In this episode, PakoVM joins me as we discuss the security challenges facing Bitcoin users, from scams and self-custody risks to the trade-offs of convenience versus sovereignty. The conversation explores emerging Bitcoin protocols such as Ark and Spark, the role of Linux and open-source hardware, advancements in wallet design, privacy, inheritance planning, and whether stablecoins and Bitcoin-native financial infrastructure can accelerate global adoption.

Timestamp:

(00:00) – Introduction 

(05:24) – Navigating Scams in the Bitcoin Space

(10:16) – The Rise of Linux and Desktop Alternatives

(15:18) – Bitcoin Technology: Lightning, Ark, and Beyond

(30:27) – Bridging Traditional Finance and Bitcoin

(35:10) – Bitcoin as a Medium of Exchange vs. Store of Value

(39:22) – Stablecoins and Their Role in Bitcoin Ecosystem

(41:50) – Wallets and User Experience in Bitcoin Transactions

(44:23) – Community Perspectives: Bitcoin Only vs. Multi-coin

(46:14) – Global Perspectives on Bitcoin Adoption

(50:17) – Future of Bitcoin Technology and User Adoption

(01:02:18) – Privacy Solutions and User Experience in Bitcoin

(01:08:21) – Closing thoughts

Links: 

• https://x.com/PakoVM
• https://blog.bitbox.swiss/en/transferring-bitcoin-without-actually-moving-it-explaining-how-statechains-work/

Stephan Livera links:

• Follow me on X: @stephanlivera
• Subscribe to the podcast
• Subscribe to Substack

Transcript:

Stephan Livera (00:00.93)
Hi everyone and welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Joining me on the show today is PakoVM. Some of you may know him online for his commentary around Bitcoin and technology stuff. Parko’s into Linux also, and Pako is also working at Bitbox, which is one of the hardware worlds. So welcome to the show, Pako.

PakoVM (00:20.773)
Thank you very much. Impre impressive intro, by the way. Most people record that. but yeah, super honored to be here actually. I’ve been listening to your show for a long, long time since I started the Bitcoin back in twenty twenty one, I would say. and you were instrumental for me to to get into Bitcoin and understand a lot of the technology. So super honored honored to be here.

Stephan Livera (00:43.85)
fantastic. Yeah, well hey, you never know who’s listening, right? so I guess we should also talk about the the scammer. So let’s talk a bit about that story. I think Craig from Bitcoin magazine also mentioned or Bitcoin Conference rather I should say,

PakoVM (00:53.775)
Yeah.

Stephan Livera (01:00.878)
mentioned this idea and I was like, yeah, actually I mean ’cause look, I mean right now there’s a lot of sc scammers and spammers and everything out there in the world today. Tell us your recent experience so other people can learn about how to, you know, watch out for this scam.

PakoVM (01:15.333)
yeah. Yeah, so like basically the scam has the the scam has been evolving, so like we s we saw recently a few months ago that a lot of Bitcoiners were getting their telegram hack because the scam was to get somebody you kinda know, have you like call with them and have an AI version of the person and then then they start claiming that the you have like

connection problems and stuff and you have to update your client for the connection to work or whatever. And a lot of people fell for that. the the attack I think it it went into the dark for a while. People said forget started forgetting about it. And then I got this message from a guy called Billy Bitcoins. I said, okay, don’t know this guy from anything, but I I checked

everything on his profile and I saw like no indications of hacks or anything. I said, okay, like maybe my articles or art and lightning and spark are catching up. I we saw great reception f of those in our blog in Bedbox. I thought, okay, maybe people are starting to to listen to them during we are in the fair market. We were taking interest in the technology, so it’s

good place for me to start talking about this stuff. yeah, like they had a a podcast. The podcast was legit, but they talked more about ordinals, BRC20 tokens and stuff. yeah, since that stuff is kinda dying. Maybe it makes sense that they want to touch something else. asked around nobody knew if it was hack

So yeah, I like I then started to ask for verifications. Kind of one of the things the key verification I always ask for people who have podcasts is like, hey, can you send me a message from the podcast directly? Unless I know the person. Like, hey, if you have access to a social account of account of the podcast, please send me a send me a message so I can confirm it’s you. and they didn’t. They said no, I forgot, whatever. Then when the

PakoVM (03:40.829)
when the interview day comes, I said okay, now this is too suspicious. I asked for this multiple times. Not a single time I got an answer. So I’m gonna take measures. What I did, I created a new user on my PC. I’m running Linux. So I didn’t give it any administration administrative permissions. then use FlatSeal, that’s something on Linux if you know what

What the flat pack is. It’s kind of packaging Linux. Yep.

Stephan Livera (04:13.025)
Yeah, like when you install software, sometimes it’s a flat pack form versus like the package manager format. Yeah.

PakoVM (04:16.624)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So flat packs have permissions that you can control. What it is that I remove all the permissions and only allowed for a camera and microphone. Just in case it was an actual interview. You know there’s always a slight chance, you know?

Stephan Livera (04:32.791)
This is a lot you know, what you’re explaining to me, it sounds like this is a lot of work just for a you know, just for a podcast, you know?

PakoVM (04:39.59)
Yeah, I know.

Stephan Livera (04:41.953)
But yeah, I mean, to be f it’s a fair point because I mean nowadays, look, I mean, there’s a lot of podcasts going online and there’s a lot of obviously sc scammer, spammer stuff going on and

the tr the the the hack I’ve heard of before is yeah, as you were saying, like they might say, I’m having trouble hearing you, I’m having difficulty install this firmware install this update, software update. And because like in the moment, you might just quickly kind of like normally the and the alarm bells might go off, but in this case of like we’re we’re all used to like some kind of call thing not working, so then you have to troubleshoot it and then it kind of already your defenses are down. And so that

PakoVM (05:04.464)
Yeah, of course.

PakoVM (05:22.256)
Yeah, exactly. That that’s that’s what that’s what I’m aiming that’s what they are aiming for. Things I’ve seen this attack like a lot of times. a little cautious about it. That okay, if this is not podcast interview, I’m just going to be cautious. it took me like ten minutes to set everything up. And yeah, for a lot of people that that’s a lot of work. For me I’ve been I I’ve been doing Linux for my whole life. So I’ve been tinkering with my DC and doing this kind of stuff like

Stephan Livera (05:22.739)
Yeah.

PakoVM (05:52.35)
I’m the kind of guy who usually like just create an user to install a new program just to know if it it’s not going to fuck up my PC. So I’ve been doing this for years. So it feels natural to me for me to do this. And yeah, like I saw that this attack happened a lot of times. I was like, okay, let’s be cautious. Just in case. I was right to be because when I joined the call, like the first thing I get is like there are like egg people in the room.

Stephan Livera (06:00.246)
Right, yeah, yeah. So I mean as you Yeah.

PakoVM (06:20.709)
Apparently it was to be I was going to be only guest and nobody could hear me and then a message pop pops up like please download the wrap because we are having connection issues. I said, Okay, this is a scam. So let’s let’s see what it takes me. I just click on download and it downloads an MSI file, but it’s a Microsoft installer file.

