TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #464: The Emergence of the Network of Keys with Matt from Unchained

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Marty sits down with Matt from Unchained to discuss key networks and setting new industry standards for Bitcoin custody. 0:00 - Intro 6:17 - Matt’s backstory (go birds) 12:56 - Challenges overcome ...at Unchained 19:43 - The role of keys in Bitcoin 21:53 - Preparing for the next bull 23:42 - Misconceptions about keys 26:41 - UX gaps 29:18 - Structures built on key networks 34:15 - Countering bad optics for regulators 37:29 - Predictions 42:27 - Recognition of multisig 47:59 - ETFs and Coinbase 54:41 - Multi-jurisdiction 58:07 - Blinded xpubs and deepfakes 1:05:56 - Incoming developments in Bitcoin 1:08:48 - Are you an ordinals enjoyer? 1:11:32 - MPC vs multisig 1:17:52 - Shitcoin cycles 1:21:43 - Here for tech or money? 1:26:26 - Saving Philly 1:34:02 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠

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Starting point is 00:00:00 what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc this rip was brought to you by our good friends at river river's the best place to buy bitcoin you can easily buy and sell using the app if you dollar cost average you're not going to pay any fees on those buys if you set up a daily weekly bi-weekly monthly whatever it is you set that up Set it and forget it. You're not going to pay any fees on that. They have limit orders as well. So maybe you want to price snipe and set your buy below where the current price is
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Starting point is 00:01:18 Great time to start SAC and SATs. River's a great place to do it. Not financial advice. the store was also brought to you by good friends down the hall unchained it's lively down there right now and then they are strong down the hall they're leading the way in terms of leveraging bitcoin's native multi-sig properties to bring you products that give you peace of mind whether that's their vault product their core product which is a two or three multi-sig where you can old two keys you know one key you know no keys they've got multi-institution multi-signal
Starting point is 00:01:54 partnerships with coin cover kingdom trust they just announced backed last week really leading the way on multi-institutional multi-sig again they have that vault product you can buy bitcoin easily and sell bitcoin via unchained buy send it directly to your vault they have an ria product which gives you peace of mind knowing that your retirement funds are in bitcoin in a wallet with keys that you control you can roll your ira over they have an inheritance protocol to talk about peace of mind passing your bitcoin on is a big problem that many people think of unchained has created an inheritance product a protocol to make that as easy as possible so hit them up Go to unchained.com slash consultation to learn more about what they're building, why they're building it, and why you should be securing your Bitcoin interacting with their products.
Starting point is 00:02:50 They do it the right way, freaks. Unchained.com slash consultation. Set up a call today. This rip was also brought to you by friends at CrowdHealth. CrowdHealth is here to help you bring sovereignty to your healthcare. If you're in Bitcoin, you're finding monetary sovereignty in the Bitcoin protocol. you should go seek sovereignty in other parts of your life health care is one of the pivotal parts of your life crowd health is really attacking the health insurance model which is typically
Starting point is 00:03:19 expensive opaque impersonal crowd health isn't health insurance it's crowdfunded health care you join the crowd health community you pay a monthly fee if you ever go to the doctors you pay the first 500 of that bill then the rest is crowdfunded by the crowd health community they have a bitcoin community and the beauty of crowd health is that you have health advocates so you can get a personal experience talk to somebody to advise you on what to do if you have a health care incident or health event that you need to take care of they advocate for you with the doctors since you're paying out doctors in cash they can negotiate prices lower and they get very steep discounts on everything it's a beautiful thing if you're looking to take
Starting point is 00:04:07 sovereignty over your health care me and my family have done this we've been using crowd health for almost two years the experience has been incredible it's much better than the health insurance industry we were on cobra very expensive crowd health is much cheaper much better experience it's a beautiful thing go to joincrowdhealth.com slash tftc sign up today and you're going to get 99 for your first six months of subscriptions to the crowd health community joincrowdhealth.com slash tftc this report was also brought to you by our good friends at bitcoin talent co a recruiting firm built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners if you're a company in the space looking to hire talent to poach talent from the tech industry from the banking industry
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Starting point is 00:05:24 banking industry or somewhere else go set up a profile with bitcoin talent co get in the mix Get your resume out there and come help us build a future built on a Bitcoin standard. Go to bitcointalent.co. Tell them that TFTC sent you. Enjoy this rip. 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.
Starting point is 00:06:12 If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. How about them Eagles, dude? Hell yeah. What a game. Much different headspace this week after that W. That was probably the most hard-fought win we've had. Yeah, the Eagles refused to die, just like Bitcoin. It's a beautiful thing.
Starting point is 00:06:34 We watched it at the house. My family was still in town for Thanksgiving. Big Philly crew. I can't imagine being at that game. It looked pretty miserable. Yeah, I gave my tickets to one of my buddies. He said it was the top five game he'd ever been to, but it got pretty gnarly with the weather there.
Starting point is 00:06:49 Birds are looking good right now. I agree. It's a resilient team. One of the worst point differentials in NFL history for a team with this sort of record. but they just find a way they find a way Jake Elliott
Starting point is 00:07:02 beast 60 yard bomb yeah in the rain into the rain into the wind never a doubt don't want to
Starting point is 00:07:11 pump our pump our stuff too on a prep kid touchdown another prep kid big first down on the final drink yeah
Starting point is 00:07:18 two prep kids on the team yeah no Malvern guys the prep we had the NASA brothers that was our claim to fame but they're both out of the league now
Starting point is 00:07:27 for those of you wondering i'm sitting down with matt from unchained a fellow philly scumbag is that what we are yeah that's what sounds right stash is extra scummy today you're building some pretty important stuff we like to think so i like to know so somebody uses it yeah family uses it and you guys have been pushing like crazy yeah i've been pretty happy with our uh our speed over the past six months or so we really tightened up focus in the summer and just stuff some coming off the assembly line yeah well before we get into what's coming off the assembly line i think it's important to set the context for how you ended up at unchained because
Starting point is 00:08:18 will coles told me the story many times where you basically just showed up to him with a bunch of hardware wallets you're like i just play with these things all day believe me i know what i'm doing pretty much yeah and he uh yeah that was like two and a half years ago now um and yeah it was just sort of uh i wanted to get into bitcoin like professionally there just wasn't that many companies that i found that interesting you know there wasn't that many bitcoin only companies had a good mission uh seemed to be you know have like a reasonable track record at that time it was still pretty early in terms of bitcoin companies um having like been around for multiple years and you know on chain's been around for a while now um but it's still very early it's still
Starting point is 00:09:00 very early as you know there's how many of bitcoin only companies really are there that are that are focused on you know like uh basically traditional financial services high net worth clients and stuff like that there's a growing number but it's still nothing compared to say like go to silicon valley you see just a million marketing tech sass companies you know yeah come out every week Yeah, we're pretty far away from that, which I like. I like being early. Yeah, I like being early too. It's exciting too.
Starting point is 00:09:28 It's just fun to see how you think the game's going to unfold and knowing that you're still in the early innings and you've got a good game plan. What drew you to the security custody side of it? Well, I think for me it was just kind of going through the paces of talking about just how early we are, right? just like, all right, what actually matters the most right now? It's really helping people get more Bitcoin and then not losing it. It was really that simple. And Unchained was doing,
Starting point is 00:09:59 you know, I still think we're doing the best at that. And so, and then once you got, once I got talking to the people, you know, met Will, Parker, I was like, these are, these are my guys, you know, this is just a good vibe, a good culture, like the way people work there. And there's a lot of amazing people at Unchained that are not very public, you know, no one knows about them. They're just heads down building you know and like the work is going to speak for itself and you look back 10 years later be really proud of what we built and that that I like that you know it's not a bunch of people just always being in the public you know kind of just debating or talking and just focus on
Starting point is 00:10:32 building yeah no and it's important what you guys are building is getting back to the fact that we're early I'm sure you've heard this before but I believe there's an order of operations that needs to be fulfilled for bitcoin to attain the level of success that many of us think it can attain custody solving these problems of getting people bitcoin and then helping them secure it in the best way possible is on the very front order of that maybe right behind full node distribution and hash rate distribution yeah i agree uh and i think that it'll be interesting to see i mean we have a lot of mining clients of course and so it's interesting sort of those companies bull bear market they're interfacing and they have specific
Starting point is 00:11:18 financial services needs with bitcoin too then that's like a really fun problem space that you know we're looking forward to doing more stuff in next year um but yeah the custody piece is just so big and when you think about like layering in the financial services on top of that it it's interesting because you can't like the the traditional banking business model isn't isn't available, you know, to a place like Unchained where, you know, core philosophy is, you know, people holding, you know, their own keys, we're not re-hypothecating. And so you can say these terms, there's no perfect analogy, like we're building a bank on Bitcoin. It's like, well, sort of, but not really, because the entire banking business model isn't really available to us.
Starting point is 00:11:57 And so you have to find ways to be creative. And what are the parallels and different types of services that solve the same problems that people have in the fiat world, but like on a Bitcoin standard? And how do you help them adopt the Bitcoin standard at their own pace? So how would you describe what you guys are building? How would I describe what we're building? I think we're building, I really do think, and it'll play out over the next couple of years, like we're really building that bridge between fiat and Bitcoin. And we're helping people adopt the Bitcoin standard at their own pace and solve, you know, financial needs they have, whether that's retirement products, you know,
Starting point is 00:12:34 leaving your Bitcoin behind for loved ones, whether that's accessing dollar liquidity. It really is a traditional financial services business. However, the way that those products take form and building them directly on top of, you know, an open distributed protocol, it just looks and feels a lot different than a traditional financial services business like a Goldman or JP Morgan or something like that. Yeah. And so what are the challenges of building on this open protocol and particularly leveraging something like multi-sig, like leveraging the open protocol to build a commercial business.
