00:00 Hello, I'm Seth Simmons and welcome to season one, episode six of Opt Out. Opt Out is a show where I sit down with passionate people to learn why privacy matters to them, the tools and techniques they found and leveraged, and where we encourage and inspire others towards personal privacy and data sovereignty. Ever wondered how you can easily self-host tools? Or thought about hosting tools for friends or family to use? This episode, we're sitting down with Diverter to chat about his favorite hosting solution, You Know Host, the importance of hosting tools for friends, family, and online communities as Uncle Jim, and where Bitcoin fits into his toolkit.

Welcome to Opt Out, Diverter. Excited to sit down and chat today. Yeah, glad to be here, man. Glad to finally make an appearance to get to speak with you. Yeah, we've chatted a lot on Twitter. I followed you for a while there. We've been involved in quite a few chat groups. I've used a couple of your rooms on Matrix to chat with people. We've interacted a lot, but never actually audio chat. So I'm excited to get to hear a little bit more of your thoughts around privacy, Bitcoin, self-hosting, all the things.

Yeah, me too, man. For my listeners who haven't heard of you, aren't familiar with you yet, do you mind just giving a little bit of an intro into who you are? Sure. I've got probably the simplest bio in the whole space. I'm just some dude that likes Bitcoin and censorship resistance. There's nothing particularly special about me other than the fact that I recognize the problems that are present. And I see a lot of the direction that the world and society in general seems to be heading.

And my entire goal is to try to find whatever tools we have available at our disposal right now that work and turn as many people on to them as I can. I've kind of referenced it before as basically I'm just kind of fumbling through a dark room, feeling around for a light switch. And whenever I find one, I kind of try to show everybody else where that same switch is at. So, you know, there's nothing really particularly special, in my opinion, that I necessarily do.

I just really try to be more of a conduit for people to try to, you know, get into some of these things and learn a little bit on their own. Yeah, I love that. I love that focus. And we talked about that a little bit in the past on the podcast. But I think people often revere or kind of put people up on a pedestal who make educational content around really any topic. And it's helpful for people to see that, like, we're just regular people. We just we're passionate about something.

And when we find those solutions, when we find those tools that we love, we just take the time to write it down, to share it and to kind of build a bridge for other people into that. Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, it's very self-serving as well, because, you know, a lot of these tools, they only really function if a lot of other people are using them. You know, if you're using it in encrypted chats or whatever, but literally no one you speak to is, well, it doesn't really matter, then does it?

So, you know, there's a self-serving incentive behind it, too. Yeah, absolutely. And what was it that woke you up to the need for personal privacy? Well, you know, just the way that I grew up, you know, I'm sure people can pretty well pick up on it. A very, very slight accent. And I'll hear nothing more of it. But, you know, where I grew up was in a very private sort of environment. I don't I'm not packed around with neighbors all around me. I basically am able to do whatever I wanted to do within my own little bubble there and coming out of that and go in and going into I entered the United States military at a pretty young age, coming into that area and realizing that other people in the world didn't enjoy this same level of privacy growing up.

Like they were forced into these just concrete jungles of cameras and and eyes and ears everywhere. And it really kind of took me out of this zone where, you know, I suddenly realized that I actually had a very sort of privileged upbringing, but not in the way that one might think of being privileged. My privilege was less about finances and more about privacy. And especially, you know, being in the military and seeing kind of the way things are done and and the way that civilians, for lack of a better word, are approached, even though I wasn't, you know, any sort of like high level intelligence officer or doing any sort of NSA contracting or anything of the sort.

Just the general feeling in the in the seeing how things were approached really kind of woke me up to it. And then, of course, along with everyone else, the Snowden revelations, all the stuff that we kind of always thought was happening, but for it to actually be revealed and be seen the proof right in front of us that, you know, again, that's as I'm sure a lot of other people did. And that really kind of opened my eyes to, OK, this is something that we're really going to have to pay attention to and actually focus on kind of getting out of this, these surveillance crosshairs.

Yeah, it's really that's a good perspective on how important privacy is and how much of a privilege it can be for those that that do get to grow up, grow up in either more rural areas or just with a more close knit community. That's that's not as kind of in the middle of the metro kind of feel. It's an interesting concept. And the physical world is not one I usually think about deeply when I'm thinking about privacy. It's not something I consider a lot.

I usually am focused on digital privacy, but it's a really important one. It's one that especially for those who live in or near large cities, it's much more of a much more of a thread or at least something to be concerned about and thinking about. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, obviously, our world is a very digital. It's a very digitized world and we're moving more and more so there each day. But, you know, the physical aspects of it, it ties in, you know, extremely well.

So when you start talking about start thinking about these, you know, AIs and these cameras that are in these cities everywhere, I mean, you know, whether they're on stoplights or whether they're on people's ring doorbells, you know, all this stuff is is is is all together. It's all one big giant web of surveillance. And so being able to have some sort of physical privacy is very, very difficult these days, unless you are willing or able to actually remove yourself from these settings.

So as you said, the main focus then is to try to create some sort of a digital safe haven for your digital identity and then to try to focus on finding ways to separate away your digital identity from your meatspace identity or whatever you want to call it. Especially when it comes to certain things, you know, some things are less important than others. It's, you know, some things it's not that big of a deal if your digital identity is tied to your real life identity and then other things it's very important.

But the problem with that is, again, all this stuff is so tied together that even if you reveal your identity to one of these things, that's not that important. It's not that big of a deal. Well, there's a very good possibility that that somewhere down the line ties you back to this other thing that is really important. So, you know, it's a very difficult problem to solve. It requires a very multifaceted approach. You have to come at it from many different angles.

If you just focus on this one certain tool, which I feel like a lot of people sometimes do, you'll miss so much of the other stuff going on around you. Is that idea of being able to kind of opt out of physical surveillance or out of the physical communities that we may have and into a parallel community or crypto community? Is that kind of a core idea to what makes privacy an important topic for you today? Yeah, absolutely. You know, the way that we interact with each other these days is just it's all so digitized.

And which is a great thing and a terrible thing, you know, depending on the way that you're looking at it. You know, the Internet is at the same time a humongous place and a very, very small, tiny place. You know, it allows you to connect with people anywhere in the world. I mean, it's this humongous web of people. But at the same time, it can it can be, you know, vanishingly small, depending on what type of the communities that you actually interact in.

So, you know, it's very important that that these digital safe havens are created so that a person can have their true identity be revealed to the world or whatever they wish to reveal to the world. I should say, you know, the problem these days ends up being a lot of self self-censorship, I believe, takes place because people are are scared of, you know, real world implications of something that they may say online on a social media platform, for example.

So, yes, it's all it's very important.

10:00 It's very important to focus on feeling safe in your digital space, wherever that may be, and feeling safe with the amount that that identity is tied to your real life identity. That idea of self-censorship is one of the ones that really kind of woke me up to the importance of privacy, especially for those of us in more theoretically free areas of the world. There's a really good, I think it's a TED Talk by Glenn Greenwald, where he talks about that idea of how a lack of privacy changes the way that people think and communicate in ways that they may not even notice.

