← Escape the Technocracy
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- [00:18]
A
Hello and welcome. This is Gabriel Custodiet of Watchman Privacy, privacy practitioner, consultant, author, and frontline fighter in the push for privacy. I know why you're here. Like the rest of us here in the resistance, you're trying to escape the technocratic apparatuses that you see enveloping you and crushing your freedoms. That's why I created all of this, all without sponsors. I hope you enjoy this show. But then when you're ready to take the next steps to secure your privacy and your future, Visit my website, escapethetechnocracy.com to start the real journey. Your support alone does determines the future of the show. See you there. I'm very pleased today to be speaking to Max Tannehill. It's been a while, but Max is back. He's here to talk about all things bitcoin and the original cypherpunk vision. Maybe we'll get to some Monero related stuff, but Max, my favorite person to hear talk about bitcoin. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing today?
- [01:16]
B
Oh, thanks so much, Gabriel. Pleasure to be here again. Always an honor and yeah, doing well and happy to chat again. And, you know, it's, it's, it's been a, it's been a good time since the last time we spoke about this. A few things have kind of happened, I think. So there'll be plenty to talk about and hopefully, yeah, my, as my concern always is I don't want to be repetitive. So hopefully there's, there's new things for the, for the listeners to talk about, to listen to and, uh, talk to me about, uh, afterwards. So, yeah, absolute pleasure, thank you for, for your time and having me on.
- [01:49]
A
Yeah, my pleasure. So Max has been around bitcoin for a while. He's worked with some bitcoin companies. He is just in the mix every day, testing wallets in telegram groups, fiercely responding to people on Twitter. So he's an active force in this world. Max, I just wanted to start us off with a little bit of a big picture question here. Samurai Wallet is never coming back. Even if the guys got pardoned. That whole concept, that whole thing is, is a part of history at this point. And I just wanted to kind of lob you a softball here and maybe ask a little bit of a legacy question. What was the significance of Samurai Wallet within bitcoin?
- [02:30]
B
I think for me, the significance was the fact that. And it still kind of is this way in some areas. The bitcoin ecosystem is that. It's actually for me is that they were incredibly Approachable, aside from like, what. What they.
- [02:46]
A
What.
- [02:46]
B
What they believed in and what they espoused and the software that they released, I think everyone that kind of came across and with them and use this software and interact with that was like watching a YouTube video or kind of interacting with them on the social media, which was typically, say, on Twitter or Telegram. I think you always had that feeling that you were. You were seeing kind of history being made, and they were very kind of uncompromising in. In their beliefs and what their vision was. Sometimes they, you know, they didn't give out a detailed roadmap of what they were building. You knew what they stood for. They. They certainly for me, and I think this is the case for a lot of people. They educated a lot of us that may have been politically aligned in some ways or kind of had the same kind of values, things that we wanted to see, but taught us a lot. I mean, the two of them particularly, you know, you know, Bill and Keone, obviously, they were more in the team as a whole, but the two of them were kind of, obviously the lifeblood of that company. And, you know, Keanu especially was, you know, a few years younger than me and older than his years would. Would come across. And, you know, Bill, you know, a fair bit older and a different generation, but really, like, the breadth, the information they covered, what they could talk about and their knowledge, you know, was. Was. Was really kind of something. I. You know, for me, what they kind of represented and, you know, what they kind of, you know, what they really kind of gave to the ecosystem. Like, they were huge on open source. They kind of taught me about, like, the licensing, what was important, the kind of. The. The message about what it was about. They were kind of uncompromisingly kind of capitalistic, you know, in their approach. You know, they wanted freedom. They kind of believed in the freedom of software. They. They. They kind of taught a whole generation of us, especially ones that kind of came later, to bitcoin that maybe kind of were onboarded via the kind of coinbases of the. Of. Of the world and Krakens and like the other kind of big exchanges, you know, what it was to. To buy bitcoin for cash and not have a wallet that was integrated with your id. And of course, you know, they introduced to us that despite the fact that bitcoin was this kind of incredible gift and was an amazing piece, that it was also like, not a finished piece of tech and that they believe that at the app layer they could kind of solve problems that weren't weren't, weren't solved or likely to be solved at the protocol layer. And so, you know, really like for me it was a real kind of cypherpunk spirit and it wasn't just talking about it, wasn't just posting about it, wasn't writing about it, they were doing it. You know, they released an incredible amount of software, a lot of different kind of projects that, you know, individual apps and, and things that kind of came under the kind of the umbrella of that whole kind of samurai ecosystem. And you know, the day we're recording today, you know, it's two years since the day those arrests. When you look back on that in the last kind of two years, we haven't even seen people pick up fully what they left behind. That's not just about will, I think it's about capability and it's the kind of, you know, the ability to do so and all that. It was a huge amount they did. They had a block explorer, they had a wallet, they had a desktop kind of wallet companion app, they ran a whirlpool mixing service, they had a kind of coin join as a service, backend software, indexer type software. There was just so much there that really was quite comparable, at least for me compared to kind of other kind of companies in this space like say someone like a kind of blogstream that was kind of far more well funded, more individuals working at. And yet these guys, very kind of scrappy outfit were able to produce a hell of a lot of software that really enabled you to kind of take sovereignty and, and operate this in a way. And you know, it was a lot of time they covered in the space as well. They taught us a lot about, you know, aside from kind of what it meant with Bitcoin. There was also leadership that for, for us that were kind of involved with them for kind of the earlier days that were around kind of, you know, things like the block size wars. They had a particular kind of political viewpoint on that as to kind of how the software should be. And their software was also kind of designed in a way that was influenced by their experience during that. So it was really shaped by, you know, by real life events and things that occurred in Bitcoin's growing pains. And I think they've represented one of those kind of few long standing companies that were kind of a rare combination of long standing, successful and yet still pretty small and incredibly approachable in the fact that you could kind of hit these guys up and ask them questions and if you went at the right way and Even if you did it the wrong way, you might get a bit of a kind of ribbing at times. But overall, they're incredibly approachable, polite guys and very eager to share their vision with you.
- [08:06]
A
Well said. Very well said. We're recording this on April 24, 2026. There's the big Las Vegas bitcoin conference coming up. There's a special panel on basically the war on cryptocurrency. And you'll have people like Cash Patel, head of the FBI, Todd Blanch, who is the US Attorney General, and another guy who is high up in crypto legislation. There's a theory that maybe this is an announcement that the samurai wallet guys will be getting pardoned. So we'll see what happens. And any thoughts on that, Max, and the current situation of seeking a pardon and where. I don't know where the samurai wallet guys stand at this point in time?
