the credit unions that I'm connected to where they're starting another education program. And that particular one was on loans and finance and that side of things. And I talked to Kyle. I said, Kyle, we've got to get these guys talking about Bitcoin and not loan side of things. [02:55:18] But they already have a mission to educate their members about this. So right from the beginning, it's different than normal finance type of stuff. From a standpoint of what their incentive is, unlike a lot of the other financial institutions, their goal is they want to keep deposits in their system, but they don't really want to keep dollar deposits in their system. They're not all about the Bitcoin deposits on their system. They're not going to be able to rehypothecate and leverage and all that type of stuff on the Bitcoin side. [02:55:48] And that's not really their mission on that. Their goal is really to help their members. And at least from our standpoint, the direction that we're driving them towards is much more of a Bitcoin is that leverage point in terms of the connection to the members to bring in more members to get a deeper a deeper relationship with existing members. It's not a give us your Bitcoin so we can resell it or rent it out or whatever else. [02:56:17] Kyle Shurtness: Great explanation, Jesse. Look, I worked in the industry for 20 years. Financial literacy is in the DNA of a credit [unclear: union]. There you go. These institutions are not for profit. They must provide educational services, literacy. They go into schools, colleges. They go to small businesses. They give back to their communities. They are required to do so. It's why they're not for profit. That is their mission. The mission of a credit union is to be there for your community, your members, to help support one another. And education is a huge piece of this. [02:56:51] Now, to your point, there's other things outside of education, which education still goes with it, but you also need to understand, like, you know, members are going to start using Bitcoin and stablecoins, right? These two things will be used heavily. And what does that mean for traditional payment rails? Well, they may not be used as heavily and income that, you know, that fee, non-interest fee income that may be lost potentially. So how do you make it up somewhere else? And how do you provide the, you know, look, you're going to need Bitcoin. [02:57:23] And I think the lightning payment rails coming in, that's going to be awesome for many reasons. And that, to me, is the big focus. It's not just about lending or just hold it as a, you know, store of value. I really want people using this. I love going to my local coffee shop, OK? I do. I really do. I take people there all the time. I've taken former executives or my credit union I just left and I've paid with Bitcoin. And that right there is a tipping point, folks. [02:57:51] For real, practical Bitcoin adoption is let's start using this, not just hold it. Right. [02:57:59] Jesse Markowitz: One of the things that I saw a lot of at this particular conference was stuff built on Ark, stuff built on Lightning. And one of the key things on both of those is in order for that to work practically, you need a lightning service provider. You need Ark service providers. There's at least one or two folks I talked to about Fedimints, which, again, is kind of a we need some sort of organization to help support people, whatever else. My view is credit unions are perfectly positioned as trusted financial partners to sign up to either be this type of Ark service provider or participate in that. [02:58:39] [unclear speaker]: Can you bring Dobby here? Can you bring Dobby? [02:58:42] [unclear speaker]: Sorry. There you go. Yeah. I want to hold Dobby. He's a free elf now. There you go. [02:58:52] Jesse Markowitz: So I think there's a lot of technology advantages as well where credit unions could actually fit in exactly that type of role. [02:59:02] Vlad Costea: That makes a lot of sense. But you also mentioned that there are mergers and there are situations where larger credit unions buy the small local ones and they can end up rehypothecating. That's a mouthful. It is a mouthful. Where was I going with this? There is even a DeFi service called Aave where people earn like six, seven percent in stablecoins on Bitcoin collateral. And I can see credit unions thinking in terms of, well, why should we just let this sit in cold storage and not make money off of it? [02:59:34] And there is added risk that comes with that. Are credit unions also insured by FDIC? [02:59:42] Jesse Markowitz: So this is why I think it's really important for the Bitcoin community that it's Kyle and I and the Bitcoin pivot that are going out and working with the credit unions because we are very committed to the Bitcoin mission. And so we want to make sure that whatever it is the credit unions are doing, they're doing it in a way that is respectful and helpful and dedicated to the benefit of the members. And that they're not doing some of the. Oh, we're just going to take all this stuff and we're going to play financial games and do that type of thing so that as part of our education effort, they understand the risks and the downsides and why they shouldn't do a lot of that