00:00 we go. Hey, hey, hey. Anybody able to hear me now? Test, test, test, test, test. There we go. Now we should be good. Okay. Well, as I was saying, thank you everybody for jumping in. Like I said, this is going to be my first live stream. So a new thing for me. Thankful we got tons and tons of questions, suggestions. So we'll see how many we get through before I get. Very excited to do this. Thank you all for hanging, hanging in through the, just kind of the quiet time for opt out. As I've mentioned on Twitter and other platforms, step back a little bit to focus on other things, spend time with family, but really excited to jump back in. Have a lot of interesting topics I want to dive into in season three and really excited to kick off the next season by doing this Q&A and getting through some things that maybe we haven't covered before in the podcast, some of which we have, but a lot I think we haven't actually touched on. So really excited to dive into that. A couple quick kind of housekeeping notes. I'm not going through the questions in any particular order. It's hard to

kind of rank them by best or anything like that. So they're very loosely grouped into kind of categories, but we'll walk through those and we'll also take some time if any questions pop up in the live chat. You're welcome to drop questions in there and I'll get to them when there's kind of gaps in the other kind of pre-submitted questions. Should be fun. Well, we'll go ahead and get rolling here and we'll talk a little bit more about what's going to be happening in season three later on, but we'll go ahead and start diving into some questions and get into the reason why y'all are hanging out here. Hopefully we've bought a little bit of time for people to jump into the live stream, but since it's 105, we'll go ahead and start rolling through. Okay. So the questions will scroll on the bottom, but I was having a problem getting text to do what I wanted in OBS. So it may be a little bit hard to read, but I'll just go and read them out first before I jump into them. The first question is from D Martian on Twitter. And he said, how would you convince someone to start their privacy

journey who currently feels overwhelmed and helpless in the current surveillance landscape? I mean, I think this is one of the ones that we've covered a good bit on the podcast. A lot of guests bring this up. I bring it up with guests to kind of get their feedback because I think it's one of the hardest questions to answer in this space. And it really applies to anything that requires personal responsibility. But ultimately, I think the way that you convince someone is that they get burned. I think normally what I run into in my experience is it's hard to actually talk someone through the reasons and get that across unless they've had something happen to them personally, or they've seen somebody around them struggle because of privacy. They've been in an oppressive country, something like that. So the vast majority of the time I've found that people really need to either have something happen to them, generally something bad, which is unfortunate, or know somebody who's had some kind of a struggle or interaction where the lack of privacy has hurt them

in the past. For those who realize that need for privacy, but are just feeling overwhelmed, like you kind of keyed on in your question, Demartian, I think just harping on the idea of every step you take having tangible impact. It's definitely something where it can feel like those steps that you take aren't changing things right away. But each of those tools you're learning to use, each of those services you're disconnecting from, deleting accounts, even something like a password manager, each of those services where you're changing to a random password rather than the same one you use in all those other sites, it's continuing to just reduce your exposure down and give you more and more control over time.

So just kind of that idea that we talk about a lot of take it one step at a time, realize that it is a journey, and it's going to take some time. But each of those steps definitely does make a big difference. So yeah, thank you for that question, Demartian. And like I said, roughly going through in just kind of categories. So we're starting off with broader privacy questions. And then we actually had a lot more Bitcoin and Monero cryptocurrency questions than we had even privacy ones. So I was surprised at that, but excited to get into those as well. But definitely felt like we should start with the more broad personal privacy related ones. The next question is from Oceanus. He asks, what is my perspective on Google phone numbers to use on less sensitive accounts that require a phone number like utility bills, internet provider, that kind of thing? I think for this one, I mean, like these types of services, you generally already are giving over your ID. So they know who you are. So this specific scenario,

I don't think is a great use case for an anonymous phone number service like Silent.Link or using text verified or something like that. You certainly could. And the main advantage would be that if one of them has a leak or hack or something and the phone numbers get leaked, you wouldn't be as affected in that case. But since they already have your ID, this is one of those situations where like I personally have a personal phone number that is connected to my ID. I'm fine with that. And I use that on accounts that are connected with my ID just to have that single space. But I do think that the better alternative would be where possible, something like text verified, some sort of way that you can use different phone numbers so that when those inevitably get leaked or sold to a spam company or something like that, you're not having to deal with tons and tons of spam calls to your main phone number, which has happened to me. So it's definitely something I need to work on changing, but I don't think it's

necessarily something to go full anon. So I think something like Google Voice is a reasonable thing for that because you could quickly just disable or switch numbers if you need to, like if your phone number is leaked. So yeah, I think that's a good one. And I think there's a lot of nuance to what service you actually use for each of the things. And I like to judge it on, is this something that I want to remain anonymous or at least not directly linked to my ID? Or is it something that's already linked there? Next question is about Mastodon. And all the people who didn't submit names, I'll just call them Anon because it's easiest. So Anon asked, any progress with your Mastodon account plans? Things like bot integrations, cross posting between Twitter, things like that. I haven't dug into it anymore rather than just creating an account.

And the main reason is that I'm not sure that Mastodon fixes the problems that I have with Twitter necessarily. And it's not, I don't think, the ideal solution. So I think in a lot of ways it is better than Twitter. Obviously less surveillance, less restrictions, less trackers, less ads, that kind of thing, which is a big deal. But the federation with something like that is not, I don't think, a great model. Because the problem with something like Mastodon is if you're on a home server and they decide to ban you or limit you or anything like that, it's very hard to actually transfer your data around between federated servers.

Um, let me actually pause and just send out a tweet that we are live now, just to make sure that people know. Guys.

10:00 Definitely a noob at this, so I'm working on it. But back to Mastodon. So I think it's a reasonable solution, and I think if you don't have a specific following or platform on Twitter and you can follow people who give you the content you need, you can get that info on Mastodon. I think it can be a good solution. But I'm really waiting for Panquake, which is something that I talked with Sean O'Brien about Panquake in an early episode of Opt Out. And I'm just really excited for what they're building.

I think they're building the ideal middle ground between something like Twitter and something like Mastodon. And they're doing it in a way that's not just a Twitter clone, but they actually are building out useful features that put you in control of your feed, you in control of your data, that are privacy-preserving. They're taking very smart approaches. So my real focus right now is as long as Twitter is good or useful as a platform. It's not something I use as social media, but it's useful as a platform to me.

I'll keep using it, but as soon as Panquake is out, I'm going to try to start switching almost immediately. That's really the plan there. Let me get that link episode I did with Sean. Drop that link in chat there. So yeah, I definitely think that something like Panquake is a better solution, but for those who are already using Mastodon, I think it can be a great fit there. See any questions in chat yet, but just a reminder, if you have some questions or you want me to expand on something that I talk about, it's a great opportunity to go ahead and get that question.

And I would love for this to be a little bit more interactive. I mean, I know y'all don't have audio, but I would love to be able to hear a little bit more of what y'all are thinking about there. Text does not work. More text struggles. But this question is, oh, there we go. Just within the length. This question comes from Mr. Muffin. He's in the chat right now. Thanks, Mr. Muffin, for jumping in and jumping in as a moderator as well. But he asks, if privacy became so hard to do tomorrow because of new laws around the world, what would your motivational speech be to tell yourself in the mirror every day to keep fighting for the right to privacy?

I definitely think that that, I mean, the word fighting, I think is going to be more and more applicable. I don't think this is something where it's going to become easier to take back your privacy. In some ways, I mean, I think it depends on where you are in the world. But a lot of, I think while the privacy tools get better and more usable and more approachable, we'll see more attempts by the government to prevent their usage. Because ultimately, these things strip the governments of control over citizens and give freedom.

And that's not something that governments generally want. There are good governments, but they're more of the exception than the norm. So if there was something cataclysmic that really changed that kind of the atmosphere around privacy and made it much more difficult, I think the main thing for me would just be that if we don't have privacy, we don't have freedom. So, I mean, I don't want to live in a world where there is no freedom, where I'm not free to think what I want, to be who I want.

And I don't want to live in a world where other people don't have those freedoms either. And so if it's fighting for privacy or not having freedom, the choice is clear. It's not really a choice for me. And I don't think for most people it would be if they realized that that was the choice. And I think that already is the choice between fighting for privacy or not having freedom. But many people don't feel the lack of freedom yet. So I think, yeah, it would just be that it's worth it.

And even if I am not able to achieve the world that I want or the privacy personally, I think the biggest thing is that hopefully at least I will get some of the way towards helping others get there. And I think that was something from a presentation at Barham's in Bitcoin that really stuck with me. It was just the idea of even if, I think he called it death athletic, but even if in the middle of fighting for this thing, fighting for privacy, fighting for personal freedom, even like going to the extreme, I were to die, at least the goal would be that it would be a bridge to help others get there to a place that maybe I wasn't able to in my lifetime, etc.

So definitely still worth the fight, but that definitely is not maybe an optimistic thing to think about. But I think a very valuable one to consider what you would do if things became harder and not easier in the environment around you. Next question. Too long as well. I'll just read it out. I won't be able to have it scrolling on screen because it's a little too long. But I have free Robux said, let's say I'm a student and live in an economy that does not allow me to forward any funds to my privacy and security.

I can't buy subscriptions, can't buy a pixel phone or any new device. What are the things I can do to significantly improve my privacy and security with this in mind, starting from square one? Biggest thing for me, I think, is that thankfully many of the best privacy tools are free as in freedom and free as in beer. And because of that, you generally will be able to take drastic steps to improving your privacy and security without spending a dollar.

