TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #769: Freedom Money In Your Private Chat with Vik Sharɱa & Seth For Privacy

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. Rick and Seth, welcome to the show. First time, long time.

Starting point is 00:00:40 Thanks for having us on. Yeah, I'm excited for this. I've been, man, Tales from the Crypt was the first show when I first went down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin and fell down the listen to a thousand hours of podcasts. uh tales from the crypt was the the goat for me so that's it's really really cool to be able to be on here obviously i've known adele for a really long time but uh we've never gotten to chat much marty so i'm excited for this thanks for having us on i am as well i mean you guys just launched

Starting point is 00:01:10 radar chat this week which is a long time coming uh adele and i have been talking about the need for bitcoin payments and signal for years i think since we started rabbit hole recap eight years ago it's always been a topic of discussion here and there you guys have finally launched it thank you for that number one number two i think the uh the juxtaposition of your launch date on july 7th and everything going on in the eu as it pertains to chat control uh vpn uh banning being talked about in the uk official recognition being talked about in cars throughout the european union and And it seems like the digital panopticon is being erected around us and it's incumbent upon us in the freedom tech space

Starting point is 00:02:00 to build the tools to route around that. And it looks like with Radar, you've done just that. So I think to jump off, I was talking about what convinced you to build Radar in the first place and why now? I mean, there was a lot of factors involved. One being, of course, the community wanted it. You've talked about it, Odell, like you said.

Starting point is 00:02:25 Even Jack Dorsey's tweeted about it. We have a pretty good video coming out on that pretty soon. So that was a big driving force. Another one was all my trips to China, you know, everyone using WeChat. And when it comes time to pay at the cafe or wherever I am, you're not pulling out another payment app or anything. You just use the same app that you're communicating with. Um, but that was, that was also a driving factor. Um, you know, right now for messaging, it's, it's so natural. Everybody's doing it all the time. That's what you wake up and you do,

Starting point is 00:03:01 you check your messages, see what you've any messages from your friends or family. Um, it's, it's already a platform that everybody's using all the time and there's already so much stuff blowing and messaging apps like text, of course, but also video pictures, documents, so why not money right that's what we thought why not money why can't bitcoin flow through this the same system um and why now i think the tech is is there now to do it um i don't know if you know a couple years ago when seth just joined on actually we were trying to implement lightning into cake wallet and it was just a terrible user experience um even though the user didn't have to worry about managing channels and liquidity and all that still the user experience is pretty bad

Starting point is 00:03:50 and actually seth killed and he came on so you can blame him um but then uh you know spark and uh and breeze breeze building sdk for for spark and we put that in cake earlier this year and it was a huge success um and we're like okay this is it this technology is here now we can put it into signal then your next question should be why signal right um and we kicked around the idea of of doing another messaging app you know new one all together but i mean you probably have four or five messaging apps on your phone right now at least um and now try to get people to download yet another messaging app and have all their friends and family join it's just it's a heavy lift right um signal made sense that their gold standard and privacy uh it's open source we can build we

Starting point is 00:04:44 can build on it to have some payment rails that we were able to take advantage of with that mobile coin they think they did so yeah with all these things coming together at the right time if it was an obvious and right time to do this project so that's what i mean you've been on the tip of the spear of freedom tech and particularly as it pertains to bringing privacy to users like how would you how would you describe the the implementation of of radar leveraging um for a signal that open source project and then the the way in which you guys implemented bitcoin payments within the wallet yeah for sure so i mean i think they covered all the high level details the big things to me are one like you said like the the ability to do lightning in a way that

Starting point is 00:05:35 feels frictionless but is still self-custodial i know we can maybe get into some of the specifics of the trust model spark down the line if you want but in my eyes still self-custodial that that just really changed the game because even if you look back at the the bitcoin for signal campaign that happened uh a year 18 months ago now um there's a big push on on x jack dorsey and others pushing for for signal to add bitcoin indirectly that push was using cashew which is a custodial e-cash solution which is great for privacy like essentially perfect uh privacy on the transaction layer but requires a custodian to actually hold people's bitcoin and obviously one problem with that is like obviously we want people doing self-custody

Starting point is 00:06:20 the other problem is signal themselves as an org if they actually touched custody of anyone's coins from a regulatory perspective, that's a complete shift for them. It makes them a huge target. So they weren't going to want to do that. But honestly, when that campaign went, even in these last 12 or 18 months, there's been a revolution in the payments UX

Starting point is 00:06:41 that's possible with Bitcoin while still letting people actually hold their own keys. So Spark was part of that. I've been really leading the way. ARK through both Arcade and Bark are getting there as well and allowing us to build tools like this where suddenly we don't need to have the user

Starting point is 00:06:58 like understand the ins and outs of Bitcoin or deal with a ton of headaches or figure out what does inbound liquidity mean or how do I buy inbound liquidity and how much do I need and what happens to it? Like all of that stuff goes away and people get to just make payments simply. So it's really that the technology

Starting point is 00:07:17 for building around Bitcoin actually has gotten good enough that we can put it in apps where people aren't necessarily ideologues. like people are using signal today who have no clue what privacy is provided um and that was another reason why that was such a good pairing for us is signal have hit that sweet spot over the years so it's a sweet spot that i think many of us in the freedom tech space are targeting of how do we build underlying incredibly impressive privacy tooling but on top of it build a user

Starting point is 00:07:47 experience that is just very very approachable easy to use and that that people want to use even if they don't care about them doing privacy. And even when you look at Signal, like I have gotten all of my friends and family to get into the Signal network over the years. I have not convinced any of them of the need for broader personal privacy. I don't know if that says a lot about them

Starting point is 00:08:07 or a lot about me as a poor evangelist, but I haven't been able to convince them about the broader need. They don't have any idea how Signal itself works under the hood for privacy, but they're just there for the good features. And they're there because I'm there and other people that they love are there.

Starting point is 00:08:21 And I think that's where we need to get Bitcoin to over the long term is people just use Bitcoin because it's the simplest, best tool for the job, not because necessarily they're ideologically motivated to use Bitcoin or because they embrace Bitcoin maximalism or any of this, but rather they just, hey, I'm already chatting with these people. oh i can also send value like i can pay them back for lunch i can send a remittance over borders without having to worry about anything without being worried about custody without having to worry about if it will be intercepted in the middle it opens up a whole new world and now it does it in a way that combines the people you're already chatting with you don't just start from scratch with money that is cross-border that is permissionless and that that's the real powerful combination a lot of it is that the tech behind it has gotten good enough that we can do that in a way where it's it's honestly just seamless yeah well you mentioned like bitcoins

Starting point is 00:09:16 oops sorry vick sorry i was just going to add to that just a broader i guess something that's going to happen trend that's going to happen is people are going to stop building tools for bitcoin and force people to join that tool but rather embed bitcoin into existing tools and rails like jack dorsey did with am i frozen i'm going in now oh okay i froze there for a second Like Jack Dorsey did with the Square Terminal, you know, it was already an existing infrastructure and he put Bitcoin Lightning in there. And the same thing we did in an existing messaging app and we put Bitcoin in there. I think that'll be the trend moving forward. Rather than making things for just Bitcoiners, make things for regular folks and put Bitcoin in there.

