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OnlyFrens: Privacy After Dark with @thedesertlynx
Recorded: Sept. 4, 2025 Duration: 1:22:30Space Recording
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Mr. Sir, how are you?
Hello, Mr. Sir reporting for duty.
Good to see you, man.
I'm just sending this out to a couple people.
Back to space a little more.
And we'll get going.
Yeah, we've got to'll get going. Yeah.
We've got to pump the numbers.
Yeah.
Funny anecdote about that, by the way.
Yeah.
Long time ago, I went to some sort of a crypto meetup.
And that was when my dad was still alive.
And I brought him with me.
And there's someone who's posting pictures online
about, like, look at this pathetic guy.
He's trying to pump the numbers by having his dad.
I'm just like, dude, bringing one old guy here,
just pumping the numbers.
Like, what the hell are you talking about?
We normally have one and the allure
of potentially him taking his pants off on live stream.
So that's been the running incentive for people to join OnlyFriends.
But sorry to disappoint.
No such shenanigans today.
Juan is not here.
He is not with us.
He is on a flight. So I can't make it this week. But he actually
suggested you. He was like, aren't you close with Joel? And I was like, yeah. And he's like,
do you think we could bring him on a space? And I was like, yeah, he would love to be on.
But we ended up saying that to fill this spot this week and schedule our next set of guests that it'd be great to have you on.
And I was looking forward to the conversation anyway, because we're used to free flowing so much.
Yeah, absolutely.
Definitely a good time.
Yeah.
I'm always, I've become quite the spaces fiend these days. Do you remember back in the
early days when it was like clubhouse and stuff? Yeah. And I never, I didn't get it. I was such a
boomer on that stuff. I was like, why would I go do this like audio only like zoom call,
but it's public. And also I didn't like zoom either because i've been used to using
like google meet and stuff but that's a different subject and when spaces came around i'm like this
is like i've been video podcasting for like you know what has it been four or five years at least
i'm like this is like the lame version of that it's bugging all the time and then now i kind of get it i think people like being on these types of things because um you know the first of all i realized that the spontaneity thing
it's a lot of it's manufactured and you just have to manufacture it and then it's like okay that's
how it works but then also i think that um you there's just a lot of like people just doing work all day long that are just like
also multitasking in a space instead of doing that lo-fi chill beats to you know study and
relax too it's like it kind of beats that sorry i was on mute making a post it definitely does
and uh i i loved clubhouse initially um it kind of went the got invaded and you know as as trends
or like as cool things cool spaces get invaded they just degenerate and there's this like you
know the life cycle of a subculture you probably read the original but I wrote a revised version of uh an article i called it geeks normies and grifters
or nerds normies and grifters um it's like the evolution of the subculture of crypto where
basically in any subculture you have a group of people that get really excited and nerd out over some topic. And then normies come in too.
So those are nerds.
And then normies come in and dilute the space.
And then grifters see that there are normies there that will pay money.
And that there are people there that will pay money to be a part of that subculture.
And then the grifters extract all of the things
that are cool and commercialize it.
And that is how subcultures die.
So that was, I don't know,
that's what came to mind right there.
I don't even remember the segue
or what point I was trying to make.
It's early for you.
It's late for me.
And by the way,
I appreciate you getting up so early for the space.
No worries at all.
It's yeah,
it's not that early.
I mean,
getting up,
getting up,
like,
listen,
I'm never going to be a whiny little bitch about getting up at seven in the
morning.
You know,
it's like,
boo hoo.
And you're walking downstairs making yourself a
espresso in your own little home and go and sit in front of your nice comfy computer with the
sunrise kind of thing oh wow such a sacrifice that sounds amazing um i'm in the opposite but maybe
complimentary mode where i think i'm gonna light up a a cigar and just hang out on the porch and chat about privacy stuff.
I think we can kick it off here.
People will filter in.
The space is recorded.
But I am really looking forward to chatting with you about all this stuff today.
It's been a while since we got to talk about these things.
And I feel like you're the practical expert at how to use crypto the way that crypto should be used.
So I know you have some takes on privacy and takes on privacy tech.
And I'm looking forward to digging into those.
But how would you like to introduce yourself for people that don't know you?
What would you like to introduce yourself for people that don't know you? What would you say?
Yeah, I'm not even sure.
But my name is Joel,
in case you don't see up there.
And currently I do business development
and marketing for Dash.
I also do a...
I do the whole, what they call,
the micro KOL thing on the side where I should post a lot on X, do a podcast.
So basically crypto user and advocate since, I don't know, I would say 2013.
That's kind of what I like to say.
I feel like you're under, oh, go ahead.
It's kind of it, you know.
I feel like you're underselling it,
understating it, because you've been living
on crypto for
10 years or something like that.
Not just in crypto, but
you are the guy
that has been campaigning for
this stuff is money
or this stuff is an
alternative to banks and here's how you do it.
Yeah. And it's, it's kind of, um,
one thing that makes that kind of like awkward to talk about sometimes as far
as like where my place is in that thing is back in the day,
this is kind of like, I kind of feel like it should have been everyone, right?
And it was sort of everyone in the early days
where everyone was talking about,
you know, end the Fed, Fiat's a scam,
all this kind of stuff, you know, gold standard,
oh, that'll never happen.
And then we come to this magical thing
called Bitcoin at first.
And we're like, now this is a solution
and people caught the bug.
And I think that that's one thing that people don't really understand historically. There's
this weird phenomenon, by the way, with Bitcoin, BTC specifically, where you have a lot of people,
a lot of experts today who talk about it, who kind of don't really understand where the value comes from, but they think they do.
And they come up with a lot of like, what should I say? Like, a lot of like theories based on
basically, basically, they just describe present present reality and just say, that's the reason.
And I know there's a weird way to back into this whole thing but like they say like oh it's a store
of value because it's just been stable for all these years and oh it's just like nothing else
will be like it and like you know they say all these things that are kind of like the the after
effects of what's missing the big piece which in like you know no no, no ICO, no marketing, just organic. It's just, but no one would ever do that today for something like Bitcoin.
The reason is like back in the day, again, to talk about, this is where I'm really showing
all my gray hairs.
It was like the beginning of a revolution kind of thing.
It's just like the first time someone had like an electrical anything.
And I'm like, oh oh my gosh this is amazing and
you had a massive amount of not only tech geeks because this kind of stuff hadn't really been
done before but then um like cypherpunks and a lot of libertarians a lot of people like that
just jump on board and start promoting the ever-loving crap out of bitcoin just for years
and you know i was one of those people. I was one
of what I feel like is a latecomer in like the 2012, 2013 era. And like in early 2014, for example,
I worked on some of these flyers. They're called Bitcoin Bigfoot. The guy I knew commissioned them
and paid me in Bitcoin to write the copy for them. And it was big enough to where Coindesk wrote an article about these like flyers,
which is that's how small the world was there.
That Coindesk is writing something about, you know, oh my gosh,
like someone's promoting Bitcoin with these flyers.
And it's like no marketing agency paid this guy.
He just said, we need this.
And then I was like, I'll do it.
And then people peer-to-peer ran around and just actually
on board of people were like hey google can you take you know hey microsoft can you take like
started harassing everyone about taking bitcoin and stuff and so it created this magical sort of
phenomenon um that since then i guess every single other crypto technologies had to compete
then, I guess every single other crypto technologies had to compete on its own merit.
