{ "episodeId": "SLP738", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "pakovm": { "name": "PakoVM", "role": "guest", "tag": "PAKOVM" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:00", "start": 0.14, "text": "Living with Bitcoin used to be almost impossible because you had to only gift cards, P2P exchanging for cash, those were your two options. Now you have so many tools that it's as easy as having a bank account, but you know that nobody's going to rob you because you are in control of your money." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "00:20", "start": 19.9, "text": "Hi everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Joining me on the show today is Paco VM. Some of you may know him online for his commentary around Bitcoin and technology stuff. Paco's into Linux also, and Paco is also working at BitBox, which is one of the hardware wallets. So, welcome to the show, Paco." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:40", "start": 39.73, "text": "Thank you very much. Impressive intro, by the way. Most people record that. yeah, super honored to be here, actually. I've been listening to your show for a long, long time since they started in Bitcoin, like in 2021, I would say, and, you were instrumental for me to, to get into Bitcoin and understand a lot of the technology. So super honored, honored to be here. Oh," }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "01:03", "start": 63.31, "text": "fantastic. Yeah, well, hey, you never know who's listening, right? so, oh. I guess we should also talk about the, the scammer. So, let's talk a bit about that story. I think, Craig from Bitcoin Magazine also mentioned, or Bitcoin conference rather I should say, mentioned this idea, and I was like, oh yeah, actually, I mean, 'cause look, I mean, right now there's a lot of sc-scammers and spammers and everything out there in the world today. Tell us, your recent experience so other people can learn about how to, you know, watch out for this scam." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:34", "start": 94.3, "text": "Oh, yeah. Yeah, so like basically the scam has, the, the scam has been evolving. So like we, we saw recently a few months ago that a lot of Bitcoiners were getting their Telegram hacked, because the scam was to get somebody you kinda know. have you like, code them and have an AI version of the person and then, then they start claiming that you have, like, connection problems and stuff, and you have to update your client for the connection to work or whatever. And a lot of people fell for that. the, the attack, I think, it, it went into the dark for a while. People started forget, started forgetting about it. And then I got this message from a guy called, Billy Bitcoins. I was like, \"Okay, don't know this guy from anything, but I, I checked everything on his profile, I saw like no indications of hacks or anything, I said, 'Okay, like maybe my articles or, Lightning...\" I catch you. we saw great reception for, of those in our blog in BitBox. That, okay, maybe people are starting to, to listen to them during we are in the fair market. We were taking interest in the technology, so it's a good place for me to start talking about this stuff. yeah, like they had a podcast, the podcast was legit, but they talked more about," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:15", "start": 194.77, "text": "BRC20 tokens and stuff, yeah, since that stuff is kinda dying, I like, okay, yeah, maybe makes sense that they want to touch something else." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:27", "start": 206.88, "text": "asked around, nobody knew if it was her. So, yeah, like I then started to ask for verifications. And one of the things, the key verification I always ask for people who have podcasts, it's like, \"Hey, can you send me a message from the podcast directly? \" Unless I know the person. Like, \"Hey, if you have access to the social account of, of account of the podcast, please send me a, send me a message so I can confirm it's you.\" and they didn't. They said, \"Oh no, I forgot, whatever.\" Then when the, when the interview day comes, I said, \"Okay, now this is too suspicious. you asked for this multiple times.\" Not a single time I got an answer, so I'm gonna take measures. What I did, I created a new user on my PC, I'm running Linux, so I didn't give it any administration, admin, administrative permissions, then use Flatseal, that's something on Linux if you know what, what a flatpack is. It's, kind of when you install," }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "04:33", "start": 273.33, "text": "software, sometimes it's a flat pack form versus like a package manager format, yeah?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:38", "start": 278.26, "text": "Exactly. So flat packs have permissions that you can control. What I did is, I removed all the permissions and only allowed for a camera and microphone. Just in case it was an actual interview, you know," }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "04:52", "start": 291.77, "text": "this is a lot of work. There's always a slight chance, you know? This is a lot of work just for a, you know, just for a podcast, you know?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:59", "start": 298.65, "text": "Yeah," }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "04:59", "start": 298.96, "text": "I know. But yeah, I mean, to be fair, it's a fair point, because I mean, nowadays, look, I mean, there's a lot of podcasts going online, and there's a lot of obviously scammer, spammer stuff going on, and, the tra-the, the, the hack I've heard of before is, yeah, as you were saying, like, they might say, \"Oh, I'm having trouble hearing you,\" \"I'm having difficulty install this firmware,\" \"install this update,\" \"software update,\" and because like, in the moment, you might just quickly kind Of like, we're, we're all used to like some kind of call thing not working, so then you have to troubleshoot it, and then it kind of already your defenses are down. And so yeah, exactly, that's what, that's what, that's what we're" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:44", "start": 343.82, "text": "aiming, that's what they are aiming for. I think it's, I've seen this attack like a lot of times, a little cautious about it. So, okay, if this is not part of the interview, I'm just going to be cautious. it took me like ten minutes to set everything up. And yeah, for a lot of people that, that's a lot of work. For me, I've been, I, I've been doing Linux for my whole life, so I've been tinkering with my PC and doing this kind of stuff. Like, I'm the kind of guy who usually like just create a new user to install a new program just to know if it's not going to fuck up my PC." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "06:19", "start": 379.26, "text": "Right, yeah, yeah. So I've been doing this" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:21", "start": 380.9, "text": "for years, so it feels natural to me, for me to do this. yeah, like I saw that this attack happened a lot of times, I was like, okay, let's be cautious just in case, and I was right to be, because when I joined the call, like the first thing I get is like, there are like eight people in the room, apparently it was to be, I was going to be the only guest, and nobody could hear me, and then a message pops, pops up like," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:49", "start": 408.82, "text": "We are having, connection issues. I said, \"Okay, this is a scam. So let's, let's see what it takes me. I just click on download, and it downloads an MSI file, that it's a Microsoft installer file. Which was kind of expensive because the guys like, they already profiled me, but they didn't profile me as a Linux user. Which of course, like, if you're going into a job, do it, do the full job." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "07:18", "start": 437.67, "text": "You" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:18", "start": 437.73, "text": "know, like," }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "07:18", "start": 438.13, "text": "yeah, I mean, as you said, like they were clever enough to target based on an article that you had written to sort of, now I guess nowadays with AI, they can maybe use this to kind of automatically quickly research and figure out, oh, what is this guy into? Let me, you know, let's try to target the scam pitch to try to get you to, you know, obviously sign up for the call and download their, their malware. And then once you've installed their malware, who knows what they've managed to install onto your computer? And of And from a Bitcoin security perspective, you obviously wanna make sure your private keys are cold or offline, right? So that's kind of an obvious one. But even other things like your privacy could be doxed, your-- I don't know, maybe other tokens or things on your computer, like not shitcoins, I mean, more like the token that you, your, your Gmail or something like that could be, maybe they could try to hack into your Gmail from that or into whatever, into your email, your calendar, whatever." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:14", "start": 494.02, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course I like that. I, I know that's the, the kind of stuff they usually go for. That's why it's always good to have like a lot of extra browsers for this kind of stuff if you're suspicious. Like, I can count on my PC I have, let me tell you, seven browsers. That's a lot. It's one for work, one for Twitter, one for stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, so yeah, I mean, like that seems kinda paranoid for a lot of people, but it's normal for" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "08:48", "start": 528.11, "text": "me. I see, yeah, and I guess, 'cause there's that difference between like what a typical, like everyday person, I mean, nowadays it's almost getting to the point where most people just use their phone, right? Like they might not even use a laptop or a desktop PC, like personally, they may have a work one if the, if the work gives them one, that kinda thing, but I guess the other meme, seeing as you mentioned, you know, we've been talking about Linux, you're a Linux enthusiast, the whole meme of the year of desktop Linux, right? Like that has been a meme for a while, since and 2009," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:25", "start": 565.2, "text": "if I remember correctly." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "09:27", "start": 567.0, "text": "Right. Yeah. So we're, I mean, we're talking, what's that, like, I don't know, 16, 17 years, something like this, like it's a long time. but funnily enough, it's almost that Microsoft So annoying for people that there are actually genuinely a lot of people starting to move over to Linux. There's still a few, the, the typical issues you would hear from people were like, oh, they're, they're a creative person, they need Adobe, and Adobe doesn't work, so they have to-- and they're not comfortable with the alternatives. Or historically, they're a gamer, and some of the gaming stuff didn't work on, you know, Linux. Now, funnily enough, some of these things are changing, like Steam, and, you know, some of these things are So what, what's your reaction on some of that, this kind of desktop Linux concept?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:16", "start": 615.86, "text": "I think it's great, and I think it's just going to accelerate. I think that Microsoft fucked up for a lo- for a while with Windows 11 It's getting worse and worse and worse and worse, suppo, and they had to recognize that they fucked up. And Valve, on the other hand, they did a great job, starting compatibility layers for, for Windows apps to Linux, and now we've seen a lot of migration from a lot of apps to Linux and a lot of," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:47", "start": 647.37, "text": "That reminds me, like, e-e-just for context, like years ago, there's this blog called OMG Ubuntu, and they wrote a, they wrote a post called like- Linux way, why don't you mean? the reason for the post was because in Linux there was, there were no like small apps that did just one thing and did it right. there were a lot in Mac OS and that was super interesting for users and developers. And now we're seeing the shift in Linux that now it's the case that you can find a lot of apps that do lots of stuff and small stuff and these kind of apps that only do one or two stuff and they do it well with while being well designed, so I think we are accelerating into, into being an actually viable alternative for the desktop users, and especially with games. Games run incredibly well on Linux. I, I've never seen any, never seen anything like I've seen with games on Linux. I've been playing on Linux for years and it was horrible. You had to download the libraries yourself, you have to set one, you have to troubleshoot a lot in order, in order to start, and most of the games didn't work. Now it's just one click install and ninety percent of the Steam library works." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "12:12", "start": 732.0, "text": "Interesting. Yeah, and the other thing I found recently is that AI really makes it a lot easier now to troubleshoot things. Like, so you'll find an issue, like historically it used to be you, you would hit some issue and then you would be spending like hours or like a really long time trying to troubleshoot something and like find some, you know, whatever stack exchange or forum post where something, some guy who's also on a similar setup to you, he found a way to fix some issue, whereas nowadays with AI, it's almost like you can just copy paste that into Your AI and then it'll like quickly find out for you, hey, this is what's wrong, try this command, try that command. Are you finding a similar thing with that?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:50", "start": 769.77, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I've actually done a lot of, AI troubleshooting myself with my own PC with like small stuff, like now nowadays I don't have any problems with my PC that I used to have." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "13:03", "start": 782.88, "text": "well," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:04", "start": 784.31, "text": "yeah, with AI it's super easy. Like, I don't know why this doesn't work, what, what do I have to do? And it tells you right away what you need. But you have to specify that you are in specific desktop, specific version, what desktop, that kind of stuff. That, years ago it gave you a lot of, internet search skills, but now, now it's super easy. Now it's incredibly easy, and it's easy to troubleshoot. Like But then you can basically do the same thing. Do you see the competition" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "13:33", "start": 812.89, "text": "now being kind of between Linux and Mac and Apple? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:39", "start": 818.89, "text": "Yeah, yeah, like it's-- I think, I think most Linux, Linux, Linux desktops, Stop caring about Windows a while ago, and what they want to do is try to, to, to have competition with Apple. Because Apple is like the gold standard of what a desktop PC should be. Like Windows just mostly doesn't work, and Mac OS, great UX, usually things work very well. And yeah, many of the startups they want to replicate the Apple experience." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "14:16", "start": 855.58, "text": "Yeah. Now on the hardware side of things, that's probably an area where Apple has also been a real leader, like especially with these like, now I think it's called M5 chips and M5 Max and all these kind of like, and even people doing like local AI stuff. With the different Mac hardware, on a Linux perspective, how are you seeing the kind of the ecosystem now of Linux hardware for laptops and desktops?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:45", "start": 884.54, "text": "I'm still jealous of the Mac people, 'cause the hardware there is amazing, but, have you seen the framework 13 Pro? Yeah, I've heard of" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "14:53", "start": 893.23, "text": "that. And it's like, the idea is like a modular laptop and stuff, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:57", "start": 897.07, "text": "Exactly, and it's basically what most Linux users have been asking for. It's basically just a MacBook Pro for the Linux users. So it's great build quality, great specs, and but on top of that, it has a modularity and repairability that Macs don't have. And it works with Linux, but Linux out of the gate. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I think we are getting better hardware. The main trade-off" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "15:18", "start": 918.32, "text": "I've heard with some of these is they tend to cost more than like a Mac equivalent, right? That there's not as much of like the, like Mac Air, Mac Pro kind of standard thing, whereas like a lot of Linux people, I'm on a ThinkPad. ThinkPads are apparently also a common, you know, thing for Linux people, but, yeah, framework and system 76 and some of these others are" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "15:42", "start": 941.84, "text": "Similar." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:46", "start": 946.24, "text": "Yeah, so, I've never gotten that why, why people love it. Think that, think that so much. The people who have them, they say it's, it's like it changes their life. Never understood why, like I really like ultrabooks, the smaller, the smaller, the footprint, the better." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:07", "start": 967.01, "text": "but yeah, like I ca- I see that we're getting better hardware now, 'cause years ago Linux on laptops was horrible. Like you had to compile the WiFi drivers yourself, now it's simple work." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "16:22", "start": 982.14, "text": "Yeah, so it's kind of interesting to see that's, yeah, but I guess some of this stuff is kind of, it is more for the, you know, technical or hobbyist, style of person, where if you, if it's just like your typical, you know, person who's not that into it, then, you know, maybe they're gonna be less inclined to, to go down that pathway. but, yeah, let's, let's focus back to Bitcoin stuff. So I know you've written some articles on- You know, just Bitcoin technology, where things are going, so do you wanna just give a bit of an overview there, like, I, I, because, you know, we've got Bitcoin on chain, we have Lightning, and then nowadays there's ARK, there's Spark, there's, you know, state chain, which is, you know, I guess Spark is using some elements of a state chain in it, and, now there's like this whole BitVM concept, so maybe can you help, explain from your perspective, like- What are some of these at a high level, and then we can sort of go further into that of why you would choose these different things?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:24", "start": 1044.26, "text": "Oh, yeah. So let's start by, okay, let's start by defining what Lightning is, like sure most of your audience already knows what it is, but just in case, it's just state channel. So I open a channel to you, we have some liquidity, it's like we have a box with- With money sharing that, we have a little paper that says, \"I owe you this much, and you owe me this much,\" and the account can never go over the level, over what we deposited, okay? So This great for speed, but the problem is that this doesn't scale. Why doesn't scale? Because it depends on block size, Bitcoin's throughput. Which is very limited. And so the solution for this is find a way to get into, into the same safe box, get as many users as possible. Problem with Lightning is that you usually need a coordinator for that. So, users need to be online all the time. So what Ark does is that it solves this coordination and operation part. without the user having to lose the, the property of owning what's inside the box. Okay, so the operator is just It's, it's just a coordinator, that's it. It's who coordinates what people have in there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:57", "start": 1137.35, "text": "yeah, like I explained usually that it's, it's like a train. So, Lightning are usually like a courier private," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:08", "start": 1148.18, "text": "private packaging. And what it adds is that it now adds trains to this formula. Instead of just moving a little cargo super fast, you can move a lot of cargo. And, and Ark since, it's a little bit, different infrastructure, you can move in outside of the Ark and of the channel without having to close the state channel, as you have to do with, with Lightning. And you can share with a lot of people." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "19:39", "start": 1178.85, "text": "Yeah, gotcha. And so, in terms of ARC, there are two, let's say, main types, at least today. There's the second, their implementation is called BARK, B-A-R-K, and then there is the arcade version by ARC Labs, and that's like TRO and, and those guys. and they have slightly different, visions and implementations. How familiar are you with those? Would you be able to explain any about those or just, are you, you, are you kind of staying more At a higher level here of what Ark, the concept is." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:11", "start": 1211.19, "text": "I am more familiar with Arkade since I've talked more about this with Tierra actually. So what they want to do basically is to add programmability again to Bitcoin, but using, using the same concepts of NRG that is, it's user aggregation, but they, on top of that, they are, they are doing, more complicated scripts. So basically getting what we know as great script restoration with extra stuff off-chain and then settling that on-chain. Okay? while second, they're simply want to be user-aggregation and they want to be like the fastest for Bitcoin payment. But the arcade is maybe a little bit more complicated, but because they want to do more, so high level is, yeah, they want, financial apps on top of arcade, well, second just wants. A better overall Bitcoin experience." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "21:13", "start": 1273.05, "text": "Yeah. So I guess maybe one way to see it is the second or Bark guys, they are kind of more focused on just quickly setting up with a wallet and maybe, maybe they, they might even see it like, if there's custodial wallets today, maybe they should just be using second and Bark to have an arc You know, VTXO. and then on the Tierra side of things, like the Ark Labs Arcade, Ark Arcade Scripting, the concept, as I understand, is that they will-- they want to enable more things to be done, not just payment side of it, like it could be loans, and it could be other scripting that can be built in, to allow things, whether that's escrow, whether that's, you know, borrowing against your Bitcoin for a collateral and this kind of thing. So, I guess the- The idea is that they wanna, they see it like by enabling some of these other uses, more people gonna come to Bitcoin, and I guess also f- for a bit of context for people who are coming to Bitcoin and have been kind of broadly around so-called crypto circles for a while, even though crypto is, you know, on the down I would say that there's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of these bridge hacks that happen, right? And so the reason some of these people are going to use things like wrapped forms of Bitcoin And they're, they're trading around and they're using some kind of shitcoin thing to do something with. But part of the, what happens is a bunch of bitcoins are held in a bridge, and if that bridge gets hacked, that's, that's-- and if you search, like, I'm sure there's like, I don't know, how many hundred of them by now, there's so many of these hacks. And so in a way, this concept of using, let's say, the Ark Labs arcade style It might help reduce a bit of that risk and make it more about-- it's more about, okay, yes, there's a trusted execution module, but you're, you're staying closer to Bitcoin and there's maybe less of a bridge requirement. Can you elaborate or do you agree or disagree or how would you explain it?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:15", "start": 1394.81, "text": "Yeah, I agree on that. I'm not a hundred percent certain on the details, but I've talked to a lot of people who, who know about this, and most of them what they say is that the problem is the EVM." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "23:28", "start": 1407.72, "text": "Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:28", "start": 1408.12, "text": "No, so the EVM isn't secure enough for this kind of stuff, so there are a lot, so there's a lot of, attack, attack surface that Bitcoin doesn't have because it doesn't have a VM per se, it's just scripts executing. So you can either try to hack the contract or hack the logic of the EVM. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:51", "start": 1431.09, "text": "maybe I'm mistaken on this, but that's what I understood so far. And on the case of Bitcoin, since it's just a script, like what you program is what you get. Okay, so it's no nothing weird happening or calculations then, just what we understand. Like you have a few lines that says this is going to happen and this is what's going to happen. And since they are super limited, like, you need to be super careful, and usually people are more careful because they, they need, if they aren't, they can, they can lose funds and stuff. However, Ark allows you to recover them. And like in the worst case, but bridges don't, since bridges, they are on chain and once a block is valid, it's, it can't be invalidated." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "24:39", "start": 1479.24, "text": "Yeah, and I guess the other important concept to understand here is it matters whether we're talking just about those two individuals getting wrecked or the entire system, everyone who's in that bridge getting wrecked, right? Because that's also an important dis-distinction, right? Like as an example, if you and I have a lightning channel together, something- In the case of that lightning channel, it only impacts you and me, not other random people who aren't party to the lightning channel that you and I have together. And so I guess we, maybe we're gonna see, more evolution or direct, you know, more people going down this pathway of trying to restrain who gets wrecked in the fold, in the breakdown scenario, in the unhappy pathway. now, I guess there's a few related ideas, much, which would be interesting to get your reaction on them. So as we were saying, there's like this- The idea of using ARC to do, have more programmability, whether that's loans, collateral, liquidity pools, maybe other assets, I don't know, that's maybe one way to do this in this kind of trusted execution environment. Another concept might be Liquid. Liquid brought Simplicity recently, right? So Liquid is a federated sidechain of Bitcoin, and they put in Simplicity, which allows like a massive, massive amount of new things, and so- So that might also be another way to achieve some of these more Dex-style decentralized exchange size-style uses on a Bitcoin sidechain, which is Liquid. that's maybe one other way to do it. And now another concept is Like ZK rollups and some of the ZK startups, right? Like Alphan and Citra and stuff like that. Now, I think Citra have a shitcoin, so, you know, I don't endorse that. But, I guess more broadly, there's like this BitVM bridge concept of like bridging in and out of those. So, how are you sort of seeing this concept of bridging? And is it relevant for us in Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:38", "start": 1597.68, "text": "I think it's very relevant because it allows you to trust-minimize, sidechains. That, for example, Liquid, personally, I don't consider it to be as trust-minimized as I would like to. I think it's very trusted, and you don't have unilateral exit. So you have to ask permission to get out, but, yeah, you can do an atomic swap, but, but the part that matters to me is the unilateral exit, at least it doesn't happen. Doesn't have it. So, PakoVM allows you to have it in some, in some cases, in side chains and stuff, and allows you to do like super complex stuff that Bitcoin Script can't do. It's impossible for it to, we by bas-bas basically having a, a consortium of signatures where only one has to be honest. Yeah, and the thing with BitVM is that since it's not a part of consensus, it's getting better. It has gotten way better, and it still has a long way to go to get even better than it is today. So like, at the start, first concept, we needed like four megabytes of data to put in chain, now it needs like, I don't know, like one hundred kilobytes or something. because I think they keep coming up with like new" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "28:04", "start": 1684.46, "text": "optimizations and new ways to do it. Like, I think what are we on, like the third or fourth version of BitVM, something like this, and different, researchers and like Robin Linus and other researchers just kind of end up coming up with new ways to do things, and then like some-- and then some of that gets, ends up getting used by the zk rollup startups like Alphan Labs and other people like that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:27", "start": 1706.9, "text": "Yeah, exactly that. And that's pretty cool because, what that tells me is that people aren't waiting for consensus to change to start doing cool stuff with Bitcoin. Like I've noticed a, a huge change in the discourse, because a few years ago it was like, \"Okay, we can't do anything because we don't have consensus for X, Y, and Z change that we need to do stuff.\" Then Robert Linus comes with EVM, and people realized that, \"Okay, we can do a lot of stuff here. The only thing is that we don't have the tools. We have to make the tools ourselves.\" And Linus went like, \"Okay, here's a tool to do whatever you want. It's super convoluted, it's super inefficient, but you have a way to do it. And the good thing is that it can get better.\" So if you're going to wait for consensus, you're never, never gonna get what you want to do. If you start making the tools yourself, you're going to whatever you want, because anything is possible if you make the right tools yourself, because nobody's going to make them for you." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "29:30", "start": 1770.37, "text": "So where do you see the most value for Bitcoin users to do this kind of thing? Is it the loan side of things? Is it vaults? Is it, I don't know, other programmatic ways of controlling your Bitcoin? Where do you see the most value?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:47", "start": 1787.27, "text": "Okay, so this whole spectrum of things, so I think it's that on the eyes of the beholder, okay? So it's up to you, up to what you want, but for me personally, the thing is that since this opens the door for a lot of applications, it also opens the door for for traditional finance to try to integrate with Bitcoin, I think that creates a bridge for people who actually use Bitcoin and they are on the only Bitcoin side of things to integrate with the traditional systems, to have more tools to actually spend Bitcoin. And I have, I have noticed it. Like in the last few years, I have noticed that living with Bitcoin used to be almost impossible because you had to only, gift cards," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:37", "start": 1836.57, "text": "P2P exchanging for cash, those were your two options. Now you have so many tools that it's as easy as having a bank account. But you know that nobody's going to rock you because you are in control of your money. So I think that the most important thing is basically the whole picture, not, not any specific use case, but the fact that we are getting more use cases, which means that it's easier to use Bitcoin in a lot of modes. Now what about, let's" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "31:08", "start": 1868.34, "text": "say the TradFi style? Now, I'm kind of pressing you for the reason of, it's all well and good for, let's say, ideological or like really into it Bitcoiners to kind of talk about our way of doing, like, whatever, people are doing peer-to-peer and direct spending. But as an example, what I could also see is a lot of people just using TradFi style or Neo, like Bitcoin Neo banks, right? Whether it's a strike or a river or a, you know, one of the European, options of this where maybe you can borrow against your coins, get some fiat and- Maybe they have a card or they have some other way, and you're tapping that card. So it kind of feels similar to just TradFi, or Neo, let's say NeoBank TradFi. What's the The problem with that, in your view?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:55", "start": 1914.9, "text": "The problem with that is that we, we're taking with us the same problems the old system used to have. But being realistic, being pragmatic, that's something we are never going to eliminate. It's impossible to eliminate." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "32:11", "start": 1930.93, "text": "Well, in fact, a lot of the barrier for that is actually on the fiat rail side. Like, it's just that, you know, if you want to interact with the fiat card bank system and be able to tap your card to the random merchant on the street and take your payment with his terminal you know, you have to, like, that's the fiat system. Now, of course, we can be again, you know, I'm, in theory, if I could abolish AMLO, FATF sanctions, BSA, all, yeah, I could, I would, if I could. But it's not happening anytime soon, right? And so then the practice, then it's more like, well, do you see it like the point is, you know, people should be able to use Bitcoin, and of course, there's, you know, there, there are apps various tools that you can just direct, you know, earn and spend Bitcoin, and I'm all for it. But I guess the, the challenge is at this point in Bitcoin's evolution How many people are gonna do that as compared to the masses who will just be using the TradFi style of, you know, just tap a card or tap their phone or this kind of thing?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:16", "start": 1996.26, "text": "Yeah, exactly. That's the thing, like, Like if you asked me a few years ago, I would say like we have to destroy everything that they have and everything has to be rebuilt on top of Bitcoin and, and I don't want anything to do with that system. I still don't. I would love to destroy it, but the reality is that we can't." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:38", "start": 2018.36, "text": "what we can do is try to integrate, create bridges, but making bridges doesn't mean living in that system, just means being connected to that system, living in the same society, but having a different standard of how you do things. Just having a connection. No, you can't, you can't, go completely off-grid just because your money is different than others. that's not I don't think that's logical, I don't think that's possible. If you can do it and want to do it, okay, but it's not, not, not something I would like to do. I would love Simply to spend my own Bitcoin, earn them Bitcoin, and stay having nothing to do in that interaction, but if I need to connect to the state. infrastructure in order to spend, they have to fall eventually." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "34:35", "start": 2075.03, "text": "Well, a-and so the thing is, unless-- now, certain exceptions will exist, of course, like if you go live in a Bitcoin circular economy or maybe online commerce can be maybe more done through these Bitcoin rails, but the, the truth of it is, if you're talking about for, for the masses, then, yeah, it has to sort of speak the fiat rails and, the other aspect of it is I don't think the-- we're kind of there yet in terms of medium of exchange adoption for Bitcoin, because for most people, at least above a certain level of wealth and, in de-- development in what co-- in, in the country you're living in Most people don't have a fiat payment problem, right? They, they just tap their card and that's it for them. so I think it, you know, maybe this triggers some people, but it's more like, I just-- I think there's gonna be more store of value, you know, adoption to come before we get to that phase of like actually having a meaningful amount of medium of exchange. Now, it's not that I'm against it, I, I'm happy to earn and spend, I encourage people to, but I also wanna recognize it's not that" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "35:45", "start": 2145.39, "text": "Instead of using your fiat card, because, you know, it's just you're not gonna have much success with that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:52", "start": 2151.8, "text": "Yeah, exactly. I, I completely support that because I am, I am on the same, on the same page here. Because I, for a while, I told people like they should, spend their Bitcoin if they want Bitcoin to succeed and whatever, but not everyone is doing it. I think a lot of people are just going to save in Bitcoin. And now what I see, it reminds me a lot of what I lived in Venezuela with the hyperinflation. That everyone was saving dollars, in the US dollar, and nobody was trying to spend them. Everyone was trying just to earn dollars, but never spend them because they were their, their savings. And then becomes the chicken and egg problem, but there's a moment when it simply breaks and everyone starts using them, because there's no alternative there. Okay? So I think Bitcoin's going to be for a long while in this store of value, savings kind of thing. And the good thing, the good advantage that Bitcoin has is that, since it made the dollar and fiat evolve, make the internet money as well, thanks to stable coins, now Bitcoin move in the same rails that they do. Like they are making the rails for us, all we have to do is Safe, stay there, do nothing, just wait. And it's, you know, it's getting easier, it's getting faster and In the end, what matters is that if you can spend Bitcoin, you can, you do it if you want, but if you don't want, like, it's your money, it's not mine." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "37:38", "start": 2258.07, "text": "Yeah. Now, there are some ideas that could kinda help you, like, probably a good example that comes to my mind is, Tony Klossing has this thing called stable channels, right? And that's kind of like an interesting idea of like creating a virtual dollar, let's say, but not actually using a stablecoin per se. and maybe that's something that could be enabled with further, like, Bitcoin technology and more, more use. Now, of course, again, it, it, you, there's a reason people like, you know, Tether and Circle and, you, you know, these coins are so popular." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "38:16", "start": 2296.2, "text": "So where are you at on some of these ideas of like stable channels and others?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:22", "start": 2302.05, "text": "I think they are unworkable. I think they are a waste of time, of time. It's better to just do atomic swaps. I think it's way easier. And maybe, I don't know, like we already have Taproot assets and that kind of stuff. So we can, we have like tokens, on top of Bitcoin, but they need RGV and that stuff. So yeah. It's my, for me it's a waste of time. It's hard to defend. 'Cause we already have a lot of alternatives that already work, so it's better to just try to integrate with those instead of trying to, to reinvent the wheel." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "39:07", "start": 2347.49, "text": "I see, yeah. And so you see it as just there's so much market demand for the stablecoins, that you just have to support those, and that's just, you see that as kind of, that's the direction things are going to go further, more adoption of those, as opposed to people looking at ways to do like stable channels and other- Like ways of representing fiat without actually directly touching the fiat." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:33", "start": 2373.16, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think the stablecoins are growing at this huge pace, and we can't not, we can't ignore them. But trying to reinvent the wheel is a waste of time when we have Rails, we have Atomic Swaps, we have Arcade and Spark that they have their own stablecoins as well. So yeah, like trying to redo the same thing isn't gonna yield us a different result. Integration is the way to go." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "40:06", "start": 2405.68, "text": "And so then When it comes to Bitcoin wallets, how do you see like the best way to support these things? Like, do you have a, a preference in terms of how these things are done, or, you know, do you see it like people should just be using the so-called multi-chain wallets that just kind of handle everything? Or, there are some different, yeah, there's different approaches out there, like there's the kind of the Aqua or Bull wallet style where they're kind of, it's a liquid-based wallet, and let's say in the case of Aqua, they've built Then swaps in the background to do like the tether swapping in and out. That's one way. maybe the Spark or, or RGB wallets are another way to do it. How, how are you seeing those?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:49", "start": 2448.61, "text": "Okay, so for me the preferred way is the swaps way. But not using Liquid, Liquid it's a little too slow for me because you need to wait for block confirmations. So, my main wallet right now is Blitz, the small Spark wallet, and they have this, this feature that allows you to get stablecoins into Bitcoin. So, like, I use this with a lot of people who live in Venezuela, I usually send stablecoins back and forth. But I don't hold any stablecoins, they want US dollars, so I send them Bitcoin in the for-, in the form of stablecoins in whatever chain they want, and they send me the stablecoins in whatever chain they want, and I get that in Bitcoin. I think that is- Preferred experience for anyone who is into Bitcoin, because you don't have to do all this other stuff that you don't know or you simply don't want to do, while still being able to interact with people who don't want to, don't want to know the things you do want to know. I think that's the best experience." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "41:56", "start": 2516.2, "text": "This is also, as I understand, this is generally for the smaller, like, spending amounts. Like, if you're doing larger, let's say, big boy amounts, then you might be using more like Bitfinex platform or something like this to do these things. Oh," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:11", "start": 2531.32, "text": "I'd be, I'd be using one of those." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "42:14", "start": 2534.4, "text": "Alright, yeah, okay. So, but then what, how do you do, does BitBox have stablecoin support using, like, via Ethereum or Tron or something like that, or how do you do it?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:27", "start": 2547.31, "text": "Yeah, yeah, we have, we have a Bitcoin-only version and a multi-version, and multi-version supports, EVM, so the other software you can, you can use, a lot of EVM chains, we support, stablecoins as well. Well, not only on those chains, but on Ethereum as well, and our app, has like a nativ-native support for a cur-curated, a curated list of tokens, and many of those are basically stablecoins. That's" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "42:59", "start": 2578.78, "text": "maybe the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:59", "start": 2579.18, "text": "biggest user, biggest use for, for Ethereum." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "43:03", "start": 2583.18, "text": "Yeah, interesting. And so how are you seeing, kind of community splits around things like Bitcoin only as, as contrasted to like, \"Oh, I don't want any shitcoin stuff.\" How are you seeing that? Do you see, do you see a lot of users who are like strict Bitcoin only or not, or what do you see?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:22", "start": 2601.66, "text": "Okay, so it depends. thanks to my job, I go to a lot of conferences, so I see a lot of people, and you see kind of everything. So yeah, if you go, for example, to Twitter and you go to, to the more hardcore conferences, everyone thinks that it has to be only Bitcoin, and I'm a Bitcoin-only person, like the only thing I like is Bitcoin. But I think there should be integration with the things that work. I still think that, app tokens, gas tokens have no other value than just keeping the network alive. That's it. The value isn't other things in there, not in tokens itself. So I don't like him, but people should do whatever they want with their money. And if they want to lose all their, their savings into a token that is going to zero, they are free to do it." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "44:32", "start": 2671.83, "text": "Yeah, and I think it's," }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "44:35", "start": 2675.48, "text": "I guess it depends on how you see it, like if some people see these chains as really just regulatory arbitrage, right? Like it's just really just like the way of kind of getting around certain government Re-uh, requirements and things. and I guess ironically, not maybe we're just seeing maybe more and more of those requirements come in, and of course, people should be aware when they're using these stablecoins, they can be centrally frozen, they can be centrally, all kinds of things. Of course. which is different to Bitcoin that you truly self-custody and self-validate with your own node, right? So they're in a different category, but that just seems to be where things are going, but w- There is probably a, a distinction between, let's say, American users and like non-US, right? Because like a lot of the American users probably don't care as much about this, because for them, most of them can already access standard, you know, fiat banking services, so it doesn't matter as much for them. But I presume for the non-US, customers The stablecoin factor does matter more. Is that your experience? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:38", "start": 2737.95, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's actually the experience. so what I, what I've seen is that in the US, like, there's literally no dis- no distinction between Bitcoin crypto and crypto for most people. It's the same thing, it's just an asset class they don't understand. And they believe it only works for speculation, like there's no other value. the thing is that, banking there works relatively well, better than most parts of the world, so like they don't need the solutions that Bitcoin offers. And actually, they have one of the strongest fiat monies in the world. So they don't need to skate, the fiat devaluation because they don't feel it as much as other people in the rest of the world. In Latin America?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:31", "start": 2791.27, "text": "people go for the stablecoins, like people, everyone knows how to use all kinds of, kinds of tech right now, like there's no chain maximalism, like I don't think that, that thing ex-exists, sir. People only care about whether it's USDT or USDC. That's it, that's all we care about. But in places like Africa, in Africa, people actually want solutions for their problems, and Bitcoin offers Solutions for problems they have that are way bigger than they are in Latin America. You know, like they can't do commerce directly with families in the US because they aren't, they aren't just five hours away, they are I don't know, twelve hours away, but it's, it's harder to move more, move money around for them, and they have different problems. And in Europe, in some parts of Europe, a lot of people are going into Bitcoin just for the savings. And for the inherit-inheritance, at least here in Spain, you have no idea how many people ask for inheritance. That's maybe the main use case here. Inheritance is the big use case. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the big use here is in-inheritance. Now, it's not savings, it's not loans, it's not remittances, it's inheritance." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "48:00", "start": 2879.77, "text": "Inheritance of Bitcoin, you mean, or just like fiat inheritance that has to get given out?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:06", "start": 2885.86, "text": "Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is uncensorable and the state can't know the about it." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "48:12", "start": 2891.72, "text": "I see, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:13", "start": 2892.54, "text": "And in a lot of, countries in, in Europe, like the state takes a huge cut of your inheritance" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "48:20", "start": 2900.24, "text": "while doing nothing taxes. Yeah, yeah, I see. So then it's about, I, so then presumably there will be a big market for- Let's call it no KYC inheritance, Bitcoin solutions and, things that allow a kind of a censorship-resistant form of inheritance of these assets. So, kind of interesting to see because, like, I guess you would have thought, oh, like people who are getting shut out from the banking system, so they're gonna use Bitcoin as their MoE. But in practice, now, yes, there's some of that, but it's, it's funny to me that actually the big use, at least In Europe is inheritance, so- Yeah, yeah, it is. Interesting to see." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:03", "start": 2942.87, "text": "It is, at least here in Spain, and I remember also in Germany, it's inheritance is like super important people know that they shouldn't inherit, inherit, anything fiat to their kids. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "49:16", "start": 2956.31, "text": "yeah. Because of the taxes and so on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:18", "start": 2958.19, "text": "of the taxes and so on, inflation, whatever." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "49:22", "start": 2962.28, "text": "Interesting. And so, just kind of looking forward, where do you see things going, like, on the technology side on Bitcoin? Like, do you think it's gonna be more use of these ARC and Spark and so on, or do you see something else, technically speaking for Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:40", "start": 2979.95, "text": "Yeah, I think, I think this, this things are going to grow even more because they, they made the Lightning experience incredibly good. you can see there's a boom of Spark wallets. Like, everyone is now integrating Spark, so they can integrate Lightning, Lightning in it, in it. And what I see is that there's now a race, to see who takes the biggest cut in the market, because basically they are ser-service providers, but now you don't have to trust a service provider. And then for me the next step is to see who decentralizes this, this kind of services first. Like, now the first race was to find a way to scale Lightning trustlessly. Now it's to find a way to decentralize operations of these trustless operations. It's considered trustless, but they are not decentralized." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "50:45", "start": 3044.91, "text": "Spark model, it's a one of n, honesty assumption, and, I believe there are multiple entities and they are signing, and you are trusting that at least one of them was honest, in the moment of transit. And so, the problem, or not problem, but just that's one of the trade-offs of state chains is that Instead of, I guess loosely speaking, instead of thinking of like you're moving the coins around, you're kind of moving the private keys around, and you're trusting that the state chain operator is deleting the prior, shards of the keys so that you remain, you, the user, remain able to, you know, still have, control over your funds. And of course, in the Spark model, they have been clear to say you have unilateral exit, but maybe that is kind of again- You and I are talking kind of at a, at a level that people in the industry would know, but like if you talk to like a random person on the street, they're not gonna like really know or understand any of the, like some of these terms, and maybe some of the terminology gets confusing for people. Like if we start using the word, \"Hey, it's self custody,\" well, I guess you have unilateral exit, but the word and the term is just getting so blurred now that it's, you know, it used to be a very clear thing, right? Like back in like twenty self custody, it was very clear, because this is pre-lightning, pre-everything, it was just like, you just, you hold the keys, that's it. But now it's like, you're in this hybrid situation where theoretically your wallet can unilaterally exit, assuming, you know, the one of n honesty and the state chain deleted the prior shard and all that How do you see that? Like, is that just gonna be a confusing mess of terminology for people?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:31", "start": 3151.11, "text": "it's going to be, it is already. It is already, like, at least for something that like state chains, like the creator, Ruben, Ruben Sampson, like, he came up with a term that was proactively self- pro-active self-self-custody? So, if the operator behave correctly, it's self custody, but if they don't, it stops, it stops being self custody in this, in the stage. Yes. You got a lot, a lot of," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:06", "start": 3186.01, "text": "a lot of ways to exit if they behave maliciously, and you can exit before them, before they do it. But, yeah, like, there's a lot of debate on this. Like, I've been pushing for Spark for a long time, and a lot of people try to tell me, \"No, this isn't Bitcoin.\" But, yeah, it is Bitcoin. The thing is that it isn't the kind of self custody you are used to, so we need a new term for it. And calling it self custody isn't correct, but it's not incorrect either. So you hold the keys, but you hold them, you hold them on the stage." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "53:43", "start": 3222.59, "text": "And you aren't, and let's put it this way, you hold the keys, but you're not the only one who holds the keys. So that can make it a bit challenging to explain for people so they can understand that. And then it gets into that broader conversation around, well, the easiest thing for a lot of people is to have a custodial service. And of course, if we're kind of, let's say, ideologically, Bitcoiner, we want more people to self-custody, we want more people to be able to do that. And so then it's like, how And I think this comes up, this brings up this whole idea of like maybe it wasn't the technical hurdle to begin with, it was more like the social and, you know, psychological aspect of doing self-custody as opposed to the literal technical a-aspects of doing self-custody of your Bitcoin, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:30", "start": 3269.84, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would-- I actually would say that's a huge problem. Like, while working at the, the hardware wallet manufacturer, I've noticed that a lot of people fear like they dread, self-custody. Like they are super, they are horrified because they know they can lose it. So can you" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "54:53", "start": 3292.76, "text": "explain what are the main, what are the main fears in their mind on self-custody?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:58", "start": 3298.46, "text": "it's usually common, the, the common things, that you should know you shouldn't do. it's like people always ask the question, \"Okay, what happens if the device is compromised? What happens if I lose my keys? What happens if my house burns? \" \"What happens if I have to leave the country and I forget my keys?\" and this kind of stuff. So, People like are super filled for, of their responsibility, because it's nothing, it's something more they have to take care of." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:37", "start": 3336.54, "text": "Sounds complicated at first, and that's where I think we lo- we lose most of the people. Because it, it sounds kinda complicated, because Bitcoiners tend to explain like, \"Oh, you're holding keys, and you're doing this and this stuff, it's a huge number, whatever.\" Because we want people to understand what's going on, but people only want to know, \"Okay, is this the money or this is not the money?\" No, so, so yeah, I think like the biggest fear is losing the money, because you can see horror stories, people actually losing a lot of money. Especially with, with passphrases." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "56:15", "start": 3375.09, "text": "So where do you think things go then on the self-custody front? Like, do you just think most people are gonna end up holding custodial, but there'll just be like a small group of- Let's say enthusiasts or maybe some high net worth people who take the time to actually go, like, learn this stuff and do it for themselves." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:35", "start": 3394.79, "text": "I believe, there's, we are going to hit a balance. At some point, where a lot of people will, will still trust the banking system, at least I see my, my generation, millennials, most people will, will use the banking system. But the coming generations, I can see for my nephews, that, that they know what they're doing because they, they, they are going to be self-custody because they do, they do crypto, they do stablecoins, they do Solana, they do Ethereum, it's all the same stuff, and they, and they know how to do it. It's like, it's somewhat like computers." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:14", "start": 3433.7, "text": "my parents still don't have, they still don't have an idea how to use a computer, and now kids, they are using iPad first month." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "57:24", "start": 3444.45, "text": "No, so I think they're actually gonna come out really tech savvy, and that is actually gonna make them more comfortable. But at the same time, there's just a certain level of things you have to learn if you're gonna do it right. Like, now it's one thing to just have kind of a phone wallet with like spending money, but once you start getting to like, \"I'm gonna secure my life savings in single sig or multi sig.\" That, you know, that raises the bar dramatically in terms of how-- do you know how to operate this device? Do you know how to recover? Do you know, like, how to do the backups? Do you know, like, do you know how to, like, se-- secure your, like, that multi-sig backup aspect? Like, there's so many of these other aspects of it, that, you know, it's a real journey, and probably when people, like, in years gone by, they had practice of doing a lot of on-chain transactions, and so they kind" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "58:16", "start": 3496.31, "text": "The concerns now is that actually people aren't doing that many on-chain transactions, right? 'Cause look, I mean, there's just not that many, on-chain nowadays compared to before. At least that's, that's my subjective sense of it. What do you see?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:30", "start": 3510.29, "text": "Yeah, I mean, what I see is that it's also getting easier to use. Everything, everything in general in Bitcoin is getting easier. like, for example, privacy used to be a hurdle, now we have silent payments and we have pay joints, so pri- privacy is way easier than it used to be." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:50", "start": 3529.81, "text": "we have a lot of solutions for multisig that used to be a pain in the ass, at least for most people, but you have services that make it super easy. You have custodial services and escrow stuff, hardware wallets, I checked the, the older models and, and I understand why people lost a lot of money with those hardware wallets, and now hardware wallets are super easy to use, the most of them have their own That it's super easy to interact. you aren't exposed to things like script types and derivation path and that kind of stuff that you use to, to need to be exposed to. Now it's just you write your words and you have your money like magic. No, so it's getting easier and easier and easier because, there's, there's fit for this kind of products and these products are getting better because more people are getting into it. So it's growing and by growing it's making easier because there's a lot of competition. Everyone trying to be better than the competition." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "59:56", "start": 3595.99, "text": "Yeah, that's a bit of a white pill, that's good to hear. And I mean, I agree with you that, yeah, there's certainly a lot of improvement in those things compared to like in the old days where you had to like really know what you were doing, and there were just so many foot guards that you could screw things up, whereas nowadays you've kind of, you know, it's like ball, when you go bowling and they put up the rails, so you sort of have a bit more of the rails so that your ball" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "01:00:23", "start": 3623.05, "text": "Yeah, there's that, and then, yeah, like, I guess part of it is just normalizing some of these things, like, as you said, silent payments and Payjoin. I know Sparrow Wallet, Craig is recently doing a lot of work on that, so he's got this Frigate thing for Sparrow Wallet, which is like an indexer for silent payments. we haven't really got to the point where lots of exchanges are supporting that yet, but as I understand, that is-- That's not a trivial thing because it, there is a high scanning requirement on the exchange If you're an exchange and you've got like millions of customers and you start handing out SP silent payment addresses instead of just standard addresses that people are used to, that's a massive scanning requirement on, for, on you, the exchange or any like service provider, and so I guess people are still kind of wrestling with the right way to optimize some of that. And then there is, there are some, let's say, fly in the ointment kind of aspects of some of this, like silent payments, as I understand, doesn't support multisig yet, so then now you're back to Single sig, so like now you're not dealing with like larger, like 'cause if, if you're dealing with larger amounts, you probably want multi sig for that, whereas like, you know, so some of the-- Yeah, but maybe some of these are just growing pains, right? That like these things get sold and they start getting better. They," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:38", "start": 3698.33, "text": "they get better over time. Like, I mean, like two years ago, it wasn't possible to see silent payments because the requirements were so high. if you tried to have your own indexer, you needed like super beefy computer. But now you don't, you just need a any common GPU, and it, it, like, the indexation takes like a few hours, just like setting up Electrum, just twenty, twenty gigabytes on top of Electrum, that's not that much. It used to be like a lot of data and a lot of CPU power that you needed to, now it's not that much. yeah, like the, the things are just optimizing and when, when they break out, like, and they get some adoption. They also start getting more optimization from other sites that people didn't see before that could be optimized. yeah, if an exchange starts giving a lot of silent payment addresses. To most of the, of their users, and they are going to have to do a lot of indexing. They just have to need to buy a better server." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:53", "start": 3773.18, "text": "I mean, it's going to be a cost, but maybe they now are ahead of their competition in terms of privacy for their users." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "01:03:01", "start": 3781.29, "text": "Yeah, and maybe not even just privacy, but just UX, like it's just a better UX, like contact list kind of ex-experience, whereas now in the, let's say, the stone ages of Bitcoin, people are still doing like test transactions to the same address, right? Like, and 'cause that's like a typical thing, as I'm sure you and basically people in the industry know, it's very common that people will do like a test transaction. First and then send a bigger amount, and there's a ton of address reuse. people are still in this paradigm where they might say, \"Oh, here's my donation address, here's like just a single donation address,\" or doxing all this privacy stuff. So, like, that's just- Yeah, these are some of the things where we are now, but of course, we want to get more people using like silent payments, Payjoin, all these things that then, improve the ecosystem. And I guess we won't see it, you know, because it's one thing for the hardcore technical person to do these things, but it's another for, like, just an everyday Bitcoin user to do those." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:00", "start": 3840.92, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, because for the, for the hardcore user, it's like supernatural to, to start doing this kind of weird stuff, but for the day-to-day user, like, they don't really care. They just care to receive and send money. They don't care if it's more or less private. They, they would be thankful if it, if it's more private. And they can do it, but they don't want to learn it. that's why you get a lot of people moving to privacy chains because they think there's no privacy in Bitcoin, while there is. The thing is that you have to prepare your privacy yourself. And now we are getting to a point where you don't have to do-- you don't have to take your, your steps to do privacy. Privacy is- Start slowly becoming the def- the default. Yeah, so in a way, the privacy" }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "01:04:50", "start": 3890.08, "text": "aspect is gonna get better over time. And there's this aspect of as more people do it, it helps too, right? And so even, the Payjoin case, I hear from talking to Dan Gold, from, you know, the Payjoin, one of the guys really working on Payjoin for Bitcoin, he, he mentioned as well that there's like an efficiency gain as well. It's not just a privacy thing too. So that's also an interesting, Point for people to understand that it's not just, it's not just that. So, hopefully we see more people doing that, but, yeah, I'm not sure how many like wallets right now support it like just out of the box. I think maybe TapWallet. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:05:30", "start": 3930.34, "text": "And all Bitcoin. Right. Those, those are the only two that do it, other wallets are working on it, but it's not like the hyperledger. And to be clear for the listeners," }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "01:05:38", "start": 3938.97, "text": "this is the new form of Payjoin. There is like older forms of Payjoin, like I remember back in the day my BTC Pay server had Payjoin set up on that, right? But what we're talking about is the new form." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:05:50", "start": 3950.36, "text": "Yeah, and the new form is feels like magic, because it's asynchronous, so like you don't have to be online and creating a, creating an address at the moment. You simply, you simply get it and there, there's a lot of things happening in the background, and then when you send the money, if your wallet is Payjoin, Payjoin compatible, you're simply going to do the Payjoin, and you both gain a little bit of privacy. So, and surely, surely, surely it's going to get better because, a lot of people are working in finding ways to- to reduce coordinate-coordination in everything, so that's also going to reduce coordination payments as well." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "01:06:38", "start": 3998.59, "text": "Yeah, so There is some, you know, good news out there. how, how closely do you follow any of the Miniscript stuff?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:48", "start": 4008.02, "text": "not really, not really. I talk to a lot of people who do Miniscript And I know it's awesome, but I'm not super into it." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "01:06:59", "start": 4019.21, "text": "Gotcha, yeah. Because I can, I can imagine that's also an interesting future direction for security and to what you were mentioning before around inheritance, that could also be a way to set up, more, you know, because like in Bitcoin, we like to talk about low time preference. Well, inheritance is one of those things, and so it is a real use case. Maybe the lowest. Maybe the Yeah, that's exactly what we want to put our coins on to our children and so on. so I think that's an area where, yeah, it'd be nice to see more work and more standardization and, you know, these things will come, so I'm, I'm confident about that. But yeah, it's just, it's a matter of kind of the industry sort of hammering out, okay, this is kind of like a good default thing to do for inheritance, and you can like structure it where maybe it's your key plus, you know, your son's Something a-a-after a certain time window, then this, this pathway is active, but until then, no, it's not. And so then, like, if I die, my son has to wait, whatever. Twelve months or whatever, and then he can access the coins or so-something like that. I'm just kind of throwing out some ideas, right? But that's kind of hopefully where it might go." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:11", "start": 4091.6, "text": "Yeah, there's actually awesome stuff now with that. there's something called, depreciating or deprecating multisig. I think that AnchorWach, AnchorWach does. The key, the key multisig. Yeah. Yeah. Which I think is awesome. So you have a contract with the lawyer, they have a third key that can recover, but after a Time if the contract ends and nobody renews anything, their key is out of the, of the multisig and it's only you and your son and only your son can recover it. You know, so like now the lawyer doesn't have the, the way to recover it, only your son. So, you know, it's, it's cool to see that, that we can do that kind of stuff and get prepared. In the future and surely that also opens up for like layer two's and stuff." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "01:09:02", "start": 4142.45, "text": "Yeah, so we'll just have to see. So, any, any other closing thoughts? Anything we didn't touch on?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:09:08", "start": 4148.62, "text": "I'm not really sure. Maybe we didn't touch, Bitcoin 100 ten, but as I told you, that, that topic is dead for me already. I think it's dead on arrival. Just wanted to leave there. yeah, I'm really happy with the conversation, man." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "01:09:25", "start": 4165.86, "text": "Excellent. Well, yeah, listeners, we'll put the links in the show notes to, the blog posts you wrote, Pako, and, and your x account, which is, just PakoVM, right? Yeah, exactly. PakoVM. Great. Okay, well, thanks for joining me." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:09:39", "start": 4179.35, "text": "Thanks for your time." }, { "speaker": "pakovm", "time": "01:09:41", "start": 4181.41, "text": "Have a nice one." } ] }