Full Transcript for Forensic Examiner Turned Cypherpunk: The SeedSigner Origin Story

seriously and putting too much trust in commercial companies that are building products. And that's always going to be a thing to a certain degree. But what I've loved about the last few weeks since the vulnerability was discovered is people, I've loved a few things. One was that most Bitcoiners seem to inherently understand even without it being explained that this was a single vendor problem and not a Bitcoin problem and not a self custody problem. People just seem to intuitively understand like I still want to hold my own private keys, but I just need to think more carefully about it and take a different path. And then I've just loved a lot of the bantering and conversations and people talking about dice rolling and people are trying to say dice rolling is a bad idea, a good idea, but the important thing is people thinking these things through and talking about them because that's how people learn and how we arrive at best practices and what consensus beliefs are in terms of Bitcoin cold storage. But yeah, high level, I love that people are thinking more deeply about their stack and I think like mildly controversial take. In some ways, I think cold storage needs to be a little bit harder so that people take it seriously and really dig in and learn what they need to. It's like if you want to offload, because with cold storage, what we're really doing is taking custody of our private keys and trying to protect them in a reasonable way from all sorts of threats. And if you kind of think about that in terms of you know, your personal security and your person and your home, if you want to completely offload that responsibility for your personal safety, you know, to another party, then really all you need to have to learn how to do is call 911 and hope that the police get there in time. If there's somebody trying to break down your front door, somebody gets in your house or whatever's going on. But if you want to take more responsibility to protect yourself in the case that something crazy happens at your house, you're probably going to want to learn how to shoot a gun and probably buy a gun and own it. Things are going to get a little bit dangerous and you're going to have to invest some time and energy into learning how to properly handle a gun and how to properly load and unload a gun and how to shoot it and how to aim it and think about where you're going to keep it in your house and stuff. But that's going to enable you to have more control over your own safety so that when something crazy happens, you don't have to pick up the phone, call 911, and wait for someone else to come and solve your problem. But it's going to require people to dig in and learn and care about it a little bit more. 00:05:48 Speaker 2: I feel like I feel much more comfortable being a Bitcoiner in America. If I lived in a country where you weren't able to keep a firearm in your house or that sort of thing, it reminded me of Pomp saying, a while back, I remember it stuck with me. He was like, I think that Bitcoin's more American than the dollar, you know? And I've thought that like the, I think that Bitcoin will continue to flourish in the United States because there is this underlying, like you take responsibility for, you know, that culture. It's died out quite a bit in some ways, but it's still strong and lays underneath things. 00:06:31 Speaker 1: And strong property rights are an inherently American thing. And, you know, Bitcoin is maybe the only thing in this world that you can truly own because like your house, if you don't pay your property taxes, they come take it from you. You know, your gold can be seized or stolen from you. Money in the bank can, of course, be seized or stolen from you. But if you want to, I don't advise this, but if you want to memorize 12 words and let your Bitcoin live in your head, like that is the ultimate control over your personal property such that it's really difficult for someone, uh, to take that from you. And in terms of American values, this is kind of controversial take, but Nick Carter used to say a lot, Bitcoin's values are American values. And earlier in his journey, he was one of my favorite, and I think really one of the best Bitcoin apologists. And then, you know, I don't know what changed with him if it was getting involved in altcoins or Bitcoin, venture or his ego got big or whatever, but he used to be one of my favorite Bitcoin apologists. And he would say that all the time. And I, to your point, I agree that, um, yeah, Bitcoin's values are definitely American values. Yeah. 00:07:45 Speaker 2: And an important caveat with, with that too, is for me, the, the biggest lesson that I think I took away from the cold card fiasco was like single SIG, single point of failure is like unacceptable now. You know, like that's just, it's just, you can't, it's totally unacceptable, particularly for anyone that I know that is doing this sort of stuff that's focused on education, that cares about, you know, furthering the Bitcoin revolution, but takes the trade-offs with that that come with, you know, yeah, take the trade-offs that come with being public about that. To me, the takeaway was like, it is absolutely unacceptable to, to have a single point of failure at this point in time. 00:08:28 Speaker 3: And I think that's true for any Bitcoiner as well, really. 00:08:33 Speaker 2: Unchained sponsors this show and they have great options. There's lots of great options for that. There's lots of different ways you could go to defend against single points of failure. 00:08:42 Speaker 3: But yeah, to me, it's just not allowed anymore. Unacceptable. Cannot do it. 00:08:49 Speaker 1: Right. And to just dig into that a little bit further, it's like the unknown unknowns... are more often than not end up being what bites you in the ass because like coin kites marketing was all about you know we've got two secure elements and if you know the feds come banging down your door or some bad

guy gets into your house he's going to get this device and there's no way you can get into it blah blah and you know the real threat ended up being what appears to be carelessness in the implementation of their you know private key generation and that was something that I've talked about it in the past, but that is something nobody was really expecting to see out of a major, major wallet manufacturer. But to your point with multi-sig, if those unknowns are what are most likely to bite us, then the best way to protect yourself against those is just to isolate yourself from any single vendor being what can possibly take you down. And I'm sure we'll talk more about it, but in terms of multi-vendor multi-sig, then you have multiple private keys that make up your Bitcoin wallet. And if any sort of technical issue or lost device or other issue among any one of those keys becomes a problem, thankfully with multi-sig, That shouldn't take you out. You shouldn't lose, you know, custody of your Bitcoin because of that. But anyhow, I'm sorry. 00:10:27 Speaker 4: No, yeah. 00:10:27 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's... I think it's important to, especially, I think, maybe people who are newer to this need to understand that you should set up your custody setup anticipating your Bitcoin 10x-ing in the next whatever duration of time, right? So think about how much you have and then think if it was 10x the value and then how you'd approach it then. It's like, do that now, you know, because... That time will come eventually, if you ask me. You had this great interview on Danny's show, What Bitcoin Did. And there was a couple of things you said in there. I listened to it in the past couple of days. There was a couple of things you said in there that sounded like borderline prophetic, you know, reflecting on this cold card problem. At one point in time, you said explicitly, like, one risk is these, you know, hardware wallet manufacturers not producing sufficient entropy. I mean, people have known that this could happen. No one was expecting it. You know, I wasn't expecting it to come from cold card. You were saying, I want to put my trust in the math that backs Bitcoin and not in some single hardware wallet manufacturer. So yeah, I wonder what you could tell. 00:11:34 Speaker 3: Me about that. 00:11:34 Speaker 2: And then I want to transition to you telling me a bit more about SeedSigner too. But yeah, what were your thoughts further about that? 00:11:42 Speaker 1: The ironic thing with the cold card vulnerability is that the device itself And their approach had actually already solved for that issue with the ability to combine. This is my favorite method to create a private key, but the ability to combine a random number generator wish with, you know, 50 dice rolls or 100 dice rolls, like the dice rolls alone, as long as they're truly random or sufficient to create the private key. But that was a feature with cold card. It was just that there was some ambiguity in terms of I

don't know if it was in the documentation, but recommendations from people that were endorsing cold card and advice that people give. And some people were saying, yeah, it's really important to go through and do the dice thing. And then other people were saying, no, you could probably just trust the random number generator, which as we know, ended up being not the case. But yeah, it's ironic that they had solved for that problem. And in terms of SeedSigner, that particular vulnerability was something that was on our radar from the very beginning. So with a seed signer, not to get too deep into the details, but seed signer will never use a random number generator to just produce a private key for you. You can bring a seed phrase that you've created with another wallet, like a 12 or 24 word seed phrase, and you can import that into the seed signer. But if you want to use seed signer to create a new private key, we're going to require some sort of random information that you've collected from the world around you. So one common way is what I refer to as a BIP 139 lottery, which is, for people who don't know, there are 2,048 that make up the official list of words that can appear in seed phrases, and there are different ways to do it, but you can basically choose 12 or 24 of those 2,048 words at random. You actually choose 11 or 23 randomly, And then the way the math works out is the final word is a checksum, a deterministic checksum against the words that precede it. So you need usually some device to calculate that final word so the seed phrase becomes a valid seed phrase. So one way, pick seed words at random. Second way, just roll dice. 50 or 99 times of the seed signer, depending on the length of the private key you're wanting to create. That's also an extremely simple way low cost, most people have Dice around, you just roll the dice, enter the dice rolls into either SeedSigner or there are other devices that'll do this too, and that'll produce a secure private key. And the third way that is unique to SeedSigner is that because the device has an onboard camera, we can use that camera to gather random visual data from the world around you. So we'll be collecting frames from a video feed, and then we'll take kind of a final image That's the last thing that goes into creating a private key. And this approach does put more trust in the device and our software stack. But when implemented properly, it really does hold up to scrutiny as being a great way to quickly and easily create a private key. But yeah, we as a project took that stance from the very beginning that we're not going to use a random number generator to produce a private key because it's so cheap and easy to gather random information from the world around you. And that's really a belt and suspenders way to do it because when you're using a random number generator, you know, there are just implementation details that can go awry as this whole situation illustrated. So it was, you know,

