Chris Blec (00:01.889)
What do you have against sparkling water? Spindrift is good man.

@sethforprivacy (00:06.354)
It, I know we, so we started keeping some at our house just when we have people over, cause it feel bad. Cause all we ever have to drink is filtered water and raw milk. And I feel bad when we have people over and I'm like, would you like a drink? And they're like, yeah, sure. And I'm like, we have water and milk. Sorry, we don't drink anything else. So.

Chris Blec (00:23.01)
Do you do the reverse osmosis deal, or do you just use a Brita filter or something? Reverse? Okay.

@sethforprivacy (00:26.144)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Now, reverse osmosis. It's so nice just to get an under-sink filter and then have essentially unlimited, cool, but not really cold filtered water. It's been one of the best things for my family because we all drink so much water all throughout the day. It's well, well worth it. Oh yeah, all that fun stuff. And then remineralize it. Yeah, yeah. I think you don't have to replace filters every week with the Brita thing. I know they're not that frequent, but.

Chris Blec (00:42.166)
Get the fluoride out.

That's like the only way to get the fluoride out, right?

@sethforprivacy (00:55.46)
They're a pain in the butt to me. So I like the ones where you do it once a year and have all the water you can need.

Chris Blec (01:01.354)
Yeah, I've done the research into or I've tried to into fluoride water, fluoridated water. Like why it's there is a whole other story, but getting non-fluoridated water is hard. Like you buy like I, you know, I'll buy this, you know, just spring water, right, from the supermarket. But this has fluoride in it. But then like some brands do and some don't. Like how does that fluoride if it's from a spring? Like they must add it at some point, right?

@sethforprivacy (01:11.524)
Yeah.

@sethforprivacy (01:25.436)
It doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

Chris Blec (01:27.838)
And then, but if you buy Evian, I believe, like it's fluoride free. Like, why is that one fluoride free? What's going on? And like, who knows this and who doesn't? Like.

@sethforprivacy (01:36.432)
figured out a way to filter. I'm assuming it's cheaper to filter with fluoride, or not filter, but clean with fluoride rather than do it a more expensive way, but I like my water to be just clean water and not sparkling because sparkling water is just like bad juice or weak soda. That's how it tastes to me.

Chris Blec (01:45.802)
I have a lot of questions.

Chris Blec (01:52.534)
Well, okay, before we get into Monero and stuff, okay, so Spindrift is good. Now, I don't know if there's fluoride in here, but it's nice, it's real. It's not like that La Croix garbage. There's some of those other ones that are like artificial flavors, but maybe, I think it's pretty good. Yeah, fair enough. Okay, except, you know, whatever, right? You know, we can't agree on everything. Uh.

@sethforprivacy (02:07.76)
They're not bad, just to me they taste like watered down juice. But you know, it's personal preference. Yeah.

These are the riveting self sovereignty conversations that people come to you for, Chris. All I really want is freedom to choose my water, so.

Chris Blec (02:20.898)
Who do you have to trust to get good water these days?

Chris Blec (02:26.366)
So we decided to get on a podcast this time. We've done your podcast before. And by the way, Seth, you're the guy who introduced me to like Calix OS, Graphene. You and Henry from TechLore were great for me two, three years ago when I was starting to dive in to like, how do I stay private with my mobile device, with my computer? So I went down that rabbit hole. So thank you for that.

It's still impacting me, obviously. We started to talk about doing this podcast because of Monero. I just randomly go down rabbit holes once in a while. Monero Twitter fans are relentless. Every time you post anything even closely relating to crypto privacy, they jump on your ass.

And they're like, why aren't you just using Monero, you dick? Like, it's like, and with nothing else. Okay, so, you know, one of the reasons, there's a couple of reasons that I liked. What I say in my position is typically, Monero is a great tool. It's a great tool, it's an important tool, and we should support it. I don't think it's a tremendous store of value. And the reason for that is because...

I think there's too many, when you're talking about store of value, you can't talk about something as a store of value without talking about its future in terms of buying power and in terms of fiat. You can't. You just can't. Because if you're talking store of value, you're talking about store of buying power, right? You're talking about, can I use this to buy the same amount of bread today as I can buy in two years or five years?

And so when you have that conversation, you start to talk about what can impact its buying power. OK, so one of the things that can impact its buying power is the fact that it could become a subject. So it could be subjected to fear tactics by governments, right? Governments could say it's now illegal to hold Monero. OK, that's a that's a big one. Right. I mean, I'm not out of line there. Right.

@sethforprivacy (04:35.524)
Oh yeah.

@sethforprivacy (04:43.564)
Yeah, I mean, I think the illegal to hold or use is one that's very unlikely to be enforced, although tornado cash obviously kind of shifted that around a bit because just using tornado cash as US citizen became a crime overnight. But at least as far as it's illegal to buy it on a centralized exchange. I mean, we're already seeing that that's been happening for years. And like regulations coming in the EU and a lot of kind of shadowy back channel stuff with banks.

Chris Blec (04:56.994)
Yeah.

@sethforprivacy (05:12.14)
has been preventing exchanges from listing it or causing them to have to delist it over time. So I think that's it's definitely a valid concern if you're looking from only that angle of how easily can I on ramp or off ramp to Monero.

Chris Blec (05:25.942)
Well, yeah, but, okay, so.

When you think about like tornado cash and you think about other stuff we've been seeing from the US government, I guess, and EU government, as far as not just crypto, but generally, they don't want you to be able to move money without them seeing it. And Monero is a, it happens to be a currency, but it's also a technology that allows you to move money without them seeing it. Right? So

If you remove the fact that it's a currency, which is inextricably linked to that technology, if you just look at it as tech, it doesn't stray too far from the same objective that tornado and other mixers and stuff like that have. People come back to me when I make this argument and say, well, name one other time it's been illegal to hold a currency.

Right. And it's like rare, if ever in the U S where that's been an issue, you know, gold, obviously for a little while there. But but with Monero, you can't use it without holding. I mean, you could like say maybe there's some atomic swap situation where you wouldn't hold it, but I mean, the main function is to hold it and to use it as a as a money. So it's like, I don't think it's out. I think it's likely that it becomes illegal at some point somewhere.

@sethforprivacy (06:48.654)
Yeah.

@sethforprivacy (06:54.904)
It's certainly possible. I mean, it's one of those things where a lot of the design decisions that have gone into Monero have been preparing for that type of eventuality. Obviously not that we want governments to ban Monero or we want people to be prevented from using it legally, but understanding that technology that removes power from centralized governments and gives it back to the individual is something that's always going to be a fight. There's going to be a battle.

Obviously, hopefully not a physical one, but at least a digital battle, likely a legal and regulatory battle. And so the design decisions ensure that even in that situation, it still works. But you are right that it's inextricably linked between Monero, the currency and Monero, the technology, because even there's no real use case where you can use it without holding the Monero and still gain privacy. A lot of the ideas people have around using Monero or any other privacy preserving cryptocurrency.

do not work if you're talking about using them in the sense of I'm paying with Bitcoin, I'm using some service to swap it to Monero and ultimately pay in Monero to gain privacy. It doesn't work very well because that middleman obviously has visibility in the transaction and timing analysis is very simple to do between those two to trace through those transactions most of the time. So even that's not an effective method, but I think maybe the devil's advocate view there is if something is powerful enough that

the US government is seeking to ban it. And yet it can prevent the government from actually preventing its usage. There could be something to be said about that actually driving value. Is it white market value of kind of the above board KYC compliant value? No, but is it a separate type of black market? Again, not like drug usage or something like that, but black market in the sense of it's not allowed to be used by citizens value where

people see its immense value once they realize, why does the government hate this so much? And we've seen a little bit of that with tornado cash, with there's still quite a bit of volume to tornado cash, even though it's harder to use than ever, people are still using it. And I think something very similar would happen with Monero in that instance. And in a lot of ways, it could gain value as a tool that can be used for things that nothing else really can, but that really does depend on kind of what the landscape's like with Bitcoin privacy tools, other cryptocurrencies, what other options there are for people.