Aside from that, it's just like Bitcoin got all the financial freedom for the world is
awesome kind of energy and it just soaked it all up.
And then every other project is like, yeah, why do you need to exist shit coin?
And so that's kind of to sort of like wind back.
People forget that magic of the era.
People just jumped on board.
Everyone was doing what I was doing.
Everyone was trying to.
And back in the day, like my thing today is a little bit of a gimmick sometimes where, I mean, I think it's the one thing that really matters.
one thing that really matters but a lot of people are like oh yeah he's the guy that this and back
But a lot of people are like, oh, yeah, he's the guy that this.
in the day it was everyone's like oh my gosh like you like I want to do that too this is great like
it was like it was the top of that mountain now there's different mountains so to kind of back
into that whole thing that's kind of where it came from is like I find it weird to sort of talk about
oh yeah I've been doing this and I'm so cool.
I was doing what everyone said they should have been doing, what the purpose of this stuff was back in the day.
And at some point, I just looked around me and was like, you guys aren't coming too?
What's going on here?
Yeah, man. I remember that energy. And that's one of the things that I feel like of Bitcoin in the early days and what it was
Yeah, man.
I remember that energy.
intended to be, what everyone understood it to be, and how that got changed over time
to leave us with the shell of a project that it is today.
But I'm curious about sort of turning this to privacy, and thank you for the intro.
this to privacy and thank you for the intro um i'm curious about like your perspective as someone
who is very publicly uh in the crypto space how do you feel about privacy and like your account
balances potentially even being public like i'm sure you've seen all of the kidnappings in paris
the kidnappings in Paris and these kind of places,
and these kind of places like how does that factor into your thinking
like how does that factor into your thinking?
Yeah, well, privacy is an interesting thing, right?
People want it for all kinds of different purposes.
And it's just like people need it the most if they are at risk of some,
something like they're rich or famous or in certain part of the world,
they're rich or famous or in certain part of the world, et cetera. For me, it's going to sound
et cetera.
strange to say this, but I don't have a very strong personal interest in privacy. It's just
that it is a big part of the whole sovereignty piece. And I think that we're finding that with
crypto where the privacy projects are the hardcore cypherpunks. And I think that we're finding that with crypto where the privacy projects are
the hardcore cypherpunks. And I think that privacy is an important part about it. So it was
decentralization. So it was censorship resistance. So it was universal accessibility. So it was open
source. So it was all this other stuff. But usually, I guess the crypto space did a lot of
those things in some way, shape or form.
And then it just didn't do privacy super well.
So privacy is that last piece sort of thing.
So where do I sort of see it?
Well, privacy is optionality.
And that's the thing that people don't necessarily.
it's a hard way of people wrapping their head around right obviously i would say no one here
It's a hard way of people wrapping their head around, right?
is a privacy like a ridiculous privacy hardcore because we're on this glorious platform called x
just speaking to as hopefully as many people as will come listen that's not right i heard dms
are going to be encrypted soon can't knock x privacy this is the most private social media platform on the planet
i just sent one like three minutes ago i saw the the option pop up for the private encrypted dm i'm
pretty sure let me try this out i'm pretty sure they're literally encrypted by the four digit pin
code that you give them yeah well that's that's exactly thing. And we all choose what we want to share publicly and privately. And I think that the reason why privacy is such a thing in the crypto world today is because since basically the 9-11 era, it's been radical surveillance has kind of been the norm in, in a lot of the Western world,
not to mention a lot of other places that have, you know,
fewer even enshrined rights. It's just been pretty bad.
And so now we just don't have, it's not that, Oh,
everyone needs to keep everything private.
It's just that everyone should keep some things private and they have not
been able to for a very long time.
And so now it's like taking that optionality back. And so there's
a few things, like, for example, being a public persona, like, I don't mind my words being attached
to who I am, because I live in a free country, relatively speaking. Again, this is always very,
I don't think such a, as far as countries exist, and there is freedom, I'm, you know, I could
basically say what I want so far and not be annoyed.
So I have nothing to fear from being from speaking publicly with my name.
I'm not an activist, dissident, anything like that.
I don't have any job outside of crypto, so it's not like I could get fired from that.
My family and my, you know, in-laws and all that all know I'm a lunatic already, so I have nothing to hide there. So there's nothing wrong. I like being, you know, public on that stuff and everyone's
sharing bits about my life, but I do take some precautions. Like I don't tell people exactly
where I live. I do the practice of posting personal travel photos and stuff. Not exactly
when I'm there, not with too much identifying information,
because I know that it's extremely, for anyone who's determined, you can just take a picture
and determine exactly where you are in the world in most cases. And so I'm just, that's fine. I
don't care if people know where I've been. I just don't want to tell them while I'm there so they don't come after me. And so for me, it's kind of like the public side of things
is I think that there's two sides of it.
First of all, privacy is choosing
what you want to reveal and to whom.
And so I choose to reveal a lot of things
and I choose not to reveal a lot of things.
And that's what privacy is all about.
And on the other side of things, there's just a lot that is kind of public and I don't think,
it's not worth pretending to keep it hidden if you know what I mean. Like for example,
I don't, you know, when I stay, you know, I talk a lot about freedom in the free state
project and stuff like that and in New Hampshire and stuff.
And so I'm not going to be like, well, but I might be living in Brazil.
It's like, come on, dude, everyone sort of knows, like, I'm not going to talk about that.
And, um, just other things like, you know, what preferences I have, certain things,
what projects I'm involved in, those kinds of things.
If it's all public, people don't tend to try to ascribe malicious intent to it or anything like that.
They don't go looking for it as much and try to exploit it if it's just there.
Whereas if it's like, well, let me find out if this doc's this guy.
It's just like, then you start looking,
and then you start, when you find the basic stuff,
maybe I would say the red herring stuff,
such as, what is my name?
What do I basically look at?
Kind of where in the world do I live?
Once it's already there, it sort of distracts people
rather than like, oh, let me just dig into them.
Then they start digging and finding more and more and more personal details.
And then there you go.
Yeah, it's kind of weird.
There's this tendency or trend in privacy
that may just be a byproduct of being a public figure in general.
But the people that really want to campaign for privacy
often are the most radically transparent
because it takes away the power of their enemies to destroy their character or dox them or threaten to dox them.
It takes away a lot of leverage that people would have over you, but it's like almost a higher road to walk.
It's a higher calling, sort of, to be someone pushing for privacy publicly with your name out there like that.
Because at the end of the day, there are a lot of powerful people in the world and organizations in the world that don't want you to have privacy.
Yeah, that's true.
And in everything, there's always a trade-off for everything. And I think that public free speech and advocacy is one of the most powerful things we can do. And it's also one of far as if you want more people to have private rights someone has
to talk about them in some way and the more public of a figure that they tend to be the more I guess
credence that that leads to the cause but then that's of course a bigger a bigger trade-off
there and so for me I think it's an acceptable trade-off. It's one of those,
like those, I guess, value maximizing deals as it were, because there's a lot of stuff that I don't
have major risks for, and that's already sort of public. And if I lean into those that helps,
you know, for me, it's almost no cost to just use that to promote,
you know, privacy and things like that, where because it's already sort of out there, and it's
very low risk or cost to me, whereas, you know, someone who's like a dissident or something,
coming into the public limelight is maybe a much bigger cost, but then the benefit is not that much
greater than just having a public voice. For sure. I really think that, yeah, I think that, you know,
some of the best privacy educators out there are sort of public to a certain extent.
