{ "episodeId": "SLP767", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "piers_macrae": { "name": "Piers Macrae", "role": "guest", "tag": "PIERS" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:01", "start": 0.761, "text": "Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Joining me on the show today is Piers Macrae from MineRacks. Piers, recently made an interesting project, and I wanted people to learn a bit about it. It's called walletplayground.com. so we're gonna chat about that this episode so people can learn a bit about self-custody. but yeah, first off, welcome to the show, Piers. Thanks so much, Stefan. long time listener, first time, guest. Well, thank you. Yeah, so, look, I know you're doing a lot of stuff around self-custody, self-custody education, and what I call self-custody consulting, right? There's kind of different models out there, right? There's kind of the model of like, obviously DIY, everything, do everything yourself, that's like the maximal kind of hardcore mode, and then there's, let's say, like the Casa Unchained sort of nunchuck model" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:49", "start": 49.3, "text": "Teach you, you know, they teach you how to do it, they kind of coach you how to do it, so there's different models to that. So talk to us a little bit about that and what you're doing at MineRacks." }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "00:58", "start": 58.446, "text": "Yeah, I think there's a, a, a great distinction you just drawn there between, I guess, custodians, so like collaborative custody is kind of like, help me do it, for, well, do it for, partially it means do it for me partially," }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "01:19", "start": 79.42, "text": "Self-custody consultancy is kind of like, \"Teach me how I can do it by myself, and, hold my hand along the way.\" and so, I guess, Wallet Playground sort of an artifact that's come out of the many years I've spent doing that work, it sort of scratched my own itch, of there was, yeah, it was quite difficult to bring along, my collection of hardware wallets and all of the different software that, that you can use to a conference or a workshop with lots of people attending. what would be an easy way to dematerialize all of that, to not have to take that much equipment with me as I travel around, and, and, and, do these workshops? and so I stumbled across, a way of being able to simulate, basically having all the identical software. So the great thing with all of these wallets, and all- All of the, the signing devices, and the coordinating software is-- most of it is all open source or so-- at the very least, source available, which means that there's no technical barrier to someone taking all of that source code, running a firmware emulator on servers that then enables you to see, that code interacting just as it would as if you had the real device in your hands right in front of you right now. And that's turned out to be quite a powerful, training device be-in two, in two scenarios. One, you might have a customer who's, who's interested in getting eyes on all the different combinations of Software that they could use on their desktop and hardware they could use to secure their keys, but rather than having to purchase all of those pieces of equipment or borrow them from someone else to get eyes on and see which one is gonna work for you, you have instead the ability now to, just go to your web browser, type in a URL and, at no cost, instantaneously get eyes on and hands on, those very same tools. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:36", "start": 215.842, "text": "it's really cool. I was just playing around with it. Now, I will say, there are point, there are times where it feels kind of a little bit clunky or it's hard to get certain hardware wallets to connect to certain coordinator apps or software, but nevertheless, a very useful and educational tool, right? Because there are a lot of people who- You know, for people like you and I who've been kind of in the industry and we've pretty much played around with every hardware wallet and used almost every coordinating software, it's kind of a different thing for us, but for somebody who's totally new, who's never played around with these things, it's a totally like, \"Oh, I've got...\" And the thing with some of these devices is they work in so dif- so many different ways, right? Like, as an example, the QR air gap flow is different to the microSD card flow, which is, is again different to certain Bottom of the top and like tapping it, and that's like that is a different flow to like, oh, I've got my Trezor and I approve, you know, on the device. Like, it's just, we just have so many different devices in Bitcoin that are well known. talk to us a little bit about the diversity of the devices and, you know, how you, go about teaching people when you're trying to teach people different self-custody hardware wallets." }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "04:47", "start": 287.456, "text": "Well, the principle that I went with for Wallet Playground, obviously I've got some very strong views," }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "04:56", "start": 295.622, "text": "which are my favorite devices, I think everybody does, but I wanted Wallet Playground to be completely neutral, to not- Take any sides or, or, yep, try and promote one wallet over another. I just wanted it to be a neutral level playing field where anyone could try out any combination of signers a-and devices, including ones that they, they've just never had contact time with. so it's very hard to make a judgment on something without ever having seen it, played with it, or used it. and so that was the objective with Wallet Playground was to give, to surface all of that hardware into people's hands. and allow them to have a friction-free way of, of experiencing them