TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #104: Janine

Episode Date: October 1, 2019

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Janine, privacy researcher and co-host of Block Digest, to discuss: - Janine's path to Bitcoin - Common privacy blunders - Avoiding big tech - Coinbase's checkered history - CoinJoins - Block Digest - Traveling without Google Maps - Much more Follow Janine on Twitter: https://twitter.com/J9Roem Check out Block Digest: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb53lXz2IzEFT5JNHSbdvPg Shoutout to this week's sponsor, Cash App. Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Casa. Use promo code “TFTC” to get up to $250 off your Casa membership … or hit their team up [e-mail] for a free demo, or to put them to the test with your hardest OpSec questions! Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdbWsnfA08KhSUO4amVLaQ?view_as=subscriber Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here to introduce this week's episode of tales from the crypt we sat down with janine from the block digest podcast she's uh an incredible privacy researcher and advocate for bitcoin and privacy in general uh if you guys haven't checked out block digest go check out that podcast they do an incredible job of diving into everything that's going on in bitcoin and they have a keen focus on privacy and opsec this week's episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by the cash app you freaks already know all about them if you're in the u.s or anywhere in the world where cash app is available you listen to this podcast and if you have not downloaded it yet what the hell are you waiting for you got to do it use the code

stacking sats after you download it that's s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s you're going to get five dollars and five dollars is going to go to alzacross charity very near and dear to our heart and then on top of that you're gonna be able to take that five dollars and stack stats with it you can buy bitcoin sell bitcoin receive bitcoin send bitcoin from the app on top of that they have their boost program uh you get a specialized debit card it's accepted anywhere visa is you put your signature on it and then they have a boost that you can enable and once you enable them you go shop at these merchant partners you save some money actually this week i noticed they opened up a $1 off MTA boosts for us New Yorkers.

That was pretty cool to see. So take your Subway fare from $2.75 to $1.75 using the MTA boost if you're in New York City. Again, use the code STACKINGSATS to get $5. Send $5 to Al's. Go to your local app store. Download it today. This episode is also brought to you by CASA. Freaks, how confident are you in your key security?

Our friends at Casa have drummed up one of the smartest and most secure ways to hodl your Bitcoin. No KYC, no altcoins, no percentage fees on your Bitcoin. No one's standing between you and your keys. They've got an incredible team there, including Jameson Lopp. Jeremy Welch is the founder. And if you guys use the promo code TFTC, you're going to get up to $250 off your Casa membership. Or you can also hit their team up directly. membership at team.casa again if you want to email them directly that's membership at team.casa

they'll give you a free demo and you can even put them to the test uh with your hardest op set questions um so they have multiple packages all memberships come with a full set of hardware wallets for your multi-sig plus the the casa node which uh you can plug and play and then they've also got faraday cage bags excuse me and other early access stuff that they're going to give you uh with this package deal so for serious hodlers diamond and platinum memberships net you 24 7 vip service dedicated a dedicated client advisor and custom onboarding an opsec plan and today actually today they just announced a team key sharing so if you're running a business and you have a team and you want to make it so you need a certain amount of people to sign off on moving

bitcoin uh this is now available via casa's product suite um so again use the code tftc to get up to 250 dollars off um and then go to keys.casa to check out their website i hope you guys enjoy this episode with janine again she's incredibly uh smart and uh i don't want to say She's an incredible adversarial thinker. You're going to learn how to use maps outside of Google Maps and how to basically survive in the digital age without interacting with any of these big tech companies. I hope you guys enjoyed.

I know I certainly did. Okay. from the crypt what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here sitting next to matt odell and we're looking at a computer screen as we have one of the very few remote guests that we have uh on tales from the crypt i'd like to introduce you freaks to privacy researcher co-host of the blocked digest podcast and overall interesting bitcoiner janine janine welcome to the podcast hello guten tag guten tag how's uh how's traveling siberia treating you right now uh well the zoom part of siberia is uh you know not my

favorite place but uh i i definitely enjoy going on other people's podcasts i've only done it this is my second time now so i'm okay with it yeah this is why we brought you on to to help uh to help point out where where we're going wrong in our privacy journey particularly in bitcoin but zoom as we all know they had that terrible uh they were rooted basically and able to spy on everybody it's apparently been patched but that is the software that we're using to record this episode right now thank you for uh for uh infecting your computer with the software to join this podcast sorry i had to subject you to it yeah luckily i can nuke my browser after this um yeah so before we get into like the nitty-gritty of like block digest and what you guys are doing

there is uh the way we usually start out this podcast to get to know you a little bit more is like how did you become a privacy researcher number one and then what about bitcoin piqued your interest in particular um so i i mean i wasn't a privacy researcher initially um i actually did work primarily as a transcriptionist and a researcher in general like whatever i was basically told to research up until 2015 and then i decided i mean i've wanted to become a journalist for a while but i kind of oscillated between that and becoming a park ranger which is a whole nother story um but i've never so far worked for any media organization because the uh let's say the style and the editorial policies of most traditional news media uh don't

really fit with what I do. So then I started researching Bitcoin in late 2014. I'd actually first heard about it through the Cypherpunks book that was published in 2012. But I didn't really have a strong interest in money at the time. So I kind of glazed over it when I first read it. And then I read it again, I was like, that's more a lot more interesting. Because I've been interested in whistleblowing for a really long time and then i realized how important it is to have censorship resistant money um if you're doing journalism and especially if you're doing any kind of whistleblowing on a corporation or a state so what about uh what about these topics in particular like draws you to them the privacy and and helping whistleblowers and basically

uncovering uh state malpractice if you will incorporate um i actually i actually don't really know because to be honest i grew up in the middle of nowhere and i didn't actually have anyone around me who influenced me in that direction um i didn't grow up in a particularly computer science focused group of people I just I think it's kind of just a product really my interest is kind of a product of the time where I became attached to this field because when I was hearing about especially stuff with wikileaks and all of that I that was just something that I felt really passionate about and I felt like these were passionate people who were trying to right wrongs in the world and so it inspired me and then I wanted to kind of follow along in that

