You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
We talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Vic and Seth, welcome to the show.
First time, long time.
Thanks for having us on.
Yeah, I'm excited for this.
I've been, man, Tales from the Crypt was the first show when I first went down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin
and fell down the listen to a thousand hours of podcasts.
Tales from the Crypt was the go for me.
So it's really, really cool to be able to be on here.
Obviously, I've known Adele for a really long time,
but we've never gotten to chat much, Marty.
So I'm excited for this.
Thanks for having us on.
I am as well.
I mean, you guys just launched Radar Chat this week,
which is a long time coming.
Adele and I have been talking about the need
for Bitcoin payments and Signal for years.
I think since we started Rabbit Hole Recap eight years ago,
it's always been a topic of discussion here and there.
You guys have finally launched it. Thank you for that, number one.
Number two, I think the juxtaposition of your launch date on July 7th
and everything going on in the EU as it pertains to chat control,
VPN banning being talked about in the UK,
facial recognition being talked about in cars throughout the European Union.
And it seems like the digital panopticon is being erected around us.
And it's incumbent upon us in the Freedom Tech space to build the tools to route around that.
And it looks like with radar, you've done just that.
So I think to jump off, just talking about what convinced you to build radar in the first place and why now.
So, I mean, there was a lot of factors involved.
One being, of course, the community wanted it.
You've talked about it, Odell, like you said.
Even Jack Dorsey's tweeted about it.
We have a pretty good video coming out on that pretty soon.
So that was a big driving force.
Another one was on my trips to China, everyone using WeChat.
And when it comes time to pay at the cafe or wherever I am, you're not pulling out another payment app or anything.
You just use the same app that you're communicating with.
um so that was that was also a driving factor um you know right now for messaging
it's it's so natural everybody's doing it all the time that's what you wake up and you do you
check your messages see what you've any messages from your friends or family um so it's already a
platform that everybody's using all the time and there's already so much stuff blowing in messaging
apps like x of course but also video pictures documents so why not money right that's what we
thought why not money why can't bitcoin flow through this the same system um and why now
i think the tech is is there now to do it um i don't know if you know a couple years ago when
seth just joined on actually we were trying to implement lightning into cake wallet
and it was just a terrible user experience um even though the user didn't have to worry about
managing channels and liquidity and all that still the user experience was pretty bad
and actually seth killed when he came on so you can blame him um but then uh you know spark and uh
and breeze uh breeze built an sdk for for spark and we put that in cake already this year and it
It was a huge success.
And we're like, okay, this is it.
This technology is here now.
We can put it into Signal.
Then your next question should be, why Signal, right?
And we kicked around the idea of doing another messaging app, you know, a new one altogether.
But, I mean, you probably have four or five messaging apps on your phone right now, at least.
And now I try to get people to download yet another messaging app and have all their friends and family join.
It's just, it's a heavy lift, right?
Um, Signal made sense at their gold standard and privacy.
Uh, it's open source.
We can build, we can build on it.
They have some payment rails that we were able to take advantage of with that mobile
coin.
They did.
But yeah, with all these things coming together at the right time, if it was an obvious and
right time to do this project.
Seth, I mean, you've been on the tip of the spear of freedom tech and particularly as
as it pertains to bringing privacy to users,
how would you describe the implementation of radar leveraging
for a signal that open source project
and then the way in which you guys implemented
Bitcoin payments within the wallet?
Yeah, for sure.
So, I mean, I think they covered all the high-level details.
The big things to me are, one, like you said,
like the the ability to do lightning in a way that feels frictionless but is still self-custodial
i know we can maybe get into some of the specifics of the trust model of spark down the line if you
want but in my eyes still self-custodial that that just really changed the game because even
if you look back at the the bitcoin for signal campaign that happened uh a year 18 months ago
now um there's a big push on on x jack dorsey and others pushing for for signal to add bitcoin
indirectly that push was using cashew which is a custodial e-cash solution which is great for
privacy like essentially perfect uh privacy on the transaction layer but requires a custodian
to actually hold people's bitcoin and obviously one problem with that is like obviously we want
people doing self-custody. The other problem is signal themselves as an org. If they actually
touched custody of anyone's coins from regulatory perspective, that's a complete shift for them.
It makes them a huge target. So they weren't going to want to do that. But honestly, when that
campaign went, even in these last 12 or 18 months, there's been a revolution in the payments UX that's
possible with Bitcoin while still letting people actually hold their own keys. So Spark was part
of that have been really leading the way. Arc through both Arcade and Bark are getting there
as well and allowing us to build tools like this where suddenly we don't need to have the user
understand the ins and outs of Bitcoin or deal with a ton of headaches or figure out what does
inbound liquidity mean or how do I buy inbound liquidity and how much do I need and what happens
to it. All of that stuff goes away and people get to just make payments simply. So it's really that
the technology for building around Bitcoin actually has gotten good enough that we can
put it in apps where people aren't necessarily ideologues.
People are using Signal today who have no clue what privacy is provided.
And that was another reason why that was such a good pairing for us is Signal have hit that
sweet spot over the years.
So it's a sweet spot that I think many of us in the Freedom Tech space are targeting
of how do we build underlying, incredibly impressive privacy tooling?
but on top of it, build a user experience that is just very, very approachable,
easy to use, and that people want to use even if they don't care about them building privacy.
And even when you look at Signal, I have gotten all of my friends and family
to get into the Signal network over the years. I have not convinced any of them of the need for
broader personal privacy. I don't know if that says a lot about them or a lot about me as a poor
evangelist, but I haven't been able to convince them about the broader need. They don't have any
an idea how Signal itself works under the hood for privacy, but they're just there for the good
features. And they're there because I'm there and other people that they love are there.
And I think that's where we need to get Bitcoin to over the long term is people just use Bitcoin
because it's the simplest, best tool for the job, not because necessarily they're ideologically
motivated to use Bitcoin or because they embrace Bitcoin maximalism or any of this, but rather they
just, hey, I'm already chatting with these people. Oh, I can also send value. I can pay them back for
lunch, I can send a remittance over borders without having to worry about anything, without
having to worry about custody, without having to worry about if it will be intercepted in the
middle. It opens up a whole new world. And now it does it in a way that combines the people you're
already chatting with. You don't have to start from scratch with money that is cross border,
that is permissionless. And that's the real powerful combination. And a lot of it is that
the tech behind it has gotten good enough that we can do that in a way where it's honestly just
seamless.
Yeah, well, you mentioned like Bitcoins.
Oops, sorry, Vic.
Sorry, I was just going to add to that.
Just a broader, I guess something that's going to happen,
trend that's going to happen is people are going to stop building tools
for Bitcoin and force people to join that tool,
but rather embed Bitcoin into existing tools and rails.
Like Jack Dorsey did with, am I frozen?
I'm going in and out.
Oh, okay.
I froze there for a second.
like Jack Dorsey did with the Square Terminal.
It was already an existing infrastructure,
and he put Bitcoin Lightning in there.
And the same thing we did in an existing messaging app,
and we put Bitcoin in there.
I think that'll be the trend moving forward.
Rather than making things for just Bitcoiners,
make things for regular folks and put Bitcoin in there.
Yeah.
I think diving deeper into this, more technical details,
or maybe like the philosophy of the tech,
like Ysignal versus something like WhatsApp
for the layman out there.
Like Ysignal the way in which you described it
compared to something like WhatsApp, Telegram,
other messaging apps, and then Bitcoin,
obviously with the rise of the agentic economy,
the X402 protocol,
and the OUSD consortium bringing stable coins.
