What Bitcoin Did - The War on Bitcoin Privacy | Calle

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Calle gets into into the future of financial and communication privacy, exploring how tools like Cashu and BitChat could help Bitcoiners survive in an increasingly hostile regulatory environment. He breaks down why privacy is essential for democracy, the lessons from the original Crypto Wars, and how eCash can offer near-perfect transaction privacy. Calle explains the history behind David Chaum’s invention, the trade-offs Bitcoin made for auditability, and why eCash mints could be run by communities for both Lightning payments and private internet services. As well as BitChat as a censorship-resistant messenger and the growing legal risks faced by privacy developers. In this episode: - Why financial privacy is as important as free speech - Lessons from the Crypto Wars 1.0 - How Chaumian eCash works and why it’s unmatched for privacy - Offline payments and tap-to-pay Bitcoin - The risks and pressures facing privacy developers today THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN RIVER ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\\\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Calle: https://x.com/callebtc or https://primal.net/calle

The Krakken is now putting its arms over the system that we've been building for 15 years now. And yeah, we're starting to feel the consequences of that. You need to be able to express yourself. You know, we have understood that privacy is necessary for a democracy to function. Otherwise, you're just a tool. You're not a free human being. The general population will only start to understand things once it starts to hurt. We rely on a small number of large corporations that have a lot of control over our lives.

They have accumulated so much power. It becomes trivial to control those companies politically and then affect billions of people at this point. We're not trying to do anything bad. We're literally just trying to improve the world. As long as we just keep moving into the right direction, I think we'll, I hope will be okay. Bitcoin is absolutely ripping and in every bull market there's always a new wave of investors and with it a flood of new companies, new products and new promises. But if you've been around long enough, you've seen how this story ends for a lot of them.

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miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network. They're also providing cutting-edge computing resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. We've been working with their founders Dan and Will for quite some time now and have been really impressed with their values, especially their commitment to local communities and sustainable computing power. So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. Visit iron.com to learn more, which is iri-en.com. All right, Callie, man. It's been too long. How you doing? Danny, nice to see you again. I'm great. How are you? I'm very good. I've not seen you since you came to cheat code, which was like a year and a half ago. And you've been a

busy man. But one of the things that I wanted to start with is in Bitcoin, everyone's constantly saying we are winning. Bitcoin's at all-time highs. There's like seemingly good regulation being passed through the US, new treasury company every week. So it's like the taking down the traditional markets. But there's a big butt in that last week, the two samurai dives, Bill and Keone, pled guilty. They're facing up to five years in prison. From what I've heard, it sounds like they're going to get at the harsher end of that sentence. Roman Storm was found guilty by jury. And now the UK has brought in the online safety act.

And all of this seems like we're not winning. So I want to know your take, just like a vibe check. What do you think of what's happening right now? I think they're catching up to us. That's what it feels like. So on a financial side, everything is going great. Right. So the playbook is evolving just the way that people,

predicted it, price goes up, people FOMO in, institutions are coming, etc., etc. That's the most predictable, maybe even like the most boring part of Bitcoin, which is still a necessary part for Bitcoin to gain global dominance. I understand that. On the freedom and privacy front, which is kind of a, in my mind, a necessary precondition for the first thing to succeed, it seems like the, you know, We've had quite some room to work on things for now 15 years. And the system didn't quite understand what Bitcoin is and what we do with it.

And now it's closing down and using like old playbook, like oppression against freedom technologies that have been going on for decades. So zooming out, I think it's just a continuation of a process. that has already started, if you want, in the 80s, which is to clamp down on the freedom of expression, whether that's messaging, calling people just communication, crypto wars 1.0. And a continuation of that in the crypto space, in the Bitcoin space, which is now exchange of value without any intermediaries,

without control, without borders, any of the old rules that apply in cyberspace. And the Krakken is now, you know, putting its arms over the system that we've been building for 15 years now. And yeah, we're starting to feel the consequences of that. So in the midst of this, like what do you think the way out for us as Bitcoin as it is? Is it just to build the tools that we need to use? No, I think we need to engage much more with the external world.

So, you know, we need to build the tools and we need to make sure that we build parallel systems that we can use. So I think this movement is a constructive movement. We're building a parallel system because the old system is not building the tools that we need for the next century. And so there's a constructive part. But we tend to be a community that talks a lot with itself. You know, we say Bitcoin is winning. And it's like everyone is repeating the same old sentences. This is good for Bitcoin.

And Bitcoin is for enemies and blah, blah, blah. It's the same things that people just say in circles. I think it's a mechanism to ensure what the boundaries of the community is and what's inside and outside. But we are clearly lacking the. the voices that bridge those gaps and try to communicate to the outside world, what we're doing here and why we're doing it. And so what do you think the key things that we need to change are?

I think these movements, they live of individuals that represent the links between the inside and the outside. So there is a group think in the crypto and the Bitcoin space. that has lasted for a while now, which is like as long as we keep building, then we'll reach freedom. But I think we're waking up to the fact that we are still embedded in a larger system. So we need to find the voices that can communicate to society in a way that helps people to understand why we're trying to build Bitcoin systems. And why we're, you know, this is about human rights, freedom, freedom of expression.

It is about transcending nations and transcending politics. It is about mathematics. And, you know, these are complex questions that we are very used to. We've been talking about these for years. Yeah. But talk to a normie. And like the association that people have. with Bitcoin is trading the value going up or, you know, terrorist financing, tax evasion,

you know, all these bad labels that they've put onto Bitcoin. Our job is not only defend Bitcoin in a technological way, but also try to put out the narratives that are stronger than the the bad ones. So, you know, we're in a situation where they determine what Bitcoin is from the outside. And what we should be doing is we determine what Bitcoin is from the inside and spread this message. I want to give an example. For example, I think Alex Gladstein has been one of the most influential and important people in shaping the narrative around what Bitcoin is because of his background, it comes from human rights perspective, you know, he's been working in that field before he's gained quite some,

you know, people know him from that world. Yeah. So he has managed to build like an entire narrative, very strong, very good narrative, an ethical narrative around Bitcoin, which is to help the people who need the help the most. So whether that's refugees, political descent, or, you know, human rights groups around the world protest movements that rely on a system like Bitcoin to operate when a cruel unjust regime tries to crack them down.

And like Alex has done such an amazing job at that. Because the message is so powerful, and it's also one that you just can't ignore, you can't sit there and pretend, you know, all the fudge against Bitcoin, whether it's on mining or whether it's used to, finance terrorists or whatever. When that comes from the mainstream media, you can't use the same FUD if you're saying, this woman in Afghanistan is using Bitcoin to fund a school. Like, it's just,

it's such a powerful narrative and he does such a good job. When we did cheat code last year, the one you weren't able to come to, he had an hour slot where it was all human rights. And a guy from the Bedford Independent came and was watching the conference. And he wrote an amazing piece afterwards. I'll put it in the show notes. But it was basically, it was how Alex Gladstein's hour of presentations or from different people. across the HRF's kind of roster, just changes a perception on Bitcoin entirely. And like, I think you're right,

but what I think is a really hard narrative to sell people, and I don't know why this is, is the need for privacy. I was talking to some friends when I was back in the UK recently, and I was talking to them about the Online Safety Act that came in and how this is a terrible precedent to set. And no one gets it. Why do you think privacy is so hard to sell to people?

