Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin could mean
for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you so
much for listening.
Liana ensures that your Bitcoin stays accessible when it matters most.
No third party involved.
If you've not taken self-custody of your Bitcoin, what are you doing?
Seriously, I aim to shame.
If you've not taken self-custody of your Bitcoin, you are not doing it correctly.
I don't know what else to say.
You're leaving everything to chance.
you've decided to opt out by exchanging your fiat for bitcoin and then you're leaving it on a third
party exchange for it to be hacked or for somebody to have a fat finger event and wipe out your
holdings with no recourse so not only will you lose all your bitcoin but you've already spent
all your fiat to get the bitcoin in the first place spend a hundred bucks or so to get yourself
a hardware wallet go do your own research you can listen to kevin in this episode talking about
Liana. Bitbox are a sponsor of this show. That's bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten. Use the code
bitten. You'll get a 5% discount at checkout. Taking self-custody seriously is your goal.
And if you're not, you definitely have to start upping your knowledge around this.
Now, don't feel the FOMO. Like I said, do your own research, get out there, ask around
who uses what hardware and why, get to a meetup.
You can join Orange Pill App or start your own meetup.
I've been talking to a couple of people recently
who are getting inspired to start their own meetups,
and that's great to see.
You can download and pay.
Yes, it's a paid app, Orange Pill App,
and find almost 17,000 Bitcoiners already there
waiting to connect with you around the world,
a perfect travel companion as well.
What else is there to say other than buy Bitcoin?
As much as you can, don't get over your skis, don't go crazy.
Set up a dollar cost average program.
You can do that with Swan Bitcoin in the US, swanbitcoin.com forward slash bitten.
You can do it across Europe with Relay, R-E-L-A-I dot C-H forward slash bitten.
And with Relay, you can stack up to a thousand Swiss or equivalent per day.
Now, that might sound like a lot.
if so just set up a hundred bucks a week whatever it is that you can afford to do
like i said take this slowly and set yourself up properly do you want to accept bitcoin for your
goods and services get over to paywithflash.com this is click and play you can be up and running
in no time at all it's nostril enabled as well if that is your if that's your jam and reach out
of Pierre and the guys and they will give you the handheld help that you need that's paywithflash.com
to start accepting bitcoin for your goods and services have you heard of bubble bubbl.fm this
is a podcast curation platform where you can start training their platform their ai to listen to all
the Bitcoin podcasts across the specter and pick out certain topics of conversation that are going
on. They will then piece all of those together and create for you a podcast episode out of that,
but you're only listening to one specific topic. So you can get up to speed, hone your skills,
and get different versions of the topic as well. You'll have somebody that is pro XYZ,
you'll have someone that is con xyz and you'll get all kinds of different opinions in the same
episode so go and check it out bubble.fm the link is in the show notes for you there if you are
looking for places to spend your bitcoin and businesses to support go and download btc map
you've got all of the information on there and you can help build that out by verifying locations
or adding new locations plebeian.market is a new project put together by chief monkey you can find
people there that are willing to sell their goods and services for Bitcoin. So get these sats
flowing. Not much else to say, really, other than get to a conference. We've got BTC Helsinki
and Riga coming up in August. So Baltic Honey Badger is 9th to 10th of August, link in the show
notes. BTC Helsinki is the week after. If you can do both and make a trip out of it, that's awesome.
If not, choose one and get to a conference.
There's no words I can use to put into your mind how important it is to get out there and meet people, meet other Bitcoiners.
This is where the magic starts happening.
So if you can get to one of these conferences coming up in August, I look forward to seeing you there.
You can use the code BITTON at checkout for 10% discount.
Meanwhile, here is Kevin.
All right, Kevin. Welcome to the show. Nice to have you on.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Well, Lauren usually asks the first question, but she's not around to do that.
But I'm pretty sure I would have said to her, Kevin's going to come on the show and he's going to talk about inheritance planning.
And she would have looked at me and said, what's inheritance?
So you're going to have to explain, you're going to have to pretend a 14-year-old girl has just asked you what inheritance is.
The pressure is on now.
yeah that's actually a very complex thing to explain even to an adult so so yeah inheritance
well the idea is that we would like to be able to pass our assets what we own to the next generation
when something happens to us so as simple as that right it's just making sure nothing is lost and
and we can keep things going along generations.
Now, from the reality of things,
inheritance is a bunch of things.
Of course, you have the physical kind of aspect of,
okay, I'm getting the asset, right?
I'm getting something, I'm getting the money,
I'm getting the house, I'm getting the car, whatever it is.
But you also have the problem kind of of the title.
So who is actually the owner of this asset?
And of course, when there is an owner,
and we're talking about like legal stuff,
then there is also taxation that happens on top
where the government also want their cut.
And that's starting to be very complicated
when we are talking about something like Bitcoin.
It's really hard because you can be technically
inheriting some Bitcoin from someone,
but nobody has the keys.
And so maybe from the legal process,
you're now the owner of these Bitcoins.
You can see them because maybe you have the XPub,
but if you don't have the private key,
well, you don't really own them, right?
so that's an issue and actually that from a taxation perspective is going to be a complex
one like proving you don't have a key is complex you also have the opposite one where you might
have access to the coins for some reason because your family gave you a copy of the mnemonic or
something like that where legally you are not the owner of these coins for some reason I don't know
maybe your family had a debt and and part of the assets were these bitcoins and so they are not
owned by you, even though you control them. And so you have a lot of like layers like this that
makes inheritance an extremely complex topic. But yeah, typically what I'm looking at is just the
access to the coins, right? It's just the technical aspect. Can I make sure that my family will have
access to my Bitcoin? Then it's on them to talk to a lawyer or anything like that, or an accountant
to try to figure out, you know, yeah,
how to make that like an official thing.
Do they have taxes to pay on top of that?
Like, you know, that's up to them basically.
Would the simplest thing be just literally
to have the hardware wallet and the private keys?
I mean, obviously, if you're going to get knocked over
and hit by a bus tomorrow, you know,
there's not enough time to plan.
But if you've got the plan in place
and you've educated people around you,
then you're basically just passing the alloidal title of that Bitcoin,
which you have.
And if people aren't familiar with that term, alloidal title,
it means that you have complete and utter total ownership of something,
not like your house or your car,
which is registered with the land registry
or with the DVLA in the case of the UK.
In France, I can't remember what it's called.
ANTS, maybe? A-N-T-S?
is i don't even remember yeah haven't been in france far away so yeah right okay uh where you
do not have a lawyer title over these things and that's where you need a third party to get involved
i.e the probate people the lawyers the solicitors whatever they call themselves
and they're going to take their cut and uh in france i know it was uh it was very convoluted
very difficult to pass property like your house down through the family because
correct me if I'm wrong and it could be the same in the UK I've not gone through this yet
thankfully the property gets sold and then that's got to be taxed in some way shape or form
and then that's you've got to pay the solicitors to do that and you know before you even I mean let
alone grieving like you know no it's just straight into administration stuff yeah and uh i mean it's
gonna stay there right like the complexity is part of the game and they are not trying to make it
um easier there is also a lot of debate right now around like taxation of uh inheritance so some
countries have very high taxation some of them have very low or even zero um but given the aging
of the population and where the assets are mainly held right now with the older generations uh they
are starting to like see oh maybe we should tax that very heavily for many reasons right one of
them is just that there is a bunch of money sitting there and it's going to move at some point so we
can tax it um another one is also like this entire like a fairness slash equality thing where like
you kind of want people or at least they kind of want people to start from the same level and so if
So if you have a big inheritance and you're not working and then you have the working class that's kind of getting poor now, that creates a big imbalance.
