What Bitcoin Did - Bitcoin Adoption Is Going Mainstream | Max Guise

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

Max Guise from Block joins the show to break down one of the biggest leaps forward for Bitcoin self-custody: BitKey’s new privacy upgrade, why it matters, and how it removes one of the last major trade-offs between safety and privacy. We get into how BitKey’s new chaincode-delegation system prevents Block from seeing balances or transactions, and why this BIP unlocks a new era for private, user-friendly multisig. We also get into Square switching on Bitcoin payments across the US and why that’s a much bigger deal than most people realise - removing the friction of onboarding merchants and making Bitcoin everyday money. As well as the structural risk of mining centralisation, how relying on a handful of foreign ASIC manufacturers threatens Bitcoin’s long-term resilience, and how Proto’s approach is designed to spread hashpower, strengthen the network, and give miners real optionality for the first time in years. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN RIVER ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Max Guise: https://x.com/max_guise

There are some great existing tools out there, but to really get a complete solution to safely hold Bitcoin, you got to combine a lot of them by the time you actually put together a full solution to keep Bitcoin safe long term. You've kind of designed your own wallet at some level by putting these things together, and you sort of have to trade off amongst safety, usability, and privacy. We believe that Bitcoin will be the native currency of the Internet. We believe that its openness and its permissionlessness is what will make that true. that's what we're focused on making Bitcoin everyday money. Max, good to meet you, man.

I'm excited for this show. You guys over at Block have just been shipping relentlessly for the last few months. Was it just maybe three, four months ago you were launched Proto, then Square have just announced that they're allowing Bitcoin payments, all the merchants in the US. Bikki have had a big security upgrade, which we're going to talk a bit about today, a big privacy upgrade, I should say. But I want to get into this in detail.

But before we do, this is the first time you've been on the show. The listeners might not know exactly who you are. Do you want to start with just a bit of an introduction, who you are, what you do? Sure. Yeah, and thanks for having me, excited to be on. So I'm Max, guys. I'm leading Bickey and helping to develop Proto and also just generally excited about all the things we're shipping at Block and can't wait to talk about more of them. And I've been at Block since 2013 and helped work on early square hardware.

It helped some of the development of Cash App when we launched Bitcoin buying and selling capability. And then in 2021, started leading and developing Bikki and now contributing to Proto as well. That's awesome. So you were working at Square way before Bitcoin was like an integral part of that business. When did Bitcoin actually become like something that you were focusing on there? It's an interesting question because I think, honestly, from as long as I can remember at Block. the whole time. We've had an interest in Bitcoin. I think the fact that we started off disrupting the payments industry with making it possible for small sellers to never miss a sale,

that came from frustration with the existing system. That came from hidden fees. That came from crazy Byzantine processes that people had to go through to sign up for merchant accounts. And that came from a desire to help enable people who were basically being left out of the financial system. And that's really what Square was born out of. And so I think we've attracted people and talent across the company that has been interested in it for a long time. And we also have a history of making bets early on that we think can be disruptive long term. And sometimes we're early with those. And so we actually did have some very, very early Bitcoin experiments where we were probably a little early.

I think where we really really took off is when we introduced buying and selling a Bitcoin and Cash app. That was timed incredibly well with people's interest and also part of creating that interest. And so I think it helped put Bitcoin in front of a lot of people in 2018. And inside Square or inside Block maybe, is it Jack driving all the Bitcoin stuff? Or have you got a load of people internally that are also very keen to push Bitcoin as far as possible? Jack's been a visionary for this for sure. I think got lots and lots more people interested in Bitcoin who maybe hadn't heard of it originally. And, you know, once they discovered it, started to understand, you know, how it can help. And so I think there's been a massive enablement from Jack at the company to sort of point the way. And then there's a, there are a ton of folks that have helped build all the things we're going to talk about. And I think, you know, some of those folks started off as Bitcoiners who came. here specifically to build those features. And some of those were folks who are incredible electrical

engineers, incredible software developers, incredible marketing folks that started to learn more and more about what we could do with Bitcoin and now have sort of joined the ranks, so to speak. And just in the last week or so, you've announced that all square terminals in the US at the moment can now accept Bitcoin as payment. This is really cool because everything previously has been Bitcoin is going into their local butcher or wherever and just nagging the owner to accept Bitcoin. And then when they finally do, like, they're the only person paying in Bitcoin. So they like, they forget how to do it in between sales. Like it's always been a very clunky experience.

And you guys have just basically turned this on at then on their normal payment terminal, making it really easy. Like, do you want to explain what you've done there? Yeah. This is, this is huge. I'm really excited about this. And just a huge hat tip to Miles Suter and the whole team who's, who's driven this and I love seeing it go live. So we launched acceptance on Square. And so what that means is that

