WBD520 Audio Transcription

Privacy on Monero vs Bitcoin with Seth for Privacy

Release date: Wednesday 29th June

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Seth for Privacy. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Seth for Privacy is a privacy advocate and host of the Opt Out Podcast. In this interview, we discuss how financial privacy protects all other rights, the current limitations with Bitcoin’s privacy, and Monero’s protocol privacy that some Bitcoiners find beneficial.

“People need to realise that politics can rapidly change, countries can rapidly change. And the things you do today on-chain and Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, those things last forever.”

— Seth for Privacy

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Welcome to the show, Seth for Privacy, how are you doing, man?

Seth for Privacy: Doing pretty good, Peter.  Thank you so much for having me on, this is a great pleasure.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, I wanted you on, I've been following you for a little while now, seen you jumping into some of the debates regarding privacy.  We have Matt Odell in the audience watching us here; something I've been discussing with him the other day.  But yeah, it's been really interesting watching you jump into the debates regarding privacy.  Even the other day, I just tagged you into something, I was just, "Fuck it, Seth can come and answer this for me".

Not everyone listening will know who you are, I don't know how much you want to share about who you are, your background, but please go ahead.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, I can give a really quick intro.  I am Seth for Privacy, but trying to be a little bit more approachable, trying to keep the face out there if it's helpful.  But I'm relatively new to the scene in the grand scheme of things, got into Bitcoin in 2017, just hoping purely for Number Go Up and only cared about it as an investment; but I think quickly, thankful to other people around me, realised that it could be a tool for freedom and that there was a lot of value in not just the Number Go Up and speculative aspects of it, but really that it could be a force for good, at least on the personal level, and maybe at the broader societal level.

Then eventually, went through kind of a Bitcoin maximalism phase and stumbled into Monero, just because I wanted to mine it, because IT is kind of a main thing for me.  I do a lot of IT work as a hobby and have fun with that, and building a mining rig seemed fun.  So, got into Monero that way, and then had no care about personal privacy or anything like that in the world.  But a lot of the Monero people helped me to understand how important personal privacy is, both with cryptocurrencies, but really at a much broader scale, with the way you choose to share your data, who you give it to, just the approach that you take to the world in really a digital-only age, almost.

So, that was kind of the beginning of that.  But since then, when I took the dive into personal privacy, it's helped me to, I think, get a better overall picture of what Bitcoin is and try to help drive Bitcoin privacy, while also doing what I can for Monero, because I think it's a very valuable tool today as well.

Peter McCormack: So, you came for the games and you stayed for the revolution?

Seth for Privacy: It's true, yeah!

Peter McCormack: Okay, man.  I made a show with FluffyPony back in maybe late 2018, early 2019, I can't remember when it was, and one of the first things I said to him, I said, "There are Bitcoin maxis, and there are Bitcoin maxis but Monero's okay", and we talked a lot about that.  He explained why he considered it, because it was a fair launch, as opposed to some cryptocurrencies haven't been such a fair launch; and also, that it offers something out of the box that you currently can't get from Bitcoin. 

I trended towards a Bitcoin maxi, but I've never really felt like I'm one of those people who wanted to call Monero a shitcoin.  It feels like it is a tool that is useful to people in certain scenarios, it offers a little more privacy out of the box, and I've been seeing a debate going back and forwards regarding this.    So what I wanted to talk to you today was just about privacy with Bitcoin, privacy with Monero, understand the trade-offs, try and get some honest answers out there.  I think one of the challenges with Bitcoin maximalism is that we've created this almost, I don't want to be insulting, but almost a religion around Bitcoin and Bitcoin maximalism, and therefore I think some people may be criticised, or are detractors of Monero, because they feel they are maybe being disloyal to Bitcoin, and I don't think that's particularly helpful. 

So, I want to be as fair as I can today, but at the same time, I've also found some of the Monero community quite difficult, in that they want to criticise Bitcoin in a way that's a little bit over the top, to try and promote Monero.  I don't think either needs to be too critical of each other.  I think Bitcoin is the best form of money, will be the best form of money, I don't think it will be beaten personally.  But I do see Monero as a tool that bitcoiners can use.  Does that sound like a fair setup?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable approach to take.  I mean, Monero's one of the few cryptocurrencies that I don't think anyone could rightfully call a shitcoiner scam.  It's one of the few that had a very similar birth to Bitcoin, that was birthed by anonymous or pseudonymous people, has fair issuance, there was no premine, nothing like that.  It has a lot of the same ethos behind it and aiming for great decentralisation, and aiming for a lot of the same things that we love Bitcoin for, but obviously with this focus on privacy being a very fundamental aspect to Monero. 

So, I think it has a lot of similarities in that I think the approach I'm seeing many people take, and I think there's a really strong momentum behind this, is the "Bitcoin is for savings, Monero is for spending" approach.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think that's a great bit of marketing for Monero.  I think Bitcoin is for saving and Bitcoin is for spending.

Seth for Privacy: It can be.

Peter McCormack: Monero is also for spending in certain scenarios.  But if I'm going back to my travels to El Salvador, where there's been massive adoption of Bitcoin and expansion of the Lightning Network, both within El Zonte with the project launch, but also across El Salvador.  I mean, you can go to Starbuck's, you can go to pizza, you can go to any of these places and spend your Bitcoin; so there, I would be spending Bitcoin and not Monero.  But I get there are scenarios where I've used Bitcoin in the past where now, if I was to make similar purchases, I would have a preference to go for Monero, just because of certain risks associated with it for me.

But one of the things I really want to just get across and be quite clear to people is that I don't think there needs to be a fight between these two cryptocurrencies.  I don't think it helps either party, but I do think there's some healthy competition which can drive privacy forward in the way that people want to do it with Bitcoin.  But let's start with Bitcoin, let's talk about Bitcoin.

I made a good show with Matt the other day talking about privacy with Bitcoin, but I also thought your analogy the other day, where you compared it to PGP, was very good; and the reason I thought that was a good take is because, every time I've approached my Bitcoin privacy, there's a lot of things I have to think about.  I have to think about my IP address; I have to think about, do I use Tor; do I use Tor within my node?  There's so many things that in the end, even if I followed the instructions provided in the various articles or videos you find, I have no confidence that I haven't fucked up or made a mistake.

Now, that's not a reason to not start attacking my privacy and starting to improve it, and Matt's given me some great tips on this and things I'll definitely take away from it and start working on.  But for me, I just don't know if I'm making mistakes.  I think for anyone, let's approach this show like we're not making this one for the Matt Odells and people who understand privacy; let's make this for people who just don't know anything, who really have basic fundamental understanding of Bitcoin, maybe they're new to it, or whatever.

So, as a starting point for you, it's going to seem like a really simple question, but why do you think people should be caring about their privacy; why have you made that central to your place in this ecosystem?

Seth for Privacy: I think it's something that most people overlook in a broad sense.  Even just stepping outside of cryptocurrency, most people have taken the approach of, the incentives that I'm given by the companies that I love, by the brands I love, by the social media I love is, I give them my data and they give me a product that I want.  So, we've gotten used to this system of commerce where we're paying with our data, we're paying with all of this instant information about who we are, about the thoughts that we think, about the things that we write, about the things that we love, the things that we hate, and we're paying with all of this information to get access to something that is being sold to us as being good for us and a net good for society.

But we're quickly seeing that those things are very harmful to the individual and very harmful to society.  And so, people overlooking that are neither not caring about personal privacy, or taking -- I love Odell's approach to this, kind of taking the idea of, "I'm totally screwed anyway, I don't know anything about personal privacy, so I'm just not even going to worry about it, and I'm just going to go through life as if it didn't matter".  We're seeing that be the more than norm in society.

But when we look at cryptocurrencies specifically, we've had a lot of similar approaches, and I think a lot of it is because early on in the Bitcoin days, people kind of assumed that Bitcoin was anonymous.  I don't think it was improperly pushed as that by Satoshi, or anybody like that, but it was very much a pseudonymous system that people thought that was good enough.  This pseudonymity, where you have these pseudonyms on-chain, which are the addresses that you're given, and the address that you give somebody to send you funds, that is really a pseudonym for you, and you can use multiple, you should never use the same one; there are all of these basic things for Bitcoin privacy.  But people thought that that pseudonymity would be good enough.

In reality, it's a very, very fragile pseudonymity, and even more so now that we have invasive regulations, like KYC, the Know Your Customer, Anti-Money Laundering, AML, laws.  We have things like that that mean that usually, when people are buying or selling Bitcoin, they're also attaching their ID to it.  So now, all these exchanges and the governments, who ultimately have control over them, can attach your ID, who you are, directly to on-chain addresses, which means that you have no, even fragile, pseudonymity; you are just directly linked between your ID and all of your on-chain activity.

For most people spending, you may not worry about what that means today.  I think the thing that I harp on for people in more western societies, where I'm not undergoing any oppression right now.  I definitely think there are flaws within the US system, but it's not something where I'm suffering; but people need to realise that politics can rapidly change, countries can rapidly change, and the things you do today on-chain in Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency, those things last forever, or as long as the chain goes, which with Bitcoin I think probably will be forever. 

So, the things that you choose to do today will irrevocably be on-chain as you doing them.  And, if at any point you've linked that to your identity in the past, or in the future you link that to your identity, that can come back to haunt you very quickly.  And I could do something that today is completely legal and normal, it doesn't need to be buying drugs on a darknet market; it could be supporting someone who's running for political office that you favour, who in the future is known as a criminal, and then they come after anyone who donated to them, and those things can rapidly change a country.