same field and hope that I could live up to it and maybe do better at some point in the future you know bitcoin seems like a very fitting topic for this interest is since you've sort of been exposed to bitcoin and been learning more about it and reporting more on it or doing more research into it is your worldview sort of changed at all um i think so because uh like i said i wasn't really i didn't really understand the importance of money or rather my only view of the importance of money was that you know people care too much about it we should get rid of it bankers are bad blah blah blah and i actually i was i was severely distrustful of banks even before i got involved in bitcoin because the first time that i opened

bank account when i was old enough i actually i i told the bank like i'm not giving you more than 200 because i don't trust you to hold my money i was like my money is right here i don't know why i need to give it to you and my suspicion was proven completely right because i i don't remember exactly when but i used it i used a debit card the new debit card either the day of or a couple days later after i just got it and it didn't work and i was like what the hell so i go back to the bank and they're like oh it's okay it's just because it's a new card you know that happens sometimes it's like but that that how do you stop it from being a new card if you can't use it so yeah that just kind of cemented my view where i just i didn't trust banks because i mean i think

a lot of us um i mean i remember times where you know they're just especially with all the financial crises uh there was just times where you know there wasn't i distinctly remember a time when there just wasn't food like there wasn't money to buy food and so we had to basically do with what was ever you know left in the pantry and i hated the idea growing up that you know i would have to live my life subject to you know someone else basically taking my money away and so i think a lot of the early you know desire to go into something like bitcoin was there but i just i didn't realize it until a few years ago damn no an innate visceral distrust of banks it's something i get behind no i'm something uh similar feelings towards banks as well but it feels like

we're just forced to work within that system bitcoin presents this new opportunity to create a system parallel to this but is there anything uh in the way the bitcoin industry has sort of build itself up in the first decade that worries you that we're sort of replicating the the system we're trying to run away from or do you think bitcoin's assurances as a as a network are such that it is uh somewhat impossible to replicate that uh i mean i definitely think that in terms of onboarding people who don't understand the values of the system and they're just getting in because they think they can get rich off of it like in a way the easy user interfaces were kind of a curse because that meant a bunch of people could come into the system and sure the price

went up and that's great for you know everyone including the people who actually care about the values but um that that exposed a large portion of the economy to the types like bank-like institutions that i was trying to get away from uh which i mean we can talk about one of those going forward which is uh coinbase because that has a lot to do with the research that i've done regarding privacy and bitcoin so yeah let's jump into it what uh what are your thoughts on coinbase are they a good custodian uh would you recommend using them and if somebody uh if somebody has had to use coinbase in the past and they need to uh uh rid themselves of the of the stink that comes with the UTXOs from Coinbase?

How would they go about that? So, I mean, I know a lot of people who have, I mean, I don't know a lot of people anymore who still use Coinbase. I know a few, but I know a lot of people who at one point or another have used Coinbase. I have personally never used Coinbase. I've actually never used any exchange

like KYC exchange. All of the exchanges I've done have been person to person or over some decentralized exchange or something like that and um so yeah the idea the idea of using coinbase is kind of like it's against everything that i stand for um i mean a reason in particular if you saw with the whole delete coinbase uh campaign that happened earlier this year was that um a few people including me were raising awareness about the fact that in February, Coinbase had acquired a blockchain surveillance company called Neutrino, which, by the way, the reason I say blockchain surveillance and not

blockchain analytics has to do with, like, I feel like there's an important difference between surveillance and analytics, even though in a lot of ways they're similar. And I think it has to do with intent, consent, and transparency, which is what those were the three things that I pointed it out when i did a presentation about this recently and um so as far as what was public neutrino was staffed entirely by former upper management and engineers from a company called hacking team which was an italian offensive hacking firm that had taken advantage of various lax human rights and privacy laws in various uh countries especially authoritarian countries The United States, Europe, like a lot of countries, and they basically spied on and compromised a whole bunch of people, including journalists and activists who are often the primary targets of, you know, such activity, including citizen journalists in Morocco, one of which I actually spoke to during this campaign,

and also a human rights advocate in the United Arab Emirates who is actually still serving a 10-year prison sentence as a result of being targeted with their software. And so they weren't directly involved in Neutrino, but the kill team that brutally murdered Jamal Khashoggi last year was actually led by a man who was trained by a hacking team several years prior, probably because they wanted to use their strategies, if not their tools, to surveil him up until his death. And this was actually, Hacking Team wasn't mentioned

specifically, but this man was confirmed in a UN investigation, and there's public records through leaked emails that he was involved with Hacking Team. So yeah, that's basically a whole bunch of things that like red flags um that i i find that unacceptable and i could never use a business like that personally or get involved with a business like that who has those kinds of connections um i actually talked more about this in an episode of bottom shelf bitcoin i think it was episode 43 so if you want to hear more about that um that's there they tried to brush it off too and say that they it was like a uh negligence in their due diligence process or something like that yeah they did which well initially they said no we

were aware of it like their initial response a few days after everything blew up was that they were aware of it um but they made a decision you know based on the calculation that they needed to they needed to have some kind of blockchain analytics company and they were dealing with regulations it was all this pr stuff to like not talk about the legitimate concerns that people had. And then later on, uh, Brian Armstrong in a personal statement claimed that this was a gap in their due diligence, which makes no sense because I mean, one, if, if, if they didn't know that these guys came from hacking team, they are full of shit because you can literally Google or not google but duck duck go any of their names and they will come up as being from hacking teams so

