217 - The Politics of Bitcoin (Zelko & Samourai Wallet)

Hello and welcome.

This is Gabriel Castodiet of Watchmen Privacy, Privacy, Practitioner, Consultant, Author,

and Frontline Fighter in the push for privacy.

I know why you're here.

Like the rest of us here in the resistance, you're trying to escape the technocratic

apparatuses that you see in developing you and crushing your freedoms.

That's why I created all of this.

All without sponsors.

I hope you enjoy this show, but then when you're ready to take the next step to secure your

privacy and your future, visit my website escapethetechnocracy.com to start the real journey.

Your support alone determines the future of the show.

See you there.

Editorial note here.

This episode was originally recorded in December of 2023.

The audio has been remastered, it is being re-released, and I think the topics pertaining

to Bitcoin are as relevant as ever.

The Bitcoin community is like a ship.

A fantastically engineered ship, the first of its kind, headed toward an undiscovered

but no doubt fabulous new land.

It's been traveling for a while now, always in roughly the same direction, and the further

it goes, the more locked in the destination becomes.

Now aliens arrive on the planet for the first time.

The first thing they see is this ship.

They assume, not incorrectly, that anyone on this fantastic ship together headed for

what is clearly a great place must have a lot in common.

Then they get closer, and there's samurai wallet, cutlass between his teeth, beating

the crap out of some guy.

This poor guy, what did he do?

Well, perhaps he tried to mutiny.

Perhaps what you're witnessing is self-defense.

No doubt there's some history there, hard to tell from first appearance.

This is one of many fights going on on the ship.

Random assailants are trying to stab samurai from behind.

The team of Ronin Dojo is fending them off so samurai can do his business.

One bloke waving a black flag with a digitized pirate skull picks up his gun without hesitation

and is now taking shots to main everyone who looks suspicious within reach.

There's a crazy look in his eye.

Coming out, this is one of many skirmishes going on on the ship.

The aliens look elsewhere.

There are officers on the deck looking at the fighting in between sips of tea.

Some sit on the fence railing to get a view of the participants, but don't say anything.

There are officers for a reason, and they rarely bother themselves with the fighting downstairs.

Suddenly, one of them shouts, let's all get along.

The voice doesn't carry amid the screams of death and mercy below, but the officer simply

nods, content with his action, turns around, and gazes off into the horizon.

After thinking it over, the aliens realize that these fights are not minor.

They're probably fighting over the trajectory of the journey, if not the destination itself.

There's a coral reef on one side of the ship, and any diversion at this stage could wreck

the boat entirely.

The reef is oddly colored and only visible to those who aren't wearing sunglasses.

A few fights have cropped up for this reason alone.

Quite a few people below in the hole can barely hear the shouting and certainly can't see any

navigation dangers.

They're counting and recounting their paper money, and only look at the ceiling and frustration

when a loud noise distracts them and makes them lose their place.

One money counter with a lot to spare stands up and puts some into the donation dish of

a ship entertainer.

This female journey woman receives a lot of attention just by virtue of being on a predominantly

male ship.

In between sketch, she yells out statements affirmative of their journey.

She has a parrot on her shoulder that repeats some of the phrases to everyone's amusement.

One man laughs in agreement, but then entertains a thought.

Did the bird get the word from her or did she get the word from the bird?

He goes back to counting his money.

Above deck, the skirmishes continue.

Despite various personalities, the ship somehow ambles on day after day.

The arrival point has certainly changed from the beginning, and many on the ship think

that the destination itself has changed.

Some don't disagree, but think that they've learned things along the way that weren't

such changes.

The Bitcoin community is like a ship.

Welcome to the Watchmen Privacy Podcast.

I'm very pleased to be joined by two people, Zelko from Ronin Dojo and the speaking representative

for the Samurai Wallet.

Zelko, how are you doing today?

Fantastic.

Thanks for having me.

I'm excited.

Of course.

And Ronin Dojo is a node that connects with the Samurai Wallet.

It's designed to be integrated, the two, and go to Ronin Dojo.io and see what they're

all about.

Great company to support Samurai Wallet.

How are you doing today?

Great to be back with you, Gabriel, doing well.

A few purposes of this episode.

The first, of course, is just to hear from Zelko and Samurai Wallet.

That's always a pleasure.

And to kind of understand some of the underlying Bitcoin values that animate both Ronin Dojo

and Samurai Wallet, the second purpose is to see some of the big conversations happening

in Bitcoin and to do so historically.

I think a lot of people stumble onto the scene and they see all these people going at it

and they're kind of wondering what's going on and what they don't realize is that there

are conversations that have been happening for many years in some cases since the beginning

of Bitcoin.

And so uncovering some of this history can, I think, give people some perspective.

And then the third point is just to show that not all Bitcoiners are the same.

In fact, I think that a lot of people might see Bitcoin as this monolithic ship.

That's just sailing off into the horizon.

But there are different factions within Bitcoin and they sometimes do not like each other.

And they're steering the same ship that they believe in.

But if somebody steers it the wrong way, it is as dangerous as, let's say, somebody who

is working for the Federal Reserve.

Like, it's that serious.

So the first question that I want to ask you both is a question of what are the lines

that you do not cross as a Bitcoin company?

Yeah, great, great question.

And it's something that I've talked about a lot actually over the years.

And I call them red lines that we cannot cross and we'll not cross.

And primarily the red lines are KYC and custody.

If we're ever forced to by law to KYC our users or implement KYC within the wallet or

even integrate with a partner that does KYC, it's just something that is not happening.

We're not going to do it.

We rather shut down then, then go down that road.

And the second one is custody.

We don't want to take custody of anyone's coins.

We don't want to build custodial solutions.

And even if it's just for a few seconds of custody, we don't want anything to do with

it.

So custody and KYC are two major red lines.

What if there was a law against the exact language that would involve Whirlpool?

Would that be a red line or would that be encapsulated in maybe the self-custody?

It's definitely encapsulated.

You know, one of the, at least up to date, what makes a non-custodial coin join different

than a mixer is custody.

It's kind of the key aspect.

And this is recognized by FinSEN, this is recognized by all the regulators.

They admit that because it's non-custodial, because the software developer doesn't take

custody, there's nothing for them that they can stop, right?

Because in order to make it quote unquote illegal, you'd have to go after each individual

as opposed to one software developer.

But if they adopted language in the future that said it was illegal to develop this software,

it would be a red line, but it's nothing that would make us go away.

It's something that we would fight, and we would fight it very diligently, because that's

a constitutional issue.

And our lawyers, I think, would be very, very happy to make that argument, that that's

the first amendment issue.

And I should note here, if you're not familiar with Bitcoin or these two gentlemen, please

go and watch a different episode.

This is not an introductory episode.

And Samara has in the past, they moved out of the UK because of a law that was, at least

at the time, suggesting that a self-custody Bitcoin might not be allowed.

So they've certainly practiced what they preach.

And there are options, like, instead of shutting down, you could do things like move companies

or things of this sort.

So there are multiple options.

Yes, definitely.

And again, just to reiterate, if the federal government in the US or any government anywhere

wanted to make, you know, whirlpool illegal, the enforcement of that would come down to

the individual people who are whirlpooling.

And there's, you know, thousands of them, if not more.

It would be a very, very, very difficult thing to enforce.

So this is why they focus on targets, such as, like, Bitcoin fog, which are centralized

and custodial.

They can go after a person or group of people for violating money transmission laws, for

violating, you know, things of that nature because whether I agree with it or not, it is

money transmission because the developer is taking custody of the funds.

The same is not true for Samara or anything that we do.

So it's really our red lines of no custody and no KYC have kind of insulated us and

protected us in that way, where we can say, no, we're not money transmitters because

we never take custody of anyone's money or anyone's funds.