Obviously, I think if you have the means to spend money and to support companies and developers who are building great things, by all means do that. But obviously, not everyone has that ability. So for those who don't, like in the scenario where you're a student and you don't have any free funds, I think the most important things are just trying to take back the privacy you can with the devices you have. So like basically everyone will have a laptop and a smartphone or a desktop and a smartphone, something like that.

Even just a smartphone. Trying to take measures that will allow you to gain increased privacy there. And I know most people aren't going to flash something like CalyxOS or GrapheneOS or have a pixel. But even just doing things like changing the default browser on your smartphone. We'll just go on the assumption that you only have a smartphone. Things like changing the default browser to Brave browser or if you're on Android, something like MULL, M-U-L-L, which is a great privacy preserving Firefox fork.

It's very similar to Firefox. It basically is Firefox, but with some good defaults. So yeah, I think starting with that, starting with changing browser, maybe changing search engine. I have a blog post on my blog that walks through kind of how I would take the first steps. And the vast majority of those are actually free. Finding a community, free, obviously. Privacy preserving browser, free. Password manager, Bitwarden's free plans are excellent.

Privacy preserving email, ProtonMail has a free plan. Search engine, you can use the Google instance I host. You can use Brave Search. There are lots of good choices there. There's really a ton of options there. And I'll drop the link in the live stream as well to that blog post. But if you haven't read it, I think that's a good place to start. It can get you thinking about the ways you can do that. And the vast majority of steps you can take without spending any money.

So definitely a good option there, I think. Next question is from Barolo. And he asked on Twitter, Do you think having a standalone GPS driving app or device on your car is better privacy-wise than using Google Maps, Waze, Apple Maps, whatever the other options are? And definitely, I think it's a good option. I mean, I know people like Matt O'Dell advocate for using a GPS in your car. I mean, usually not like the one that's built into your car because it's usually just kind of garbage and age quickly.

But some kind of garment or something.

20:00 is great because obviously they could do triangulation because of the satellites you're connected to, but it's not tied to your account. Buy it with cash. It's not tied to your ID or anything like that. And it's offline, so there's no internet access. So at least it's not streaming data or anything like that. So I think those can be very, very good options. I still don't use them. I probably should, honestly. I just haven't taken the time to try one out. But I use Magic Earth still. And I found it really good. I think the main problem with many of the more privacy preserving navigation apps is that the search is really bad. I found that for really most of them outside of Google Maps or maybe Waze. The search is terrible. So normally what I do is I just search in my browser for the point of interest I want, the restaurant, the shop, whatever. And then just copy and paste the address into Magic Earth and navigate. It works well for me. In Magic Earth, you can download maps and then use it completely offline. So you can just disable network access

to the app on your phone if you're worried about the app specifically streaming data. So definitely a good option there. Lots of useful things. If I remember correctly, Magic Earth isn't free as an open source. But they have a good privacy preserving model. And it has worked really well for me. Jump to we have another one from Barolo, but we'll jump to someone else first before we dive into that one. So the next one is also too long to show on screen. Actually, we'll see if we can do just part of it. Yeah, we can do part of it. So this one's asked by CJ Bitcoin. Actually, we'll jump into the chat question first. I think this one was also submitted over text. So I'll just go ahead and remove it here. Just see it now. Oh, yeah, there we go. So that one was submitted as well. So we're going to clear that one out. But thanks for the question, spicy onion. I think it's a really good point. I mean, I have struggled with the back and forth of what should I do for Bitcoin? What should I tell people about Bitcoin? When obviously, I'm a privacy advocate first. And my focus is pulling in people

and helping them do good things for their personal privacy. And Bitcoin is very problematic for that. But I think the I don't know if I could say that I advocate for Bitcoin. If you follow me on Twitter or hear the other things that I talk about, hear me at conferences, stuff like that. Normally, I'm advocating for Monero and telling you if you have to use Bitcoin for some specific reason, like the merchants you shop at only accept Bitcoin, you prefer the potential store of value in Bitcoin more than Monero, things like that. If you have to use Bitcoin, then I generally would recommend doing it the right way. I'll only recommend that. I'm not going to tell you to use Bitcoin in the default manner. So normally what I'll tell people is, and I'll just keep it really simple here for time. But if you're going to use Bitcoin, use something like Samourai Wallet or Sparrow Wallet, which are two Bitcoin wallets that care about user privacy and that enable you to take back some of that privacy on chain. They're not the easiest to use, but it's possible.

And so I will advocate for that only. And basically, I will continually say, if you're going to use Bitcoin, you have to do it the right way. And if you can't do it the right way, you need to not use Bitcoin and use Monero. And so advocate, I don't know if there is the right word, but a lot of the research and content that I put out is around Bitcoin privacy because I'm hopeful that we can change things in Bitcoin. And I think Matt O'Dell has had a big impact on me to try to help me see that we can try to push Bitcoin to be what it needs to be because Bitcoin is going to gain adoption, is going to continue to gain market share, it's going to continue to gain people, whether we like it or not. And so if that's going to happen, let's do what we can to help improve it as much as we can and to make sure that anyone out there who's willing to listen will use it privately.

And Mr. Muffin in chat, I think, hits on a good point too, that in many scenarios, Bitcoin is still better than the default banking system for privacy. Not always, again, if you're buying KYC and sending directly from an exchange, that can be worse sometimes. But it certainly has advantages. So if you can't use Monero for some reason, I still think using Bitcoin and doing it privately is better than using regular kind of banking tools. But that can definitely be tricky.

So I guess in summary, I don't really advocate for Bitcoin, but I basically tell people use Monero. But if you can't use Monero or you specifically want to use Bitcoin, you need to learn how to use the tools right. And you need to know that it's a problematic and difficult thing, but it is something that can be conquered if you're willing to put the time in. Next up is a short one we can actually fit on screen. So this next one is from Dave on Twitter. And he asked, "What services are you still using, although they're not private? And then what triggered the privacy journey for you?"

So I guess two very separate questions. What service am I using that's not private? I mean, I think maybe the main one would be YouTube. I just still, I like a lot of content that's on YouTube, but I try to do it in a privacy preserving way as much as possible. So using NVIDIA, like the instance I host, I've been using something called Tube Archivist to actually automatically follow channels and download videos locally. And then I watch them locally. So at least there's no data about when I'm watching things, how long, none of the ads, none of the trackers, anything like that. But yeah, I think YouTube's probably one of the main ones. I mean, it's just, it's hard to get away from. I think it's a immensely valuable platform, but obviously problematic because Google runs it.

So it's, I think, trying to find, again, just like how I use Twitter, I'm trying to find the value out of a platform and not necessarily toss it out just because it's not perfectly private, but find the value, and then minimize the privacy costs associated by using good plugins, using privacy preserving front ends like NVIDIA for YouTube, doing things that can help to improve that. But I think probably YouTube is the main one there. As far as the privacy journey, I think I've touched on that a little bit, a little bit before in podcast episodes. But the main thing that kicked it off for me was just honestly getting into Monero is the reason why I started to care about personal privacy. Just that the people in the Monero community were really passionate about broader personal privacy and not just on-chain privacy and cryptocurrency privacy. And it helped to kind of get me thinking. And then ultimately reading Snowden's book and then watching something called Nothing to Hide, which is a documentary where they had a friend of theirs agree to let them track his phone and laptop and without

knowing anything about him, try to figure out as much as they possibly could about him and then tell him about it. And both of those combined really kind of opened my eyes to both the governmental surveillance and the big tech surveillance that's possible and really what that exposes about us to the world in ways that we don't realize, we're not really agreeing to, we don't understand what we're giving up. And we're not being told clearly the things that we're sacrificing, the intimacy we're sacrificing, the privacy we're sacrificing, and how much of ourselves we're losing in that kind of scenario. So yeah, I think those were the main ones that kind of helped get me rolling. But it was just kind of starting to understand that the government doesn't have my back when it comes to privacy and the big tech companies that I used and liked the products of didn't have my back either.

So starting to take some some steps there. Catching back up on YouTube chat. Thanks. Thanks, Duke. Yeah, I'm glad that the the Barums and Bitcoin talk was helpful. It's been cool to see that I think whenever someone starts to understand Monero and specifically when they just use it a few times and see how it can be helpful, they they gain a lot of value from it. And almost nobody who's actually done that has been like, no, I don't need Monero. I'd rather just use Bitcoin for everything or other things because it really just the power and its simplicity and the privacy that it brings, I think, are hard to avoid. So I've been glad to see a lot of positive responses to presentations and I've been doing chats that I've had with people there. And then cga almighty mentioned that I, yeah, I hosted an invidious instance. I have for a while, I hosted a good bit of resources.

Let me pull those up. All right. I host quite a few resources on my

30:00 On my website, I have on my blog specifically, I have links to all of that. But NVIDIA is one of the first ones that I started to host because it is, I think, a really, really valuable tool for accessing YouTube without giving up privacy and without all the trackers and invasive stuff there. I have tried Piped a little bit in the past. Running an instance used to be a lot more difficult, but it's been simplified a lot recently. So I'm going to circle back and try to run a Piped instance as well.

The UI, I think, is obviously a lot better than NVIDIA's. And I think it would be nice for people to have options. So I'll look into running a Piped instance as well, but I haven't done that yet. Okay, just a couple more questions on personal privacy, actually. This one from Prem Lee Barbosa. He asked, how can we trust the devices we use? Given the reach and methodologies of the intelligent state, it seems unreasonable to trust mass-manufactured electronics.

This is one I get asked a lot, especially about things like Pixel phones for Kallax OS and GrapheneOS. A lot of people have the fear that all of them are going to be backdoored because they're made by Google. They're made a company that is generally not one that cares about your personal privacy. But I think the thing to keep in mind is that governments, to keep people docile, they don't want people to be worrying about their personal privacy. They don't want people to think that the government is spying on them or watching the things that they do.

