TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #82: Ketominer + Askuwheteau

Episode Date: July 2, 2019

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Ketominer and Askuwheteau, the team behind Nodl.it, to discuss how Nodl came to be, their recent partnership with Samourai Wallet, the freedom that Bitcoin enables, potentially moving from hardware to software in the future, the new Raspberry Pi, and much more. Check out Nodl: https://nodl.it/ Follow Ketominer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ketominer Follow Askuwheteau on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IAskuwheteau Follow Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/matt_odell Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Shoutout to our sponsor, Cash App. Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty here to introduce this week's sponsor. This episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by the Cash App. Freaks already know it's been the number one app in the, excuse me, the number one finance app in the App Store for the last two years, and they keep on getting better. Their first P2P payments app that allows you freaks to buy Bitcoin. Recently, they added deposits, so not only can you buy in withdrawal, now you can deposit Bitcoin onto the Cash App as well. So they're completing the circle there. I participated in the Cash App Friday last Wednesday. It was a Cash App Friday on a Wednesday, but it was fun. I received, I believe, $5 worth of Bitcoin directly to my

cash tag, which is really cool. On top of this, they have the Boost program where you can go to merchants that they're partnering with like chick-fil-a whole foods door dash taco bell there's the list goes on any coffee shop you can go save a dollar use the boost card save some money stack some sats with that go to the app store download the app the cash app today and use the code the promo code stacking sats you will get five dollars uh and then we'll give a five dollar to a charity of our choice we're we're deciding our charities right now we've got it it settled down to a few. But yes, you will get $5 if you have not downloaded it yet. And $5 will get to a charity that we choose. Stacking Sats is the promo code. So go download

it today. Use the promo code. I hope you guys enjoy this episode with the Noddle team. Michael and Esquieu are two dudes that are really pushing for in the hardware and software areas of Bitcoin and user privacy and consumer hardware. And this conversation was an incredible one a long time coming matt joined me for it and we love this team and had a great almost two-hour conversation so enjoy what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt we're in a very foreign studio in a hotel in san francisco across the street from the san francisco mint very fitting matt extremely fitting obviously we got matt odell here in the studio we're sitting down uh with two guests the founding

team from noddle michelle and escueu did i say that right hello freaks what's going on hi guys michael so uh we met uh for you freaks who don't know you might know i don't know if i tweeted about it i think i did but in december i was in paris with my wife and i think there was a bent about it yeah they actually tweeted the vests yeah the vests remember yeah yeah the Binodal Vest. Still have those in my apartment, by the way. So I met you guys in Paris in the middle of the Yellow Vest movement. I walked up a very, very long hill to come meet you guys to drink some beers at an Irish bar. Yeah, we actually met before in Riga without knowing it.

Yes, yes, yes. We met in Riga first, but we had our first very long conversation in December in Paris. Before we jump into Nodal and everything you guys are building, how did you guys get into Bitcoin? What drew you to this? yeah so first time i heard about bitcoin it was worth like one cent of a dollar probably and it was close to impossible to buy you had to go to an atm in second world and buy it with linden dollars so i gave up and i just didn't look at the technicalities of the thing and didn't know anything about mining if if i did i probably wouldn't be here today and then i met a guy

in one of my jobs that was all into mining. It was ASIC period already, like Spandulis was a thing. And we started talking about making a hardware wallet. It was long before Ledger and Trezor had any product. We wanted to make a credit-size e-ink hardware wallet, which was close to impossible with the tech in 2012. of so we like the it was not going really up in value so we gave up and a few years later was i started building full nodes because i wanted to apply what andreas was explaining his book and i

needed a hardware full node and yeah that's when i really started so it was slightly more than two years ago i i really committed to bitcoin full time now that's actually what i remember from meeting you guys first. You guys were at Riga, you were outside and you had your node running outside on the go. And that was the first, this was even before

I think it was before I had Akasa, but it was the first time a dedicated hardware node popped into my head. I guess it was one of the last prototypes that he had. Because you hadn't launched Noddle yet, right? No, no, no. It was like, I don't know

when the conference was like september you don't have a name back back then yeah we got the name during the conference actually um but um no no it was like the last prototype and maybe like a couple weeks after there was the hcpp conference in prague and um he went on your pod well no on that sorry on the wcn and um people like max and etc started pushing him saying you should do this as a business kind of thing that's when i heard about it i think yeah and then you put up the website there were a couple pictures screen on the website horrible website that just had like the dream list of features on it well so before we get to the nod on the dream list and like it's past upset how

did you two meet in front of beers yeah yeah we we drank beers basically at the bitcoin at the paris bitcoin meetup for the past probably a couple years something like that and um you know like i read about bitcoin in the newspaper like i don't have a technical background so like i had to wait for like mass media to really put it in front of you to like start digging into it and um i was curious so i headed up to the bitcoin meetup to learn more about it and start talking to people and eventually that's how we met and um you know we've been going there for the past couple years every month yeah no it was um it was cool when we back to nato when we first met up in paris you brought out like the different stages the different prototypes that you had and it's

crazy to see how quickly you guys have iterated and built new boxes so i guess michael for you like what do you when you're building this hardware what are you looking for like what's the hardest parts what's sort of the process of building this thing so the the first prototype i had two years uh ago it was april 2017 and it was syncing in about a week uh i mean when i say syncing it's a bad word for initial block download which is not syncing at all actually but whatever and uh when this hardware died one year later i wanted to have something which syncs in less than a week and that was the main criteria for the product so i started iterating on many different hardware like probably 40 different combinations of storage and cpu boards with another constraint

which was i wanted something the size of a raspberry pi so it fits in any standard box i can buy on the market because i didn't want to produce a box myself obviously so yeah we that's how we ended up with the ROG 64 and an SSD for storage and it syncs in about two days if you don't do IBD over TOR. If you do IBD over TOR, good luck with that. And if you use the fast cable, right? That's a miss actually. It doesn't help so much because what counts in IBD is latency not bandwidth so you get the same latency over usb 2 than you get over usb 3 yeah you would probably have like five percent improvement maybe 10 max if you have a very fast internet connection and

if you're very lucky in pure selection yeah because i think i feel like it took me it took me like it felt like an eternity but it took me a little bit less than three days and i i upgraded to gigabit uh while the noddle was in the mail yeah so i mean it's just gonna be for a month and then i still have gigabit now yeah the you know the problem is you you depend on the luck you have in bitcoin d choosing your peers you can choose some peers in a very far country very low bandwidth and very shitty latency and you can't do anything about it except like checking how fast your sync goes and kicking the peers by hand

so no one would do that anyway so yeah if I run the same sync on the same internet connection it can take 40 hours one day and 4 days the other I feel like the Tor IBD

don't do that Noddle could be improving on that because it's so easy to run your node through Tor on Noddle like i feel like there's a large amount of new high performance like pretty high performance uh tor nodes that are serving blocks right like presumably yeah the problem is not the the node serving the blocks is every relay in between and uh and another problem is it's true

for lnd i'm not sure it's true for bitcoin d uh lnd when the circuit uh dies because of one node going offline in the chain it doesn't renegotiate the the circuit you have to restart lnd to to reconnect so some people are complaining like they had 50 online peers and then they go to 10 because they're running tall and because uh just probably one relay died somewhere and they have to restart LND to recover all the peers. Oh, shit. It's a big pain. It sounds like a pain in the ass.

Yeah. So... Tor is made for short transactions, not for long, persistent connections. So is that an issue that we're relying on Tor so much? I don't think so. I mean, Tor is a living project. It will fix that.

LND can fix it on its side as well. So, no, it's not really an issue. It will just improve over time. and we can probably do things at the at the system level to improve it as well i mean that could kind of be an argument for i mean one of the reasons i love the noddle is that you you do sync from scratch and you do verify from scratch but that could kind of be an argument for for uh like precinct nodes yeah so what we're planning we are planning to change that after talking with staticus in germany uh what they what they want to do with the beatbox base is to ship it pre-synced

but at setup time you can choose to erase what is pre-synced and sync it yourself and you can still revalidate regardless anyway and you can still revalidate regardless and and with james for assume tx valid that's what i was just going to say would you prefer assume utxo than having We've met in Amsterdam, and yeah, it's totally something we want to use, Assume Tx Valid. Because you might be able to make that modular like Neutrino was before it was officially merged, correct? I don't know. I mean, you could just put your own Assume UTXO in it.

Yeah. I mean, that's what James wanted to avoid. I mean, it's supposed to be... He didn't want everyone to do their own, so... Yeah, no, it should be hard-coded in the binary, but... No, but that is an interesting trade-off. Do you want the responsibility of having the initial sync in your hands or assume UTXO would sort of democratize that risk?

