We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC066: Creating Bitcoin Products and Infrastructure w/ NVK (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 01:34 - Why Entropy Dice are important for creating ultra-secure private keys. 10:19 - When NVK came into the Bitcoin space and how he started his company. 21:53 - The Block Clock incident with Jack Dorsey. 26:21 - What is the Satscard? 31:07 - How can the Bitcoin network be hardened. 41:17 - How has Bitcoin impacted the current situation in Canada with the trucker protests? 58:15 - Will Smart contracts get more traction on top of Bitcoin in the future? 1:01:25 - What will UX look like with major cell phone companies entering the space? 1:06:10 - Does he have security concerns of components being manufactured upstream of hardware wallet integration? *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. NVK's Twitter. NVK's Company ColdCard. New to the show? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Are you a looking to start investing? Check out our article on How to Invest in Stocks: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: SimpleMining AnchorWatch Human Rights Foundation Onramp Superhero Leadership Unchained Vanta Shopify Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the podcast where we're talking about Bitcoin. On today's show, I have a good friend and major contributor to the Bitcoin space. Then he goes by NVK. NVK is the founder of the popular hardware wallet company, Cold Card. Cold Card is known for having an ultra-secure Bitcoin wallet, and on today's show, we cover some really interesting topics. At the start, we get into a fascinating discussion about entropy in the elliptical key generation

process and why it's important to Bitcoin's security. We talk about how the Bitcoin network could be hardened using HF frequencies. We then cover what things might look like with big tech companies starting to enter the space like Intel and potentially smartphone manufacturers. These are just some of the fascinating topics that we cover in this episode. So get ready, sit back and enjoy a ton of information coming from cold cards NVK. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. All right.

So, NVK, this has been a conversation that I'm kind of blown away that it's taking us this long to put it down on the recorder. But man, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here. You're such a wealth of knowledge. So I'm sure this is just going to be a really fun conversation for both of us. Hey, man. Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure.

It's one of my favorite pods. This is where I want to start this conversation. Entropy dice. I find this just fascinating, that you have a product for this. And like, I mean, I understand that just the stupid basics, like at the most elementary level of why these exist. And it gets into elliptical curve key generation, right? But help us just understand what that buzzword even means, right?

the fact that you went out and created a product around this and why there needs to be a product around it, in your opinion. And then lastly, not that I'm trying to give you all these questions at once, but is this how you generate your own keys? Yeah. So this is, it's funny. I mean, no wonder you said it. I was going to be surprised by the first question. That's starting like right there. So cryptography, like especially publicly cryptography, requires a very very, very, very big number, right? A random big number. And that's the basis that you build all your math on top to create your secrets, right, to sort of operate on top of your secret. Actually, let me back to this a bit of. So a password, right? A password is not really the basis

of any secret of the information that you're trying to store. You know, a password is just how you are encapsulating something encrypted, right? And that's the secret that sort of like breaks that, that sort of shield out to see something that's inside. In Bitcoin, the secret is the money, right? So the stakes are much higher because if somebody can break that, because they know the public part already, they already know the information.

It's already out there. So if somebody could break or reverse that, right, and find the original secret, they can spend your money. So in Bitcoin, the secret or the quality of the entropy that the secret has, it's like one of the most important things is the basis of everything security-wise in Bitcoin self-custody. What happens is, how do you create a random number? It sounds like an easy problem, but it's not, right? Because if you are a enterprise solution, right, you know,

and they have been having to create big numbers, big entropy for, you know, like 50 years. And, you know, that's how they protect banks and that's how they protect airplanes and all this stuff. So what they do is they will use this FIPS as a certification, right, by the NIST. You're a serviceman you would know. And they certify the little tiny computers that generate like the gates on a chip that generate that random number, right? randomly. And you know, some of them we use different things. Some of them we use heat. Some of them we use noise, any kind of noise, because noise is entropy. Now, it gets really tricky because most things that you believe are entropically good actually are not. If you observe them for long

enough, you find patterns, right? And if you know those patterns, you could try to reverse engineer which number was created. So it's a massive problem. So much so that like when you're talking about true deep, deep secrets, like the army sort of like main secrets, they will use atomic decay as a means of finding true entropy is one of the best sources of it. But, you know, that's completely unrealistic for the average person to have some apparatus that measures that at home. So what do we do? In Bitcoin, we go and we have very good, well-reviewed crypto libraries that try to do a very good job at like spotting bad sort of means of generating that entropy or or generating that secret, right?

But you still have to feed it something, right? On a computer, you're going to feed some of the noise from the computer, and Bitcoin Corrie is going to use some well-serted libraries to do that, right? But you can't really fully trust that either, right? Because you don't know if the computer is not lying to you. This is the biggest problem that Bitcoiners have, is that, like, do I have one here? I can't really trust the device, right? that's the whole goal is not to trust the device.

So what do we do is we essentially take the entropy from dice. So you throw dice, right? And out of 99 dice throws, you have 256 bits of entropy, right? Which is the full amount of entropy you need for a Bitcoin private key. And, you know, code card can generate the entropy for you. We do a very good job with that. But having the option for you to be able to enter it. enter your own, the risks one us.

There is less interest in actors to try to compromise us as a company, right? Because now they know that, you know, most users are not going to trust us anyways. And then the next step is, okay, great. So I'm entering the dice entropy into the device. How do I know that the device is showing me the correct entropy is not just lying to me about the dice that I threw for it? We have a companion script that you can run on, say, a sales CD. or some other machine, and you can enter at the same time.

And because this is deterministic, you can actually generate the same seed that you can actually compare. So you can validate the device is doing what it claims he does. And we are getting at a level of security that, like, it beats almost anything that a state actor has, right, with all their disposable by just being like honest, verifiably honest. By being really rudimentary in the way that you're doing it. I think is really kind of the simplicity in using the dice is actually just you can't replicate that in any kind of way.

Yeah, I mean, good luck trying to replicate 99 dice throws, right? Even if the dice were biased, you're still fine. Yeah, no, this is something that whenever I was studying for an interview I was doing with quantum computing. And when I was studying this, I would realize that really kind of the, the, the most vulnerable part of your private keys and your Bitcoin is in that key generation process that you just kind of really went into a lot of depth describing. And so I realized that it came down to the random numbers that are being generated by the computer, and we'll say random

in quotes, because like you so eloquently pointed out, there's ways to kind of reverse engineer that pattern that kind of pops out of the way that those random numbers are being generated and without, you know, a lot of effort being placed into making sure that the number that's coming up with. And you're saying, how big is, how many digits is this big number, this quote-unquote big number that's being generated? It's big. It's a big.

