TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #109: Justin Moon

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down to catch up with Justin Moon. They discuss: - Building Buidl Bootcamp - Mooniversity - BitBoy - Junction - Wallets - Redundancy - Much more Shoutout to this week's sponsors, 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/

Well hey there freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt, the immense pleasure of sitting down again with Justin Moon from the Mooniversity. He was in town and had a long layover, so I invited him over to my spot, we drank some whiskey, drank an incredible amount of whiskey, and caught up. Last time I talked to Justin, he was just starting Biddle Bootcamp, which has turned into mooniversity um since our last discussion a lot has happened in justin's life he's been building a lot of cool shit um a couple projects he's working on in particular junction the bit

boy in mooniversity in particular we we talked about uh a lot in this one um this is a great app it's always fun getting together with justin uh a truly kindred spirit in the bitcoin world i'm very uh i'm very happy that you freaks get to to listen in on this conversation we had because It was truly just two guys palling around, you know? That's what we're here to do. And if you're not palling around, you better be stacking sats, and you better be using the Cash App. This episode's brought to you by the Cash App.

If you're not using the Cash App, what the hell are you doing? You download the Cash App. You use the code STACKINGSATS. That's S-T-A-C-K-I-N-G-S-A-T-S. One word. You're going to get $5. $5 is going to go to Owls Lacrosse, a charity very near and dear to our hearts. And then you're going to get all the functionalities of the Cash App,

and the list just keeps getting longer what you can do with it so you already know you can stack stats you can buy bitcoin you can sell bitcoin you can send bitcoin from your app to a personal wallet from personal wallet to the app on top of the boost program where you get your debit card you go anywhere visa is accepted you put on your partner boost you go to where that merchant is say be whole foods you save your five percent of whole foods hey you need to go get a coffee you put on your coffee boost you go save a dollar there boost program is incredible they're always switching merchants in and out and then uh they started teasing it last week it looks like you're going to be able to buy stocks in the cash app soon partial stocks at that so they started rolling

it out to a few users it looks like towards the end of last week and so if you don't have the functionality yet i believe it will be there soon so use the code stacking sats go to your local app store and download the cash app today this episode is also brought to you by casa freaks how confident are you in your key security how protected are your keys from disasters physical tax and yourself uh you got to protect your keys from yourself you are your keys biggest enemies our friends at casa have drummed up one of the smartest and most secure ways to huddle your bitcoin there's no kyc no all coins no percentage fees on your bitcoin there's no one standing between you and your keys uh engage with casa and get the peace of mind for your stash with the

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so go to keys.casa check them out if you guys do get a casa membership make sure you use the code tftc you're going to get up to 250 off and i hope you guys enjoy this episode with justin again it's It's always fun getting together with Justin, sitting down. It was a long one, a long rip. We got pretty cosmic. So enjoy. Okay. What is up, freaks?

It's your boy Marty Bent here on a rainy, scary October Wednesday night with a good friend. Happy to have him back in the studio. uh just a moon welcome back good to be here it's good to have you back man i'm tempted to make that sound of yours but it feels like a violation i'll leave that to you you can do it i encourage people to try that that was good that was a good first attempt it you have to get higher up in the falsetto than a man is normally comfortable getting yeah you have to be uh well i would argue i would argue that the higher in the falsetto that you can get uh the manly you are right you can't be afraid of a musical talent exactly um what did you think of this critique

we were just watching here uh it was it was good i mean there are a lot of flaws that bitcoin has uh but there's and he hits a few of them yeah so let's describe what we're watching we're watching the real vision gold versus bitcoin week right now and we were talking about uh something that we will get into more heavily later in this conversation multi-sig setups um but uh justin was walking me through some multi-sig setups that he's been working with and it uh brought me back to this video which i watched earlier this morning on real vision gold and bitcoin the monetary systems navigational beacons and it was an interview with simon uh mikhailovich who is the founder of the bullion reserve and he's a huge gold proponent uh and uh not a not as big of a

as a fan of bitcoin and he had some good critiques but i think so this is the thing i often see with like uh i don't want to say good critics because i'm not sure if there is one but like at least the better critics uh like they'll say something true right so he says like what would people use as a money the thing that everybody knows about and is familiar with or something that very few people know about that is more complex and fewer people you know are familiar with it and it's like well clearly they'd use the thing everyone knows and then so he's like therefore gold is better than Bitcoin. And it's like true statement, non sequitur, right? It's like, well, maybe it's better now. I mean, it is better now if you need to settle like a huge transaction volume, like

it's probably easier to do it in gold, maybe, especially with certain counterparties, like a government or something. It's like they're going to be more comfortable working with gold, but that doesn't mean it's going to be true in the future. So like he's making a present argument about Bitcoin and trying to write it off for all future when the thing went from zero to 10,000 in one goddamn decade why doesn't anybody give bitcoin a chance why can't they just give bitcoin a chance i mean it's the blessing it's like there's there's a great quote by like paul graham where it's like uh what is it there's uh like the best startup ideas uh sound so crazy that the people who are most threatened by them don't realize it until it's too late right like

hotels thought airbnb was a joke until it was a juggernaut uh same thing with taxi cars cabs and uber uh with uh uh you know mainframes and uh microsoft this sort of thing it's like you have to be crazy enough to actually you have to be so crazy that you are actually able to get a leeway and bitcoin is exactly that like 10 years later people still think it's crazy and that's cover yeah no and it's um it's fun to be one of the crazy ones but you keep going down uh to keep checking off simon's um critiques another one was the uh again with multisig the the five dollar wrench attack like he he uh proclaimed that gold owners don't have to worry about physical harm because their goal he started with banks which is like a very true point it's like that's

one of the great things banks do is they don't city your money they custody your money they don't give money they don't you know they can sort of they can sort of be there and help out when someone's tortured at least that's all the how the movies all portray it right like the bank managers there's always these good guys right like the banking lobby is somewhere involved there in these critiques but like that's people's perception at least and it's like yeah it's probably true it's better to have that than to just have like a bunch of diamonds like trailing you as you walk down the streets in brooklyn right like that's i'd rather have the banks than the bank uh receipts than the diamonds but uh and he goes on to say well then gold is similar you can have it stored

away in another country he's like but bitcoin you have to memorize it in your head it's like wait no you don't you can this is one of the things is like they'll say intelligent things and then all of a sudden it's like this one thing that's like this is like 101 level understanding the whole point of bitcoin is that it's easier to physically transport it's like this the analogy satoshi gave is like imagine a uh precious metal a gray metal if i remember correctly yeah that uh is like gold in every way except for one thing you can send it over the internet like that is the differentiator in his mind uh and so to say it's easier to physically get gold into a foreign country than than it is bitcoin it's like what it's absurd on

its face yeah and well that's i want to give simon some leeway here i mean he's he's a gold bug gold it's his uh it's his wheelhouse and what he focuses on is probably not as educated about bitcoin multi-sig setups and the way in which you can set up your bitcoin security so that you are less susceptible to it see this is what i wonder when he says something like that that you cannot when he basically claims root claim gold is easier to physically transport than bitcoin like that was his claim right there is he uneducated does he not actually does he know does he believe that's false and lie or is he does he actually believe that because if he actually believes that he's incredibly ill-informed and that just speaks to again how crazy the bitcoin idea is and how this

crazy thing just sort of somehow shields it and allows the sort of the right people to understand it like in a series over decades and then this guy this brilliant guy i'm sure still is you know like kindergarten level i want to say kindergarten level if he doesn't know if he doesn't know that bitcoin is easier to transport physically than gold i think it's this is like the this is like top three thing like scarcity and that are the two big things yeah what's the quote um basically it'll be hard to convince a man of something that hurts his paycheck exactly yeah so so that's my point is like uh i mean if i were him uh Uh, if I were him, I would probably, I mean, I, it would be hard to see the value of Bitcoin

when you're, I mean, it's like us in a shit coin coming. It's like, we're not, if we're honest with ourselves, we're not the best person to judge that. We're highly biased, right? Are we? I mean, dude, they're all scans, bro. I, that's, I agree. So like, that's not a, that's not like, you know, in some crazy world where there is an

invention that beats bitcoin i don't think it's gonna happen but like in that crazy world like we would be pretty blind because we're like heavily biased in one way and i think similarly he's probably the same way the gold it's like hey man it's worked for millennia it's gonna keep working like it's a val it's a it's a sensible point it is and actually so i can say this now because by the time this is recorded and posted the episode will have aired but that's what safe and i talked about on the real vision episode and safe even acknowledge that too he's like hey the the biggest competitor to bitcoin right now is a successful gold standard it's got the lindy it's got the history um if the gold standard or if the uh the gold standard doesn't get its

shit together the people who run under a gold standard get their shit together so if people were able to get their shit together and create a viable gold standard in today's day and age safe can see that yeah that hey that may kill bitcoin in the long run but um i'm not putting safe words in safe's mouth this is what i believe i don't think that's going to happen yeah that's why we bitcoin yeah uh which is it's uh it is interesting when you like as a bitcoiner hearing somebody who wrote the bitcoin standard be like yeah bitcoin can be beaten by the gold standard The funny thing is, on a personal level, these gold people are the most similar to us of anyone in the world. They're basically us, but a generation older and a generation grayer.

You know, like, kind of the same demographics, kind of the same walks of life. Why can't we be friends? Exactly. It's like, we should really be looking to them for, like, you know, life support. It's like, what's the next 20 years of my life going to look like? I'm actually hopeful that this is starting to happen. And I, at least me personally, I can speak for myself again. I have been like a Peter Schiff, gold bug hater.

But then it's like, hey, you guys are actually fighting for sound money, hard money, too. And I think that's admirable. And I do think over time we'll be able to convince you because I do believe that you're the only ones that care. They're the only ones that care of anybody. And so it's like every time Ron Paul ends up going out on some Litecoin event or something, it's like, hey, man, he doesn't get this part of it. this is a little detail he gets so much of the rest of it though well then uh shout out to people like warren davidson exactly man that guy fucking legend that guy ripped it just putting it all out yeah talking about bitcoin guns everything man yeah uh to hear the candor of um of a politician

like that in the first like 10 minutes all of a sudden he's like they're like you know how'd you get into digital cash he's like well you know back in the day i was a big fan of digit cash and i'm like what what elected official uh digicash and he and he keeps going it's like he's talking about this destroyers when the destroyers come uh he's like pierre sort of ironically asked him like well what round would be money in a world where like you know we use barter what what what ammo round with gun round and he took that like and he ran with it like for like two minutes actually seriously addressing that conversation like if you're talking about the four four two and there's a nine and it's like the one will pierce the man the other one will obliterate the man is that

fifth column huh would you consider him fifth column i don't know what fifth column fifth column is uh actors within the government or a corporate setting uh not acting against oh yeah well i mean he's acting for us like yeah acting for us and against the the will he doesn't own bitcoin he doesn't own bitcoin he clearly would if he weren't elected so it is like you know it It seems like the guy's sort of taken a personal – I mean, he's taken a sacrifice probably because he's been interested in it for years. And he's, you know, trying to go and improve the regulatory environment for us. That's, I mean, yeah, a little bit. Huge shout-out.

Huge shout-out to Warren. Exactly. But I don't know much about politics, so this is the extent of it. If it comes unnoted, I can converse on it. But basically, I hear Tulsi's around or something. I don't know all the names I know. I haven't watched any of the Dem debates or any of the debates. Yeah, I was just thinking like last year, so we did the first podcast a year ago.

That's exactly what I was just going to say. What the hell's your year been? So Justin and I were talking about it before we hit record. It was probably almost exactly a year since we last talked. Like you were, before, while we were talking, you were on your way to a Lightning Network conference here in New York, and now you're on your way to a Lightning conference in Europe. Yeah. So it's prescient that you're here now.

Yeah, it's sort of interesting. I was thinking back to what was Lightning like back then, and kind of what's it like now. And yeah, a lot's changed. Not even Lightning in particular, dude. What the hell's been going on with BiddleBooCamp? You've been building dope hardware. You're working on this junction thing. What has your life been like last year?

Yeah, we'll go into that. I want to learn about Justin Moon, not about the Lightning Network, not about Bitcoin. How the hell have you been, bro? Man, it's just tales. I'm going to give you some tales. All right. So yeah, a year ago, I decided to... So I was trying to figure out where my role would be in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Because it's like there wasn't... So I have sort of like a missionary zeal about how I do things. It's like I want to I want to when I hear about something that's like really important like this I just have to participate. I can't just like buy coins and sit on the sideline so yeah, I was trying to figure out what what would be interesting and I was just learning the technical details of Bitcoin and find it kind of difficult like I'd just be oftentimes like reading code and Guessing what it did. It's like I took Jimmy Song's course and it was great and that's about all there was And so yeah, I started this class called Biddle Bootcamp at the time

I did not realize Biddle was an Ethereum thing and after about three months months i really regretted the name choice but it's like too late now uh no you co-opted so i there's a good co-op co-opt a little bit but that name sucks man uh i it's got to be it's got to be hard for seo purposes yeah so uh yeah it's like and no one can pronounce it there's justin from bugle boot camp unnoted one time they were like booed yeah they were talking with stefan lavera who took my class and uh they called it shit or shit camp like oh man i was i was stefan lavera's first advertiser i think i was the first person ever contributed to pierre richard's open source project they call it shit or shit camp we uh i need a new name man we uh we read

a bit of boot camp ad on tales from the crypts as well i did let's do a free ad now um where can we find you what can we do so so this is the thing is like uh so i started with this bit of boot camp right and uh what's surprising is that a lot of the people who signed up weren't programmers i was expecting programmers teach them about bitcoin it's more like bitcoiners who want to learn about programming so i just sort of like lowered the expectations in the material material somewhat and so basically in the in the summer i ended up making like a learn to code class uh where it's like zero to basically zero to being able to communicate with your full node using python in the command line uh which i think any bitcoiner should learn so this is mooniversity

i like that name a lot better mooniversity.io a lot better that's gonna be a uh a titan someday uh but yeah so mooniversity.io if you want to learn to code like that's what i created it's pretty cool like when i so i've been building a project recently and i use this editor called visual studio uh code an editor is like microsoft word if you ever write prose an editor does that for code and you're not doing sublime dude no i mean i usually use vim but like when you're doing website stuff it's hard to use them so uh so uh so the the thing is is that when you're learning to code one of the hardest things is setting up this environment setting up your text editor setting up your terminal it's uh for the layman it's called the ide correct yeah the id integrated

developer environment. Yeah, you're really flexing here, Marty. You've been on Code Academy or something? Really impressed with yourself. I may have used to work for a software. So, yeah. So, the hard thing is you have to get all this shit set up, and it makes it not fun. So, what I did is I basically create an environment that I use, this Visual Studio Code, really popular in a Linux environment, and this environment is running a full node, and it's all in the browser. It's like one click button. You get this, like, real programmer's environment in your browser, and by the end of it so we do a couple things it's like we implement the bitcoin monetary policy in python so when you're learning a for loop like how to do a statement repeated times the repetition we're

doing this problem is like well we're going to divide the issuance rate until it hits one satoshi when it drops below satoshi it's like well that's uh the end of the uh the policy and so it's like the question is how many happenings are there and like we write a little computer program that can answer this it's kind of cool and this is a good tangent fact we could go on right now there will actually never be 21 million bitcoin a little short of that right a little and and the the the program will actually produce this like we keep a tally of how much so it's like it's a really cool like this is like the second program you ever write and it like uh one thing you notice is like god damn the bitcoin monetary policy is front loaded you know it's like we can print out what

it is like today and it's like oh what is it 80 percent or 85 i saw a tweet uh earlier tonight the 18 million the 18 millionth bitcoin will be mined i believe within the next month yeah so that's two so we only have three million to go after that so yeah uh you are six sevenths of the way there yeah it's crazy uh so that's that's it's it's a cool thing to like actually have that experience writing code one of your first times and so some of the other things we do is we like pull data off coin market cap and try to say like what was the most volatile day in Bitcoin's history. And we write a little program

that can parse a CSV. Now, that's valuable. Like, being able to parse these spreadsheets and shit from Python. That's really... So it's like a real-world skill that is useful.

