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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 not determines the future of the show. See you there. I'm very pleased to be joined by Craig Raw, who is the developer of the bitcoin wallet called Sparrow Wallet. Sparrow Wallet is a PC wallet, very excellent wallet. Back in the day it was one of the only wallets to implement Whirlpool. Obviously with the situation with Samurai, that has been removed. But it's been an incredibly solid wallet on the best platform, of course, which is personal computer. So I'm very pleased to be joined by Craig. This is our third discussion. We're going to get into some very interesting stuff. Silent payments, updates on the Sparrow Wallet and some other Bitcoin related topics. So, Craig, welcome back to the show. How are you doing today?
- [01:36]
B
Great. I'm doing well, thank you very, very much. It's good to be back on the show.
- [01:40]
A
Perfect. So it has been 15 months since we last talked. That would be March of 2025, today's July 2, 2026. What would you say are some of the updates if, if anything serious from Sparrow Wallet in the last year or so?
- [01:57]
B
Yeah, so I would say that in the last year, my major focus, apart from the normal maintenance, which is, which is always a very important part of any soft software project, of course, has been the development of a new feature around silent payments. So that's really taken up, I would say the latter half of last year and the majority of this year to date, quite a lot of work not only in Sparrow Wallet itself, but on the standards development side around silent payments as well. So writing and helping others to write various BIPs, which is the kind of bitcoin standards body, or should we say repository around this, this concept of how do we implement silent payments in wallets and how do we ensure that all the wallets do so in a sort of interoperable level.
- [03:01]
A
So before we get to that, Craig, tell me a little bit about just the regular maintenance of a software, especially one so important that has so much real world funds on it, like Sparrow Wallet. What is it like just maintaining, maintaining a project like this?
- [03:16]
B
Well, I would say it's, it's a process of constantly trying to find the weak points. And when I say weak points, I don't necessarily mean, you know, bugs or security holes. I kind of mean parts of the software which are less well maintained than others and replacing those or finding ways to improve them. But of course there are other areas as well. So, you know, how do you fix the dependencies of the wallet and how do you ensure that the dependencies are always verified? So that's currently a process which Sparrow Wallet's going through. There's really a whole lot of a long list of things where you try and think what are the various ways in which this piece of software could experience difficulties, whatever those might, might be, and you try to then improve them over time. So you're trying to get to a point where it's really robust going into the future and there's nothing worrying you at night where you're kind of thinking that, you know, that dependency, for example, isn't being maintained anymore. How can I ensure that I'm not concerned that it's going to fall behind or I'm going to be in a place where, where that's going to be more difficult to maintain in future. So that kind of thing really goes on all the time and takes up, I would say, 20 to 30% of all of my time in terms of what I spend. It's new feature development obviously is important. People are not going to download new versions of the wallet if there are no new features. But just the maintenance is really a very large part of the work and a very important part as well.
- [05:00]
A
Well, you mentioned silent payments. Let's just get into this from the beginning then aside, maybe let's talk about whether silent payments belongs in Sparrow Wallet and how would that would work. But just big picture here, maybe you could explain what silent payments are and what you think that is doing for Bitcoin users.
