Doug 
All righty, we are live, live on the narrow talk. That's like the good old days, Diego.

What's going on, man? I feel like you still got the same setup over there, the same Mike. You haven't, you haven't used it in a few years. You probably had to dust that thing off. 

Diego 
Yeah, uh, use this sparingly over, over once in a while, you know, in my face in shame for a while, but, uh, decided to come back on the world can't contain me. Yada, yada, yada.

And all, all the nonsense, uh, everybody I'm Diego Salazar. Uh, those of you in the Monero or cryptocurrency community probably know me as Rarar. Um, I've been around the Monero community since 2017 and have done many things, both prolific and background. Uh, and these days I run cypherstack, which is my little design development infrastructure research firm. We do stuff all over the place and I bring with me one of my mathematicians and cryptographers, Luke Szramowski. So I will kick to him real quick for a quick introduction. 

Luke 
I started working with Cyberstack earlier this year. I get to work with an awesome team of really smart dudes. I love being the dumbest guy in the room. It's always what you should shoot for as a good researcher.

Yeah, I spent most of my time. I originally got my master's degree in number theory, and then I did another master's degree in coding theory. And I've been in love with cryptography. And Diego was like, hey, I'm going to do cryptography for me. And I'm like, say what? And I've been happily doing so for the last couple of months.

So hopefully I can answer any math-specific questions. 

Doug 
Well, you're definitely not the dumbest guy in this room. That's for sure. You're light years ahead of me. As Diego knows, I'm kind of like the buffer between normies and the Monero people, right? So I've never had a mathematical understanding of what's going on with the Monero. I'll put it that way, right?

It definitely takes a certain brain to be on that level. Thank you for joining us today, man. Super excited about this episode. A lot of people are wondering what's going on with Full Chain membership proofs. Diego, as I hear you give your intro, I'm thinking like, wow, it's crazy that there's probably people listening to this that don't know you, which is crazy to think of. Because when I was kind of first getting into Monero, you were very vocal, one of the faces of Monero. So there's new classes of Monero. There's people that just came in that are probably just getting in today, right? Monero is growing. It's grown a lot, I think, since I even I last spoke with you. I feel like we're in a new phase of adoption here. So for those that don't know Diego, he is an OG, OG. And super excited to have you here. And I do think it's great that you did take a step back from the public scene, and you've had your head down, and you've been doing amazing work behind the scenes. You should also mention, did you mention your wallet as well? Did you mention Stack Wallet? 

Diego 
Um, this, uh, this podcast is sponsored by cake wallet and love the cake guys. Love Vic, uh, they do great work. Some of the best work in the space.

Um, I make my own little wallet as well with my team, also open source, self-hosted, you know, privacy conscious, privacy coins, Monero supported all these things, um, cake has taken some of our tech. We have taken some of cake texts. We're all open source here. That's, that's, you know, one of the cool things I think, in my opinion, we got the best UX in the space. So give us a look stack wallet, uh, Android, iOS, windows, Mac iOS, Linux. We, we support everything and we're clean, clean, clean. And we have a Monero Chan theme. So you're going to want to check that out. If you're a Monero Chan, Stan, uh, it's that stack wallets. Uh, my, my, my team with developers and designers and stuff, we, we were kind of guns for hire. We go and help whoever and whoever needs help and whoever's got some money. And they were just talented enough. And I'm like, you know what? I think I can throw my hat in the ring here and, and see what we can, see what we can accomplish. And we have big accolades. 

Doug 
And you've always been a UX guy right like I feel like that's always been something like you're concerned with Monero Like like we got to make it so people can actually use it and you had you have the skills to do so

Diego 
Absolutely. If we have the best privacy technology that money can buy, but nobody can use it, I mean, so much like PGP keys and stuff, then, you know, it's only as good as the crowd that you're hiding in is the kind of the key thing for privacy. And if your crowd is small, then, you know, there's like, if you and five other people, then that's not a big crowd, you could probably be found out pretty, pretty easily.

Monero, as we all know, you know, no one pitching the choir here, Monero makes it as easy as possible, it's not like Bitcoin, we have to jump through 10 hoops to keep private, you know, you just press send, and it does work, right? But there's even ways that it can go and make things further, further easier, I was about to say, if you'll excuse my lack of poetry there, make things easier for the, for the people, for example, like there was a lot of discussion about churning, and there's a lot of discussion about, are there ways that you can out yourself by accident, you know, by using wrong outputs at the wrong times or whatever, and all these things, ideally, you want the end user to know nothing about you don't want to explain any of it, you don't want them to go to a 30 minute lecture to understand it, you just want the wallet defaults and things to choose the right things at the right time to give you the maximum privacy all under the hood, and they give zero thought and don't even know what any of those words mean. So I mean, I've been, I you're right, I've been banging on that drum for a long, long, long time. And so I try my very best to make that happen. So for example, in Stack Wallet, we do have a fun little churn feature that will just continuously churn for you. I didn't realize that. I didn't know that. Yeah, give it a look, give it a look. I will put a big asterisk there, because in as much as I like to say, Oh, we have features that nobody else don't, I also like to be very, very clear, especially when it comes to people's privacy. You know, the research for churn in terms of how much it helps. We know it usually doesn't hurt. But we also don't know exactly, we don't really quite have an upper bound on how much it helps. It can help somewhat, it helps the whole network somewhat. It obviously not clogs the chain, but puts a bunch more outputs on there, because you're sending to yourself a bunch, right? So like, there, it helps a bit. It helps a bit. It may give you that extra little kick that you're looking for, if you're being quite paranoid while you're waiting for FCMPs and need to. 

Doug 
Right. This one's going to say like, good segue, right? Because hopefully once we have full chain membership proofs, that will even become less of a need to do churning. Absolutely.

Listen, I think we got to do a separate show just on the wallet and stuff. I would love to do that because I feel like we could talk about it for quite some time because I'd love to know your vision, where you're headed with it, and all that jazz. But I think it'd be good if we could focus on the full chain membership proofs. That's what the people want to hear. That's certainly what I want to hear as well. And plus you have Luke here. So before we get into that, I guess give us a little background on what Cypher Stack is doing and does in general and what kind of projects you guys are working on in general. 

Diego 
Yeah, so when I first started Cypherstack, there was a pretty good group of Monero people that were either were looking for work or leaving some of their jobs. And, you know, of course, it's the dream of everyone who kind of is involved in the community to be able to do this kind of thing for money. And so I had the really stupid idea of like, let's try to make this happen. And it wasn't just for this for its own sake, I was also trying to retain researchers, you know, both Saray and Saray Noether, the primary old school MRL researchers of old, they had to generally leave because the CCS, it was good for quite some time. For those of you who don't know, they were able to kind of put out quarterly CCSs and make money that way. But it does come with drawbacks. And they stuck with it for several years before like, okay, I think this is about enough. They wanted something more traditional. So I decided to try to make that happen. That was actually one of the primary goals of starting cypherstack or rather expanding it out to its, but it is now. And I was successful.

I was able to get Saray on board with us for quite some time for several years. He's no longer with us. He went to another privacy focused kind of cryptocurrency thing, which is great. But in this place, I got Saray, haha, you know, so I have a revolving door of old school MRL mathematicians. And then we started seeing opportunities financial and otherwise to expand the team and get new blood in which is where Freeman Slaughter, you may have seen his name thrown around a bit. By the way, he just got his PhD today. So he is now Dr. Freeman Slaughter. Huge, huge, huge win for that and for us and now I could charge people more money and it's great.

And Freeman recommended Luke and I brought Luke on and he's like, yeah, I know all the things and he did so it's safe. So I had to think less because I say guys do this make the math work. Thanks. Bye. And, you know, obviously, CyberSec does do other things. We still do like web stuff, design stuff, infrastructure stuff. We do a lot of the infrastructure stuff for Monero actually, like some of the site things, but we're not here to talk about that very much. FCMPs, that's why we're here. And the research side of CyberSec, I have been so, so pleased.

We were very instrumental in Firo's Spark upgrade, the line to Spark. And I know, you know, depending on where you are on the tribalism spectrum, people don't like to talk about this or try to refute it somewhat. But Spark was pretty big, not in FCMPs, but in helping get Serifis out of the little rut that it was in. And obviously we're going FCMPs and then maybe Serifis after that. But, you know, I like to think that privacy technologies inform each other, right? The one out of many proofs that was the original Atlantis gave way to things such as Serifis and which will potentially be deployed down the road. Excuse me, we've done things for other privacy coins around the space, but, you know, you know me, my heart's in Monero.

This is where I, this is where I started. This is where I am. So. 

Doug 
Are you feeling about Monero's tech and position versus other quote unquote privacy coins right now? Yes. 

Diego 
So this is a really, I don't want to say interesting question, but it kind of is because other 

Doug 
You're a good person to ask you are you you know obviously you're a Monero guy But you're out of also coin egg not you're you're you're truly are interested in the tech 

Diego 
Yes, I am a privacy guy. Like that's my thing, privacy. And my big thing is we cannot put all of our privacy eggs in one basket because if that basket were to fail, we are screwed.

Right. So, you know, Zcash with their Halo 2 orchard stuff. I know people in Monero have problems with Zcash, but that stuff is really powerful, super cool. And now free open source software as opposed to what it was a couple of years ago. So I'm happy that they did that work and that they exist and hope they continue to iterate on that and make that more powerful. Um, same thing with, you know, Monero, we have just Monero. The thing that really draws me to Monero is just the commitment we have to good research, right?

