TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #181: Zach Herbert

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Zach Herbert, Co-founder of Foundation Devices, to discuss: - Zach's experience at Obelisk - Nuance of hardware manufacturing in China v. US - Tradeoffs made by the predominant hardware wallets - Why airgapping is important - The Passport - QR code standards and statelessness - How Bitcoin incentivizes open hardware - The importance of making hardware locally - Future products from Foundation Devices - much more Follow Zach on Twitter Follow Foundation Devices on Twitter Checkout Foundation Devices' site Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with co-founder of Foundation Devices, Zach Herbert. Deep dive into hardware wallets, the trade-offs that come with different hardware wallet designs, the importance of open source hardware in this space particularly. Also we dive into Foundation Devices' premier product, the Passport. I think you guys are really going to like this episode. very lengthy discussion on the trade-offs that exist in this space

and the future of open hardware and why that's so important and how Bitcoin incentivizes a better more secure future. This episode is brought to you by our good friends at the motherfucking Cash App.

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That's S-T-A-C-K-I-N-G-S-A-T-S. When you download the app, if you haven't done so already, you're going to get $10. And $10 is going to go to our good friends at Owls Lacrosse. That's Owls Lacrosse. Use the code STACKINGSATS, download the Cash App, and enjoy this episode. with Zach Herbert very excited to see what foundation devices has in store for us enjoy okay you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about

a Fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here on a windy wednesday morning sorry if there's some wind picking up on the mic i'm on my back back porch studio here it is a beautiful day and a very exciting day on this podcast we're going to talk about some exciting stuff hardware open source hardware particularly i'm sitting down

with zach herbert founder of foundation devices zach what's going on how's it going marty great to be here going great man very excited for this conversation we've been uh talking in back channels for a few months now you've been teasing what you've been working on and it seems like you're on schedule too you told me you told me three months ago middle of july and here we are smack dab in the middle of july yeah uh trying to do the under promise over deliver thing um but yeah i mean hardware you know can can take some time um but we've been working on the product for a few months now and are really excited to talk about it and just to tell you more about you know what we're building and it's also kind of surreal to be on here i feel like i've been listening to you

guys for um probably like a year and a half um and i never like in the beginning of course when i was listening i never thought that i would be like on the pod you know at some point in the future so uh yeah thanks for the work that you guys do oh well uh it's people like you that make this work worthwhile and actually uh possible so thank you for doing what you do uh let's jump into what you do obviously you started foundation devices but you've been around uh the space for quite a quite a while worked at obelisk before um before starting foundation devices so let's just learn about your journey and why you're focused on hardware so much yes so um i think i've always been really interested in computers since i was a little kid which i think is pretty common you

know for people in this space building those you know liquid cool gaming computers and whatnot uh you know my first job out of high school was actually at the apple store um and i've just you loved specifically like hardware, right? I know a lot of people come into the space from different ways. I've always been kind of obsessed with hardware and product design. And I did mechanical engineering in college. And yeah, like you mentioned, I've been working full-time in the space since beginning of 2017, came across Bitcoin around 2013, and just always knew that I wanted to you know, work in the space. And when I had the opportunity to, you know, at that point, I was actually finishing up my second semester of business school. And I had the opportunity to join

up with this company in Boston called Nebulas that was launching a hardware company, making ASIC miners, which seems kind of crazy at the time, and maybe still does. You know, I actually dropped out of school and joined up, um, as, as one of the first employees, um, with that company obelisks and, uh, really got a crash course to hardware from, uh, real life experience as opposed to, you know, learning it, you know, uh, like in school or something. So, uh, at obelisk, uh, we ultimately grew a small team. Uh, we sold over $26 million of, of cryptocurrency ASIC miners. We manufactured them all in the United States, in the New England area, and we shipped them all out.

And as you can imagine, a ton of war stories from there. But it was a really great experience. And yeah, it definitely informed a lot of how we look at the space today. Yeah, I think it's important to hone in on the lessons you learned there, because we've talked about them before. um there's a bunch of intricacy that goes into hardware production from the design to the supply chain and what were some of the tough lessons you guys learned yeah i think i think the biggest lesson was that uh we in an attempt to get to market as fast as possible we outsourced a lot

of the work so rather than taking the time to build up our own strong team internally from the beginning of like electrical engineers for example uh we worked with like outside contractors and you guys talk a lot on the pod about you know incentives right and when you're working with outside groups uh the incentives are super different and the speed at which we wanted to move compared to the speed of working with a bunch of contractor groups and so forth is difficult so that was a big lesson that we learned uh the only thing that we do outsourced at foundation devices today is uh some of the industrial design and mechanical engineering but everything else we do in-house the electrical the firmware and so on um so that was one big

lesson another lesson was actually uh you know working with uh contracted manufacturers we originally believe it or not uh wanted to do our manufacturing in china um it makes sense you know you save a lot of money. These are ASIC miners, right? So you could argue it doesn't necessarily matter where they're produced. Of course, I think it does. But, you know, you could also argue that customers want to pay, you know, the lowest possible price for an ASIC miner, right? And so we originally were working with like a US-based contract manufacturer that had a wholly owned plant facility in China. And we're also going to be working with a chip fab that was based in China. And both of them dropped us without much notice. And so a lot of our early

days were spent scrambling, trying to redo our supply chain, basically. And we ultimately, from the manufacturing standpoint, did that all pretty close to Boston, you know, where we're based um so that we could be on the floor you know and on the ground during production and have a lot more control yeah what uh what do you mean by that control so like being on the ground and being in the factory what what sort of control does that afford you yeah when you're building something physical there's always stuff going wrong right like a great example was you know you start you you work with this company you you figure out a solution to uh heat sinks right how to get the heat sinks to properly attach to the to the hashing board let's say that's a problem that

bitmain has i know you guys have talked about that yeah yeah and that's a problem that a lot of different uh asic minor producers have right um and we thought we had this awesome solution where we had these little like spring clips that adhere to the hashing board and they hold down the heat sinks with little clips so that they're not going to come off. But what ended up happening was it just got so hot that it melted the adhesive and they all started popping off. And so we had to figure out a solution, right? And it's much easier to figure out a solution on the fly when you're physically present, as opposed to if you're working with some kind of manufacturer that is on the other side of the world, right? And I think that agility is very important.

Companies like Apple, you know, that are massive companies and work with massive contract manufacturers like Foxconn, they're able to move super fast. And the reason they like working with outside manufacturers like boxcon because it's because they'll bend over backwards to help apple and iterate quickly and solve problems but when you're a small company you know in the millions of dollars of revenue uh it's it's hard to be treated as like uh you know in that in that same way and so by manufacturing locally you know physically actually being on the ground and believe it or not spreading the work out across at that point three different uh cms contract manufacturers uh we were able to you know move really fast and solve problems as as they came up

yeah now you're describing the um like sort of the project management between the uh chinese factories and the u.s factories or some difference there too right like translations and yeah yeah and and we don't have as much experience with that because we primarily worked you know with uh with U.S. manufacturers, but I think the U.S. manufacturing industry has a, has a ways to go. The way it works here is that it's incredibly process oriented and they'll want to know like the exact manufacturing process going in. And if you need to make a change, they need to document that change. And so it does slow down your pace compared to what you can do at China. When we've worked with other companies in china or talked to other companies that are building there

there's like no documentation like it's just on the fly you're you know you're just running around trying to do things and then yeah if you're bringing if you're trying to do stuff in china and in the u.s you run into issues where you've got stuff coming back from china and you have to translate it all and and we did like a small project for that and one of my co-founders jacob can speak mandarin and so he helped a lot with the translations um but you know for what we're doing at foundation devices um we're just really double down on on u.s manufacturing and and we want to build up that capacity for the long term now this is why i really like what you guys are doing sort of picking up what rodolfo and coin kite are doing up in canada yeah sort of creating

the local supply chain and bringing that here to america which i think is is very important so why i guess we just get into like the nitty-gritty of foundation devices and um uh before we get into like the manufacturing i guess we should talk about like the the different trade-offs between the different predominant hardware wallets on the market right now between ledger trezor cold card and then we can get into uh supply chain and keeping that local yeah for sure and thank you for um i know you you highlighted that twitter thread i did um in one of your newsletters just kind of talking about the differences between the different wallets and i think i was just super frustrated one morning seeing some like twitter beef i don't remember

who it was between but especially in hardware wallet world i feel like there's always a controversy no i don't know if i don't know if i'm ready we're going to try to stay above the flame wars but um i think what's most important to us is that is that manufacturers including ourselves are as transparent as possible about the trade-offs right and and it's very just like you you said trade-offs because no no product is perfect every product makes compromises in some areas. And for us to be able to have no experience making hardware wallets and then come in and make one, we had to kind of come up with a very good understanding of the trade-offs between these different products. And then I personally, of course, have been using all of them for some

years now. So yeah, I feel like we have three different security models in hardware wallet world right we have um trezor which is open source um and they do not use any components that uh might have an nda with it so they don't have any security chip or it's commonly referred to as a secure element for example um the benefit of that is anyone can just like go online and buy the parts for trezor and build it themselves and then load up the firmware The downside of that is you can extract the private keys, I think Kraken said in like 15 minutes with commonly available lab equipment. Kraken Security Labs, by the way, has done a great job with these posts about hardware wallets and a lot of security research. So I think that came out in, I think maybe January of this year. so um so that's trezor so you got to understand that if you're going to use that device physical security is very important and they recommend and and they're transparent about this you know