Starting point is 00:10:02 Yeah, I think diving deeper into this more technical details or maybe like the philosophy of the tech. like why signal versus something like whatsapp for for the layman out there like why why signal the way in which you described it compared to something like whatsapp telegram other messaging apps and then bitcoin obviously with the the rise of the agentic economy the x402 protocol and the o usd consortium bringing stable coins like why why not embed a stable coin in in the app uh why why start with bitcoin what considering the use case that you're going going after is which is private speech and sovereign money like why aren't those other tools good for for either speech or money or maybe not optimal for the use case that you're going for specifically yeah i guess i could

Starting point is 00:10:56 give a basic reason and set can get into more of the technicalities um signal made sense because it's open source. There's no corporation behind it. It's an organization, a non-profit organization. But main thing that it's open source and we could work that right away. And it's the, like I said, it's a gold standard privacy. Like Seth said, it's a gold standard privacy that makes privacy easy. You don't even know you're being private. And Bitcoin Lightning made sense. It's fast, instant um you can do very very small payments um stable coins i mean i think that's something we're considering in the future either giving users a choice to automatically convert to stable coins so they don't see their value fluctuating like you may with bitcoin um it would be a great

Starting point is 00:11:49 feature for non-bitcoiners where they open up the app and they just see a usd balance they don't to worry about they don't even have to know that it's bitcoin lightning in the back um so we're kicking those ideas around i guess from a more technical reason why we chose signal set to get into that why we chose with lightning yeah i mean the the pairing is very intentional because i think something that we like i know y'all have been talking about for a long time on the show marty and odell's and being the drum on is like the stuff needs to be freedom tech needs to be be something that enables the individual and so the underlying messaging tool that we use had to be something that was censorship resistant privacy preserving other apps claim that whatsapp

Starting point is 00:12:34 telegram famously claim that all the time about that they're a privacy messenger but they're just they're not they're not at all um they they kind of use that as a marketing veneer something to put on what they're actually building but it's not core to what they're doing and even when they do it there are a ton of drawbacks and caveats to the actual privacy preserved or to who has access to those chats even if they aren't encrypted whatsapp for instance those chats can easily be sent as well to facebook and they get access to all the chats so they're into into and encrypted uh in many scenarios where where they they are accessible by third parties so signal yeah i mean that it's it's the the standard for privacy preserving messaging so we wanted a really good base

Starting point is 00:13:18 to go with there. Also, messaging protocols are very complex and you can go wrong in many different ways. And so being able to use what is the gold standard of messaging protocols out of the box was also a huge win for us so we didn't have to reinvent the wheel there. There are some other messengers

Starting point is 00:13:34 that are doing really cool things with reinventing the wheel in terms of messaging protocols. Simplex, for instance, have done a great job there. But we wanted to lean into something that was very established and set in stone on the messenger side. um and then obviously like why bitcoin like it's it's the same reasons we want freedom tech to be

Starting point is 00:13:53 paired with freedom money uh we want it to be that we want the the bones the rails at least to be bitcoin no matter what so like even when we talk about exploring stable coins in the future those are only stable coins that live on bitcoin um so like specifically we're using spark under the hood those would be stable coins on spark so yes in theory those stable coins have different trust models like some of them can be frozen not necessarily all of them but some of them can be frozen remotely even if you have your own keys so obviously they're not filling the same freedom money space but when we're talking about people who just want to be able to send remittances back to south america maybe they don't want to deal with the volatility of bitcoin so i think

Starting point is 00:14:31 giving users that choice but doing it in a way that is still they hold the keys to that still lives on the bitcoin rails and the very important piece to me is it gives them the add a tap in a second ability to swap between those stable coins and bitcoin and get to permissionless money very quickly i think something we're going to see with stable coins is it's all fun and games until your your tether gets frozen your stable coins get frozen and as people experience that more and more as the pain of that comes more and more we'll see that people want to shift to hard money to something that is more censorship resistant so enabling that rail to be able to switch at a tap from your stable coins to bitcoin when you need a kind of a flight to safety that's really critical

Starting point is 00:15:16 to us as well yeah i mean another sort of topic i really want to dive down because back i know you and i have been talking about this a lot which is the the emergence of vibe coding and i had francis pull out from bullet bitcoin on earlier this week like they're in a sued the french government for an infringement on privacy rights of their customers via the DAC-8 legislation or regulations that went live earlier this year and that Bull Bitcoin is expected to report on early next year. And like I said earlier, it seems like the attack on privacy, the attack on individual sovereignty in the digital age is being waged at an accelerating pace.

Starting point is 00:16:03 But it also seems like the ability to combat that with the building out of Freedom Tech tools is encouraging, I would say. And I think I'm very curious to get your thoughts on historically the knock on Freedom, or not the knock, like the lack of adoption of Freedom Tech has been because of the convenience factor. It's not as convenient as the closed sourced walled garden tech that makes everything easy out of the box. And is do you think with the emergence of vibe coding or just the maturation of the Freedom Tech protocols and the development sort of concentration around these protocols that we do have the ability to compete with the closed source platforms and technologies that really make the trade off of convenience? or privacy in favor of convenience. So your lack of privacy, but you get way more convenient experiences. Do you think we're getting the feature parity

Starting point is 00:17:16 and UX parity in the freedom of privacy space? So I think the genie's out of the bottle, right? I'm one of those people that believe that the will of the people does win out in the end. governments regulators can keep fighting something but people want it and do it and you saw that happen with bitcoin right in the early days you remember in 2012 13 there's so much fud that was going to get banned the government's going to crack down and and eventually it got so big that they couldn't ignore it that you know these people are trading value in in billions and regulators

Starting point is 00:17:57 finally looked at it governments finally looked at it and said okay we need to somehow bring this into the fold um as far as freedom tech is concerned i think it goes along the same line you can't dock code uh if i publish some code somewhere take k-quality for example right it's open source we can go away tomorrow government's been shut us down let's say but you can download the code and you can build it yourself and i think your vibe coding um references is really applicable here because before you know three years ago somebody gives you a code hey you can download kick wallet and build it yourself like well i don't know how to do that i'm not a not a developer i'm not a coder but now with with ai you can just feed that into cloud or chat

Starting point is 00:18:43 and boom it'll make you an app and the ux ui reference you made i mean elon musk last year tweeted out, because of AI, user interface is dead. And he's right, because on the fly, you can have it look whatever the way you want it to look. You can take the cake code and say, here, build me a wallet, but make it look completely different. Do something that you like. So now you can do very custom user experience the way you want it. Hide information you don't want, show information you want, features that you want, features that you don't want. You can control everything a side note does that worry me about cake well yes it does but but i think in the long term not thinking selfishly uh thinking selflessly i think in the long term this is all

Starting point is 00:19:33 going to contribute to freedom tech and the use of freedom tech and accessibility to freedom tech to the regular folks i think it's i think i think all these efforts by the eu and things is futile yeah i think it like vibe coding also enhances the the overall uplift that comes with open source code because one of the really nice things about open source code is like for us as a business we can't compete on a an intellectual property moat like like you mentioned at cake wallet like you can go download the code right now the exact code that we're publishing to all of our users and you can go build it and you can go customize it in whatever way you want not going to necessarily recommend like vibe coding complex changes to a wallet that's

Starting point is 00:20:21 self-custodial because obviously there are risks there but you can do that today and so what it means is that us as a company we have to compete very aggressively for users by building what they want we can't just sit back and say like okay we built we built something it's locked behind ip ip laws we're just going to do the bare minimum and keep it alive and just keep people locked in with a subscription for a decade like that that world is dead that world used to exist that world is dead now and that's a really good thing because it means that the actual end tools that get in people's hands are much more competitive and are much more built for them i think the other thing like vick touched on this with with ui ux on the design side one of the really exciting things

