The Wolf Of All Streets - The Dark Side Of Technology: How Your Privacy Is Being Invaded And How To Stop It | Seth For Privacy

Episode Date: July 2, 2023

Privacy is the ultimate passion of Seth For Privacy (due to privacy issues Seth does not disclose his last name). In this episode of the Wolf Of All Streets podcast we cover everything privacy related: from how privacy is abused, to practical tips on how you can take it back. This is a very important episode, and I hope you watch it and learn as much as I did.  Follow Seth For Privacy: https://twitter.com/sethforprivacy ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:14 Ledger Recover flaws  6:12 Difficulty of self custody is overblown 13:08 Solutions to self custody 16:10 MPC 17:00 Seth’s passion for privacy 19:32 Monero 22:30 Privacy with Bitcoin 25:30 Giving up privacy 31:15 How to protect your privacy 34:00 How to buy Bitcoin without KYC 38:00 Is there a way to regain privacy? 41:10 CBDC 44:45 Follow Seth For Privacy The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Which has always been a thing that I think we've battled within the Bitcoin space is like, how do we do it like the way that Bitcoin is originally intended? How do we do this properly, but also try and push to get this, this freedom tech in as many people's hands as possible. I think in a lot of the community, there's been a push to do things to secure for the actual needs of most people, keeping 12 words secure. The funny thing is though, then people say it's very easy for me to secure these 12 words and then they put them into somewhere secure like i don't know last pass privacy is more important than ever although

people seemingly want to give away all of their private information and share everything they're doing online but in the future as governments continue to crack down on social media on your privacy on your ability to transact you're going to need tools to help keep yourself private. Seth for privacy is an advocate in the space. He was the whistleblower on Ledger Recover and has gained a major voice now in the space, giving really good, solid ideas on how you can live a normal life,

but also remain private. You've seemingly been on the circuit though you have your own podcast of course focused on privacy seems like you gained a lot more popularity and and and fame and people start noticing you after the ledger incident lately is that is that fair to say yeah yeah definitely was surprised that i think my thread kind of became the thread on ledger incident lately is that is that fair to say yeah yeah definitely was surprised that i think my thread kind of became the thread on ledger recover um because it was as soon as they announced it i was like this seems like a terrible idea and wanted to write up my thoughts and just kind of took off which is pretty cool you want to know what's crazy is that maybe four days before that i interviewed pascal standing in this very same room the ce CEO of Ledger. And my podcast with him came out

maybe an hour before your thread. Or an hour before they made the public announcement, it came out. And we superficially talked about it in the podcast that I had with him. I've spoken to him a number of times. And it just blew right over my head. So to your credit, to see it immediately,

I was kind of like, cool, you can recover your phrase and Ledger has been a great company. I didn't even think beyond the fact that there could be issues there. Maybe just talk about what those issues actually were when you saw the Ledger Recover announced. Yeah. I mean, I think for most people, they've been teasing out that Ledger Recover concept for a while. I think they had revealed some of it kind of been teasing out that Ledger Recover concept for a while. I think they had revealed some of it to like Wired or something like that. So people had like a loose idea of what Ledger Recover would be. But then I think it kind of ended up being

two interesting pieces that made it a more painful launch for them is that they accidentally leaked it early with some details that got people starting to think about like, maybe there are some problems with this approach before Ledger like had their proper kind of pr campaign in full swing um but when they did reveal it i think the the really big thing that jumped out to me is it it revealed that there's a there's a big values difference i think between ledger as a company and most bitcoiners now obviously that doesn't necessarily hold true for everybody within ledger or anything like that. I'm not speaking about specific people there. But it showed that I think a lot of their values are around driving profit for them and driving mass adoption at all costs, which has always been a thing that I think we've battled within the Bitcoin space is like,

how do we balance doing things the right way? How do we do it like the way that Bitcoin is originally intended? How do we do this properly, but also try and push to get this freedom tech in as many people's hands as possible? Because it ultimately is something that brings freedom. But when I looked at Ledger Recover, the biggest problems are that when you go ahead and use the service, and it is opt-in, so clarifying that for everybody, I know that was an initial confusion that people thought it was something that was enabled for everybody. It is theoretically opt-in, but the big problems are it is closed source in nature. And so for people who aren't familiar, there's this concept of open source and a free and open source movement. That means that the things that we build for those who adhere to that idea should build them out in the

open, build them in a way that others can build on top of them, review what's going on. Ledger as a company has been closed sourced with the majority of the firmware on Ledger and a lot of their software for a very long time. So it's never been a core piece of what they do. But because Ledger Recover is closed source, we can't verify any of the way that it works in practice. They did say they're going to change that and open source the protocol before it actually goes live after all the pushback that they got. But that's an important caveat. The other main problem is this reveals to people that Ledger could and always could have, in theory, gotten the seed phrase off of their devices. Because the basic way that Ledger Recover works is you connect it to this Recover app, you log in, you give over a

