{ "episodeId": "SLP631", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "ben_kaufman": { "name": "Ben Kaufman", "role": "guest", "tag": "BEN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 11.23, "text": "Hi everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast brought to you by Bold. For American listeners, go to getbold.io and you can buy Bitcoin there. Now joining me today, or rejoining me today, is Ben Kaufman. He is, over at Keeper now, and, you know, people who don't know, Ben has been around in the space for a while, has done a lot of memeing As well as a, a bunch of development around things like hardware wallets and Bitcoin security and things like this. So, Ben, welcome back to the show." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "00:38", "start": 38.41, "text": "Yeah, thanks for having me again. It's, it's been a while." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:42", "start": 42.22, "text": "Yeah, it's been a while since you've been on the show. So, I, I know you were commenting recently on the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. So for video watchers, I'll put the, the meme up. But basically, the, the gist of it was, you were saying, you know, Bitcoiners then were like, \"F the government, we're gonna use Bitcoin to exit the fiat system,\" and now, Bitcoiners now, \"Please, Mr. President, add some Bitcoin to your stockpile, please.\" So," }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "01:06", "start": 65.67, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I think the, like, the entire environment feels so different right now. So it's not-- before it used to be like, \"Fuck the government, we don't need them.\" we, we're doing our own thing, we want to be completely separated. And now, I'm not saying it's bad that the government will, will buy Bitcoin, right? Eventually, it's something that we expected to happen. But it's kind of cringe to see everybody just, \"Oh, please, please buy Bitcoin as well to your stockpile of a lot of diversi Diversified crypto, right? Or please do this, please do that. I mean, the stuff that we obviously want the government to do is to get out of our lives, right? So of course, stuff that we want is to get us free, which is amazing. We want to get rid of the, of the capital gains taxes and taxes in general, right? We want to reduce government in our lives, you know? We don't want them to do stuff that increases their involvement, right? That increases their, you know, if they start buying Bitcoin Bitcoin with our tax money. I, I don't want them to do that. I don't want them to tax us in general, right? So seeing all of this is kind of extremely weird for me right now." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:16", "start": 135.68, "text": "I see, yeah. And so let me steelman for a second. I, I'm inclined to agree. I think the strict principled libertarian view is we want less government, so that would mean just things like no capital gains tax, the government shouldn't intervene in self custody or Bitcoin mining or running a node or running Lightning or these kinds of things. but let's Second, someone like, let's say like a Pierre Rochard might come back to you and say, \"Well, hang on, Ben, if the government adopts Bitcoin, does that contribute to taking away their scenarage income? Does that contribute to pushing people towards a Bitcoin monetary standard in some way?\"" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "02:55", "start": 174.52, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I think it will be great if the government will actually stop using, you know, their own fiat currency and start relying on Bitcoin. That's, that's the end goal, right? If everybody does that, including the government, because eventually, I mean, I'm not seeing the government completely disappears, right? That's not something that, that I, I see them change over our lifetimes, probably not, but in not in our lifetime, I'm not seeing the government disappearing, right? So I'm definitely in favor of seeing a replacement from fiat currency towards Bitcoin. Right? But just stockpiling it, making it a reserve, I mean, that's, that's also good for them, right? They want to, to use money that they, they're not gonna, going to inflate, they're not going to debase themselves also, right? But yeah, I, I think this cheering towards them and like trying to convince them to do it, I mean, this, this seems very cringe, this seems very, and contrary to the principles of Bitcoin, right? So I think eventually, if they get it, they'll get to it eventually, right? But this cheering towards the government and trying to convince them that, okay, stop with this shit, Konrad, he's, trying to get you in, in, into it. I don't know, I don't like Like the center approach." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:12", "start": 251.98, "text": "Yeah. And so I'm curious as well on the, the point about stopping shitcoin. So this is, you know, to explain a little bit of the context, there's been some, let's say people commenting that essentially Ripple are trying to either undermine the, US government strategic reserve or that they are trying to- Get the government to buy their bags, right? To get the government, to at least the US government, the US state, to purchase XRP. and so I guess that's part of the context, and we're seeing a lot of people who are sort of pushing back and saying, \"Oh, look, Ripple is pre mined. It's a-- It's not, it's not really decentralized. All of these kinds of arguments.\" Yeah." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "04:51", "start": 291.14, "text": "It's, it's, again, so we, we've, we've had this discussion so many times over, right? Every cycle we have this" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "05:00", "start": 300.05, "text": "We have it with corporations, now we have it with governments, right? But it's the same thing all over again, right? So we, each time we try to convince people, okay, don't buy into these schemes, don't do this, right? Just go into Bitcoin. Eventually, it's, it's, it's the same result every time, right? They get, they do it anyway. A lot of people get screwed, right? A lot of people lose money, and then a lot of people also start learning why Bitcoin is the only thing that i- that is important." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:27", "start": 327.16, "text": "Yeah. And so I'm curious then, from your perspective, do you see a role for engaging in the political process as a Bitcoiner, or do you see it more like, no, just go full cypherpunk, you know, cypherpunk's write code and bu-bu-- you know, build products and services aspects only?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "05:44", "start": 343.86, "text": "On the personal side, I would definitely not engage in politics in any way, not try to do anything. I'll definitely go the cyberpunk approach, right? But in general, I think there is a place for people who, who will also engage in politics and try to influence, because we see that this also helps, right? We see it with Ross, we hopefully will see it more with, with, changes that are coming now in the regulations, right? So we see that this also helps. it's not my favorite approach. approach to do stuff, it's not something that I will get personally involved in, but yeah, I definitely think that it's valid and it seems to be working. They say like someone" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:22", "start": 382.21, "text": "should be doing it to try to, let's say, minimize the state. Yeah, probably some-" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "06:25", "start": 384.97, "text": "Someone should be doing it, somebody that is, that thinks this is the right approach, you know? I'm definitely in favor of them trying it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:33", "start": 393.21, "text": "Yeah, and so I agree with you on that, but let me again try to steal, man. So I'm thinking someone like David Bailey of, Look, we, we pulled off a coup. We managed to get all these people to sort of get them to care about our issue of Bitcoin, and maybe this is the first step to get a, quote-unquote, Bitcoin strategic reserve, and then after that, maybe we can get capital gains taxes taken away or the right to self-custody or the right to do Bitcoin mining. What would you say to that?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "07:06", "start": 426.14, "text": "Yeah, I think it's, it's definitely the right, we're going the right direction now, right? we can't rely on that because then eventually, if next four years they're, they're great, but then the next guy isn't gonna do so great with us, right? So we can't rely on that, but it's good when it works, right? It's not gonna work all the time. It didn't work the last four years, it might not work the four years after, right? So this is the problem here. It's always changing. so let's try to achieve as much as we can while we have, the guys on, on our side, in the, you know, in the government, but definitely don't rely on them and especially not for the future." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:50", "start": 469.96, "text": "I think those are fair, totally fair comments to have. So let's focus again now to the more, you know, technical aspects of Bitcoin. I know you, you know, this is an area that you have been professionally involved in for years, in terms of development of Bitcoin software and hardware that relates to self-custody and things like this. so do you wanna just kind of give an update? Like, a, an overall sort of sense, where do you think things are in terms of Bitcoin self custody technology?