Like how many digits would you say? I don't know. It's 256 bits. It's a lot. It's a huge number. So on the dice, you're dealing with nine digit dice or 10-digit dice, including? including the zero or six. Six. Six. Yeah, the D6, standard dice. Okay, just a standard die. Okay. Yeah, remember, right? Because it compounds, right? Like, we have this, it's kind of cool. And I'm very lazy. So, and I didn't want to throw, like, you know, dice, like, 100 times. So we found the smallest dice that could possibly be boxed. They're like five millimeters big. And it comes in a bag of 100. So we just throw it once.

Just throw one time and then, and then what are you doing? You're just, you're just, you're just, you're just. You're just. You're just. You're just. You're just. You're just. You're just. You're just randomly selecting the numbers. No, no, no. Don't never. Humans cannot do entropy. If I tell you to give me a random number, it's probably not random. So you literally read each dice and you input each digitally. That's what I was getting at it was you're just, I'm going to use this word,

randomly just grabbing whatever dice off the table and you're just kind of compiling those numbers. That's right. 99 of them, six digit numbers. And that is how you're coming up with your key generation. So is this how you did your own? I mean, it depends, right? So I don't believe there is like a single solution to rule them all, right?

So, you know, I have many harder wallets, right? Some are deep cold, some are semi-cold, some are operational, you know, for an operational wallet. The one you use every day, you know, with like smaller funds, I don't care. I'll just sort of let the device generated. I'll give myself last work. But the idea is to really trust, minimize it because nothing is proof, right? It's always just stress minimizing is the goal of our company.

All right. I had to ask that first because when I've observed some years, and I have your block clock sitting here, there's so many things that we can talk about. But this is the one that I've just always kind of smiled at and just had deep admiration for the level to which you are willing to go with your products and with your company to ensure that people's security is at the highest level possible if they choose to take it there.

Right? And I just have a deep admiration for that. But here's my next. When did you come into the space? Because I'm not, I know you came in very early, but when did you come into this space? And then I want to kind of talk about how you build a company around it. I mean, coming to the space in the early days is like a complicated question because it's like, I got into the space when the Satoshi paper came out on slash dot. And then it's like this is something sane idea, right? Like I mean, I still to this day, I just laugh. If anybody pre-17, pre-2012 sort of like said that this thing is like a certainty. Like 2010, it's like, okay, great.

Like some Satoshi guy wrote some paper that's very interesting. And there is absolutely no way this thing is going to work, right? But it was very interesting. And it was interesting to see the stuff starting to form and like, and people start to use. I mean, our first project was launched, I think, end of 2011. You know, we were still working in other companies and sort of like still doing other stuff and, you know, but the first little sort of like, like attempt to doing something in Bitcoin, I think might have been early, like late 2011 kind of thing.

And what was the product? It was definitely early days. Oh, it was a BTC look.com. It was a block explorer for Bitcoin transactions. In those days, the block, the entire blockchain was maybe like 11 gigabytes or something, or 30 gigabytes. I can't remember. It could fit in a, in a normal computer RAM.

So we ran the whole blockchain Redis and you could like do all this cool like visualizations of it. It was fun. It was the project that we did to sort of understand Bitcoin. When did you decide that you were going to do the hardware wallet? The first thing that sort of like, and this is me and Doc Hex, my co-founder. We were sort of like looking at the stuff as like, okay, great, you know, money is in the computer. If I send money goes to another computer. There's no middleman. Wonderful. Bitcoin is for payments.

You know? So we created like this Bitcoin debit cards and Bitcoin payment terminals. And we started sort of deploying them around the world in like late 2012 kind of thing. And, you know, there were kind of like PCI certified payment terminals that we sort of got them done. And the hardware was ours. And it was a little too early. But we had to essentially be the back end for all this stuff. Right.

So we started creating the hardware security modules, right? So they just send servers because neither tails nor the other company that I forget now the name had any servers, any security servers that could do the Bitcoin curve. The Bitcoin curve is not FIP certifiable. Maybe it is now. I don't even know anymore. It wasn't at the time. And, you know, we needed secure servers. And then we sort of ran with that.

And then the company started to become more like an online wallet solution. And then essentially like Big Go before Big Go, it was the back end for a lot of exchanges. is then we sort of decided that one that was not profitable enough and two was not like I didn't want to be a centralized point of failure. Yeah. Like receiving letters and things was not my shtick. So we move on to focus only on harder. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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That's Shopify. com slash WSB. All right, back to the show. Back then, I know whenever I first came into the space, like, there really wasn't a lot of confidence that you could scale so that you could get to the instant payment portion that you have with Lightning now. And building like the product that you're talking about, I'm sure the biggest concern really had to been wrapped around this idea that you needed 10 minutes on average for

just a clearance assuming you can get into the next block. So how are you guys thinking about that at that point in time in the business and thinking about how it could possibly scale. What were your thoughts at the time? It's kind of funny. So we let the, let's see if I have a card here. I actually do. So this were the debit cards. You could essentially, there were a few things, right? Because the cards didn't have a private key in themselves. They were essentially just authentication to get into the big system. You could do user to user instant transfers, right, if they were within the same system. If you were paying from another wallet to the terminal, the merchant had an option to choose

how many confirmations he wanted. We explained, right, that like zero confirmation concerns, it's not your Bitcoin until it's confirmed. But, you know, people buying coffee and stuff, who cares, right? I mean, it's like, what, you're going to lose a dollar? Somebody tried to do a double spend attack at a merchant. It's kind of unrealistic. And this is before transaction maliability too. So it was possible to do that kind of stuff. And then, you know, that's when some of the poop coins. And, you know, in my mind at that time was like, okay, great. So you have like Bitcoin 10 minutes a block and then you have say like coin, right, which had enough security at the time. I think it was like two, three minutes a block. I can't remember

anymore. You know, it was enough. So like, you know, maybe use this stuff for payments that are instant, maybe use this stuff for the other, but people are really going to want to start their money in Bitcoin. So we just sort of like gave options to the people to choose because a lot of people we're using those terminals not for retail. They're using those terminals as a means of being sort of Western Union transfers, right? Because you could print paper wallets, you could sort of onboard new Bitcoiners into the system,

or withdraw really, could get a whole private key out in a QR from the machine. It was a mixed bag, right? Because it's easy now to say Bitcoin is a store of value, right? But in those days, maybe I think like, the only person I remember saying that was like Trace Mayer. Trace Mayor. Yeah.

