support dispatch: https://citadeldispatch.com/donate
EPISODE: 114
BLOCK: 817211
PRICE: 2746 sats per dollar
TOPICS: merchant adoption, keeping it simple by reducing friction, custodial risk, liquid adoption
project website: https://coinos.io
nostr live chat: https://citadeldispatch.com/stream
nostr account: https://primal.net/odell
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@citadeldispatch
podcast: https://www.podpage.com/citadeldispatch
stream sats to the show: https://www.fountain.fm/
(01:00) Introduction of guests: Adam, founder of CoinOS, and Cole, head of business development
(02:00) History and evolution of CoinOS
(03:20) Discussion on the adoption and usage of Liquid and the challenges it faces
(11:31) Focus of CoinOS on merchant adoption and its features
(19:35) Strategies for merchant adoption and the importance of community support
(36:13) Lessons learned from the merchant adoption process
(44:25) Cold calling as a strategy for onboarding merchants
(45:01) Bitcoin meetups during COVID lockdowns
(46:28) Custodial lightning wallets and self custody
[00:00:33]
ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Friday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Seal Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on Bitcoin and Freedom Tech, specifically actionable discussion. Thank you guys for joining us. Again, I have a great guest with us today for a great conversation on Bitcoin Circular Economies merchant adoption. We have Adam here, founder of CoinOS. How's it going,
[00:01:02] Unknown:
Adam? Good. Good. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:05] ODELL:
Pleasure is mine. And we have Cole here, head of business development. How's it going, Cole?
[00:01:10] Unknown:
Very good. Thank you. Yep.
[00:01:12] ODELL:
Awesome. Nice. So, Adam, October 17, 2020, me, you, and Marty recorded, almost a little over 3 years ago. That was, 37 months 37 months ago, about Point OS. And at that point, yeah, at that point, it was a very different product. So, I mean, I don't think we have really chatted much since that happened. Like, what, you know, what what happened over the last 3 years? You know? Where is Kona Konawa set today? How are the priorities different? How do you look at it?
[00:01:55] Unknown:
Yeah. I was just, thinking about that conversation myself, remembering about that. So I think back then, I just finished my job working on a mesh net project, and I'd taken up CoinOS again after a long hiatus, and I just added liquid support to it. That version of coin OS, now lives as classic coin OS. So if you go to classic dot klinosdot I o, it's still there, and it still supports liquid and lightning. At one point, I was experimenting with, liquid atomic swaps and sort of building it into a a DEX or a marketplace.
[00:02:41] ODELL:
I like I like that I like that you took us there because, in my head, I was gonna just put you immediately on the spot. You're quite bullish on liquid 3 years ago.
[00:02:51] Unknown:
I was. Yeah. And I still like liquid. I still think it's, like, a very awesome project. It's it's good to have side chains as a scaling tech. I think it's underappreciated, underutilized. Yeah. But I haven't been working with it, the last little while. But I guess over the last 3 years since we last chatted.
[00:03:18] ODELL:
Before we continue, I mean, you brought up liquid. So just real quick. I mean, we've talked about liquid a lot on this show, and part of my interest in Liquid probably started from that conversation we had 3 years ago because it was the first, like, consumer facing app that, like, made it easy to interact with Liquid. And, you know, right now, if you go to mempool.space, we have mempool.space's, like, clock dashboard up on the screen. But if you go to the actual mempool dot space, they have a liquid explorer. And if you go to, like, the regular the regular Bitcoin explorer, fees are fucking insane right now.
You know, you need to pay 90 sats per byte to get into the next block. But for whatever reason, like, liquid is still not being used. Like, it's it's just sitting there, like, dormant. Very few transactions are going through it. I'm just curious, Adam, from, like, your opinion, like, where did it go wrong? Like, why does you know, like, did this did the liquid not solve any kind of real problem? Like, why aren't users actually using it?
[00:04:19] Unknown:
I don't think it's necessarily gone wrong. It just hasn't been picked up. Maybe out of necessity, like, people haven't been squeezed hard enough with fees yet to force the shift over to some of these other, side chains and things. I know for, like, retail payments, lightning has sort of, you know, taken that on and for micropayments. But I still see Liquid as serving this kind of middle ground where if you want to do, larger payments and you don't want the complexity of running a lightning node and doing channel management because it still follows the same sort of, model with, like, you know, blockchain and UTXO's as Bitcoin.
You can cold store your liquid. You can have, yeah, like a paper wallet for your liquid coins. And, yeah, it's gonna be cheaper to do transactions there. I guess it it suffered a lot of, FUD, and there's a lot of people that don't like liquid because it's semi centralized. Right? It's not as as decentralized as Bitcoin. There's a federation or a bunch of functionaries running the network, and technically they could all collude and drug people. So I think there's a lot of fear or just skepticism and doubt that that's something that could happen. I personally don't think they're gonna do that. I think they were selected as, you know, well intentioned good players in the Bitcoin space, and their interest is to, you know, bring Bitcoin forward and, provide, like, a, you know, scaling solution not to, you know, take people's money one day. So I'm not worried about them rubbing people.
But, you know, that's, I guess, part of the concern. It would be better if there wasn't any trust at all, and it was totally trustless and decentralized, but
[00:06:21] ODELL:
I think it serves, yeah, this, like That's not it. That's not it. Right? Because, like, like, more people it's hard to calculate this exact I mean, we we know how many transactions are going on in liquid, and it's minimal. It's, you know, like, 5 transactions an hour or something like that. More people I think it's a safe assumption to say that more people are using custodial wallet to Satoshi, with a single point of failure. You know, maybe they're they're trusted entity in the space. People, you know, don't think that they're gonna rug. But more people trust that than they do liquid or use that than they do liquid. It's just weird. To me, it's interesting. It's it's, there's there's a lesson to be learned there. I don't know what the lesson is.
Yeah. I don't know either. The fees are crazy right now. I did, like, where we do, like, ridiculous payouts for Open Sats. Like, we're basically running, you know, a 70 person Bitcoin payroll when you when you account for all the grant recipients that are receiving monthly grants from us, all paid on Bitcoin. And fees are fucking crazy. Like, it would be I ideal in your head. It's like, oh, like, Liquid would be perfect for this use case. But it's just that it doesn't have for sure. Yeah. Lightning might be an option too. Why aren't you guys doing Lightning? The amounts are too much. And then you have to do, like, channel you have to do, like, liquidity and stuff. It means all of our grant recipients have to have inbound liquidity. Yeah. So, like, there's a beauty of this. Yeah. It would be a lot cheaper. Beauty of either on chain or liquid where you're just, like, signing a transaction. It's all fine. They don't need it. Yep.
Yeah. We'll see. Okay. I derailed us.
[00:08:00] Unknown:
No. I don't have any agenda of what to talk about. Liquid's interesting to me. But that was one of the first things I noticed,
[00:08:07] ODELL:
that I was gonna bring up when I signed into the new coin OS, was that there was no liquid anywhere.
[00:08:14] Unknown:
Yeah. I just I haven't put it back in yet. It I kind of rewrote the code base over the last 2 years, and, you know, liquid adds a lot of complexity to it. So I'm planning to add it back in at some point. I just haven't haven't got it in there yet.
[00:08:32] Unknown:
I wanna So we on my name more. We we still have the liquid option on the classic coin OS. Like, the original one you probably know about, Odell? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I originally used, and that's what we talked about 3 years ago.
[00:08:47] Unknown:
But since that though, I built rarotoshi.com, which is a liquid NFT marketplace.
[00:08:54] ODELL:
Oh, that was you. Yep. I didn't realize that.
[00:08:58] Unknown:
So that's still going too, and that does atomic swaps when you go to buy an NFT there. You're paying with liquid Bitcoin, and it's doing, like, a trustless, single transaction. When you get your NFT, it's doing a an atomic swap. So it's kinda neat. It's like there's no, third party having to custody the funds or escrow the funds while you swap your tokens there. And, to fund it, it uses coin loss on the back end. So if you don't have liquid Bitcoin, but you wanna fund your rare Toshi account, you can deposit lightning or on chain Bitcoin, and coin also automatically convert it to liquid for you and stick it into your rare Toshi wallet.
So yeah. Has there been any kind of busy.
[00:09:52] ODELL:
Has there been any has there been substantial NFT adoption on liquid?
[00:09:57] Unknown:
I wouldn't call it substantial, not compared to the solar, solar, BRC 20, and other ones. But, yeah, it was an interesting project. And, I think, you know, as a, you know, a chain for doing tokens and stuff, liquid's great because the fees are are paid in Bitcoin, so you're not going to some other, shitcoin to cover the the fees or the gas. So if we were gonna have a a platform to create tokens and NFTs and things, then might as well do it on one that's, you know, made by Bitcoiners and using a a code base that actually is kinda like an experimental, you know, live test net or monetized test net that, the tech that's being built for a liquid can actually, you know, one day roll into Bitcoin and help improve it because they do experiments with covenants and, like, they first, tried Segwit on the liquid network before they rolled it into Bitcoin.
They've got experimental opcodes there. So it's kinda like a, you know, sandbox where we can experiment with things before putting them into the main chain.
[00:11:19] ODELL:
Yeah. Fair enough. Okay. So we got derailed when we started talking about liquid. Where so so CoinOS, you you've you've built this new version of CoinOS. It's focused specifically on merchant adoption, I think. Am I correct on that?
[00:11:37] Unknown:
Yeah. That's our main focus. I mean, I would say adoption in general. It's a wallet for people can use it as personal wallet just like wallet of Satoshi or something. But we've we've got a bit more focus on trying to onboard merchants, specifically, like, in person retail merchants versus online ecommerce.
[00:11:58] ODELL:
Yeah. So, like, one of the first things I noticed is that it's just simply a web page. It's a custodial wallet. I I assume, like, the idea is the merchant has it open on their iPad or their phone or something, and then they're manually plugging in, like, the amount? Like, I'm gonna charge you $25. They put that in, and then they show it to the
[00:12:22] Unknown:
Traditionally, yeah. It it was like that. In the last few months, I've actually been encouraging people or the merchants to not use it on a tablet or a device and have the customer initiate the payment. So you go into and you wanna pay your bill, they're just gonna tell you your total or give you your bill so you know in dollars what you owe. And then you are going to create an invoice. You're gonna go to the merchant's page. So it'll be like coinos.io/, let's say van love is a sushi restaurant in Vancouver. So if you go there, you can click on the pay button for them, and then you can generate either a lightning invoice or get their on chain Bitcoin address to send to.
And then, it'll have a number pad where it'll let you enter in fiat, what you wanna pay, and it'll do the conversion. So it'll generate an invoice in Bitcoin or in Sats, and then you pay it. So you can either if you're logged in to Coinos yourself, you can immediately just send that off, or you can open it with an another wallet. So there's a link to open it with, like, your wallet of Satoshi or whatever other wallet you wanna use. And then the customer is doing all that. So the merchant never has to touch a screen. They can just be off, you know, getting your order ready or serving other customers while you're doing the payment all on your end.