Starting point is 00:21:04 about vibe coding is not just the the back-end code side which i think is what most people think about when they think about vibe coding but actually ai is really good and getting much better on the design side if you know what you want and if you have a good idea on in terms of brand that sort of thing like a good example of that is the website for radar radar.chat uh i built that but it was built from a really good brand that high mayor had a brand came up with good logos color palettes all of that so like it still needed good underlying building blocks with good messaging system that was built by folks at Neural Radar helped us out on the marketing side. But then I was able to build a really beautiful website. I'm not a designer or a

Starting point is 00:21:46 developer, but I knew what I wanted and I had good building blocks. And the ability to do that is something that I think has been a problem in the Freedom Tech space for a long time, where usually it's very technical people who have a vision for what the technology needs to be, but have a hard time translating that into a beautiful user-friendly product. But there's really good tooling now on the AI side in terms of design review, in terms of the actual like building the websites and the front end side of things as well that can let us build freedom tech that's really beautiful, intuitive and approachable and easy to use at the same time, which is a big shift as well in this space. What's up, freaks? This episode is brought to you by Block's Bitcoin ecosystem. You probably know Cash App. You probably know Square. You definitely know BitKey if you've been listening to the show for the last couple of years. What matters most is that these are not disconnected

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Starting point is 00:23:47 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 hobblers 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 volt that's tftc10 at unchained.com i said speaking of shifts let's shift back to radar specifically because i think uh it would be remiss for us not

Starting point is 00:24:25 to to dive into some of the details one of the most important to me is the fact it's completely interoperable with signal right now um and that i think that for you guys is massive like the the ability to back up your your signal um your signal key and your encrypted key and then upload it into radar and then have your chats there in the radar app is a massive three ux booms the thought of downloading a fork of signal and trying to rebuild your contact list and reach out to people to start starting your chats is a bit bit cumbersome so i think the ability to basically onboard yourself on the radar and have it in a way where it's it's it's like oh it's just picking up all your signal chat history that you're using as an everyday driver makes that that sort of

Starting point is 00:25:20 adoption hurdle much smoother there's not even a hurdle makes that adoption curve much smoother yeah i mean like seth and i have been using radar as our primary signal client for four months now and right i messaged you on there you can't tell i'm using another app or anything and it works seamlessly and like i said earlier that's what we wanted we wanted to enter something that's already there and not try to bring people onto a whole new thing and learn something completely new so i'm glad to hear that's being accepted well although we did think it was obvious that people should back up their signal first and then restore from backup we're adding a little splash to the next update, which will warn people,

Starting point is 00:26:08 hey, before you move any further, go do this on Signal first. Your Signal will stop working. Of course, you can link it on another device like your desktop. You can still run Signal on your desktop or another phone if you have it as a link device, but not as a primary device if you want to use the Bitcoin features of Radar. But yeah, like you pointed out, that was important for us. To bring it to something that already exists rather than making something brand new and to really drive it home to people. I mean just

Starting point is 00:26:42 For those who are listening. We're unaware like how big is signal? How many users do they have and how many potentially over a million? Yeah. Yeah Yeah, like 100 150 million monthly active users just for clarity on the specifics of the number obviously way more than that in terms of downloads And and potential users but monthly active somewhere between 100 150 million so huge huge audience and one that is growing very rapidly yeah i mean well i'm set to your use case you're messing with your family you don't realize the privacy type but you have to imagine a large portion of that user base is in it for for the tech for the privacy um because they realize the the benefits of it and is is was that part of the intent too

Starting point is 00:27:25 is like slowly sort of orange pill signal users or the signal foundation itself it would be a win yeah i think they want to stick to messaging though i have i don't know when i haven't spoken to anyone there but you know they do messaging well they do privacy well yeah i mean like like we talked about a little bit too like the the vision here is not that this is just for for hardcore bitcoiners who who already know about bitcoin already use it it's not just to be another wallet app like there's there's plenty of wallet apps um out there right now honestly like that's not what was needed here so a huge part of this too is like signal users already have clearly a desire to move outside of the existing system in terms of messaging but the vast majority

Starting point is 00:28:14 of them are not bitcoiners i would guess there's definitely some crossover it's hard to obviously estimate exactly what that crossover is but signal is heavily used within at least all the bitcoin circles that i'm in so there there is a good crossover there there's also a lot of users like we talked about who are just there because of the network effect they're because of maybe the privacy like it's starting to become a little bit like that um it's becoming a normal thing that people understand is like if you want a private conversation it happens in signal um actually that was funny the other day on a just a sports podcast that i listened to they mentioned that maybe they should start a signal chat for their their private conversations because they shouldn't

Starting point is 00:28:51 have it in uh in sms anymore or something that's it's becoming something that's become just kind a cultural norm of if you have something private you do it in signal but it's also just a draw to people because it's a really good cross-platform messenger as well um so the goal is far beyond just the the hardcore bitcoiners like obviously not that we don't want hardcore bitcoiners like that i think they'll be the first adopters definitely the t1 audience here um but the reason we've made it so honestly like stupid simple to use is because we want it to be something that anyone who's familiar with any other payments app can do this you don't have have to understand bitcoin you don't even have to necessarily back up your seed phrase like you can

Starting point is 00:29:29 manually back it up and we prompt you to do that when you first receive funds but we're able to back up your seed phrase directly into encrypted into your signal profile so that when you log into if you lose your old phone you log into a new device all your stats come with you you don't have to do anything for that you don't have to remember that you had a separate seed phrase it automatically comes back up without any issues and that's the the real impetus here behind all the decisions we're making is we're not going to add additional complexity that you would have in a like a fully featured bitcoin wallet we're not going to add a ton of bells and whistles it's very much meant to be how how simply can we show people how powerful bitcoin is as a payment rail as a value transfer

Starting point is 00:30:08 system and really start to bring back that peer-to-peer digital cash method of exchange side of bitcoin and make that something that people are doing and get it snowballing so that people who are not even bitcoiners are using it because of how simple it is and that's where i think the the real value will be down the line what uh in your mind would make the success what what are you looking for what um what expectations do you have for this out of the gate and what would make you guys extremely happy to see in terms of user interactions with radar I mean in terms of users who knows I had to throw a number on it I don't know 10% of what signal has 10 I think we get even 10% of what they have they're on 10 million users which would

Starting point is 00:30:59 be fantastic I mean just for comparison cake has 2 million users but cake is cryptocurrency wallet that's what it is it does nothing else it's a cryptocurrency you're a crypto person you want a wallet and you download that. But Radar isn't about that. So I think we can exceed the user base in terms of numbers for a TK wallet. I think that would be a huge success. And I think, as we talked earlier, I think we would have to kind of shift away from Bitcoin and do a stablecoin type of thing to try to get to those

Starting point is 00:31:34 numbers. By the way, I missed one of the factors. You asked me what were one of the factors that led us to making Radar. Another weird factor was, and you know this already and you've heard this, people say, hey, Beck, why don't you make a Bitcoin-only wallet? Cake is great, but I'm not going to touch it. A lot of Bitcoin maxis say that. This is also kind of our way to put a Bitcoin-only wallet out there. That was kind of interesting.

Starting point is 00:32:04 but yeah i think i think um if um if we just in terms of pure numbers i think if we can get 10 percent of signal in my mind that would be a that'd be a huge success um and who knows after that uh if uh people continue to see the value in decentralized instant as for a value which is what Bitcoin is meant to be, then that number could go whatever from there. Yeah, I think an interesting outcome too would be, obviously, we've not been able to reach Signal, but it'd be interesting to see what their thoughts are about this long-term too. Will they want to integrate Bitcoin as a result of this?