stuff. [03:00:24] Yeah. You can talk about the... [03:00:27] Kyle Shurtness: It's not FDIC. No, they're not FDIC. [03:00:31] In the United States, the NCUA, National Credit [unclear: Union] Administration, is the regulator, examiner and insurer for credit unions. So it's the same thing. It's insured, but it's with... [03:00:31] Vlad Costea: [unclear: Yes, with the NCUA.] [03:00:31] Kyle Shurtness: That's their, like I said, their regulator, their examiner and the insurance. Right. But it is still insured. [03:00:31] Vlad Costea: But backed by the good... [03:00:31] Kyle Shurtness: Yeah. We know where that goes. Right. But it is the same. It's similar. It's not different. So. [03:00:55] Vlad Costea: Where can people learn more about the Bitcoin Pivot? Do you have a website or a page where they can get more information or access to a service? So [03:01:05] Kyle Shurtness: We have thebitcoinpivot.com. And then we have also you can go through that website and get to this other one. But we also have bitcoinforcreditunions.com. And, you know, so both are relevant. But, you know, we have a whole world of resources on thebitcoinpivot.com. And you can get in touch with us. So. [03:01:05] Vlad Costea: Excellent. [03:01:05] Kyle Shurtness: Anyway, it was good having this conversation. Thank you for having us. [03:01:29] Vlad Costea: Thank you so much. [03:01:29] Jesse Markowitz: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure meeting you this week and glad to be on your show here. Thank you. [03:01:35] Vlad Costea: Nice having you as well. Don't forget the microphone. Great. Thank you. You want to join, Peter? [03:01:46] So we have Peter Todd right now. This is a live stream. The way in which I envisioned this was that I would go to the hotel to get the Zcash laptop and just show it to you and reunite you with the device. I have it with me. So can you wait 10 minutes for that? Can you sit here and just entertain people maybe? Can [unclear: Rita] get on camera and just tell jokes or something so I don't stop the live stream? [03:01:46] Peter Todd: You're good. [03:01:46] Vlad Costea: OK. Are you fine with just sitting here? [03:02:24] One, two, three, four. Can you test your microphone, Peter? [03:02:24] Peter Todd: One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. [03:02:24] Vlad Costea: One, two, three, four. Today is the 16th of October, 2026. And the date on this laptop that we're about to take out of the bag is October 26th of 2016, which means it's almost been 10 years since the Zcash Sprout ceremony. 10 years minus 10 days. And I made a deal with Peter. He will unbox this on camera to remind people why he did this and what this means. [03:02:56] And in exchange for this, I'll donate one Zcash to one of his favorite charities, which is Car for Ukraine, I guess? [03:02:56] Peter Todd: LADA, really. The Ukrainian military charity I'm involved in. It'll end up going to Car for Ukraine eventually to go get vehicles out there. [03:02:56] Vlad Costea: How can other people donate if they see this and they want to donate? Because now you're going to accept Zcash too, right? [03:02:56] Peter Todd: Yeah. I mean, [unclear: Chris,] I could even get a brand new fancy QR code. Where the heck is this? In Cake Wallet. Where is it? Receive. There. That'd work. [03:03:36] Vlad Costea: It's interesting that you're using Cake for this. [03:03:36] Peter Todd: I mean, this started off as Solana and I knew Cake had Solana support and I had a bunch of other stuff, so I just kept on using it for a different donation [unclear: of prizes] for that same thing. [03:03:50] Vlad Costea: Okay, Peter. So show us what's inside and remove this also sideways. You don't have to untie it. You did sign. [03:03:50] Peter Todd: I did. [03:03:50] Vlad Costea: And you did seal it. [03:03:50] Peter Todd: Yeah, well, sealed it with a bit of packing tape. Not exactly super high security. [03:04:10] Vlad Costea: How did you end up buying this? How did you end up participating, actually? Because in 2014 you were one of the critics of Zerocash on Bitcoin and then you were invited to participate two years later in the Zcash ceremony. [03:04:25] Peter Todd: So remember, in 2014 I had been a critic of Zerocoin on Bitcoin for the obvious reason that if we actually add it to Bitcoin, you're creating this big pool of funds that's likely to get stolen in a cryptographic break. And I was very much proven right. I mean, Zcash has had multiple issues with this. Now, in the same year, though, in 2014, I then also worked with, well, I was hired by Matthew Green to go and try to do work on figuring out how to get Zerocoin either as an embedded consensus system on Bitcoin or potentially some other thing. [03:05:02] And Matthew Green didn't really do much with this. And then later on, Zooko came along and again had some discussions with Zooko about potentially working on this. But the key distinction there is if it's an embedded consensus system, it's separate currency, not going to kill Bitcoin if it dies. And if it's an entirely separate currency, well, you know, it's a separate thing. End of story. And the idea of privacy isn't bad. It's just you're going to have a trillion, two trillion, whatever dollar asset. Unfortunately, we really need Bitcoin to work. [03:05:35] And