Everybody else was saying Bitcoin's payments, right? And, you know, it's hard because it was just so unclear what he best did as a utility. Yeah. No, you're right. Trace was pretty much the only guy out there saying those things. So what time frame did you develop the calculator? I love this design. I'm just going to tell you right now.

Like, this is the best design ever that you have this hardware while looking like a calculator. When did you produce this? Okay, so OpenDyme must have been 2016, 2017. I think we launched Cold Card around 2018, 2019, around that time. It sounds right. Because that's when we closed our other system finally. No, the system was closed 2016, maybe. Anyways, we were in flux even with our own stuff, right?

And I'm like, you know, I was not very sort of satisfied with the options in the market. And we created this just for ourselves, really. And then there was enough demand and we sort of, you know, started to make it into a product. Open time was the product that the company was made. making and selling at that time. Yeah, yeah. But we figured out, hey, you know, we need a good harder wallet that respect certain principles that we like.

It's our preference, our sets of tradeoffs, and cold card was born. And by the way, I just heard American Hoddle paid Peter McCormick with one of the open dimes on his show just this week. It's hilarious. I mean, people, it's surprising, like the amount of those devices in the market and how much people actually use them. It's instant. It's already confirmed, right? It's a pre-confirmed U-TXO. So, like, for people that don't understand, that's like an unspaned Bitcoin is in there, right? And you can trust when you're receiving anyway. It's just fun.

It's awesome. That's awesome. How about the clock? So first, the first question I got for you is, what did you do when you were watching Jack Dorsey testifying before Congress? And there's your clock behind him. Like, you had to just been laughing. Like, what would you? was your reaction when you're watching this? It was funny because I think the year or two prior to that, I had dinner with him and, you know, I met the guy first time was sort of out of the blue, super nice guy. And, you know, we gave him some, some products. Blockc didn't exist yet, at least not the mini. And then, you know, sort of time passes and all sort of exchanging messages here and there. And, you know, I'm watching the thing.

And it's like, so you didn't even know. had it. No, I had no idea. It was totally like, it was a funny surprise. It was funny because, you know, like, what a better way of sending a message to those guys. They're like, look, there is like sats and it's sats dollar. Like, you know, like, it's not that's, you cannot ask for anything better than some crazy person to create a conspiracy with Russia around. Oh my God. So people who are listening to this might not be familiar with what happened. So Jack goes on, he's testifying in front of Congress. I think it's all about like just the censorship on social media is what I'm assuming that it was about. I don't remember. But in the background, he has this block clock that NVK and his team there have manufactured, design manufactured and has on the market. I have one actually sitting right in front of me right now. And instead of it, you know, posting like the price of Bitcoin, Jack had his setup to display the value of Bitcoin in dollars per Satoshi. Right. So, or the other way around, Satoshi's per dollar.

So he had, you know, at the time it might have been like 2,300 sats per dollar, right? And following the appearance on C-SPAN or whatever it was, there was a person on Twitter who's there talking about how Jack Dorsey has the time in Moscow in his behind him. So all these bitcoinsers are on Twitter. All these bitcoins are on Twitter. And they're like, no, bro, I'm sorry. It's not Moscow time. That is the price of Satoshi's per dollar.

And this guy, he wouldn't believe. He this guy. No, no, he doubled down. He quadrupled down. He was some kind of journalist, right? I don't know. I don't know what he was. But he had a fairly decent size following.

And so the whole Bitcoin Twitter laser-eyed obnoxiousness swarms this guy. And we're like, no, we know the guy that made the clock. And like, in fact, here he is. And then you were in there and the whole bit. And the guy just refused. So how does NVK respond to this? Well, I'll tell you how he responds to it. He rolls out a software update so that you can.

And hold on one second. I just want to make sure. Mine is in Moscow time, sir. He rolls out a software update that says instead of it saying sats per dollars, it's just says Moscow time. And then it has the price in sats per dollar still. It's that's brilliant. But this is brilliant.

This is how you're having fun. This is how you're, you know, just like, I can't even imagine the marketing that came out of this. And it wasn't like you were planning it or anything, but it was just brilliant. It was hilarious. It's fun. Yeah. You know, this is kind of how we see like all this stuff is, you know, we only come to the office,

like, which we don't have one. This is my hobby, right? Like, my hobby is to make stuff, right? Yeah. We, yeah, we just love what we do. It's awesome. And it was sure a lot of fun. All right. So NVK, how would you make Bitcoin cheap to transact for the unbanked locations in the world? So these two cards are what we think is sort of like the game changer, right? I mean, this one has cryptograffit, Zark on it.

We found that like Open Dime is like a fantastic solution. People loved it. and people were trying to use them in developing countries, but it's just too expensive to the device, right? I mean, we just couldn't do it. So after a lot of sort of sourcing and trying to figure out, we found a chip that could do NFC and the security in the way that we wanted at a cost that we could, like,

drastically decrease and also make it reusable. What do you mean by the NFC part? So this is a tap card. It's a contactless card. So you just tap it on your phone. And essentially, this is how you can transact. Bitcoin. You load the card with Bitcoin. There's going to be a QR on the back. This one is inactivated. And that's it. You give this to somebody. They don't have to trust you and they can

just take a card. And that's it. The transaction is done. It's already in the card. So if I'm if I'm receiving this payment or I'm saying I'm requesting $10 worth of Satoshi's, right? So I would type in to my device that I want that many SATs, which would be what? How many SATs would that be? 20,000 SATs or something. So I'd put that there. And And then you'd just hold the card up to my device and then I would see that it was paid. How would that, what would that look like? So think about it this way. You could just send it to the card.

Say the person doesn't even have a wallet. Say you want to give it to your cousin, some Bitcoin, right? But you want to do it in front of him. So you can give him the card. You take a picture of the card with the QR or the top and you send Bitcoin to it. Done. He has Bitcoin. He doesn't need to understand.

He doesn't have to have a wallet. Nothing. But he has the project key. This is non-custodial. And whenever he wants to spend it, he just taps on an app and puts the pin that's on the back and he spends the card. Wow. Now, imagine you have a stack of these preloaded with like whatever amount you want or denomination you want. Right.

And you can go and you can say like, you know what? Like here's 10 cards of 100. Just a gift card. But it's Bitcoin. And then if the person receives these, they can spend it. But then they can generate a new private key on them. They don't get the QR. The QR is fixed to the first one.