Because they have that subconscious idea that like, okay, I know that this conversation is being monitored, so I'm going to leave this out. Or maybe you would have verbalized some thought or idea that maybe if you run to the full conclusions, you don't agree with or maybe don't love. But read out of context or that kind of thing, you end up censoring yourself to say, ah, maybe I shouldn't even say that. And so a lot of ideas, a lot of creativity, a lot of art just gets shut down before it even could exist because we self-censor when we know that we're being surveilled.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. So much of it could get left on the floor just because you're terrified of the social repercussions for that. And we see these days it's only getting worse and worse and worse. Around every corner is seemingly is someone or a group of people that are not only passively, but they're actively seeking offense. They're seeking out ways to take offense to something that you've said. Whether you intended offense or not is irrelevant.

Intent has gone out the window. It doesn't matter what your intention was any longer. And, you know, these things can shift so quickly as we see, you know, the Overton window, as we call it. You know, we see that literally change within a matter of weeks of what is acceptable to say and what's not. You know, it's very troubling to see and think about, like you said, all of the great ideas and great conversations that could have occurred had it not been for this, you know, this huge black cloud of censorship hanging over you.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. And what's a common myth about personal privacy that you run into? Well, I mean, I would say probably the normal, the regular, the ones that, you know, one usually runs into, mainly being, you know, I have nothing to hide. Which that entire argument, in my opinion, it starts out from a flawed premise because it instantly puts you on the defense of hiding. It forces you to defend hiding. But that's not actually what privacy is.

Privacy actually isn't hiding. You know, it's very simply, it's the ability to selectively reveal what you want about yourself. So there's no hiding in there. It's just a matter of some things are personal and private and some things are more public. And if we're unable to separate those two things, then a huge part of our lives just goes out the window. And a lot of people take this approach as, you know, I'm not doing anything wrong. So I have nothing to hide.

But again, referencing what I just talked about a moment ago, what is perfectly fine and not quote unquote wrong today may very well not be just a matter of, you know, weeks from now. We've seen some things and phrases and words and even topics that were perfectly fine to be discussed, you know, not a year or two ago that these days are untouchable. You cannot speak on them. Sometimes you can't speak on them because, you know, it's a fear of retribution or censorship or something that may come behind it.

Sometimes it's literally banned from social media platforms that you actually cannot type the words out. You can't speak on it. So this thing about hiding, it completely warps the argument. And that's a big one that, you know, you run into that or this the general defeatist type mentality. Oh, they've already got so much on me. There's no point in even starting to worry about it now. I've already gave Google my whole identity. Why would I? You know, they already have it.

And again, that's just it's just the wrong approach to take. It's completely defeatist. And on top of all that, it's just wrong because there are steps that you can take to regain some semblance of your privacy. And if nothing more to stop the leaks that have already occurred, you know, if you you get up, you poke a hole in a boat and it starts leaking water and you don't just look at it and say, oh, well, there's already so much in there. You know, no point in stopping it now.

No, you plug the leak. Stop it. And then you try to work on repairing it. So it's the same approach with privacy. No matter what point you're at, no matter how far along the path you've gone, there's always the ability to, at the very least, stop some of this leak of your data and your personal information. And then we can talk about, you know, ways to try to remove some of that. Yeah, there's I think some of the key roadblocks that we see people run into when they're thinking about the concept of privacy, especially when it hasn't been something that maybe friends or family have have talked to them about.

One is just kind of mainstream media or social media that they've gotten that concept that, hey, if you're not you're not a criminal, you don't need to worry about privacy. Are there any other roadblocks that you've seen people struggle with when it comes to personal privacy? And how do you motivate or prompt people around you to get past those roadblocks? Well, I mean, you know, sometimes I think some of the problem could potentially be, you know, the ease of use of some of these tools.

But for the most part, I think it really is more of a mentality thing and an understanding of the problem. Ways to get people past them, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you want to look at it. Right now, these government agencies and big tech companies are really doing the job for me there. I really don't am having to do less and less explaining of why these tools are necessary or why somebody should learn how to use them. Because these these, you know, these companies and these agencies, they are forcing people to see the problem.

I mean, they're putting it right out in front of you. So less and less, I find of people saying, you know, why and more and more nowadays is people saying how. So that's kind of one of the reasons why I focus on trying to get some of these tools and procedures and ways to do things out there. So that people that are waking up right now to the to the why so that they can get to the how portion. You know, one story I told a couple of times, I gave a speech at the Bear Arms and Bitcoin Conference.

It's a conference that a company called Guns and Bitcoins. They put on for the past couple of years down in Austin, Texas. And this last year that I went in 2021, I had at least six people that came up to me and specifically said that before the previous year, before 2020 happened, they it had never even crossed their mind that the government was anything other than just here to help people. And it never even crossed their mind. And then 2020 happened and all the covid hysteria and the censorship and all this stuff started taking place.

And these people saw it for themselves and there was no longer that they could deny it. And so they went from never having thought about the government being anything but, you know, benevolent and here to help people. They went from that to being in the seat at a conference about 3D printed guns and Bitcoin and taking notes in a notepad. So it happened so fast. So, yeah, a lot of the advertisement is being done for us these days. Now we just need to kind of more get people along to the to the how portion.

It certainly seems like and like you mentioned, since 2020, I feel like the need to reason with people as to why they need privacy or censorship resistance. Yeah, it's just it's no longer the focus. Like, I don't even need to discuss that anymore with most people I know because they've seen firsthand like the company is doing this. The government's doing this. It feels like they don't even care about hiding it anymore. They used to do it in the shadows and keep up this this veil of positive of, like you said, benevolence of wanting to protect their citizens and care for their citizens or care for their customers.

And it feels like that fails just dropped. And they're just very blatantly aggressively attacking privacy, censoring people, shutting people off their platforms. It's certainly been a crazy shift over the past year and a half now. Yeah, absolutely, man. They have the veil has dropped and they no longer care. So it's a it's a it's a very scary time. It's also a very exciting time. You know, so these these are these are interesting times.

20:00 to be alive. I say that. Yeah, it's good to see a lot of people wake up that I wasn't sure when or if they wake up to the need to start caring about their personal privacy. But what's something you feel like almost no one agrees with you on? You know, this is such a good question. I've listened to a couple of the episodes that you've done before and I always hear this question. And it's so funny. I sit and think about it and it's such a good question. I think what I would probably say is that proper user interface UI or UX is not the god that it's made out to be by some people, I think. You know, a lot of times people, I feel like, believe that if we can just get the user interface or, you know, if we can just get the UX good enough to where, you know, it's easy enough to use, then everyone will just start using these tools. And I don't think that's correct. And not only do I not think it's correct, I think it actually sometimes leads people to make certain trade-offs that should not be made. Because you can always, you can almost always make a thing

easier to use if you sacrifice some sort of privacy or censorship resistance. You can sacrifice some of those or decentralization. You can sacrifice those things and you can then make your tool much easier to use. But you sacrifice the very thing that is supposed to be built to not have to sacrifice. So I think that a good UI or good UX, what I think it does is I think it helps pick winners inside of a certain space. Like, for example, if you're going to use a Bitcoin wallet, you know, a certain Bitcoin wallet having better UX than another Bitcoin wallet that could potentially get a user to use one of those instead of the other one. But I don't think it would get them to use Bitcoin, if that makes any sense the way I'm explaining it. But yeah, I think I think a lot of people think that if we just get a good enough UI or UX that that the users will start to use these tools. And I don't think that's correct. I think there has to be more there. I think that the individual has to be able at least at some level to recognize

the problem in order to be able to use this tool, regardless of how good the UX is, or it has to also serve some other purpose. And then the privacy or the censorship resistance is then a byproduct of that other service. Those are the ways that I believe we can get users there, not through just having the best UX. Yeah, that last point you made about having privacy or censorship resistance or decentralization be a an added benefit on top of another necessary feature.