this type of cryptography just is too new to trust it with that much money, especially when, let's say, if Bitcoin dies, we may not get a chance to get another Bitcoin. You know, the [unclear: high point] of cryptocurrencies, that may be it. And it was even more true back then when Bitcoin was very, very dominant. So it is what it is. But of course, come 2016, when they actually needed to trust the setup, I mean, obviously, [unclear: one of the guys could do it]. [03:05:35] Vlad Costea: Why do you think you got picked for this? [03:06:05] Peter Todd: Because they knew I was adventurous enough to actually say yes and competent enough that it was worthwhile. And in my opinion, I'd say out of all the people who were participating, I certainly by far did the most thorough attempt of what was possible on my end to make my part of the ceremony secure. [03:06:27] Vlad Costea: I know, for example, that Andrew Miller, who was also part of the ceremony, used his home computer and he just destroyed the RAM and the CPU. So it wasn't like buying a laptop and going through the wilderness in Canada. You have an entire blog post about this. [03:06:44] Peter Todd: Yeah, no, I thought about this and I figured the underlying strategy I'd have was if someone wants to go and backdoor my computer, now obviously the software itself is a problem, but that's out of my control. Assuming I do my part correctly, the thing I can most control is being in a place where people can't easily surveil what I'm doing. And what's a better way to do that than just go rent an SUV and drive, I think it was what, 3,000 kilometers across British Columbia in Canada? [03:07:13] Vlad Costea: Yeah, you went to great lengths. Where did you buy this from? Like, did you remember you just walked into an electronics store and you picked this up? Yeah, I mean that had to be the system. [03:07:28] Peter Todd: I couldn't order it online, I couldn't purchase it in advance. I mean, as it is, I happened to be in San Francisco, if I remember correctly, prior to the ceremony. And I wound up actually booking plane tickets to a different part of Canada so if anyone was already surveilling me, they'd potentially send the guys to the wrong place. And then right at the very last minute, I literally went to the airport and right at the counter, maybe on two hours before the flight, booked plane tickets where I was actually planning to do it. [03:08:00] And that ultimately ended up in Vancouver. I knew from Vancouver there was a very long, very boring road I could drive up with good cell phone coverage, which is the sort of interior highways across the British Columbia highlands. And that was kind of the plan. And of course you get the car and you just start driving. [03:08:00] Vlad Costea: And you just picked up a computer at... [03:08:00] Peter Todd: Well, some random computer store. [03:08:25] Vlad Costea: I think it does say on the side. [03:08:25] Peter Todd: It might. [03:08:34] I don't know. [03:08:37] Peter Todd: I didn't have it written down somewhere where the hell it actually was, but I did just literally keep driving until I saw a computer store. I was like, alright, I'll just pick that one at random. And the beauty of the trusted setup is all we needed was a computer with a DVD drive, which 10 years ago was still pretty common. [03:08:49] Vlad Costea: It's also interesting that you called this the compute node, not the Zcash ceremony, whatever. You just call it remaining parts of compute node. [03:08:49] Peter Todd: Well, it was a compute node. I mean, that's what we called it. Like, I think. [03:09:06] Yeah, so these were the disks we created. [03:09:12] Vlad Costea: What's interesting about these disks, Sean Bowe told me, is that at some point he was very interested to buy them because you could generate inflation in the Sprout pool using the information on these. [03:09:26] Peter Todd: Well, long story short, one of Zcash's screw ups in the crypto was relevant to this trusted setup because they made a mistake where the information on the audit, on the audit records could be used to go and basically create fake proofs. And it was quite interesting how that played out because they wouldn't tell anyone that they had this bug. So mysteriously, the audit records started disappearing. And quite rightfully, people were wondering, like, what the fuck's going on? I mean, why, you know, why have you taken all this stuff offline or it just disappeared? [03:10:00] And as I remember correctly, I mean, you didn't really get a good answer. They just covered it all up until they finally fixed it. But yeah, this is my set of disks, because the way we actually interacted with the compute nodes was we'd have a separate node burning DVD disks with data, move it to compute node, put it in, do stuff, burn more stuff, then go back. And that was the communication mechanism. And it had, was it A, B, C, D... [03:10:32] Vlad Costea: Yeah, here. [unclear: For the sake of not announcing this.] [03:10:37] Peter Todd: Yeah, so they're, they're ordered by letter. A, B, C, D, E, and then F. I would not remember off the top of my head what the hell the significance was there, but it was basically steps of this multi-party computation. And the beauty of DVD is, as a way of getting data back