But like you can do it 10 times. You can have 10 private keys in a card. That's just unbelievable. And the key here is it's going to cost less than $10, right? Say you want to donate this to some cause you want. You know, like you don't have to worry about privacy. There's no privacy implication. And the person receiving this can just give this to the next person.

They don't need to spend it. Right. So you can have an old UTXO here, an old Bitcoin in this card, just passing around for years and years and years without ever being spent. There's no cost to transact. Now, it gets interesting, right? Because you have a Bitcoin private key here. So we made another variation of this that this one essentially behaves like a normal wallet. And you can essentially use this for multi-sig. So you can just tap it with other wallet. Or you can authenticate with your phone. You can. and I'll think it's a key with anything that does an FC. And you just don't need to understand Bitcoin anymore. You know, it's nice. You want people to understand it. But like, and it functions off of the web too. So you have a website that if you tap this,

this ones are not active. But if you tap it on the phone, a website tells you if the card is valid or not, because he can check the cryptography of it. And in good quankite fashion is you don't have to trust us either. Well, there's a level of trust. But the trust is minimized because, We use a block nonce as part of the entropy.

So it's provable that we don't know the private key. Yeah. It's just that like, you know, open dime was fun and all. I'm still going to sell it. But it's just I couldn't make it scale to like a billion people. Yeah. This is a card with a chip that I can get a billion made. Like, and that's it.

It's like, and the cost to just lower and lower and lower and lower. I can get economists of scale on this that are different. And you can get artists on this. It's a whole different universe of scale that, like, I think we can finally serve people that don't necessarily even want to understand Bitcoin. When does this roll out? We actually announced the SDK for devs to start implementing this on wallets. So it's open, right?

So it's going to function with any wallet that wants to work with this, essentially. And the software is done mostly for the cards. the cards are functional. I think in just like a few months should be out. Wow. Who knows? Maybe by Bitcoin, Miami,

you already have some, but I just don't want to promise. But it's done. That's why we got the laser machine there. Congrats. That's amazing. It should be fun. We'll send you some when we have it.

I'd love to receive it. Load it, of course. There might be some money transmitter thing there. Don't load it. That's right. He does ship on a card. People don't understand, like, shipping physical things, it's a problem, right? This goes in an envelope.

Like, you can ship anywhere in the world. Unreal. It should be fun. Here's a question for you that I think you're one of the few people that I know I can ask this question to and get a really profound response. How do Bitcoiners harden the network from a transmission and reception standpoint if Internet service providers go down? And let me give you an example.

for people that are listening to this, over in Kazakhstan, they had the internet service providers turned off. They were going through a conflict with their politicians and overthrow. And I was participating in a spaces chat. And one of the guys is like, hey, you know, it's really cool that Blockstream has a satellite. But all we can really use it for is kind of knowing where the current block is. It's not like we can actually transmit to it. It's only on the satellites broadcasting the blockchain, it's sending, but it has no receive mechanism. And on top of that, he didn't have any type of, even if it would, he didn't have a satcom set up in order to transmit or any of that stuff. So here's a guy who's able to pull four cent per kilowatt hour electricity in his mining facility,

which is extremely cheap for anybody who's mining, but he can't submit blocks because he doesn't have an internet connection. What can be done in order to harden this network and make it more robust so that that type of scenario, which could happen anywhere in the world right now, based on things we're seeing, which we'll get to later on sure, how can we harden this network? You know, it's hard to explain to people that, you know, modern nations cannot just flip the switch. Okay. Like, you know, your G20 countries, which is where most of the wealth is anyways, I can't just turn off the internet. Okay, just, I just like starting from that premise, just so people understand,

because that's how the banking system works. That's how the stock system works. That's how every single Fortune 500 company that pays all the taxes works. So, like, you just can't just, like, press a button. But let's do the game theory, right? Like, so fine. Let's say Canada, we're under dictatorship right now. Let's say, dear leader Trudeau decides to turn off to flip a switch, right?

So what does Rodofo do? Well, I have my hem radio set up, right? I can transmit in many different types of frequency bands, right? Some are better, some are worse. I do have, you know, the blocks stream satellite is kind of off right now. So I can receive blocks. If they try to jam Q-Band, right, which is the satellite dish sort of band, which they could state actors have the capabilities of doing that kind of stuff. I probably would use maybe

pigeons with micro-sneed cards because it's a lot of data. So let's assume that I can receive, right? So I'm receiving from the satellite. Now, you know, I check the blocks. I sign a transaction. Then what do I do? Well, I find a counterparty that could relay this transaction for me in a different country, right, through Hemmer Radio. I'll transmit to him the data. And he'll simply broadcast a transaction for me and then it would show up from cell light on my desktop saying that it's fine. So, you know, you can resolve this stuff fairly reasonably. Does it create a lot of nonsense? Does it create a lot of friction?

Yes. But am I capable of transacting? Yes. Right. And, you know, let's expand this a little more, right? Let's say, for example, you know, they're now, say, jamming HF, right? So the frequencies that go very far. Okay, great.

So now, you know, you go closer to the border and you get some, some Americans in Buffalo to point to point their high gain Wi-Fi antennas or all their stuff that the, you know, the government just don't want to like just, just fully jam because, you know, they're going to jam their own stuff. And you can try to get data out, either not that way, they can broadcast it for me, right? And we do see this in many countries, right, like that do have issues with government. sort of governments trying to block things. In a way, I think modern rich countries just can't handle like this. They just can't do this kind of nuisances because the economies will just absolutely implode immediately. But it is a nice exercise. It's nice to know that you're capable of.

Maybe there's a catastrophe, right? There's a disaster. Maybe you're a pickering atomic plant explodes and you know, like you still need to sort of maybe receive Bitcoin or send Bitcoin. You can do that. I mean, the first responders in any disaster, hand radio operators, you know, like, they're the first people online. And it's just nice to know that you have a money now that can also sort of flow through the same comms. So in the first scenario that you were talking about as far as sending it to a friend and then they would submit the block for you that you discovered as the correct solution through your guessing, through your mining, in that scenario, you're suggesting that you would use HF or would you use? Would you use a different frequency or would you send it via text message? Like, how would you, how would you transmit that? We don't have a setup that's already pre-set up, let's put it this way,

something that's already like high availability and essentially high speed. Everything travels a speed of sound, right? It is digital. Sorry, this has a speed of light because it is digital. So there is no difference between a radio transmission, regardless of power, okay, and the transmission of something going through copper, right? So through Ethernet, just so people understand snow. But the problem is mine.