Like why not embed a stable coin in the app?
why start with Bitcoin?
What, considering the use case that you're going after,
which is private speech and sovereign money,
like why aren't those other tools good for either speech or money?
Or maybe not optimal for the use case that you're going for specifically.
Yeah, I guess we could give a basic reason
and get into more of the technicalities.
Signal made sense because it's open source.
There's no corporation behind it.
It's an organization, a nonprofit organization.
But main thing that it's open source and we could work that right away.
And it's the, like I said, it's a gold standard of privacy.
Like Seth said, it's a gold standard of privacy that makes privacy easy.
You don't even know you're being private.
And Bitcoin, Bitcoin Lightning made sense.
It's fast, instant.
It can do very, very small payments.
stable coins i mean i think that's something we're considering in the future either giving
users a choice to automatically convert to stable coins so they don't see their
value fluctuating like you may with bitcoin it would be a great feature for non-bitcoiners where
they open up the app and they just see a usd balance they don't have to worry about they don't
even have to know that it's bitcoin lightning in the back so we're kicking those ideas around
And I guess from a more technical reason why we chose SignalSeth to get into that, why we chose Lightning.
Yeah, I mean, the pairing is very intentional because I think something that we, like I know you all have been talking about for a long time on the show, Marty and Odell's and being the drum on is like the stuff needs to be freedom tech.
It needs to be something that enables the individual.
And so the underlying messaging tool that we use had to be something that was censorship resistant, privacy preserving.
Other apps claim that WhatsApp, Telegram famously claim that all the time about that they're a privacy messenger, but they're just they're not.
They're not at all.
They kind of use that as a marketing veneer, something to put on what they're actually building, but it's not core to what they're doing.
And even when they do it there are a ton of drawbacks and caveats to the actual privacy preserved or to who has access to those chats even if they aren encrypted WhatsApp for instance those chats can easily be sent as well to Facebook and they get access to all the chats So they end to end to end encrypted in many scenarios where they are accessible by third parties So Signal yeah
I mean, it's the standard for privacy preserving messaging. So we wanted a really good base to go
with there. Also, messaging protocols are very complex and you can go wrong in many different
ways. And so being able to use what is the gold standard of messaging protocols out of the box was
also a huge win for us. So we didn't have to reinvent the wheel there. There are some other
messengers that are doing really cool things with reinventing the wheel in terms of messaging
protocols. Simplex, for instance, have done a great job there. But we wanted to lean into
something that was very established and set in stone on the messenger side. And then obviously,
like why Bitcoin? It's the same reasons. We want freedom tech to be paired with freedom money.
We want it to be that we want the bones, the rails, at least to be Bitcoin no matter what.
So like even when we talk about exploring stable coins in the future, those are only
stable coins that live on Bitcoin.
So like specifically, we're using Spark under the hood.
Those would be stable coins on Spark.
So yes, in theory, those stable coins have different trust models.
Like some of them can be frozen, not necessarily all of them, but some of them can be frozen
remotely, even if you have your own keys.
So obviously, they're not filling the same freedom money space.
but when we're talking about people who just want to be able to send remittances back to
south america maybe they don't want to deal with the volatility of bitcoin so i think giving users
that choice but doing it in a way that is still they hold the keys to that still lives on the
bitcoin rails and the very important piece to me is it gives them the add a tap in a second ability
to swap between those stable coins and bitcoin and get to permissionless money very quickly
I think something we're going to see with stable coins is it's all fun and games until your tether gets frozen, your stable coins get frozen.
And as people experience that more and more, as the pain of that comes more and more, we'll see that people want to shift to hard money, to something that is more censorship resistant.
So enabling that rail to be able to switch at a tap from your stable coins to Bitcoin when you need a kind of a flight to safety, that's really critical to us as well.
yeah i mean another this is a topic i really want to dive down because back i know you and i have
been talking about this a lot which is the the emergence of vibe coding and i had uh francis
pull out from bullet bitcoin on earlier this week like they're in a sued the french government for
an infringement on privacy rights to their customers via the the dak 8 legislation that
or regulations that went live earlier this year
and that BullBitcoin is expected to report on early next year.
And like I said earlier, it seems like the attack on privacy,
the attack on individual sovereignty in the digital age
is being waged at an accelerating pace.
But it also seems like the ability to combat that
with the building out of FreedomTech tools is encouraging,
I would say. And I think I'm very curious to get your thoughts on historically
the knock on freedom or not the knock, like the, the lack of adoption of freedom tech has
been because of the convenience factor. It's not as convenient as the, the closed source,
um, or walled garden tech that makes everything easy out of the box. And is, do you think with
the emergence of vibe coding or just the maturation of the freedom tech protocols and the development
sort of concentration around these protocols that we do have the ability to compete with the
closed sourced platforms and technologies that really make the trade-off of convenience
or privacy in favor of convenience,
or your lack of privacy,
but you get way more convenient experiences.
Do you think we're getting the feature parity
and UX parity in the freedom of privacy space?
So I think the genie's out of the bottle, right?
I'm one of those people that believe
that the will of the people does win out in the end.
governments, regulators can keep fighting something, but the people want it and do it.
And you saw that happen with Bitcoin, right? In the early days, you remember in 2012, 13, there's
so much FUD that was going to get banned. The government's going to crack down. And eventually
it got so big that they couldn't ignore it, that these people are trading value in billions.
And regulators finally looked at it, governments finally looked at it and said,
okay we need to somehow bring this into the fold um as far as freedom tech is concerned i think it
goes along the same line you can't dock code uh if i publish some code somewhere take take
k quality for example right it's open source we can go away tomorrow government's been shut us
down let's say but you can download the code and you can build it yourself and i think your vibe
coding um references is really applicable here because before you know three years ago somebody
gives you a code hey you can download kick wallet and build it yourself like well i don't know how
to do that i'm not a not a developer i'm not a coder but now with with a you can just feed that
into cloud or a chad chifati and boom it'll make you an app and the ux ui reference you made i mean
And Elon Musk last year tweeted out, because of AI, user interface is dead.
And he's right, because on the fly, you can have it look whatever the way you want it to look.
You can take the cake code and say, here, build me a wallet, but make it look completely different.
Do something that you like.
So now you can do very custom user experience the way you want it.
Hide information you don't want, show information you want, features that you want, features that you don't want.
You can control everything.
A side note, does that worry me about cake? Well, yes, it does. But I think in the long term, not thinking selfishly, thinking selflessly, I think in the long term, this is all going to contribute to Freedom Tech and the use of Freedom Tech and accessibility to Freedom Tech to the regular folks.
I think all these efforts by the EU and things is futile.
Yeah, I think it like vibe coding also enhances the the overall uplift that comes with open source code, because one of the really nice things about open source code is like for us as a business, we can't compete on a intellectual property mode.
Like like you mentioned at Cake Wallet, like you can go download the code right now, the exact code that we're publishing to all of our users, and you can go build it and you can go customize it in whatever way you want.
not going to necessarily recommend like vibe coding complex changes to a wallet that's
self-custodial because obviously there are risks there but you can do that today and so what it
means is that us as a company we have to compete very aggressively for users by building what they
want we can't just sit back and say like okay we built we built something it's locked behind ip
ip laws we're just going to do the bare minimum and keep it alive and just keep people locked in
with a subscription for a decade.
Like that world is dead.
That world used to exist.
That world is dead now.
And that's a really good thing
because it means that the actual in tools
that get in people's hands
are much more competitive
and are much more built for them.
