Chat_155 - Where We Are, Where We've Been, & Where We're Going with Ben Kaufman

[00:00:00] Speaker A: You don't want money. That is not a good store of value. Just in a very specific point in human history where that's the. Where that exists, but that's not the default. Right? We have to remember that, okay, this more or less last hundred years, this is just a very small spot in human history where we just were all happened to be born in, where money is not a good start value. Right? Because governments have coursed it upon us. But it wasn't like that before. It's not the normal state of things. The normal state of things is that money is a good store of value. Right? Gold was a good store of value in other occasions, societies. It was a good store of value and various materials. Right? We don't need to get into the history of money. But the important thing to remember is that we are the exception. We are the anomaly. We are. We're. Something went kind of wrong and has to be fixed. [00:01:12] Speaker B: What is up, guys? Welcome back to the show. [00:01:15] Speaker A: I am. [00:01:15] Speaker B: Guys, following the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we got Ben Kaufman on the show today, which I've read a couple of his pieces. I actually searched through the podcast history and I've only got one, but I swear there are two. I think. I think it's because I stopped putting the author's name in the title just because the titles, the titles of the episodes were getting so long. So I think that might be why it's not coming up. But I'll go, I'll find all the episodes. I think, like I said, I think it's just too. Of previous works that we've read from Ben Kaufman. And I've been following Ben for a really long time, but he's been in the space for a really long time. Like, it's been years and years ago, like four or five years ago that we read his work on the show. And so I just was seeing some of the stuff that he was posting, and I hadn't caught up with him in a really long time. I hadn't talked to him. And I was like, man, it'd be really fun to dig into Ben's perspective on this, just because it's really good. Especially when people disagree who've been here for five, six, seven years. I like to dig into why. I like to dig into what some of us see is bitcoin failing and not having enough privacy or bitcoin having succeeded and what it's doing really great, what it's supposedly doing bad at. And, you know, five years ago, what did you see? [00:02:39] Speaker A: What did you see where, where did. [00:02:40] Speaker B: You see this heading and what has fulfilled its promise and what hasn't yet? And so you know, I just hit him up and we had a really, really cool conversation. Did not actually get to hit the spam wars because he ended up getting sidetracked and having to save a kid situation. So we had to cut it a little bit short. But maybe, maybe we'll have him on at. You know there's always ample opportunity for conversations but I think you guys are really, really going to like this show. A quick shout out to our wonderful sponsors. We've got Leden Ledn IO they do bitcoin backed loans. This is an absolute must have for anybody on a bitcoin standard if you the simplicity of just having of backing a loan with bitcoin and then just getting the money and you can, you can reinvest in bitcoin if you want but if you need access to Fiat and you just don't want to sell your bitcoin and all you need is to buy yourself a little bit of time, it's a fantastic option preventing yourself from hitting in capital gains and all that stuff. And lead's a great company. I've really, really enjoyed using them. Then we've got PubKey app that's P u B K Y app. It's basically a showcase for their tools, their protocol stack for re decentralizing the web. And I think I have, I have a link for an invite code that you can get down below. Then we have Chroma co link to a video actually that he did recently mentioning some of my favorite things that I've actually got from Chroma. But they do red light therapy. My, my biggest thing is they do the blue red light right? Blue and green blocking light blocking glasses to protect your hormones and circadian rhythm. I swear by those. I seriously my wife got me on those and it has made a world of difference. Check those out if you haven't. And then lastly the HRF they do the financial Freedom report which we I'll dig into on a show every once in a while. But if you're trying to keep up with the fight for freedom around the world and the tools to defend it and the stories of the people who of where they failed and also learning the lessons of how to actually win this battle, there's probably nobody better than DHRL and a link down to their newsletter so you can check them out. So with that let's get into today's chat. This will be chat155 where we are, where we've been and where we're going with Ben Kaufman. Ben Kaufman, welcome back to the show. I think we, we did do crap. I didn't even look it up. We did a show just after like a read like five years ago or something, didn't we? [00:05:28] Speaker A: So you definitely read my, my articles when I just started writing. So that was. Yeah, I don't know, probably like five years ago, maybe a bit more even. But yeah, I'm not sure. We did like an actual show together, did we not? I can't remember right now, but yeah. Yeah. Well, not in the last few years for sure. [00:05:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. My memory is terrible with stuff like that, so I'll have to consult the database. But dude, welcome, welcome. Whether it's the first or the second time to the show, man. [00:06:02] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks, thanks. [00:06:05] Speaker B: So I wanted to get your thoughts we've been thinking about recently. I've been, you know, fishing out for people whose thoughts I've really enjoyed and stuff I've really enjoyed and respected over the years because I still get. I've been getting a lot of questions and also it's funny like family members like thinking about this from the context of like the, the four year cycle. Right. Because we are in a. You say we're in an odd spot when it comes to that because that pattern maybe has broken or at least in the general sense of the four year cycle. The third year is always supposed to be the big green candle. Historically, bitcoin has always just liked to punish me. Like it's just like it's the path of greatest pain is the way I've always referred to it, is that if you expect it to do something, it's just not going to do that thing. So I don't give it a ton of credence that it's supposed to follow this like perfect pattern. But nonetheless, I know it probably like has people wondering or concerned or did like, you know, like, oh my God, we got ETFs. Did paper Bitcoin take over already? You know, and I'm just curious like what's your thought? What's your perspective on this? How do you, how do you think about where bitcoin is today in the market sense? [00:07:22] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think with the four year cycle, well, maybe I think it's kind of like more flat than previous years, but it's definitely playing out. So we had the biggest rise. Now we're in the fall again. So it kind of seems like it's going to play out and I think we've basically topped for this one and we'll see each other in 3, 4 years for the next full run. Yeah, yeah, but I think so. Yeah, I think it kind of plays out. You know, the dates may be moved to one way or the other, but it's pretty much the same each time. It's the same cycle, it's the same bull run. Then we're back down. Everybody's surprised that we're back down and then, yeah, we go back up again and everybody's surprised that we're going back up again. So yeah, it's just the same thing. [00:08:11] Speaker B: So in your estimation, you think 2026 is the, is the hunker down and build year? It's the first of the bear market year. [00:08:19] Speaker A: Yeah, most likely. I think it's going to be just chilling and building. [00:08:25] Speaker B: Yeah. What do you think about the whole like it's a move into politics and, and ETFs and like all this, like, like essentially the establishment or the perspective from the establishment has changed drastically in the last year and a half. Curious your thoughts on that. [00:08:45] Speaker A: No, no, of course. Everything is completely changed. You remember that everyone, politicians, banks, first of all, you ignore you and they loved you fight and now they're kind of in the. Okay. They're trying to kind of join this and see how they can make the most out of. Was taboo to talk about bitcoin in like financial, like financial conferences or in financial circles a few years ago. Now it's just everywhere. It's. It's obvious now. Right? [00:09:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:09:17] Speaker A: Nobody's denying that you should at least have a small location anymore. Right. When in the past it was crazy to even suggest that in, in these circles. Right. So we've come a long way and it honestly like it's, it's. We all laughed about how it's going to happen in a few years, so we knew that it was coming and it was kind of inevitable. But yeah, it's not, it's not the most fun outcome to us. It's. It's kind of made quite a bit boring to be honest. In some ways it kind of changed a lot of the community, I would say. But yeah, I mean it's something. We knew that that was going to happen and yeah, it's just the natural progress of things there. [00:10:02] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, in the context of the whole financial circles and like mentioning bitcoin, it's funny, a couple of years ago I had something that I had wanted to do or a direction I had considered with the show for some time. Actually was, which I don't think I was, like, really public about. I was just, like, starting to try to put out feelers to see how it would go, was to talk less to bitcoiners and to actually reach out to people in, like, finance and investment and real estate. Like, I was. I was going out to, like, very, like, kind of like, Normany podcast things and trying to just be like, would you want to come on the show or. Or have me on the show or something. Would you like to do a show together and just talk about bitcoin? I would love to hear your I hate it for this reason perspective or, like, just to just talk to non bitcoiners. I got nowhere. Like, I got nowhere like, everybody, I guess. And it's. That's kind of a cold email thing, you know, but. And, you know, I'm not a cold emailer, I guess, but I was just constantly being told, please shut up. And I don't. I don't. I don't deal with scams. And I was just like, Jesus, man. I'm just, you know, like, again, I don't have to come