And then we learn how to, like, communicate with your full node, how to, like, create a transaction, how to sign a transaction, how to broadcast a transaction. I'm sure using Python to scrape that data

is a lot better than MATLAB. I think so, yeah. Python's just great. One of the things that's so nice about it is it's like the lingua... It's like the lingua franca of programmers that like javascript here's a good tangent too so this is something i'm curious of

and i actually have to talk about on rabbit hole recap tomorrow so i really want to get your opinion on electrum just announced that they're gonna release a lightning implementation written in python and i wrote a ben about it like hey this is pretty cool python as you're describing seems to be pretty popular powerful programming language that people are using right now so i wrote like hey this maybe this will be a boon to uh people developing on top of lightning network and had a couple people come back at me and say python may not be a good implementation language for lightning in particular why would yeah maybe not it's a little slow uh so like you know some of these things have they have to single out state i haven't like gotten i don't understand

the lightning protocol very well compared to the i understand the bitcoin protocol pretty well so i'm not the best to ask this but like for these types of languages you want something that's a little faster, and Python's a little slower. So that's generally, like, maybe you couldn't manage as many channels in Electrum as you could in your C Lightning or something. There's something about being able to compile before you go live or something.

Yeah, so that's another thing. It's sort of easier to write multi-platform code in something like C Lightning to get it to run on Raspberry Pi. That's my struggle right now, writing this multisig you I've been working on, is, like, I got it working on Windows, and then I got it working on Linux, and Windows broke. so you know like fuck me she's like you fix one side of the the brick wall and this has happened

a few times now it's like i add more features and i get one of them work and then the other one breaks and so multi-platform code is hard because you have to be able to target all these different platforms and make them all work at once so it's like something lnd does really well because uh golang is pretty good at that and i think it's a little harder with python uh in some cases uh yeah it's a little harder to create like a binary that can just run anywhere uh usually A lot of the stuff you install with Python, you actually have to have Python installed on your system, and maybe some smaller systems that we'd want to run Bitcoin nodes on won't have it.

Well, this would be Electrum. So this would be a desktop machine. So I don't know. I think it's fine. I think it's nice that they... It's good to have more diversity. Another exciting one is Rust Lightning. On Mapcrawler's GitHub, if you're curious, there's a really cool thing where it's a little

prototype of a Lightning node written in Rust, and it's like 1,000 lines of code or something. It's very short, and it uses Rust Lightning for everything behind the scenes, so you can really like look through what a lightning node actually does like what are the messages it gets you know what how can it respond to these things it's really cool so I think there's yeah there's a lot of diversity coming there and you see a big difference between like Bitcoin and lightning you know like it's nice to have like one of the things I did recently is I made a sea lightning plug-in for opening channels from hardware wallets that's a feature I'd

like to have in my Junction app here we're going to talk about one of the annoying things about lightning is you have to fund your node and then you have to fund your channels right and so it's like this extra step that sucks so it'd be better I'm not gonna lie somebody's been using lightning for almost a year now it's still confusing as fuck to me

yeah it's like what am I doing it's the mental model's hard and so it would be better if you could just say like your wallet is like here's your you know warm wallet maybe your cold storage wallet's three or five your warm wallet's just one of those hardware wallets your cold card or something

and, you know, it's like, hey, you want to open a channel? Just plug in your warm wallet, open a channel, and, you know, it'll go directly into the channel. You never have to fund your node. Like, the node stops having to fund channels. That job is taken over by someone who's better at it, a hardware wallet, because this problem is about signing a transaction.

You want signatures to happen in the most secure environment you can get, and that's the whole point of these hardware wallets is they're tiny, little, secure computing environments that do one thing, well, two or three, like it displays information, sometimes it generates information like a new private key, but most of all, it does a math manipulation

on a private key to create a signature. And you just don't want anything else interfering with that, and you want like a one-way communication channel that can only send these, you know, a transaction and assign transaction back. And that's really hard in the context of like a modern operating system

where there's a hundred, you know, there's like 10 million lines of code and a hundred programs running and different users and passwords and all kinds of hardware that could have been manipulated along the supply chain from China to here. So that's the point of a hardware wallet

is to simplify everything. And so you outsource this funding of channels to the thing that's good at it, the hardware wallet. So this is exciting. L&D can't do this. C-Lightning can. So this is the point I was bringing up is you can start to see Bitcoin and Lightning diverge

in terms of how it works. It's like, well, one, multiple implementations thrive, and it's good. C-Lightning can meet my desire to do this, and LND can do other stuff, and that's perfectly fine. You think it's good in the long run, though? I think so. I mean, it's good that, so I'm not an expert on this, but C-Lightning tries to be very modular. Maybe LND goes for more features, and they become more monolithic in search of more features. I think that's roughly true.

I'm not an expert. So but but this is cool because for some use cases one of them will serve you better Like you don't want the same implementation five times. That's worthless. You want five different implementations. So like a Python one You know may be marked easier easier for people to integrate with because they can read the code and understand it better That was my assumption. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I agree It's like I'm excited as a Python programmer someone who doesn't really like reading see I can read go but it's like it's Because LND is such a big project, it's hard to really grok it all. Why was, I don't know, you've made it clear that you're more focused on Bitcoin at the protocol level than Lightning.

But do you know why Nicholas Doria was mad at LND? Yeah, so the big problem was that Lightning has a database of all the channels. And in general, when you upgrade your software, you'll have a database and you have to migrate that database. basically update the structure of this data update the structure of this data uh for how the database should look at you know the newest version and so lnd made the decision to only support these migrations between major versions between like version 6 version 7 version 8 and not between version 6 and version 8 and uh that's just really hard because if somebody doesn't use their node for a while you're not thinking of the man in the coma exactly exactly which is i mean

uh yeah it's it's it's uh so they reverted it yeah they reverted it and uh yeah because version uh 0.8 but this is this is sort of one of these holy wars i've seen a few times where uh roast beef and nicholas will go at each other a little bit because like roast beef loves go the go language and and nicholas loves c sharp i don't know much about either one but they like really go at it sometimes it's sort of it's sort of uh funny at times that is again as an outside You have these religious wars amongst programmers. This is one of the worst parts of being a programmer. Amongst languages, right?

No, and that's something as... I will concede that I do probably know more about coding languages and the structure of code and how it all works together. Yeah, you were talking about MATLAB, and you were talking... But it still fascinates me, like the holy wars over these languages

and how entrenched people get in their language and what they can do with it and how other people critique it. They get very defensive. yeah it's weird like nerd sniping it's like how you how you get status in the nerd community uh sometimes it's like you you know this is the way it works uh is there like a tower of babble going on with programming languages right now will there ever be consolidation on one would would you ever want that is that ever advantageous kind of so like you have like for

example mobile apps have been interesting so you started with like two legacy languages ios has this Objective-C, Java, or Android has Java. There's, like, these two 10-, 20-year-old languages. And so they run these for a while, and, like, it got to be really pain in the ass to use these two very different languages, and they were both old, not great in some ways. And so, like, there came this thing React Native,

which is, like, a way to use web development techniques to make mobile apps. And so, like, I built a really early React Native app, and it was pretty cool, because I could just use the skills I already had to make mobile apps. But then the thing was is that each of these platforms went and developed their own native language like swift and kotlin these are the next generation

ones and so now the move so like for example airbnb went and made this react native app right tower of babel is gone or whatever or like you know it's it's uh you can we all have a language to speak now and then they end up migrating back because they were the you know by having to sort of like make compromises between the two different approaches their behaviors they couldn't accomplish and so now they've migrated back to like the new native language swift and kotlin it's kind kind of interesting you see this like is this different than react.js react.js is the web version react native is the thing that can run on like a and what was the big competitor was it react and node view that's what it was yeah angular angular angular that's what it was

if you want to learn about all this stuff come take mooniversity uh you know like as i was sort of saying earlier before we got sidetracked like it's a so i i like put you in an environment we're back to learning python to be able to communicate with your node yeah like fucking learn to talk to your node man like if you're listening to this podcast and you have never talked to your node like can you really call yourself a bitcoiner really i i will admit the last time i talked to my node was the um it was a few months ago uh with the uh just out of curiosity i checked my bug logs to find that miner who tried to add more he added his fees to the block reward and he and he got axed for it my node rejected it nice

yeah felt good it felt good to confirm that in the command line so exactly exactly yeah so these are skills that are useful and they they're they're sort of like uh yeah i think this is a smart thing to do if you're in like i created this class because i saw all these people who wanted to learn get deeper but they struggled to get from zero to like one uh they just struggled to get a foothold so i created this class to like help people get a foothold and i've had like maybe five percent of the people actually go on and take my little boot camp class so that's been pretty cool uh but yeah it's like i think that if you want to understand bitcoin a little better and you want to be able to use it more securely uh like it's really hard to have a really solid

sense of security in bitcoin without without learning a little bit about software exactly fundamentally what you're dealing with that's exactly i'm happy you said that because that's like take a step back from bitcoin like understanding the stack like how it all interacts with each other like even how html and css interact with each other all html is just like the hypertext and the css is the makeup on top of it and then how that interacts with the mongo db database on the back end if you're doing like a e-commerce site or something like that where does the data come from exactly what what what's it calling to what's what does the browser do yes and uh once you and and i'm again i'm somebody who can't when you learn this you start

uninstalling chrome extensions before you learn about it so this is like there is a benefit here you'll be like before you even start uninstalling chrome extensions you get because for a lot of people the internet is magic yeah it's just magic it just works but it actually does have a structure and a hierarchy and an infrastructure to it this is and once you understand that it helps you get a better holistic picture of what's going on in the world in general let alone bitcoin yeah so as a web developer i was working like web developer mobile stuff uh just like a product engineer startups uh i learned how like the internet i learned how the web works i never learned how the internet works like how is the data actually transmitted and so like learning about bitcoin you

actually have to learn that because bitcoin is a protocol right on top of the raw internet tcp it's a gossip protocol yeah exactly and so you you learn how to send and receive these messages and how to compose them how to interpret them uh and you can sort of get like this is one of the things this is like the second part of my bit of boot camp class you get like close to the point of being able to do like initial block download or being able to write an spv or a full node You'll never get the true exact behavior of a Bitcoin node, but you can write a very naive, silly one. And at that point, you really understand what it's doing

and when you need to run a full node and when you don't need to run a full node. Because there are times you don't need it. If you just have a five-year, like John Doe, for example, he didn't need a full node those five years because he wasn't spending. He wasn't receiving. He was just sitting on it.

We're talking about a former guest who had a forced huddle. He was in jail. He was holding it. And he had it on Tails, right? I think he had it on Tails on a USB. And they're like, sorry, we couldn't crack the USB. Here it is. And it's like, oh, thanks.

That's one of the interesting things about the dark web people because I've never really interacted with them. And it's like every once in a while you'll come across this when you're trying to learn how to use Tor or something. You'll come across one of these sites that was written for these people. And it's like, wow, those are really best practices on security. It's like some of the best material on how to improve your OPSEC was written by these people for these people. uh and they really like left some night like it's not it's no accident that that guy had good opsec because that's what that community actually became good at it well today's lesson uh the drug dealers are much better than the pedophiles exactly um or you freaks don't know all right

you do know by now like there was a huge bust of uh i mean that's a big fud today in bitcoin did you see that i didn't you didn't see i was trying to release the fucking windows thing man you didn't see this no okay so today that's why i was like oh give me you justin's looking me over you're going into pedophiles right now like it's topical believe me um so he's up on the programming languages he's up on the news this man really gets it but so the fun uncle had his eggs this morning the fud line uncle marty ate his proteins ate my scrammies ready to go he didn't cook them either yeah raw yolk but um the flood line of today is a uh a pedophile dark market was brought down and you were just talking about how uh the silk road drug dealers like had their opsec down

down pat um these idiot pedophiles and these people should burn in hell they should be burned at the stake they should die they were sending transactions right from exchange accounts to the website from which they were acquiring this terrible material and it's just like and it's one of the it actually brought it highlighted bitcoin's lack of privacy which is pretty crazy yeah uh fuck those people yeah i mean it's and this is one of the tough things about uncensorable money right like like when we started the podcast like with this critic i forget his name but uh simon uh mikhailovich simon simon mikhailovich it's like a lot of these guys will have good arguments and because it's like there are problems with bitcoin like yeah i mean it'll

it'll get easier to like these these child porn people probably it'll help them it'll help arms dealers or you know like in like sketchy people it'll help a lot of sketchy people and that's i mean that's one of the things we got to be upfront about and it's like yeah there are some costs here like it's not all roses those people can also drink water they can exactly breathe there exactly yeah it's hard it's hard to it's hard to give them it's hard to remove freedoms from them without removing those freedoms from themselves at the end of the day it's like either both sides get a freedom or nobody gets it it's hard over time it's hard to it's hard to like enforce those boundaries well it seems the go-to idiom here is don't throw the baby out with the

bath water and but it seems like people are more willing in today's day and age to throw the baby out with the bath well that's one of the tough things it's like i think so often like law enforcement has trouble proving like a really nasty allegation uh and so like al capone for example right like they could never pin al capone for killing people they got it for tax fraud so exactly so it's like you end up get you end up nailing people for these financial crimes and that's sort of how this like financial surveillance state sort of started it's like you get these like reco acts and you get all these these different things uh you know you start shutting down or restricting american access to like swiss bank accounts and all these things uh and you start

to criminalize uh like financial acts that went along with crime but the crime itself was never punished because they couldn't actually pin it on them so that's like that's where it gets really tough it's like you don't want bitcoin to be illegal because some bad people use it you want to do the bad things they did to be illegal and like bitcoin is unaffected well this is why i like to fall back on the the beauty on argument of bitcoin is it is just code at the end of the day like beauty on doesn't like the fact that we imbue the fact that we imbue the property of money on bitcoin or the property of uh free speech this is this is scary though it is free speech at the end but no again like bitcoin as a protocol like when you get down to it you know more better

than i it has no idea what we're doing again it's just a gossip messaging protocol i don't think free speech is the place we want to like put our defense though because it's like that's getting eroded pretty quickly like lebron james is on on tv like shitting on free speech these days we should fucking put our stake down put our flag down and be like yes this is free speech like i do think we need to stand up for speech free speech i agree with that i'm just saying i'm i'm just saying that it's like that's being eroded pretty quickly i think well somebody's gonna stand up and yeah fucking fight for it right i don't know i don't really have an opinion on whether code is speech it's like in a sense it is uh like obviously printing out code is speech