And so they are like, OK, we need to fix that somehow.
Yeah there is a lot of problems right now especially in Europe So it not going to get better or easier I think I really believe taxation is going to be insane in the short term for inheritance
just because that's like the one thing that they know they can touch without,
you know, creating too much drama.
So right now, of course, like you have the pensioners that are getting the money
from the social security.
And then the only people that are paying for that now are like the young people
who are working and then you know they can't afford a house and blah blah blah blah blah blah
so yeah there's like this uh this big problem with the generation gap right now and uh and i
think inheritance is where they're gonna find the money in the kind of in the short term that's like
the the least uh political suicide decision they can make i think in the short term to make a lot
of money so yeah taxation and and bureaucracy is still going to be around yeah i mean it is a
honeypot to them to these people like you know that they have an aging population that where all
of the assets are rolled up in when all of the uh cash deposits are rolled up in
yeah well what can we do here we can tax the hell out of them when they die and no one's gonna
raise like an it's shocking to me that people don't question it like yeah like honestly
inheritance tax what are you talking about like the person's just died and they've passed away
and they've paid tax their whole lives and now i've got to pay tax on their belongings
before i can and there will basically be nowhere around it right it's it's extremely hard to
like hide assets or even not hiding it's like they know everything right so you're supposed
to declare everything and of course in reality that doesn't really happen like that like
some or most families will still have some things that you know are not declared like jewelry and
things like that i mean basic stuff that you can just go fetch and and distribute between the
family and of course you're not going to declare everything you find in the house um but you should
and uh yeah and so like larger assets like a house or a car it's just like there's no way around it
and then of course we talk about bitcoin uh bitcoin is a special one in that case um because
many people in Bitcoin right now are not declaring their assets, right? For different reasons.
Sometimes it's because they don't have to, which is also a thing now in many countries. So you only
have to declare it in some countries when you are taxable. So if you just hold it, the state might
have no idea about how many Bitcoins you have. And so if something happens to you, then it's getting
really difficult even if you want it as the heir uh if you want it to uh to declare things it's
going to be very complicated because you have no provenance and things like that for like where
do these coins come from and things like that so sometimes it's a it's it's a complicated topic and
that's why i'm kind of glad that uh as a business ourselves we just deal with the like okay the goal
is that your kids will have access to your keys uh that's it the rest you figure it out with them
uh always you know third parties like a lawyer and uh and yeah that's it so how what what yeah
i mean obviously you've been down this rabbit hole and back and you you you've produced something
built something that uh that you want to tell the people about uh that listening to the show
what what set you off on this path why why this particular avenue for you and uh what's the product
Yeah. Okay. That's a big question. So actually, let's start with the product. So the product is called Liana. It's a Bitcoin wallet, but it's a Bitcoin wallet that's more advanced than your typical single-sig or multi-sig wallet because it makes use of the time locks on Bitcoin.
So the time lock can be used for many things in Bitcoin.
The main thing that people believe time locks are for is for locking their coins.
But it's not.
The time lock is just like a tool in the script we can use in Bitcoin.
And the way we are using it, or most people using time locks are using it,
is to actually put a delay on a specific condition to spend the coins.
But it doesn't have to be to lock the coins for a specific amount of time.
So the way Liana works is basically that you have your normal wallet.
So like a single SIG or multi SIG, you know, what you would consider a wallet until now.
So a single SIG or multi SIG.
And you can, of course, you know, spend this money whenever you want.
You can receive money, spend it, whatever.
You don't have to think about time locks here.
But with Liana, you can add conditions for other keys that you will also have in this wallet.
And these keys cannot spend the coins until you haven't moved them for a while.
So it's basically kind of a dead man switch.
You have like, as long as you keep using your wallet normally,
the other keys in your wallet can, or the other hardware wallet,
let's say the signing devices,
the other signing devices cannot access the coins.
But if something happens to you after a specific amount of time,
let's say one year in the example, if I disappear,
one year after that, the other keys that I might have given to my family,
for example, will be able to access my coins.
So the coins are not moving by themselves or anything like that.
It's really the access to the wallet that is being unlocked.
So you can use that for many things.
And inheritance, back to your question,
inheritance is kind of like the, I would say the obvious,
but also probably the more impactful thing that this solved.
The reason for that is that before Liana,
so before this kind of time locks,
inheritance in Bitcoin was solved in very bad ways. The reason for that is that when you are
in self-custody, so assuming we're talking about self-custody here, custodial is very different.
So in self-custody, the goal of self-custody is that you control your coins. The goal of inheritance
is that someone else access your coins when you're not here. So these two things don't work together.
You cannot be in control of your coins and the only person in control of your coins if you also need someone else without you to be able to access your coins.
It's two completely different things.
So let's say if you want to do a multi-sig to do that, you could do a one of two where you have one key and your family has one key.
But then at any time, they could empty your wallet.
And that's not great.
Now, some people are doing like two of three, but you still need the family to have access to two keys at some point.
if they need to access it.
So one way to do it is, for example, to use a service,
I don't know, like Unchained or whoever,
which will probably collude or collaborate
with your family when needed.
So they will also sign and then you have two signatures there.
The problem is that there is a third party here.
So the family itself and by themselves cannot recover.
And so then if you want to do something
when they can recover, you have to go through like two
or four or something like that again, where they could empty your wallet
when you're still around, which is not great.
The other thing, even more basic that actually most people are doing
is just writing down their mnemonic, their own mnemonic, not even a separate one.
Put it in an envelope or something and just write down, you know,
if something happens to me, just open this envelope and you will be able
to access my coins.
Again, this is pretty terrible.
It's actually worse because if something happens to your coins,
like if they disappear tomorrow, who are you going to blame?
It's the same key.
So cryptographically speaking, you can't even blame the family.
You will never be able to prove if it's their backup or your backup
or something else that emptied your wallet.
So this is like a terrible situation where you can imagine
that if your wallet is empty after you actually gave a backup to someone,
even if they tell you it's not them, like the trust is completely destroyed.
And that would be pretty terrible in a family situation.
And so this is really why we were like, okay,
now that we have a way to actually give a key to someone,
but that key cannot access the coins as long as I'm around,
yeah, that should be a pretty strong use case.
So yeah, this is why Inheritance and this is why Liana.
Now the product itself, Liana, can be used for many other things.
One that I really like for myself is basically what I call safer backups.
So again, back on this backup thing, right?
You write down your mnemonic on a piece of paper,
12 words, 24 words, whatever, and you store it somewhere.
But if anyone accessed this mnemonic, they can empty your wallet.
And this is just a backup.
Why does it have to be always valiant, right?
You could imagine that this backup is also behind a time lock.
So now instead of freaking out all the time that someone finds my 24 words,
I can just have a key.
so these 24 words but they are time locked so i have my normal hardware wallet it works all the
time but i don't have a backup of that one and if it breaks or if i lose it if i type the wrong pin
three times whatever after a specific amount of time let's say three months i will be able to input
my uh my backup mnemonic but um but if somebody break into my house and get my mnemonic they
can't do anything with it as long as i still have my hardware i can move the funds etc but they
They cannot empty my wallet with a mnemonic.
So yeah, you can do a lot of things with something like Liana.
I know it's a lot to take, but yeah, it's really a lot of things you can do.
For companies, it's like key rotation, for example.
You have an employee leaving.
