Becoming Uncle Jim: Being Digital Sherpa for Family & Friends

Hi and welcome to the Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin. Today for episode two hundred and sixty-five, my guest is Diverter. Now, Diverter has been doing some guides on various things like how to do mining at home, and also how to host things yourself at home. And so in this episode, we talk about this concept of becoming Uncle Jim. The guy who provides some of that infrastructure for your family and friends, and this goes beyond just Bitcoin, obviously Bitcoin is part of that, you can run the full node that your family and friends call into, but here we're also talking about other things that give you and your family some more digital self-sovereignty or potentially some privacy and running your own password manager or your own other infrastructure. So that's what we get into for this episode, I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

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Sure. I generally don't, haven't told a whole lot

Almost corny, the amount of, the role that Bitcoins played in, in my life. But the, the truth is, you know, when you're growing up and you look at things and you're seeing things, around you, like in the, the, the, the government and the way things are run and the way the money is spent, and you see all these problems, but whenever I was coming up and seeing all this stuff, I, I, I felt like there was no, there was no path forward. You know, it's like I, I, I can see I felt, you feel, you feel helpless almost, and so it, you know, it leads you down some bad paths sometimes, you know, you can kinda get lost, and that's what ended up happening with me, I lost quite a few years of my life, you know, just basically due to that feeling, and then to finally come back around and in the late two thousand sixteen, time is when I first, when I first bought Bitcoin, it was in two thousand sixteen, had no idea what it was, like absolutely zero idea, I just, I thought it was a stock You know, literally, I like, I had zero, I, I was just looking at charts, you know, trying to make some money. And two thousand and seventeen came around, bull run hits, I'm seeing this price go crazy, of course, I sold entirely too early, because, you know, again, I, I, I just thought it was a stock or something. And as I saw this thing just go crazy, it, you know, kind of dawned on me like, there's, there's no way that this is, like, everybody's just

All of this, this stuff that we're gonna be talking about today and the stuff that I like to write about, it all ties in with that general feeling of, wanting to take more control of, of your own life and the things around you and what you can control and, you know, minimizing the things that are done to you essentially.

Excellent. And so was that part of your philosophy or the way you were thinking even before you got into Bitcoin or is this something that Bitcoin has also spurred within you?

Well, you know, grew up in a, I guess, I guess you would call it like a classical, liberal, sense, you know? I guess you could describe my kind of political philosophy as, I just wanna-- I, I belong to the "I just wanna growl" party. I kinda just wanna be left alone, you know, to do my thing, and that's kinda how I was-- grew up. And I, I went and did, military service, in the United States, and that's what was really when A, a lot of people, you either come out extremely patriotic or quite disillusioned. Mine was, the latter. I, I was, I was quite disillusioned with things that, a lot of the things that I thought were true, I discovered weren't true. And like I said, that's what kinda led me, you know, down a path of not knowing how to go forward, because it just didn't seem like anything was viable at the time. You know, what are you gonna do? Go back to gold? You know, like it's not coming back. It's So it always seemed like that was that barrier. So it was there, but it had kind of gone away, you know, because like I said, I, I just, I, I just didn't see how to do it. When I found Bitcoin, it really reinvigorated, my spirit of, of, you know, this can actually be done, you know, we actually have tools now that we can do some of the things that have been theorized for so long.

So Divya, I've seen you mention just recently, and even on Twitter as well for So for listeners out there, what does that mean?

Yeah, that, that is copyrighted, by the way. I just went through this with Bitcoin Q&A, you know, so I'll, I'll send you an address to pay me later. but, but, yeah, you know, it is exactly what it sounds like. You know, it's these little catchphrases and stuff, you know, of course they're, they're a little silly and it's about branding or whatever, but it, it really is a, a sort of a mantra, a mind,

I'm not very technically savvy, I'm not, I just never have been into that sort of thing, so I never really did learn it. What I do know how to do is kinda get my, get my, get some dirt under my fingernails, you know? I, I, I just kinda get in there and use the tools. And when you do that, it really becomes crystal clear what you do need, what you don't need, what's better for you and what's what, you know, so all these questions that you can sit and think about and theorize and talk

In terms of using the tools, will solve a lot of those questions.

Yeah, it reminds me of how people used to talk about, and I don't know whether you'll relate to this e-exactly or not, but I recall back when people used to talk about StarCraft on forums, there, there was this saying, they would say, "Oh, stop theory crafting, like actually do it in practice, right? You're just making up some strategy that you think kind of works, but like you need to just like get your hands dirty." And I think that's probably very much aligned with what you Kind of software or hardware are you looking at and, writing about nowadays?

