S17 E41: Vik Sharma on Radar, Arbiter & Vibe Coding the Future of Cake Wallet

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hey, loader and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover podcast. This is season 17, episode 41. We are live with Vic Sharma, CEO of Cakewallet. This is his second time on the show this season. It's been seven months since he was here and he said he's gonna have a big announcement. And now it seems like the announcement is already out there and you can try it on your computer or phone or whatever. And it's not just one, it's actually two products that you launched, it's kind of crazy. And this is the part that I like the most about you that you're this workaholic perfectionist. It's something to which I can relate. But you're a sponsor of the show, so I'm gonna give you a hard time during this interview. - Please do, Vic. - Yeah, please do, yeah. Don't let the sponsorship influence you in any way. - Yeah, but people when they see Cakewallet, they're like, oh, that's why you don't talk about our project because Cake doesn't support it and therefore you're like, I don't know. They make all sorts of assumptions, but nobody ever told me what to do. And that's why I accept the sponsorships. (laughs) - Good, good, yeah. We don't want any editorial or viewpoint influence over what you're doing. - No, and if you do, it's fake. And people know it is when something is fake. - Exactly, exactly. - So when we talk about it, what's not really fake is the fact that you launched a fork of signal, which is actually cool because you can send Bitcoin in the chats. So instead of, I think signal came up with mobile coin or something a few years ago. And that never took off in any way. - Never took off, right. - And you came up with this radar app, which basically installs on top of signal. I made the mistake of actually typing my account information after I installed radar. And I realized that I can message people in radar, but signal got logged off and I was like, oh, so I can have one or the other on the same device or I need a different account. - Oh, I mean, that's the ideal way to run it. I mean, run radar as your signal client. But you can run both simultaneously. So there's now in the, I think in the latest update, we have a link feature. So you can use your radar as a linked device if you want or the other way around. For example, what I do on my phone, I'm using radar, but on my desktop, I'm using signal and that client is a linked device as an additional device. So that seems to work well. So radar on your phone and signal on your desktop for now. But it's funny you brought this up because we're actually starting to build the desktop version now of radar. So hopefully that'll avoid any confusion when moving forward. - Yeah, so how does it work? Is it a one-to-one copy of signal? - Yeah, yeah, it's a modified fourth signal client. The backend, the servers, everything that's all still signal. We're using signal servers and we're donating every month for the privilege of using the servers. Not that they've asked or communicated with us, but I just thought it's the right thing to do. So it basically is signal. It is signal, well, it's a fork of the signal app anyway, with Bitcoin Lightning built in. And so far people love it, we can see massive downloads, people are sending Bitcoin Lightning back and forth to each other and we know people are using it because we're getting support tickets and plus Spark. Let's just know how many wallets were created, things like that. So it's been good. So how many cake.cache URL Lightning names are created? So that's going quite well. - I don't recall asking you that, but it's a pretty good question. Can you keep track of voldakake.cache aliases that were created? - I can't, I can't, no. We can't, cake, I mean radar can't, cake can't. - Okay, but there is a system to make sure that you don't register somebody else's name, right? So yeah, I don't know who handles that. Either a breeze or Spark, one of those two, we're using the breeze SDK and radar and in cake. So in radar, you get at radar.cache and cake, you get at cake.cache. So I don't know, let me ask that too handles that. I don't even know. It's quite interesting because in crypto, we have this tribal war between zcache and monero. And in messaging apps, we have this tribal war between the people who prefer signals, signal and those who prefer telegram. Why was it that you chose signal instead of telegram? - A privacy. I mean, signal is the gold standard of private messaging. I know people don't like the fact that you got to do it with your phone number. But it's kind of a spam prevention thing for them. But once you register and you have your phone number, you don't have to give your phone number to anybody like you used to in the old days. You can just give them, you can create a username and signal slot or radar and give that to whoever and still remain private. It's open source. It's a gold standard, it's open source. What else? They already have some payment rails built in. I mean, the mobile coin, even though that was a failure, we were able to use some of that infrastructure and rails for this Bitcoin lightning thing. So yeah, but those three reasons combined, we made sense just to do it with signal. - And now following the same line of thought, why was it that you chose lightning as opposed to monero? Because I know that you're like a saint figure in the monero community. And I guess some of them that you did to support monero before you support lightning with Bitcoin. - For a quick payment system that we wanted to make, lightning just made sense. I mean, it's Bitcoin has a broader appeal right now. I mean, you know, I'm not bashing monero anyway. I'm a monero bro. - And I've become a Zcash bro as well, as you've seen. But Bitcoin just made sense. - Where you ended the privacy wars. You said, okay, we see both of them down there. It's over and I didn't see that the community reacted to that and they were like, okay, we're not taking shots at each other anymore. It was peaceful for a while. And I don't think you got the credit for bringing the piece of cake like peace with PEACE. - Yeah, I'm a uniter, not a divider. Yeah, I'm just starting to see that as well. Interaction between Zcash Minero folks. I mean, yeah, of course, there's still a lot of hostility, but I'm starting to see some communication between different, you know, commonero accounts and Zcash accounts on Twitter. So that's been kind of good. I even sent a message to Josh saying, yeah, I'm seeing some positive interaction. Which is good. I mean, the tech works. But anyway, let's go back to radar. So yeah, that's why we chose Bitcoin. I know a lot of people said, why didn't you go with Minero? Why didn't you go with Minero? For being on the road payments on the go, you don't wanna have to wait 20 minutes and listen to that. It just made sense for lightening right now. In the future, would we add Minero or in other coins? Yeah, probably. The next thing we're gonna add is stable coins. So users can see a stable balance. But the idea is radar chat shouldn't just be purely for Bitcoiners. Of course, that's the first step. And it can be used. And I think it'll be adopted nicely. But for the normies out there, they don't wanna see their balance fluctuating because they're still thinking in dollars. Of course, that's Bitcoiners were thinking in either Bitcoin absolute terms or Minero or whatever you're using Xanoze, cash, Ethereum, whatever. But for the normal person out there, they don't wanna open up their radar chat and see a balance of 245 today and then tomorrow, 237 in the next day. 50, whatever. So we're putting in a enlightening based staple coin. And users will have the option to automatically convert everything