selfie into this identity verification. And then once you do that, you confirm a prompt on your ledger and your seed phrase is encrypted on the ledger again, theoretically, because it's closed source, but I would expect that it is how they do it. And then that's uploaded to Ledger and then to other custodians. So that opens up a lot of other risks where you have to now give up all of your personal identifying information to these companies and to a third party broker to be able to use this service. And then you've ultimately changed the threat model really around your Bitcoin, because not only now do you have to secure your ledger, but even if your ledger is securely at home, no one gets it, no one gets access access to it no one gets access to your seed phrase if uh the u.s government for instance went to ledger and their other custodians

who are all kind of within the the realm of of subpoena they could ask them to give over the private keys of a specific individual and those companies could easily collaborate and give that over um so it opens up risk of loss of bitcoin theft of Bitcoin if a company like Ledger was hacked since they do own the decryption keys for these shards. Opens up exposing your personal data to these custodians as well. And really showed people that Ledger is focused on mass adoption at all costs and was willing to kind of sacrifice the things that people thought that Ledger stood for in order to achieve that. It's a difficult situation because obviously i mean i think though that there are very few people who deeply care about their privacy and securing their bitcoin in a manner that this would offend them right even finding out yes, there was this uproar among a certain part of the community.

But I would argue that most people who will come in when we have mainstream adoption will be leaving their coins on exchanges or want them like custody that fidelity or being a melon or something, right? And so how do we actually even talk about mainstream adoption if our expectation is that people will care so passionately about their privacy and custody that they will go

through these absurd lengths? And it is absurd, to be honest. Listen, and I'm very, very, very passionate about self-custody. I have multi-sig. My stuff is geographically dispersed. I'm very passionate about it, but I also think I'm nuts. And when I tell the people in my life what I do to secure my Bitcoin, the few who I trust, they think I'm nuts. So where's the happy medium there? Maybe Ledger Recover is the happy medium because it's opt-in

and people are comfortable with that level of risk. Yeah, I think there's two main responses I'd have to that. One of them is that I think the difficulty of self-custody has somewhat been overblown because I think in a lot of the community, there's been a push to do things to secure for the actual needs of most people. I think a really good example of that is multi-sig and that multi-sig is a fantastic tool. It's one of the most kind of unique aspects of Bitcoin because of all the things that it enables us to build on top of it. The way that it works for companies, the way that it helps specifically high net worth individuals. But multisig adds a lot of complexity.

And I think a lot of times we've seen Bitcoiners pushing new entrants to the space straight into like, oh, well, you need like a multisig setup, two out of three, three different hardware wallets. Yeah. It's not doing that. They're not, three different hardware wallets. Yeah. It's not a deal. Nobody's doing that. They're not doing that like their first day. Yeah, I definitely agree. And I think that's part of it is that a lot of people have kind of been scared off initially and said like, I can't self-custody. Rather than approaching it from a much more simplistic perspective of really worst case self-custody is keeping 12 words secure.

That's pretty much it. So that's not necessarily easy, but it's also not this crazy high barrier of entry. But I think even when it comes to that, there's some unique ways that we can start to abstract away from seed phrases in a way that doesn't give up your seed phrase to a third party in plain text or that doesn't do something that you don't have total control over. So there's some interesting ways where we can do things like we can encrypt a seed phrase locally with a key that you control using open source software that anyone can verify how it works and then store it into an encrypted in something like Bitwarden or something like iCloud Keychain and a tool that by default makes sure that only you have access to that no matter what, even if the company that you're choosing to store this with got a subpoena or something like that. They would have no technological ability to turn over this data. So I think there's some really unique approaches we can take.

And it's something we've been working on at Foundation, especially for mobile wallets, because there's a different threat model for mobile wallets than your long-term wealth that you'd store in something like a hardware wallet. But even that worst case of keeping 12 words secure, I don't think is really that crazy when people kind of come down to it and realize that most people are not needing to protect against someone knowing they have Bitcoin, knowing their address, coming to their house and hitting them with a $5 wrench. That's where really kind of the multi-sig concept starts to help and that there's no one person you can go to. If you're in your space and you're sitting here having conversations about Bitcoin,

you obviously have to go to extraordinary lengths to secure it. Although I think that many won't. I totally agree with your point. The funny thing is, though, then people say it's very easy for me to secure these 12 words and then they put them into somewhere secure like, I don't know, LastPass. Funny thing is, though, then people say it's very easy for me to secure these 12 words. And then they put them into somewhere secure like, I don't know, LastPass.