Like, of course, Naomi Brockwell is sort of the gold standard out there.
Very privacy conscious, but also a very public figure.
People like, you know, Seth for privacy.
I don't always agree with everything he says,
but he does know what he's talking about and he does a great job with this kind of stuff.
And even though I don't know his last name, cause I haven't done some basic Googling or anything.
Everyone sort of knows what he looks like and stuff. He's, you know, done a good job
stabbing out there. I could probably go on and on about a lot of these people. Of course,
Edward Snowden, a big part of why of all the
whistleblowers out there, he really stood out is because he came out very publicly and it took
enormous risk for that and became a sort of a public face of the privacy movement. And I think
by doing that, it kind of is like a way to do a little Snowden rant, I guess, but by doing that,
he led a lot of credence to the movement.
But also, once these leaks and stuff are out, it's easy for the hostile powers that be or whatever to manipulate them into a bad place.
And by just staying alive, staying out there and staying free and staying vocal, he managed to keep the moral discourse around privacy and sovereignty rights.
He managed to keep it focused and you kind of need to be like a figurehead.
It's kind of like as if Satoshi never disappeared and was still here to keep the ship on the
right course.
Man, the world would be a better place.
Assuming Satoshi wasn't the CIA, but.
Or that Australian guy.
He who must not be named.
Yeah.
But that's an interesting framing.
I like how you articulate that it's like a trade-off
in deciding to be public as a privacy advocate.
And I think that makes a lot of sense
that you might not have a whole lot to fear
in some senses. Obviously, this calls to that infamous line, if you have nothing to hide,
you have nothing to fear, which was Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda.
Nazi minister of propaganda. Turned out that was a lie. But I think the key there is that most
people don't make that calculation. Most people naively assume that they have nothing to hide,
and so they have nothing to fear. In a lot of ways, that may be true, but I'm curious how you would describe, like, what are the, uh, the
reasons, maybe not the things people should fear, but the, you know, in a more positive framing,
like what are the reasons for privacy? Why should people care about privacy in your, in your view?
Well, man, there's so many kinds of things there um and i'll ask another follow-up
sort of a prompting question um did you know by the way that your phone is spying on you
listen um unfortunately yes one of the two the one that i like to keep in the faraday bag
you asked me this question and everybody this question at the last conference we were at
together you must remember that yeah for the the audience this is the inside joke
yes and the the joke comes from naomi brockwell's uh educational stuff a lot of the videos become
you know i kind of like jokingly distilled all her content into the one phrase, did you know your phone is spying on
you? And she kind of like, you know, I teased her about it so much that it finally, I got her to get
it on a sticker. So she has a promotional sticker that says your phone is spying. So I finally got
that in, but that is kind of the portal by which most people are spied on. So the thing about information, information is always
power. And the more you know, the more power you have over people. And a lot of times,
if you have like this wealth of information versus like, let's just imagine you're someone on
a date, like you go out on a date with a nice person and you happen
to have every single bit of information of everything that they've ever done in their life
like god-like kind of knowledge about them going in that's just a an interesting situation where
they have no i should try this yeah listen it's gonna take some extra, it's going to get you on some lists, I'm sure, but go for it.
If you have that kind of advantage coming into the thing, you have a completely different type of relationship moving forward from that.
And you could do all kinds of like, you know, manipulate them like, oh, I know all your favorite foods, but you don't tell them.
And you say, oh, like, oh, I know where you live.
I can like, oh, yeah, let me just walk you back.
Or then if you tip her out to be a creep or something and, you know, not judging.
But then at some point you can follow them home.
Now you know where they live and that's a danger to them.
And there's just so many elements that kind of gets exposed to.
And especially it's bad when there's asymmetry, when's the other way around when you don't you don't have that
reciprocity one person has all the cards the other person has none of the cards and this um unfair
power dynamic is kind of is at play and people can use it to expose you so for example you know
just random even things like you're in an online argument and someone says,
yeah, well, that's why your wife left you and this and that because you're a bad this
and they're doing all this stuff.
And I mean, obviously, that's terrible.
You don't want that out there.
You don't want that, especially in a professional, semi-professional argument or whatever, especially
when you don't know the opposite.
You can't just say, well, hey, look at you too, buddy. It's just like, I don't know this person. This person
pretends to be whatever. And that's one thing that I talk about the living on crypto stuff
because 99.9% of the people I encounter don't. And it's a big kind of hypocrisy lever where you,
I've had this, I've gotten some argument
of some, you know, self-proclaimed influencer person and they, they're like, well, you know,
you're just a, whatever they say.
And it all comes down to, at the end of the day, you know, I do what I do to live sovereign.
And by the way, you don't.
And say, well, you don't know that. I'm like, I do what I do to live sovereign. And by the way, you don't. And say, well, you don't know that.
I'm like, I do. It's like, okay, it's only because I've done this for so long that I understand.
I know the signs. I know people. I know the kinds of people and what they would brag about if they
could. But it's this, for example, these individuals almost never say, yeah, you're right.
I only own 70% of my wealth in crypto and everything that I 100% of my spending is in censorable fiat rails.
And therefore, I'm in no position to criticize the way you choose to live sovereign.
There's that never happens.
It's always like, well, I could live 100%.
You just never know.
And I'm like, I do know. Even though I don't, I do know. And there's this very clear knowledge
of like the information asymmetry there where they don't want to, they think they got it because
they know what I'm doing, but then they don't want to reveal that sense to that personal
information about them because that sort of guts their entire argument.
So it's important because for safety and power reasons, we're just talking about the very
surface level thing here. It gets a little bit crazier after that. But the very surface level
thing is this information is power and power can be used against you. And it can be used,
especially if it's asymmetrical, you can be used against you. And it can be used, especially if it's asymmetrical,
you can be very disadvantaged.
I love this term,
semi-professional argument
that you just floated,
I believe was the term.
And so, but imagine,
you know, imagine if all the Twitter trolls
had access,
everybody you've ever argued with online
had access to your entire personal history.
That's a very unique threat model.
And I wonder if that's top of mind for you
because you opened up your DMs this morning
or your notifications this morning
and saw a bunch of retards criticizing you
about things they have no place doing.
But I'd imagine that's a pretty common experience uh in your
in your day-to-day it is it wasn't today i have not looked at my notifications i'm sure there's
some because i was beefing with proton yesterday so that's a different that's a different thing
but a one actual real life example is uh you know a few years ago i did some you know, a few years ago, I did some, you know, when I did a stint of doing some work for
the Dash ecosystem from like 2017 to 2019, then took a few years break and then kind of went back
full time last year. During that first stint, there was a lot of like Thunderdome equalities
going on at the DAO at the the moment and i dealt with anonymous trolls
and stuff all the time and i have a brother who's a little bit of a strange guy and i didn't really
talk to him too much in the last couple decades or so i guess but he somehow found you know reddit
and he started like shitting on me with all this like personal information stuff, which is just so which is one of the most bizarre things because I hadn't talked to him in like probably five, six years at that point.