Starting point is 00:13:10 Yeah, that's interesting. So I definitely think it was pretty eye-opening for me when I joined Unchained, having been like a Bitcoiner and a hobbyist and playing around with all this stuff, like you mentioned earlier, to really building enterprise software on top of that. You learn how shitty Bitcoin D's API is. That's definitely something that you learn pretty quickly. I think that's an interesting piece.
Starting point is 00:13:34 You know, one other thing we've been dealing with lately that I think is fascinating for a Bitcoin company that other places don't have is, so typically you have different like development environments, right? You know, you're building locally on your machine. You know, you have like a staging or development environment, staging environment, where you're deploying early preview versions of software where people are going around and playing and testing. And then, you know, you got like your quote unquote production environment where, you know, clients and users, that's the party, right? However, Bitcoin has its own set of environments. There's mainnet, then there's testnet, signet, regtest. And so what is that matrix and how do you set that all up?
Starting point is 00:14:13 And in a way where it's easy and effectively QAing and testing software against these different Bitcoin environments, not just our own code environments in a way where we're really confident that things are going to break when we go live. It's like we move fast, but we don't move as fast as you know we don't release at the cadence that like typical silicon valley companies do because people's life savings are at risk you know and so like we really thoroughly test everything and that that definitely presents a challenge and you know there's always that push and pull because people want to move faster but we don't want to break things either yeah and on top of that like the protocol is changing beneath you in some regards like
Starting point is 00:14:48 rap segwit addresses beck 32 addresses native segwit taproot and taking those into consideration testing it's just yeah and the standards you know require adoption themselves and so we don't just interoperate with the bitcoin protocol but we have you know our hardware wild vendors and signing devices that we interoperate with and now our new sort of network of keys and so as we start to turn unchained into really like a platform uh which is what i actually think we're building in the long term uh that comes with its whole own set of challenges and like when do you pick up stuff and you might get shamed on twitter for not supporting like taproot or something uh but there's actually like way more layers to that onion than it appears when you're doing that in
Starting point is 00:15:33 a business context and not just like a little open source prototype project well let's start with that the standardization process across the industry right because that's like one big hurdle before talking about order of operations before you can even get to the point where you guys feel comfortable building the product suite that you are there has to be this somewhat the standard and many different standards as it pertains to how to set up a wallet, how to create a PSBT, how to pass that along, how to coordinate bringing together a multi-sig wallet. What are the standards that led to you guys being able to build
Starting point is 00:16:13 what you're building in your opinion? Yeah, so we're in a good spot there in terms of really relying on rock-solid standards like PSBT. you know, HD wallets and keys hierarchy, you know, BIP 45 with our M45 derivation paths. Like we don't actually have Segwit yet, which people, you know, I'm sure people are aware of. But part of that process to your point is you want, so signing devices have their own sort of restrictions, some of them on like what paths and what sort of things they'll sign essentially. And so, you know, there's, we've been talking for a long time with different signing device manufacturers
Starting point is 00:16:50 about, Hey, here's kind of our standards, other, uh, you know, companies in the industry. What do you think about this? Uh, is there something we can all kind of get behind? It's not a lot of this stuff too. It's not really, they're not really bips, right? Because it's not like a Bitcoin improvement proposal, like for the protocol, it's just sort of like, Hey, what are these standards? It's, it's all, it's more like, um, if you, if you're familiar with like the OSI model and like the seven layers of the internet stack, you know, like layer seven is HTTP and there's like the w3c and there's like certain standards on how to interface with that build web browsers and build web applications it's like more analogous to that where it's like hey we're
Starting point is 00:17:27 building on top of this lower level lower layer thing um is there a way we can all kind of agree upon that like provides leverage for everyone and you know there's way and you can you can really do whatever you want um like if it's your own setup but that doesn't always mean you can build like a reliable thing on top of that for a large amount of clients who, once they start storing significant amounts of Bitcoin with you, you need to support that indefinitely too. Right. And so you need to be very particular about when you choose to adopt something new and when not to, because it has long-term ramifications. Yeah. Most importantly to ensure that it's interoperable and they decide to go use that Bitcoin. If they do, they don't run into a
Starting point is 00:18:07 situation where they're trying to send it somewhere else than the other software is like, I don't recognize this. That's exactly right. Yeah. And that's something we're really proud of how interoperable we are. Like we're really just building right on top of that bare metal. You know, even in our new delegated custody product where a client may not be holding any of the keys themselves, it's still collaborative custody. It's still just a multi-sig wallet that you can load up in Caravan or Sparrow or Electrum or any of these other tools. And, you know, if something were to happen, you can coordinate in meet space with the necessary key holders to facilitate a signature and you get visibility into that right you can verify everything's there on
Starting point is 00:18:42 chain and that it's it's more work to do it that way it really is but it's worth doing it that way and like our clients value it and it's just like a core principle of the company yeah and I mean you guys have been working on this so long and it seems like I mean I have close relationship with you guys so I know that you guys are making like significant progress particularly this year but you're almost getting to a point where you're putting in many, many years of hard work where you're just be able to sprint. Yeah. Not move fast and break things, but just really go balls to the wall. Yeah, for sure. I think everyone, everyone feels it. I mean, we're,
Starting point is 00:19:20 the momentum is building and there was a lot of kind of that infrastructural groundwork that needed to be laid. And then from there you can let, you can do new things and try things out more rapidly. just in a way that is sustainable and you're not just sort of like making decisions that you know you're going to have to cash that check later on in the future and that's not going to be fun yeah so what do you think the role of keys and bitcoin has been up to this point in bitcoin's history and you i mean you mentioned it but like moving forward like the network of keys idea that you guys are really going after and spearheading? Like, do you think we'll look back on the first
Starting point is 00:20:01 15 years of how people manage private keys and be like, holy shit, I can't believe they were doing that? That's interesting. I mean, I don't know. I still think there'll always be people doing it the way, you know, it's been done up until this point and the switching costs are so high, right? Especially, you know, the mempool never clears, right? Like, you know, it's expensive to move those funds on chain. And if you have something that you don't want to move for many years, even if it's 10 generations, you know, previous of a setup, like you might still keep that. However, I think going forward, you know, we really just see it all being more collaborative. And, you know, the focus has been on kind of getting that for like really large enterprises
Starting point is 00:20:44 and such first, but that will continue to be expanded. So, you know, I could hold a key for you, or you could hold a key for your family. And like, that's easy to do. And like, you're already the Bitcoin guy, right? And so they trust you, they'll have the tools, and it'll start to look and feel a little bit more like how traditional services are working, where, hey, you know, I have my beneficiaries or a joint account or something. And, you know, like that, that will evolve, the UX will evolve in that direction. All of the same stuff under the hood is there, Like it's, it's still mechanically a Bitcoin multi-sig wallet, uh, that requires M of N keys to, you know, uh, sign a transaction before it can be spent.
Starting point is 00:21:24 But if you think about like all of the, the missing layers of design and experience that are on top of that, like that's, what's going to start to be layered in. And I think it'll be a lot more social and like blocks obviously on this track, right? You know, they, they're making some interesting design choices around, you know, the social recovery aspect and how that's going to work. Uh, Thea, Y Combinator startups doing similar things. Like there's people on the, on, you know, all on the same trail, like kind of culminating around, I think what will be like the next like step change evolution in custody.
Starting point is 00:21:53 Yeah. And I think it's really important that you guys and everybody else working on this particular design landscape within multi-sig doing it right now is extremely important because if we are turning into another bull market, you have the institutions coming in the wave of adoption. we're about to see i think many believe is going to be bigger than anything we've seen up until this point like getting the stuff out the door to market so that you can basically bring a lot of that wave into this better user experience around key management is going to be massive
Starting point is 00:22:28 because we think about again saying we're so early in anchoring to the first 15 years of how people have secured their private keys like moving forward if bitcoin is going to succeed like we think it is there's going to be orders of magnitude more people adopting bitcoin and getting their first exposure to bitcoin yeah totally and they can they can progress along that journey in a way that you know like right now you can either go with a custodian or like you know hot wallets on your mobile phone or you go like full hog into a um uh like some hardcore bitcoin twitter setup there's no sort of like stepping stones along that journey and that's what we want to provide And so you can maybe start out where I'm holding a key and I'm change holding a key and another third party is holding a key.
Starting point is 00:23:14 But as you get more comfortable, then you can actually kind of go backwards, quote unquote, and start holding more of your own keys because now you're comfortable with it. And like that's actually what we want. Like we want everyone to hold their own keys. We just need to you know, we're reaching out to them right now. We can't get them all. And so we're trying to get a little bit closer to grab their hand and, you know, pull them along along that journey in a way that they feel good about. And that's like super exciting. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about holding your own keys? Oh man. I mean, there's so many, I think like, you know, the, the classic like Zoolander thing,
Starting point is 00:23:46 like the files are in the computer, right? I mean, I think that's a huge one. It's sort of, oh, it's, it's the Bitcoin's like on my phone and I dropped my phone in the toilet and now it's gone. It's like, well, not, not really. If you had your, your seed phrase backup, you can just load it into any of these other interoperable things. So I think there's, um, there's definitely a hurdle there.