and forth, is it meant you did have a record. Supposed to be a read-only record, though there's a caveat there, but supposed to be a read-only record of all the data that went back and forth. [03:11:14] So something went wrong later. Hypothetically, you could go and audit that by verifying what was actually on these. Now, catch with this is DVDs, the physical media, once you write to it, you can still write to it more, because you can literally take a laser and burn more pits in it, basically. Now, how that plays out into logical-level read-onliness, that is a very complex topic. It's not really clear. But hopefully they were read-only, and in practice, of course, since the whole thing was busted anyway. [03:11:51] I mean, no one ever validated the stuff. But I did hold on to these for many, many years, just in case. [03:11:59] Vlad Costea: Why did you decide to sell it? It was always like a mystery to me. You decided to let go of it. [03:11:59] Peter Todd: You're taking up space in my apartment. I'm not a very sentimental person. I'm happy to accept some Bitcoin in exchange for sending this off to someone who cares more. [03:11:59] Vlad Costea: Oh, that was me. I'm just adding memories, because I took this to Singapore last week, and I showed it to people, and they were as excited to see it. It's one of six. Edward Snowden had one. Who else was part of the ceremony? [03:12:27] Peter Todd: Zooko's brother. [03:12:27] Vlad Costea: Yeah. And [unclear: Peter Van Valkenburgh], from Coin Center. [03:12:35] Peter Todd: And the guy named... [03:12:37] Vlad Costea: [unclear: Socrates.] Andrew Miller. [03:12:37] Peter Todd: Andrew Miller, yeah. [03:12:37] Vlad Costea: He's one of the co-authors of the [unclear: Cytunes] paper, also. [03:12:52] Peter Todd: Yeah, so then separately, the software we ran off DVDs as well. Yeah, so that would have been the final copy of the actual software. Now, separately, there's a huge issue with this, which is obviously the software backdoored. Everyone backdoored. We all ran the same software. And the idea was the software should be deterministically built, but the final configuration they used was this very obscure Linux distribution. As I recall correctly, a daily version of it, not even like a fixed release or something. And then that Linux distribution, in turn, wasn't deterministically built. [03:13:36] So anyone with access to that could have easily just backdoored the whole thing. You know, frankly, they really screwed that up. But it is what it is. Similarly, the Rust compiler that they used, as I remember correctly, was also another daily. So yet more levels of, why did you pick this? Who has actually accessed this? And of course, the rest of the time, and if you think even now, not deterministically built. So just layers and layers of places where backdoored could have gotten in. But of course, the math was broken, so it's all irrelevant. [03:14:08] And yeah, two test disks where we tested that the DVD writers worked. [03:14:18] I think there should be a copy of Tails in here too, I think. [03:14:18] Vlad Costea: Yeah, there should be four here, so you're missing one. [03:14:18] Peter Todd: Oh no. Well, so Tails. Tails, of course, is the Linux distribution meant to put into your PC and do stuff anonymously in a disposable way. So I had a copy of that, I believe, to then actually get the stuff and burn it. And then that would have been my route of trust there. And the Tails version, if I remember correctly at the time, I had some sitting around. [03:14:55] So that would have come for me ultimately. [03:15:02] Vlad Costea: Oh, we can take a look at the hardware. [03:15:02] Peter Todd: You should actually have, maybe I didn't have it here. There might be some SD cards here too. [03:15:14] Vlad Costea: There are parts which I never opened because this is a case part. It doesn't look like something interesting. Yeah, I don't think that was that interesting. [03:15:23] Peter Todd: I think that is the case. So once I was done, and everyone had verified the ceremony had finished, I took this laptop out to literally a clear cut. What's a clear cut? It's a chunk of forest where they've cut all the trees down. Very common term in Canada, if you're in the right part of Canada. And that part of Canada, there's a lot of clear cuts. No shortage of them. But yeah, I took it there and I got a blowtorch. And for legal reasons, I won't say I set it on fire, because that would have been illegal. [03:15:56] But I did heat it up enough with that blowtorch that every single place data could have possibly hid. That was pretty gone. And I think... [03:16:05] Vlad Costea: There's also that article. Yeah. Yeah, still sealed. Burnt compute node remains. That would probably be the motherboard. Yeah. So you want to open that up now for the first time? [03:16:05] Peter Todd: Why the hell not? [03:16:21] [unclear: My cheek might be a little...] See, this is why I should be a man and carry around a knife. But I'm not one of those types. I can't travel with a knife. I would get arrested. I'll open it from this side. [03:16:39] Oh, I did a real good job of this. [03:16:49] Yeah. I'll just wash my hands after this. [03:16:49] Vlad Costea: That is remains of the DVD, I think. [03:16:49] Peter Todd: Yeah, that would