And he's like, yeah, this guy's a, you know, he's a my our parents would be so disappointed in him because of this.
I knew him growing up. It's all this like nonsense.
Like none of it was like true, really, other than that he do me.
And then the fact that
we grew up together that part was true but he just used this to like professionally harm me from an
angle that was like you know from that gave personal credence and helped the trolls and later
he like i i barely spoke to him since then but one time he's just like oh i'm sorry i got carried
away with some stuff okay dude i never that never happened with me but whatever but i guess the point is like the the personal
information angle really made it less than just this random guy and then it's like oh this guy
actually knows him from his past says he's a scammer what the hell this is this is interesting
and um this is before this individual had had a job.
Basically, the first 20 years of his adulthood was living on other people.
So there's that.
So I guess maybe that's my little tat back of where that comes from.
But yeah, the point is, yeah, just the personal angle, the extra information is harmful or can be used to be harmful. And so if it's all even, even level playing field, then things can work out. What were you going to say
about that? Just know that's like a really interesting anecdote that I feel like there
are many, many reasons that people might want, you know might want privacy, but one of them is certainly that people can use information about you
to ruin your reputation.
I can think of many others, but to not get stuck on that point,
I am actually curious.
You mentioned you had a beef with Proton.
What is that?
I have some beefs with Proton, but I would like to know what yours are.
but I would like to know what yours are.
Yes.
So let me be as fair as possible here, right?
Because obviously when you do speak publicly also
and you have a reputation to uphold,
anytime you go a little bit too outside of anything,
that doesn't reflect well.
And again, that's another reason
I choose not to have privacy
as far as my, you know, public personas concerned, because I do kind of want that natural check and
balance on what I say, you know, as far as like, I do want to maintain a good reputation and it
helps me anyway. Proton long time ago, like 2016 2016 era, were in some sort of a discussion and works with the Dash core team, which at the time did business development and stuff like that.
They don't anymore.
That's kind of what I do.
I'm not involved with the core team.
And back in the day, there was this mystery, big integration that people were working on for a while.
This was many months.
There were funds appropriated for this.
And at the time that when you would do these kinds of integration type things, a lot of time, and by the way, still there's an unnamed merchant network that just asked me like, you know, a bunch of money to integrate and stuff.
So it still happens to this day. But basically, there was there was a DAO money and a good thing
about DAOs and stuff is a lot of this is out in public. Unfortunately, not enough of it. But
a lot of it's out in public. Basically, there was this super secret company that was going to
integrate Dash and they needed some money for integration. That was being
talked about. There's tons of public forum posts and stuff. Eventually it was revealed that it
was Proton and they were working with the release of Proton, et cetera. And there was a post that
came out from Proton that said, we're in the process of integrating blah, blah, blah, including
Dash. And so they publicly talked about it as well.
They kind of confirmed that. At some point, everything went sort of dark. It's like,
what happened to this? And like, oh, they've been dark. They haven't gotten back to us.
And eventually it was one of the big disappointments of that era where it just
poof, materialized, like just nothing came of it. And so I don't like that,
but that is sort of par for the course in a lot of business dealings where things change.
You know, there's also a little bit of a mist
between whoever was working for the business development
of Dash Core Group at the time.
Again, as I mentioned there, no one is now.
Wasn't super transparent about what transpired and things like that. So there's always like something missing in there.
And I know that funds were allocated towards this thing. I don't 100% know that Proton got those
funds. I suspect they did, but I don't 100 hundred percent know. And they're not going to be honest about
it. So that's basically this thing, you know, they probably got paid or at least someone got
paid to talk to them. They publicly said they were going to integrate and then they just didn't.
And that was like, you know, nine years ago. And so they kind of got followed up over. That's just a little bit of a disappointment,
but that's not a beef. Where the beef starts is over the years. First of all, they've been asked
and just not answered. And it wasn't until the last year or so that they made a Bitcoin wallet,
which is weird. Again, Proton, they're all about privacy.
They made an old school Bitcoin wallet
with no real privacy features that I could tell,
which is, again, it's a little bit weird.
It's just like, oh, we're going to debut
our own Amex card or something.
It's like, what are you doing?
This is kind of weird.
And they got roasted by a lot of people,
especially the Monero people,
the loudest
online voices about the privacy stuff and they basically just said oh we don't deal with shit
some like here's the thing about maximalism right um it's this weird kind of like cult ideology i
would say but people i i can recognize when people are trying out lines they've heard right there's these
aren't independent thoughts this isn't like you know whenever you hear oh shit coins or whatever
it's like a maxi virtue signal they're trying out to be cool with their kids you know i love
pressing those people because they'll like they freeze and you're like telling me like what do
you like about bitcoin over altcoins and they're like, it's decentralized or some shit like that.
Or their brains just stop.
It's like an idiocracy.
But Brando's got what plants crave.
And it's like that moment.
You see their NPC brain just short circuit because there's no defensible.
I mean, it's not that there's no defensible position.
It's that they don't get it.
They don't have the nuance.
And, yeah.
Preaching to the choir.
It's that they don't believe it.
You know?
Yeah, it's a line.
It's a line.
Yeah, and it's...
There are people that do believe it
and are just not...
They don't have a lot behind those
in between those eyes.
But I think the Proton people are intelligent people and i think that they
just for whatever reason aligned with the maximalist vibe and they're like oh and let
me use the lines that people like so they're talking about just oh shit coins and then they
got absolutely roasted over that because i mean the bitcoiners are like not about privacy so they
probably don't care nearly as much about a service that claims to be as private as proton whether
that's true or not um the the interesting thing to me there is like i wonder if their marketing
in turn realized that you know that fact and also that
none of the Bitcoiners
there's like four Bitcoiners
that would actually use Bitcoin
to pay for Proton. Everybody
else is using other coins
to pay for things. So they lost
the business that they would have had
from the thing that they thought was
going to give it to them by promoting
that thing.
You know, it's interesting.
The one small caveat, I guess, to that thing,
as I bet there's a lot of people who, a lot of non-Bitcoiners using Bitcoin to pay.
I just, not too long ago, I had a personal hug out with Zuko for a long time in person
and was chatting with him. And I know that
he's, I think he's publicly talked about using near intense to swap Zcash for a Bitcoin payment.
And I think Proton might've been one of those. I'm not sure. But so there's a lot of people that
are just like, Ooh, I want to use my actual coin that I actually use, but they only accept Bitcoin.
So therefore i'm going
to just do an instant swap and therefore they see that it's kind of funny because um
yes i've done a lot of that in the past thankfully i don't have to do it a lot because
most of what i use just doesn't just is accepted everywhere kind of. But yeah, it's funny because like Nano GPT, which is a great,
I guess, LLM service you can pay as you go in crypto and stuff. It keeps it all,
I guess, as anonymous as you can if you're using like ChatGPT and stuff like that.
But their statistics were like super skewed in certain ways for certain months because I topped up like five or five different
times and with relatively significant balances for the amount I use it. And I was testing out
some swap integrations. So I sent five dash transactions and they received a no dash for
any of those. And so it's like, oh, it was like all my activities showed up as other coids.
And then the next month he started to see things like change again. But that's just
a funny anecdote on that part. But so I guess the thing is like Proton did this stuff. They
did their Bitcoin wallet, they got roasted, and then they got harassed about accepting
specifically Monero for, you know, stuff for their, their products.
I wonder who has a vested interest in people not using Monero to pay for something like Proton.
I don't know.
I think a lot of it is, so like, for example, Mulvad takes Monero.
That's who I use, or I use up to, I guess, the present time.
That might change in a second, but I might get to that.
But they take Monero.
That's fine.
I think IVPN does.
There's a few places that do,
and it's just like,
okay,
I get it.
And a lot of those people decided their crypto acceptance things before
Zcash really came onto the scene with more,
more usability with usable wallets,
more shielded wallets,
et cetera.
So it's like,
okay,
I get it.
It'll take a while to get like Zcash to catch up and stuff. But mostly I think it's just inertia. People just set up
their infrared to take these kinds of things. And then they're like, all right, that's enough.
We're, we're good. Um, it, it was, it was always funny about like cash in the mail stuff. I'm like,
Alyssa, that, that reminds me of like, that's old school stuff. That's the stuff like, um,
like my mother used to pay for stuff back in the day.
She was a little bit of a fiat privacy person, you know?
So yeah, that's a little sketchy.
But so they got harassed into basically accepting Monero.
And I would say that this is like, they drag their feet so much.
And then they said, oh, well, only if you give a petition that says a thousand people then we'll do it and then they just there's a lot of argument in the community too about well
let's get the thousand signatures no let's not beg them screw them they've been ignoring us for years
all that kind of stuff um they kind of finally did it but so during that time i relentlessly harassed
the accounts on any opportunity to say, hey, remember this?
What happened to this?
Hey, remember this?
What happened to this?
Hey, remember this?
What happened with this?
Because getting an official answer was not like, oh, let me look into that.
Oh, yeah, sorry.
According to our thing, people, you know, we I don't remember what happened back then, but it was deprioritized.
And so we haven't done it.
Sorry.
Like that would have been a perfectly
acceptable answer but instead they ignored it until finally they answered and this has been
multiple people associated with the company have answered with like weird salty kind of things
about like oh i think you must be mistaken it was never that and then it's just like no here's a
tweet well that's just a tweet was literally the answer,
which is mind blowing from the company to say,
we're in the process of this, that, that from the public handle
and not be like, oh, interesting.
Yeah, I didn't heard about that.
Let me check that.
It seems like our priorities shifted since then.
It's like, okay, that would have been acceptable.
But instead, it's like, um, that was just a tweet.
It's not exactly a promise, don't you think?
And I'm like, what the hell? And then they're're like well you know you know you didn't have a petition you know your
you didn't have a petition to do this like well you didn't say we could get a petition there's a
lot of that weird stuff and then i mentioned it again i think yesterday another guy was like
posting price charts and it's like that's how you know like the maxi brain rod has really got to you
when someone's saying like you know i'm upset that they didn't integrate when they said they shouldn't it's like
yeah well aren't you upset that your coin isn't on the top of the front market page here anymore
dude i'm just like really a professional company is like saying this publicly so that's kind of
where my beef is like kind of going i of going. If anyone here wants to...
What were I doing here?
One person.
If one person here is using Proton for anything
and wants to switch to NIM VPN instead,
if you post a picture of canceling your Proton thing,
I will pay for your NIM yearly subscription.
Yeah, anyone might be abroad.
That might attract the token farmers that are subsidizing the entire NIMP and anybody's set.
Joel will pay for an unlimited number of VPN subscriptions if you just show him an edited screenshot on Proton.
Kidding, kidding, but someone should take you up on that.
That would be great.
I also use Malvad and then Tudanoda for email, for privacy.
My philosophy is if it doesn't go down at least once, twice a year,
it's probably not that secure.
You know, if it doesn't have state-sponsored DDoS attacks,
it's probably not that secure of a platform, paradoxically.
But in Tudanotaonode does. The UX is
absolutely atrocious, but I
keep using it because it's private
and they have
an outstanding track record.
Unless you have interesting information about that,
I'm open to having my mind changed.
Yeah, it's an interesting metric
about that stuff.
I don't know.
I don't necessarily disagree. I just don't know. I don't know if that's how things work out, but it is kind of a fun metric to use, I guess.
source stuff could be audited of course but at the same time we don't really know how it works
out in the real world in a lot of ways we don't know who can see what or who can compromise what
we kind of have some ideas but a lot of that stuff is is kept private for a reason you know
whether it's um the people if they don't want to say by the way we have all these vulnerabilities
they said we're going to jump on them or then then like state actors are not going to say, guess what?
I think we got into like a third of Proton users, whatever.
Like they're not going to say that either.
So there you go.
For sure.
So on the topic of other tools that people can use for privacy,
that people can use for privacy?
like what is your tech stack for privacy?
And what do you recommend
for the average person to be using?
Well, that's a big,
that's like a big journey.
It's kind of,
when you think about privacy,
so first of all,
sometimes I conflate privacy and sovereignty.
Privacy is a great part of sovereignty, but sometimes there's sovereign tools that aren't necessarily private associated or there is an angle.
So just with that big disclaimer there.
So first of all, for mobile device, I use Graphene OS, which is an open source alternative de-Google operating system,
they tend to advertise on being secure rather than private,
but getting rid of all the Google tracking
and all that other kind of stuff
is definitely a big boon for privacy.
So that's like the number one thing
that your phone is spying on you.
The less you can make your phone spy on you, the better.
So for the phone, Graphite OS, obviously use VPNs and Tor to connect over whatever apps would use Tor, etc.
Kind of keep, do whatever open source versions of any app that you can that aren't, you know, spying on you.
So like I don't use Gmail or any of that kind on you. So like, I don't use Gmail or
any of that kind of stuff in the app. I don't use any Google services. I do have a sandbox Google
profile. The only reason I have that is for this, this watch trick that, you know, maybe I'll get
into a little bit for paying, but, but basically everything de-Googled, including like the open
source, you know, YouTube thing that
doesn't spy on you, that just takes stuff. And then the open source app stores and obviously
encrypted communications like, you know, Signal and Matrix and other stuff like that. Now think
about the privacy people love to go after each other for like, oh, you should use Session, man.
You should use this. Everyone's always after you're using
the wrong encrypted messenger.
And there's always this giant network effect issue.
I feel like Signal is where I can talk.
I can talk to everyone on Signal.
And that pretty much works for me
because all the privacy people worth their salt know how to use it.
And a good chunk of normies will too.
Like some work friends and people in the political world and even reporters and stuff for mainstream media, they use that kind of stuff.
So I guess I would say the reach from that is all a lot better so then i
one thing is i don't know my own phone number because i don't want to be sim swapped i guess
that's more of a um security thing than a privacy thing um so i use um there's an interesting service called JumpChat, JMP.chat, which is an anonymous VoIP number service.
They take a few different cryptos.
And so basically, I have a few different VoIP numbers.
One of them is some old phone number I used to have that I want to hold on to.
And so basically, I use, you know, voiceover and protocol numbers so that I don't get SIM swapped.
So that's good.
Try to think of what else for the phone.