- [08:50]
B
Yeah, I suppose, I suppose my big fear at the moment, I mean, you know, the, you know, when you look at that, that announcement of that particular panel, I think it's the, the head of legal kind of from Coinbase, I think it is obviously the director of the FBI and Todd Blanche, who's now, I think the acting AG is it? But yeah, he, he's obviously kind of, kind of quite well known in the space for having written a kind of, what was known as the Blanche memo, which was pretty clear about them not prosecuting devs that were doing this type of kind of software. And yet obviously all these prosecutions continued on. I think unfortunately, like where we are now. And I think much people's, a lot of people's discussed and I think increasing realization is that the war on crypto means different things to different people. When you look at, from the perception of people like know, aside from just Samurai guys, but particularly the Tornado Cash guys and also a kind of couple of other cases that don't quite get the attention as the, the kind of. The real privacy software, which is Roman Sterling of who was convicted of operating bitcoin Fog and which, you know, at least from my perspective, he. There's very, there's no evidence to suggest that he did. You know, we won't get into all of that. It's kind of a, you know, a whole probably podcast episode in itself. But also Ian Freeman as well, who is operating a bitcoin ATM and real kind of, kind of stalwart of the, of the libertarian movement in, I think in New Hampshire it was, or certainly in New England, I believe. But you know, the war on crypto For a lot of us, I think means the, the, the, the lawfare that people, you know, software developers and small business owners such as, you know, Ian Freeman, that have kind of suffered with, under like the Biden administration and really kind of probably what kind of been started under Obama as well. I think unfortunately that, you know, the war on crypto to some others in the space is just not like getting a banking license for your regulated industry, for your regulated company that happens to be in the industry. It's not being able to easily get clear regulations that you can operate your regulated company with and bring up a kind of a fence around it once you've complied with those regulations that enables you to kind of have protection, you know, a bit of a kind of regulatory moat to stop other kind of companies, you know, going up against you. It's the fact that companies, particularly in the U.S. for example, have a whole bunch of different, like, you know, licensing to get, depending on the state. And that's been, you know, problematic versus clear regulation that maybe you can kind of adhere to at the national level. So kind of, I think my fear here is, is that as far as Cash Patel and Coinbase and Todd Blanch are concerned, the war on crypto for them, and you know, yes, it's kind of crazy they're talking about it being like a free speech thing, but I think for them is just making sure that companies that want to be compliant and regulated and are actually chasing regulation have the ability to raise money and list on particularly US Exchanges and run businesses there and get pretty well integrated with the traditional finance system. I think for them that's what the war on crypto ending means for them. Despite the fact that obviously all those companies are heavily dependent on the efforts of those type of software developers, not only for kind of building the tools that their companies have been built on, but also as we're seeing particularly in Europe and France and not kind of uncommon in the US as well, but problems in terms of consequences with lack of privacy impacting people from having submitted KYC documents and then getting exposed raids on homes, muggings, that type of thing, burglaries, etc. Because of the really poor kind of state of transactional privacy, kind of personal privacy in the crypto space, which the bulk of these kind of crypto prisoners have been building tools to or have been involved in the tools. You take Sterling off, he wasn't even building the tool, he just happened to use this tool and now by proxy has kind of suffered for that. But yeah, despite the fact these Companies are kind of heavily adjacent to the efforts of these developers and are really related. Unfortunately, I think it doesn't seem to kind of be particularly applicable. So I think, yeah, I mean, I can, I hope I'm wrong and I hope kind of over in the next week or two that Vegas happens and we get surprised and Trump realizes the kind of there is still political capital to be had by cozying up to the kind of libertarian stroke kind of crypto kind of community for votes in the midterms and kind of offers a bit of an olive branch and appreciates it probably as foreign policy hasn't been that particularly pop. Particularly popular and that this is a way of getting some goodwill. I hope that's the case. But I, I unfortunately, I think they're that disconnected from the rank of file here that yeah, we're probably not going to see particularly good news on that front and we're going to have to wait for something else to, to develop there.
- [14:20]
A
I will tell people that Bill and Keoni.org check out that website. This is the website about the Samurai Wallet guys and gives instructions about how you can, for example, sign the petition for a pardon. But just as important, maybe send a little donation to help them offset some of the serious legal costs that they incurred and the fines that they incurred along the way. Are you willing to say Max? Because we have heard a lot from Keone and now we hear a lot from his wife, both of whom have been on the show recently. What's the deal with Bill, otherwise known as T Dev though? Because we haven't really heard anything from him.
- [14:56]
B
Yeah. So Bill is a bit more. Well, he was not so kind of open to kind of receiving kind of communication the same way that Keone is. I think it's fine to share some kind of information, like he's a private guy, but I can say that he's certainly still in good humor. I email him and in fact I just received an email today from him. Um, I've been using to actually communicate with both of them. I, I generally, I actually sent a few emails to Bill and I've only really sent one to Keanu, which I should kind of correct and kind of send him something soon. But personally speaking, like, I've, I've tried to keep more in touch with Bill just because I know that Keone has other people writing to him. Um, but I can do a little shout out. Econo Alchemist, um, sent him, Sent Bill a letter today. Sorry the other day. And there are some magazines going to him that he did I've been sending books to Bill, so Book Bill. I spoke to Bill before he went in and yeah, he had like a kind of a list of books. You know, Bill speaks fluent French and most of these were kind of French books. So bit of an effort.
- [16:13]
A
Of course he had a list of French books.
- [16:15]
B
Yeah. So yeah, I've got pretty much all of them over to him. I've got one that I couldn't get in the US that I got in, in France and had it sent to my parents place in the UK and get that. I'll get them to post that over and kind of just kind of. I was using like a kind of some software called Core Links that I could email both of those guys for, but Bill. And one of the things I'm going to actually mention to K is that Bill's actually just used another system recently where he, instead of me having to log into a portal to email him, I can actually email Bill directly. And Bill's got kind of a plan here where, you know, obviously these emails that we send to each other are completely surveilled and checked. But Bill actually even has some access to some Google searches, very basic like Internet access from. I can see again heavily restricted and he can kind of get text versions of the website of websites, for example, so not fully interactive. And from what I can see as well, he's even got like a very kind of basic chat GPT kind of connection. So there's a kind of a, like, I don't know if this is even going to be available to QA because they're both at different facilities. But effectively this kind of software has been kind of done and is a way to kind of provide some benefit to inmates so, you know, they can do things like, you know, help educate themselves or deal with kind of, you know, legal appeals and things like that and do the necessary research there. So yeah, I've kind of heard from Bill. He was at one point cleaning cars in the, in the kind of the garage of, of the facility he's in. But he's managed to kind of move off that job, which think wasn't the most pleasant in freezing New York cold to something a little more accommodating. But yeah, overall I think like from Bill's perspective, like it's all kind of quite manageable for him. He's a tough guy. I think his biggest problem is, is that as a facility he has, you know, yes, it's kind of certainly an easier experience than like the time he had in that absolute shithole of A medieval prison in Portugal. But at the same time, like on the downside, he hasn't got kind of quite the same kind characters and, and freaks to entertain himself with in, in this prison. So it's kind of, you know, as he's kind of doing some writing that he won't publish at all while he's inside, but he's going to kind of write up and I think we'll write either, you know, write a book or you know, whether that be fiction or non fiction, I'm not really sure. But he'll be kind of doing writing and obviously kind of, you know, for the inspiration whatever. I think the, you know, nothing quite beat the, the Portuguese prison and he spent kind of 12 weeks at, when it all went very kind of quiet in 2024 with us not knowing really to him. So yeah, I think he's, you know, he's doing as best as he can under the circumstances, I think. Yeah, probably. The other thing I should mention is, and again, this is not giving away that's anything that's not kind of already really known, but hopefully I can kind of just you know, bring to kind of light the kind of, the human side of this is, you know, Bill's wife is not an American citizen. She's not based in the US and so I think for Bill that's an extra kind of difficulty that he has versus Keanu. Whereas Keanu can get visits from Lauren, it's fairly easy. Like Bill's wife's actually got to come over, fly over and spend a period of time in the country. And obviously there's going to be a kind of, you know, visa for a period of time and then make her way over to kind of visit him in, in prison. And so it's, there's going to be kind of far longer breaks for between them seeing each other. So I think that's kind of very tough. And obviously then they see each other probably kind of very frequently for a short period of time. It's kind of like a very, very, it's like the toughest version of a long distance relationship that you kind of think of there. So yeah, it's certainly not easy, but I can, I can at least kind of tell everyone that's listening here that he's not lost his sense of humor and he's, he's still, he's still a fantastic writer and he's, you know, it's good to hear from him and yeah, got, got no, no concerns. We'll, you know, we'll see him at the other side some interesting stories to say, hopefully.