Starting point is 00:24:05 Like it's why a huge part of like the work you're doing and everyone in the space around education is so important. Right. Every single adoption wave, this educational content gets like more and more evergreen because there are just some fundamental like technical hurdles to get over. You know, you mentioned Will earlier and one of his his sayings was always, you know, like driving a car isn't is like super dangerous and not easy. But everyone does it like you get you get trained up and you're good to go and you don't really think twice about it. and like holding your own keys once the ux is good enough will like eventually feel like that too but there's still major misconceptions about like what did what that even means what are you doing what do you mean i need to sign something or unlock some things there's not great analogies no i'm just like my own experience like i was aware of private public key encryption before
Starting point is 00:24:56 bitcoin but just knew of it and not until i got into bitcoin and actually wrote down my first seed phrase was like oh this is how it works recover the wallet and you're like oh this is very important this is very different like a new way of interacting with with money that really raises the bar of risk number one and then two like personal responsibility yeah and then it's like that c phrase though it gets turned into what a string of what looks like gibberish to people which then gets turned into other things in a tree type structure and then if you actually don't know where on the tree because that's actually where your bitcoin's at if you don't know where on the tree then and the wallet doesn't know because while it's coming back to
Starting point is 00:25:36 the standards thing have different ways of doing it you know those are those are real hurdles to get over yeah you gotta learn how to scan your wallet look at different derivation paths right go back and try to remember which wallet you created that private key with and yeah what was their derivation path out of the box and did they change it over the two years since i last looked yeah we had the situation at a 1031 event last year where one of the bartenders uh became privy that he was bartending at a bitcoin event and like came up to one i forget what wallet he was using i think it might have been trust wallet or something like that but he couldn't get it out um and he thought he'd lost his bitcoin forever luckily we had some
Starting point is 00:26:14 hardcore bitcoiners there we're like no let's go back and look at how you created this private key what derivation path they were using yeah and so apparently he tried to upload his private key into a wallet that wasn't finding that derivation path we're like no here's what you have to do he found this bitcoin yeah we saw limits all that stuff saw him again this year and he sold it all oh well that's how it goes sometimes yeah yeah i'll be back yeah they all will be yeah so you mentioned ux what do you think the biggest gaps in ux are right now um well there's a lot of gaps i mean i could tell you like some of the things we're focused on solving um as a way to frame it so you know i think one of the interesting things about
Starting point is 00:26:58 multi-sig and building better multi-sig UX is the, the protocol is like pretty explicit, obviously about what you can and can't do. Um, but when you start having multiple parties involved, multiple entities, multiple humans, um, that then now the challenges change. It's not just like, Hey, do you have, you have all three keys or you, you know, you need two of them or you're securing them in different spots, et cetera. And like in general, it's kind of like a linear flow for yourself. Uh, once you have multiple different people collaborating, there's like a whole layer on top of that, that doesn't really exist. And it will never exist in Bitcoin itself. Like Bitcoin enforces the multi-sig contract, but on top of that, you know, how, how is key agent
Starting point is 00:27:40 XYZ verifying, you know, it's like me and I have the intent to move all the funds out of my wallet. How are they coordinating with the platform provider to make sure they give the green light to release that thing for signature? And so, you know, like some of the models we look at, like a GitHub pull request and kind of how that goes. There's kind of synchronous things. There's asynchronous things. There's automated things happening in CI, CD checks. And sort of it all kind of culminates in this like,
Starting point is 00:28:05 all right, you know, let's merge this to master and ship it. You know, we kind of envision a very similar like collaborative process and like a design canvas for that we're working on now. It's like, how is that going to work? And there's all these different entities involved and just getting a transaction through the process, through the approval process.
Starting point is 00:28:23 has the fee environment changed? Cause these can be multi-day things, right? So you can get wrecked if you said it, Hey, I'd low priority by the time you go to broadcast that it's going to get purged. Uh, so even things like that are interesting challenges that, you know, you don't really have to think about in the Fiat world, or even in like a, just, I'm just, you know, sending something over lightning or from my hot wallet. Yeah. It's a develop these social protocols. Yeah. It's like a meat space protocol, basically. Yeah. That's actually been one of the hardest parts even getting to here is actually a lot it's largely a bd uh and relationship and like you know looking at each other's audits and stuff process um the software if you can
Starting point is 00:29:00 export an xpub and sign a psbt like let's lock and load um but it's actually the whole like how do you even get someone to understand that this thing like holding a key for others on this larger platform building this larger network is even valuable to participate in to begin with especially when they have their own customers their own businesses and all that well let's dive into this i think number one are people starting it seems like you guys announced coin cover and backed in the last month and a half maybe last month obviously kingdom trust has been a key partner for for years with the lending product are people becoming privy to the fact that this may be advantageous then on top of that what type of unique business
Starting point is 00:29:40 structures can this enable because when you think about it like typical fiat world particularly we're looking at asset management like each manager wants all the aum under their house so they can get the fees but in this new network at keys world you can create much better and client assurances but there's going to be like new business structures built on top of that because you're going to have multiple institutions playing with each other to service the same client at the end of the day yeah and so i mean i think ultimately um you know we envision a world where it's a free market and so like different key agents are you know competing on hey here's my sla here's my security procedures here's what i'm charging um and so it really ends up look
Starting point is 00:30:29 starting to look more like a two or multi-sided platform like an uber and airbnb you know would be sort of analogies and so but it will take time like you always have to solve kind of the cold start problem when you're working through like multi-sided platforms and so it's like okay what's the hard side is it the supply side of in this case like keys is or is it the demand side of people actually wanting this sort of model and so the time is ripe now to be working on this like unchained had for a year years ago had what was called like the multi-institution vault where was unchained kingdom trust and the client held one key and there just wasn't a lot of demand for at the time. And so we, we basically just turned it off for like a year, put, put that whole concept
Starting point is 00:31:12 back on the workbench and now have, you know, of course have recently relaunched that and are now kind of leaning in and sprinting towards it. But the, the businesses are going to be really interesting because if you think about ultimately like some of the platform type capabilities you can build, like, you know, potentially other businesses as, especially when traditional financial service businesses start getting in and want to offer Bitcoin to their clients, It's like they can do it in a way where they're sort of mitigating single points of failure. It's like, hey, sign up for custody through whatever, Capital One. We'll hold a key.
Starting point is 00:31:46 You can hold a key. So-and-so holds a key. At that point, you're now, you know, you're beyond even thinking about like logging into unchained.com. But it's just something totally different. It's like it's just like amoeba that is growing and people are starting to realize the value of it and they can build those types of services directly because like that's what the market will demand and so it'll it'll move in that direction and the most beautiful thing about
Starting point is 00:32:12 this is it is a forcing function for good actions by these companies at the end of the day you get away from fractional reserve they literally cannot mishandle your your funds without colluding with other members of that key quorum and the likelihood of other members colluding and ruining their reputation. The process is significantly lower than one institution just running with your funds. Exactly. It's, it's, it's, it's theoretically a win for both sides, right? I mean, so many, you know, there's been a lot of businesses that have collapsed in, you know, earlier this year as well. Right. And there's been a lot of consolidation in the custodian market. And so this is sort of like opening that, that like letting that bloom a
Starting point is 00:32:53 little bit more and saying, Hey, this is good for you. You're still getting a piece of the pie, but also if like you go under now the client's funds aren't totally at risk anymore either and even if you're spreading across multiple you know putting the eggs in multiple baskets with like different custodians you're not actually mitigating like truly any single points of failure there uh you're just you're just like playing a probability game because if one went under whatever eggs were in that basket are crushed they're gone yeah yeah we found that out with the banking crisis earlier this year a lot of bitcoin companies scream like silver Gates down, Silicon Valley banks, right. First Republic's down, right. A lot of bank account
Starting point is 00:33:30 hopping. Yeah. And the regulatory environment is hostile. I mean, it is, you know, I think there's a lot of, there's, there's, there's a lot of that goes into just even being able to operate a Bitcoin business at all, even just being able to get bank accounts and stuff. Right. And so, you know, that's something that people sometimes, you know, I think you want to move fast, but you also want to be building redundancy and mitigating risk in your like in your own ability to continue servicing clients forever as well and so there's like a trade-off there and you saw with some of the scrambles that you know this is like oh yeah i think that's top of mind for everyone now yeah and it's the same to think like this network of keys model if regulators actually cared about
Starting point is 00:34:13 end clients this is like a two-parted problem one part is like crypto ftx celsius block fi they blow up everybody who doesn't understand what's actually going on in the industry more particularly between the individual companies like comparing unchained to block fi it's like you guys were doing offering similar services but doing it in complete opposite ways i think time has proven that you guys were doing it the right way um but point being is like that all happens and really puts a black eye on the industry and the regulators just say oh it's all bad but if they were forward thinking they actually understood the network of keys you guys are building and the way that you guys if we just look at lending as a service how you guys have
Starting point is 00:35:05 done it compared to others it's leaps and bounds uh better for the end client at the end of the day Like they would be fighting for this to become the model of the financial system in the future. Right. Right. Yeah. And I mean, you know, things are we've invested a ton of resources into our, you know, compliance and risk team who are all like stone cold killers. And like, I mean, like they do such a good job, frankly, just like educating behind the scenes, you know, regulatory bodies and these other entities. And, you know, the things are it's moving along. And like, of course, having a model that essentially prevents loss or really significantly mitigates the risk of that happening. And then having an extended track record of that as every year goes by and more and more education happens, you know, it starts to become a little bit a little bit more. Those discussions are just like, all right. Yeah. There's like less of let's start at zero and get there. You know, you're maybe starting a few levels in, which is nice.
Starting point is 00:36:03 yeah and again going back to like it being very important that you guys are launching this and others are going after it right now like if we rip into a bull market and you guys are successful in obviously servicing people as the price runs up but more importantly keeping people's bitcoin secure as it goes back down which if we're using history as a barometer it's likely to happen like does that create what i think we both want which is the recognition that this is the standard that everybody should be using moving forward. Yeah, I mean, that's what we're hoping. I think I always just kind of come back to like the hash rate goes up
Starting point is 00:36:40 and the number of people year by year who get it continues to go up. Maybe not at the rate that everyone, you know, wants. It is a long game, but for people to learn, and once they get in, they very rarely kind of go out the other direction. And we have tools for that too. We just launched selling a couple of weeks ago where that is its own complicated thing, selling out of multi-sig. But there are people who try and time it and play it, and they do understand the long-term value prop. But yeah, like as every cycle happens, more and more people holding their own keys or mitigating single points of failure.