Or, right? And the problem to me here, and I'm not looking to solve it here today, is that the trusted companies and sources, there's always a hacker who's trying to get ahead of them. And you have to still trust that they're going to be able to secure things. I mean, we saw the Ledger data breaches in the past. Right now, we're saying that Ledger maybe can abstract away your keys. Who can you trust? That's the thing. Every time you see one of these trusted parties, a LastPass or one of these get hacked, you think, well, can I trust the one that I'm using? Or should I be questioning even the most secure by consensus? Yeah. And I think it comes down to this idea of trust minimization. This idea of being totally trustless, unless you're a brilliant, super shadowy coderer and you can read and write all types of code, you're not

going to be able to verify everything from scratch. But what we can do is we can minimize the trust that we're placing in these entities. So when it comes to things like hardware wallets, when it comes to things like software wallets, when it comes to things like tools that leverage encryption that only you can decrypt into an encryption. I think it's really important that we use the tools available to us to minimize that trust. And open source as a movement and as an ideology and as a technical thing is a huge piece of that because it means that we don't have to just blindly trust the things that are being told to us. With Ledger Recover, at least until they open source it, if they actually open source all of that,

we have to blindly trust what Ledger is saying. With something that's open source, we can verify ourselves or for most of us, I mean, I'm not a developer either. We're going to have to have somebody verify it, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't think any 99.9999% of people can't verify it themselves, which then of course leads you to have to trust someone who can. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. To me, it's this endless game of trust. I think it's very clear that open source is superior to closed source. No question there. And listen, you can't hold everyone's hand through everything. I just think that it's still a major challenge that's yet to be solved on the security and custody side. And it is probably very confusing and disorienting for new people. Because even

if you come in and you say, okay, I'm going to buy a ledger, then you get like bombarded by the entire community telling you not to do that. Right? When six months ago, people would have said, buy a ledger. Yep. Yep.

Things have gotten more complex. But I mean, there are good ways to do this stuff in a way that does minimize that trust. And I think that's the piece we have to fight for.

Yes, we're never going to get to this, again, unless you're like some brilliant dev, we're not going to get to this total trustlessness. But what Bitcoin really does for us and what the tools that we build around Bitcoin need to do is minimize the trust we have to put in third parties, keep things open source and transparent, just like Bitcoin does. And that gives the user ultimately power rather than the company or the provider themselves. Is there anything compelling you've seen outside

of the existing model of seed phrases and private keys that you think could be compelling or anything that allows you to secure those in a manner where you're basically don't have access to them, don't need them and don't need to be able to recover them? Yeah, I think when you're talking about something like a mobile wallet,

I think there's very compelling options. Like what I briefly mentioned before, it's something we do with Envoy, our mobile wallet that we call Magic Backups. And it's, in essence, your seed phrase you generate on the device. Everything is open source, totally transparent. And then if you choose to use something like Magic Backups, it encrypts your seed phrase and then puts it into your iCloud keychain, which only you have access to.

Not even Apple has access to that. And then we encrypt all of the data about the wallet, like wallet names, transaction labels, all that kind of stuff. And we send that to our server, but an encrypted method that again, we can't read, only you can decrypt with your seed. So while that does open up some potential threat models for a mobile wallet, it's really ideal because you can onboard someone to Bitcoin in 30 seconds. They don't need to understand the concept of seed words. Everyone already has,

basically everyone in the world already has either an Android phone with a Google account or an iPhone with an Apple account. And both of those have default functionality to do end-to-end encrypted storage of this data in a way that not Android or not Google or Apple can actually access. So I think that's a good

solution for mobile wallets, but that is probably not how you want to do your long-term wealth. It's not how you want to secure millions of dollars, right? Yeah, exactly. And for that, I think something interesting, and this is something that I think needs to be iterated on more, is social recovery. So kind of taking the same concept of ledger recover, but doing it in, again, an open- source way, but doing it where the custodians of the shards of your seed or of the pieces to be able to recover that are people that you know, and doing it in a way where they can just install an app, set it up, connect to you, you set this up, and it sends the shards. So ledger recover with trusted parties rather than a third party that you're unaware of or something that's closed source. That's an interesting idea. Yeah, I think that that would be a good fit

and that lets you leverage your social circle for the ability to recover funds and not trusting any one of them. So, even like, I mean, say you do like a five of eight shards or something, you would need five of your friends and family to collaborate to try and recover that. So So you would do some

model that protects you against them being malicious. And then obviously you're the one choosing the custodian. You're not forced into this choice of these three custodians who all have a financial contract together like with Ledger. So I think that's a really interesting alternative. Yeah, it is because even if you have multi-sync, people realize then you go down the path of what happens if something happens to me. And I want to hand this off to my wife or I want my kids to understand it. You still have to have people you trust. Even if you make it a complex scavenger hunt, you have to have people you trust who eventually are going to have access to these things and have access to your wallet.

Because one day you might not be there. What do you think of MPC? I think it will be interesting as it's proven out more, basically as it gets implemented to more things and we see it more kind of in the wild. I think it does hold a lot of very powerful potential for this type of thing and would solve some of the potential problems with social recovery,

with people being able to collaborate against you. Yeah, it would be interesting. It's not something I've dug into too deeply. I know a couple wallets use it, but the two that I know of are closed source, so it's hard to verify exactly how they're doing things. But that's where another, like, if these companies are building out in the open with open source code, it lets the rest of the community, the rest of the Bitcoin ecosystem, see what they're doing, iterate on it, build their own versions of it. And it breeds this environment that is so much better for the user because there's so many more people being able to build these things out.