Starting point is 00:32:49 Will they want to add some functionality like this? We'll see long-term what that looks like, but I think this could also be just a huge proving ground for the desire and demand for Bitcoin support in messengers overall and can show how this can compete on a user experience perspective with the custodial bank fiat centralized options that are the norm right now in the Alipay and the all of the other payment systems that are in messengers today that are on the just regular fiat banking rails. yeah and i'm thinking back to your your comments earlier about being in china vic and pulling out wechat or alipay whatever it may be like your chat app is your payment mechanism and i mean

Starting point is 00:33:34 china is an example of i think how to how to do it wrong at scale and it's interesting that this this type of technology correct with the surveillance is yeah yes and it's funny that We haven't really had a WeChat-like app at critical mass in the U.S. yet, which is probably a good thing considering Facebook, I mean, Facebook I think probably tried to do it with Libra before they shelved that. But really honing in on the potential to create a WeChat or Alipay-like super app in the United States for a global audience that is privacy-preserving is extremely encouraging.

Starting point is 00:34:26 Yeah, I see this as... Go ahead. No, I think WeChat... I see this as an open-source, private messaging, decentralized payment version of WeChat. if that makes sense um it's it's doing the same thing you can message and you can send value but you're doing in a private and decentralized and self-custodial way yeah and i think i mean seth while i have you here i think you're very eloquent in describing this for

Starting point is 00:35:00 everybody listening who may be one of the i have nothing to hide so i'm going to make the convenience trade off uh why why is privacy important and why should people care about it especially today. Yeah. I mean the, the underlying reasons I'm sure most people have, have heard at this point, but the interesting thing to me is this, like, I have nothing to hide kind of pithy statement. That's become the normal retort. I think that that sentiment is kind of dead. I don't, I don't think that's really how people feel anymore. And I think there's been a concerted shift, especially over the last five, six years for people to understand after finally seeing like seeing all of the problems that come with a lack of privacy that people are starting

Starting point is 00:35:43 to understand like this does actually matter and i think the sentiment now is much more what are the tools like are there actually tools that i can use that aren't too painful to gain privacy and that's been the huge gap there i think like signal is a great example of that where a good privacy tool needs to feel as easy to use as one that is not privacy preserving like we have to care about the user experience here um and so for the for the the core of like why does this matter ultimately the the things that you do the people you message and the people you pay tell everything about you if i can see who you're talking to even if i can't see the message contents themselves and if i can see who you're paying when i can pretty much figure out

Starting point is 00:36:30 everything else about your life. And no matter what other things you care about or what other rights you think are being protected, if you don't have the ability to protect your conversations and your transactions, your actual financial history, everything else falls apart very quickly. And so that's the huge impetus here is like we can solve both of those at the same time signal already solved the messaging side. Let's latch on to that and make the most of the already existing protocol network that's there and then let's bring the the financial side of that home at the same time but again i think that the critical thing for people is not i don't care about privacy especially when you talk about financial privacy like no one is going to ever

Starting point is 00:37:13 give you their bank record or their credit card statement or anything like that they they would never publish that online like they they do there's a natural innate desire for privacy especially financial privacy, but privacy more generally. And when we can actually do that in a way that feels like I'm not sacrificing too much from a convenience perspective, that's the huge breakthrough for people. I think that's why we've seen Signal be so successful when it comes to messengers. I think that's why we've seen Proton be so successful with their suite of tools that they offer is that they get very close to the same user experience of the centralized surveilled tools but they also give you strong privacy and that's what people want i mean you even look at

Starting point is 00:37:54 apple and others their marketing campaigns are heavily focused on privacy these days that's not just because they feel like they might want to care about privacy it's because people are actually seriously considering which thing will i buy which tool will i use based on if it does give them some level of privacy at the end of the day yeah i think apple's been i don't know if it's Apple or reports of Apple talking about having many models on the iPhone using the secure enclave. I think that's another thing, the emergence of AI and particularly the frontier models

Starting point is 00:38:31 with the leaders being anthropic and open AI. Funnily enough, Alex Karp from Palantir made a pretty eloquent point highlighting the privacy trade-offs that a lot of enterprise clients of these frontier model providers are making in terms of giving up all your IP. And it's funny that this AI revolution may force people who previously did not care or at least do not appear to care that much about privacy. It may force them to as they're thinking about how they share their data with these

Starting point is 00:39:05 frontier model providers. Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the other really cool things about like as the technology gets better, we can actually do powerful things in a privacy preserving way much better at the same time i mean that's even like when we're talking about like how we're able to do bitcoin within radar like that wasn't possible two years ago and that's not necessarily because of hardware changes but that's because people figured out new good ways to be able to do things in a self-custodial manner that shift has come to ai as well and that's where like everything is also faster when you're doing

Starting point is 00:39:37 on device compute when it comes to to ai like there's another incentive that makes people want that they maybe aren't thinking as deeply about the privacy even though that is becoming more and more of a conversation around like do i want to run local models but at the same time when you can run something locally the questions you ask against it are much much faster than when you have to go out to the cloud your network connection could be flaky all of those problems can exist if you can do that in a local model at a very high speed that changes the game in terms of user experience and privacy. You kind of can Trojan horse the privacy and under the user experience, guys. All right, freaks, you know me, you know, I don't take sponsor money from

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Starting point is 00:42:18 have a regular health event you pay five hundred dollars and the crowd pays the rest go to join crowdhealth.com sign up today use the code tftc opt out of health insurance i'm uninsured baby and i love it use the code tftc at join crowdhealth.com you'll get 99 a month for the first three months that you're on the crowd health platform in the community big winners you found sovereign money now find sovereign health and sovereign health care digging into secure enclaves this is an area i think's been um been very underexplored shout out to the team at maple um ai for for bringing sort of private llms via secure enclaves like truly private llms compared to something like venice um i think their design choices are are incredibly wise and

Starting point is 00:43:06 i think the leveraging of secure enclaves is an underexplored area and it's encouraging to see companies um like in clavia from alexis felini come to market and um and just exploring that design space is something that's again seems underappreciated to me right now how would you describe the potential there and you mentioned e-cash earlier i know calais um is exploring sort of these these e-cash mints that live in the enclave that are cryptographically provable that the operator can't really control them to some extent at the end of the day what um what are we missing in the market by by not leveraging secure enclaves to their full potential right now yeah they're they're really interesting i mean like oh go ahead to pick

Starting point is 00:43:58 now i was gonna say specifically for ai you mean for everything right oh yeah for everything yeah i mean i think seth and i were kicking the idea on just a few weeks ago about there needs to be more um providers um because obviously host your own hardware with the secure enclave is going to be super expensive so we were kicking around the idea maybe that's the business model we should get into um provide ai service that's the that's in the in the enclave um but isn't bit tensor doing that um or they have a version or you can choose to run the ai within within some enclave um yeah i'm not sure but i know i know nvidia is launching the gpus with the nitro enclaves in them so it makes sense that anybody

Starting point is 00:44:52 wanted to could put an llm in there yeah yeah i think it's i think it's definitely in the future yeah it's becoming much more normal and that's yeah yeah i was just gonna say it's becoming much more normal because like that that demand for privacy is not just a personal thing as well like the the primary driver for privacy at scale with the ai space is enterprises i mean if you're if you're a business who are dealing with sensitive internal data all the time you don't want to be dumping all of that into clod or to chat gpt like they're huge huge potential issues with you touching anything like that, if you're dealing with customer data,

Starting point is 00:45:37 if you're dealing with HIPAA-specific data, all of these specific use cases for AI at scale, you need those. So it's not even something, I mean, this is not a new technology. Secure enclaves are quite ancient technology. At this point, your phone has had a secure enclave in it for the last decade plus in the Android and iOS space.

