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Aug. 8, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

02:31:01

Decentralize.TV - Episode 9 - Aug 8, 2023 - FIRO innovator Reuben Yap on PRIVATE digital money

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	Welcome to Decentralize TV.
	I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brightia on the free speech platform and And of course, this show with my co-host Todd Pitner, he'll be joining us after this interview.
	This is all about decentralized living.
	And one of our favorite topics to discuss on this show is, of course, private digital money.
	Because we believe that privacy is a basic human right.
	And so we are very honored to invite on our guest today, who is one of the leaders, the brains, the inspiration behind a project that I find really inspiring, very amazing from what I've seen so far.
	But we'll ask him, and I'll ask a few tough questions.
	We'll see how it goes.
	But his name is Ruben Yap, and welcome, Ruben, to the show.
	It's great to have you on.
	Glad to have, I mean, glad to be here.
	It's, you know, thank you for making such a, you know, it's an awkward time for you and it's a real pleasure and honor to be on here.
	Our community was asking, you know, when are you going to get on Mike Adams' show?
	And I was like, I don't really know him.
	And then somehow we got connected.
	So it's a real pleasure and honor to be here.
	Yeah.
	Well, no, the honor's all mine, believe me, because I've watched many, many hours of your videos and your conversations.
	You just came back from MoneroCon, and I noticed people were stopping you in the hallways and filming interviews.
	So I was watching all those, too.
	And just for the audience to know why I'm not in my studio, I'm filming this late at night, my time, because you, Ruben, You're halfway around the world.
	Do you talk about what country you're located in?
	I'm based in Malaysia.
	I'm actually based in Borneo, which we're more famous of orangutans and headhunters, the ones that cut off people's heads, not the HR people.
	But yeah, that's where I'm from and where I am.
	Yeah.
	Okay, great.
	The last time I was in Malaysia was in the 1990s.
	Wow.
	And I was in southern Malaysia, right near Singapore, giving network security lectures.
	In Johor?
	What's that?
	It was in Johor?
	No, I don't remember the city at this point, but I was touring throughout Southeast Asia, including Hong Kong, and giving talks for a company that is now a very well-known antivirus company.
	But I don't want to mention their name.
	But anyway, I was a young communicator then.
	So I've been to Malaysia, and I've had...
	I met a lot of people there, enjoyed a lot of the food there, and you have a lovely country.
	So thank you for joining us from Malaysia.
	It's great.
	Thank you.
	Well, where do we begin?
	So your project is called Firo, F-I-R-O, and it's a privacy coin.
	So what do you tell people when you need to give them kind of the quick summary of what Firo is and why it's even worth talking about?
	I'm actually a really bad shiller.
	But, you know, typically, you know, I'll just say we are a privacy-focused cryptocurrency.
	You know, we use our own protocol that we developed called Lelantis and soon moving to Lelantis Spark.
	And, you know, what it does is that, oh, you know, It gets too technical.
	I know.
	We've got to keep it easy to digest.
	I think one of the coolest things, even though I wouldn't say it's one of the core values, is the election that we held in 2018, which I would say was one of the biggest real-life use cases for our blockchain, where The Thai Democrat Party used us to elect their party leader, and they required a blockchain, and they also required the votes to be...
	There's some form of privacy, right?
	You can't see who voted for who, right?
	So our blockchain was used then, and about 127,000 people cast their votes nationwide, and I think that was a real first.
	That's kind of like on the application side, but on the technology side, we...
	Unlike many other, you know, projects, we are one of the few people that actually developed our own privacy protocol from scratch.
	And right now our research is Very, you know, it's being used in other privacy cryptocurrencies as well, like Beams using something called Atlantis, Mimberwimber, and Moneros also implementing a lot of our key ideas into their next-gen privacy protocol called Seraphist.
	So I'm really proud of that, like, you know, even not just as a cryptocurrency, but as, I guess, a research, as someone contributing to the space.
	That's what we're all about.
	So, yeah.
	So what you said is really critical.
	I hope people haven't glossed over about that because what I really respect about you in researching your project, watching your videos, is that you are a collaborative person in this space.
	You work closely with Monero developers, for example, and you share ideas.
	Such as you mentioned Seraphis or Lelantis Spark.
	And I know maybe we'll talk about full membership proofs and concepts like that.
	And how even Monero is moving off of, you know, ring signatures potentially in the future.
	But these ideas, you know, I think the whole space benefits when we are willing to share and collaborate with each other.
	And that's one of the reasons I really look forward to speaking with you here.
	So thank you for doing that and not being one of those guys that's just trashing every other project except your own.
	It's not been easy.
	Sometimes even our collaborative efforts have turned to backstabbing.
	I've had personal experience on that.
	It takes a conscious effort to try to remain collaborative and work with...
	We have to think about it.
	What are we here for?
	Are we here to show our bags or are we here to really change what would be the freedom of money?
	That's how I see it.
	We're building, I would say, the financial infrastructure that's going to be really important, especially as CBDCs come online, which they already are.
	Well, you know, did you know that the slogan of our show here, Decentralized TV, the slogan is, quote, building the infrastructure of human freedom.
	Oh, wow.
	That's great.
	It aligns completely.
	Exactly.
	Because that's what we believe in, and that's what we're doing here, and that's what you're doing.
	So if people look at FIRO right now, you can download wallets from FIRO.org, which I've done.
	I've tried all three of the wallets that you have there.
	And People can, you know, they can acquire FIRO using swaps, you know, Bitcoin swaps and swap sites and what have you, and they can play around with FIRO. But it's so much more than that because FIRO, what I see as FIRO really pioneering here is some of the very best technological advancements in this space.
	And because FIRO is, let's face it, smaller than Monero, Monero is like a big ship, and it takes a little longer to turn that ship, to turn the direction, and to get consensus among the developers.
	And I'm not in any way talking bad about Monero.
	Monero is an awesomely successful project.
	It's the number one privacy coin.
	But Firo can be more nimble, right?
	Yep.
	I would say, like, I guess, you know, as a smaller community, we...
	There's pros and cons, right?
	Obviously, Monero has a lot of contributors and stuff like that, but it also relies on...
	I mean, that's part of being decentralized, right?
	It relies on contributors stepping up.
	And, you know, Monero's contribution, like EBS and...
	There's the ebb and flow, right?
	Like, sometimes there's a lot of contributors going and sometimes, like, people are busy with their lives and doing stuff.
	And that's fine.
	There's nothing wrong with Monero, right?
	But for us, you know, I guess we are a smaller, more focused project.
	And as a result, we can say, like, look, we really want to go down this direction.
	Of course, we get community buy-in.
	But I think things can happen a lot faster.
	And I guess...
	I guess maybe can be a bit more consistent about it because we have, you know, people full-time working on the project, not just like on the side and, you know, they're being paid regularly and that sort of stuff.
	So there's trade-offs, yeah.
	But that does bring up a question then, you know, how do you fund the developers?
	Because I think right now, the last time I checked before the show, Firo was like $1.80 or something like that per coin right now, which is, let's say, one one-hundredth what Monero is per coin, roughly.
	Yes.
	I believe, right?
	And yet the tech is actually...
	Very competitive with Monero.
	So how do you fund the operation?
	Or, I mean, not you, but how does it fund itself?
	Right.
	So, you know, some people are very against this.
	Like, basically, off-the-block reward, we take 15% of it.
	And that sounds like a lot, but if you put it into real terms, especially since there's already been a halving, it's 16,000, around 16,000 FIRO a month.
	Wow, that's not that much for R&D. That's not a lot of...
	People are like, oh, DevTax, you guys are getting rich.
	I'm like, dude, just do the math.
	There's 16,000 euros.
	Everyone can say it.
	There's not a lot of...
	None of us are getting rich of it, right?
	And we may think, well, that's not enough to run research and all that.
	And that is true.
	It's not enough, right?
	So we have...
	You know, some generous donors, like, recently some people, like, donated, like, 100k, 200k.
	I think, total, this past year, we received, like, 300k in donations.
	Wow.
	So, and that was done through...
	Something called Magic Fund, which is not run by us.
	It's run by some...
	It's a 501c3 in the US. So if you donate to it, it's tax-deductible.
	So a couple of people who really support and like what we did.
	And some of them are companies that we...
	chance in helping Firo and they have now taken off and they were like, hey, look, we like you guys, let's contribute and it helps my taxes.
	So that has really helped us.
	So I would say, although the primary revenue would be from the block reward, We do get substantial donations.
	And from time to time, there's a separate committee that's not set on by the core teams elected by the community.
	And that has a separate fund that they can fund anything.
	And sometimes if we have like specific things that, hey, we need an additional researcher, we need an additional developer, would the committee fund it?
	And sometimes they contribute there as well.
	But I would say as a whole, I would say we probably have like 40-50 thousand US dollars per month to run everything.
	Not just development, but everything.
	Yeah, so you have to be very efficient with your decisions.
	Of where to spend.
	And I mean, you've also been, I think your people there, your team, they've been really critical in the mathematics development of, for example, Lelantis Spark, which, as I understand it, is quite a revolutionary change or advancement in what's going to happen. is quite a revolutionary change or advancement in what's going I want to ask you about that.
	But I mean, you have to hire math people and then people to do proofs and people to try to break the proofs and so on.
	Right.
	Isn't that part of it?
	Yes.
	It's not an easy process.
	I'm like...
	That's why it takes so much time and development to build a new protocol from scratch.
	It's not like I'm just implementing that something someone else has already done or implementing something that's already been fully described.
	It's actually like coming up with the math, the constructions, and then checking that, you know, forming the security proofs with that, then doing the code Then, tracking the code and auditing that.
	So, there's many, many processes.
	So, like, for example, the LanternSpot, we first announced it in 2021, in August-ish.
	But we have been already working on it for, like, six months prior to that.
	Like, we're trying to figure out the math.
	And then, since August 2021 to now, even the protocol has...
	There's been multiple revisions to make it better and more functional.
	And only now, in maybe a couple, one or two weeks' time, we're going to see the testnet for Spark.
	So, these type of things actually take quite a long time.
	So, it's a lot of unsung work.
	And I hope the audience appreciates the fact that this is not like just forking Bitcoin and putting a new name on it and having a fully transparent blockchain.
	I mean, privacy coins are way more complicated, as even Monero knows as well.
	And there are many different approaches, you know, ZK-SNARKs or Zero Knowledge Proofs or Mimble Wimble, Volantis, as you're using.
	And each one of these requires some really hardcore mathematics and some good coders and some good auditors to be able to make it work.
	And especially since it seems like the governments of the world are always trying to find backdoors or how to break into things like Monero, right?
	So far, I don't think they're having much success, but they're going to try.
	That's for sure.
	Your thoughts?
	Yeah, I mean, definitely.
	I think, you know, there's...
	Unfortunately, like, you know, there's this tendency for...
	For, like, projects or different protocols to kind of hit on each other.
	Like, mine's better than yours and stuff like that.
	But at the end of the day, you know, there's always trade-offs, right?
	Like, you know, I want to get, like, really high privacy and all of that.
	Then, like, oh, with ZK Snarks, you have a trusted setup.
	You're using very, like, exotic cryptography and all of that, which had some issues to begin with, right?
	Yeah.
	And then you have like Mimber Wimber, which is like really simple and cool, but then, you know, in certain cases, you know, it doesn't offer really good privacy on the transaction graph area.
	For us, I guess we're saying like, you know, we're kind of like a jack-of-all-trades.
	We're kind of good at everything.
	And I think one of the beauty of designs of Spark as well is designed to be...
	Leads to a certain extent future proof because we designed it to be modular.
	So what that means is that when new kind of zero-knowledge proofs come about or stuff, we can take out a certain component and kind of slot it in and upgrade it without changing the entire structure or redoing everything from scratch.
	So I think that's a very powerful concept that I guess is more for us geeky, nerdy people, but it does have real-life consequences I want to ask you more about Spark, but before we get there, let's talk about the way FIRO works right now, because I do have a practical question that's come up.
	I understand that FIRO can always be privacy-oriented, but The transactions often come in and then they need to be anonymized.
	Can you explain what this anonymization step actually is doing and why this is necessary in the current pre-Spark implementation?
	Right.
	So, okay.
	I'll try to keep it short, but there's a history to this.
	So, Fero actually launched as Zcoin in 2016.
	It's the same blockchain, just a rebrand, right?
	And we started with something called the ZeroCoin protocol, which is not the same as the ZeroCash protocol that is used in Zcash.
	And they were...
	I guess ZeroCoin is kind of like the predecessor to ZeroCash, but it required a lot less fast assumptions, and it was a much more simpler system, which had some benefits as well.
	But, you know, Zcash went down the ZeroCash route, and we continued with the ZeroCoin route.
	And ZeroCoin was designed to be actually for Bitcoin.
	It was meant to be a privacy protocol for Bitcoin.
	Really?
	I didn't know that.
	Huh.
	Yeah.
	So when it was a proposal, but, you know, it didn't really gain traction because, you know, it was like, this is too experimental.
	This is too crazy.
	It's not that scalable and all of that.
	So it was kind of like put back on the shelf.
	Right.
	But then what zero coin basically allowed you to do is to burn coins and That means, like, the kind of, like, make a certain commitment on the blockchain, but it kind of disappears, like the trace disappears, and then after that, any time in the future, to redeem them for things that come from this common proof.
	So, like, think of it like...
	I shouldn't use mahjong if you're having a Western audience.
	Mahjong, yeah.
	I think our people understand that.
	Many fans.
	You're piling all your towels together and Everyone's putting in this...
	It's like a bucket of coins.
	Everyone's throwing their coins into it whenever they burn it, right?
	And then when they want to get a new coin, they just take a random coin.
	Oh, well, that's not really a random coin, but it's like there's a black box.
	You can't tell which exact coin I'm pulling from that bucket.
	So that means it's kind of like pulling it out from this...
	Like, dark bucket, right?
	And when that coin comes back up, there's no previous associated transaction history associated there.
	Because, like, with Bitcoin, right, you can trace the coin from its very inception, when it was first mined, right?
	Any coin, you can do that.
	But with these coins that go into the zero coin lane, you only can trace it to the point when they come up of the bucket, right?
	And so...
	And because it was designed for Bitcoin, it had that transparent addresses.