I think the other thing,
like Vic touched on this with UI UX
on the design side,
one of the really exciting things
about Vibe Coding
is not just the backend code side,
which I think is what most people think about
when they think about Vibe Coding.
but actually ai is really good and getting much better on the design side if you know what you
want and if you have a good idea on in terms of brand that sort of thing like a good example of
that is the website for radar radar.chat uh i built that but it was built from a really good
brand that jaime our head of brand came up with good logos color palettes all of that so like it
still needed good underlying building blocks with good uh messaging system that was built by folks
at Neural Radar, helped us out on the marketing side. But then I was able to build a really
beautiful website. I'm not a designer or a developer, but I knew what I wanted and I had
good building blocks. And the ability to do that is something that I think has been a problem in
the FreedomTech space for a long time. Usually it's very technical people who have a vision for
what the technology needs to be, but have a hard time translating that into a beautiful user-friendly
product. But there's really good tooling now on the AI side in terms of design review,
in terms of the actual like building the websites
and the front end side of things as well
that can let us build FreedomTech
that's really beautiful, intuitive and approachable
and easy to use at the same time,
which is a big shift as well in this space.
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unchained.com. I said, speaking of shifts, let's shift back to radar specifically, because I think
it would be remiss for us not to dive into some of the details. One of the most important to me
is the fact it's completely interoperable with Signal right now. And I think that
for you guys as massive,
like the ability to back up your signal key
and your encrypted key
and then upload it into Radar
and then have your chats there in the Radar app
is a massive 3UX boon
because the thought of downloading a fork of signal
and trying to rebuild your contact list
and reach out to people to start new chats
is a bit cumbersome.
So I think the ability to basically onboard yourself on the radar and have it in a way where it's like, oh, it's just picking up all your signal chat history that you're using as an everyday driver makes that sort of adoption hurdle much smoother.
It's not even a hurdle. It makes that adoption curve much smoother.
Yeah. I mean, like Seth and I have been using Radar as our primary signal client for four months now. And I messaged you on there. You can't tell I'm using another app or anything. And it works seamlessly. And like I said earlier, that's what we wanted. We wanted to enter something that's already there and not try to bring people into a whole new thing and learn something completely new.
So I'm glad to hear that's being accepted well.
Although we did think it was obvious that people should back up their signal first and then restore from backup We adding a little splash page to the next update which will warn people hey before you move any further go do this on signal first
Your signal will stop working.
Of course, you can link it on another device like your desktop.
You can still run signal on your desktop or another phone if you have it as a link device, but not as a primary device.
if you want to use the bitcoin features of radar um but yeah like like you pointed out that was
important for us to to bring it to something that already exists rather than making something brand
and to really drive it home to people i mean just for those who are listening we're unaware like how
big is signal how many users do they have and how many potential over a million yeah yeah i think
Yeah, like 100 to 150 million monthly active users, just for clarity on the specifics of
the number.
Obviously, way more than that in terms of downloads and potential users, but monthly
active somewhere between 100 to 150 million.
So huge, huge audience and one that is growing very rapidly.
Yeah.
I mean, well, I'm set to your use case.
You mentioned your family.
You don't realize the privacy type.
But you have to imagine a large portion of that user base is in it for the tech, for the
privacy because they realize the benefits of it.
Was that part of the intent, too,
is slowly sort of orange pill signal users
or the signal foundation itself?
It would be a win.
I think they want to stick to messaging, though.
I don't know.
I haven't spoken to anyone there,
but they do messaging well.
They do privacy well.
Yeah, I mean, like we talked about a little bit, too,
The vision here is not that this is just for hardcore Bitcoiners who already know about Bitcoin, already use it.
It's not just to be another wallet app.
There's plenty of wallet apps out there right now, honestly.
That's not what was needed here.
So a huge part of this, too, is Signal users already have clearly a desire to move outside of the existing system in terms of messaging.
but the vast majority of them are not bitcoiners i would guess there's definitely some crossover
it's hard to obviously estimate exactly what that crossover is but signal is heavily used within at
least all the bitcoin circles that i'm in so there there is a good crossover there there's also a lot
of users like we talked about who are just there because of the network effect they're because of
maybe the privacy like it's starting to become a little bit like that um it's becoming a normal
thing that people understand is like if you want a private conversation it happens in signal
um actually that was funny the other day on a just a sports podcast that i listened to
they mentioned that maybe they should start a signal chat for their their private conversations
because they shouldn't have it in uh in sms anymore or something that's it's becoming something
that's become just kind of a cultural norm of if you have something private you do it in signal
but it's also just a draw to people because it's a really good cross-platform messenger as well
um so the goal is far beyond just the the hardcore bitcoiners like obviously not that we
don't want hardcore Bitcoiners like that. I think they'll be the first adopters,
definitely the tier one audience here. But the reason we've made it so honestly, like stupid,
simple to use is because we want it to be something that anyone who's familiar with any
other payments app can do this. You don't have to understand Bitcoin. You don't even have to
necessarily back up your seed phrase. Like you can manually back it up and we prompt you to do
that when you first receive funds. But we're able to back up your seed phrase directly and
and encrypted into your signal profile. So that when you log into, if you lose your old phone,
you log into a new device, all your stats come with you. You don't have to do anything for that.
You don't have to remember that you had a separate seed phrase. It automatically comes back up
without any issues. And that's the real impetus here behind all the decisions we're making is
we're not going to add additional complexity that you would have in a fully featured Bitcoin wallet.
We're not going to add a ton of bells and whistles. It's very much meant to be. How simply
can we show people how powerful Bitcoin is as a payment reel, as a value transfer system,
and really start to bring back that peer-to-peer digital cash method of exchange side of Bitcoin
and make that something that people are doing and get it snowballing so that people who are
not even Bitcoiners are using it because of how simple it is. And that's where I think the real
value will be down the line. What in your mind would make this a success? What are you looking
for what um what expectations do you have for this out of the gate and what would make you guys
extremely happy to see in terms of user interactions with radar i mean in terms of users who knows
i had to throw a number on it i don't know 10 of what signal has 10 i think we get even 10 of what
they have around 10 million users which would be fantastic i mean just for comparison cake has 2
million users but cake is cryptocurrency wallet that's what it is it does nothing else it's a
cryptocurrency you're a crypto person you want a wallet and you download that but radar isn't about
that so i think we can exceed the user base in terms of numbers compared to cake wallet i think
that would be a huge success um and i think as we talked earlier i think we would have to kind of
shift away from bitcoin and and do stablecoin type of thing to try to get those to get to those numbers
um by the way i wanted i missed one of the factors you asked me what were one of the factors that
led us to making radar another weird factor was and you know this already and you've heard this
people say, hey, Vic, why don't you make a Bitcoin-only wallet?
Cake is great, but I'm not going to touch it.
A lot of Bitcoin maxis say that, right?
So this is also kind of our way to put a Bitcoin-only wallet out there.
So that was kind of interesting.
But yeah, I think if we – just in terms of pure numbers,
I think if we can get 10% of signal, in my mind, that would be a huge success.
And who knows after that, if people continue to see the value in decentralized instant
answer of value, which is what Bitcoin is meant to be, then that number could go whatever from there.
Yeah, I think an interesting outcome too would be, obviously, we've not been able to reach
signal, but it'd be interesting to see what their thoughts are about this long term too.
Like, will they want to integrate Bitcoin as a result of this?
Like, will they will they want to add some functionality like this?
Well, we'll see long term what that looks like.