And if they were to do something like backdoor hardware, I mean, even like we saw with the Snowden revelations, a big part of that was that they had been intercepting and backdooring hardware. There was massive, massive backlash on that. And even backlash from the companies that maybe were working with them, maybe were unknowingly having their hardware backdoored. That's still kind of up in the air. But there was really large public outcry after that.

And so I think governments understand that the easiest way to get people is, and really not even just governments, but even like ad tech, big tech. They understand that they can just provide people services, apps, tools that they find useful and then use them to harvest data. And that's a lot easier than backdooring hardware. And generally will provide just as much information freely without the risk of public repercussions. And can do so in a much easier way as well, because they're not having to backdoor supply chain.

They're not having to have some secret handshake agreement with Google or somebody like that. So I think the idea that like all of our hardware is going to be backdoored is unlikely right now. And unlikely really at any point in the future, because the vast majority of people are more than willing to give up their data without a hardware backdoor. If that changes, maybe we'd be more concerned. But that hasn't been something that's been done at scale.

And I don't think that that's a main focus. Personal privacy related question. This is another one from Barolo. And they asked, if you can measure every action that you take as having an impact on improving privacy, what would you say had the biggest impact? And what would you say was the action that had the best benefit to difficulty ratio? Um, hmm. I think the biggest benefit to difficulty ratio. That's a hard one. I mean, I think like I talked about in the blog post I linked earlier, um, maybe privacy preserving browser, just because so much of what I do happens through a browser.

I mean, I even try to avoid apps as much as possible and use web apps. Um, oh yeah, great. I'm glad, I'm glad you pointed out the nothing to hide documentary, normal tacos, because that it's, it's a killer documentary. It was very helpful, um, to point out a lot of the things that we don't realize are being collected and what they can be used to tell about us. Um, but yeah, for benefit difficulty ratio, I think using a privacy preserving browser, I mean, switching to something like Brave from Google Chrome, which most people use, um, is relatively painless.

Um, but you get a lot of strong privacy protections out of it and strong security protections out of it. Um, so I think that was probably the biggest one. I mean, if we're just not going to talk about tech necessarily, but other steps, I mean, the reason I harp so much on joining a privacy loving community and the community that will be helpful. And encouraging and welcoming is that that will enable all of the tech stuff much more easily. Um, and generally joining a community is very easy.

Um, sometimes being a part of a community can be hard because, uh, it can be, can be tricky. And sometimes there's, um, always interactions that aren't fun and stuff like that. But, um, thankfully there's some really good communities. I mean, the community around opt out has been amazing. Um, I've had to do basically no moderation in our, our chat rooms. Um, people have been very friendly and welcoming. They're constantly sharing updates, articles, and information to help each other, um, stay up to date and, um, helping people who have questions.

Uh, so really I think maybe finding a community would be the best benefit difficulty ratio and the things that I've done. And like I mentioned, getting into Monero is how I got into privacy. Um, so ultimately the benefit of joining the Monero community was, it, it is the whole reason that I'm here, which is, is pretty crazy. Um, but I think that probably had the, the best ratio there. So that is all of the personal privacy related questions that I, I had from y'all.

Um, one more question in chat that I'll just go ahead and throw up, um, that we can touch on. From Franklin Farms, he said, isn't hardware already proven to have various backdoors though? Um, and he mentions the Intel management engine. Um, I mean, this is always a constant topic of debate in the privacy and security and open source communities. Um, a backdoor I think is an overstatement of the capabilities of these things. Um, are they potentially harmful?

Could they be used to cause security issues? That kind of thing? Yes. Um, like disabling Intel management engine is important because, um, it gives you more control over your computer and can lead to better security. So like the main device that I use, um, is a laptop from system 76 and it has core boot, which removes as much as possible of the Intel management engine. Um, you can't remove all of it, unfortunately, but removes the majority and, and prevents most of the functionality there.

Um, but it's not a backdoor in the sense that like Intel can't just suddenly start monitoring everything on a computer remotely. Um, someone could use it on the network maybe to potentially compromise your computer. But again, I think that's very, very unlikely. Um, so I think the fears are overblown, but if you can remove it without a headache and usage or that kind of thing, it's a hundred percent worth it. So that's why things like core boot, I think are very valuable.

Um, but it's not something that I would consider a backdoor in all hardware. And it's certainly not something that Intel or others are exploding at a, at a wide scale to try to, um, to watch hardware. And yeah, I mean, uh, P in the chat, I think makes a really good point that you should be more afraid of windows than Intel. I mean, like I was mentioning earlier, it's much less likely that your hardware is backdoored because it's a lot easier to just surveil you and get all the telemetry and information they want from the operating system.

You run the browser you use the apps you run rather than using some obscure hardware backdoor that, that they know they'd get tons of backlash over. So I think that's a good point. They can focus on the software because they know that's the easiest way to crack down and take a quick break and just check Twitter. See if anybody needs, needs anything. See if we need to retweet the announcement, stuff like, Hey, John Smith. I, if you want to post your question again, I'm the only moderator.

There's no one who can delete comments outside of me and I haven't deleted anything. So feel free to post a question again, but I haven't seen anything from you. Uh, okay. Yeah. So it looks like we're good on Twitter. Um, I'll keep rolling through these. Uh, well actually let's jump to some of the, uh, off the wall questions that I thought were, were interesting. Um, first off was one from Nate Bartram from The New Oil, which if you haven't checked out, um, his work or listen to surveillance report, which is a weekly privacy and security update podcast, um, that he does with Henry from Techlore.

Definitely go do that. Um, Nate is an absolutely, absolutely amazing person, um, and has made great content and is a big reason why I'm here doing what I'm doing as well. Um, but he asks, what's your favorite sandwich, which obviously is a very applicable, uh, privacy and cryptocurrency question. Um, and I'd have to say probably my favorite sandwich.

40:00 sandwich is probably something spicy. I mean, I love jalapeno peppers, buffalo chicken, stuff like that. So probably some sort of maybe buffalo chicken sandwich. I don't know. I don't think I've ever really thought about my favorite sandwich before. It's a good question though, Nate. I'll have to keep thinking about it and see if I come up with a better response by the end of the day. And then another kind of off the wall one from Peace and War on Twitter. He asked, what's your favorite TV series? I think the one that I, at least it's top of mind now, I don't watch a lot of TV. When I do, I like more dramatic shows. So I think the favorite right now, well, historically favorite is Band of Brothers from HBO. I'm a huge military history buff. So a really well done show on World War II is always going to be a winner. That's the best out there.

So Band of Brothers is probably the top all time. But outside of that, Peaky Blinders is really the only show that's modern that I watch and make sure to watch as soon as new seasons come out. Yeah, I think that's Peaky Blinders is my favorite right now. I just finished the sixth season when I was traveling out to Portugal for MoneroCon. So good to enjoy that. But let's see chat questions before we move on to next will be Bitcoin and Monero questions, which we have a lot of. So I'll try to run through those pretty quickly. Narwhal Tacos asked if I have a vid on setting up a secure laptop.

I don't, I don't really have videos right now. But the goal is to start doing that as time allows. Part of that will be hopefully something. It's a good idea to do something on my System76 laptop and talk a little bit about the way I set up Pop OS, which is the OS that I use, that kind of thing. Yeah, so nothing yet, but hopefully we'll get something in the future. Mr. Muffin, if you want to clarify your question, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking there, but I'll keep an eye out for it and circle back if you don't mind clarifying the specifics of what you're trying to say.

Gonzalo Kativa asks, would you use a hardware wallet? So I think generally hardware wallets are a useful way to store cryptocurrency. I mean, it's a good way to have better physical privacy, not physical privacy, physical security for your cryptocurrency when you're actually sending funds because you're able to sign with keys that are never on your primary device. So it's less likely that malware would cause problems or something would steal your keys or your seed. So I think there's a lot of value there. The biggest problem with hardware wallets is that generally when you buy them, you give out your name and address and buy a cryptocurrency hardware wallet, which just tells the world I have enough cryptocurrency to want to own a hardware wallet, which is not a good thing. So things, unique approaches like SeedSigner, I think are really, really fascinating. SeedSigner is a Bitcoin hardware wallet that you can assemble yourself with commodity hardware. It uses, I think a Raspberry Pi zero

as the base with the screen buttons. And that allows you to, okay. And that allows you to build the hardware wallet without ever linking your name and address to a hardware wallet itself, which I think is a really valuable, really valuable thing there. Okay. So John Smith looks like he got a guy's question and it looks like a URL was causing his, his question to be automatically deleted because it was definitely not me. So glad he was able to get that through. Um, so he asks Tor mobile browser is basically unworkable lately, especially on text verified. Um, I would assume the problem. Yeah. I would assume the problem that you're, you're having is because of the, the Tor attack. Um, there's a large distributed denial of service or DDoS attack going on against Tor. It has been for two weeks now, I think. Um, and that causes a lot of slowdowns, a lot of failures, a lot of problems. Um, so it's, it's been a tricky time relying on Tor. Um, it, this is a good reason I think to at least have a good

VPN as a backup. Um, obviously they sponsor the show, but IVPN, I am a huge fan of, um, they work very well. They're accountless. You can pay with Monero. Um, you never have to give out email address or anything like that. Um, and a good VPN, if you are, are a Tor user primarily when there are issues with the Tor network, at least you have something to fall back on. That's not just your ISP being able to see all your traffic. So we'd definitely recommend having a VPN as a backup for times like this. Um, if you don't already. Yeah. Gonzalo makes a good point that there's also sidekick, which the Monero team are working on for, for Monero, which would allow you to use a second phone as an offline signing device. Um, in a similar way to seed, uh, seed signer and that the device isn't obviously purpose built for storing cryptocurrency. So it's a really good, um, approach and I'm, I'm cool. I'm excited to see such a cool idea come to fruition. Um, it was funded. So I know that's being worked on and hopefully we'll be here sooner rather than later. Okay. And then Mr.