It's not something where I want it to be proprietary. So that would definitely be an interesting angle to explore more in the future. I mean, you go by Seth for privacy. So clearly this isn't just about self-custody of your Bitcoin, right? You obviously have a passion for this. Where does this come from and why is it so important to you? Yeah. I mean, for me, the idea of personal privacy didn't mean anything to me until I got into Bitcoin. I think it's one of the very interconnected rabbit holes that once you get into Bitcoin, you start to think about now that I'm in control of my money, how do I get to be in

control of the rest of my life, my food supply, my privacy, my security, all of these things start to become more, I think, interesting to you as you dive into Bitcoin. And for me, it was, I got into Bitcoin, and then I actually got into Monero shortly after that. And Monero is a very privacy focused cryptocurrency open source. There's a lot of the same ethos as Bitcoin, but a bent really wholly on digital cash and privacy. And that community is so privacy focused that they really took me under their wing and showed me that financial privacy is essential. And that really provides the rest of the freedoms that we can have as humans.

But there's also this, this broad need for personal privacy because everything that we do is online these days, literally everything. The devices that we have in our house, your light bulbs are often internet connected. Like there's so much of our lives that is being just constantly pushed into the internet that we really are in an environment that we've never been in as a society, as a civilization. I mean, if you look 50 years ago, no one had these problems because the worst case situation was your phone was tapped. I mean, yeah, yeah, really even 20 years ago. And so we're in this place where people wittingly or unwittingly are putting all of their lives data on the internet and don't understand the ramifications of that. And we're only starting

to really come to grips with the problems that are there. So for me, it's become a passion because privacy is not just something to attain on its own. Just like I don't think financial sovereignty is a thing to attain on its own with Bitcoin, but it's the means to an end. And the means to an end, the how is that we use tools like Bitcoin, like privacy preserving technology, like open source code to rekindle human freedom in a digital age and to do it in a way that is resistant to tyrannical governments, resistant to central bank digital currencies, resistant to all of the things that are pressing around us in our time right now. And these tools are ultimately the ways that we fight back and we get the power back in the hands of the individual rather than the corporation or the government.

Well, you invoked Monero. So now I know they're tapping this conversation. We know how much they, whoever they are, love Monero. But you don't hear about Monero as much anymore. You know, listen, I was an entrant into the Bitcoin crypto world in maybe 2016, early 2017. And Monero was the talk of the town at that point. Privacy coins in general, but Monero, even for traders, just trading it for price. I've seen that it's sort

of been pushed aside, banned, whatever you want to call it in a lot of places. Is that still a pretty rabid community? Is it still a thriving project? I really haven't kept up with it. Yeah, it absolutely is. And I think depending on kind of what the current news is, you'll see Monero mentioned more or less, but it's a rapidly growing community. The project has been continuing to iterate and improve on the protocol itself, the implementations. A lot of the ecosystem has grown.

A lot of merchants have started to adopt it. So it's definitely something that's vibrant. It's just, I think it falls by the wayside a lot of times because there's a lack of a focus on personal privacy and on financial privacy. The number one rule of Monero is never tell anybody that you're using Monero. Which is also a problem. It's all these very, very privacy-oriented individuals behind it. So a lot of times the social and the marketing aspects have fallen behind. So that's where a lot of the work that I've done in the past four or five years has been to try and help out Monero in that aspect, because I'm not a developer, but I'm technically minded.

And so bringing the concepts of Monero into the real world and also looking at what does Monero do? How does it do it? Why does it do it? And how can we bring these concepts, if not these specific tools, back into something like Bitcoin and help to improve Bitcoin at the same time? I mean, as a Bitcoiner, there's a lot of them who would say Monero is a shitcoin. Don't touch it because it's not called Bitcoin, right? But it seems like you get away with it. Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is I have never been price-focused or speculation-focused. So when I'm talking about it, I'm only talking about these tools, Bitcoin and Monero, as tools for freedom.

And so ultimately, when I'm talking about them, I try to be very nuanced with Monero. There are different choices made in Monero that may make it a better or worse tool for specific use cases than Bitcoin. And I view it as really an immensely powerful tool for freedom for today because it's very easy to use in a privacy preserving manner and that's something that's tricky with most other cryptocurrencies bitcoin included it's not easy to use bitcoin in a

privacy preserving way which is something i'm passionate about fixing and then foundation we're passionate about fixing it but it is really kind of i think the the coming storm within bitcoin is the kind of privacy wars and how we're going to handle improving this because the freedom that we can get from a financial tool like bitcoin will ultimately be limited if there's not a way to use it in a privacy preserving manner because the people who want to shut us down or to take away freedoms will be able to see how it's being used and who's using it and crack down on a lot of the edge cases, the ecosystem, the merchants, that sort of thing. So yeah, I think a lot of it is really just that when you look at Monero, its ethos is very similar to Bitcoin, fair issuance, proof of work. It has a different approach to emissions. So it's not a

hard cap like Bitcoin has 21 million, Monero has 18.4 million, but then a tail emission. So it's not a hard cap like Bitcoin has 21 million, Monero has 18.4 million, but then a tail emission. So there's certainly some differences, some trade-offs, but the approaches taken share a lot of similarities too, especially how Bitcoin was started. I know a lot of the ethos now depends on kind of what communities you're in within Bitcoin, but it really shares a lot of the cypherpunk roots with Bitcoin and what Satoshi and Hal Finney and all of those were working on from day one. I'll take it. I accept it. You're allowed. You're allowed to like whatever you want. I got the pass, the Hall pass to talk about.