And when you do send the payment, the the issue is you don't wanna trust the customer's phone for them to show you, like, hey. I sent it. So to handle that, we've been giving merchants a thermal printer, like a receipt printer, and it listens for payments into their account. And whenever any money comes in, it just spits out a little paper ticket that says in dollars how much they got. So when they're ready to go, they're done, like, getting your order ready and stuff. They get this little paper receipt that says in dollars what they received, and they can just put that in the cash register. And it doesn't matter what kind of point of sale software they're using. They just enter it as a cash payment in dollars. And for accounting purposes and stuff, we tell them just treat it like cash.
So it's really easy for their staff. They don't need to learn how to work our app or any kind of Bitcoin app. They just have QR code, like a paper QR code posted up at their till or their counter. And we as customers come in, we scan that, we go to their page, we pay them, and they're just, you know, getting a piece of paper that tells them what they got so they don't have to learn Bitcoin or deal with a Bitcoin wallet at all.
[00:15:13] ODELL:
Super simple. Yeah. I like the analog piece of just, like, a paper printer. Because, like, I could see how that could break down. It's very pragmatic. Right? Because I I feel like that could break down if they were getting a ton of Bitcoin payments. But in reality, like, if they're getting a couple Bitcoin payments at a time, it just will print and tell them.
[00:15:35] Unknown:
Exactly. Yeah. So I've been ordering these from China. They're, like, $20 US, super cheap. And I've just been covering the cost of it, air dropping them into a bunch of merchants here. And, you know, give them a QR code, and then they're off to the races. So it's it's, like, really easy to set up a new merchant.
[00:15:59] ODELL:
So how many how many merchants do you guys have on board right now? I think there's a map on the web page. Right?
[00:16:05] Unknown:
Yeah. If you go to dot I o slash map, you can see it there. We got about 330 That's impressive. Worldwide. A lot of them are in Brazil. There's a project there called Beachcoin Aki, And they just went crazy and, like, orange filled their whole town and then a bunch of other places in Brazil. So that's the majority of them. In Vancouver, from us, it's 30. 25, 25, or 30 here.
[00:16:36] ODELL:
Yeah. That's awesome. That's pretty impressive, dude. That's a decent amount. Like, I you got I feel like you guys have been doing quietly too. Are they actually active? Like, are they are they legit? Like, I've a lot of times, like, the merchants gets onboarded and then they forget.
[00:17:00] Unknown:
It's legit. Yeah. We we, try to bring people out to them regularly. We've got a bunch of meetups going in Vancouver. So not just from us, there's there's other Bitcoiners here that host meetups and events all the time. And we've got a pretty active Telegram group, Vancouver Bitcoiners.
[00:17:20] ODELL:
So I had Leo. Leo visited us in Nashville at Bitcoin Park. Yep. Is that what he he use CoinOS when he's onboarding these people? I mean, he was, like, just bragging about how how big of a circular economy was being built out there.
[00:17:36] Unknown:
He tends to try to set them up with their own nodes if he can. Yes. He's really about but he he he visits a lot of the merchants that are running coin us. And, yeah, Leo's, like, one of the main guys out there just going around and supporting the merchants, going out and buying stuff with Bitcoin all the time and trying to develop that. So
[00:17:59] ODELL:
Yeah. I love the idea of, like he was, like, calling it, like, meet up bombs. It was, like, you onboard a merchant to Bitcoin, and then you have, like, your entire meetup go and eat there or shop there or whatever so that they feel loved.
[00:18:12] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:18:14] ODELL:
It's a cool idea.
[00:18:16] Unknown:
Yeah. And the the community here is really supportive. They've been all there's tons of people that go out and spend their their Bitcoins just to support the merchants. And, yeah, we couldn't do it without that because that's that's the main selling point too, and we're going into a place. It's it's not just, hey. Will you give this a try? It's, hey. If you give this a try, we're gonna you're gonna get some new business because we've got this community that we're gonna start bringing around. We're gonna put you on the map, and you're gonna increase your sales if you take Bitcoin.
So it makes it makes it a way easier sell when we have that. And the more of us there are, then the more of a an economic powerhouse we become, then it's just gonna snowball. We're gonna get more and more merchants, onboarding, and they're gonna talk to each other, talk to their friends, talk to other business owners. So the more volume we can send their way, then the more they're gonna, you know, spread it, and we're we'll get more adoption that way.
[00:19:21] Unknown:
Yeah. We, we are trying our best to, get the name out there and and us doing what we're doing right now with you, Matt, is, is we're trying to get, like, our name out there and stuff like that, and that's why we're we're just so incredibly appreciative of of your time and being on your show. And, we just had another pod we're we're trying to do a lot of podcasts. Yeah. All our social medias, posting a lot of videos, promo videos, and, yeah. So just trying to push that because we're international, so people from all around the world are messaging us. You know, we're all across Canada. 35 businesses, I think, in Canada, 6 in Miami.
So, yeah, we try to try to get around that way.
[00:19:59] ODELL:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to the to the freaks, Cole Cole messaged me on Discord, seeing what was up. And I was like, oh, shit. CoinOS. I know Adam. What the fuck is going on with CoinOS? I had honestly, you guys had fallen off my radar. So I was I'm I was looking forward to this chat. It's been great so far. So to the freaks that are in, I see a bunch of you are in our YouTube chat and our Twitch chat. Just FYI, the chat shown on screen now is our Noster Natives chat. You can get to that at cildispatch.com/stream. Do you guys see this question from salty Kate? Why would a merchant use CoinOS over a mobile wallet?
[00:20:45] Unknown:
Yeah. There's they're pretty similar. Like, CoinOS, we built it to be mobile friendly. So if you go there, you can even do the add to home screen thing. It's a progressive web app, so you can get a icon on your phone to launch it, and it kinda feels like an app. The reason we didn't launch it in the Play Store or the App Store and have, like, an actual native mobile version is because well, I tried that in the past. We did have that in the past, and it's just more of a a hassle for me as a developer to, cut a new release and then put it out to the App Store, and then everyone's phone has to download it and update it.
And then you're dealing with those gatekeepers, like Google and Apple can decide, whether your app is legit, and they have all these follow-up questions, and it's just oops. You have to jump through to have an app. So I kinda like having it on the web. If I wanna release an update, I can just push it out in seconds, and people just refresh the page and it's live. So it's way easier for me to release new features. And, yeah, users don't have to, like, even download anything. It works on any device anywhere in the world. You're not gonna be, censored in places that, you know, I think in Australia, people were saying they couldn't find some Bitcoin wallets because, the Play Store there was, like, filtering them out and things like that. So websites are universal and, yeah, it's just my preferred, environment to develop for. I I started as a web developer. That's what I know. So gonna stick this up and
[00:22:30] ODELL:
I mean, that'll make sense. I mean, do you see Ivan, like, he added he added to the question. He basically was, like, if if we're gonna compare it to Breeze, and I think, like, Breeze is probably a good comparison. I don't know how familiar you guys are with the project, but, essentially, it's a mobile app. It's self custody instead of custodial, like CoinOS. And, yeah, and it has a merchant tab. Like, it has a merchant mode on its app where you can do the dial pad thing. I think I know what my answer would be to this question, but I'm kinda curious on your answer.
[00:23:09] Unknown:
Well, yeah. So, like, yeah, Ivan. That's a good question, Ivan, and then also a salty Pete. Yeah. We the part of the package that we offer, merchants for using us as opposed to, like, Breeze or Moon is that we give you free marketing. We blast your business on all of our social media pages. Matt, that's probably one of your answers. Yeah. And, also, we're the lowest fees. We have the lowest fees in the world. I don't know another Bitcoin wallet that has fees like ours. So people get people might get concerned about, like the custodial aspect. Well, you know, me and Adam both teach people about non custodial. We're both non custodial advocates like we believe in self custody. We show people how to do that. We just believe coin toss is a very very good starting point and a good middleman for merchant transactions. We also offer offer sweeping.
Ivan also mentioned something in the chat earlier about the liquid to lightning sweeping. We offer sweeping for certain merchants if they want. For those who don't know what sweeping, I assume most people do know what that is, but for those who don't know what it is, sweeping is where we automatically will move your Bitcoin from your wallet into your bank account if you want if you wanna do that. Like Oh, you convert it into dollars? If if they want. Yes. It's a case by case basis. I'm proud to say that me and Adam are both proud to say that most merchants that are using us are not doing that, and most of them are Huddling. And some of the
[00:24:31] ODELL:
Yep. What about auto sweep to, like, Bitcoin address? Right? Like, so the way I look at it Yeah. That too. And I wanna dive into your fee structure, but the way I look at it is, like, you're getting the benefit of simplicity and the trade off is custodial risk. Right? So then it's like, how do you mitigate custodial risk and auto withdrawals to self custody after, like, a certain threshold or something? It's, like, oh, I get and once I hit, like, $1,000 in payments,
[00:24:58] Unknown:
then it's just all announced in our Telegram, like, yesterday that that's a feature I'm working on. It's, like, top of my priority list to do auto withdrawals to your own either lightning address or Bitcoin address. And I'm, I've added, like, a a private key backup. So if you go into your coin auth settings now, there's, like, a seed phrase you can back up. Right now, it's just being used to generate a Nostra key. So, every CoinDesk account comes with a Nostra key pair now. But that same, you know, master seed phrase is also gonna be used for, self custodial Bitcoin addresses.
So exactly that when you hit $1,000, whatever your threshold is, we'll know your pub key so we can generate addresses, from your pub key and then automatically sweep them out to your own wallet. And then you'll have the seed phrase for that, and we won't store that on the server. That's generated client side. It'll be, just just your own keys for that.
[00:26:07] ODELL:
That's clean. I was I was gonna my one of my questions was gonna be what is your master strategy? I, I I like the because we're basic dispatch is basically a half show now. It's not just Bitcoin anymore. I like the idea of I wasn't even thinking of you actually generating generating a self custody wallet for them, but that makes complete sense. You could easily do that in browser, and then it'd be way simpler for the end user. I mean, at the end of the day, it seems like you're selling simplicity. I mean, these merchants don't want friction. Right?
[00:26:39] Unknown:
Exactly. That'll be the default if they don't provide their own, but we'll give you the option to also provide your own external addresses or pub key or whatever.
[00:26:50] ODELL:
So, I mean, fees, we started the conversation talking about on chain fees being ridiculously high. And then, and and so so part of of that of that situation is most people don't realize is if you're opening a lightning channel, Lightning Channel requires 2 on chain fees. It's time of open and time of close unless the Lightning Channel never closes. And as a result, the self custody options, even if you forget about the lightning routing fees, which can be high in some of these situations, the on chain fees make it can make it very cost prohibitive for these self custody solutions, unfortunately. Like, that is the reality, particularly in small amounts.
So an easy fix for that and easy mitigation for that is custodial, and obviously, then it comes with trust and then you can get rugged. So I'm curious, like, what is, like, what is your fee structure? Like, how do you guys make money?
[00:27:49] Unknown:
We don't charge any fees, and we're not really making money right now. We're just trying to spread Bitcoin adoption because we hold Bitcoin. What a nice list. There is a 0.1% fee if you're converting between lightning and on chain, and that's to cover our cost to rebalance our node. But, basically, yeah, we're just trying to build us as an open source platform. It's free. Anyone could run their own point of instance, and we're trying to make it easy for people to you know, if you wanna be a custodian to be able to run this thing so that it's not just us doing it, but maybe there's people in other freer jurisdictions with less regulations that might be able to also, run coin us as a custodial service for their country or their town or community or their family, whatever scale makes sense. But I think, like you're saying that, you know, custodial option is great because you can have unlimited transactions. They can be free because there's almost no overhead to do a custodial transaction in a database.
