{ "episodeId": "SLP414", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "matt_hill_of_start9": { "name": "Matt Hill of Start9", "role": "guest", "tag": "MATT" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 8.43, "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Now, my recent episode with Katan did ruffle a few feathers in the Bitcoin community, in the community of node runners, so I've got an episode now with Matt Hill to give his perspective and perhaps clear the air a little bit, but also offer his own views on what the difference is with Raspberry Pi's versus Using other platforms. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, and Swan is organizing a new conference. It's called Pacific Bitcoin. It'll be on in November, so 10th and 11th of November. And the big announcement that we recently made is that Michael Saylor is coming, and he's coming in person. So this is gonna be a fantastic opportunity for those of you who want to hang out and meet all kinds of bitcoiners from all different walks of life. There will be three main stages. There'll be content and programming on all of those. There'll be education, There'll be panels, there'll be fireside chats, and there will be a range of events leading up to it in that week. So make sure you are there early, but the main event is November 10th and 11th. That's Pacific Bitcoin. Go and get your tickets, get your friends together. Pacific Bitcoin dot com. Use code Livera for a discount on your tickets. One site I regularly use is Bitbo dot io. I regularly keep track of what's going on, whether that's the Bitcoin price over the short term, or you can zoom out and use log scale Like a Bitcoin magazine newsfeed of articles, you can see various statistics, whether that relates to Bitcoin mining, the halving, Bitcoin network, Lightning stats, sat per dollar, as well as comparison versus normie assets. You can see things like the inflation rate also. So this site is great to bookmark or potentially use as your homepage. That's Bitbo dot io. When it comes to securing our Bitcoin private keys, we need to use good quality Bitcoin hardware. My favorite Bitcoin hardware signing device is the Cold- card, which you can get over at coinkite dot com. The coldcard is such a versatile device, you can use it in all kinds of configurations, but if you're a beginner, you can just buy this device and a USB-C cable and plug it to your computer, and that's easy to use with wallets like Sparrow Wallet. Now, of course, if you are intermediate or advanced, you can use it in other configurations like as part of a multi-signature setup. And as part of a multi-signature setup, we do this feature called registering the quorum, so that the coldcard" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:30", "start": 150.3, "text": "Memory of the xPub of the other signers in that setup, so it's also really useful in that way. It's got a range of security features, it's got two secure elements, it's got improved, CPU and memory. So if you're interested to get your cold card, either for yourself or your family and friends, go to coinkite dot com, use code Livera to get a discount on your cold cards. Onto the show with Matt. Matt, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me back on. So Matt, we're gonna talk about RaspiFUD or Raspi, Raspberry Pi's, Bitcoin nodes, you know, and of course, you know, the latest with, you know, what's going on with Start9. So, yeah, let's, let's start, with that. So I guess, you know, I like just to set the context for listeners, I had a recent episode with your time where we spoke a little bit about Raspberry Pi's and, I think Katon and I were, let's say, sharing some" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:25", "start": 205.29, "text": "I wanted to, you know, g-give you a chance to chat about your, your views on this also, Matt. So do you wanna, you know, just give us your, I guess, high level thoughts on, on that topic?" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "03:38", "start": 217.6, "text": "Yeah, absolutely. So after that episode, you know, we have a pretty, pretty strong community and they all reached out, being like, \"Hey, what's up?\" So I, I thought it was pretty cool to, you know, be able to get on here and, talk about it in order to, answer which I'm sure other communities have as well, because the Raspberry Pi has essentially come to dominate, Bitcoin and Lightning home node operatorship, and so with an episode coming out that's like, \"Hey, this thing's no good anymore,\" obviously there's gonna be a lot of feathers rustled. And so, yeah, it doesn't mean it's wrong, just means that, you know, adding some context and providing some, some advice going forward, is warranted. So, now, you guys did a great job of that as well, actually. Katan did a wonderful, job, I thought his analysis was very thorough, and not inaccurate, in any meaningful sense, and, you know, maybe, lacking a little bit of context from sort of what our community is expecting. So that's the main reason I'm, I'm here now. so to answer your question directly, now that I've sort of set the stage, as to how this even came about and why, you know, the Raspberry Pi, as was mentioned in your initial, broadcast with Katan, Designed as a, as a low priced, you know, computer board for children to learn on, and it got really good, right? It became a very powerful, entry level computing device, powerful compared to, you know, say, other super cheap single board computers, it actually became quite performant over the years, enough so that you could run a Bitcoin full node on it, and as a, as a show of, you know, as a demonstration or, or, of, of the- The limited resource needs of Bitcoin and Lightning as well, it's like, hey, you can run these things on a little Raspberry Pi. Anyone can do this, they're available all over the world, they're super cheap, and very few other systems, you know, sort of blockchain, cryptocurrency style systems, could possibly run on a little Raspberry Pi, and that was a testament to Bitcoin's, engineering, feat that it had achieved. And as you discussed, it's starting to now kind of- Get bigger, right? Not just Bitcoin itself in terms of the size of the blockchain, it's actually gotten more efficient, in terms of RAM and compute needs, the, the storage needs are bigger if you are running a full archival node. If you are running a pruned node, then Bitcoin is actually more runnable on a Raspberry Pi today than it has ever been before. and if you have a, you know, two terabyte SSD, then it's also just as if not more runnable on a Raspberry Pi today than it ever has before. Where things start to get tough is the dependent services, right? Things like Electrs, you know, things like, Lightning, and then layer three services that are using the Lightning nodes, like they can really start to add up, and then that can start to put stress on this, you know, little Raspberry Pi. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin, essentially, it has to do with the ecosystem that is exploding around Bitcoin and that people want to do With their Bitcoin nodes that can start to make the Raspberry Pi, a bit, you know, inadequate. So where does it start to become inadequate, right? It's not RAM, that isn't the first place that we see bit-- the Raspberry Pi start to break down. Eight gigabytes of RAM is pretty good, right? So I have a little old Embassy One running here that I've been running for two and a half years, and it's an, you know, Pi Four eight gigabyte variety, and I have twenty five services running in parallel on it, and I'm About seventy percent of my RAM, on any given moment. Now, during times of sync, it gets a lot worse, right? So if you're syncing Bitcoin from Genesis, and you're syncing Electrs, and you're syncing the NBX Explorer from BTCPay, and you're doing all these at the same time, you're going to, you're gonna bog it down. But actually, RAM might not even be the first place that that happens, it's gonna be the CPU, right? So the Pi, that is the biggest shortcoming of the Pi, is actually the chip. It is And some of the Bitcoin services, Bitcoin and related services can really get CPU hungry, at times. And so if you are trying to do a lot of syncing at the same time, you're gonna have a bad time. like we tell our community members, you know, when you first spin up your embassy, don't install twenty things and turn them all on right at the exact same moment. The operating system just isn't sophisticated enough yet to Protect you from yourself in those circumstances, right? On even a normal computer, if you were to crank up forty things at the same time and try to sync them all, and when I say normal computer, I mean something much more powerful, you're still gonna notice a significant performance drop off, if not total throttling. so, you know, there's a little bit of user discretion involved into making these things, work as expected." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:49", "start": 529.34, "text": "Yeah, so that's, look, I think fair points as well. I think that's, I think that's been part of the story of Of the, the history of the, the Raspberry Pi Bitcoin node, it became almost like a meme, it became, and it became a thing in the community. And I'm not denying that, and I, ob- obviously, I've, I've promoted that in the past myself. I think the other question that probably comes up is around cost today. The cost today to buy a Raspberry Pi compared to the cost, let's say, pre, you know, if we went back, if we re-wind the clock two or three years, the cost to buy a Raspberry Pi might have been, Right? Whereas if you're looking at it now, that cost has come up a lot. So I think that maybe that's also the point that, you know, that people have to think about wh-whatever they're doing, whether, whether they are doing their own, like whether they're buying, a node off the shelf, whether they're doing their own thing, maybe that's, that's where the conversation is. Maybe it's kind of like Raspberry Pis, you know, if you're buying a new device, right? So let's say if you already have your device" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:55", "start": 595.09, "text": "We're all good. I think maybe the, the question then is more about what's the, what's the story going forward or what should we do if you were advising somebody today who's like, \"Hey, Matt, I wanna run a Bitcoin node, what, what are my options?\" Yep. So when the Raspberry" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "10:10", "start": 609.88, "text": "Pi shortage kicked in, we had to really look at ourselves. I mean, this was what probably a year and a half ago, was the first time we started to witness some shortages. You know, we were lucky because we're buying in bulk and because we kept inventory and because Good suppliers, and because we're aggressive, we have always been able to get our hands on, you know, baseline price Raspberry Pis. We are, have been, and continue to buy the eight gigabyte varieties at seventy-five dollars a piece. It's how we've been able to keep our prices of the lower end device reasonable while still maintaining something of a margin for ourselves so we can do business. But we immediately were just like, \"This is a single point of failure. There's no way that we're going to build, a successful company around the, a supply chain like this that Plus, it's unnecessary 'cause there's lots of computers that can run, you know, all the services that we're looking to run. So we, began looking at other options, and so we're actually quite familiar with some of the other options out there, right? We went to the Rock Pro sixty-four first, you know, this other single board computer variety that has a little bit more power, and we found out that we were gonna have to do a lot of customization, right? We were gonna have to build our own encasements, we were-- like, there The Raspberry Pi. and then so we started looking at more traditional things, right? Like even some of these mini PC options, which ultimately is where we've landed. So as a company, what we have done now is we've created two distinct products. We have like the lower level entry level product, which, I can get into specifics in terms of how we recommend usage and what we recommend using them for, which is still based on the Pi at present, but does so in a way that alleviates many of the shortcomings. things of the Pi, which first and foremost I should have mentioned earlier, the biggest problem with the Pi, by far, is power. The Pi is notoriously bad at, power usage, as in it doesn't, it doesn't supply it very well, and so if you're running an external SSD plugged into the USB three port and you have a, you know, normal stock Raspberry Pi power supply, you're going to have issues. We've- seen these issues. We had, we learned them the hard way actually. We, we had to do some replacements for people because it's like, it took us a minute to figure out what was going on and what was happening was like voltage leaks. We, we just weren't supplying enough power, and it's like your home power mattered. Like if your house had any kind of like, lower levels of power or power fluctuations, all of a sudden these ghost-like, you know, database issues were popping up, and we were just like, \"Wow, so the Raspberry Pi just isn't very good The Embassy One, the new Embassy One, is we've gone for an all-in-one enclosure. So it is a very small all-in-one enclosed device where the SSD is actually inside of the box with the Pi, and the encasement has its own added power supply. So we've solved both the dangling cord external USB issue as well as the shortcomings of the Raspberry Pi when it comes to power, and that is our new offering, and that is the only thing That we now recommend and support. So even our DIY guide, this is all happening like right now, right? So that's why this was so timely. Your conversation with Katana was just like, \"Yes, yes, that's, it's exactly why we're making the changes that we're making, is because the old recommendation of get a Pi, put it in a box, get an external SSD, with an enclosure, plug it in, and then use it for twenty five things in parallel, just is causing problems. People are having a bad time with this. So the all in one enclosure with its The issues with the Pi, save for one, which is the low CPU. So we recommend that if you're gonna go with the one, use it for your non-heavy things, right? And this can dovetails into a conversation about bifurcation of services as well, like Bitcoin, non-Bitcoin. Is that even a proper bifurcation? But we recommend the one now, and we say, \"Look, if you wanna use it to run Bitcoin and Lightning, you absolutely can, just don't sync everything at once. Once they're all synced, it's gonna be smooth sailing.