It's all about trade-offs. When you download an APK from the Google Store for an Apple Source application, you have no idea what you are running, actually. And that's one big issue, for example, with wallets on Android because you can verify the source code on GitHub, but nothing guarantees you that the APK which is actually on the store

is the result of building the code you've seen That's what's nice about that Samurai has they're both on F-Droid and you can download the APK from GitHub Yeah, totally Good segue there, Samurai Build it yourself If you have an infinite amount of time

So it was announced recently that you guys are partnering with Samurai to help them with their dojo box We are so fucking excited about this Swearing is a lot here It's totally fine It's more of an issue. We get yelled at for cussing. Yeah, so we share so many values with those guys

without even knowing it before we met. We met in Paris and we agreed, like, handshake agreement that we have to build this together. And the BitSeed news, rest in peace. Yeah, so what happened to BitSeed? I have no idea. I would like to know more because maybe it's something that can happen to us.

i would like to know it beforehand but yeah i'm really sorry for those guys because they were probably actually one of the first hardware full nodes on the market a long time ago yeah yeah and it's sad to see them go and uh but yeah on the other side we are now the only manufacturer of some way hardware so they also got like stagnant they lost focus yeah i feel like nothing happened for many many months or years and uh and the product was pretty limited it was Bitcoin only, no lightning yeah exactly

it got very stagnant so how do you guys avoid staying stagnant what's your sort of mentality when it comes to building this hardware and what are the boundaries that you're working on we want to build the most comprehensive full node on the market we don't want to

forbid people from running things they want to run but to provide good enough support we want to package the application ourselves so today we have bitcoin d and lnd tomorrow we have sea lightning maybe eclair maybe btcd maybe bitcoin we are not close to other other components it will always stay a bitcoin only product but not a bitcoin core only product we are open to other implementations what i what i like is i feel i i feel like your your company uh you you fall like right in between the it's like accessible for mainstream but it's it's like a more um

like a more dedicated type of person but but still they don't have to be like a full techie but it's not just completely sugar-coated for you so you so you have so much choice you get to pick like what packages you install and stuff like that but like you're not building it yourself or you know so like you have obviously there'll always be a contingent of bitcoiners that will want to build their own hardware and there'll always be a contingent that want their hand held the whole way and like noddle kind of sits like right in the middle where like you don't want your hand completely held but like you wanted like a little bit you know yeah so what we are planning to a future for a future release is to like in the initial setup wizard now which

is non-existent it's just set your admin password we'll add like like a selection of autonomy you want to get the zero level will be like do everything for me and it will pre-install So everything starts to sync and you have nothing to do. And the maximum level will be just initialize SSH connection and do whatever you want on the box. I love it. And same from privacy. Currently, the Tor implementation is for LND and Bitcoin D only.

And I want a cursor when you set up the device, the level of privacy you want to get. And the maximum level will be just IP tables at the system level redirecting any outgoing connection to Tor. fuck yes hell yeah even for apt updates you know like every single connection going out of the device will be over so how are uh how are you guys prioritizing all this like your small team what what like what do you see as like the most pressing issues and you get worked on now telegram who who shouts louder gets the feature first it's just usually max right just yeah yeah probably

No, I mean, EPS was a long-requested feature. Everybody wanted EPS before seeing what it does. And now everybody wants something else. So we are going with Electrum X. By the way, I would like to cut short the controversy over Electrum X. Yes, it's made by a big blocker and a shitcoiner, but it's what Electrum officially supports. Yeah, so let's dive into the problem with the Electrum personal server.

has been DDoS attacked pretty consistently for the last... Well, not EPS hasn't, but the public service. No, the issue with EPS is that you have to hard-code the XPUBs of your wallets in the configuration file and re-scan the blockchain. And ElectrumX and ElectrumRust server just index the whole thing, and you can use any wallet afterward.

So, yes, ElectrumX is slower, is maybe not such a good program as Electrum REST server, but on the other side, it implements all the APIs that Electrum needs, and every time Electrum needs a new API, they just ask the guy and he does it. Because he knows if he doesn't, they will just fork it off and make another product.

Just be worthless. So how have things been so far since we last met in June? I remember we met in the bar and you were like, should we buy ads on TFTC I was like Matt's definitely just going to talk about the noddle all the time so I don't think you have to worry about it it's definitely what happened

well let's talk about our nodes our node that we gave to a friend who's been running to it you build a piece of hardware that now is running 1% of the liquidity on the lightning network how does that feel as a builder and somebody that made this product

I'm just ready to disappear the day it crashes so does it put a lot of pressure on you now in that yeah i when i've seen this guy uh building up these channels what the fuck is going on here i don't want that i that that's that was the main driver to implement the static channel backups fast you wanted it you wanted it you like said you didn't want it but you also wanted it but but now now i think we'll just bootstrap a very exclusive club of one percenters in in another customers so we advise everyone to to to go to one percent of the lighting network on his another we we should be the dominant node on the on the

lighting network yeah so other than being stressed like how does it feel does it feel uh it's so very stressful i don't sleep at night i mean i became an alcoholic can we talk about this alcohol for a second oh yeah short pause to give a shout out to satoshi gin london dry gin uh half liter 44 alcohol by volume it is delicious and as you can see it's already making me slur it is fucking drink responsibly and you guys you guys met the guys behind this right yeah so they are driven like by the the complexity and the the beautifulness of the satoshi's white paper there is a text in German on the bottom. You can Google translate it later. Basically, they went to Sicily and selected the best blood oranges they could find, and they are making

this near Stuttgart, if I remember correctly. Excuse me, I just have to butt in here. I can't read German, but this is the dopest description of Satoshi I've ever seen. The first sentence is, Satoshi Nakamoto, das phantom yes das phantom he's a phantom i love it yeah they say something about genius later in the text and yeah the bottle has like a block stream satellite a moon a rocket like all the all the popular culture of of bitcoin is on there yeah i would like buy that clean energy unwrapped like as a art piece hydropower right here there's a yeah it's a watermill yeah Very subtle.

It's all in the details. And they didn't even bother translating the website in anything other than German. No, I love it. Let the product do the speaking. It's a very good product. It tastes very good. Yeah. I usually don't drink gin.

It makes me angry. He bought some bullet because he wasn't going to drink gin. Everybody says, like, I don't like gin because it's bitter, but this one is different. Yeah. It's got a good mango citrus taste to it. Not mango. That's what I'm looking for. Grapefruit.

Grapefruit. There we go. It's definitely got grapefruit. yeah blood orange grapefruit that's what it is, it's blood orange and they also make blood orange liqueur which is with orange labels on it

by the way kudos for making only one bottle and adding stickers for different products on it very good idea and the guys are extra nice, they were like making people try it in Essen for blockchain hotel

conference and in Munich for lightning hack day so yeah thank you thank you for bringing it uh and enjoying it with us in this conversation um back to bitcoin though like again you guys are building this hardware when i met in france in december like you could tell you guys are very passionate about this so what like philosophically made you to build hardware in particular for bitcoin like what what drives you we were we met during the midst of the yellow yellow vest movement and had some interesting things to say about that so yeah so basically i'm i'm coming for like from

electronics initially i started learning electronics when i was a child and uh never stopped um i had a very good mentor he's like more than 80 years old now he started electronics before it was called electronics it was a low you had high currents and low currents so he was in low currents like relays and stuff you know before tubes and transistors and yeah he taught me like all the basics you have to know to to do electronics and and another thing i was passionate about was programming i started programming and with a pen and paper because i didn't have a computer at home and uh how does microcontroller how does that work yeah yeah did you what did did you say pen and paper the best computer yeah i was like writing programs in basic on

in a notebook and uh once a month we were going to some friends who had a computer and i could try my programs on the computer how uh how often would they go off without a hitch uh not very often what was that like it was like simple stupid programs you know like kids kids stuff so it wasn't so hard yeah and uh my only regret is i didn't realize back then that very something called the assembly language and that you go can go much deeper in the hardware and i learned that like 15 years later so basically wasted 15 years of my life with high level programming languages is that a waste though do you think you learned yeah yeah i i think i could be much further if i if i went deeper back then yeah but yeah and then like microcontrollers like peak and

The 68HC11 came out for a reasonable price. So I started programming like chips. And it blended like electronics and programming world. And then I made some like web development for some company and had to host the program. So I started hosting and networking. And basically Bitcoin is combining all of this. It's hardware, it's software, and it's networking.

so it's the first thing in which I don't feel bored because it combines everything I like so you're into this just from it piques your interest from everything you're interested in from a purely technical point of view it's a beautiful object

so is there anything philosophical to drive you towards it like do you believe in Bitcoin as sound money Bitcoin as freedom of speech money so I discovered that later so yeah I spend a lot of time in the open source environment in Paris, like all these

Linux users groups and an association of people defending free software and libre software. But I was always on the, more of the hacker side, like I wanted them more to, do you remember the period of DECSS?

