{ "episodeId": "SLP445", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "dhruv_bansal": { "name": "Dhruv Bansal", "role": "guest", "tag": "DHRUV" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 8.49, "text": "Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics, brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. Today my guest is Dhruv Bansal. He is the co-founder and C-SO of Unchained Capital. Now he's rejoining me to chat on the show about a range of things we talk about being in a bear cycle, as well as innovating through that bear cycle. What does that look like? We reflect a little bit on the role of leverage and credit. Whether that serves a purpose in the world today, Bitcoin and financial planning, is there a connection there, and should that be more prominent? We also chat a little bit about inheritance planning, multisig and Taproot, as well as his thoughts on Nostra and Bitcoin and computer security. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, and as you might know, you can buy Bitcoin and also learn about Bitcoin, but also you can use it to give a business benefit plan for your employees. So if you're out of business and you want to give the benefit of Bitcoin Let's say a hundred dollars a month or fifty dollars a month for your staff, Swan can help you with this. And so this is an easy way to help onboard people because you're not just giving them the gift of Bitcoin every month, you are giving them the gift of Swan's ongoing education and world-class customer support. We get a lot of really great testimonials on how good and how fast the customer support is, and you get solid answers from real people. So if you're interested in this, go to swan dot com slash business. Now, if you're interested in Bitcoin and hardware security Security, CoinKite dot com is the place to go. They have a range of products, most notably the Cold Card Mark IV, but also they have the TapSigner. This is a cheaper level device, it's about forty dollars, it's the size of a credit card, and basically you use this with NFC to tap and sign your Bitcoin transactions, and it's really cool and really slick, so it might be a great option for you if you want to use this as part of your multi-signature or potentially as part of a more regular wallet with a smaller amount that you use for- day to day signing and receiving of transactions. So go and check it out, it's over at coinkite dot com, and of course, if you're getting cold cards, use the code livera for a discount there. And lastly, Blockstream is also a sponsor of the show, and they have a new community coming out, it's called Build on L2. This is a community for Bitcoin builders, whether you are a product manager, a designer, or an engineer, there'll be events. This is an interactive community, you can join a mentorship program to fast track your success. Do some networking and explore this community space to learn something new alongside other Bitcoiners. Now, there are different tracks for those of you more interested in core Lightning, there's that side, and then there's also Liquid. So there'll be a range of things to get involved with, whether that's events, programs to fast-track your success, a way to showcase your skills to the community, or and you can ask for support and help other people. So that website is buildonl2 dot com. And now onto the show with Dhruv. Dhruv," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "02:53", "start": 173.03, "text": "welcome back to the show. Thank you" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:57", "start": 176.87, "text": "Yeah, so I mean, there's been so much going on this year, and, you know, here we are, December 2022, there's been just a complete blow up of, quote unquote, crypto, right? But there's been obviously been an impact onto us here in the Bitcoin world. So, you know, what are some of your reflections on, what's going on in this bear cycle or downturn or whatever we're calling this?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "03:19", "start": 198.71, "text": "Yeah, no, it, it has been a strange few years for so many reasons, right? Like the macro situation has been crazy This past year with the collapse of so many large players in the space, it has been a wild ride. My emotions are mixed, as you may imagine, I think a lot of us Bitcoiners are in a position of feeling a certain degree of vindication and a degree of like, you know, I told you so, like you should have just not done that thing. But, no one likes seeing Bitcoin prices at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen K for extended periods. We don't like seeing our friends and colleagues, despite how wrong they may have been. No one likes seeing people's wealth destroyed People gained and taken advantage of, and it does erode trust. I think an experience I have a lot, I'm sure maybe you feel this too, around the holidays and stuff, you're going back to your family or your friends, your hometown or whatever, and people have no ability to distinguish Bitcoin from this bag of tricks that's been going on with SBF and, hey man, are you guys doing that SBF thing? Is that affecting you? And, and part of me wants to shout like, no, not, absolutely no way, is that affecting you? Like, I'm so Right? So it's a, it's a huge black mark, I think, at the same time. Like, and this is the vin-- this is the vindication part, like, there are definitely folks that I've spoken with and, and encouraged to avoid these kinds of things that now feel like I saved them a lot of pain and stress. Unchained has had one of its best months ever in terms of onboarding and activation of new clients. I think there's a lot of folks for whom the freezing of deposits and sort of the runs on some of these third-party custodians really So I did, like, had been meaning to do that collaborative custody thing, I just haven't done that, and maybe this is a good signal that I need to do it. So it's, it's been really good for us in that way. But then again, conversely, the price is, is down, that really impacts our business, metrics are down as a result, and in a lot, in a lot of other areas of our business, people are, are, are scared. There, there n- there's not as much top of funnel coming in, I think for" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "05:27", "start": 326.71, "text": "For its own reasons, I suppose, but, I don't know, I, I, I feel very optimistic in terms of other downturns that have happened, like March twenty twenty, you know, beginning of the COVID, you know, pandemic stuff, it's like, there were a lot more object, or even before that, when my company was a lot smaller, when things were a lot more uncertain, there were so many more downturns where I felt like I had less control, I felt like we had accomplished less as both an industry, as well as, you" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "05:55", "start": 355.31, "text": "know, We're, we're all in a position of strength right now. I think a lot of Bitcoin companies are in a position of strength, and if we can continue to survive, if we can, you know, continue to innovate in our business models and win and make, make happy clients, you know, I think we can make really big businesses. So I'm feeling very optimistic, about both Bitcoin as well as the, the companies, who are helping bring Bitcoin to more and more people." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:19", "start": 378.79, "text": "Yeah. I'm also curious your thoughts around leverage in the space, right? Obviously" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:27", "start": 386.69, "text": "A lot of the, whether they were badly run businesses, whether they were Ponzi's or frauds or just frac- you know, fractional reserve, right? Have people learned the lesson or is it just like, are we just gonna see the cycle play out over and over and over?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "06:41", "start": 400.72, "text": "I don't know. It feels like there's a few big bads, right? In crypto or in our world. Like one, one of them is the, is the getting hacked, right? The other is the, you know, the ICO speculative mania for like shitcoinery, that it's not gonna Wanton, bad risk management across whole, you know, linked players in the marketplace and, and consumers and retail investors and, and even whales sometimes not being isolated from that, right? So there, there's, there's some big bats, and I, and I feel to your point, none of these are new things to crypto necessarily. You know, one of the things I really loved about, being on Bitcoin Twitter is you, you have so many different kinds of experience. I, I've loved some of the threads from Arda on, you know, railroad manias of Hundreds and so on. And it's just like, you know, humans are really kind of the same animal in, in a lot of ways, and, we behave the same, when predictably similar stimuli are, are, are put to us. So I kind of feel like that argues for, no, we won't learn our lesson, that every new cohort that comes in is gonna, is gonna, I'm here for, I'm here to fix Bitcoin, well, let, let me start my own thing, let me repeat some of these mistakes around not holding keys, not" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "07:57", "start": 476.69, "text": "The stuff moves in cohorts, and there, there's a cohort that, like, for whom these events were the reason they became real Bitcoiners, so to speak, right? Like, this is what minted a new class of Bitcoiners. I'm certainly not the first to say that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:09", "start": 489.38, "text": "Yeah, no, and I think that's absolutely right. I think this is, the common experience for the, those of us who've been around for a while, we see people who come in, they're a little bit newer, maybe they haven't spent the time to actually do some learning about what Bitcoin technical understanding of what's going on and learn the practical steps of that, right? Whether that's setting up multisig, whether that's learning how to run your Bitcoin node, whether that's learning how to do privacy stuff, like there's all kinds of things that you can learn and do in these down times," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "08:40", "start": 520.26, "text": "ev-e-evaluating financial services providers with a little bit more skepticism and diligence." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:45", "start": 524.9, "text": "Right. Yeah, exactly. yeah. So I think, you know, going through, a bear cycle, I guess there are challenges around that too, right? Everybody's trying to, you know Right through the bear cycle, assuming, you know, it's, assuming we're still in a cyclical sort of environment and eventually the cycle will turn, but it's about trying to survive then, isn't it?