You want to be able to still access the coins in the future.
You can have dispute resolution.
Like for example, you have two co-founders in a company.
or even like just, yeah, let's say for a company,
two co-founders do a multi-sig, two of two.
If there is a dispute or if they don't agree
and they don't want to sign a transaction
because of a disagreement,
then after a specific amount of time,
you could have an extra key from the board of director
that would be able to co-sign after deciding
on which side it should work.
So a lot of things you can do.
so just to get people i want to make sure people have uh you know they've got the right picture in
their head here a liana wallet is a desktop wallet that you download so there's not hardware
that's one thing i want to make clear for people and so so for the person that's already got their
hardware wallet their cold storage at home it's not like they've got to go out and buy another
piece of equipment they've they're set they've got their they've got their bitcoin uh tightly
stored cold storage on a device so now what's the next step for them if they want to start looking
into liana they go to the website and they download the uh the uh the desktop wallet yeah
yeah so yeah wallet is a terrible word we're using in bitcoin because everything is a wallet
So the software is a wallet.
Your Bitcoins are in a wallet.
Your hardware wallet is a wallet.
But, you know, it's not the same thing.
So, yeah, hardware wallets are a terrible name.
We should call them signing devices.
There is progress towards that right now.
So at least that's a good thing.
The signing device contains a key.
And the key lets you kind of open the door to your actual coins So yeah we have a software that also called a wallet But basically what it is it just kind of a coordinator of these signing devices you want to use
And you are defining the conditions,
like which keys do you need to actually access
the coins in this thing.
And so when you set up Liana the first time,
it will ask you, OK, what conditions do you want for this?
Do you want a single SIG for yourself?
Do you want a multi-SIG?
So let's say I want just a single SIG.
So I'm going to use my cold card.
I'm going to just plug in my cold card
or even exchange the key through the SD card or whatever
just to tell my Liana software that,
okay, I want my cold card as my personal device
that's going to be valid all the time.
With it, I can spend my money.
Then I'm going to select my first,
let's say my inheritance path,
what we call a path or my inheritance option.
So I'm going to pick another hardware wallet.
Maybe my family already has one signing device, whatever.
Even if they already use it, that's not a problem.
You can have as many coin wallets if you want in one signing device.
People are also kind of confused about that.
But the coins are not in your hardware wallet, right?
They are not there.
It's not a hardware wallet.
It's just a key.
So you can use the same key for different wallets.
And so if your family already use, let's say, I don't know, a ledger,
you can actually get the expert from their ledger.
so you can just plug in their ledger to your computer or something like that,
put it in the inheritance option in your Liana, and then you just set the difference in time
between them. So typically by default it's one year for inheritance. So what that means is that
after one year of inactivity, so if you haven't spent coins for one year with the gold card in
in this case, then the ledger would also be able to access the wallet.
But the coins are not going to move from one to the other or anything like that.
The concept is not that.
The concept is that the coins are on the blockchain, right?
And the keys that can access it are right now only the cold card.
And if the cold card doesn't sign for more than a year, then it's either the cold card
or the ledger in this case.
So it's just the setup.
It's pretty simple.
Just plug in your hardware and it's done.
And once it's open, like when you finish your setup, it's just a normal Bitcoin software, right?
You have the receive button, the send button, you put your addresses, you scan your QR code.
It doesn't annoy you with anything complex or anything like that.
It's just a normal software.
Got it.
So for those people that are sitting there thinking, okay, yeah, this sounds good, but I'm not going to make a transaction in the next year or two.
They can set the time period themselves, I'm assuming.
They can. There is a maximum though that currently is a limit. It's kind of a virtual limit, but it's a limit in Bitcoin core. Well, in Bitcoin, in the network. So currently the kind of time lock we're using, the maximum is 15 months. So one year and three months for this type of time lock.
So in the near future, I hope we can have, it will require a soft fork, sadly, but I really hope we can increase that a bit because it's a tiny change to do in Bitcoin.
But yeah, currently 15 months maximum.
So if you really don't transact, as you were saying, it's not catastrophic, but it means that your family can also access your coins if they try, right?
So let's say if I miss my one year, what we call a refresh.
So if I miss my one year transaction, it's kind of okay.
I could wait two years.
And after two years, if I do a transaction, it resets the time lock
and you're good for another year at least.
But yeah, it just means that the key your family has is valid
after this one year period until you do another transaction.
I mean, I would say what most people should consider
and just put a reminder in the diary to make a transaction
and just a transaction to yourself, right?
Just spin up a new address on the device and just say...
You don't even have to.
You have a button to do that.
Now the signing devices all support as well
to recognize when it's a transaction from yourself to yourself.
So on the hardware, you don't even have to validate
because it knows the coins are going back to yourself.
So it just shows you the transaction fee.
It doesn't even tell you the amount
because the amount is back to you.
So you don't lose anything.
Um, so yeah, all the signing devices support that it's just going to say self
transfer on your signing device and that's it.
So it's, it's just a one button thing.
You don't have to copy paste an address and put it in the transaction
detail, none of that.
So how long has this been available?
How long has Liana wallet been around?
It's been more than two years now, uh, that it's been launched.
Uh, actually how long has it been?
I don't even remember when we launched it.
More than two years for sure.
Maybe we're reaching the three years soon.
So are you seeing more pickup from individuals or from companies?
Because obviously now we're having this spate of new businesses
declaring that they're going to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet.
What kind of dynamic are you seeing?
Yeah, that could be a whole podcast by itself.
One huge problem we have as a company,
and it's really, really hurting us
is that we do not know who are our users
or how many users we have
because the software is really sovereign,
completely open source.
You put it on your computer.
It doesn't talk to us.
It doesn't connect to our servers
or anything like that.
You run your own node.
It connects to your own node.
We have no clue how many users we have,
which is an issue.
And so that also means we have no clue
who is using it
except the people who contact us for support. So we do have individuals, that's for sure.
I guess that's the majority, but I also know we have some larger businesses.
And I really think Liana is like the more Bitcoin you have, the more it makes sense to use Liana,
especially if you want to do self-custody. So I actually don't think there is any
alternative right now. If you really want self-custody and you have, let's say, a bunch of
money, the alternative would be just a multisig. And multisig is not great when you start thinking
about, okay, now I need a threshold because if I lose one key, I don't want my coins to be lost.
So I can't do a two of two. I need a two of three. But then that means different combination
of key can spend. So security gets really complex. But for a company, for example,
like my company, Wizard Sardine, we have our coins in Liana, right?
And so right now to access the coins, it's a two of two between me and another employee.
But it's a two of two.
So it means like we absolutely both have to co-sign this transaction.
There's no way around it.
If there is a problem, if this person is unavailable or something like that,
after a specific amount of time, it's switched to another two of two,
which is again me and a different employee.
And then again, after some time it switches, et cetera, et cetera, until at some point it removed me from the equation in case something happens to me.
And then still the others can access the coins.
But it's not like a two of three or two of whatever, because they cannot sign together.
I always have to be in this signing thing.
And we know exactly who can sign at which amount of, like at which time.
So when you have these kind of things in place, going back to like a two of three or three of five just feels like going back to, you know, prehistoric times in Bitcoin.
So, yeah, it's just really cool for companies.
We don't really advertise it for companies yet.
But, yeah, we know we have some very large users and companies that are using it.
So, yeah, that's all I can say right now.
I think in terms of numbers of users, it's still mainly individuals.
We know we have some companies, but again, we have no way of really knowing the exact numbers.