It was about cracking the DVD encryption so you can rip your DVDs. So I was wearing that t-shirt in the meetings and I felt like not in my place because they were only about open source software but not about real freedom and liberty and when i went to hcpp 17 first time in my life i discovered that actually this anarchist movement is what i was always looking for and this is my anger of of going into bitcoin because i think bitcoin is the ultimate tool for

for self-sovereignty and anarchy well thank you for your help um your product's been incredible and now it's funny seeing the different ways in which people that's what this whole goddamn podcast is about is finding the different ways in which people find bitcoin and you know it's funny we were again going back to yellow vest movement like we were talking like maybe like bitcoin is a solution for these people you're like yeah they'll probably never get it they're just like rioting to riot uh and yeah yeah we have this culture of protesting and rioting in france unfortunately they don't see much more than i mean they don't think it through and why why is that What happened?

What's the mindset in France? It's an accumulation of things and unsuccessful governments that screw things up. I don't know. I don't want to go into politics. Okay. You don't have to do that.

Maybe you will. Well, what drives you? What drives you to this? I don't know. I guess it's just like one tool that you could use fairly easily at least that's what we want to do we want to make it easier for people to do it

and I think you don't have to be technical at all and like if we succeed we'll probably make it available to people who aren't technical at all I think that's something that we're interested in doesn't necessarily look that obvious

right now because it's really new it's only six months in but we do want to make it part of the tool set for people to do it and i guess like where we're trying to go potentially in the next few months is um selling like mobility so there's a lot of people who are going to want to use these tools without even having them in their own homes and that's maybe something that we want to build going forward so do you uh look to apps like zap um people building things like zap to help you

guys out there because it is interesting uh how all this stuff plays together you guys are working working on the hardware side and um being able to connect to your node from from home via another app or you guys think about building something yourselves well you think about hosting right that's that's what you're mentioning yeah i mean like what i mean your earlier question like we got a ton of stuff on the list um how do we prioritize i don't know because i mean there's so much stuff you just can't do it all um we're both building a business and we have to grow the business itself and we have to focus on the product right now i mean the past few months we've only focused on on the product itself um we're coming out with new products basically that's

one thing we're focused on and part of it is the cloud and the server um that will be like complimentary to what the box offers right now oh yeah you know um fuck yeah so what uh again like so the business side what's it been like building the business side where like building a business having to meet margins having to make profits having to think having to stay lean we work all the time and we have fun all the time you know it's like love it it's not a it's a job and it's not and maybe for the first time at least for myself but probably the same for you it's um we're just i mean we want to keep it as long as we can it's fucking awesome how crazy is this is our monday right now we're in a hotel in san francisco talking about the fucking mint which

by the way it looks a little bit decrepit now you know used to make currency i don't think they still make currency there anymore right it's a personification of the Kang financial structure in this world this whole block

is a fucking shithole it is disgusting hey I don't want to shit on San Francisco too much just come to see us in Oakland

if you want to see a shithole oh you guys in Oakland yeah it's called the lower bottoms for a reason well it's like

I don't want to keep shitting on San Francisco I have been all week we were looking at the street view of the Airbnb and there was a drug deal going on

that's it boss yeah but i mean it's on the other side it's so peaceful i mean no one wants any harm that people are just minding their own business things are happening whatever yeah they're just strung out that's what i like about america i mean i i haven't been here for eight years and it still feels so good when you arrive here it's like people are just doing things crazy shit is happening on every street but nobody cares yeah ayahuasca is legal now in oakland you were telling me yeah you guys you guys going and mushrooms and well yeah mushrooms is like now that's just a given right it's like uh mushrooms very uh very in vogue right now yeah but ayahuasca that's a fucking step up yeah that used to be a an old white woman's drug that they would only

be able to get basically they went from the assumption that people are using it anyway and it doesn't do much harm. So why penalize it? No, I agree to criminalize it all. Free market it. Yeah. I mean, the market is not free. You can possess and use,

but you can't sell. Right. Well, it should be. Yeah. I mean, coming soon. Coming soon. Yeah, well, imagine if it does come

and Ross Albrecht has to spend two life sentences in prison. Fucking shame, man. And I have to say, I was really anticipating this trip to United States because my name came out on Coindesk and i'm sponsoring this conference here yeah horrible object and i was thinking like i would

spend like one hour on the border explaining things and it just went through so easily yeah and people can say many bad things about america but actually i think it's getting better your customs are super easy right and we were both surprised about that yeah i i i went to to the border they told us like you have esta with a visa waiver program uh go to u.s cities online and just go to this automatic uh devices you put your passport they makes a picture prints a receipt and then you go to the officer he asks you what are you here from business or pleasure i'm here for a conference i don't know how what it is i said okay yes stamp in the passport and go away and that's it welcome to america yeah i mean my my my 10 previous trips to america were

not as friendly mine uh i well i fly into jfk a lot internationally since i live in new york just jfk in particular sucks i hate jfk no yeah i mean i'm not i'm never gonna yeah every time i go through both my own customs and other countries immigration i will just i always shit my pants i always take every fucking precaution in the book because like you're literally their bitch at that point like you can just they can just do whatever the hell they want and you don't even even in america you're you're not entitled to a lawyer at that point really so they can just put you in a room they can leave you there for like 14 hours and they can be like decrypt your drives do this do that and you should just always just imagine that's what's going to happen to you

because all it takes as long as you're not out from the international zone you're on you have no rights zero rights you have no rights in that situation is that like a homeland security patriarchy and if you're like a known bitcoiner you're extra you know you should be extra concerned but i i strongly advise anyone to go to ex-ussr once and after that you feel every border like it's a piece of cake of russia russia belarus i mean any of the ex-sovietic bloc countries you after you have two days after your arrival to fill the kgb papers and go to the milice to to register yourself uh yeah it's i mean it's a fun experience it never goes bad actually but it's so procedure you can't smile at anyone if you smile it's rude and

really yeah yeah it's a it's a difference this is why bitcoin is so important right because like it breaks down that that that control that they have in that situation i mean because you can just you can bring infinite amount of money yeah and i had to fill this immigration customs paper and i read like many times the line about do you carry more than ten thousand dollars equivalent in currencies see on the back for definition i checked the back there is no mention of cryptocurrencies yeah no that's actually it's into a good semantics argument about like are you carrying bitcoin if it's if it's what if it's a brain wall if you have a brain wall in your head are you technically i have a t-shirt in my bag or is it like are we getting to the beauty on

argument where it's just pure language and what if you print your seed on the t-shirt and you carry it on you you like literally wear it you're an idiot if you're doing that you still don't have my my passphrasing um no that's a that's i guess i think that's what makes me optimistic about the future is like when you get down to this because the the shirt that you were talking about earlier that you're wearing was that from the 90s court case here in the states where like adam back made the shirt that they tried to weaponize pgp um yeah oh yeah yeah that's that's how pgp went to europe yeah yeah yeah so uh the uh what was his name whatever it's a big i'm a believer that bitcoin is very similar in that case would be very similar sort

of free speech yeah yeah here in the states but we shouldn't be relying on that shit right no yeah but it's a good precedent yeah uh money is speech and speech is protected yeah so there you go so you're saying uh it feels good to go to america what what outside of the ussr what would you talk about like why compared to europe is it that much better compared to europe you you find some peace here like in in paris you meet some shit happening on the street you worry for your life and you change a sidewalk really and no way no way the the only time i get into a fight in the street was with a drug guy in the streets of Paris.

I was just waiting for a bar to open and some guy came to me and started beating me. Damn. I've seen much more wasted people here on the street

and nothing happens. People are pretty strung out on the streets. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I had a fun time in Paris when I was there.

I enjoyed Paris as well. I stayed in St. Germain. You didn't go to the good places. yeah you guys in the uh you guys in the burbs or should we not maybe i'm let's say in the privileged part of paris why why do you say that uh that's how everybody sees it but actually it's pretty cheap and shitty where i live but yeah people see this part of paris as a rich part of course yeah i wanted to jump into it but we have to jump into politics if we do that

so i wanted to jump in what we talked about when we uh when we met at that bar like the situation and or the mindset in paris or france at least of of like the state is probably the the cause most of their problems we get they're calling for more and more state help i think it's really hard to explain what's going on yeah because i think when you talk to a bunch of different people even like people who are going in the streets like regularly every saturday um they'll all have a different story they'll all say different stuff they'll have all have different reasons and they don't go into a lot of depth until like why they're unhappy apart from probably the fact that they just feel like they're getting poorer and poorer and like and they are

life's getting more difficult you know but then honestly you go to a bunch of different countries and ask people around they'll probably feel the same way in america people feel that way because it's happening everywhere it's happening everywhere and like at the end of the day maybe i mean that's That's, I guess, me thinking that. I don't know if it's true or not. But the states are just bankrupt, and people don't notice it. They'll get to notice it probably much too late. And they're just fucked, you know?