So just broad strokes then.
Linux for the computers.
I've been Ubuntu since 2017.
That's another thing people get all weird and judgy about.
Like, oh, why don't you use Tails?
Why don't you do?
Okay, I don't listen.
I use what works it
works it's fine and you know more importantly is what i've been able to use to get off
the windows slash rack os slash whatever stuff for the past eight years or so and
everything else i guess open source as far as like you know open source video editing tools
and stuff like that.
Again, we're going to the more fun, sovereign side of things and not necessarily purely on the private side.
But, you know, I, you know, very various private email kind of things.
I do have a Proton account.
I'm going to figure out what I'm going to do to get rid of that.
Probably go to Tuda.
But, you know, that was, again, set up way back in the day.
And anytime you change your email or whatever, everything starts to, everything gets complicated.
And so, basically, from, like, the personal privacy stack, that's kind of, I don't know, did I miss any major, like, areas of the tech there?
No, not...
I mean, on phone, I don't think so.
I'm curious about your laptop as well.
My question is actually,
I had a question about your handle,
the Dessert Linux.
Is that the Linux distro that you use?
That is funny.
So my handle, the Desert Lakes, comes from some old blog I used to run.
And I don't anymore.
But it just became, I started this X handle to promote the blog.
And so it just ends up being a thing.
And everyone in crypto loves to have their dumb pseudonyms.
So I guess I got roped into that too um but it's funny because i lost my keys to the desert lakes handle on the
hive blockchain and so i started a new one called the dessert linux because it's funny and so that's
so i am kind of both and i do tend to keep um both handles wherever they, dude, I didn't actually know you had the dessert Linux.
Maybe we talked about this before.
And so that's where it was seated in my consciousness.
But dude, I'd say like once a month, I get followed by a fake account, someone impersonating
you.
And I think one of them was something like the dessert Linux or like the dessert links
or something.
It's just they've tried every
permutation at this point it feels like but i keep seeing more of them so um but like what
operating system would you use on a laptop same i've been using ubuntu because that's where i
sort of started before i had a desktop um i have thought about doing tails and it would be pretty cool to do something like that.
I just have to, I have to wrap my head around exactly how I get to, you know, how I'm going
to be able to work on the road the same way. So basically, yeah, if I could figure out a way to
do it where I could just plug into tails and then everything else could just work and I have access to all the stuff that I need to. Like at some point, like I, threat modeling is important,
right? So for example, if I, like the amount of the risk that I have for people, like
I don't have like a space age kind of like risk profile where, you know, it's like, oh my gosh,
this guy's got the key to these nuclear codes. If anyone gets, you know, he's got to like be a ghost
in the night and like, no, I'm pretty much like a regular nine to five type person, not even less
so in some cases, um, kind of security profile. And so a lot of this stuff is sort of LARPing.
So obviously I LARP to the best of my
abilities but it's like I'm not gonna I'm not stress like if if I do tails and I have to like
unplug this little USB thing every time and then put it in and then just like re-sign into like 800
accounts with a little password manager that's on another stick or whatever it's just i'm going to
spend so much time just doing that that i'm not going to actually get any work done or i'm just
going to end up having a backup computer that's already in everything so i have to like figure out
if it makes sense to do that kind of stuff um it would in my mind it sounds so odd like this is one
of those like larp things where it just sounds so like awesome in cypherpunk to be like, dude, I just unplugged me.
I just go completely dark, man.
But like, I got to be real to myself.
Does this actually make sense to my life?
Yeah, I feel like that's a powerful arc that a lot of people exploring privacy go through.
I know Manu Al-Zuru a while ago gave a talk at Barcelona on how not everybody needs like insane levels of privacy.
And some people do for sure.
But something I've heard from multiple people that are very good with privacy and understand it deeply is like not everybody needs to be on everything the most possible, you know, most private thing possible.
Like you talked about
privacy as a component of security. Our last guest, Arjun, last week, working on, he's working
with Zcash in some capacity. He talked about how privacy is just a synonym for security in some ways, or you had mentioned that it's a sort of a subset of security of sovereignty.
And in my personal experience,
like I went fully off grid,
like ditched my phone was just using cubes,
which is a fucking actually not that bad.
It's not really a nightmare,
but it is a lot of cubes cubes has virtual containers uh virtual environments
for all of your applications and it sandboxes them so that they can't like nobody can get in
and they don't leak information out um and what i learned was this stuff hinders me it slows me down
so much that i couldn't get anything done and so so at the end of the day, like, yeah, the, you know, what I was doing was private, but I wasn't doing much. So there's a
trade-off between effectiveness and privacy a lot of the time. And there are some, some few
exceptions, applications that have great privacy that are also good for productivity. But, um,
it's nice to hear you, to hear you say that, that not everybody needs privacy.
With Tails, I've also heard there's kind of another argument, which is being on Tails
puts you on a list. Just being on Tails, they're like, what does this person have to hide?
The anonymity set is you know
privacy people that are very deep and obsessed with this that are maybe testing it out and um
and then you know people that really need privacy for some reason uh and you know if you're showing
up as a user using tails you know with, um, in whatever places you are, it's going to raise
some, it's going to draw some attention, if not raise some flags. Um, so there's the gray man
philosophy as well of like blending in with the crowd. Um, how do you, you know, how do you think
about these things? How do you feel about this? Are you familiar with the gray man philosophy?
Amen philosophy.
Yeah, pretty much.
And I do think that that's one of the funny things is privacy.
It's such an interesting, people get so worked up about this stuff too,
because like anything I get to say, people are going to get pissed off,
but who cares?
It is kind of interesting how like there is a,
like we talk about anonymity sets, right?
And the best thing to do, of course, is to leak the
least amount of data possible so that there just isn't much to go on. Sometimes there can be a way
where you don't, you leak maybe more data than you otherwise would, but you're part of a bigger
anonymity pool. Therefore your actual privacy is larger. It's, you know, again, where it gets very
like nuanced based on the thing. But I guess my point there is no one, if I'm walking into a
coffee shop, no one should tell instantly that I am different in some way. Like that's kind of
what I would, I should think.
And so if you come in and instantly someone notices
something weird about you, the way you act and work and stuff,
then it's like, okay, that's immediately drawing extra attention to you.
So like I walk in, you know, people and all the cyberpunk LARPers
are going to talk shit with their fiat bank accounts
here in just a second but like let's say i walk into a coffee shop and then i just go up to the
counter and i get whatever i get and then i pay and like okay how does he pay okay well first of
all um maybe like if there is cash which i haven't had much cash in a very long time because you know
just my sources of favor just not there and also I try not to have and use fiat anyway.
But like if I use a, if I buy a single, like you single load anonymous crypto card and use it on my
watch, which is connected to my Graphenoa sandbox profile. So it's not connected all the time.
Just, Oh, some dude comes and pays with his watch. That's not connected all the time. Just, oh,
some dude comes and pays with his watch. That's it. It's like, maybe they see that,
maybe they don't, but it's not, doesn't stick out. But this is a weirdo. What's up with this guy?
Lingo sits down, opens up a relatively nondescript laptop of a name of a regular
consumer brand. And then he starts just working and that's fine.
You might,
someone who's looking over my shoulder might see like Gmail here or there for
a work thing.
Or they might be like,
then they might look in the background and be like,
Hey,
is that a no,
is that a one,
two operating system?
This doesn't look like windows or they might be able to see some more,
but for the most part,
you have to really start looking to be like,
this is,
this person is different kind of thing.
Whereas if you come in and then you have like this this wad of like what sketchy water like one dollar bills or whatever like that or um could be a separate say like yeah it could be that and
actually have been someone did actually say that at a local coffee shop that like i had a bunch of
ones that i was just consolidating and then they're like you know is that from work fun night that's a good all right lady
yes uh so if you do something sketchy like that and it's like what's your
you know like what's your name like when they call your name it's like john called okay don't get a latte for john called
like ridiculous and then you go to some kind of like a brick like a gross looking laptop shaped
like a brick or you have something with a million cypherpunk stickers yeah that's great for your
privacy to like if you if you cover your your computer with tor stickers that's how you know
that no one can see your activity.
It's like, so people do stuff like that, or then they're not even on the local Wi-Fi.
They bring their own, like, again, there's some individuals I'm thinking of in particular when I'm saying this.
But you bring your own little, I don't even remember who it was at, Calix OS does it, has that, that like portable wifi thing that's like,
or portable data thing, you connect to your own thing.
So it's like, you're bringing your router with you.
It's kind of ridiculous.
So if you just do this, people are like,
what is this person up to?
Are they, they're either 10% of people think
you're some kind of agent.
90% of people think you're this huge dork,
but 100% of people notice you. And it's like but 100 of people notice you and it's like oh
that's great for privacy like everyone sees you and so yeah that's kind of a that's kind of
interesting thing to think about is like when you do privacy like if you like what information
what are you risking by not using tails for example, that it's worth the attention of doing that.
Like anytime you turn on,
let me just stick my dirty USB
into someone else's machine
and then I got my stuff here.
Oh, it's gone.
I unplugged it.
Not just open up your laptop.
No, well, you see,
I got to go re-login to all this stuff
because I like, okay.
That is a ton of extra attention i
don't think it's necessarily worth it for people that don't have like real security things
interesting so where where do you feel like this sweet spot is for most people and actually
i i don't know that we i like that we covered threat models and i don't know that that's even
I like that we covered threat models.
And I don't know if that's even, yeah, you've kind of already answered this question.
I am still curious.
You know, I've another 10 or so minutes to go over on this.
And I appreciate you staying long on the podcast.
We haven't covered sort of like the current narrative around privacy.
And I know you've seen, you've probably seen a lot on Twitter.
We both spend way more time
than I think either of us would like to on Twitter
for work, for better or for worse.
And it seems like privacy has been coming
on the timeline a lot.
What do you think about this current narrative?
Is this a passing fad and what is driving this? And how are you seeing this? What are you think about this current narrative? Is this a passing fad? And what is driving this?
And how are you seeing this?
What are you seeing?
I think it's sort of the...
I think it's the future.
And I don't necessarily think that everyone being all,
oh, this is cyberpunk.
Like everyone acting like us talking about it that much.
I don't think that's necessarily going to be a permanent thing.
But I do think that we're finally in this era
where it's crazy to think that it's been,
I don't know, when did Snowden come out on this stuff?
It's been like 15 years or something.
Yeah, that was like 2011 or 2010 maybe.
Yeah, the whistleblower era.
When that started, I think we're starting to inherit the fruits of that finally.
It's taken this long, but now we're seeing Apple talk about Apple means privacy.
And then all the major, like every crypto, everything.
Like all the big exchanges.
Of course, Kraken was one of the earlier ones doing this.
But then you have Gemini too.
A lot of like, you know,
the whole Zcash world's gotten a lot more
like trendy these days with that stuff.
It's coming back in a big way.
And I think a lot of that is because
there is very little private,
explicit privacy in crypto.
And there has been for a very long time.
There hasn't been, I should say.
And now we're finally getting to the
point where we realize we need strong robust privacy like i call it mvp minimum viable privacy
in order for this technology to be kind of adopted at any kind of a decent scale and so i think that
after the next five or so years privacy will be pretty much the default for everything to a certain
extent. And people will be a little bit quieter about it. Like they won't need to brag about it
as much, but like right now it's like, we're starting to see the world sort of adjust to this.
And so I do think that it's very important for every sovereign tech to obviously have privacy
of some kind, some kind of privacy features, but
in a weird way to start talking about privacy. Because if you don't, it's kind of like the
virtue signal, as it were, that reminds people about the rest of your features. Like if you say,
you know, like even Solana is talking about it now too. And it's just like saying that we're one of the cool kids.
We're,
we're serious about these values.
And so I think that once you start talking about privacy,
people take you seriously and then they look into the other stuff.
They're like,
they're actually decentralized too.
they're actually sovereign in this and this is great.
But if you don't talk about privacy,
you're just sort of excluded from the conversation.
It's kind of a,
it's a proxy for that kind of stuff. And so like what features, I love that you said even Solana's talking about privacy, by the way. They, yeah, it was, it was weird to see that.
And same with Apple, you know, same kind of idea. We talked last week, Juan and I, with Arjun about how Apple is like, you know, maybe the opposite of private.
In a lot of ways, they're private.
You know, they may be more secure, right?
They're more private from other people, but they're not really private from the people that those of us that care about privacy want to be private from.
care about privacy, want to be private from. But I'm curious, like, what features,
what privacy features do you think are going to stick in crypto? Like, like we had HTTP to HTTPS,
and that was privacy for payment information and, you know, private, private communication
with websites on the internet. Like what, what kind of things do you think we're going to see
in crypto last? And what things do you think might fall to the wayside? Like what kind of things do you think we're going to see in crypto uh last and
what things do you think might fall to the wayside like what level of privacy could we expect in five
years in crypto so i think the one thing that will stick more than anything um is c CT or confidential transactions. Basically what that is, is it cryptographically
hides amounts and balances. And I've seen, the reason I'm seeing that is because it seems like
that is one of the biggest, I guess, attack vectors in crypto today, where you see people
talk about, oh, some whale just
moved this much, or then this person got wrecked on this amount. People are seeing very real
amounts. And that's the consequence where someone says, oh, someone donated to this fund, so no one
really cares. But it's like someone donated this amount to this. Oh, all of a sudden that, you know, gets the interest going. And it's also
something I've seen. It's like, what do you want to see if something's going to become,
if you want to see what something's going to happen, you want to look at both extremes of
like the overture window, I guess, on that and see what they both agree on, right? So if it's like,
to the window, I guess, on that and see what they both agree on, right? So if it's like,
if right, let's like political spectrum, if right and left agree on something,
first of all, it's usually not, it could usually be something awful, right? But it definitely
means that there's a good chance that that's going to happen. And so, for example, right and
left seed do both talk about getting insider trading banned in Congress in the U.S., at least like nominally.
And now, I mean, I don't know how much good that's actually going to do, but the fact that both sides are talking about it means it's probably going to happen at some point.
