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Chat_167 - Why Your Keys Matter with Seed
02:14:24
"If you think of River or Gemini or Coinbase or whatever, think of all of those as silos and how people custody Bitcoin. If some sort of compromise were to come into the Bitcoin ecosystem at the private key generation level, that could create an incident that could set Bitcoin back by 10 or more years because it would be almost indistinguishable from a protocol compromise and that we would be talking about Bitcoin being hacked again and not individual custodians being hacked. So I think we need to decentralise how people do Bitcoin custody as much as possible and what better way by leveraging private freedom preserving open source software." ~ Seed In today’s chat, I sat down with Seed, the creator of the SeedSigner project, and his backstory is completely wild. He told the story of how he got pulled into Bitcoin through a forensic case tied to a local Silk Road user, why he panic sold in 2017, and how that path eventually led him back to the basics and into building one of the mos...
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- [00:00]
A
If you think of river or Gemini or Coinbase or whatever, think of all of those as silos and how people custody Bitcoin. If some sort of compromise were to come into the bitcoin ecosystem at the private key generation level, that could create an incident that could set Bitcoin back by 10 or more years because it would be almost indistinguishable from, from a protocol compromise and that we would be talking about bitcoin being hacked again and not individual custodians being hacked. So I think we need to decentralize how people do bitcoin custody as much as possible and what better way, by leveraging private freedom, preserving open source software. Foreign.
- [01:05]
B
What is up guys? Welcome back to the show. This is Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know. We've got a fantastic chat today with Seed, the guy from seed signer who I actually got my very first seed signer from. I sat in front of the booth at Tab Comp from, I don't know, six years, I don't know, it feels like a million years ago. And we put it together right. He had like buckets of like the different pieces of the seed signer and I would just grab one of each of the pieces and we put it together in the 3D printed case and it's dope. I still have that original seed signer to this day and he has such an interesting opinion and perspective, I guess on the idea of DIY hardware, of how to think about hardware wallets, how to think about multisig and. And we actually both of us kind of get into the FUD against multi signature setups and how you can actually do it much more user friendly, much more easy today. And so many people are intimidated by something that is actually a really great benefit. And him and the whole team are so great in the idea of what the ethos of bitcoin is and the reasons why. And he actually mentioned a project at the very end that I is very close to my heart and I actually hope it's successful. I have the link in the show notes so that you can check it out. Obviously you can follow him and Seed signer and everything and stay up to date on that project. But for his new account and what he's trying to do with it, I'll. I'll let him explain it towards the end of the show. But I thought it was actually a really great thing and also critically important in a different way, especially in the context of Reminding people of the reasons that we do this, of the, the real lessons of bitcoin's history and the real story of kind of how we got here and who led us to this place. So really, really cool stuff. Awesome conversation. Shout out to Seed for coming on the show. I'm glad we can make it work. And with that, I just want to also thank our sponsor, bitbox. You guys know bitbox, I love the hardware wallet and it's actually great to have them back working with them on the show because I haven't shield bitbox in a while and I've got some really fun ideas for little commercials or maybe, maybe videos to go with it. So stay tuned for those. They're going to be fun. You can get a discount with my code. You can find that right down in the show notes. I believe it's guy. I don't, I don't remember exactly which one it was, but it's right down in the show notes so you can find it and I got a link to take you straight there. Check it out. If you're looking for a good hardware wallet that's actually great with multisig and single sig, check it out. So with that, let's go ahead and get into this chat. This is chat167 why your keys matter with Seed. Really I wanted to start out, get your background because I mean, I didn't know you would be somebody who would frame up your whole basement, you know and you know, what got you here, what made you want to build the seat signer, all of those things. Because I don't really know much about the backstory and as someone, and also I'll, I want to get into things about just like the general making of hardware because one of the things we want to do with Pear Drive is a hardware project as a specifically that will be one of the ways we actually hope to make money as opposed to just releasing a bunch of open source software that we spent years on. So.
- [04:55]
A
And you, you, you just said pair drive.
- [04:58]
B
Yeah. Pair drive, yeah.
- [04:59]
A
What? Tell me more about that. I, I, I'm. There's so many things I don't know about in the bitcoin space.
- [05:04]
B
Sure, yeah. This is one of my, I took on a project and I got a million, you know, just a million miles down the rabbit hole before I was like, oh God, this is a billion times bigger than I thought it was going to be. But paradrive is. You ever use sync thing?
- [05:23]
A
No.
- [05:23]
B
Or local send or, I mean you, you know BitTorrent, right?
- [05:29]
A
Yeah.
- [05:29]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have. One of the banes of my Internet existence has been the utter hell of trying to get a fi. A group of files from my MacBook to my Linux machine, which are maybe 2ft 8 inches apart. And then also if I want to share something from my iPhone to my Android, good luck. You know, it just, it's just an absolute mess. And of the few things that actually can in some sense do the job, they are the worst. I, a developer built it for himself and didn't even care about the ux, just type in these commands or you know, do this networking, import forwarding stuff,
- [06:23]
A
SCP and all that kind of stuff.
- [06:24]
B
Yeah, it's always a mess. The God, the number of times that I've been like this is, this is a super pain. And somebody on Noster be like, why don't you just make it, why don't you set up an FTP server? It's like, dude, no, I don't want to do that. The hell's wrong with you? And I have always felt that sharing files around should be, should be fun. Should not only be fun, but it should be stupid, stupid easy. Like nobody, if you send somebody a link to a web page, they don't, they don't send you back a text asking what to do or how to get to it. You know, files should have that same thing. This is like the whole purpose of the Internet is to just get file from A to B and it just comes in a different packages, a bunch of different packages. Well, so we took on that task and the, the application that we are trying to build to kind of like showcase all the things you could do with it is paradrive. But the kind of, the heart of it is called Pair Core and it's kind of an, an engine to obscure away all of the complication. Right? It's like, and it's kind of built on this primitive called a space. The technical, technical stuff doesn't really matter, but it accepts the fact that it's, you know, peer to peer encrypted by default. You've, you've got multi, multi peer, like asynchronous discovery and download. Basically everything that BitTorrent has, except that you're creating these little tiny private networks that we refer to as a space. And you can kind of think of those as more of like a, like a group text chat or something. And they can actually be massive or they can be tiny and private. And so it's, it's kind of like one base idea and we're Also kind of levering, leveraging noster at the same time to kind of get, give it that social feel. But you know, when I'm sh, when, when somebody shares media they want, they should see their media. When somebody is looking at moving stuff between devices or friends, they shouldn't see networking stuff or IP addresses, they should see their friends, they should. And, and so like that, that's the idea. We built an engine to obscure it all away and then we're building an app on top of it. And the is it in the XKCD of like oh, there's 14 standards we need a 15th spirit we've created. Basically the thing amounts to an agnostic protocol for how you do file delivery but in building connections and groups and so if anybody else builds on top of will be compatible. So like you could build an audible app or a podcasting app that connects to my private pear drive folder in my home. So you could very, very easily build a kind of decentralized plex on top of this with like a group of your friends. And the idea is that like oh well, you just use RPC calls and you build a web front end and that's it. So it's been a very long running project but one of the, in the context of hardware we want to build and sell the, the, the easiest no setup NAS that has ever existed is that you get a box, you stick it in your home, you plug it into power and then it comes up, there's a little screen on the front and it says connect and you hit connect and there's a QR code and you scan it and that's your nas.
- [10:12]
A
Yeah.
- [10:13]
B
And so we're getting there. I'm shocked at how many of the primitives we've solved and every time something got complicated and turned into key derivatives and multi sig we were like no, just make it stupid, you know, just, just make it, no, just sign stuff, just, just make it a list of signed stuff, you know, like so I, I, I think so far like, like where we are right now, I think we really have all the pieces in place and it's really just kind of like making sure it really does scale to the size that we want it and that things don't break when you have like you know, a hundred thousand people in a group or something like that. But I don't know, I'm excited about it and I think, I think it's got a massive amount of potential and genuinely, I mean not to, not, not trying to blow smoke up my own ass but like nothing like it exists. Because all the people who can build this stop before it's done. They build something like sync thing and they're like, oh, this is a product. And like, no, you did, you just, you just proved that you can do a thing. Like, that's like building a hammer and think, you think, you know, here's a house for people. It's like, well, no, that now people have to use the hammer and that's annoying. Like build them a house, you know. So anyway, that's paradrive.
- [11:30]
A
I'm selfishly curious if you have thought about or have any plans to integrate payments for files into.
- [11:38]
B
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, yeah, a million percent. We'll probably use Breeze SDK. But zaps are. This is why the only reason we're using Noster is because zaps are taken care of. Like we didn't want to build anything that we didn't have to build. Um, and so the reason Nostra keys are derived from the same seed for the network keys or the peer to peer connection keys is purely because we get zaps, we get likes, we get public notes as well as private notes. And you know, like, we're basically leveraging Nostr for solving a bunch of problems that we don't have to build. So a thousand percent there will be pay for files, there will be tipping files, there will be tipping friends and liking friends files and all that good shit.
- [12:23]
A
Yeah, you, you might actually bring me back to Nostra if this all materializes.
- [12:30]
B
Well, see, the thing is, is that it won't even necessarily. You can use it without Noster. Noster is just kind of like the, the social communication medium, but you could push, publish things public publicly, but otherwise you could use it entirely in paradrive. Like, that's why I don't think about is like, like people might hear about Noster in it while they're using paradrive, but they don't have to or they don't even have to care about it. It's more just like we're using Nostr as a public directory. It's like a giant phone book.
- [12:59]
A
That's something I still have trouble wrapping my mind around. Is like everybody says that social media is just the first app for. I call it Noster, but. And that there's, you know, all of this other stuff that can be built on top of it to centralize GitHub and yada yada. I probably just don't understand enough about the fundamental architecture of it and why that all makes sense. And yeah, I don't Know, I don't know.
- [13:24]
B
I think about it more than anything. As great example is Lynn Alden. I was working with her on a very simple project of. She had this little audio thing that she was doing, and she wanted me to edit and master the audio for. And I was like, yeah, throw it over. I'll knock it out in a couple hours. And one of the things was she had a couple of flubs that she made in the. In the audio, and I couldn't edit one of them or a couple of them together. And so I actually had like a simple thing do a. Do a, you know, sampling to train an AI on her voice or whatever. And then I read it and converted it to her voice and then used those three middle words to like, splice in. Beautiful. Splice is great. This perfect use for AI. But anyway, I had fun, did all that, and then got back to her and she was like, all right, how much? Rather I was like, it doesn't. It's whatever, you know, pay me 50,000 sats or something. You know, just. Just not a big deal. Only took a couple hours. And she was like, okay, you mind if I just zap you? And I was like, sure. And so she just went to a post on Noster and zapped me. And then both of us kind of had a little bit of an aha moment sometime later about the fact that I didn't have to send her an invoice. Like, she just had me in this public registry where she knew it was me, and I didn't have a website that she had to go make a BTC pay for. She literally just went to Guy in her social graph and said, pay guy. And, you know, we did business over that. And so, like, the. The big thing that like, kind of hit me then was I started thinking about Noster as a. A, A public. It. It's the yellow pages of public private keys that will allow contact and payment. Like, that's really the big unlock. And that's funny enough, that's kind of what we're using it for it with Pair Drive and. And allow. Obviously that allows social because you're, you know, you open up a network and you have all these different events and that sort of thing. But I just think it's far more generic than that because social just has so many other things, like, intertwined and like, dependent on it. And I think it's a little bit missing the mark because, like, relays also. Relays don't have to be. Or, excuse me, the communication doesn't have to be through relays. It's also just agnostic to how it gets messages from one place to another. It's really. Nostra is really just PGP done right is you know how you have to use the PGP keys where like, oh, this is a trusted and this is a not trusted. Nostra is really just that with Bitcoin payments in my mind. And that's how we should think about using it.
- [16:31]
A
That's interesting.
- [16:35]
B
And it's, it does it so well actually that it fixed that problem without actually thinking that it was fixing that problem. You know, like in hindsight it was like, oh, we gave everybody keys and created an environment and a social graph so easily trying to make a social network that we actually made the PGP key. Publishing not horrible. Not a horrible stupid experience that nobody's going to use.