And so they have to find some other way to, like, deal with their lives. I don't think they will easily or quickly. We see other options. I mean, Bitcoin is one. for us um i'm not sure they get it it's too bad um maybe we can help them with that at least we scream it from the rooftops well trying to yeah and we're trying to give them tools and you know um it makes sense for a lot of these reasons uh you know the sound money aspect and all these things make a lot of sense um but they just don't get it and like potentially in our lifetime or

maybe our kids' lifetimes, if any one of us have kids, you know. Probably one of these countries will have a big problem. Yeah. Are you overall optimistic or pessimistic about the future? I think you have to be optimistic. You know, you have, like, the, like, centuries of history. Like, people figure out a way to overcome whatever is thrown at them. But you can go through rough patches that last a long time.

big corners are fucking awesome so that makes me optimistic i mean people should make you optimistic i mean the track record is good i mean there's civilization you know yeah but you can you can go through like 20 30 50 years of pure hell pure hell and and that's i mean that's a very big theme on this podcast there's the pure disconnection from reality in which these bankrupt states have have run away from reality i would say and potentially i mean it's you can see anything but like you can see like large-scale violence you know which is scary and you don't i mean i don't want that i don't think anybody wants that um but it's like one of the possibilities yeah no it's it's and it starts small with like hey throw milkshakes at people and stuff like that

and starts with small acts like that and then and then tumbles out of control and that's that's why I think we focus on Bitcoin so much is because it's like, hey, we know things are fucked up. I think all the squabbling at the political level, at least red versus blue here in the States, is sort of misdiagnosing the core of the problem and swiping at branches. And Bitcoin really gets to the core of the problem, which is an unfair monetary system at the end of the day. At least it's a good way to get some power back, some say in a way or another. Yeah, at least we'll have good money, you know? i'm gonna solve everything no will it can it we've all pretty much if you like go through

human history it's just pretty much just been violence like it's just everything is violence so we should just appreciate the times when there aren't violence because they're they're rare there will be with bitcoin yeah i think there will be in just general um i i also think that in terms of um in terms of like opsec for bitcoiners um in the in the immediate term the obviously like known bitcoiners are at way higher risk levels than everyone else but i think once we hit a certain level of of adoption you get to the point where like any rich person is expected to even if they don't they probably first of all have a decent amount of their net worth in bitcoin and if they don't they're expected to be able to like fork up any

kind of ransom or whatever in bitcoin relatively quickly because it will be you know such a dominant dominant asset at that point right so it at that point it doesn't even matter if you're a known bitcoin or not if you show any kind of wealth then you will be you know just at just the same level of risk yeah level of concentration bitcoin though is i think insane what do you mean what do you mean yeah too few people too many bitcoin do you think so probably uh the distribution i think distribution is bad but have you seen like the distribution of the current world's wealth it's really horrible it's way it might be worse than bitcoin no i think it's i think it's worse it's really fucking bad

what is this like 50 people you know what gives me hope though is that people like that idiot from QuadrigaX who traded 21,000 bitcoin down to 8 bitcoin helping with the distribution you know I think what is interesting maybe the concentration

in the bitcoin world is pretty high but it's not the same kind of people so you think bitcoiners are better people in a way yes why is that i love this continue aren't we no i mean at least it's people who acquired some wealth by being smart and not by being lucky or close to the spigot we weren't lucky it's ridiculous we aren't we are

lucky but not because of that it seems like there's a bunch of people who want like a change for the better too you know so i like you can you can sense it there's like a like you said there's a palpable palpable tension in the air throughout the world right now i would argue yeah and and again like going back like i think people are misdiagnosing the problem and like again like you said i was goading you like do you think bitcoin is a better view i did like the bitcoiners i met meeting you guys uh bitcoiners are better people we don't want to be giving these people give yeah it's people give like people just connecting people like if like that's actually one thing that's been great about this podcast i've had so many people come to the show that

it's turned into like a mini network where i'm able to connect guests uh with each other like after interviewing like hey you guys are sort of working on similar problems you guys should talk they help each other out all the time i mean you guys have helped us a ton more probably more than anybody else i've been talking to you guys for like a year now i i telegram i talked to to michael on telegram every day every day and like i finally got to meet him yesterday you know how fucking exciting that was i was like i don't really want to go out you know am i gonna go out it's like i gotta i gotta wind up shutting down the bar here yeah with stefan it was like we had it we one of the lost tapes

the ultimate podcast the unrecorded the unrecorded no it is great I'm actually very excited for this week too we're going to go to a cool beefsteak dinner later tonight it seems like it's going to be pretty fucking fun

seems like there's a very good group of people have you guys seen the venue of the conference? I've seen pictures yes we've been there it's huge yeah yeah

this will be this will be really great I'm excited yeah it's a good week to roll into the conference too going back over 10 days it didn't even start

but we don't regret being a sponsor at all it's like the best investment we did we're going big and noddling every now and then

you guys you guys are giving out a bunch of nodes correct no we we don't

but there will be for sure at the conference store they set up a store with some bitcoin artifacts and the noddle is one of them. Awesome.

So let's get back to the noddle, like the hardware that you're making with Dojo, or not the Dojo hardware that you're making with Samurai, excuse me. What is this red box going to be like? It's different than your typical noddle, correct? So there are three things actually. So the current noddle will be rebranded as the noddle 1. It will be the same hardware, same software,

just probably a custom case then you will have the nodo dojo which will be the same hardware just with dojo pre-installed and the premium support from from the samurai team red case right no and and then there will be the samurai edition which will be red case with a samurai logo on it the specs are not final yet but it will probably have redundant storage it will probably have a slightly better cpu and maybe some other goodies what about the new raspberry pi and it'll be faster because it's red yeah well that's the red that's the fact that's the most important that's the most important aspect uh the the new raspberry pi so yesterday uh the raspberry pi foundation announced the

Raspberry Pi 4. The Noddle group is going crazy over this. We were literally drinking and everyone got excited. After spending the last two years shitting on Raspberry Pi,

we'll probably switch back to it because it's just awesome. The competition is good. Rock 64 was probably one of the main reasons. The problem of the Raspberry Pi is it's very hard to buy in volume

in a consistent way it's not designed to be bought in bulk even harder than the rock yeah way harder than the rock i mean it's very easy to buy one raspberry pi it's very hard to buy 10 of them i didn't realize that um because they want to be like they're trying to be enthusiast is that why yeah yeah i mean the the raspberry pi zero for example it was like one purchase per customer so to get many i had to set up like accounts for my kids on every possible store and parents and everyone of the family anyway now the the b the the b might be different because it's a more mainstream product and usually on the big retailers like founder you can buy it in bulk yeah we'll see how it goes but it might be it might be the new

another hardware actually boss so what is the uh what is the ultimate vision for for noddle down the road like 10 years from now what is the exit scam that's genius uh 10 years from now i have no fucking idea because hardware is changing so fast yeah uh are you guys believers in like node in every house one day or a family running or a smart family running a family member running a noddle that other family members connect to i don't know maybe it will go in a totally different direction i don't even know if we'll be making hardware in two years from now because the the hardware of set-top boxes like this android tv stuff and phones and everything is improving very fast so i i might see a future in which

nodo is actually an app on the android app store and ios app store and you just install your full node on any device you have at home and and inside the app you will find the same ui which will tell you do you want to run bitcoin the lnd btc pay server whatever so somebody's so fascinated with hardware it's uh incredible to see you like willing to be like hey we might not we'll be still making hardware for the server side because i mean the the hosted part of the business will be a big part increasing part you really think like a mobile device well it wouldn't be like a mobile device what are you thinking like an android tv or something yeah i mean it could be anything but like what we're doing right now is like we're testing everything like we're testing

our assumptions like it's guesswork we talk to our customers every day we see what they like or they don't like and we're just trying stuff but the first step for us i guess is to do have your noddle at home for some people and try to grow that market because we think like not everybody's going to have one but like more and more people will want to have one and like it's dedicated hardware you don't put other stuff on that and you want it at your home and i feel like you just need like the head of household or something to do it like you can have like or set it up for your family and your cousins and your friends etc is the dojo pitch actually they say like set up not everyone will buy a dojo but you have close friends yeah exactly they can use

your dojo over tour so you don't even know where they are exactly i would be happy to give my friends access to my node exactly and that's so that's one thing that's one target then there's the other target it's like more high-end customized like hardware that like companies can buy or rent that you can host for them or they can have etc and it's larger scale businesses and like in between there's a lot of people who are like either nomads like you know sovereign individuals traveling a ton and who want the same stuff but they'd have nowhere to put it or host it or anything and you can do it for them and that's probably a market segment that doesn't exist today or that's not catered to so that's where we're going yeah you know soon and this will be

just like a huge reputation market in the future where you have providers that you you trust and so you guys are working on building that trust now by building good hardware and good software exactly yeah so hardware is like a component of it but like we don't know where we'll be and like hardware will probably evolve much faster than we can move forward you know well that's what we were talking about you've had a little bit of a fanboy

weekend here in San Francisco going to the Apple stores and you were petting a super computer a couple days ago you went to the garage I went to see Steve Jobs garage first time in California what else could you do and

yeah I advise everyone to go to the computer history museum there is a cray one petting zoo cray one is a one of the first supercomputers and actually the story of the the inventor of it mr cray is pretty impressive because he invented lane management before everyone else like 40 years ago lane management lean management a lead management yeah like small teams like a lean startup yeah okay he Yeah, he... Lean management. Small teams, every time you start a new product,

you start from scratch. You scrap all the teams, you scrap all the ideas, you start from a blank page. Very interesting profile. And so talking about like hardware changes, how much has the hardware changed in your life? Like as an enthusiast that's been watching this space for your whole life almost.