And again, if they did go down that route, we would absolutely fight it.

I think that, you know, a lot of people today and today's world, they get an order from

the state, whether it be from a court or more than likely a federal agency of some sort

that really has no power to create law, but they do anyway.

And they immediately roll over, but you don't have to, you can always fight those things.

You can always say, I don't agree with this and we're going to take it to court.

That spirit has been lost somewhat, but there is, you know, a precedent for that all throughout

history when a federal agency or the federal government oversteps their bounds, you have

to take it to court to get it corrected or try to get it corrected in the courts.

What would the red lines be for Ronan Dojo?

I mean, so they're very similar.

I mean, the fact that we, well, we're the node sets.

So we're the backend that's trying to allow you to, to not need any third parties, but

for us, so there's some other things that kind of come to mind and that's, that's what

we support in our stack.

And so we've dropped support for certain, certain applications and stuff that people use.

Even though they were popular at the time because of their stance and their stance,

either on us that happened recently, and then also their stance on whether it's KYC and

who they partnership with.

And you know, we're not going to support people that, that fund KYC, we're not going to

support people that actively don't like what, what we do.

And so that's where what we build and what we're trying to do.

Like as long as there's a way to get to the end that gets our users what they, what,

what we want and to what our users need, we're going to do that.

And we're not going to sit and just support things just because.

And so that's whether it's controversial or not, I'm not, I'm not here to support people

that support censorship.

I'm not here to support people that don't want privacy.

And if people don't like that, they can use something else.

I should mention that I'm talking to two people who represent companies who have left

a lot on the table, left a lot of money on the table by sticking up to their values,

and not just any values, but really awesome values.

So definitely respect for that.

Now for the next question, I just kind of like to go back in time.

And I think this will be useful to set the scene for the conversations, the problems

that the Bitcoin community has now go, they go back a long ways.

This is a broad question, but I think important.

So Bitcoin was a peer-to-peer Cypherpunk project.

And that is not necessarily the case these days if you look at Bitcoin as a whole.

So I just want to ask you, Samurai, what happened?

What events, what companies, what people, feel free to name names if you feel like it happened?

That Bitcoin moved away from being a peer-to-peer Cypherpunk project to what it is today.

Yeah.

So I was going to say it's not a one group or one company or one group of users.

It's been a long time in the works that kind of evolution from a Cypherpunk project to

what we see today.

You mentioned earlier in your intro the facts, different factions and politics of Bitcoin.

It's really been like that from the start.

And you can go way early to when Satoshi was still involved.

And the reason he or the presumably the reason he left the project was because Gavin and

Theresa gave a presentation to the CIA on what Bitcoin is and what it's about.

And he felt that it was important to educate these people on the thing that they were working

on and Satoshi disagreed and ended up leaving the project.

So these factions exist and have existed for a long time.

It's true that in the early days from 2010 to probably around 2013, 2014, the predominant

faction was the Cypherpunk faction and what Bitcoin and then I would consider myself part

of that faction.

That's why I got involved.

Bitcoin was seen as a way to, as money without outside of the jurisdiction of the state.

And it was kind of the realization of a long time dream.

Leadership resistance was key, privacy was key, permissionless, nature was key.

That obviously was going to become diluted if the project succeeded because as more people

get into the space, they don't necessarily align with those values.

And they have, they come to it with different ideas or different values.

And I think so the main reason why we see such a decline in that kind of thinking is one

there's not a lot of us.

Most people, the question of if you have nothing to hide, why do you need privacy if you don't

have anything to hide.

That's a common fallacy that many, many people entertain and believe even as they have

curtains on their windows and as they use envelopes for sending mail, they don't recognize

that disconnect.

And I think more of those people joined in because they saw the price rising and they

saw this as a speculative asset and investment they could make and you know, they just have

different goals, different ideas.

It was always going to be the outcome of something like this.

The hope at least from my view was that we would have enough time from the cypherpunk privacy

first group or faction to develop the tech to make their, their eventual entry irrelevant

to the dilution of the project.

So we hoped that there would be more privacy tech on chain.

We hoped for confidential transactions for example, we hoped for things like this so

that even when these people came, the mass adoption came.

They wouldn't be able to dilute project as such.

Unfortunately things didn't really go in that direction.

There was a lot of time wasted with scaling, quote unquote scaling and the need to scale

as fast as possible as opposed to privacy.

I think that was a malinvestment but that's just the way it works.

So you know, it's hard to just blame one group or one company or one person or anything

like that.

It's just indicates the broader culture that we are a part of and we're in.

And it's not just Bitcoin, it's the internet in general that has seen this dramatic shift.

The internet of 2006, 2007 was much freer and much more lined with the cypherpunk ideas

and goals than the internet of 2024.

So it's not just Bitcoin, it's just society broadly.

Bitcoin is a, on the one hand, there's room for different people and factions and people

have versions of their tech but on the other hand, it is a single thing that has value

because it can trace its lineage back all the way back.

And so we're defending this single thing and that's why these conversations are so important.

Well, I was just going to say like to me and I think to a lot of people from that cypherpunk

privacy faction, the only reason that Bitcoin has any value at all is because of its promises

of censorship resistance, its promises of being money outside of the state, its promises

of being able to transact freely, you know, to us, I guess to me speaking for myself,

it's the whole value proposition.

If Bitcoin is just another payment system that can be censored, that can be captured, then

you may as well just use PayPal and this is just my point of view.

And I think it's the right point of view, by the way, obviously.

So when you have these people who prioritize mass adoption over prioritizing privacy,

for example, I think they're missing the force for the trees.

The only reason why Bitcoin is as valuable as it is.

The only reason why is because of its properties of censorship resistance.

And the more you chip away at that, the less valuable and the less interesting it becomes.

I mean, it's going to go into the mass adoption, but I think that the,

I've been saying a long time that I think that the whole plush of how people got onboarded,

right, how you were introduced to Bitcoin is key.

Right. If you were introduced to Bitcoin by saying, like, oh, wow, like,

hey, it's a great investment.

You're going to make a lot of money.

If you just buy and hold or stack sets or DCA, it changes completely.

Like what you were actually here for.

And yeah, there's a lot of people that start that way and then they kind of grow into it.

And they just, you know, they were, maybe they were lucky enough to get through

and at the right time that they ended up having time to learn into the real value proposition,

which is, as Sam was saying, which is that censorship resistance, which is that,

that ability to operate without permission and cut out the central, cut out central banks,

cut out third parties, that's, that to me is supposed to be, you know, what this is about,

you know, as a person that's guilty of joining, you know, because you were told, like,

hey, it's going to be a great investment. It's going to be worth something one day.

Sure. But once you open your eyes, you realize that that's nothing.

Like that, that doesn't matter. That started to change. And as a person, I came in in 2016.

And that was all the talk. I mean, that was, and that was just post the block wars,

but even the block wars that part of it was about that part of it was about spending versus,

you know, keeping smaller blocks for, for the value proposition of, of number go up.

So I think that as, and as the price pumped, it didn't help anything, to be honest.

So yeah, I think how people were onboarded, the influencers through that time had a large

impact on that. But the mass adoption, and I know we'll talk about is, is another big one.

And so Sam, right, would you give, would you give any at all paths on the back to, to people

who are trying to focus on mass adoption? Because what, I mean, we could say that the reason we,

we can use Bitcoin and all over the world, the reason why it, you know, has its value is at least

because of the, the people who have been promoting it. Or is that a fallacious way to think about it?

