Can Bitcoin Become Easier Without Becoming Custodial? With PakoVM | SLP738

**PakoVM** (0:00)
Living with Bitcoin used to be almost impossible because you had to only give cards, P2P exchanging for cash. Those were your two options. Now you have so many tools, it's as easy as having a bank account, but you know that nobody's going to rock you because you are in control of your money.

**Stephan Livera** (0:19)
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Joining me on the show today is PakoVM. Some of you may know him online for his commentary around Bitcoin and technology stuff.
Pako is into Linux also, and Pako is also working at Bitbox, which is one of the hardware worlds. So welcome to the show, Pako.

**PakoVM** (0:39)
Thank you very much. Impressive intro, by the way. Most people record that.
Yeah, super honored to be here, actually. I've been listening to your show for a long, long time since they started the Bitcoin in 2021, I would say. And you were instrumental for me to get into Bitcoin and understand a lot of the technology. It was super honored to be here.

**Stephan Livera** (1:03)
Fantastic. Yeah. Well, hey, you never know who's listening, right?
So, oh, I guess we should also talk about the scammer. So let's talk a bit about that story. I think Craig from Bitcoin Magazine also mentioned, or Bitcoin Conference rather, I should say, mentioned this idea. And I was like, oh yeah, actually, I mean, because look, I mean, right now, there's a lot of scammers and spammers and everything out there in the world today. Tell us your recent experience so other people can learn about how to watch out for this scam.

**PakoVM** (1:34)
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So like basically the scam has been evolving. So like we saw recently a few months ago that a lot of Bitcoiners were getting their Telegram hacked because the scam was to get somebody you kind of know have you like a call with them and have an AI version of the person. And then then they start claiming that you have like connection problems and stuff. And you have to update your client for the connection to work or whatever. And a lot of people felt for that.
The attack, I think, it went into the dark for a while. People started forgetting about it. And then I got this message from a guy called BillyBitcoins. I was like, okay, I don't know this guy from anything, but I checked everything on his profile.
I saw like no indications of fax or anything.
I was like, okay, maybe my article is about lightning spark. I catch it. We saw great reception of those in our blog in Bitbox. I thought, okay, maybe people are starting to listen to them during we are in the fair market. We were taking interest in the technology, so it's a good place for me to start talking about this stuff.
Yeah, like they had a podcast. The podcast was legit, but they talked more about Ordinals, BRC20 tokens and stuff. Yes, since that stuff is kind of dying. And like, okay, that maybe makes sense that they want to touch something else. Okay, asked around, nobody knew if it was hack. So yeah, I then started to ask for verifications. And one of the things, the key verification I always ask for people who have podcasts, is like, hey, can you send me a message from the podcast directly? Unless I know the person, like, hey, you have access to the social account of the podcast, please send me a message so I can confirm it's you. And they didn't. They said, oh no, I forgot, whatever. Then when the, when the interview day comes, I said, okay, now this is too suspicious. I asked for this multiple times. Not a single time I got an answer. So I'm going to take measures. What I did, I created a new user on the PC, I'm running Linux. So I didn't give it any administration. I mean, I mean, it serves the permissions.
Then use FlatSeal. That's something on Linux. If you know what, what the Flatpak is. It's a kind of-

**Stephan Livera** (4:32)
Yeah, like when you install software, sometimes it's a Flatpak form versus like package manager format. Yeah.

**PakoVM** (4:38)
Exactly. So Flatpaks have permissions that you can control. What it is that I remove all the permissions and only allowed for a camera and microphone. Just in case it was an actual interview.
There's always a slight chance.

**Stephan Livera** (4:54)
This is a lot of work just for a podcast.

**PakoVM** (4:58)
Yeah, I know.

**Stephan Livera** (5:00)
But yeah, I mean, to be fair, it's a fair point because I mean nowadays, look, I mean, there's a lot of podcasts going online and there's a lot of, obviously, scammer, spammer stuff going on. And the hack I've heard of before is, yeah, as you were saying, they might say, oh, I'm having trouble hearing you, I'm having difficulty, install this firmware, install this update, software update. And because in the moment, you might just quickly kind of like, normally, the alarm bells might go off. But in this case of like, we're all used to like some kind of call thing not working. So then you have to troubleshoot it. And then it kind of already your defenses are down.