they recommend using a strong passphrase um i would guess though that the majority of trezor users that use a passphrase do not use a strong passphrase uh i think you have to use like if you're thinking about it from like a BIP 39 word list, I think you need like six words for it to be resistant to being brute forced. And how many people do that? I know when I used to use the Trezor back in the day, I thought I was super sophisticated with my hardware wallet. And my passphrase was one word that could probably have been brute forced in like 10 seconds. Yeah. okay yeah yeah so uh it's serious stuff and so you know there has to be a lot of user education there um and then security model from ledger's perspective is kind of the opposite uh it's

pretty closed source the apps that run on the device are open source because ledger asks developers to like submit apps to them to go into ledger live which is like their app store And I believe Ledger develops like the Bitcoin app themselves and some of the other core apps themselves. But the hardware itself is closed source. And there's firmware running on the device that's closed source, the operating system as well. And so you actually have unknown code running on the device. And so, you know, you can make whatever security, you know, you can make whatever security claims you want as a company, but it requires that the user really trust the company, knowing that there's stuff on the device that security researchers can't readily see. Um, and that's tough. Uh, I don't think there's been any significant vulnerabilities, uh, in the last, in the recent history. There, there was one, I think last week where, uh, they were using, uh, the, there's, there's two chips on the ledger. there's like a standard processor and then there's a security chip so they were able to crack i think it was uh kraken again they were able to load up some um some kind of firmware on the the normal chip and have it act as like a keyboard and kind of take over the user's computer when plugged into

usb but there hasn't been any serious like vulnerabilities to my knowledge uh the issue is though if there was a vulnerability uh you probably weren't wouldn't hear about it because of the nature of closed source hardware yeah and so while we're still on trezor and ledger let's talk about the trezor bridge and ledger live too yes those are definitely trade-offs as well correct especially the bridge i mean if you are let's say let's say an exchange or some kind of custodial provider and you want to integrate or even like something like casa right like a multi type service and you want to integrate Trezor into your workflow or into your offering, the easiest way to do that. And the way Trezor has really been pushing everyone to do

is to go through their, their, their bridge. And if you're, so if you're using Casa and I've used Casa before, you know, we've tested out obviously like pretty much every wallet or have used them at different points in time. Casa, you know, sends you an email when you want to sign the transaction and you click a link in that email and if you're using a trezor it opens it on trezor's like website like it's uh i forgot what what the exact url is but it's something.trezor.io and that's like terrifying to me right because that means that they they could be seeing a lot of information about your transactions but then also what happens if that service goes down you You know, are you not able to use Kasa now?

And so I think that Trezor's approach of kind of pushing everyone through this centralized bridge is a problem. You obviously do not have to do that. They're, you know, like Electrum, for example, you can use it with Electrum, but it's just like, that's their preferred way to integrate with Trezor.

And they must collect a lot of information about users. And then, you know, Ledger Live, similar thing, except it's, you know, actual desktop software, but a lot of information going through their servers. And I still think you cannot use it with a node, right? I think you guys keep bringing it up every, every few weeks. I got to say that, yeah, the two weeks thing is very tempting. Cause I want to say like, it's just a natural, it's a natural thing when you're doing like hardware to say, yeah, we'll have this up in two weeks. And I kind of have to like hold myself back because yeah it's a trademark for sure yeah but focusing on like staying on the bridge and

yeah like do you think treasure can get away from the bridge i mean they've made some steps to to alleviate worries one of which being showing the address on the actual device so you can confirm that you're not getting man in the middle attacked and then they have the uh sd card that can act as like a 2fa yeah sign as well on the model yeah but like but ideally they get away from it in the long run correct i think the the way to do it is is psbts right i think you know you guys have been hyper critical of exchanges for example that were slow to adopt segwit or other new technology and i think it's imperative that hardware wallet companies um adopt psbts which are partially signed Bitcoin transactions, which is like a universal standard now, a cross-compatible

standard for Bitcoin transactions, both single-sig and multi-sig, where if Trezor, for example, was able to adopt PSVTs natively, then you would be able to have this universal format where you could use Trezor with any wallet without them having to integrate with Trezor, without having to deal with like USB drivers, right. Or other things like that. And it's the same thing with ledger as well, where, yeah, it's like, if you're plugging in devices to a USB port or in ledger's case on the phone using Bluetooth, which is just like, are you kidding me? I don't care how it works. Like you're going to seriously put Bluetooth on a hardware wallet and just say it's all okay. You know, when you do that USB, Bluetooth, those kinds of technologies,

you kind of force you make it much harder for developers to integrate with right like if your goal is let's make it as easy as possible for users to choose the software wallet they want to use and then integrate it with whatever hardware wallet they want to use and then if they want to use multiple hardware wallets they can just use multiple in a multi-sig setup like when you're having to deal with different proprietary interfaces for each wallet with different documentation and sometimes even like restricted derivation paths, which was a big controversy with Trezor's more recent firmware update a few weeks back, you know, yeah, you run into a lot of issues. And so what I would posit to hardware wallet manufacturers, I would ask them, who are

your users, right? And, you know, who matters in the ecosystem? I think right now, it's very, very tempting for hardware companies in general to go right for the walled garden ecosystem. Apple has been the biggest pioneer of that. It means you have a lot of control over your ecosystem and then you have that magic term that every hardware company loves, which is lock-in, right because you get you get them locked into your ecosystem they have to go through your services they have to go through say your app store like ledger live or they have to go through your centralized bridge and then you increase the switching costs for users what i would posit is that a hardware company's role and apple did this really well in the beginning like when when they

first launched with like the original like apple 2 a hardware company's role i think is to provide an open platform for developers because then all we have to focus on is building great hardware, making it really intuitive for the end user, and then giving developers free reign to go build whatever software products or integrations on top of our hardware. And so if you look at it like that, then it's like a no-brainer to just embrace PSBT and say, you know, whatever software wallet you want to use, use it with our hardware wallet. we're not even going to build an app right which is cold cards approach which i love and that's our approach at least for now which is like we're just going to focus on building the best possible

hardware leaving it as open as possible you know and and letting the developers do their thing because they're going to do their thing better than we can not i really like that approach that brings us naturally to cold card and yeah if you freaks been listening to this podcast for long enough you know that that cold card is the preferred hardware wallet and just because of the reasons you laid out i like that you can uh you can generate a seed offline add entropy to it do psbts and don't be afraid of uh psbts freaks i just i just got the acronym right like four times this podcast let's hope i keep it up uh but yeah i i for for me personally like wasabi's had a great ux for psbts to to um to create and sign broadcast the transactions but it just makes

sense like these devices from a first principle standpoint you should just assume that the internet is malicious and and will transmit data from this stuff so the fact that you can do all this offline construct a transaction on an sd card plug it into a wallet software sign it broadcast it it makes a lot more sense to me so yeah uh how would you describe cold card its trade-offs and and um and why you like them so much yeah so i think cold card is is the most rational team i think in the space and maybe it's because they're building for themselves similarly to how like when i think about building a product as like a new company you want to try to build it for yourself right because if you do that then it's probably going to be a great product

for people like you and so you know cold card made some interesting trade-offs they are using a secure element chip to store the keys but the way they do it is they actually kind of like encrypt the private keys and then store the encrypted key on the secure element but then store like the encryption key on the standard processor so it has a really cool security architecture because you need to compromise both chips in order to get to the to the private key So they kind of came up with like a cool practical way for how to reduce the need for trust in a closed source chip, which, by the way, pretty much all computer chips today are closed source, like everything is closed source. And we can talk more about that and the nuance there later on if you want. So they have this really cool security architecture, right, uses a standard processor and a secure element.

The secure element is a, it's like a 75-set part from a company based in the USA called Microchip. They're a big company, you know, they're a reputable company. So you have a, you're going to have to trust someone, right? And so, you know, you kind of trust that, you know, they're selling millions of these chips, you know, every year. I think their biggest customer is Amazon and AWS data centers. So you're like, okay, if it's good enough for Amazon and their data centers, and this architecture is kind of mitigates the risks that are involved, let's do it. Also, the previous gen, which is called the 508A, which is the part number for microchip,

and the Mark 1 and Mark 2 cold cards did have a completely open data sheet, which is very unusual when you're talking about security chips. So they were able to find a part and source a part that had an open data sheet. The newer one that they're using and that we're using, the 608A, not a fully open data the sheet, unfortunately. But there is a version of it that is available and pretty detailed. And so it's still something. It's still better than what you see anywhere else. So I really like that architecture. Of course, PSVT is really important and they've embraced that from the beginning. And then they have so many cool security features and advanced features,

some of which you just mentioned. And they're always at the cutting edge of integrating the latest bitcoin stuff i forgot what that new bit is i think it's 80 something where you can actually derive like a child entropy and and use like you know what it is right it's 87 i think okay 87 you just have a master master key for a bunch of different keys right yeah exactly where you can essentially have like your cold card uh creating child seeds which you can then use to initialize different wallets so let's say you're making like a mobile or you're using a mobile wallet for example and rather than generating the seed on your mobile wallet you can generate the seed from your cold card and then import it into your mobile wallet and that's awesome and like