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "08:20", "start": 500.44, "text": "Yeah, I think it's, in general, we can see huge improvement all the time, you know? So when I started with it, I was working on Specter back then, the solutions were very, very bad back then, I would say. you didn't have any good way to do multisig in a self-sovereign way. you didn't really have a lot of inter- Integration, hardware wallet integrations for multisig were just beginning. you know, it's, it was all very, very early, and even before I joined, it was even more early, and I'm sure it was even worse, right? Right now, you can definitely see how things are improving. you can see that we have more solutions and more interesting things that are happening, right? So instead of just having multisig, you can do a lot of other stuff, either with some services or With Miniscript, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. but you see that there's always innovation, always people try to improve stuff. it's really great, direction I would say." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:22", "start": 562.28, "text": "Yeah. Okay. So when did you first like, what year did you start getting involved in, you know, Specter and, and this, and that stuff? Was that twenty nineteen or twenty twenty? When was that?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "09:33", "start": 572.71, "text": "with Specter it was twenty twenty, I believe, they started. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:36", "start": 576.33, "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "09:37", "start": 576.99, "text": "So let" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:37", "start": 577.31, "text": "me ask you this, just out of curiosity, if you had to sort of say, what were the big picture items or technologies that came to Bitcoin from twenty twenty to now January twenty twenty-five? What were the big things that moved the needle from your perspective?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "09:54", "start": 593.8, "text": "On, on self custody, you'd say? Yeah. So I think, it's, it's mostly like the ease of use, right? I'd say that the, you know, Taproot came, for example, it's not still like widely in use. It will be in a few years, but these things always take a lot of time. so I'd say it was just a thing that, not, like extreme new innovation, but, the, the biggest thing that moved- Moved in self custody was, was the, with the UX, I would say, was the experience to use it, right? And I think both at the software level" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:31", "start": 630.66, "text": "and at the hardware level, there, right?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "10:33", "start": 632.6, "text": "Yes, yes, of course, on, on both sides, right? You had a lot, you, you had very little options on both sides, now you have quite a lot, and they're way more user friendly than they used to be. So back then, the approach for multisig was usually like Electrum, which is, pretty technical, I should say you see solutions also in terms of, both in the technology and also like in the services, so you see like collaborative custody options, you see inheritance planning stuff. So this is stuff that we didn't really discuss even back then, and now it's very common, to see. Yeah. and now I believe that the biggest thing that is coming is miniscript again. But this is still also early for it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:19", "start": 678.95, "text": "Yeah. Okay. And so for listeners who aren't clear on Miniscript, let's, do a, just a, you know, just a short explanation, what is Miniscript?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "11:28", "start": 687.58, "text": "Yeah, sure. So you could think about it as, as a programming language for Bitcoin, right? As a simplified programming language. so in Bitcoin, you-- the way it works is that you have, you can program the spending conditions, the conditions in which you can move coins on the chain, right? So when you send it to someone, you're essentially locking it to a certain, A certain set of instructions of how the next person can spend it, right? So I send it to your address, now I lock it into your private key, right? And only your private key can spend it. So this is like the simplest thing you can do, right? To send it to a specific key of someone. But instead of that, you can do more interesting stuff. You can have more instructions, right? You can have a multisig where you send it and it's locked into two out of three keys or three out of five keys, right? you can- Do other stuff which was not really around, you can do stuff, for example, to lock the coins, for three years, let's say, right? So I send it to you, but you can't spend it for the next three years, let's say as an example. you can do various constructions, various, spending conditions in general, based on time, based on which keys can spend it, based on the specific conditions that you want it to be able to be spent, right? So when I create my wallet, I can decide if I want, the funds that I receive to be locked to a single key, multi-signature, or whatever, right? So this is what Bitcoin is capable of. But until now, it wasn't really common to do anything beyond The single sig or multi sig key, right? And because it's very difficult to program this stuff in Bitcoin, right? There is the script programming language, but it's very limited Okay, it's, very, it's very limited, it's very hard to work with, I would say. it's very hard to audit the, the things you do, and it's very hard to, to use it in a way that is interoperable between wallets, right? So Miniscript what it does, it kind of give you a higher level on top of it, which makes all of this much easier. It gives you a way to do this in a way that is working with multiple wallets and gives you a lot of options in your spending conditions. This is in general Miniscript. It makes, the spending conditions of your wallet much more flexible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:57", "start": 836.75, "text": "So with that in mind, what do you see as the most interesting or useful applications of Miniscript?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "14:04", "start": 844.27, "text": "Yeah, so this is the thing with Miniscript, it is so flexible that there can be so many use cases, right? for example, with, with Bitcoin Keeper, what we did is we implemented the first one as an inheritance key. so let's say you set up your, your multisig wallet, let's say you have a two of three multisig, and you, when you set it, you set it as a normal two of three MultiSig and you define an extra key which is an inheritance key which is not active. So the vault, the wallet that you have starts as a two or three MultiSig normally, and then after, predefined time that you decide, let's say you decided two years, so after two years, the inheritance key becomes active. So instead of a two or three, it becomes a two or four MultiSig, right? So you can give one of your keys already to your, to your heir without giving any control of the funds to them, right? This is One of the things that you can do, this is the fir- just the first thing that we did, but there's so much you can do. You can, for example, say that, okay, I set up my normal wallet, but in ten years, I want this company that is providing me some, some service to be able to spend insta-in, in case that I lose too many keys and I can't recover the funds, right? So some sort of like emergency recovery. you can say that I have, for example- For example, two or three wallets, but, these two guys, these two other guys can't spend together, only me and the one of them, right? So you can limit who can spend. So instead of having a two or three multisig with where each one has the same right, where each key has the same right, you can give different rights to these keys. Right. So you can do so many things. And you can say one key" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:49", "start": 949.04, "text": "of these three must be included as opposed to any two of three, that kind of thing." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "15:53", "start": 953.35, "text": "Exactly, exactly. So you can do so things with it. These are like some examples. You can do time locks as well if you want to lock your coins for a certain period or stuff like that. there's just so many use cases that you can do with it. it's just about, right now, I think it's just about finding what works best for most use cases." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:13", "start": 973.0, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. This show brought to you by CoinKites dot com, the creators of the best Bitcoin hardware security devices such as the Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices is to keep our keys offline, our private keys offline. Now, the way these work is you can do that setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on the, the seed word cards, and keep that secure. Now, you can use this device to interact with the Bitcoin network using software such as Sparrow Wallet, Electrum, or Bep20 Desktop or Nunchuk, as a few examples. Now, you have a range of security features that you can use with these devices, such as passphrases. You can use seed x or, or my favorite is multi-signature. Now, if you're starting in a basic way, just start with the device and the USB-C cable, plug it directly to the computer and use it that way, and then later improve your setup. But I believe these devices are great at helping secure your coins, especially as you start to migrate up into multi-signature security. But don't be disheartened or don't be, scared away, they are accessible, and I think you actually do learn about Bitcoin in the process. So to get yours, go to CoinKite dot com, use code Livera to get a discount on your cold card. And now, back to the show. Yeah. And so when it comes to some of these uses, do we need to- Is there any kind of refreshing or recycling of coins that's required to maintain these time locks, or can you explain a bit on that?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "17:46", "start": 1065.71, "text": "Yeah, sure. So in Miniscript, right, you can define the time locks to have like different stages. So let's say you start as a two of three multisig, and then you want that in five years, okay, I want also this new key to be activated, right, to be added, or I want it to become a one of three instead of a two of three, right? You can do this stuff of, of like Like, different stages at different times. And then the way that you need to define each time is you have two options, essentially. You have an absolute time where you say, \"Okay, in five years, I want this wallet and everything in it to, to be, have to, the, the conditions to apply to this wallet and everything in it.\" Or you can have relative time lock, so each time you receive a UTXO, the timer starts for it, right? So these are essentially your two options." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:38", "start": 1117.62, "text": "So as I understand, that's, that's CLTV and CSV, right? So check lock time verify, which is the absolute time, and then CSV, which is the relative lock time, as in, I send you the coins and you can have, whatever, yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "18:51", "start": 1131.09, "text": "Yeah, that you can basically decide how you want to, decide when you want to spend it, if it's, relative to the time that you receive it or just as a deadline" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:01", "start": 1141.2, "text": "in general, like at a block height, is it? You can say that, I think, for" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "19:07", "start": 1147.18, "text": "Say also at times, but it's more common to use block heights." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:11", "start": 1151.06, "text": "I see. Yeah. So in that example, I guess you have the choice then, or maybe depending on the scheme you use, it's either You know, the ten year example, where maybe it's a block height thing or, I guess in the relative example, was m- you correct-correct me if I'm wrong, is it one-about one year or so that people would use a relative time lock, and then that's-that's the one where you might need to cycle it?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "19:35", "start": 1175.41, "text": "Yeah, so the thing is with the relative time lock, you have a, a much lower limit of what you can do. So with the absolute time locks, you can do for decades, there's no worrying that really. In the relative time locks, you can only, do it for, I think, around one and a half years, more or less. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:55", "start": 1195.04, "text": "And so then that's the one where you might need to be a little bit more- Cautious, or at least aware that if you-- Okay, so a-h, as an example, let's say it's, you know, normally it's a two of three, and after one and a half years it degrades to a one of three, but you are You need to be cautious of that because maybe you don't want it to degrade. So you have to sort of keep in mind, oh, I need to, you know, it's been one year and four months or one year and five months, okay, I better do, I better go and cycle it to kind of keep it as a two of three. You get what I'm saying? Yeah. Is that, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's basically what it would be, right? So" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "20:31", "start": 1230.81, "text": "this applies to both of them, right? So eventually, in both of them, you have to move your" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "20:45", "start": 1244.96, "text": "And then move everything. You can do it separately or at the same time, but eventually it all expires at the same time, right? It all expires at the absolute time. with the relative one, you have your UTXOs and then you have, let's say, you received this now, so the timer starts now, and you received something else in six months, so the timer for that starts in six months. So you kind of can rotate it in different times and not, you basically, you'd have to manage the times for each separately." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:13", "start": 1272.71, "text": "Let's say. And I guess hopefully There is over time, if this got built out, some of the wallets can kind of manage it for you in the background, just in your, in your normal flow of spending. But I guess in other cases, it might need to actually manually prompt you and say, \"Hey Ben, you've got some coins that you need to roll, you need to recycle that coin, do it now or in the next week, something like that, right?\"" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "21:34", "start": 1294.08, "text": "Yeah. So in basically the, the biggest differences in s-- or one of the differences is that in absolute time locks, when you want to, Change your, your lock, right, your absolute time, you have to essentially create a new, configuration of the wallet, right, a new descriptor, a new wallet configuration, because eventually the up, the actual number that is there is changing, right? So the actual number of the block height where stuff becomes activated, that changes, right? So you have to basically change the, the wallet and its new addresses, right? You have a new address, and you need to move your funds from this old configuration to the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:15", "start": 1334.51, "text": "new, yeah," }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "22:15", "start": 1335.31, "text": "into the new setup. You don't have to do it, of course, all at once. You can do it, okay, I'll move this part in this week, this other part in the next week. You know, you don't have to move all the things at once, right? But you'll have to do it before the lock expires, right? And it's a new, configuration basically. Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:34", "start": 1353.83, "text": "And to be clear, this isn't-- Your coins aren't destroyed after this time, it just means your coins have changed security model, right? Just, just for listeners who are thinking, \"Am I coins expiring?\" No, it's, it's that your security model has changed. Because maybe you initially thought you were in a two of three threshold multi-sig context, and after one year, it's degrading into a one of three context. And, I don't know, maybe, back when you set it up," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:00", "start": 1380.41, "text": "Everyone was kumbaya, and then maybe after eleven months, you fall out with the, with one of the guys in the multisig, and now you're worried that, you know, you don't want him to be able to have sole control. That's a context where you would need to sort of think, okay, actually we need to cycle these coins and move them out before this guy has single control and able to spend the coins. As an example, although I mean, in practice, if you did fall out with some guy in this kind of thing, maybe the other two would move the coins out" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "23:30", "start": 1410.39, "text": "And you can decide that they can't move without you or that you can't move without them. So that's the power of multisig, you can decide whatever you want essentially. And so" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:40", "start": 1419.79, "text": "let's talk a little bit about the setup process for this because it would be a new flow, right? It's a new thing. Most people aren't used to that. I mean, most people are just used to like a typical single sig or maybe a multi sig if they've used it in kind of a guided context. so what does the setup look like here when you want to create more advanced spending conditions Using miniscript." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "24:03", "start": 1442.79, "text": "So it's not that different really from a multisig, right? So you still have all, all of the same concepts of storing the descriptor or the configuration as a, as a in, as your backup, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:15", "start": 1455.18, "text": "Yeah. All right, let's just quickly, just before, just for new listeners, just to make sure everyone can follow along. For sure. The kind of the super quick explanation of what's going on here is in a multi-signature context, you need to back up not only your private keys of your device, but also this kind of like an extra file, people call it the output descriptor, or sometimes there's kind of like a configuration file, and this is like an extra thing. Basically, it contains the mult-- it contains the public keys of all the keys associated with that setup, and this is an important thing that you keep for backup purposes. and so that's just one thing, I guess, for listeners who aren't sure what that is, just kind of take it as read, just kind of take it as assumed, it's a thing you need to back up and keep. So go on." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "24:59", "start": 1499.1, "text": "Yeah, so basically the reason you have to back it up is because the-- you need to be able to reconstruct the actual spending conditions that will appear on chain, right? So if you have a three out of five, and then, you're spending only with three, of your signers, right? But you have the public keys, the actual information of all five signers on chain, right? Because you have committed to three out of five. So all these five have the public keys, the public information on chain. So this is why you need that. In Miniscript, it's the same thing, but you need also the rest of your conditions, right? So not just the public keys, but if you have, like, a time lock, then you need to define, okay, so you also have this time lock. it's, again, it's a very similar format. It looks, very similar to a descriptor, to a regular descriptor. but it's essentially just have all the spending conditions instead of just saying, \"Okay, these are the, the multi-sig keys.\" but this is the same thing, right? You just have to make sure that you back it up. And then the setup process is really depending on the tools you use, right? And what you want to achieve. So for example, in Keeper, where we, we, for now, we offer the inheritance key, we'll soon implement more things, but let's start with the inheritance key as an example. So you basically select, okay, I want to do an inheritance key vault, of two or three. So then you select your three signers, right? The normal, the normal keys that you want to use. Then you select the extra signer, and that's it, you have the wallet created. Everything is, is equal." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:35", "start": 1595.29, "text": "So just in that example, we have four total keys, right? So it's three that like you and, let's say, you and your family or whatever, you're gonna use those two or three primarily, but the fourth key is held by some third party, some, maybe it's a company or maybe it's like a trusted, some other distant- Family member or a close friend, and they are sort of designated as your backup person in ten years time or something. Is that the idea or how, how, how do you see that?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "27:01", "start": 1621.31, "text": "Essentially, the, the idea is, yeah, you can have it with, with a family member, close, distant, whatever, you can have it with a lawyer, for example, if you want, you know, when you keep it with your will, for example. you can have it in various ways, right? So it depends on how the user wants it. But yeah, it's essentially Of configuring just three keys, you configure four keys, but one of them is not active yet until the, the deadline passes." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:30", "start": 1649.87, "text": "Gotcha. And just to underline the benefit, the idea then is you can sort of- Have the best of both worlds, right? You can have your two of three with security, knowing that, you know, a robber or a criminal can't sort of put gun to the head and say, \"Hey, gimme your keys,\" because it's two of three. but also you've got this fourth key as a backup sort of thing, but it's not available right now. It's only accessible, let's say, in this example, ten years from now, and the robber can't just go to that lawyer right now because that key isn't valid yet. It's only valid in" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:03", "start": 1683.2, "text": "In this context, yeah?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "28:06", "start": 1685.56, "text": "Yeah, yeah, that's basically the idea." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:08", "start": 1687.53, "text": "Yeah. And so then, as an example, let's say you do that setup and it's now been nine years. And now, because let's say it was coded on absolute time lock, and you now want to, you know, refresh it again for another ten years, because you know, in one year's time, let's say that lawyer, he's now got single access to your family, you know, generational wealth or whatever. So at that point, you need to, I guess, refresh or re-roll the setup to, to do it a new one." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "28:40", "start": 1719.59, "text": "Yeah, so essentially all you need to do is, for example, with Keeper, all you need to do is go to the settings and say, \"Reset inheritance key.\" you select a new time that you want it to be activated, and you move the funds, basically, that's it. You make a transaction to move the funds, and that's it. So it's a really simple process. So then that would involve" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:58", "start": 1737.7, "text": "moving a setup. So let's say in this example, nine years have passed, you need to refresh and roll that setup and change the, lawyer key or The \"quote-unquote\" old setup into the new setup, because that's the, that's the, you know, you need to move that coin to, or that, or all the UTxOs in your old setup to put them into the new context where you've got another ten years time, of inheritance or, and redundancy, I guess. It's kind of giving you this redundancy in your, backup process as well, because let's say hypothetically somehow you and your family screwed up and you lost your two or three keys, the lawyer is kind of like your Deep backup case in ten years time." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "29:43", "start": 1782.81, "text": "Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and so I think so if you don't--" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:46", "start": 1785.66, "text": "Yeah, go on." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "29:47", "start": 1786.94, "text": "No, yeah, if you don't want the lawyer to, to have the access, right? So let's say in the last year, the last month, whenever, but before the time lock, expires, before the time lock passes, you just move the coins. That's, that's all. You do a normal transaction and that's it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:03", "start": 1803.18, "text": "Yeah, gotcha. And so, yeah, I think this could be quite valuable. I think a lot of, listeners might be thinking, okay, yeah, I'm, I'm hodling these coins and I'm holding for the long term, but, this is a common thing you hear is people are sort of worried about inheritance. They're worried about being able to pass their keys down to their heirs, to, you know, whoever, and so I think this might be an interesting option, but I guess for now it's sort of, it's quite early days, being, let's say, popular and kind of used and people knowing what it is and how to do it, but I think, to me, it seems like this is gonna become more popular, right? I think it is sort of the direction things are going to go because this isn't I guess let me explain it this way. This isn't trusting a company to uphold your spending policies or, let's say, ten-year backup or whatever. This is using Bitcoin protocol. So I think that's an important point just for people to understand, like this is happening at the protocol level. It means the Bitcoin nodes are checking, you know, the signatures of these transactions and making sure, \"Yes, is that a valid transaction?\" It's checking at that level, it's not happening at a company level. So it's just an important thing for people to sort of grasp the difference between what's happening at the protocol level versus trusting a company to do that for you" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "31:21", "start": 1881.33, "text": "yeah, this is the absolute security, it's as secure as Bitcoin itself, right? So in self-trusting account- So for example, us, we had, in Keeper, we had the service of inheritance key before that, before using Miniscript, it was basically depending on a server that we were running for you, and we had like a dead man's switch logic there, but it was using eventually a server that is controlled by us. now it's using Miniscript, right? Now you don't have to trust us anymore. Now you're completely independent." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:53", "start": 1912.61, "text": "Yeah, I see. And so let's talk about some of the-- So we've spoken a bit about the inheritance case. Are there any other sort of key big cases that you wanna talk through?