Square merchants can accept Bitcoin. Now they can actually receive it as Bitcoin or they can receive it as dollars. And I'll talk in a minute about why that's important. And we've also launched the ability in Cash App when paying with Bitcoin to fulfill that either by debiting your dollars balance or debuting your Bitcoin balance. And so what this means is when transactions happen at a Square merchant and with cash up on the other side, basically any combination of sending dollars and receiving Bitcoin, sending Bitcoin, receiving dollars, all of those combinations can happen. And this is really interesting because it means that square merchants can accept Bitcoin, but if it doesn't make sense for them or for their business to receive in Bitcoin right now,

they don't have to. They can still accept, make the sale, and receive in dollars. And on the cash app sides, you know, if I'm paying at a merchant and I want to, you know, avoid a taxable event given the current status of, you know, where I live in the laws, I can debit my dollar balance. And one of the things that's really interesting about this is that, you know, in the background, what we're really targeting here is three percent fees that everybody has accepted we need to pay on every transaction. And to small businesses, three percent is a lot more than it sounds like. So you might, you know, see a credit card fee, be annoyed by it, you know,

but for most transactions, it might not matter that much. But when you look at the books for small businesses and the actual profit they're making, these are businesses that they're not, they have thin margins. Like they're really, and a lot of, especially right now, a lot of small businesses are actually really struggling. And so the fees that they don't have to pay because of transactions like this, that can be really, really meaningful. And so I think this is really exciting. I think it's a really big deal for small businesses. And, you know, you mentioned Bitcoiners, nagging folks to take payment. We also added the Bitcoin map in Cash App, which makes that even more possible. And we're actually, if you follow Miles on Twitter, you can see

we're paying bounties for folks who, you know, help square sellers get started with this. So definitely check it out if you haven't already in Cash App. If you go to the Bitcoin tab, you can see a map in the spend Bitcoin option. You can see a map of, you know, local square merchants that are accepting Bitcoin and local merchants that are accepting Bitcoin, even if they're not using Square. Do you know how many people are actually accepting Bitcoin as of so right now. You know, I'm probably not the right person to ask about the stats. So I don't have anything to share right now. But I think one thing that I've found really inspiring is that there are a incredible number of videos of folks, you know, going around to businesses that are,

you know, on the map and patronizing them and also, you know, in supporting their businesses. And also folks who are, you know, have shared some videos of convincing merchants to turn it on because it's opt in for right now. And I think it's really neat to see. Yeah, it's really cool. I've seen Parker Lewis has been posting a load of videos around Austin, going to different places, buying with Bitcoin. And so when, on the merchant side of that, how do they actually accept it? Is it, does it work in the exact same way it would for just a Fiat payment? Or do they have to do something else? Like, do they have to actually select Bitcoin payment. You have to tell them you're paying in Bitcoin. Today, you do need to tell them you're paying in Bitcoin and they need to opt into doing that. We're starting small, but you should expect to see that expand. Yeah, because if that got to the point where there was no noticeable difference in how like the UX of that flow works and you could just pay in Bitcoin, the merchant doesn't even need to know you're paying in Bitcoin, that would be huge. With this, though, like obviously one of the challenges is the merchants understanding why they would want to accept Bitcoin. Like, is there a kind of an educational thing that goes along with this? Are you sending out like care packages of Bitcoin information to these people?

There's actually a page that I should point folks to. It's a Bitcoin merchant community.org that talks about it. And, you know, credit with Steve Lee, who leads Spiral here, I think, is a great champion of highlighting when we need to speak in terms that aren't purely drawn from the Bitcoin community. So, you know, showing up at a merchant and talking only about Bitcoin without the why or kind of putting things in the terms that makes sense to them in their business today, that can be amiss. And it's much stronger if we can explain why this is important and where this is going

to take us. And really the central theme here is fees going to third parties that we rely on for most transactions. And when this is an open network and you can pay, not even just with cash app, you can pay with any Bitcoin wallet at square terminals, like there aren't 3% fees. And, you know, this is really about that. And the openness of the network, I think, is going to support that and make this very, I think it make it really widespread long term. And I think, you know, the path we're on where we're headed is all the signs we've seen in the past that are like there's a 3% surcharge for credit cards. I think this is going to turn into, you know, there's a 3% discount for paying Bitcoin. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack Bitcoin at the same time? Well,

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I've sprung this on you because this is news since we sort of set this show up and I really want to talk about. It's something I'm very excited about. So last question on the square stuff. Obviously, this is US only at the moment. I don't live in the US. Although I spend a lot of time there. And when I do, I'll be searching out these places.

But is this going to expand globally or is it at the moment just focused on the US? It's a good question. Bitcoin's an open global permission list network. We've started with the US. We have the strongest network there and, you know, large base of merchants, large base of cash app users. So we're starting there. But you should expect to CSF intentions beyond that over time. It's very exciting. I think it's one of the coolest things we've seen in a long time because this has always just been a mess trying to get merchants to accept Bitcoin, trying to do the education. It's just like Bitcoin is going around to their local shops and doing it. Like having this from like I don't know how many people you square. but an insane number of businesses, particularly small businesses, are using swear. Like having that just enable on everyone's machine, like that's very cool. But we should talk a little bit about Bitkey because you guys have had a huge privacy upgrade there. Before we get into the details of that, do you want to just explain like where Bitki came from and like what it is trying to, you know,

where it's trying to fit in the hardware wallet market? Yeah. So we started Bitcoin. We want to make it safe and easy for people to truly own their Bitcoin. And you could probably guess based on me talking about an open network earlier that what's driving that is that, you know, the strength of Bitcoin is it's permissionless. Anyone can use it. And part of what's behind that is the decentralization of the network and the fact that, you know, we don't have centralized entities controlling it. And so, you know, if we ultimately have coins stored on, you know, a couple of exchanges worldwide, then that's not particularly permissionless in the end.