Yeah, I don't think that's true. I think that in 2012 and 2013, I was, I was using Bitcoin

all over the world. I was spending, I was onboarding merchants and merchants that I, that I was

going to and using anyway. So no, I don't think it's to do with mass adoption. I don't think we've

seen mass adoption yet. We've seen it, we've seen an adoption wave, certainly. But I, I would say

that there's less places to spend Bitcoin or fewer places to spend Bitcoin today than there was

in 2013. I agree, by the way, with what Selco just stated about how, how it is you're onboarded

into Bitcoin. The primary focus in the early days was about getting merchants and about getting,

you know, people to accept Bitcoin and you to spend Bitcoin at those places. Whereas today,

it's more about get Bitcoin and as an investment, don't spend it. Just, just save it. And as

such, we've seen a lowering of places that are willing to accept it because no one's spending it.

So I know I don't think that and I think that we often say, you know, one of our,

one of our slogans you can say at Samurai is that mass adoption is the poison pill. And it's,

you know, you should be careful what you wish for. Because when we, when we do actually see

real mass adoption, it's not going to be pretty. We don't, we're not in the, we don't have the tech

in place to combat the regulatory response to Bitcoin being mass, mass used in a mass way.

So for example, if we do see CBDCs come, come, come around, which it looks like we are going to see.

And Bitcoin is, is there as a means of side stepping these CBDCs is going to have a real response

from regulatory agencies against Bitcoin, self-custody against Bitcoin outside of the KYC AML regime.

And, you know, we don't, we still have a fully transparent blockchain. We don't have confidential

transactions. We don't have the tech in place to handle this outside of the application layer,

which is where Samurai lies. Like we, we, we're doing everything we can, right? We have coin

join. We have all sorts of privacy tech. But ultimately, to really handle mass adoption,

to really handle the effects of a hostile government, which we haven't seen yet. They're starting

to start, they're starting to go that way. But we haven't really seen the full force of the state

come down on Bitcoin. Not yet. We're not, we don't have the, you know, the artillery in place,

so to speak. Zelco, if you could, if you could snap your fingers, and we no longer have coin

base, and maybe Michael sailors no longer with us, and all that entire industry of, of promoting

maybe a non-sipherpunk vision of Bitcoin, do you think that would be better for Bitcoin?

Yeah. I mean, I think that if it was being promoted, I think a great example is probably

Antonopolis back in early days of how he was going around doing talks and stuff like that.

If that was how we were educating people and how people were learning about Bitcoin and,

and not this like on rails and payment rails and stuff like this. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think

that I, I talked to somebody about this at an event, and because they asked me at the end of the

event, if I was bullish about the next price run or something, and I basically blackpelt them on

the idea, and I just said, like, it doesn't matter, because to be honest, Bitcoin could end up being

something like tour, where, tour is not used by everybody. It's a great tool for people that need

to use it. It's, it is, it's a tool. It's exactly that, but that's powerful. It's a powerful tool.

We don't want it to go away, right? So that's something that I, and I told them, it's like just

because it's good right now, and everything is, is fine and share the price could pump, but

ultimately, like, what is Bitcoin supposed to be about? What is the actual value propositions?

And that's when I talked to them about, you know, censorship resistance and, you know,

the more that the government start to push in and lean and do all these things, if, if it got made

to be illegal, right, and you could only use it in the black and the gray markets, that'd be great

for Bitcoin. That'd be, that would bring back Bitcoin back to what it was supposed to be, censorship

resistant, peer-to-peer digital cash. And so, yeah, if I was not my fingers, would we be as high

of a price? Probably not. I don't know, maybe, but it's irrelevant, right? Because people who,

who are, would be using it are people that need it and people that are using it the right way.

Yeah, that's interesting. I always, I came into Bitcoin as a, you know, as Satochi says, a

peer-to-peer money technology. And that's kind of how I see it. And regardless of the price,

that is how I wanted to be using Bitcoin. So, as I was looking at my next questions,

this all might actually, at the end of the day, break down into mass adoption versus correct usage

in a safer punk manner. But let me pivot to one topic that maybe you won't bring us into that

discussion. Another bit of politics in Bitcoin is software that isn't actually open source.

Yeah, great question. And that's actually something I missed from our red lines.

One of our red lines is being open source, true open source. Yeah, it's definitely

something that has been degraded over time, again. There was a time back in 2012, 2013, even

up to 2015, probably, where if you were providing a wallet or some kind of interface to Bitcoin,

and you were an open source, you were laughed out of the room. No one would use your stuff.

It was inconceivable, really, that a wallet would be closed source. And we've seen that

kind of the grade today. So, I mean, the best example I can think of, the most recent example

would be coin kite. They produce hardware wallets for Bitcoin in the form of what they call

cold card. A little bit of history, the first hardware wallet was treasure. I'm sure your users

have heard of treasure or your listeners have heard of treasure. And what treasure did was they

created all open source code to work with their hardware wallet. And they licensed that code

as an open source license called the GPL. And the GPL essentially says you can do whatever you want

with this code. You can change it. You can monetize it. You can copy it. You can copy it and

make changes, or you can copy it and compete with us. You can do anything. There's no restriction.

The only thing that you can't do is take what you've done and make it closed source. So,

we've extended this license to you to do whatever you want. You buy extension by using this code,

have to give that option to everyone else as well. And you can see what treasure by making that

decision to go completely open source, true open source using the GPL license. What has

blossomed out of the industry where we have tons of different hardware wallets now. And largely

most of them using some iteration of treasure's original code. And one of the examples is a

cold card. So when cold card was created, they used a huge amount of treasure's code to create

their product. They made changes. They made improvements. And they licensed it because they had

to under the GPL, meaning anyone else from then on could do the same thing. And we saw that exact

thing happen where after the cold card was released under the GPL using the bulk of treasure's code,

they then had a competitor join on the scene in the form of foundation to improve the hardware

wallet. Or they think it improves it and it probably does. And they took that code,

licensed it in the same exact way, GPL, and have brought to market another hardware wallet.

So now consumers have a choice. They had treasure. They have cold card. They have foundation

each with their own strengths. And it's a beautiful thing. That's the power of open source.

Unfortunately, CoinKite, the developers of the cold card, were very unhappy that a competitor

used their code even though they had done the same thing. They were very unhappy.

They had a competitor used their code to create a hardware wallet and compete with them in the

market. And as a result, they changed their license and said, we're no longer open source. We're

now, they use a term source viewable, except they didn't actually say that. They continue to say,

we're open source. And that's where the point of contention comes into place.

Right? You have a company that says, here's our source code. You can look at it, but you can't

do anything with it. You can't make a competing software or competing hardware with it. You can't

do anything but look. And that's not what open source means. Open source is free software,

and it means free to do whatever you want with the software. And that might mean, yes, competing

with you. And that's a good thing because it brings more options to consumers. So the issue with

CoinKite is, they're marketing themselves as open source because open source is a popular thing.

And people want to see open source software, but they don't actually, they're not actually

open source because they put a lot of conditions on what you can do with the source, with the source

code. You know, it devalues for everyone who is building true open source software to values

the meaning of open source. And it's misleading to consumers. But you know, Samurai wallet,

all of our stuff is open source too. And we, you know, every component of the system, the Samurai

stack is open source from the wallet to the coin join to the server side component of the coin

join. And that means we understand what that means. That means not only that users can look at the

code, audit the code, review the code, but it means that someone at some point can come along and

take the code and compete with us. That's a good thing, you know, that's something that's a

positive thing for consumers in the end at the end of the day. And it's, you know, it's happened,

we've had people fork our wallet and go to compete. And they haven't succeeded in terms of

taking over or taking our users because running a software company or a business of any kind

is a lot more than just a source code. You know, it takes a lot to gain the trust of users to

operate efficiently to develop all this source code and maintain it. So it just being out there

is not a threat to people, to builders, I should say. It's a strength. One of the things I respect

about Ronan and Zelko is they followed that, you know, all of the stuff that they've put out has

also been open source. They understand the power of open source. And yes, there's risks to people

coming in and swooping in and taking our source code and competing, but really it's such a

like a small risk compared to the benefits of opening up your systems and people coming in to,

you know, build on top of. And in fact, I'm sure Zelko will go into this, but it's how Ronan came

about. You know, we created Dojo. We open source Dojo and put it out there. And then our attention

focused on to other things like CoinJoin and this and that. And we're not as focused on Dojo.

