{ "episodeId": "SLP391", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "ben_carman": { "name": "Ben Carman", "role": "guest", "tag": "BEN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.51, "text": "Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin and Swan is organizing Pacific Bitcoin. This is going to be the biggest Bitcoin only conference ever. It's going to be November 10th and 11th in 2022. It'll be in LA, California. I'll be there and I'm looking forward to it. You can hang out with thousands of Bitcoiners from around the globe, catch your favorite Bitcoin Educators and personalities on the main stage, ask questions on the Q&A and hang out with people at the conference and at the event throughout the week. This one is gonna be optimized for fun. There'll be all kinds of sports, games, music, photo opportunities and high fives. And don't forget, this is just gonna be one event of LA Bitcoin Week, so make sure you plan the schedule and get there early so that you can be there for the events. Come and join us at the inaugural Pacific Bitcoin Conference in LA on November 10th and 11th. The website is p Are you interested in Bitcoin mining? Brains dot com can help you. Brains have Brains OS Plus. This is firmware that you can install on your Bitcoin mining machine. So go to the website and check out if your model is supported. They are adding new models all the time, and Brains OS Plus is really good because you can improve your efficiency. This may allow you to get more hash rate and more sats for your dollar in terms of electricity spent. You can improve your efficiency by as much as twenty-five percent. So don't leave those sats on the table. Go and check it out Now, you can use this to mine on any pool, but if you use Brains OS Plus and then you point your hash rate towards Slush Pool, you actually get zero percent pool fees. So, Brains dot com is the website, and don't forget they've also got their Insights dashboard with all kinds of statistics that you can use to keep up to date on the world of Bitcoin mining. If you are in the market for self-custody of Bitcoin, check out the Coldcard. This is available over at CoinKites dot com. It's my favorite Bitcoin hardware wallet or signing device. Now Third party custodians, exchanges, lending platforms going down or stopping withdrawals, so learn to self-custody with your hardware signing device, the Coldcard. Now you can use this easily with wallets like Specter Desktop, Sparrow, or Electrum, or others. With the Coldcard, you can use it in single signature, and when you're ready to upgrade, you can use all kinds of additional features like passphrase, bip eighty five to have child seeds, you can use SeedX or, or you can use it as part of a multi-signature setup. There's all kinds of- Of things that you can learn to do, and there's always more that you can do to i-increase your security over time. So go to coinkite dot com and get your cold card there. So joining me today is Ben Carman. He is a Bitcoin core contributor. He's also working at the Bitcoin company, and he's a well-known pleb in the space for those of you who don't know him. He is joining me to talk about Bitcoin privacy, some of the implications in the industry today in terms of KYC, in terms of surveillance, and also what can be done about it Or building additional privacy technology, and we talk about ideas around what's coming into Bitcoin and Lightning that will help make some of these aspects a little bit easier. And we also talk a bit about the Austin Bitcoin scene, as well as his work in being a co-organizer of Austin BitDevs. Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks, Stefan." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "03:20", "start": 199.62, "text": "long time friends, but now I get to finally come on your pod, so I'm happy to be here." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:24", "start": 203.8, "text": "Yeah, of course. Love the work you're doing, and I know you're doing a range of things. Bitcoin Core contribution, you're an organizer of Austin BitDev, so one of the organizers, and, yeah, working on a bunch of things. So let's get into some of this stuff. So, yeah, maybe let's just get your view just broadly, on what's going on in the space" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:47", "start": 226.52, "text": "And Bitcoin development." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "03:48", "start": 227.9, "text": "Yeah, Bitcoin has been like kinda a little weird since Tap reactivated, where like now there's no like next thing. Like, CTV kind of had its time in the light, but then, you know, not so much anymore. And, so like what I've kinda been focused on recently is just like Lightning privacy stuff, and like my open source life, like full time on the Bitcoin company, but- when I'm not selling gift cards, I try to do some Bitcoin stuff. So, yeah, like, me and some like friends, like Tony Giorgio and, Paul Miller, have been doing some like Lightning research on, different privacy stuff and like kind of turned into a couple hackathon projects we did where, I made something called Trans-LD, which lets you like rotate Lightning, pub keys. And, you know, we're working on other various ideas of trying to like figure out like how to make, you know," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:39", "start": 278.8, "text": "aspect is a hot one right now. There's a lot of discussion about fungibility, censorship resistance, what exactly is required. So let's talk a little bit about the privacy aspects just generally. as I think it's fair to say, if you just use Bitcoin by default without any techniques, you're not necessarily being private. And I think it's probably important for people to understand that, but also understand there's, it's not like there's zero hope either. So at least that's how I'm seeing it. Do you wanna, give us your view? and actually, You to answer this question as well. Do you believe Bitcoin is fungible?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "05:12", "start": 312.11, "text": "I think Bitcoin's fungible. Like, if you can find me some cheaper Bitcoin, I'd like to buy it. But, or if it's more expensive, I'd like to sell it. But, yeah, I think Bitcoin privacy is a, it is a problem. Like, you know, we're not-- it's not completely confidential. You know, when you make an, a, given an address, people can see, you know, all the transactions that come from that address, and this is spurred, You know, people just kinda use it for fun too, where you, you know, you go to blockchain.info and see, if your transaction's confirmed and stuff like that. so it is a problem where, you know, you like with different, heuristics and stuff, you can kind of like s- weed out, you know, what someone's wallet balance or, you know, if someone's, doing certain things like multisig versus lightning versus just normal single sig. So there's problems there. you know, there are, we have made lots of" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "06:09", "start": 368.86, "text": "Taproot was, most recent upgrade to Bitcoin that really added a lot of, potential benefits that are, you know, yet to be implemented, but we'll have that in the future. And as well as like, there's lots of other ideas and things that, aren't, don't need like soft forks like Taproot, like things like CoinJoin and CoinSwap, that make it a lot better. So it is always a, ever-going problem and kind of the hard part is like you kind of need to know what you're doing, at least today," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:39", "start": 398.78, "text": "And so the other aspect with Bitcoin privacy is, let's say, the elephant in the room is the KYC aspect, right? And I'm not saying this from a position of, I'm coming from the moral high ground, obviously. I work at Swan Bitcoin, you know, and many people in the space are either working in the industry, and many of the companies in the space are having to do KYC on their customers. And then as part of that, they're often having to work with trained surveillance firms who in turn are potentially getting access Access to some of that data, and that can make it more difficult for a person to be private in Bitcoin. So, what are your thoughts on that aspect, the pervasiveness of chain surveillance and the, the KYC? Yeah, I mean," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "07:21", "start": 440.81, "text": "KYC