S5 E2: Leo Wandersleb on WalletScrutiny & Why Samourai Isn't That Great

Published: April 30, 2020, 11 p.m.

b"As a developer, Leo Wandersleb is passionate about the way Android wallets work. In his quest to evaluate myCelium's main competitors, he has established a methodology of rating mobile wallets. That's why he created WalletScrutiny.com, a website where you can find information about how open source and transparent your mobile wallet of choice really is. If the wallet that you download from Google Play Store is not the same as the binaries you clone from the public GitHub repositories, then a red flag quickly gets waved and the wallet is not reproducible. This means that the developers are not entirely transparent about their code, do not maintain the repositories in a congruent way, and may just become malevolent if the users don't pay attention. Another interesting fact presented by Wandersleb concerns Samourai Wallet's dishonest marketing: though the developers of Samourai talk about open sourceness, their builds are not verifiable and there are great differences between the code on GitHub and the application that can be downloaded from the Play Store. Wandersleb provides interesting insights about the amount of trust that we should have in developers, explains how and when reputation matters, and ultimately helps all users to use better mobile wallets. Time Stamps Leo Wandersleb 00:46 \\u2013 Introduction 02:15 \\u2013 Categorization of mobile wallets on WalletScrutiny.com 3:50 \\u2013 What verifiability means for wallets, and why verifiable does not mean verified 6:40 \\u2013 Why verifiability matters to make sure that the wallet developers are not hacking you 9:40 \\u2013 Which wallets are listed as verifiable on WalletScrutiny.com? 12:20 \\u2013 Why Coinomi wallet is not open source 13:05 \\u2013 Coinbase is custodial and should be avoided 15:21 \\u2013 Some of the most popular mobile wallets also happen to be the worst 18:25 \\u2013 Wallets that are popular, open-source, but not verifiable 19:08 \\u2013 Samourai Wallet is not verifiable 22:10 \\u2013 How reproducibility works at MyCelium to prevent abuses by release managers 24:20 \\u2013 More arguments against Samourai 29:20 \\u2013 Android\\u2019s interesting security 31:27 \\u2013 Google Play vs F-Droid 33:55 \\u2013 What about iOS wallets, are they verifiable? 35:20 \\u2013 Blockstream Green and why it\\u2019s great 37:20 \\u2013 Coinbase vs Samourai for the average user 40:30 \\u2013 Why it\\u2019s better to be careful with mobile wallet updates 45:40 \\u2013 In the \\u201cDon\\u2019t trust, verify\\u201d issue, what can the average user actually verify? 48:40 \\u2013 Leo fails at marketing his own project 50:40 \\u2013 Why builders are the best 51:10 \\u2013 Companies exploiting the ignorance of newbies 53:00 \\u2013 Satoshi was honest about Bitcoin\\u2019s limitations 55:30 \\u2013 Why MyCelium\\u2019s iOS wallet is terrible and not recommended, but the Android version is better 59:10 \\u2013 MyCelium vs Blockstream Green 1:00:30 \\u2013 Collecting fees from routing Lightning Network transactions 1:02:48 \\u2013 Lightning Network Routing 1:06:00 \\u2013 Best mobile wallet for ease of use and open source verifiability 1:09:00 \\u2013 Wallet Scrutiny [dot] com and its methodology 1:10:30 \\u2013 How much does reputation matter in the Bitcoin space?"