#769: Freedom Money In Your Private Chat with Vik Sharɱa & Seth For Privacy

**Odell** (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

**Odell** (0:18)
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

**Odell** (0:29)
I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

**Odell** (0:31)
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. You probably should be.

**Marty Bent** (0:36)
Vik and Seth, welcome to the show. First time, long time.

**Vik** (0:40)
Yeah, thanks for having us on.

**Seth For Privacy** (0:43)
Yeah, I'm excited for this. I've been, man, Tales from the Crypt was the first show. When I first went down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin and fell down the listen to 1,000 hours of podcasts, Tales from the Crypt was the go for me. So it's really, really cool to be able to be on here. Obviously, I've known Adele for a really long time, but we've never gotten to chat much, Marty. So I'm excited for this. Thanks for having us on.

**Marty Bent** (1:08)
I am as well. You guys just launched Radar Chat.
This week, which is a long time coming, Adele and I have been talking about the need for Bitcoin payments and signal for years. I think since we started Rabbit Hole Recap eight years ago, it's always been a topic of discussion here and there. You guys have finally launched it. Thank you for that, number one. Number two, I think the juxtaposition of your launch date on July 7th and everything going on in the EU as it pertains to chat control, VPN banning being talked about in the UK, a facial recognition being talked about in cars throughout the European Union. And it seems like the digital panopticon is being erected around us and it's incumbent upon us in the freedom tech space to build the tools to route around that. And it looks like with Radar you've done just that. So I think to jump off is talking about what convinced you to build Radar in the first place and why now.

**Vik** (2:17)
So I mean, there was a lot of factors involved. One being, of course, the community wanted it. You've talked about it with Dell, like you said. Even Jack Dorsey's tweeted about it. We have a pretty good video coming out on that pretty soon. So that was a big driving force. Another one was on my trips to China, everyone using WeChat and when it comes time to pay at the cafe or wherever I am, you're not pulling out another payment app or anything. You just use the same app that you're communicating with.
That was also a driving factor. Right now, for messaging, it's so natural, everybody's doing it all the time. That's what you wake up and you do, you check your messages, see what you've, any messages from your friends or family.
It's already a platform that everybody is using all the time. There's already so much stuff blowing in messaging apps, like text, of course, but also video, pictures, documents. So why not money? That's what we thought, why not money? Why can't Bitcoin flow through the same system?
Why now? I think the tech is there now to do it. I don't know if you know, a couple of years ago when Seth just joined on actually, we were trying to implement Lightning into Cake Wallet, and it was just a terrible user experience. Even though the user didn't have to worry about managing channels and liquidity and all that, still the user experience was pretty bad. Actually, Seth killed it when he came on, so you can blame him. But then Spark, and Breeze built an SDK for Spark, and we put that in Cake earlier this year, and it was a huge success. We're like, okay, this is it. This technology is here now. We can put it into Signal. Then your next question should be, why Signal?
We kicked around the idea of doing another messaging app, a new one altogether. But you probably have four or five messaging app on your phone right now, at least, and now try to get people to download yet another messaging app, and have all their friends and family join. It's a heavy lift. Signal made sense at their gold standard in privacy. It's open source. We can build on it. They have some payment rails that we were able to take advantage of with that mobile coin, they did. Yeah, with all these things come together at the right time, it was an obvious and right time to do this project.