And the Ronan team goes, we can make Dojo even better. And we can be 100% focused on it. So they

took what we did and improved it, made it better, built beautiful interfaces around it, put it into

beautiful hardware. All of that stuff, we probably would have never got around to doing ourselves

because we're just, you know, we have other things, other focuses that we're working on. So by

open sourcing and making it open source without restriction of any kind, you know, the whole

industry can flourish. And that's why it's such an important aspect of Bitcoin. My last point would

be, what if Satoshi had licensed Bitcoin in the same way that CoinKai has licensed their stuff

now, meaning you can look at it, but you can't do anything with it. You know, we would not have

anywhere near the level of innovation and the level of products and services that have been built on

Bitcoin that we do today, he made that licensing decision. But he chose a very, very permissive

license in the MIT through open source license where you can do anything. And it's even less restrictive

than the GPL license that I was talking about. Whereas you can do anything and you don't even have

to license it as open source, you know, and so open source, I think, is a fundamental, has to

be a fundamental red line for anyone who's working in Bitcoin. And I think it's shameful to not

respect that and to close your source code down, especially when you've benefited so greatly

from the open source ecosystem as CoinKai did. That was well said. I know Zelco, you're going to have

a lot to add to that. So I know that Ronan Dojo feels strongly about this. Now,

free and open source software, free as in freedom, not free as in no cost, is a kind of a complex

thing. Some people get into it. They don't quite understand. They know that they want to be able to

see the developers doing their work so that they're not hiding anything, right? So I trust as much of

my privacy and security software to open source. That is, I can view it. I tried to rely on that as

much as I can. I simply wouldn't be comfortable trusting somebody who's not showing the work. But

there's the whole other aspect to it, which Samurai Wall was discussing where this is a package.

It's not just that you can see the source code. It's that you can take it and you can use it for what

you want to use it for. And that is better for everybody. I mean, absolutely. That's how

innovation is made. Being able to take, I guess a good example would be the tour package that's

in Samurai Wall, actually, and that being a mobile package that can be put in the Android apps.

That being, if that's not open source, and people can't build it, or if tour wasn't open source,

and people couldn't be able to build that other stuff, we wouldn't be able to get to where we're at

today with so many wallets now and Samurai being the first, right? But so many wallets now being

able to have tour built into their app. I think what gets me the most upset about this concept

and going back to the cold card is this, they want to play both sides. So they pander both sides

where they're, oh, well, the source code's all right here. And be like, you can view everything

right here. It's here it is. And then to see it's open source. And it's such a slap in the face

to everyone that is actually building open source code. And another part of that story and Samurai

can correct me if I'm wrong. But when cold card did take a lot of that code from

treasure, they also changed the package names to their own package name. So that it didn't,

which is kind of a shady move if you are literally copying and pasting that source code that

was someone else's. And then you changed the names to try to make it seem as if you wrote it,

which, you know, that that was kind of like a big, a big issue in the beginning. But the fact is

that this whole thing is supposed to be as open sources that you're standing on the shoulders of

giants, right? For Ronan Dojo. Yeah, like we do stand on the shoulders of giants. You know,

the team that I know Laurent was a heavy player in developing the Dojo architecture. And I was

talking to him recently. I was like, it's just amazing for me, even after all these years,

it's just how well, how well he built it that it's, it doesn't take all that much for us to change

things. And we can still tweak and do other things. But, you know, we stand on, on Samurai shoulders,

on Dojo shoulders. And, you know, for us to go back and try to change it and say, oh, well,

we could take their stuff, but no one else gets to do that. One, I find it disrespectful too. I

find it completely wrong in the space that people put on their, on their websites for people

to see is they're going and looking at their stuff. They're like, oh, here, here's our open source

code. And they make it seem as if open source is the same as, as false. And it's an intentional

marketing play to pander to both sides. And then then they go on a whole campaign to try to say

that it's basically the same thing that you can audit it that you can do the stuff. And that is not,

that is not what this is about. And what it really comes down to is that these people who do that

are scared. They're scared of competition. They don't realize all of the, all of the benefits

that come from it. And they're scared that someone can just take their stuff and make it better.

And they were just too lazy to make their product better in a competitive way. That that's the

real reality to it. And yeah, so as people, as we go forward, I hope that more companies get back

to that, get back to the open source and that we can build off of each other. Because that's what

this is. That's how we get better. I might not like everything. If someone were to clone

Ron and Dojo today and do something else, which I actually had someone recently that,

they took our stuff and modified it for x86 and they're pushing that out. And I think that's great.

Because similar to Samurai, it's on our roadmap, but it's not someone we've had the ability to

get to it right now. So the fact that someone's already done it, that's cool. And it's open source,

so I can go back and grab that. And then we can put that in our stuff. It's supposed to be a

give-and-take. But at the end of the day, if they were to rebrand it, it's not going to be

Ron and Dojo. They're not going to have the same vision that I do. They're not going to have the

same roadmap that I would. And so it's going to be a different product. And it's going to be

different. And like Samurai said, they're not going to know this is not going to be as easy as

everyone thinks, just copying and pasting code doesn't make it. It doesn't mean that you can run

a software company. It doesn't mean that you can maintain all that code that you actually know

what's going on. Yeah, I think that that whole push and it happened a lot. And on the node side,

there was multiple node implementations that just decided to go the opposite way and to close

their code for whatever reason. And which is silly, really excited to be one of the teams that

maintained the open source. And it was never a doubt in our mind that we would do anything

other than that. And everything that we do, we try to make sure that we open it back up,

even if we're developing something or whatever it is, we make sure that we find a way to get

that information out to people because information wants to be free. The gaslighting behind that is

infuriating. And hopefully anybody that looks at that, if you see someone that's spouting that

open source, go look at their code, just go look at the license and make sure that they're not

just talking out of their ass. Are there any other companies, maybe historically or otherwise,

who we could point out as being guilty of this? And I don't say that to be to have at least

gotcha things, but it is the case that people might listen to what we're saying say, oh yeah,

that sounds good. And not realize that they're still using or supporting a company that doesn't

actually have true thoughts. Yeah, Umbro is one. I don't know if my note opened it back up.

I know start nine just recently opened up there, made their source code,

at least part of it, uh, false. And umbro probably being one of the most popular ones for

for new people running a node, um, that is still close, close source. So there's a there's a good

episode of the the people from various node companies discussing and arguing with one another,

Zelko was there representing Roni Dojo. I'll try to link that in the description. That was on

a citadel dispatch. Yeah, Umbro was not present. They were too cool to show up. That was that was

a that was a very informative episode. So, uh, but these two gentlemen I'm talking to right now,

they don't have they don't live in a glass house. And so they by all means they can throw as many

stones as they want. Maybe we can move on to a a political topic here. I'll get this one started. So

one of the other pieces of the political agenda about Bitcoin is that people will say that Bitcoin

is a political or they'll even go so far as to say that Bitcoin is is for progressives. Now this

this kind of irks me. I understand what people are saying in that Bitcoin like it doesn't matter

what your politics are. You benefit from the false nature of Bitcoin and all of the monetary

properties it has. And the fact that's node system is spread out making it uncenturable and all

these other good things. On the other hand, I think it's pretty disingenuous to look at a project

that is absolutely libertarian. You might say anarchist certainly super limited government and

has nothing to do with the progressives who have ruined sound money and who stand for everything

against Bitcoin. Yeah, I think it's complete nonsense. Bitcoin is is very political. At least

that's how it started anyway in the in the in the genesis block Satoshi inscribed a headline

chancellor on the brink of second bailout for the banks. Politics is integral to Bitcoin. It's

not apolitical at all. One of the early presentations that I watched and it was 2013 or 2014

by Michael Goldstein is highly recommended if you could find it or I'll send it to you and you

can put it in the show notes. I think it should be required viewing for anyone interested in Bitcoin.