\" We have years of data to prove that the Pi four eight gigabyte can provide smooth sailing on probably about fifteen parallelized services running Bitcoin stuff, or we say, \"Use your Embassy one to do all your non-heavy stuff, and then the Pi is a breeze. You can run Vault, Warden, and Nextcloud, and all of these, you know, messaging applications and services on a Raspberry Pi, and it doesn't even touch the, the CPU and the RAM. It's perfectly adequate for that stuff. Elect RS is really The beast in the room that's making this conversation a lot more interesting" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:59", "start": 899.29, "text": "around. Right, I think that's like the elephant in the room, right? Yeah. And so for listeners who aren't familiar, Electrs refers to Electrum Rust Server, and so the idea is when we run our Bitcoin node, we can think of the Electrs, it does this address indexing function, and so when we run our wallet, so for example, Sparrow Wallet or Electrum Wallet on the computer, that connects to our node, and that's normally talking to the Electrum server. So that's the- The, the, it adds hard drive usage, it, it has a lot more CPU. So as you rightly point out, I think that's probably the elephant in the room. although I wonder, I'm curious, how much does adding Lightning add to things? Like, let's say if you have a lot of channels going, does that add a lot? No," }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "15:42", "start": 942.4, "text": "not comparatively. if you're running a Bitcoin node and an LND node, and so on Embassy, we offer, you know, LND and CLN, I run them both on the same box Not in the same way that Electrs does. And again, during initial sync, they're gonna use a lot more, and if you have a ton of channels, they're gonna use a lot more. But if you are a power routing node, like if you're a serious lightning node operator and you have tons of channels, 'cause look, the average person running a lightning node, if you're using it to pay and get paid on the lightning network, you only need like three good channels, right? Find a couple well-connected peers, open sizable channels, make sure they have in- Inbound and outbound liquidity, and you're gonna be able to pay anyone, anywhere. You only need two to three channels. If you're running twenty, thirty, hundreds of channels, you're not using a Raspberry Pi with an SSD, otherwise you're just-- you don't get it. Like, you need a serious machine, which is where our new product comes into play, right? Where it doesn't have to just be for power Lightning node users, it's also for the Uncle Jim model, for content creators who want to reach tens of thousands of people, you need a serious computer So that's our other product that we are now offering, which is the Embassy Pro. Now the Embassy Pro is a thirty-two gigabyte, two terabyte NVMe, it's got an Intel i7 four point nine gigahertz processor with Intel Management Engine disabled in firmware, which is the only device, that can claim that, running anything on Intel is sort of inherently backdoored. Okay? Intel Management Engine, which exists beneath the operating system Is sort of a built-in backdoor, and it's just a known vulnerability that people have learned to live with. our hardware partner that we got with to manufacture the Pro, Purism, they make Pure OS, which has a boot, boot process that actually disables Intel Management Engine underneath the operating system. So it is totally private, not backdoored, at least not by that. If there's something lower we don't know about and nobody knows about, then whatever, but we, we can claim that the one known- Vulnerability, has been disabled in the Pro. So anyway, it's, it's a rocket ship of a computer. It's built on an x86 architecture with an Intel i7 chip. It will satisfy you to do pretty much whatever you want. you can, you can run probably fifty, sixty services in parallel. We don't even offer that many on our marketplace yet, while also serving as Uncle Jim for your friends and family, while also serving your, community, you know, followers with blog posts and stuff like that, hosting your own web- So it, it is a serious professional tool or just for somebody who needs the biggest, baddest, latest thing. And then the lower end, again, is still the Pi, which we think is okay so long as you understand the, the sort of limitation of how much you can do with it at the same time. That's really the, the big caveat, the asterisk of, of the lower end embassies or Pies in general. It's just like, don't run twenty, don't sync twenty things at the same time on it. That's the, the big asterisk. That's it. That's it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:56", "start": 1136.13, "text": "One other point, probably just to clarify on that as well, is some users with Raspberry Pis have commented publicly, and we've seen people talk about this kind of thing around their SD card getting corrupted. So I'm curious if you have any experience on that. Now, I've seen different comments on that. So, for example, with of Mempool dot space, he's spoken about this idea where, again, there's people using different approaches. One approach he's mentioned is this idea that that SD card should just be like a read-only thing, and then that's So the idea is you're using the SSD to do most of the actual work, which can deal with more read and write. I'm curious what your view is on that and how, how the Start9 team are, are thinking about this question." }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "19:35", "start": 1175.11, "text": "That's exactly how we think about it. Our, our SD card, is a read only thing. I shouldn't say that, stores a little bit of metadata about the SSD, just so that it sort of knows who its parent is. Like if, for instance, you were to take out your SSD and put in somebody else's SSD, it's SSD is, but other than that, the card itself strictly holds the operating system and then has a fully empty partition that is designed for holding another operating system, another copy of MBCOS, because we do these deployments, these red green deployments like that. So, for instance, when you update your embassy, what you're doing is say like you're on O3.1 and you're downloading O3.2, it downloads O3.2 to the SD card and then on next boot it just switches over, and then it actually keeps a full copy of O3.1 in case you There's some sort of emergency rollback necessary, which we don't expect and have never had, but it has both, both the old and the new copy of mbcOS on the SD card, so it's not read only, but it is OS only, meaning if it became corrupt or you just took it out and snapped it in half, nothing bad would happen. All you would have to do is go get another SD card, flash mbcOS on it, plug it in, and two seconds later, you're back up and running right where you were. So the SD card isn't," }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "20:55", "start": 1254.59, "text": "no Their system, it's a mistake. we were doing that for the first year, we sort of knew we were doing it when we first launched, but we also knew that there was no, like, the threat model was not there, there was nobody using our device, we were iterating and growing, but as usual, we identify our own shortcomings and try to fix them." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:12", "start": 1271.68, "text": "Right, yeah, and I understand maybe part of the trade-off was for people who, it depends what data they were storing on that SD card, and maybe for some reasons where if people wanted a certain level of, let SD card, let's say, more actively, yeah. but I think it seems that the community has sort of settled on that idea of kind of relatively less rights to that SD card, so that there's less risk around the corruption there, and so that, you know, the user has a better time, let's say. The best thing" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "21:40", "start": 1300.04, "text": "is just not use it for anything important. And then if it corrupts or breaks, it doesn't matter, you just replace it. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:46", "start": 1305.72, "text": "Yeah. And so I think the broader question as well, and so I guess going to that broader, you know Known vulnerabilities that people talk about in, let's say, FOS and FOSH, you know, free open source hardware world, and so there are various manufacturers I know like Purism and, I think System 76 and various others who try to do this idea where they're like saying, okay, we're trying to like mitigate that in some way or whatever, right? So I think it also comes to like that question of like which architecture, right? So is, is it an ARM chip? Are we using like x86 for our infrastructure? And, I Might be interesting if you have any comment on, let's say, Warren Togami's views as well, whereas Warren has put out his view where he's saying one of the problems with some of these, Raspberry Pi nodes, in his view, is that they're not bringing the up-to-the-security updates that are feasible on the full-blown level of Linux, and so that's why from his point of view, he would rather people are using like the full-blown Linux as opposed to like Raspberry Pi operating systems. Do you have a comment on that? You know," }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "22:55", "start": 1374.77, "text": "I, Probably more on the margin. You know, you want the latest software, but at the same time, doing automatic updates, for instance, to the latest thing all the time is actually a vulnerability too. So you're kind of, you know, like always staying up to date with the latest software can be dangerous, and having software that doesn't get updated frequently enough can also be dangerous. I, I would not be able to cite off the top of my head any sort of reason to believe that the Raspberry Pi Foundation doesn't, you know- Stay up with security vulnerabilities in Raspberry Pi OS. it's possible that there's some precedent where, you know, a security vulnerability was discovered and they didn't release an update for four or five months. I'm not aware of an incident like that. could it happen? Of course it could happen. It could happen to any distro. You know, Embassy OS is based on Raspberry Pi OS for the one, and it's based on PureOS for the Pro, and so it is up to us to make sure that we are keeping an eye on Raspberry Pi OS and PeerOS and the underlying sort of Debian, and Linux kernel to make sure that those distros are staying up to date. if they're not, we have ways of, you know, getting in there and trying to, to, you know, patch them up as well. but at the, at the same time, this is just sort of an inherent kind of challenge when it comes to software development is dependencies. It's like, what are you built on? Because nothing is built on binary, right? Like we're like six layers up in the stack, for most of OS is obviously much lower, but we're still built on like, you know, we're built on PiOS, which is built on Debian, which is built on the Linux kernel, and it's just like, it's just like software is a layered thing, so dependencies are always something you just have to keep an eye on and be diligent about." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:40", "start": 1480.22, "text": "Sure. And so on the question of cost as well, so can you just outline for listeners what's the cost difference here? Let's say if we're going for the Embassy One, what's the cost of the Embassy Pro device just to give people an idea" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "24:55", "start": 1495.25, "text": "We are literally in transition right now. So the Embassy One, we're-- we have just transitioned from the like external drive plug-and-play thing to the all-in-one, encasement. We're actually lowering the cost as a result of this, but that is more of a sort of company decision rather-- it's not like our costs have gone down. We're just trying to keep the entry-level device lower while we push the Pro for more, advanced usage. So the cost, the new cost of the Embassy One, don't quote me to the dollar on this, is going to For the one terabyte variety, and that's before any kind of discount, which there's lots of discount codes floating around out there. We also have eight percent, seven percent on Fold, by the way, too. So if you have a Fold card, you can compound these discounts and basically just get free Bitcoin, and then the all-in cost is in like the low four hundreds, plus you're stacking Bitcoin. So all in, if you take advantage of the right discount codes, you're looking at low four hundreds for a one terabyte variety and low five hundreds for a two terabyte variety," }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "25:55", "start": 1555.23, "text": "So again, power problems solved, it's a very nice device. the Embassy Pro, we're currently pre-selling 'cause we haven't started shipping it yet. it is on track for a fall release, so in the next couple of months, we, we will be shipping this device. We are taking deposits currently at forty-two dollars for a deposit, which then gets you a huge discount off of our expected retail price. we're still sort of feeling the market out on this, but we expect to retail the Embassy Pro, at At between eighteen hundred and nineteen hundred dollars, if you're putting the forty-two down, we're giving you four hundred dollars off of that price, so we're looking right around fourteen hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, as your all-in cost for the Pro. I know that sounds like a lot, if you were to go online and configure an Intel Nook To the exact specification of the Embassy Pro, it would be almost $2, 000. So we are undercutting the market from a computer performance standpoint significantly, by about 20 to 25%. these are real badass computers, right? I would like to talk about some of the options that you and Katon talked about as well, which is going the like refurbished mini PC route to get more power on a budget, which we think is wonderful and very viable as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:16", "start": 1635.62, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Have you left your coins on the exchange or do you have family in France who are just simply too scared to do this? Get your coins off the exchange and don't delay. Go to Unchained Capital and they can help you out with a multi-signature vault. This will give you that peace of mind knowing that you have removed single points of failure. After the crypto collapse of earlier this year, so many more people have learned why it's important to hold your own keys with Bitcoin. So with Unchained, they can give you a concierge onboarding experience where they will help you over call, set up your vault, and with-withdraw your coins out of the exchange or out of your single signature wallet into your multi-signature vault. So if you want this, go to Unchained dot com, go to the concierge page, and use code Livera for a discount on your package. Are you interested in Bitcoin mining? Brains dot com, that's b r a i i n s dot com, can help. They have Brains OS Plus. This is firmware that you may be able to install on your Bitcoin mining ASIC machine. You can increase On the other hand, you might choose to improve efficiency and get better jewels per tera hash. There are all kinds of, features available as part of Brains OS Plus. Now, they also offer Brains Farm Proxy. This is a single application that allows miners to configure parallel usage of multiple pools, you can reduce data loads and designate backup