- [05:18]
B
So I think in order to answer that, we need to go back in time and look at how wallets were originally made and then kind of take us forward. So if we go all the way back to the Bitcoin white paper, we see that Satoshi wrote about this privacy issue about address reuse. So it goes all the way back to really the origin, the bitcoin origin story is the idea of address reuse is this almost unsolved problem within the original Bitcoin spec. And that problem has been attempted to be addressed many times over Bitcoin's life. So if we look at back the original wallets, you had to create a single key, one key with one address, with one secret to spend at a time. And of course this was good from the point of view of everything was completely independent from the other, but very bad from the point of view of how much effort it took to create a new address. So what happened is people tended to reuse addresses because think about it, if you had to back up your wallet every time you needed to give a new address to somebody, you just would tend not to do so. And so we had these wallets which were these bags of keys, bags of addresses. And that was the early wallet for a few years. And that was obviously not ideal. So then people said, well, let's use the cryptography that we have available to us and create a better wallet. And that was called an HD or a hierarchical deterministic wallet. And that's the wallet that you know, of today it's got this idea of seed words, which is a single secret. And that single secret allows you to derive an infinite number of addresses. And the idea is making addresses really easy to generate would make the address reuse problem better or go away. Now this was over 10 years ago and we can have a look on chain. And because everything is easy to measure on chain, we can see whether it worked. And the reality is it just did not work. So as of Today, we have 70% address reuse on the Bitcoin blockchain. That means that 70% of the time you have a spendable output, it's going to a reused address. And that obviously indicates that even though probably you and the listeners of the show are using a new bitcoin address for every new payment, the reality is the majority of the world is not. And the trend is unfortunately also in the wrong direction. So the 70% is currently going higher. Now we can sit back and say, you know, well, we tried, or we can try and do better. And silent payments is the most recent and I think the most compelling attempt to do better. It's a way in which you can have a static payment address, so a single address. And every time you pay to this address, which is not an on chain address, you can think about it as a payment code. It creates a new on chain address and only you can then see the payments that were made to that on chain address. So the address is private to the sender and private to you as the recipient of the funds. But nobody else can See what's going on. And with this, you cannot reuse an address because the way it works actually uses the inputs to the transaction to create this unique address. So you can just never have the same address. It eliminates address reuse by design. So this is really a very, very much an improved approach to, to a wallet. It basically says if you have a silent payments wallet, you cannot have address reuse anymore. Now if we manage to introduce silent payments and make it widespread, we'll start seeing that 70% address reuse figure come down. And that's really, I think the goal here is reducing address reuse by making it more convenient and getting the privacy benefits that goes hand in hand with it.
- [09:28]
A
Shall I take it your pro silent payments, Theoretically, how does this get implemented into wallets especially, let's say, Sparrow Wallet? What's the, what's the, what's the challenge there?
- [09:40]
B
So interestingly, the design separates the implementation of spending and receive sieving. So you can implement the ability to send to a silent payment address completely independently from receiving to one. And that was intentional from the design signers of this particular wallet system. So the natural place for most wallet implementations to start is the easier part, which is the sending side. And of course that's ideal because we want to have a large variety of different, different wallets being able to send to asylum payments address. That's a, that's a good way for us to be able to get that initial traction. Receiving is more difficult because the way in which it is designed, it's better in every way to the standard address system or even the other static payment systems that we've had before, except for one area. And that area is that you have to scan the chain in order to see what payments have come to you. Now that makes receiving a more difficult thing. And one of the reasons that we haven't seen silent payments take off as fast as we might hope is because of that difficulty, that computational burden that has to be endured. So what Sparrow does through a piece of software, separate piece of software called Frigate, which runs on a server, is makes that process much easier and much faster. So Sparrow itself still loads the wallet in seconds. It feels very much like a normal HD wallet that people are used to, but the server in the backend is doing the hard work of actually scanning the chain in a handful of seconds in order to return all of the transactions that have gone to that wallet.
- [11:30]
A
What about the problem of dust attacks as regards silent payments? Is that a concern?
- [11:39]
B
I think it is something of a concern. It's a theoretical concern at this point. So here we're talking about if you have a silent payments address, what if people sent small amounts to it in order to track when you spent those small amounts and said, ah, you know, I can see that this amount here was sent, was spent and was linked to these other inputs. So what I've done in Sparrow is actually increased the dust limit from 1,000 sats to 5,000 sats. So Sparrow will suggest that you freeze any amount sent to asylum payments address under 5000 SATS. And that's, that's a significant, should I say a more significant sum that than the normal kind of dust limit. It remains to be seen how much of you know whether dust is actually an issue, whether people even send send dust, but something to be observed for sure and certainly I will watch that.
- [12:38]
A
So Craig, as you said, the length of time to scan the wallet has been one of the biggest hurdles of silent payments. How does one get that down in time?
