{ "episodeId": "SLP687", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "panel": { "name": "Panel", "role": "guest", "tag": "PANEL" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:10", "start": 9.85, "text": "Hi everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast, brought to you by Bolt, the Bitcoin banking platform 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, joining me on the show today is Kalek. People may know Kalek from his work on, in various worlds, let's say the eCash is probably the, probably what you're most well known for, as well as As kind of privacy and freedom advocacy and technology aspects of it, and I guess most recently this, BitChat project also. but, welcome to the show, Karli. It's been a while. I've been, meaning to get you on, but I'm sorry that I haven't been able to get you on sooner." }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "00:44", "start": 44.15, "text": "Thanks for having me, Stefan. Big fan. Finally, we made it work." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:48", "start": 48.41, "text": "Yeah, that's right. So lots of things going on. I know, you know, probably BitChat is the most recent one, of E-Cash is a big focus for you, so, I guess just sort of more broadly, where, where do you see things at in terms of privacy and freedom aspects, w-where's your head at overall?" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "01:14", "start": 74.05, "text": "Well, I think, privacy is extremely important for, society to work, and most of our modern, modern world requires privacy for financial interactions, for anything that requires security, we also need privacy. We need privacy for our democracies to work And, we've seen in the last couple of decades that the interest for privacy in communication has gained quite a lot of traction, enabling and, introducing technologies like Signal or, end-to-end encrypted messaging in WhatsApp. So there's been a long evolution of people fighting for privacy in, in the messaging and communication space, often with a lot of backlash from state, from the state and security Security agencies and intelligence agencies that try to undermine personal privacy, and, then there's the whole separate branch, for financial privacy, which is a whole different topic for itself, in which I see the fight for financial privacy still at the very beginning of this whole saga. So whereas the fight for privacy for communication has, already accumulated quite a couple of decades' work of, worth of proof of work we are still at the beginning of the fight or the evolution for financial privacy, and as we transition from a analog world into a digital world, more and more people are starting to understand that making payments and using your money reveals so much about you and your surroundings, the context in which your life is embedded into, and also, comes with security risks to your own security and the systems that you use. Once you don't have privacy anymore. So, we're seeing a societal, evolution and a technical evolution, driving forward financial privacy for legitimate use cases and to enable ordinary citizens and ordinary people to benefit from these technologies that we've been working on for quite a few, decades now. So that's, that's why I'm, so passionate about it. I'm- Primarily focusing on Bitcoin and trying to, drive Bitcoin forward. I think Bitcoin is the base money of the new world, the new currency of the internet. However, Bitcoin itself comes, with, relatively weak privacy, which we accept due to its auditability. So there's a trade-off there between auditability and privacy that Bitcoin makes very consciously. So, what remains to be done and what- What's, what's kind of the required work that we need to do is to build systems on top of Bitcoin that respect user privacy, and still benefit from the auditability of the Bitcoin blockchain underneath it. And that's why, I started working initially, on Lightning, did a couple of years heavily focusing just on that. Lightning is, is great for sender privacy and it also allows micro-transactions. In my mind, these things are- Are, are un- you know, they're, they're linked in a way that you can't really, think about one without thinking about the other, because microtransactions themselves, are s- are supposed to, fuel the internet economy, that we're building for the next decade and century. So, we want the internet to be, full of products, full of, Media and, and, things that people can consume and buy on the internet. At the same time, we don't have a privacy-preserving payment method yet for the internet. And I think that's where Bitcoin comes in. So now that Bitcoin has established itself as a dominant currency of the digital age, now we need to work on making it fast and private enough so that people can use it for everyday purchases and machines can use it for micropayments between them so that we- We can build an internet economy that respects, the privacy rights and security of the individuals." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:32", "start": 331.81, "text": "Yeah. Now, obviously, I, there's a lot I agree with there. Like, I think, I, I have long been critical of things like, even on the financial privacy side, I've long been critical of things like AML laws, sanctions laws, or BSA, Bank Secrecy Act in the US, FATF, these kinds of organizations and laws and regimes that basically strip us of any hope of having financial- Financial privacy, all in the name of, you know, quote unquote, stopping the terrorists and stopping whatever, whatever boogeyman of the day, whatever the boogeyman of the day is, and so that is a big factor that I think all of us are facing. Like it just feels, it sort of feels like this constantly constricting kind of net, right? That, you know, some-- Depending how old people are, and probably some listeners who are maybe similar age to me, they might remember a day when you could sign up for services without having to show" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:25", "start": 385.1, "text": "Address and source of income, source of wealth, and blah, blah, blah, all these kind of typical questions, that typical questions that come up now, with any of these, services. But at the same time, a-and I'm curious to hear where you're at on this, because I don't view it strictly like we have a right to privacy per se. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. I see it more like from a libertarian perspective, yes, you have right of, you know, freedom of private property, but- If it's very difficult to stop this data once it's out there, right? That I don't have a-- So as an example, let's say I disclose certain information that's now on your physical hard drive somewhere, I don't have the right to go and kind of stop you, doing something with that data that sits on your hard drive, right? So I see it like we don't really have a way to, I guess, principle-- to be, if we're gonna be principled about private property rights, now of course people have different views, maybe not everyone is kind of in Canadian camp that I would be, but other people have different views on this. so while I definitely see a threat from things like the state enforcing like AML and financial, all these, and for various forms of, mandatory surveillance, I also am sort of torn in a way because there's only so much privacy that's actually possible in today's world. So I'm curious, like, how do you sort of wrestle with that in terms of not having a right to stop the use of somebody else's hard drive or processor? But at the same time, you know, we don't necessarily wanna dox our financial lives out to the entire world, because obviously, for obvious safety and security reasons." }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "08:02", "start": 482.12, "text": "Yeah, that's, that's an interesting point. So, I don't approach this, the question of privacy from, let's say, an intellectual property perspective. So the data itself, in my mind, isn't owned by anyone. Data is just data, and it can be on your hard drive, it can be on mine, you have access to it, but that doesn't mean you really own it in a That we understand property rights, because property rights itself really only works if you have scarce, scarcity or scarce assets. So you can own something that, you know, like in the Star Trek's universe, if you can just replicate, physical objects, right? Then the own-- the question of ownership becomes, a bit, kind of, doesn't make much sense if you can just copy anything