Starting point is 00:37:17 That is the real NGU over time, and that's really exciting. Yeah, that really is. fully fleshed out like what is your cosmic view of where this network of keys goes what is your 15-year look into the future you guys have been successful people get it they've adopted it what does the world look like well hmm 15 years i'm usually an optimist on that long of a time frame that's why yeah yeah yeah i mean i think um i think what it looks like is like everyone has some has some bitcoin and it's being secured by if not a majority of themselves like family members friends their estate planner their you know registered investment advisor uh an
Starting point is 00:38:12 another institution like the world is collaborating to secure the majority of the bitcoin that's held you know, outside of like single points of failure. I think that that is like the ultimate end goal. And you can measure that pretty concretely, right? Like how many keys are in the network? How many different configurations are there? How much Bitcoin is being secured? You know, we already have thousands of keys securing billions in Bitcoin, and that that's only going to keep going up. And it's really just distributing it wider and wider. So if you think of just like a visual of like a little network graph, you know, it's growing, more nodes are adding, there's more connections being drawn between nodes, and it just starts to grow into
Starting point is 00:38:49 this huge web uh and you have to start somewhere and like seed that with some miracle grow uh but like and that takes time but once it happens then network effects happen and so you get positive network effects on both sides of the platform where for every additional key added to the network everyone gets value it's like how facebook grew right it's like if all my friends are using it every new friend that comes on it's more valuable for me like ultimately the the network keys can grow in a similar manner where if we do it right uh it's just like it's just compounding value like layers of value building up over years and years that's how like the true long-lasting stuff is built yeah and if the bitcoin secured and collaborative multi-sig too like you can see
Starting point is 00:39:31 like this type of platform being the bridge that we need to get away from this banking system that's completely insolvent to a banking slash financial system that is rock solid where the collateral is where you think it is when you think it is totally yeah it's uh i can see it i can see it too clear as day but there's a lot of time between now and 15 years in the future what uh what are you most excited for like in the next six months in terms of unchained next six months hmm i'm excited about a lot of things. I think just continuing to sort of build out some of this collaboration tooling is going to be exciting. I think bringing in a little bit of the dollar side of the equation to the table. And so you sort of like really strengthening that bridge.
Starting point is 00:40:22 We have a really good sort of one-way bridge right now, but it, you know, making it so people can kind of go back and forth a little bit more seamlessly. I think that's going to be pretty exciting, um, because it's sort of, um, people are servicing these needs elsewhere. Right. And so if you can get them to do it in one place while that, while that's continuing to strengthen the network of keys and sort of like the Bitcoin in custody in the network of keys over time at their own pace, um, you know, we just think that that's just going to continue to add fuel to the fire. And there's some other interesting, like financial service type stuff that, that we've now laid the groundwork to be able to do. And so like this week we're shipping trust accounts as
Starting point is 00:41:04 like a dedicated thing. We have a lot of, a lot of clients use trusts. Trust is like a legal wrapper and structure plays, meshes really well with Bitcoin. And so like, we're going to have the best trust, like account, like in the world, not, not just, not just for Bitcoin. I mean, go try and open a trust at like TD Ameritrade. It sucks ass. That's going to be really, really nice and so starting to starting to sort of like tighten up some of those hey here's these like legacy like things that are going to be around for a while whether even if they're just like paperwork or legal structures with like the bitcoin side of it is going to be really exciting too yeah and bitcoin multi-sig for trust is beautiful yes as somebody not if you have a trust
Starting point is 00:41:48 like you technically need to give up control that assets those assets within the held within the trust and if you have a trust it's just filled with bitcoin you can give one key to your lawyer one key to your state planner and then pick another trustee yep you technically don't have control of the assets and you have the paper tray on the audits and all the other stuff you need for to like count you know in the real world yeah yeah the real world comes in to make sure that you're checking all those boxes it does it does but it's still there it's still secured in a bitcoin multisig wallet right at the end of the day yeah what do you think took people so long to recognize the validity of multisig
Starting point is 00:42:32 and multi-institution more specifically and are people even recognizing it i think they're recognizing it i think um some of it is just still design challenges you know to your point like it's hard enough to have gotten individuals to the point where they understood enough to just have one one key and secure their stuff that way uh and then it sounds very complicated it sounds like another like exponential leap to get the multi-sig um but then really it's more on the i think just it had to play out the way it has on kind of like the institution institutional side where you know of course the meme of institutions are coming well like obviously they are to some extent right i mean there's public companies holding on their balance sheet now the fasb rule goes in effect
Starting point is 00:43:19 what next year 2025 officially 2025 but you can start using the guidelines next year i believe yeah and so just like seeing how it kind of functions as like a hedge um just like if you're looking at it's just like a traditional investment instrument uh and then seeing how some of the things have collapsed and played out like all of that just you know for um sharp individuals who are kind of like looking and gathering all that information and making an informed case it really just starts the cream just rises to the top in terms of being oh okay multi-sig no single points failure has all the legal wrappings on top of it like it's just starting to like move in that direction and so some of it is just you know it kind of had to play out the way it did um i mean
Starting point is 00:44:03 And the people early on, of course, who were enterprising could figure it out and realize that this was a rock-solid way. But if you think about it, there's been a lot of improvements to the Bitcoin protocol itself and multisig, but really just the original version of multisig is kind of all you need. It just takes time to build those layers on top of it and things to play out in the macro environment to where people recognize. That's my assessment. I mean, who knows if that's actually true, but that's how I see it.
Starting point is 00:44:32 that's how i see it too to the point of like ux design i mean what's your perspective is somebody leading a product team obviously heavily focused on the test technical aspects of what you guys are building and trying to find designers who can articulate that via visual experience design yeah i mean i think um there's there's certain aspects where not knowing anything about bitcoin at all really helps. And then there's certain aspects where that harms, you know, our design team is kick ass. And I think they bring like a wide, a wealth of experience, both at in at having been in Unchained for a while, and also their previous ventures building, you know, like higher performing software applications that kind of allow, like challenge everyone to see things in
Starting point is 00:45:17 a new light. You know, I think the challenge always is, is you can only abstract away so much like at the end of the day, the reality of holding a key, have this little device thingy, like what's that about, you know, those things are still there. And so figuring out how you can kind of weave education and, and sort of like guidance, you know, like navigate, help people navigate through, um, and then end up in a spot where they feel like they're really comfortable. That's always part of the big challenge. Um, and I think that it's interesting that there's more and more, like I would say design out of all that sort of technical disciplines of, you know, engineering, product managers designers like there's definitely fewer designers who have sort of caught the the
Starting point is 00:45:59 bitcoin bug in my in my sort of estimation just like industry-wide than any other of the of the other disciplines and so we're fortunate to have you know some of the very few uh who do and like really excited for them to for us to clear out some of this infrastructure work we were talking about to just let them cook honestly and it's going to be awesome that's what i say if you're designer out there looking to leave your mark because you think about it you have to create experiences like hey number one this is a multi-sig number two this is a wrap segwit address or a native segwit or a taproot address number three like here's the amount of keys in your quorum here's the number of keys you need to actually broadcast transaction like there's so
Starting point is 00:46:40 many user experience user experiences to build to articulate all this because yeah and you can't paper over like you can you can pay there's many many debates about what do you selectively expose of those things in a design but regardless of that you can't paper over getting and understanding those details to come up with something right you might say hey i dove in i understand all this only three of the 10 things actually need to be there and here's why but that requires just like a lot of work to get to yeah um which which is also you know makes it a little bit of a different discipline than some other places here's my component library you know slap it together like everything else i don't even need to care about i don't need to understand the technicals
Starting point is 00:47:24 yeah it's if you uh fuck up something just using a react js library it's like oh you can't send money anymore right right people's life savings yeah that really just trickles through you know all every aspect of everything for not just us but then everyone building on bitcoin you know it's just sort of, there's a reason things go or like, okay, we're doing like the alpha, the alpha two, the beta test net only, like things happen and, you know, and it takes that sort of progression because you want to be confident yourself as the builder that it's rock solid when it goes out there.
Starting point is 00:47:59 What do you think about all these ETFs going to Coinbase as their single custodian? Most of them, I think five out of 12. Fidelity is going to do self custody, obviously. and then the other six had not announced their custody partners? Well, I mean, I think the reality is, it's like if you're looking at it, if you're in their shoes
Starting point is 00:48:19 and you have your sort of spreadsheet up with the rows and the columns and you're filling in the little Xs in there, say like, hey, I need like all these boxes to be checked, like Coinbase checks all those boxes, right? And so, you know what, like I of course think that the sort of multi-sig, you know, collaborative custody model is better long-term.