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "32:05", "start": 1924.97, "text": "Yeah, sure. So the things that we're considering now, for example, is the case of an emergency key, right? So instead of just saying, \"Okay, we have an extra key,\" you're saying you have a key that is the sole spender or that in addition, of course, to the normal setup, can be a sole spender. So let's say you have, you're a three of five, right? you're two of three, everything is great, but then you lost access to two of your keys or to three of your keys in the three of five You have zero keys with you now. So if you configure this emergency key and you have it somewhere safe or have it with, with a company, with, someone that you trust, right? You can still recover even, even if that happens, even if you lost everything, right? So this gives you really high level of security from, from losing your funds, right? Without having to trust someone to actually hold that key, right? So currently, if you'd want to do that, you'd have to give them, right? You have to say, okay, you want I have full, spending, option right now, right? So you have to trust them. With, with miniscript, with the time lock, you don't have to trust them if you don't want them to get this, this, access. You just move the coins after the five years time, whatever you decide, but you just move the coins, that is all." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:23", "start": 2003.23, "text": "Yeah, I see. And so that's really giving redundancy, right? Like that's the key benefit is redundancy in your backups and redundancy in your, recovery abil-- in your ability to recover in the case of some kind of catastrophic, you know, as an example, you know, in the Palisades there was big fires and, you know, if people, if all your family were there, let's say you have two or three family members, but all their houses were burned down, and you, you know, that, that's an example where it might help you." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:53", "start": 2032.75, "text": "yeah Inheritance and recovery, sorry, the emergency key recovery." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:59", "start": 2038.86, "text": "do you have any other cases you wanna talk through here? Because I guess I've got some other- Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Okay, go on." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "34:04", "start": 2043.7, "text": "Sure, just I can just mention, for example, multi-sig with reducing, threshold, right? So your two out of three becomes one out of three, your, three out of five becomes a two out of five, you know, this is also a very common use case. another one is just simple time lock. So sometimes people just want to lock coins for, for a long time, you know, for like, a year, two years, I don't want to be able to spend it at all. this is something that can If you really need them, but a lot of people are really asking for it, so it's another thing that we consider." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:39", "start": 2079.09, "text": "Yeah. Okay. And now, I guess there is a conversation as well to be had around how does the user verify what's happening here, right? Because that's part of, like, Bitcoin security has all of these elements to it, right? Part of it is letting the user, you know, have their twelve word seed so they can kind of take that out of one device and put it into another. But another point here is around verifiability, right? Knowing Yeah, this is, you know, that my software isn't lying to me. Yes, this is actually the setup that's being created, right? Now, I guess part of that is, you know, on the-- I guess nowadays, you know, you're getting these bigger screens on some of these hardware devices, so I guess that's, that's part of it. But can you explain what is it gonna look like for the end user to understand that, yes, it is correctly a ten-year setup, not a one-year setup or something like that?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "35:30", "start": 2130.05, "text": "Yeah, so when you set up a multisig, for example, with, with your hardware wallet, it shows you on the screen all the cosigners, right? So every key that is involved, right? Right. So with these, with these keys, this is" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:41", "start": 2140.92, "text": "kind of known as like the registering the quorum sort of setup, yeah? Yeah, yeah," }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "35:46", "start": 2145.52, "text": "exactly. So when you register it on your, on your hardware device or when you use it with your hardware device, then you can see all the keys that are involved, so you can make sure that, okay, these are really the keys" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "36:00", "start": 2160.37, "text": "with Miniscript it's similar, so instead of just verifying the, the public keys, you also verify the conditions. So this, basically the hardware wallet itself will show you, okay, so this is the conditions for the spending and these are the keys involved, instead of just showing you the keys involved." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:18", "start": 2177.51, "text": "Yeah, right. So in that example, you would wanna see, okay, I've set an absolute time lock and this is the block height. And so that's something that you would need to, you know, and, you know, maybe this is, I guess, your app might guide the user here or people might be using a professional consultant to sort of walk them through a, a, a setup if they're dealing with lots of money and they're not kind of Bitcoin technical experts. That, you know, what does it look like there?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "36:44", "start": 2203.73, "text": "Yeah. So basically, usually the spending conditions look like, like the descriptor format. They, they look very similar. So, the only thing is that instead of just saying \"multi,\" yeah, for \"multi,\" it will say like, for example, \"and\" or \"or.\" So it will just give you like, or, for example, the \"after\" or \"all there,\" right? So it's not too-- it's, it's still a bit technical, but it's not too complicated to read. So yeah, so let's say" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:10", "start": 2229.63, "text": "engineer readable, but not," }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "37:13", "start": 2233.23, "text": "It's definitely engineerable, for normies it will be hard, right? It can be a bit hard, but also just reading the xPub's in general is also a bit hard, right? So eventually you either trust or you get help, because eventually in Bitcoin security always is always hard and always requires some kind of either trust or help, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:35", "start": 2255.25, "text": "Yeah, okay. yeah. Okay," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:40", "start": 2260.37, "text": "yeah. So, one thing, yeah, so let's get one other question around, the device support, right? So, can you just list out what devices are supporting this right now, and what it's gonna take to sort of, yeah, make it happen more broadly?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "37:59", "start": 2279.06, "text": "So basically in order to securely support it, every device which have, which offers, a screen has to show the information correctly on the screen, right? So has to be able to process and show you the information so you can verify that it's correct. this is like the big challenge. This is why it took so long for Miniscript to become popular, right? Because Miniscript started like, what, twenty twenty, twenty twenty-one, something like that, but it's just now starting to actually see using, like being used, right? by By, by, by everybody, right? By, not just super, super technical guys, because, yeah, the hardware wallet support is, was a very crucial part and it took a long time. right now we have relatively high hardware wallet support, so Ledger has it, BitBox has it, Coldcard has it on their edge firmware, but they, they have it there. Jade has it, Specter-DIY has it, and I think, Krux has it. And besides, also well, TapSigner, for example, will work well with it, but because it doesn't have a screen, it doesn't need speci-like special support for it, so but TapSigner will also work with it, for example." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:11", "start": 2351.43, "text": "Great. Okay, so that's the, the device question. And so in terms of what Keeper is offering as well, so the Keeper specific offering, is it that Keeper will be your emergency key or can you walk that, walk us through that? What would that look like?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "39:28", "start": 2368.5, "text": "Yeah, so you can decide, for example, that your, that your keeper hot, hot key, like the mobile key that keeper generates for you, it can be part of your multisig, right? It can be the emergency key or it can be just normal part of your multisig, right? you can decide who you want it. So you, you want it to be a not just another key that you control or you want it to be someone else's key. but eventually it's completely flexible in that sense, you can just decide. yeah, so with Keeper we also s-uh, offer you the, the mobile key of course, which also support the Miniscript, but again, this is something that is on your device, so you should be careful with it eventually." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:08", "start": 2408.5, "text": "Yeah. Okay, so I think these are the kind of the key points. so are there any other kind of Keeper specific things you wanna mention here? Because I've got some other points I'd, would be, which would be interesting to discuss also around self-custody more broadly, but is there anything on, on Keeper you wanna mention at this point?