that comes in to the stable coin. And I don't know, we're thinking whether to make that mandatory. So the USD stable coin will be mandatory or make that into, give that as an option. So we're open to hearing ideas about that as well. But I think, you know, like I said, you get the normies in and have them treat it like a Venmo or a PayPal or a cash app, one of those apps. You got to have the option for a stable balance. And I'm not a fan of stable coins in any way whatsoever. I think, I think for regular folks, you got to give that, you got to give that feature. Right. So how does this lightning implementation work? You mentioned Spark. Are you working directly with Spark or is it still the breeze is the case? And what's the stable coin? Are you still going to rely on breeze or Spark? Or do you have another provider for that? So Spark does have a stable coin USDB. You know, it's on that flash nut thing. It's supported also in flash nut. I mean, but we're also looking at just doing our own stable coin for this. For both the radar radar chat app and cake wallet. I think it's a good opportunity now because for stable coin, anytime somebody comes out the stable coin, the first question is. What's the use case? Why this one over anything else? Who's going to use it? Where are the users? But with cake wallet, I mean, we've got over two million users now. Which can start using our stable coin, whenever we do build it and implement it. And we're going to bridge your braille and I think I forget it. Let me see. My memory is really freaking going. Can I tell you? Maybe it's lack of sleep in too much AI. I can relate to that. And I did see that. You're browsing these Nvidia machines to run local AI models. And it's really amazing that you're going all in on this. Like, you're not cutting expenses. You even sent to set for privacy a bunch of these devices. And I was so jealous of like, man, this guy can run like the frontier latest version of deep seek or Kimi K3 or whatever. Yeah. I mean, look, one of my biggest fears in life is to fall behind. I don't want to fall behind. I mean, with Bitcoin, I was early to jump on it. Just coding in general. I mean, even though I've encoded since 1992, but you know, I can 90, 90, 83, 84, you know, one of the early people to get on, starting to code and all that. So that was the idea for AI. I mean, it's a powerful tool. I don't want myself or the cake team to fall behind it. And the best way to do anything is to do it yourself. You can read all you want. You can watch all the YouTube videos you want. You can watch, you know, look at it. Tutorials on Twitter that people write up. But until you do something yourself, it's kind of hard to learn. At least for me, I need to, I need to get my hands on things. So I started first with first chat, GPT and all that. And then open clock came out. I went like hardcore into that. And I put that on a M3 Ultra 512 machine for the local model. And then I got another Mac studio M3 512 to put Hermes on it and, you know, compare the two and play around with different models. And then of course, the whole sparks thing set now or talking. And so we really need to start experimenting with this and see how it can be beneficial to to take all it in just to be on top of it. So we started out with two sparks and then we went to four and then quickly we bought four more. Now we have eight. The fact is doing a lot. I mean, for our bidder, which we'll talk about, I sent him that GitHub thing link and he had the local models burn through it and find security vulnerability vulnerabilities and other stuff. And it's been great because I think it's really helping the team. So yeah, just main reason was to just be on top of this and not fall behind. We're buying the sparks really slowly because what if Nvidia tomorrow comes out with the 256 gigabytes model. So I don't know, we may continue buying two until we get up to 16 or wait a couple months and see what Nvidia does with 256. But, but our goal is to, you know, run like a like a chemi open weight model locally on our machines. So, but right now, so that's a bunch running on the sparks. I have a bunch of models running on my Mac studios. And we have shared them with each other. We've shared them with the team. It's been, it's been quite exciting. I love it. And I think this is the coolest part because it's not like you're buying the subscription to cloud or whatever, where you're sharing all your information with cloud. You actually have full privacy because everything works on your machine and is not stored in a cloud. Exactly. You don't have to share any information about what you're doing, like the auditing that you have. And possibly if you discovered some bugs with the latest version of cloud fable or something. It's possible that one of the anthropic employees or something got like very early information about the vulnerabilities. And you never know how the gossip spreads or whatever or who finds out what you've been up to. So, from a security point of view, it's very thoughtful to run your own models. I wish I could afford the 500 and 12 gigabyte version of the Mac studio. I got the 64 one and I run Quinn 3.8. I think it's 27 billion tokens. It's pretty good, but it's not as good as Kimi K3, which I use with nano GPT, which works with cake wallet. You basically have like a tab inside of cake to go to nano GPT. I love that. I've interviewed Milan. Yeah. He's awesome. I love those days. Yeah. I mean, it's the other thing is you don't, yeah, the cause you don't run out of tokens. This morning, I tried from from sets running the sparks and doing the audit on arbiter, which we'll talk about. I gave some issues and I stuck those issues into table five and I put up guardrails. I don't know what it thought that I'm trying to hack my own account, my own app. And there's no way to override it. It seems so, I mean, even just today I faced the guardrails and it dropped me down to opus 4.8. I mean, still is able to fix those things, but I don't know why if they let opus 4.8 fix those things. I don't know why they don't let favor five fix those things. I've had this eureka moment with Kimi when I've asked Claude to do something and he was like, I'm sorry, unfortunately, I cannot help you with this. And I'm just typed into Kimi and I got such a detailed response of like, my god, this is exactly what I've been looking for. I pointed it to my website and I was like, can you find any issues? Like, how can I get hacked? I'm trying to understand how I can get hacked so I can patch or fix or whatever. And it told me everything I should do, like, give me a list, like a checklist of stuff I need to do. I'm not sure if it's like 100% complete and there is no other way, but it's still much better than it was before. That was quite pleased. Yeah, it's really awesome. I had dinner for somebody's birthday and here in New York a couple of weeks ago and I sat with a guy from the Trump administration. I won't say who and we started talking about AI and all that and I told them that the government is making a huge mistake, trying to neuter and limit the access to AI. Is this going to put us in second place and the Chinese models are very strong, almost as good. Some people say equally as good. And I told them a lot of people in the tech world right now, including myself, have moved over to Chinese models. And he's kind of shocked to hear that. I'm like, you guys should know this. Your fingers should be on the pulse. I don't know if my talk is going to change anything or help anything, but I thought let me at least here's an opportunity. the administration let me be vocal. So let's see, let's see how it goes. But I do think the the US government's making a mistake. It's too early to regulate. You know, when the internet started really expanding in the early 90s, I went to a FCC event in DC back in, I don't know, 94, 95. And and there was a lot of talk about regulating regulation, regulating the internet. And yet so many way you had DSL, you had cable, you know, all these different ways to get the internet. And I always forget his name, like I said, my memory's going the son of Powell who is the FCC chairman for a while. And he said a very interesting thing though. He said it's too early to regulate who early to put guardrails. Let, let, let the technology develop and flourish. Let's see where it goes. It's too early. So I think the same thing with AI right now. I think the the government involved that is too early. I still remember when three or four years ago, I saw on the news that they need to lead. They decided to ban AI, but what they actually did was blacklist the URL chat gpt.com. So you could no longer access it with an Italian ISP, which is very silly. Like it's not like there are no people. But you can use an open router or an, yeah, exactly. Yeah, but yeah, in Europe at least, it's a much more popular point of view that well, the government should regulate AI. And to be honest, a lot of people are confused and they should be and they should be concerned because if you don't adapt and you don't try the latest tech out there, you're going to become obsolete. And this is now different from what it was like when computers, like personal computers became popular. And some people were very like, well, I will, I will never use a computer. I don't need to because I'm very good at my work. I don't need it and blah, blah. I have a nonch was like that and she's like, I will never own a computer. And now she's not because she wanted, but because she had to, you had to fall behind like this and you fall behind. And it's AI is definitely like that. I mean, whatever your job is right now, you should be thinking of ways to should be thinking of ways to. And a way to make, make you more efficient, more productive, improve the quality of your work, whatever you're doing. I think AI can help you with that. I mean, I don't know if you're if you're labor and you're out there laying bricks. Who knows? Maybe there's a way for AI to improve that job also, but at least people that are office workers dealing with information, whether in tech or finance or law or business, I think AI should be used somehow. Yeah, I also want to tell people that this episode has a contest that's sponsored by Cakewallet. So if you want to win $100 in a coin of your choice, it can be Bitcoin whenever or Zcash write a number in the chat from one to 100, one number per person. So if you try to cheat, I'm not going to give you the prize. And yeah, try not to spam the chat. Please just pick a number. And that's it. And on the topic of AI, Vic, I just want to ask you if Cake uses AI for coding or only uses AI for auditing or both. Right now, it's mainly for auditing. A lot of our team members don't feel comfortable enough in throwing everything AI, especially since we're a financial app. And the app is actually handling people's money. So primary use of AI right now is for auditing. Some routine basic non-critical stuff. Some of the guys have turned to use AI. A lot of guys are using AI to check their work or do a quick review before submitting. But it's mainly for review and audit right now. Will that grow in the future? I hope so. I think there's got to be a safe way to take advantage of AI and coding as well and to expedite. The coding and to improve the quality of coding. But it seems I'm not a coder. So I don't know. I'm not a developer by any means. I can't read code. I can't write code. So I rely on the team. And it seems like even on Twitter, it kind of there's two camps. So I'm open. I'm open to see how this plays out. And that's it's a good question. And that's actually one of the reasons I built Arbiter. Who should we talk about Arbiter now? Or do you want to talk about it more stuff? No, I think that's a very nice transition. Yeah. So I needed an AI project. I needed a project that I could build with AI. And I just couldn't find a good hyper-liquid rating app. And I thought there's a good way to merge cake wallet side along with hyper-liquid in the back. I thought I wanted to let me buy code this. Totally buy code it. And I did. I mean, it's a. And maybe it's good to not know anything. Because I'm not trying to get. I use cloud, by the way, in cloud Fable 5 and Opus 4.8. Maybe not knowing anything is a good thing because maybe if you know too much, you're trying to force AI to work in a very human way. And I'm approaching it from a totally different. And I'm saying, here's what I want to get to. Here's what I want. Do whatever it takes. Use your best judgment to give me this result. And so far, it's been so good. It's been good. I did the same thing in cake wallet for the multi-sake using ledger. We didn't merge that. Yet, because it's 100% written by AI. And we're not going to merge it. It was, again, just purely an AI exercise for me. Treasure Native Bitcoin. I vibe coded that on a weekend as well for cake wallet. Again, we're not merging it because it's completely eye-written. But at least we can learn something from that. At least we can hopefully learn something from that. So, I've done a lot of things. I mean, Zcash and Cupcake vibe coded by me. We didn't merge it, but it worked. I did some videos on it. Zcash or Keystone. I'm talking shielded transactions for both. Holy vibe coded. We didn't merge it. These are just my own experimental things. And I made videos to demonstrate that it works because I had ledger, multi-sake, treasure, Bitcoin Native. All these exercises were just my own learning. And for my own understanding of what you can actually do with AI when it comes to coding. And so far, for me, it seems like anything you want. It's amazing. Like, now I get an idea in my head. And I'm not sure on ideas. I can be like, oh, I mean, just do this this evening. And boom, it's done. It's crazy. So, Arbiter was a full-blown exercise to see how that would work. And it's working great. It's generating revenue. It's got massive downloads. I think people have already traded well over five million dollars worth of assets on Arbiter. It's only on Tesla right now. Last night, I launched a desktop version for Mac. 100% vibe coded. And I'm not giving complicated prompts. Anyone can do this. You just say, I want this. And maybe cloud will have questions for you. Go back and forth a little bit. And I don't have to worry about Xcode or during this doing that, it just delivers wirelessly the build to my iPhone. And it's good to go. I mean, there's no setup on my part to get that done. So I think it's a whole new world we're on right now. And I'm proof of it that it can be done. So Arbiter's fun. It's hyper-liquid back end. You can trade everything that you can trade on on hyper-liquid. You got perps, stocks, all cryptos, you got spot. And there's a bunch of different order types that even hyper-liquid doesn't have, by the way. You know, when you're you're putting in order, you sit limit or stop loss or bubble. So there's Publ order types that don't even exist on Hyperliquid. Clod just made it. I said, I want this type of order and a visit, which should be out this evening. So by the way, you see a lot of activity on regarding our barbiter from me on weekends, because I just work on it on weekends. I don't want it to distract my time from a cake and radar. So if I work on weekends evenings, you'll see some more updates that night. But I haven't fun with it, and people are loving it. It's really cool. - There's actually someone in the chat named VHans J. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be one word, Vans. I'm not even sure how you pronounce that, but he's asking if there's going to be a Linux version of Arbiter. - Yeah. - I guess that can be your next weekend project. - Yeah, exactly. Linux first and then maybe Windows, I don't see. But I do want to say that there is a fork of Hyperliquid, which does pretty much the same stuff as Arbiter, and it's from thebitcoin.com guys, and it's called Dore and Rock. - Codway. - Orange Rock. - I think that you are orangerock.com. - That'd be interesting to interpret it too, to see. - I'll tell you a lot of cool stuff I put in, because it's on the, it's that we're using USDC on Arbiterum. So Circle has this thing called CCTP, and you can convert USDC from any chain to Arbiterum, any chain to any chain for very, very, very low feet. I also built in gasless payments. So if you're sending USDC to Arbiter and you're sending out, we pay the gas. So it's totally gasless. 'Cause right now you have to go get Ethereum. If you get Ethereum, you're like, ah, I really want to use it, but I got to get USDC and Ethereum. So in Arbiter, you don't need Ethereum. You just use, just deposit USDC, totally gasless. We pay for, and Claude did that. Built a system and created a wallet for me that I can fund with Ethereum on Arbiterum. And it's awesome, totally gasless. And the CCTP swaps, so you can send USDC on Ethereum, for example, or base, for example, and send it to the address in Arbiter and boom, you'll get USDC on Arbiterum, ready to be used on the hyper-liquid side. So I don't think anybody else is doing that. So we just make it easy, completely frictionless. - Yeah, I think a big issue when using stablecoins is the gas token and the fact that you need to pay a transaction fee with that one. And I fixed it in gasless. - We do tend to larp sometimes and say, well, you know, it's difficult to get the average person to use it because the onboarding process is difficult and the UX is horrible. And I'm always like, are you aware that millions of people are using USDT on Tron? And they just figured out that one has a much worse user experience, except that it confirms very fast. It's a proof of stake network. I guess you get a block every 10 seconds or something and after like a minute, it's final. So you have much faster confirmation from this point of view, people figure it out very intuitively. But it's not censorship-resistant. It's not easier to use them Bitcoin. It takes like a learning curve and you need to understand what you're doing and look at this very confusing Tron scan website where you have to know exactly where to look and whatever because you have section for tokens, you have section for stable coins and whatever. So it's really not easier to use. It's just that people find it more useful. - And that-- - The altos are pretty fast. I mean, arbitraram, avalanche, very, very, very low fees and very fast as I understand it could be wrong. But yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. The gas thing is a problem and I knew that when building this app that it's such a pain and I didn't know how you could do it. And I asked, "Klong, is there any way to do this? "Gaseless." And it researched for like six, seven minutes and came back and said, "Yes, we can do this." And I even created a dashboard for me where I can gift people in the app. I don't know if you saw that in arbitrar, there's a gift function, gift just for receiving. And through this dashboard, I can gift people USDC. I can see which addresses are doing the most volume. I can gift them for doing, you know, high volumes. And it shows all my gas wallets on Ethereum and Polygon, avalanche, base, arbitraram, blah, blah, blah. I can keep topping that up so people don't have to use gas. I mean, it's awesome. - But you're a privacy guy. So do you think that there are ways to do this with private networks, have the same user experience and the same onboarding process to get people to use something which is private? - I'm sure there is. I haven't looked into it. I mean, what private smart chain contracts are out there that you can build this on? - I think you have Zanno. And maybe Zcash is going to do the shield of assets. I'm not sure if they're going to do it at the time soon. And there's also something called beam, which is a member Wimble chain that's optimized to do Ethereum stuff. - Yeah, I don't know what's happening with Tari. I think Tari would have been a good thing for this. Or Aztec, there's a. - Oh yeah, Aztec. - Aztec's there as well. I don't know how to look into it. I'll ask Claude. I don't know, so yes, we can do this. Build me a hyper-liquid. Hey, Claude, build me a hyper-liquid on Aztec. Make no mistakes. - Jaxley's hyper-liquid no mistakes? - No, I'm kidding about that. Yeah. And something so crazy to make no mistake. - It is like. - Yeah. And you know, like with Arbiter, I'm able to say run 10,000 simulations for this type of order type. Run 5,000, and I do that. I say, okay, and it takes, you know, like 30 seconds or something, it runs simulations. So, you know, I want to see if the order types are behaving and triggering like they should. I see you can just do so much with it. But Arbiter has been fun to build. It's a nice, it's been a nice learning experience. I mean, it's in Testflow right now, whether we release it full-blown production app, I'm not sure, I don't know if Apple will allow it or Google allow it because you know, with hyper-liquid, it's kind of in the gray area. Maybe I'll have to block some countries like the US, for example. But let's see, I think right now it's still beta, it's still building out, but it's getting close to a production version. So, let's see what happens. - Yeah, I was gonna ask you because in Bitcoin, we have all of these open source projects and we have the red team. And I guess there's another blue team or something. And they're trying to stress test and to try to find all the vulnerabilities in all sorts of mallets and services that are related to Bitcoin. You actually gave like $10,000 to the red team, I think. - Yeah, thank you for that, by the way. And I was gonna ask you, did you find anything bad in cake like some old repository binary pieces? - Not from them. - No, I mean, they definitely ran the audit on cake also. Very minor stuff, nothing, nothing critical. But now because of AI use, we created a, we set the creator to system where people can submit security reports. And we're just getting loads of stuff every day from, I mean, red team did it and it was done. But we're getting so much security. And most of it is not important or the person who ran the AI on cake didn't stand it. Or a lot of stuff is this preference. You know, like, oh, wouldn't this be better? So, I mean, cake was audited by an external third party a few years back. So, but, you know, there was some stuff, nothing, nothing that would risk any funds or anything like that. But I don't accept without the specifics on that. What things came in that we fixed. But nothing major from the red team. And I did fund them $10,000. and I'll tell you why. I just, the cold card hack, I don't want to call it hack, the wrong number generator. You know, everybody says open source, everything should be open source, open source, open source. So that means somebody smarter than yourself, smarter than me is not you. I'm saying in general, you, somebody smarter than yourself is looking at it. And you believe that, right? Okay, I can't read Bitcoin code, but somebody, it's open source, somebody must be looking at it. Somebody, right? Somebody is looking at it. Somebody smart, all the smart people are on it. But what the cold card think showed us, no, people didn't look at it. Even though it was open source, smarter people weren't looking at it, I think that's part of the problem. I wasn't open source. It was available, which means that you can look, but there is no incentive to do anything with it. Because if you try to use the code for fork, this guy's going to sue you for something. But you could look at it, right? You could audit the code. You could. So there were some paid audits and whatever, but it's just that people did not catch it. But there were some reports from Reddit, like users four or five years ago were saying, I just lost all my money from my cold card and I don't know what happened and everyone was blaming the user saying, well, you must have done something wrong. So maybe that was a back door that this is just my conspiracy that someone put in there and they were just selectively stealing maybe once a year or something. And then someone just found the back door and they're like, oh, so you can use this steel from everyone who did not roll their own dice, which by the way is stupid. That was the design that they chose for cold card. Seeing how the biggest conversation on Twitter for a week or even longer was how do you roll your dice and Jamison Lops and while you should buy casino dice and I'm like, dude, you have chips. You have sources of entropy that you can capture, like the room temperature or whatever. You can use that for entropy. Yeah, that happens on Twitter, it just has one topic and then everybody jumps on it and everybody wants to be part of that conversation and part of that discussion and I guess feel included maybe, but that's common and then it was gone. The whole dice thing, you don't see a single post about it anymore. But you know, past phrases, right after the cold card thing happened, I did many tweets about past phrases. I think past phrases such as simple security feature to add to your seed, you know, as long as that has good enough entropy as well, you know, make that also 20 or 24 characters long and has more entropy than a 12-word seed phrase. So I mean, there's a big blow for self-custody for sure and people like me, people like you are always preaching self-custody, self-custody or don't put your money on exchanges, it's going to get hacked or stolen or they get shut down or something. And then here we are in self-custody because of a flaw that happened. As I'll say, Bitcoin is what, 16-year-old, 15-year-old asset, 18-year-old asset, Cian, right, compared to gold, 5,000-year asset. So I think these are all growing pains, good learning experience, I think it continues to make Bitcoin stronger. I'll say, yeah, I think it's, so that's what I'm going back to the thing about the red team. That's why I donated 10,000 to them because I want that somebody smarter than me to look at the code and here's a group of guys who are willing to do that work, so I not support them. Yeah, that was very nice of you. I want to ask you to reveal your number, but I also want to ask you if you've been following the conversation surrounding the Bitcoin forks. Today I think they switched from shot to 56 to Blake 2 on the look-junior fork and there's also the cash fork which is running on alpha net right now and it's going to launch on Halloween with the main net. I haven't. I'll be honest with you. I haven't followed any of the forks or anything. There's been forks in the past, people are free to fork, that's a great thing about Bitcoin, right? You can do whatever you want and the people will decide which is what, so I mean I'm all for trying stuff to be honest with you, right? I know a lot of Bitcoiners won't want to hear this, but as you know, you and I talk a lot about tribalism. You had to be a pretty open-minded person to accept Bitcoin in the early years, right? I mean, people that came out in 2018 to 2020, yeah, Bitcoin is already kind of established, but people who got in in the early years, you had to be pretty open-minded to consider this new asset that's the world I've never seen before, decentralized, hard to get your head around it. Even today, people have hard time getting the head around it that it's decentralized, can't change it, blah, blah, blah. So if you're open-minded and you got into Bitcoin, your open-mindedness doesn't just stop there, right? I mean, you continue to be open-minded, I would think. So hey, you know what, people are free to try new stuff. We might learn something from it, Bitcoin might learn something from it, other chains might learn something from it. So I'm ready for all these experiments. I mean, I'll support them personally and say, oh, yeah, this is the new Bitcoin. I'm definitely not that guy. But I'm open to experimentation. Like I'm doing now with AI, like I did with Bitcoin in 2013 with mining, like I did with Monero in 2017, you know, so I think it's, I like open-mindedness, you know. I think Monero is also pretty open-minded towards stuff like, wow, Nero. Which is a live net that is also used for testing stuff. It's sort of the douche coin of the Monero ecosystem. But ironically, there are sort of hostile towards Xano, which is also using the same code base and also has one of the developers who actually created crypto notes on the team. So they don't like that. It's hard for me to get around it. Yeah, I remember where wow Nero came out. I mean, somebody was doing a fork of Monero called Monero V, Monerov, I don't know, pronounce it. So to kind of drown out that initiative, some folks in the Monero community came up with the wow Nero to make everything a joke. Like that's a joke. We're a joke. Everything's a joke. But then once it was out, it kind of became like a test bed and things from Monero. We just dropped it, by the way, and kicked all that, I think, I hope, we were talking about dropping it. I think we dropped it. Is this because usually you list coins, you don't drop coins. Yeah, when we dropped Haven, they kind of just stopped working. So we dropped them. Our Haven coin is also a fork of Monero. Is it related to the Haven no, or something, or whatever, no, haven was out very early. I mean, early 2020s, I guess, and we ran that for a while, but it just didn't get traction. They stopped supporting it, the team stopped supporting it, no more updates with we dropped that. Wow, Nero. I know there's, I mean, it's a good project. There's a lot of people passionate about it, but for us to, you know, there's only so many resources we have, right? So we have to decide what are people actually using, what are people actually benefiting from and cake wallet, and just seem like, wow, Nero, there's other people doing wow Nero. So it's not like we were abandoning people, you know, people can easily switch, but I'm not against it anyway. Again, like you said, it's something, it's a test bed, you can learn things from it. It just wasn't for us. Oh my god, the comment section is filled with bots right now. I'm not even sure if the giveaway is such a good idea because it's just numbers. what's your number, Beck? 27. 27. If there is any 27, I will take a look at the chat and try to find it. See any. Only see 44 and 69. Nice. But if there is no 27, I'll just give it to 28 or 26 if there is. Where do you see it? It's on YouTube. Oh, I see. Oh, there's a 547 42 74 55 33 is a closer to one so far. Yeah, you're going to have to download Cake Wallet to get your prize if you're the winner. I don't think we have a winner. Nobody said 27 as far as I can tell. There is a 26 that I saw. Oh, there is. Yeah. Oh, there is someone who said it just now, but it doesn't count. I'm sorry. Do you have to go to another call or something? You said you have one hour. Yeah, but there's nothing you want to discuss for a quick. Oh, yeah, always. Always. What's your next topic? So, what do you think about this privacy narrative being so dominant right now? Because it seems like the biggest privacy coins are the ones that are pumping the hardest. And they're even making Bitcoin look bad in Ethereum and all the others. I think we're going to have like a big privacy narrative where everything that has privacy is going to get its moments in the spotlight. Or is this exclusive to Monero and Zcash because they're the biggest? Well, I mean, I think everyone's waking up to privacy and fungibility. I think those two things are two sides of the same coin. And people look at whatever is the technically as well as what's widely adopted. And Monero, of course, is that it's widely adopted. It's used all the time and running the largest Monero while we know that. The Zcash probably technically superior right now than Monero until Monero does its full chain membership proofs and probably neck to neck. But I mean, I've been a support of Zcash. I think the first Zcash I got was from Zuko like 2021 or something when we talked about putting Zcash in cake wallet. So number one, I think people want privacy. And then they look what are the privacy coins and the same in Aaron Zcash as the top ones. Well, I can hear myself. Let me turn that off. And then of course, in Zcash, you've got some big names with big money behind it that are promoting it that have been able to create treasury companies and trust the grayscale and the winkel ones. So that has that momentum. Whereas Monero has the momentum, you know, that it's being used just purely for speculation. Will more people start to use Zcash? I hope so. I think more privacy coins people use the better. So I think a lot of people must see that, right? They look a bit cool and they think, oh, it's transparent. Addresses could be blacklisted. You could get a dirty bit coin and things like that. I think people are waking up to it and they look at it and then they look for privacy coins. Somebody said if Monero or Zcash would have come out first with privacy built in and then a couple of years later, Bitcoin came out and everybody was like, why would I use, why would I use this transparent chain, right? Is Bitcoin going away? No, I hope not. I'm a Bitcoiner as well. I think it's here to stay, but at the same time we live in a multi-coin world and people can use what they want and some people want privacy. They want their transactions to be graced till the end of time and that's where things like Monero and Zcash are going to shine. It's already our. You said that we live in a multi-coin world and every day I get people in my mentions who say that I don't understand money and that everything that is not Bitcoin is going to zero because it's the hardest and it has the Lindy effect and Met-Kalf's law and whatever. And I'm like, if I don't understand money, you don't understand markets because if something exists and is open source, there has to be something else that's going to compete with it. No matter what, there's always going to be something that's going to try to improve something else and maybe that even if we end up with only one type of money, only one currency, the fact that it has competition while it's getting to that perfect shape or perfect feature set or whatever, it's net benefit. And they're always upset. They're like, well, Bitcoin is perfect and whatever. It's just tired. And that's fine, but I mean for it to become the one currency, somehow you have to stop everyone else from using other coins or they have to be banned or not accepted. And then that goes against the whole, again, back to the open-mindedness and decentralization and self-somerate, self-choice, everything. In a weird way, being a Bitcoin maximalism is almost being anti-Bitcoin. And maybe it's just me. Maybe I just relate Bitcoin to forward thinking and open-mindedness. But like I said, if you got into Bitcoin early, you had to be an open-minded person. And then one day you just stop being open-minded. Especially now with AI and everything, you're not going to stop people from creating new cryptocurrencies and stop them from gaining traction. And people want different things, right? You want smart contracts, okay? You use Ethereum or EVM chains, AL2s, whatever you want. Privacy is whenever Zcash you want something that's accepted and well-established. You use Bitcoin. I don't see how one currency wins out at the end and everybody decides to use that. You never know. Let's see. In the meantime, they are features people want. On this topic, there are all of these defy protocols like Maya and hyper-liquid and what's the other one, near-intense. Basically, I think the most popular way in which Zcash is being used right now is not by being accepted directly. It's by making payments from shielded Zcash into USDT or BTC or ETH or whatever, using near-intense, which means that there's going to be a shielded transaction that gets unshielded on this protocol, with just the amount that is necessary for this. Nobody really knows how much money you actually have. And then the receiver of the transaction will just see that they received money from this liquidity pool from the DeFi service. So they don't know how much money you have, which is still a better design than using Ethereum or Bitcoin or something that has your privacy. I mean, for spending, I'd like to see if people want to go that route, then go Zcash shielded to maybe a Bitcoin. Like I said, I'm not that big of a fan of stablecoins because it's linked to the system that debases your value. Then it kind of goes against the whole concept of cryptocurrency, the whole wide Bitcoin was invented in the first place. So if somebody is not accepting shielded Zcash or Monero, I hope they would at least accept Bitcoin and you can go from Banero. or Zcash or whatever coin you prefer to Bitcoin and then pay it that way. But anyway, a long way to go to get everyone to accept Bitcoin or other types of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, not crypto. There's someone in the chat who wants to know how they can try arbiter on iPhone. His name is ProctTNLotor, ProSEON. He just gets some USDC in deposit and start trading. No, but he does. USDC on IG app on the iPhone. Is it on test flight or something? Yes, flight. Yeah, if you go to the Arbiter Twitter account, the pinned tweet, or just go to arbiter.xyz website. It's got the test flight, it's got APK, if you download that directly, it's got DMG file for the max macOS. You can do all that there. When do you think this is going to be final arbiter? I think it's close there. Maybe a week or so. Just some more testing. What's also been fun about building Arbiter is the community built it. First, I just put out a basic version and then everybody told me what they want to see. I just put those features in, what people asked for, I put it in. That's also been fun and interesting. It's like a crowd-developed app, which has been interesting. It's been fun to do. I'll try to release in a week, maybe next week or something. Let's see how Apple and Google take it. I'm sure to get it through the app store approval. I'll have to probably block a bunch of countries. Let's see. Do you want to hint what's next? Because the last time you're on the show, you said you're working on something secret that you can't reveal, and it turns out. That was radar chat. We're going to improve our desktop apps. We haven't really paid attention to those at all. We want to fix those up. Get them up today. They look outdated. They're kind of clunky and buggy. We'd like to fix that. We'd like to add more hardware while it's supported. Multi-sig, especially what happened with the cold card thing, I think Multi-sig is really important. And I'm using a cake wallet version that I, that Claude made, that we're using three ledgers, using two of three Multi-sig. It's working great. So get back to some of the basics of self-custody. As an industry, we lose sight and get into NFTs, and meme coins, and off-ramps, and earnings, and on-ramps, and blah, blah, blah. But I think we need to get back to the basics of what Bitcoin was meant to be, you know, self-custody, self-custodial, permissionless payment system, and that's it. That's what it is. That's what it needs to be. And try to get people to use it. I think lightning is a great way to get people to start using it. Greater is a great way to get people to start using it. Kind of interesting that you're still bullish on lightning, but we shall see. I think we have a rough couple of weeks where people were asked to turn off their nodes and stuff. Yeah. We didn't go that route. Obviously, we went spark, so we didn't have that problem, but, you know, those issues with all the AI hacking and vulnerabilities discovered that could happen to spark as well, of course, could have no anybody right now. But it works, right? I also could, in the end, the user experience. What does the user feel? Can they walk into a coffee shop and pay on a square terminal with radar or cake right now with lightning? Yes, they can. And that's what's important, I feel. Before I let you go, Vic, and I know that you're going to be late for the next call. I apologize to the person, so he's going to be on a call with you. That's fine. People see you. I tell them specifically. You said that. People see you as this gatekeeper in some way with cake wallet because you only list like a dozen coins, and always there's someone who comes along and says, "Well, why don't you list this and that?" And I believe this coin is better. You have the piratine people. You have the Caspo people. You have all sorts of nerds who always like to say that they're the ones being discriminated or something, and you're this big time gatekeeper. And I want to ask you, what is the main criteria that you use when you decide to supply the coin? Yeah, I think it's funny that people get mad at us as to when we don't list the coin. I mean, like you said, some gatekeeper, there's some authority on what's real or not, or maybe either we validate or invalidate things. Number one, I don't see us that way. We, in a lot of coins from the beginning, were just stuff I wanted. In the beginning, it was just stuff I wanted. But Caspo is interesting. I mean, I've been watching it for a year. The crypto market's pumped, but Caspo has just gone down, down, down, which reveals to me that not enough people are adopting it or buying it, obviously. I'm open-minded. Let's see how it goes. Dash is another one. I'm open to Dash. I'm open to adding Dash. I know some people in Dash are mad at me because when Dash put their account themselves, said, "Hey, we're not a privacy coin. I don't know much about it." There hasn't been that much demand for adding Dash. There's been one person asking for it, maybe two at the most. And I know it hates me probably because I didn't add it. And it's the same person who assumed that the reason why he was never invited to join my podcast is that the show is sponsored by Cake and he made some sort of connection in his mind. Like, oh, if he's not liked or whatever by a sponsor, then he's not welcome here. That's not how it works. Have I ever asked you to limit a guest or anything? Never. Or content? Never. I don't think we've ever, ever talked about that subject and any podcast that has sponsored. I'm sure you don't do it to Doug Tumon or to Esquilita Bitcoin or. Of course not. I guess not. There are some others too. The girl got caught, so you never told Leah what she works for us now. Yeah, Leah, I've never told that to anybody. People are free to do what they want. I don't know. I mean, I agree with that person on 99% of things. So I don't know why he's got a grudge against me. It's weird. I don't know. I guess people need enemies in their life to motivate them who does. I don't know. I like the guy. I like this message. But whatever. The dash. I don't know. I mean, I'm willing to learn more about it. There's a huge demand of all of sudden tomorrow. We start getting support tickets, dash, dash, dash, dash, dash. It would be like, okay, we'd have a meeting and talk about it. But there just hasn't been that much demand. But I'm open. I'm open to it. Like I said, you know, the open mind in this that I preached about in the beginning of the show, that's something I should practice as well. And I try to practice. Regardless of the members of the society, right? You have to look at the tech. And I always said that about Zcash, to the Menero people. Forget about all the shenanigans. Forget about all the crazy stuff. Forget about some things that some people might say, look at purely the tech. And the tech is good. The same thing with Dash. I mean, if somebody convinces me, the tech is good and people will demand it. I'm open to it. I'm not against it. I think right now, Dash is adopting the orchard pool from Zcash, which is weird to me because Zcash is just the banditting it because they found the better design. But I thought Zcash is already private. Why do they need to adopt the orchard chain? No, you mean Dash, not Zcash. Sorry, Dash. I thought Dash was always private. There's one for the new guest. like a coin join in the node client, and that was like the privacy feature. Exactly. It wasn't confidential transactions to be able to hide the amount, it was just kind of a coin join that you can do. I don't know how to say anything more, because this guy already hates me, so I don't hate me anymore. But I'm open to coins. I mean, people who have wanted to see some coins, you know, pitch it to us, set the nine in the team. You know, we do talk about it as the full company, or there's like close to 20 of us now. I think we are 20 now. We discuss things openly with everybody's involvement. So yeah, you got something to pitch. I mean, let us know. We'll debate it internally, even externally. Let's see what we do. Yeah, I appreciate the transparency. And I think the clear message is that being technically good is not enough. You also need to have users and markets and whatever. And it's not just the price. It's also the fact that you need to have people using it every day for something. And that's a big issue. Like a lot of the coins in this base are just solutions and search for a problem to solve. Yeah. And you know, the maintenance in the back, right? I mean, these updates happen this and that. And we're always trying to make sure we update. We're on time. We don't fall behind. The users never have a period where they can't access their coins. So you know, try to see it from our end also. There's limited resources. We can support everything and look at Exodus dropped Manero and you know, we took the the migrated their users over the cake. Manero is widely used, but they dropped it because the infrastructure is a hassle to maintain and to operate and to give the user and the user, a good user experience with Manero, they felt that that's not there and they dropped it. So you have those technical and resource challenges well within the company. So you know, I mean, continuing to maintain something that nobody's using. I mean, I won't say one coin at which coin, but one of the coins are node. We didn't realize our node was down for like two months and no support ticket came back and said, Hey, you know, I can't access. I can't send. I can't receive. Maybe they're using their own node. I don't know, but and we're like, why does node has been down for two months and nobody said anything? So that means nobody's using this. Anyway. Final question, because I noticed that you had a very cool migration tool for Zcash. So when they launched the Ironwood Pool, which were places orchard, it was automatically happening in the background. And I very much liked the user experience and everything. Like it was designed to not dox how much you own. It was doing transactions in small chunks. And it was very efficient. I liked it. But right now, I think there's a vote going on in the Zcash community where I think they're quote unquote, official wallet, the saddle wallet prompts you that you have to vote on some issues. And I just opened cake to see if it prompts you about voting and it doesn't seem to support that or at least not yet. We haven't yet. That's something I've been thinking about. Letting people vote in the app. I think a big, great feature. We just don't have it yet. Even if we're on the road map, we won't be able to look at it for a few months down the road. Yeah, but I think the voting takes like a month or something. So maybe that for this round, you're not going to support. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. We haven't looked into that yet. Adding voting yet to be honest with you. But that's something we talked about. Yeah. Would you like to see that? I mean, I always look at wallets and I try to compare them feature for feature, right? I kind of, I don't know, I'm just a nerd. I like to open wallets and see, well, this one can do this, can get everyone do this. I like that cake when they integrate a Zcash. They also added support for this, what's it called, sapling, the one that has the addresses. And that's useful because there are some services out there, for example, fixed float, I think. And they let you withdraw to a Z address. So they don't support unified addresses that start with a U because I don't know, their engineering team got lazy or something. But at some point, they decided that they want to support shielded addresses in Zcash. So I can use cake for that because it has the Z addresses. And that's not something that you find in Zadol. It used to be called Zashi, which is designed to be very simple and only has the latest version of the shielded pool. That's something that it supports. Of course, right now, it's transitioning from orchard to ironwood. So it still supports orchard. But at some point, it's only not a support ironwood. And with Zcash, with cake wallet, you have more options. And that's something that I really like. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad that's noticed. I appreciate that. I mean, another thing is the passphrases, right? I mean, I think we're the only Zcash shielded ironwood wallet that has passed phrases for your seed. So try to differentiate ourselves and try to be, you know, one step ahead of the others. I'm sure, like you said, the voting, Zadol has that voting. We don't have it. It's, I guess it's something we'll add later. Yeah. I do enjoy seeing Seth being involved in everything. Like I remember when this guy left foundation, which is the company that's building the passport hardware wallet, which is this one. Investor in that. I'm an investor in that. You're an investor too. He left that company to join cake. And I was like, okay, what's he gonna work on? Just Monero, but it seems like he has a very broad job resume. It's the, oh, see, oh, those are the broad jobs. And we all wear multiple hats and cake, you know, we're all doing a bunch of stuff. But yeah, Seth's been great. He's been, is an improved cake wallet, the product in a lot of ways. He's improved the company in a lot of ways. He's doing good job. Do you guys get to one million downloads? Two million. Two million. Two million. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Because I remember when I met you in Vegas, you were like at 800,000 or something. Yeah, after that, it just took off. We're, we're seeing downloads on iOS and Android together. Probably 3000 a day. That's really good. It's impressive. Yeah. And is it profitable at this point? Like, you make money from swabs? If swabs on earth, like any other wallet, you make money on swabs on your own phones or cake pay product is pretty popular. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we've reached like a tipping point where it's like, the downloads are actually, and we've always increased or stayed the same every month for the last eight years. But over the last six months, I would say our installs are rapidly growing like they've accelerated. I guess this is a good insight that the privacy narrative is playing out. And people are searching for something that gives them privacy. This is a useful tool. I hope that everyone listening to this has already downloaded cake wallet. If you haven't, like, I'm, I'm got a frown at you. Like, what's wrong with you? Give it a try. It's free. You can choose not to deposit coins on it and just try to see what it can do. Yeah. It's free download. Free to use. No charges for anything. Yeah. It's cool. Yeah. I know you have to go, Vic. I've kept you for 30 minutes longer than, yeah, thank you. The time that we established and you also came on a short notice. I respect that. Are you going to go to any conferences this year or you can be seen or something? I haven't been going to head ankle surgery like three months ago. Like major ankle surgery. So I don't know. I'm going to, I'm going to play it by ear. I mean, I might go to that big mail in India. I may go to Bitcoin Amsterdam. Bitcoin Amsterdam more chances. me going, because that's in November. And I think it should be. I'll be a speaker there. Oh, great. Even with my, I think my foot should be better by them. But I'm playing it by ear. Everything's up in the air right now. That's why you're seeing the whole team at, like a Bitcoin Asia we did last week. You know, he's probably saw our pictures from our booth and everything on the kick wall of the count. I don't know if you saw that. I wasn't there. I haven't been to any conferences this year, except Vegas. I remember seeing you there. It was a very cool booth. If you're coming to Amsterdam, I'm going to show you what I've been working on, which is a book/magazine about Bitcoin forks. That's awesome. Yeah, you're telling me about that. Yeah. I've been doing presentations about it at conferences. But now I'm like, why shouldn't I write about it? And maybe just have like a resource that has information about everything relevant out there. That's cool. Like a company or something that you just open when you want to see like, oh, what's this e-cash fork or whatever. How is it different from the look that's junior one? Right, right. That's cool. In order to that, it should be quite interesting and informative. I mean, in the era of AI, you can just ask questions like this, but some people like to have physical media still. Right, right, exactly. Thank you for your time, Vic. I hope that the listeners got something useful out of this interview. I hope you learned something new. Thanks to Cake for sponsoring. Thanks to the other sponsors too. I think I did mention them by name. They're on the screen, but I'm going to mention them right now. Brain's hash power that lets you rent proof of work from this shot to 56 pool. Orange Rock, which is actually a one-to-one competitor to Arbiter. It's actually quite interesting. I don't know about one to one. We are gashless. Okay, good. It's going to be interesting to see which one takes the cake pun intended. Layer 2 labs, which is delivering the eCache hard fork right now. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I don't know. It could be a good outcome. It's definitely interesting. You can download the free wallet at eCache.com, and there's a faucet where you can claim some free coins, so you can play with it. Also, site shift, which is the place where you can swap your stable coins for something which cannot be confiscated and taken away from you. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you, Kate for joining. I called you, Kate. Thank you, Vic. That's fine. That's fine. Yeah, I called me, Kate. Yeah. All right, man. We'll see you later. Take care. Thanks so much. Bye. (upbeat music)