Like we throw lots of money at a whole bunch of talented mathematicians to say, make better privacy. And sometimes there's slow going. There has been a couple of false starts such as Triptych and Arcturus, which Sarang penned back in the day that ended up not being able to be deployed on Monero for various reasons, of which Cypherstack was once again, you know, a big part of finding that out and axing it, so to speak. But, you know, kind of in regards to lay of the land, I really do. And I don't just say this because I'm a Monero guy. I mean, FCMPs is kind of the big excitement around the block and for good reason, right? For quite some time, Halo 2 Orchard was kind of the only big, big boy, no trusted set up. Like it's got very cool technological stuff going on. But like I said, you know, it wasn't fast for a long time. It wasn't under a good license. Not a lot of people understood it. It wasn't battle tested. A lot of those things have gone away. So I'm much more positive on that technology in general.

But that was our only basket for next gen privacy. You know, then the Lanta Spark came along and Spark's cool. I know Furo plans to put FCMPs in Spark as well. Come down the line, that will make it even better as well. So I like seeing all these baskets, man. And Monero being the front runner of FCMPs and really making it a reality as opposed to just something that's talked about. Like I think that puts us a cut above there. We do other work for other coins. You know, Salvium, Zanno, we've done various audits for them and stuff. A lot of them are trying to do interesting things like, you know, proof of stake, but private, you know, whatever you think. 

Doug 
What is your XANO take if you don't mind? Because it's one of the controversial, I have them participate in Monerotopia. I've said all my positive things about them in the past, why I like them. But I'm curious what your take is. 

Diego 
As a project and as a community, I think it's okay from a technological perspective. And this is true of like Salveum and other things as well. All of them are trying to do like proof of stake with Monero Tech or compliance with Monero Tech in the case of Salveum and other things. But they're all doing it on Monero's current tech stack, which is ring signatures and things. And they're going to require quite a bit of work to get over the hurdle to get to FCMPs as well. Right. So in a sense, like it's I think all of these are science experiments worth running. Let me say it like that. Right. All of these are experience that are worth running in parallel just just to see, you know, just so we can have more things. And maybe one of them will be successful. But man, dude, like it really hurts.

Like, can you guys get this stuff on like the new tech stack, which I know is hard because we have don't even have it on ours yet. But it makes it just that much less interesting, I guess, because it's going to be obsolete fairly soon, maybe not obsolete in the things that they're trying to do specifically, but in, you know, from a privacy perspective, because Monero people have known, Monero researchers have known that ring signatures and the way that we are currently doing privacy in Monero is not the greatest. Like it gives good enough. I said something on my Twitter pretty recently that I stand by. And, you know, this may ruffle us a few feathers here as well. But when we think about threat models, right, before you say privacy, privacy, you have to know what is your threat model? What am I trying to hide my information from? What are their capabilities? Right. Who are they? What resources do they have access to? And what are the mathematical guarantees of privacy, hopefully with hard numbers backing it up, right, that my technology protects me from? And for the vast majority of people, Bitcoin with privacy options is going to be sufficient for their needs. Obviously, if the person you're trying to hide from is kind of passive surveillance, big, big brother authority type people, that's probably not going to be good enough. But I would say for maybe 60 percent of people, maybe 70 percent of people's threat models, Bitcoin with privacy things is probably good enough. Monero covers another 20 percent, I would say, right, which ultimately we want all of society to get to, to kind of have that baseline level of privacy, because that just increases the crowd for everybody. But, you know, if we're like, well, I don't really care about the government, I just don't want targeted ads or, you know, whatever, OK, then Bitcoin privacy will probably be good enough for you. The next step, Monero, 20 percent, what covers like 80 percent of use cases. Halo 2 orchard from Zcash and the upcoming FCMPs would kind of bump that up to cover 99 percent of people's use cases in regards in regards to money. So it really depends on your threat model. And I know the tribalism people don't like that because they like to just say, my team better. The end. Right. But that's not the way math works. Yeah, this is what. 

Doug 
Yeah, I mean we've been talking open and honestly about ring the the flaws of ring signatures since you know Like 2018 or I mean even earlier right there like I remember, you know we had a Monero talk and I had just it on and you know, it's but back then and you know that he was breaking it down and It's it's always been it's always been a known it's a known problem, right? There is an attack vector there you could do the evil as Eve attack or whatever it is It opens us up to some attacks, right?

There are ways you could avoid them like right like if you do your whatever if you if you do mix your you know Mix your own Monero or whatever tumble tumble your own Monero some Monero to yourselves, right? There are things you could do avoid exchanges but obviously like you said we want to get beyond that we want to get to the point where Monero is as easy as it is to use today With all all privacy features built into the point where you don't you don't have to think about what you're doing when you're using it Right, and so that that is the dream that is that that is the goal So how far are we from getting there guys because we've been waiting for you know, full-chain members Actually, I shouldn't put you ever should proofs came out of nowhere with Luke Parker, right?

Like we weren't we weren't on that on that train. We were heading towards The seraphis train we were just gonna improve ring like nominally improve ring signatures Wasn't gonna be like a major Like, you know, it was it was it was uh, it would have gotten us closer Yeah, but it truly wasn't like a final solution, right? It was And then Luke was like, you know guy came out of nowhere Pitching us full-chain membership proofs and saying he figured out how to do it

Diego 
And interestingly, if I may interject here, Luke Parker, Kayaba has done things with Firo and Zcash and Monero and stuff as well. And I have no doubt in my mind that just all this cross pollination just really gets the ideas flowing and going. So, yeah, just throwing that out there.

I know this part, I'm not really speaking to the choir because I do know we have a lot of Monero maxis, of which, you know, half the week I am myself. Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday is when I flip flop between, yeah, Monero is kind of the only thing worth working on. And the next day I'm like, you know, some good stuff has come from these other places. Let's work on this stuff, too. 

Doug 
Yeah, I mean, I keep trying to drive that home as well because, you know, that's what Monerotopia is all about. It's getting people that are into digital cash into one, into one 10, because the amount of people that are actually into it, it's not that large a group even globally.

So for us, just like exclude like, oh, like I'm also into digital cash, but I want to use this version of it, like, let's at least all get in a room together and agree that we want a tool that can do this and, you know, let the best, let the best tools win. 

Diego 
But if I can re-endear myself to the audience here for just a second, I do, I do absolutely think that Monero is probably the only coin that is positioned to take such technology and bring it to the masses. Just from a, not a marketing, from a network effect perspective, you know, this Monero is known. Right now, Monero's big Achilles heel is that it is known, but people do know that, you know, ring signatures are kind of okay or whatever. And yeah, like, I agree with user 58 here, you know, it's marketable, cool logo, cool community, cool, you know, cool name.

And it's so once we do kind of bump that up with FCMPs, I just think Monero was honestly the only coin that is positioned right now, unless there are major changes or massive amounts of money thrown at these other projects to actually deliver not just on the privacy dream, but privacy for every one dream. And I, at present time, unless things change, that is my current, like, that is my current opinion and I hold to it pretty strongly. 

Doug 
Awesome, brother. I couldn't agree more. Family tip, $10. Thank you so much, family.

You didn't even ask a question. Greatly appreciate that. Use xmrchat.com slash MoneroTalk. Send us your Monero-based Super Chats. You don't have to send $10. You can send $0.10, but just use it. Let's use Monero. All right. Yeah. So let's get into it. Let's get into the juicy stuff. So where are we at with full-chain membership groups? We were headed towards full-chain membership proofs, hopefully getting implemented. The good estimates I was hearing was around February 2026, we would actually be live, up and running with full-chain membership proofs. Where are we currently at? What has taken place? We are just saying there was some potential disrealment. What was that potential de-realment? Give us the lowdown. 

Diego 
Yeah, I'll give the stupid person's answer and then I'll let Luke give a 

Doug 
smart person's answer. Yeah, I want to go deep down this rabbit hole, so. 

Diego 
and Lou can absolutely correct my stupid person's answer. So FCMPs is a really cool technology that is going to effectively, for those of you who don't know, allow our anonymity set to gigantically balloon from, what is it right now? 15, you know, a 15 ring member. I forget exactly what it is. Six, yeah, something along there. To basically every other transaction that has used the Full Chain Membership Proops technology ever in the history of Monero. So for every transaction that goes out, that anonymity set just increased by one and another and another and another and another. So no longer are we locked into 16. We have a theoretical infinite number and the more people use Monero, the better the anonymity set gets.

This has always been possible to us in theory. Nothing stopped us from editing the code and saying ring signature size equals 1,000. The problem with doing that is that it balloons the transaction size, meaning every Monero transaction, instead of being kilobytes, maybe, you know, hundreds of kilobytes or thousands or what have you. So every time you sync the chain, you have to download a massive, it's gonna take a lot of hardware, a lot of space in your hard drive, it's gonna take a lot of bandwidth. Just syncing the chain is gonna be a nightmare. Some people on weaker hardware actually wouldn't be able to sync the chain at all. And then you won't be able to mine, you won't be able to send, you know, whatever. Nothing stopped us from doing that except the reality that it would pretty much just crash the Monero network. The cool thing about FCMPs is it allows us to, instead of having a linear increase, it allows us to have a logarithmic increase where basically it will still go up. The average transaction will still go up in size, but it tails off. So we start reaching kind of a maximum that it will go up. And once again, Luke can expand on the details here. But, and here's where kind of the speed bump that hit within the past couple of weeks, here's where that happens. There was a way to make it way, way, way more efficient as well, because FCMPs by itself, naked FCMPs, naked FCMPs, sorry. It's still balloon transaction sizes and probably a bit more than we would like. That would probably be feasible. It would probably kick a few people off the network. And so there was this really cool technology called Divisors. 

Doug 
That is that was that the plus part of full-chain membership proofs plus Luke Losing the plus no longer full-chain membership proof plus 

Diego 
Yes, okay. The plus, I know what that's for, admittedly.

We have been hammering and hammering on divisors and what divisors do is that it makes things way, way more efficient to the without divisors. We, there was even a tiny bit of talk in MRL. It was, it was contentious. 

