{ "episodeId": "SLP368", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "bitcoinqna": { "name": "BitcoinQNA", "role": "guest", "tag": "BITCOINQNA" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.51, "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today, for episode three hundred and sixty-eight, Bitcoin community educator, Bitcoin Q&A joins me on the show for the first time, and he's well known in the space for writing a lot of guides and material that really helps people. Think of his stuff often as like a quick start guide For Bitcoin. And so today we're talking about the Seed tool that he collaborated with, SuperFatArrow is the d-developer name, and basically this Seed tool is actually really useful as an educational tool to help us understand what's going on in our Bitcoin wallet, what's going on in the background, what is this bip thirty two root key, what is the mnemonic, what's the passphrase, what's the seed, and what are the addresses that then come out of that. So in this episode, we're gonna talk a little bit about the Seed tool, and this will be useful for you whether are a beginner or whether you are an experienced person thinking about how best to teach some of these concepts to your beginner friends. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. With Swan Bitcoin, you can buy Bitcoin and also learn about Bitcoin at the same time. Swan Bitcoin has the cannon, which is a set of different rabbit holes with different individuals who have put together their own curated list of resources. We have rabbit holes from Lynn Alden, Matt Odell, Jameson Lopp, Guy Swann, myself, and many others. The mission with Swan- is to create ten million new bitcoiners, and this isn't just people who are stacking satoshis, but people who truly understand the importance of bitcoin. Education is key to accomplishing this mission, and the cannon is here to help. So if this is either for yourself, or you could use this as a resource to share with your beginner friends, that website is swanbitcoin dot com slash cannon, that's c a n o n. Lend at HodlHodl is a peer-to-peer Bitcoin-backed lending platform where you can anonymously borrow stablecoins against your Bitcoin. Now, this might be useful for some of us where we don't want to incur a capital gains event and we don't want to sell our Bitcoin, we want to keep that exposure. So We can get fiat liquidity by borrowing against some Bitcoin as collateral, and as part of this arrangement, you still hold one key out of three, so you know you're not being rehypothecated. So with Lend at HoddleHoddle, think of it just like an offers marketplace where there are users and lenders, and you go there and you set the terms and you put up offers depending on how long you want to borrow or the interest rate that you are looking to pay. Go and check it out, that website is lend.hoddlehoddle.com, that's h o d Now onto the show with Bitcoin Q&A." }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "02:42", "start": 162.28, "text": "Q&A, welcome to the show. Hey Stephan, real pleasure to be here. yeah, looking forward to, to diving into, to see tool with you. And, yeah, I'm excited for the conversation." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:53", "start": 172.58, "text": "Fantastic. So, let's start with a little bit on, the why. So what was the, I guess, impetus behind your decision to go and, make this particular tool?" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "03:05", "start": 184.73, "text": "Yeah, so we're blessed with a plethora of great wallets out in, in the ecosystem now in, in twenty twenty-two, a lot of which, are really great at hiding the, the sort of complex stuff, i-in the background, which is great for onboarding people. But I had a, I suppose a personal itch to try and understand a little bit more around what was going on, you know, if you, the, the, the typical flow is you download a Bitcoin wallet from the App Store or the Play Store, and you sort of create a new wallet or generate a new Happens in the background, and then you're just given, a list of what we call seed words, and you're told to back them up, and then you go on your merry way and you use that wallet. So, I guess it kind of came from a personal itch to say, \"Well, you know, that's great, and it's great for onboarding, but what's really happening underneath when I hit generate seed or create wallet, however the, the wallet sort of badges that?\" So I started to poke around with some of the great tools, such as His tool, which is really great at sort of showing you more of the nuts and bolts of what happens when you do create a new wallet or generate a new seed, it shows you sort of the, more of the complex stuff that goes on behind that. The problem that I saw with, tools like Ian Coleman's, as great as they are, and it's, you know, it's pr-provides fantastic usability, was it's just a little bit scary looking, even for people like me that have been in the space a little bit longer than others maybe, it's just a Kind of more of a power user tool. So I thought there was kind of a happy medium where we, we could give, offer this functionality to, newer Bitcoiners, what, that, like myself, like to sort of understand the nuts and bolts of things that go on under the hood a little bit more, but be able to, present that in a more approachable way so that, you still have most of the same functionality, so you can, you know, I'm sure we'll get into that in a sec, but there's also sort of really useful explain This is why you might want to take this approach with a passphrase, for example. so just to sort of offer that, helping hand for people that want to sort of dig a little bit deeper into sort of entropy seed generation and wallet creation and things like that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:18", "start": 318.06, "text": "Right. And this is interesting for me as well, because there are times where I have been coaching somebody who's new, or Katana and I, when we're teaching people, and we would sometimes pull up the Ian Coleman tool just to sort of give them a bit of an understanding, hey, here's what's happening. Actually going on in the background when you're setting up this Bitcoin wallet, really what's going on underneath the hood. And so it's really, a useful idea because there's all these things that are happening on the front end, but without understanding a little bit of that in the background, it can make it more difficult from a security or a privacy point of view, or even just, just understanding what you're dealing with. And so I think it's an interesting tool and, so it'll be good to just talk through a little bit about how that works. How Bitcoin wallets work, just to make it accessible for a person who's trying to learn a little bit about Bitcoin and how it actually works. So, yeah, I guess breaking it down for that beginner, if you could just offer a bit of an explanation about how entropy is used to create these wallets, like what's the point of all this entropy stuff?" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "06:24", "start": 383.94, "text": "Yeah, so when, when the typical user would, would, sort of download a wallet again from wherever they, they choose to download it from, when they, press generate seed or create wallet, what that wallet is doing is generating a really long random number. And when I say really long, we're, we're talking here that it's, if it's twelve words, it's a hundred and twenty-eight bits or a hundred and twenty-eight, characters long, or if it's a twenty-four word seed, then it's two hundred and fifty-six bits of entropy, as," }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "06:54", "start": 413.68, "text": "unfathomably large, number, that it's, it's generated at random, generally speaking, using the, a random number generator that's, contained either within the software or on the hardware or within a browser or whatever software that you're using. Computers are really, really good at being quite random, they, they've had quite a lot of time to sort of perfect not having any sort of bias towards the number that they pick, and this randomness is really quite crucial, when you're generating, your Bitcoin seed because if there is some bias or, you know, a hole in the method that this number is being generated, and there is actually, it's not actually that random, then there is a chance that somebody, an attacker or somebody else may actually sort of use the sort of similar method and sort of stumble across your Bitcoin wallet. So that's why sort of randomness is really, really important. Once the wallet is generated, this really long string of random numbers, which is, you know, terrible for humans to read, and it's, you know, even if you try to- to write it down, the chances of you making a mistake are incredibly high. So we have in Bitcoin something called Bip thirty-nine, which is, basically a standard of, as to how, Bitcoin wallets, which, you know, ninety-nine percent of wallets have adopted this standard, get from that really long, horrible string of letters and numbers that look like absolute, you know, they look like an absolute mess To encode that into either a twelve word seed or a twenty four word seed that most people listening to this will be fairly familiar with. The reason that that is done is obviously a twelve word phrase, you know, using generally English words, is far more approachable and easier to write down, stamp into steel. You know, some people choose to memorize it, although I wouldn't advise that to most people. It's far more, you know, we're using the English dictionary at the end of the day, and it's words that people have used their whole life, that's And, you know, a two hundred and fifty-six string of, you know, ones and zeros or, or hexadecimal, depending on how you choose to encode it. So the tool aims to show you all of that. So, you, you know, if you click into the entropy side of things, you'll see the, the raw binary, which are sort of the ones and the zeros, which are the raw entropy, if you like, that are used to encode the seed, without getting too deep, you'll also see various different ways to encode it, and of course, you'll Trying to show you as much or as little as you want to see basically, so that you can either literally just load the page and just click generate, and then you can see all of the different ways that are used to encode the randomness that is used to generate your, your ultimately your seed word, which you'll be familiar with." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:29", "start": 569.35, "text": "Sure. Sure. So just summarizing for listeners who are trying to stay up to date or catch, stay with us here, you can think of that it's like, it's this massive, massive number, and what your wallet or most Bitcoin wallets are doing nowadays is that they They are just representing that in a sense with these twelve or twenty-four words, and that's sort of what this Bip thirty-nine thing is doing for us. But actually in the background, as you're explaining, there's this entropy, there's this root key, there's this fingerprint. If you could help explain what some of these concepts are for us, so wh-what's this Bip thirty-two root key and what's this fingerprint?" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "10:06", "start": 606.36, "text": "Yeah, so Bip thirty-two, again, the clues in the name, Bip thirty-two is another one of the Bitcoin standards, one of the earlier wallet standards that was adopted Is another way of encoding this entropy essentially. It, the bip thirty two root key, which you'll see on the page, starts with x P R V, x private essentially, and then a really long string again of letters and numbers which are essentially a, a mess again that are not sort of human readable, but that was like an earlier standard, before, before bip thirty nine, a, as to the way that wallets were sort of deterministically generated so that if you pass the same entropy through the, the standard within bip thirty, thirty two a hundred times, as long as you've got that same entropy, you'll get the same result on the other side. Again, it's not human read, not very human readable, so that's why bit thirty-nine was came, came in later on to sort of make that more approachable. and the bit thirty-two fingerprint, people listening to this who have used sort of hardware wallets may have actually seen the term \"fingerprint\" using their hardware wallet signing device and not, not knowing what it is. It's essentially, well, I guess clues in the name," }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "11:14", "start": 673.78, "text": "And offer the, the seed words of the wallet. So if you were to, let's just say you, you were to, set up your signing device and generate a seed, that will generate a root fingerprint, which is kind of like a short identifier that you can just quickly check to say, \"Uh, yep, that, that's my wallet.\" If you were to then sort of be a bit more advanced and say, add a passphrase to this wallet, that would actually change the underlying root key, and essentially create a brand new wallet. The result of that would be And because it's so short and sort of it's si- six or seven characters long, it's just a really quick identifier to say that, you know, if you're, if you have a wallet that's protected by multiple, or sorry, multiple wallets protected by different passphrases, they will each have their own root fingerprint, and it can be like a quick reference so that when you're switching between these wallets, you can just have a quick look for that root fingerprint, to see that you've entered your passphrase correctly, for example." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:07", "start": 727.34, "text": "Yeah. And so we can think Or it's, it's not ch- it's changing like what, you know, the addresses will be, right? It's like an, it's creating another whole account, right? And I think this is an important point just so people understand that difference, right? So seed, twelve or twenty-four word seed, passphrase, and then you might have a device PIN or some kind of control at that level, and that's distinct from the passphrase, right? So that's just an important point for people to understand because people can sometimes confuse, okay, passphrase with PIN on the device, as an example." }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "12:44", "start": 763.8, "text": "The tool up and just generate a, hit generate and, and get yourself a twelve word seed. you can then open the, the bit thirty nine passphrase, section of the tool. and if you were to enter anything into that box, you know, literally just the number one, you can see the bit thirty two root key change, so that you can sort of see the impact that adding just a single character essentially creates a brand new wallet. Now, these passphrase can be as short or as long as you like, and we, we've got one of the