TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #745: The AI Approval Layer Is Fake with Zach Herbert

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Marty sits down with Zach Herbert to discuss how Foundation Devices is building a microkernel operating system to bring Bitcoin-grade security principles to the AI era, why current AI permission layers are fake, and the urgent need to reinvent personal computing before autonomous agents overrun legacy operating systems. Zach on X: https://x.com/zherbert Foundation Devices: https://foundation.xyz/ GitHub: https://github.com/foundation-devices Presentation: https://x.com/OPNEXT2026/status/2052465451804836101 STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Zach Herbert, can't believe it's been six years, sir. Yeah, the world is very different from when I last came on.

Yeah, I mean, we were just talking about it, too. I think maybe we start there because it's something I'm fascinated about and something we were just talking about. You've noticed that we're leaning into it. You said that you're leaning into it personally. And on the business side, at Foundation, I think the AI wave that has hit over the last two years is really, I mean, just from observation and experience, it has founders thinking differently about building businesses, particularly within Bitcoin. And I'm just curious for somebody working on a hardware and security product, what is the best approach for you guys or how have you approached it? Because there's many considerations I feel like that your team would have to take in compared to ours, which is just media where we're not really securing data. And so we can be a bit more liberal, but I feel like for you guys, it can certainly help.

But you have to, correct me if I'm wrong, have some guardrails to make sure that everything's copacetic at the end of the day. Yeah, I mean, the AI stuff has been incredible. And I wish we had had it when we started the business because it's allowing us to move so much faster than we would have otherwise. It's still getting better at the low-level embedded firmware and drivers and operating system stuff. So it's still not that great there. Improving every day, obviously, with every model. But like the pace at which we're able to start adding new features to our new devices and software and everything is insane. But I mean, of course, it has us very worried about the security side of things.

And we have, I think, I don't know if it's a unique point of view, but I think when I hear the crossover between Bitcoin and AI, I know that's becoming very topical. uh a lot of bitcoin podcasts and uh you know i've heard i've heard this this intersection of bitcoin and ai and like what does that mean and typically what i hear from that is something like bitcoin or lightning powered payments right being like the ideal uh source of uh you know money transfer between the ais which was a concept that is probably is over 10 years old from like the original 21 Balaji machine payable web, baby machine to machine payments, which was so long ago. I mean, that was maybe like 20, 15, I think. Yeah. It was, it was in the depths of the bear market when they were working on, on that and then ended up pivoting to earn and selling to

Coinbase. Um, but what we think about now is like bringing our Bitcoiner principles and point of you to securing AI. And I think that's like what we're most excited about at foundation right now. Cause if you think about it, I mean, we started with, with just the Bitcoin hardware wallet back in 2020. And when, when I came on, I think you were the, I think you're the first podcast I ever did, which I remember being so nervous for, cause this was like, we were just a few months into the company and I never done like a podcast before. And I think about what I was talking about then it was, you know, open source hardware. We were doing the air gap QR codes. We were just doing a Bitcoin only hardware wallet. And those same like security principles that we have done for

Bitcoin and other great companies right in the Bitcoin space too, where you want to, you want to have a human, like a person know what they're about to approve. Right. And then explicitly authorize that transaction in a computer environment that they trust that's effectively what a bitcoin hardware wallet is and that's effectively like the kind of tech that we've been building right since 2020 and i think you could bring those exact same principles to the ai side of things and so when i think and when foundation thinks about like you know the ai stuff in the crossover yeah there's there's enormous challenges with the security side and we all feel it right now as users uh you know you're you're mashing the approve button or you're just turning

off the the permissions and clod or gpt and just letting it do its thing uh we think about like how can we bring our bitcoin or principles after years of building uh hardware wallets and and expand that beyond specifically bitcoin approvals and maybe take that like to the entire ai world as well so it's like bitcoin uh principled security but trying to bring it to like the broader uh tech space so i mean just off the top of my head as you're explaining that so when i'm thinking of bitcoin hardware you mentioned like air gaps so when we're when we're trying to secure bitcoin and create a private public key pair i mean the the way the the safest way to do it is to have an air gap device you create it offline and um you you make sure that it's not connected

to the internet so the the main goal is isolating the hardware from the the broader internet and i guess when it comes to bringing those bitcoin principles to ai uh how is that how do you see that being accomplished i mean you before hit record we're talking about maple obviously they have trusted execution environments uh in the enclaves and this is something that i'm focusing more and more on because i think people are beginning to realize like hey open claw and odd co-work and gpt are incredible but as you use it the more and more you use it the more and more becomes ingrained in your business you're like how much information am i leaking to these frontier models and the companies that run them and am i comfortable with that and i think

it's a massive problem set that needs to be solved and i think ultimately will be solved if we're going to do that i think we could see ourselves hitting a point where people just get too uncomfortable doing this and um essentially giving their personal business lives over to the ai overlords at anthropic and open ai yeah i mean it's it's tough because if you don't use it you're not going to be able to compete and so like if we had foundation didn't use it we would over the coming years need to hire huge numbers of people and everything and i want to keep the team small right i want to i want to use this uh technology as leverage so that we can do a huge amount with a with a small team uh and i think the privacy stuff is very important and i think

there's great companies working on the privacy side of things like maple you know like you mentioned and so i think our perspective is less about the privacy and more about like you have a technology that is probably going to be i don't know how you equate like the intelligence to human intelligence it's it's hard to equate it then you get into like the philosophical view you have a technology that's like uh more powerful than humans when it comes to computer use computer security right you have that mythos model from last month from from Claude and it's not even available to anyone yet. And people are trying to figure out, is that hype? Is that, is that overhyped? Is it real? I don't know, but I think we can see that the trajectory

that the space is following. And so I think like the really interesting question that we were not thinking about until really like January. And so I haven't talked about this anywhere, really just gonna share my thoughts with you in real time and like kind of give you a little preview as to what we're working on right now you know within the company but it's like how do we constrain or contain these ai models so that you can use them to their full capabilities uh but that they ultimately answer to a human authority, right? Like it comes to you for any crucial type of approval. So maybe, you know, if you wanted to, let's say you were like investing in a portfolio company, right. Or, or you're paying, if you're paying, or, you know, if you're doing a new

investment, you're sending a million dollar wire transfer or even better example, Bitcoin transfer, You want to approve that. You want to know exactly what you're reviewing and approving. But if you're just paying an invoice for the podcast to a vendor, and it's a vendor that you've paid before, and it's an invoice amount that's roughly the same amount, and it's 30 days from your last invoice, you probably want the AI to be able to just pay that for you. And so I think right now what what where we see the opportunity and we also see like the biggest challenge is that like with how everyone's using AI today is that the place where it's asking you to approve things is the computer or device that the AI is running on itself. So you're like doing all the approvals inside the blast radius of the device or devices that the AI is either running on or has access to. And that's crazy. Like, I don't think that that's going to work at all long term. And we're already seeing them. You could point to all the crazy stuff happening.