be the DVD mechanism in there. You'd see the little... Well, you can't see it on camera, but... The little laser head. [03:16:49] Vlad Costea: Go for it. [03:17:13] Vlad Costea: I think this is the weirdest unboxing anyone has ever watched. Well, [03:17:18] Peter Todd: This looks like parts of the screen, actually. It's probably like parts that would fit on the side. [03:17:26] Vlad Costea: It still smells like it was freshly burned. [03:17:31] Peter Todd: Super sealed in. I sealed in the freshness. [03:17:35] Vlad Costea: This could be an advertisement for [unclear: these boxes]. [03:17:36] Peter Todd: There's the RAM. Yeah, so an interesting thing about electronics is the way flash memory works is they literally trap electrons. So you have an insulator and you use a high voltage to force electrons into a segment of insulator where the electrons can't get out. Now, what happens when you heat up a piece of semiconductor? Well, the kinetic energy of the heat gets to the point where the electrons are free to move. So long story short is even if there was flash memory on this and there actually is a little bit, it's just RAM but there's a little bit of flash memory there is no way after being literally heated until it was glowing that any data could possibly survive on this. [03:18:27] It's a very cooked piece of RAM. [03:18:34] That would be a little dongle with USB ports SD card reader big SD card reader I think there might be another stick of RAM in here. Probably some random motherboard parts. [03:18:52] Vlad Costea: Also what I like about you, Peter, is that you didn't just buy a random laptop, you bought a high-end laptop, a fancy one. Large screen, you didn't need that. [03:19:01] Peter Todd: No, we did need that. It was actually pretty high performance to finish the compute [unclear: in a relatively fast way]. Oh, this is funny. You see here, see all that sand? [03:19:01] Vlad Costea: That was the CPU, right? [03:19:01] Peter Todd: No, that's not the CPU. Oh no, not at all. You have not taken apart enough computers. But yeah, that sand where I was they had taken away all the topsoil and it was just literally sand. So that sand that melted into the plastic on the bottom of the circuit board, all the way from British Columbia. [03:19:38] Vlad Costea: Wow, British Columbian sand. [03:19:44] Peter Todd: Yeah, you'd have to travel to get that normally. Oh yeah, these are all mechanical parts of the DVD. That's the head that well, the thing that moves the head back and forth. I mean, no data is going to be in a piece of plastic like this. [03:20:06] Yeah, from the battery. Now batteries are fun because if you don't really want a lithium fire, they kind of suck. So that I just dispose of separately. This, wait, it's probably the screen. The motherboard would be an interesting one. [03:20:28] It feels like more case. That might be a motherboard. [03:20:36] No, no, I think that's also the screen, I think. [03:20:43] Yeah, LCD screens. [03:20:49] If you're a real stickler in theory, maybe there would be storage in here, but not likely. LCD screens have no reason to have non volatile storage. A little crunched up. [03:21:04] And yeah, more DVD parts. [03:21:10] Vlad Costea: If anyone ever wants to put the DVD drive together, that's going to be a lot of effort. [unclear: Good, we'll see many parts.] Good luck, man. [03:21:18] Peter Todd: All right, I'll have to find the motherboard. It's got to be here somewhere. [03:21:23] Vlad Costea: Is this empty now? There's still something inside. [03:21:29] Peter Todd: Nope, that is case. This is the head, right? Yeah. [03:21:37] [unclear speaker]: [unclear: Are you still using that card?] [03:21:38] Vlad Costea: No, you can take it. You remove it from USB support. [03:21:38] [unclear speaker]: You're not using HDMI anymore? [03:21:38] Vlad Costea: No. [03:21:38] [unclear speaker]: Great. That's everything, right? Thank you very much. [03:21:50] Peter Todd: The tripod. The tripod belongs to TABConf. So, who knows? [unclear: Where's the bug here?] [03:21:50] [unclear speaker]: Yeah, I see. I'll let them know that you have it. I'm sure it's not like an ultimate urgent concern for them. So I'll figure it out when we're done. [03:21:50] Vlad Costea: Okay, I'll message Michael. Yeah, that's hilarious. Oh, that's such a nice keyboard. [03:21:50] Peter Todd: Well, I'm a fan of ThinkPads, so I think the keyboard sucks. There's only one true keyboard. Now, a fun thing about the randomness is part of it was generated by literally just mashing the keys on the keyboard. [03:22:39] Vlad Costea: That's a hot topic. Like, I want to show you something else which I can carry with me. It's [unclear: this gem], which sucks at randomness. [03:22:48] Peter Todd: Yeah, well, you know, between the two of these, that's a better source of randomness. This, eh, you know. [03:22:48] Vlad Costea: Lots of Bitcoin was lost. [03:22:48] Peter Todd: Yeah. But yeah, literally these keys, that was part of the initialization of Zcash hitting, just literally mashing those keys back and forth, which I got to stress is a perfectly good way of generating a random number. Nothing wrong with it. You can even use a cat if you have that. [03:23:17] Now, where the hell did the... Oh, man, this is it. This must be the motherboard. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah, that's the motherboard. Check this out. Holy shit. Yeah, nothing's gonna survive. Now, you were talking about the CPU. Hey, Michael, look at this motherboard. [03:23:46] Vlad Costea: The Zcash trusted setup compute node. It's one of the six computers that was used for creating the first shielded Zcash pool. [03:23:52] [unclear speaker]: Yeah, yeah. [03:23:52] Vlad Costea: This is unboxed for the first time after ten years. [03:23:52] [unclear speaker]: Yes. Oh, wow. [03:23:52] Vlad Costea: And we're filming it. [03:23:58] [unclear speaker]: You can smell that privacy. You can just smell that privacy gleaming off of it. Good job, Peter. Peter, the thing that I was most impressed with by far was the door leaning against, the chair leaning against the door. [unclear: Fancy ninja thing.] I mean, what an absolute safety practice we should all be, you know, practicing. [03:23:58] Peter Todd: Emin was not impressed by that. [03:24:20] [unclear speaker]: Not at all. [03:24:20] Vlad Costea: Emin Gün Sirer? [03:24:20] Peter Todd: Yeah. [03:24:20] [unclear speaker]: Okay. Is it? Oh, Lord. Yeah. Zcash compute node. It's a beautiful piece of art. [03:24:20] Peter Todd: Yeah. But yeah, so you were talking about the CPU. Probably this was the CPU here. That's the right size. That's probably like Northbridge or maybe a GPU. [unclear: By the resource. Either they said.] [03:24:20] [unclear speaker]: [unclear: You want to be in this video?] It looks cool. [03:24:53] [unclear speaker]: This is the destroyed laptop. The Zcash... [03:24:53] Vlad Costea: Destroyed laptop. Yeah, the one with the compute node. [03:24:58] Peter Todd: Well, you can even see that would have been where the hard drive was before I removed it. And then that would have been the SSD. And then before I started the compute thing, I removed as much of the storage as I possibly could. So started off life without those. But. [03:25:14] [unclear speaker]: And we have to admit that, or we have to give credit, give the devil his due, in the form of Zcash is still alive today. There was no... It survived its trusted setup era. So whatever Peter did, it worked. [03:25:14] Peter Todd: Maybe. No. Well, [unclear: I was for sure]. But. [03:25:34] The Bitcoin community were so against trusted setups or, you know, back in that day. And I am sure you probably find video footage of me in 2013 San Jose conference. Basically saying in response to some question like, yeah, trusted setups, it's probably fine. We'll get away with them. Like I wouldn't want to use in Bitcoin, but they'll be accepted enough in other lower quality systems. That'll work. And I think Zcash is great example that even after multiple possibly could have killed the whole coin incidents still muddled its way through. [03:26:09] Vlad Costea: No, I'm giving him one Zcash as a donation to a charity of his choice. What's that, Peter, again? [03:26:17] Peter Todd: Well, I'll send it to my LADA coin fund, which I've been using to go and get manly vehicles and other stuff for soldiers in Ukraine. I'm actually wearing the wearing the car for Ukraine shirt. They're a different charity, but it's one that I've worked with twice before to get armored vehicles. L200 trucks and Toyota Hilux trucks. Those are indestructible. Especially when you go and add, you know, 600 kilos of steel plating to them. Although, I mean, to be perfectly honest, one of them, the first one I drove out, it managed, I think they said, 12 combat missions before it got hit. [03:26:56] Which, you know, per combat missions, doing pretty well. And the armor plating, every single soldier in there survived. [03:27:04] Vlad Costea: So, do you have any memories of burning this? What did it feel like? You were all alone in the woods. [03:27:04] Peter Todd: Not burning. [03:27:04] Vlad Costea: Not burning. [03:27:12] Peter Todd: Heating. [03:27:12] Vlad Costea: Heating, yeah. [03:27:12] Peter Todd: Well, I mean, not only do I have memories, I have footage. I mean, I recorded the entire thing. Like, there's footage of absolutely everything. [03:27:12] Vlad Costea: Where is that stored? [03:27:12] Peter Todd: A few places. Some of it on Amazon S3, actually. I think the Zcash guys should have a copy of that, too. Although, it was a little weird because it seemed like they'd lost everything. I'm not quite sure what happened there, but I think I did send them a hard drive with all my documentation. [03:27:45] It would have also actually been a very early use case for OpenTimestamps. Because 2016 was just after the first public release of OpenTimestamps. Which, incidentally, had its 10-year anniversary last month. [03:27:59] Vlad Costea: Congratulations on that. Lots of 10-year anniversaries. [03:28:06] If you could go back in time, would you still participate in the ceremony, given what you know now about the outcome? [03:28:16] Peter Todd: Well, I mean, that's kind of a trick question. Because, of course, if I knew now the outcome, I probably would have told those guys, hey, could you go hold off another month? Let's go fix this crypto vulnerability that I magically know about? Now, like, would I do another ceremony like this? Oh, sure. You know, I think it's still the same caveats as I mean, obviously, these