Is Your Bitcoin Transaction Safe? with Keith Gardner | SLP723

**Keith Gardner** (0:00)
I generally think the safer we can make Bitcoin Lightning Arc, the more anxiety we can remove is a good thing for the industry.

**Stephan Livera** (0:08)
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about Bitcoin payments and how to verify the addresses and how do we make sure we're secure in this age of AI and deepfakes and malware and all this. So rejoining me on the show today is Keith from the team at Branta. Keith, welcome back to the show.

**Keith Gardner** (0:26)
It's great to be here. Thanks, Stephan.

**Stephan Livera** (0:29)
So Keith, give us the latest. I know you guys had some recent partnerships or deals signed. I think you did one with Amboss as well.

**Keith Gardner** (0:35)
Yeah, yeah, there's been a lot going on. I think we last spoke in 2024 Yeah, just for the audience, I'm Keith. I founded Branta in 2023 The goal is to have people never lose their Bitcoin when they think they're setting it to a certain counter party. But yeah, since 2024, there's been a lot of action. We're on BTC Pay server. We're on Zapray. AmBoss was announced yesterday. Remittance Company in Africa. Yeah, there's been a lot happening since then.

**Stephan Livera** (1:05)
Yeah. Now, I guess let's take it back to the start. So for most people, you know, just basics. When you go to send Bitcoin, the experience typically is you might be copy, pasting an address and putting that into your wallet. If it's an online wallet interface, like whatever, Electrum and Sparrow and so on, or Blockstream or whatever. Or you may be copy pasting it on your phone, or you may be used to the kind of scanning experience. But the question that we're exploiting here is more like, what are the ways that can fall down? Where are the ways you can be tricked? Because there are various ways you can be tricked there. Do you want to just take it from there?

**Keith Gardner** (1:42)
Yeah, let's go into it. So actually, I think it was last week, Stephan, there was quite the nice thread on Twitter with Mr. Hoddle.

**Stephan Livera** (1:49)
Yeah, I was going back and forth with him on that.

**Keith Gardner** (1:52)
Yeah, now you were going back and forth with him. And so I think there is some misunderstanding to clear up. But backing way up, Bitcoin is different than fiat, because when you send Bitcoin, we settle with finality. Right, and this is beautiful because this is a bare instrument like cash. Now with credit cards, you know, maybe this isn't popular with your audience, but credit cards are kind of the UX we're aiming for. Right, like how many credit cards does the average American have versus how many Sparrow installations does the average American have? Right, so we have work to do with Bitcoin payments. And what we really want to be able to do is verify the counterparty address in a zero-knowledge way before I send my Bitcoin. Now, what that means for me at home, whether I'm paying a bill that's large or small, if I so choose, I can check that the recipient is actually correct and confirmed, and I'm not getting phished, man in the middle, address swap, any of this nasty stuff that is a tail risk but does happen too much.

**Stephan Livera** (2:57)
Yeah, I see. And so the issue is now, yes, there's certain best practices that, of course, check the address on the typical piece of advice people give is, when you're about to send money, check the address that's listed on your hardware wallet that you're about to send to is the address on your screen. But it gets deeper than that, right? Because yes, yes, that's best practice. That is a good, that doesn't change. That's still correct. But there are still other ways that we can be pwned without even knowing. And I think what we're talking about, and look, sympathy for Mr. Hoddle, because I think he didn't quite understand what was that risk. And then after that thread, he sort of got it a bit better. But the point being, not everyone is just sort of only periodically doing a transaction, right? Like, if you're just kind of DCA-ing, and every now and again, you're spending a little bit, or maybe you're selling a bit of fiat on the exchange, this kind of thing. Well, that's a different case to... Imagine if you're a business, and you're doing like regular payments, and you're just kind of receiving invoices all the time. How do you verify that that Bitcoin address is truly belonging to the actual counterparty who you think, and is not like a hacker who has sent you a malicious invoice, or that your browser that you go on hasn't had some kind of malware to add to what's called an address replacement attack? So I think that's probably the key, or at least one of the key risks, right?