There's something that Justin mentioned in the last episode. I think that's it's so important because getting people to use something just because it's private or just because it's decentralized can be a really hard sell. And honestly, most people aren't going to go for that because they don't they don't care enough about like switching chat platforms, switching maybe to crypto. Currency from not using cryptocurrency just for privacy. Usually, I mean, there are certainly people, but it's definitely it's a niche. So having that other thing that draws people in and then making sure that at the same time we keep those those fundamental tenants of privacy of decentralization.

Depending on the actual application, some things don't have to be decentralized, but usually it's a benefit. Right. And the censorship and persistent is really key. Yeah. And, you know, users that that do care about those things, you know, once you realize the problem and the severity of the problem and you're ready to use it, you know, and you're ready to use some tools to to get around this problem or to try to solve for it, those type of users almost always will put up with a certain amount of loss of, you know, good user interface almost always.

Now, when if another app or service comes along that solves the same problem and it has a better UI or UX at that point, that could like I said, that could decide the winner in between this category. But neither of those having such great, you know, user interface is what actually drew the person to use it in the first place. So making tradeoffs that sacrifice the very thing we're fighting for just in order to have a nice interface. I don't I don't think that's advisable or acceptable.

So, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great point. It's a great question. Yeah, I like that one. It's kind of a curveball compared to the rest. But I like getting that that angle of what people feel like is maybe a little bit unique to them or a view that's more unique to them. I think it brings up a lot of a lot of really good topics. So let's let's shift gears a little bit here. I want to chat a little bit about the things you've written about in your blog, the things you talk about on Twitter and you're you're best known, at least in the circles that I'm around for your work in the Bitcoin space.

And you focus primarily on privacy and privacy education around Bitcoin. Where does cryptocurrency fit in with the other tools that you use for personal privacy? And then maybe some what are some recommendations you have around using cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or maybe Monero? Sure. You know, Bitcoin is is such an essential tool in my view to all these things that that we're trying to do in these problems that we're trying to solve. It's an essential tool, but it's not the only tool that we need.

And Ragnar, which is the guns of Bitcoin, the guy that puts on the Bear Arms Bitcoin conference, he gave a speech the first year. And I know I've said this a thousand times, but it's stuck with me so much. And his entire speech was necessary, but not sufficient. And this is kind of one of the things he was talking about, where I believe Bitcoin is necessary for the movement and the tools that we're trying to get done. But it's it's it's not sufficient.

But what it can be used for is when any time that you're needing to transfer value for a good or a service and that good or service is a tool that can help you circumvent either government censorship or corporate censorship or anything of the nature that that could be a target of these corporations and agencies. The one choke point that they really have over anything else is financial. If they're able to just attack this financial choke point and cut off any sort of payment providers, if they can cut off the means of these these people earning a living and funding their endeavors, then they're essentially just it's a slow strangle.

And so what Bitcoin does is allows you to pay for goods and services or even if a service is free, it allows you to make donations to further fund more work or more research by developers or individuals that that are out here getting things done. And it enables you to do so in a way where you can also protect your identity. We've seen certain times where users of certain tools or certain platforms become targets for having their information hacked or being docked online.

Just right off the top of my head, one of the examples is like you see these places like Parler, one of the apps where it gets a name as being a quote unquote right wing social media site. And so you have people you become a target then. And people actively attack these targets and try to gain whatever information they can about the users and then reveal that information to the world. Now, this potentially could have severe impacts for your real real world where you actually work.

If you were to work in a an environment which is a much more liberal environment, it's very, very feasible that your information being leaked that you have either either been a member of a certain group. Or even that you have donated to or funded or subscribed to a certain newsletter or on a certain social media site. All those things can be revealed and have very severe real world impacts. So being able to pay with a pseudonymous cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or with an anonymous cryptocurrency like Monero, it really, really, again, opens up the individual to be able to.

Speak their mind to speak their mind to talk about ideas or or have debates around ideas that are not allowed in their in their real world environment. So it opens up the ability to fund all of these tools in a way that both is censorship resistant from it being stopped from a payment provider standpoint and also able to protect the identity of, you know, the person making the donations or funding the work. So it's an essential tool in my view. Yeah, we've seen a lot in this this wave of censorship that's happened in the last six months or a year.

We've seen a lot of people really just a continuation of what's been happening for a long time. But payment processors like PayPal, like Stripe.

30:00 those platforms, removing people from their platforms due to many different reasons. Usually political, there's lots of things that go on there, but that ability for one company or maybe a couple companies to completely shut off financial flows, to completely shut off the donation avenues, like you mentioned, that's so critical to people and that can really be the final breaking point for people to give in if they're not able to make enough to live, they're not able to raise money for the work that they do.

That can be a really vital one. So I think that censorship resistant aspect is really important. But I think that the one that a lot of people forget about is that anonymous or pseudonymous piece that a lot of times it's really important that the person who's actually giving money is able to protect their own identity. And that's usually lost using these platforms like PayPal and Stripe and those kinds of things. And that again, like you mentioned earlier with like the Overton window and this concept that things quickly shift, the person that you're donating to or the service that you're paying for today may be completely fine.

There may be nothing wrong with that. But when you're using a central company like PayPal, like Stripe, like Google, like Apple, they are likely logging this stuff. They're keeping track of where and when you sent money. And that thing that may be fine today could be very much not fine. It could be at least socially unacceptable in the future. It could be illegal in the future. And so those things you do today over those services could really come back to haunt you or to haunt the person that you're sending money to in the future as well.

So that's definitely it's a vital piece of the idea of opting out. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And on my blog, I actually just kind of transcribed the speech that I gave at the Bear Arms and Bitcoin conference in 2020. What that speech was focused on was protecting your Bitcoin identity and kind of the way I kind of delineated this in real life identity and your quote unquote Bitcoin identity. And the reason for that is Bitcoin is not an anonymous cryptocurrency in the way that Monero does.

Monero does a lot of things to protect the privacy of both the sender and the receiver. Bitcoin does not. It does not do those same things. So what is baked into Bitcoin's protocol as a privacy protection is pseudonymity. So what you actually leave on the publicly visible blockchain is not readily tied to your identity by just anyone able to view the blockchain. But what you can see, you can see the amounts and you can then follow this transaction path and you can use certain heuristics that have been developed over the years.

After analyzing user spending, you can you can do all these things. And what the goal of that is, is to eventually track this this this this Bitcoin, this payment or even track the past transaction history until you reach a point where you can then tie that Bitcoin purchase or sale to a real life identity. And the way that's done is by using, you know, KYC, AML, know your customer anti money laundering regulation. So these regulators and agencies, they essentially do the same thing to Bitcoin.

They attack the the choke point. And the choke point is the fiat to cryptocurrency on and off ramps. So if they can enact these regulations to where every person that makes a Bitcoin purchase has to also tie their real life identity to that purchase of Bitcoin. From that point on, people are these these chain surveillance companies and government agencies that contract these companies are able to surveil and track this this Bitcoin that is now tied to your identity.

Even though it's not publicly visible on the blockchain, it very much is visible to them. And so, you know, this idea that Bitcoin is this anonymous payment payment rails or payment system that was kind of floating around and originally touted back in 2010, 2011 was extremely harmful and ended up resulting in a lot of people being being very badly injured by, you know, people being able to trace this these Bitcoin transactions. So what I focus on right now, because I do believe Bitcoin's robustness, its resiliency has been proven over the years.