I hate where people lose money, but it was kind of indicating a way to one design choice that we have made kind of from the very beginning. 00:15:19 Speaker 4: Hey, look, over 130 million in Bitcoin was just stolen from cold card hardware wallets. This is the largest hardware wallet hacking history. And the sad part about this is that the victims, they did everything right. They had real devices, they kept it all offline. But there was a small firmware update that let hackers access their Bitcoin wallets and completely drain them. 00:15:37 Speaker 3: Now, don't blame self custody. 00:15:39 Speaker 4: Self custody isn't a problem. It's single key custody. That's the problem when you have a single point of failure. So here's what I actually do. I've been doing this for years because I was always afraid something like this could happen. Now, this happened before Unchained ever sponsored me. 00:15:52 Speaker 3: I was a customer. 00:15:53 Speaker 4: And it's my Bitcoin, it's my parents, it's my sister, my family's Bitcoin, and it all sits in what we call multi-sig wallets. And I do that with Unchained Capital. Instead of one wallet and having one key, there's three keys on three different devices, three different places from three different companies, okay? I hold two in different locations, Unchained holds one, and it takes two of those wallets to move anything, which means like this exact hack right now that got everybody drained, one compromised key won't be enough. 00:16:21 Speaker 3: It probably sounds complicated. don't worry. 00:16:23 Speaker 4: Unchained has a concierge service where they can walk you through the entire thing one-on-one, and they're going to build out your vault. They'll test your recovery. They'll have an expert review everything, making sure you don't have any problems. If you want to do the same thing I do, the same thing I have my family do, go to unchained.com slash Mark Moss. Again, unchained.com slash Mark Moss. Set it up right. 00:16:43 Speaker 5: Do it once. 00:16:44 Speaker 4: Don't get vulnerable to a hack like this. 00:16:47 Speaker 2: There's a few other design choices that really stood out to me when I first heard you explain how this works, which was very recently in the past few days. I have known about seed signers for a while, but the fact that all of the data stored in RAM and the private keys aren't on there, I wonder if you could tell me about a few of the features that set a seed signer apart from a lot of other signing devices and why you decided to make those choices, those design choices. 00:17:14 Speaker 1: So some of those choices, the reasoning was based in my personal experience as a digital forensic examiner. I've talked about it on another podcast, but I was a cop for 15 years and my law enforcement career took a pretty unique path in that for the first few years, I was just like a guy in a uniform driving a police car, you know, making traffic stops, fights in progress, you know, burglaries, that sort of thing. And then a little before three years in, this opportunity came up to join a local computer crime task force as a forensic examiner. I'd had a little bit of a background in information systems, but I did not have a background of expertise in digital forensics. So I said yes to the opportunity. It ended up being a great opportunity. But there was a multi-year process in the first few years that I was doing the work of kind of drinking through the fire hose and getting up to speed with all of the different techniques and information that you needed to do that job competently. But back to our design choices with SeedSigner, one of them is the statelessness concept. And that arose from a lot of the hardware wallets kind of advertised themselves as this digital Fort Knox, where they put all of these access restrictions in place such that there's no way to access the private key or it's very, very difficult to access the private key. And my experience as a forensic examiner was the timing of my career was unique in that I watched mobile phones grow up from these very simple things that you'd flip open and hit the seven button eight times to get a lowercase t or whatever it is. Very kind of simple, rudimentary devices to basically the supercomputers that we carry around in our pockets. And as mobile phones became more sophisticated, their security features became more sophisticated, especially from manufacturers like Apple and Samsung. And so being a digital forensic examiner, of course, I had not just computers and hard drives and thumb drives and stuff coming into the lab, but we also had a lot of mobile phones come through. And so I got to watch this cat and mouse game of being in a position of there being information that I suspected to be on a phone, but there being security features in place. You know, in the beginning, it was like a pin code for Android. I don't know. I'm not an Android guy, but Android phones for a long time had this lock pattern that you would draw on the screen and that kind of stuff. And with a lot of phones, you know, for a period of time, you would not be able to get into them. But there were a lot of, I guess we'd say, government-funded private contractors and contractor companies who were actively looking for vulnerabilities in the security architectures of those phones to be able to get into them. And so you'd get a phone in that had, you know, say it was an Apple phone or the PIN code in place. And if you keep that phone off the network, keep it charged for six months, there's a good chance that one of the vendors would come up with a way to bypass the particular security feature that was in place on that phone. And if you take a step back and think like these, Apple and Samsung are trillion dollar companies, and they have a security spend that is probably in the billions with dozens if not hundreds of people looking at every aspect of what the security primer of that device is and how difficult it is

to get in and such. And especially in the beginning, these hardware companies are these kind of small startups with a security spend that is one or two orders of magnitude less than what a premier phone company's security spend is. And so I just, I didn't buy it. If I'm getting into these sophisticated devices routinely, In the forensic lab, some of the protections in place that were in hardware wallets, if they're not trivial to get into now, with enough pressure put on them, some of those devices are going to break and they're going to get into them. The first generation of Trezors was a great example in that now, if you get your hands on one of those devices, there are security vendors that have developed hardware exploits that within... some hours or a day or two are able to extract the pin code and get the private key off the device. So anyhow, it's a long way of saying I didn't have a lot of trust in this whole concept of a digital vault and eventually came around to what if we take that concept and flip it on its head such that instead of this device being this super secure place to store a digital copy of your private key, what if we very intentionally do not store the private key on it such that, as you alluded, we leverage the volatility of RAM or computer memory such that all of our software is running in RAM. The Raspberry Pi, which is kind of the heart and soul of what a seed center currently is, mimics a traditional computer architecture. And if you're just running the operating system and all the software in RAM, when you remove power from it, the nature of RAM is such that it kind of resets to this original starting point a lot of times with the at the physical level it's either on or off for ones or zeros and the data that was stored there while the device was powered after you unplug it is basically gone and so SeedSigner took that concept and inverted the concept of a digital vault to being like This device doesn't store your private keys. It doesn't store information about transactions you've made or keys you've used or anything like that. And then it's up to you to think more carefully about how you secure those physical copies of your private keys. Like for some cold storage applications where you're using a harder wallet, like using a wallet like it's a checkbook, like you have a medium amount of Bitcoin stored on there and you're making more frequent spends, you're buying things online, or maybe you're operating a business. you know, and you're paying suppliers or invoices or something like that, having that digital copy of your private key nearby as a convenience, I think there's definitely some value in that. But for your long, long-term cold storage, which is really what SeedCenter is optimized for, I'm a big proponent of multi-sig. SeedCenter was created with multi-sig in mind from the absolute beginning of the project. And I like the idea of focusing on the physical copies of your private keys as being what you think

about safeguarding. Am I worried about someone snooping on this key, so am I going to think about putting a Bit39 passphrase on it? Or am I worried about a fire or a flood potentially damaging my physical backup of the private key, so what kind of packaging or temporary packaging am I using to try and secure it? Or do I keep one in my house, or do I keep it in a state deposit box at the bank? or burying it under a tree in my grandma's backyard, or whatever you're doing, how many private keys am I using in a multi-sig, and how many of them do I need to get access to my money? Is this all in town? Am I trying to store things in other geographic locations? Having a center that doesn't store your private key forces you to think through all of these implications and introduces friction into the process of spending Bitcoin, which, two more things, One is digital devices can suddenly fail irrecoverably and without warning. So your hardware wallet, and this happens to some of the hardware wallets that have batteries in them, whatever, or when you're updating the firmware, it can happen such that when you're using the device, you go to use the device, like it just doesn't work. Gold cards are notorious for saying bricked on them sometimes when you try to update the firmware or when people hadn't used them for a long time. And so... That's why, because digital devices and digital storage can fail, that's why these analog copies of our private keys are so important, having those words written down on a card of paper or preferably stamped into metal. And when you get into a multi-sig, now you need kind of like two hiding places for each private key because you've got to have the analog version and there's the digital copy that's on the wallet or the sign device or whatever you want to call it. And so for even a simple two or three, maybe you need like six hiding spots. And it quickly gets kind of crazy in terms of how many places you need to hide things. So SeedSigners' approach has been to focus on the analog physical copies of those keys and what you use to safeguard them. And I think that's what I was going to touch on. I've been talking for a lot here, so I'll let you jump in and redirect. 00:26:18 Speaker 3: No, that was exactly... Yeah, what I want to talk about. 00:26:21 Speaker 2: I think my favorite thing that I've heard about it so far is that you kind of, you're able to, you know, I understand the analog world and analog defense better than I understand the digital world and digital defense, you know? And so when you are using, there's lots of great hardware wallets out there, but when you're using them, you're sort of relying and trusting on, unless you understand how to like pick the code apart yourself and, you know, assuming that they are open sourcing their code, which most of them are, But unless you know how to do that yourself, there is an element of trust there. And what I really like about the seed signer side of things is that you can just be like, let me just defend this in the analog world, you know, and I don't have to get in the business of code reviews and all that sort of stuff. 00:27:08 Speaker 1: Yeah, there's definitely a spectrum there. 00:27:10 Speaker 3: There is still code you rely on as well, of course, but yeah. 00:27:14 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:27:15 Speaker 1: I want to throw that in. Um, and it's, as I say, it's a spectrum. So I would say with seed signer, you're able to do cold storage in a more trustless way. But if you want to take advantage of that and truly relinquish some of the trust you're putting in the device, like you're going to have to learn some things. In some cases, if you really want to go deep, you know, you, our current architecture is a lot of it's in Python. So it's relatively easy to audit for people who are maybe less sophisticated when it comes to, you know, auditing code. But, um, it does enable you to put less trust in the system. And that's kind of part of that is, uh, we've, our lead developer pointed this out over the last week or two is we've kind of been going through a lot of, uh, you know, the, when, when something like this happens, you know, you, you, everybody wonders what kind of skeletons we have in our closets and all the other hard work. That's what's behind all these red team scan scans and like using, uh, some of the more capable and free, when I say free, like open source, free AI tools to go through code bases and look for unknown vulnerabilities. With SeedSigner, we've really tried to constrain what we're trying to do with the device. Because when you think about just a conventional hardware wallet, like take a Trezor, at a basic level, There's at least three things it's trying to do. First, it's trying to do random number generation to support private key creation. Two, it's trying to do digital private key storage and create access restrictions around that so that it's a relatively secure way to store private key. And then three, there's this whole process of transaction signing and when you want to actually spend Bitcoin, you have to use the private key to create the signatures that are necessary to prove you have the Bitcoin and those get broadcast to the blockchain. So There's kind of three big areas that you're trying to, one device is trying to do all those things. And with SeedSigner, we don't try to store digital copies of your private keys. And we won't just use a random number generator to auto create a private key for you. We're going to insist that you bring some entropy from the outside world that's kind of on you to make sure that's random information. You're not like rolling dice or you're lazy and you're just entering like the six a bunch of times or whatever. But we've really tried the seed center to focus on keeping the device isolated from other networks or computer devices so that your private keys are safe there. And then generating those signatures in a secure way that nothing leaks out or