Starting point is 00:45:57 And it uses it for a lot of the functionality and the security of the device itself. But I think the real shift now is that because of the way we can actually leverage this, especially on the AI side, like there are definitely other use cases, but I think a lot of times secure enclaves kind of get overblown and people forget about what the downsides and risks are to where they are very centralized. they're extraordinarily expensive they're not something that a normal person can can host at home or would have access to and they are very much a trusted system uh and a single entity has the the root keys to actually provision all of those secure enclaves so obviously you're you're trusting with an intel sgx you're trusting intel themselves there have been a lot of breaks in intel sgx secure enclaves over the years nvidia you're trusting nvidia amazon nitro you're

Starting point is 00:46:51 trusting amazon like all of these services you are trusting the provider still in some ways to be honest and to be secure to not leak those root keys or accidentally set them to null or something like that some of that stuff has happened in the past but the things that it unlocks are a huge huge shift like like you said maple has been a kind of a revelation because like when i'm thinking about how am i going to be using ai it's similar to how i think about chats where like i i will self-censor subconsciously or consciously if i know that the thing that i say is going to a third party that i don't know what they're going to do with that data there are some things like i just i will not put into claude because i don't want to to trust it with that or i don't want to know

Starting point is 00:47:37 that about me i even talking yesterday to somebody who i know doesn't care that much about personal privacy i was helping with some financial stuff and just giving him some some tips around that and he was like i want to learn more about all the financial tools that like help me see the details about what i'm doing with my money i know that all that data is being mined and he wasn't sure how to go about that but something like maple is a fantastic solution for hey i can upload my bank statements into this and know that they're not being leaked to a third party or being used to train ai so it's a lot of the same the same principles that went into radar and went the cake wallet um our core to to bitcoin right now is there's a freedom of expression

Starting point is 00:48:16 and honestly like a weight being lifted off your shoulders when you know that the thing that you're doing is is private and that you're getting to choose who knows about it like obviously it's not about being this anonymous super shadowy hacker in the woods it's about you getting to choose who knows about it if you and your spouse want to sit down and go through your bank statements and get insight into that and ask questions about it you should be able to do that in a way that only you and your spouse see that info. If you want to have a conversation with your brothers in a group chat and talk about sensitive stuff about your childhood or something, you should be able to do that without worrying about like, what's Facebook going to think when

Starting point is 00:48:50 they read through this about what happened or like those things need to be able to happen freely. And that only happens in a space that is privacy preserving. So secure enclaves are a huge part of that for the AI side, obviously not necessarily as applicable on the chat side, even though, As I mentioned, that Signal heavily uses Intel SGX secure enclaves for the server infrastructure on the Signal side to provide some of the provable, attestable privacy that's built into the Signal protocol. It's a big part of that as well. Hey guys, if I could just interrupt. Vic, I know you've got to hop off here. Yeah, I've got to hop off.

Starting point is 00:49:24 You guys continue, of course. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Am I getting broken up? Thank you for coming, Vic. Thank you for building and launching Radar. like i said desperately need a product been waiting for a while as you're describing that like i saw a tweet yesterday and it's it's always i mean the samurai guys everyone free samurai but

Starting point is 00:49:44 like talking to kian over the years i think the the example of like you have blinds in your house like that's a that's uh an explicit use of privacy technology as blinds you don't want people looking in your windows and i saw somebody tweeting yesterday about um about uh envelopes like mail like when you when you mail something to another individual it's in an envelope that's sealed and meant expressly for that person these are privacy technologies that are surrounding us every day that people take for granted and don't even recognize as private privacy technology but However, when we get to the digital realm, there's this sort of assumption that, oh, no, like privacy doesn't matter here as much as it does when I'm sending somebody a letter. I don't want the mailman to open the letter and to read my mail.

Starting point is 00:50:38 There's actually a federal offense if you're caught stealing somebody's envelopes and opening their mail. and it's just hilarious that we've been conditioned in the digital age to not bring that same mindset to to what we're doing in the digital world yeah i think that's the the big part to highlight is it's more of a conditioning that we've like the early internet days were not like this but quickly it got taken over and the the realization that the data that's available in how people are using the internet is immensely valuable and so we got conditioned by all these these corporations that were building and abusing our data building companies around selling our data they got conditioned to think that there just wasn't a way to achieve privacy and that

Starting point is 00:51:27 this was just how the internet was like if you're if you're doing something online just assume it's not private and deal with it and if you want to do something private just don't do it online And that conditioning, I think, is the root of the problem, because the building blocks of the Internet, there's like cryptography and cypherpunks have been core to a lot of the technology that powers the Internet. And yet a lot of it's been abused and misused to make us feel like there is no privacy. But these days, that really is just a feeling. It's just not true in how we can use the Internet. And that's been one of the really exciting things I think over the past few years is the technology is actually good enough now that when people are able to break free of that conditioning, and they're able to understand, like, wait, signal just feels like iMessage. There's no difference here. And yet I am getting perfect message level privacy, and metadata privacy. And I'm not having to time ID to this in any way. It's not tied to a phone number in a way that's revealable to other people.

Starting point is 00:52:27 like that shift happens but once it happens people understand that i can actually just have privacy and not sacrifice too much for it so a lot of it is just like when people break out of that conditioning and that misunderstanding that everything i do online can't be private it starts to change the game a lot and we've seen a huge shift in that so it's been exciting over the past few years that the i feel like the freedom tech has gotten good enough now that as people are waking up there's actually good usable real tools that they can jump into and use today to gain privacy and it's not nearly as much of a nightmare from a user experience perspective or a pain perspective as it was 10 years ago eight years ago even five years ago

Starting point is 00:53:07 i feel like when i was first waking up to the need for privacy and falling down the rabbit hole really hard it was a lot more painful than it is today when i recommend what people can use it's just it's a night and day difference yeah like bringing it back to the envelope example it's like such a you literally just have a layer of like epoxy that you lick and you put down and the assurances of that privacy that privacy assurance is like literally like a layer of of the glue and yet people respect it and it's like how do we make that similar but i would argue more hardened and verifiable and robust assurance on the internet via cryptography like how do you make that like socially not acceptable but like socially like oh no like

Starting point is 00:53:57 this this is a foregone conclusion this should be the way we do things yeah i mean it's it really is happening but like you said like the really fascinating thing about it is like the idea is we can't have privacy on the internet the reality is we can have actually better privacy on the internet than we can a lot of times in meat space these days like the the cryptographic tools that we have are so much more sure and reliable and dependable than an envelope that you just like and stamp and send to your grandma like that thing theoretically provides privacy but it's also all being tracked and surveilled and read in between and we should assume that usps etc know what's being sent in every package whereas when i send you a message on radar both of us know cryptographically

Starting point is 00:54:44 in a provable way that no other person has read this in the middle and if they have we will both see that someone else has opened this somehow and we'll we'll understand that something is very broken here with a letter it's really easy and this has been happening for hundreds of years you can open it and then reseal it and send it on its way and you have no way to ensure that obviously there's some tricks you can do to try to try to make it clear that someone has tampered with a package sometimes we do that with like hardware wallets in the bitcoin space if tamper evident uh tape or packaging but for the most part you have no idea if someone has read the message in between whereas with cryptography we can actually have provable privacy between people

Starting point is 00:55:22 over the internet and really have like the best of both worlds yeah it's like this is the extent of of meat space like high-tech privacy preserving packaging it's like right here it's like the uh what are your thoughts on because uh let's bring up tucker carlson and signal in the whole like u.s government hacked my signal rush like and read my yeah read my messages with uh with the russian um delegates that i was talking to um and i think it's important to to to dispel the rumors around there because i think tucker's done a very poor job of um sort of besmirching signal when really at the end of the day it was likely something like pegasus or somebody got access to it before yeah i mean obviously there's been a lot of people other people who have talked