It certainly has many flaws, but what it has shown is an enormous ability to survive through very, very strong and coordinated social attacks. It's shown that it's shown that it's able to withstand an outright basically attempted co-opting of the chain by these big agencies. When you look at things like the, you know, Segway 2x and all that, where a lot of the bullish case for Bitcoin was really cemented. So I think it's a very important tool. So I think it's a very important tool to allow users to maintain their level of privacy, both on-chain and off-chain, by using certain tools in the Bitcoin space.

Mainly, Samourai Wallet is the main recommendation that I make for actually using Bitcoin. We can go into some of the reasons for that, for why, if you want to. And the really, really big one is no KYC only. To absolutely not submit to know your customer and anti-money laundering regulations in order to purchase or sell your Bitcoin. It's not necessary and it's extremely harmful. Yeah, I'd love, since you're recommending Bitcoin and like you mentioned, there are some risks with how it is not naturally anonymous, but there are good ways to use it.

I would love it if you could just briefly go through what Samourai Wallet is and why you recommend it or how it helps to protect people's privacy. I want to make sure that people who are listening, if they do dive into Bitcoin, dive into a good privacy-preserving way to use Bitcoin. Because not all wallets are equal, not all tools are equal around the Bitcoin ecosystem. No, you're absolutely right. And it's honestly quite sad that I can't recommend more than this one wallet.

I mean, I would love to. I would love to be able to recommend several tools that users could put to good use to maintain their privacy. But unfortunately, I simply can't, not in good conscience. And so again, I kind of wrote down the speech that I gave in 2020. So if people want to visit my blog, which I'm sure you'll have that in the show notes, they can visit and kind of see this and go back to it. But essentially what Samourai focuses on, first of all, it's a mobile wallet.

It's available for Android only. There's a couple reasons for that. I myself am an Android maximalist, so it works quite well. But it's an Android Bitcoin wallet. And what it really focuses on is in providing really high and strong guardrails, I like to call it, so that users are less apt to hurt themselves by making poor spending habits. And it focuses on providing on-chain privacy. And what it does that is by using both steganographic or just kind of decoy-like transactions, something that's called a stonewall.

It focuses on doing manual, two-party, what are called coin-join transactions, where there's two individual entities that combine, and they both provide inputs to a transaction. So what that does is breaks a common input ownership heuristic, which I won't get too much into that. But it essentially, it makes the people surveilling the chain think they're looking at something they understand, but they actually don't understand what has happened. They think they're looking at one party when, in fact, they're looking at two.

So it uses those type of decoy transactions. And it uses a tool called Whirlpool, which is a coordinated Chalmium blinded coin join. So what that does is it takes five different entities, five different wallets, and it takes one single input from each of those five different wallets. And what comes out of the other side, on the output side, are five outputs that are identical in their size. There's varying pool sizes. But when they come out, they're essentially identical.

So it's akin to thinking like you take five different gold coins and you melt them down and then you pour them back out into five equally sized gold coins. And you hand those back out to the five identities. So there's no way to tell which output is attached to which input. There's many different interpretations to this. And all this just adds doubt to what these chain surveillance companies are able to observe on chain. So because it's not blinded, there's no way to completely, you know, do away with any sort of tracking ability.

So what you have to do is you have to use essentially you have to use math and you have to use probability and you have to add decoy.

40:00 and make it so that whenever somebody is looking at this thing from the outside in, even if they have some more information than just what's available on chain using some of these tools, there's no way to deterministically say this output or this input belongs to that output. It's just a level of doubt. So now instead of 100% sure that belongs to this, now maybe we're talking about 70% sure. Maybe we're talking about 30% sure. And so that's kind of what it does to focus on providing the most privacy that it can from the very public and accessible to anyone with internet connection public ledger that Bitcoin produces.

So it's a very, very important tool. Awesome. Thanks for that. Thanks for that rundown. And we also had a lot of listeners chime in and say that they wanted to hear a little bit more about mining Bitcoin at home. I don't want to get super deep into that because that's not necessarily the focus of the podcast, but I do think it's an important topic. So maybe you want to just briefly introduce why you, why you talk about that quite a bit. And then I'll put info in the show notes to previous stuff that you've written on that.

Sure. And yeah, this is again on the blog. I wrote a little something called mining for the streets a little while back. And basically what the goal of that paper was, was to attempt to shift the narrative in the Bitcoin space, because at that time, what had become the prevalent narrative was that individuals or, you know, maybe even small, small time operation, Bitcoin users should not be attempting to mine Bitcoin. And I'm not going to get into the whole ASIC thing.

It's a whole big deal. But suffice it to say, the whole point was that the narrative is that you as an individual should not be attempting to mine Bitcoin as a way to procure it. And I wanted to change that narrative and change it from one of viewing Bitcoin mining as a business to one of viewing Bitcoin mining as a means to acquire Bitcoin without having to do the KYC AML regulations. And that's the whole point of it. So if you're able to mine Bitcoin yourself, which just means you essentially point this miner at a mining pool, and then you receive Bitcoin as payment for the hashes that you provide, and you get that directly into your wallet, and you do that without having to provide your name, date of birth, social security number, a cute little selfie with you standing there holding some note or something, all that stuff that you have to provide at these regulated exchanges.

You don't have to do any of that. And now you've obtained this Bitcoin. So right there off the bat, you have protected an enormous amount of your Bitcoin identity just by not revealing all your identity in order to purchase. So you're starting off from a point that is way ahead of someone that has done KYC in order to maintain some privacy. So it's a very important tool, I think. I think it's going to become even more important in the future. As like we've seen this crackdown from China, I expect that to continue.

I expect the future of Bitcoin mining to be what would be referred to as off-grid. And I consider a single, you know, miner, one or two ASICs running in your home. That is essentially off-grid Bitcoin mining. And, you know, what I like to say is instead of having one mining farm that's running 10,000 ASICs, if we end up with 10,000 homes running one ASIC, we get the same level of security and we vastly more decentralized network and make it much more robust.

And I think, I mean, that's like mining is an important thing for Monero as well. And I've talked about that in the past, but it's like you mentioned, it's a great way to just acquire access to a financial thing that is censorship resistant, that can be used privately, that you can use to donate, to pay for services in a way that is not necessarily easy. I mean, especially more difficult in Bitcoin than Monero, but it's, it's definitely approachable.

And I think I really didn't see it as approachable until I read your article and started hearing you talk about it more in Bitcoin. But it's a great way to acquire that censorship resistant money that you can use to opt out without having to jump through hoops, without having to give over ID and without the government or corporations needing to know that you own Bitcoin or that you own Monero or how much money you can do. How much you own that kind of thing.

So it is definitely an important thing that I would recommend people look into more. Sure. And, you know, it's definitely not nearly as approachable as, as Monero. There's, there's a much higher barrier to entry, both in money and infrastructure needs. So it's not something for just anybody to jump into, but, you know, again, I encourage anyone that's interested to check out the article and maybe just, just, just think about it. Just shift your thinking a little bit from this is something I'm going to do to try to make money.

money to something of, this is something I'm going to do to acquire Bitcoin without giving up my identity. And I think that opens up a whole world of possibilities. Yeah. Thanks for, thanks for bringing that up. And I'll, I'll definitely put links in the show notes for people who are interested in, in learning a little bit more around that. You also had a really good article about PGP on your blog, and it's a, it's an older technology that people may or may not be aware of, but I feel like it's kind of making a resurgence recently, which has been great to see.