It was called I believe Bitcoin an experiment in anarchism and it goes in depth into the

what we were talking about building on the shoulders of giants that goes into all the giants

that Bitcoin was built on by Satoshi. It absolutely is not apolitical and I believe it is

coming. It was designed and built from an anarchist perspective and of course I mean anarchism

as in anarchy without rulers not throwing Moltov cocktails and anarchy versus chaos two different

things. Two different things in the Latin meaning of anarchy and arcosis without rulers and I

believe that's what Bitcoin was built to usher in anarchist money and that's why I you know

before Bitcoin I was involved in that kind of sphere. I still believe ideologically those things

I still would call myself an anarchist in that way so no it's not apolitical at all. It's very

political. It's a big statement and that's I think what the you know the tension is between those

factions that we were talking about earlier where you have the anarchist faction or the without

rulers faction and the factions that want to integrate and become part of the system so I would

highly recommend your listeners to listen to Michael Goldstein's 2014 talk. The progressives were

in the late 19th century the people who looked at the world and said hey we need to improve things

we need to change things we need to tweak things they're the ones behind central baking they're the

ones behind large government they're the ones who believe that's money should be a creation

of the state and not as any inherently something I don't want progressives at all around me or

involved in Bitcoin please please stay away that's my opinion. We talk about you know in Bitcoin being

against fiat and this and that and and even the progressives will say say that and it's funny

because going back again to what words actually mean fiat is not talking about fiat money

it fiat means by dictate right and the progressives would quite be quite happy to dictate and have

historically been happy to dictate policy and dictate how you should live and dictate how you should

be by you know I just think I find it ironic and funny that they will rail against fiat thinking it's

just talking about money when no fiat money means money by dictate that's the whole point of Bitcoin

is to you know get around these dictates get around fiat in general not as fiat money completely agree

and the progressives should stick with their fiat money and sink along with it I definitely

support that I completely agree with all that I mean you can see right the to go along with the

dictate you can see how that is where people try to tell you how you need to spend your money or

how you need to how you need to operate in the system which you know I think there's a huge

difference between a recommendation right and then or what is best practice so to speak and then

there's there's people telling you oh you you can't do that you should never do that you shouldn't

be allowed we shouldn't be allowing you to do that we need to find a way to make it so that

this is not an authorized transaction it you need to understand the what you're actually getting

into and not just you know trying to dictate to other people how they need to how they need to operate

yeah now I completely agree with everything that you guys have been saying there is a another

divide in Bitcoin about whether Bitcoin should be saved or spent and there are a lot of people

who do not use their Bitcoin do not think you should be using Bitcoin because they're waiting I

suppose for the day when it is a lot more valuable than it is now and they might even have a theory

of money where they say that look something has to have kind of max value before you really use it

as spending and we're going to simply wait for that day to arrive what do you think about the

savings versus spending argument what are people getting wrong so okay it's not for for me to

tell people what to do with their money but I think if you're getting into this just to save

for future time that's the most boring thing that you could do Bitcoin and it's funny because

recently Sam was talking about Satoshi Dice back in the day and how they used to be able to gamble

with Bitcoin and do different things I think it's a totally different when you spend your first

like you spend something with Bitcoin for the first time for all those people who you know they have

their money they have their Bitcoin saved on a hardware wallet somewhere and they've never touched

it and they're just waiting and waiting for the day the day that you do it and you actually do a

transaction and you actually buy something with it you know it's it is a it's a changing moment

I know I'll never forget buying something with it for the first time especially like a larger purchase

and now it's it's not even really a thought but it's if you're getting into it just for that

you know just to save it you're you're missing you're missing it and you're missing out on a huge

aspect with a real aspect of Bitcoin in my opinion so I would definitely encourage people to

go out and buy something do something and I think that's one of the cool things that is actually

built directly into Samurai wallet which out without people really needing to think that they're

necessarily spending something because they're paying for a service but like you know even even

that so many times people want to complain about how much a fee costs for a service and you're like

did you don't spend your money you don't spend your Bitcoin anyways so like what are we what are we

doing and then you have people that the same crowd that tells you to never never spend your Bitcoin

and you know hold forever they're the same ones that want to push a payment network that's like

dead you know that's it's broken so I thought I always thought that part was kind of funny so yeah

people just I encourage people go go do something with Bitcoin go spend it go just make a transaction

especially one that you maybe you didn't think that you should it's it's it'll it'll open your

eyes for sure that would be my recommendation on that and personally I don't see any value in Bitcoin

besides being able to send it to somebody else and use it as a money now Samurai I know you don't

really use hardware wallets you think that that your Bitcoin should be available to spend it anytime

you you live off of Bitcoin but shouldn't you be saving that absolutely yeah you should spend

and save um you know as someone who has been living off of Bitcoin since late 2012 and someone who

is running a business completely uh using Bitcoin no no fiat of any kind since 2015 I both spend

and save you have to let us though make sure that we cover a timely topic which is the drama of

ocean mining it came to our attention on the uh six of December that uh ocean mining which was a

it's a new mining pool that launched towards the end of November of 2023 had made some software

changes and as of the six of December several of our privacy focused transactions would be filtered

by them and not included in the blocks that they mine this is what what came to our attention on the

six uh I reached out to one of their their their their main investors which is jack dorsi who all your

listeners I'm sure are familiar with I reached out to him kind of as a in a hail Mary kind of pass because

we've never communicated before and I asked him to confirm this was happening and if it was

happening to use whatever influence he has at ocean to to change course and if I didn't hear back

from him in a timely manner I would have to make a public statement uh about these things so I didn't

hear back for him for for some time and on the seventh I made a post on twitter essentially

alerting the community to the fact that these transactions which are of course standard and valid

transactions would be filtered by ocean and not included in the blocks that they produce um and

then I you know I continue to explain they're welcome and and this is the way bitcoin is designed to

to do whatever they want with the blocks that they create but that said I hope that users and

and miners who are pointing hash power at this pool choose not to support it they're this pool

because it's a endorsement of filtering and and censorship and the the tweet blew up it got a

lot of a lot of attention and it you know it reiterated that the majority of bitcoin users on the

surface just don't agree with censorship and I thought that was a positive thing now what it

really means realistically is not much because ocean has very little hash rate um if they're

unlikely to create uh blocks anyway just based on the the amount of hash rate they have but that's

kind of besides the point um they're very well funded over six million uh dollars in funding

big headline investors like Jack Dorsey it's a it's a dangerous slippery slope to go down for a

mining pool to enforce their their own vision on what blocks should it contain is essentially

laying out the blueprint for hostile state regulators and activists to bring this in right and it's

kind of like it's kind of like the debate around um internet publishers where are you a publisher

or are you an editor right if you're an editor you're choosing what content goes in and you

can be held liable for the content that you publish whereas if you're just a publisher anything

can be published and you're not liable for what is published because you're just putting it out

there it's a first amendment and again or maybe something like net neutrality right yeah exactly

exactly and and there's another um regulatory um framework in the in the US that I forget

which one it is but it's essentially is Google for example liable for their search results

you know if you if you can find you know the recipe to build a bomb on Google should Google be