Muffin rephrased his question. Um, oh, okay. So I think he's mentioning misinformation and being, and using, or sorry, disinformation. Okay. Disinformation and using things like false aliases, false identities, false address, false name, all of that kind of, um, information. When you fill out an account, not just using randomly generated anonymous stuff, but trying to give them a false persona so that the actual information is not properly, they can't easily use that information to build profiles. And you're basically feeding them bad information intentionally to make their job of surveilling people harder. Um, I honestly haven't really dug into disinformation too much. Um, I'm more focused on using things like, like you're specifically talking about signing up for accounts online. It sounds like, and like in that scenario, I generally prefer the randomized approach of random, SimpleLogin alias, uh, random password, random username generated through Bitwarden. Um, and I think that that's the simpler approach

for most people. Disinformation takes a lot of extra time to actually go through and build those kinds of fake identities and come up with that information. Um, but, uh, yeah, I think generally I go with the random approach, but disinformation isn't, isn't interesting one. And, and it was one that I need to dig into more. So it's definitely not, definitely not an area of expertise for me. Uh, last chat question and then we'll start getting through some of the cryptocurrency questions that we had. Um, it's a good chance to dig into a little bit of, um, kind of the future plans for the show. Uh, so Duke asked, when is the new season of Opt Out Start? And I said, he's heard me on many other podcasts and, uh, Monero shows. So yeah, like I mentioned at the very beginning of this, um, have been taking a bit of a hiatus from Opt Out because I've had some exciting opportunities to do freelance writing. Um, I've just had a lot of family, personal stuff that, um, always takes priority as much as I love Opt Out. I love, I love you guys.

It's definitely come second after family for me. Um, and so there has been that hiatus, um, kicking off with this Q and A was really the goal to, to get things rolling again. Um, so season three will be starting soon. I'm starting to schedule, uh, all of the episodes that I want to do initially, but like I've mentioned in the past, season three is going to focus on more, more technical, mostly cryptocurrency topics, um, is probably the idea. I'll have some follow-up, uh, episodes that are similar to season two, just with people that I wasn't able to get scheduled in time to, to fit them into season two. So like I'm hoping to have someone from matrix on for season three. Um, but like I mentioned on Twitter, um, and for anyone who's here and does not follow on Twitter, if you want to keep up with the podcast, that's going to be the first place that I'm posting updates and information about future episodes, um, asking questions of people, uh, all, all of the things like that.

Um, but the, the, probably the first episode of season three, or maybe just a bonus episode, I don't know how I'm going to actually fit it in. Um, it will be something on a new Bitcoin concept called Fedimance, uh, which is this basically this idea that you can have a group of people holding a multi-sig wallet. Um, so they each have keys to that wallet, but they have to work together to generate transactions. And generally you'll have to, um, have a large portion of that group colluding to, um, transfer funds. So it's using this multi-sig group of people, um, to custody funds, but to do it in a way that, uh, uses a concept called Xiaomi and eCash. Um, and it's, it's a very old concept. I think 1992 was the first time it was actually implemented. Um, but basically what it means is that these custodians have no visibility in the transactions that happen within that, um, that Fedimint or Miniment, I'm not sure the language yet around it, but essentially it's a way that you can help to onboard users where you do give up custody of funds, which is the biggest

drawback. Um, but you gain strong privacy and you can still use things like the Lightning Network, um,

50:00 without having to give up privacy or deal with all of the user experience issues with Lightning. So that will be the kickoff. I'll be doing that with somebody called Eric Sirion and then Matt O'Dell. So very much excited to kick off with that, but then have some other good episodes planned. Really going to focus on things like building circular economies within cryptocurrency, which are absolutely vital. I'm going to be talking about Lightning Network, hopefully having some people who are working on improving Lightning privacy on, just to get into the details of what are the pros and cons of privacy within the Lightning Network on Bitcoin.

How useful can it be for us? And then past that, I'm open to suggestions, but I have a long list of topics that I want to get to. It's just a matter of scheduling everybody. So season three will not be weekly. I don't think it'll probably be maybe every two weeks, but a lot is going to just depend on being able to get people together, because for most of season three, I want to have at least two guests on for each episode to give some different viewpoints and different ideas.

So I'm really excited for that, but it will be a little bit different and it may not have the same clear cadence that I've been able to keep up with prior seasons. But yeah, that's a quick update on the podcast and plans there. Okay, now on to all of the cryptocurrency questions. So if I've already been going for 55 minutes, I'll probably keep going until maybe 1830 UTC. We'll see, but I'll go and start rolling through these. So the first one is one that I've been focusing on a lot lately in the Bitcoin space, and that is Lightning Network Privacy.

So a very quick explainer for people who aren't familiar with the Lightning Network. Basically what it is, is it's a way to send and receive Bitcoin using a second layer network, where you essentially open channels that you can use to pay back and forth between people. And there are a lot of different privacy concerns with Lightning Network versus layer one Bitcoin. Excuse me. So PC asked, what are the privacy concerns when receiving Lightning on your own sovereign Tor node?

Until we get improvements like Bolt 12 or route blinding, which are two things that are still being worked on. I'll go ahead and drop a link to my post that walks through all of the different kind of proposals that are going on for Bitcoin. Drop that real quick. Ultimately, the biggest problem with the Lightning Network is that when you're receiving funds, you have to give out the ID and the alias of your node. And so even if you're using Tor, that alias doesn't change, and that ID doesn't change, and your Tor address doesn't change.

So while they don't learn anything about necessarily the transactions that you're making within Lightning Network, when you receive funds, they learn about your node, which means they also learn about any announced channels that you have with your node. And each of those channels give them information about the actual layer one UTXOs that you have. So you reveal a lot of information about your node and your on-chain activity, and you also can allow different entities to link you across using different...

Like if you use three different exchanges that are all in no KYC, but you use your same Lightning node to withdraw, all three exchanges could talk to each other and know that you're the same entity withdrawing across the three exchanges. Or if you are... We'll just use an extreme example. If you're using a darknet market and you're receiving funds, and someone sends you funds on the darknet market, and then let's say law enforcement or something also goes through and purchases something and sends funds, they could link you back across darknet markets or other usage.

Or like if you used a KYC exchange in a darknet market, they could see that it's the same node, so that's the same person behind it. So there's a lot of problems with receiving right now. That theoretically will improve, but it's pretty problematic at the moment, unfortunately. Another good question was, What's the best way to obtain Monero without KYC? From Anon. And he said, I cannot afford to mine. So if you can't mine Monero, which the nice thing with mining Monero is that as long as you have a computer or even a smartphone, you can mine it, but you're not going to get rich doing so normally.

But the best way to obtain Monero without KYC generally is one of the show's sponsors. I mean, it's why I wanted them to sponsor, and they reached out, and I was happy to say yes, because LocalMonero, that's the name of the exchange, is an amazing peer-to-peer, no KYC Monero exchange. So you can go on there, you can buy Monero with cash, you can buy Monero with bank transfers, lots of different approaches and ways you can do it. But it's really the best one-stop shop for buying Monero.

And if you have Bitcoin, you can go on there as well and buy Monero directly for Bitcoin. So there's a lot of flexibility, and it's generally all non-KYC. I mean, some sellers can ask for KYC, which I would just say avoid them, but that's generally going to be the best place to get plugged in. Next one was from Bitcoin Dad, who I went on his podcast, I think it's called, I know it's called the Bitcoin Dad Pod. I went on his podcast maybe a month ago or something like that.

We talked a lot of Monero on there. But he asks, privacy and Bitcoin is complicated. Privacy and Monero is easy. But Monero doesn't hold value like Bitcoin when measured in Bitcoin terms. How do you reconcile these thoughts and work this into a narrative you can explain to normies? Yeah, this is an interesting one. I mean, I think a lot of it comes down to what do you need to get out of using cryptocurrency? If the main thing that you need is transacting in a censorship persistent way and in a way that preserves privacy, just use Monero.

It's by far the better option. If the main thing that you need is storing value and wealth preservation in cryptocurrency, Bitcoin does have the better long-term track record. There have been times when Monero has drastically outperformed Bitcoin, but generally Bitcoin does have the better record there. That, again, I don't think that past performance is indicative of future performance necessarily. So, maybe Monero will be better, but price isn't really something that I focus on as much because the more pressing need, in my opinion, is using Bitcoin or Monero to make payments that they don't want you to make and to preserve your privacy while doing it.

And Monero is the better tool for that. So, that's the main reason that I focus on Monero is that if you're going to use something to actually make transactions, Monero is just vastly superior to Bitcoin. But when you're trying to pitch someone on storing wealth, I still sometimes default, it depends on the person, but I still sometimes will focus on Bitcoin first because once they get the understanding of what Bitcoin is and what it can bring, it's a lot easier to explain Monero.

But I've been surprised that a lot of people, that if I start with Monero, that makes even more sense to them than using Bitcoin when they understand what both are. It seems clear, like, why would I want to use a transparent asset? Why would I want to use something that costs a lot to transact with? All these different things. So, yeah, thanks for the question, Bitcoin Dad. Going down the list here. Real quickly, I just want to say thank you to everybody who's tuning in.