is obviously a problem because it forces the user to, you know, like, you have to upload pictures of, you know, my documents, even the selfie, like saying I'd like to do whatever, and, you know, i-it's, for one, it's terrible UX 'cause you have to go through that whole process," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "07:39", "start": 458.84, "text": "When things get hacked, like I think maybe this week there's a news announcement that like a billion people got doxxed from like a China hack or something, like it's not actually really stopping any of these like nefarious actors, or most likely it's just, you know, you're, someone's gonna upload a document and then it's gonna get hacked and now someone's gonna steal your identity. And it's, I think something like one in four Americans have had their identity stolen, like, and people in my family have had their identity stolen before. It's like, it's an actual problem that It's never good, and, you know, the touted reason why they're doing it is, oh, to stop money laundering, to stop, you know, child pornographers, to stop, you know, drug traffickers, anything, you know, whatever the boogeyman is. And, in reality, it doesn't really stop much, much of this. Like, what they're actually gonna do is gonna go find a stolen identity on the dark market and buy that, and then do whatever they want. Or, you know, there's KYC versions of how to That stuff will exist and it's kind of impossible to stop, so it's like, if we're gonna not stop, like, we're not stopping the bad stuff and just harming the good stuff, like, the good users, like, what are we even doing here? So I think that is a problem, and then, the chain analysis part just kind of makes it worse, where, you know, like, chain analysis is done by, like, your own wallet probably does, does mild forms of chain analysis to try to give yourself privacy, where it's checking, like, you know, what I use to make, when I spend this and stuff like that. But, you know, the, the chain analysis, like companies like Chainalysis, Elliptic, whatever, what they really, like, their secret sauce is they take, you know, they have their view of the blockchain like everyone else, but then they get all these data from like Coinbase and Kraken and maybe Swan, I don't know, like all these companies that are KYCing users and they pull them together so they have this like huge holistic view of like, okay, like, user A withdrew to this address on And now I can see, oh, okay, they're, is this, this is their wallet? And then, you know, they have a record of like this entire user's balance, and they use lots of heuristics that's, they claim to be anonymized, but it's really not, 'cause you're using it from KYC information. So It kind of creates this like just another honeypot of information, and, we've seen this various, problems with that where, I mean, it wasn't exactly a KYC thing, but when the, the, ledger got hacked and all the addresses of their users got doxxed, there's like lots of like people at first getting like emails and text messages like trying to hack their coins off their ledger, to get them to like, install bad firmware or something or enter their, seed phrase online, but, you know, eventually, there, Like knocks on their front door 'cause, you know, they gotta ship to their house and stuff. So that's like, you know, actually threatening human lives, which is awful. And, you know, that's just with, shipping address. When we're doing actual like IDs and, you know, birth certificates, whatever you want, like, it gets so much worse and you can, cause a lot of harm that way. So it's like, objectively, it's a bad thing. And, the people that are trying to enforce this, you know, there Well, that's bad, so let's do something that just, you know, they think it makes it better, but, you know, it doesn't." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:00", "start": 659.7, "text": "Unfortunately, it seems that the answer is always, \"Do more regulation, do more KYC, do even more surveillance,\" and yet the more surveillance they're doing on the world for all of this cost that they've imposed on banks, financial services, Bitcoin companies even, they haven't got a lot to show for it. And in fact, there is research on this. I interviewed Dr. Ron Paul, P O L, not Paul, He has spoken about how ineffective the AML regulation is, but I mean, anyway, I guess the point is, what should Bitcoiners be doing? Should Bitcoiners be anti-AML laws? Should they be advocating in other ways in the public system or is it more about building code, writing code? What are you thinking that Bitcoiners should do about it?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "11:45", "start": 704.77, "text": "I mean, you could, you should do whatever you can, like, you know, I'm a coder, so that's, I'll probably, like, my kind of personal mission is kind of build software that helps you get away from But, you know, ninety percent of the world doesn't know how to code, so, you know, you can go and do other things like, you know, you could, like, you know, I don't think you know how to code Stefan, but you make a podcast where you bring up these issues and try to get people informed or other people can go and, like, you know, talk to their senator and try to get, you know, actual laws changed or, create educational tools and all the various things. But, yeah, it's, it's a hard problem, There's lots of other ways. There's like things like RoboSats and Bisk, that's just like an online P2P exchange that lets you do things. There's also just like the good old classic, like go to your local Bitcoin meetup and shake hands with someone. you know, like at the, at Austin BitFest here, we have a huge meetup and, you know, people come here all the time. So there's lots of times where people are like, \"Hey, I'm trying to get some cash, can anyone hook me up?\" And then, But, you know, that it's a completely normal thing to do, and it's not like, until like you show up in a mask with like three guns and a knife and hopefully don't get jumped, like, you know, we're, we're downtown Austin, like, you know, you'll get caught if you try to, or we'll break your knees at the next, Bitcoin meetup. So you're, you'll should be fine. And, you know, there's, there's kind of, there's ways to get around it, like, I don't Amazon like Bisc or something, which is, you know, it's supposed to be the advanced Bitcoiner thing, but, you know, people are able to do it. So if you like guide people through that, you wanna help, or if you haven't done it yourself, you should really try because it's not that hard." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:36", "start": 816.33, "text": "Sure, yeah. And, look, I don't have anything against non-KYC acquisition of coins. You know, I encourage people to do that also. For me, and what I'm thinking about here is also the scalability aspects of it, like" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:51", "start": 830.66, "text": "how Looked up the stat yesterday, that number was about one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars worth of volume on Bisc over a week. You know, so-" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "14:00", "start": 839.6, "text": "So yeah, that's like nothing compared to Coinbase or something. So that's, that's a problem. So, you know, getting around that's the harder problem. You know, you can mine Bitcoin, that's a great solution where lots of people will just, you know, they'll just buy a lot of- miners up front, that doesn't require KYC, and then, and, and electricity doesn't require KYC as well, so you could just have a huge mining operation and mine some Bitcoin. It does require other, skill sets, but it is possible. Of course," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:24", "start": 864.1, "text": "yeah. And, and to be clear, I'm not trying to fud bisk or anything like that. I, I think people should be, you know, willing to use it. And the other aspect of it is that volume number might be also down from maybe a few months ago when, you know So some of that volume might be happening off those platforms, right? People might already meet one time and then only do the first trade on the platform and then, do other trades off the platform. So to be clear, that, that volume number isn't taken as gospel, right? It, it can change, and there are other platforms like Robo Sats and Hoddle Hoddle and