pools. So there's all kinds of options there that help you manage your Bitcoin mining farm. Also, Brains Analytics Dashboard, the Insights Dashboard is fantastic. If you really need If you want a deep insight into Bitcoin mining, this is the place to go. So go and find all of this over at brains dot com. Are you sending Bitcoin transactions or are you managing a Lightning node? Mempool dot space is really useful for you. It's a Bitcoin explorer built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners. It has real-time transaction tracking and mempool visualization, so you can see both the projected blocks and the confirmed blocks, and you can also see what kind of fee rate you should set depending on the priority of your Bitcoin transaction. Also, mempool Mempool.space have recently launched a Lightning Explorer, so you can search based on Lightning node ID, you can look at the different channels that are there, you can see things like the average capacity, the median capacity, the most connected list, the highest liquidity list. There's all kinds of features, and it's really indispensable if you are using a Bitcoin node or a Lightning node. Mempool.space is just another tool that you need to use. So you can go and try it out today, you can even self-host it, and they even are Offering an enterprise edition, so for those of you interested, go and get in touch, but the website is over at mempool dot space. Right. Yeah, and I think that's, you know, just to sort of give the listeners their kind of neutral, and, you know, for them to understand, okay, if I'm buying the Start9 device, what am I paying for, right? It's not just the hardware, it's also that kind of the software support. You're supporting this project, and so there's like an aspect there. I, I appreciate that. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:15", "start": 1814.98, "text": "People were to DIY, let's say, DIY with, you know, if you went for a ThinkPad or if you went for, you know, Katans, you know, Dell Optiplex, you know, a couple hundred dollars. Now, to be fair, there is some more DIY required here. So for example, you might need to actually be comfortable with opening that box up, putting in a, a bigger hard drive. You might need to be comfortable with, depending on how you wanna set it up, you might need to be comfortable with command line. You might need to flash Ubuntu" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:45", "start": 1845.28, "text": "To that, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts that you wanna add there around, you know, the comparison of DIY versus buy something out of the box." }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "30:52", "start": 1852.06, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:53", "start": 1852.58, "text": "So we are sort of" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "30:54", "start": 1854.12, "text": "DIY first in terms of our messaging. So like, if you go to our website, there's, you know, Buy an Embassy and DIY side by side. Ultimately, we wanna see this technology spread. We want to see people self-hosting. You know, that's the point here. We sell convenience, and support, right? We sell community. We sell, so- When you buy from Start9, what you're doing is, is like, we're developing arguably the most advanced kind of self-hosting for everyone technology that has ever existed, and that doesn't come cheap, right? We're a talented team of people who, who need to survive and, and, you know, we're growing a business here, so that we can continue to propagate the technology. Now, that said, it's also not a donation, right? You are getting real value if you buy from us as opposed to DIY, which is the plug-and-play experience. You just Just plug it in and it just works. and you're also getting this sort of twenty four seven white glove support from us and from our very passionate community of very technical people. like you're gonna have, you're gonna get help. So that said, people who do feel confident to sort of put this together themselves can do so and, and save a few bucks. Probably not as much as you think. The discount isn't that steep once you tally all the, all the added costs and time. It, it is there, but it is on the margin. So for instance, doing a kind of DIY refurbished mini PC like an Optiplex, you know, if you find a good deal, if you find a good refurbished one that's in excellent condition, you're gonna end up with, you know, probably an i5, so, you know, a, a great processor, something that's gonna blow the Raspberry Pi chip out of the water. it's also not gonna be, you know, the i7 or i9 brand new thing. It's gonna Moderate, but very, very adequate for most usage. You are gonna have to get some storage, if you don't have it already, and that can get pricey, depends, right? If you're doing a one or two terabyte variety, so like the Embassy Pro, for instance, is a two terabyte NVMe, which is a far cry from a one terabyte SSD. Those are very, very different price, considerations. A one terabyte SSD you can pick up for under a hundred dollars, a two terabyte NVMe is usually gonna run you three hundred if Any, decent quality, and there's a very noticeable difference there. Not only is it double the amount of storage, but it's way faster, way faster. And when you have write-intensive, things like Electrs, you're gonna notice a big difference with something like that. So I think all in, Katon had cited a like five hundred dollar kind of price target, maybe four hundred, right, for getting like a good, right? I think you were speaking in, in, in" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:41", "start": 2021.05, "text": "AUD terms, so yeah, something like that," }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "33:43", "start": 2022.87, "text": "yeah. Okay, yeah. About four varies a lot depending on where you are and, and the deal you can find. But let's say you can pick up a good computer between the four hundred and five hundred dollar range or something like four hundred dollar range, you know, versus buying a Raspberry Pi all in one, everything put together for a similar price. which one do you do? Right? It depends. It depends on if you're comfortable doing the DIY approach. It depends on if, you value the, the community and support aspect of the product. But we, we support it, right? If you wanna go get A Dell Optiplex and, and install mBcOS on it. Can't do it yet because we haven't launched the x86 distro of the operating system, but it's around the corner. we will be able to support, we, you know, hopefully, pretty much every, every architecture and form factor under the sun eventually. that'll require a little bit of tweaking for different things, and, you know, the problem here too is just variance in hardware. Like, you're not gonna have a lot of issues with the board itself, like the chip And on the RAM, those are all gonna be okay, but storage can be, can be really painful. there's a lot of drives out there that don't conform to exact standards or claim that they do, and then don't exactly. So you gotta be careful, you could end up having IO issues with your drive if, it's not one of the sort of like known supported quality drives." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:07", "start": 2107.37, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah. So I guess in this example, the one, 'cause Katana and I chat and o-often he, he, he's a fan of the, QVO. So for example, let's say you went for that and it was a two terabyte drive, I think, I was looking it up, I mean, at least for me, in the UAE, I can get that for about a hundred and fifty dollars, ish, for a, for a two terabyte Samsung QVO SSD, not the NVMe, as you were saying. That's correct. So you'd have to be, again, be comfortable opening your computer, plugging that in. So, you know, that will require a little bit of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:45", "start": 2144.98, "text": "I'm curious, you mentioned, you know, in the DIY case, so let's say a Start9 user wants to DIY, are you selling like a license to use the operating system or what's the model around that?" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "35:55", "start": 2155.44, "text": "Not anymore, no. So we have recently, changed our approach to MBCOS, actually as planned, okay? So like, a lot of the things that we do, we actually have kind of a vision of how we're going to evolve this company and it gets more and more open over time, not less and less, 'cause when you're tiny And then as you grow, you can sort of get-- and this is opposite the way a lot of people view company growth, they view it as you get bigger, you sort of corrupt more and more. we have an idea of doing it a slightly different way. But anyway, so MBCOS, is, is now totally, we, you know, at today, you can go download, the O3.1, which is the latest version, you can go download O3.1 from either GitHub or images.start9.com, and you just type in As your product key, and it'll just download a fresh image, and then you can install that on a Raspberry Pi. So it is possible today to essentially get up and running fully with an embassy, without ever touching us or doing business with us. And we are going to continue that obviously into O3-2, which is on the eve of being launched, which is a big version for us because it removes product keys altogether. So now all images are created equal. You will be able to download it from our website, download it from GitHub, download it from your friend One's self hosted instance of Nextcloud, wherever, you can just download mBcOS, flash it, plug it in, run it, and you're up and running. So it is a, you know, totally free, free as in beer OS for the consumer now. We retain a non-commercial clause in the license that basically says at present, Start9 is the only entity that can profit from the distribution, of mBcOS, but again, that's part of the strategy as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:45", "start": 2265.14, "text": "Gotcha. And so 0.3.2, is that also the edition where, like, along with releasing that, is that where you're going to also have x86 support? 0.3.3" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "37:55", "start": 2274.58, "text": "is x86. So 0.3.2 was a sort of intermediate step to get rid of product keys. It is a lot of under the hood performance tuning. So like, we switched from using a SQLite database to a Postgres database because SQLite just, just, we, yeah, it was just causing some, some- Obscure issues from time to time. So we've, we've really kind of beefed up the OS in O3.2, as well as simplified it by removing a lot of the weird stuff we were doing with product keys and, and then O3.3 is the x86 distro, which will follow pretty shortly. We're actually a good way into O3.3 already, and we'll launch with the Pro. Fantastic." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:34", "start": 2314.21, "text": "And so then, if you could walk us through that install experience, I presume it's going to be similar, like basically the user will Flash that either to the SD card or to a USB stick and then install it that way, or what's the install look like? Exactly." }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "38:51", "start": 2331.2, "text": "You would, you would download, Embassy OS, to your computer, you would put in, you know, your, your SD card, open up BelenA Etcher, flash it, take the SD card out, put it in your Raspberry Pi, plug in an SSD, plug it in to the wall, you know, an Ethernet, and then visit embassy dot local. It's a pretty standard setup procedure for these, for these products it's all done over the local area network of your home, right? The, the Embassy is broadcasting on embassy dot local, so it's just a webpage, you just go to m dot local, and, you know, about three clicks later, your device is up and running, serves itself on both the local area network in perpetuity, on a unique address, by the way, it doesn't stay at embassy dot local, because if you had like multiple embassies, those would conflict with each other, so it serves itself up on a unique dot local address and a unique So when you're home, you use it over https dot local, and it has a self-signed cert that you install into your browser, so it's encrypted traffic even on the LAN, so if somebody was, you know, sniffing your LAN, they couldn't even see what you were doing. and then when you're on the go, you visit your onion address, which is also, you know, obviously encrypted and onion routed, for remote access. What's really cool is that shortly following the release of the Pro, our next major, feature launch is going So you will be able to optionally, you will not have to do this, but it will be probably the best way to use your device, you will optionally be able to add any domain, that you, that you own, and use it to host your embassy. Not only like the main dashboard of your embassy on, say, s-- you know, stephanolivera dot com would be like your embassy main dashboard if you wanted it to be, and then btpay dot stephanolivera dot com or store dot stephanolivera dot com would actually- Serve your BTC Pay store, and then you could do, you know, nextcloud dot stephan livera, and that would serve your own self-hosted Nextcloud instance. And so you can optionally, you will optionally be able to toggle on and off what domains slash subdomains you use for various services, and these will be highly granularly configurable. So for instance, you'll be able to register like four different domains: stephanlivera dot com, stephanlivera dot net, and then pi You can choose which services you host on those domains and subdomains of those domains, and then turn them on and off. So if you think that one, like, you know, is being abused, like somebody's trying to doss you on Clearnet, you can just go turn it off, and that will stop, and your Tor address will remain. So censorship resistance is like a big deal here, because it's like, you can go full Clearnet, but if they ever pull the plug on you, you're two seconds later telling everyone to go to the onion site." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:42", "start": 2502.29, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah Uncle Jim context, right? So let's say you have Nextcloud and you have your uncle or your auntie who you wanna share a photo with, or you can put that into your Nextcloud and in that example, it could be, you know, in that Nextcloud instance under your, website, and it's easier to share that URL with them because now they don't need to have Tor browser to go there, and for them, maybe they're a bit weirded out by, \"Oh, what's this Tor browser thing? \" Now it's just, \"Oh, I can just" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "42:15", "start": 2534.98, "text": "Very necessary censorship resistant fallback, right? To date, we and everyone else have been using Tor as a primary. It really isn't a good primary, right? The threat model of Clearnet is pretty low. Like, you have to be explicitly targeted, right, to, to have your Clearnet domain compromised in any meaningful way. and if it is, then Tor is just sitting right there, right? So having that fallback, that escape hatch of Tor, we think will actually act as a deterrent. Of Clearnet attacks, because it's like, why attack the Clearnet site? All you're gonna do is push it into the shadows, right? And then you can't stop that. You can't turn off a website, you can't even denial of service attack an Onion website because Tor has DOS protect, DDoS protection built into the protocol, right? Now it itself is being denial of service attacked, the entire Tor network, that's a different problem, and, you know, we're, we're dealing with that, it's very painful, but But yeah, I mean, you know, we talk with organizations who want to-- like, this is the whole reason of the Embassy Pro and Clearnet. It's, it's like, it's-- 'cause an individual, a highly, not even highly technical, your average Bitcoiner is going to put up with more inconvenience and weirdness than anyone else in the world for the sake of independence and sovereignty, okay? We're dealing with a very, slanted market here. It's not representative of the rest. of the world, the rest of the world isn't going to do this. They aren't going to set up Tor on their computer and then use v3 addresses to do their self-hosted anything. They're just not gonna do it. So what we're doing is we're pushing, obviously for the, the, the, the, the ideal end game of everyone running a personal server, but we also recognize that that's probably not realistic ever, that in the future you're mostly going to have, yes, a lot of people running their own server But you're also gonna see families running a familial server, you're gonna see organizations running an organizational server, right? Churches are gonna have their own server, businesses, schools, and the people who belong to those organizations or that family are going to use that server, right? The uncle Jim model, we think, is the real push into the future. And then, yes, obviously, if you always ever wanna take that next step and become fully sovereign, it's not that hard, you can do it, and you can stop using your uncle's server, for your needs. But in order for the Uncle Jim model to work, two things had to be true. We needed better computers. Raspberry Pi's weren't ever going to cut it if you wanted a hundred of your congregation members to use a server, and two, Tor. Tor wasn't ever going to cut it either. So by beefing up the hardware and going multi-platform and by introducing ClearNet support, which is what we're calling the ability to host your embassy and its services on a normal domain, we are un- Locking the door to organizations and content creators, of all sorts, and we think that is the path to grow the technology. And" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:25", "start": 2725.29, "text": "it may also be more viable for, you know, let's say businesses or a group of people to, let's say, hey, let's all chip in to get one big server going, rather than each individual person trying to buy their own, right? So you can see there's a business case there. So in a sense, in some sense, Start9 might, start- Being a little more B2B in some sense." }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "45:46", "start": 2746.25, "text": "Yeah, it's, it's more like, yeah, it's not even B2B necessarily, it's just like organizations using it for themselves, for whatever those purposes are. And if you look at some of these organizations today, they're actually getting raked over the coals in terms of SaaS costs, right? Like, we talked about" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:03", "start": 2762.98, "text": "this on my last episode. And this is our recent episode where we spoke about how you're, you're able to, let's say this organization is currently paying a lot for Dropbox or for, you know You know, some kind of, Microsoft Office 365, whereas maybe if we could use Nextcloud instead and host that, then, hey, we can cut out all this Dropbox cost, and hey, all of a sudden now it's a lot cheaper for us to just buy this Embassy Pro device than pay Office, Dropbox, Slack, et cetera." }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "46:31", "start": 2790.7, "text": "Yeah, it's a one-time upfront capital cost." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:33", "start": 2793.2, "text": "Yeah. So I think, that's fascinating as well to see. I think one other question I was really curious, and you mentioned earlier, is the I guess setting the table again for listeners, I think Katan's thoughts on this were more like, \"Hey, you wanna-- from a, they, they, you, you might wanna have some segregation, have Bitcoin things on one thing and non-Bitcoin things on another.\" What's your thinking here? I, I think that Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "46:58", "start": 2818.25, "text": "and non-Bitcoin is the wrong delineation, right? That is the, the sort of easy one and it's sort of the, the popular one to say, but that's not actually what they mean. When somebody says you shouldn't run your Bitcoin and non" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "47:14", "start": 2833.7, "text": "Two other things. One is your hot and cold infrastructure, right? As in things that are hosting keys that protect money should not be on the same box as things that don't. And number two, what they imply by that statement is that things that are very resource, intensive should not be running on the same box as things that maybe don't need a lot of resources. That there's sort of this cross-contamination. And I generally agree with that if you are going to be running a lot of things. And this, and running any, using any meaningful amount of money, right? So if, if, for instance, if you're running five services, like Bitcoin, c-c-l-n, you know, Core Lightning, and- Vault Warden or Nextcloud, right? Like, say like those are, that's what you're running. So you've got some, you know, you got Bitcoin which is totally cold in most cases, unless you're using the, the core wallet as a, as a hot wallet. and then you've got things that are inherently hot, like Core Lightning. But the resources aren't gonna be an issue. So the second reason for bifurcating goes out the window, right? Resources aren't gonna be an issue because you're not running a lot of services. And Have like two hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin on your Lightning node, it's also not a big deal if the whole thing goes kaboom, right? Either. So it's like, you don't really need to bifurcate your stuff because the-- your threat model and the disaster scenario just aren't that big or that bad. And so it's like, it's okay, right? Like, you don't need to shoot for the ideal. But if you're running thirty, forty services, and a good chunk of those things are really resource intensive, and other things are- Are holding private keys and are super hot, and other things are totally benign. You should probably come up with a strategy of threat mitigation, right? Like, and, and resource, usage so that your benign things, sorry, your non-resource intensive things, aren't getting bogged down by your resource intensive things. So I don't think that there is like this clear, like, you should run these things on one box and these things on another box. It really depends on how many of these things you're running And what they are, and what you're using them for. there is unfortunately no just one size fits all, do this, which I know isn't ideal, 'cause people really want that. So here's what we, what we, have been telling our community is if, if you want to-- So hold on, let me, let me back up for a second here and, and state kind