like what the whatever zimmerman or his name was with the pgp stuff like printing it out i'm putting on it like not trying to be a dickhead here but does it matter what you or i think hasn't already been deemed by the supreme court as speech i think the printing out of code was deemed as speech like this distribution of code but i don't know if it was the execution of code like there's a little bit of a difference there like you know like if you press a button that runs a computer program that nukes a city or something it's like was that act speech i don't know i mean there's obviously like physical things that happen yeah but where's the crime there is when the nukes created is it when it's when it's it's a good point this is an argument i think

other people are better at than me it's like i just i just punt it's like man i these like moral questions are just like i don't know so what do you focus on what broad strokes do you like to focus on you like building shit obviously yeah i like uh what do you focus on and like what dictates your decision making so like within i mean uh i'll start within bitcoin and maybe say more generally um so like in bitcoin i get excited about the things that i think are really important like i have i don't i i have to i have to really be convinced that something's important to even show up uh otherwise i just won't uh so in within bitcoin it's like i i thought that teaching was important because I struggled myself to learn how it worked and I could

see that like, you know, there's like 30 core contributors, right, like, ooh, it would be better if there were more of those, like, and, you know, there weren't very many good wallets. There were only a couple hardware wallets. Like, okay, more developers would be good, so I'm going to go work on that. And then after like nine months of that, I started to think, like, so this is the next thing I did after the Mooniversity is I did this thing called HODL boot camp. part of the inspiration for that is like uh my own struggle is like using using wallets right like

so i the first time i ever used a trezor uh when i had to upgrade the firmware i uh when you got to hit the button down at the same time well so no uh so it's like i i was like okay i got to check the seed right and this is i've been teaching people about bitcoin for six months like i should know a lot about this so i i uh i tried to go verify the seed because i wrote the seed down and i tried to verify it on a separate computer so i had like an offline machine where i loaded the seed in and tried to check that the addresses were the same and they weren't i was like what the fuck so when i set this up i just assume when i set this up i wrote down the wrong thing or something i couldn't figure it out and then uh and uh and i ended up having to sweep the wallet

i should have like reached out to some friends but i swept the wallet to somewhere new i was probably embarrassed that like this happens i don't want to tell anybody uh so i swept the funds a different wallet and and like it worked it was fine but he's like holy fuck i almost like lost the first big chunk of bitcoin i had uh because i didn't understand how the wallets worked while i'm teaching a class about bitcoin like this is this is wrong it turned out the problem was is when i checked the wallets i checked them in electrum and electrum by default has a different seed format and so i imported my bit 30 my bit 39 c or bit 44 they're bit 39 539 yeah uh election as elect as as as electrum seeds and so it got the wrong stuff and so like

it's like damn we need to teach if this could happen to me like this we need to like teach people how to like i have a very similar story and one i'm actually probably more ashamed of than you are because it wasn't my money like yeah why was that bar stool and people were like hey i want like i'm in like the few people who looked at me were like hey i'm in bitcoin for the long around like i don't know i don't have a hardware wallet yet like where should i like keep it i was like electrum was my go-to yeah and i had a one case in particular where somebody put some bitcoin in an election wallet and in the middle when election was getting ddos like that couldn't access no you didn't get fish you just couldn't access his bitcoin oh yeah you couldn't send it

off the election wallet and i'd explain like uh they have a different uh they have a different seed phrase like structure and it doesn't work like you think you can get uh recover your seed on your trezor but you're not because they do yeah just trying to explain the nuances of electrum versus the other wallets i was like ah fuck like uh maybe i'll think three times before giving yeah yeah so that's what so i was like okay i have a new idea for class hollow boot camp we'll basically teach people to set up wallets and to recover them and do this on testnet so practice right so and that's also nice for like legally like i'm not like helping them on mainnet so i could get sued or something i was just like all play it's all fake money just practice and

then you can do with these skills what you will uh and it was really cool like people loved it like 350 people signed up uh and i got like half the way through and i was trying to teach them how to do like multi-signal electron and it was like fuck this is complicated and it sucks and like oh here you forgot to pip install like a python package and like oh here you accidentally set it as single sig and not multi-sig and you know this and that and it's like oh by the way you set it up and now all those addresses went to chain analysis and so now run your electrum server and it's like it's like uh there's all this stuff going on and i i got to the point where i was like man it maybe it would just be better to spend some time trying to make another way for people to do

multi-sig because like uh i want to i want to redo my own cold storage right uh because now what i was doing it to begin with is i should probably like if it 10xs or something i'm not going to be very comfortable so it's like i want to redo my own cold storage and i've like struggled with electrum there's not really a good like i want to i want to do multi-sig uh mostly because it's like multi-sig uh the big way to think about it is there's like like you can't be taken out by a single thing if you like in theory if you do it right no single thing will just take you out just lose all your coins you'd have to fuck up twice there's no silver bullet yeah yeah well no this is kind of the opposite idea like there's no there's no silver bullet means like there's no

one thing that will do to fix all your problems but on the opposite side it's like with multi-sig you get this idea so there's no there's no one bullet that can kill you but you can you can take one hit if you have a two of three if you have a three or five you can take two hits you get shot twice and survive uh you can lose two of those keys and so that's really appealing not just from like the chances that you actually keep your own money but just the ability to sleep at night you know like sort of uh having to fend for yourself like the individual sovereignty that you get with bitcoin is like uh uh it's like a right but more responsibility it's like it's a weight you carry it's a big weight you carry and so like multisig helps to make that lighter because you're like

hey man i can drop some of this and be okay it's like a pulley system it's a pulley system yeah it's like leverage so that's that's why i want to do multi-sig and uh like i gave a talk at bitblock boomers conference about it like the big thing you want is like you just want the different keys in your setup to be generated in a different way to be stored in a different way to be manipulated in a different way and so like if these ways are all sort of different like on a different computer architecture written in a different programming language a different supply chain a different group of corporate governance like you know hiring people or whatever like separate sets of employees if like one of these elements goes rogue and steals one of your keys

it's like if if you're truly segregated the other ones won't be affected by that same thing so a lot of this was inspired by talks with michael flaxman he had a great episode on stefan lavera that i'd suggest legendary episode yeah all hardware wallets are fucked yeah so he's one of my good friends in austin and uh one of the you know loyal attendees of my meetup austin bitcoin developers so let's get into this we uh we're talking about the austin bitcoin developers meetup before we hit record and justin is uh pretty keen on explaining what it's like to run a meetup because yeah what's it like i think it's i think it's something people should look into right uh so like when i before so i moved to austin because i was like i went and did like

startup stuff in san francisco and then got kind of burnt out on it went traveling and i come back to states and i'm like uh so where do i go right i don't want to go to san francisco new york city because it's like i don't really want to jump right back into a job again so i went to austin because it's a little cheaper you can sort of get more leeway and i show up and it's like i don't really have any friends uh i have some friends but none of them are like bitcoins people and i'm like at that time i'm like going 90 miles per hour down the rabbit hole like i am you know one of those like skydivers i'm skydiving down the rabbit hole you get the bat suit on yeah speed's unreached before going down so fast uh and so i wanted to meet some of these people and it's like i dm a few

of them on twitter and they'd be like yeah maybe and it's like but they don't want to meet some rando right and so it's like so i'm like fuck it i'm gonna make a meetup and get these people to come to me and uh so the first one i did uh i found a like a co-working space and uh i booked an hour and i told them like i'd be able to pay them a bunch of money in like three months and of course that was a lie but uh uh yeah we did like i did a class about a thing about using wireshark to analyze the network traffic of bitcoin like so what happens wireshark wireshark is a tool that can analyze packets sent through your like network cards so you can actually see what messages leave your Bitcoin node what messages receive so you can like watch it get

catch blocks like you make a filter to say look for blocks look for packets that contain the word block or maybe it's like a code uh I know it would be an ASCII block because that's the name of the message in Bitcoin is this how you try to find malicious nodes or uh no no so this is just to see what you're just so I don't understand what your Bitcoin node is doing uh like a malicious node you'd probably be able to find the logs easier where it reject your node rejects that of assuming your node is actually doing what you want it to do. But this is just like, what the hell is my node doing? Because we all hear like run a Bitcoin node,

but I feel like very few people know what it is actually doing. And so like Wireshark is a cool tool where you can set a couple queries like, hey, I want it to spy on port 8333. That's the peer-to-peer port. And I want maybe the TCP protocol or something. And you could also say, I want the ASCII interpretation of the message to contain block.

And so there every 10 minutes you'll see a message. or probably a little more because it'll it'll you'll receive it more than once uh you only respond to it the first time right you update your blockchain but the second time you're like i already know about that you'll see transactions come across you'll see all kinds of stuff come across and so it's kind of cool to see what it does and so eight four people showed up to this meetup uh two of them i have never seen since that day and then one of them is alex hardy this like really cool dude who used to live in new york love alex he's like visiting for a business trip And now he's moved to Austin and we're like homies.

Huge shout out to Alex. Yeah. So he was one of my homies in New York too. He's one of my, one of my favorite breakfast dates was Alex. Yeah. It's like, he's a really cool dude. And so the other guy is this guy, Richard, uh, who is one of the like foremost testers of sea lightning software.

He did this like multi-pay plugin that allows you to, uh, in one unshamed payment fund multiple channels. It's really cool. And, and, uh, so he was one of the people that came to the meetup and like, we're like buddies like so two weeks ago we got together at a coffee shop and made a plug-in to open lightning channels from hardware wallets uh and so it's like i had to interject here to yell at alex hardy i know you're listening uh we need a new proof of take it's about time that's about it so yeah so like the point is like within one meetup it was worth it i made two friends and

i'm still friends with both these people and like as it went it's like i got to meet every bitcoiner in my city uh and uh that that's been really cool it's like now I can sort of like I'm friends with Michael Flaxman and Bitsy and all these people and I didn't know them before uh and I think that's true you know this is uh you know there's probably some hidden bitcoiners in your city if you're listening and if you create one of these little events and put the word out you can probably get a few of them to show up and like that's worth it just for starters and it's also like one of the other fun things about running a meetup is you're sort of like accountable to be on top of things uh so like we've switched this like like for to begin with i tried to like get

speakers at the start i gave the talks which was really challenging then i got exhausted and invited speakers that lasted like six months and we switched to uh the socratic style it's incredible so the idea with the socratic style is you have sort of facilitator who uh brings up various topics shout out to jay here in new york yeah so there's like one guy who perfected and john newberry so jay and john newberry yeah and willow verne who abandoned you will abandon us the greatest city in the world austin you guys are too lucky to have well will i miss you will i miss you yeah so luckily we still have james and michael so so the idea is like you have these facilitators that lead people through a number of topics and they sort of uh start dialogue and the

art you sort of pull knowledge out of the audience and so this is really cool because like in austin We have, like, Jimmy Song, Flaxman, Bitstein, the people at Unchained, Polstra, Johnny Dilley sometimes, Kanger, a bunch of these people. And so it's like you can get these people to basically run your meetup for you. But you have to be on top of, like, the ability to sort of, like, lead the conversation. So Jay does it incredibly here in New York where he has a – him and John, John Newberry, at this point gets just as much credit. jay will go through white papers and uh just general computer science security security security issues on some platform john comes in runs through bips and where certain bips are we'll we'll talk about pull requests you know like what's happening to the bitcoin core wallet yes

will then will would come in lightning and he does lightning apps and demonstrations and and it just starts in here in new york where we're spoiled where some months you'll have peter todd walk in You start raising his hand and putting ideas out about certain topics. And it's actually hilarious. I have to note, earlier this year during Consensus, Matt O'Dell was not at BitDevs. And it was the night that we demoed his final message app. And Peter Todd was at the demo and did not critique the app. So Matt was not there to see that Peter Todd did not not like his app.

which uh matt i know you're gonna you you're gonna be bad about that for life but it was just hilarious being there i was like peter todd didn't critique it dude you're good it's a pass man um but no the format is it just again like in socratic when it's socratic it's it's open it's not even debate it's just open questioning right like why like explain like if even at bit devs if you are a novice and you're not technically competent which has happened many times people walked in thinking it's just a meetup where you can ask any questions people are nice like hey most of the room may already know the answer to this but we will take the time to answer it for you and explain the context of uh this answer and why it may be important pertaining to bitcoin

it's one of the interesting things about running a meetup is you want something that appeals to noobs and the pros it's like if jimmy and brian bishop stop coming to my meetup that sucks uh but if noobs stop coming and it's just these like advanced people that also kind of sucks because it's not a community uh and so yeah striking that balance is really interesting but my point in all this is like running a meetup for me has been a great way to meet all these people in a new city like i know probably i know so many of the the people who are interested in share it's not just this that they bought the same thing i did and have similar investment views to me it's that they uh have views about you know like uh like shared views about what human action is

core values yeah like really core values and so you can you can you can sort of build friendships on these shared values and have deeper conversations than you can with like the regular people in your own life who don't share some of these values uh and so it's like a like yeah i'm a i'm a big proponent of of joining the meetup if there is one starting one if there isn't one and i know some people are a little concerned about like being publicly known as a bitcoin or something for me it's been totally worth it uh just to to be just to meet all these like great people because i'm sort of like a disagreeable person like if i take a personality test i was gonna bring this up i thought i was gonna uh i thought i was gonna shock you with it last time

you were here we were on my roof smoking cigarettes drinking wine late at night what uh you you said this to me you are 99 disagreeable yes i took like a couple personality tests uh i always assumed i was introverted because i don't get along with people uh or like i i i sent to like not spend a lot of time with people and uh no it turns out i'm just highly disagreeable i just don't like people like i'm actually i like to be around people i find this hard to believe because i like being around you i love well yeah let's just be like agree on stuff i'm a little more frictious frick what do we disagree on where can we where can i see the bad side just a minute that's what wanted uh we'll get there uh but yeah so like uh why are we bringing this up i'm making all these

admissions on your podcast this will happen this will happen you're saying you're disagreeable and you're saying a meet up uh oh yeah so it's like i i don't make a lot of friends because it's like uh i mean i have like some really close friends but like most people i don't really want to be around and so bitcoin is like this outlet to find a lot of people that i do want to be around Uh, and they're different, they're not all like programmer nerds like me or they're not all, you know, it's, it's a diverse group and, uh, they share some like thought, they share some values with you so that like in the second conversation, you can have a really substantive conversation or something. you go and barbecue a steak with them and you like talk about real shit it's like oh this is a surprise so I'm a big proponent of starting a meetup uh you know like I've had a number of students in my classes now I think like the France meetup or the Paris meetup is one of my students

uh Halifax there's like three or four actually more than that I mean Stefan he's not like my he's his own thing but like he runs a meetup there's a number of them that run meetups and And I think it's a really good thing, and I encourage people to do it. I think you're going to look back, dude, and be proud. I do. I do. Of teaching all these people and planting these seeds and getting these ideas out there. Yeah.