But I think this could also be just a huge proving ground for the desire and demand
for Bitcoin support in messengers overall and can show how this can compete on a user experience
perspective with the custodial bank fiat centralized options that are the norm right now
in the the alipay in the uh all of the other payment systems that are in messengers today that
are on the just regular fiat banking rails yeah and i'm thinking back to your your comments earlier
about being in china vic and pulling out wechat or alipay whatever it may be like your chat app is
your payment mechanism and i mean china is an example of i think how to how to do it wrong at
scale and it's interesting that this this teacher is all direct with the surveillance is yes and
it's funny that we haven't we haven't really had a wechat like app at critical mass in the us yet
which is probably a good thing considering um if facebook i mean facebook i think probably tried to
to do a Libra before they shelved that.
But really honing in on the potential to create a WeChat or Alipay-like super app in the United
States for a global audience that is privacy-preserving is extremely encouraging.
Yeah, I see this as...
Go ahead, go.
now i think we chat i see this as a open source private messaging decentralized payments this
version of we chat if that makes sense um it's it's doing the same thing you can message and
you can send value but you're doing in a private and decentralized and self-custodial way yeah
and i think i mean seth while i have you here i think you're very eloquent in describing this for
For everybody listening who may be one of the, I have nothing to hide, so I'm going to make the convenience trade off.
Why is privacy important?
Why should people care about it, especially today?
Yeah, I mean, the underlying reasons I'm sure most people have heard at this point.
But the interesting thing to me is this, like, I have nothing to hide kind of hithy statement that's become the normal retort.
I think that sentiment is kind of dead.
I don't think that's really how people feel anymore.
And I think there's been a concerted shift, especially over the last five, six years,
for people to understand after finally seeing all of the problems that come with a lack of privacy,
that people are starting to understand this does actually matter.
And I think the sentiment now is much more, what are the tools?
Are there actually tools that I can use that aren't too painful to gain privacy?
And that's been the huge gap there.
I think like Signal is a great example of that, where a good privacy tool needs to feel as easy to use as one that is not privacy preserving.
Like we have to care about the user experience here.
And so for the for the core of like, why does this matter?
Ultimately, the things that you do, the people you message and the people you pay.
Tell everything about you.
If I can see who you're talking to, even if I can't see the message contents themselves.
And if I can see who you're paying when, I can pretty much figure out everything else about your life.
And no matter what other things you care about or what other rights you think are being protected, if you don't have the ability to protect your conversations and your transactions, your actual financial history, everything else falls apart very quickly.
And so that's the huge impetus here is like we can solve both of those at the same time.
Signal already solved the messaging side.
let's latch onto that and make the most of the already existing protocol network that's there
and then let's bring the the financial side of that home at the same time but again i think that
the critical thing for people is not i don't care about privacy especially when you talk about
financial privacy like no one is going to ever give you their bank record or their credit card
statement or anything like that they they would never publish that online like they they do there's
a natural innate desire for privacy, especially financial privacy, but privacy more generally.
And when we can actually do that in a way that feels like I'm not sacrificing too much from a
convenience perspective, that's the huge breakthrough for people. I think that's why
we've seen Signal be so successful when it comes to messengers. I think that's why we've seen
Proton be so successful with their suite of tools that they offer, is that they get very close to
the same user experience of the centralized surveil tools, but they also give you strong
privacy. And that's what people want. I mean, you even look at Apple and others,
their marketing campaigns are heavily focused on privacy these days. That's not just because
they feel like they might want to care about privacy. It's because people are actually
seriously considering which thing will I buy, which tool will I use based on if it does give
some level of privacy at the end of the day. Yeah, I think Apple's been, I don't know if it's
reports of Apple talking about having mini models
on the iPhone using the secure enclave.
I think that's another thing, the emergence of AI
and particularly the frontier
models, the leaders being anthropic and open AI.
Funnily enough, Alex Karp from Palantir made a pretty eloquent
point highlighting the privacy trade-offs that a lot of enterprise
clients of these frontier model providers are making in terms of giving up all your IP.
And it's funny that this AI revolution may force people who previously did not care,
or at least do not appear to care that much about privacy it may force them to as they thinking about how they share their data with these frontier model providers Yeah absolutely That one of the other really cool things about
like, as the technology gets better, we can actually do powerful things in a privacy-preserving way
much better at the same time. I mean, that's even like when we're talking about, like,
how we're able to do Bitcoin within radar, like, that was impossible two years ago. And that's not
necessarily because of hardware changes, but that's because people figured out new good ways
to be able to do things in a self-custodial manner. That shift has come to AI as well. And that's where
everything is also faster when you're doing on-device compute when it comes to AI. There's
another incentive that makes people want that. They maybe aren't thinking as deeply about the
privacy, even though that is becoming more and more of a conversation around like, do I want to
run local models? But at the same time, when you can run something locally, the questions you ask
against it are much, much faster than when you have to go out to the cloud. Your network connection
could be flaky. All of those problems could exist. If you can do that in a local model at a very high
speed, that changes the game in terms of user experience and privacy. You kind of can Trojan
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Dealing into secure enclaves, this is an area I think has been very underexplored.
Shout out to the team at Maple AI for bringing private LLMs via secure enclaves,
like truly private LLMs compared to something like Venice.
I think their design choices are incredibly wise.
and I think the leveraging of secure enclaves
is an underexplored area
and it's encouraging to see companies
like Enclavia from Alexis, Fellini
come to market
and just exploring that design space
is something that seems underappreciated
to me right now.
How would you describe the potential there?
You mentioned eCash earlier.
I know Calais is exploring sort of these e-cash mints that live in the enclave that are cryptographically provable that the operator can't really control them to some extent at the end of the day.
What are we missing in the market by not leveraging secure enclaves to their full potential right now?
Yeah, they're really interesting.
I mean, like, oh, go ahead, Vic.
No, I was going to say specifically for AI, you mean?
For everything, right?
Yeah, for everything.
Yeah, I mean, I think Seth and I were kicking the idea around just a few weeks ago about there needs to be more providers.
Because obviously, host your own hardware with this enclave is going to be super expensive.
So we were kicking around the idea.
Maybe that's a business model we should get into.
provide AI service that's in the enclave.
But isn't BitTensor doing that?
Or do they have a version where you can choose to run the AI
within some enclave?
Yeah, I'm not sure on BitTensor,
but I know NVIDIA is launching the GPUs with the Nitro enclaves in them,
so it makes sense that anybody who wanted to could put an LLM in there.
yeah yeah i think it's i think it's definitely in the future yeah it's becoming much more normal
and that's yeah yeah i was just gonna say it's becoming much more normal because like that
that demand for privacy is not just a personal thing as well like the the primary driver
for privacy at scale with the ai space is enterprises i mean if you're if you're a business
who are dealing with sensitive internal data all the time you don't want to be dumping all of that
into clod or to chat gpt like they're huge huge potential issues with you touching anything like
that if you're dealing with customer data if you're dealing with like hipaa specific data all
of these specific use cases for ai at scale you need those so it's already something i mean like
this is not a new technology secure enclaves are quite ancient technology at this point your phone
has had a secure enclave in it for the last decade plus in the Android and iOS space.
And it uses it for a lot of the functionality and the security of the device itself.
But I think the real shift now is that because of the way we can actually leverage this,
especially on the AI side, like there are definitely other use cases, but I think
a lot of times secure enclaves kind of get overblown and people forget about what the
The downsides and risks are too, where they are very centralized.
They're extraordinarily expensive.
They're not something that a normal person can host at home or would have access to.
And they are very much a trusted system.
A single entity has the root keys to actually provision all of those secure enclaves.
So obviously, you're trusting with an Intel SGX, you're trusting Intel themselves.