You could point to like Amazon calling emergency meetings because their employees kept taking down their AWS environments or, you know, all the stories on X people deleting all their email. It may have happened in the last 12 hours with Coinbase. That's what they're blaming it on. Yeah, I mean, they said it was an AWS outage, right? But they also said that, what was it? Product managers pushed the prod. Yeah, exactly. And so I feel like we as humans, we're building this extremely powerful technology that in some instances is more powerful than ourselves.

and i don't see anyone uh working on ways to contain it like i don't see anyone working on on like the the containment is is about politely asking the model to please follow the instructions you know please please listen to me and we're going to do all this training we're going to put all these kind of guardrails in but it ultimately comes down to please listen to me and what we want to do is like force it to listen to the humans and force it to uh deliver uh approvals right or or requests to approve certain actions to the human where we can like review and approve them and it starts to look a lot like the same process that you would uh do to review i mean different technology under the hood but the same kind of user experience process of like let me review

and approve this bitcoin transaction on trusted hardware yeah and that that's the uh again i've i've said this many times and the listeners may be tired but i will continue to beat the drum it's equally unnerving and exhilarating unnerving because of everything you just described but exhilarating because it's it's somewhat of a still a blank canvas and there's so much to be done in terms of creating these user flows that that give you the confidence that you're not borking your system or doing something that is going to be detrimental not only to your business but to your customers as well and that we're just like in that weird amorphous period where the models are still progressing because that's that's a hard thing right because this thing

these things are still progressing at a pace that is extremely hard to keep up with and so you're just trying to keep up with that pace but at the same time you're trying to build the guardrails in parallel and i feel like every three weeks or three months i'll build a system and become not depend on it become comfortable with it and then something is released it's like okay i gotta rip this out and put this in how does it affect everything else i've built in the context and conditional um approvals that that i thought i had before it's just it's uh discombobulating to to a certain degree yeah and i i think that we i don't think the message should be like handicap yourself in in the search for privacy and security i don't think i don't think that's

the message and i think right now um if we're using ai we're faced with like a choice and when it comes to privacy i think there's good options you know what like you can you can use ai services or providers or you can even do local models i mean it's hard to get uh it's expensive at least to get the uh you know whether it's a mac studio with a ton of ram or the nvidia hardware the framework desktop right there's there's local models are pretty good uh or you can use one of these in tee style right type things or you can use i think there's like venice right where it can um gives you some privacy as well uh but you still have that huge trade-off with security You have the big trade-off of, like, I want to go and if I'm going to use these tools, you want to give it as much context as possible.

You want to connect it to everything. I've been kind of building a, like, a company knowledge base internally where we ingest, you know, all the data from all the different company tools that we use so that we can reference decisions on the fly. We can look anything up. We can give the AI models that kind of context. But the challenge is that once, as it stands right now, like when you give Cloud or Codex or whatever tool you're using, you give it the credentials for those tools, whether it's MCP or CLIs or whatever it might be, it now has full access. And any permissions it's asking you is just politely asking you permission for something that it already has the capability of doing, right? So when you actually connect it, like if you connect Claude to Gmail, right, it has full capabilities to read and send all your emails, everything. And then you could go into the Claude app and you can choose the settings of, you know, let me mark this as needs permission, mark this as, you know, you don't need permission, you're allowed to just go take action.

But that's all Claude side. So the entire AI space right now, like every kind of permission approval, like the entire approval layer is all fake. Like it's all fake. It's just trying to make us as the users feel comfortable that it's coming to us to ask for permissions. But if it's asking for permissions for something that it already has the capability to do, like that's a huge problem. and this is going to be a problem that has to be solved over the next couple years otherwise i think it is going to uh significantly hinder adoption because it's going to be a total shit show as more and more things break and so how do you think we solve that this is probably the cryptography

come into it like because you can imagine a world where it's like hey i need permission to do this and i actually can't do it unless you sign a message that allows me to broadcast the and what for using bitcoin analogies here to not only broadcast the transaction but broadcast the command to go do a certain thing on gmail or something like that yeah so i think it's a longer journey and i actually think it's it's something about like um trying to distill it as much as possible it's like we almost need to reinvent the whole idea of of what a personal computer is because if you think about it like right now you have mac windows linux you have ios and android and that's basically it you have these uh five different computing platforms and at least on the

mac side there it's it's like the same code roughly for mac os versus ios i mean there's there's a lot of nuances but it kind of comes back down right to the same uh code base and then that all comes back down to like unix type operating systems from what we're talking like 30 years ago 30 plus years ago and then uh you look at like linux for example within the linux kernel there's like over 30 million lines of code and so when we're dropping these ais into these monolithic operating systems that are kind of built on on top of the previous code over decades we're dropping them into one an environment that just has huge attack surfaces so i think that's like one thing and attack surface is like a thing that a term that bitcoiners know right because that's how

bitcoiners evaluate oftentimes hardware wallets they'll say like i want to use a bitcoin only hardware wallet right i want to use something that with a lower attack surface with you know the smallest amount of code possible like on the hardware wallet or on the device and so we're running these ais like the models the the applications the harnesses the agents like it's running on these very old school operating systems that everything else runs on and the attack surfaces are enormous so i think like that's one problem but the other big problem is that the os has no way to distinguish between a human user and an ai agent so like you have your screen right you have your uh your mouse you have your keyboard and i mean that model of like

the desktop and the files like that goes all the way back to what is it like um like xerox park with apple and i i don't know who took what first right but where they saw the mouse and they have like the desktop and then obviously windows so like the operating systems that we're using to run all these ai agents and tools they don't know if it's a human user or an ai user so like the way that clod and now codex are doing computer use is that they're just taking control of the mouse and the keyboard and now codex can take control of the mouse and the keyboard on like a mac even when the window is not on the foreground so it can just go do all that stuff or like you're giving it full control over a um a chrome browser or something and it's just taking control

uh and so i think that the right answer is to rebuild all this stuff from scratch yeah well i mean yeah multiple companies are like so i i in january i think that's when they released co-work claude did and i used it and i saw it like using my computer and i was like after an hour i was like all right remove permissions to do anything that scared me And then luckily I saw Claude bot blowing up. I was like, okay, I'll put, I'll put, uh, I'll put my, uh, Claude in the cloud and give it its own server and I'm not going to give it access to my machine. I'll give it its own machine and feel much more comfortable that way.

It's that point. Like once you understand, you can see that these things are using your computer and your computer is none the wiser as them using it and it has access to all this stuff. It's incredibly scary. And then to your point that we have to redesign this, I think I completely agree and i think i'm actually a layer above you and i've been talking about a layer above you for months now and i'm really interested to dive down to the protocol level stuff because

it's something i'm more ignorant about but one thing that's become clear to me is like the form factor of how we interact with the internet is changing right before our eyes like i'm pure voice to text now voice to voice with my ai systems and it's like if i get frustrated if i to type now or if i have to point and click i like to hit the only typing i like to do is like option space bar begin talking to super whisper uh and it's become clear to me that like uis as we know them particularly within browsers are going to be rendered unnecessary you can project any ui that you want or that you need something that's specific to you using these tools in the future And so like on that layer, on like the UI app layer, like I think we're just going to go to a world that's like purely API agent to agent talking, pulling information, distilling information, presenting information to you.