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "40:29", "start": 2428.71, "text": "yeah, so we are having quite a big release. Part of it, a large part of it is the multi-miniscript integration with all the hardware wallets. So right now we just did it with, with TapSigher for the launch, but now we have everybody, so we have everybody that supports it, so Coldcard, Ledger, BitBox, Jade, so we have all of them, right? This is one of the big things. we also try to simplify a lot in the case of how you can, of how you create it, how you use Prepare the ground for all the new main script stuff that will be coming, so emergency key, reducing the multisig threshold, all of that is, is coming very soon as well. besides, we have also have some very big changes in terms of like, a complete new design for it, a lot of stuff that is coming soon. So yeah, just very excited about that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:21", "start": 2480.62, "text": "So in terms of miniscript adoption, do you foresee there being standardized miniscripts or standardized formats here, like so that people find it easier to think about? Like it might be that a standard thing is to have a, a 10-year recovery key. Or do you see that happening? Like, is that part of what it's gonna take to get more people across the line?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "41:43", "start": 2503.43, "text": "Yeah. So you don't have, of course, you don't have to like decide, if it's ten years, if it's two years, but you have to eventually, I do think we'll have like certain templates which become like the more prominent, right? Because right now we're still kind of in the phase where we explore what people are most interested in doing, right? What people-- Okay. So some people might prefer to do it three or five with one extra key, some people will prefer an emergency option, some people will prefer to do something completely different which I haven't mentioned. Or even thought about maybe. So there is so much flexibility that it's hard to predict what people want. Yeah. And I guess in just try to offer solutions. Yeah, it's an interesting point. To me, it's like" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:23", "start": 2542.85, "text": "a parallel of how, you know, in the, in those earlier years, yes, multi-sig existed, but people were still figuring out what were kind of the, the setups that made sense for a lot of people, right? Like this idea of two of three or three of five, those became very popular setups for a reason. And so maybe it's a similar thing Templates or standardized setups that become popular because that's just kind of, it makes sense for a lot of people to use that instead of doing like some crazy non-standard, whatever, four of nine multisig, four of seven multisig or something, right? There'll be a reason why certain kinds of setups just make sense, and then I guess over time the market will sort of, you know, people will get used to that and be like, \"Oh, okay, this is kind of a standard template, this is how you do it,\" and then there'll be consultants who help teach people how to use that" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "43:12", "start": 2592.15, "text": "Yeah, I definitely think this is, this is becoming the future for, for it. yeah, with multisig as well, it's a very good point. We used to have like people trying a lot of things, and we kind of converged on the two or three, three or five, because this is what made most sense eventually. I think you will see the same thing, right? So people will start with a lot of options and converge into what works best for the most of, of the users, right? And then we'll see better support for it from, from consultants, from" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "43:42", "start": 2621.83, "text": "I think this will help us eventually make it as easy as possible to the users." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:47", "start": 2627.19, "text": "I see, yeah. Now, the-- Oh, I guess this is another common, I know this i-- an issue you often, like to talk about, which is the issue of passphrases or multisig. And I, you know, I think the, the general argument is that passphrase is basically just like a really bad two of two multisig. Is that still your stance, or do you still see a use for passphrases?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "44:10", "start": 2650.5, "text": "I, of course, I see use cases for passphrases for advanced users. I wouldn't generally recommend them though. if you have some certain case where you want to like hide something, maybe it can-- this is like the only use case where I would maybe consider that. More like a duress scenario" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:28", "start": 2668.33, "text": "where like the criminal has you under the head and you have to give something. Yeah, some like duress scenario, but" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "44:33", "start": 2672.53, "text": "not really for, from the security or recovery, let's say, perspectives, right? Because eventually the- This thing is kind of like, right, you have two pieces of, of information you need to protect, and you need both of them at the same place, at the same time in order to spend, right? So if you want to, to spend from your, from your, single sig with a passphrase, you'll have to find your passphrase, that you hopefully wrote down somewhere. or maybe you memorize to some extent, it's, it's hard to memorize well with, with a secure passphrase, but it's not impossible. So you could maybe have that, and then you'll need to bring your normal wallet and combine them in the same place, so then you're becoming more vulnerable again. So it's just, it's basically just a more complicated multi-multi-sig out in this, in this case. I'll just recommend people to do it to a free multisig." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:33", "start": 2732.72, "text": "The lead sponsor of this show is Bold, the best place to buy, sell, and save Bitcoin. For listeners in the US, Bold lets you secure your financial future with complete peace of mind by integrating a low fee Bitcoin-only brokerage with next-gen multisig vaults. With Bold, you can smash buy Bitcoin or set a DCA plan for only 0.99% fees and seamlessly deposit the Bitcoin direct to your Bold vault. The Bold Vault is a 2-of-3 collaborative multisig Where you hold two keys and bold holds one as a redundant backup protecting against loss or theft. You can use Trezor, Ledger or cold card hardware wallets to spin up a bold vault in just a few minutes, and the bold vault is the only collaborative custody vault available with zero monthly fees. They're also offering zero fees on your first ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin buys and twenty five dollars of free Bitcoin when you buy a hundred dollars of Bitcoin or more. Try bold today and upgrade your stacking experience over at getbold dot io. And now back to To the show. Yeah, I see. And so part of the arguments that we normally see online about this kind of thing, there'll be the, the passphrase maxees or just kind of the people who are saying, \"Oh, multisig is too hard.\" What's your updated view, right? In January 2025, is multisig too hard?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "46:48", "start": 2807.78, "text": "I definitely don't think it's too hard. you know, people, most of the people I hear is like, \"Oh, you have to store the descriptor. Wow, you need to store like, and one piece of information that if it leaks, nothing happens, right? Like, it's the privacy a little bit, but nothing happens to your funds, right? So, you know, you just have to store that and you can just leave it with each of your keys and that's The same model, you get the same security in, in that sense or same privacy, let's say, as, as a normal single sig, and you get a lot more security and more recovery options, right? So it's not, and the, the UX for it is definitely not hard anymore. So you can create that and you, it will, the wallet will help you do that very easily, the wallet will guide you if you need help, then you can get it from like con-con-consultant, which are there so many these days. I mean, this isn't, years ago, it's not hard anymore. so I think this is like a lot of it is what is left from, from, you know, from when it was hard, right? So when it used to be hard, then yeah, people went for other solutions, but it's not that hard anymore. So I think for people who are joining, it's quite obvious to see that, okay, this is not hard, like I can do that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:04", "start": 2883.62, "text": "I see, yeah. And I think it, it really has shifted a lot in a few years' time. I, I mean, I still wouldn't necessarily recommend people DIY, if they're totally new. I think it's kind of a good thing to just start with, like, okay, to start with a single signature hardware wallet, you know, and then, you know, sort of once you're more comfortable, okay, now play around, have a test setup, and then at that point you can slowly upgrade into it, and so- So" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "48:30", "start": 2909.64, "text": "yeah, you I have very, like, just get a hot wallet, right? Try to understand what an address is, how you spend stuff, right? So just do the very basics, just test everything. You don't have to rush and do everything at the same time, right? You can take your