Like, what's life worth living if you can't go out there and find the people that you want to build your future with, right? Yeah, so that's what I was talking about earlier. It's like, why am I into Bitcoin? It's like, I want to find things that are, like, really, really important. I just, like, can't get motivated. and uh it's like this teaching thing was was definitely one of them and i mean yeah it's it's cool to see like i think four or five of my students are speaking at this lightning conference uh it's like cool to see them sort of graduate and like go out into the world and i i just played a

small part like most of it was their own characteristics like i have one like one student who's now like sending doing like uh uh will clark he's like doing this really cool like lightning over mesh network stuff with gotenna and it's like i played i helped him but it was mostly him and that's the cool thing to be around these people it's like they were going to get there regardless of you but you can sort of help them it's just a great group of people to be friends with so like every conference i go to there's like 10 15 20 of us and it's like i really know these people now and we always like share jokes because they like went through this whole curriculum and well having gone through a boot camp myself not a bitcoin boot camp in any sense

the imagination but just a boot camp where you're constrained for 10 to 12 weeks with a very small group of people with very different goals at the end of the day but uh a very uh broad uh general goal that they're all striving towards you find like everybody feeds off each other and it's just like everybody trying to pull the best information from everybody else and level everybody else up and that i think and then this goes this we can circle back to the way education works in general and how it works today like i agree or i agree i i think that we the whole world should adopt the montessori mindset like mixed age groups just gently nudge people into what they're interested in yeah and say hey you're interested in this here's what you need to know to become more

interested and things will just work out yeah i mean that's like i feel like i've got i've had a little bit of that at times but it hasn't been perfect and so it's like that's my big question in life right now is like do i want to keep working on this education stuff or build products yeah so bitcoin product that was the big conversation we had last time you're here yeah so since the last time i see like since the last time justin's been on the podcast he's had the middle boot camp he's done everything he's described and now you're getting into hardware injunction and yeah so this is this is like the so like i was talking about this hollow boot camp thing like trying to teach people to use wallets it's like i got a little way through i was like

fuck some of these wallets suck ass you know sorry to cuss twice in four words most of these wallets suck ass yeah and the software wallets aren't good the hardware wallets aren't great and so like i started to like neglect my responsibilities as a teacher and sort of spend more time programming and so the first thing i did is i wrote up like a hardware wallet and part of this is because we do these some of these exercises in my middle boot camp class but i really wanted to learn like what goes into making a hardware wallet i was at like bitboy it's kind of popular on twitter uh it was like a qr air gap hardware wallet so like that thing was sweet and it was all pstb ptsb excuse me partially signed bitcoin transaction psbt psbt

that's what i said i've heard you fucked this up i fucked it up i said psbt did i say tb i don't remember when you said psbt so uh yeah so it's all psbt and uh yeah it's just cool to see what goes into making a hardware wallet and so like what are the considerations what that what information does a hardware wallet have available what doesn't it what can it check what can't it check uh i made my hardware wallet stateless meaning uh between turning it on there's actually nothing stored assuming that the like the memory is actually wiped you have to plug your seat in at the beginning you have to enter the seat in on a keyboard every time and that's kind of cool because uh this would be nice if you created a paper wallet there's this like cool tool called

seed picker for example that'll direct you through putting uh printing out all the seed words cutting them out into little pieces of paper sticking them in the hat and drawing your seed words so you draw 23 words and then the fourth one they have like a little computer script to create the 24th because that includes a checksum which means it's uh it's basically a check that uh that this one goes with all the other ones it's it's a check against uh typos so if you if you if you type in the wrong word for word 11 the checksum the 24th word won't match and so this is a it's a fail safe it's a fail safe just to just to check if you made a typo it's to help the user uh and so this is i like that the seed picker yeah it's a cool thing so like uh you can

create that you don't need a hardware wallet you can roll dice if you just want to create your seed in like a multisig for example like if you're doing a 305 you only need three hardware wallets in order to like start spending the other two seeds could be like backup seeds and a good device to recover those to actually spend those

if you ever need to would be something like a BitBoy or a more advanced version of it's like a crypto advance this is an actual company that's doing something similar since it's stateless you can enter a seed in spend the funds and then wipe the device and start all over so that's that's like kind of a cool thing it's a little different model than other devices

so in this scenario could you have like a seed phrase in a bitboy which would have been the fourth and fifth signatures in that three or five setup and if somebody were to find that seed phrase in that that cookbook would they be able to tell that it's part of a multi-sig uh you can you can find if you get a seed the point i'm trying to get out here is yeah i can answer that so if you can tell if it's part of a multi-sig only after one or more of the outputs have been spent because a multi-sig uses a construction called pay to script hash so like in the beginning we we paid to public keys and public key hashes and so these would be like when you create an output a utxo basically a bitcoin inside that it would include a public key or the

hash of a public key which is it basically just means a way of uh of sort of like hiding what key it was but a way to check later on that uh the same key is used again so satoshi all of his coins are in pay to pub key yeah exactly so uh so uh this this construction has the pub the the script meaning like the encumbrance the uh the uh the thing that actually defines the conditions under which you can spend your coins exist in the transaction output, right? And so what pay-to-script hash did is it said, well, for multisig, that gets kind of expensive

because you have to put, like, let's say three of five. The way a three of five multisig looks in the script, the Bitcoin's programming language, it will say op three. That means I want three signatures. And after that, five public keys will be there. And each one of those is like, I forget how many bytes, but they're a lot.

and then it says op check multisig which means i want to check of these five that three of that there are three matching signatures presented to me and uh this is this is a lot of data to put into an output uh because the spender has to pay for an output because bitcoin charges per byte of a transaction presented to miners right so uh the uh fee would all go to the sender but the center doesn't actually get the value. The center has no benefit of this multisig address. It's the receiver who gets the benefit of receiving to a multisig a more secure address. And so it paid a script hash. It put that responsibility to the recipient. And so you'd pay to a hash of this script. And then when the recipient who owns the multisig wallet wants to spend it, they would have

to present this script so the script went to the inputs so when you spend now you have to present a script and so it sort of changed a little bit the way it is and uh and yeah this i figure exactly why i was bringing this up did you just explain that very like i follow along the whole way yeah i've been doing this a lot uh yeah so it's it's it's just like uh this this pay to script hash was uh uh it was like a a different way of of assigning it's basically like an extra layer security too right also so yeah that was your question is under what conditions can i know that this is part of a multi-sig and so the answer is once one has been spent if you have the public key the master public keys you can drive that with uh because because you have to see someone

to present what that public keys were the public keys aren't presented when the outputs are created the public keys are are presented when the outputs are spent so that's the big difference So you put the burden on the receiver instead of the server. Yeah, so once you start spending multisig, if somebody got a hold of these public keys, they could see, like, oh, this is part of a multisig. Interesting. I mean, this gets to one of these really interesting questions. So yeah, let's segue to Junction a little bit.

So I did this huddle boot camp, and I was like, fuck, man, maybe I could write a better wallet than some of these. Or not a better one, but just like, maybe I could try to give my effort. I guess like what Bitcoin is is like everyone sort of gives their effort and like One of us will kick the ball forward. It might not be me It might not be you but someone will kick it forward like we should all take our shot at it, right? And so I was like, I gotta take my shot, you know And there's also a little bit of you know, it's like I'm gonna teach this class about Bitcoin programming

It's like at the beginning. I was not qualified to be teaching this class Fuck it, but somehow they're gonna do it. Well, how they liked it. Yeah I mean, I always have a refund like every one of my students get a refund And so I was like, let me just prove to these people I can actually do it. So I decided to create a multisig wallet. And partially because I didn't feel comfortable doing multisig with my Electrum server. Or with Electrum. Yeah, I just didn't really like using Electrum.

And it's kind of like, it gets to this question. The last week I've been kind of confused. What does it mean to run a node even? Which is kind of weird. like i've been studying just as last week what does what does it mean to run a node because it's like i asked this question on twitter so bitcoin nodes have this thing called rpc uh it's a way to send uh http post requests and you send a lot of these every day every time you submit a login form on the internet on the web you submit an http post this is uh it contains like your username

and password and it's supposed to like modify the database to make you logged in and so it that's what this rpc is it's just those and there's a bunch of commands like for example there's list transactions uh uh you know you can broadcast transactions the login credentials giving you access to the data on the node yeah basically so you can you can query the blockchain you can see what the height is you can see uh what coins are involved in a wall if if private keys are enabled you can spend and generate addresses and all kinds of stuff so this rpc is called and it's like uh So with my junction thing, I'm trying to basically utilize this to make a wallet and connect directly to my Bitcoin node, right? Like that's, I don't want to connect through a middleman.

I don't want a middleman with my fucking node. Are you kidding me? I want to talk to my node. And so it's like, so one thing that's really hard is it's hard to, like Bitcoin Core has sort of like punted on the authentication to this. They used to have an encryption, like TLS it's called, encrypted connection to this thing. they removed it i think because it was extra complex and because it was largely like exchanges that were basically getting free tech support from bitcoin core developers and stuff uh i don't know i don't know enough to judge them on their decision i assume it was the right decision

but it like for me as an application developer and as a hodler it's like well it sort of stinks that i can't authenticate to my bitcoin node in an easy way like if you have a noddle right or if you had a noddle yes if it hadn't been stolen it was stolen if it hadn't been stolen like you could you could maybe run a a server a program on your computer that would talk to it and it would talk over rpc like the direct language that your bitcoin talks yeah my casa node still does this exactly be an extension so you you want to be able to to do this uh but like the core developers generally frown upon it's like don't ever use this only do it if it's on the same computer right so that means like if you're running it i think generally a full node should probably run on

basically a server like a little node in your corner it probably shouldn't be running on your laptop like you know you want to spend 20 of your disk space on a node probably not uh do you want to always have it running i mean it's like you have to always have it running when you're using the computer so everything's going to be slower on the other hand it's not always running because you turn your laptop off so it's just probably better to have it on a separate machine and so this makes it a little harder because there's no authentication between these two machines built into bitcoin core really uh or there's like there's it's like uh it's yeah it's not like secure authentication and so uh so it's like well so what do you do as an application well what will

you talk like an electrum server and it's like okay you told me to run a bitcoin node now i'm running two right and it's like okay well if i want to you know if i want to do any like small payments it's like now you got me running on lnd too and to do that i gotta run a watchtower and it's like goddamn i've been scammed with cost or fucking building up i've been scammed yeah Now I have four nodes when I signed up for one, you know? So it's kind of like, to me it's confusing. What does it mean to run a node? Like, I want, basically I'm trying to create a software that's called Junction.

I'm trying to create software that would facilitate the creation of multi-sig hardware wallet cold storage. So I want to set up, I want to get a group of devices, uh and i want to set up a wallet between those that can securely receive large amounts of money how do you make this possible so i don't know yet i'm so this is like my hack at it right so i don't i don't think i have the answer but i got i got the walkthrough to the hack tonight i think you're pretty close yeah yeah so So there's, like, a couple parts in setting up a multi-sig wallet that works. Like, I think the first big challenge is, like, how do you know when you receive funds?

Like, when you set up this group of devices, how are you able to verify that these funds you receive will actually be spendable by you, right? because that's really the important thing because there are multiple devices involved and you want to know that like let's say you have a two of three that's the simplest case you want to know that any two of three could spend these funds

that you're going to receive because if only two of them can spend now you're just doing like basically a complicated brittle single SIG because it's like you have two things that both have to be there you you lose your redundancy so you want to know that any permutation of the signers required like the two in this case uh can sign right so if you let ledger treasure cold card when you talk about

permutation what do you mean by permutation uh it's a choosing of sorry i got it i'm a math guy so uh so like treasure ledger cold card right you want to know that the treasure and the ledger can both spend you want to know that the ledger and the cold card can both spend and you want to know that the trezor and the cold card can spend you want to know that anybody can team up any combination any combination works right and so there's not one like rogue involved that uh won't be able to spend and so this is a big problem when you're like the biggest transaction you ever receive in bitcoin is probably like the first or second time you redo your cold storage right you have a couple inputs that are big i don't speak for me so i'm like 20 class of 2018 bitcoin

and this is a problem i hope to have in the future right it's like fuck me but uh uh like for people who are like when i'm trying to think about who to design software for it's like those are the people who have a big problem and we need to make their we need to alleviate that problem for bitcoin for them to stick around so like if you're redoing that first cold storage the biggest transaction you'll ever receive is when you send money to yourself it's really like change in a sense well but the output yeah the output let's get let's get nitty-gritty here like the like and we were talking about this before we hit record like i've only ever thought about the input of transaction when i send it from a hardware wallet i never think to double check the output like

where's the change going exactly so so so so that's what like the first big challenge of a hardware of a multi-sig wallet is how to verify when you're receiving funds that you will be able to spend them under any condition that you expect to be able to spend them right uh and so what that means is that uh basically each uh one option would be to make a present a ui on your javascript app or your mobile app that will check this for you uh it can say like well here are the the master public keys right so uh each hardware wall will contribute one of these master public keys and this is basically a way of deriving

a number of addresses right so each one of these is sort of like a factory for new addresses right so the first address will take sort of the first child of each of these three public keys and put that into the that will become the address

we're getting into derivation pass yeah derivation pass yeah it's not that complicated honestly but it's important to so this is what I was talking about it's so complicated to me even dude it's hard to really use it's hard to really really really sleep to sleep all at night and to not be an idiot like because you can be an idiot and sleep all at night but like if you're not an idiot it can be hard to sleep all at night using bitcoin uh and so yeah so it's it's worth learning a little bit about this

and so uh so the way to like verify this is you don't want to check it on your desktop machine on your computer that's connected to the internet on your computer that you use to do whatever to that you click on random pdfs from your accountant that you uh plug random uh keyboards into and mice into and uh uh you download torrents from the internet of for movies you don't want to pay for or whatever you know you installs the zoom uh audio calling thing right it's like a virus it turns out uh yeah so still a zoom user yeah exactly yeah so you're wrecked uh sorry so it But that's kind of the idea is you don't want to check that on your internet connected machine. That's why we have hardware wallets is it's a simple, minimal computational environment

to do these sort of things. And it has a screen on it so you can check your address there. So you want to basically be able to perform. You don't want to perform this on your host machine. You want to perform this on the hardware wallet. And so one of the hard things, so let's talk about single-sig. If you have one private key involved, that one private key will exist in your hardware wallet.