they're they're at the cutting edge of embracing all this stuff so that's why i drew the parallel earlier to like exchanges embracing segwit which is you know when you're a bitcoin first or a bitcoin only company um you are naturally going to be much faster adopting the cutting edge stuff and that's going to provide your users with a much better experience and so those are some of the things i really like about them i also love that it's just it's made in north america you know it's made in canada i think that's great and um you know it's it's just like you guys it's the hardware wallet that i personally you know use and recommend yeah and it's bit 83 not 87 okay cool at least i knew it was 80 something right uh yeah i had to double check there sorry

for typing but uh no problem no i mean i think this is a very thorough sort of expert uh rundown of the different trade-offs and the different products on the market so let's dive into the passport yeah yeah you guys are building and yeah and how you've sort of what you've learned from these products and and how that's affected the design yeah of your hardware wallet yeah and so you know i just spoke a little bit about the security models of these different devices right but there's a whole nother component which has somehow become controversial which is ux right in the in the last few weeks i mean the stuff i see on twitter is just hilarious you know um so you know obviously ux is really important and the reason why you know we started

foundation devices and our first product is a hardware wallet you know called passport is because of my deep frustrations with hardware wallet ux you know and and security model you know and supply chain stuff of course but like if ux wasn't an issue then i would just be like yeah i'm just i'm cool with my cold card and and that's that right um the issue is i think you know on during the next bull market i think we're going to see a massive influx of new users and my biggest fear is that those new users all go to coinbase because they try out the hardware wallet maybe they'll they'll they'll see a picture of it or they'll maybe buy one or they'll see their friend using it or they'll watch like a youtube video and you need this whole complex

like tutorial, right? To set it up if you're a new user. And I'm just thinking like, could you imagine if you needed a whole complex tutorial to set up like an iPhone or something? And obviously we're not there yet, right? It's still early. But once again, my biggest fear is that users will choose custodial providers during the next big bull market because the existing non-custodial options are too complicated and i think it's a it's a reasonable and sound you know fear and and it's why we're a bit more focused on you know mass market right with with this product and trying to figure out you know how do we make a hardware wallet that's easy enough to use where you know you're you're a relatively new user and you just do a little bit of research

and feel comfortable buying and using you know this kind of hardware wallet and so you know trezor um i think the model t is probably the most usable wallet right now from a ux perspective because they employ a small touchscreen um you can enter a passphrase on device you know with that touchscreen uh but like i mentioned i'm not a fan of their security model right cold card um the ux is you know speaks for itself and i feel like that's a feature with that product it's designed for the for the hardcore user it's designed for someone who wants total control and have you know every single option at their fingertips when they're securing their bitcoin and that's great right and then ledger i actually think they're the worst like in the worst ux

believe it or not and um it's hilarious to me that that their product um has not really changed in the way that you function like the way it functions or the way you interact with it Since like the original, like a ledger, you know, try entering your eight digit pin, the two buttons for a new user is the example that I like to give. You can't see the whole address at once on this screen. Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, that is just bad. And so there's no reason that you have to use a small screen for a hardware wallet, but you should keep in mind that there are trade-offs when you're buying screens. For example, we could talk more about this later, too. But most touchscreens, pretty much every touchscreen has an embedded processor running firmware that the manufacturer puts on. And so if you're sourcing a touchscreen on Alibaba, you know, it's coming from China, pretty much every screen, you know, will come from China anyway. that means that you know trezor's touchscreen is running unknown firmware on it and the screen is a very crucial part of a hardware wallet so i want to point out that there's a we can just keep

going all the way down the rabbit hole there's there's layers and layers and trade-offs but basically we just we're not comfortable with the ux uh of the existing options and for the ones that we thought the ux was okay we weren't comfortable with the security model um so So Passport, it's a pretty small device. It's four inches tall and one and a half inches wide. I think by the time the pod airs, we'll have our full website up that gives all the product details and everything like that. It uses a 1.8 inch monochrome display.

It's actually made by Sharp in Japan, and it's called the Memory Display. It's very similar to E Ink, and it doesn't have any embedded chip on the screen at all. And so they actually etch the circuitry into glass. so we can optically inspect each screen as it comes to the production line and be like, okay, the screen is good to go. It has not been tampered with at manufacturing. So that's just a cool feature. It has a physical keypad, an alphanumeric keypad, much like what you would see on like an old cell phone, you know, like a Nokia candy bar phone. It kind of looks like a small version of a Nokia candy bar phone. And it also has a physical, you know, four directional nav pad with two

buttons to, you know, for, for, for making selections on the screen. So the goal there is that, yeah, making it kind of almost feel like an old phone means that for most users, it's an incredibly intuitive experience. When you pick up the device, you already know how to use it, right? We don't need to teach the user how to navigate. You know, we don't need to have buttons that serve multiple features, right? We don't need to have a number button that is also a letter that is also an up arrow right so we were able to just kind of space out the the the text input and the and the character input on the device a bit and make it more comfortable um it uses uh for communication it's completely air gapped it uses either micro sd card or a camera and the

camera of course is to scan qr codes and we're seeing a lot of progress now um with like multi qr code standard um i think it was just blockchain commons has has released this standard and um we followed that conversation we did not did not contribute to that but a bunch of great people did contribute to that and that's what we're going to be using for for multi-qr can can you dive into that because i watched that demo video it just looks really cool uh just that it's like flashing many yeah codes at once you're scanning it to get a message like what what's going on there's a lot of nuance with qr codes think about it like this so let's say you want to transmit some some amount of data and you don't know how much data you're going to need to transmit right

psbt files can be different sizes depending on how many utxos you have right so you know when you're constructing transactions you could have larger transaction sizes you can have smaller transaction sizes and if you think about a transaction it's just like a string of text you know let's pretend like you just are on like a notepad or a text editor and you're just like copy pasting strings of text you know you have to basically take that text and then translate it into a qr code and the more text you have the the denser the qr code gets right and so that's just kind of i think like a good way to think about it and so now you have two devices that are trying to communicate with each other. You have the software wallet, which is either on a computer or it is on a phone.

And those screens are larger screens and they have higher resolution screens. And so they can display more dense QR codes. So you may have a transaction that is huge, but that you can fit the entire thing in one QR code, you know, on the computer screen. But then you also have to deal with the resolution of the camera that you're using to scan the QR code, right? So it's like, how many megapixels is this camera? Is this enough to discern the difference between each tiny little square in the QR code? And then you also have to think about the screen on the hardware wallet. How large is that screen? What's the resolution on that screen? Usually it's the hardware wallet you have to worry more about because the phones are good enough. If you ever

scan a QR code on your phone, it can pick up anything. It's amazing. But if you're using a less expensive camera on a hardware wallet, or if you're trying to display a QR code on a 1.8 inch screen, which is what we're doing, you're going to run into limitations where a transaction might be too large to fit into one QR code. And then, you know, if each manufacturer solves that their own way, there's no standard. So if you're developing a software wallet, you have no idea how to handle multiple qr codes you might end up having like having to have uh uh hwi hardware wallet interface modified to be able to accommodate all different standards from different wallets which is sadly what it has to do today um which sucks um or you can create early on uh a universal

standard for how to split up the data into multiple QR codes and how to communicate within each QR code, how many QR codes you should expect to come afterwards. So each QR code would, if you think about it in like more basic terms would say like, okay, like this is one out of four QR codes. And so you as the, as the app or as the wallet that's scanning that knows how many to expect and if you have a camera that's good enough it can be almost instant because they can go really fast or you can go slower if say the screen can't do that fast or if the camera can't handle that kind of refresh rate on the screen that's fine because they can keep doing the same four qr codes in a loop until the camera has picked up each one so there's actually a lot of

complexity that goes into that that was one of our biggest worries when we're when we were going into it which is like shit there's there's no um there's no standard for this and so we're gonna have a really hard time and it just so happened that now there's a standard you know for this yeah shout out to uh christopher allen and the blockchains a blockchain commons group for for putting that together and yeah this is important the qr code stuff and what really um sparked an A moment for me was Justin Moon's Junction and his BitBoy, where the stateless transmission of data via QR codes just seems like a much more secure way to to to move data if you're using Bitcoin. Yeah, definitely. You know, ideally, we'd like to pull off the micro SD slot completely and just do completely air gapped with only a camera. uh the difficulty is firmware updates so we there is one way to do it which is

firmware updates over qr code but as you can imagine that requires an operating system on the hardware wallet that is extremely small in terms of like the size of the of the of the operating system like the number of you know kilobytes or megabytes and you need to have it like designed in a in a more modular type form where if you want to update something in the operating system you don't have to update the entire firmware image you would just send over the exact updates that you would need and that's complicated um we uh for passport actually forked cold cards firmware um because we thought that we'd be crazy as a new company in the space to make our own firmware from scratch

and then tell people, trust us, use our firmware, everything's going to be fine. We figured let's start with the mature firmware that's been tested for years on the market. Let's make a lot of changes, change the entire user interface, adding camera support to scan QR codes, everything like in terms of what the user sees is different.