held liable for that and of course no they shouldn't be held liable for that but then

if Google starts and they have started this and it's again it's slippery slope they shouldn't

if they start um heavily censoring what is out there on there and then and can be found on their

search engine they're editorializing their search then maybe they are liable if something gets

through because they have these policies where things are not supposed to get through does that

kind of make sense it does yeah and just to give a little bit more context so in in the last year

we have ordinals on in Bitcoin which has clogged and so ocean mining sets out to start censoring

those kinds of things in a in a broad way in order to solve the problem as they see it but the

transactions of the samurai wallet get caught up in that net now maybe you could just explain

samurai why what is it about the transactions within samurai wallet that they were caught

by this limit that ocean mining set sure yeah so so the limit we're talking about is the

opportune limit in Bitcoin this is not consensus stuff this means that every node operator can set

their own limit and every mining pool can set their own limit but the default limit that 99% of nodes

are running is 80 bytes and the limit that ocean chose is 42 bytes now in a samurai whirlpool

tx 0 so not the coin join itself but the tx 0 you can think of it as the setup transaction the

the transaction that is made to set things up for a good coin join in that transaction we use 46

bytes of opportune so that's if ocean was looking anything above 42 gets filtered we're at 46 so we

get filtered the main issue with this this filtering though is that it's not doing what they think it's

doing because the majority of um ordinal stuff jpegs on the blockchain as people like to say or

brc 20 outputs is they're not using opportune at all they're using taproot outputs or multi-sick

outputs and that won't be caught by this filter and the second aspect of this is those

utxos are remaining unspent so that's increasing the utxo count and you can't prune them so on your

home node that you're running you can prune all returns so you can prune that without any issue

without any negative side effects to the network but you can't do that when they're using taproot

outputs for example you know so actually the use of opportune is the best uh best option

for the ordinal people and it's the best option for what samurize doing and the reason we're using

the opportune output is to tell the quarter to prove to the coordinator that the anti spam fee has been

paid and without having to run a centralized database comparing all inputs making sure they've

been paid etc and this is going to be extremely important as we continue our efforts to decentralize

the coordination of uh whirlpool coin joints which we are currently and have been working on for the

last year and a half or so and the this is nothing new as i lay it out in the thread this is nothing

new from uh luke jr who is the cto of ocean mining he has been caught several times in the past

implementing blacklists implementing um uh censorship of transactions that he disagrees with

or he believes are sinful and and i'm not you know being fallacious or anything this is he believes

that certain types of transactions are sinful and he's quite happy to exclude them from blocks

this goes back all the way you know to 2011 or 2012 when he he secretly updated the bitcoin

package on gen2 linux to include his blacklists as part of the default package and of course when

that was found out there was huge amounts of uproar um within the community because that was a very

early early days of the community and censorship was just absolutely not up for debate whatsoever

and you know he got egg on his face during that event and of course in the passage of time

people don't know that or don't remember it or i have no concept of it but this is just part for

the course with with luke this is how he is this is what he believes and of course as i already said

he can run his company the way he runs to run it he can choose to not include blocks that he does

not include transactions into blocks that he doesn't agree with um but it's not the right way to go

about things and we're seeing that pool has lost hash power miners are pointing their hash away

from ocean putting it into other towards other pools and this is exactly the way that one was

designed to run you know when you have a pool that it becomes hostile and wants to censorship wants

to censor transactions whether that be o-fact compliant blocks or no ordinals or none of what

no whirlpool miners will point their hash power away because the economics of it are you're

believing money on the table and miners are about one thing that's making money it's not an

ideological thing it is how can i make the most amount of money doing this thing and the way

you make the most amount of money doing this thing is including all the valid transactions that you

can because all of those transactions paying minor fees you know none of none of our transactions

go above the current default size and what has been the default size since 2012 of 80 bites

like i said whirlpool uses 46 bites and bit 47 paintings use the full 80 bites and they you know

they need to be used if if for whatever reason the majority of miners decided to not respect those

defaults and not related transactions above you know 42 like loop well then we will make

relationships with miners to provide them with our transactions directly and bypass the

mempool entirely we've already had miners come to us and say look if this becomes a problem for you

will happily mine your transactions you know out of band and this is not something that we want

to see happen we like the mempool we like the way that it's designed and you know i think that um

i think that honestly there's no risk to this catching on because it catching on would mean that

these miners are saying we don't want your fees and there's not many miners who think that way

and so it should go without saying i'll give zelko a chance to speak here that the three of us

are are pretty aligned in and how we think obviously there's a you know another side of the story

etc but um it's my show so i get to choose which viewpoint i put on um zelko you said that the

or deal with ocean mining reminded you of the blockchain wars why is this why is this such a

on the one hand people looking from the outside might say oh this is this is small but why is this

such a big deal why should we care so much about ocean mining situation i mean in particular

with the censorship um because i mean you see so many people that want pro ordinals and or

your c20 brc20 whatever it is and then you have the other side that that doesn't believe in

that like you've once either wants to do all those and then you have the other side that wants

to censor those we're not whether you want to call it censor they just don't want to see them on

on the blockchain that's a totally different thing so i mean that like it adds into each other for

the fact that like we're talking about censorship and we'll pull transactions painems

that they got wrapped into this and seeing it brought to light uh by sam marwell and and the thread

heard round twitter i guess around the world it opened up a lot of people's eyes i thanks to the

reality of the censorship just to make people under really understand because a lot of people's

it started by saying like a world pool transactions all world pool transactions are being censored

and i don't think they understood the the reality that based on the counter arguments that

world pool in of itself that actual transaction wasn't what was being censored it was the tx0

transaction zero which is a preparations transaction to enter world pool that was what was being

censored and and just to clarify so people really understand is that that transaction is

critical is a requirement for a world pool transaction to happen right you have to have a pre-mix

transaction they have to have at least two pre-mixers in order to to execute a world pool so if say if

this had caught on right and say that this did get bigger which i agree with sam mar i don't think

it will but if that was the case you would see world pool transactions slow down because of that right

obviously sam mar i already talked about the the counter points to to not allow that to happen but

the the point is is that by censoring that to that tx0 it effectively is it is censoring the

world pool transactions end of itself and so a lot of people didn't understand that point is that

yeah that that pre-transaction the setup transaction of tx0 which is critical in in order to set up

equal outputs paying the minor fees and paying for the world pool transaction that that has to happen

and it's critical to have in a zero a zero link protocol coin join which sam mar i's the only one

to have it's critical and so that's it's the fact that like if they didn't care enough

to do this and the my counter argument was just that like if all these people think that

look juniors the greatest developer ever and helped with segwit and make all that stuff happen

you know he that's cool but if he's that smart then he knew exactly what he was doing that's my

counter argument is that he knew exactly what he was doing and he's been a samurai hater whatever

you want to call him he's been anti samurai for a very long time since pain and was a bip

since bip 47 was introduced and called it spam from the beginning when i said it's like a

the block wars again it just felt very divided but very passionate on both sides and to an extent

i think that that passion both sides to be honest passion is what bitcoin had been lacking for a while

like true dedicated passion of like this is a line that will not cross and seeing people pick a

side is kind of what it reminded me of because i i joined bitcoin during the block wars so i got to see

all these people like attacking each other like despite despite people having points on both sides

like actually attacking but attacking of people's ideas i think it was still a little different but

this uh recent movement was was excellency it actually gave me life because i got to see how many people

even people that i never thought that would actually come out and uh defend samurai or defend their

point uh but seeing people stand up for the right thing and seeing people stand up against censorship

and for privacy like it was it's exciting and um it was uh rejuvenating to say the least i like

having you both on because you can speak to some of the history that when something happens it's

not just oh this is an isolated event you can trace this back a long time ago and on that topic

it wouldn't be a episode with zelko and samurai without criticizing lightning and samurai maybe you

could help us give get some of that historical perspective lightning network has been the solution

or has been pitched as the solution to a lot of bitcoin's problems who have been the main players

or what has been the main mindset pushing the lightning network and why is it not the solution that

we think it is yeah sure so you'd lightning network you can trace it back to um 2015 maybe a

little bit before with the research papers and such um but it was a um result of the block wars

block size wars and it was essentially the answer the easy answer that proponents of keeping blocks

small quote unquote had when confronted with the question of how do you scale bitcoin it was

convenient for the small blockers who chose to engage in that argumentation to say well we scale

it off chain in something we call lightning network um now during the block size wars we samurai

was around we had a software product we had the wallet out and we came out on the side of smaller

blocks however we did not engage in the argumentation of well how do you scale bitcoin in that case

because we saw it as a deflection the answer is yes bitcoin blockchain does need to be able to scale

however it doesn't need to scale right now because it's nowhere near the usage required to

to go down that path lightning network was used as you know this answer where well we scale using

lightning network that's how we scale and as it's been proven that's not the answer at least not

in in the market because the market has has rejected lightning network even with high fees that

we're seeing now as a result of the ordinal stuff lightning network still isn't being used

and our um argument towards lightning network back then and still to this day is it's not

it's it's designed on high top down as opposed to organically bottom up and what will end up

happening in the current design of lightning network and this is what we said back then

is that you will end up with custodial solutions because that's the easiest way to interact with

lightning it'll be custodial solutions middlemen and roadblocks on on the on ramps

and that prediction has turned out to be largely true the only usage of lightning that we're seeing

today and yes there's a few people here and there that are using it non custodially or whatever

but a very few and far between the majority of usage that we're seeing is via custodial solutions

it's it's kind of what we call banker tech middleman tech anyone who is of that kind of mindset

is very pro lightning because they can easily see a way to monetize easily see a way to rent seek

using that network so it's not the it is not the scaling solution I don't think and I think it's

taken a lot of um investment and time away from actually determining and figuring out what will be

the scaling solution but it's certainly not going to be lightning at least I don't think so

and everything that we predicted about lightning in terms of it being custodial in nature first and

foremost has turned out to be true and that's what we've seen so you know lightning network is

theoretically cool on paper but in practice is in very much not ready for prime time hasn't been

ready for prime time and we see it in the marketplace you look at bit refill or coin cards are any of

these these online merchants that do large amounts of volume either in bitcoin or altcoins you look

at their sales and lightning network isn't even as popular for for making these transactions as

something like like coin is like coin beats it obviously bitcoin is number one most people are

using bitcoin for these websites but number two and number three are like the narrow and

light coin so you know and and then with the ordinal spam like I said or not spam the ordinal

transactions like I said you would expect to see with minor fees so high these days you know

on every any day given day you're looking at 100s to choose per buy at least you would expect to see

flocking towards the lighting network but we're not seeing that you know it's just not what people

want to use and it's a big difference between creating code and creating a product that people

want to use and that's what they've done they've created code but no one wants to actually use it

and the people that do want to use it and they go you know they go to try to use it realize

that it's near impossible to use privately it's near impossible to use sovereignly so they end up

using it using a custodial solution and at that point what's the difference between that and PayPal

right and so zelko it's not that we're criticizing the concept of lightning it's always nice to

see more things it's that lightning has been used by people to to force down our throats so to speak

are there any egregious examples that you've noticed over the years when we were starting to

really get run into joe going and we were adding other features and adding other apps like

electrs and explorers and stuff like that i think i even wrote a guide for lightning because i wasn't

as practiced in in lightning at the time and so that was something that was on my mind and then

once we really started playing with them we realized like this one it's never going to happen

because there's some million apps the development time is absurd just to try to keep up and try to

make sure that you don't have a you don't upgrade into a bug that can lose people's funds there's

just there's a million things but at the time all the other node implementations had lightning

they were they were that was like one of the things and every conference that we went to every

event it was oh so can this run lightning this one lightning even today um you know that we'll

get that question from time to time most people have since learned not to ask that question but

we still get it and um and when we were trying to secure funding in the beginning we were looking at

you know some like angel investing and some some other stuff like that just to kind of help keep

you know keep us going forward um as soon as they heard that we didn't want to do lightning they

immediately said oh okay well good luck it was a kind of an unspoken force narrative um as far

as development went and um you know thankfully I had some smart people in our corner that just

said stay the course and it'll work out and it's never been true right like just I was even just

looking up some some lightning stats right now and if you look at like the full total capacity

of lightning network versus it's about 5,000 Bitcoin um and I believe that the unspent

capacity of whirlpool is almost 10k at this point so hopefully by the end of the new year but it

just goes just goes to goes to show right that like it was a a force narrative that we were told

that this is what has to happen um I can't remember how many times that um that people uh

influencers on bitcoin twitter try to say that oh if you're a Bitcoin company and you don't

integrate lightning uh you're gonna be dead in two years or something along those lines and that

was you know like four years ago five years ago like it's absurd and it's just wrong

I 100% agree like it's not needed like you don't you don't need that like people is like oh well

I can buy a coffee or people have individual cases where they say oh well works for me and I'm like

that's great that there's a lot of things that might only work for you but don't work for everybody

hence it doesn't work if it doesn't work for everybody then it doesn't work that's the point

that's how bitcoin's supposed to work it's supposed to work for everybody and if it doesn't then

it's broken and we've spent years and years and millions of dollars on investing into lightning

and it's a sunken uh sunken cost fallacy at this point you know people are just can't accept

that it's not the solution I hope that we can get there I hope that people can find it but it

it really is not anything more than a custodial solution to be honest yeah I remember um

electrom electroms uh wallet said to us if you don't implement lightning you will be dead in two

years and that was in 2017 I think so we're still around we're still kicking and um you know we have

no plans to implement lightning and I the other the other other thing I'll say on that on

lightning is maybe people don't realize this because we it's something we said earlier about not

actually transacting but there is such a beautiful simplicity in bitcoin and I know it you know

it might be hard to understand that because you know bitcoin is such a different thing

and there is a learning curve of course but there is a beautiful simplicity in in spending bitcoin

in that you either have the UTXO or you don't you know there there is no other state it's either

UTXO or no UTXO um and with lightning that's not true right uh you can send to someone and then

it can fail because of routing this or that it can get stuck somewhere you know there's there's

a big question mark around it uh there's not enough inbound liquidity there's not enough uh you

know channel capacity there's not you know there's all of these edge cases and and you know failures

that can happen that are just not possible to happen in bitcoin it's either sent or it's not

and that's really a beautiful thing and I think that lightning network was entirely over engineered

entirely um academic in it in how it was designed and it wasn't designed for actual use um and

it's one of really the incredible and amazing things about how Satoshi designed bitcoin um where it's

you know that fundamentally at its basic level it works exactly as he just as he designed it and

hasn't been changed in that fundamental way yes there's been bug fixes yes they've done

introduce new script types and all of that sort of stuff but that hasn't changed the fundamentals

of the system you either have a UTXO or you don't there's no UTXO can't get lost it can't

you know not exist it's either there or it isn't there and if it's there you have it and if it

isn't there someone else has it it's such a beautiful system and there is beauty and simplicity

and I think that lightning um the designers are lightning they failed that important metric they

failed it completely there's way too much complexity and with complexity when you have such a

complex system you need intermediaries you need people to stand in the middle you need watch

towers you need liquidity providers you need this and that that's the reason we're not seeing

huge lightning uptake and huge adoption is because it's too complicated and where where um

you know the individual can't run the system the components of the system that are required

intermediaries will step in and do that and that's what we're seeing happen and why would you