Would you mind breaking down a little bit about what PGP is, why people should use it, and maybe how you use it or how you recommend people use it? Sure. PGP is, it stands for a pretty good privacy PGP. It's an encryption program. It's used to like, you could sign and encrypt or decrypt, you know, whether it be like emails or files or just text, or, you know, entire like disc, you can, you can encrypt. So you can encrypt and, and decrypt these things.

And, um, basically what it is, what it allows for people to do is it allows for people to drastically reduce the number of eyes that are on, um, you know, a string of text, for example. So I want to send you a text message. Um, the text message that I want to send you, say it contains a link to a site that is deemed, you know, unacceptable by whoever. Um, and so I want to send you a DM on Twitter, for example, um, and ask you about this site or whatever.

And I, and I'm concerned that I don't want anybody else to be able to see this message. I trust you. I don't trust anyone else. So we've already seen, for example, you know, Twitter got hacked and the DMs and stuff were, were wide open for anyone to read. So what, um, what I would be able to do in that situation is I would be able to use this PGP technology and I would be able to use a public key encryption, um, and some hashing and, and things. And I would be able to encrypt this message using my private key and send it.

Um, and you on the receiving end, um, because I have your public key, I would be able to encrypt this to your public key. you on the other end, um, having the private key that corresponds to that public key are now able to decrypt that message. But anyone else looking from the outside just sees a jumbled mess of characters that they're unable to decrypt. Um, so, you know, it's a, it's a very interesting thing. As you said, it's a very old technology.

Um, but it's, it has so many, um, the way I talk about it, it's, it's one of those things where it's like, you don't use it every day, but when you need it, it is absolutely necessary. Um, so, you know, the problem a lot of times with PGP, uh, is that it's pretty difficult to use. There's a couple other problems too. Um, but the difficulty to use, I feel like really holds a lot of people back because, you know, a lot of times it's a command line or type of a tool.

It's not, it's not very simple, especially someone just trying to learn it. It's not very easy to use. So if you've identified that you could, you know, you might need PGP for whatever reason, whether that be you want to prove your identity, um, it's, it's, it works excellent for that. Uh, whether you want to encrypt or decrypt some text, you know, to share sensitive messages, whatever your reasoning that you were wanting to use PGP is, um, there's a tool again on Android, um, it's called open key chain.

And this, this tool is, it's so easy to use. It works incredibly well. It's of course, it's open source, um, able to be downloaded through either F-Droid or you can get it on Google play too, uh, or, you know, direct, but it allows you to use your mobile phone and you essentially turn your mobile phone into an encryption device. And it's just a couple clicks of a button. Once you acquire the public key of the person that you want to encrypt something to, you choose to encrypt to that public key, press a couple of buttons and voila, there it is.

You have an encrypted message. You can just copy that and share it. And now you have drastically reduced the number of eyes that could potentially see this message from anyone that's able to hack it or see it to you and the person you sent it to, or I should say the person that owns that cryptographic key. Um, because you know, obviously the risk you run into is if someone else has,

50:00 has their key compromised, then naturally, whoever owns that key will be able to decrypt your message. Also, if you're using it for identification purposes, if, again, someone compromises their key, then it would appear that you're still speaking with the same person. So, you know, obviously it has its flaws, but it comes in extremely useful for sharing information on platforms that do not have encryption or do not offer any sort of protection to the users.

You can create your own encryption. You can create your own protection without having to rely on any other third party to do so. So, you know, it's one of those things where we're able to, again, remove the number of trusted third parties that we have to rely on, in this case, for our encryption and instead do it ourselves. Yeah, it's been a commonly used tool for, like, whistleblowers, for people who need to maybe talk to journalists or something like that and keep things off the record.

There's been a lot of key uses. And I think, like you mentioned, one of the most powerful is just if you don't have a secure or private communication channel with the person you want to communicate with, you can turn anything into a secure and private communication method with PGP, which is one of the most powerful things to me. But then there's also that aspect of if you have an exceptional need for privacy that even goes above and beyond maybe a tool like Signal or something like that, and you want to make sure that the only person who can see this, even if there was some kind of a break in Signal or if maybe, like, you mentioned, the other person's messages got hacked and were visible, something like that, even in that case, the person who's reading those messages would still need that PGP private key to read them.

So it definitely has that extra, it can add that extra level of security or privacy and is definitely a valuable tool to be familiar with. But I think, like you mentioned, it's not something you're going to be chatting with your friends and just PGP encrypting every message. It's not something that's like that. It's more of a very, it's more of a specific tool for specific uses. And there are other tools for encryption that do a lot more behind the scenes that are simpler and better for just kind of day-to-day usage.

Sure. And one of the things, though, that I believe it's coming to fruition now, and I believe it'll give even more so in the future, is the idea of using this PGP and using encryption as a means of identification, especially in systems. What I like to say is whenever we use these type of systems that we're talking about, whether it be, you know, Bitcoin or Monero or whatever, where we essentially step outside of the regulators' control, where there's no sort of, I hate to use the word protection, because they don't really offer any protection anyway, but we'll just say there's no protection that regulators offer, then we have to rely on our own regulations, our own reputation systems, essentially.

So what ends up happening is, especially if you are interacting online as a NIM, if you're interacting with someone without your actual public identity attached to your online identity, then all you've really got to stand on is your reputation and your acts and what you've done and what you've said to this point. So if you've built a reputation, then people will begin to rely on that reputation. What ends up happening at that point is scammers or people outside here that are, you know, have bad intentions, they will essentially try to hijack your good reputation and then exploit that and use it against the people that you've built a certain amount of, like a web of trust amongst.

And so what PGP allows for is a very, very simple and easy proof of identity by just simply clear signing a message or, you know, even detached signing a file. So it's very simple. It's very quick and easy that someone can confirm that they are, in fact, conversing or dealing with the person that owns this same cryptographic key. Again, of course, there's a chance of something being compromised, but that's a very minuscule chance as related to dealing with people that you may never meet in real life.

But being able to say, okay, is this you, you know, just clear sign a message for me, sign this, you know, encrypt this message, decrypt this message. And if you're able to do that, then you're able to at least prove at some level that this is the same person that you have that reputation built with. So I think that's going to only get more important in the future. Yeah, especially on platforms that don't have kind of a native ability to verify someone cryptographically on another platform.

Like I know Matrix has it built in, but it can be a little complex. Signal has it built in, but it has kind of a default trust model. So it is nice to have PGP for that. And there's a really cool site that I found recently called keyoxide.org, where you can use your PGP key to kind of prove your identity and ownership over different assets. Like I have mine on there and it's on my blog, but you can see proof that I own the DNS domain names that I use for like my blog and my podcast.

You can see that I own that GitHub profile, who I am on Matrix, who I am on Twitter. You can prove that identity in a way that's much harder to fake. It's impossible to fake unless someone stole my PGP key, which is a much more complex and a very targeted attack. So yeah, it's great for identity. And that's something that it does seem like is taking off a little bit more recently. I know it's been a thing for a while again, but I feel like it's kind of making a resurgence, which is nice to see.