- [12:52]
B
So the initial design of this particular system, that was the initial criticism because it was obvious to see that this was a great system in every way, except for this one area, that it was very burdensome to look at the entire Bitcoin blockchain, which is many gigabytes in size, and to go through every potential amount, every potential output that could have been sent to a silent payments output that could have been something that came to your address and then to scan every single one, because that's what the specification demands. Now, in reaction to that, the BIP authors actually put down a way for clients, clients without the entire blockchain to be able to scan. In my view, that wasn't necessarily the best thing to do because it kind of led everyone down a certain path. But I completely understand why they did it. In response to the initial criticism, that approach that they put forward in the BIP is a valid approach. It does work and it's very private. But unfortunately it also kind of carries or gives the light client a great burden. And it says you have to download quite a lot of data and you have to scan quite a lot of that data. So when you're looking at something like a mobile phone, it typically takes a long period of time and there are a few implementations out there that have gone down this route and in my view they're not particularly usable because it just takes so much time to scan, to download and then scan the chain. So I decided on a very different approach with Sparrow. Even though I'm a desktop, I still don't want users to have to sit and wait for minutes to hours to be able to see whether they have funds in their wallet. The approach I took was to move all of that computation to a server, first of all, to do the actual computation within the database that had the data. So we reduce the entire blockchain to a reduced set that contains one value per transaction, which allows us to then compute over that. That's a standard approach that every silent payments receiver will use. But to then take that database and actually perform computation within the database itself allows you to get much, much faster results. So that's like a 10x improvement. Right, right there. Then the next step that I took, because that clearly wasn't enough, you know, it's. I needed to get this down from something that could take hours to something that felt like a normal wallet that really just took seconds. I think you've got maybe 15 to 20 seconds tops in order for a user to feel like the software is working. And the second step that I took was to move the computation onto gpu. So as far as I know, this is the first kind of use of a GPU in Bitcoin, since we were mining blocks with it. And this basically allowed me to take this computation, which actually turns out to be very easy to kind of implement in a GPU sense, because you can scan in any order. You can scan from the beginning, you can scan from the end, you can scan, scan in the middle. So you can send this computation off to the GPU and it does this kind of calculation really well. And that second step took another 10x right off the time. So now you, you're at 100x off the original time that it took to scan, but it still wasn't enough. We were still in the, in the realm of, you know, kind of a minute and a minute just felt too slow for me. And luckily, what happened at that point is another gentleman came along and wrote a really optimized GPU implementation of many of the algorithmic functions that are required. And with his help, I was able to then get another 10x. So now we're looking at roughly a thousandx in reduction in time to scan the chain. And that brought us down so we could scan for, say, two years in just a few seconds on a reasonably powerful machine. Now, that allowed the release of a public server where you can basically connect sparrow to the server and scan whatever your history is within seconds. And that service is free. Now, to have a public server server which is able to handle silent payments is something that I don't think was really seriously considered before. This work. So I think that that was really important because as much as privacy focused people like to run their own servers, the reality is it's a payments network and it's a network like any other. It obeys Metcalfe's law, which is the power of the network is the kind of strength of it. So you need to have a wide variety of people with access to this technology in order for it to become widespread. And the public server allowed that to happen. So it's still very early days. This has only really been released into the wild for about a month. And we need to go on to the next step now, which is bringing the entire Bitcoin ecosystem along with it, so the hardware, wallets and all of that kind of thing. But I think it's an important step because without the ability for anybody to kind of use this as their default wallet, without for example Binance or you know, the sort of trust wallet to kind of use this as the default method, we're just not going to get to a point where silent payments ever reaches anything beyond, you know, a fun sort of project used by a few, few privacy conscious people.
- [18:57]
A
So as of July 2, 2026, Sparrow Wallet has sending and receiving for silent payments. How do people make use of that? Test that, explore that within the wallet.
- [19:09]
B
Great. So very easy. You just create a new wallet, so file menu, new wallet and then on that settings tab then opens. The very top field is this field called policy type. And there's three different options. One is for single Sig HD Wallet, the second is for multi Sig HD Wallet and the third is for Asylum payments Wallet. So you would select that third, third one and then you just go from there. Now, as I said, we don't currently have hardware wallet support. It's still too new. And I think the hardware wallet support will come. So right now you'll have to create a software wallet in Sparrow in order to use it. But I think that the hardware wallet support is coming. So right now a hardware wallet manufacturer, a vendor can integrate with Sparrow, they can go ahead, all the standards are written and the software is ready to be able to accept and export and to be able to then also handle the signing side of things. So there's a whole requirement in terms of verifying that the address which is generated that the on chain funds actually go to is the correct address. Now that's actually an interesting little aside because what we have here is the idea that you're going to generate an address based on the inputs of the transaction that you create and you do so based on the private keys of those inputs. Now of course only the hardware wallet has an understanding, has knowledge of those keys. So the software behind it, or at least the coordinator in this case Sparrow needs to verify that the hardware wallet has actually not lied and has created the correct on chain address even though it it doesn't have access to those private keys. And the way in which it's done is quite a clever system called a discrete log equivalence proof and that allows us to cryptographically prove that the hardware wallet did the right thing. So all the standards that are required in order to implement that are written and in place and Sparrow will use those in order to determine whenever it's signing for a to send to a silent payments output that it's that the hot hearted wallet is actually doing the right thing. And you know, all of those kind of details needed to be worked out and decided as a community before this could really become a real and kind of, you know, widespread, should I say at least potentially widespread approach to a new wallet system.