but on the back end it's the same you know base firmware as what cold card was using and hopefully if we make changes that are not just applicable you know to our device then we'll we'll want to contribute that back of course um but so far it's been mostly like ui stuff and camera stuff um and uh you know if we were to do some version of firmware that um where you could update it over QR codes, you probably have to do something from scratch in a language like Rust, where it's like a 10 times smaller footprint than MicroPython. And we're just not there yet. And so we figured, you know, SD card, it's okay for V1. It's actually useful, because it might be more convenient than multi QR codes, or even better. It means that Passport from day one is compatible with any

software wallet that supports PSDTs over micro SD. And so, you know, even if not all software wallets support qr codes from day one and the ability to capture an image from the computer webcam or from the you know from the phone camera um that means we'll still have compatibility from day one with all these different software wallets and that was really important to us yeah and another i'm just looking at the uh the product specs yeah right now the information set over another huge thing is that it's completely battery run correct oh yeah yeah triple a batteries, old school. We're joking around about how we're like, we are, of course, going to include in the box batteries,

and we're also actually going to include an industrial grade micro SD card in the box, maybe two. And we're gonna push users to like backing up the wallet to the micro SD card instead of writing down your 24 word seed on paper, you know, cold card already does a really cool backup, you know, functionality that you probably know about. But yeah, the battery thing, I mean, why wouldn't we do it right we don't want to have a usb port uh and then the option after there is

either lithium ion battery where we could have made the things so much thinner i wish we could have done it it would have been so much thinner and and and that would have been awesome um or triple a batteries there's there's two reasons we chose triple a maybe maybe more than two but two key reasons one is a long-term storage of the device i know a lot of users love to keep their hardware wallet and like a faraday bag or a safe or drawer or even a safety deposit box and lithium-ion batteries that are non-removable are typically not recommended for long-term storage so that's one because like you pop out the batteries throw it in a drawer somewhere you know and and open it up a year later right and make and have faith that the batteries wouldn't

have like exploded or something in the device right then the other thing is that most lithium-ion batteries uh also have uh opaque uh like closed source silicon inside the battery and uh uh cold card has talked about this a bunch and it's why they have their like cold power type adapter because if you're plugging into a say an external battery or even if you're using an internal battery uh that battery can collect data it could it could theoretically have a chip inside of it that collects data it needs to be able to have a like a smart chip inside because it needs to be able to regulate its charging and so they all have chips in them and so if we were to put a lithium ion battery in our hardware wallet in the future we would probably either a still sell like

this version of passport as like passport classic you know or something like that because we think it's just killer to be able to put triple a batteries in um or b we would try to find some supplier that can make one that's like a dumb battery and that does exist like if you've ever bought like rechargeable um you know uh batteries back in the day like rechargeable double a batteries but those typically are not lithium i believe they're like like nicad like the older school batteries and so we have a lot of work to do on that front and we figured let's not do the work for v1 let's just do triple a's and we can try to figure out that nuance for a future release of the product yeah no i think that's really cool and again just

is somebody who holds utxos on hardware wallets another like trezor is my go-to but obviously i've shifted hard towards cold car because i never have to connect it to a computer and the fact that you don't even have the ability to with passport is is pretty huge yeah and i just want to just emphasize the the attack vectors when a wallet is not air gapped are enormous right the the space that you have to discover vulnerabilities if you can just plug in with usb for example um is enormous uh i think that ledger vulnerability from last week is a perfect example which is yeah it didn't it doesn't affect your coins at all like your coins are are theoretically safe but the fact that you know you could load something up onto there and and make the hard

wallet behave as a keyboard you know you could theoretically have have it like you know navigate to like what would happen for example if someone was able to take advantage of that vulnerability you know you plug your ledger into your computer and it takes you to a website to download ledger live immediately and you and you just think like as a new user oh this is awesome this thing is like, was able to automatically take me to their website to download their, you know, their software. And then it turns out it's a phishing website and you download some modified version of Ledger Live and it displays to you, you know, like it does something right. And there's, once you do that, there's numerous ways where they could get your coins without having to actually

compromise the Ledger wallet itself. And so we just want to try to just close down as many potential attack vectors as possible and we do think air gapping is the best way to do that it kind of cracks me up there's been some like you know i obviously keep tabs on like the new hardware wallet companies that are like launching stuff on kickstarter or other places and there's been some hilarious stuff where they like say their air gap and then there's a usb port for like charging yeah it's it's absurd right so i guess the biggest ux hurdle for your users would just be updating firmware via the SD card. That's correct. How do you plan on making that as seamless of a process as possible? I think for right now, it's going to have to be a similar

process to cold card. I don't think we have a better way to do it. What we'd really like to do down the line is we'd like to have a mobile companion app that you can use because I think there's a lot of cool things you can do with the mobile companion app. You obviously run into security issues in the sense that, you know, for the more hardcore users, they wouldn't be able to like build it from source themselves if they're on iPhone, but you could release a desktop version as well. Ideally, what that, what that app would do is it would allow you to update the firmware like over

QR code or make it really easy to do so over SD card where it's like a little bit more intuitive than downloading from like a random website because there's worries you know with that um and uh additionally you could be able to do some cool things with the with the seed phrase backup that's i think one of the worst things about hardware wallets today is having to write down the seed if you're using a multi-sig setup and you're feeling like confident in your setup um you might not want to write down the seed um but i think for new users i don't know i'm curious what you think like what percent of users that write down the seed actually understand that if someone finds that they're going to get full access to their bitcoins

uh yeah i mean i think i do think the the wallets uh whether it be software or hardware do a good job of like throwing the warning sign out there like don't lose don't take a picture of it don't but yeah still people probably gloss over that and yeah that's one thing when i'm teaching somebody or helping somebody set up a hardware wallet like i really had to drill in their head like don't let anybody see this don't lose it uh keep it safe no but it is something that that is daunting and especially if you're running multiple hardware and software wallets at once and you got to keep keep the track of many seeds like if it gets over 10 it gets a little daunting and yeah um it is not the best ux yeah and so we really love the the cold card ux

of the backup functionality where, you know, you back up the wallet to a SD card that is encrypted with, it's another word phrase, but if you discover that word phrase, it does not give you access to the coins. You need the word phrase plus the encrypted SD card in order to recover your coins. We think that's a better option. And so that's the option that we're going to be pursuing by default for new users. So the default option is gonna be backup your passport to a micro SD card. It's not gonna be write down 24 words.

So they'll still have to write down the words, right? Because they'll have to have the decryption key for the SD card. But I think that'll close off one of the attack vectors. And one thing you could do with a companion app is you could theoretically backup, instead of having them write down like the 12 words or however many words for the backup,

you could just have the wallet transmit that as a QR code. And you could have it immediately save that on like their phone or password manager or computer or something like that. And that's a really cool functionality. We wanna be able to do it as a QR code and have it be saved in like users like contacts on your phone or like maybe even their photo library.

But the issue is, is that a lot of apps can access your photo library or your contacts on your phone so you don't want to have them access like wechat for example you don't want to reach out to access your contacts and then find like your 12 words that unlock the sd card backup so there's a lot of issues there that sounds like a security hole right um so i think we need to have our own app in order to pull that off where it's like very user friendly yeah um that would make sense to ship it with two sd cards then one to keep the seed phrase on and hide it and then and then one if you just want to be able to do transactions and you're using a wallet that doesn't support qr codes yet exactly so um where

i think we're going to end up doing two and the cool thing is is that we can just customize like the labels from the manufacturer so we can actually have one label on the sd card say like backup and so we can designate to to a new user that might not that you don't want to get them confused and then also we're looking into this um but you know how like large like normal sd cards have a little like switch on them to lock or unlock it so you don't mistakenly overwrite the data um micro sd cards actually have that functionality like in software where you can turn it a lock on or off so i think what we can do and we're looking into this now too is like we could have for this backup sd card we could just act turn on the flag to lock it and so if a user

does put it into their computer or device by mistake it won't let them write anything to it so we're kind of exploring those angles to try to figure out like what's the best ux for a new user where they're not just writing down this 24 word seed yeah yeah that's um actually had somebody and the other thing is even if you're able to protect it and um hide it well some people some people don't write it down correctly i actually had somebody in my dms trying to recover from seed and uh they were doing so unsuccessfully because that's heartbreaking yeah and that's why i think multisig by the way is still the best avenue right because you know you lose one of your devices you can you can cycle it in or out and the way we look at our roadmap you know for the hardware

we're building at foundation is um we think every device is gonna have the ability in the future to send and receive bitcoin right um hopefully it'll be more native on some of these devices like in the future um but that i mean more than just like your phone or your hardware wallet it could be like your wi-fi router or other things too especially if we have this mesh net future right which which i'm very much looking forward to and everyone should listen to the your previous pod with the locha mesh um but uh you know if we have that then you're gonna have like other devices besides phones or computers interacting with Bitcoin. And then it's almost like every device needs to have hardware wallet capabilities. And if every device has hardware wallet capabilities

and has the proper like isolated like hardware wallet with the security chip and so forth in it, then you could kind of make every device a multi-sig signer. And then you can imagine that you can obfuscate away a lot of the seed type stuff for users if they have large multi-sig setups without necessarily realizing that it's multi-sig it's similar to how like if you use icloud right now um i don't know if you're on like a mac right now um but what you know yes yes i am yeah so so what my old faithful 2014 macbook pro before they messed up the keyboard going strong with your hdmi port on there probably um so what they do with icloud which i think is kind of cool is, you know, if you go to log into a new device, it'll ask you to authorize it from

another device that you have connected to iCloud. Obviously, it's all centralized. But the premise of being able to use one of your devices, or maybe multiple of your devices to kind of authorize a new device is already something that users are kind of comfortable with, because most of them have been using iCloud for some time. So if you do the same thing with like multi-sig, you know, you could potentially put users in like very secure multi-sig setups where they never have to deal with seeds but they have full custody over their phones and so that's a future that i hope we can build towards yeah and that's um sorry i got a volunteer fire fire department alarm going off right now but that's uh and i think that's a really like a lot of people

