VIVZgEK6EgjAEa4emRAbWg

Verifying my plugin-builder.btcpayserver.org account. Proof: VIVZgEK6EgjAEa4emRAbWg

SO excited to reveal Radar to the world today!

We’ve been working on all of the moving parts of this launch for many months, but the core of Radar is simple. Why are the two most private things we do every day - who we talk to and what we pay for - always disconnected and surveilled?

Radar solves this by building on top of Signal’s amazing messaging protocol and network while implementing payments over Bitcoin. All of your existing Signal contacts come with you, but everyone who joins Radar can send and receive payments at a tap. This combination makes sending money to friends and family, supporting an activist or journalist, or funding a political dissident as easy as sending a message.

No need to juggle separate apps, and now we can get Bitcoin into the hands of people who just simply want a good way to transfer value. No custodians, no banks, just permissionless freedom money.

It's been a blast getting to break out beyond "just" the wallet space, and build a tool that we see a huge need for from human rights groups to "normies" and everything in between.

I'll break down more on the why we made the choices we did throughout the week on a host of podcasts, so keep an eye out for those if you want to dive deeper!

In the meantime, take a minute and go check out

🫡

See you all there, can't wait to chat with Matt as always 🫡

Nothing like just sitting down and chatting with an old friend to revive your spirit and make you want to keep pushing out more freedom tech.

Immensely grateful for

and all he's done for freedom tech and for me personally over the years. Absolute legend and one of the few heros I won't have to slay 🧡

See you all there, folks 🫡

Honored to be joining the man, the myth, the legend after so long but tons to cover in the Bitcoin space, can't wait.

I know I'm rarely (if ever) on Nostr, but I see my favorite robot doing amazing work I zap it and I reshare it.

Keep kicking ass,

🔥

I'm leaving Foundation and joining Cake Wallet

It's time for a new chapter in my journey building freedom tech, and I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be jumping in to help Vik run Cake as VP of Operations starting in September.

Why Cake?

I've known Vik for many years in the space, and have been watching from the sidelines as he's worked hard to bring together an amazing team to build out a wallet that prioritizes ease-of-use and powerful privacy no matter what cryptocurrency people prefer. That all started with being the first Monero wallet on iOS, and has rapidly grown to being a cross-platform, multi-cryptocurrency wallet used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

The best part? Cake Wallet has been paving the way in the privacy space for many years, including the latest push to be the first mobile wallet to include Silent Payments for Bitcoin and MWEB for Litecoin. My vision for Cake is to carry this privacy-first vision even further, continuing to push the envelope and let users access powerful privacy features with an intuitive, beautiful user experience that makes privacy easy.

The first three objectives I have will be improving and expanding Silent Payments support (especially improving the sync experience!), building out an amazing (and privacy-preserving) Lightning experience, and fine-tuning and improving the existing Cake Wallet that you all know and love across the board.

I can't wait to step into this larger role, especially with friends that I've already gotten the chance to meet and get to know over the years. I'm also thrilled to be able to dedicate a bit more time to expanding access and ease-of-use for Monero, especially in the wake of the takedown of Samourai Wallet and the broad attacks against Bitcoin privacy.

Monero is a more important tool than ever, and Cake has been a key part of making Monero more useful over the years.

Grateful for Foundation

I have nothing but amazing things to say about Foundation and the incredible people I've gotten to work with so closely over the past two years. We've gotten the chance to build the best Bitcoin hardware wallet out there in Passport, and turn Envoy from a simple companion app for Passport to a powerful standalone mobile wallet with the best coin control in the space.

I especially wanted to shout out Zach Herbert and @qna, as they have been close friends and allies, giving me the chance to get started in the space and grow into what became a much larger role than originally planned with Foundation. Zach has gone above and beyond to empower me over the past two years, and his tireless efforts to drive Foundation forward and ensure we ship the best possible products has been inspiring.

@qna is the reason I'm even in Bitcoin in the first place, and was the key voice of reason that helped me understand the how and why of privacy in Bitcoin, as well as the power (and necessity) of going no-KYC-only. We've built a great friendship over the past two years and I'm honored to be able to have learned so much from him.

This has to be the most bittersweet move of my life, but I'm thrilled with the new prospects at Cake and know that those taking over in my place at Foundation are going to bring a unique approach to help them take the next step forward as well.