why would you degrade yourself in that way when as a user when you can just use bitcoin as it was

designed and that's what we're seeing that's how people are you know are using it and unfortunately

you know some people are being onboarded directly into lightning without ever having to interact

with the bitcoin blockchain and by and large 99% of those people are being onboarded into custodial

solutions like walled of satoshi or something else and as we just saw with walled of satoshi

they're no longer able to provide services to us persons so all the people that were onboarded

into walled of satoshi over the last several years um got in the us got a nice little message saying

get your get your funds off of here because you're not welcome to use our product anymore

and we're gonna see more and more of that going forward I want to ask either of you is there a

topic that we haven't covered one topic that is always kind of funny and it seems to have

not been as bad I remember how many how many goal posts had been moved for the samurai team

based on like literally everything um anything that they tried to do was immediately met with um

you know oh or whether it was mobile mixing tojo only pools there's there's always been

something the defaults there's not enough default warnings or something along those lines

there's always somebody who had something to say just because they didn't like samurai about um

so what we like to call the click not not necessarily a long history but there there are definitely

individuals who consistently gone out of their way just to spread stupid fun and then

when their foot is met up against something then they uh you know they just move the goal posts

again like I like one example is you know talking about the dojo only pools and and world pool needing

to be decentralized coordinator being an issue and needing uh to decentralized and all of a sudden

now with uh with the whole knots and um opportune stuff then it was oh the solution should have should

have always been like you guys were stupid for setting up this way and you guys should have

should have always had a centralized database to yeah I couldn't believe that that was that was

a new one well it's true um from from day one we had been fighting an uphill battle um

you know we launched as a closed beta um software in 2015 we had maybe 50 testers or something

like that and the way that you had to become a tester was uh by emailing us and saying you would like

to test and um so we had 50 50 testers in 2015 I remember it very well this was back when the

bitcoin subreddit on reddit was like pretty popular and and everyone was there now it's I mean

I'm sure it's still popular but no one no one really hangs out there who's worth anything

but back then it was kind of a big deal and uh I remember there was a a post on there from

I I'll never forget the user it was poop wallet nor wall and it was obviously a throwaway account

I know who was the true author but I'm not going to say their name because they made it under a

throwaway account and there's no need for me to attribute authorship to them but it was a pretty

thorough indictment of what we were doing there was a lot of of shade thrown that we were using

third party APIs to to query nodes uh query balances and transactions and of course this was true

though it was not something that we tried to hide or anything all 50 of our users at the time

were very well aware of the third party API we were using uh in fact at that time it was

one of two API providers that existed in the market um and most people were using them

but I remember that and basically the consensus of this poop wallet nor wall uh was that

no one should use samurai they're completely um incompetent and that you know the their stuff

isn't worth even looking at um so we obviously disagreed and we continue developing what we were

doing I responded on the reddit saying it's true we are using third party APIs to do this but this

is the reason why it's a closed beta and we're not making it available for everyone we will make

it available for everyone once we stop using third party APIs uh then so fast forward a little

a little while later and we finally built out the infrastructure so that we could we didn't have

to query any third party APIs we ran our own node with our own API server which would eventually

become dojo and so that you know that goal post then had to shift it wasn't now the issue wasn't

that we were relying on third party APIs the issue was that we were relying on one API our own

centralized API okay this is true but also we had already stated that the work and the the ideal

was to open source that API server and provide it to users once it was ready at this point we were a

team of two so things took longer than then then we would have liked but and and we didn't have any

investment or anything like that so that goal post shifted to that and then so we continue developing

and users continue to come in now we have several thousand users by this point all of which

understand that you know unless you're running your own node you have to rely on someone else's

node and back then now we're talking like 2016 2017 there still wasn't a lot of node runners out

there you know most most people who were connecting to wallets were either connecting to core very few

or using a mobile wallet like my psyllium or samurai or blockchain that info co-pay was another one

at the time all of them had the same exact architecture we did but it was only us that got targeted

for this then 2016 2017 we this was during the block block size wars and we innovated and

figured out a way that you could not use your own node to query blocks and stuff yet but you could

connect your own node to samurai so that you could verify that samurai wasn't lying to you by

the information that you were that it was feeding back to your wallet we were the first to do this

and we got a further goal post moving saying well they're letting you connect to your node but it's

not good enough you're not feeding the you know the transaction history they're just feeding the

proof of work header and your wallet is comparing proof of work header okay that's true but we're

still working on you know getting out the full node based stuff fast forward a little bit we finally

released dojo and this is the API server that you know people had been waiting for for us to open

source which finally came it's out there people are using it you know have people like zelko who

started growing in dojo forked it and built a you know a beautiful solution for it we actually had

whirlpool ready to go before that but we refused to release whirlpool until users could run their own

node self-solveringly separate from us and so we delayed whirlpool until we launched dojo once dojo

was launched we launched whirlpool so that users could connect to their own nodes by passing all of

our infrastructure and then the as zelko stated the goal post moved from that to well you need dojo

only whirlpool pools otherwise are going to be mixing with people who who are in running their own

nodes we're like no that's that's just going to divide liquidity and make it less we less of a

robust solution for everybody will continue to have one liquidity pool but don't worry other wallets

will join in and those wallets are essentially it when when if you're thinking about it in those

high adversarial terms like that samurai wallet is malicious those wallets don't share any

information with samurai so they are effectively running their own node pooling pool then down the line

we have sparrow joining we have Bitcoin keeper joining we have another wallet that's in the works

joining every step of the way there's been interference there's been people like Luke Jr like Peter

Todd like all these people who have stated that you know we're incompetent that that our stuff

doesn't work but the thing is the market has spoken the market is saying no it does work if it

didn't work we would actually have real you know we would have real examples of it not working not

these theoretical what about this what about that so you know we were born in the fire we've been

fighting a long time with people but at the end of the day our stuff speaks for itself our code

speaks for itself and our results speak for itself like I said earlier it's one thing writing code

and putting out code it's another thing putting out a product that people want to use and we've

proven time and time again that what we put out people want to use it the market has spoken and

that's all I can say well thank you both for sharing your knowledge of the politics behind Bitcoin

hope this has been informative for people and the best way to support samurai wallet is to use

the samurai wallet or sparrow and get into the whirlpool because they get some of that as compensation

for their work and the best way to help Ronin Dojo is to go to Ronin Dojo.io consider buying something

they have including their excellent prebuilt nodes that's a fabulous way to support them and thank

you both so much Zelco final thoughts. No just I mean it was a great talk I appreciate you having

us out here and yeah just continue to use the tools like that's really what this is about and

learn the learn why you know I think there's plenty of information out there but I think sometimes

we also get into the mode of just like yeah whirlpool everything but understand why why it's important

because it is but understand like what what does that mean and what does it mean if I'm going to

spend and how do I spend it privately like take the time and and thankfully there's people like

Gabriel that have great podcasts like this that actually go into it but use the tools and just

use Bitcoin the way it's supposed to so enjoy spending it but you know save as well do whatever

you need to do it's your money and samurai you had a good final statement there in your last question

could you maybe give people a couple places to follow you or participate in the samurai wallet

community yes absolutely you can follow us on twitter at samurai wallet and I would recommend

joining our telegram group I think it's samurai underscore wallet lots of conversation lots of

discussion happens there about samurai about privacy in general and you know I'm quite active

in there people like Zelco are quite active in there it's a great little community can visit us

online at samurai wallets dot com s-a-m-o-u-r-a-i wallets dot com a tutorial note here that's website

that kionine just read out don't go there it's owned by scammers at this point and samurai wallet

has been shut down hey thanks for listening I could really use your help real quick if you could

share this episode with someone engage with me leave a review anywhere this helps me to break the

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