Yeah, yeah. Another thing you talk about on your blog and you've chatted about it a lot in some group chats that I'm in with you is a tool called YouKnowHost. I hope I'm saying that right. I know it couldn't be pronounced why YouKnowHost, but I'm going to go with YouKnowHost. But you talk about how it simplifies self-hosting and how you use it for a lot of the things that you run. What is it that makes it such a great tool to you and what drew you to YouKnowHost initially?

Sure. Initially, I had no idea that YouKnowHost existed. Just being around in the Bitcoin enemies community, which in my opinion is probably one of the most underrated communities, I guess you would call it, in the entire sort of Bitcoin and privacy space. But I came across this service of YouKnowHost being in Bitcoin enemies. And when I first look it up, I'm like, wait a minute. There's no way that it's this easy. There's no way that it's this simple to actually self-host all this stuff.

Because what we talk about when self-hosting, we talk about really taking control of all of your data or whatever information that you have that you're relying now on, some third party to provide and for Toasted online for you. Like, for example, just off the top of my head, say, like, you know, Google. Google Drive is hosting all of your files and stuff. And you don't have to worry about, you know, you've got plenty of storage. You don't have to really worry about it.

It's just going to kind of run. It's an afterthought, you know, for most people. But you have absolutely no privacy by using this tool. So it's going to work great for you. It's going to store all your stuff. But what you don't realize is every image that you upload to it, they're actually hashing that image and then comparing that hash to a database of known hashes they have of, you know, images, which right now I think they only state publicly that they're only doing it to search for child pornography images.

So, of course, you know, who's going to complain about that? But, you know, all that means is that they have the capability. So that can be applied to any sort of image, you know, whether that be 3D printed guns, whether that be whatever you want to talk about. So the point being self-hosting enables you to, you know, host all your own information and host all your own tools. The problem is it's not super easy to just spin up all these tools on your own.

I mean, if you're a quote-unquote power user and, you know, you're perfectly fine with, you know, spinning up Docker containers and, you know, all that stuff, then sure, yeah, it's no big deal. You can just spin up your own stuff and you can host it. But for the other 99% of us that aren't super technical and able to understand how to do these things, there's this tool, Unohost. And basically what it is, it is actually an operating system is what it is.

It's basically it's based on like a Debian operating system. So it can run on whatever sort of hardware or a VPS or whatever that, you know, a Debian based system can run on. And what it is, once it is up and running, then after you have Unohost running, you're able to just go through a catalog of apps that they have available and basically one click install all of these apps. So, you know, instead of having to understand how to, you know, spin up your own Nextcloud, you can go to Unohost here.

And on the command line aspect, it's basically one command. And after this one command is run, you're able to go to a web interface GUI and complete the entire rest of the setup. And once you've got that set up, not only can you just spin up, you know, Unohost, whatever, when a single click. Now, you know, you can go right on down the line. Now you've got Unohost, you've got Bitwarden, you've got Standard Notes, you've got all this stuff that you can just literally one click install.

It's so easy to do that I feel like...

1:00:00 It's a very, very important tool for anyone looking to take back some of the power over their own data by self-hosting it. Especially if you're not very technically inclined, Unihost is right up your alley, I tell you. Yeah, I haven't had the chance to explore using it yet. I've used different methods to deploy a lot of things. I usually do focus on using Docker, but I know that can be a lot more complex. So I do want to take a look at Unihost because it seems like a really good solution.

Are there any kind of key drawbacks that you know of around using Unihost? Well, I mean, one thing that I can tell you for sure, if you try to run Unihost on a Namecheap VPS, for some reason, something that happens there is Namecheap just absolutely does not like. And they'll basically just accuse you of participating in network attacks through some type of port scanning attacks. I've never had that complaint from anywhere else. So I'm led to believe that it's more of a Namecheap problem than a Unihost problem.

But it exists nonetheless. You know, the thing about Unihost is the reason that it's so easy to do is because it basically takes over the entire your entire hardware. Like, for example, say you want to run, you know, Nextcloud. And you just are able to just spin up a Docker container and take right off. And, you know, the whole rest of your hardware software is just doing whatever it's going to do. But if you want to install Unihost, it's basically what it's going to do is take over your entire system.

Okay, so if you install Unihost as a base on your laptop, for example, then your laptop is now running Unihost. It's not running, you know, Ubuntu or Popo. It's running Unihost. So, you know, that could be looked at as a drawback, potentially. You know, I hesitate to say a whole lot of things that are really wrong with it. I haven't personally run into a whole lot of problems with it. I know some people maybe have had some problems with it staying up.

But me personally, I haven't. I'm not aware of any sort of glaring security or privacy issues in it. I haven't seen those mentioned anywhere. I haven't heard of anybody having it. I certainly haven't experienced it. So, you know, the drawbacks really are going to be that it's probably not going to fulfill all the needs of, like, say, a power user. That's going to want to do a lot more stuff. It's probably not for you. You know, you don't need it.

And you can do all kinds of other stuff anyway. But other than that, I really struggle to kind of see, you know, the problems with it. They are essentially all the same problems you run into anywhere else, you know. So I would just suggest anybody giving it a try or visiting the website, visiting their GitHub. It's all open source, you know. So it's not like they're trying to hide something behind some, you know, closed source coding or whatever.

It's all right there in the open. So if there is a security or a privacy issue that's in the code, then I haven't seen anyone find it yet. Yeah, it seems like a great solution if you have a VPS that you want to run it on or if you have dedicated hardware at home. Like you mentioned, like, yeah, you don't want to install it on a laptop or desktop you want to use for other stuff. But it does seem like a great solution outside of that. So I'll definitely have to dig into that a little bit more.

And the last thing from your blog that I wanted to cover is this idea of Uncle Jim and basically someone who self-hosts tools for friends, family, neighbors. I thought that was a really fascinating idea and one that we've touched on a little bit in past episodes. But I felt like your focus and your phrasing around it was was really well done. So I was curious what sparked that idea for you and kind of how does our ability as people who can self-host tools lead to a responsibility to the less tech savvy people around us?

Right. Yeah. Well, you know, almost basically all of all of life is just a matter of dealing with tradeoffs. What tradeoffs are acceptable for you, what tradeoffs aren't. The tradeoffs that we have as a society generally made on the technological side is we have offloaded a lot of our responsibility. So we've traded off your responsibility for maintaining and hosting your own information and your own data. You've offloaded that to a trusted third party, a company like a Google or Microsoft or one of those companies that are perfectly willing to host your data for you.

And they'll take care of all these problems and they'll make you have a super easy, smooth user experience. No problem. The only issue is you're trading off basically your entire identity. You are allowing them to, you know, scan your images and look for things in there. You're allowing them to, you know, basically they wanted to search for keywords and report all this data to whatever agencies that they're able to talk to. And, you know, all of this can be done warrantlessly through, you know, using this third party doctrine stuff.

There's no, there's no for a lot of things. There's a lot of things that could be accessed without any sort of court proceedings, without any sort of warrants, without you even knowing that you're subject to any sort of investigation or on any sort of list. So, you know, the whole idea as a sovereign user is basically just to stay off of their list. If you're not on their list, you're ahead of everybody else. So, all that to say, we all almost always offload some amount of responsibility or work to a third party.

And that's, in my opinion, probably always going to be the way because true personal responsibility and self-sovereignty just does not scale very well. It's very difficult to get every single person to care about their sovereignty and their privacy and their identity enough to spin up their own, you know, Nextcloud or spin up their own Bitwarden. It's just not going to happen. Now, what they may do, they may be willing to use a service that better protects their privacy, doesn't hand over all of their data to one of these big companies and stuff.