like you you didn't even do the due diligence of you know an internet search that's pretty bad whatever your process is but um and then if they did know that just means that they made some kind of calculation that you know the values of user privacy or even just you know not hiring people who have i don't know gotten journalists and human rights advocates uh imprisoned for you know potentially several years um we're cut up in the pieces like something i yeah i mean that's just something i wouldn't want to be involved with and it's also i mean it's a public image issue because obviously like people like me found out about it and we made a stink about it and uh i don't feel bad about it whatsoever yeah i mean if i recall correctly they even had the nerve to say it was

like a pro privacy move they were like oh we don't want to outsource our chain analytics yeah yeah which it's like come on guys that's it's like if if if you know they're going to outsource your data basically that's what's going to happen if you know i don't see any reason why you would trust these people and actually i mean i guess they moved into a london office that's owned by coinbase i don't know if that still ended up holding because they brian armstrong then claimed that he would transition the hacking team people out of the company who knows whether that actually happened or not uh because they don't actually believe in transparency we never got a follow-up on that right they never said anything yeah so they could have just created

a shell company and they could be working for that company something like that delete coinbase Yeah, I mean, that's, that's like, it's funny, because they're not, they're not the only group of people from Hacking Team to do that. The CEO, I don't remember the name of the company, I think it was like, Gray something, but he moved into, I can't, well, I can't remember the details, but I remember the CEO did something similar where he, he was acquired with Hacking Team or Hacking Team staff or resources or whatever were acquired by a different company that basically does the same stuff. So they're all kind of just trying to snake their way out of their own public relations crisis, because, you know, all of the information that came about, or came out about them years ago, basically destroyed their business. And they've been, you know, trying to, you know, slowly move away from that. But I think, you know, these people haven't shown any remorse. And if someone doesn't show remorse, I believe that they should still feel the consequences if, you know, it's not imposed on them. yeah i didn't want this to turn into a coinbase bashing podcast but it seems like it's going to do that like not only did they not have any remorse but one they don't have any remorse too like i don't even think brian armstrong particularly gets what bitcoin is for he like openly admitted that he's trying to create the best payments network in the world which is not really what bitcoin is trying to do and then three like there's so many fuck-ups that one of

these stalwart companies of the industry quote-unquote stalwart companies of the industry can have over its existence before people have to walk away with their dollars. So they had the ninja launch of Bcash. It took them a year and a half to get access to Ethereum Classic, to Ethereum holders. And it's just, I think,

the late Coinbase movement was the last straw on the camel's back of terrible decisions throughout Coinbase's career. Yeah, and I mean, to kind of transition kind of statement is, the one thing I can say is that even if I wanted to use Coinbase, I actually can't right now because Coinbase only, and this is the problem with a lot of KYC exchanges, is that because they only accept certain kinds of identification, that means that you can actually be a you know quote documented person and still not be able to use them because for example i only have a passport as an id and coinbase doesn't accept passports as a form of identification so i literally can't use coinbase unless i were to go out and get some kind of state driver's license for a state that i don't even live in

or something like that like that like that's insane to me that's actually harder to open a coinbase account than to get a bank account so the whole their whole marketing thing about you know we're trying to create an open financial system it's like you've already failed because you're harder to open than a bank account uh now it is uh it is funny they are but they are for for some reason they are still the go-to exchange for for new entrants which like i was at a conference a couple weeks ago and some dude walked up to me with the coinbase app open on his phone he's like which bitcoin do i buy and i was like delete coinbase and download download the cash app yeah the the real question is if you had like which coin would you actually be able to use

effectively in the economy if you had it but of course that's a more complicated question that they can't answer so yeah that's the that's the drawback of having good user interfaces for services that don't actually reflect the values of that we want to see in the system yeah so i guess this is a good segue and so i have a ton of questions on my mind right now i think where we could start because you were talking about surveillance versus analytics so like surveillance like a chain analysis uh i think i'm comfortable saying you would argue is surveillance but something like uh lorenz oxt.me is probably more analytics coin metrics probably more analytics with the stuff open yeah um like how do you what are you looking for in a quote-unquote

analytics service that's doing it ethically quote-unquote and um how do we uh how do we get delete coinbase like um social movements going when we do find the provider is uh maybe acting unethically and then from a buying bitcoin perspective you said that uh that you've never bought on a kyc exchange i think it's fascinating but if we're being honest most people do buy via kyc and in your opinion if they are forced to buy via kyc exchange which should they use if any um and how can we make it easier to uh get bitcoin without kyc exchanges i know that was a loaded question loaded question i'm sorry about that yeah it's okay so to clarify um and this was if anyone wants to see more about this i did

a talk um called bitcoin privacy on and off chain at the blockchain training conference in denver and i have slides available for everything um on my website but the point that i made during that presentation about analysis versus surveillance is that um i have these three differences, which are intent, consent, and transparency. And I say that a very simple definition of blockchain analysis is that it's the process of inspecting, identifying, clustering, modeling, and visually representing data on the blockchain. So if you're doing any kind of analysis, you're doing one or more of those things. And so for us to call what are considered blockchain analysis companies, I mean, there's a wide variety of them, and they do different

things and they have different intents. And so that's why I have intent as being one of the key differences, because with blockchain surveillance, which I separate, is that there's this intent to perform the analysis for the purpose of de-anonymization for either intelligence or law enforcement purposes, or maybe, you know, I mean, debatable whether you could classify, you know dirty tactics to you know one up your competitors if that's surveillance or analysis but basically there's i i draw the line definitely at law enforcement where there's some kind of intelligence or law enforcement purpose um and of course because this data is you know it's on the blockchain the blockchain is available to anyone who's part of the network or even not if it's an

old copy um there's no warrant required obviously so you're parsing this data that you know you're not having to go out and get consent from the user who made the transaction or anything, which I don't know if you necessarily should, but the point is that, you know, it's surveillance, it's warrantless surveillance, whether that's justified or not. And also it involves aggregating personally identifying information that was also often not provided either with consent or with informed consent. And the difference is that most users don't know the consequences of providing this personally identifying information to these various third parties so they can't make a good decision about whether that risk is worth it when they're buying you know shitcoin 420 that is