- [16:58]
A
Yeah, because that's, that's always awkward. Yeah, no, it interests me like in two separate kind of areas. One is I'm a 3D printing geek and love it.
- [17:10]
B
Interesting. My seed signer has a 3D printed case. I don't know how did that work out?
- [17:15]
A
It has come so far in the last 10 years, 3D printing and computer aided design and what people are doing, you know, at home in their living room and their couch and the things that they're able to design has come so far. But a big part of it has been like anything. People who have a ton of creativity and solid design skills that come up with these amazing printable ideas like that. There is time and expertise that goes into that and honestly those people deserve to be compensated for that. But for a long time the only thing they could really do after they designed something really cool is post it on printables or something and not get paid for it and just have to give it away. It's kind of the same dilemma with open source software in a lot of ways. And I think a very simple monetization platform. These people that are amazing designers can post things and in the end what they need to deliver is just a binary file that's not even any significant size. But that's the secret sauce that enables somebody else to, you know, recreate this amazing thing that they designed some sort of dead simple platform for them to be able to point people that are interested in something they've designed to a download place that has super simple checkout scheme and blah blah blah. You just pay for the thing and get the thing all in one, all in one file swoop. Yeah, I think there's a huge need there.
- [18:38]
B
I'm hoping There's, I'm hoping that we have a solution for that.
- [18:42]
A
Yeah.
- [18:44]
B
Just because it's, it kind of requires this element of social, but, but without a platform and obviously it has all the network effects problems. But the reason why I think a PEAR drive could actually be a sustainable solution to something like that, that could build its own network effect is because you're, you're already going to be using it. I think there's, I think there's a good reason to believe that a lot of people will be using it the, the free version or whatever or the base version for themselves, whether or not they have friends on it. Because there in my mind, or at least in every tool that I have ever used, there will not be an easier way to get something from my Android, my iPhone, my MacBook, my Mac mini and my Linux machine that exists. So the atomic network is one. Right. Like I just need me and my devices and I, I, this is why I use it all the time myself. And if you can then also just scan a friend and then follow them and then they have a couple of, they have 20 files that are free and they have 10 for sale. It's in the same interface, same tooling, same stuff, same wallet, same all the things. And you can download it straight to your Pear drive. Even better is you can help seed it to other people through them and you can be a blind seeder too. So, so it's encrypted on your as as you forward it, you know.
- [20:11]
A
Yeah, or anything, like recipes or anything.
- [20:15]
B
Anything.
- [20:16]
A
Anything.
- [20:16]
B
It just makes a market and gets rid of that stupid 80% cut for the platform.
- [20:21]
A
I think paywalls honestly get a bad rep and it has, it's surprising to me that some sort of pay to download model has not taken off in podcasting.
- [20:39]
B
Yeah.
- [20:40]
A
But like I, I think somebody with a big platform just needs to have that kind of Joe Rogan moment where they're saying like effort I'm going to Spotify or effort, I'm going to. The first 10 minutes is free. And if you want to download the whole episode, it's 20 cents or whatever. I don't think it has to be a dollar or anything high because in aggregate, like people that, you know, the, the people that have, that are doing things at scale like can charge a tiny amount per individual and still do just fine for themselves and the market will work out what the fair price for a podcast episode is. But I, and this, this comes from somebody who is just disgusted with the ad revenue model. And I'll apologize in advance because I know you probably have sponsors.
- [21:26]
B
Dude, I know. I hate it as much as you do, trust me.
- [21:30]
A
The C Center project has kind of been a victim of this show.
- [21:34]
B
It's sponsored by bitbox.
- [21:36]
A
Sorry. You know, it's something that has just fought tooth and nail to get traction and adoption in the bitcoin industry when there are two dozen other things that are willing to pay a lot of money to a bunch of different platforms to get the mind share of the bitcoin space. It's admittedly like a personal thing with me, but I think the monetization of podcasts is still an unsolved problem. It's kind of like it's basically the equivalent of reading and going, wanting a recipe for fried chicken or something. And you go onto the Internet and every single recipe that comes in the top hundred search results is some scammy website that is way more concerned with showing you ads than it is actually giving you the recipe. And you have to click through all this stuff and, and even when you go to the print only version now, there, there's still ads in it. And it's just like I would just pay 50 cents for this thing.
- [22:36]
B
And even worse is that it kills natural discovery because like you, you go to all the search platforms and all of the big people and the, the big things are all just trying to get the same examples in front of you from all different things because of the, the search engine or the platform and the advertiser, the one, the one trying to be in front of you are working together at odds to what you're trying to achieve. You know, like you have a principal agent problem where their goal is not your goal and their goal is to get you to see the ad. You, your goal is to try to find a good chicken recipe and Google's goal is to keep you there and searching or finding exactly the, the chicken recipe that they want you to find that's going to pay them the most. So in that, in that same sense, like this is, this is why I think some form of essentially a protocol, like some decentralized alternative actually has to be where the Internet goes or we lose this concept of the free Internet, the open Internet entirely. Everything's going to have to be kyc, everything's going to go plat through platforms. And so you should search for chicken recipes first in the 2000 friends that you have. And you should see what of your 2000 friends. Somebody in your 2000 friends has a chicken recipe. And like they should be kind of like your first, your first pass out into the web.
- [24:12]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [24:13]
B
And, and so anyway. But yeah, that's all of. It's funny you, you bring those things up and those are exact things that we have thought and talked at length about for paradrive. Because I think if you can monetize, if you can essentially kill the barrier to hosting so that you don't have to have DNS, you don't have to have, you know, HTTP, like a TLS certificate and you don't have to host with AWS and you don't have to port forward, you don't have to domain nothing like all of that awful mess that cost ends up costing six hundred or thousand dollars a month and you can just have that pure. Like I'm hosting thousands of hundreds of terabytes on BitTorrent for free because it's just fun. I could do whatever the hell I want. But then you can put what essentially is a web face on. On the front of it and then you can charge for it and you can share hosting and you can buy hosting from your best friend as opposed to Amazon. Like if you crush that barrier to entry to 98%, you know, just getting a hard drive plugged in and a decent Internet connection and then you can monetize it and you have keys and authentication and encryption and all that stuff and you make the environment fun so that people don't know that those problems are being solved. It's just like file sharing is just easy again. I don't know. I think there's just a chance if
- [25:35]
A
I was a vc, you have me sold. I'll just write the check right now. I suspect that's what like Lyn Alden found too. But file sharing is actually kind of an interesting segue into my background.
- [25:52]
B
Well, let's go there. Let's go there. I don't know if we've started the show. I'll figure out where to cut in, cut into this to start publishing the recording. But yeah, let's. What's your background? Because this is one of the things I really wanted to dig into and how does that relate to file sharing?
- [26:09]
A
So I'll apologize to. People have already heard my backstory because I've told it in a lot of places, but I was a cop for 15 years and during the majority of my time as a cop for the first three years, you know, I was.
- [26:22]
B
He's a spook. Sorry.
- [26:24]
A
Exactly. You know, the guy who drives around in a police car and writes tickets and goes to fight in progress and all this kind of stuff. And Then about three years in. I also have a background in computers. The, I don't know, I, I, I was a computer geek from a relatively young age and in college I worked in the computer labs at the university and I got an undergraduate certificate in Management Information Systems. So I have a little bit of a computing background and my superiors at the police department knew about this. And there was a local digital forensic task force or lab or whatever you want to call it, that was looking to add people and they asked me if that was something that would, would interest me. And it, this was kind of like almost pre csi, uh, but it sounded really cool and it meant that I didn't have to work midnights and weekends and a bunch of other good stuff. So I jumped at it. And so for 12 years I worked in a crime lab taking apart computers and cell phones and hard drives and all that kind of stuff to see if they can take that sounds like
- [27:36]
B
nerd heaven to me. Like it's just to, just to be able to like get paid to like geek out and do shit like that. Like did you love that? Was it great?
- [27:45]
A
It so what I loved the most about it was like the, the technical challenges that were sometimes maddening but sometimes also extremely gratifying to figure out like computers.
- [27:57]
B
Maddening? What do you mean? Yeah, yeah, what, what do you say sir?
- [28:02]
A
Somebody brings you like a, a server with an eight disk array in it. And according to good forensic practice, you can't just turn it on and try to log into it obviously. So you have to image all the hard drives and then try to figure out how to reconstruct the RAID that they're configured in and then figure out how to virtually boot that data set so that you can check out the environment, all that kind of stuff.
- [28:25]
B
Yeah. MDMD or mddm, whatever the hell it is, figure it out, find it.
- [28:32]
A
Yeah, yeah. But the time that I entered digital forensics, law enforcement was responding to the initial explosion that was peer to peer file sharing.
- [28:47]
B
Yeah.
- [28:47]
A
And it was not like all the, was it DMCA stuff. What I always cannot think of what the original file sharing platform was that was all about music and that really got everybody hooked. And they eventually you joined on Napster. Napster. They got trolled by Metallica and they were eventually sued and all that kind of stuff. So it was Napster. But then Napster morphed into LimeWire and BearShare and BitTorrent and 50 other creative spins on sharing data. And what this meant for law enforcement was that people who abuse children or have A desire to see children abused or anything like that suddenly had a mostly anonymous or pseudonymous, permissionless way that was global to share child porn all over the world. And there was a ton of federal money that was available that was being distributed to agencies and to local police departments to try to get up to speed on all the aspects of trying to get their arms around that. And I'm not like, surprisingly, as someone who's a cop, I'm, I'm, I lean libertarian, but I think it's a legitimate, A lot of people have been cops for many years, inevitably have things that they were involved with they didn't feel good about. And there's this kind of element of I was just doing my job kind of thing that comes into it. And there is, there is a certain amount of that. But like I kind of got lucky in that the great majority, not lucky in that the great majority of my crimes that I helped investigate involved crimes against children. But like that for me, it was a very clear cut moral thing that
- [30:35]
B
I was about to say. There's no, you don't have any moral qualms. You don't, you sleep at night, you know, Right.
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A
It's, it's not like I was at, you know, I don't give a what
- [30:43]
B
government is or who's getting paid what. Like that's a good thing to do, you know, like. Yeah, right.
- [30:50]
A
It's the ultimate like libertarian dilemma because they want everything to be self organized and not involved with government. Like, but ultimately if you hear what sounds like your neighbor beating his wife, like if, if you're not going to go over and kind of figure it out, you need somebody you have to call to figure it out. So anyhow, that, that was kind of like my law enforcement career and it was. Forensics is kind of its own special discipline where I think I joked before about needing to be like a mile wide, an inch deep on a lot of different topics. And you have to know, you basically have to try to be an expert in the variables that are involved in that particular case that you're investigating. So if it's, if it's a LimeWire file sharing case, you have to be an expert at, you know, how to recover potential search terms from someone who's using LimeWire and file downloading artifacts. And what does it mean that this file actually, actually exists on their system? Did they look at it? Are there operating system artifacts that show that like there was a link to it on their desktop or it was in their recent folder or all this stuff that you kind of use to build intent that it wasn't because there, there's legitimately people who accidentally download things that they shouldn't download and they regret it. And you, if people are going to be prosecuted for this kind of stuff, you want the worst of the worst and the people who are intentionally seeking that out or creating it or trying to distribute it or whatever. So for me like the first two years of being a digital forensics and probably more than two years, but the first few years was like drinking from the firehose because there was all of this stuff that you know, when I had studied management information systems, they glossed over as kind of like a theoretical exercise like binary counting or NTFs. File systems are stuff that you had to like really go deep in for some of the cases because ultimately, you know, you're, when you do an examination on media and you write a report on it, you're setting yourself up possibly to be sitting in front of 12 people who weren't smart enough to get out of jury duty and being cross examined by somebody who's being paid a lot of money to make you look stupid. So you have to like really dot your I's and cross your T's and understand what you need to understand at a low level so you can regurgitate what hexadecimal encoding is on the standard, you know, all this kind of, or how cellular networks function or all this kind of stuff. But it was at the forensic lab that I first encountered Bitcoin. And I don't totally recall if it was late 2012 or early 2013, but there was, there was another examiner, it wasn't my case in the lab where I was working who had a computer that had been brought in for examination where some local kid who's probably a rich kid and he had a nice gaming computer that had two GPUs installed in it. And this was on the tail end of when you could competitively mine Bitcoin with GPUs at home. So he's mining bitcoin that he is then using to purchase weed on the Silk Road and then he breaks the weed into dime bags.