And so we want to make it, you know, easy for people to safely own their coins and not to sit there with them on an exchange subject to packs and mismanagement like we've seen with exchange collapses. And also just in charge of their Bitcoin instead of listening to somebody else about, you know, when they can move their money, who they can send it to, and how much they can send. And so that's that's why we built BitKee. And when we started this off, one of our observations was that, you know, there are some great existing tools. tools out there, but to really get a complete solution to safely hold Bitcoin, you got to combine a lot of them. Quite a few of them are hard to use for most folks and like really capable tools, but things that are just by the time you actually put together a full solution to keep Bitcoin safe long term, like you've kind of designed your own wallet at some level by putting

these things together. And, you know, for some people, that's an awesome exercise. It is for me. That's literally what I do, you know, every day. But not everybody. is, you know, wants to take on that odyssey. And so our intent with Bickey was to make it easy for folks. And historically, what that's meant is, you know, you sort of have to trade off amongst safety, usability, and privacy. And so, you know, in sort of the basic case, or the most vanilla case, somebody might use a hardware wallet, single signature, they have one key,

they have a seed phrase backup. And you probably heard my opinions many times on this, but that often leads to a situation that isn't as safe as people think it is. things like storing a seed phrase improperly and having someone see it and be able to steal your funds or in some cases accidentally being tricked into, you know, revealing part of the seed phrase and getting funds stolen, or having the seed phrase back up and the hardware wallet in the same place and suffering a house fire and being out of, you know, completely out of luck. These sorts of things just for long-term, safe storage of Bitcoin, like, they're a problem. And so, you know, another alternative is people gluing these things together, using something, you know, doing a sort of DIY multi-sig that turns out of the turn to the same.

out, you can build something that's really safe and really private. It's just really hard. And it's really hard to maintain it and keep it in a safe state over time. And so what people have often gone to is something we'll refer to as collaborative custody services. And that's where you ask a third party to help keep your Bitcoin safe, not by handing it over like a custodian where they have unilateral control and can move it without you, but where they're holding on to maybe one key or a backup or some combination of those where they can help you when you start to lose things, but the default state is you can unilaterally exit at any time. So to me, that's part of the definition of self-custody that you can unilaterally move your funds at any time.

And collaborative custodians have historically been able to help you more safely store Bitcoin while retaining control. And the problem is exactly what you said, which is the trade-off in that case is privacy. When you give, you know, that third key, for example, in Bikki's case prior to this upgrade to a custodian, you know, we had what's called a wallet descriptor. which meant that we could see, you know, your balance and we could see your transactions on the blockchain. Like, we could pick out on the blockchain, which activity is associated with that wallet. And that's true of every other collaborative custody service out there. And this is highly unfortunate because as you and I both know, and I think as most of the Bitcoin community knows

and values, like, we don't want that. We don't want people to know, you know, which coins are ours. We don't want people to know how much we have. Like, there's a, there's a fundamental need for privacy. that we want to be able to fulfill. And we found ourselves torn between, how do we get that if we have to trade off safety? And so the really interesting thing about this upgrade is we've figured out how to do both. So the big key product didn't change it all with this upgrade.

It's the same great recovery features, the same safety that comes from that, the same ease of use. And suddenly we can't see your balance and we're not sitting there with a descriptor where we can pick out which transactions are yours. So it's really, really exciting upgrade because it kind of takes away one of those fundamental tradeoffs that comes with,

you know, comes between safety and privacy. Yeah, I think it's really cool. And like any of these security solutions, like you say, is always tradeoffs. Like you can go and use, you know, five cold cards, do a three of five multi-sig. And like, that's great and it's incredibly secure as long as you know how to deal with your backups. And like, I think the risk kind of changes from going from single-sig to multi-sig where it's like with a single-sig, it's like how well have you it's always how well have you secured your backup but what is your risk profile of that? And like the probably the highest probability

of you actually losing funds isn't going to be someone stealing it. It's going to be you messing up in the process and actually just locking yourself out. And so Bickey obviously has taken that away. And then the tradeoffs there have always been like what if you're basically giving up the privacy. Bickie can see every transaction that you make on that.

But then this BIP has just come out written by was it Jesse Posner and you're very, this time. Is that how you say it? Yeah. So maybe it's worth explaining what this BIP is and how can you explain how it works? Yeah. So what this BIP, so first of all, really exciting and really proud of the team that we're working on things like this and also sharing it with the community so that it doesn't have to be just Bikki that implements this. It can be others as well and we can get, you know, more private collaborative custody throughout all of Bitcoin and not just with, you know, one team that adopts it first.

And so super excited about this. And basically what the BIP does is it, so it has a pretty technical sounding name, chain code delegation. What's underneath the hood there is that, you know, every UTXO on every unspent transaction output on the blockchain is, you know, locked with the script, that script, and essentially locked with an individual key.