Trust me, I'm not the guy giving out Bitcoin maxi appropriateness passes. I get on the other side of that community quite often myself. But it's funny because one of those sort of prevailing anti-Bitcoin narratives from governments has always been that it's for criminals and it's to be private. But then you see the FBI constantly tracking down anyone who uses Bitcoin for crime so much easier than if they had used cash. So, I mean, isn't that just one of those nonsensical narratives that doesn't really hold water anyways? I mean, your wallet is private. Who owns it? But the transactions, I mean, it's literally a transparent public ledger. Yeah. And I mean, there are certainly ways to use Bitcoin in a way that does preserve your privacy, especially like the folks at Samurai Wallet have built out fantastic tooling that helps you to use it in a privacy-preserving way.

Lightning Network provides some potential improvements to privacy depending on a lot of factors. So there are certainly ways to use it in a privacy-preserving manner. But the boogeyman of terrorism or drugs or whatever the latest fad is for the government to use to target tools that it doesn't like will continue to come at Bitcoin, whether or not they're true or whether or not they're true of a very small percentage. It doesn't matter. No, it doesn't matter. All they have to do is say it, then 99% of people who know nothing are going to believe it. Yeah. And if you want to talk about what tools are used to commit crimes,

the US dollar and banks are the main source of money laundering, of drug-related crimes. All of these things are driven by the dollar, not by Bitcoin. It's a very, very, very small percentage of those things. And even if a technology enables some sort of bad actors, that doesn't mean that the overall impact for humanity is lost. I mean, if you look at literally any technology that we use today, the first adopters were almost always criminals. And then people started to understand, okay, this thing actually has a broad impact. Yeah, exactly. I mean, exactly. So I think it's something where they will continue to use these boogeymen to try and either scare people off of Bitcoin or attack it. And I think that the current attacks,

especially against Bitcoin, are coming in the ability to trade Bitcoin peer-to-peer with other people. It's been an attack that they've been doing for a while. Yeah, I mean, a lot of these companies that were used for that have folded. I just always laugh at it because it's like a criminal has never used an iPhone, right? If a criminal makes a call to do some criminal things on an iPhone, do we ban the iPhone as the technology? Because it enabled them to... Nobody would ever, ever float that notion.

So it's just patently absurd and a silly narrative. I want to talk about something you said before, though. You were talking about privacy and individuals giving up their privacy. You said, wittingly or unwittingly. Seems like 99.9% of the time, it's wittingly. And either people... Or someone believes they care about privacy, literally while using their face on their phone to open it up. Right. We know that if you're using these technologies that you probably have minimal privacy.

Then you get this pushback from the government with things like the Restrict Act, right, which is skinned as banned TikTok, but actually is violating every privacy you could possibly imagine online and attaching huge monetary and potential jail time penalties to it. The strict act was huge talk a couple months ago. It seems to have disappeared, but it hasn't. So have you been looking at that? Have you been tracking it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the whole crux of what the US government and what pretty much every Western government wants to do is have privacy for themselves and not for you. They want to prevent data from getting into the hands of their enemies, but they want to collect all of that data. I mean, even this last week, we've seen that the US government has been collecting very, very sensitive information on citizens illegally for years

and storing it for their own use later on. So this is very much something where the US government has shown that they do not care about your privacy. They just care that they have all your data and China doesn't or Russia doesn't or whatever the latest boogeyman there is. So when you look at something like the Restrict Act, you can really boil it down to it would become the Great Firewall of America, just like we have the Great Firewall of China, where they have complete control and censorship capabilities over what their citizens view on the internet, what their citizens use as far as apps, how their citizens communicate. The proposed legislation in the Restrict Act essentially opens that door for the US and being able to quickly censor and ban

any specific app or communication method that they want. And then, like you said, impose crazy fines, crazy jail time. I think it was, I can't remember exactly. I think it was like $250,000 in 20 years. I'm not looking at it, but it was something that absurd. For using a VPN. Yeah, for using a VPN to access a site that was bad. The thing is, which I think has become the norm for government and regulators as well when they're tagging crypto, but to be exceptionally vague, anything that is a foreign government, a million things could fall into that bucket. They never mentioned crypto, but you could certainly apply almost steady crypto to how they were saying it.