They may be willing to do that if someone else is, again, willing to take that responsibility of hosting the data for them and actually running the service. They just want to use something that works. They don't really care. The point is the privacy has to be the byproduct of it. Okay, we're going to provide you this service, but we're also not going to invade your privacy. One of the ways that that can be done is through using a trusted third party that you actually know, that you actually have a trusted relationship with personally.

So, I think it was Matt O'Dell that coined the phrase Uncle Jim as basically as to refer to as the quote unquote the tech guy or the computer guy or the Bitcoin guy or the Monero guy. You know, almost everybody's got that guy in their family or circle of friends somewhere and everybody knows who that person is. Now, if you're not that person yourself, you know who is. So, the idea is instead of this personal responsibility, this radical personal responsibility, having to scale individually, what we can do instead is have an individual within a very small subset, within a very small group of friends or family that is willing to host these services and run these services and take the responsibility for the data on them.

And then the friends and family group then get off of these major dragnet servers and onto a much more personalized, smaller server. And these smaller, personalized servers then interconnect with other smaller, personalized servers. And then we form this big, huge web of individual pockets of sovereignty that are connecting and talking with each other. So, it's a big goal. It's, you know, a lofty dream or whatever, but it's actually a very viable method to be done.

You know, there's the tech guy exists, you know. And so, if they are willing to take on that responsibility and you're willing to trade this, you know, your responsibility from this big, huge company to this person that you personally know, then, you know, it opens up a whole other world of possibilities for privacy. Yeah, it's one I've seen take off in the circles that I've met. I mean, especially, I feel like you've built a really good community around this concept.

And you've just been a good example of this and the things that you run for the community, which I've loved to see. I mean, tons of people have jumped onto your matrix server. I know you recently spun up a Knitter instance and you have some other tools that you run there. But it's been great to see how people do latch onto that. And when you have that person that you know that is a little bit more tech savvy, and again, you don't need to be, like, the smartest computer guy and running all these tools, CLI only.

And, like, you don't have to be a Linux expert. But if you can self-host this with something like Younohost or maybe another tool, or if you can just follow some guides to self-host the tools that you find important or that the friends and family around you find important, that can be a great way to start building these local parallel communities that exist either physically locally or maybe digitally local. A group of people that you chat with, you know, online and y'all can help to share tools and host tools for each other.

It builds these these communities that you can really opt out in an even more powerful way than

1:10:00 just using privacy preserving tools, which is a very powerful step. And I think usually that's the place where people start. But when you do build that community, when you do have that person, like you mentioned that, you know, that kind of Uncle Jim character, I love that, love that, that naming. But when you have that person around you who you, you know, like I would trust them with this data. And the nice thing too, when you, when that person's hosting those tools, most of the tools that at least like we're recommending here that you've recommended, they're still protecting your privacy, even from them in a lot of ways.

You are trusting them with some of the data. And a lot of times the responsibility comes down to if they mess up, maybe you lose some data. That's probably the biggest consideration for people. But there usually is some loss of privacy to them specifically. But like you mentioned, it's such a better trade off to hand that data and hand that responsibility to a person that you know and trust in your life, rather than to some big corporation or to a government or something like that, that maybe you've chosen to trust, but you don't know them.

You don't really know what they're doing. You don't really know what's going on behind the scenes. You don't really know what they're talking about in meetings, what they're doing with your data, that kind of thing. So having that extra way to opt out is a very powerful thing. And I think a, I think a really good next step after you learn to use some of these privacy tools, kind of finding community, finding people you trust in your circles that, that you can start to take this approach with.

Are there any other tools specifically that you host in this, in this manner for people that you want to mention? Well, you know, that's something that you can kind of separate, you know, what you are willing to host essentially for your, your digital community, as opposed to what you're willing to host for your actual in real life family or friends community. You know, just as an example, say I want to host Nextcloud. And, you know, and the thing is, is, okay, so now I'm not sharing, I'm not uploading files to Google drive.

Okay. personally. But if the people that I interact with daily on my, in my life, say my spouse or, you know, my parents or children, whoever, if they are, then anytime I've shared a file with them that they've uploaded now, that same file, it's still, it still makes its way to this, to this same server. So, you know, the idea would be to run something like a Nextcloud for you and your family members where, you know, these files and stuff are only known and only shared on the servers that you guys control instead of that.

Anybody else has access to that type of service may be something that you actually want to keep protected from the community at large, because, you know, even as much as we may build up a reputation and stuff with these people online, there is still, you know, after all these years, there is still even the slightest, you know, hint that something could be amiss there, or maybe they get compromised and there's no way for you to know this on the other side of a computer screen.

So, you know, yes, the person that is using a service that you're hosting, they are trusting you with some of their privacy, but you're also trusting them basically to not attack your service. You know, especially like, even like something like a DDoS attack or, you know, whatever. So there has to be, there's a mutual level of trust. And so that kind of dictates what sorts of services you may host for the community at large, as opposed to yourself.

So right now, I myself, I host a Bitwarden, I host a Standard Notes, and I host a Nextcloud that is just for myself and my family members. I've got four friends and family members in my actual real, real world life that are using my, my hosted services. And so I keep those as more of an internal thing. And then for the greater public at large, as more of a, you know, digital community help, I'm hosting a bunch of other services. That's where I host like a, a Mastodon that I just recently spun another one up.

I host a Knitter. I host a CRX that anyone's willing to, are able to use to kind of get off of these Google search engine. Let's see, what else do I host? I host a Matrix server. I host, and I'm, I forget. I host so many things. I actually, so many things you don't even know. Yeah. I actually kind of forget. Cause it's so easy on, you know, host to just spin this stuff up. All you, you know, it's, it's, it's just a couple of clicks and boom, you're up and running.

So, you know, I've got, I've spun up a Knitter instance in, you know, less than 30 minutes. And then said, ah, I might as well throw Mastodon on here too. Like it's, it's just, you, you're actually just sitting there like, eh, well, why not? Um, so you end up spinning up a bunch of stuff. So I've got quite a few things that are spun up. Anybody that's interested, you can visit my Twitter profile. I'm sure it'd be in the show notes and stuff. And you can see, I've got links right there to a bunch of the stuff that I'm hosting.

All that stuff that I post links for is, is anyone that is, uh, you know, willing and able, you're perfectly, perfectly acceptable to use all those. Awesome. Well, I'm sure there'll be a lot of crossover, but a question that we, we talked about with every guest is, is what are the, some of the tools that you use regularly to opt out that you'd recommend others to take a look at and why? Yeah. Um, and, and you're right. A ton of crossover here. I don't think I have anything necessarily special that, um, I use, um, huge fan of Bitwarden.

Um, I have Bitwarden is actually, not only is it, am I a fan of it as, um, and as an actual service and what it does and, and being able to host it itself and the service that it provides, it works extremely well, but I'm also, a big fan of it as, uh, it has been the single most successful thing, uh, service that I've been able to get people to use. Um, you know, uh, that opens the door for them to now accept my second recommendation. Like it's a thing, um, that, you know, with most, with, with most privacy, uh, enhancing tools, usually you end up sacrificing a bit of, you know, convenience to use this tool.