Now let's get back to building 🫡

P.S. - Keep an eye out, Cake and Foundation will be working closely together in the near future 👀

Summarizing my thoughts on ecash

For some reason this ecash trend seems to be gaining steam instead of going away, so I'll try my best to detail my thoughts on ecash into one post.

1. The incentives are broken

Ecash finds itself between a rock and a hard place. For users to trust the mint, they need to know that the people behind the mint are trustworthy. If the people running the mint reveal their identities (or even just nyms), they're a trivial target for regulators and law enforcement as it's clear a mint is an MSB.

If the people behind a mint don't reveal their identities or nyms, users of that mint are subject to trivial rug pulls with no recourse. Which do you prefer as a user? Mint operator rug pulls or government rug pulls?

If a mint had been targeted like Samourai Wallet was, instead of just a potential privacy loss, all users would have lost all of their Bitcoin.

2. Ecash is not "self-custodial"

For some reason this concept of ecash being "self-custodial" is a thing, merely because the tokens themselves are self-custodied (and require proper backups of seed phrases etc.) While the lines get a bit weird, it's important to separate two things:

1. The asset people want is Bitcoin, not ecash tokens.
2. The asset people give up custody on is Bitcoin.

The ecash tokens themselves are completely worthless IOUs without the Bitcoin behind them, so even if I can take custody of my ecash tokens, I have 100% given up custody of my sats to a third-party.

Because of this, talking about ecash as self-custodial is disingenuous -- no one wants empty IOUs, they want Bitcoin. When they use ecash they do not have custody of their Bitcoin.

3. Ecash still requires all of the hurdles of Bitcoin self-custody

The hardest hurdle for many people to adopting Bitcoin is the simple first step -- writing down 12 words and making sure not to lose them. With ecash you still have this single greatest barrier of entry as you must backup a seed phrase or secret in order to restore your ecash tokens.

4. There is no incentive for custodians to implement ecash

While a custodian could switch to ecash out of the goodness of their heart, the incentives are broken for custodians. Not only does ecash harm the UX their users are used to (not having to store a secret seed phrase), it also introduces additional infrastructure complexity. Instead of just running a database, now they have to run additional mint software to provide their users with tokens, and handle support cases where users lose their tokens.

In theory a custodian could just also store the seed phrase for their users, but then have we actually improved on custodians at all? They even have custody of the ecash tokens in that case.

5. Custody is a line that cannot be crossed

The core of what makes Bitcoin unique is that we can actually take custody of it ourselves, gaining immense freedom and self-sovereignty through a bit of personal responsibility. Even though I am a massive proponent of building better privacy tools, sacrificing custody to get better privacy is a non-option for me.

Surely we can do better and build privacy tools on top of Bitcoin (or directly into Bitcoin's consensus layer) that allow us to have both privacy and self-sovereignty via self-custody.

I will not give up custody of my Bitcoin, no matter what, and you shouldn't either. "Better custodians" are just custodians with extra steps, and still strip us of self-sovereignty and thus freedom.

6. Time is a more scarce resource than even Bitcoin

Even though I have been very outspoken on what I view as a pointless venture, I am not here to stop anyone from building what they enjoy in the space. Devs working on ecash are free to do so as of course I have no control over them, though I fear that time spent on improving custodians is time that we will not get back. It's clear that the US gov and many in the EU are seeking to ramp up their attacks on Bitcoin privacy and self-custody, and our time to build tools to route around them is growing shorter and shorter.

P.S. - None of what I write is a direct attack on any ecash dev, and I have immense respect and personal relationships with most of the people working on this stuff. Respect for an individual doesn't have to mean I agree with them on every avenue they pursue.

If the only solution for Bitcoiners to have private payments is custodians (be it e-cash, Fedimints, etc. as is all the rage) then Bitcoin will simply be dead for me. Feels like the ultimate cop-out.

Custody is the line in the sand that cannot be crossed. Custody not only opens up immense risk for loss of funds, it also makes these tools far less resilient to adversarial environments.

Can "they" stop every Bitcoiner from keeping 12 words safe? No.

Can "they" stop a few popular mints from operating? Absolutely.

Excited to learn more about this one 👀

Say hello to https://silentpayments.xyz/

Wanting to learn more about Silent Payments, see which wallets support them, or find out how to integrate them into your wallet?