Those are some of the core reasons why you should worry about privacy, even if you're not doing something that you would deem illegal today or dangerous today.

Peter McCormack: I think the wake-up call for me was with regards to the Canadian truckers, and you and I have the benefit of growing up in a liberal, western democracy, fairly relatively safe country, questionable government at times, but not under dictators, and I would have considered Canada the same.  I don't think you have to decide what side you're on with the Canadian truckers, but the right to protest, I think, is an important right.

Seth for Privacy: Very much.

Peter McCormack: But even if they could have deemed the protest themselves illegal, the financial penalties for people who were just donating to what was seen as a fund-raise, to suddenly be either persecuted, financially cancelled, to me that was kind of a scary move for a western, liberal democracy to make.  And that made me realise, just like you said, things can change quickly.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah.  And that was, I hope, a good wake-up call for many people to see that governments understand that if they can cut off your finances, they ultimately can cut off all of your other rights without directly attacking them.  Because, just like we saw with the Freedom Convoy, and we've seen in many other authoritarian countries that have taken similar measures, if they can cut off your access to funding, obviously you need money to be able to buy food, to buy gas, to feed your family; there are all of these things that if you don't have a way to fund yourself and then pay for things, you ultimately have to abide by what they want, or flee, there are no other choices.

So, when governments can perform financial oppression, it's fairly simple in the current broken system.  With Bitcoin, it does make it more difficult; but we even saw in the Freedom Convoy, the situation that a lot of things were not handled very well in the approach that was taken, and a lot of the privacy taken on the Bitcoin side was not done well either, and so there were a lot of issues with funds being traced directly to truckers, funds being frozen when they tried to deposit them to exchange for Canadian dollars. 

We saw a lot of problems with that, that fragile pseudonymity that, yes, Bitcoin was able to be used to donate, which was a huge step up from GoFundMe and the others, because obviously they could just shut things down at the flip of a switch.

Peter McCormack: Well, they didn't, they stole their fucking money.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, exactly, that's very simple.

Peter McCormack: Fuck you, GoFundMe!

Seth for Privacy: Bitcoin makes that much more difficult, which is a huge win.  That is very important for people to understand.  But on the flipside, Bitcoin's fragile pseudonymity can also be a problem, because it can be very easy for governments to trace funds.  We saw in the Freedom Convoy, they quickly traced all of the funds.  Funnily enough, it was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, it was the Mounties who were the ones tracing funds and blacklisting all of the known UTXOs and trying to make sure that centralised exchanges would censor and confiscate funds when they were deposited, all of that. 

So, there are definitely aspects of Bitcoin, whilst they can enable these things, if you don't do things correctly, you run into a lot of problems.  And situations like that are a lot of the reason why I care so much about Monero, because it can be an extremely valuable tool, especially in scenarios like that; I think in many more, but especially in scenarios like that, where you are doing something actively against the state and you know you're going to be persecuted.  So, you need to think very deeply about both personal privacy and on-chain privacy.

Peter McCormack: And, we're getting into the area of why privacy's important, I think it was David Chaum when he was working on eCash, or it might even have been prior to that, where he wrote, and we should try and dig it out and put it in the show notes, but he wrote a very good piece on why financial privacy is an important pillar of democracy, because if you don't have private transactions, then you can either be tracked, or you can be persecuted for having particular political beliefs.  And if you want a free and open democracy, you have to have financial privacy.

I'm not sure what it's like here in the US, I mean in the UK it's a fucking shit show, but in the US, what privacy rights should you have, or are you meant to have, constitutionally maybe?  I know the Fourth Amendment is relevant, but with the likes of the NSA, we know that the US Government tracks a lot.  But are you meant to actually have some fundamental privacy protection?

Seth for Privacy: Theoretically, yes, I mean especially with cash, which thankfully is still very common in the US.  It's one of the main places remaining that's very, very cash friendly of western societies.  Obviously, Third World countries are normally very cash friendly, but with cash obviously you have very good privacy guarantees, both technically, and you're supposed to have good privacy from the government.

As far as banking laws and that kind of thing, normally your data is supposed to be protected outside of a warrant being issued, but there are lots of flaws in that system, so that breaks apart very quickly; but you should have good financial privacy laws protecting you here in the US, assuming all else holds up, just a lot of that can fall apart very quickly under whatever pretence they decide to role with.  But generally, you do have pretty good guarantees.

Peter McCormack: And I think off the back of this, we've had this erosion of privacy from the large tech companies.  I mean, I think I saw today, someone had put on Twitter, someone uploaded a file to Google Drive and it was rejected; they said, "We've rejected that file based on its content".  Now, I don't know what the contents were.

Danny Knowles: I saw this as well.  I think it was something like deaths in nursing homes due to COVID.  It was along those lines.

Peter McCormack: Can you look it up?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I'll have a look.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  That gets into a very weird place, because that's thought-policing the files that you want to host on a network.  And in some ways therefore, that's control of speech privately.  I mean, it's bad enough to be censored in public scenarios, but in a private scenario, where you just want to host a file, I mean who knows if this person's not working on a report into the range of opinions with regards to COVID, and therefore they want to see the good, the bad, what is the truth, what is misinformation?  They can't even work on that, because they can't host that file.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, I mean I think people should expect this, but it is definitely startling when people first see it.  I mean, the concept we have in Bitcoin of, "Not your keys, not your coins", it's very similar and analogous, but people haven't realised the risk of, I guess, "Not your server, not your data", would be a similar analogy there, in that you're sending something to Google; yes, technically it's under your account, but it's theirs.  They host the data, they have the servers, they have total control.

Google, specifically Google Drive, for a long time has been censoring documents and information that they don't want to host, mostly illegal content would be the main thing that they focus on, but they've also been key in a lot of censorship around COVID stuff, and there's a lot of history there.  That is not uncommon and people should not be surprised, but is something that I think many people are just waking up to.

Peter McCormack: Have you found it?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, it was, "Nursing Home deaths by states", COVID deaths by states, but it's hard to tell you if it's definitely true or not; it's just a screenshot.  Yeah, interestingly someone's said, "What if the file contained proprietary or confidential information?"  There's stuff that we don't know about it, but it highlights something.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's still a weird play, especially from a company who originally touted themselves as, "Don't do evil, don't be evil".  One of the things I'm surprised about is that more companies haven't identified privacy as a competitive advantage.  I think Apple feels like they've been fairly good, and then you do have things like DuckDuckGo on the search side of things.  Shame it's a slightly shit search engine, but it still is fairly good.  Have you been surprised by that, or is there more being done on that that I'm not seeing?

Seth for Privacy: I think there's been a relatively large push over the past few years for companies to either be actual privacy companies, who actually want to preserve your privacy, and build tools that are uniquely enabling for people who wake up to that need.  Then, we've also seen a lot of Apple specifically, but Google's also been fairly large in that as well, of really using privacy as a marketing term, more than they actually care about user privacy.

I think Apple, for instance, like to tell people that they're very good as far as third-party privacy is concerned, just the idea of your data is only going to be between you and Apple normally.  They're going to have full purview into everything you do, your backup's normally unencrypted, your iMessage that's there is unencrypted, iCloud there is unencrypted.  So they have access to that, but they have done a very good job of helping to rein in the visibility that other people, other apps, other providers have within the Apple ecosystem; whether that's for your good, or ultimately I think what a lot of people have pointed out is that it helps them build a marketing monopoly, where only they have access to the data of iPhone and MacOS and iPad users, so they can then leverage that to make money.  There's a lot of thoughts around if they actually care, or if it's just a grand scheme to do that.

But there has been a push, as I think people have realised, that enough people within the populace have said, "I at least care enough about privacy to vote with my wallet sometimes".  So, companies have latched onto that, and some really good privacy-preserving services have been built out as a result of that, I think.  And Proton, with Proton Mail and Proton VPN and all of their services, I think, is a very good example of a company that's seen the need, seen a way to monetise off of it, and there's nothing wrong with building a business that --

Peter McCormack: Makes money!

Seth for Privacy: Yeah!  People always say, "Why would I give them money, they don't need to build a business, they should just build tools?"  No, they need to build a business and they can build better privacy-preserving tools and do better things for us, because they're making money as a result.  And I would much rather pay with my money than pay with my data.

Peter McCormack: So, are you an advocate of both Proton Mail and Proton VPN?  I've got Proton Mail.  I haven't used it enough.  I have an account, one account, which I use for just certain messaging, but I'm still using Gmail for most of mine.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, Proton Mail specifically I am a huge fan of; I would highly recommend it.  Even for more advanced use cases, where you have your own domain, you have a team, they have great business plans as well.  It works extraordinarily well, they have, I think, the best user experience and interface of really any of the privacy-preserving email services.  Their whole revamp has been very well done.

Peter McCormack: Oh, so there's a revamp?  You see, I haven't used it in a while.  I always found their webmail interface was shit, it was badly designed; have they changed that?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Oh, okay.

Seth for Privacy: They changed that a little while ago.  The last to come were all their Android apps, which they just changed, which as an Android-only user, it's been painful to suffer through their old apps for a long time, while iPhone people had the nice one.

Peter McCormack: Right, can you use third-party email services, but use them as your mail server?

Seth for Privacy: So, they have a tool called Proton Bridge, which you can install on your computer, and then you can use any email client with it.  But you couldn't use Gmail with Proton Mail, or something like that.  So, you would need to use Proton Mail itself, but you could use a third-party email client, like Apple Mail or Thunderbird, or something like that, to actually handle your email, and then all of it's going directly through Proton Mail servers and getting all of those guarantees.