So the story about privacy is a long one that has been going on for decades at this point. And to really understand how the evolution of this narrative in society evolved, I think it makes sense to start with what we call the Crypto Wars 1.0 at this point. And we call it 1.0 because there is now Crypto Wars 2.0 also going on. So Crypto Wars 1.0 is, let's say, in the 80s, even in the late 70s, where intelligence agencies in the US, primarily in the US, but this spread across the globe started to fight encryption, because they thought that talking without the state's ability,

communication without the state's ability to intercept and to read what you're talking allows criminals to you know drug dealers you know all this thought human trafficking child safety and we can come to that later all these you know labels that they put on used to um to justify the fact that they wanted to put literal hardware into our devices that can listen to the message that you're writing to someone, even with end-to-end encryption. So what has happened since then is, and this is a remarkable change and evolution that I think we need to learn from,

is that decades of work from activists, from people fighting this fight, had shifted the narrative around the need for encryption for communication quite considerably. So while, encryption was only for criminals in the 80s. Sometime in the 90s and in the 2000s, the story started to shift. But very slowly after decades and decades of fighting from especially activists,

not only like cryptographers and there are like big cryptographers that have that have fought that fight and were, you know, necessary to get to that point. But the narrative needed to shift from the criminals needed to use needed to write a love letter to someone you needed to communicate to your family to your friends to you know to retain your human dignity you need to be able to express yourself you know we have understood that privacy is necessary for a democracy to function because you cannot be a an an intelligent um well informed citizen if you're not able to communicate freely with your citizens, peers, right? To form a political opinion and to be able to cast a vote in democracy

requires you to be able to get that information freely and to share information freely. Our democracy is literally built on the necessity of privacy. In any democratic country today, the ballot is private. It needs to be private, otherwise you can be pressured to vote for someone specific. And after the fact, also that, you know, know, after voting, that also needs to remain private. Otherwise, you can be, you know, you can get a bonus or you can be rewarded for voting for this candidate rather than that candidate. By the way, like, I hope everyone remembers what Elon Musk did with the American elections

last year, which is like terrible way of interfering with a democratic process that needs to remain pure. Because the process itself, the principle around it is so much more important than the result of each individual boat. So I think, you know, we, we, the fight is not over. Crypto Wars 1.0 is still going on, to be honest. But at some point, you know, the DOJ was decided that, no, sorry, I should say the fight against the DOJ, the Supreme Court in the US decided in a case against the DOJ that encryption

is everyone's right, and you're allowed to encrypt your communication. So it went from being treated the same as munitions to being the right of every citizen. Correct. Yeah, the export of cryptography was treated like exporting weapons in the United States, which is insane. If you think about it today. And so the crypto wars was won, and then, you know, narrative started to shift, and we've seen, you know, the EU parliament, then very, very important. recommending to the parliamentarians, like use signal, you know, because Russia is watching.

And, you know, people starting to understand that we, you know, we need to rely on these things. And you have things like Tor being funded by U.S. agencies because they notice that this can be a quite useful tool for freedom in other countries when you have political dissent and they want to be, you know, have secure communication. so this is something that they want to push. So the fight for privacy in communication has done quite some leaps. And at this point, I think most people understand

at least have a sense of intuition that the NSA is watching what you're typing here. And it's kind of disgusting, you know, the feeling that someone is watching you. And I have a friend, I always think about, like we were chatting on Telegram. And he told me, like, you know, I can't talk freely here. Let's use signal.

And then we switched over to signal. And the way that communication changes once you know that there is no one watching is you become like your normal self. Yeah. It's like you and me. Yeah, exactly. Like one street, whoever you are. And that's how you should be. And as I say, like, I want to repeat this, this is necessary for democracy to work.

Right. Otherwise, you're just a tool. You're not a free human being. We understand that. And now decades of work have resulted in this intuition of people feeling that it is a disgusting feeling that someone can read what you're watching. By the way, in physical space, we have this intuition already. We've been in physical space as humans.

We've existed for hundreds of thousands or hundreds of thousands. of years as homo sapiens, you know, we have we have curtains. We do, you know, we whisper and we, we hide our mouth when we talk because people can read your lips, right? We do this intuitively, although we don't even understand why. It's about reading the lips. And you also even have a almost like a sixth sense where it can make you feel uneasy if you think someone's watching you in public. And you, like, I don't know what that is, but if someone's stood in the corner and they're looking at you, sometimes you get that intuition of like, you know it. and it makes you feel uncomfortable.

Absolutely. There's loads of psychological research on behavioral science. Like how do people behave when if there's a camera just pointing towards you and like how your, how your behavior changes. And so in physical space, we have the intuition. We close the curtain. It's not a problem. It's a human right to close the curtain.

We have ballot rooms like you cast a vote in like this little thing, the chamber. in digital space for communication, for phone calls, for chats, we're developing an intuition. I think we're still at the beginning there, but people are starting to get it. Most people still don't. Now let's come to financial privacy, sending money around, like the most basic form of it. I pay you in cash. Like you, I don't know, you pay for the dinner. Next day I pay you in cash.

We take it for granted. We took it for granted that most payment systems, which was physical cash, was perfectly private. And we never really, you know, got the feeling, got to understand what it feels like at this point. We're starting maybe to understand it. Credit cards and everything came a bit later. So I think society doesn't get it at all yet. When we talk about sending money to your friends even and the need to remain private, then people still associate it with, you know, only criminals would want that

or what are you trying to hide or, you know, I have nothing to hide. It's just a pizza or something like that. Right. So I think I hope we will also get to a point where we are with messaging in terms of financial privacy. And I think we will have to get there because people will develop that intuition. The same way as when Edward Snowden. revealed that the NSA is literally watching everything that is happening on the internet,

I think we'll also get to the point with money. And the reason why we will get there is that money is almost as important, you know, if not more important than speech. In fact, here again, the American Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech. And I can make some examples why money is speech, for example, you have a political belief. you want to support this political movement. You donate to them. This is expression of speech.

Like, I support this political cause. Now, someone could stop you from doing that. That's financial censorship. Or someone could just observe your bank account from, you know, you're doing that. And then retroactively, after the regime, you know, this current regime has been toppled by the next regime, they might say like, hmm, actually we want to persecute everyone who's donated to that, to that foundation, to that cause five years ago. Right.

So there are many ways how we express speech or human freedom or personal freedoms through money. I'll make another example is we're in Riga right now. It's a Bitcoin conference. You know, your credit card statement says you're in Riga and Danny is in Riga right now. So they can see like you're in Riga right now. Maybe that's not so interesting. But maybe they'll see like, oh, there's a bunch of bitconers now in Riga. You know, lots of people suddenly appearing in Riga and they all go to the same

place. Like this cafe shop has like a high influx of international credit cards now paying at that cafe. Maybe there is a conference of Bitcoiners there. Right. So there is a social graph as well associated with money. Now it shows who your therapist is. You can see like, oh, you're, doing psychotherapy at this place or who you're going to cinema with. You know, oh, you paid like for four tickets and there were like these people around you. So so many ways how we, leave traces around. And unfortunately, you know, I care about these things, you care about these things. We kind of have an idea of what's happening. The general population will only start to understand things once it start to hurt. And with money, I think like with money, it can really,

really bad. It can hurt more than with messaging even. Like when they turn off your bank account, you know, you might lose your home. And sounds unrealistic to people. To some, they say like, oh, I will never be affected by this. But yeah, good luck, right? You don't know what's going to happen politically in five years in your country. So better be prepared now. If you already self-custody or Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets, complex setups, clumsy interfaces, and a seed phrase that can be lost, stolen or forgotten. Well, Bitkey fixes that. Bitkey is a multi-sig hardware wallet built by the team behind Square and Cash App. It packs a cryptographic recovery system and built-in inheritance feature into an intuitive, easy-to-use wallet with no seed phrase

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or their funding partners. Your Bitcoin has never lent out to generate interest. I recently took out a loan with Ledden and the whole process couldn't have been easier. It took me less than 15 minutes to go through the application and in just a few hours I had the dollars in my account. It was super smooth. So if you need cash but you don't want to sell Bitcoin, head over to ledden.io forward slash WBD and you'll get 25% off your first loan. That's LEDN.io forward slash WBD. I do think that's almost the most dangerous narrative though is that I'm doing nothing wrong. so I don't need to worry about privacy.