But when it comes to the protocol layer stuff, I'm completely ignorant. Like, how do you even rebuild that? yeah so i think um well firstly we started to do it without realizing which is uh pretty interesting like so with our with our new device passport prime which is like our third generation you know we don't even call it a hardware wallet we're actually not sure still what to call it like we've used different terms like um personal security platform uh personal security device uh so we're still i think working on like how to properly define it but we we kicked this off in uh in 2022 we kicked this project off at the end of 2022 so

we raised like a seed round for foundation in the summer of 2022 and we're fully closed up with everything by uh by winter early winter and then we just started working on this new operating system and we call it a key OS. And before we started working on the new operating system, my, uh, my co-founder and I can, who's our CTO have been dreaming about like a next gen operating system since, since we started the company in 2020, like we were having conversations about, Oh, what if we could do a phone? You know, what if we could do like all these computer devices and it was my first time as i'm a first time startup founder right and so i think you can get a little carried away like months into starting the company and we're like oh yeah we could do a

phone we could do all this stuff i don't think we really knew how hard it is to like build hardware right and ship hardware and and scale that up uh and so we were very like wide-eyed and bushy-tailed and and just doing a lot of brainstorming and you know talking about like well what could we make And what we basically settled on as our dream operating system was not a monolithic kernel like like Linux that I mentioned, which is like 30 million lines of code and like everything is part of the kernel. Like every driver that's supported is in there, like literally everything is in there. It's crazy is the idea of something called a micro kernel. And so I would argue that not only is the microkernel architecture, I mean, the right approach for what we did, and I can talk about like Passport Prime and Kiosk and like why we did a microkernel. um but about a about a month ago i sat down and i asked all the different ai models you know if

you could build your dream operating system that would allow you to like work unobstructed but kind of keep you contained right where uh you don't have direct access to all the keys or the creds you have to go ask for approval for important actions like what would you build And they all gave us the same answer, which was a microkernel operating system and described something very similar to what we had built over the last three plus years for Passport Prime. And that was like an oh shit moment for us because we built it like specifically for Bitcoin and for securing things that are important to Bitcoiners. We say secure your entire digital life. So like Bitcoin, of course, 2FA codes, like six digit codes, security keys, you know, kind of like YubiKey style security keys, files. We have, you know, like almost like a hardware encrypted flash drive, other seeds that you use for other apps, like all this important stuff being stored on the device.

But the reason why we want to do a microkernel, which is basically like this tiny core of the operating system that has a very small attack surface, and then where everything else is an app in the operating system. So like everything's like a driver, which, which, you know, allows us to, you know, connect to a certain peripheral, like a screen, right. Or, you know, any kind of anything you, you have on the circuit board or something you might plug into the device, like those drivers are in user space. Those are apps. They're not even in the kernel. So the kernel for Kiosk is less than 9,000 lines of code right now. so it's like yeah it's like order of magnet like orders of magnitude i don't even know how many that is like you know four or three something like that yeah and and we're not the first ones

that there are other micro kernels that are out there there's like one called scl4 which is a little bit more academic it's like a formally verified micro kernel but no one is shipping these in consumer hardware right now because it's really hard to do a new operating system And so we started to do this new operating system in 2022 because we wanted to build something that would allow you to secure your entire digital life and importantly, install apps on it to customize what you want to do with it and enable developers to build apps for it. But each app like needs to be in its own sandbox and can't talk to other apps. Otherwise, that would compromise the security model of the entire device. And so we want to build like the open app ecosystem to be able to keep things on like offline secure hardware, whether it's Bitcoin or all this other stuff. And so we started building this OS in end of 2022.

And so I. This was like before we even knew what I was. and i think that this microkernel primitive is really powerful and uh we can start to use that over time to like uh to contain the the ai as well but i'm happy to you know dive more into all like the actual like tech and stuff behind it because like you said most people i think are focused on the the upper layers right like the user experience or like you said like the ui that's going to dramatically change like kind of beaming uis or um the ai kind of making you a ui in real time uh everything's going to be like like you said api based i i completely agree

with all that as well but it's kind of interesting because like this was also a kind of similar to how when i came on in 2020 it was all about you know open source hardware being the the foundation of this, this Bitcoin powered, I think we use the term like decentralized internet back then. And I think our heads have always been very much on like that, that base layer, right? Like, like where the software meets the hardware stack. And for us, that's expanded beyond like the hardware stack itself. It's also expanded into like the OS layer. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key

on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device, and Block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step, your first step to self-custody. If you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off, tell them to pick up a BitKey. Go to bitkey.world. Use the key TFTC20 at checkout for 20% off your order.

That's bitkey.world, code TFTC20. All right, freaks. You know me. You know I don't take sponsor money from products I wouldn't use myself. So listen up. The Avon Bitcoin Visa card is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the Bitcoin lending space in a long time. Here's the deal. You can get a line of credit up to a million dollars backed by your Bitcoin without selling a single sat. No gains, no annual fees, no minimum draws, and your Bitcoin is custodied by BitGo, which is one of the most trusted names in digital asset security. Avon never lends it out. There's no rehypothecation. You stay in control. And guess what? You can lock in a fixed rate for up to 10 years that's 10 times longer than most lenders out there or go interest only for up to five years

rates start at 7.99 apr for a product that lets you keep your stack and still access liquidity it's hard to beat i mean the duration in the rates is the best i've seen in the market to date you also get two percent unlimited cash back every time you use the card spend fiat keep your bitcoin the whole game if you've been stacking for years and you need liquidity without triggering the taxable event this is worth a serious look go to aven.com bitcoin that's a-v-e-n dot com slash bitcoin check it out and let's i guess let's dive into it because like again trying to because that's going to be the hardest problem right like because we've you mentioned area mac os ios um windows linux if stuff's been around for decades the whole for lack of a

a lack of a better term i think the whole digital economy has been built on these systems in one way or another uh and the thought of transitioning away from that like the switching cost and the user experience and uh how do you actually approach it from a technical level because the way you're describing it seems like okay we built these systems obviously inarguably they've been incredible for humanity but in a world in which robots are emerging becoming smart and we are commingling with them in the digital world they are insufficiently secure hopefully just in the digital world right on the robots the physical robots are coming too yeah um and so yeah kind of how do you begin to take bites of this apple and like you said

The microkernel seems like a good thing, but the modularity and making sure that everything is siphoned off from each other, can't communicate, and how hard is that? And what is the possibility of actually successfully doing that? And maybe it's ultimately 100% because it's 100% necessary. And whether people realize it now or later is the big question is we can learn it now and rebuild now, or we can learn the hard lessons of letting these things run wild on the operating systems that exist today and learning the hard lessons down the line. Well, I think the most important thing is to build something opinionated with a specific product that already works. And this has been the thing that's plagued the operating system world over the last, I mean, you could probably say decades.