peer-to-peer stuff and in-person Bitcoin meetups and things like this. But I think in terms of where the industry is going, I think that's probably also an interesting question, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:12", "start": 911.95, "text": "Bitcoin business gets forced and pushed down this pathway, I think that's probably the tougher question, and is there a way out of that? And I sure hope" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "15:21", "start": 920.94, "text": "they don't. And like, luckily, like, this is like a, a gradient, like you could have, like, you know, something like, like Bitcoin Core, that doesn't, that doesn't talk to any outside service, it's just your own thing, that'll never have to do a KYC. But something like Coinbase, where they have custody of your funds, and, you know, they give you tax records and all" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "15:42", "start": 942.03, "text": "KYC on it because of regulations and because, you know, things like, you know, if you died, well, how, who do we give this money to? And, you know, the KYC can help figure that stuff out with like legal claims and stuff. But, as a user, you should have a choice, so there are different services that let you do that. And, you know, like for us at the Bitcoin company, like today, like we sell gift cards, you get Sats back in your account, and, so we're not like, you We, we don't take anything, we just have like an email, and that's fine because like, what the only things we need to comply with, with, is like OFAC compliance, which is like, you know, there's like fourteen addresses or something we're not allowed to send to, which, most likely our user doesn't have, the private key to, so who cares? And, and so like, the, stuff like that's a lot easier to get around, but, you know, as you add in things like buying Bitcoin with," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "16:42", "start": 1001.99, "text": "Things and stuff and like, and that's where it gets hard. So, I mean, legally today you need to take KYC, but the, the chain analysis part is always just like a hairy thing where like a lot of times it's not like, they're not, they'll, they won't knock on your door and like shut down your company if you don't, but then like no liquidity provider will work with you if you don't have, chain analysis or anything like that. So, that gets weird, but, A lot, like all these laws are, you know, it's just like the banks are, you know, these fiat institutions that, you know, just wanna comply with everything 'cause that's how they make their money with the regulatory moat. So they require all these things, and, a lot of times this, they're, this is like, they're doing the full, like, you know, the, the law will say like, \"Do the, the most reasonable thing\" or something. So they take that as, \"Oh, well, do all the chain analysis possible,\" '" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "17:35", "start": 1055.14, "text": "Personally don't, so, you know, I think it's reasonable to do zero, chain analysis, like, so you, you know, you, you have a debate with your lawyer and stuff and find what's comfortable, but, reasonably, it makes sense, I think, like, you know, to, you know, if we're, if we're doing this o-fact, like, you know, there's 13 people in the world we're not losin' Bitcoin to, I'll be fine with that, you know, like, I won't send money" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "18:03", "start": 1083.33, "text": "to it's just like a gradient you have to do on based on like what, what you're trying to do as a business." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:09", "start": 1089.3, "text": "Yeah, for sure. And so some of this, I think it came up, it flared up a little bit with some of the recent debates on Twitter as well, where you, you said, you made that comment of saying, \"Look, if we had to do it, then, you know, that's the point I'd be quitting.\" And I totally respect that, of course. I think the question from my point of view as well is" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:35", "start": 1115.16, "text": "Doing chain surveillance and, okay, let's say that's their regulatory, you know, requirement and so on. Then the challenge is, even if you were to get funding, how many companies or firms in the space are offering, let's say, developer funding without any connection to, say, KYC or and surveillance, you know, let's say the Gemini's of the world or the others who are doing that, you know, it, it, it just is that pervasive, isn't it?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "18:56", "start": 1136.39, "text": "Yeah, and on that comment too, like, you know, you can do like your own chain analysis without And elliptic, where like, you know, and those, you're like just pulling all of your data with, you know, these other huge honeypots of data and just making it worse for like your personal users. But like, you know, if, if you're trusting yourself to take this KYC data, you should, you could, should be able to trust yourself, and you can, legally, I think, like do the chain analysis yourself, which, you know, can be whatever you dictate is reasonable. So, I wouldn't like, you know, quit if we had to Companies like, you know, say like, they're like, \"You have to use Elliptic and, you know, go...\" So I, I know I quit, and it's like, \"Oh yeah, the, the, now, you know, every other company's doing it as well, so, you know, you're kinda shit out of luck.\" But, I do like, you know, I like, I like the, the case where, you know, like, you know, everyone and their mother is sponsored by Spiral today, where you have, Bringing it to Bitcoin development. So, you know, I, I'm happy to take money from the, the bad people and bring it towards the light. So I think that's okay, but it, it is, you know, you do have that taint of, you know, you're, you're getting the dirty money, but, as I said in the beginning, I think Bitcoin's fungible, so that's okay." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:22", "start": 1222.38, "text": "Yeah, of course, of course. And so on the topic of-- Okay, so I guess firstly, there's that point that you made, which is if we're thinking of the gradient here, the worst is to create the massive globalized honey pot of chain analysis and elliptic, who, when-- if they can, again, we're speculating a little bit here, but presumably this is what they're doing, is they're able to pull the KYC data and the chain data of many customers across many exchanges. Whereas what you're saying is, in a gradient sense, in a less bad sense Your own personal risk analysis of coins, of customer coins, where they're coming from, where they're going, and things like this, then that's less bad because at least you're not creating the honeypot aspect. Now, of course, the privacy purists would still object to that. They would say, \"No, hang on, you're still trying to surveil your customers.\" But, you know, in, in this world where we're dealing with government and regulators, and the only way that you can do things at scale, at least in certain business models, is to have to comply with" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:22", "start": 1281.98, "text": "At the same time, we also understand that the only way to really grow the pie meaningfully is to have to play inside that regulated pool, I guess. Is that kind of what, how you're saying? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "21:32", "start": 1292.21, "text": "yeah. 