- [21:40]
A
Craig, you had some trouble in the last bit of time and especially recently with the Apple App Store. I wonder if you could tell that story real quick.
- [21:48]
B
Yeah, it's actually not too much to tell. So basically there have been a number of scam apps that have appeared on the Apple App Store. Unfortunately people have lost sums to those apps, sometimes significant sums and it's been quite a point of view frustration for me over the years. So one of the things that I did was to create an application that was never published which had just a warning to people saying hey, there are no Sparrow mobile apps if you see one, it's a desktop only app. This as I said, Apple didn't approve prove it. It just sat there in kind of this kind of pre flight state but unfortunately it was used or some, I suspect some automated process came across it and flagged my Apple developer account as a result and that would have affected my ability to release Sparrow on Mac os. So obviously I appealed. But Apple's appeal queue is long and one is not sure so I had to reach out on social media. Luckily I got a great response there. People were very good in pushing it forward and we were able to fix that with Apple's help. So I think it was more the result of an automated accident than anything intentional. And certainly Apple have, you know, have fixed it and added note to my account. And I certainly hope that the silver lining of this is that we are going to see fewer sort of, if I can put it in air Quotes Sparrow Wallet mobile apps, scam apps, in other words, on the App Store.
- [23:38]
A
That was very diplomatic, Craig. I'll just say in. In my own words, from my own perspective, there were a number of scam Sparrow Wallet apps on the App Store. Apple didn't do anything about it. They're busy, you know, censoring other people doing various things. And not only did they not take care of that, they. But they actually ended up flagging your account when you were calling attention to this. So, hey, at least things are fixed now and we can move on. But has Craig, since we've last talked, the Samurai Wallet guys have now gone to prison. Has that created a chilling effect in Bitcoin wallet development?
- [24:22]
B
Absolutely. There's no question that the hard truth is that currently running a server which allows others to create transactions together, and I'll put that broadly, is sitting, whether we like it or not, at the edge of the Overton window. Now, obviously you and I would agree that if those developers do not have custody of the funds, if they are not in control of the funds, they should not be liable. But unfortunately, the reality in the US at least, is somewhat different. You know, if you go back and you listen to Keone's podcast that he did shortly before he went into prison, I think you'll get a good understanding of how stacked the deck is against developers, particularly in certain states in the us and that's just the truth of it. It's very unfortunate, but one has to recognize that truth and one has to do the best that you can given it, because you can't always go head to head sometimes have to find clever ways to work around so that, you know, without wanting to go on about it. Silent payments is one way to work around it. It's a way to bring additional privacy without any means of. There's no servers involved. It's just people calculating private addresses every time. So I think that we have to be clever about the way in which we go forward here. We can't expect to win every battle as much as we might want to, but that doesn't mean that we need to keep going forward and we need to find other clever ways in which to make privacy tools better and to effectively make the situation better. Because the reality is the people in charge will regulate the norm. They will basically, if the norm is addressed, reuse as it is today, then they are going to regulate it as the norm and they're going to increasingly find it easier to say, well, everyone's reusing addresses. And whilst everyone, I mean, 70% in this case. So why don't we just make it that that is a requirement. Why don't we just say here's your on chain Bitcoin address. That's the one that you have to use. You can't use any other one. It might sound extreme, but that's been talked about. I've seen drafts with that kind of language in it. So we have to build better systems before those norms become something more than what they are. And I think that that's incumbent on us all is to not only build these systems but to push them forward and to try and make people use them in order to get to a better place.
- [27:28]
A
So that's very reasonable. That's very understandable, Craig. And I assume that your answer there would, would answer other questions people might have about your thoughts on Ashigaru, their whirlpool, whether their whirlpool, whatever, end up in Sparrow. Peer to peer Coin joins in Sparrow. I, I assume what you just said would probably answer that question as well.