And you mentioned, yeah, I forgot to ask you, where did the name come from?
Wizard Sardine.
Obviously, Liana is one of your products.
Then you have Revolt.
We can talk about Revolt in a minute.
But why Wizard Sardine?
And when did you pick that?
So the company is Portuguese.
And in Europe, bureaucracy likes to be very complex.
and everyone likes to put different laws on top of each other.
And so it just happens that the European Union put some kind of,
well, I don't know if you can call that a law,
but a very, very strong mandate on each of the member states
to be able to open a company.
I think it's in like a couple of days or something like that, maximum.
Because some countries had very, very slow processes
and it's really hurting the economy
when you can't start a business easily.
And so the EU said something,
like I don't remember the exact number,
but it's like a couple of days or something
that every member state need to have a process
to open a company quickly.
And there is no way around that.
So of course, the way they were thinking about that
was modernization, was, you know, automatization,
making use of digital stuff to create stuff more easily
instead of having all the paper bureaucracy.
In Portugal, they really like their bureaucrats.
And so instead, what they are doing is that to fix this problem,
they are actually creating hundreds and hundreds of shell companies in advance.
So when you go to the company office, if you want the fast way of getting a company,
they just basically give you one.
And so you do have the list of all these names of shell companies they created,
which are randomly generated. It's two words.
So you can check it on the website of the Ministry of Justice.
So you have the list of all these shell companies that exist that you can pick from.
And so when you go to the company office to create your company, you just need to pick one of these names and they will give it to you.
Right. It's in less than an hour.
And so it's really fun because it's a very long list and there is a lot of very funny names.
And so, yeah, we picked Wizard Sardine in this list.
So it's actually randomly generated by the government.
And Wizards, because Bitcoin, now it's a bit less nice because of the Taproot guys.
But Wizards were really the name for the devs in Bitcoin until now.
And Sardines for Portugal.
So for us, it was great to do a Wizard Sardine.
Yeah, I'm glad I asked.
Because the Taproot Wizards have done damage to that emoji, let's say.
Exactly.
exactly and that was the whole meme as well right so you had the this join us uh drawing uh from uh
from reddit back in the days like very very early days the the wizard that they actually took out
their brand which is a very shit i wonder if i wonder if people are even aware of that um that's
a good story to go into because you know that that picture of the wizard goes back a long time
and it has been co-opted and it's pretty sad uh so yeah do you want to just give the quick history
as to where that that original picture came from well i i don't even know how old it is um as far
as i know it's been in bitcoin longer than me so it's been a long time that's probably something
like 2012 or something um i know it was made on paint by a guy i forgot the name of the guy So just like they were just trying to find a good image I think for the Reddit for the slash R slash Bitcoin Reddit
And yeah, they just went with that.
As far as I know, this is the story.
Maybe there is much bigger story that you know about.
Well, all I remember is, I just Googled it so we don't need to guess anymore.
In February 2013, a marketing campaign for Bitcoin was launched on Reddit featuring the now iconic Bitcoin wizard.
Since then, this beloved mascot has become synonymous with Bitcoin and is recognized as the most well-known symbol of the cryptocurrency.
Now, I remember Danny Scott over at Coin Corner, when they started pushing out their Bolt cards, they had the picture of the wizard on the Bolt cards.
And this was back in like 2021, 2022, I want to say, 22, I think.
And I'm sure he told me that they had to stop producing those because somebody contacted them and said, no more.
Like, you know, this is trademarked or copyrighted or something.
And they're like, oh, yeah, whatever.
OK, we won't do.
So I've got one of the original cards with the wizard on, which is great.
But it's just such a shame to what it's become now and what it's known for now.
It's a testament, actually, to the personalities and the people behind it.
Absolutely.
And yeah, for us, it's actually hurting us as well in terms of brand.
So we were there before, of course, Taproot Wizard.
And a lot of people, when they just see the wizard name, they're like, you know, these guys, scammers, whatever, NFT.
I'm like, no, I'm working on the hardcore Bitcoin layer one stuff.
I have nothing to do with these guys.
and I'm not going to change my company name just because some people are having a bad name like
come on man you know it's like they're going to disappear before us so oh for sure mate absolutely
uh that that's inevitable but that's a very very cool story I'm glad I asked you about that um
because yeah just walking into the Portuguese government and randomly picking a company shell
name that they've made for you uh yeah very very cool so right have we have we done liana and no
the last thing i wanted to ask you about liana uh and it's a very hot topic right now is when you
go on the website uh you can go through like the things that you're capable of doing open source
so you know it's open source that's very cool time locks uh miniscript coin control uh multi-sig
no kyc dark mode only by the way yeah very very you know cypherpunk move um coin uh not coin
control uh one click node so that's interesting to a lot of people because of you know the current
conversation around running a bitcoin node which i'm glad is happening because a lot more people
need to be running nodes like first of all you know not so called debate aside more nodes please
like everybody listening make this your 2025 goal so if they download liana and they click that one
click node what's going do you do i mean how much of the the space of their computer is it going to
take up do they need a new device or refurb an old laptop you know what what's the actual
practicalities obviously one click node is the the headline banner what's actually going on
So you actually have four ways of using Liana.
So when you launch Liana and you reach the node step,
it will ask you, do you want to run your own node?
Or do you want to use something called Liana Connect?
Which is basically, we have a big disclaimer there on this page,
on the software itself saying, if you use that,
Like do it for testing purpose or at least know that you have no privacy towards us.
Because if you use someone else's node, they will know about your assets.
They might not know who you are, but they, if they have to track your coins, they have to know, you know, which coins are yours.
Otherwise it doesn't work.
So there is this option.
If you don't want to run a node at all, that can be useful for like, if you're just using a burner computer and you just need to access your wallet or something like that.
So we do have this option, Liana Connect, where you put an email address.
You don't have to put, like, of course, an email identifying you.
That's to connect you and to get access to the remote node.
Very few people use that, but it's like the simple option.
If you want to test and stuff, you can use that.
Then I want to use my own node.
So when you click in there, again, you have different options.
You have I already ran my own node.
And so in this one, you can use an Electrum node or your Bitcoin Core node.
or your Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core node.
So locally, Bitcoin Core, and if it's remote, Electrum.
And then if you don't have one, you have this one-click option
to actually install a Bitcoin Core node
and configure it automatically as well in prune mode.
So we do prune it to 30 gigs.
So it's probably going to take, nowadays,
it's probably going to take something like up to 50 gigs
because the UTXO set is pretty large already,
and that doesn't count in the pruning.
So yeah, if you have like 50 gigs of data, it will work.
But you still have to do, of course, the full IBD.
So the initial block download, so the whole validation of the entire history.
So even though you're pruning, you still have to download the entire history of Bitcoin.
You're just discarding the old block as you move along in your verification of the node.
So when you do that, depending on your machine, it might take up to like a couple of days or something.
or something. So it's not great UX to have to wait a couple of days, but that's the minimum you can
do to be fully sovereign. And otherwise, of course, if you already are running a node,
then you can connect to that one. That's no problem.
You said a few keywords there, bloat being one of them. Do you just want to explain to people that
that might have seen this topic going around Twitter
and aren't completely sure what all of this means
or which side of the fence they're falling on?
So the UTX, so we have, like, there is, like, two things
in basically your node.