supposed to go to the moon and also a lot of the time blockchain surveillance software is not transparent the results are not transparent anywhere they're not published and the code itself is often not publicly available except in rare circumstances where they may offer demo software but that's the key difference like things like oxt that is all you know all open source code it's available to anyone and it comes with the explicit purpose of helping everyone you know be more aware of the privacy consequences of how they're transact how they're transacting yeah we're lucky to have actors like laurent in this space and you know and what you guys are doing a block digest um to help highlight this stuff you're saying um are do you think we

are kind of blame that it's even possible in the first place is it possible in oh is bitcoin to blame for it being possible to do analysis yeah like is should we like i hate chain analysis companies as much as the next person but isn't the solution that it shouldn't be possible for them to do it in the first place um i mean that's that's kind of the i think the question is more could we have done any better with the tools that were available to us at the time and even if we could have done better would those consequences have been worth it for example there's you know Obviously, there's so-called privacy-focused blockchains like Zcash and Monero. Zcash, debatable because it's basically Bitcoin with a small number of their user base using shielded transactions, which, you know, that's debatable about whether that even has a sufficient anonymity set to do anything.

Monero, I mean, that's, from my perspective, that's really the only one that can really call itself a privacy coin. But obviously that choice to hide everything, to shield everything, that still comes with consequences in terms of decentralization and things like that. So there's always going to be consequences, but whether Bitcoin can make the right series of upgrades that still keeps that balance. But, I mean, I definitely think we should get more privacy improvements in Bitcoin. I just don't know what the right balance is in terms of still keeping the system decentralized and open. Do you think if we get something like Schnorr enabled and we're able to do P2EP transactions more easily or just coin joins more easily, that'll be a sufficient amount or definitely a step towards the ideal, correct? Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely, because especially one of the things I mentioned is, because I don't know if you guys know this, but Chainalysis, it's kind of weird to say their name because you want to say Chainanalysis, but Chainalysis actually holds webinars regularly. lead and it's kind of funny because um no para who's the or well he was the lead developer i

think he he since stepped down as cto and now he has a research role but um at the time lead developer of wasabi uh which does coin joins he actually makes a point of attending those webinars and reporting back on block digest about what they said and so it's basically and and sometimes they talk about like wasabi and coin joins and what can they do about it or are they effective um so it's quite funny because he's he's learning about his quote enemy um in their own territory and they're obviously not learning very much about him in that way because um i mean you know whatever no para does doesn't have any effect on whether coin joins work um but one of the things that they said that I remember is someone asked them during the Q&A, can you track Bitcoin going into

and out of Coinjoins? And the researcher from Chain Analysis said that they could track Bitcoin generally going into Coinjoins, but not going out. So already with Coinjoins, we have a pretty, like not perfect, but a rather effective tool for really screwing up their, you know, ability to perform analysis in any effective way. So it's going to just get even worse. I mean, it's always an arms race, but I predict that it's going to get worse on their end in terms of what they're able to actually understand about what's going on on the blockchain. If these updates come out as predicted and they all work and there's no issues and they enable more updates that improve privacy so at the moment i'm pretty optimistic about what we're able to do whether people will

adopt those updates is obviously that's that's a whole other question you know what section of the economy will actually be capable of um you know knowing how to use these tools and whether they'll even be usable enough for most people to take advantage of them yeah i guess that's the like that's so that's my biggest worry for bitcoin is just apathy at the end of the day so you're again going back to the kyc exchange versus getting it uh getting bitcoin on a p2p market do you think it's more of a ux hurdle or an education hurdle so obviously it's easy to go the cash app and just buy bitcoin there obviously you got a kyc bisque or hodl hodl it's another story it's a little bit more uh involved yeah meeting people and people meeting people in

person um wiring strangers money and stuff like that do you think it's a ux problem or do we just educate people and why they should want to acquire bitcoin in that fashion um i definitely think it's more heavy on the education because you can make a really nice user interface but if users don't understand why they need to use a particular tool they're just going to still keep using the easy route and even if it's super easy to implement you know one of these privacy features they still may not use it because they don't understand what advantage it gives them or you know why not using it as a problem so i think it's it's also like it's very heavily on the need that we need to communicate the value of why this is necessary even if it's

not personally necessary for any one individual like they don't live in a country where they feel like you know their their money is going to be taken from them or they're going to be you know surveilled and imprisoned as a result of whatever they're doing they should still use those features because the more people that are using them the greater the benefit there is to everyone especially the people who actually need them yeah um it's uh that's one thing we try to do here i mean full disclosure we're sponsored by kyc exchange uh and kyc loan provider here but and it's one and that's somebody who's trying to educate people about bitcoin it's it is a weird because obviously as humans they usually go the easier route and it is hard um to to help people

develop new practices and new tendencies um so that like as as somebody who's attempting to educate like it's it's uh always something i'm i'm interested to hear other people's perspectives on because do you think there is a right way though to buy kyc and then uh cover your tracks and do you think that is a good maybe a good course of direction to get into bitcoin is maybe you buy on a kyx exchange you learn more about bitcoin you come to understand the value prop of actually holding your keys and then move it off um do you see that being a flow into self-sovereignty or do you think that's a bad course to take uh well i mean in terms of self-sovereignty i mean as long as you reach that point i guess you've succeeded um in terms

of privacy it's a bit more difficult because it you know sometimes there's circumstances where once you've made that disclosure once you've made that leak um i mean you're essentially leaking sensitive information to someone and then you know crossing your fingers to make sure that they don't do the same um in a way that you don't know or expect um yeah that some of those mistakes can't be recovered from and obviously like you know certain people they have the money and the resources that they can fix that problem in various ways by you know changing their identity moving to some other place uh you know they can do various things to make up for that but the average person can't um so it all depends on whether you think that risk i mean like some of

these services you know they'll go down and everyone will forget about them and maybe there will never be any problem because they don't even back up any of the data for that service and so it just kind of disappears somewhere into uh into a landfill like bitcoin keys often do um but in other cases that can stick around for years and if the service becomes really popular and really big they'll just keep it and you know they're the privacy policies that no one reads say that they can keep it um and so you know you never you never know where your data is going to flow once you've let it out um so it just depends on the risk that you're willing to take but um yeah yeah i mean i think one of the main issues with uh bitcoin privacy is that the blockchain is forever

and a lot of our errors are going to be forever so not only is it important to advocate good practices you know being privacy conscious like here at tftc we've been pushing coin joins very strong because we need more liquidity and we need more people to realize why it's important but all they have to do is make one mistake and it just all gets you know for the most part gets exposed and they might not even realize

there's so much nuance there that it's going to take a lot of education yes I guess that's a good segue into what are the most common mistakes you think people make like outside of the blockchain actually like whether it be searching block

explorers or sending addresses via email that that bitcoiners commonly make that they could they could easily avoid yeah so i would um i mean we can go into like off blockchain mistakes and then maybe some opsec things which are kind of related but um they're not they're not always common mistakes but the number one thing that i think people do on chain that damages their privacy which satoshi warned about in the privacy section of the bitcoin white paper is that they reuse addresses and that just makes it really easy to cluster coins together um so that's like an on-chain mistake and then um using kyc services another thing um i and i do like there's there maybe a few years like that's

why you know i'm not surprised that a bunch of people that i know have used coinbase at one point or another because you know several years ago it was like mount gox coinbase and not very much else and that was the only option but these days like in the past year or two there are so many options available like not all equally usable or available to everyone but there are a number of options and i think it's entirely possible to do what i did and not use uh custodial kyc services um and i I actually have a term called KYC Lite, which is that there's some services which ask for your name or phone number or something like that, but they're all easily spoofable pieces of data. So you can, you know, you can fake the data and put whatever you want in there and they don't really care because they don't verify it. So that's another thing.

It's like just try to find as many services as possible in each area, like merchant services, exchanges, things like that. Just like I think most of it is just people aren't aware of what's out there. And so that's why I included a lot of examples in my presentation I did last month, because I think just some people aren't aware of what's out there. um another common thing that people uh do that damages their privacy is that they don't they think that as long as they do things right with in terms of bitcoin like the wallet that they choose to use um and things like that or how they transact that they think that that's kind of all they have to do but i think there's a number of like basic browser hygiene type things that people also need to do outside of what they do with Bitcoin that can still damage their privacy

in Bitcoin. For example, you may, you know, if even if you never use a KYC wallet or exchange, you can still end up, you know, loading up Google Chrome without a VPN or Tor and type in the name of a blockchain explorer. And then you enter one or several of your addresses into that explorer to check your balance, and you've basically now not only told that block explorer what your approximate location is based on, you know, your IP address, and also if they're using any kind of browser fingerprinting, which Coinbase does, a lot of services do, they know a lot of things about the kind of device you're using as well, and you've also now correlated all of those addresses to that IP address, and so they can reasonably assume that you could control all those

addresses and they belong to you so you could do everything right in terms of the wallet and the blockchain but then there's other behaviors that could compromise you outside of that um and i can go into like opsec things that are related to that that i think um can also be compromising yeah yeah let's jump into it um so one of the biggest things for me and this surprises many people but i don't use smartphones and i think people should avoid using smartphones as much as possible if they can uh just because i don't know if you've seen it but um edward snowden actually tweeted recently a whole thread about like all of the things you have to do to make your smartphone reasonably secure and private to use and even at the end of that he said like

you know even after all you've even after you've done all this you know it would you would just be better off not using a phone. So I think, you know, as much as you can, avoid using smartphones just because they're not good in terms of privacy. But if you have to, you should use them as little as possible. You should, you know, buy SIM cards with cash. Don't link the phone to accounts with your real name. Don't use biometric authentication at all. Use a, yeah, so I had to use a smartphone for a brief period of time for work, but what I did is I ended up weaning everyone that I was working with off of any applications that required a phone, and so then I eventually didn't have to use a phone. For example, chat apps like Signal and Telegram all require phone numbers, and

you've probably seen it, but there's a big problem with cryptocurrency people getting sim swapped and that's basically because telecom companies are absolutely shit at security um i mean they're shit at security but uh i think it was nick zabo who pointed out that you know we maybe we shouldn't necessarily blame them for that because they weren't designed for the purposes that they're being used for now but i don't know i don't really i'm not going to give them that much credit uh so yeah smartphones big vulnerability try not to use them um also i mean you've probably noticed but big one for me is try not to share pictures of yourself online if you can avoid it especially ones that reveal your location uh for many people in bitcoin it's kind of too late for

this part of the advice because uh all of you are probably going to need a face change surgery in a few years to fix this. Um, and I don't think, uh, uh, I think it's still possible that you can attend, like some people think that you, if you have this rule, you can't attend meetups and conferences, but you kind of, all you really need to do is develop an awareness of cameras in the area. And you also need to, um, you also need to start advocating for consensual photography policies in these spaces which shouldn't be that hard because i think there are i think there are a lot of people who are photo sensitive and they would not push back against that policy um especially you know the chaos communication congress which is like one of the most popular

hacker conferences they've had a no photo no video policy without asking first um for as long I can remember. And so it's not even a new thing. And I was actually able to be a speaker at the conference I went to in Denver without being photographed or video recorded, while also wearing a mask and a wig as a backup. So it's, I think, I think it's entirely doable that, you know, we just, when, you know, we're taking a selfie or a crowd shot, we just think, you know, maybe there's someone in the audience who doesn't want their face on the internet. And I think I've done a pretty good job so far because no one knows that i look like unless uh unless they've met me so um i do get recognized for my voice though that's a problem and apparently you can generate

reasonably accurate renderings of people's faces based on their voice so what i think i got i didn't know that you can really yeah it's it's pretty scary um i'm not looking forward to getting voice change surgery how's that even possible uh can they just like i do sonar to read the vibrations that would come off your voice or something what yeah i think it's something like because voices are they're relatively unique it's something about you know the i don't know i don't know exactly the the details of how they do it but i guess voices are somewhat unique enough and rather specific in terms of ethnicity and things like that or at least they give a lot of clues about that that they can paint a reasonable picture of what you look like um

i don't know how quite how accurate it is but um yeah that's that's a thing that apparently we have to worry about as well it's pretty crazy actually surprisingly probably surprisingly to a lot of you freaks out there the bitcoin community here in new york is actually pretty pretty good with that no picture policy like we just ran an event a cold card event last night here and matt matt here ran and uh no picture policy was uh it it blows my mind that's not more common in this space it's ridiculous we have to push for that more yeah and another big one is um i mean i'm i'm constantly surprised by how many bitcoiners will just i mean the lambos are one thing that's like that's like extreme example but i'm surprised by

the number of bitcoiners who are just walking freely around with all kinds of crypto memorabilia on them um especially ones that like have the bitcoin symbol or say bitcoin um because personally when i'm out in normie society i don't display bitcoin stuff because i mean one i don't want to be followed home by some creepy dude or gal who thinks that i'm crypto rich and thinks they can get money off me but i also don't want to be questioned at airports and i don't even really want to show up on city surveillance footage um as being someone who's interested in bitcoin and here's where i'm going all the time um so i just don't want to make it easy for people so when i'm going to conferences or meetups i either cover up uh whatever memorabilia i may have or i change at

the venue and i don't wear it anywhere else so that's a big thing for me as well that's one of the things we made sure of with with our own merch it doesn't say bitcoin anywhere uh it doesn't even say tftc anywhere yeah trying to keep it discreet no it is yeah is this a is this a uh depressing living we have to live in privacy are you optimistic about the future of privacy do you think we will build systems that are more inherently private and uh we'll we'll make a lot of this this easier uh will make keep will make privacy easier do you think this iteration of the internet uh where we have huge corporations as data silos will be something of the past at some point in the future um i definitely i definitely don't think that like in the next

few years we're going to be able to turn that wave around towards the complete opposite of what i want to see but uh i definitely plan to be at the front line of people who are resisting those type of changes like for example there's been a number of times where i am told that i'm required to give a phone number and i'm like but i don't have one and then they're like oh okay like they just deal with it and if if it ever comes up where i have to give that and there's no other option it's just like i'm not using your service so i'll i'm going to be trying as hard as i can to avoid things that i know are leading in that type of direction um and that's just not that's not only with bitcoin stuff it's like social media in general like i'm i'm probably

not even up to my own standard with that but i i try to as much as possible use services in a way that or at least if i'm compromising myself by using things like twitter um i try to do it with the purpose that i'm putting out uh research and information for how people can improve their privacy uh at least you know in terms of a balance that that's more of a benefit than whatever cost i'm suffering you know i really hope you do keep out keep on putting that content out on twitter is invaluable and the work that you guys do at block digest is as well but um is it is it a hard life to live uh trying to be as private as as you are um i mean it can be difficult sometimes but because i i hello janine i mean oh yeah i'm sorry can you hear me you still got me yeah i'm sorry

we broke up there yeah the question is like is is it a hard life to live trying to be this private uh do you find uh do you have to put in a lot more effort uh to to go about your daily your daily life um i i mean some of it is i wouldn't say so i mean there are some things that are definitely more difficult like uh i mean i for example don't use like google maps to navigate so when i'm traveling yeah i don't i don't use google like the the only time i've used google Maps is if I'm looking up the location of something and I just can't find it on any other mapping service, like especially the ones that I use that I feel better about using. So I don't use Google Maps to navigate. Obviously, I can't because I don't use a smartphone when I'm walking

around. So I can't use it for that. So I've just gotten in the habit of, you know, if I'm going to go to a place I I literally you know I take out a piece of paper and I make a map or I write down the directions and it doesn't actually take that long um and it's just something I've gotten used to and actually there's been a number of occasions where people using google maps around me they've gotten lost and they don't know where to go because the map is like updating and changing the route because you've now moved or it doesn't get your gps location and so they get lost and i'm like i have my paper we can go now um so i i've just gotten used to it by this point um because i've become accustomed to not using certain things that you know they may make

life easier in the moment but they come with a huge privacy cost that not everyone was aware of at the time um and may take a while for them to realize it so i wouldn't say it's particularly difficult it's actually relatively easy to live without a smartphone um and people are surprised by that because they think it's like something that's at the center of their life um but i found it relatively easy to do something like that in particular i can get down with it's also kind of fun yeah it's also kind of fun like when people don't know who i am or they don't like there's a lot of people they don't know what continent i'm on um most of the times i just find that fun because it's like i can it's like a game like you're trying to find me and i'm trying to you know

come up with things to you know confuse people i i can treat it like a game where in the world is janine where in the world is carmen san diego i can get down and bring it back cartography as uh as a thing yeah what is your favorite uh google maps alternate um so it's mainly open street maps because that's the one that's the most comprehensive um compared to google maps and it also has the functionality of like estimating how long it takes to go a certain distance and things like that it's not perfect but it's the closest one that i found that's open maps open street open street maps yes okay cool i'll have to check that out and it's it's a particularly cool project too because um they they have so much in terms of like

the development community going on in terms of actually building the maps and you can actually create local versions of open street maps too um on your device that you don't need to have internet or anything that's pretty sweet so just to bring the part of the map that you need for your day and go about it yep interesting yep um sweet so i guess we'll wrap up here let's talk about block digest a little bit it's uh we got you shinobi aka brian trolls crypto rick and no para how did you guys how did this motley crew get together how did block digest start and what is like your mission with the show because if you freaks out there have not listened uh to block digest yet uh you're missing out it's an incredible show on youtube that uh janine and in the cast i