Because if you go and you start looking on Wikipedia or searching, ask your AI, how many operating systems are there? I mean, there's dozens of stuff that's been made. and there's also microkernel stuff that's been made and there's some really cool projects that we took inspiration from back when we started building kiosk in end of 2022 like one of them is did you ever have bunny on the pod i think at one point to talk about um that is like precursor be trusted project said no no no no he's like a he's like a hardware hacker guy he did he did a few bitcoin pods like years ago um but anyway he he's like famous in the hardware hacking world and he has a uh a project that he was he was kind of showing off to bitcoiners probably in like the

i don't know if it was 2021 or something like that uh but he was working on this microkernel operating system called zeus as part of this like it looks like an old school like blackberry type thing his device that he was working on and that was like a hardware um like crowdfunded open source hardware project and then there's also i think jeremy soller uh who was also doing some of the bitcoin podcasts back in the day talking about his operating system called redox he's the lead engineer at system 76 uh which is also a rust microkernel operating system so those are two and and there's a bunch of others that have happened over the years that never get shipped on anything and i think the reason is because they're more like academic

or like passionate open source projects but they're they're putting that like they're putting out that code and it's going into a github repo somewhere and it has a lot of potential but it's like never getting shipped on real devices and so we listened to those podcasts and and and as they were kind of approaching the bitcoin community back in the day and we got really excited about it and we actually started building on um originally on this zeus uh microkernel core uh which was like a open source github project and we've over the last three years diverged significantly from like that open source project to the point where it's like a basically like a completely different um you know project it's specifically designed to run on like the passport

prime hardware as well we ported it from like risk 5 to arm so that it could run on actual like security chips that we could buy and everything but i think like the first my first like long-winded answer to that is that if you're trying to do this you you can't just like make a cool os concept and like post it on github and say i have this awesome operating system concept it has a lot of potential it could be used for because that's just like step zero right like the hard part is actually getting it on to like a device that you can ship to customers like that people actually buy and that that is can be used and then when you're doing an operating system from scratch or mostly from scratch you have to build support for like every single chip and every

single peripheral in the hardware and that takes a long time to do especially if you're a small team or at least it did and i don't know now with ai maybe it could be a lot faster but um so that's that's like how i would first answer your question right where it's like it can't be an academic project it can't be like an open source uh hacker like or interesting project it has to be something that you actually get out to the world and that you ship right because unless you ship it no one's building anything for it like it's it's it's a it's a hardcore hobbyist type thing and i think that's been the big problem in my opinion with all these interesting operating system concepts over the last few years and then also like over the past decades which is a lot of really cool

concepts like a lot of amazing stuff that we can draw from but like if it's not shipping in a real device that people can buy and use and developers can like build apps or stuff for then it's just not gonna get anywhere so trojan horsing it into the world via a bitcoin security device is is a way to do this is it still trojan horsing if we didn't really plan it at the time because like we weren't thinking about this at all you know we were so i'll tell you exactly what we were thinking about so you know um we were but we did two generations of passport that you know air gapped uh looked like the um like the cell phone you know little cell phone dumb phone uh form factor uh and i mean we had you know really great customer feedback

in the space uh we were i mean you know like we we had a reputation for not only just the open source and like assembled in the usa but doing something that had like the hardcore security uh but then also was more approachable was like kind of uh and it was like kind of an alien where meets virtue you know design language and everything and i'm really proud of everything we did um but like store securing your bitcoin for us was only like the first part of a very long journey to secure your entire digital life so we have bitcoin q a on the team who's who's been for for years he's been with us since like 2021 when we were just a few people uh he was known for putting out all these amazing guides and tutorials over the years he's our head of customer experience

And so like you, you, you set up your passport hardware wallet or a hardware wallet from another company. But then as you go down this Bitcoin rabbit hole, you start to care about securing everything, right? You, you need to keep your online accounts secure. You have your multi-factor authentication. You want to start self-hosting stuff. You kind of go down this, this entire like rabbit hole as you get orange pilled, hence, and it's kind of stealing your, your name a little bit with, with rabbit hole. And we want to make something that, like, that we can use, that someone can buy and use as a one-stop shop to level up their entire security, right? Not just the Bitcoin. And what was really important to us as well was enabling developers to build apps. And, like, this is key. Because what we realized was that we cannot build everything at Foundation. so examples let's say bitcoin examples um there's those guys doing frost snap that's a cool project you know it's like this like hardware device and like they all do frost and they they usb into each

other like a giant like uh yeah i was gonna ask how you describe it i was gonna say it's like like uh like towing a bunch of you know cars or something when you're attached it's like a train car but centipede i like as well um those guys probably i don't want to speak for them but there's a lot of interesting stuff like that and you know miniscript frost uh there's arc stuff right now with these l2s there's light obviously lightning stuff most of this new stuff does not have good hardware wallet support. And that's because hardware wallet teams are relatively small and you have to decide what you're going to add, right? You have to decide what you're going to devote your team's resources to adding first party support for. Another great example is

I don't think there's still a great like Noster key management type device or something that would keep those keys offline but be convenient enough where you're not where it can like uh you know sign any of your any of your posts or messages or whatever but but keeping the keys out front so like our thesis back in end of 2022 was if we build more of a platform type device and then we open it up to developers that we can get a huge number of interesting applications that are very useful uh built for the device uh that so that we get to focus on maintaining like the operating system and the sdk you know the software development kit and the app platform and building the best hardware but that we give users the ability to customize their exact

device experience i mean we're not i'm not saying anything new like apple did this of course it's like the iPhone playbook, but our main, like one of our main theories was that the space is being held back by the fact that developers can't build apps really for hardware wallets. And then the only hardware wallet company that has some like quasi version of this, right. Where developers can build apps is 90% of the market, you know, ledger. And I have so much criticism about how they do it and we can get into that as well and how like we're kind of the polar opposite from like an openness and architecture perspective but i mean it's very telling i think that you have a company where most of the users i think are dissatisfied most ledger users are are they're

not really happy users if you check you know x and reddit and you know you just anecdotally but they're 90 of the market because i think because they were the only ones to offer some kind of developer platform. keys to move bitcoin meaning their single key can't access your bitcoin on its own just resilient shared custody that gives you institutional grade security while keeping you sovereign unchained also lets you trade straight from your vault access bitcoin back commercial loans open a bitcoin ira where you hold your own keys and set up personal business trust or retirement vaults they even offer inheritance solutions built for long-term hodlers or opt for the highest level

private client service with unchained signature and get a dedicated account manager discounted trading fees exclusive access to events and features and much much more if you want a partner that helps you secure and grow your Bitcoin without giving up control, go to Unchained.com and use the code TFTC10 at checkout to get 10% off your new Bitcoin multisig vault. That's TFTC10 at Unchained.com. What's up, freaks? This rip is brought to you by good friends at CrowdHealth. I've been a happy CrowdHealth member for almost five years now. My wife and I have had two children while we've been on CrowdHealth, and I actually just got the last bill for our third child funded. it was $6,157. CrowdHealth negotiated down to $2,309 and we only paid $500. The rest was

crowdfunded by the CrowdHealth network. If you're sick of health insurance premiums and having to pay deductibles and getting ripped off at the hospital, join CrowdHealth. It's an alternative way to pay for your healthcare. It's not health insurance. It's crowdfunded healthcare. As you can tell, they negotiate prices for you. You pay in cash. It's much cheaper. Overall, we're much happier they have incredible perks go to join crowdhealth.com slash tftc to sign up five years on crowd health not looking back join crowdhealth.com slash tftc use the promo code tftc once you set up your account you're going to get 99 a month for your subscription for the first three months yeah let's lean into that because i think it's completely cosine it is i think we all know