And I think that's like a very pervasive, well, yet, yeah, but I think that's a very pervasive kind of way of thinking. That is one of the things that we need to change. But with messaging, before we get onto the sort of financial privacy side of things, have we not just taken a huge step back with this online safety act? I mean, I know this in the UK, but I assume this is going to spread to more countries. And with it, I know that Signal have said, well, the government have said to signal that they want to have backdoor access,

and they somehow trying to say that they can still be end-to-end encrypted. but Signal just said they're going to leave the UK if they try and make them do that. Yeah, I applaud Signal and Signal Foundation for doing that. And I hope they would, they will do that once that terrible point is reached. Obviously, I hope that point will never be reached. But they should definitely do it. And I hope the parliamentarians in the UK will feel what it feels like when Signal doesn't exist in that country anymore.

But yes, it feels like we're taking a huge step back. The Online Safety Act, at this point, it looks more. like a way to regulate internet access to public internet services like Twitter, Reddit and so on. At this point, this is how we see it. Once they enforce messengers that are meant for peer-to-peer person-to-person interaction as well with the same techniques, then I think like most people will start maybe, like hopefully most people will start to question whether this was, this is like truly just an issue. for the criminals or not.

So yeah, online safety act is, it's truly astonishing how fast things have changed in the last couple of weeks. We should say maybe in France, something similar happened one month ago or one month before that when under a similar disguise, maybe we can put those actually side next to each other. In France, they've started to regulate the internet because of porn because they say porn is not, you know, this is not moral and you need to verify that you're actually holding a credit card in order to access a porn website. Right? So because it's immoral. And then in the UK, the narrative is save the children,

protect the children. You know, it's very dangerous if children can read a Reddit forum or or be just a free user on X on Twitter. So in both of these cases and remembering, you know, the Crypto was one point over, this was about drug dealers and human trafficking. It's basically, you know, there is a scapegoat. There is some kind of a narrative de jure that people come up with that strikes the courts of the population the most.

Currently it's about the children. It's always been a lot to children for a while, actually. And it also feels like they, like literally no one cares about the children. It really doesn't feel like they're trying to help the children at all. You might even say, you know, the opposite. But so right now we've seen in the last couple of weeks that a surprising, shocking number of internet platforms have introduced eight verification due to the Online Safety Act. in the UK. So that means if you're an online user, your IP address is from the United Kingdom,

then you go to Reddit or to Twitter and many other platforms. And you will, you won't see, even Spotify, you won't see or hear certain types of content that was deemed to be not okay for children by someone. That someone could be an automated algorithm that makes mistakes, that it also could be just, you know, a ministry of truth in the that country that presses the button like, this is okay and this is not okay. And, you know, just this is not, this is not about porn or hiding like nudity or anything. Rather, what we've seen, like, there are already mistakes that are showing up. I've recently seen a post by, you know, I'm not an expert in UK politics, but like we're,

there was like a post by by some politicians in the UK where they say like, were they making a new party and they're leaving like here, Samars Coalition or something like that. And they're like, hey, I'm excited to to start, you know, to join this new party or something like that. And that was blocked by the same online safety act. So it has already affected just pure political speech. Nothing bad about it.

It's just like it was blocked by whatever mechanism that happened. It's terrible that this could even happen. And if this just keeps continuing, we'll see more and more of the internet becoming a K-Y-C hell where you'll have to identify yourself to participate. Now, I need to say this. It's called Online Safety Act.

First of all, this is SciOps. Like saying that word, I feel bad saying that because it's like saying US8, you know? It's A-I-D. And this is like Online Safety Act portrays this whole problem as if it's increasing safety somehow. And it could be the opposite. Like maybe there's information that you really need to get,

but it's blocked by the Online Safety Act because someone has pressed the sensor button. So I think the end goal is to introduce a KYC, a KYC door through which everyone needs to go in order to access the internet. Because, you know, this all ties back to the beginning of the story is the internet is the biggest innovation in human history.

It is the most important thing that we need to protect. We're just at the beginning. Like, you know, the graph is just like starting here. And we have hopefully thousands more years to go as humans, right? Everything will be online and digital. That's clear. Everyone, like even the boomers got that at this point. And they're noticing that they're losing control.

you know, people are talking to each other, spreading, you know, information about their governments, leaking information and, you know, holding people accountable. There is, like, misinformation and fake news going on there talking about things that they shouldn't be talking about, you know. So the political system is losing control about what people say and think and do. And more and more, it becomes stronger and stronger with every day, because everything gets more digitized and more online. So now they're trying to put a door there where you need to go

and you need to swipe your credit card before you can get into that door. And that's not how the internet was designed in the first place. So we need to put all our efforts into protecting that and hopefully helping people to circumvent these tools. I hear now that politicians in the UK are fudding even VPN used it. Like for the good of the children, please don't use a VPN. But I do think that's one of the most interesting things that came out of this. From the day that this Online Safety Act was put in place,

VPN usage went up like crazy in the UK. It was the top of all the app stores. And I just wonder if it's one of those things where things have to get bad enough for people to see kind of behind the veil and make change. Well, very good question. And I don't know if I'm optimistic about it. it. So we've just briefly talked about this. You know, we are we are we're governed by boomers at old people. They are let's say like 50 plus they don't know what the internet can be.

Most of them don't know they're like the you know they're at the iPhone level like yeah they've never you know done anything interesting with their computers. Most of them. I'm not saying like everyone. So there is a an older population that just doesn't get it. And it's too late to tell them. And again, like there are many OGs and very, very cool, very old, you know, super important old people that also help and fight this fight. I'm just saying how it is. And I don't think that you can, you know, you can really educate that part of the population about what the internet will be for the rest of humanity going forward.

They're kind of stuck in this. You know, you have 20 channels on your TV. And information is filtered through the ministry of truth. And I never say anything edgy. I never did anything edgy. You know, those are people, often people will say, you know, I have nothing to hide. I've done nothing wrong.

On the other spectrum, you have the younger generation. Let's call them Gen Z. that really don't know what it felt like to be free on the internet. You have like people with now 16 years old, 18 years old, 14 years old, they're growing up now and they're growing up in a world where the internet already has to go through that door. They need to go through that door. So they don't know what it could be. There's a there's a thin sliver of a population of, of it's called them like plus minus millennials that are that grew up with an internet that was like

wild west complete freedom no identities just no logins yeah no logins you know just ircce chat rooms anonymous people you just talk about your interests and you don't present yourself it's not about like look at me but it's look at this interesting thing and anything goes file sharing, sharing of information, the age of WikiLeaks. You know, we're going to revolutionize the way that the planet works because we can now finally communicate. We're going to grow together as humanity because now we have this internet that is like this web of neural web, the global neural web that is going to like put us together.

There's like this idealism from that time affected only a small part of the population that is still around today. And those are the people that care the most. Do you think the birth of social media was like the death of the free and open internet? That's a good question. So the birth of social media, for anyone who has been around before social media,

remembers this very vividly, I'm pretty sure, is when profile pictures started to pop up, when people put their faces online and then put their first name and last name there. Whether they were single? For everyone else was like, what the hell? Like, why would you say who you are to everyone? It's just, you know, and then people started to put their vacation photos online and

just dump everything without thinking twice about the consequences of that. I mean, you know, there's also an interesting development there that people don't do that anymore. The people starting to understand like it's kind of idiotic to just overshare. Yeah. And could get you in trouble to overshare. So you're kind of selectively sharing what's what's kind of good or not. So, but yeah, the rise of social media was inevitable in the sense that the normies needed to join at some point, right? The internet should be in the hands of everyone. So, of course,

it's going to be get normalized. And but what couldn't have been predicted maybe is that the social media platforms are going to dominate the internet and going to be the biggest companies in human history or be extremely profitable and control web standards, fight web standards, and build these silos that people think that that's the internet. There are many countries out there where people think that the internet is Facebook. That's all they have. And where you get free data if you want to access Facebook, but everything else is paid, which is also against net neutrality principles where everything should be treated the same

because bits and bytes are just bits and bytes, right? So I think, yes, social media definitely put us into a place where we rely on a small number of large corporations that have a lot of control over our lives. That's why it's so important to advocate for systems like Noster, where we're trying to bootstrap social connections outside of the control of individual companies. And it's just because there is too much risk

to put all your communication, all your social online life into the hands of a single company or a small number of companies. And yeah, so they have accumulated so much power that at the end of the day, once the draconian laws come into play like the Online Safety Act, it becomes trivial.

to control those companies politically and then affect billions of people at this point, which we're seeing now. So I want to move on to the financial privacy side of it. We did a first show on what you're building at Cashew. I think it was about two years ago now. So a lot's changed, and it was really in its infancy then compared to where it is today.

Do you want to start by talking about what E-Cash is and what you're building at Casu? Yes. So let's start with a bit of history. So this system that we're working on is called Chaumian e-cash. And Chaumian e-cash is named after the inventor of this, David Chaum. And David Chaum is one of the OG cryptography professors who's done so much for the fact, you know, that we have private communications today and he's working on private voting.

And he also invented the concept of digital cash. So e-cash was invented in famous paper. blind signatures in 1982 by David Chaum where he described for the first time how to make a digital money that works online but is untraceable. So it has the same properties as physical cash but digital.

So e-cash, electronic cash. And he was way too early for the world. No one was online yet. The internet still takes like 15 years to propagate to most people. And even then people weren't spending money on the internet like they are today. No, no, there were no websites to spend money on the internet on. But he was extremely visionary, extremely visionary. And he's also, you know, he's famous

for saying things like that privacy is a necessity for a free society. So he was, he knew in the 80s that we're going to live in the world that we live today. He knew that everything will be digital at some point and everything will touch the internet. So we need to work on a way to make private transactions possible on the internet. Otherwise, the internet cannot work. Because you're not going to register for every single service that you're going to use, right? That's kind of funny.

Yes, we are. Yes, we are. So he came up with this idea and it's called Chominee Cash and it was 30 years before Bitcoin. And he started a research revolution in which thousands and thousands of researches after his invention tried to improve on it. And that's the quest for digital cash, by the way. So it starts with him. And people have been working for decades for how to improve the system.

Because there was one big flaw in his idea, which is you need the banking system in order to make it work. So his idea was, so I'll briefly explain what it is, is you go to a bank, your bank, Chase account. And then, you know, imagine you go to an ATM and you withdraw physical cash, right? So it's subtracts from a bank account. You get physical cash. And then you go around and spend it. Instead of doing that with a physical cash, you do it with electronic cash. You log into your bank account, you press a button, you download e-cash that's stored on your device,

and then you walk around the internet and you spend it. And then the receiver gets the e-cash, and then they can go back to the bank and then say, like, look, here's e-cash, can I have it back on my bank account? So that's how he envisioned it. So maybe the naive part of that was thinking that banks would give up that kind of financial surveillance? Well, interestingly, the world was different back then. So the banks love this idea. This was the most, you know, revolutionary financial technology on the block back then.

And literally everyone wanted a piece of it. Wasn't it even in Windows 95? They were very close to putting it into there. They had like the history of it is crazy. So you had like the big banks. They wanted this. Like they said, this is crazy. We want this.

Everything is going to be online. Let's put e-cash into our systems. So there were already DigiCash is the company by David. Tom that had these talks. And then even Microsoft, that might have been one of the biggest potential deals, said that this is great. Let's put this into Windows 95, maybe 98. I don't quite remember.

Let's put it as a standard default wallet into every installation. And, well, you would ask like, why didn't it happen? And the reasons for that is kind of like business related when you look back. It's like David Chaum did some mistake. and the negotiations were really bad, and he changed the terms after saying yes and so, blah, blah, blah, blah. And none of this happened. So all these big banks, this credit suites

and you had like MasterCard and you had like Bank of America, like big, big banks. We said like, we want this. And then everyone was awaiting, awaiting it to happen. This is mid-90s, beginning of 90s. And then nothing happened. Like none of them really implemented this. And then there's silence.

And then 95, 96, 98, we had credit cards, you know, things like PayPal pop up. And those kind of completely different, like there's no notion of privacy in the systems that came after it and then conquered the Internet. But I think what's more interesting than the business perspective here is the research perspective that this caused. So 98, when you started working on this, people started like the cypherpunks are. getting started. And they noticed that this is amazing. We need digital money for the internet. This is privacy preserving. Now let's make it decentralized. Now let's take away the trust part

that we still require towards banks. And then there is like 25 years of research. And what they're all trying is kind of like improve e-cash. Try to like get rid of the trust here and improve the properties there. And like and you see all these papers coming out. These like wide eyes, B money and things like that. Yes. So they all built on this whole story that starts with David Chom until Satoshi Nakamoto, 2008, 2009,

where he released the white paper, the first code. And with the finally a solution to the electronic cash problem, which is finally a way that is sustainable, that works, that doesn't require any third parties or intermediate, where we can transact with electronic cash, a peer-to-peer electronic cash, the title of the Bitcoin white paper, is where we can transact with electronic cash without the need for the banks. And the way that he did it is, first of all, he decentralized it.

So he came up with a way to decentralize it. He came up with a similar way to how he decentralized. He also managed to limit the issuance of it, 21 million Bitcoin. and and back it with physical energies to protect it from the outside, right? So fantastic. And that's kind of the conclusion of this quest, which was finally found. And so at this point, we're very different from original Charmin E-Cash. There is no bank involved, but there is also no tokens that you share and so on.

This is a blockchain system. Like, that's invented the idea of blockchains. you can imagine this like in the physical in the ether there is some kind of like this this this blockchain thing and then when you want to make a payment you just like say hey blockchain i want to send money to danny and then something happens here and then it pops up on your side so then then we started looking into bitcoin and bitcoin versus revolution and the big tradeoff with bitcoin is that it isn't inherently private yes that's that's one of the one of the tradeoffs of bitcoin is it's not inherently private although

So, to be fair, some of the outcoins that came after also found ways to make it more private, also accepting other trade-offs, right, that we don't want to accept in Bitcoin. The auditability. Especially the auditability. So there's a trade-off between privacy and auditability. And Bitcoin went full-on auditability, no privacy, in that sense that all the transactions can be traced in the blockchain, but you don't need an account with the bank. So you're just like a random number, right?

So you don't need an ID. You don't need to talk to anyone. You just start your Bitcoin node and you're immediately part of the system. And you're making it stronger by starting your Bitcoin node. So it's an amazing thing. It started a whole revolution. And so that's one tradeoff is a privacy. And the other one is speed.