things have holes, and, sure. But also because they just screwed up the deterministic builds. And, yeah, those were worthless. But, hypothetically, would I do another ceremony? Yeah, sure. Especially if someone wants to pay me for it. [03:28:56] Vlad Costea: I was part of the Citrea ceremony last year, but there were like 60 people. Seemingly, it's not very important, but I still destroyed the computer for the fun of it. And I keep it in a box, and I'm going to send it to them someday. [03:29:13] Peter Todd: Well, the beauty of these ceremonies is, roughly speaking, it's fair to say that the math has gotten better and better. So, while the first ceremony, I think it's fair to say that they had like n-squared complexity, or n-squared compute or time or whatever, where for n participants, it's n-squared effort, if you will. Don't know the exact details there, but I think that was roughly true. Now, by the second ceremony, if I remember correctly, they made it linear, so basically anyone could possibly participate. Now, that didn't necessarily make it more secure, but it certainly made it possible to make it more secure by having many people participate in a variety of ways. [03:29:54] Of course, if you all run the same software, ultimately the software is the underlying issue. [03:30:02] Vlad Costea: Well, did you feel nostalgic about any of this? Did it bring any nice memories or do you just do this for the donation that I'm going to be doing? [03:30:02] Peter Todd: I'm not a nostalgic person, man. [03:30:02] Vlad Costea: That's an answer that I respect for its honesty. What do you think about Zcash today? [03:30:25] Peter Todd: I think people who hold Zcash today, a lot of them are still very underestimating the risks of them losing everything to a crypto break. But, and this is a very big but, Zcash in combination with other privacy techniques is probably a worthwhile add-on, assuming, of course, that the money spent on it fits your use case. If Zcash works, if the cryptography does work the way it should, it's a very good privacy model. You get a proper anonymity set of, in theory, everyone who owns Zcash at the moment. [03:31:05] And depending on the assumptions people make, well, you know, maybe if the adversary thinks you put the money in and took it out recently, it's still a reasonably large anonymity set. Now there's a lot of people who claim to be able to deanonymize Zcash based on timing, but let's face it, the history of chain analysis is full of frauds who lie about what their analysis can do. And if you go buy some Zcash, hold it for a while, and then sell part of it to go and get some other crypto, you're right. [03:31:36] You're probably getting reasonable privacy. Obviously, there's caveats, you know, you go to the same exchange twice with the same IP address, yada, yada, yada, but probably works reasonably well. The bigger issue with Zcash, like all this stuff is, it just doesn't scale. Like, you cannot run the whole world on Zcash. It's not gonna happen. [03:31:56] Vlad Costea: Well, have you heard of Tachyon? Because that's Sean Bowe's thing for what he calls interplanetary shielded money. [03:32:06] Peter Todd: If you change the underlying system to something else, yeah, maybe they'll be able to make it scale. But it just isn't there yet. The current crypto, that's what I'm talking about when I say Zcash, it's a consensus system where to get the full benefits, you gotta have the full state, and that state just grows without bound. Like, it's slightly worse than Bitcoin on chain in that respect. [03:32:27] Vlad Costea: It still got better. Like, it used to not run on mobile wallets, and now it's usable. [03:32:35] Peter Todd: Well, it's interesting that the Zcash price kind of stagnated forever and then finally went up a bunch when the, I think at the time, it was first called the Zashi wallet, if I remember correctly. Like, that seemed to be the thing that finally made Zcash interesting enough people actually started using it and holding it. [03:32:52] Vlad Costea: But you know what it was about Zashi that made it interesting? [03:32:52] Peter Todd: Being able to swap to other currencies? [03:32:52] Vlad Costea: Exactly. Like, you could pay in stablecoins or BTC or... [03:32:58] Peter Todd: I, you know, I have seen people use Zashi wallets, I think they changed the name, didn't they or something? [03:32:58] Vlad Costea: It's Zodl now. [03:32:58] Peter Todd: Whatever, anyway, I'll call it Zashi wallet. I have seen people use Zashi wallet by holding a balance in Zcash and just using it to pay out all kinds of different currencies. And by see, I mean literally sitting next to them, watched them scan QR codes, like all kinds of different stuff. So for that use case, yeah, some people seem to like it and probably for them it got them reasonable privacy, especially from the point of view of privacy against random adversaries. [03:33:33] And remember, in the quote unquote shitcoin world, so many things are based on accounts. [03:33:33] Vlad Costea: Based on what? [03:33:33] Peter Todd: Accounts. Accounts. So like most ways people hold USDT, Tron, Sol, Eth, etc, etc, your wallet is an account and every single transaction in or out all go through the same place. There isn't even the attempts of