time, but the eventual thing is that you have to move forward in your security. You don't want to stay in, okay, setup, let's say, and then realize that okay, I didn't have enough recovery like I should have set it up for. So you can take your time, but eventually Essentially, it's something that you should be" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:06", "start": 2945.86, "text": "doing. I see. And so more broadly, self-custody in general, there seems to be--" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:13", "start": 2952.7, "text": "Now, you and I and sort of maybe listeners of this podcast, we're sort of in somewhat- Somewhat of a bubble or an echo chamber, right? Because, you know, there's probably, there's probably a hundred million or more people who have some form of Bitcoin Maybe even hundreds of millions who have some form of Bitcoin exposure, right? A meaningful amount, maybe they hold some coin on an exchange somewhere or with a custodian or maybe they're just buying the ETF right now, as, as I'm sure you know right now, the, you know, the fees on main chain are quite low. Is it just that a lot of people are onboarding through the ETF or MicroStrategy and that they're not, they're not, they're not interested to self-custody? What, in your view, is driving that? Is it, it's, you know, it, it seems like, I mean, let me put it this way, is it not a technical thing? It's more about motivation. Is it more about some, you know, reason to actually self-custody? Is that what's going on or how, how do you, how do you see this?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "50:10", "start": 3010.15, "text": "Yeah, so I think it's mostly just that people aren't aware that either aren't aware or not willing to take the responsibility of self-custody, because eventually self-custody means, okay, I don't give the responsibility to someone else, I take full responsibility of myself, right? This is something that is hard for people to do, right? If they usually they are relying on a bank account, and then if something happens, that's the bank's fault, I need them to fix it, right? Even if something really bad happens, like eventually Actually, I, they, they try to avoid taking responsibility, so bad stuff can happen, but at least it's not my fault, right? That's kind of the, the thinking that, that is preventing it, I think. You know, with Bitcoin, they have the opportunity to take the responsibility for themselves. I don't think everybody will want that, so I think this is like the main thing" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:03", "start": 3062.69, "text": "Yeah, it does, it does seem that way, and it seems that, you know, a lot of people talk about how, you know, Bitcoin as an example, when people come to like Bitcoin scaling conversations and saying, \"Look, eight billion people can't use Bitcoin on chain and all this stuff,\" but We know that today, it's only a small fraction who self-custody, at least in terms of the number of people. Now, those people who do, they may be the whales, they may be the people with a lot of coin, so by coin value, it might be a lot of people are self-custodying, but by numbers of people, maybe not so much." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "51:37", "start": 3096.6, "text": "Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, if you have just ten bucks, then you don't have to write anyways, you can" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:44", "start": 3103.75, "text": "just have" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "51:47", "start": 3106.91, "text": "the emergency keys. And it might not be economical because that might be very, And right now we, we aren't really facing this, this issue, right? Fees are very low still. Eventually, I do think we will face this issue, right? It's, it's a matter of time, but I think, you know, stuff will happen again that will push, you know, another FTX might explode, people will eventually realize that, or more people at least, definitely more than now, will realize that self custody is the right way to go." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:20", "start": 3139.79, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "52:20", "start": 3140.37, "text": "So it will be something like, I don't think everybody will want it eventually, because again, taking responsibility is not the easiest thing, but I definitely think that more people will want it than, than right now. so yeah, scaling is of course very important, but we probably have a little bit of time still, and probably we're not gonna have to onboard eight billion people on chain ever. you know Right, because it'll only ever be a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:48", "start": 3168.43, "text": "fraction of that number, you know, Yeah, that's" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "52:52", "start": 3172.07, "text": "so, yeah, just a fraction will even want to self-custody, just a fraction will actually use Bitcoin, just a fraction will have funds that are worth enough to, to actually do it on chain and not just, okay, if, if you trust, yeah, eventually if you trust it for a few dollars, that's, that's not the end of the world." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:09", "start": 3189.02, "text": "Yeah. And so I think it's fair to say, at least today, in twenty twenty-five, there's a lot of \"quote unquote\" headroom. We have a lot of space for more people, if they want to self-custody, they can. There's actually, it's quite relatively cheap. I mean, you can buy a good hardware device in the range of two hundred dollars, and hitting the chain, you know, is, you know, quite affordable. so as long as you have, you know, a, an amount that's worthwhile self-custody Even a few million sats at today's prices, which is let's say a few thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin, it's probably worth your while to, to do that. So I guess it's just an interesting thing because it's sort of people go back and forth on like, \"Oh, no, we're not scaling well enough,\" or, you know, there are people talking about, \"W- you know, why haven't we got covenants yet?\" these kinds of things when- Maybe, you know, it, it, it's not necessary right now. I guess part of the arguments are sort of that, okay, maybe, we need to-- I guess the steel man would be, \"Oh, well, we need to get this particular covenant in because the government is gonna block these upgrades in the future.\" I guess that would be the argument. I'm not A hundred percent sold personally, like I don't, I think it will eventually just be seen as, like, you know, it's just neutral technology, everybody wants it. I think" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "54:26", "start": 3265.83, "text": "if the government can block it, then we have bigger problems, right? I think that that's like a stage where if they can block an upgrade, they can probably do a lot of other stuff. maybe the upgrade isn't even the biggest problem in that case." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:42", "start": 3281.72, "text": "Possibly, yeah. but I think I, and I, I'm curious as well to get your thoughts, like, I'm just kind of commenting a little bit on how I've seen the space develop a little bit. I would say In, let's say, late 2021, 2022-ish, there were a lot of people using wallets like Moon Wallet as an example, so M U U N Wallet, right? And so as an example, that wallet did hit the chain a lot. It was just using on-chain transactions and using swaps to kind of do Lightning in the background. So it's kind of like you would pay on-chain, and then Moon's server would pay the Lightning invoice for you in the background. Now, that resulted in a lot of on-chain volume. My- Speculation or my, my understanding of what happened is, you know, the, we had the whole retarinals or ordinal inscriptions, BLC twenty, runes, whatever, that kind of craze happened in twenty twenty-three, and I think my read of that is a lot of those users kind of got \"quote unquote\" chased away because, you know, the fees went on-chain up quite-- the fee, the on-chain fees rose quite a lot in terms of getting into the next block. And so that probably chased a lot more people to using Lightning and maybe custodial Lightning and maybe- Maybe some liquid and maybe ARC and things like, you know, other L2s. and so it may be that people might have kept using the chain a lot, but they kind of got chased away because kind of all the inscriptions and runes and ordinals and whatever. I'm curious how you, how you see that." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "56:13", "start": 3372.82, "text": "I mean, in terms of, if you want to consider like spam in general in on chain, it's something that you can't, like, if they have the funds to spend, if somebody's willing to pay for it, you can't really call it spam, because, if, I mean, eventually it can just be moving coins between my two wallets back and forth for, for all of eternity if I have the funds to do it, right? If I'm rich enough to afford it, right? And how you do, how do you know if that is spam or not, right? These are like Eventually, the like s- you can't call like stuff that is paying the fees spam, I think. Eventually, we, we need to deal with, okay, this is like what the fees are, are for, right? To filter the transactions, right? To get the most hyper- the transactions. like any other service, right? So when you have a lot of customers, you raise your prices, you get less customers, right? Supply and demand, it's, it's easy, right? So eventually, we, we have to deal with the, with the fact that the block space is scarce, right? And we'll have to deal with higher fees eventually in the future. And whatever it's because of ordinals, whatever it's because people actually use it in transactions all the time, whatever it's like big entities that are coming and doing settlements on chain, right? So eventually something is, is, I think it might- In my view, it's destined to happen," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:36", "start": 3455.61, "text": "right? So I think I disagree a bit on the spam thing, but I kinda agree in the end, right? Like, here's how I see it. I think it wouldn't be-- it wouldn't make sense for me to say, \"Oh, look, Ben, your email, I sent you all this, spam email about, you know, random products that you don't care about, but, you know, I paid the fee to my email provider, so therefore it's not spam.\" Well, no," }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "58:04", "start": 3483.73, "text": "Protect from emails, this is why proof of work was kind of invented, right? So this is like the original use case of proof of work, right? So if they provide the proof of work, if we in, in the sense of Bitcoin phrase, right, eventually they use proof of work to mine Bitcoin, you get it, right? This essentially Bitcoin is the only proof of work. So even in that, the case of emails, it would still, right? It would still happen, right? If they're willing to pay the proof of work, then this is, this is gonna happen." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:34", "start": 3514.01, "text": "You" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "58:34", "start": 3514.09, "text": "can call it spam if you want, but it's just, it's not gonna change anything, right? It's just the way you call it. And that's where I agree. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:40", "start": 3520.27, "text": "I agree that I, I call, I still call that stuff spam in my mind, but I also don't believe it will, like, that we would be able to- Stop it with some kind of, you know, Bitcoin Core change because I just think they would route around it. I think the more advanced arguments are more like, okay, could you sort of make it difficult enough that the spammers just go away? That's maybe a more debatable point, but I think it, to me, it looks like a bit of a fad, and it was kind of gonna go away on its own anyway. I think eventually," }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "59:13", "start": 3552.57, "text": "yeah, that's the thing. So that was going to, in my view, that was something that was just going to go away anyway, right? Eventually, all of these ICOs, whatever, it comes, it stays, it runs itself out, right? People lose interest and it goes away, right? They lose the interest, they lose the funds, and then they can't This is like, this is how I see it, it was like crazy that it's going to eventually fade, right? Because people will, will not be interested enough to send, to spend on, on it like compared to other cases, right? So if like big, entities would want to settle on chain now, they would also, raise the fees, right? and then they will price out this stuff." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:54", "start": 3594.45, "text": "Yeah. So I just see it like it's, it's still a bit, it's still a bit silly to say people kind of abusing sort of, you know, witness to sort of attach, you know, JPEGs into the chain and make every node kind of externalize their cost to all, to all the node runners. that to me is a bit, but at the same time, like I said, I don't think we'll be able to necessarily stop it with the chain, which kind of let them try that. There's stuff that you can" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "01:00:18", "start": 3618.55, "text": "always consider, yeah. You You can touch right your, your witness size, you can limit certain stuff, but eventually you can always include data, right? We don't want it to be impossible to include data. Yeah, and that's also a fair" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:34", "start": 3634.86, "text": "point, I agree. So, so yeah, so in the end, I think it's gonna, you know, we, we want, as far as I'm concerned, I want monetary users, and I don't consider retards as kind of monetary in the sense that they're just attaching JPEGs or whatever into the chain, like, or just sort of creating kind of Shitcoins on chain per se, with like, you know, runes or whatever. But, yeah, like I said, anyway, that's a bit of a, a fad, and I, I, I, I believe it's a fad. I, I mean, I could be proven wrong, who knows? but it seems to be kind of on the way down. we'll see what happens there, but, in terms of getting more people on board, getting more people to self-custody, what do you see as, I guess, catalyst" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:22", "start": 3682.77, "text": "But a crackdown, and then that's the point where people are gonna start, you know, caring about self custody. What do you think?" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "01:01:28", "start": 3688.95, "text": "Yeah, if, if we wait until the government cracks down, then it's probably too late. we, we have to start now, and I think the catalysts are definitely, you know, all these, blow ups, you know, this FTX and the entire collapse there was massive, and I don't think it will be the last, right? So these events always wake up people to this. but hopefully we can also do it So this would be the ideal thing, right? To do stuff before it happens, before the government cracks down, before the exchange blows up, you know, you want to make sure that you do it before that. So for that, we need a lot of education, and we need people to start understanding the prin- eventually the principles of being self-sovereign, of not relying on, on banks or third parties, but doing stuff yourself, which gives you power and gives you responsibility, right? So they need to accept that, and eventually, yeah, I think this will, this will increase," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:23", "start": 3743.45, "text": "Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, I, I agree, I think it is about getting more people to sort of learn and understand why self custody is, is so important, at least for the people who can afford it and are technically able to do it, because there'll be a bunch of people who maybe they can't afford it or they're not technically able to. but part of that is over time, it becomes easier and more practical to do that. And maybe historically, one of the hurdles might have been, \"I, hey, I might otherwise want to self custody,\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:52", "start": 3772.77, "text": "They might say, \"I might otherwise have wanted to self-custody, but I didn't, I, I wasn't confident enough in the redundancy and backup solutions and inheritance solutions. And hopefully now, over time as the tooling improves, then more people feel comfortable to do that.\" and so I guess that's the, the optimistic and perhaps realistic take that over time as the technology and, the products and services around this improve, more people will actually go and do that self-custody." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "01:03:19", "start": 3799.97, "text": "Yeah, so eventually, yeah, it, it comes down to that, yeah, of course, the big, exchanges can do stuff that, can afford to do stuff that is more secure, right? So that's why like, okay, so these guys can afford a better team which will do, you know, even before Miniscript, so they could already do like stuff which was super advanced, scripts because they had the money to, to spend on that, right? So they could afford to do this. but yeah, the normal people can't. But" }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "01:03:49", "start": 3829.69, "text": "Easier for people to do by themselves, a miniscript is opening up a lot of, options and possibilities. So yeah, the thing is it's always improving and now with, yeah, I can with, with just a simple app on my phone, I can compete with the security of, of an exchange, right? Simply because I can set up a lot of stuff by myself and I don't have to basically do super advanced stuff anymore, I can just do it, with the simple UX, right? So this is also a big, big opportunity, a big catalyst." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:19", "start": 3859.92, "text": "Yeah. Alright, well, I think this is really interesting to see where things are going with Miniscript and how it can sort of give people the \"quote unquote\" best of both worlds, right? You can have your own self custody, but also still have a kind of backup that is available for you in case you screw up, kind of thing. So I think that's really useful for people. I hope more people look into this. and so yeah, listeners, check it out. the, link is bitcoinkeeper dot app, and the links will be in" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:49", "start": 3889.74, "text": "Ben Kaufman. so yeah, thanks for joining me, Ben, and, hope to catch up soon." }, { "speaker": "ben_kaufman", "time": "01:04:54", "start": 3894.89, "text": "Yeah, thanks. Was great. Thanks for having me." } ] }