There have been a lot of breaks in Intel SGX secure enclaves over the years.
uh, NVIDIA, you're trusting NVIDIA, Amazon, Nitro, you're trusting Amazon, like all of these
services, you are trusting the provider still in some ways to be honest and to be secure,
to not leak those root keys or actually set them to null or something like that. Some of that stuff
has happened in the past, but the things that it unlocks are a huge, huge shift. Like you,
like you said, Maple has been a kind of a revelation because like when I'm thinking about
how am I going to be using AI?
It's similar to how I think about chats
where like I will self-censor
subconsciously or consciously
if I know that the thing that I say
is going to a third party
that I don't know what they're going to do with that data.
There are some things like I just,
I will not put into Claude
because I don't want to trust it with that
or I don't want to know that about me.
I even talking yesterday to somebody
who I know doesn't care that much about personal privacy.
I was helping with some financial stuff and just giving him some some tips around that. And
he was like, I want to learn more about all the financial tools that like help me
see the details about what I'm doing with my money. I know that all that data is being mined.
And he wasn't sure how to go about that. But something like Maple is a fantastic solution for
hey, I can upload my bank statements into this and know that they're not being leaked to a third
party or being used to train AI. So it's all the same the same principles that went into radar and
into Cake Wallet. Our core to Bitcoin right now is there's a freedom of expression and honestly,
like a weight being lifted off your shoulders when you know that the thing that you're doing
is private and that you're getting to choose who knows about it. Obviously, it's not about being
this anonymous, super shadowy hacker in the woods. It's about you getting to choose who knows about
it. If you and your spouse want to sit down and go through your bank statements and get insight
into that and ask questions about it. You should be able to do that in a way that only you and your
spouse see that info. If you want to have a conversation with your brothers in a group chat
and talk about sensitive stuff about your childhood or something, you should be able to do that without
worrying about like, what's Facebook going to think when they read through this about what
happened or like those things need to be able to happen freely. And that only happens in a space
that is privacy preserving. So secure enclaves are a huge part of that for the AI side, obviously not
necessarily as applicable on the chat side, even though, as I mentioned, that signal heavily
uses intel sgx secure enclaves for the server infrastructure on the signal side to provide some
of the provable attestable privacy that's built into the the signal protocol so it's a big part
of that as well hey guys if i could just interrupt i know you gotta hop off here yeah yeah i gotta
hop off you guys continue of course thanks thanks for having me on really appreciate it am i getting
broken thank you for coming thank you for building and launching radar like i said desperately need
a product been waiting for a while as you're describing that like i saw a tweet yesterday and
it's it's always i mean the samurai guys everyone free samurai but like talking to kian over the
years i think the the example of like you have blinds in your house like that's a that's uh
an explicit use of privacy technology as blinds you don't want people looking in your windows and
I saw somebody tweeting yesterday about envelopes, like mail.
Like when you mail something to another individual,
it's in an envelope that's sealed and meant expressly for that person.
These are privacy technologies that are surrounding us every day
that people take for granted and don't even recognize as privacy technology.
But however, when we get to the digital realm,
There's this sort of assumption that, oh, no, privacy doesn't matter here as much as it does when I'm sending somebody a letter.
I don't want the mailman to open the letter and to read my mail.
There's actually a federal offense if you're caught stealing somebody's envelopes and opening their mail.
And it's just hilarious that we've been conditioned in the digital age to not bring that same mindset to what we're doing in the digital world.
Yeah, I think that's the big part to highlight is it's more of a conditioning that we've like the early Internet days were not like this, but quickly it got taken over.
And the realization that the data that's available in how people are using the Internet is immensely valuable.
And so we got conditioned by all of these these corporations that were building and abusing our data, building companies around selling our data.
they got conditioned to think that there just wasn't a way to achieve privacy and that this
was just how the internet was. Like if you're, if you're doing something online, just assume it's
not private and deal with it. And if you want to do something private, just don't do it online.
And that conditioning, I think is the root of the problem because the building blocks of the
internet, there's like cryptography and cypherpunks have been core to a lot of the technology that
powers the internet. And yet a lot of it's been abused and misused to make us feel like there is
no privacy. But these days, that really is just a feeling. It's just not true in how we can use the
internet. And that's been one of the really exciting things, I think, over the past few years,
is the technology is actually good enough now.
that when people are able to break free of that conditioning and they're able to understand,
like, wait, Signal just feels like iMessage. There's no difference here. And yet I am getting
perfect message level privacy and metadata privacy. And I'm not having to tie my ID to this in any way.
It's not tied to a phone number in a way that's revealable to other people. That shift happens.
But once it happens, people understand that I can actually just have privacy and not sacrifice too
much for it. So a lot of it is just like when people break out of that conditioning and that
misunderstanding that everything I do online can't be private, it starts to change the game a lot.
And we've seen a huge shift in that. So it's been exciting over the past few years that the
like the freedom tech has gotten good enough now that as people are waking up, there's actually
good usable real tools that they can jump into and use today to gain privacy. And it's not nearly as
much of a nightmare from a user experience perspective or a pain perspective as it was
10 years ago, eight years ago, even five years ago, I feel like when I was first waking up to
the need for privacy and falling down the rabbit hole really hard, it was a lot more painful than
it is today. When I recommend what people can use, it's just, it's a night and day difference.
Yeah. And like bringing it back to the envelope example, it's like such a,
you literally just have a layer of like epoxy that you lick and you put down and
the assurances of that privacy, that privacy assurance is like literally like a layer of
of the glue and yet people respect it and it's like how do we make that similar but i would argue
more hardened and uh verifiable and robust assurance on the internet via cryptography
like how do you make that like socially not acceptable but like socially like oh no like
this this is a foregone conclusion this should be the way we do things
yeah i mean it's it really is happening but like you said like the really fascinating thing about
it is like the idea is we can't have privacy on the internet the reality is we can have
actually better privacy on the internet than we can a lot of times in meat space these days
like the the cryptographic tools that we have are so much more sure and reliable and dependable than
an envelope that you just like and stamp and send to your grandma like that thing theoretically
provides privacy, but it's also all being tracked and surveilled and read in between. And we should
assume that USPS, et cetera, know what's being sent in every package. Whereas when I send you a
message on radar, both of us know cryptographically in a provable way that no other person has read
this in the middle. And if they have, we will both see that someone else has opened this somehow.
And we'll understand that something is very broken here. With a letter, it's really easy.
and this has been happening for hundreds of years,
you can open it and then reseal it
and send it on its way.
And you have no way to ensure that.
Obviously, there's some tricks you can do
to try to make it clear
that someone is tampered with a package.
Sometimes we do that with hardware wallets
in the Bitcoin space.
They have tamper evident tape or packaging.
But for the most part,
you have no idea if someone has read the message in between.
Whereas with cryptography,
we can actually have provable privacy
between people over the internet
and really have the best of both worlds.
Yeah, it's like this is the extent of meatspace, like high-tech, privacy-preserving packaging.
It's like right here.
It's like the – what are your thoughts on – because let's bring up Tucker Carlson and Signal and the whole like U.S. government hacked my Signal brush and read my –
Yeah, read my messages with with the Russian delegates that I was talking to.
And I think it's important to to to dispel the rumors around there, because I think Tucker's done a very poor job of sort of besmirching signal when really at the end of the day was likely something like Pegasus or somebody got access to it before.
yeah i mean obviously there's been a lot of people other people who have talked about that as well but
the underlying fact is ponying your device is going to be drastically easier than ponying signal
at this point and that's the thing i mean if you are a very high level journalist activist dissident
you should assume that your device is compromised essentially that's the the sad state of things
right now obviously apple has done a lot to try and prevent what damage that can do and like there's
there's lockdown mode on iOS, which if you are someone like Tucker Carlson, you better be using
all of the most hardcore functionality available to you to protect your device. Because the thing
that a lot of people forget is like, whatever the state of the security on the device you're using,
that's the lowest default state of security of whatever apps you're using on top of that.