'Cause, I mean, like, sadly, I think like most people won't onboard Bitcoin in the like no KYC way, and I think that's just because you can provide a much better UX by doing that. And like, you know, like Coinbase has a beautiful app, like, you know, I don't like them, but, you know, they did a good" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "21:52", "start": 1312.1, "text": "If you want, but my mom's probably not gonna wanna do that. And, so I think like, you know, if you wanna bring Bitcoin to the masses, we're, you know, some people are just gonna capitulate and, you know, do we want Coinbase running that and getting all those users or do we build it ourselves? So I think it'd be better if we have like real Bitcoiners, do it, like, you know, like you guys are doing at Swan, what, or like Cash App or River, what we're trying to do at the Bitcoin We're, we're taking this and we don't want to, but, you know, these are the risks. So I think that is, important. And yeah, and scaling that up, is good and, so yeah, and when you, when you, when you're doing this as well with this, in, internal chain analysis, like, you get to make your own risk metrics as well then. So you know, like, I think like in the past, like, people like BlockFi and BittlPay were like blocking coin joints from coming" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "22:52", "start": 1372.0, "text": "And, versus like when you're doing internally, people like, \"Oh yeah, CoinJoin, those are cool, good job, you get, you know, we'll give you a bonus 'cause you're cool now,\" you know, use it however you want. So, that it is like a, you know, not only are you not, just feeding the honey pot, but you're also letting yourself control like exactly what you wanna do, so you don't have to, you know, if someone decides CoinJoin is bad, you don't have to just immediately start blocking" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:22", "start": 1402.02, "text": "The chain analysis and the elliptics of the world. What are the big ideas in your mind? Like, I think one idea I can see is this idea of trying to stop the common input ownership heuristic or undermine it in a way where, as an example, if we did a lot of lightning channel collaborative opens, channel opens, then that helps undermine that heuristic, which is a key heuristic that they rely on. So that's one idea, but I'm curious, what's really gonna move the needle here in terms of actually obsoleting them or making them less relevant?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "23:52", "start": 1432.04, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So like, yeah, these chain analysis companies, they have two inputs. One is the actual blockchain, and the other is, you know, the KYC exchange. So like, you know, if you stop using them for your KYC exchange, you block off one input, so now you have to worry about the other input, which is the blockchain. And, yeah, so like, things like you were mentioning, like, you know, this common input heuristic where, you know, if when you have a transaction, it has multiple inputs in it, chain analysis firms generally just That's gonna be true. So it's a good way to do that. So if you mix, if you like, if me and you are doing a transaction, if both of our inputs are in there, now they're gonna think that, you know, both of those are my inputs or both of those are your inputs. They're actually both of ours, and now our wallet histories get, clustered together in their, in their like, dataset. So now, you know, it gets harder to actually dictate what's happening. So that, that improves things a lot. And typically the kinda way" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "24:47", "start": 1487.42, "text": "you" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "24:52", "start": 1492.04, "text": "And gone, we have to create a new wallet history. But, other like sneakier ways are things like Payjoin, where you're actually able to hide, the actual payment amount and the, you know, the inputs that are in there of who owns what, because you're adding in, the receiver's input, so you can, do all these fancy techniques to hide that. As well, things like CoinSwap, where you can, instead of like, you're not breaking this common input heuristic by having, a transaction with two inputs, but you" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "25:22", "start": 1522.02, "text": "Both like the same amount UTXO, so like, you know, I start with UTXO A, you start with UTXO B, at the end, I have UTXO B and you have UTXO A. So that way, you know, we basically just swap histories and no one can tell that we did that, 'cause, you know, they never in the same transaction. So that's, you know, other ways to do that, but, you know, it's all kind of, You know, they're all just incremental steps you're trying to get better. 'Cause if you do all this and then you just go and deposit into Coinbase, they'll now see, okay, like, okay, that last address is his. So you're always, something you're always keeping up with and trying to improve and, you know, technology is always improving this as well. Like, before, you know, before Taproot, if we knew we're doing coin swaps, then you'd deposit it into a multisig and I kept it on a single sig, it'd be obvious And, you know, it'd be obvious that you did that versus now with Taproot, we can hide that you're actually using multisig. So these would look the same and, you know, not just multisig, but things like, things like Liquid or even like Lightning, all these different things can all look the same now, so it makes it even, harder to do all these, heuristics." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:31", "start": 1591.04, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. 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Book your onboarding today, it's unchange dot com slash concierge, and use code levera for a discount. And now, back to the show. Of course. And so what you're referring to there is this new output type, Taproot. And so, you know, just like how we went through historically, we went, we upgraded to the native SegWit, addresses, now we've got these Taproot addresses. Now, I suppose one criticism that could be leveled at us here is Taproot's anon set right now is very small, Of Taproot. Now, I know, for example, BTC Pay Server's wallet supports Taproot. I know, Moon Wallet, I think they are actually using Taproot in the background, but in terms of Taproot Lightning channels, that's not really, here yet, although I believe that's coming soon. but I'm curious your view on that about growing the Taproot anonymity set." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "28:50", "start": 1730.15, "text": "Yeah, yeah, it's, we do, like, yeah, there is a couple wallets using it. LND just released it for their on-chain wallet, but not for Lightning" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "29:01", "start": 1740.66, "text": "Hopefully like soonish, but, it is something that, like, you know, if you're a Taproot user today, you're like one of like, you know, maybe ten thousand people, so you're not, you know, you're, you're reducing your anonymity set, but I think, just like building tools on top of this and getting people ready to support, 'cause like a lot of, wallets don't even support sending to Taproot addresses and stuff ne- yet, so we just kinda need to do this incremental process, and, it was nice So, you know, naturally a lot of people moved over just to save money. But now with Taproot, it's more of a privacy saving thing than a, fee saving thing. Like you're maybe saving a couple bytes, but like, you know, it's, you're not gonna be saving like thirty percent whatever you would with SegWit. But, there is like kind of a, a push towards that, 'cause, lots of people are like saying, you know, like, luckily like kind of, the Bitcoin kind of, initial use case is now A moon or, you know, just a traditional Lightning wallet. So, in that regard, since, Lightning is much better when we have Taproot, everywhere, all these, Lightning wallets are moving towards, a Taproot first, look. So that's gonna help a lot. So maybe, you know, Bitcoin only got in in twenty thirteen that, and it has its cold storage, you know, buried in Argentina, he's not gonna upgrade the Taproot, but, you know, all the new users coming in are gonna upgrade the Tap" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "30:31", "start": 1831.06, "text": "A big help." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:32", "start": 1832.02, "text": "Yeah, and actually on this, now again, this may be triggering to some listeners, and I'm not saying I like this reality, but this is perhaps the reality that we have to acknowledge. I've seen some interesting statistics from Sergei Kotlyar of Bitrefill, and he, he speaks about, and it's an interesting framework, it's this idea of Bitcoin the tool and Bitcoin the movement. And so obviously people like you and me, and even Sergei, are arguably part of the Bitcoin movement. We go to Bitcoin conferences, we speak, we talk to our friends there and so" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:01", "start": 1860.64, "text": "necessarily ideological about it, right? And by ideological, I mean broadly speaking, cypherpunk or libertarian-ish, whereas there are a lot of people who use Bitcoin without having any ideology about it. So for example, he makes the analogy, which is a good one, of BitTorrent. There are lots of BitTorrent users who aren't ideological about it. They wouldn't go to a BitTorrent conference, they wouldn't call themselves part of the BitTorrent movement, let's say. And so just by the numbers, if you look at the stats on Bitrefill, he, he points out that" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:31", "start": 1891.02, "text": "Exodus wallet, which is like a shitcoin wallet, or they're using, Blockchain dot info, right? So it's kind of funny because we have this ecosystem where in our Bitcoin world, we're always promoting, you know, Bitcoin only and things like this, but objectively, out there in the real world, there are a lot of users being onboarded by basically shitcoin exchanges. And so this is, I guess, this is a reality we have to grapple with, isn't it?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "31:54", "start": 1914.06, "text": "Yeah, I know it's a hard problem. Like, it was funny, Blockchain dot Like a couple months before Taproot activated, and you like saw the, the chart and the graph just like go straight up, like, and, w- at Awesome Videos we made a ton of fun of it. It was like, \"Well, in four years, we'll get to talk about when they add Taproot, 'cause, you know, someone'll do that.\" But, you know, luckily there is like, you know, at least like, you know, a lot of new users are being pushed onto these like non-trick coin wallets it seems," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "32:31", "start": 1950.7, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:31", "start": 1951.42, "text": "Yeah, of course. And so I think that's perhaps a little bit of cold water, but of course, we as a community can do what we can to advocate for obviously what we see as the leading wallets and Bitcoin companies that people, new people, should be going and onboarding with. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that not everybody is, especially the new people coming in, at the top of that funnel, they're not going to be as ideologically committed or aligned as, say, we are. But nevertheless, there are possibilities for privacy and- Security to improve in the background, right, by default, where if this technology comes out and if it eventually makes its way into the mainstream applications, and some of that happens by support from the more hardcore members of the community, the developers, and the advocates and the educators out there. So I think it's not totally without hope, but it's just a, a recognition that it takes time to change things, right? And even on the question of SegWit, there, it depends on how we count it as well. So as I understand, if you count it basically, if you count transactions based on To have any SegWit whatsoever on any of the inputs, that number is something like seventy or eighty percent. But if we count it based on every output being SegWit, that number is more like twenty, twenty percent or twenty or thirty percent. So it's actually a lot lower, even for SegWit, which came out in August twenty seventeen, right? And here we are in June twenty twenty-two, and we're still trying to get adoption of SegWit." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "33:52", "start": 2031.75, "text": "Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a, you know, getting people to change things, especially with their money," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "34:01", "start": 2040.64, "text": "Like, all these things add like new functionality. Like, you know, without SegWit, we couldn't have Lightning. So any user that wants to use Lightning, they'll have to, they'll be forced to use SegWit. And, you know, with Taproot, it'll enable other things. Most likely, like, Lightning will go to like a Taproot-only thing eventually. So, you know, eventually, you know, if a user wants to use Bitcoin, they'll have to use these kind of features, it seems. So," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "34:26", "start": 2065.86, "text": "you know, it" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:31", "start": 2070.72, "text": "The campaign is to, is to shout when Taproot, but or when Lightning as well. So I think, and in fairness, that we are seeing Lightning adoption in terms of exchanges. We are seeing large exchanges who are supporting that, and so over time, that's more and more millions of customers who can use Lightning. And so it, it'll take time, but I, I see those network effects as growing, but it is perhaps some cold water that we have to face when we see statistics today in terms of who's spending today and how much light- Lightning uses today versus Bitcoin on chain today, even for small values, which we would presumably say, \"Hang on, for that kind of value, you'd be better off using Lightning.\" Well, maybe that person is coming from a wallet that doesn't have Lightning, things like that. But nevertheless, let's talk a little bit about some of the ideas you have around Lightning privacy. I know you have this LN Vortex, so do you wanna tell us what's LN Vortex? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "35:25", "start": 2125.02, "text": "LN Vortex is a pro- project I've been working on for about a year now. You know, today, like, there's a couple coinjoin solutions like Samurai, Wasabi, and Joint Market, but all of these are mostly just like you spend to yourself, so like, you know, you create a transaction that just spends to your own wallet, and then, but you have more privacy at the end, so you're willing to pay for that. But, when you want to con- combine that with Lightning, the, like, the typical flow is like, mix to yourself a few times, and then send it to your like LND or c-lightning wallet, and then That kinda sucks. And, so the idea is be able to like kinda merge these two things, where you're coin joining to yourself, and then when you wanna open a channel, you just do that in the same coin join, where you just, instead of like, the output being yourself, it's now a lightning channel. And, a couple things needed to happen for us to do this. The biggest, like we've been saying, is Taproot, where these, on-chain transactions to yourself are most likely gonna be like a, you" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "36:29", "start": 2188.54, "text": "know, just a The, lightning channel are very distinct, you can, you know, immediately tell like which is which, or at least that they're different. So you would be able to tell in the, in the, coin join, you would reduce the anonymity set and, wouldn't really work. But with Taproot, we can combine these two, so they could just look exactly the same. And, a great thing about Lightning nodes is there's something that, it's just something that you kind of just always need on. So, you know, like I have a laptop" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "37:01", "start": 2220.66, "text": "Because, you know, I got coins I wanna mix. So, kind of the idea is like, well, we have like all these nodes that are running all day, why don't, why don't they always coin joining? And then when, when they wanna open the lightning channel, let's do that, in a coin join as well. Just kind of give yourself a holistic approach of, your on-chain balance, almost making, you know, if you're a lightning first user, almost every on-chain transaction you're doing is now a coin join. So, I've been working on Where, for one, it's a, you have like your mix to yourself, and then after you do that, you can open a channel, but once LND releases or any, implementation releases the, The, you know, a Taproot channel, then we'll just combine them both, and you'll be able to open a channel. And, kind of the, a hard part about it was, you know, you can't really implement this into, like, Samurai or Join Market or, Wasabi today, because you need to change the protocol a little bit where, so today, like, if say you're doing a Samurai mix, what you do is you register your inputs in a blinded output, and then you just wait for the mix to happen. So that could be" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "38:12", "start": 2292.2, "text": "And, to, to have that output, you need to know where you're sending the money for this coin join. So you have to say like, okay, I would like to mix to an, to this address, but you're, you know, you're hiding the address in that