You can apply any foreign website and never did it mention Tik TOK. And I mean, if you want to be in Tik TOK, ban Tik TOK, which by the way, I disagree with, right. Because I don't think you should ban social media platform if people are

willingly using it, but just pass something that says Tik TOK specifically is, you know, a Chinese spy app that people that they're using to spy and you would like to ban that. Don't say we're going to ban everything into the future that we deem inappropriate for you. That is really 1984 Big Brother stuff. Yeah. And I think a lot of it too is setting the precedent is an immensely important part of it. So if the government is able to get through something that allows them to ban TikTok,

even if it was more tame than the Restrict Act, that opens the door. Because if you can argue and pass something that bans a specific app because it does something that you don't like, you can ultimately do that for anything. I mean, we've seen that even within cryptocurrency when we talk about privacy-preserving tools.

The Tornado Cash sanctions by the US Treasury were absolutely insane, far beyond anything we've seen. And they do the same thing in that they use this boogeyman of North Korean hackers are using this to get funds through using the privacy-preserving tools of Tornado Cash.

But even them in their own press releases, they could only link something like 7% of the usage to these North Korean hackers. So 93% of the users of Tornado Cash are perfectly legitimate as far as the U.S. government was concerned, but they still sanctioned the entire tool. And that's something that they will gladly shut down the privacy of individuals in order to shut down one specific perceived threat to national security, even if there's not really a threat to national security. It's a crazy thing and it's something where thankfully we still have some control

over the government in the US, but we will lose that if we allow things like the Restrict Act through because the ability to organize, the ability to protest, the ability to communicate can quickly fall through and something like that is reality. Yeah, giving away your freedoms is a very slippery slope

and I find specifically with privacy, it's a one-way street. And you never get it back. had it removing them so it's very very unlikely that when something is granted to the u.s government or any other kind of modern government they're going to relinquish that when the whatever the pressing issue or boogeyman at the time is at least they used to call it cool like go america names like the patriot act and stuff now now it's like restrict action the next act will be we're watching you act the uh the pr team that one, I don't think was very strong. Questionable. So listen, knowing that this is likely the truth about our governments and all governments and knowing which direction this is headed, what are some very basic pragmatic things

that the individual can do? I think we all, everyone listening to this knows buy Bitcoin, maybe these things, but what other things can people do to help at least at the very basic level, protect their privacies, not give it up to your government and corporation at every turn? Yeah. I mean, I think to add one thing onto the concept of buying Bitcoin, it would be, if at all possible, buy Bitcoin on an exchange that doesn't require your personal information to be able to sign up, that doesn't require you to give over that KYC data, as it's often called. Because if you don't do that, if you're able to avoid giving over your personal information, Bitcoin actually becomes usually a good enough tool for privacy because there's no direct link

between your identity and your on-chain activity. So that's kind of the, I think, the first step. That gives you a huge advantage over the rest of people using Bitcoin through KYC exchanges like Coinbase or whatever. So I think that's an important one when you're looking from the Bitcoin perspective. When you're looking broader personal privacy, some of the biggest ways that you can have some large impact on what data you're putting out into the world without really sacrificing a lot of quality of life is using a better privacy-preserving browser. There's some really good tools from Brave Browser to Mulvod introduced their own. It's a little bit more hardcore, so it's probably more

hardcore for most people, but something like Brave Browser or Firefox with some tuning will allow you to block a lot of the tracking that's common online, allow you to block a lot of the privacy invasive methods that are just everywhere on the internet. So that's a really big one. I think past that, using privacy preserving messengers like Signal is a really big step forward. It's something where it can be tricky initially to get friends and family on there if they're not already using it. But once you do get them on there, it provides a large privacy boost because the things that we talk about with the people that we love and respect and are friends with, and those intimate details are very useful against us in the future, potentially, not necessarily, but potentially. And even unwitting comments can

be something that's problematic in the future. So being able to have that communication in peace, in privacy, also just allows us to be more honest, to be more human, to be more transparent, where we're not thinking about what will the Facebook employee who's reading this messenger message say about me when they read this. How will they social engineer me to SIM swap me and steal the very Bitcoin that I was using for my privacy? Yeah, but I've been SIM swapped multiple times. I mean, just, and the reason is because they socially engineer you with that very kind of information or by looking at your Facebook page and they swipe you. But I want to talk about how you can buy Bitcoin in the United States without KYC, AML, without being concerned

about being in violation of some future regulation that we know is probably coming. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the best ways right now, there's really, I think, three of the most important tools for US people specifically are RoboSats, BISC, and something called AgoraDesk. So let's go in that order. So RoboSats is a very, very cool way to purchase Bitcoin using the Lightning Network specifically in a way that doesn't reveal your personal identity, gives you very, very good privacy, but allows you to trade cash for Bitcoin or gift cards for Bitcoin or Zelle for Bitcoin or Cash App, lots of different payment methods and be able to buy Bitcoin from someone else, get it directly into your Lightning Wallet without ever connecting your identifying information. It's really straightforward to use. They have their own Android app that you can

install. They have a website that operates over Tor, so there's a little bit of a hurdle because you'll have to get the Tor browser to use it properly. But that's a really cool tool that's been taking off and becoming a lot more popular. The second one is BISC, which is a little bit more hardcore, so it can be harder to recommend for new people to Bitcoin. If you're already an experienced Bitcoiner, it's not going to be daunting at all, I don't think. But it has that same purpose where it's totally decentralized, a little different than RoboSats and others, and that no one runs it. It's run on a node of a volunteer or a network of volunteer nodes, just like Bitcoin. And that lets you, again, find other