And when you send an address across, you can say, hey, this is an address created with this type of script, like pay to pub key, pay to pub key hash are the two popular ones. It could say which one it is. And it could say basically the derivation path, which just means which in practice it means which child is it. Is it the first address, the second address, the third? And so the hardware wallet will just be able to go say, okay, I'm going to start at the parent the master and if this is the ninth child i'm going to go do nine child you know go find

nine so when you talk about children you're talking about the first nine public addresses yeah that are created so you go and check the ninth public uh public key and you turn that into an address and you just check if the address that your host machine had matches what the address that you're you're what's the difference between like i can't believe i mean i'm drunk enough to be uh willing to ask this to be willing to ask what's the difference between an address and a in a pub key like uh so a a script a script not a script in public but like an address in a pub key yeah so uh isn't a pub key an address isn't that interchangeable what you uh so you can have the same pub key and you can use that and pay to pub key i actually don't even think

there's a way of encoding that as an address uh you can encode i'm not sure about that it's so Anxion, I forget. But you can use that one pubkey. Let's say it's just all zeros for the sake of argument. I think that's a valid pubkey. All zeros. You can use that for a pay-to-pubkey hash transaction. Or you could use that as one of three keys. So that's single signature. That's one private key involved. You could also use that as one of three keys in a multi-sig address. And so these would be two separate addresses, but with the same key. So that's the difference, is like when you have a key you also need the type of script involved basically what set of uh basically what puzzle needs to be solved with this key right and that in what dictates one of the what dictates

that is where the keys are manipulated right at which like so at which public key below the master key so we're like 48 was an example earlier yeah that would be the 48th public key basically the 48th public address that's the way i understand it yeah yeah you can accept bitcoin 2 under that master branch yeah so that's that's like roughly the idea of how multi-sig is roughly close enough that's that's not so it's so the 48 was involving like a native segwit multi-sig address so that was that was defined uh there's like a special set of children that you go to if you're looking for multisig and so the bigger reason here is that the bigger reason here is let's say you're using a vendor who's who's doing multisig for you right and they go away it's like well how do you check

how do you go and find those keys again so the challenge is like if your wallet software goes away you still have the seed that's like the master private key it's like a factory of private keys right and the factor the the way this thing works is like it can create children that's your master key basically yeah your master key the master key can create children it can create i forget how many millions like billions and billions of them like uh it's like 30 i forget i don't want to be wrong but uh you can create a lot of them and the thing is each one of those can create children so it's not like a linear thing where it's like yeah it's like it's it's not like a bunch of it's a tree you have one parent and you can create this whole tree and so

uh given that each one of these can be millions of possibilities sometimes it's challenging to go and find if you have if somewhere in this tree there exists a private key with bitcoin stored on it it's can be challenging to go and navigate this tree and find that private key and so that's the point of common for it could turn out to a point where you're looking for a needle in the haystack yeah it's a needle in the haystack right and so the solution to that is we have for certain types of things so the user remember i did native segwit multiseg right and so there's a path for that it's like 0 48 i forget exactly what it's like 40 something like that uh and if it was like wrapped multi-sig then it's like slightly different instead of a two at the end there's a one i think

and uh there's also a difference in this there's there's two types of children there's like hardened and unhardened children uh this is like really in detail but a hardened child if you ever heard of this it just means that to do that production you needed the private key you can't do it from the public key. I was talking to Marty earlier. When he puts up his store on BTC Pay, he puts up one of these ones that's a child of an unhardened key. To create a bunch of change addresses to present invoices to his people looking for his... To you freaks. To you freaks, yeah. The server shouldn't have access to the private key, right? That's

the whole point. You don't want this insecure web server to be able to steal my money. It just has the public key, so that's unhardened derivation. Hardened derivation is when you have the public the private key on hardened derivation is when you only have the public key and so the big difference here is like when a private key is involved that is security you can lose funds because anybody who has that thing can move move bitcoin if if in a single sig case if they have enough of them they can move it in the multi-sig case but if you just have public keys it's only privacy information uh and you know that bleeds insecurity a little bit if someone knows you have a lot of bitcoin that becomes a security problem it's not just a privacy problem

so that the two bleed well if you have if you have a situation in which you're in btc pay server being the example i'm using now where you're creating new invoices with new addresses uh i'd like to be able to think that you'll be able to preserve your uh privacy moving forward like is there um so coin selection within wallets right now is a big problem so that's that's what leads to the problem you're alluding to is if you're taking donations and from a bunch of people and then you're going to consolidate them into one utxo or whatever you have the the problem of secure privacy when you consolidate those they know oh if you're consolidating them all into you this this utxo we can assume that you own or received all these utx exactly so that's

that's one of the i mean this is one of the i mean it's kind of a different problem than what the multi-sig is like more for security it's like so i can shoot myself it's to make sure nobody can five dollar wrench i want to i want to be able to take two bullets uh and still be able to have my money that's the three or five that's why you do three or five that's why you buy costs we're right now we're talking about how do we make sure nobody knows exactly how much money yeah and so that's a separate problem and uh i guess we can sort of like i haven't finished talking about junction but let's let's sort of move on to because no this is my fucking things up no no no this is interesting because this is like this is how it is to work in bitcoin you're

talking to like a natural idiot here no no this this is this is the interesting thing is like this is how i work too it's like i learn about security it's like well fuck then like i learned a little bit more about privacy i want to move over there so like a couple weeks ago i was at a hackathon it was a shitcoin hackathon uh it was a caitlin long uh cat that was light shitcoin it was sponsored by cardano that's a shit all right all right all right all right i didn't know that yeah so uh i did not know that all right heavy anybody who has i have a great picture of uh charles uh selling shit going to a bunch of children yeah no in front of a whiteboard can we use this i just i need the right use this can we use this as the artwork for this episode yeah

let's just be the only unique artwork for this for any episode ever i'm dead serious like remind yourself to send that to me that's what we're going to use uh so yeah i was at a shit going hackathon i'm sorry for for for trying to act like it wasn't a shitcoin hack yeah so uh and so me and there's this guy ben woosley he's a really good he's a core developer uh he's a really really bright guy and so he was like the one uh non-shitcoiner that knew how to code like it was like uh well uh like parker lewis a couple of my friends were there and so it was like a good good group of people that were there uh but uh developer wise there was just only ben so we got together i'm like well what can we build and so we were both thinking about privacy it's like we've

both used wasabi i know the freaks are big into the wasabi uh right they're i'd like to think they are i hope i hope they are if i hope i don't know if they listen to matt if you're big into wasabi i hope i don't know if it's uh yeah so i know i mean yeah so i'm big i've used wasabi pretty heavily wasabi isn't uh a uh one it's an online version of like this mixing so like the idea is that certain transactions can you can look at them and sort of guess what happened right if there's like uh one input for one bitcoin right and a second input for 0.1 and then another one for 0.9 you can kind of guess that someone probably paid 0.1 bitcoin to someone else and got 0.9 change back and so one of the ideas here is like well let's say instead of that example

let's say you added another input that was like 0.3 so you have one and 0.3 and then on the outputs you don't add a new output you you uh increase one of them so remember so so how can you increase an output uh you just give them more money you you add a little to the end inside and you add little to the outside how would you increase it without creating an input with it uh so there already is an input okay so like before there was 0.1 and 0.9 now let's say it's so you double spending with the change no no no so we're adding a new input so so like somebody else is contributing funds to this transaction and we're giving those funds to one of the pre-existing recipients okay and so whereas before it was one bitcoin and then 0.1 and 0.9 now it's one bitcoin and 0.3 bitcoin

and there's 0.4 and 0.9 what the fuck happened it's hard to say like it's no longer so clear that it was a 0.1 bitcoin payment and the way you do this is you have the actual the recipient the merchant would be the one who would add this 0.3 create the output so it's pdp well so he the the recipient the merchant would add a little bit on the input side and just take a little more on the output side so they net the same but it all of a sudden becomes very hard to see what the nature of the transaction was to know who ended up with what yeah and so that's the way the this is p to ep uh this is called uh pay join is this like uh pay pay to end point i'm not i'm not totally sure what paid input is to be honest uh you're not sure pdep so pdep will be enabled with

schnorr signatures where every every transaction would basically be a coin coin join where the recipient like exactly we described okay yeah so something exactly gotcha yeah so so uh yeah i'm not super up to speed on the the uh terminology this was a block stream proposal like two years definitely heard of it uh so but the idea here is it's a simple mechanism that doesn't require a lot of behavior change like basically all that has to happen is the merchant has to be able to add a little bit to a transaction and the sender has to still be willing to sign that transaction even if they would like the net the net in their wallet would be the same the inputs and outlets would be a little different this is called a pay join and so the question was like at the

hackathon how can we make some software that people would actually start using this smart thing like uh waxwing adam gibson is a guy who's written a lot of on his uh he's one of the creators of join market he's written a lot about this adam we need to get in the studio so one of the one of the questions was like how do we try to build a uh how do we how could we bring these features how could we make like popularize these and so we try to make this thing called snowball it was like the idea is like you'd create a sdk software development kit on ios and android so basically any mobile phone wallet developer could include this and at the moment of signing and spending a transaction they would be able to basically broadcast this transaction to people

nearby them and see if they want to add an input and a matching input and output to it and so one of the the logical first person would be the merchant so it's like hey do you want to tack on an input and an output like or equal add equal on each side just to make it more confusing and like let's say the uh bag boy wants to also do it right or like uh it could quickly get interesting uh uh and so this is like kind of an interesting take on coin join and it's different from wasabi in the fact that it's not online it's local and so you have a much better guarantee that like you know your peers aren't all chain analysis uh because online it's like anybody can participate you don't really know who it is uh and so when it's local it's like well i don't know who it is

maybe i mean you could you could design a ui so you do know you have to actually check on every if you're at a table and you want to do a coin join you could check everybody but if you're doing it in more of a willy-nilly manner it's like well i don't know who they are but they're 300 yards from me so unless chain analysis is like uh got me on a leash and then adam even had a different proposal too where you could construct a transaction where you send it out and you say hey yes yeah so this is this is a problem this is a uh so this is one of these things where i'd only know if i ran a meetup because i this is on the like stuff that bit devs did so i'm like i gotta learn this because i'm gonna talk about so it's basically you send a transaction it's like hey

if one of the the necessary inputs of this transaction accepts it and does it you have a quasi coin join yeah so you can uh you can look for public keys that are uh that own utxos so that's kind of the first step you try to find public keys that own utxos uh and with these you can say okay well i know their public key i'm going to try to create a transaction i'm going to i'm going to construct a transaction that they would be able to spend and i'm going to take an input they own and maybe an input i own and so those are two inputs and then we're going to spend to two different outputs and now no one knows

which one's mine which one's theirs and so the idea is that you could basically like post these to a forum or something he doesn't go into detail but you could sort of like

basically somehow send these to that other person present this somebody be like hey you want to coin you in right now so it'd be like a mailbox right like

you have a mailbox and it's like all these like coin chain requests and you say yep yep yep yep yep and the cool thing is that you don't have to be online running a server

you just need like a mailbox that you can check up on every once in a while yeah and the dependency is like whether or not the second person to spend or not yet right basically yeah yeah well and the hard part is figuring out who what

the public is coin join is possible until that UTXO is spent yeah so most the hard part is actually figuring out the public key because like most keys right now are either in multi-sig or pay-to-pub key hash and in those the public key is not visible but with Schnorr and Taproot it'll be more most of it is going to be basically pay-to-pub key in the default case will be kind paid a pub key and so you'll know the public key much more readily in that scenario but you won't necessarily know if it's one person or a bunch of people uh but that's fine so you can spam this message out over everyone you can give everyone hey i'll i'll do it with you and uh and yeah so it's cool because it's non-interactive well that's the thing that confused me at first i thought you'd

be like ah like for this particular setup you'd have to know somebody's utxo and present this coin join to them where it's sort of passive right yeah so you you'd need to know that some that there is a ut you don't need to know who owns the utxl you need to know that there is somebody with xyz pub key that owns this utxl and then you you'd need some way the paper doesn't go over it you just want to basically broadcast this to everybody such that the owner would be able to discover this which could be like a third party party whatever the hell you could be a wet like craigslist it could be whatever you want you want to come yeah i mean that's a it's a market facilitation type of thing and uh so that would be really interesting so so yeah it's like this

has been one of my experiences it's like you get deeper into the security and it's like you're like oh well now you start to have better ideas on that like this i don't know this location-based coin joining is an interesting idea and someone should build it uh and like it would be cool if like when we got together tonight we'd be like uh let's you know pour a drink and now let's do a coin join like just like that would be cool like when you go to a conference is that what ricochet for though like what's isn't that what samurai is working on isn't that what they i haven't actually used ricochet i haven't either yeah i don't have an android i don't have an android yeah so uh i gotta i gotta look into uh uh samurai's stack a little more but uh but yeah i

mean there's a lot of stuff on the privacy front and i feel like it's not terribly explored uh and i mean the other tough thing about privacy is that there's i mean on the one hand it seems like there isn't a big market for it but like i think wasabi did like somewhere 80 million dollars in transactions so they only get like 0.01 percent of those because it's like i think their model is point like three zeros and then a three uh per anonymity set basically per person that participates in the coin join so uh so they actually have a business which is cool i didn't like when i got into bitcoin i didn't expect that there would be a business for providing privacy to people and it sounds like Wasabi is actually able to make it work and that's

to me that's like quite inspiring like as an independent developer like I think about these like there's there's one route where it's like you know you go run to San Francisco and try to get a bunch of funding and you end up you know doing shit coins and all kinds of stuff and then there's another route that's more like a cold card or wasabi wallet and it's like somehow these guys manage to create a business model that works and is only Bitcoin and provides like real security or privacy services uh to the thing that really matters and like those are pretty inspiring business models to me i'd love to find a way to like find something like that you know

they're incredibly inspiring i think you'd have to lose your name and your face and your everything right like they're taking on extreme amount of risk right from a regulatory perspective but actually no like i mean wasabi might be but i don't think that's what i was gonna that's what gonna say wasabi wasabi like napara love them like love you napara you're putting your neck out there though that's right like yeah i really admire it yeah no i do as well and it's it's beautiful to see the passion that like comes out right yeah why why are people like we shouldn't need to feel passion to support these people these should be these should be indelible rights what it gets inalienable rights and daily it gets into like what motivates these people to do it it's like

when i look at myself it's like it would be much smarter for me to go work at u.s bank or something or like uh google and like i can't imagine you and stack sats right and stack sats but i can't i just like i cannot do it uh like there's something yeah it's like what so what part and i agree i am the same person like i cannot do it either what what is it of us is it our need to feel important or is it a a sincere drive towards something that is sincere do you think we we are just assholes that like hey i need attention i want to be the guy that fucking owns probably part of it yeah i think a lot of for me is just like this will to sort of like independence and self-determination right like that's uh i think that's what draws me

to bitcoin it's like i want to be my own man and i want to like uh be the captain of my own fate and uh could you not do that in the the uh incumbent system i think i can but uh i think that the bitcoin financial world would make that a lot easier for everyone and that's more appealing uh like a world where uh i mean it's like it's it's more dependent on like producing value because value can be stored rather than uh sort of like you know uh bullshitting value yeah whatever it is now it's like i just think that would be a a better world where people could really like determine their own fate a little more so that's i think that's what attracts me to it yeah me too like i feel

and again like that's why i had to pause it like are we just assholes like i just feel like a lot of the world is like wandering aimlessly like what the fuck are we doing just like i don't know i don't know we're drunk now we uh we officially finished the bottle of uh so let me let me let me continue giving that let me continue giving the pitch on junction which we've sort of like we've sort of been dropping uh hints and so let's give the full junction pitch yeah so the idea is like it's a uh desktop app for working with uh for using hardware wallets and the hardware wallets are in charge of the private keys which is what they're good at but they don't know anything about the blockchain they don't know anything about what your balances are

what transactions you control or how to create a transaction what they're allowed to spend what they're not allowed to spend that's what bitcoin core is really good at that's what bitcoin core does watches the blockchain it can also do private keys but it's not actually but it's probably not the right tool for that so uh so that's that's the idea of junction is it's a uh desktop app that could help you connect these two uh so you could create like you know you can use single sig with one hardware wallet and use bitcoin core to monitor the blockchain that can be running in your nodal or your casa node I don't I don't know if it'll actually work with these when eventually but uh it you know like something like that in the corner

of your house that will keep track of your balances but actually the ability to spend the balances will be on these private keys which you can if you have one you can store it you know in a safe if you have three you can store one with an attorney with one with a safe deposit box one at home if you have five you get more and more dials to configure it for yourself. And so that's the idea with Junction, is it would be really easy to set up a single-sig or especially a multi-sig setup

where you actually have control over consensus. This is a problem with most, by default, Electrum outsources consensus to other people. Some of these collaborative custody models where you have a group help you, provide some software for you to set up a multisig and they hold onto one of your keys, generally those are all, you outsource consensus to them.