Right. The things that I'm most interested in are the things that are the easiest to use and that don't add a ton of friction, to the process. I, I'm kind of fond of saying that, convenience is actually the biggest enemy of privacy and security. not, it's, you know, it's not government agencies or spies or anything, it's, it's convenience. people will give up so much Security and privacy for a little bit of convenience. So if you're going to use a tool, you know, again, it's one of those things where you can make the coolest thing in the world and it does all this neat stuff, and, but if you have to use command line to do it, you're eliminating a huge, huge part of your audience, and people that will actually get in there and use the tool. So I really like stuff that it is powerful enough that a power user can go in there and do what they want with it, but it also can be run in That it's easy enough that anybody can do it.

Yeah, and as you are pointing out in the series as well, the article series becoming Uncle Jim, it's also about how do you bring people along with you on that journey? Because your family and friends, you know, we love them, we care about them, but they don't necessarily care about the same things we care about. So how do you approach that idea of trying to bring them down that pathway?

Sure, and, and, you know, again, it, it really comes back down to, to the convenience convenience aspect of it, it's really hard to get people to use something different than what they're already using, even if the tool you're proposing to them, i- i mean, it can be ten x, improvement, but if they don't really care, the way that you care, then they don't care, you know? So, they're not-- We can sit on here all day, and, you know, we'll be on, on Twitter or Telegram or wherever, and we'll, we'll debate back and forth, you know, the, signaling which one's better and what should we do. Meanwhile, you know, the, our friends and family are debating on whether or not they post this next thing to Facebook or Instagram. You know, they don't, they, they don't care, they don't care. So it has to be something that doesn't, like, you know, it doesn't add any friction. It needs to actually make us, a difference, in the way they use things. That's why I just one of the things that I threw out was, Bitwarden Add, to the convenience. So any tool like that that you can find that rides that balance between being convenient enough to use, but also adds to your security and privacy, that's, that's, that's where I wanna head.

Yeah, so Bitwarden is a great example. I think there are some friends who I know who they just have, you know, very few passwords that they reuse across many different services, and they have to memorize them. And obviously, a password manager can help with that. So just for people who don't know or if they're not familiar with- With using Bitwarden or password managers, what, what are they? W- how do they

work? Sure, Bitwarden, I, I, I really like Bitwarden. It's, it's open source software. E-essentially what it does is it takes a lot of the, the problem of passwords that we have around us. I mean, there, there are so many passwords that the average person needs to remember. I mean, every service that you use, you know, basically needs a password. And so what ends up happening the vast majority of the time is that people just use extremely weak passwords or, e-the, the best case scenario usually is they may have one kind of hard password, but that's their one password, and so they're gonna use this across every single site that they use or at least three or four or five of them. So what Bitwarden and, and password managers in general do is they kinda take that away from you and, they will, be able To generate you, a password that you can determine how, how, you know, long, what kind of characters you want in it, whether it's a password or a passphrase, all this different stuff to where you can create really, really good, strong, secure passwords, but you don't have to remember them, they're being held in your password manager. So when you nav-navigate to a site, say, say you're going to Facebook, when you go onto Facebook and you go to log in, when you click on the, the site, you'll get a little Or, you know, if you have an extension on, on your desktop, and it's a one-click, and then it auto-populates your username and your password for you. So now you've used a strong and secure password that you don't have to use anywhere else, and you've actually taken away, some of the friction as opposed to adding it.

Yeah, and it can be-- it can be difficult to get people over the line there, but I think if you can show them, hey, this would actually make your experience a lot easier, and if you can explain that to I'm sure there are probably listeners of the show who, maybe they're just holding Bitcoin and they haven't kind of gone to that level next of, oh, okay, learning how to self-custody. It's kind of like one of those steps where you just have to learn how to get started with it. And I think in this case with password managers and Bitwarden, it's about showing that person, hey, currently you're having to recall, you're having to remember that password and enter it multiple times. And have you ever noticed how there's those times when you wanna sign it, you And about on your mobile. Well, now if you have Bitwarden, it can actually remember that for you, and it can generate far more secure passwords than what you will be able to memorize.

Exactly. And, and that was the reason why I kind of led off, this series with a very, very, you know, general article about Bitwarden, because I really do feel like, password managers are a very good, like entry, entryway. They're a good first step for people because, you know, as As you just said, it, it, it actually, makes your experience more convenient. You don't have to remember anything, you don't have to do any of that, and once you're able to pull it up, you know, on your device or whatever, and just show them, "Hey, look," and go, go to whatever site you wanna go to, you, you see the little popup that pops up? It's, it's one click and boom, and it's all filled, and you've got a, you know, a twenty-five, thirty character, strong

millions of years to crack, you know, with the current computing s- software. So, you know, it's, it's one of those things where if you can get this first step right here done, I've found, it really kinda opens up the door for them to accept this next, recommendation.

Yeah, so it's kind of like the gateway drug in your mind. Precisely, it really

is, yeah.