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "09:06", "start": 546.3, "text": "Yeah. a, and it- Surviving, but also I think not, not becoming afraid in a certain way, I think is important too. That like, I think there, there tends to be, at least I noticed this, I'm, I'm pretty passive on, on Bitcoin Twitter and a lot of discussions and stuff, but I do tend to see that, there's a, a need for scapegoating sometimes, in times like this, like when shit is fucking going wrong, it's like, well, whose, whose fault is it this time? Who, who screwed this up for us" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "09:38", "start": 577.92, "text": "I believe there's some credence to notions of like rounded tops last year and, and so on due to various internal trading things that are very complicated and, and, and strange. So I, I do believe there, there are some effects like that a-a-and things we can blame if we wanna blame something. I noticed another curious trend though, which maybe we can highlight and talk about for a second, which is like, I, I've noticed a trend of like blaming the concept of credit itself as, as somehow like that, that is the root of the problem, like Bitcoiners shouldn't be Evil thing, credit is fiat, borrowing is fiat, lending is fiat. We have a very tribal culture sometimes, especially in Bitcoin Twitter. and that-- but this to me is a very curious reaction, because it, it strikes me as similar to the sort of person who, who, you know, lumps SBF and FTX and altcoins alongside Bitcoin and, and, you know, more secure, and more principled projects, right? It's like, it, it's just you're so far away from it that you're not distinguishing, and new, That, in that statement. So I sometimes think that like, there's a lot of ways that you can blow people up with credit in, in Bitcoin, and credit can be a very dangerous tool, but it can be a very powerful and important tool. I know that Unchained, you know, we've saved a lot of Bitcoin because we've helped people not have to sell their Bitcoin when they didn't want to. I will, I have seen people get liquidated though on our platform as well because they took on too much risk. I tend to be in of the mind Make bad decisions, and it's gonna, it's gonna maybe reform their behavior. Sometimes they're gonna make those bad decisions, they're gonna look for someone to blame. I have found like the more time I've spent at Unchained and thinking about and ideating around credit products, I actually think credit is a really powerful construct, like just for the growth of Bitcoin. Like, there's a lot of reasons why credit is a, is a vehicle that brings Bitcoin closer to dollars, that makes Bitcoin more useful, and this is credit can work in both directions. I feel like part of Bitcoin is like, we wanna provide them in a way that is like in the spirit of Bitcoin, and we wanna expose risk and parcel out risk in a way that's transparent and controllable and meterable by the consumers of those financial services. the reaction that like all financial services are bullshit, just huddle and don't do anything else, and the world will, you know, change for the better just through that action alone, I think is a little naive, and it, it lacks some of the nuance of like trying to understand why some approaches to financial services can be successful in a Bitcoin-based world Should be, you know, left by the wayside and thought of as, as, diseases of the old financial world, right? Like notions of, of wanton rehypothecation without any kind of accountability or transparency, I think is something you sort of had to allow, like, or rather the only protection you had being reputational and diligence based. Like, well, so-and-so said it was safe, therefore it's probably safe, or their brand is so great, therefore it's probably safe. I think we can, we, we should dispense as an industry with those kinds of" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "12:38", "start": 758.04, "text": "Can don't, don't have to make that choice, at least." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:41", "start": 760.52, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "12:41", "start": 761.18, "text": "So I, I, I, I like, I like to be a little bit more, courageous and, and not get afraid and, and suddenly turn away from these challenging areas. I want to go dig in, like, this is the time when innovation is almost most called for." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:53", "start": 772.97, "text": "Yeah. And I, I've commented on my views on credit also. I did an article for Bitcoin Magazine talking about why it's not that all credit-- it's not that we're against all credit. I think it's the right Like a kind of like a full reserve version of credit versus a fractional reserve version of credit, and Kate LeLong has been very vocal about this and, and others in the space also. And I think what might be interesting, especially from your perspective and your viewpoint working at Unchained and being a founder of Unchained, I'm curious if you could spell out maybe in your view, obviously not doxing individual customers or whatever, but if you could spell out what were the scenarios where people were able to successfully do it and why, what made it successful for them, their loan as opposed to customers who maybe Maybe it didn't work out for them because maybe they got liquidated or maybe they were a little too risky or not conservative enough." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "13:44", "start": 823.66, "text": "I, I think it boils down to that, boils down to risk management and your ability to swallow large price changes in, in Bitcoin's motion. There, I think there's a sense in which Bitcoin's volatility can always outpace, your collateral if you're not careful. so I, it's, it, it tends to be a little bit of a red flag, I think, for our loan operations team in general, but someone borrowing Like, even if you think we are at the bottom, we can always go lower. Do you have the dollars to back up the change in price? If, if you don't, you probably don't wanna borrow against all your Bitcoin, you wanna have some dry powder. I mean, Unshamed allows you to pull Bitcoin out of collateral for loans, as prices increase, so you can always get it back. it's just a matter of if you don't have any dry reserve left, like, okay, now you're having to sell Bitcoin. which of course, Unchained can do, and sometimes that is the right decision, and that's perfectly fine, but if you're forced into that solution, you may not feel very good about borrowing or using leverage in the first place. And, and maybe that's the right solution, maybe you're not a person that can, can do that effectively. but for a lot of people, you know, I think we have a great relationship, for example, with miners. A lot of our clients are miners, and, you know, they're dealing with the com-combined If they're able to hold their coins like through these, like, really bad periods, that they get into like an amazing green territory, you know, in a year or two, right? And that selling those coins right now is one of the worst things that they could do for the long-term health of their, of their business. And so giving them a tool to manage that is really important. credit is really powerful, so it's just you gotta, you gotta do it safely, and you gotta do it in a way that gives as much control to the borrowers as possible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:29", "start": 929.39, "text": "Yeah. So small portion or a, a smaller portion of your stack, you should ideally have income that you're able to be paying that loan down with. You, you know, you should be quite conservative in how you do these aspects of it. And, you know, by the time you've crunched out the numbers or looked at this, it may be that maybe you can't borrow as much as you thought you were going to be able to borrow, or maybe you just shouldn't be borrowing because it's not the right decision. But, you know, everyone, everybody has to make that decision for themselves, whether you Etcetera, but I think it's just taking that right approach in terms of being fundamentally conservative, and I'm sure, you know, there are cases where, you know, people can do this and people can, have saved themselves in terms of tax obligations or saved themselves in terms of not having to sell at a very inopportune time from a tax perspective or just from a cycle perspective." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "16:27", "start": 986.73, "text": "Yeah, and time preference is a big part of it too, you know, I think, the longer you intend to hold that loan for you know, I think our, I think we'll offer term loans of multiple years at this point, though I think the most common period for unchained at least is about a year, but we often do renewals. That's one of the most common ways that, a loan ends its life, it just renews into a new loan for us. But if you can hold that credit for a number of years, it puts you in a much more advantageous position in regards to Bitcoin's price appreciation, it's so tremendous over like the three to five to, you know, six Then necessarily at this point next year, right, where there's still a huge amount of volatility present. And so I think there are certain like sweet spots for borrowing where it's like, you know, you're gonna collateralize ten to twenty percent of your Bitcoin holdings to make a long-term investment in dollars. Like, you don't need the cash back, the investment itself is gonna pay out over some long period of term, you'll hold the credit for some long period, like this can be a very, effective tool, because timeframes are, are matched here. I think if At this point, there's so many variables that are coming into play in order for your plan to succeed, better to not try that, I think." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:40", "start": 1060.3, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's, that's a good point as well, because without, you know, attacking individuals in the space or whatever, but I think what happened maybe with this cycle, we could say, and look, of course, this could be twenty twenty hindsight, but Monday morning quarterbacking, but I think what happens in some cases is if people are buying too much Bitcoin in that sense of not being able to sustainably hold Like in some cases, you know, I think maybe people will take it too far in thinking, \"Oh, I don't want my stack, my stack to go down at all, \"and therefore I'm gonna borrow against it and just try to never, never-- It's a, it's sort of like, you have to be conservative enough to understand when you can make that work for the long term and when you can't, right? And if you, for example, if you aren't working anymore, you don't have any more income, then you need to be extremely conservative about how much you borrow" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:33", "start": 1113.43, "text": "Things, pay things off and kind of keep, keep the thing running." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "18:37", "start": 1117.01, "text": "I mean, a-a-ultimately, this is, this is a financial planning conversation. and I think some people are good at financial planning for themselves, and some people aren't. And I, I think one of the things that, that is, an area of growth for Unchained that I think we're excited about is perhaps starting to make foray into that financial planning space, because something that we've learned is that it's just, it's very hard to make decisions Views to the, from the perspective of, of a lot of the traditional financial planning community. but nonetheless, you ultimately need to practice some of the wisdom that that community dispenses. Like, you, you can, if you like, be like the, the I'm on zero, like, zero fiat, like, I live my life, you know, only in Bitcoin and Sats, and, I have some friends and, and employees on chain that live this way, and to me it's crazy. Like, I, you know, I'm, I'm older dynamic way over the coming decades of my life as my obligations change, right? As I hopefully become a father and have to deal with things like inheritance and estate planning and all that. This is very complicated and, and we live in a very-- in a country that has a huge apparatus of rules and, and systems for this, and I don't understand all that. And so financial planning is a very valuable service, it's something that I've actually used for a long time, but only with my dollars. I think one of the challenges that I experienced personally, and I think a lot of Bitcoiners Also experience is as you hold Bitcoin for longer and longer periods, right? It grows, it becomes a larger portion of your portfolio, and if you're not selling it, you start to get into these higher and higher ratios of your net worth being in Bitcoin. And then, and then you're, now you're a Bitcoin, right? Because you're in this position. And, if you have a financial advisor, almost certainly they're not gonna be able to work with you and talk to you about Bitcoin, so they're not gonna be able to advise you around it, they're not gonna be able to have a real financial planning conversation with you about it. and I think what that sometimes leads to is hiding Bitcoin from your financial advisor and just not talking about it, right? Because their advice, if they have any, is gonna be, \"Well And as a result, you're now not getting financial planning advice that you might otherwise have benefited from, and you're kind of doing it all on your own, which again, for some people, is fine, but I think for other people, they, they need that helping hand, they need that advisor, representing their interests and, and helping them balance Bitcoin and, you know, fiat holdings over the long term. So I think that's an area Unchained wants to start playing in and understanding a bit more over the coming years, is, we have a lot of expertise on the team around that Clients on the custody and lending and trading and retirement, you know, sides of our business, I think we're in a good position to offer some kind of financial planning that's, that's targeted at Bitcoiners, right? Like the theme being, you know, don't hide your Bitcoin from your financial advisor, talk about it openly. And there's, the reason most financial advisors can't is because most firms don't have a thesis around this or they're timid around having a thesis around Bitcoin holdings long term. I think Unchained obviously has a very strong thesis around that, and we could help you do Competitive tasks of financial planning, sometimes hard decisions around financial planning, but without defaulting to this status of like, \"You should probably sell your Bitcoin.\" No, if, if you believe Bitcoin is the future of the global economy, if you believe hyperbitcoinization is happening in our lifetimes, probably the last thing you wanna do as a productive, working young person is sell your Bitcoin. But how do you preserve your Bitcoin over the long term? How do you not fall into these leverage traps? How do you effectively use tools like credit and tax planning and so on? To get the most out of your Bitcoin, over that timeframe. Those, those, those, that's a harder problem. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:21", "start": 1341.22, "text": "and I think it's also fair to point out that Bitcoin is growing and it's taken, you know, now, what are we now? Fourteen years, you know, coming up to Bitcoin, and a lot of people, especially people who've been longer time hodlers, like even for me, like when I started, I was a single guy, no, no, you know, no, like now, I'm, I'm married, I've got a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:46", "start": 1366.1, "text": "Aspects of how we manage our money, how we manage our Bitcoin when our life situation changes. And of course, in Bitcoin, many of us are, you know, there's like, it's, it's, it's encouraged, right, this whole idea of low time preference, and you should, where you're, yeah, the, I know people debate this question of the Bitcoin fundamentalists, but the Bitcoin fundamentalists, or some of them, believe that very much in this idea of having a big family and so on, and that brings in all these other aspects to the conversation" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:16", "start": 1396.1, "text": "So unchained, obviously, you have the, inheritance, the, the inheritance planning component has become more prominent recently. So can you tell us a little bit about that?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "23:26", "start": 1406.26, "text": "Yeah, we just launched, I think the first iteration of an inheritance protocol, and it's very much in the spirit of this kind of financial planning discussion that we're having, right? It's all about advising our clients to be in a good position, to, to plan out, what would happen, you know, i-in the event of, of, of, of, For us, this is a journey, like this isn't a, the final product that we would hope to have in this category. I think there are some very sexy things that I think all Bitcoiners can immediately leap to around, you know, time locks and more complex structures and processes. I, I wanna get there too, but we'll get there in time. I think that requires, you know, collaboration with everything from hardware wallet vendors to, to multi-sig wallet software and stuff. But, but it's, it's a place the industry will land at. Here we're just starting that journey and" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "24:16", "start": 1456.14, "text": "That prior discussion around financial planning, inheritance, and I think security, right, is actually a major component of what an investment advisor or a financial planner should do for a client, I think, in a hyper Bitcoinizing world, right? Like a big role the financial planners and investment advisors have in the traditional world is, is investment management, right? Is taking the dollars and growing them over time. That's, that's part of the function that they provide. It's less necessary in a Bitcoin world, right? So does that mean that the, the concepts of financial planning and investment management- Are useless? No, it just means they sort of have to shift, right, to focus on the other areas where you're gonna now need more advice. And, and especially because of my experience at Unchained, I, I really do believe that, security and planning your key management strategy and thinking about how inheritance works, not just at a legal, you know, an estate and taxing level, but also at the sort of mechanical cryptographic level of how to keys transfer, where are keys gonna live, how are you gonna set that up, how are you gonna communicate that to the beneficiaries of your estate Like, is, people are gonna be bereaved and freaking out, \"You just died! \" Like, are they gonna be able to successfully onboard a wallet and get through the process? Especially if there's a kind of time lock involved, right? Imagine that scenario. so I think your financial advisor really starts to play a very stronger role in these aspects of, of your financial life in a way that they don't really have to today, right? Right? Because today everything is handled by the legal system. This person died, there's a death certificate, we take it to the bank, There aren't keys, and so keys, as powerful as they are, as we both know, for, maintaining control, over one's finances, for representing one's interests, and, and I think they're, they're sort of the, the reason Bitcoin even exists, is to, so that we can have keys to Bitcoin. It just complicates the hell out of these kinds of inheritance conversations. And so, you know, I think your financial advisor is a person that can really help, give you confidence that, you know, not only are they growing the fiat side of your portfolio and Preserve your Bitcoin long term, and then, you know, should you pass, they're helping to make sure it, it goes onto your, to your next of kin as, as you specified. I think this is a very cool evolution for that industry, and it's a set of skills that they're gonna have to learn, which I actually think would be really exciting for a lot of the advisors that at least I speak with." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:35", "start": 1595.41, "text": "Yeah, for sure. and so can you give us some ideas around what, what is a prudent approach there? Like, what kinds of things should we be doing?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:46", "start": 1606.1, "text": "That on your death passes to an executor or what, what's the approach?