{ "episodeId": "SLP676", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "praveen_perera": { "name": "Praveen Perera", "role": "guest", "tag": "PRAVEEN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:12", "start": 11.73, "text": "Hi everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast brought to you by Bolt, where US listeners can buy Bitcoin for the industry's lowest fees and earn the highest Bitcoin back rewards with the Bolt debit card. Now, I had a small error with the, recording, so I'm just recording this in post, but my guest for today is Praveen Perera. He is He's the developer and founder of Cove Wallet, which is a Bitcoin app for you to self-custody your Bitcoin, and, I know Praveen through different Bitcoin circles, and, wanted to get him on to explore his views on self-custody and what he's doing and aiming to do with the Cove Wallet. So, Praveen, welcome to the show!" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "00:53", "start": 52.61, "text": "Hey, good to be here." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:55", "start": 54.61, "text": "Yeah, so Praveen, I, I, I guess just for listeners, obviously you know, but just for listeners, I, I met Praveen or through Bitcoin circles, but, from, some of the Sri Lankan, Bitcoin community as well. And, I know you've got this Cove wallet that you've been working on, which as I understand is for iPhone, so I haven't had the chance to actually use it yet 'cause I'm an Android guy myself, but looking forward to getting into chatting a bit about" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:22", "start": 82.25, "text": "Create yet another Bitcoin wallet." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:25", "start": 85.03, "text": "Yeah. before I get into that, it is for iPhone right now, but Android is coming soon, a few months. Just, yeah, I just wanna put that out there right now. I, I want, I wanna, I wanna be multi-platform, and hopefully in the future, maybe we'll look into, desktop as well. But the, basically the very next thing I'm gonna be working on is Android because all the main features I wanna do are, are complete, so I'm just gonna bring them all to Android next. Of why another mobile wallet. basically, I am an on-chain Maxi, I use on, you know, I, li-lightning, I, nothing wrong with Lightning, it's just like the user experience for me isn't there, I just end up using, I just end up using, custodial solutions usually. but for, For on chain, I usually, I was a big Coldcard guy, that's what I used mostly. and before Cove, for anything that I needed to do on mobile, I would use Green Wallet because that was like the nicest looking, easiest to use wallet, I was mostly just focused on on-chain. The problem with Green was I couldn't really use it with a hardware wallet, so I had to, if I was using, if I wanted to keep it, other than Jade, I guess, yeah. Yeah, I, I didn't have, I didn't have a Jade, so I, I couldn't use it with like any, other hardware wallets, right? so that's basically, and the other thing is I was always helping people with, Bitcoin just getting set up, which I'm sure we all do." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "02:54", "start": 174.09, "text": "And recommend an app, I would like to have them, if, if I'm recommending an app to someone, I would like to have a nice path for them, okay, like start with a hot wallet, you know, but eventually where you want your end goal, where you want to be, is some sort of hardware wallet, and, it'd be nice to stay at the same app through that whole journey And, yeah, and then that, that, that, that, that was basic, basically my, motivation. Gotcha. And, yeah, and I, first, first of all, I wanna say thanks to OpenSats because, they, they funded me, but the reason I'm getting into that is because, they, they fund using Bitcoin, right? So I've since been, since I've been funded by OpenSats, I've been using on-chain even more. And, since I, it's like a monthly thing" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "03:45", "start": 225.04, "text": "thing for me to use, and it's been really nice, just because, ev-ev-even for like, temporary funding that, like, or like temporary Bitcoin that I need to, like, move over to sell some, you know, to pay for my monthly stuff, I don't have to use a hot wallet. Basically, I wanted to use-make an app that was easy enough to use with a hardware wallet that, like, for most situations, you wouldn't even need to use a hot wallet at all. And, I've, for me at least, I've accomplished that" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "04:15", "start": 254.96, "text": "Q1 for basically everything, right? So, yeah. So that meant," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:19", "start": 259.39, "text": "out of curiosity, are you doing like QR codes there or NFC or what's your main" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "04:23", "start": 263.35, "text": "mode of use there? Yeah, my main, main mode of use with the Q1 is definitely QR. It's been, really nice to use with Q1. definitely, it, it works with, NFC as well, and I have an MK4 to test with, and I've been testing it. NFC I, it's good once you find exactly where to put it, but, QR is just a little bit easier. the other thing is the tap signers also, the tap signer, NFC is really nice, it works like very quick, so, yeah, those are my, my, basically I, I think of, Cove as having two main, cohorts of users, people that are really new, so I wanted to make it really beginner friendly, try to- Try to guide them through it as much as possible, and then other cohorts of advanced users that want to, not just a hot wallet, but a natural proper, coordinator that, that you can use with the cold hardware wallets." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:18", "start": 318.02, "text": "Gotcha. And so in the same, let's say, category, because obviously the questions will come, so I'm asking, because listeners will wanna know, they might think, \"Well, okay, Praveen, what about Nunchok or Keeper?\" Because I guess those are, as I understand Understand the market of other options out there, those seem the most similar in the sense that you can just do a hot wallet, single sig on the phone, and of course, you can use cold card on those or other hardware wallets and QR codes. Where is Cove different? Is it more like the user experience? Is it kind of your focus or your, you know, the, the way you design the product? How do you compare Cove with, let's say, Nunchuk or Keeper?" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "06:00", "start": 359.7, "text": "Yeah, definitely that's a question I get that a lot, especially at the beginning when With the product, it basically compared with Nunchuck and, BlueWallet a lot. Right. BlueWallet, so I'm just gonna compare all of them. BlueWallet, it's, it does work with PSBTs, but the, the experience isn't as nice, with the QRs and NFTs. Nunchuck is very nice to use. The only problem is it's multisig focused and It, it, it, it has multisig. I know you can use it as a single sig wallet. It's just Cove is very focused, right? So this Cove is no lightning, no multisig, just single sig, which, which makes my life job as a developer much easier. There's mu- le- less flows to think about, less things to explain to the user. So if you drop, if you drop a, a brand new user into Cove and a brand new user into Nunchuk, they're gonna have less questions with Cove. And And that's because, that's just the nature of, of what Nunchuk is. So the Nunchuk has to ask you, hey, is this, are you, do you want multisig? Do you want single sig? You know, Cove, there's no, there's no questions, right? It's just single sig, that's all, that's all you get. So the less questions, new users have to, answer, the better, right? So I, so everything I like I'm pretty happy with Cove right now, but there's definitely more improvements I wanna make. and for every new improvement that I wanna make for beginner users, it's-- it all comes down to How can I reduce the number of questions? Or if they-- or if I have to ask, ask a question, how do I explain it, in a really simple way, right? So number one is like, just like the number of questions that has to be asked is much less. and then if you know, and even if you're not a beginner, if you know you're only gonna use single-sig, I, I think it's just a better experience just because there's not a bunch of stuff that you never use. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:55", "start": 474.52, "text": "yeah. I'm, I'm gonna make some analogies here. I think- In a way, I would frame this as you're more opinionated about how to do things, and maybe that's a good thing, right? Maybe for-- because it means maybe you're not gonna be everyone's cup of tea, but there'll be some people who are happy to send either the, let's say, the experienced Bitcoiner who's kind of, \"How do I coach my noob friends, my new coiner friends, and the new coiners themselves, the noobs?\" They, they might like that in a sense because historically, different wallets, the setup can be It can ask you all these questions, and then if you're new, you don't know the answer to those. And sometimes it's like, \"Oh, what script type do I wanna use?\" And what this and that, and it's like experienced users will know, \"Oh, okay, do I want like, whatever, native SegWit or this kind of output type or whatever.\" But if you're a noob, it's just, it's too confronting all at once. And so that's kind of, interesting to see that. So I guess you're kind of taking, as It's kind of like how, maybe Craig Raw took a certain approach with Sparrow, and then that approach became very popular in the desktop wallet world, right? Because he was kind of putting out something a bit different to the Electrum, it's kind of a competitor to Electrum, but done in a new style and a certain way, and it kind of took off because so many people were really into it, and they just liked the way he designed it, and he's sort of the the main guy obviously behind Sparrow, and I guess in a similar way than maybe Cove is kind of like that, in, in the mobile sense, that you're taking a more opinionated approach, and it's different to some of the other ideas out there where, you know, they, they have a different idea of how to, You know, build that wallet. Now, I guess the question people might have is, are you intending to make this a, like, a sustainable business? Is it gonna be a business model? Is it gonna be just kind of like, you know, it's just out there for free? W- because the, the sustainability question will matter, because then people might not be as comfortable, you know, using this thing if they don't know it's gonna be around for a while." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "10:07", "start": 606.51, "text": "Yeah, honestly, that's probably the biggest question up in the air right now. so I've been lucky enough to get funded by OpenSats for the last year, and I just applied again, like yesterday. but yeah, sustainable-- first of all, the sustainability, the- First thing I have to say, it is fully open source, MIT licensed, right? So if for whatever reason I stop working on it, anybody, someone else can take it over, right? And, the other thing is we have all these things built in to make import/export easier, so it's not just, It's not just the transactions that you care about, if you're labeling things, that's a big thing you should really care about, you know, labeling and transactions, separating those things out. So right now we support BIP, three twenty nine, which is the labeling standard supported by, Sparrow and other, that's just a standard BIP, right? Yeah, so we, we support, importing labels and exporting labels. We, you can even do it through QR codes, which is nice. So, I guess that's the first answer is if, if I, you know, bust factor one, if I go away today, You will not lose anything, right? Like obviously your Bitcoin is safe 'cause it's Bitcoin, but your labels, whatever else, yeah, labels are safe. That's basically the two things you care about. As far as sustainability, I mean, assuming I get funded again, I'll be, I'll be working on at least another year or two, right? for sure. But ideally, yes, I'd like to figure out how to make this sustainable, and work on it long term. Maybe I'll have to talk to Craig Raw and ask him how he's able to do it. It's, it's just a hard balance to do. Like, I don't wanna bring in a bunch of services. just like the more stuff you add to the actual app, I think the more, complex it can get and Yeah, it's just like the guiding ethos of this wallet is to remain simple, right? So I'm gonna have to weigh that, how do I keep it simple, but how do I make it sustainable so I'm not having to rely on, you know, funding forever? But, that is an open question, I'm definitely open to ideas, but yeah, definitely something I'm thinking about. I mean, my first thought was like maybe I could like try and, partner with those, people that let you buy Bitcoin. I was doing some research into that You know, the, the fees are much higher obviously, 'cause like if I need to take a cut and then those people, it's like, you're, you're looking at like anywhere from like three to five percent, which maybe some people would be willing to pay to, like, to buy Bitcoin right in the app. that, that's probably like the easiest first thing that comes to mind, but, yeah, I'm definitely-- that's definitely a question that ha-- doesn't have a good answer yet for me." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:54", "start": 774.4, "text": "Yeah, and I think it is-- that's been one of the challenges for self-custody wallets in general, right? Because in Bitcoin, it's such a strong ethos around like- People don't wanna use wallets unless they're open source and all this, but then there's kind of that question of how do they monetize, how do they make it sustainable? Now, one common answer before that was very cyberpunk friendly is kind of the coinjoin wallet, but obviously with Wasabi and Samurai, you know, both shutting down or Samurai being shut down by, DOJ, that's kind of another question there. And then like you said, the other way is kind of having buy Bitcoin in the app kind of functionality, and that, a common one, I think You know, they might partner with like MoonPay or something like this to be able to quickly be able to have, support for that around the world. So, yeah, kind of an open question. so we'll see what happens there. I wanna get your view on this as well around- Being in touch with what the users need. Right now, you were speaking to this before, this idea of how can I take a noob on this wallet and get them to the point where, you know, they don't have to ask questions. So how do you stay in touch with that?" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "14:03", "start": 842.94, "text": "Yeah, this is a good question. Mostly I'm trying to remember what it was like with the new people I've, I've guided through. And the other thing that's been helpful is I have a little feedback group. that feedback group has a good mixture of people, so there's like the very technical people, but then I also have some, my friends that are self-described, technical retards, such as plate-licking pleb. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but, he actually has really good feedback because, you know, it Like someone that's been in it longer, it's really hard to remember everything, right? I, I remember even when I was pro- learning to program, the people that I learned best from was people that had like just started recently, right? That are like a few steps ahead of you, they're much easier to learn from, 'cause like people that are ten steps ahead, they forgot the hard, like the stuff they struggled with at the beginning, right? So for example, I used to have a button that said, \"New Wallet, \" right? Easy, makes sense. But I don't wanna click this button because I'm afraid it's gonna delete the wallet that I already have. Yeah. So I'm like, okay, I'll, I'll change it to add wallet, right? So that's one thing. the other thing is, it's not just me on this wallet. I'm doing all the programming, but OpenSeas was nice enough to also fund, a guy I knew from Canada named Adrian. He's the designer, so I'm, I'm a terrible designer. If I made this, if I designed this," }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "15:33", "start": 933.24, "text": "He's basically getting into Bitcoin as he's, as he's doing this, and but he's getting paid in Bitcoin, so he actually has to, he's actually using it, right? so he's like brand new and, Every design, every UX flow, we work together where I explain what the point of this is and how it needs to work, and he has good ideas on how to actually lay it out, and, I, I can't think of anyone better because he has no idea what's going on, I have to explain just enough for him to understand, and he's like, \"Then he has all the questions.\" So like, that kind of like focus group or whatever is, is built in already. And then the rest is just taking, just taking feedback. but right now a lot of the feedback is going to be from, the early adopters are gonna be people that are basically, Already in Bitcoin, right? From Bitcoin Twitter, of whatnot. But I will be taking more feedback, but it's-- those two things have helped, just like having two different groups of people that are like super new or slightly experienced, but not super experienced. And Yeah, of course." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:39", "start": 998.68, "text": "And also it matters who you take feedback from. And I mean, the point would also be that there are times where you as the, you know, the app creator, developer, have to decide whose feedback you're going to take and who, who you're gonna ignore, because you can't listen to everyone. So that's also kind of an interesting thing. So, my next question is, if a user is setting up the wallet, can you just walk us through what does the flow look like, so people can get an idea, if they haven't" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "17:08", "start": 1027.55, "text": "Yeah, makes sense. so right now, this is an area that I wanna improve, especially for new users. But right now, you get dropped into a screen, and there's just two buttons that says, \"Uh, where do you wanna set up your-- Where do you wanna store your keys? Hardware wallet or on the phone?\" the reason I wanna, improve that is I think for brand new users, that's already like a little bit-- That's already" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:28", "start": 1048.5, "text": "one step too far for some, yeah. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "17:30", "start": 1050.44, "text": "So basically," }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "17:34", "start": 1054.26, "text": "I'll get back So if it's, if it's a hardware wallet, you click it and it just takes you, to a screen that lets you, import using a file, QR, or NFC. so for QRs, we right now only support the BB QR standard, so I think, so all the coldcard stuff works, and, Krux, but the other hardware wallets Need the U R standard, so that, that will be the, the two things I need to work on right now is supporting the U R standard and, Android app. But yeah, so you, Hardware Wallet Flow, you say how, how you wanna bring in the xPub file, basically, file. QR or NFC, and yeah, from there you just scan it, and then it puts you into, it just puts you right into the wallet screens. so that's a That's, I guess, a little different from some other stuff. That's a place where we try to avoid questions, so it doesn't ask you, you know, is this a legacy, legacy, is it SegWit, native SegWit? It just puts you right into the native SegWit wallet. And then, but while you're in it, in the background, it'll look through some of the addresses on the other two wallets, assuming this is like a full xPub that has the information for all of them. It'll do a scan, and then if it finds, Transactions in like, legacy addresses or, wrapped SegWit addresses, it will, at that point, it will ask you, \"Hey, we found, transactions in these, do you wanna switch?