Sorry. How much has the hardware changed over the course of your life? basically I started when the Z80 was the best CPU you could get so like Amstrad computers and spectrum you know and so it's like I don't know 100,000 or 1 million times improvement I got like 128 K of RAM in my first computer now I have 16 gigs in my laptop Jesus so do you see this this progression like the pace of progression continuing into the future it's it's going like sideways actually

because we reached some limits via some hard hardware limiting frequencies but every time someone tells you that we reach the limit someone else just breaks it so i yeah i don't see it stopping so so fast yeah and i mean we are in the heart of where it happens now so right what's it uh what was it like going to steve steve jobs garage uh that's like a home like people live there right yeah actually people live there so i just i just like stopped stepped out of the car made two pictures and drove away to not disturb them I feel very bad for these people. You should have brought them a novel, is what you should have done.

Have you heard the good word of Bitcoin? Do you think that house is worth more or less because of Steve Jobs' house? More. It's definitely, you can't buy that house. But you have to put up with people stopping and taking pictures of you every day. The dude who bought that house is like an ultimate Apple collector. I'm saying it today on TFTC, if I become a rich person one day, which I don't see happening, but if it happens

I will buy that house and make it a museum I mean a recreation of the garage we're going to hold you to that tweet stamp tweet stamp on the pod minute 53.37 now I think I thought the house itself

would move me more than it did but seeing the first time the Copatino sign on the freeway that was something that's pretty cool this is this is only my third time in San Francisco

and I never got that excited about it but where do we go now so what was that thing that you were petting the super computer

I saw the Cray one yeah it's it's really like one of the first super computers in history yeah and

it has some crazy wiring happening inside because it's like old components so you have a lot of lots and lots of wires

I think it was nitrogen cooled it's really a crazy design like people don't do that anymore it's not what

IBM Watson's using no so actually I mean for anyone interested in computing you should go to this museum

because there are so many artifacts there is Deep Blue so the computer who bet Garry Kasparov in chess

there is the first Google search rack it's the actual rack with all the servers inside where Google started there's even our

French mini tail there's going to be a noddle in there one day probably I mean they like we should just send one that's such a baller move first noddle in history

all the pieces exposed in this museum are donations from companies or individuals so I bet if we send one and explain what it is... Send one and be like, hey, you may not know it yet but you're going to want this at some point in the future. No, it's great. I got my

21 machine at home. I'm hoarding... Your 21 machine. Yeah, I'm hoarding my hardware, my Bitcoin hardware. I kind of hope that never ends up in that museum but... I hope it does. I like this company so much. I have one too and I

I loved this company for doing that one miner in every home stuff they lied on so many things actually we're gonna put it in toasters there's gonna be they're gonna be you're gonna buy a toaster it's gonna mine bitcoin machine payable web baby it's here and uh and then the second smartest thing they did was this paid apis and uh and the paid apis make sense yeah and I mean it was it was channels before lightning those payment channels lightning basically and they they had their own stuff it worked very well i think i mean lightning's making that happen with the satellite right now you can send years early on the mining too they need mining to like straight up plateau like motherfucker and then like you could do it then you can put it in toasters and

stuff once it once the hardware doesn't go obsolete in like six months yeah do you think Do you think mining is going to, hashrate is going to plateau in like 15 years? No, I don't think hashrate plateaus. I think the hardware lifespan, like they last longer, right? That's key. Like if you're going to install like an ASIC

into like boilers, right? And then take the extra heat and use it to heat water. That's like a super easy application, right? You need, you're not going to put that into a building unless you can. I'm not sure I agree with you because actually since you use the heat and, like, 95% probably of the energy used by the miner is for heat,

you don't really care about hardware changing because it's profitable anyway. But I'm saying it'll be even more, right? Yeah. Like, once those lifespans increase, like, you'd be an absolute idiot to have, like, a building-wide boiler and not have ASICs in it, right? Like, then you see the wide distribution.

Then you see it in toasters and shit, you know? like that's the only time where their plan was like a decade and a half too early yes and they didn't have lightning and now they do and now we do paid emails paid emails earn calm baby but no I actually am happy that they came out with it as well because a great learning experience and I do think that like you're alluding to that vision will come to fruition in the future just a a different different way that device will never be worth a bitcoin again it will never be worth a bitcoin what really got me upset stamp it somebody stamp it out there what really got me

upset about the 21 computer is that the first one i received uh the sd card was not working and they told me like we can't give you the i i said don't send me another sd card just give me the image i have sd cards i will burn it myself and they said no there is a whole blockchain on it it's big we We can't upload it. And when I received the new SD card, it was actually like one gig occupied on the card. It never had the whole blockchain on it. Ridiculous.

Oh, really? Interesting. So outside of the boxes that you're making, what are you looking at at Bitcoin? Are you looking at anything at the protocol level that you're excited about? Are you excited about development activity? Anything? So my next big thing is looking at the networking side and the routing in Lightning.

I'm really interested in routing because of doing, I mean, I have two ISPs and I know BGP, I know routing at internet scale. And when I see Lightning, which is like 4,000 to 5,000 active nodes, which is nothing compared to the internet, and the trouble we have routing already I think there is a lot of work to do in good routing in Lightning and I would really like to see some people coming from the router and internet

industry coming into Lightning to teach us proper routing. What do you think we need to learn? Everything You have a show to them How to scale from 5000 nodes to 5 million nodes because I don't see it happening right now

Why not? I mean, every third time you try to send a lightning payment it doesn't go through because of a failing route and then you force LND to find the route, it finds it, it works once and you try 5 minutes later it forgot about the route. That doesn't happen on the internet, when you want to reach point A to point B on the internet it always goes through that's what bgp is for and uh of course the the routing and lighting is much more complex because of um channel balances yeah balances and the fees so even if you have a route you still need a route with enough balance on every hop and you need the

fees to to keep the fees low any hop can change their fees at will yeah so at any point so i i I think actually we should move to some routing protocol style advertisement where you can predict the full cost of your... The background sounds par for the course here. Guys, the cops aren't coming for you, that's just an ambulance. It's okay, you don't have to look in your mirror. So yeah, some kind of routing protocol in which you advertise all the total cost and I mean, yeah, there are so many things

to do on the routing level. I know there are smart people working on it, but... I like the gin. I'm just trying to... I just drank my body weight in wine over the weekend. I'm trying to ease into this week. But back to the routing. This seems like to be the biggest knock on Lighting Network

because people say this is an unsolvable problem. Do you see it as unsolvable or just needs a lot more eyes and a lot more work? I think it's not unsolvable because we did it for the internet. we did it for voice but the internet is pretty centralized

right if you call one 800,000 routes centralized you don't think it's like look at the Chinese firewall right I think

look at the search team in square leaving China out of the equation because it's a really particular case but they're the future in a lot of places right i don't think so you don't think so they're working well they're trying to get after talking to alex gladstein from the human rights foundation i have like a 40 billion dollar infrastructure fund to get into south american africa i feel like a noddle in every home like defeats that right to a degree like obviously they can see you know they can just

cut off internet completely but yeah no i just to go back to the routing you you know on the on the internet you have tier one tier two and and other careers and i think that's where we are going with lightning we have like uh there was a talk in in munich i think about that and yeah i think we'll go to the tiered network in lightning you have like these major players like like Pierre's note I would say rather like Amazon

Apple, Microsoft, Facebook nah they're not going to be able to compete with the novel network and these guys will be concentrating like these big ass channels except it will probably be Bitrefill and OpenNode Bitrefill and Async they did the one Bitcoin channel

yeah we are working on that too by the way yeah we need the one Bitcoin novel channel and yeah and um and then you will have like the second class players who will have smaller channels like big companies having like 500 employees and paying everyone with lightning and receiving payments in lightning and then you will have like the end users which will be on the edge of this mesh um yeah i definitely see it as a tiered network and not as a everybody has the same weight i mean yeah part of the vision right is that like you i guess you like you launch

like a light wallet and you don't sync to your own node and you make like a single channel out to like a well-connected node and then you balance it out real quick yeah with like a loop out or something and so like that person is just like they're super on the outside they're just they have a single channel into uh to like basically a routing yeah and and the same as convinced that Bitcoin is the future. I don't know if Lightning will be the second layer solution in five or ten years. And that's fine. That's fine.