things that we" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "13:14", "start": 793.92, "text": "On generating a passphrase, so, you know, in the example that I used, that just using the passphrase number one is a terrible passphrase, and because it's so short, it's obviously really easy for a semi-sav-savvied attacker that's got, sort of some brute-forcing software to try multiple, iterations of common passphrases would, you know, they'd stumble across that passphrase in a matter of seconds. So we have a little tool in there where you can actually roll dice, to, to generate, a more secure passphrase. That's using the Electronic Freedom Foundation's DiceWare list, essentially. So all you would need to do here is tick the passphrase box, roll dice, keep rolling dice until you see the words pop up. All you have to do is pop the number of dice, you know, the result from the dice roll into the tool, and it will map that to the long DiceWare list that the Electronic Freedom Foundation provides, to generate, again, a, a fairly good random passphrase. And a neat little tool that we've added is that if you just add one word, the tool will give you Information for how sort of secure that is in, that passphrase is in terms of how long would it take an attacker, you know, as an estimate, to break that passphrase? And you can see the difference between sort of a three-word passphrase that might take a day, as soon as you go to a four-word passphrase, it jumps up to centuries. So the, that's kind of the sweet spot for anybody looking to explore sort of passphrases is four words seems to be, the sort of sweet spot for going between something that is very likely to be hacked if somebody Was to discover your seed words, and something that's almost unfeasible given the current technology to, to break into. Yep." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:52", "start": 891.89, "text": "And, probably just one other point, just rewinding back, just for listeners to help sure, make sure everyone's following along. The whole point with HD or the hierarchical deterministic wallets is this idea that those same twelve words or twenty-four words will always generate these addresses and these private keys and these public keys, meaning once that wallet has given you the twelve or twenty-four words If you were to lose that phone, as an example, you could get another phone or another hardware wallet, and you could basically put in that same twelve or twenty-four words, and guess what? It's gonna generate the same public key, private key, addresses, et cetera. So I think that's an important point for listeners if you're new, just to make sure you understand that, so that way you are more familiar with manipulating these different tools and devices. But at the same time, it gets complicated because if you think- From a security point of view, you don't wanna enter in the twelve or twenty-four words into an online connected device, right? It's best to do that into an offline device, right? Like into your hardware wallet if you can, or into, let's say, an offline computer, that kind of thing. So just so people are aware, right?" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "16:01", "start": 961.12, "text": "Yeah, definitely. So there's, there's kind of, I see two sides to this tool. There's the online version which you can, visit, at bitcoiner dot guide slash seed. Obviously, that is connected to the internet, it's hosted on my server, and I see that sort of side of things as like a playground where you can go in, just generate an unlimited amount of seeds, have a play with some dice rolls, maybe to generate a seed or, and/or your passphrase, or you could maybe even use coin flips or, or, cards out That, that, you know, potentially may ha-have some, malware in it on, on your computer or your phone. so it's obviously not desirable to be using this with, seeds that you're gonna generate with live funds. The absolute best way to do that, as, again, as you said, is on a, a, an offline hardware, wallet or signing device that has, literally has no way to connect to the internet. That's obviously the most secure way to do it. You can of course use this tool offline. There's a download button there, Tails operating system, which is kind of, an operating system that runs off a USB stick and forgets everything every time it's powered off, or you can just kind of use it on a, a laptop that's got, either the Wi-Fi switched off or, the Wi-Fi card removed, depending on how far you wanna take it. Of course, that's more of an advanced feature, so I, I see the main value here is more of an education piece where people can go in, generate seeds, passphrases, look at the impact" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:31", "start": 1050.88, "text": "Valuable from an education point of view, even if you're not planning to use this seed tool as like in practice, it's just useful even just from an educational point of view, just so you can understand a little bit about, hey, what happens when I say have no passphrase, and what happens when I put a one-word passphrase, what happens when I have a five-word passphrase as an example, and so then you can see what that does and how that changes your addresses, and so then this is useful for us when we're learning about how to use those addresses. Now, of course, we understand that maybe for the beginner, total beginner, this might be a bit overwhelming, but it's useful for us as you're learning, right? As you're going from beginner to intermediate or intermediate to advanced, to sort of try to understand a little bit about what's actually going on in the background, because it, it can be useful for those of us who are trying to do more advanced security setups, and obviously for people who are in an education role, just so that you understand what you're talking about before then you go to try to orange- Bill your friends so that you're giving them the right guidance. Also on security as well, it, it sometimes we can get a bit like really going into like all kinds of nuances before a person's ready for that, so it's also important to just understand what level is this person at so that you're giving them the right information, you know, choosing the right tool for the job. But there's some other points, we should touch on in the tool as well. So you've got a bit forty-seven here, so do you wanna just give a bit of an explanation what's bit forty-seven 7 and how's that represented in the seed tool here?" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "19:05", "start": 1145.0, "text": "Yeah, so bit 47, is a, a Bitcoin improvement proposal that, offers what, what, sort of, known in the space as kind, kind of private stealth addresses. So this wallets that adopt bit 47 are able to generate, unique, wallet addresses between a sender and receiver that are only known to the sender and the receiver. So currently the only two wallets that have implemented this Our Sparrow wallet, and Samurai wallet, who's, who've had that, this functionality in for years. So one of the main benefits of Bit 47 and why people might want to use it, I think the donations piece is a really great example. So we saw the unfortunate situation that unfolded with the Canadian truckers where, the same addresses were used repeatedly for multiple donations, which made it sort of trivial for governments, chain analysis firms, et cetera, to, to monitor the flow of funds into the addresses that were controlled by The people who were collecting the donations for the truckers. If this, that cause and that same, method was followed using Bit forty-seven, every time that a new donation was sent from a new person, that would have automatically gone to a, a brand new address, in the receivers, in the receiver's wallet, so that, it would be, far more difficult for anybody who's surveilling the chain, they don't have that sort of one single address or, you know, collection of, say, five or ten addresses that they have to watch to see All of those funds flowing in, and, you know, in the, Canadian truckers we were talking, you know, millions of dollars here, so it wasn't small change. So, to flip that back to Bit 47, it's just a method of automatically deriving private addresses that are only known between the sender and receiver. So, to tie that into the tool, of course, at the top of the tool, you will have the opportunity to either generate a seed automatically using the in-built random generator, or you can provide your own entropy to generate your own 12 or Derived from that master seed is, essentially the bit forty-seven standard of sort of what's, what we call a payment code. so a payment code starts with PM8T. A-After that, it's, again, it's, Bitcoin has a habit of doing this, it's a really long string of letters and numbers that looks like an absolute mess. with that payment code, I could combine that with, say, your payment code, Stefan, that, who, let's say I wanted to send you, send you a tip for your podcast, I could use Payment code to, follow the standard that is defined within Bit 47 to generate an address that only you or I know, so that I could send, however many satoshis I wanted to into Bit 47. So with the tool, obviously, you get your own payment code, which is derived from your, the seed words, and I, I can paste in your payment code, in the counterparty details, and that will give me a list of unique addresses, again, only known to me and you. So if I didn't, let's To Sparrow Wallet, but I wanted to pay to your payment code. I could actually use this tool to generate, a private address to send to you, and then send that using any wallet essentially. obviously, this is a far more convoluted way than just down, downloading Samurai Wallet or Sparrow Wallet, but essentially opens up, the ability to send to Bitforty-seven addresses to anybody that's willing to sort of use this tool and go through that process that I've just outlined." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:23", "start": 1343.38, "text": "Right, yeah. And so I think one of the main barriers so far has" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:31", "start": 1350.9, "text": "Of more wallets having it, but yeah, to date it is only two, but hopefully i-if more wallets were to implement this, then it could become a very quick and easy way for a person who needs to take donations under a more, let's say, adversarial conditions where maybe they don't want those addresses all tied together so easily. And so this is where a person could, let's say, even if they're at a protest, they could literally have a key QR code with their pay name on it, with their QR code of their payment code, right? And so even though it looks like a QR code, actually encoded into that is the PM8T, et cetera. And then so anyone who sees that even on TV could literally pull out their phone and scan it and pay and donate in that way. And I mean, that could be really useful, right?" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "23:20", "start": 1400.05, "text": "So that was a great example where you said, you know, somebody, these truckers could have just had a QR code on the side of their truck, and they, that would be" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "23:31", "start": 1410.84, "text": "To do, to be able to do it properly using the other tools that are available right now would be to run something like a BTC Pay server, which again, including the name, it, it requires a, a server that's always on, that will generate a fresh receiving address for every new visitor that wants to go and send that donation. Obviously, that's a significantly higher barrier to entry than just downloading Samurai Wallet or Sparrow Wallet and, printing out your QR code and sticking it on the side of your truck. So the, the benefit here in terms of, is massive in Alternatives, which as great as BTC Pay Server is, it's just, you know, we're not gonna get, absolute new beginners g-going through that pain process to receive donations initially, at least anyway." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:12", "start": 1451.79, "text": "Yeah. And so I think for now it seems like people are just gonna use static addresses, not, not supporting that, but that's, I'm just saying that's what typically people are doing today. But hopefully over time, technology improves and we find ways to make that smoother and slicker and easier rather than everyone just doing one single address. and then it does also bring in an implication from a privacy point of view, because then if everyone's, if people are using static donation addresses, they're taking all those donations into one address, then it becomes a lot easier to trace what's happening on chain afterwards, unless they are privacy conscious and they know, okay, I've received all these funds into this static donation address, now I'm gonna start using a coin join and other privacy-preserving techniques to then remove and break that link. But again, that's getting a bit more into the advanced side of it. So before we move Off the tool, I also want to talk a little bit about, BIP eighty-five as well. So what's, BIP eighty-five and what's the, treatment in the Seed Tool today?" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "25:11", "start": 1510.67, "text": "Yeah, so BIP eighty-five, again, is a, a Bitcoin standard that I'm a huge fan of. It, it's called deterministic entropy. But essentially what it means is it, it's a way of taking your, your master seed words and generating an almost unlimited amount of what's called child seeds from that master seed. So let's say I go into I generate a twelve word seed, and I write that down, and that's gonna be my, main wallet seed, let's say for example. I can open up the BIP85 section of the tool and specify that I want to da- I want to generate what's known as a child seed from my master seed. that will then spit out another twelve or twenty four word seed that is, ag-what we call deterministically linked to the master seed. So there is a, a repeatable way that I can go from my main seed to that child I could generate an unlimited amount of these and give them to one to my wife, one to my brother, one to my mother, they could all have their own wallet seeds, and if I was to know my family, like I do, the chances of me them listening to my warnings and saying, \"Make sure you write this down, make sure you keep it somewhere safe, this is your Bitcoin, it's, it's crucial that you write this down,\" if they were to not do that, and then they lose their phone, they've got no backup. Because this, Basically regenerate those same seeds all over again. All I'd have to do is use a bip85 compatible, hardware wallet or this tool, and I would know that I gave my wife, bip85 child seed number one, I gave my, my brother number two. I could regenerate that as many times I want, I could do it every day for the rest of my life if I wanted to, so that it's that