Starting point is 00:56:17 about that as well but the underlying fact is pwning your device is going to be drastically easier than pwning signal at this point and that's the thing i mean if you are a very high level journalist activist dissident you should assume that your device is compromised essentially that's the the sad state of things right now obviously apple has done a lot to try and prevent what damage that can do and like there's there's lockdown mode on ios which if you are someone like tucker carlson you then you better be using all of the most hardcore functionality available to you to protect your device because the thing that a lot of people forget is like whatever your whatever the state of the security on the device you're using that's the lowest default state of

Starting point is 00:57:01 security of whatever apps you're using on top of that and that's all i think a lot of that is forgotten even like in the bitcoin space when you're using like let's say you're using a fantastic wallet like sparrow on your desktop but you're using a windows desktop and you aren't careful about what you download and you're sharing the device with a few other people if sparrow and the password you use for that are good that's awesome but if the underlying os gets hacked you have serious problems at that point because they have they have access to all of the underlying infrastructure they can change things about what you see on screen it breaks everything else so i mean the the the assumption and everything that i have been able to find out about the tucker

Starting point is 00:57:42 carlson incident is it seems very likely that his device was pwned maybe not even pegasus or something that was a true zero day but most likely that pretty much just like with a lot of other privacy preserving tech the other thing that happens is people forget that anyone in a chat can leak what's in that chat like if you add someone who's not a trusted individual and they're in a group chat your privacy obviously doesn't protect you from them because they're the ones also receiving all of those messages in plain text anyone can screenshot messages and take them out even if there's protection in the app there are ways to do screenshots outside of that like that side of things i think is often forgotten that this is just one piece of a broader

Starting point is 00:58:21 like opsec operational security stack that you need and you need to be thinking about the device security as well um but yeah as far as we can tell like the signal protocol itself has remained fantastically secure despite being such a high profile tool that's being used by governments and journalists and dissidents at this point but it does still come down to how secure can you keep your device at the same time yeah how secure can you keep your your group chat that the department of war found that out the hard way a couple years ago by letting a yeah i forget the journalist they went into the group chat by accident i forget what it was yeah they added the wrong journalist they thought it was someone else they had like the same first name but yeah they added the wrong

Starting point is 00:59:02 journalist into the chat just let him sit there the whole time yeah you can't you can't fix can't Fixed stupid, unfortunately. That's always the lowest common denominator. What are your thoughts on the cozying up of the frontier model providers in the government? The cucking of Fable 5, the offering of a 5% stake in OpenAI from Sam Altman to the Trump administration. How are you viewing this trend that seems to be growing? And it seems like the AI models are becoming an issue of national security in the eyes of the federal government here. And I think it's incredibly worrying that this is the case.

Starting point is 00:59:50 I think the fear mongering around Fable 5 was, and just anthropics positioning and marketing tactics specifically are detrimental to human freedom. because AI is probably the strongest double-edged sword we've ever come into contact with as a technology, and it can go in two very different directions. Yeah, I mean, I think it's been the strongest reminder of why open-weight models not only matter, but will be essential. Because we're kind of getting into a lot of the similar stuff

Starting point is 01:00:26 where when encryption technology became possible, the U.S. absolutely flipped their lid about GPG being something that you could export to other countries and that other people would have the ability to to use encryption technology and what a nightmare that would be for them governments are always going to kind of like clutch at pearls and hold on to what they can to protect themselves and in this case like there is an understandable national security risk where the government has always been the worst ones at maintaining security when it comes to cyber security like they've never been very good at that. Systems are always out of date and stale. I've done work in cybersecurity

Starting point is 01:01:05 for governments. It's interesting when you see behind the veil about how out of date and how behind the times they are and how slow they are to move. And when you talk about these AI models, especially frontier models, not only from the like, we're normally thinking about the vibe coding perspective, but when you get into the cybersecurity world, the ability this gives to outside entities to either for good or for evil do penetration testing to find vulnerabilities to to build novel zero-day tools it is a whole it's a whole shift in the paradigm of cyber security from the ground up so i understand their their reticence but it's another reminder that if we're building closed model closed source models behind for-profit

Starting point is 01:01:53 companies we're going to be beholden to whatever jurisdiction they live in and we're going to be drastically restricted from how useful they can be and how much freedom they can actually provide but the the other really good thing is that the it's kind of similar to the streisand effect where like when they when they try to clamp down on something it only makes people want it even more and that's happening even with i think it's pushing the development of the open weight models further forward, because as they stall out Anthropic with Fable 5, or as they put in these artificial delays, or they try to stop them from using it, they can't do the same thing to the people building open weight models.

Starting point is 01:02:32 They don't have the same control over that. And so we're seeing things like JLM 5.2 that are catching up with what's possible. Maybe not, those aren't like Fable 5 level, but their Opus level, they're getting there to where they're able to provide the vast majority of what people need, and others are waking up to the idea that like hey we can't build these things in closed closed environments if we want to be able to distribute them freely they're kind of relearning the whole idea of open source software which is fascinating to me but we're kind of rehashing the same thing that we did 20 30 years ago with with open source uh microsoft versus linux and like there's so many stuff that's

Starting point is 01:03:12 so many things it's kind of a time is a flat circle but it's been interesting to see that become more more popular and more kind of invoke to talk about the stuff needing to be open source yeah i mean you have whether it's lip service or riding a trend i don't think it matters to your point about the streisand effect you have the all-in podcast guys talking about open weight models and the importance of them which is a good a good microphone to have at least incepting the idea of an open weight model in the minds of of their listeners specifically and i mean that that i mean getting back to like the convenience of signal and the convenience of these tools the ultimate goal should be

Starting point is 01:03:53 to get on a convenience parody with the with the sort of cucked walled garden sort of not private at all um technology that exists in the in the digital world today because most people outside of the bubbles that we live in and the Freedom Tech corners, our corners of X, the podcasts that we listen to. The vast majority of people probably don't understand how any of this works. Just going back to you just need convenience parity

Starting point is 01:04:25 with Freedom Tech. If I were to go to the beach later today and talk to people and if I mentioned the term open weight model, they'd be like, what the hell are you talking about like what is that yeah yeah people but it's just like just like no one knows what the triple ratchet protocol that signal uses is like i bet you've never thought deeply about the triple ratchet protocol and how important that is like no that the whole point is we abstract away what these things are and we put them in front of people

Starting point is 01:04:57 in a usable manner like you mentioned maple if you're if you're talking about ai when you're using maple you don't need to understand anything about tees or secure enclaves or attestation or like the whole point is a really good company or a really good team or a really good individual can build something that abstracts away the complexity but leverages technology for all the benefits you need under the hood and it's really going to be the same way with ai like we're so obsessed especially when we're we're in the space heavily right now like we know all the model names and the effort levels that you need to choose for each and like all these things this is not going to be the future it's just like when we're first we're kind of getting into

Starting point is 01:05:39 bitcoin like we know all these technical terms and all this jargon and slang but the vast majority of people using bitcoin they don't understand it they don't know what segwit is they don't really know what fee rates are they don't know what sats per vbite is like that stuff is just not common because we've been able to build tools that abstract away the vast majority of that and make it very simple for them to use. The same thing's going to happen with, with the AI side of things as well, where you won't understand that it's an open weight model. You'll just see, oh, I can use one that's really cheap, or I can use one that's really expensive, or I can use this one no matter where I am. But to use this one, I have to provide my ID