Doug 
lose divisors and you could look if you could explain what divisors are do we definitely lose them or is there a chance that there's some other way of approaching them or have they they've been proven useless

Diego 
Let me let me finish the story here. I'm almost up.

Give me give me like a 15 more seconds The the cryptographer that proposed divisors He his idea seemed solid But he didn't do all the ooey gooey math work to make sure to like prove with hard numbers That this was not exploitable that this could not be broken and I can't see myself anymore. Okay, here I am so guys.

Okay guys So we had to Basically we we were hired to take a look at that and it was expected like yeah It's all gonna work. But as we kept digging and digging and digging it's like, oh, okay This this actually might be a problem and then we fix that and like, oh, okay Yeah, this this next thing actually might be a problem So we fixed that and it got to the point where we didn't know how many more of these we would encounter So we said, okay at this time we cannot recommend we actually think divisors will still do what it's going to do But at this time we can't recommend it Because there's just too many unknown bear traps in this tall grass that we're trying to get through Spoiler warning we've done the hard work We spent our nights and weekends and we're pretty happy now with divisors and we let MRL know that this past Wednesday at the Manera Research Lab meeting so we go is we give our little thumbs up here now I'm gonna kick it down to Luke for if that's alright Doug

Doug 
Yes, I just want to fully understand what a divisor is and what this new version of divisor that we're using is that that's okay and what the difference is. 

Luke 
Sure, yeah, so the thing that made divisors so tantalizing to begin with is there's this sort of transformation that takes place where you can take really expensive operations and transform them into relatively inexpensive, comparatively much less expensive operations, which is always something we should be shooting for because that's where all of your efficiency gains are basically going to be coming from. The idea is that if you're familiar with elliptic curves that elliptic curve addition or point multiplication can be very pricey. But regular addition and regular multiplication comparatively is a lot cheaper.

So the core idea behind the technology, the divisors idea, is can we prove stuff about sums with points by transforming it and putting it in a different space, a space where it's computationally less expensive and then still kind of get the same result? 

Doug 
So you're not using the elliptic curve, you're using something else, right? 

Luke 
Whenever we're talking about the visors, we're really talking about these sorts of formal sums of points. It's basically a way of keeping track of where a certain function might have zeros. So whenever you evaluate it at a certain point, the whole thing just disappears, or where you have discontinuities, like infinities, or poles. We call them poles. And it turns out there's some really nice underlying map that wasn't fully fleshed out until we just kind of nosed to the grand stone, got all the details polished, that made these things actually seem like they work in this sum of points proving scheme, which is very beneficial. It's a very interesting idea. It was always very fun. It was just tricky pinning down all the, there's a lot of braid edges. So getting those ironed out was the disability. 

Doug 
Yeah, so what was the the if you can try to explain the the issue that you guys came across with Divisors when you were first looking at them. They would like what was the fluff 

Diego 
Actually, Luke, if I may, let me once again give you a quick, stupid person's answer. The, the actual issue was that Monero Research Lab wanted an answer within X number of weeks. And because, you know, everyone's excited for this and a lot of time and money had been put into this divisors project. And so they, they basically told me, as we went back and forth with them, is divisors a dud and should we be looking at something else or trying to do the same thing, but in a different way. They just didn't want to waste more time and money resources on divisors.

So they said, Diego, you and your guys, you have X number of weeks to get us an answer so we could potentially look at other avenues. And so the big scare that happened a couple of weeks ago was because we were fairly confident. We were fairly confident several times. Okay. We're almost done and things should be good. But once again, we kept hitting bear trap after bear trap after bear trap after bear trap, so much so that we could not even say how many more existed out there. And so I, what I told, what we told MRL is we generally think this works, but we cannot give a thumbs up here on your timeline because we keep hitting these bear traps. That's, that was, that was the whole Twitter scare of like, FCMPs has been delayed. What was actually delayed, by the way, was the test net. Like FCMPs itself was never promised at a particular time. And we were also fairly certain that we could give in a few more weeks and we prove that right retroactively. Get us, get ourselves to a point where we were happy with divisors, but on the MRL specific designated timeline, that was a, okay, if you're, if you're holding us to this timeline, the answer is no. But we said, give us just a little bit more time. We could probably do this. And so MRL didn't throw a whole bunch of resources elsewhere. They put their faith in us and guys, we delivered. We got it. 

Luke 
Well, a huge shout out to Saray for just absolutely grinding through the nastiest. And really that was the big problem with Diego saying bear trap after bear trap. And it's just, if there's not enough background in existence, then you don't even know enough to know when you're wrong. So it becomes imperative that you build the theory in a very rigorous manner. So you can constantly refer back to things that are true, instead of referring back to things that might have massive amounts of holes in them.

So whenever me and the other research guys would sit around and talk about things, we'd be sitting there and be like, oh yeah, this is feeling really good. And then someone would have an offhand comment about like, hey, what about these edge cases? And then everyone would just spiral, right? It was like, oh, okay, great. Well, now there could be, we don't even know how many, are you guys like. 

Doug 
in a room doing this together? Is this happening on a whiteboard?

So, funny story, can we make a documentary of behind the scenes of an Arrow research lab? Too late, oh man, they're making a full chain membership, Bruce. 

Diego 
Yeah, fun story about that. Actually, we, we have had in-person get togethers. I mean, we are, Cypherstack is fully remote. Everybody is all over the place. So we meet JitC and you know, we do like people show their notepads on the screen or use internet white blowers, but yes, we, we do have, we did have, in fact, what was it, three, four months ago and in-person get together and we're going to be having another one in the next couple of months and not just Cypherstack.

People are invited. I invite various people from other places funded by Power Up Privacy, who has been a co-benefactor with the MRL CCS big shout out to them, powerupprivacy.com. I do some work for them and stuff and they're, they're great people fund privacy initiatives and yeah, we're going to be doing another in-person get together. Where we're going to be hashing out some more things, both FCMP related and not other privacy stuff it's going to be a blast.

It's just, it's a small little thing. If you want to come and you've got math chops, let me know. 

Doug 
Where is this taking place? 

Diego 
This is just this is taking place in my little hometown. So it's oh, it's not like a conference It's like eight guys getting together in a little warehouse that we have and riding on a whiteboard But yeah, yeah What does that go on?

That's July

Doug 
That's how we got like. Yeah, let me know if you want to get the word out more on that Showing up, I don't know you 

Luke 
Well, I will say it is great being able to just get in or like all good math is done with a bunch of like Hired-looking guys standing around a whiteboard just being done with the universe. That's how good stuff gets done, right?

We get to do that virtually which is awesome as well. But on our last meetup, we we covered So many different We covered so many different topics. We covered tons of different cryptocurrency Different emerging technologies related to cryptocurrency some just pure math stuff because we had you know A couple cryptographers data scientists computer scientists there So it was really nice having this group of people together Then everyone had a different opinion about things which you know having that sort of Was it like intramural sports in stem is very important where we can all just kind of get together and and talk things out From from different perspectives

Doug 
Any what's the likelihood I get you guys down to Monero topia in February 2026, Mexico City, you know I actually I really think you thought you would love it Diego that I think you would you would freaking love it I know it's a very good environment for for testing out your wallet as well because people are actually using Monero there

Diego 
So yeah, I know we're going to be KG on the Monerotopias and I've had, I only have a few, uh, big trips in me per year. And I've been going to C3 and doing my, uh, big conference work there and been going to Defcon the past couple of years as well.

But to your credit, every time Monerotopia passes, I think to myself, man, I wish I would have got. 

Doug 
So just this year would be good because I'm hoping I'm hoping that so are we still on track as far as we know? For full chain membership proofs potentially going live by you know first quarter 2026 Is it are we still back to the original timeline here or have things been somewhat derailed in or did? 

Diego 
The divisors slowed down. The divisors thing that we completed is not a 100% one-to-one proving of what the original proposer named Egan did. It's our own little spin on it that we did prove secure. So technically it's a cypher stack original.

And because of that, some code does need to be changed, but we don't expect that it's going to be massive. That said, I speak. All of this just got like validated this past Wednesday, like I said. So it's a bit early, but I'm hopeful. I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic that it should be sooner rather than later, for sure. 

Doug 
Awesome. And I think Justin Erdhoffer is giving a talk at MoneroCon, right?

Detailed update. Another place I don't go every year and wish that- Yeah, somebody's asking, are you guys gonna be able to- you're not gonna go this year? No? 

Diego 
Ah, Linus Manerikhan, June, something like that. 

Doug 
It's the end of this week. It's next week.

It's this weekend. It's this coming week to probably know it. We're gonna be at Portfest I can't make it this is my first time I'm missing MoneroCon But I will be running my own thing here at Portfest and we'll be showing the MoneroCon talks Okay, yeah, that's it's a big trip. That's a big trip for you too, right? Yeah

Diego 
The irony, Cypherstack does excellent work. We make decent money, not enough for me to send like six guys over to Europe, which is a bummer.

You guys are free to give me all of the money and I will send the guys. So unfortunately, Cypherstack will not be having a presence at MoneroCon this year, but I'm reachable, many virtual places. And if you ever, we've actually talked about having like a streamed, one of our virtual get togethers where we talk about the different math stuff for anyone that just wants to scratch their heads. I sit in and scratch my head. 

Doug 
I'd be happy to broadcast that on a Venero talk you guys let me know but yeah you guys should do that you should done it 

Diego 
Bellantro while they keep going. And my eyes tend to glaze over. 

Doug 
So, Luke, you do have a question here. So, yeah, you were mentioning these bear traps so you keep running into Austin's asking, can you give a detailed example of one of these bear traps only because I'm interested in how complicated it is?

Yeah, kind of give us an idea of what you mean by. 

Diego 
Say the full thing Luke don't doesn't matter that neither me nor Doug will understand that you say like 

Doug 
speak in our native language. Sure, sure. 