view hardware wallets is is like wallets that they hold that like holds things on but they are really signing devices at the other day and that's i think once once you have that aha moment of hey this is just signing like all the utxos and i'm sorry this is getting annoying uh like all the utxos are actually on the bitcoin ledger like they're not on the wallet and your wallet is just a signer that says hey i own these utxos in the ledger and once you have that um that sort of structural understanding of how these devices actually work i think it leads to aha moments and then hopefully better uses in in the future better ux because people understand that you're just signing and communicating that you possess these utxos in the ledger right and there's a lot of

cool i mean i'm excited to see what the what the software developers in the space do and that's one the things that's great about being a hardware company which is we don't actually have to figure this out from a software perspective like we just need to provide great hardware that's user-friendly and open for developers and we need to put in the tools that developers can access so a great example is um like what happens when if what would happen if you released a phone or a router or something that had hardware wallet capabilities and was completely open to developers would they take advantage of that if you make it accessible over like an api for them and have like an sdk that they can use um i think a really i'm all my hardware examples are like from apple

um because i i used to be pretty i am pretty obsessed with apple right even though i i'm gone obviously down the rabbit hole on the sovereignty and privacy angle but i think they're just a great example to pull from look at what they do with like uh you know the latest ipad they added a lidar sensor right now what apps use lidar today like none of them right but the point is that they're not going to use it until the hardware maker adds the functionality and makes it accessible right to developers now all of a sudden i think you're going to see a lot of really cool um artificial reality you know ar apps that are going to come out that are specifically designed for the ipad and of course rumor is is that this new iphone later this year is also

going to have a lidar sensor and go on oh sorry sorry so lidar is um it basically can uh visualize in like 3d space and so you know previously how if you were doing like like an ar type thing on the iphone like i don't know if you've ever uh clicked the button to go on yeah yeah yeah or like how if you go to buy an apple product now you can on their website you can say like view this in ar you kind of move your phone around like in space to calibrate it you know and then like all of a sudden the object appears like on your floor ikea has that now in their app there's a lot of apps that do it um so that is what you have to do without lidar because like the phone basically uses the camera and the accelerometer and other functionality to kind of figure out

what your room looks like and the space looks like and then will properly size the object in artificial reality but with lidar you don't have to calibrate anything it just makes a 3d map of your environment and you can just use it immediately and it's also uh there's there's use for that and things like self-driving cars or other stuff like that and there's you know there's a lot of use cases there so by apple adding this you know it's something that developers probably didn't think about but now it's something they're working for so another great example in in our world in the bitcoin world is you know what would happen if we had like let's say an open source uh phone that could run like something like graphene os um which i know you guys talk

about i think matt really loves to to show graphene um big graphene stand i'm running graphene as well on pixel and i like nice so what if you were to add the proper mesh net antennas to that kind of device and you gave developers access to that then all of a sudden you know bootstrapping a mesh net becomes much more feasible so when we think about like what our response what our responsibility at foundation is to the to the bitcoin space and kind of like the sovereign internet space it's like our goal is to build great hardware make it completely open make it really nicely designed and easy to use for the end user and add in all like the dream wishlist stuff that the developers want to take advantage of and then step away and let them get

to work and i i feel like that's what hardware companies used to do and now it seems to be more about like maintaining your walled garden ecosystem and if there's like there's so much controversy with the app store lately on apple's side of things of rent seeking and trying to take large large fees from developers and forcing them to use like in-app purchases and now with apple pay grabbing a slice of every single credit card transaction and having capabilities on the device like nfc but restricting what developers can do with that that's crazy because when you remove those restrictions you'll sometimes see developers doing really cool things with with the technology that you didn't think of as a company so our goal is just like try to get as much cool stuff into

the hardware and get out of the way yeah i guess that drives an interesting question like when you get out of the way uh and you let software developers do their thing does that does that necessarily increase attack surface um it depends on how you do it right so like for example um if you were to do some kind of node product and there's a bunch of different teams working on cool node operating systems and that kind of thing today um you know all of which are running on like a raspberry pi which i think is probably not the right environment to do a node on it doesn't even have hardware wallet capabilities for example uh you could you can kind of containerize the apps it's very common to see them like like using docker or something

like that um in order to uh kind of keep the apps within their own container and and one app is not able to talk to another app you could even have like two standards you could have like bitcoin core be something that all the apps can talk to right but then you could have um the apps unable to talk to each other and the best example of that in the real world is ios where every app is completely isolated from every other app and there's some universal things they can access but it's extremely locked down and so as long as you do that in the os then i think you can have a relatively you know safe environment um i think also um having some kind of like curated app directory could become really important obviously with with open hardware users should be able to

install any app they want like if you're a technical user and you know that you want to install a specific wallet or some other app you know you should be able to do so um but the idea of maybe bundling up these node operating systems with some kind of curated app directory where there's other eyes looking at it. And, and, you know I think that could be really powerful as well. And then you could maybe subscribe to multiple different, you know, different app stores, right. Where, where you know that there's some smart people that are curating what's, what's allowed to run on the device. And that's like opt in for the end user.

Right. That's the key. Yeah. Key is it's always opt in. The key is that you never want to lock it down. but you always want to kind of strive to make it easy for new users who might not be technically competent or might be new to the idea of you know the different security models and the attack vectors that exist in the space and so i think in this like sovereign internet um i think that curation becomes very important right the idea that you can uh follow like your curators of of choice and and have some trust in them and then if you want to you can switch to something else or follow multiple yeah i mean it's probably what the bent and tftc is we just try to curate

exactly interesting exactly in this space particularly uh no i wholeheartedly agree with that trend i think people are gonna i mean the the news out of new york times this week is oh my god evident of that it's gonna it's gonna transition to and it already has in some ways towards independent curators or content creators that audiences trust yeah i wish we uh i almost wish we had a resurgence in rss feeds because i have i have like like 20 email newsletters i get now and it's just ridiculous you know and it's like every time i see some some interesting new publication start right i i'll subscribe now and it's just like overwhelming i almost like want a return of rss where you can just have a nice feed of everything yeah that's actually um

some i forget who brought it up jeff vander brought it up on the episode that he was on you i haven't listened to that one yet yeah he didn't directly um say this but uh like getting rid of guis will be important like maybe like maybe graphic user interfaces are actually driving a lot of the uh the confusion on the internet a lot of the uh vitriol the fact that it's easy to access this is like a tangent but it's funny something like an rss feed really dumbs down that that interface and consolidates everything yeah i mean i if you if you think about i guess i don't know how i feel about that because obviously i'm i'm super focused on like the ux side of things and i think a lot of people you know interfaces i think drive drive the way

that that individuals interact with technology at the same time i think like um you know online advertising and and using uh images or videos to kind of distract right and and catch your eye and all that and i think i mean obviously that model only works in a like a user interface based world right so i would love to be able to see like an app like an rss type app where i can almost build my own New York times homepage where I could like pull in different feeds and have my own kind of homepage and read that at my convenience. And I know there's stuff that, that exists, but it just doesn't seem to be popular, you know, anymore. Yeah. What would, um, paperweight was that one? Is there a pocket? Um, pocket. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

business idea freaks get on it but uh one thing we didn't touch on yet before we get into like the open source nature of the hardware that you're producing and how you source and and communicate that with your users uh the entropy creation oh yeah that's fun yeah um so how are you guys doing that you guys are using an open source software for that as well as i understand correct so uh actually open source hardware for that so yeah so um and i can use this actually as a segue into kind of why open source hardware is important so you know right now uh sources of entropy are obviously important what that means to to listeners that that are unaware is basically you know you need a good source of random numbers when you're generating

a private key so that you can make sure that it's random and if your source of entropy is compromised your whole hardware wallet could be fine but it's possible that say the manufacturer of the chip that you're using to provide the source of entropy uh it might be able to somehow derive like for example your private key and so it's very important to have multiple sources of entropy cold card offers dice rolls as a source which i think is awesome um it's definitely something that we're going to offer as well, which means that you could effectively add to the entropy that it's already using in the device when creating a private key by rolling a dice as many times as you want and plugging those values into the keypad, which then goes right into the

firmware. Because the firmware is open source, you can have some confidence that it's actually incorporating those dice rolls into the entropy. There's other ways to do it. So we have obviously a camera on this device so we can use the camera for entropy. I'm not sure if we're going to do that because it's on the back of the device and you might be like covering it up if you're holding it or if you're using it on the surface, but we'll definitely look at that. We have a photodiode on the front of the device next to the LED strip on top. Photodiode is like a light sensor. So we can actually use light as a source of entropy. And then of course we can use the true random number generator, which is in the secure element chip, which I believe cold card uses as well, which

typically we'll use something like heat to derive entropy um but what's really cool is that uh when we were researching how to build like open secure hardware we came across this guy named bunny uh bunny who is a very famous like hardware hacker he even wrote a book i think more recently i forgot what it's called but it's all about like hardware hacking and he is super well known in the space with regard to open hardware and um totally recommend that you read his stuff he has this project called be trusted where it's trying to build like uh almost like not like a phone but like a wireless communication device almost like if you can imagine having a a device that could run signal and that's it um with a full keyboard and everything and um that's how we found out