on your show. You could come on my show. Like, I just want to have a conversation about it, and I think people would find it interesting and. But I basically got told to F off a couple of times, enough times, and then ignored from everybody else that I was just like, this is not a direction that is going to be fruitful at all. Um, but I was curious if you had any, because I. I do agree that I think that shift has occurred and maybe actually would be a good time to start doing that again to. To see if that whole path is actually possible for, you know, finding good conversations. But I was curious if you had any, like, personal experience or anything, like, if there was something specific other than just kind of like the general sentiment that. That makes you think that or like a conversation that stands out. [00:12:10] Speaker A: So it's. It's kind of the thing like. Well, in the past, we used to have our own, you know, community, and we would talk to each other, but people from the outside, they didn't really want to talk about it. Either they didn't know what it is, or they thought it's a scam. All of that. Right now, from what I feel, it's. It's just completely different right now. So right now, everybody knows about it and it's completely legitimate now. Everybody is okay. Everybody in. His cousin has been investing into some crypto thing. Right? So everyone is kind of okay. We're comfortable with It. Now that the president was shitting a shitcoin. Right. So, I mean, it's. It's not cool. Yeah. It's no longer something that is like weird to people or that is scamming to people. Like, okay, the president is doing stuff with it. So yeah, everybody's kind of into it to some extent. Right. So, I mean, but the, the other side of it is that now I get kind of like now that everyone is a bitcoiner, nobody is a bitcoiner. Right. So it's. Yeah, it's the problem. Like everybody's gotten into it. So we kind of diluted this community there. I'd say. So it's harder to do like bitcoin only podcast, bitcoin only content, kind of having to expand, I guess. [00:13:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good point. That's a good point. Do you think it dilutes the mission or the capacity for bitcoin to do what we've always thought it would do? [00:13:41] Speaker A: I don't think it dilutes the capacity, I think so. I'd say that we had a few theories of how things would turnout, right. So like, one option would have been that, okay, there would be a certain big collapse and it will just emerge from it. Right. As a natural replacement. Another that the government will try to attack it as much as it can and kind of like reduce it to a certain black market side of things. But this financialization that we're seeing was also one of the, like, one of the very probable options we all knew that is kind of quite likely to happen. So it's not something we didn't know that it was coming. It was definitely. Well, we weren't sure that this was the way, but it was definitely on the table that this is one of the things that would happen. So it's something that we knew that. [00:14:37] Speaker B: Was coming eventually, inevitable in one way or another. [00:14:41] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. [00:14:43] Speaker B: The, the. The quote unquote community, so to speak, kind of lose its. Loses its center. And I guess, you know, one of the things that's kind of surprised me to some degree, I guess not to a huge degree, but is, is how little new people have gotten interested in bitcoin. But then they don't care what bitcoiners think. Like, they're, they don't like, you know, like they're not like asking bitcoiners for like, how does this work? What should we do with this? You know, like, they're still asking. It's like it's. It's like they all suddenly, they found out. And then they're asking CNN and it's like, CNN's like, what do you think about bitcoin? What should we do? Who should we invest in? It's like, well, definitely go right to Blackrock. And it's like, bitch, we've been here for 15 years. We've learned all the hard lessons. [00:15:32] Speaker A: Ask us. Yeah, exactly. So now everybody's kind of going this way and like, instead of, okay, in previous cycles, I don't know, 2017, 2021, they would still come to you and like, okay, how do I do that? You'd see like people crowding conferences, right, to try and understand, okay, how do I install a wallet and all of that. But now once they have it on their broker account or whatever, they just buy there and forget about it. Right? They don't, like most people don't care enough to understand what's even going on. And yeah, that kind of dilutes the mission to some extent. And we need to be careful that this doesn't happen, you know, to, to the extreme. But we also cannot do much against it. Just try to educate as much people as possible. [00:16:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think it's education and then also like, we have a, we have an uphill battle, but I think we also have more tools than we have ever had at our disposal for building good UX that doesn't, that compromises what needs to be compromised without compromising on the critical things, you know, like allowing for sovereignty and, and also that kind of like simple, oh, I'm just going to log in. I'm just going to do a thing sort of experience that a lot of users expect and there's been a lot of moves in that direction and it was interesting because like you work with Bitcoin Keeper and, and you mentioned miniscript just before the show and that has been like one of those things that, like when we can like standardize second paths, you know, like, like, like standardize like ways to, to you know, even like claw back mistakes. You know what I mean? Like, like this, this idea and I don't even mean it necessarily in covenants, but like a, this is going to take. In fact, I read an article today, this morning, when I was just going through stuff about how insane it is that AI is making it that like you can't tell the difference between the real world and the fake world. And one of the things was that like there was a ce, A CFO that was convinced over a phone call that they were talking to their CEO and told to send a wire and The CFO got all of the like, got all the details right and sent the wire and luckily they were able to pull it back. But it's because it was a wire and they actually mentioned in the thing, you know, everybody talks about like how great bitcoin is because it's irreversible says. But the fact that they were able to call that back is actually a feature, not a bug. And I thought that was really interesting and like a really like super important thing because of this. And we actually can do things like that. We can make it so like a standard transaction literally has a three day wait period or something. And so I wanted to get your thoughts about like how, you know, Bitcoin keeper and how you've been thinking about that and like how miniscript plays into this because I feel like it's a totally untapped. Because we've had this like, oh, it's irreversible and not your keys, not your coins. We don't really think about that as, as being kind of an important piece of the puzzle, you know, of, of allowing quote unquote, I guess allowing trust, but also just kind of like allowing a check, you know, like a, like a, a period of, a pending period of. Have I made a bad decision? Let's, let's, you know, let's do the homework a second time. Let me reconfirm. Um, so anyway, I was curious your thoughts on that and how the stuff you've been working on falls into it. [00:19:18] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's something that I'm very excited about, but it actually doesn't exactly exist right now. Right. Because what you're describing is more similar to a covenant than to what miniscript allows today. Yeah, yeah. So the, the big difference, okay, so what people kind of get wrong most of the time is the difference between what we can do and what we need covenants for. So what we can do right now is we can limit the spending of funds in a lot of ways. Okay. This is what miniscript allows us to do very well. It allows us to put limits on the conditions on which the funds are unlocked. Okay. So let's say, I can say that I want certain times for the funds to be unlocked, I want certain keys, I want pre image of a certain hash or whatever. Right. So we can put a lot of limitations on how the funds can be unlocked. But what we cannot do, and that's very important is we cannot control how the funds are spent once they are. Let's get unlocked. Okay. Once you satisfy the script, we cannot control the Outputs of a transaction we cannot limit and say, okay, this transaction must be sent to this specific address. Kind of say that we can control the inputs and what's going there, but the outputs we cannot really control. Control with that. There's no way of the input to say anything about what the output of the transaction should be. So if I want to say, okay, I need to send to an address that has some cooldown period or something like that. We cannot do that naturally today on chain. [00:20:50] Speaker B: Technically, couldn't you do a. Couldn't you do it with a relative time lock though? Where with these two keys there's a. After it's, you know, block, whatever. No, you, you have to wait like to, to this block height after it's broadcast. But one key could take it back. [00:21:12] Speaker A: So the time lock starts when you receive the funds, right? That's the thing. The time lock starts. So let's say you sent me funds and I received them. Right? So I. This is when the time lock starts, when you send me the funds. But now that I want to send them. That depends on the time lock that started when you sent the funds. Not on a time lock that starts when I want to send them again to someone else. You see the difference? [00:21:36] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:21:37] Speaker A: The time lock starts when you send me the funds. Not when, not when I want to send them to someone else. You see? So that's the main difference. [00:21:44] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, no, that makes sense. [00:21:46] Speaker A: Yeah. If we want the time lock on when I can send them to someone else, like a time lock that initiates like a request. Request to send them to someone and then that, that unlock starts. That's not something we can do right now naturally we can, we can simulate that with lightning. [00:22:05] Speaker B: Has lightning does it by having two steps. They have another multi sig with the second set of instructions and that's how they do it. You're not sending it directly to them, you're sending it to another joint that then has the time lock. That's why I was, I was confused. [00:22:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a confusing. Yeah, it's a confusing part basically. But yeah, so that's the thing. So to do that we can do it. There are some projects that do something like that with pre signed transactions, but we cannot do that like fully on chain. We have certain level of trust and management of off chain data. Basically. That's the thing. If we want to do that fully on chain, we'd need Covenants, and that's another store, basically. [00:22:51] Speaker B: But are you a Covenants fan? [00:22:53] Speaker A: I am a Covenants fan. I think that you see it, I think it's pretty useful, as you said. This is, this is an idea. This, the idea that you described is basically what's called the Vault. I'm a big fan of this idea. I think it could be very interesting. But yeah, just not practical enough without covenants on chain. Without. We have a few proposals, but none of them is moving enough right now. But I'd love to see that happening. [00:23:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Talk about Bitcoin Keeper a little bit. How did that integrate that? [00:23:28] Speaker A: Yeah, Keeper basically integrated that well. We used a library that was written by the same person that created. That's cool. And I think that the project name is Rewind, but maybe I'm getting it all wrong. It actually does basically what you described with actual vaults, but with pre signed transactions. So we utilize that to integrate into Keeper miniscript. What we did in Keeper basically is we try to find a way to balance the complexity that it comes with miniscript and the UX that we wanted to give to the user. So you cannot just. Or it's a bit hard to just throw all the options on the user and let them choose. Right. Because miniscript allows a lot of constructions, a lot of options. So you need to kind of balance that and how you show that to the user. So what we did, we allowed two options. Well, three options actually. One of them, the first one was what we called an inheritance key, where you have a multi sig setup or even a single key setup where after some time another key is being activated. So let's say I have 2 out of 3 wallet and after 3 years a key that my, I don't know, my friend holds or a lawyer holds or whatever that the key becomes activated. So it's now instead of a two out of three, it's a two out of four. Or instead of being a two out of two, it becomes two out of three. Instead of a single key it becomes a one out of two, whatever. But basically it just allows for easier inheritance planning. So you can give someone a key but it's not yet active, so they cannot do anything with it yet, but later on it becomes active and they can use it to send transactions. Yeah. The second option we gave is an emergency key, which is very similar. The difference is that the emergency key was able to spend by itself. So instead of being, let's say instead of converting a 2 out of 3 to a 2 out of 4, it would have the 2 out of 3 normal, but you'd have an extra key which could spend by itself. You know, without any other key being involved. That's more for emergency recoveries where you lost, you know, a catastrophic loss where you lost two out of your three keys so you can no longer sign anything or you lost all of your keys, you cannot sign anything. So that's kind of like, for that emergency situations. And then the last thing we allowed was basically full time lock on spending. So just allow the user to set a wallet where they can receive funds but can only spend them at a specific date. Which could be nice, I guess, if you want to do like gift someone coins but you don't want them to be able to spend them just yet. So you want them, okay, you have to hold it for a year at least and then you can actually spend them with something like that. But yeah, it's, it just, it's a nice use case. It can have its issues because you cannot spend any if you're in a real emergency. But it's, it's a nice use case, I think. So these are the three things that we enabled in keyboard with miniscript. [00:26:53] Speaker B: Yeah, one of the interesting things about that is that I felt like miniscript is such an interesting tool, but it, it does come with this. Like, I think this is the perfect way to think about it is that like, okay, we're going to offer like three set things. And I also kind of expected that at some point the whole idea of like a, a key, what's it called, like hierarchy, like a key decay setup. And then also like, you know, an alternative path, they would develop some sort of a standard and then it would just be like one type of transaction. Because like my thinking is like, okay, yeah, I want to be able to have these tools and build whatever construction I want. But then you think about it from like a typical user, like, nobody wants to, you know, nobody wants to Photoshop their Bitcoin. Like, yeah, you know, like nobody wants to come in with this thing that's got all these tools and you're like, what the hell is this thing? How does this, how does this work? You know, like, what is. How do I edit this interface? [00:27:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I see. Yeah, no, I agree. I think that's why we try to simplify it. There's still some use case where you want more stuff. Of course you can have a lot more stuff. But we try to simplify it just to start with the worse also, I mean, small min script is still very much in the beginning. There are now a bit more wallets that support it. But when we started, I think we were basically the third, like there was Liana, there was Bitcoin Core, and then us. Right. [00:28:24] Speaker B: So still, still pretty few. It's slowly but surely like expanding. I'm seeing it more and more and exciting that it is. [00:28:34] Speaker A: Exactly. But yeah. [00:28:36] Speaker B: Um, I'm curious, in working with that, like, did you test it out with a bunch of different hardware wallets and or you know, quote unquote signing devices and what was your general experience with those? Because I know some of them, like PSBTs are a pretty common standard, but some of them, the flow is still just like, like I wouldn't want to have to explain it to somebody that wasn't like a serious bitcoiner, you know? Um, I'm curious what your, what your thoughts about like which wallet did you use? Because there's still some that I haven't even used. I still haven't used Spectre. I just found out about Crux the other day. The open source firmware that you can turn like any little device into one, which is super interesting. In fact, I've been meaning to hit them up to get them on the show. But what's been kind of your experience, like what do you like, let's say, with Bitcoin Keeper in general, what's like your favorite wallet to use with it? [00:29:32] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I'm not sure because there was, let's say, disadvantages and disadvantages to using each wallet. The easiest thing that was to use for me was a tab signer, which was you just tap it and that's it. Which is a very easy ux. It's super fun, it's super nice to use, but it's of course it doesn't have a screen, so it's less secure. So. But of course it makes it easier, right? You don't need to check anything because you can't check anything anyways. So yeah, it's kind of like in the middle, I'd say, but it's fun to use, so I like that. Besides, I'd say yeah, I mean, Hold Card is also super nice to use because it has the NFC it has now the QR with the queue. Right. The ones that are most that are usb, like Ledger or bitbox, it's. It's a bit harder because we, we didn't have like full USB integration there, so we had to basically do it with the, like a companion app on your, on your computer, which kind of made the UX a little worse, I would say. [00:30:44] Speaker B: Clunky. [00:30:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So we just didn't have the resources to develop that for every one of the wallets. But yes, we just did it with existing tools and the companion desktop app, it was still nice, right? But it makes the UX a bit worse compared to QR based wallets or NFC based wallets. [00:31:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I swear by the tap signer because of that like UX. In fact, I have like, I have like 9 or 10 tap signers or something and I, when I, when I'm like onboarding people now, I give them, I give them a tap signer because it's just, it's just too easy and, and honestly it's usually like it does. The most important thing I think is it just gets the keys off the phone, you know, and, but dude, I would love. And I know there's like one wallet that is like super close or like almost, but if you could get one that was literally just a card and you could get it to display like to just like the thinnest, simplest, like, like, just like a little digital, like the, like a, like a clock screen, you know what I mean? To display the address, the amount and the fee that is being sent before. Before. And you had like one. Yes and no button or whatever. And it was the size and thickness of a credit card. Maybe a tiny bit thicker. That would still, that would just be. [00:32:28] Speaker A: Like, that would be great I think. [00:32:30] Speaker B: In my, in my opinion. [00:32:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I, I definitely agree on that. I haven't seen anyone doing that, but that would be really nice. Um, I think that would be a great ux. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:32:45] Speaker B: You know, I'm curious. I'm not sure if I even know how or when you got into bitcoin. It's a little late in the show for the how'd you get into bitcoin? Question, but what did you do before Bitcoin Keeper and the writing. Because I found your writing, I feel like pretty early on when you were. I don't know, maybe, maybe when did you get into bitcoin? [00:33:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I wrote these articles that you read in the show was probably 2019 most likely. And I started getting into things like around 2017, I think it was. Okay. Yeah. And I started. Yeah, of course I started with shitcoins because that was called. I, I came like with the developer background and that's what. Okay, everyone was trying to convince you to kind of work on shitcoins because, oh, you can develop shitcoins, right? You can. Bitcoin can. You cannot write smart contracts on bitcoin, but you can do it on shitcoins. So you're A developer. You should go to Sheetcoins only. Right? So yeah, of course I did that for a while and then when I moved more into like bitcoin focus, then, yeah, that's when I started writing those articles and all of that. But yeah, I mean how it got into it is I just heard from a friend about, about it, like, oh, you know, something about bitcoin, I like, he wanted to ask me some questions because I was like a developer and then I didn't know anything about it. So I got curious, started reading and yeah, that's, that's mostly how I got in. [00:34:24] Speaker B: Gotcha. What was, what was your craziest or like maybe what's your biggest regret actually between then and now? [00:34:38] Speaker A: Well, besides not buying enough. [00:34:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that one can't. That one doesn't count. You can't. Everybody's got that universal. [00:34:46] Speaker A: Right? That's universal. I mean there was just a time that I didn't do almost any bitcoin related development for a while. So that I regret a bit. I kind of took some time off. I regret that a bit. But I don't know, not much besides that, I guess. Yeah. [00:35:11] Speaker B: You, you said you have recently started working at Synonym, which I, I literally didn't even know. What are you working on with them? Because that's really awesome. I've been like really closely following what they do and I still am waiting for like something like catch and roll with that. I love their bitcot wallet. The design of it is so like the like the aesthetic and like the flow of the big hit wallet. I don't know, I just, I really like. It is you. You said, is that where you're working like you're working on bit? [00:35:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So I've been working with them like very recently and yeah, my focus was almost entirely on BitKit. So far it's been very fun. And yeah, I really like working on this wallet. [00:35:58] Speaker B: How's it like working with John? [00:36:00] Speaker A: Well, it's not such a small company. Right. So we don't work that much. Like we don't talk all day together. Right. But it's completely nice. It's all fun. And yeah, I like John a lot. [00:36:14] Speaker B: John is one of my favorite, very opinionated bitcoiners. [00:36:18] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely, definitely. But yeah, it's been fun and Yeah, I think BitKit is really cool. I hope to bring it. It's mostly lightning focus which I haven't worked on for. I usually stayed on the on chain side in previous works that I did. So I kind of hope to also bring a Bit of that into the wallet so you know some more advanced stuff. But yeah, also working with lightning now has been pretty nice. [00:36:49] Speaker B: Yeah. What's your take on lightning? How do you see lightning right now? And kind of like it's kind of its maturity like and how you're working with it and then also kind of like what UX is deliverable right now and with the state of the protocol, so to speak. [00:37:08] Speaker A: So again, I'm not like they just started because I was not focused on lightning at all before. I didn't do much with it until very recently. [00:37:18] Speaker B: Do you use it a lot? [00:37:19] Speaker A: But I, I use it quite often. Yeah. Well, not a lot, but I do use it from time to time when. When there's opportunity. Basically anytime that you want to play pay something that. Except maybe very big things, anytime you want to pay is usually of nothing. Like not really. It's. It's really the go to for payments. It. It really did become the go to protocol for payments. [00:37:41] Speaker B: Yeah, that's totally true. In fact, I don't even know. It's been a really long time since I, I almost hadn't even thought about that. But like if you, if you're paying with something with any of the merchant tools or whatever, it's lightning kind of by default. Like when I went to plan B conferences or whatever, like all of it was just lightning. [00:37:58] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And anything that you want to pay is just. It's just lightning. These days a lot of people use either. Yeah, some use custodial, some use self custodial, but it's. It's all lightning all the time. It just became the go to for. For payments. Even the new like, you know, our sparkle that is. Are integrating with lightning. [00:38:17] Speaker B: It works because of lightning. [00:38:19] Speaker A: Interoperable with lightning. Yeah. Right. Because it's just the golden right now. Yeah. [00:38:25] Speaker B: What's your main Lightning wallet? Do you have a favorite custodial and favorite non custodial? [00:38:31] Speaker A: Well, favorite non custodial, have to say bit kit. Right? Yeah. Favorite custodial. I would say speed is very nice to use for me. Speed wallet. It does like speed wallet. It's not that common. Yeah. Because it does have like usdc, USDT and that stuff. But also for it. It just worked for me. So I, I stayed with that and I, I really like the ui, honestly. So yeah, it's. I mean it's custodial but it just works. So for small payments it's very nice to use. So I don't. You don't keep a lot of stuff. A lot of money there. But then, yeah, if, if you have like yeah, $50, $100, you would rather you make it. It's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, man. [00:39:23] Speaker B: That's something that always, that always like gets me is the, this argument that like and like, good God, there's nobody who understands the lesson better than you know, somebody who's been in the space for, you know, 12 years, 15 years or whatever. But the whole failing to recognize that not your keys, not your coins should also be weighted by how many coins we're talking about. Is this like because, because I'll be like, oh yeah, you could totally just use, you know, like Primal has an internal wallet, right? Or wallet of Satoshi and I'll recommend it every once in a while to people like you're not a real bitcoin or you recommended something that's custodial. Everything we're talking about like four bucks. [00:40:10] Speaker A: You know, like exactly. [00:40:12] Speaker B: Like of course there's a threshold. Like as soon as this is like $300 or something that's like meaningful that you don't want to lose, you withdraw it. You know, you put it in your, you put it in your bitcoin on chain or you, you have a non custodial lightning wallet. But there's nothing wrong with using a custodial that you can just empty or refill based on how much you're willing to risk. Um, exactly. And so anyway, just always thought that was silly. [00:40:40] Speaker A: Um, you know, I'm talking about all the time talk about multisig hardware, wallets, mini script. But if you just want like four or five bucks, just, just use a custodial one. And you're, you're still good, right? I mean it's, it's normal these days, right? It's. You don't have to. The thing is, okay, what's important does the it that you have the option to have it non custodial if you. [00:41:03] Speaker B: Want the option to exit. [00:41:05] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So you have the option to exit and you have the option to even have that completely non custodial. So it's important to have the non custodial tools as for people that actually need them. Right. So someone who is actually being censored that is actually experiencing like censorship or certain limits, right? It's important to have these tools for them. But if you just want to like receive some tips on Noster or just have some small coffee purchases, like normal stuff that's. For most of people a custodial would be just fine. Normally, you know, you don't have to go through it or be. It's important to have the option, but you don't have to do it all the time. [00:41:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. What's your take on the whole difference between the, let's say the conflict or the cooperation, whether you think it's one or the other, between the medium of exchange and the store of account or store of value? [00:42:10] Speaker A: Store of. Yeah. [00:42:12] Speaker B: What do you think about kind of where we are in the whole bitcoin space and bitcoin's mission? Like what bitcoin can do and is it being diluted because it's like oh, everybody just used it to save or are these irrevocably connected to each other? I'm. I'm just curious your thoughts. A lot of people debate it. [00:42:32] Speaker A: I think they're definitely connected. You don't want, you don't want money. That is not a good store of value. We're just in a very specific point in human history where that's the, where that exists but that's not the default. Right. We have to remember that. Okay. This more or less last hundred years, this is just a very small spot in human history where we just were all happened to be born in where money is not a good store of value. Right. Because governments have forced it upon us. But it wasn't like that before. It's not the normal state of things. The normal state of things is that money is a good store of value. Right. Gold was a good store value in other occasion societies. It was a good store of value and various materials. Right. We don't need to get into the history of mine. But the important thing to remember is that we are the exception. We are the anomaly world where something went kind of wrong and has to be fixed. Right. It's not, we're not. The common thing like Bitcoin is this new idea. Oh we have money which is both good medium of exchange and a good store of value. It's something that naturally comes together because this is the money that the market would prefer that just it. So I think it's very important that bitcoin is a good store of value. That was like the foundations for it for also being a good money and being a good medium of exchange. Eventually medium of exchange, you need actually be able to exchange it. Right. So these were. Lightning coming comes handy. Certain scaling solutions are important. But yeah the important thing is that it's. They're not contradictory. They come along together. [00:44:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Generally felt the same thing because like there's a whole lot of people who. [00:44:28] Speaker A: Like. [00:44:31] Speaker B: Kind of like harp on the Like Bitcoin has to be used as a medium of exchange and there's part of me or it's going to be captured and there's part of me that like, I prefer for that to be the way we think about it specifically because I think, you know, it needs a lot of pressure and needs a lot of people caring about it to build the tools for it to be that. But I also don't think it's totally accurate. It's like one of those things that like I think is decent practical advice for pushing things in the right direction. But that if you have, invest if, if you have something that people desire, like you're not going to get everybody to accept something as payment unless everybody already wants it. Yeah, you know, exactly like you, you kind of have to do store of value first. But my thing is, is like I still want everybody building all the tools to have it as a medium of exchange because when we get to that point, I don't want to have to wait two years for everybody to then build the tools to get to that point. You know what I mean? But, but yeah, yeah. [00:45:43] Speaker A: The thing is Bitcoin just becomes medium of exchange because people actually want it. Yeah. As you say, it's. I mean I. You prefer, I assume you prefer to get paid in Bitcoin. I definitely prefer to get paid in Bitcoin. Right. So. [00:45:56] Speaker B: Oh yeah, I charge people a fee if they don't pay me in Bitcoin. Exactly. [00:46:01] Speaker A: So this is already a medium of exchange. Right. I mean a lot of people, me, you and a lot of other people prefer to be paid in big, prefer to make, to, to pay or make payments in Bitcoin. [00:46:15] Speaker C: Having to sell Bitcoin hurts, especially when you are certain it is going to be worth more in the future. But, but you can actually get access to the Fiat without selling it by using a Bitcoin backed loan. Maybe this is for an emergency, maybe this is for an investment that you think will do really well, but it won't beat Bitcoin because it's monetizing. Or this is actually something that you know you'll get back but the timing just isn't right. And you don't want to let Bitcoin go for that span. This is why Leden was built. They let you borrow against your Bitcoin quickly and easily and Bitcoin is the ultimate collateral. There is no more perfect thing to use securely in this setup and something that you can verify with their proof. [00:47:01] Speaker B: Of reserves that they do. [00:47:03] Speaker C: There are no monthly payments if you don't want you pay it off at your pace. There's no penalties for early payment, there's no finder's fee. It is quick and simple to get your funds. I think their turnaround right now is like 12 hours. And I don't know why every bitcoin company doesn't do this. Everybody who's at least holding bitcoin for other people but they do a proof of reserves so that you can confirm that your balance is there. And something that made me really happy recently is they just cut their Ethereum loans, they cut their yield product, they cut their non custody loans at lower rates and so they now offer one simple hyper focused thing custodied, secure, easy Bitcoin backed loans. Use someone with a good track record who's done over $10 billion in loans available in over a hundred countries. They do proof of reserves and they've made it through the toughest times in the market without having a single problem. There's no credit check, there's no hassle. [00:47:59] Speaker B: It's simple. [00:48:00] Speaker C: This is why Leden IO exists. Get the value of your Bitcoin without having to sell it. [00:48:06] Speaker B: Remember to read up on how the collateral works. [00:48:08] Speaker C: They're really good at reaching out and making sure that everything stays balanced. [00:48:11] Speaker B: Remember that Bitcoin is volatile so do. [00:48:13] Speaker C: Not overextend if you know how to use it. This could be a huge benefit to your bitcoin stack and and give you optionality in accessing fiat without it being that selling bitcoin is your only option. I've been a very happy customer. Check em out. The link and details are in the description. [00:48:31] Speaker B: A what's your thoughts? But then B have you actually gone to a merchant with the square rollout. [00:48:37] Speaker A: And pay lightning yet? No. [00:48:39] Speaker B: You haven't? [00:48:40] Speaker A: No, I'm. I mean I'm not in the US so it's. [00:48:43] Speaker B: Oh that's right, that's US only isn't it? Where are you based out of? [00:48:48] Speaker A: I'm. I'm everywhere. Traveling. Good luck. [00:48:51] Speaker B: So all over the place. Gotcha pretty much, yeah. I forgot the rollout is I think US only right now. Of course most of their merchants are US Square is and they're in like. [00:49:06] Speaker A: A couple of different I think mostly the U.S. i'm not sure. I know they're in mostly in the US but then also I think UK not sure where else actually. But yeah outside of the US it's not common to see it so yeah. [00:49:20] Speaker B: Yeah I, I went to the, the Raleigh bitcoin meetup with Steve. He does the. The bar and bought two beers and was pretty st. I mean worked like a charm, you know. It worked really well. I was, I was pretty impressed with it though that he did actually have like a problem with somebody who came in that night for. We were doing a hold up game night. I'm not sure if you know the hodl up game. Dude, that shit is so much fun. [00:49:47] Speaker A: No, I'm not sure. I don't think so. [00:49:50] Speaker B: You should definitely check that out if you haven't. It's a really fun game. But somebody came in and they paid with strike. And so it was strike to square and they on the strike side it said it went through and then square just acted like they didn't receive it. So it was like, well, it's like, like Jezerol out and we got like a big problem and they're like what do we, what do we do? I guess we just give them a beer and just like take the loss, you know. But I did it from a non custodial and it all, it all worked fine. But you know, who knows with some of it. But there's gonna be a lot of growing pains because as Steve said, like men I love. He's like, I, I like it. You know, I, I want to accept lightning and bitcoin and all that stuff says. But there are a lot of errors. There are a lot of payment errors. [00:50:37] Speaker A: Yeah, it's hard in the beginnings for sure. Yeah. [00:50:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Looking back, let's say, okay, let's go back to 2019. It's been six years, right? What has happened in the last six years from a big picture perspective, that's the biggest thing that like you didn't see that coming. Not even necessarily like bitcoin because like I'll tell you, I'll tell you mine actually is I thought bitcoin would be bigger by this point as, as kind of like a player in the political realm. I mean it is, but I just thought it would be a lot bigger from a, from a market standpoint. Yeah, but. AI is the thing that like I didn't even see. [00:51:24] Speaker A: That's definitely what I was about to say. [00:51:27] Speaker B: Expand on that, Expand on that because that's definitely mine too. [00:51:31] Speaker A: Yeah, of course we can. We can. As you said, they. I also thought it would be like bitcoin would be bigger, but it still, it got quite big. I thought that the like one thing that is a bit different now is how the community got kind of like spread over. Like you have so many people. So it's. The dynamics changed. So Much. But I think the biggest thing by far is it's how AI is coming now. So I'm no expert on that. On this subject. I was completely skeptical at the beginning. I mean, and six years ago, nobody even talked about it really. So it was. It wasn't even a subject, right? Until, like, probably until ChatGPT came out and kind of started making grounds. It was just not a subject people would really discuss or think about, even, you know, who took thought that it was coming this way right then. Yeah. I mean, last. What, like, last two or three years, it started really, really growing. Like, last three years, I think, right. Started really growing. And now, I mean, when it started to, like, I, you know, I saw the first results, okay. So especially focused on the field that I work on, right? Programming. I saw, like, AI code, like, three years ago, two years ago. It was shit. It was terrible. [00:52:52] Speaker B: Like, so bad. [00:52:53] Speaker A: You couldn't use that. Like, I was. And I didn't know much about it, so I said, okay, there's no way this is gonna do much. This is not gonna do anything for. On my job, right? But right now, I'm using AI all the time. Right now I'm. I'm using it to work all the time, right? It's. It's crazy. Like, it's hard for me to imagine now working without AI. The productivity boost that it gives you there, it's insane. It's something else. So, I mean, this got me completely by surprise. And it's really changing things, right? It's really changing everything. [00:53:34] Speaker B: Yeah, dude, I have been on a vibe coding rampage the last few weeks. In fact, just last night I finished. So I've been building just kind of like single, single task scripts, basically. So, like, anytime I'm just like, I need to organize this folder, like, I'm just like, all right, how do I. How do I make a script to do this? And I went through and consolidated. I've done like, a couple of, like, random backups of the podcast feed, but they're all, like, every single time I've used, like, a different tool. And so they're, like, named differently or, like, numbered in, like, a weird way. So I went through and I built like, a handful of little scripts to do a couple things. One of them was to a download and then normalize the naming on all of the podcast episodes from start to finish to go through and convert them all to wave format, then to go through and run a whisper model to transcribe the entire thing and. And then chunk it out into like, 10 to 30 second pieces that, that are all kind of like contextually relevant. You know, like each thing is like a specific thought. Um, and I used two little models for that, obviously, whisper. But then I used. [00:55:02] Speaker A: What is it? [00:55:03] Speaker B: Nomic. I think it's nomic. The 1.5. The, the smaller model, but it's, it's still like a 150 megabytes or something like that. To do vector embeddings for the entire database of my transcriptions of my entire podcast and then build a simple little like one shot, One shot. I built a little web interface for it and now I can just like contextually search for anything in the entire history of my show. And I specifically was like, I, I test. Started testing it on a couple things where I was like, okay, how can I know that this is like good semantic search? So I, I searched privacy in one of the episodes and it literally brought out sections in which I did not say the word privacy at all. So it's no, no keyword search. But one of them, I was describing what a coin join transaction was. One of them I was literally just giving an example of like, okay, so Ben signs one and then my wife signs one and I sign one and then we put it together and it's like one signature on chain, so we have a larger anonymity set or like, whatever. But again, I didn't say privacy. And it like pulled like four sections in which I was explicitly talking about things that gained privacy without actually saying that that's what was happening and it worked. And I'm just like, this is so cool, you know, I don't know about the code, you know, like, I can't, I can't write two good lines. All I can do is argue with it about architecture. But yeah, it's been, it's been wild. Like, I'm gonna have like, I've got a whole rabbit hole to go down in like image cataloging and captioning. I've got like, I've been testing like five different captioning models. Like, like Blip 2 and Florence and Cog VLM. Like, I mean, just like lava to just see which gives like the best captions and OCR for like text and stuff. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to organize my entire meme database. [00:57:10] Speaker A: It's going to be great. [00:57:10] Speaker B: It's going to be great. But anyway, yeah, so that's the, that's the rabbit hole I've been down. Are you doing any fun side projects? [00:57:20] Speaker A: Well, I use it all the Time for work. Right. So side projects. You're probably just stuck at work. I. Yeah, I just, I'm stuck at work and then on when I want to do like side just continue working. Honestly, I did like what one of the simplest things that I did just like time conversion interface which was always annoying for me to see all the ads that all of the time conversion websites have. So I just made my own in like half an hour basically which it looks exactly the way I want. Like I hoped a website like this to be. It's super simple but it's just one of those things so that where you. Okay. As a developer I'm not going to take like the half a day that it will take to, to actually do this and I'm definitely not a designer so without a. I couldn't actually like make it look good. Right. But now I can like with, with AI it's just half an hour. You like put a few, a few prompts there and gives you exactly what you want. So it just, you know just some tools that are very small, very like you know that, that you think that should already exist but. And they do they just have so many ads, subscription whatever. Right. Annoying. [00:58:33] Speaker B: There's not like that one just like open source, easy like you know like just like out there that you don't have to deal with this. [00:58:42] Speaker A: Exactly. That is just the way you want it. Yeah, that is just the way you want it. So yeah, that's it. So I'm not doing anything big with it. But yeah, you know I was just. [00:58:53] Speaker B: Thinking that's a perfect one. So I have another. This has been a much bigger application project and I actually want some real developers to look at it and make sure it's not just like a bunch of spaghetti code. But it's a pretty fun project and I think it'd be really useful. That's like kind of a perfect one. It's called Drop click and I use it for like conversion and transcription and just like a bunch of like one off things that I need to do while I'm doing my workflow. But it's built so that like so I was. I build a lot of these like single purpose scripts that just do one job. But I ended up with a folder like 50 of these things. And so Mike is like oh my God, how do I even sort through which one I'm using? And my favorite thing is to just have it so I can have a file and I drop it on the icon for the thing I want to do for the process that I want to do. Like that's what I do with the show. As soon as this is done, I'm going to download this, I'm going to drop it onto my transcription tool and it's going to convert, pull the audio, convert it and then give me a transcription. But every one of them needs like this little different scripting environment or like it's a python thing or it's a JavaScript thing. [01:00:04] Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah, I see. [01:00:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And so I built basically an environment, like a little interface with just a drop zone and then I can drag stuff to it and then I can select which I can just keep building these little scripts that don't need, need all of the packaging material and, and so other people would be able to build for it too. And like a simple, stupid, simple little thing is like I have a bunch of them, like convert a jpeg, convert this GIF to a webp or vice versa. But a great one would be like type in your time and like convert it to a different time zone or you know, convert this to Fahrenheit or Celsius or whatever. Um, yeah, but, but no, it's a, it's a super fun little thing and AI is just from just six months ago or a year ago, there were dead end projects that like I, I couldn't finish because it just wasn't good enough and I didn't have the time to fight with it. That now I'm going back and just like knocking out in no time. [01:01:09] Speaker A: It's, it's one shot and stuff that was impossible like just a year ago. [01:01:15] Speaker B: Yeah, dude. Yeah. It's so crazy. So on the reverse of that in the next 10 years, what do you think, what do you think's gonna happen? Like what's, what's the biggest thing that you think you should, or anybody should prepare for or think about coming in the future? Again, not necessarily bitcoin related, but things that they need to be doing now to prepare for or think about again. [01:01:44] Speaker A: AI is a major change now. A lot of people are saying that it's going, you know, a lot of people are talking about this apocalypse scenario, let's say where AI is taking all the jobs and you know, nobody works anymore, so the government will start giving people the UBI money, you know, the free money because nobody will have any job and the productivity will be like infinite. I don't believe in this stuff. I think this is just, this sounds like nonsense to me. It's definitely a productivity boost. It's definitely gonna make a lot of things very Interesting, but it's not, I don't know how jobs will look like because, I mean, I don't know. Software development is a very recent job, right? Podcasting is a very recent job. So it's stuff that I'm not, I, I, I just cannot foresee what will be the new jobs that are created post AI, but I'm, I'm very confident that there will be like a lot of jobs that are gonna die and lots of new jobs that are gonna open up basically. So I'd say that the biggest thing is just that you, you have to be prepared for big changes. But, and of course just holding, using Bitcoin is a good way to be prepared for changes. But I also don't think that people need to be hysterical about all of that. It's going to be very interesting. You just need to keep your mind open and try to be adaptable, let's say. [01:03:24] Speaker B: Curious what your thoughts on QC quantum computing is and your thoughts around the foot. I, I'm increasingly pulling back away from it being like a huge concern. But I, I do want to read, I'll probably read it on the show. It's long, but Nick Carter has like a three part series on it that I want to give a good, good effort to. You know, like, I don't want to dismiss something just because I found what I think is really strong evidence that it's not made the progress that it has been marketed that it has had. But I'm curious, your thoughts, have you, have you dug into it like and in the context of a 10 year, 10 year timeframe, are you worried about it personally? [01:04:07] Speaker A: So, I mean, I don't know anything about it personally. Right? Not deep into it. I did not try. I just, on that side, like, I know my limits, I know that. Okay. I cannot just know everything about AI, everything about quantum computer. Of course, nobody can. Right? So I don't try to pretend. I just try to find like a few very smart people that I know that understand it and that I can trust and from what I see and the way I, I can feel from, from these people and from generally I would say I, I'm not very concerned about it at all. Everybody that actually, that I know, that actually knows about quantum computing is just saying that it's still like, it's possible but it's still far off. Right? I mean we might get caught by surprise to some extent of some major breakthrough. That's always possible, but I think it's very unlikely and I think maybe like 15, 20 years, but I don't think even 10 years is reasonable to. For us to. To have to worry really about it. So it's. It's very important that we, like, consider solutions that we have some backup plans ready for if something happens. If things move way faster than we expect them, and we kind of have like, a rough consensus of what to do in the next, let's say, like 10 years from now, what to do. We kind of. It's. It's important that we start reaching this rough consensus of, okay, this is likely. What. What we do, what we're gonna do, what we should do with. With coins that are vulnerable, that are not gonna move. How do we move coins to stuff that is quantum secure. But I'm not worried at it. Like, in the near future, I'm not worried at all. Like, I don't think it's gonna be a concern. And even in the farther future, I think we can solve it relatively, like, in. In a very. In a way which. Which will just not make it a big concern. It's not gonna kill bitcoin. It's not gonna harm it in a. In a big way, I think. So I think we'll be fine. I don't think it's. It's a real concern. People are getting, like. A lot of people are getting really stressed about. They are saying, oh, it means terrible because it is vulnerable to random computing. It's. It. I don't see it that way at all. I'm very relaxed on that. [01:06:27] Speaker B: Yeah. So I did a. A bit of a deep dive into. Just went on a. A bit of a rampage on reading papers, like, trying to, like, go back, go to the source, you know, on like, quantum stuff. And I found a really fun one that was that. I don't even know how I stumbled upon it, but it was referencing. So I had gotten kind of concerned. Not. Not like heavily concerned, but concerned enough that when I saw some of the examples of factorization that they had done, one of them was like, like one septillion something. You know, like, it was a. It was a big, long number. And I was like, damn, that's a little concerning. Um, and there were three claims specifically that had me, you know, talking about, like, how many qubits they had versus, like, how many it took to do this and that sort of thing. And Jameson Lopp had a good piece talking about, like, you know, how many or a talk and a article on how many qubits would be needed to. With, you know, good error correction to actually break Bitcoin. But then I Found out that all three of the ones that I had been really concerned about had actually used a trick that one of them, if you actually turned the number into binary, it was like 100-00000000. Like it was like zero. It just happened to be like this perfect thing where when you broke it down, the actual quote unquote physics of the quantum had none of the complexity of the apparent number. And then there was another one where the number that they factored it to, the factorization that they did was actually one number up and one number down from the square root of that number. And then what they had actually done with the experiment is that basically in the big scheme of things, what looked like something that had you know, a billion bits of like, not a billion bits, but like, you know, 12 bits or 10 bits of entropy, which were going to be like really difficult in this quantum computer solved this problem is they essentially boiled the problem down to they, they picked a number that was so easy to factor from one math problem that they actually only had two bits of entropy. Which means that out of all the experiments they've literally never had anything to actually factor that was greater than the number 35 or greater than like 3 bits of entropy or something like that. And I was just like, okay, that's, that that changed my perspective because I've been looking at this for like five years, like, you know, and, and getting more and more nervous. And then to find out that there's not actually a good, a genuine record breaking of a genuine factorization of a genuinely random number. [01:09:25] Speaker A: It feels it's, it's too full of, let's say, like cheating or. Yeah. Tricks. Let's say they all have the, the financial interest, I'd say to, to show these results, like true or not, they have the, the financial incentive to have results. And as fast as they can, you know, if they can make a headline that's good enough, they don't have to have the actual product. Right. If they can make the headline that they did something, sometimes that's enough. And I think in the industry of quantum computing it seems enough for a lot of projects. [01:09:59] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's not especially because it's such an asymmetric scary thing. You know, like if it does, if it does happen, that's a big problem. [01:10:09] Speaker A: That'S not a small problem. Exactly. So they, they, they can scare you a lot. Right. And then they, if they can make a headline that scares you, they can have a big effect. Yeah, yeah. [01:10:20] Speaker B: And that's not to Say that things can't change very, very quickly because, you know, if you'd asked me in 2019 where AI was going to be in five years, I certainly would have been wrong about that. [01:10:30] Speaker A: Shit. We were all extremely wrong on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:10:35] Speaker B: It's like, what are you talking about? Terminators? No, not even close. It's like Boston Dynamics. [01:10:40] Speaker A: You're talking about, like, Siri. [01:10:42] Speaker B: Like, that's basically Terminator, right? [01:10:47] Speaker A: That's. I mean, yeah, we were all just completely wrong about. I was definitely wrong about it. And at first I was completely, like, close to it. Like, okay, this is not gonna work. This was terrible. And it was very bad at first. First for coding. It was very bad at first. But yeah, now, like, you just, you can't deny it. And if you're trying to deny it, I mean, your productivity compared to others is going to be, you know, terrible. You. You just can't compete without it anymore. [01:11:15] Speaker B: Yeah, no, no, absolutely, absolutely. I'm curious, what are you, what are you most bullish on right now with Bitcoin? [01:11:25] Speaker A: Price. [01:11:25] Speaker B: Price aside, like, what are you much bullish on about? Like, the space and the tech and all that stuff? [01:11:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, in general. So I've, I've worked on miniscript in the last, like, year or so. It's. It's been fun. I'm. I'm definitely bullish on that and on more schemes like being popularized because it is very important. I think it makes it very easy to. Very secure to recover funds in case something happens or plan your inheritance better. So it has a lot of options and I think the UX with it is getting so much better these days and people are starting to actually talk about it. So I'm pretty excited on that. I hope to eventually see covenants happening, which will be another big UX win, I think, in the long term. But yeah, even if it happens, it will take just so much time to actually have real products using it. So it's something that will be nice to see, but it will take a long time. Short time. Yeah. I'm not sure in general there are a lot of layer two projects that are making payments even better now. So there's just so many things that are happening right now. So much work that is being done, but that it's no longer, you know, like a few years ago it was okay, something new came out and everybody was talking about it. Now the community is just so big and so dispersed that, yeah, it's hard to make noise anymore. It's hard to actually see, like, Exactly. Like everything that's going on. [01:13:02] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I totally agree there. And what's funny is that, you know, like one of the things that like how I think about this is this is actually why, because I a little bit disagree with you on the four year cycle thing that we talked about earlier. And I, I genuinely kind of think it's like the pattern's broken because. And I, I kind of think two, that 2026 is going to be a green year. And I. The reason I think is, think this is because every single bear market, we start building a lot of great tools. And then when the quote unquote bull market happens, we start to realize those tools. Like, like we kind of see those, those tools flourish, so to speak. And the last couple of bull markets in particular, we usually like pushed to kind of the limits of what the adoption cycle would entertain with it before it was basically got to a point where it couldn't keep facilitating it without a bunch of new foundational work. And then we go back into a bear market and then we build the next layer of things and then we finally get to play and explore and use them. And they'd go through an adoption cycle. I don't feel like we've had that adoption cycle. Like, I don't feel like we've had any. We've actually realized any of the tools at scale that we have built, you know, whatever the scale is that they can actually extend to in the last bear market. In fact, I think everything that's happened around bitcoin in the bull market that we have had so far or the run up to 120 and so was totally irrelevant to everything built before. [01:14:44] Speaker A: It's all in edfc. So the tools that everybody's using now, it's all in the financial institutions now. [01:14:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Which is kind of what makes me think. And then going back to like my idea of like path of greatest pain, my thinking is that we're going to have a bad first half of 2026. Everybody's going to be convinced we're going to go into a bull market and then everybody's basically going to plan on it and you know, position themselves that way. And then bitcoin is going to turn around and kick them in the nuts again and then go up for the second half of 2026. Everybody was like, oh my God, and we'll probably have like a year of like really, really great move and everybody's gonna be convinced that this is it and it's gonna run forever and then it's gonna crash really, really hard and we're gonna go back into a bear market and kick them in the nuts again. [01:15:32] Speaker A: Possible. I see, I see. I, I doubt it. But I'm not like, I would say that. I'm like, I'll give it like a 40 probability. So I would say that's not likely. That's fair. But it's, it's a good chance still. I, I'd say, yeah, it's not my first guess, but it wouldn't really, like surprise me. [01:15:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it wouldn't super surprise you. [01:15:56] Speaker A: Yeah, what would surprise me is, yeah, I guess, like a huge drop or a huge jump right now. Like, yeah, would, would surprise me basically. If, if we go to 40 or 50, like in, in the next month or two or if we go to like 150, that would surprise me. [01:16:14] Speaker B: Now both of those would be. [01:16:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Going to the 150 or like even a bit more in the end of 2026. Less surprising, I would say. [01:16:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I kind of feel like in the short term, I mean, I mean, I'm not going to place any major bets either way on any of these predictions, but I feel like in the short term, I feel like we're crabbing, we're crabbing to down, you know, like, we might see 70s again. We'll see. We'll see. [01:16:46] Speaker A: Yeah, that seems likely, I think. [01:16:53] Speaker B: What's the thing you're most proud of building and that doesn't have to be like a bitcoin wallet or anything that can be a birdhouse, you know, like. But what do you think about when you're like, you know, I built a thing, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? [01:17:13] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I'm, I'm not good with like building things in the physical world. This is why I chose being a developer and build things in the digital world. So definitely not a birdhouse on that type of stuff. [01:17:29] Speaker B: I've made some good birdhouses, man. I'm not going to lie. [01:17:34] Speaker A: I'm sure it's super fun. I just not something that I'm good at really. So I think for me, I mean, yeah, bitcoin wallets is stuff that I've been working on for a long time. I've done a few and I'm very proud of this. I think it helped a lot of people to actually securely store their coins. Right. And I think that made a big impact on a lot of people. So, yeah, I'm, I'm happy about that. [01:18:02] Speaker B: That's awesome. That's awesome. No, I, I, I would Definitely, definitely say that. Just because I think a lot of wallet work is really under thanked and you know, like, it's not the most grateful work. You know, it's like kind of. Wallets are hard to really make money off of. [01:18:26] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:18:28] Speaker B: It's difficult to get like the UX for that is an insanely difficult problem. And it's mostly thankless, you know, like, it's just like if it works great, I have a wallet that works. If it doesn't work, you suck. [01:18:44] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's hard to, it's also hard to make everyone happy. So everyone wants their Tiny Little things feature. Nobody actually wants to pay for their feature. So it's, it's, it's hard. It's not an easy work to make wallets. It's not easy to do open source development. But yeah, it's. I still like it. I mean, I've been doing it for a very long time already and yeah, I enjoy it. [01:19:12] Speaker B: Nice. Nice. What do you have plans for? I mean, you got plans for things with BitKit that you can share and, or projects that, projects and, or features