The amount of data that's being sent is what's limited. This is the issue. So transmitting a whole block is going to take a while in HF. You know, through Wi-Fi, through the border, it'll be fairly quick. You know, maybe it's 3G, maybe it's 5G, whatever connection you can. I think transacting, you're totally fine. There is a million ways to get in and out. Miners would have a harder time because they are.

are also competing with others, right? So if they don't get that block out fast, right, somebody else will probably find a block before they broadcast it out. So, and that was kind of the essence of my question. But I see where you're going with this. Because anywhere else in the world that can continue to mine, is it really an issue? And it's really not, is it? No. I'm a big fan of making blocks smaller, which is another conversation. If blocks were smaller, then we could just buy old AM radio stations in the whole world and just broadcast pickering. I mean, you come through your little AM radio and you're done. Like, I mean, it's just so simple.

But I got to say with the existing block size, it's just like, it's just on the edge of like what you want to do on those 10 minutes and data. But again, it's really a non-factor for mining for submitting blocks via mining because you're always going to have somebody in the world that's mining it without with no rest. And it is decentralized. I mean, China did that, right? It wasn't through cutting off the internet, but they literally made mining illegal. And then we had a massive hash rate drop. Bitcoin survived. He actually went up in price. And then the mining equipment moved. I mean, you know, moving things in and out of places that are under distress is not exactly a new thing. There have been dictatorships and bad places in the world forever and people somehow find a way. But as far as, as software that's written for a country in distress with internet service provider cutting off access, it doesn't seem like there is kind of like a go-to software solution, whether you're submitting that over HF or you're doing it via text message that's kind of in place for countries that might be going through a scenario like that, correct? There used to be a number for you to text transactions to, if I remember right, way back in

the day, that would broadcast for you. I don't know who ran that number, but it was around. It's just, you know, it becomes sort of like unused enough and then I think this project's die, right? That's why like it's kind of like the ham radio stuff, right? Most people have it's collecting dust. It's just nice to have it if you ever need. And but the cool thing about the ham stuff is that you don't need specialized software, right?

We already have FLDIG and a few other sort of like digital two analog converters. Got it. Right? Then you just, you dump a file. And it just spews it out. just, yeah, I mean. An R2D2 type way. Yeah, exactly, right?

So it's exactly that. And so if you're a sailor, people who do transatlantic sailing and stuff, they have what this thing called wind tour. And it's essentially email over hand radio. Oh, okay. And there is lots of stations around the world that just rebroadcast those emails for them. Yeah.

And I don't think people realize the range on HF. I mean, it depends on which bands you're going into and the atmospherics and things like that. but you can get 3,000 kilometers out of the HF. Oh, much more. Yeah. I can reach Japan. Yeah.

So like from Canada. From Canada with very little like power. Yeah. So, you know, like it's actually very hard for a state actor to find through like advanced common recognition, right? They can normally find people broadcasting. But like a low power, it becomes very hard. You get, you get lost in noise. How long do you think it would take for you to try?

transmit a block in HF if you started it? It depends on the frequency because essentially the higher the frequency, the more bandwidth you have. So essentially the faster. Three megahertz. Yeah. So essentially three megahertz would probably take about seven minutes. Oh, wow.

It'd take that long. Yeah. And then there is like the radio is going to please stop. That's assuming you're going to get the, yeah, the whole transmission comes through. No, because like the difference between voice and data is that data is constant, right? It's really like the load of the radio is full. The radio is going to be like, please make this stuff. Everybody on that frequency is like, what is going on? That's right. Okay. So we were talking about this a little bit. And I'm trying to keep it as

politically agnostic as possible, but it's a little hard with this one. Things up in Canada are getting pretty crazy. So everybody's familiar with the truckers, the government's response, the government steps in. The part where I think it's just kind of got outrageous is, shutting down the bank accounts, going after anybody who's provided a financial contribution to this protest. And it seems like tonight I saw some charts that it's basically a bank run, right? Like, what's going on? Yeah. So we don't know what's going on at the banking thing. I mean, it was just a glitch between the major Canadian four banks. All at the same time. Yeah, maybe that mainframe crashed. I don't know. I kind of had a theory. I think that maybe they

we're running the donor list against the banks DB at the same time. And maybe that's what caused that. But, you know, banks have a lot of data per day. So like maybe, you know, it's unlikely. I don't know. I have no idea what's going on with the banking thing. What an ad for Bitcoin up in Canada. Everybody up in Canada is going to be a bitcoiner.

Yeah. I mean, you know, you have like, you know, the deputy minister sort of like going on TV and saying that, you know, essentially we can't do anything about Bitcoin. Like, you know, thank you for explaining. people, why people that have a different opinion may want to not bank. The context of this whole thing here is even like more stupid to, right? Canada is essentially having a deplorable moment. The political sort of political class here, I don't think I've ever had a non-woke,

a big movement happening politically, right? And destructors are not exactly polished small guys, right? So like, you know, you have this big guys who, who are not going to budge with this massive rigs honking downtown up for three weeks. Has it been that long? Yeah. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah, they took the wheels off of some of them.

Oh, and this is, this is amazing. So the towing companies don't want to tow. They're like, no. Yeah. I'm not going to, I don't want to participate. I don't want anything to do with this. You can't move those rigs without a rig. Are they still there right now?

Yes. Oh, my God. It's amazing. So they cleared the bridge. I understand that they logistically shut off the bridge to the U.S., right? Have they cleared that out completely? Yeah, so that's the weird part, right? So they cleared a Windsor Bridge, which is the one that has the most sort of amount of trade-through.

And then there were a few other sort of border crossings, right, that are, your show is mostly American audience. So, like, no, we have a small little border between Canada and U.S. and a ton of crossings. So they close a few major ones, right? But, you know, there was like some guns found in a truck. So, you know, all the truckers are like, you know what? We're done of this. You know, in one of the border crossers, it's like, we don't want to be identified with violence.

This was supposed to be peaceful. Everybody left. All the borders are clear, essentially. All that's laughed is the guy's honking in front of parliament. And it's a party. Like, there's kids. They were actually roasting a pig today. There's like a jacuzzi in the middle of the street.

It's totally like a party. And the politicians and the people who live in Ottawa are the political class, right? Yeah. They don't know how to handle it. Yeah. So they're calling martial law to handle that. Wow. Yeah, no, it seems like, and I think maybe even the bigger part of this,

especially when you're looking at it from a global context, is that idea is a seed that's now being planted everywhere. I mean, you saw it being replicated in France. I don't know how that kind of played out. I just saw that there was clashes inside of Paris. But I think the idea in Israel, you're seeing this seed of an idea about mandates and basically people wanting their freedoms going back to where they were pre-COVID, starting to really take root around the world, especially.