And so I have seen, obviously, privacy advocates, you know, it sort of starts with with you know starts with some
sort of obfuscation then you get to add in ct like uh madero added ct into the ring signature scheme
in like early 2017 from my memory somewhere around then and so then it's pretty much standard with a
lot of privacy protocols like obviously mweb uh mimblewimble on a litecoin has ct as part of this
obviously you know anything zk has a ct component as far as the balances and things like that but
i've noticed that paypal is talking about ct i've noticed that circle is talking about ct
and talking about this different thing called confidentiality, which is separate from anonymity.
That's like the everyday privacy versus the hardcore Cyberpunk,
Tails Linux and your laptop kind of nonsense.
And obviously, I believe in the most hardcore stuff possible.
But when you have the most regulated entities possible talking about
something you could assume that's kind of like a minimum right so that also will i think so first
of all i i think that in the future in crypto if you send crypto funds and tokens you will have
the ability to keep that private for any chain that anyone uses seriously
so if i send you some coins it's like hey he sent him some pump tokens i don't think that's
necessarily a problem that people see that as far as like for most people but to see how much you
have is going to be a big problem though that's where you have like thefts and like real person
burglaries and stuff
like that it's it's not because oh you are into crypto therefore i'm going to beat you up it's
like no i think you have a lot of money therefore i'm going to beat you up and so if you keep that
hidden i think that's going to be very important things like also once nfts and other tokens like
that become rwas and all that become something real and not just a fun little play
thing where it's like, oh, this is your master access card to your apartment complex is an NFT,
for example, that you can use to mint other little sub keys to digital keys to send to your friends
and family you want to get in or whatever your guests at that point if someone like can send you money and then see in your wallet oh he has this key
to this apartment complex i know where i think he lives and things like that i think that keeping
those basic like basically your possessions sort of private i think that that's what's going to
stick what i i'm 50 50 on what's going to stick is what you send to which people.
Will your transaction graph be kept private? I don't know. That's a little bit trickier.
I think in some cases, obviously, you will be able to keep that private. In plenty of cases,
maybe not. But what I don't think is necessarily going to be prioritized for privacy is like for
crypto transactions is like the network level privacy type thing. Like as far as which nodes
broadcast which transactions, are you going to do it over Tor? Is there, you know,
Dandelion++, all that kind of stuff. i'm obviously still going to push technologies that use that but i don't see people caring that
much because that that at the point is like isp level spying government spying people running
those to specifically you know like this is it's more advanced type stuff that people who care
about keeping people who are just fun cypherpunks like
us care about people who are like actual you know criminals or dissidents or activists actually care
about but 95 percent of people are not going to be like oh my isp saw that i broadcast a zcash
transaction yesterday at 7 48 p.m what do they know like no no they don't
the average person is just not going to care about that enough so because the average person doesn't
care i don't think it's going to be something that sticks in the mainstream that is a very balanced
take i really love your your way of looking at both sides of the Overton window and saying the shelling point is somewhere in between.
And I hope, you know, there's that famous Obama quote.
Like, I think it was Obama's, like, head of something.
Might have been Obama.
No, it wouldn't have been Obama.
This is too impactful of a statement.
But there's that statement, we've killed people based on metadata.
And that's like, you know, that echoes to me.
It's like the transaction graph and all of this, like a sufficiently capitalized or sophisticated attacker can infer a lot from your transaction graph.
transaction graph and even down to like the amounts and things like that. Like, let's say
And even down to like the amounts and things like that.
balances are private, but you know that, you know, certain people have a massive, like, you could
identify like what is an exchange wallet very easily by looking at the connections where everybody,
you know, 20% of crypto is connected to one wallet. Well, what is that wallet? That is,
it's not a smart contract. It's an EOA on Ethereum or whatever. That connected to one wallet. Well, what is that wallet? That is, it's not a smart contract.
It's an EOA on Ethereum or whatever.
That's an exchange wallet.
And then you could figure out, like,
who's doing the most transactions to and from exchanges.
And if you find one of those people,
then you can infer that they also maybe have a lot of money.
And so, like, this would be a way to figure out
how much money someone has even just from
the metadata but i i think your your position makes a lot of sense and uh my here's another
thing that'll blow some people's minds even on the super most encrypted stuff uh there is a a one
last little data leakage point and the only reason I know this is because I work with a fellow
who goes by Duke Leto of the Hush Project.
And he kind of opened my mind to this a little bit.
The number of inputs and outputs.
So if you send a fully shielded transaction,
but you send it to a multiple recipients,
that does show up differently on the blockchain.
And so even if you can't say who you sent it to or what the amounts were,
if like every first of the month, there's a multi-person transaction thing,
it's like, oh, that's probably a salary payment of some kind.
And so then you can sort of say, well, who gets paid who gets who do you know who probably
might get paid in zcash for example and then you start to figure out okay well there's someone here
and then all you need to do is one like ip address slip up or something you know like ah god i'm like
i know this is when this guy gets paid this is when i can go attack him so even and this is being
super paranoid by the way this is not for the part, this is not that one little crumb
is not gonna amount to anything,
but it is a crumb.
And there's a basic wall protocol called Siege,
which basically, it basically sends a few dummy,
like zero balance outputs as well.
So every transaction looks like
a multiple person transaction.
So then it just kills that extra heuristic there.
Just thought that was kind of a funny thing to add.
That's wild.
And I feel like that's a good place to wrap up.
It's like there are so many techniques like this.
And I think most people just don't realize what kind of attacks they're at risk of.
I think most people just don't realize like what kind of attacks they're at risk of.
And, you know, it only takes the world getting a little bit worse for these kind of attacks to be more threatening and more of a risk for more people.
And so I am grateful that we could talk about all this stuff.
And thanks for joining me today on this episode of Only Friends.
Any parting words?
It's chill o'clock, as a good friend has told me before.
What would you like to push?
Yeah, well, I would just like to remind everyone to use privacy tools wherever you can.
And as one, let me just do this little show,
share it to the space.
I did get a Dash got integrated into NIM VPN,
which kind of talked a little bit about before maybe,
but a bunch of different places accept it.
I mean, it accepts a bunch of different cryptocurrencies,
Monero, C cash, all the rest as well.
I don't know an astronomical amount
because a million other things I've been juggling
within life and stuff.
But Edward Snowden doesn't talk a lot about products and services like specifically, but he did come out for their release party, kind of like officially endorsing, advocating, whatever.
So I assume that there's a certain like minimum viable functionality it's got to have for that.
So definitely try out NIM.
And then I would encourage anyone to withdraw.
If you have any crypto, get it off an exchange just do it and try to figure out how to buy something with it and then
try to make that buying kind of frequent just one thing and just just have that small little
toe under the door of financial sovereignty and you never know when you might need it to snowball
into like everything you do. But it's just that first thing of like, how do you send and receive
crypto? How does that work? What can you actually do with it? The very basic first step of that is
like, I would say like 70% of the work and just the rest of the work is like, which service do I
go here? This one doesn't work.
What's my backup?
And then how do I pay for this specific thing?
That's like, that is a lot of work,
but it's not nearly as much as just like the familiarizing yourself
with using this stuff as money.
So use crypto as money.
Love it.
All right, Joel, thank you.
It's been a pleasure talking with you
and I'm looking forward to our next conversation.
And thank you, everyone in the audience,
for tuning in to this episode of Only Friends.
Join us next week as Juan will be back,
and we will be talking to more interesting guests.
Thank you, guys.
Catch you later.
Peace.