Peter McCormack: Do they have their own email app?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah.  Not a desktop app, they don't have any desktop apps; it's just the web app.  But they have good iPad, iOS, Android apps, all of those.

Peter McCormack: I might check that out and this might be a time to move off Gmail for that.  Okay, cool.  Before we get into the next bit, are there any other cool privacy tools or tech that you think people should look at?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah.  Another really big one for me has been one that actually Proton recently acquired, which is both exciting and nerve-racking, just because whenever a bigger company acquires a smaller one, you never really know.  But one that I've really enjoyed for a long time is called SimpleLogin, and basically what they do is they provide an email aliasing service, where you can create unique email aliases for every account that you use, just like you would create a unique password for each one, hopefully.

Peter McCormack: Like Apple does when you sign up to an app?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah.  They added that I guess about six months ago now.  Apple added something very similar, email aliasing, so it's the same concept, but it's through a third party, so you can do it with non-Apple stuff.  But that service has been really a game-changer for me, because it makes it so much easier to manage your email, because if you sign up for some service and they sell your email and you start getting all this spam, you just disable the alias at SimpleLogin.  You don't have to change your email, you don't have to worry about that, you don't have to worry about setting it to spam and trying to get your email provider to properly mark it; you just disable the alias and you never get email again and you're done.

Peter McCormack: My spam's got out of hand recently.  I get probably five to ten emails a day where it's clearly from some mailing list, and it's always YouTube accounts, or NFT launches.  Are you getting these ones?

Danny Knowles: No!

Peter McCormack: They're a fucking nightmare, every single day.

Seth for Privacy: Who did you give your email to?

Peter McCormack: I have no idea, but it's just relentless, to the point where I'm like, "I've got to give up that account now, that one's got to die", because it's just relentless.  Okay, so let's talk a little bit about privacy with Bitcoin.  You said you went Bitcoin maxi, and then you went towards Monero.  Was that in response to what you found with privacy on Bitcoin, or did you just get exposed to Monero and you just thought, "This is kind of interesting"?  What was the journey?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, it was really because I had done a good bit with Bitcoin privacy before jumping into Monero.  Back in those days, I played around with Wasabi Wallet initially, then Samurai Wallet after that.  And because I realised the need for personal privacy, I was trying to do the same on Bitcoin, but it was fairly difficult.  I mean, I'm a technical person, I was able to do it, it wasn't impossible, but it was quite difficult.

Once I got exposed to Monero, like I mentioned, I just wanted to mine it initially, couldn't have cared less about it.  Once I got exposed and then started to actually use it, instead of just mine it, I realised that it greatly simplified the whole process of using a cryptocurrency privately, and that's why I started to focus on that.  I've never stepped away from Bitcoin completely.  A lot of the content that I make and a lot of the conversations that I have, and things that I talk about on Twitter, etc, are Bitcoin-focused and Bitcoin privacy-focused.

But I have shifted most of my free time to Monero, because I think it's a much simpler tool to use.  You don't have to care about privacy.  You could both not care and have no idea what you're doing, and you can gain very strong privacy guarantees with Monero; not perfect, there are trade-offs, and we can walk through some of those as well.  But especially as somehow who, I think I've kind of become a privacy advocate and I'm trying to make content that's more broadly privacy-focused, the tools that I recommend need to protect people well by default, and that is very much a low bar for me.  If something doesn't surpass that bar, I'm going to be very hesitant, or I'm not going to recommend it.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so I'm not in that world where I think every -- well ideally, every transaction in the world I would make would be private.  But I'm in that world that I accept that a lot of them aren't, and that's just a reality of life.  But I know there are transactions I've made in the past that I know that I did with Bitcoin that I assumed I was anonymous, and I clearly wasn't.  And if I was to make similar transactions today, I would want it to be private.

My problem with trying to achieve privacy on Bitcoin, and I don't want to detract from Bitcoin, I don't want to feel like I'm attacking it, because I don't want Monero people to jump on this and suddenly say, "Oh, Pete's a Monero guy!" but my difficulty is, like I said to you before, I don't know what trails of data I'm leaving behind with my IP address.

Say I want to make this transaction, I don't know if I can be identified from my IP address, so how do I hide my IP address?  I don't know if I need to create a separate wallet, or I can create a sub-address.  I don't know if the sub-address can be linked to the other addresses.  I don't know if I should be using Tor.  I don't know if I've made some mistake where a UTXO has come from, say I bought it on exchange, and it's gone to that wallet and I've done everything correct there and then I've spent it, but I've been tracked all the way back.  I've never done a CoinJoin; I've tried and I got a bit confused, and I'm going to go back and definitely going to do it again.

So, I recognise the tools are there and I recognise people are doing a really good job.  But with Bitcoin, what is the challenge of doing privacy out of the box?  Do you think in the world of Bitcoin, privacy is being approached in the right way, step by step, providing more tools; or, are you actually critical of it?

Seth for Privacy: I mean, anyone who has followed me at all definitely knows that I'm very critical of Bitcoin's approach to privacy, and really almost every single cryptocurrency's approach to privacy.  I wish people had a little bit thicker skin when it came to Bitcoin, because a critical response to Bitcoin is not necessarily hating on it or wanting it to fail or anything like that, and it's always interesting to see the feedback I get when I talk critically of things that Bitcoin approaches that Bitcoin has taken technically and not bad-mouthing the project or the people behind it, but really the approach that's been taken.

I think the approach that's been taken is an understandable one, because of what the current narratives around Bitcoin are, and I think that narratives really control what happens with Bitcoin.  It is ultimately code, it is ultimately a cryptocurrency project, things can be changed, the base layer could be changed, we could have hard forks.  These are all theoretically possible things, but obviously with the narratives around Bitcoin, most of those things are not going to happen.

Peter McCormack: Okay, let's start on that one.  So, what kind of change do you think that Bitcoin could do that would require a hard fork, because I've got a strong defence against the hard fork; but tell me what you're thinking?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, I mean ultimately the reason why I have talked about, I would be a fan of a Bitcoin hard fork, and I understand that I don't think that will ever happen; in a realistic world, I don't think that's going to happen, and I don't think there will ever be enough people who want that for that to happen, unless there was a bug or something that could only be fixed through a hard fork. 

Peter McCormack: Or, I mean I could see a scenario where there becomes a pressing need for a larger block size.  I know we've had the block size debate and we had the block wars, but I know people in Bitcoin said it's not never, it's at the right time, and we may get to a time within ten years that Bitcoin's being used so much that there is a pressing need for more block size.  I would look to other people, I'd look to Adam Back, and I'd say, "What do you think?" and I would be led by them.  But I don't think that's a never. 

But I think on features, it feels more unlikely, because if there's a disagreement on the features, it's not just a hard fork, it could become a true chain split and you can end up with two coins, and then you end up with Bitcoin, and maybe this one is Bitcoin Private.  And I actually think that Bitcoin Private would ultimately fail.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, and that's where, really when I talk about a hard fork, I would really mean a non-contentious hard fork, and that's really what -- in Monero, we have had non-contentious hard forks.  We have had several of them, because we want to implement these changes at the base layer, we want to enforce them to get the protocol to make sure that everyone gets the best privacy guarantees we could bring, and that we remove as many possible ways to shoot themselves in the foot.  Obviously within Bitcoin, a non-contentious hard fork, above anything really, would be hard to fathom.  So, that's definitely a less likely scenario. 

But the reason why I talk about that is because when you're looking at how to do privacy on-chain, and really privacy in any kind of tool, even outside of cryptocurrency, the defaults are very, very important.  Because in Bitcoin, like we talked about, you can use Bitcoin privately.  I do, many people do, it's definitely achievable, but it's not approachable.  And ultimately in Bitcoin, the default is sending funds very simply between one address to the other.  There is a direct deterministic link between the originating address and the destination address that's extremely visible.  Everyone can look it up in a block explorer and see it.

If you've never linked to your ID or something, that may be good enough, but in most scenarios that's a bad idea.  But that's the default behaviour of Bitcoin, and ultimately a lot of the problems could down to, within Bitcoin, that default behaviour plus amounts being completely visible, addresses being completely visible, outputs being known, spent or unspent.  Those things combine to build a chain that I think was very useful in the early days to be able to demo it to people, for Satoshi to show people what Bitcoin did.  If it had the privacy of Monero, nice little nod --

Peter McCormack: Nice little nod, man!

Seth for Privacy: If he had tried to demo something like Monero, I don't know if it would have ever taken off, because no one could have looked at a block explorer and seen, "These are the outputs, these are the amounts being spent".  You couldn't visualise that in the same way that you could with Bitcoin being transparent.  So, I think there's a lot of value in the bootstrap phase of that, but those things boil down to it being extremely difficult to achieve privacy on Bitcoin, because you have to basically fight all of the defaults within Bitcoin to gain on-chain privacy.  That means, anyone not using the right wallet, not understanding the tools, not properly approaching it, they're basically just going to lack privacy and they'll have that fragile pseudonymity, which hopefully will be enough for them, but for most people it won't.

Then the people who understand the tools, who take the time, who have the money and the technical expertise to approach the privacy tools, they can theoretically gain strong privacy on-chain.  So, you really have two classes of people transacting, in that some people can achieve privacy and some can't.  And when you're able to do something via the protocol itself and enforce defaults, like for instance if we want to talk about potential features you could hard fork into Bitcoin, confidential transactions, or confidential amounts I think is a better name for those, would allow you to hide the amount in every transaction in Bitcoin.

