Join the Wasabikas - a Bitcoin Privacy Podcast

New episode of Join the Wasabikas is now out! Starring David Molnar and @HillebrandMax discussing Wasabi principles, the limitations these mean and automatisations in Wasabi Wallet 2.0. www.wasabiwallet.io Blog Documentation GitHub Podcast YouTube Twitter Instagram

New episode of Join the Wasabikas is now out! Starring @nopara73 and @HillebrandMax discussing everything you want to know about Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Wasabi Wallet 2.0 Testnet www.wasabiwallet.io Blog Documentation GitHub Podcast YouTube Twitter Instagram

2.0 Testnet: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi/releases/tag/v1.98.0.0 Website: https://WasabiWallet.io Blog: https://blog.WasabiWallet.io Documentation: https://docs.WasabiWallet.io GitHub: https://github.com/zkSNACKs/WalletWasabi Podcast: https://anchor.fm/Wasabikas YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/WasabiWallet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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