about about what screen to use because he had already found this this screen from sharp you know that didn't have any onboard circuitry or onboard semiconductors but we also came across he had an open source implementation for what's called an avalanche noise source which is a way to have a true random number generator with just having some like common available circuit board components this is above my head a little bit my co-founder matt who does our circuit engineering could probably speak better to it but the idea is that you put down like standard circuit board components like resistors capacitors stuff that is completely dumb in a certain circuit configuration and you can prove that it can generate

random numbers from that. And so we put that down on the board. And so we also have that as a source of entropy for Passport. So it's important to have these sources of entropy, but that's also like a perfect example as to why open source hardware is like really important because someone's going to come around

and someone's going to come up with some like circuit schematic for having say like a better true random number generator with commodity components or dumb components and what typically happens in hardware is they'll develop that at whatever company they work for and that'll be closed source proprietary the world will never see it but if you're able to open that up then maybe some other hardware engineer will see that and then incorporate it into their designs like what we're doing with passport and then you can build on each other's designs and so one of like our general theses and i'm

curious what you think about this you know i think it was i think it was peter teal who said like the the famous quote about you know promise flying cars and instead we got 140 characters um you know kind of as a joke about the physical world has been lagging the digital world over the past several decades right we have amazing innovation in the digital world um and it seems like most of the the mind share of smart people is like internet and software and that kind of stuff and then the physical world has in most cases been lagging and we think one of the reasons for this is the rise of open source software and how like in the digital world in the software world if you want to say integrate like a qr code scanner into your into your app

you just go on github you type in qr code scanner and you get like hundreds of repos and then like you find one that you like and maybe it doesn't do exactly what you need so you fork it and then you contribute back to it and then make it more robust we don't have anything like that in hardware We have a couple like hobbyist communities, but every time you want to do something in hardware, you have to reinvent the wheel. And so if you think about human progress and the idea of building on top of other people's achievements and knowledge, you know, in science or in technology, it's really hard to do that today in hardware because there's almost nothing to build on top of unless you're like paying like to license the technology. Even a company like Apple has to pay, it's probably billions of dollars a year. I don't know what the license fees are, but they have to pay an annual license fee to ARM to license the technology that they use to make the different chips. It's like a company at that scale is paying license fees.

The whole thing is crazy because it's very hard for like if you're smart, like say like kid going into college and you're like, I love hardware. I want to do hardware. You know, it's very hard to start that without just going to get a job at a company where everything is proprietary. and so you know philosophically the idea of open source hardware we think is really important to the world um and also really important to bitcoin which i can talk more about and just this rise of like a sovereign internet and then really applicable to what we're doing because we were able to just be like all right this guy has this open source hardware schematic and we can just take that and incorporate into our device yeah well i'm gonna be a full-blown uh bitcoin stand

here bitcoin fixes this right it finally creates the incentive to thank you thank you to um to move towards open source hardware and i've said this many times on this podcast and in the newsletter like i think bitcoin is going to be just as much of a hardware revolution as it is a software revolution and uh maybe it was just an incentives thing like yes why like you're competing with all this closed source hardware with ios and uh android android's open source to an extent uh yeah the base base operating system is open source i don't believe google's actual like android they ship is open so i think similar to like chrome versus chromium if you're familiar with that yeah yeah but yeah again the incentives there to create this open

source hardware because bitcoiners you're holding precious or not again not holding precious utx as your your uh these devices yeah give you access to your utxs and you want to be as sure as possible that it's not um compromised in any way yeah i think and this is extending beyond bitcoin hardware devices like you mentioned locha mesh um like what they're building with the terpial device is very similar like just incentivized by um people in countries like venezuela that need to relay bitcoin transactions um need alternative uh vehicles for doing that compare or they need to be able to do that outside of an internet service provider due to the lack of connectivity and um yeah it's maybe maybe it was an incentives problem i think i think i completely agree about

the incentives problem if you just like a practical example right um if you are you know making the chip that goes into inside a credit card right the security chip there um typically that's based on like a smart card technology that's a closed source and very proprietary and there's hilariously a certification that you can get uh to be pci compliant which is like the payment industry compliance standard, which if you're ever run like a Shopify store or taking payments online, you'll typically see this like, you know, this software service is PCI compliant or like this chip is PCI compliant and therefore it's okay to use the payment processing hardware, right? Hardware that can accept credit cards or is inside credit cards.

You know, who cares if something's bad with that hardware? Who cares if there's a vulnerability that's undiscovered. Because the worst thing that happens is that you call your credit card company and they reverse the transaction, right? And then you're done. And so I feel like we built this entire hardware industry around, you know, all these like certifications and proprietary IP that are kind of meaningless because there's no real consequences if something goes wrong, right like you said you know if someone if someone steals your credit card or was able to get access to your bank account who cares most people don't even care if their data is stolen right i mean they're giving it away freely anyway to you know facebook and you know all the tiktok controversy

and whatnot lately you know it's not as important to people sadly when it comes to their data i wish it was but it's just not right to the average person but dan if someone is able to steal your Bitcoin, it completely changes the equation. And so when we're thinking about hardware, we have to think about it from a first principles perspective. So, you know, when we were talking to a company about sourcing a secure element chip, they were trying to drive us to buy some like fancy PCI compliant chip. And we're telling us that, you know, in their opinion, as our industry matures, we're going to have to go the PCI compliant route. And we're just sitting here kind of laughing to ourselves because they're like, well, hold up. You actually have zero

understanding of our industry because certifications mean nothing. It doesn't matter how many security technologies that are in your data sheet or whatever either. What, what means something is having trust in the supplier, being able to audit and verify the designs, being able to audit the firmware that runs on the device and having everything transparent as possible, ideally where someone can build it themselves if they had the expertise so that you don't have to trust anyone, you know, so that you can minimize trust. And we've hilariously built this hardware world around layers of trust, and it's going to be really hard to peel those back and do it from scratch.

So that's the other reason why we're starting with a hardware wallet, because like I would love to be able to go make like an open source phone, right? But if you think about what goes into a phone, the touchscreen, the very sophisticated cameras, health, how about the 5G chip that you need for these new phones where there's a lot of controversy over Huawei and, you know, getting Chinese, you know, chips that are connecting all these devices to 5G and, you know, building 5G towers across the world, or maybe all the data is falling back to China or something, or the chips are backdoored or something like that you know we wouldn't know where to start honestly like as a as a company and so we figure

like by starting with a very simple single purpose device that's meant to store bitcoin and getting really good with that using things like a physical keypad because we don't feel comfortable with touchscreens um using triple a batteries because you don't feel comfortable with the current lithium-ion batteries and then working our way up layer by layer maybe if we can sell you know if we can sell millions of dollars of these of these hardware wallets then we can reinvest that income into designing a touchscreen that we feel more comfortable about maybe we can reinvest that income even into designing some of our own chips and uh one of our co-founders matt who i mentioned who does our circuit engineering was actually at intel for for about three years

working on semiconductors so even though we're doing circuit boards now we have the capabilities as a company to do chips too. And so we're just trying to figure out like, you know, where's the best starting place and what's the path to working our way up? And this is like a decade long, you know, thing or more. But the cool thing is, is that I think it's going to really follow

Bitcoin's progress, right? As Bitcoin becomes more prevalent and as we hopefully enter some kind of hyper Bitcoinization period in the future and every device starts to send, receive, store Bitcoin, it gives us hopefully, you know, more resources to build more complex hardware because the market will actually demand it because the incentive alignment is there yeah no i completely agree and that's

i mean it's something where we've noticed to date with the ransomware attacks right yeah it's really highlighting the need to sort of secure these systems and um because uh they're able to do it except bitcoin as payment and or monero and nobody can really stop them from doing that and um and it does this in many ways like that's a software example this uh we're talking about hardware here and right um so i'm very happy to see that you guys are sort of taking the bull by the horns like you said it's a 10 year you have a 10 year vision and stuff's not going to happen overnight it takes small incremental changes like just launching the passport and getting it out there and then building on that and so you sort of

alluded to it start with a single purpose device dedicated to signing bitcoin transactions what what do you guys how do you envision foundation devices evolving over time if this is a successful product we over time are hoping to be like like an open equivalent of apple really like we're hoping to compete head to head with incumbents like apple by the end of the decade um we're so we're starting with this hardware wallet um and we're also working a bit on some node hardware which i think could be really really cool um especially because we're not too focused on the, on the software, you know, there's already some great teams working on the software. I think they need a really good hardware platform to build on. Um, and I think,

you know, the idea of, of mesh nets and being able to create hardware that can support that for more normal, like mass consumers, I think is really important. And so I think you'll see us start to integrate that a bit, you know, maybe merging like a wifi router with a node could be really really promising um so you know we're working on on that side as well right now from like an electrical engineering perspective while the rest of the team is focused on finishing up passport and getting it you know ready to sell and then ship in the fall um and then over time i think the semiconductor part is going to be important making some like very simple open source security chips i know trezor launched like a subsidiary called tropic square that's supposed

to be doing that as well. So we'll be really interested in what they're doing too. But I think that's going to be a key part of what we're looking at over the next few years and figuring out how we can actually have the chip completely open and produce it, I think in the US would be really cool. And then working our way up to phones and other devices, I think is the long-term goal. Now we're always going to make a great hardware wallet, right? But I think having, you know, a lineup of products where we can get people out of the ios or the android you know strong grip i think right now like if you were to say i want to start a company today that wants to compete with apple and you went to like investors or something they'd probably just laugh you out of

the room um because i think the only way to actually take on a company like apple over time is to, one, I think, kind of leapfrog them in technology, like maybe in VR or AR type stuff. Or two, it's to hop on a trend that we think that they're going to miss. And we think that privacy, sovereignty, Bitcoin is now an unstoppable trend throughout this decade and beyond.