	It also offers some auditability because you can always see the amount is there.
	Everyone can see the amount.
	And therefore, if you want to anonymize it, you need your private keys to send that back into the The pool, right?
	So that's why there's this anonymization feature because we started out with a zero coin back down.
	We kind of reiterated and improved on that on many, many ways.
	And then now, right now, like...
	Okay, maybe I'll stop here, but I'll let you continue your question.
	Yeah, sorry.
	No, no, this has been great.
	So one of my questions in the anonymization step, I've noticed, is very rapid.
	It doesn't seem like it's a step that requires multiple confirmations or anything.
	That's not the way it works.
	No, no, that's right.
	And then every coin that comes out of that pool then is, of course, as you said, it has no transaction history, so it's a fully fungible coin now.
	It's as good as any freshly minted coin.
	Yes, it's like a freshly minted coin.
	Correct.
	That's right.
	Yeah, mind.
	Excuse me.
	I should use the word mind.
	So, but now, as I understand it, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, then under Lelanta Spark, which is your next protocol that, as you said, is going to be on testnet in a few weeks, then this anonymization step is no longer necessary, correct?
	Yes.
	Right, that's right.
	Like you can just send directly from any transparent layer into the Spark address and that person doesn't have to do anything.
	It just goes directly into this Spark address, kind of like your shielded layer, your private layer and you don't have to do that because We didn't use to have a separate addressing structure for private transactions.
	We only had one, which was the transparent layer.
	And you have that anonymous pool, but you didn't have a separate addressing system for the anonymous pool.
	With Spark, you have that, like, you know, I would say like a whole ecosystem in the private where you can send to each other, even within that layer.
	You don't have to bring it out of the bucket.
	Yeah.
	Huh.
	Okay.
	That's interesting.
	And also, isn't addressing simplified under SPARC? Well, it's simplified in the sense that for the user, it's really complex.
	Right, for the user, it's simplified now.
	There's less for the user to have to worry about.
	That's right.
	So that means you don't have to re-anonymize or something.
	You can send to someone with a Spark address or even if they're using a transparent address, it's all the same, the same process itself.
	Everything is...
	And you can share that address.
	You know, like, you know, with Bitcoin, you're supposed to use, like, a new address every time.
	And even with current, like, Vero, you've recommended to use the new addresses whenever you're receiving.
	But that's kind of like a downer because, yeah, it's very obvious, right?
	So we want people to be able to share their address like an email address.
	And when they receive funds...
	No one can look into your email and know when you're receiving stuff.
	So it works like an email address for your coins, which is how addresses should work.
	Yeah, so this brings up a really important couple of questions, and I'm glad you mentioned that.
	So on our platform, brighttown.com, we have so far implemented, you know, we wanted a tipping system where users could send crypto tips to the content creators whose videos they enjoy.
	And so the first tipping system, the first coin that we embraced was Monero.
	And because it was easy for people to just publish a Monero wallet receive address, and then our website just pops up the QR code and people can just send.
	You know, very easy.
	We don't have any logs.
	It doesn't go through us, right?
	It's non-custodial on our part.
	We have no idea who's tipping who, which is frankly the way we want it.
	And then...
	We introduced the Epic Cash coin as a tipping system as well.
	And then that brought up the conundrum of the Mimbo Wimbo blockchain and how wallets have to be open to talk to each other at the same time.
	So people would try to tip other people, but then those receiving wallets wouldn't be open at that time.
	And then those transactions would just stall until they're canceled.
	So my question to you, you've already answered the single address.
	We want to implement FIRO also as a tipping system.
	I mean, we will do that, by the way.
	So people can just, especially under Spark, they can just have one receive address, no problem to make that public, correct?
	Yes, correct.
	That's right.
	And then, if somebody sends to that address, the other receiving wallet doesn't have to be open at that time, correct?
	That's right.
	There's no, what we call in technicals, interactivity.
	It can be done totally passively.
	The other person doesn't have to be online.
	Okay, and thank you for confirming that.
	I just want to make sure.
	And for the audience, let me translate this to the audience.
	You know that when you send, let's say, Fero from your wallet to somebody else's wallet, it's actually not sending from a wallet to another wallet, right?
	It's posting it to the blockchain, and then the receiving wallet simply gets a kind of permission to assert ownership and control over those transaction outputs on the blockchain.
	Am I saying this correctly, Ruben?
	Yeah, I mean, basically, the ownership of the coins are being passed to a key that is within a new person's country or something like that.
	Perfect.
	Okay, great.
	And then it doesn't matter, like, a person can go on vacation for three months and come back, open their wallet, it's going to scan the blockchain, it's going to synchronize, and boom, all those transactions are now theirs.
	Yes, yes.
	I mean, most cryptocurrencies work like that.
	Mimberwimber is an exception because of this requirement of interactivity.
	This is a great feature.
	It's more like this is how most other blockchains work.
	Bitcoin works the same way.
	But yeah, every other coin works like that.
	You know, this is interesting.
	Every kind of protocol has advantages and disadvantages and so on, right?
	Like ring signatures, you know, tends to make the blockchain, you know, quite a bit larger in terms of how many kilobytes per transaction, right?
	Like Mimblewimble is pretty small because of its, you know, pruning, self-pruning, whatever it does, coin join, whatever.
	What about Firo?
	How's the transaction size looking for Firo transactions?
	Right now, I would say it would be competitive with Monero-ish, but yes, there is some bloat, but I don't think it's going to be a problem, because people always talk about the bloat issue, but let's be real, right?
	Like, right now, our entire blockchain is fixed in, like, 20 gigabytes or something, and we've been operating since, like, 2016, right?
	So, I mean, sure, maybe if we see, like, a huge uptake, but, you know, even SSDs now are, like, 1 terabyte and stuff like that.
	The main thing is that...
	How fast are you going to be able to sync your wallet?
	If you can sync it in a decent amount of time and your thing can actually solve it, then there shouldn't be an issue like, oh, we're going to optimize so heavily on disk storage, which I don't think is the bottleneck in most cases, right?
	And nowadays, you know, there are now more, I would say, Better light wallet infrastructure where you can actually only take a small proportion of the blockchain and strip all the thing out and still almost function like a full node because you're going to be using zero-knowledge proofs to verify the state of the chain or something like that.
	So I think...
	I mean, to me, yeah, you know, Mimber Wimber is a very elegant solution in certain cases, but it's also very conditional because the savings come from the cut-through, right?
	Around A, B to C, you only need to store A to C. But...
	There still is data that needs to be stored, right?
	So, to me, you know, it's a trade-off that we have.
	I wouldn't say like, oh, yes, ours is the smallest or ours is the most scalable, but I don't think it's a problem that we...
	It's kind of like the least priority of issues when we're trying to discuss about building a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency.
	The world is already so wide, yeah.
	I agree with you, and storage is so cheap.
	I was buying these NVMe modules a terabyte for $35.
	It's like, wow, this is crazy.
	I couldn't have imagined that.
	So how about this?
	Share with us, if you would, your vision of where are you trying to, or you and your team and all the contributors, what's the plan for Firo?
	I mean, obviously, Atlanta's Spark, we've mentioned that, but How do you see FIRO playing a role in the future of private digital money?
	Right.
	So, the way I see it is that, you know, in the short term, because we're going to develop Spark, because we spent a lot of time getting our fundamentals right, and we think that Spark is the right platform to start, like, really, you know, just focusing on the use case rather than just purely on the tech, right?
	So, we already got Spark bear down.
	But now, the next thing that we're going to be doing is what we call Spark assets, right?
	Which we allow people to actually create their own tokens.
	That means...
	Fever doesn't just become a cryptocurrency.
	It becomes like a privacy ecosystem.
	And the beauty about Spark assets is that anyone can create their own coin.
	It can be a dog coin.
	It can be a stable coin.
	It can be a voting token.
	It can be anything.
	But the beauty about Spark assets is that all the assets share a common anonymity set.
	What that means is that on the blockchain, You cannot tell whether a stable coin or a dog coin or a Ruben coin or even Furo is being transferred.
	It's just like something has been transferred.
	I don't know what.
	I don't know who.
	I don't know who sent it.
	I don't know who received it.
	I don't know the amount.
	I don't even know the asset that is being transferred.
	So what that means is that even if I have a small little dot coin called, I don't know, Shiba Rubin, right?
	And there's only 100 people using it.
	Previously, that would be a problem in privacy because your anonymity says it's only with this 100 people, right?
	Or maybe there's not many people using Firo or some other coin.
	But because...
	You're building a whole system where everyone shares this common pool.
	Everyone's usage of the token increases everyone's crowd, right?
	So I see that as, you know, rather than, you know, focusing just on payments.
	I mean, sure, we can be used for payments and I don't think that would go away.
	But I think we also have to realize that Beyond just being a replacement to current money, what blockchain has allowed us to do is to create, in a way, new forms of money, new closed-loop crypto-native ecosystems, kind of like what Ethereum has done with DeFi or even with NFTs.
	If you want to get into NFTs, you need to have crypto.
	You want to do stuff in DeFi, you need to have crypto.
	You can't put You have to make US dollars into a crypto coin before you can assess those ecosystems.
	And that to me is not to say that traditional payments are not important.
	Of course, that's super important, but it is further and further Carrying the strength of this alternative financial system that you're building.
	So I feel that it is important that we embrace the full, I would say, opportunities that blockchains and token ecosystems provide, rather than just saying, we're just going to be focusing on payments.
	And that gives greater utility to Firo and its blockchain, rather than just being for payments.
	Wow.
	That's huge news, as far as I'm concerned, for this show and for our audience.
	That's huge news.
	And I've shared this publicly, that we are constantly looking for a way to take our online store loyalty program, and instead of giving people loyalty points that we centrally store in our database, we want to give them loyalty tokens.
	And loyalty tokens they can always use as cash in our store, but they could also send tokens to other people or even maybe sell those tokens themselves, whatever cash value somebody else wants to offer.
	So you're saying that with FIRO, at some point then, we could theoretically build like a store token, a reward token on top of FIRO. It would work in the FIRO wallets?
	You don't even think it would work in the FIRO wallets?
	Yeah, I mean, definitely that would have to be put into the wallets.
	We may have even custom wallets to do it.
	But the blockchain will support it.
	And I guess the only, I would say, usability issue is that you have to have a little bit of Fero just to pay for the gas.
	So that's it.
	That makes sense, yeah.
	But it's very inexpensive.
	Like fractions of a penny.
	So then all the nodes that are running Fero would, of course, continue to just function as nodes that support the things on top of Fero.
	That's right.
	That means it's not like some, you know, it's not like Bitcoin ordinance, this thing that's kind of like, you know, kind of hacked on.
	It's with native support, and it kind of, like, I would say that it enjoys all the privacy benefits of Fira, right?
	Like, it has all the Spark address.
	Your Spark address can hold multiple different assets as well.
	There's no, like, you know, separate whole ecosystem that you need to build.
	So we also hope to, like, you know, make it easy because smart technologies allows very efficient what we call threshold multi-sigs, which are really important when you're doing cross-gridging stuff.
	So it's not just about multi-signature, like, custodial type of thing.
	It's also important when you're talking about cross-chain bridges, right?
	So let's say, like, you know, it may not be realistic to expect a regulated USDC to build It on Fero, right?
	But they're probably going to...
	They already built it on Ethereum, right?
	But if people can bridge it over into the Fero ecosystem, then I don't need to put my own stablecoin.
	I don't need to do all that risk, right?
	And have it exist in Fero's ecosystem as a bridge asset into the thing.
	So that's why I think that rather than doing all this, like, you know, if you want to have privacy on Ethereum, use something like Tornado Cash and that has, like, a lot of metadata leakage and all of that and...
	All their sanction addresses, you know, just bridge it over into Firo and just leave it there and transact as you like.
	And I think that's quite powerful.
	So it's still a work in progress, but, you know, something I'm really excited about.
	That's pretty cool.
	But Ruben, you are definitely getting kind of techy on us.
	So let me help translate for the audience here.
	Okay.
	And, folks, let me just remind you that the world is going into digital money.
	Whether we like it or not, that's what's happening.
	And as I see it, there are really two choices here, you know?
	Or maybe you'll use both, but there's the central bank digital currencies, you know, the Treasury, the Fed, the governments with their currencies, which are not decentralized, they're not private, they're centrally controlled and they can be programmed.
	So that they can, of course, limit your usage or reward you if your behavior matches the behavior that they wish to see, right?
	In other words, you're programmable also.
	Not just the money, but socially programmable.
	Or you can choose decentralized private digital money that's peer-to-peer That's what we focus on on this show.
	So that's FIRO. So the truth is, if any of this sounds a little bit technical, a little bit intimidating, the truth is we are all going to have to become literate and competent in using these systems and understanding these wallets and learning the terminology.
	So don't be intimidated by it.
	There's a lot of tech behind the scenes, but ultimately projects like yours, Ruben, your desire is to make these more user friendly so that more people can easily enter this realm without having to understand what's under the hood.
	Because frankly, what's under the hood is pretty scary to a lot of people.
	Right.
	Your thoughts?
	I mean, just to put it down into very simple terms, it's like, there are US dollar coins that are being issued on other systems like Ethereum, right?
	And rather than having...
	Because if you want to launch a US dollar coin, you need regulatory approval, you need banks and all of that, which is really tough, right?
	But...
	What bridging does is that I can have those assets brought over into the FIRO ecosystem where you can do all these things privately and then if you want to convert it back into fiat, you can go back.
	So it's just like...
	Rather than thinking of blockchains as closed ecosystems, they all somehow can be connected to each other and you'll be using different blockchains for different things.
	For some blockchains which are more centralized but have higher performance, You can use it for gaming tokens.
	You can be using it for all these NFTs and stuff because, well, you're not so concerned about centralization when I'm just doing some online blockchain game.
	I need the higher performance while Firo's blockchain is like, well, I want privacy.
	I want to do it deep.
	I don't want to have any compromises there.
	So then I'll use Firo's blockchain.
	So that's how I see Firo fitting into the larger ecosystem, not just like one coin rules them all, which, you know, this is increasingly the Bitcoin attitude, which is impossible.
	You cannot optimize for everything.
	You have to choose...
	What does my blockchain stand for?
	What is the blockchain features that make me unique?
	Rather than say, I'm trying to do everything and you end up being good at nothing.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Good point.
	And I think a really important use case for Furo and other privacy coins is that many people in the world are living in places where there are wars, let's say, going on.
	So there are refugees out of war zones.
	There are refugees from economic collapse zones, such as Venezuela, for example.
	The history of the world is a history of revolutions and collapse, and sometimes currencies collapse, and sometimes political dissidents are persecuted by whatever regime is in power in whatever country around the world.
	I mean, North Korea, for example.
	So private digital money is a way also for people to take store of value with them in their head.
	By memorizing the seed phrase and then restoring the wallet at their destination.
	So if you try to take gold out of one of those countries, it's probably going to be taken from you.
	Anything physical, it's going to get stolen.
	But if you take something in your mind and then you can restore it when you get to a safe destination, then that preserves the value and allows you to restart a life wherever your destination happens to be.
	Does that...
	I know you agree with that Ruben, but what are your thoughts on that?
	I mean, like, even not going to that, like, extent, you know, which is, yes, you know, it's happening, it's very dystopian, but some people may say, oh, that's not going to happen to me.
	I mean, you know, that's why we're trying to fight for the future, that that doesn't happen, right?
	We're making these things.
	But at the same time, even, like, even now, right, I am facing issues.
	For example, our lead developer is Russian, right?
	He's not a supporter of the war or anything like that, but then because of sanctions, you know, he's He's in trouble too, not because he's being targeted specifically, but then it's just by virtue of being a Russian, regardless of your actual affiliation.
	I couldn't pray to him, I couldn't do all this sort of stuff.
	Cryptocurrency offers that ability for me, for him to do totally legal work, right?
	It's just coding, right?
	And allow me to do that, right?
	Of course, we managed to relocate him and all of that, but The fact that...
	Okay, there's another example where we have one researcher who's a Nicaraguan.
	I'm not sure how to pronounce that.
	Yeah, Nicaraguan.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So apparently the U.S. imposed certain sanctions on specific individuals, but then now companies are like, no, we're not sending any money to Nicaragua, even though this person won first prize.
	In a particular zero-knowledge competition, they say, no, we can't send it to the UN. That's total rubbish, right?
	Nowadays, sanctions are now, I would say, one of the preferred ways for countries, or rather the U.S., To kind of exert their dominance.
	And we are seeing the increased weaponization of money.
	China's doing it.
	Every superpower is going to be trying to weaponize money.
	CBDCs are a step in that direction, but that doesn't mean that we don't already have this kind of control, right?
	It's happening today.
	And that's why we have to have this separate financial system That kind of exists alongside it, right?
	That allows you to have this type of freedom.
	So yeah, it's going to be a battle, but it's affecting people today, not even people fleeing or stuff like that.
	That's a really good...
	Really excellent insight there, Ruben.
	And let me just add to it.
	And yes, the U.S. loves to fling sanctions around the world at the drop of a hat, it seems.
	But what we've all observed is that the sanctions, they never really hurt the leaders of the countries that they're intended to hurt.
	They end up hurting the everyday people, right?
	The farmer, the coder, the farmer.
	You know, the small business owner.
	And so the sanctions are really an inappropriate weapon, a financial weapon that, again, only hurts, typically hurts the innocent.
	And we've seen that, especially over the last, you know, year and a half or whatever has been going on with the U.S. and Russia and so on.
	But this fundamental issue of the right to private money, that is the right to control the output of your labor, The right to determine how you wish to spend or not spend, i.e.
	save your money, without being subjected to all of these controls, limitations, withdrawal limits, dictates, and so on.
	This is a fundamental human right now that I really see being asserted by even Bitcoiners.
	Now, I hear Bitcoiners talking like Austrian economists.
	And this is something new.
	I didn't hear this five or ten years ago out of crypto.
	And now it's like crypto is coming into this maturity of understanding the role of autonomy, self-determination in your money.
	And I think it's a beautiful thing to see.
	Yeah.
	I mean, just to kind of add to that, this is kind of like a pet peeve of mine because like, yeah, you know, I really love Bitcoin.
	You know, it was like the OG that started it all and has the most adoption and stuff like that.
	But increasingly, I'm very frustrated with the top leadership or rather the vocal top leadership surrounding it.
	You know, when people talk about, oh yeah, censorship resistance, but then you have all transparent addresses that can be locked down, or like, say, like, don't accept money from this particular address or any funds that stem from it.
	You can have this decentralized, you know, currency, but because of existing regulations...
	And, you know, all the funds are visible sitting in an address, those can be sanctioned and affected as well.
	I mean, like, remember in Bitcoin, the trace of every single Bitcoin can always be traced back.
	So once I've sanctioned this one address, Any funds that flow from that, once it hits to anything, it's going to be locked down as well.
	So that's why I see privacy cryptocurrencies, where you can't even see where the funds are sitting on, is very important.
	And of course, people would argue and say, well, you know, isn't this kind of enabling crime and all of that?
	And I feel like that's a bit of a distraction, right?
	Like, We always talk about privacy, cryptocurrency as being used by criminals and stuff like that.
	But look, you know, all the big crimes in the world are happening through the regular financial system and it is not difficult to hide it, right?
	True.
	So it's kind of like you can have controls.
	Like if you want, if the government wants to control, you know, control it at the point of conversion when you convert it from crypto to fiat.
	Like apply the same rules that you apply to cash to crypto.
	I don't see why there should be a war on crypto per se, right?
	So anyway, that's a bit digressing, but I just like really pissed off when people say, oh, we offer sensitive resistance.
	And they're like, no, use Bitcoin.
	And then like, no, it's kind of like, yeah, it's not good.
	It can get you in trouble.
	Do you think, Ruben, that, you know, a lot of people, when they buy Bitcoin, they think Bitcoin is something like Monero.
	Right?
	And only later do they learn, like after they've sent 50 transactions and maybe bought cocaine or whatever out of their wallet, then later on they realize, oh my gosh, that's all traceable, right?
	And then it seems like it's an education process to realize that, you know, oh my gosh, Bitcoin is actually very public.
	Every transaction is recorded and visible by anybody, not just, you know, chain analysis, but other companies.
	Don't you think that's the case with a lot of people?
	They just don't yet know.
	Interestingly, this is how I got into cryptocurrencies because I started the VPN service in 2007.
	And in 2012, 2013, VPNs were considered, even though they were not illegal, they were considered hiring as kind of like in the same category as gambling and pornography for some reasons.
	And we were being deplatformed from many payment processes and all of that.
	Wow.
	And then someone said, like, hey, why don't you take a look into Bitcoin?
	I was like, what the heck is that, right?
	And then, you know, I don't want to be...
	All these customers were telling me, if you're a privacy service, you're a VPN service, I don't want to give up my payment details to anyone, so why don't I pay you with Bitcoin?
	So, you know, back then, Bitcoin was considered anonymous enough, right?
	And then I realized, oh, well, actually, it's not that anonymous.
	It's probably not anonymous.
	But back then, you know, the infrastructure wasn't that great, right?
	Then I went down the rabbit hole, went into Merrill, went into Darkcoin, which is now Dash.
	And that's how I kind of, like, ended up, you know...
	In Fear or Zcoin, right?
	So it's this whole trail of history from Bing D platform, from financial services, for doing something that's totally illegal, right?
	Wow!
	That's a fascinating history.
	I didn't know that.
	But it brings up...
	The first time I ever used Monero was to buy VPN services for that specific reason.
	I didn't want my credit card on file on a VPN. That kind of defeats the purpose.
	Yeah.
	And even with the person, no logs, right?
	So how do you know?
	No logs.
	Yeah.
	You don't know.
	You don't know.
	So at least you can use a privacy crypto.
	But let's talk about that for a second.
	FIRO is not yet, to my knowledge, I mean, you know how Binance deleted a bunch of privacy coins.
	I think, wasn't FIRO one that Binance dropped because of that?
	It's very confusing.
	So first of all, I mean, Binance only delisted us in four countries in Europe, which is like Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal.
	So when they say delistings, it's like delistings in four different countries.
	And they cited local regulatory concerns.
	They didn't tell me their specific thing.
	I said, is it because of MICA, which is an upcoming regulation in Europe that comes into force sometime next year?
	They say no local regulations and whatnot.
	And then after that, Binance kind of went around and said, oh, we're relisting a bunch of coins like Zcash.
	PIVX, you know, like Verge and all of that.
	And that, I mean, to me, I'm not one to kind of shit on coins, but I really cannot stand it when you're a privacy coin and you are celebrating how transparent you are.
	Yeah, like a bunch of coins went back to Binance and said, we're not really that private.
	Everything's public, you know?
	Everything, you can see our mouths and say, who's sending to whom?
	I'm like, wait a minute.
	If we're not like, you say you're a privacy coin, now we're saying we're not a privacy coin.
	Like, if you're not a privacy coin, you say not, that's fine.
	But if you're selling yourself as a privacy coin and then say, oh no, we're not compliant, well...
	It doesn't mean, like, transparent or private doesn't mean non-compliant.
	It just means that you just sold yourself out, right?
	So, anyway, we also, like, were really confused because it was like, well, what is the difference between something like Zcash, which also has a transparent layer, versus us, right?
	Like, if you think on it from a regulatory perspective, the The same amount of data is being leaked when you use transparent addresses.
	And, you know, there was, like, this back and forth, and I was, like, trying to convince them.
	Eventually, they still said, no, you're still in the same boat as Monero, Beam.
	Beam was already delisted a long time ago, so I don't know why they included them.
	Yeah, they mentioned Beam twice.
	Like, we banned you, and we banned you again.
	It was kind of funny.
	Yeah, even NAF, like, they got banned, like, many years ago, and then they're like, you know, like, why keep on hitting them down, right?
	So now I'm not really sure what's going on, because I think guidance is facing also a lot of regulatory pressure from many ends.
	So now, apparently, we are still available in these countries, but I don't know, I don't have my...
	I don't have my, you know, hopes up that we're going to be there forever, at least in certain jurisdictions.
	I don't think Binance will, like, delist this completely, but it will probably limit access to Furo in different countries, right?
	Yeah, but I think that...
	Not being listed on these exchanges, I don't think that's a death blow for any project.
	In fact, there are some benefits to it because the whole idea of decentralization is really the antithesis of what these centralized exchanges are often doing, especially when people hold their coins on the exchanges.
	It's like, whoa, what are you even doing in crypto?
	Don't you understand the ethos of this?
	You know, you're supposed to hold your own coins in your own wallet.
	If you don't understand that, you might not be in the right place, right?
	So I love...
	I mean, there might be a short-term hit to projects, but long-term, I think it's a healthy process to get people off those exchanges to doing more peer-to-peer usage of these coins.
	Do you agree with that?
	I guess a more nuanced take on this, because obviously in the ideal world, I would like everyone to be using, you know, decentralized exchanges, atomic swaps, and all of that good stuff, which we already have.
	We have, you know, cross-chain atomic swaps on our ferro decks and all of that, right?
	But we're seeing very, very little uptake, even with The only time that I saw a huge uptake in use in our DAX was when USDC was crashing and it was losing its pack.
	And then people were just letting us buy all the USDC on these DAXes.
	So they just completely wiped out the liquidity for USDC on our DAX. So that was, I guess, interesting, but...
	Other than that, there aren't that many users.
	And I feel that a delisting, even for something like Monero, like if you take away Binance and Troken at the same time, they will lose a lot of integrations, all the swap providers that rely on them and all of that.
	And we say, yeah, in the long term, it'll be fine.
	Yeah, maybe Monero, maybe, right?
	But for many like smaller projects, like how do we get back to that, I would say, like critical mass to be able to function as a currency, right?
	Like we have seen many coins that function well, but then they just don't have the liquidity for that.
	So ideally, it's a face approach out.
	Yeah.
	Well, let me ask you a practical question then on that.
	So, you know, we reach a very large audience of relatively well-to-do people, right?
	So our audience is not broke 22-year-olds, okay?
	Which is usually the people that are doing the exchanges.
	They have no money, but they want, you know, VIP tech support, by the way.
	Our audience...
	Actually, they have a lot of money.
	They've worked 30 or 40 years, they're retiring, or they have pensions, they have savings, but they don't have a lot of strong technical knowledge necessarily.
	There are exceptions to that, but usually the tech is more intimidating.
	But how can they interact with FIRO right now?
	Tell us, just in simple terms, if people want FIRO or want to use FIRO, what's the DEX? What's the web address for that?
	No, it's got fewer decks.
	I have to admit, at the moment, there's a GitHub page to that.
	It is not the most user-friendly, and that's why I don't expect people to use it right now, because it's easy for us, because you just start it up, you set up a wallet, and then you just use it as anything, but there is a learning curve.
	But I feel like for easy people, Use something like a swap provider like ChangeNow and whatnot.
	At least you're not beholden to a particular exchange or whatnot.
	But eventually, the end goal is to get these DEXs to a point where the user interface, you don't have to download anything.
	You don't have to download a separate client.
	You can just do it from within a website or your browser or something like that and be able to trade.
	And by that point, because there's a lot of DEX infrastructure, but there's no...
	If the swap providers can integrate with DEX liquidity, which is very slowly happening, but once that happens, I say, oh yeah, you know, if we lose centralized exchanges, that's fine.
	But this is still a process, and this is still like...
	The problem is that centralized exchanges will always offer the gateway to fiat.
	To do that in a decentralized manner is very hard because even stuff like local Monero or stuff like that is far from ideal.
	You can't do it for large amounts or anything like that.
	So I do think that the tax infrastructure has to catch up.
	Yeah.
	We interviewed Local Monero, and I've used Local Monero, and I experienced that.
	There's a lot of roadblocks, especially if you want to move a large amount of fiat into Monero.
	You know, you're going to pay super high premiums through that kind of process as well.
	And, you know, the exchanges can make that way more cost-effective if you can get on the exchange and complete the KYC, which not everybody can, right?
	That's right, yeah.
	It's almost like there's a penalty, obviously, or a premium you pay for not being able to go through KYC. By the way, I was temporarily banned by Kraken, and then I tweeted about it, and I said, why are they banning me?
	This is crazy.
	I didn't even do a single transaction, by the way.
	And then they reached out to me, and they apologized, and they reinstated me, and they said that what happened was they thought Somebody was impersonating me.
	And they shut it down because they couldn't believe that it was actually me doing this.
	I'm like, hey, I gave you my ID and everything.
	What do you think?
	Somebody looted my passport and everything?
	But they have to be kind of hyper-security-minded because there's a lot of people committing fraud from the fiat side to try to get the crypto because the crypto transactions are non-reversible.
	Correct.
	That's right.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, like, you know, I... You know, even though I'm really, like, pro-freedom, pro, like, you know, decentralized stuff, like, if you're going to still live in a world of fiat, which is hard to do so, but it's hard to not do so, you know, you have to expect that they would...
	You cannot say, screw regulation, you know, even though this thing says, like, crypto anarchy and stuff like that, like, they still need...
	If you're still going to live in a fiat world, there are some people who manage to live completely on crypto, but even they rely on centralized services to convert their crypto into credit cards or gift cards and all of that.
	Those still rely on centralized liquidity, right?
	So to say that, oh, can Monero survive if they lose all their centralized exchange listings tomorrow?
	Probably not, you know.
	Another cryptocurrency that maybe offers some privacy that still remains listed would take that place, right?
	I mean, this is where we are in this world, right?
	And unfortunately, like, Monero right now is, like, kind of a bit like a bogeyman, right?
	Like, if we're going to ban something, we're going to ban Monero.
	That's right.
	So I feel that, yes, we should be aiming to a world that we can survive all centralized exchange delistings, but realistically, that's not going to happen that quickly.
	It's a process, right?
	We have to...
	And whereas, I guess, maybe even they cannot survive something like that.
	I mean, this is just pure speculation, right?
	Yeah, that's interesting because I... Respectfully, I think Monero could survive that for a number of reasons, but its value would probably take a hit, no question about that.
	But I think it could survive in a lot of...
	I think there are a lot of communities, actually, that want to take up some form of digital private money to use amongst themselves.
	co-ops and PMAs, private membership associations.
	And so I see a lot of that happening and we're actually interviewing a future guest about that.
	But just to get back to FIRO, you're never, let me, I mean, let me confirm, you're never gonna have FIRO, I mean, it's always going to be private, right?
	It's not gonna be a choice like Zcash where it could be public or private, is that correct? - So I mean, right now, because of the transparent layer, there's like, you know, this thing, right?
	But we spark, you know, we're going to make all our wallets private by default, right?
	But whether it's enforced, that is because there are certain parts of the infrastructure that still relies on the transparent address, like the masternodes and stuff like that.
	That's our next step.
	So we're going to remove all of that from the transparent layer, then switch to full spark.
	Then you'll be like, you know, mandatory privacy, no more, I would say like, no more playing around with the transparent layer, which I guess is a legacy that we inherited from our zero coin heritage.
	But there needs to be some steps to happen there.
	We already have a roadmap to get there, but it requires development time.
	But I do feel that even with Spark as it is, it's going to be a very, very major step in the right direction to getting more people using the private transactions.
	Because One of the things that Binance told me was like, if you guys want to be not included in the privacy coin list, you can sign up with a blockchain analysis firm that can certify that they can trace your transactions.
	I'm like, no, I'm not doing that.
	Yeah, to prove that you're a surveillance chain, basically.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Okay, well, wild.
	Now, we're about to wrap this up, and I really appreciate your time.
	We're coming up on an hour here, but I want to, it's one of the last things I want to say that my impression from taking a deep dive into this space, especially privacy coins, is that we're really in the infancy of private digital money.
	It's like a lot of things are trying to be sorted out, worked out.
	A lot of experiments are being run.
	Ideas are being floated.
	Some of them are being shot down and so on.
	Whereas sort of Bitcoin is pretty mature now, how many years later from its inception.
	But privacy coins are more in the adventure stage, it seems, right?
	And it's kind of exciting, and I'm really looking forward to what comes next, but a lot of questions have not been resolved yet.
	What's your take on that?
	While you would say it may seem very adventurous that we're always trying all these new things to hide privacy, the building blocks are starting to become very well understood.
	This is no longer seen.
	Certain components that we use, which used to be like, oh my god, we'll never be implementing that.
	That's too risky.
	Now it's just like, oh yeah, I'm going to use bulletproofs to hide the amounts.
	It's like...
	Certain components building blocks of it are becoming very well established that people just accept it as it is.
	And that's how we are progressing with our tech.
	Yes, there will always be new developments and stuff like that.
	I don't think there should be.
	They shouldn't be.
	But...
	I feel that we're getting to a good state in terms of technology, and it's not as adventurous as it used to be.
	You wouldn't have to worry.
	Sure, obviously, there's risk of cryptographic flaws and things like that, but I would say they are much more fewer and far between.
	It's getting better.
	I'm not saying there's no risk.
	Obviously, there is risk, but Projects are getting better at doing it, which is why when we had our paper, we had full security proofs, we had several audits and all of that.
	Obviously, none of this are 100%, but the state of privacy coins, the general quality of projects developing this stuff have been improving because we now fully understand the risks that we take when we are doing these things.
	What about the risk of switching over to Spark?
	Because if I were a project manager, that would be terrifying to me.
	People are using it, and then we've got to switch over.
	I don't know, is there a hard fork on the miners and things like that, right?
	Yeah.
	transition we've gone through like even the narrow has gone through like several hard fault transitions like that's not a problem as long as you have an engaged community like come on you know you don't need like you don't need like six months to upgrade like it's it's more or less a drop-in upgrade you just freaking update your wallet like what's the big deal right so um but then in terms of as as a project like you know steward
	and and someone that's like you know leading the project you know making sure that there's no bugs or catastrophic failures that's always weighing on my mind right and And that's why we, you know, people are like, oh, when are you going to launch Mainnet?
	That's why we are not rushing, like, technically, if you wanted us to do it, we can launch Mainnet right now, but...
	We're trying to be as careful as possible and making sure that we work out all this as much as we can.
	So yeah, it is terrifying.
	I mean, I'm not going to say that, oh, I'm totally sleeping soundly at night.
	When the hard fault date comes on, I can assure you all of us will be like...
	You know, looking at it.
	But at the same time, with this fear also comes a lot of excitement.
	And once, you know, the lantern spark has gone in, you know, thinks everything is smooth and everything, we all breathe a collective sigh of relief and be much happier with a much higher level of privacy.
	So, yeah.
	Okay.
	Well, I really look forward to that day, and I would love to, in fact, invite you back on the show.
	Thank you so much.
	That's quite a ways out, but when that happens, I think that's a couple months.
	Yeah, well, let's keep in touch because that's a huge deal.
	I mean, I think that's a major milestone, not just for FIRO, but actually for private digital money across the board.
	You know, the Lantus Spark upgrade.
	Has anybody else implemented that on mainnet yet?
	No, no.
	I mean, this is our protocol that we've been pushing.
	I would guess the closest would be Monero with their Seraphis protocol, which has a lot of shared elements with us.
	But they're still not close to mainnet launch, as far as I know.
	But yeah, so that's it.
	So, essentially, both FIRO and Monero are going to have some pretty major upgrades in the months ahead, or maybe for Monero, it might be well into next year.
	I mean, who knows?
	Yeah, that's right.
	But it's going to be exciting for both projects.
	Well, Ruben, this has been a real pleasure, and I just can't thank you enough.
	I mean, I've been looking forward to this for a long time.
	I've learned a lot from you, and you've shared some tremendously valuable information with us.
	I just want to thank you for your time.
	It's been great.
	Thank you.
	I hope I did not disappoint you.
	Not at all.
	Not at all.
	This has been great, but it's only scratching the surface.
	I mean, I know our audience is going to ping us and say, we've got to get you back on when they have more questions and so on and so forth.
	So, you know, to the extent that you're able to do that, we'll do that.
	And then what we're going to do right now for those watching is we're going to bring in my co-host, Todd Pitner, and he's going to review this interview because he wasn't able to be here during this interview.
	And then we're going to have a reaction discussion.
	About all of this.
	So Ruben, we won't say anything bad behind your back, by the way.
	But we're going to talk about this and what our thoughts are and where we think all this is going.
	And so that's going to be coming up next.
	But Ruben, thank you so much.
	We appreciate you.
	Thank you so much.
	This has been a real pleasure.
	And the website, folks, is FIRO.org.
	And there you can find out everything and find all the links and find all the wallets and everything you want to do.
	You know, just understand that this is not financial advice.
	You notice we don't talk about price and things like that.
	We don't talk about speculation.
	We're talking about the tech and the use cases because that's what we believe in.
	But I can say right here before I close this out, we do intend to implement FIRO as a tipping system on our platforms.
	And we do intend also to implement FIRO as a means of payment in our own online stores and to also advocate for that with our e-commerce partners that have been asking me, like, you know, how can we take privacy coins?
	So we're going to be implementing that and sharing code with them and doing a lot of cool things.
	So we're going to help create a lot of use cases.
	So hopefully, Ruben, that'll also give your community some use cases to look at and say, wow, you know, we can use Fero to buy, you know, organic food or whatever.
	So that's coming.
	So thank you very much.
	All right.
	So stay tuned, folks.
	Todd Pitner coming up with the reaction to this interview right here on Decentralized.tv.
	Take care, everybody.
	Join the official discussion channel for this show on telegram at t.me slash decentralized TV where you can ask questions or offer suggestions of who we should interview next.
	Also be sure to subscribe to the email newsletter on decentralized.tv where you'll be alerted about one day in advance of each new upcoming episode before it gets published.
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	Check it all out at Decentralize.tv.
	FIRO Scorecard.
	Advantages.
	Very strong original privacy tech with L'Atlantis.
	Tried and true cryptographic building blocks using discrete log.
	Very high anonymity sets under the new Lelantis Spark rollout.
	Healthy trading volume and liquidity means easy to get in and out.
	Shares innovations and some code structures with Monero developers.
	Every Firo coin is a fresh, fungible coin with no history or baggage.
	Transactions work even when receiving wallets are offline.
	No need for a trusted setup means better security.
	Under Spark, we'll support creation of private secure assets on top of FIRO. Disadvantages.
	Relatively few people know about FIRO compared to Monero.
	But this can also be an advantage as it won't be as quickly targeted by lawmakers trying to ban privacy coins.
	Isn't represented in popular online exchanges such as Kraken.
	Isn't yet accepted as a direct payment currency in many online stores.
	The Lelantis Spark upgrade isn't yet live and its success is not guaranteed.
	Currently requires an extra step in wallets to anonymize received transactions.
	Requires more processing power compared to non-privacy coins.
	Best use cases.
	Potentially viable for storing value in a way that isn't visible or trackable.
	Good for making donations or purchases without financial surveillance.
	It's fairly fast for privacy preserving e-commerce transactions.
	A viable way to transport assets across borders without government intervention or confiscation.
	All right, welcome back to Decentralized.tv.
	And in this segment, this is our reaction segment.
	We're now joined by my co-host, Todd Pitner.
	Welcome, Todd.
	Great to have you back.
	Hola, amigo.
	Good seeing you.
	Is that because you went traveling down to South America or wherever?
	Where were you?
	Central America?
	No, Costa Rica.
	Oh, yeah, you were in Costa Rica.
	Los sueños.
	So do you speak much Spanish?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Oh, we're taking a world tour now.
	Okay.
	All right.
	It's all good, but we welcome...
	My wife is Russian, so I can speak fluent.
	Oh, okay, okay.
	Nyet.
	No, not fluent Russian, just fluent nyet.
	Just fluent nyet.
	Okay.
	That's great.
	Well, get us all together.
	It's going to be like a world tour, you know?
	Yes.
	But anyway, you saw the interview with Ruben at FIRO, and this is what we're going to talk about here now.
	And Ruben isn't listening at the moment, so we can say whatever we want, although he'll probably hear about it.
	We should tell people that we made a game-time decision.
	We did invite a couple of guests to stay on, and then we decided, you know what?
	Not really fair to us, not really fair to them.
	You know, I mean, because what if we did say something that was negative?
	We wouldn't want to hurt their feelings.
	Not saying that we ever would.
	Well, we may have to hurt a few feelings along the way at some point.
	Probably.
	But maybe not today.
	But I'm not...
	I mean, look, we're here to assess these projects in the best way we can and to be very upfront with the audience of what we like and what we don't like.
	And, you know, there's another project that we did an interview and You and I both felt like that project wasn't really quite ready yet, and that's reflected in the review.
	But let's talk about FIRO today.
	So give us your initial reaction.
	You know, there are three things that I want to touch on in this review, and that is Shiller, Crypto Barbecue, and Bilbo Island.
	What's all that got to do?
	That's not crystal clear to you, Mike.
	No?
	No.
	Schiller, I had to take a note there.
	My favorite part of the interview was him just being self-effacing, saying, I'm really a bad Schiller.
	Right.
	I thought that was classic.
	And that is so Ruben.
	I've known him for a good while now.
	And that's exactly what he would say, and he means every word of it.
	And as you can tell by being the interviewer, you know, he didn't shill a thing.
	I mean, he's just full of knowledge.
	But Crypto Barbecue...
	I was probably about three quarters through the interview, and I was just sitting here.
	You know, he's just got a joyful smile about him.
	He's very conversational and obviously bright.
	But I'm like, man...
	If there was ever a barbecue where we just invited a bunch of crypto dudes, I definitely would want Ruben there.
	Wouldn't you?
	I do have a quarter steer in my freezer, as we mentioned last time, because my neighbor has butchered a steer.
	So you think Ruben would be interested?
	Is he a vegetarian?
	Who cares?
	We'd still invite him.
	Alright, we could grill some veggies or whatever.
	Welcome to Texas.
	You gotta eat some brisket while you're here.
	And the last one that we're going to touch on is Bilbo Island.
	Because...
	I want you to educate me more on this.
	I don't even know what you're talking about.
	Bilbo Island?
	Is that from Lord of the Rings?
	What is that?
	It is.
	It is.
	But, you know, Sparkle Atlantis to where he's talking about What seemed to me like he's almost intending to build an Ethereum-type ecosystem on an island to where no matter what asset you put on the island, it just puts a Bilbo Baggins ring on it and it disappears.
	And it can transact on the...
	See what I did there?
	Okay, I see that now.
	Okay, privacy coins, yes.
	Yes, privacy coins, but I thought it was very cool, if indeed it's going to work this way, to where Thero, the blockchain, ultimately will be a place in space where other assets can come on and somehow, and you can educate me a little bit, Is that what Lelantis Spark is?
	To where you put on this shield or you put on the ring and you disappear and you can transact on that island without anybody knowing?
	Well, Lelantis Spark is the entire new protocol, which will require new addressing as well, that FIRO is in the process of rolling out.
	One of the interesting things here that has happened from the time that I filmed that interview with Ruben, and today, Firo has actually rolled out on their testnet, Atlanta Spark.
	Oh, wow.
	Yeah, so it's actually working right now.
	Wow.
	Good job, Ruben.
	I know, I know.
	Pretty cool.
	The guy doesn't mess around.
	It's not, of course, going to be on mainnet or is not going to be rolled out for the live project for probably several months.
	And in that interim, it's possible they might discover some things that maybe set them back or something.
	But the Lantus Spark...
	I think represents a technological leapfrog or a leap that would put FIRO... If FIRO gets this out, let's say, before the end of this calendar year, I think it puts FIRO ahead of Monero in terms of the tech because Monero still has the ring signatures of 16, not yet...
	They haven't yet adopted full membership proofs.
	That's being talked about, but that's a ways away.
	It might be a year away.
	It might be a year and a half away.
	So Firo, with this Lelanta Spark, which I admit I don't fully understand all the little subtleties of it, but this, in what I do understand, it puts Firo in the lead of privacy coin tech once they roll it out to mainnet.
	So I'm going to watch this very carefully.
	And isn't it basically that with this tech that it doesn't matter the coin, the sender, the receiver, the payment amount, None of those...
	It's not that they're obfuscated.
	They're just not there.
	You know, the Leilantis spark gives it that shield, gives it that element of privacy to where he was talking about we could create a DTV coin, if you would, right?
	On top of the Fero system.
	Right.
	Right.
	Now, is that all...
	Part of Leilanta Spark, you need Leilanta Spark to build it on the...
	Go ahead.
	Yeah, I would say Leilanta Spark is...
	It provides the infrastructure on top of which those coins would be built.
	But Leilanta Spark is really...
	That's the method by which the privacy is achieved.
	Privacy of the transaction amounts, the transaction receiving and sending addresses.
	That's Leilanta Spark.
	But then on top of that, as let's say a layer two privacy digital asset could be created that runs with the benefit of the existing FIRO nodes.
	So let's say, right?
	So if we wanted to launch, let's say a coin, let's call it decentralized coin.
	Yeah.
	Or ToddCoin.
	Let's just call it ToddCoin.
	Let's go DTV. Okay, DTVCoin.
	All right.
	If we want to launch a DTV token, I guess technically would be the term.
	Yeah, right.
	It would be a Layer 2 token that rides on top of Fero.
	But it's powered by the FIRO layer one blockchain.
	Exactly.
	Right?
	Exactly.
	Thank you for clarifying.
	So FIRO's nodes and miners, all of which I'm quite certain are going to need a hard fork with Lelanta Spark, by the way.
	But that's not a problem.
	I mean, they're all on board.
	It's such a great achievement.
	They're going to do it.
	Right.
	But there's going to be a hard fork at some point, I imagine.
	And then, Lentispark rolls out.
	And then, once that is active, then other people can start building digital assets on top of it.
	Depending on how quickly the wallets start to support that, I can imagine a day in 2024, for example, where you can open up your Firo wallet and you can have Firo coins, but you could also have a DTV token if we wanted to do that, or other people's tokens.
	They would all be recognized by the FIRO wallet because they are FIRO. Potentially, I mean, theoretically, I would say, because they're all going to use the same zero-knowledge proof math, but I guess it's up to the wallet developers to decide, you know, what's the process of having your token recognized by the wallets?
	Because they probably don't want a million people throwing in, like, junk tokens to pollute the wallets, right?
	So some of this has to be worked out.
	But this really empowers us, right, out there, who do want to launch our own privacy project, our own privacy.
	Like, it really intrigued me when you were talking about, where's my notes, that you want to set up Your loyalty token.
	Loyalty price, yeah, exactly.
	So you could do that by creating your own token on top of Firo using Leilantis Spark.
	Absolutely.
	Right, right.
	So just to clarify to our audience, so when people purchase products from my online store, healthrangerstore.com, We have a loyalty points program.
	It just pays you loyalty points, but actually it's just our own centralized ledger keeping track of how many points you have.
	And then you can use those points for future purchases.
	Well, what if instead of giving you these centralized points, what if we gave you actual tokens that you could take possession of those in your wallet and you could use them for purchases or you could send them to people.
	You could send them as a gift to someone and they could use them in the store or you could sell them on the open market.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	You could do swaps or exchanges and actually sell those tokens.
	So yeah, we are very interested in doing that.
	So doesn't that make Rubin like the Vitalik of Ethereum to where...
	I mean, he created Fero, but what he is creating, just like Ethereum blockchain, to where...
	It revolutionized, you know, altcoins, right?
	Well, yeah, but hold on a second.
	First of all, I think Rubin himself would interject and say it's not just him, obviously.
	There's all these amazing people.
	It's a community of dedicated developers, and, you know, there's a whole history of Furo when it was Zcoin.
	For example.
	And there's a lot of people who have been involved over the years.
	And Ruben understands that.
	He's very humble.
	I like that about him.
	I love that about him.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	I don't want to deal with arrogant pricks in the crypto space.
	Do you want to deal with arrogant pricks?
	No.
	Eopaths.
	No.
	Eopaths.
	What's an eopath?
	Well, you have your sociopath.
	You have your psychopaths.
	I guess...
	I guess, like, if you take a look at the attributes of both of those, and you combine them into one, what would that be, a maximum?
	Like, maximum psychopathy or something?
	Yeah, yeah.
	So, crypto's, I think, full of Well, any high finance, right?
	It's just, bottom line is, Ruben is no eopath.
	Yeah, Ruben is not an arrogant prick, that's for sure.
	No, he's very humble and he's very smart and he's easy to communicate with.
	And these properties matter.
	You know, it really does matter.
	Yeah.
	And as part of the show, Todd, you and I are getting to talk to a lot of leaders, even we've done other interviews that haven't yet aired, and we're seeing a lot of different personalities, and it's pretty cool.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	And for the most part, I'm really impressed with the personalities that I've been meeting.
	I've been very impressed.
	Very impressed.
	Yeah.
	I mean, surprisingly impressed.
	Yeah.
	We haven't met an arrogant one yet, have we?
	Well, not on the show.
	Yeah.
	Not on the show.
	Not all are welcome on the show, but the ones we've had on the show have all been pretty cool.
	But getting back to Firo, so I think the idea is, at least as I understand it, that Firo is going to be much more than a coin, but rather almost like a platform for digital assets.
	zero knowledge proofs and Lelanta spark and so on, which in my book, I think that that makes Firo incredibly valuable to the crypto ecosystem sometime before the end of this year is my guess.
	Now, did you pick up what he was putting down, though, when he was talking about the island and the bridges to the island, that literally other assets out there could come on to his island?
	In my mind, I was like, does that mean Bitcoin could actually bridge over and become part of that ecosystem, basically be a private Bitcoin?
	I didn't quite follow.
	Maybe he's talking about a Fero-wrapped Bitcoin.
	I'm not quite sure of the structure, but you could take other assets and you could bring them into the FIRO universe and wrap them around the Atlantis Spark infrastructure.
	I know Ruben's going to watch this and laugh because I'm not saying it correctly, but I think that's the idea.
	But guess what, Mike?
	Guess what?
	Hey, Ruben, do us a favor.
	Come on.
	This is an opportunity for us to promote our Telegram.
	If people go to Telegram and just search for Decentralized TV, decentralized.tv, come join us.
	And Ruben, if you would come answer these questions in there.
	I know you're already in the group.
	Thank you very much.
	He is.
	He is in the group, yes.
	Yes.
	But if you could kind of...
	It's obviously clear as mud to me, but that's because I'm a little slow up the on-ramp.
	Let me ask you a question, Todd, because I don't understand this.
	I don't understand the value or the pricing that is associated with these different coins.
	So let's say we look at Monero.
	It's the number one in private digital money.
	It's got a lot going for it.
	You know, we've interviewed local Monero and so on.
	And Monero, I think, is right now $165 a coin or something like that.
	Yeah.
	And then you look at Firo.
	And I checked before we came on, and Firo's like $1.75.
	And it has the same supply, basically, as Bitcoin.
	Yeah, exactly, Todd.
	But what confuses me is, like, Firo, how can Firo be one one-hundredth of the value of Bitcoin?
	Monero, essentially.
	And yet, FIRO has very advanced technology that is about to leapfrog, at least arguably, Monero in terms of privacy, right?
	So the privacy is not the determining factor of the price.
	It's the popularity, which is the price.
	And to quote another guest that we recently had on, who we asked the same question, he basically said, We're the world's worst marketers.
	So I think that would be my answer right now is I think that Ruben and his team have been so focused on what is most important to them, which is getting the tech right, that they're not even in that zone yet of evangelizing from the rooftops.
	Yeah, I think you're right.
	I think they're really waiting for the land to spark to get rolled out, and then they feel like they're ready to evangelize it more aggressively.
	And, I mean, what I've found in covering private crypto over the last two and a half years is you really do have to evangelize these things, and everything is pay-to-play.
	Except not here, not here.
	Not here.
	Right.
	No body per show.
	No, read our code of ethics.
	That's right.
	Decentralized.tv, please.
	But everywhere else is what you're talking about.
	Yeah, everywhere else.
	So, you know, you have Monero, right?
	They're a community.
	They're large enough now.
	There's enough support there.
	But smaller communities, let's call them startups, if you will, If you are a fair launch, privacy coin, you're doing it right.
	You don't ever want anyone to tap you on the shoulder to declare that you're a security.
	Ultimately, funding for any kind of marketing initiatives comes from either, let's say, in Fero's case, he has that 15% discount.
	Dev tax on the block rewards, which really ends up being rather nothing.
	I mean, it's something, but it's nothing.
	It's something, but it's ending also.
	I think eventually it fades out.
	And it's nothing that is going to allow you to go out and do a half a million dollar campaign, right?
	Like some of these other.
	I mean, you get hit up all the time with these people that come in and tell you what they can do.
	You know, we used to always like to say, how about just invest in our project and put your own ore in the water if you're so damn good at this stuff.
	But he says there are people who have donated some pretty substantial funds to FIRO, which I understand that.
	I think FIRO, it's a really important project for the privacy of humankind.
	And we all agree that privacy is a basic human right.
	And I love how Ruben was talking about how there was an election that was carried out using...
	Brilliant.
	The tech that he has for integrity of the ballot, essentially.
	Now, gosh, can you think of a country where that might be useful?
	We don't know anything about honest elections.
	We're Americans.
	What the hell?
	That was fascinating.
	I would like to have a follow-up with him to really just dive deep into that as far as the genesis.
	Like, how did that even come about?
	I mean, it's...
	Done.
	Okay, done.
	My job's done.
	It's the crypto barbecue.
	Ruben, you've got to come tell us that story at Mike's Crypto Barbecue.
	He lives in Malaysia.
	That's a long way to fly to Texas, or Florida for that matter.
	He'll figure it out.
	Okay, well, virtual barbecue.
	Okay.
	The next thing, though, here's what else I like about Firo, is that it...
	You know how Mimble, Wimble blockchains, they...
	It's more difficult because wallets have to be online at the same time in order to send to each other.
	We've run into this on the tipping system a little bit.
	But Firo...
	Like Monero, it doesn't require wallets to be open, right?
	So in Firo, and I've tested this, I've set up numerous machines, by the way.
	I've installed more crypto wallets in the last two months than most people will ever do in their life.
	I've got multiple machines and multiple wallets everywhere, and I'm destroying wallets and recreating wallets, and I'm testing sends.
	But anyway, Firo, you can send, and the other wallet doesn't have to be online.
	So that's pretty convenient for tipping.
	Yes.
	The thing about, if you go to FIRO.org, the website, it shows you how to get FIRO here, and it says, like, get a wallet.
	And if you go there, there are three wallets that are listed, and I've tried all three.
	I will say that this wallet, Electrum, is probably the best one to work with.
	It's the simplest, so if people want to know which one.
	I've done the QT wallet and the Electron wallet.
	And I will say, being critical of Firo, their wallets look a little dated.
	That's my only real criticism.
	They need some upgrades to the UI of the wallets.
	Yes.
	And that'll probably happen, you know, with the Lantus Spark.
	But for the existing system of how Fearwell works, you got to understand that when you receive a transaction, you need to click the Anonymize button so that those coins are then anonymized, which happens almost instantly, by the way.
	Okay.
	You know, as Ruben was saying, they go into this pool, they get burned and then sort of reselected out of the pool, and nobody knows where those coins came from.
	So you do have to anonymize.
	It's an extra step currently, but that step will go away with Lelantis Spark.
	Is that the resurrection box?
	Yes, the coin resurrection.
	Three days later.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	It's the Easter coin selection.
	Right.
	But anyway, the UI is a little clunky compared to, let's say, the Monero wallet.
	Monero wallet looks really sleek right now.
	Yeah.
	You know?
	So, just saying.
	Well, yeah, the Monero wallet was created by Diego Salazar, who UI is his middle name, and he also created the Epic Pay wallet, and it's another beautiful wallet.
	Are we going to get Diego on the show?
	Yeah, we are.
	But, you know, Diego asked if we wait a few months because he is finalizing everything with Stack Wallet to work with everything.
	And he says, I'm so afraid of your reach that the last thing in the world I want to do is still be working on Bugs or fixes and then have everybody come and be disappointed.
	Okay, fair enough.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, we'll give Diego the time that he needs to wrap that and get it all solid.
	He recognizes he has one chance to make a first impression and something about drinking through a fire hose.
	He gets that.
	Totally.
	All right.
	So back to FIRO, then.
	I will say this.
	So, of course, on our platforms like Brighteon.com, we already support Monero and Epic Cash as tipping systems.
	We're going to, of course, expand that to FIRO and other coin projects that we like.
	Yep.
	And then I also was talking to my devs last night, reminding them, hey, make sure you figure out how people can purchase from our stores using this ever-expanding set of crypto coins.
	We are going to include Firo in that set.
	So it's going to be Monero, Epic Cash, Firo, and then whatever else comes next.
	So that's all going to happen.
	I think that's going to be a game-changer when you incorporate it into your shopping cart.
	I can't wait.
	I can't wait.
	Because, I mean, who doesn't want to purchase things with privacy intact?
	I just love the idea of my crypto being backed by food.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You've seen our warehouse.
	You see the pallets and pallets of food that we have there packaged up.
	I have.
	And I also saw your medical facility because you walk through there and where you do your testing, it's like going through an ICU unit.
	Everything is so...
	What?
	What are you talking about?
	Are you talking about one of the clean rooms for the...
	For the liquid handling or what?
	Where you do all your testing and everything is like white glow.
	Oh, yeah, the micro lab.
	Yeah, the micro lab.
	Yeah, yeah.
	By ICU unit, I didn't mean there were little babies in there.
	Like patients or anything, no.
	No, we're testing for salmonella and things like that.
	Yeah, it's a fun operation.
	People are shocked when they go into our warehouse.
	Huge!
	And I was just showing comedian J.P. Sears.
	He was here in the studio recently.
	And Mickey Willis, I took them through the warehouse.
	They couldn't believe it.
	They're like, this is like the Indiana Jones warehouse from the first movie of all the artifacts here.
	But anyway, that's getting off topic.
	Getting back to Fearow.
	Yes.
	You know, we're about use cases, right?
	So we want to show people better ways to use their coins and not just hodl coins.
	Right.
	I mean, hodling is only one-dimensional.
	It's like, okay, and then what?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, don't you ultimately hope to have some kind of value that can be translated into something?
	Well, that's what I love about his idea of, you know, empowering people to create their own projects, their own, you know, tokens, their own...
	You'll have these huge companies that are going through like you're doing with being able to incent people to buy or give them rewards or things.
	I think you're going to be like the tip of a spear on a use case.
	Matter of fact, we should really do this.
	We should talk to Ruben and volunteer to be one of the first coins that's created on his system.
	Well, why do you want to create a token?
	I mean, what would we do with a token other than just play around with it?
	No, I'm actually thinking instead of we, I'm thinking you.
	Well, we're going to do a loyalty program type of thing for sure.
	Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
	A loyalty token that you could be like one of the first ones to do that.
	Okay, I'm game.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, I think that would be totally cool.
	We can all follow along with that.
	Do you think I could get my customers to download wallets and then withdraw reward tokens or is that asking too much?
	They have to.
	They have to.
	Ultimately, we all have to.
	That's what I think.
	We've got to get these skills nailed down.
	There'll be a point in time where we don't have to, you know, to access our crypto, put a 250 baud modem going, you know, remember back in Web 1.0?
	It wasn't that easy.
	I remember that.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Let me bring in something else.
	So news hit recently, court decision, a split decision involving Ripple, XRP. And this decision was widely celebrated across the cryptocurrency space.
	The decision, as I understand it, is that Ripple's sales of its tokens to institutional investors will be considered...
	But Ripple's sales to individual people and also to its own employees and project people are not securities.
	This is a major court decision.
	It's not over yet.
	It could be further litigated and so on.
	But this is being celebrated across the crypto space.
	So Todd, my question to you.
	If Ripple is not a security, then...
	Doesn't that speak well for pretty much all altcoins?
	Or most?
	I think it seems to speak really well.
	Yeah, I think shitcoins get to go back to the original name altcoins, right?
	And?
	Meaning that they're all shitcoins.
	In the SEC's, you know, point of view.
	Actually, that would be the Bitcoin maximalist point of view, right?
	But no, I think this is, it should give everybody who is developing blockchain technology and crypto projects a real deep sigh of relief.
	I think that's the real big win, is it's going to unlock development again.
	Because until there's some clarity, it's like people are just a deer in headlights, you know?
	Who's going to really invest money in these ecosystems?
	Right.
	This does help provide some clarity.
	And by the way, coincidentally, it also means that when you sold me epic cash for gold, remember that trade that we did?
	I gave you gold coins and you gave me some epic cash.
	That was not a securities exchange, it turns out.
	Oh, we're not going to prison?
	It turns out not.
	I mean, not unless you go to jail for building that food forest in your backyard against HOA regulations.
	Right.
	They might get you on that.
	What food forest?
	Oh, okay, okay.
	Yeah, too bad you can't have Atlanta Spark wrap up your food forest and make it vanish.
	Don't tempt me.
	Go back there and pick some avocados.
	You're like, where'd those come from?
	Nobody knows.
	It's all secret.
	Oh.
	I hope everybody watches the video that we dropped today with Jim Gale regarding the Food Force Abundance.
	Man, what a great show that was.
	I just kind of want to reverse plug it.
	If you haven't watched it yet, go back.
	If you need a jolt of energy or some caffeine, just watch Jim speak.
	What a great show.
	Definitely a great show.
	And folks, you can see that all episodes you can watch at decentralize.tv.
	And also, by the way, I'll go ahead and mention this.
	We have a guest coming up who is about decentralizing Hollywood.
	So this is a film studio owner.
	Who has agreed to come on the show and talk about getting away from the big corporate, monstrous Hollywood studios that are pretty much just into pedophilia and Satanism at this point, and instead making films that are wholesome, good films, and you can't do that in Hollywood.
	So we're about decentralizing entertainment, decentralizing food, decentralizing medicine, all of it.
	It's not just talking about crypto all day.
	I mean, it's so diverse, right?
	I mean, you can really think about just any subject that's meaningful to our daily lives, and you can ask the challenging question, is it centralized in a way that, you know, potentially could be harmful?
	If so, what alternatives are there?
	Is it worth exploring?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I think so.
	And I told you, I called you about this.
	I was stopping into pawn shops around town.
	I went into a couple of pawn shops and I was like, hey, can I interview the pawn shop owner?
	Because I want to talk about decentralizing local economies and how people are trying to get cash right now.
	And how does the pawn shop economy operate?
	It's kind of like...
	It's kind of like local Monero.
	It's kind of like the pawn shop ecosystem of crypto, in a sense.
	Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
	Yeah, kind of.
	But it turns out, I didn't even know this, but these pawn shops are mostly franchises of big national chains, and there's nobody there who will go on the record and talk about anything.
	That's true.
	Yeah, so the pawn shops are centralized.
	I'm like, oh my gosh, this just kind of defeats the purpose of pawn shops.
	I thought it was all decentralized.
	But when I was at one pawn shop, a couple of guys walked in and unloaded this collection of what looked like stolen jewelry, by the way.
	It's like, oh man, that doesn't look legit at all.
	So, who knows?
	Who knows what's going on?
	Well, you know what?
	Speaking of decentralized, I was traveling through Orlando today, and I was going through just...
	I mean, one part was...
	The CD section, but I went through some other parts that weren't.
	And it just hit me literally on every corner, like manned or woman in the center barrier is somebody holding up a, you know, Jesus loves you on cardboard sign, I'm hungry, whatever.
	And I'm like, it's so well organized.
	That's decentralized begging.
	I swear.
	I think these people are dumped off from a van, and that's their thing.
	And then they have to be picked up, and they give their pimps, you know, the money.
	Pimps?
	And they get their hit for the evening.
	I don't know.
	Man.
	It has to be that way, right?
	Just because it cannot be a coincidence that literally for like a mile, there's nothing but, you know, homeless people that are begging when people have their cars stop.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	Well, yeah, that's a whole different layer of the economy that we haven't really explored on this show, but maybe we should find some homeless person to come on.
	No, I'm serious.
	Tell us about the homeless economy, man.
	Yeah, that could be interesting.
	How do you eat?
	What do you do for first aid?
	That would actually be a really interesting show.
	Fortunately, here in Texas, we can just go to Austin and find all kinds of homeless people.
	Maybe make that happen.
	I don't know.
	Crazy idea, but we'll see.
	But let me change the subject here before it gets even crazier.
	I do want to say, for the record, remember how the Kraken exchange was giving me all kinds of trouble before?
	Right.
	And how I've been banned or frozen on Gemini and Robinhood also and Coinbase before and Kraken froze my account.
	Well, Kraken reached out and they apologized and they restored my account.
	And then I was able to provide additional documentation and get even higher levels with Kraken, where you can deposit more money.
	But so far, nothing from Gemini, by the way.
	I'm not sure that they even have a functioning customer service department at this point.
	But Kraken fixed the problems, and I'm even in touch with a Kraken rep now, who was helping alleviate these issues.
	And this guy, he's going to come on as a guest.
	That's going to be so great.
	I can't wait to speak with him.
	See, it's not the problem, it's how the problem's handled.
	True.
	Right?
	Exactly.
	And he just totally turned it around.
	Now you're a raving fan of Kraken.
	It's the only one that's working.
	But what I found out, Todd, and this is a warning for everybody listening, I found out how I accidentally flagged all the fraud algos.
	You know how I flagged them all?
	What?
	Is he going to say being older than 50?
	Well, I'm sure that our age is probably part of it because most people in crypto are younger than you and I. But it was a behavioral flag, which is that I bought crypto and then withdrew the crypto immediately.
	Apparently, that flags the algos.
	So, in other words, if you go on to, let's say, Gemini or Robinhood, let's say Robinhood, because you can buy all kinds of stocks and everything on Robinhood.
	You go on to Robinhood and you buy a bunch of crypto and you just leave it there, they don't flag you.
	You buy it and take it off.
	Oh, man, it's all frozen and shut down.
	Send us this, send us that.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Because that's what fraudsters do.
	Yeah, they like their rehypothecation, don't they?
	Well...
	They're happy to sell you something, they just don't want you to take custody of it.
	Isn't that interesting?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	Which kind of brings us back to FIRO, right?
	So FIRO is not available for purchase on a lot of exchanges.
	No.
	Or any that I can tell.
	But the way to acquire FIRO, let me actually bring this up.
	Perfect.
	Perfect.
	I just use simpleswap.io, and here you go, right here.
	So let's say you want some Firo.
	You can just choose here that you want Firo coin, F-I-R-O, and then you send, in this case, 0.1 bitcoins, and you're going to get 1,725 Firo's.
	And, you know, no KYC required, nothing.
	There's also another one called StealthX, I think.
	StealthX.
	I've used Godex.io.
	Oh, really?
	They are great as well.
	They're fantastic.
	Godex.io?
	Let me bring that up.
	Yep.
	Okay.
	So, yeah, here's StealthEX.
	Right here, same kind of deal.
	You know, you just do an exchange.
	It takes a few minutes.
	You know, no KYC, no account required.
	You mentioned this one.
	What is it?
	Godex.io?
	Godex.io.
	Okay, cool.
	So, yeah, no limits, right?
	You can exchange without limits on these kinds of exchanges.
	And so that's how you can acquire a lot of altcoins, such as Firo or whatever coins that we're talking about, or even Monero, right?
	This is a real simple way to get Monero once you have Bitcoin.
	It really couldn't be easier using those.
	Yeah, they're really easy.
	And I was surprised the exchange rates are actually better than I thought they would be.
	I mean, obviously, these services, they make a couple of points, but it's not crazy.
	Yeah, that's okay.
	No, that's okay.
	Yeah, it's not like 10% or anything crazy like that.
	Yeah, it's not like local Monero where, what did you say, $300?
	Yeah, there was one seller offering Monero at pretty much double price if you don't want any KYC, like no questions asked.
	Yeah.
	You can get it.
	You just pay double.
	But you can also, in fact, the local Monero guy, he saw the interview that we did with him, and he said, hey, I really wish you would try cash in the mail because that's the best rate.
	Yeah.
	And, look, I don't feel comfortable sending cash in the mail, but I know a lot of other people do that.
	But, you know, look, I've got Kraken cranking now, so I'm buying Bitcoin and Kraken, yeah.
	So I don't need to send cash in the mail.
	Yeah, I'm Kraken, I'm Kraken.
	Yeah, and you can get Monero on Kraken.
	Yeah, you can buy Monero straight out.
	Just straight up.
	On Kraken.
	But anyway, I wanted to tell everybody, you know, don't buy crypto and then immediately withdraw it.
	That will flag the fraud out.
	I think what you could do is buy crypto on these platforms and maybe wait 72 hours.
	Right.
	Just like let it settle a little bit before you start taking it out.
	And take it out a little bit at a time.
	Yeah, and I don't think these exchanges are at risk of going away within 72 hours.
	I mean, there is a 72-hour risk, but they're not going away.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I don't think they're going away either.
	I mean, FTX cleaned out the industry a lot.
	Yeah, that's true.
	The deleveraging event was major.
	In fact, you know what?
	I want to say this, and talking to Ruben at Fearwell kind of reminded me of this, but I feel like the privacy digital...
	Crypto space is in its infancy.
	I feel like we're at the startup stage before the big bull run, so to speak.
	Me too.
	It doesn't feel to me like this is really a mature industry.
	They're still trying to sort out a lot of the tech and fixing wallets and figuring out how these things work.
	But man, this is a great time to be ahead of the game on this, I think.
	But I think, and Ruben touched on this, he also said, we're pretty far along, considering where we were, right?
	He said that during the interview.
	It's kind of like, you know, a lot of this stuff is second hat now.
	True.
	Yeah, good point.
	But because privacy is so much harder to do than just a big public blockchain.
	Yeah.
	You know, I mean, Bitcoin is simple by today's standards of what, like what Firo is doing.
	Correct.
	So the three or four or five different approaches to privacy Those are really well known now.
	But Leilantis Sparkman, I am super excited about that.
	Yeah, I am too.
	In fact, you know, I want to look at the math and see if it makes any sense, you know, if we could look at the math ourselves.
	Wouldn't that be cool?
	Oh, wow.
	You're going to become a cryptologist.
	I don't care.
	I don't care whatever you want to say.
	Let's do it again.
	Give the whistle again.
	Okay, let's do it again.
	Yeah.
	Back that up.
	Back up that junk in your trunk, baby.
	Back it up.
	No, no, that's a different show.
	Hold on.
	Okay.
	So, yeah, what if we could just...
	Wouldn't it be great to look at the math and try to actually get a grip on what's happening mathematically?
	I think it would be great for you to look at me.
	For the record, I did not ace the test, you know, that you did.
	But what would that make you?
	A cryptographer or a cryptologist?
	I can't remember.
	I know that Diego has a cryptologist who he refers to all the time.
	Is that right?
	So I don't know.
	We'll have to ask him when he gets on.
	Okay, yeah.
	Well, I don't know.
	I think it would mostly just make me confused, actually, if I try to look at the code and how is this working again?
	But the zero-knowledge proofs, I think, are really fascinating.
	And the fact that even small programmable devices, mobile phones and what have you, can carry out the computational load that's necessary to conduct these zero-knowledge proofs, it's remarkable.
	That here we stand at the horizon of the future of human civilization.
	We have a fiat currency that's collapsing.
	We have CBDCs that are trying to enslave humanity.
	And at the same time, we're at the dawn of this computational miracle.
	Right.
	That not only with the microprocessors that are so capable right now with very little...
	consumption of power, but massive memory storage is available for blockchains, very inexpensive.
	And then these mostly young, mostly guys coming in and figuring out very clever ways to hide information that can be claimed as being true by someone who has the right keys.
	One day, just because this is the world today, Mike, and I'm just going to play by their rules.
	One day I will self-identify as a cryptologist.
	Is that right?
	Just because I say so.
	And you will be fined on this show if you correct me at all.
	I'm just saying.
	Oh, no, no.
	I don't want to correct you about anything, but what about a...
	Isn't there...
	People who study Bigfoot, isn't it like a zoo cryptology or something?
	What's that term of people who study, like, odd creatures?
	Doesn't it have something to do with a bonus hole?
	We found the Bigfoot, and sad to say, it has a bonus hole.
	What's that term?
	Zoocrypto...
	Hold on.
	Cryptography...
	No, what the heck?
	Hold on.
	You're only going to get this here, folks.
	Biocryptography?
	Biometric?
	Cryptography?
	Cryptozoology?
	Ah!
	Oh!
	Ah!
	There you go.
	Okay, hold on, hold on, hold on.
	I knew I heard this.
	What the hell is that?
	Cryptozoology.
	You could be a cryptozoologist, Todd.
	How about that?
	Here it is.
	Thank you.
	Cryptozoology is people who search and study unknown, legendary, or so-called extinct animals like Bigfoot with bonus holes.
	There you go.
	That's cryptozoology.
	And I don't know how much math you need to follow Bigfoot around.
	Just a really bad camera.
	But is it possible that Bigfoot is only not visible because it's using stealth addresses and ring signatures?
	It very well could be.
	It could be ahead of his time.
	Yes.
	It's a Lelantis creature.
	He needs to rebrand BigFero.
	Man, how can people not think Bigfoot exists?
	Because there was one in every Star Wars movie, Chewbacca.
	Yeah.
	I mean, clearly.
	I mean, how else would they even film the film without Bigfoot playing the role of Chewbacca?
	Chewbacca did say on air, though, he is bonus hole-less.
	He stood very firm.
	Hey, did you ever notice that in the Star Wars movies, the early ones, there are no displays?
	There are no screens?
	Think about Star Wars, the first one.
	Yeah, right.
	There's not a screen, except maybe in the X-Wing fighter, there's kind of an old school.
	There are no screens anywhere.
	But you look around society today, we all have screens everywhere.
	Mobile phones, laptops.
	Oh, good point.
	Right?
	Where are all the screens?
	Good point.
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	Yeah, clearly.
	That's a valid point.
	Nobody had their nose in their phones.
	Well, yeah, they were fighting the Empire, as we are.
	We are.
	But we are fighting the empire with our screens, it turns out, and with our private digital currency.
	All right.
	Ruben, sorry, we took that someplace.
	Ruben's going to kill us, man.
	Yeah.
	Ruben's going to be like, why are you guys getting so off topic?
	Yeah, he's like, can you take the last 10 minutes and just lay land to spark it?
	Yeah.
	All right, let's get back to Firo.
	We have to honor our guests, but you and I can get carried away with a certain amount of chocolate on my part.
	What are you on right now?
	I did too many cacao nibs.
	You know what?
	I got back home and I ate, I made some amazing brisket two days ago.
	Oh, really?
	I just tore into it.
	So it's just pure brisket.
	Okay, brisket powered.
	Yeah.
	Okay, good to know.
	All right, so back to FIRO. So let's give a summary assessment of what we think about FIRO. You want to go first?
	I am really, really intrigued about when he was talking about all of the assets share the same anonymity set.
	So I presume that's with Lelanta Spark.
	Yes.
	That's when he was talking about being able to create your own coins and you wouldn't be put under a microscope because you only have a hundred coins and they're going to say, "Hmm, that's kind of strange.
	We know it's you." But man, being able to just share that same set with everybody.
	I think about that and I think, who wakes up in the morning and tries to solve that problem?
	Right.
	People like Ruben.
	So I'm really impressed with a humble person like Ruben that's solving these problems, and I really believe at his core he does it for one reason only, which is he believes privacy is a human right.
	Yes.
	I think that's what drives him.
	Can I add, too, that one of the other things I really like about the philosophy of FIRO under Rubin or with Rubin's help, and I know it's bigger than one person, like I said earlier, but what Rubin brings to the table is a sense of collaboration with other projects, specifically with Monero.
	And you and I, Todd, we've seen projects where the culture is that everything else sucks other than this project, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah.
	I don't think that's a winning strategy in this space.
	I love to be able to talk to other people on other projects and share ideas.
	Yeah.
	I mean, because you just never know when you might learn something, Mike.
	Right, right.
	And this is also, by the way, one of the things about so-called Bitcoin maxis.
	So there are a lot of good people in Bitcoin, don't get me wrong, and we're going to be interviewing a Bitcoin-related project person coming right up.
	But there are also these so-called Bitcoin maxis that they do smack of a kind of arrogance, that is, that nothing is a real crypto coin other than Bitcoin.
	Yeah.
	I think that side is just a cult.
	You do?
	Yeah.
	A cryptozoology cult?
	Yeah.
	I just don't think they have the ability to critically think, you know?
	I think they're NPCs.
	They're NBTCs.
	Yeah.
	BTC NPCs, yeah.
	Well, that's interesting, but I've got to tell you, anytime we have somebody on the show about Bitcoin, I'm going to ask them, what about privacy?
	Where's the privacy solution for Bitcoin?
	Right.
	Because Fero's figuring it out.
	Monero's got it.
	Epic and other projects that we're interviewing coming up.
	They've all figured out different solutions to privacy.
	That's right.
	Yeah.
	Bitcoin could be made private, but I guess there's just not enough consensus there to do it.
	Or they don't want to do it.
	Is it one of those too-big-to-fail things that if they made the attempt that it might...
	I don't know.
	If it's not broke, don't fix it?
	Yeah.
	If it's just like...
	It's numbers go up technology.
	You guys don't know anything.
	Who has anything to hide, Mike?
	Or is it that too many wealthy institutions like BlackRock with the ETFs and so on are now involved in Bitcoin and they want to play along with the government surveillance grid to turn Bitcoin into a surveillance coin, which it is already.
	Which it is.
	Yeah.
	Already.
	So they don't want privacy.
	Whenever you have a company that literally is generating $20 billion block stream in revenues on an annual basis because of the surveillance, think about that.
	$20 billion.
	So what's that mean?
	They're selling your transaction information to interested third parties.
	Right.
	And if it's all privacy coins, they don't have access to that information.
	You know, I... That's why they hate us.
	I asked Kraken this question.
	I said...
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, I said, look, okay, suppose I buy Bitcoin on your platform.
	How do I know it's not dirty Bitcoin?
	Oh, good.
	Yeah.
	They said they use chain analysis.
	And they check the Bitcoins before they sell them to their customers.
	Yeah.
	So there's actually...
	A check, like a sanitation check on the Bitcoins before they sell them to customers.
	But do they not do that sanitation check while you are sending it, before they actually accept it and transact it?
	No, they do it when you send also, so they run the chain analysis check on the Bitcoin that you send them.
	Right away.
	Right away, and if they don't like it, If your Bitcoin is dirty, dirty Bitcoin, they reject it.
	Interesting.
	Yes.
	I wonder what percentage of Bitcoin is rejected then.
	Well, I don't know, but we're going to have my contact on the show, so we'll ask them.
	Yeah.
	That'd be fascinating.
	That would be fascinating.
	But I'm also wondering, you know, how many steps back or hops on the blockchain does...
	I mean, surely with Chainalysis, you could get different numbers if you look back, you know, more hops on the blockchain.
	Yeah, six hops.
	Right.
	You know, enough hops and you get the whole freaking chain.
	But, you know, what...
	Who sets the parameters?
	How dirty is clean?
	Didn't someone report at some point in time that 50% of all Bitcoin out there have history with the black, what was it, the Silk Road?
	Silk Road.
	Well, perhaps that might have been true at one time, but I mean, now there's so many more coins being mine.
	But then the question is, were those cleaned somehow?
	I don't know.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	Ignorant on my part.
	No, but the thing, when I use Firo or Monero, I don't have to worry about this.
	No.
	I don't have to think about where did this dirty, contaminated coin come from, you know what I mean?
	No.
	It's just like all the coins are all clean all the time.
	Yes.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Private crypto, man, that's going to be the future.
	I think so.
	I'm convinced.
	It has to be.
	It has to be.
	But it has to be out of the network because the network is never going to embrace private crypto.
	You mean traditional finance network?
	Yeah.
	TradFi.
	Just start saying TradFi.
	Trad fight.
	Okay, the Druid Babylonian Bastards Network.
	How about that?
	Yeah.
	Those bankster bitches.
	You know, it's those people.
	Right.
	But yeah, no, the network, which unfortunately is the off and on ramp, right?
	Yeah.
	So, but that's why ultimately...
	We hope we can all figure an elegant way to be able to get out of our private crypto into something that is accepted, that you can off-ramp.
	Well, right.
	Use cases.
	Just more use cases for it.
	And we're all about that.
	More people accepting them.
	Exactly.
	The more this show succeeds, I think, the more we're going to see merchants accepting privacy.
	I would never want to convert my crypto to fiat if I knew everywhere I went, they accepted my crypto.
	Exactly.
	Why would you ever go back to fiat?
	It's like gross.
	No, I completely agree with you.
	It's crazy.
	I do not intend to ever...
	Transition crypto back into fiat, ever.
	That's a big, bold statement.
	That's very, very cool.
	Well, especially since I've transferred now, at least I'm in the process of transferring my own savings, my after-tax savings, I'm moving it into gold and silver and crypto.
	I've said that publicly.
	And then I ran into all these problems in crypto because of the exchanges and they're like, how dare you buy crypto here and take it off platform, right?
	But with the introduction of food forest abundance, you know, now we have a fourth leg to the stool, right?
	Which is gold, silver, crypto, and food.
	You know, you can invest in your own food forest that you can have custody of.
	And it will continue to give you...
	Energy moving forward because food is energy.
	So sustenance.
	You're investing in your own future sustenance.
	So it's the gift that keeps on giving.
	So let's not forget food.
	Good point.
	Thanks for bringing that up.
	I think that's really important.
	I want to mention something, too.
	As a disclosure, I forgot to mention, I do hold some FIRO, and I hold some of every privacy coin, by the way.
	And I don't know, do you hold any FIRO? Because we need to explain the...
	Yeah, I do not hold Thero.
	I have not done the Mike Adams setting up 18 different wallets on 30 different computers.
	So I'm still wholly into Epic Cash, but all of these projects I find very, very interesting, and I fully intend to be able to divest some of my holdings to be able to get into these projects because they impress me greatly.
	Well, I think it's just awesome to use all these different coins and see how they work and see the transfer speeds and also look at the wallets and see how they handle seed phrases differently.
	For example, the Monero wallet does the best job with the seed phrases.
	It just makes it easy for you to type it back in and confirm it, things like that.
	That's cool.
	Yeah, Monero wallet's very elegant.
	It's even got built-in mining right in the wallet, which is not something I've seen elsewhere.
	So you're mining Monero?
	No, I mean not.
	I turn on mining to see if it would work, and then you do the math and you're like, oh, I could lose this much money every day on electricity bills.
	Like, no, no thanks.
	I'm not interested in that.
	Yeah, if you pay for electricity, you will lose money mining Monero.
	Okay.
	As far as I can tell.
	Yeah.
	Gotcha.
	Unless you just have free power from somewhere, you know, forget it.
	Right, right.
	But I got to try it.
	I want to see how it works, you know?
	Good.
	Just like I mined a couple of epic cash coins.
	Yeah, you did.
	I did.
	You are the breaker with a capital B. You try to break everything.
	You're really good at it.
	Oh, man.
	You beat things up.
	Yeah, well, that's part of my job here on the show is to do that.
	It is.
	Oh, also, by the way, for the next show, I do have all these.
	I bought a bunch of different types of steel seed phrase storage devices.
	I'm going to bring them and have them on set here.
	That'll be great.
	You've seen these where you punch letters into the steel.
	It probably takes an hour, a lot of hard work to put your seed phrase in there.
	Yeah, I remember getting my bifodal, and I was so excited to be able to slide all of the things in, and I'm like...
	The little letters?
	Yeah, the little letters.
	I'm like, oh, I paid, what, a couple hundred bucks for this, and it only holds one seed phrase?
	Yeah, right.
	And you notice how all those seed phrase storage devices, they're made for younger people with much smaller fingers than what you and I have.
	Who can see.
	They have 20-20 vision.
	Great working eyes, little tiny fingers, too.
	Right.
	I'm like...
	Tell me which show that you're going to do your show and tell because I'll go bring my Dremel and I have some fresh plates.
	The ones we're going to film tomorrow.
	I'm going to bring it.
	I'll have my Dremel and I'll have my fresh plates to be able to show everybody.
	I won't hold the ones that I have engraved my seed words on, but you'll get the idea.
	Very cool.
	Yeah, that'll be fun.
	Okay, very cool.
	Yeah.
	Well, I have a laser.
	It's like a 3D printer, but it's actually an etching laser setup.
	Oh, cool.
	And I programmed that to cut holes in the polyethylene tops for the hydroponic grow bins that we have.
	Yeah.
	So I have it programmed to burn those holes with a pretty high-powered laser.
	So what I can do is I can just take a piece of steel and I can use that laser program.
	I forgot the name of it, but you just type in text and I can actually burn seed phrases into that piece of steel using that laser.
	Does that machine have memory of what you just typed in?
	No, you don't have to save the file, no.
	It's not online.
	It's an offline disconnected machine.
	It's good to ask those questions, though, right?
	No, it's good.
	It's good.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No, you just have to be sure not to look at it because you'll go blind, obviously, because the laser, you know, if you're etching letters into steel, you don't want to be looking at that.
	Yeah.
	No, you don't.
	So you have to leave the room, basically.
	Hey, on your ranch, are you a welder, too?
	You do everything else.
	Have you figured out how to weld?
	I have done some welding, but the reason I don't routinely weld is because it exposes you to a lot of toxic metals.
	In the welding rods, they contain a lot of cadmium.
	As you know, I'm a food scientist, and so I'm very particular about cadmium, arsenic, and mercury.
	And then when I read that a lot of welders have cadmium poisoning, I said I'm not going to do a lot of welding.
	Okay, that makes sense.
	So I discovered JB Weld, which is the epoxy weld.
	I have a question.
	Not related.
	Sorry, Ruben.
	Not related.
	Yeah, Ruben's really got to kill us for this because we're way off topic.
	So when I go into the grocery store and I get the organic, vegetables or whatever, I started thinking the other day, the people that run the show, it's all centralized probably, Are they just getting one over on us?
	How easy would it be just to put a stamp on it that says it's organic and it's not?
	Or do you trust the food system?
	Oh man, well being that I'm in the food system and that almost everything we do is certified organic and that we have a food lab, I absolutely do not trust The organic certifications from a lot of places, especially from China, it turns out.
	So organic certification is pretty easy to counterfeit out of certain countries, like China, where there's a lot of counterfeiting anyway.
	But in the United States, it's more difficult because the organic certifiers, they do on-site inspections and audits, and they'll do accounting audits.
	So, for example, if I sell, let's say, a million pounds of organic quinoa in a year, then the auditor, and I meet with our auditor that does it at my facility.
	I meet with him about once a year.
	He will say, show me the invoices where you purchase one million pounds of organic quinoa.
	And if you can't show that you bought what you sold, then you're going to get your cert yanked is the way that works.
	But what's fascinating to me, it's worth mentioning, is the USDA, they do not test any organic products for heavy metals or even for pesticides.
	Testing is not part of the certification process.
	Yeah.
	You think it's tested?
	No, it's not.
	It's never tested.
	You know what's never going to touch my food, Forrest?
	What?
	Pesticide.
	There you go.
	You know.
	You don't like atrazine, the gender-bender chemical?
	It'll give you a bonus hole.
	It's the second most popular herbicide in America.
	I don't know if people are going to come to this show for the tech or the comedy, but that was good.
	No, seriously, it's atrazine.
	Wow.
	RFK Jr.
	was talking about it the other day.
	He's like, we've got to get rid of this.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	I'm all for it.
	Okay.
	In the meantime...
	Let's talk satellites.
	We do need to give credit to our sponsor.
	Okay, let's do that.
	But I've got to give my summary of FIRO, too, before we close this thing out.
	Let me give credit to the Satellite Phone Store for sponsoring this show.
	Thank you for your sponsorship.
	The Satellite Phone Store, of course, offers, in essence, sort of decentralized communication, but it's a backup plan.
	It doesn't use the cell towers.
	It doesn't use AT&T. It does use satellites, obviously.
	That's the way it works.
	But it doesn't give up your location.
	And it doesn't use the identity of your cell phone account, right, to do this.
	So you have more privacy using satellite phones, and it works everywhere, everywhere on planet Earth, even the oceans and deserts and so on.
	And so there are Iridium phones available right now at sat123.com.
	The InMarsat phones are currently out of stock.
	Let me see.
	Let me bring these up.
	Hold on.
	So here are the Iridium phones.
	Oh, low inventory, they're warning on these now.
	Gosh.
	Man.
	It's hard to keep these in stock.
	It's the popularity of the show.
	Yeah, maybe.
	These are sold out.
	These are the InMarsat phones.
	They're sold out.
	Iridium is available now, but limited supply.
	And then these bivvy sticks are the two-way satellite text messaging devices that talk to the satellites.
	You can send and receive text.
	You use your own mobile phone to compose and to read your messages, but it uses satellite network to send.
	Those are really handy.
	I won't travel without them.
	All right, so beready123.com and sat123.com is where you find out details about all that.
	Now for my own...
	Oh, you got any comments on that, Todd?
	No, I just would have said excellent.
	You're our in-house cryptozoology expert now?
	Yes.
	Aside from Bigfoot, what are the other creatures that might exist?
	What's it called in Mexico, the...
	Chupacabra?
	What's the demon creature that's reported in Mexico?
	Chupacabra?
	Chupacabra?
	Chupacabra.
	Yeah, I think that's it.
	Chupa.
	Let's just call it Chupa.
	Yeah, they come in and take you in the middle of the night.
	Maybe we can get Chupa on.
	All right, here's my take on Firo.
	So, yeah, I think Firo is about to leapfrog the other projects in the privacy crypto space with its tech.
	But we've got to see how that rolls out.
	But that's called Atlantis Spark, which is, as I understand it, pretty cool tech.
	I haven't seen the math yet, but I hope to actually take a look at it.
	I might need some assistance with that process.
	Firo's current wallets are a little dated.
	They need to be upgraded.
	Better UIs and so on.
	I'm sure that'll happen with Lantus Spark.
	Firo's trading volume seems pretty healthy to me.
	There's a lot of activity in it.
	Its price seems, again, it's only about 1% of the price of Monero.
	Do we know what the market cap of Firo is?
	That's a good question.
	We can look that up.
	Give me a second.
	Let me bring up coin market cap.
	Yep.
	And C. Good question.
	Hold on.
	Market cap.
	$22 million.
	Oh, interesting.
	That's it.
	Okay.
	That's it.
	Wow.
	I'm shocked.
	Okay.
	I am too.
	Yeah.
	I would think that...
	But again, the price is not very high.
	No, it's not.
	Because they haven't been in marketing mode before.
	But here it is.
	It looks like it sparked.
	At one point, it spiked.
	The FTX crash took out everybody, 90%.
	And so FIRO was over $3 before with the FTX collapse taking down everything.
	But FIRO has been hanging out here.
	But it's been rising for the last, I don't know, month or so.
	Looks like kind of steadily building.
	I don't know.
	You know what we should do, Todd, is we should see what effect this show has on some of these projects.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	It's a good idea.
	We should, like, the day after this launches, see if it's having any impact at all.
	It's a great idea.
	Yeah.
	We should track it.
	Okay.
	Just kind of see how it's doing.
	But just for the audience, you know, we're not...
	We're not here telling you to buy this or to speculate or anything like that.
	We're not your financial advisor.
	Do whatever you think is right for you.
	I'm just saying I can't believe it's this low price given the tech.
	But maybe in 2024, Ruben and the team will go into more publicity mode or something.
	Yeah.
	Well, the other thing with these microcaps, Mike, is that One BTC can go into FIRO and then all of a sudden that dollar becomes, you know, two bucks pretty quick.
	And it looks like it just spiked.
	You know, it doesn't take much.
	But that is the issue with these smaller privacy coins is there just isn't a lot of liquidity in them.
	So price is affected up and down.
	Doesn't take much to sell for it to go down.
	But you know what?
	It is also a gift if you are bullish on private money long term.
	But the volume of this, what is it, 700?
	$751,000 a day?
	That's hard for me to believe.
	Unless there's a bot wash trading.
	Yeah, there might be market-making bots that are in between trades, things like that.
	But what I know about those two that boggles my mind is those aren't free.
	Exactly.
	That's not for you.
	That's where, when it's a community project, I just continue to wonder, well, where the hell does everybody get all the money to be able to have the market makers and to fund those?
	Because you have to fund...
	I don't know.
	Good question.
	So, yeah, a lot of this stuff.
	I mean...
	Look, we're on this journey together and there's a ton we don't understand, but if anybody out there wants to come on this show and educate us a little on market making and proper analysis of these coins and being able to Do we know the right questions to ask or the hard questions to ask or in analyzing the tokenomics of any private crypto or any coin altogether, right?
	Well, I'm just glad that this is not a market analysis show because how could you make sense of the movements of the market?
	I mean, and we've all seen shows where people do a technical analysis.
	We're like, oh, this trough and this peak and this double shoulder or whatever, and then therefore it's going to mean that this is going to happen.
	I've got to tell you, I'm not convinced that there's any predictive value in analyzing the past.
	I think it's kabuki theater, tea leaf reading.
	That's why we focus on just use cases.
	Like, let's find ways to make this whole ecosystem more valuable.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And that's use cases.
	So that's my market analysis.
	Find ways to use it.
	And it probably becomes more valuable.
	That's it.
	Consider that.
	Yeah, I mean, I don't know how people say, oh, because it...
	Essentially, a lot of the technical analysis is like, if it goes up this much, it's going to go up much more.
	If it goes down this much, it's going to go down much more.
	I'm like, okay, so what?
	It did a triple gainer in 24 hours, and I can see the bored-out carburetor with the dual quadrobustion system move.
	I can make it up like the best of them.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, anyway, I think the fundamentals are that more people are going to be interested in private digital money over time, and especially as there's more crisis in the banking system and fiat currency becomes less and less valuable and practical, I think more people are going to seek out money that works, money that's honest.
	And frankly, the honest money is in this space.
	I mean, I consider...
	Blockchain and crypto at this point to be honest money because nobody can fudge with the blockchain.
	That's right.
	The ledger.
	You can't cheat the ledger.
	No.
	So, honest money.
	Plus, I still have gold and silver.
	Right.
	Just in case.
	In case everything goes bad.
	Yeah.
	Look.
	Yeah.
	I think all of them are important.
	And we need food.
	Okay, final comment.
	You know, it was funny.
	I had a younger guy comment on one of our previous shows.
	He's like, yeah, I love your show, but aren't you guys a little old to be doing cryptos?
	All of us are in our 20s.
	And I'm like, and you're all broke.
	And we're the guys who actually have the money that crypto should be caring about.
	True.
	If crypto is to succeed, it's got to attract people who have the money, who are people our age and older, who are more closer to retirement.
	They've worked their whole lives, they have funds, and they want to know how to protect those funds.
	It's not every 20-year-old that's got five bucks to his name and can't even pay Uber Eats a tip.
	But I have a sneaky suspicion there's a couple of young guys out there that can launch their own Beavis and Butthead crypto show.
	And I'll watch it.
	I think it'd be great.
	No, look.
	They say crypto is for everyone.
	We say that.
	And so, you know, I wish, and I mean this, I wish there was a couple of people that were 80 years old that had a show and they were riffing back and forth and talking about it.
	I would love to see a couple of young women that have their own show.
	I'd love to see...
	We all get smarter together.
	We are just so early in this game on a 100-yard football field.
	We're at about the 4-yard line, and we've got 96 yards to go.
	So, so much learning to do.
	So many plays to be called.
	Right?
	True.
	And so, we're still early.
	All of us are...
	Oh, geez.
	Give us 10 more years and we'll be like, we won't even believe that we were ever as naive as we are today.
	Yeah, someday, like today's young people are going to look back at us and joke about how we were pounding seed phrases into metal with hammers.
	Like, what the heck?
	That's old school, man.
	You know, stuff like that.
	Yes, exactly.
	Exactly.
	But these young people can also go out and invent the future.
	That wouldn't suck either.
	So, you guys are smart.
	Go figure it out.
	As long as it's the future of freedom, I'm all in.
	Yeah, make our lives easier.
	Make it about freedom.
	Decentralized freedom.
	And we'll have you on the show.
	Sounds good.
	All right.
	Well, that was good, Todd.
	So let me just give out the website again.
	Firo.org.
	That's F-I-R-O.org if you want to learn more about Firo.
	And I kind of think we owe it to Ruben to have him back on the show since we talked about him so much.
	We've got to schedule that out.
	But we're already booked all the way through August.
	Did you know that?
	It's crazy.
	Like the next scheduled opening for the show is September.
	We may have to...
	Todd, we may have to increase the number of days that we film.
	Let's do...
	I'm game.
	I'm down.
	Let's do it.
	There's too many great guests out there.
	Let's not be selfish.
	We can both do it.
	Let's go for it.
	I might have to sacrifice some of my other show times and just do this show more.
	No, that's worth it.
	This show is the most fun show.
	We get to talk about Bigfoot bonus holes.
	Where else can you do that?
	Only on this show.
	All right.
	So the website, folks, is decentralized.tv and join our Telegram group, which is also called Decentralized TV. And there you can click on the chat group.
	You can chat with us.
	And, hey, Todd, do you have people DMing you and trying to get you to invest in their projects?
	I keep getting hit up by people on Telegram that want me to, like, plug or fund their projects now.
	Yeah.
	Are you getting that?
	I swipe left.
	Okay.
	I have no patience for those people.
	I don't respond to DMs.
	Barely at all, unless I know you.
	Okay, yeah, fair enough.
	Because there's so many freaking scammers out there.
	Yeah, so true.
	So many scammers.
	And look, our channel, we have a little bit of work to do in our Telegram channel, too.
	We want to be able to get some bots in there, and we want to be able to make sure that we have some mods in there that continually remind you that watch out for scammers, beware of scammers.
	So we're working on that, but...
	Man, I think we're pretty busy, Mike.
	Yeah.
	So hang in there with us, everyone.
	Okay, yeah.
	Thanks for your patience.
	Thanks for your suggestions and for your participation.
	And feel free to repost this show on other platforms as well.
	And just give us a link back to decentralize.tv.
	I'm Mike Adams, and this has been Todd Pitner, our co-host here.
	And I'm the founder of Brighteon.com also, so...
	Feel free to post your own videos, your own analysis on brighttown.com.
	And thank you for watching today, everybody.
	Take care.
	All right.
	Cheers, everyone.

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