And even the Casa node is actually just for Lightning, it's not for a consensus for your multisig. And so this, the idea here is like, I want consensus where it fucking matters on my multisig. Uh, and, uh, and, uh, so yeah, that's the idea is like, you know, set up a multi-sig with your node and that's it. So, and I think we're like teasing at right now too, is like the intricacy of the software and how to interact with it.

Like you can set it up where it's leveled and securitized in a way where it is, gives you better peace of mind at the end of the day. Exactly. Like that's the whole point of multi-sig. it just to me it makes it like the chances that you lose your key on single sig are very low like less than one percent probably or something uh for most people uh but it's like there's a chance they're like one it's like you always in the back of your mind know that one thing can wipe you out and so it's like like let's say you have a price run up the whole price run up in the back

of your mind is going to be like man i hope when i go to spend this i'm safe it like ruins your whole thing for you. And if you have some more redundancy, you know, like, well, I mean, I would have to really fuck up. Like if I fuck up twice in this thing and lose two keys, like I would almost deserve to lose my coins, right? Like that's the situation you want. You want where like so much would have to go wrong that you'd have trouble believing it. Like that's where you want to find yourself. And then you can, you know, then you're a lot more relaxed. So what did I see when you're given the visual demo of the two hardware wallets connected to each other so when you create a wallet injunction you have to like the idea is that a wallet is a set of signers just like basically

public keys that will be able to sign for transactions and so you register these by like you plug in your cold card and that guy says hey i'll be a signer and this is eventually a Bitcoin Core will work. Shor's Provost has a very work-in-progress thing that will probably go in in two years. Add signers, right? Your Trezor, your Ledger, and you kind of plug

these ones in, unlock them, and they will contribute a public key. Once you have, let's say, three public keys and two of three master public keys, these are like these public key factories, then you can go and create, use each of these public key factories separately to create their first child, for example,

and use those first children to create a multi-sig receiving address. And so the key thing is in this ceremony to set up the wallet, you really want each one of these hardware wallets to know the identities of the other participants. And the big problem is right now only the cold card can do this.

Only the cold card has the ability to upload, say, hey, I'm in a multi-sig setup. These are the three devices. These were the derivation paths and these were the public keys that were created at that derivation path. that are like these public key factories. And if you know those, then given any address that should

be spendable by this wallet, the hardware wallet, the cold card, the Trezor, the ledger, should be able to actually validate that that will be spendable. They could say, hey, I can derive that private key, and I will be able to spend this. And that's really important. And so the main job of a tool like Junction is to facilitate this initial ceremony to make sure that each device

can sort of commit to the participants in this sort of like a contract, this like multi-sig party. And it's a problem because right now only the cold card actually implements this ability. And the ledger, I don't think can really check anything. And the Trezor can check that it is one of the keys, right? So for a three or five against a hat, I'm one of these keys.

But the other five, like you'd actually have to go to every one of these to check. If you were doing like three or five with Trezors, you would need to go and actually visit the location of each one of the five, and that's a nightmare. So on the cold card, once you initiate this multisig at inception, each device has an ID basically associated with that the cold card can confirm the other IDs

of the other devices. The other devices cannot confirm. basically their own ids let alone other sort of the the yeah the id you have like a an id that's for like an identifier of which key it came from and then also this public key that is used to create these child public keys which go into addresses and uh yeah the cold card is the only one that can really verify that so like junction will take this point and be like maybe cold card should be the one that you have at home because that you can you know use to validate receiving addresses and uh i don't know maybe it could uh like it's still early like it's it's just getting

to the point now where i think by the time this is posted i'll have uh linux and windows binaries that you can like you can go double click on and run and uh like it's at the point now where you can set up this wallet you can register signers that works for treasure ledger cold card bitbox and keep key should be supportable very quickly bitboy and uh crypto advanced specter will both be supported so it'll be able to do like qr code air gaps these hobbyist wallets will be uh supported and so uh so yeah the uh that's that's so it supports three now it can set up a native segwit or a wrapped segwit meaning like segwit so you get the discount but wrapped is meaning you get a legacy address so that if if the people paying you it's got a three in the front yeah it's got

got three in the front uh instead of uh bc yeah bc uh so people with shitty old wallets or even like bitmax uh can spend to that right so that's the uh that's the uh let's tsk on bitmax right now huh let's tsk on bitmax right now yeah i mean what's going on i've heard that i mean this is the tough thing though like uh like what is the business case for them to do that like people like if people are using their platform they're either so drowning in money they're either making so much money they don't care about the discount of segway or they're losing so much money they don't care about the discount discount of segway it's tough because like so this is a big problem i have with myself it's like i'm thinking about all these like super advanced signing ceremonies

for multi-sig and like what you validate what here's the big exchanges don't even use segway like am i just on am i on cloud nine just completely oblivious to the real world so yeah So for those of you who don't know, the particular pain point at which we're coming at BitMEX right now is the fact that the way I understand it, they use the same receiving address for all accounts. So if you are able to trade on BitMEX and you're going to send Bitcoin to BitMEX, you have the same address for your account that you send Bitcoin to in perpetuity. So if you've been on the exchange for two years, you've been sending Bitcoin to it for two years, you've been sending to the same address. um but i don't even care about bitmex in particular i'm gonna go back more to the conversation we're having earlier like does this all get abstracted for us at some point like do we even have to worry about uh like unique address creation and uh interacting with other wallets and

shit like that like is this all early stage pain points that will be overcome in your mind like will all this ux be abstracted i think you can trade the uh i think you can trade the uh difficulty of verifying for trust like you can have somebody sort you can trust somebody to take care of it for you like if you if you go to some company that helps you set up a multi-sig that's basically what you're doing you're outsourcing a like threat model to them like you figure out what's you know what's a threat what isn't uh you're going to outsource that to them and so you trust them and I think that's the way it works like if you really want to know for sure or to if you want to maximize the chances that a given set of funds are safe somebody's

got to really pay attention to that and then other people are going to trust that person and that's rational because not everyone is going to be a security expert and some people are more talented this than others and like that's the beauty of like specialization of labor but someone's got to do it and then you don't want that person to be trusted too much right like you don't want them that person or that group of people to have 10 of the coins or five percent of the coins like you'd like them to you know these trusted people to have smaller chunks but i think i think always like you do you're never going to get like really good you're never going to exercise the benefits of bitcoin like this trust trust minimized trustless trust minimized value transfer

without Zabo's not happy about trustless Zabo's not happy about trustless yeah so trust minimize like you're not going to get this without understanding how it works because it's like in order to actually like go down the list and say yeah I'm not trusting them I'm not trusting them you have to know what's going on so uh so I think like this can be I mean I mean I'm a big I think that a lot of this stuff will work I think there will be a lot of like custodial successful stuff in the future like you know visas and master cards running on bitcoin and all that all that uh i think there will be a lot of custodial things blasphemous motherfucker i mean uh like uh i just i think they'll lose their privileged position as a uh you know uh

there will be competitors to them and so they'll they won't be as much of a monopoly as they are now uh i agree i agree yeah so but like you know for a lot of people for a lot of people it's like yeah you don't i mean you don't need trust minimized uh you want the trust minimization for like really large transfers for stuff like validation of money supply to know that you actually that that what you have now the percentage you have now is going to be you want to be able to predict what percentage of the of the total supply you're going to own in like 10 years 20 years 30 years like that's the really the important thing when you're thinking about like bitcoin is like do i believe that like if i buy one bitcoin that i will own one 21 millionth

of the supply in 30 years roughly right yeah so like that's the that's i mean that's this is one of like that kind of it's like do you have to trust somebody for that to happen or is this like a natural game of incentives and once we get over to that question without learning no no you can't you can't but what is the the threshold for learning at which it becomes a known fact that you can have confidence in the system that's what i'm curious about now like is there a threshold will there ever be a threshold will there always be uh not doubting but questioning of the security and efficacy of the system yeah i mean it's an interesting point like in the early days like the first people to really adopt it were cryptographers because like they didn't have

to outsource the trust in somebody they could actually verify themselves right and so like maybe a hard money guy a sound money guy would or somebody would would be interested but they wouldn't be able to do the due diligence that it actually works but the cryptog the cryptographer was able uh and so you know after that like these people like dreg maxwell's of the world became you know it's like they sort of became established and then like somebody who comes at it from more of like like safety and perspective it's like he can sort of outsource that to them and be like you know they they if if they say it works i'll believe them and i'm not going to have to do all that research and so it sort of like begs the question of yeah like what uh like the people

who are coming in now it's like it's been clear for a while now that there are like technical experts who like vouch for the fact that the system works as expected but like i guess the question now is like whether that is worth something and that's the that's like the thing that the current people are betting on and uh and yeah so like i think now it's like you can kind of you can kind of say that it works i mean i guess one of the big questions is whether something would work better right like that's always the thing that comes up in conversations is like well uh could you swap out some feature of bitcoin and make it more private or something well i guess the biggest question you have to answer to answer that question is how much of an improvement is

bitcoin to the incumbent system right like uh we're talking orders of magnitude uh of an improvement over the incumbent system what is better uh compared to that when it's different things to different people and we were talking about this earlier it's like well we're talking about kind of how bitcoin could fail and like there's like two really big value propositions i think bitcoin has to be like one it's like this scarcity right it's like harder it's it's uh you have a you have a you have a better guarantee than gold that your slice of the pie is is getting no smaller it's finite yeah like you you have a lower bound on the slice the size of your slice in the pie and that's what a certain class of people are really interested in and then there's

another thing it's where like well i want to make a transaction no one can stop this transaction or i want to make a transaction and or i made this transaction and no one knows i made this transaction that's another value proposition uh bitcoin these are sort of like unrelated you know People speculate as to which one Satoshi really valued and which one he used as the sort of... Prototype or... Well, sort of like the implant mechanism, the mechanism of implanting this idea in people.

And I guess the thing I sort of worry about is we'll get the scarcity, but we won't get the censorship resistance. The cypherpunk. It's like you'll get the Austrian side of Bitcoin, but you won't get the cypherpunk side. this is exactly where i wanted to end it because what you started it with before we hit record like that's what you're worried about like how does let's walk through this so

pause the question again uh what happens if we get the the austrian uh garden eve or garden of eden uh but that comes at the cost of our privacy being completely bastardized yeah like how do you get the austrian and the cypherpunk dream all in one yeah so i don't want to scaremonger here i don't want to say i'm like terrified of it but it's like it's like when you think about like what what would you be concerned about like this is the thing i get concerned about i i i get concerned of a scenario where i would characterize it as like a big win it's like scarcity held the supply cap held like a fee market developed all these great things but like somehow and like you know the ability of governments to rule over us was diminished because they couldn't collect taxes

and print money as easily. And so all these great things happened, but everything is still out in the open. We sort of collectively chose to ossify the protocol quickly. And yeah, and it's like this digital dream, but sort of like everything you do is public knowledge and not so much states have control over you

with this manner, but like for-profit entities. well capital self-censorship yeah yeah i mean like it fits into surveillance capitalism future of the world so that's one of the things that i am like i don't want to say i'm worried about it but it's like if you ask me how could bitcoin fail like that's one of the things i think of it's like well it would be a great success we'd all be happy like the people who are entered into it now we'd all be like deliriously happy but like that's not what we want that's something we set out to do i don't know if i'd be deliriously happy with that like i want both i want both i

know but like i can just knowing people it's like if the investment games can buy it we'd all change you know like that's the that's the thing i sort of fear like no i agree i agree like at a point like when you're set like why why why disrupt the status quo spoiled so that's that's the that's the way so i guess i want to like i had this uh on a tweet a while ago that i mean people didn't really like it but i thought it was like uh it's like bitcoin uh uh it's like maybe bitcoin uh can't fail but it's it's it's one of these videos like uh maybe bitcoin can't fail but only if none of us believe it it's it's one of those ideas where it's like maybe it's true that bitcoin can't fail but only if none of us believe it like if we believe that and we get

complacent uh it's probably it might not be true like so so peter teal gave an example like only an idea like us feigning it being alive so this is great there's i got the idea from peter teal he had like he had a like somebody who he worked with who it's like uh he's saying the graduation ceremony el basically they were saying like hey you have your whole life set for you like this was the no not the graduation like the freshman introduction thing and they're like hey you're set for life uh like you're you've succeeded you're set for life like congrats that's what they said to the freshmen it's like maybe that's one of the things that's true only if none of the freshmen believe that because if they believe that it'll corrupt them right and so i think a

similar thing is maybe true of bitcoin where it's like hey maybe it's true that it will succeed but like we we can't assume you can't assume you need to assume the worst exactly uh i don't want to end it here i'm gonna pee i'll be right back we're not ending it we're not ending it i'm gonna We're at 1-53-53. One of the things I've learned is that when Marty starts talking into the mics, seeing timestamps,

this is the moment that he always forgets that it happened. In case this makes it in the interview. We just wrecked it back from a piss break. We're almost two hours in. Yeah, and in three hours, I got a flight to Copenhagen. Do you want to get to the airport? Three and a half hours.

I got plenty of time. Let's get back into the story of Justin Moon. How's your year been? What you've had, it seems. Yeah, so I was talking about this earlier. It's like surviving in the Bitcoin economy, right? I don't think we talked about this on the show yet. It's like, I mean, I've always had jobs, right?

And you have a boss and you have an employer. And it's like this big hierarchical structured thing. And like your life is sort of arranged for you. And you get out of a trough, basically. And it's great. And so when I got into Bitcoin, I was like, I'm going to start this class, right? And I didn't think anybody would sign up. I started it for free.

