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Monero, Privacy, and the V16 Hard Fork
Recorded: Sept. 15, 2022 Duration: 1:05:03Space Recording
Full Transcription
I'll go ahead and invite you as a co-host right now.
Same for you, Paul.
It's magical.
Okay.
Cool.
Okay.
You're hearing us loud and clear?
Yep.
And my audio on Riverside is working, too.
Perfect.
We're pretty good to go.
And let me just pull up our little agenda for the chat here.
All right.
Well, we're a little early.
AV check.
Good.
No stress there.
That's always kind of a little cram thing at last minute, making sure it all works.
Have you guys tweeted this out from the Edge account?
Because then I can retweet it from there.
Yeah.
Peter, if you're there.
Yep.
I'll go ahead and send out another tweet right now just so people know that we're live.
Awesome.
Then I'll retweet that.
Cool.
I'll let you know once that's out.
I'll do that as well.
Alright.
So we'll do that as well.
Okay.
Let's do this as well.
Do-do-do.
Okay, just sent that off.
Cool, retweeted it.
All right, cool, thanks much.
So have you been in South Africa pretty much in the past?
Yeah, we know how this game works.
We know how this game works, right?
Have you been on many spaces?
Have you been doing that?
Or what was the old thing?
Clubhouse.
Oh, yeah.
I did a bunch on Clubhouse and I really enjoyed Clubhouse.
And then, like, it just feels like Clubhouse got absolutely obliterated by spaces.
Yeah, pretty much.
Sure, I've never seen anything quite that brutal.
You know, even like Vine getting obliterated by TikTok.
There was a gap of a few years, you know, where Vines died.
No, just like months.
Yeah, this is like, oh, man.
I think that they didn't even have their Android client.
Clubhouse didn't even have their Android client out yet.
And spaces were already just blowing up.
I was blown away that they even had the success they had without an Android client.
I mean, is it really everybody on an iPhone?
Oh, I think I saw that you are on an iPhone.
So, yeah, I guess the answer is yes.
You actually can have pretty good success and not have an Android client.
Yeah, which is a little nuts to me.
But, yeah, like that was like anyway.
So to get back to it, to actually answer the question you asked.
Yeah, we do spaces for Yat.
We did one every week for a while.
But, like, I think it's, you know, there's – it just makes more sense to try and space them out a little bit.
Otherwise, we tend to like rehash a lot of the same stuff over and over.
It takes time.
Yeah, no, it does.
It takes time out of your day.
Yeah.
Balance between building and promoting is the other challenge.
Exactly.
So we'll chat about Yat in a little bit.
But it looks like we're getting things started.
People are joining in the call.
And so let's kick it off.
So, Ricardo, we've known each other for quite a few years now.
Obviously, a big part of the Monero promotion ecosystem development and whatnot.
For those of you that don't already know Ricardo Fluffy Pony, I know that – I don't know how you would kind of describe yourself.
Maybe you would say, like, the Twitter troll that built the Monero Bitcoin and shit on other things.
I get it now that – that's just part of the world that we're in with crypto, right?
So why don't you go ahead and give yourself a quick intro and give people an idea of your background and where you're at today and kind of the contributions, especially into the Monero side, privacy side.
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
So, I mean, I've been involved in this space for a long time.
Started in early 2011 through a Slashdot article, oddly enough, about Mike Hearn writing a library, a Bitcoin library.
And that sort of piqued my interest and built a bunch of stuff in this space.
I created a payment gateway called Globy.
I created this thing called – co-created this thing called Yatt and this other thing called Tari.
And then I guess most famously, I was the lead maintainer on Monero from its outset for 2019 when I stepped back to build more stuff.
So that's sort of, you know, my history and background in this space.
And I've been a big advocate for open source software development for a long time.
I am very aware pragmatically that there are times when open source is not the answer, but there are plenty of times when it is and when people ignore the fact that open source is a great solution.
It moves differently to other models.
But as a result of liking that model, I've had a big interest in decentralization.
And I feel like privacy is just like this natural part of if you love decentralization, you tend to love self-sovereignty, you tend to believe that privacy is important.
And I think, you know, we live in a world now where we've started to realize through a combination of government overreach and people just being weird,
that actually personal privacy is like, it's becoming a fundamental human right, but it's becoming ever more important to us as individuals.
And it's not just something that big corporations should have.
And I feel like people are starting to care more about it as well.
Like the people that normally would be, oh, I'll just put everything on Instagram and Facebook are starting to actually care and say, you know, maybe I actually can't, you know,
we'll care about the fact that, you know, for better or worse, even though it's closed source and you did promote open source,
even though it's closed source, iMessage actually gives a higher level of privacy than like an SMS.
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, big companies are starting to promote that, like Apple's promoting, they've got these great ads that are like the ones that I wish I thought of.
Yeah.
You know, genius ads.
What is it?
Like a guy walking down the street yelling every little piece of his private information, which is what you're effectively doing when you're using social media.
Right.
And then the beautiful Apple lock icon, privacy, whatnot.
So, yeah, it's a big piece of it.
And Monero, obviously, is at the forefront of crypto private transactions, like private cryptocurrency.
And I've loved it from the beginning.
And we're, you know, at Edge, being a multi-asset cryptocurrency app, buy, sell, trade, being able to support Monero was one of our key initiatives when we had first launched.
And with the help of MyMonero, which you had also helped build, we've been able to do so.
Now, one of the philosophies I wanted to talk about today, especially this is kind of relevant.
Today is the day after the big merge, you know, everyone's talking about Ethereum, which is a hard fork, right?
The merge is a hard fork.
The philosophy on hard forks, I'd love to hear your take on this because I know you've been a big Bitcoin proponent, which in the Bitcoin ecosystem is like a four-letter word.
Like fork is like, how dare you even speak the word hard fork?
But it's pretty regularly occurring in Monero.
It occurs in other currencies.
What's your take on kind of the hard fork philosophy and also Monero's?
Right.
So great question.
So I'm of the opinion that there's nothing fundamentally evil about hard forks, even though sometimes that's just like the thing that gets portrayed.
It's like, oh, they're inherently bad.
They're inherently centralizing.
And there are environments where they are inherently centralizing.
I think one of the big things with hard forks is, is there a common belief system in terms of what an upgrade is?
You know, and I'll expand on that.
So when it comes to Bitcoin, if I said to you that Bitcoin needs to be able to handle more capacity, you know, there are a lot of people in this ecosystem that say, yes, seven transactions a second is insufficient.
It needs more capacity.
But there are other people that say, no, seven transactions a second is great.
In fact, it's probably, you know, more than sufficient because that's almost like a settlement layer.