And again, I'm trying to stay as politically agnostic on this as possible, but especially when you look at the Omicron variant that had just drastically less lethal effects on people. people, I mean, for all intents of purposes, it was very much like the common cold, right? So for your audience, for your audience to get a little bit of context, like in Canada, we had like some pretty draconian rules, right? So for example, have vaccine passports to enter restaurants. You know, you can't fly out of the country without a vaccine passport. You know, and this truckers really started because, you know, listen, I think like Canada is probably like 80, 90% vaccinated. Yeah. So like it was really just like politicians

trying to be mean, really? Like, there's essentially no risk, statistical risk associated with this. So they essentially wanted to mandate truckers to be vaccinated in order to cross the border. But the problem is, though, you know, like they lose their livelihood if they don't want to get vaccinated, essentially, right? So, you know, they're like, okay, screw this. We're all done at this anyways, right? And in Canada, about half the population is for it, half the population is against it.

It gets very complicated. We have a public health care system. You see most of that from a global context, too, in that there's a split. And I think that's what really kind of is forcing the banging of the heads together between political parties is you really do have a split between how people view this. But I guess for me, just personally, if I'm going to speak of my own opinion, is just the virus is mutating. The last variant that came through is, for all intensive purposes, very much like a calm

and cold. And so to kind of be forcing a lot of these policies and a lot of these procedures, I mean, for God's sake, look at the Super Bowl, not a single person there with a mask on, right? The mayor itself isn't there, but yet the kids go to school who don't even have a concern of catching this thing. They're wearing masks. I have kids. I don't want my kids wearing masks because, you know, it's bad for them, right? It's really is that simple.

They are not at risk. And the way to say, it's like, can we just all go back to like mind your own businesses and all? Like, you know, if you want to wear a mask, wear a mask, if you don't wear a mask, don't wear a mask. If you want to go vaccine and get vaccine if you don't want to wear it. It's just really so simple. If you're really scared, stay at home. Nobody's forcing you to live the house. And it's not my, my, like, fabric masks is going to prevent you from catching COVID from me anyway. So it's, I think people sort of like did a power trip and we have to hide inflation somehow, right? So COVID is a great narrative for that. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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And boy, boy, what a conversation that is. So you and I, I don't know that we've ever, I know we've talked online about kind of our points of view on that particular topic, but how do you? do you view this from a financial lens, from a macro lens? Because it seems like when you got your start, it was much more about the hardware, the kind of the tech, the software of Bitcoin, and then maybe you grew into this understanding or this knowledge of the broader macro implications of like what's going down. Is that a good characterization of it? Or have you kind of seen the macro background for since you've been in the space?

You know, I have no background in finance. I was economically illiterate, you know, before Bitcoin. So this all came with Bitcoin. But I did grow up in Brazil, right? And we had multiple currency failures there. And we had bail-ins. We had it all. We had capital controls. And then we had the delusion of the Brazilian Real, which was a fascinating experiment. Anyone who's interested in currency failings or winning, I should read. the story of the Brazilian Real because it was essentially just everybody magically making it happen. It was absolutely based on zero. Like, there was nothing backing it. It's just, we're all just going to agree that this is going to be one to the one to the dollar. And that's it. And they made it happen. What was it like leading up to that through the failure?

Like, how would you describe socially what was happening? Oh, the Vimar Times. Really? Yeah, no, it's like, the way I like to say it, it's like, it's never the way that people think This stuff is it's sort of like, because government is still poking, right? And you also have like foreign actors sort of like causing interference in a peer signal of the economy, right? So, you know, you have multinational companies that come in and they will have like different,

you know, they can pay a lot more. So like there's a lot of like big signals in the market. But the main thing is the market cannot have a clear sort of like clear signal of like, you know, matchmaking. Right. So you're going to have, for example, a lot of people looking for employees. And then you're going to have a lot of people without a job. So, you know, it's the market not finding a way of matching those two, right? Because maybe is that, you know, the business cannot pay enough or the government is mandating weird stuff because it's whatever the times dictate the government to mandate some extra stuff, right?

And then you have those other people who may be receiving a check, right? That's like, you know, it's not a great check, but it's like better than leaving the house to go work. Right? We had this with Serb in Canada, right? Like businesses could not find people. The taxi companies here, like they couldn't find taxi drivers, even though the taxi driver would make three times what he made from the check. You start having all this disparity of like matchmaking in the market between labor and employers. You start seeing that with like financial products. So for example, you're going to have low interest rates for some stuff that is like highly disposable, say buying a fridge and financing a fridge. But then the house price, the house interest for mortgage, at least in Brazil, would have been like super high.

But now in Canada, we have say like, you know, if you want a city house, you can get a variable rate 1.5% a year on a 25 year mortgage. Okay. It's insane with 5% down. That's it. It's insane. But now they're sort of trying to cramp it up a little bit so they're making so that, you know, you have to do it's only 5x combined income total that they'll land you, which is also like makes it impossible for people to buy a house because the house prices are doing we did 28% this year house increase in price yeah i've heard up in canada housing prices just going well and the irony for me is there's just so much land there's so much

oh yeah no i mean it's not that right the the problem i mean but but like outside of the cities like it's worst it's like two three x the house price, right? Because it was really mispriced before. There was no interest in a country home. Let's put it this way, right? The market was just not there. Now that people had COVID here and being prisoners in their houses, they were like, you know, I want more property, want more land, I want to move out of the city. So that demand spiked. So you have like cottages and country homes going to three acts, but those you cannot get a mortgage for in the same way, right? So because the, I think the government won't guarantee as much for the bank and then

credit cards are going up a lot. The line of credits are going up a lot. It's an absolute insanity with pricing, right? The beef. I mean, it's, you know, like just 15% a year over year. Oh, it's crazy right now. The thing that the meme that you see online is everything's clown world. Is that what it felt like in Brazil when it was going through it? Was it clown world? Is that the best way to just kind of summarize it into a fun or like simple phrase? I mean, Brazil politically speaking has always been clown world. Hey, hey, everywhere in the world. I mean, you know, the last Comey people who were elected for president through a party,

I think they spent $300,000 in lobsters. You know, like Brazil like plays like politically speaking in a completely different level of clown world, right? But funny enough, at least there you have a little bit more polarity in, uh, in, uh, in So aside from the main big ones, like there is more media variety for you to consume. So there's like better source of information. In Canada, we don't. There's there's less people. There's last options and they're all subsidized by the government now because they're all broke in the last 10, 20 years.