You have the history, so all of the previous transactions
that are in blocks, and you basically store that,
or at least you verify that, and you store some of that
when you prune it.
you can discard all the old blocks, it's no problem. But then your node is also validating
that the transactions that are incoming are valid. And to know if they are valid, they need to spend
an existing UTXO, an unspent transaction output. So every time a transaction is spent, great, you can
remove it from the UTXOs because it's now spent. So this one you can discard, you can forget it.
The problem is that all of the ones that have not been spent yet, so all of the coins
on the network that have not spent yet, we need to keep a track of them because that's where we
verify if the new transactions are actually spending from those. Because if they are not
spending from those, they are fake transactions. And so this is normal to grow over time because
the price of Bitcoin going up and more users using Bitcoin, typically the UTXOs are getting
smaller and smaller. In the early days, people might have UTXOs of a thousand Bitcoin because
it was worthless. Now having a UTXO of one Bitcoin is starting to be more rare already because people
are using more reasonable denomination, kind of like you do in your pocket when you go buy
something in your wallet, you have different denominations. So same with your wallet.
So each person probably owns a bunch of UTXOs. So the more people we have using Bitcoin, the more
UTXOs there will be. So it's normal that this set grows over time. And that's kind of a fact.
Now, it's growing very fast for the past couple of years.
Again, I'm saying again because it's not the first time that it happens in the history of Bitcoin.
It's kind of okay and expected that it goes up.
But we also know that some of these outputs, some of these UTXOs, are actually not going to be ever spent.
Because they are there for other reasons.
or I mean, we can't know for sure, but some of them are probably there in a way that they might
not even be spendable. And so we're not tracking, we are now tracking things that are useless to
track because they might not be spendable. So we're talking about some very extreme cases,
like the stamps, for example, which is like a type of NFT or something like that. Like to,
Anyway, it's a very bad idea to do this. Gladly, they are not doing much of it because it's not
efficient, but it's very hurtful for Bitcoin nodes. Any type of transaction that creates an output
that we know is unspendable is terrible because we're going to have to store it. I'm not going
to say forever. In the current architecture of Bitcoin, it is forever, but there is a lot of
research going on about how we can prune this UTXO set as well. So typically the Floresta project
or U3XO is very interesting for that. So that might be a thing to the future as well.
And yeah, so it's just, there are like basically, yeah, the thing you can prune,
so the blocks you can prune, and you can have a node that's like pruned to 500 megs of blocks.
so very small but then on top of that you also have your utxo set which is probably 20 gigs today
so the minimum size of the bitcoin node today is probably 20.5 gigs something like that
yeah and i'm just looking at the last block uh as we're talking and there's a bunch of these um
transactions for example i'm looking at one the amount uh was 330 sats and the fee to do that
was 302 sats and yeah there's tons of these just in the last block so this is the type of
transaction that you're talking about these are going into blocks and they're never ever going
to be spent so they are literally just bloating the utxo set yes probably yeah so again we can't
say for sure they will never be spent so that's also an interesting thing um because there is no
limit on the dust. This is, again, a policy thing. So let's say if at some point what they are using
this for, and probably the ones you're talking about, they might be like inscriptions or whatever.
It's labeled as an inscription. Yeah.
So if you imagine that what's kind of tied to it is becoming worthless, let's say in five years,
nobody cares about any of this. It's absolutely worthless. But 300 sats might be actually worth
something even if it's just one dollar right in five years so we do like 3x in price or something
like that so if it's one dollar per utxo now you're like oh wait maybe it makes sense to actually
spend them right so these ones are kind of interesting because the inscriptions they do
have the private key otherwise they can't spend the inscription so they actually have the private
key so it's technically still spendable now there are some like the stamps that are technically not
spendable and this is the horrible
when they don't have a private key next to it.
So there are different level of like how bad things can be.
And when you don't have a private key,
when there is no way to spend it except quantum computers,
this is like, yeah, this is bad.
And this is also the reason for the whole kind of drama
recently on Twitter because, yeah,
one of these layer twos called Citria, whatever.
But yeah, one of these layer two had a kind of a punishment transaction, kind of like Lightning does.
So in Lightning, you have this thing that typically you collaborate with the other end of the channel.
So if you want to close a channel, you will close it with them, et cetera, et cetera.
But if someone is trying to cheat, you have kind of an emergency that you want to push your defense transaction to actually make sure the thief cannot take away your money.
So in Lightning, you have a unilateral emergency close in case the other party is trying to steal from you.
And this is time sensitive.
So it has to go through as quick as possible because if the other transaction goes through before that,
or there is a time lock, but if the time lock expires before that, the other party can steal your money.
So that's the entire defense mechanism of the Lightning network is that you have this kind of transaction
that you can actually defend yourself if the other party is trying to cheat.
And so this layer two, this T3, I think, is kind of similar.
So they have a kind of defense transaction thing
that supposedly would never be used, kind of like in Lightning,
but it could happen.
And so because it's a time-sensitive transaction,
they want it to spread through the network as fast as possible, right?
So they kind of want to not use the slipstream
or they don't want to use the minor out-of-band thing
because, again, statistically, we don't know which miner is going to mine the next block.
And so it's better if every miner gets this one and so it can be mined.
And so it's very important for them that it relays through the normal Bitcoin network.
And so the thing they are writing in there, the data they are putting,
because it's a layer two, so they're putting a state there.
I don't know how big it is.
It's not very big.
it's like, yeah, just a few hundred bytes.
It's really small, very, very small.
It's smaller than a normal transaction in that sense.
So it's pretty small the amount of data they put,
but it's still bigger than a normal up return.
And so because you could do only one up return,
well, you can right now do only one up return per transaction,
what they were planning to do
or what their testing transaction was,
was to fill the up return
because that's like the normal way or the normal,
the way to put data there to be relayed.
And then because it was bigger than that,
then they were creating two more UTXOs,
but the ones without a private key to put the data there.
And that is horrible.
So even though it's probably never going to be used,
so their approach was that, you know,
it's just there in case there is a problem.
We might never even write any of these transactions,
but because it's there and it could potentially go bad,
the idea was like, yeah, that's just terrible.
Like UTXO set should never be used for that.
An up return is actually pruned, right?
Up return, the whole point of it is that you don't store it
in the UTXO set we were talking about before.
That's the whole point of up return.
And so the idea was just to increase the up return size
to not create any of these new UTXOs.
So that's basically the thing about the entire drama.
a lot of people are thinking it's related to like these JPEGs or NFTs, but it's actually not,
it's nothing to do with it. It's not worth for any of these NFT people or these images, JPEGs people,
it's not worth paying the price of even an up return. It just makes no sense. It's like way
too expensive compared to the other ways they can store data in Bitcoin. That is not going to be
relayed right now, but they don't care. There is no urgency when you do a JPEG on Bitcoin,
they don't care. They can wait a few blocks. So it was just a very narrow niche thing that happened
where some developers had a niche problem that they needed to have this emergency transaction
to go through as fast as possible. But the only way to propagate that was actually to create some
unspendable UTXOs, which is very bad. And so the Bitcoin call approach was like, okay,
okay, let's just increase the operator and thing because it's like,
it's the least bad thing for this specific use case. And yeah,
that's basically the whole drama. So big discussion, a lot of misunderstanding.
A lot of people think now like a lot of JPEGs are going to be put in up return.