Starting point is 00:48:38 um, you know, Coinbase hasn't had like major custody failures and like, they are very close in the industry with regulators and like, they have all the approvals, they have all the audits. And so if you're someone who is sort of at the direction of the office of the CFO at your company, it's like, Hey, I want to pull a little bit of Bitcoin, 1% hedge for all these reasons. Like, can you just like go do a sort of vet vendor analysis basically, right. Of like what we should go with like coinbase is going to bubble up to the top and that's good for them for sort of like having a product strategy that gets them into that position um and so it'll take time to kind of especially with the switching costs you know like it has to be 10x more valuable to switch over to
Starting point is 00:49:19 something else and like there is going to be 10x more valuable things out there but if you look at it from the in the put yourself in the shoes of the people making those decisions like i you know it makes sense yeah and now going to coinbase too i guess that's an interesting question we dive into like what is going to convince them as you mentioned they successfully secured individuals corporations funds bitcoin for many years now uh obviously many people focused on bitcoin only are not the biggest fans of coinbase but you can't knock them they've done it successfully right they bought zappo incorporated their deep cold storage into their operational stack like what is what do you think it's going to take to convince them to begin participating in
Starting point is 00:50:07 multi-institution custody models or do you think they'll just be like no we're good i think it's gonna i think it's gonna it's gonna be a whale migration right like when when sort of their big fish starts swimming over another pond uh you know i think how i see this playing out is you know an olive branch will be extended like hey you know i think this thing over here with how how much we're securing now and our you know internal controls and procedures like this is a much better fit for our model, we'd love you to still participate, but just one of the keys, you're no longer a single point of failure. And now boom, they're into the party. So like, I don't know if I think, I think it'll be a demand driven thing that gets big players like Coinbase kind of into
Starting point is 00:50:44 the, into the party more so than perhaps them coming up with it on their own. I would love to be wrong about that, but I think that business is good for them right now. So why, why sort of, it's classic innovators dilemma stuff, right? Why disrupt yourself if like, there's no signs that there's something more disruptive on the horizon until but like the beauty of the network of keys is that the clients can bring them with them in into the the large network at some point yeah and you also have to imagine like the the gravity especially if bitcoin appreciates some price we'll be talking about like trillion dollar wallets at some point yeah and like thinking you know chief security officer coinbase like trying to sleep at night knowing that
Starting point is 00:51:26 your product is a single point of failure for all that money that's the way on people Maybe it doesn't, but yeah, I mean, and, and I think the, the, the likely scenario is that the person on the other side of that is thinking, oh, like there's a point of failure for this. Like, let me go to see what else is out there. And then even if the Coinbase guy's thinking about that, um, you know, if he decides to go be an internal champion for, you know, moving to something else, they're like, those things take time. And so it's really gonna have to come from, I think just users and clients and customers and sort of just demanding like something better. Yeah. And then on your end, are you guys creating sort of onboarding processes that will make it
Starting point is 00:52:08 as seamless as possible for the Coinbase of the world or others to enter the network of keys when they decide to do so? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's largely, you know, there's obviously a lot of sort of things that have to happen. So if you think about like listing your house on Airbnb in your apartment, you want to rent it out, you got to put the photos, fill out this and that. And so like eventually, you know, we'll we'll get there. We're sort of people will be able to kind of just join, join the network themselves at any of the tiers because there's like really different market segments. But already for like an enterprise, like a Coinbase, it's pretty easy. I mean, if you can export XPUBs out of your cold storage setup and sign PSBTs, like it's pretty easy to integrate with our platform.
Starting point is 00:52:51 The larger challenge is getting to that agreement that like we're going to do this together still. for now yeah and one would have to think like once you guys continue to add more people to the list of key agents within the network like the legal side of things will become more streamlined it'll be like hey we've done this x amount of times here's exactly what you need to do exactly and like like right now we're at the focus on kind of the enterprise market is you know we're doing all that very intentionally working really closely collaborating with these teams all rock solid awesome teams i've been impressed with everyone one we've worked with. But yeah, you're sharing, you know, here's our audits, like, and you're
Starting point is 00:53:30 going through, here's our, here's our security review process. Here's your security review process. And you go through all of that. And so like, that is the bulk of the quote unquote, like onboarding work. Once it gets into the like redlined, you know, we agree to a deal, then the fun part of like, all right, let's get the key on, let's test it out. Let's try a caravan recovery. Like that stuff's, you know, the fun part. Over time though, like not everyone will need those type that, like that level of key agent. You know, you could have, like I was mentioning, like your estate planner or your lawyer, it's like, Hey, you want to hold a key. And of course we're not going to then like the same level of sort of like requirements for that
Starting point is 00:54:10 person to participate with their family and friends or their clients. That'll be different as well as like me just onboarding my mom and my, my sisters and my brother, where I hold a key, like that is its own separate thing. And so the benefit of focusing on kind of that enterprise stuff first is you really work out a lot of the kinks while like, and sort of like solve all of that in like a premium luxury way that they can just be opened up to everyone in the future. It's just like a highly like leverageable thing.
Starting point is 00:54:40 Yeah. And so you guys have coin cover is one of the first key agents. How important do you think multi-jurisdictional multi-institution custody will be in the future? I think it's going to be pretty important. And, you know, there's there's definitely we have there's been some interest in like participating in the network from from other jurisdictions, even more so than the U.S. I think it's like if you think about it, it's a highly global just like concept in general, the network of keys. I think it'll be important. I think some of the hurdles right now are the folks who are really interested in this model from like an institution standpoint.
Starting point is 00:55:17 you know they have that spreadsheet they're saying hey you need SOC 2 audits you need needs to be qualified custodian and they're like you have to check certain sort of like legal wrapper check boxes that sometimes you can only obtain in certain cases in the U.S. and so that's like a really interesting thing we've learned over the past year it's like okay but like as you start opening that up you know you can even envision sort of like a map or something you can see where the different keys are located and kind of like go through your own shopping and selection process in a way that that meets your needs. And they might have different, uh, maybe it's just, it's not just that the key secured in a different location, but maybe they're, you know, they turn around
Starting point is 00:55:58 signatures faster because they're awake when you're asleep and you want to get a transaction through. And so it's going to be interesting. We still need to learn more how that's going to evolve, but I do see it being like highly global by the end of it. Yeah. That's the thing too. i mean what you're talking about i mean having had drew on this show many times and obviously reading all the incredible content he puts out like what you're working on is pretty sci-fi and oh yeah the looming specter of regulatory overreach is just so it bums me out because like we have the ability right now to go build these extremely unique and beneficial financial services,
Starting point is 00:56:40 particularly around custody for everybody on the planet. But you could see a future which seems to be materializing where the regulatory environment could slow it down precipitously. Yeah, for sure. There's also like, there's way like there's other things we're looking at too, that aren't,
Starting point is 00:56:59 aren't just kind of in the shell of sort of like the regulated unchained experience, but more like open source tooling that like you, that can also take advantage of the network of keys too. Right. So it's like, Hey, like maybe I don't need the white glove support. I don't need any of the financial services. I just want like unchained to hold a key. I actually don't even want them to know who I am or,
Starting point is 00:57:19 or sort of how well my holdings are unless I need them in the future. And that's how that's like, that's where the, okay, now we got to go through that process and like, you know, make sure no one's getting in trouble. But there's like, there's, everything we're doing is going to create that sort of nice bifurcation where like you can sort of meet this other audience who maybe is like that cypherpunk or they've been around for a while. They have those old setups we talked about earlier. And I do want to move to something more secure. Don't want to go through this heavy handed process and expose some of those types of
Starting point is 00:57:49 tools too. Cause that's really what the value is, is in a lot of cases, the key, the distributed keys are almost like an insurance policy. You know, it's like break glass in case of emergency, if you need it if you're holding the majority of the keys yeah right and so like what are products and things you can build there that are almost like their own little entities were you alluding to michael flaxman's idea of like a multi-sig blinded expose yeah we're familiar with the proposal let's explain it to people who may be unaware what the proposal is yeah again talk about sci-fi stuff yes and like i mean you know i wish flaxman was outside right now because he who do a much better job than I, and we've used like a warded term, but, but basically you can,
Starting point is 00:58:30 you can essentially like provide like a mask essentially on the key that you get, say you like, you go as like a PEZ dispenser, like give me an XPUB from Unchained. You basically mask it and you include that in your multi-sig quorum. And so Unchained actually doesn't know like how it was like fully derived by the time it got into their multi-sig wallet. And so it's still there And it just uses sort of discrete one way math to be, it's like, it's, it's deterministic. And so you can always like, if you go to on chain, you say, Hey, this is the key I use basically. And it was used this way.
Starting point is 00:59:05 And thus you can like get signatures for it. And so it's a really interesting concept. And it's like, it's, it's, it's privacy preserving, you know, up until a point in time where you're like, well, I'm happy to break the veil because, you know, I lost one of my keys and like, I'm going to lose all my funds. Yeah. so in this example you have like a two it's three setup where you hold two keys you engage uh you get unchained x pub to create a two it's three quorum you are the only one with
Starting point is 00:59:34 access to the public addresses associated with that master public key and that multi-sig public key you can put bitcoin in those addresses and you know you can spend from that up until the time which hopefully doesn't happen but if you lose a key and you only have one in the two or three quorum you go to unchained say hey uh here's the derivation path you have a key they can sign here yeah and like here's the wallet configure it like here's the wild config here's how i wrapped your key and included it in here so you can peel it apart and and give me the necessary signature yeah and then if the person was using bitcoin privately and just doing things by the law but they like their privacy they go to unchained this area and you can audit the history of this make
Starting point is 01:00:16 sure it's all kosher and then sign exactly yeah yeah it's a beautiful thing it's sci-fi it is it is sci-fi um yeah i mean when you get drew ball next game going on the ai stuff and how you know a lot of the the collaboration tooling you know will account for those sorts of things too right you know it's like if you're so if a deep fake video is you calling in hey this is me i'm gonna i'm authorizing this transaction like how do you protect against that right i mean there's all these interesting like meat spacey things that that you need to um be able to like have plans for hasn't happened yet but you know we take that stuff like incredibly seriously uh and you know we're already thinking about what are ways you could do that uh like how could someone attack
Starting point is 01:00:58 adversarial thinking how could you attack it how could you verify that it actually is them in this video that is uh the first question i ever asked drew because he unchained i think him and parker did a vault demo in new york it's 2017 or 2018 and i was the dickhead in the crowd like any questions i was like what are you going to do when deepfakes come are you going to sign um how do you think because that's back then it really wasn't a problem that many people had to worry about but now it's becoming abundantly clear that this stuff is getting legit it's getting legit and there's a lot of um in a lot of these things there's a lot of centralization too I don't just mean centralization in terms of like, oh, it's all in, you know, AWS US East one, which which is true or West one.