- [34:08]
B
Good times.
- [34:09]
A
And he's making a nice little hustle on the bitcoin that he's mined, turning it into to fiat. And of course at the school a teacher finds out and they call the police. And that's how his computer landed at our lab. And that is what sent me to the Googles to the what is bitcoin search. And that sent me pretty quickly to Bitcointalk and they, A lot of people, I can't forget where I first heard it, but they say bitcoin kind of hits you where you are in your life. And I was a young father who had just, just built a house that was way too expensive and had these mortgage payments. And so I was looking at this bitcoin thing through the lens of being an investor and maybe this thing has potential value and it's undervalued and how can I acquire some of it? Or you know, you go down all the right, like, how can I mine it, how can I trade to try to generate like more value and blah, blah, blah. And so that was, that was my first introduction to bitcoin and I, I went down the rabbit hole like pretty quick.
- [35:27]
B
That's a heck of a time to. That was an era, man. 2012, 2013 bubble, 2014. Like even, even in the bear markets of 2014 and 2015, you know, like those were, they were still like really epic times. You know, I've, I bought couple of like old rigs, not really to, to mine. We did mine like a little bit from, from some people or whatever. And I had a friend who's like, oh no, the bitcoin thing's over. And I was like, no, dude, I really think you've, you're, you're misunderstanding where and what this is. Like we just had an huge big cycle and, and this is just consolidation, you know. And I was, I'm like trying to convince him not to get rid of his stuff as he's like sitting in front of me to sell it to me. But, but no, that was the first
- [36:20]
A
Bear market is always. Your art is always the hardest.
- [36:23]
B
It is.
- [36:23]
A
And I, I always joke that like 2013 was the absolute worst, one of the worst years, if not the worst year to start paying attention to bitcoin because it was this relentless, ridiculous price run up that really, there was, there was some dead time in the summer where it dropped down from the. Was it the April high or whatever. But then you know, it recovered and went up before the year was over to like 11 or $1200. And so the dopam from that first year that I was following bitcoin was like, it's going to go up forever. Like this is. So I remember, I remember we were visiting some in laws in Chicago in November of 2013 and I remember looking at my phone at the bitcoin price and I bought some bitcoin that year and just driving around to go get fast food for the Kids or something and thinking like how much, how much the value of the bitcoin I bought was going up just as I'm driving around. It's just ridiculous. And then it was, you know, Mt. Gox happened and like into 2014 and stuff. And that was like a long bear market for me because it's like you had never experienced the redemption of having kind of like followed it through a downtrend and then it turning around again. So it's just like they, you're just thinking like maybe I am an idiot. Maybe, maybe all this money and time I put into this is just like I'm the sucker at the table. And that's the lesson here.
- [37:51]
B
I don't know. Yep. No, I had those moments too. I, I had the benefit of, of having been through it really is true though. Your first bear market is your worst. And then all the other ones you kind of like see the picture or the pattern, you know, still not easy, but it's no, it's not easy. Never easy. And so I managed to catch the one in 2011, that crash. And like basically I, the moment I got in, it crashed. So I, I opened the door on like I was rich for 30 minutes and then I was just utter bloody horrible poor. And, and so like I, because of that, I think it was actually just like the right time. Even though it was utter misery and I felt as dumb as dumb gets because I didn't really have the time to become super arrogant about how, how much I was winning before I lost it all, so to speak. And but because of that I was a little bit more, a little hardened for the 2013, 2014, even as, oh, even as vicious as that one was, just because of Mount Gox was something else.
- [39:10]
A
Oh yeah, that was like, I mean people like bitcoin died. People don't understand the nuance of a custodian versus the entire network or you know. Yeah, there was, yeah it was and it, that the, the media space is still kind of prone to that. But the long hard bear market of 14, 15 and into 16 is like what led into my, I, I, I did not handle the next run up in 2017 either very well. Partly because the bear market had been so brutal and then partly it was timing of 2017 was like that's when the block size wars were. I noticed you were on the UASF hat that's when the block size wars were going down. And I had some amount of paranoia that yeah, it's one thing if bitcoin cash splits off, but then if the network fragments like 30 times. I had anxiety that the whole thing is going to lose its value proposition because it just kind of keeps splitting apart into smaller and smaller pieces. There, there wasn't this clear. Like if you're that worried about it, just hold your private keys from all the forks and one of them is going to win. Like I thought maybe the whole thing isn't going to win. And then early in 2017, the amount of bitcoin that I had accumulated over the previous years was creeping up to the point where the total value of it was equal to paying off our mortgage. And the idea of having a debt free life, or mostly just about all debt free life, like that was really, really appealing to me. And then you sprinkle in like my work with crimes against children are starting. Well, it had been for a long time grading against me personally and I had been long kind of scheming to see if there were ways that I could find my way out of that career and you know, either do something different or be a stay at home dad or whatever. And the ability to sell the house was financially like an unlock for me of like now I don't need, need this job. I could take some time off and try to figure something else out or maybe even just indefinitely plan to be a state owned debt or whatever. So early 2017, like the long dirt market, the fork wars, the getting to the price that could pay off the house and then sprinkle in like a little bit of unsecurity or insecurity rather about your bitcoin cold storage situation. It was like a perfect storm that in, I don't know if it was March or April, but I remember the day I was sitting in the forensic lab and I always had the bitcoin price up, which probably is not a good idea to begin with, but I had charts and it was moving and it had gotten up to like, I don't know, 2,400, we'll say somewhere in that neighborhood. So it wasn't. This is very early in the bull market of 2017. I remember just being so filled with anxiety or anxiousness or whatever that I told my boss, I'm going home for the rest of the day. I left work and I broke out the, you know, printed piece of paper in my underwear drawer that had all my private keys on it and I started typing them into, I don't know if it was green address or whatever. And moving the coins to it was Gemini. And like there is. It was just so clumsy, so painful. There's probably like a minor blip on the charts today on Gemini because I just like market sold everything. I wasn't even smart about how I sold it. Like when, when you're when or maybe like I'll sell a quarter of it and then see how the rest of this bull trend. How the rest of like when you come from a background where you're, you know, a lower middle income kid and you don't really have like the gains from that investment from 2013 to 2020 17, even just up to $2,500 were like gains that I had never imagined it never would. You start to wonder if you have
- [43:27]
B
no idea what you're, how you're going
- [43:29]
A
to react when yeah you actually is this really real?
- [43:32]
B
It's in your hand, you know. Yeah.
- [43:35]
A
Until you have the, the amount of required zeros in your bank account that is greater than your mortgage. Like it, it doesn't seem real. And so I clumsily panic sold everything. And I, I have some regrets about it but if, if I keep perspective and I'm honest about it, had I not panic sold all that bitcoin, the reality of having a debt free life and having the opportunity to start thinking about exiting my career and after I did exit my career, the years that I had at home with the kids and really got into be present with them and engage like in their lives, especially during COVID when everything was so crazy, all that stuff wouldn't have happened. So like, yeah, do I wish I would have waited even just 2 or 3 months longer before I PID and sold everything? Yeah, that would have been nice. But fortunately like in 2018 because for the rest of 2017, I didn't want to hear about bitcoin. I don't want to think about it because every time I saw the price it was just like it just hurt how much gain I had missed out on. But in 2018 I started like getting sucked back into some of the same podcasts and I found my way back to Twitter and, and like started getting back into bitcoin. But this time it was like I was still interested in number go up, but it was also for more ideological reasons. That was the period of time when the national debt was noticeably starting to ramp up in America and you start to think about like, you know, my kids are getting older and what kind of future are we leaving for them in terms of, you know, our, our nation and me personally, you know. Yeah, what, what can I help? Help to. I, I, I hate this term privileged. Like they, they talk about like how people come from privilege. And it's one of those things that there's like a kernel. You understand what I'm talking about? Like when people like not white privilege, but just like I come up from a privileged background or you know, that kind of stuff like that, that it's, it's something that's a kernel of truth, but that people totally distort. Like, privilege is really your parents, your grandparents, and the people that. That came before you working their asses off and making sacrifices so that their kids.
- [46:04]
B
Yeah.
- [46:04]
A
And their kids. Kids could have a little bit better life. Like, that's at its core what privilege is. And they try to mix race into it and all this kind of stuff. So that's total sidebar. But like, you start thinking about, like, what am I going to leave for my kids? Like, what kind of world is it going to be? What kind of. What. What kind of can I help set them up to make their lives easier? And all of it. So that's. That was my path back into bitcoin. And part of that path was. So in 2019, I. I left work and embarked on being a stay at home dad. And I had like, the fall of 2019 was like epic because I was taking the kids to school every day and I had time to explore things that I was curious about. I was like, trying my hand at woodworking, something I'd been curious about for a long time but didn't have another time to put into. And there are a bunch of other things I was curious about kind of dabbling in. And then the spring of 2020 hit and there was a Covid spring. And it was like I went from this idyllic fall of taking the kids to school and picking them up to like, all three kids are at home every day, all day, and we're trying to do distance learning. I'm trying to. I'm trying to shepherd like a second grader through distance learning and sitting in front of a computer when he'd rather be doing a million other things.
- [47:28]
B
Oh my God.
- [47:29]
A
And we got through it all, but it was like the stay at home dad life was like. It ended up being much different from the life that I had envisioned when it all started up. So the transition to seed signer is in 2020 as I reaccumulated some bitcoin and I started thinking about a long term bitcoin setup that I would feel comfortable with, especially given my unique background in forensics and what I know about information security. I've. By that time, I earned a graduate Degree in organizational security management, which touches on information security and some things like that.
- [48:14]
B
Oh sweet.
- [48:15]
A
What would be.
- [48:17]
B
That sounds like another great thing. That would be another thing I would love to nerd out on, dude. Just like security from like a, like a big picture point. Organizational security, you know, because so much about like there's a. There's a great book called the Code breakers by David Kahn, which I haven't actually read through the whole thing. It's massive. It's like the most comprehensive history of cryptology I've ever seen.
- [48:43]
A
I'm gonna have to look it up.
- [48:44]
B
It's so good. I hope to do an audiobook for it one day because like, nobody else would take the take, take the beast on, but actually have like three chapters of it. But literally goes back to like the earliest, earliest days and like kind of walks through all of the thinking and the threat models and everything and talks about like where like how humans are really the vulnerability, you know, like, like when you. When you get to the point where the math is just kind of like solid, it's everything around it that becomes the attack vector. And so anyway, like all of it's just fascinating. And I can see like organizational security as being like, you know, how to defend everything around the thing you're supposed to protect is like the. The layers build out from. From the key or from the heart of like what the thing is you're trying to get at.
- [49:36]
A
And during, during the time when I went through that master's program, it was kind of, I guess what you'd refer to as the coming out of the guard shack moment for security professionals. So a chief security officer at an organization, like first of all that, that long time ago, that wasn't a thing at the C level of most organizations. It was just someone who managed facility. Sometimes they would even fall under facilities like managing the guards who had sit in the shacks or you know, do building walkthroughs and all that kind of stuff. But they were in the process of transitioning from the old model to what was commonly referred to as total asset protection. Whereas if it was somebody who is in the C suite in an organization, their focus was on any way that the organization could experience loss. So yes, it was at the physical level of the buildings and inventory being stolen and that kind of stuff. But it was also started to think about brand and reputations and what do they call it, intellectual property and how you manage that and try to keep it safe as well as, you know, that was also during the time when organizations we've gotten through the dot com bubble and organizations are doubling down on Internet presence and they're obviously using email and mobile phones and stuff. And so a lot of it started to become having a high level view of information security and not being down in the weeds of, you know, you know, making firewall rules and stuff like that, but like someone who understands the threat environment and has, you know, thought about strategies to address some of those threats in the, in the outside world. So all of that was kind of part of my background. I. Like I said, I was thinking about what would be a way to secure my Bitcoin. That with my unique background and perspective, would give me more peace of mind.
- [51:34]
B
Yeah.
- [51:35]
A
And that is what sent me to. It was an episode of Stefano Vera where he interviewed a guy called Michael Flaxman, who's a security researcher. And this was also. Everything kind of coming together magically. This was also the time when multisig was becoming something that everyday bitcoiners had access to. So initially when Bitco was laying some of the foundations for multisig and it was not bleeding edge, but still newer stuff, it was really only available to institutional custodians. There wasn't any, I guess what you call pleb facing tools that were designed to help individual bitcoiners do multi sig. And Spectre Wallet was just kind of getting its wind in its sails. And Odell was really excited about it and talking about. Talking about it a lot. And that was one of the things that this Michael Flaxman had mentioned on Libera was Spectre Wallet and how it enabled just an individual person to set up a multi sig wallet. And there was also, I guess, a branch of Spectre Wallet that was called the Spectre diy, which was a project that let you build an offline signing device to be able to manage.
- [52:56]
B
I have wanted to build one of those, the seed, I mean the, the Spectre DIY wallets for ages. They look so cool. Because I've done the seed signer. I've got two of those now. I've never, I've never actually 3D printed my case because my 3D printer is another one of those things that's just in a box waiting for my studio to get done. My brother got it for me. Not this past Christmas, but the Christmas before. Like that is how painful this basement project has been. Um, but so I've got, I've got two of those, but I have one at a Spectre diy. They look so dope. They're kind of like the. You know, the Keystone or the.
- [53:34]
A
Yeah, and they're the. The OG of DIY stateless signers. Like, they. Stefan Snigger of is. Is probably the principal person to reference on that project who's kind of the father of it. There's another. There's another guy called. I'm going to butcher his name because he's Moritz Widersheim.
- [53:59]
B
Yeah. Just say with confidence. That's. That's probably super accurate right there.
- [54:04]
A
He kind of had the vision for the whole thing. And Stepan was the, like, super smart guy who started putting the pieces together. So anyhow, so I'm thinking about redoing my bitcoin security. I hear about this spectra DIY thing. I've got a little bit of a technical background, so I order the parts and I build one. And I start just playing around on testnet with Spectre Wallet. And I set up my first multisig. And there's this process that I don't know if it. It was Spectre that pioneered it or if it was Keystone that pioneered it. They kind of. I've done some research on it. They kind of came into the idea roughly at the same time. So I. Maybe it was independent or maybe one of them borrowed it from the other. I don't know. But this whole concept of moving bitcoin signatures from an offline device to an online device using QR codes was a revelation to me. And now a lot of signers and wallet do it. Wallets do it. But that first time I saw it, it was like my first bitcoin transaction. It was like my first lightning transaction. There was this element of magic to it that just, like, checks so many boxes for me.
- [55:16]
B
And that's what we're doing with, like, sign in stuff. It's like, why. Why are we not. It's so stupid to not, like, utilize that. Because it's such a clean experience and you're. And because you're getting the same. If you can still do it with nfc, you can still do it with a paste a link thing, you know, like, there's options if your camera isn't available or you're on a desktop or something, but it's still just. It's so clean. And, like, I want that to be the login experience. And it's so, so much safer than so many things.
- [55:45]
A
That passwords are still so prevalent, I guess is just a testament to the Lindy effect and, you know, how much lindy, like, momentum certain things have. But it's maddening that there are better ways to do it. And it is such a painful, painful experience. So yeah, yeah, with Spectre, so set up my first multisig wallet experience. This QR code thing, that was a revelation to me. And it's like I realized this is how I want to secure my Bitcoin. And I, I, I guess the tangent into Seed Signer is that I'm a little bit of a cheapskate and the parts to build a Spectre were like, I don't know, it's like $130 at the time to buy the dev board that they were focused on. And I'd actually been dming with that individual Michael Flaxman that I mentioned before and he mentions to me this idea. He has to use a specific version of Raspberry PI Zero that doesn't have WiFi and doesn't have Bluetooth as this secure kind of isolated computing environment where you could create private keys because it doesn't talk to the Internet, you can use it in a way where it doesn't have a USB connection. It's this naturally isolated sort of Linux environment and maybe you could use it to create private keys. So I'm again this new stay at home dad and I like projects and I'm, you know, kind of curious about learning to code because I, I've had a couple classes in Java way back in like 2002, but I would not consider myself a coder by any stretch of the means. So I, I binge watch udemy videos on Python programming for a week to remember enough about object oriented programming and just the basic stuff that people learn in, you know, CS101 or whatever. And I attach a screen and some buttons to this Raspberry PI and I create this really like clumsy proof of concept, but it actually works. And initially it was just creating the checksum word. Like if you'd picked, if you'd picked bit 39 words out of a hat and you need the checksum word, it was originally just to enter the random words into it and then you would get the checksum word and you'd have a full private key that was generated offline in a pretty secure way. And then I created another module that would take dice rolls and convert them into a private key. And then I thought like, if I connect this like 5 or $10 camera to this Raspberry PI, you could basically potentially replicate all the functionality in the Spectra diy, but at a much lower price point. And I, I, I, yeah, so that's what I started working on and I eventually got the camera stuff working and was able to get the software to a point where you could actually sign it up. A multi sig transaction using the Raspberry PI and the screen on the camera. And that was around the time when I had started tweeting about the project because it was just all of these things are clicking for me because, you know, it's inexpensive, because the device doesn't remember your private keys, you can actually use it to manage more than one private key. So you wouldn't have to, if you wanted to start playing with multisig, you wouldn't have to buy three or five harder wallets. And everything about it was just really clicking and making sense for me. So I started tweeting about it. And then in 2021, I went to one of the bitcoin conferences, the one that was in Miami that year. And it was kind of an epic year because there was this inflatable dome in the parking lot that they had all the floss content in. And I made just a short, like 20, 25 minute presentation about it in the dome and ended up meeting like two of our key collaborators at the conference that year who saw my presentation. And the whole thing kind of just started, you know, in, in small time, like floss, floss in a small time foss way started to take off and you know, a couple other guys were way because I, my initial plan was like, I'll use this as like an excuse to learn to code and I'll get better at Python. And the people who had volunteered to, to help me build it out were just such way better coders than me that I started focusing on other things like, you know, refining the external profile of the device and 3D print enclosures and then kind of just becoming a public face for the project and trying to get these into as many people's hands as possible so they could experience what for me had been a revelation. And this is all back when multisig was still, you know, something that people still weren't considering. There weren't, there wasn't a lot of tooling. Sparrow Wallet had kind of started to come on online shortly after that. And after that we started seeing mobile coordinators that will let you do a multi sig with your phone. But it was kind of this exciting time of, of.
- [61:09]
B
It's crazy how long it took for like the tooling to really build out for that to be like user friendly. But I, I love nuncha. Like I don't have anything that's not multisig anymore. You know, like, even if it's just like my base multi sig for like my. My daily driver is just a phone key and a tap signer. You know, and the, the brilliant thing about that is that, like, it. It feels like I have one signer because the other key is on the phone. But if I lose my phone, I still have recovery option. Like, like it just getting everything back is just really easy. Like, I, I get kind of the best of both worlds.
- [61:49]
A
Even though one key's hot, you still have some security advantages.
- [61:52]
B
I have it online. Exactly. I have it offline and, and the tap signer, like, experience of just being able to tap and then. And then being able to. Like when I go to a cold card or I, I do have one with a. Or I had one with a seed signer. It's not got any bitcoin on it. I have one with a bitbox and I have one with a cold card that will scan. And I think I have one. I don't know. I. I went on like a spree. I have like 12 wallets in this nunchuck or whatever. Um, that some of them are just like test wallets just for fun. And, you know, I, I found it funny because, like, my immediate thought you said, like. So I started playing with it on test. Net and I just think, man, I just yolo in every time. Like, I just like, let me ch. Let me test this thing out. Let me. Let me send a thousand dollars worth of bitcoin to it. Just like, play and like, I'm. I'm main net always, man, but I just being able to like, break it out and then just do the scan. Scan the QR for like, my third key on like, any of my heavy setups. It's just so cool. It's. I love multisig.
- [62:58]
A
Blue wall was first of the game in terms of multisig and the, the being able to sign with QR codes. But I really love that nunchuck. Did they. They put a lot of thought into the different kinds of setups that each have their own advantages and disadvantages. And just thinking more about, like, what are the different ways that people can use this and then helping people where it might be a collaborative multi sig. Being able to manage that remotely from different places. And they, They've. They've really moved a lot of exciting features forward.
- [63:30]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, I've. I've been shout out to Hugo and the team, man. Nunchuck has been a godsend for a lot of my setups and, like, kind of getting things feeling like super awesome. Like on mobile. Um, so, you know, shout out to those guys if you haven't tried out Nunchuck. You got to, especially with anything that's got a screen, like a seed signer or something, scanning that QR code just, it just, it just feels nice.
- [63:58]
A
Yeah, a lot of people don't, don't realize it, but in terms of the whole process of scanning any QR code and then returning QR codes from your device, like mobile phones are actually the best user experience because they have an even better camera in them than even what is in a high end MacBook or something. Um, yeah, the, the camera scanning is just like, it's really, really good user experience. Yeah.
- [64:23]
B
I'm curious. So what, where are you going from seed signer? Like what's the, what's the company? What's the big picture? Like, are you, are you expanding or thinking about like another project? Are you just kind of like going hard on keeping? Because like I feel like the seat signer. I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this is just because I'm like a, you know, a like in the weeds bitcoiner. But seed signers having like a seed signer is kind of like that. Like you're not like a real, you're not like a bitcoin OG until you get your seed signer, until you have like you, you put it together thing. And so like how, how roughly successful is a seed signer? And you know, it's probably like a cult classic, I would guess, but how do you think about that and like what y' all are doing as like a group and projects and thinking about bitcoin going forward? Because things change. Things are changing like a lot all the time. Right, right. And we're in an interesting space with where it's headed. Sorry about the dogs.
- [65:26]
A
No, no worries. So I, I'll, I'll just wind back and you asked where we were going as a company or whatever, so that's something I should clarify about. In that Seed center is in no way, shape or form itself a company. There are people who build seed signers and sell them and I have a little side hustle where I sell seed centers and there's several people in Europe and there's some in Australia and Africa and South America. But Seed center itself is just a volunteer open source software project that does not have revenues or can't do sponsorships and, and that kind of stuff because a lot of people, oh, I guess
- [66:06]
B
you can't even buy it on the website. I don't know why I thought, where did I buy mine? Because I bought one. I got one at Tab Comp.
- [66:15]
A
That was, that was through me. We met at.
- [66:17]
B
That was you.
- [66:18]
A
That was.
- [66:18]
B
We sat there and you. I put it together with you.
- [66:21]
A
Yeah.
- [66:23]
B
And. But I bought one somewhere. Where did I do that? Does. I thought I bought one online. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm. Maybe I'm just mixing it up and I'm thinking like crypto cloaks or something. And like it was like a case.
- [66:35]
A
It could have been crypto cloaks. I think they just sell the cases. Or I have an online shop, I might be confusing myself where I sell them. But again, it's. I'm not trying to corner the market. And we very thoughtfully have not put a quote buy now button on the seats on our website. Like the ethos of the project is, is really about open source and diy and I, I think there are trade offs when it comes to buying a seed signer that someone else has put together or even buying a seed center that's a kit that someone else has kind of pulled together and is giving you to put together.
- [67:12]
B
Yeah.
- [67:12]
A
There are trade offs between those two things and then sourcing the components yourself, because a lot of the, the security advantages just come from sourcing the components yourself from companies that have absolutely nothing to do with bitcoin. So there's no incentive for those companies to be infiltrated by malicious firmware.
- [67:32]
B
Infiltrate the hardware, the supply lines, that sort of thing. Yeah.
- [67:36]
A
Or even just by keeping yourself off of as many lists of bitcoiners as possible. I'm somebody who bought a ledger in 2016 or 17 and now my personal information, because I like a dope, you know, put in my name and an address and stuff. My information's out there forever in terms of the address that I had when I bought that and such. And that's such a. That's something that so many bitcoiners have been impacted by. And it's not something that is, you know, isolated to just ledger. Like Trezor has had significant customer data breaches and a lot of the online custodians have. And it's just building a seed. So yourself with.
- [68:21]
B
It's basically everybody except river now.
- [68:25]
A
Yeah, I am a lover of river, but yeah. And who knows?
- [68:30]
B
Knock on wood, right?
- [68:32]
A
Exactly. Your information is on file somewhere with river. And it is possible that someday, somehow it could come out as it is with every other bitcoin custodian or people that sell bitcoin and have to do KYC stuff. But Building a seats on yourself from these general purpose off the shelf computer parts is one way that you can keep yourself off of lists of bitcoiners. And so that's something that is important to me and the other people who are deeply involved in the project. So we've never added the buy now button to Seed Siren. We really like. Like an example is, I don't know if you know Ronnie Anando who is one of the partners that operates the bitcoin hardware store in El Zante, but he came to me when they were spinning up the bitcoin hardware store and was like, hey, I want to buy seed centers from you and then resell them in the store and we can work out some kind of like revenue sharing thing. And I'm very intentional and it wasn't the answer he wanted at the time. But I said, how about I'll point you to where you can buy the things yourself and a good 3D printer that you can buy that you can, you know that that isn't going to be hard to operate. You can just keep in the back of the shop and how about you build the seed centers yourself and sell them in the store And I don't need to be involved or get any royalties from it or anything like that. And I think that that keeps some natural incentives in place where it's more about supporting the project and the individuals who are writing the software that so many people are getting value from than it is about me trying to, you know, monopolize the supply chain and figure out how to be a middleman and all that kind of stuff. Which isn't, that's not what I'm after. I don't think that's the ethos of bitcoin. So it's like I say often, this, this free permissionless open source monitoring network that we all love so much. It's a shame that when you start to use it to save money, the first thing that most people do is point you to some sort of for profit, often closed sourced proprietary device that you have to use to secure a copy of your private keys to make the whole setup work like that. Like in my mind I understand a lot of people are going to do that, but in my mind there should be other options too. And for this, this free permissionless open source monetary network, we should have a free permissionless open source tool or tools that you can use to securely save for the future with it. And so Spectra DIY and Seed Signer and now newer stuff like Crocs and there's Another project called Kern that I'm closely following. Like all of these things are part of an increasing array of options that I think are being built and deployed in the true spirit of Bitcoin that I think are just like it in securities trade offs. But there are some very solid security options and trade offs involved with them. In some ways I think they're more secure and the trade offs are better, but just, just more options for people. Bitcoin not being decentralized from a custody standpoint I think is a bigger risk than a lot of people appreciate. And I'm. I'm reading this book right now called so this Is How They Tell Me the World Ends. And it's all about nation states accumulating cyber weapons that they can use to defend their own interests and used to attack other nation states or other corporate entities abroad or individuals abroad or whatever. And if you think of each bitcoin custody tool, not just custodians like river or like Blockfly or not Blockfly, I was thinking about Blockfi this morning where we were talking about this in terms of the whole like sponsorship game and how it comes back to bite certain people. But if you think of river or Gemini or Coinbase or whatever, think of all of those as silos and how people custody Bitcoin. If some sort of compromise were to come into the bitcoin ecosystem at the private key generation level, that could create an incident that could set Bitcoin back by 10 or more years because it would be almost indistinguishable from a protocol compromise and that we would be talking about bitcoin being hacked again and not individual custodians being hacked. Or if you think of Ledger as one custody silo within the bitcoin ecosystem, if Ledger were to have some sort of person inside who is planning a zero day kind of retirement attack that involve entropy that goes into the device, that involved the sharding mechanisms that they use to back up private keys or something like that. That would be something that would be kind of a, could be perceived as a protocol level event that would set Bitcoin back by years. So I think we need to decentralize how people do bitcoin custody as much as possible. And what better way by leveraging private freedom preserving open source software. So I'll jump off my soapbox now, but that, that was kind of the elevator pitch for it.
- [74:19]
B
No, dude, I, I super appreciate that. Just because like custodian people don't. Some people appreciate it, some people appreciate it. But it is often overlooked that the proof of keys is such a huge defense mechanism for all the ways that people that for like 95% of the ways that bitcoin can be attacked, you know, like the, all the low hanging fruit where you can do a lot of damage to either the network or the value is an order of magnitude better when the more you have people holding their own keys and the. This is kind of similar in kind to building your own blocks versus renting your hash.
- [75:12]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [75:13]
B
To a pool, right? Is it? Which is, I think a lot of people don't quite get. They're like oh well, you can just like log out. It's like, well sure you can react but this is literally the difference between running your own node or having a light client. Like literally like am I, am I trusting someone else's node to tell me what bitcoin is? Or am I running the node? Am I putting my stuff in my block and doing it? And it's, It's so core to the, to the idea of its resiliency, of its anti fragility and it's like sure, we can react and like we can get some of that back. But. And that's part of like why I, I have this like, oh, it's really nice. Things are going great, well for bitcoin and all this stuff, but every once in a while I'm like, we need a couple of kicks in the nuts because you know, sometimes people aren't, people aren't. There's not enough people holding their own keys. There's not enough people, you know, like those small fractures and those small stressors I think do such an important thing, getting people in the right mindset and understanding what is important. And when we don't have them for too long, I get antsy. I start getting nervous because I worry it's going to get bigger. Whatever the kicking the balls does get
- [76:31]
A
here, people holding their own keys is what enforces the scarcity that is Bitcoin. If we think about.
- [76:37]
B
Absolutely.
- [76:38]
A
If we think about receiving a bitcoin payment from someone else and if you're doing it, you know, where you hold your own keys and you're using your own node to validate that you know, the funds were actually included in a block and that you're actually holding the keys that control those funds. If you do that, you have the guarantees of the 20 million bitcoin that are outstanding, you know, not including the 1 million or less that have yet to be mined. I mean sure there's been a bunch that lost, but enforced by the Code there can only be this 20 million some odd bitcoin that exists. But when you start getting into custodial Bitcoin or if you're not holding your own private keys, like if you consider the bitcoin network plus all of the financialized networks that surround it, so the third party custodians like we talked about with Coinbase and River and other companies like that, and you mix in the bitcoin treasury companies like strategy and all the other follow behinds for that and you start to mix in like the, the financialized options and stuff that have been built on top of Bitcoin and all that kind of stuff. Like realistically that scarcity starts to fall apart because there are inevitably some number of those players that are playing fast and loose and that have re rehypothecated coins that don't exist. So it's not really like there are 20 million Bitcoin, there might be 25 or 40 or even 80 million Bitcoin outstanding once you include all of the IOUs and stuff. So that's like that using making sure that you hold your private keys at an individual level is one of those things that when enough people do it it really goes a long way to safeguard the scarcity value proposition of Bitcoin which is a check against governments being able to print money at will and steal from you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [78:31]
B
And one of the interesting things about Seed signer too and the Spectre DIY and this idea of explicitly like build your own is that you know like, like cold card or whatever. Like we, we read a article about like their security setup and how they use three different chips to like kind of break up the things that actually create the keys. Is it three now is it? Well it's the, it's two different chips and then their own just like open thing that they have firmware on and like those three pieces together work together to actually do it. So without all three of them you can't actually recreate it. Like it's really interesting mechanisms, right? And I've read like deep dives into some of the other hardware wallets on how they kind of get around vulnerabilities and risks and trade offs and all this stuff. And it's like oh well you should have a dedicated hardware wallet that's designed for this so that you definitely know it's not, you know, you can compromise a Raspberry PI zero. It's like yeah, but who's going to compromise? Who's going to go install fake firmware on every grasp Berry PI zero in the world hoping that maybe somebody puts it on a seat signer. You know, like you're, you're literally doing it yourself. And whereas ledgers and treasures, you go buy that crap on Amazon, you're like 50, 50. You know, you're like that thing's probably compromised.
- [79:49]
A
Definitely don't want to buy one there.
- [79:51]
B
Yeah, yeah. You always buy directly from the manufacturer. But even then, like it's, it's a target. It, it's, it's much clearer what this is being used for. And like you said, you're giving your information over and an address and all that stuff, which I recommend everybody trying to set up like a very cheap llc. It's not that, it's not that much and it's a really great way to just get that privacy. It's, it's a little bit of a headache, but it's worth it on the back end. It's, it's a, it's a setup headache. And then it's just, it just goes after that. Set up an LLC and get yourself like a UPS mailbox or something like that.
- [80:23]
A
Yeah. Or buy just as simple as like buying in person from someone who's either an authorized reseller or the actual. Like at the bitcoin conference last week in Vegas, like at, at the Blockstream booth, they were selling jades. Like that's probably. With cash is probably the best way if you really want a jade. Like to buy one of those is just to, you know, there are some
- [80:45]
B
risk and buy it in cash.
- [80:47]
A
Yeah, but yeah, or digital cash. Exactly.
- [80:52]
B
Zap them.
- [80:54]
A
But I'll kind of. Because there's this sense out there that I'm anti hardwallet or that I always shit talk hardware wallets and stuff like that. And it's. My position is probably a lot more nuanced than people who have heard me speak before may realize. I always try to be clear that there are some use cases where I think hardware wallets absolutely kick ass and they're perfectly suited for. So if you, let's say you operate a bitcoin business and you keep some amount of operating funds that you need to be at hand, so you're accepting bitcoin payments through a BTC pay server or through zap, right. Or whatever like mechanism you do and then you're taking custody of those funds and then maybe you're lucky enough to where you can pay some of your suppliers with Bitcoin or you can pay some of your employees with a portion of all of their salary in bitcoin. And maybe you're taking some money every once in a while from those operating funds and you're raking it in the long term cold storage. But you, but let's say in this kind of operating fund wallet you're making five or transact five or 10 transactions a month, maybe a little more, maybe a little bit less. For that type of use case where you want to be self sovereign and hold your own keys and yet have the ability to use the funds relatively conveniently accessible. I think hardware wallets are a no brainer for that type of application to where you can have the ability to sign transactions close at hand. There's a reasonable amount of protection and that if that device gets stolen or it falls into like some random person hand who you know finds it or something like that, there are, there are access control restrictions in place that should prevent them from being able to steal your money. And ultimately if that device does get stolen stolen by somebody malicious, usually it gives you some amount of time to where you can access a backup and sweep the funds and hopefully have a happy ending in that regard. For that type of use case or for an individual bitcoiner who keeps a moderate amount of bitcoin so that they can buy things online or maybe they're living off of bitcoin and they're making several transactions a month. I think horrible use cases harder. Wallets rather are a really almost perfect, well suited tool for that particular use case. Now for your long term Bitcoin and this is the bitcoin that you're saving for a house or for college or for your children's future or to buy a car, whatever you. Or just to speculate so you can buy an island someday or whatever.
- [83:28]
B
That's the one I'm going for. I need an island. I'm going to private island. I'm going to get the island.
- [83:33]
A
The whole private island thing has gotten a PR black guy ever since Steam anyhow.
- [83:43]
B
I wonder if that one's for sale yet.
- [83:46]
A
I've kind of been wondering what is going to happen to that. But separate conversation for your long term bitcoin savings. So I, I have some strong opinions and one of those is that most people really should be thinking hard about multisig. And I know that there are people out there say that multisig is too complex or whatever. There's. There's been a lot of sort of UI UX advancements in, in multisig that had have been made to make it easier and more accessible to more people. But even if those hadn't have happened. It is worth investing your time and energy to learn about how to set up a proper multi sig wallet, how to back up what you need to back up to make sure that you have access to it, you know, whatever you need to, and to ensure that the fault tolerance for that wallet is what you would like it to be. So I have a strong opinion about multisig and with multisig, harder wallets for me make less sense for your long term setup. Because of the issue of hardware wallets. Storing a digital copy of your private key, is that such a horrible thing? No, but I think it was Samson Mao who kind of like every time, every once in a while you hear somebody say something and it's like super clear and they just spell it out in a way that's really accessible. And he said that like digital storage of private keys should be considered a convenience mechanism, but essentially nothing beyond that. So the convenience of being able to have your private key handy nearby and being able to sign for transactions to move money for a business, awesome use case. But for long term cold storage, where this is like you're making one or two or three transactions a year, if that, maybe to consolidate UTXOs or to make, you know, a small to moderate size spend that you want to do or have some operating money, or maybe it's for that big project purchase you've been saving up for. But generally you, you don't need access to the keys obviously to make deposits to the wallet or to just check on the balance or anything like that. You only need access to the keys when you want to make those spends, and they're few and far between for your long term savings, or at least they should be for those few and far between instances of accessing your private keys, you really don't need the digital copy. Because when you set that hardware wallet up, what's the first thing they have you do? Take out the card that came with a hardware wallet, Write down these 12 words, write down these 24 words and store them in a safe place. A lot of people don't even really understand what those words signify. And they end up storing them with the box the hardware wallet came in, where they're also storing the hardware wallet. Like I, I talked to, I talked to a lot of people about cold storage and that is a very common phenomenon because people just don't understand what cold storage, the seed backup really is. But if you're doing it right and you store the hardware wallet in one place and you store the, you know, the seed in a more secure place like a safe deposit box or gun safe or something like that. Even with a simple multi sig, you start to end up having a lot of places where you need to hide things. So for a simple two of three, now you need six hiding places because you need three for the harder wallets and three for the backups for the harder wallets. So my argument is not everybody's going to agree with it and that's totally fine. But for your long, long term cold storage, let the analog physical copies of your private keys be the ones that you worry about securing. And think carefully about where you put. You think carefully about whether you add a bip 39 passphrase of those keys. You think about how you put them together in a multi sig. You think about whether you store them on paper or whether you store them on plastic that's resistant to water or you store them on metal that's resistant to fire and water. You think about do I keep them in tamper evident packages? If I'm putting them in a safe deposit box, am I storing them hidden in my house in the attic or in a gun safe that might be a little bit easier to find but has some sort of protection around it? Am I going to put one in my, my grandma's basement or hidden under a tree in a piece of property that I own two states over? But focus on, focus on those physical backups because you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to worry about how you're securing them anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll stop there. But that's, that's kind of how I have come to think about cold storage.
- [88:23]
B
It comes back to organizational security and the, the idea of like how to secure your relationship to them and not just do I have my keys, you know, especially if you have multi sig and like, and this is specifically why I usually like, like for like super, super cold storage. I have multisig and I only have, I have like one main key that's my, that's kind of like the, the decider, right? Is so like, you know, you have a tap signer that's going to be traveling with me and like ready to go or whatever if I, if I need it. But if we're in super cold storage or like, like a big wallet or whatever, like I like this is one of the reasons I like Nunchuck is the do collaborative, you know, rely on your best friend or, or something because he's going to have his own setup and you don't even know it. And like he's only there if something goes wrong. Right. Or if I don't, I don't have all of my keys. Like I still have control but I have a best friend that I could call on or a family member, a wife or spouse to call on where they, they deal with the security of one of those keys. And if theirs goes bad, not that big of a deal because like I didn't rely on, they don't have ownership of it. Right, right. And I, I really think that's a undersung like option of leaving. And, and this is also why I'm super stoked about like how mini script is going this way is that you can have it. So like let's say you have a three of five or even just like a three of four and then you have five people able to do the one signature of that four so you're not like making it so they can collaborate and get together and like steal your coins and yes that in immediately. Now I've got a little bit complex setup and you know all this stuff but you're really distributing the risk of the keys and I think there's, there's a huge unlock in making that simpler and accessible to users. It's not easy to do but there's a huge unlock there. I feel like in, in really kind of bringing like a mini script set up to, to that kind of a model 100%.
- [90:49]
A
And we don't support miniscript yet with seed center because for a couple reasons. One that I wouldn't say it's bleeding edge or anything but we're still at a point where common best practices are still being established around the different tools.
- [91:04]
B
Oh yeah, and smart wait you take your time on something like that.
- [91:10]
A
And as a volunteer open source software project, most of our contributors have fiat jobs and they work on CSR in their spare time. So we're not always the fastest at pushing code out. We kind of take a wait and see approach to when, when these standards do emerge and you know, best best practices for use cases emerge. That's kind of where we're going to follow because it's the best use of our limited time and resources with our developers. But I like what you say about when you think about individual keys in a multi sig setup there are some that like are the keys that you use most times you plan to sign and then there are the other keys that hardly ever get used and that are a little bit maybe more difficult to get to and that's, that's all part of the dynamic of thinking through the security of, you know, your multisig wallet. But I, I, I, I love that you're into multisig because when, a lot of times when I get called to do a podcast or something like this, like, the people that are doing it are still very much in the camp of I haven't tried it yet, and it seems scary. And I've heard from a lot of other people that it's risky and that there are, there are too many, there's too much downside to it. So I think there's two sides to every story. Some of that's fud, but I love that you're a pro multisig guy. By the way, as a total sidebar, I just want to say that the episode that you did with Jimmy's song sometime within the last year during the whole opportune thing, and you probably did more than one with him, but that one episode that I'm thinking of, I couldn't cite, like, you know, which one was such a complete breath of fresh air for me. And it was so refreshing amidst all of the, like, the core people on one side and then mechanic and everybody who I really like, Mechanic, but him and Luke and everybody screaming on the other side. And Jimmy was kind of this voice of reason that I felt like, struck a middle ground that I could, like, I could co sign with a lot of the things that, that he was saying. So that was.
- [93:24]
B
No, that was a fantastic conversation.
- [93:26]
A
Much appreciated nuance.
- [93:27]
B
It mirrored, it mirrored a lot of what I had been thinking. And, you know, you try to put words to it or, and it's, it's so hard to figure out, like, because there's so much pressure to be in one side, like, from both sides. Like, I kind of universally, anytime I like, I say anything, I'd like to contradict the bip1 tenors or the core communists or whatever, the Nazis or the core Meists. I. Right, I get it was like, well, nobody gives a about your bip110. It's like, well, I'm not, I'm just, I'm. I'm talking about this one point, you know, Like, I'm not, I'm. I'm endlessly in both camps because the other side just makes the assumption if I try to say anything that I think is just a sensible reason to counter or add some nuance to, to something. And, and it's so hard to even find, like, okay, where do things land? And I thought Jimmy had, like, a bunch of just really Great things on, like, why does it feel off? You know, like why, like something's not right here. It doesn't mean that this is definitely the path or the, or exactly how I should think about it, but also, like, I shouldn't just be like, I'm not going to stick my head in the sand and just pretend that something that I feel was really negative didn't happen. You know, like, there's. So anyway.
- [94:49]
A
But that's interesting with like that, like that feeling your gut kind of thing, because that's something I, I joked when we were chatting on Signal prior about being an adi cur. And I'm not a deep, deep technical bitcoiner. Um, I understand some things, but they're mostly related to cold storage and vanishing keys and, and signing and that kind of stuff. So a lot of, a lot of it is out of my wheelhouse. But when you are a cop for any amount of time, you exist in this adversarial environment where people are constantly lying to you. Like, and sometimes it's about big things and sometimes it's about very small, insignificant things. And you have to operate in this environment where everyone is trying to mislead or steer you to believe their version of what happened so that they can stay out of trouble or help their friend or whatever reason. And so most cops, not all, but most, have a really strong BS detector and they're able to size up situations relatively quickly. And they tend to get like an intuition or a gut feeling when something is not right or they're missing information or they're seems like they're being misled and stuff like that. And I kept getting that feeling throughout the whole like, like up return saga, if you want to call it that, or whatever. And there was this just like, and I'm not smart enough like Jimmy is to be able to, you know, tease apart specific pieces of information and explain why certain things are misrepresented. Misrepresented or inaccurate or like, so it was like, I don't want to fanboy out on Jimmy, but I've gotten to meet him a couple times. I think he's a really solid person. And again, that, that episode was just like, awesome.
- [96:39]
B
Yeah, I'll tag this, I'll, I'll clip this and send it to him just so that we could blow some smoke up his ass. Just
- [96:48]
A
so funny story. I was, I, I, I got the opportunity to hang out with him in El Zante for a few days and we talked very briefly about Seedsider. And his primary feedback was he was like, I really like the device. I like the being able to buy it. I'm, I'm paraphrasing here. I like, you know, commodity parts and build it privately yourself and open source and all this kind of stuff. He's like, but why don't you save the key on the thing? I just want to save the key on the thing. And that's like, it's, it's not, it's not a suggestion that we haven't gotten from a lot of other people. It's just kind of through the looking glass of how we think about private keys and being built with multisig in mind and long term storage. It's just not a feature that we're comfortable implementing. But it was, it was kind of funny. Like getting that from him was like, why can't I just save a key on the thing?
- [97:43]
B
It's amazing how much of a difference it makes in like access. But I will say that the seed signer is the first one that finally got me to break down and like do the nerdy thing of like drawing out my own QR code, you know, on the, on the little graph thing and for, for the private key. And then I think I did it again for. What is it the jade that has that or something. Maybe.
- [98:05]
A
It, it seems like such a ludicrous idea, but it's kind of cool.
- [98:09]
B
This is like, like, I don't know, I, it does seem ludicrous. It seems crazy, like I'm gonna draw out a QR code. But it wasn't quite as terrible as, or as painful as I, I thought it would be going into it. And it is kind of neat. Like it, it, it kind of makes me nervous or whatever and I pick it up. It's like a little different for my seed signer or my seed, seed words. That's why I see my seed words. I'm like, can. I don't know, it's like, it's like, I don't know, it's like this is digital speak. I gotta keep it. I'm more sensitive about like making sure the camera can't see it, you know,
- [98:40]
A
and it's, it's funny, but with like OCR being ubiquitous everywhere, like there's nothing there, nothing different.
- [98:46]
B
The computer can read any of it. Right, right, right. But it's interesting. But going back to the thing you were talking about with multisig, the like. So in doing multisig setups, one of my, one of my rules. You mentioned the whole idea of now you have three keys and you have three hardware Wallets. And so now you have six hiding places or whatever. This is part of why I think miniscript could be such a massive unlock is not only do you like kind of like offload the responsibility of like one of the hiding places, but is to think about it like everything has like a full key's worth of security here. So and one key is technically quote unquote safe. Right? It's like if you have one key that you can reliably keep private and it's the differentiator between whether or not somebody can sign for your Bitcoin or not, they still don't have your bitcoin. And one of the things that people talk about as being like this huge trade off is you know, having to say having a Now I have to save like configuration file too, right? I want to because I can create an infinite number of wallets from the same seeds.
- [99:57]
A
I'm just gonna say it multi sigfud
- [99:59]
B
it, it's 100 multi sig fud because not only do are there like standard derivation paths, like if you just punch in the same thing, it's probably gonna use the same one. But like with Nunchuck or whatever, you just get a BSMS file. I think it's, I think that's the acronym. And. But the beauty of that is that the only thing, the only risk that that that thing is is a privacy risk. Exactly. It's not a key risk. It's not anything like they can't get your keys. They're not gonna like record, recover anything. It's just, they could see, they could see. So you don't have to treat that one with as much. Oh, I, I have to lock it away and it can never touch anything or whatever. You can just encrypt the thing and then send yourself an email back up and send your wife an email back up or whatever. Like you could just make sure that that's accessible. You know, stick a, stick an encrypted version of it in your password manager because that's just not, you just need to make sure that that's always going to be there. So having like five copies of that around, not that big of a deal. Not that big of a risk.
- [101:07]
A
Paper copies in different locations.
- [101:09]
B
Paper copies. Paper copies. You know, just print it out like and that is, and that's also something that you can keep with, you can keep the same version of that with every one of your individual keys. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't really risk anything. If somebody gets your key, they've, they've got your key. Right.
- [101:30]
A
So you have a bigger problem.
- [101:31]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And because of that, like, I think it's, I think using this is why I love, I actually love hotkeys and tap signers is because they kind of give this element of the additional security with something that's a little bit easier, that's less difficult or less centralized so to speak, in, in how you access it or make sure that you can recover it. Right. Is I keep my hot wallet keys in my, my, my, my, my quote unquote non networked password manager. You know, because I was almost no Bitcoin directly behind the hot wallet key. It's just a key that I want to make sure I can get to. And then the tap signer keys, I have a physical backup and I have a physical card. And so the card just travels with me. I don't need a place for it. It's just my wallet. And then you have like your hardcore like your, your cold keys right in your multi sig or whatever. And that's the thing that I think about like okay, this needs to be in a hiding place. This needs to be here. And so I, I can, I can narrow down six hiding places into kind of like two. And like the rest of them can just be, I can vary my access based on the keys and then in aggregate the number of things that I actually have to concern, concern myself with are actually a lot less. They're just kind of part of my main system. I, I ever, I, I always have to have my password manager for a million other reasons. I never, I'm not going to lose my wallet for a million other reasons. And I can have a different tap signer to swap out that one, that same one that's in my wallet at home. You know, so there's this. If you know the pieces of the puzzle, you can get a really clean and really recoverable setup that doesn't. It seems complex. It feels complex. Kind of like going into it if you're like trying to put your head around it. But in practice it's so clean, it's so nice and I don't have to worry. I just do not feel like I have to worry about my wallets.
- [103:38]
A
I love like the, the apparent thought that you've put into your multi sig setups. And like I, I'm sure there was some amount of personal education they had to go into it and experimentation with seeing what you were comfortable with. Yeah, you, you, it's like you, it was worth investing in your knowledge about cold Storage setups because of the value of what you're protecting. And you want to do that in a way that was, you know, self sovereign and that was fault tolerant and yet was like highly secure. And like there's it's, it's just a whole, and there's the whole other aspect of, there's this meme of in bitcoin of the wrench attack and actually it's not even a bitcoin meme. It's like a guy with a computer where he says I've triple encrypted this with these keys and blah blah, blah. And, and then the guy comes up and he's like I'm just going to hit you with this wrench until you like give me what I want kind of a thing. And as bitcoiners we all tend to think about like the nation state attack or the 6102 where somebody is going door to door collecting private keys and we're like resisting the Nazi, you know, powers or like it's the, like it's the attackers who are coming to your house in the middle of the night who are going to like come into your house and steal your private key or like ransomware any of that kind
- [105:05]
B
of stuff and cut your wife's fingers off until you give it to them. Like that's always like the big out
- [105:10]
A
there risk, the biggest risk. Like not that some of that stuff, especially in France, you know, can't happen, but the biggest risk.
- [105:19]
B
The ring that they uncovered in la, they had been doing this with people based on like not in la.
- [105:23]
A
I haven't heard about that.
- [105:25]
B
Oh dude, it's been, it's been rough on a couple of months ago like on. I guess it's one of the round tables. I brought it up I think but the, the $5 wrench attacks are, are no joke. Get a gun. Get a gun and you know, put your big stuff behind a. Not all my keys are available with me, but anyway, yeah, yeah, aside.
- [105:48]
A
And that's, that's part of why I signal like hey, I used to be a cop and I'm a big multisig believer in blah blah blah.
- [105:58]
B
I have security system and guns.
- [106:00]
A
Sorry, not that like. But more people have the rights attacks are horrible mo. More people have lost bitcoin rugging themselves because they use some sort of non standard setup or because they didn't learn as much as they should have before they yoloed into a setup or any of that kind of stuff. And so that's like, that's just Something else I encourage people to remember is
- [106:27]
B
your number one enemy before the, the crypto hijacking mafia and the police state and all that stuff is you. I have only ever lost keys one way. I accidentally deleted them. That's the only way. Like of all the other risk factors and everything and the hostage situations, it is literally just because I accidentally, accidentally delete them. That's the only way. And it was before I knew what the hell I was doing, you know.
- [106:58]
A
Yeah. And it's so just thinking about like you, you want to conform to existing standards. You know, you don't want to. We, we have a seats on our telegram community and there's always people in there, you know, using all sorts of variations on what I'd call traditional bitcoin security where they want to memorize a. Their, their seed and only keep it in their mind or they want to add some crazy long passphrase to their not that bit. 39 passphrases are wrong, but they want to do something crazy with a bitter grind passphrase. Or they want to derive the 99th child key from the private key that they store and they're going to then from that 99th child key derive the next 99th child key key and that's the one that they're going to use to still like, literally this stuff happens. And we've seen people. There's a guy in our telegram chat who's, he's on Twitter as YouTube or YT crypto guide and he has made a living from helping other people recover money from these obscure setups where they've rugged themselves and they kind of remember what they did, but they don't remember all the details. And he's able to set up, you know, brute force attacks to where he can figure out like what the variable that they're missing or misremembered was and he gets a portion of the money that they recover. But yeah, we, we see that stuff all the time. And I am so big on trying to conform to existing standards so that if you take out your. I always pick on ledger 1 ledger
- [108:37]
B
a lot but like deserve it. Just go.
- [108:40]
A
I, I've been seeing a lot of tweets for whatever reason on Twitter lately about people's batteries who have swelled inside of their ledgers because they've been in storage for too long. And if the battery is kept at wrong temperature or the wrong humidity or something like that, it swells up in the device and it can crack the screen and do damage to the device or whatever. Like. But because that Device. Well I, it's a double edged sword with ledger because they also have this recover bs but because they conform to existing standards. You could take your 24 word seed from a ledger, type it into a seed signer or enter it into a cold card, whatever else and very quickly still get access to your money because of those standards. And so I appreciate like the innovation that's going on with bitkey and some of the other like newer hardwoods, but it's kind of one of those things that I just kind of see how it develops because existing standards are another one of those things that is going to help you rug yourself if your particular setup encounters a problem. So yeah, just my two cents.
- [109:48]
B
No, I agree. And my, to add my two sets to that is the quote unquote key that I deleted was a passphrase. If you ever use a passphrase for anybody out there, it makes no sense to not make it memorable. It makes no sense to not have it brute forceable because it's a hidden key that isn't anywhere anyway. And if you want to, you, if you want to have the degree of like entropy of a whole nother key, then just make another key and do multi sig. You know, you're using a passphrase for privacy purposes so that if somebody gets your key they're not just going to immediately regenerate your wallet, which means that you should make it like your home address when you were a five year old. You know, like it should just be basic and something that you can create because it's just, people wouldn't even know if, if they got your seed, they wouldn't even, might not even know to just generate a whole bunch of different wallets from a, from a random thing. Like that's just kind of like a last defense mechanism. And you don't want that ever to be the thing that causes a problem because you're, you're creating that out of band, right? You're creating that in a different setup and in a different way. And you're probably not going to treat it the same. You're not going to think about it the same. And then you might run into a situation where like, oh God, you know, I just, I just reinstalled my OS on the computer that had that text file that had the thing. And like, you know, you're your number one enemy.
- [111:28]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. From an academic perspective, there are three foundations of security. Things you have, things you know, or things you are. And like I'm not a big fan of things you are that's like your fingerprints or your DNA or, you know, the pattern in your retina or whatever. But the second that you write down a passphrase or start in a passphrase manager or anything like that, it switches from something that you know to something that you have. And that's a completely different security model where multisig, in my humble opinion, wins every time. So I, I, I, actually you're, you may be the first person that I've heard say that out loud. Like, if you're gonna have a password, it should be something that you can reasonably remember and that you will remember and that, that's, I, I would have never said it should be brute forceable, but I, I can appreciate the, the thinking behind that for sure.
- [112:21]
B
Well, you think about it. The reason you don't want a brute forcible password is because in a, in a general sense is because you're talking about an online account or you're something that if somebody else got access to it, you don't want them to be able to get in invisibly while you're still thinking that you're the only one who has access. This has nothing to do with the seed situation. It's never online anyway, right? Nobody, nobody has. Like, nobody's going to go grab your seed phrase out of your Twitter account or something. It's not even there. Like, so it doesn't need to not be brute forceable because that's, you don't, you should, if as soon as your seed gets out, you should consider it compromised. Your password is just that one little extra thing to make sure that they don't immediately get your coins. You should think about it like a time lock, right? Is that as long as I know that any adversary is going to take at least a week, even if they do try to brute force this, I'm good because I'm going to have the information, I'm going to, and I'm going to take it out of the wallet before that week is up. But if I lose it and nobody even attacked me or got my seed or anything, I want to be able to know that in a week with a nice gpu, I can get my stuff back. And I, I, I really think that the idea, this, and this was the thing that got me right, is my idea of security was a 13 character randomly generated password with symbols and capital letters. And that is what effed me, right, is that that didn't help me that that calls me. That's the reason they're not, that's the reason they're still there. And so I, I, I think we have to remember what domain we're in when we're thinking about the security trade offs because that, the idea of using the, using that type of a secure password in that environment makes no sense because you're not securing something that anybody will ever get access to. You're again, you're just trying to get like one little layer of privacy if your seed gets compromised.
- [114:15]
A
Yeah. Like once upon a time when, when I was storing Bitcoin with bitcoin core and you had to, you would use a passphrase to encrypt your. Initially it was just a keychain of unrelated keys, before hierarchical deterministic wallets were a thing. But I used a line from a famous poem that I majored in English in college. So I had some literary blah, blah, blah. But it was a line from a poem that I had always in my mind misspelled one of the words with a unique spelling.
- [114:54]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [114:55]
A
So it was like, it was something that somebody wouldn't typically get if they're running through, like they just ingest a bunch of information and they're trying to brute force that way. But so it's, there are all these little tricks where it's like something that does something that is memorable, but there's your own unique twist on it. It's, it's, there are still risks. There are still absolutely risks.
- [115:16]
B
But yeah, yeah, I would generally say unless you're, unless you think you can safely do that, just don't use the, the extra passphrase. It's not necessary. And I think multisig is the better, is the better trade off with and, and the fud around like, oh, now you have to have a configuration file. It's like, well, that's really easy to deal with. You know, how do you make sure that you don't lose a digital file?
- [115:39]
A
So one more thing about like multisig and how like it clicked with me. So in my background, occasionally I would help execute search warrants and I've never executed any search warrants that were bitcoin related. It was always, you know, looking for child.
- [115:57]
B
Liar. You stole bitcoin. You did it. You did it so many times.
- [116:01]
A
Almost always for other stuff. But like I always, as I became more familiar with bitcoin, sometimes I would think about Bitcoin as, you know, we're going through people's houses and you have, you have a warrant from a judge that allows you to look literally anywhere in that house where the thing that you're seeking could be contained. It could be on a memory card that's like the size of your thumbnail or so you can look pretty much anywhere. And Bitcoin stored in a conventional hardware wallet in a single sync setup is just so easy for someone who's going to your house and searching through things like the hardware wallet is immediately recognized as a bitcoin thing. And so unless you're trying to do something really clever with it, like most people are going to find that and instantly know, oh, this is a treasure, this is a bitcoin thing or whatever. And you know, even if the devices are as secure as they purport to be in terms of the access restrictions, human beings are really crappy at choosing PIN codes and stuff on those devices. Like, as someone who has cracked a lot of mobile phones that had a four or six digit PIN code on them, we're like, we always pick the obvious stuff every single time. And people try to get creative, but 98% of the time it's your, the last word, your social or your birthday or your wife's birthday, your kid's birthday or some, some other. Like relatively. Why build a biographical dictionary of things that you're interested in stuff. It gets easier and easier. So. But going from that single sig hardware wallet that is in a gun, safer in your, your desk drawer to a multi sig setup ramps up the difficulty of someone trying a government entity trying to seize your Bitcoin or a targeted attack from an individual. The amount of effort that they have to put into figuring out where the keys are and getting those places really is just, it's a game changer in terms of personal security setups. And that became immediately apparent to me as I was getting experience, like doing searches of homes and businesses. Like how much of an asymmetrical advantage multisig was and how important it is to just like everyone's security posture.