Starting point is 01:06:14 or something like that. Those are going to be the things that separate it out for people. And honestly, already, they're all kind of good enough to meet the needs of the average person. And we're only getting started in terms of open weight models specifically. So a lot of that will be abstracted away but yeah right now we're kind of kind of in the weeds of things that no one in the real world is going to understand what that is yeah i mean you mentioned stablecoin integration on the roadmap for for radar what what else in your mind do you think would be a good feature like how how far do you guys want to push it yeah i mean there's there's a long ways to to go now in terms of features obviously we wanted to start with just nailing payments having that down very

Starting point is 01:06:54 smooth very effortless so i think we did that i think the the two biggest things moving forward obviously there's a lot of other things on our roadmap two big things are handling payments in group chats so not even just like you can send to one other person in a group chat but things like splitting a bill but you you have a friend group that you meet for lunch every thursday like when you end you should be able to just say hey the bill was 83 72 and then each user gets a prompt just to pay their split of it. Things like that. Things like fundraising as well,

Starting point is 01:07:25 I think will be really helpful. Like the earthquakes in Venezuela. There's a lot of people who are using like a dozen different fundraising platforms. But all the conversations about that are all happening in another platform like Signal, like WhatsApp. Imagine being able to have a group

Starting point is 01:07:41 where you're posting all of the updates about what help you're providing to people in Venezuela. And you get to just put up a fundraiser that everyone sees on screen whenever they're in that chat they choose how much they want to donate to and again all of that is not going through a third party that's going directly peer-to-peer between the person who wants to support you and keep up to date with what's happening and your wallet immediately so those

Starting point is 01:08:03 are the i think two of the really big things are the the group messaging side there's a lot of a lot of value we can bring on again making it even more social to do payments um the stable coins one is is really interesting like it's been painful for me to start to understand how useful stable coins are for people like i i hate them like i hate everything that a stable coin stands for and that it reinforces the legacy fiat system they're usually censored and able to be shut down at a tap they're almost always easily surveilled like they're in every way they're the opposite of freedom money. And yet, when you actually talk to people who are on the ground in most of the countries who need freedom money, they're not using Bitcoin yet. And that is

Starting point is 01:08:52 unfortunate. I think a lot of what I'd like to change with radar is to start getting them to use Bitcoin. But there's a lot of the world where they just need the stability of stable coins. And we can now do that on Bitcoin at least. So the goal is that people will be able to choose if want to keep their balance in stable coins or in bitcoin it'll be easy at a tap um and then again because we're building both of these things on bitcoin rails you can swap between them in a split second very very seamlessly uh very low almost zero fees at the same time so it's one of those things like it's painful to enable it's just like a cake wallet like people like why do you have all of these evm chains and cake wallet it's not because we love all of the things that

Starting point is 01:09:32 happen on those chains but it's because like when i go to the oslo freedom forum or i chat with with anybody from the hrf like it or not most of these journalists and activists and dissidents and freedom fighters and uh opposition leaders they're not using bitcoin right now i want them to so i want to pair the stable coins they're already using with bitcoin in one really seamless experience but we need to support the stable coin side at first and then slowly push them more and more into the bitcoin side of things but another really cool thing one last thing i'll mention because of the way that it works within spark you if you keep your balance all in bitcoin but you want to send to somebody who wants stable coins you can do that and it gets converted on

Starting point is 01:10:14 the fly in a split second or if you keep your balance in stable coins but you are sending me bitcoin in radar it doesn't matter i don't need to care about the conversion i don't need to care about asking you for a specific thing we can do that automatically behind the scenes on the fly so that you can choose what you want and always receive the currency that you want always pay to currency that the other person wants uh in a way that doesn't rely on a trusted third party or a centralized exchange so that's another really cool side of the actual tech that's underlying this yeah stable channels have always been the holy grail of stablecoin like features and uh with a custodial trade-off that is much more freedom oriented

Starting point is 01:10:57 yeah they're one of those things that i think is They're very much like built by Bitcoiners thing where they're like a fascinating idea, but they're like so over engineered that I seriously doubt that there will ever be uptake because there's just always this disconnect between what do the real users want and what do us as Bitcoin ideologues want to build? and finding the middle ground there is is really hard because a lot of times we have to be willing to move past our ideology in our view of like what the best for that person is and build something that's closer to what they want now obviously i'm not saying that we we give up on self-custody because people just want simple user experiences like there are there are some hard lines that we draw but that we have to get closer to where they're at and like everyone's already using usdt usdc using them on evm chains that are very quick stable channels have a lot of other

Starting point is 01:11:56 downsides and usability issues amongst broader issues about how that will actually work on the lightning network they're really cool in theory but in practice like getting a user to actually adopt that when the user just wants stable balance they they don't really care if it's on that but if it feels just as good and it happens to be on bitcoin awesome if it feels totally different and painful to use it's just not something that's going to gain uptake but we'll definitely see it's the same with like um like rgb has been like a thing that's been talked about for what feels like a decade now long time long time and it's always like it's going to solve all these problems and they're going to do stable coins natively on there and taproot and

Starting point is 01:12:40 but it it's always kind of like trying to i think shoehorn bitcoin into something where you don't necessarily need bitcoin or trying to do things in a way that's just too hardcore that's not going to actually meet people where they're at but it's always a it's always a balancing act because you don't want to give up on all the fundamentals and all the things that really matter just just to meet people where they're at and just for mass adoption and yet you want to try and meet them as closely as you can to where they're at it's a it's a it's a hard line to walk no to that point to the credit of many of the builders in the industry and i feel like they've been dragged away from the the hardcore ideological um sort of tool perspective towards the the meat

Starting point is 01:13:21 in the middle by actors like light spark david marcus light spark and his team there um and others and i do think the last two years specifically um the sort of ability to look at the trade-off matrix and sort of draw the lines and begin to move toward the line where you're meeting people in the middle has been has been uh moving in a positive direction which is good i think it'll be good yeah yeah i think like spark is a really good example of that where at first glance you're like nah it's not not bitcoin or enough like i don't think this is the right solution when you actually dig into it you realize like it's just it's a very pragmatic set of trade-offs where it's not, I don't think it goes too far into the custodial or into the

Starting point is 01:14:09 trust models being too, too onerous. And yet it makes some design decisions that just make sense when you talk about how do we bring a reasonably trust minimized solution in a way that people can actually use. And that's been a, I think a huge wake up call to a lot of people and should be of there's room for doing things in the super hardcore way but there's also room for figuring out like where can we compromise for lack of a better word like i know compromise is a scary word for people but where can we compromise specific pieces of that without compromising the core of what bitcoin offers and spark is a really good example of that and i think light spark of like as much hate as they get they found good ways to build out things that people really

Starting point is 01:14:54 want on bitcoin rails now i think it it does stay up to us as the more hardcore bitcoiners perhaps to kind of keep them accountable and make sure that that they do keep building in ways that are empowering the individual and we don't lean too far towards custodial or too far towards just like layering on the legacy banking system on top of bitcoin but it is interesting to see that there's like there's there's got to be this balance between ideology but also pragmatism and figuring out what will actually work not just what is the most hardcore route we can take what will actually work and how far can we take that towards the bitcoin that we want to see yeah we're beginning to see the emergence of the semantics of unilateral exit wars

Starting point is 01:15:40 emerge whether it's via spark or the competing and competing or complementary depending how you at the mark protocols as well and i i feel like bitcoiners do themselves a disservice when they get into the semantic wars it's it's like in your mind what are the trade-offs there yeah yeah i mean it's always funny to me because like in all of these things there's always there is a clear point that should be made and i think the point that spark right now a wallet built on spark cannot do you know unilateral exit in a clean way even if you can do unilateral exit in spark via other tooling, that point is, is good. It should be raised. People need to understand that trade off. Um, the problem becomes where it's always, it's always people with financial incentives