So they're all essentially spilling out the message that, you know, the government is not evil, right? It's fascinating to be watching this. To me, the COVID narrative, the reason why they don't want to let go is because, you know, like COVID- has been great for them to hide inflation, right? The supply chains, right? That's it. Just absolutely no reason there was all the printing, Canada printed 4X, right? It was an M2 last year. So the COVID narrative is absolutely perfect, right? It's like we have this thing that's out of our control. Look, everybody's having problems with this. It's not just Canada. Yeah. Right. And then print, print, print. All right, smart contracts. Is this something that you see, is this something that you see getting

built and constructed on top of Bitcoin? Is it something that requires another token? Can you somehow do this on top of lightning? What are your thoughts on this idea of smart contracts in Bitcoin? I don't think that the smart contract that people want to have, like the Ethereum style thing, is going to happen on Bitcoin. Remember, like, Bitcoin's purpose is to replace central banking, right? It's on the Genesis block. Like, we're not going to make any single trade-off that will cause any erosion of that immutability of the monetary supply, block size, and how mining works. So it's not going to change, right? I think Bitcoin can provide two smart contracts that no other system can provide is an immutable

source of truth. So you can anchor stuff you want to do on the Bitcoin blockchain. And people try to do that in projects back in the day, but it wasn't the time, right? I think the time is starting to come and people are starting to do stuff, especially with lightning, right? So, you know, lightning in a way is kind of a smart contract. You know, it's not like a total incomplete one. Like, but, you know, you do have two parties and you're essentially sending a UTXO between each other without spending. And there is this district log contract that are coming that you can add essentially like an Oracle to something.

What do you think about those? Do you think that there's some promise there or do you think this just hype? No, it depends on what you want to do, right? I mean, like, pretty much everything that's done in smart contracts nowadays, it's like essentially mostly centralized and could be done in a database, right? So. Aim into that. Right?

I mean, it's Web3 is a big database, right? So where are all the VC's going to pump their money there? You know, but this is ultimately the problem, right? I mean, Bitcoin disintermediates the middleman. And like the VC model of the last, say, 10, 15 years has been really honed down to be the perfect middleman that creates a monopoly, right? I mean, that's literally Peter Thiel's thesis. That's so true. It is.

It literally is. So, and it makes sense. It's a great thesis to make money. But, you know, Bitcoin sort of removes that, right? So the smart contract stuff is possible and it's happening, especially with landing, those sort of features. And I think as true need, true utility comes, right, I think we can sort of like resolve those issues with Bitcoin being the original source of truth for at least the place where you dump your liquidity. Because you don't want to like money that I hold in Bitcoin, I go to bed and I sleep, right? If I was holding Ethereum, I probably wouldn't sleep, right?

So, you know, all these contracts and all these people are still sort of like find their place. of resting, right, where they park the capital they made, the profit they made in Bitcoin, right? So how that plays out is interesting, especially the stable coins and all that stuff. I'm sure they're rolling 99 dice. What does the U.X in this space look like in five or seven years from now? This was a question that Marshall had asked some of these questions. I thought these were really good questions. So like your cold card today and just most people with a hardware wallet, when I'm thinking of like where we're at in five to seven years for now, I think Apple, Google, some of these

major players are going to be entering the space. So what does the UX look like? How do they integrate into this space and do it in a way that still allows self-custody? Because I think that there's going to be a huge demand for that. What do you see this being? It's kind of like a funny question because thinking about Bitcoin seven years from now, It's like, it's, I mean, what happened in the last end. I mean, yeah, you just look at what happened in the last seven years. It's just crazy, yeah. So first, it's like you're never going to be able to trust, right?

The Apple phone or the Google phone is just, just you can't, right? It's all closed down. It's all done verifiable. It's extremely complex. Like, even if you could trust them, right? You simply cannot trust a general purpose computer because the attack surface is just ginormous, right? What I think they'll be great at is providing you with a safe wallet that is for small amounts of money.

But remember, your carrier can still remote access your phone. Okay, so they could maybe remote cancel your wallet, right? So you can't, if it's based on their chips and all that stuff, right? But even with the wallets on the phone, I mean, technically they can't, right? They have access to the base band, the shares memory with the phone. So they could technically see you generating the private key. You simply cannot trust. So what we are doing is we're making this essentially NFC cards, right, that you can just

tap on the phone. The security profile and tradeoffs are different than quote card, right? This is not for your eternal wealth. Essentially, you're going to go like, oh, I want to sign this transaction, right? Like send money, you know, like to buy a phone, right? So it's like real money, but not your wealth. You know, you just tap on the back of the phone and sign the transaction. Or it's maybe multi-sig.

The wallet has one key. has maybe, you know, I only allow you to spend, say, $1,000 per day, either because that dead set it or because you set it so that if it gets robbed, it's not an issue. And you use the card to co-sign that, right? You're going to see a lot of NFC coming. Square analysis are going to do NFC. The Mark 4 has an FC on it. I think that's how I see a lot of the stuff going the next, say, five years, right?

It's the NFC as a means of an easy, quick U-X. I think that once taproot starts to get more interesting in scripting, we might be able to de-risk devices by having more complex threshold signatures between them. Then, you know, you don't have to trust the phone as much. So maybe one day cold card doesn't exist anymore, right? Maybe we just, that's 10 years, 20 years from now. The scripting became so, so smart and so good and so derrised that like you could have 50.

50 devices and then it's also spread, right? And it's not a concern, but we're definitely far from that. And so for people who aren't maybe understanding what you, what you're getting at from the technical front, so similar to like how you have three different Apple devices and then it's going to ping the three of them and you're secure. So you're talking it because of taproot and because of the scripting that can be done through that update that just went through with Bitcoin, you think that maybe they could get to something like that in the future? Yeah, I think there's limits, like being very realistic, but I think a lot can be done. And a lot can be sort of reimagined and sort of like refought and more maybe upgrades come.

But I think it's possible to do a lot more on the middle ground, right? I think when you're talking about generational wealth, you're talking about like real money, like the level of security, the level of a forward error correction, forward thinking needs to be much greater, right? That's why I want to trust minimize like a very simple device that is like fully verifiable and you know, you do your dice, you know, because we simply don't know. And you might be dead, right? Your kids might have this private key that you generated, right? Maybe their grand grandkids have the same private key still, right?