And the other interesting thing is, there's levels to all of these things, right? So, for example, bit- Bitcoin Wallet has the default setup, and you can also, do, you know, the next level up which has premium, and then maybe you can add a UBI key, which is adding another level of security, and then, then from a self-sovereignty point of view, you can also take that and now self-host your Bitcoin Wallet. So I know this is something you're big on, my buddy Katan, he's big on that also. So can you tell us a little bit about the different levels and how you can progress through them to become more, either more private or

Sure. and, and Kiton, I'm a huge fan of, of the stuff that, he a-and you guys are, are both doing, over there. It's, it's, it's important work, and, He, he, gives me a lot of goals to kinda shoot for, as far as the self-hosting goes. He's, he's taken it to, you know, whole other levels. what I've kinda am shooting for here is, is I'm kinda trying to be, again, this, I, I'm trying to be the gateway drug to Katon. Okay, I, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna give people a little taste and then, you know, maybe I can get you on down the road. but yeah, just as you said,

You wanna use it for free, which is completely adequate, it will do the job just fine, if you use the app that, you know, if it's using Bitwarden's default servers, they use encryption, you know, so they try to keep, your, your stuff as secure as possible on their servers, so that's a good thing. but then, you know, you can add in additional hardware like the Qube keys, you can just continue to level up and make, cracking your passwords, in- Incrementally harder and incrementally harder. the one, the, the good thing that I really do like about Bitwarden is as you, as you noted, the ability to be, fully self-hosted. so you, no longer have to trust, that their encryption is, is working properly on their servers. now Bitwarden is, like I said, it's an, it's an open source, open source, app, so it's good the source code's out there, everybody can see it, you can see what it does but still being able to, host that service on a server that, that you have control of, that really, makes it a lot easier, especially if you're trying to remain, more private as far as not having to worry quite so much about, you know, IP addresses, where you're connecting from, all those things like that fall into there. so it's, it's a really, it's a really excellent service, I, I highly recommend it. Excellent. And so

now, At this point, as we're starting to get more technical, you might get some of the pushback from family and friends. So they might say, "Look, Diverter, I, I don't have anything to hide. What would you say to them?"

Yeah, that's, that's, that's the classic one, right? That's the one that, that, that we always get. Nothing to hide. First of all, the, the, the entire framing sets you up immediately to be on the defensive if you're the privacy advocate in here, because now suddenly you have to def-def It is about having the ability to selectively reveal yourself. You get to decide what information is revealed and when that information is revealed. Now, somebody might argue that, you know, technically when you click on "I accept" on these, you know, huge long terms and conditions and, and terms of service that these companies put out, that there's probably some fine print in there that says, "Yeah, you agree that, you know, you're giving over all of your data." Nobody reads that, they just wanna use the service. Service. So of course everybody clicks through, I agree. What are you gonna just say no? And now I can't use it? That, that, you know, so it's not about the, the, the hiding part of it, it's about keeping what belongs to you belonging to you. You know, there's, there's a reason that when we go to the bathroom, we shut the door behind us. Some things aren't for public consumption. and your data is, is certainly one of those things. In today's day and age, data has become the hottest- Commodity on the market. so I, I really try to approach it, that argument and, and kind of twist it and turn it away from this, defense of hiding, because it's really, it doesn't need to be that.

Yeah. And then there's also the aspect that laws can change. Things that were once legal and totally fine might now not be acceptable. And in this world, obviously, in the Bitcoin case, the things that are on the blockchain are, you know, they're gonna be around for forever. For hundreds of years or whatever, and some of these things you never know, how much data they're sucking up and when that could come back to bite you years or decades down the line.

It, it's so scary when you really sit down and think about it, when you-- if you really just start breaking down the amount of data that is probably out there about you and where that particular data resides, and then you think about the fact that these legislators and lawmakers can quite- Quite literally, with a stroke of a pen, turn you into criminals overnight, and it, it, you know, it's, it's happened before. If you're in any sort of community where freedom or the, the individual's rights are, are, you know, emphasized, in today's day and age, I, I think it would be very hard for anybody to argue that, that those individual rights and freedoms are, are under attack, virtually from all angles. It's a full-on assault right now. You know, Samurai Wallet, had, Fond of using the term that, you know, privacy is a human fight, not a human right, and I'm, I'm a firm believer in that, you know, right now, the fight is on, now whether or not you wanna realize that you're in that fight, it's irrelevant to the other party, 'cause they're just gonna keep hitting you. They, they don't care if you know you're fighting or not, you're fighting. So it's just a matter of being able to properly defend oneself, against anything that- Might change unexpectedly or that might, you know, a hack, a leak. There's so much that could go wrong.