Which was kind of offensive because the guys like they already profiled me but they didn’t profile me as a Linux user. Which of course like if you are going to the job do it do the full job. You know, like do the whole thing.

Stephan Livera (06:52.716)
Yeah.

Stephan Livera (06:59.115)
Yeah. But I mean as you said, like they were

Clever enough to target based on an article that you had written to sort of now I guess nowadays with AI they can maybe use this to kind of automatically quickly reseArkh and figure out, what is this guy into? Let me you know, let’s try to target the scam pitch to try to get you to, you know, obviously sign up for the call and download their their malware. And then once you’ve installed their malware, who knows what they’ve managed to install onto your computer. And of course, even from a Bitcoin security perspective, you obviously want to make sure your private keys.

Are cold or offline, right? So that’s kind of an obvious one. But even other things like your privacy could be doxed, your, I don’t know, maybe other tokens or things on your computer, like not shit coins, I mean more like the token that you, you know, your Gmail or something like that could be maybe they could try to hack into your Gmail from that or into whatever, into your email, your calendar, whatever.

PakoVM (07:33.819)
Exactly. Of course.

PakoVM (07:55.048)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah of course like I I I know that’s the the kind of stuff they usually w go for. That’s why it’s always good to have like a lot of extra browsers for this kind of stuff if you’re suspicious. Like I can count on my PC. I have let me tell you seven browsers. It’s one for work, wa one for Twitter, one for stuff. Yeah.

Stephan Livera (08:17.665)
That’s a lot. Yeah. I mean most people might just have Right, yeah.

PakoVM (08:23.901)
Yeah, so so yeah, like I mean like that seems kind of paranoic for a lot of people, but it’s normal for me.

Stephan Livera (08:24.171)
And I guess

Yeah. I see, yeah. And I guess ’cause there’s that difference between like what a typical like everyday person I mean, nowadays it’s almost getting to the point where most people just use their phone, right? Like they may not even use a laptop or a desktop PC, like personally. They may have a work one if the if the work ha gives them one, that kind of thing. but I guess the other meme seeing as you mentioned, you know, we’ve been talking about Linux, you’re a Linux enthusiast.

The whole meme of the year of desktop Linux, right? Like that has been a meme for a while. and

PakoVM (09:02.759)
Since twenty nine, if I remember correctly.

Stephan Livera (09:06.631)
Right. Right. Yeah. So we’re I mean we’re talking what is that, like s I don’t know, sixteen, seventeen years, something like this. Like it’s a long time. but funnily enough

It’s almost that Microsoft have become so annoying for people that there are actually genuinely a lot of people starting to move over to Linux. There’s still a few the the typical issues you would hear from people were like, they’re they’re a creative person, they need Adobe, and Adobe doesn’t work. So they have to and they’re not comfortable with the alternatives. Or historically, they’re a gamer and some of the gaming stuff didn’t work on, you know, Linux. And now, funnily enough, some of these things are changing, like Steam and you know, some of these things they’re coming out with their own Linux computer.

Compatibility and things like that. So, what what’s your reaction on some of that, this kind of desktop Linux concept?

PakoVM (09:56.766)
I think it’s great and I think it’s just going to accelerate. I think that Microsoft fucked up for a lot for a while with Windows eleven. It’s getting worse and worse and worse and worse to the point that they had to recognize that they fucked up. And Valve, on the other hand, they did a great job starting compatibility layers for for Windows apps to Linux. And now I’ve seen a lot of migration from a lot of apps to Linux and a lot of

that reminds me like I just for context, like years ago, there’s this blog called OMG Ubuntu, and they wrote they wrote a post called like Linux why why don’t you meme? the reason for the post was because in Linux there was there were no like small apps that did just one thing and did it right.

there were a lot in Mac OS and that was super interesting for users and developers. And now when seeing the shift in Linux, that now it’s the case that you can find a lot of apps that do lots of stuff and small stuff and this kind of apps that only do one or two stuff and they do it well with while being well designed. So I think we are accelerating into being an actually viable alternative for the desktop users.

And especially with games, games run incredibly well in Linux. I I’ve never seen anything never seen anything like I’ve seen with games on Linux. I I’ve been playing on Linux for years and it was horrible. You had to download the libraries yourself, you have to start whying, you have to troubleshoot a lot in under in order to start, and most of the games didn’t work. Now it’s just one click install and

Ninety percent of the Steam library works.

Stephan Livera (11:53.025)
Interesting. Yeah. And the other thing I found recently

is that AI really makes it a lot easier now to troubleshoot things. Like so you’ll find an issue. Like historically it used to be you you would hit some issue and then you would be spending like hours or like a really long time trying to troubleshoot something and like find some, you know, whatever stack exchange or forum post where some thing some guy who’s also on a similar setup to you, he found a way to fix some issue. Whereas nowadays with AI it’s almost like you can just copy paste that into your AI and then it will like quickly find out for you, hey, this is what’s wrong. Try this command, try that command.

Are you finding a similar thing with that?

PakoVM (12:30.791)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I’ve actually done a lot of of AA troll shooting myself with my own PC. With like small stuff. Like now nowadays I don’t have any problems with my PC that I used to have. but yeah, with AI it’s super easy. Like I don’t know why this doesn’t work. What what do we have to do? And it tells you right away what unit. But you have to specify that you are in a specific distro, specific version, what desktop, that kind of stuff. That

Years ago it gave you a lot of internet seArkh skills.

but now now it’s super easy. Now it’s incredibly easy. I think it’s easy to s to troubleshoot. Like you can basically do anything there.

Stephan Livera (13:14.638)
So then do you see the competition now being kind of between Linux and Mac and Apple?

PakoVM (13:20.411)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, like it’s I think I think most Linux decks Linux decks desktops stopped caring about Windows a while ago and what they want to do is try to to to have competition with Apple. Because Apple is like the gold standard of what desktop PC should be. Windows just mostly doesn’t work, and Mac OS

Rate UX usually things work very well. And yeah, many Linux but desktops they want to replicate the Apple experience.

Stephan Livera (13:58.819)
Yeah. Now on the hardware side of things, that’s probably an area where Apple has also been a real leader, like especially with these like now I think it’s called five chips and five Macs and all these kind of like and even people doing like local AI stuff with their different Mac hardware. On a Linux perspective, how are you seeing the kind of the ecosystem now of Linux hardware for laptops and desktops?

PakoVM (14:08.586)
yeah.

PakoVM (14:27.749)
I’m still jealous of the Mac people, ’cause the hardware there is amazing, but have you seen the framework thirteen pro? Okay.

Stephan Livera (14:35.982)
Yeah, I’ve heard of that. And it’s like the idea it’s like a modular laptop and stuff, yeah.

PakoVM (14:40.293)
Exactly. And it’s basically what most Linux users have been asking for. It’s basically just a MacBook Pro for the Linux users. So it’s great book quality, great specs. And but on top of that, it has modularity and repairability that Macs didn’t have. And it works with Linux but Linux out of the gate. So yeah, I think we are getting better hardware than we had.

Stephan Livera (14:58.858)
Interesting, yeah. N I think the main trade-off I’ve heard with some of these is they tend to cost more than like a Mac equivalent, right? That there’s not as much of like the like Mac Air, Mac Pro kind of standard thing, whereas like a lot of Linux people I’m on a ThinkPad, but ThinkPads are apparently also a common, you know, thing for Linux people. but yeah, framework and system seventy six and some of these others are out there and trying to do something similar.

PakoVM (15:05.661)
Yeah, yeah.

PakoVM (15:27.101)
Yeah. Yeah, so I’ve never gotten that why why people love Ink Pets so much. The people who have them, they say it’s it’s like it changes their life. Never understood why. Like I really like UltraBooks. The smaller the smaller the the footprint the better. but yeah, like I can I see that we are getting better hardware now because

Stephan Livera (15:48.866)
Yeah.

PakoVM (15:56.12)
Years ago Linux on laptops was horrible. Like you had to compile the Wi Fi drivers of yourself. Now it simply works.

Stephan Livera (16:05.356)
Yeah, so it’s kind of interesting to see that’s yeah, but I guess some of this stuff is kind of it is more for the, you know, technical or hobbyist style of person where if you if it’s just like your typical, you know, person who’s not that into it, then, you know, maybe they’re gonna be less inclined to to go down that pathway. but yeah, let’s let’s focus back to Bitcoin stuff. So I know you’ve written some articles on y you know, just Bitcoin technology, where things are going.

So do you wanna just give a bit of an overview there, like I I

Because you know, we’ve got Bitcoin on chain, we have Lightning, and then nowadays there’s Ark, there’s Spark, there’s, you know, State Chain, which is, you know, I guess Spark is using some elements of a state chain in it. and now there’s like this whole bit VM concept. So maybe can you help explain from your perspective like w what are some of these at a high level? And then we can sort of go further into that of why you would choose these different things.

PakoVM (17:07.493)
yeah, so let’s start by okay, let’s start by defining what lightning is. Like sure most of your audience already knows what it is, but just in case, it’s just state channel. So I open a channel to you, we have some liquidity, it’s like we have a box with with money sharing that, and we have a little paper that says I owe you this much and you owe me this much, and the account can never go over the level.

over what we deposit there. Okay? So this is great for spit, but the problem is that it does this doesn’t scale. Why it doesn’t scale? Because it depends on block size and Bitcoin’s own throughput, which is very limited. And so the solution for this is find a way to get into into the same safe box, get as many users as possible.

Problem with lightning is that you usually need a coordinator for that. So users need to be online all the time. So what Ark does is that it solves this coordination and operation part without the user having to lose their the property of owning what’s inside the box. Okay, so the operator is just it’s it’s just a coordinator, that’s it.

is who coordinates what people have in there. yeah, like I explained usually that it’s it’s like a train. So lightning are usually like a courier private private packaging. And Ark what it adds is that it now adds trains to this formula. Instead of just moving a little cargo super fast, you can move a lot of cargo. And an Ark

Since it’s a little bit in a different infrastructure, you can move in outside of the Ark and of this channel without having to close a state channel as you have to do with with lightning. Then you can share with a lot of it.

Stephan Livera (19:22.038)
Yeah, gotcha. And so

in terms of Ark, there are two, let’s say, main types, at least today. There’s the second. their implementation is called BArk, B-A-R-K, and then there is the Arkade version by Ark Labs, and that’s like TRO and and those guys. and they have slightly different visions and implementations. How familiar are you with those? Would you be able to explain any about those or just are you you are you kind of staying more at a higher level here of what Ark the concept is?

PakoVM (19:54.362)
I am more familiar with Arkade since I’ve talked more about this with Tiero actually. So what they want to do basically is to add programmability again to to Bitcoin, but using using the same concepts of any Ark that is it’s user aggregation, but they on top of that they are they are doing more complicated scripts.

So basically getting what we know as great script restoration with extra stuff off chain and then settling that on chain. Okay. While second just simply wants to be user aggregation and they want to be like the fastest for Bitcoin payment. But yeah, Arkade is maybe a little bit more complicated, but because they want to do more. So high level is the yeah, they want financial apps on top of Arkade, while second just wants

a better overall Bitcoin experience.

Stephan Livera (20:56.258)
Yeah. So I guess maybe w one way to see it is the second or bark

guys they are kind of more focused on just quickly setting up with a wallet and maybe maybe they they might even see it like if there’s custodial wallets today maybe they should just be using second and bark to have an Ark you know vtxo and then on the tiero side of things like the Ark labs Arkade Arks Arkade scripting the concept as I understand is that they will they want to enable more things to be done not just payment side of it.

PakoVM (21:20.935)
Exactly.

Stephan Livera (21:34.526)
Like it could be loans and it could be other scripting that can be built in to allow things, whether that’s escrow, whether that’s y you know, borrowing against your Bitcoin for a collateral and this kind of thing. So I guess the idea is that they wanna they see it like

By enabling some of these other uses, more people are going to come to Bitcoin. And I guess also f for a bit of context for people who are coming to Bitcoin and have been kind of broadly around so-called crypto circles for a while, even though crypto is on the down, there’s a lot of yeah, there’s a lot of these bridge hacks that happen, right? And so the reason some of these people are going to use things like wrapped forms of Bitcoin.

PakoVM (22:07.677)
I would say that

Stephan Livera (22:17.899)
And they’re they’re trading around and they’re using some kind of shit coin thing to do something with. But part of the what happens is a bunch of bitcoins are held in a bridge. And if that bridge gets hacked, that’s that’s and if you seArkh like I’m sure there’s like I don’t know how many hundred of them by now, there’s so many of these hacks. And so in a way, this concept of using, let’s say, the Ark Labs Arkade style.

it might help reduce a bit of that risk and make it more about it’s more about, okay, yes, there’s a trusted execution module, but you’re you’re staying closer to Bitcoin and y there’s maybe less of a bridge requirement. Can you elaborate or do you agree or disagree? Or how would you explain it?

PakoVM (22:59.39)
Yeah, I agree on that. And I’m not one hundred percent sure on the on the details, but two of the people I talk I have talked about this. The reason why this happens, why usually these crypto contracts are are insecure and stuff.

PakoVM (23:32.057)
Hey.

Stephan Livera (23:36.141)
Hey, can you hear me?

PakoVM (23:36.846)
Hider. Yeah. Yeah yeah. I don’t know if it was my internet or yours.

Stephan Livera (23:41.399)
Yeah, I’m I’m still on, so I don’t know what happened. Anyway, just go on. So you were explaining a bit about bridges and how you know, why there are so many of these hacks happening.

PakoVM (23:45.401)
Okay.

PakoVM (23:53.518)
Yeah, so yeah, let me recap it late. so yeah, like I’m not a hundred percent certain on the details, but I’ve talked to a lot of people who who know about this and most of them what they say is that the problem is the EVM.

Stephan Livera (24:09.508)
Gotcha.

PakoVM (24:09.944)
No, so the V VM is not secure enough for this kind of stuff. So there are a lot so there’s l a lot of attack attack surface that Bitcoin doesn’t have because it does not have a VM per se. It’s just scripts executing. So you can either try to hack the contract or hack the logic of the EVM. So may maybe I’m mistaken on this, but that’s what I understood so far. Okay, and on the case of Bitcoin, since it’s just a script,

What you program is what you get. Okay, so it’s no nothing weird happening or calculations than just what’s put on the stack. Like you have a few lines that say this is going to happen and this is what’s going to happen. And since they are super limited, like you need to be super careful, and usually people are more careful because they they need if they are not, they can they can lose fonts and stuff. Ark allows you to recover them.

in like in the worst case. But bridges don’t since bridges they are on chain and once a block is valid is it can’t be invalidated.

Stephan Livera (25:20.995)
Yeah, and I guess the other important concept to understand here is

It matters whether we’re talking just about those two individuals getting wrecked or the entire system, everyone who’s in that bridge getting wrecked, right? Because that’s also an important d distinction, right? Like as an example, if you and I have a lightning channel together, something happens to that lightning channel, it only impacts you and me, not other random people who are not party to the lightning channel that you and I have together. And so I guess we are maybe we’re gonna see more evolution or dire you know, more people going down this pathway.

PakoVM (25:33.063)
yeah.

Stephan Livera (25:54.208)
Of trying to restrain who gets wrecked in the fold in the breakdown scenario, in the unhappy pathway. Now, I guess there’s a few related ideas which would be interesting to get your reaction on them. So, as we’re saying, there’s like this idea of using Ark to do have more programmability, whether that’s loans, collateral liquidity pools, maybe other assets, I don’t know. that’s maybe one way to do this in this kind of trusted execution environment.

Another concept might be liquid. Liquid brought simplicity recently, right? So liquid is a federated sidechain of Bitcoin, and they put in simplicity, which allows like a massive, massive amount of new things. And so that might also be another way to achieve some of these more DEX style, decentralized exchange size style uses on a Bitcoin sidechain, which is Liquid. that’s maybe one other way to do it. And now another concept is

like ZK roll ups and some of the ZK startups, right? Like Alpen and Citrea and stuff like Now I think Citraya have a shit coin, so you know, I don’t endorse that. but I guess more broadly there’s like this Bit VM bridge concept of like bridging in and out of those. So how are you sort of seeing this concept of bridging and is it relevant for us in Bitcoin?

PakoVM (27:01.294)
Yeah.

PakoVM (27:18.907)
I think it’s very r relevant because it allows you to trust minimize side chains that for example liquid personally I do not consider it to be as trust minimized as I would like to. I think it’s very trusted and you don’t have unilateral exit. So you have to ask permission to get out. but yeah, you can do an atomic swap, but but w the part that matters to me is the new unilateral exit.

liquid doesn’t have doesn’t have it. So BitBm allows you to have it in some in some cases in side chains and stuff and allows you to do like super complex stuff that Bitcoin script cannot do. It’s impossible for it to do. with by bas basically having a consortium of signatures where only one has to be honest. Okay and the thing with

with VM is that since it’s not a part of consensus is getting better. It has gotten way better and it still has a long way to go to get even better than it is today. So like GitBn at the start, first concept, we needed like four megabytes of of data to put in chain. Now it needs like I don’t know, like one hundred kilobytes or something. and it’s going to need less in the future.

Stephan Livera (28:44.141)
I see, ’cause I think they keep coming up with like new optimizations and new ways to do it. Like I think what are we on like the third or fourth version of BitVM, something like this, and different reseArkhers and like Robin Linus and other reseArkhers just kind of end up coming up with new ways to do things and then like some and then some of that gets ends up getting used by the ZK rollup startups like Alpen Labs and other people like that.

PakoVM (28:53.85)
Third.

PakoVM (29:08.719)
Yeah, exactly. that and that’s pretty cool because what that tells me is that people are not waiting for consensus to change to start doing cool stuff with Bitcoin. Like I’ve noticed a huge change in the discourse because a few years ago was like, okay, we cannot do anything because we don’t have consensus for X, Y, and C change that we need to do stuff. Then Robin Linus comes with it VM. And people realize that okay, we can do a lot of stuff here. The only thing is that

We don’t have the tools, we have to make the tools w ourselves. And Linus went like, okay, here’s a tool to do whatever you want. It’s super convoluted, it’s super inefficient, but you have a way to do it. And the good thing is that it can get better. So if you’re going to wait for consensus, you’re never never gonna get what you want to do. If you start mark making the tools yourself, you’re going to whatever you want because anything is possible with if you make the right.

tools yourself because nobody’s going to make them for you.

Stephan Livera (30:12.195)
So where do you see the most value for Bitcoin users to do this kind of thing? Is it the loan side of things? Is it vaults? Is it I don’t know, other programmatic ways of controlling your Bitcoin? Where do you see the most value?

PakoVM (30:13.826)
Yeah.

PakoVM (30:29.112)
Okay, so this is a whole spectrum of things, so I think it’s that’s on the eyes of the beholder. Okay. So it’s up to you of to what you want. But for me personally, the thing is that since this opens the door for a lot of applications, it also opens the door for for traditional finance to try to integrate with Bitcoin. And the thing is that that creates a bridge.

for people who actually use Bitcoin and they are on the only Bitcoin side of things to integrate with the traditional systems to have more tools to actually spend Bitcoin. And I have I have noticed it. Like in the last few years I have noticed that living with Bitcoin used to be almost impossible because you had to only gift cards and P2P exchanging for cash. Those were your two options. Now you have so many tools that

That it’s as easy as having a bank account, but you know that nobody’s going to rock you because you are in control of your money. So I think that the the most important thing is basically the whole picture.

Stephan Livera (31:47.28)
I see. Now what about the the let’s say the Tradfi style? Now I’m kind of pressing you for the reason of

It’s all well and good for, let’s say, ideological or like really into it Bitcoiners to kind of talk about our way of doing like whatever people are doing peer-to-peer and direct spending. But as an example, what I could also see is a lot of people just using TradFi style or neo like Bitcoin neo banks, right? Whether it’s a strike or a river or a you know, one of the European options of this where maybe you can borrow against your coins, get some fiat, and maybe they have a card or they have some other way and you’re tapping that card. So it kind of feels similar.

That just TradFi, or neo-let’s say Neo Bank TradFi. What’s the problem with that, in your view?

PakoVM (32:36.697)
The problem with that is that we we’re taking with us the same problems the old system used to have. But being realistic, being pragmatic, that’s something we are never going to eliminate. It’s impossible to eliminate.

Stephan Livera (32:52.707)
Well, in fact, a lot of the barrier for that is actually on the fiat rail side. Like it’s just that, you know, if you wanna interact with the fiat card bank system and be able to tap your card so the r random merchant on the street can take your payment with his terminal, you know, you have to

Like that’s the fiat system. Now, of course, we can be again you know, I’m in theory, if I could abolish AML, FATF sanctions, BSA, all yeah, I could I would if I could. But it’s not happening anytime soon, right? And so then the practi then it’s a more like, well, do you see it like the point is, you know, people should be able to use Bitcoin? And of course, there’s you know, there there are apps and tools out there, BTC Pay, Numo, Cashew, various tools that you can just direct, you know, earn and spend Bitcoin. and I’m all for it.

PakoVM (33:20.618)
me too. Me too.

Stephan Livera (33:42.455)
it but I guess the the challenge is at this point in Bitcoin’s evolution how many people are gonna do that as compared to the masses who would just be using the trad fi style of you know just tap a card or tap their phone or this kind of thing?

PakoVM (33:58.052)
Yeah, exactly. That that’s the thing. Like like if you ask me a few years ago, I would say like we have to destroy everything that they have and everything has to be rebuilt on top of Bitcoin and and I don’t want anything to do with that system. I still don’t. I would love to destroy it, but the reality is that we can’t. what we can do is try to integrate, create bridges, but

Making bridges doesn’t mean living in that system. Just means being connected to that system. Living in the same society, but having a different standard of how you do things. You just having a connection. You know, you cannot you cannot go completely off grid just because your money is different than others. that’s no I don’t think that’s logical. I don’t think that’s possible if you can do it.

Stephan Livera (34:50.447)
Yeah.

PakoVM (34:54.422)
And want to do it okay, but it’s not not something I would like to do. I would love simply to spend my own Bitcoin, earning Bitcoin, and the state having nothing to do in that interaction. But if I need to connect to the state’s infrastructure in order to spend, like I have to fold eventually.

Stephan Livera (35:16.803)
Well, a and so the thing is unless now, certain exceptions will exist, of course, like if you go live in a Bitcoin circular economy or maybe online commerce can be maybe more done through these Bitcoin rails, but the the truth of it is if you’re talking about for for the masses, then yeah, it has to sort of speak the fiat rails and the other aspect of it is I don’t think the

PakoVM (35:21.77)
yeah, of course.

Stephan Livera (35:43.438)
we’re kinda there yet in terms of medium of exchange adoption for Bitcoin. Because for most people, at least above a certain level of wealth and in de p development in what co in in the country you’re living in, most people don’t have a fiat payment problem. Right? They they just tap their card and that’s it for them. so I think it, you know, maybe this triggers some people, but it’s more like I just I think there’s gonna be more store of value, you know, adoption to come before we get to that phase of like actually

having a meaningful amount of medium of exchange. Now I’m it’s not that I’m against it. I I’m happy to earn and spend. I encourage people too, but I also want to recognize it’s not that I can like lecture someone and be like, hey, you need to go and like spend Bitcoin instead of using your fiat card because you know it’s just you’re not going to have much success with that.

PakoVM (36:13.535)
Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

PakoVM (36:33.583)
Yeah, exactly. I I completely support that because I am the I am on the same, on the same page here. For a while I told people like they should spend their Bitcoin if they want Bitcoin to succeed and whatever. But not everyone is doing it. And I think a lot of people are just going to save in Bitcoin. And now what I see it reminds me a lot of what I live in Venezuela with the hyperinflation.

That everyone was saving dollars in the US dollar, and nobody was trying to spend them. Everyone was trying just to earn dollars, but never spend them because they were their savings. And then becomes a chicken and egg problem, but there’s a moment when it simply breaks and everyone starts using them. Because there’s no alternative there. So I think Bitcoin’s going to be for a long while in this.

Store of values, savings kind of thing. And the good thing, the good advantage that Bitcoin has is that since it made the dollar and fiat evolve, make them internet monies as well, thanks to stable coins. now Bitcoin moved in the same rails that they do. Like they are making the rails for us. All we have to do is save, stay there, do nothing.

Just wait. And it’s you know, it’s getting easier, it’s getting faster, and in the end what matters is that if you can spend Vicky, you can’t you do it if you want, but if you don’t want, like it’s your money, it’s not mine.

Stephan Livera (38:19.821)
Yeah. Now there are some ideas that could kinda help you. Like probably a good example that comes to my mind is Tony Clossing has this thing called stable channels, right? And that’s kind of like an interesting idea of like creating a virtual dollar, let’s say, but not actually using a stable coin per se.

And maybe that’s something that could be enabled with further like Bitcoin technology and more more use. Now of course again, it you there’s a reason people like you know, tether and circle and you you know these coins are so popular. so where are you at on some of these ideas of like stable channels and others?

PakoVM (39:02.798)
I think they are unworkable. I think they are a waste of time of time. It’s better to just do atomic swaps. And it’s way easier. And maybe I don’t know, like we already have tabroop assets and that kind of stuff. So we ca we have like tokens on top of Bitcoin but they need R G V and that stuff. So yeah it it’s

My for me it’s a waste of time. it’s hard to defend. ‘Cause we already have a lot of alternatives that already work, so it’s better to just try to integrate with those instead of trying to to reinvent the wheel.

Stephan Livera (39:49.218)
I see, yeah. And so you see it as just there’s so much market demand for the stable coins that you just have to support those and that’s just you see that as kind of that’s the direction things are going to go. Further more adoption of those, as opposed to people looking at ways to do like stable channels and other like ways of representing fiat without actually directly touching the fiat.

PakoVM (40:14.981)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think like stable coins are growing at a s huge pace and we can not we cannot ignore them. But trying to reinvent the wheel is a waste of time when we have rails, we have atomic swaps, we have Arkade and spark that they have their own stable coins as well. So yeah, like trying to redo the same thing is not gonna yield us a different result.

Integration is the way to go.

Stephan Livera (40:44.847)
I see. And so then when it comes to Bitcoin wallets,

How do you see like the best way to support these things? Like, do you have a a preference in terms of how these things are done? Or, you know, do you see it like people should just be using the so-called multi-chain wallets that just kind of handle everything? Or there are some different you know, there’s different approaches out there. Like there’s the kind of the Aqua or Bull wallet style where they’re kind of it’s a liquid based wallet, and let’s say in the case of Aqua, they’ve built in swaps in the background to do like the tether swapping in and out. That’s one

Way. maybe the Spark or or RGB wallets are another way to do it. How how are you seeing those?

PakoVM (41:30.522)
Okay, so for me the preferred way is the swaps way, but not using liquid. Liquid it’s a little too slow for me because it it you need to wait for block confirmation. So my main wallet right now is Blitz. It’s a small Spark wallet. And they have this this feature that allows you to get stable coins into Bitcoin. So like I use this with a lot of people who live in Venezuela. I usually

send stable coins back and forth, but I don’t hold any stable coins and they want US dollars. So I send them Bitcoin in the form in the form of stable coins in whatever chain they want. And they send me the stable coins in whatever chain they want and I get that in Bitcoin. And I think that is preferred experience for anyone who is into Bitcoin. Because you don’t have to do all this other stuff that you don’t know or you simply don’t want to do.

while still being able to interact with people who don’t want to do and know the things you do and know. And I think that’s the best experience.

Stephan Livera (42:36.1)
Gotcha. And so this is also as I understand this is generally for the smaller like spending amounts. Like if you’re doing larger, let’s say big boy amounts, then you might be using more like Bitfinex platform or something like this to do these things.

PakoVM (42:50.752)
I’ll be I’d be using one of those.

Stephan Livera (42:56.306)
right, yeah, okay, yeah. So but then what how do you do does Bitbox have stablecoin support using like via Ethereum or Tron or something like that, or how do you do it?

PakoVM (42:56.815)
Okay, looks

PakoVM (43:09.082)
Yeah, yeah we have we have a Bitcoin only version and a multiversion and multi version supports EVM. So via our software you can you can use a lot of EVM chains and we support stablecoins as well, not only on those chains but on Ethereum as well. And our app has like a native native support of a cure of a curated a curated list of

Tokens and many of those are basically stablecoins. That’s maybe the biggest use or biggest use for for Ethereum.

Stephan Livera (43:40.238)
I see. Yeah.

Stephan Livera (43:44.964)
Yeah, interesting. And so how are you seeing kind of community splits around things like Bitcoin only as as contrasted to like I don’t want any shitcoin stuff? How are you seeing that? Do you see do you see a lot of users who are like strict Bitcoin only or not? Or what do you see?

PakoVM (44:03.461)
Okay, so it depends. thanks to my job, I go to a lot of conferences, so I see a lot of people, and you see kind of everything. So yeah, if you go, for example, to Twitter and you go to to the more hardcore conferences, everyone thinks that it has to be only Bitcoin. And I’m a Bitcoin only person, like the only thing I like is Bitcoin. But

I think there should be integration with the things that work. but I still think that app tokens and gas tokens have no other value than just keeping their networks alive. That’s it. the value is in other things in there, not in tokens itself. So I don’t like but people should do whatever the

they want with their money. And if they want to lose all those all their their savings into a token that is going to zero, they are free to do it.

Stephan Livera (45:13.603)
Yeah, and I think it’s I guess it depends on how you see it, like

If some people see these chains as really just regulatory arbitrage, right? Like it’s just really just like the way of kind of getting around certain government r requirements and things. and I guess ironically, mm no maybe we’re just seeing maybe more and more of those requirements come in. And of course, people should be aware when they’re using these stable coins, they can be centrally frozen, they can be centrally all kinds of things, which is different to Bitcoin that you truly self-custody and self-validate with your own node, right? So they’re in a different category.

PakoVM (45:40.568)
yeah, of course.

Stephan Livera (45:48.93)
categories. but that just seems to be where things are going. but w

There is probably a a distinction between, let’s say, American users and like non-US, right? Because like a lot of the American users probably don’t care as much about this because for them, most of them can already access standard, you know, fiat banking services. So it doesn’t matter as much for them. But I presume for the non-US customers, the stablecoin factor does matter more. Is that your experience?

PakoVM (46:18.588)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah yeah. It’s actually that experience. so what I what I’ve seen is that in the US like there’s literally no dic no distinction between Bitcoin and crypto and crypto for most people. So it’s the same thing. It’s just an asset class they don’t understand. they believe it only works for speculation, like there’s no other value. But the thing is that banking there works relatively well.

better than most parts of the world, so like they don’t need the solutions that Bitcoin offers. And actually like they have one of the strongest fiat monies in the world. So they don’t need to escape the fiat devaluation because they don’t feel it as much as other people in the rest of the world do. In Latin America, people go for the stable coins. Like people

Everyone knows how to use all kinds of kinds of tech right now. Like there’s no chain maximalism. Like I don’t think that that thing exit exists there. People only care about whether it’s USDT or USDC. That’s it. That’s all they care about. But in places like Africa, I forgot people actually want solutions for their problems. And Bitcoin offers solutions for

problems they have that are way bigger than they are in Latin America. Like they can’t do commerce directly with families in the US because they are not they are not just five hours away. They are, I don’t know, twelve hours away. So it’s it’s harder to move more move money around for them. And they have different problems. And in Europe, in some parts of Europe, a lot of people

are going into Bitcoin just for the savings and for the interi inheritance stuff. At least here in Spain, you have no idea how many people ask for inheritance. That’s maybe the main use case here. Because yeah, yeah, it’s like the big use here is inheritance. No, it’s not savings, it’s not loans, it’s not remittances, it’s inheritance.

Stephan Livera (48:30.198)
Inheritance is the big use.

Stephan Livera (48:41.57)
Inheritance of Bitcoin, you mean, or just like fiat inheritance that has to get given out

PakoVM (48:43.738)
Yeah. No no Bitcoin. of Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin is uncensorable and the state cannot know the about it. And in a lot of countries in in Europe like the state takes a huge cut of your inheritance while doing nothing. Yeah.

Stephan Livera (48:53.52)
I see. Yeah.

Stephan Livera (49:01.774)
Right, high inheritance taxes. Yeah, I see. So then it’s about I so then presumably there will be a big market for let’s call it no KYC inheritance Bitcoin solutions and things that allow a kind of a censorship resistant form of inheritance of these assets. So kind of interesting to see because like y I guess you would have thought

like people who are getting shut out from the banking system, so they’re gonna use Bitcoin as their MOE. But in practice, now yes, y there’s some of that, but it’s it’s funny to me that actually the big use, at least in Europe, is inheritance. So interesting to see.

PakoVM (49:41.775)
Yeah, yeah it is. It is, at least here in Spain and I remember it also in Germany, its inheritance is like super important. people know that they should not inherit inherit anything fiat to their kids. Yeah, because of the taxes on inflation, whatever.

Stephan Livera (49:57.837)
Gotcha. ‘Cause of the taxes and so on, yeah. Right.

Stephan Livera (50:04.034)
Interesting. And so just kind of looking forward, where do you see things going like on the technology side on Bitcoin? Like do you think it’s gonna be more use of these Ark and Spark and so on? or do you see something else technically speaking for Bitcoin?

PakoVM (50:21.765)
Yeah, I th I think this this things are going to grow even more because they they made the lightning experience incredibly good. you can see there’s a boom of Spark wallet. Like every wallet is now integrating Spark, so they can integrate lightning lightning in it in it. And what I see

Is that there’s now a race to see who takes the biggest cut in the market. Because basically they are sa service providers, but now you don’t have to trust a service provider. And then for me, the next step is to see who decentralizes these kind of services first.

Now it’s to find a way to decentralize operations of these trustless operations. It’s because they are trustless but they are not decentralized.

Stephan Livera (51:24.504)
I see. Yeah. So as an example in the Spark model it’s a one of N

honesty assumption and I believe there are multiple entities and they are signing and you are trusting that at least one of them was honest in the moment of transit. And so the problem or not problem but just that’s one of the trade offs of state chains is that instead of I guess loosely speaking, instead of thinking of like you’re moving the coins around, you’re kind of moving the private keys around and you’re trusting that the state chain operator is deleting

the prior shards of the keys so that you remain you the user remain able to you know still have control over your funds. And of course in the Spark model they have been clear to say you have unilateral exit. But maybe that is kind of again you and I are talking kind of at a at a level that people in the industry would know. But like if you talk to like a random person on the street, they’re not gonna like really know or understand

PakoVM (52:26.085)
No, not at all.

Stephan Livera (52:26.508)
any of the like some of these terms and maybe some of the terminology gets confusing for people. Like if we start using the word, hey, it’s self-custody, well I guess you have unilateral exit, but i the word and the term is just getting so blurred now that it’s you know, it used to be a very clear thing, right? Like back in like 2016 or 2017, if we say a wallet is self-custody, it was very clear because this is pre-Lightning, pre-everything, it was just like you just you hold the keys, that’s it. But now it’s like where you’re in this hybrid situation where

Where theoretically your wallet can unilaterally exit, assuming, you know, the one of N honesty and that the state chain deleted the prior shot and all that. How do you see that? Like is that just gonna be a confusing mess of terminology for people?

PakoVM (53:12.572)
it’s going to be it is already. It is already flag. at least for something like stage chains, like the creator, Rob Ruben Samson, like he came up with a term that was proactively self cus proactive self self custody. So if the operator behaves correctly it’s self custody, but if they don’t, it stops it it stops being self custody in the s in the stage.

Because you got a lot a lot of a lot of ways to exit if they behave maliciously. And you can exit before them, before they do it. But yeah, like there’s a lot of debate on this. Like I’ve been pushing for Spark for a long time. A lot of people try to tell me no, this is not Bitcoin, but yeah, it is Bitcoin. The thing is that

It is not the kind of self custody you are used to, so we need a new term for this. And calling calling it self custody is not correct, but it’s not incorrect either. So you hold the keys, but you hold them you hold them on the staging.

Stephan Livera (54:24.386)
And you are not and let’s put it this way, you hold the keys, but you’re not the only one who holds the keys. And so that can make it a bit challenging to explain for people so they can understand that. And then it gets into that broader conversation around, well

PakoVM (54:29.115)
Exactly.

Stephan Livera (54:38.968)
the easiest thing for a lot of people is to have a custodial service. And of course, if we’re kind of, let’s say, ideologically Bitcoiner, we want more people to self-custody. We want more people to be able to do that. And so then it’s like, how do you achieve that? and

I think this comes up this brings up this whole idea of like maybe it wasn’t the technical hurdle to begin with. It was more like the social and, you know, psychological aspect of doing self-custody as opposed to l the literal technical a aspects of doing self-custody of your Bitcoin, right?

PakoVM (55:12.295)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I would I actually would say that’s a huge problem. Like w working at a at a hardware wallet manufacturer, I’ve noticed that a lot of people fear the like they dread self custody. Like they are super furtherful, they are horrified because they know they can lose your money.

Stephan Livera (55:33.434)
So can you explain that? What are the main what are the main fears in their mind on self-custody?

PakoVM (55:39.516)
it’s usually common the the common things that you should know you shouldn’t do. it’s like people always ask like okay, what happens if the device is compromised? What happens if I lose my keys? What happens if my house burns? what happens if I have to leave the contract and I forget my keys? And this kind of stuff. So

People like are super filled for of of their responsibility because it’s not vi it’s something more they have to take care of. And it sounds complicated at first and that’s where I think we lo we lose most of the people. Whatever, because we want people to understand what’s going on.

But people only want to know, okay, is this the money or this is not the money? No. So so yeah, I think like mm the biggest fear is losing the money. Because you can see horror stories of people actually losing a lot of money, especially with f with passphrases.

Stephan Livera (56:56.868)
So where do you think things go then on the self-custody front? Like do you just think most people are gonna end up holding custodial, but there’ll just be like a small group of, let’s say, enthusiasts or maybe some high net worth people who take the time to actually go like learn this stuff and do it for themselves?

PakoVM (57:15.577)
I believe there’s we are going to hit a balance at some point where a lot of people will st will still trust the banking system. At least I see in my g in my generation, millennials, most people will s will use the banking system. But the coming generations I can see for my nephews the that they know what they’re doing because they they they are going to use self custody because they do they do crypto.

So they do stablecoins, they do Solana, they do Ethereum, it’s all the same stuff and they and they know how to. You know, it’s like it’s somewhat like computers. Like my parents still don’t have they still don’t have an idea how to use a computer and now kids like they’re using an iPad first month.

No, so I think it’s going to be a general show, I think.

Stephan Livera (58:06.479)
Yeah, so you think that they’re actually gonna come out really tech savvy and that is actually gonna make them more comfortable. But at the same time, there’s just a certain level of things you have to learn if you’re gonna do it right. Like now it’s one thing to just have kind of a phone wallet with like spending money, but once you start getting to like, I’m gonna secure my life savings in single sig or multi sig, that you know, that raises the bar dramatically in terms of how do you know how to operate this device? Do you know how to recover? Do you know like how to do the backups? Do you know like

PakoVM (58:19.029)
yeah, of course.

Stephan Livera (58:36.483)
Do you know how to like s secure your like that multisig backup aspect? Like there’s so many of these other aspects of it.

That you know, it’s a real journey. And probably when people like in years gone by, they had practice of doing a lot of on-chain transactions. And so they kind of had practice of that and then slowly worked their way up. Whereas maybe one of the concerns now is that actually people aren’t doing that many on-chain transactions, right? Because look, I mean, there’s just not that many on-chain nowadays compared to before. At least that’s that’s my subjective sense of it. What do you see?

PakoVM (59:12.081)
Yeah, I mean what I see is that it’s also getting easier to use. Everything everything in general in Bitcoin is getting easier. like for example, privacy used to be a hurdle. Now we have silent payments and we have page joints, so pri privacy is way easier than it used to be. we have a lot of solutions for multisig that it used to be a pain in the ass, at least for most people, would you have services that make it super easy?

Yeah, concierge services and this kind of stuff. hardware wallets. I check the the older models and I understand why people lost a lot of money with those hardware wallets. And now hardware wallets are super easy to use. The most of them have their own app. It’s super easy to interact. you are not exposed to things like script types.

And derivation path and that’s kind of stuff that you use to to need to be exposed to. Now it’s just you write your words and you have your money like magic. No, so it’s getting easier and easier and easier because there’s there’s fit for this kind of products and these products are getting better because more people are getting into it. So it’s growing and by growing it’s making it easier because there’s a lot of competition. Everyone trying to be better than the competition.

Stephan Livera (01:00:37.743)
Yeah, that’s a bit of a wide pill. That’s good to hear. And I mean, I agree with you that yeah, there’s certainly a lot of improvement in those things compared to like in the old days where you had to like really know what you were doing and there were just so many foot guns that you could screw things up. Whereas nowadays you’ve kind of you know, it’s like bowl when you go bowling and they put up the rails, so you sort of have a bit more of the rails so that your ball doesn’t fall down into the alley or whatever it’s called in the side in the gutter.

So yeah, there’s that. And then yeah, like I guess part of it is just normalizing some of these things. Like as you said, silent payments and pay join. I know Sparrow Wallet. Craig is recently doing a lot of work on that. So he’s got this frigate thing for Sparrow Wallet, which is like an indexer for silent payments. we haven’t really got to the point where lots of exchanges s are supporting that yet. But as I understand, that is that’s not a trivial thing because it there is a high scanning requirement on the exchange side. Because if

Like if you’re an exchange and you’ve got like millions of customers and you start handing out SP silent payment addresses instead of just standard addresses that people are used to, that’s a massive scanning requirement on for on you, the exchange, or any like service provider. and so I guess people are still kind of wrestling with the right way to optimize some of that. And then there is there are some let’s say fly in the ointment kind of aspects of some of this, like silent payments, as I understand, doesn’t support multi sig yet. So then

PakoVM (01:01:58.47)
Yeah.

Stephan Livera (01:02:03.623)
Now you’re back to single sig. So like now you’re not dealing with like larger like because if if you’re dealing with larger amounts, you probably want multi-sig for that. Whereas like, you know, so some of the but maybe some of these are just growing pains, right? That like these things will get solved over time. Yeah.

PakoVM (01:02:14.608)
Yeah, but

Yeah, but they but they they start getting better. Like I mean like two years ago it was impossible to see silent payments because the requirements were so high. if you try to have your own indexer, you needed like a super beefy computer. Then now you don’t. You just need any common GPU. And it it like the indexation takes like a few hours, just like setting up Electrum.

Because twenty twenty gigabytes on top of Electrum is not that much. It used to be like a lot of data and a lot of CPU power that you needed to do. And now it’s not that much. yeah, like the that things are just optimizing and when when they break out like and they get some adoption, they also start getting more optimization from

other sites that people didn’t see before that could be optimized. Yeah, if an exchange starts giving a lot of silent payments addresses to most of the of their users and they are going to have to do a lot of indexing. But they just have to need to buy a bare server. Which I mean it’s going to be a cost, but but maybe they now are ahead of their competition in terms of privacy for their users.

Stephan Livera (01:03:43.057)
Yeah. And it maybe not even just privacy, but just UX. Like it’s just a better UX of just like

PakoVM (01:03:43.909)
No yeah, the UX is way better.

Stephan Livera (01:03:47.889)
contact list kind of exp experience. Whereas nowada in the let’s say the stone ages of Bitcoin, people are still doing like test transactions to the same address, right? Like and because that’s like a typical thing, as I’m sure you and basically people in the industry know it’s very common that people will do like a test transaction first and then send the bigger amount and there’s a ton of address reuse. people are still in this paradigm where they might say, here’s my donation address. Here’s like just a single donation address, right? Doxing all this privacy

stuff. So like that’s just yeah, these are some of the things where we are now. But of course we want to get more people using like silent payments, pay join, all these things that then improve the ecosystem. And I guess we won’t see it, you know, w because it’s one thing for the hardcore technical person to do these things, but it’s another for like just an everyday Bitcoin user to do those.

PakoVM (01:04:42.727)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because for the for the hardcore user it’s like supernatural to the to start doing this kind of weird stuff. But for the day to day user, like they don’t really care. They just care to r receive and send money. They don’t care if it’s more or less private. They they would be thankful if it if it’s more private. And they can do it, but they don’t want to learn it. that’s why you get a lot of people moving to privacy chains because they think

There’s no privacy in Bitcoin. While there is, the thing is that you have to prepare your privacy yourself. And now we are getting to a point where you don’t have to do you don’t have to take your your steps to do privacy. Like privacy is start slowly becoming the default the default. And it’s going to get better.

Stephan Livera (01:05:30.042)
Yeah. So in a way the privacy aspect is gonna get better over time and there’s this aspect of as more people do it, it helps too, right? And so even the Pageoin case, I hear from talking to Dan Gold from, you know, the Pageoin one of the guys really working on Pageoin for Bitcoin, he he mentioned as well that there’s like an efficiency gain as well. It’s not just a privacy thing too. So that’s also an interesting point for people to understand that it’s not just

PakoVM (01:05:38.599)
Yeah, of course.

Stephan Livera (01:05:59.067)
It’s not just that. So hopefully we see more people doing that. but yeah, I’m not sure how many like wallets right now support it like just out of the box. I think maybe cake wallet. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

PakoVM (01:06:09.723)
I I only know of two. and Bull Bitcoin. Those those are the only two that do it. other wallets are working on it, but it’s not like a high priority too anymore.

Stephan Livera (01:06:19.056)
Yeah. And to be clear for listen for listeners, this is the new form of PageOin. There is like older forms of PageOin that like I remember back in the day my BTC pay server had Pageoin set up on that, right? But what we’re talking about is the new form.

PakoVM (01:06:23.99)
yeah.

PakoVM (01:06:32.157)
Yeah and the new form is feels like magic because it’s asynchronous. So like you don’t have to be online and creating a cre creating an address at the moment. You simply you simply get it and there like there’s a lot of things happening in the background, and then when you send the money, if the other wallet is paying join pay joint compatible, you’re simply going to do the pay join and you both gain a little bit of privacy. So and surely.

Surely surely it’s going to get better because a lot of people are working in finding ways to to reduce coordinate coordination in everything. So that’s also going to reduce coordination in pay games as well.

Stephan Livera (01:07:20.336)
Yeah, so there is some, you know, good news out there. how how closely do you follow any of the mini script stuff?

PakoVM (01:07:29.382)
not really. Not really. I talk to a lot of people who do miniscript and I know it’s awesome, but I’m not super into it.

Stephan Livera (01:07:40.999)
Gotcha, yeah. Because I can un I can imagine that’s also an interesting future direction for security and to what you were mentioning before around in inheritance. That could also be a way to set up more, you know, because like in Bitcoin we like to talk about low time preference. Well, inheritance is one of those things and so it is a real use case.

PakoVM (01:08:01.607)
I mean maybe the lowest. Maybe the lowest time preference because it’s not even for you.

Stephan Livera (01:08:03.524)
Yeah, exactly. Passing our coins on to our children and so on. so I think that’s an area where

Yeah, it’d be nice to see more work and more standardization and you know, these things will come. so I’m I’m confident about that. But yeah, it’s just it’s a matter of kind of the industry sort of hammering out, okay, this is kind of like a good default thing to do for inheritance and you can like structure it where maybe it’s your key plus, you know, your son’s key plus like the lawyer’s key or something ab after a certain time window, then this this pathway is active. But until then, no it’s not. And so then like if I die, my son has to wait

whatever, twelve months or whatever, and then he can access the coins or s something like that. I’m just kind of throwing out some ideas, right? But that’s kind of hopefully where it might go.

PakoVM (01:08:53.405)
Yeah, there’s actually awesome stuff now with that. there’s something called depreciating or deprecating multisig. I think that’s Anchor Wac Anchor Watch does. Decay decay multisik. Yeah. Which I think is awesome. So you have a contract with a lawyer and they have a third key that can recover, but after a time if the contract ends and nobody renews anything, their key is out of the of the multisig and it’s only you and your son and only your son can recover and

Stephan Livera (01:09:01.85)
Right. Decaying multi sig, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

PakoVM (01:09:23.303)
You know, so like now the lawyer doesn’t have the the way to recover it, only your son. So no, it’s it’s cool to see the that we can do that kind of stuff and get prepared in the future and surely that also opens up for like layer twos and stuff.

Stephan Livera (01:09:44.198)
Yeah, so we’ll just have to see. So any any other closing thoughts? Anything we didn’t touch on?

PakoVM (01:09:49.825)
I not really sure. Maybe we didn’t touch bit one hundred ten, but as I told you, that the topic is dead for me already. I think it’s dead on arrival. Just wanted to leave there. yeah, really happy with the conversation,

Stephan Livera (01:10:00.358)
Ha ha

Stephan Livera (01:10:07.674)
Excellent. Well yeah, listeners, we’ll put the links in the show notes to the blog posts you wrote, Pako, and and your ex account, which is just PakoVM, right? PakoVM. Great. Okay, well thanks for joining me.

PakoVM (01:10:17.265)
Yeah, exactly.

PakoVM (01:10:21.02)
Yeah, thanks for you to for mate, my have a nice one.