And I think a lot of that is forgotten, even like in the Bitcoin space, when you're using,
like let's say you're using a fantastic wallet like sparrow on your desktop but you're using a
windows desktop and you aren't careful about what you download and you're sharing the device with a
few other people if sparrow and the password you use for that are good that's awesome but if the
underlying os gets hacked you have serious problems at that point because they have they have access
to all of the underlying infrastructure they can change things about what you see on screen
it breaks everything else so i mean the the the assumption and everything that i have been able to
find out about the tucker carlson incident is it seems very likely that his device was pwned maybe
not even pegasus or something that was a true zero day but most likely that pretty much just like
with a lot of other privacy preserving tech the other thing that happens is people forget that
anyone in a chat can leak what's in that chat like if you add someone who's not a trusted individual
and they're in a group chat,
your privacy obviously doesn't protect you from them
because they're the ones also receiving
all of those messages in plain text.
Anyone can screenshot messages and take them out.
Even if there's protection in the app,
there are ways to do screenshots outside of that.
That side of things I think is often forgotten
that this is just one piece of a broader
OPSEC, operational security stack that you need.
And you need to be thinking about the device security as well.
But yeah, as far as we can tell,
the Signal protocol itself has remained
fantastically secure despite being such a high-profile tool that's being used by
governments and journalists and dissidents at this point but it does
still come down to how secure can you keep your device at the same time yeah
how secure can you keep your your group chat that the Department of War found
that out the hard way a couple years ago I'm letting a yeah I forget the
journalists they let into the group chat by accident I forget what it was yeah
they added the wrong journalists they thought it was someone else they had
the same first name, but yeah, they added the wrong journalist into the chat. Just let him sit
there the whole time. Yeah. You can't fix stupid, unfortunately. That's always the lowest common
denominator. What are your thoughts on the cozying up of the frontier model providers in the
government, the cucking of Fable 5, the offering of a 5% stake in open AI from Sam Altman to the
Trump administration, how are you viewing this trend that seems to be growing? And it seems like
the AI models are becoming an issue of national security in the eyes of the federal government
here. And I think it's incredibly worrying that this is the case. I think the fear-mongering
around fable five was in just anthropics uh positioning and marketing tactics yeah specifically
are um detrimental to to human freedom because the ai is a probably the strongest double-edged
sword we've ever come into contact with as as a technology and it can go in two very different
directions yeah i mean i think it's it's been the strongest reminder of why open weight models not
only matter, but will be essential.
Cause it's, we're kind of getting into a lot of the similar stuff where like when
encryption technology became possible, the U S absolutely flipped their lid about
GPG being something that you could export to other countries and that other people
would have the ability to to use encryption technology and what a nightmare that would be for them Governments are always going to kind of like clutch at pearls and hold on to what they can
to protect themselves. And in this case, like there is an understandable national security risk
where the government has always been the worst ones at maintaining security when it comes to
cybersecurity. Like they've never been very good at that. Systems are always out of date and stale,
have done work in cybersecurity for governments. It's interesting when you see behind the veil
about how out of date and how behind the times they are and how slow they are to move. And when
you talk about these AI models, especially frontier models, not only from the like,
we're normally thinking about the vibe coding perspective, but when you get into the cybersecurity
world, the ability this gives to outside entities to either for good or for evil, do penetration
testing, to find vulnerabilities, to build novel zero-day tools, it's a whole shift in the paradigm
of cybersecurity from the ground up. So I understand their reticence, but it's another
reminder that if we're building closed model, closed source models behind for-profit companies,
we're going to be beholden to whatever jurisdiction they live in and we're going to be drastically
restricted from how useful they can be and how much freedom they can actually provide but the
the other really good thing is that the it's kind of similar to the streisand effect where like when
they when they try to clamp down on something it only makes people want it even more and that's
happening even with i think it's pushing the development of the open weight models further
forward because as they stall out Anthropic with Fable 5 or as they put in these artificial delays
or they try to stop them from using it, they can't do the same thing to the people building
open weight models. They don't have the same control over that. And so we're seeing things
like GLM 5.2 that are catching up with what's possible. Maybe not. Those aren't like Fable 5
level, but they're opus level. They're getting there to where they're able to provide the vast
majority of what people need. And others are waking up to the idea that like, hey, we can't
build these things in closed, closed environments, if we want to be able to distribute them freely.
They're kind of relearning the whole idea of open source software, which is fascinating to me,
but we're kind of rehashing the same thing that we did 20, 30 years ago with with open source,
Microsoft versus Linux. And like, there's so many stuff that's so many things, it's kind of a
time is a flat circle, but it's been interesting to see that become more
popular and more kind of invoked to talk about the stuff needing to be open source.
Yeah, I mean, whether it's lip service
or riding a trend, I don't think it matters to your point about the Streisand effect. You have
the all-in podcast guys talking about open-weight models and the importance of
them, which is a good
microphone to have, at least incepting the idea
of an open-weight model in the minds of their listeners
specifically.
Getting back to the convenience of signal and the convenience of these tools, the ultimate goal should be
to get on a convenience parity with the sort of
cucked walled garden, not private at all
technology that exists in the digital
world today. Because most people, outside
of the bubbles that we live in and the Freedom Tech corners,
our Corners of X, the podcasts that we listen to,
the vast majority of people probably don't understand
how any of this works.
Just going back to you just need convenience parity
with Freedom Tech.
Because if I were to go to the beach later today
and talk to people, if I mentioned the term open-weight model,
they'd be like, what the hell are you talking about?
What is that?
yeah yeah people but it's just like just like no one knows what the triple ratchet protocol
that signal uses is like i bet you've never thought deeply about the triple ratchet protocol
and how important that is like no that the whole point is we abstract away what these things are
and we put them in front of people in a usable manner like you mentioned maple if you're if
you're talking about ai when you're using maple you don't need to understand anything about tees
or secure enclaves or attestation or like the whole point is a really good company or a really
good team or a really good individual can build something that abstracts away the complexity,
but leverages technology for all the benefits you need under the hood.
And it's really going to be the same way with AI. Like we're so obsessed, especially when we're,
we're in the space heavily right now. Like we know all the model names and the effort levels
that you need to choose for each and like all these things. This is not going to be the future.
It's just like when we're first, we're kind of getting into Bitcoin.
Like we know all these technical terms and all this jargon and slang, but the vast majority
of people using Bitcoin, they don't understand it.
They don't know what SegWit is.
They don't really know what fee rates are.
They don't know what sats per V byte is.
Like that stuff is just not common because we've been able to build tools that abstract
away the vast majority of that and make it very simple for them to use.
The same thing's going to happen with the AI side of things as well, where you won't
understand that it's an open rate model.
you'll just see, oh, I can use one that's really cheap, or I can use one that's really expensive,
or I can use this one no matter where I am. But to use this one, I have to provide my ID or
something like that. Those are going to be the things that separate it out for people.
And honestly, already, they're all kind of good enough to meet the needs of the average person.
And we're only getting started in terms of open weight models specifically. So a lot of that will
be abstracted away. But yeah, right now, we're kind of in the weeds of things that no one in
the real world is going to understand what that is. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned stablecoin
integration on the roadmap for radar. What else in your mind do you think would be a good feature?