the sort of relative security trade-offs that Ledger has made. But to their credit, and to your point, like 90% of the market, like their most popular hardware wallet by a long margin. And I think it's because of, and it's funny because like the device,

at least the original device, the UX was terrible physically. Like having like you have that small screen and like three buttons and it's like, okay, what am I doing here? and if something like i guess it's because they have this open app architecture obviously like metamask and many of phantom and many others have tapped into that and it has been lacking in the bitcoin space and i think to your point i mean the hardcore security conscious

bitcoiners and builders in the space they deem it a trade-off that they cannot stomach And I think that's the point that you're trying to get at with Kiosk is like, we need, we probably need this from a UX perspective. And if we really want to scale this beyond just this cottage industry of hardcore security breaks, which is not a bad thing. I love the cottage industry, I love the hardware wallet options that cater to people who really care about security. But if we're thinking making an impactful change and getting people to hold, getting more people to hold their keys is a very virtuous and I wouldn't argue imperative

goal to have as an industry. I think your point we're going to need to make a system that gives that device more extendability like ledger has into the digital world yes so absolutely fully agree with you and i don't think at the time especially when we started the company i fully understood why ledger was so successful um i know i came on in 2020 and one of the things we talked about was a lot of like the the pros and cons between all the different hardware wallets and before we even started the company i was i was thrilled to have i think you included like a long twitter thread for me in your newsletter once about like an honest trade-off list between all the different hardware wallets right it was about

this one's open source uh you know this one's closed source this one has this kind of user experience this one is manufactured in this place right like kind of like a breaking down the industry. Cause I thought like I really understood it back then. And I think I understood it from a like tech specs point of view and UX point of view, but I don't think I really understood it from like a, like a, a platform point of view. And that I think whoever builds the best platform is who wins. And I think ledger has done a pretty masterful job so far about building the only platform in the space. Now I have tons of criticisms about the platform. It's walled garden. They review all apps that are submitted. Apps are predominantly new coins. You don't see

like a, like a Casa app for ledger, right? You see a Bitcoin app. Uh, you don't see like the arc guys building an arc app for ledger. You see an eighth app or a salon app. You don't even see the phantom guys or the metamask guys building an app for ledger instead what happens is when you're switching between coins you have to close the bitcoin app and open the salon app you have to close the salon app and open the eth app and so yeah there's a ton of user experience you know complaints i have about that but it's interesting that um they've leaned so hard into the coins that they've obviously completely lost the plot because the app feels like a casino when you open up. I mean, it's probably you open up and you're like flooded with all the different coins and

you're encouraged to swap between them. And they've said publicly that their software revenue from the services equals the hardware revenue, which means that, you know, the whole the whole product becomes designed to push you to trade. You know, they've been doing marketing recently for the traders right it's all about trading and swapping because they're making a killing on all those fees through the ledger app um but what it's really interesting to go deep into the technical reasons why the apps have to be reviewed by ledger why the operating system cannot be open source why they've released things like open source roadmaps during the ledger recover scandal a year or two ago, right? Where it was like, oh, well, you know, pay us 10 bucks a month and we

take your key and we split it between three custodians, but we promise we can't see anything. And there was a lot of, you know, outrage from the space and they released an open source roadmap. But the irony of the open source roadmap is that the actual operating system can never be open source. So why is that? Well, this comes exactly back to our conversation about legacy operating systems that are built on 30 plus years of code what most people don't realize is that ledger is basically running on a smart card operating system another term for that is java card because a lot of the times um in the smart card world and those are like the chips inside your credit cards every single credit card has a smart card chip uh high-end like company like um door access badges

smart card chip they're made by a small number of companies nxp st microelectronics each one has a proprietary smart card operating system and a way for developers to build applets to run on the smart card typically in java hence the java card operating system what most people don't know is that ledger's first product was a usb drive with no screen back in like 2013 and they had and they ended up releasing a companion mobile app for it like to kind of extent like kind of give it like a fake screen on the mobile app before they launched the nos that had the screen and then kind of the rest was history it's made by stm st microelectronics domain ship it's a smart card chip. And what they've done is they've built this operating system to run on the smart

card. This is like 30-year-old legacy tech. It's very slow. It doesn't have the power to do things like drive a modern screen. Like the smart card chip can't drive like a three-inch nice LCD screen or something, which is why they always had those tiny screens on the device. And when you're working with smart cards you have to load an app and then unload an app and so when if you understand like the smart card technology which is 100 closed source super proprietary maintained by these different chip companies each has their own you know kind of smart card os version that's a little separate from the other ones and you know that ledger works very closely with st micro electronics ledger is like that perfect example of building on like a 30 year old technology

and that's why it's so limited that's why developers can't build robust apps that's why you have to open and close apps and that's actually my theory as to why they had to use e-ink screens and they to their credit they leaned into it right tony fidel creator of the ipod and nest coming in beautiful my beautiful industrial design e-ink long battery life but i think the real reason behind the curtain that no one said why they have to use e-ink is because it's the only thing that the smart card ship can power because it's so low res it's just text on a you know on a it's literally just text on like a screen that doesn't need to be constantly powered so they had a breakthrough where they realized i think and this this is not documented anywhere

this is my opinion but i think they realized that they can do a bigger screen but it has to be ink And then they leaned into it. So in end of 2022, we were sitting around saying, like, if we could build a new operating system that allowed developers to write apps without foundation having to review the code, where they can be sandboxed in a modern kind of next gen operating system, then maybe we can like leapfrog ledger, right? Like we can build like that open architecture to finally give them competition from like the platform side of things. What, how do you sandbox successfully? Yeah. How do you approach that design? Like again,

protocol development, no enough to be dangerous, but not nearly enough to actually be competent, fully competent. That's, that's my quite like, how do you isolate and sandbox? everything sure um and and one interesting thing is that like ledger does not so the way that

ledger does it is they they only have one app running at a time and that's how the smart cards do it and so each app actually accesses the master key on your ledger like the seed words no no but that that's why they have to review apps and and and because if you had a malicious this app, it would theoretically be able to, you know, kind of pull off the seed words and maybe somehow, you know, you've had people on the pod before talking about how you can like, you know, kind of exfiltrate the seed words, you know, there's ways to do it. So that's why Ledger has to review each app. And we've also heard anecdotally that you have to pay Ledger to do an app so that they can review it. So how we do it on Kiosk, which is this micro kernel operating

system is there's a couple of different characteristics. One is, is that the, it's called a message passing microkernel and it's all written in rust. It's, it's pretty cool, which is like a very safe, you know, programming language. A lot of like the hardcore Bitcoiners have, especially on the research side. Yeah. Switched over to Bitcoin. So this is pure rust, which is very, that's a lot of the Bitcoin devs are like very excited. We were giving them out at the conference developer units and everyone's like really, really excited about it. So firstly, It's all message passing, which means that let's say you have the Bitcoin app on the device. And let's say the Bitcoin app wants to access the camera so it can scan a QR code.