So as long as the custodian is trustworthy and isn't gonna rub people, then that's a great way to scale Bitcoin up if you have trustworthy custodians. So we're trying to build this as a platform that, you know, people can use to do that themselves. It's not quite ready yet because I haven't documented it or made it easy enough to, like, spin up your own instance, but that's part of the goal.
[00:29:26] ODELL:
That was my next question. I mean, I remember that was a key aspect of the original Coin OS is that you could self host it. I mean, I I love the concept of, like, me in Nashville onboarding 20 merchants with my own self hosted Coin OS instance, and, like, they know whose knees they could break if something happens. And then that gets the it kinda scales in that way. But if if you have, like like, the hard question is, like, if you have, like, a very large custodian, like, all of a sudden, there there is you become a regulatory target. Like, it's not even just,
[00:30:01] Unknown:
Regulatory target and a hacker a hacking target. Yeah. You're a massive target by every party. Yeah. All the people wanna all the people wanna kill you. That's why I don't wanna be the I don't wanna shoulder the responsibility yet. I'm happy with the scale it's at now with a few 100 merchants, and now I wanna see more people kinda share that burden.
[00:30:22] ODELL:
So what's what's the plan with that? Is that are you gonna fully faucet? You're gonna make it easy for people to run their own instance? Like, because I don't see any GitHub links or anything. Like, is there a repo? Yeah. It's github.com/coinos.uh,
[00:30:36] Unknown:
well, github.com/coinos. That's our organization, and then there's a couple of repos under there. I need to do a better job, I guess, of linking to them from the home page. But, yeah, it's already Because
[00:30:49] Unknown:
on the on the bottom on the bottom of the home page, it says documentation. That's where all our GitHub is and and I API and stuff like that.
[00:31:02] Unknown:
Yeah, Matt. I'll set you up your own coin toss for Nashville if you wanna give it a whirl, you know, and put it on a Well EPS somewhere and
[00:31:10] ODELL:
We could we could take that conversation offline. But, yeah, I mean, that would be all I mean, the reason I I was thinking about I didn't see the Git link in, I found it, but that's a very easy domain, github.com/coinos. But I didn't see it in documentation for what it's worth, but maybe I'm just idiot and I'm live on air. The reason I bring it up is because if it is false, it could be a good target for OpenSats funding. Like, if you go to opensats.org/apply, but all applicants need to be false. So I don't know what your license is, but consider applying considering you guys oh, yeah. GPL. Awesome.
Yeah. Because, I mean, that's why OpenSats exists. Cool. Yeah. But it's it's cool. I I I love how I mean, I you know, in a perfect world in a perfect world not a perfect custodians, and they'd all be competing on on on, like, reliability, up yeah, uptime, reliability, fees, and there'd be, like, this beautiful free market and people would move between custodians and there'd be no friction with KYC and stuff. And, I mean, I think I kinda just know your answer. Like, are you like, do you have a do you have any concern that I can just go to coinos.io and or coinos.yeah.
Coinos.io and just immediately open an account, and I have no no identification information or anything that I have to give you guys.
[00:32:59] Unknown:
Yeah. Doesn't concern me.
[00:33:03] ODELL:
Not even email. Not even email. You don't yeah. You don't even need to go through the hassle of making a fake email. You don't even have to make a username and a password. I when I click create account, it just creates a randomly generated username and password for me. I'm assuming that's client side.
[00:33:18] Unknown:
That's a new feature. Yeah. Actually, we do, we do send the password to the server. But it's encrypted on the server, but, yeah. It's it's encrypted.
[00:33:34] ODELL:
Okay. Fair enough. Or maybe put a little disclaimer there or something. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna move to,
[00:33:40] Unknown:
like, pub key private key authentication. Like, log in with Nostra or lnurl makes more sense, I think. So just have to get around to that.
[00:33:52] ODELL:
Yeah. Noster would be nice. One identity. I already have it. That's what the zaps the zaps stream that we're using for the client, like, it can generate an M pub for you if you don't have one, like an end second M pub. Or if you have your own master key, you can just come here and and just set it up or, you know, just log in.
[00:34:14] Unknown:
It's it's pretty cool. Yeah. That's coming soon. That's on my priority list too. Like, letting people log in with their Albie wallet and things like that or being able to import your own master keys.
[00:34:27] ODELL:
Yeah. But I'll just say, guys, like, when you go to coinos.io and just just, like, start you press start in seconds, and you literally you're just you start in, like, in seconds. It's just like you're good to go. You got you got your nice big one wallet, and it just fucking works. Yep. Yeah. You can create an account in in under 20 sec. If you're good with a phone, you can create an account in 15 seconds. Like Well, less than that if you use the pregenerated
[00:34:56] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Like, true act yeah.
[00:34:59] ODELL:
I have a random account, yak43,
[00:35:01] Unknown:
and, like, just made a password for me. That's new. I just put that in last, like, in the last week. So I just skipped it. I was so confused
[00:35:10] ODELL:
I was so confused because it was just, like, pregenerated. I was like, what the fuck is going on here? Is there someone else who can? I just press sign and I was, like, I see what these guys are doing here. That's interesting. Shaves the talk to the people. Yeah. Okay. This is a really talking about the dark mode. I I appreciate it. Yeah. This is an important question.
[00:35:27] Unknown:
Yeah. The the dark mode. Yeah. You can have dark mode, but it doesn't really work properly. You have to adjust the settings in your Google Chrome browser. That's not a coin house thing, but, yeah, Adam, it's it's, on our list to add dark mode because that's what a lot of people want. Yeah. The the people want dark mode, man. Yeah. Yeah. People.
[00:35:47] Unknown:
You know, I'm glad they asked that.
[00:35:50] ODELL:
I have learned you can't win, because I know a project that the people had a petition for light mode because they were dark mode only. So no matter what, you're gonna have haters. You have to support both modes.
[00:36:00] Unknown:
Yep. We'll get around to it. Oh, that's hilarious.
[00:36:04] ODELL:
This is awesome, guys. This has been a great conversation. Like, what lessons have you learned from the merchant adoption process? Like, it's something that I've been very keenly focused on for a while, and I've I've been mostly a failure about it, I think. Like, I I've I've I know things take time, like, good things take time, but I've I've become a little bit disenfranchised with the idea of being able to spend my Bitcoin at local merchants, and I've been very outspoken about trying to get we let me put it this way. We've personally I personally failed in Nashville so far. Like, what are the do you have any tips? Do you have any thoughts? Like, where how do we make this thing happen quicker? Because Yeah. Yeah. What what you do is you my Bitcoin. I wanna spend it.
[00:36:57] Unknown:
Yeah. What you do is you fly me down there, and we onboard 30 merchants in a week. And then the next week, we do 50. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's, yeah. The the one of the biggest things I've I've learned is just what is the trigger that a business owner wants to hear? Like, what is the number one thing most business owners want is more sales. What can they do to get more sales? So I immediately start with that. I say that we we guarantee you that you will get more sales, and I underline and bold that in my emails when I'm following up and stuff. So we tell them that, and then we just tell them that there's a lot of people that will come here to spend their Bitcoin. That's So you're relying on the meetups to actually drive people to locations.
[00:37:38] Unknown:
Yeah. The community is key. You gotta have a community. Can't just be 1 Bitcoiner who wants to go and convince merchants to try it. You gotta have people that are coming with you, other people that are going to that same merchant, the Bitcoin, or you you have to be able to show them that, yeah, you're gonna get, a bunch of people coming in to use it. Otherwise, it's not worth their time to even go through the mental, you know, gymnastics of what is this thing and what are the pros and cons even though it's almost all pros. And it's like there's very little friction to giving it a try just for them to get to the point where they'll even entertain the idea, they need more than that. Like, even telling them that it's no fees and you're gonna save on credit card transaction fees, it's not enough for them unless they think there's gonna be some significant volume to have to train their staff on this other payment method, have to get in another device potentially, have to worry about the accounting aspect of it.
It's kind of like a a big lift for them even though it it's not really, but it for them, they don't know that. Right? So you kinda just need to keep it simple, Do as much hand holding as you can. Like, here's your account login. Here's your QR code. Here's your Windows sticker. We're gonna put you on the map, like, show them the map of other merchants. And that helps too when they see that, you know, you're not the only place in town, but there's, like, 30 businesses, maybe some of your competitors are using it. It helps to get that, snowball effect of the more there are then the more, other people are gonna wanna jump on board and not be left out. So yeah. Starting with the community and and meetups and just having some Bitcoiners that are willing to go and support the first couple merchants, that's crucial to getting started, I
[00:39:43] ODELL:
think. Yeah. I might have to, like, rally the troops, so to speak. I, so, like, in Nashville, we have one of probably one of the largest monthly meetups in United States. At least it's not run by Parker Lewis, because he runs both the Austin, the tabs, and, Houston. But, like, we get, like, a 150 to 200 people every month. And, like, one of the big things we do is we bring a local merchant and we a local food merchant, right, like burgers or barbecue or something like that. We onboard them to Bitcoin. They set up, like, a little tent or they pull up a food truck, and that they they they're at the park. They're right outside.
They're selling food, and they always accept credit card cash and Bitcoin. And we get, like it's like, on average, it'll be, like, 15 to 20% of people who pay with Bitcoin. And then if I, like, shame them in, like, the announcements, like, I might get 40% max. But there's just this and of that 40%, maybe, like, half of them are paying directly from strike from dollars. They're not, like, actually spending Bitcoin. So to me, it's just it's been this slog, but maybe that doesn't matter. Like, maybe if I can just get like, what if I said 10%.
So, like, if I can get, like, 20 ride or dies that wanna spend their Bitcoin, and we just, like, roll into a coffee shop and just pour Bitcoin on them, like, maybe that's enough. Like, maybe you don't actually need more than, like, 20 dedicated people to make a merchant happy.
[00:41:27] Unknown:
Yeah. The other thing is really, cold calling, like, going into a merchant and just saying, hey. Will you give this a try? It's really tough. Right? Because if they're not a Bitcoiner already, they're they're gonna be kinda hesitant about it. So So it's way better to get the word out to the community and say, hey. We're looking to get some merchants. Sorry. And, let it be known that we wanna get some merchants taking Bitcoin. Reach out to your friends. If anyone knows any business owners, can you get us an introduction with them? Because if you get a, like, a warm referral to a business owner and you're coming in from someone that they're friends with and they their friend has said, hey. Bring this guy, Matt, and he's gonna set you with Bitcoin.
They're way more likely to go for it than just walking in off the street and saying, hey. We're a bunch of Bitcoiners, and we wanna spend money here. That that can work too if if there's a big group and it's obvious. Or or if you're doing regular meetups at the same spot and they see you coming in every week or every month and there's a bunch of you, then, yeah, they're gonna be more receptive to it. But, yeah, finding people that you know. Right? Getting friends of friends, friends of family, Just tell them, hey. We wanna get some places accepting Bitcoin. Who do you know that will let us give it a try and then go from there?