anything like that. And one other thing I'll point out that I was going to say before was that this process of learning what your private keys are and what those seed phrase mean that a lot of people have been going through over the last few weeks. Prior to that, a lot of people didn't understand what those seed words represent. And of course, when you sit down to set up a hardware wallet, with so many of them, the workflow is the first thing you do after you've turned it on is it presents you with this list of 12 or 24 words that represent your private key. A lot of people don't understand really what those are and what they represent because most people, not most, but a lot of people, because I talk to a lot of people about this, would write those words down on the card that was supplied with the hardware wallet and then they would store that card with the hardware wallet. A lot of people keep the hardware wallet in the box that is what you originally received it in and then they'd put that card right in the hardware wallet. So this This sophisticated digital vault that's supposed to be protecting your seed trays and your private key, there's a card with what it's trying to protect sitting there right next to it because people weren't doing their diligence or they really didn't understand what those seed words represented. So the process of using a seed center, because you're interacting with those seed words every time you want to set up a wallet or make a spend, really kind of drives home that these are the keys to the kingdom. If someone else gets a copy of these, they can steal some or all of your Bitcoin usually. So we've tried to just be really thoughtful about the platform because it's a powerful tool. And if you're not careful with it, you can cut yourself. To throw out another metaphor, if you want to dice an onion, you can get one of these bang chop tools that is just something you tap on and it like it it dices the onions up but usually they over dice them and you ended up like with the onions not in the consistency that you'd prefer whereas if you invest the time in learning how to use a knife and how to use it safely and how to keep the knife sharp and all that kind of stuff you can dice an onion and get the consistency exactly how you want it or you can slice an onion into rings or whatever you want to do and But again, it's going to invest in you getting a little bit dangerous and learning a few things. And that's such a great metaphor for Seed Center because it's this very capable, powerful tool, but it does require some things of you in terms of learning how private keys work and learning how you derive a public key from a private key to set up your wallets. and how to potentially use multi-sig, and the actual process of generating signatures for wallet, and how passing those from the secure device that interacts with your private keys to a wallet coordinator that interacts with the Bitcoin blockchain, how that's kind of this very controlled, sacred process. And it just helps people understand more about it. And the beauty of understanding more about it is that when you invest the time in learning and understanding more about the process, after you've set it up, you have a state of mind that leaves you in a much calmer place than sometimes when you've onboarded with a hardware wallet. And they try to obscure a lot of the complexity away because that is a smoother onboarding experience. But in the end, maybe when you use the hardware wallet, you don't really understand what you're doing. You just know if you press these few buttons and you remember your PIN, you can access your Bitcoin and spend it. But it's through learning more about the process is what I'm trying to get at is what gives you that like deeper peace of mind such that like, if you turn that device on one day and it didn't work, like you have a confidence that you'd be able to, um, let's say you're using a ledger and you have ledger live install on your laptop and hard drive crashes or whatever reason one day your, your laptop doesn't work. Like if you understand really what a seed trade is, seed phrase is, and a private key is and the public key is derived from that and all that stuff, like, yeah, it sucks. Your laptop wouldn't turn on. But you have a lot more confidence in how to securely basically create a new copy of your wallet and still have complete access to all the same money that you did with the installation that went bad on your computer. And it's just knowing that you can do that gives you a peace of mind that, you know, it's going to make the hodler's journey a lot less stressful over time. 00:34:43 Speaker 2: Last question for you about the seed signer device. I wonder, so I know that it is very open source in its development, but I wonder if you could explain to people what that actually looks like. Like what does it mean for it to be open source? Who is working on it and reviewing it? And then with that, I wonder too, what is the actual manufacturing process look like? And how can you verify that your seed signer comes from a reliable source as well. 00:35:15 Speaker 1: Sure, there are a few different avenues to talk about with that. So the heart and soul of the Seed Center project, even though there are people out there that build and sell them, myself included, I'm one of those people, an important part of some of the security assurances you can get with a Seed Center is that when you're trying to source the hardware and get that device, it uses generic computer parts that can be used for all sorts of other things. So when you go onto Amazon or go onto AliExpress or some other online website and order these parts, there's not an immediate, you know, unless you're going to a place that sells kits where it's known that those devices are going to be used to build a seed center. If you're buying them from generic vendors, nobody knows you're building a hardware storage tool or anything

like that. So that's just kind of some privacy benefits right off the top. But the other aspect of it is kind of this whole issue of supply chain risk. And with the commercial hardware wallet vendors, like as soon as a component that is going to go into a hardware wallet, it's known to people that it is going into a hardware wallet, that kind of is where this concept of supply chain risk starts. And it's a deep topic that we can go into, but there is a long history of, you know, it's everything from NSA level type attacks that have occurred by three little government agencies in the past that have been used to compromise network infrastructure and other, you know, types of consumer grade electronics devices that happen at the factory pagers. That's a great, you know, kind of, vignette to bring up is like people may not be familiar it's presumed that the Israeli intelligence community or an Israeli intelligence agency was able to infiltrate a supply chain of a particular brand and model of pagers that were known to be used by their political enemies and they were able to have those devices you know parked built differently at the factory such that sometime down the road they were able to remotely detonate these pagers and significantly harm and even kill some people just by doing bad things through a supply chain attack. A lot of supply chain attacks aren't as dramatic as that. But every hardware wallet maker is kind of a honeypot because people know that the devices that they're building and selling are going to touch an awful lot of Bitcoin. you know, moving into the future. And it's like, if nation states ever get to a point where they, they, if they're not already there, some of the, some of the ones we don't know about are taking interest in Bitcoin and either wanting to own a lot of Bitcoin themselves and they're willing to steal it, or just wanting to be, be able to create chaos in the world via some sort of, you know, exploit that touches an awful lot of Bitcoin that people think that they're self cussing. Um, This is a long-winded way of me saying that they're just like obvious targets. And seed signer, because it's a smaller thing and because it uses off-the-shelf hardware, we're kind of hiding in the crowd. I don't anticipate seed signer will ever grow large enough to the point that it would make sense to target the Raspberry Pi factory to try to build in some sort of exploit. People who are trying to get into manufacturing facilities and execute those kind of super secret low-level attacks would be much more efficient to try to get into one of the big hardware wallet manufacturers. Because, again, we know those devices are going to be used to interact with Bitcoin. So we're kind of hiding in a crowd in that nobody knows which Raspberry Pis are going to be used to build a seed signer or where they are in the world. There's already tens of millions of these devices already deployed in the world. before seed signer became something that existed or something that a lot of people know about. So yeah, it's this concept of DIY and we're not the only one. There's other DIY signer projects that are great. There's one called Spectre DIY that's been around for a long time that predates seed signer. And there's another one called Self-Custody Crux, K-U-R-X. There's a great model. And then there's a newer one coming online. I'm going to blank on the name. It'll come to me in a few minutes. Yeah, I'm not going to pull that one up. Anyhow, there are other DIY options. And then SeedCenter itself, we are in the process of expanding beyond the Raspberry Pi ecosystem to even more generic, general-purpose computing parts that are ubiquitous throughout the world with microcontrollers that you find in everything. Anything that's automated these days probably has a microcontroller in it that is being used, or low-cost devices that are ubiquitous computing power in this day and age. So yeah, DIY is an interesting security approach, but I think it's proving itself to have some value, and it is still early innings. A lot of these projects, that are coming online or that are still growing that are DIY cold storage projects, I should say, because you can, the majority of them, you can build yourself with simple, inexpensive, optional parts. We can still very early innings of these. We're still gonna see a lot of innovation in the approaches and expansion into more complex scripting support, improved user interfaces, access to more people speaking more languages around the world. And it's just rapidly developing. It's a really exciting time. And our lead developer, Keith McKay, just published an article, self-published an article that is about just this, how there's just a diverse array of these projects coming online. And they're going to enable some powerful things coming into the next months and years, especially. 00:41:51 Speaker 2: Yeah, I really love how it feels like you guys are helping keep the cypherpunk spirit alive, you know, and the fact that it is really open source, very decentralized. It's something that you can put together from a bunch of generic computer parts. And, you know, I think this battle, the cat and mouse game of security will continue for a very long time and it will develop and there will be new exploits in hardware manufacturers and new things we learn. You know, this is one of the latest, this is the biggest one we've ever seen in terms of the fallout of it. And we survived and Bitcoin's okay. You know, like it's, it's there's forever. There's been really hard lessons learned in Bitcoin. You know, lots of people left Bitcoin on exchanges and there, and there were, you know, there was FTX before that there was Mount Gox and they were like really hard lessons learned there. Now people are learning hard lessons about, generating sufficient entropy and multi-sig and single points of failure. And so I think this will continue. There will be new things we learn. And I, I love

how you and the other people you're working with are continuing to push the boundary and, you know, just stay on the edge of that fight because that fight will continue for a long time, I think. 00:43:06 Speaker 1: And yeah, this is going to sound, uh, diversity is important. I'm not talking about people or anything like that, but having a diversity of options available to people is, It's not solely about being cypherpunk and all that kind of stuff. Having a lot of options out there from a security perspective for the whole Bitcoin ecosystem is a really good thing. Because it's been a while since something like this happened. But as more ASICs were coming online in the Bitcoin mining industry and with Bitcoin mining pools, we've had a few instances over time where there were these freakouts because pools... would start to amass close to 50% of the network's hashing power. And for people who aren't deep in that, like when you get to 50%, it's not a sure thing, but there becomes some sort of weaselly things that some of the mining pools can do in terms of selfish mining or even worse things that can happen when too much of the mining park becomes concentrated under a centralizing force. And if we think about the same concept of staying decentralized and diverse, In terms of Bitcoin cold storage, it's probably a good thing that although cold card was prominent in the Bitcoin culture, in terms of actual hardware wallets deployed, it's probably kind of a blessing that they were a smaller slice of the pie. Because something like Ledger or Trezor, this had happened where they had faulty entropy and it was you know, really simple to sweep, you know, public keys connected to compromised private keys, that would have been way, way worse if it had been, you know, Trezor and Ledger are the two big ones that I think of. And in a way, I'm thankful it wasn't one of them, because that really would have been a shockwaves to where a much bigger proportion of Bitcoin held in cold storage would have been vulnerable and people would have lost their savings and stuff. So yeah, back to what I was getting to originally, just this idea of diversity and having a lot of different approaches and companies and ways of doing cold storage is important because if any one of them proves to be vulnerable for some sort of unknown, unknown expected reason, the impact on the broader Bitcoin ecosystem is not as great. Yeah. Yeah. 00:45:36 Speaker 2: Well, thanks for sharing about that. I think it's really important. And yeah, I need to get my hands on one and and continue learning. I'm trying to know how all the hardware wallets work so I can make better and better recommendations for people. And especially too, you know, I think it's sort of tailored to the. 00:45:53 Speaker 3: Person, right? The one that I might recommend to, I don't know. 00:45:57 Speaker 2: Let's say a 55 year old woman might not be the same one that I'll recommend to a 21 year old software engineer coming out of

college. And, you know, so I think that, um, yeah, the diversity there is important because different, different, options are better fits for different people. Yeah. 00:46:15 Speaker 1: And one, one other thing I'd say is like, people tend to think of like self-custody as a destination rather than a journey. And it's like, once you get your coins into that one setup, which before for a lot of people was single-sig, and it probably still is for a lot of people, single-sig as you know, what you alluded to before, let's assume Bitcoin's going to 10X, right? you know, if you haven't done that planning or it's grown beyond what you expected, your Bitcoin cold storage sort of experience really is going to be a journey because you're going to start getting those nagging little questions in the back of your mind of like, could I be doing this better? Or what happens if this is something I'm vulnerable to? And so I encourage people, you know, even that 55-year-old grandma who might be intimidated by creating her own private key if I roll like dice a hundred times or whatever that like, it's a journey for her too. And maybe she never gets to multi-sig or maybe she does, but just like it's important people for people just to not think of I'm finally at the finish line and to continually think about those things that keep you awake at night or opportunities for growth or stuff like that. Like it really is a journey and not a destination. Indeed. 00:47:31 Speaker 2: So I want to transition to talking about your Personal experience in Bitcoin, how you've navigated previous cycles. Again, I heard some of this story already, but I wonder if for our audience, we can go through that. You know, Bitcoin came on your radar. You were working in forensic investigations. You had a kid in high school who was slinging weed to his buddies and he was taking Bitcoin for it. And so it came onto your radar as like, okay, this is drug dealer money. What's going on here? And then you dug into the economics of it and learn more and more about the scarcity in the investments. And then you had this interesting path from there, navigating cycles. 00:48:14 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:48:15 Speaker 2: I wonder if you could walk me through that from the forensics to how you handled your huddling journey over the years, so to speak. 00:48:22 Speaker 1: Yeah. Briefly, I don't want to make it too long of a story, but The kid actually wasn't taking Bitcoin for the weed. He was actually mining Bitcoin to buy the weed on the Silk Road, which is how it came on to... First, I think somebody told a teacher at school that this kid's selling weed. And of course, they call the police. And that's how his computer ended up in our forensic lab. And it wasn't my case. It was another examiner's. But that is how I first heard the word Bitcoin. And this was in late 2012 or early 2013. And that is what sent me to the Googles to try to figure out what this thing Bitcoin is and why this kid was able to acquire it trading compute from the GPUs and his gaming computer. And that takes you down the whole, what is Bitcoin and Austrian economics and what is money and true scarcity and all of that stuff. And that was something that for me, like I was a young father with a huge mortgage and a guy who was looking to make investments and maximize the income that he had coming in. And so I first thought of Bitcoin as this investable asset. And when it first came onto my radar in 2013, I Like there was a summer mini bear market in 2013, but for the rest of the year, it was just wildly going up and up and up. It went from, gosh, I don't know, in early 2013, it was probably a few dollars up to almost $ 1, 200 at the end of the year. So it was a wild ride. And from a pragmatic investing standpoint, it was like the exact wrong time to learn about an asset because you can't get this, especially as an unsophisticated investor, you get this idea that it's just going to go up forever. And so I bought some Bitcoin in 2013 and thought of it as an investment. I mined some altcoins and mined some Bitcoin. And in 2014, I think it was early 2014 when Gox went down, and that had already accentuated what was beginning to be this long, painful bear market from 2013. I'm sorry, from 2014 into 15 and 16. And I had done... my homework per se. And I felt like there was overlooked value by the market in this Bitcoin thing. And I was content to hold it through that long bear market in 14, 15, 16. And for people who've come in subsequent to that, your first bear market is always the hardest because you have not yet experienced the redemption of having an investment thesis. And for the value of it to go down, And for it seeming like maybe, you start to question, you think like, maybe I'm thinking about this wrong. Maybe the value isn't there. Maybe it's not coming back. And then, you know, the price started to rebound in 2016. And in 2017, it was coming back and it was starting to make new all-time highs. And my particular vulnerability was that when Bitcoin reached the low 2000s. It did that, I think, in February, March or April of 2017. When it reached that sort of price point after I'd been holding through this long, painful bear market, the amount of Bitcoin that I was holding actually became enough to pay off the mortgage, the primary mortgage on our house. We'd built a house and we actually had two mortgages, a primary and a smaller secondary that was all used to fund the construction costs. And I always kind of like joke to myself that like, oh, this Bitcoin thing ever grew enough to be able to pay off our second mortgage. Like that would free up a few hundred dollars a month and that'd be really cool. Like that would be a financial sort of relief to have a few hundred extra dollars a month for our budget with kids and everything, you know, the families have to pay for. And Bitcoin had grown to the point where not the second mortgage, but it was able to pay off with some money extra,

left over to spare, including paying all the taxes on the wild gain and everything. And so I was in the hot seat when Bitcoin got to like $ 2, 200. And to throw in some other variables, this was also kind of really as the fork wars were heating up in 2017 and Bitcoin Cash had split off and then there was Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond and all these other forks. And I had kind of these concerns that if Bitcoin kept forking the value proposition of the original chain could become diluted or there would be a loss of confidence in the whole concept, the whole network. So I had some misgivings about the forks and where things were going. And so I will never forget the day that I was at work and I was glancing over the Bitcoin price chart. I'm doing the numbers in my head in terms of what I'd be able to get out of the Bitcoin if I sold it. And being kind of an unsophisticated investor, you tend to think in the realm of absolutes, like either I own the Bitcoin or I sell all the Bitcoin. The smarter approach would be to sell a little bit of Bitcoin. And then because we're in a general uptrend in terms of the market, like sell a little bit and then kind of keep an eye on it and see what it does and try to maximize, if your plan is to liquidate all of it, try to maximize what you can realize from this investment. But I'd I grew up lower middle class kind of upbringing, didn't know a lot about stocks or investing or these kind of moonshot investments that are sort of similar, more similar to venture investing and all this kind of stuff and trends and market cycles. And I've sensed like I'm still, I don't think a sophisticated investor, but a lot more of it is on my radar now. So anyhow, long story short, Like I panic sold all of it super awkwardly one day. I remember telling my boss that day that I was going home. I went home and I like dug into my underwear drawer where I had all these private keys printed on sheets of paper. And I started transferring money to Gemini was where I had an account those days. And like just not even like selling smart, like putting in market orders or putting limit orders in. I still don't understand how a lot of this stuff works. Like, just dumping, market order selling. There's probably, like, on that particular day on Gemini, there's this weird price blip of me just dumping, like, a couple hundred Bitcoin. And after that, like, I remember just so much adrenaline for the rest of that day. And you see... you know, this dollar amount in your Gemini account. And now it's like, well, I got to get that to my bank account because that's where I'll be paying the mortgage from. And it's like, the number still doesn't feel real to you because like I said, modest upbringing and never had experienced a financial gain like that. And it was enough money to pay off like our mortgage, which is the biggest investment most people make in their lives. So did end up paying off the mortgage and which enabled some really interesting, amazing kind of blessings for our family in terms of me starting to think about leaving law enforcement and becoming a stay-at-home dad. But boy, for the rest of that effing year, I did not want to hear about Bitcoin because $ 2, 200 was nowhere near the high. Bitcoin went up close to $ 20, 000 that year. And for the rest of the year, I was still pretty happy. But I didn't want to think about Bitcoin because the effing thing just kept going up and up and up. And so it sucks you right back in. And it was about 2018 that, for different reasons, I started reading Twitter and following Bitcoin again. And I started listening to the same podcasts. Except this is kind of like a new chapter of Bitcoin for me. And the national debt's really starting to creep up. And I'm thinking about what kind of world we're going to leave to our children. And I started thinking about Bitcoin from much more of like take away the government's power to arbitrarily create new money and create inflation that dilutes everyone's savings kind of a thing. And so I started buying Bitcoin again. And as I started to think about how am I going to secure this Bitcoin that I'm now buying back at much higher prices, paying more for the Bitcoin than I've ever paid for Bitcoin and owning way, way less of it than I used to. So I started thinking about cold storage and I realized that maybe part of the reason why Panic sold everything was just I just had a lot of anxiety about how I was holding the Bitcoin. And by 2014, 2015 standards, I had what I think was a really solid Bitcoin setup. But by 2018, 2019 and moving forward standards, like it was some private keys printed on a piece of paper in my underwear drawer kind of a thing where I, because of my background in digital forensics, I'd done a really good job of creating those private keys using, you know, a tool called bitaddress.org that people have been around for a while in Bitcoin are probably familiar with and doing it, you know, on an offline system with, you know, real entropy going into the private keys. I checked a lot of boxes and But still, there were a lot of gaps to my security setup. And multi-sig was a big part of that gap. So as I'm thinking about securing the Bitcoin that I'm buying, Michael Flaxman comes onto my radar. He's a Bitcoin security researcher. He did this amazing guide that he did in 2018 or 2019. It's the Bitcoin 10x Security Guide. It's still freely available. If you Google that, you'll find it on GitHub. And it is, as far as I'm concerned, evergreen in terms of the things that he focuses on, ways that you can maximize your security posture in terms of how you're securing your Bitcoin. And a big part of his theory was multi-sig and eliminating single points of failure, which is so relevant to current events in Bitcoin. And I started digging into multisig. And I just, because of my background in forensics, I still just had these misgivings about hardware wallets because at the time, most of them, you'd have to plug

them in via USB. And having some degree of knowledge about what happens when you connect something via USB to a computer, what can happen if the wrong software environment's in place and all of that, like I was just never comfortable with USB connected hardware wallets. And so I started looking for other options and came across SpectreDIY and started tinkering with that and then thinking about alternate builds for that kind of same setup. That was the genesis of SeedSigner. But yeah, I don't want to get too far into that story, but that was kind of like my Bitcoin journey in terms of first learning about it as a, quote, dumb cop, end quote, an unsophisticated investor and experiencing just a wild game and then totally fumbling it. When people talk about Laszlo, the Bitcoin pizza guy, and how much money he spent on Papa John's pizzas, I saw one interview with him where somebody asked him about that. How do you feel about spending thousands of Bitcoin for like $ 40 worth of pizza or whatever it was? And he very wisely said, I just don't think it's healthy to think about those sorts of things. And so, yeah, I used to own a lot more Bitcoin and fumbled that, but I'm still blessed. 01:00:37 Speaker 2: Yeah, there's one thing that I like about that in a way, where I feel like a lot of people when they're new to Bitcoin, they need to go through this, like the never sell your Bitcoin mantra thing. is like a good lesson to learn, you know, like when you're getting into Bitcoin to learn how to like, yeah, yeah, yeah. 01:00:56 Speaker 3: It's actually a pretty wild ride. 01:00:58 Speaker 2: It's actually like, you know, it's actually going to put you through a lot of emotions, especially when you're new to it. You know, over time, it's like we get a, you know, we get a 25% rip this week and it's like, I don't even feel anything, you know, but, but, you know, so that wears off a bit, but I think it's a good lesson for people to learn at first to be like, okay, you got to learn how to like hang in there and deal with this. And it's actually, you know, It's actually harder than you might think it is once you're actually in it. But then I think once you like graduate from that level, I think there's another level that's like, hey, hey, hey. 01:01:31 Speaker 3: Also, it's just money. It's just a tool. You should use it. 01:01:36 Speaker 2: If you like, if your whole life you're like stacking sats and you die with a bunch of Bitcoin, it's like you missed it. 01:01:43 Speaker 3: You missed it. That's not what money's for. 01:01:44 Speaker 2: You know, like if you're, you know, and I think at that point you're basically like worshiping at the altar of money. So it's like you should, you know, you should take it serious and learn and all of those things. 01:01:55 Speaker 3: But then at some point it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. 01:01:58 Speaker 5: Use it. 01:01:59 Speaker 3: This is what money is for. 01:02:00 Speaker 1: You know? Yeah. That's really good perspective. And to like just a little bit more about my personal story was, so I, most of my time in law enforcement was spent investigating crimes against children. I wasn't the guy online pretending to be a kid trying to lure like child molesters or a dateline style. I was the step after that, after they'd seized his computer or his phone and to make a legit, you know, case off of that to prosecute somebody, they have to have a forensic analysis done on their computer or their phone or whatever. And so during the course of my law enforcement career, like I just went through a lot of what they call CSAM has been, it's actually oddly come up in Bitcoin over the last year, but like I was exposed to a ton of CSAM and by, 2017, 2018, like it was weighing on me as someone who's a young father and you know, they're in law enforcement, the culture it's changing, you know, I'm out of it now, but from what I hear, like the culture is changing. But back then it was kind of like, uh, you look at nasty, shitty pictures and you go home and drink to try to forget about it and, and, uh, deal. And then like, you try to come back the next day and do it again. It was kind of just this, like, push it down and deal with it sort of mentality. I wasn't in an environment that offered counseling and, you know, kind of like what is important, but touchy feely stuff. And so I was looking for an exit and it's sort of poetic justice that I found out about Bitcoin at work. And it, for me personally, ended up being the escape hatch such that, you know, I was, I was looking for the exit, but like, We had that big mortgage. My wife and I both work. We got lured into that. And I think it's a trap for a lot of families, the dual income trap. And it's a hard trap to avoid in this day and age with everything being so expensive, but we've been lured into that trap and being able to pay off our mortgage with the gains from selling all the Bitcoin. It's painful that that is to look back on enabled us to start looking at being a single income family. And, you know, The dream came true in late 2019. I left law enforcement, and we figured out how to cut back on our expenses and arrange them in such a way that we could live. My wife has always been better at bringing money home than I was, too, so it was a logical choice for her to stay at her job, but I became the person who came home and was the person waking the kids up and taking them to school and making lunches. I get a little choked up thinking about it because it's been transformative for our lives. The things that I've been able to experience with the kids, and especially at that time in fall of 2019 was the dream for me. I'm dropping off the kids at school. And then spring of 2020, if you can remember what happened, that fucking sucked. Like, all of a sudden, I went from, like, dropping the kids off at school and living the dream to, like, I've got three kids at home trying to do... Trying to do distance learning, including,

like, a first grader. Anyhow, this is fucking embarrassing. 01:05:37 Speaker 3: So to be able to be... No, I mean, it's the important... This is the real important stuff. 01:05:40 Speaker 1: You know? Yeah. 01:05:42 Speaker 5: Yeah. 01:05:42 Speaker 1: So to be able to... like, be at home and shepherd our family through that time. I.... 01:05:59 Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, if you think of the alternative, had you instead, like, yeah, worshipped at the. 01:06:03 Speaker 1: Altar of money, so to speak. Probably would have gotten the shot, and, like, thankfully they didn't, and all this kind of stuff, but, like, being there was priceless. The experience I've had with my kids, like, we bought a camper and started spending summers camping. And it was, it's just, it's just been amazing. So like with exactly what you said about money being a tool. 01:06:26 Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah. 01:06:28 Speaker 2: I think about, I think about that a lot too. You know, I'm in a different stage of life. I've really focused on my career. I kind of, you know, 20, A while back, it was when it really clicked for me in 2020. I've been paying attention for a few years before that to the Bitcoin stuff, but that's when it really clicked for me. And, you know, I made a lot of sacrifices to build in this space that like were hard fought. 01:06:56 Speaker 3: Important things. 01:06:56 Speaker 2: You know, I don't look back on it with regret, but also too, I think that like, if I spent another six years, you know, doing the same thing, that would be a mistake, you know? And I like had this part of my young adulthood where I really was locked in focus, made a lot of sacrifices to build in this space. And to me, I think then you, you know, in some ways I feel like I like served my tour, you know, like I did my tour in overseas or whatever, you know, like, and, and, and, uh, you know, I'm not, I I'll never. 01:07:26 Speaker 3: Stop fighting this fight. 01:07:27 Speaker 2: I don't think, I think it's very important, but you know, I think there is, it's important for, especially people who have been really focused in the space to think about that well-roundedness, family, marriage, home, you know, and not. 01:07:39 Speaker 3: Just be single-minded, focused forever sort of thing. 01:07:43 Speaker 1: Right. And who knows, you know, I don't know your personal situation, but who knows what that money that hopefully if Bitcoin continues to grow like we hope it does, who knows what that money enables for you in the future. Maybe it's like the blessing of giving your wife the opportunity to stay home with kids, or maybe it's being able to, to help you know a family member with a medical emergency or maybe it's able to being able to donate a significant amount of money to a charitable cause that you really believe in or who knows what good that that can do for the world or like maybe it's an idea for a company that you have that like it's your personal dream to like bring that to fruition like it's

yeah yeah you're totally spot on that money's a tool and um if you take it to your grave like i like Well, it's, that's kind of a separate issue, but like, there's also something to be said for like inheritance and for a long time, people worked their entire lives so that their kids could have some advantages that they didn't have. And I think like this whole, not to get too political, but this whole idea of privilege and stuff, how privilege comes up in like this almost like negative way. Like people will have to like, like tiptoe around and say like, why, because of my privileges in life, like for a lot of people, like privilege is your parents working their ass off for years and trying to make the right choices so that their kids could have things a little bit easier than they did. And like a lot of times that enables that not enables a lot of times that means being able to, to, pass down a little bit of money so that their kids can have a down payment for a house or you know can i think some aspects of college are a scam these days but you can make a case that it's worth going to college so having money to pay for you know a training for a career a solid you know college education or medical emergencies or whatever it is like i yeah 100 so i wonder then. 01:09:46 Speaker 2: What you feel like it's a good perspective to go to this next question with, I guess, is I wonder what you feel like you've seen the biggest mistakes you've made, or you've seen other people make through the cycles over the years, you know, more of that like long-term holder group, um, who's been in this for a while. 01:10:02 Speaker 3: Yeah. What are the common mistakes you feel like you've seen people make? 01:10:05 Speaker 1: Get out of the binary thinking like, and it's, you know, human beings are like, we're, we inherently try to optimize so that we have to put less effort into everything from you know, things we have to do physically to decisions we have to make. And we'd come up with these like mental shortcuts. And that was a classic example of that was me selling all the Bitcoin instead of thinking like I could just sell some of the Bitcoin and then wait a little longer to see how this plays out. Like in your mind, you just like binary thinking, but it like, it extends not just like to your, your stack and selling it all at once, but how you like, um, break your Bitcoin into what you can think of as buckets of money. So a lot of people in their mind, because they think Bitcoin is going to be worth more in the future, like have a number in their head. Say that number is two and a half Bitcoin, you know, and in their mind, like as the Bitcoin price rises, they do the calculation. Oh, I have so many hundred thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin today. And that's more than it was yesterday. And, you know, stuff like that. And that tendency to think of our, our quote stack of Bitcoin as, as a cumulative amount, also I think tends to just drive people to just having one pile of Bitcoin that they custody. And a lot of times that ends up being in self custody. And so I don't want to knock on self custody. It's a great thing, but you can make a good argument for keeping 10% of your Bitcoin on an exchange or with a provider like Unchained, or maybe you do 10% in an exchange. and you trade that. I don't endorse that. I don't actively trade, but some people who are more sophisticated may be able to, you know, do that competently. And maybe you keep 20% of your Bitcoin with Unchained, and maybe the other 70% you keep, you know, in a multi-sig at home, or maybe you keep 5%, you know, in a harder wallet, a single-sig harder wallet, because you're going to use that money to, you know, spend on things that you want, and you anticipate spending that money. So it one of the things I'm getting at with this is just like, I think a mistake is thinking about your Bitcoin stack is like one cohesive unit. And like, I encourage people to think about like not just multi-sig, but a multi-pronged strategy for just how you custody your Bitcoin and where you keep it. And that's that way. If you try to do a multi-sig and you totally screw it up, you know, with a multi-pronged approach, like, Really sucks. But at least you haven't lost all of your Bitcoin. Or maybe if you're keeping 20% of your Bitcoin at Coinbase, if Coinbase ends up crapping the bed and it ends up being a Mt. Gox situation, you still have your self-custody Bitcoin. And it's just thinking about things in terms of not all your eggs in one basket kind of approach. That's the first thing that comes to mind. 01:13:07 Speaker 3: Yeah, that's good. 01:13:08 Speaker 2: Yeah, and even when you're saying like have, you know, maybe 10% here and multi-sig here and whatever, I think having like a plan, there's not a plan for everybody that works and, you know, that you can copy paste for everybody, but like think it through, think about where you're going and like have a well thought out plan rather than, you know, it's just too important. I think, I don't know, I've seen, I actually haven't seen a lot of this, but I would imagine that there's probably a good amount of people who are just like, you know, they make a decision back in the day, they buy some, they stick it on a hardware wallet. And, you know, I had, I had a house fire a year and a half ago, um, that my, my, basically my neighbor's house caught on fire and, uh, well, our, we were connected. So it was my neighbor, but, but our units were connected. And so, uh, you know, that was, I didn't have any keys in the house that, you know, luckily. And so, um, not that I really want to talk about it that much, but I kind of made that decision a while back to be like, yeah, if you're going to be public facing, I handled things differently. I think people should be more self custody than probably I am. But the conversation that I won't get into really, but, but that for me was like, uh, you know, like for, for me, I was just kind

of lucky that that was the case because I'd made the, that decision. If I was your average pleb, I probably would be more reliant on like single SIG in my house sort of thing. And, uh, you know, crazy stuff, floods, uh, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, all that sort of stuff. You know, there were fires in LA a while back and, uh, you know, I know of people who, not personally, but I saw people who like had, you know, Bitcoin in their house and single SIG and some were able to like dig out pieces of metal and fireproof, uh, uh, bags out of the fire, you know, but like, if you hadn't, if you hadn't done that, but you know, that's, you gotta, you gotta have a plan and be ready for that sort of stuff. And I'm lucky to have, you know, I kind of have a streak of the like, doomsday prepper, uh, lineage to some degree or whatever out of, uh, you know, sometimes I, I like to talk vaguely about these things, but I have a bit of that. I had that pushed into me a little bit and that was, that was a good for me just to the little bit of that paranoia, you know, it. 01:15:19 Speaker 3: Can go a long way. Yeah. 01:15:21 Speaker 5: Um, yeah. 01:15:22 Speaker 2: Uh, so I wonder when you were telling your story in another podcast, I listened to, you got to this point where you said, okay, we sold the Bitcoin. Um, You were able, it was able to turn your attention to things that were more important to you than your job, basically, you know, your family and that sort of stuff. And you said, I went through this, like, focus on this, like, self-development phase of life sort of thing. And I wonder what that looked like for you and what some of the, like, key lessons and takeaways you learned from that, from that. 01:15:54 Speaker 3: Period of study. 01:15:55 Speaker 1: So I didn't want to end up like this is when I was thinking about staying at home with the kids. And I didn't want to end up to be like that Mr. Mom sort of figure who's like in his undershirt, you know, and not bathing and barely getting anything done. So I kind of wanted to prove to myself that I wouldn't fall into that. And so probably the most important aspect of that part of my life, I was reading like every kind of quote self-help book from like I really like Robert Kiyosaki and Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The first probably at least two books in that series are definitely worth reading. There's some caveats, but it gives you a lot of thoughtful, and there's a bunch of these other financial self-help books that are out there, but also just getting my own stuff straight in my head, and I I started doing this routine in the morning called the miracle morning. And it's based on a book. I don't remember the author's name, but if you Google miracle morning. 01:16:56 Speaker 3: Book, Hal Elrod. 01:16:58 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it. And he, I think at a podcast for a period of time, but it's like what that book that he wrote, like really resonated and it helped a lot of people. And I think he ended up trying to monetize that idea of, like more than it probably merited. He started writing all of these like versions of the Miracle Morning book, like Miracle Morning for real estate developers and Miracle Morning for this and blah, blah, blah. He had a podcast and stuff and it just got a little bit crazy. But the core, you know, concept of the book, the original book is such a valuable one. And if I try to remember, like basically you get up every day and instead of reacting to stimuli from the world around you, you set the tone for the day in terms of your health and your mental state of mind and your intentions and your, your really just like everything. So what it boils down to is like. 01:18:00 Speaker 2: I know that there's the, I know there's the, the acronym silence, affirmations, visualizations, exercise, reading and scribing. 01:18:10 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:18:11 Speaker 1: Yeah. And you're much, it's much fresher with you than it is with me. Cause I've, Unfortunately, I've fallen away with it, but I still feel like the benefits of it, even though I'm not actively doing it every day. And so I would get up early in the morning. If I remember the routine, like I'd brush my teeth and then I'd spend like 15 or 20 minutes meditating. And I had never done meditation in any sort of– I thought it was kind of a joke before that. But the benefits of it are really real in terms of like things you wouldn't expect. 01:18:42 Speaker 5: There's obviously like especially not starting your day boom right on your phone if you can just get right past that yeah that i think that's the hugest thing now i think we have the phones are heroin in your pocket hunter biden say recently actually who's an expert you know and uh and uh yeah it's like that's right that's right we we have this heroin like substance glued to us all the time. 01:19:09 Speaker 1: You know So I'd get up and do the meditation, and then I'd do some exercises. 01:19:19 Speaker 2: What sort of meditation practice? How did you learn that? What did it look like for you? 01:19:25 Speaker 1: There's a few different schools of thought on that, and I remember reading a couple books about meditation. Ultimately, what I tried to do was just sit there and not have thoughts, which is a weird... sort of exercise to engage in, because I know some meditation encourages you to visualize something or to focus on a mantra or a sound. And like, I really just tried to empty my brain of thought. And part of it is like, you're inevitably going to have this like part of your brain that they call the monkey mind that just has things that you're thinking about in terms of anxieties or things you have to do later throughout the day or just things that are happening in your life. And you can't like chastise yourself for having those thoughts because it's perfectly natural, but you kind of just like, when you feel a thought appear in your mind, you try to like acknowledge the thought and be like, yep, I'm worried about this. I'm

thinking about it. It's natural. And then just try to set it aside. And for me. 01:20:26 Speaker 3: Notice and release. 01:20:28 Speaker 1: Right. 01:20:28 Speaker 3: That's what I think of as notice. There it is. There's the thought. Okay, release. There it is. 01:20:32 Speaker 1: Release. 01:20:32 Speaker 2: And once you have noticed and released enough, you can reach this place where... It quiets down a little bit, yeah. 01:20:38 Speaker 1: And what always happened for me, and it's weird because I've never read about this or heard about it in people who talk about meditation or in my reading on it, but I'm sitting there with my eyes closed and the blackness in front of me kind of becomes this empty canvas and all sorts of shapes start to appear. And there's most of the time it's like, there's no rhyme or reason to it. It's almost like a kaleidoscope or sometimes shapes will appear and they start to move around or I'll start to feel like I'm moving through space. Like a couple of times when meditation has been really particularly deep for me, like I kind of lost the feeling of my body and felt like I was somersaulting like head over heel through space. Um, Just like really, but it's a hallmark for me that I know I'm doing a good job of focusing and just letting go of thoughts when I start to see shapes and colors appear like in the blackness as I'm sitting there with my eyes closed. And kind of like two related points. For me, that particular state of mind, once I'd kind of trained my mind to be there, became a cheat code for falling asleep. It made it like, way quicker and easier to fall asleep when you're laying there in bed and you've got things you're worried about or things you're thinking about like i would intentionally lay there with my eyes closed and just try to focus on like because you know when you know you close your eyes you have ghost kind of images of light or things that you know you've been looking at or whatever and i would just try to focus on whatever shapes appeared in front of me and just kind of like kind of being open to like where they were moving or how they were morphing into different shapes or whatever. And like, man, that'll put me to sleep like, like that. 01:22:37 Speaker 2: Just paying attention sort of like, you know, like a direction of your attention or something like that. 01:22:43 Speaker 3: Yeah. The, where you're not like, I need to do this thing. I need to do that. And there's this, you know, where your mind, yeah. 01:22:48 Speaker 2: That where that monkey brain's running instead. 01:22:50 Speaker 1: You have this like sort of metal level awareness of your thinking and being able to get a little better at turning it off. And then the other thing I'll mention, um, that I don't get to do often enough, but that I really love is, uh, uh, float float tanks or sensory deprivation tanks. They're sometimes referred to as, um, there are a couple of like float spas that are in the city where I live. And I've been a few times. And, um, like the first time I went, that was closer to when I was really into my practice of meditation and like, After I got out of the float tank, one, it was like the best meditation I'd ever had up to that point. And two, like it was just like for two or three hours, I was just in this like ultra relaxed, like ever dude, kind of like frame of mind. It was just like really, I continue to be very impressed by float tanks. And I don't do them as often as I would like to because you end up being wasted. busy with so many things in life and i kind of had this dream to have a float tank eventually at home but um if you're into meditation and you're kind of going down that path like check out a float tank they're they're like pretty cool yeah yeah. 01:24:06 Speaker 2: They sound super interesting so then we have the the other elements of this you got an exercise reading and writing i may be curious about that piece of it too are there any specific things you were reading writing about at the time as. 01:24:16 Speaker 1: Well I wouldn't do an extensive amount of journaling. There was a gratitude journal that I would do, and it was just an app on my phone, and it's like a stupid, simple app. Every day, there's like three blanks, and you try to just think of three unique things that you're grateful for. And some days, it's just a generic thing that most people are grateful for, and some days, it's like a very specific thing. But it's sort of like training your mind to be in this like, there's, there are so many benefits from being just a grateful person in terms of like your mood and how you look at the world and your ability to problem solve and stuff like that. Um, yeah. So journaling was primarily like a gratitude thing for me. Um, and then I, we have an elliptical in the basement and after I'd done like kind of this, I did these like burst body resistance workouts where you do really fast circuits of like a bunch of sit-ups, a bunch of push-ups and then dips and like maybe one or two other things. And you do it for like 90 seconds and it kind of kicks your butt. And then after that, I would get onto the elliptical machine and I'd rigged up a Kindle that was kind of like right in front of me when I was on the elliptical. And it took some training in terms of, because when you're on an elliptical, you have to kind of get used to your balance and like holding your face in a stationary place. But I I got pretty darn good at being able to read a Kindle while I was on the elliptical. So I was like going through all of these other books about leveling up, you know, my financial intelligence and you know, personal stuff about trying to be a happier person and really like, you know, I'm Catholic. So some of it was based on my faith tradition and just kind of trying to like, it's really rich for your life. If you can, if you can increase the volume of like new ideas you expose yourself to, and you can pick and choose things. Like I read a

book, I don't remember what it, but I read a book about sleep. It was just about maximizing the value that you get out of sleep. And that's probably one of the most impactful books on my life in terms of like health and improving like just your, your general frame of mind. But it seems like such an, frequently overlooked thing but for a while like i really dug into sleep and trying to maximize like the benefit that i was getting from that time that you spent in bed every day um but. 01:26:50 Speaker 2: Let's spend a 30 year life sleeping you know it's worth investing a little time into doing it right yeah and i. 01:26:55 Speaker 1: Used to money you know when you got small kids like oh my gosh like i used to i'd kind of gotten into this groove where six or six and a half hours i thought was good enough for me And I do not believe that now, but I totally get that like your life may only allow for that during certain seasons of it. But yeah, that went down that rabbit hole of like just high level for anybody who's curious. I have chronic back issues. I bulged a disc in my back when I was younger. And so back pain was a thing that like for a long time, if I was in bed for more than six or six and a half hours, like I woke up with back pain. And it would make me get out of bed just because my body was like tired of being in that position. So at first it felt like an old person thing, but I got an adjustable bed, like one of these, like lift your legs, lift your feet. You can fine tune adjust like to get to more of a zero gravity position and got a nice mattress. That was a huge game changer in terms of being able to just physically be in bed for longer periods of time. And then I got this thing called, I actually read about it in a, one of Tim Ferriss' books called A Chili Pad, which all it is is a temperature conditioning mattress cover to where it circulates water that is heated or cooled to a temperature of your choosing that runs through a mattress pad that just sits on top of your mattress. And it basically enables you to, because a lot of people have this experience of when you go to bed, you huddle up under the covers and then depending on what the ambient temperature is in your room or how many blankets you're using or how much heat build up in your mattress or whatever like a lot of people end up in a place where in the middle of the night all of a sudden they're hot and they're like throwing the blankets off a part of their body and they're kicking a foot out so they can cool off but then like an hour and a half later it's like you're cold because your foot's out from under the blanket so you come back in and what this chili pad does is like keeps your bed at a consistent temperature in the beginning of the night it'll warm the bed up because you haven't been in it and you're still kind of building up heat and then as you build up body heat and actually it's a physiological thing that you want your body to be at a lower temperature like i don't know two three four hours after you fall asleep you get deeper sleep if your body temperature drops a little bit so it actually has a schedule so you can drop it to like warm it up when you first get into bed and after you fall asleep it drops mine drops a couple degrees and so I can get into like a deeper level of sleep. And then as it gets closer to morning, when I wake up, it raises back a couple degrees. So it's more comfortable when I wake up and I don't do this, but you can actually have it wake you up to where it makes the bed warmer. And that wakes you up more gently. Um, but like that was a game changer for sleep. Uh, I started using a sleep mask because I, I wasn't able to have a lot of light discipline in the environment where I slept. Um, to like totally black things out. And so using a mask for me, once I got used to it, it was a great way to get into a deeper sleep. And like I mentioned before, like the, the, uh, meditation impacted my sleep like really profoundly. And then, um, my latest thing is like, I'm into this blood health thing because I've always had back issues. And, uh, I started wearing like these dorky, they're called, um, Vibram five finger shoes. Um, that separate your toes out and stuff. And I've always had to wear orthotic inserts because like I mentioned before, I had back problems. And I was able over the course of like six months to, like before that, it would be painful for me to walk around even for five or 10 minutes just in my bare feet. Like I had collapsed arches and it radiated pain up through my back. And I literally had anxiety about not having either my shoes on or I'd become really accustomed to Birkenstock sandals. And so I would have anxiety about like where my shoes were and how long I had to walk around without them because like I literally couldn't survive without them. And I bought these things called perfect toe separators that like take your toes and spread them out a little bit to kind of like this ideal or what some people think is an ideal sort of position. And it distributes the weight across your foot in what I think is a much more natural, healthy way. And over this, like, six-month period of training my feet, I was able to ditch the arch supports completely. Like, I could walk around barefoot all day and be perfectly comfortable. And, like, that has had some knock-on effects with my back to where I mentioned before having the adjustable bed, like, was helpful. Like, this straightening out the issues with my feet has radiated up through my back and, like, made my bed even more comfortable. Whoa. than it was before. So I'm not having like back pain issues, uh, when I'm sleeping. So that's kind of like another rabbit hole. You can really have time for somebody rabbit holes, but that's my latest one. Yeah. 01:32:02 Speaker 2: That I, I mean, you're talking to the right guy. I think that stuff is really important, especially when it comes to sleep. I like, I have an eight sleep

mattress. I like evangelize about it. You know, I'm like, it's the most important thing ever. And I always tell people you spend a third of your life sleeping, you know, like, uh, and you said about lights, like I have smart lights, so, you know, we, no blue light after, right now it's 9 p.m., all the lights turn red every night, and that's kind of my, like, all right, let's wrap it up, put the phones away, you know, try and get off the devices, blue light, that sort of stuff, and I think that goes a long way in terms of just, yeah, understanding your neurochemistry and how it's affected by those sorts of things, and then Temperature wise, eight sleep. I, I've been wanting to reach out to them to see if they'd sponsor the show. Cause I already like preach about them basically. And so this might be my opportunity. You know, I might clip this and be like, look at, trust me, bro. 01:32:54 Speaker 3: I'm a believer. 01:32:56 Speaker 1: Um, yeah i don't i don't have disclaimer i don't have any stock in chili pad or whatever their brand company is and i don't get any benefit but i probably incented at least a few hundred people to buy those because like you i talk about. 01:33:09 Speaker 2: It's so important and it's it's that it that the roi is so high you know on the on a few things like that like your sleep it's like invest in your sleep man it yeah yeah i think it's i think it's a worthwhile uh rabbit hole to go down um. 01:33:25 Speaker 3: Dude i really appreciate. 01:33:26 Speaker 2: This this is like uh this is the all the threads that we pulled in this conversation it's um it wasn't exactly what i expected but i'm like super happy about where the the conversational dance has taken us and so. 01:33:41 Speaker 1: Yeah i don't get to talk about float tanks on like too many uh bitcoin podcasts that i i like talk on and like just real briefly to circle back on everything. Uh, so I went through this miracle morning thing and I felt like I was in a much better place and I felt like that was the green light to put in my retirement notice at work. And then like, because my mind was growing and I like, I, I, I, I love projects to begin with, but I was just like really curious to like learn new stuff. And that's a big part of how seed center was born because I kind of wanted to learn how to code, uh, And I haven't become an expert coder, but I learned enough Python. And based on a couple classes I took in 2002 on Java, I wrote the initial versions of SeedSigner. It was all me, and this was pre-AI, so it was me doing dumb stuff and spending all my time on... What is the... Before AI was a thing, it was like one of those websites where you go and ask coding questions and the graybeards answer you and blah, blah, blah. Anyhow, SeedSigner wouldn't have happened without that whole Miracle Morning self-help, figure out my shit kind of period of my life. The fruits of that have been immense in terms of the friendships that I've made. I kind of arrogantly think seed signers are a force for good in Bitcoin and that it has helped a lot of people secure their Bitcoin in a way that they're comfortable with or use it as a multi-sig or whatever. And just like it has enriched my life so much in terms of the opportunities it's given me to meet a bunch of amazing Bitcoiners and collaborate with some of them and to actually tell my story on podcasts and like full circle. It's like I'm in a place where I'm super blessed and like. 01:35:41 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that that's a really, I went, I took a super similar path, a lot of ways a lot of, you know, it was in part a study of psychology I went really deep down that rabbit hole for me and was studying it personally. You know, there was the Miracle Morning stuff. There was, yeah, a lot of books that I'd read. Like I listened to like Jordan Peterson's, his Maps of Meaning course, his personality and its transformations course, his Genesis lectures, a couple of courses at Stanford, some at Harvard, you know, and then that like, you know, really deep diving. I even like took like a couple of sabbaticals, you know, I went away. It was part like psychology, like spiritual studies in some ways. Um, and in part like Bitcoin sabbaticals, I moved to Indonesia for four months, two different times. And that was just kind of like deep dive focus on studying. And, uh, I think especially, especially for like young people trying to decide where they're headed in life, you know, where you're out of college, you know, for me, I was working a few years before I kind of like hit pause and was like, there's, there's too many important things that I don't understand well enough, you know, and just, um, went hard into that. But I think that it's, I don't know where I think it's probably something good to do maybe like once a decade or something like that in different stages of life, you know, continuing to like deep dive and redirect and introspect and set intentions and all of that sort of stuff I think is worth thinking about and very valuable. 01:37:11 Speaker 1: One of my favorite Jordan Peterson isms or whatever is, uh, voluntary self-sacrifice is the foundation of both an ordered society and an ordered self. I think that's, like, so, and it, like, he goes on to. 01:37:29 Speaker 3: The foundation of Christian belief, really. 01:37:31 Speaker 1: That's what I was going to say. He goes on to. 01:37:33 Speaker 3: What it means to be Christ-like, basically. 01:37:34 Speaker 1: Extrapolate that into Christianity, and why there's so much meaning in it for people, and yeah. 01:37:38 Speaker 3: Yeah, and you got to ask the question, like, why, you. 01:37:44 Speaker 2: Know, the West is not perfect by any means, but there's a lot that's worked in the West, and to the degree to which it's built on voluntary individual self self-sacrifice for the benefit of the collective that's worth thinking about you know and it's also funny how you notice that you don't really like you know we have

this like human instinct for like self-preservation and like from like an evolutionary perspective you know like that that sort of instinct yet it's funny that you find that when you make sacrifices of yourself for your family for your community for those sorts of things There's nothing that really matches that in terms of felt sense of meaning and joy and happiness. And it's kind of funny to observe that, that that's how it's happening. to work for just about everybody, yeah. 01:38:32 Speaker 1: It's tough to imagine, like, a pre-Christian world, but, like, with what you're saying, like, I think of that in terms of, like, you know, the stereotypical good news, and, like, it really was, people don't appreciate what an earth-shattering sort of new take Jesus was teaching. And some of it, as you alluded, is kind of built into Western culture. But like in terms of like taking the direction of humanity and altering it permanently, if you just think of Jesus not as like a super, he's my Lord and Savior, and I think of him as a supernatural sort of thing. But if you just take his teachings, it's such a like a sudden divergence for humanity and history and like where things would be if he hadn't been a historical person. Yeah. Indeed. 01:39:25 Speaker 3: Indeed. 01:39:26 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:39:26 Speaker 2: That's probably the most worthwhile thing to spend time thinking about. So I think it's a cool place to wrap it. 01:39:32 Speaker 3: Appreciate. 01:39:34 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:39:34 Speaker 2: You taking the time in this conversation. I hope we can bump into each other at some conference or some, some engagement at some point. 01:39:41 Speaker 3: In time in the future. 01:39:42 Speaker 5: Yeah. 01:39:43 Speaker 1: That'd be cool. 01:39:43 Speaker 3: That'd be great. 01:39:45 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:39:45 Speaker 2: Uh, what, just to end things off, where can people connect with you? How can they learn more about like how they can support you and what you're doing with seed signer and all of that sort of stuff? 01:39:54 Speaker 3: Yeah. Final thoughts on that. 01:39:56 Speaker 5: Yeah. 01:39:56 Speaker 1: If you're curious about seed signers, dig in and like maybe take the leap and try to build one yourself. The parts are simple and inexpensive to find. They're a little bit tougher right now because, uh, the projects gained a little bit in terms of popularity over the last few weeks. But, um, I think it's a worthwhile exercise for any Bitcoiner, even if it doesn't end up being a part of your self-custody setup. So I'm on Twitter a fair amount of the time. The project's Twitter handle is just SeedSigner, at SeedSigner. Thankfully, that wasn't a thing before we created the project, so I was able to get that. I end up retweeting my personal account with the SeedSigner account frequently, so you'll have no trouble probably finding my personal account, and you can learn a lot about the project at just seedcenter.com. Don't go to. org,. netter,. edu. There's some URL trolls afoot, but we do have the main seedcenter.com URL, and from there you can follow a link to our GitHub repo. We have a very active, unscammy Telegram community that has a lot of good, helpful people in it that share great information. We have a lot of explainer videos by... Ben Sessions and other people you probably are familiar with in the Bitcoin space in the explainers section of the seedcenter.com website. So yeah, if you're curious about it, like maybe dig in, learn about it, try to build one or ask some of your Bitcoin friends if they've used one. But yeah. Awesome. 01:41:33 Speaker 3: Awesome. 01:41:33 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:41:33 Speaker 2: And we'll have everything you just referenced in the description down below. So go down there and click and follow it all those places. 01:41:42 Speaker 1: Cool. 01:41:43 Speaker 3: Thanks, man. Really appreciate this. 01:41:45 Speaker 5: Yeah. 01:41:45 Speaker 3: It was a great chat. 01:41:46 Speaker 1: This has been a deeper one than some of the others I do. So I appreciate it as well. Yeah. 01:41:52 Speaker 3: Thanks so much.