@sethforprivacy (09:19.036)
Because people will go for the legal easier method if there is one that is still good enough. But the question is, would there be something good enough that's allowed at that point if Monero was banned? I would argue probably not because we'd likely see more centralized privacy tools taken down first or attacked first rather than Monero.

Chris Blec (09:31.83)
Yeah.

Chris Blec (09:41.266)
Monero obviously is private and the tech is designed to not reveal senders and recipients and amounts. But do you feel like enough people are using it in a way where the fact that they're using it, not who they're sending to, not the amounts, but the fact that they're actually using it, do you feel like that is still too easily discerned?

with users or do you feel like most users are using it in a way that because you do have to use it in a way that actively protects your identity right so like do you feel like most of our users are findable or not?

@sethforprivacy (10:22.372)
I mean, again, I think it really depends. You don't necessarily need for it to be something where you are totally anonymous and using Monero. Like I think that we don't have to go, well, yes, yeah. Okay, yeah, so if we're talking to a scenario where Monero is illegal, yes, then it does get a lot harder. And that in that situation, the normal issue is not the currency that you use, but it's other operational security, OPSEC related issues. I mean, even if we look at Bitcoin,

Chris Blec (10:30.986)
You do if it's illegal. I guess that's what I'm saying.

Yeah.

@sethforprivacy (10:52.26)
By default, terrible for privacy. People, the vast majority of the time, in almost every single case where someone has been arrested and they've been using Bitcoin to do something illegal, they're not arrested because the Bitcoin is traced, even though that could be done, but they're arrested because there was some other opsec mistake that made it easy for them to be linked to the thing that they were doing that's illegal. And I think that would apply in that kind of situation too, or it would be important that if you wanted to keep using Monero in this hypothetical...

future situation, it would be very important that you care deeply about the rest of your personal privacy, especially when it comes to actually on ramping and off ramping from Monero. And that's where decentralized exchanges, that's where peer to peer exchanges become vital because that would be the only way that you'd actually be able to get Monero. A lot of those could continue to function in those situations. Things like BISC would still work for like Bitcoin to Monero. Fiat to Monero was always the tricky part. That's where...

If governments really want to push back against cryptocurrencies, the easiest way for them to do so is to fight the fiat on and off ramps, because those are the hardest ones to do in a privacy preserving manner. But as long as cash is legal, it would definitely be doable. But that would be the tricky part is if it was illegal to use, hiding the fact that you use it involves broad personal privacy, which is a lot more difficult than just using Monero. But today, you don't need to...

have everything else in order to gain a lot from Monero, to gain a lot from the financial privacy that it provides. Because you don't need to be anonymous today to use it. It's totally legal. There's nothing wrong with using it. There's nothing written or unwritten from regulators that goes against it, even in the places where there are some regulations being proposed. They're not against you using it or having it. It's about whether or not exchanges can list it, which, like I said, is the easiest pressure point.

Chris Blec (12:41.794)
Right.

I think it's likely. I think it's likely it becomes illegal at some point. So that's my personal view. So I think that if it does, it's very hard to hide the fact that you're using it. And most people will be afraid to use it. And it'll impact the market. Now, liquidity will drop, obviously. It'll be harder to find. It'll be harder to buy. Supply won't drop because you can't alter the supply. But low liquidity could drive up. It might be harder to buy, kind of like weed or, you know.

It's not like there's a low supply, it's just it's harder to find, harder to, where it's illegal now it's legal everywhere. But, right, you need a Monero dealer. Right, he's going to charge a premium. So that's one thing. All right, so we were talking on Twitter too about the auditability. I know you've thought about this a lot, but the fact that Monero is an opaque,

@sethforprivacy (13:19.468)
Yeah, you'd have to know a Monero guy to be able to get it.

Chris Blec (13:42.646)
blockchain where you can't see the amounts in the transactions. You can't see who's it sent to, who's receiving. That's all by design, right? But you also wouldn't be able to see when it happens if somebody exploits a bug in Monero and is able to mine or mint a billion XMR.

Right. So you wouldn't be able to see that transaction on the chain. Right. So that my just to set the table here, what I said on Twitter was it's I like Monero. It's a useful tool. It's wonderful. It's amazing. I support it and I use it. But I take into consideration the fact that you can't be as certain about its supply at any given moment as you can about bitcoins.

@sethforprivacy (14:11.406)
It depends.

Chris Blec (14:39.762)
So, and I'm comparing the two, and I'm saying that this is why you might want to think twice about using Monero as a store of value versus Bitcoin. You know, obviously Bitcoin is less private, but in this case it's like a feature when you're thinking about at any given moment can you know the supply. So how do you push back to that?

@sethforprivacy (15:01.74)
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of things to unpack there. Initial concession is just that I agree with you. I think this is probably the only rational, maybe not the only rational, but I think the most common sticking point for people when it comes to do I want to store value in Monero and use it as a method of exchange? Do I want to use it to pay for things, to be paid for goods and services? Or do I want to use Bitcoin as a store of value and just use Monero as a way to...

to pay and receive funds. And I think this is a common sticking point and an understandable one. If you're looking from the store value angle, easy auditability is an advantage of Bitcoin. But the problem is then also for Bitcoin privacy and using it in a way that doesn't reveal massive amounts of information about you is difficult in almost every case. There are ways to make that a lot better, even just not buying through exchanges that...

that take your KYC information and that take your PII and actually know everything about you. If you avoid that, you get a lot of kind of a head start over other people that are using Bitcoin. But it's very difficult to do privacy on Bitcoin because all those details are revealed. Yes, you get easier auditability, but it makes every attempt to use Bitcoin in a privacy preserving manner more difficult. It makes it harder to use privacy preserving tools. Yeah. And it is a very big trade off because privacy in a currency, especially a currency that's aiming to be...

Chris Blec (16:18.41)
Yeah, it's a trade-off.

@sethforprivacy (16:27.248)
digital gold and digital cash, as I think many people would attest to Bitcoin aiming to be necessary.

Chris Blec (16:32.558)
So I'm acknowledging and accepting the fact that it's a trade off, but my point was that you have to make a choice. Like, you know, if you want to take more of a risk on supply, even if it's a small risk, and keep privacy, go with Monero, but if you want to use this as store value, have full confidence that you are 100% safe from, not from bugs, right, because there still could be a bug, but from...

being caught off guard by a bug, from a bug happening and nobody knowing until like three days or a week later. That's where Bitcoin can benefit you. Is that accurate?

@sethforprivacy (17:12.556)
Yeah, yeah, I think so. And to unpack a little bit more about the Monero side of things. So when you look at auditability in Monero, most people paint it as a kind of a black and white situation where Monero is not auditable, Bitcoin is auditable. And it's not actually, it's not that black and white. It's very nuanced. So when we look at Bitcoin, the way that you do audits right now is you trust the Bitcoin Core software to do the audit for you. And you run a

get txoutset or I can't remember exactly what the command is off the top of my head, but you run a command, you can sum up the UTXOs within the Bitcoin blockchain and know how many Bitcoin exist and make sure that that's the right amount by comparing to other people, comparing to block explorers, et cetera. In doing so, you are trusting cryptography, you're trusting code to do that for you. Ultimately, though, in Bitcoin, if you really wanted to, you could.

get out a napkin and do some math and count up the UTXO set yourself, because it is all visible amounts that everyone can see and everyone can compare. So you can go kind of a layer beyond and remove some more trust from the code and do it yourself. And that is the main advantage in Bitcoin, is you can kind of do the napkin math and figure out what the TXO set is. Obviously, I've never heard of anyone actually doing that. Everyone just trusts the software.

It's a similar circumstance in Monero where you're trusting the software to check the supply for you. In Monero, the way that we're able to do simple audits is that every Monero that's mined is mined in a way that reveals the amount. So the actual mining process, the emissions, the actual block subsidy, that is all visible, all calculable in the exact same way as Bitcoin. And that's one of the ways that you verify Bitcoin is you check.

how many Bitcoin have been mined, make sure that that's legitimate. Miners haven't created more out of thin air by exploding a bug or something like that. You need the exact same thing in Monero. There's no difference there. The difference in Monero is that when you actually send a transaction, what happens is we use ring signatures to make sure that, or sorry, not ring signatures, confidential amounts to make sure that when you make that transaction, the inputs and outputs balance out. Same thing you do in Bitcoin, but in Monero,

@sethforprivacy (19:25.104)
the sender actually creates that proof and then everyone else in the network can't see the amounts but they can validate that proof. It's a zero knowledge proof like everyone in the Zcash system likes to focus on. It's a very popular type of thing to do. And that zero knowledge proof is very time tested, heavily reviewed, repeatedly audited. But that is where the little bit of, I don't know if I wanna say trust comes in, but the little bit of an additional reliance on more advanced cryptography.

because if there was a break in the way that proof is created or verified, then someone could create Monero and it would be undetectable. But all that said, there are ways that you can detect inflation bugs outside of that. So the only known inflation bug that's happened in Monero is one that was detectable, that was detected and was fixed before it was exploited. So there are ways that there can be inflation bugs just like in Bitcoin that are detectable.

that are able to be fixed, you can just move on from. But yes, in Monero, there could be an undetected hidden inflation bug that you don't have a trivial way to find unless you had someone else maybe creating a client in a different language or someone else re-implementing the cryptography and seeing that there was some sort of an issue, something was missed in an audit, that sort of thing. So there is a little bit of trust that goes in place there, but for me, it's just like a bit more than Bitcoin.

And I understand, I think it's valid if people think that that's a problem as far as storing their wealth. Like I think that's one of the beautiful things of these systems, especially when we can easily move back and forth between them is that you can choose what works best for you. I'm not, I'm not mad if you choose to store value in Bitcoin and just use Monero for spending, or even if you just choose to use Bitcoin only, or you choose to use Monero only, I think there's, there's valid reasons to do any of them. Um, but I think people do need to understand that though the auditing is

reliant on slightly more complex cryptography in Monero, the vast majority of the ways that bugs would be present would still be visible, though there are some ways that someone could create inflation and it would be hidden, which is a risk. And that comes with the massive advantage of every single user of Monero, no matter their technical capacity, no matter if they care about privacy or not, gains strong financial privacy just by using the tool. They don't have to jump through any extra hoops. They just press send and they gain very strong privacy, which

@sethforprivacy (21:47.564)
Obviously to people in the Monero community, that trade off is well worth it. To people in the Bitcoin community, that's a little bit of a harder sell. And so that's why I think that most people settle into this idea of Bitcoin as their core store of value. Monero is maybe a lesser store of value and the tool that they use for spending when possible. And I think that's the sweet spot for a lot of people. I'm not here to sell Monero as a store of value, but it's a little bit of a deeper dive into the auditability thing. It's a very complex topic. I'm happy to jump into any other kind of questions you have off that.

or any other thoughts around it.

Chris Blec (22:18.058)
Well, yeah. So like if you if there was a bug and somebody exploited it and minted a billion XMR. At what point would that be caught? You're saying it would be caught when the when the block is mined or would it not be caught? And OK.

@sethforprivacy (22:35.088)
It depends. Yeah, so if the bug was with something in the consensus code around mining, that would be detectable instantly because the moment that block was mined, it'd be visible that there were a billion Monero emitted in the block subsidy. Everyone would see that on a block explorer, everyone would freak out. There'd be a hard fork just like there was with Bitcoin and you'd just move on. You try to do it quickly so that the person who exploited it couldn't send that Monero to a bunch of different exchanges or something and try to.

to sell it, but that would be easily detectable. The one that wouldn't be easily detectable is if there was some issue in the cryptography or the implementation of that cryptography that actually hides the amounts. Those confidential amounts are what are traditionally known as confidential transactions. Because if there was a break there, what could happen is you could create a transaction that would appear legitimate to everyone on the network. Nodes would validate it. The proof would look okay. There wouldn't be any problems with it.

when in reality it could be creating a billion Monero. Now, obviously we've never seen that done and because there's that sensitivity, we have taken, we meaning the Monero community, I'm not a developer, but just kind of speaking for the Monero community, we've taken a lot of extra steps to get extra eyes on the code and the cryptography behind that to ensure as best we can that nothing like that happens. And that's why we're very careful to get multiple audits whenever we touch any of that code.

because we want to make sure that there's nothing happening there that could be introducing a bug that would allow that kind of hidden inflation. But that's where it gets weird because people think if there's an inflation bug in Monero, you'd never be able to see it. But that's not true. There are lots of ways you could see it. There's just this one specific way where it could remain hidden. Because even the one inflation bug that did happen in Monero, it was detectable. It wasn't with the mining process. It was with key images, which you can kind of think of as an unspent transaction in Bitcoin.

Chris Blec (24:09.294)
Have a good one.

@sethforprivacy (24:31.472)
And it was detectable, but if they moved the amounts, you wouldn't be able to follow the amounts after that, but you could detect if the bug was actually exploded itself. It was seen, it was detected, it was fixed before it was actually exploded at all. So again, it's very nuanced. It's not as simple as you couldn't detect it in Monero or you could. There are just some situations where you couldn't, some where you could. And wherever possible, we try to make sure we can detect those things.

Chris Blec (24:53.974)
Alright.

Chris Blec (24:57.818)
And this would be, this is an issue with any encrypted network or blockchain or whatever it might be. So this isn't something that's unique to Monero. Like there's been an example is the now defunct Aztec network, which was being built on Ethereum, which has since been halted mostly because I think they were afraid of going to jail. But the layer two was fully encrypted.

You know, so you, they use zero knowledge proofs and whatever, whatever other stuff to high, high level encryption. I did a podcast with them and I still don't understand what the heck they were doing, but they admitted that the encryption was so strong that even they couldn't see what was going on, you know, whether there was a bug, if somebody was able to exploit their own code, um, to make some moves, um, mint,

@sethforprivacy (25:45.187)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Blec (25:57.174)
until all the assets were ultimately withdrawn, until they could actually see a balance sheet at the end of the day. So there's always a challenge when you're dealing with this kind of stuff. So are we making the case for Zcash here? Because you have sort of the... Do they though? Because... So, okay, so from the mining point of view, they don't, right?

@sethforprivacy (26:16.016)
They have the same problem. Yeah.

Chris Blec (26:25.55)
to their mining is more out in the public, right?

@sethforprivacy (26:29.336)
It's the same. So it's, I think they did enable mining to Z addresses, which in theory is private and actually hides the amounts initially. I can't remember exactly how they implemented that, but otherwise it's the same as Monero where mining is transparent and it's mined to transparent addresses. And you can see how much Zcached is emitted in each block, which is very standard. But when you use Z addresses or unified addresses, which could be a Z address, it's all confusing, but...

Chris Blec (26:38.954)
Oh, okay.

@sethforprivacy (26:58.22)
If you use the privacy tools that are within Zcash, you have the same problem. They use a very similar approach to hiding the amounts. And because of that, you have the same issue. A lot of people think that it's lessened in Zcash because they also have transparent addresses. And when they do a protocol upgrade, they use what's called a turnstile, which essentially just means that in order to use the new version of the protocol, you have to move your funds from the old version to the new version.

and migrate between those two pools. And you go through a turnstile, which actually reveals the information about the transaction. It goes from like Z address to T address to Z address, is how you can think about it. They claim that that's a better approach, but the only thing that really does is it does allow them to check, is there hidden inflation that has happened, and only this amount can come through. So they'll limit it to exactly what you would expect is in the Zcash supply can actually come through.

that turnstile. But all that means is that if there was hidden inflation, the attacker who created the hidden inflation would just be the first to move his coins through the turnstile and everyone else would be wrecked and stuck in the old pool and unable to use their Zcash. There's some advantages to that in the sense that they could then maybe tell if enough people reported or something happened that they could kind of figure out, hey, like one entity moved all of the Zcash in existence into this pool.

Chris Blec (28:09.084)
Okay.

@sethforprivacy (28:20.232)
So there's a little bit more visibility to that, but it also has some privacy implications because everyone has to reveal their funds as part of that migration. So they have a very similar approach in how the protocol actually works, but they have an interesting, maybe better, maybe worse way to handle kind of an additional step of verification each time they upgrade their protocol. I think it's an interesting approach, but most of the people I know who are very familiar with both the Banero and Zcash approach.

don't like the way that turnstiles are handled and think they're more problematic than useful.

Chris Blec (28:55.518)
Do you think these potential inflation bugs are the biggest technical risks to these blockchains? As far as separating out all the other risks, as far as just exploits, what else could Monero, for instance, suffer? What are the potential things that could really hurt the ecosystem outside of that?

@sethforprivacy (29:16.096)
Yeah, I think the biggest one is really more around how good the privacy provided by Monero is. Because one of the issues you have when you are a tool that claims to preserve privacy, and I 100% believe that the claims that Monero makes are valid, are legitimate, that it does provide as good a privacy as it says, and the lack of court cases involving Monero tracing and the lack of chainalysis and...

and other companies providing tools that are being used to trace Monero. I think it's good evidence of that. But I think the biggest problem for me would be that there was some sort of a break in the privacy protocol itself that meant that people using Monero were not getting the privacy that they wanted. Obviously there is none, there's none that we know of right now. And if something came out about a privacy break.

One of the great things about the Monero community is we are willing to upgrade the protocol when necessary. And so if something came out that Chainalysis had developed a tracing tool that could 100% link transactions in Monero together, that would be something where we would immediately try to figure out what's the next step. Let's implement it. Let's hard fork and upgrade as soon as possible once we're able to verify, once we're able to get audits, all of the normal stuff. But it would be fixable. But I think that's probably the bigger problem. And I think we're...

We're kind of at a turning point in the Monero privacy protocol, where we've done lots of things to make the protocol as powerful as possible, but have kind of hit a wall with the current approach to hiding the sender in transactions, what we call ring signatures. But I'm really excited because it's looking very likely that with kind of the next network upgrade, which will probably happen in like two to three years, we'll implement something that's called a global membership proof, which is the same kind of concept as Zcash, where any transaction

the sender looks like they could be one of any of the people who have ever sent a transaction in the history of the network. Rather than right now in Monero, you look like one out of 16 potential people in each transaction. So it's a much better tool to protect users against very specific, very targeted types of surveillance. Monero is already incredibly effective at preventing mass surveillance because you can't just trivially link transactions together like you can with Bitcoin or with other transparent cryptocurrencies.

@sethforprivacy (31:35.484)
But I am excited for that upgrade. I think that'll be important. Because I think that Monero providing the privacy that it claims to is more important than protecting against an inflation bug because the primary use case right now is really as a tool for spending. If that switches and Monero gains this broad adoption under merchants as it has been rapidly gaining and it kind of becomes a store of value because people value it as a tool for spending, I think that it does continue to become more and more important that

no inflation bug happens. But like I said, there's only so much you can do around that. And one of the benefits of more people using Monero and more people building on Monero and more developers jumping in to help with Monero is that the more eyes we have on the code, the less likely one of those bugs is. And that's why I like when I talk about, I would love to have confidential amounts on Bitcoin. I know that's never gonna happen, but I would love it because of the scale of the developer community and the cryptographer community and the research community.

around Bitcoin would bring a lot more surety to the ability to audit through that cryptography. Because as I mentioned earlier, Monero is not auditable. It is auditable. And you're able to audit it. If you run a Monero node, you can audit the Monero supply. But you are trusting that the implementation and the cryptography are sound for checking those amounts. But that's the part where the more people we have looking at it, the safer I think people can assume it is. But like I said,

Chris Blec (32:54.402)
Mm-hmm.

@sethforprivacy (33:02.412)
have that concern to store their wealth in Bitcoin and keep some Monero to be able to spend from because it's so much easier to actually use in a privacy preserving way right now.

Chris Blec (33:12.062)
Yeah. Isn't the fact that we're so sure that Bitcoin will never have confidential amounts or real privacy, isn't that the clearest sign that Bitcoin is captured? I mean, the fact that we can completely rule out something that's so useful, just because we know that the people who want Bitcoin to be accepted in global payment systems and its federal

currencies and things like that and people that want institutions to engage and people that want ETFs and stuff like that they all know that won't happen if Bitcoin achieves real privacy so To me like that's the clearest sign that we know that it's been captured by that group of people You know, it's like I still use Bitcoin and endorse Bitcoin and because I still feel like it'll get me to where I want

be as a free person. But really at this point, it's only because of other chains like Monero that offer additional functionality to Bitcoin. You're part of an effort working on atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Monero. That kind of thing is what keeps my faith. It would be harder for me to keep my faith in Bitcoin as a standalone.

project. What do you think about that?

@sethforprivacy (34:45.7)
Yeah, I mean, it's a tricky one because I understand why people are wary of implementing big changes to Bitcoin's consensus layer. I understand why they're scared. But I think a lot of it comes down to something else I tweeted about today. Somebody had a fantastic tweet about how Bitcoin has struggled to gain merchant adoption because it hasn't been a focus. We've kind of failed in that area because we focus so heavily on other things.

I think a lot of that comes back to this overwhelming focus on the digital gold or store of value narrative. And when you're talking digital gold or store of value, most people don't associate a need for privacy with that. I would still argue that if you want to store a value that actually works well, you have to have a way to be able to spend it privately or else you're going to be limited on how you can actually use it in the future. And you'll be limited in the freedom and the self sovereignty you can gain through that if there's not a way for you to easily spend it privately.

But I think that same kind of store of value only, hodl only mentality means that these tools that would make Bitcoin better digital cash are relegated to essentially just my dreams, which I would love to see them implemented, but I don't think there's a way that we could get social consensus at this point. And really it would have either had to happen sooner in Bitcoin's lifecycle, or there would have to be some sort of...

crazy social change within the Bitcoin community to make that valid. I know that right now the focus

Chris Blec (36:17.41)
You're just saying what I said, but you're being nicer about it. It's captured.

@sethforprivacy (36:23.316)
Probably yes. I mean, yeah, I don't like using that word because I don't know that I would say Bitcoin as a whole is captured, but perhaps you could say that kind of core development or consensus development is and that it's stagnated both because people desired it and because people were so unwilling to try out new things within Bitcoin. I think too, a lot of it comes back to the Lightning Network for me.

And when I look at what was promised in the Lightning Network, it was promised to fix our scaling issues, promised to fix our privacy issues, promised to do all of these things. And while I love a lot of the things that Lightning Network can be, it is not what it seems like we were going to get out of it. It's something where I have tried repeatedly, many times, to do it in a wholly self-sovereign way, run my own node, open my own channels, manage them myself, do all of that. That process is incredibly tricky.

We've seen the vast majority of Lightning usage is custodial. We've seen really the, I think the only valid way at this point for Lightning to gain adoption in a non-custodial way is through the use of Lightning service providers. But in the light of the Tornado Cash indictment, if that goes through, I don't see a world in which running a Lightning service provider isn't tied to that type of thing because of the way that the Lightning network works. It would be an easy next step for the US government to go after that.

And just to caveat, when I say things like that, or when I say things like we were talking about Monero being made illegal, it's not that I am, I do not want those things to have a chilling effect on the development or usage of Monero or the Lightning Network, et cetera. But rather, I think just maybe a realistic look at what could happen in the future. Because it can be easy to take when I say things like that as like, you should stop working on this because it's not gonna fly. I would love for us to build things that no matter what the US government says, we can continue using them.

and gain privacy or gain freedom through them. That's one of the reasons why I love Monero so much. Because even if there was a ban, all of the privacy tools happen in the consensus layer. So if they want to stop Monero being used privately, they have to stop an entire decentralized blockchain and entire network of nodes. They have to somehow shut down people's computers from mining Monero because you don't rely on ASICs. There's a lot of things that make it harder to shut down there. But kind of circling back, I think like...

@sethforprivacy (38:46.568)
A lot of the issues have been we were promised that lightning would fix so many things and it, it hasn't. And now we're starting to see a shift to people focusing on other layer two networks, most of which have concessions with the way that minor incentives work, or they have concessions with custody, or they have concessions with the other changes we'd have to make to Bitcoin that are also going to be contentious and be problematic. And there's, there's a

I think a lack of a real vision for how we get to Bitcoin actually being digital cash outside of just using the tools we have today. You had Samurai Wallet on your podcast and I am massive, massive fans of theirs. They're really the only thing that's kept me in Bitcoin for the last few years because it's the only way that I feel I can use Bitcoin in a way that's privacy reserving. The only way I can use Bitcoin ads digital cash is really by using Samurai Wallet. But app layer privacy has other issues. So that's one of the things where I like.

One of the things I think I mentioned outside of this tornado cash indictment was if we had privacy at the consensus layer, I don't think any government is stopping Bitcoin at this point. If they wanted to, I don't think that they could. And often they wouldn't want to because there's other ulterior motives there. So if the privacy was happening at that base layer, like Monero, it would be something where it would just, who cares if they indict you? Who cares if they try to shut down core development or whatever? Miners are going to keep mining, nodes are going to keep running.

could focus on mining in secret, building their own ASICs. There's lots of different things that could be taken. But yeah, I think I got a little lost there, but a long-winded answer.

Chris Blec (40:17.952)
Yeah.

Chris Blec (40:22.162)
Well, I mean, you know, you raise some great points. And when I say you, you talked a little bit about what it means for Bitcoin to be captured, right? I think it's important that we acknowledge that in a sense, every open source project is captured in a way by the consensus, right? By the, by the decisions made by the community about its development.

There's only one Bitcoin and that one Bitcoin has to be one set of rules, one piece of code, right? So when I say it's been captured, I guess what I mean is there is that overarching mentality in the community that has led to an abandonment of privacy. I guess the key issue there though is I think it's driven by money.

I think it's driven by who has the most money, who can make the most money, who's investing the most money, who's paying the most money to developers, stuff like that, exchanges, the coinbases and the big companies of the world that are involved on this level. I think they're influencing it.

@sethforprivacy (41:42.156)
I think I'd push back a little bit on that though, because I think that while they do seem to wield a lot of power, I think like we saw in the block size wars, that they don't necessarily control what happens within Bitcoin. We can through social consensus. And the way that Bitcoin changes is social consensus. I think a lot of people assume that like...

Bitcoin consensus is a technical thing that's been implemented in code. But the only reason why those choices were made was because there was social consensus behind what was wanted out of Bitcoin. And I mean, even now we could, if we could shift social consensus somehow to focus on privacy by default at layer one, those things could be implemented. We have the cryptographic tools. We have the, we have the code. We have all these ways that we could change Bitcoin to make it a

a more private tool, a more digital cash like tool. But the problem is shifting social consensus. And a lot of social consensus is formed through honestly, influencers and talking heads, the people who are garnering the most listeners who are kind of controlling the majority of what people view Bitcoin as. And I think there was a large shift towards this digital gold hodl only mentality.

which says Bitcoin is perfect, Bitcoin is this immaculate conception, all you have to do is buy it, hold it, and we're all gonna win. And obviously that's a little bit of a overstatement on the view, but that is a broad view that was pushed by many people who had very large audiences. And that is how social consensus is formed.

Chris Blec (43:20.918)
Well, because that was the clearest path to $50,000 Bitcoin. Like that was, it's all about greed. It's all driven by greed. All of this is greed, okay? So it's like if Monero could be, you know, if privacy could be taken away from Monero, there'd be a group pushing for that right now because of greed. Because, you know, it's just like, where things can be changed to make people more money, they will be changed to make people more money, you know? And...

@sethforprivacy (43:26.264)
Yeah. Yeah, no, that's true.

Chris Blec (43:49.922)
That's a big risk of any of these projects. But I think personally, the best case scenario may be actually forming before our eyes, where we do have a transparent Bitcoin that's accepted, that governments aren't trying to chase down, that is as decentralized as you can imagine in 2023, I guess. And then you have other chains.

That we have the technology to trustlessly and permissionlessly move back and forth to like Monero Atomic swaps aren't quite really yet. They're not quite I mean they are but they're not too I Want to talk more I want to talk Yeah, like I mean it just feels like it needs to get over that last hump But if we have that

@sethforprivacy (44:35.236)
very close, but they've been very close for a while, so.

Chris Blec (44:45.15)
Okay, Bitcoin is the big one. And then if you want privacy, you can flip over here real fast and get it and run those risks if you want, if it's worth it for you. Or you want this other feature, you can bounce down here. Or you want programmability, you can bounce to Ethereum if you really want to. So it's like, it might be the best case scenario where Bitcoin is like, they always used to say the internet of money. And then you have these sort of branches off that do other things. Do you think Monero is...

is relegated to kind of that secondary role forever because most people just don't care about privacy. Like, do you think that it's, and do you think that's okay? Like, do you think that's a good place for everyone ever to sit?

@sethforprivacy (45:29.644)
Yeah, I mean, I think in an ideal world, Bitcoin would have the features of Monero and would still have the market capture and all of the things that Bitcoin has going for it. I think the best case scenario is that the money that's the most popular is also privacy preserving by default. So like, no, I don't think it's best that Monero is relegated to this kind of...

I mean, you can really view it as like a layer two or some way to scale Bitcoin in a privacy preserving way because I think it really can be viewed as that. But I think that that's probably the most realistic scenario. And like you, that's one of the main reasons why I'm still in Bitcoin and why I still think Bitcoin is powerful is because we can have a multi-chain future. And I know that's kind of anathema to a lot of kind of Bitcoin maximalists and the maybe Bitcoin Puritans, which is a word that.

Chris Blec (46:23.438)
Screw them.

@sethforprivacy (46:23.876)
Jamison Lopp used. But yeah, I mean, honestly, I think a multi-chain futures. So no, I don't think so. I think this is much more realistic. And the ability for me to store value in Bitcoin or Monero, again, it's always up to user choice. But I think kind of my overall thesis for Bitcoin and Monero is that most people who see the need for privacy will store value in Bitcoin and use Monero for spending.

Chris Blec (46:28.22)
They're not realistic either.

@sethforprivacy (46:52.58)
And the way that that'll look like is they'll have a stash of Monero that's obviously not their life savings. Cause maybe they don't, maybe they don't trust the audit ability or they have other concerns with Monero, but they keep enough to pay for a month's goods and services or six months or whatever they want to store that store in that. And then they just spend from that as they need. I think that's kind of the best of both worlds. And it's one where we don't have to have this winner takes all mentality when it comes to these things. And one of the beautiful things about digital cash and

digital cryptocurrencies is that the ability to move between them can be made to be far easier than like moving between US dollars and British pounds. Like you mentioned atomic swaps, that even is the most hardcore way to swap between them. There are other ways to do it right now that you have some trust, but when you're doing small amounts, it doesn't really matter. You can do it without giving over KYC. You can do it peer to peer.

But atomic swaps are beautiful because you can do them in a fully programmatic way. Another person can just have a listing up. You can take it. You can swap. The other person never even needs to know that it's happening. They don't do anything. They just have their swap daemon online and you're able to get them an error you need for the month. They're able to get the Bitcoin that they want to go ahead and put into savings or whatever. And everyone wins. And the ability to seamlessly move between cryptocurrencies and kind of a multi-chain future is

I think is what will really enable freedom through these tools. It's not that everyone will use Bitcoin and everyone will be happy, but that Bitcoin will be the hub as it has been for cryptocurrencies and will be kind of the starting place of most people. But then once they realize the need for privacy and they realize that privacy on Bitcoin is harder, it's doable, but it's harder, they'll realize that, oh, I can seamlessly jump into Monero, swap for some of that, and then I can spend from that.

And that really benefits everyone because that benefits Bitcoin because maybe there's less pressure or less need to build out things that are able to be captured. There are custodial privacy services or ones that are centralized, those kinds of things. And it obviously helps Monero because it means there's a lot more liquidity and a lot more ability to get in and out of Monero, which makes it better for merchants, which comes full circle. And you build this circular economy that includes Bitcoin and Monero and probably something like Ethereum, because I do think that programmability is valuable.

@sethforprivacy (49:13.912)
I think the lack of privacy in Ethereum is problematic even for that, but they have a lot of layer two approaches that they're trying to tackle that. But yeah, that's kind of my ideal realistic future is Bitcoin, it's not going to become privacy preserving by default. I just don't think there's a realistic path to that. I'm not sure if any of the layer two approaches are going to actually work in reality, whether we're going to get something powerful like zero knowledge roll ups or something on Bitcoin. And Monero works amazingly well right now.

It's easy to use. There's good wallets for it. It's easy to swap between the two and decentralized ways. With atomic swaps, it'll be even easier. Even though liquidity may be a concern with atomic swaps, that's kind of yet to be seen. You can kind of have your cake and eat it too. Story value in Bitcoin, spend in Monero, gain privacy that way, gain the ease of auditing that comes with Bitcoin and enjoy.

Chris Blec (50:08.118)
Yeah, I do however see a future where there's more experiments with forking Bitcoin and with implementing different kinds of privacy potentially on a fork. And Zcash was one thing, but I think there's still more to try. I would love to see more of that kind of stuff being done.

@sethforprivacy (50:31.484)
The problem with forks though is just you come back to network effect. I mean it's been hard enough for the Lightning Network to gain network effect because even though it's denominated in Bitcoin, it requires different payment methods and different handling than on-chain Bitcoin. And there's been a great struggle there. I mean when you look at like one of my favorite kind of proxy merchants, Coin Cards, they publish the percentage of gift cards that they sell for each cryptocurrency each month.

It's like I've never seen it above two and a half or three percent of their usage, whereas Monero is basically equal with Bitcoin in usage now. And I think the problem for Lightning is not only that it's incredibly difficult to use in a non-custodial way without lots of concessions, but you still have the whole separate network effect. Because if I get you to accept Bitcoin on chain, I still can't pay you with Lightning. Or if I get you to accept Lightning, but I happen to want to pay on chain maybe for something larger that you're selling or whatever.

It's essentially two different currencies, even though it's denominated in Bitcoin. And if you do other forks, like you do a Zcash, Ultra Private or whatever, it doesn't change that it's going to have the same problem. I think that once Monero implements global membership proofs, the kind of war for privacy coin dominance is over. There's nothing else that will beat out Monero because there's nothing.

substantial enough that you can change at that point to overcome the network effect advantage that Monero has when it comes to privacy preserving cryptocurrencies. And I think probably that's even true with layer 2s in Bitcoin. I think if there's a privacy preserving layer 2, it's going to be hard to get that network effect because you still need to get merchants into that layer 2 or you need some way to be able to pay the... Maybe you can pay out of the layer 2 for lightning or other things, which is possible, but it gets tricky because you need something else. And Monero is already gaining.

Chris Blec (52:02.614)
You're a maxi.

@sethforprivacy (52:23.888)
Good market share there. Probably not as much as Lightning at this point, but we'll see how the future holds.

Chris Blec (52:30.35)
Hmm. It's interesting to hear you become such a maximalist. It's over. Monero's it. Once it does this, it's done. There's no further innovation necessary. I know that's not what you meant. I just had to pick on you because it sounded like a Bitcoin for half a second.

@sethforprivacy (52:35.922)
Hahaha

@sethforprivacy (52:42.323)
Not no further innovation.

@sethforprivacy (52:49.992)
my Monero maximalist coming out. So I keep him hidden inside most of the time, but sometimes he breaks free.

Chris Blec (52:52.13)
Hehehe

Chris Blec (52:56.202)
What kind of impact do you think the tornado cash?

Well, the indictments for one, but then if it goes to trial, it could not, maybe they'll plea or whatever. But like, what kind of impact do you think this could have on Monero development, if any, depending on the different kinds of outcomes we might see?

@sethforprivacy (53:20.524)
I think Monero is well positioned for it to be...

the least impactful possible. I mean, the problem with a situation like the tornado cash indictment is the government knows what they're doing. They know that through the sanctions and the indictment, they can create a chilling effect around creating and using privacy tools. And that is one of the things that they want out of it. And possibly the main thing or the only thing that they want out of the indictment. I think there are a lot of reasons that if the indictment actually goes to trial, which I think you hit on it.

probably won't most of these things they just play out and you never get to see anything else out of it. But if it does go to trial, there's a lot of stuff that's just so far off base and false in the indictment that I don't understand how a judge who actually understands how tornado cash works could convict on these counts. Obviously, that's not to say that it's not rigged and they're convicted anyways, even though it's ludicrous claims being made.

Even if that doesn't happen, what just the indictment does, which they can indict pretty freely and say pretty much whatever they want in the indictment, is it does have a chilling effect on developers. I think when you look at Monero specifically, there's always been a culture of pseudonymous or even anonymous contributions to the Monero code base. And there's always been a recommendation to developers to do it pseudonymously. And the main developers, the main core members of Monero throughout the years,

have been pseudonymous. And that is very much by design, because we understand that building a privacy preserving tool that takes back power from the government and gives it to the individual is something you're going to have to fight for in the future. And there's no reason to reveal more information about yourself than you need to contribute. But there certainly could be a chilling effect out of this. I think thankfully, since Monero's privacy is done at the consensus layer, it's even harder

@sethforprivacy (55:21.084)
to make any sort of legal or regulatory argument that Monero itself or using Monero itself is any form of money laundering or money transmission or anything like that. If tornado cash's indictment is ludicrous and absurd, and indicting like Monero core developers or something would be a whole nother quantum leap in imagination that the government would have to make to actually take any steps there.

But I am worried that it will have a chilling effect broadly on people who wanted to build privacy tools or wanted to build on Monero. But now are worried that at some point in the future, the government will just change its mind on how these things work, which is basically what the tornado cash and diamond looks like. It doesn't follow FinCEN's guidance. It doesn't seem to match anything that we've seen from the government before in the way they prosecute privacy tools and Bitcoin and others. So it's that doubt that they're sowing that is so dangerous. And that's one of the reasons why I want to continue to push people like...

keep contributing, keep using these tools, but protect yourself along the way. Like use other privacy tools, use pseudonyms online, use privacy preserving chats if you're gonna chat about stuff that doesn't need to be public for accountability or for community involvement. Do things in a way that limits your exposure so that when a tyrannical or totalitarian government goes after Monero or some other privacy tool, you've protected yourself as best you can. And I think that's...

that's vital to do and start from the basis of I'm going to reveal as little about myself as possible and just contribute, build my reputation up, not rely on maybe some alternate personality that people know me about on Twitter and just build and build in private as much as possible in the sense of preserving your identity and preserving your kind of activity.

Chris Blec (57:10.178)
Why didn't Fluffy Pony do that? What's wrong with that guy? He's out there, face everywhere, name everywhere, getting brought in by the feds or whatever that was all about. By the way, that's number three on my list of concerns about Monero. And people think I'm joking about this. And this is not meant to impugn his integrity in any way. It's just a very black and white, just totally...

@sethforprivacy (57:21.636)
Such a weird situation.

Chris Blec (57:39.65)
factual thing. He was, was it the feds? He was brought in by the, was it the FBI? It was, I might be wrong about that. If I am right to South Africa, on, it was, it was different. It was not related to Monero as far as I know. It was, that's what they say, my friend. That's what they say. Okay, so I, look.

@sethforprivacy (57:47.572)
Yeah, I think it was the FBI that extra added him to South Africa essentially.

@sethforprivacy (58:00.673)
No, not at all.

@sethforprivacy (58:06.204)
That's another weird and ludicrous seeming case.

Chris Blec (58:09.594)
If it looks like it smells like it, then you gotta wonder what's going on. Why this guy? Why is he being brought into a dark room you don't hear from him for days or a week? And all of a sudden he's out and everything's fine. So look, if he's listening, I'm sure he'll catch wind of this, whatever. I'm not trying to bash you as a person. If it wasn't you, it could be anybody. That's a lead, not a lead dev, but a founder or co-founder or whatever, knows...

Monero Inside Now, you get brought into a dark room for days with feds, I get a little nervous about what happened in there. So

@sethforprivacy (58:48.612)
But that's where it comes back to open source and separation of duties. When he was arrested, he had no power to push builds. He had no power to do anything like that. He had been a core maintainer for a while, which essentially meant that he managed pull requests. He helped to publish new releases alongside other people. So he did have some kind of power in the project as far as that went. But when he was arrested, he had nothing like that.

And there's, I mean, there's been this kind of conspiracy of like, what did you tell them about a backdoor? But the code is open source. He is not even a developer really. He's done some in the past, but the majority of his role has been as a, as a maintainer and kind of community steward of the project. So he certainly has not introduced some sort of backdoor five years ago or 10 years ago or whatever to, to leverage now. And there's no way that he could be shipping anything in the code that wouldn't be seen by other developers.

It's all open source. Monero builds are reproducible. So there's really, there's no, there's nothing reasonable that the government could have done. The only thing that I could think is if the case was actually bogus, which it seems to be in hindsight and talking to some other people behind the scenes, it seems like it was just the South African government being idiots, but if it was bogus and it was like an FBI conspiracy to bring in the ex-core maintainer of Monero and grill him for back doors, there's nothing else he could give them.

Everything is open source. If there was a backdoor, they could find it. And they could have used it without him. But if there was a backdoor, everyone else who worked on the code or who reviewed it, every auditor, et cetera, would all have to be either complicit or blind. So there was nothing really to worry about that case. I mean, there was obviously, as soon as he was arrested, there was a double check within the community where we made sure that there was no additional access he had to the website or to file hosting because obviously,

Monero wallet downloads are served from a file host, things like that. But there's really no, I don't think, any rational concern for what happened as it pertains to the Monero community. It seemed like a really just crappy situation for Fluffy Pony himself to have to go through. But it wasn't concerning at all from the Monero project perspective. Once you understand how things are separated and how little could be done in a truly open source project. And that is one of the huge benefits of open source.

Chris Blec (01:00:59.39)
Yeah, I'm sure it was.

@sethforprivacy (01:01:11.992)
And one of the huge dangers of closed source is if a project is not open source, those kinds of things can easily happen. A dev could easily be compromised, change something, and no one would ever know, except for maybe the other developers on this team or something who get access to the code.

Chris Blec (01:01:26.558)
Yeah, I mean, personally, even if there's not some exploit he could have revealed or some, you know, some way some back door he somehow revealed that doesn't seem likely at all, like you said, but he might know where the soft spots are, he might know where you could poke with a stick and start to see some of the weak spots, or he might know where some bodies are buried.

In those cases, it just narrows the scope of where they would need to look. So it's, look, this is total speculation again, like conspiracy theory. Yeah, yeah.

@sethforprivacy (01:02:02.877)
If he was like the lead dev for Monero, if he was one of the people who had contributed the majority of the code, that would be much more of a cause for concern, in my opinion. But as a maintainer and kind of a community steward rather than a developer at his core, I think it's a lot less worrying because there was much less under his purview and there's much less chance that he would know about something that for some reason another...

Chris Blec (01:02:11.338)
Yeah, totally. I agree.

@sethforprivacy (01:02:28.68)
more developer focused person in the community wouldn't have caught. Obviously, it's certainly possible. It's all speculation. But I think that there's not much cause for concern there outside of like, was it something to try to create a chilling effect in the Monero dev community or something? That could be maybe a valid reason for it. But it also might have just been the South African government being crap.

Chris Blec (01:02:34.735)
Yeah, would love to know one way or another, but.

Chris Blec (01:02:51.07)
Yeah, yeah, no, I hear you. It still sticks in my mind though. Even the fact that...

@sethforprivacy (01:02:57.72)
I didn't have that on my list of things we were going to cover today. I hadn't thought about that in a long time.

Chris Blec (01:03:03.918)
Those are like my top three Monero concerns. Now, the benefits of it outweigh those for me as far as using it as a tool, as far as trusting in the cryptography and the privacy. But it's good to put them out on the table and discuss issues like that because all you get on Twitter is maximalism. It's so hard to get into these conversations.

@sethforprivacy (01:03:32.796)
Even from the Monero side, unfortunately. There are Monero reply guys and there's people within the Monero community who don't understand the trade-offs that are inherent to the things that Monero has done. And nothing you do in building these protocols is without trade-offs. Everything has benefits and drawbacks. And I think that the trade-offs on the benefit side drastically outweigh the negatives that come with the choices that have been made in Monero. But yeah, these...

Chris Blec (01:03:35.082)
That's who I'm talking about, actually. Ha ha ha.

Chris Blec (01:03:48.909)
Right.

Chris Blec (01:04:00.447)
Yeah.

@sethforprivacy (01:04:01.552)
These longer form, not 240 character conversations are the ideal way to hash these things out and get to a better understanding of them. And I think that's one of the things I've loved in the Monero community. And really one of the things that endeared me to them initially was that every Sunday they had a Monero skepticism post on Reddit. And the whole goal was that you shared the issues you had with Monero and the Monero community came together to discuss them in the open.

I think that's something that we could really benefit from in other communities like the Bitcoin community is a lot more long form, calm, rational discussion that's not on Twitter. Because Twitter is probably the worst possible medium for technical discussions around protocols. It's sad that it's the core of where Bitcoin discussion happens. And there's other good efforts to try to get that back to kind of a Bitcoin talk style discussion. And obviously the mailing list that...

Chris Blec (01:04:47.295)
Yeah.

@sethforprivacy (01:04:59.452)
that a lot of the dev and cryptography work happens on is very different, but Twitter is just a, is an absolutely awful medium for any of these kinds of discussions. So long form kind of getting things out there, being open and honest about benefits and drawbacks is so important for this, so important for Bitcoin, so important for any freedom tool. I mean, if you're talking about freedom tech generally, we have to have these discussions to properly understand how these things work, what they're good at, what they're not good at, so that people can come and make

informed decisions on what tools they want to put in their toolkit. Because ultimately that kind of freedom or self-sovereignty comes down to how are you choosing to approach things and you need to understand these things to be able to approach them. So I love these kind of open and honest conversations.

Chris Blec (01:05:44.718)
Before I let you go, before we wrap up, where are you at with mobile these days? Last I talked to you was Calix OS. Are you still there with the Pixel? Is that what you're doing?

@sethforprivacy (01:05:59.58)
Okay. Ooh. So, no, I do. So I was on Calix for a long time. I switched to Graphene OS about a year and a half ago and had been running that exclusively. I think both are excellent options. I think my slight recommendation would be Graphene OS, but there's some weird stuff behind the scenes that makes me hesitant to discuss it more. But

Chris Blec (01:06:01.174)
or do you not discuss?

Chris Blec (01:06:25.514)
Oh, I know.

@sethforprivacy (01:06:27.368)
In actuality, I've actually been testing out using an iPhone recently. Both to see if it's beneficial for me. I know, I know. It's not something I've talked about publicly at all. So you're the first to know. But part of that is some, some other issues behind the scenes that we won't get into. But I, I was very curious how using an iPhone with all of the added steps that Apple had put in place to preserve your privacy from Apple.

Chris Blec (01:06:32.202)
Ooh baby. Scandalous.

Chris Blec (01:06:38.201)
Okay.

@sethforprivacy (01:06:53.868)
and to preserve your security from attackers, like lockdown mode, have actually gone. How usable they are, how useful they are, both from the perspective of seeing how they work for me, but also just so that I can comment with an educated background on how those things work and what they're like to use in practice. Because I talked a little bit previously about, I really like some of the approaches that Apple is taking.

The only real issue for me now is that it's closed source. It's not an open source platform, and it is a pretty restrictive platform, which is 100% problematic. And my broad recommendation would not be iOS yet. But I love the approach they've taken with advanced data protection. I think it's a massive win for the average Joe being able to gain privacy from Apple and from people who would attack Apple and try to steal data. Because.