- [27:51]
B
Yeah, I mean, you know, the, the, the unfortunate thing is that we should have Coinjoin as a general tool, but it's just, it's just too edgy, if I can, for the developers doing it, to really promote it, they have to kind of work in a, you know, in a, in a way which doesn't present them to the world. And that means, unfortunately, that those tools don't really get talked about much. That they kind of get sent to the side that. That is the unfortunate and very real chilling effect that we have seen as a result of what has happened with Whirlpool. Yeah, I don't really know that there's an easier path there. I think that time is going to tell whether those tools become more widespread or not. But we are where we are today.
- [28:48]
A
Another very topical thing in Bitcoin is ordinals. Sparrow Wallet famously has supported ordinals in, you know, in a basic way. What are your updated thoughts on that and do you get, do you get some heat for having taken that position?
- [29:05]
B
Well, I actually don't think Sparrow really. I think it, it was a tool used simply because it was a capable tool. But certainly I don't spend any time thinking about ordinals. They have zero interest to me, absolutely zero. I just don't really think about them. They don't take any, any part of my mental space in terms of what I think about to build. So yeah, I'm not part of that world in any way or form.
- [29:33]
A
Questions about the UI of Sparrow. Would you ever consider let's say, for accounting purposes, being able to see the fiat price of a transaction in the wallet.
- [29:45]
B
Yes, I think I would. I've gone back and forth on it. It's not something which I feel particularly strongly about either way. I do think there are better and worse ways to do it. I think that, you know, you have to always bear in mind that such a translation is never going to be accurate and should never be taken as a financial truth because it's never going to be at exactly that point in the day. What is the source? You know, the source obviously varies for different currencies all over the world. And that's kind of the reason that I haven't focused too much on it. I tried to make Sparrow as best a source of truth as I can, when the fundamental source of that truth is variable and kind of almost unknowable in a sense. That's always been an area in which has given me pause at the very least. But I'm certainly not completely against it. I have considered building it in various ways. I think there are better and worse ways to do it. So, yeah, that certainly remains something that I could build in.
- [30:51]
A
In our previous conversation, you had, I thought, a very based take on lightning. Are you using Lightning more yourself? Are you more interested in it in the last, let's say, year or so? Would that ever have a part to play in Sparrow Wallet?
- [31:08]
B
So in Sparrow Wallet, no, I think I understand well what what Sparrow's users want. I think that they are not looking for that inner wallet. And in particular, I would say my general philosophy on soft software development is that servers should be servers and clients should be clients. And when you try and start making clients into servers, as indeed you must, if you try and write a Lightning client which is a server, it is something which, at least in theory, needs to remain always online. Obviously there are caveats and ways to work around it, but that is the general principle. Then I think you enter a world where you've broken some of the central tenets of that entire system and you're always then going to be working with uncomfortable edges. So I try and say Sparrow is an application which you want to open when you need to send or receive a transaction, or check a balance or have some kind of need to interact, but otherwise you should just keep it closed, or at least keep the wallets that you put your sort of savings enclosed. I think that that's the kind of the way that I see it, which is very different from the way in which Lightning works. You know, there you Generally want the wallet to be open as much of the time as you can, so you just have security, privacy, all of these factors which are kind of counter. And that I think is clear to me on a sparrow side from using lightning with other wallets. Yes, of course. I mean it's a very useful tool. So I find it in its current form very usable. I don't have an issue with it and I run my own nodes and yeah, it's been, I think, great to see how far it's come the last few years.
- [33:01]
A
Are there any other wallets out there that you're following, that you think they're doing interesting things?
- [33:08]
B
I really like Zeus. You know, I think that's, that's a great wallet. They, they really got some interesting ideas and they're pushing things forward, you know, in terms of other wallets. I'm not really using a whole, whole lot, if I'm really honest. I'm not. I do try, but I tend to kind of jump around the bitcoin ecosystem and look at all kinds of different things. Wallets tend to typically do much the same thing, I would say most of the time, so you don't generally get to get too many surprises. But I'll try an ecash wallet from time to time. I'll try various things, but none that I can that jump to mind right now who have recently made big sports, big strides that I could say, wow. I would say also Phoenix remains to me a great example of how to build a really excellent lightning wallet, which is kind of easy to recommend.
- [34:08]
A
Craig, do you think that bitcoin should have privacy on the main layer? Privacy features?