I would really bet money that it's not happening because it's four times more
expensive than putting it elsewhere. So.
yeah mate well the debate will rage on it doesn't look as though it's going to end anytime soon
yeah i actually don't think so i think it will uh it will just die out uh very soon um yeah i
because it's going to be a nothing burger uh we will see that people don't use up return it's too
expensive so people don't use the up return to put data it's too expensive it's just this this
expensive thing incentives is what the game is about and so if it's too expensive and we're
talking four times more expensive uh people are not gonna use it like nobody likes to burn money
for no reason no that yeah that's the thing um and this is where you know people need to put their
tinfoil hats on it's like who's actually putting this in is it just the dgens uh i don't think so
I think like they would have got tired of doing this a long, long time ago.
Or is it coming from much deeper pockets?
And, you know, why is it still happening?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I agree with you.
I do believe a lot of it is probably like money laundering type stuff,
like it was on Ethereum and other chains.
But even though it's like you don't want to pay four times more fees
just because, so you put it elsewhere, right?
And then if it was malicious people,
So if we were talking about like somebody attacking the network, we cannot prevent them to do the UTXO set creation.
And so that's a major issue in Bitcoin is that we know that if people really want to spam the UTXO set, they can.
And yeah, nothing we can do about it because like we really cannot do anything about it today.
because right now a UTXO, what does it look like?
It's a Bitcoin address, right?
A Bitcoin address, when you look at it,
you don't know if it's valid or not.
I mean, what is valid?
We would need the private key to know that.
And you don't give your private key when you give an address.
It's just like, it's just an address.
That's the whole point.
And so, yeah, people can write data to that.
And if they just write data to that,
they don't have a private key,
but they don't need a private key to write.
like you don't need a private key to send money to an address right uh at least to receive it and so
yeah that's the main issue because it is quite cheap still today to just create a transaction
with like hundreds or even thousands of outputs and maybe none of these outputs are real so if
you just wanted to hurt the network if you were like a government or whatever uh you could just
do that and the UTXO set would grow and grow and grow and there is just no solution there is none
we cannot that's the worry is actually to prove who is who and that means KYC we're not going to
do KYC on Bitcoin like on the blockchain like this is not happening so yeah that is the worry
if you have a state sponsored attack uh with infinite amount of cash that they can just print
whenever they want or a central bank attack.
Yeah, that's where the real worry lies.
But the good news or the good or the bad news
is that there are still a lot of other attacks
that are much easier and cheaper to do.
That's the good news.
That's kind of the good news is that even that as an attack
is probably not happening because the other attacks
are just kind of easier.
Well, anyway, all right.
So we've done that.
we've done uh liana uh did you want to talk about revolt sure yeah we can talk about revolt a little
bit and then uh yeah we will see after that if we have time but revolt is also interesting in the
sense that it might be related to covenant and uh and there are some discussions now about ctv csfs
which is like potentially a softball coming up so revolt revolt is actually why we created this
company in the first place um so a investment fund that invests in bitcoin uh reached out to me
end of 2019 um to actually do kind of a research on how they could secure their bitcoin
while a group of them were owning the fund so they were controlling the bitcoin if you want
But they wanted a couple of traders from their company to be able to spend from it but not to empty the wallet And I like this is weird So you asking me like you want to control the coins but you actually want two other people to have access to it So to be able to delegate the access basically
while still kind of retaining a way to prevent them from stealing the money.
I'm like, either they have the money or they don't.
Like, it's how it works.
And they really wanted self-custody.
So, of course, if you go on a platform, like a professional platform,
a custodian they will give you the same kind of control as an online banking where you have like
the admins then you can give some i don't know like a trader account with specific limits per day
or things like that but you can't do that on chain on bitcoin like a limit of spending per day on
bitcoin on chain is not possible and so there's been a lot of research on that since 2013 and
And that's actually what we call the covenants.
So the actual name of the kind of mechanism
to let you delegate funds to someone
and being able to claw back the funds or put limits
is actually a vault.
But now, kind of like wallet, a vault
is used by many people for different reasons.
So a lot of people, for example, call a multisig a vault.
I don't do that.
a vault is a very specific transaction type on Bitcoin
that was defined in 2013, so a long time ago.
It's when you have a multiple stage Bitcoin transaction on chain.
So the first stage is to kind of like unvault,
so unlock your coins from being super safe
to go in a staging type transaction
where they are waiting there for a specific amount of time
before they get actually released to finalize the transaction.
And while they are in this staging area,
the owners of the funds can actually claw it back. So they can actually get the funds back to
themselves. So you can see, oh, funds are actually going to move. And then you have a pretty long
amount of time when you can define it, but typically a few hours or days even where you can
press a button to actually cancel the transaction. But this is on chain already. So this is pretty
cool. That's what a vault does. It's really useful for like very deep cold storage stuff
where you don't want to transact with it, but you want to move it to a hotter wallet, for example,
or when you want to actually delegate some of your funds to someone else.
And so the way we were doing, the research was like, can we do that on Bitcoin today?
And until now, for the past more than a decade now, all the conclusions and all the scientific
paper were that it was not possible without adding covenants to Bitcoin. And so covenants are a way
to restrict transactions in its outputs itself. So not just the inputs, not just timelocks,
but actually saying conditions to the outputs like, okay, from this wallet, you can only spend
to this list of addresses. It will never go to extra addresses, for example. Or you could imagine
like the maximum amount of transaction you can do per output, per transaction, etc. And so there's
been a lot of research on Bitcoin for that. And my view in 2019 was that we're never going to see
covenant or at least not anytime soon a lot of people disagreed with me but so far i've been
proven right so in 2019 i was like it's probably not possible but let me do the research and i
actually came up with an architecture uh to do a bitcoin vault without requiring any change in the
in the bitcoin protocol um so that's probably my like lifetime contribution to bitcoin i don't think
i will ever be able to come up with something like that um so i was super excited sent it to
the bitcoin mailing list tried to get some feedback uh it worked out and so then i got uh
antoine poiseau which who is now actually a chain code and part of all the drama uh recently so he's
he's making his name now but um antoine poiseau joined me actually to build a prototype of this
and um and after like two three weeks we had a working prototype of a vault without
uh covenants which was insane and so i was like okay let's try to build that the company the
investment funds that funded the research didn't have enough funding to build the whole product.
This is why we created the company. I raised some funds from Bitcoin VCs and we actually went along
with the Revolt product. Problem is Revolt is still very complex to deploy. It's not a software
you install on your computer. It requires servers, watchtowers, a lot of stuff. So it works. But
But yeah, as far as I know, nobody is using it in production right now.
So it's a very cool project and product.
But yeah, too complex, sadly, for today.
Too complex for the majority of users.
No, no, no, no, no.
This was already targeted only at very large institutions.
So yeah, Revolt is built in a way that it's designed for resisting nation state attackers.
So a government holding Bitcoin could deploy revolt to be sure that nobody can steal their coins.
It was built from the starting point that the attacker is a nation state funded level attacker.
So it is the most secure thing you can get out there for storing your Bitcoin.
The problem is it's extremely complex.
It sounds like the sailors should be on the phone to you right now.
Oh, it should be.
Yeah.
But no, they don't want to.
They prefer to use a custodian.
So, yeah.
But like early days when sailors started the thing, I was like, okay, that's the perfect use case for me.
Right.
So I was talking to all the exchanges, all the large exchanges, because they have a stash of Bitcoin.
Right.
I was talking to the large holders and yeah, no, the sailors of this world, they don't care.
It's Coinbase and Fidelity.
It's not going to be deployed in-house.
Fidelity, for example, also had then their research on Bitcoin vaults.
They even had a team building one in-house, but they decided to not put it in production either.
So, yeah, sadly, people don't push enough.