I've built out a website with all of that info and more to do what I can to speed up Silent Payments adoption. https://i.nostr.build/EnGDG.jpg

If you were a Samourai Wallet user and confused about how to restore your funds elsewhere, we've got you covered:

https://freedom.tech/samourai-to-sparrow/

Everything actionable you need to know about what this indictment means for you as a Samourai Wallet (SW) or Whirlpool user 👇

As a Samourai Wallet user (no Dojo)

Unfortunately, the architecture of SW meant that your xpub (a master public key, allowing anyone holding it to derive all your past/present/future Bitcoin addresses) was at some point in time held by Samourai, and could now possible in the hands of the DOJ.

Though it's a worst-case scenario, you should assume that your xpub was compromised, and thus all previous mixes you have done have been unwound and are now traceable. You should also assume that the gov can now derive all past/present/future addresses of yours and track movement of funds if so desired.

In addition, Samourai's coordinator and backend sync server was seized, and so SW will no longer sync, show received funds, or allow sending funds out. As such, you have to migrate funds to another wallet like @SparrowWallet following the docs here:

https://docs.samourai.io/wallet/restore-recovery#export-to-external-wallet

In addition, I would recommend migrating funds to a new seed phrase to prevent anyone holding the xpub from seeing all future received/spent funds.

You should also disable automatic updates in the Play Store (if used) to ensure no malicious updates are pushed.

As a Samourai Wallet user (using your own Dojo)

Thankfully, you avoided having your xpub potentially compromised. The worst case scenario for you is that your previous mixes may not have the full anon set you expected if non-Dojo users xpubs were compromised.

You will still be able to sync/send/receive from your Samourai Wallet app, but should also migrate funds eventually as no further updates will come out for Samourai Wallet. If you want to migrate, use the docs below:

https://docs.samourai.io/wallet/restore-recovery#export-to-external-wallet

You should, however, disable automatic updates in the Play Store (if used) to ensure no malicious updates are pushed.

As a Sparrow Wallet user

Thankfully, you avoided having your xpub potentially compromised as well. The worst case scenario for you is that your previous mixes may not have the full anon set you expected if non-Dojo/Sparrow users xpubs were compromised.

There is no real need to rotate to a new wallet etc, and Sparrow is still an excellent option. Unfortunately you will no longer be able to mix in Sparrow as the Samourai coordinator was seized.

Next steps for privacy

If you (like me) relied on Samourai Wallet for privacy on Bitcoin, it's time to look elsewhere sadly. As of today I have two recommendations:

Use Monero for spending, keep using Bitcoin for savings

Yes, this isn't Bitcoin, but its by far the most used and most practical privacy coin out there with strong (and growing) ways to swap in/out of it without a centralized, KYC exchange. My recommendation is buying enough to cover your normal spending of Bitcoin for a month at least, and spend out of that lump sum as needed.

Learn more:

getmonero.org

Where to get Monero:

bisq.network Trocador.app In Cake Wallet's exchange feature

Wallets:

Feather Wallet Cake Wallet Monerujo Wallet

Merchants that accept Monero:

monerica.com

cryptwerk.com/pay-with/xmr/

Use JoinMarket

JoinMarket is a decentralized Coinjoin protocol that brings together peers to mix funds together, gaining strong privacy without relying on a central coordinator, without giving fees to a central entity, etc.

The best way to get started today is using the new UI built around JoinMarket, @jamapporg:

jamapp.org

Have any more questions? Drop them below and I'll do my best to answer them.

And just like that I have my own simple, non-custodial, entirely self-hosted LN stack in seconds.

Bravo, amazing work Phoenix and 1f52b_xyz

https://sethforprivacy.com/lnurl

If you want to test it out, don't tip me, tip the creator of this awesome LNURL tool 1f52b_xyz!

https://1f52b.xyz/lnurl

Once we finalize the Docker image + publishing for this and phoenixd, you will literally just register a domain, create a text file, run a single command, and have self-sovereign LN, LNURL, Zaps, etc.

Working on making a guide for running this with phoenixd directly in Docker Compose with

!

Really excited to get this up.

Hilarious that no one on Nostr seems to know that pseudonymity != privacy and yet try to use Nostr being "private" to dunk on anyone who still uses other social media.

You're not going to want to hear this, but Nostr is VERY BAD for privacy, but great for pseudonymity.

For most people, Nostr directly ties their HOME IP ADDRESS to their nym and publishes this correlation to a dozen servers they don't control for all to see.

While being pseudonymous is pretty easy on Nostr, being private requires a good, always-on non-logging VPN, or even better connecting to relays only through Tor at a bare minimum.

Haven’t updated my relay list in a while, what are some quality relays I should be using these days?