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "26:51", "start": 1611.36, "text": "I think it depends on so much on, on who you are and what your situation is. I, I think that's a, one of the generic statements about estate planning, right? Is that there are some things that probably everyone should be doing, and then there's a lot of very specific things that depend on you and your family situation, whether you have like, other sort of legal entities or other trusts or other things going on. Like, I'm not trying to avoid the question, I feel like Make sure that, you know, keys don't need to be transferred necessarily in the ideal scenario. They can be either, they can be instantiated, let's say, from backups or whatever. You don't wanna have to transfer hot keys with like pins or other kinds of structures, and that gets very complicated. Thinking about the legal ownership of those keys and who, who executes that process. there, there are legal wrinkles here that I don't really understand, frankly, around the concepts of like probate being public versus not and having estate planning sort of being able to sort of short-circuit the Greater degrees of privacy as your property transfers to your heirs, there's a lot of complexity in doing that correctly, that I think the, the key management mirrors some of that as well, and there's, I think, a smart synthesis of bringing that all together and making sure it just gets handled in a smooth way. I don't think we're there yet on Unchain, where, again, this is a first iteration of, of this product for us, I think we're going to learn a lot. From folks who are buying into this and helping us, gather requirements for a more sophisticated version here. ultimately, I, I've made this point before, and I think I've made this point on your show, Stephan, I think where, where we coined together the concept of collaborative custody, I think in a, in a Fonda Extemporaneous Exchange several years ago, was a great moment for me personally, I felt. But, you know, I, I think, our clients are gonna help us discover like the right, shape for a more complex," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "28:39", "start": 1719.18, "text": "Multiple keys, like, like, you know, more complex product, and, and because that's the heart of collaborative custody, right? Multisig is, is the generic built-in thing to Bitcoin, collaborative custody is all the permissions management, the identity verification, the notifications, the glue to get, glueing people together on the same platform. That's, so there's just a lot of human complexity in that, and that's where Unchain shines, right? So that's what, where we wanna step in and, and hopefully serve as advisors to folks, service the platform where they" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:10", "start": 1750.06, "text": "Yeah. And it's such a complicated beast because there's the legal aspect of it, there's the financial planning and just what's prudent aspect of it, and there's even a technological com- component as well, obviously multisig, but also even things in Bitcoin like Miniscript, right? Does Miniscript or does like some kind of Taproot multisig form a future part of this, right? That maybe you have like, you know, some kind of advanced wallet spending conditions where maybe in the standard case it's two of three, but, you know, there's some extra- Extra pathway that is, you know, in the case of death, here's how somebody else-" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "29:45", "start": 1784.83, "text": "I mean, literally a, a dead man switch, right? And I kind of view it as like, you know, you can imagine a, a, a model where you're engaging in a yearly reset the switch, sort of a cop way to put it, but you're resetting that switch yearly so that the contract, smart contract, you know, it's a, it's just a Bitcoin script thing, but it's a smart enough contract, right? You're just resetting that time lock in some way," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "30:09", "start": 1809.4, "text": "Time lock address for next year. Who is helping you with that yearly, very important transaction, right? It's probably, it's your financial plan. Yeah. It's your advisor, right? They're the person that's making sure that you get that done in the way that my advisor is the person that makes sure I do my, you know, yearly contributions or whatever that I have to do. those kinds of, that kind of life cycle and annual management work, I think, very neatly fits into the advisory role." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:31", "start": 1830.82, "text": "Yeah. And so maybe like an example in that case where it's-- Now Maybe you guys had this My Citadel wallet, you might have seen that, and it, it had a similar idea where you could do a kind of, you know, it could be a, a given level of quorum for multisig, okay, let's say it's two of three, but then after a few years, it degrades down into a one of three multisig or something like this. So, and, and so I guess the idea is you could be continually refreshing" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "31:00", "start": 1860.32, "text": "it, which could actually be, you know, totally separate keys, right? So the idea is it, it's in your A totally different multi-sig form, which is now your inheritors or your estate planners or your, or your lawyers, so they can now dispense with it and get it to the places where it needs to go. I do think stuff like that is awesome, but at the same time, very dangerous, very dangerous. Oh, yeah, a hundred percent." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:24", "start": 1884.31, "text": "And so I think that's one aspect where it may be only for the, brave-hearted people at the start, and then over time, you know, after the pioneers have kind of tested out the system and proven" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:39", "start": 1899.22, "text": "More ready for the prime time system. And I think maybe it's a similar thing even with Taproot multisig and mSig, right? Like, you know, there was a lot of excitement about this maybe a year or so ago when obviously Taproot was coming into Bitcoin and there was discussion about, \"Oh, would it make sense for us to do mSig too?\" or things like this. But then I think what happened is people discovered, or maybe not everybody understood, is that there were multiple rounds of interactivity required in, in a mSig two context, and therefore it just made sense for us Like the multi-sig we have today, as opposed to the multi-sig two stuff, which maybe will be applicable someday, but maybe isn't the right choice just yet and not put into practice yet. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "32:20", "start": 1939.72, "text": "no, I, I don't know enough about Taproot to sit here criticizing it, but I will say that change in interactivity and the increase in the number of rounds of communication required would, you know, for example, fundamentally change the way the unchanged product is structured right now. Right now, there's a very clean linear flow of, you know, transactions are created by those who are authorized to do so, signatures are accumulated, the transaction is made ready to broadcast, and, and out it goes. that second round of, you know, renegotiation at the end when you're doing the more complex multi-sig, you know, whatever, whatever details that looks like, that just changes the flow. could we build that? Yeah, of course we could build that, you know, where-- But, but it, it, it, it is, it's a Collaborative custody is, is the, the practice we're super reliant on, on the, on the ecosystem. Like, it's, it's a discussion, I've actually enjoyed having this discussion with, you know, our, our, our partners and investors at Nidig, who have a very different custodial model, but they're also very good technologists and they're very excited about things like Taproot and actually, in some ways, able to make tap progress faster than we are, because they can just decide to do it and they can start to convert parts of their system over to" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "33:32", "start": 2012.15, "text": "Whereas for us, this is a little bit a collaborative process. We can't just decree and decide that we're gonna change how everything works for our vaults. We have to get our clients to participate in the motion of Bitcoin like as we roll that out over some time period. and that of course re-then requires all the hardware vendors, the treasurers, ledgers, cold cards, and so on of the world, to work in the exact same way that we do to support all, the same things from these new protocols that we need and also overlap with each other A cold card, and if you want to switch to a Trezor, then somehow your vault product, your loan isn't, isn't in trouble or needs to be reset, or there's some complexity. And we want, we want simplicity that we're trying to drive towards, so we want shared behavior. So now we're, now we need an ecosystem of hardware wallet providers to all get on the same page about anything at all is very difficult, as, as I think a lot of us who, who've been around in this industry for a while know, they're, they're S-BT, which are becoming like pretty common standards, are, aren't adopted uniformly across all the hardware wallet providers yet. Standards is a, is a fast-moving target in our space." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:42", "start": 2082.43, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Are you ready for something huge? BTC Prague is coming in June, on the eighth to the tenth of June, twenty twenty-three, in Prague, in the Czech Republic. It's gonna be a fantastic event. It's gonna be a three-day event with some side events on either side of it, and this will be huge. They are looking to bring ten thousand people, ranging from People to Bitcoin whales, business insiders, developers, miners, and get everyone connected together. It'll be a unique networking opportunity with more than sixty world-class speakers and a hundred companies. I'll be one of the hosts of the show, I'll be an MC for one of the days on the main stage. It'll be a relaxed summer atmosphere for those of you who've never been to Prague. It's a beautiful city, they've got some really cool beer, it's really affordable also. So this is a great cost-effective way to meet a lot of people in the Bitcoin world. Go to btcprague And there's also a discount for using the code Livera. So when it comes to multi-signature and securing your coins for the long term, Unchained Capital can partner with you and help you achieve multi-signature and remove single points of failure from your setup. Unchained Capital have a concierge onboarding program where you can sign up, you pay that money upfront, they will ship you the hardware if you need it, they'll do a call with you and teach you how to set up your vault and withdraw from your single-signature wallet or out of the exchange. Now, they also have a Inheritance protocol. So if you buy the concierge onboarding package, you get the inheritance protocol also. So that includes step-by-step che-checklists, letters for the executor, inheritance seed phrase card, and a tamper-proof bag. Go to unchained dot com, select the concierge package, and use code Livera for a discount there. And finally, when it comes to watching mempools, Mempool.space is the leading Bitcoin blockchain explorer. It's a fully-fledged multi-layer explorer. You can see the mempool or Wiz's mempool, you can see the blockchain, Like the Lightning Network, and you can search Lightning nodes, you can see channels, you can even see the channel outpoint, that's the actual UTXO relating to that