I know we don't have a huge crowd, but it's first time doing a live stream. So, I was expecting basically no one. So, it's good to have a few of you on. And the recording of this will also be published on the podcast feed. So, you can listen back if you missed some of it or want to share it with people. It'll be published there. And then, obviously, the recording will also be live on YouTube afterwards. If you want to watch back or, again, share it with other people.

But thank you all for joining. And I'm really, really thankful for the live chat as well. It's nice having direct feedback on the things that I'm talking about. So, feel free to drop more questions and comments in there as we go along. Um, next question. Yeah. P said that, now that everyone got their tax bill from the last couple of years, they're a lot more receptive to learning about Monero. Definitely no, uh, no, no tax advice here. I, I think a lot of people value privacy more when they see the financial impacts that it could have.

And if you not talking about avoiding taxes, but if you realize that the government can use the lack of privacy to enforce tax collection, they can also use it to enforce other things in the future. Um, and so even if you're on board with taxes, which I'm not necessarily against taxes, uh, I'm not that extreme and I'm certainly not advising anyone to not pay their taxes. Um, but if you're in a country that's sliding towards authoritarianism, uh, and you see that they can use things like the transparency on Bitcoin or Ethereum to enforce tax collection, that should be a good warning sign that they can also use that to try and confiscate it.

They can use that to come knock on doors, et cetera. The next question is way too long for the text box. Um, so we'll just go ahead and place that real quick, but scrolling is killing me. Um, I promised the,

1:00:00 The stream quality and the text and everything will be better next time. But we're learning as we go here. The next question is, Bitcoin and Monero don't have native decentralized exchanges, but atomic swaps enable peer-to-peer or decentralized exchange between many chains. And this is a big thing that the Monero community has been funding and working on. Atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Monero, which essentially allow you to swap between the two assets in a trustless manner where you can swap your Monero for Bitcoin or vice versa and know that the other person cannot cheat you out of those funds.

You will get them and you never give up custody of funds. So you will either keep your Bitcoin or Monero or you'll swap for the other asset and nothing in between, which is a big step forward and a great tool for getting away from centralized exchanges that will generally have to have KYC and other things like that to be regulatory friendly. But yeah, next question. Continuing with that question. He asks if these atomic swap transactions are detectable on-chain.

We'll answer that. He has a couple other sub-questions around this. But basically, right now, atomic swaps are detectable on-chain, unfortunately. And that is due to Bitcoin. They're not detectable on the Monero side because Monero is fungible and the way that the transactions work are just like any others. But on the Bitcoin side, they are unfortunately detectable. With the new atomic swap approach that's being built out called Farcaster, that actually will make it so that if the atomic swap goes properly, it won't be detectable.

They're using something on the Bitcoin side called Taproot. They basically will hide the script that's used for making the atomic swap unless something goes wrong. And if the person on the Monero side tries to cheat the Bitcoin person, they basically have to reveal that script on-chain to resolve the dispute. So if it goes properly, they will have privacy on both sides. If not, then they'll have to reveal that and basically be just as bad as it is right now, not worse, but have the opportunity to be better.

So Farcaster, the kind of coming atomic swap protocol, will be an important step forward there. And then he also asks, if not, it seems like there could be a risk of acquiring a UTXO that is blacklisted or being actively monitored. That's definitely the biggest problem right now with atomic swaps. And again, it's due to the problems with Bitcoin, the problem with Bitcoin's fungibility. Because you don't know what the history of the Bitcoin you're acquiring is.

So if you're swapping Monero for Bitcoin, I would definitely recommend that you understand how to use tools like Samourai Wallet or Sparrow Wallet to be able to actually detach those UTXOs from their history moving forward so that the person you swapped with can't surveil you and the history isn't directly tied to those UTXOs if you try to spend them or swap them at other time or anything like that. It's definitely a concern. And there's no way to prevent it other than doing chain analysis, which you shouldn't be doing.

In theory, we could see this world where people will watch the Bitcoin that's being proposed for the swap and back out if it's not something that they're comfortable with the history on. But ultimately, yeah, like Caternity is saying in YouTube chat, you need to understand how to use Whirlpool, which is the way to coin join Bitcoin, which is a whole other topic. But it is a way to remove that history and detach the forward usage of the Bitcoin you gain from that from the past history.

So you need to understand that well if you're going from Monero to Bitcoin. The beauty is if you're swapping Bitcoin for Monero, you don't have to worry about history or blacklisted funds or tainted funds or anything like that because Monero is fungible. So that's another huge advantage that Monero has is you don't need to jump through tons of extra hoops to get fungible currency on the other side. And that's a big deal. The biggest potential problem with atomic swaps with Monero is not Monero, it's Bitcoin, which is annoying, but always how that works.

One question in chat, a related topic. I'm going to drop that in the feed. He also asked, do you think there's any other projects in crypto working on privacy that are actually worth paying attention to? Actually, before I get that, I'll get to another question that relates to what we were just talking about about taint. So Gonzalo says, CoinJoin doesn't untaint a UTXO though. If the CoinJoin protocol works properly, which the one in Samourai Wallet called Whirlpool does, it does detach the forward use of that UTXO from the past history.

So when you use it and if you use it properly and you don't reuse the toxic change, and again, it's Bitcoin, there's a lot of things that go into it, but if you do it properly and Samourai and Sparrow Wallet try to make sure that you do it properly, you will essentially remove the taint from those funds because there's not a deterministic way to link the UTXO on the other side with the tainted or blacklisted UTXO. So it is an effective way to do that for now.

That could change. There could be problems in the future. Who knows? But it is a way to remove taint at the moment. But back to the question. P said, Do you think there's any other projects in crypto working on privacy that are actually worth paying attention to? I think the... I don't know. There's not a ton that are super exciting for me. As much as Monero people hate it, I think Zcash is doing some really interesting things with transactional privacy.

I think a lot of the other aspects of the project are very poorly thought out and handled. So overall, I don't prefer it. But on the purely transactional side, they have some really interesting approaches. So I keep up with them and try to see what we can use to pull in from that into Monero or that kind of thing. But outside of that, there's not a ton. I mean, Firo, F-I-R-O, I keep up with. Ruben Yap, the kind of head of Firo right now, or kind of the community lead, is a great guy.

He's put out great content. And they do good work there. They've done some great research that's been applicable to Monero in the past and have been friendly with the community as well. But that's probably about it. There's some interesting stuff on Ethereum, but it's just not very usable. And most people shoot themselves in the foot. So it's certainly not something I wouldn't recommend. Let's see. So there's some more conversation about the tainted UTXOs.

So Gonzalo says you're just swapping a UTXO for another one when you mix. And that's actually not true. So there is a way to do Bitcoin privacy, which I don't think it's a useful way, called CoinSwap, which is a new thing that's being worked on. And all that does is literally swap your UTXO for another person's. And that does not remove taint. That just means that the other person gets the tainted funds that you're swapping with them. So that is, I don't think, a useful approach to things.

It can be used to break some heuristics, but ultimately you're just getting someone else's UTXO that you don't know where it's from, which is the same problem you have in Atomic Swaps. But yeah, with CoinJoin itself, with, again, a properly working protocol like Whirlpool, you're not just swapping a UTXO for another one. You're entering a mix and you're making that UTXO on the input side and on the output side completely disconnected. There's no way to connect between the input and the output or to connect between any other of the inputs, someone else's UTXO, maybe it's also blacklisted, maybe not, to one of the outputs.

So you're not just swapping UTXOs. You're essentially creating a transaction in such a way that you break the deterministic links. And there's no way for someone looking on chain to say, this fund is tied to this one. And because you get that plausible deniability and that breaking of deterministic links, it's usually good enough to not have to worry about taint at that point. Obviously, like VDO mentions, CoinJoin itself can be considered taint.

So this has been a problem in the past, specifically with Wasabi Wallet, where exchanges will refuse funds, confiscate funds, etc. because the user used Wasabi Wallet. And so it can be considered taint, which is a problem. If the protocol works properly, like Whirlpool, they can't see history. So they either have to just say, all Whirlpool funds count as tainted, so we're not going to accept them, or they say, none of them do. Similar to Monero, you either accept all or nothing.

But that is the biggest problem with CoinJoin is it's apparent on chain that a CoinJoin transaction happened. It's clear if they know your UTXO going in, they can see clearly that you did a CoinJoin. They can't connect it to the output, but they can see that you did that. So that's one of the big problems with privacy on Bitcoin is that when you try to achieve privacy, it's transparent to anyone who is watching your UTXOs before that, which is a really big problem.

And there's not a way around that right now within Bitcoin. Skip a few here. There's a good question. I think it's going to be too long to fit into the text box. Yeah. Fit a portion of it. So Anand said, does Monero's ASIC resistant mining create a lot of money?