Starting point is 01:01:47 But I just mean more like, oh, the the places that, you know, provide what's called like a liveliness check, like do the thing with your license and all this. And like there's there's only so many places that even provide that offering. Right. And so if you can figure out if that's what everyone's using on the back end, you can figure out how to get through that. Like how like how deep did your tentacles just go? Now you can get in the door to potentially like major banking institutions and a lot of other places that all kind of rely on the same tooling because it's just like, you know, those companies made it easy to do. You know, just say, hey, just do this. You know, like how seriously you're taking this versus just checking a box. And then you sort of like build up these like honeypots, essentially.
Starting point is 01:02:28 Yeah. How do you think you solve this problem? Deepfake problem, particularly. I mean, I don't know. That's the better question for the engineers. but I do think there's probably, there's definitely ways you can, you can like agree upon certain terms or words to be said in the script you read. Right. And you like insert that into the script. So instead of an AI, just reading the script off the computer and then,
Starting point is 01:02:51 you know, deep faking it verbatim, you know, there's like safe words or things like that. You can put in, there's ways you can do like, like fingerprinting and signature checking, like on the actual like video uh package payload itself uh and basically be like hey we think this was manipulated uh so like how you actually do that is a little bit beyond my my my scope of expertise but it is it's like it will be possible i think um and but some of it's going to rely on those like some of it'll be like just offense defense software type stuff and then some of it'll be these kind of like when we onboarded you in person you know we talked about this thing that only you will know, and so we're going to look for that.
Starting point is 01:03:33 So there's a couple different ways, and probably ultimately some combination of all of them. Yeah, and then you think of who's going to be susceptible to that. If it's a two-inch reset up where the user holds their own two keys, the attacker would have to have access to at least one of the keys, the PIN, to be able to sign. Yeah, and we have PINs in both directions, and we have approval workflows if it's multiple parties,
Starting point is 01:03:55 you know separate from the keys this is that like collaboration layer on top like did did you know my two business partners approve this um and then you know okay and now like unchanged talking with coin cover like what do we think about this came from a weird ip or something you know like and so there's going to be like that all of these things happen now but it happens i guess like manually is probably the best way to say it you know there's no like great sort of like way to collaborate on bitcoin transactions themselves to verify that these checks and balances are where they're supposed to be yeah it takes a lot of effort to like do that on our end like we don't you know we go through a process before we sign with our key yeah i've also heard the idea like giving
Starting point is 01:04:37 somebody a tap signer as well they hold with them physically it's like all right you have to sign this or do a key check with this before we release we sign we sign a transaction but then it's like if they lose the tap sign or yeah it's like or signing devices a two of a device is interesting um who knows if we get back who knows if we get back to just like paying branches where it's like all right if you want to move your money come in and show us your face i mean a lot of a lot of the the you know some of the biggest bitcoin holders in the world like that probably would prefer that honestly i mean i think that's what's some of the most interesting stuff about the whole thing it's like they get it and they also like that too and so how do you blend those two worlds yeah
Starting point is 01:05:18 if i try to move more than five bitcoin you can only do so if i meet you in person yeah yeah and like yeah you're gonna have to pay a premium for us to fly out you know you know tyler to go to your go go meet you at your office to do that but like we'll do it yeah it'll be worth it too 100 part of the transaction fee yeah exactly it's uh paying for the uh the flight to go verify that you're coming to leather briefcase and a little top hat and you're like all right we're here just open it up you got all the stuff that'd be dope sci-fi yeah it's like some uh 19 yeah like 50s mad men sci-fi uh what are you looking for on the horizon in terms of just bitcoin more broadly oh well i think i'm i'm still sort of i keep my eye on lightning of course you know i think like
Starting point is 01:06:06 the whole payments uh the whole payments layer and you know i know there's like other emerging protocols there um i think that you know i i personally like experiment a lot with that stuff um you know we don't have any like business offering there yet at unchained uh i think there's a lot of interesting proposals out there for just like protocol level improvements just around like covenants and all that and you know the op vault uh from james ob and and you know i think there's a lot of interesting like i i really focus on kind of like the governance process and like how are these people communicating and like how does it seem like decisions are being arrived at i find that like very interesting um you know more so than saying
Starting point is 01:06:45 hey i'm going to bet on any one particular like feature or improvement horse uh i think all the mini script stuff is really interesting uh i think you know stratum v2 and like decentralizing mining is like that's actually probably the thing i'm most excited about um because i think that's like an interesting attack vector that probably doesn't get like enough attention and like sort of the non-Bitcoin, like broader ecosystem. If I'm, if I'm like an advisor trying to make an investment decision, like how do you even explain, Hey, well actually there's like this risk over here with this mining thing. I know you do a lot of work there and I think that's really interesting too. Yeah. There's other good developments on that front. Yeah. Thank God. It is probably one of
Starting point is 01:07:25 the biggest risks to Bitcoin right now. So I have two pool with censoring transactions and they backpedaled. So we're not going to do it anymore, but there's a mining pool level is probably the that's vulnerable yeah i think so and i think there's like just going to be a huge opportunity like the whole next wave of just how mining evolves i think it's just going to be very interesting and just like with utility providers and like how do they get into the game and like it goes closer and closer to just the the source uh and like what products and services get built on top of that and how do they integrate with everything else and like is there anything that needs to happen like from a protocol standpoint to to sort of like unlock that
Starting point is 01:08:02 that growth the energy sector is coming and i think from a lobbying perspective this is the most important thing that could happen for bitcoin go build your own bitcoin lobbies go lobby on behalf of bitcoin uh but i'm going to focus on getting the energy lobby to fight for bitcoin yeah hell yeah man play smart yeah i think the fee here's another one the fee sponsor stuff um or just with the sort of mempools kind of increasingly getting clogged and like it's really expensive to move stuff on chain that is what spurs my interest in like lightning and those other protocols but i think there's probably some like like l1 type stuff that could happen there too to facilitate sort of um just like making that easier for people without like totally
Starting point is 01:08:47 clogging the network yeah are you an ordinals enjoyer dude i like honestly barely understand what the ordinances are in a weird way like since i joined unchained i just was so focused on you know trying to like build a business on top of bitcoin that like my pace of sort of understanding and like keeping up with kind of all the latest irons in the fire from like a protocol level has definitely taken a bit of a hit um fortunately you know i get i get direct access to our boy buck pearly who who has to himself prepare for a bit does every month and then i usually get the readout from him that keeps me keeps me fresh but buck runs a type ship he He does.
Starting point is 01:09:22 He does. At Austin BitDevs. That's right. With Ben and Justin. It's a good one. Yeah, but the word on the side, I don't know. I just see stuff, and I just kind of don't pay that close attention. I know that it's like causing higher fees, causing the mempool to be clogged.
Starting point is 01:09:39 That's like where my level of understanding is at. And you're just writing data. You're just writing arbitrary data into the chain. I know enough to talk at that level, but I don't understand the value prop or what the pitch or the positioning is or anything like that. I think that's where I am too. I don't know. I've never, even before, ordered NOLS and JPEGs on Bitcoin.
Starting point is 01:09:58 The JPEGs never made sense to me. Yeah. It's nice. Like, I think, like, I think something I mess around with a lot, like, years ago was open timestamps. And I thought, like, I thought the concept of PGP, you know, encrypting and signing, like, a blog post or a piece of content And then open timestamping that was like some of the best digital proof of authenticity you could get, at least based on what I understood. It just proved there was election fraud in the Guatemalan presidential election last month. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:10:32 Open timestamps. It's fascinating because with PGP, you could solve the, is the content what I said it was going to be? And did this public key, whoever that identity was, do it? But then the when piece is what the open timestamps brought into the equation. I still think that's pretty interesting I don't know what the footprint on chain of that looks like I know they like roll them up but yeah
Starting point is 01:10:55 I thought that shit was cool I think it's very minimal and it makes sense you can't take the open time stamp hash and then like trade it for it's a notary service a public notary service I think those use cases could be potentially pretty interesting
Starting point is 01:11:11 yeah the whole like rare sets thing doesn't make sense to me no I mean and look i'm someone who has like a like a baseball card like i have like i i'm a collector of thing rare things in the real world um but i just yeah i don't see how it translates yeah i know but alas we're getting uh getting distracted by ordinals one thing we need to cover before we end this who knows when we'll end it but came top of mind because we've talked about this before while we were golfing this summer mpc versus multi multi-sig why is npc trash well you know um i think what i would say here is
Starting point is 01:11:50 i think it really just comes down to just like proprietary versus like uh you know interoperability with like a public protocol right and so like um there's a lot of interesting things about npc you know we're actually working on a good a good post coming up here soon that kind of goes it goes into like this deep, deeply in a technical way. Um, but I think like there are some, well, one, you know, you kind of get into kind of like, it's a key and then it's sharded. And so it's like, okay, so it's not really like multiple keys. Like you can basically, um, you know, end around it that way. It creates more single points of failure, but it really just comes down to like, if the software that created the proprietary NPC thing, like if that goes away and then like, how are
Starting point is 01:12:30 you going to recover? You know, ultimately it all just comes, everything just comes back to sovereign recovery um for us and and for me personally and so you know in in a in a world where you're just using raw bare metal multisig like there's always going to be stuff out there you can go to github download the shit and save it on your computer for years from now if you wanted to you know they release 20 versions between now and them and like facilitate a recovery if something goes wrong with like any of the platform providers you're using for multisig And like the same just simply can't be said for, for MPC. And I think that it's like, it's like feeder basically.