The Bitcoin app doesn't just get access to the camera. It has to send like a message to the QoS kernel, which then has to relay a message like to the camera app. The camera, even though there's drivers and stuff, it's a camera app like that. it's its own app as opposed to just being something that the OS just like gives as like a core functionality. And so each, each message is being passed from app to app and it's going through the kernel.

And the kernel is deciding, does this app have permission to do this? And so for our first party apps, they have permission, but as third party apps go live in the coming weeks, you'll have to ask permission, you know, to use the camera.

So from like a UX perspective, it's very similar to what you're already used to on iOS or Android, but from like an OS perspective, it's very different because all these apps are like all these functionalities or individual apps behind the scenes, or we even call them like servers on the backend. But we don't typically use that term when we're talking to like consumers and it's a message is being passed through the kernel, which is evaluating and deciding if it's allowed to if the app is allowed to do that. So that's one thing. Two is we're using a security processor that has what's called an MMU, which is like memory management, which is what's used on major processors that you'd find in like Windows, Apple, iPhone, that kind of thing, where memory can be isolated based on the application. So we are leveraging that feature of the processor so that like the app is isolated, like the actual memory, like the RAM, right? It's like it's only in that space given to that app and not to the other apps. The other apps can't see it. That's like not novel to us. That's something that is common in modern operating systems.

But where it is novel is I don't think there's any hardware wallet type devices that do that. they don't you know there's no there's no such thing as like processes and isolation or anything like that on any of these hardware wallets including ledger because they're designed to just run like one set of firmware and the code is the code the code is all there right the code you can't load or unload parts of it it's like and that's why you see trezor and bitbox and others doing like bitcoin only you know hardware wallet versions because they'll say okay well That's the only the code for the hardware wallet and Bitcoin is there and all that other crypto stuff is not there. And so on Kiosk, it looks much more like a modern computer in the sense

that we're leveraging the memory management that the processor offers us. But of course, it's not in like a monolithic 30 million line operating system kernel. It's our own 9000 line micro kernel. And so we feel very comfortable about how that the safety aspects of that and then three what's really cool is each app gets its own hardened derived child seed or key so unlike ledger where the apps can all just grab the master seed from the os and then use it with a specific derivation path for that cryptocurrency on kiosk if you were building a third-party app your app can never see like the master key you call it um you get a hardened derived key so it's still using a key derived from like the master key but it can't go backwards to

actually see that master key so you what you get is you get an app in a sandbox with its own isolated memory uh it only has its own uh derived hardened child seed so and that can be used for anything that can be used for like bitcoin or crypto stuff that can be used for 2fa that can be used to derive keys for like signing code. Like you could build an app or Noster, right? Like once you get a key, you can use that key for any kind of purpose. So you have your isolated memory, you have your hardened derived child seed. And then you have the message passing characteristics of the microkernel where any action you take has to go to the kernel for evaluation and approval. So that's how we do it. It's very different. Like I said, there's some

aspects of it that are um are not unique to us like just you know isolated memory but when it comes to like the microkernel the message passing the hardened the hardened child keys it's like a unique model for enabling uh third-party apps where they live in their own sandbox well yeah that makes a ton of sense is your point about like leap leapfrogging ledger or the the intent and the goal being that you can see you can begin to see how that's made possible with this with the the modularity of the sandboxing and i mean on that point obviously you guys have a robust set of apps that come out of the box with the 2fa the seed vault um file browser things like that but in your mind like what do you want people to build like what are some apps that you guys yeah uh

are not going to build that you think others should build and may be enticed to build now that they understand that this operating system enables it yeah um so an sdk is already out in like an alpha beta type state so um our cto did a talk at op next a few weeks ago in new york and walked through like how to build apps and and we have like a cli tool foundation cli we have a simulator on the computer and what's really cool i don't know if we've talked about it publicly is that we're going to have with the new firmware release for Passport Prime a developer mode that you can turn on that gives you an MCP server so that your AI can test the app itself. It can see everything on the screen on Passport. It can interact with the entire UI. So you can go to

bed, wake up, and be chugging away, testing your app on the real hardware. So first, we spent a lot of time working on the tooling for this. And that'll be out of beta in a few weeks. But it is in beta for anyone that wants to like use it use the simulator we can we can send you know there's a you can contact us on our online and we can send you like a developer unit for free as well um what kind of apps that we want folks to build um well firstly i'll talk about a couple of things we vibe coded q and a and i in the last few weeks i think you mentioned one actually on rhr uh that that q a vibe coded like a noster uh key storage and signing app yep which is awesome or two weeks ago yeah yeah so that that was i think yeah the week before the conference so

it works it's great i can't i can't attest to the code being reviewed like that's not uh that's not going to come from an official foundation uh repo yet uh but that's one great example which is you know you can have your noster keys on there you can do your signing from there and you can keep those keys off your phone permanently so that you don't have to worry about, you know, losing those keys. Another one he built was a full featured password manager with a Chrome extension so that it can just inject the passwords directly into, you know, your browser. A lot of the things I'm interested in that category are being able to like fully lock down your computer from the device, maybe even like Mac OS or like login from the device

where you have to tap on Passport to log into your computer. That's very interesting to me. Some of the stuff I vibe-coded but I've not announced is MCP-related stuff, storing creds and keys for all your different AI tools on the hardware. Oh, this is cool. This is the Noster one, right? Sorry, I was muted. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, so basically what's happening here, I know not everyone's watching. Some folks are listening as Marty's showing off Q&A's Noster signer app. But you can basically create like a Noster key or you can, I think, I don't know if he lets you import it. You can have more than one, you know, for all everyone who has 10 different NIMs on Noster. and uh i think he has it talking over usb now but passport prime has bluetooth and so what you know basically you'll be able to on the go right just be connected directly to your phone and go ahead and and any kind of noster message can be uh signed from passport so that you don't

have to keep those noster keys on on your phone it's really cool yeah um and then so yeah so i'm really interested in a lot of the ai applications like i did it some for fun a couple weeks ago where you keep the uh the creds for all your mcp tools and everything on passport um and i'm also really interested in all the next gen bitcoin stuff both things like frost um but then i want like my big ask for a lot of these bitcoin companies is is releasing native versions of their app on passport prime so like i used uh casa as an example right just saying like there's no casa app for ledger but if you were to build a casa app for passport prime you know to run on kiosk you could put your logo you can put your same ui from the mobile app you could use your

own terminology like health checks. So effectively what happens is that instead of having a hardware wallet where you have to like tell your users how to use the hardware wallet, support all the different functionality, deal with bugs introduced by the hardware wallet and like all that kind of stuff, you can just bring your experience onto the device where it feels like a native first party experience and so i we have a new ui coming out along with our sdk um where it's it's like iphone style like a like a grid of apps right and so it's very easy for developers to understand that like you can make an app you can have your app you know icon on it the same one that you have on your mobile app you can put it right here and then any kind of offline capabilities for

secure key storage or signing that you want to give to your users you can finally do it and you don't even have to talk to us so like you'll be able to release it to our app store if you want to and all apps on our app store have to be open source and reproducible because we're building them from your repo we're not going to like just trust like the the build that you give us like we're gonna we're gonna build and and release it ourselves onto our app store but we're also going to have like robust side loading capability so you can release an app directly to your user base so you don't have to talk to us or interact with us at all and i'm really excited about all the security related apps um we're gonna have our own internal app so that we can sign kios releases

from kios we do like two of four signature scheme for our for our signing uh github code signing commits um all that kind of stuff uh just any anything like that uh passwords right uh we have our security keys but we haven't done pass keys yet there's probably an opportunity for like password manager, pass key stuff, any next gen Bitcoin stuff, basically anything where you want to get your important stuff off of your computer or phone, you'll be able to do that, you know, and get it onto Kiosk with a native app. And whether it's something you vibe code for yourself, whether it's something that you have an existing app or service or something like that, either on desktop or mobile, we're basically giving everyone the tools to build these kinds of apps to run on

the uh passport prime hardware that's awesome again going back to the beginning of the conversation like building for the ai world now i'm like running wild like how many api keys have i given my agent access to how many yeah uh credentials is it now i mean limited uh like read only api keys now but i would love to give right capabilities um as well and if there is a way to add the key stored on a Passport Prime running QoS, and you can somehow basically sign access to the key while it's doing it without having the agent stored on its own server. It would be massive.