And we think that all of them are going to miss it. And we hope that we can help fill that gap and work our way up from a hardware perspective and hopefully have phones and computers and other devices later in the decade. And so that's really the long-term goal for Foundation. We called it Foundation Devices very intentionally. I'm a sci-fi novel fan.

I'm a huge fan of the Foundation books by Asimov. Kind of funny that Apple is making a Foundation TV show now airing next year. That was pretty funny to see that several weeks ago. but you know in the in the sci-fi books the idea is that you have you know civilization is on the verge of collapse and you know to simplify it a bit to the listeners that haven't read the books you have you know someone set up this this planet the first foundation where they sent like all the scientists all the engineers and all like the super smart people to preserve all of humanity's

knowledge you know through like the dark ages almost until society is able to rise again and so the idea of like you know kind of rebuilding this hardware stack from scratch and trying to uh you know preserve all this technology and make it very open to everyone right just open sourcing everything that we do i think is really cool and kind of aligns with that from like a sci-fi perspective so that's one of the reasons you know we called the company that and just you know had kind of fun uh with with regard to the naming and the branding and so forth i need to read these books oh they're so good so much on this podcast i feel i'm missing out there's some great books that are yeah yeah for for sure highly would recommend a dune as well um i feel like there's

there's some quotes that really apply to the uh hilariously to the to the bitcoin space now i can't remember but i i like tweeted a photo of it you know some some number of weeks back of some cool quote yeah i think uh dune and snow crash are like the two that get mentioned i actually haven't read uh snow crash yet so i should do that um and then why passport i like the name passport um i just i just had it in my head for a long time i think um it's really important when you're making a device that has more of a mass market appeal to name the devices with with names that people understand and sound really good hopefully and are intuitive and and and how you understand what the device works so like right now passport as single purpose device like you

mentioned it's there to just store your private keys and sign your bitcoin transactions i do think we're moving though to a place where i hope everything is going to be private key based right where your identity hopefully private keys i know microsoft is doing some work there that's actually tied to the bitcoin blockchain which is awesome uh you know passwords right maybe the idea of replacing email and password with private keys that could be something lightning based which i'm very excited about right yeah like ln url auth or lsat right exactly so that could be something lightning based where you're sending like a one sat payment to log into a service and obviously that's connected to your node which is connected back to your private keys or it could be something

different the point is that and i'm just going to keep coming back to that we as like a hardware maker we don't know what standard is going to win we don't know what's going to become popular but we do feel very strong conviction about like the decade-long trend about identity privacy bitcoin and so forth and the importance of private keys and to give normal users the ability to store their own private keys so if you think of passport more as like a in the future a general purpose signing device maybe we'll always have a version that is like only can do bitcoin because there's going to be that hardcore segment that cares but maybe we have one that is also able to store your 2fa codes store other private keys if you're a developer maybe storing your ssh keys right like

the idea that this is a general device that's designed for key storage maybe we can even derive all that from your master private key with bit 83 and create a very user-friendly way to do that where where the device is still just like a bitcoin wallet storing one key but you're actually using these keys in a lot of different places with like derived keys from there so that's that's what i'm hoping we move towards in the future so we think of this device as like your passport to a more sovereign internet and so that's why we called it passport and then we have some cool naming for our some other products that we have in the works that hopefully we'll be able to share in the future but everything is trademarked so i'm sure if someone was wanting to do some searches

they'd be able to find find it well i think this trend is imperative yeah it is imperative that we move towards this direction yeah because the alternative is is not uh not a very freedom inducing alternative uh yeah it's pretty scary actually so the fact that um you guys the foundation devices are working on this stuff is extremely encouraging and i just want to thank you guys for all the hard work you're doing to to sort of not only get these products out but really push this narrative like hey this stuff's going to be important moving forward yeah well thank you and and you know it's interesting when i first got into bitcoin it was mostly like number go up and it was uh it was mostly because i was just like hell yeah let's create a better form

of money right let's let's go let's go create a more um you know a more simple straightforward system where people can transact directly and get rid of these middlemen listening to this pod over the last like year and a half and you know reading your newsletter and obviously getting exposed to a lot of other people in the space i feel like i've i've personally kind of transitioned my view it started out i couldn't care less about privacy and sovereignty back in like 2013 and and around there i just i just honestly like it just was not something i thought about and now i think about it a lot and i think it's because a lot of people in the bitcoin space have really drilled at home as being something that's important right giving giving people actual ownership of their money

giving them control over their money and then also maybe giving them control over their identity and their data and so forth over the coming decade you know leads to a much more stable and robust society and you know i that's the other reason why like we're really big on the u.s manufacturing uh one is obviously like we're an american company and like i mentioned there's a lot of reasons to want to have that control over the supply chain especially when you're making security related hardware like it's really important i love to i would love in the future to kind of vertically integrate and maybe have our own facilities in the future which is something that you don't really see much anymore but i think i think there's a reason to do it i think the

incentives are finally there when you're building you know this type of hardware but also like i've I've been freaked out by the stuff coming out of China, um, lately. And I think, um, if any of your, if any of the listeners read, uh, Stratechery, which is Ben Thompson's newsletter, it's typically more like MBA type people and, and stuff, read it, but he's done some great content this week already about, about what's going on in China and TikTok and has also done some other great posts previously. And it's like, yeah, you could be super critical of the political situation in the US, right? You could even say that, you know, opt out of the system, buy Bitcoin, your vote doesn't matter anymore, right? Like, and obviously, I've heard you say that in the newsletters and on the

pod, it's kind of like, you know, opt out, buy Bitcoin, right? Kind of take control of your own destiny. I still think it's important to remember, regardless of how you feel today, it's like the principles that this country was founded on, right? Which is, you know, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom of speech, and so forth. And unfortunately, the incentives aren't there at the government level to make that happen. But there's no reason that we can't still embrace that as individuals and do everything we can to make that vision a reality today. And so I'm terrified of buying any hardware that's made in China, right? I think, you know, it's such a different outlook on the world and you know uh curtailing freedom instead of embracing freedom thinking about you

know uh a citizen more as uh like a cog in the machine as opposed to a sovereign individual and the tiktok stuff has been scary and i believe you guys i believe you guys talked about like the banning tiktok right on the on the previous article recap matt was against it because is why don't we ban facebook but it's like yeah well i've i've gone back and forth since that conversation like a slippery slope but ban it fuck it like i'm on i'm on the ban it like get him out of here and i'll tell you and i was very influenced by by a ben thompson's i think newsletter over the last day or day or two which is that to me it's not about the privacy it's about the uh the algorithm that they're using to recommend videos to people. So what's scary to me, it's

like, yeah, I mean, of course you're sending a lot of your personal data and they're doing facial recognition and it's all going back to the Chinese government. Of course, Facebook does facial recognition too, and it can get back to the US government and they can request Facebook's help for law enforcement matters and so forth. And who knows what the NSA and other groups like that are doing. But to me, like what's even more important is the idea of, of, of, of kind of a cold war over ideologies. Right. And with TikTok, it has a, a proprietary algorithm that can recommend videos to people in certain geographies. And you don't have any insight as like a, as a, as a user as to how you're getting recommended content and so the idea of like a foreign-based propaganda

machine that has ideals that directly conflict with our ideals of sovereignty you know liberty freedom that kind of thing and then having that that company and government essentially control the algorithm that dictates what people see right and what people hear that's what scares me it feels very orwellian in that regard and so i'm on the side now of band tiktok but it's just another thing it's like you know it's great that most hardware wallets today are not produced in china like you know i believe trezor and ledger are produced in europe cold card is produced in canada but all the other devices are and if we're entering into some kind of cold war you know which which we could be um i think it's important yeah i think we're definitely in the midst of one yeah

so i think it's more important than ever that we really learn how to make things here and that's one of the other just driving uh goals that we have as a company and again this is going to be a long-term thing it's not going to happen overnight freaks and i that's why i love 10-year plans long plans bitcoin is a long project it's going to take a long time it's going to happen slowly but surely over time and just a great american mining that's our mindset too like there's not much hash right here on american soil now but in the next 10 to 20 years we're pretty confident there will be and we're just starting to chip away at that and speaking of chipping away it's incredibly encouraging to see uh love them or hate them president trump uh

negotiating a deal to get a fab here in arizona with tsmc so i'm interested to get your thoughts on that yeah particularly yeah so the fab situation is really difficult in this country um you have intel which does make their chips domestically but intel's fabs as of today are only for intel i believe if we wanted to like approach them and use one of their older chip processes from like you know like a decade old type process we'd be able to do that but the problem is is that when you operate a company that designs the chips and makes the chips, you don't design the fab to be friendly to outsiders. So unless you trained up on Intel's design kits for years, you would probably have a hard time making chips for Intel. And that's one of the great things that TSMC did

where they basically said, you know, the idea of a, of a fab where any design company can come and essentially submit their chips for production, right. And use the fabs toolkit to be able to, so you can essentially have what's called like a fabulous semiconductor company where you can spend all your day designing chips and you're designing it like for TSMC specific process that you're using. Right. So TSMC, you know, really pioneered that. And then, uh, global foundries is based in the U.S. as well, which I believe used to be part of AMD and then split off years ago to pursue the same model that TSMC did of being able to accept outside work. Global foundries unfortunately discontinued their next-gen chip processes. I think it was in 2019. And I know