for the first time. and along the, the journey, I've discovered a whole bunch of wallets I didn't know existed, and, yeah, that's exposed me to new combinations and ideas that, you know, even myself working in the industry for several years hadn't been exposed to. one of the interesting parts about this whole process was, going back and, and testing your knowledge on each- Each of the different platforms that are out there and how they're built and how they say they're built versus what you actually experience when you try and put them together yourself, yeah, for example, how does Bitkey work? yeah, that all the source is available except for, the actual key material that's stored on the Bitkey servers, through an Amazon, secret, system, so you can just about compile the whole thing and get it all working, on Emulators, of all the different bits and pieces, but, yeah, we had, we had to do some tricks to actually get it to appear to do something, but in each and every case, what we're running is the actual real source code, of, of software. and we found, we've, so far we've put together something like, seventy-seven different simulators in Wallet Playground, so that gives you an idea of, how many different, signing devices And coordinator software stacks there are, and there's coordinators that cover mobile phones as the platform, iOS devices or Android devices, and then obviously there's a whole category of desktop class, software. Some desktop class software only works on Macintosh, for example, and some will only work on, yeah, you can make them work on, on, Linux-based machines as well, so, yeah. It was, it, it was quite a journey of discovery to do this, many, many months. w-with respect to sort of the, the jankiness of being able to connect every single, wallet, signing device with every single coordinator, you can imagine the number of permutations and combinations that have to be tested for this to really work. So what we focused on instead was focusing in on the transport mechanism. So we literally separate out, okay, which coordinators support which transport mechanisms, be they SD cards SD QR code, SD QR, so we catalog each of those, and then we catalog which devices, support which types of transport environment as well, be it QR, SD, USB, et cetera, and bl-Bluetooth being the hardest of all of them to emulate properly. NFC is actually quite trivial, by comparison. and yeah, then trying to sort of create a generic bus over which that transport mechanism works. And the other really challenging part of this is making sure that One user doesn't clobber the work of another user, and that we can keep those, those, communication channels segregated from each of the multiple users that are on the site at the same time. that, that, that turned out to be quite challenging. I see. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:52", "start": 531.557, "text": "it's not that each user is doing their own instance of their own Sparrow, their own thing, it can actually be other users can screw it up. It is. Yeah, it's" }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "08:58", "start": 537.641, "text": "a, it's a hybrid of the two. So the, the reason why Wallet Playground got released when it To, the, the demand, that skyrocketed in the middle of the, the, the cold card, revelations, and, it just felt like a lot of people who knew what I was working on, urged me to release it, even though, you know, i-i-in terms of the, the standard and the quality that I would like to have released, it wasn't really, it w- hadn't quite really hit that, that level. That level, yeah. But as I said, I truly, I believe it's It" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:38", "start": 577.528, "text": "is worthwhile as a learning tool for people, right? Because if you are just coming to it straight without having, you know, and even, 'cause obviously listeners of this podcast generally aren't beginners, like my listeners tend to be intermediate or advanced people, but they are themselves educators trying to educate other people, so then they might find it handy as a tool for themselves to kind of- Get familiarized with the different software and then use that when they're doing a workshop, when they're training somebody, when they're teaching. So it's just, it's very useful for them, regardless. But I'm sure, you know, a, a project like this could, you know, get more support, even as a community project even, because some of these things, let, let me put it this way. Every, pretty much every hardware wallet has their own kind of manufacturer app, right? Trezor has their Trezor Suite, Ledger has Ledger Live, et cetera, et cetera. Bitbox has their thing, Blockstream has their app, and so on. But the apps that can kind of work across, like Sparrow or Nunchuk or Electrum or maybe Liana, you know, they, they need their own ways of supporting all of the different devices. Now, there's HWI. Now, even actually support for that is kind of shifting a little bit. But as Playground could be seen as a valuable community educational tool because it's not, you are, let's say, you are vendor agnostic, your wallet agnostic, and so I think that's an interesting idea that, it's worthwhile supporting." }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "11:04", "start": 663.608, "text": "Yeah, I mean, yeah, that, that's the feedback that I've had so far is that, yeah, this was worthwhile even if it wasn't completely fully baked at the time that, that it got released. I, I've been working furiously at it to, to add, add more robustness and more features that are clearly missing, and, yeah, but I'm-- for me, it was super important that I captured, 100% of the ecosystem. Yeah, to the, if, if any listeners are, looking through Wallet Playground and discover, you know, either a wallet coordinator or a signing device that we don't yet have coverage for, please, please, please, let us know, so that we can, yeah, add that to the catalog." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:49", "start": 709.328, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "11:50", "start": 709.849, "text": "So let's walk" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:50", "start": 710.369, "text": "through, just like, give people a basic idea of how to walk through, like, you're doing it as a SigNet demonstrator, and the idea is, okay, just pick something that's popular, let's say Sparrow, And you just walk through a multi-sig setup, like what does it look like for the user on walletplayground dot com?" }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "12:07", "start": 726.958, "text": "So one of the, the test cases I've, I, I just did the other day was, you, you literally land on walletplayground dot com, you get given a, a two-sentence introduction to what it is, and you click, click that away, Shortly you might get a, a, an intro video as well, just to explain how to use it. but once you've clicked that away, you should be in what looks like a, quite a familiar environment if you're used to doing this sort of work. On the left-hand side, we do default now to Sparrow as the wallet coordinator 'cause, as I think most of the listeners of this show would probably be Sparrow users, so they're, they're in familiar territory there, they know how to drive Sparrow. but equally you've got Caravan" }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "12:51", "start": 771.064, "text": "and, and a whole host of others. once you're in on, on that left-hand side, you can create, you can click the create new wallet, link in Sparrow and start the process of designing either a single or a multi-seg. On the right-hand side, we show you a palette of all the different supported signing devices that you could use as chips for, for example, the Coldcard, the, the Jade, the Seed Signer, Seed- Signer Plus, which is the widescreen format Seed Signer. pick any combination of those that you wish to work with, up to three at this point is the, the, the current limit, though we can increase that to, to five, in, in shortly. but, yeah, for screen real estate, you're probably looking at three is probably the maximum on a large screen. It's easy to drive. And from there, I picked, for example, Seed Signer Premium. And Because I don't necessarily wanna go through the process of entering dice rolls or, or typing in seed words, through my, my, the, the, the mouse movements, there's an option to use, the camera to generate a new seed. So I use my own native camera that's inside the browser, so I can take a picture of just about anything to feed the entropy into the generation of that first seed on the Seed Signer. and then I go through the whole process of creating that- Seed backing it up if I, if I choose to. but then I go to the backup as QR seed QR option, and I choose the twenty-one by twenty-one seed QR, to display on the screen of the Seed Signer Premium. Meanwhile, I then go and select the Jade, for example. I go to-- when I turn on the Jade, it gives me the ephemeral Lotus seed via QR option. So then what I can do in the, the hamburger menu next to- Jade, I can actually tell the Jade Simulator's camera where to point, so I can point Jade at the Seed Signer Plus, which is currently displaying a QR of that randomly created seed, right? and then, I can basically scan that seed, in, using the Jade, and now I've loaded a fresh, brand new random seed into the Jade. So I've initialized the Jade ephemerally, and next I can choose Use the options in the, under the option menu in Jade to now expose that seed, and using the arrow keys, I can basically turn it into a multi-seg, q- animated QR code displayed on the Jade's device. At which point, I can then go to the, the wallet I just created on Sparrow on the left hand side, point Sparrow's camera at the Jade using the hamburger menu, and it just reads the Jade's, airgap QR code into, Sparrow, and I just repeat that process for each of the different seeds that I want to work with, and for example, if I wanted to work with, a coldcard, I could, for example, choose which firmware version I'd like to operate the cold card with. So we, we do actually support multiple firmware versions per signing device, and that includes the, and this where, where we think this will be very useful for researchers is, you, you are actually able to run the faulty, cold card, firmware, and actually move a q-- move, a seed over From the cold card into your Sparrow, multisig, via SD card. so there's literally a button in the cold card hamburger menu to export your seed as a, as a, as an SD card, and, similarly on the Sparrow side, you can import, that, that file and access the, the cold card's, SD card that we, we completely emulate as if it was the real thing. Yeah, so the flow is identical to it. whether you had the devices physically there, the parts that-- the physicality that we can't as easily replicate is literally inserting and removing the SD cards themselves, we do that via menu clicks, and the same with where do you point the camera and where do you point the display, or we handle that via, hamburger menu clicks at this point." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:24", "start": 1043.524, "text": "Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. So yeah, as you said, it's very useful for educators, developers who are just kind of playing and fiddling around, and, yeah, so I think that's really cool. let's talk a little bit about your experience, just 'cause obviously you've been doing self-custody consulting for a while. What would you say are some of the kind of common misconceptions people come to you with, or what were the kind of big sticking points that people, you know, when they were learning self-custody," }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "17:53", "start": 1072.908, "text": "Yeah, what I often see is that people associate a key with the device that generates it, signs with it, and stores it for them. so I think what a lot of people haven't quite grokked when I first meet them is that their-- what they call their hardware wallet isn't in fact a wallet, at all. It's really a, a signing device. In fact, I, I would say that in trying to make things easy for people, and again, when, when I'm working with people who tend to be working On long, long-held, long-held savings, lifetime savings, that aren't intended to be touched or moved, that, where there's, you know, it's extremely important these, that these funds aren't lost. So putting more effort into things and doing things the hard way, is actually what, what they're looking for, versus, you know, something easy and convenient. so the typical hardware wallet attempts to do three- Three things all at once. so the, the example I often quote is in the 1990s, we used to have these multifunction centers, that were both, they did three things, they were a photocopier, a fax machine, and a printer, and they did all three things badly. and that's a little bit the story with a hardware wallet these days, is that they're probably fine for, you know, the mid-tier of funds, funds that you're gonna access relatively regularly, more than once a year, for example. And, those funds are, yeah, you, th-those hardware wallets are doing three things. They're essentially acting as your random number generator, and we've seen how that can go badly wrong, when you put too much trust into the device itself, to do that job. secondly, they're a transaction signing device, which, yeah, really they only need to come into contact with a key at the time that they are doing the actual signing, which is essentially merging together your private key Key with the transaction information and hashing it to give yourself a signature that you can then give to your wallet coordinator and keep the key offline. And then the third role is acting as a digital locker or storage device, which basically dumps down what you need to remember in order to be able to spend your funds. So instead of it being that as long as you can remember twelve or twenty-four words, you can spend your funds, now we compress those twelve or twenty-four words down to a four or Eight-digit PIN number, so that's, but knowing that the, the words themselves are somehow somewhere embedded inside that device, so what a lot of people don't realize is, that, that hardware wallet is trying to do all three things in one device And it isn't necessarily the best of breed at all three of those things. yeah, there are obviously solutions out there that do each of those roles a little bit better, than what most hardware wallets do, all in one. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:55", "start": 1254.736, "text": "and I mean, look, the thing with this stuff is it's-- there's a million different kind of trade-offs to discuss, and there's so many different ways to do things, and kind of what's academical, what's academically or theoretically, a good thing versus what is pragmatically working in the real world, right? Because, and I think that's where kind of a lot of the kind of online community debates can be at these kind of very academic theoretical levels and not, oh, actually, what's practical for many people, right? And look, certainly Some of the conversations you and I, we might have, we might be, sometimes we're in our own little insular little online echo chambers, whereas when you interface, now for you especially, when you interface with a new person and you hear the questions they ask, that gives you the real world feedback of like, \"Hey, this is what normal people think. This is how normal people are understanding this, not, you know, ten year veterans in the space or whatever, people who have like been playing around with all the hardware wallets and know how to do everything.\" It's a different kettle of fish, there's a, there's a world of difference there between like what we talk about as like what's good, what's like a really good setup versus like what are most people just doing, right? Because there have been, I think if I, if I were to just kind of ballpark the number, it's probably ten million hardware wallets that have been sold and maybe Five million or so, four or five million-ish unique hardware wallet users, and out of that five million, it might only be one percent ballpark, let's say fifty thousand people who are using multisig for lifetime, for their long-term savings, right? I know multisig is used in Lightning and things like that, but what we mean here is multisig for your cold storage, for your life savings. It's probably only fifty thousand, ish. You know, that's kind of the ballpark where-- that's, that's the ballpark we're in. So even though we talk about like multisig, multivendor, and all this stuff, most people are just using single sig, maybe with a passphrase. Probably not even that." }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "22:42", "start": 1362.06, "text": "well, we are definitely talking to an audience, that's a niche within a niche within a niche, when we're talking multi-seg, and, yeah, I just wanted to, at least for that tiny niche, solve a particular problem which is, you know, where is the catalog? That was-- This is the catalog that was missing of what are all the options, and an interactive catalog at that, where people can actually not just see a word or, you know, someone's- Review of a product, but actually get hands on themselves. and to that end, yeah, one other feature I added to Wallet Playground that I think, may be of, of benefit to people, who arrive at, at the site but don't really know how to drive any of this software is the guided coaching runs. So this is where if you, you click on the coaching tab at the end of the, the train tracks on the Wallet Playground, I offer up, three different reference