\" Right? that's it. And then to the hot wallet, this is a little bit, there's a bit more. So you go, it asks you import or new. you can also scan words from, there's like different QR standards for that, like the seed QR and compact, seed QR, so you can scan the words or you can enter them. if you're importing and if it's just a new wallet, you can say twenty-four or twelve words. and then it, it, it takes you to a screen That where you can verify the words, one by one, and it's, it's just like a multi-select thing. maybe I, I can add, send you pictures or something of that. But that's pretty cool. You just, you know It says what is your fir-first word, and I think there's like six or seven i-options, and you s-select them, and you go through all the words, and, and then you get put into the wallet. you, you aren't forced to- Verify your words right away, like you can click away, but there will be a warning, annoying warning banner that doesn't go away until you actually verify it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:15", "start": 1214.78, "text": "The lead sponsor of this show is BOLT, the banking platform designed for Bitcoiners. With the BOLT virtual Visa debit card, you earn Bitcoin back on every purchase. The more Bitcoin you buy with BOLT, the more Sats back you get on the card. Buy twenty-five hundred dollars of Bitcoin and earn three percent Sats back. Keep stacking with BOLT to earn up to ten percent Sats back. BOLT offers the industry's lowest themselves with zero added spreads. When starting out, you can use Bold Wallet, which is managed by the team, but Bold is also supporting self custody with Bold Vault, a two-of-three collaborative custody multisig for zero monthly fees. With Bold, you get your own FDIC-insured checking account to store and send fiat, pay bills, direct deposit your paycheck, and replace your legacy fiat bank. Sign up today and get 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. Or more, go to getbold dot io. This episode is brought to you by CoinKite, the makers of my favorite Bitcoin hardware wallet, the Coldcard Q. Now, some people think self-custody is too hard, but it's really about taking responsibility for your Bitcoin wealth and understanding that self-custody gives you a true feeling of liberty. The Coldcard Q has a full keyboard and big screen, it's got two secure elements and a true air gap, allowing you to go fully air-gapped using QR codes from seed generation to transaction signing. You can power the device using three triple-A For power, you can easily use it with Sparrow Wallet for PC or Nunchok on mobile, and you can dial it into the right level of security and complexity that you choose. If you want a simple setup, just use twelve words and single signature. If you want passphrases, easy. If you want to add multisig or co-signing features, you've got those too. So go to CoinKite dot com, use code Livera to get ten percent off on your cold card or other devices and level up your self custody today. Okay, so that's the main setup aspect of it" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:05", "start": 1325.46, "text": "The idea would be like, let's say that user has, you know, they've got the coldcard Q, they've gone through, they've written down the twelve words. is there guidance for that user on where to kind of go in the coldcard menu to actually know where, which to scan in? Yes. so" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "22:21", "start": 1341.25, "text": "in the, in the, we have a little like help button that has A, it's like a pop-up that shows like, hey, if you're on the Q1, if you're on the MK4, and then, if you're on other wallets. The problem with that right now is, only hardware wallets I have on me are stuff that either I bought from what I had or stuff that, CoinKite has sent me. So I have the TapSigner, the Q1, and the MK4. So I have Loose instructions on how to do that, but I think I need to re- reach out to some more hardware wallet people and get them to send me stuff so I can actually- Like make a video and like, hey, first of all, I need to test it out when I have you are support, but then also I wanna add those flows. yeah, and then even the help right now, it's a, it's a little- It's a little off to the side, I think I would like to make that into more of a flow, so it, it, it'll ask you what kind of hardware wallet you have. But I think before I add that, I, I wanna have instructions for more wallets, 'cause right now it's very much just like, \"Do you have a cold card? Here it is. If not, like, you know, good luck, try to find your way to this file.\" yeah, so they're definitely improving the chain, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:36", "start": 1416.27, "text": "And even with that, there can be, you know, let's say there are changes on firmware updates, and then the menus will change. So, so then that can kind, kind of also be a bit of a pain with how you deal with, like kind of for all the different things, you gotta stay up to date on that. So, yeah, that's another-- But I'm-- but that's, I mean, that's part of the challenge, right, of, making it easy for those end users Some other thing. So" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "24:04", "start": 1444.41, "text": "then yeah, so that's another thing I want, I, I did was, for the cold card exports, I, I support every single format on there. So the idea is that like, I, I tell them to go click generic JSON, but whatever, the idea is if they don't know what to click and they just select one, whatever they select will work. Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:23", "start": 1463.33, "text": "Yeah. And just, I just, I should just take a moment here, just for listeners who are new, if you are new, how it works is like when you set up, You set it up and you, you go through that process of writing down the twelve words and so on. In there, there will be like a, an export menu, and so what you're doing is you're exporting like a, a viewing Think of it like a viewing, only, a watching only address or watching only, export. And so what we're doing is, what we're talking about is how you would get that out of, you know, out of this to scan it into your, into your phone wallet so that way, or sort of into your phone app so that it can, you know, sort of watch your, you know, what's going on, because the private keys live here, but the public keys are, you know, obviously, on the app so that the app knows whether you And this kind of thing or watching your transactions, things like that. And so, in terms of like signing and scanning flows, I presume those are kind of all pretty standard, like it's sort of like send a new transaction, copy paste the address, do the scan back and forth. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "25:34", "start": 1533.74, "text": "So, yeah, exactly. So Whether you imported a hot wallet or a cold wallet, the send flow at the beginning looks the same. You know, you enter your, how much you wanna send, where you wanna send, and then you have a fee selection. You can-- there's three options you can customize the fee selection. and then after that If it's a hot wallet, the next screen's just like a confirmation screen, shows you everything and slide to send. The, if it's a ho- a cold wallet, a hardware wallet, you'll just have two buttons that says export transaction and-- or, yeah, import. Sorry, export transaction and import signature. So you would press the export transaction button, and again, you get to choose NFC, QR, or file. and then some-- so assuming it's QR, you would scan it with the- The Q1, let's say, and then once the QR, so you scan it with the Q1, it signs it, and then it shows you a new QR code, and then From your, Cove, you can just scan that QR code and then it'll take you to that same confirmation screen which has all the information and slide to send. Gotcha, yep." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:44", "start": 1603.77, "text": "Okay, and so- Yeah, those are kind of, I guess, the key things that, you know, people would need to know to get started. kind of zooming out a little bit, there has been some more talk about things like, graduated wallet. So this kind of concept of like, you know, different other wallets are kind of, there's other people with this idea of like, okay, start with like eCash, then go up to like, I don't know, Liquid, then go up to Lightning, then go to OnChain, these kinds of things. How are you seeing that? Like, do you see this more like, \"No, let's just keep it on chain and just do, you know, hot wallet, phone wallet, and cold card or other hardware wallet?\" Can you give us your thoughts on? You know, contrasting those ideas, those approaches." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "27:28", "start": 1647.73, "text": "Yeah, I really like the graduated wallet for like, lightning wallets and stuff. It's just not the right decision for this wallet, right? So, like I like to describe, Cove as being, as much as being-- is what it doesn't do as what it does, right? So never lightning, never multisig. It's, it, It needs to be really focused so I can really focus on what it does well, right? So, so the graduated wallet, for Cove, it really is basically what you said, right? You can graduate from a hot wallet to, hardware wallet, and then we do have advanced, more advanced features, right? Like, I think I forgot to mention this, probably should have said it earlier, but, we have UTXO management, like coin control, so that was another reason, like, That I like Green wasn't doing, wasn't good enough for me at the time when I was using it, 'cause like, I wasn't able to do any coin control. But, so for the graduated wallet approach for us, We don't show the coin control, UTXO management at all in the normal send flow. The reason for that being is like, if you're just a user, like, there's a big send button, you don't need to know about UTXOs and stuff. But if you are an advanced user that wants to do coin control, there is a way to get it. It's just a complete different flow. So there's like a three but, a three dot button at the top of the thing, and then it just says \"Manage UTXOs,\" right? from there, you" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "28:53", "start": 1732.64, "text": "You select them, and then in the next screen, you can choose how much of, from those UTXOs you wanna send, right? So nice, simple, but completely different from the send flow. I don't wanna con-confuse users that don't even know what a UTXO is at that point. Gotcha, yeah, and that makes sense. Yeah. So, I think long answer is that I'm definitely keeping the graduated wallet ethos, like that was what, what I had from the very beginning, in that like I see the user starting off like here, like a, at a point that they know nothing, and I want to get them to all the way to basically being an expert, whatever that means, right? b- and then the whole idea is I want them to get all the way to being an expert, but I don't want them to have to switch out to a different wallet at some point, right? Yeah. Unless of course you're gonna do multisig and then, then yeah, then you have to- Right, then you have to- Then it's another" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:44", "start": 1784.5, "text": "whole conversation, and by then, it's kind of the, that person is already, let's say, graduated