- [34:16]
B
I would say we kind of have what we have now. I mean, yes, we should have privacy features, but I don't think that we should be making radical changes at this point unless they really make sense. What I'm not advocating for is sort of radical new address types that have a whole lot of computational complexity or cryptographic uncertainty. I think that that's not what Bitcoin should be. I think that it's largely at the application level that we need to make changes. I am still a proponent for sort of basic technologies like cross input signature aggregation, which would make spending with others cheaper. I think that there's a kind of a natural benefit to that that might encourage the erosion of the common input ownership heuristic. And that's, I think, something that remains very possible going into the future. It just requires, you know, the right kind of developer focus and the community to kind of get behind it, which certainly hasn't happened today. But that's the kind of thing that on a bitcoin kind of base layer I would like to see. I wouldn't say that I expect to see it though. I'm just hopeful that I might.
- [35:44]
A
July 2, 2026 is, when we're talking here, what would you say, Craig, is the best that a privacy seeker can be doing in Bitcoin today?
- [35:54]
B
Well, there are many things. I think the classic things are the most important things, right? The ability to talk about Bitcoin without talking specifically about how much you own and that kind of thing. It sounds obvious many people don't get it, right. Those are, those are the most fundamental things to be able to do. And we see evidence all the time of, you know, this attack or that, that that attack. And usually it comes down to some, somebody was just too vocal about their holdings. So that's the kind of basic thing from a software point of view, you obviously want to be using recommended software that has privacy features built in. So one of the reasons we have such high address re that many of the popular app store wallets are built around other cryptocurrencies which have an account based model and they offer a single address or sort of account number or you know, something of that, of that form. Now when Bitcoin was built into these apps, they tended to just offer a single bitcoin on chain address. And that's one of the reasons we have high address reuse today. So you obviously don't want to be using, you want to be using something which gives you a new address, at the very least a new address for every payment. And you want to make sure that every time you receive a new payment you are actually going through the steps of getting a new address out to whoever's going to pay you. These things sound really obvious, but clearly they are not being followed widely because otherwise we wouldn't have 70% address reuse. Beyond that, I think you can look more detailed at how you create transactions. For example, not using round amounts. So if you have two outputs of a transaction, one of them is a round amount. Well, obviously that is going to be the amount which is changing ownership and the other amount is likely to be the change amount going back to you. So very easy thing to do is just to create a slightly random amount, slightly overpaid. It's not going to make the recipient of the funds unhappy, but it will give you a lot more privacy. You know, you might not always be able to do it. But think about things like that. I think that that's quite a helpful and easy thing to do. And then, you know, there are various techniques within Sparrow itself, like the ability to send a more privacy focused transaction which sends two outputs of the same amount and then that reduces the chance of being able to know which one is the actual output that went to, you know, whoever you was paying and which is just the decoy which then goes back to you. So that's the privacy tab at the bottom of Sparrow Wallet's send screen. Those are things that I can think of off the top of my head. You know, just really following the basics and making sure you do it on a consistent level as I think the most important thing.
- [38:59]
A
Yeah, that's all good advice there. Kind of. On this topic, you grew up in South Africa, very dangerous place. Not sure if you still maintain a residence there or not. Not my question to ask, but one of the things that's happened in the last year since we've talked, Craig, is there's been a huge uptick, especially in France, interestingly, of people getting attacked, $5 wrench attacked, kidnapped, finger cut off and held for ransom. People connected to bitcoin companies. There have been 11 of the 14 known physical attacks on cryptocurrency holders tracked globally in 2026 have taken place in France. I'm sure you've had your eye on this. Do you have any take on all of that?
- [39:42]
B
I'm not sure that I have a great deal to say other than what I've just said. Most of those cases involve high profile individuals of one form or the other. And certainly I think if you are a high profile individual in charge of a sort of commercial entity which is in the bitcoin space, I think you are, you know, you should take such things seriously, particularly if you live in France, which as you say, seems to have a very high percentage of them. But most people shouldn't see this as a warning for anything other than just don't talk too much about your funds. Just talk, by all means about bitcoin, about your ability or your desire to see it used in the world if that's important to you. But try not to talk too much about how much you actually have or what you're doing. I think that that's, I think really the risk is where that goes beyond family and friends and become something else. Because, you know, there's some way in which these criminals find out about you and it's really your best defense is to make sure that they never find out about you in the first place.
- [41:05]
A
Craig, what do you think about the fact that so many people seem to be developing and using Bitcoin on a mobile phone.