If you could do that, all of the privacy tools being built up for Bitcoin would be much simpler.  You could gain much better anonymity sets from the tools, because like something with Samurai Wallet, when you join a CoinJoin mix, basically you can only join it with a set output of a certain amount of Bitcoin; because, if anyone has a different amount of Bitcoin, it's very simple to trace them through based on the amount.  So, if you could hide the amount, you could join with 0.01 Bitcoin and someone could have 50 Bitcoin in the same mix, and it wouldn't matter.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  Do you think there's another layer to this as well?  I've not heard it discussed, it might have been discussed, but there is a huge regulatory lens on Bitcoin now, has been ever since it became popular.  There are certain people in this world who don't want Bitcoin to exist, they wish it would go away, whether they have this fundamental belief that Bitcoin is bad, or just because they just want control; whatever their reason is, there's this regulatory lens.

Monero has both a weaker and a stronger regulatory lens, in that it's not at the forefront of the industry like Bitcoin is, but there are higher concerns regarding it, because it is completely private, and there are assumptions and accusations regarding it.  Do you think there's potentially an actual risk to Bitcoin having full on-chain privacy in that at the moment, that would be not palatable for regulators?

Let's get the 21 million, let's get a Bitcoin standard, let's get everyone on Bitcoin; then when we can't come back, then we could maybe add some deeper privacy tools.

Seth for Privacy: I guess the two responses to the last piece specifically, I would definitely ask people to consider, "Can we reach that state?  Can we actually fight an adversarial battle; a digital battle, but a battle nonetheless, against the state to get Bitcoin to being at that stage without on-chain privacy?  If there are very, very few people able to transact privately using Bitcoin, and most people using Bitcoin are both IDd and completely traceable on-chain, can you reach that hyperbitcoinisation world?"

That's one of the main concerns for me, is can you actually achieve the societal change you want to achieve through Bitcoin if governments are very easily able to trace and connect names and addresses to on-chain activity?  I think the current state of Bitcoin is mostly there, unfortunately, both the coupling of most people coming in through KYC centralised exchanges, and then most people using very simple basic Bitcoin wallets, where they're not getting any on-chain privacy.

So, I think that's the pushback I would give on that idea of, "We could just add it in later", because you may not ever get to that stage if everyone who's using Bitcoin is able to be traced.  So, they can shut down the few people who are trying to use Bitcoin in a way that they don't want it to be used.

Peter McCormack: Well, I was thinking more because you get to the point where you can't shut Bitcoin down, because so many people have it.  If you had it at that point, it's a bit too late to, because everyone's using it; it's ubiquitous.

Seth for Privacy: I mean, I would argue now that Bitcoin's probably large enough that it couldn't be shut down, and much of the --

Peter McCormack: It can still be regulated away.

Seth for Privacy: I mean, they could try to prevent people from easily acquiring it, but the beautiful thing with Bitcoin is that it doesn't really matter.  Ultimately, we should not be making our decisions on what Bitcoin should become, or what the protocol should be, or what wallets you should use, or even what cryptocurrencies you should use, based on regulatory pressure.  Ultimately, they're not looking out for your good; they couldn't care less about you as a person.

Peter McCormack: And I guess the cypherpunks would be like, "Look, fuck you" and just take them on, like they have done historically.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, and that's a lot more the focus that Monero has taken, is much more of a, maybe not anti-regulation, many people are very anti-regulation, but much more of a, "We're not going to worry about that.  We're going to build the tool that will be the best tool possible for people, and then we're going to let the regulatory chips fall where they may".

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Danny Knowles: Is that situation a bit of a catch-22 though, in the sense that to get to that point, we need Bitcoin to have a verifiable supply, and you lose that if you then have on-chain privacy on Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: You could do on-chain privacy not as well, you could do it without hiding amounts.  But obviously, I was mentioning confidential transactions with confidential amounts, which would hide those amounts, which reduce the simple auditability of Bitcoin.  One of the I think less well-understood aspects of auditability is that it's not really this black-and-white either something is auditable or it's not.  With Bitcoin, obviously right now, because the UTXO set is transparent, the amounts are transparent, you could in theory just pull out your TI-84 and sum up the UTXO set and you could see how many Bitcoin there are; and so, you could verify that there's no inflation that way, no exploit, or anything like that.

With something like Monero, it is auditable still and it is being audited all the time by everyone running a node in two separate ways.  So the first is, just like Bitcoin, the actual coinbase output, the amount of Bitcoin or Monero that you get in a block when you mine it, that is completely transparent in Monero.  So, you can ensure, just like in Bitcoin, that Monero is minted in a way that it should be by miners through the coinbase transaction. 

But obviously the piece that differs is that within Monero, because the amounts are hidden, you're relying on this cryptography, this approach called either "arranged proof" or "bulletproof" or "confidential amounts" however specific you want to get; but you're relying on that cryptography and the implementation of that cryptography to prove when someone makes a transaction and when anyone verifies that transaction, that it balances properly.

Peter McCormack: And the risk is that if someone finds a way to break it, you might not know ever?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, and that's the main concern.  Obviously in Bitcoin, we've had inflation bugs; there has been one that required a hard fork.  But obviously, amounts are visible, it was caught.  In Monero, we've also had a bug that was able to be exploited, but no one exploited it, but it was also detectable.  So, there are even cases where in Monero, an inflation bug where someone could mint funds, could be detectable, depending on how it's done.  But you don't have again that simple detection; you can't just look at the amount on-chain in each transaction and validate that this transaction has created 21 million Monero, that's impossible. 

So, obviously that's bad if it was just a standard transaction and they broke either the cryptography there, which is very, very, very unlikely, that's probably never going to happen; or, there was an implementation bug and they found some exploit in that.  That's the more possible piece; I think also very, very, very unlikely, because the actual piece that does that is very well understood and is a relatively old, in cryptography terms, technique.  But that's definitely the biggest concern that I think many people have with Monero, is that there could be hidden inflation that we can't detect, and that could be a problem.

But that's also a lot of why I focus on that for bitcoiners specifically, "Bitcoin as savings, Monero for spending"; because, if you're just using it as a method of exchange, the risk of hidden inflation doesn't really matter for you.

Peter McCormack: Is there an easy way to -- I mean, in an ideal world, if you wanted to make a transaction, you would send some Bitcoin and you would receive some Monero, and the transaction -- well actually, no, that's probably terrible, because that exposes the fact that you're doing it.  Is the best way therefore then just to have a wallet and maybe hold a couple of hundred bucks' worth, and you know that it might go up and down, but in the short term, if you're using it regularly, then you've got an amount to play with?  It's like a sats wallet.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, the way I recommend it to most bitcoiners is to use it very similarly to how you would use a normal hot mobile wallet, where you keep something on you.  Yeah, you're not going to keep your whole Bitcoin stash on your phone, hopefully, but you keep some on you so that you can spend it easily. 

I would recommend people treat it similarly, and the Monero community has given our own voluntary donations to fund two different approaches to atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Monero, which essentially allow you to swap in and out of Monero or Bitcoin, vice versa, in a way that is completely trustless, so that the other person can't cheat you, you can't cheat them, and both of you either go through with the swap or don't, but you're not trusting any kind of central exchange, you're not trusting internet exchange or provider or something.

Peter McCormack: Explain an atomic swap; what is it; how does it work?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, it's a very fascinating idea.  It's something that's been talked about for a very long time in Bitcoin.  It's a very old concept, but it's something that's never really come to fruition.  The Monero community's been trying to change that, because obviously Monero would benefit greatly from bitcoiners being able to swap into Monero, and vice versa; but also because that would very much be a net positive for society and for bitcoiners and Monero users, to be able to quickly swap back and forth.

Basically what it does is it uses features on both chains, mostly Bitcoin's scripting, to be able to build out transactions in such a way, and communicate it between the two parties in such a way, that you can build transactions that will only go through if both people actually follow through on their end of the deal.  And, you're able to do this in a way that is still privacy-preserving, it's done exclusively over Tor, to make sure that the other person doesn't know your IP address, that kind of thing.

Peter McCormack: It almost makes Monero a sidechain to Bitcoin; not exactly.  I know some people will say, "It's not a sidechain".

Seth for Privacy: It would function in a similar way.  The only real difference at that point would be that it's obviously not pegged to BTC, the token.  It's not pegged to that price, and I think that would be the concern that a lot of people would have.  And again, if you're just wanting to use it for spending, you're just swapping a bit, you don't keep half of your life savings in there.

Danny Knowles: Is a big reason that's valuable to Monero that if regulations get harsher and harsher, that there's a good chance that they stop any exchange from actually having Monero, so it's a way of getting in without a regulated exchange?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, I mean the ridiculousness of the whole regulatory landscape out there is that there is no regulation or law that speaks against Monero's usage or Bitcoin's or anything like that.  But basically, regulatory bodies and bankers have used back channels to pressure exchanges to delist Monero or not list Monero.  So, because of that, there are many less exchanges than you would expect for a cryptocurrency that's as well-established as Monero.

Peter McCormack: How many; what are the known ones?

Seth for Privacy: If we're talking about the US specifically, you really only have Kraken.

Peter McCormack: Oh, you only have Kraken?

Seth for Privacy: There's no Coinbase, there's no Binance US, there's no other --

Peter McCormack: Bittrex had it at one point.