that because back when I was at Obelisk, we were speaking with them a bit about 7 nanometer stuff, And I believe they were going to be making the seven nanometer chips in upstate New York, which is so cool, because if they had gone down that road, we would have had a U.S. based company making seven nanometer, you know, industry leading chips in New York state that could compete with TSMC and then Samsung, which is the other big one, which is in South Korea. um and unfortunately global abandoned that effort and the only next-gen fabs that we have that are accessible to companies like us that might that might want to make chips are tsmc um or samsung at the at the leading edge like at the stuff you'd want to make bitcoin asics with for example or the stuff that apple is using to make you know iphones and ipads for their chips um so tsmc is you know taiwan semiconductor manufacturing corporation i think or company so they're based in taiwan um they uh you know are now it looks like going to be opening some kind of fab in the

u.s my understanding of it is the production quantities are going to be much lower compared to what they can do elsewhere it is possible that it will be used purely for like military type purposes or defense industry type purposes it's unclear if they would have enough capacity to even open it to like outside companies right as opposed to like the government or defense but i think it's a hugely important move um when you're doing a fab uh much of the processes are automated because the chip like the silicon you have to take silicon and transform it into semiconductors that's not like human labor right those are those are machines that are always running and are very complex. And while it does cost more to build things today in America, like build physical

things, like even a building that it does in China, for example, it's something that I think we can relearn as a country. And so I think if we can get companies like TSMC opening more fabs here, and if companies like us can direct business to those fabs and cause them to want to open more fabs, I think that's huge for the space from a national security perspective, but also just have more robust global supply chains right where it's scary to have everything concentrated right around china um and then hopefully we can get companies like intel to open up their their fabs to outside companies i mean that would be once again like a decade-long type effort but i really hope we can do it and um and then hopefully too we can we can you know get some fabs that are more friendly to

Open source chips. If you want to like the 50 year vision. I think that we gotta, we gotta be doing more fabs here. I think we have to be like if you want to have, for example, an open source chip. It's like, and it's virtually impossible today to do that at any cutting edge chip process like anything from the last 10 years because How it works is that you are licensing IP from the foundry that you're working with. So when you're designing a chip, if you think about it as like, let's say like different blocks and you want to connect different blocks together, maybe you design some of your own blocks and you could open source maybe some of those blocks, but you're getting other blocks that the foundry gives you, like for memory, for example, or other things. And they're actually like black boxes.

you don't know how they work you just they tell you how to connect to them but you don't know what they're doing and so everything is like that tsmc you know samsung everyone that's how they do it and so to really have like if you want to think about the stack we can open source like the circuit board designs themselves we can open source some of the components if we can make them like screens or other things but open sourcing chips is going to take i think it's gonna have to redefine the idea of like the foundry relationship like the relationship between the companies and the foundries and how the ip works and everything so it's a very long process i hope so and and google actually uh took a leap on that uh i believe at the very end of

june um i forgot what it's called i can always send it to you after if it's of interest but there is a fab located in the u.s um that uh can do like uh it does like defense type stuff and uh intel partnered with them sorry not intel google partnered with them to have uh like a open source design kit for for for chips and this is like i think it's like it's in the hundreds of nanometers. It's like a hundred plus nanometer chip when we're at like seven today and smaller is better with nanometers. So you can't do like a processor on there, but maybe you can do like some kind of secure element on there. And so it's something that we're looking really closely at because they've opened a lot of it up completely to the point where you could have like a GitHub

repo and send it to the foundry, which is unheard of. And so hopefully we'll see some progress on that side of things and hopefully companies like ours can can help push that along boss big plans thinking big that's why i love bitcoin it's uh makes people think big brings back like a moon race type vibe not only to america but like just to individuals who who value sovereignty and making cool stuff and moving us further into a cooler future or not even a cooler future it's a better future right it fixes our time horizon right it completely fixes it it pulls us out of this artificial you know situation that we have today from the fed you know which is messing with you know the interest rates and and devaluing our currency

and it really you know in this environment it changes the calculation that companies have um when they're looking at what kind of projects to pursue right if you if you ever have like a like a traditional finance type class where you're trying to evaluate an investment and looking at like the hurdle rate, you know, like the rate of return that you have to clear to make the investment worthwhile. If you have a higher interest rate society, you know, then your hurdle rate is higher because maybe a company does not have to pursue a certain project. It can just keep the money in the bank instead and make like 7% interest. But in our society of artificially low interest rates pretty much any project is worth pursuing and i think it's one of the reasons

why we have a lot of just crap like a lot of startups that are just doing the same thing as 20 other startups it's why as soon as you have like one mattress company that's direct to consumer you have like 20 more as soon as you have like one pot and pan company that's direct to consumer you have like another 10 more it's it's like why are all these smart people starting companies that are not really doing anything novel right and i think it's a problem with time horizons and i think you can track it down to the monetary policy i think you can wisely say bitcoin fixes this fix the money fix the world yeah i mean yeah safe drives us home time preference if bitcoin really forces you to shift your time preference to a longer view and not it's been incredible to do

this podcast and the newsletter to follow people with the same mindset and and i think i think the idea is a certain acceptance to the to the rest of society slowly but surely especially as everything gets uh crazy polarized um throughout the whole world and i think people feel it deep down that something needs to change and many or most vast majority of people aren't able to to diagnose the the core of the problem and what is causing this deep down problem that they feel in their stomachs. Uh, and again, yeah, it's time horizon and thinking big and having the ability to think big cause you, cause you don't have to think on a short time horizon.

And you guys at foundation devices are thinking big. I'm very excited to, um, to get my hands on a passport when it's officially released. when when can we expect that to yeah so uh we're in the prototyping stage now um and uh we're also just working on on the firmware side of things which will which will take uh probably about a month before we have like a kind of alpha version of the firmware that we feel comfortable releasing and then uh we just got our second revision back of prototype circuit boards and And so we're working on validating those now.

I have a 3D printer in my apartment, which you can see where we've done a lot of prints for the actual enclosure. We've sourced all the components already. So the next stage is getting a small set of production-ready prototypes, probably 20 to 30 of them, where we can actually load up

like the alpha version of the firmware. So that'll be probably over the next 20 to 30 days. We'll probably place those orders once we validate these prototype boards that we have. And then we'll have a set where we can hopefully send one to like you, for example, get them out there for some feedback and testing and constantly release updated firmware images

until we're ready to actually launch the firmware. We will be selling these through pre-orders. It's the best way for us to finance like a new product without raising some large amount of venture capital. We're not going to launch the pre-orders until we have everything like open source on GitHub, like the like the hardware and the software side of things even though there'll be a lot of iteration on the software side of things between pre-orders and actual shipping uh the lead times

on all this stuff once we start doing pre-orders is it takes us uh probably comfortably uh three months before we go from like pre-orders to shipping so as long as we can sell around a thousand of them and we're of course hopeful hopeful that we can sell more but our break-even cost is is around a thousand so we saw a thousand of these things between like you know around august time period then we could be shipping these in like late fall um while also having prototype units in the wild you know and as soon as as about 30 days so yeah so that's our current path and um we're hopeful things will go well with the pre-orders and we're hopeful that um you know that we'll be able to get all these into customers hands you know well before the holiday

season of this year boss um again i'm pumped to get my hands i want to test it out uh you said you could maybe do an hour and a half and not get bored we're we're almost an hour and 50 minutes i'm not bored yeah yeah i'll probably get hungry soon but uh but that's it yeah they uh i'm excited to continue this conversation i feel like it's going to be the first of many especially as you guys uh expand your product suite um but as we wrap it up here you have any like parting notes final thoughts uh where can we find you um yes so uh you can find us you can find us at foundationdevices.com um i think by the time this podcast airs um we'll have the website up so you'll be able to see all the information about passport images of it specs and so forth and you'll be able

to just put your email address down to reserve one um we for the first thousand units are going to do like a special edition type device it'll either have like a special edition back cover we might like number it one out of a thousand and at minimum we're going to do like a special edition type like gift with it so if you're able to put your email address down we won't spam you you know we'll just send you an update when the pre-orders go live and um and then hopefully you if you want to buy it you know that'd be awesome besides that we have some good blog posts up on the website too where we talk about things like the importance of open source hardware us manufacturing and so forth and we'll be putting up some more blog posts that dive much more into

like a passport and the product design process and the specifics around how to open source hardware for example what licenses do you use that's actually a much more complicated question than you'd think then we're also on twitter uh foundation dvcs because foundation devices is too long to fit you know and on the twitter username so really really appreciate uh you taking the time marty and uh yeah hopefully we'll be back on in the future no thank you again um i'm very excited uh to see all your products hit hit the market and um yeah i'm sure we'll be providing feedback uh matt matt will definitely be providing uh some unadulterated i just want to provide matt with uh with a really cool phone that comes pre-loaded with graphene with like a um like

a custom launcher where it actually the user interface looks nice that's what i want to do maybe we'll get there sooner than we think but like i i just can't wait for however many years from now he can like freeze that mat with a phone sure he'll be waiting with bated breath cool all right that's all we got this week freaks zach thank you this has been incredible i'll post this probably next week right yeah that sounds good to me awesome peace and love freaks