channel. With Mempool.space, you don't even have to trust a third party, it's free and open source software, you can host it yourself with one click on various full node packages like Umbrel and Raspiblitz and others. For, if you're with an enterprise, Mempool.space offers customized mempool instances, you can have your company's branding, with increased API limits, increased, feature priority and space slash enterprise. And now back to the show. Yeah, yeah, and I think you make a great point, right? Because I think we have to-- there is a balance of what can people practically do as opposed to what is the latest and greatest technology, because as an example with music too, it, and, and the three rounds of interactivity required, well, that's gonna be a very-- that's gonna be a big lift, as you said. And what kind of quick wins or easy gains or low-hanging fruit are there that we can just, like, for example, there your wallets right now and just getting them into a multi-signature context, even if it's a two or three vault with Unchained or someone, that it's a huge lift, like as in, for some people, and but it would also be a massive improvement in their security. So, you know, and we see some people debating in the community about this also because I see this and I'm curious to get your thoughts as well because some people in the community are, you know, and of course, everyone has their different view, but some people in the community are commenting and saying, \" And just having a passphrase is more practical for people. Stop pushing this idea of multisig to people that it's too complex for people, right? That's kind of what we're, what we're hearing from people, from some people, to be f- to be clear. but on the other hand, there are these big benefits to having multi-signature. So I'm curious how you see that." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "38:21", "start": 2301.06, "text": "I'm, I'm such a, a broken record here, like of course it depends on the way that you model threat and et cetera, et cetera, et c realize it, not necessarily in the, in the hardcore Bitcoin community, but there's definitely a single sig camp that want single sig because single sig is how you generalize to other cryptocurrencies. You don't get to use multisig in Ethereum the same way or in whatever the fuck other coins are out there these days. but there, but a lot of the coins use, you know, bip thirty two type HD wallet, you know, architectures. A lot of them use similar and compatible public key cryptography for holding and signing transactions. And so if you stick with single sig, right, then, I If you stick with a single private key, then you can, you can engage with all that stuff too. So that's compelling for, for those who care about that, and that's why there's a disincentive to embrace multi-sig. I think the complexity argument though is a real one too, and I empathize with the idea that, look, at the end of the day, a physical thing is really, is, is quite easy to protect, especially one that you can copy, right? So single sig doesn't mean necessarily there's one point of failure, right? Like you can It now, there's more places for it to be discovered or, or whatever, but, at least you won't lose it as easily. and for most people, they're not-- the, the chief threat isn't being infiltrated by some attacker in their physical world to get at their threats, it's that they're gonna lose the words or that their house is gonna burn down or some other tragedy that's unrelated is gonna prevent them from getting to their Bitcoin, in some way. or their-- or honestly with passwords, they're just gonna forget. Passwords, for God's sake, like it's just, it's just, it's a hundred percent what will happen, or they're gonna write it on a, on a, on a post-it and keep it somewhere. And I just think about, you know, my dad and, and, and some of the folks in my family I know and their password management. But I, I don't wanna deride the practice, like it obviously can be done very safely. I think a lot of people also who criticize multisig as too complex are perhaps conceiving of multisig in kind of its naked, bare The reason Unchained exists as a collaborative custody option is because there is this intermediate world where you can get a lot of the benefits of multi-sig, but with a professional keyholder to be in your quorums to bail you out if you lose keys, and with a UI and a UX that's well-designed and easy to use on the web with support, folks you can call, get, get walked through things. Like, this is, this really lowers the barrier to entry, and I know this because we are onboarding not people who aren't technologists, older people, medical professionals. Non-technical positions can be, right? Like they're holding keys and, and they're doing it, and, and, and they're, they're capable of doing it, and we're walking them through it, and we're, and we're making this achievable. So I think, I'd encourage those who, who don't distinguish between multisig and collaborative custody to sort of realize that there is a pretty meaningful difference between those two ways of doing multisig, quote-unquote. And then I think finally, in kind of a, a, a fun way, part of thing more than once, right? Like if once you can protect a single key, in, in theory, you can do the same thing more than once, but it's just more complicated, right? So why do you have to do that? Like just the single key is good enough. You can combine these ideas, right? You can have multisig in which you just have a single key, so the work on you is pretty similar, that you just have to protect that one key. We're not increasing that part of the cost or mental burden, you're still just protecting that one key, but you can Institution, product on our vaulting side, it's less utilized, but, it is something that we have some clients doing, and so that looks like you'd have one key, Unchained as a second, and there's a third party with a third. This is a good construct for a lot of businesses maybe who, who don't actually want to be sovereign for various reasons over the assets that they protect in their treasuries, for legal compliance reasons, let's say. But there are, there are other interesting models to this. I brought my Again, it's not very, it's not something we're doing very publicly yet, but it is capability within the platform. internally we refer to this as, as key agents. I'm, I'm a little bit telling tales out of school right now, but I feel like this is very relevant for our discussion. So, with my dad, we've got it set up so my dad has one key and I'm the second key and Unchained is the third key. And so my dad now is in a scenario where he's still protecting one key, but now he's in multi" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "42:56", "start": 2575.98, "text": "Key, well now Unchain can come and back us up. And I think this is actually a really cool model. Like, number one, I, I, I get to onboard my dad, I'm in my dad's quorums, and, you know, like obviously I love my dad, I love talking about technology and sharing my business with him and, and sharing about Bitcoin with him, so this is a cool way for us to do stuff together. and then two, my dad is, God bless him, he's not the greatest investor sometimes, you know?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "43:25", "start": 2605.48, "text": "he This is what I'm trying to say. And so one of the things that's really nice is, of course, you know, the, the Bitcoin, the way that we've implemented here at Unchained, this, this feature, it's his Bitcoin, it's in his vault, I'm a keyholder in that vault, I have some, some rights to sign, but ultimately it's his coins. If he wanted to create a transaction and spend the coins on his own with Unchained, and, and he could of course do that, but he never will, right? He's" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "43:52", "start": 2632.11, "text": "my dad Like, you know, we'll get to at least have that discussion once before he freaks out and just sells it, you know, to buy Ripple or whatever bad advice he got from somewhere, right? So, I'm, I'm making it sound like my dad is, is a fool or has no, in-investment sense, but, but truthfully, like, I don't think my dad would hold Bitcoin if he didn't know me, right? I, I, I think Bitcoiners talk a lot, we talk a really big game about don't trust, you We didn't know how to verify. We didn't know what it meant to verify. We were trusting a friend, a family member, a colleague, someone who got us into Bitcoin, someone who maybe held a key for us in the early stages of our own self-custody journeys. And so I think this idea that like, there's like a zero to one instant moment where you go and understand everything about Bitcoin and then you can be a Bitcoiner and do it on your own, that's, that's, that's an idealization. That's not how it is. There's a," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "44:56", "start": 2695.98, "text": "And the smaller you can make the steps along that gradient, the more people you can, you can convince to climb that hill, right? It's now just one step at a time. And my dad doesn't need to maybe have both keys on his own right now, like just protecting that one key is enough for him to experience what it's like to use a hardware wallet and sort of marvel at how, you know, this is actually kind of cool that we're doing this just on our own and it doesn't matter, you know? He's getting the experiences, he's getting to hold Bitcoin in a very and he's really safe. and I love this, this is a great way for families and friend groups to protect each other. so this is a feature I think we're also gonna be pushing a lot on, on, in, and Unchained over the coming year. we've had a, a lot of work to do in other areas, but we're catching up through that work, and this is something I have talked about in other forums elsewhere, but it's something we're gonna be pushing on quite a bit more now, because I think this is, but Unchained, I think, wasn't quite ready to push this more broadly. Yeah. We're starting to be, we're starting to be there. It's almost- I think enough of our clients are saying, \"Hey, I kinda wanna do this thing.\" and, and, you know, you know, w-when I look at some of our client vault names and stuff like this, 'cause, you know, we have some visibility internally into those things, I often see that they're named in, in a collaborative way. Like, \"This is the," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "46:26", "start": 2785.94, "text": "Like when Bitcoiners are on that journey to building their ability to verify, working with other Bitcoiners that they trust and love and, and that they know will take care of them, it's actually a really powerful way to get them to the end of that journey. They don't have to do it on their own." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:39", "start": 2798.9, "text": "Yeah, and I think it's, maybe there's a bit of a parallel with, this concept of the uncle Jim, idea, right? In a way, you're, you're sort of being a bit of an uncle Jim for your dad in that" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:56", "start": 2816.36, "text": "As opposed to a custodial Bitcoiner." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "46:59", "start": 2818.9, "text": "Yeah, and I, I actually think this really connects also back to our inheritance conversation, that like this isn't an official part of the inheritance protocol on chain yet, we're sort of, you know, again, incrementally moving these protocols forward. But, you know, God forbid my, my father were to pass away, I'm in a great position to be able to actually, like, step in and work with the assets that he had on the Unchained platform and serve as one of the signers. and, and, and, and conversely, like, I, I could, I haven't done this, but I could also have him be a keyholder in my form if I wanted to. I don't have to do it that way in order to do the first thing, but it's an option for me. so I think these are really powerful structures, not just for onboarding, but long term for inheritance as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:38", "start": 2857.64, "text": "Yeah, fascinating. yeah, it's just like a, it's such a big topic, and I think people have been speaking And I believe, off the top of my head, I think it's a twenty fifteen or twenty sixteen book, but things have advanced a little bit since then, and I think there's still not really any one resource or one way to do this thing, and so there's a lot of people all trying to figure out what's the best way to deal with inheritance and Bitcoin, like it's just a hard thing to deal with, because if you give somebody the keys, well, then can they spend now versus like not making it accessible, th-there's like almost this balance of how accessible you, executor or the person inheriting the coins, that, it's just a tricky balance to set. So, I know you also mentioned offline that you, you, you've been thinking a bit about layers in Bitcoin, so what were you getting at there?" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "48:34", "start": 2914.49, "text": "It's just, it's again another theme that I've been talking about for years. I feel like I've been trying to get some articles out about it, but I'm so excruciatingly slow at writing that, I'm having trouble getting them out. So maybe I'll Couple of months, it's, it's become, it's come back to the floor for me due to a variety of-- I think chiefly driven by the Elon Twitter, you know, debacle slash savior, depending on your, on your perspective on it, I guess. You know, I, I tend to be very like, my favorite meme about it is like, you know, the one where people are drowning in the pool and thinking it's like, you know, Twitter and then Tesla and then like Mars program, and" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "49:15", "start": 2954.68, "text": "I'm like, oh, come on, man, like, you Disconnect, I've, I've found in, in some of the discourse that Elon himself puts out about this stuff, which is that like, Twitter is a town square, it's a public square, and so it should be, it should have these properties. But then I think, but Twitter is also a company. Companies shouldn't own town squares. That's not-- You don't get the town square effect if the company owns the town square. It's fucking branded. The bricks have the company logo on them. You know, that seems a little weird. Like the town square is built by the townspeople Because building a complex application as good as Twitter is, like for all its faults, like it's a great tool for disseminating information and, and ship posting and, and learning about the world. It's very complex to build that application, just in terms of resources, like cost, design, and I think we're starting to see with, you know, some of the people who are, you know, fleeing Twitter for whatever reasons, re-recently, that with the, with the Elon stuff, like what are their options, like, you know, to, to go to? Right I don't even know how to pronounce this word, but like, nostra," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:24", "start": 3024.01, "text": "nostra, yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "50:25", "start": 3025.39, "text": "I've been reading about that, that's very cool. you know, Sphinx Chat, was there for a little while, I heard a little bit more about it last year, but I know it's, it's, it's in this category. it's clear that Bitcoiners and, you know, a lot of people have been working on this stuff too. I wanna, I don't wanna present it like Bitcoiners are like the Corners actually build fucking cool, useful, you know, attempts at solving this problem. And to me, like, these are the beginnings of kind of like that layered thesis, right? That like Bitcoin is like that layer one kind of hard as money, and then layer two is like payments, but also routing, right? Like the Lightning Network is doing two things at once. It's, it's, it's like the, the thing that's valuable on Lightning Network isn't necessarily a Satoshi, it's a Satoshi in the right place in a channel where it can be utilized effectively to route other Satoshis Right? So, there's a spa- there's a spatial element to, to the Lightning Network, which is really important. And so it feels like the Lightning Network is beginning to start to address problems of routing and payments, and immediately we're like, \"Great, let's use it to build stuff, right? \" So, cool, I'm glad that we're showing off and building these apps. I, I'm a little skeptical that any of these apps are like the final version of anything. Like, Nostra is a really cool and impressive technical achievement and an interesting experiment. But- But I don't know if you read about it, that there's like, you know, there's deep concerns with how do you scale a system like that? Like, where's the data gonna come from? Those are layers that have to get built. and I think one of the things I keep harping about and thinking about a lot is like, what Satoshi I think taught us is that layers are really markets, and that we have to build layers of markets that are doing and providing different kinds of services, but how we actually-- like, but each individual market has to be really, really fucking simple A distributed version of that market. Like the market that's at the core of Bitcoin at layer one is a market of proof of work, like in exchange for Bitcoin, right? That's the mining process, that's the market that's constantly running. And there's an interesting time element in there, you know, Heiko's work on Bitcoin's time, I think is deeply connected to a lot of this. But that's not a complicated market, right? It's not selling a, a good that has like all these things hanging off of it that characterize it, like proof of works are, proofs of work Maybe complicated and volatile over time, but like the core service is, is actually really simple to understand, like when you, when you open it up. And I think similarly in Lightning, like, Lightning isn't trying to be like a, a, an app framework for social networks, right? Maybe you would criticize some Lightning companies as, as overreaching in certain of the things that they're doing, I don't know, like that's more of a, a, I think reasonable people could disagree about that, but Lightning isn't trying to solve like all of computer development like on blockchains or something like It's trying to say, I want to focus on payments routing. I think that's very powerful, that was a smart boundary that we drew as Bitcoiners to, to craft the project in that way. and I think if, and I always imagine like if Lightning is more successful and we have these, robust systems for routing Sats online and routing information accompanying those Sats, like, then we will organically start to see new markets develop for the things that we need to build like a real distributed Twitter, public town square kind of thing. But again, those markets will have- to be extremely small or rather, extremely narrow. Like, I don't-- it's not a market for social media, right? It's not even a market for tweets. It's a market for, you know, fetching, like, \"Give me the asset that has this as its hash,\" right? That's the market, and it doesn't-- like, your file system doesn't actually know why you want this file or what the file is. It's just trying to serve you files, right? And I feel like the market for data online should just be trying to serve you data that you ask for Or even what the data is. I think there's something really smart in the Noster, like if you read about, in, on their GitHub page or whatever, they talk about, \"Well, how will this scale when we have huge amounts of data that have to get routed through here?\" And they make a very good point that ultimately mesh networking can potentially be very efficient if the mesh is smart enough to understand the relationship between data, that's required by nodes and the locality of those nodes. Right? So if we're all at a Bitcoin conference and we're all trying to read the same" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "54:51", "start": 3290.9, "text": "To like one of us, and then we can feed it to each other in that local environment, right? We don't have to stream the same tweet from fucking outer space to every person in this ten thousand seat auditorium independently and in parallel. Right? But to me, that's a, that's an optimization problem, which really means that markets have to be brought in order to solve it. So we want-- and those markets aren't gonna be only capable of solving this one problem, they're not gonna simultaneously be able to solve the problem of, how do we index your Twitter feed? How do we surface the content from the marketplace that is best for you? That's probably a different kind of market, right? Like, how do we mechanically search through things that are available? That's probably a different kind of market that is monetizing the Or things that you flag. even concepts of liking and retweeting, these are reputational signals, right? These are inputs into feed algorithms to better determine for you what should be surfaced based on peer-to-peer, shall we say, ranking of what's interesting at that moment in real time, right? This is what makes Twitter powerful, in both a good and bad way, right? In a good way that it makes it awesome, but in a bad way that it makes the, the, the company of Twitter perhaps too powerful, right? So like, I, I think of the, Projects are, are, are, are showing us that like there's, there's some beginnings to this, like happening, but I, I worry that like sometimes people feel like, okay, we're just gonna all switch to Nostr, and it's like, I, I don't, I don't think so. As much as that would be cool that that happened, like it's, it's not gonna scale, right? For the reasons that we haven't built these massively horizontal marketplaces for bandwidth and routing and data and algorithms and, and so on. And of course, I'm talkin', Localized perhaps parallel structures. I think that's a point that Nostr really also embraces very well, is that they recognize that they can't control, like, there's no blockchain here, there's no notion of like putting out a, a tweet or a statement and having it be forever available at all times, like always. It, it could disappear from a given relay. And the solution to that is to make sure you get it to other relays, right? It's replication, it's-- which I think is ultimately again a market effect that relays should be in a market for wanting to host the, To them at some subsequent point. and so the idea of there being any \"the\" here as compared to a collection of \"a's\" or, or, you know, indefinite articles here of, of like, you know, there, there are multiple copies of a conversation across multiple relays, there's not just one fucking Twitter." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:19", "start": 3439.19, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "57:20", "start": 3439.91, "text": "and I think this, this market splitting phenomenon is, is something that's, that not to recognize this is actually a good thing, because it means then, because there's no one place to have the conversation, there's no one place" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:33", "start": 3453.42, "text": "So at one point, I was thinking about this idea, people talk about even like in Unix philosophy, this idea of do one thing and do it well, right? It's kind of-- That's kind of related to what you were saying." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "57:43", "start": 3463.27, "text": "Composability ultimately, I think, is, is the, is where that's trying to get at, right? Like the, the reason that that's a mantra in Unix is because if things do one thing well, then we can understand their bounds and we can learn how to compose them together. All right? So similarly, like we can build a complex" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "58:04", "start": 3483.62, "text": "Each layer of these markets to provide the total service that is Twitter, and it can be modular and composable in that way. In fact, it's, it's not really even one Twitter anymore, it's which services did you glue together to, to govern your own personal newsfeed, right? Becomes really what, what it looks like." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:19", "start": 3499.17, "text": "Yeah. And it's kind of pulling together all parts of aspects of the internet, and I, I guess notably RSS, right? Like, RSS is a very similar kind of concept, it's this idea that Dhruv Bansal may have an RSS RSS client, and I'm interested in what Dhruv says, let me subscribe to Dhruv's RSS feed. It's a similar, and even podcast, like we're talking about on a podcast right now, and that's, that's using RSS, right? So it's kind of interesting where-- And, and, and then when," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "58:46", "start": 3525.79, "text": "when you follow a hundred people, now you have a hundred RSS feeds, and then we've outsourced to Twitter the responsibility of curating those feeds back to us, and it feels like that's just another market service. We should just be able to, to Before me, here's the kinds of stuff I'm interested in, and then they're incentivized to give us exactly what we're looking for, whatever that is, but it's not exactly what someone else is looking for, right? It's not, they're not incentivized to give us the content that someone else wants us to see because advertising isn't a part of this discourse. They're only like being incentivized to give us what we directly pay them for, so it's a little bit more self-directed, hopefully." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:27", "start": 3566.92, "text": "Yeah. So it's interesting, and, there's all these colliding aspects of it. Obviously, we're, we're talking about Bitcoin a lot, and arguably one, you know, one of the big enabling pieces behind Bitcoin was BitTorrent, right? This whole idea of distributed hash table, and, and we're seeing this even with, projects like Keet and, Synonym, I think they're doing a similar kind of idea. So it's kind of related, is this, which is this idea that, you know, you can use other people's upload bandwidth as Everyone has to download from. Each peer can also be uploading things too, and so that's also getting to this idea. So then I guess maybe the one other aspect that maybe isn't so easy to solve, let's say, is this matter of, is it a, is it a public record, right? So for example, Australian Parliament has this thing called Hansard, and it's, it's a public available record of what the politicians were saying in the chamber, and I'm sure a similar exists in other countries, in the US and everywhere. But then I guess that-" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:00:26", "start": 3626.56, "text": "No idea what we have no idea what our dude said at all. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:30", "start": 3630.44, "text": "Yeah, but I mean, the point being, there's not, and maybe that's old thinking, right, this idea that there should be one canonical public record to prove. As an example, let's say, you know, let's say I did some dodgy things or whatever, or I tweeted out some whatever, and then later I try to deny that and say, \"Oh, no, I didn't say that.\" But if Twitter has like a record of what I tweeted, then you can say, \"Oh," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:55", "start": 3655.38, "text": "no Or maybe it's some kind of cryptography thing where you can say, \"Look, Stefan, I can see you signed this message with your private key.\"" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:01:02", "start": 3662.38, "text": "I think it's, it, it becomes more of a context-based statement, right? Like, again, it, it's replacing the definite article of the, like, record with a set of records, and different people and entities care about different kinds of records, right? So like, I can easily imagine like a, a, a really well-connected major component of such like online data, bandwidth, whatever application market, like, there's- A big fat connected component, which is like what most people use for most stuff, for like, you know, most discourse, and perhaps is endorsed by governments or large entities or corporations that is somewhat official, and if you can find it within this marketplace that is, you know, maybe tracked in some ways, I don't know, depends, then, then it's sort of official for their purposes. but there's unofficial markets, right? There's wildlands, there's other places that you can go get data. And so, you, you might imagine like, like, and there's good and Powerful but dangerous, and it's been scrubbed from the mainstream, but it's okay, you can go find it in, on the fringe, and now that's powerful because I'm hard to silence. But I think conversely, there's this idea of like, I was exploited, and, I don't know, fucking naked images of me as a kid are now on the internet, and, and this is really upsetting to me, and how do I, how do I get rid of that? Well, okay, maybe there is a chance for some kind of moderation or content control, because in like" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:02:26", "start": 3746.62, "text": "Mutual incentive and there's a set of norms, and we were just, like, we're willing to forego revenue on those kinds of things, we don't care. But conversely, it means that, like, probably on the fringes, that thing still exists, right? And so, I think, to me, it's always like about the freedom to, to be able to choose to go into certain marketplaces, to go find certain things. Like, it's, it's not about things being impossible, it's about them being harder or potentially more expensive, right? Because they're either They're esoteric, and so maybe they're not available at the Barnes and Noble. You have to go to the odd corner bookstore in the village to go get that particular thing. But that's not terrible to me. Like, I, I, I feel like there's this, there's a lot of ways to, to approach this issue, but like, this notion that, like, that convenience of there just being one place to go to get a thing is like such a dangerous idea in some ways, that like, we shouldn't have to search through a number of different providers and marketplaces and" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:03:27", "start": 3807.12, "text": "To find it, we must be able to find the tweet on the Twitter, we must be able to find the truth on this page. It's a very dangerous impulse, I think, because it leads to centralization, right? It leads to, well then now if it's not there, it basically doesn't fucking exist anymore, and that, that can be very dangerous." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:44", "start": 3824.43, "text": "Right, because it allows the whole blackholing or memoryholing of various ideas, and maybe those ideas are very important, especially over the last few years as we've seen people shutting down, you know, the When I, I believe they were proven to be correct over time. But, anyway, I, I wanna also get to one other area where you were mentioning as well about this idea of Bitcoin security and just generalized internet and computer security. And you see that there's an interaction here, you see there's a, there's some way that they are going to be more related in the future." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:04:16", "start": 3856.39, "text": "I mean, I feel like this, it connects to a lot of what we were just talking about, like from the perspective of, of if more and more of the world's like infrastructure online starts to run through way, because it's being directly monetized and paid for and metered in, in some meaningful way, then it just means that so much of what's digital now becomes connected to money in a way that it isn't today. I think that's, that's the root of the argument that I'm going to make. I'll try to condense the argument into a few brief minutes here, but, it kinda looks something like, I'll, I'll take this angle on telling the story, like in my experience at Unchained, I have learned, Like I, I started using a password manager years ago because I first bought Bitcoin and sort of was like, \"Wow, I'm, I'm a security, I should care about security now.