[00:42:53] Unknown:
Yeah. We also yeah. We have a bounty program, coinos.io/bounties, which is more directed around the the Vancouver area. We'll give you a 1,000,000 sats if you direct us and refer us to a business that is interested in accepting big payments.
[00:43:11] ODELL:
Dude, I love this because, so if you go to coin o by the way, you guys pronounce it coin o s? It's coin o s. Right? Is it coinos?
[00:43:21] Unknown:
Coinos.
[00:43:22] Unknown:
Yeah. We get asked that all the time. It's coinos. Yeah. But say whatever you want.
[00:43:26] ODELL:
Okay. Coinos. If you go to coinos.i0/ bounties, this is pretty cool because I've talked about this in the past. Like, it's like, okay. So you have it broken up into categories, like grocery we need a grocery store to accept Bitcoin. We need a bakery to accept Bitcoin. We need a a laundromat to accept Bitcoin. And this is so true. Like, to I only for the short term in the short to medium term, I just need one hardware store in Nashville to accept Bitcoin. I just need one grocery store to I'll just go to that store. Like, that'll be my hardware store. The second to 5 you know, second to 10 hardware stores or whatever mattered less to me than the first one. Yeah. Because I just need every category, to accept Bitcoin, and and then I'll be happy. So I actually like this bounties idea. This might we might, I think I'm gonna I'm gonna, like, I'm gonna copy this for Bitcoin Park and just put just straight up be, like, I will pay you a 1000000 sets if you onboard me at a grocery store, you onboard me at a hardware store or something. I like that idea. Awesome. I love to hear that.
[00:44:28] Unknown:
It's That's fantastic. Weird weird robot in the chat is saying cold calling is what Oshi was doing, and I don't think it was a very scalable strategy. In in the for the most part, yeah, but I did do a bunch of cold calling, and we did onboard multiple merchants actually from cold calling. So it does work. Just careful kinda who you who you are calling, who you're talking to. But it does work, at least a little bit. I mean,
[00:44:51] ODELL:
I think the problem is is that the merchants fall off. It's a problem that a lot of us have witnessed. And I I think that's where, like, Leo's meetup thing, like, at least while we're trying to fake it till we make it. Like, the meetup thing is, like, okay. Like, one of the most bullish fundamentals of Bitcoin to me is while COVID lockdowns were happening and governments are trying to stop us from meeting, Bitcoin grassroots Bitcoin meetups all around the world blossom. Like, so many the meetups grew even though people in general outside of Bitcoin weren't meeting as much. And, it's an asset that we just, you know, that local community should really be leveraging. Like, that is that that is a incredibly valuable asset that that different local communities have. This idea And so we need to mobilize them essentially.
Instead of mobilizing them to, like, picket lines or annoying people to sign petitions or something like that, you just mobilize them to go to the local coffee shop that accepts Bitcoin. You know? If every person in the meetup buys 1 coffee a month at this place, they won't get old. You know, they they they won't get sick of it. They won't think it's just a fucking gimmick. They'll actually they'll actually have business.
[00:46:06] Unknown:
Yeah. We actually host a weekly Bitcoin and coffee. We go between 2 different coffee shops here every Monday morning, and it's just like a casual Bitcoin hangout. And, yeah, they both accept Bitcoin, so people are buying coffees and bagels and muffins and whatever. And, it's, yeah, it's good stuff.
[00:46:29] ODELL:
I'm curious while I have you, and we're, like, wrapping up here. We're close to the end of our time. You know, I as a Bitcoiner, like, I grew up as, like, self custody only. Like, I don't recommend custodial options to anyone. Self custody Bitcoin is easy enough. People should be using self custody Bitcoin. We've learned so many lessons about people getting rugged. Lightning kind of flipped it on its head because Lightning self custody is is has got technical difficulties. There's trade offs that are made, that Lightning needs to be interactive, that we have liquidity constraints, then you need to be online, that that that make self custody lightning, particularly on mobile, much more difficult.
And as a result, we've seen this growth in there's almost like a default growth in custodial lightning wallets that you don't really see in the on chain Bitcoin world. And on chain Bitcoin world, for the most part, it's dominated by self custody wallets at this point. And there's really great tools out there. They don't have really horrible trade offs. But with with lightning, we've seen custodial lightning, and specifically, we've seen Walt and Satoshi. And I've been, like, one of the few people that, quote, unquote, I'm sounding the alarm, you know, you can get rugged at will, governments can pressure them into adding KYC, all this other stuff.
They could get hacked. What? They could censor people at will. They have your all your private information. Like, what what is your view on all like, so having this conversation with you guys, I I'm partially wondering I'm, like, partially questioning my own perspective. Like, are they just you know and while the Stoshi won't come on the podcast, they don't do any podcasts or anything. So I can't have the conversation with them. Like, are are they just is is there a perspective that they're, like, based Bitcoiners that are just running a service without doing KYC and they're just, they're just fighting the good fight? Or, like, like, am I how do you view, Like, how do you view that growing custodial risk?
[00:48:39] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm in the same boat. I think, I've had one interaction with the Walla of Satoshi guys, and it was positive. I think they are base Bitcoiners as my sense, but I don't know. For sure, I've never met them really in person or anything. But,
[00:48:54] ODELL:
I don't know many people that have. Yeah. The bigger
[00:48:58] Unknown:
they become, like we said earlier, the more of a target they are for the regulators and for just a fuck up, like, if they accidentally mess up and we sell the money or something. So spreading it out amongst multiple custodians. If custodians are good actors, then no problem. Right? But, yeah, history has shown there's enough bad actors and rug pulls that, you definitely don't wanna put a lot of money into a custodian and be very careful about who you're dealing with and prefer self custody if at all possible. But, yeah, I agree. Like, on chain, self custody is the way to go if you're doing anything more than a few $100 or a few $1,000, whatever your personal risk tolerance is.
And then you have a lightning wallet that you top up periodically, maybe with a couple $100 for your spending money for the month or something. That may be the way we go for now until lightning self custody and other scaling solutions develop that allow you to do retail micro transactions totally, you know, trustlessly. But using this as a a transition or a stop gap measure in the meantime, it might be the way we go for the next few years until those develop more. But
[00:50:22] ODELL:
yeah. Yeah. My concern is with custodians. Yeah. I think I think that was well said. I mean, my concern is specifically, like, because while Satoshi has become so successful that there's such a massive custodian. And as they grow, it becomes more like, 10 Wallow Satoshis are less of a concern than 1 wallet of satoshi. And this, like, small balance thing, I just feel like is mostly a cop out. Because, like, people say small balance, and then you find out how big the balances are when when the rug happens. Right? And they they usually tend to be larger. And in the developing world where a lot of people are getting onboarded to Walletistyoshi because they they don't wanna pay on chain fees, which is understandable.
Like, maybe like, a $100 or a 1,000,000 sats could be their life savings. Like, that's a substantial amount of money for them. And just, like, if a rug happens, it's gonna be fucking depressing. Like, it's gonna suck to see, like, the entire developing world that got onboarded via Wall of the Satoshi all getting rugged at the same time. So I would say to to the guys running Walla, the Satoshi, I I don't hate you. But if you are if you are running this custodian, your your your plan in your head should be to try and reduce the amount of users you have slowly, because there's no way you can't unwind a custodian. Custodians can't be unwound easily, especially if they have small amounts. It's fucking clusterfuck.
So, you know, maybe open source your app. Maybe encourage other people to self host instances. Maybe slowly increase your fees to to encourage people to move to other wallets. But you should have, like, a strategy in place to, like, try and reduce the Bitcoin liability you have because the the larger you grow, the more shit can happen, and you're pretty big already. That's, like, my view, if they're listening.
[00:52:22] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:52:23] ODELL:
Well said. Guys, this has been great. I'm gonna quickly read, the top 4 boosts on podcasting 2 point o, and then we're gonna end with final thoughts from each of you. Cielo Dispatch is a 100% audience funded. We do not have sponsors or ads. We're supported by our viewers using Bitcoin. Those viewers are either supporting us through sidildispatch.com/stream on the live chat, through podcasting 2.0 apps such as Fountain or Breeze, or by going to citildispatch.com/ donate and donating with Bitcoin there. So our top 4 boost from podcasting 2.0 is Coco 101 with 20,000 sats. Dope rip as always. Love hearing from Evan and excited for him to destroy the lightning work lightning network. We have at 8 Myth Ran Deer with 14,441 sats. Lightning is a work in progress. Good to see Evan building the tools. We have at Boz with 10,000 sats saying, really cool Evan. Did I hear that right? Ellen, you were relative to my own node. Got try that out soon. And we have at Dash with 7,777 sats. Caps o Dell is back in all caps.
Caps o Dell is just getting started. This is gonna be a crazy cycle, freaks. I would just say, like, huge shout out to the the freaks who support us through podcasting 2.0 because specifically, when you support that way, it's great to see dispatch high on the charts. It really goes a long way, and and it helps helps people find the show. And I know it's the end of a bear market, maybe the beginning of a recession. If sats are too hard to come by and you don't wanna part with your sats, you can support the show by sharing it with friends and family. We're on all platforms, every podcasting app. Leaving a review, all that stuff helps.
So with all that said, Adam, do you wanna wrap us up with some final thoughts?
[00:54:17] Unknown:
Yeah. Just thanks for having us, and I hope, people give Coin Az a try. Like, it does literally just take seconds to to sign up and then, get out there and and talk to those business owners. You know, ask ask your friends and family if they know anyone who has a business that might be willing to try Bitcoin. And, shout out to BTC map dot org. They're listing all the businesses in the world that take Bitcoin, so let's fill it up and keep it going. Thanks, guys.
[00:54:51] ODELL:
Thanks, Adam. Cole, final thoughts.
[00:54:54] Unknown:
Yeah. And I yeah. Thank you so much for having us on your show. Really, really enjoyed it. I love seeing the live chat. A lot of people are saying a lot of really good comments. Anyone that wants to reach out to us, it's just our website, coinos. Io. Scroll to the bottom. That's where our link tree is. Our link tree button has all of our social media links, including Telegram, Twitter, NOS, or Instagram. Please reach out to us if you ever just wanna chat, you have questions. We're all me and Adam are active in the Telegram chat, always willing to help people out with learning how to onboard merchants or just anything in general. And I appreciate every single one of you on the chat here. T I wanna give a shout out to Teejem.
He's in the NausseTrack, t e e j e m. He's a prominent member in the Vancouver Bitcoin community. He's one of the most consistent buyers of coin us merchants of Coinos merchants in Vancouver. So, like, he deserves a shout out because he puts a lot of effort in being a customer at Coinos merchants. So That's awesome. I can see, like, early
[00:55:52] ODELL:
early days, like, us 1 or 2 people in the city can really push the tide. So that's, like, an awesome. Yep. I wanna thank you both for joining. I wanna thank all the freaks who joined us specifically in the live chat, but also everyone, who continues to listen and support the show. I'm glad you guys find it valuable. That's why I do it. I would just say to Cole, first of all, I don't know if you're aware, but there's a Linktree alternative on Nostril called Nosttree. Consider checking it out. And, also, a personal request to to you guys. I've noticed your Nostril account is a little bit dormant. Consider consider maybe giving it a little love.
We we'd love we'd love to have you guys more active in Noster.
[00:56:35] Unknown:
Yeah. Get on that.