Starting point is 01:16:29 who make these claims and they never quite make them 100% accurately. And so it gets into this thing where it just becomes a war of attrition, where everyone's trying to grind down the other side by sharing how bad their thing is instead of just focusing on building their own product. like it's something that like like i used to be very very active on x like very very active i'm not nearly as active anymore because i like i have something to build like i have i have only so much time and if i spend six hours a day yapping on twitter like i can't i can't actually build something productive i think a lot of times we get we get like dragged into this this loop of fighting each other and not having enough time left to actually build the tools that

Starting point is 01:17:12 we need like bit 110 the whole knots first core thing is another example of this where it's just like the amount of time that we've spent arguing about this over the last two years like i don't even want to think about the amount of time and messages that have been posted about this and that have changed literally nothing about the argument and i think it's very similar to this like arc versus spark thing where these should be yes competitors but in the sense of pushing each other to be better not in the sense of everyone's trying to drag others through the mud And I think it's kind of like, I think Spark have gone about this right way. It's like, they're not wading into it at all.

Starting point is 01:17:46 They're not getting into the debate with other people. They're just continuing to build. And I think that is the right approach. But again, that being said, like it's never black or white. We do need to be holding people accountable. And if, if some system is saying that they can do something and they can't actually do it, we do need to call that out. So like, it's, it's always a, a balancing act, but then like this unilateral exit thing,

Starting point is 01:18:09 like, technically, some of it is true, like you can't unilaterally exit in radar right now, we're using Spark. So if the Spark entity and all the Spark operators disappeared tomorrow, yes, your funds would be locked. Obviously, that's not okay. That's going to be fixed. It's already in progress right now by the Breeze folks to fix it. But if you wanted to unilaterally exit, you can use this separate tool, which you can just import your seed phrase into and exit. So there are ways to do it, but it's not as seamless as it should be. And obviously, that does need to be fixed yeah but to me it seems like it's pointing in the right direction again getting into the semantic shit throwing is not productive to your point to your point

Starting point is 01:18:50 that i think that's i don't wade into those arguments anymore bit 110 i spent two days at bitcoin plus plus i think last year two years ago maybe even at this point talking about the opera turn battles between like interviewing people on both sides and i think then i realized like doesn't seem like they're going to come together you're talking about conversation here and so there's like even though many people try to goad me into that conversation like it's not worth the effort like i'm never going to convince you you're never going to be like let's just see on the field i think more people need to see you on the field mentality just go build your thing into the to the sort of competition between spark and okay yes there is a degree of competition but

Starting point is 01:19:32 that they're all interoperable protocols via the lightning network like they're all going to find their spot and in the use case that that people are sort of attracted to and the trade-offs make sense for and i think there's a big tent where all these things can work together yeah yeah and they're all open protocols which again like we talked about with with open source one of the beautiful parts of this is they have to really aggressively compete for the user because the like even with arc specifically like anyone could spin up an another arcade anyone could spin up another bark if they wanted to anyone could spin up another spark uh entity as well so they they have to be really aggressive with how they compete and because the switching cost is essentially

Starting point is 01:20:13 nothing like if if i use a spark backed wallet right now and i decide oh i really want to use rk i just send the stats over lightning and i'm done i don't there's no there's no friction there's no new account there's nothing like that and that's one of the really beautiful things about these is there will be really fierce competition because they they have to compete for users in a way that there aren't wild gardens there's no ip laws protecting them it's all open protocols open source and open money and lightning making them interoperable really means that we don't need one to win they all work well together and that's another thing that's really awesome is like i don't i and users don't need to care like am i using a spark wallet is it an arc wallet

Starting point is 01:20:54 is it a full lightning wallet when they actually need to make a payment they just make a payment and it just works and then everything else gets settled under the hood and that's a huge benefit of these things as well as you just you pick the wallet that you want and you get a really good light user experience that's what's so exciting about spark and both arc implementations is we can actually do lightning in a way that's really user friendly now yeah and like who's to say like i'm i'm becoming more convinced that the whole form factor of how we interact with computers is changing. I don't think UIs, like we mentioned earlier,

Starting point is 01:21:28 you can be a projectionist now. If you want a UI, you can have one. But I think the her version of reality that Spike Jonze put out there over a decade ago or maybe two decades now at this point is coming true. I think rethinking how these things actually work or how people interact with them in the first place is something people need to put a lot of thought into.

Starting point is 01:21:52 like i can i can see like bitcoin payments being sent in a way where it's like hey um seth just bought me dinner can you send them 20 worth of sats and i just tell my agent it just does it and i have no idea what's happening in the background yeah it's gonna be an interesting one like the the other interesting thing with that too is like your agent could run a full lightning node and manage liquidity theoretically so like there's some ways where we could start to see a shift back towards the more complex technology under the hood and the more sovereign tech because you're not having to worry about the actual ui or ux yourself you're able to say like hey go ahead and create a wallet make sure you keep enough inbound liquidity for me to receive

Starting point is 01:22:41 100 bucks a month or 100 bucks a week or day whatever and it can figure out how to actually do that under the hood and you don't have to actually worry about that and me as a wallet dev i don't have to worry about that either so there's some ways too that that can like ai can be a great tool for self-sovereignty and that it can help you to do technical things you would never be able to do yourself so even if these these less trust minimized tools like spark and arc compared to something like running a full-fledged bitcoin and lightning node if those do go away or they become they start to censor people or whatever uh like the agentic future that i guess we're walking into now uh could enable you to do all

Starting point is 01:23:21 this stuff in a much simpler way even if you're not you don't have the technical know-how to do all the self-hosting stuff they can do it for you it's something that's actually really good at today yeah well that i want to be respectful of your time i know it's a friday in the summer um any final thoughts notes calls to action as it pertains to radar um this has been fascinating yeah i know you need to do a proper like three hour debrief on privacy tech at some point we really do we really do there's um there's always time for that i'm always down for the the long form stuff about privacy and get into what the what the freedom tech space is looking like today um when it comes to radar i mean the biggest things are like it's been exciting to

Starting point is 01:24:02 be able to combine the two most personal things that people do where the people you talk to and the people you pay just bring it into one place make it seamless make it a really good user experience do it in a way that's self-custodial that's privacy preserving uh on the messaging side specifically and that has just been an absolute blast if you want to give it a try go to radar.chat you can learn everything about it download it there if you want to migrate from signal do a backup first save that recovery key that it gives you and then you can just log into radar you'll import that backup it'll be super seamless at that point and view it as something that would replace your primary signal app if you're not a signal user already then now's the

Starting point is 01:24:40 time you'll you'll become a signal user when you become a radar user give it a try uh give us a shout out if we're in issues if you have feedback for us we're constantly iterating already pushed multiple updates this week so always leaning on customer feedback at the same time but yeah radar.chat follow us on social media at radar chat pretty much on every platform uh it's been been a ton of fun to build this vix idea from the ground up it's been fun to be able to to bring that into reality over the past six months or so and and build out something that i think It could be really, really powerful freedom tech moving forward. Go check it out, Freaks.

Starting point is 01:25:14 Seth, thank you so much. And Vic, you're not here, but thank you as well. And we'll do this again at some point. For sure. Thanks for having us, Marty. Peace and love, Freaks. 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.

Starting point is 01:25:32 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

TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #769: Freedom Money In Your Private Chat with Vik Sharɱa & Seth For Privacy

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