Starting point is 01:13:05 I mean, it's sort of, it, it is, it checks the boxes in terms of, you know, I'm trying to distribute the risk and like there's multiple backups, but at the end of the day, if you just play the five wise game and you keep going all the way down to the bottom of the rabbit hole, it just doesn't really like hold muster in my opinion. Yeah. And it's, I mean, the way MPC has been implemented to date. essentially a workaround to create like a multi-sig like custody solution for shit coins exactly which
Starting point is 01:13:35 if we believe bitcoin is going to be winner take all like it's just completely spread your focus then yeah i mean that's a huge reason like like you know unchained obviously supported ethereum back in the day um i think just as large just as much of a reason for dropping support for that But of course, just like philosophically, you know, like Bitcoin, the winner take all market, we're betting on Bitcoin. But it was like it's just a huge like, like, how do you even do at that time doing multi-sig on Ethereum in a way where you can make the UX and make the same security assurances to users? And the way you could with Bitcoin was just like a total, a total drag. Like you're just create constantly creating technical debt. You're maintaining all these proprietary things.
Starting point is 01:14:20 You know, it's a drag. Its opportunity cost is really high because you could be pursuing other things with a more dedicated focus. And to your point, that's like totally, you know, it's like trying to have your cake and eat it too a little bit. I feel for like the developers and stuff at exchanges and these other NPC custody providers, like having to build basically super complicated middleware that integrates with a thousand different protocols and you're constantly have to keep that middleware up to date and this and that. it's like i mean that that that keeps that just so scary to me i wouldn't be able to sleep at night on that point like do you think there could be like a we've talked a lot about exchange hacks
Starting point is 01:15:01 ftx celsius block fi do you i mean i don't want to besmirch what may be deemed as competition but do you envision a future in which something like fireblocks could have a critical vulnerability they could bork? I don't know enough about how their stuff is built. Um, and they do have some pretty good industry standard sort of, um, like that, like collaboration layer that I'm talking about, like they have some good stuff there. Uh, and so, you know, there could potentially be, I don't know enough about like, Oh, what a hack or something expose all customer funds or something like that. Um, cause I don't understand the inner workings of their platform, but, uh, it's Certainly, it's still like even with those sort of collaboration layers,
Starting point is 01:15:46 where it's like I need two or three people to verify and stuff, right? Like it still potentially poses that risk on the back end because it's not just like the who is holding the Bitcoin and how do they collaborate, it's the how as well, right? And so like collaborative custody solves both the who and the how problems and like some of these places kind of blend them together into one blob a little bit. That just makes me a little bit uneasy.
Starting point is 01:16:09 but like I certainly can't comment on you know how exposed they are I'm sure that they're think about this all the time and what they're doing yeah that would be again not trying I'm just walking through hypotheticals here but that would be like talk about like Mt. Gox level would mainly be for like crypto not bitcoin but right right like how much bitcoin you think is secured by npc um probably more than you would think but not i would say not well that's interesting because it kind of depends on how many of the big custodians and exchange exchanges in particular like you know are they using service providers on the back end like how much have they rolled their own custody um but i would say like in turbulent market times when volatility is high
Starting point is 01:16:59 there's a lot of bitcoin moving on and off exchanges probably like a good amount of bitcoin to security and npc um and it's mixing with all those other things i mean that's just kind of like that's just like the the problem it's just kind of an age-old like do you want to be vertically integrated or try and go as horizontal as possible you know like vertical integration takes longer to build and is more complicated and hard but will win out in the end um and i just find it's it's it's something that i think will means that like even adoption of multi-sig and collaborative of cussing in these things if you think about it like i bet you there's people at the big exchanges and other companies like we totally would do that with their bitcoin but then like what do we do
Starting point is 01:17:38 with these other 999 things right so it's just an easy decision to be like we're just gonna put our bitcoin in this other one too yeah and so like until that until that gets teased apart uh you know that'll take some time do you think the shit coin cycles are gonna be as big as they have been in the past moving forward you know every every time i think no um but probably i mean because people just want to get rich quick and you know churning out like the cost to create content marketing and those sorts of things now it's getting even lower now with with all the sort of like large language model tooling out there and stuff um and it's just like people want to hear a good story and they want to buy into like a good story and it's like i'm gonna be right no
Starting point is 01:18:23 else has figured this out uh yeah i think i think at least one more maybe after that i think it'll start to uh fall apart at the seams and in a large part not just because of you know people will come to their senses but like some of the stuff we're talking about like it will just become an encumbrance to continue to support more and more of these things over time like like eventually that just won't be possible and a line will have to be drawn in the sand like somewhere and then once that line in the sand is drawn that's when that's when that you know okay then more drop off and then all of a sudden the line's working its way all the way back towards, it's just Bitcoin
Starting point is 01:18:56 at the start of where you get onto the beach. Yeah, and then if Bitcoin, let's see, if Bitcoin runs too, particularly if like institutional money comes, they decide not to mess with any of that. It's like, all right, like what's going on here? Right. It runs away and all that other stuff is not running
Starting point is 01:19:14 as fast as Bitcoin, but historically they outperform Bitcoin in the bull markets. Yeah, at least for like periods of time And, like, savvy people can make good money off that. And if they're doing that and making more sats, good for them. Who knows what the, like, regulatory crackdown is going to be either. You know what I mean? It's like, there will be a convergence of, like, are these unregistered securities?
Starting point is 01:19:37 This is technically a pain in the ass to support. But, like, the casino business model is an unbelievable business model. And, like, they'll keep it going as long as they can. And, you know, it's not my personal decisions, but it is what it is. I like going to the casino in Vegas and playing blackjack, even though I know it's a losing proposition. Yeah. And again,
Starting point is 01:19:57 maybe I'm just a boomer, but it's like, imagine if all that energy was focused on building things like you guys are building. And yeah, we're on a risk against time here. People, uh,
Starting point is 01:20:08 there are a lot of designers in that stuff. That's the interesting thing, you know? And, and, and, and, you know,
Starting point is 01:20:13 they don't, uh, I've seen some pretty, we've seen some pretty interesting portfolios come our way of like, all right, this is pretty interesting. it's sort of, you know you you get to work more like a traditional software like product designer
Starting point is 01:20:25 in that world because it's like we don't like the security wins for no we don't care that much about that like this is not a thing you're just gonna make it look good just like yes make it look sweet with animations and all sorts of cool stuff and so like i i'm excited for the the the sort of uh brain drain in that world to to start coming over like even if those things limp along you know private equity buys it and they they turn it into a skeleton and farm it for five ten years like talent will move first over time and that's what we can hope for because you know the waters are warm you know come come hang out with us yeah i've seen the interesting trend over the last six months of particularly here in austin a lot of former solana developers getting interested in
Starting point is 01:21:04 lightning and building on that which has uh been encouraging yeah well it's like tps or whatever right i mean it's like that's the thing you're optimizing for and you didn't realize that like that was happening over here and like that's what the itch you're trying to scratch then like yeah let it rip. It is funny though. How many people out there still do not understand what's going on. Bitcoin was going to lightning. People don't even know lightning exists.
Starting point is 01:21:27 Oh no, dude. Yeah, no. I mean, I, I, it takes me,
Starting point is 01:21:32 I think I've gotten into lightning with like a handful of friends. Like that's like, you know, that's less than like 15 or something on the list. Yeah. How has Bitcoin having been in it for a bit? Has it lived up to your expectations, surpassed them, fallen short? Bitcoin itself?
Starting point is 01:21:54 Yeah. No, I think it's lived up to them. Yeah. It's just resilient, you know, and it's anyone can do anything on top of it or with it or to it if you can build up enough consensus. And I think that's like just a really powerful, that's just like a really powerful tool. And if you just look at the history of like other things that have happened over time with sort of like some of the like, you know, public private key encryption you talked about, like Tor, like Tor is interesting, BitTorrent, like all these other, it has the characteristics of these other things that they've been trying to cut the head off for years of these hydras and then just another one or two grow back. And so like, I think it has, it has some serious staying power, but I think, you know, we need to have some successful businesses built on top of it to like really help grow that wave of adoption. And that, that I'm not like anti sort of, it's for the people and like every, you know, you can, oh, it's permissionless.
Starting point is 01:22:52 You can use it yourself. Cause I, you know, I believe all that stuff too. But there needs to be a flywheel effect created here. It's funny. I was just about to ask you, are you here for the tech or are you here for the money, sir? So I came into it from the tech because I was an engineer. And when I used to work, I used to work at a bank, Capital One, and I was working on helping. Basically, we couldn't like show just like timely updates about your transactions because like ACH and like the way that works is like a total clusterfuck. and so we were like loading in you know we were like we were basically porting stuff into AWS and like figuring out how to make this more real time and it was like a very interesting architecture
Starting point is 01:23:33 and so I was like okay and at this time I had already been like hearing about Bitcoin for a little while but then like all of these shitcoin peddlers would come through and be like selling us on this and that and we were like taking these meetings and I was like much younger and junior in my career at that time and I was I don't know what are these guys talking about like what am i missing here uh and so i just like read mastering bitcoin cover to cover and so came into it from that angle i was like this is interesting and then over time i'm now in it for like the money and the sort of like you know if you fix the base layer like money is a obviously foundational like layer like with communicate it's a communication tool that helped us like
Starting point is 01:24:10 evolve as a species and that's fucked up and it causes all these higher layer problems so now i'm here for that but i definitely came into it through the tech and i still find the tech very interesting But I mostly find it interesting in ways that it can help solve, like, you know, grow adoption and awareness and solve that, like the money problem. Yeah. And so Bitcoin being audited, I guess, every 10 minutes, solve that ACH transaction problem you were trying to solve a capital one. Yeah, basically. I mean, it's all public. You can get it.
Starting point is 01:24:39 It's auditable. Final settlement. And, you know, every 10 minutes, you know, and like I don't actually like I actually have developed a lot of respect. for the fiat system since like as we've been having to build and integrate on it like there's a reason that it's still widely used because like uh it may be built in some areas on like houses of cards but like it works and generally is reliable um but it's just so so clear from just like a design like a systems design and like engineering standpoint that bitcoin is superior and needs to be built in layers just like the fiat system was and like we just have and like
Starting point is 01:25:14 you can be working on multiple layers at once but they need to work together and like so there's a it's just like a lot of brain power going towards solving those problems and stitching that all together. That that's really exciting. Yeah. Yeah. I made it for the bunny too. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:25:31 I know you are. Yeah. We fixed the bunny, fixed the world. The rebrand of TFTC. True for the commoner. Logan, what do you think of the rebrand?