as much as you want. In the digital space, we can copy data as much as we want. So, holding data And owning data, in my mind, isn't the same thing. And whereas, side note, I would like to say owning data itself is something that is, in principle, doesn't make much sense. So, that's, that's for, for intellectual property. But I think the question of privacy is rather, about the fact what you want to reveal in the first place. So, and not how to control something that someone knows about me, but control how much someone knows about me. So it starts with How much you share. And, it should be everyone's own choice, I believe, it should be everyone's own choice to determine how much they want to share with their peers or any other system that they're embedded in, and, to, to gauge by themselves how much makes sense or not. And unfortunately We've come to a place in the evolution of the world and the politics around it that, we are kind of in an oversharing status quo in which we-- whether you wanna just sign up to an arbitrary service where you, let's say, you wanna, you want a fo-mobile phone and you want to talk to someone, that's your goal, but you end up sharing like your life's history, your bank account, and like your state registration and so on just to, just to be able to communicate with people. And so I don't think that it is necessary, for a-- to keep the world, in quotes, safe, it's not necessary for everyone to share all their data with, with a small number of corporations or political institutions. rather, I see it the other way around. I think the world is a safer place when the-- when the individuals have more control over the data that they want to share. So, and in fact, we're not in a state where we can choose what to- share or not, because, typically international legislation, sets the tone for all the other countries and all the other political systems to follow, suit. So we have regulations like FATF, that is primarily something that is of American origin, but They, it, it since it, it kind of becomes popular globally so that other states implement the same rules so they can be compatible with the American system. So, the, the requirements for ordinary people to give up their privacy is often decided by a small number of people, and because the systems in which, you know, we send money, we have like global, transmission of- Bank transactions and so on force others to join, and we're kind of seeing the same thing also in the communication space happening right now with things like chat control, where, you have a number of countries in the, European Union that want to really look over everyone's shoulder and look into their phone screens and be able to read what you're writing with someone before you encrypted end-to-end, and, because the legislation of the European Union Wants to act as a unity, it makes other countries who originally might oppose this idea to accept the consequences and rather say like, \"Okay, like, let's, let's curb on the privacy of the individuals, so for the sake of being, you know, working together and being compatible with each other.\" So, we see the same happening in for financial privacy and for communication privacy. So, I think that my essential point is that individuals should be able to choose whether they- Share the data or not? And luckily, we have these technologies today that we can build systems with where you as the user can control whether you want to share information or not. So in the old financial system, let's say, in the banking, system, it is practically impossible to use a bank account without your identity because the whole security system around it depends on the fact that you can be identified and, you know, there are no private keys. Anything, you just basically have to prove you are the person that you say you are, and then you have access to the funds. In the new world where we can use cryptography to build monetary systems and financial systems, we can basically skip all that and say you get a private key and a public key, you generate your private and public key, and that's all you need to prove that you have access to these funds basically. The, so the, the question of an identity isn't required By the system itself, only by the kind of surrounding systems that we build around it. So Bitcoin itself, looking at the history of Bitcoin, for years and years it was completely parallel system, and, like very rarely, would you interface with a website or something that would ask for KYC? but Bitcoin didn't change since then, right? So the Bitcoin still works the same way as ten, fifteen years ago. Now when you wanna sign up for an exchange, basically every exchange that you wanna sign up to requires your KYC information today. So I think, it's a choice that we can make as a society. And, technically speaking, we're in a, we're, we're, it's the first time that we're even able to build privacy-preserving systems today. So there is a lot to do from the technical- Side to make these things more usable, easier to deploy and so on, and safer. At the same time, we have a lot to do, from the societal and political perspective where we have to convince the, systems that surround us, that we want to play with different rules, we don't want to share our data, and we believe that, it is a security risk for every individual to share the data with multiple parties that could be compromised and forced to share the data with, agencies and so on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:45", "start": 884.93, "text": "Yeah, and I'm, I'm with you there on that side of it, definitely. I think we need that effort on the development side and technological side, as well as some kind of work on the, let's say, legal, political, social, cultural side of things also, because without that, it'll just be seen like, okay, it's just like twelve hacker men in their basement, you know, doing some technical thing, but it's not accessible for the everyday people. And if you don't get everyday people on board You're gonna be a very small, you know, group of people, or we are gonna be a very small group of people, let's say. so how do you s- like, what, what do you see as the way to actually- Get more people using some of these technologies. What other things that, you know, we, you and I, or we should be doing?" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "15:29", "start": 928.96, "text": "Well, I think, we should just all focus our energy on Bitcoin and trying to spread it as much as we can. I know we-- the, the two of us do that, and, we need more people who just cheer for Bitcoin and who advocate for Bitcoin and make it, useful for more people. So, in order-- as I said, Bitcoin is the first- system that allows us to build something privacy-preserving on top of it, and so it's our best bet to build a parallel system that respects user privacy. On a technical side, it means that us as developers, we need to focus on kind of use cases for the ordinary people. So privacy technology should be as easy to use as any other software that you have. It shouldn't require you to understand what you're doing and to- To get that kind of privacy PhD before you can actually use the internet safely. And we have succeeded with that, we have succeeded, with things like TLS encryption, HTTPS, for example, is something that is, you know, end-to-end encrypted web, web communication. Every time you use a website today, it's a HTTPS connection. This wasn't the case like, a couple decades ago, and required a lot of work in convincing also, also from a, you know, social side, if you will. to make people jump on board of it, and today everyone is using it without even realizing. So when you use your banking app and so on, everything is TLS encrypted. So that, that's, that's one, that's one way of looking at it. And, so I, I think we need to, do the same for financial privacy as well. So we need to build wallets that just out of the box are perfectly private, where you can't make mistakes and you don't need to understand what you're doing. So, I think the biggest amount of work Developers to make the UX of all these apps as slick and easy to use as possible, and that is also, the one of the most important reasons why I worked on Cashu, which is a Tor mini-cash system that gives you almost perfect privacy when you want to use, custodial Bitcoin services. So that you cannot really make a mistake. So the whole system is built on a premise of privacy that you cannot do accidental address re-use like in Bitcoin. You don't have to manage UTXOs and so on because there's no transaction graph. So building technol-using technologies that provide you privacy by default and making them as easy and, ergonomic and intuitive to use as possible, I think is the way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:05", "start": 1084.61, "text": "I think it's a good point you mentioned there, because for a lot of people, when they start going down the privacy rabbit holes, they start seeing, \"Oh, whoa, it's not as convenient to do this. Like, I've got to do extra steps. I've got to either pay more money or pay more, you know, use more time to do this particular thing, or it's less convenient.\" And as I understand you, then, it's more like you're trying to create technology or improve the technology such that the more private thing is actually the more convenient thing. Is that how" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "18:31", "start": 1111.02, "text": "Yes, that's, that's how I would see it, and I, I'm also optimistic about that because we, we build faster than any other system, in, in the Bitcoin space, the pace of innovation is quite, quite astonishing, and so we have a chance to outpace the old way of doing things by building better software. I mean, just compare any arbitrary online banking application to an arbitrary Bitcoin wallet in terms of design and thoughtfulness. And how much effort, is going into like making sure that people actually enjoy this experience, and I think we just like need to continue on working on that and keep producing like the best in class software products and privacy-preserving tools that we can." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:17", "start": 1156.98, "text": "Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, banks, I mean, they're making all this money out of whatever lending products, interest rates, whatever, and on the Bitcoin side, of course, you have like products that are made by, let's say, Bitcoin, big Bitcoin exchanges or big banks, but there's also kind of the- This big ecosystem, very deep ecosystem of like open source entrepreneurs and developers who are just building something-- well, now of course, now not that making profit is wrong, but there are a lot of people who, they're just passionate, they're so passionate about it that they're spending so much time trying to improve their wallet or their software that allows people to, to interact with Bitcoin. So it's just like, I think it's, it's a different motivation, isn't it?" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "19:55", "start": 1194.62, "text": "Yeah, definitely, but I think there's also lots of people who just understand that there's no one coming to help us if we don't do it ourselves. This is just the nature of a decentralized system that is an open source system where everyone can participate in the same manner. And no company has more, power over Bitcoin than you and me, and there's no overarching institution or anything like, official about Bitcoin. That also means that anything that you want to- To see improved, basically needs to be done by one of the people who are part of this ecosystem. So as a developer, you've-- I think you feel like there's this sense of agency that you have that comes with your skill, being able to build software, is kind of coupled with the fact that you're-- that we're feeling that the fiat system is, i-is approaching, is like, is getting closer to us, is limiting our lives more and more and more, and we need to build our ways out of it. Gives a sense of urgency For open source developers to keep working faster and keep innovating faster and to outrun the old system. I see." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:03", "start": 1262.76, "text": "So let's get into some of the eCash and Cashu components of, what you're working on, what you're excited about. So I guess I'll just give like a super quick overview for people. So the un- so my understanding of eCash, it's originally this built on this concept of Chalmian eCash, named after David Chalm, I think in like the eighties or nineties, maybe in the eighties, and he- He had this startup called DigiCash. Now, it was kind of, it was a, it was a corporation, it was a custodial form of a very private token, and that was maybe where commercially it didn't succeed, and now as I understand, you've come out with, you know, a couple years ago, you have this, this idea of what if we created like online Chameleon e-cash mints where people can deposit and withdraw Bitcoin? Over Lightning or something else, and inside this mint, they have really, really strong privacy, and the mint operator cannot kind of individually, you know, steal one person's balance. He either has to kind of rug the whole thing or- you know, just keep operating the mint. That's kind of his option, and then I guess there's a few other things around fractional reserve and things like that. But do you wanna just elaborate on that, did I get anything wrong there or how, how would you explain it?" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "22:21", "start": 1340.8, "text": "Yeah, so, my approach to this is like looking at what we already have, which is like the ordinary custodial systems that we have, and, and if you wanna imagine how they work, they're basically as easy, as simple as you can imagine. So you give someone Bitcoin, let's say you go to a website where you have a balance and you wanna top it up, and then, watch videos, and you pay for each video that you watch, like that's the website. And what you usually would do in a normal custodial website that, you know, this exists thousands Times basically is that you get a QR code, you send some Bitcoin to that website, and they know who you are in the case, in the sense of like they know that you have an account, they don't need your KYC necessarily for it, but you need at least something like an account number, and then they will go to the database and say like, \"A-account A B C one two three has just deposited two hundred thousand satoshis, and we just add that to the database, and that's your new balance.\" This is how every bank account works, this is how every website Balance and, you know, a-any kind of web shop interface or, or custodial wallet that we know of today. And Torii E-Cash, in my mind, starts with that premise and tries to improve on the privacy and properties of those systems. So, in the case where you replace like this database of who owns what with the Torii Mint, what happens is you send Bitcoin to the service. It could be a custodial wallet, it could be also a website that, that wants to sell you videos, it could be any kind of like AI- Application and so on, like what people do. The point is that it can be anything that would give you a balance could also be a bank account. So what you do is you send Bitcoin to that service or the mint, and then in return, you get Charm and eCash tokens that are bearer asset tokens that you store on your device. Now your, your balance, now this-- there is no database that says like user A B C has just sent, this amount of money and that's how their balance has changed. There is no such database. In, instead, instead of that database, what What the service does is it issues you eCash tokens for the same amount of the Bitcoin that you put in, and now you hold eCash tokens on your device, which you can use within the ecosystem of this, of this service. So let's go back to this, example of the website where you want to watch, videos. You've sent them two hundred thousand satoshis over Lightning, they have give you two hundred thousand satoshis worth of eCash, which you have on your website, and you see a balance, on your, on, on your screen that's It says two hundred thousand satoshis, but most importantly, this isn't a balance on a database in the backend somewhere of that service, but it's the e-cash that you hold on your device, in your browser. And now when you wanna watch a video, what happens is when you, when you pay, when you click pay, it's not that you ask the server, \"Please, could you, you know, change my, subtract, thousand satoshis from my balance and add thousand satoshis to Stephan's balance,\" for example, let's say you're the Banks and PayPal and custodial systems work. Is, I take the eCash that I've created before and I just basically just send it to you directly. So there is a peer-to-peer aspect of eCash where it travels from my device to your device directly, and then you accumulate this eCash as a way to kind of make money or earn, or earn satoshis on that website. And then later, at the end of the day, at the end of the month, you can go back to the website and say, \"Here's now the- Ecash that I've accumulated, could you please send it out back, via Lightning to my non-custodial Lightning wallet, for example? So that's how you withdraw again from the service. So, and, and most importantly, so there are two main things that just happened that are different from the old way of doing it, is first of all, it's a, it's a bearer asset, it's a bearer token. That means you st- the data that you store that represents your balance, the money, you can send it via HTTP, you can send it via any kind of medium Transport data, so that makes it super versatile and extremely fast to use. And second of all, is that you have perfect privacy while you're using these tokens. So the, the, the mint itself cannot correlate my, payment where I charge my balance to your withdrawal when you take out money again, and it also doesn't know that my transaction to you even happened, because it happens peer-to-peer from my device to your device directly. There is no trace on the public Internet, if you will, of that transaction. So these couple of points make it kind of ideal for microtransactions on the internet, and that was the original idea of David Chaum. So David Chaum invented this whole scheme in '82, that was the, the first paper where he published, blind signatures as a cryptographic primitive used for this, and where, he envisioned an internet economy that would spring up like in the '80s and '90s. And he already assumed that the internet needs some form of digital money so it can work, so we can pay for things and can make a, build an economy around it. And so with all of that, he was completely right. But, and he also, because he understood that, he thought that we need privacy for these systems because otherwise you would have to- Register with every single service that you do, and you would have to give you up your identity with every single service that uses money on the internet, and he thought back then this is a crazy idea. And people were kind of agreed that this is a crazy idea. you know, interestingly, fast forward almost, you know, forty, fifty years today, this is-- has become the norm. So we, we enter our details in every single website today, but it wasn't strictly necessary. So if David Chaum had succeeded with DigiCash in The early nineties to the mid-nineties, we could have seen a completely different internet payment experience, a world where digital cash respects user privacy and we go online and just, you know, can surf online and make tiniest tr-transactions and tiniest payments for the services that we wanna use. One example that most listeners will be, familiar with is just- Reading an article on a website, let's go, let's say you go to newyorktimes dot com, right? So the, the choice that you're presented with today is to, get-- basically, you need to get a subscription today for anything that you wanna do because the credit card payment system, requires you to make- At least a transaction of a certain amount. So there's, let's say, five dollars is the minimum that you, that you can make with a credit card because of all the fees and so on associated with it. So, then you need to register and you need to put in your details, and then you can read the article. In David Chaum's world where, that he envisioned, you would go to that website and you would see like, you wanna read this one article, that's, that will cost you five cents, you press the button, it's instant, and you And you can read it. You never had to leave any information on that website to be able to consume this medium. So, I think that the internet still is in need of exactly that kind of, microtransaction system And, since the banks won't be part of it, as they've shown in the nineties, that they are, you know, they'd rather go with credit card systems, which is what most of the world uses today, we have a second chance to rebuild this, privacy-preserving microtransaction system now on Bitcoin, which is why we focus so heavily on that aspect in the Cashu ecosystem." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:03", "start": 1803.12, "text": "Fantastic, yeah, and I, I'm supportive, obviously. I think this is a good trend to see, and what we are, I guess, obvious question, I think I haven't a- I answered what your idea is, but just for listeners, the question mark on, well, hang on, why not just use- Lightning, you know, why not just have Lightning or just use Ark or Spark or Liquid or, you know, any one of these different L2s or however we're defining it? What's the, what's, what's the crucial differentiator here between an e-cash? style solution like Cashu versus one of these L2 style s-systems." }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "30:35", "start": 1835.32, "text": "So that, that's a very good question, and, first of all Only Lightning, Lightning is the special one, among the ones that you just mentioned, because it's fully decentralized. So, Lightning would be, in theory, it would be the best option, right? So if anyone could just use a non-custodial Lightning wallet on the device that they use and that wallet syncs seamlessly with all the other devices that they have, you know, then Lightning would kind of be the best choice that we have because you can make micro-transactions on the internet, you can just send tens of- Satoshi's and just, you, you'll be, you'll be, there'll be a great internet if that worked. However, the technical limitations of Lightning, which are strongly associated with the properties of Bitcoin itself, so it's not just a Lightning issue in a sense, but it's also just a Bitcoin baseline, base layer issue, means that it's Very hard to run a non-custodial Lightning node for most people. So there are great options out there which, I mean, people should try. For example, Phoenix Wallet is one of the easiest to use non-custodial Lightning wallets that just works on your phone, it's great. But also, Phoenix Wallet first requires some form of centralized services, the LSP, does most of the heavy lifting for you to have this experience, so you're still bound to a company. And, there is a second problem of Lightning that is inherent to Lightning itself. Which is, it isn't, completely reliable. So Lightning payments really often do work, but the problem is when they don't work. And so you don't wanna be stuck with a payment trying to pay like a hundred satoshis to a website and, now it takes like three hours to fail You're just waiting there and you don't know what, what the issue is. So Lightning is amazing if it works, but for the cases where it doesn't work, it can be really hard to deal with. That's why Lightning today seems more like a solution that is, ideal for service providers, companies People with an expert level knowledge where they can, you know, you know, debug these issues, open new channels, do, rebalancing, and basically care for their lightning node and be able to care for a lightning node. And it seems to be a very hard UX problem to solve to make it work for everyday people having a lightning balance that you can just take with you across multiple devices and so on and so forth. So there has been a kind of, sobering up on lightning in, in recent years because the expe- Expectations that were set in the very beginning were a bit too high from a, everyday user perspective. Still, I wanna say like Lightning is amazing. I think it's one of the best technologies that we've ever inven-invented in the Bitcoin space. It is the only decentralized layer two solution that we have come up with so far. All the other, solutions that qualify as a layer two, heavily rely on centralization. So Lightning, and there is nothing comparable to it also in the altcoin, space, to Lightning. So Lightning is great, and I think it will be around for, for a very long time. Now, when we go to solutions like Spark and ARC, I, I think that those are really interesting and great projects. I'm also looking forward to working with them, on, on them. However, they don't solve the privacy issue for us, like, this is true for Spark and Ark, both of them, as I, mentioned, require you to use a centralized service that typically will be run-- this is my, like, I'm making a guess here, looking into the future, I think will have to be run by large, larger corporations and companies because the capital requirement to even keep an Ark running is kind of pretty significant. So there- Well, I don't, I don't wanna say never, but, I don't see a world where there will be a neighborhood arc, for example, and we will have many, many arcs springing up. There will be rather a small number of larger arcs that are funded by large institutions because you need to put up so much Bitcoin and you need to make like on-chain transactions every couple seconds, and, you know, it comes with a huge, Investment basically to keep it running. E-Cash on the other side, makes its life much more easier. It doesn't give you the security guarantees that, a true layer two will give you. Mostly, I mean, the most important factor is your unilateral, unilateral exit, Ark, Spark, and Lightning. in principle, allow you to exit, whenever you want. You can take out the Bitcoin that you want. There is a asterisk there, obviously. The asterisk is it has to do with, you know, you need to get into the mempool The amounts must be large enough and so on and so forth. So in Cashu, we try to ignore all of that and try to really focus on the privacy and efficiency part. so Cashu doesn't give you the guarantees of being able to, you know, the mint can just shut the its services and run away, right? So you need to kind of accept that. What you get in return is this, almost infinite speed of making payments and the privacy that you get in return. So I think there's again kind of, let's say a balance or, you, you need to basically balance again between privacy and efficiency in, in also these cases. So you see The same kind of compromise that you need to make appear over and over again, basically, and we, we just focus heavily on the microtransactions and privacy-preserving side" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:20", "start": 2180.16, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah, so I'd summarize, as you said, there's, there's a lot in there, but kind of there's certain various technical nuances of some of these other systems that- Either require a larger operator or they maybe don't allow you to operate at the very small levels, like a few sat levels of things, because of various technical limitations and how they work. but the interesting thing as well that we are now starting to see, and I think this is starting to become true, like our friend Roy has been talking about this for a few years, where h-- his idea was Lightning is gonna be the common language of these different- Ecosystems, and we are now actually starting to genuinely see this in practice, right? As you and I, we were just at recently, Baltic Honey Badger in Riga, in Latvia, and they were using Ark as a setup, for the merchants. But then these Ark wallets on the front side are showing a Lightning invoice. Now, in the backend, there's Boltz dot exchange doing swaps for them, but actually, you and I and any of our fellow people at the conference, we could just pay with any Lightning wallet. You could pay directly with Ark, and I believe Sirian tweeted, that they actually did do an eCash payment as well. Now, again, actually in the background, it might be like an eCash payment and then like a Lightning gateway is making that Lightning payment. But isn't that an interesting phenomenon now where Lightning is becoming this common language? what are you seeing on that front? That's," }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "37:41", "start": 2261.06, "text": "that's, that's why I think that we will see Lightning just persist for a long time because Lightning is a system where you don't have to buy into anything. You don't have to accept- you, you don't have to kind of do your due diligence, look at that service provider, do you agree with them, is that policy correct? No, Lightning is completely decentralized. You just spin up your node, you don't have to tell anyone, don't need, to ask for permission. That's great for the individual, but it also makes it very attractive for a service provider itself, which means that you can decide fully if you wanna engage with the Lightning system or not. So, as you said in, at the Baltic Honey Badger conference, you, The payment terminal just shows your Lightning invoice, you don't even know what's happening in the background. There might be an arc, and in that case, it was an arc that received the ultimate payment, for the merchant, but on the other side, for the payer side, it could be anything as well. It could be a liquid wallet that does a Lightning payment again with a swap, or I paid every single coffee that I consumed there with a cashew wallet. So the, the receiver, the POS system doesn't even know where the money originates from. In my case, I, you know What you do is you take the eCash, you send it to the mint, and the mint makes the lightning payment for you because lightning is the way, the primary way that the mints communicate with the outside world today. However, I wanna say, because of this disconnect between eCash and Bitcoin, because, you know, This is also related to the fact that it can't offer you unilateral exit. eCash itself as a system is completely disconnected from Bitcoin. It is, it was invented thirty years before Bitcoin, so obviously it's disconnected. And the original intention was to put it onto the banking system. That means, like, the way in and out of the mint originally was supposed to be a bank transaction, a wire transaction, for example, or withdrawing it from your bank account. We have just, you know, we've built the mints in such a way that they primarily use Lightning to- But they will be able, and they are able to use basically anything that can do a funding and withdrawal transaction for the mint. So we, we are looking into building a mint that just runs on ARC itself, so we can use ARC itself to, again, put a eCash system on top of it and, you know, make use of both, both of these properties that you can now as a mint operator, you don't need to care for your Lightning node, for example, that makes it very easy for a mint operator. or you can take a cashless system, you can, You can plug it on top of, on-chain Bitcoin. That's what Fedimint does, that primarily runs on on-chain Bitcoin, right? So, there's, there's disconnect, it comes with some trade-offs, but it also gives you much more flexibility on what you actually wanna put the system on top of, and that's what I'm looking for. Like, I'm always happy to see that something new appears, because in the back of my mind, I keep thinking, \"Now this is great for Cashu because we will be able to make use of these new innovations in The UX and speed of, of the Cashu system itself." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:41", "start": 2440.55, "text": "And just so people understand a bit of the ecosystem here, obviously you're well known for working on Cashu. Now, Cashu, just to disaggregate the concepts here, can you explain for people Cashu, the protocol, and then there are eCash? Wallets and, you know, can you just explain a little bit about the difference of those and just give us a bit of an, awareness of the ecosystem, like how many eCash wallets are there out there or at least that you know of?" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "41:06", "start": 2466.19, "text": "Yeah, so Cashu is a protocol, as you said, and to be a protocol means that you need kind of specifications and independent implementations. That's at least the definition that I use. So, we started building Cashu, as a kind of specification system first. So we have a bunch of- Of English language documents in which we, like, precisely explain how Cash App works so that anyone who reads those specifications can, build their own mint implementation or wallet implementation. And this is what we're seeing today already. So there are, many different implementations of the Cash App protocol. And the nice thing about using specification-driven development is that all of these, individual wallets built by individual people that, e- You know, don't even have to do anything with each other, they're all compatible with each other. So you can use, the cash wallet built by developer A and, use it with the mint implementation by developer B. And if you're not happy anymore about developer A's wallet, you can just get a different cash wallet, move your e-cash from that wallet to your new wallet, and then you're using, now you're using a different wallet, still with the same mint, though. So what this gives us, and this is kind of- Something that, we see for the first time in the Bitcoin space is a disconnect between the service provider and the frontend wallet application that you're using. So because it's a standardized protocol, you as a user have full control over which software you wanna use, without having to, you know, change the protocol that you use. So, you can, I think there are like More than a dozen cash wallets out there already for, mobile, for iOS, you know, Android, for, the command line interface or just libraries that operate without, you know, user" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:00", "start": 2579.83, "text": "interfaces. Can you explain for us who are the people that you envision would be running a mint? Are these normally gonna be like s-centralized service providers, kind of everyday- You know, guy in the community trying to help his community, either locally or digitally, let's say, who do you see as the main people who are actually going to take on the job of running a mint?" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "43:22", "start": 2602.27, "text": "So, yeah, that's an important point. So again, to reiterate," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:27", "start": 2607.41, "text": "the lead sponsor of this show is Bold, the banking platform designed for Bitcoiners. With the Bold virtual Visa debit card, you earn Bitcoin back on every purchase. The more Bitcoin you buy with Bold, the more Sats back you get on the card. Buy $2,500 of Bitcoin and earn 3% Sats back. Keep stacking with Bold to earn up to 10% Sats back. Bold offers the industry's lowest fees on Bitcoin buys and sells with zero added spreads. When starting out 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. Go to getbold.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 batteries, so you don't even have to plug" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:51", "start": 2690.83, "text": "For PC or Nunchuk 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 coldcard or other devices and level up your self-custody today." }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "45:13", "start": 2713.18, "text": "the Cashu system isn't a, isn't a system where you have one big mint that everyone uses. Rather, it's a software that anyone can run on top of their Lightning node. Right now, it's a Lightning node, but it can also be on Chain and/or ARC in the future, for example. So anyone can run a mint, and who should run a mint, and when does it make sense? Typically, what we're seeing already is there are multiple mints that are run by, like, leaders of Bitcoin communities today, that might be like local Bitcoin meetups in town or just like an online community of bitcoiners that run mints, for, various number of people. It could be just a mint that is used by a family of ten people or so, but or a meetup of a hundred people or two hundred people. We have physical communities that run mints where bitcoiners gather in a specific town, for example, and then the, the technical guy of that group runs the mint for the non-technical people in that group, for example. And they just can use that infrastructure that is run by the technical guy to make, to m-receive and send Lightning payments, for example. so that's, that's like the, grassroots Mints that we've already been seeing popping up all over the world and in various different sizes. And another use case is, from a corporate perspective, when you, run a s-service or a business. And this is also what we're seeing today, already happening. So one example here is, for example, Routers is an AI tool where you, it's an LLM marketplace where you as a user can find someone else who, runs infrastructure for AI. And use their infrastructure for your, LLM-based chats or APIs or whatever you wanna use. So here they wanna use the cash ecosystem, the cash protocol to make micro-transactions for AI use, right? So similar to what I just explained with David Chalm's idea of how the web was supposed to work. Instead of having a subscription, you just pay for every single prompt that you enter into the AI, tiny amount for each pro-prompt. So, in that, in that case, We're seeing service providers running mints, for the sake of privacy and efficiency of their users. So instead of using a database to, to, record user balances and user transactions, you can basically just rip out that database and run a cash mint instead. And, running a mint is, is a very low effort thing. So it just basically once it's set up, it just keeps on running. There's practically no maintenance that you need to do, and it's very lightweight software as well. So a cash mint is, you know, if you compare the amount of, energy or CPU that is, that's required, resources that are required by a Lightning node, then, putting a cash mint on top of that basically makes no difference, compared to the rest. So it's very lightweight and, that's why it's kind of, makes it kind of easy to get rid of your old accounting system and just replace it with an eCash, mint. So, the way that people should think about this is that it can- in individual mint can service, thousands, po-possibly hundreds of thousands or millions of people because of how fast the transactions can be and how little resources it uses. So it scales insanely, insanely well across many users, but it can also be extremely useful for a small number of people, where you have only ten people, fifteen people, twenty people, where one technical person can help the others to use the infrastructure. And, that's already like Like those are two different, developments that we're, observing, in parallel." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:02", "start": 2942.02, "text": "I see. So I guess summarizing, for some people, they are, they are using it as like a, almost like a temporary use thing for privacy reasons in a smaller context, and maybe others are using it in a more long-lived form for privacy reasons, and then like you said, at the business use, it can be for some of these online services where they wanna charge per use, and the use for them is that they would rather not have- Have a standard account model and just have a, hey, pay me in eCash kind of model. That's what you're seeing so far. That's absolutely right. Yeah. Yes. Okay. also I'm curious, I've seen- this is-- I kind of remember seeing some chatter about this. Was it called Boardwalk when they were trying to use like eCash but also have some kind of stable channel feature? What, what have you seen on that?" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "49:49", "start": 2989.14, "text": "So, we have this, concept called Stable Nuts, and that's basically a way to peg the eCash now not to a Satoshi Bitcoin-domin-dedominated currency, but to a, fiat currency, so USD, Euro, for example. So, if you want to issue eCash for a fiat currency, you need some form of, keeping the fiat reserves, so getting, fiat-denominated payment in, fiat-denominated payment out, and- And, holding that reserve while, while you issue the e-cash for it. And, because we don't want to interface with the fiat system itself, but still some people want the stability of fiat What we've built is similar to how stable sets also works, in, let's say, the Blink wallet. there are ways to collateralize basically, or like, to hedge the Bitcoin that you have in reserves in such a way that it's, the, the amount of Bitcoin that you have in the reserves remains constant in fiat terms, right? So the fiat price goes up, then the amount of Bitcoin that you hold goes down, and vice versa. So, if you have a thousand dollar, payment into the min- Then you issue thousand dollars as eCash, that remains thousand dollars for the mint itself, so the mint never runs into a risk of like the price going up or price going down. And the way it works, with stable channels is quite nifty actually. We can build this system without any centralized, Exchange, that's how, things like stable sets work, in Blink Wallet, where you have a perpetual future that keeps the price, the, the, the price, the value of your Bitcoin stable. And yeah. in the case of stable channels, this can, you can do it completely decentralized basically is, you have a mint operator, and that mint operator has a stable channel with any other lightning node. And a stable channel is this simple construction where you have like two people on each end of the channel, and they both agree- Let's say let's stabilize, let's say five thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin, and then once the price changes every minute or so, they send each other tiny payments to equalize that balance again back to five thousand dollars. And they just keep doing this forever, and that means that when you receive Bitcoin on that channel, you kind of know that this Bitcoin will always remain at five thousand dollars, and that's why you can then issue, fiat e-cash for your users that can hold it, keep the price stable, and once they wanna- Withdraw the, the, the payment out of the mint, again converts it into Bitcoin, and they make an equal amount of Bitcoin payment out." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:29", "start": 3148.73, "text": "Of course. So, I, I, I could see this, maybe that, this combination of techniques and technologies could be useful for a fiat service, right? Like maybe they wanna do something Like fully just fiat, because maybe they're more no coin or fiat minded or fiat denominated, and maybe that is what enables them to start doing this altogether, right? So I think it's not, it's, you know, to not be like purity signaling about like, \"Oh, you gotta do it exactly everything non-custodial and on chain and stuff.\" but to be fair, there are risks also, right? Like, there is obviously a risk here that the mints can rug, right? So that's something people just have to be, you know, aware, and Make sure I'm only dealing with like spending, smaller spending amounts if I'm trying to play around with a mint. that's at least how I see it. how are you thinking about that and how are Cashu users thinking about that?" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "53:21", "start": 3200.59, "text": "Absolutely. So this is something that we mention over and over, over again, just to make sure that people don't misunderstand this. is like, we are Bitcoiners, that's the most important thing for us is that users are safe. So everyone should understand that the Bitcoin you put in a mint isn't under your control anymore. You have Bitcoin and that eCash, you, you assume that you will be able to exchange it back for Bitcoin later, right? So, that, that should be clear on, on, top of everyone's mind. That's also the reason why we don't, advertise this technology as like savings technology or anything, but we purely focus on small scale payments, and that, that's what we, that's what we wanna fix with this is Small transactions with a high frequency that you need to do. That means, practically that my cashewallet, probably has less than a hundred dollars in it because, I just don't want to expose myself to a risk higher than that. And I would advise to anyone to just play with microscopic amounts only and never, you know, trust a mint too much. the same way you shouldn't trust your bank too much, right? So you, you might have a bank account But obviously as a Bitcoin, you don't want to have your life savings in a bank account, you'd rather want it on-chain Bitcoin. But you're, you might be okay with having like a small spending amount in your credit card, in your bank account so you can do daily purchases. So that's the way I think of eCash is taking a small spending amount that you would put on your physical wallet, you know, that you would risk losing while you walk around, for example, with your physical wallet. The same, dili-diligence is necessary for e- Ecash. But then once you have this small amount of eCash, then you can make like this instant and fast payment. So then you really see the, the use case for, for that? And, one other thing that is relevant here in this context is that you don't need to use one single mint. So you can reduce also the risk of losing your funds due to a malfunctioning or robbing mint by spreading smaller amounts on multiple mints. So every Cash App wallet that you can use today allows you to add as many mints as you want. So typical, for example, could be five mints that you have, and on each mint you have just ten dollars, for example. So you would have ten dollars here, here, here, here, total fifty dollars. And that's your maximum risk, and if one of the mints goes down, you basically can lose only ten dollars with that mint, and you keep forty, dollars in the, in the remaining mints. Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:55", "start": 3355.04, "text": "Yeah, interesting. So where do you think, things go from here on the cashu and eCash front?" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "56:04", "start": 3363.59, "text": "So, we're, we're working really hard in improving the protocol. One of the things that, we've started to roll out and already, working with is, that's already working is multi-nat payments. It's, it's a type of payment that allows you to use multiple mints at the same time to pay a single Lightning invoice. This is super nice technology, I think. it makes this case that I just explained before, where you can have smaller balances of, on multiple mints, makes This case really useful at the same time. So this, it, it allows you to reduce your risk by having multiple mints at once, but also allows you to pay one single payment from these mints at the same time. So it uses, MPP, multi-path payments and Lightning to make a single, to pay a single Lightning invoice from multiple sources, which is extremely useful and we're, kind of rolling this out step by step. currently we're, we're basically done with Vault Twelve, we're basically done with Onchain. Where, so we, we're also improving things like efficiency and security of the protocol. So there's a lot going on in the protocol side itself. At the same time, like on the other end of the spectrum, we're seeing more and more apps using, Cashu. So we are, there, there are a lot of Noster apps that use Cashu as a built-in wallet, for example. There is the concept of, of a not-zap, where you can just send, instead of a lightning-based zap payment, you just send someone iCash as a tip. Social tip, for microscopic payments online and applications like Routers, for example, or Hashpool that really take the eCash idea and apply it in a completely different context where you don't have a, you know, it's not the use case of a wallet anymore where you scan invoices and make daily purchases, but it's like a, either a machine-to-machine system where you require micropayments and, eCash presents itself as one of the best choices there, like in, in, Routers. Or in Hashpool, where, the, the concept of a mining pool itself is kind of improved by, instead of having a database of all the miners and their rewards that they earn by contributing to the mining pool, in Hashpool, they use eCash as a reward for your mining, shares when you participate in a mining pool, and then you can use those, eCash tokens that you collect and then withdraw back to your Lightning node or your own- Blockchain wallets as a miner, for example, this improves the efficiency and the privacy of the individual miner, but also adds a new level of auditability to the- Mining pool itself. So, eCash, this is kind of, an interesting paradox there. Although it's like super private and, and we said before in the beginning that there's a balance between privacy and auditability, although it's super private, in the case of hashpool, it actually increases the auditability of a mining pool because, like, the, the worst way of doing things is the normal ledger, the database, that every custodial system is doing currently. And With eCash, you also, have some way of auditing, let's say, the amount of, shares that the pool has received and the rewards that it has issued to its individual miners." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:23", "start": 3563.02, "text": "Yeah, it's interesting the way-- I think maybe one way to think of this is not to think of it as a replacement for an existing Bitcoin user using an existing Bitcoin or Lightning or Ark wallet. It's more like, could this be a replacement for people who are currently using some kind of fiat custodial system to begin with, right? Or is it, you know, can it be used- used instead of other custodial systems where, okay, yeah, they're still custodial, but now they've at least got better privacy. Maybe that's a more interesting way to understand this cashew phenomenon, let's say, compared to, you know, if you, if, if the, let's say the benchmark is kind of my on-chain hardware wallet or my, whatever, my lightning hot wallet on my phone, which is each of these, has a different use, is how I'm thinking about it." }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "01:00:08", "start": 3608.73, "text": "Just to be very clear, like I'm a, I'm a self-custody maxie, you should keep like your, your vast amount of your we-well, you should self-custody, you should learn about these things, get a hardware wallet, run your own Lightning node if you can, right? but I'm also a realist, so I'm just looking at the data, I'm not saying like this is how the world should be, I'm just telling you how the world is, and the world is in a state where ninety-five percent of all users on Nosta" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "01:00:38", "start": 3638.25, "text": "You know, extrapolating this is most use of Bitcoin today is custodial already. So we can complain about this, and we can hope that we come across a technology that will help us someday. But if, you know, we-- and we should work on that, we should hope that we can improve the ability for anyone to do self-custody and still have fast and cheap transactions. But, I think these like custodial relationships will be around for a very, very long time, if not forever. There will always be use cases where people say, \"I don't want the responsibility, I don't want private keys, I just want someone to do this work for me.\" And this large part of the population, this large part of the user base of Bitcoin, deserves better privacy. It deserves more efficient use cases and like more ways to spend their Bitcoin and use it online. So this is how we see it, from the, cash perspective, where just, we're not Kind of competing with the, self-sovereign use case. We want to increase the self-sovereign use case, but we're rather, in quotations, like competing with the old way of doing custodial systems and, and hoping that we can convince more and more par-- like parts of the ecosystem to focus more on privacy and give them the tools. We wanna give them the tools to do this as simple and easy as possible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:05", "start": 3725.07, "text": "Yeah. And, I guess zooming out a little bit on the broader privacy and social elements of this, what do you see as being achievable privacy wins and what is, you know, not so easily achievable, from a social environment, right? Like as an example, I know, you touched on this earlier, there's this big chat control kind of law coming in in the EU, it seems, that even if you, we-- even if you and I had end-to-end encrypted, end-to-end encrypted chats But they wanna kind of go one level down and pon-pon us at the devi-device level, let's say. Now, I'm not in the EU, but let's say for people inside the EU, and so, it just feels like there's a, w-w- there needs to be a big shift in terms of at least acceptance of this idea that- Let's say you don't have to be a criminal to want privacy, and I think it, it feels like today that's still a minority view. Where are you at there?" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "01:03:02", "start": 3782.47, "text": "Yes, I agree with that, and I think we've, we've achieved a lot already in terms of messaging, and, you, you don't, you know, it's not only criminals that should have privacy. If you outlaw privacy, there's, it's a famous Phil Zimmerman quote, \"If you outlaw privacy, only outlaws will have privacy.\" Every human deserves privacy in their interactions because it gives us agency and it allows us to organize as a civilization, as a society. So there are many reasons, ethical reasons, why we should push privacy. But we also, you know, really need to change the narrative, and that's why I think, the, the way we talk about privacy needs to change, and the way we interface with the world about privacy also needs to change. We need to, broadened the coalitions, like worked together, closer together with journalists, NGOs, human rights defenders, and especially the human rights, perspective I think is the most valuable one because there are countless examples in history where, political movements, human rights organizations, or just groups that challenge the authorities are most threatened, with privacy violations, or censorship. And, you know, examples are like the famous Nigerian protests Of the feminist protests where their bank accounts were closed and they then used Bitcoin to circumvent that, or re-more recently in Belarus, the same happened when the regime started to crack down on journalists there, where they closed bank accounts and they couldn't use their own bank accounts anymore and had to rely on Bitcoin to continue their work, or in Hong Kong during the protests when the, the individuals were identified who participated in the protests and their bank accounts were closed Or in Canada, where the individuals participated in a protest and their bank accounts were closed. So like the examples just go on and on and on and on. And at some point, we need to ask ourselves, like, who are we really protecting with this? Are we really protecting the people with these measures that should be protecting them? And were these intended to actually, you know, protect people, for, you know, do we really need to, to harm ninety-nine point nine nine? nine percent of the population in order to catch the zero point zero zero one percent of criminals that actually do harm to society. And I think the trade-off there is completely off. We are in a, in a world where most people aren't really aware of the alternatives, they aren't aware of their rights, they're-- they don't know about the risks until The situation gets so bad that they need to learn about this, and you can go to any kind of these conflict scenarios or issues that I just mentioned with the examples and talk to the people there, and they understand quite clearly why privacy is necessary for communication and for financial transactions. Whereas, for those who just still enjoy the peace, in their specific regions and countries, they don't see it as clearly. But, we shouldn't wait until it becomes like too- Hard to ignore. We should start working on these technologies in, during peacetime so that in, in situations where really things blow up and get really bad, that, not more people get harmed by it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:33", "start": 3993.47, "text": "Excellent. Well, I think that's a good spot to finish up. Where can people, find out more if they wanna follow your work or find out more about Cashu?" }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "01:06:41", "start": 4001.89, "text": "Yeah, sure. So you can go to cashu dot space. That's our main homepage where you can find all the different wallets that you can try out. There's a documentation where you can find like more about the protocol that's on docs dot cashu dot space. And, you'll also find links to our specifications that I just mentioned where you can, that's on GitHub, you can read through the specifications Like, and if you wanna contribute to Cashu, you can find me online anywhere on the socials, on, on Nostr, on Twitter, and or any other project that interests you in the Cashu ecosystem, you can just like contact directly the developers, and we're, we have dev calls, monthly dev calls, we have like smaller, sub projects like TypeScript and, Python and Go and Rust. So if you're, interested in any of these languages and you would like to contribute, just contact me somewhere and I'll show you Around, and other than that, if you're not interested in Cashu per se, but you are a developer and you aren't participating in the Bitcoin open source ecosystem yet, you should strongly consider doing it. It doesn't need to be Cashu, it can be all of the different things that we mentioned today in the podcast. There are many projects out there who are looking for, contributors. So if you're a programmer, there are funding opportunities out there that haven't been around a couple years ago. The situation is much better than a couple years ago thanks to generous support from From various different organizations and institutions out there. So just have a look around, get your hands dirty. There are many people who need your help, and, we kind of need to get, you know, increase the number of developers who work on this because, as I said in the very beginning, no one is coming to save us, no one is coming to improve Bitcoin for us. Nothing happens just automatically. It's all the relentless work of individuals who want to contribute. So This is my invitation for anyone listening is to start, caring and, looking for projects that you like and start contributing to them." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:41", "start": 4121.9, "text": "Fantastic. Well, great work, Calé, and, hope to see you soon. Thanks for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "panel", "time": "01:08:47", "start": 4127.43, "text": "Great, thanks for having me, Stephan." } ] }