{ "episodeId": "SLP268", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "peter_todd": { "name": "Peter Todd", "role": "guest", "tag": "PETER" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 9.23, "text": "Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin. Today, for episode two hundred and sixty-eight, my guest is Peter Todd, and we're talking about whether Signal should have used Bitcoin instead. So recently, they implemented this mobile coin, and Peter and I go through and talk a little bit about what were the trade-offs of doing this, does it actually make sense, and- Should they have just used Bitcoin and Lightning instead?" }, { "speaker": "peter_todd", "time": "00:38", "start": 37.75, "text": "Hey, ten Stephan Livera fans. This is Dread here, and I have some big news to share. 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So if you're sitting on a stash of coins and you wanna also help enhance the Bitcoin network's security, this is one great way to get involved. Compass can help you buy your own ASIC and secure hosting at great facilities around the world that they have vetted for you. So for years we've heard mining was only profitable if you're investing tons of money, but Compass are making that accessible to people. You can tap into the economies of scale and access reasonably priced hardware and cheap power. Rates. So if you're unsure about how to get started, Compass offer these hardware and hosting bundles, so you don't need that advanced technical knowledge, you can quickly get started mining Bitcoin. So visit them compassmining dot io and start mining Bitcoin today. On to the show. Peter, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So, Peter, I, I know, you've had some commentary recently about, Signal's new shitcoin, mobile coin, so, yeah, let's just kind of get into that and maybe set some of the background here. What's your kind of initial impression of Signal up until now?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "03:35", "start": 214.62, "text": "Signal, from the point of view of a user using it, you know, Signal's convenient, you use a phone number to use it, you know, set up kinda- Automatically work, so though, you know, from a more tech point of view, like there's a lot of things that they've done that really cut corners to allow that experience be quite as easy as it is, and you always kind of wonder, you know, are these really like quite the right trade-offs? Some good example being phone numbers, you know, the heavy utilization of them where that's just dubious for a lot of reasons, but the trade-off there was it made getting people on the platform very easy. So, you know, there's been controversy about this, but then you go look at New coin and I think the trade-offs they make aren't quite so defensible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:16", "start": 256.37, "text": "Yeah, that's a really good way to put it, because I think the purists might say, \"Oh, look, everyone should just be using JPG and, you know, have your public keys out there and do it.\" But then the reality is, would we have gotten to the-- I don't know the exact numbers, but let's call it forty or fifty million monthly active users that Signal has, and I guess that's always that trade-off. And I know Signal also had a big jump in popularity only recently Recently, because of that recent drama about WhatsApp data being shared with Facebook, and so I guess that's probably the, the counter argument would be something like, okay, well, without this phone number trade-off and without making it easy- That's," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "04:56", "start": 296.02, "text": "that's the counter argument, but then the counter-counter argument is it wouldn't be that hard to give people another way to get on the Signal without a phone number. You know, we don't have to go to perfect decentralize everything just to reduce some of these risks." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:10", "start": 310.43, "text": "Yeah, and I think Moxie's- argument, Moxie, for people who don't know, he's, one of the founders and, one of the lead maintainers and contributors of Signal, and I think, now, I'm not, I'm obviously not gonna be able to represent his argument perfectly, but I think his argument was something like, we should have a slightly more centralized infrastructure so long as that gets more people, that can get more people in, and you can sort of make certain trade-offs around that. What's your perspective on that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "05:36", "start": 336.5, "text": "I mean, the funny thing is, this mobile coin, Centralization more than it necessarily needed to, and, you know, and, and wh-why I say that is because centralization with competent people running it, you know, it's more dangerous in certain scenarios, but it's less dangerous than it could be, whereas MobileCoin is this thing where, hang on a second, why are you, you know, why are you poking the bear? You know, why are you adding this very, very controversial thing? Controversial, not just from sort of government point of view, but also even within the crypto community point of view, to the thing that already has a vulnerability of centralization. You know, it'd be like, I mean, after all, I, I myself, I run a centralized platform, my OpenTimestamps. It's absolutely centralized. And part of my argument for why that's okay is because I'm not gonna do controversial things with OpenTimestamps. You know, if I added file sharing to OpenTimestamps, that would really undercut my own argument for why it's okay that OpenTimestamps" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:34", "start": 394.49, "text": "And so the, there's this whole argument, and I think I probably agree with that, but I guess I'm curious what you think. There's this argument that Signal have essentially sold out their user base by creating and marketing this, you know, this cryptocurrency." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "06:47", "start": 406.64, "text": "Yeah, unfortunately, I, I, I think you can make that argument very easily. And what's annoying about it is they could have gotten-- From, from the user's point of view, they could have gotten- All of the advantages of a centralized infrastructure for payments without actually creating a new coin. That wasn't, you know, that part of it wasn't needed, but creating a new coin gets them a ton of money, and by them, I, you know, mean the People Pine Mobile coin, which indirectly sounds like it'll help Signal, but it's not a hundred percent clear. But long story short is creating a new coin gets a massive monetization opportunity, and it just doesn't necessarily make very much sense." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:28", "start": 447.71, "text": "It's a real shame in some ways, because I think many Bitcoin people have been, I guess, helping new people get into Signal to say, \"Hey, instead of using normal texting or Facebook Messenger, why don't you get on Signal?\" And then for some of us, it feels a little bit, kind of like a betrayal, because we're trying to build the scene and build the community, and then they're sort of turning around and it's unfortunately a sad, trend that we've seen as well." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "07:55", "start": 475.41, "text": "Let me make one thing clear. You can see the The exact same thing for Ethereum people. You know, it doesn't matter what coin you happen to go back, the fact that they're creating this brand new coin with all the problems that has involved with it, to then, you know, get money by sort of tying it into this other thing which we'd like to continue to exist, namely Signal. That's sort of a betrayal of everyone involved in Signal, everyone who's been pushing it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:20", "start": 500.19, "text": "Yeah, exactly. And like, yeah, not just Bitcoiners, but just anyone who's been trying to, I guess, give people somewhat of Privacy trade-off, but still better than what they were normally doing with SMS or with Facebook Messenger or whatever they were using before. And I think historically, the problem is there's been a lot of scams in the crypto industry or basically everything other than Bitcoin, should be default assumed to be a scam. And unfortunately, it seems like this same trend is playing out here where perhaps some insiders get early access to the coin and then dump it onto retail. what's your Your view on that and how that has played out over the last few years?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "09:02", "start": 542.34, "text": "I, I mean, I think you're exactly right. Every time anyone starts a new coin, there usually aren't good reasons for it. I, I especially an example like this where, like it or not, you know, they, they claim otherwise, but in fact, this mobile coin's centralized. The way that technology works, you know, with the stellar consensus and their addition of SGX, it's a centralized system, end of story. And they could have gotten the advantages of that by, you know, without creating Doing that, you add in all these really complex legal questions, and also the fact that you're gonna wind up having very big winners and losers in the buying and selling of this thing. You know, like for technical reasons, occasionally you need to create new coins. That's, that, that's just a fact. But this isn't one of those cases. They didn't need to do that, and it creates so many, you know, just creates so much problems that Signal's kind of attaching themselves to, you know, and big, like frankly, I wouldn't be that surprised. If Moxie wound up in jail for this, you know, both for the whole like sort of financial fraud side, but also the sort of very clear fraud of saying something's decentralized when it just isn't. You know, that's, that's something that could backfire in a very bad way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:13", "start": 612.74, "text": "Yeah, okay. So, and obviously we'll get into the should they have used Bitcoin and Lightning stuff, but first, let's talk a little bit about, a little bit more in detail about what some of these components are. You know, for example, what is Intel SGX? What is that" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "10:28", "start": 628.31, "text": "Security solution offered by Intel that does something quite specific. It allows the creation what they call, an enclave, which is, you know, an analogy to real world enclaves, sort of sovereign, if you will, execution environment within your CPU. And what that means is that within an enclave, code can be run that, if the security assumptions prove to be, you know, correct, you know, Intel's implementation of it works, the owner of that CPU You cannot modify or observe what happens in that execution environment. So it's sort of like having a, you know, a little CPU within your CPU. The implementation doesn't work that way, but that's sort of what it's like." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:11", "start": 671.3, "text": "I see." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "11:12", "start": 671.86, "text": "And a really key thing that SGX can do, which is quite hard to get, is not only can this code run in that environment, but it can create a signature attesting to the fact that this environment, is present and secure. And That signature can then prove to a third party that if what Intel is doing is trustworthy, then the code that they're talking to, or, you know, interacting with in some way, communicating to, whatever, is actually within an enclave, and it's therefore not able to be modified. So why is that important in MobileCoin? Well, that's part of their privacy argument. You know, they use these, signatures to prove to other nodes that no one can go observe what the transactions are actually doing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:58", "start": 718.25, "text": "Yeah, and so in some sense, we can say this is like a trade-off they were choosing to try and say, okay, because we made this trade-off, that's giving us more privacy. And so in essence, one, I guess, counterargument that you're making here is that you, you know, you could have used the SGX in another way rather than creating it with another coin. That's essentially what you're saying, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:21", "start": 740.67, "text": "Yeah, it's definitely part of it. And the funny thing about this is the trade-offs they make, the, they made with this are not getting anywhere near as much advantage as you might expect. So w-what Signal has done is they've taken the Monero, you know, how would I put, you know, the sort of the Monero, way of making coins more private, and they've actually implemented this. So they already have the sort of privacy that Monero has, and then they use the- SGX to eliminate the statistical analysis that's possible on Monero. But by using SGX, well, your whole system could be shut down by Intel ultimately, because SGX in its current form, effectively to run code on SGX, you need Intel permission. So it's, it's a strange kind of set of trade-offs they've made, and the implementation seems to be even more restrictive than that. And, I mean, I, you know, to, to actually run a full node on this, to actually, you know, be a part of the- This consensus, well, they don't actually tell you how on the, on the repo, you know, in the, in the source code, it's actually not clear how anyone's supposed to go do that. you know, they asked you to go send them an email, which I did, and I haven't gotten a response back. So, you know, is this something you can actually participate in? I- I, I can't go tell you yet. And the, the fact that that's even true is pretty suspicious to begin with." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:44", "start": 823.68, "text": "Right. Because we're used to in Bitcoin this open source ethos that anyone can read the code, anybody can participate, and anybody can run their own Bitcoin full node. And so, as you were pointing out earlier, this is, you were mentioning earlier how there's a, it's kind of like a, loosely speaking, it's like a meshing of Monero and then potentially the Stellar and Ripple consensus protocol. Can you tell us a little bit about the The difference between that versus the kind of the Bitcoin approach, the Bitcoin way?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "14:12", "start": 852.18, "text": "Well, Stellar and Ripple, in a nutshell, they're essentially traditional consensus systems, and what I mean by traditional is there is a set of nodes that you trust to maintain consensus In those nodes, choose among themselves, you know, what, what transactions have happened. And what's very strange about the way, Stellar and Ripple can advertise this is, while their particular flavor of this sort of traditional consensus is meant to kind of allow people to pick different, you know, different trust sets or unique node lists is one way to, you know, is one term that's used for this. The fact of the matter is, if you and I pick a unique node list that doesn't overlap enough, there's scenarios where we will- We'll be out of consensus. So the logic, unfortunately, is that everyone has to go pick the same unique node list, or you risk serious, serious problems." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:06", "start": 905.77, "text": "Yeah, and just to spell that out for people, why is it an issue if we aren't in consensus?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "15:10", "start": 910.38, "text": "Well, it's because then the, your view of who owns what money could be different than mine, which allows me to send the same, you know, spend the same coin twice." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:19", "start": 918.84, "text": "Yeah, and that obviously is a huge issue, for any cryptocurrency, that people are essentially trying to come up with a, you an agreement on what is the correct or current state of the ledger, who owns how many coins. And so in this world, we're just sort of pushing that trust off to somebody else. And if you can't, you know, become your own, kind of make it so that in this decentralized way we can all agree what is the truth, then you've, you've got some fundamental issues here, don't we?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "15:50", "start": 950.06, "text": "Well, and I'll point out, I mean, Ripple uses the term validators for nodes in this unique node list and That's a completely different use of the term than the way Bitcoin talks about validation. You know, when you talk about a validating node in Bitcoin, that node takes information available to it, verifies that the Bitcoin rules are being followed, and then effectively spits out a yes/no answer. You know, yes, is this a valid block? No, is it not? And as part of that process, it also maintains a set of all unspent coins. You know, so that's very, very simple. And the consensus in Bitcoin is defined by most- work chain. Now, most work goes back to proof of work, namely who has, you know, which chain in total has essentially tried to find the most, you know, winning hash, solutions. You know, it's a bit, a bit more complex than that, but, you know, you can think of it as sort of work you apply. But what's really important is that that definition of what is the most work chain is independent of who actually created it. So the process of coming to consensus in Bitcoin is just getting as much information as you can, but what chains might be out- There, and then picking whichever one, you know, meets that definition. So it's very hard for you and I to have a different definition that doesn't come into consensus. You know, so long as we're distributing blockchain data around freely, you and I are essentially guaranteed to think that the current block, you know, the current highest block is the same current block. And that's just not true in something like Ripple, you know, Ripple, there is no way to decide which version of the chain is correct, other than to just pick some people who get to decide that, you know, that is the unique node list and then let them make that decision." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:34", "start": 1053.83, "text": "Yeah. And basically that's just re-re-- that's unsolving the problem that, you know, fiat money, that Bitcoin is doing, because fiat money is that system where, you know, there are certain people who can, you know, print new money or have access or privilege Access to that ledger, where in Bitcoin it's seen like it's an open ledger and anyone should be able to view it and verify it and, be able to, I guess the important part in some ways is like, like we say in Bitcoin, being able to reject an incoming transaction to say, \"Oh, I've, you know, yes, you know, for example, if I send you some fake, you know, if I send you something wrong that's not Bitcoin, you can say to me, 'No, Stefan, that's not real Bitcoin. You," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "18:16", "start": 1096.03, "text": "you didn't Like, what is it that makes my computer reject that fake transaction? Well, it's because I have a validating node. It's got access to all the same information everyone else in Bitcoin does, and it can do that same computation, that same validation, which gets to another problem with MobileCoin's plans. They want to have the system which would scale to every, you know- Every Signal user, and, and all, and you know, and then some. Well, that's a lot of transactions, that's a lot of data, and if you put all that data on the chain, now for me to go validate that data, we're talking about a number of transactions that if, if it caught on, would be totally impractical for me to validate. Well, what's their solution to that? It's actually trust these unique nodes even more. You know, not only are they saying, \"Hey, here's what the valid block is,\" they're also saying, \"By There." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:12", "start": 1152.12, "text": "Yeah, and I guess, I guess maybe to steelman that, maybe the equivalent in Bitcoin is look at all the lightweight client users out there. How would we compare that to, let's say, a mobile phone wallet, typical Bitcoin wallet that is a light client?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "19:27", "start": 1167.23, "text": "Well, the way I would, compare it is to point out that with Bitcoin wallets, while a lot of them, let's face it, are even completely centralized, you know, they trust the wallet developers for information from servers, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of- A lot of them or not. Yeah, it's quite easy for me to run, Electrum server myself and just point my wallets, you know, my phone wallets to my own Electrum server. I got, I don't actually use phone wallets, I've never bothered doing that, but- the wallet I do use most for Lightning, I just point it to my own Lightning node, so I actually get essentially the same security just in a slightly different way. And, you know, it's something that's quite easy to do. You know, you can buy kits off the shelf that just do this and just, just magically work. And because of all this variety in ways you can get to the same state, it's much harder to pull off an attack, whereas the way they're designing the software for MobileCoin, there really won't be that many people who have the ability to- Break this consensus, you know, lie to like clients, et cetera, et cetera. And that's just a dubious position for a coin to be in. And I, I, I, I point out, there's even a political side of this, which, for example, if you-- if most of the people using MobileCoin are, for instance, using it with Signal, well, you also get sort of outside the consensus attacks where, you know, suppose some government just says to Signal, \"Well, no, you must go change the Signal software to blacklist some coins or even re You know, how, how do you really withstand those attacks when your user base is so centralized at so many different levels? It's, it's just not a good idea." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:03", "start": 1263.16, "text": "Yeah, and so I guess in some ways we can sort of, we can say, \"Look, given your own goals, this isn't the best way to achieve that goal.\" and so I think that's another vector. You've also commented that, that, go on. The," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "21:16", "start": 1275.65, "text": "the one thing that their plan, I think, achieves, it meets their own goals, is making money. You know, that really is And for every other perspective, this doesn't make sense. You know, even ignoring like centralization issues and stuff like this, it's, the, the technicalities just don't make sense. But by creating a new coin You get a lot of money, and supposedly to date, MobileCoin's got about forty million dollars of investment, and I've heard rumors that their sort of pitch is market cap of a billion pretty soon. So, you know, that, that, that is serious money." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:50", "start": 1309.53, "text": "Yeah, so they're expecting, you know, over a twenty x on that. And so historically, this has been a big scam basically in the industry, known as the shitcoin waterfall, where essentially shitcoin insiders create a coin with very Questionable justification, paper thin justifications. They pump it on or they sort of sell it on and give, you know, a deal, family and friends deal to, their friends and to some VC investors and potentially some, you know, quote unquote, crypto influencers who then go and shill it to retail. And then once they get it listed on some big exchange, that's when there's a big liquidity event and then they are dumping into-- dumping onto retail basically. Is that, would you say that's basically a fair characterization? Of what has happened in this industry, in the quote-unquote crypto industry, over the last few years, and potentially this is, a similar, what's going on now." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "22:45", "start": 1364.73, "text": "Unfortunately, yes. You know, if you asked me to say, \"All right, what coins can you actually justify from tech, you know, for tech reasons?\" Bitcoin obviously, you know, someone had to do the first one. I think Monero is an example where because it's meant to be a decentralized cryptocurrency, it would be very hard to go pull off Monero without creating some kind of new coin. for Zcash, you know, it's the exact same argument. For Ethereum, ignoring all the other issues I'd have with Ethereum, I think you can make that argument, and then quickly you start turning Projects that are kind of copycats of everything I just mentioned." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:20", "start": 1400.33, "text": "yeah, yeah. And, the other point that has to be mentioned here is if this coin, you know, if Bitcoin and, you know, well, Bitcoin is meant to be-- well, Bitcoin is decentralized, but, this, you know, altcoins, if it's meant to be decentralized, then it should be able to be developed in a way that is decentralized. And you've pointed out that that's actually not true, that because of the use of Intel SGX, that's not possible. Why is that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "23:48", "start": 1428.11, "text": "Yeah. Well, you know, let's go back to, well, what is Intel SGX trying to achieve? The purpose of it is so that your node is getting, or, you know, your wallet, is getting an attestation from the node you're talking to saying, \"I am running this software, and you can trust me to maintain your privacy because this software doesn't have code in it to violate that privacy.\" Well, that means that the actual software that's running on that node, you have really two options. One is it's, is, it's bit-for-bit identical and never changes, and two is you have a third party that is allowed to Sign new versions of it, but then that third party is the point of centralization. And I haven't delved into the details of exactly what Signal's doing there, but either option winds up being centralized. You know, either you just can't change the consensus at all, which then actually has the level of centralization, well, alright, when something breaks, which inevitably will, how do we manage that? Or you get the level of centralization where someone has the ability to swap out the code, and then they have this privileged access. And that, you know, it's just, it's a Very dubious position to be in, and I think it will invite regulatory headaches that Signal just doesn't need." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:05", "start": 1504.6, "text": "Yeah, and I guess to frame that in, in a Bitcoin sense, if somebody, you know, for example, hypothetically, somebody had proposed some incredible new change to Bitcoin and, you know, everyone agreed to it and it was gonna bring about some great technology, well, they could go and code that up and put that out there and say, \"Hey, guys, let's, you know, soft-fork this into Bitcoin,\" and people could all agree, yeah. This is a good change, we think this is, you know, win-win-win all around, let's do the change. That's something we can do in Bitcoin land, but unfortunately, this isn't even possible in mobile coin land." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "25:39", "start": 1538.84, "text": "Absolutely. A-and, you know, and I'll point out, I mean, I've been one of the people who said over and over again, running different implementations of Bitcoin, you know, has very big dangers because it's really hard for us to get two versions of soft- you know, two different software implementations to agree on doing the same thing. But the fact it's possible in these sort of extreme cases is so important for the decentralization argument. And to actually go from, \"All right, this isn't necessarily a good idea, but it is possible,\" to, \"No, actually, technically, it's not possible to do anymore. That's a really serious problem.\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:15", "start": 1575.26, "text": "Yeah, okay. And so now, I think there was some back and forth in terms of people were going at Moxie saying, \"Hey, why don't you use Bitcoin and Lightning?\" And now, at that time, and this is maybe a week ago, a couple Moxie's response was something along the lines of, \"Oh, it'd be nice to do if it could be done in a way that was non-custodial and, you know, scalable for the mobile users.\" What would you say to that sort of argument? I mean, it's" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "26:41", "start": 1601.08, "text": "s-s-surely, you know, I mean, l-l-let's face it, Lightning does have scalability problems at a certain point, because every channel in Lightning ends up being a UTXO on Bitcoin. But we're very far from reaching that point, and given the sort of trade-offs we're willing to make, it'd be very easy to use things like SGX To get excellent performance on Lightning wallets while still letting the users maintain full, you know, full custody of their coins, and also, you can kind of say full custody of the meaning of those coins, you know, what, like, what is the consensus, for instance. And I, I, I suspect knowing Moxie, I mean, let's, you know, let's steelman this and say, all right, let's assume he wasn't motivated by money or all that. I would think this would come out of his general philosophy of, \"Let's go and create fairly centralized solutions Solve problems like this, and I think a good example where that philosophy wound up in MobileCoin is one of the many things that they've centralized around is the actual blockchain data is apparently being hosted on Amazon S3. So, you know, you've got yet another third party failure mode by having Amazon S3 be the way that wallets go and, you know, get data from, you know, that they actually need. It's just like, what? But if you're Moxie and the rest of the system runs on S3, you know, Amazon, EC2 anyway, I mean, you kinda see the logic." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:04", "start": 1684.23, "text": "Yeah. So I guess then the challenge then would just be, you know, I guess I, I'm, I'm sort of bringing it back to a Bitcoin sense and thinking, okay, the, you know, the general, you know, the good Bitcoin user can run their own Bitcoin node and that way they've got their own version or their own, I guess, copy of the blockchain data." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:26", "start": 1705.74, "text": "and they're kind of stuck, they're trusting Amazon now." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "28:30", "start": 1709.89, "text": "Yeah, well, so, so in this case, I mean, assuming they've done their, done, done their job right, they're not actually trusting Amazon for correctness, but if Amazon blocks access to it, yeah, their wallets will stop working. And, you know, if this is something that can be fixed, and, in, in comparison to all the other problems, it's maybe not such a big deal. But it's, it's just sort of telling a-- about, of the philosophy that's behind this. It's We just want something that'll go work, and we're gonna take a very easy path to it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:01", "start": 1741.49, "text": "And so hypothetically, if they had gone with Lightning and let's say they had said to their users, \"We're gonna integrate some kind of Lightning wallet into the app,\" and then there would still be some kind of channel open and channel close, and those kinds of transactions would still have to hit the chain in, in the Bitcoin world, in Bitcoin's blockchain, how, how do you have any idea? Around how that could have been done, just I guess hypothetically." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "29:31", "start": 1770.53, "text": "Well, in fact, we have a good example of this, which is a Claris Phoenix wallet. And Phoenix wallet does all of the channel management for you. You know, if you send money, for example, suppose I have, Phoenix wallet and you send money to me, it'll manage the opening of a channel from one of their lightning nodes to my wallet on my phone in the background. And it just automatically happens. And when I want, you know, when I go to send that money again, well, I've already got a channel there, and I just send it back the other way, and everything magically happens. But importantly, because my, you know, my Phoenix wallet on my phone actually is running a Lightning channel, there is no way for them to just take money out of that. It's not custodial at all." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:15", "start": 1815.11, "text": "Yeah, that's a great, example. And I think there are wallets out there like Phoenix or Breeze or Moon Wallet, And I've interviewed the founders of the, of these, wallets also, or of these applications, and they're, they're kind of, in some sense, they're like a clever hybrid model that gives you, you know, mostly non-custodial experience while still hiding the technical details and the, you know, the, that kind of gory stuff in the background." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "30:43", "start": 1843.08, "text": "Phoenix Wallet is non-custodial. It's not mostly non-custodial, it is non-custodial. You know, they--" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:50", "start": 1850.42, "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "30:51", "start": 1850.72, "text": "They, they just don't have access to it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:52", "start": 1852.47, "text": "Yeah, I guess the only part would just be the swap ins and swap outs aspect, where it is a trusted swap in and out." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "30:59", "start": 1858.87, "text": "Well, not really though, because until that swap in happens I haven't received a payment. You know, the, the one part of that which is, you could kind of say is trusted, is the time between when I see the, you know, payment pop up and when it actually confirms. But if you're willing to do this with SGX Just go and attest to the fact that the f-- the equivalent of Phoenix Wallet's implementation on their servers will never steal my money. You can also use SGX to attest to the fact that your privacy is protected. You know, I mean, Signal itself already actually does this for contact, data, information. You know, they use SGX to attest to the fact that their servers aren't leaking who, you know, who is in contact with whom. So doing this with Lightning would be very easy. But if you did that, well, then you wouldn't need a new coin, would you?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:53", "start": 1912.51, "text": "Unfortunately for, the, those, those poor, poor VCs who wanna get their nice twenty x." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "31:59", "start": 1919.19, "text": "yeah. So I guess point, and I should point out, if they went with this path, there is still a way to get revenue out of this, which is you just go and charge some fees on transfers, just like any other Lightning implementation. You know, this, this really isn't a big deal. But That business model is a lot more boring than we made a billion dollars 'cause our co- you know, our coin sold out." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:23", "start": 1943.16, "text": "Alright, quick break for the sponsors. CipherSafe dot io are producing metal backup seed products, so don't just rely on that piece of paper that comes with your hardware wallet, use a metal backup product. CipherSafe have a product called the Bitcoin Recovery Tag, specifically helping you with recovery. It's an extra stainless steel tag, it comes with information like the original wallet, the gap limit. Derivation types, scripts used, and all the major hardware wallet types all have their own type of recovery tag that you can buy for that type. You attach this to your seed word backup with a stainless steel cable, and there's even a website link for recovery so you or your heirs can recover the coins using Electrum, so it actually adds that value of helping you or your heirs recover in practice. 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So if you're sitting on a phone wallet or you've left your coins on the exchange, it's time to upgrade today. Go to coinkite dot com and use the code livera for a discount. Back to the show. Basically done something similar to the, you know, Phoenix model and created their own, you know, well-known lightning node. It could have been the Signal lightning node, and then the Signal users in some sense become" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "35:08", "start": 2108.18, "text": "Signal lightning nodes using this model. Yes. You know, it's, you don't- Don't need just one, you can, you can paralyze this as much as you want." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:16", "start": 2116.17, "text": "Right, right. And so then users could pay to a, you know, other Lightning network, and here's the other thing, it would have been far more interoperable. So all the world's Bitcoin users and Lightning, Bitcoin Lightning users could pay a Signal user." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "35:31", "start": 2131.26, "text": "Yep. And it would still be just as instant as any other Lightning transaction." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:35", "start": 2135.16, "text": "Yeah, which is, which is a shame in some ways, because I mean, even right now, I'm sure there are, you know, Bitcoiners and Lightning You have used Signal just by literally copying and pasting a Lightning invoice into Signal and just using that to pay, like I, I've done that here and there, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "35:51", "start": 2150.81, "text": "I, I, I've certainly, I've totally done that many times. It's, it works just fine." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:55", "start": 2154.97, "text": "Yeah, so it's, it feels like a big disappointment to see Signal basically sell out and start shitcoining when they had, they could have just done this simple Lightning option. I mean, maybe it's not simple, but it would have been a-- it would have been work, of course, let's be I, I mean, my perspective, yeah, go on." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "36:14", "start": 2174.13, "text": "I think in comparison to creating their own, you know, their own coin, it would have been simpler." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:19", "start": 2178.99, "text": "Yeah, yeah. When," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "36:20", "start": 2179.79, "text": "when you go look at how much work they had to do to create MobileCoin within the SGX environment, which were, you know, needs to have all your software rewritten, this isn't trivial. This is a lot of work." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:32", "start": 2191.52, "text": "Yeah, and you were pointing out that as well on, Twitter that they had been, I think, implementing this since October of twenty twenty, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "36:42", "start": 2201.52, "text": "Yeah. I don't think that was me pointing out, and, and it wouldn't have been even earlier than that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:46", "start": 2205.83, "text": "Oh, I, I think, I think you were saying, I think, yeah, it wasn't that you found it, I think you were just kind of raising awareness to that, and I think you were saying, you're giving credit to someone else, but I think you were saying they had added mobile coin payments integration back in October 2020." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "36:59", "start": 2218.95, "text": "Oh, oh, okay, okay, yeah. So sorry, I should say, so. Signal added support to their server backend, in 2020, but when I'm talking about the amount of work being done, I'm talking about more the effort the mobile coin needed to do to write all the software, yeah. Signal itself One way or the other, wouldn't really need to do that much work. The, the wallet itself, obviously, would be fair bit of work, but that's not work you save by creating your own coin. That's, yeah, that's work that has been done no matter what." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:30", "start": 2250.12, "text": "Yeah. And I think it's probably a point where maybe, someone who doesn't like Bitcoin or Lightning, they could come back and say, \"Well, what about all the privacy trade-offs of using Lightning?\" You know, Lightning isn't perfectly private, and maybe there's a lot of-- They could say Lightning, nodes can probably de-anonymize, you know, a decent amount of the Lightning network traffic. It's possible to run some gets" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "37:55", "start": 2275.41, "text": "back to, if you have SGX, SGX can do all this much better. And in fact, there's a particular way where, you know, I should say a particular failure mode where I think SGX plus Lightning has much better privacy than what they've implemented with MobileCoin, which is if SGX is broken The problem with mobile coins' use of SGX is you still have all the statistical analysis being possible, in that you can still look at the blockchain and say, \"All right, now that we've sort of unmasked this, who might have paid whom?\" But with Lightning, that data just no longer exists. You know, a Lightning transaction's ephemeral. The moment it's happened, the actual data associated with the fact it happened can be thrown away. Well, alright, I should say, maybe not exactly moment, but, you know, you get the point. Within a few minutes, it's, it's, it would be completely okay to throw away that data because the transactions happened. And it's now reflecting just a balance maintained between two different computers. How, how they arrived at that balance is a real-" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:58", "start": 2337.82, "text": "Yeah, I see. I, I suppose there is a maybe, maybe this would be another steel man for the anti, now I'm, obviously I'm a Bitcoin and Lightning promoter myself, but I, I guess the anti Bitcoin and Lightning argument here might be something like, look, there are still channel probing attacks possible on Lightning, and by trying to infer the channel, you know, balance in certain Lightning wallets and potentially looking at what's going on on-chain in terms of the on- One chain footprint of a lightning wallet by looking at the channel opens and channel closes, that it's possible or that using a more advanced surveillance, that it is possible to do that kind of surveillance on Bitcoin and Lightning. And I guess obviously, I don't, yeah, fully agree with that, but yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "39:43", "start": 2383.03, "text": "In this scenario, what we're trying to do is maintain privacy between end users doing transactions to a hypothetical Lightning and SGX implementation. You can make that implementation just not be vulnerable to- Any of these attacks, you know, if you, if you're, if you're running big lightning nodes within SGX and they're connected to a whole bunch of different users, trying to do any probing attack will just get you no information at all because you can't- Access the state of the channels between those users and that SGX node, nor can you access the state of the channels between the different nodes in that group. You know, 'cause after all, in this scenario, you know, you're not gonna run one node for every single Signal user, you're probably gonna wanna scale it out a bit and have some redundancy. But the communications between those nodes, there's no reason to give out any information about the status of those channels. You don't have to." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:35", "start": 2434.56, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "40:35", "start": 2435.23, "text": "So all these attacks just disappear, and we're back to the requirement of- Saying, \"Well, we're trusting SGX to say that there isn't code running that's recording the transactions, \" which I think is a pretty good, you know, a perfectly fine argument, because the transaction data can be discarded. And that's what makes SGX, I think, a reasonable trade-off to make." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:56", "start": 2455.9, "text": "Yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "40:57", "start": 2457.02, "text": "Someone should just go do this. I mean, screw MobileCoin. Like, this just makes sense. It would actually be quite useful." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:03", "start": 2463.04, "text": "Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good way to frame it. And so essentially, these Signal users In the hypothetical world, let's say they took on Lightning and they did it like a Phoenix style, they could pay each other, other Signal users, a-and in a way that was much more private, obviously with certain trade-offs of trusting SGX, and then they could have also had that benefit of being interoperable with the rest of the Bitcoin and Lightning world by being able to pay Bitcoin and Lightning invoices using Signal, hypothetically. That's, you know, that was the possibility they could have had." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "41:37", "start": 2497.05, "text": "And on top of all this, their payments would actually be a little faster Master, because that's, you know, Lightning just has lower latency than any consensus system ever could." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:46", "start": 2505.93, "text": "Yeah, because Lightning payments can be done in a few seconds." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "41:49", "start": 2509.03, "text": "Well, much less than that, remember? A Lightning payment is done by the time the information is transferred between the nodes in the route. When you're talking about a system where you've got a bunch of users using, you know, this with, within themselves, that latency is down to literal packet latency. You know, I could make, like, look at this way, if we were connected with Lightning WALLETS through a third party and that third party had ample CP and so on. We can make a lightning transaction effectively as fast as a packet takes to go back, you know, between me and you, and that's milliseconds. You just can't have a consensus system that maintains global consensus in milliseconds like that You know, the speed of light's too slow, so Lightning actually has the advantage there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:33", "start": 2552.76, "text": "Yeah, that's a real, yeah, it's pretty damning in some ways. I think it's, and it's not to say that, you know, Bitcoin and Lightning is perfect and there's no trade-offs, I just think it would have been, would it not have been better for them to just do the work and grapple honestly with the trade-offs of Bitcoin and Lightning than to go start a shitcoin," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "42:50", "start": 2569.81, "text": "yeah? And if they don't like Bitcoin, whatever, use the same technology for like" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "42:57", "start": 2577.25, "text": "Lightning isn't dependent on Bitcoin. In fact, Lightning wallets on, Litecoin, if I remember correctly, do exist. You know, I don't know anyone ever uses them, but, you know, you're not actually tied to Bitcoin, the currency. This technology is better than anything that they've implemented. And, you know, in a point of, like, look at- Like, look at it for, as a retail example, if you want to use your Signal wallet to send someone money in sort of a retailish situation, the fact of the matter is the speed of light's slow enough that I would much rather that, that data packet go, you know, locally within my province. And you can do this with Lightning, 'cause you can go set up Lightning nodes that are actually physically located close to me. And, like, that, that is actually a noticeable improvement in, you know, in experience versus having to wait till the whole- Globe comes to consensus. You know, we, we kinda don't notice it that much 'cause the world isn't that big compared to the speed of light, but, you know, you put a, you put some retail on, the moon and you're gonna pretty quickly complain about this." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:58", "start": 2638.35, "text": "Yeah, interesting. Yeah, it's a good point you make about not having to get global consensus on every little payment. And in the Lightning world, we can, you know, I can pay you or you can pay a Lightning user very quickly, now, I guess the steel man And that might be, you know, three or four back and forths in terms of channel state updates, but I think even if you net all of that out, it still works out far, far faster and, just a lot more kind of long-term sustainable. Now, it might also be a point there that over time, you-- so let's say Signal has fifty million, you know, monthly active users, let's say if they were to get, you know, go another twenty x and get to whatever Facebook or one of these other messenger sizes, then all of those channel opens and- Closes, having to go on Bitcoin's blockchain might actually become a little bit more difficult at that point, wouldn't you say?