Seth for Privacy: They did have it for a while.  They delisted it with a bunch of other proclaimed privacy coins, which a few of them actually went to Bittrex and said, "We're not actually that private, you should relist us", which I thought was very ironic.  But they were one of the ones as well that, there's still no regulatory framework that says you can't list or support Monero, but they are pressured by their banks essentially who tell them, "We don't want you touching Monero, so either remove Monero, or we're going to cut off your banking ties".

Danny Knowles: I've got a question that could be so stupid that Ben might have to cut this out, but is there a risk then to Monero that if all the exchanges are pressured to not list it, there's no market, so then how can you have an atomic swap when there's no market for Monero?

Seth for Privacy: The only difficulty there would be just determining the swap price; that's the question.

Peter McCormack: That's literally the question that I was going to ask, so you fit in well here, man!

Seth for Privacy: I mean, at that point, if it was literally on no exchanges, which I doubt that that will happen in that extreme, but if there literally no exchanges, the price would be determined by probably some sort of decentralised exchange, either Bisq or the Monero version of Bisq that's coming soon, called Haveno, or the atomic swap market itself.

With atomic swaps, there doesn't have to be an actual exchange, you could just say, "I want to swap with someone", and they can just swap with you.  But usually, there would be some sort of order book done over Tor, or something like that, so it could just be a fixed price there that changes based on what prices people agree on.  But that would definitely be an interesting piece, because you couldn't just ping Kraken to get the exchange rate, and understand that.

So, it would definitely bring complexity, but it could still be done.  It would probably just have more swings maybe, but it also could lead to a price increase, because there's no way to easily get it.  So, the people that want to get it would have to get it off market, OTC, or something like that.  That would certainly be an interesting scenario to go through, but thankfully there are still some exchanges, and there are good decentralised exchanges at the moment.  Bisq is really one of the better ones, LocalMonero is another one.  So, there are some good avenues you could get it outside of the centralised exchanges, but that would be a complicating factor for sure for atomic swaps.

Peter McCormack: With the Bitcoin for hodling, Monero for spending, does that present a risk to Monero in that, if people aren't hodling Monero, then the price itself would trend down?  I mean, my expectation is, on a long enough time period, Monero always trends down against Bitcoin, potentially.  There are scenarios where the opposite is true, but does that present a risk?  You're still going to want some people to believe so much in Monero that they're hodling it.

Seth for Privacy: When I talk about Bitcoin is for savings, Monero's for spending, that's really just an easy way for bitcoiners to approach it.  There are lots of people who choose to only save and spend in Monero, and there are many people who obviously only choose Bitcoin.  So, there is this wide gamut, and I think there will always be people who are more Monero only.  I have been mostly saving value in Monero over the long term as well.

Peter McCormack: Can you tell us why?

Seth for Privacy: Mainly for the simplicity.  A lot of what I focus on with spending Monero is the same, but even saving in Monero, I don't have to worry about the privacy, I don't need to worry about, "What am I doing with these funds?  How did I withdraw them?  Where do I send them?  How do I actually move from my cold wallet to hot; and how do I do that without linking all of my life savings to this coffee that I'm about to buy?" that kind of thing.

Peter McCormack: Can you buy coffee with Monero?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, you can buy Gratuitas, you can buy coffee bags direct to your door.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay, I was thinking you can't go to Starbuck's?

Seth for Privacy: A coffee shop itself?  No, not Starbuck's.  Can you go to Starbuck's and pay with Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: I mean, you can get those cards that are linked to your Bitcoin wallet, so there's options like that that do exist.  How's that worked out for you economically, because I don't know how Monero's performed against Bitcoin?

Seth for Privacy: Not as well as if I had just done Bitcoin only, to be completely honest, I'm not going to lie about that one.

Peter McCormack: Okay, but that price differential's been worth it to you?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, I mean it's still been very advantageous compared to holding in fiat.  And it's been helpful, I think, to keep me -- I know this feels weird to say, but a lot of it's been helpful to keep me focused on the freedom aspect of it, and less on the money aspect.  But hodling Bitcoin alone, from when I got in, but I got in at the worst possible time to Monero.  So, there were many times before that where Monero was vastly superior to Bitcoin in price appreciation, and there have been times even now where Bitcoin's dropped, Monero's actually done better than Bitcoin.

So, just like any other thing like that, there are ups and downs, and there can be times where it's been better.  And I think there's great momentum behind this as we see, most people who want to spend cryptocurrency start to shift into using Monero, I think we'll see a great drive behind the price as well.

Peter McCormack: Can you say that again?  Most…?

Seth for Privacy: Most people who want to spend cryptocurrency are starting to use Monero.

Peter McCormack: That's a bold statement!

Seth for Privacy: It's not there yet, but the momentum is there.  I've been able to talk to a lot of people.

Peter McCormack: Well, "most" and "momentum" are two different things.  If you say, "The momentum's trending up", that's interesting.  But saying "most", I don't believe that's true.

Seth for Privacy: I maybe should segment it more to, most bitcoiners who want to spend are spending in Monero, or are approaching that.  And many people who people would think have nothing to do with Monero are already using Monero and spending it today.  So, most people just don't talk about it.

Peter McCormack: There's no way of verifying that.  That sounds like Monero marketing to me.

Seth for Privacy: No, I mean you can verify it.  We've seen a lot on the fringes, with things like darknet markets, where they're becoming Monero-only, or Monero-focused; we've seen Bitcoin markets go down and Monero-only markets come up; we've seen a large shift there, which is usually really the portent for things to come, to see what's going to happen in the other places.

Then, we've also seen merchants and things like Coincards that accept Monero, which there are some larger ones like Bitrefill, that don't accept Monero.  But the ones that do accept Monero are overall mainly shifting to Monero being the dominant currency used on those platforms.  As far as merchant adoption, obviously Bitcoin is superior right now, but we're seeing this shift between people who love Bitcoin and they want to spend it; but if Monero's accepted, they're going to spend Monero, because it's so much simpler, the headache is so much less.  And so, they're shifting into that, and we're seeing the circular economy grow.  We're obviously not there where most people are spending in Monero, but I'm just saying that there's a shift happening right now.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think a trend, I've seen it myself; I have seen it myself.  I've seen a lot more people talking about it, I've seen the conversation become more open.  I don't believe that most people wanting to spend Bitcoin are moving to Monero.  But I think saying "most" and the trend are two different things.  Both are positive, I just think one's real and one isn't.  In terms of Monero, how does Monero achieve out-of-the-box private transactions where Bitcoin can't; what is the difference; what's been done here?

Seth for Privacy: The main thing that's been done is Monero's taken this holistic approach to really remove the necessity and the onus from the user doing all of the privacy to the protocol making sure that if you're using Monero, you're getting all this privacy.  It does this through a holistic approach, of which there are three main building blocks there.  One of those building blocks is the confidential amounts, confidential transactions that we talked about before, where all amounts within Monero on-chain are hidden; you can't see any transaction amounts, thus you can't see anyone's wallet amounts, you can't see who you're sending your money to, they can't see anything about yours.

Peter McCormack: There's a funny thing on the block explorer.  If you look it up, doesn't it say something, "Stop being sneaky"?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, it's like, "Oops, you were trying to see the rich list", to peak into an address!

Peter McCormack: Do you know why I know that?

Seth for Privacy: You looked up to see your own transaction?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  The first time I bought Monero, I was using, surprisingly for me as a technical moron, I was using the command-line interface.  So, I actually had the CLI to use it, and God knows how I preserved that and never lost everything!  There did come a point where I wanted to get it out, and FluffyPony had to --

Seth for Privacy: Coach you through it?

Peter McCormack: Well no, he swept it for me, and I just trusted him and he sorted it out for me.  But I did go to check my balance and I was like, "Oh, I'm being sneaky, am I?"

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, nobody's peaking in there!

Peter McCormack: No one's having a look.

Seth for Privacy: You can if you have the keys.  That hiding of amounts if a very critical piece, and that undercurrents the rest of the approach.  The other two pieces there are something called ring signatures, which basically ensure that whenever you send a transaction in Monero, you can't actually see which output is being spent.  So, when I send you a transaction, you can't tell which input is from me, because I'll essentially build a ring of, right now, my input and ten others.  Soon, we have an upgrade coming up in July, my input and 15 others.  Essentially, any of those could be the true spend; any of those could be the actual input of the transaction.

So, even if you wanted to dig in and try to find what else I've done, you can't know for sure which one of the inputs is actually mine that I'm giving you.  And obviously, no one outside, no one looking on a block explorer, or anything like that, can see the true spend in any transaction.

Peter McCormack: What about the bloat on the chain?  One of the things I was told is that to achieve -- I think it's because of the bulletproofs; that bulletproofs require a lot more data, so you get more chain bloat to achieve this.

Seth for Privacy: So, there's a couple of pieces.  There's certainly trade-offs to everything.  With those bulletproofs, you do gain increased transaction size, so the actual transactions on-chain are larger than a standard Bitcoin transaction.  But what a lot of people don't understand is if you're using Bitcoin privately, it actually takes up more block space than using Monero, because you have to make multiple transactions to be able to spend privately within Bitcoin; whereas within Monero, you only have to make the one.  So, I actually have a blog post that runs through all this; it was my first blog post that I published.

Peter McCormack: Has anyone fought you over that?

Seth for Privacy: No, because it's just true; that's just the way that it works on-chain.

Peter McCormack: Oh, interesting.