And to derive that key, there are a couple of inputs. One is a seed, which is often represented as a seed phrase. and another is something called the chain code. And what the BIP proposes is keeping the chain code private from what's called a collaborator in the BIP. So, for example, a collaborative custody service, you know, something you might be familiar with, you know, from some of the services that were out there before BICI or BICI,

for example, holding the third key for you. And by keeping the chain code private from that third party, the bit basically specifies how to do co-signing. So you have a collaborator because sometimes you need them to sign. Maybe you lost off and you need to do a recovery transaction. Or, for example, Bickey has, you know, a mobile pay feature, sorry, a hardwareless transactions feature where, you know, you can configure a limit and spend, you know, underneath that limit without using the hardware. There are reasons why you might want to do either of those things, especially recovery and lean on a collaborative custodian to do that. And the BIP basically makes it possible to share only the information necessary to sign an individual transaction when there's a need for recovery.

It also specifies a way to do that completely blindly, which is actually not what we've implemented up front. But most of the BIP, what it provides for is you can send up partial information effectively about the chain code so that the collaborator can sign one recovery transaction. Underneath the head, there's, the BIP is full of some cryptographic equations, which I will try not to recite here. And also, I'm probably not the right person on the team to go over my head anyway. Yeah, really interesting, though. And basically, by sending up that partial information, we can still get the greatness of, you know, recovery transactions when we need them. But not have to, you know, have the collaborative custodian sitting there with a wallet descriptor that reveals everything. So just for like the actual users, like I want to go through what this actually means for them. Because at the moment, like the way Bitki works is you have your keystone.

You have a key on your phone, which is like encrypted, and then Block hold one of the keys on your servers. So if you want to send a transaction now, you use your encrypted key on your phone and use this. Unless you lose this or unless you can't actually use this key, and then you have to contact Block and they sign a transaction. So with this update, what this will mean is that every time that you sign a transaction with your actual hardware and with your phone, Block can't see what's going on. But if you end up having to rely on the key on Block servers, then you can see what's happening. Is that correct? Yeah.

So there are basically two paths in the BIP, and one of them requires implementing something called Schnor signatures. We haven't done that yet. When anyone who adopts that portion of the BIP, it means that even at signing time, there's no information revealed. Short of doing that, when the collaborative custodian signs a transaction, they see the UTXOs involved in that transaction. If that's a recovery transaction, that might be all of your UTXOs. And what we do is when that happens for BICI, we don't log anything. We don't store anything about the UTXOs that we saw. And we're working on a feature that we call server verifiability that will allow people outside of BICI to see that that's true.

We use something called AWS Nitro or something called Nitro enclaves on AWS, which is basically a secure computing environment that has what's called an attestation capability. It's a way for that environment to basically provide a cryptographic attestation of what code it's running that can be checked from outside of the system. And this is not like that's not a block thing. that's like an AWS wide thing. And we're working on a feature that basically will allow people to verify that this is true. And even in the interim, I'm really excited about this because we're truly blind to balances and transactions. Like we don't save this stuff.

And so we don't know. So just as an example, like I've been really excited by since we have been able to see, like, I'm aware that there's a lot of money that has been moved on to Bikki and like a ton of momentum around that and folks getting a ton of value out of storing it. And then I'm simultaneously sad because. because now that we have folks migrating to our newest privacy upgrade, like, I don't know what's on it anymore. And I think that's awesome.

And I think the whole team actually has just been really excited about this, because it's been one of the things that for us was a pretty sharp tradeoff as we design Bickie up front and we're finally able to remove it. Yeah. And I also just want to reiterate that this isn't like a BITKee specific thing. If you use like a CASA or an unchained, you have the same problem in any of these collaborative custody models. So the thing that you guys have focused on really heavily from the very start is making this as easy as possible, making the UX as clean as possible and as user friendly.

So does this remove any of that UX or is it exactly the same? It doesn't remove anything. In fact, actually, this feature is pretty quiet relative to its power, meaning like when you go through the upgrade flow, like it's pretty simple. It's a screen explaining what's going on and doing a wallet sweep to a, uh, to a, you know, new set of keys. And, you know, underneath the hood, really, you're gaining something huge. And, you know, new customers who set up the key now, they just get it by default. And they're not going to have any different experience. They're going to have the same five-minute setup. They're going to have the same immediate safety after that point. They're

going to have the same, you know, easy recovery contact set up to protect them against losing, you know, both their hardware device and their phone. They're going to have the same easy setup for inheritance so that they can make sure that their Bitcoin gets passed on their loved ones, all of that's still there. Oh, that's awesome. So that was going to be my next question because I was playing around with this over the last few days. And for me, because it was already set up, there's like a private option. And you just like click on that, move funds to a new multi-sig and that's basically all you need to do. But for anyone new setting up a Bikki now, is that, that's just a default?