initial message, but you still need to know that address. And, in, in Lightning, when I wanna open a channel to you, I need to send money to that, to that address in the next ten minutes. So, you know, it doesn't really totally work with this like asynchronous You do this, slightly tweaked flow where you register your, thing right before you mix, so that way you can, you can open that channel. And, it, it's, it's, you know, it's not like totally released yet, it works in tests. Me and, my friend, dregg, he's a front end dev at the Bitcoin company, works on, Zeus and stuff as well. He's been helping me build the front end, and we're like about to do our first, like," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "39:10", "start": 2350.16, "text": "test Soon and have like it on like Umbrel and all that. But, the idea is really just, you know, let's get everyone coin joining 'cause like, you know, it seems like everyone and their mother has an Umbrel node running in their closet now, so like, why not have those funds coin joining? And, you know, let's, and then, you know, so now there's another incentive to get people on the Taproot, where you know, now, you know, someone might be like, \"Oh, I don't care about Taproot, that's as well as with that, it'll most likely be the first Taproot, CoinJoin coordinator, so that'll be cool to have as well, where you know, 'cause today if you wanna use Taproot, but you're like, \"Oh, I need to CoinJoin my funds,\" you have nowhere really to go, so you could like, you know, go into Samurai, mix, and then send to Taproot, but like we talked about earlier, you're now reducing your anonymity set by, Revealing that you're going to Taproot, so, you know, you're leaving the, the herd. So, it's not a, you know, total hostile approach anymore. So, hopefully with this, you know, you could have like your Taproot users just only use this. And, it's, it's built in a way where It works with like lots of different types of wallets, so, natively it supports, LND, c-lightning, and Bitcoin Core. So, you know, Bitcoin Core doesn't have lightning support, but you can still just mix yourself in your own Taproot wallet, if you'd like to do that. I'm gonna work on adding Sensei support soon, but, I gotta, the Sensei needs a little more work to, to get fully worked out, but, it is possible, so that'll be" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:43", "start": 2443.02, "text": "hopefully soon as well. Okay, So let's say in the near future, this is available as an application that people can install on their package node like Umbrel and, and so on, like, like Raspiblitz and all the others. What would the flow look like in this case? Are they-- Is the user going to withdraw from the exchange into their LN Vortex wallet, and then the wallet is just gonna do these Taproot coinjoins in the background? Is that roughly what you're thinking, or what's the flow look like?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "41:13", "start": 2472.56, "text": "Yeah, I mean, pretty much. So it doesn't have its own wallet, it just uses like your lightning node wallets, like actual on-chain wallets. So, you know, it's nice I didn't have to actually code that myself, it's just like LND or Core Lightning just handles that for you. So, it is, you know, if you have funds on there, you can use it today. And then, yeah, you would just like open up the Vortex app and just hit like, you know, I wanna, you know, be mixing or I wanna open a channel And then those funds will just always be mixing. And then, and say like a week later, you know, Stefan, you're like, \"I need some inbound, you know, to be selling some hats. Can you open a channel to me?\" I'm like, \"Sure.\" So I'll go into Vortex, type in, you know, type in your pub key, say, and then hit, \"Uh, open channel.\" And then, you know, the next round, I'll open a channel straight to you in a coin join. Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:03", "start": 2523.39, "text": "Okay. And so is the idea then that you're just kind of plugging into the wallets that are already existing, as you were saying? And so then the users are having this coin join operating. And so I guess the other question as well is Who's running the coordinator? Are you gonna run a coordinator for this or how does that work?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "42:23", "start": 2542.92, "text": "Yeah, yeah, so it has to be its own coordinator, so I can't use like Wasabi or Samurai or any of those, 'cause it has, does have this slightly altered protocol. So, I do have like a Palap friend that offered to run it, so they're gonna be, running it, I'm not gonna say who, but, yeah, so, you know, we'll have, its own coordinator running, and that'll," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:48", "start": 2568.48, "text": "So you might have different pools, as, pool sizes, as an example, that you might have like point one or point five or the baller pool, one bitcoin pool or whatever, and so then you are just mixing your coins with other people in that same denomination, let's say, in that pool. And so then the idea is you open, off of that, your, either your LND or your C-Lightning can open a channel out of that and then just spend normally like you would with any Lightning wallet. Like, let's say you have Zeus connected to that." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "43:16", "start": 2596.46, "text": "Yeah, exactly Have your Umbrel just mixing, you open your channel, and then, you know, you go to, you know, Starbucks and, you know, scan an invoice and just pay from now a mixed, channel. So you get the, you know, this extra added privacy, 'cause, in Lightning, like, it's generally very private in most regards, like on the actual Lightning layer, but on the, actual, like, you know, Lightning requires a Bitcoin layer under it, and, you know, that is, you know, as we know, fully," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "43:48", "start": 2628.44, "text": "Well, but still it, you know, people can find it, like, what Tony Giorgio's been working on. But, you know, if you're, or if you're a routing node, you still wanna protect your on-chain funds. This is another way to do it, where you could, you know, hide this and, you know, now you're just like, \"Oh, this one, this is a Vortex user, but I don't know what their, you know, on-chain wallet" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:06", "start": 2646.39, "text": "looks like.\" Got it. And so, yeah, it And join, and then you open a channel, and then now you're doing lightning channels, which those transactions don't touch the chain per se. Now, of course, in lightning, there's still improvement work required on that side too, and of course, there was, the recent lightning summit, I think that was maybe a month or two ago. so listeners, you can check out Bitcoin Ops, Op Tech Newsletter two o four, there's a summary there of lightning developer meeting, and so there's things there like gossip network updates or trying to, potentially change some of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:49", "start": 2688.58, "text": "Shares, balances, and things like this. So these are some of the ideas coming that will help bring privacy to Lightning, because today Lightning isn't super private, but it's kind of a complicated question where maybe you, the receiver, sorry, the sender is getting a little bit more privacy than they do today on chain, just naively spending on chain, but there are some of these other aspects where, let's say, the channels, have this aspect, what's it called, the short channel ID, where that's kind of pointing to the output of that channel on chain, whereas maybe in the" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "45:19", "start": 2718.92, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So they actually just changed that, the, the channel ID thing. So now for unannounced channels, you can just have a B random value, so you can, you don't actually have to like dox it to people or like, you know, they can probe it out of you and stuff. So that does help. But, you know, it's not a totally, you know, like, that doesn't solve everything. Like, like you said, it is slightly better than on-chain, where, you know, like, on-chain is being stored forever" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "45:49", "start": 2748.64, "text": "You do have that benefit, but, yeah, there, there is lots of problems where, you know, you are requiring this, you know, lower Bitcoin layer so everyone knows these, you can know these UTXOs that are, that are using to like route these payments, as well as, you know, you have these static pubkeys which are like kind of identities on Lightning, so people tie different, flows to that, and there are these things like probing where you can kind of almost fish out balances of things or, you know, detect payments going on. So They talked about different things. one of the like, kind of bigger things that, I think will be big is things like, trampoline routing and, blinded paths. they're both like, by themselves, like, powerful, but together, they're like, extremely powerful. what trampoline lets you do is just kind of say, like, you don't tell someone, like, \"This is, like, how to get to me,\" you say, like, \"Oh, I have a friend, Stefan, you can pay him, and he'll Private channels to, to get received through or anything like that, you just say, \"I'll get it to him, he knows how to get to me.