How far do you guys want to push it? Yeah. I mean, there's a long ways to go now in terms of
features. Obviously, we wanted to start with just nailing payments, having that down very smooth,
very effortless. So I think we did that. I think the two biggest things moving forward,
And obviously, there's a lot of other things on our roadmap.
Two big things are handling payments in group chats.
So not even just like you can send to one other person in a group chat, but things like
splitting a bill.
When you have a friend group that you meet for lunch every Thursday, like when you end,
you should be able to just say, hey, the bill was $83, $72.
And then each user gets a prompt just to pay their split of it.
Things like that.
Things like fundraising as well, I think will be really helpful.
Like the earthquakes in Venezuela.
There's a lot of people who are using like a dozen different fundraising platforms.
But all the conversations about that are all happening in another platform like Signal,
like WhatsApp.
Imagine being able to have a group where you're posting all of the updates about what help
you're providing to people in Venezuela.
And you get to just put up a fundraiser that everyone sees on screen whenever they're in
that chat.
They choose how much they want to donate to.
And again, all of that is not going through a third party.
That's going directly peer to peer between the person who wants to support you and keep
up to date with what's happening and your wallet immediately. So those are the, I think two of the
really big things are the group messaging side. There's a lot of, a lot of value we can bring on
again, making it even more social to do payments. Um, the stable coins one is, is really interesting.
Like it's been painful for me to start to understand how useful stable coins are for people.
like I I hate them like I hate everything that a stable coin stands for and that it reinforces the
the legacy fiat system they're usually censored and able to be shut down at a tap they're almost
always easily surveilled like they're in every way they're the opposite of freedom money and yet
when you actually talk to people who are on the ground in most of the countries who need freedom
money, they're not using Bitcoin yet. And that is unfortunate. I think a lot of what I'd like to
change with radar is to start getting them to use Bitcoin. But there's a lot of the world where they
just need the stability of stable coins. And we can now do that on Bitcoin at least. So the goal
is that people will be able to choose if they want to keep their balance in stable coins or in Bitcoin It be easy at a tap And then again because we building both of these things on Bitcoin rails you can swap between them in a split second very very seamlessly
very low, almost zero fees at the same time. So it's one of those things like it's painful
to enable. It's just like a cake wallet. Like people are like, why do you have all of these
EVM chains and cake wallet? It's not because we love all of the things that happen on those chains,
but it's because like when I go to the Oslo Freedom Forum or I chat with anybody from the HRF,
like it or not, most of these journalists and activists and dissidents and freedom fighters
and opposition leaders, they're not using Bitcoin right now. I want them to. So I want to pair
the stable coins they're already using with Bitcoin in one really seamless experience.
But we need to support the stable coin side at first, and then slowly push them more and more
into the Bitcoin side of things. But another really cool thing, one last thing I'll mention,
because of the way that it works within Spark.
If you keep your balance all in Bitcoin,
but you want to send to somebody who wants stable coins,
you can do that.
And it gets converted on the fly in a split second.
Or if you keep your balance in stable coins,
but you are sending me Bitcoin in radar,
it doesn't matter.
I don't need to care about the conversion.
I don't need to care about asking you for a specific thing.
We can do that automatically behind the scenes on the fly
so that you can choose what you want
and always receive the currency that you want,
always pay to the currency that the other person wants
in a way that doesn't rely on a trusted third party or a centralized exchange.
So that's another really cool side of the actual tech that's underlying this.
Yeah.
Stable channels have always been the holy grail of stablecoin-like features
with a custodial trade-off that is much more freedom-oriented.
Yeah.
They're one of those things that I think is...
they're very much like built by Bitcoiners thing,
but they're like a fascinating idea,
but they're like so over-engineered that I,
I seriously doubt that there'll ever be uptake because the,
there's just always this disconnect between what do the real users want and what
do us as Bitcoin ideologues want to build and finding the middle ground there is,
is really hard because a lot of times we have to be willing to move past our ideology in our view
of like what the best for that person is and build something that's closer to what they want. Now,
obviously, I'm not saying that we we give up on self custody because people just want simple
user experiences like there are there are some hard lines that we draw, but that we have to get
closer to where they're at. And like everyone's already using USTT, USTC, using a money VM chains
that are very quick. Stable channels have a lot of other downsides and usability issues
amongst broader issues about how that will actually work on the Lightning Network.
They're really cool in theory, but in practice, like getting a user to actually adopt that when
the user just wants stable balance. They don't really care if it's on that, but if it feels just
as good and it happens to be on Bitcoin, awesome. If it feels totally different and painful to use,
it's just not something that's going to gain uptake but we'll definitely see and it's the
same with like um like rgb has been like a thing that's been talked about for what feels like a
decade now long time long time and it's always like it's going to solve all these problems and
they're going to do stable coins natively on there and taproot and but it it's always kind
of like trying to i think shoehorn bitcoin into something where you don't necessarily need bitcoin
or trying to do things in a way that's just too hardcore that's not going to actually meet people
where they're at but it's always a it's always a balancing act because you don't want to give up
on all the fundamentals and all the things that really matter just just to meet people where
they're at and just for mass adoption and yet you want to try and meet them as closely as you can to
where they're at it's a it's a it's a hard line to walk no to that point to the credit of many of
the builders in the industry and i feel like they've been dragged away from the the hardcore
more ideological sort of tool perspective
towards the meet in the middle
by actors like LightSpark, David Marcus,
LightSpark and his team there and others.
And I do think the last two years specifically,
the sort of ability to look at the trade-off matrix
and sort of draw the lines
and begin to move toward the line
where you're meeting people in the middle
has been moving in a positive direction,
which is good.
I think it'll be good for you.
Yeah, I think Spark is a really good example of that
where at first glance, you're like,
nah, it's not Bitcoin or enough.
I don't think this is the right solution.
When you actually dig into it,
you realize it's a very pragmatic set of trade-offs
where it's not, I don't think it goes too far
into the custodial or into the trust models
being too onerous.
And yet it makes some design decisions
that just make sense when you talk about how do we bring a reasonably trust minimized solution
in a way that people can actually use. And that's been, I think, a huge wake up call to a lot of
people and should be of there's room for doing things in the super hardcore way. But there's
also room for figuring out like where can we compromise for lack of a better word? Like I
know compromise is a scary word for people, but where can we compromise specific pieces of that
without compromising the core of what Bitcoin offers.
And Spark is a really good example of that.
And I think LightSpark, as much hate as they get,
they've found good ways to build out things
that people really want on Bitcoin rails.
Now, I think it does stay up to us
as the more hardcore Bitcoiners, perhaps,
to kind of keep them accountable
and make sure that they do keep building
in ways that are empowering the individual.
And we don't lean too far towards custodial
or too far towards just layering on the legacy banking system on top of Bitcoin.
But it is interesting to see that there's got to be this balance between ideology,
but also pragmatism and figuring out what will actually work,
not just what is the most hardcore route we can take,
what will actually work and how far can we take that towards the Bitcoin that we want to see.
Yeah, we're beginning to see the emergence of the semantics of unilateral exit wars.
emerge whether it's via spark or the competing competing or complementary depending how you look
at the mark protocols as well and i i feel like bitcoiners are themselves a disservice when they
get into the semantic wars it's it's like in your mind what are the trade-offs there yeah yeah i mean
it's always funny to me because like in all of these things there's always there is a clear point
that should be made. And I think the point that Spark right now, a wallet built on Spark cannot
do unilateral exit in a clean way, even if you can do unilateral exit in Spark via other tooling,
that point is good. It should be raised. People need to understand that trade-off.
The problem becomes where it's always people with financial incentives who make these claims,
and they never quite make them 100% accurately.