[00:56:40] ODELL:
And apply to open sats. Opensats.org/apply. Your project is a perfect fit for something that we would support. Thank you, guys. It's been a pleasure, and until next time. Thank you. Stay humble, Stack Sats. Later, freaks.
Happy Bitcoin Friday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Seal Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on Bitcoin and Freedom Tech, specifically actionable discussion. Thank you guys for joining us. Again, I have a great guest with us today for a great conversation on Bitcoin Circular Economies merchant adoption. We have Adam here, founder of CoinOS. How's it going,
[00:01:02] Unknown:
Adam? Good. Good. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:05] ODELL:
Pleasure is mine. And we have Cole here, head of business development. How's it going, Cole?
[00:01:10] Unknown:
Very good. Thank you. Yep.
[00:01:12] ODELL:
Awesome. Nice. So, Adam, October 17, 2020, me, you, and Marty recorded, almost a little over 3 years ago. That was, 37 months 37 months ago, about Point OS. And at that point, yeah, at that point, it was a very different product. So, I mean, I don't think we have really chatted much since that happened. Like, what, you know, what what happened over the last 3 years? You know? Where is Kona Konawa set today? How are the priorities different? How do you look at it?
[00:01:55] Unknown:
Yeah. I was just, thinking about that conversation myself, remembering about that. So I think back then, I just finished my job working on a mesh net project, and I'd taken up CoinOS again after a long hiatus, and I just added liquid support to it. That version of coin OS, now lives as classic coin OS. So if you go to classic dot klinosdot I o, it's still there, and it still supports liquid and lightning. At one point, I was experimenting with, liquid atomic swaps and sort of building it into a a DEX or a marketplace.
[00:02:41] ODELL:
I like I like that I like that you took us there because, in my head, I was gonna just put you immediately on the spot. You're quite bullish on liquid 3 years ago.
[00:02:51] Unknown:
I was. Yeah. And I still like liquid. I still think it's, like, a very awesome project. It's it's good to have side chains as a scaling tech. I think it's underappreciated, underutilized. Yeah. But I haven't been working with it, the last little while. But I guess over the last 3 years since we last chatted.
[00:03:18] ODELL:
Before we continue, I mean, you brought up liquid. So just real quick. I mean, we've talked about liquid a lot on this show, and part of my interest in Liquid probably started from that conversation we had 3 years ago because it was the first, like, consumer facing app that, like, made it easy to interact with Liquid. And, you know, right now, if you go to mempool.space, we have mempool.space's, like, clock dashboard up on the screen. But if you go to the actual mempool dot space, they have a liquid explorer. And if you go to, like, the regular the regular Bitcoin explorer, fees are fucking insane right now.
You know, you need to pay 90 sats per byte to get into the next block. But for whatever reason, like, liquid is still not being used. Like, it's it's just sitting there, like, dormant. Very few transactions are going through it. I'm just curious, Adam, from, like, your opinion, like, where did it go wrong? Like, why does you know, like, did this did the liquid not solve any kind of real problem? Like, why aren't users actually using it?
[00:04:19] Unknown:
I don't think it's necessarily gone wrong. It just hasn't been picked up. Maybe out of necessity, like, people haven't been squeezed hard enough with fees yet to force the shift over to some of these other, side chains and things. I know for, like, retail payments, lightning has sort of, you know, taken that on and for micropayments. But I still see Liquid as serving this kind of middle ground where if you want to do, larger payments and you don't want the complexity of running a lightning node and doing channel management because it still follows the same sort of, model with, like, you know, blockchain and UTXO's as Bitcoin.
You can cold store your liquid. You can have, yeah, like a paper wallet for your liquid coins. And, yeah, it's gonna be cheaper to do transactions there. I guess it it suffered a lot of, FUD, and there's a lot of people that don't like liquid because it's semi centralized. Right? It's not as as decentralized as Bitcoin. There's a federation or a bunch of functionaries running the network, and technically they could all collude and drug people. So I think there's a lot of fear or just skepticism and doubt that that's something that could happen. I personally don't think they're gonna do that. I think they were selected as, you know, well intentioned good players in the Bitcoin space, and their interest is to, you know, bring Bitcoin forward and, provide, like, a, you know, scaling solution not to, you know, take people's money one day. So I'm not worried about them rubbing people.
But, you know, that's, I guess, part of the concern. It would be better if there wasn't any trust at all, and it was totally trustless and decentralized, but
[00:06:21] ODELL:
I think it serves, yeah, this, like That's not it. That's not it. Right? Because, like, like, more people it's hard to calculate this exact I mean, we we know how many transactions are going on in liquid, and it's minimal. It's, you know, like, 5 transactions an hour or something like that. More people I think it's a safe assumption to say that more people are using custodial wallet to Satoshi, with a single point of failure. You know, maybe they're they're trusted entity in the space. People, you know, don't think that they're gonna rug. But more people trust that than they do liquid or use that than they do liquid. It's just weird. To me, it's interesting. It's it's, there's there's a lesson to be learned there. I don't know what the lesson is.
Yeah. I don't know either. The fees are crazy right now. I did, like, where we do, like, ridiculous payouts for Open Sats. Like, we're basically running, you know, a 70 person Bitcoin payroll when you when you account for all the grant recipients that are receiving monthly grants from us, all paid on Bitcoin. And fees are fucking crazy. Like, it would be I ideal in your head. It's like, oh, like, Liquid would be perfect for this use case. But it's just that it doesn't have for sure. Yeah. Lightning might be an option too. Why aren't you guys doing Lightning? The amounts are too much. And then you have to do, like, channel you have to do, like, liquidity and stuff. It means all of our grant recipients have to have inbound liquidity. Yeah. So, like, there's a beauty of this. Yeah. It would be a lot cheaper. Beauty of either on chain or liquid where you're just, like, signing a transaction. It's all fine. They don't need it. Yep.
Yeah. We'll see. Okay. I derailed us.
[00:08:00] Unknown:
No. I don't have any agenda of what to talk about. Liquid's interesting to me. But that was one of the first things I noticed,
[00:08:07] ODELL:
that I was gonna bring up when I signed into the new coin OS, was that there was no liquid anywhere.
[00:08:14] Unknown:
Yeah. I just I haven't put it back in yet. It I kind of rewrote the code base over the last 2 years, and, you know, liquid adds a lot of complexity to it. So I'm planning to add it back in at some point. I just haven't haven't got it in there yet.
[00:08:32] Unknown:
I wanna So we on my name more. We we still have the liquid option on the classic coin OS. Like, the original one you probably know about, Odell? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I originally used, and that's what we talked about 3 years ago.
[00:08:47] Unknown:
But since that though, I built rarotoshi.com, which is a liquid NFT marketplace.
[00:08:54] ODELL:
Oh, that was you. Yep. I didn't realize that.
[00:08:58] Unknown:
So that's still going too, and that does atomic swaps when you go to buy an NFT there. You're paying with liquid Bitcoin, and it's doing, like, a trustless, single transaction. When you get your NFT, it's doing a an atomic swap. So it's kinda neat. It's like there's no, third party having to custody the funds or escrow the funds while you swap your tokens there. And, to fund it, it uses coin loss on the back end. So if you don't have liquid Bitcoin, but you wanna fund your rare Toshi account, you can deposit lightning or on chain Bitcoin, and coin also automatically convert it to liquid for you and stick it into your rare Toshi wallet.
So yeah. Has there been any kind of busy.
[00:09:52] ODELL:
Has there been any has there been substantial NFT adoption on liquid?
[00:09:57] Unknown:
I wouldn't call it substantial, not compared to the solar, solar, BRC 20, and other ones. But, yeah, it was an interesting project. And, I think, you know, as a, you know, a chain for doing tokens and stuff, liquid's great because the fees are are paid in Bitcoin, so you're not going to some other, shitcoin to cover the the fees or the gas. So if we were gonna have a a platform to create tokens and NFTs and things, then might as well do it on one that's, you know, made by Bitcoiners and using a a code base that actually is kinda like an experimental, you know, live test net or monetized test net that, the tech that's being built for a liquid can actually, you know, one day roll into Bitcoin and help improve it because they do experiments with covenants and, like, they first, tried Segwit on the liquid network before they rolled it into Bitcoin.
They've got experimental opcodes there. So it's kinda like a, you know, sandbox where we can experiment with things before putting them into the main chain.
[00:11:19] ODELL:
Yeah. Fair enough. Okay. So we got derailed when we started talking about liquid. Where so so CoinOS, you you've you've built this new version of CoinOS. It's focused specifically on merchant adoption, I think. Am I correct on that?
[00:11:37] Unknown:
Yeah. That's our main focus. I mean, I would say adoption in general. It's a wallet for people can use it as personal wallet just like wallet of Satoshi or something. But we've we've got a bit more focus on trying to onboard merchants, specifically, like, in person retail merchants versus online ecommerce.
[00:11:58] ODELL:
Yeah. So, like, one of the first things I noticed is that it's just simply a web page. It's a custodial wallet. I I assume, like, the idea is the merchant has it open on their iPad or their phone or something, and then they're manually plugging in, like, the amount? Like, I'm gonna charge you $25. They put that in, and then they show it to the
[00:12:22] Unknown:
Traditionally, yeah. It it was like that. In the last few months, I've actually been encouraging people or the merchants to not use it on a tablet or a device and have the customer initiate the payment. So you go into and you wanna pay your bill, they're just gonna tell you your total or give you your bill so you know in dollars what you owe. And then you are going to create an invoice. You're gonna go to the merchant's page. So it'll be like coinos.io/, let's say van love is a sushi restaurant in Vancouver. So if you go there, you can click on the pay button for them, and then you can generate either a lightning invoice or get their on chain Bitcoin address to send to.
And then, it'll have a number pad where it'll let you enter in fiat, what you wanna pay, and it'll do the conversion. So it'll generate an invoice in Bitcoin or in Sats, and then you pay it. So you can either if you're logged in to Coinos yourself, you can immediately just send that off, or you can open it with an another wallet. So there's a link to open it with, like, your wallet of Satoshi or whatever other wallet you wanna use. And then the customer is doing all that. So the merchant never has to touch a screen. They can just be off, you know, getting your order ready or serving other customers while you're doing the payment all on your end.
And when you do send the payment, the the issue is you don't wanna trust the customer's phone for them to show you, like, hey. I sent it. So to handle that, we've been giving merchants a thermal printer, like a receipt printer, and it listens for payments into their account. And whenever any money comes in, it just spits out a little paper ticket that says in dollars how much they got. So when they're ready to go, they're done, like, getting your order ready and stuff. They get this little paper receipt that says in dollars what they received, and they can just put that in the cash register. And it doesn't matter what kind of point of sale software they're using. They just enter it as a cash payment in dollars. And for accounting purposes and stuff, we tell them just treat it like cash.
So it's really easy for their staff. They don't need to learn how to work our app or any kind of Bitcoin app. They just have QR code, like a paper QR code posted up at their till or their counter. And we as customers come in, we scan that, we go to their page, we pay them, and they're just, you know, getting a piece of paper that tells them what they got so they don't have to learn Bitcoin or deal with a Bitcoin wallet at all.
[00:15:13] ODELL:
Super simple. Yeah. I like the analog piece of just, like, a paper printer. Because, like, I could see how that could break down. It's very pragmatic. Right? Because I I feel like that could break down if they were getting a ton of Bitcoin payments. But in reality, like, if they're getting a couple Bitcoin payments at a time, it just will print and tell them.
[00:15:35] Unknown:
Exactly. Yeah. So I've been ordering these from China. They're, like, $20 US, super cheap. And I've just been covering the cost of it, air dropping them into a bunch of merchants here. And, you know, give them a QR code, and then they're off to the races. So it's it's, like, really easy to set up a new merchant.
[00:15:59] ODELL:
So how many how many merchants do you guys have on board right now? I think there's a map on the web page. Right?
[00:16:05] Unknown:
Yeah. If you go to dot I o slash map, you can see it there. We got about 330 That's impressive. Worldwide. A lot of them are in Brazil. There's a project there called Beachcoin Aki, And they just went crazy and, like, orange filled their whole town and then a bunch of other places in Brazil. So that's the majority of them. In Vancouver, from us, it's 30. 25, 25, or 30 here.
[00:16:36] ODELL:
Yeah. That's awesome. That's pretty impressive, dude. That's a decent amount. Like, I you got I feel like you guys have been doing quietly too. Are they actually active? Like, are they are they legit? Like, I've a lot of times, like, the merchants gets onboarded and then they forget.
[00:17:00] Unknown:
It's legit. Yeah. We we, try to bring people out to them regularly. We've got a bunch of meetups going in Vancouver. So not just from us, there's there's other Bitcoiners here that host meetups and events all the time. And we've got a pretty active Telegram group, Vancouver Bitcoiners.
[00:17:20] ODELL:
So I had Leo. Leo visited us in Nashville at Bitcoin Park. Yep. Is that what he he use CoinOS when he's onboarding these people? I mean, he was, like, just bragging about how how big of a circular economy was being built out there.
[00:17:36] Unknown:
He tends to try to set them up with their own nodes if he can. Yes. He's really about but he he he visits a lot of the merchants that are running coin us. And, yeah, Leo's, like, one of the main guys out there just going around and supporting the merchants, going out and buying stuff with Bitcoin all the time and trying to develop that. So
[00:17:59] ODELL:
Yeah. I love the idea of, like he was, like, calling it, like, meet up bombs. It was, like, you onboard a merchant to Bitcoin, and then you have, like, your entire meetup go and eat there or shop there or whatever so that they feel loved.
[00:18:12] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:18:14] ODELL:
It's a cool idea.
[00:18:16] Unknown:
Yeah. And the the community here is really supportive. They've been all there's tons of people that go out and spend their their Bitcoins just to support the merchants. And, yeah, we couldn't do it without that because that's that's the main selling point too, and we're going into a place. It's it's not just, hey. Will you give this a try? It's, hey. If you give this a try, we're gonna you're gonna get some new business because we've got this community that we're gonna start bringing around. We're gonna put you on the map, and you're gonna increase your sales if you take Bitcoin.
So it makes it makes it a way easier sell when we have that. And the more of us there are, then the more of a an economic powerhouse we become, then it's just gonna snowball. We're gonna get more and more merchants, onboarding, and they're gonna talk to each other, talk to their friends, talk to other business owners. So the more volume we can send their way, then the more they're gonna, you know, spread it, and we're we'll get more adoption that way.
[00:19:21] Unknown:
Yeah. We, we are trying our best to, get the name out there and and us doing what we're doing right now with you, Matt, is, is we're trying to get, like, our name out there and stuff like that, and that's why we're we're just so incredibly appreciative of of your time and being on your show. And, we just had another pod we're we're trying to do a lot of podcasts. Yeah. All our social medias, posting a lot of videos, promo videos, and, yeah. So just trying to push that because we're international, so people from all around the world are messaging us. You know, we're all across Canada. 35 businesses, I think, in Canada, 6 in Miami.
So, yeah, we try to try to get around that way.
[00:19:59] ODELL:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to the to the freaks, Cole Cole messaged me on Discord, seeing what was up. And I was like, oh, shit. CoinOS. I know Adam. What the fuck is going on with CoinOS? I had honestly, you guys had fallen off my radar. So I was I'm I was looking forward to this chat. It's been great so far. So to the freaks that are in, I see a bunch of you are in our YouTube chat and our Twitch chat. Just FYI, the chat shown on screen now is our Noster Natives chat. You can get to that at cildispatch.com/stream. Do you guys see this question from salty Kate? Why would a merchant use CoinOS over a mobile wallet?
[00:20:45] Unknown:
Yeah. There's they're pretty similar. Like, CoinOS, we built it to be mobile friendly. So if you go there, you can even do the add to home screen thing. It's a progressive web app, so you can get a icon on your phone to launch it, and it kinda feels like an app. The reason we didn't launch it in the Play Store or the App Store and have, like, an actual native mobile version is because well, I tried that in the past. We did have that in the past, and it's just more of a a hassle for me as a developer to, cut a new release and then put it out to the App Store, and then everyone's phone has to download it and update it.
And then you're dealing with those gatekeepers, like Google and Apple can decide, whether your app is legit, and they have all these follow-up questions, and it's just oops. You have to jump through to have an app. So I kinda like having it on the web. If I wanna release an update, I can just push it out in seconds, and people just refresh the page and it's live. So it's way easier for me to release new features. And, yeah, users don't have to, like, even download anything. It works on any device anywhere in the world. You're not gonna be, censored in places that, you know, I think in Australia, people were saying they couldn't find some Bitcoin wallets because, the Play Store there was, like, filtering them out and things like that. So websites are universal and, yeah, it's just my preferred, environment to develop for. I I started as a web developer. That's what I know. So gonna stick this up and
[00:22:30] ODELL:
I mean, that'll make sense. I mean, do you see Ivan, like, he added he added to the question. He basically was, like, if if we're gonna compare it to Breeze, and I think, like, Breeze is probably a good comparison. I don't know how familiar you guys are with the project, but, essentially, it's a mobile app. It's self custody instead of custodial, like CoinOS. And, yeah, and it has a merchant tab. Like, it has a merchant mode on its app where you can do the dial pad thing. I think I know what my answer would be to this question, but I'm kinda curious on your answer.
[00:23:09] Unknown:
Well, yeah. So, like, yeah, Ivan. That's a good question, Ivan, and then also a salty Pete. Yeah. We the part of the package that we offer, merchants for using us as opposed to, like, Breeze or Moon is that we give you free marketing. We blast your business on all of our social media pages. Matt, that's probably one of your answers. Yeah. And, also, we're the lowest fees. We have the lowest fees in the world. I don't know another Bitcoin wallet that has fees like ours. So people get people might get concerned about, like the custodial aspect. Well, you know, me and Adam both teach people about non custodial. We're both non custodial advocates like we believe in self custody. We show people how to do that. We just believe coin toss is a very very good starting point and a good middleman for merchant transactions. We also offer offer sweeping.
Ivan also mentioned something in the chat earlier about the liquid to lightning sweeping. We offer sweeping for certain merchants if they want. For those who don't know what sweeping, I assume most people do know what that is, but for those who don't know what it is, sweeping is where we automatically will move your Bitcoin from your wallet into your bank account if you want if you wanna do that. Like Oh, you convert it into dollars? If if they want. Yes. It's a case by case basis. I'm proud to say that me and Adam are both proud to say that most merchants that are using us are not doing that, and most of them are Huddling. And some of the
[00:24:31] ODELL:
Yep. What about auto sweep to, like, Bitcoin address? Right? Like, so the way I look at it Yeah. That too. And I wanna dive into your fee structure, but the way I look at it is, like, you're getting the benefit of simplicity and the trade off is custodial risk. Right? So then it's like, how do you mitigate custodial risk and auto withdrawals to self custody after, like, a certain threshold or something? It's, like, oh, I get and once I hit, like, $1,000 in payments,
[00:24:58] Unknown:
then it's just all announced in our Telegram, like, yesterday that that's a feature I'm working on. It's, like, top of my priority list to do auto withdrawals to your own either lightning address or Bitcoin address. And I'm, I've added, like, a a private key backup. So if you go into your coin auth settings now, there's, like, a seed phrase you can back up. Right now, it's just being used to generate a Nostra key. So, every CoinDesk account comes with a Nostra key pair now. But that same, you know, master seed phrase is also gonna be used for, self custodial Bitcoin addresses.
So exactly that when you hit $1,000, whatever your threshold is, we'll know your pub key so we can generate addresses, from your pub key and then automatically sweep them out to your own wallet. And then you'll have the seed phrase for that, and we won't store that on the server. That's generated client side. It'll be, just just your own keys for that.
[00:26:07] ODELL:
That's clean. I was I was gonna my one of my questions was gonna be what is your master strategy? I, I I like the because we're basic dispatch is basically a half show now. It's not just Bitcoin anymore. I like the idea of I wasn't even thinking of you actually generating generating a self custody wallet for them, but that makes complete sense. You could easily do that in browser, and then it'd be way simpler for the end user. I mean, at the end of the day, it seems like you're selling simplicity. I mean, these merchants don't want friction. Right?
[00:26:39] Unknown:
Exactly. That'll be the default if they don't provide their own, but we'll give you the option to also provide your own external addresses or pub key or whatever.
[00:26:50] ODELL:
So, I mean, fees, we started the conversation talking about on chain fees being ridiculously high. And then, and and so so part of of that of that situation is most people don't realize is if you're opening a lightning channel, Lightning Channel requires 2 on chain fees. It's time of open and time of close unless the Lightning Channel never closes. And as a result, the self custody options, even if you forget about the lightning routing fees, which can be high in some of these situations, the on chain fees make it can make it very cost prohibitive for these self custody solutions, unfortunately. Like, that is the reality, particularly in small amounts.
So an easy fix for that and easy mitigation for that is custodial, and obviously, then it comes with trust and then you can get rugged. So I'm curious, like, what is, like, what is your fee structure? Like, how do you guys make money?
[00:27:49] Unknown:
We don't charge any fees, and we're not really making money right now. We're just trying to spread Bitcoin adoption because we hold Bitcoin. What a nice list. There is a 0.1% fee if you're converting between lightning and on chain, and that's to cover our cost to rebalance our node. But, basically, yeah, we're just trying to build us as an open source platform. It's free. Anyone could run their own point of instance, and we're trying to make it easy for people to you know, if you wanna be a custodian to be able to run this thing so that it's not just us doing it, but maybe there's people in other freer jurisdictions with less regulations that might be able to also, run coin us as a custodial service for their country or their town or community or their family, whatever scale makes sense. But I think, like you're saying that, you know, custodial option is great because you can have unlimited transactions. They can be free because there's almost no overhead to do a custodial transaction in a database.
So as long as the custodian is trustworthy and isn't gonna rub people, then that's a great way to scale Bitcoin up if you have trustworthy custodians. So we're trying to build this as a platform that, you know, people can use to do that themselves. It's not quite ready yet because I haven't documented it or made it easy enough to, like, spin up your own instance, but that's part of the goal.
[00:29:26] ODELL:
That was my next question. I mean, I remember that was a key aspect of the original Coin OS is that you could self host it. I mean, I I love the concept of, like, me in Nashville onboarding 20 merchants with my own self hosted Coin OS instance, and, like, they know whose knees they could break if something happens. And then that gets the it kinda scales in that way. But if if you have, like like, the hard question is, like, if you have, like, a very large custodian, like, all of a sudden, there there is you become a regulatory target. Like, it's not even just,
[00:30:01] Unknown:
Regulatory target and a hacker a hacking target. Yeah. You're a massive target by every party. Yeah. All the people wanna all the people wanna kill you. That's why I don't wanna be the I don't wanna shoulder the responsibility yet. I'm happy with the scale it's at now with a few 100 merchants, and now I wanna see more people kinda share that burden.
[00:30:22] ODELL:
So what's what's the plan with that? Is that are you gonna fully faucet? You're gonna make it easy for people to run their own instance? Like, because I don't see any GitHub links or anything. Like, is there a repo? Yeah. It's github.com/coinos.uh,
[00:30:36] Unknown:
well, github.com/coinos. That's our organization, and then there's a couple of repos under there. I need to do a better job, I guess, of linking to them from the home page. But, yeah, it's already Because
[00:30:49] Unknown:
on the on the bottom on the bottom of the home page, it says documentation. That's where all our GitHub is and and I API and stuff like that.
[00:31:02] Unknown:
Yeah, Matt. I'll set you up your own coin toss for Nashville if you wanna give it a whirl, you know, and put it on a Well EPS somewhere and
[00:31:10] ODELL:
We could we could take that conversation offline. But, yeah, I mean, that would be all I mean, the reason I I was thinking about I didn't see the Git link in, I found it, but that's a very easy domain, github.com/coinos. But I didn't see it in documentation for what it's worth, but maybe I'm just idiot and I'm live on air. The reason I bring it up is because if it is false, it could be a good target for OpenSats funding. Like, if you go to opensats.org/apply, but all applicants need to be false. So I don't know what your license is, but consider applying considering you guys oh, yeah. GPL. Awesome.
Yeah. Because, I mean, that's why OpenSats exists. Cool. Yeah. But it's it's cool. I I I love how I mean, I you know, in a perfect world in a perfect world not a perfect custodians, and they'd all be competing on on on, like, reliability, up yeah, uptime, reliability, fees, and there'd be, like, this beautiful free market and people would move between custodians and there'd be no friction with KYC and stuff. And, I mean, I think I kinda just know your answer. Like, are you like, do you have a do you have any concern that I can just go to coinos.io and or coinos.yeah.
Coinos.io and just immediately open an account, and I have no no identification information or anything that I have to give you guys.
[00:32:59] Unknown:
Yeah. Doesn't concern me.
[00:33:03] ODELL:
Not even email. Not even email. You don't yeah. You don't even need to go through the hassle of making a fake email. You don't even have to make a username and a password. I when I click create account, it just creates a randomly generated username and password for me. I'm assuming that's client side.
[00:33:18] Unknown:
That's a new feature. Yeah. Actually, we do, we do send the password to the server. But it's encrypted on the server, but, yeah. It's it's encrypted.
[00:33:34] ODELL:
Okay. Fair enough. Or maybe put a little disclaimer there or something. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna move to,
[00:33:40] Unknown:
like, pub key private key authentication. Like, log in with Nostra or lnurl makes more sense, I think. So just have to get around to that.
[00:33:52] ODELL:
Yeah. Noster would be nice. One identity. I already have it. That's what the zaps the zaps stream that we're using for the client, like, it can generate an M pub for you if you don't have one, like an end second M pub. Or if you have your own master key, you can just come here and and just set it up or, you know, just log in.
[00:34:14] Unknown:
It's it's pretty cool. Yeah. That's coming soon. That's on my priority list too. Like, letting people log in with their Albie wallet and things like that or being able to import your own master keys.
[00:34:27] ODELL:
Yeah. But I'll just say, guys, like, when you go to coinos.io and just just, like, start you press start in seconds, and you literally you're just you start in, like, in seconds. It's just like you're good to go. You got you got your nice big one wallet, and it just fucking works. Yep. Yeah. You can create an account in in under 20 sec. If you're good with a phone, you can create an account in 15 seconds. Like Well, less than that if you use the pregenerated
[00:34:56] Unknown:
Yeah. Yeah. Like, true act yeah.
[00:34:59] ODELL:
I have a random account, yak43,
[00:35:01] Unknown:
and, like, just made a password for me. That's new. I just put that in last, like, in the last week. So I just skipped it. I was so confused
[00:35:10] ODELL:
I was so confused because it was just, like, pregenerated. I was like, what the fuck is going on here? Is there someone else who can? I just press sign and I was, like, I see what these guys are doing here. That's interesting. Shaves the talk to the people. Yeah. Okay. This is a really talking about the dark mode. I I appreciate it. Yeah. This is an important question.
[00:35:27] Unknown:
Yeah. The the dark mode. Yeah. You can have dark mode, but it doesn't really work properly. You have to adjust the settings in your Google Chrome browser. That's not a coin house thing, but, yeah, Adam, it's it's, on our list to add dark mode because that's what a lot of people want. Yeah. The the people want dark mode, man. Yeah. Yeah. People.
[00:35:47] Unknown:
You know, I'm glad they asked that.
[00:35:50] ODELL:
I have learned you can't win, because I know a project that the people had a petition for light mode because they were dark mode only. So no matter what, you're gonna have haters. You have to support both modes.
[00:36:00] Unknown:
Yep. We'll get around to it. Oh, that's hilarious.
[00:36:04] ODELL:
This is awesome, guys. This has been a great conversation. Like, what lessons have you learned from the merchant adoption process? Like, it's something that I've been very keenly focused on for a while, and I've I've been mostly a failure about it, I think. Like, I I've I've I know things take time, like, good things take time, but I've I've become a little bit disenfranchised with the idea of being able to spend my Bitcoin at local merchants, and I've been very outspoken about trying to get we let me put it this way. We've personally I personally failed in Nashville so far. Like, what are the do you have any tips? Do you have any thoughts? Like, where how do we make this thing happen quicker? Because Yeah. Yeah. What what you do is you my Bitcoin. I wanna spend it.
[00:36:57] Unknown:
Yeah. What you do is you fly me down there, and we onboard 30 merchants in a week. And then the next week, we do 50. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's, yeah. The the one of the biggest things I've I've learned is just what is the trigger that a business owner wants to hear? Like, what is the number one thing most business owners want is more sales. What can they do to get more sales? So I immediately start with that. I say that we we guarantee you that you will get more sales, and I underline and bold that in my emails when I'm following up and stuff. So we tell them that, and then we just tell them that there's a lot of people that will come here to spend their Bitcoin. That's So you're relying on the meetups to actually drive people to locations.
[00:37:38] Unknown:
Yeah. The community is key. You gotta have a community. Can't just be 1 Bitcoiner who wants to go and convince merchants to try it. You gotta have people that are coming with you, other people that are going to that same merchant, the Bitcoin, or you you have to be able to show them that, yeah, you're gonna get, a bunch of people coming in to use it. Otherwise, it's not worth their time to even go through the mental, you know, gymnastics of what is this thing and what are the pros and cons even though it's almost all pros. And it's like there's very little friction to giving it a try just for them to get to the point where they'll even entertain the idea, they need more than that. Like, even telling them that it's no fees and you're gonna save on credit card transaction fees, it's not enough for them unless they think there's gonna be some significant volume to have to train their staff on this other payment method, have to get in another device potentially, have to worry about the accounting aspect of it.
It's kind of like a a big lift for them even though it it's not really, but it for them, they don't know that. Right? So you kinda just need to keep it simple, Do as much hand holding as you can. Like, here's your account login. Here's your QR code. Here's your Windows sticker. We're gonna put you on the map, like, show them the map of other merchants. And that helps too when they see that, you know, you're not the only place in town, but there's, like, 30 businesses, maybe some of your competitors are using it. It helps to get that, snowball effect of the more there are then the more, other people are gonna wanna jump on board and not be left out. So yeah. Starting with the community and and meetups and just having some Bitcoiners that are willing to go and support the first couple merchants, that's crucial to getting started, I
[00:39:43] ODELL:
think. Yeah. I might have to, like, rally the troops, so to speak. I, so, like, in Nashville, we have one of probably one of the largest monthly meetups in United States. At least it's not run by Parker Lewis, because he runs both the Austin, the tabs, and, Houston. But, like, we get, like, a 150 to 200 people every month. And, like, one of the big things we do is we bring a local merchant and we a local food merchant, right, like burgers or barbecue or something like that. We onboard them to Bitcoin. They set up, like, a little tent or they pull up a food truck, and that they they they're at the park. They're right outside.
They're selling food, and they always accept credit card cash and Bitcoin. And we get, like it's like, on average, it'll be, like, 15 to 20% of people who pay with Bitcoin. And then if I, like, shame them in, like, the announcements, like, I might get 40% max. But there's just this and of that 40%, maybe, like, half of them are paying directly from strike from dollars. They're not, like, actually spending Bitcoin. So to me, it's just it's been this slog, but maybe that doesn't matter. Like, maybe if I can just get like, what if I said 10%.
So, like, if I can get, like, 20 ride or dies that wanna spend their Bitcoin, and we just, like, roll into a coffee shop and just pour Bitcoin on them, like, maybe that's enough. Like, maybe you don't actually need more than, like, 20 dedicated people to make a merchant happy.
[00:41:27] Unknown:
Yeah. The other thing is really, cold calling, like, going into a merchant and just saying, hey. Will you give this a try? It's really tough. Right? Because if they're not a Bitcoiner already, they're they're gonna be kinda hesitant about it. So So it's way better to get the word out to the community and say, hey. We're looking to get some merchants. Sorry. And, let it be known that we wanna get some merchants taking Bitcoin. Reach out to your friends. If anyone knows any business owners, can you get us an introduction with them? Because if you get a, like, a warm referral to a business owner and you're coming in from someone that they're friends with and they their friend has said, hey. Bring this guy, Matt, and he's gonna set you with Bitcoin.
They're way more likely to go for it than just walking in off the street and saying, hey. We're a bunch of Bitcoiners, and we wanna spend money here. That that can work too if if there's a big group and it's obvious. Or or if you're doing regular meetups at the same spot and they see you coming in every week or every month and there's a bunch of you, then, yeah, they're gonna be more receptive to it. But, yeah, finding people that you know. Right? Getting friends of friends, friends of family, Just tell them, hey. We wanna get some places accepting Bitcoin. Who do you know that will let us give it a try and then go from there?
[00:42:53] Unknown:
Yeah. We also yeah. We have a bounty program, coinos.io/bounties, which is more directed around the the Vancouver area. We'll give you a 1,000,000 sats if you direct us and refer us to a business that is interested in accepting big payments.
[00:43:11] ODELL:
Dude, I love this because, so if you go to coin o by the way, you guys pronounce it coin o s? It's coin o s. Right? Is it coinos?
[00:43:21] Unknown:
Coinos.
[00:43:22] Unknown:
Yeah. We get asked that all the time. It's coinos. Yeah. But say whatever you want.
[00:43:26] ODELL:
Okay. Coinos. If you go to coinos.i0/ bounties, this is pretty cool because I've talked about this in the past. Like, it's like, okay. So you have it broken up into categories, like grocery we need a grocery store to accept Bitcoin. We need a bakery to accept Bitcoin. We need a a laundromat to accept Bitcoin. And this is so true. Like, to I only for the short term in the short to medium term, I just need one hardware store in Nashville to accept Bitcoin. I just need one grocery store to I'll just go to that store. Like, that'll be my hardware store. The second to 5 you know, second to 10 hardware stores or whatever mattered less to me than the first one. Yeah. Because I just need every category, to accept Bitcoin, and and then I'll be happy. So I actually like this bounties idea. This might we might, I think I'm gonna I'm gonna, like, I'm gonna copy this for Bitcoin Park and just put just straight up be, like, I will pay you a 1000000 sets if you onboard me at a grocery store, you onboard me at a hardware store or something. I like that idea. Awesome. I love to hear that.
[00:44:28] Unknown:
It's That's fantastic. Weird weird robot in the chat is saying cold calling is what Oshi was doing, and I don't think it was a very scalable strategy. In in the for the most part, yeah, but I did do a bunch of cold calling, and we did onboard multiple merchants actually from cold calling. So it does work. Just careful kinda who you who you are calling, who you're talking to. But it does work, at least a little bit. I mean,
[00:44:51] ODELL:
I think the problem is is that the merchants fall off. It's a problem that a lot of us have witnessed. And I I think that's where, like, Leo's meetup thing, like, at least while we're trying to fake it till we make it. Like, the meetup thing is, like, okay. Like, one of the most bullish fundamentals of Bitcoin to me is while COVID lockdowns were happening and governments are trying to stop us from meeting, Bitcoin grassroots Bitcoin meetups all around the world blossom. Like, so many the meetups grew even though people in general outside of Bitcoin weren't meeting as much. And, it's an asset that we just, you know, that local community should really be leveraging. Like, that is that that is a incredibly valuable asset that that different local communities have. This idea And so we need to mobilize them essentially.
Instead of mobilizing them to, like, picket lines or annoying people to sign petitions or something like that, you just mobilize them to go to the local coffee shop that accepts Bitcoin. You know? If every person in the meetup buys 1 coffee a month at this place, they won't get old. You know, they they they won't get sick of it. They won't think it's just a fucking gimmick. They'll actually they'll actually have business.
[00:46:06] Unknown:
Yeah. We actually host a weekly Bitcoin and coffee. We go between 2 different coffee shops here every Monday morning, and it's just like a casual Bitcoin hangout. And, yeah, they both accept Bitcoin, so people are buying coffees and bagels and muffins and whatever. And, it's, yeah, it's good stuff.
[00:46:29] ODELL:
I'm curious while I have you, and we're, like, wrapping up here. We're close to the end of our time. You know, I as a Bitcoiner, like, I grew up as, like, self custody only. Like, I don't recommend custodial options to anyone. Self custody Bitcoin is easy enough. People should be using self custody Bitcoin. We've learned so many lessons about people getting rugged. Lightning kind of flipped it on its head because Lightning self custody is is has got technical difficulties. There's trade offs that are made, that Lightning needs to be interactive, that we have liquidity constraints, then you need to be online, that that that make self custody lightning, particularly on mobile, much more difficult.
And as a result, we've seen this growth in there's almost like a default growth in custodial lightning wallets that you don't really see in the on chain Bitcoin world. And on chain Bitcoin world, for the most part, it's dominated by self custody wallets at this point. And there's really great tools out there. They don't have really horrible trade offs. But with with lightning, we've seen custodial lightning, and specifically, we've seen Walt and Satoshi. And I've been, like, one of the few people that, quote, unquote, I'm sounding the alarm, you know, you can get rugged at will, governments can pressure them into adding KYC, all this other stuff.
They could get hacked. What? They could censor people at will. They have your all your private information. Like, what what is your view on all like, so having this conversation with you guys, I I'm partially wondering I'm, like, partially questioning my own perspective. Like, are they just you know and while the Stoshi won't come on the podcast, they don't do any podcasts or anything. So I can't have the conversation with them. Like, are are they just is is there a perspective that they're, like, based Bitcoiners that are just running a service without doing KYC and they're just, they're just fighting the good fight? Or, like, like, am I how do you view, Like, how do you view that growing custodial risk?
[00:48:39] Unknown:
Yeah. I'm in the same boat. I think, I've had one interaction with the Walla of Satoshi guys, and it was positive. I think they are base Bitcoiners as my sense, but I don't know. For sure, I've never met them really in person or anything. But,
[00:48:54] ODELL:
I don't know many people that have. Yeah. The bigger
[00:48:58] Unknown:
they become, like we said earlier, the more of a target they are for the regulators and for just a fuck up, like, if they accidentally mess up and we sell the money or something. So spreading it out amongst multiple custodians. If custodians are good actors, then no problem. Right? But, yeah, history has shown there's enough bad actors and rug pulls that, you definitely don't wanna put a lot of money into a custodian and be very careful about who you're dealing with and prefer self custody if at all possible. But, yeah, I agree. Like, on chain, self custody is the way to go if you're doing anything more than a few $100 or a few $1,000, whatever your personal risk tolerance is.
And then you have a lightning wallet that you top up periodically, maybe with a couple $100 for your spending money for the month or something. That may be the way we go for now until lightning self custody and other scaling solutions develop that allow you to do retail micro transactions totally, you know, trustlessly. But using this as a a transition or a stop gap measure in the meantime, it might be the way we go for the next few years until those develop more. But
[00:50:22] ODELL:
yeah. Yeah. My concern is with custodians. Yeah. I think I think that was well said. I mean, my concern is specifically, like, because while Satoshi has become so successful that there's such a massive custodian. And as they grow, it becomes more like, 10 Wallow Satoshis are less of a concern than 1 wallet of satoshi. And this, like, small balance thing, I just feel like is mostly a cop out. Because, like, people say small balance, and then you find out how big the balances are when when the rug happens. Right? And they they usually tend to be larger. And in the developing world where a lot of people are getting onboarded to Walletistyoshi because they they don't wanna pay on chain fees, which is understandable.
Like, maybe like, a $100 or a 1,000,000 sats could be their life savings. Like, that's a substantial amount of money for them. And just, like, if a rug happens, it's gonna be fucking depressing. Like, it's gonna suck to see, like, the entire developing world that got onboarded via Wall of the Satoshi all getting rugged at the same time. So I would say to to the guys running Walla, the Satoshi, I I don't hate you. But if you are if you are running this custodian, your your your plan in your head should be to try and reduce the amount of users you have slowly, because there's no way you can't unwind a custodian. Custodians can't be unwound easily, especially if they have small amounts. It's fucking clusterfuck.
So, you know, maybe open source your app. Maybe encourage other people to self host instances. Maybe slowly increase your fees to to encourage people to move to other wallets. But you should have, like, a strategy in place to, like, try and reduce the Bitcoin liability you have because the the larger you grow, the more shit can happen, and you're pretty big already. That's, like, my view, if they're listening.
[00:52:22] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:52:23] ODELL:
Well said. Guys, this has been great. I'm gonna quickly read, the top 4 boosts on podcasting 2 point o, and then we're gonna end with final thoughts from each of you. Cielo Dispatch is a 100% audience funded. We do not have sponsors or ads. We're supported by our viewers using Bitcoin. Those viewers are either supporting us through sidildispatch.com/stream on the live chat, through podcasting 2.0 apps such as Fountain or Breeze, or by going to citildispatch.com/ donate and donating with Bitcoin there. So our top 4 boost from podcasting 2.0 is Coco 101 with 20,000 sats. Dope rip as always. Love hearing from Evan and excited for him to destroy the lightning work lightning network. We have at 8 Myth Ran Deer with 14,441 sats. Lightning is a work in progress. Good to see Evan building the tools. We have at Boz with 10,000 sats saying, really cool Evan. Did I hear that right? Ellen, you were relative to my own node. Got try that out soon. And we have at Dash with 7,777 sats. Caps o Dell is back in all caps.
Caps o Dell is just getting started. This is gonna be a crazy cycle, freaks. I would just say, like, huge shout out to the the freaks who support us through podcasting 2.0 because specifically, when you support that way, it's great to see dispatch high on the charts. It really goes a long way, and and it helps helps people find the show. And I know it's the end of a bear market, maybe the beginning of a recession. If sats are too hard to come by and you don't wanna part with your sats, you can support the show by sharing it with friends and family. We're on all platforms, every podcasting app. Leaving a review, all that stuff helps.
So with all that said, Adam, do you wanna wrap us up with some final thoughts?
[00:54:17] Unknown:
Yeah. Just thanks for having us, and I hope, people give Coin Az a try. Like, it does literally just take seconds to to sign up and then, get out there and and talk to those business owners. You know, ask ask your friends and family if they know anyone who has a business that might be willing to try Bitcoin. And, shout out to BTC map dot org. They're listing all the businesses in the world that take Bitcoin, so let's fill it up and keep it going. Thanks, guys.
[00:54:51] ODELL:
Thanks, Adam. Cole, final thoughts.
[00:54:54] Unknown:
Yeah. And I yeah. Thank you so much for having us on your show. Really, really enjoyed it. I love seeing the live chat. A lot of people are saying a lot of really good comments. Anyone that wants to reach out to us, it's just our website, coinos. Io. Scroll to the bottom. That's where our link tree is. Our link tree button has all of our social media links, including Telegram, Twitter, NOS, or Instagram. Please reach out to us if you ever just wanna chat, you have questions. We're all me and Adam are active in the Telegram chat, always willing to help people out with learning how to onboard merchants or just anything in general. And I appreciate every single one of you on the chat here. T I wanna give a shout out to Teejem.
He's in the NausseTrack, t e e j e m. He's a prominent member in the Vancouver Bitcoin community. He's one of the most consistent buyers of coin us merchants of Coinos merchants in Vancouver. So, like, he deserves a shout out because he puts a lot of effort in being a customer at Coinos merchants. So That's awesome. I can see, like, early
[00:55:52] ODELL:
early days, like, us 1 or 2 people in the city can really push the tide. So that's, like, an awesome. Yep. I wanna thank you both for joining. I wanna thank all the freaks who joined us specifically in the live chat, but also everyone, who continues to listen and support the show. I'm glad you guys find it valuable. That's why I do it. I would just say to Cole, first of all, I don't know if you're aware, but there's a Linktree alternative on Nostril called Nosttree. Consider checking it out. And, also, a personal request to to you guys. I've noticed your Nostril account is a little bit dormant. Consider consider maybe giving it a little love.
We we'd love we'd love to have you guys more active in Noster.
[00:56:35] Unknown:
Yeah. Get on that.
[00:56:40] ODELL:
And apply to open sats. Opensats.org/apply. Your project is a perfect fit for something that we would support. Thank you, guys. It's been a pleasure, and until next time. Thank you. Stay humble, Stack Sats. Later, freaks.
Introduction of guests: Adam, founder of CoinOS, and Cole, head of business development
History and evolution of CoinOS
Discussion on the adoption and usage of Liquid and the challenges it faces
Focus of CoinOS on merchant adoption and its features
Strategies for merchant adoption and the importance of community support
Lessons learned from the merchant adoption process
Cold calling as a strategy for onboarding merchants
Bitcoin meetups during COVID lockdowns
Custodial lightning wallets and self custody