And we should be building out scaling solutions at a different layer, at a different level.
And so there's actually not broad agreement as to what constitutes a network upgrade or an upgrade in the general sense in Bitcoin.
You know, there's a strong sense of the status quo must continue and there must be a Lindy effect and a sort of like ossification of it as a protocol.
Now, with Monero, it's slightly different because, again, privacy is not this is very different from a lot of things because it's never a done deal.
You never go, well, OK, now this thing's private.
We can walk away.
It's, you know, like we never need to make any changes.
Privacy is always a cat and mouse game.
You're always going to have attackers, whether it's a 15 year old kid in Poland or the NSA or North Korea.
You're always going to have attackers who are trying to break the privacy that you've created or the privacy tool that you work on.
And so you have to improve privacy.
If you don't, if you have ossification, if you are stagnant, then all that happens is people stop using that tool.
And we've seen it in the past.
There have been instant messaging systems.
There have been encryption tools.
There have been all sorts of really interesting privacy enhancing tools that have died on the vine because people just simply can't trust them because it's like there's no more development.
You need that development.
You need to have cryptography that is current.
You need to have cryptography that is working towards or at least developers and researchers and cryptographers who are working towards things like post-quantum crypto.
And you just simply like you don't have you don't have that if you're stagnant.
So everyone in the community in the Monero ecosystem can agree that an upgrade that improves privacy is an upgrade that is not just important, it's necessary.
And that's, I think, why hard forks work there because you've got a group of people like no one in the community is ever going to say, no, no, please, guys, let's not improve privacy.
Like that's just a bad idea.
Let's rather, you know, improve something else like scalability.
And so once you've got broad consensus, loose consensus on what constitutes an upgrade, what constitutes an improvement and some sort of like necessary feature change, then it becomes easy to like bolt on other things like, well, okay, this thing improves privacy and also is more efficient.
Fantastic.
But the key component there is always improving privacy so that, you know, every successive network upgrade is like the cat and mouse game where the mouse is getting smarter.
I think you nailed it on the head because if there's anything I found about the Bitcoin community, which is probably why they're so against hard forks, is that people like Bitcoin for different reasons.
And they're not rallying around a very singular thing such as privacy, such that the Monero community has.
Some people say, I want just that store value, that gold that's going to be exactly the same for my great, great, great, great grandkids.
And then there's other people that do want a bit of that scalability.
People that do want the payments like network and they're fighting even just for soft work.
So it was just hard even to get a soft work push through because some people don't care about Bitcoin for payments.
You know, people want like smart contracts and then they're fighting for a soft work for them to get, gosh, what is the Jeremy Rubin soft work he's trying to get in so he can get some kind of smart contracts.
And then what is it, like the root stock teams trying to get drive chains so they can get side chains.
Yeah, everyone kind of wants it for different reasons.
I mean, it is the granddaddy crypto.
And I remember when I first got involved, I mean, what class year were you, Bitcoin?
Oh, my God.
That's like true OG.
Holy smokes.
Satoshi, was he still around then?
Is he still chatting?
Or is it 2010 when he kind of stopped?
No, it was 2010 that he, yeah.
He stopped.
Okay.
So didn't go back to the days when he was still around.
More 2013.
And in 2013, I felt like the ecosystem still had a lot of people.
They all had different desires out of Bitcoin.
But in their mind, all of those desires were possible.
Everyone still felt like, oh, we're going to get privacy.
We'll just bolt on this and that, kind of like the technology that Monero has.
Or we're going to get these smart contracts.
Bitcoin 2.0.
Remember that term?
Bitcoin 2.0.
And then I think all of that started to dissipate and why other coins such as Monero started to come about.
So talking about like hard forks.
Yeah.
Oh, go ahead.
Well, I'll add one thing.
And that is, I don't know if you, you were at the Satoshi Roundtable that was still when, I think it was the second one when it was in, not California.
I know about it.
I didn't go to that one though.
I know that's when Chris DeRose crashed.
Right?
Yes.
The one that Chris DeRose crashed.
So there was this whole thing where, it was during the whole block size debacle.
And, you know, there's Chatham House rules.
So I'm not going to say like who said what.
But there was this whole thing that happened where we wanted to all agree on 21 things about Bitcoin.
Just 21 things.
That's a lot.
That's a lot.
I don't think we could agree on more than like four.
It was so, even like, even like there will only be 21 million Bitcoins ended up having this like insane debate about like, but will they really, is that really going to be the case?
It's like, you know, like I, it's not, it's not a fractured community.
I think that's a, you know, like, I don't want to characterize it as that, but it is a community that's made up of such broad, diverse people that you're right.
A lot of people want different things for it.
And that can lead to a lot of resilience, but it can also lead to a lot of frustration if you're, you know, part of those debates.
Yeah.
Especially when you feel like you came in with a certain promise, you know, you're like, oh, this is what I loved about it.
Everyone told me that this is what I get.
And then that kind of changes.
So, well, you know, that's why we have some other coins such as Monero.
And so kind of getting back to Monero and its hard forking, openness to hard fork.
What is kind of the schedule that people would expect out of these hard forks?
And also, what has it kind of brought to the Monero ecosystem?
What have been some of the past benefits of being open to this hard forking process and schedule?
Yeah.
So I think, you know, like there's been a bunch of stuff like Ring CT is probably a big one.
We, you know, confidential transactions is this thing that Greg Maxwell invented and that the Monero research lab modified to get working on Monero.
Monero and invented a bunch of stuff to make that happen.
And what's interesting about Ring CT is before it existed, transaction amounts in Monero were obfuscated, but not very well.
And they were, as a result, they were much smaller pools of privacy.
Anonymity sets.
And there were very real, right.
And there were very real attacks against Monero's privacy prior to that.
And those attacks literally went away the day that Ring CT went live.
And so such a fundamental upgrade.
And it's not, it would not have been possible to do that as a soft fork.
It was just too fundamental a change.
And, and the, I mean, it's a, it's a totally different transaction type, but totally different data.
You've got, you know, all of these like extra pieces of information that were required and, and trying to do it as a soft fork would have been complex and incredibly painful.
I mean, so was Segwit.
Even as a, even as a soft fork, that was incredibly painful.
And even if you're not doing for like scalability, everyone agreed that they wanted it, you know, it comes back to the, you want to do it as a hard fork would have been a lot simpler.
But anyway, so we got, we got Ring CT.
So we got Ring CT, big one.
And I remember, I remember Maxwell just actually presenting that at a San Francisco Bitcoin meetup.
And I was like, wow, this will, I don't know if you were there, but I remember going, wow, this would be amazing in Bitcoin.
And yeah, didn't quite make it there, but awesome to hear that Monero adopted it.
But yeah, and it's, and it's some part of, of, of Liquid as well, which is, which is a fork of Bitcoin.
So, you know, I mean, it's, it, it does continue to live on.
Yeah.
So, so that's a big one.
Then another one that's really interesting that would, again, would not have existed were it not for, for hard forks is something called Dandelion.
So the way Dandelion works, and now we're actually, we've got something called Dandelion Plus.
What is it?
Dandelion Plus Plus.
I don't know.
There's some pluses now.
But, but a thing called Dandelion, which prevents network level attacks against Monero transactions.
So a network level attack is where you run a bunch of really bad nodes, naughty nodes, and they listen to transaction broadcast.
So they're part of the network.
And then they're able to make a set of guesses and assumptions and, and assertions around which node broadcast a transaction first.
And then you can, with some degree of probability, say that that was the transaction, that was the node that, that created the transaction where, yeah, exactly where it was, where, where it was created and is responsible for it somehow.
Now, and, and network level tracing has not really made a, it's not really made an appearance in, in.
It's a lot of the obfuscation.
Yeah.
The obfuscation attempts.
Right.
So you're not seeing a lot of that, but it has, I mean, there have been attacks like that in the past, but it's not made appearances in a court paperwork or anything like that.
So, but it's still an essential part of, of protecting against attackers.
And so Dandelion just does this whole thing where it's got this like stem and fluff phase.
And so the stem phase is where a transaction gets broadcast between single nodes only.
So it doesn't get sent out to multiple nodes.
And then eventually in the fluff phase, it does.
And there's like this randomized things.
You don't know how many nodes were hit before it eventually got to the, the fluff phase.
And so it's like a really cool technology.
It does a fantastic job on a network level.
You don't need to run tour to, to like protect yourself from a network perspective.
And that again, if we had a bunch of nodes that didn't speak Dandelion and then a bunch of nodes that did, and we had this mixed network, it would be very bad for privacy.
So that as an, as a network level upgrade was so critical because it just, it destroys any network level attacks.
And by the way, we've seen attempts at this where people have gone like, oh, I, you know, look, I can figure out, I've got a bunch of nodes and I can figure out which node was the first to broadcast the transaction.
And then you're like, no, actually, that's not true.
Yeah.
As an example, I broadcast this transaction from this IP address and you think it came from that one.
So this sort of thing is really critical to, to Monero.
And I wanted to just speak to one extra thing, which is, you know, the sort of general sense of like why network upgrades are important.
And it's because you do have old nodes that fall off the network.
Okay.
And they're no longer part of the network.
And I think that that is the balance you have to have here is, is that a net net net negative or a net positive thing?
And if you, if you do hard forks really infrequently, it can be a net negative thing because then people aren't in the mindset that they need to upgrade.
And so then, you know, their node falls off the network and they're like, don't even know.
But with Monero, because it's just part of our ecosystem, part of our community, because we have so many different ways of notifying people, whether it's mailing lists and Twitter and Reddit and whatever, there's so many different ways of knowing that there's a hot ball coming.
Even within the software now, it notifies you that you might be cut off from the network because there haven't been blocks coming in as, as expected over a period of time.
And so then you're like, oh, I actually need to go and I need to go and upgrade my node.
And so that's something that you, that we're starting to see people just become accustomed to.
And it's so critical to, to this being a net, a net positive thing instead of a net negative.
Now you found that like the Bitcoin community, have there been contentious hard forks where people disagreed and there was a lot of convincing necessary and infighting necessary before finally the code base actually got shifted and people adopted it and the miners adopted it.
Has that have ever had an issue in the past?
So, so there have been, there have been things where people have, have said like, oh, you know, I mean, like, I don't think that we should do this.
But typically you, you know, one of the things that's really nice about the Monero community is there's a broad separation between the part of the Monero community that is technical and the part that doesn't care that much about like the technical bits.
And, and, and the, the ones that don't care that much about the technical bits, they'll just like read the, the techno babble and go like, oh yeah, I'm sure it's fine.
Whatever.
Let's go do it.
We'll trust the smart guys.
Right.
Exactly.
And then as developers and, and as researchers and cryptographers, we tend to have, sometimes we do have like long drawn out discussions.
We've had long drawn out discussions about ring size increases and, you know, there has to be like data to, to prove that it's like the right move and so on.
And so we do have these discussions and, and as a result, we end up coming as a, as a smaller group, as a group of developers, we tend to come to consensus and those discussions are not closed.
They're all on GitHub and RSE and whatever.
And like there are non-technical people that participate or read or whatever the discussions, but they tend to go, I'm okay with trusting whatever decision the, the developers and the Monero research lab and, you know,
these other clever people, whatever decision they come to.
And so there's, there's been very little that is, that I could say is truly being contentious.
There've been a couple of times where there's been concern trolling.
You know, I think, I think it was with rings, with ring CT.
There was like Monero, Monero classic where they were like, no, we're not going to get it.
I remember that one.
You know, and it was like, guys, guys, you're saying no to an important privacy upgrade.
That just seems silly.
So, you know, it's, um, and, and, you know, like, of course, Monero classic is dead and like has no development and like no one's using it.
So unsurprisingly, um, like that's, that's what happens when you don't have, uh, or when somebody tries to create a, a concern trolling, um, uh, contention, contentious issue.
Either that, or they're just trying to create a fork, which they can of course pump and dump, which, uh, exactly.
You know, admittedly, these forks are good opportunities for people to make a little bit extra money.
Um, heck, I'm looking forward to getting some of my, uh, ETHW.
ETHPOW.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
You know, get it now while I can.
You know?
Yeah, exactly.
You got to get your address.
Is it a taxable event?
We don't know.
Uh, only when you sell it.
All right.
I think so currently.
And depending on what country you're in, you know, South Africa, U.S., totally different rules.
You know, um, and, and if you're in doubt, you just go move to Puerto Rico or something.
Yeah.
Like everyone else.
Yep.
Okay, cool.
So yeah, hard forks are on a regular schedule.
Is it, I think it's twice a year roughly.
Is it one?
I'm coming right.
I know October-ish.
It used to be, it used to be twice a year.
And then as things have, have developed and we've realized as a, as a community that we
don't need to have them as frequently because when we don't need to move as fast because
things from a privacy perspective are in a pretty good space, um, you know, we've gotten
to a point where, um, I think annual is kind of where we're at now, even maybe every two
years.
Um, I do think that we'll probably get to a point where it's like, okay, well, culturally
we're going to do this every five years or something.
That would be nice.
Right.
Yeah.
That would be nice.
Grand.