- [20:20]
A
Oh, all. All documented, no doubt. And you know, he. He seems like the kind of guy that rolls with just about every punch that you can imagine.
- [20:29]
B
Absolutely. Yeah.
- [20:30]
A
I'm going to shout out his substack, by the way. He was writing some stuff leading up to going to jail. It's recluso. R E C l u s o774. Maybe I'll put this in the show notes as well. That's on substack and people can track down. My French is not amazing. So I had a native French person read it and they say it's pretty fun stuff. Pretty fun stuff. So. All right then. Moving on to some broader questions in the bitcoin world. Now, Max, we'll just quote this tweet. Cypherpunk, Jameson Lopp and other Bitcoin developers propose BIP360 1 to freeze Quantum vulnerable wallets. This could lock dormant BTC like Satoshi Nakamoto's 1.1 million coins, now worth 74 billion, before Quantum computers can steal them. Good or bad idea, Max.
- [21:23]
B
I'll confess, like, I didn't even bother reading the entire bip. Not that I've got much interest in that process anyway. But yeah, I kind of took a brief read and within the first few paragraphs, I, you know, is pretty appalled by it. There's just so much there that, you know, aside from just kind of being unrealistic to even do, is just kind of just on a principles basis is. It didn't seem correct to me. You know, I think kind of it was pretty roundly criticizing the community as well. I suppose there's a few things that kind of, you know, jump out to me, but I think like, number one, like, is, you know, even if it's not kind of explicitly said in this way, but if the kind of the process involves it, anything that comes close to confiscating coins is never a good kind of thing, in my opinion. I think. I mean, look, just. Just from speaking, I'll kind of put this out there right from the start. I don't see kind of quantum stuff as particularly kind of high priority to be looking into it. I think it's obviously something that should be considered, but there's just so many other things in the. In the bitcoin world that have a far kind of higher priority to be looked into from a core development perspective. And I think a lot of this kind of stuff is being motivated by the social media attention and the fact there's obviously a bunch of companies Raising money, you know, for, for kind of mitigating against a quantum threat that, you know, isn't even kind of defined as to kind of what that is or kind of known with any kind of surety on the horizon. But I think just as a kind of a principle is that the protocol itself is not. If you're operating a protocol, the protocol's responsibility isn't to kind of give you property rights. You don't own coins in Bitcoin. Just to kind of be very clear, you shouldn't be designing, you know, without getting into the details of the. The actual BIP itself, but you shouldn't be designing processes where you say, hey, you know, Gabriel, you have this many BTC max, you have this amount of btc, and we should design a protocol that, you know, ensures that you own that number of btc. Like, that's not how the protocol even works. Now, sure, we, we. We operate like that, and when we have wallets, we see that balance. But, but all the Bitcoin protocol is, is you move BTC when you have the ability to provide a valid signature for the, for the ledger movement. And so for me, kind of, it's really kind of quite out of scope for anyone to kind of be concerned about the actual individual owner. You know, all you've really got to say is like, you know, is there consensus for actually moving the coins? And if there is and that's a valid transaction. And so, you know, like, we wouldn't try and like, if we know, for example, that an exchange got hacked, you're not going to say, well, that hacker got that, got that Bitcoin that doesn't really belong to them. Let's try and work away where we can kind of move that money back. It's up to whoever owns kind of the keys to move that coin for them to make sure they've kind of taken the required kind of operation. I don't think there's any difference there on a kind of a widespread exchange hack versus, you know, a significant number of coins that are so called quantum vulnerable. They're really just from a kind of, you know, just as a general kind of standard. And it shouldn't be for us to kind of worry about whether people have passed, they no longer have the ability to have their coins, and then someone else through kind of, if, if this was even happen, use kind of some kind of quantum hardware to actually, you know, be able to do the kind of signing for a transaction themselves and move it shouldn't be up to, up to the kind of you know, developers to kind of build something like that into the protocol to do that anyway. So kind of, you know, that's kind of a bit high level but from, you know, at least from a kind of principles perspective, kind of, you know, my viewpoint on that. But I just generally on this I kind of, I'm fairly skeptical of anything kind of coming out on this subject where kind of these kind of something like a BIP is written for this kind of thing. For me, if anything, I'd say it's kind of done more to, to raise the profile of the people that are writing that bip, you know, more than anything else and shouldn't be taken too seriously.
- [25:55]
A
Well, on that topic, one of your responses I saw on Twitter to a post surrounding this BIP suggestion, you said this proposal is not, is also not a bip. I have absolutely no interest in the BIP process. What do you mean you're not interested in the BIP process? Isn't that bitcoin, Max?
- [26:15]
B
Sure. So this was from my own kind of protocol. So kind of. This wasn't to do with the quantum stuff. This was something that I kind of done myself that.
- [26:24]
A
Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry. So, right. This was a comment not connected to what we just discussed. But bigger picture being isn't BIP bitcoin?
- [26:36]
B
Yeah. So kind of like there's obviously kind of like a long, long history on the kind of the BIP stuff and you see similar things like on Ethereum they had the EIP process with Ethereum improvement proposals and I'm pretty sure if memory holds me correctly, this had its origins and based off kind of what was done in the Linux world and I can't remember what it was even called there, but Amir Tacky had designed the, the bitcoin improvement proposal process. And really it was, yeah, it was an idea of a way getting something out I think typically on a mailing list at least initially. And then obviously it became like it's, it was, I can't remember it was a mailing list first or in a repo or whatever. The idea here is you, you, you know, you put out a kind of an idea and you get kind of input and it's a, you know, specifically typically around something like on consensus on Bitcoin where you're making a change, you kind of get some buy in to kind of what you're proposing. You put in some kind of maybe some test vectors code, some samples of what you're trying to do and the whole bit process, it's become almost like an industry in itself it seems, and there's so much confusion around it. I mean, I won't kind of go through all of it, but just kind of a few things I say is that number one, BIP seemed to have kind of outgrown what they were. Rather this bit process is outgrown far more like what it was originally kind of intended for. So, you know, it's very much kind of around decentralized governance on Bitcoin and you know, proposals there for, you know, how the software should operate. And then you've seen, since people do BIPs for, you know, I've seen people do bits for like labeling for a wallet, for example. I think Craig Roh did that or something. And sure, you can use like the bit process to kind of get attention to a proposal and to try and get other people do it. And you know, for the record, Craig Rohr is, is a friend, a great guy and like, you know, does, you know, probably my favorite wallet in Bitcoin, but. So I certainly don't really pick on him. But just kind of one of the things I could think about. But it's almost like another example of like where bips have been used for like a number of different things that probably don't need to even be a bit. For example, like they could just be just a proposal like BIPs themselves kind of, especially if they're in the core repo. You get a lot of eyes on it and not everything really needs to be there. And for example, if you're doing wallet software and it's not something that needs to go into the core wallet, it probably doesn't need to even to be a BIP in the first place. People have done BIPs for, I mean, it feels really unfair to pick on Craig on that one on the labeling. But there's, I've seen bips I think, you know, on, on all sorts of things, know, in the last few years and, and, and they're bizarre because they, they just, they don't need to be BIPs, for example. It was kind of very much something kind of more on the kind of protocol side. Obviously there's some well known bips like bip39 where you, you had like a, you established like seed words for a standard and that was kind of, you know, loudly kind of criticized and you know, rejected by a number of kind of core developers. But you know, this is where a lot of confusion sits in. It doesn't matter whether people reject it or say I don't like it at the end of the day. It's just a proposal and people can still build what was set out in a proposal. And something like BIP 39, for example, has become like a de facto way for individuals such as me and you like less so obviously on the institutional side, but certainly the retail side for wallets to handle their key the way for their key standard and key import and export and generation there, you know like 12 or 24 words and a passphrase that gets converted into a master key, which in itself was also described in a bip being bip 32. And then you've got things like bip 44, which is like accounts an account structure and hierarchical deterministic wallets. So you've got all these kind of bips. And again, like even the way that those. Even when something like a BIP has been written, you don't necessarily get like adherence to the standards in those BIPs. By the time they get to implementation, those BIPs aren't necessarily maintained in terms of updates to them, them and all that. So when I say I've not got really interested in the bit process, it probably means a few things. Number one, typically as individuals such as myself, if I'm doing a proposal for something like I'm just, you know, just, just max, I'm not working on Bitcoin core, I never will and I never have. If I'm doing a proposal for something like, I'm not going to expect a Bitcoin core developer to even look at it or be interested in it or it to be appli. Applicable to many people. So there's just no reason for me, for example, to do anything as a bit. Secondly the bit process because the nature of some of the people involved in it with assigning, you know, what was really an administrative task of saying, assigning numbers and maintaining a repo of like these MD markdown files of kind of, you know, of descriptions. People seem to have kind of interpreted as though you've got to go and get approval and if someone says yes, that's kind of good, then it can kind of happen. And like that's just simply not the case with, with a bit and there is no approval, you're seeking for it, you're trying to obviously get consensus. In some ways if someone says, hey, I don't like it, I don't agree with it, like they can't veto it. Like you can write nac. Like I don't whatever that as I understand it's like not acknowledged. You know, I always interpret NAC as something using like a messaging Specification people can use the word term NAC for a bit, but it's irrelevant. Like, you know, you can kind of give feedback and the whoever's maintaining that kind of proposal can maybe incorporate it or they can argue with it. But I mean ultimately like, you know, it's, it's immaterial what you do. And so kind of, you know, certainly kind of from my perspective I'm not looking to kind of have something rejected by someone because I'm not asking for permission for a proposal in the first place. And then kind of, I suppose lastly, kind of my aspect for the bit process as well is, is that I have no real interest in it is because I would say as well there's been a lot of kind of certainly amongst the less technical people in the space they feel that if they put something to a bip, then somehow that will happen. And like, at least from my perspective, like if I was to write proposal, which I've done recently for a kind of entirely kind of separate piece of work, but I wrote a proposal so I could get feedback from people I respected and maybe someone that I wouldn't expect to give feedback to give me some useful feedback so I could incorporate myself and you know, help spot kind of errors and all that and help me do it work on a specification. And that was for the purposes so I could, I could write software and other people could write software with some kind of form of reference implement yeah reference protocol to work from. So we're all working from the same page. So that's kind of like what I can, what, what I kind of seek to do. And you know, I can do that writing a website or you know, writing a Word document or a PDF however anyone wants to. You can do that however you best, you know, for, to distribute it. I certainly don't need and I've got no interest in, in reading bits that, that people do on, on. On the year on Bitcoin Core because quite honestly, like, you know, what happens on Core doesn't really tend to affect me too much. You know, my node, you know, I can't even remember what version it's on. It's on a few versions behind at the moment. I largely care what the, you know, what's happening on the kind of the wallet side and all that. And that really just only depends on the, you know, the software developers that maintain those wallets and stuff happening. Consensus is happening obviously in a far longer time frame. And you know, these changes aren't sudden certainly from my perspective and really, and I think a Lot more people should probably have this approach. Shouldn't really concern yourself too much with kind of consensus stuff unless you really understand it. And, you know, your kind of opinion on it is somewhat irrelevant because it doesn't matter whether you, you know, running a node or not. Like typically kind of, you know, what's enforced here in Bitcoin is, is from like, you know, what I described kind of the large economic actors in the space, these big custodians, exchanges, the large whales. So, yeah, you want to be aware of roughly what's happening. But, you know, the idea that you can have any real effect on the governance of Bitcoin as an individual, no, you don't. You know, you voluntarily interact with it, but you submit yourself to the rules of this open and free network to operate on.
- [35:13]
A
I think that's very fair take on that. Continuing though, the theme of BIP Max, one of your and my favorite people to follow on Twitter, Orange Surf. Yeah, says that your wallet should be connected to your note, especially if you have an opinion on bip110. Could you break down a little bit what's going on in that statement?
- [35:40]
B
It's been a while since I've seen like the. I've not even read bip110. I'm aware. So, you know, apologies for the little kind of shaky and detail here, but I'm certainly aware of kind of some of the beliefs on that. So they're unhappy with, obviously, what's the best way to describe it? I'd say arbitrary data on chain. So this is kind of fitting what, what, what individuals see as transactions that aren't financial in the way that they'd expect, even if they're meeting consensus, strictly speaking, on a Bitcoin perspective. And they're particularly on the kind of, I think on the filtering side and potentially like, I think there's a chance here on, on bit 11 0, there's like, there's a. I think there's a date here in which potentially there's a chance where they'll even soft fork and kind of like reject transactions that don't fit certain kind of standardness, for want of a better word, that they're after. I don't think that's kicking in yet. I don't know the details of when that is. But I think, you know, what you should be very aware of though, and I think this is kind of on Orange's point, is that your wallet is simply a keychain for signing transactions, but when your wallet sees like a balance of Bitcoin and when your wallet understands when it's received Bitcoin and when you're kind of making a transaction, it's the wallet that interacts with the node at that point. And what node you're connected to is very important. And so if, for example, your node is connected to someone that's running an alternate implementation like something like Knots or in this case it's bit 110, you know, the reference client's been changed, then there is a chance that you could find yourself forked off on a different network because you're not kind of in consensus with the, with the rest of the network. And so, you know, like one, I think orange surface, right, is your wallet should be connected to a node that you run, ideally and that you know kind of what, you know what that represents and what it's doing. But secondly, even if you don't run your own node, I think you need to be aware of the node that you're connected to. For example, what you know, what software that is running and what version it is and what the rules are. And this also kind of takes me back to kind of when we were talking about Samurai right at the beginning is, you know, it was very early in my kind of time using Bitcoin, but Samurai probably punching above their weight at the time, but were pretty vociferous open about their support for what was then in 2017, a user assisted soft fork which never actually happened, but it was to get SEGWIT in. And they were anti a block size increase. But one of the reasons their node software was designed the way it was was that if you weren't running back then, wasn't the case with Samurai, you couldn't run your own node, you had to use their node. They were very opinionated on what the node should be doing, what rules should be going along. So you knew is chained that your transactions and your bitcoin that you controlled would be being broadcast and we'd receive on. And they were very clear that what the rules their bitcoin node would be on. And so if we are in a situation, it's certainly, as far as I understand, certainly nothing kind of critical happening in terms of chances of forks happening. But if you are transacting on Bitcoin and this is only when it really matters, it doesn't matter with you passively downloading blocks or filtering, none of that really matters when you actually transact, you move bitcoin from, you destroy one UTXO and you create another as you transact. When the time comes it's important. And there is some kind of user assisted soft fork or a minor assisted fork, something like that. You do need to be aware of the, of the node that you're running and the rules that it's set to so you can be sure that you know you're not going to end up being in a problem where you, you know, you're broadcasting a transaction and you find it's doesn't get confirmed or you think you've received payment for something and actually you didn't because it's, you're looking at the wrong fork. Yeah, that kind of thing. And it's certainly going to be important if you're, if you're dealing with trading, you know, you're, you're on an exchange or whatever and you, you think you've received bitcoin, you think you sent it and you know your counterpart, especially for a kind of financial trade or an exchange, doesn't recognize it. It's going to be important for you to kind of understand that.
- [40:06]
A
Let me get your thoughts on this. There's some wild things that one can see going to, let's say Bitcoinmagazine.com completely blown my mind. Some of the articles that I see on there, just cosmic stuff. Amazing. Also podcast episodes, some of which inspired me to create my own commentary on bitcoin. Is Bitcoin Divine? It comes to mind as one podcast episode title that greatly inspired me. What is the worst bitcoin podcast episode that comes to mind for you? Or maybe an article? Can you remember the title? Or if not, maybe the sentiment?
- [40:47]
B
Like I've generally got a pretty good like nose for sniffing out what's going to make me rage and wouldn't listen to it. I'm going to struggle to put you exactly on like a day. It's actually kind of so long back. So, you know, But I can tell you who it was that really kind of made me rage. It's kind of interesting because this individual now is, I think people are waking up a bit to kind of some issues. But I remember kind of in the early days, this would have been probably 2018, 2019. I remember Pierre Rochard doing kind of podcast stuff and going really heavy in on, you know, this is a savings protocol. Like this is what it is and gonna have to, you know, struggle the exact thing that was being said. But it was, it was around the redefinition of like censorship, resistance. It was, you know, say Fidena Moose was kind of talking around the same thing. There's about faith around the you know, it's not particularly light hearted or amusing here, but I think it was kind of. It was a very kind of fundamental kind of shift in the, in the bitcoin culture. It was a kind of a reclassification of censorship. Resistance from censorship. Resistance isn't about you kind of like making a transaction you're not supposed to make. Like, you know, me buying drugs or me buying, you know, you know, buying a banned burk or, you know, if we, if we keep in kind of current politics, me paying a toll at the Straits of Hummus to get my ship through or something like that, that they reclassified it to like, oh, bitcoin is, you know, censorship. Resistance is being able to kind of transfer value from yourself to yourself in the future by saving. And like they went very hard on like, you know, bitcoin is saving and that's all it is. And in fact, you should never spend your bitcoin. I think it was around that time. I can't come to tell you on a particular podcast. I can't. You know, I, I know Pierre at the time was doing a podcast. I'm sure it was him because I remember, I. I still remember visually like him. This was him pre facial hair, sitting kind of, you know, you know, you know, in. I can't remember if it's kind of called like a nakamato podcast or institute podcast, whatever. I think it was particularly egregious to me because his, his friend at the time. You don't see him tweet anymore. Forget the guy's first name. Goldstein, whose net tweets under the handle Bitstein or Bitstein, however you pronounce it, had done this kind of great YouTube video of how bitcoin was anarchy back in kind of like really early. It must have been like 2014, 2013 or something like that. And there it was for me, seeing these guys that have been really early in the space absolutely grok what bitcoin was about and what it meant suddenly kind of turn into these kind of Nguyen. You know, bitcoin is saving kind of only thing. Yeah. As for kind of like, I'd love to give you kind of better examples of like, probably what. There is an absolute plethora of cringe content. But like, I just won't entertain it. Like, I won't watch podcasts. I can't sit through it, you know, of the, of the kind of, the more kind of cringe things, man, I couldn't even like watch Peter McCormack's show because I kind of found him, his Kind of playing the kind of the dumb guy asking the questions. Stick. Very irritating. Very kind of very quickly. Yeah, like I've been very good at filtering out that stuff, you know, really in the last, I suppose, five or six years and just been far more focused, unfortunately.
- [44:22]
A
Well, hey, who says filtering is bad all the time?
- [44:25]
B
Yeah, indeed.
- [44:26]
A
Now Max, who's a bigger threat to sound money? Is it Luke Dash Jr. Or Jerome Powell?
- [44:33]
B
Yeah, I really would say like no joke intended. Like I think Luke Dash Jr. Genuinely is. And I think the reason is you can look at Jerome Powell and obviously he stands for so much that isn't sound money and isn't important. But fundamentally what Jerome Powell does on a day to day basis is have influence over a fiat system, which that system in itself is. Obviously it's not a voluntary system, it's coercive. But, but as we've said before, you know, you can opt out of that. I think the problem that I have with someone like Luke Dash Jr. Is is that you've got someone with some pretty bad politics and has put in some pretty bad, where they try to put in some pretty bad kind of software implementations, you know, into, into the reference client and have had a kind of a history of, of sympathy towards censorship. And we've obviously got a lot of influence in space and their influence is in this kind of wonderful voluntary system that we have now. And that is, you know, a pretty close to kind of, you know, it's far, far from perfect, but a pretty kind of close, you know, rendition, I suppose you say, of sound money. Still fundamentally to me, like Bitcoin should be a cash system. It's not, not really a cash system. It's also not really sound money as it is at the moment. But I think it's still a kind of a worthwhile goal and it can be sound money. And it, you know, there's a lot of properties that Bitcoin has that I think that makes it emulate what you could consider sound money. But it certainly falls short of it now. But it's certainly a kind of the direction that the developers and application builders and users in this space should still go towards. Because the sound money aspect of the cash system has been, I think most importantly a crucial start of its bootstrapping of its popularity. But it's also what kind of keeps it anonymous system and what keeps people's kind of faith in it going in the fact that, you know, these rules don't. There's some kind of certain rules in that system that don't change Obviously the consensus does change. There's been a lot of changes to bitcoin since Satoshi kind of released it. But there are kind of some things that have just remained constant that are. I think they're very important for those that care about sound money. But I do think that the sound money thing has been a bit of a distraction though in some ways and has. Has meant that a lot of people have missed the wood from the trees. About what the system was certainly designed to do at the beginning and isn't doing so well now.
- [47:19]
A
Wanted to get your opinion on a bitcoin company. Max, you're very up to date with what's going on in the space. What are your thoughts on the company service strike?
- [47:35]
B
My big disappointment was that Jack Mallers. Jack Mallers, that's it? Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I suppose I was kind of a bit biased against it because Jack, pretty talented dev, he did a really good like lightning kind of he called a wallet. It wasn't really a wallet. It was more like a kind of a thin client back in the day for lnd. And it was a great little app, really nicely done, great UX ink and one that I used when I was first playing around with lightning. And so I was disappointed when he went in the direction of strike anyway because, you know, look, I understand it like I doubt him doing Zap. That was what it was called, this kind of light kind of client. I doubt there was a kind of a good way of monetizing that. But yeah, I was disappointed when that project got effectively archived and no was no longer being maintained and he went on to. To. To do strike. I think, you know what's. What I find disappointing is, is that, you know, I see, you know, I don't get an awful lot of it in my feed because again, I'm fairly good at filtering this stuff out. But it's big on. On. On just kind of marketing with these kind of slightly kind of cringe bitcoin kind of culture stuff. Now that's so common. You know, this constant talking about like sound money, how everyone's got to be on a bitcoin standard and like, you know, yeah, it's the thing to save. Know this is what's going to kind of like, you know, you, you, you know, US dollar is like this terrible thing and like if everyone uses bitcoin, like, you know, we can move away from the system. Yeah, it's a company that obviously is fully integrated into the traditional fiat system. I mean, I'm a little out. I've not used it for a long time, but certainly a kind of couple of years ago when there's a lot of kind of at least I saw a lot of marketing around. It wasn't even really using Bitcoin as, as a kind of a settlement methodology to perform what Stripe was offering, which was the ability to pay kind of bitcoin invoices and being a kind of a point of sale payment aspect as well, moving money from doing remittance. It was heavy on stablecoin integration, particularly with Tether and all that. And I think many years ago they ended up even doing a blog post about that. That. So I think, you know, I've got no interest in it. I certainly haven't used it. I think it's, it's much more of a us thing. I still will not forget when there was a lot of big kind of an announcement as to kind of all the companies that be, you know, receiving Bitcoin. I think Whole Foods or whatever, Whole Earth and we're kind of down there as you know, that and then that nothing ever happened with that. I know there's been some kind of greater kind of adoption with merchants I think in the domestic US market with ability to be able to kind of take payments. But again, you know, very kind of lightning heavy, very middleman heavy. And you know, the software at least kind of, you know, generally kind of like nice ui, nicely designed. But you know, none of this is like interesting to me in terms of, you know, like I don't like the messaging from the company. It's not something that, that resonates with me. And you know, all the software there involves you kind of, you know, giving you know, your personal details over KYC itself to use. They've had to get money transmitter licenses. You know, from my perspective, if I'm going to be in a position where in order to use Bitcoin or Lightning I have to give away my kind of personal details and I would have to, you know, I would run the risk of, of having my transaction censored. Honestly, I just have no interest using it. It just, you know, I don't want to use it just because it's bitcoin. I would far rather use like a fintech type app like a Revolut or a Wise, which I generally find give a better experience and better rates. I've got like no interest using you know, Stable Coins for example to like make payments at various services I use. I'll just happily use like a debit or a charge card from one of the kind of the very other polished and nice apps out there that I can, if I need to remit to people. And then, you know, I'll use Bitcoin in the way that I kind of want to, which is just like cash. And those two, two things will be kind of completely segregated. It disappoints me that Jack has kind of spoken a bit disparagingly of, of, of like the people that want to, not KYC and all that. He's kind of, I think, being a bit dismissive about like, oh, you know, if you want to use Tor and you want to do that, you're really private, then sure, you know, we're not for you. And it's kind of like, okay, like, you know, that's, that's fine. You know, I get that he's building something else. I suppose I've just personally been a bit confused why he wants to use kind of crypto and on chain stuff for very traditional finance remittance stuff, because at least in my perspective, I don't think they're particularly compelling use cases for doing compliant payments. You know, I think you can use existing banking system to do that pretty well yourself. And if it is expensive and you're finding expensive and difficult to do, then you've probably just, you know, you're dealing with a, a banking jurisdiction, for example. It's going to be expensive whatever way you're dealing with it. And if it is cheap with crypto for that period of time, then great, make use of it. But it's not going to last long because the compliance people sink their teeth into it and the regulators get there. You know, you'll find your best off just using a regular app at that point.
- [53:22]
A
Yeah, I think it's just an entirely different worldview is what people have to recognize about that. Max? Yeah. I do want to get into something that you created recently. We talked about the BIP stuff and suggesting changes and such. You have created something. This is bip47db GitHub IO and it is a way of making paynims more resistant to censorship. Could you talk a little bit about this thing that you've written up and we'll certainly have links for people to have a look at.
- [53:53]
B
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, so, yeah, one thing that's probably a little confusing, there's not really an easy way of naming it, but it's not a bip. It is in relation to bip 47, which was a bit from over 10 years ago for proposing a way of doing reusable payment codes, which at the time was denounced by a few core developers, but yet was implemented and has been implemented into like a number of wallets since. So I kind of named this bit 47 because that's kind of the name of the, you know, that's kind of very well known with, with these type of payment codes or reusable payment addresses as they're also known. And you know. Yeah, it's a database for storing those codes. Yeah, it's just on a GitHub pages account at the moment, sorry, big pages web page at the moment I have got a domain, I haven't kind of put it that domain yet. I've got bit 47 db.org which I'll kind of start switching things to in a bit. But yeah, just as a kind of a bit of background. So actually this kind of idea of mine actually happened, you know, came about a few years ago actually and it was something I kind of actually mentioned to the samurai guys at the time. And just to probably provide like a bit of context here, someone actually asked me kind of in the comments on this, like can you, you know, put it in layman's terms and you know, I'll just try and like, yeah, find my kind of tweet and I'll kind of talk through it here. But like bit 47 just as a kind of very kind of high level thing, you have a kind of a long address type code, it doesn't exist on chain and then you share it with someone else and when they pay that with a compatible wallet between you and that person, you will basically create regular bitcoin addresses to pay to. And the neat thing about bit 47 is you can put that address up there like say you could be a merchant, you can do it, you can have it as a donation and anyone looking there can't see the actual bitcoin address that people pay you to. It doesn't render to that. It's, you know, it's private to the people paying you. And so it's a great kind of, it's been a great kind of tool for, for stopping like chain analysis type companies getting that kind of first bit of observation. Now one of the things that kind of I'd realized is that BIP 47 is a kind of, you know, it's a, it's an old bip, you know, from about 2015 or 2016, I think 2015. And obviously there's a bip and what's kind of written in the bip and then there's the actual implementations, you know, Samurai Wallet was kind of a. Probably the first, I think, to. As it may not be in the first. I can't remember if they were. May have been certainly one of the earliest. And then they also did a thing called Paynims, which was like a kind of centralized directory of payment of BIP 47 payment codes. BIP 47 codes are, like, super long. They're very. No one's going to remember them. And then paynims were a way to kind of take that really long code, give it a kind of a nice name and a friendly kind of avatar, and then to kind of, you know, help people share their payment codes a bit more easily. Now, most people's understanding of bit 47 and pay NIMS is kind of limited to that. You know, like, oh, I've got, like, an avatar that I can see, and now it's got a name. Oh, and then there's a long address, and I can pay that. And I've also, you know, people also know they've got to make what's called a connection transaction that kind of helps you recover the funds that you and your counterparts send to each other. So it's kind of like a way of anchoring your kind of payment channel, for want of a better word, between you. And I think most people's understanding is kind of limited to that. Like, hey, you know, I could send kind of payments in that way without having to kind of keep on sending an address to another person. But one of the things I kind of realized a few years ago is I'd been trying to do recovery with a Samurai wallet or a Sparrow wallet, and I'd been. I've often shared keys between Samurai and Sparrow. So, like, when I've kind of made connections, for example, on Sparrow, I wanted to, you know, you want to make sure that, you know, you can also send from the same wallet that's, you know, managed in. In Samurai, for example. And one of the things I've kind of realized is kind of when I've been testing the wallets, is that the Paynim server that Samurai had been maintaining wasn't just only being used for doing a friendly rendition of the payment codes. It was also actually being used to kind of help recovery. And so, like, without getting into kind of too much detail, but, like, if I, for example, if I pay you, Gabriel, you know, I do a connection transaction. And what it actually does when I do a connection transaction is I take, like, what's called your, like, notification address. It's like a legacy address, and I embed some Arbitrary data that into, you know, into a kind of an output on that address. And I actually basically put in my payment code into that address. I'm simplifying things a bit. And you're now aware because like, because you could you monitor your address. Oh, you know, Max now has put or, you know, you don't necessarily know it's me as a name, but you know, my nim I've put into like, you know, Internet address, like a notification that, you know, here's my public code. And then you can do also the same to me. And that's pretty easy when you want to find out who is, who's paying you because everyone writes that same address, their payment code and then afterwards, whatever, whenever they make payments to you all goes to different addresses. And it's nice and private. But when you're like making a payment to someone else, you don't actually like when you're recovering your wallet, for example, your wallet actually can't find easily who you've made all these connections to because you're sending your payment code to someone else's like legacy, this legacy address, which is like a fixed address, but you don't actually see their payment code. And so what these. But the Paynim server that Samurai was kind of maintaining did was it like basically like when you do a recovery, you can actually say, hey, I've made a payment to this address. It's like a regular legacy address. Now I'm going to look up to the Paynim server to say like, what's the associated payment code? And then I'll know and be able to recover like the channels again. Now you're not like completely going to lose access to your coins. You can also re establish payment channels, but that's not always easy to do because you've got to keep on doing other transactions. But the Paynim server has always kind of operated as a bit of a. Kind of like a. I like to think of it as a bit of a crutch to recovery. Now obviously you've still got like, in the case of Sparrow, you've got like almost like a database file. It's called an NVDB file for Sparrow and for Samurai. And then later Ashigaru, you've got TXT file that includes your encrypted encryptions and the metadata in that file. But it's often the case most bitcoiners are going to be, you know, if they really want to kind of save their wallet, yes, they can kind of keep these database files, these recovery files. But most Bitcoin is still, if you actually ask them, they're going to be like, well, it's my 12, my 24 words, my passphrase that's going to help me recover the wallet. But what you find with bit 47 is if you can't like recreate all the transactions and all the channels that you've opened up with these people, if you've received or you've sent coins or you've had coins refunded back to you along these channels, you might have a bit of a challenge recovering those assets when the Paynim server doesn't exist. And so like a while back I'd kind of proposed Samurai, like when ordinals had first been described, like, how about, would it be worth doing, saving these BIP 47 codes as ordinal inscriptions and basically having it as a kind of a backup because the panin server is centralized, it's a single server and all that. And guys were interested, there was some kind of questions, although obviously they had a number of things that were on their roadmap. It wasn't something that was prioritized and, and you know, I didn't come up with any kind of specification or anything. It's just kind of a bit more of a kind of an ad hoc kind of idea and it wasn't, you know, well articulated by me or anything. And I think some of the other opinion on, you know, this was a private group chat at the time from some of the other kind of community members was like, ah, yeah, it's not really that important and like, you know, you don't really want to kind of have that obligation, for example, for samurai to maintain not only their server but to have the cost of like writing data unchained. So like, none of this was really discussed further, but one of the things that I kind of was in my mind was obviously when the arrest happened and you know, the Paynim server wasn't seized but it wasn't maintained anymore. And when you look at how the Ashigaru project approached this, it was kind of interesting because they rebuilt. Well, I say rebuilt. They built an entirely new Paynim server in order to support Ashigaru Wallet. But also they, they also did a thing where they also helped support Samurai Wallet because they actually got control of the old Paynim domain, routed it to their, their server and actually fairly seamlessly for, for kind of any users of Samurai. And Ashigaru managed to ensure that like, anyone like trying to recover their wallet would actually be looking up to Ashigaru's new server and Ashagaru did a thing where they actually like scraped data off the old server from Samurais. And I won't go into detail here because it's in their blog post, it's in the, in the, the proposal that I wrote, but they actually describe how they kind of basically scrape data and repopulated their new Panium server with pretty much all of the data from the old Panium server that Samurai were maintaining and stopped maintaining, obviously because they were, they'd been arrested and were either under house arrest, didn't have access to their servers, or were basically prohibited from operating that company anymore. And it kind of occurred to me like, well, shit, like a few years ago I seen that the pain in server was a central point of failure. It did end up being a central point of failure. And yeah, it's great that Ashigaru managed to recover most of that database, build a new one, all that. But we've still got the same problem. And obviously if Ashigaru are out of the picture at any point, we kind of got that recovery issue and we've got that kind of problem where that you've got this fundamentally decentralized protocol, but all of the wallets and the implementations still rely on like a centralized server to do recovery in a straightforward way. And so what I did really is kind of go back to the drawing board on this and like look at my initial thought, which was pretty unsophisticated. It was kind of like I had this idea in my head of like, oh, like a CSV type file that you could write on a chain and then, you know, did some more research and then, you know, partly as I kind of seen how the ordinals ecosystem had gone, things like BRC20 had been heavily criticized as not being an efficient way to write data. I kind of realized that actually you didn't really need to have like a full table of PayNIM data, you know, with like a notification address in one column and a version number and like a payment code actually you could just basically write down payment codes, inscribe them. You could actually compress that data, get it really efficiently done. And it kind of. I realized that you could like compress and then decompress that data and then basically it could be a way that anyone could like basically back up effectively, like all the payment codes on chain in a way that there's no single point of failure. Now. It's not something that would replace Paynims themselves. You know, there's still like a centralized Trade off where you take a payment code, render it in a, in a kind of more friendly way and like have an avatar that represents it but at least from a recovery perspective and having actually, you know, a record of all payment codes which as a user you use other people's payment codes to derive the channels that you have. Like this is a way to do that. And so yep, put a protocol protocol together again, didn't do anything like a bit process or anything like that. Did my own protocol hosted on GitHub pages, made it a web page people could comment on. And the nice thing obviously about putting it into git is that any other developers or anyone that wants to comment on it and I've had like five issues raising it in which I've actually changed the spec. As a result of that, had some great feedback from people who've looked at it and done feedback is you can now update a kind of a protocol specification, you know, over. And I've been doing that over the last few weeks and had some great feedback and actually what I'm just doing now and hopefully be able to release the next kind of, you know, couple of days is also just building a web tool so that not only like a wallet provider, ideally someone like Ashdaru would do this. Yeah, they'd take the data from their own Paynim database and do this themselves. But actually anyone could do it is to actually kind of query the amount of payment codes out there and say right, I'm going to see what ones are out there, see what ones already exist on chain. And if there are say some payment codes that still haven't been actually written on chain and backed up, anyone can be able to basically create a transaction that writes payment codes on chain. And so what this will actually kind of mean is that effectively like these payment codes that never existed on chain because they're not actually like within the Bitcoin protocol, you know, they're not an actual address stand that Bitcoin recognizes and that was part of their kind of their benefit. But now what we'll actually have is by using the Ordinals protocol we'll actually be able to store what is an off chain payment code and actually embed it in the Bitcoin database so that it's completely censorship resistant, it's completely available, doesn't matter who gets taken down and then someone can actually rebuild another payment directory if they want in the future they've got a kind of common sense or if they need to maybe other wallet implementations like Ashigaru or Sparrow or like Dojo, for example, server mutation. Rather than using the Paynim server as a bit of a crutch for recovery, they can actually go straight on chain and grab this data from the actual blockchain and serve that up. So people aren't using like a centralized server to kind of help in their recovery. So, yeah, sorry, kind of quite a long overview there. But the challenge there is also trying to describe at a high level what bit 47 is and therefore what this protocol there is to, is there to solve.
- [68:53]
A
No. That's great. The whole point of this is to open up the conversation anyway, so, so we can continue that conversation in another episode and certainly on Twitter and Telegram. I'm sure you're open to people respectfully reaching out and having a discussion about this. Absolutely, yeah.
- [69:09]
B
Yeah.
- [69:09]
A
We'll get you out on, on one cultural question here, Max. Going back to the, the motherland, the homeland. How terrible is it, how immoral is it, how racist is it to hold up an English flag or put that up somewhere if you're an English person?
- [69:29]
B
Yeah, I think, I think it's certainly from the kind of the political establishment, the so called elites in the metropolitan kind of London area and the political class, the bureaucratic class, it's not, they are simply not happy to see that imagery. They don't like what it represents. They don't like the connotations culturally with it kind of. For myself even like, I've never even thought of myself as particularly English. I personally identified like more with a, with a British national. That's partly because I've got, you know, Scottish lineage. My surname to Scott's name, although kind of brought up in England and like most of my family England. But yeah, it's a, it's a, it's an odd thing in the, in the, in the motherland because people have different ideas of, of, of who the English people are, who the British people are, what England means. You know, a lot of the time it's kind of heavily tied to kind of involvement in sport and with the way that national teams are represented and you know, obviously, you know, you're not an English citizen, you're a British citizen. And I think, you know, I think people now are. It's becoming ever more clear that just holding a passport doesn't mean you're actually a British person. The same way that, that, you know, if, if I migrated to China and got myself a Chinese passport, no one would actually consider myself me. Ch. You know, ethnically or racially Chinese. Yeah, I think it's still kind of, it's still like in, in certain areas kind of not comfortable. But I think there's a, there's a rising wave now of, of English nationalism and the, the, the Overton window is, is shifting. But I would also say though that, that I think things are getting kind of more polarized in the fact that I think there's a great awakening of English nationalism which was always going to happen with the way the political climate gone with devolution in the UK as well. But at the same time, like, I think the support is going away from the so called mainstream parties and it is now definitely, you know, I think the kind of, the fervor towards that flag and what it represents has increased, but also the hatred towards it by those on the left wing certainly have increased as well. I think. You know, you know, the, the, the, the, the attitudes are kind of getting more polarized, definitely for sure. And I don't think, I don't see anyone kind of reaching across the aisle as the Americans say, and being a kind of candidate that represents both, you know, happening anytime on the horizon. I think very much we're looking at that whoever wins the, you know, the next election when it comes round will probably not have a remit democratically from the large chunk of the population, but may, but, but may be only there either via a coalition or because the quirks first pass the post system. So yeah, it's going to be a bit of polarizing time I think in the, in the UK for, for many years to come.
- [72:33]
A
Yeah, we shall see, we shall see what happens now. I'm going to give you the final thoughts here, Max. As always, folks, the reason I don't talk too much with Max is I appreciate hearing his thoughts on a variety of issues. So this is the conversation starter. You can continue this on Twitter, you can continue this on Telegram. We will share Max's accounts so that you can go and have a conversation with him, follow him. Be polite maybe, maybe not. I don't know that you always deserve people being polite. No, just be, just be honest and I'll give you the final thoughts here. Max, anything you'd like to say as we wind down?
- [73:10]
B
Yeah, a bit of a different, I suppose, final thought for me this time is that, and you know, this isn't just about me getting onto the current thing. It has changed the way I've been working particularly over the last couple of months. But I would say now is that the ability, the ability to make change now is actually greater than it's ever been. And that's in no short order and for some of the listeners here it'll be probably very obvious, but due to kind of the LLMs or AI as it's kind of known now, I didn't go into this kind of detail when I was going through the overview of the protocol that I was talking about earlier because I didn't want to distract from obviously the messaging about what it was about out. But my original idea on that was like looking back on it embarrassingly kind of dumb and naive. And it was me asking an AI, you know, what is an efficient way to do this? What is that? That was kind of how I started kind of down that rabbit hole. And then, you know, it was, you know, like AI is obviously not going to think for you, but when you've got like these tools that have been trained up on some kind of, you know, all sorts of kind of code libraries and stack exchange responses and all that, like the, the output quality is just, is, is, is, is incredible. And you know, I think, you know, I, you know, I'm certainly kind of in the early age discovering kind of how to do this. But like for me, just the last few weeks I've kind of had an output that's been incomparable to any kind of time in. I've always had a strong opinion on software. I've been a user, I've tested a lot and I've got a good understanding of what software does. But I'm not a developer, right. And I've always been limited by what I can get another developer to do for me. And typically in the workplace there's, there's all sorts of bureaucracy, you go through that. But you know, I use like to, to help me design a protocol. I then was very fortunate to leverage some great guys in the space and I didn't go to them and give them like obviously AI slot. I gave them something that kind of made sense to me and I understood and, and I thought was kind of a good first draft, then to comment and then took those, that feedback and then further incorporated it. And then once I got a really good protocol, kind of what I thought was a good protocol kind of done and dusted use that and then to, to kind of build a web app that will then now be a tool to actually do what was just, you know, previously words on a white paper as such. And so that is going to meaningfully, genuinely meaningfully decentralize payment codes, which is an absolutely vital part of not just the samurai kind of ecosystems. I kind of talk about it but that kind of wider kind of standard there I utilize in that stuff that Jordan from the ungovernable misfits crowd had done from having built an information website using similar tools to actually get kind of basically good API documentation and all that. So I was actually able to feed my white paper construction from that documentation there as well. And I'll be able to build a web app that enables me to give tooling that doesn't have to go through an app store, doesn't have to go through, you know, that I don't need like developers to maintain. We'll barely need any hosting for it and do that. And so all I really kind of ask or kind of, you know, my kind of really last words here is that if you've got a problem problem and you know something that you want to solve, don't sit there and hold back for a developer to go and build it. Go and have a go yourself now, like the tools are out there, you go and do it in the same way. I would hope my effort on bit 47 is similar to what other people view as xtx, the NIM that did the Dojo Bay for example, who meaningfully decentralized dojos in that ecosystem, them. And there's still so much, I mean with two years after Samurai RS now there's still so much of the remaining software stack that Samurai had that could be further decentralized, expand upon, built on. And you don't need to rely on a team to of developers to do that. You can kind of, you know, pick out a small aspect for yourself that's important and now get that built out. And you know, we are incredibly fortunate now not only to have those tools, but have a really good community of people that will give you good frank feedback and will test that stuff out for you. You make use of it, get involved, get stuck in. I know we all miss the, the leadership of those guys that are now, you know, unfortunately incarcerated at the time. And I would love to have to have these tools with them under their direction now. But you know, these communities exist out there still. It's a bit more distributed now, but I would say now I don't think there's a community of people that have, that are more robust in the bitcoin space as the kind of of, let's say the former Samurai community now because they've gone and seen like their entire, you know, an entire team that kind of built software obliterated and that stuff is now being built back with a whole host of projects. It's not just a single team. It's not a single guy. There's a whole host of different people building all these things back now. And you know, it really is absolutely at your fingertips. So please get stuck in. If you're looking ideas for ideas, come to me. And if you've got ideas, I'd happily come back and give feedback. But yeah, as long as you're a logical thinker and you can write down what you want, you can do a bit of testing. There's no enormous amount you can do without having development skills now. It just wasn't open to us even a few months ago.
- [78:59]
A
I would second that. We call it AI Mastery. If you already have some inkling of what you're doing, AI can certainly help you to accomplish that thing. Escape the technocracy.com AI resistant. That will get you learning about AI in all the ways we have discussed. All right, thank you so much, Max and we'll see you next time.
- [79:18]
B
Thanks so much.
- [79:19]
A
Hey, thanks for listening. I could really use your help. Real quick, if you could share this episode with someone, engage with me, leave a review anywhere. This helps me to break the technocratic shadow banning that is happening with my brand. And of course, if you really want to escape the technocracy, go to escapethetechnocracy.com privacy tutorial series, books, newsletters, consulting. And of course you can leave a donation. Thank you very much.