That's a default. Oh, that's awesome. That's very cool. And like when it comes to the tradeoffs with something like Bickey or really any collaborative custody. Is there anything else that you think is a sort of barrier that you need to improve on? I think a couple of things. So one is, I think even though we've made big strides on privacy, there's still more to come. So for example, with every hardware device, you have to get a hold of the hardware. You have to actually get it shipped to you somehow or you need to go get it in a retail store. And I think historically, that's been a huge vulnerability for folks. There are folks who, you know, lost their addresses in the ledger hack many years ago that I know that have moved because of it. I mean, I've been very

quiet on this because, like, I was, I was one of these people. I don't mind saying it now because all the details who were released are now not my details, apart from my name. But, like, it was a huge thing. And for a long time, like, I've actually moved house relatively quickly after that unrelated. But I had to like change my phone number. The amount of fishing scams I was getting was insane. Like that's a that's a real problem. And there's people like coin kite who will wipe your data from their servers after a certain amount of time. But like what can you do to fix that problem? Yeah. That's one of the things. And we're actually working on a similar approach for Big Key. Another is retail store pickup can be can be helpful. We're actually working on. We're actually

working on implementing pickup at retail stores. Don't think like big box retail stores are selling, but more like pickup points. We think that's an important thing to roll out so that folks have more options for actually getting a hold of a device without having to put a physical address that they're, you know, either even if it's work that they're at physically a lot. And then we also introduce the ability to purchase Bikki with Bitcoin. One of the other aspect, there's a lot of aspects to this, but one of the other aspects is that, you know, when you pay with something that's not Bitcoin, you need to provide a billing address.

And very often, that's pretty problematic for folks. And so really trying to go systematically through where this type of information ends up in, you know, both our systems and potentially others. And I think, you know, it's something I'd love to see more focus on industry-wide because I think it's a real problem. I mean, the idea of being able to pick this up at retail, I can see all this coming together now, it's the idea of being able to pick this up at a retail store where you can pay with like e-cash through the square terminal is kind of the perfect solution to this. It's a good idea.

We need to push that forward. The other thing that I really wanted to kind of hit on is, like, this is a huge privacy improvement for the individual using a bit key. But this isn't like a private Bitcoin. This doesn't give you private Bitcoin transactions. I want to make sure that that's not lost in kind of the nuance of this. Like people who are using Bitcoin, like your interaction is blocked from, Like Block can no longer see that, but everyone else can see it on the network. And Block can still see transactions on the network. They just don't know they're associated with you. It's probably worth like just reiterating that point.

Yeah, I think it's a really important one. On-chain privacy is a huge challenge. And I think, you know, this is one of those situations where things like Lightning can help. I think most people don't realize that, you know, if they pay somebody on L1, they're potentially revealing a lot to that person about. their holdings. And that's something that like there isn't really a direct analog prior to Bitcoin for. And I think it's like a very Bitcoin specific thing.

It's not big key specific. It's not really specific to any wallet vendor or anything like that. But it is a difference in Bitcoin relative to what people are used to. Like, you know, it's basically comes down to, you know, if I pay for something, you know, if I pay for a coffee with a $20 bill, they know I had at least $20, but they don't know all the other $20 bills that I've spent. and who I might have given them to or how much it adds up to or anything like that. And I think that still flies under the radar for a lot of folks and is something that is

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sale now. Use code WBD to get 10% off at checkout on all pass types. The website is mina.b.tc.t and use code WBD for 10% off. So Bitki is obviously relatively new in the Bitcoin hardware space. What is like the future of Bickey? Is there the stuff you're working on that you're sort of really excited about? Like what will this look like in a few years time? Yeah. So a few years time, I probably can't go into too much detail about.

I will say, you know, we have heard a ton of different requests from our customers. We have a lot of folks using Bickey really excited about it. And I think getting a lot of value out of safe storage on Bikki And also realizing, like, we've made it so simple that, like, there's actually quite a few feature requests that people realize, like, hey, I would be awesome if Bickey also did this. And so we've gotten requests for things like, you know, some on-chain privacy tools like we were just talking about. So things like coin control. We've got requests for things like multiple accounts. So maybe being able to, you know, help folks and not just like personal multiple accounts, not just like, oh, I want to. have an account that's my savings, an account that's like something I'm spending from, but also multiple accounts to help friends and family with Bitcoin. And I think this is, this is something that's really special about the key because what we've seen,

there are a lot of folks who, you know, buy Bitcoin for friends and family and help them take control of their Bitcoin. And then, you know, one of the follow-on requests we'll hear is like, well, I didn't have to do anything because like they did the five-minute setup and it worked, but I'd also love to be able to like help make sure over time that they're maintaining it in a good state and this type of stuff. And, you know, to maybe set it up for kids, for example. You know, lots of folks, lots of our customers, you know, especially with like adult kids who maybe haven't, you know, are hearing about Bitcoin from, you know, their crazy parent or whatever are, you know, getting started for the first time and folks want to kind of help continue that journey for them. And then really, you know, our main focus areas are security usability and privacy.

And so we've also got a lot of stuff planned on the security and privacy fronts. We talked a little bit about this earlier in the year in one of our blog posts. But on the privacy front, you know, we're planning some data retention and deletion changes. We're planning some pickup points, you know, now that we've shipped the ability to purchase with Bitcoin. And on the security front, we have a couple things planned around transaction verification. And we'll have more to say about that sometime soon. Yeah, I mean, from my perspective, and I'm maybe not the average bit key user, but things like coin control would be great.

Even if that was hidden away in advanced settings and you had to turn it on, I would love to have something like that. And then on the sort of sub accounts, like I've got a young daughter who has been stacking sat since the day she was born. And like being able to have sub accounts that you could kind of put that Bitcoin away and would also be a really cool feature. But I guess the challenge for you guys is always that trading off UX with features. Like, will the physical device remain the same? We're always looking at how we can improve. Some of that's small stuff. And, you know, some of that is we've definitely heard questions from customers about alternative hardwareers and have some ideas there as well.