- [118:27]
B
Dude, if everybody, if anybody came in and like got a warrant and like started going through all my stuff, they would start out really excited and then they would end with utter hopelessness because they would be like, oh snap, here's a treasure. They be like, oh, here's a coal card. Oh shit, here's a sea tuner. Oh shit, here's four more cold cards. Like, here's like, like, it's like, oh, two bit boxes. Like, and they would end up with like 27 wallets. And none of them like natively just have like one thing. Everything's like kind of like a multi sig something or like some Even just with like a hot wallet or something like that or a hotkey and some. There would be. It would be a lifetime's job to.
- [119:13]
A
To parse through.
- [119:14]
B
And like I said, I always. I always yolo into testing stuff on mainnet. I've never even used testnet. Not true. I have, but good God, it would be. It would be a mess. I feel bad for anyone who would have that task.
- [119:34]
A
It's. It's not a fun job.
- [119:38]
B
Well, dude, I. I actually have a hard stop here in like 10 or 15 minutes. I am curious, though. Like, what other. Like, you know, you're kind of in a position, it seems like, to just kind of like, explore and build stuff and do stuff that you want to do in the bitcoin space. I don't know if you're intending on taking on any more projects or anything, but I. I would just ask, like, what. What do you think about in, like, what's the other problem that you wish would be solved? You know, what's the other big thing that you're like, man, I wish somebody would do this, or, like, this is the unlock that has not been tapped into or that sort of thing.
- [120:19]
A
This is kind of like a funny segue. I almost feel like I prompted you to ask this question, like, near the end of when we were talking, because literally just within this last week, I had an idea and I've spun up this thing that I'm kind of excited about. But, you know, maybe next week it'll be like, this is a pain in the ass. I'm not going to do it, but I have started another Twitter account called I'm going to show it. The handle is. I want to make sure I get it right. I got you Daily underscore, btc, Underscore
- [120:52]
B
Lore and Today in bitcoin History.
- [120:58]
A
Yeah, pretty much that. That very. And the idea was like, I want to keep alive a lot of the cypherpunk. This sounds so. Like, this sounds so, like, I don't know, trite, but, like, I want to keep a lot of the ethos that
- [121:17]
B
underlies so fast, that gets lost so fast.
- [121:21]
A
I think telling these stories is so important. There's, like, I don't know if he was with Bitcoin magazine or there was Pete Rizzo, who bills himself as the bitcoin historian, and all he posts is slop about sailor saying he's going to buy more bitcoins and all this stuff. So, like, I want to have a real historical.
- [121:42]
B
In his defense, he has written a really awesome series on, like, like, all the cypherpunks or whatever that I've read on the thing. So that's probably, like, a lot of what he's talking about in. In that context. But he doesn't post much about bitcoin history. You're right. He posts a lot about Sailor and, you know, all the bitcoin magazine stuff that's going on.
- [122:03]
A
And I'm going to mine the crap out of his writing for my thing.
- [122:07]
B
There you go. There you go.
- [122:08]
A
But no, I. I think, like, you meet people where they're at and people are on Twitter and I think, like, just having a few threads.
- [122:14]
B
That's a good thread. The thread from three hours ago. No, this is a good one.
- [122:18]
A
Yeah. And it was interesting. So I'm obviously leveraging AI for this. Like, I'm not a smart guy, and everybody keeps telling me that they're using AI for all this amazing stuff. And again, in my 80 IQ brain, this is like something that was like, yeah, that's something AI could help me with. And so I am building a database that is just like 365 days out of the year, you know, what happened in bitcoin historically. And on some days, there's almost nothing. And in some days, there's a lot of stuff that is unrelated. But it was interesting working with AI. They brought up this bitpay thing, which for people who haven't looked at, it's about the founding of Bitpay, and I think it was 2014, which at the time, if you were in bitcoin then, which I know you were, that was a big deal. And a lot of the bitcoin industry and the individual bitcoiners were behind BitPay succeeding because it was kind of this missing link of bitcoin being a medium of exchange and people having an API that they could tie into to accept bitcoin and making it easier. And it was an exciting thing. But ultimately, Bitpay kind of went afoul of the bitcoin culture and supported some questionable things during the four horrors that I talked about. And they were also the genesis for BTCPay and AI. Totally missed the link to BTC Pay as it was doing research about Bitpay. And so, like, I just want to say I'm personally curating this and to some extent putting my own, you know, viewpoints and flavor and whatever into it. But it's like, yes, I'm using AI, but there is so much that, like, you have to massage. And if you want it to be really a quality thing, you have to
- [124:02]
B
know, you have to know, you have
- [124:04]
A
to guide it and be willing to do the research and to have a passion for it and all that kind of stuff. So it's, it's a brand new thing. But I'm actually excited when I sit down to fact check this stuff and research it, I learn little things that I didn't know before, or I remember things, or I think about how when this particular thing happened, it affected me personally, or this or that. It's just like keeping all of that alive for people so that maybe we don't make some of the same mistakes that we've made in the past or go down some of the wrong paths that we have like before, like maybe. And it's just a fun project to keep like some of this stuff alive because there's so many interesting things that go on and it's like the founding of the Internet, like certain people deserve so much credit for work that they did or decisions that they made that they don't get credit for. And to tell those stories I think is something fun and exciting. So yeah, that's, that's the, the canned answer to your question of like, what are you working on right now? There's a lot of still exciting, interesting stuff with Seedsider that I could talk about with microcontrollers and porting the new hardware platforms. And a lot of that research and work is being done by our lead developer, Keith Nakai, and a collection of other people that are interested in it, about excited to it. But I'm not a coder. I just kind of cheer for them and then think about like some of the higher level user stuff. And so this is like, yeah, this is kind of at this moment what I'm passionate about.
- [125:34]
B
Nice. No, that's awesome, dude. And I, I completely agree, especially in the context of like one of the ways I've thought about this very same thing. Because it's crazy how quickly you see history be twisted into something that it wasn't at all.
- [125:50]
A
Yes.
- [125:51]
B
Or somebody says this was the reason for this and you're like, what? Not a soul was speaking. Like, not like this could not be more of a hindsight projection as I've ever read in my life. Like, and it's like it's been two years. How are you already making up new reasons for things that happened when we have all the conversations for these things,
- [126:12]
A
you know, history is witten written not just by the winners, but by the spinners too.
- [126:17]
B
Dude. It's crazy. And it's so important that we keep that Alive. And this has actually been something. If it hadn't been for the fact that I'm so deep into so many other projects. In fact, I've even considered, you know, bitcoin Audible had a really great place, especially in the early days when people were just trying to learn as much as they could about bitcoin. But I feel like it's not as valuable, this idea of like just reading things out. Like, it's good for convenience and stuff, but it's not got the. It's got.
- [126:52]
A
Not.
- [126:52]
B
Not got the need that it had back when I started it. And so I've considered shifting this over to storytelling of history, similar to what the ethos of what you've been doing is. You know, one of the only real stories, real breakdowns of the block size wars are the Block Size War by Jonathan Beer and Hijacking Bitcoin by Patterson and Ver. And the block size wars are great, but it's super technical and nuanced. And Hijacking Bitcoin is garbage, but it's more intriguing, you know, it's like it's a conspiracy, you know. Yeah. And of course, Hijacking Bitcoin is the one that's gotten way more attention because everybody loves a government takeover story, especially in the libertarian community.
- [127:48]
A
Yeah, it's it. And it really frustrates me with a lot of the libertarian voices that I respect and listen to, like how they've been misled. But anyhow, side note, it is.
- [127:57]
B
It is what it is. But I've considered, like, somebody needs to tell a good narrative. Somebody needs to tell it like a story and make it good. And I've. Part of me has always been like, that should be my responsibility. That's my background. That's. I genuinely think I have a skill at that. And it's not something that I've really tackled or gone into for published work before, but I do a lot of story writing and ideation and script writing and stuff kind of behind the scenes just for fun, just because I love it. I fix stories all the time. You know, it's just like this doesn't even have good character arc. This is how you need to do it, blah, blah, blah. And so I've considered taking Bitcoin Audible in. In that route, actually, but too busy with other things before I actually do that. But this. That's awesome. I think that's a huge initiative that's probably super underappreciated by most people and would think it's, oh, a Twitter account that shares stuff. But it's like, ah, dude.
- [128:55]
A
So the value.
- [128:56]
B
Reasons. Reasons matter. And reasons are forgotten.
- [128:59]
A
Reasons matter. And the value in most things is not the idea, it's the work you put into it. You probably can explain this even better than me, but like, when I made that initial proof of concept of a seed center, yeah, it worked, but it had tons of bugs and it had a horrible form factor and a horrible ui and I was just one goofball writing code. And what has made seed signer into something like a cold storage tool the bitcoin community can really rely on is the years and years of work that we've put into refining the user experience and improving the security assurances and like refining the code. And there's just like, it was a great idea initially, but with, with everything, it's the day in, day out work that you put into it that like, is where the real value is found. So hopefully a year from now I'll still be making these tweets. But yeah, I'm human, so we'll see.
- [130:01]
B
All right, well, dude, thanks for coming on, man. It was a good, good combo. Good hangout again. And will I see you at maybe Colorado Summit or anything? Anything. You're going to this, you're going to Tab Conf this year?
- [130:13]
A
I will be at Tam Conf.
- [130:15]
B
All right. I think I'll be there.
- [130:17]
A
That's like our dev summit. It ends up being for seat center too. So.
- [130:21]
B
Yeah, nice. I hadn't been since, literally since I got the seat center from you is the last time that I've been to Tab comp. And I keep telling him like, tidwell, every year is like, I'll probably go this, I'll probably go this year. But this year he might have me. We hung out for like a lot of a long time at BitBlock. Boom. And so I may have gotten slightly pressured to. To finally come back to Tab comp. So maybe I'll see you there.
- [130:45]
A
Props to Mikey for that. Yeah, I hope I see you there.
- [130:49]
B
Awesome. Well, dude, shout out any point people in the direction. I've got that Twitter profile, your other stuff, anything you want to point people to.
- [130:59]
A
Yeah, just seedcenter.com to keep up on developments with the project. And that'll also get you to the re the GitHub repository where, you know, we've got obviously all of our software, but there's a really solid independent custody guy that walks you through a multi sync set up there as well that a ton of people have gotten value from. So if like having a more trustless private Self sovereign cold storage solution either to manage a whole quorum or maybe just to be one key in your quorum. If that's the kind of thing that appeals to you, look us up and and dig in.
- [131:35]
B
Awesome. All right, dude, well thank you so much for coming home. I'll catch you in the next one. All right. I will have all of those links available right down in the show notes. If you do not have your seed signer, all the details and links to get the pieces and build your own are right available@seedsigner.com check it out. It's. It's a rite of passage to build your own hardware wallet as a bitcoiner and for those who haven't really played around with multisig, he's a great resource and everything that they're the team and the website itself is a great resource to kind of start digging into that and, and to make the leap and play around with it. It's fun to nerd out on that sort of stuff and it's such a cool addition to your security that you can really get the best of all worlds, I feel like. So don't discount it and if you haven't played around with it, take the dive, take the dive. I really think, I really think it's worth it. And if you're looking for just a good hardware wallet, Bitbox now has the Bitbox Nova on top of their original and it's really, really awesome and I I cannot rave more about how great Bitbox has been and I love their devices in so many ways. I it's one of the few that I have multiple versions of and I also just have a lot of respect for that team and the stuff that they've built over time. So definitely, definitely check them out. Don't forget the discount code and take the dive and follow the new account. Learn a little bit of bitcoin history, keep it in your feed so you can remember that I again the link to that Twitter profile as well as seed signers and everything are all right there in the show notes along with other bunch of other great options that have affiliate links to services and products and things that I love and use. It's a great way to help out the show in addition to just a great set of resources for things that are just super reliable and trustworthy things in the space. Those are the only things that I put up there. Trust me and trust me, bro. And with that I will catch you guys on the next episode of Bitcoin. Audible. Don't forget to subscribe and share this out with everybody you know? And until then, I am Guy Swan, and that is our two sets,
- [133:58]
A
Sam.