Starting point is 01:25:40 He's throwing his hands up. I think that's, you know, that's like, it's been awesome. You know, I share your stuff with a lot of people and I think like, as you get into Bitcoin, you start to, it starts to, you start to peel back these layers of like
Starting point is 01:25:52 self-sovereignty and like other areas of your life where you can like take on more personal responsibility and stuff. And I think that's been really like enlightening for a lot of people. It's interesting. It kind of opens your, your eyes to a lot of different things. Yeah. I know you're a big fan of sovereign beef. Mm-hmm. I bailed hay for the ranch next door during the summer. Got a nice discount on my a half a cow. Proof of work. That's right.
Starting point is 01:26:15 Shake your rancher's hand. Hay for beef. That's right. Oh, yeah. What are these guys over here doing? Hay for beef to give you more beef in the future. It's a beautiful thing.
Starting point is 01:26:23 It's a closed loop. It is. Circular economy. Maybe we can figure this out. Well, we'll see. Speaking of sovereignty and stuff, we're both from Philadelphia. Do you think we can never save Philadelphia?
Starting point is 01:26:34 Does Philadelphia need to be saved? Shouldn't run with assumptions. Oh, well, it's an interesting question. I think, uh, like, like a lot of large cities, you know, it has a lot of problems. Um, and those problems have compounded on themselves for years and years. Like, I think, I don't know if it needs to be saved because I think the character of the people there is pretty unique and like, they will always band together, you know?
Starting point is 01:26:59 And it's like, has a much more tight knit community feel for that millions of people than like a lot of other places. So I think there's other places higher on the list that need to be saved, but, but, you know, we'll go back and sort it out at some point. philly feels is a big city it feels like a small town yeah everybody knows everybody everybody knows everybody yeah there's a lot of a lot of philly bitcoiners yeah that's what i like from like a 10 mile radius i would love to party rip party rip but also like just build up like an industry in philly like a bitcoin focused industry city wage tax fucks things it does there's a lot
Starting point is 01:27:32 of there's a lot of good um and like my sister's involved in some of this like there's a lot of local small like food type stuff community like food and food kitchens and like there's a really thriving there's a lot of really thriving like small businesses like that and like that could be like an interesting way in we're sort of like partner with these people who are like trying to solve these like they've been creative in solving these annoying like regulatory problems like oh like you can do 10 batches in your oven but then as soon as you want to do anything between that and being like in whole foods you know you need like a fucking commercial kitchen space and stuff It's like, well, okay. And I'm like, so they created these spaces and people ran them out at different times. And like, you know, there's like clever ways to get around some of that stuff. So like, those are people who I feel like would get Bitcoin rather quickly compared to someone who just hasn't had to run into some of those issues.
Starting point is 01:28:19 Yeah. And you think place where the declaration of independence was signed constitution, it's in our soul, you know, Bitcoin is tightly aligned with the ideals that the country and the city of Philadelphia were founded on, you know, a hundred percent. Yeah. There's a few places like it and you go and just a little, all the cobblestone, you know, alleys and stuff that used to be like for the horse and carriages. And obviously you got the large Amish community out in Lancaster. Yeah. there's definitely a uh there's something there for sure that's why i went to that first philly
Starting point is 01:28:54 bitcoin john with you that was when we predicted ftx would be fine for a little while and it collapsed three days later we were on stage and somebody quite like oh is ftx gonna go down we're like yeah i was like it'll be fine we'll probably have a few months done yeah it was november of last year in october yeah it was october 6th of last year that's right um that's yeah it starts that way too talking about like building a bitcoin community and that industry within a city you need something like the bitcoin john for sure yeah to matt and just people in like uh just like community and teams and and that stuff in general i mean um i think that's what's like uh you know there's a lot of the focus is on bitcoin is like yourself and self-sovereignty and that is true and like
Starting point is 01:29:45 all of those tools and things are useful and continuing to get better but like to get to kind of have step to make like step level changes you need teams of people need to work together on stuff and like that actually has there's something to say for that too yeah i mean in local communities you can be the the doomer prepper all you want but you're only as strong as your weakest link within your community the goal should be obviously build up your own sovereignty and your own robustness and your the robustness of your family to a certain degree but then then you spread it yeah yeah make damn sure your community's strong to teach timmy how to use his ham radio so he's not the weak link anymore you know yeah spin up a mesh network that's right help your neighbor
Starting point is 01:30:26 gather some hay you know if you're not sending you know transactions via go tennis through samurai i on what you're doing you know it should be that's how you pay your local rancher that's what parker i know you're listening we've been talking about this austin mesh network for like a year now we need to i run i run mesh nodes yeah how how hard is it or simply you just buy a fucking go tenant and you just put it on a little stand and have it plugged in it's a little relay it's like local relays is there enough other relays in colorado i mean up where i live it's actually decent yeah i mean it's like big for hunting uh because you know people go out and you're covering tons of ground um and you know you don't have service out there so you use like satellite radio but like the
Starting point is 01:31:07 local mesh and being able to communicate via that is actually uh is actually not everyone is like picked up on that but i see i see them out there especially during hunting season like on the little map i'm like okay well it's got to be hunters really so it kind of goes up and down that's fascinating yeah we need to get the awesome mesh network there probably is one you just need to plug into it yeah i bet you yeah it's like uh there probably are in the cities there's always some because there's just naturally going to be like a higher density uh but you need more because of the interference so it's like you need you need more points to to bounce off of when you're in the open terrain you don't need quite as many and you're gonna have a higher
Starting point is 01:31:48 concentration of nerds in the city so of course don't underestimate like the back backwoods nerds though. They're there. Oh, no, never underestimate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's just fewer of them by definition. The density is much less, um, much more handy than the city nerds. That's true. Yeah. Do you like living in the country? Yeah, that's great. I live like right on the edge of, uh, you know, I'm, I'm like, uh, about an hour West Denver, five minutes from like a target. Uh, but also five minutes then from just open, you know, ranch national forest, just right out the back door so it's like a good little mix yeah and it's like some of the stuff that's like in between um in between where i live in steamboat springs there's just some really cool
Starting point is 01:32:34 land and there's like tons of a lot of people like wealthy people have like big ranches and stuff like paul tudor jones's giant ranch is like 10 minutes down the road have you ever knocked up on his dorm no but he has a little easement a fishing easement on the blue river that you can go in and fish on um that i have not tried yet because i just learned about it a few months ago uh my neighbor knows how to get down there apparently it's awesome yeah so he's like pretty pretty cool about that with like you know opening up aspects of it yeah you gotta go knock up on his door and say look you got the fastest horse are you securing it correctly sir yeah one i mean i know i gotta have cnbc up so when i see him in there and i know the backdrop i'm just
Starting point is 01:33:11 gonna get in the car drive over probably get shot honestly but i'm a door-to-door multi-six salesman hello sir sometimes that's what it takes you know yeah i bet you he it might just be crazy enough where he would listen he's not going to answer a cold email you got to go knock on his door no chance yeah i barely answer a cold email let alone paul tudor jones the amount i get on a daily basis of people trying to come on the show just like shit coiners it's like i don't even look at my you should just have like a 300 of them on at the same time i've i've actually thought about the party like a lemming party doing or not maybe not 300 at a time but i have thought about answering like yeah let's do this and just grilling the person yeah i envision that me
Starting point is 01:33:50 like you can't post this maybe like post a hundred percent video on too yeah oh we're live you didn't know we're live sorry all right this has been fun yeah man thanks for having me on thanks for coming on yeah it's a long time coming it has been what uh anything we should touch on as it pertains to unchained before we wrap up covered a lot no i mean thanks for yeah thanks for hearing me out. I didn't know exactly what we were going to get into today. I think, you know, I'm, I'm obviously personally excited about everything happening in Bitcoin and then unchained. I think, you know, it's been a long bear market, a lot of people and unchained everywhere else, all the other Bitcoin companies, it's been good to see people building. I follow
Starting point is 01:34:35 that no BS Bitcoin telegram feed and just like, you know, it's like release notes every day. Right. And so a lot of people have been shipping, we're going to keep shipping and I'm excited for when the momentum starts building again to see if what we built stands the test of time. Yeah, if you're looking for some peace of mind, go to Unchained.com. That's right. Set up a consultation.
Starting point is 01:34:56 We call this a mid-roll. Tell them the TFTC sent you. No, honestly, I mean, I've had this show, this company, myself personally, I've had a very intimate relationship with Unchained for years now. I could be prouder of what you guys have built and how far this has come
Starting point is 01:35:15 and the fact that we work down the hall from each other now. It's been really cool to see. Yeah, we appreciate the support. It was a nice short John over here. It's cool to see what y'all are building down here in Austin, and it's cool to just see, too, just Joe and Drew, who founded Unchained, still here as the founders,
Starting point is 01:35:33 just see some of the stuff that they envisioned years ago come to life has been pretty rewarding for everyone at Unchained, too. Yeah. You've got to come down more often. You should come to every BitDevs. It could be in the cards. I got two little ones at home right now.
Starting point is 01:35:48 I'm not going to put that pressure on you. Bring my son Fitz. He'll love it. Good heckler. This is a child-friendly BitDevs. We do have kids. It's a lot different than three, four years ago. Everyone had multiple kids since then.
Starting point is 01:36:02 You get locked down. You're with your wife a lot. You're going to have kids. True. That's true. We'll end it there. Yeah. See ya.
Starting point is 01:36:12 Peace, love freaks.

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