Yeah, and we're working on a couple ways to do it right now, yeah. It's still in progress. I don't think I have a perfect solution, but I think directionally, based on what we've built internally i think that's exactly the kind of stuff that that you'll be able to do yeah that's awesome it's a brave new world out there and how imperative do you think like that's one thing i worry about i mean we talk about it in bitcoin a lot like the biggest um biggest detriment or the biggest risk to bitcoin long term is complacency i feel like this is equally if not even more so true in the world of incumbent operating systems and software colliding with this wave of ai that's

hitting like going back to what i said in the middle of the conversation like do you think this is a problem that's inevitably going to force a solution like you're building the key os or is there a potential that people don't adopt this and we we live in this woefully insecure world uh in perpetuity well it's funny when you were saying that the first thing like what i what i was thinking about was um not just us as like individual users where you know we have you know we want to self-custody bitcoin we want to keep all of our keys and credentials you know secure as part of our entire digital lives i was actually thinking about like the enterprise custody too because like where my mind went to just immediately was how like the history of all

these exchange hacks over time and like i got into bitcoin i think a few months before the mount gox hack and so everything after that has just been defined by you know one after the other year after year exchange hacks and probably one of the reasons why you know building self-custody tools is it's because of that but right now it's like it's not i actually think as individuals we're like less we have less to worry about than the enterprises and like the enterprise custody stuff that's my big worry too and so i used to think a foundation is just you know we're making tools for for sovereign individuals and now i'm thinking about it as well we've made this tool It's been designed to allow like an individual to secure his entire digital life, including Bitcoin.

But there's a huge need and therefore business opportunity for us, but like huge need on the enterprise side because most of the Bitcoin, is that a true statistic? Is it most of the Bitcoin I think is stored with custodians right now? um i think at least i mean i think it's around 50 50 now at this point that's good yeah so i would just say like there's there's individual custodians that are holding millions of bitcoin yeah right i think has over two million at this point yeah and micro strategy has like diversified to anchorage and fidelity is my understanding maybe others that are which is which is good and kind of spreading it out but what worries me is as we just talked about earlier in the conversation what are these custodians using to keep everything secure and some of them will say

like well it's offline it's on paper we have an hsm we have this coordination policy don't get me started on hsms though because like this that's an that's an hsms are another great example of like built on 30 year old legacy tech like hsms are closed source proprietary old hard to develop for have like enterprise sales cycles where uh they'll maybe send you a sample and then you have to pay them like monthly or annual fees for what like they're not doing anything it's just it's just it's it's exactly in the same category i would say as like smart cards but the opposite like smart cards being small and cheap and prevalent in all the credit cards and hsms being these like old monolithic proprietary black box things that once again they're they're not

designed for you to know what you're approving like they're designed for the pre-ai era like things just get automatically signed there's no human in the loop that's like reviewing what the hsm is signing on some secure device and what i've heard anecdotally from some custodians is that they're doing things like building internal iphone apps to approve things and this is like exactly kind of our thesis for why doing an operating system and hardware like this is interesting where you can enable apps to be built because i want them building internal apps on an open source device running a next-gen open source operating system not on an iphone and then like maybe there's a linux computer sitting in like a locked room somewhere with some armed guards

or maybe there's this hsm that's completely closed source black box in like their server rack that has a lock on it with like a guard outside the room and they're saying don't worry our million bitcoin they're totally safe we have the next gen you know best in class security practices and then you start to unpack like what are they using do these guys have tools that are not available to a normal person and the answer is no because i could go rent a cloud hsm right now on amazon like i can go get a smart card and make an app for it like i can go get a linux laptop and put it in a room with a lock on it it's all the same thing yet because they're custodians like we're just trusting that they have their shit together but we also know as bitcoin long-term

bitcoiners no one has ever had their shit together over the long term yeah and uh obviously i won't disclose who and at what company but i heard the iphone app example earlier this week too so this is a problem and it's going to become over a problem when you look at like ai uh from a security perspective so you look at like let's not even talk let's not talk about something hypothetical because like the mythos model is still kind of hypothetical you know there's been a lot of i just saw like firefox patch the most bugs they ever have this month in this last month and the assumption is because they had access to cloud mythos but let's look at from uh like march that dark sword ios exploit which most people have forgotten about already but about a quarter of all

ios devices were vulnerable to this zero day and all you had to do was load a website you load a website from the browser on your iPhone. And what it did was it broke out of its like browser container and it immediately started looking for important stuff on the device. It looked for crypto wallets. And if so, it would just grab those, you know, seeds or keys off of the secure enclave. It looked, it pulled tiny little thumbnails of all the user's photos so that I could try to figure out, are there any photos that are worth, um, pulling like the, like the full contents of the photo. Um, and then it went through the whole OS and just tried to pull anything else important

from it. So like, if you're using an iPhone for your custody, and even if you're using like a Bitcoin hot wallet, lightning on chain, whatever it might be, I mean, that's a quarter of all iPhones, uh, that were vulnerable because they hadn't updated to like the latest, you know ios version and apple pushed out some emergency stuff i kind of think that they may have pushed some emergency stuff out to everyone because i woke up with an iphone update that was installed and i don't have auto install enabled on my iphone so i think they may have pushed something and just like you know they announced it but i wonder if they pushed something else

and didn't say anything as models like mythos become prevalent we may see one of those every couple weeks because i think the the ios and the mac os kernel i think is around 10 million plus lines of code and then you also have like the web browser engine right sitting on top of that and these browsers are just these enormous web these web engines there's only a couple of them and they're um you know chromium uh with chrome web kit which is like powered with safari i feel like firefox announced they were like switching to chromium or something so i think there's like only two maybe that are being actively developed and they're just enormous as just huge i mean they're not black boxes because they're open source but the problem is is that you point a

model like this towards the linux kernel or towards chromium or something and you try to have it find these zero days and these vulnerabilities and then you can also have it break out of its containers within like ios and you're in huge trouble and so i think that's going to be a constant um fact of life over the next couple years and i do think there's going to be a lot of these uh these zero days and you know um i think the vp uh you know vance that just came out that he had like an emergency call with all the different um the ai leaders like a day or two ago talking about how the banking industry is at risk uh mythos is not publicly available you know they're only allowing it for certain um certain companies yeah operation glass wing