Um, and so that's kind of, that's kind of, I think the, the dream state and, um, and,
and what we want.
And so, um, talking about like the schedule and the, and why we want to get to the five
years, I know we've been, you know, at edge, we've been part of the hardworking schedule
since, oh gosh, we launched like 2018.
I think we launched support with Monero, maybe 2019 at late.
I think it was 2018.
Um, and there are definite challenges in, in kind of creating and executing hard forks.
Um, what kind of have been what you'd see are the, the key challenges in these past
hard forks?
Yeah, I think the, I mean, one of the, one of the key challenges here is just like, um,
we now live in a world where there's a, the ecosystem is broader.
Uh, sorry, the ecosystem is broader, um, than it, than it ever has been.
Um, and, uh, the challenge is, um, that there are more and more tools and wallets and, uh,
exchanges and, you know, all sorts of, all sorts of, um, like libraries and whatever that
need to be updated for stuff like this.
And so it can be, um, uh, it can be pretty challenging, um, you know, like, like to, uh,
to, to really get people to, um, adapt and adopt quickly enough.
Um, and it also doesn't help that sometimes there's, um, there's just a lot of work to
be done, you know, especially when there's like major changes to, um, cryptography or whatever.
Uh, and then there's like one piece of code, uh, or, or code written in one language rather.
And there's not a lot of like, um, communication about, uh, how to get it, how to get it right.
A lot of Monero code I've seen is written in good old fashioned, what C++, I believe, which,
uh, you know, as a developer, I kind of, you know, uh, cut my teeth on C and C++ when I worked
at NVIDIA decades ago, but, uh, it's, uh, definitely not the easiest language for people to use and
not one that you find a lot of developers excited to, to be coding in, you know, it's
kind of the old, old timers, low level developer type language, and that can present challenges.
I like what you brought up in the sense that as an ecosystem grows and more tooling is
built in a way you've kind of increased the decentralization, right?
And I've promoted this in the Bitcoin ecosystem where I know, I know a lot of Bitcoin core
developers were very against alternate implementations of Bitcoin, right?
They wanted, Hey, you use Bitcoin core, got to use Bitcoin core, use Bitcoin core, where,
you know, in Ethereum, there's multiple implementations in different languages.
And I've always felt strongly about an aspect of that being, uh, a part of the decentralization
aspect of multiple teams building on a similar protocol.
Um, but if you, as you do that, if the protocol then changes, you now have a whole lot of teams
that now need to adapt and change the code.
Exactly what you had said.
So it's, it's kind of the pain point of growing, right?
It's a growing pain.
Oh, for sure.
Um, and maybe, maybe an added challenge there as well is, you know, multiple implementations
also mean that like, sometimes you have disagreements about like a specific standard, you know, or
like, it's like, well, okay, here's the code, but we've implemented it slightly differently.
And so now there's, uh, there's actually not, um, consensus.
Yeah.
Cause people could say what the protocol is, you know, they can, they can document it, but we're
humans.
Our communication is never a hundred percent perfect.
And, uh, we say one thing, we do one thing, we think they're the same.
When someone else reads the document, they interpret it differently.
And so you have a disagreement.
And so that is the challenge of the multiple implementations.
So it has been, and I think, I think most famously there was a, there was a, um, a network split
on, um, Ethereum years back where, um, geth and parody, um, you know, who were the two major
implementations at the time, um, implemented a standard and it was, the standard was well
written up.
It was all like got well-documented and whatever.
And they implemented that standard and they just interpreted something in the spec slightly
differently and that caused the network split.
So it does happen and it is a challenge.
Um, and like you said, it's just, it's growing pains.
Um, and, and I think we have to be cognizant that we're managing people's money in code.
Um, you know, so you, you want the growing pains to be as, uh, you want to be as cautious
as possible, but you also do need to move forward.
And so, you know, there's different approaches.
There's the conservative approach, um, with Bitcoin, there's the, you know, move fast and
break things approach with some other, um, other chains, right.
Um, and I think that like, I think Monero tries to do a reasonable job of, um, being conservative,
but still saying this hard, this is a hard fork.
We're not with, there's an upgrade and you know, like, like move it or lose it.
Got it.
And so given the most recent network upgrade, uh, the V16 hard fork, which was like back
to back, was it V15 or V16 within like hours or 24 hours of each other.
Um, and this is common.
I've seen this where the hard forks are, are frequently back to back, like one transition
than the next.
Um, it was definitely a challenge for, uh, a lot of the Monero ecosystem.
A lot of tools went down.
People couldn't transact for a few days and whatnot, including people on edge.
So we apologize for that.
Things are working a lot better now.
So that's good to, good to know.
Um, what did it bring?
Let's talk about what exactly did this V16 hard fork bring that, you know, we went through
all this trouble and headache to, to deliver to the ecosystem.
What do we get out of, uh, V16?
So, so really five things and I'll, I'll go from, uh, you know, what I, what I consider
to be least important to most important.
Okay.
So the first thing was, um, was there were, there were major issues with multi-sig.
There was a, um, a researcher that discovered a bunch of like big bugs and like critical
security issues where, you know, multi-sig, some of the multi-sig stuff could have like
totally been blown up.
And so that needed to be fixed.
And the only way to read it, the only way to do that and ensure that everyone was using,
um, a fixed version of multi-sig, um, was the hard fork, um, it just wasn't something
that we, we could do as a soft fork.
Would that affect anyone that had money in a previous multi-sig address?
Like if someone created a multi-sig address and then after the hard fork is out when that
multi-sig address continued to work, I assume we couldn't like lose the money.
Um, no, no.
So yeah, I mean like that's, that's the whole thing is like, you know, we like this new
setup is now there and people can shift things over and that's all good.
Um, so, so that's now there and it's, and there's no longer that risk.
Um, second thing, you know, fee changes.
So just sort of like preventing certain fee market attacks, um, and, uh, uh, you know,
really just improving that algorithm that we have, cause there's a adaptive fee algorithm.
Um, so that's the third one.
And then, um, ring sizes increased from 11 to 16.
So, you know, like increases the anonymity set, very important.
Um, why doesn't that number talk to talk a little bit about the decision on, on the
rink side, that's one of the biggest, most contentious numbers.
And that's where like the Zcash community criticizes Monero for having kind of a lower
anonymity set than what they claim is huge.
And there's other trade-offs of course, but, uh, why 16, why not 32, why not 64?
And for those layman's that might ask that question.
Right.
So with each increase that, uh, it increases transaction sizes.
So if you increase transaction sizes too much, then you end up with a scenario where
everything's blown out and like the network grinds to a halt because like, um, the, the
changes gets massive, the bandwidth requirements get huge.
So it's just one of those things that can be extremely frustrating and infuriating, um, and, and
really net negative for the network.
Um, at the same time, there is stuff that's coming in the future, um, where there is a
massive change to the way Monero transactions work, um, that will, um, uh, fundamentally affect,
uh, affect how ringside or how big ring sizes can be.
So there'll be exponential and then we can go to like two, 128 or 256 or, you know, even
larger.
Um, so that's, that is like, like we don't need to go much bigger right now.
It's big enough.
Um, it's big enough to prevent most of the attacks that we, that we would expect.
And that's, I think is the most important thing now with that.
So we can expect right now with the change from 11 to 16 transaction sizes will be increased.
Like you, you know, on average, you actually will be sending a larger transaction.
And so with that, would, would people expect to be paying more per transaction or did the
fee modification you talked about previously help offset that?
Yeah.
So the fee modification helped offset that.
And it's, um, it's just sort of generally, um, Monero transactions are pretty cheap.
So, you know, there's not, uh, there's not like massive concerns about that.
Um, and I think we're largely, we're largely okay in terms of, um, transaction, uh, costs and
you know, how much people are paying per transaction.
You forgot to mention, I think in the previous, uh, maybe this is part of a ring CT, but, um, correct
me if I'm wrong, but I think the transaction costs went down a lot when bulletproofs were introduced.
Is that correct?
And that was one of the hard forks, hugely decreased the cost.
I remember that because I think we started implementing Monero right before bulletproofs
and we're like, Oh, I remember the transactions were also slow to create.
They were slow to create and they cost quite a bit.
They're like in the 50 cent range for a transaction.
Then they suddenly like drop transactions were super fast, went down to like pennies and like,
wow, this is, this was easily the most, you know, for us at the time, uh, worthwhile hard
fork, even though it was a total pain.
And I think we were down for like a month trying to adopt this, this hard fork back in
2018 or 2019.
Um, but it was well worth it.
At the end of the day, like, wow, this is an, it's an amazing experience then to use
Monero at that time.
Um, and so, okay.
So we talked about, um, why you don't increase, you know, all the way to 64, 128 just yet.
Um, it'll blow up the transactions fees should roughly be still the same.
All else considered.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not going to be like fundamentally more expensive that people like, it's not going to,
let me put it this way.
It's not going to be noticeably more expensive, you know?
Okay.
And I think that's the, that's the critical part.
That's a key thing.
Cool.
All right.
All right.
So, uh, you'd mentioned fee, fee change, ring size, um, multi-sig.
Um, and then two more.
So first is just a bulletproof going to bulletproof plus, um, which is just an improvement to, um,
bulletproof.
There's, it's not, again, this might not seem big, but there's like a, call it like six
odd on average, 6% decrease in transaction sizes and about a 6%, 6%, um, improvement in
transaction verification performance.
Um, and so that like 6% doesn't sound like a lot, but it actually is because like all
of this stuff just adds up.
It totally does.
Yeah.
Um, that actually makes up for the, uh, it partially makes up for the increase in ring
size.
It actually makes up for the increase in, exactly, exactly.
And that was why, that was why, like, cause you've got to choose this magic number of
like, what are we increasing ring, the ring size to?
And so then this helps you to sort of offset it a little bit and then go like, okay, this
is great.
This is, this is what we're doing.
Um, so that's sort of, um, I think like being, being a big thing.
And then like the biggest thing, at least in my mind, the biggest thing is this new thing
called view tags, which I think it'll take a little while to, to start being, um, used
by like all the wallets everywhere and so on, but view tags reduce wallet sync times
by like 30 to 40%.
Um, so, you know, like that when you, when you're like firing up a wallet and it's got
to like, like catch up, especially if you're firing up a wallet and you're scanning the
entire blockchain from 2014 to now that take, that can take hours and hours.
And so view tags, like reduce that massively.
And that's like, uh, in my mind, critical, critical components.
Now there are still like, um, other things that are going to come in future that are going
to improve, um, the, the wallet scanning stuff.
But like, this is, uh, this is, I think what we've needed now to really help new, new wallets
that get created post the smart fork to be able to sync really quickly.
So it's given people a little bit of idea of how Monero works in that sense, because,
um, Ed, for example, uses the my Monero API, of which, you know, I feel like you're one
of the founders of my Monero.
Is that correct?
Correct.
Um, and that doesn't require any sync time, right?
There's no sync time at all for people using edge.
Right.
It does all the scanning in the background for you.
Yeah.
It does all the scanning in the background on the my Monero API servers with a slight compromise
in privacy in the sense that the servers have the view key.
Correct.
Um, that's what's sent over.
It doesn't allow them to spend money.
Um, maybe you could describe kind of that compromise and I just want to be straightforward and honest
to the viewership.
Like there's a little bit of compromise.
I think it's well worth it for the, for the, for the experience, the performance, the usability
of Minero.
I think it's well worth it.
Um, what exactly does a server having a view key allow that server to see?
I can, you know, what is the information it sees?
What can, and what can it not see still?
Okay.
So all that, all that it allows the server to see is your incoming transactions.
Okay.
So we can't determine your outgoing transactions.
It can't determine like whether the transaction that it's seeing is a change address transaction.
So you're getting changed back from something you've sent out or whether it's like you've
just received money.
Um, so, but it, it, the reason that that's so important is because then it can go, oh, these
are all the transactions you've received and just send that piece of data to your phone
instead of going like, oh, this is every transaction that's ever existed on the Minero
network.
You've been out, which is the way that it works normally.
Now it is obviously a privacy compromise because you've got a server that has this like
little piece of information about your wallet.
It can't spend any of the money.
It's like, it doesn't have the spend key.
You have the spend key.
Um, and, and the way I've sort of characterized it in my head is that, um, for most people
like that is a privacy compromise that doesn't affect them.
But if you need maximal privacy, then you need to go and use like the Minero GUI, um, or
the Minero command line clients, because those are the two wallets that are always going
to have the best possible privacy.
Um, there are many wallets in the Minero.
Yeah.
There are many wallets in the Minero ecosystem, but the GUI and the TLI wallet are the two
that are always going to have the latest technology, the latest software.
They're always going to be compatible with every four.
Right.
Right.
Um, and they're always going to have best practices built into them, um, and baked into
them.
Um, and so, you know, you, you sort of like, as you go down the, the, you know, the list,
if you start, if you use like, um, either the GUI or one of the other wallets in the ecosystem
that use like remote nodes, then there's some compromise there, but it's like not as, um,
um, uh, bad as, uh, or it's not as big a compromise as using my Minero or edge, you know?
And so you go down the list and then, um, obviously like, like what's great about, um,
my Minero and edge and, and the way that the remote scanning works is two things.
The first is you still control your spend key, which I mentioned.
So like no one can steal your money, um, unless you go and like give your spend key out.
Right.
Um, but secondly, there's this new thing, which is really cool called LWS.
Um, and so LWS is this lightweight server and it is, it gives you the ability if you
have a Minero node to run your own my Minero server, and then you can point a wallet like
my Minero.
Um, and, and I, I don't think edge exposes this functionality because it's very new and
like, um, not something that a lot of people I think will care about, but, um, you're able
to point it at your server instead of pointing it at like my Minero servers.
Got it.
So then that piece of information still lives, um, on, on something, but it lives on a computer
you control instead of like living on my Minero's backend.
So it's kind of, um, it's like running your own node and this, this little, like almost
like an Electrum server gets it away.
Exactly.
And actually funny thing is edge has supported the ability for people to point a UTXO based
coins, which is Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin cash to their own Electrum server.
We moved over to block book recently.
So you'd have to spin up your own block book server and point it to that.
And so actually we like, we'll add the support for people to point to their own LWS server.
And it is my Minero API compatible if I recall correctly.
So there's not really a change necessary in that regard.
So, um, glad you let us know about that because it's something that we had heard about
lightly.
Wasn't sure of the state of, of that project, but, um, we'll definitely add support for that
because it's, it's a fairly simple, straightforward change so people can point to their own node.
Exactly.
And then the, and then the, uh, the, the, the privacy compromises go away.
So, you know, but I think, I think for most people, most people don't, um, don't need to
care about that because it's not like a gigantic privacy compromise.
Um, you know, but I think it's important that people are aware of it and they understand,
um, you know, like, like, like choosing a wallet that really depends on your threat model.
And if your threat model is not like, um, I'm like, like, it doesn't involve deep concern
about, um, very resourceful people, then you're fine.
All right.
So one thing you'd mentioned, what is it that the server sees?
They see, it sees your transactions, your incoming transactions, incoming transactions,
but let's talk about what it does not see.
Like, um, yeah.
What does the server not know?
It doesn't see your outgoing transactions.
So that's like a big one.
Um, and then, um, it, uh, it, it isn't able to determine like your wallet balance.
It isn't able to determine who has paid you or, um, you know, who you paid.
It isn't able to determine anything like that.
It's really, it's almost just like, you know, oh, Hey, this is a transaction.
Uh, here's an encrypted bundle of data.
I know this encrypted bundle of data is yours, but I don't know what's in it.
Yeah.
Is that a good way to describe it?
It knows some little bits of, of what's in it.
Like it can tell the transaction amount, but it can't tell like much, you know, there's
a lot of stuff it can't tell.
It knows the transaction amount and that it's for you.
And that's sort of all it already knows.
Now, Monero is a UTXO based currency, correct?
At the end of the day, it's all encrypted.
It's a UTXO based currency.
So when you say it knows the transaction amount, there's input amounts, output amounts, outputs
that go to you, outputs that go to someone else.
Which of those amounts is it able to determine?
Good question.
So it only knows the output amount, output amounts going to you.
It can't tell.
Going to you.
Got it.
Yeah.
So, and it doesn't know, there's no way for it to say like, oh, this is change coming
to you or like, this is somebody who sent you money.
And so this is why I say it can't, it can't tell your balance because it can't say, if
you just add up those amounts, well, you can have like, you know, 10 Monero coming back
to you as change all the time.
And you don't actually have a hundred billion Monero.
Right.
Because you've been spending it out.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And so that's, you know, that's sort of like you've been sending little bits.
And so that's, I think the, um, an absolutely critical aspect is that it, even though like
the amounts the, for that single UTXO are visible, um, it doesn't actually provide cumulative
information.
Um, it just provides this like, you know, a little like piece of exactly where a little
nugget that doesn't actually give you anything overall.
Got it.
Got it.
And so talking about the view tags.
So I've, I've studied some of the, the challenges in being able to know what transaction is
yours in a privacy based blockchain or, or protocol.
And it generally has been pretty much this, uh, trade-off, right.
With privacy versus performance and bandwidth.
Um, I, especially when I'd looked at things like a stealth addresses on Bitcoin, I'd studied
those.
Yeah.
No, we actually worked on, uh, uh, my co-founder William had worked on a implementation of
Bitcoin called LibBitcoin with Amir Taki, you know, who had built Darkwall.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and, and looking at stealth addresses, it just seemed like, oh my gosh, like we could
do this, but in order to do that, we just have to get the fire hose of transactions coming
at us.
Or we use these address prefixes to get more transactions than are really ours, but we have
to filter through less.
And it just becomes this like, well, how much bandwidth do you want to deal with?
So talk about view tags.
Um, yeah.
What kind of compromise is there, if any, is there in this sinking speed?
Cause this is for sinking wallets that end up having to see the entire blockchain, right?
They're having to see all the transactions, figure out which are theirs and view tags somehow
speed that up.
Is there a compromise at all in that process?
No compromise at all.
Because the view tag is not like, it's not like a, the same view tag for every single
transaction of yours.
It's a view tag that is, um, uh, based on a shared secret.
So, um, it's unique and, uh, it is, it, it doesn't require like, I mean, it's, it's based
on the sender and the receiver's address.
So it's, it's a shared secret based on those two.
So, you know, if like, Oh, okay.
If you're sending to different people, then like your view tag is going to be different
each time.
But what is important is as you are, as you're receiving transactions to scan, instead of
scanning each transaction and saying, does this transaction have a UTXO for me?
No, it doesn't.
Does this transaction have a UTXO for me?
Yes, it does.
Instead of having to do that for every single transaction, you just say, does this transaction
have a view tag for me?
No, it doesn't.
Does this one?
No, it doesn't.
Does this one?
Yes, it does.
Now I will scan the transaction to see if it's got a UTXO for me.
So it's not that you're not scanning every transaction.
It's just that you're cutting down the number of transactions that you actually need to fully
scan.
Open up, like opening up the box of the transaction, decrypting it, looking at what's in it.
Exactly.
Instead, you just, just look at a little header of the transaction.
Exactly.
You just, and it's one byte.
It's one byte that you care about.
So now think about it from this perspective, from like a lightweight perspective.
So like, you know, let's say my Monero or Edge and the, and while it's sync there,
instead of like streaming, you know, like every single transaction to, to the wallet,
we could now say, we're just going to stream a set of bytes to you for like the last 10,000
transactions, 10,000 bytes.
It's not a lot of data.
You let us know which ones you're interested in and then we'll, we'll send the transaction
to you.
So it could, it could lead to like some sort of, you know, where, where Edge and a little
compromise are light, super lightweight.
And then like remote nodes and that sort of thing are super heavy.
This could lead to some sort of middle ground where it's like lighter weight than running
a full node or using a remote node, but it's not as light as giving out your entire view
key.
Right.
Cause then, cause correct me if I'm wrong, but even if the client would have to go back
to the server and say, Hey, I want these exact transactions by not having the view key,
you still don't give up the amounts.
Correct?
Exactly.
Got it.
So that nice improvement.
So that was a, I think that was number, that was number five in what V16.
That was it.
That's what I consider to be the most important one.
Yeah, no, that's a good one.
That's an important one.
That's awesome.
This is great.
So this is amazing detail.
Thanks so much for this chat.
This is hopefully everyone, hopefully everyone else on, on the space is appreciating this information.
God, we gotta do this with every hard fork, but I know that you said you had kind
of stepped down as the lead maintainer, right?
But it sounds like you're still very, very knowledgeable and in touch with the entire ecosystem.
Correct if I'm wrong.
Like what is, how, how, how connected are you?
Like how, what's your, how much of your week is, is Monero, you know, versus other stuff
that you're doing?
I mean, I, I think like once you've, once you've dedicated so much of your time and energy,
your time, energy, money, lifeblood to something, you know, you don't ever really, you don't
ever really walk away from it and go like, Oh, I don't really care what happens to it now.
You know, it's, it's a part of a child, it's a baby, it's a baby.
It's, it is your, it is your child.
Um, and like, I'm never gonna, I'm never gonna properly disconnect and be like, eh,
you know, whatever.
I hope you don't.
I'm always gonna be, no, I'm always gonna be part of the community.
I'm always going to be, um, an active participant of the community, um, in, in one form or the
other.
Um, but what has changed is there's, and this is so critical.
There is nothing in the entire Monero ecosystem any longer that relies on me.
There is nothing that requires my presence or my existence.
And that is from a, a like decentralization perspective is so critical because no one
can ever say, Oh, well, if, if Rick dies, everything dies because now everything is so decentralized
and so distributed that like, I could literally be hit by a bus tomorrow, which I don't want,
I don't want to be, you know what happened tomorrow, but like, like I could, everything
would just continue.
And I think we've seen that because like little things like my, the very first release that
was put out without me signing the, the hashes was like, I had like a little internal celebration.
And I think I drank a, I drank a whiskey that night.
Yeah, exactly.
Nice.
Because it, it is so critical.
It's like so important that that sort of thing happens.
So yeah, that's been, that's been a critical component.
Yeah.
And I'm very proud of like all of the work that everyone's put in, um, all of the people
who've stepped up to take responsibility for, for various things.
Um, it's really been just incredible to watch the community continue to grow and form around,
um, this, uh, this critical part, this critical thing, um, which is a privacy for everyone.
Um, so is that lead maintainer role kind of, has that transitioned to somewhere else?
Is it does not exist anymore within the community?
Is it just that decentralized?
They are, no.
So there are, there are now, there's more than one maintainer.
So it's not, it's not just like, you know, the buck stops, uh, the buck stops.
Yeah.
Right.
And, uh, and there isn't there, you know, what's nice is the project, like the project has grown
to a point where there isn't like a single sort of like, oh, well that's the lead maintainer
who's going to like, you heard the cats and corral the, the, the peeps.
So that's been nice to see as well.
That's like just that general broadening out of the, of the community and of the development
community as a whole.
Oh, that's awesome.
Cool.
Um, I want to make sure people are aware that we're going to have, leave a little bit of
time to ask any questions.
So if you guys have any questions, feel free to step up, raise the hand and we'll, uh,
we'll bring you forward.
But, uh, while we're waiting for people to ask questions, I'll go and ask the question of what
else is on your plate?
What else are you working on now that you kind of stepped out as lead maintainer?
I know, yeah, it's been a project that, um, brought up, you've shared with me, maybe
people, give people a little description of that or anything else you're working on.
Yeah, sure.
So, so, you know, one of the things that, um, that has bugged me for a long time is, um,
and this is sort of like how the gem of the idea started was actually that cryptocurrency
addresses suck.
They're just so bad.
You know, it's like, it's like, oh, here's this 96 character long string, which is meaningless.
And so I started thinking about, um, ways of, of expressing data using different character
sets and settled on emojis.
And so the initial gem of the idea was literally just, what if we use the emojis instead of
base 58 and from that, um, you know, for, for addresses.
And so from that, um, my, my co-founder and I, um, invented this entire emoji based identity
product.
Um, so your ads are between one and five emojis long and they let you, uh, you know, they
can be your home on the web.
They can be a way to receive, um, payments.
They can be, uh, you know, it can be something as simple as like, um, just to redirect to your
website, you know, but it is like, it's your identity.
And so, you know, if you can imagine, like, if you see, uh, if you see something where
it's like, um, uh, let's say it's P PUE 96, what does that mean to people?
It means nothing.
It's just like, yeah, it's your name, but it doesn't tell them anything about you.
I mean, they can guess that maybe 96 is 1996.
Maybe it's an important year to you.
Like that's all that they can possibly tell from that.
It's meaningless.
But if they see that your yet is like, you know, um, fire dragon, I don't know, um, you
know, poop emoji sky or whatever.
Exactly.
Poop emoji.
Clearly you like dragons that breathe fire and poop.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It's emotional interpretation.
Right.
But it's like, it is, there's, there's an emotional connection that gets made.
There's, um, something that you, that you gather from it.
And most importantly, it's universal.
So emojis are used every day by 4.5 billion internet connected people.
Um, and it is totally universal people in China and in Korea and in Australia and in
South Africa and in South America, all like look at emojis and generally speaking with some
exceptions, which we've learned, um, interpret emojis and emojis in very similar ways.
And so, you know, your, your, yeah, it becomes something that is, um, a common identity that
people can look at regardless of the language that they speak and learn something about you.
And I think that that is truly special.
And people forget that emojis are not new.
They predate written language with letters and Roman numerals is that, um, you know, that's
what it's hieroglyphics.
That's what people put, you know, on pyramids is, you know, images, right?
That's really the way we digital hieroglyphics.
It's digital hieroglyphics.
Exactly that, you know, with a lot more bits and a big selection.
And you're right in that it does transcend any specific language because it is visual,
right?
And there's, there's no need for a language in a visual, in a picture, like the picture
is worth a thousand words.
Well, yeah, emojis worth, you know, thousand letters.
So no, I get it.
That's cool.
So people can actually register, like say a Monero address linked to a YAT and potentially
support, you know, with wallets that might support it, be able to send to those
things to, to these YATs.
Is that one of the use cases?
Absolutely.
So, um, you know, we have this, uh, this feature now on the dashboard, um, where you
can just go in and add any arbitrary address.
You can be like, oh, well, you know, it's my Ethereum address.
This is my U.
And what's nice is you can say, this is my USDC address for Biner or for BSC.
This is my USDC address for, uh, Avalanche.
This is my USDC address for Ethereum.
Got it, got it.
It's not just like, this is my, this is the only address I've got.
Only I got.
Yep.
Exactly.
Especially now with tokens being across a bunch of chains, you kind of definitely need
to be specific with that.
Now, the funny thing is I've, there's obviously a bunch of protocols like ENS that try to do
this.
Um, and it is a bit of a compromise in privacy and personally, like I, I, for example, I
have got an ENS address.
I hardly ever use it.
Um, I'm also a big fan of the, the FEO protocol, which does something similar, but really the
only address that I register, um, and that I ask people is like my Monero address because
it's the one that I actually don't care.
Like I don't care if the address is sitting out there associated to my emoji or my name.
And so I feel like the adoption of these protocols for specifically for wallet address
resolution, maybe not so much for domain names and whatnot, but for wallet address resolution
to me is hinged on privacy protocols and privacy based blockchains being broadly adopted because
they work so well together.
They work really, really hand in hand.
Um, so part of me thinks like, wait, it makes sense that of all people, Ricardo's here, you
know, trying to build, yeah, it works amazingly well with Monero.
They go, you know, absolutely.
So, and you know, butter and jelly, right?
Exactly.
And one thing I'll add there is like, um, that the, um, the, the other aspects are so
critical is like, uh, yeah, so actually like right now, um, the, they're centralized, but
the aim is, uh, like we've, we've structured it and designed and architected that, um, it'll
be decentralized in the future once Tari's live.
And one of the things that's so important about this is that then it becomes a critical
privacy tool because instead of needing to reveal stuff about you, um, you know, like
your username, which might be common on different platforms, you're just like, Hey, you know,
these five emojis, that's what you can use to, to send me money or to contact me or to,
you know, see my, my, get to my website.
And like, no one needs to know anything else beyond that.
And you can create hundreds of yats and like, give them out like candy.
You know, you're like, Oh, this is the ad I'm giving to you because you're a weird person.
And this is the ad I'm giving to you because you're a nice person.
And people can't, can't make connections between them because they're just emojis.
And so there's actually like a privacy benefit to it as well.
Um, you can imagine a future where there might be a chat client, like an IM client, you know,
maybe it's like a WhatsApp or a telegram or whatever.
And instead of finding someone based on their username or their phone number or their email
address, you just punch in a bunch of emojis.
You're punching like, you know, one to five emojis.
And that's how you contact the person.
Like it says something about them.
It protects your privacy.
It doesn't reveal anything else.
It's fantastic.
Soon people will, if they don't, don't mind giving up the privacy a bit, start having
emojis on their business cards as you hand them over and whatnot.
I love it.
That's awesome.
Cool, cool.
He has my business card with a bunch of emojis.
Yep, exactly.
We got Don here who has a question.
So let's bring them up and, uh, let's see.
I always got to remind myself how to unmute somebody.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hi guys.
How's it going?
I tuned in a bit late.
Um, but yeah, good talks about Minara happening here.
Uh, Fluffy, these questions for you.
Um, is there, um,
are there any like smart contracts, uh, or NFTs down the roadmap for Minara?
Any plans for, for smart contracts?
Is it possible?
I know Minara like focuses on privacy and anonymity, but, um, I have spoken to a few people in the
community and they have said it is possible.
Um, so what's your take on that?
So, so good question.
So I think two things there.
The first is, um, that, you know, the, the, the big challenge is doing it as like colored
coins where you're embedding data into a transaction is very challenging because you're basically
adding metadata to a transaction that could reveal information about a transaction, um,
or at least allow linking transactions that, uh, that are related, whether it's the same
source, the same destination, or even the same NFT.
Um, and so, you know, like Minara transactions are designed to be as similar as possible.
And the minute you start adding in this metadata that, uh, that might reveal something like
it's just not good for privacy, but could there be stuff as an L2?
Well, absolutely.
Um, and that's one of the things that Tari is, uh, is designed to be is like, um, you
know, uh, uh, merge mine side chain.
And, um, that side chain is, um, uh, you know, supports all sorts of things like NFTs and
other, uh, digital assets, it's a digital assets protocol, but it, it, it, it's not designed
to impact on, um, Monero's core or Monero's transaction structure.
Um, instead it's like atomic swaps and merge mining.
And that way you like really separate the two, um, and make sure you're not, uh, you don't
end up being the thing that ends up, um, hurting privacy, uh, for Monero transactions, which
is so critical.
Cool.
Cool.
We're just about running out of time.
I'm sorry, we only had time for one question.
So, uh, Rick, in the last couple of minutes, any, uh, parting words, suggestions for people,
places where they can, uh, follow you and some of the projects you're working on.
I mean, I'm, you know, I'm on Twitter as BuffyVoney, which I hope if you're, if you're
listening to a Twitter space and you don't know that, I don't know.
Exactly.
You know, and you know, other than that, yeah, like I, I think one thing that I would encourage
people to do is just like continuously think about small ways to improve your privacy.
You don't need to go crazy and like, you know, change everything, but maybe if you just
change one thing every six months, maybe you switch from Gmail to Tutanota or, um, something
else, uh, ProtonMail today.
And then like in six months time, you can think about switching off Instagram.
Um, you know, use Brave as a browser, right?
Right.
Something like that.
Every six months, make a small change, get used to it and then make the next change.
You'll see very quickly.
You, you end up with a bunch of privacy enhancing stuff.
Yeah.
And as we all do that, you start seeing governments get more and more pissed off and you know,
oh, there you go.
Well, cool.
Um, well, Rick, thanks so much for this chat.
This is amazing.
I got an immense amount of details on, uh, what we actually got out of this, uh, recent
hard fork.
Love to do this on a regular, um, hopefully not every five years, but then again, I wouldn't
mind if Monero only hard fork every five years, you know, but amazing details.
So, and for everyone else, um, I didn't even make an introduction myself.
So Paul, CEO and co-founder of edge, big supporters of Monero.
If you guys want to be able to transact easily, um, using the, my Monero API baked into edge,
which Ricardo was one of the founders of, you can give us a try edge.app.
Let us know what you think and send us any feedback and, uh, we'll be on a next Twitter
space at some point.
So thanks a whole lot.
Cool.
Cheers everybody.
Bye.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