people who are selling Bitcoin. You find one that's using the payment method you want to pay with, you pay, they transfer the Bitcoin and there's security mechanisms in place to protect you so that you can't lose your fiat and not get the Bitcoin or something like that. And then the third is called Agora Desk. And it's really a re-implementation of local Bitcoins. It's very similar. So if you were familiar with local Bitcoins in the past, it'll be very familiar to you. And it's a website you can go to either ClearNet or the Tor network, set up an account. And then again, just find other Bitcoiners

who want to sell Bitcoin, buy directly from them. And that's normally how it works. In order to avoid having to give up your personal ID, you usually have to buy directly from other people. And there is no law specifically against that right now. There have been some cases of them prosecuting people who do like massive volumes, like $300,000 or something in Bitcoin a year. So if you're doing it for regular purposes, there's absolutely no law against it at the moment. But that is again where privacy is so important and where you are protecting yourself a lot in that if for some reason the u.s government went crazy and made a law that you cannot trade bitcoin with another u.s citizen which would be crazy but i know that

they would love to do that in the future doing this now rather than starting with the kyc exchange starting to learn these tools and use them now gives you much better privacy and much more plausible deniability around that in the future when you use them and you're not linking your ID directly. And then you may want to also learn more advanced kind of privacy tools like Samurai Wallet or Sparrow Wallet to learn how to gain further privacy. But that's not necessary for most people, but it's something that everyone should look into and start to get comfortable with as well. Yeah, I mean, listen, the government wants to know if you have a foreign bank account.

The government certainly needs to know every stock and every asset that you own. I don't think it's a far leap for them to view Bitcoin through that same lens. So even if you buy it in a non-KYC manner, they're going to want to know one way or another that you have it. If you don't somehow report it, that's going to be some sort of violation in the future, if I had to guess. Yeah, absolutely. And obviously, I'm not recommending tax evasion or anything like that. I mean, right now, they would require you to report it. If you buy it, you don't sell it. It's not even a taxable transaction. So, yeah, I'm not talking about tax evasion. That's why you never sell, guys.

You never ever sell Bitcoin. I remember having Corey from Swan on and he was like, we don't have a sell button on Swan. So you have to call us. It's a one way street. Yeah. It only comes in, never, ever, ever goes out. So, I mean, it's a pretty scary world, you know, and once you really start going down this rabbit hole, it's hard to keep the balance of being sort being fearful about this or thinking about it all the time and actually living a normal life. But it does really not seem like there's a path to more privacy in life with the evolution of this technology. And there's just too much technology and too many ways for them to track

us. They just couldn't do that in the past. You talk about 50 years ago, like you said, they literally would have had to come in and tap your phone and you would have happened to have the conversation that they needed to hear on that specific phone. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is easy to be demoralized. I think that's one of the most common problems when you start to dive down the privacy rabbit hole. That's why a lot of times my first recommendation to people wanting better personal privacy is find a community who shares your views so that you can have people to back you up and to talk to you and talk you down from the crazy privacy things that might make your life too difficult or too closed off from the world. So it's definitely hard,

but I think there's also, there are so many reasons for optimism as well. I mean, Bitcoin is the first and foremost reason for optimism in that even though governments are going crazy, even though the financial policy in the world is insane, even though they're cracking down on the usage of cash, tools like Bitcoin break that open for the world. They break that open for us in the US. They break that open for anyone who is willing to jump in, learn about it, and start to use it. So tools like Bitcoin, the open source ecosystem is producing so many valuable privacy preserving tools. I mean, Signal is a fantastic, very approachable example of that. And that you just install it, you use it just like iMessage, and you're gaining extremely strong privacy that no one, not Signal, not the US government, not anyone else can

break through to read those communications. So it's something where even though there is constantly this kind of demoralizing deluge of bad news when it comes to personal privacy, there's also so much optimism because we have amazing tools being built out, improved. We have many, many, many more people waking up to the need for personal privacy. I think we've seen a large amount of change in that area with different governments' responses to COVID over the past few years. We saw a lot of people start to think like what happens if the government decides they want to close things down, if they want to prevent people from traveling freely, those sorts of things. So I think there are so many reasons

for optimism, but I definitely understand that when we talk about all this kind of this demoralizing news, it's easy to lose heart. But thankfully we do have tools. I mean, imagine where we'd be if we didn't have open source software, if we didn't have privacy tools like Signal, like Tor, like strong VPNs, if we didn't have Bitcoin. If Bitcoin had never been invented, how would we approach the kind of economic future that we're looking at right now? It's crazy to think where we could be,

but where we're not because of these tools and because of the things that we can do with them once we wake up, understand the need for them, and just start to use them. We'd have highly inflating cash in our mattresses still like in the past, right? We'd all be gold bugs, I guess. We'd be a silver and gold bar saving off gold

to pay for your haircut. The circular economy. Yeah, but isn't the endgame of all this then with the evolution's direction, the governments are going to central bank digital currency? I mean, if we believe that the money is really the source of all of these, the endgame for all of this privacy violation, then a central bank digital currency has to be a government and central bankers' wet dream, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think that we've already seen many, many governments around the world starting to explore them. I mean, China, just like with anything else authoritarian and surveillance-oriented, is leading the charge with the digital yuan and the ways that they're implementing that and incentivizing citizens to use it, even though it sacrifices their privacy and their control over their money.