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "44:54", "start": 2693.84, "text": "Well, you know, the funny thing is my answer to that would actually be Screw Bitcoin, just do it on Ethereum. You know, and, and I'm sort of being facetious 'cause actually Ethereum has higher fees than Bitcoin does right now. But i-if I was, you know, look at this way, if they'd hired me as consultant, I probably would have given them an answer like that, like, \"Let's go just pick some coin that isn't actually getting that much use, that we can sort of do this sort of thing and get away with it. \" Or even for that matter, like, if we were to do it on a brand new coin," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:28", "start": 2727.88, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "45:28", "start": 2728.34, "text": "You know, because you reduce the size of the shared state. And, and just from a maintenance point of view, s-shared consensus state is really tricky because It makes running the servers hard. I, I, you, you, you forget this, but, you know, suppose you have a server that goes down, and you need to bring it back up again. In a Bitcoin environment where the speed of computers is faster relative to the blockchain, you can do almost any operation with a sufficiently fast computer in a matter of minutes to maybe a few hours. You know, you need to resync the whole chain 'cause, oh, shoot, you just realized there's a bug, and you don't quite know where the val-- you know, invalid transactions are. You That, because blockchain data just isn't that big compared to the fast computers you can get. But you try to pull that same thing off with a Visa scale coin with a shared consensus, and suddenly you're wondering, shoot, like, how long are we gonna be down for? You know, can we even afford to validate the stuff? Can we afford to check for this condition we found? It, it just makes all administration that much more tricky and that much more high-stakes." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:37", "start": 2797.41, "text": "And I guess also some listeners might be thinking, okay, so- So we've, we've spoken a bit about the idea of the Lightning model. What about the sidechain model? Would that have been an appropriate alternative, or how should we think about that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "46:53", "start": 2812.7, "text": "The, the reason why you do a sidechain, or I, I should point it to, I mean, when you, when you talk about a sidechain, you could ask, \"Well, what type of sidechain are we talking about?\" Are you calling, say, Liquid a sidechain? Are you calling, you know, something more heavily tied to Bitcoin a sidechain? I mean, if you're talking about the sort of liquid model, then I think that's getting very close to what, what I just mentioned, you know, as it's, if you're going to have a separate coin or a new, new currency or whatever, you'd much rather have something where it's, say, a, you know, a chain with somewhat more, maybe, you know, somewhat, say, less restrictions on how much data can be, but using Lightning to then actually make it really scale properly. But If they really wanted to say, well, alright, wait, wait, I'll put it this way. Suppose they were dead set on creating their own coin for the consensus side of it Tying that back to Bitcoin to come to consensus would probably make sense. Unfortunately, that's just, you know, unfortunately, that's just not gonna happen because I think they're, they're sort of a group of people who would want to use environmental cost as an advertising point. Yeah, like that, that, that's part of their argument for MobileCoin, well, oh, look, you know, we have no environmental cost. And so many of these arguments are kind of bullshit because they don't talk about Bitcoin, you know, they, they pretend Bitcoin is a system where every transaction's on chain You know, or they pretend that, for instance, energy scales with transaction volume, which is also not true. But even though technically doing that kind of model might make more sense against a lot of failure modes, they're just not gonna do it. They'd much rather have this, the best possible centralized system you can get, where you can sort of kinda claim it's decentralized, even though it really isn't. And it, it just invites so many ugly questions from regul-- you know, regulations. I, I wouldn't wanna be, I wouldn't wanna be involved in that project right now." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:49", "start": 2929.07, "text": "Well, shame. and, I mean, I, I wonder, could they have done some kind of advanced DLC type approach where they do some kind of fiat-denominated payments, but in the background it's actually, you know, Bitcoin DLC is going. Is there any way that could have been, a potential?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "49:08", "start": 2948.08, "text": "Well, interestingly, this is one of those things where again SGX, could potentially play a role because you could use it to attest to the fact that, for instance, prices were accurate Or, you know, coins would be held in certain states or so on. You know, there's, there's a lot of things you could do with that, but, I think going back to this notion that, you know, how the, you know, what coin the tech is on top of doesn't really matter that much if you just- Partnered with some institution to maintain, you know, USD in the background, that would be great too." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:38", "start": 2978.36, "text": "Yeah, and I guess the challenge may be something like, \"Oh, well, the-- that there might be concerns later down the line that users would have to go KYC, and the whole point of Signal is that you can be, you know, an activist under an oppressive government, tyrannical government, and you need to be able to, you know, send money or receive money under these adversarial conditions, and if we use this, then maybe that's ex- Exposing too much, you know, KYC requirement or putting too much KYC requirement, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "50:08", "start": 3007.58, "text": "Well, I'll bet you that was part of the, the idea of creating a new coin with this. But you notice how it's not, you know, that act-- like this demo software isn't available to people outside of the UK. They've already run into these sort of problems." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:23", "start": 3022.69, "text": "Yeah, that's a good point as well, because they're starting, I think the trial is starting with UK users, or at least currently, and maybe they'll expand that out, but then maybe they will run exact same hurdles of, oh, you need to do KYC and you need to do know your customer and ask them for blah, blah, blah, and then all of a sudden now the privacy that was meant to be given to these people is actually not, isn't a reality for them." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "50:45", "start": 3044.99, "text": "And worse, you've now invited all this attention to Signal itself." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:49", "start": 3048.89, "text": "Yeah, kicking the hornet's nest before you're ready." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "50:53", "start": 3052.57, "text": "Yeah, yeah. And, and I mean, frankly, if I was talking from the perspective of Signal, of just Signal users, I would say the idea of adding a coin- Coin to this just doesn't make sense under almost any circumstance. You know, like if people need to move money around on Signal, just copy and paste a Lightning transaction. You know, maybe add some very minor support to, like, call out to another wallet or something, but, you know, putting this much integration And inviting all this KYC and all attention, it's just not a good idea." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:24", "start": 3084.21, "text": "Yeah. And so let's talk a little bit about funding in general for projects, open source projects. Now, Signal has a foundation, I think they were given a donation of some funding for that," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "51:39", "start": 3098.62, "text": "no, they weren't actually, they were given a loan." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:41", "start": 3101.06, "text": "Oh, I see, right. I, I actually thought that was a, yeah, okay. So do you know, are you able to elaborate more on that and what's the funding model there and what you would- What, how should they approach that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "51:52", "start": 3111.61, "text": "Well, you know, unfortunately I can't because nobody knows the terms of the loan, as far as I know. Now, this could mean that it's structured as a loan for, you know, tax reasons or something and is completely harmless, or it could mean that whoever gave them the loan actually expects that to get paid back somehow with revenue. So, you know, that's just, it's a big open question. It'd be much better if they didn't have that and they just had a straight donation. And I think for something as important as Signal, getting Getting those donation funds is probably not that hard. Signal isn't that big of a project, it doesn't have, you know, that big of costs to keep it running, you know, if you compare it, say, to Wikipedia, I think Wikipedia- needs a much bigger budget than Signal does, and Wikipedia seems to be doing just fine on that. So I, you know, it's, it, it, it really makes me wonder, is this really needed to get funding? And I think the answer is probably actually no." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:48", "start": 3168.27, "text": "Yeah, that's a shame. And, you know, there's obviously, in the open source world, it's difficult to, like, have one true answer of how it should be done, but, you know, there, there's different ideas out there. Some of them are just donation only, some of them are Do a freemium model where they have the product free, but then the some users can just pay for better fe-for some additional features, and then those paying users are in effect subsidizing the free ones. I guess that's another potential option that they could have gone." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "53:21", "start": 3200.51, "text": "Yeah. And the, the fact of the matter is, if you have something that works as well as Signal does, and, you know, does as much good as Signal does, it's not that hard to get donation money, and there's a lot of projects that run purely on donations." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:34", "start": 3213.64, "text": "Yeah, that's a shame because, you" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "53:35", "start": 3215.14, "text": "know, you know, and that's including for paying developers too." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:38", "start": 3217.66, "text": "Yeah. And so what are the main costs for these kinds of, foundations and organizations? Is it mainly around developer cost and then, say, server and hosting costs, and potentially some legal foundation fees and things like that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "53:50", "start": 3230.39, "text": "It, it honestly depends a lot on, what project you're talking about. For Signal Given Signal's goals of scaling up, they may be in a position where hosting costs are actually more of an obstacle than, than development costs are? But frankly, it's, it's hard to know because it really depends on, you know, how exactly are people using Signal. if I send you a text message on Signal, the cost of bandwidth for that is well and truly trivial. Now, if I go send you, a minute-long video, I'm doing the equivalent in terms of resources of, you know, hundreds of thousands of text messages. So how people use Signal is, you know, that kind of open question, and frankly, I don't, I don't know. But this is, again, one of those things Sponsorship for that hosting doesn't sound like it should be that much of a challenge, you know, I'm not gonna say it's trivial, but given where Signal is, if you'd, say, you know, gone to, I don't know, Microsoft or, you know, Google or Amazon or something and partnered with them for hosting costs, that's probably doable, you know, Cloudflare seems to be the sorta, the sorta company that might be willing to go and do this kind of stuff or, you know, more niche things. It's, it just- It just doesn't feel like this is an insurmountable obstacle." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:08", "start": 3307.91, "text": "Yeah. Okay, so turning more to what should Bitcoiners do, because," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "55:13", "start": 3313.09, "text": "and m-m-maybe I'll, I'll just make one final point too, is that the fact that they now have a coin and they have this sort of taint attached to it makes future sponsorship a lot harder to achieve." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:24", "start": 3324.02, "text": "Yeah, that's right, because they'll say, \"Well, hey, you started your own shitcoin, why do I need to pay you now for it? \" Exactly. Yeah. So from a Bitcoiner perspective, we seen this happen, and look, I mean, it's not just Bitcoiners, right? But anyone who's sort of interested to use privacy, technologies, privacy messaging, you know, they, they might have been using Keybase, but then Keybase, you know, had, some Ripple shitcoin integration. Oh, sorry, Stella, sorry, yeah. and, and then, you know, I mean, there's other messaging apps out there, right? Like people talk about, what is it, Threema, and then, you can self-host" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:05", "start": 3364.53, "text": "So the options that, you know, Bitcoin people or anyone interested in privacy, what should they be doing? I mean, should they just continue using Signal for now, but then be on the lookout for something better?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "56:14", "start": 3374.43, "text": "Well, I think in general, people have to assume there's a good chance Signal gets shut down over this. You know, I'm not gonna say it's, say, a fifty percent chance, but it's certainly more than zero, and it's probably in the single digits. You know, what, what Signal has done is really risky, and they, they've opened a hornet's nest that just didn't need to happen. And also, this may be something where Signal becomes available on a per country basis, India as an example, you know, they're trying to ban cryptocurrencies. Will you be able to down-download Signal in the future in India? Maybe not. You know, I mean, even if, even if they say, \"Well, the version in India doesn't have it enabled,\" or, you know, so on, doesn't necessarily mean the government's Explanation, they may still say, \"Well, you know, app stores may lo- no longer offer Signal, and unfortunately, Google would probably comply.\" So it's, it's an ugly thing. And as for alternatives, I, I, you know, it depends on what, what you're trying to do. If you're just talking amongst- Close, you know, a small group of technical people, self-hosting stuff as options and so on, but, you know, if, if you're talking to your, less than technical family members, you know, I, I wish I could give you good options. Right now, Signal, Signal is kind of your best option even still, but you just sort of, the best advice I'd give is sort of be on the lookout and see what comes in the future." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:37", "start": 3457.14, "text": "Yeah. And actually, one more point, while you were, you just, Right? So many applications nowadays rely on Google and Apple for distribution to the user, but in the more, let's say, adversarial environment, that user may not be able to rely on that, and that is why they use alternative app stores and F-Droid or sideload apps or potentially have, you know, the dot APK file which they are downloading and installing. That's probably another area." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "58:08", "start": 3488.4, "text": "Well, first and foremost, I need to point out all of these solutions are only- Google and Android. Apple just doesn't allow this stuff in any reasonable way. So right there, yeah, get an Android phone rather than Apple." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:21", "start": 3500.85, "text": "Well, there you go. And even then, there's, you know, more of a push some Bitcoiners are into using some of the alternative, more hardened, operating systems, right? So, Graphene OS, some people use Copperhead and some people are into Calyx OS. I guess the idea then is, you know, Signal the app should be usable in those, in, in that kind of scenario scenario as well, you shouldn't have to be trusting and using the Google Play Store to get access to these things." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "58:49", "start": 3528.53, "text": "And that's one of the things where Moxie is famously for centralization. You know, he has pushed back very hard on people Even just having alternative Signal clients, you know, let alone federating the protocol. So, you know, he, he kinda has a history of this stuff, and it's made a lot of people dubious about Signal even before this mobile coin stuff." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:09", "start": 3549.2, "text": "Yeah, that's unfortunate. So, I guess any, I guess closing thoughts to leave listeners with, what should, should they be thinking about in terms of their, you know, private messaging and potentially for private messaging with their less technical family and friends?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "59:23", "start": 3562.67, "text": "Well You know, unfortunately, maybe the thing I'd say is this could be like email. You know, we, we don't need to have a system where there is sort of a one size fits all for how you use your, you know, how you use your messaging, in much the same way as you can go use Gmail for your email and I can go and run my own server, which is exactly what I do. You know, that's advantage of federated protocols. And Mark's these arguments against that as well, then you can't advance the protocol as fast, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, at this point, I think messaging is pretty well understood. It, it would be pretty reasonable to create a federated protocol doing the things that Signal does, and doing it in a proper federated way. But remains to be seen if anyone will put in the effort to do that, and even if they do, will it catch on?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:10", "start": 3610.17, "text": "Yeah, I think that's an, that's Essentially, it's like e-even when people were angry at Twitter for all the censorship and so on, and then there was a push about using Mastodon, it's probably an equivalent to that. It's like this idea of, \"Let's try to look at these federated options that give people a way to interact and interoperate using different clients and different software, such that you don't have to tell people, \"Hey, get this one app.\" and maybe in the messaging world, maybe that ends up being something like the Element, Matrix style setup." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:00:41", "start": 3641.87, "text": "Exactly. Will it happen? I guess we'll have to go see. And unfortunately, a very important ingredient to it, which I think, you know, you mentioned before, is we need phones continue to be able to inst-- you know, have general-purpose software installed on them. And right now, our sort of last holdout of commonly used phones is Android. Apple doesn't really allow this in a reasonable way, and I don't-- you know, unfortunately, I don't have good answers to this if this goes away. It is just not feasible to create Phones these days and expect a reasonable percentage of population have them, unless this is possible from the get-go. And crazy enough, we probably need legislative, solutions to this to ensure that you can actually run custom software on phones. That, that's something that could go away." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:27", "start": 3687.62, "text": "So what about if hypothetically people are listening and they wanna fund projects that are going in this direction, does that mean they should be looking at things like, you know, Libram or PinePhone or, you know, those? Those kinds of projects that are trying to be like a Linux phone or an open phone?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:01:45", "start": 3705.03, "text": "I mean, I think those things are valuable, but they aren't by themselves a solution to this problem. You know, as much as I, I, I want people to support those things, I think we also need to put pressure on Apple and Google to, in case of Apple, open up their phones again, and in case of Google, continue opening it, and that also part of that putting pressure probably means talking to your local politicians. And making sure they realize this is an important thing, and it kinda fits into right to repair, movement as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:16", "start": 3736.33, "text": "okay, yeah. yeah, I'm not as familiar with the right to repair, what, what is that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:02:21", "start": 3741.31, "text": "Well, it's effectively, well, so a good example is, in most countries, you have a right to repair your car, and not only are automater-makers not allowed to, for instance, cancel your warranty for repairing your car, they're also required to provide technical information about, you know, cars in And also require, required to, supply spare parts, et cetera, et cetera. And that effectively means that you're able to modify and repair your car. And in the tech world, that's going away. It's much harder for people to, for instance, replace batteries on iPhones than the equivalent thing for a car. You know, nothing stops replacing like the gas tank on your car, but with iPhones, they're rapidly adding security features which makes this impossible. And the idea of right to repair laws Just to force phone manufacturers to continue making this, making these things possible, as well as depending on, you know, what proposal you're talking about, re-re-pla-um, supply the same Manuals for repair as are available anywhere else, you know, supply schematics and so on. So there's, there's a bunch of different proposals and sort of general umbrella term, right to repair, but I think the name kind of sums it, you know, sums it up, like the right to actually modify your phone and fix your phone and get access to how it's working, you know, rather than just being this glass brick that you have no visibility into. And from a security point of view, this is very important. You know, even experts have a very hard time analyzing phones to know what they're actually doing. And a phone, of course, has a microphone and a camera. You know, you could be walking around with A bug in your pocket recording everything you go say, and it's very hard to prove that's not happening." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:04", "start": 3844.53, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:04:04", "start": 3844.85, "text": "You know, the, the level of lockdown in modern phones is quite extreme." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:09", "start": 3849.24, "text": "Yeah, I see. yeah, so I guess I, I wouldn't wanna see the, the answer being, \"Yeah, let's call out for favorable government regulation.\" I think, I think the answer would be more like, \"We, we have to actually just put money into building the alternative,\" and I think, maybe that alternative isn't clear and easy to see right now, but Given enough time and enough people getting concerned about using these things, using technology, in a more privacy-preserving way, then maybe, there'll be enough, a-and also as obviously number goes up over time, we might see more funding into suitable projects. I guess that's, that's how I would, hope to see it." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:04:49", "start": 3889.66, "text": "I mean, the thing I'd point out there is the nature, like the level of resources that go into building a modern phone from scratch is so extreme that the entire world's economy can barely support, you know, more than a handful of manufacturers. Like, it's, it's just something where we run into the problem that Earth itself is too centralized, you know? And it's, and it just keeps getting worse year after year because as we get more and more advanced chips The amount of infrastructure required to build those chips just keeps going up, you know? I mean, Intel, for example, could actually drop out of the manufacturing business, and that would effectively leave us with one company in the entire world that's able to make chips from scratch, you know, TSMC. And there is no competing with that. Unfortunately, these are things where I, I think libertarians get a bit naive about the scale of these problems. There aren't good solutions to this of just going your own, and it's very easy for governments to cut off access to the- Those solutions anyway. Puri's phones, they depend on third parties to supply them, and the ecosystem of those third parties is remarkably centralized, and there is no way to fix this problem without the level of resources that effectively turn you into government anyway." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:04", "start": 3964.79, "text": "Yeah. So I think that's probably the open question. I think of it more like, it's not necessarily, you know, it's not to say that every market, in order to be a healthy market, must have, you know, thirty high, you know, all equal competitors. I think Some, in some markets, it will just naturally tend towards a few smaller amount of larger players, and I think from my point of view, it's not saying, \"Oh, yeah, look, if the government wasn't there, everything would be perfect.\" It's more just to say, \"We're probably gonna-- By inviting government in, we're probably gonna create a lot more problems than we're solving.\"" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:06:38", "start": 3998.65, "text": "Well, look at it this way, when we get to the point where these things are decentralized, we can't avoid inviting government in, because these companies end up working with government anyway. You know, there, there is no avoiding this. One way or the other, chip fabs get in bed with governments. You know, I mean, TSMC, they're a political football between Taiwan, China, and the US, and really the rest of the free world. Like, it is very easy for TSMC to get into-- I mean, concretely, there is a very genuine worry that the Chinese government invades Taiwan to seize TSMC. And once that happens, you're screwed because it's now the Chinese government that has, you know, that's controlling the chip industry. You know, they're, they're not gonna care about your libertarian ideals, they're gonna say, \"Well, no, purism? Tough luck, we're just not gonna supply you with chips.\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:07:27", "start": 4047.2, "text": "Yeah, no, that's a fair point. I think, I think We're just gonna have to--" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:07:32", "start": 4052.99, "text": "Oh, this way. Governments are more decentralized than the chip industry right now, 'cause there are a lot more governments out there than chip manufacturers." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:07:41", "start": 4061.54, "text": "Yeah, for sure. yeah, I, I, I think, I think that's correct. I, I can't, I can't, disagree with you there. So we'll just have to wait and see. I think, what we'll see is over time we'll just like see, it'll, but it's not gonna be a, it's not gonna be something that's A little bit about, you know, what were some of the trade-offs of Signal, Signal's decision and their choice in, you know, starting a shitcoin or, you know, using this shitcoin as opposed to, you know, doing the Bitcoin Lightning thing. So, yeah, probably we'll probably, close it off there. any, any final comments or, and, and of course, where can people find you online, Peter?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:08:21", "start": 4101.29, "text": "Well, peter todd dot org is my, not often updated website and, peter k todd on, Twitter and, I'm, do have mastodon, on mastodon dot, peter todd dot org as well. So, you know, that's the, that's where I am. And I always like to say, if you can't figure out my email address, you're not a very good stock." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:43", "start": 4123.1, "text": "Well, thanks very much, Peter. I enjoyed chatting with you and, certainly very educational." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:08:47", "start": 4127.31, "text": "Yeah, thank you. Talk later" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:49", "start": 4129.55, "text": "Make sure you subscribe to the show in your podcatcher application, and you can find me at stephanellivera dot com slash two six eight and get the show notes for this episode over there as well. Thanks, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }