Join the Wasabikas - a Bitcoin Privacy Podcast

Niko Omnifinn explains the differences between a spider, or centralized organization, and starfish, a decentralized and resilient organism. While the spider is quicks, agile and innovative, it is easy to kill with a single point of failure. But if you cut the starfish in half, then that will create two separate creatures.

Bull Bitcoin is a privacy preserving instant delivery of bitcoin, a non-custodial exchange that values the sovereignty of its users. It has numerous great features, like efficient hourly transaction batching, liquid sidechain integration, and now even over the Lightning Network. This runs all on the free and open source Cyphernode infrastructure backend.

Verify offers numerous services to their clients, there are hourly individual support sessions about self custody, verification and privacy. But the most popular offer is a bundle of Bitcoin related hardware, combined with the excellent consulting.

Verifi helps their clients to understand both the why and the how of Bitcoin. Nowadays so many people are close to understanding the problem that Bitcoin fixes. Even though it might take a couple attempts, eventually most will naturally migrate to this new monetary standard.

Most people out there don’t yet understand the reason why Bitcoin is a useful tool that solves a massive problem. But the ongoing educational efforts are proliferating, with the earlier students now teaching the next generation.

Gustavo always had new people coming with good questions about Bitcoin, yet many people still first fall into the trap of shitcoin distractions. But Verifi has continuously grown their staff and clients, proliferating self custody and privacy. These principles were celebrated at the Bitcoin Montreal Summer Conference.

Gustavo discovered Bitcoin at a young age of 15, at first with the goal of making more fiat through speculation, but he stayed to fight the good fight with Verifi, a Bitcoin company for educating about individual sovereignty, self custody and privacy.

Gustavo is so motivated to work on Bitcoin self sovereignty and privacy software, mainly because the group of individuals building these tools is so dedicated, principled and passionate. Particularly in these days of lockdown and social distancing, finally meeting the Bitcoin tribe again is staggering. 

Niko explains one of the benefits of starfish organizations is that everyone learns more, when one additional node enters the venture. Niko is not micromanaging and planning the nuances, rather he is confident in the incentives of the venture he crafted. The hard work is paying off.

Niko has built a great starfish organization to translate and publish important Bitcoin books. He focused on getting dedicated and motivated peers involved, to have a great ethic and throughput in the venture. Everyone has skin in the game, and natural incentives leading to the overall best outcome. 

Niko explains how centralized systems can work with service providers, but because of monopoly privileges and no skin in the game, these merchants are not responsible for their actions and provide a worse service. Again, state intervention is suboptimal. 

Niko explains that centralized systems work great, until they stop working. They are well equipped to scale quickly and innovate rapidly, but they are prone to die completely from a small shock. 

Why do societies fall apart? Because they try to hide from the responsibilities of their actions. The current calamity is yet again backed and supported by the “expert” who think they are the good guys. The solution is easy - carry your own burden.

The older you get, the more you are attached to being plugged into the matrix. You tend to invest a lot in your carriere, family, and lifestyle. This is often a very nihilistic outlook, that basically everything is yet another joke. 

Roger has vast experience in private aircraft travel. He explains in detail the process of acquiring your own private jet, the everyday operational tasks, as well as the numerous benefits. Every Bitcoin citadel ought to have a private jet to ensure secure travel to the other citadels. AeroOne.org is the place to buy exactly that.

Roger explains that each flight does have to have a manifesto with the people on board. However, for a private owner flight, these do not have to be leaked to authorities, thus all they know is that a plane flew, but not who was in it. This is of course vastly superior to the numerous harassment and inefficiencies of commercial airline travel.

Roger explains that there are some ever-changing restrictions when it comes to border crossings of for example Canada to the USA. However, once inside the USA, there is barely any harassment when traveling across states. America also has a vast network of small airports with affordable fees and gas prices.

Roger explains the unnecessary and convoluted Cabotage Rules. It is not permitted for an aircraft to have both origin and destination in the same foreign country, or to have multiple countries as destinations in the same trip. However, with private jet ownership, this rule does no longer apply.

Roger explains that the aircraft offered by AeroOne.org is registered for both private owner flights, as well as on-demand charter services. The difference is, that all the interior has to be fire and destruction tested, and the crew needs to have special training and experience. 

RyanAir or other commercial air lines are a great solution to provide cheap flights at short distances often. But especially with the incentive models of frequent flyer miles, you are incentivized to travel more than you otherwise would have.

Air-plane charter business is a very innovative and ever changing industry. But it is all about hiring a plane and crew, to take you from any origin to any destination. The major benefit is speed, as you can drive your car up to the airplane, it takes off immediately, and at landing your car is already waiting for you. 

Roger flew millions of miles for his work in the private air travel industry, where he also consulted clients on the right choice of plane. Later he pivoted and created his own company in the financial services industry. Through his objectivist philosophy, he got interested in Bitcoin and is now eager to provide his services to Bitcoiners.

Ruben is an entrepreneur who wants to provide his clients an easy way to purchase bitcoin at regular intervals directly into their own wallet. Bittr is a non-custodial Bitcoin exchange that was victim of heavy censorship of their fiat bank accounts and overbearing KYC regulation. But now it is up and running again in a swiss company ready to serve clients.

Bittr is a non-custodial Bitcoin exchange, where as soon as you send fiat to the company's bank account, they send sats to your own address. They use hourly batched payments to save on block space usage and fees.

Censorship is not applied on the state registration of a company, but rather at the financial service provider level, mainly banks. Ruben explains his struggles with getting a swiss bank account for his Bitcoin exchange company Bittr. 

Ruben initially used Bunk as the bank for the Bittr Bitcoin exchange. This is a software company which happens to be a bank. This comes with a great API to enable applications being built on top. This is much superior to German banks, which are all stuck at last gen technology.

Free software projects benefit from a great community of enthusiast users who give feature requests and bug reports, as well as dedicated developers who help to implement them and improve the software. But sharing your code in the public, especially when it is ugly, is a scary task. But publishing your software for free use, helps to find and fix bugs early, reducing the potential harm they could have done. 

Ruben went with a specialist firm to build his software, which provided him with a group of dedicated high quality devs that were in it for the long run. But he also considered Bitcoin focused freelancer platforms, which turned out to be too risky without long term incentives. 

When Ruben started to work on Bittr, he had no software development experience at all. So he teamed up with a specialist firm to build their very first Bitcoin application. Ever since, this company is busy with building cryptocurrency software for many clients. At the same time, regulatory burdens in the Netherlands led to the temporary closure of Bittr. Ruben used that time to learn how to code.

While studying his masters degree in digital currencies at University Nicosia, Ruben thought of ways to bring existing fiat tech applications into Bitcoin. Acorn is an app that allows you to invest regular small amounts into stocks and funds. So he set out to build the ultimate tool for stacking sats!

Aviv Milner shares his tales of coming to love the Cypherpunk ethos, and why freedom of speech and movement is essential for a healthy individual. Trusted third parties, in any case whatsoever, are a serious security hole that can be taken down by hostile actors. This is a collection of multiple cases in communication networks and bitcoin service providers. 

Aviv Milner is talking about the book Drug Use for Grownups, Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. Even heroin can be used in a responsible and recreational manner. No third party can prescribe what a “responsible” use of any substance is. 

Aviv Milner recollects that the FBI created a phone and operating system ANOM, which claimed to provide secure and encrypted communication services. This scam was used to target drug dealers to use the technology for coordinating their criminal activities. 

Aviv Milner recollects the fork wars of 2017, where a minority of users insisted to change the Bitcoin rule set in a backwards incompatible way. Most Bitcoin users prefer to stay in consensus though, only upgrading with non-contentious softforks. Hardforking a monetary network will lead to continuous fracturing.

In the long history of attempting to create digital money, all failed because of a single trusted third party essential for the operation of the system. One example is Liberty Reserve, a gold backed eCash company, which let it’s users transact gold certificates among themselves privately, got shut down in 2013.

Chill is explaining the basics of LNURL, a genius trick to avoid the end user having to scan the actual lightning invoice. Instead, the user visits a website domain, and that server then responds with the final lightning invoice, which the user can then pay. This enables many cool tricks.

What’s missing for mass adoption of cypherpunk privacy technology? Aviv Milner thinks it’s the will of the people, and better trade-offs. People give in to non-private solution because they get more likes and perceived engagement. The UX and security best practice defaults of a software needs to become flawless.

In the basement of Paralelni Polis, a group of hackers met frequently to talk about the latest cutting edge software and hardware. This is when Chill first discovered the Bitcoin lightning network, and he understood the layered scaling solution, and the importance of SegWit for it’s deployment. 

Aviv Milner explains why PGP never really took off. Even though the concern of cypherpunks of a surveillance panopticon future was a spot on prediction. Personal information is public for anyone to see, which is a ripe target for totalitarian governments.

Aviv Milner grew up with parents escaping communism from Soviet Russia to the United States. This longing for freedom of speech and movement was the kernel of his love for the Cypherpunk ethos. 

Initially the Bleskomat was an application for the phone, then Chill built a plywood box with open cables and the coins falling openly. Now there are hand-crafter steel boxes, with separate coin and bill security boxes, and a custom PCB to avoid the cable clutter. 

Chill’s philosophy while building the Bleskomat was to reduce the things that could go wrong. The UX is trivial: toss in coins, scan a QR code, and magically you receive sats! The sats that the user receives, can be instantly and cheaply spent somewhere else. With this simple machine, hundreds of future-coiners can be onboarded every hour!

The Bleskomat is an easy to use Bitcoin ATM, working with the latest cutting edge Lightning technologies. But the key is, it is completely offline, not knowing about the bitcoin exchange rate, and without access to the blockchain! It only counts the bills & coins, signs the amount, and then displays this signature to the user in a lnurl link.

Chill explains how LNURL withdrawal can be used as a very basic custodial wallet, as it gives anyone who visits a website the right to withdraw some sats from the server. This is great for video games, to get paid without needing to provide an invoice.

Chill started to work on free software, by contributing to SimpleMachinesForum, which is still used by the BitcoinTalk forum. He was always fascinated by sharing his code with others, for them to enjoy it’s use, to provide feedback, and to even write the code to improve it. 

Jeremy Rubin is working on advancing Bitcoin in the aspects of decentralization, privacy, self custody and scalability. Sapio is his attempt to move Bitcoin's smart contract infrastructure technology to the next generation. OP_CheckTemplateVerify is script code which, if enabled, would allow a vast new number of use cases for Bitcoin.

Jeremy Rubin explains how the original sidechain research was to find a trustless two-way peg never succeeded, and the trust assumptions of the Liquid federated two-way peg. On the other hand, Sapio is a type of oracle server which ensures the execution of novel Bitcoin functionality which is not yet in the consensus protocol.

Jeremy Rubin explains how Sapio and OP_CheckTemplateVerify fit into the four pillars of Bitcoin. This infrastructure technology will enable a vast number of user facing applications. 

Jeremy Rubin explains that with Sapio you define a route, but with Miniscript you define a key. The key is used to unlock your car or house, but it doesn't help to find out where to go next, for this you need a procedural and stateful route on a map. 

Jeremy Rubin explains Sapio, a programming language used to design modular but bounded circuits. This ensures a higher security than programming languages like Solicity. 

Jeremy Rubin organized PlebFi, a side event to the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, with further events in Austin coming up. It is a conversation about new Bitcoin technology to write smart contracts for defi applications. 

Patents hinder innovation, that's why Bitcoin is fully free and open source software. But when releasing software gratis, it is difficult to earn money for further development. Jeremy Rubin seeks to work around this.

Bitcoin is the most important technological revolutions of our times, Jeremy Rubin cannot imagine any project more important to spend his time on. He is focusing on bringing advanced smart contracts and DeFi protocols to the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Alex Gladstein is a freedom fighter and human rights activist, for years improving the lives of countless individuals who are suffering under government tyranny. From smuggling usb sticks to oppressed countries, to financing the development of Bitcoin free software. The Human Rights Foundation is improving the lives of many.

Alex Gladstein is convinced that Bitcoin does not rely on oil and dictators. This is because green and renewable energies continue to get cheaper and cheaper, and Bitcoin miners are always on the hunt for the cheapest electricity sources. Stranded and unutilized geothermal, hydropower, and photovoltaic energy is perfect for Bitcoin miners.

Alex Gladstein is contemplating why so many Human Rights activists don’t understand the value proposition of Bitcoin. This is because they are often far left-wing oriented, who despise rich white guy projects, and the perceived environmental damages of Bitcoins proof of work.

Alex Gladstein understands that reaching a perfectly anonymous commerce system is very difficult to achieve. However, there are ways to gain half-privacy even when using KYC fiat systems, as long as one side of the trade is done in private cash or bitcoin deals. 

Alex Gladstein is convinced that right now we have amazing tools for techy users who know what they are doing. But if we want to proliferate privacy to the average Bitcoin users, then there is still lots of work to be done. Most people simply don’t have a laptop where they can run Joinmarket or Wasabi, they have a smartphone with spotty internet connection at best.

Alex Gladstein explains that in the incumbent fiat system, financial privacy is essentially non-existent. Bank accounts are fully surveilled and easily censored, as we see with countless protestors of government tyranny. Currently in practice, the state does not have the tools to deanonymize and censor Bitcoin users, but this might change in the future.

Alex Gladstein understands the importance of protecting financial privacy, yet spinning up a new altcoin for this is often counterproductive. Bitcoin is the free and open financial system which is almost certainly going to succeed on a monetary base. However, privacy is not yet perfectly protected in Bitcoin, which means there’s still lots of work to do.

Alex Gladstein has always been on the forefront of liberating oppressed individuals. He smuggled movies and books translated to spanish to the underground movement of Cuba in 2007. Later he helped to send over 100 000 USB sticks with critical information to North Korean victims. He is teaching dissidents and activists how to use powerful cryptographic tools to protect their communication. 

Ben Arc is a hobbyist, tinkerer and hacker who has built numerous breathtaking Bitcoin applications. From automated vending machines, to Bitcoin Lightning Wallets, and DIY hardware wallets. His passion for teaching inspires him to continue building awesome tools, and helping others to do the same.

LNbits is a Bitcoin Lightning Wallet with numerous cool extensions. Ben sees the incredible benefits of splitting up payments to multiple destinations in the Bitcoin Lightning Network. For example, for every payment in a coffee shop, the cook, waiter, owner, and barista all receive atomically a small amount of bitcoin. The Lightning Jukebox connects your Spotify account so that anyone can pay you sats to play a unique song. 

Even though the Bowser hardware is a small-scale DIY project, because it is compatible with the Hardware Wallet Interface and Partially Signed Bitcoin Transaction format, it works with many companion software wallets, like Wasabi. This shows the beauty of an open ecosystem where anyone can contribute and collaborate.

The DIY Bowser Bitcoin hardware wallet doesn’t have a hardware secure module, meaning that a sophisticated attacker can extract the storage when he has physical access to the hardware. But this is why Bowser has BIP39 password protection, so that only encrypted ciphertext is stored on the hardware, and the user always must type in the passphrase in order to spend the bitcoin.

Ben has a vision of an easily accessible, cheap and open source Bitcoin hardware wallet. The DIY Bowser is a perfect device for small business owners who want to get paid bitcoin. The low cost of the hardware enables this to be a profitable option even for small users. Seedsinger, yet another DIY hardware wallet, is targeted to be used in a multisignature scheme among multiple hardware vendors.

Ben has been tinkering around with Bitcoin Lightning IoT devices for a long time. He can connect pretty much any electronic device to trigger upon arrival of a Bitcoin payment, like a sweets vending machine, punching machine, or smoke dispenser. This enables a breathtaking amount of innovation for DIY tinkerers.

Ben has a career in teaching kids with behavioral issues, and he loves to foster them to their full potential. Bitcoiners have a similar worldview, to reduce the amount of wasted potential. Bitcoin, just as teaching, unleashes a new wave of innovative improvements to everyday lives and empower individuals.

Ben explains how code doesn’t just magically appear, but that someone has to actually write it! If you are not a skilled enough developer, then you have to bother other people to do it for you. It’s up to the user to convince enthusiasts to build the software, maybe even with a bitcoin bounty.

Dan Gould started to contribute to Tumblebit, a Bitcoin Privacy project for coordinating anonymous payment hub transactions. Now he has achieved the seemingly impossible: To bring Wasabi Wallet to mobile iOS, helping Apple users to protect their Privacy with advanced CoinJoin. The Tor integration that he built is a groundbreaking achievement that enables countless powerful features.

Dan Gould explains the challenges of properly backing up a Bitcoin wallet. The 12 recovery words are a useful disaster recovery tool, as they give you at least access to spend the bitcoin. However, important metadata like labels and memos, as well as advanced script features, require creating a new backup after each transaction. The backup can be encrypted and stored on a cloud server.

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Dan Gould remembers a hackathon at the MIT Bitcoin Club, where his team built a sophisticated PayJoin client which communicates exclusively over Tor on iOS. ChainCase opens an ephemeral Tor hidden service on the iPhone, so that other users can talk to this phone peer to peer. 

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Dan Gould explains that iOS has a strong limitation on the computational power of an application if it is not running in the foreground. Push notifications can be used to start an application in the background, which can be used to run a CoinJoin client under the hood with a large user base. 

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Dan Gould was an avet user of Wasabi Wallet on desktop, but he was frustrated with CoinJoin not being available for mobile wallets, and the cumbersome UX of Wasabi. This is why he developed ChainCase, an iOS application that runs the Wasabi code in a mobile environment, with a focus on intuitive UX. The Tor implementation for iOS was the most difficult technical challenge to overcome.

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Dan Gould explains the reasons why Tumblebit never made it into production: The company Stratus invested into developing the client and server software, however they were not interested in running the coordinating server. Regulatory uncertainty of the definition of anonymizing communication service or a money service provider. 

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Dan Gould explains that Tumblebit is a multi-transaction ceremony, and that the anonymity set depends on the number of users. For a higher level of privacy, the user has to wait for a long time in between the deposit and withdrawal transactions. The challenge in Bitcoin Privacy is to coordinate multi-user transactions, and finding a balance between speed for fees for privacy.

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Dan Gould attempts to explain the rather convoluted TumbleBit Privacy protocol. There is a client server relationship, where the user “deposits” bitcoin into a non-custodial payment hub, so that at a later point in time, he can “withdraw” bitcoin to a new address. Even the coordinating server cannot link the deposit and withdraw transaction.

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Raj is a civil engineer and physicist by trade, but he caught the Bitcoin bug and is now heads down in the Bitcoin rabbit hole. He has made the jump into being a full time contributor to free software projects. This is possible thanks to his great curiosity and the financial support of the Square Crypto Grant.

Raj was successful in receiving a yearly grant by Square Crypto to focus his full time on building Bitcoin tools. Now he is focusing on advancing rust-bitcoin infrastructure, as well as reviewing code in Bitcoin Core itself. The Lightning Developer Kit, and Bitcoin Developer Kit are also part of his scope. 

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Raj was unsure at first if he can make meaningful contributions to free software if he does not have a university degree or other official paperwork. However, of course the only barrier in free software is the amount of contributions that you actually provide. Working on free software feels more like having fun, rather than laboring a job.

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Instead of playing video games, Raj spent his time after work playing with the Bitcoin Core command line interface. This was much more productive than the regular day job. Now that Raj is focusing full time on contributing to free software, his productivity has again been boosted tremendously. There’s no way that he will do a corporate job anytime soon.

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

As a classical engineer or physicist, after a couple of years there are few new groundbreaking theories or projects. This is very contrary to the extreme case of Bitcoin, where every day countless new breakthroughs are happening. Raj cannot see himself to stop learning new things about Bitcoin any time soon.

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Raj found the rust-bitcoin and rust-lightning projects, and then fell in love with the rust programming language and architecture. It’s type safety and memory safety guarantees allow for high security and high reliability software. Raj contributed to the RGB project too, and now is receiving a sponsorship grant to work on free software full time from Square Crypto.

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Raj started to study civil engineering and physics, where he accumulated the basic understanding and even achieved a decent job. But as soon as he discovered Bitcoin, he found an intriguing subject that sparked his curiosity so much that he could again dedicate his time to exploring this new rabbit hole.

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Raj loves the free and open source ethos, where contributors are sharing their code so that others can use it, and even contribute back to make it better. The closed source ecosystem has to constantly catch up with the novel improvements by free software contributors. 

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Matthew Mežinskis is a great Austrian economist with an in-depth knowledge about the nuances of the money supply for hyperinflating fiat currencies, as well as for sound money Bitcoin and gold. This is a conversation about methodological approach in monetary economics, and the factual consequences of government intervention and inflation.

Watch all Highlights: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsjpqK1YHYYG5b55M6Y--6Qd

Watch all full episodes: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPwc75tPMdsixsuhwau82Q0IfxECo0z_E

Website: https://WasabiWallet.io

Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io

Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io

GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi

Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas

YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

Matthew is doing great research on the inflation of the fiat base money supply. The numbers of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 are a staggering hyperinflation. The trailing 12 month inflation rate is over 204% in Canada, 62% in the Eurozone nations, 60% in the United Kingdom, and 50% in the United States. The global base money supply increased by 35% in 2020, and by 29% in Q1 2021, this is the most meaningful comparison to the Bitcoin money supply, which increased by only 2%. 

Tweet 29: https://twitter.com/crypto_voices/status/1392828269343412224?s=20

Tweet 38: https://twitter.com/crypto_voices/status/1392828308967108610?s=20

Tweet 67: https://twitter.com/crypto_voices/status/1392829393341456387?s=20

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Matthew explains the Cantillon effect, which shows that the consequences of an increase of the money supply, is that those who are closer to the money printer gain in their percentage holding of the money supply, while those who receive newly printed money later, lose. Further, if the inflation is hidden, then latecomers don’t adjust their prices in time, thus further losing in the future.

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Matthew explains what makes up the base money supply in a fiat system, physical cash notes and coins, as well as reserves at the central bank. The reserves are traded among banks, as well as used to buy government debt. Inflation is properly defined as an increase of this base money supply.

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Matthew explains that it is impossible to calculate one number which displays the purchasing power of money, and thus track the historical trend of price inflation in an economy. Consumer price indexes are fundamentally flawed and totally useless in economic decision making. Inflation is properly defined as a coercive increase in the money supply.

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Matthew talks about how you cannot blame a private business to act in their best interest and beg for government privileges in regards to tax subsidies, licenses and regulation. The real fault lies in the existence of the government and other mafia organizations who interact with others based on coercion and aggression. 

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Matthew explains how Marx had a flawed definition of a monopoly as a business that was so good in providing the good, that they “stole” a vast majority of the market share, to then raise prices to squeeze consumers. Rather, a monopoly is a business that can use the threat of government violence to keep new businesses away from entering the market. The monopolist has government privileges like licenses, tax subsidies, or patents. 

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Matthew explains why the labor theory of value is a flawed idea that leads to great destruction. Karl Menger established the subjective marginal value which is observed in the act of individuals exchanging goods and services. The source of value is not labor, or some bureaucracy planning board, it’s the subjective demand of individuals who seek to improve their situation.

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Rusty Russell is an ancient contributor to free software projects like the Linux Kernel, who now focuses on specifying and developing the Bitcoin Lightning Network. He is an early pioneer of the protocol, and is actively involved in improving its usability, security and privacy. Currently he is working on offers (next generation invoices), channel splicing (atomic closing and opening), and dual funded channels (CoinJoin openings).

Rusty Russell explains the problems of the current Bitcoin Lightning Network invoice, and how the new BOLT 12 Offer spec addresses them. First, the merchant creates a static offer, which includes the amount, description, items, recurrent payment information, and other important metadata. Now a user can request an invoice for this offer, and receive a cryptographically sound payment confirmation proof. 

Rusty Russell explains the privacy of dual funded channel openings of the Bitcoin Lightning Network. Here both channel peers provide their own inputs to the opening of a channel, making this a CoinJoin transaction. In later iterations of this protocol, advanced cryptography can be used to further protect user’s privacy.

Taproot enables public key and signature aggregation, so that multisig looks like singlesig. Because Lightning Network uses the multisig functionality, Taproot will make channel opening and closing transactions look more like regular non-lightning transactions. This is a great improvement for the privacy of Lightning, but there are still other problems to be solved.

Rusty Rusell explains what is splicing in the Bitcoin Lightning Network. This is an onchain transaction which closes one or more channels in the input, and opens one or more channels in the output. Even non-lightning coins can be spent, and non-lightning addresses can be paid in this transaction. This enables advanced CoinJoin among many collaborative users.

Bitcoin is a radically new and ambitious project, creating something that has never been attempted to be built before. Throughout the history of the Linux kernel development, there were crises of how to govern the project that seemed insurmountable at the time, yet small in hindsight. Bitcoin can take some of these learnings, but of course must overcome new problems to ultimately succeed.

Rusty Russell shares a story about the early days of the Linux Kernel, where many critics would say that this is not a solid software project. Especially the free software ethos of collaboration was a radically new idea, which later established itself as a solid approach to building security critical software. The early vision was to bring Linux to Desktop, which to this day is not yet achieved, though it did succeed for servers and mobile phone operating systems.

Rusty’s Wife encouraged him to take a sabbatical from Linux Kernel work, so he developed Petty Cash, what is now known as one of the first Bitcoin sidechains. Later Blockstream published their Sidechain paper, introducing a federated two way peg, so Rusty joined their team. But with the publication of the Lightning Network paper, he shifted his focus to specifying the Lightning spec and developing c-lightning, the very first Lightning implementation.

Stephan Kinsella is an incredible scholar of the Austrian school of praxeology, his major contribution is the advancement of the arguments in favor of property of scarce goods, and against intellectual property of non-scarce goods. He applies his in depth wisdom to how Bitcoin can be explained in this view. 

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Bitcoin had an immaculate conception, a steady software development progress, and a solid monetary stability. It seems to be very difficult for a new project to have similar, or even better, fundamentals as Bitcoin has. Yes, Bitcoin is beautiful, but it for sure is not perfect. It is yet to be discovered if humans will find an even more beautiful solution to the question of money.

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Bitcoin is a set of rules that every participant of the network follows. Thus changing these rules is extremely complicated, and can be very dangerous. A gold atom has 79 protons, and this definition is not man made, and thus cannot be changed by men. This is where gold is seemingly superior to Bitcoin.

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Money is a technology to enable trade without barter, and thus without the double coincidence of wants problem. Any supply of money will work to enable this function of medium of exchange. Further, when entrepreneurs price their goods and services in money, it becomes possible to calculate the cost of deep production stages, and thus find out the profitability of a project.

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A physical key is a scarce good that can unlock a given area in meatspace. A cryptographic key is also used to unlock things, however, the key is non-physical and non-scarce, just a long random looking number. Information is only the feature of an owned scarce good, but data can never be owned in it of itself.

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Every human must use scarce resources, in order to reach the end goals that the individual wants to achieve. Property rights are used to ensure social peace in regards to having a clearly defined record of who can use which scarce goods. This is a social concept among multiple individuals, to ensure long lasting mutual beneficial prosperity.

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Property Rights are a method to answer the question of who can decide how to use a scarce resource, and who bears the responsibility for the good. Ownership can be obtained peacefully, by either being the first one to use it [homesteading] or by contractual agreement with the previous owner. However, these rules do not apply to non-scarce goods of cyberspace. 

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Lloyd Fournier, a Bitcoin researcher, shares his insights into the latest Bitcoin development progress. With ancient ideas like Schnorr signatures now finally coming to Bitcoin, cutting edge cryptographic breakthroughs like Adaptor signatures become possible too. With Taproot, the Bitcoin blockchain will become more and more boring.

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Lloyd Fournier is curating https://Bitcoin-Problems.Github.io, a website detailing open research problems in the Bitcoin space. He intends to notify outside researchers and thinkers to come into the Bitcoin rabbit hole to explore answers to these tough questions. This will channel the energy of eager researchers to make Bitcoin better.

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Lloyd Fournier explains the difference between adaptor signatures and discrete log contracts. Adaptor signatures are basically encrypted signatures, and a DLC is a logical construct build with interlocking adaptor signatures. This can be used to settle financial contracts based on an anonymous oracle attesting to the outcome of a certain event.

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Lloyd Fournier defines a CoinSwap as a fair exchange of two coins on the same blockchain. These atomic swaps are the first true protocol build natively on top of Bitcoins open blockchain. Both parties lock up bitcoin in a script, where if one party spends the coin, then the other party learns the secret that is required to spend the other.

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Lloyd Fournier says that the design goal of Taproot is to make the Bitcoin blockchain more boring, meaning that most transactions look basically the same. Currently each advanced script leaves a unique fingerprint on the blockchain. But with Taproot, unused spending conditions don’t have to be used, and multisignatures or adaptor signatures look like regular signatures.

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A thief is whoever initiates aggressive force against the property of a peaceful individual. The victim has the right to defend himself and his property with protective force. However, retribution is difficult, because the crime has already been committed, and the punishment is expensive too. Restitution is when the victim bargains with the aggressor for a financial settlement of damages.

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Lloyd Fournier explains that to make cross input signature aggregation possible in Bitcoin, signers need to be able to spend multiple coins in a single transaction, while only providing a single signature for all of them. Verifiers of this transaction need to ensure that the knowledge of all the private keys of all the input public keys is proven.

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Lloyd Fournier deems ECDSA signatures as reasonably secure, as it obviously protects a massive valuation of the Bitcoin network. But ECDSA is an inelleganent solution to a rather simple problem, while Schnorr signatures are the most fundamental Sigma protocol, and thus enable far more flexibility.

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Lloyd Fournier started to engineer technology to atomic swap bitcoin for ethereum at a australian research team. He is using and contributing Rust Bitcoin software, and has provided minor contributions to the Bitcoin Dev Kit. Though most of his code is experimental to help him understand the nuances of ap protocol.

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Ruben Somsen shares his insights in advanced Bitcoin sorcery, including his novel sidechain innovations statechains, spacechains, and softchains. He applies his generalist understanding of Bitcoin towards advancing the security, scalability and reliability of the technology.

Just alone understanding the Bitcoin base layer consensus system is very complex. But advanced second layer systems provide much more nuance in what the technology can be used for. Bitcoin will foster a massive wave of innovation and improvements.

Ruben Somsen explains the intricate nuances of layering multiple spacechains on top of each other. This can provide for vast transaction scaling improvements. But for every spacecoin on the spacechain, a coin on the baselayer blockchain has to be destroyed. This is effectively shrinking the coin supply for every additional layer.

Ruben Somsen talks about his latest invention: Spacechains, a Bitcoin sidechain where any user can compete to add a hash of the recent statechain block into a transaction in the Bitcoin blockchain. With a perpetual one-way-peg, any user can make his baselayer bitcoin unspendable, and in exchange create spacecoins, which are used to create transactions on the spacechain.

A Bitcoin address is an unbreakable vault that can only be opened if a valid solution to the script is provided. Many Bitcoin wallets use single public key scripts that only require a signature of one private key to be validated. Lightning Network uses non-custodial multi signature payment channel scripts, with pre-signed refund transactions to prevent theft. But with sidechains the base layer bitcoin are in full control of the sidechain protocol.

Ruben Somsen explains that the Bitcoin base layer is designed to provide a high amount of censorship resistance and individual sovereignty. This security comes at a high cost of proof of work and global consensus verification. It is not feasible for all worldwide economic transactions to be settled in the base layer. Individuals can choose to use higher layers with different trade-offs to make payments of lower value and higher frequency.

Ruben Somsen asked himself the important question of how Bitcoin could fail. Yet he did not really find a successful attack vector, which strengthened his conviction in the magic cyberspace money. Bitcoins blockspace is limited, so it is important to use it efficiently with second layers without decreasing the ability to verify layer one.

Bitcoin is an organism that is nurtured by its users. Buying bitcoin and doing nothing else is already a meaningful contribution. But there is so much more work to be done! Ruben Somsen realized that he wanted to be more than just a parasite, so he started the Soel Bitcoin meetup!

Janine Römer shares her concerns with the current journalist processes to research, publish, and maintain information. These should have individual privacy, censorship resistance, and sustainable financing built in. Revision Control Journalism and Bitcoin Lightning Network can in combination ensure that free journalists get the respect they deserve.

Many Bitcoin companies, especially custodial banks, are preemptively harassing their uses with arbitrary regulation that was made up by unelected bodies. There are no official requirements to enforce these rules, yet companies are cowardly doing their best to please the rule makers. The solution is simple: don’t give those crooks your bitcoin.

Janine explains that most journalists are funded by advertising revenue, some others have monthly subscription offerings. Bitcoin and the Lightning Network can help journalists with three things: censorship resistance, privacy and micro payments. As more journalists use Bitcoin as their native currency, this enables a whole new architecture of a free internet.

Janine explains how journalists can easily be censored by relying on trusted third parties for the publication of their work. It is essentially important to have local backups of all the important data that is entrusted to the publisher. Blockchain as a content storage mechanism is not a suitable solution.

Journalists are in the business of publishing information, while the goals of a privacy advocate is to carefully choose what information to publish. Alone the employment history is very interesting for journalists to research, as this can reveal interesting correlation among companies. Oftentimes there is no special access rights required, as all this information is public on facebook or linkedin.

Janine explains how Bitcoin as a time stamping server is incredibly useful for journalists, as this can prove that a certain piece of data did in fact exist at a certain point in the past. Even the git commit history can be secured against many attacks. Cryptographic signatures are essential to prove the authorship of a certain data.

Janine prefers to use free and open source software to write and edit her research. Her strong focus on strong encryption is obvious. Operating systems like Tails or Qubes, and writing software like Libre Office, and Etherpads are essential in every journalists toolbox.

Janine thinks the status quo standard practices in journalism are both unproductive and unethical. The main problem is intransparency of the review and editing process, where editors are not credited for their work. Silently fixing a gross error is a common practice. Revision control journalism uses the principles of free software development, mainly a transparent open review and crediting system.

Shand Radliff explores the idea of Vonu, voluntary and not vulnerable, a liberation strategy to reduce the interaction with coercive thiefs. This was first articulated by a pseudonym known as Rayo, who lived as a van nomad, and later as a wilder man in nature. Privacy and encryption are a key tool for Vonuans to protect their liberty in the here and now.

If the attacker cannot find you, then they cannot coerce you. And if the attacker cannot read what you write, then he cannot find you. Encrypting communications is an essential part in the Vonu liberation strategie. Rayo spoke about encrypted HAM radio networks, and even hand-written cyphers.

Rayo defined the effectiveness of a liberation strategy as the mean time to harassment, it measures the amount of time in between instances of coercion, from both agents of the State and private individuals. The higher the mean time to harassment, the more free an individual, and therefore the superior the lifestyle.

Shane shows how cost of living is usually the largest expense of an individual. Yet reducing your costs increases your optionality. One benefit of nomadism in general is a drastic reduction in living cost. Van nomadism is especially affordable compared to other living arrangements. In the end, if you spend less, you save more Bitcoin!

Shane explains that a potential downside for a Nomad is to rely on the income of physical jobs, and how digital entrepreneurship alleviates that problem. The unknown and uncertainty of where to wake up tomorrow is challenging, but empowering. Yet being out of the 9 to 5 rat race gives ample time to contemplate and reflect on the importance of a free life.

As Shane started the Vonu podcast and wrote the book Vonu The Strategy for Self Liberation, he realized that this focus on publishing freedom related knowledge is meaningful. He also started a nomadic lifestyle, moving to Austin and Achapulco and exploring opportunities there. But finally understood the value of owning land and growing food in a homestead.

Podcasts have the benefit of inviting guests to come join on a show, and usually the guest will actually want to be published, and thus is happy to come talk. Building this network of strong individuals can be leveraged for building a second realm of freedom.

Shane Radliff speaks of his experience in independent radio and podcast hosting with Liberty Under Attack Publications. He explored ideas of minarchist constitutionalism, until he discovered the ideas of anarchy and austrian economics. Now he is focusing on living voluntary, and not vulnerable, in a second realm agora.

Peter Todd joins the Wasabikas to talk about his exhaustive background in free software and Bitcoin development. He explains the three groundbreaking technologies he has invented: Open Time Stamps, a protocol to prove that some data existed in the past; Client Side Validated State, for efficient and private value transfer off-chain; and Proof Marshal, to validate data in itself and in context.

Proof Marshal is a crazy idea by Peter Todd about a nuanced protocol to validate data. The verifier not only checks if the data itself is valid as a whole, but also if it is valid against an external context. For example a Bitcoin block can be valid for all Bitcoin consensus rules, but if it is not in the most heavy proof of work blockchain, then it is not a truly valid Bitcoin block.

Peter Todd explains Single Use Seals in 3 minutes. With a private key, you can create an infinite number of signatures. The signature proves that a message was signed by a key, but it does not indicate that there was no other signature. If Alice signs a contract to sell a house to Bob, this does not imply that Alice did not sign such a contract already with Carol. Single Use Seals is a signature scheme, with which you can only sign once. This cannot be achieved purely by math, but it can be solved either by trust in other people, or trustlessly with the Bitcoin blockchain.

The Bitcoin blockchain cannot provide fine grain timestamping. The miners in fact don’t even have to put the actual time into their Bitcoin block. Peter Todd judges that Open Timestamps are accurate for a certain date, but not necessarily for any hour or minute.

Security software is not about solving problems, it’s about preventing things from happening. The Open Timestamps protocol prevents people from falsely claiming that data existed in the past. It does this by proving that data did in fact exist in the past! And all by the power of the Bitcoin blockchain.

Peter Todd got primed to understand Bitcoin based on his fathers education as an economist, he quickly figured out that fiat money is simply a fraud. Peter tried to invent Bitcoin in highschool, but he was on a wrong track to use proof of work to mint coins, and puttling not enough emphasis on reaching consensus on verifying the transactions and coins. What was missing was a data structure that can be validated within itself.

What drives entrepreneurs to work on free software? Peter Todd explains that it is first and foremost because businesses themselve use the software, and thus have a direct benefit of a reliable toolkit. Even more so, free software projects are renowned for their enhanced security through the rigorous review process.

Why did Peter Todd get entangled with free software in the first place? By Uncle Jimmy introducing him to UNIX and Linux, which was available gratis to play around with. The free software ethos figured out the right incentive to build complex projects at scale.

Ben Kaufman is a long contributor to the Specter Bitcoin Wallet, which is a graphical user interface on top of a Bitcoin Core full node, with a special emphasis on multisignatures with hardware wallets. This is a next generation Bitcoin wallet definitely worth checking out!

The Specter DIY Bitcoin hardware wallet is a offline signing device that can be built by yourself from scratch. It includes a QR code scanner, a large touch display, and SD card port, as well as all the cutting edge features desired. Because you build it yourself, this removes a whole bunch of supply chain attack vectors. It’s a great addition to a multisig wallet.

Ben Kaufman is a fan of Andrew Chow’s Hardware Wallet Interface, which is a library used by software wallets to communicate with all types of hardware wallets. This makes it so much easier for software developers to integrate offline signing devices into their Bitcoin wallet.

Ben Kaufman explains the nuances of backing up a Bitcoin multi signature wallet. Obviously, it is very important to backup your private keys with the recovery words. However, since multisig is an advanced smart contract, it is important to also backup the exact script that is used to lock-up the bitcoin. Even if you know the private keys, without knowing the exact script, you cannot spend your coins!

Terminology in Bitcoin can be confusing. A hardware wallet only does a subset of the features of a wallet, mainly generating private keys, and signing transactions. While a software wallet is used to check your transaction history, show your coins in a GUI, and help you to build a Bitcoin transaction.

Ben Kaufman knows why it is  important to run your own Bitcoin full node, it improves your own privacy, sovereignty and security. When you run your own Bitcoin full node, you are not trusting on any third party to verify your transactions. Protecting your Bitcoin with multi signatures is a massive improvement. Specter Wallet is a graphical user interface which calls the Bitcoin Core RPC server, thus inheriting all its powerful features.

Ben Kaufman exhaustively studied the Austrian School of Economics, which helped him to understand the value proposition of Bitcoin, and why Bitcoin is the most important project to work on. In the medium term, Bitcoin will enable individuals to manifest their sovereignty. Governments are constantly threatening their citizens to escape their jurisdiction, but Bitcoin makes wealth transfer out of this tyranny possible and cheap.

Ben Kaufman started his entrepreneurial cariere as a freelance software developer. But because he was under age, he was censored from opening a bank account, and always had to ask his parents and friends for permission to make financial transactions. For him, Bitcoin was a solution to this problem, and he started to demand to be paid in bitcoin.

Andrew Chow is pioneering in his contributions to Bitcoin Core to rebuild the Bitcoin wallet from scratch. He is working on output script descriptors, miniscript, taproot, hardware wallet interface, and partially signed Bitcoin transaction. The future of Bitcoin wallets is secure, interoperable, transparent and easy to backup.

Andrew Chow is livestreaming his coding sessions where he works on improving Bitcoin software. Users interact asking questions about Bitcoin, and pointing out bugs in Andrew’s code. This rubber duck explaining style of coding is very helpful in boosting productivity and understanding.

Andrew Chow thinks there’s a rough consensus to deploy Taproot via BIP 8 softfork, which uses the Bitcoin block height instead of timestamps for timing coordination. There’s contention on if miners should activate via readiness signaling, or if users should enforce the activation in any case. Speedy Trial is supposed to achieve swift miner signaling.

What happens if you put output script descriptors, miniscript, taproot, hardware wallet interface, and partially signed Bitcoin transactions together? An awesome Bitcoin wallet experience! This brings countless improvements in security, privacy, scaleability, and upgradability.

Bitcoin output script descriptors include a precise definition of the conditions under which a key can be spent. This is important to know for backups of an advanced Bitcoin wallet, for example multi signatures. One descriptor can even include an extended public key, and thus describe an entire wallet in a single backup string. And even Miniscript is supported!

While Miniscript allows to express arbitrary Bitcoin scripts in a human and machine readable way. With Miniscript it is much more intuitive for both developers and users to understand under what conditions the money can be spent. Miniscript is designed to create secure, efficient and private scripts, even based on how likely a certain condition is to be used.

The old wallet generation relied primarily on private keys, but Bitcoin’s concept actually works with scripts. Andrew Chow is working on output script descriptors, which clearly express under which conditions a coin can be spent. But this change is no longer backwards compatible with old Bitcoin Core wallets.

As a young student, Andrew Chow was censored from using fiat banking infrastructure, he always had to trust his parents to make financial transactions for him. That’s why the idea of a completely decentralized currency is so appealing for him. Bitcoin is available for your use regardless how old you are or where you live!

Seres Istvan [@Istvan_A_Seres] explains that the Lightning Network is a layer on top of Bitcoin, so for any privacy analysis, we have to consider both layers in tandem. Lightning requires two on-chain transactions, the channel opening, and the channel closing. In its lifetime the channel can be used for off-chain payments. We must assume that the adversary is present and attacking on both layers.

Adam Gibson shares how his background in physics, cryptography and philosophy primed him for understanding Bitcoin and thriving as a contributor. He explains eloquently the nuances of randomness and how this ensures Bitcoins security. His contributions to JoinMarket help to finally make Bitcoin fungible and private.

Adam Gibson enjoyed the easy to understand concrete building blocks that the early JoinMarket scripts offered. A lot of the privacy footguns were taken care of, while having a strong focus on usability and practicality. Waxwing’s early contribution was an end-to-end encrypted messaging layer.

As Adam Gibson got deeper in the Bitcoin rabbit hole, he connected with Chris Belcher to research the possibilities of Multisignatures and CoinJoin. This interest got fostered by conversations with Gregory Maxwell, and early prototype development by DarkWallet. Belcher finally discovered the idea of using market incentives to create CoinJoin liquidity.

As a nuclear engineer, Adam Gibson first started to explore UNIX. Later he discovered Linux, and fell in love with the freedom and personal power to control the computer. But in his ordinary teaching job he abandoned the hobby, only to later rediscover the beauty of free software in the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Cryptography was initially mainly used by closed source minded institutions like governments and military operations. Only with the advent of private public key cryptography did this tool get used by the masses, without the approval of a priest class. But coming up with and reviewing cryptographic protocols is very counter-intuitive, and requires a lot of nuance, so be careful!

Adam Gibson explains why RSA is less performant than elliptic curve cryptography, because algorithms to factor prime numbers are getting more efficient, which means that the key size has to be larger too. But ECDSA is a lot more complex and difficult to understand, than RSA is.

Adam Gibson explains that prime numbers logarithmically decrease in density, but the distribution of prime numbers is in fact random, which makes them really difficult to find. Without computers, there’s not really a use case for such unfadementally large random numbers, but thanks to fast computation, cryptography becomes possible.

Adam Gibson's first contact with cryptography was the early crypto wars, where cryptographic keys were treated as ammunition. But only after discovering Bitcoin, did he treasure how numbers can magically be used to protect secrets.

Adam Gibson got interested in the philosophy of physics to discover the organizing principles of the universe. Though he did not focus his education on the mechanical aspects of physics.

Chris Stewart [@Chris_Stewart_5] and Nadav Kohen [@Nadav_Kohen] share their story of the Bitcoin rabbit hole, specifically pioneering usage of Lightning Network with the PAID pay per API call. Their current focus is on building discrete log contracts on Bitcoin and in the Lightning Network, to enable incredible financial contracts that are private and scalable.

Nadav Kohen [@Nadav_Kohen] explains his favorite future use case of discrete log contracts in Bitcoin Lightning Network. Users can set up smart contracts to create synthetic assets that represent the value of arbitrary assets. DLCs make this trust-less, non-custodial, and peer-to-peer.

Chris Stewart [@Chris_Stewart_5] explains his favorite business models made possible with DLCs. Atomic Finance enables holders of bitcoin to earn more sats, by offering a covered call option on bitcoin. This can be used to hedge against the Bitcoin price going down. Thanks to DLCs, this is all non-custodial and trust-less peer-to-peer.

Nadav Kohen [@Nadav_Kohen] explains how Bitcoin Lightning Network transactions work. If the payment is inside only one payment channel, then there are just regular signatures, and no hashed time locked contracts. But if the payment is routed through the Lightning Network, it uses contingent payments with HTLCs. The routing node only gets paid, if he commits to paying the next node in the route.

Nadav Kohen [@Nadav_Kohen] explains that a Lightning Network channel opening looks on-chain like someone paid into a 2-of-2 multisignature. Taproot improves this, by utilizing Schnorr MuSig, where a multisignature looks like a single signature. In the future, a payment channel can settle more advanced things than “just” payments, like DLCs.

If you want to use private and scalable smart contracts, then put as little information as necessary on the blockchain. Nadav Kohen [@Nadav_Kohen] gives the advice to keep state off-chain between peers, and use cryptographic tools to ensure security. As less information is put on chain, it’s cheaper and less people see what’s going on.

Chris Stewart [@Chris_Stewart_5] and Nadav Kohen [@Nadav_Kohen] were pioneers in developing PAID, a protocol to pay per API call with Bitcoin over the Lightning Network. First, the user receives an encrypted data set, then the user pays a lightning invoice to SuredBits, which reveals the decryption key to the user.

Nadav Kohen [@Nadav_Kohen] talks about the challenging onboarding experience of starting to contribute to Bitcoin. It was vital that Chris Stewart [@Chris_Stewart_5] was there to answer his many questions. His first task was to implement the Bitcoin RPC client in Scala, here he could learn about Bitcoin one function at a time. Nadav has transformed himself to a grey-bearded wizard who has an in-depth understanding of Bitcoin and discrete log contracts.

Max Hillebrand [@HillebrandMax] explains that if a Bitcoin wallet UX gives the user all possible freedoms, that this puts the user at risk of shooting himself in the foot. For example, Adam Ficsor [@nopara73] once clustered all his transactions in Bitcoin Core, by selecting all coins, and sending a small amount. Wasabi 1.0 was designed to prevent this mistake!

Dan Walmsley [@dwuk86] explains the struggles of depreciating an old UI, and improving on its intuitive use in a next version. Power users love the quirky features of the Wasabi 1.0 design, and those features should still be possible in the new Wasabi 2.0. But wherever possible, UX hurdles to achieve privacy will be systematically removed, while keeping advanced features hidden by default.

Dan Walmsley [@dwuk86] agrees that the original Wasabi 1.0 was powerful, but not intuitive. For example it did not have CoinJoin by default, and thus default users did not gain any benefit of this awesome feature. Wasabi 2.0 is designed to protect the privacy of every user, even those who don’t know what’s going on under the hood.

Wasabi 1.0 design was for power users who knew what they were doing, and were eager to look out for the hidden features. It enabled advanced technical users to enjoy the full privacy benefit of a quirky Bitcoin wallet. But Wasabi 2.0 sets out to be intuitive and approachable for even non-technical average Bitcoin users. Dan Walmsley [@dwuk86] explains the new priorities in Bitcoin wallet design.

Dan Walmsley [@dwuk86] talks about the creation of the original Wasabi Wallet design. Thanks to Adam Ficsor’s established work, this could be achieved in only three weeks. Lucas Ontivero spent hours in conversation with Dan to explain how Bitcoin works, and how a Bitcoin Wallet should look like.

Microsoft’s WPF was not cross-platform and closed source, Avalonia set out to be the open source alternative. WPF was a mature framework with established features and flows, while Avalonia started out from scratch and with the benefit of hindsight could improve on it fundamentally. Dan Walmsley [@dwuk86] explains the benefits of the open approach.

Dan Walmsley [@dwuk86] speaks about the struggle of working with closed source proprietary hardware. Reverse engineering hardware is actually easier than software, because at least you can look at the computer and see where the wires go. Closed Source software can have advanced obfuscation to make inspecting the source code even more difficult.

Join Nicolas Dorier and Max Hillebrand for a fascinating conversation about the struggle with trusted third parties, the origins of BTCPay, and the future of advanced crypto magic in Bitcoin.

Nicolas Dorier explains the wonders of adaptor signatures in discrete log contracts with oracles. Two parties can make a bet, and an oracle signs a message of which outcome won. This is private, scalable and secure, with an in-built lie detector and even multi-signature oracles.

Nicolas Dorier was censured from opening fiat bank accounts, thanks to a massive apparatus of keeping and sharing a record of sensitive personal information. After 7 denied account openings, the central bank forced one of the banks to open him an account, so that he at least can pay his taxes. Bitcoin fixes the problems of surveillance in fiat money.

Nicolas Dorier talks about the struggles of working for gratis on important free software projects. He started the BTCPay Foundation to fund raise from Bitcoin companies and distribute the money to the contributors of BTCPay. Since they hold their capital in bitcoin, every price rise makes them more valuable!

Already when Nicolas Dorier first released BTCPay Server, the Docker image was modular with three important pieces: Bitcoin Core full node, a UTXO tracker, and BTCPay Server itself. But recently with the new Greenfield API and a new PlugIn system, many more other contributors can build on BTCPay.

According to Nicolas Dorier, Satoshi wrote a monolithic Bitcoin software that did all the things, from consensus verification, wallet management, mining, a market place, and even a poker software. Over time some of these features were dropped entirely, and were developed into advanced and specialized standalone software.

Nicolas Dorier explains that a full node allows you to verify transactions, but it’s feature set is very limited, while it’s RPC server is not stable and powerful. Bitcoin can do so much more than the basic full node features. A library gives you way more control, and a much larger feature set.

How did Nicolas Dorier even start to write a full Bitcoin library? By taking the tests of Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin J library, porting them to C#, and then writing code that would pass.

Lucas Ontivero [@lontivero], the first contributor to both NBitcoin and Hidden Wallet, joins the Wasabikas to share his journey down the rabbit hole. From copying source code out of magazines, to researching advanced cryptography in WabiSabi.

Before Bitcoin will fix the world, there will be a war on Bitcoin. As governments see their power diminish, they will tax, ban and criminalize those who use Bitcoin to protect themselves. Those loyal to the state will try to slow down the adoption of Bitcoin.

Lucas Ontivero [@lontivero] explains that a primitive hunter needs to kill and eat his prey immediately, while a smart hunter can conserve his food with salt. Thus he doesn’t have to spend every day hunting, he can invest his time into more advanced tasks. Government intervention makes people more primitive, poor and stupid. Bitcoin is the new salt to help people save their capital.

Lucas Ontivero [@lontivero] explains that ZeroLink can only do naive equal amount CoinJoins, while WabiSabi can coordinate any arbitrary CoinJoin. WabiSabi improves privacy and enables many more advanced use cases for centrally coordinated CoinJoins.

People feel that something is horribly wrong, but they don’t know exactly what is messed up. Lucas Ontivero [@lontivero] discovered libertarianism and Austrian Economics through Bitcoin, and thus understood the answers to these questions.

What excited Lucas Ontivero [@lontivero] about Bitcoin in the early days? It’s that usually, people tell the software what to do. Yet Bitcoin is software that uses incentives to organize people. A novel and genius concept.

Everything was yet to be built, there were no libraries, no test frameworks, no prerequisite work. Everything was possible, yet Lucas Ontivero [@lontivero] did nothing meaningful. He was interested in malware and antivirus software, yet he regrets that he did not follow up on them.

Lucas Ontivero [@lontivero] started coding when nobody knew what the computer was for. He found the source code of programs in print-magazines. His parents didn’t understand the crazy magic he was working on.

Adam Ficsor [nopara73] shares his motivation and experience for developing Bitcoin Privacy software. He loves free software because it is designed to solve real and important problems for everyday users. Building the first version of Wasabi Wallet took years, and v2.0 is promising a substantial improvement with privacy by default for everyone.

Bitcoin solves all aspects of a money near perfectly, other than portability & fungibility. Lightning Network helps with Bitcoins portability. Although fungibility is commonly considered 'risky to work on', Adam Ficsor [@nopara73] thinks it's the most important current problem to work on.

Adam Ficsor [@nopara73] explains that the cryptography in ZeroLink is very simple, and that prevents us from doing many advanced things. Privacy is only achieved for coins of a standard denomination value, but the coordinator and outside observers can spy on the non-standard change coins.

WabiSabi uses more advanced cryptography tailor-made for CoinJoin, to create private arbitrary amount CoinJoins, which was not possible before!

Adam Ficsor [@nopara73] explains that the original goal of Wasabi was to build a light wallet that actualy provides privacy in Bitcoin. But the final product has to be a wallet that is easy to use for anyone, and with private by default for everyone.

We started the weekly Wasabi Research Club [https://github.com/zkSNACKs/Wasabiresearchexperience] to analyze all existing Bitcoin privacy research papers. Based on these learnings, we created WabiSabi, which might be the best Bitcoin privacy technology for a long time, at least until another groundbreaking innovation.

Wasabi 2.0 consists of WabiSabi, a new CoinJoin protocol; a novel graphical user interface; and an improved user workflow. Changing the Wasabi project so fundamentally is a big risk, however Bitcoin is just warming up for mass adoption, so this has to be implemented swiftly.

Adam Ficsor [@nopara73] contributed to multiple Bitcoin privacy projects, especially Joinmarket and Tumblebit. However, he realized that there is an opportunity to improve the efficiency and decrease the cost with CoinJoin. This lead him to research and implement the Zero Link Fungability Framework.

Adam Ficsor [@nopara73] thinks that Wasabi used to be user friendly in it's early days, but as the expectations and user group changed, there are countless improvement opportunities for the UI/UX.

In this clip, Adam Ficsor [@nopara73] speaks about why he stopped working on proprietary closed source software, and what motivates him to build free software itself.

"If not for Bitcoin, I would have stopped writing software a long time ago!"

Adam Ficsor [@nopara73] concludes that in free software you're free to do anything, there are so many problems to solve, and ultimately it is your choose which problem to work on. When others see that your work improves the code, they will merge it and everyone will benefit from the solved problem.