\" And getting into hardware wallets helped me understand a lot more about my security posture. I, I use VPNs now, I'm using more open source password managers, obviously working at Unchained, my security expertise and, and requirements for me have, have really gone through the roof as well. That's been a huge part of it personally. But it's not just people who are running, you know, Bitcoin banks About security, because Bitcoin forces you to think in those terms. And dentists and, you know, politicians and, and average working people who have Bitcoin, who are unchain clients, are now using multi-sig, hardcore, fucking cryptography, that something that was considered a, a, a defensive weapon or, or a weapon, and I don't wanna inflame that whole conversation, but like, you know, something that was once considered very dangerous, now in the hands of average people protecting their resources, this is very cool, right? So Bitcoin is like, in some sense, a killer app for security This is alone, but I think it gets, it gets a lot deeper than that. And, and, and because there's, it turns out I think a very, like, interesting economic angle to computer security, which isn't well appreciated, it manifests in two ways. Like, the first is just the idea of like, it's cheaper to get hacked and then pay a fine than it is to build good security, and most of the time it doesn't matter. Like, you know, Equifax or Experian got hacked, I can't even remember which one got hacked because we say that good security isn't worth paying for. It's cheaper to just have bad security and then pay the cost of fucking up. Like, so that's one of the economic, like, levers here. that's hard to correct, but it's very social and sort of like, amortized across everyone's losses and stuff like that. I think there's another angle though that is much more explicit. And that's like, what about people that actually care about security? Like, the truth is that they can't achieve computer security either. Like, Google can't achieve secure networks, the FBI and NSA can't achieve secure networks. Their own hacking tools have been hacked and released and sold for Bitcoin and public auctions in the last few years. So it's not just that like average people aren't good at computer security, like the people who are professionally supposed to provide computer security can't really achieve it at scale. and the reason for this is, is you know- Even touches on Ethereum where it's just fucking, computers are impossible to predict. Like the Turing, halting, the halting problem, like the fact that the, the only certain way to know what code does is to run it. complexity, all these ideas conspire to mean that we just don't know what bugs exist in the code that we run, we just don't know. So it's impossible to make secure software. So now what happens, when a bug is found in some secure piece of software, like, so you might hope for like, okay, the bug report gets filed" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:07:44", "start": 4064.56, "text": "A security researcher finds a really powerful bug in, like, an Apache web server or, like, Microsoft Word or Windows itself or some fucking tiny thing inside Windows that lets you get in and be able to do crazy stuff. What do they do with this knowledge? Right? Like, they can make no money from it by reporting it and, and handling in the usual ways, maybe they'll even get ignored and they'll just feel marginalized, or they can sell it. On a zero-day marketplace, on the dark web, and they can easily get hundreds to thousands, to sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for, depending on the nature of the exploit. Now, this is super interesting because this creates a time period, right, in the life cycle of this exploit where some people know about the exploit, but not everybody knows about it. And this is what makes computer security impossible, because your system can have a hole in it, and you don't know about that hole. Potentially no one knows about that hole, but potentially someone does know about that hole who isn't you, and now your system is insecure and you don't even know that, right? The reason that that hole exists, and that economic, hole exists, is because the average security researcher who discovers a flaw in Microsoft Word or Apache or whatever the tool is, can't turn that into money directly. What are they gonna do? Like, they're gonna steal your Microsoft Word files, but it's not gonna, it's not gonna help them. In theory, they could ransomware you, right? And we're starting to see that the rise of Bitcoin, you can see the economic connection, right? That like ransomware is on the rise because Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are on the rise. You couldn't, you know, encryption has been around for long enough where you could have been shredding and encrypting people's files twenty years ago, and you, but how would you have benefited? You'd send me a Which increases the threat level of bad actors. The idea that, like, if, I'm gonna kind of like turn this around and say, like, if it were possible that every security researcher or, you know, hacker or whatever, every time they discovered an exploit, if they could immediately use that exploit to make Bitcoin directly, then they would do that, right? My claim is that the more software that runs Bitcoin, the more opportunities-- sorry, the more software that interacts natively with Bitcoin on the internet, the more opportunities there are for a bug. Or shallow or whatever to cause the, discoverer of that bug to be able to earn Bitcoin. So for example, if in order, like, Microsoft Word, how do I get money out of it? If, if I can just get Microsoft Word to make, you know, web requests for me to my server, you're gonna pay me in sats because I'm sending you data. So suddenly, like, every hole can become something that I can immediately exploit to get Bitcoin. So this changes the game theory of the marketplace for exploits. Instead of hoarding an exploit and selling it into this private or oftentimes governments and corporations who are actually just buying zero-day exploits about their own software to protect themselves, instead of having this crazy marketplace, what happens is as soon as an exploit is discovered, it starts being exploited, right? And you get into this position where either your software is secure or it's being actively exploited right now. and I think we've already reached that place with certain things in Bitcoin. So for example, like the Bitcoin core software, like, like, would you believe there's a bug right now that allows someone to steal your UTXOs in Bitcoin without having your private keys?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:10:55", "start": 4255.93, "text": "Like" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:10:56", "start": 4256.59, "text": "maybe that bug exists, maybe it does, I don't know, but what I can fucking say for sure is there's no human being who knows about that bug. Because if they knew about it, they would start to use it, right? They would start to exploit the bug, 'cause they'd be getting Bitcoin out of it immediately without having to do anything else. So the fact that that isn't happening, that we're not sitting here talking about the giant Bitcoin bug that exists, that's causing people to steal UTXOs, means that there's no such bug that anyone knows about. This is Tools, et cetera, and I think the only way we get there is by closing that zero-day marketplace to nothing, which means that all software has to run Bitcoin, which means that all software is exploitable directly for Bitcoin, which means that all bugs are either being exploited or they don't exist. I think this is a very powerful new paradigm for how to think about computer security that really hasn't made it out to like the world of computer security researchers or even, even bitcoiners yet. yet we know it, we, we understand it, because I would say we know Bitcoin's probably the In the world because of its monetary footprint. And what are the next most secure pieces of software? I'm gonna guess Bitcoin wallets and things that are already adjacent to Bitcoin, because they're how you steal Bitcoin, and so bugs in those things get found very quickly, exploited, and then fixed. So my conjecture is basically the more we Bitcoinize the internet stack, the more we actually achieve potentially real computer security for probably the first time since the internet began." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:12:21", "start": 4341.65, "text": "I see. So it's, you, we can maybe frame it like a, an advantage Advancement of things like having bug bounties and darknet markets for zero days, but taken to more of an extreme or taken to a more actualized sense or more popularized in a way. If, if bug bounties were to get popularized," }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:12:41", "start": 4361.14, "text": "I love that actually that framing. Every piece of software is, once it interacts with Bitcoin, becomes its own bug bounty, just because if you can exploit the software, now you're getting Bitcoin, so people are gonna do it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:12:50", "start": 4370.68, "text": "Yeah, but it could also be scary for some people, right? They could be like, \"Hey, Software has all these bugs in it, but I think that's also the reality is that there are, you know, that's true today. Yeah, exactly. That's true today. It's that, it's that people were able to live in ignorance for so long, and I think maybe, maybe, maybe Bitcoin is gonna change that too. So we'll see, hey? No, I" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:13:11", "start": 4391.6, "text": "think that's right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13:12", "start": 4392.44, "text": "Yeah. All right, well, I think it's a good spot to wrap up here, Dhruv. Where can people find you online and, if you have any" }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:13:25", "start": 4405.57, "text": "Sometimes at Unchained, but, I recommend for, for all those that aren't familiar, do come check out Unchained, blog for a lot more crazy ideas from other folks and as well as our product, which I think is one of the safest ways to hold Bitcoin for the long term." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13:37", "start": 4417.44, "text": "Fantastic, thank you, Dhruv." }, { "speaker": "dhruv_bansal", "time": "01:13:38", "start": 4418.48, "text": "Thanks, Stephane, for the opportunity." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13:40", "start": 4420.26, "text": "I hope you enjoyed the show. Get the show notes at stephanelivera dot com slash four four five. Remember to share it if you're enjoying it, and I will see you in the" } ] }