beyond kind of the simple, stuff, and, Warm or somewhat cold, but not kind of the deep cold multisig aspect of it. so, yeah, that makes sense. Also, I think there is, maybe there are different ethos and visions and worldviews, right? And if I think of, you know, our friend NVK, his view is really Seeds are a superpower, and he's kind of more against this sort of, quasi vendor lock-in kind of approach, right? Or this kind of, he sees it more like some of these efforts to make it really simple, like something like a bitkey as an example It's sort of, yes, it's more simple for the user, but then what about things like portability of that setup? It's not easy to take it out of that That device and put it somewhere else, and you're, you're putting a little more, you know, a little more trust into that manufacturer, the software behind it, the, you know, some of those elements of it that, And I think some of this is just different worldviews of how people should onboard into Bitcoin as, into Bitcoin self custody, because maybe the view of like a bitkey person would be like, \"Look, these people would otherwise be on the exchange, and it's better to just get them off,\" whereas let's say, kind of more in the NVK camp, it's more like, \"No, have your twelve words, and, you know, you, you need to just take responsibility and you need to do a certain amount of learning,\" but the trade-off for that is Yeah, you're, yeah, you are handling private key material, handling the twelve words or twenty-four words, but the trade-off of that is now it's more portable and you have a little bit more-- you have less, let's say, vendor lock-in. do you wanna give us your, your view? I, I, obviously, given, you know, the, the wallet you have and the way you're going, I, I understand you're obviously more in the, the cold card camp on this, but can you elaborate or spell out how you, how you see it" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "31:54", "start": 1914.08, "text": "Yeah, I think that's an interesting question and, yeah, I've been thinking a lot about it. I personally not a fan, definitely not a fan of the marketing bit he's been doing, kind of like shitting on seeds. Like, I don't think that's necessary. I understand why they're doing it, but, But, but I also understand that people are afraid to, deal with seeds themselves. And like, yeah, is it the lesser of two evils? you know, going with a big key, I'm not sure. but I recognize the issue, so I, I do wanna bring some more of those convenience features that are maybe not a hundred percent cipherpunk, like, Phoenix does a really good job of like cloud backups, where they give you a warning saying like, \"Hey, like, if your threat model is like NSA plus Apple colluding, they could probably steal your hot wallet keys, right? So if that's your threat model, just go with a cold wallet.\" but for most people, I think Apple is like a really," }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "32:53", "start": 1973.0, "text": "really good trade-off there, where even if you get a new phone, Apple syncs those, cloud backups between so you, you can get that, so something like social recovery. again, I think is like a good trade-off for stuff like that. But, yeah, to me, Bitcoin is personal responsibility, so like, yeah, you can make it easier, you can make it less scary, but at the end of the day, ultimately You are going to be personally responsible for this bearer asset, right? 'Cause if it's not losing, like, you still have to protect it, like, you might have to physically defend your Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "33:31", "start": 2011.26, "text": "And yeah, I mean, there's obviously ways to make that easier, but to me, like, you know, people say Bitcoin fixes this, and like, a lot of that is, you know, getting rid of the money printer and all that, but I do think part of it is the ethos of, like, Personal responsibility, like I, I think something changes when you are personally responsible for securing your wealth, right? Something in, like, you become more of a personally responsible person, or like, yeah. I, so I think all that to say is like if you can't move into an era of personal responsibility without having to take some personal responsibility, But so does that, but does that mean everybody in the world is gonna self-custody? Maybe not, you know, maybe they'll be in Bitcoin TCS or exchanges, and then like if they're in exchanges, maybe it's probably better to be in a BitKeeper or what's that, BitKeeper, BitKey, right? BitKey, anyway. I just maybe I think them as almost completely different markets, people willing to take the personal responsibility and people unwilling to. maybe you can Maybe you can, maybe it's a graduated approach. the thing is, Bitkey is definitely not marketing themselves as a graduated approach. It's, they, they market themselves as, \"This is the only wallet you'll need. Screw seeds. Who needs seeds? You got, you know, buy this and keep it forever.\" which I understand, you know, nobody wants to market their product as an in-between product, but- I think I'm just like not thinking about that too, too much because right now they're almost two completely different market segments, right? They're like, \"Am I gonna try and get, People that are on exchanges to come to Cove? I don't think so. I think there's just like so many steps between exchange and Cove that like it doesn't make sense, but maybe- you know, maybe if they're on a, a different wallet and they're like, \"I would custody more my coin if it was easier,\" or, you know, I'm on a hot wallet because I use my mobile or my phone a lot, but I'd like to move to a, a hardware wallet, but there's no easy way to do it. That's kind of like maybe the people I'm targeting. or like people that are like, you know, I'm super into personal responsibility, I, I, I want to rely only on myself and no Information, right? Like, I don't wanna make privacy trade-offs, I don't wanna make security trade-offs, like I want it all. Like, you know, that-- those are the people I'd like to focus on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:00", "start": 2160.04, "text": "Yeah, yeah, and it- In some cases, it is a case of people start on something and then they eventually evolve up or they graduate up, you know? They might start on, start on something that's really simple and maybe oversimplified per se, and then- Go down, go further down the rabbit hole, and then they're like, \"Yeah, actually, I do wanna kind of do the full self-sovereign thing without kind of having to interpose a particular vendor or a particular...\" Software service or some provider in there, but yeah, I, and I think it does come down to just different worldviews, right? I think now, obviously, I'm, I'm sponsored, you know, I'm sponsored by Coinbase and obviously, yeah, Coldcard is my favorite, I use Coldcard, you know, quite regularly, so obviously, listeners probably have an idea of where I stand on this, but, you know, So be it, you know, people will have different worldviews. Maybe, the people who are more in the cold card camp on this will see it like, \"Look, not everybody is going to self custody. There'll be a bunch of people who just go use whatever ETFs and treasury companies and custodians, but the more self sovereign user will be the ones who are just gonna, either, you know, jump straight to a cold card or maybe they, they come to the cold card after they've kind of played around with other things in the industry, in the ecosystem. And World views." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "37:24", "start": 2244.18, "text": "Yeah, exactly. I think what I basically, I think you nailed it. I think what I really wanna do is just really focus on that group of people that are already into self-sovereignty, focus on what they need, what they want, and not so much try to focus too much on the Bitcoin TC group and try to get them over, you know? I, I want, if you will at least have the ethos of wanting to s- be self-sovereign, I wanna make it as easy as possible, and less scary as possible for you. I'm not trying to convince everybody, you know, come here, like it's better. Like, you, you need to have some, you need to at least have that idea of like, this is something I wanna do, right? Yeah. I think, I, maybe there's a group of peop- I'm, I'm thinking there's a group of people I really wanna be self" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "38:13", "start": 2292.88, "text": "My main, like, that's who I really wanna target, right? The people that really want to, but for whatever reason, haven't." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:21", "start": 2300.85, "text": "Yeah, yeah, totally fair. And I think, we'll see. And I think that's the kind of the reality of it as well, because there'll be some Bitcoiners who are happy to, so called, play across both worlds, right? They might do some of both, and, but when it comes to their own personal stack, they want like multisig and, you know, the, the kind of the more self-sovereign stuff" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:43", "start": 2322.86, "text": "Somewhere, people somewhere in the middle who want some kind of guided provider, some kind of, you know, service who helps you set up your multisig. And, I think, yeah, there'll be different approaches and let's see, let's see what, people adopt, right? so- Yeah, as we kind of look, around in the space, I guess what's your view around, kind of the, the lightning and kind of day-to-day spending? Do you see this as more like a- well, I guess to be fair, right now fees are quite low, right? So that's kind of people can still use, you know, on chain. but I guess longer term, maybe it does go that way where maybe for day-to-day spending, it's more like Lightning and other kind of off-chain things or custodial things, of even if I prefer people to use self-custodial, and you're just kind of planning your, your flag and saying, \"Look, this is, you know, just use on-- if you're, if you're doing on" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "39:42", "start": 2381.64, "text": "Yeah, exactly. for layer two stuff, I'm very much in like a wait and see right now. Like, I don't know where the chips are gonna fall, but Layer one, I think it's like, the, the, like I think seeds are it, right? So layer one, it's more crystallized for me, like this is what people that have enough Bitcoin that wanna actually custody it, that, this is where they're gonna keep it, right? For layer two, there's a lot of interesting stuff, like definitely interested in, eCash, FETI, ARC stuff seems really interesting, especially if you can get the soft fork." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "40:19", "start": 2418.69, "text": "but it's very much up in the air. Like, I don't know where everything's gonna land, whereas I look at Layer 1 and I'm like, \"That seems like where, where we're gonna be in five, ten years even.\" That's what I think, right? So, made sense for me to focus there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:32", "start": 2432.11, "text": "Yeah. I'm curious then, because I- And I'm curious to get your view, because I see this like, it's likely that some of the more miniscript enabled wallets will become very popular in that, in that timeframe, like five to ten years. Now, disclosure, I don't, personally use, like the, the miniscript stuff right now, but I could see myself using that in like five to ten years, that maybe it becomes more popular, and there are people who use that for like inheritance planning or, you know, having fancy- Time locking and things like this, w- how are you thinking about that from a Cove wallet perspective?" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "41:11", "start": 2470.55, "text": "so f- personally from like a Bitcoin user perspective, Miniscript, all that stuff is interesting, but it really feels like It really feels like, you know, we don't need vaults, we got vaults at home kind of situation there. and like as a Bitcoin user, I would love to not need all the mini, miniscript, fancy s- stuff because hopefully we'll get vaults. Like, that's my hope, right? Eventually. Some people I know very bearish on ever getting vaults, and I understand. But yeah, I, I think right now a lot of the mini-scrip wallets and stuff like, are basically trying to get around the limitation of not having a vaulting feature in Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:50", "start": 2509.55, "text": "Gotcha. So let me just quickly explain this for listeners, just people who are new. so what we're talking about here is if there were to be a functionality like Op Vault, jet from James Ob, although I believe he has now sort of, kind of let that one go a bit, and he sees it now like Op C C V, check contract verify by Salvatore, Sort of superseding that proposal, and the idea would be that this is enabling more advanced vault at layer one, at the Bitcoin protocol level, not at an application level. And so the point here would be, there are different people in the ecosystem who are in favor of this, you know, ranging from like, you know, CoinCat and people like that, and even the guys at Casa and various other people who generally- You know, might see a use for this kind of thing, and the caveat here is this would require a soft fork, and we don't know if or when, a, a feature upgrade, soft fork could happen. and also the other one that a lot of people talking about now is CTV and Trezise from Stack, which would enable, let's say, a lesser form of the vaults, but for the more advanced form of the vaults, it might require something with a little more firepower per se, but of course, that's potentially controversial in the Bitcoin- Bitcoin community for now, because maybe there's not support for that yet. So just putting an explanation there. But, go on, Praveen." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "43:08", "start": 2587.82, "text": "Yes. Exactly. yeah. So hopefully if we get vaults, you know, that'll be a solved issue. But even if not, like, let's say we don't get vaults, I just don't see people Doing inheritance planning and all this like really long term linking on a mobile wallet, right? Yeah. Like you don't, you don't need to and you shouldn't just have one wallet, with passphrases and bip whatever, bip eighty five or Don't have multiple seed words, but like with Proxies and stuff, you can have multiple wallets for different things, right? You'll have your, maybe you'll have your Hot Wallet, Tap Signer for like day to day, you'll have, A cold card secured wallet on your mobile for month to month, year, whatever purchases and stuff like that, and then you'll have your super cold storage. This is my retirement, inheritance, all that kind of stuff, and then that might not even be in single seg, right? So Cove's already out for that group, right? Gotcha. So you see it like that's" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:06", "start": 2646.14, "text": "a different product or that's a different- You know, need, use case per se than what Cove is trying to serve. So you see Cove more like the, let's say, day to day on chain spending and day to day hardware wallet use, and you see it like- Deep code or kind of really long term stuff, that's where maybe the multi sig and inheritance planning and that's kind of you're getting into the more advanced stuff there. But I will note actually, I believe doesn't Liana Bitcoin, they're one of the many script, wallets, and they do have a mobile app, right?" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "44:39", "start": 2679.03, "text": "Yeah, yeah, they-- Yeah, but I guess the point" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:41", "start": 2680.69, "text": "is you're saying that that's a different use case." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "44:43", "start": 2683.0, "text": "Yeah. I think m-most of the stuff I've seen is there has been desktop. Yes. yeah, I'm, I'm thinking really from a user's perspective. yeah, I don't see all those wallets as like competitors. Like I, I like all of them, and I- Can see myself using it in the future if we don't get vaults, right? I just don't see them as a competitor because me personally, if I'm doing like a long term, this is my retirement in fifty, whatever, twenty-five, thirty years, this is for my kids, I just don't see why I would be doing it on my phone. I would really sit down, carve out two hours in my day, sit at my computer, on my desk, you know, get comfy, and really just do it on my desktop. I, I, it's not that like, I'm not saying wallets don't support mobile, I just don't see a user using it for this purpose, doing it on their phone. Like, while you're, you know, doing something else, you're not gonna be Planning your inheritance, for example. That's, that's, that's my thesis on this, I guess." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:39", "start": 2739.31, "text": "Yeah, yeah, fair enough. And I would say that's-- I think that's right, especially for power users and people with, you know, who are gonna do that kind of thing, and the kind of person who-- 'cause there are some people who just don't have laptops or desktops, right? They just use mobile. but I guess maybe we'll see what happens in that, in the next five, ten years, maybe that space evolves a bit further, So, yeah, I-- and so then that's also the question of like, how do you serve the people who only have a mobile, who don't really use laptop or desktop that much?" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "46:16", "start": 2775.68, "text": "Yeah, I don't, the thing is, like, I don't know what the intersecting circles of people that don't have a desktop and laptop but have enough money to put into multisig and are going to put into multisig inheritance planning, I don't know what that overlap is. Maybe I'm like, I could definitely be open to being wrong, and I could be more wrong in the future if like more people don't have laptops, but right now that's just" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:40", "start": 2800.24, "text": "Yeah. No, I'm, I could be wrong, but I think you're correct. I'm not a concern. No, I think you're, I think you're correct, b-because the, the person who has that kind of net worth would easily be able to just, you know, buy a laptop and use that. But, yeah, I guess maybe for- Yeah, maybe if it's like a really older person who's maybe not as tech savvy or something, but yeah, I think you're right, there's probably not a lot of people in that category. so yeah, I mean, what else, do you have, strong views on? Do you have any strong views on, treasury companies and ETFs, or do you see that as like- You know, people are gonna do that, but you're just not focused on that." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "47:20", "start": 2839.91, "text": "yeah, as, as more for me, TCs, they're interesting in like the financial sense, like, you know, are they, are they responsible for NGU this cycle? Seems like it, right? Yeah, I definitely see it as like a completely different segment of the market, right? A lot of people buying like MetaPlanet and all these other TCS, I think, are Companies that can't buy Bitcoin, not even, there's, I don't, there's no Bitcoin ETF in Japan, right? Like, so they basically have to buy MetaPlanet, for example. I, I see that as like basically the TCs being-- there's definitely people getting into it that's, just trying to, you know, get rich quicker. That's definitely a segment, but I think it's, it's providing a service, a service in that it helps people that wouldn't, or organizations that normally couldn't get into, couldn't get any Bitcoin exposure, get some exposure that way. So I'm not like super, You know, militant on like, no BTCs, no ETFs. I understand why people do it, and I'm hoping that like, I, I think what I, what I see happening, Is that like, maybe this is me being like hopeful, but basically peop- the people that get into ETS because it's easy, I'm hoping, you know, once Bitcoin ten x's, they'll have like, like a moment of like, \"Holy shit, like, I have this much and like...\" You know, it's just 10x, I don't really control it, and I'm hoping that'll bring some more people into like, okay, like I have this much, I think it's time to do something with it, right? And I know a lot of Bitcoiners that are like mostly self custody stack, but they keep, ETF or Bitcoin TCS in their tax advantage accounts, right? So that's gonna continue," }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "49:08", "start": 2948.46, "text": "Yeah, but I'm hoping that like more of them will come to, soft custody, but I think it's also just a realization that like eventually not everybody will be able to custody on layer one, right? and it, that doesn't make Bitcoin a failure, but just- Anyone needs to be able to, but everybody doesn't have to, for Bitcoin to be a success, right? Yeah. So, just really kind of like stay in my lane, like focus on the people that want to self-custody, and, yeah, that's been my focus." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:40", "start": 2979.55, "text": "This episode is brought to you by Galloy, builders of banking software for the Bitcoin age. After years of risk and uncertainty, Bitcoin and banking are colliding. The regulatory environment is rapidly shifting in favor of Bitcoin and digital assets. FinTech and And crypto-native companies can become chartered banks, and traditional banks and credit unions will launch Bitcoin products. But the legacy core banking software that many financial institutions run on wasn't built for Bitcoin. The Galloy banking infrastructure stack delivers all the key elements of a modern core banking platform with cloud-native infrastructure, event-based architecture, and robust APIs coming together to meet the security, scalability, and reliability needs of banks of the future. Whether you are launching a modern financial institution from the ground up or you are adding- Adding Bitcoin-backed lending or payments to your product offering, talk to the team at Galloy. Visit galloy dot io or reach out to the team at b i z at g a l o y dot io. Yeah, totally fair enough. And, it is interesting that obviously many of us who are focused on, like, we would like more people to self-custody, but despite we're seeing, you know, mempool has pretty much been around one sat For a while, you know, now, now the joke is that, maybe not joke, but we're starting to see chatter about going below one sat per byte, and so that's kind of a topic now as well. and kind of on this, I guess we're getting into also like the filters aspect of it. I know you have a, you're, you have a strong view on the whole core and not thing, so maybe you wanna spell out some of your views there for, for listeners." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "51:09", "start": 3069.23, "text": "Yeah, sure. my main view on the filters debate, was that the Bitcoin core devs and just devs in general were being super arrogant, and not, not listening to the users of Bitcoin. not everybody comes to Bitcoin from a technical perspective. I don't even think I came from it because when I knew it, like, of it technically, I wasn't really interested. It was actually just, people explaining The financial," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:36", "start": 3096.02, "text": "right, like the sound money part of it, yeah." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "51:38", "start": 3097.62, "text": "Sound money part of it, yeah. I remember it was, I was listening to a Greg Foster podcast, on, with- with, Preston, and I'm like, he was describing basically not what Bitcoin did, but what fiat is gonna do, and I'm like, oh, okay, I get it now, right? Shout out to Greg Follis, missed that guy, he should get back on Twitter. But, yeah, they were just being-- I, I feel like a lot of devs came from a very, from a very technical aspect and they're like trying to, they think about it only from a technical aspect and completely forgetting about the human element of these things and like It was just very arrogant, I didn't like it. yeah, that was my main thing. in terms of lowering the fees from one or like the minimum fee, that's interesting. I don't, I don't know yet what to think about that, just because like it's been very new. it's, it's funny though, like the people that, the filter people that are like, \"Oh, we need-- Like, who cares about? We don't need filters, they don't do anything. Like, whatever, you know? That doesn't change how the" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "52:43", "start": 3162.66, "text": "If it doesn't matter, just go around it, right?" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "52:48", "start": 3167.83, "text": "but yeah, but I, I think the, there's a, the trade-off there is like, you got-- the reason that minimum was there was to prevent like DDoS attacks, right? Like service. So we'll see, we'll see. I'm, I'm also very conservative when it comes to changes to Bitcoin, whether it's consensus or filter, like, or like changing like relay level stuff, yeah. Yeah. Just like, you know, it's working, why do we have to change stuff? Let's just, let's just leave it, see what the market does, and, go from there basically. Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:17", "start": 3197.42, "text": "Yeah. Okay. So I think there's a few things. I mean, the way I see it And I know, you know, like the not sky's seem to think I'm like, you know, shitcoining or spamming or, I don't know, apologizing for shitcoins or something, but I, I just, I just see it like Filters, okay, so this is like another Bitcoin of contention, right? Do they work or do they not work? And I think people sort of get a bit binary and zero and one about it, whereas I think it's more like they have some Small, they have some effect, but I think it's more like it, it doesn't deter a seriously economically motivated person. And I think that's kind of the argument is would the, you know, retinal people have been deterred, you know, even if, you know, like I think it's probably the case that in twenty twenty-three, at the time that Luke Dasher and kind of the Knots guys were really trying to filter the inscriptions, I don't believe it would have worked at that point. I think it probably would not have, even if Core had merged it At that point, I think the, you know, the, the heat was just on, like it was just, that was the moment for, for the spammer, retardinal people. Like, I don't like them, I don't like the spam, but I just don't believe it would have stopped them. so, but, but I do accept that there was like, there's kind of, there may be there's some element of like a cultural thing of like- I think that's probably the point that like Luke and Mechanic and those guys would argue that, \"Oh, it's about trying to send a message to them to say, 'Hey, you can't do that here. We're not gonna, we're gonna fight you every possible way.'\" I just think It probably wouldn't have really meant a lot in the end. I think in the end, the block size and the fees would have done a lot more to sort of deter that activity, but I guess that's where pe- maybe people take a different view of it, right? That it's like my view of it is more like the spammers, they kind of ran out of money and the fad kind of died out, and that's what stopped it. Whereas, you know- Maybe their view is more like, no, filters were working and that's how it kind of got stopped. I, I'm not sure if I fully summarized their view though. So, yeah. But anyway, how, how have you seen that?" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "55:26", "start": 3326.36, "text": "Yeah, I'm not sure on the, like, if, if the filters would have stopped it completely or not, but I don't, well, that's the other thing, the other side has a lot of, bad straw man arguments, like nobody's-- no, I don't think anybody on that side was like, \"Oh, filter's gonna stop at a hundred percent.\" It's more like, you know, it'll slow it down, or it'll set the tone, and I, I think that's valuable in that," }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "55:53", "start": 3353.48, "text": "Yeah, like Bitcoin is, is money, right? Like we should treat it as such. What, what would have been the downside of updating the filters? 'Cause like even if, if you look at, it technically, I would argue that the way, inscriptions specifically with the op false op thing, op false was used as like, it's like a, it's a bug. It's a, it was used in a way it wasn't meant to be used, right? That's like the definition of an exploit. It was, it was explo-exploiting the So why not, update the filters to filter that out? What, what, what is the downside of doing that? Yeah. To me, the upside is maybe you slow it down. Yeah. So the downside to" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:31", "start": 3390.62, "text": "answer your question would be Driving mining centralization. I think that's their point, and I think this gets into kind of some of the back and forth arguments because like Luke or Mechanic would say, \"Hey, you're not serious about mining decentralization because, you know, you haven't helped with this other thing around whatever DART or SV2 and this kind of thing,\" whereas like the core people and most of the other developers would be like They, they probably see the issue more like, \"You're gonna drive extra revenue to the Mara slipstreams of the world, \"rather than making it so that anyone can, pick up those transactions and mine them into a block and have a competitive block. And so I think that's, that's probably the, like, I'd put it this way, it's almost like Filters kinda work, but not really enough to like properly stop it every, like fully, which everyone agrees, but they're, they are also, let's say, working at kind of exacerbating the problems of mining centralization. so that's- Yeah, I, I definitely don't, I," }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "57:30", "start": 3450.21, "text": "I don't agree with that, and I'm struggling for an analogy, but I think it would be like- That would be like going and pissing in a pool already full of piss, in that the-- it's already super centralized, right? FPPS makes it centralized, there's like what, like- The, well, I forget, Antpool or whatever, and them and their fake other ones are like, what, like seventy or like, I don't know, sixty percent of the, mining, like the hash rate, something huge, right? Or more than that, right? 