Nice cage answer. That means something could be coming. We will see. And then the last one on this really is one of the, I guess, criticisms put at Bitkey is the fact that you have to use the Bitkey app. Is there any plan to kind of open this up and allow you to use the Bitkey with other software wallets? Yeah, it's a good call. So it's true. Today, the way this works is you need to use the BigQuery with the hardware if you want to get all of the great features of Bitkey.

There's actually nothing inherently causing that. Like, Bickey is open source. We've published all of the code on GitHub under an MIT license. People can use it for whatever they want. And that includes the firmware and the API and how to talk to the hardware. There are some things that should call out, like Bickie is an NFC device. And that's really easy to use from your modern smartphone. If you use that from a desktop computer, you need a dongle to interact over NFC.

but there's nothing inherently stopping, you know, anybody who wants to interact with the Bickey hardware right now from writing code to do that in another product. It hasn't been a focus for us up to this point, largely because ease of use, the sort of lowest hanging fruit, like most highest leverage work for us, was to build something integrated that, you know,

we can make sure it's that five-minute setup. We can make sure that things work seamlessly. there's a lot we've done in the past, you know, with hardware and software and services all tied together and, you know, all the other parts of Block and all the team's careers before that and everything that, like, we know how to do that really well. And so we put all of our energy behind that. But, you know, I think we are listening to community feedback and we've heard requests for, you know, potentially using Bikki hardware with other software or using, you know, other hardware with Bikis, you know, awesome recovery tools. And, you know, it's something we're thinking about. And, you know, it's

something we're thinking about. It's not like there's something we're launching tomorrow and I'm not saying it, but it's definitely a feedback that we're paying attention to and I think might become part of our roadmap. With that feedback, though, is there almost a part of this, which Bitcoin needs to have a solution for everyone. Like the hardcore Bitcoiners that want to use like a, they want to set up their own multi-sig and use Sparrow or Wasabi or whatever. Like, there's tools out there that they can go and do that with. Is part of this just a case that like Bitcoin might not be for those people? It's serving a different audience. Certainly. I mean, I think everybody's threat model is different. Everybody's, you know, tolerance for how much time they're going to spend setting up and maintaining something is different. Everyone's technical capability is different. And the kinds of risks that they're subject to in life is different. And I think that there are great tools out there for folks who want to spend a really long time figuring out, you know, a DIY multi-sig setup. Like there's great hardware out there.

there's really flexible software. I've used it. Everybody on our team has used it at various points. And I think for some customers, like, that's the right thing and that's what they're going to use and that's it. And there certainly is a subset of those folks that, you know, probably never will use Bitcoin, and that's okay. But I'd also call out that I think there are a lot of Bitcoiners who maybe in theory they want to do those things. Maybe they've tried. Maybe they did at one point, but, you know, that three or five multi-sig that they set up, like, well, one of the keys is actually lost, and now it's like less safe state than they set it up in the first place. And, you know, or they replaced something and didn't rotate other keys and, you know, or had a compromise of

something and didn't rotate other keys. And I think there's a bunch of situations like that that more people than we would expect will benefit, you know, or than you might expect on paper, will benefit from what big key brings. So I do. want to see, I do want to bring more people, even, even those who are maybe used to some of the most sophisticated tools out there into the Bickie community, but also definitely not forcing anyone. And, you know, if we can enable even more people to use Bickie by, you know, allowing more interoperability or enabling more interoperability, rather. I think, I think I'll see us do that at some point. Yeah, I think that this is my like unpopular opinion, which is that like, you have to be really

honest about what your actual threat model is here. And like, it's great having this incredibly robust setup where, you know, you're, you're kind of removing yourself from any, you know, nation state attack type threat against yourself. But like, if that's never a realistic threat, then the big risk in any of these setups is you. And like taking out as much of that from the equation as possible is probably a good thing for more Bitcoiners. But I also understand, like wanting to use the Bitcoin tools, wanting to do things in like the Cyphopunk, sovereign individual type way. But I think people just need to be really honest about the actual threat vector that they're facing.

All right. I want to move on to the proto stuff. Is there anything else on the Bikki side that you want to make sure we hit? I'd love to hear feedback. So we have a lot of folks who've set up so that I guess is really for everybody listening. If you've set up Bikki recently, if you've set up Bikki recently, if you've, you've set up Bickey a long time ago, but haven't been in touch with us.

I'd love to know what you think. I love to know what you love about it. I'd love to know what you think we should add and what should be on our roadmap. And so, you know, whether that's DMing me on Twitter or reaching out to Bickie at Bockee atxyZ or adding the official, you know, Bickey account on Twitter and telling us,

like, please speak up. You know, it's how we make this better. One of the also, I mean, Full disclosure, probably a little bit late. Bikki, you're obviously a sponsor of the show. I think it's a great product. And one of the cool things is I don't want to exactly say, who I don't want to give away too much security information. But like I've got all the members of my family to set up Bikki on their own, just me like basically watching them to see if they can do it. And it is an incredibly seamless setup where they can take control their Bitcoin in a way that's

far superior to just having Bitcoin on an exchange. And it's incredibly, incredibly. user, user focus, which is really cool. But let's talk a bit about Proto, because this was a really cool announcement, maybe, I don't know, three or four months ago. I know you did the launch. What is Proto? What are you doing? Yeah.

So with Proto, we're building tools to help Bitcoin miners of all sizes. And that's what we're building is basically hardware and software. And the hardware we're building is everything from custom chips, so silicon that's at the core of Bitcoin miners to hashboards that pack a bunch of silicon to what we call proto rig and that we announced in August that is basically a bunch of hashboards, fans and power supplies that make up a Bitcoin miner and software that goes on top of that, both to run the rig, but also to manage a fleet of Bitcoin mining machines. And we got interested in this for a large variety of reasons. Number one is that the

permissionlessness of Bitcoin depends on the decentralization of the network. And there are a bunch of centralization pressures in mining. There are very, very few hardware vendors. And, you know, of the very short list that make up, you know, more than 90% market share, they're all in the same country. And we would like to help fix that. So we'd like to add the list and, you know, make it possible for folks to, you know, get Bitcoin mining equipment. and software from another entity. And we basically started looking into this and realized, like, we're in an incredible position to help make that happen for Bitcoin and for Block.

We have, you know, you talked about Jack as, you know, kind of driving the Bitcoin vision earlier. So we have a visionary CEO who believes in this, which is actually quite rare. And then, you know, we're a publicly traded, U.S. publicly traded company with a healthy balance sheet that can invest in something as capital intensive as Proto. And then we have, you know, long-term system engineering expertise to be able to bring some, actually build something like this. And we realized, you know, this is really important for Bitcoin and let's go.

I love it. And what are the like challenges that miners face that this is trying to, because obviously, like you say, the vast majority of basics right now are built in China, having one of those built in the US, which is, I assume you're building it this in the US. That's a massive benefit. But what are the sort of on-site issues that these miners have that Protokin help solve? Yeah.

So we didn't, we're not Bitcoin mining operators. We didn't start out that way. So we started off by talking to customers. That's what we do when we begin efforts at Block. And what we heard was basically that all of the hardware that folks have been using up to this point just wasn't built to be infrastructure. It was something that was more disposable.

not reliable, people would trash their fleet after, you know, just a couple of years and go through this expensive and time-consuming process to upgrade as machines get more efficient. And we also heard things like software is a mess. So there's a software tool to do just about every individual thing in Bitcoin mining. None of them talk to each other. People have these glued together software stacks and pay high fees for them. And so we set out to make something better. And our answer came in a couple forms. So what we announced in August is proto-rig, which is durable, repairable, and upgradable. So it's built to be infrastructure. The hashboards are, you know, something that you can swap out, the PSUs you can swap out, the fans you can swap out. We focused both on making this possible

in upgrade cycles, but also while people are maintaining their fleets to make it, you know, easy and quick to repair on the rack. Every moment spent not hashing is less Bitcoin produced for miners. And in these huge operations, those things add up really, really fast. And so we introduced ProRig and we also introduce Proto Fleet, which is free and open source software for managing your entire mining fleet. And I'm excited to bring those out. Yeah, that's very cool.

because I think quite often people think of Bitcoin miners as being these like mega miners in the US where they have like beautiful huge data centers where they're like clean and and things are very efficient and work like I've been to see the gridless sites in Africa. Not every mining site is like that. Like when I was with Eric Hursman, he was saying like the biggest challenge is getting like literally flies out the fans. Like they're they're just in a shack on the side of the side of a river essentially. And like he couldn't even. even use bit main machines because they're just not durable enough. And so like the, the idea here, I guess, is not necessarily, I could be wrong here, tell me, but like, is it not necessarily to hit those mega miners? It's to hit everyone else that's helping, like, decentralized hash rate. Yeah. It's actually both.

So, you know, the proto rig design is something that can serve folks in a lot of different sort of mining operator settings. So we see everything from, you know, large industrial miners, meaning, that, you know, have large sites, many, many, many thousands of miners at a site, many sites, you know, owned by the company or whatever. And then, you know, we also see miners that maybe have a couple of hundred rigs and they have a lot of the same problems, a lot of the same challenges. And then we see, you know, folks with just a couple of miners that are, you know, maybe getting started with a new operation somewhere. We see settings that

are, you know, extreme desert climates with crazy dust everywhere and high wind seasons. We see situations like what you described with gridless, who are awesome, by the way. We know, we're, you know, leave the lights on by accident at night and suddenly, you know, all of the miners are clogged with literal flies. And being able to swap fans out easily and, you know, understand the state of the system remotely ends up really important in a bunch of those settings. And so we're building for miners of all sizes. You know, there are some things like, for example, home miners and stuff,

like Proterrig's probably not for that. I wouldn't recommend, you know, that if you're looking for a home miner, that's probably not where to get started. But, you know, over time we anticipate serving really wide set of groups. I guess the huge thing as well for the actual operation side is instead of having to have sort of an ASIC engineer on site who can take apart the fan and the chips and and fix the machines. Instead, it's literally you just pull something out,

push something in, and press go again. Yeah, we're really interested in on rack repairs. So one of the things that we saw happening a lot at customer sites is, you know, the, especially at larger ones, there might actually be a couple of folks who are focused on repairs and have to, you know, go around spending, you know, their entire day collecting machines, you know, throughout their racks and come and bring them back to a repair center

and taking them apart there. And we'd watch them take out 12 screws where we thought there could have been three or zero and do all these things that we wanted to be able to, or we wanted to make possible in 90 seconds on the rack. And that's what we're bringing with ProFleet. That's awesome. And how efficient are these machines going to be?