like the use the new address each time that Bitcoin is. It's terrible privacy. Absolutely terrible. And in that context, it's no wonder that Zcash wallet, Zashi, would be popular. [03:34:10] Vlad Costea: Last question. How would you compare Zcash with Monero today? [03:34:17] Peter Todd: Well, Zcash uses scarier cryptographic assumptions in exchange for potentially better privacy. So like Monero is ring signatures at the moment. They have an upgrade, they want to add Zcash style privacy, but at the moment it's ring signatures. I think it's like a ring signature of 20 is mandated. I don't remember off the top of my head. I know they've upped it a few times. But anyway, point is, when you spend a coin in Monero, it could have come from one of 20 places. And in many threat models, that's just not that good. [03:34:51] Like you're asking the question, well, I know you have a coin on Monero and I hypothetically think you paid this thing. Well, what do you know? There's a set of transactions that go from that to that. And the number of possibilities isn't that much. Under some threat models, that's pretty nasty evidence. Whereas in Zcash, assuming the crypto works properly, et cetera, et cetera, looking at the chain, all you know is, well, yeah, someone paid that. I know you had Zcash. How do I put two and two together? [03:35:24] Unless you emptied your entire wallet and I know how much you had at one point. Although even that, I don't know, maybe by luck the numbers would sync. And if you're not stupid, you're not going to spend your whole wallet to one place. [03:35:38] Vlad Costea: Thank you very much, Peter. This was a very nice walk down memory lane. I'm going to have to put everything, so you're not seeing this, but I'm going to have to take all of this and put it back in the box. And we're going to have to wash our hands because they're dirty. [03:35:38] Peter Todd: Yeah, I need to wash my hands. [03:35:38] Vlad Costea: All right. And send me your Zcash address. Let's make this happen. [03:35:38] Peter Todd: I mean, I put the QR code right up there. Maybe someone sent a donation already. [03:35:38] Vlad Costea: It was not live streamed because I don't trust that the internet was going to be stable. [03:36:06] It was recorded. I will upload this when I get to my hotel room. [03:36:06] Peter Todd: Sounds good. [03:36:06] Vlad Costea: And yeah, if you don't want to give me the QR code... [03:36:06] Peter Todd: I'll give you it right now. Do it live. [03:36:06] Vlad Costea: Well, if my wallet syncs, that's the other thing, because Zcash is still slow with... [03:36:06] Peter Todd: Let's try this. Let's show whether or not Zcash sucks. [03:36:06] Vlad Costea: I mean, if you want to use a privacy coin, it makes sense for you to... Okay. So what was I saying? If you're using a privacy coin, it makes sense that you wait first to connect to Tor and then [unclear: connect] to other stuff. [03:36:46] I'm just happy I have enough balance in my wallet because that would be super embarrassing to be like, hey, I'm going to give you one ZEC and be like, oh, I don't have one ZEC. [03:36:57] So I need to connect to the Wi-Fi first, I think, because it's connecting to Tor from my 5G whatever. Oh, it did something. [unclear: I'll try to send.] We'll see what happens. No, because it's not connected. So... Well, okay. It's the Wi-Fi. [03:37:15] Peter Todd: It's [unclear: eduroam] or something. You don't need a password. [03:37:25] Vlad Costea: GT Visitor. Yeah. [03:37:30] This is recorded at the Georgia Tech University campus in their expo hall, just outside of it because they're wrapping up everything from TABConf. It still has not connected. I guess I need like... [03:37:30] Peter Todd: Well, you got the... Yeah, there you go. [03:37:30] Vlad Costea: So I agreed to the terms. Then I need to wait. So this has nothing to do with Zcash. It's just... [03:37:56] Peter Todd: I mean, I think it's actually already in, but whatever. He's allowed to upload to this thing. The funny thing is this Georgia Tech guest Internet, unlike nearly all guest Internets, actually is IPv6. [03:37:56] Vlad Costea: So it's encrypted? [03:37:56] Peter Todd: Well, it's a new, quote unquote, new Internet protocol, which has been slowly taking over from IPv4 for what, two decades now? Is that syncing? There you go. [03:37:56] Vlad Costea: Send. All right, let's try this. [03:38:27] One ZEC. [03:38:35] Let me write a note here. Ten year anniversary. Anniversary of Zcash Sprout Ceremony. [03:38:52] Add memo. You press the button, Peter. Sending. Was sent. Let's see if Cake Wallet picks it up. This is called [unclear: Visor]. It's actually pretty cool. Because it's fast. [03:39:11] It's built by Sean Bowe and his team. I forget what it takes for the Zcash block time-wise, but... [03:39:11] Peter Todd: It's like 90 seconds. [03:39:11] Vlad Costea: 90 seconds, should confirm. But they want to reduce that to 15. Oh, there you go. Received. One ZEC. Current price $1,234 USD. Cool. I'm sure it's going to do something nice. You can show that to the camera too. So nobody suspects this was not part of the deal. Thank you very much, Peter. [03:39:11] Peter Todd: Thank you. That'll buy one tenth of a truck. [03:39:49] Awesome. [03:39:57] All right, there's your front thing.