just uh listed off host weekly correct once a week yeah um it's changed up a lot um over the because we've been doing it since uh august 2017 so we're now at we're past the two-year mark and when we initially started it we were actually doing it daily but the episodes were a lot shorter um and then we were switching to like I think it was three times a week two times a week once you know the schedules changed a lot just because um we're all doing a bunch of things and our schedules change during the year and um so we're not strict on any schedule right now but we're also branching out into different types of videos besides the main show um but for a little background on how it started uh basically i used to be at another youtube channel called world

crypto network but much to a much more limited extent um many years ago and basically my partner and i because he was also there we had some content quality and money disagreements with the other hosts and it became very clear that we weren't appreciated there so we left in august 2017 and basically there was a few people who they were also interested in doing uh they were interested in doing a show but fixing the things that we were concerned about and originally i wasn't actually supposed to be a co-host on block digest i was just a background person who was making the video descriptions and things like that you know technical support um but uh i decided that maybe I should practice public speaking. And so in September, the next month, I decided to

actually start speaking on the show. And going back to those episodes, I don't sound so great, but I definitely feel it's worth it in terms of building that skill, if it ever becomes of any real use to me. And I think it has. So I think we're now on season seven, and we have almost 200 episodes and we still have quite a small audience i think we only have like 2500 subscribers on the youtube channel um we also have i think we're using another well we're setting up an itunes as well um but we're averaging you know 500 viewers uh somewhere around there per episode but i feel like a lot of the right people and a lot of the people who share our values are watching even if it's not a great number so i care more about that um than getting tons of views yeah i

mean your audience is highly engaged and i mean i'm one of them i i love the show so uh definitely keep up the great work no i do as well and i think yeah it's some example like you guys when you went through the user activated soft fork that's actually one thing we tried to off the top of our head to go through that whole saga like the new york agreement and sort of the timeline of of how segway got adopted and how you use their accuracy the soft fork unfolded and we complete we had to like we couldn't even post it because like our dates were all off and you guys covering that was uh was an incredible it's incredible 45 minute video if you guys want to it might have been longer than that actually but that one was shinobi only no that was shinobi only yeah

yeah that was that was shy 256 yeah yeah yeah so yeah originally when we started we just had the normal block digest show and that the length of that has changed a lot uh but we also um for like the past almost two years or so we also have a special edition series which is where we interview people um and then shinobi and i have recorded a shorter more in development video series called zk snacks which actually uh nopara and his co-founders at uh that were developing wasabi uh took that name and used it for the company that was making wasabi so that was pretty cool and um shinobi recently also has his own series like you said shy um shy 256 and um i think it was last year or so before no para was really a regular co-host or around the time he

joined we also published a series called cypherpunks 101 privacy and bitcoin which is a series of interviews specifically um and that was made by deja jean and um that was interviewing people like adam gibson and chris belker uh julia fante fonti um and ethan heilman and people like that who are focusing on privacy upgrades to bitcoin yeah again if you freaks have not checked out block digest yet go do it um janine thank you for joining us um we're about an hour in here before we wrap it up i guess do you have any parting notes anything you want to hit on before we we wrap up here any any advice you want to give out or or topics that are on the top of your mind that you think we should oh let's talk about we did not even get to this the the lightning

network uh uh talk that you that you want to give in berlin um oh yeah so not yeah not completely solid yet but a proposal that i made to a conference uh for a talk was um because a lot of my research in journalism uh well that's the thing is i do more writing about how to improve journalism than i've probably written as a journalist uh and one of the models for journalism that i've been working on is called revision controlled journalism um which it'll take me a bit to explain but you can also find that on my website and also it's pinned on my twitter um But basically, I want to create more open source censorship resistant journalism. And when I say open source, I mean both in terms of the software that is used for journalistic activity.

I want it to be open source as much as possible. But I also want the sources that are used behind stories to be more easily verifiable and transparent in terms of how they're presented in stories. because i think that's really important um i mean it's important for code as well like you should be able to verify code for yourself so why shouldn't you be able to verify the facts uh behind what composes a journalistic story and it's kind of based on um julian assange's idea of scientific journalism which is that you should be able to test uh the assertions made in a piece uh like you should be able to test the assertions in a scientific study that you know publishes an experiment um so it's kind of based on that and um so the talk that i want to

give is how applications of blockchain tech to journalism that i've seen over the past several years have really failed or have significant problems with them that i don't feel good about. But I have a really good feeling about what Lightning can do in terms of, you know, making it possible to do much easier micropayments for a reader base, but also in terms of censorship resistance and privacy, in terms of funding sustainable journalism. Are you telling me that Steemit isn't the end-all be-all of journalism on the blockchain? jane uh yeah well it was quite funny because uh one of the projects that i'm planning to criticize is civil media which was a consensus spoke for a while i don't know if it still is

oops sorry that is a doorbell ringing one second it's all good um one of the yeah if you can edit that out i don't know but uh we like one of the projects i plan to okay one of the projects i plan to uh criticize is uh civil media which is uh it was or is a spoke of consensus um in the ethereum space and their idea for building censorship resistant journalism using a blockchain was basically to put like basically put everything on the ethereum blockchain like the text even the formatting of the article and like yeah you're gonna have a bloating problem and uh and uh so when i mentioned uh it wasn't someone at civil but it was one of their media partners i mentioned some of these concerns to her and her and i said you know you're basically

doing what steam it is doing um and she was like she said something like steam it no one knows what steam it is and it's like yeah do you know why because because because they tried basically what you're doing and it's not working out so yeah that's that's what i hope i can i mean if i if i don't end up doing it at the upcoming conference i plan to do it at some point because i think it's important to talk about and it's it it'll basically be what i'm currently working on yeah we can't have any more dan laramers or joe lubin's running around uh profiting from these terrible journalistic endeavors on the blockchain i mean i think with civil didn't they sell their pre-mined bags to like journalists i think they were paying their