And people started signing up. it's like pretty soon I had all these like individuals who are paying me to provide the service to them and I never like actually had that with like individual people where it's like I'm accountable to people uh I mean it's kind of like uh like gelt gulch or whatever it's like you have these like they're making your tires you're gonna tell them if you don't like the tires they're gonna like try to give you the best tire they can deliver it's like it's it's uh it's great to like there's a certain feeling of aliveness when you have this way of making a living you like make individual people happy rather than like fit into some uh industrial nation state

apparatus and really do shit all with your life uh you can make a great living that way but like you don't ever serve individuals and so uh so that's been like the story of my last year is like finding ways to serve individuals for the beginning it was these classes uh and more recently it's been starting to like you know more consulting uh and stuff and uh you know hopefully i can find a way to either continue the education or find a way to help people use bitcoin more easily but yeah that's uh that's been like the really interesting thing is like it's like it's like an eat what you want like i was saying earlier it's like an eat what you kill world it's like you have to i'm so happy we got that quote on here yeah it's like an eat what you kill

it's like uh you're not fed you have to go get it and there's like you feel more alive when you live that life and that's been sort of my experience of one year in the bitcoin economy and there's been some ups and some downs i mean i've certainly lost a little hair along the way you're looking good dude i'm looking good but it's been i mean it's like stressful when you're like uh you know you're doing all this shit and you know you're not really uh like i feel like i'm finally qualified to teach i've like i've been class i've been teaching a class for a year and i'm finally now qualified to teach the class what would you say to all those out there who are bit apprehensive to uh lurk out of the shadows to put their voice out there to put their voice

forward about what they think about bitcoin like you were somebody you are some not were somebody you are somebody i respect very highly in the bitcoin space and the fact that you're trying to teach others i think the humility of realizing that oh my god i need to teach myself on this journey to teach others is something that everybody needs to hear so like how do you overcome that uh maybe embarrassment of oh my god i'm supposed to be teaching these motherfuckers i don't even know this right now like yeah i mean there's not a good answer that like i can think of a few times like a few times i did a meetup like i'll just say this the first time like jimmy song came to my meetup was like oh this is great you know and like i tried to give a talk and i like fuck i

fucked it up big time i was like oh that was disappointing jimmy's sitting front row and i fuck it up big time and it's like ah you just you just uh i can think of a few more but like like like fuck ups right you just you just keep going eat the l's you just eat it yeah you just eat it and you bleed a little bit and it's like i'll keep going uh so it's like yeah that's the i think that's the way it is it's do you think it has anything to do with your disagreeableness that you're like fuck like i gotta prove everybody that probably has quite a lot to do with it to be honest what do you mean in that way uh well uh maybe like the uh what does it mean to be disagreeable because i feel like i don't disagree with you on many things uh so it's i think it's

about uh where uh which external opinions you'll put value in so i think there's a lot of people whose opinions i don't care about at all uh and so uh so yeah you just don't uh care you don't you don't like that that's not valuable to you and you like put value into the few people that you that doesn't go into your input output system yeah so it's like the opposite of politeness i guess like you know like politeness is like you try to take the consider taking consideration the opinions of everybody and uh disagree you know be more indifference would be disagreeableness or indifference more i think both yeah yeah but uh but yeah so that's the uh i don't know that's the like so i i'm in a weird position because it's like my interest in bitcoin is pure almost purely

from like a hodler uh like store of value like hard money point of view but it's like i've i've made a living so that's one point of view and then there's the other point of view like that's safety right and the other side is like serge katya katya or whatever his name is or however you pronounce his name like brilliant i think he's ceo of bit refill and so he has a ceo beaver yeah search yeah yeah so he has this great uh point of view where it's like well no we need we don't just want store value we need to build the circular economy right and he's very articulate it on that point of view just like safe is with the store of value and so it's like i come at it from safe's point of view more but like my wife actually living it out has been more on the search

point of view it's like i'm the recipient of people who are participating in the circular bitcoin economy they're willing to pay me oftentimes in bitcoin to uh like to help them defend themselves in this uh world in this bitcoin world and uh and so that's been an interesting experience uh and i'm very happy that you brought the dichotomy of surge and safe in particular and the dichotomy of using bitcoin as a medium of exchange and as a sort of value in particular because as somebody who's using it for both cases right now like it works for both yeah i and this is something i tweeted out earlier today that's all you finish it finish it the 87% of all the transactions

we've ever accepted on tfdc.io have been lightning network transactions thousands and thousands like 87% are lightning transactions from the lightning network they make up total 9% of the value

we've accepted so another way you could put it is it's 90-10 yeah so the other way you could put it is 13% of the transactions we've accepted have been on chain yeah but they've accounted for 91 of the value yeah but you can see just in that use case in particular with our website the interaction not that use case the interaction with our website in particular less people are able to donate money on chain to us or less move less likely to move

utxos on chain to us but when they do they they'll invest a lot and then counter counter that you have more people able to spend 10 cents with us every day one of the fascinating things about lightning versus other cryptocurrencies is that the people who use it have actually no natural financial incentive to use it like an ethereum person is like you know pump my coin like i'm using defy i'm like uh but like i don't think ethereum is really like the i mean people lightning let's say like it's like the people who are using lightning aren't using it to like pump the price of bitcoin i don't think like that's not that doesn't go into generally trying to create new experiences yeah it's like it's this is the interest this is one of the differentiators

about bitcoin versus like everything else in the scene it's like these people are sort of just doing it out of just like innate love for and almost quote unquote innovation on almost gratitude for the change that bitcoin brought to their life and they're like i look at it as gratitude it's like they're like i am so grateful for what bitcoin has done to me i'm gonna like sort of like participate in this thing called lightning i don't make anything from it like i don't it's uh i don't gain from it and that's one of the really that's i think that's one of the things that's really fascinating about lightning that's the intention i went into it with yeah that's yeah that's what i went to it we've actually gained stuff like like even though like it's 87

percent of the total amount of transactions that we received but only nine percent of the value that nine percent is still value that we would have not have otherwise had and the overhead for making that overhead uh excuse me the overhead for making that uh value acceptable was minimal yeah i mean that's one of the other like uh the thing that's interesting to me about like i'm always on the fence about lighting because it's like on the one hand i feel like it doesn't solve a problem i have or a problem that exists like the problem that solves this fee pressure and that problem doesn't exist yet so it's like well do i get excited about that uh it doesn't solve a problem that exists in my point of view but it solves a problem that will exist if if this

if the future plays out like i expect it to well it depends on uh where the fee pressure is coming from right like as a transactor like i want as low fee pressure as possible but as somebody who's as a minor you want a little bit better yes as a hotler you want more as a minor you want more because you want more assurances that it'll be secure over time but if we're able to so So with lightning in particular and fees in particular, I believe that lightning will lead to a Jevons paradox, right? Where the utility of the lightning network leads to underlying demand of the need to open channels, which leads to higher fees.

Yeah. Do you follow? Yeah, no, it's like, I mean, I was just reading the, this like interesting, I was, I was like trying to catch up on taproot. This is like, I'm going to go off a little bit, but come back. Go off, go off. Uh, and so it's like, uh, uh, Peter Wula had this like interesting kind of way of, uh, describing like a blockchain system.

It's like sort of like this perfect court where, uh, it's like, I think he called it the court model or something where it's like, it would always rule fairly, uh, uh, you know, based on what it was. And that's, it's sort of like the way he, he described, uh, the blockchain. And so the, the point is, is that it's not so much important that everybody has the ability to go to court because most people don't go to court like in a legal situation but the ability to go to court like the threat of a court appearance makes it so most people can dictate certain actions yeah and so like in the taffret case it's like uh there'd be like the sort of

like cooperative case where most people agree and then like the uh other cases the arbitration yeah there's like the the backups wouldn't ever have to be displayed to the chain because you'd always have the option of falling back on those. So it's like this ability, it's like the presence of a plan B makes it so like plan A is sort of more lethal. And so I think that's a lot of the way I view lightning. I tend to think more custodial things will become really popular, that a lot of people do that.

But I think that the presence of a lightning, if any of the custodians ever sort of like start uh like this is this is for like you know paying for restaurant like paying for your mcdonald's like this is not a really important transaction yeah this is not like a really important thing this is just like buying food right for that level of transaction i think there will be probably like trusted third parties and i wouldn't care one bit if a trusted third party know where i ate or what plane i flew on uh most of the time right but the thing is is that the presence of a lightning network is like this court it's like hey i will go to court if you abuse me uh and lightning is there and i got a node and like and and so i mean maybe i'm a juror

in this court yeah maybe someone like me would use it all the time but like i think the presence of this court like lightning that anybody can access is going to make it so the custodians behave better it's a check check and balance basically basically yeah that's the way i do it it's a leverage card yeah fuck dude we need to do this more often i gotta i gotta come out here more i mean i love new york like uh every once in a while i mean until like i love it until you guys tell me what rent you pay i always ask and i'm like i can buy a castle for that in austin man it's not fun yeah it's not fun fuck dude no i've been i i love sitting down with you and again we we sat down what three four weeks ago yeah that's fine that was a lot of fun that's a lot of fun and

i think you approach this different than anybody i'm so happy that that's good that's interesting to hear no i did i know you never know how originally you never know if your ideas are you're a perfect example of something like everybody likes to talk to talk like oh i didn't know how it worked until i actually got down like you created a bit boy like you're creating this desktop software that that verifies that your address is part of the five three or five multisig like you are actually getting your fucking feet dirty you're getting your hands yeah trying getting into it so this is the thing i think multisig is the biggest like okay okay so here we go i'm embarrassing myself i think bitcoin multisig is the biggest problem that exists

on the planet like i think it's i think the ability to store bitcoins in a multisig It's so much more important than global warming, than wars, than anything else. So it's like I'm absolutely compelled to work on this problem. And my question is how to work on it? I've been working on it by myself. Now I'm starting to work with some companies. It's like, I don't know, just making the, I've been learning to meet some of these protocol developers. That's the big thing in the last month of my life is I've learned to use IRC.

So I can actually go and talk to these core devs now. they're like oh dude where you been man i had a thing with my like uh junction where i wanted a certain feature and like i complained about it on stack overflow and peter willa answered it's like yeah this could be implemented in the descriptor language and it's like i had no way to like like hit on a dorm but like do it peter what is the descriptor language and so fine so finally like shores provost this other core contributor like basically made the stink that i didn't know how to make and he got it implemented by andrew chow and so it's like it's a kind of like learning how to uh navigate this landscape where it's like yeah i have some features i want uh how do you

get that how do you make that happen centralization i mean it's it's governance no it's governance it's like uh it's interesting like like these first few like the last couple months i've been participating in governance a little bit and i mean yeah it's like uh it's uh it's interesting like it's very human like like like the like the the way these these sort of like new changes go to Bitcoin is like a message is sent from one person to another and it's like something that the recipient says it's a good idea and I'm going to try to do it and it's like it sort of like has to pass a series of gates right like when this I'm talking about the sorted multi descriptor like this is very detailed and so it's like interesting like

this you know someone tells Andrew how to do it like I've I made us think about it no one here heard and then and so it sort of like goes by and then like you know it becomes a pull request on GitHub, and all the main people have to check off on it, and anybody saying no could stop it, and so it's sort of interesting to see how it sort of happens, like these, yeah, it's, I don't really have a point here, but it's interesting to watch, to me the interesting thing is how human it is, it's actually individuals working together, And then individuals reviewing, it's a very individual, the interactions are one-to-one versus sort of like a board, it's very different from a boardroom.

That's one of the really interesting things, yeah, it's sort of nothing, Bitcoin is very different from a boardroom, the way governance happens, because often it's between individual people who have a disagreement. Because you have the shareholders basically being able to confirm what the boardroom wants to instill right sure sure shareholders being the full but the actual the actual uh the way the code is updated is like oftentimes very much like one-to-one like developers like making comments back and forth it's like a very important pull request and it's like uh you know it's like matt corallo and uh john newberry going back and forth and it's like you you read through it it's

like these two going at it and uh and that's sort of like is the distillation of the entire governance process is like these two individuals get nominated to like but to lock horns a little did they even get nominated or they just step up to lock horns so like now i'm the same those were the same thing in my view uh what do you mean like you can self-nominate like how come justin moon kind of in a in a system uh uh yeah i mean i think you can self-nominate like the the the most in a system based on like production it's like in a system where two people are free to produce like the most productive participants will be extremely obvious like with everyone is free to participate on equal grounds like you'll have a few people that sort of rise to the top

and so people just naturally step back and like hey sure I mean like yeah I mean when it comes to protocol development it's such a narrow skill it's like you need to learn like if you know how much Matt Cruella knows about how Linux does networking, you would barf. He knows so much. You would barf. These people, how much Peter Woola knows about

bit manipulation and algebra or something. It's just amazing. It's a highly specialized skill and it's not something that everyone should learn. It's not something that not only should everybody not only should everybody not have

to learn, but it would be ridiculous to even attempt to believe that everybody could learn yeah it's a highly highly specialized skill and so i do think it's a process where like it's sort of like out of it's it's cool it's like out of all of the hodlers it's like you get this like sort of uh sublimation of like 30 people who are who get it who somehow have this like really weird skill set and uh and like i'm on the edge like i i could be a shitty one of those i don't think i could be a good one of those so i choose i sort of choose to like stay on the application side uh and so but like so i can kind of see into it a little bit and it's it's like really i think it's really in uh it's it's

it's amazing that this sort of order like when you meet the court of alpers when you let me i feel like you can name the 20 off my head right now let me finish when you when you meet these court developers like they're they're just like really impressive and uh and uh and it's it's interesting like having worked at startups and and companies and stuff it's like when you meet the people at the top they're often not impressive and uh i mean like uh yeah i don't want to like oversell the core developers like there's flaws too but uh but like they're very impressive i know exactly where they're very expert you're talking about your your prototypical startup founder who yeah it's like you meet this guy and he's a snake yes yeah he's a snake uh and so i think it's cool that

uh like that's been a that's been a thing i don't like to like maybe use the word bullish but it's like been like kind of a bullish thing where it's like yeah the deeper i get into the development community uh like i remember at the breaking bitcoin i was like standing with a group of people uh who are really sophisticated and it's like i was listening to this conversation it's like man uh it's like really uh like these guys are taking this really seriously and uh and they're really thinking through uh what they're doing and i i i think like when i have these interactions i'm like okay this is the right place to be well and any of you freaks have been listening to tales from the crypt for the last two years will know that matt corallo is one of our first repeating

guess and he came on in november october of 2017 said bitcoin has a five percent chance of succeeding and peter wola is another dev like this like right now like he was i saw him getting into it with neil wood fine on twitter about like yeah this is an interesting point i mean right so the interesting debates like is bitcoin more social and economics than it is technical right yeah and that is the question I mean that's one of the questions is like do the uh I don't want to judge anybody here I'll just like say that no you're not judging anybody it's like the question is like do the core developers of bitcoin the people who are like the masters of the technology like understand why it works I think fundamentally that's what it is and so it's like someone who comes from an

economic point of view would say I mean it's like it's like the uh like and I'll come out and say what you're trying to say like i've come out and say like yes you so as somebody who has come from finance jumped into tech and into tech in the most surface level cursory way possible um like looking at bitcoin what is more important the the social the social aspect of it or the tech aspect of it it's hard to say because the tech the tech aspect of it is sort of piecemeal technologies over time that i've worked and it's just a perfect combination of these technologies and then the social aspect is something that i think may be way heavier but what is the lowest barrier of technical capabilities that you need to have the system persist into

perpetuity that is the question yeah I mean it's I mean I think it's reflected by the fact that many people get interested in Bitcoin and then their interest persists for like a different reason it's like came for the blank stayed for the blank yeah I think it sort of reflects that it's like the essentially these like developers like came for some reason probably like some of intellectual curiosity or something else and maybe they stayed for a different reason and you also see this by the people who left bitcoin like the vitalik buderins of the world right like he was like a great magazine writer incredible writer incredible technical writer yeah he's like aaron

van weird i'm like before that i think like i wasn't around back i'm class of 2018 so i don't know but uh but yeah so it's like in a large class of these people left and uh and i mean that's a big yeah i like i think nick carter had a good quote uh tweet recently where he's like people think of uh like for example the the quote we started with earlier would sort of describe a bitcoin developer a core developer as like an idealist right like somebody who is who has these convictions that aren't don't necessarily align with the real world but which uh are sort of like utopian in some sense and carter had this great point was like no these these people are like techno realists like they are they are very in touch with all

the things that can and will go wrong and that's definitely my experience it's like every time i try to like push something like hey i want to do this on the application side it's like you're going to get wrecked in xyz directions and it's like fuck uh but that's that's very much my opinion of my experience with them is they're realists well this goes back to the sovereign individual ones that are left the sovereign individual individual thesis is such that we are going to transition into an age where there's so much information there's so much noise and signal and fake news and literally information literally bits and bytes to take in for each individual that it is going to be hard for each individual to discern on themselves let alone the collective

to discern on itself and that's what that book really preaches is being able to discern for yourself what is happening and sort of not a reclusion to the self but a a confirmation in the self and like hey these are first principle uh beliefs that i have and i'm gonna move outward from here like i can describe the world from these first principle beliefs and yeah it's it gets crazy man once once it all opens up to everything and and you have like the babble situation that we're talking about earlier like that is very possible in this internet connected age where people can get very confused but i also think that's the beauty of it people can either get very confused or you can get a very concise that's why a standard of value is important

right right exactly standard of value is the thing that like jumps the babel problem uh uh when everyone when everyone has a way of like uh bartering yeah of uh of sort of squaring their transactions and squaring their financial interests that's really important is this the basis for what we do as humans? I think so I mean

yeah I mean I think there's definitely a case to be made that like when you so I gave this talk this is going to be my new passion project is I'm going to go to shitcoin events and give maximum speeches I really like if any of you freaks run a shitcoin event please invite me

so I went to this it was like a Texas blockchain conference or something it was run by the University of Texas and so I gave it was a blockchain conference so I gave the talk about Bitcoin the only blockchain that matters I walked through like a couple uh uh points about it like you know it's like there's two big ones is like you know because everyone's pitching these like you know put corn on the blockchain and stuff and it's like there's two big problems like one is like it's really hard to get information into a blockchain because you have to like if you if you if you get information in you trust who gave it to you and you lose the trustless property right how do you enforce what a computer says in the physical world and that's the other problem it's

enforcement so uh it's the oracle problem and the enforcement problem like enforcement is like i got a blockchain marty i got a blockchain this is i own all of new york it says you don't make it could you please vacate like i got a blockchain says i own this place no it doesn't matter uh cause it's not enforceable. So, so yeah, that's the, that's my new,

that's, that's going to be my new gig is I'm going to go, I'm going to go to these, uh, kind of what we were talking about just before that. I had a reason for like bringing that up. You're going to meetups and I don't know. This is,

this is when, this is when the podcast starts to end. I remember this happened last time. I didn't remember my trains of thought. We're two and a half hours in. We're two and a half hours in. Yeah. So,

uh, no, you're, what were you talking about? We're talking about, like, self-realization. And then in the context of blockchains. Yeah, I forget what it was. I had, like, a really good point to make at the end of this, but, like...