Luke 
OK, I'll cover this. So I guess one of the first issues that we ran into, kind of like the inciting issue of, OK, we need to be real careful, is that whenever you take a look at this divisor stuff, if you have a background in like, let's say you took AP calculus in high school, or you took calculus as an undergrad, you look and you'd see a lot of familiar stuff, right? And you look and you say, OK, well, there's some stuff. I see some stuff that looks like derivatives. I see some function evaluations. And you would be right, but it's not quite as straightforward. There are levels of abstraction happening in the background that are a fair bit deeper than they actually might see. So I know one of the Herculean tasks that Saray undertook was doing a formal re-derivation, but being extra careful about where each of the elements of the various algebraic structures were living. And it ended up reducing down to, it was like a seventh dimensional calculus problem that eventually got reduced to a six dimensional, two dimensional. There's just so much stuff happening in the background that if you're not looking for it, it's easy to miss, which was the initial problem that we have with the idea to begin with.

I think it was one of the first projects that I was working on, one of the first papers that I was primarily typing on, where it looked like, yeah, you're just doing some calculus, and then hopefully everything works out neat. But there are these sneaky little things hiding. The fact that we're not dealing with the calculus that we're used to from undergrad. We're dealing with a formal type of calculus that looks like it follows a lot of the same rules, but you have to be really careful. You look at things that seem familiar, but there's a boatload of background information that's really hiding behind it. 

Doug 
Stupid question. Is AI ever, ever helpful in any of this analysis? Or would it just lead you down? It would do more harm than good. 

Luke 
So I was playing around with a chat GPT for like the first Diego was like you should try this out this is cool there's some stuff in it just mess around with it and I know Saray was interested too because it gives very good examples if you're like hey give me an example of a divisor on this elliptical curve that has these properties very good at the compute computation stuff. So in order to kind of like test its chops I started asking it questions about stuff that I would consider myself an expert in stuff that's relatively niche in a larger mathematical community but stuff that I've spent years working on my own and the amount of stuff that it got wrong that but it looks it looks right it's so sneaky right the only reason I saw it was wrong is because I've been staring at the same problem since I had hair right it's been a long time and there were really subtle things it said stuff like oh well this induces this upper bound and you can use that to do this this and this and you know from here down it all worked out but that upper bound part didn't sit right with me and I checked it and it was wrong right so I mean I think it can be a very useful tool for making examples it might even actually have some good maybe there's some good logic behind it but unless you're not unless you're very carefully looking over the actual work it's doing you're you're on a very slippery slope that I guess they don't just do math the old-fashioned way you know it's it's miserable but you'll get to the right answer

Doug 
Thanks. So proud of this. Thanks, John. We have people like you working on Monero, man. There's not too many of you. You are a rare breed, my friend. 

Luke 
I will stick. Having a group of researchers to talk about this stuff too is also very helpful. I mean, we, I don't think anyone even had the chance to like, ask, like, even if we wanted to ask AI, we were coming up with a million different ideas all at once that I just wouldn't have even been beneficial to begin with. Because everyone has a little bit of a different mathematical background. So everyone's perspective is just a little bit different. But that's enough, right?

Because what might be hiding that the other three guys can't see might just be the crack that I'm able to see in it. And we had that happen for like weeks, months, right of talking about this stuff, where it was always something new. And it's very important to find those breaking points, all these bear traps in the in the tall grass. Because once you find enough of them, you can start building a really rigorous sound, so a sound in a logical sense system that actually works. 

Doug 
What's your level of certainty in terms of the fact that you have actually achieved soundness? 

Luke 
So I want to make sure that we're using the same definition of soundness. So whenever I feel confident that the proofs as given, if they have any issues with them, aren't issues that would cause the entire thing to collapse.

Which is, is that a good way of putting it Diego? So whenever I think of it as being sound, OK, maybe there's, if there are edge cases that cause problems, then they are few and far between. They have a very tiny probability of occurring, if they occur at all. I think that there was enough, that the whole device yourself was built like a pyramid. Whenever we got it, it was the pieces were there, but it needed put, constructed in the right way. And it has a very solid foundation now, which I think is important because there is going to be tons of different applications for this in just a mathematical way moving forward. So having a nice sound base means that we can continue research without having to reinvent the wheel every single time we do it. 

Diego 
And this is, this is one of the issues, not issues, this is one of the drawbacks of doing research on the bleeding edge is like Luke alluded to kind of earlier in the talk. There's not a lot of prior art that you can look at and say, you know, okay, this is similar to what happened here and it all worked out there. So it should be good here too. 

Doug 
Was there anything to be gathered from like Halo and Zcash or other or it's really its own beasts its own animal 

Luke 
Yeah, it kind of it kind of is and I i'm not going to try to like talk at the same level of proficiency You guys do about the cryptos phase in general. I can only really speak towards the math because that's the bit that I know um, but This is it's sort of its own monster behind behind the uh Behind the mask I guess and even finding literature to to make sure that everything was fine So finding the old textbooks about um, you know divisors It's not a new thing What is being applied to is not but divisors have been studied since algebra became formal and like 1930s or something, right?

So so we have this passing idea of what they do, but this is the first time it's been applied in this way And in building that bridge between Like sort of the old guard theory and then this like new thing that is right on the edge. That's the tricky bit because no one's going to tell you where the holes in the bridge are you got to Walk the bridge a couple times and punch all the holes out and then do the best you can to prepare them so as far as the um I'm, not sure how similar if similar all the math behind the halo 2 and and this divisor stuff is But at least it Wasn't no one brought it up in a conversation. So I can only imagine if it's there It wasn't useful in the context that we were using it. Okay, if that makes sense

Diego 
We, we do have some more weeks of work to do on it until we get it to a place that is publishable to the academic community, which is not the same thing. Um, I mean, obviously in a perfect world, something is very rigorously academically reviewed and tested and all these things before, you know, it goes live, but the proofs seem to hold, which they did not before, you know, the proofs seem to hold what, what proofs were there did not.

And is the way this is the better way to say it, uh, the proofs hold the math checks out. Um, it has been my, my team of cryptographers is four and all four of them gave a good hard sniff and said it smells like strawberries instead of dung. 

Luke 
It happened. Yeah. 

Diego 
Uh, this, this is what we handed to MRL said, you know, this is pretty good. Uh, we do have more work that we're going to be doing on our own time, on our own dime, on our own, all this stuff to get it ready for academic stuff.

Because we do want to put it out there to the broader academic community. It could only be beneficial to Monero and to privacy technologies at large. 

Doug 
looking at it yeah yeah 

Luke 
Well, if I can jump in, it's very important, too, that topics like this can be very accessible to people that are at the graduate level of mathematics. And there's plenty of math grad students out there.

So the idea that you could take the visors, give it a nice formal background, and throw it out into the world, all it takes is one cryptography professor to pass it off to their grad student and say, hey, do a year's worth of funded research on this. And then they get something good that gets published and now it's kind of cemented, not just in the crypto community, but in the math community. 

Doug 
It can lead to more breakthroughs and then more efficiencies that we could then add back into product math. 

Diego 
Begetz, math. 

Luke 
Yeah, it's exactly right. If you've met any mathematicians that you meet, you'll notice that it can be fairly neurotic whenever it comes to studying stuff. Because once you find something good to sink your teeth into, it's kind of hard to pull away from it.

And it was very interesting going from academia into the crypto space, noticing how fast things were going, how many ideas were being thrown around, and how much cool stuff there was. At the beginning, it was honestly a little overwhelming until Saray sat me down and said, look, there's going to be a million great ideas that you're going to see. You really got to pick and choose which ones you devote your time to, because you can spend centuries working on this stuff. And there's still an infinity of material that you'll never get to. I think that's one of the biggest benefits from a mathematician's standpoint that the crypto community is offering is, hey, we got a ton of great ideas. It was formalized a couple of them and thrown to the guys that are doing this for 20 hours a day and see what they get back. And it makes a really nice back and forth between the purists and then the people that are applying it.

Because until I started working for Diego, I assumed that 99.9% of my work would be useful in about 300 years and not until then, right? So a lot of people on the math side aren't aware of this side of the coin, which is cool. 

Doug 
Yeah, which is great. I would think by now they would be right?

Like if it was like five years ago I'd be like, okay, but I think now everybody would but know what's going on in crypto, right? I'm surprised

Luke 
Yeah, I mean, I guess the direct connection isn't as clear. There's a lot of computer science stuff that I think makes some mathematicians a little nervous.

Because that's kind of like the great bridge between pure math and the real world is what can we do to computers to make it useful. And I was pathingly familiar with, I mean, I was familiar with cryptocurrency and the technology behind them, but really just as proof of concept stuff. Like blockchain stuff, super cool, very interesting idea. You got a whole bunch of neat little vignettes of mathematics that I recognize floating around in there. But then working in it, there's an unbelievable amount of untouched material. And it's really, really cool. 

Doug 
Magic Rants shining it says the code compatibility is being checked as we speak which that sounds like a good good sign too in terms of 

Diego 
You know, that's why I didn't want to speak prematurely. It's like yes, we're on for gym 

Doug 
anywhere. I imagine that's Justin that's shining in there, which it is. Nice to hear from you, Justin.

Actually, somebody... Yeah, somebody's asking, can you talk more about the educations in these divisors? Would they ever pop up practically and cause problems? Which is what I was trying to get at. When you say it's secure, how confident are we on the security? Is there always a potential edge case? Like, what's the... So... A certain ARRI. 

Luke 
I think Diego alluded to it nicely, where you really have to be careful about what your threat model looks like, what does your adversary look like. Because for some of the stuff, we want to shoot for non-interactivity.

So we do this really fancy information-theoretic transform to make it so that the back and forth between two people is really just happening inside a magic black box. So in the case that we wrap everything up nicely in this magic black box, then the edge cases occur with insanely, insanely low probability. And it's reliant on what curve you're using. And since we're using the 25519, the probability is as close to 0 as you think it is. 