Essentially, you can go through a similar process that you would do with securing your Bitcoin. You get a recovery key, and the only person who has access to that data is you and anyone who has that recovery key at that point, which is a far cry from what used to be where Apple had just complete access to everything you did, all your photos, all of that. Whereas now all of that is encrypted between your devices and is not visible to Apple. Even with a warrant, you would have someone hacks Apple, et cetera.

And then lockdown mode is a really helpful security inclusion that they have now that if you're a little bit more high profile or you're a journalist or activist who could be targeted with like a Pegasus malware or something that's on kind of the cutting edge of malware out there, it can provide a lot of protection as well. So that's where I'm at. I'm not recommending Apple or iOS at this point, but I have been very pleasantly surprised by the choices that they've made. They've put a lot of legitimately useful privacy tools.

at the fingertips of people who otherwise would have no access to those tools. And so I wanted to have a better understanding for how they actually work in practice, what they're like, what the drawbacks are. And I think a lot of people would benefit from just turning on advanced data protection, continuing using iPhone, and then they'd be in a much better situation than they even would be on a stock Android phone or something. But I do think the ultimate best place for the majority of people who can is to switch to something like CalixOS or GrapheneOS for sure.

Chris Blec (01:09:03.63)
Right.

Chris Blec (01:09:11.326)
Yeah, yeah, and you know that I did that a couple of years ago, I guess, switched to Calix OS, which is, you know, Graphene OS is like the, you're not going to have any fun with your phone. It's going to block everything fun and you're just going to use certain things. Okay.

@sethforprivacy (01:09:27.512)
It's not true anymore. It's actually not true anymore. So that was true back in the day, especially when we were first talking about it and going through Calyx OS, first Graphene OS, but they have done a lot of things to make it much, much more user-friendly. And they have a, I think that's called a Google Play compatibility layer, where you can still install the Google Play services, use the Google Play Store, all of that. It's in a hardened manner, so it's good for security, but not necessarily for privacy.

Chris Blec (01:09:33.431)
Mm-hmm.

@sethforprivacy (01:09:57.012)
And you can do that. You can drastically restrict what Google is able to access, but still have functionality like notifications, like banking apps working, like installing things from the Play Store. So they have come a long way. And I think Calix OS was good pressure for them to realize that not everyone wants the hyper, hardcore, I can barely use my phone approach, which is valid for specific people. But for the majority of people, I'm not going to get my mom or my wife to use.

like Graphene OS without Google Play services, or CalXOS without Micro-G. It's just not gonna happen at this point. So I'm glad that they've done a lot of work there, and I actually really do appreciate the approach that they've taken to that. I'd say it's probably on par in usability with CalXOS at this point, but with a different approach, with different advantages and disadvantages.

Chris Blec (01:10:27.962)
Right.

Chris Blec (01:10:45.458)
Interesting. Oh, that's good to know. Maybe we'll give it another try. I will say trying it for, I probably was using it for close to a year exclusively and switched to Linux for a while and really tried to harden everything. You know, I switched back to Mac and iPhone eventually, but I switched back with a greater appreciation for what I needed to do to stay private with the iPhone, with the Mac, and with, you know, these types of tools.

@sethforprivacy (01:11:13.007)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Blec (01:11:15.718)
Even if you don't plan on staying forever with these hardened privacy, you know, things that you think only like Edward Snowden would need, it's still useful to live your life that way for a while. And to realize how much you're giving up by, by using these closed source apps and how much you're giving up by, by using these, these walled gardens and, um, yeah. Yeah.

@sethforprivacy (01:11:27.748)
Mm-hmm.

@sethforprivacy (01:11:37.38)
And how much you can live without. I think like one of the most advantageous things that came with switching to, I switched to Calix OS originally from using just regular Android, was just the understanding that like a lot of the apps and services I thought I needed, I don't, like I don't need it all. I don't miss. That's one of the like the main recommendations I make is like delete all your social media apps, like delete.

the vast majority of what you use and then only add things back as you feel like, okay, I am really missing that. Because a lot of it, we just have an addiction to a lot of the things that are not actually beneficial and not actually helpful. So that is one of the benefits is when you kind of get that chance to start with a clean slate that I feel like we don't usually get, usually like in the digital world, we started with a clean slate before we understood anything and then we just have been building on it for a decade or however long.

And then we just keep inheriting those things with the next phone we get or the next operating system we run. So that chance to start with a clean slate and kind of practice digital minimalism intentionally is so, so useful. And it has helped me to realize that I need drastically less out of my phone than I thought I did. And I can do the majority of what I need on my computer, on my laptop, but whatever, rather than relying on my phone to do everything for me for a lot of different reasons.

Chris Blec (01:12:55.01)
Right. Or even in your phone browser, you know, just like moving from the app to a browser and using the browser website, the mobile website. Like people don't understand the differences and they don't understand the importance of doing something like that until you go through that kind of exercise and you really sit down and you watch every Seth video and every TechLore video on these topics and you start to realize, dang, okay. So I would say to people, I tell people now,

You don't have to plan to stay in that world forever, but if you stay there for a while and then eventually switch back, you're gonna come back with a greater sense of what is important and what you need to do to protect yourself. Now I'm using an iPhone, mostly switched back for productivity purposes because there's so much you can't do on Linux and on Graphene and Calix. The trade-offs are huge.

To move over, I mean, no matter what they say, they're pretty big, especially if you're coming from iOS. So it's like, you know, I switched back so I could do stuff like this, like record this conversation just as hard on Linux sometimes. So um.

@sethforprivacy (01:13:53.735)
Hmm? Yeah.

@sethforprivacy (01:14:03.726)
I am on Linux now, just for what it's worth.

Chris Blec (01:14:06.246)
Fine, whatever. You're right, I should switch again. Actually, but I think that it's good for education, as is everything. If you think you can't stick with it, it's not a good reason to not try it. You know, it's like it goes for crypto, it goes for everything, I think. You know what we didn't talk about that I wanted to talk about? Maybe we'd do this again some other time, is the article you wrote about 12 words versus 24 words. Seed phrase.

@sethforprivacy (01:14:22.978)
Mm-hmm.

@sethforprivacy (01:14:32.875)
Oh, yeah.

Chris Blec (01:14:35.294)
It's too much of a topic to get into right now, but that's another thing. Actually, I'll share that in the show notes because anybody listening this far into the podcast should read that post because it's really interesting. It talks about, it's sort of like a philosophical proof for why 12 words is enough on your seed phrase, and it's interesting. Yeah.

@sethforprivacy (01:14:37.488)
Thank you.

@sethforprivacy (01:14:55.34)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was a fun one to write. It was not the conclusion is something I've been thinking about for a long time, but never kind of put pen to paper or done the deep research. And it was fascinating to do. I think, yeah, I love it if you're shared and I'd be happy to come on and chat. Maybe we just do kind of like a rapid fire episode around it and dig into it. But I think it's one that's really helpful for people when, especially when they're first getting started with cryptocurrency. We can we can simplify a bit of that journey.

Chris Blec (01:15:15.027)
Yeah, yeah.

@sethforprivacy (01:15:24.416)
and not actually lose anything.

Chris Blec (01:15:27.334)
Yeah, that's an important conversation that we don't have enough in general is that kind of stuff. Like, I mean, a world where everybody's doing 12 words with diceware and just like, skipping the hardware while entirely, that's a great future. So it's like another time. But for now, this has been great. It answered a lot of my questions about Monero. I love to talk about this stuff, so thanks for coming on.

@sethforprivacy (01:15:38.544)
I'm sorry.

@sethforprivacy (01:15:47.671)
Mm-hmm.

@sethforprivacy (01:15:54.732)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Gris. It's always a blast to get to chat with you. And I just love your honesty and the kind of laid back approach with this pod that you've taken. So thank you for having me. Glad we got to chat Monero. Always happy to chat about that. And it's not too frequent I get to, so good thing to cover and definitely look forward to chatting again soon.

Chris Blec (01:16:12.191)
Right on.