That's okay. It's the second layer. Yeah, exactly. Have you looked into state chains at all? No. That's been exciting me recently. Basically exchanging private keys. Yeah, it's like in between the trade-off levels between Liquid and Lightning.

Liquid and Lightning Network, yeah. like if if if the previous person who sent you the payment colludes with the federation then they get it they can take your money but again liquid if the federation can just take your money and then with lightning uh your channel partner exactly yeah but again it goes back like the state chain the state chain federations will come back to like a reputation game like you guys are are depending on in the future to have people download your software the the federation would depend on yeah speaking about reputation people are starting to ask us to embed some identity features in the noddle like to have your noddle as your reputation on the internet and your

identity this is actually funny you brought this up i actually met with uh somebody who's working on urbit yesterday and we we talked about i said could you run urbit on a noddle and uh we had that conversation so that's actually something i was thinking about yesterday um what are your what How do you think that would be possible? Urbit is a shit coin. It's not a shit coin. There's no coin tied to it. There's no coin?

No. You have to buy stars or whatever, right? Yeah. So what are the stars? They represent nodes or something like that. The stars are tokens, right? I don't know if they're tokens. They're basically tokens.

They're assets. You're buying them with money. I don't know. I don't want to get into the semantics. All tokens are not made equal. I'm not shilling Urbit. I'm just saying I met somebody from Urbit. And they were talking about the reputation system.

I'm just getting ahead of this one. Okay, get ahead of it. And I'm the one calling Urbid as a shitcoin. About tokens, all tokens are not shitcoins. You have tokens built on Lightning and Bitcoin as well, like Counterparty or RGB. Yeah, that's fine. That's more or less fine.

I mean, there is no reason anything couldn't run on another as long as it fits in the CPU, RAM, and disk space we have. And if it compiles on ARM64, which is always challenging. yeah so outside of Urbit I brought Urbit up because I had a conversation about it

yesterday how would you attack reputation we didn't start thinking about it yet it's just something which starts to be requested by our

users so we will be thinking about it after we do everything we have to do before which is huge yeah no it's like

because HODL HODL they're using like the local bitcoins reputations on their exchange and there's many ways that it's

tried to been solved but it's still an open space in my mind i guess if a lot of people try to like spend more time in cyberspace and use tools like like noddle bitcoin stuff like that like reputation makes a ton of sense uh not picking that up as a service or something would be stupid um because that's where everybody's heading in a way um so typically in the future you could envision having more stuff on the model that's not Bitcoin related but that fits into the same kind of vision

that you need tools to be sovereign in a way and that ties into that really well how? we have no clue yeah like storage, chat or like easy things exactly as long as it doesn't interfere

like people are asking for like mail servers yeah that's a great idea well yes and no because like he'll tell you it isn't right why security uh a mail server has to be open on the internet we we are going we are leaning toward full tour and having email or storing personal data on the device is like opening it back and uh and these apps are not designed to be secure like bitcoin dlnd are designed from the core to be secure software and an email server or a web server or stuff like that they are not designed to be secure inherently

and there are far too there is also another thing which makes the software secure or or more attacked the more popular it is the more attacked it is uh see the example of wordpress wordpress powers like 30% of all the websites on the internet is probably the most attacked engine for a website and as long as we stay in some more confidential

software we have less exposure like the attack surface is smaller no that's not a good way though right and also people ask for build a router function in another no that's ridiculous for me

having a mail server is even more ridiculous than having a router because a router is a piece of network equipment and it's it's built for one single purpose and it's pretty secure and an email server is have so many moving parts

and we start talking about things like antivirus, anti-spam So you just gotta make another box then? Yeah They still have two boxes I'm not against designing yeah I'm not against designing a modular box

and you plug bricks for features I think that like every single thing that people use in the cloud should be run through whether it's one noddle or two noddles or fucking five noddles like in your closet

should just be running all of that shit for them if you want an easy way to run your web server, mail server personal cloud and all that shit at home everything just buy your fucking synology nas and it has everything embedded already and it's a very good hardware or a qnap if you don't like synology they all have the same features they have like security cameras recording on your box they have mail servers they have docker you can you could even run like uh i don't know uh the btc pay server stack inside don't do it

but you could no but i i think i think it's important that we we have like companies like with your philosophy like businesses with your philosophy that that is is is very much customer first uh privacy first sovereignty first and and those companies are the companies we need to to provide these these uh devices that are powering all this stuff because at the end of the day like it doesn't if you pull it if you pull it locally but then you're just trusting another company that that you know that is out to screw you you're you're at the end of the day it's the same exact situation also at the end of the day you guys might end up being like a high-end brand where these types of services and these these hardwares are only for people who are are like

willing to to go the the length to to get their own privacy and this will be like a luxury like oh i have my noddle in my closet this is where i handle my finances they'll be like oh you have a noddle that's sweet yeah but like trust isn't always bad and the second thing is like we we try to talk to our customers every day and like they have lots of stuff to say but maybe sometimes not everything makes sense or not everything makes sense right now that's a famous steve jobs quote but the customer doesn't even know what they want. Yeah. And so the mail server thing is they're trying to import their personal information

on what we see as a dedicated box, and that kind of defeats a lot of purpose. It's bad for their OPSEC. And sometimes you might feel like it's still too early because if not you're gonna have like bring bad habits to the whole experience or that makes sense to me it's like i think all that stuff is probably a sign that certain things you're still in too early and you know but i totally see a future in which another diversifies in like a personal cloud at home box

I would I mean I would make one for myself and that's what Nodo is in the beginning I needed a full node for myself I built a full node then Lightning happened and I thought

that could be a commercial product that people could actually use so yeah I have my personal cloud on a NAS today I could probably build one myself when the time happens it may be a new product in our catalog but there are so many other things we want to do before like a vpn dongle that protects you when you connect to a public wi-fi you turn off

the wi-fi of your computer you plug in the dongle and it proxifies all your traffic and it encrypts it oh i fucking love that idea yeah i mean all the hardware right yeah and uh i mean smuggler is doing that with a crypto hippie already but I'll show yours but yeah we I don't have it with me but I will show you something

tomorrow I'm very surprised because it's a shit product I tried to make long before the noddle and people are taking pictures of it every time they see it like the guys from beatbox made pictures of it the guys from ledger made pictures

of it so i guess you will be interested in what i have to show well i don't want to spoil the surprise but you did um you did bring up something uh bringing up ledger that i wanted to ask you earlier it slipped my mind so i'm gonna now that i have it in my mind gonna bring it back up what do you think about like the hardware wars going on between like trezor and ledger and them hacking each other yeah okay so no it's TFTC right come on we can't we can't say everything I think ledger is a superior hardware product they have a secure chip in the products and the Ledger X removed many of the vulnerabilities the Nano S had, like connecting the keys and screen to the secure element

instead of the MCU. That's a very good move. I don't like the added Bluetooth functionality, which is obviously a bad idea. I don't like their attitude. I also hate the Bluetooth added. but it's because of the iPhone, right? All the Bluetooth chipsets

are hackable, it was proved and I think that one is no exception but what I really don't like about Ledger is the attitude of the company I contacted them for at least two different air quotes vulnerabilities which were like privacy vulnerabilities

of the device and every time Nikola replied like it's not an issue go away and yeah and then they fixed it so it wasn't nothing

no that's they do seem very like on the combative to bring their competitors down which is obviously you want to make all these vulnerabilities you want to bring them to light but it feels like sort of nefarious

what I have to say the new CSO I really like the guy he has a very constructive talk and we talked a lot in Amsterdam and he asks the right questions and he's not like trying

to push you down he's trying to bring you up maybe I'm letting the feels get in too much here he's the first decent person in Ledger Ledger Live is horrible for your privacy

right it's like absolutely horrible but it is extremely user-friendly like you know I wouldn't say so yeah the Trezor is that nicest experience probably so what are what are our thoughts on this on the Trezor vulnerabilities because I I also, I was, Treasure T, with the touchscreen, I really, I think they've, like, pretty much nailed things. But if you use their web wallet, it's also horrible for your privacy, right? I'm a daily user of Treasure. I have, full disclosure, I have all my wallets, the same seed, on a Treasure, a Ledger, and a cold card. Because if one fails, I want to have another manufacturer with the same seed.