Yeah. And so then that brings us to this whole theme of being the digital Sherpa for family and friends or this idea, as our friend Matt O'Dell would say, becoming Uncle Jim. So this idea that you have, you know, you might run the infrastructure as the more technical person in your family or in your group of friends, and then you've got your little, you know, nieces and nephews who are piggy- Backing off the infrastructure that you run. So why is that the, setup in your mind?

Right. Sh-Short answer is, honestly, personal responsibility doesn't really scale, to be quite honest. A, a lot of people don't really want, this responsibility because taking control of, your own finances like through Bitcoin, taking control of your own data if you're, whether you're hosting, you know, Bitwarden or Nextcloud or whatever you're gonna do What that requires is for you to actually take full responsibility for all of this stuff. There is no customer service that's, that's coming to help you. if somebody gets your Bitcoin keys and they steal your Bitcoin, it's gone. There is no FDIC, there, there's, there's none of that. And it's quite scary to a lot of people, you know, a lot of people just have no interest in accepting that level of responsibility. So what ends up happening is we, we, we pawn that responsibility off on- onto these huge, big tech companies that, you know, they'll take care of everything for you, and if you, if you run into a problem, they'll, they'll do everything that they can to help you out with it. But the other side of that is, is you, you are paying for that service, whether or not it's free is irrelevant. You're paying for it either through your data, they're gonna be pushing advertisements on you, they'll possibly even be scanning your data and, and looking for keywords and things that are in there again to- Try to push another advertisement on you, so we end up trusting these third parties, and, you know, as we're all quite aware, the great Nick Szabo line, you know, trusted third parties are security holes. That still holds true for Uncle Jim. Your Uncle Jim is still a trusted third party, however, it's a trusted third party that you have a much more intimate relationship with, that really, is somebody that you care about, that cares about you, that you have a personal relationship with, and it's not somebody that's looking Can to monetize at any possible, you know, chance that they have.

Yeah. And so that's, I guess, taking it now to the be- being able to run your own infrastructure. So many listeners of the show might themselves be Uncle Jim for their own family and friends. So what are some of the steps that they can take to get started on this journey, either for themselves or to help their family in terms of running infrastructure?

Right. You know, a-a-a-virtually all of us, we either- Are the, quote unquote, the Bitcoin guy or the, you know, the tech guy, in our family and group of friends, or we know the guy that is. And to become that person, it can take a whole lot of, research, and you have to really start understanding the networking and, and how things connect and where you leak data and where you don't, and it's, it's very, very intimidating. So again, what I'm trying to look for here are programs and, and Applications, anything that can make this transition as easy as possible from going from allowing, you know, Facebook or Google or whoever to host all of your data for you, to moving into a more self-sovereign-- That's, it's gotta be done as simply as possible. So I've become a huge fan of, it's, it's an operating system application called Unihost, Y U N O host, Y U no host, alright? and I, I really, really- Like the service, this isn't really a service for the quote-unquote power user, alright? Kiton isn't using Unihost, I mean, he might, but he has no need for Unihost, okay? He's fully able to, you know, spin up Docker containers and whatever he wants to do, okay? And there may be some people out there listening that are able to do that for themselves right now, and that's great, and that's all good and fine, and, you know, if you want to spin up your own stuff, that's, you can do that, Like that. But I would say the majority of people would really benefit from having basically a one-click install to be able to start hosting all of this data and run different various applications without really having to learn a whole lot about, the networking side and a, a whole lot about how, you know, Docker works and all this different stuff. It's really kind of, done in the background and there's a good GUI web application for It takes a lot of the work out of your hands and does the heavy lifting for you.

Excellent. So let's talk a little bit about how that works, what's the process of setting that up, and, you know, what are some of the options? Like, we- are we talking VPS, virtual private server here, or are we talking, on your own bare metal hardware, some hardware that you have in your home? What are some of the ways to think about, you know, that first decision of which pathway to go down?

yeah, the self implies that you, own a server. now the word owning right there can mean several different things. It can mean that, as you said, you, you have your own actual hardware and equipment, in your home. It doesn't have to be, very specialized equipment. you know, Raspberry Pis or regular, you know, x86-64, just regular computers, will work. You can run things on, virtual machines. And then there's the option of, the virtual private server where You are, self-hosting, okay? But the way that it works is the, server itself is partitioned off, and it's a virtual server that's partitioned away from everybody else's. So essentially, they cut out-- you, you cut out your own little corner, of this server, and it's yours, and you can install whatever operating system you want on it, and you can do all kinds of things. Now, why you would go with one over the other? One of the main things is depends on what you really wanna do with this thing. Host like, take for example, we have, you know, every now and then Twitter does something, it puts everybody all up in arms, and we see a mass migration, to Mastodon. Okay. So when you move over to Mastodon, say you sign up on, you, you, what's the, the big one, bitcoinhackers dot org, right? The one that's run by, Novak. Okay. So now what you've, what you've really done is you've just shifted from, you know, Twitter

hosting all your, just to own, mastodon instance in a very, very simple one-click fashion. But what that also means is if you're gonna, open this up and have other people connect in, that's gonna be a public-facing type of site. That's when you're gonna get into a situation where, like, your IP address is gonna be exposed, people are gonna be able to possibly find out your actual physical location. You have to start learning a lot of the networking ins and outs. So that's when running it on your own hardware or at your house, it kinda- becomes a, a little bit more difficult. So my very, very basic advice on, on these sort of things is, if you're gonna host like a password manager for yourself and your friends and family, even a Nextcloud for your, for your friends and family, then that's completely and totally fine. There's nothing wrong with you hosting that on your own hardware. It's not gonna be exposed to the public, and, you know, other people aren't gonna be signing into it. It's not gonna be a target for hacks. And anything that is on that other end, like a Or anything that you're gonna let just anybody use, like a search engine, something like that, that's when the easiest and the quickest way to get it done is gonna be using, a VPS or a virtual private server.

Yeah, and I think there might also be some interesting considerations there for people who are traveling. So there are some, you know, people out there who are more Bitcoin nomads, let's say, and in that kind of use case, they may actually need a VPS because they may not have a permanent location, and so that's probably one other consideration. But I think for most people who've just got a dedicated, you know, home, then that's where having just a dedicated box at home might make sense for them.

Sure, absolutely. And yeah, you're, you're exactly right. Any situation where you're gonna be moving around a lot, you know, all that stuff, the using a VPS gives you a really good chance at having a good uptime. So it's one of those things where you can go where you want, do what you wanna do, and it's essentially just gonna sit there and run, and it's not gonna eat up computer space and your storage and all that stuff. But, a Raspberry Pi sitting at your house, it, it would do the job just fine of hosting your password manager, your Nextcloud, all that stuff can be done, way cheaper than what I think most people believe.

Yeah. So, out of, you know, just to give some context for listeners, roughly how much would that cost be to set up the Raspberry Pi at home?

I mean, if you're gonna-- Really, the, the, the cost is in, you know, just the hardware You're lo- you're probably looking, if you're gonna go with an SSD and SD card and stuff, even if you go kinda high end, you're still, you know, looking at a very, you know, hundred fifty, two hundred dollars maybe. I mean, you could get stretch it up probably into the threes and fours, but you could probably also get it down to as cheap as like maybe seventy five or even a hundred, because you don't really need that much storage, as far as like your SSD storage, that's where a lot of your price is gonna come in.

On the, on the Unihost. So some of the things on the Raspberry Pi, what you need to have on it, like what you must have, is, sixteen gigabytes, on, on micro SD card. Okay? And so that's, you don't need to go out and splurge for a one terabyte SSD, necessarily. Now, if you're gonna host a, a ton of data on a Nextcloud or something, then okay, maybe. But for the, for the majority of people, you can, you can probably get by You know, I would call it maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty dollars at the most.

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Sure, many different ways you can do it. The good thing is the documentation on, YUNOHOST, it's, it's Y U N O H O S T dot org, YUNOHOST dot org. and the, the instructions and the- Installation guides and stuff, they're, they're extremely simple, because it's an extremely simple program to run. So if you get a, a Raspberry Pi that you, that you've got that you're gonna be able to run, essentially all you're gonna do is you're gonna download the actual Unihost image. It, it is, it is basically an operating system, okay? Unihost is its own operating system. So once you install it, it's, that's, you're gonna be running Unihost as opposed to, say, you know, I'm running Ubuntu or Host. So you download this image and you flash it on, the micro SD card. Once you do that and you power up the board, essentially all you're really gonna need to do, if you have a screen that's connected to it, you can do all this with, a, a, a web application through localhost. you can just visit, unihost dot local on, your hardware and it will pull up a nice, GUI that you can work through, or you can just SSH in if you don't have A monitor or anything, and there's just a very few extremely simple commands. It walks you through. What you'll need is a domain name. It, it helps if you have your own domain name that you've purchased, just because that gives you more control over the, the DNS record configuration, so you can do more with how that's configured. But it's not absolutely necessary, because Unihost does provide default domain names that you can use. To just spin it up without really having to have anything. But it's just, it's really, really easy to follow. a couple little commands. You install the program, you create yourself as a user, and then you go through and pull up the application catalog, and there's an extensive list of apps that you basically one-click install from that point.

Cool. So basically the setup then is it's, in some ways, it's similar to like setting up the MyNode or an Umbrel, like you're flashing this to a SD card and you're very simply booting it up. And it then spins up its own little personal server or your personal server, and you can then SSH into that. So if you're on Linux, you just fire up a terminal and you SSH using that IP, or if you're on Windows, you're using something like Putty, and then you mentioned asp- the aspect around the domain names as well. So that's where you might have a custom domain name that you've purchased that you wanna use that, and then that way your friends can, in their Bitwarden, for example, they can point that to your instance.

Exactly. And, like I said, it, it helps because you can, you can configure your DNS records, which basically just, allows you to kind of prove that you own the site, and kind of configure how email works, whether you're gonna be sending out emails and stuff from this site. So if you have, you purchase your own domain name, like from a place like Namecheap, for example, you can use Bitcoin to do that, okay, if you're looking to stay, more pseudonymous. They do ask you for, information to fill out for the registration for the domain name, but honestly, it's, it's kinda up to you, how accurate, you'd like that information to be. Now, you know, you, you can run into problems if something were to happen and you were to need, for some reason, to prove ownership of tho-that domain, of course, you can't really do that, so you're just kinda gonna lose your money there. A-again, that's a, that's a niche case. The vast majority of the time,

Your domain, use Bitcoin, you can kinda keep yourself, more private, spin up this unhost, configure your DNS records. It's all, it's all ex-extremely simple, it's very linear, easy to follow, and before you know it, you'll be hosting your own stuff.

Very cool. And, so we've mentioned Nextcloud, but just for listeners who aren't familiar, what is Nextcloud?

Nextcloud is, a storage in the same vein as like a- Google Drive or a OneDrive. So it's that place where, say you go on vacation, or wherever you go, and you take a bunch of pictures or, you know, you, some family members you haven't seen in a long time, some of this stuff is, is extremely important to us, it holds, you know, essentially priceless value, it's sentimental value you can't really put a price on. So if you only have, those pictures or that data stored locally or it's only on your phone, then if anything- Happens, to that phone or to that information, it, it, it's gone and there is no getting it back. So what, Google Drive and those companies do is they, they, offer that, hosting of your files and stuff for you. You upload stuff to Google Drive. Now if your phone gets lost or stolen or whatever the case may be, you can always go into Google Drive or OneDrive or whatever and access that file and, and re-download it locally. Well, what Nextcloud does is it- It provides, that same service and a bunch of other things if, if you would like. It, it's quite a powerful, application. But it provides that and it takes that data and that information out of the hands, of these big tech companies that, you know, when they get it, it's, it's very likely that some of this information is tried to use to manipulate advertisements your way at the very least, if not more nefarious things. So you take that power out of that Pair of hands and you put it into your own hands. That way, anything that you wanna keep, in case you're gonna lose it or that has extreme, amounts of value to it, you can configure your device to automatically upload to Nextcloud whenever you snap a picture, for example, and you don't have to worry about it anymore.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. And, just with the, with Nextcloud, is there a way to do it through Tor or is this all

not through Tor? basically, I would imagine mostly all this, I haven't actually Tour, but I'm quite sure that there, there, there wouldn't be that much problem with it. The reason that I haven't really focused on tour, even though, you know, obviously if you're in, in any sort of the privacy, game, tour is, is kind of a big deal, it's pretty ubiquitous. The reason that I've kind of stayed away from tour, which does help quite a bit with hosting stuff, because you don't have to worry so much about your IP address and different things like that, 'cause the, the encryption is automatic, all that Quite scary for people, okay? And it's, it's, it's still quite scary for your friends and family to, to, to access, an onion site. And so I, I, I've stayed away from it, but I would imagine the answer's probably yes, you probably, you, you should be able to spin one up.

Got it. And also, it's not just the photos, but also applications. So as an example, you might wanna collaborate on them with a document, and that's where Nextcloud can also come in too, right? Oh, for

sure,

As an example, I migrated a couple of my phones, I installed, Calyx operating system on, this Google Pixel that I was, formerly running Copperhead on, and, what Nextcloud enabled me to do was back up, all that data from all of my applications, and whenever I got the Calyx OS operating system running, I was able to just access those backup files from my Nextcloud, and it made migrating all that data to my new phone, it- Extremely simple. Yeah, that's pretty cool. and

so then you've also got, this idea of searching and having that being done. Like that, that sounds like it would be like another whole level of, self-hosting and self-sovereignty. Why go down this pathway?

I mean, it, it, you know, on, on its face, sure. You know, a-and you don't, most people don't really think about typing things into a search engine. I mean, it's, you're just searching for words. What's

The, the terms that you search for reveal quite a bit about you. People generally, we know, you know, when you're in your own home and you're sitting behind this computer screen and there's nobody else around you, that's the times when you can search some of the things that you really wanna search. You know, never mind what you tell your friends and family or whatever, this is when real you comes out. And these big tech companies, they know that as well. All right, no, regardless of what you might say on Twitter or anywhere else, they know what you really- Really search for whenever nobody else, if you think nobody else is looking, but there's somebody else looking. if Google search engine, it accounts for over ninety-two percent of all search requests. Alright? That is a massive, massive, monopoly on that amount of data. Okay? It is, it is outrageous. So what that opens up is the ability, essentially, for Google to determine what you get to see and what you don't. they can censor your search, search results. they can feed You what they think you really wanted to search, not what you actually searched. All that stuff comes into play. And what a, what a search engine like Syrex, which is what I, talked about in, searching for Uncle Jim, what Syrex does is it's basically just, it's a search engine aggregator. So it takes all the various different search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, all these other different various search engines, and it pulls from each one of those. And you- You can configure which one it pulls from, but what that does is it allows for you to still be able to see, the same quality, search results as you do when you're searching from a Google, but the difference is, Google's not able to scrape that data from you because that search results, all the stuff that, to do with SiriX is stored locally on your device. So it's just another, another way to take your data and, you know, the things that, that these big tech companies know about you out of their hands. And back into yours.

Yeah, that's a really cool, very powerful sounding thing there, and it also strikes me that we are living in this world where there's just all this crazy amount of data out there on all of us, and you never know what two pieces of info someone can just find and then tie it together to de-anonymize or find something out about you that maybe you didn't even know about yourself or your own family. Absolutely. There's, yeah, and there's that famous example, I think it's now a couple of years old, maybe eight, seven or eight years Was Target or one of those US retailers, they had done some data analytics work and basically, they, they had sent this father, you know, some marketing material in relation to like a pregnancy in the family, and he, it was like literally, they had figured out that his daughter was pregnant, his teenage daughter was pregnant without him even knowing, you know? The, this is kind of the scary stuff that's possible.

It's, it's unbelievable. And, you know, a lot of the, the argument back, you know, people wanna talk about, quote unquote, anonym The problem with anonymized data is it inevitably leaves just enough bread, breadcrumbs, to de-anonymize, all that data. What I wrote about in, in one of the pieces was, one of the famous examples where, AOL, it was just back in like two thousand and six, they had, you know, when they were doing a whole lot of searches and responsible for a lot of results, there were over, twenty million, supposedly anonymized, search requests. They revealed this data to the world, Essentially as like an educational thing, you know, for research purposes and stuff like that. Well, what ended up happening is the, the New York Times, got this data and they started really scrutinizing it, and they were actually able to track down one individual woman off of this completely supposedly anonymized data, and they literally walked up to her and asked her if these were her search results, and they were, and it, it's, it's because they were able to just go off of what she searched, you know, she searched For landscapers in Lilburn, Georgia, or wherever she's from, okay? And then she searched for some people with her same last name, and then she searched for a subdivision right next to her, and then she started-- so it just, all this stuff snowballs and it builds up this entire file or folder, on you, and basically Google knows you better than anyone else, which is a scary thought.

Yeah. Yeah, very concerning. And there are also, from a financial point of view, as I understand, I'm- I'm not in the US, but I, I know apps like Venmo are quite popular, and it's like, I don't know if this is still a thing, but some of that data is like still public, so people can like see what they're paying each other for and stuff. It's just like really crazy when you think about it.

It really is, yeah, absolutely. And you, that's one of the other things that often you'll run into in, I guess, privacy arguments, you hit the, the, I have nothing to hide wall, and then, There's really no point in trying now, which I, I can't urge strongly enough against that type of, it's just a defeatist mentality, you know? Again, it, you, it really is, a fight. This thing is all of this privacy and your security around yourself and your loved ones, it's a fight for the most important things in your life, and to give companies, especially in this day and age where these large, big tech companies are really starting to accelerate on the censorship On the narrative pushing, on the twisting of words and stories, and all this stuff is culminating right now, and it's very, very important that as many people as possible are able to defend themselves. I mean, there's just no better way, really, in today's digital, world to defend yourself than to pick up these type of tools to take your own digital life back into your own hands.

Yeah, and also on that theme of people who are being a bit defeatist B-about their privacy or their sovereignty. I think it's also worthwhile remembering that after time, information does go stale. So if some bank or if, you know, Google and Apple and so on, they've got some information on you, but if you're able to start that process, at least take steps to improve your situation, that old information will go stale after a while.

Abs- absolutely. And, you know, each step matters. You know, each step really does matter, and even if it's a small one. Take baby steps, that's totally fine. That's, that's basically what, what Unihost is. I mean, it's a, it's, it's a, it enables you to be able to, to take baby steps towards self-hosting, which is what I really, really like about it. And it does that without you having to spend a whole lot of money, and it does that without you having to spend a whole lot of time and effort to really learn all the intricacies of this stuff.

Yeah. And in terms of other services or other software, what other things are People should know about and just be thinking about using for their own journey of privacy and self-sovereignty.

There's a ton of, ton of good stuff, that you can host it. It really is, is, kind of an individual thing, more of, you know, what are you into? You know, what do you actually do? one of the things that, you know, while, while we're just on this topic anyway, is, you know, two-factor authentication, not so much dealing with self-hosting, but two-factor authentication, being Anywhere that you can, and use one of the time-based services, not SMS, that's a really important step to kinda, up in your security, game, which if, you know, security and privacy, they're, they're inexorably, they're tied together, but, you know, you can do anything from, like, you can run a service, like Invoice Ninja, you know, if you run a small business or you're selling some things out of your own home or whatever, you can set up,

To create invoices, to, to, to repeat billing, all the stuff that you would need to do from a small business standpoint, you can take care of there. you can set up, docu wikis or, you know, the things where you can take really, really detailed, notes if that's what you need to do, or you can even host, it's something as simple as a, a pace bin. You know, a pace bin can come in really handy, when you need to jot down some notes and, but you don't, you don't Like Google Notes, you know, again, this is just one of those services where you can just take one more service out of the hands of a company like Google. so I, I would really encourage everybody, to visit, unihost, unihost dot org and look at the applications that are readily available there. Like I said, they're, they're literally one-click installs once you get it up and running, and they run the gamut from, you know, Internet of Things and taking care of home automations, dimming light Notes and things of that nature, to writing a blog, whatever you wanna do.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. So if running your own Bitcoin node and, you know, whether that is, I mean, there's so many now. You got Umbrel, you got MyNode, Ronin Dojo, Raspiblitz, others, I think Embassy, the StarNine Embassy, that's like in the Bitcoin sense, and then now in the, you know, not necessarily Bitcoin sense, there are other examples of things that you can do and you can run, so you know host.

Where the embassy, the Start9 Embassy device also enables people to run their own services and their own things, and I think they've got Nextcloud on there as well. So I think those are a few directions people can look at. have you got any other tips for people who are out there trying to learn about this stuff?

the main tip that I have for, for anybody that's, you know, dipping their toes into this area is the KISS theory will go a long way. You know, keep it simple, stupid. You know, don't attempt to overcomplicate Things. What I've seen or noticed is a lot of times, even the more, or sometimes even especially, the more, advanced technical users, what can end up happening very easily if you're not careful is you get so caught up in the quote-unquote coolness of a thing, and, you know, whether or not, I wonder if I can do this, I wonder if I can put it on tour and then put it behind this other thing, I wonder if I-- and so you end up going down all these basically unnecessary- Necessary rabbit holes, and it can really lead to you, you forgetting to do the thing that you set out to do. Now I'm not even hosting my own, I'm just seeing if I can spin up websites on tour. And so simplicity is, is key. you mentioned the Start9 guys, I personally haven't had any experience with the Embassy, just looking at, at the device and seeing all the stuff that they offer, hearing some of the feedback from some of the people that have used it, it looks very, very interesting. similar type thing where it's, it's essentially just plug and play. You download, you, you plug it in, and you take off. so there's a lot of different, a lot of different programs that are coming out right now, and there's more of a push towards getting people off of these big tech platforms as we see more and more every day another story comes out about the way that they're, tending to put their thumb on the scales, socially, more and more. So I would advise everybody, first of all, do it, Use the tools, don't have, paralysis, analysis paralysis, you know, don't get so caught up in worrying, oh, I don't know enough, I'll never get it, I don't know. Just dig your hands in, get, get a little dirt under your fingernails, it might be much easier than you think. And once you find that it is a lot easier, keep it that way.

Fantastic. So, Diverter, before we let you go, where can people find you online?

I'm, I'm hanging around on Twitter, every Telegram, I'm generally hanging around in the, the samurai rooms, the samurai chat rooms, and some of the other places. You can actually catch, catch me in a couple of weeks, the, Guns and Bitcoin conference, Bear Arms and Bitcoin twenty twenty-one, it is, in Austin, Texas, on April tenth and eleventh. it's gonna be a blast. We got a lot of cool, Samurai Wallet is, one of the sponsors for that place. We got a lot of cool Bitcoiners and a lot of members from the three D gun And seeing what kind of trouble we can get into. so you can catch me there if you want, buy a ticket. And, yeah, just know that if you, if you want any help with anything, if you need any help with, you know, just one more little nudge to get it, you know, well, maybe I can do it. You can. And my DMs are open. All I will say is, don't DM me asking me about, you know, the double HTTPS ratchet encryption. I don't know. I'm just, I'm good at Tell you, install Unihost and give it a try.

Excellent, thank you, Diveta, for joining me. Thank you, man, it's been, been a pleasure. I hope you found that discussion educational and perhaps you are now feeling a bit more inspired to go and take those steps to build out your own self-sovereignty approach and to help either yourself or your family and friends. So get the show notes at stephanlivera dot com slash two six five. Make sure you share the show with your family and friends so they can also learn about Bitcoin and these associated concepts. And I