And so it gets into this thing
where it just becomes a war of attrition
where everyone's trying to grind down the other side
by sharing how bad their thing is
instead of just focusing on building their own product.
Like it's something that like,
like I used to be very, very active on X,
like very, very active.
I'm not nearly as active anymore
because I like, I have something to build.
Like I have only so much time.
And if I spend six hours a day yapping on Twitter,
Like I can't, I can't actually build something productive.
I think a lot of times we get, we get like dragged into this, this loop of fighting each
other and not having enough time left to actually build the tools that we need.
I think like BIP 110, the whole Nott's first core thing is another example of this, where
it's just like the amount of time that we've spent arguing about this over the last two
years.
Like, I don't even want to think about the amount of time and messages that have been
posted about this and that have changed literally nothing about the argument.
And I think it's very similar to this like ARK versus Spark thing where these should be,
yes, competitors, but in the sense of pushing each other to be better,
not in the sense of everyone's trying to drag others through the mud.
And I think it's kind of like, I think Spark have gone about this right way.
It's like, they're not wading into it at all.
They not getting into the debate with other people They just continuing to build And I think that is the right approach But again that being said like it never black or white We do need to be holding people accountable
And if some system is saying that they can do something and they can't actually do it,
we do need to call that out.
So like it's always a balancing act.
But then like this unilateral exit thing, like technically some of it is true.
Like you can't unilaterally exit in radar right now.
We're using Spark.
So if the Spark entity and all the Spark operators disappeared tomorrow, yes, your funds would be locked.
Obviously, that's not okay.
That's going to be fixed.
It's already in progress right now by the Breeze folks to fix it.
But if you wanted to unilaterally exit, you can use this separate tool, which you can just import your seed phrase into and exit.
So there are ways to do it, but it's not as seamless as it should be.
And obviously, that does need to be fixed.
Yeah, but to me, it seems like it's pointing in the right direction.
Again, getting into the semantic shit-throwing is not productive, to your point.
To your point, I don't wade into those arguments anymore.
BIP-110, I spent two days at Bitcoin++, I think last year or two years ago,
maybe even at this point, talking about the opportune battles
between interviewing people on both sides.
And I think then I realized it doesn't seem like they're going to come together.
You're talking about a lot of conversation here.
And so even though many people try to goad me into that conversation,
it's not worth the effort. I'm never going to convince you.
You're never going to convince me.
Let's just see you on the field.
I think more people need to see you on the field mentality.
Just go build your thing.
To the competition between Spark and Oracle,
yes, there is a degree of competition,
but they're all interoperable protocols via the Lightning Network.
They're all going to find their spot in the use case
that people are attracted to and the trade-offs make sense for.
And I think there's a big tent where all these things can work together.
Yeah.
And they're all open protocols, which again, like we talked about with, with open source,
one of the beautiful parts of this is they have to really aggressively compete for the
user because the, like, even with arc specifically, like anyone could spin up on another arcade,
anyone could spin up another bark if they wanted to, anyone could spin up another spark
entity as well.
So they, they have to be really aggressive with how they compete.
and because the switching cost is essentially nothing.
Like if I use a Spark-backed wallet right now
and I decide, oh, I really want to use RK,
I just send the stats over Lightning and I'm done.
There's no friction.
There's no new account.
There's nothing like that.
And that's one of the really beautiful things about these
is there will be really fierce competition
because they have to compete for users
in a way that there aren't walled gardens.
There's no IP laws protecting them.
It's all open protocols, open source, and open money.
And Lightning making them interoperable really means that we don't need one to win.
They all work well together.
And that's another thing that's really awesome is like, I don't, I and users don't need to
care.
Like, am I using a Spark wallet?
Is it an ARK wallet?
Is it a full Lightning wallet?
When they actually need to make a payment, they just make a payment and it just works.
And then everything else gets settled under the hood.
And that's a huge benefit of these things as well as you just, you pick the wallet that
you want and you get a really good user experience.
So that's what's so exciting about Spark and both our implementations is we can actually do lightning in a way that's really user friendly now.
Yeah.
And like who's to say, like I'm becoming more convinced that the whole form factor of how we interact with computers is changing.
Like I don't think UIs and like we mentioned earlier, like you can be a projectionist now.
If you want a UI, you can have one.
But I think the her version of reality that Spike Jonze put out there
over a decade ago, or maybe two decades now at this point,
is coming true.
I think rethinking how these things actually work
or how people interact with them in the first place
is something people need to put a lot of thought into.
I can see Bitcoin payments being sent in a way where it's like,
hey, Seth just bought me dinner.
Can you send him $20 worth of sats?
And I just tell my agent,
which just does it,
and I have no idea
what's happening in the background.
Yeah, that's going to be an interesting one.
The other interesting thing with that too
is your agent could run a full Lightning node
and manage liquidity theoretically.
So there's some ways where
we could start to see a shift
back towards the more complex technology
under the hood
and the more sovereign tech,
because you're not having to worry about
the actual UI or UX yourself,
you're able to say like,
hey, go ahead and create a wallet.
Make sure you keep enough inbound liquidity
for me to receive 100 bucks a month
or 100 bucks a week or day, whatever.
And it can figure out how to actually do that under the hood.
And you don't have to actually worry about that.
And me as a wallet dev,
I don't have to worry about that either.
So there's some ways too that that can like,
AI can be a great tool for self-sovereignty and that it can help you to do technical things you
would never be able to do yourself. So even if these less trust-minimized tools like Spark and
ARK compared to something like running a full-fledged Bitcoin and Lightning node,
if those do go away or they start to censor people or whatever, the agentic future that
I guess we're walking into now could enable you to do all this stuff in a much simpler way,
even if you're not, you don't have the technical know-how to do all the self-hosting stuff,
they can do it for you.
It's something that's actually really good at today.
Yeah.
Well, that, I want to be respectful of your time.
I know it's a Friday in the summer.
Any final thoughts, notes, calls to action as it pertains to radar?
This has been fascinating.
Yeah, I know.
We need to do a proper three-hour debrief on privacy tech at some point.
We really do.
There's always time for that.
I'm always down for the long form stuff about privacy and get into what the what the freedom tech space is looking like today.
When it comes to radar, I mean, the biggest things are like it's been exciting to be able to combine the two most personal things that people do or the people you talk to and the people you pay.
Just bring it into one place.
Make it seamless.
Make it a really good user experience.
Do it in a way that's self-custodial.
That's privacy preserving on the messaging side specifically.
And that has just been an absolute blast.
So if you want to give it a try, go to radar.chat.
You can learn everything about it.
Download it there.
If you want to migrate from Signal, do a backup first.
Save that recovery key that it gives you.
And then you can just log into Radar.
You'll import that backup.
It'll be super seamless at that point.
And view it as something that would replace your primary Signal app.
If you're not a Signal user already, then now's the time.
You'll become a Signal user when you become a Radar user.
Give it a try.
Give us a shout out if you're in issues.
If you have feedback for us, we're constantly iterating.
I've already pushed multiple updates this week.
So always leaning on customer feedback at the same time.
But yeah, radar.chat.
Follow us on social media at radar chat,
pretty much on every platform.
It's been a ton of fun to build this.
Vic's idea from the ground up,
it's been fun to be able to bring that into reality
over the past six months or so
and build out something that I think
could be really, really powerful freedom tech moving forward.
Go check it out, Freaks.
Seth, thank you so much.
And Vic, you're not here, but thank you as well.
and we'll do this again at some point.
For sure. Thanks for having us, Marty.
Peace and love, freaks.
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