And we will absolutely see that within Europe, within the US, I would think within the decade at the very latest. So it's something that we will have to come face to face with, and it's something that governments love because it's the wet dream of control. You have the ability to not only surveil everything that happens in your citizens' financial interactions from start to finish, every single, your dollar, cup of coffee, no cup of coffee is a dollar anymore, but your $5 cup of coffee, whatever you're buying, they would know exactly when you're buying it, how you're buying it,

where you're buying it. And then even worse than that, something we've never seen is they would have the ability to just pull money directly from your account. And it would be the federal government. Or drop it right in. Yeah. Or drop it right in. Take it out.

Want to drop that stimulus? But you can only spend it on shoes and it's got to be by next Tuesday. Oh yeah. Yeah. They would have so many new levers to mess with our financial sovereignty. But it is pretty terrifying.

And it's interesting because I think they leverage the success and the growth of Bitcoin actually as a way to kind of pave the path towards CBDCs because they can talk about Bitcoin bad, Bitcoin brings all these bad things, FTX, look at all the problems, but we can do it the right way

and we can bring a digital currency. Oh, the technology is great. It's just the actual asset that's bad. Yeah, we've heard that. Blockchain, not Bitcoin, right? Yeah. It's just the actual asset that's bad. Yeah, we've heard that. Blockchain, not Bitcoin, right? Yeah. Oh, for sure. And that's, I think, something that they'll drive on.

But again, it is going to come. I don't know that there's a way we can protect ourselves against, that we can stop it from happening. But again, continuing to use tools like Bitcoin now. Pushing hard. I mean, obviously, I think we still have some kind of democratic control in the US. So pushing very hard for laws that at least slow down the spread of CBDCs. We already have states like North Carolina and Florida creating legislation that would ban CBDC usage within the state. So there's some interesting

protection that we can have in the US and states' rights play an important part of that. But ultimately, it's getting your foot into the circular economy of Bitcoin before CBDCs come, getting used to how it works, getting used to actually using it to buy and sell goods. I think that's another piece where a lot of Bitcoiners just buy and hodl. And I understand the mentality. But if something like CBDCs come and all your favorite merchants switched using a CBDC and none of this Bitcoin, it's not going to be useful to you. Yeah. You have to start to embrace this world where Bitcoin is not just a store of value. It is a method of exchange. It is digital cash. And we really need to lean into that both with on-chain and with lightning and Bitcoin.

So again, there's obviously reasons to be worried, but so much optimism because of the tools that have been built because of all the amazing people building around Bitcoin, helping to grow and improve it, and all the educators in the space working on it. There's a lot of hope for optimism. So where can people follow you after this conversation and hopefully stay updated on all the things we need to do to protect ourselves? Yeah, so the best place for kind of my broad content is probably just Twitter, at Seth for privacy is my handle there. And then if you want to follow my podcast,

which I'm a little bit more intermittent and posting to it at this point, just because I'm busy with other things, but that's Opt Out is the name of the podcast or at Opt Out Pod on Twitter. And then the majority of my content now is actually coming out through foundation. I'm head of content at foundation where we build Bitcoin centric tools to help you to reclaim your digital sovereignty, help you reclaim your privacy.

And so the vast majority of my content now is going into their blog, going into some, some really exciting things that we're working on to, to help in the broader freedom space as well. But that's, that's another good place. Foundationdevices.com is where that blog is. You can learn more about us, learn more about what I do there and read the blog posts that I'm putting out. I'm glad that you're a privacy advocate. You're sharing all this information

rather than moving up into the mountains in a small shack and keeping your privacy truly, right? Because a lot of people who believe in this stuff aren't going to come on podcasts and show their face and have these conversations. So I think it's very important. Yeah. Yeah. I made a hard but conscious decision that I was going to show my face. I was going to have a well-known pseudonym. I'm not super, super hard on the anonymous side because I think there's value in kind of being a

bridge to the privacy community and helping people to see the need and see that real, normal, everyday people with families care about privacy, take steps to preserve it and want to help others do the same. So it's definitely something that's important and something that I hold dear and so thankful for the opportunity to come on a podcast like this and talk about these concepts. Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much for your time and for sharing those very, even just practical tips on very basic steps that people hear who run into that wall of, okay, now I care about my privacy.

What do I do? I'm glad that now we have a few ideas that you could share. And I think that'll send people properly down the rabbit hole. So thanks once again. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Scott. Let's go.