im- Implementations of, what, what I would deem to be best practice standard for people that, that are entering the space on best practice standard of how to set up and configure a single sig, a best practice standard on how to set up and configure a single sig and a passphrase. I- importantly, we do all of the verification steps, and that isn't a canned video, that's actually spinning up a unique instance of Sparrow, plus Seed Signer, Plus running the actual entropy, so every single time you generate, one of those guided runs, you're seeing brand new seed words that have never been used before, and you're going through the entire process, and you can actually track and trace the entire SigNet transaction going through the networks, it's literally going through the SigNet network, and, yeah, so those are, that's real life, steps. So if, if you're, if you've done a course And you want a refresher, all that information is sitting there, 'cause a lot of people, they'll deal with their single sig, multisig, single sig and passphrase, they'll, they'll remember it at the time they got training, but then six months later, if this isn't their gig, if it's not their thing that keeps them passionate and awake at night, and they're busy doing their day job, perfecting their own craft They've forgotten everything they learned. They don't remember the steps, so having that set of reference steps just available on tap serves as a really good memory jogger, and then to be able to immediately put that knowledge back into practice on the devices without having to, yeah, pick up where they left their, their physical hardware or open up the software and expose their keys or their, or their xPub's, to, to, to get those reps in, on training. Yeah, it's a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:33", "start": 1533.251, "text": "great point around kind of Maybe some people don't like the analogy, but I've heard people use in the, in the, in the American case, it's like firearms drilling, right? Like you need to do safety drilling and like regular practice with firearms, and it's a sim- maybe it's a similar thing for Bitcoin self custody. Now, I know some people don't like that because that feels like, \"Oh, that's too much work.\" But ultimately, if you wanna be self-sovereign, this is kind of what it takes, right? That if you really want this, now of course, there's guided And then there's, if you want to do DIY, this is what it takes. So I think, that's, that's probably where it's gonna shake out. So I guess zooming out, I guess last few minutes, where do you think it's all going? Do you think more people are going to actually learn and do multisig as a result of all this stuff, or do you think they're gonna go custodial ETF or what do you think?" }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "26:23", "start": 1583.08, "text": "I, I think it's made a lot of people, aware of, basics like entropy. I think entropy has been, an underused, term, for, for a long time. it's really highlighted the don't trust, verify, part of the curve. The, the, the main point I make at the start with, with my customers is to take them on a journey to show them what it looks like. to begin with, they've probably started at the trust and believe End of the spectrum, and I try and give them a glance at what it looks like to take on the other end of the spectrum where you go from trust to verified or from believe to know, because there's a gigantic gulf between the meaning of those, those words. so, yeah, I'm definitely seeing a, an increase in people wanting to go on that journey, wanting to leave trust and, and, a-and belief behind, and go towards know and verify. will, will it ever be more than a, a microscopic percentage of people who have Bitcoin? Price exposure? Probably not. but it doesn't matter. what matters is that there are a core group of us, that do do this work, and can prove that it works." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:49", "start": 1669.112, "text": "Yeah, I think that's a great spot to finish. So look, self custody, it does take work, it's responsibility, there are no bailouts in Bitcoin, so these are important lessons for all of us. And I guess we've also just got to be realistic when we're out talking about Bitcoin and self custody, be realistic about who can handle it, like who actually can do this and who will go and do it versus You know, who needs more guidance, more assistance, or for some people, custodial, right? Like just pay a professional to deal with the risk for you, but also be wary because obviously this industry has, you know, Mt. Gox and Bitcoinica and FTX and BlockFi and, you know, Podrigo CX and, you know, many, many more examples. And so I think a lot of people were, people, perhaps bundling that risk or thinking, \"Oh, just trust the exchange.\" And really what you're doing is you're paying with risk, right? So you, you either pay a professional custodian to deal with that risk for you, you go to a, you know, a collab custodian, you pay a guided, you know, you have a consultancy who teaches you how to do it correctly Or you put in hundreds of hours and you learn to DIY, and that's kinda, that's kinda where it's gonna land, isn't" }, { "speaker": "piers_macrae", "time": "28:56", "start": 1736.185, "text": "it? Those are the choices, those are the trade-offs, and, and, all of them involve some level of risk. in the case of self custody, I guess it appeals to those for whom, if, if they're going to lose their coins, they'd actually rather it were down to themselves, and self responsibility, versus them having put their trust in the wrong person." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:19", "start": 1758.981, "text": "Yeah. Alright, well listeners go and check it out, it's mine racks dot com and of course the walletplayground dot com are the websites. Piers, thanks for joining me today. Thanks so much, Stefan." } ] }