1:10:00 a risk that a three-letter agency or special interest group could rent a bunch of servers and disrupt the network? And he asks, if so, what are the risks? So ultimately, yes. I mean, the only real problem with ASIC resistance, like in Monero, which for anyone who doesn't know, that basically means that in Monero, the developers have built a protocol so that anyone can mine Monero. If you have a computer, a smartphone, whatever, you can mine Monero in a reasonable way. In Bitcoin, it's dominated by something called an ASIC or an application specific integrated circuit, which means it's a CPU. You can think of it like a CPU built to do one specific thing. And it does that incredibly well. And so since you can't mine Bitcoin with a CPU or anything like that, you have to buy special hardware. And the main advantage of having to buy special hardware is if someone wants to attack the network, they have to buy that specialized hardware to be able to do so. They can't just rent out an AWS data center or something like that to try and attack

the network. They have to get that specialized hardware and set it up or rent it from someone else or that kind of thing. Like there are ways to do it, but it is more difficult. But with Monero, since it's ASIC resistant, general compute like in AWS and Google Cloud and data centers, supercomputers, etc., they could be leveraged to perform an attack against Monero. And that is definitely, it's a concern. It's a potential problem. They could do things like mine empty blocks so you can transact. If they were big enough, they could try to double spend funds. There's a lot of possibilities there. So that is a problem. But the other beautiful thing of ASIC resistance is if that started to happen, literally anyone with a computer could join the fight and start mining Monero to help push back against that attack. Whereas if an attacker in Bitcoin had enough ASICs to attack Bitcoin, you can't just go buy an ASIC at your local store. And most people certainly don't have an ASIC just lying around at home unused. So actually defending against that attack would be incredibly difficult

and would take a lot longer. Whereas in Monero, we could try to get people who don't normally use Monero to just start mining on their computer to help provide honest hash rate and fight that attack. So that's one of the advantages there. But there definitely is some risk of a state-sponsored attack using compute power that's run by AWS, Google, that kind of thing. So Gonzalo asked more about CoinJoin. He said, if you have a blacklisted UTXO, you CoinJoin and that's it.

Yes, in theory. Again, if you do it correctly and use the proper tool like Samourai Wallet, you can remove taint from those funds. But that is pretty difficult to do. It's time consuming, it costs fees, etc. But that is the beauty of having a useful tool like Samourai Wallet or Sparrow Wallet on Bitcoin is that you can actually achieve some privacy and you can remove past history from funds. So if you have funds that are blacklisted or you have to use Bitcoin for some reason, you need to use those tools because then you can actually do these things that give you what I consider the bare level privacy that you should want out of something like that.

One more good question here. It's a good beginner one for Monero. John Smith asks, can you explain the difference between the Monero addresses that start with an 8 versus the ones that start with a 4? And do you need to use a new 8 address each time? And then one more sub-question that we'll get to after that. But quick drink for that. So in Monero, this will change in the future. There's some really interesting advances happening there. And there was a really good presentation at MoneroCon in Lisbon by Justin Berman on the kind of coming changes to addresses.

But for right now within Monero, there are two main types of addresses. There are more, but we'll just focus on those, which are your primary address is normally the one that starts with a 4 is called the primary address or main address. And then sub-addresses, which are the ones that start with an 8. For each seed phrase, you only have one primary address. You only have one address that starts with a 4. But for each seed phrase, you can generate essentially infinite sub-addresses.

The beautiful thing with Monero privacy is that if you give someone your address, they can't gain any information on-chain about it. So if I gave you my Monero primary address, you couldn't see any of the transactions I've received, sent, anything like that, because Monero uses something called one-time addresses or stealth addresses, so that the addresses actually on-chain are completely disconnected and unable to be linked back to that address. But, and this is the reason that I advocate for people not to reuse addresses and not to use their primary address. And again, this is something that will change, but for right now, I recommend you using a new sub-address, that address that starts with an 8.

Generate a new one at least for every entity you transact with. So if you receive funds from somebody for each person at least, or just every time you receive, it can be easier to just do that, but at least for each person, generate a new sub-address. And the main reason for that is just so that if they collude with someone else, like say you use three or four different exchanges that are no KYC, but if you use the same address, they could talk and they could know that you're the same entity.

So again, they don't learn any on-chain information about you. They can't look up transactions or anything like that. But they can collude to say, okay, this is the same person withdrawing Monero these times. And then they can start to use that to try to gain some off-chain information about you. But if you used a new sub-address with each one, there's no way for them to know that you're the same entity because those sub-addresses can't be linked back together and they still can't see any of the on-chain activity. So generally my recommendation is use a new sub-address at least per entity you transact with, if not per transaction. And I'm hoping to push more wallets to start doing automatically rotating sub-addresses and using a new one every time. But once we have this new address format, which is called JamTest, it's a whole nother topic. But once we have that, probably the default in wallets will be just using a new address every time, which will be a good thing.

And there's a sub-question where he said, if you're using external node, does that node see anything about addresses? So I have a good article about using remote node in Monero that I'll go ahead and post, which will really get into the nitty gritty details of that. But the short answer is, if you use a remote node, they can see when you send a transaction and they can see the transaction ID of those transactions. But because of Monero's strong on-chain privacy, they can't see addresses, they can't see amounts, they can't see the true spins, they can't see who the funds are going to, anything like that. But they can still see the timing of those transactions, which can be useful for someone who's trying to surveil you. So it is important if you can run your own node. There's some other attacks that can be done by remote nodes, but ultimately, it's just best to run your own node to stay as safe as possible. But there is very little that they can learn about you. But dig into the article if you want to want to learn more about that, John. Let's see other questions.

I'll be keeping going for about 10 more minutes and then I'll close out here. This is an interesting one because I just did a presentation on this at MoneroCon in Portugal. But save, invest, repeat asked, do you think we can have something like the Lightning Network, which I talked about earlier on this, on the Q&A? Do you think we can have something like the Lightning Network on Monero as the transactions take quite a lot of time, which is hard if you're trying to pay someone quickly? And then he also asked someone working on it.

So there's a lot to get into here. And I don't think my presentation is live on YouTube or not yet. You can try to look it up, MoneroCon, Seth For Privacy. It's Monero, K-O-N. If it is, that will tell you everything about this. But the very short answer is we can have something like the Lightning Network within Monero. I would ideally like to see it be less complex than the Lightning Network for Bitcoin and more focused on opening a channel directly to merchants and people you pay or receive money from frequently.

So like I use coin cards all the time. So I would open a channel with coin cards and just transact within that channel rather than making long-term transactions. And that gives me better privacy. That gives me lower fees, zero fees, actually. And it also has that benefit of instant finality. Finality is a complex topic, but it is in a way instantly their funds when I send that transaction rather than on-chain. Theoretically, you need to wait two minutes or more before you give out the gift card or whatever you're purchasing.

So it definitely is possible. People are working on it. There's been really good research on the topic by external researchers who aren't technically associated with Monero and even some very recent research. So there are people working on that and it's a focus of mine. It's something that I'm helping to drive. So keep an eye out for the presentation I made at MoneroCon. Should be posted on YouTube on the Monero Community Work Group channel sooner rather than later if it's not already up.

Okay.

1:20:00 Nate from The New Oil says, your fireside chat is up, but not your solo talk. So yeah, hopefully the solo talk will be up soon. Definitely keep an eye out for that because I think it's a fascinating topic within Monero. But thanks for pointing that out, New Oil. On the topic, I think this one's pretty well related. So we'll roll with this one next. Cavalero asks, can a cryptocurrency that's not private at the base layer, such as Bitcoin, become private with further developments?

And I assume he means like layer two networks, something like the Lightning Network. Or would those inherit the transparency and other characteristics? Ultimately, this is the main problem with the Lightning Network right now, is that the privacy is problematic because of the on-chain privacy issues in Bitcoin. So like within the Lightning Network, when you, like I was talking about earlier, if you're receiving funds, like if you send me your node ID so I can pay you, or you send me an invoice so I can pay you, I can see all of the UTXOs on-chain that you use to fund those channels.

And I can start to figure out information about what you've done on-chain. I can figure out amounts, where you've spent funds. Yeah. Basically, all of the problems at layer one bubble up to layer two and cause a lot of the privacy problems at layer two. So it's very hard to fix privacy issues at upper layers when there are problems at the base layer. Because in cryptocurrency, you have to settle at the base layer always in some way. And so if that base layer is not private, like in Bitcoin, you have problems.

And that's why something like the Lightning Network on Monero is really interesting to me because we can inherit the good privacy and the good scaling and the low fees from the base layer and build a layer two like Lightning Network that would not have the same problems that Bitcoins does. So it is very hard to fix things there. Off-topic question in the chat from New Oil. I'll just go ahead and post this. He just asked, what mic am I using? So this is the Shure MV7.

That's S-H-U-R-E M-V as in Victor, 7. It's a really high quality USB mic. I just wanted something simple to start with. This is USB-C. You can control a lot of the functionality on the computer itself and you don't have to have any kind of mixer or anything like that to actually handle the audio or change it. So I like the simplicity. It's also easier to travel with and use. But audio quality is good. It's probably not ideal right now because I'm trying to use it far away from my mouth because I'm talking for a long time and interacting with the screen.

So it's easier to keep it away. But I've enjoyed it so far and the audio quality is solid. Let's see. Drink it down a little bit and make it fit. So GoneBatFire asked, what's your opinion on CryptoBank Physical Notes? It says that he thinks they could be useful for regions that have poor and imminent access to the internet or maybe in places with no internet at all. I'll spill it water. So there's actually a really interesting concept called the OpenDime, which is a Bitcoin hardware wallet of sorts that you can use to put funds and then transfer by just giving it to someone and they have the funds that are on it.

You can see them right here a little bit. Focusing great. But you can look these up. They're called OpenDime. And it's kind of taking that concept of physical notes and making it into a more Bitcoin-focused topic. So I think it can be really useful. It's very niche. I think a lot of the benefits of something like Monero are because it's digital. So you don't have to carry around something physical to spend it. But I think something like this is really helpful to have in those scenarios to have.

Like when you travel, maybe you don't want to keep your whole wallet or you don't want to have the app installed or something like that. But you could keep five OpenDimes or something like that with half of Monero each and use those to be able to give to people, give as gifts, things like that. So I think there is a lot of value. But I think leaning on the digital aspects will most of the time be the best focus because most places in the world have at least smartphones with Internet access.