But my daily driver is a Trezor. I have one Trezor 1 for noddle and one Trezor T for my personal use. And yes, this vulnerability exists if you have a passphrase, a good one. You need to have a good passphrase. Yeah, it's less bad. What is a good passphrase? Because if they get access to your Trezor, they can pull the seed from the Trezor if they know what they're doing. Yeah, so what is good about this, it didn't leak yet. I bet if Ledger found how to do it other people did as well, so we will end up

with having the full tutorial on the internet one day or it will be sold on the dark web. Especially since like Trezor and everyone said that yes this exists. Yeah. It's unpatchable. We know it exists. And it's unpatchable which is pretty bad because they are not using a secure chip in the design of the device. But the Ledger secure chip is closed source does that worry you because like what it would then say if the i the way i think about it is like the ledger as long as the u.s government isn't in your threat model then you're probably so that's not true for one simple reason the secure chip we're using is not american it's french right uh so as long as france is not your threat model and i don't think it is

in any one. I mean, or like the US in combination with France, right? Yeah. I'm not so scared about it. It has to be proven. It's an old chip. It's not a new thing.

It's an old chip from ST. I think if it had a backdoor, it would be already proven by now. isn't the thing like there's other targets bigger than that anyways what do you mean well the secure chip is used for other stuff than this right right right so outside of ledger yeah is that is ledger the biggest target like you know maybe the whole like andrews thing for like shot 256 right is it bringing bitcoin down or something else first right yeah and this chip is actually very popular it's used like every other smart card on the planet so it i think

if people wanted to attack this chip they would already done it and the cryptocurrency would not be the first target but you still use the trezor as your daily device just because ux the ux the touchscreen right the touchscreen and the and the web app even if it leaks my public keys to to trezor so i i yeah i i could use it for electron but i mean it's a it's really a question of attitude uh slush has been a very friendly person he's a customer by the way yeah that's fucking badass yeah slush is a fucking boss for those of you who don't know slush created the first bitcoin mining pool slush pool still live today it's being run by jan he doesn't own it anymore.

He doesn't know anymore. Being run by a couple other guys but Slush. He's not even a treasurer anymore is he?

Or is he only for Satoshi Labs? Yeah, Satoshi Labs is a treasurer. You spoke with them on the pod?

Yes. Brains? Yes, the Brains OS guys. Yeah, they'll be here. Jan and Pavel.

Pavel's name was slipping my mind there for a second. Yeah, that was a great episode. Pavel this time? No, not Pavel.

Oh, the Pavel from brains from brains yeah um last name i'm very bad at names yes i'm not uh i'm not great with uh latvian last names it's not my not my strong stagiaire czech last names yes they're from the czech republic excuse me met the menriga that's why yeah the fun story by the way we were like it was the third day of the malta conference we were very wasted from the day before party it was the last day it was like a hack day in a room and one guy comes and asks if he could buy an order from us and pay by lightning

i said okay but let's cut the payment in 10 times to so it went through easily after four we yeah and i said like could you type your mail address in btc pay server because i'm asking like the mail address to match the serial number and the mail address. Slush at Satosh. Oh, fuck. It was too wasted to recognize the guy who was buying it. And it suddenly

made sense. That's fucking gold. It's great to see he's experimenting. He's still hungry to get after the new hardware. Shout out to Slush. Like you said, he just had a good mindset around Bitcoin. Please reply to my private messages.

and he tried it and he sent us a huge email with like his thoughts on it you know and it's people like taking the time to like buy it try it comment on it like give you ideas feedback you know take it or leave it you like it or not but like it's constructive criticism coming from people who know so much more than us it's gold you know it's awesome thanks you know yeah it proves how much i was thinking we have to switch that phrase you know because i just said it too it's gold but it's not it's bitcoin you're so bitcoin you don't even know it um no but it's like and you can tell like acts like that slush like an early adopter early builder on bitcoin shows how early we are like

even him somebody's so respected like reaching out like all right you're willing to help here's what here's what you guys can do with your product in particular and like you were saying with you want routing engineers to come on like reaching out to them and just slowly but surely the roots keep getting longer and longer and like i don't know like how it was before but 10 years in right now when you talk to a lot of people they seem very keen on helping each other and saying you know what like everybody's gonna profit from this like it'll be even better if we we just like all stick together i'll help each other out because there's so much to do and it's just starting and like we're all in together you know yeah we're building something we're building

something so you can feel it yeah i was actually google translating a word because i don't know in english but yeah i think the bitcoin community is very benevolent benevolent yeah that's the word benevolent is a great word yeah that is exactly what everyone is out there to help each other even when you're a competitor yeah no and it's um it's great to see how long do you think this will last you think this will be uh in perpetuity i think we're like in the the early stages where it's during next bull run we'll just kill each other well let's talk about the the synergies that you and uh the samurai team have how did what what clicked with you guys obviously they're very privacy centric and yeah we should talk about

samurai more yeah um no maybe you want to start i don't know it like it felt like a very very natural fit like from our perspective like samurai while it was saying the same thing it makes sense from a customer base point of view like from a product base everything makes sense and it was so easy we never agreed on anything pretty much

you know sometimes you meet someone and you feel like you know that person for 20 years that's exactly what happened with Samurai we didn't even talk about the values we share it was just so obvious we knew we share them awesome

and yes no the samurai samurai has been been growing slowly but surely they brought loren in um with oxt.me he's been working with them he's another great french bitcoiner yeah um but it's it's it's incredible to see like the forces that are that are joining and i think samurai noddles like a great no-brainer like you said yeah and uh what really impressed me is uh samurai wallet saying that he never anticipating a hardware brand to become so strong as samurai is in the software world and yeah thank you for saying that first of all and second i think he's very some truth in that and the another brand as crazy as it seems it's like a crazy idea file during a conference and then this logo which is above noodles it's so ridiculous it's great

sort of yeah i mean similar to this podcast i got forced to start it and here we are two years later traveling to hotel rooms to have conversations with people from all over the world it happens fast no it's crazy to see again where like when we met in december to where you guys have come in the last six months eight seven months now it's uh it's been inspiring too because you guys have been shipping quick like i remember you showed me three different prototypes when we met yeah so what i've shown you is the like the the mini and the micro which will never happen but it was fun to do anyway i like the tablet one yeah yeah the tablet one except the screen is so shitty but i like the idea with like a slightly better screen so i think actually it was a bad

idea anyway because you don't want you so for for for the freaks who are listening the tablet nodder was like a nodder with a touchscreen on top so you can run btc pay server and use it as your cash register uh your bitcoin register but i kind of like it just as like a like your note is in the closet and it has like a dedicated screen to it yeah i can just go to it i don't have to you know ssh into it i just can just go to it and i can just yeah but that was that was not the the use we imagined the use we imagined was really like to put it on your on your desk and have people pay directly on the touchscreen, which is a bad idea

because anyone can just take it and run away with your private keys. So I think it's a much... It's in the cash register. Yeah. It's a much smarter idea to bundle the noddle box with a cheap tablet for 50 bucks

and put this tablet in the front desk. What about having the node in your closet have a fucking screen on it, you know? just plug in a monitor and a keyboard it will be more efficient like how you have a touch screen

you know I think it's kind of nice I think it's a thing I think it'll be a thing wait and see that he ask who said wait and see

I'm excited high end lifestyle you got me excited it's an idea I'll keep poking you speaking of poking I think the beefsteak

I think the beef's getting poked right now we may have to make our way over there I have one other topic I want to talk about yeah let's hop into it that's why I'm not

ending it here i'm saying we should shot clock oh i'm super excited for the beef steak yeah it's the beef steak's not going to start for like another hour and a half i mean it started but it's the the beef isn't being served for like another hour and a half okay we got time because i spoke to him about that about the lightning uh meetup that we're not at right now anyway the topic i wanted to talk about which we had a conversation about yesterday and i thought it was a very good conversation is hardware signing devices like hardware wallets basically in combination with lightning routing nodes and how that could um because because my issue and i've spoke about this on the pod before

my issue is is that we have routing nodes right now like ellen big that are in um they're in server farms where they don't control the hardware the hardware is just sitting there and if an employee realizes we had this issue in you know in 2013 a lot where employees of the server farms would realize and they would they would access the hardware because they had physical access um discussed yeah so um we we we have this issue too of course and uh we are very closely looking at what Stepan Snigirev is doing. Who? Stepan Snigirev.

Okay. He's working on lightning hardware wallets and one of the projects is a continuously signing lightning hardware wallet. So obviously if we just plug it in the ass of the server in the same data center,

someone taking the server takes the keys with the server. Right. so it doesn't do any good so the idea we have is to um host the hardware signing devices remotely in another facility preferably in another country um you yeah for it ideally in a bunker in the mountain in heights of switzerland for example right but you could even have like the signing key like in your home yeah or in your home or the opposite we could host your signing key and you could have your not at home or the other way around i mean yeah so you you can buy these

devices like which let you expose usb ports over of an ethernet port and then you can mount it on any computer like it's a local usb port so yeah that's a that's the way we want to go for Because the issue with Lightning is that you basically need the hardware device always connected to constantly sign. If you want to be able to route transactions, you have to sign any transaction that shows up. Right. So you need it to be hot at that point. Yeah, you need a kind of a hot air-gapped wallet, which is weird. Why is that weird?

Because it's not really air-gapped since it's hot and always connected. and signing anything you throw at it. But if they want to compromise it, they basically have to go to both physical locations. Yeah, so the idea is if you want to compromise it, you have to make a coordinated attack in two different countries on two different data centers, one of them being a military facility.

Good luck with that. And probably on this closed location as well. Let's just get cosmic here. it's crazy to think of the different attack scenarios that exist in the world and people tend to forget that under the internet there is like physical infrastructures and the cloud is not

actually just cloud it's like metal it can be attacked by sharks every once in a while we just attacked Iran did you see that? No did we? are you kidding me? Trump responded by he did a cyber attack against Iran's I was actually in an Uber to the airport in Paris

when I i was in the uber going to paris when the radio was talking about trump attacking iran and i was like no please don't i'm going there now i'm going to the u.s please relax just wait a week like what are you doing i don't want to get started on that path no but my point is right is like once you start adding in like major governments attacking these kind this kind of infrastructure like you you can go down like a pretty ridiculous rabbit hole yeah do you think uh we'll ever get to the point where nation states start attacking bitcoin infrastructure of course yeah yeah i i don't see how it

wouldn't happen and you'd be an idiot and like i feel like you're just you're just screwing yourself to failure if you if you think otherwise no yeah you tweeted about that earlier um any project just not building with a future nation state attack in mind is probably too naive i mean the quote that i quoted like i could just see like it replaced with iran like stellar or something you know like like like rumor like on wednesday like the trump administration like they like took down like four stellar notes and the whole network went down or whatever they bought all the all the stellar lumens and uh they uh but that's the attack the staking they don't even have to buy it yeah but like they could right they could that could be another attack vector yeah exactly

ah i also see some nation states emerging with a huge loads of bitcoin like north korea bulgaria north korea has a shit ton of bitcoin apparently the bulgaria story was false oh really we got fact checked no no it could be it's well like what i said originally like they could just have really good opsec because like two days afterwards they were like no we have no bitcoin so it could be i bet on the good opsec there's plausible deniability in there i like that all right bulgaria back on my hands but bulgaria just got a voting accident a huge voting accident they're like no no we didn't get that bitcoin i mean bulgaria replace it with any other country like iran has a shit ton venezuela has a shit ton russia definitely has a shit ton like

Putin knows exactly what's up like there's no way that he does Belarus will have a shit tone because he just figured out that he has a nuclear plant that is pretty useless and he built a mining facility just next to it there you go really yeah I mean if you have if you already have a plant and there's excess energy there and you're not using it like you're a fucking idiot if you don't have miners there like that's basically what it comes down to at the end of the day especially you have your friends with ex-USSR countries like Georgia who has Bitfury and can sell you containers

of miners. They have the same idea. They have Hydro there, I'm pretty sure, right? Yeah. And that Hydro wasn't being used fully, so they fully embraced Bitfury. I hope you guys realize that this is going to be unpalatable to a lot of people

that these are the countries holding Bitcoin. Well, I mean, if it makes them feel any better, like Trump definitely owns the shit. Oh, I agree. It can totally invert the powers in the world. When Bitcoin will become mainstream, these countries will be the financial powers of the world. You think so?

No, no, no. Bitcoin, well, I think a lot of our people will be those people. No, no. Hey, this is what TFTC is all about. We're not going to have these heavy conversations. We're going to have the TFTC Citadel Network. we're gonna take our airships we're gonna go over to each other's citadels it's gonna be a fucking great time please reserve your place on the international waters platform now i'm gonna

bring keto miners gonna wire up like my whole citadel seastead peter told we'll make some mining satellites as like a supernatal oh that's the other thing i want to talk about uh like mesh and satellite because you got the Blockstream satellite working on Rock64. Mr. Grubbers got Blockstream satellite running

on Rock64 so it's totally doable. We are fucking late doing it. We said we'd do it in July. July hasn't happened yet. We got a deadline in July. You're still early. You guys got a week to make that.

The end of July. Deadline just for ours. testing you know i'm kidding i'm kidding i mean i have to go to my parents house to set up a dish and then we can start from here well what are your thoughts on like mesh and uh just like the alternative transaction relay networks on the list here we were talking about like tier one like tier two i'm just talking about i'm not necessarily noddle i'm talking about like the vision right like I know I know in America at least we have most people just have one internet provider for that last couple miles to their house or two

maybe max so so the idea that you could have a potential mesh going going to those last couple of miles to really distribute internet yeah I'm a strong believer in LoRaWAN. I think that's the tech to go with. I love what Rich is doing with Gotenna, but Gotenna is a closed product and there are many cavities that are hard to circumvent because of the SDK and I think it's not it's not open enough and LoRaWAN is a really good tech for that. competing mesh network together it's it's not really competing because it's a totally different tech and it's totally open so but basically you can have any

one in his home running a lower one to internet relay it could be a USB stick you plug in the back of your model and you become a relay and anyone walking on the street can just broadcast a transaction to you and read. Because then it switches to Wi-Fi, right? Yeah, it will just transfer it to your network connection. But if you think about it, why not just use Bluetooth Low Energy instead, which everybody has already in his phone and doesn't need any extra hardware? Why not use Wi-Fi?

Oh, Wi-Fi. Yeah, sure. the only problem with Wi-Fi is you have to attach to the network and with BLE you can just broadcast and anyone can pick up the signal and relay it's crazy how much

shit you have to think about building out these networks do you feel like a pioneer? I feel like a kid who was good at building things from Lego bricks and now I'm using bigger bricks and more complicated bricks to build stuff yeah i would say you guys are pioneers um yeah it's again thank you for what you guys are building um we're an hour and 45 minutes in here it's been an incredible

conversation i think this is one of your longest no it will be up there yeah it will be up there yeah i think this will be top five longest easily um no but again it's crazy and i was worry that we have nothing to say but from meeting on the top of the hill in paris to it's been a long time coming man to to the bitcoin 2019 converts it has been a long time coming i would yeah i was shooting myself in the foot when i had my recording stuff on me uh in december but i actually think was uh it was good to let to let noddle simmer and build out for for seven months before sitting down i mean i'm as a greedy motherfucker i was pretty i had a lot of fomo so I was happy about that.

And it's only a few months in, you know? Yeah. It's very short. We're just getting started. Yeah, exactly. It's the start of it. The crazy thing is, I was thinking back, January 1st, January 3rd, we're, like, celebrating Bitcoin's 10th anniversary, right? So that's, what, six months ago.

I did not have a Lightning Node running. um then i had the i had the noddle running and then i passed jack dorsey the torch in like february it was like late february and now we're in june like that that is not a lot of time it's nothing january 3rd i guess we were shipping our like we were done with the pre-sale in the first 21 etc the first batch and we started shipping our first notes around that date like the same week or so yeah yeah it's fucking crazy six months like yeah like you're saying i don't have it like i've sent more lightning transactions like in the last two months than than i ever did by the way jack has a casa and elon you have six days left to get an order before i officially

call you a moron just ship him one just just send him another you already did that one night when you were busy working well you just send them a noddle just send them send them one be like welcome to the future you know i i had a stupid idea one day like every month we would do a fun fundraiser we name a celebrity and we make a fundraiser to for people to buy that person another i like that idea i would buy you i would contribute yeah we should well i buy elon model and like we haven't like gifted models or like you know discuss the price with people etc like you get to buy the model basically and like we think it has some value and you pay the value we think it has etc you guys could like to charge way more for the model is my opinion yeah

it was a mistake probably at first we'll see i've said this on the podcast like guys i tend to agree best deal in the space and other people have said that too but you know but um we made like just a few exceptions um and like we should thank you a lot for everything you've done for us because it's meant a ton for us like just like how we feel about what we're doing um you have a lot to do in that you know so thank you oh thank you there's no i mean there's no need to thanks you guys are building dope shit and we like talking about dope shit so it's pretty easy you know about the price there are two kinds of people there are people who never tried to make any hardware product and say we are too expensive and there are people who made a hardware product and who

say we are way too cheap yeah exactly i love is in the air i love you guys i'm just i'm just i'm so happy that that you've entered my life and i just shit is good and we're gonna end it on that sentimental note and go eat some beef let's go eat some beef gentlemen thank you for joining us peace and love freaks