So, you know, making sure you are doing your 256 bits and sort of like, like in their good bits, part of your legacy. Your dice. Exactly. Your great grandkids will be proud of you. Yes. It's like that he didn't get it robbed. How do you think about security's concerns of the components of the hardware when you think

about the upstream supply chain? So you're receiving components, you know, maybe some are more complex than others, but to think that you have absolute control of everything that you're kind of sticking in any type of hardware these days is just, you know, there's no way. So how do you think through that? I know that all your manufacturing is done there in Canada, but I know you're probably receiving some parts from China or wherever components inside of your, inside of your hardware. So how do you think about the upstream risks? Yeah, we receive parts from all over the world. It's very simple. We don't trust anything.

Yeah. So assume it's compromised, right? That's our sort of like way of thinking about this stuff. It's just you assume everything is compromised. You essentially don't trust the parts. So, for example, we store your seed in the secure element. But, you know, we all know the state actors probably have a backdoor that's a secure element. And also, nothing is unhackable, right? So give it enough resources, somebody will get in eventually, right? I mean, Ledger spent, you know, like half a million dollars in gear and probably like a million dollars in like just staff, like breaking the cold card mark two.

The three resolve the problems. But, you know, it's a matter of time and somebody's going to figure out. away. Is it reputable and all that stuff? That's a different story, right? Like, good luck. But the key here is, so for example, the seed is encrypted with a key from the other manufacturer's chip and then it's stored in this manufacturer's chip. So now we're playing two chips against each other, right? Mark 4 is going to have another secure element. Now you have to break three parts, right, to get two secrets. And that's not even counting the passphrase, and everything else you can do and you should do.

But like, we're just trying to play in a way that like we're raising, because nothing is impossible, but we're just raising the time and cost and failure of attacks so high, right, that essentially becomes silly for them to try to break it. And you're not even talking multi-sig, right? You're not even talking a multi-sig wallet, yeah. This is like plain Jane wallet, right? It's still fairly secured, right? Because remember, you also want to defend the firmware, right, because you don't,

want the firmware. That's why, like, having a secure element is so much more than just the seed protection per se, right? You want to make sure that the firmware is not tampered with because that firmware could lie to you and the firmware can see your seed when it's operating, right? To protect all those secrets, we want to create this sort of like Wacamole game that has high failure rate for the attacker. And that's sort of like how we play the game theory on the design of the device and how we don't trust supply chains. It really is that simple because you can't. No. Speaking of which, what do you think about the supply chains right now? Are you seeing them

getting any better or are you still seeing delays in deliverables? Well, I mean, everything started to get slow on the beginning of COVID because of like everybody said, you know, I don't want to take public transportation. So everybody decided to buy a car, right? This was early 2020, right? And the same chips that we use car manufacturers use. And, you know, they get priority. But we're pretty good at buying parts. And we bought, you know, for the next device, we bought parts for the whole year. We're for manufacturing. Like, we can just make them now. But it sucks because, you know, China was super delayed with like just logistics per se. So like a lot of our stuff doesn't come through ships. So we don't have to worry too much about that,

except when we buy big machines. So, but because the container ships were all slow, everything got moved to airplane. So now the airplanes are getting sent bag with orders that shouldn't go in an airplane. So if you want to buy, say, dual press plunges, right? He used to be like cheap and they come on a ship and, you know, max three months you have them, right? You know, you were starting to look at like six months a year. And you're not going to send these things in an airplane because it's going to make it cost five times. Yeah.

We had to buy this big laser machine to etch the new NFC cards. It's like a reasonably sized industrial machine, right? You know, you normally come on a ship cheap. We had to put it in an airplane, and that was a fortune. The airplane ride was more expensive than the machine. Hey, all right, the last question I got for you here. When we think about this is kind of a generic one, I'm talking about Bitcoin price action. We go through these big runups, and it seems that there's some type of narrative or something that kind of drives,

whether it's the halving event or it's Facebook's trying to do their own Libra. We saw a massive run-up from that. Is there a catalyst that you kind of see that's going to play out or something that you think is going to drive the next big wave of people coming inbound into the space? I mean, I guess you could even argue that this stuff happening in Canada right now could be a potential catalyst. But is there anything that you kind of see playing out that you think is going to drive a lot of that. I mean, Russia just announced that they like Bitcoin now, right? So can you imagine if Russia

tells Europe? So do you know all the energy you need from us? Well, we want to get paid in Bitcoin. I mean, that would be... I'm with you. It's like... No, it's over. It's like full capitulation of Fiat. I mean, just because of the drive of Bitcoin and then you have like the self-fulfueling cycle, right? People see the price go up. They're going to this thing too. And And then there is the Russian story with the ammonia nitrate too, right? Yeah. The 60% producer and, you know, those guys want to be off the dollar, right? Yeah.

And then you have, you know, the thing between China and Russia, it's a different story. They're going to be happy to print their own monies and send to each other there. You know, I think if we have more of these sort of Canada style banking, like illegal seizure of money, I mean, you know, people are going to smart enough and not have money anymore in these banks, right? Because a lot of people don't understand that like the foreign bank account is not what used to be. Like nowadays, all these banks are on their like they all talk to to daddy IRS, right? Like there really is very little escape for that except for stable coins. Stable coin is the new sort of like Swiss bank account, right, for people that want dollar. And a lot of that flows through Bitcoin, not because it's running on top of Bitcoin, but flows through Bitcoin.

And I think the demand for that has been insane. It's going to grow a lot more and then a lot more. And then there is inflation. It sounds like there's no aspect of life or economy or politics or it does not point to a essentially event horizon for Bitcoin. Right. I mean, this is just nothing. I mean, I look outside, right? I talk to people.

Everything just points to a Bitcoin demand just based on, you know, the economics and everything else the society has done for the last 100 years. It's no escaping that. And thankfully, we have Bitcoin. Amen to that. Well, if there's any Canadian politicians listening to this conversation with NVK and myself, I just want to put out there, he makes the best dice and makes the best calculators in Canada. NBCK, I want to thank you for coming on the show. If people want to find out more about you, we want to find out about your products. Give them a handoff where they can learn more. Go for the products, go to coincite.com.

And then on Twitter, we have a million accounts there. At coincite is one of them. And then you can find me at NVK, November Victor Kilo. We will have links to all this in the show notes for folks. If you don't remember, whatever, just go to the show notes. You can click on the links that we'll have there. And NVK, thank you so much for making time. This was long overdue.

And I thoroughly enjoy learning from you. You're just such a wealth of knowledge. So thanks for coming on the show. Hey, yeah, thanks for having me. Great questions. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires.

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