It's I don't know about you, mate, but we talked about honey pots earlier and that these places, you know.
if if a government decides like right let's uh 6102 attack this um this network and confiscate
uh everybody's bitcoin because we want it to and we will build a a new world reserve currency
around it and then re-hypothecate the shit out of it like they'll just take this bitcoin like
an order will be signed and um over it comes especially if it's held with like you know
registered businesses because if the business is registered under that jurisdiction then it is the
government's by like i think we lost this war when the etfs were approved so when the etfs
got approved, it created a massive risk to Bitcoin, in my opinion. People didn't see it that way.
Everyone was excited because a number grew up. But to me, the ETF is the thing that's the main
risk. So it's not even the government confiscating coins. It's like if anything happened to Coinbase,
if anything happens, right, they lose their keys, they get their funds stolen, anything happens,
who is losing money well the ETFs is basically the pension funds and so that's the thing that
people don't understand the ETF is not the average investor it's the large institutional
institutional investor that's basically dealing with other people's money typically pensioners
and they couldn't buy Bitcoin directly for legal reasons and yeah so now that they have the ETF
it's perfectly normal for them to put billions into this.
So the problem is if anything happens to the money at Coinbase, for example,
then what happens?
You have millions, for sure millions of people
who didn't even know they had Bitcoin exposure
that are going to know they actually had Bitcoin exposure
through their pension funds.
And they're going to be like, what the fuck?
And so everyone is going to start suing each other.
And now you have entire governments,
typically the US government in this case, that have to deal with millions of pensioners that lost their money or part of their money,
with pension funds potentially blowing up, etc. And then it's catastrophic.
So there is no way, we talked about political suicide at the beginning, but again, I think this is one,
like there is no way for a government to be like, oh, well, it's Bitcoin, there is nothing we can do.
no way we're talking about millions of people didn't sign up for any of that that lost their
coins um they're gonna be a lot of problems there um it might even go through like um yeah taking
over the mining farms in the u.s trying to roll back the chain i mean we're talking about u.s
government type stuff trying to save millions of people right doesn't matter how much money they
lost it's millions of people so they kind of have to it's like it's their job to save the population
So to me, this is where we lost.
It's when the ETFs came online.
Because you're delegating your money to them.
You don't know what they do.
And then when they lose the money, who are you going to blame?
Now, in reality, yeah.
Will government start seizing Bitcoin I don know Possibly You right with this If it becomes really a strategic asset not You know they did it in the past they will do it again Could be also like haircuts could be oh if you have more than I don know 100 Bitcoin
in your Coinbase account, we're going to say it's dodgy, so we're going to take everything
over 100 Bitcoin.
You know, it could be haircut like that.
But the current risk we see in the security side of Bitcoin is that there is more and
more, it's actually a meme, but it's not a meme, more and more North Korean attackers
that are really getting close to this money. So we know for sure that working at Coinbase full time,
you have quite a few assets, typically from North Korea and other nations. So this is starting to
be documented. You have actually a pretty good blog article from Kraken on this. So they actually
caught one that went pretty high in their hiring process. So they are fully state funded. So fake
passport, fake everything, fake addresses. They look like normal people with the skills to get
the job. It's not just fake stuff. They have actual engineers on these calls trying to get
into the company and they will work in the company for months, if not years before actually
getting through either trying to leak some security stuff,
installing some malware, and maybe at some point getting access to the coins.
So we know this is a reality now in these very large companies
and these very large exchanges that, yeah,
a portion of their employees is basically state assets from different countries.
And so this is starting to be scary and nobody cares.
That's wild.
Yeah, there is actually, yeah.
And I know the large exchanges have like communication channels between them.
So between the CSOs to actually report these applicants and things like that.
So they are tracking who could be a potentially bad applicants and they are trying to track them toward like between companies.
So they actually collaborate with each other to make sure it doesn't happen too much.
But for sure, it's happening.
Yeah.
I mean, well, the most recent thing with Coinbase where, I mean, according to Brian Armstrong,
somebody was paid off to release a bunch of email addresses and account details from one of their
like I don't know offshore customer service like you know what are you saying like this is
and we'll make you all good and we'll give you all your money back and uh oh my god so that was
I mean, or was that just a cover up for we've got a mole within our organization that's doing all of this and we just can't catch them and just blame it on some offshore customer service center, you know?
Yeah, and basically you will never know and they might never know either.
so it's really that when you have nation state level attackers it's very hard to fight against
them right like coinbase is a normal company in that sense they are like a bunch of early people
that started a startup probably like the the first 20 employees are still there you know in
high positions they they have no kind of specific training to deal with a nation state attacker you
know being their employees there it's just complicated no and canute uh did a thread about
this recently uh on his bitcoin infinity media um thread uh and it's a thread and he's got a
picture of morpheus um it's like do you think the system is going to just roll over and let bitcoin
win like uh you know and he goes through the thread and we we would we would be so naive
to just dispel all of this stuff as oh it's just conspiracy theory it's like no they're here
like nation-state level attackers and why and why wouldn't they be like you know absolutely
they're behind yeah they are here and and uh and also yeah the the kind of impact is getting
different over time so we know that north korea is funding themselves through uh stealing money
from random hacks, right?
All of these exchanges.
And that's just the simple thing.
It's like they steal money
so they can fund their operations.
And that's fine.
They get billions of dollars per year now at this stage.
So it's actually a very large funding
for something like North Korea.
And the problem is that
when you are talking about things that are larger,
like Fidelity, like Coinbase and things like that,
it's now starting to not be just for the money
because it's too large anyway.
So the money would just go down.
but it's really like how bad it impacts the economy.
It would really collapse some of the economy in the US
if something like Coinbase disappear.
As I was saying again, you know, like the pension funds
and things like that.
This would be crazy.
Or MicroStrategy, which is now SP500, right?
So it does have an impact if they even break things.
They don't even have to steal it, which is crazy.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay.
So what was the last thing you wanted to talk about
before we sign off?
What can I talk about?
Yeah, I mean, I think this was a good discussion
and self-custody is, sadly,
self-custody is actually in a kind of downwards trend right now.
It's less fancy.
A lot of people are talking about Bitcoin and holding their coins,
but less and less are actually caring about self-custody.
So I can tell you that because I really work in that.
So these kind of numbers are pretty scary and it's not just me.
It's also like the other wallet developers and things like that.
We see a difference in terms of numbers.
Yeah, less and less people are doing self-custody.
Some people are even moving from self-custody to custodians because they are like, oh, this
never had any issue and it seems simpler.
I have too much stress, et cetera.
so we do hear these kind of stories when people have now more money or more value in their bitcoin
and they are just starting to be too scared to keep it themselves which i might understand in a
way right you have like some different risks you can be abducted whatever and uh yeah so
this kind of risk are starting to make people more scared of self-custody than
than of custodial services and yeah it's very bad for bitcoin right like centralization of money in
with one single point, Honeypot is terrible.
And so I'm not sure how we're going to fix this.
So education, I think, is good.
The tools are very good now as well.
Like we are in a much better place today
than we were like three, four years ago.
Multisig is super easy to do now.
It was very complex in the early days.