that would come yeah the idea that they're going to somehow find all of the vulnerabilities and patch them and then they'll magically be able to roll it out to everyone so i don't i'm not like pessimistic but i i do think that the the need to find a way to uh better secure everything is more important than ever and everyone's gonna have to figure it out like not just individuals but especially you know these enterprises that are storing things like bitcoin where if you lose it it's gone forever yeah like yeah it's a brave new world yeah equally exhilarating and unnerving but um i'm an eternal optimist and it's like okay yes recognize that these problems exist and will likely persist for a time but the opportunity to fix them create new operating systems new

experiences new ways of interacting with our digital lives incredible opportunity uh both from a user experience perspective and then selfishly uh on your part on my part like from a profit perspective it's like hey we got to re-architect and build new ways of interacting with computers and the internet and there's a lot of opportunity and potential in that yeah i'm uh i'm really excited about it because we were like dreaming about these kinds of stuff in the early days of foundation um we even have some documents from end of 2020 about like what a next-gen operating system could look like where it can beam uis from like one device to another device but we didn't know what that meant we were just having fun you know brainstorming and coming

up with these cool ideas and now you see examples of of these generative ais or the idea that you could have like a server maybe up in your office at home and it's running all your ai stuff locally and it's like whether you call it beaming or like whatever you want to call it it's some combo of streaming UI and generative UI, like on your phone or on your computer side. Like, I love that stuff. Like that stuff. I just, I'm so excited about all of it. Will foundation like build some of that stuff? I don't know. Right. Cause like right now we're very focused on the security aspects and everything like that. But, um, we made like the hard decision to spend what we thought would be two years, but that ended up being three years building this operating system.

we almost it's it's like we we had a very non-linear approach for the company because we did these two generations of passport devices the passport founders edition then like the passport we called a couple different things you know the gen 2 and we ended up calling it passport core and you'd think we would have had like a linear progression of just kind of taking that same form factor and like you know making it thinner making it more powerful more affordable scaling it up getting into more hands but what we actually ended up doing was it's like well we had our alpha product we had our beta product and then we raised the seed round and we're like you know we need to do a whole opera we need to need to do a new operating

system and then we were still selling that second gen passport but we kind of went dark for a couple years like r and d and now we're coming out with a product that was envisioned before ai was popular but that i think has like the the desirable it's not perfect there's a lot we still have to do to it but it has like the most desirable operating system characteristics for this like ai security world as well in addition to the bitcoin security in addition to like the identity related stuff and i'm really excited about that obviously from like a you know selfish profit uh motive but then also because um there is like this is a time where we're going to be able to rip up a lot of stuff and rebuild it because there's going to be this imperative hopefully it's not because bad things

are happening and we're like and and and there's all this chaos on like the cyber side hope hopefully it's because like we think about this stuff in advance and we see the value in them and we start to transition you know to these new tools and everything but i feel like um like we we have something that uh is is shipping that developers are going to be built be able to build apps for in the coming weeks and i'm just really excited to see like what everyone builds well on that note if there's any there's millions of developers listening to the show right now what is your call to action to them uh to begin getting their hands on the operating system and thinking about building apps on top of it yeah so um one is we just uh retweeted from the op next guys yesterday

a talk that ken our our cto did it up next a couple weeks ago in new york if you want to actually like watch a little talk and see how he uh in real time like vibe coded an app using the the CLI tool and everything like that. You can check that out. And then there's instructions there to, um, you can basically start using the SDK and our simulator today. If you want on your computer, you can also shoot us a message on any of these channels, you know, contact form on our site, email, um, DM us on, on X. And if you're a developer, we'll send you a free developer unit. So you can get started and check it out and everything like that. And then, and I would say by end of the month our goal is to have like a release of kiosk out that supports that developer

mode that i mentioned so that you can like flip on mcp and like have it you know test help you the ai test your app for you and you'll see like start to see the ability for users to sideload apps or be coming out with our app store all that kind of stuff and so um definitely check it out and and uh ask us if you have any questions but over the next few weeks there's going to be a lot of SDK and app related stuff that we're going to be putting out. Awesome. Logan, I just sent you the, uh, the link to the up next presentation by Ken. So make sure you put that in the show notes. So you're listening when I get involved, we'll link to that link to the GitHub, obviously the website, but can't believe it took us six years to catch up. And, uh, it was great. I love the,

the line of thought that you're in right now. Cause I think it's, uh, again, a layer below mine but a very important layer as it pertains to the intersection of not only bitcoin but everything we're doing in ai i think these conversations and thinking about these problems particularly at the layer uh that you are is is an imperative right now because it's becoming obvious again going back to my my co-work example like i saw this thing using my computer i was like this is not this is not safe at all like we need to figure out a new way to interact with these things so i'm pumped that you guys are working on it well thank you and i'm really glad that that you've been uh doing a lot of ai related uh podcasts and content and everything because

we often forget that like we as bitcoiners we have a unique perspective when it comes to like both our values our philosophy and then everything we've seen in the field over the last decade plus when it comes to institute not trusting institutions and we bring that same mindset to everything right it might be uh related to custodians right like i mentioned exchange hacks that kind of stuff might be related to covid right or other type institutional stuff and then when it comes to ai i think that whole industry like that i don't consider us in like the ai industry right i consider us still like a i don't know what i would actually consider us maybe like a like a Bitcoin or lead company, something like that. But like, we have a unique perspective

and different values than most of the AI industry. And like, it's important for us, I think, to talk about that and make that heard, because I think they're barreling right now towards this, the growth of the industry and the growth of these tools at the expense of the privacy and security. And that is going to catch up to them. Like, that's not a good position to be in for the long term it may be a short-term high time preference maybe profitable maybe not you know position maybe like user growth position but i don't know about profitable but like in the long term it can it could i don't want to be like doomerism because i'm as optimistic as you but like need some sane voices in there i'm saying okay how can we do this but do it with

privacy how can we do this but do this with security how can we bring these these the way that we approach security on the bitcoin side and like bring those same principles to the ai side of things and i'm really excited to be able to start working on that well again thank you for doing it and i completely agree and thank you for uh the compliments it's uh again just tickling my own fancy i'm fascinated by this stuff and to your point like i do think we have a unique perspective it's funny the parallels whether it's from security or even on the energy side watching all these data centers get built and having been in bitcoin mining for almost a decade now it's like ah i see what you guys are doing i know where the uh where the land mines are for you and um

it's just funny how bitcoiners seem to be ahead of the curve and i think it'll take some time maybe three to five years but i think the approach to security in the ai world that many bitcoiners are taking will be recognized as like oh this is the right way to do things and so i think to that point you guys are ahead of the curve and keep pushing and if you're listening your developer uh and you're interested in what we just discussed go check it out again we'll link to everything in the show notes and begin building because i think to that point we have this legacy architecture and infrastructure that many people are dependent on you need to begin to uh transition away from it slowly but surely and um if not you then who to build the uh the

apps that people can actually trust in this this world that we're barreling towards thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives

you incredible value so please consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time