So Bitcoin is slow by design. And it is slow because we want to keep it decentralized and easy to verify and easy to participate. So there's again another trade-off is a super-fast system and how many people can participate. A super-fast system requires very big servers. So then your Bitcoin node is not like this like a $100 machine that you can run in your bedroom that protects the Bitcoin system. Whereas like when you go full retard, like Solana is like we don't care about decentralization. Like we're just super fast.

But there's only like three nodes controlled by a single company. I don't know, but like a handful of people and no one can reproduce it or replicate the system and like they want that, like whatever. Like have fun. So it's not really private and it's not really fast. And those are very conscious decisions that are necessary to make Bitcoin successful.

That Satoshi chose very consciously. So okay, 82. 2008 and then 10 years of Bitcoin, 15 years of Bitcoin, we're building the Lightning Network, we're trying to scale it and so on and so forth. But very early in the history of Bitcoin, already 2010, I think, there were already people theorizing about now that we have a parallel financial system, can't we implement the ideas of David Chom on top of that parallel financial system

on top of Bitcoin, right? So in the beginning, we needed to build this on the banks and all the problems with making deals and the bank says no and then it doesn't happen. Let's scratch all that. We have a system that cannot be stopped. Let's build a Charm in e-cash banks on top of that. And Hal Thinney himself,

the first Bitcoin contributor, the first person who was positive towards Satoshi Nakamoto, by the way, everyone else said, it's not going to work. And he was the first one that said, like, amazing. He even proposed this very early on that we could build like Chaumian banks on top of Bitcoin, right? So then he saw like the vision of his Bitcoin world before, you know, we have now also other ways of thinking about scaling that weren't present back then.

But he already envisioned that. So 15 years later, then a couple of projects in Bitcoin started. pop up that actually wanted to implement this idea. And I want to know that two of them are Fettiment and Cashew. I work on Cashew. It's a charming e-cash system. So what this allows you to do is to basically build a community bank on top of Bitcoin without having to ask anyone to do it.

You just like plug it into your computer. The Bitcoin protocol is underneath it and you can like run the software on top. And then issue e-cash tokens that are backed by the Bitcoin. that people can deposit or not. So replace the entire bank account thing with Bitcoin and then issue digital e-cash to the users, they can now trade online, on the Internet, for example. And so what this gives us today, de facto,

is mainly two things, is one of one is that it greatly increases the privacy of custodial solutions right now. So this is a trust-based system still. You still need to trust, the issue of the e-cash that they don't debase the e-cash. But accepting that allows you to increase the privacy of that system, like many, many-fold.

So it's like almost perfect privacy. E-cash is known to be like the best in class in terms of privacy. And the reason for that is like many cryptographic reasons as well, but like you can imagine the fact that I have now a bare e-cash token that is like, like cash in my digital wallet. And to pay you, I don't have to now call the Bitcoin blockchain and say, hey, Bitcoin blockchain, can you like send any money? I can just take it out from my phone and just hand it over to you.

Like you can scan it with a QR code. We can do tap to pay or something like that. So the money flows peer to peer from me to you and doesn't even really touch the internet. And you can be, you can do offline payments with this. One side can be offline. So to complete the entire flow is you need to, the receiver needs to reissue. the token once with the mint, we call this object, the issuer, we call it the mint. You need to reissue the token once, otherwise I could double spend it with someone else.

So this is super cool because first of all, the transaction is kind of, it doesn't require the internet. The payment itself happens only between the two of us. You need internet to verify and then reissue, so I cannot double spend the coin that I just gave you. But we can also reverse the roles. You could be offline as a receiver and I could be online as the sender. And what I can do is I can lock the eCash token so I can construct a token so that only you can spend it. So you can look at it and say like this is a token that only I can spend. You don't need to be online for that.

So with eCash, we can build a system where one of the two parties can be offline and we can still make a transaction work. Make it work means not double spent the token. Yeah. And this is like very common for a merchant situation where you have a merchant. The merchant is, for example, is online. They have a payment terminal point of sale that is connected to the internet. And then I as a customer can come with my e-cash wallet that is backed by Bitcoin. And I can just like to tap.

And it instantly goes from my phone into the POS system, POS is internet. And can say like this is verified. Everything is done. So I can be offline as a payer. and gives me amazing privacy for the payer and instant confirmation. So I think one of the things that's probably most misunderstood about e-cash

is the fact that there is a central issue so you're not in total control of your own funds. But maybe you can explain how you should use that to make that as little of an issue as possible. And then also, last time we spoke, these things like multi-nut payments weren't a thing. So maybe you can go through some of that. Yeah.

So yeah, we've built quite a lot. So the way you have to think about this, is that, you know, there is not a single mint, the big mint that everyone uses and we all need to trust that one mint with our, with the Bitcoin that we give and then hope that the e-cash that we get is actually backed. No, it's like a completely open source system. And it's just code that you can download and run yourself. And you can run this for your local group of bitcoins, like 20 people, if you want, you can run a mint for them. And what people are doing is like for their village or for, for their physical Bitcoin meetup community,

that there's like one technical guy. And that technical guy runs the Mint. And the friends around the guy can use the Mint to make lightning payments, to have like a custodial wallet with the guy, like an Uncle Jim system, where they can pay lightning, make lightning payments. So it's enough for to have one guy who's technical

to help like 100 people around that guy. to have like a perfectly private and offline payment system that they can use. But what we're also seeing is that this is not only for physical communities, but also like digital communities, basically, if you want. So there are websites that have like some kind of a payment system inside. And they would usually like you go to a website and it says like, you know, charge your account. Then you send some Bitcoin over.

Then it says like you have no 20,000 Satoshi's on that website. and then you do you press some buttons, you watch a video or something, and that's like subtracts from your account, right? You can replace this system also with the Charmian Mint. So instead of like charging your account and then showing it like up there, where the balance is like fully controlled

on the web service database, what the web server can do is just run a Mint and give you e-cash. And then you have the e-cash, it's you have it. And then you use the website by, By interacting with the website, you pay back the website for the services that you use. For example, video streaming. What we're seeing right now is for AI use.

This is really popular where people are building like chatbots, like AI chatbots that everyone knows where you can pay Bitcoin to charge your balance. You don't really have, like you don't charge your balance. You get e-cash for it. And then as you chat with the chatbot, you pay for the service with the e-cash. And why is this cool? It's cool for several reasons, but like the most important. part is that you don't need an account or you don't need to register to be able to use it.

There is no email address or telephone number required to be able to use the system. You just send Bitcoin, get e-cash, use e-cash. That's it. And this is pay it back. So it's super easy to onboard users. And at the same time, the privacy of using it is like best in class privacy. Just by default, it's like the best privacy that you can get. For the chatbot use case, it means that.

But you as a person, you as an email address, you as an account identify, you cannot be connected to the payments that you do for the chat interaction. So no one really knows who's the person now entering this text there. So we have use cases where people build wallets with this. And we have use cases where people just build like web experiences with it. And the nice thing is there are many men out there that are run by individuals, by companies, by companies, by web services and so on that you can choose from. And you can, because it's a protocol,

the cashew is a protocol, it's not an app, it's not a company, it's just a bunch of code with specifications. That means there are many different people who have built the mints and the wallets. So it's kind of the first that you can choose which wallet you want to use and you can choose the custodian that you want to use. And you're not bound to that wallet. or to the custodian. So you can choose from like 15 different wallets,

the one that you like most. And then in that wallet, you can have like 10 different mints, where you have like 2,000 Satoshes in this mint, 5,000 Satoshes in that mint, and so on and so forth. And then just keep using it like a normal lightning wallet. So it doesn't lock you in. You can choose the software. If you don't like the software, you can just say,

I don't want this anymore. Move to the other one. And just keep using the same protocol with a different app made by someone completely different. And you can also move your funds around between the different mints, depending on, let's say, I trust this guy more because this is like a regulated company. And like, I'm okay with leaving $100 bucks on that account. Now it's not an account, but getting from that mint.

And like maybe 2,000 sets only from this rando that I found on the internet, whose mint I used. So, and this most of it is abstracted away. I was going to say, for anyone listening to this, it's not as complicated as it sounds. Like all of this is abstracted away. And the first time I ever received eCash was from you on the last show we did a couple of years ago. Yeah, I remember. And it was almost like the first time you send or receive a Bitcoin transaction, the fact that it's like, holy shit.

It's a mind-blown thing. People should try it out. Yeah, you should try it out. So you can download, you can go to cacheu.dots space. You'll find a few wallets there. And then you can like discover mince using Noster and you'll find them. You can try, you know, you try them out. The experience is very different from using a normal Bitcoin wallet because like the e-cash itself is like bearer. You can copy paste it. You can take the message, like you can take the eCash. And I think last time I sent it to you over signal or diagram or something.

And it looks like a piece of string text. That is like you can imagine it as a piece of paper money, basically, that you can send over the internet and the other person receives it. And because it's a bearer asset, the eCache itself is a bare token, we can build experiences with it that are not possible with like OG normal. Bitcoin, which is, for example, tap to pay, which I'm very excited about because the Fiat system is like really, you know, putting it out there. But the U.X of tap to pay is amazing.

The U.S. of, like, that's the most bearish thing that I can think of. You go to, you know, you go on a hike in Guatemala in the mountains and there's like a little hut and that sells you like a Coke. And in the middle of nowhere, you take out your iPhone, you do this, beep, and it takes half a second and the payment clears is just amazing. Really, the level that the bar that they set. Very high. And it's very high.

And we as an open source community working around Bitcoin, we should also try to replicate the same ease of use and the same intuition for payments. So with Keshu, we're really trying to rebuild also these experiences for the Bitcoin space because we care about how Bitcoin works and how easy it should be to use Bitcoin. In my mind, it's like the prototypical user I always think about is the mango selling old lady

in the Brazilian beach where the internet is bad, right? That's like, I want to build software for her. I want her to have the best privacy and the best experience and like the fastest transaction possible. And I think we'll get there. So like this is one of the tools that we have in our, you know, belt. So when we lasted that show, the cashier wallet was new. I remember you putting a tweet out, which is like, I've just built this. It's full of bugs, but have a play. And now, like,

I still use the cashy wallet. I've used macadamia as well. That's very good. What's the state of cashew now? Is it to the point where it's really solid? Anyone can trust it with like a decent, obviously it's not something you're going to put a lot of money in, but like a decent amount of money. Yeah. So the amount, so I think in terms of software quality, cryptography, the, how well, well, how much effort we've put into it at this point, I can really say like, it's a solid system and I trust it. And it's open and verifiable. So you can just like, you can look at it. If you're competent, you can read the code and you can look at it yourself. And if you're, if you don't trust the app, if you don't trust the app that someone else made, you can just make

your own app. There's a, there's specifications. They're written in English language. And you can read those documents that describe exactly how Kasha works. And you can build your own app. That's why there are like 15 different wallets. So in terms of software, I think, yes, we're like really solid at this point. It's super fast. It's super reliable. It just works. And it doesn't require you to know any of the things that I just said. It just works. In terms of trust, what it means to put money into it. I would always advise people to just, you know, do it with microscopic amounts, just small amounts. I treat it, you know, I'm a developer in that space.

I treat it like my physical wallet. I wouldn't put like hundreds and hundreds of dollars into my physical wallet and run around because you could lose it. You could forget it in a bar and someone could steal it. So the way that you make that trade-off with physical cash, I make the same kind of trade-off with e-cash. So I keep, I don't know, a dozen bucks. 20 bucks maybe 100 with different mince and I tried to separate it if one of them tries to

rug me well then I might lose like 20 bucks or so which obviously sucks but you know it's a calculated risk that I took have any of them rugged yet any of them I don't know of any mint that has rucked so far no no one has rucked so far as far as I know like I don't also like even like knock on wood there haven't been any major technical issues either. So I'm not aware of like things going super bad for anyone. There might be like a bug here and there with a wallet, but that's like isolated issues. But no one has rocked. And I hope that can continue that continues. But obviously it's not in my control. I don't run these systems. It's just like people can do with it, but they want. So I want to ask you a question that's a little bit awkward. And I'm nervous to ask you.

because I don't want to wish anything into the world. But when we've seen such a crackdown in privacy developers in Bitcoin, are you nervous at all? It does affect me, yes, because I'm a normal person. I care a lot. I care about the people in the space,

and I care about Bitcoin, and I care about the safety of the people, and what it does to the psyche of a developer, I'm not alone. I'm in touch with many developers. out there. We're trying to, you know, be a union of developers that also care about each other and each other is safety. So I'm not the only one who's like affected by the things happening around us because we all believe that we're doing the right thing. We're doing a moral thing.

And we're not, you know, we're not trying to do anything bad. We're literally just trying to improve the world. And we're thinking about the most vulnerable. and those who need it the most. And at the same time, you see that governments even contradict their own suggestions on how to operate. So we've seen Wasabi wallet, I'm sorry, not Wasabi Wallet, Samurai Wallet and Tornado Cash as two prime examples that were the developers and the operators of these systems were heavily sanctioned and now also are threatened with jail time

for operating non-custodial systems where everyone like with FinContin guidance basically. Yeah, well FinCEN said they couldn't register with them even if they wanted to. Government guidance that says, you know, these are the rules, play by these rules, everything will be okay. And then you start building and then some, you know, you know, due to unforeseen uncalc you know this is how how do you even calculate that risk and um so the i think the most stressful part is just not knowing what the rules are yeah and when you don't know what the rules are

it can really affect your productivity and i mean obviously also like mental health and and psyche and And some people are more stress resistant than others, but especially the way that we can move forward to build, to build our way out of the old system. It requires a lot of energy and mission driven focus. And lots of people cannot handle the fact that we just don't know. So I think it's more important than ever to show support to your local neighborhood hacker to support them

and to, you know, just be vocal about what your ideals are and especially show them that they're not alone. I know we're not alone. We have like a big system of individuals and organizations that really care and that are also like that can protect you, So I would advise for anyone who feels like this, and I, again, I know that there are people out there who feel like this to just reach out to others and just talk about, you know, the situation that you're in. And often it really helps a lot. But then again, do not lose focus.

We, you know, we're just one individual in a largest process. and the goal is more important than the localized, like, little failures and the successes. Like, the goal is much, much, much bigger than that. And, you know, as long as we just keep moving into the right direction, I think we'll, I hope will be okay. Yeah, well, I think it's amazing what you're doing. I think you definitely are building tools that humanity needs. So I'm very glad you're staying in your building because I would understand why you might walk away from a project like this at the moment. So I think it's very cool.

But what's next? I know you've been working on BitChat. Yeah, I've been also working on BitChad. So I like just, I like Freedom Tech. I like Cypunk tech. And for me, that means, you know, shaping the internet in a way that I want the internet to be and fulfilling the cypherpunk vision of the internet. So we've just talked a lot about Bitcoin, money, e-cash and how that, you know, the role

that plays. but communication is a big part communication and you know things like signal for example or tour or matrix those are projects driving and forward so recently i've been involved in a project called bitch chat bit chat is a project started by jack dorsey no other one than jack dorsey who i mean i had nothing to do with that he just came up with a he vibe coded a project that is a messenger that runs on your on your iPhone, initially only on the iPhone, that's what he built,

that connects to your peers over Bluetooth, so you can chat over Bluetooth, but the most interesting part is that it builds a mesh. So it's a mesh network. What does it mean? You can imagine it like a network, like a, yeah, like a network of individual phones that all can, like that can transport the messages between them.

So the message between me and you, like if there are people between us, they can transport that message from me to you. So that means like Bluetooth, it's a Bluetooth mesh messenger. And Bluetooth has a fairly limited range in terms of proximity. It can be like a couple dozen meters

or sometimes even more, but it's certainly not going to be, you know, hundreds of kilometers. It's not getting across the city. No. But if you have a mesh that is large enough, there is at least a chance that you can reach your destination through multiple hops through that mesh.

And lots of network systems work that way. Even like the normal internet that you use is a protocol that is routed. So when I send a message from my computer to your computer, it doesn't go like single hop, but goes through several routers who all help me to reach you. So you can imagine this a bit similar, but hyper-localized.

So BitChat allows you to chat with those people in your proximity. And wherever you go, it doesn't require email address or sign up. You can just like you start it up, then you see who's around you and who's reachable. And you can just start chatting with them. It's funny because I didn't get in on the test flight of this app. I got it when it was like on main release, only a few days ago. And I've been looking at it.

And I've not had a single connection until you walked in the door. See, yeah, it's running on my phone. And yeah, it's constantly like if you leave it running, it constantly looks for other bitchat users. And you can just start chatting with that. And so he put out that iOS app. And I thought it's like fantastic. It's amazing.

It's like exactly. It's up my alley. And I'm an Android user. So I took it and I also like I heavily love vibe coding a lot. So I took his iOS app and translated it into an Android app that looks and feels the same and publish that. So now we're kind of working on two different apps. He's building the iOS.

app, I'm building the Android app and they're compatible with each other so they can talk to each other. And we're at a conference here in Riga and today we had the developer conference, the pre-conference, BTC++. And it was super fun and very useful at that conference. So basically, lots of people had that app running and you can just walk, you can watch a talk and you can take out BitChat and you see like 25 people are online right now and you can just talk about what you're seeing. You can, you know, or say like, what's the Wi-Fi password and like people sending me the Wi-Fi password over BitChat because you can use it while you're offline.

It's just it relies on Bluetooth, which is completely different from the other Internet apps that you have on your phone. So it's cool because it's a it's a parallel system again. It doesn't require Internet. It doesn't require registration. And it doesn't require anyone's permission. So you can just like, we don't need a SIM card that we would have to buy and register, or we don't need a router that would need like a cable internet connection. It's just peer-to-peer, pure magic being, you know, hopping from one phone to another.

What's like the best use case for a mesh network? Because even if you're in a pretty highly densely populated city, you still have like this. So for example, the building I live in, like I could imagine a mesh network working in that building. But if I want to message the building over the street, like, it's probably not going to reach that far. So, like, what is the ideal use case for a mesh now? So, like, with any network, there is a network effect. That means, like, it gets more useful, the more people use it. Yeah.

Right? So, I mean, that's also true for any messenger. But here in this case, it's like literally true for the infrastructure itself. So the more people have it running, the more people you can reach in principle. Funny because I also use it, like, in apartments talking to neighbors. and it worked really well. So let's say if they're like we don't know how well it scales yet. The largest meshes are still kind of small.

But potentially like what are use cases for it is especially in cases where the internet doesn't work, this can really shine. So and there are many cases where the internet doesn't work, especially when people concentrate. So this could be a sports stadium, it could be a festival, could be a conference, but it could also be a disaster situation where I don't know, maybe an EMP has turned off the internet or some like natural disaster as taking down the cell network or something where you still want to be able to communicate to your neighborhood, for example. In those cases, like an app like Bich chat can be the last digital communication that you have. So obviously we're not building yet for the disaster use case.

So it's still an early development and we need to test it, make sure that it's kind of scales to larger, larger, meshes and see how reliable it is to reach people. But it's looking pretty good so far. So we're just going to keep improving it. And I think since this hasn't really, there are other mesh projects that we can mention like mesh-tastic or Laura, the technology, there's FireChat, that is like previous work that has done something similar.

So maybe one interesting example here is FireChad, which was important in the Hong Kong protest in 2020. Oh, that's cool. Yes, where the Chinese regime monitored the internet of protesters or also can play around with the internet, turn it off to basically make it harder to voice your political opinion and organize on the streets. People started using fire chat back then to send each other messages. Like, it's safe here now, now we're going here. So anything where the communication requires you to talk to lots of people around you

and you don't want to go over the internet, this is super useful. That's very cool. And so, like, as this scales, is it the kind of thing that you could use as a mesh network that's also connected to the internet when you're not in one of those disaster scenarios? Yes.

Yes. So we're already working on this. There are like already, you know, BitChat has this already, for the iOS app, has this already integrated, which we can, where we can connect mesh individual meshes basically through Noster. So there's another freedom technology like Noster

where you can just talk to a public key basically. So the way it's implemented right now is that we two meet in a physical space. I see your phone, like your public key, you see mine, and then we can favorite each others. So to make sure that we're actually the person that you know that you're talking to. And then when we spread and we go apart

and there is no Bluetooth connection between us anymore, then we can default back to Nostr, basically. And then use the Noster network to talk to each other. So it's not taking a social graph from Noster. It's just using the public-private keypad. So the base is like the, yes, the basis for it is your Bidjet identity. And Nostr is just used as a communication layer

in case the Bluetooth range is out of range. I see. That's very cool. And so I want to know about you vibe coding this app because I've never written a single line of code. Oh, you should. So that's where I'm at with this. But when you take the iOS app that Jack developed, is it literally as easy as putting that through AI

and being like, make this the same but for Android? Kind of, yeah. Kind of yes. And no. I mean, it really, it definitely helps when you know, if you know what you're doing and what the machine is doing. Because like right now the AI tools are in this like, first of all, they're amazing.

So I should like be super encouraging to anyone listening here. is to try it out because coding itself gives you the feeling of, you know, agency. It is the closest thing to magic in the current world that you can get to is making electrons do what you want them to do, right? Trust me, Kelly. I know how much you love this. I remember when you came to Bedford for cheat code. On the second day, whenever I went to the football, everyone's hanging out,

drinking beers. You're in the clubhouse coding. Yeah, I mean, I wasn't alone. So two years ago, maybe two years ago, this required like expert level knowledge. You couldn't do anything as a beginner. Just to get to a point where you can do anything interesting required so much effort.

And it's still worth the effort. You should still learn how to really code if you really want to walk that path. But sometimes you just want to make a website. Sometimes you just want to make a game. Sometimes like maybe you're a designer and you need a website or you have just like a crazy idea and you want to see it live and see like play around with it. The tools today are good enough for a person who doesn't know like almost nothing

about coding to get an agent and try something and and let it build an app that you like. And then you can just like once it starts to build like a framework around and shows look, let's say you say let's build a marketplace where I can put like, where I can sell objects for my neighborhood or something like that. And it will make a website for you where you can like list objects and then communicate with those who are interested in buying them, for example, right? So it would be able to do that at this point. You can do that without knowing a single line how to code.

For a project as complex as BitChat, that's like more on the complicated site, you can get away, like, you can do nice 95% 90% of the work without even looking at the code. But at some point, things are at this point, at least the AIs aren't there yet that they still need someone to hold their hands. So as a coder who's been coding for a very long time just without AIs and knows, I kind of know what I'm doing. It becomes like you change your role from being a developer into a project manager where you're talking to the AI as if it's a programmer and you can even larp a project like we're working on this project and it's supposed to be great and like I want it to be super stable and easy to use and it should you know it has these requirements and then you say like make a detailed plan of how you would

approach this and you can just generate a very detailed plan like in a project that you would do in a software startup for example where it says like step one built like the framework of app. Step two, built the interface. Step three, talk to Bluetooth. Step four, find others. Step five, implement DMs. Step six, implement NOSTA. So step by step by step by step, you can spell out what the project should be. And you can take this long plan. Give it back to AI. Give it back to the next AI. So what you do is like you're managing multiple AI's doing it. You can choose one is better at planning, the other one is better at implementing and so on. You gain more experience in doing that. But generally speaking, as a software developer, I think at this point,

almost everyone understands if you're not in this game right now, then I mean, I hope you'll have a job in five years because it's the most ironic part about the evolution of AI right now is that we thought it would replace the boring jobs. Yeah, it was always meant to be the blue-collar workers that would get replaced. Yeah, yeah. It's a good, good news. Your job has just gotten more important than before. The plumber is not getting replaced. Yes, and I'm very happy for the plumber. On the contrary, software developers around the world are kind of like, you know, are in a high alert mode right now. I hope most of them are, is that if you are not on top of your game in using AI to increase your own productivity by like 10x, then, you know, you're falling behind. You're falling

behind and the question for a company in a couple years will be like do I need 20 people to build this app who don't use AI or do I need three of them who use AI and that's already happening. So yeah, you better get started if you haven't yet. I really need to improve my website. What AI tool do you use to do this? There are many to choose from. My favorite one is a goose from block. That's a fully open source interface.

That's like a chat window on your computer. And the nice thing about it is that it can talk to any LLM provider that you want. So you can get a subscription with GROC or G.PT or Entropic. And you put your API keys in there. And then it's an agent. So it's not just a text chat box like you know from chat GPT where it can like ask a question and get a response. But it's an agent.

And that means that it can do. things. So it can it can change things on your computer. It can write files on your computer. It can execute commands on your computer. So you're kind of giving it control over your computer. And that's how it can just like generate an entire website for you with a single command. At this point, they're so good that you can say, build me a educational Bitcoin website for activists from Asia and explain how multisig and coin-jointed. join's work, right? So that could be a prompt. I'm pretty sure with that prompt, you could one shot a website that looks pretty good. That's insane. It's a, it's fucking cool to see.

I'm so impressed with everything you've done, Kelly. You're like the most prolific dev in Bitcoin right now. Can we close with one kind of big question? So I did a show with O'Dell maybe three or four months ago now. And the whole thing was on like, is Bitcoin still freedom money? And with taking or kind of like everything we've gone through today, do you think Bitcoin is still freedom money? I absolutely do think that Bitcoin is freedom money. And the nice thing about Bitcoin is that it does not depend so much on the interpretation of what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is just is. It has the properties that it has. And those don't change with, you know, the bull market and the very market or the suits coming in or the suits selling their stash again or a tornado cash and

and and you know being indicted or not so bitcoin is a constant so and because it has it still has the same properties that it had when satoshi invented it which is it is decentralized it is uncontrollable it is unstoppable and it's verifiable and it's fair and everyone can have access to it without permission, those things haven't changed. However, I want to say that Bitcoin also depends on the people who use it. So as long as there are enough people who uphold these ideals, I think we're in a safe place. But, you know, even for those who are just interested in the monetary value that Bitcoin brings them in the investment case and just, you know, the number going up, I think, you know, even that number go up story depends on the basis of these properties that I said.

Like, if Bitcoin becomes just like a investment account that where you never make use of the properties, which is like permissionless use of it, where if all the Bitcoin in the world would be held at the banks, and the only interaction that people have with Bitcoin is, from my account where you don't control the Bitcoin, then it will lose all of its interesting properties. Even the 21 million cap is not worth anything if the underlying principles and the underlying properties are not met. So the Bitcoin, I think, you know, the white paper says it. It's peer-to-peer electronic cash.

It's made for payments and it's made for individuals that you. use it at their own free will. So we cannot lose that mission from side. Like we cannot lose side of that mission. And all the stories that we tell about Bitcoin on top of it all rely on this. Luckily, it's one of the most resilient and most stable, most like most bad ass systems ever created in the history of the world. So I'm not worried at all.

but it depends on people listening to this that understand what the value proposition is to drive this forward because no one is working on it except us. It's not improving if we don't improve it. It's not reaching more people if we don't spread than the message. So we cannot depend on the people who are just interested in the financial aspect of it. That's not what makes Bitcoin great.

And 21 million of something that is useless is not worth anything, right? 21 million of something that has these properties that is worth something, right? So even if you're only interested in a financial use case, then you should think about how you can support the basis of that investment. So support developers, support open source development, support all the foundations and organizations that support this open source. movement because those are the people that keep it alive and that give it the purpose that it has. So we can just go forward for another 100 and another thousand years. Maybe a more interesting way of framing that question is, what percentage of Bitcoin users do you think will use Bitcoin as freedom money?

That's a good question. I think right now, probably most people who are interfacing with Bitcoin are using it in a way where they do not control the Bitcoin itself. So most people have Bitcoin on an exchange account but also the number of people who don't have an exchange account is increasing. So I don't know the number,

but as long as there is a healthy number of people that just keep running the notes and keep verifying the network and like give us hash rate to secure it, then as long as that is given, then everyone who uses Bitcoin in a way that doesn't support its principles still has the option to fall back. So that's the most important part for me.

I'm not saying, you know, I'm not moralizing that you're using Bitcoin wrong and you're using Bitcoin right. Just like just use Bitcoin. Like even the wrong way of using Bitcoin is already great. But we as developers and the community and educators, we need to remind people that, you know, and make sure that also the institutions and organizations who manage Bitcoin for others respect these principles, is that they can withdraw their Bitcoin from a exchange account. You can put it in your cold storage. And that also, I mean, it has many

technical dimensions. We need to scale Bitcoin. We need to be able to provide like faster transactions and cheaper transactions for the increasing number of people using Bitcoin. So the most important part is that there is always an exit from the permission system into the permissionless world. And yeah, so I think there's a significant number of people that make use of that. And, you know, I'm not too worried that we're in a bad place. Well, Kali, man, this has been amazing. I think as Bitcoiners, we're very lucky to have you. So thank you for giving me the time, ma'am.

Thank you, Danny. Oh, actually, before we go, first of all, everyone should go try out e-cash, try out Noster. But where do you want to send anyone? Where can they find out more about you and Cashew and everything you're doing? You can go to cashew.space. You'll find a lot of information. If you're a user, you can find applications that you want to use. If you're a developer, then you'll find ways to contribute.

You can find me on Nostrad on Twitter, but you know, you'll find me. That's not the interesting part. I'll just say like whatever. If you're, I want to talk to the software developers. If you're a software developer, you're working in a company and you feel like your your job is shit. it doesn't give you fulfillment and you're like you're always thinking of how could i change the situation i'm in the bitcoin space literally needs you like we need more people working on bitcoin and

improving bitcoin so please consider it open source is now viable we never had a system where the system can fund itself from the inside so join bitcoin and contribute to bitcoin put some effort into improving bitcoin and i can assure you you will have like you will have the most amazing experience because like the open source world is just is there and it was waiting for your contribution. So please join us. Welcome, Kshu. If you're not interested in Keshu, just like on the broader Bitcoin ecosystem, join us. And if you talk to me directly, I'll hold your hand and show you around.

So whatever we can do to increase the number of developers and the support that we get, I'll do my best to help with that. Let's go. All right. Thank you, Kali. Appreciate you, ma'am. I appreciate you too.