I mean, even the middle of Africa have smartphones with Internet access. So if we can focus on that, I think it's more helpful. But there is some use for some sort of way to physically transact. And you actually gain privacy when you do that, too, because you're not revealing that UTXO or output or whatever is swapping hands on chain. There's no record of it there, but it's owned by a new person now. So there are some privacy benefits as well. See if this one will fix somehow.

I did take away some of the question to fit it in. But the question is about the Canadian truckers. And just try to set aside politics for this response. I'm not going to get into whether or not what they were doing was right or their approach. But the case study itself is very useful for us. But the question is, how would you have advised both the donors and the Canadian truckers handle that situation? A quick refresher. Basically, there were truckers within Canada that were protesting a vaccine mandate.

And they were trying to raise funds through platforms like GoFundMe. And those platforms essentially stole the money or, in some cases, gave it back to the people who had donated. But because it was that centralized platform, the companies were able to be pressured into not giving any of the funds to the people raising funds. So, again, set politics aside. Bitcoin ended up being used. It ended up being used, unfortunately, very poorly. They were able to collect donations.

And they were able to give that Bitcoin to truckers. But, unfortunately, all of the funds were known because they used a static address within the Bitcoin. So, all of the funds were known, were blacklisted, and were marked as tainted. So, no one was able to send them to, like, an exchange and sell them or anything like that. So, getting back to the question. Anon asked, how should the donors have purchased Bitcoin or Monero? How should they have sent it to the truckers?

What wallet should the truckers have used? And how should they have cashed out? So, a lot to get into. I'll try to give a quick answer. We'll probably wrap up with this question. If there's any more in chat. Oh, looks like I missed one of Mr. Muffin. Drop it again. My chat is limited in how much history I can see. But happy to answer it if you want to drop the question again. So, how should they have handled the situation? I think, ultimately, the main thing that should have changed is they should have used Monero.

Ultimately, the truckers were not technically proficient. They didn't even know what Bitcoin was, much less how to use it. So, using something like Monero means that even if they have no idea how it works, they're going to gain strong on-chain privacy. It also would have simplified raising funds privately because in Monero, they could have still used a static address and donors could have sent Monero in without anyone being able to see any information about transactions received to that address.

So, that's one of the huge, huge and most useful aspects of Monero is that those addresses are not linkable on-chain. So, they could have used a static address and still preserved the privacy of both donors and the people who are collecting donations. Now, as for how people who are donating should have purchased something, in this case, I'll just say Monero. I mean, always the best is non-KYC. But even if they had used a KYC exchange and withdrawn to their own wallet before sending, it would have been enough.

The exchange could have not known that they sent anything to the Canadian truckers. So, again, Monero would have really protected them well. Yeah, Monero ultimately would have solved those problems. The main one that's hard to solve, and this is one that Monero wouldn't just natively solve, is how do they actually use it to buy things that they need? So, again, these were truckers. They needed gas. They needed food. They needed just basic essentials, which, unfortunately, there's not a lot of places you can actually spend Bitcoin or Monero in person.

So, I think the best thing in this scenario probably would have been either not to give them Bitcoin or Monero, but to, yeah, Duke just hit it on the head in the YouTube chat, but to actually give them gift cards. Like, they needed basic things. They didn't need cryptocurrency to store value in. They needed a way to be able to get gas, get food, etc. So, ultimately, I think, like, the people accepting their donations probably should have just bought gift cards through something like coin cards and handed out the gift cards themselves, and then maybe helped the truckers understand how to set up a Monero wallet and then accept donations directly.

So, if people did want to give Monero directly to them, they could have still done it. But something like coin cards, etc. would have been a better way so they could actually buy the things that they needed. Yeah, I think that's probably the best way. if we had a stronger circular economy and you

1:30:00 could have actually spent Monero or Bitcoin on gas. That would be a different story. But really, in either case, whether it was Bitcoin or Monero, you would have had to ultimately get gift cards. So either you would give the Bitcoin or Monero to the truckers, and then they buy gift cards themselves, which then you have to teach them that. There's a lot of problems there. But ultimately, you just give them gift cards directly. Would have been the better approach, I think.

Saturnity asked, he said, they use multisig for the donations. Is that really available on Monero right now? So multisig is available on Monero. It was available when this happened. It's pretty bad right now. It's very close to being fixed, basically, with this network upgrade. All of the core issues, the security issues, the bugs, the user interface are going to be fixed. So it would have been a lot easier after this network upgrade. But before, they could have done multisig as well.

It's possible. It just would have been more complex. And if one of the people accepting donations was malicious, there are ways that they could have tried to screw with it. But yeah, as IFH says in chat, all of this comes down to, if we want these tools to be usable in adversarial scenarios, like the Freedom Convoy, the Canadian truckers we're in, we have to have a circular or parallel economy. Because if we can't actually spend this stuff anywhere, it so greatly complicates actually benefiting from the tools.

So it's really important that you try to work with merchants, try to get the people that you enjoy buying things from, the services you use, etc., to accept Bitcoin and Monero directly. And obviously, my focus is Monero, but even Bitcoin would be better than not having it. Try to help build these economies yourselves. Sell things for Bitcoin and Monero yourself. Do work for Bitcoin and Monero. Lots of ways to help to drive these things. And the more people doing it, the more people actively buying and selling, the more services you're using Bitcoin and Monero to purchase, it creates this snowball effect that will continually build that up and make these tools much more useful in the real world and not just in a hypothetical world.

Because most people don't just need to be able to hold funds, they need to be able to buy things. And especially in scenarios like this. So yeah, I think building those circular and parallel economies are super, super important. And I'll drop real quick a blog post form of a talk that I gave on building circular economies. I think it's very relevant to this. Yeah, as Duke said, Monero could definitely solve this with a circular economy. But without that, you'd have the same problem as Bitcoin.

But circular economy is certainly the answer to these things being useful in these scenarios. Duke also asked about onboarding merchants with Monero. I don't know. This is something I'm trying to get better with. I haven't done a great job. I have a... I'll have to look it up later. But if you go on my GitHub, which I'm Seth For Privacy on GitHub, all one word, I have a template that I made in a gist that I've used for talking to merchants about accepting Monero that I'll use in like an email or chat or whatever to be able to talk to them that has like resources linked, that kind of thing.

But if they're already accepting Bitcoin, it's generally a fairly easy sell to get them to accept Monero. And you can use things like coin cards as an example of when you accept Monero, you actually get a lot more people wanting to buy and you get a lot of free publicity because we like to talk about people accepting Monero and seeing wide usage. So you'll get a lot of people talking about it just by accepting it. So I think right now, I'm mainly talking about you can avoid credit card processing fees.

You can get the funds directly, immediately. And you can gain privacy with Monero when doing that. But it is a tricky sell if they're not using cryptocurrency at all to actually onboard them all the way to Monero. And that's something I'm trying to get better at. And if anyone has good tips or tricks on that, I'm all ears for sure. Let's see if there's any other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to. That's probably about it. We have some really good ones.

Oh, there is one self-hosting question, which since that's the only self-hosting one, it's worth getting to. So we'll close out with this one, which comes from Nate, which I think is different from The New Oil, Nate. But Nate says, as someone who lives in a place with unreliable power, I'm considering moving my self-hosting to hosting with a VPS or a virtual private server. What considerations would you have when deciding what can be safely moved to a VPS and what should definitely stay at home?

So this is something I've gone back and forth on a lot. And I do both self-hosting at home and on a VPS. So like all the services that are run publicly, I'll run on a, it's technically not a VPS. It's a dedicated computer hosted by Hetzner, but it is similar in that they have access to the hardware. They could monitor what I'm doing. They could take that. Oh, it was New Oil as well. Okay. Yeah. I think for most things, hosting them on a VPS is a perfectly reasonable approach for the normal person.

If you don't have a fear of being targeted by the VPS provider, which there's very, very, very, very few people should be worried about that. And if that's not in your threat model, where you think that the VPS will be wanting to specifically see what you're doing on there or mess with your data, that kind of thing. I think a VPS is really valuable for hosting the vast majority of things. The only thing I would say is if you're storing very personal information, like personal photos, private documents, stuff like that, you should use some sort of full disk encryption.

Depending on what service you're hosting, there's a lot of different possible answers. If it's just Linux, you could try to use something like Lux, L-U-K-S. Different VPS providers may or may not offer that. But ultimately try to make sure that if there's very sensitive data stored on there, just to make sure an admin doesn't go rogue or something, you use encryption in some way or another. Like if you're hosting Nextcloud, they have experimental encryption you can enable so that if someone just like yanks the hard drive from the VPS and tries to steal data, they won't be able to.

That doesn't prevent them from when everything's up and running, grabbing a keyboard and mouse and plugging in and messing with it. So there's always some risk. But I think as long as you're not worried about targeted surveillance or targeted attacks, it's generally a really good approach. Even if you're doing basic sensitive data, I don't really have a problem with it. But especially if you're just hosting things like NVIDIA, Google, Circs, all of those things that are like privacy preserving, front ends or tools where you're not actually really storing data there, it would just be maybe like logs.

I think a VPS is more than enough and a really great solution for that. So I think most stuff could go there. But the things that I choose to keep at home, and I have reliable power, I have reliable internet, I have a NAS, a network attached storage that I use for things like personal photos, personal documents, stuff that I don't want to hand off to someone else. I still use full disk encryption on that. But I use that because I both, it's my day job, so I'm very comfortable with actually managing it.