Well, let me ramble right now, and maybe you'll come up with your point. Sorry. Yeah, it's... That was better than the first. That was way better than the first. no this is this is old tftc right here like this is what we like i fucking love this right now justin's in town for five hours i got a plane in three hours to go back oh fuck marty you're gonna like stroller me over here i'm i don't know i will i will get you to

that airport no matter what don't worry if you pass out i will put you we were we were together jfk had a layover from uh from riga riga last year you jameson that was like one of the biggest shows i've ever seen uh getting through that i was somehow able i lied and i was able to get through the line i uh that's the last time i've gone around the world i can't i can't travel that's the other thing like i like to stay static here in new york like i just want to yeah you got a good spot i'm in like the opposite point of view where it's like austin is cheaper so it's like you can sort of you have the leeway to go and travel more so this is something i'd like to do more is like it's fun when i can get in the same like physical location as somebody for a couple days

and like go and work with them so if i continue doing this like education like one thing yeah if i continue doing this education stuff i'd love to like go and travel a little bit and like go and meet some of the people that work on bitcoin and try to like pull some of the knowledge out because that's one of the problems in bitcoin is like you have these people like you know jonas jonas Snelly or Matt Corallo who have like just immense amounts of knowledge and one of the challenges is how to like basically drain them right you want to like drain it out of them and fill the rest of the community with it I recommend whiskey and beer it helps I'm telling you dude it helps believe it or not if you can believe it after this conversation I mean I believe it to some

extent but when it comes to like certain topics I think it's a hindrance like if I if I try to go make a windows build right now i'm pretty sure of my junction my sweet sweet junction it could hurt it could hurt yeah so where does junction end up like what is your this is what i want what is your ideal vision of junction like what there's like two visions it's like uh it's a question of where to put like one of the questions is like where should your multi-sig wallet run uh should it run on your desktop computer or should it actually run on your nodal uh like in a world when you have to plug in your hardware wallet into the USB port

it probably has to be running on the desktop because you have to have actual access to that USB port and a program running yeah like a program running on the desktop could do it to some extent but you'd have to be using like trezor.io which is sketchy because

they could be like they can sort of oversee what you're doing you'd have to use one of their web services and so So on one hand, if you're going to be using the USB port, actually plugging it in, you probably want it running desktop. But I don't want to run...

I actually don't want to ever plug stuff into my computer. I would rather communicate with QR codes, honestly. The QR code is the... This is the way you'd set up a wallet. In Junction, you'd say, hey, I want to do a 3 or 5 wallet. I'd say, okay. You'd choose the network, mainnet. You'd choose the...

You want native segwit? Gotcha. Okay. And so then you have to add these devices to participate and so the first device you'd say like hey I'm gonna add a QR wallet right and so it would open up the camera on your laptop and you'd scan a public key from your Hardware wallet and you'd have like a screen on the hardware like BitBoy can kind of do this BitBoy is a piece of shit Let's be honest. BitBoy is beautiful. It's it's it's glorious too and like Spectre product from crypto advance I'm really excited about this product when it releases.

It's really cool because it has the iPhone 4 screen. He's from Switzerland, right? No, he's from, he's Russian. Russian. Stefan Snigerev. He's one of the best. I met him in San Francisco. So I met him, I went to a Bitcoin hackathon.

The first thing I ever did in Bitcoin, I went to a building on Bitcoin conference and the hackathon was before the conference. And so I show up and I'm like, I sort of told this on Stefan Lever's podcast, because I walked around and was like talking to people and was like hey what are you doing and everyone's like super introverted right and they're like look at their toes I'm gonna build a chrome extension to like you know do whatever uh and he's and then I get to Stefan he's like

this Russian dude and he's like got this lap full of hardware crazy blinky shit you know he's like I'm gonna build the first lightning hardware wallet and I'm like I'm working with you I am working with you and we've been like great friends ever since uh and so he's he's working on a hardware wallet that's qr based and that's the way i would like to interact with it and if you had a hardware wallet like that and we're actually pretty close to this right so you could run you could run a junction you could run a multi-sig wallet if it was only cold cards you could run it on your nodal uh and though you basically just visit a website and the website would be like hey upload a file from your sd card either upload your public key to register the app

the the wallet or upload a transaction to register a new signature yeah to sign and so like that's a real air gap and you could run that on your nodal and it could just serve as a website because you don't actually have to have access to any physical ports on your computer like like a usb port and so So, yeah, so that's a pretty interesting point. Like, if you could have, if Spectre launches their QR-based one, and ColdCard already has it. Let's give them the QR-based. Tresor T is going to have an SD card reader.

Like, you could do a three of five with three AirGap devices, two of which use SD cards, one of which uses QR codes. And then, so those would be the three, like, active devices. And you could just generate the last two, one with dice and one with a seed picker or something, and just put them on crypto steel or something, or just put them on paper. And those would be your final two signers. Those are your backups. And so that would be kind of a cool way for Junction to work,

is that it would just be something that runs on your nodal, your casa hodl or casa node, or my node. My node BTC is a really cool project. Relatively new, right? Yeah, it's relatively new. I've looked at the code actually uh and it's a pretty sleek interface right you can like it's plug and show yeah he did a he did a good job on it he did a good job on it and like it's sort of like the noddle so the cool thing I like about it what you want the cool thing I like about it is it's freemium so you can try it for free and if you want basically to be able to connect remotely

to your node either via vpn or tor you pay and that's a great model you can try it uh and then And if you like it, you can pay for a little more premium access. And so I think that's a cool, it's a different business model. Like most of the business models so far are like, buy this box, right? And in order to do buy this box, you, the firmware is kind of closed source, oftentimes. It's all good software in the future, right? Yeah. It's all good software in the future.

Yeah. So like with any hardware you want, I think this is one of the interesting things is like You can have, yeah, it's like a freemium thing, you can try it on your own hardware. If you want them to ship you one, you pay the full price. If you have a Raspberry Pi, like I have so many hard drives and Raspberry Pis sitting around, it's embarrassing. So I actually set up two of these last week. And yeah, so I think like that's a question, it's like where do you want your multi-sig,

like the thing tracking your balances, where do you want that to live? Do you want like, yeah, I mean, it's a question like do you, this is what I was getting back to earlier, like what the fuck does it mean to run a full node? does it mean that I have to have a separate index that I can query against, like an Electrum server? Like, the real reason is that, like, Bitcoin Core can't look up an address. That would be called an address index.

It can't do that. And so you have this, like, separate protocol called, like, Electrum. And it's like, well, is that what it means to run a full node? Do I have to run that? Or, like, can I talk directly? Am I sketched out if Bitcoin Core,

like, if someone got access to my Bitcoin Core, they'd be able to see every UTXO I own? Well, that's the whole point of Bitcoin Core, is that it can keep track of every UTXO I own. That's consensus. Not necessarily consensus, but that's like governance. That's the mechanism through which people are participating in governance. They care about what they own. And so this is the big question for me.

It's like, as an application developer, what does it mean to run a full node? What do I want the people, like, are they going to be running on a desktop? Are they going to need to run it? One case is like you just do a one-click like Pierre Richard's Node Launcher. The other case is, like, you need this massive software stack running, like, five different nodes, and the user doesn't understand any of it. They're very different security models, kind of.

It's all redundancy-based. I mean, it's confusing. Like, I'm honestly, like, kind of a little confused about it. And so, yeah, like, I'm trying to figure out, do I need the Electrum server, do I not? Do you think the solution's more complex, more simple? I personally am a minimalist, so, like, for minimalism reasons, I don't like lightning.

like it just complicates my life uh for minimalism reasons i don't like multi-sig but for a few reasons i like multi-sig like i i want the to be all sleep at night so it's like i want to cut off all the chap i can and uh and uh and yeah so i think do you think we get to a future where single-sig custodianship of these UTXOs will afford enough protection where we don't have to worry about multi-sig and shit like that? I mean, I think a different version of the world will be that multi-sig looks on-chain the same as single-sig.

So Taproot gets us close to there, but you end up having to have an interactive protocol when the number of signers does not equal the number of total keys. right so if you say like like two of three multisig right that makes sense though right well uh it's a big it's a big problem so interactive is a problem because it means like to do this uh i forget exactly the constraints in tablet but i think it basically means like to do a signature you need to be online basically and so you can't like do that in a bank vault uh and i'm now at the point where i forget like i'm not uh speaking terribly

accurately but like this is uh an interactive protocol is tough when you want to execute it in a bank vault where you're offline and so i think this is like part of the way there like i think in the future you'd get to a point where uh everything looks like single sig uh the on-chain costs the on-chain data produced it all looks like single sig but there's actually like more complex policies uh in the background and maybe like the absolute degenerate case meaning like everything breaks down you can have one person sign it right so it'd start off as like a three or five and then go to like a two or three and then they go up one on one like after time locks right so that one on one would have to be like one n of one a two n who knows what it would

like that that like last signature that you could sign yeah that would be specific within the multisig or anybody like that would be well probably not anybody but like it just it really depends if it's an individual if it's an individual it can be anybody if it's an institution it cannot be anybody uh the point is like i think in the future we'll have more of these cases where like by default it's like a sort of like a large multi-sig quorum uh and like if that degrades you can have uh backups that are less likely to fail and that's the kind of the future i see where uh Yeah, I mean it's like I think the goal in Bitcoin is to make it so you can't lose the stuff. And like that's like sort of that's what kind of one of the

protocol goals is if you can compose like these scripts in a way that you can always have like backups. Like a smart wallet could always have like backup so if you fail here you can always recover there. And and then in the applications that's the protocol side and the application side you just want to make it really hard for one of those layers to fail it's like these two sort of have to go together like the protocol wants to make it so you can have backups and the application makes has to make it like you don't need backups they have both have completely different goals yeah they completely even goals but together they can be like well you get the best of both worlds if they sort of harmonize

so that's kind of like the way i see it going is like hopefully you have this redundancy but hopefully you have software that makes it so you never have to take advantage of that redundancy. Like, it just works. And so that's when it's like, like, being on bank is a burden. Like, the way I look at it is like, man, I would like it if it were easier.

It's hard. And so I think hopefully the concert of these two, the combination of these two sort of, like, independent efforts can make it so that's easier. And that's a world where I can see Bitcoin being really mainstream, where like it's not as scary like that's a cypherpunk future like when we were talking about like whether we whether we can or cannot uh attain the cypherpunk aspect of bitcoin's

aspirations uh like where public where private key security is easy like that's a cypherpunk future where we do have that sovereignty and that's something i'm really excited i hope we can achieve that so cypherpunk uh first financial second over financial first cypherpunk second I mean I don't know I would go that way I would go that way I think so I guess maybe

I'd be on the opposite side like I think people only care like number go up is like the only reason people care well like to get

number go up number go up is something we can't handle right like number go up is

either it does or it doesn't and whether it does or it doesn't is very consequential to some people's

ability to believe whether or not Bitcoin will be successful or not in the future. It's really tough because people have sort of been trained to not care about Bitcoin's value propositions. It's like, you've been trained to trust the state will take care of everything. Or that your employer,

even absent that, your employer will take care of everything. The people who work at Google are like, it's like a daycare. It's unbelievable. have you ever gone around their campus it's amazing it's not a workplace it's a campus so yeah it's like an extended childhood

in a sense it's like they are your parents and so it's like I think a lot of people have been trained to have been systematically desensitized to Bitcoin's value propositions which are like

independence, self-sovereignty critical thinking yeah and so uh so yeah it's like it is a challenge to get people to respond to those things because i think they've been there's been a systematic effort to make people uh not value those things and uh and yeah i mean that's one of the tough like that's one of the fun things about like i've worked mostly on the education side in terms of the technical side the technical helping helping people who already are interested in bitcoin understand it better and so if i continuing the education stuff i would it would be cool to start more to work more on like

helping people who don't understand understand it like that would be uh exciting more exciting than what you've done to date i don't know if that's possible justin i mean like the biggest problem in bitcoin you want to onboard people you want new people involved well can you put that burden on yourself that's the other question is that burden on you or should you subject yourself it's not a burden it's like uh how effective is exactly any one strategy exactly how how effective can one strategy how effective or ephemeral will it be yeah so i mean this is a big i have no idea like uh i think i but i do think that the people who are effective at this are the most maybe not the most important but probably the most important like if you can if

you can make the most high leverage who would be the most important people if you can if you can make this pitch to people like hey this is valuable uh this is something that you should engage in i don't see what would be a more valuable role than that i don't know if i can disagree so like that comes to the whole like are we just not many people like who believes bitcoins the end all be we may be wrong like imagine that you may be very wrong imagine that two years from now we're most likely like if you're talking about like a jersey city licking our wounds the devils are gonna win it this year i swear sound money it had its moment it had its moment kids we could have brought sound money into the world five years ago

fucking the fucking jersey devils ruined it justin it's a problem it's a potential justin i'm hammered right now we have our table is a bunch of let me just narrate this is a bunch of empty bottles it's a ton of empty i got a i got a flight in two and a half hours so i think i'm gonna have to uber there and you're definitely gonna have to uber there we're gonna go upstairs we're gonna get some pizza first oh that was better than the first um this is where i'm gonna end it this is the last i'm gonna say i love you freaks this has been uh an incredible conversation and it's always a great like i didn't even have to do anything just was like yo can i come hang out it was like uh i'm gonna hit record is that cool and here we are hey you ordered pizza that's

uh it's more than most people do peace and love freaks i love all y'all take it easy give me it give me it give me what