- [41:15]
B
Yeah, it's a tricky topic, I think. Personally, I don't regard mobile phones as secure as PCs because you're taking it
- [41:26]
A
around with you at all times. For one.
- [41:29]
B
For one, yes. But I think, and I'm certainly no expert on this matter, but I believe that the mobile phone itself is. If you really just dig into layer after layer and you get all the way down to kind of the baseband layer, you're really looking at a device which was not built with privacy in mind. It's just not core to that device. We can very loosely compare it to the kind of Windows operating system. Here's an operating system that wasn't designed in the beginning with privacy in mind. I see the mobile phone as kind of the same in a very broad and loose sense. As a result, I don't believe it is the right platform for your savings. Now, is it a good spending platform? Of course, because you take it around with you wherever you go. But is it the platform where I would want to interact with my savings account? No, I don't think that's what it is for me. So that said, it is the only computing platform that many people have. So I would rather that they interacted with Bitcoin in some way or form than not interactive at all. So it is a nuanced topic, but for those who own both, I would say the PC is again, pros and cons that the PC is a more trustworthy source, particularly if you are running macOS or Linux. I would say, you know, that's a better, a better place. In fact, I would say that the best way to interact with your savings is on a clean Linux system which you use primarily just for that. That is really best practice here. Now, many people will never get to that point, but at least perhaps it's a data point that somebody might use. Because if you do that, then you really are ensuring to have a clean system. You're not installing a whole bunch of things in it and you are very likely to have zero issues at all. That's how I would kind of think of things. If you would look at a continuum from the mobile phone all the way up to your kind of daily driver PC to having something which is not that, which is a bit more clean, a little bit more reserved for that specific task of interacting with your savings account.
- [43:50]
A
As a final question here, Craig, is there anything that you are advocating or have your sights set on Bitcoin more generally, we talked about the silent payments, but is there anything else that you're advocating for more generally in the space?
- [44:06]
B
So you know, I, I think silent payments for me has been the big push and if you look at, you know, you know, I obviously build a wallet and my, you know, Sparrow has been built on the kind of HD wallet tech which was first introduced in 2013. So if silent payments becomes the next wallet tech and that still remains an if, of course we don't know whether users will adopt it, we don't know any of those things yet, then I think that that's a significant step forward. And for me I think that that's where my focus needs to remain. What I'm trying to paint here is a picture that we need to keep with the current thing and keep working on it and keep making it better, keep making it easier to use in order for it to be able to have to kind of really achieve widespread use. And I think if we achieve that then we'll have taken a significant step forward for privacy in payments. So I'm going to stay on that for the time being. There are of course other techs out there, other things which are, you know, sort of interesting. We've got different multi seg tech in terms of Frost. Frost standards have been slow to appear. I don't have a particular desire to go and lead that charge myself, but I'll certainly keep an eye on it. And we have various ideas around Inheritance which remains I think a big issue in Bitcoin today. I would love to see better solutions for that. We've got some concepts around miniscript which have been put out there and implemented which I think have certain issues attached to them in the self sovereign sense. But you know, those are things which I think need more, more work and hopefully we can come to better, better sort of answers there over time. My focus I think is going to stay on silent payments at least for the time being in order to hopefully see it become a more widely used means of wallet. Perhaps at some stage in the future it will become the default wallet that Sparrow creates. That would be a feature I would like to see.
- [46:18]
A
So this has been Craig Raw, the developer of Sparrow Wallet. The website is sparrow wallet2ws.com. We'll have various links for that and on Twitter it is also Sparrow Wallets with two W's. We'll have those links as well. If you use Sparrow or you have used Sparrow, go ahead. And while you're listening to this, while you're thinking about it, go to the website, send Craig a donation like you would pay for other software that you use. And with that said, Craig, any final thoughts from you?
- [46:48]
B
I would really just encourage people to just try the new version of Sparrow, try and create a silent payments wallet. So go and close all your other wallets down, connect to to or select public server, which you might not otherwise do, and just try it. Even if you don't use the wallet for anything other than this test. It's really by usage of these new privacy technologies that we can develop a sense of whether they are worthwhile or not, whether they are worthwhile talking about whether they are worthwhile talking, you know, sort of in an online or to your friends or whatever have you. You know, if it just remains an option then it will never achieve that. And as I said, that really high address reuse figure will not come down and probably will just keep on going up. So that's really what I would encourage people to do.
- [47:45]
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 and 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,
- [48:17]
B
Sam. It.