That's a little bit more privacy preserving. That's the whole, that's the whole game. They, they give you the convenience, but they take your privacy. And now when we try to reverse that a little bit, it's very difficult to get people to give up on this convenience, even if they know they're going to help their privacy. So the good thing about Bitwarden is, is actually you don't give up convenience. You actually get convenience added. It's an add on, um, because now you don't have to remember any passwords.

This little thing is just going to pop up and fill in your password for you. You have to remember one, one single strong master password. Um, and so it's actually a convenience ad. It makes things easier to use. And so once you're able to get people using that and they're able to see, okay, wait, this actually works really well. You know, this guy kind of knows what he's talking about. They're much more open to accept this second recommendation. You know, now let's go ahead and change that default SMS messenger to signal now.

Um, so, you know, it's, it's a very good tool to open the door. Um, so I use Bitwarden. I use standard notes, uh, is a good one that I use. Um, open key chain. Of course we've talked about, um, uh, as far as encrypted communications, I, I am a signal user because I am in the United States, United States being a, you know, primarily SMS based, um, communications. I think a signal is an essential, uh, tool for United States, uh, users. Um, but I also, I'm a big fan of Threema, uh, for, you know, communications, encrypted communications.

Um, let's see, what else do I use? Um, I guess the one tool that is maybe a little different that I use that, that maybe only a few others do is an app called Tesser Cube. Um, and Tesser Cube, Tesser Cube is, uh, a keyboard. It's an open source. There, it has an open source keyboard in it that has, uh, PGP integrated in the keyboard. Um, now I actually forked, um, the Tesser Cube, uh, application initially just because it had a typo that, that I couldn't stand looking at any longer.

Um, and I couldn't get anybody to fix it. So I, I actually forked the repo just to fix this typo. Um, and then I recompiled the app myself. Um, I built it from source using, using Android studio. And for whatever reason, that actually drastically improved the performance of this app. So now I have my own Tesser Cube. It's called Tesser Cube DV. Uh, it's diverters vision, of course. Um, but I actually use that. Like I said, it's an open source keyboard.

So it takes the place, of, you know, whatever, uh, Android open source project keyboard or any soft or whatever you can, you can use it as a keyboard as your base. Um, and then it just has a little button in it, a little encrypt button. So what you do is you add your private key into this app, and then you take your public keys of the people, uh, that you're talking to, your public PGP keys, you import them into this keyboard app. And then once you get, and you're talking to people, as you type the message on the keyboard, when you're done typing the message, instead of hitting the send button, you just hit the little encrypt button, and then you choose your recipients and boom, it PGP encrypts your message and then you press send.

So it can all be done right there inside the keyboard. It's a really neat, cool little tool. Um, there's supposed to be a version two coming of it, but, uh,

1:20:00 I'll believe that when I see it. So it doesn't really get worked on very much, but it's completely open source, of course. And yeah, it's a really neat... It's the keyboard that I use. So yeah, I guess it's probably the one I had. Nobody else does. Yeah, I remember you mentioning that. I had totally forgot about that until now. So I just took a look at the super secret F-Droid repo and installed it. So I'll have to take a look at that after we finish recording because I have been wanting to start using PGP a little bit more and just have it more accessible.

And I do think that that's a great tool. So I'm excited to try that out a little bit. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. I like it. Okay, well, last question that I have for you is just what advice would you give to someone who's just starting to realize the need for personal privacy? I mean, basically the same that I would say about essentially anything that you're just getting into is one step at a time. Don't get overwhelmed. It's very easy, especially in the privacy game.

It's very easy to allow yourself to feel just completely overwhelmed and trapped and surrounded on all sides. And you're smothered and there's no way out. And oh my God, even if I fix this one thing, then there's 10 other things over here I got to worry about. And that may be true, especially in the beginning. It may be true that you are leaking an amount of data that you had no idea about and you're just now realizing. But that's okay because once you realize it now, just like with anything else in life, you're not going to solve it all in one fell swoop.

You're not going to solve it all with one single tool. So it's going to take an effort. It's going to take focus. It's going to take multiple different tools in order to accomplish a goal. But it can be done and it all can be done one single step at a time. So what I always say is, each single step that you take matters immensely. But the thing that matters the most is the fact that you are taking a step. So don't allow yourself to be overwhelmed.

Take the step. Find your tools. There's plenty of information out here. There's plenty of people that are willing to help you. I know a lot of these communities that we're in, you can't find anywhere else in the world. You'd be hard pressed to find any group of people that are more willing to help than what we have around us. So make use of the resources around you and don't allow yourself to get so beat down and overwhelmed by this that you just kind of throw your hands up.

I've seen it happen too much. It's easy to get burnt out. So take it easy. Yeah, having that community around you is just, I don't know, there's nothing really more vital than that. I don't even care what tools you're using. If you have those people around you who can help to support you, who can help to recommend things, to give feedback, to provide just fresh ideas, that it's invaluable. So if nothing else that you get from this podcast, find a good community, get plugged in, find people that are like-minded that you can learn from and that you can just support each other.

That's really going to be key to more and more of us taking this journey to opting out of surveillance and really taking steps towards privacy personally and for the people around us to pull them into it is having that community that helps each other out along the way, that supports each other and really makes sure that we're all able to keep moving forward. Yeah, could not agree more. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, that's all I have for you, man. Thank you so much for coming on.

That was a great conversation. And I'm really excited to share this with the listeners. Yeah, man. I appreciate it. It's been a really good time. I really like what you're doing here. You know, I like the fact that it's not just another podcast. You know, you're not just putting something out there just for the sake of putting something out there. There's very useful information. And a lot of the characters and people that you're getting on here maybe don't get quite the spotlight that some others do, but they're doing excellent work.

And there's a lot of good stuff that's going to come out of this. So I really appreciate you doing this. And I know a lot of other people too. So thanks for having me on, man. I really appreciate it. Yeah, for sure. That's one of my favorite things about this is just having the chance to build a platform that I can give to others. I mean, yeah, I'm sharing the things that I think and sharing my thoughts, but I love being able to have on people like yourself that maybe don't get as much of a spotlight or maybe aren't in the same circles as I am, that kind of thing.

And it's great to give you a chance to share the insights that you have and just hear all the unique perspectives from people that we've talked about so far and opt-out and from you today. I really do enjoy that privilege. It's a great blessing to be able to go through that and chat with people like yourself. Yeah, absolutely, man. So we'll catch you around the old Matrix chats or Threemas or Telegrams. We're everywhere together. Yeah, we are. Seven different chat platforms and still connected on each one.

That's right. Absolutely. Thanks for coming on, dude. All right, man. Have a good one. Thanks for listening. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Opt Out. If you did, please take a moment and subscribe to the podcast. Or if you're already subscribed, share it with one friend or family member this week. As always, you can check out the links to our guest content and contact info, as well as links to all of the tools we discussed in today's episode in the show notes or at optoutpod.com.

Now get out there and opt out this week. This week's project to help you opt out is Knitter, a privacy-preserving front end for Twitter that allows you to view tweets, search, and subscribe to users on Twitter via RSS without the tracking and bloat, particularly JavaScript, of native Twitter. I use Knitter as the default when sharing Twitter links with people to protect their privacy. I run an instance for personal usage and for family and friends and subscribe to some of my favorite accounts via RSS to follow them closely.

If you haven't used it yet, I'd highly recommend checking it out either via an official instance or diverters instance below and start to transition to using it whenever possible.