Seth for Privacy: Because you essentially have to spend three transactions on Bitcoin to achieve reasonable privacy and actually spend the funds, whereas with Monero you just spend the funds.  And so, while Monero transactions are 1.3 KB, 1.4 KB per transaction, if you're making the Bitcoin transaction, I think it was, I can't remember off the topic of my head, but it was like 1.6 KB, 1.7 KB to actually make that private spin, because you have to make three separate transactions, all of which add up to be larger on-chain, which is something a lot of people don't realise.

But the other trade-off that does come with the ring signatures specifically is that, because you don't know which inputs are spent, you can't actually prune in the same way that a Bitcoin node can, because you can't just keep the set of unspent transaction outputs --

Peter McCormack: Because you don't know what they are.

Seth for Privacy: -- because you only know your spent transaction outputs, you don't know anyone else's.  And so because of that, it is a vital piece for privacy, but you can't prune it in the same way.  You can still prune Monero's blockchain and get rid of a lot of the other data, so right now I think a pruned node in Monero is about a third of the size of a full node, and both are still smaller than Bitcoin's blockchain right now, but you can't prune the same way.  So, there are certainly trade-offs with these things that you pay for.

The other main privacy piece within Monero is something called "stealth addresses" or "one-time addresses", and these are very similar if people who know the Bitcoin privacy space know what a PayNym is or BIP47, something that Samurai Wallet has championed and driven for a while.  Basically, it means that the address that you give to somebody in Monero to send you funds is never published on-chain.  So, even if you have that and you go to a block explorer and look at this address, just like you mentioned in your example of trying to look at your own balance, you can't actually see anything about that address on-chain, because there's only a unique one-time address that's used with each transaction that's generated from that public address that was shared with you. 

That breaks a lot of the very common tracing in Bitcoin, which we even saw a very fascinating paper come out, I think today, about improving the wallet clustering heuristic, which is this idea of maybe you don't reuse addresses within Bitcoin, but you do different things, like your change outlets look a certain way, or you combine funds, and those things can tie addresses back together within Bitcoin.  And so, people who are doing blockchain analysis can tie things back to one single entity, even if you're never reused an address.

Peter McCormack: And this is the kind of thing that very few people will understand, will do the research and will be able to -- well, maybe they just don't even care, because it's just too much work.  And they won't even know if they've made the mistake, and that's one of the things I find tricky and I'm sure this show's going to piss a bunch of people off, but it's true and I think you have to be honest about these things.

You say the Monero blockchain is smaller than the Bitcoin blockchain.  Is that because it's less popular?

Seth for Privacy: I mean, to be completely honest, yes; the main reason that it's smaller is because it's less used right now.  It's about 10% to 15% of the transactions per day of Bitcoin.  If we had the same transactional volume as Bitcoin, it would definitely be larger.  But like I mentioned with the size of using Bitcoin privately, if you used Bitcoin privately at the same transaction volume of Bitcoin today, it would be much, much larger; the chain would be about 1 TB in size.

Peter McCormack: But not everyone is and not everyone will and not every transaction needs to be private.  Okay, yes, in an ideal world, but I'm just saying, even if I knew how to do it, I'm not sure I would every single time.  There's some that are almost unnecessary, in that I've got a commercial trade ecommerce relationship with somebody; it would be very easy to even track back to me with that, because they could go and put a gun to their head and say, "Who are your customers?"  So, it's not required for me in every scenario. 

Talk to me a little bit about just the general basics of Monero.  What is the block size; how long does a transaction take; how decentralised is it; just some comparables for Bitcoin, so I've got a benchmark?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, I'll really quickly go through both Bitcoin's and Monero's approach to things.  So obviously with Bitcoin, we have a 1 MB block limit, but also we have SegWit, so that introduces some interesting things with the way that transactions are weighted.  Within Monero, we have what are called "dynamic block sizes", and this is essentially approaching block sizes with the idea of, we don't ever want to have to make a decision on what size blocks should be.  We want the usage on-chain to decide that, and we want a penalty to be paid appropriately if people want to increase the block size.

What that means is basically that Monero, we're not just going to scale to infinity and have BSV-level block sizes, that's not the goal; but the goal really is to enable, in these times of quick inflows of lots of people want to transact, we see when Bitcoin crashes or goes through the roof or whatever, we see a lot of people rush on-chain to make transactions and Bitcoin's block size is fixed.  So, if there's no one transacting, it's this block size; if way too many people to fit into that block are transacting, it's this block size, and that doesn't change.

Within Monero, essentially what happens is miners can choose to increase the block size slowly, and pay a penalty from the actual block subsidy, the amount of Monero that they're given from the network, not the fees themselves, and they can pay a penalty in that, and then they can basically make up for it and gain more by including more transactions; then, the fees make up for that penalty.  So essentially, miners can pay to increase the block size to benefit themselves, but then the block size comes back down and you have to keep going through that penalty process anytime there's a rush on-chain.  That just helps for those short-term scaling situations. 

That's not to say that Monero can serve 1 billion people transacting every day or anything like that; it doesn't just magically solve the problems that come with distributed databases like blockchains are.  But I think it's an interesting approach to that, where we won't have to have that potential debate or hard fork to increase block size or something; we won't have Blocksize Wars, we won't have anything like that.

Peter McCormack: How long does a transaction take?

Seth for Privacy: So, in Monero, the block time is two minutes.  So, if you're just waiting for one conf, the actual security guaranteed by one conf in Bitcoin and Monero is not the same, so you can't really compare them.  Monero is very secure and is very decentralised mining, which I'm going to jump into next, but it's a two-minute block time.  So, if you're just waiting for a confirmation to make sure they're not going to do a simple double-spend in the mempool, or something like that, it's very quick; a lot quicker block times with smaller blocks right now.

The minimum block size starts out at 300 KB versus the 1 MB of Bitcoin.  So, they start out small but like I said, they can grow as necessary within certain bounds; there's a lot that goes into that.

Peter McCormack: And what about fees?  Is it similar to Bitcoin in that -- oh no, because if you've got dynamic blocks, are the fees kind of fixed?

Seth for Privacy: So, there's actually a really interesting thing that's enabled by both dynamic block size and another difference between Bitcoin and Monero, in that Monero has this thing called a "tail emission", and this is actually going into effect tomorrow, which is interesting; very well-timed for this talk.  But this tail emission means that contrary to Bitcoin, which eventually all Bitcoin will be mined and there will be no Bitcoin emitted by the network, there will just be transaction fees, which within Bitcoin, we're just hoping that the fee market materialises and we're okay.  But that's very much not proven and impossible to predict.  I can't tell you it's going to work or it's not going to work.

Within Monero, they've implemented something called the tail emission, which means that at a certain point, when all of the defined supply, is kind of what we call it, is emitted and it's 18.4 million Monero, this tail emission kicks in, which means that for every block, there will be 0.6 XMR emitted as the block subsidy, and that will go on forever.  I know that is anathema to bitcoiners and this idea of this 21 million hard cap, but what that means is not only that we know for a fact that there will be a lower bound of network security, so we know that miners can mine for that 0.6 XMR, even if no fee market materialises; but it also enables us to do the dynamic block size, because you have to have a subsidy to do the dynamic block size, because you need to be able to penalise something to raise blocks, or they would just be raised infinitely.

Then, it also enables fees to also have a very interesting inverse relationship to usage.  So, as usage in Monero goes up and as block sizes increase, fees per transaction actually go down.  So, the more people use Monero, the lower the fees get, because you're essentially compensating each other and coming together to produce enough value for the miners to mine, and they have that guaranteed 0.6 XMR in the tail emission.  So, fees actually go down as block sizes increase.

Peter McCormack: But that necessity for a fixed limit for Bitcoin has different meaning than Monero.  The goal of a number of Bitcoin is for Bitcoin to be the standard for the world, not have inflation, so you don't have money distortion; and that's an important thing on the side of bitcoiners.  And if Monero acts like a payments network that's used by people who are Monero fans, or Bitcoin fans, it has slightly different trade-offs.  I think that's more acceptable.

Seth for Privacy: I think the thing that people don't really look at is that the problem is not any inflation, the problem with the fiat regime is that inflation can change at any time and is completely under the control of a centralised entity.

Peter McCormack: Predictable versus unpredictable.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, so Monero is perfectly predictable.  So, at any point in the future, I can understand how much of the supply I own, how many Monero there will be, all of that.  So, you still have that same predictability that you have with Bitcoin, and the inflation rate is actually lower than Bitcoin is today, and will remain lower I think until 2040.

Danny Knowles: Is it fair to say it's perfectly predictable though, when it's had quite a number of hard forks?

Seth for Privacy: Yes.

Peter McCormack: That's a fair criticism.

Seth for Privacy: No, that's a very good question, and a lot of people bring that up.  I mean, I would say that just like Bitcoin, the money supply is just as fixed in social consensus as Bitcoin's is.  And really, in Bitcoin, it comes down to social consensus.  Obviously, Bitcoin could hard fork to have 42 million Bitcoin, or whatever they wanted, but that would never, ever, ever happen.  Similarly in Monero, that would never, ever, ever be changed.

Just because you can change things, and ultimately what's changing in Monero is not the money supply, we're changing the actual transactional protocol to improve it.  The money supply is untouchable; that will never be touched.  It's the same idea of social consensus in Monero, as in Bitcoin there, and that's something that just would be non-negotiable.  Obviously, that would be a very contentious hard fork, and the hard fork that tried to change the supply would just die.

Peter McCormack: It feels like it's easier to achieve social consensus with Monero with a smaller community than with Bitcoin.