But also I had the money and I have the internet, I have the power to be able to do it. I see your response to that. You don't want them snooping on Plex for reasons I'm sure I can guess. Yeah. I mean, yeah, again, I think there is very little chance that a well-known VPS provider is going to be looking at what you're doing on disk. As long as you're not doing something blatantly illegal and harmful to them. Like if you're using VPS to torrent specifically, they might be mad because the owners of that digital media or whatever could go to the VPS provider and say, someone's torrenting on your network, and they'll find it and they'll shut it down.

But even if you were hosting like Plex movies that you've definitely ripped from DVDs and Blu-rays that you own, I doubt that would be a problem, honestly. And yeah, that's not as much of a concern for me. But if you can host at home, I think that's always the preference. And if you have reliable internet and power, you can get really good, cheap solutions like old Lenovo laptops, old Lenovo Ultra Small Form Factor, like mini PCs that are great for using for that kind of thing.

And then just getting like a terabyte SSD or something, you can roll with that. But if you don't have reliable power, all of that's going to be problematic, really. So a VPS, I think, is a great option there. A couple more chat questions, and then we'll close out here. But I'm glad there's so many people jumping in with good questions. So hopefully I pronounced this right. If not, I'm very sorry. But Bashar in chat said, noob question, I know Bitcoin very well, but no info on Monero.

Yes, if I can explain it briefly. So yeah, basically, if you understand Bitcoin well, you'll understand the vast majority of what Monero is. But very similarly, it's proof of work, mined. It has a fair issuance. There was no pre-mine or anything like that. No one with ability to print it. It's decentralized. It has a verifiable ledger, just like Bitcoin. It's very similar to it.

1:40:00 those ways. But the main differences are it is private by default. So no matter what wallet you use, no matter how you approach it, you're going to gain strong on-chain privacy. It does that in a holistic way by three different methods. One of those is, I talked about them earlier, but one-time addresses or stealth addresses, which means that the addresses you actually see in your wallet are never on-chain. So no one can look up an address and see the activity associated with it. Another is something called ring signatures, which are used so that when you actually spend funds, the on-chain transaction, you can't tell which input is actually being spent in that transaction.

And then the third thing is something called confidential transactions or confidential amounts, I think is a better name. And that means that none of the amounts are visible on-chain. So if I send you one Monero, not only can you not see that it's one Monero, you just see some Monero. You also can't see which input I actually spent. So you can't see any of the past history. And you can't see my addresses that I'm sending from, and I can't see your address on- well, I could see it as I'm the one sending to it, but no one else looking at the transaction could see that transaction address. So the main thing is transactional privacy is a huge change.

And that also brings fungibility, which means that any Monero is the same as any other Monero because there's no history. And another main difference is, I don't know, there are some big differences. I guess two other main ones we'll quickly hit on. One is that Monero does not have a fixed supply or it doesn't have an arbitrarily hard capped supply. So Bitcoin has 21 million ever. In Monero, there are 18.4 million in the defined supply, but there's then something called the tail emission, which we actually, uh, this was the original idea, but it was set for a time far in the future back then, which actually just happened to be, um, June 8th of this year. So just, just under a month ago, um, the tail emission kicked in, which basically means that every block from now forever, 0.6 XMR will be emitted. Um, and this does a lot of things, but the biggest thing is it means that there will always be a lower bound of network security because miners don't have to rely on transaction fees necessarily. They can trust that there's always that 0.6 XMR, which is, is very important.

Um, and then the other main difference is that unlike Bitcoin, we talked about this earlier, Monero is not mined with ASICs. It's mined with commodity hardware. So you can mine Monero with a CPU or GPU. Um, and that's the most effective hardware is essentially an AMD Ryzen CPU is the most effective hardware for Monero, but any CPU is able to mine it quite well. Um, so those are some of the main differences. There's lots of good, uh, information about their basics, lots of other, uh, podcasts I've gone on and given a walkthrough of it. Um, but that should be a good intro to Monero. Yeah. So someone mentioned to The New Oil, get a UPS. I do have a UPS cause I had some problems with, um, power outages in the past where we just get blips, but when you have a NAS, it's a pain in the butt. Um, and so I did get a UPS. I put my NAS on that and I put my, uh, router and modem on that so that if there's just blips or short outages, I can maintain internet. I have time to shut down the NAS properly. Um, all that sort of thing. So it's definitely worth the purchase

if you have other hardware. Um, and they're not too expensive. I want to say like 80 or $90 was my UPS, uh, which works well there. So, um, next question is from Cody. He asked, what's your opinion of brave search? Um, I've been using it for the last few months actually. Um, and I really like it. I think it's the best option right now, honestly. Um, hard to tell what the future will be of it. Uh, and I've had some weird issues lately with them making me go through, um, basically like robot detection just cause I'm using a VPN. So hopefully that won't continue, but I think it's the best centralized option. If you want to host something yourself, uh, I think Google or Circs are great options as well, but for the, for an unhosted version, or a centralized version, I think brave is the best tool out there today. Um, I've gotten away from DuckDuckGo cause I don't like their approach and I don't like their search results anyways. Um, start page is reasonable, but I wanted to use a search engine that, that doesn't just rely on

something else for the results, but actually are building the index themselves, which brave does. So, uh, I definitely recommend trying it out. I've been, been enjoying it a lot. Okay. Um, I think we will go ahead and wrap up there. Uh, it's a good hour and 45 minutes stream. So, um, thank you to everyone for jumping on. Um, it's been a blast. I've never done anything live like this, especially not with live chat. So have really enjoyed, um, being able to chat with you all, walk through a ton of questions. I love that so many people submitted questions beforehand. Um, it's really encouraging that people are willing to take that time to submit a question and want to get the response. Um, so very thankful for that. Thankful for everybody who tuned in, uh, on the live stream.

Um, I'll put the regular sponsor segment in the, um, recording that goes on the podcast feed, but just want to, and this isn't sponsored, they're not paying me to do this, but just want to say a thank you to the sponsors of OptOut, um, Cake Wallet, LocalMonero, and IVPN. Um, just all of them have been amazing. They've been amazing throughout this hiatus that I've taken. Uh, they're a huge reason why I've been able to continue to do this even when life has been crazy and, um, with having a full-time job on top of this. And they've let me carve out some extra time, um, for this. And, uh, I hope can help me to turn it into something that is more of my time in the future. But, um, just want to give a thank you to, oh, I missed, I missed Mr. Muffin's question. So we'll get to that one in a second, but just want to give another thank you to sponsors Cake Wallet, LocalMonero, and IVPN.

I will only accept a sponsor that, uh, will actually build a product that I will use and that will take feedback and that will let me work with them to help them improve their product. Um, there's, there's certainly, I don't take on sponsors lightly. Um, so when I have a sponsorship, it means that I value them. I use the, the, the thing and I, I find it very useful. Um, and I will only share things that I think will be beneficial to a broad user base. Um, so definitely check them out. If you haven't checked out Cake Wallet, LocalMonero, which we talked about as a great Monero exchange, Cake Wallet is a Bitcoin or Monero wallet. And then IVPN is my favorite VPN service. Um, they're great.

And I got to meet somebody from the IVPN team in Portugal as well. Uh, that was a great time to meet someone face-to-face and build some more of that trust that's required when you're using a VPN, as we've talked about on the show. Um, now the one last question, Mr. Muffin, I almost missed it again. Sorry about that. Um, he asked, when you use a custom ROM flashed on a phone, what are your main concerns regarding security rather than privacy? Um, so this specific question is why I prefer to use something like CalX OS or GrapheneOS instead of Lineage OS or EOS or other things. Um, and why specifically I recommend using a Pixel phone? Because I don't want my phone to be a major security risk all the time. And with other mobile operating systems, they can require you to keep the bootleater unlocked, which exposes you to a lot of attacks if someone physically has your phone. Um, and that's a big problem for me. I, mobile security especially is very, very important. Um, because your phone is,

your phone is, um, with you, but you could also leave it places. If you're at a restaurant, you forget it, you go to the bar, you forget your phone, et cetera. That could be a serious problem. Or if you're going through TSA and they confiscate it, there are lots of times when you can be separated from your phone in ways that you usually wouldn't be from a laptop or desktop. Um, and so mobile security is very important to me. Um, and because something like CalX OS or GrapheneOS allows you to keep the bootleater locked, um, and especially with GrapheneOS, which they take a very hard approach to security in addition to privacy. Um, I, I think there's a lot of benefit to those because you are actually gaining a lot of the security back that you get with stock Android. I mean, stock Android and iOS have very strong, uh, security and like iOS is good. Third-party privacy is a lot there, but they, they generally have very strong security. So being able to keep that while increasing the privacy

offered, which is what both GrapheneOS and CalX OS do, um, I think is, is well worth it. So that's why I recommend people get a pixel phone and flash one of those two operating systems. Um, because they do allow you to keep at least the vast majority, if not even increased security over stock Android, which is, is very, very important. Um, so yeah, thanks for the question, Mr. Muffin. Sorry, it took me so long to get to it, but I got to it. Hopefully you were still on stream when I got to it. Um, but yeah. Okay. Well, we're go ahead, gonna go ahead and stop there. Uh, thank you everybody again for, for tuning in, keeping out for future episodes. I'm working right now on scheduling multiple.

Um, but again, if you don't follow yet on Twitter, um, be sure to follow there. That's how you'll best be able to keep up with the podcast. Um, so, uh, follow on Twitter, I'll post updates. Uh, hopefully we'll have new episodes rolling in soon and, uh, definitely I'm planning on kicking things off and really getting back to the swing of things because I've been, I've been missing opt out, but yeah, thank you everybody for joining. Have a good rest of your day.