'Cause it's not just Ant, it's like other people are using their stuff. But, yeah, it's already centralized. This is like, I don't know, I, I'd like how much more centralized could it be than, like, there's like four pools that control everything basically Yeah, that I just don't think it's a good, good argument just because it's already so centralized. no, no, but what I'm" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:20", "start": 3500.06, "text": "saying, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that, it's not already centralized. Yeah. Like I think most of the, let's say the core people would be like, yeah, it's, we should try to focus on mining decentralization. This is just one vector on which you're making it worse or better, and you're making it worse if you have these filters that aren't that are driving, the transactions to, let's say, the Mara Slipstreams of the world. So I think that's how they would see it. And I, yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "58:48", "start": 3528.37, "text": "I don't even know if that It, it made it worse, but like my point is like, it's already, like, you can't make it worse because it's already so bad. Like, like it's, it, it just I need, I don't have a good analogy, but like, it's already so bad, like, will you gonna make it like, like a point tenth of a percent worse? And I, yeah, I think for the cult-culture wise, like, you can already see that like not updating the filters has had negative consequences, because not updating the filters has what led us into, oh, okay, like, you know, we don't, we let these, We let these transactions on, so why don't we increase the op, op return value? Or, why don't we get rid of that, right? That, to me, that's a direct consequence of not- Admitting that the subscriptions were, an issue, right? So you don't update the filters, which means like, okay, we let these, all these on, so, and then the next, Next logical thing was the up return. So it's like, so people always say slippery slope is a fallacy, but I think, if, if we looked at all the LGBTQ stuff and all the stuff that has happened over the last, whatever, ten years, I think you would, you might agree that the slippery slope fallacy isn't a fallacy. So to me, not updating filters was the slippery slope, and it's, it's, I don't like where it's leading us as a- Definitely has like a dev community of like, okay, like, you know, all this stuff is okay. If it's a valid transaction, it's a valid transaction. Those things are here, right? So yeah, I think" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:24", "start": 3624.62, "text": "so. I mean, I would agree with you on the kind of the broader political aspect of like, yeah, like what happened with all the woke stuff. I mean, I'm more, probably, we're probably similarly aligned on that point, but I just don't see them as the same thing, you know? I just see this more like there are developers who are, You know, I think they see it as like they aren't just kind of building, they're kind of helping maintain the highway, and they can't control that a lot of people choose to use that highway. and I think, I think the dirty reality of it is that they-- They-- Let me just finish this point though. I think they- I think they, most of those, let's say graybeards from the kind of Bitcoin core developer and technical community, I think most of them just see this like, you- They, they kind of already sort of gave up on this idea that you would be able to stop this spam stuff, even if they don't like it. I think they just see it like, \"There's no principled way to stop it, \"and that's probably-- so you might as well at least not make money centralization worse. That's probably how I'm-- That's how I'm understanding it, anyway." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:01:30", "start": 3690.9, "text": "Yeah, I just agree because I think they talk out of both sides of their mouth on that because they're like, \"Okay, we're just, maintainers, we options from your node runners, right? Okay, if you're just like, if you, if you're very conservative and not making any changes, okay then don't fuck with the operator. So the option," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:52", "start": 3712.58, "text": "so in terms of the config thing, there were different views on that, right? There were some people saying, \"Yeah, keep in the option,\" and others of them who were saying their argument would be something like, \"It didn't-- it, it would be like, the user having an option to shoot themselves in the foot, right?\" And hey Well, libertarians let people have, you know, their choice and so be it. And I think there were others who were in that camp of saying, \"Yeah, like, you know, let them do that.\" And I think it's kind-- it gets into like other arguments of like, \"Oh, is the-- is there more technical debt required to maintain this thing?\" And, you know, i-i-for an option that they view as it's worse for the network. But, and this also gets into kind of-- it's like a really deep thing of then you start getting to like And BTCD and Libbitcoin and whatever else out there. So I think that's-- Yeah, I'm actually a big" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:02:46", "start": 3766.48, "text": "fan of having multiple implementations. That's-- I think that's, I think something that's been really good that came out of this is that like people realizing right now Bitcoin Core is Bitcoin, and, I don't think that should be the case. Like, I, I think Bitcoin, the protocol, shouldn't have one client, right? 'Cause that's centralizing and it's like- In the beginning it made sense 'cause like, you know, there's changes happening more often, it was easier to make changes and not have a chain split when there was only one implementation. But like- Ideally, I think, I think a lot of people agree with me, even the people that don't agree with me on the filter stuff, that like, in an ideal world, we have a plurality of, like, we have multiple- Implementations, none of them having over fifty percent, of the, of the, like, yeah, you know, of, of the market share basically. I think that, I think that would be great." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:41", "start": 3821.34, "text": "Yeah, I think a lot of people agree. I think even there, that's more like some of the developers I've spoken to Or I've heard their view is kind of like, \"That's a pipe dream.\" But to be fair, there are some developers who think, \"No, actually, it should be done. It should be an effort made to have multiple implementations.\" but there are just other, let's say, graybeards who, who see that as like- That's also in the too hard slash impossible camp or bucket, let's say. so I, that's, at least that's my understanding of kind of from talking to different developers to try to understand some of the different views in the community, at least in the, let's say, the technical community, why, why, why are they thinking this? and so, yeah, but I'm curious, where do you think it's gonna go from here? Do you think it's gonna be like there'll be a lot more people who use Not or use some other implementation, or" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:31", "start": 3871.73, "text": "well, how, how are you seeing that?" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:04:33", "start": 3873.43, "text": "Yeah, I think, I mean, not adoption is still going up, right? And people like to pretend that it's fake and scable attack, but I think it's, I think it's real. There's no reason to think it's not. a lot of, and yeah, I think that'll continue and I think, I'm hoping that this opens the gateway to people Realizing that like you can be on Bitcoin, use Bitcoin without using Bitcoin Core. So right now it's not, maybe something else will come out. you know, that makes different choices on the non-consensus code. And, yeah, I, I mean, it's already like, I don't understand the two hard thing, like it's, it's already like dropped so much, right? Is what is it like ten, ten percent now? Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:05:17", "start": 3917.76, "text": "think what they're getting at there is, well, remember, Nots is a lot of the code, like ninety-seven percent or some, you know, very high number is Bitcoin core code. It's options, and some people like that, and fair enough, you know. But I think the problem or the, the point the people who say it would be too hard or slash impossible are people saying like Having another total reimplementation be fully, you know, compatible can be hard, right? So you've seen, yeah, I don't, I don't care about" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:05:49", "start": 3949.09, "text": "a full reimplementation, though. That's the thing. Like, I don't, I'm not-- When I say multiple clients, I don't mean from the technical perspective of I need, someone needs to rebuild this from the ground up. It can be, I think that's why I like the, the idea of LibBitcoin, I, I know some people, or LibBitcoin Kernel, I forget what it's called, but" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:06:11", "start": 3971.41, "text": "I've, I've heard some people not being a fan of it now for so, whatever reason, maybe there's something else, I don't know. But the, I like the idea, I think the idea makes sense, right? You keep the consensus code the same and then, let let users choose whatever relay policies and whatever, other things that aren't consensus. yeah, it doesn't need to be a full rebuild, 'cause like that's, that's a technical detail, who cares, right? That's not what matters, it matters what, what is the, what is the user downloading, what is the user running, how do they see that?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:41", "start": 4001.58, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, I, I, yeah, I think it would be nice, I, I would, it would be good to see different implementations," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:50", "start": 4010.42, "text": "but I think, yeah, it just depends w-what do people think is possible, in terms of, yeah, the, the reimplementation stuff or, I mean, to your point, more like just having the options and things like that, So I think there's kind of different arguments in and out there, but I mean, hey, let people run whatever they want, and, we'll see what happens. I, I think, the spam stuff, you know, like I said, I don't like it, but are we just gonna see these kind of periodic waves of spam? Maybe, but I, I don't see it as like some, whereas like, let's say some of the filter guys, and I'm not saying you are in that necessarily in that camp, but some of the filter guys, I think their rhetoric is a bit overdone, like I think they're kind of saying it's like, \"Oh, this is like the end of Bitcoin,\" and \"Oh no, you know, you let this through, and all of a sudden...\" You, you know, it's Ethereum. I don't think so. I think it's just like, yeah, there's a few spammers who are idiots and wanna spam the chain with garbage, and, you know, it's just not that much. And we already set, we, the community, in twenty seventeen, let's say, that w- as a result of the SegWit, you know, soft fork, we already chose these particular limits, right? This theoretical four megabyte or four million weight units, whatever, that's the limit we chose. We the-- and these con-- limits aren't really quite conservative, so I'm not that worried personally. I don't think spam is the end of Bitcoin, I think it's more like a nuisance, like I don't like it, it's a nuisance, but I don't Of, you know, sound money and Bitcoin and all that. So I, I see it as kind of like, it's just an annoyance. I'm not that worried personally. Yeah. I do agree about the mining centralization though. Like, I think it would be nice to have better, you know, DARTM and SV2 and, ideally going away from FPPS. So I agree on that part. And that's why I, I support Ocean. Like, I like what Ocean are doing. I just don't necessarily agree on the Knots side of it and the relay filtering" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:08:52", "start": 4132.03, "text": "Paranoid or barris on basically, spam taking down Bitcoin, but I'm glad they're there. those people are there. I think that's part of the reason of Bitcoin's resilience is because of the super tin foil hat people that get super, involved in that kind of stuff. as a analogy, have you heard of the, the bubble gum like counting experiment? No, so basically you have, you know, you have a jar full of bubble gum balls or whatever, and then you ask the class, like, \"Guess how many is in here?\" Right? No one person's gonna guess, but it, right? But if you take guesses, they'll be pretty, like, very close. Which means, like, which means that if you didn't have the absolutely retarded guesses on either side, right? Like, you might not get to the right answer. So I think it takes all kinds of, like, I, I think that's how, that I'm paranoid, but I'm super glad that the super paranoid people are there, 'cause if it's not this, they'll get paranoid, paranoid about something else and like make a lot of noise, and that will matter, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm definitely, I like those people, I'm glad they're there. I'm not, I'm not there, I don't think it's gonna take down Bitcoin, but it's definitely an annoyance, I don't like it. but- I'm, I'm glad that people are pushing back on it, 'cause like, let's say we didn't have the paranoid people that thought it was gonna put, put it, take Bitcoin out, if they didn't push back, what would that look like? I don't know. Right? I'd like, I don't know, would, is, does Bitcoin Core go in a different direction because they have no pushback? It does that lead somewhere else? I, I don't know. Right? So I'm, I'm happy they're there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:10:24", "start": 4224.96, "text": "Yeah, and I think there is, maybe there is an, there is a role of maybe social pressure, and to be honest, I think the social pressure element, like if people were to go pressure, I don't know, the mining pools or the mining people Maybe that would be a different outcome, I don't know. I-- for me, it's more just like, I just don't think the relay filters are gonna work, and I think if they were to apply social pressure, that actually has a-- actually has a better chance of working than, relay filtering. Whereas, I think in the mind of, like, when I talk to mechanic and other people, it seems like they kind of conflate those things and say, \"No, well, we're, we're letting the miners know that we don't like this.\" And To me, I, I don't really, doesn't really follow for me. Like, I think if you wanna go tell the miners you don't like something, well, hey, pick up the phone and call them or talk to them and tell them, hey, you know, we don't like this, spam that you're doing or whatever. and at that point, the miners might say, you know, okay, yeah, maybe I agree with you, or no, screw you, I don't care, I just have a different worldview to you." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:11:24", "start": 4284.99, "text": "I think that's They'll just do what is, what, what they think, and we'll just have to, you know, operate what we-- the way we think is best." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:11:39", "start": 4299.05, "text": "Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, that's fair. I just, I don't know if the big mining pools cares about like what" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:11:46", "start": 4306.66, "text": "we think at all." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:11:47", "start": 4307.4, "text": "So," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:11:48", "start": 4308.18, "text": "yeah. But maybe it would matter at like a social level, like if it was seen like, I don't know, like chainalysis or something like that, right? Like if it were seen like, \"Oh, you're a loser if you go work for chainalysis.\"" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:11:59", "start": 4319.99, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:12:00", "start": 4320.49, "text": "Maybe it was like, if, if it was a similar thing, then, I don't know, maybe, but who knows? Like, 'cause don't forget, like, a lot of the spam people, they don't really care, they might not care what you and I think. They might not care. So, I don't know. Like, that's why for me, I just see it as like- It's-- to me, this is like a nuisance thing, it's not like high priority. It's more, I'm more interested in like, what is there that we can do to grow Bitcoin adoption, i-in terms of monetary use, right? Obviously, I don't like the spammer uses, but, you know, so be it. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:12:30", "start": 4350.77, "text": "no, I, I, I mostly agree with you in there. It's like the, it's a nuisance. what I didn't like is like the, dishonest argument. Kind" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:12:39", "start": 4359.6, "text": "of the, the arrogance or" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:12:40", "start": 4360.36, "text": "the, like I said, the dishonest arguments, yeah. Yeah. Like, like, like people would be like, \"Oh, filters don't matter at all. Okay, then why change this? Right? Like, it doesn't make sense. Like, at least be honest about it.\" Yeah, it's, I, I guess my other, is the only thing is, yeah, the, that kind of like social, like dishonest arguments and w-where does this go next? Like if unchecked, where does it go? That's, I don't know the answer, but right now, whatever, I feel like it's past, like we, you know, it's, we don't need to rehash it too much, but, You know, very bullish on Bitcoin in general, I'm happy, yeah, it's good. Do you" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13:17", "start": 4397.36, "text": "have any other controversial takes or any, strong opinions on anything else in Bitcoin? Or have we kind of gone through most of them?" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:13:24", "start": 4404.2, "text": "Yeah, no, honestly, right now, not really. I probably had, I feel like I was more, engaged in Twitter and controversy and stuff before Cove." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13:31", "start": 4411.42, "text": "but now it's" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:13:32", "start": 4412.04, "text": "like really, yeah, head's down building, that's good. Yeah, exactly. Build" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13:35", "start": 4415.05, "text": "is build and, laugh is laugh." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:13:40", "start": 4420.93, "text": "Yeah, Nothing comes up, but then I go right back down." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13:45", "start": 4425.82, "text": "Gotcha. Okay, so look, I think you touched on this before, but you said your main priorities now, are Android support and this QR, QR version, standard, I guess. Any other closing thoughts on Cove and where can people find you and find Cove?" }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:14:01", "start": 4441.61, "text": "Yeah, so, I have, Twitter my it's just Praveen Perera and then the Cove wallet, it's just cove wallet. Cove website is covebitcoinwallet dot com, so you can find Cove and all that stuff there. it's on the App Store right now, hopefully it'll be on the Google Play Store in a few months. yeah, so those are my definitely short-term, goals. the other one would be, I wanna add an onboarding flow for new users so that guides them a little bit more than what we have. and then I have a whole list of features that I wanna add, I- if Yeah, I mean, maybe I'll, I'll put it on Twitter or something, my, my, my plan just to get, feedback on what, what people think I should prioritize. definitely wanna add a lot of privacy stuff, I don't know, If you wanna go into that, but basically, right now, you know, it defaults to a public node, but you can right now connect to your own node, but it's the mobile wallets, so I wanna, I need to make it easier to connect your own node when you're not at home, right? So that means adding Tor support, maybe some other way of, making a direct tunnel with your home and your mobile phone. I wanna add, Keoto integration. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but that's a compact block filters, so those nodes are, you know, more privacy preserving. And then Payjoin is really interesting, I'd like to, I know the shitcoin wallet, K wallet, that a-adds that, so it's, it's disappointing that we as Bitcoiners let a bunch of shitcoiners beat us to these, Privacy features, so I'd love to add Payjoin. yeah, and then other than that, it's just like a little features here and there, some hard, more hardware wallet support. I wanna add RBF. So I just wanted to, you know, really round out the wallet, make it really complete, add more privacy stuff, and, just try to make it easier for users. And then I'm also thinking of desktop builds, but that, I think that'll really come later, and I would like to get some feedback from the community, to see if that's something they want. I was talking to Odell, and he said he liked the idea of a desktop build for the simple fact of If he's recommending a wallet, he doesn't have to add all these caveats of like, okay, if you're on mobile, use this, if you're on desktop, if you can like, if Cove can be the- A really good wallet or the best wallet for new people to go to on any platform, then you can just say, \"Go get Cove.\" So, I think that makes sense." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:16:40", "start": 4600.5, "text": "Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great. Well, yeah, listeners check it out. links will be in the show notes, covebitcoinwallet dot com. Praveen, thank you for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "praveen_perera", "time": "01:16:48", "start": 4608.09, "text": "Thank you. Thanks for having me." } ] }