extra level of, extra level of backup without actually needing to back anything else up. All you need to know is the index number of the child seed that you gave" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "27:01", "start": 1620.8, "text": "It's kind of trivial to, to work out which is which. So it's a really great way that you can kind of be sort of Uncle Jim to your friends and family without having to be awash with unlimited, you know, ten or fifteen different seeds that you need to back up on their behalf, knowing that they won't do it themselves. The other flip side that you could do is that you could use this to actually populate the seeds of different mobile wallets. So let's say that you use your secure offline hardware wallet to generate your main master seed that you're gonna back up and potentially- Set with a passphrase, you could then use it to generate these child seeds that you then populate your samurai wallet, your Blockstream Green, your Blue wallet. Again, if you choose to do so, it removes the need to back those up. I would always advocate to back them up, but I understand why people might not want to do that, so it just provides another great bit of optionality where thanks to this deterministic standard, we can regenerate those seeds without the need to back them up." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:56", "start": 1675.53, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. My favorite Bitcoin hardware wallet is the Coldcard by CoinKite dot com. Now, they are just releasing the newest version, the Mark IV, so you can go and order this newest device. It's got two secure elements, it comes with support for NFC, it's got much more memory, a faster processor, and all kinds of new features. So you can also check out my recent interview with NVK where we talk about some of the new features, which you'll see now. The Coldcard is just a really excellent device. You can use it in all All kinds of configurations, whether that is single signature, multi-signature, it has all sorts of features like Jura's PIN, BrickMe PIN, you can use an SD card to airgap it, you can use NFC now. There's all sorts of things that you will learn about Bitcoin by using the cold card, so I encourage you go and check out the website, it's coinkite dot com, and don't forget you can order your cold card, but you can also get your gear like your seed plate to do your metal backups also there. Brains are a Bitcoin company through and through, and they are working on some of the most unique and cutting edge projects in the mining industry. They have Brains OS Plus. This is firmware for ASIC mining machines, and if you're not using it on your ASIC mining machine and you could use it, well, you're leaving sats on the table here. You can optimize your mining performance and get more hash rate for your electricity bill. Also, the team at Brains are hiring, especially for those of you in technical roles. If you are an engineer, developer, DevOps, mining operations So you can go to the website brains dot com, that's b r a i i n s dot com slash careers to see more there. And finally, Unchained Capital, have you thought about upgrading your security to multi-signature? With Unchained, you can do this easily. You can bring two hardware wallets to the platform and set it up for yourself for free. Now, if you need assistance, they've got a concierge onboarding program which is quite popular. You can set up, you can pay upfront, they'll ship you some hardware wallets, they'll do calls with you and teach" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:50", "start": 1790.5, "text": "You are removing single points of failure and this might give you additional peace of mind, especially if the number has gone up for you and it's worth a lot of coin, worth a lot of money. So go to unchained dot com, select the concierge onboarding program, and use the code livera for a discount on that. Now back to the show. Yeah, and, like you said, for people who are, let's say, intermediate or advanced level Bitcoiners, they probably have multiple wallets, right? They might have a Lightning wallet on their phone, they might have another one that they've got for their LND or Core Lightning, or they, they might have something for different hardware wallets in different states. They may have like a warm hardware wallet and a really deep cold hardware wallet, and they may have all kinds of different setups. And so this Bit 85 style allows you to just have one, one seed to- Rule them all per se, and different indexes to kind of specify for all of these different child seeds off of that, and that can be handy instead of having to have all these different sheets of paper all over the place to specify for this. And I mean, a-as another example, you might even have a BTC pay server with a payjoin seed, and you might have that there as well. That's like another seed. So it's, it's kind of just a useful way to keep all of these things in one way. I think it is still a relatively new technology and standard, so- Probably needs a bit of time before people are sort of familiar with it, just to actually use it. I mean, for now, I think people still just have this situation of different seeds, but the option is there, and so that's the important part. I also wanted to talk with you a little bit about some of the different approaches and the ways things are going in the space. So while it's true that the Bib thirty-nine seeds seem to have won in the marketplace for ideas and products, at least, you know, for the most part, in terms of hardware wallets and the typical Bitcoin mobile Wallets and even some of the typical desktop wallets, right? The Electrum's and Sparrow's of the world are using these, these kinds of seeds. There are still other kinds of seeds, right? There's like the OG Electrum seed style, there's the LND AEZ seed style, and there's even like as an example with Moon Wallet, it's not using the typical twelve or twenty-four word seed that most people are used to. It's like doing this output descriptor approach with a different backup style. I'm curious, your view View on that, just also as, as an educator in the space, and, you know, obviously I'm sure you've played around with many of these different wallets and setups yourself. Do you have any thoughts there around the potential confusion that can create, with all these different seed standards and styles?" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "32:23", "start": 1943.01, "text": "Yeah, I think, well, as you correctly said, bit thirty-nine has kind of won, as it currently stands today. And, and I, I'm a big fan of simplicity. Telling somebody to write down twelve words and knowing that that is almost universal across the whole space, is a great position to be in, especially, like you say, from an educated pers-perspective or just from an uncle Jim perspective. I do worry a little bit around, you know, wallets sort of forking off, if you like, and taking different approaches, but only from You know, I, I think you, you covered it on a previous podcast quite recently of, you know, we've got too many standards, so I'm gonna introduce a new standard to, to rule them all, and, and then what we get, all we get from that is just another standard, and then the, the problem snowballs. That's not to say that, Wallets like Moon Wallet and their approach is, is bad. I'm, I'm all for people, you know, and Wallets trying new things. I think, yeah, e-experimentation i" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "33:23", "start": 2002.71, "text": "And seeds, currently, so I'm, I, I'm not one of these that's, trying to sort of, move us off that standard. I think it's widely adopted, it's got the, the legacy acceptance, and, yeah, I think, that's not to say, of course, that there's gonna be new Bitcoin standards that might come out that are, completely blow Bitcoin Q9 out of the water, you know, that might be output descriptors, particularly from obviously a multi-sig perspective, but I think Bitcoin Q Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:51", "start": 2031.27, "text": "yeah, and look, I'm, I'm probably with you there in terms of long term security, multi-signature, like, these, these aspects are prob-- and I guess the educational aspect is probably for that reason, that's why so many people are using Bitcoin QNA. There's a certain lendiness, if you will, to them, because people have just used them for so long and they're used to kind of recovering them into different hardware, even one from one particular hardware wallet type into another hardware wallet type and recovering the same coin. It's just into another hardware wallet as an example, because it is typically using the same BIP thirty nine style. I, I think it may-- the difference may come in the future when there's more advanced things, or it might be, I think in the example with Moon, I guess to Steel Man for a second, right? Even if I personally do still think the BIP thirty nines aren't going away anytime soon, the Steel Man would be something like, \"Well, we've got new things coming, right? We need Lightning, we need better multisig, and for this reason, the Output descriptors anyway, so therefore we're just gonna have to get used to this new approach where the backup isn't literally just the twelve or twenty-four words, but rather it might be different backup standards that, let's say, Moon Wallet is doing, as an example, where they email you this recovery page a-and you have a separate password and you need those two pieces to recombine them into regenerating and recovering your coins, whether that's using Moon Wallet or some recovery tool Or some other, some other thing." }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "35:22", "start": 2122.43, "text": "Yeah, I think, that was a really great example of, you know, Moon i-in the sort of happy path, where you're just generating a wallet within Moon Wallet and you're just happily transacting with it, and Moon is still around, and if you lose your phone, it's trivial to repopulate that into a new Moon Wallet. That's absolutely fine. But the, the fallout from that is because they're kind of out on their own, they only have-- They have like a command line tool to recover that, which, you You know, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say, don't even know what the command line is, let alone feel comfortable enough to try and recover a Bitcoin wallet in there. So I think that's kind of the danger where we're getting to, we're in that crossover period where new stan-standards might be emerging, but because it's not widely accepted that if, you know, most Moon users without Moon would have a difficult time recovering their Bitcoin, and that's not a great place to be. And I guess, again, that comes back to why BIP thirty-nine is so Just gonna throw that into BlueWallet and oh, oh hey presto, I've got my funds back. So I think obviously we're always gonna get that sort of, position where new standards are emerging and one wallet's sort of gone off on their own to adopt that. And again, time will tell as to what the best approach is and, and that's gonna play hand in hand with the new standards that are emerging again, like you say, yeah. Yeah, yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:41", "start": 2200.97, "text": "for sure. And even from a recovery point of view, I know, Luke Child wrote like a recovery tool and And I, and I actually, I believe there's something similar now in Sparrow Wallet as well, where it basically will use the known pathways and go check all of those if you type in that, seed, right? So I suppose that's something also important to know for listeners if you're thinking about, oh, how do I recover, like, let's say your, you know, your father was a Bitcoiner and he, you know, he passed away and he's left this seed and you don't really know how to do anything with it, what's the safe way to recover? What Check whether there are even coins on this seed, right?" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "37:25", "start": 2244.61, "text": "Yeah, it's, I mean, again, most wallets do use the, the standard derivation paths again, which, which makes recovery great, but then as wallets add sort of different functionality like coinjoin within Samurai Wallet, obviously they, choose to segregate their account, accounts out to provide like a, an easy best practice for users to segregate their coins, it's kind of done for them. Spiral Wallet does exactly the same thing, and I'm sure there's other wallets that, that use different derivation paths as well Because obviously you have to have sort of a minimum amount of awareness of that, that exists, so that if you were to take your samurai wallet seed that's got funds in various different accounts because you've been doing coin joins, and then throw that into BlueWallet, that you're not gonna have a real shock when you only see, you know, a third of your funds. So there is, obviously there's, there's websites such as, walletsrecovery dot org that sort of detail all of this, but, you know, understandably most new users aren't gonna be aware" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "38:20", "start": 2300.29, "text": "A bit to education around this space, and particularly for the tools like Samurai Wallet and Sparrow that do adopt these different derivation paths that are kind of non-standard, if you like, that users are kind of made aware of that, so that if the worst was to happen, then they do need to recover their funds elsewhere, that they have a, a method to do that. And like you said, Sparrow Wallet does kind of done, does a, an auto scan of those commonly used, non-standard derivation paths. So I think this combination of education and tooling that are gonna make this easier as" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:50", "start": 2330.27, "text": "And the other big one is just around multi-signature, right? So it may be that, okay, people have a small spending amount in some hot wallets and things, but really, what you really care about is that you are able to successfully recover the multi-sig part, like the big, you know, deep cold multi-sig of, you know, let's say, you know, you pass on or it's, you know, et cetera. You, you need to make sure you have that information. And I think maybe that will be handled by, let's say Sheet or information being readily available for the family and the heirs so they know what to do and at least where to find or at least know the public keys of the different components of that multisig, right? I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on that or any, thing you wanna elaborate on there." }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "39:37", "start": 2377.11, "text": "Yeah, so you, you rightly said the tools have kind of taken it upon themselves here to kind of slowly convene towards a standard. So if you use Specter or Sparrow, when you create