Seth for Privacy: For sure.

Peter McCormack: But Bitcoin also has built this attitude of, we move slow, we're a glacier, it's hard to change.  You want to change it?  Fuck you, prove it.  Whereas, I can imagine Monero's a tighter mission-driven community and social consensus is a lot easier to achieve.  Therefore, changes into monetary policy might be a little bit easier.

Seth for Privacy: No, I definitely don't think so.  I think just like in Bitcoin, that's something that is just simply untouchable, because if you touch that, everything else falls apart, because those are the incentives you've set up, that's what everyone has been understanding from the Generis block, and that's something that really no cryptocurrency project should be able to touch that and survive.  Obviously some do, which is crazy.

Peter McCormack: One does, specifically, one massive one!  Another thing I wanted to ask you about specifically with Monero, is there any need or talk about requiring something similar to the Lightning Network?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, so there's actually been some really interesting research around ways to do that.  It's more complex in Monero, because unlike most cryptocurrencies and really many things out there today, especially when Monero was created, but even today still, Monero was not just a Bitcoin fork.  We didn't just take the code base and make something unique.

Peter McCormack: It's a fork of something else.

Seth for Privacy: Yes, but it's built out of a completely unique protocol that was not related to Bitcoin at all, called CryptoNote.  And because of that, we have very different things built into Monero, and one of the things that is different is that we don't have a scripting ability like Bitcoin does.  So, we can't do things like Hashed Timelock Contracts, which Lightning relies on, or Point Time Locked Contracts, which Taproot enables and hopefully we'll be using in Lightning in the future.

So, building out a channel-based network like Lightning is more difficult.  There have been some interesting research forays into how it would be possible using different security mechanisms, instead of Hashed Timelock Contracts, but obviously those are very theoretical.  But I definitely do think that there will be both the need and the ability to build out a Layer 2, I would think similar to Lightning Network. 

I'll actually be talking about this at MoneroKon in a few weeks, but I think that within Monero specifically, because we don't need to rely on a second layer for privacy, and we don't need to rely as much on a second layer for scaling, because those dynamite block sizes enable those rush times to be able to handle, again not infinite scaling, but they allow some flexibility there, I think we could do something that would be maybe a simpler version of the Lightning Network that's more peer-to-peer focused and less complex, and that would be more easily enabled by the different things that Monero has.

Peter McCormack: What's the decimal of Monero called; mont, or something?

Seth for Privacy: I don't know that it has a set name.  Most people call it piconero, which is just the technical way to say --

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've never heard that.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, that's the technical one.  I think tacoshi is another one that some people mentioned, from Tacotime, who was an early person in the Monero community.  But mostly, piconero or just Monero.

Peter McCormack: What's MoneroKon; when is that and where is it?

Seth for Privacy: So, MoneroKon is happening in ten days now.  It's going to be in Lisbon, Portugal.  We're going to be having that, I want to say the 18th and the 19th, and that will be really good.  We actually had the first one in 2019 and haven't been able to have one since, so this will be the first MoneroKon in a while.

Peter McCormack: Are there any privacy weaknesses in Monero, like silly things that a moron like me could do that causes issues, like if I was to, I don't know, buy some on an exchange and then I'm linked to it and then send it to Danny, and then he goes and sells the same amount; any things you have to be honest about?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah.  For the most part no.  I mean, the big reason why Monero does what it does is because we're trying to make sure that users who have no idea what they're doing still gain strong privacy.  I would say the biggest potential flaw within Monero is a specific type of targeted attack, that's called an Eve-Alice-Eve attack, or EAE.  Essentially what that means is, if you were to buy on like a KYC exchange, you withdraw it to your own wallet and then you send right back to the same exchange or a different one, and you're trying to remain anonymous between those two, it would be visible to those exchanges if they colluded, if they talked to each other, that that was actually you doing those transactions.

That doesn't matter for most people, unless your threat model is one where exchanges are going to be talking to each other to try to track you down; that's not really a concern.  But it is definitely one to be aware of.  So, if you're doing something, like constantly sending back and forth between exchanges, you just want to do something like send to yourself a few times before you send it to the other one.  But for the most part, the beauty of Monero is, you don't need to be concerned, as long as your threat model is not very high, very targeted and very much surveilled actively.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, I'm going to go back a second.  Could you use atomic swaps like a mixer/CoinJoin?

Seth for Privacy: So, you can, but the problem is, and let's just set Monero aside for a moment, because it actually doesn't matter if it's Monero or anything else; the problem is, using another cryptocurrency as a mixer for Bitcoin, the problem is ultimately Bitcoin, on both sides.  So, there are lots and lots of ways to trace you through a swap like that, and many of the people who have performed large hacks, or large things in the Ethereum ecosystem, or like the Bitfinex hackers, they have tried to use Monero, or other privacy-preserving things, as this mixer in the middle of their transactions, but they've used transparent assets like Bitcoin on both sides.

If you've used atomic swaps, atomic swaps would be probably the best case, even though it's still not ideal, but for most people today, you're going to use something like FixedFloat, an instant exchanger, or something like that.  And the problem is, say you deposit 0.5 Bitcoin, you swap it for Monero, and then you withdraw 0.5 Bitcoin on the other side, it's very, very easy to guess that you were the one who did both of those things, even if you use a completely new address. 

Peter McCormack: But couldn't you swap out of say 1 Bitcoin worth into Monero, wait a few weeks, swap 0.5 back into an address, then swap 0.25; could you do it like that?

Seth for Privacy: If you did it perfectly, yes.  I mean, the problem just remains you then need to have proper privacy on Bitcoin, and thankfully there are tools like Samurai Wallet, where you can gain good privacy on Bitcoin natively, and those tools are almost always going to be superior, because there's not some central entity that sees that swap that you're doing. 

But when you're doing that swap back and forth, that's relatively easy to trace you through amount heuristics, if you don't do something like break up the amounts in a random way, doing things like if you send it back to your wallet to a new address, but then you reuse it later on to combine with other funds to send the transaction; it's very easy to link that to the other funds that you have, even if you tried to distance them by doing this mixing process through some kind of an instant exchanger or an atomic swap.

So, it very much can be done and it could be useful, but it is very difficult to do properly, because of the issues with Bitcoin.  And it doesn't matter if it's Monero, Zcash, Tornado Cash, whatever you're doing in the middle, because you're linking massive amounts of data on the in and out side; it's always going to be difficult.

Peter McCormack: So, you've obviously got into a lot of debates on Twitter with bitcoiners, which you're very brave for, because I've seen the replies, and Giacomo Zucco, you and him have had some quite lengthy discussions.  Is there anything you've been wrong on where people have corrected you and you thought, "Actually, yeah, that's a fair argument"?

Seth for Privacy: That's a good question; that's a hard one, just cold like that.  I mean, I think the main thing is I'm definitely still constantly learning, especially about Bitcoin privacy, because I focus on Monero, but I want to see Bitcoin privacy improve, so I try to keep up with the tools.  But I think a lot of the things that I have recently been wrong on, or not perfect on, have been Lightning Network-related privacy concerns, because Lightning Network is very complex, and the privacy associated with Lightning is very nuanced and very complex. 

So, I've been trying to take a deep dive lately into how privacy works and what people should know about using Lightning if they want to preserve their privacy, and that's been tricky, and I've definitely been wrong a few times on things there that people have been helpful to point out flaws.  But overall, people have been very kind and helped me to learn and wrestle with what Lightning is and what it means for privacy.

Peter McCormack: One of the tricky things with this, I alluded to it earlier, but stepping outside the Bitcoin circle and considering other things, mentioning other things, the other day I was talking about stablecoins saying, we can hate on shitcoin protocols, which I do; we can hate on them, but there are people around the world who benefit from having access to stablecoins, which are far more important than Bitcoin.  But even that causes a reaction from some people, they're like, "No, just teach them about Bitcoin". 

It's like, if you're not a halfwit, you understand that Bitcoin isn't right for everyone in every scenario.  So, I've kind of come back a little bit on these protocols.  I still think they're mostly junk, but at the same time I'm like, "Well, if TRON is useful for someone in Africa to get dollars and that helps them day-to-day with their life, what the fuck am I able to do with that?  I can't hold that against somebody".

I came out recently and said I don't think Monero's a scam, I've been saying that since the very start, I don't think it is, and I got tweetstamped for that, etc.  Do you think the zealotry of Bitcoin is holding, well I know you're going to say yes, but holding Monero back?  Is there anything we can do to try and make people realise it's not a threat?  For example, defending the properties of Bitcoin as a hodling asset, promoting -- I'm basically repeating your line here, aren't I?

Seth for Privacy: Yeah.  I mean, I think that's kind of the olive branch I have for bitcoiners, is that "Bitcoin is savings, Monero for spending" thing, because I think that's probably the most reasonable and logical end result for people who actually want to be able to spend cryptocurrency.

Peter McCormack: Actually, let me ask you, are there bitcoiners who are privately admitting to you they don't mind Monero, but not publicly admitting it?

Seth for Privacy: Yes, many!

Peter McCormack: Yeah!

Seth for Privacy: So, that's part of why I talk about, I see this building massive momentum among a lot of bitcoiners, not Monero people, but bitcoiners who understand what Monero brings as a tool for freedom.  We're not talking monetary principles, most of them are not saving money in it; that's their choice.  There are many people who choose to do that, but most bitcoiners are not, but there are many people, who many people listening to this will know, are fans of Monero, have been fans for a while and use actively, but they just don't talk about it publicly. 

I think that's a shame, because it can be a very powerful and enabling tool for people to achieve financial freedom in ways that are different than Bitcoin.  Many people can't achieve the privacy necessary on Bitcoin for their specific use cases, especially in authoritarian governments in human rights areas that are much more difficult, especially when doing donations to activists, organisations. 

I mean even the Freedom Convoy was a perfect example of when, politics aside, we'll just assume maybe you wanted them to succeed, you wanted them to be able to protest.  If you wanted to send them funds and them to be able to use it, Monero is a vastly superior tool, because those truckers have no idea what they're doing with Bitcoin.  To give them all of the tools they need to use Bitcoin privately, that's an immense educational task for people who are sitting in their trucks protesting.

Peter McCormack: And they still might fuck up.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, and they still could screw up and just get completely owned.  But with Monero, you would have all of the main bases covered.  There would still be things you would want to give them in those scenarios, extra tips and tricks, just because they are very much under targeted surveillance; but the vast majority of things would be covered without them having any idea what they were doing.

So, those kinds of situations, I wish more bitcoiners would, especially bitcoiners who already understand and use Monero, would come forward and say -- even if, you don't need to sell Monero as the tool people need to buy and invest in; I don't really care about that.  But at least you would say, "This is a useful tool in scenarios where you know you need privacy.  And ultimately, I think many people would shift from that into just, "If I want to spend cryptocurrency", but the start for many people is, "I know I want to achieve privacy and I want to be able to spend", Monero just simplifies all of that.

Peter McCormack: Well, that self-censorship is a form of censorship.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, absolutely.  And it's brought on by what you mentioned, this kind of maximalism, or I think I called it religious fervour the other day, when people were going at you on Twitter.

Peter McCormack: Oh, I don't give a fuck, but I've never given a fuck.  I say all kinds of crazy shit, and some of it's right and some of it's wrong, and I'm allowed to now walk that line; because, if you think I'm an idiot, they go, "Oh, Pete's talking shit".  But there's a lot of people I think reputationally are concerned perhaps about the social pressure that comes from admitting something like Monero's okay, then suddenly get, "Oh, labelled, you're a shitcoiner".  I mean, I did, but like I say, I don't give a fuck.

But I think that is kind of dangerous in some ways, because there is a tool out there, out of the box, that offers privacy options for some people who may need it, and they're not getting the best advice.  What were Giacomo's arguments back at you; what angle was he coming from?

Seth for Privacy: He was mostly talking about people who are promoting Monero and saying that it fixes all privacy problems, that you have nothing to worry about, and that there are no trade-offs.  So, I think he was mostly talking about other people, who I guess he's running into, who are Monero maximalists, who were just telling him that it fixes everything, which is also ridiculous; just like any other tool or privacy tool, it is not perfect and it has trade-offs.

Peter McCormack: What do you think the Monero maximalists are getting wrong, because they fucked with me once?  Do you know; I did some interview and they were asking me technical stuff about Bitcoin's fungibility, and I don't know this shit.  And then they were attacking me and I was like, "What the fuck are you doing?  I was a Monero fan, now you want me to just tell you to fuck off?"  I thought that was dumb.

Seth for Privacy: I think the main thing they're getting wrong, I guess there's two key things.  I think one is that Bitcoin is completely useless or completely harmful.  I think there are ways to use Bitcoin that are helpful, there are lots of benefits that Bitcoin brings.  And even if you couldn't care less about the actual use of Bitcoin, Bitcoin has been an immensely helpful regulatory and social shield for Monero, because we've been able to kind of grow up in its shadow and do a lot of things that Bitcoin probably would have been very vigorously fought against, but we were able to just do it in Bitcoin's shadow.

But I think the other main thing that they get wrong is that a lot of Monero people, because of the privacy that Monero brings, they assume that this idea of a Know Your Customer, a KYC exchange, and the list that these exchanges are building about who owns what and what you do on-chain, they think that that's not harmful as a concept at all if we're using Monero, because you gain strong on-chain privacy.

I liken Monero to withdrawing cash from an ATM, in that you do gain that strong privacy and that the bank knows you withdrew cash, just like the exchange knows you withdrew Monero, but they don't know what you did with it after that.  And while that is immensely powerful, it doesn't remove any of the other risks of using these KYC exchanges, and the ways that those can be leveraged against you either by the government, or just by a hacker who hacks into that exchange, gets that list of who owns Monero, where they live, and then just goes knocking on their door with a $5 wrench and wants to see their Monero.

So, there are a lot of risks there that I think are overlooked by the Monero community, not all of them, but some parts of the Monero community, because they see the privacy as fixing that problem, but it only fixes one piece of that.  That is an important piece in that in Monero, you won't be traced on-chain once you withdraw; but all of the other issues with KYC exchanges still exist, just for Monero like Bitcoin like any other cryptocurrency, because obviously the exchange knows you bought it, when you bought it, when you withdrew it, who you are, etc.

Peter McCormack: Fair.  Well, look, I'm going to continue to look at Monero, I'm going to dip back in.  Obviously, I've got Cake Wallet now, so I think I'm just going to put a couple of hundred dollars of Bitcoin in there.  I'm going to try an atomic swap, see what it looks like.  I'm not going to be anti-Monero, because I have no reason to be.  I think it's a useful tool for certain people and I think it's a useful tool for bitcoiners, and I think you can step out of this shitcoin fear and just take a look at Monero and see how it can serve a purpose, even if it's short term, medium term, whatever.  I stand by that.  If someone gets angry, just fuck off, I don't care.

Is there anything I haven't asked you that you wish I had?

Seth for Privacy: I don't think so, I think we covered the majority of what Monero is, what it can be.  I mean, something that I've said on other podcasts and just want to repeat here is, ultimately I am not a Monero maximalist.  I want the right tool for the job, and I see Monero as that right now.  But the reason why I continue to do work on privacy in Bitcoin is mostly education, I like dev work, but education and trying to build some good conversations around that.

Ultimately, the best thing for societal change and not just for personal freedom would be for Bitcoin to have proper privacy built in in a very simple and approachable way, so that anyone who uses Bitcoin, whether they use it as a miner, whether they use it to store life savings, or they use it to transact and they need privacy, I want all of those people to gain strong on-chain privacy; and because of that, for Bitcoin to be a much more powerful tool for societal change.

So, that's just something I try to harp on, because people will see me as just a Monero maximalist or something.  I don't think they'd think that if they actually knew the things that I say.  But I think it's important that people understand that Bitcoin, because of its network effects and because of its position, could do the most good overall.  But obviously, I view Monero as a more useful tool today, specifically for spending.  I think for anyone, that's true. 

Also for savings, I think it can be helpful, but I think as a tool for freedom and as a tool for making those transactions they don't want you to make, and as a tool for enabling freedom through financial privacy, which is a big part of the cypherpunk manifesto and a lot of the early OGs, even before Bitcoin came around, Monero is really immensely powerful for that, and even shares a lot of similarities to Bitcoin that bitcoiners, I think most of them don't understand. 

There's a lot of compatibility there and a lot of crossover and I hope that both Bitcoin and Monero can benefit from atomic swaps and other things that can enable both groups to use the other tool and to gain the most from the combination of the two.

Peter McCormack: Danny, are we shitcoiners now?

Danny Knowles: You are, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Go fuck yourself!  I swear a lot on this show.  Sorry, I get emails when I swear too much.  Don't send me an email, I don't care.  All right, Seth, if people want to follow you, check out your work, where do they go?

Seth for Privacy: The main places are going to be Twitter, it's really the only social media I have.  I'm just @sethforprivacy there.

Peter McCormack: You're not on TikTok?

Seth for Privacy: No, I am not on TikTok!  We had a debate about that with Odell earlier.  No TikTok.  I also have a personal blog, which is just sethforprivacy.com.  I have a lot of writings, like the one about Monero and Bitcoin transactional size that I talked about earlier.  I also have a really interesting blog I just put out, that I'm trying to keep up-to-date, with all of the privacy improvements that have been proposed for Bitcoin.  I think it's a really helpful list to get an idea of what has been proposed, what's failed, what's succeeded, what's been accepted for improving Bitcoin's privacy.  So, I have that as well as I think my latest blog post on there.

Then, I also have a podcast, called Opt Out, which is mostly personal privacy focus, really self-sovereignty.  So, we talk a lot of Bitcoin on there, we talk a little bit of Monero, but I think we've talked more Bitcoin than Monero on there; but more looking at the overall need for personal privacy and really the tools that you can leverage to gain that for yourself.

Peter McCormack: Okay, well look, we'll stick that all in the show notes.  I do really appreciate you coming in.  For anyone who's getting upset and listening, I'm not going to be making a whole bunch of Moneros now, I'm not launching What Monero Did, but this is very useful.  I think it's useful to learn about this, and I'm not opposed to checking it out, so I think I'm going to do a Monero transaction and see how it goes.  But look, appreciate you coming in, Seth, great to meet you, and stay in touch, duddy; duddy?  I was trying to say buddy and dude at the same time, and I said duddy!

Danny Knowles: I think you said "daddy"!

Seth for Privacy: That's what I heard, yeah!

Peter McCormack: Give me your Monero, daddy!

Seth for Privacy: That's escalated quickly!

Peter McCormack: All right, look, thanks for coming in, bro.  Appreciate this and good luck with everything you're doing.

Seth for Privacy: Yeah, thank you, Peter, thank you for having me on.

Peter McCormack: Cheers.