Have you released numbers on these yet? Yeah. So there are a bunch of different ways to configure Prodig. One of the things that comes with upgradeability is we can also configure it depending on what the customers needs are. Some customers, they might have different costs of power, focus on different things. And so they may want to, for example, spend less upfront and run a machine hotter with fewer boards than Proto Rig. And it might be okay because they have low cost of power, you know, compromising and optimizing for hash rate output as opposed to, going for the absolute lowest, you know, power efficiency they could get.

And others, maybe higher cost of power, want to drive power efficiency, you know, as efficient as they can. And so what we shared at our launch event in August is that you can configure it, you know, up to or really down to 14.1 joules per tear hash, which we're really excited about. Can you put that into context for both me and the listeners? Like, what does that, how does that stack up against, you know, the bit mains of the world? Yeah, so Bitmain is definitely still the industry leader.

So you're not going to go look at their website and our website and see us, you know, beating them on power efficiency. But the way we're thinking about this is that power efficiency is just one of the metrics that miners care about. Everybody that we've talked to, like, there's a whole equation they're using to figure out, like, how are they going to have a profitable mining operation? How are they going to optimize? And when you look across all of those factors, we think people should, you know, be looking to proto-rig. So those factors are infrastructure costs,

how much they're paying up front, including when you start to look across upgrade cycles and you can save 15 to 20% every time you upgrade your fleet when you're using proto rig. And downtime. So lots of folks we noticed were tended to measure downtime is like are the miners on or are they off? And really what matters is how much Bitcoin

are they producing relative to your expectations? And there's a huge gap. And so, you know, when you look at things like 90-second on-rack repairs from Proto Rig, that hash rate or that hash output, the hashing hours, basically, goes way up. And then, of course, power efficiency and the total throughput of the machine matter as well. And I actually have specs and more information about Proto Rig on Prodo. com.i-C for anyone who's interested in kind of digging deeper. It's very cool. And so you had the launch event a few months ago.

When is this actually going to kind of hit the shelves and people are going to be able to use this? Yeah, so we're taking orders for ProDorrig. ProDrig is in production at customer facilities now. And so what I would highly recommend is anyone who is looking to buy ProtoRig should talk to our sales team. And you can find information about that on ProD2XOA as well. I mean, I think as Bitcoiners, we're very lucky to have a company like Block in the space. the stuff you're doing is pretty incredible. I think this latest square thing is huge and a real game changer.

When you look back over the past six months and really even just the past couple of weeks, I think the velocity is incredible. So earlier this year at Bitcoin Las Vegas, we were experimenting with acceptance on Square and it was a really exciting time and we were selling Bikki and hearing a lot of good feedback from customers. And then, you know, since then we've launched things like the privacy upgrade. The past week, we launched, you know, the Bitcoin Map and Cash app. You know, we launched Square conversions about a month ago where, you know, Square merchants can convert a portion of their sales into Bitcoin. We've launched acceptance on Square. And the team just has so many good ideas and

so much going on and so much coming out the door that I'm just really excited for the next, you know, not just the past six months, but the next six. How much? Because obviously, like, Square is a huge company, was a huge company before any sort of Bitcoin integration, but how much of the company is now focused on Bitcoin? How much of the mine share is going on Bitcoin stuff right now? Well, I think I have to answer that in a personal way, which is 100%. So this is what I'm working on.

And across the company, I don't know the exact number, but, you know, the folks that are working on it, like this is, they live and breathe this. And why, like, why has the focus been so heavily on Bitcoin? Again, is this because, like, Jack believes in this thing, he wants to push this as far as you can go? I know he's a big proponent of Bitcoin as being used as, like, actual money rather than just this, like, savings store of value thing. Is that where this is coming from? I mean, we believe that Bitcoin will be the native currency of the internet. We believe that its openness and its permissionlessness is what will make that true.

and so I think really the whole team is is bought in on on this being the best way to you know really change the financial system and so I think I think that's where it's coming from and our goal is to make Bitcoin everyday money and that's so all of the things that you see shipping that's that's what we're focused on making Bitcoin everyday money I love it man this has been great Max and hopefully I'll actually meet you in person at some point in the in the coming year but I've really enjoyed this you should tell everyone where to go to find out more about you, Bitkey, anything we've talked about today.

Yeah, so for Bigkey, you can go to bitkey.world. Use code WBD. Yeah, of course. And then for Proto, you can go to ProD. ProD.X, Y, Z. And then would highly encourage, you know, following some of the official accounts for Bitkey, for Block.

And, you know, I mentioned Miles Souter earlier in the call. And so especially if you're, you know, following along with Square Payment Acceptance and Cash App features, I definitely want to plug him as well. And Miles, if you're listening to the show, we need to record, man. Yeah, I appreciate this, Max. It's been great.

I will hopefully see you around at some point soon. And yeah, thank you for the time. Thanks.