Diego 
If so, let me let me give a stupid person's answer once again using an analogy There is a saying that anyone can build a bridge that can stand But it takes an engineer to build a bridge that can barely stand Meaning if some if some incident happens to the bridge might me a non-engineer whose bridge is currently standing It will just topple over right but an engineer's bridge which has been thought through You know the materials and the weight limits and all these things if an incident a big disaster happens to it It will need repairs. It will probably need to be decommissioned But nobody will have died because the bridge will not have collapsed, right?

it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands and so where I'm going with that in regards to this and FC MPs is with all of our math people working on this like there could be that theoretical tornado or tsunami that never occurs in LA that destroys the bridge right and that's you know that that that just may be well beyond whatever threat model we could Potentially comprehend right and you know heck there's even you know The the threat of quantum computers wherever you think about that on the horizon that you know may have varying amounts of effect depending on Who you talk to on? Cryptocurrency tech in general and yes on FC MPs and divisors You know that's the freak tsunami kind of thing and if you factor that into your threat model You might still kind of grind your teeth a little bit

Luke 
a lot of I agree. Yeah, a lot of it. Yeah, it keeps me up at night. 

Doug 
So I guess how would you say full chain membership proofs in this given implementation compares to Zcash technology, Halo, from attack vector perspective? 

Diego 
Okay. Okay. So I have run an idea by several mathematicians that know their stuff. And I'm going to give you a spectrum of things right now. Okay. From one to ten. One does not mean not private. It just means the least private of the existing options. Okay. So the options I'm going to give are Monero as it is now with ring signatures, Zcash, Halo 2 Orchard, Firoz, Lelantis Spark, Monero with FCMPs, and Lelantis Spark with FCMPs as well.

Okay. So that's five of them, right? Once again, one does not mean not private. It means the least private of the options. And on that spectrum, Monero as it currently is, is a one. It's the least private of all of those. And we know that. We knew that. We've known that for a long time. Zcash is currently at the ten. Okay. Another live thing, Firoz, Lelantis Spark right now is about a four. It's not quite up to Zcash levels, but Lelantis Spark is definitely a live thing that is bigger than Monero's. Better than Monero's at present. Monero with FCMP would go to about a nine slash ten. Somewhere around there. And really what that number ends up being is going to be determined by, you know, just Zcash, Halo 2 Orchard has been around for a while. And we see what it's capable of. And we'll see with FCMP divisors. Now some people, especially math people or engineer people or Kayaba or any of these people might be super mad at what I just said. And no, I disagree. And that's okay. You know, that's totally fine. It was kind of in my estimation. As I said, Spark, Lelantis Spark will also wants to put in FCMPs and that would bring them to about a seven or an eight. Right. So that's by my estimation. And I've run this by several smart mathematicians that know these various technologies. And they, you know, they make some tweaks here and there, but that's about where things average out, I would say. FCMPs would make Monero quite comparable to Halo 2 Orchard, which is the holy, excuse me, at present, the holy grail and really just makes us like neck and neck competitors, if not just under, which for most, if not all threat models is way vastly sufficient. 

Doug 
And now these divisors, could they potentially get more efficient over time? Could there be different implications? That's a good question. 

Luke 
February 

Diego 
for advisors, right? 

Speaker 2 
All right. 

Luke 
Well, never say never, but I think with the divisor stuff, if I'm recalling correctly, some of the conversations that we've had in the past is that a lot of the bounds that we're getting are relatively sharp, and sharp pretty much means as good as you can get. That doesn't mean every bound that we've touched, we found a sharp bound for, and that every bound just makes it, this is as good as it's going to get.

But I think the tentative consensus is improvements will be marginal as it's, now it's application to other technology, and that's a totally different question, because we already started some internal talks about, OK, well, divisors can view this, what else can we make it do, and there's a lot of open possibilities in that realm. I wouldn't be surprised to see this used in other contexts, not just in cryptocurrency, but just as a math idea in general, because it's a very cool idea.

It's a really clever idea, which is the best kind of math idea, right? If I can, real quick, I don't think I gave a hard example of, so whenever I was saying about the adversarial threat stuff, whenever you wrap stuff up in a nice, non-interactive box, then things work out nicely, but if you are doing a back and forth communication with someone, I know for some of the divisor stuff, there are abort conditions, if certain points are chosen, so at some point in time in the communication, if I were communicating to you and doing some verification, you could adversarially select points in order to cause me to abort the process. And if I don't run a check to make sure that if the abortion happens after I had already done a bunch of computation, then I'm wasting all of that. So I guess you have to be very careful about if the adversary has the ability to choose the points that they're sending to you whenever running through this process.

If they send you the same point twice, that causes a problem. We want the points to be distinct in order for things to work out nicely. So if you just wanted to make me waste computational power, you could just send the same points to me over and over and over and over again, and then just cause me to abort continuously and then just waste computation power, which was half the motivation behind wrapping everything up in a nice, fiat, chamere heuristic and making everything non-interactive, because then you have this sort of more or less uniformly at random choosing your points, and whenever you're talking about a curve with as many points on it as 25519, the likelihood that you're randomly choosing the same one is winning the lottery 100 times while being struck by lightning and bitten by a great white shark. It's just insanely improbable.

And if it does happen, it'll just happen once, once in a trillion, trillion, trillion, as opposed to 50% of the time. Thank you. 

Speaker 2 
Do you love coffee and Monero as much as we do? Consider making gratuitous.org your daily cup. Pay with Monero for premium fresh beans and if you like what you taste, send a digital cash tip directly to the farmers that made it possible.

Proceeds help us grow this channel, gratuitous and Monero. 

Doug 
I don't know if you could answer this question, but how much does full-chain membership proof divisors improve on CCLSAG's transaction efficiency? Could this lead to lower transaction? 

Luke 
Ooh, I don't think I, I don't think I can speak on that with confidence. Uh, Diego, do you have a, 

Diego 
I was going to say, the transactions are still bigger. It's just like an FCMP with divisors transaction is still bigger than Monero's current ring signature transaction. So I don't think fees would reduce.

They might reduce or rebalance depending on Arctic Mine's calculations for block weights and how fees should be calculated. But I do think, and if I am wrong, somebody can come let me know and I'll issue a retraction on my Twitter page. 

Doug 
Yeah, they're going to be larger, but like you said, they scale exponentially, right? Right. Right. So... 

Diego 
I don't think that the transaction fees will be reduced in a meaningful sense. I think there's a possibility they will increase somewhat, but that doesn't pay for better privacy. 

Doug 
So Luke, maybe you know, are there other aspects of full chain membership proofs where we could be looking to add efficiency that you're aware of? If we are going to try... Once we implement full chain membership proofs, I have a feeling they're here to stay for quite some time.

Are we then going to be iterating and improving full chain membership proofs to make it more efficient, make transactions, fees lower, things like that? Is this it? I hope so. 

Luke 
So I think this sort of line of research is very interesting, mainly because whenever you have a linear bump down to a logarithmic, that's huge. That's massive, especially whenever your sizes start to get very, very, very large, because now you're talking about the difference between pulling down an exponent or having to just bite the cost of that exponent. And I need to familiarize myself with more of the math in order to give any sort of definitive answer.

But I always think it's worth looking into, especially if we have something that's shown a very clear efficiency gain, like this divisor stuff. I mean, we're talking about, I couldn't tell you I'll pop my head with the computational cost of multiplying a point by itself and times on what the curve is, but it is massive in comparison to just multiplying two numbers together. Looking for more shortcuts like that are very clever, because now you're just talking about, you're talking about very clever homomorphisms from something that's difficult to something that's easy, which I love. I wish I could see more of it, but it's also something that I think has some academic interest still. So it'd be very cool to see in the next year or so if there are any papers that can be directly applied for efficiency gains. So maybe there's already stuff in the works in some university in the middle of Colorado that will pop out a paper that'll totally blow this off the map, but more work needs to be done. 

Diego 
As all this does happen, like papers coming up out of nowhere from people you didn't even know were working on it. Well, we were working on divisors. There was a paper that came out that looked at this stuff and we were like, that threw us for a loop when we were like, okay, this is probably good. And that paper came out and threw us for a loop. So this does happen.

It's not just us out there working on this stuff. Sometimes some, like Luke said, some grad students like, hey, I like this, I'm going to run with this for a little bit. And then they're like, they publish their things and they're not in contact with the community at all. So we don't know that anybody's working on it. 

Doug 
that's kind of how we got bullet bulletproofs right came out of that what was his name Benedict Buns from like Stanford right as we we implemented that and it was he wasn't like a Monero guy you know it wasn't like working on it for Monero he's like just found found the symphony

Diego 
And this is, this is the silly part of research is that a fair amount of your researchers time, I say this as a business owner who pays researchers is honestly, like obviously not the whole thing, but a portion of their time is best spent just sitting down and reading the latest math stuff that's come out. Because not only will that kickstart new ideas for them, but some of it is directly applicable or in the best sense, oh my gosh, they're literally researching the thing we're doing right now and have something to say about it.

So it seems so counterproductive, like, okay, you should be inventing, right? I'm paying you to invent, but no, it's like, okay, I want you to sit down and troll the math forums and the, you know, read the latest preprints just as part of the job description. 

Doug 
Right, which is why I think AI, I mean, could help find efficiencies, right? Could we just have some like AI constantly running, like analyzing? So I have thrown out ideas there for improvements. 

Diego 
I have a personal theory regarding AI, particularly when it comes to math, is that AI typically over time gets better at esoteric things. It's a balance because, you know, when there's something that everyone has an opinion on, like politics, the AI is trained on everybody's opinions, right?

And, you know, depending on what censorship or weights or whatever are done with. But when things are a bit more esoteric, like when you start getting much more, you know, it's a PHE territory, that kind of thing. Now, all of a sudden, the only articles that you can find on the internet about this stuff are usually, usually by people who know what they're talking about, because they're the only nerds who, like, actually end something about it. So there's less things to train on, but it's all, like, better quality stuff. So, like, to me, maybe that balances out and means that maybe AI in the future, like, in these kind of, like, PhD level topics, because it's going to be trained on so much high level stuff, less of it for sure, but better quality. I don't know, I'm hopeful that it will actually kind of outpace the regular stuff in terms of how accurate that is. Like Luke said, we're not there yet, and you really have to have the eye to be able to check its work to make sure that it's not just wrong. Right. But yeah, I don't know. I'm hopeful. Yeah. 

Doug 
Go ahead, go ahead, Luke. 

Luke 
Yeah, that's my biggest gripe with the AI stuff right now is that if I had shown what I was looking at whenever I typed in a question about a certain bound on chat GPT to nine out of 10 of my buddies that have math PhDs, I'm sure they'd go through it and be, oh yeah, that's fine. It's fine because the place where it was wrong is just that it's like sneakily subtle, right? It's something that if you had to just,

Doug 
That's just what we're saying. How certain are you guys, right?

Like, it's like, it sounds like you found things that other people couldn't find. Is there somebody else who could find something that you guys... 

Diego 
you say that I give a sneaky smile because we're pretty confident but we absolutely want them in every community to send our work the silver bullet work that we made to other people to take a look at it because we're guys is a lot of guys but you know it tend the guys is war guys and I was in guys

Luke 
right. And you never know what you don't know. And having more eyes on, it's always better. So if I'm confident that something's right, I want as many people looking at it as possible.

Because the benefit is if someone can tear a hole in it, better that they do that and tell me so that we can fix it, as opposed to, you know, some real shady fella that's looking to steal all the cryptocurrency in existence, finds it and exploits the hell out of it. So that's the big benefit of having good communication within these sort of like little research squads is that I can throw it and it's like no one takes personal offense to someone if someone said, Hey, your research is wrong. I'm so I just want to know why I don't I don't care that I'm wrong. I want you to tell me what I can do better because at the end of the day, it just makes you a better problem solver, better mathematician, photographer, whatever. That being said, I am as confident as one can be with the quality of the work as it stands, which is like, you know, in research is as good as it's going to get until someone comes along and slaps you in the face and says, Well, what about this? There's always a chance that that happens. 

Doug 
Yeah, you know, well, you know, anything can happen, right? 

Luke 
That's right, yeah. But I feel like 

Doug 
Monero, anybody who's watching this, I do feel like there's new people that are, like I said, discovering Monero. This is one of Monero's greatest qualities, if not its greatest quality, is its true open source, false nature, scientific approach where you have researchers like yourself looking at these things and you're not invested in the... Maybe you are, maybe you're a Monero guy, but you guys give it just a mathematical objective take.

You guys are interested in it for the math, for the cryptography. I think there's not too many other projects that share that, that have that at the base where you have these mathematicians just kind of giving an honest look and that's what gives us our security. Because at the end of the day, all this stuff is just code and math and you are trusting in the code and math and I do think that the Monero seal is pretty good to date. We greatly appreciate your takes here and that you guys are just taking an honest approach and you're always cognizant of the fact that you got to keep looking and researching. Nothing's 100%. 

Diego 
I mean, yeah, yeah, there's, there's a bit of queasiness there, uh, not because we're not confident, but heck, I mean, I've used cryptocurrency for a long time, but if I send a big amount in cryptocurrency, I I've done it many times before, but I'm still like, but what if it messes up? What if I scan the wrong address? Like, you know, right? Like that doesn't last very long because, you know, I I'm a veteran in the space, but like there's just, there's just that little thing in me that tells me to quadruple check the address that the, the, the higher the amount is right.

And it's that same queasiness here where, you know, like we, we did the work, we did the proofs, we did the, the ooey gooey stuff, and it's all there. And we get to look at it and say, what a beautiful work of art it is. You look at it again, you go, but what if we miss something? 

Luke 
And that is as a as a math fellow that that's like any time you write anything any proof of anything down You're always sitting there like okay This is gonna get ripped the shreds in a second and you do have to just spend enough time doing it to be like If someone's gonna break this they're gonna have to be really clever and that's that's a good guarantee right there because Clever I good ideas come around every once in a while clever ideas don't occur that often That's the that's the rare thing right there you

Doug 
Oh, so hopefully you guys are more clever than the NSA, right? Guys, it's very close.

Maybe you work for the NSA, right? Who knows? I mean, I'm sure they'll be looking at this as well and contributing, right? 

Diego 
NSA, please give me a bunch of money. I have no problem doing open private research for you all. 

Doug 
Yeah, I think that should be funded. You guys should be funded by the USA.

Oh my god, it would make sense. User 50H is beginning, it's the most encouraging comments, it's just beautiful seeing people actually absorb and love what they do, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure man. 

Luke 
Always get into math. There's always something to fall in love with there. It's it's always the weirdest thing too. Yeah 

Doug 
You know, not, not anybody can just get into math the way you're into. 

Luke 
I disagree vehemently. 

Doug 
Yeah, that's like, you know, just get into playing in the NBA, you know, it's it's fun 

Luke 
a little intense, a little different. You know, as a five foot eight fella, I think my NBA dreams are dead in the water. I'm also very out of shape from doing math all day.

But with math, it seems to me like math is sort of the natural state that most human beings gravitate to. It's sort of like programmed into our DNA. I truly do believe that. Whenever I was at grad school, I taught for years and there wasn't a single student that was incapable of learning when I was teaching. It they fell in love with it or not. And to me, the only difference between me and a non-math person is that I can spend, let's say I woke up at like nine and I was at my whiteboard until like five minutes before we got on here. I could do it for hours on end because it's just so endlessly fascinating. 

Doug 
You're just you're just also an extremely humble person, man. You're one in 10,000. You know, there's not that many feet I just true, you know, it's it comes down to CPU power man. Not everybody's 

Diego 
He can't do this. 

Luke 
But it's about what you value allocating your time towards. For me, like I was saying, I've been working on the same project probably since, let's see, I hate thinking about how old I am because in my head, I'm still like plucky 22-year-old math guy, but it's been a decade. I've been working on the exact same problem. I could give you a list of 10,000 failures, 10,000 attempts that didn't work.

For the exact same problem, but it's still fun. It never ceases to make, yeah, exactly. It's a puzzle. And one day if I solve it, we'll be back on here talking about that problem. But everyone has that problem out there for them. Whether it's math or not, everything is math. So you find that thing you love. There's a math analog to it that you're going to fall in love with, too. It's just whether or not you actually want to do it. You need your hair there. 

Doug 
There's some genius 11-year-old watching this right now, get on it. 

Luke 
Yeah, maybe so. 

Doug 
Join the Monero team 

Luke 
Well, I think the biggest problem is people think that they can't get into the math space because there's a perceived high extreme level of difficulty. And yeah, it gets hard, but it is just a stepping stone process that I believe anyone can get into if they really wanted to. 

Diego 
And I think it's important to say this because there is somebody in the chat who says, I wish I could do what you guys do. 

Luke 
And you can, chat member, I promise you. 

Diego 
can chat is this is this real can you do this 

Doug 
Yeah, I can do that 

Luke 
Well, you know, all it takes is one person with one really good idea, and then it can turn things. There is a long standing conjecture, the Twin Prime conjecture. No great work was done on it.

And then some random guy in China with like no publications. He like he makes the first biggest leap in like 3000 years. Right. And this happened like, you know, in our lifetime. That's incredible. Right. And you could just have a one off great idea, but the world will benefit massively from that great idea. So don't start the world with that, you know. 

Doug 
So given your understanding of crypto, where do you see potential breakthroughs could happen in math and cryptography that might be disruptive to crypto as we know it? 

Luke 
Uh, definitely the post quantum stuff that that's going to be a very neck and neck race of 

Doug 
That's what I that's what I wanted to get to and I see I see you guys will be Participating in this right because that's gonna be an expect thing we focus on but go ahead go ahead 

Luke 
There's going to be this ongoing race between good, realizable post-bottom security and then good, realizable quantum computers. And I'm sure the NSA has a really fancy quantum computer sitting underneath a mountain somewhere that could bust most things wide open. But until they reveal that, we still got a little bit of time to come up with some clever stuff that I'm just saying. 

Doug 
Send us a sign right now in SA if you're watching, let us know, give us a shout out, stream. 

Luke 
What I brought up at the meetup in New Mexico, whenever we did that a couple of months ago, was just because we have these ongoing concerns about quantum computers and post-quantum stuff, it doesn't mean that the bill is stopped ticking for non-quantum stuff. There could be a paper that comes out tomorrow that breaks elliptic curve cryptography wide open and has nothing to do with quantum computers. That's always something that's sitting in the back of my brain, making me a little bit nervous because, again, most of the breaks are really clever ideas. 

Doug 
Right somebody somebody could just break elliptic curve photography, you know, you don't need to quads computer to do it, right? Yeah, yeah that that sounds wild 

Luke 
And it's like it's like the divisor stuff where when you have this sort of uh, because I think I spent a solid week You know bloodshot eyes staring at my whiteboards thinking. Okay, what else can we do?

Is this is there a potential break here somewhere because you have the shift from very difficult to very easy? But that's not something that's novel or new in math It's a common theme to take something take a problem that's difficult here and transform it and try to solve it over here uh, and as it turns out there's lots of problems that are More or less unresolved in the general space that have specific instances where they they hold all the time um, so you never know if you know one of those one of those things is elliptic herb groups or um Let's say like maybe like hash functions or or isogenes or any of the other primitive Cryptographic cryptographic problems that occur today

Doug 
Do you have any insights into Monero's elliptic curve versus Bitcoin's, right? Sort of ECD, whatever 2.5 say, I have every, like there, there is, there is potentially some differences there, right? And in terms of their safety and reliability and potential to be. 

Luke 
I think the underlying problem, the reason that elliptic curve groups are used is because the operation that makes them a group, a mathematical group, is so convoluted. It's very hard to go backwards.

So it relies on something called the discrete log assumption, which has been used in RSA. Well, RSA uses large integer recognition, like Dippy-Hellman key exchange. You see the idea of the discrete log pop up, but now we're talking about a discrete log on a different group as opposed to the integer's modulus, some number. The difference in curves, I mean, bigger is always better, I suppose, in generally speaking. 

Doug 
No, because like, you know, cursor area, like I know people are saying like unsafe curves that, you know, ECD is rated higher than BIC. I don't know why, but I thought maybe you'd have some insight. 

Luke 
I do trust 2.5519 because it was at Bernstein. I think he was the one who made it. He made it specifically because he didn't trust the government. I got a lot of respect for that.

He said, hey, if you're using anything that the NSA puts out as saying safe, they probably picked it because they know the break, and the break's really so. So most people won't see it, but they already know it. So they already have a built-in backdoor. And he said, I try this one. 

Doug 
That's like a little-known aspect of Monero as well that people don't really talk about which I think is also fantastic. We just have a more badass elliptic curve. 

Luke 
And this isn't the first time he's kind of shown his, I don't want to say disdain for the government, but like distaste towards underhanded dealings in mathematics, because I'm pretty sure he's black market. Well, yeah, that's right, you know, because the only people that are going to find these breaks are mathematicians that are looking for them. And if you have some big, you know, the NSA employs what probably hundreds of thousands of mathematicians. So they got a group of 1000 guys doing the same thing that a group of me and three other dudes are doing. They have a little bit of a head start on us, right?

They on top of, you know, unlimited CIA funding and whatnot. So he, you know, he's been great being very forthcoming and saying, yeah, these are all the properties that this thing has. I'm not hiding it. There's no hidden hidden parameters. There's nothing sneaky in the background. You need to watch out for. And it's also believable because he's a single guy that made it the likelihood that he also he'd have to be like Dr. Evil love genius to bake something into the background that only he would exploit. He seems trustworthy to me, which I guess is maybe not a word I should be using in a crypto. 

Diego 
The, the, the reality is that trust stops somewhere, right? Um, the fact that most of us can't read the code, the trust stops with the developers or with the core team, or the most of us can't do the math, even though, uh, Luke says you can ask if you still hard enough, the trust stops with the mathematicians, right?

So there's always, as much as you can, you can trust, but verify up to your level of knowledge. And at that point you have to trust. 

Luke 
Yeah, that's what if I'm not mistaken kid, I think she was in a that he cracked the encryption on CDs separate is that the same guy? 

Doug 
Um, yeah, well, yeah, he was that was the free speech case, right? 

Luke 
Yes, I believe so. Yeah, if it's the same guy, I trust them all the more for it.

And they try to sue him over prime factorization, which I don't know, but it just seemed like a very suitable thing. I prime factor numbers every single day of my life. I'd be in jail forever. 

Doug 
Yeah, he was, well, yeah, because he was accused of exporting cryptographic software, right? That's the same. Yeah. 

Luke 
I believe so. I think he factored like the big number and the two primes and published them and people could crack it if they wanted.

But he's like, you can't send me to jail for publishing numbers. Right. It's not fair. 

Doug 
Yeah, he was a cypherpunk. He was one of the original cypherpunks.

So is it fair to say, just to get back on track for a second, that Full Chain Membership proofs is on the same trajectory that it was on when we were first going into the speed belt scale of Laker? We're on track, yes. 

Diego 
Okay, I give Diego's yes, which is not mr. L's yes, or anyone else 

Doug 
Yeah, I know you guys are just one aspect, but you have a you have a pretty good feel so you know what's going on You know what's going on. Yeah well 

Luke 
The math seems to be in a great place, which I don't know how that, because I'm not the project manager type. Diego says crunch, numbers, monkey, and I say, yes, sir, I'll go do that right away.

But if the math is good there, then I think that moving forward should be a whole lot smoother than just having a bunch of unconnected pieces floating in the ether. 

Doug 
And then so are there other aspects that you guys know of that need to now be looked at with regards to the full chain membership proof implementation and the coding of it? I mean, are there any other audits that need to be done, you know, beyond just what was done here with the visitors? 

Diego 
Like I said, uh, I would prefer it, and this is just me speaking even as a Monero community person, I would prefer to have another group look over what we've done because like I said, it technically is a Cypher stack original. We had to make tweaks.

We had to make more than tweaks to some areas, uh, to make it all kosher and good, and the proofs do work out for as far as we see, but that means we made something new, built on a foundation of something new, built on a foundation of something old, so it would be, it'd be good to get somebody to look over those, you know, those bridge, uh, gigantic bridge pulse things that hold up the bridges, you know what I'm talking about. We have, that we all was acted there. 

Doug 
Um, and so but are there other aspects that you know that we need to like are there other 

Diego 
So like FCMPs in general. 

Doug 
Yeah, this was it. This was like the heavy lifting that needed to be done with regards to audits. 

Diego 
Lee with my knowledge. I believe so. And if not, there's not much left. So if I'm wrong, there is not much left.

The funny thing is the coding for all of this has been done for some time. It's just the math needed to be checked out. And like I said, with our change, with our tweak of things, the coding does need to be adjusted. But the code was never the holdup. It was always the math. And divisors was one of the last, if not the last piece to get correct for that. So now that we have given our check mark, we've sent it back to MRL and they're giving it their look and we're going to potentially get it looked at somebody else. But this is one of the last, if not the last pieces. 

Doug 
Awesome. Do you guys know who might potentially look at it? 

Diego 
Um, magic was in contact with, uh, another group that was potentially going to look at things concurrently with us if we didn't finish in a timely manner. But now that we did finish in a timely manner, maybe they're going to take a look at it, but there's, there's still a little bit, like I said, we just delivered this past Wednesday, there's still a little bit of back and forth going on between us and MRL as they read what we put out, digest it, ask a few questions.

I know there is a couple of questions, uh, and some dialogue that's going to be going on between Saray and a couple of people in MRL, uh, so, uh, if this Monero talk was even just like a week later, I think I would even, I would have a firmer answer than that. Um, but it's, it's a little wishy, it's a little bobbly right now. Okay. 

Doug 
Yeah, I'm sure with MoneroCon and Justin's talk there, I'm sure we'll hear the latest with that as well. That'll be exciting.

Has Luke Parker been to see participate in the aspects of the auditing? Oh, okay. Fantastic. Of the auditing? Is he involved with that guys? 

Diego 
as you're getting the such questions, we ask him questions and not even just my four guys, like my four guys, they know different people in the math community and we have asked for different professors from different universities and say, hey, can you take a look at this and have had different people and at the upcoming stack attack, we're having some external people come as well. And so this has been a fairly involved, even well beyond Cypher Stack and the other people that MRL have gotten to work on this stuff, like Egan and Basa and stuff.

It's been like 15 mathematicians have touched this point or another. 

Doug 
And the the divisors is something that Luke Parker had come up as an idea for for what should be used He was like proposing that 

Diego 
I don't know the story behind who came up with the vices. I wouldn't be surprised if it was, if it was him, but it's possible that it wasn't. Can't answer that, sorry. 

Doug 
Yeah, so I guess we can round it off here. The only thing we have is the quantum stuff.

I was interested in hearing. Is that something you guys are already starting to work on with regards to? I know Luke had said that obviously that's what he wants to focus on next. That's what he thinks Monero needs to really put its efforts towards after one's full shame membership proof is implemented. Are you hearing anything with what those steps will actually look like? 

Diego 
Um, so we, in the interstitial period, so like after we worked on something and sent it to MRL while we were waiting to get their response to it, we typically jump into the, uh, quantum post-quantum stuff. So we have already started. Um, I may be putting up a CCS to fund our continued efforts or partially fund, like I said, power up privacy is funding us partially. Um, just, just to make sure that, you know, we don't have to worry about money. We could just keep our heads down crunching the math, but that is, it is definitely next on the list for us.

Uh, obviously, you know, if there are questions for divisors or stuff, we want that because we want FCMPs to go out as soon as possible. So we'll clear our schedules for anything remaining on FCMPs and divisors, but our very next big project, uh, between us internally in cypher stack is going to be looking at this post-quantum problem. Um, and see if we can't find something workable, uh, several workable things, ideally, once again, kind of chickens in the same basket. We don't want, you know, we want several different methods that can preserve privacy from a post-quantum perspective, but even, even one would be good at this point. 

Luke 
Yeah, well, and that's what we're very fortunate to have Freeman on the on the team Because that's sort of his his bread and butter his wheelhouse and he's been working on it Not just not just in our conversations about the post-com stuff, but in an academic capacity whenever he's working on his phd as well so he is um he I don't know. I don't want to give him to I don't want to inflate his vego too much but He's he's he's very very brilliant and he's keeping a very close eye on all this stuff He has like an encyclopedic knowledge.

So I the the hope is Um in in these sort of like downtimes between the divisor stuff Uh getting a handful of ideas that because the the post-quantum cryptography stuff is a rabbit hole and a half Right and someone will come up with a great idea and everyone will be like, yeah, this is it This is what we need and then someone will break it in a one-page paper and be like think about this thing um, yeah, so so hopefully we have enough created juices amongst the four of us and our Individual orbits that we can come up with some clever ideas

Diego 
Yeah, I'm actually pretty confident in Cypherstacks ability to deliver on something here. Our newly christened Dr.

Freeman Slaughter, like Luke said, he has that background and he can help spearhead that charge and we just like, I want to brag on you guys. You guys are such a smart bunch of guys. You make my yeast glaze over in the best way. 

Doug 
I'm just so happy that they found their way to Monero via you guys, obviously. Cypherstack doing an amazing job, running the research for Monero, figuring out how to make it work, giving it a business model as well. You guys got to eat. I know you're passionate about Swiss, but somebody's got to pay the bills. So it's beautiful to see that it's working out.

What's the other guy's name? The one that's doing the Quantum? His name... How did he find his way to Monero and get involved in this? 

Diego 
Yeah. So the four guys, the four guys are Rigo Salazar, who is my brother. He has a master's degree in math and some portion of math, and he is quite helpful.

Brandon, when I brought Brandon Saray on, he had some university contacts from back in the day and he's like, hey, there's this, you know, he's like, are you looking for mathematicians? I can, I can ask one of my old professors at the university if he knows of somebody. So I said, yes, let you know, let's make it happen. He asked, Freeman was the one that was sent our way first. And Freeman was a poor little sad math guy. And I turned him into a behemoth of math that he is now. 

Luke 
No, that's all true, yeah. 

Diego 
And then, um, I said, you know, we could use more, we could use more. So, uh, Freeman came, I let, I let them know Brandon and Freeman and Rego, if you guys know any math guys further, uh, do let me know.

And Freeman approaches me one day. He's like, you know, I do know a guy then, uh, Luke, what's that guy? And I could

Doug 
made. Fantastic. 

Luke 
Yeah, it's also great getting to work with a group of Fellas that, especially after the meetup in Stack Attack 1, it's just very easy. They're all cut from the same claw. We just mesh together really well. So the work is a lot of fun.

It is a good time. It might not sound it, because it is just, you know, nah. But. 

Doug 
It's awesome. Oh, I mean it sounds amazing in theory. I wish I could you know run with you guys I mean you guys have made some breakthroughs 

Diego 
but then I sit here doing stack attack. Oh God, it's only 12. Yeah. 

Doug 
Yeah, you guys are just on another level, man, which is, it's amazing. It's beautiful to see.

And yeah, I think we are really fortunate that for whatever reason, we bring in good people into Monero. I guess it's a fun problem to solve, right? It's a fun project to work on. I mean, you're building unstoppable digital cash. Are you interested in it from that kind of philosophical standpoint of the implications of what untraceable digital cash should do? Yeah, obviously, I know you're interested in the math and the challenge of building it, but are you also interested in the tool itself? Oh, 100%. Yeah. 

Luke 
I think it, well, like anything, it's like a double-edged sword, right? It has the capacity to be used for some really important, awesome things. But on the flip side, it's also like checks a lot of boxes for some bad people. But you can never really like, you can't, we shouldn't have not invented fire just because some asshole is going to burn some other fellow with it, right?

It still has great utility. I think that applies here. The privacy and security space should be the primary focus for it, should be protecting people that need protecting. And if it so happens to be co-opted by some malicious fellow, then that's a personal failure on his part, not on our part as security and privacy. Because you never know what tool someone is going to need, especially whenever it comes to finance. So giving people a wide variety of options to choose from is extremely important. Whenever me and Diego really like sat down and talked for the first time, he said something that stuck with me that, you know, if someone's going to use a tool, that tool should exist, right? That is our focus is making things that people need, even if it's not maybe like the most luxurious and crazy thing, it should still exist. And a lot of the privacy stuff is focused on that. We don't know how this is going to be used by refugees and other countries, disenfranchised people across the world. It has the potential to help safeguard a lot of people that otherwise would be more or less at the mercy of different financial institutions, governments, we don't know. So it's important that it exists in case that happens. 

Diego 
Yeah. And I would go, I mean, you know, my thoughts on all this since I've been here for a while, so I won't go longer than 30 seconds.

But I think it's, you know, as the world steadily marches towards this big authoritarian panopticon, I think it's even more and more and more important that we have tools to be able to, you know, we got to have seeds and things so we can plant, run your food. 

Doug 
volunteer versus Monero is what's what's happening so take our place right now 

Diego 
Yeah, the tools, the tools need to be out there, man. Um, and us first worlders don't need them too, too much right right now. Um, but that's not the case in a lot of the world and it may not be the case in the first world for too, too much longer. We don't know.

We don't know the pace with which these things are going to go. So there's an urgency there. There's an urgency that we want these tools to exist. We want them to be powerful and we want them to be here soon. And so that's, that's kind of the, the ethos that we put into our work here. Um, it's a lot of fun. There's a lot of laughs, but there's a gravitas to it also. 

Luke 
Yeah, and I think it is extremely important that like if not now then then when right a lot of this stuff is You know for as much time and stuff we put into into research It's it doesn't matter if we were all super super duper geniuses. It's still gonna take time it's still a matter of grinding up the stuff that needs to be done and You know, I've The future is always up in the air But if it's not done now and it's left on too long then it might get to the point where it can never be done where it's just there's not enough time or resources or Interests or and then the whole thing is just dead in the water So it being done now, I think it was just like a net positive mathematically Whatever your philosophical background or thoughts of a matter are I think I think there's already so many places where people's privacy and security Are infringed upon and there's nothing they can do about it.

So having Something that they can control is an important is an important aspect something that can't be taken away Especially if it's nice and mathematically secure. They're fighting against the universe, you know, the laws of mathematics That's not a fight you want to have So it makes me feel a little bit a little bit a little bit more secure a little bit safer

Doug 
It's a beautiful way of putting it, man. This has been a fantastic show, very refreshing.

I haven't had a good, like, Monero talk in a while where I talk to, you know, the gods in the community, those that I can't barely understand. It's always good to have one of these. And, Luke, yeah, you're new on the scene, never got to speak with you, so it was a pleasure meeting you. Thanks for... Thanks for coming on the Monero talk, man. Greatly appreciate it. 

Luke 
No, thank you. This has been all right. 

Doug 
do you guys want to close out with any Luke maybe you want to give some closing any any closing remarks or things you want to put out there information where you know where people can follow if you want them to find you where they can find you to ask a question things like that

Luke 
Yeah, no, I just made a Twitter site if you don't 

Doug 
No worries. 

Luke 
for a tax account yesterday. 

Doug 
All right, well, don't don't don't spend too much time on there. It's a waste of time. You get you're doing the important work for sure. But yeah, go ahead. 

Luke 
Yeah, yeah, I mean, we'll go follow Diego and cyprestack first and then he can send people my way because I have one fault or I follow one person and have one follower and react first. 

Diego 
That's me, I'm his Fallout. 

Luke 
Yeah, that's good. He's here in the room with me right now.

Closing remark, pick up a good old math textbook. Read a chapter. You'd be surprised how much you actually know. And then ask some big questions. Everyone could do math, I promise. 

Doug 
I need you down at Monerotopia, inspiring my daughter to be more passionate about math. She's a very bright kid, but she's not loving the math. 

Luke 
That's because all the math they show you when you're younger sucks. There's some really cool stuff you don't get to until you're like, like, I think my first aha, like, oh shit moment was like whenever I was 20. And I'm like, oh, okay, I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life, easy. That's, you know, but yeah, besides that, support your local mathematicians.

That's about it. 

Doug 
We definitely will support you and yeah, like you said, Diego, I think you guys might be doing a CCS soon, so you know, we'll definitely help get the word out on that. But yeah, go ahead, Diego, your closing remarks. 

Diego 
It's been a wild journey, guys, since I've stepped back. One of my primary goals was to make sure that there were people, both from an engineering perspective, a research perspective, getting to work on privacy technologies. It has had a lot of struggles, a lot of ups, a lot of downs, a lot of times when finances were bad, finances were good. A lot of times when my motivation was down, my motivation was high, but this is still something worth fighting for.

And I think it's very important that we do so because I'm not gonna make anyone scared and say like time is running out kind of thing, but there is an urgency here and there is a compassionate heart behind everything that we're doing because we want to see people free. We want to see people have the tools that they need to make sure that they can keep themselves safe. And I'm really, really happy to be a part of the scene, like the Monero scene in particular and the kind of the overarching privacy scene. And it's a great time. It's been a great time all the way since 2017. You and me, Doug, going way back and such a rollercoaster, but I wouldn't trade these years for anything. It's great having you guys. Yeah. 

Doug 
And you're a tremendous part of it, which is amazing, right? It's a beautiful time to be alive and working on this project. You're blessed to be a part of it, honestly.

Right time, right place for being a cypherpunk, right? Yes, sir. We got about almost 600 live viewers, guys. We're going to close it out here. We do this show pretty much once a week. I do it live, and then we do Monero Topi every weekend, Saturday at 11 AM. Like, share, get the word out on this episode. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be checking out on this one, because everybody wants to know what's going on full chain membership proof. So I'm sure we're going to get a lot of people checking this out. And I will be headed to Porkfest. I'm leaving tomorrow night. I'll be get up there Wednesday morning in New Hampshire. If anybody's hearing this for the first time, Porkfest is a conference that takes place in New Hampshire. And I will be running like a Monero Topi tent there. It's going to be an amazing time.

If you can make your way over there, I suggest you try to do it. If you can make your way to Prague and go to Monero Con, sure, maybe do that first. But that might be more of a trek for some people. So yeah, over and out. Peace. Later. Thanks, guys. Greatly appreciate it. Adios. 

Speaker 2 
Hi, Monero Land. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to our show on YouTube, Odyssey, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Go to MoneroTalk.Live for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. If you want to interact with us, guests, or other podcast listeners, you can follow us on Twitter, Mastodon, or any of our social media platforms. MoneroTalk is also made possible from contributions by viewers and listeners like you, and supporting us is easier than ever by typing in MoneroTalk.Crypto in your Monero.com or cake wallet send address field to send us a tip. Once again, thanks so much for listening, and we look forward to being back next week.