journalists in in the civil yeah i'm pretty sure yeah it was it was yeah base i mean yeah they basically had i mean their their first like attempt to do a crowdfund failed not only because consensus um funnily enough had been the primary donor and i think controlled 90 percent or some absurd percentage of the tokens in the in the token sale um but then also there was a lot of disagreement uh between the civil people and various i i think they were also paying various partner organizations uh about what format they would be paid in and there was obviously a lot of them who said you know we need fiat um this token is not going to pay our bills like we need to eat and pay rent and uh so there was a you know some kind of disagreement about that but

i mean that to me that was completely predictable because an organization that didn't even take the time to consider the fundamental risks of the model they were building like very obvious risk to me as a person who's not actually that technical i'm not a developer um and i was able to see these red flags coming from a mile away um you know if an organization can't take the time to figure that out then it doesn't surprise me when they have those kinds of management issues yeah it's crazy what kind of ideas people tried to throw on the blockchain in 2016 through 18. Hopefully

we've learned these lessons, though. I like to think people are learning their lessons. And that's something we try to do at TFTC, is try to build a small prototype for microtransactions, because that's something I actually wrote about last week and am pretty passionate about as well, is

if I can easily just pay a lightning invoice to read the content behind a paywall, I think that is a no-brainer. would make a lot of sense yeah i think there there actually is one that has existed for about a year and i can't remember the name of it right now but there's someone did build they built a lightning um application y'all's right yeah y'all's yes y'all's that's what it is y'all's dot i think it was y'all's dot org or something a great a great troll the greatest troll company

name of all time trolling yours by ryan x charles yeah x bitcoin yeah and i think yeah yeah i i mean i think that's that's i don't think it's been adopted too much but i think that was a good like test run of you know it it clearly works it's just a matter of you know you have to get enough people to adopt lightning and you have to get enough people who are also willing to pay for journalism which is a bit of a problem um for various reasons um but yeah so a combination I basically want to build or get someone to help me build a combination of Yalls and Libra Patron, which is the Bitcoin alternative to Patreon, that I think is an application actually directly within the BTC Pay server suite, as far as I know. Correct. Yeah, it's pretty crazy what you can do with BTC Pay.

I don't think we're using the Libra function, but we do have, like, people can donate via BTC Pay directly on our website. Yeah. No, but it feels like it's almost there. I mean, on that note, I've been recently thinking that Lightning is the single biggest privacy improvement that we've seen recently.

I mean, besides SegWit enabling it in the first place. Would you agree with that? um i think in terms of the effect that it's had and the fact that it's actually gotten pretty good adoption so far um i would say it definitely is whether it i mean i definitely it's a massive improvement um but i think there's also a lot of privacy features and tools that exist that people they're either not aware of it or they don't know how to use it um like samurai wallet has a lot of features implemented that um you know they've been around for a while and they're pretty much the only wallet that has added it so whether whether lightning is the most effective tool out there i

mean it probably is i think it is but i also think there's a lot of existing tools that people could use to improve their privacy that they're just not aware of because the wallets aren't adding them Yeah, I mean, I think with the Samurai in particular, with the Dojo Noddle that's coming out, where people can just buy the device, link it with their phone, and then have all the tools just easily there at their fingertips, it might be that full stack that really helps push the needle. yeah and the so the the last thing i would add is uh because i mentioned btc pay server and i think it would be it would be really funny because um that project i believe was basically inspired by uh bit pay you know implementing some things that people were not happy about and then nicholas story a saying you know i'll make you obsolete and actually about a week ago i um when coinbase announced that they would be moving into the office coinbase i said no coindesk sorry coindesk

was moving into their parent company office uh digital currency group and so i tweeted at them you know i'll make you obsolete in terms of journalism so that's i've now said i've i've now i've now putting pressure on myself to uh actually carry that out i don't know if it'll happen within a year like i think it did with btc pay server but yeah it's a lot of pressure to put on yourself to follow up that nicholas dory tweet yeah it is um janine this has been a massive pleasure for me thank you so much for joining us um i think we learned a lot again again this is something as to uh as an i'll speak for myself as an individual who's not as privacy conscious as it probably should be uh these are very good conversations to have and i really

appreciate you sort of coming here and educating us about how how dumb we are on the internet yeah i really i really enjoyed this i should probably go on other podcasts more often you should you're very smart and you got a great point of view i'm happy that the freaks are going to hear it um on that note where can we find out more about you working the freaks go find you uh well i'm one of those people that um uses a variety of apps some of which are not usable by the average person uh but the i mean i have emails at uh protonmail2tonota those are my public emails i also obviously have twitter that's the main that's like my only really public facing profile outside of my website um so i would say non-sensitive stuff twitter

sensitive stuff email uh if you don't want to use one of the uh og encryption applications you can use the normie one like keybase don't take the stellar and uh that's basically it yeah well don't take the seller maybe donate it to the tour project and they'll auto dump it for you um yeah yeah i guess that was um that's what we told people i haven't done it yet i haven't touched my stellar on key base yet mad has been done i donated mine to tour and shinobi uh cut me deep on my twitter what'd he say yeah he called me out he called me out he's like subtweeted me and then i liked the tweet and then he called me out directed he was like i see you liking this Matt, I know what you did.

Yeah, that's Shinobi. We need to get Shinobi on here, too. I would love to talk to him. Oh, yeah, obviously, if you want to hear me. Yeah, obviously, also, if you want to hear me shit talk once a week, that's Block Digest. Yeah, we'll share all these links in the show notes. Janine, I hope you enjoy the rest of your Friday and the rest of your weekend. Thanks for joining us.

Good to be here. uh goodbye from siberia well good luck on your journeys through siberia peace and love freaks bye