that you're, you're excited, you're interesting about that you can actually share? [01:19:28] Speaker A: I'm honestly, I'm not sure what I can or can't share. I just. What I'm excited about is bringing stuff that I've done in the past, like, you know, hardware, wallets, maybe miniscript, all of that, like bring all of that into Bitcoin. I think would be very interesting. It was, it would be very fun to work on. So. Yeah, I'm just excited about that. [01:19:49] Speaker B: Hell yeah. Okay. Well, my, my wife has messaged me twice. I think. I think she needs me, which I don't want to. I hate that I might have to cut this short, but maybe, maybe give any final thoughts? Actually, there's still something else I wanted to ask is where in Bitcoin did you think we would already be that you kind of wish we had that we don't have now? Maybe in like how you're using it. Like, like mine was. I thought. I was hoping I'd be able to like integrate more into a bitcoin standard. [01:20:25] Speaker A: It wouldn't be. [01:20:28] Speaker B: Like, I'd have more like flow, I guess, between, between like the, the old system and the new system, so to speak. Um, and, and then also in the reverse, what do we have now? Like, and your expectation of like what we had in Bitcoin that you didn't think we would have? [01:20:47] Speaker A: I think on, on what you're saying with the integration with the old system, it, it kind of happened like square is, is, was a huge thing. I think on that, that is huge. So I mean that seems to be happening and that's something that I didn't necessarily expect that we'd have. And now we're starting to see more and more and I think that's, that's increasing with more payment processors that will start integrating that. What I thought we'd see more and we don't is it's more, I'd say privacy tools. It's just that the regulation is choking it so much. It's, it's scary to be a privacy developer these days. It's. That legal risk is just insane. So unless, I don't know, you live somewhere extremely remote or you're really protecting your anonymity, it's just crazy. You know, it's scary to be like a privacy developer. So nobody's or a lot of people, even myself, right. To some extent avoiding working on certain privacy tools because it's, it just, it's risky right now. It's extremely risky. Yeah. And yeah, we used to have more and we used to have more work on that. So that's something that we, we no longer really have as much. And I'm, yeah. Kind of despondent about. [01:22:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's. Rodriguez is like, he'll start his prison sentence like to tomorrow or something, won't he? Like one of them, I can't remember exactly which one, but one of them will be starting a prison sentence like very, very soon. God damn, that sucks. Every time I think about it, it makes, it pisses me off. [01:22:35] Speaker A: It's hard. Yeah. So I mean, I hope Trump will give a part on there, but I'm not, I'm somewhat skeptical on that. And in general, even if, okay, even if Trump will do that and even if Trump does a complete reversal on privacy in general and start supporting it, which is also not likely, then the next president will completely shut it off again. Right. Things are a lot better than they were under Biden. Right. So with the Biden administration, they were going after everyone. Right. Not just actual privacy tools, but everyone that is working on Bitcoin. That was crazy. Right now with Trump, the situation is much better. But then again, like soon enough it'll, it'll be out and then what's next? Right. The next one might be even worse than, than Biden then. [01:23:34] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of political volatility. [01:23:37] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot of political volatility. Volatility right now on that. And it's. It's complicated. Yeah. [01:23:45] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I hope that remind me. I'll. I'll post the link to the petition again in the episode show notes. I'm glad you brought that up because I hadn't even been thinking about that today. Maybe just because I got another ping from my wife. I. I think we're having a. And I need help with the kids disaster or the contractors trying to get the question out of me or something. So where can people find you? [01:24:12] Speaker A: And. [01:24:12] Speaker B: Well, what kind of like last thoughts do you have on. Let's say somebody got into bitcoin this year and this year or last year and they were expecting a big bull market and now they're just kind of like, they're down in the, down in the dumps. Maybe that this, this wasn't like a huge blowout like hype year and it's just kind of been crab walking, so to speak. [01:24:37] Speaker A: What's. [01:24:38] Speaker B: What do you say to them? And then, and then follow that up with just like how to follow you and find you and the stuff that you're working on. [01:24:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I do think that we'll see big, you know, big price gains eventually, whatever it's now, whatever in it's in three years. But the price will, will eventually continue to go up. I'm. I'm very confident of that. So I would say first thing is just don't like, don't panic. Don't try to panic, sell everything and be done with it, because that's the worst outcome. I would say the important thing, what we recommend everyone, especially in bear markets, is learn the fundamentals, understand why it's important, why we actually need it. Not just because the price goes up, but because it's an actual alternative to the government money. Right. It's an actual monetary system that is completely separated from, from the government. And you know, so it's. The important thing is that people understand that that's how we get them to stay and how we make sure that they understand bitcoin. Every time that the government is, is doing any justice and is using the money for it, every time they try to, I don't know, freeze bank accounts of protesters, for example, that's an advertisement that they are making for bitcoin. Right. So people just need to understand that most of all. And that's why they would stay also. Yeah, yeah. So just the important thing is just to understand why we actually need bitcoin, not just whatever the price is going up now or in two years, that's not the most relevant part fit. And yeah, where they can find me. I'm. I'm mostly on. I'm not as much Twitter, to be honest, right now anymore, but I'm still available there. I'll still tweet from some time. I'm definitely seeing everything and I'll respond there if my DMS are open, if anyone wants to ask anything. [01:26:31] Speaker B: Sweet. Sweet. And I would. I would add to the. The whole, like, you know, learn the fundamentals. Like, I. I've always liked that just because, you know, like, when. [01:26:42] Speaker C: When the. [01:26:42] Speaker B: When the price is down is when you actually realize why. Because if the why was just you were chasing a green candle, then you weren't here for the right reason anyway. Because bitcoin will have green candles because of the real why, but you're never going to live through the red ones if you don't understand how important that one is. [01:27:03] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:27:03] Speaker B: But also, like, this is, like, this is the time to. To work, to. [01:27:09] Speaker A: To. [01:27:09] Speaker B: To earn. Because right now sats are cheap. So when you're earning sats, you earn more sats during the bear market. So get to work. Get to work. Put your boots on and get to work. [01:27:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, exactly, dude. [01:27:25] Speaker B: Thanks for joining me. Especially on, like, was awesome. It's kind of short notice and glad. Glad we actually. We actually got to do this. Um, especially if we didn't do it before. Um, which I'm gonna. I'm gonna find out. I'm gonna find out if there. If we had done an old episode and I had just forgotten. I'm gonna. I'm gonna link it to you. Um, I'll put it down in the show notes if it exists. Um, but otherwise I'll have links to your. Your Twitter and all that good stuff. Do you have a. [01:27:50] Speaker A: No, I. I do. I. I don't use it that much, but I do have. I'll. I'll send you later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:27:56] Speaker B: Send it to me anyway. Send it to me anyway. Yeah, yeah. Maybe somebody will zap you. All right, all right, all right. Thanks a lot, man. [01:28:04] Speaker A: Yeah, it was awesome. Thanks for having me. Yeah. [01:28:06] Speaker B: Yeah, dude. Have a good night. [01:28:08] Speaker A: Yeah, you too. [01:28:12] Speaker B: Thank you so much for listening. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Let me know if you have any other questions or ping us, tag us, whatever it is. If you got comments or thoughts on anything we covered in the show or anything we should have covered, let us know. I will have links to follow Ben. He also sent me his impub for Noster so you can find him up there as well as X. And like I said, I'll have the links to the episodes that we did of his previous works earlier on the show. And yeah, check him out. Follow him Links details, all the goodies. Don't forget to check out our amazing sponsors which also just a heads up is it actually really really helps the show if you use the links specifically I have in the description. I mean obviously there's discounts so you probably ought to anyway but Leden IO L E D N I O if you're a IO if you're getting a bitcoin backed loan or if you are considering selling bitcoin and you realize that you know this is not the opportune time to do it, a bitcoin backed loan is a godsend and the right spot at the right time. So if you're on a bitcoin standard, use it wisely. But Led into IO is a fantastic company with a super easy product. Check out PubKey app as well, particularly if you're a builder. [01:29:32] Speaker C: They've got a they have vibe coding. [01:29:33] Speaker B: Session like a hackathon thing recently with some really really cool tools that they built like just exploring what you can do with their stack. Check that out. Also link to Chroma get Chroma Co for light health in general, red light therapy also or all sorts of really great products and oh that one has a discount. Also Bitcoin audible gives you 10 off. And then lastly the HRF shout out to those guys for supporting my work and just just for the incredible work they do. Tickets to their Oslo Freedom Forum actually also down the show Notes thank you guys for listening. [01:30:10] Speaker A: I will continue. [01:30:11] Speaker B: Catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. And until then everybody, that's my two cents. La.