\" So that kind of like, you know, you get a, a barrier there, and you can actually use multiple trampolines, so you can say, \"Like, oh, Stefan knows how to get to me,\" and then they're like, \"Well, how do I get to Stefan?\" You're like, \"Oh, well, Marty knows how to get to Stefan,\" and then, you know, Satoshi knows how to get You ne- you need to know how to get to me at that. Instead of like giving you the full route, I could say like, \"Go to this guy, \" and then he'll have a encrypted version of how to get to the next guy, and then encrypted version of how to get to the next guy. So, you know, it's just this, you know, basically doing that, you kind of completely hide the, the way you're trying to pay me. And, it gets really powerful, but, you know, there's lots of spec work and things But it is possible, so that, it's helping, that will hopefully help a lot, but, you know, we'll, we'll remain to see when it's gonna happen." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:55", "start": 2875.4, "text": "Yeah, of course. I, I mean, it does sound like, it's promising there, and it's, I think it's also fair to point out that even today, if a user wants, let's say, just privacy from the merchant, even today, if they use a lightning wallet like, you know, these Moon, Phoenix, Breeze, these kinds of ones, where you make a The merchant doesn't know your balance, they don't know your transaction history, they just get paid on the Lightning Network. So at least there's, there's something there, right? Like, so I, I think people tend to be very binary and all or nothing and say, \"No, unless you're James Bond, Edward Snowden level private, you're not private.\" And it's like, \"Well, who are you trying to be private from? And how much privacy do you really need?\" is the average person who just wants to be able to-- As an example, let's say they Those wallets and you used like that swap functionality that's inbuilt, aren't you arguably getting a little bit of privacy that way? Now, I guess people-- Now, I guess the counterargument would be, well, hang on, the authorities could just go to Moon and say, \"Hey, give me all the-- give me all your data.\" So at that point, maybe you're in trouble, but, you know, in terms of how much work are they going to do, it might be at least a little, you know, a little bit of something that's more private. So, I" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "49:15", "start": 2955.34, "text": "don Give me all your data, well it's like, well Moon wasn't the only one wallet sending to that merchant or, you know, whatever malicious actor they determined, so they can only get a small portion of the pie versus like, like we saw with, the Canadian truckers, they were like, \"Do not send to this address,\" where, you know, you couldn't really do that with Lightning, you could be like, \"You know, don't send to this node pub key,\" but you just, you just change your node pub key with, something like Trans-LND" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "49:45", "start": 2985.48, "text": "or" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "49:48", "start": 2988.42, "text": "As well, like things like, you know, when, when I pay to a merchant, you know, they have my on-chain UTXOs, you can go back and look and see like, oh, do this little chain analysis and kind of sometimes you can figure out like, oh, this person sent this from a fifteen bitcoin UTXO, they have fifteen bitcoin, you know, maybe I'm gonna go follow them home, and steal that from them. But with, with Lightning, it's like, you know, they only know the last hop, so most likely," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "50:18", "start": 3018.4, "text": "You don't fully trust, that, that, you know, to not fall you home or whatever, you'll, you'll be protected in that regard, which is, that's a huge improvement over the current Bitcoin today." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:28", "start": 3027.65, "text": "Yeah. Let's chat about Austin Bitdevs. So you're one of the co-organizers for that, and, can you tell us a little bit about what's happening in Austin's Bitcoin scene?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "50:37", "start": 3037.29, "text": "Yeah, Austin, it's, it's been blowing up. So I guess a little bit of history. I moved here beginning of twenty People, on a good day, and, today we get about like two hundred and fifty people when it's a bull market, now it's a bear market, we get like fifty, but, but it's still a really good meetup here, and, honestly, like, I think, you know, for other people try to try to run meetups, the, the biggest thing I think for us was consistency, where every third Thursday at seven PM, we're at Unchained and we're talking Bitcoin, and, that helps" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "51:16", "start": 3075.8, "text": "a lot, you We, we only shut down for six months and, you know, we kept it consistent ever since then. In September, that'll be, it'll be two years from us for consistency. So that'll be, I think that's like kind of something to hang your head on and, I think we're really proud of that. So yeah, it's a, it's a great scene out here. We have like the whole Unchain folks, they have their huge office now and, they have the Commons as well, which is a great place to work at, like At home or like, you know, see Bitcoiners like, you know, when we go out for drinks maybe that night, but like now it's like I'm working right next to them all day, so it's like, you know, you're, you're coding and you're like, \"Hey, what if, what if someone did this?\" And then, you know, you all start just bouncing ideas, and next thing you know, you're on a whiteboard like drawing like state diagrams or something, and, you know, you, you, you get a lot more collaboration. So To, come check it out." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:20", "start": 3140.32, "text": "Yeah, and for people who aren't familiar with BitDev's and what to expect, what sort of stuff, what goes into, organizing a BitDev specifically, in terms of pulling together the resources and, you know, the content to discuss." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "52:36", "start": 3155.77, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So BitDev isn't just like a hangout, we talk about Bitcoin, it's supposed to be a Socratic seminar. So the idea is like, you know, Chatham House rules, no, no names here, we're just gonna talk about Bitcoin and ideas, no people I want to attribute this to, like, you know, Ben said this. Let's just say, like, you know, someone has this cool idea about devs, and, we're, we're doing, all things, you know, it's bit dev, so development, we're all talking tech. So, normally it's like me, Buck, and, Justin. We kind of get a list of topics that we accumulate through the month, mostly by just either reading the mailing list, Twitter, or like Op Tech, or the, even the other meetups as And maybe give a brief overview like, \"Oh, this is, you know, Lightning Labs released this idea of Taro, and then we'll talk about it, and then, you know, someone from the audience, because really I'd like to draw the, the knowledge from the audience, you know, of like, \"Oh, this Taro thing happened,\" and, you know, Ryan Gentry, you know, biz dev at, Lightning Labs will come up, be like, \"Oh, yeah, you know, give a huge explanation on this,\" and then we'll" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "53:48", "start": 3228.42, "text": "Crowd, as well as, you know, kind of hash things out. There's a lot of times where, like, you know, me, Justin, and Buck are like learning about this topic like two hours before the meetup, and we're like, \"I think it works this way, \"and then we'll just, like, basically like, kind of work with the audience and understand it together, like, live. So it's a lot of fun in that regard, and, you know, it does take a fair amount of work, but, you" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "54:12", "start": 3252.46, "text": "know, it's definitely Understand any of it, but I know I sh- I can eventually and, or other people like, oh, the hot people, you know, that have been coming for years, be like, they'll like challenge me now, they'll be like, you know, oh, actually, why don't you do it like that? I'm like, oh, shit, like, you're not even a dev, and you can, you, you can, you know, pull this stuff off. So, i-it's really good meetup to come to and," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "54:42", "start": 3282.5, "text": "and it's, it Like, goddamn it. So like, you know, coming there and they're like, \"Oh, shit, it's like a real thing.\" They're like, \"You know, this isn't just like, you know, we're, you know, buying Dogecoin and going to the moon. It's like deep research on, like, you know, things that, you know, we're saying big words and normal people don't know, and, you know, we know all of them, sadly.\" But yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:08", "start": 3308.03, "text": "So for anyone who hasn't been, any listeners, if you haven't" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:18", "start": 3318.42, "text": "Online as well, but going to the ones in person is really worthwhile if you can. You tend to learn a lot, and there might be all these words at the start that you don't quite grasp, but they're very much worthwhile. I've been to, obviously, I've been to some of the BitDev's in Austin during bull season, and I, I guess in the bull season when there's two hundred people in the room or two hundred and fifty people in the room, it tends to be more like a kind of a lecture from yourself or from Bark or from, you know, whoever's explaining but when, you know, during bear time and sideways market, you do get more discussion time, and that is a bit more interactive, and perhaps you might even learn a bit more that way as well. but well worthwhile for people, so definitely check it out and go, if you, if you don't have one in your local area, I suggest starting one. It's, a good way, you know, if you have at least a few technical friends or one or two, you can get it started and get it going that way. Bitcoin is a community thing, so we" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:19", "start": 3378.52, "text": "And, I want to say" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "56:20", "start": 3379.98, "text": "too, like, if you're looking to start a meetup in your place, like, like a lot of people say, like, 'cause, you know, Austin and like New York and a couple other places have had wild success doing a bit devs, but like, that works here because we have a lot of developers here and a lot of, you know, like, talent and always people that are well-informed on the ideas. Like, if you're, you know, if you live in like rural Kansas and you have no developers, like, don't You know, if, if you're not a developer or, you know, you, you don't have developers in your area that are willing to host it, well then just start a normal meetup where you just like hang out and talk about Bitcoin, 'cause, you know, that's equally as fun and like, you know, in Austin we have a similar meet-up, we have the Austin Bitcoin Club where, you know, they do exactly that, where they just, they just bring tacos and chicken and talk about Bitcoin, and that's like almost as big as the BitDev's now, so" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:18", "start": 3438.42, "text": "Yeah, and I think to the point around Bitcoin privacy as well, to the extent that we can grow the peer-to-peer market for Bitcoin, and that may be where you find people who you just wanna trade Bitcoin with, if maybe you're a miner and you wanna sell some coins to cover your expenses, and somebody else there is a player, and they just wanna stack, and they wanna buy the coins off you, then that's kind of a common example. Or otherwise, what you can try to do is go to your local restaurants, bars, and say, \"Hey, we wanna run the meetup, can Local Bitcoin is to go and spend some satoshis and, you know, start this whole, peer-to-peer aspect as well, which I think is gonna be useful. So I think as a community, those of us who are really into Bitcoin, advocates, educators, builders, whatever you are in the Bitcoin world, that, that's something you could look at as well. Yeah, yeah, a million percent echo that." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "58:07", "start": 3487.17, "text": "Yeah. In Austin, yeah, we're not, we're not doing the best job of getting, you know, every business on Bitcoin, but we got a couple bars and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:18", "start": 3498.42, "text": "So, with, the Bitcoin company, so tell us a little bit about that. So you guys are selling vouchers and what else is coming from the Bitcoin company just for SLP listeners who wanna know?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "58:28", "start": 3508.45, "text": "Yeah, yeah, the, it's kind of, today what we're doing is just kind of like, like letting people live on Bitcoin and basically paying, paying you for it. So we're still more to like a folder bit repo right now where you can buy gift cards, but we also offer, Visa cards and international Visa cards that you just pay with Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "58:48", "start": 3528.46, "text": "Like, you know, I think seventy-five percent of our sales or something are the international Visa cards, 'cause we're getting like all these people are just like, \"Oh, I'm in Brazil, and I love these things, and they-- you know, they're living on, living on their Bitcoin.\" And, and this is kind of another way where, like, in the beginning we were talking about, you know, this KYC-free way to, to buy Bitcoin, but like, the Bitcoin company, we kind of solved the, the KYC-free way to sell it, where, You know, most likely the, the way you're gonna spend your Bitcoin, so you can essentially sell it KYC free with us, and, we actually pay you for it, so, you know, it's kinda cool. And, you know, it's letting, users, live on their Bitcoin, and but the, the, the whole mission of us is basically just kinda be like the Bitcoin hub or Bitcoin super app. So, something we're rolling out soon is like phone top-ups, as well as, other ways you can like earn Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "59:48", "start": 3588.4, "text": "Exchange and banking and all that stuff. So yeah, the, the holistic view is just like eventually, like, you know, delete like Wells Fargo, use the Bitcoin company where you can, you know, get your direct deposit, make, you know, pay off your credit card, and, you know, your checking account has a Bitcoin and a dollar balance. You know, you can, if you're, you know, if it's six PM on a Saturday and you wanna pay off your credit card bill, you don't have to wait, you know, until, till Monday for the wire to" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "01:00:18", "start": 3618.58, "text": "Banking with Bitcoin and just modernize everything with Bitcoin. And, you know, if you don't use the KYC-free stuff, or if you don't wanna use KYC stuff, we have the KYC-free stuff which we offer today. And, you know, it's kind of, you know, if you wanna go the full view, then sign up for that stuff. So we're trying to like serve as much people as we can." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:37", "start": 3637.08, "text": "Sure, yeah. Great. so we'll, we'll leave it there then. So listeners go and follow Ben if you're not already following him on Twitter. So his Twitter is at ben the carman and the website ben the carman dot com. Ben, thank you for joining me. Yeah, thank you, Stefan. Get the show notes at stephanlivera.com/391. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }