Airgap Hardwar Wallet!

A company has come forward and developed an airgap hardware wallet for Bitcoin using QR codes and a camera scanner! This is amazing news for crypto!

COBO wallet

HAHA!

Just kidding!

That video was published in 2018 and I had my idea in 2019.

So this thing has existed for a while...

Great minds think alike I guess.

This wallet is seriously badass though. Not only does it have to be paired to your phone and you can have extra passwords securing hidden wallets, but they also give you ways to store your passphrase that are completely fireproof (metal tiles).

The new standard.

I think airgapped security will be the standard for crypto going forward. It just seems obvious. Billionaires can't trust any kind of security worse than this. And I know there are going to be a lot more billionaires going forward as technology creates abundance, and crypto is money itself.

Hopefully there's not a huge increase in the number of kidnappings going forward. Can you imagine always looking over your shoulder wondering if someone is willing to put both your lives in jeopardy just so they can steal your funds? I can. Secrecy and privacy will only get more important going forward.

Not the first time I've had ideas that came to pass.

Silk Boulevard

About a month after I posted my fond memories of Drug Wars, Drug Wars was announced on the Steem blockchain. Coincidence? Maybe.

Of course the game that got created was a bastardization of what I had in mind, but whatever. Real decentralized games take massive innovation. It's not easy.

Starcraft 2

I used to be a big SC2 player (shoutout to Korea). I've made it to master league and there is only one league above that (grandmaster). In any case, long before the game was released I had the ear of one of the lead developers at Blizzard. We are still friends. A ton of my ideas for the game came to pass, and I never knew how much I had to do with those developments. That's just the way the cookie crumbles. Some of these companies are more secretive than governments.

Open-Source Economy

I was listening to a podcast way back when. My girlfriend often has me listen to Reply All episodes. Most of the ones she shows me are pretty captivating.

It was about this guy who got involved with open-source tech and created a cryptographic algorithm (E4M). This name was Paul Le'roux.

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/dvhd9k/136-the-founder

Evan says there was nothing about Paul’s early life that gave any indication of what this guy was going to become.

EVAN: He was not a bad kid. I mean everyone says he was a good kid and he was a sweet kid. And they were even, you know, bad kids in the neighborhood, one of whom I talked to, who said, “No, no Paul was never like that. He was just–”

PJ: You talked to his neighborhood bad kid?

EVAN: I did. I talked to like a neighborhood gang kid who said, “Yeah, we all did that stuff. And, and he was, he was just like a, a kind of pudgy kid who was quiet and friendly and his relatives loved him and he was very smart.

And then he got a computer. He–his cousin told me that he got a computer for washing a car and from that moment forward. He became obsessed.

PJ: Paul spent the rest of his teens and his early twenties just teaching himself everything he could about coding. And in 1999 he goes online and releases this computer program. It’s this new kind of encryption software that’s extremely powerful and extremely effective. It’s called E4M, Encryption for the Masses.

EVAN: And it was quite well known in the encryption community because it was a piece of disk encryption software that let you encrypt your whole hard drive, but one of the things it did is that it sort of hid the fact that you had encrypted it. Because, even if you've encrypted your hard drive, if the authorities or whoever's looking knows that it is, they sort of know where to look to try to break that.

PJ: Right. It's like a–if there's one house on the block that has like 80 locks on the door, they're like, "Oh, maybe a drug dealer lives there."

EVAN: (laughs) Right. Exactly. And they're trying to- then–then they can spend all their effort trying to break in there. So it was, it was trying to solve that problem. And also just be a more advanced, sophisticated piece of encryption software. He, he incorporated a lot of different types of different software and algorithms into it and, when he did so, he released it as open-source software.

So he released it for free, he released all the source code and the idea being, under the principles of open-source software, that other people could work on it and improve it and it would all get better.

PJ: That’s exactly what happened. People took Paul’s free software and they improved it, they made it better, and then they charged money for the things that they’d made. Some of those people got to cash in and Paul didn’t. He tried to start a company, that failed. By 2001 he was reduced to this job working for a guy whose product was actually based off Paul’s work, a commercialized version of E4M. And if that wasn’t bad enough, that guy fired Paul. None of this had been the plan.

TL:DR

EVAN: He kind of thought he was participating in this open source world where everyone helped each other and then he came to feel that he never got any money and everyone was taking advantage of him. So he had really been sort of exploited in putting his code out there. And he, he expressed that on message boards.

This is the crux of the issue.

What would have happened if Paul had been on Hive helping us making badass open-source stuff? Not only would we have tipped him extremely well, but also he would have stake in the network and the value he brought to the network would be reflected via his own stake. Hive is going to explode with innovation and value when it inevitably goes mainstream.

So what happened to Paul Le'roux?

And meanwhile the guy who's running the commercialized encryption software company is like–has a house in the Riviera and is living very high. And Paul Le Roux, he gets divorced. He kind of bounces around and then he ends up in Rotterdam and, you know, he meets someone new and he gets married, but they're living in this small apartment and they have a kid and they have a beat-up car. And he really, he wants what he's seen these other tech people have, particularly this guy who owns this company. He wants that and he's so far from it despite having created a really valuable, interesting piece of software.

PJ: To make matters worse, all of this was happening right at the end the dotcom bubble. These years where everywhere Paul looked, he would’ve just seen the internet turning people–people nowhere near as smart as him–into millionaires.

Paul Le Roux was not going let this happen again. This was going to be the last time anybody made a sucker out of him.

For a couple years, he lays low. And then in 2004, he shows up online with his new venture.

An online pharmaceutical company called RX Limited.

EVAN: The sort of pitch for the company is that, in the United States there is a really messed up health care system. And as part of that health care system people get prescriptions for painkillers for their back, for their headaches, migraines, what have you. Then they maybe lose their health insurance. They can't get their pain meds anymore and then they go online looking for a cheaper place to find them. So, the premise of the company was to satisfy that demand.

PJ: RX Limited was going to let Americans buy painkillers–quickly, cheaply, with very few questions asked.

Essentially Paul became a pharma drug kingpin selling shady meds online. He did a lot of illegal things and was responsible for multiple deaths, just like John McAfee (man I still need to talk about that crazy documentary).

EVAN: People who advised him would say, "Hey, invest it in this. Or branch out into this."

But he decided, "Well, if I branch out into cocaine trafficking and meth trafficking and moving gold across Africa, those are very high margin businesses (PJ laughs) and I can make five thousand percent return on my money instead of eking out five percent at some, you know, some boring call center business. I can really, really maximize my money."

Conclusion

I highly recommend listening to that podcast; it's pretty nuts.

If only open-source devs like Paul-Le'roux had a place to build value where they wouldn't get screwed over. Perhaps a place where they had stake in the currency of the community itself.

A place like Hive.

Return from Holy Shit! They did it! They stole my idea!!! + E4M and Paul Le'roux to edicted's Web3 Blog