And when you look at the number,
it's like something that, like for example,
Spectre, the wallet software,
Spectre had I don't know like more than 10,000 users in the early days and it was very hard to
use and ugly and now you have very good software that comes out so typically Liana but you have
other right you have Nunchuck you have Keeper you have a lot of really cool state-of-the-art stuff
I'm quite sure if you put all of us together we're not at 10k users and this is scary like
very scary so yeah i'm not too sure how we can fix this if it's even fixable because uh
we we obviously like if you look at evolutions of money um banks didn't exist like magically right
it's just that people didn't feel comfortable keeping their money at home uh and so they started
pulling it together into banks because you know it's more secure uh so yeah if bitcoin goes the
same way that's kind of like not a not a good place because then we have all the risks of
centralization and things like that so yeah uh that was just a small rant but it's something we
see uh on a day-to-day basis that people have less interest or more fear of self-custody even though
the tools are just so much better now than they were even like three four years ago yeah so for
anybody listening that's going to the conferences either prague or riga or helsinki there will be
booths there go and talk to the uh the wallet makers go and talk to kevin like get in front of
these people up your knowledge because i think like education is key and um if people don't have
the right information on why it is so damn important to self-custody your bitcoin yeah
we're never and it's not hard and it's not hard like this is this is probably the main thing like
self-custody is just about, you know, installing an app on your phone.
I mean, this is the first step.
It doesn't have to be complicated.
All right.
Citadel, have you found yourself a Citadel?
Not yet.
So I am living in the Azores, which is a bunch of islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
One of the reasons why I came here was to try to make some kind of a Citadel.
But yeah, nothing happened.
It's still Portugal.
So it's extremely bureaucratic.
Not going to happen here.
So I don't know.
I'm still looking, to be honest.
I don't know where to move next.
And I'm not sure where the best place is going to be.
Maybe Prospera I mean that probably the ones that are the most advanced right now But yeah I really really interested in the topic as well Azor it a place I never been
I'd love to come and visit and check it out.
I know you've run a conference there a couple of times.
Are you doing the same thing or the Unconference?
Yeah, the Unconference.
I did run it twice.
Yeah.
And I canceled it last year because not enough people.
And this year because I don't have time.
So hopefully next year, but not sure yet.
All right, okay.
All right, well, we need to go and visit anyway.
It looks amazing.
So last question.
If you had one last orange pill left to give to somebody,
who would you give it to and why?
Oh, that's a tough one.
I mean, I would like to see kind of a good government,
but I don't believe in governments.
So it's just like, who would it be?
I actually don't know.
So I already orange-pilled my family somehow.
So that's kind of done.
I really think Bitcoin would solve a lot of the world's problem.
So a lot of people would probably benefit from it.
But yeah, I actually don't know who.
No idea.
This is an interesting question.
Well, no problem.
that you know i'm not gonna push you for an answer yeah i actually don't know okay that's
the first time that's ever happened over 500 shows like a bona fide i don't know yeah i think i think
everyone is aware of bitcoin right now so also that's a that's a big shift compared to like 10
years ago when you had to explain bitcoin to people before you even explained what you were working on
now people know what Bitcoin is
if they don't care about it
I mean it's their choice I guess
so you know everything is out there
the content is out there
the numbers are out there
everything is aligned
numbers go up
everything is there for them to look at it
so if they don't want to
I mean maybe they are just lost already
so a little anecdotal story for you
we were at our Bitcoin meetup last night
and four or five of us sitting around
and a new guy walks in
absolutely brand new
brand new to investing let alone bitcoin he's never invested in stocks and shares or anything
and uh found uh found out about the meetup and come and come and met us and his question was
just like well yeah as he'd listened to us talking well if you guys are all like you know
it doesn't sound as though you're in this for like you know to make money what what's it for
what are you going to use it for i'm all just looked at him and like well this is this is
generational wealth so that was kind of like to see him and his reaction he looked at us all around
the table he's like oh all right so this is a long term that we're like yeah like this is a
100 200 300 year thing uh which ties into what we talked about at the beginning here with
inheritance so thanks for what you're doing and thanks for building the products and uh and coming
on and talking about it and uh appreciate everything that you've done for the community
and i look forward to meeting you in helsinki if not riga if you make it over there yep yep that'd
be great and so uh if anyone listening uh is interested to try liana please do it it's just
about downloading a software you probably want to have a couple of hardware wallets as well
or signing device to try it out and uh yeah you can find more information on the website and we
have a telegram group as well to get help from other users so that's just the last thing i wanted
to add excellent well cheers kevin have a great day and thanks for coming on thank you bye see you
well thank you again kevin for everything that you have done for education around bitcoin and
the project and the software that you have built to help people take control of their bitcoin and
generational wealth. Let's talk about that for a bit because a lot of people might even gloss over
when you talk about it but that is because that the amount of gaslighting that's going on in the
mainstream media. If you just do a simple google search for spend the kids inheritance or ski
holiday something like that or skiing inheritance you will get hundreds of thousands of reports and
mainstream newspapers about how boomers, so they're talking about the boomers here,
are spending the kids' inheritance instead of saving for inheritance to pass down to them.
It's crazy.
This is the mindset now that's being pushed into that generation that holds all of the wealth.
They're being gaslit by financial advisors, by flapping heads on television,
by so-called financial experts and wizards.
Like, if I just click on one of these,
become.nz, this is one of the things.
Five reasons why you should spend your kid's inheritance in 2025.
One, life is way too short to delay having fun.
Two, there's a 50% chance your kids will blow it.
Three, your children won't remember the stuff.
4. Develop your children's values. If somebody was to die at the age of 80, we're talking about passing this down to a 50 year old adult, not children. This is absolute freaking nonsense.
5. Legal costs, delays and challenges to your will
This is absolute nonsense
and I'm so glad to be in the Bitcoin space now
and have these discussions about long-term generational planning
and unifying the family over generations
and passing down that education
and I'm sure many of you like me
you take this very, very seriously
and you will have for the next however many decades you're going to be on this planet and
however big you build your family out think of the amount of times you can have the conversation
around the dinner table about how you have to be very disciplined and very responsible with what
will be coming down i mean this isn't this isn't an idea that's just going to click in their minds
and especially if you've only got young kids but like I said you might be 35
years old you could live to a hundred you got plenty of time to instill that
education and my goodness do we need that education instilled to build to
build unified families again this is what the state despises this is why
they what did the gaslighting the boomers to spend blow go out there blow it
kickstart the economy that's great you know get that grey pound rolling
around the economy you know your kids won't need it and they end up begrudging
you when they're gone and like leaving this legacy of distaste and it's just
it's always everything they do is an attack on the family bitcoin fixes this
and the the tools are out there there's no excuse like I said at the beginning
there is no excuse for not taking self custody of your Bitcoin if you haven't
done that please heed this as your warning go and do it now reach out to
Kevin, if you've got anything you'd like to discuss with him,
reach out to me, reach out to any of the other hardware wallet makers
that you will want questions answered to,
or get to their websites, go to their Q&As,
get to a conference, go and speak to them at a booth.
But you can get up to speed quickly.
You can order yourself a Bitbox O2, Bitcoin-only edition.
It's bitbox.swiss forward slash Bitten.
Use the code Bitten for that 5% discount.
Don't leave this the chance, guys.
Please, seriously.
Bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten.
Stack your sats.
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pushing Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. Keep having these conversations with as many people
that you can meet. There are bars, restaurants, cafes, hairdressers, butchers, bakers, candlestick
makers. Always ask, just ask, do you accept Bitcoin? It's a touch point. And every touch
point delivered is just another flap of a butterfly wing in the Amazon rainforest, wherever
they live, when you have no idea the difference that will make as it ripples throughout the ether
and the rest of the world. Sounds a bit woo, keep trying it. Anyway, catch you guys soon,
thanks for listening, and stack safe. Get yourself a hardware wallet.