a multi-signature, wallet, they will both give you the, the opportunity to say, the, you know, do you wanna sort of, save this sort of what we call public information so that you can re- recreate the wallet elsewhere? You know, it's, it's not sort of security-sensitive information, it's more privacy-sensitive information so that somebody could look into the wallet but I tend to steer new users away from multisig for as, as long as I can. again, I often the most secure setup for new users is the simplest one, because more people lose their own coins than they do get them stolen from them because, you know, their twelve word seed was stolen. So simplicity is almost always the best approach for most Bitcoin users, because when you start talking about output descriptors and xPub's and fingerprints and things like that, you start to baffle brains a little bit and that's where pe-people get confused and that's where most- Losses occur, so the, again, the, the tools like Sparrow, are making this really easy, so it's kind of, you know, just download this PDF or, save this text string, you know, you can put it in a password manager or write it on a piece of paper or take a photo of it, whatever you want, because it's not, it's not per se secure information. So they're, they're making it kind of a, a one-click exercise, but it comes back to the knowledge of, you know, your heirs, if And on about, keep it simple for as long as you can. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:10", "start": 2470.41, "text": "I think that's some very good advice. And so while you, the more competent Bitcoiner who really wants to do all the stuff, I, I think you have to, you know, for listeners, i-it's to make sure that you are thinking about how they would be, how your heirs would be able to recover that, and that might mean keeping this recovery information on some USB sticks that you leave in certain lo-locations known to the family or things like that, where maybe it's not, obviously it's not The public key information or it's this recovery information that's held for them. And then in terms of your guidance that we are giving, you know, as an Uncle Jim, as an educator, you're telling them, hey, keep your setup simple, don't, overcomplicate these things or don't try to do something fancy, stay on the well-trodden pathways like the typical twelve or twenty-four word seed. if you have a passphrase, make sure you have a backup of that passphrase. And actually, something I typically do when I'm coaching a new coiner is I'll And just as it is, and then in the future, you can look at upgrading or changing your setup once you're comfortable or once the number has gone up enough that you now think, okay, I need to improve my security standpoint." }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "42:18", "start": 2537.56, "text": "Yeah, that's definitely, sound advice. I've had conversations with a lot of people that have screwed themselves with, passphrases and whatnot, and I think this is where the, the tools like the collaborative custody come into play a little bit, the, the, the value that they can offer if you're, let Being super private when interacting with Bitcoin, tools like Casa and Unchained that are sort of offer that helping hand and, you know, high guide rails in terms of putting your super cold storage or setting up a super cold storage with their help and them holding one of the keys in, in a multisig form so that they can help you but not steal your funds, is a really great proposition for people who, you know, most people don't come in and ape in with thousands of dollars worth, but there are people who do that and, and they might need more of In hand that, let's say, a twelve word seed on a mobile wallet might not be suitable for because they're, you know, a higher net worth individual. So there's, there's so many different approaches that you can take and combinations of different approaches that you can take. And I think, yeah, the, the best advice I can give is to start really slow, for-- and this is for most people who are coming in, you know, maybe with a couple hundred dollars worth, start with a phone wallet, then look into maybe a desktop wallet that's got some more functionality," }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "43:37", "start": 2616.87, "text": "Comfortable using all of those different tools, and you sort of tried out the different wallets and got comfortable with the one that resonates with you, then look into the more complex stuff like multisig, et cetera, or collaborative custody. so there's, there's so many different approaches, and just take your time and don't sort of get overwhelmed in the early days. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:55", "start": 2634.86, "text": "And I'm curious as well, in terms of, let's say you're at a Bitcoin meetup or a new coiner is asking you questions and saying, \"Hey, Q&A, you know, what, is using bip thirty nine as an example, would that change your decision if, let's say, a beginner wants just an easy, let's say, lightning wallet, would that change your mind about whether you point them towards, let's say, Breeze or Phoenix? Let's say Phoenix has the twelve word seed, but Moon doesn't, would you be more likely or more inclined to send them down that pathway of, hey, start with Phoenix, 'cause you get the twelve, twelve word seed, and then later, that's gonna prepare you for when you get your hardware wallet and you get the twelve or" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "44:37", "start": 2676.79, "text": "Maxi, if you, if you'd like to say that, so I always, I always gravitate towards, again, the simplest approach, I keep saying it was simple in this podcast, but it's really powerful. So, yeah, I always gravitate towards wallets that adopt that standard, purely because, you know, the, the guides that I've written are all geared towards that. And, like you say, I don't have to go and explain, okay, well, if you use this wallet, it's gonna get, give you a twelve word seed, but if" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "45:02", "start": 2702.12, "text": "you use this You have to use this command line tool to do it, whereas the easy way is, okay, download Blue Wallet, download Samurai Wallet, write down those twelve words, keep them super safe, out of sight of anybody else, and if they disappear, you can put that into pretty much any single wallet on the, on the market today. Obviously, when you add Lightning into that, the, the, the whole backup situation becomes a little bit more complex, but thankfully we've got these hybrid models like Breeze and Phoenix that kind of obviate that away, each with their own trade-offs They, from an onboarding perspective, you know, they're great so that people can get exposure to both on and off chain with minimal exposure to the technicals, whilst still only being backed up by that sort of twelve word seed. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:50", "start": 2750.02, "text": "and I think that's probably the, you know, if you're keeping it simple for a new coiner, that's probably the, the value there of using the, the blue wallets and the samurai wallets of the world, because they are keeping it in that typical twelve or twenty-four words, and with samurai wallet, it's twelve words plus a Having to teach them an entirely different paradigm now once they're trying to upgrade into hardware wallets or into multi-signature at a later path, later point." }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "46:15", "start": 2774.95, "text": "Yeah, exactly. They're already familiar with the terminology of seed words or mnemonic phrases, and they, they've-- it's a process that they've gone through before so that, you know, they might have a mobile wallet that they've been, they've got comfortable using, they've sent a few transactions in and out, they've stacked a little bit more Bitcoin now, you don't have to re-explain the term, you know Go and buy a hardware wallet because when that hardware wallet shows them those words on the screen when they generate it, they're going, \"Oh, I've done this before, you know? Okay, right, I know that these words are crucial. I need to write these down. I should probably stamp them into, into steel maybe, but these are the crucial bit that I need to back up for this cold storage wallet.\" So it, it's just, you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time that they take the next step up the, the learning journey, if you like." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:00", "start": 2820.13, "text": "And so then, yeah, maybe in practice for our new coin of friends, it's start on a mobile wallet, like a Blue Wallet or a Samurai Wallet or a Phoenix or something, and get your twelve word seed and have that. And then when you're ready, it's time to upgrade to a hardware wallet. Okay, now, okay, yeah, you've got your twenty-four word seed. It's a similar kind of paradigm, so you just have your two different seeds. Of course, it depends if they wanna do bip eighty-five or not, but, I mean, whether they do or not, A problem if you lose that one. The really important one is obviously the cold storage, hardware wallet or multisig if you're going that way. So I think those are probably a few useful tips there. And Q&A, useful to just chat about, I don't know if you have any other thoughts around, writing guides in the space because this is something you're known for. You've got the website bitcoiner dot guide, so do you wanna just share a little bit of an insight, what, what kind of content and stuff people can find on, on the website on bitcoin Around making some of that." }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "48:02", "start": 2881.83, "text": "Yeah, so Bitcoiner dot guide has been the culmination of a couple of years' worth of work really that started mid two thousand and twenty. I was going down the rabbit hole myself, and I still am, of course, getting involved in various different, Telegram communities and learning a lot off people that, that were kind enough to spend their, their own personal time to sort of teach me the different tools and concepts and how to use different things. and it got to the, the, the stage where I was Was, I sort of slowly turned into that guy that was helping other people that were coming into the space, and I so-started to notice that the same things, as you would expect, come up time and time again, and there's certain concepts that people find difficult to understand. That's when I started to, rather than, you know, copy-pasting the same, Telegram response over and over again, I started to, you know, build out this website with, guides to using the most common wallets, guides to how to interact with Bitcoin privately, how to obtain Methods such as HODL, HODL or BISQ, and pretty much if there's a, a wallet on the market that was sort of pre-this year, there's, you've, you'll very likely find a, a simple guide on how to get started with it. Most of the guides on my site are generally quite shortened to the point, so that it, it's more geared towards, this is what this tool does, this is why I think it's great, and this is how you can get started with it. So most of it's short form so I think, you know, there's a lot of great long-form articles in the space that, that go into the, you know, the how and the why of, sorry, the why of Bitcoin and why it's great and why it's gonna be the next, you know, global reserve currency, and, you know, that's not my stick. That my stick is, you know, these tools are great, they're only powerful if you actually use them and understand them, so let me sort of help you with that. So, yeah, you can find anything from" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "50:00", "start": 3000.41, "text": "there's probably, a guide for you on there as well. So yeah, if anybody wants to check it out, obviously there's, there's plenty of content there for people to get stuck into and, probably take you a good few days to read through, all of it back to back." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:13", "start": 3012.92, "text": "Fantastic. And so yeah, so listeners, just in case you, you're not aware, like I, I do recommend you check out the website. You can think of it kind of like a quick start guide for a lot of different things in Bitcoin land, whether that's privacy, multisig, you know, buying non-KYC coins, securing your coins, all kinds of things. I have even included links to that even inside, other things that I've, I, I, when I, people ask me, I'll sort of send a quick link here if I, you know, but I guess just to summarize and sort of talk a little bit, okay? What, what did we learn in this episode, right? So, the Seed Tool is this, educational tool and, and it teaches some of the key concepts around seeds, Bib thirty-nine, passphrases, and, you know, some of the different concepts around what addresses are generated by this. I think probably some of the key points as we've been talking about are to generally keep it simple, keep it accessible, whether you're learning about Bitcoin yourself or whether you are a listener. And you're trying to help educate your friends and teach the new coiners and pre-coiners out there. Q&A, any closing thoughts for listeners? And of course, where can people find you online, Twitter as well?" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "51:25", "start": 3085.0, "text": "Yeah, I think, you know, great summary of the tool. It's, I, I'd just like to see it as a, as a bit of a playground where you can go in, generate an unlimited amount of seeds without fear of, you know, losing any funds or anything. it's always a, it's also a great tool for, you know, generating a seed, maybe adding a passphrase to it, just make a, make a note of the, the first couple of addresses that are generated, then reload the page, start from fresh, and just practice recovering that with" }, { "speaker": "bitcoinqna", "time": "51:56", "start": 3115.64, "text": "that's essentially, w- you know, when people like Stephan and I talk about, you know, check your backups, practice recovering from seed words, you can do that with this tool and just get comfortable with that process without actually having to do it with any live funds. So just use it as a playground, just click buttons and see what happens and, and learn and, you know, just, use the tools as Diverter would say. if you wanna find my website, you can go to Bitcoiner dot guide, and if you Fantastic, well," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:25", "start": 3145.48, "text": "thank you for joining the Q&A. Thanks, Stefan. So you can get the links over in the show notes over at stefanlivera dot com slash three six eight, and if you're enjoying the show, make sure you help me out, leave a review, and share it with your family and friends. Thanks for listening, and I will see you in the citadels." } ] }