of what the, what the real threat is, like Why not put key things on a server and non-key things on a different server? Like, why, why is-- Why not put 'em all on the same device? The, the, the perceived threat here is malware. It is cross-contamination, right? It's like I install some new version of, you know, some benign chat app or something like that. Chat could be very private as well, so I'm trying to think of something that like doesn't matter, and kind of all matters to an extent, like you don't wanna get hacked on any of these services, but- Like, say like I install some new version, and it's, it's like malware, and we're using Docker for containerization, which affords some degree of sandboxing, right? Like, it's, it's pretty good at keeping these things separate. That's kind of the whole point, is that they're running in their own little virtual machines. But we're not gonna make a claim that if someone were to build sophisticated malware into one of the services that you install on your device, that it can't access other services. It can. Ultimately, they're on the same metal, okay? Like get to each other. We are building out more sophisticated systems, like we don't use Docker Compose, we're not using off-the-shelf Docker stuff to do what we do. We are building a whole new system that is far more sophisticated and featureful and secure than what something like Docker Compose can offer, which is how all these other systems orchestrate their containers. we're building out a permissions API such that services won't be able to access any other services without the sort of user- Permission, right? It'll prompt, it'll be like, \"You've installed lnd and it's requesting permission to access these, you know, parts of Bitcoin, do you approve? \" And so then you can say yes. Now, if you blindly say yes and that is malware, then you're still hacked. Ultimately, you can-- you can't protect the user from themselves, but at the end of the day, the experience will be similar to like an iPhone or Android phone when it says, \"Hey, you've installed this app and it wants these permissions to your device, The deal, though. So people say, \"Run it on different computers, \"because you could end up with some malware of this that infects this thing, and that is absolutely true. But putting them on different machines doesn't really solve that, does it? Because if you have all your Bitcoin stuff running on machine A, right? And by Bitcoin stuff, let's be clear what we mean here. We're talking like Bitcoin, Electrs, LND, CLN, RTL, Spark, yada, yada, Btcpay. You've got like this whole stack of services, and you're Super safe because they're all Bitcoin services. Why? What if one of those services in an update is total malware? Your whole system is compromised. The fact that it was Bitcoin or non-Bitcoin didn't really eliminate that threat, it just mitigated it by lowering the attack surface, right? So if I'm running fifty services on my device and they're all over the board from Bitcoin to Lightning to non-Bitcoin to storage to messaging, am I more likely to download malware and have my funds stolen? Absolutely. But if I'm running ten services on a device and they're all Bitcoin only, you haven't eliminated that threat, you've just minimized it, which is a good idea. We're not saying not to separate things, we're just saying that this isn't a magic pill. You can't just have a device that's running Bitcoin things and have a device that's running non-Bitcoin things and then just, I'm, go, I'm safe. You're not. You've, you've slightly mitigated a threat. The right way to do this is to make sure that you're downloading Trusted software, signed appropriately, and not store your life's fortune" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:30", "start": 3210.09, "text": "on your lightning node. Of course. Right. So let's summarize that then. So, in essence then, the argument isn't as much about Bitcoin versus not Bitcoin, it's essentially more about whether you are keys hot or keys cold, and as you're saying around resource intensiveness, so probably, probably the most important distinction really is just keys hot versus not, you know, because really, for- If somebody is just running an Electrum server, and all the keys are held, you know, in, in like a, in a hardware wallet instead, well then at least you're not, you're not that much at risk in terms of losing your coins. Like, okay, maybe there's a privacy ramification, fine, but it's not, i-it's not, it's not the end of the world, compared to if you, if your Lightning node has like all of your coins on it and it gets pwned, well then you're" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "54:24", "start": 3263.92, "text": "Is this, if you are a power lightning user with a ton of funds, ton of hot funds on lightning, your server that is running that lightning node should have Bitcoin and lightning on it, maybe some sort of node management software on top of lightning like RTL or Balance of Satoshi, but again, the fewer the services you have running, it doesn't matter what kind of services there are, it's not Bitcoin versus non-Bitcoin, it's like you want to minimize the attack surface of potential- Malware installation. So you want as few services running as possible on the node that is managing your money. Maybe that's the right heuristic to think about this. It's like your sensitive things, things that you really don't want someone to have access to, whether it's for privacy reasons or it's, you know, your data or your money, minimize the number of things running on that device. And then put all your sort of less important things maybe on, on another device. That might be the right kind of angle to think about this." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:24", "start": 3324.26, "text": "Yeah, I think that's a good spot to finish up. So, yeah, great chatting, Matt. I, I think it's, how should I put this? I'll just say it's, it's, good to see the community having, some rigorous back and forth about what kinds of devices we should be using, whether it's Bitcoin applications or self-sovereignty just generally, and, listeners You can find them over at startnine dot com. Matt, I think your Twitter is underscore matt hill, underscore, right?" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "55:53", "start": 3353.08, "text": "That's right. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:54", "start": 3354.04, "text": "Yeah. So yeah, Matt, anything else you want people to, know before we finish up?" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "55:58", "start": 3358.34, "text": "I don't think so." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:00", "start": 3359.58, "text": "Okay, fantastic. Well," }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "56:01", "start": 3360.8, "text": "just that this" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:01", "start": 3361.48, "text": "isn't a" }, { "speaker": "matt_hill_of_start9", "time": "56:02", "start": 3362.04, "text": "settled discussion, right? Like, this is a good-- I'm glad you had that, interview with Katan. I think he's great. I think that he was spot on with everything. It's just that we and it's important to keep talking about it, and that's why I wanted to come on. So, I appreciate it, thank you. Our community appreciates it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:24", "start": 3383.52, "text": "yeah. Yeah, fantastic. Well, thank you. So, the show notes are available over at stephanilivera dot com slash four one four. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }