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EPISODE: 132
BLOCK: 842579
PRICE: 1606 sats per dollar
TOPICS: intuitive user friendly open source projects, building a non profit, self custody freedom focused apps vs captured custodial counterparts, how to contribute
project website:
https://bitcoindesignfoundation.org/
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(00:00:03) Mallers Intro
(00:01:41) Introduction to Bitcoin Wednesday and Citadel Dispatch
(00:02:39) Conversation on open source design, specifically Bitcoin design
(00:05:21) Importance of user experience design in Bitcoin adoption
(00:08:48) Discussion on the Bitcoin Design Foundation and its goals
(00:10:08) Challenges and importance of design standards for Bitcoin projects
(00:20:42) Impact of privacy-focused design in open source projects
(00:36:06) Discussion on increasing donor support for Bitcoin design projects
(00:46:43) Process for project review and improvement suggestions by the Bitcoin design team
(00:50:21) Encouraging designers to contribute to projects
(00:51:11) Discussing the disconnect between designers and developers in project implementation
(00:52:34) Importance of collaboration between designers and engineers for product development
(01:35:24) Importance of unity and collective action during challenging times like COVID
(01:36:00) Acknowledgment and appreciation for the contribution of Mo to the community
(01:36:33) Recognition and gratitude towards dedicated supporters of the show
[00:00:04]
Unknown:
Is 360%, so that's a metric to see how much time and energy people have borrowed from all of you, and they didn't make whole on it, they can't pay that back, but that loss has to be realized somewhere by someone. And so the question that everyone's trying to wrestle with, like, we could do a debt jubilee, where, you know, the the US government just says, we're defaulting, and then the people that would be paying it back are the bond holders. Right? So they don't do that because Jamie Dimon owns all the bonds. Right? So the theory is that everyone in the room pays it back via inflation. And so to me, buying bitcoin a lot of in this realm of conversation, buying bitcoin is exiting it and saying, I understand that debt to GDP is 360%, that there's an insane amount of human time and energy that has been stolen and has to be made whole on, it's not gonna be mine.
If you're in a financial asset, like like an ETF, you you're not out like, they they still have access to your time and energy.
[00:01:41] Unknown:
Happy Bitcoin Wednesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro clip was our boy, Jack Mallers, in Bedford, talking about how the suits are stealing our time, and they're stealing our money. And the only thing more scarce than Bitcoin is our time. I tried to get a CNBC clip for today's rip. But since we're ripping so often, and CNBC consistently fails to produce decent clips, you got Jack instead. You got a little you got a little bullish, bold juice, to to lead this rip.
We have a great conversation lined up for today. We're gonna be talking about open source design, specifically Bitcoin design. I think this is a relatively novel concept. Usually, open source projects have horrible design, which is why it's important. I have Daniel here. How's it going, Daniel? All good. Thank you. Nice to be here. Great. Thanks for joining us. And we have Christophe. How's it going, Christophe?
[00:02:55] Unknown:
Good. Thanks for having us on here. Awesome. It is. So,
[00:02:59] Unknown:
guys, I would be lying if I said that design is my strong suit. I like using products that work well, that are intuitive. But it's not necessarily something that, like, I've I've been intimately focused in on. Why why let let's let's start off let's start off with why design why design matters. Like, why should people even care?
[00:03:29] Unknown:
Can I, do the first one, Christophe? Go for it. Well, I mean, we're we're all we're all, users of various products. Right? And like you said, we want them to work well. And that, has a lot to do with what's under the hood clearly. Right? The tech is important. But if, people come to you and want to use your product, and they have no idea what to do, how it works, what they should be doing, then, you know, they're gonna turn around and go and turn around and leave. So, that's basically my my perspective on why design is important. And, you know, in in that, I include, not just how it looks. That's just the surface. But, you know, it it's how it works. Can we figure it out?
Is it intuitive? Is it safe? Do you feel trust when you see it? Those sort of things. So, yeah, like you said, that's been lacking in in in Bitcoin and other heavy tech, in general. So that's sort of why, you know, where the Bitcoin design community came from. Right? There's plenty of open source, developers working on great stuff. But, that concept is a lot less common when it comes to design and and, you know, the sort of usage side of of products. So, yeah, that's where we come in in the Bitcoin design community. Try to add that open source, skill set to the mix and make it easier for developers to build well designed product, as well as designers who want to get into, helping with Bitcoin products, also. So those 2 kind of, groups of people converging into hopefully being able to build better products faster.
[00:05:21] Unknown:
I love it. I see some freaks in the YouTube chat for the record. Just a reminder, the Nostrilive chat is at dispatch.com/stream. That's what you see on your, screen right now. Someone's saying the nostril chat is not working, which is a disappointment. I will ping Kieran right now because we are an incredibly small community. So I will just ping the project maintainer and see what's going on. But anyway, let's continue with the show. So, I mean, Daniel, I I think that was a good that was a good explanation of why design's important. The way I kinda look at it is we have a lot of talented developers that work on open source, that that that work on open source projects.
But a lot of times what they do is is they build for themselves, which is awesome. Like, I think some of the best projects are built for the people that are building it, and that's why they they know what they want. But as a result, what happens a lot of the times is oh, look. The nostril chat is alive. Let's fucking go. I didn't even have to ping Karen. What happens a lot is that, it's not intuitive. So so what we end up needing is we need, like, 3 hour BDC sessions videos or something like that for people to use it. Would you guys agree that, like, if we get to a good design point, it you shouldn't need as much tutorial videos if anything.
[00:07:11] Unknown:
Yeah. Totally. You know, it's still way too hard to to set up, like, a multi key wall. It's one of the first thing I wanted wanted to do is set up a improve how to set up multi sig moments 4 4 years ago when I first started getting into this stuff, and it's still too hard. So I see I see a lot of the stuff that we do here as a it's another layer of abstraction. So I think the the developers in a way, they're very comfortable with having a toolbox. So if you know exactly what you're building, if you know what every every single tool does, if you have a band saw, if you have a hammer, if you have your nails, you have your wood, you know what to build, you know how to work with everything. But a lot of people just want Ikea, you know, they just want to get the the prepared parts and they want to have an instruction manual and they don't really care about choosing the right type of wood and treating it and file folding all the they're getting all the pieces.
And so I I also think it's pretty crucial for Bitcoin adoption. I mean, we saw in the last few weeks with the Sabi, Samura, and all this stuff, Some things are just not great at, let's say, being companies. Right? Luckily, we have something like join market, web app, which is an open source variation where that cannot really be taken down. That's just peer to peer. So I think we need more tools like that that make this all this functionality that exists, but that's only good really usable right now for people who are comfortable with the toolbox and make that usable for more people. And I think that's an abstraction layer, and that's where user experience design comes in, where you don't need to read the anymore, but it just kinda guides you through everything.
[00:08:48] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, we've had a motto from the very beginning in the design community to to really try and reach, you know, mass market adoption for Bitcoin. And that requires different sense you know, sensibilities and different, approaches from the the the early days, you know, where where the tech is kind of the most important thing. But the the more that matures, and improves, you know, it sort of falls to the wayside, and you need to move on and compete on on on the next, level, which is usability. And then, you know, eventually when, when you have amazing product with amazing usability, then, you know, it it becomes more of maybe normal sort of consumer, app place where, okay, now it's a marketing game. Right? All the products are good.
We just need to reach more people. But, you know, we're somewhere in the, you know, stage 2 with most, self custodial open source product, at least. Right? So a lot of work to do, but, you know, it's definitely improving. You know, I can already see compared to 4 years ago, there are more alternatives, and, you know, they are better. So the curve is the curve is there.
[00:10:09] Unknown:
Yeah. That makes sense to me. I'm a little bit distracted because I don't have a producer, and, the master stream is broken. We are early days.
[00:10:20] Unknown:
The tech is confusing.
[00:10:22] Unknown:
The the actually, I think he does a good job with design. And I I mean, I don't know how familiar you guys are with the project. But, Carnage is, his main developer focused on design, and and they do prioritize it. So it it's it's I think it's still pretty even though it's only the chat's working and the video's not working. But I did ping Kieran, and we'll see if he he fixes it while we're live. But like I said, the chat is working at least. I mean, there's a couple things there to unpack. The first thing is I think I think is fundamental is this idea that design, should be user focused.
So that the user everything is intuitive to them. It's not, you know, a lot of us will and I just kind of I'm guilty of it. I just said it. Right? It's a lot of us say, like, oh, design. Like, oh, something should be pretty. That is just one small aspect of it. I think probably the bigger aspect is that it's actually intuitive and usable, and that the user doesn't have many questions on on what their flow is and how they should interact with it. And then the second piece is what Christophe said, which is, I think historically, like, private companies have had better design.
This whole idea of open source design is a relatively newer phenomenon. And you guys are kind of fighting the uphill battle being so focused on open source design. But, also, like, even though productized, you know, Bitcoin companies could use a lot of help on design. I think you guys are are you have a tangential focus on helping them. I mean, open source helps everybody, including private companies. But Christophe did make an interesting point, which is a point that I think should be very clear to users, stakeholders, founders, builders, everyone in the space, which is right now, like, the regulatory environment the way the regulatory environment feels is I think it's a little bit overplayed in terms of concerns to self custody users or the average Bitcoin user.
Like, I mean, there should be concerns. Like, people should constantly feel like they're in an adversarial environment because they are. But really what a lot of this recent regulatory action has shown me and other founders in the space is that, it's more of a war on founders, and it's more of a war on people that are that wanna monetize projects, monetize open source projects, even if they're self custody. And in that situation, all of a sudden, different foundations and initiatives, that are providing open source grants become even more important. Because maybe these contributors can't monetize the project directly, but at least they can pay their rent and and have some kind of financial security from grants.
And so both of you guys are Spiral grantees, I believe. Are you still Spiral grantees? Are you still receiving any kind of grant from Spiral?
[00:13:37] Unknown:
Yeah. It's been it's been a good, couple of grants, my for myself from them. The current one is running out. So that's an interesting transition, and we we, you know, we can talk more about the Bitcoin Design Foundation in a bit. But,
[00:13:58] Unknown:
Well, before we talk about that, let's talk about, like, what is your experience been relying an open source grant, period? Like, I just on the spiral grant, period. Like, how how has that been? I assume that was new for you guys. Like, that wasn't you haven't sustained your whole life based off of open source grants.
[00:14:21] Unknown:
Correct. You know? And, you know, I'll let Christophe tell his story in a second, but, you know, it's about 4 years ago that, I got chatting to Steve, over at, you know, what was then Square Crypto, now Spiral. And they were, you know, they were building a team. They were they were hiring design hiring developers, and they were also very early on aware that, you know, Bitcoin was not gonna succeed if the user experience, user experience wasn't better. So, you know, they were they were interested in building out that aspect as well. And, yeah, it was totally new to me, you know, to to have this idea that you could, you know, get paid or get a grant to work on on open source design because that it it's still a very unusual concept. But, you know, that's also what excited me about it because I, you know, way, way, way back in a previous, career. I I have worked in the public sector.
You know, and I think it's very noble, and it's a very good cause to work on stuff that benefits more than yourself and more than a company. So I like that aspect and, you know, jumped on it. And, they have, you know, been the strongest supporter so far, but, you know, we're we're definitely trying to to widen that circle and make more people aware of the need. Like, you know, if you're founding developers, and the more the more developers you found, eventually, you're gonna get to that quota where you where you you need one designer per, you know, 8, 10 developers like, many corporate companies figure out. Right? Like, to get optimal products, you can't just have a 100 developers going at it.
[00:16:08] Unknown:
Yeah. So I've never expected this to be a thing at all. I had no idea. I but I got my footing just doing freelance, not doing just for fun because I thought it was cool, doing open source design work for the, I designed the Monero GUI with that group for two and a half years. Oh, wow. Well, I didn't know that. Yeah. It's just I totally out of the blue, it just kinda happened. And I learned a ton about, about designing for a real open community, designing in the open, designing for privacy with in mind with, like, seriously everything at a really fundamental level. So I thought it was fascinating after spending many years to it working for agencies and freelancing big companies, small companies, everything. It was just really refreshing to me, but I never thought I would make any money with this. But then Square Crypto put this thing out. It's like, hey. We're looking for a designer. Why don't you why don't you apply? So I filled out the form and basically forgot about it. But eventually because I was like, it's, you know, it's not gonna work, but it's I'll just fill out the form. So but and then it ended up working out, and I thought it was just the most incredible opportunity. I just I just thought I'm gonna I'm gonna be on this. I'm gonna make the best out of this. This is such a cool challenge because I felt the the power of this technology and what it could do.
And I just saw this huge discrepancy about, like, just, yeah, like I said, the power of this technology and then my interactions with it, like, what I was presented to to actually use it. Right? And I felt like there was just this this this imbalance. And, you know, I've I've seen so many designers and they love working on, you know, these super fancy websites for magazines or so and that's great if they all want to do that but I mean how many 1000 designers do you need for a social app or for facebook or so? There are many, there are much more things where you can make a much bigger difference. So I found, I was very I was very excited about that and, I'm still very excited about it. And, I think we made some difference, and I think we can continue to do more.
[00:18:16] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm I'm kinda. So so both of you did I mean, let's let's just nail into that, Christophe. I mean, you you did a lot of private work previously. Like, how is it different? I mean, you said it's refreshing working on an open project. From a design perspective, like, how is that different than working on, like, a private company's design?
[00:18:48] Unknown:
Well, for for one, it was, you know, for for once, it was it was basically money. It's a completely new territory, something you could never touch and and you you can't really have this much freedom. They're like layers of corporate layers and they all wanted to look a certain way and through the process you kind of it all has to be slick and, you know, professional and all of this. But here you can really do whatever you want. There's ton of freedom there. There's lots of new territory. And then the the that insane focus on privacy.
At the same time, when I started with Monero, I had I was working with a startup that was VC funded, and they were just, like, hoarding any kind of data they could possibly get their fingers on. And I saw this really strong contrast here, this super principled contrast, about privacy. And I I didn't actually realize that that exists somewhere on the Internet. That's that it's possible that some people are just so disciplined. So I love that. And then another thing was simply that, I would do some designs. So I whenever it has a huge community on Reddit, it's 150,000 people or so at the time.
And, what I would design, I would just observe what the problems people have, what they talked about. And then I would come up with some designs. Sometimes I would show them to the developers, and they said, like, don't ask me. Ask the community. And then I would just try to present it to the community, and we would have these conversations. And it was just such a a personal, just open and friendly back and forth where which is very different when you're in a company and you kind of need to make your presentations, you know, the different different, executive suites or so, and you need to have sign off from the marketing team and all these things.
It it was just much more personal and community focused, and I thought it I really appreciated that. And that answers your question.
[00:20:43] Unknown:
Yeah. There's one piece there I wanna break down, because I think this is really difficult. Specifically for I mean, when we're talking about open source design, it's almost always a freedom focused project. Usually I mean, you can't have freedom without privacy. So usually there's an aspect of of of privacy built in there or expected their privacy expectation. And that's gotta be a key That's gotta be a key fundamental difference is that usually when you talk about user focused design, like this idea that I'm gonna build a product that users, that's intuitive to users. You do, like, a b test. You're, like, tracking their clicks. You're, like, doing all this stuff.
Then you guys kinda have to shoot from the hip. Right? If if privacy matters, like, you you're you're kind of like, how do you how do you battle with that aspect? Like, how do you know if the design is actually good or useful because you're not actually logging the information that would usually tell you that?
[00:21:44] Unknown:
I don't know. I feel like it's more honest this way. I I think in a in a in a company environment, you can kind of hide behind the data. You can you can you can you can gather so much data and you still don't really know what people are feeling or seeing or how they're going through things. But I think it's it's just much simpler. It forces you to talk to people, to to do interviews, to get them on a call or give them lots of options. And people are more eager to give you feedback because they they have this more communal relationship with the product, and you have much more direct contact. You're just everyone has a everyone has a telegram channel. Every product has 1. You have these open forums. It's it's all right there. In a way, it's it's more simple and more direct, and you get more honest
[00:22:28] Unknown:
feedback. You just ask the users.
[00:22:30] Unknown:
Yeah. You just you just design together.
[00:22:32] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:22:33] Unknown:
That's good. We should mention we should mention that a big part of the coin design community is actually a user research part as well. Moe, are kind of a third, partner in crime. Well, absolutely, not in crime, but, like, partner in work. It's important to make that clear nowadays. Very clear. Yeah. Yeah. Part partner in work, partner in community, very active. She is, she's a force of nature when it comes to user research, and it's kind of the the flag bearer in that aspect and has user research kit that she's created with the community. She works with the Bitcoin core, app team and, you know, really, really, represents and does what everybody says they should do, talk to users.
So that that is kind of the best way to to get real feedback on Bitcoin products. But because you're right. You know? No data is connect collected. You know, we have bitcoin dot design and and the the design guide there, but we don't collect any data on who go who goes there either. So
[00:23:45] Unknown:
To the website. Right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Because that would be no you don't wanna do that either.
[00:23:51] Unknown:
Oh.
[00:23:53] Unknown:
What okay. What the hell is the Bitcoin design community?
[00:23:58] Unknown:
Yeah. So it's, it's, it started out 4 years ago as literally just like an online place, a community started as a Slack Slack group, but is now on Discord. Just a place where, all these people that were working on Bitcoin design, whether they were a developer that had do the design or, you know, designers getting familiarized. We knew that there were many of those people, but we didn't know where to find them or that they didn't know where to go to talk about those subjects. So that was the first the first kind of place, that the community could call home.
And then from there, sprung various ideas of creating resources that, other people could use. Right? I think we've all had this feeling, like, when we first got into the game, or the or the the world of Bitcoin, you're like, you have to start from scratch. Right? You have to learn all these concepts, pick it up along the way. And that was the case for designers trying to work with Bitcoin products as well. So we we figured, well, why don't we try and create something that can, you know, speed up that journey? So that's where the Bitcoin design guide came into place, which is sort of a collection of thoughts around all the common flows from onboarding to kind of, what do you do with recovery phrases, how should it talk to users about what that even is, all of that kind of package of knowledge, and UX and UI. So examples, visuals.
That's kind of what we first started building, and is now a great resource. Got all these flows and also lots of, reference designs for, you know, self custody wallets, sort of daily spending wallets. It's got more advanced use cases where it's saving, you know, savings accounts and multisig. So, yeah, just a huge collection of stuff. So that that's sort of the core of it. And then maybe Christophe can add add the sort of more recent bits we've been working on as well or or, resources that people can just take and go?
[00:26:14] Unknown:
No thing. Yeah. That's one of the so, again, you kind of have this community aspect where just everyone's invited to to hang out who who cares about design and and building these products in an open source fashion. And we've seen all kinds of things. Like, one of the earliest projects in there was Alby when it was just came out of the lightning browser extension. And we had these sessions coming up with the name and the logo and and all of this stuff. The join market web app came out of it through, legends of lightning kinda came out of all kinds of projects, you know, kind of emerged from all of these different activity. And we had we had lots of, you know, design review calls with just dozens of different projects and companies, 1010.1 Finance or Hexa, which is now Keeper, and, Mutiny was on was it last week or a couple weeks ago? Just as this place to hang out.
And then we have these public resources, which is basically everyone's brain power, all the knowledge in one place so everyone else can benefit from it. Yeah. The 3rd part where where, like I already mentioned, all these collaborations that are going on right now, there's a design project with bitcoin layers happening, bitcoin core apps happening, saving Satoshi is in there. Alby still has a channel in the discord. What else have we going on? There's always a bunch of interesting projects happening. And, then I think the the 4th pillar now has become the foundation, which is about making this whole effort sustainable
[00:27:43] Unknown:
and having about that. What is the foundation? Where do we stand with the foundation? What's the goal? What is it?
[00:27:52] Unknown:
So it's like like drink or open sets. You can donate bitcoin money to it and it'll it'll go to designers and design, doing design related activities for open source bitcoin projects. That's what it is. And it's a very practical it's a very it's the smallest vehicle to achieve that that we could possibly come up with. 1st of all, because we're a small group of people. We try to be nimble. We try to start, get things going in a small way. But so far, Spiral has been, as we already talked about earlier, has been kind of the entity that pushed design in this space.
But the idea was always, it's been around for years, that this needs to become more sustainable. So there are multiple donors, you know, helping, keep this effort going. And that there's also it's it's a bit more decentralized. Right? Would be a shame if, you know, a spiral goes away, someone changes their mind, and then all of all of a sudden, you know, this whole thing will start come crashing down. And, it's great to have design representation in that whole circle, in that whole funding conversation happening because it does bring a bit of a different perspective, and it can support work that otherwise maybe does not find the right place. And we've already heard from several designers that said, you know, I saw there's a foundation now. Even before we did anything, when we established it, they they said there's a foundation now. I want to be more serious about doing open source bitcoin design work. We heard that from several people right away. So it does it is a signal for people, I think.
We're still very early on it. What did we have? We had our 1st quarterly update a few weeks ago. Awesome. So there's a ton, ton there still to do. What did I miss, Daniel?
[00:29:36] Unknown:
Have you actually received any donations or, like, sizable donations? Are you actually paying out grants? Or
[00:29:44] Unknown:
Yeah. So, we've been active for more or less at 1 quarter, and I think we're on our 3rd or so announced grant, with a bunch of them, being finalized now. So we're definitely active. And we, again, you know, sort of been immensely lucky to be supported by Spiral. And the idea I think they have is to instead of having to deal with individual designers, then instead funding us with with, with a bunch of money that we can then be closer to to this part of the ecosystem, and we have a kind of a, a better overview of who's actually already active, who's who's engaging, who's got skills, etcetera. So part of what they were contributing will sort of move over to the Bitcoin Design Foundation.
But, of course, we wanna grow the pie. Right? So we're talking to other people, because the idea is that over the next couple of years, which we wanna multiply, you know, what was available for designers, to give out more grants, to have more designers working with the increasing number of developers that are getting grants from from the open source, funding organizations.
[00:31:10] Unknown:
Yeah. And just to to add something to that, I see Open Source Justice Foundation also chiming in here. I chat a lot with, who did the design for the website recently. Also, recently. Also nice work there and what the team's doing. So everything we do is completely transparent. We are our fiscal host is Open Collective Europe and they have a platform. If you go to, was it opencollective.com, look for Bitcoin Design Foundation or go to bitcoindesignfoundation.org, all the information is there. So, any donation that comes in is publicly visible. All the expenses, any grant we give out is publicly visible. Of course, there's a certain anonymity level or pseudonymity level for grantees as they desire based on their preference.
But otherwise, everything can be completely completely, transparent, and we post updates there. We have, like, 6 updates, announcements lined up right now. We also just put more casual updates in our Discord channel, the foundation channel in the Bitcoin design Discord. So, yeah, trying to trying to be completely open about all of this.
[00:32:21] Unknown:
Awesome. You guys might have noticed I have not heard back from Kieran, and I've been trying to troubleshoot in the background. So our nostril stream right now is not working. It seems like we have some ride or dies in the YouTube chat. So I've pulled the YouTube chat up, for us all to see. And and also, Christophe was calling out the YouTube chat, so it felt like it it should be on screen. That is not an endorsement of Google. We will rely on them today. But in the future, we will go back to our Nostra chat. Bitcoin Design Foundation.
So first of all, cofounder of Open Sats. Gone through I mean, maybe it's been 4 years now. Open Sats has really been on people's radar for, like, 16 months, 18 months, or something. But there was a lot of, early work that had to be done. A lot a lot of work. It's a it's a thankless exhausting, job. But someone has to do it. And so, I'm grateful for our team in open sats. We have a 9 person board. I'm grateful for Gigi, our full time, leader of the ship who came on about a year ago. Grateful for the couple part time staff that helped Gigi out. But, having said that, a key a key problem that everyone that is, like, active in this ecosystem, in terms of open source grants, is intimately aware of is what I like to call, the Jack Dorsey problem, which is actually kind of poorly named because I am incredibly grateful for Jack, supporting so many of these initiatives.
But right now, it's mostly him. Whether that's through Spiral, whether that's through him donating to open sets, individually, whether that's him donating to Brink individually. I would say HRF probably has the most diverse donor base just because they came from the human rights angle and then branched into Bitcoin. So they do have, some other donors there. But I'm curious, like, what you guys are thinking in terms of, and and and specifically, like, this can be a problem. I I don't think you guys are a 501c3 yet. But, like, our biggest issue as a public 501c3 that offers nonprofit, tax deductible donations is we cannot have a single we cannot have a single party being the lion's share of our donations. We've and, like, we've gotten I'm I'm not trying to dismiss the plebs. The plebs have been amazing.
We've gotten, like, 2 1,000, 25100, 3000, something like that, individual donations, which is fucking cool. Right? Like, $50 here, a 1000000 sats here, like like, real donations. But if you size them up compared to Jack, it's it's not that much. And one day, maybe that'll surpass. So I'm curious. Like, obviously, you guys are, uphill battle, Bitcoin design, uphill battle, open source. How do you guys think about trying to, like, increase that donor pie? Like, how do you I I think the question is really twofold. Right? One is, how do you convince people that they should donate, period?
And then second of all, how do you convince people that, you know, maybe they shouldn't just solely be contributing to open source contributors. They should also specifically support design, not just necessarily building the tools.
[00:36:14] Unknown:
Yeah. Those are all great questions, that we are trying to learn about and get better. And, you know, starting off, I would just like to call out, the other donors that we have had, including the Human Rights Foundation, and a couple of individuals, and, the Bitbox team. So so we're very you know, so we are also already getting some other ones. And, but, clearly, the goal is to increase the, you know, the the amount that we have available for grants quite significantly, and that is normally done with, bigger organizations. Right? And we're learning as we go. We are, you know, talking to the people who are more experienced, like yourself, like like other teams that have built up these organizations for developers.
So, you know, we have we have applications out. We're not we're not proud. We're we're trying to to ask for money where where we know that, there exists some pots. But on top of It's hard it's hard asking for money. Right? Yes. Yeah. It's it's a skill. It's a skill. These are me me familiar. And, you know, on top of that, we're not just asking for money for Bitcoin developers. Right? Like, I think there's some sort of agreement or awareness that, like, oh, yeah. There's no no there's no company behind Bitcoin. We probably need to figure out a way to to make this work.
But design is still a layer beyond that. Right? Like, you you talk to people who have just gotten comfortable with donating to developers, and they're like, hang on a second. I thought I had fixed this. I thought they were giving to Bitcoin already. So, you know, there's another kind of education needed there sometimes for people who are who are not aware of, you know, the the need and the value of product actually being usable as well. You know, of course, the protocol has to work first before the products can work, but sooner or later, you get to that point. So, yeah, we all you know, we're aware this is a long game. Right? We're not expecting to to double, our pot in the 1st year. Right? That this is a 5 to 10 year journey.
Like you've said as well, it's you have to build up your awareness, and we're trying to do it with, you know, proof of work. There's a lot of stuff that's been done, and we continue to do. And I think that's the best way to do it, you know, and prove that you're actually adding value.
[00:39:01] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, that's kinda what I was trying to, like, hone in on. Like, I think it's an uphill battle on the open set side. And I think it's it's important to call out that, like, I think your battle is even like, you have a steeper hill than OpenSats does.
[00:39:21] Unknown:
What you're what you're saying is we have to be even more optimistic.
[00:39:24] Unknown:
Yeah. Even more yeah. Exactly. Productive optimism. Because for whatever reason, like, design does does take it is not usually in the, like there's not enough in from a private company perspective, it's usually not founders first priority. From an open source perspective, it's even less so. I I think there's something interesting there, though. There's something interesting there in what Christophe said, which is is something like Albie helping them with their design, in an open source fashion. It's like I there's I there's a compelling argument you can make to monetize private companies that build on FOSS.
That, like, oh, we'll help you with design. And then, like, you scratch your back afterwards. I don't know if that's, like, a active way you guys are thinking about it, but I'm just thinking out loud and that kinda makes sense to me.
[00:40:30] Unknown:
Yeah. I think that's that's where it's kind of good to to, you know, it's Daniel and myself and and Moe, we we help run the the foundation, which is just this tiny little thing. But the community is a wide open space. Anyone can do whatever they want in there, almost as long as it's bitcoin. So if there are individuals working for companies, that's great. If there are people working on, you know, freelance projects or open source projects, so that's all great. There's just this common mission around helping make bitcoin more usable.
And I I think the the the funding and the foundation activity that that is and that has to be for open source. There's just no way around that. But on an individual basis, you know, people can choose to engage as it works for them. Not everyone can or you know, it's I think it's a privilege to to be able to focus on fully on open source. And, you know Yeah. For many people, it's just not an option.
[00:41:27] Unknown:
So we have a question oh, go. Daniel, go.
[00:41:30] Unknown:
Yeah. Just saying that a very good scenario from our perspective as well is that if if projects, you know, start off as a hackathon thing and then become a company or a commercial project, that that's amazing. Right? That's sort of graduating from open source or ideas into something that can take off. And the same thing with people who might start off with a grant, designers and work with with open source projects. And then maybe they later, you know, land a job with a with a with a commercial Bitcoin company. That's also success, you know. We're growing the pie of people and projects sort of graduating up the stack.
[00:42:08] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean yeah. Go on.
[00:42:10] Unknown:
I was just gonna add there. There's also something that companies can benefit from is this these best practices that we're documenting with the guide. So how are people gonna interact with poll 12 or silent payments or what's the terminology around multi sig setups and all this tech that's emerging and and coming out. If all the wallets and everyone has different UIs, then, you know, it's just not going to work as smoothly as if there are some some UX standards that all these exchanges and all these other companies can simply take and build on top of. So I think there's kind of a moderating I don't know. What is it? Standard function interrupt really be function there for this design community around UX that is beneficial to everyone else in the ecosystem too. Just like developers create libraries and all these open source tools then that then other companies can simply plug in to their business.
[00:43:04] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I think at the core of a lot of this, at the core of of of this movement, whether that's Bitcoin, whether that's Nasr, or other Freedom Tech, is is oftentimes is is user choice and mobility. Right? And if if if you have some level of design standards that a lot of different projects implement, In practice, what that means is it's easier for a user to switch between projects, which I think is integral to the whole movement. Like, that's the core thing that keeps everyone as honest as possible is that that that user is not captured. They're not behind a walled garden. They can move.
And that's not just them moving their private key or their seed words or or whatnot. It's also them actually being able to use the thing they move to in an intuitive way. So that's, I think, a really good point you make, in terms of design standards, giving greater interoperability, giving greater user movement, user choice, competition. I would say that to Daniel's point, this has been something that I've been my goal with open sets and with everything else I do in the space is, like, grants are a bootstrap mechanism. And then, ultimately, the ideal situation is you find I mean, on my side, like, you find a developer like a Cali or a Craig Raw or something like one of these, like I guess they call them 10 x developers. Like, one of these people that are just in insanely good at what they do, And they just produce and they ship.
And and you bootstrap them with grants. And then ultimately, they they figure out a sustainable, independent funding mechanism that ideally revolves around capitalism, where they're able to make a profit from their project. I will say that I've been shook the last 2, 3 weeks in the this regulatory environment. And I don't know if that's necessarily a path that a lot of people can take. I I think, unfortunately, monetizing an open source project opens you up to more liability. That may be a grant, like a no strings attached grant does not necessarily open you up to that liability. So maybe people are gonna be on grants for longer. But I'm just kinda thinking out loud here. Like, that that was, like, a key narrative talking point objective that I had. I mean, in Sparro Wild, it's a perfect example.
Craig never took a grant. And he has one of the most powerful important Bitcoin open source projects in the world in Sparrow Wallet. Like, we literally could not run Open Sats as well as we run Open Sats, which still has a lot to be desired and we're gonna improve over time, without Sparrow Wallet existing. And but his sustainable funding mechanism, was Whirlpool. And, obviously, he's not getting any kind of revenue off of Whirlpool now. It it actually turned into a liability for him. So that's just something that I want the listeners to consider.
Like, maybe in this regulatory environment, open source grants are even more important than they ever were before. But with all that said, we do have a ride or die freak weirdo robot, who's so ride or die that he joined the YouTube chat when the Noster thing broke, when ZapStream broke. And he has he has a question for you guys. Is there a process, for him as a front end impaired moron to get the Bitcoin design team to look at and suggest improvements work on new projects?
[00:46:58] Unknown:
Yes. So we have so we we have a design reviews series of calls. Like I said, the last one was with Mutiny, Wallet where the team came in, presented their project, and we we talked about design. And usually, a bunch of people, also test the application beforehand, come up with pair it with screenshots and notes, and then we just talk about it. So that's, that's and that that is done on demand. So if you if you would like for some people to look at your project, just either hop in Discord in the design review channel and just ask. Doesn't have to be a call. You just start a conversation there. Usually, some people chip in. Or if you'd like to have a more focused 1 hour session, we can also, organize a call, there. And then you asked the second question where we drove out was when bitcoin design team component library.
So we have bitcoinuikit.comandbitcoinicons.com. Bitcoin icons are available as a, view, react, and some other note modules. So you just have all the icons that your Bitcoin app might need. And the Bitcoin UI kit is a Figma file, and, some people started building, including Daniel, started building UI libraries around it. There's one done in React Native by a summer of Bitcoin student 2 years ago. That was the first one, I think, and then there are a couple other ones.
[00:48:21] Unknown:
Yep. We have Swift and we have Flutter as well. So those are, you know, off the shelf. Just take it and use it, and now a extra plug for for the for the icons, which, Christophe has steward a lot. And, they've got lots of great icons in there that you won't find find in, you know, more general icon libraries, like, you know, mining related ones or, you know, block time related ones and, other great wallet stuff and some of the some of the hardware devices and stuff. So that's absolutely awesome. And, you know, again, I want to just double double click on the design reviews. You know? They are much more than just like, oh, let's have a look at your design you know, visual design. It's it's literally like, hey. Come and tell us about your product and what you're trying to achieve. And, you know, we often start out with, like, you know, why why what what does a user want to achieve when when they when they start using your product and, you know, help out also to sometimes clarify, you know, the the product offering sometimes. You know, you as a developer, you have all these ideas. They know it's gonna do x, y, and z, and and then it's actually confusing to the user that it does all 3 all 3 things at once. And, so we often have conversations around those things before we even start talking about the flow or the UI and stuff, which we which we Yeah.
[00:49:57] Unknown:
Yeah. I like that because it's it feels very actionable. It's like, here is, like, an actual functioning product that people are using. Maybe they're using poorly. And, like, how can we improve it? And even if you're not involved in that specific project, like, you can kinda look at it and take real world examples from it. It's not it's not theoretical bullshit. Right?
[00:50:22] Unknown:
And the and the ideal scenario is that during this this design review call, some designer actually gets interested and maybe starts contributing to the project. We all we all so we always try to talk ended with, you know, how how can we how can someone contribute to it? What are some what's some stuff that needs work?
[00:50:38] Unknown:
What do you guys think about, and I say this in in the most positive optimistic way possible. What do you guys think about, like, the complaint about designers that they give you, like, this gorgeous Figma breakdown on, you know, how your app should look. And then, you know, obviously, they don't have the code to back up, like, actually implementing the thing. Like, that disconnect because there is a real disconnect. Talking to to developers that are building these projects, like, there's a big disconnect between the guy who posts, you know, Figma files on Nostra or Twitter. And it's like, this is how this client should look, or this is how this wallet should look, but doesn't actually provide any work on on how to actually implement it into the project.
[00:51:37] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I'm a builder myself, and I I can see both sides. And you don't get anything good if you don't try and come at it from sort of both extremes. Right? Like, you know, sometimes you need to put your tech hat on and say, no. No. We absolutely can't compromise on on this part. Right? It has to has to be like this. And then some other times, you have to put on the other hand and say, like, well, why do I, as a user, even need to know about this little part? You know, that I don't care about that thing. And then somehow it's a back and forth until you you marry the two things so that the user feels great using it.
And, you know, great if it looks nice too. But like I I keep thinking about design as, like, getting the user to where they wanna be with with the least friction and confusion as possible while the tech being solid. Right? So I don't think there's there's no great product without the sort of, like, designer that is trying to reach a little bit too far, and, engineer that's trying to push a little bit too far on that side. Right? And then, ideally, they stand each other long enough to to to to have sort of 5 5 to 10 times back and forth, and that's where you get the great product from.
[00:53:01] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I'll I'll just I'll just chime in with my origin story here. So the reason why I got into Monero was that I didn't understand any of this stuff at all. I'd never used a wallet. And one evening, my wife and son were sleeping. I was like, I'm gonna try out a crypto wallet. What what am I even using? And on Twitter, someone said, well, Panera seems cool. So I thought, okay. I'll try that one. I downloaded and I it was downloading blocks. I had no idea what was going on. So I sat there and was just gonna wait until all the blocks are downloaded, whatever. There was 1 and a half 1000000 blocks or whatever it was where I I thought it was gonna take 2 minutes. Right? How long can it take?
So I sat there and I got bored and I just started out. I'll just put this in sketch at the time, just redesign it. Then it was like 2 AM and it still it still wasn't done. So I thought I need to go to bed. But what I'm gonna do with this, I'll post it on Reddit. And I thought, hey. I just made this. What do you think? It is literally the thing that you just described. Someone just decide to decide something. But then what happened was that, one of the developers reached out and said, hey. We wanna implement this. Come on IRC. And I, like, I didn't even know how to get on IRC. But, they basically helped me, and I thought this is cool. Like, let let's do it. If you if you if you wanna do this, I'm bound for it.
So it was really just reaching out, to make that connection and help me help get me on board. Like, I didn't understand what the addresses looked like, any of this. I knew how to style But you, like, straight up gave them, like, a Figma like, this is what it should look like. It was just it was just a restyling. It wasn't even don't know. I don't think it was that crazy. But the that it happened to be a time. So the timing happened to be great because there was a very talented, super nice front end developer who wanted to start contributing. He was looking for something, and it was the right time. He was eager. He pulled me in. I was ready to go, and then we started working on this together. But he really he brought me in, and he explained everything to me, and he was very patient with all my dumb questions.
So I think I think this can be a great starting point. Sometimes these things are just designers just love to express themselves just like developers do little tech demos and proof of concepts. Designers just just make stuff sometimes and it's a great way to express yourself and you can just just capture this and just say, like, yeah. I'd love this. It's just an idea. Right? You're not even you're not that invested on it, but it puts a stake in the ground. And it's a good con it's a conversation starter. And then it's up to it's up to whoever sees it to to, you know, laugh at it or think it's silly they can't build it or to say this is cool. Let's let's make it happen. How why don't you join us and and we'll make something. And it's might it's it's likely not gonna be the same thing that like, the first draft. Everything has to be get iterated, and there's a process.
And it has to be broken down over time into a tiny little pass. There's gonna be issues that people can do occasionally here and there. And that's something I learned too. I I designed stuff and created issues. And then, like, 3 years later, they they got implemented. Someone put it live. But I learned to appreciate that process too because it wasn't the state to day pressure. To do It's definitely a slower process, right, with open projects. Yeah.
[00:56:14] Unknown:
But I just think it's important to Yeah. Go ahead. It's important to not shut the conversation down. Right? Like, if if you're, if you're an engineer or developer working on a project and someone, you know, drops a redesign on on you, it's easy to feel like, what's going on here? Right? I'm not even gonna engage. But it's important to not shut it down because you are literally getting someone's, valuable feedback. You know, not all of it might be great, but, like, you can ask yourself, like, why? Why why did they feel that they wanted to, you know, spend time doing this is probably because because they care.
And then you can see beyond the actual, you know, flat Figma file and say, like, okay. What was the problem that they were trying to fix? And, you know, have I got a better idea, or is their idea better? And the same thing with designers. You know? If they come up with the design and the engineers sort of have, you know, ideas to improve that. You know, the designer shouldn't shut that down and say, nope. Design it. This is how it should be. Right? Like, it's normally, value to be had in that back and forth.
[00:57:36] Unknown:
I don't mean to break the conversation, but our nostril livestream is working again. Nice. There we go. There we go. We figured it out live. And we're back. I'm gonna leave the YouTube chat up for now while you guys transition over to the nostril stream because I appreciate you guys going on to Google and and and participating. It's this show is special because of our live chat. Okay. We have a couple things to break down there. First of all, I really like I I really like the framing by Daniel of extremes. I mean, you have, like, 2 extremes just, like, smash into each other. Right? You got, like, the engineer extreme, and you have the design extreme. And then hopefully like the product in the middle comes together.
And, it's it's like an iron sharpens iron. That's how a lot of amazing things are built. Right? That that that's how it happens. That's fucking awesome. I like that framing. I think that's really good framing. Very positive, optimistic framing. But I like that framing. And then what Christophe mentioned, I'm actually gonna hide the YouTube chat now because let's make this chat big so people can actually read what's going on. The what what Christophe mentioned, which is really interesting, is like, actually, like, understanding the the designers need to understand what they're building for.
And I I think with open sets, like, the dichotomy I obviously like, I keep coming back to, like, what I focus on, right, which is OpenSats. And with OpenSats, it was important for us that it's, like, it's Bitcoin for a better world. It's not necessarily Bitcoin specific. And we hold our treasury in Bitcoin. All grants are paid out in Bitcoin. But, presumably, like, if we actually pull this thing off, like, OpenSAT should support all open source contributors because I think all FreedomTech is complementary to each other. It doesn't matter if it's Bitcoin specific, as long as the grant recipient is willing to figure out how to receive Bitcoin because we're not gonna pay them in dollars.
So they they have to receive Bitcoin, but it doesn't necessarily have to be Bitcoin specific. And obviously, the carve out is look. We got Kieran in the live chat saying, wow. It works. He I I don't know if he did anything. And he just he's he's amazed his product is working. We, it it we have a carve out that's like no shitcoin projects, but like a tour. Right? Or a simplex. Right? Like a decentralized signal competitor for for encrypted messaging. Like, it doesn't have to necessarily have Bitcoin in it. We will still support it with Bitcoin.
Right? Which is why the name is Open Sats. It's not I mean, I'm not gonna the Bitcoin Foundation is a horrible fucking organization. We're trying to be like the anti Bitcoin Foundation. But my point is is, like, OpenSats is quite broad. Now with the Bitcoin Design Foundation, I think and correct me if I'm wrong based off of Christophe's comments. Like, I think there's something special here that it is very, focused. That that the idea is that the designers are actually Bitcoin users. They actually use these products. So, like, this whole idea of a mock up that is completely devoid of reality, that just looks pretty from a designer's point of view, is probably a lesser risk in your community because those users are Bitcoiners. They're actually holding their private keys. They're using multisig. They're they're they're playing with these things and and trying to make them work. And so they understand where the engineers are coming from. Would is that a correct assessment?
[01:01:53] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. For sure. I mean, yeah, we you know, with the the thing is is these design explorations, they kinda make sense at a certain point in projects. Like when, what was it for like, for example, we helped create the the LDK logo. And right now with Bitcoin layers, there's there's a time where you're just gonna go broad or even with was it Zeus? Yeah. There was a Zeus logo, or branding session at the time when Bosch was around. He he worked a lot on the Zeus, design, the whole UX. There's a time when you just wanna go wild. There's a, like, this discovery phase, right, when you're just trying to establish a brand or a general look of something. But that's a that's just a small part. And once that's kind of settled, you know, you spend a lot more time when you're really down, you know, on the ground working with the specific functionality and trying to work through it and trying to make sure it all follows all the different, Bitcoin principles, self custody, and interoperability, and and all of those all of those security and privacy things as well.
So yeah, there's a there's a time for it, but I think it's a smallish part of the usually of all the activity.
[01:03:11] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's really cool that there it's like Bitcoin users trying to design better Bitcoin tools. Like, that is that is special. That is I mean, open source projects open source protocols do not usually have that kind of dedication and focus. There's there's something to be said there.
[01:03:33] Unknown:
Yeah. I think it it's very similar actually to the to the developer open source you know, the open source developers that work on Bitcoin things, often protocols or SDKs or toolkits, a bit lower down the stack, and then you have the sort of the wallet or the product layer. But, you know, a lot of them are users, obviously, of Bitcoin products, and we are just the the designers that also use those products and want them to be better and notice what's not there. You know, and I've part of me has also been building the one of the reference designs that we have in the in the Bitcoin design guide, the sort of daily spending wallet. I've been using LDK node, and building a mobile wallet for that. So, you know, I'm often in that as well asking stupid questions like, you know, how do I do this or how do I do that? And then, you know, sometimes the answer has been like, oh, yeah. You can't do that yet. And then I asked them, you know, can we please make that possible?
So I think, you know, having a different angle, and dipping into the to the developer chats is also valuable, you know, because I kind of think from the user action first. Right? Like, you know, I want to come into my wallet and see all my transactions both on chain and on lightning in the correct time order. It turns out that there's no there's no date stamp yet in the transaction, so I can't do it. You know, things like that that hopefully helps them also, you know, improve the tech stack.
[01:05:13] Unknown:
Yeah. And I wanted to also say that we we earlier this year so what we have this series called learning bitcoin and design where we try to take tech technical topics and just have very simple top level, you know, kind of intro calls for designers specifically. So earlier this year, we had, covenants, 2 calls on that one because it was quite complex, then time based recovery or these, recovery paths using mini script, silent payments, and frost. And those things are just to get kind of the general basic ideas and use cases and the potential things we will be able to do them if we just build the right products, right, just to get those out into designers and builders heads in a simple way with not necessarily about the technical details of exactly how it works, but more with an eye on, what uses it actually enables.
And then hopefully, you know, people can build on top of that and and start coming up with with ways like covenants was a huge discussion. I mean, no one even knows what scope with all these different proposals, what's going to be built. And then in the end, it sounds like, you know, biggest use case might actually just be, you know, lightning scaling through these, what are they called, payment channels? No. Channel factories. Channel factories. Yep. And and some things like that. So we we try to be pretty much on top of where the tech is going, and then just kind of facilitate and speed up the process to to getting to products that not just technically minded people who attend these calls can use, but to get them really to a broad audience. But I think that is that is a that is more longer perspective that will take months years for that to really play out until that's the case.
[01:07:07] Unknown:
First of all, shout out to wartime psychopath, for getting his zap in while the while the Nazir stream worked. I'm just troubleshooting on the fly. Because that's we're in open source land. We're in Freedom Tech land. We're gonna make it work. But there's always usually the major trade off is 1, personal responsibility. 2, rough around the edges compared to the slave take slave tech alternatives. Christophe, don't focus too much of your time on soft fork required designs. Like, I mean, maybe we'll get covenants. But maybe we won't.
You know? I mean, I I I will say as someone who is has focused a lot of his time on education. I focused a shit ton of fucking time in education. I just until something gets merged, you will get nothing from me. Like, I am not, I try not even to talk about covenants. I I it's a potential. You know, I will talk about it in a potential sense. But it's you know, time is scarce and
[01:08:28] Unknown:
who the fuck knows? Like Yeah. You know, earlier this year so there's obviously all this discussion around fees that that started happening, or that became more urgent than everyone's mind. So I I was trying to and I asked a lot of people at different con conferences earlier this year. So first of all, you know, the idea of scaling to 8,000,000,000 people. Like, what do we mean by scaling? Some people say, well, scaling Bitcoin means, like, we improve the tech, we enable more stuff, But then you're asking, well, what are we enabling and who for and what are they gonna do? Are we enabling the wrong thing or things that no one cares about? So what are we shooting for? So if you mean by scaling, do we mean 8,000,000,000 people?
Probably not because only 5,300,000,000 are people so actually have an Internet connection. And then 26% of people are under 14, I think. So a 3 year old doesn't need a UTXO. So what are we at? 3,000,000,000 people or something like that. Like, you can whittle it down to some reasonable number. I didn't really Sorry?
[01:09:26] Unknown:
I didn't realize that many people were under 14.
[01:09:29] Unknown:
Yeah. I think it's 24, 20 like, I I have a whole Google doc here or using Google product. But, I need a Nostra doc. Where are my Nostra I saw Nostra spreadsheets are a thing now. The Google Docs are fine. I just look at this. It's not private information. Yeah. Well, I tried to to think to think through this because I wanted to know, like, if if we need we if we if we're in the foundation, if we're working on projects, I would like to have an informed opinion about what we actually need to focus our time on, like you said, because time is precious. And, so I try to figure out from both perspectives, like, what what where is the tech heading and what are we trying to achieve?
What use cases do we wanna achieve? Like, how many UTXOs do we need? Or is it gonna be, you know, unchained lightning and e cash? Or what about all this layer 2 stuff, which who knows what that's gonna be? But I I'd like to have a an opinion and to just kind of feel that there's like a tree of options that can unfold in front of us with all kind of different scenarios. And there are some some twigs that you can probably just cut off because they're nonsense. And then there's a range of things that are more likely to happen than others. And I would just I just kinda wanna have a sense for that. So I do think having understanding some of the tech that might be coming up is kind of important, but also have this other perspective of what are we actually trying to
[01:10:54] Unknown:
achieve, what are we How many people are under 14?
[01:10:59] Unknown:
Let me pull up my my Google doc here. And,
[01:11:03] Unknown:
because I like big numbers, so I always say we're building for 8,000,000,000.
[01:11:07] Unknown:
Yeah. And while Christophe pulls up the actual number, I mean, I can, you know, we we in the community or at least sort of the the me personally, I've always been very focused on, like, you know, the individual and having any individual on on the planet that that wants to use Bitcoin should be able to use it and ideally in a self custodial way with fees not being prohibitive. Right? And I think that's that's a discussion we've had a lot in the last 6 months or so, like, where we thought, oh, you know, self custodial lightning nodes is the way forward. It's gonna solve everything. And then we realized, like, oh, yeah. Opening channels and whatnot, even if you can do it with just in time channels and stuff, that's a huge fee, which is, you know, you can feel it a little bit if you're you live in the US or Europe. But if you, you know, if you live in Africa, it's just like, why would I do that? It doesn't make any sense.
So that opens another, you know, aspect to the scaling scaling discussion.
[01:12:12] Unknown:
It's not even where where it is. It's not even necessarily the cost of the fee. I mean, you wanna talk about one of the biggest UX hurdles in Bitcoin. It's grokking. It's understanding, like, how on chain fees work. Because everything in our lives is based on amount and a percent of the amount, which is how lightning fees are based, which are are relatively easy, I think, for pre corners to understand. You know, I send $1,000 and I pay a 1% fee. And that fee scales with the amount I send. But with on chain fees, it's the data sent. So I can send $10,000,000 or I can send $50, and it could be the same fee.
And what should my fee choice be? What, you know, what like, how how should I even think about it is a incredibly instrumental, foundational, unsolved problem of Bitcoin design, I think, for apps. It's like, I I don't I have no no fucking idea how to explain that to pre corners, Except for the fact, like, I go into, like, a long diatribe about, like, UTXOs and inputs and outputs and future fee burden and all this shit. It's like, oh, you could have spent $20 to send that transaction into your wallet. And then when you wanna send it out, who knows what that fee is? Because that's gonna be based on a free market. It's like it's a crazy it's a crazy problem to solve.
[01:13:51] Unknown:
I'm fairly optimistic that we can, you know, with with well designed products, I think people can get over that hurdle. It's like, okay. You know, I have money. I wanna send money. It costs a little bit. Sometimes it costs more or less. But if you if you communicate that well in the product, I think that's solvable. But if you then move on to a world where, like, you tell someone, like, okay. I want I wanna send you money, but you gotta pay first before you can receive the money. That that's a lot harder, in most people's view and that they you know, the answer to most of that would be like, why would I do that? That sounds like a scam. So you're talking about, like, inbound liquidity. Right? Like Yeah. It's you know, without without on self solving. Getting into technical stuff, people, like, you know, get the Nigerian prince email and say, you know, I got $10,000 for you, but you gotta send me 2,000 first.
[01:14:50] Unknown:
Anyway, Christophe, what did you find inside the numbers? Well, I was just gonna say Jeremy here had a comment about how his, what is it for and what is it? 7 year olds have UTXOs?
[01:15:01] Unknown:
Isn't it so great, by the way, the Nostril live chat? Like, it the show really gets hurt when Kieran drops the ball. I love you, Kieran.
[01:15:10] Unknown:
So my son also has gotten his allowance in Bitcoin for Yeah. Why are you discriminating,
[01:15:17] Unknown:
14 and under? Like, I think a 12 year old should be able to hold a UTXO. Like, what what the fuck, Christophe?
[01:15:22] Unknown:
K. Well, cool. Alright. Then, you know, we just use okay. So 8,000,000,000 people, 26% under 15. There are 5,920,000,000 adults that are 15 plus. So 5,300,000,000 Internet users. So you just use whichever number you feel is appropriate to talk about scaling.
[01:15:42] Unknown:
And, one other thing that I actually wanna do in here Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. So what do we have? We have 5,900,000,000 Internet users. Yep. Okay. So that's probably 55,300,000,000
[01:15:53] Unknown:
Internet users. 5,900,000,000
[01:15:55] Unknown:
adults. Okay. So 5,300,000,000 Internet users is the, like, the top end number.
[01:16:02] Unknown:
That is if you don't include AI agents, which apparently are all gonna use, Bitcoin as well, aren't they?
[01:16:09] Unknown:
Tabith, they're not people. True. They don't need good design. They just need, like, good command line interface, and they're good.
[01:16:20] Unknown:
Yep. So another question I had in here, I was actually thinking about, well, what's the ultimate goal? And then I was thinking about what is the minimum viable scale. Like, what percentage do we need for Bitcoin to remain its properties of being decentralized, permissionless, all of the stuff where people have their exit route, unilateral exit up to and, you know, like, what's the minimum need for Bitcoin to remain Bitcoin? Is it 5% of the population? Is it 3% in self custody? Is it amount? Like, what is that? And maybe if we can define that at least then we know, like, you know, it are we at least on the minimum track we need to achieve in terms of adoption and scaling?
[01:17:07] Unknown:
Yeah. I don't know. We have So I'm actually reading the YouTube chat, which I usually don't, Matthew d. So if you really want your comment to be answered, it should be in the nostril chat. Acyl dispatch dotcom/stream since it works now. But Matthew says people saying everyone needs to own the UTXO are projecting the fiat reality onto bitcoin. First of all, I wanna push back on bitcoiners using fiat as a term to denigrate other bitcoiners. You're welcome to do it and there's free speech. But, like, fuck you. Like, I I I do not have a fiat mindset.
I think it's important. I think I think it's structurally important for as many Bitcoiners as as many people as possible to use Bitcoin in a self sovereign way. I think that is your focus as a foundation. I think it's one of our focuses at Open Sats. I think it's one of my focuses as an individual. As the good Lord, Satoshi said, trusted third parties are security holes. And I don't wanna necessarily worship Satoshi. I think he was wrong about a lot of things. Not a perfect person. Quite amazing person, but not a perfect person. But trusted third parties are, in fact, security holes. And we see this time and time again. We've seen this in this current regulatory environment.
That it's very clear that that is the case. And as a result, the things that we should be building are should be as sovereign as possible. And that does come down to the UTXO level. Because it doesn't matter what you build on top If that UTXO level doesn't enable people to have sovereignty and freedom, they will never get it. They will just onboard to custodians, and then they will get rugged eventually. As every custodian has shown will eventually rug, even if it's not malicious. But anyway, I it's a long winded thing. But but I think, like, the UTXO model does, in general, add complications to design elements.
I think it's I think it's a reason why Ethereum didn't do it. Right? Like, I think, the account model has a horrible trade off balance on the privacy side. But I I think the UTXO model in general is like a hard thing for people to grok. And it is one of, like, the big things you guys have to, like, push uphill against in terms of actually, like, designing good product. Right?
[01:20:03] Unknown:
There's a lot of good It is. And, you know, I like to think of most people, should be in a position where they never have to think about that. Right? That's that's the product world I want to live in that most people, my family and friends included, if I introduce them to a Bitcoin product, the the word UTXO should ideally never have to enter the conversation. They should have no fucking idea what a UTXO is. Right?
[01:20:35] Unknown:
Because they're fucked. They say no.
[01:20:38] Unknown:
Yeah. I think, obviously, there are very there are many situations where that is important, but I hope with time, it becomes less important for most people to to know about that and care about that. And I just wanted to agree with you on the self custodial part. I mean, the that's the kind of product I'm here to build and want to make easier to build and support, and that's why I'm really curious about what form should those products take to reach all those people, because on chain has its challenges with these. Lightning has many benefits, and and LDK node that that I mentioned earlier has made it so much easier to build, lightning products and especially mobile.
But, yeah, I'm discovering I'm discovering challenges that I wasn't aware of. You know? When you try to build products, then you realize what's what's stopping you from providing a great experience. And so now I'm wondering, okay. How can we move beyond those? And a lot of them has to do with fees and and the cost of you know, I want to be able to recommend a product that someone can download and immediately receive money. Right? That that's sort of a basic,
[01:21:53] Unknown:
a basic function that I want to And you you talk to end users and you start to realize once you talk to end users, you realize the pain points. Like, there's so there's so many pain points. And it really is a cheat code. Like, the the regulated custodial products, like, they have a cheat code on design. Because they just socialize all those costs, and they just hide it from the user. Like, 1031, my venture firm, is largest investor in strike. Like, Strike has great design, but it's easier, much easier than a self custody product because it's all hidden behind the surface. And they they can hide it because it's a custodial wallet, and you're not holding your own keys.
That that whole app and and this is why I think it's so it's so imperative that we have a organization focused specifically on open source Bitcoin design. Because if we don't, like, you can't do the like, it's a hard problem. It's a really hard problem that doesn't have a pure easy solution. And but if you don't understand how Bitcoin works, we're completely fucked. Like, there's no there's no shot in hell that we're gonna make. And I think I think the the solution is probably not even and I'm kinda curious. I mean, this is a hard question, I guess. But, like, I think that self sovereign Bitcoin will never have better design than non self sovereign Bitcoin. I think our our our best our best result is something that's close, not necessarily something that's better.
Do you guys have more optimism than me that you think, like, self sovereign lightning or self sovereign Bitcoin could ever rival regular regulated captured custodial Bitcoin?
[01:23:56] Unknown:
So I would I would I don't think that's the right comparison. And I would I would also say, you know, if if you look at, you know, version 0.1 of bitcoin, you double click it. It starts. It works. Like, try to sign up for a bank account. Try to sign up for Stripe or Revolut. Like, you have to go through all of this stuff, then someone has to call you. You have to, like, you know, do the the face ID, hold up your your passport or something like that. That's not necessarily easy either. Right? You you just can't make any mistakes because they made it so you can't you can't. Right? You're just you're just gonna get through it.
Well, in in in bitcoin land, you just have to work with this toolbox and have to figure things out. But I mean, how much easier can it get than version 0.1 of bitcoin? You just double click and it works and it connects to the network and and that's it, you know? So but I I would I I think the there's a saying that the org chart of a of a company reflects the product. It's like who builds it changes what you're building. So I think we're building something that can feel different, that can be different, that can act different, that does not compete on the same level.
If we try to make all of our, apps look exactly like, you know, what what, you know, Bank of America does or whatever, then I feel like we're we're totally doing going the wrong route. We can build these really unique open source things that because open source works differently, different people show up there with different time horizon, with different goals. We don't we're not gonna have tracking in there. There are just so many things that a company cannot do or will not do because it is a company, because it has to do as a business and all of these things. And open source has a lot more freedom in that respect. So I feel like we can there there there's, of course, some overlap, but there's also a difference. And I think we can lean into that difference. And it's not it's not exactly fighting the same battle, I would say. That's a good argument. I mean, the argument being
[01:25:55] Unknown:
that, like, regulatory burden, KYC, all that stuff adds all a shit ton of friction that self sovereign Bitcoin doesn't have.
[01:26:04] Unknown:
I'm I'm I'm much more optimistic than you than, Matt, I think, because I think we can absolutely build I'm an old man.
[01:26:13] Unknown:
I'm an old man in a young person's body.
[01:26:16] Unknown:
I think we can absolutely build, as good as, and if not better, self custodial products, actually. And I I've seen many things already that is approaching that. And I think it just takes again, you know, you have to not just have the, you know, the world's most brilliant minds when it comes to development and engineering and code involved. You have to bring the people that has the product sensitivity and the design skills and all of those, abilities that have benefited the custodial, companies. Right? They've been, that that's an evolution, over decades, in web 2 and what have you. Right? Like, super smooth and these kind of mega scale social products. You know?
And if you apply the same skills and, you know, pluck out some of the best people, and those that are passionate about the self custodial way, I think we can absolutely do it. It comes down to, obviously, product choices. And that's why I think it's really important to have many, many more builders and many, many more products in the space because that's that's the way you get better things, right, more competition, and that can also lead to more, specialized products. You know, we have so many wallets that are what I call generalized wallets. It's like it's it's like the the, you know, the bank that can do everything or or nothing well. Right? I think in in sort of Fintech, in TradFi Fintech these days, you have so many specialized products, and we haven't seen that yet in Bitcoin. Right? It's it's very much still it's like, oh, you know, you can you can use this wallet for storing $10 of Bitcoin or 10,000, which normally would be very different products. And I think we haven't quite seen that yet. And the more specialized you get, the more precise you can be in your product design choices, you know, the way it works, and you can make some trade offs that works better. So I I I'm I'm much more optimistic. I think we can definitely get there. And the whole, you know, not having to do KYC on the way in is so nice.
You can literally have the wallet ready to go, you know, in seconds. And then you have to spend more time maybe on education and and those sort of things. But in terms of the complications in setting up an account, it's already better. So I think we'll get there. I think we'll get there. We just need more people, more brilliant minds working on this.
[01:29:01] Unknown:
Let's fucking go. Well, I appreciate your optimism. I, guys, this has been a great rep. Before we get to final thoughts, like, what is the best way for people to support Bitcoin Design Community, Bitcoin Design Foundation?
[01:29:20] Unknown:
Also, as of a few days ago, we actually also accept Bitcoin. So there we go. It wasn't it wasn't possible for some time. So bitcoin designer foundation.org.
[01:29:28] Unknown:
Fucking time, Christophe.
[01:29:31] Unknown:
Yeah. Because we we do use open collectives, so we kinda rely on them, but they found a way to do it. So bigkindesignfoundation.org is the place to find the foundation, and in there, there should be a link to donate. So check that out. And we have not we actually have an announcement for the bitcoin donation stuff. It's so new. We haven't even announced it, quite yet. Awesome. Follow the Twitter and Nostra accounts for the Bitcoin design community, and
[01:30:03] Unknown:
you'll you'll see that. What if what if what if you're a designer that wants to contribute?
[01:30:11] Unknown:
What wanna take that one?
[01:30:13] Unknown:
The best thing is to, hop in your browser, go to bitcoin.design. That's the sort of web home of the community. You you got the link to to join the Discord there, which is a great place. Just come in there and say hi. Say what you're interested in, and we'll we'll we'll guide you to something. Every week, there are calls going on, so you can just join one of those, see what it's about, you know, lurk around, listen, ask questions. We have a calendar you can sign up to to to see what calls are coming up. And then, of course, there's there's the guide, which is bitcoin.design/guide. You know, if you're interested in just getting into designing products or see what what flows are are are there or, you know, the reference wallets, which we encourage everybody to just take and improve and, you know, build upon. It's it's, they're meant as a starting point, not just like, you know, you have to do x. Right? Like, it's take this, and this is your new zero instead of you starting where everybody else had to start, you know, 4 years ago.
And Bitcoin Design is the best
[01:31:20] Unknown:
place. And I'll add 2 two events that are coming up. So in 8 days, May 16th is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Most Bitcoin applications do not have great accessibility. So we're organizing a workshop where people can learn how to test applications for accessibility and file these issues. For developers, there's also a bit of a talk there about how to work on it, fix this stuff. We had it last year. It got great reception. Mostly developers actually showed up, which was awesome. So we're gonna do that again. That's May 16. Tried to take that day, Do something about accessibility. You know, people are gonna appreciate it. Those quiet people who who have problems with these things. Well, if you're blind, you're fucked. Right? Like, how do you use Bitcoin if you're blind?
You know, most applications are actually the accessibility features of smartphones are actually really good, but they're usually not implemented in the right way. Speak the commands? Correct. Yeah. It's like you you use a very it's it's almost like an API that you make available to the code where you can just navigate through each of the elements 1 by 1 and it the screen reader reads out what it is that you're looking at. And if, let's say, you have an icon in there that doesn't have a label, then it just says button. Right? And you don't know what it is or what it does. Right? So there's a lot of very simple stuff.
Like, there's one wallet where the there's one button to access your transaction history. That button is not selectable. No blind user can access your transaction history in that wallet. I'm not gonna say what it is, but very easy stuff to fix. So let's take May 16, find this stuff, maybe fix a few things. That'd be great. And then we're organizing a design track at the BTC Prague Hack Day on June 12th. So join us there. It's gonna be we're gonna have a design lounge. We're gonna do all kinds of fun hacky design.
[01:33:06] Unknown:
Chris, Doug, do you have the number of blind adults?
[01:33:11] Unknown:
I do not.
[01:33:12] Unknown:
No. Okay. So you just discriminate under 14, but not blind people?
[01:33:17] Unknown:
Correct.
[01:33:19] Unknown:
Because they should be able to use it. I had to ask They they should have a UTXO.
[01:33:23] Unknown:
A a 12 year old blind child should be able to use Bitcoin, in my opinion. That's our goal. I agree. Yep. We're gonna I'm and and I'm not trying to discriminate against 11 year olds. They should also I don't know. There's always a number. Okay. And then one last thing. Okay. So you're a developer. You have no design skills whatsoever. How does the develop how should the developer get, involved?
[01:33:52] Unknown:
Pretty much same thing. So, bitcoin dot design is a good start. If you just wanna kind of, you know, sneak on some designs, you know, compare your onboarding flow with with what's in there, you can do that. Just take what what what you what you seem appropriate. And if you have questions that don't seem to be answered, you know, jump in the Discord again with a question or or join one of the calls or even set up a design review for your product. Right? Free feedback. It's, friendly. It's, you know, no no expectations really. Like, if if you if you're open to to feedback, you'll get it. And it's it's normally enlightening, I think. You know? Even, you know, doesn't matter how much you think you've honed it, or, you know, figured it out. It's there's always it's always good to meet people for the first time that encounter your product and and try to kind of reason about it. So, yeah, that's what I would recommend.
[01:34:56] Unknown:
And I would say we're trying to to break that there are no there's no wall between design and development. There's also project managers and illustrators and animators and illustrators and animators and translators and QA testing and all kinds of people and just people who review code and make sure everything's clean and and and solid of this stuff. Like, we're all in this together. You know? It's called the Bitcoin Design Community because it has a focus,
[01:35:19] Unknown:
but that doesn't mean it's it's exclusive. We're all trying to achieve the same thing, I think. I agree. We're all in this together. I will say also that COVID kinda ruined that phrase for me. But I'd I fundamentally, we are all in this together. And if we want our grandkids to live in a world of freedom, and we want future generations to live in a world of freedom, then it comes down to people actually fucking doing things. So freaks keep doing things. Get the shit done. Because if not you, who the fuck's gonna do it? Guys, this has been great.
I wanna do a huge shout out to Moe, your partner in work. I met her in Costa Rica at a Human Rights Foundation retreat, and she really made sure to get across to me how important design was. I like to think that I was already, I I was already it was already near and dear to me. Like, I already realized design was important, but she really knocked some sense to me and was like, you gotta really care about this. And, you guys are lucky to have her as part of the community and and your partner in work. And, unfortunately, she couldn't join us today. But, it's important to shout her out.
And then also, I want to shout out the Rider Die Freaks who went through the difficulties of the live chat today. Going between Noster and Google and YouTube and and just and just literally going through the hoops with us, live on air. You guys do make the show unique. Without you, dispatch is just not dispatch. It's not it's not the same show. So thank you for participating with us. And huge shout out to the freaks who supported the show because we do not have ads. We do not have sponsors. Our top supporters this week was Nat Gas Immersion with a 100,000 sats. I wanna be clear. He gave a 100,000 sats last week, and then he gave a 100,000 sats this week. Massive, massive contribution. Appreciate it. Then we have guns at Gunson with a 121,000 stats.
Thank you, sir. We appreciate it. And then we have Kieran with 10,000 stats. He gave that yesterday before his site broke. It's completely unrelated to his site breaking. But, he does care. And if you haven't listened to the dispatch with Kieran, you should. Guys, before we wrap, I'd like to end it with final thoughts. Daniel, final thoughts.
[01:37:55] Unknown:
Optimism. I think, this is, endlessly exciting and unique and a good course and just fun. So I I I think, that's that's my final thought. You know, I'm I feel really happy to be working in this community and in this space. I think it's it's, you know, it's a kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity. So keep keep trying to build that, self custodial Bitcoin wallet product for for everybody in the world. That's sort of
[01:38:29] Unknown:
that's sort of my final thought. Damn right. Thank you, Daniel. Christophe, final thoughts. I've not much to add. Join the Bitcoin design community. Let's let's get hands on. Let's make it happen today, tomorrow.
[01:38:41] Unknown:
Let's fucking go. Thank you, Christophe. I wanna say to both of you guys, I appreciate what you guys do. It's important. Don't get, trodden down too much. And, if if there's anything I can do to help, don't hesitate to reach out. You guys both have my private contact info. I will specifically say I really like what the Bitwise ETF did in terms of, their donation structure, which was a 10 year donation structure. 10% of profits. Split between 3 orgs. HRF, Brink, and OpenSets. And I would love, you know, for us to have these kind of long term reoccurring things that also include the Bitcoin Design Foundation. I think that would be awesome for everyone involved. I think it's absolutely integral. I think design is one of those things that, people don't find sexy. They don't find spicy. They don't think it's necessarily that important.
But it it is it is absolutely, integral to it, to what we're building towards, which is easy to use, freedom focused product, and projects. That would not be possible without good design. So thank you guys for focusing so much on that and, consider me an asset and a friend.
[01:40:03] Unknown:
Well, thanks for everything you do. I know you're you're you're you're fighting every day. You're doing a 1000000 different things. Yeah. Well, thank you guys for joining. And, I would like to make this reoccurring. Can we make this like a reoccurring,
[01:40:15] Unknown:
maybe quarterly or something? It's like, what's going on in design? Like, we need to talk about it. Can we do that? Awesome. Totally. Sounds good. Fuck, yeah. And we'll maybe we'll bring we should try and bring Moe in next time. Like, that would be fucking awesome. Yep. Okay. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Freaks. You guys are all the best. Peace.
[01:41:09] Unknown:
Again. They've always been so kind, but now they've brought you away from here. Like this before. We don't talk about it. Dance up, I'll kill the boogie all night long. Stone and
[01:45:50] Unknown:
Love you freaks. That track was Stolen Dance by Moki Chance. It just felt relevant with the time thieves among us. Stop stealing our money. Stop stealing our wealth. Stop stealing our time. We see you. We're noticing. Don't do that. Freaks. I, remembered, yesterday's end track. Yesterday's music track, which is Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young at Wembley Stadium doing Ohio, in 1974. That was their encore track. That was the last track they played of the whole set. It's on YouTube. The full set's on YouTube. I have it now downloaded. I cut out Ohio.
Listen to it. It's a great set. It's pretty crazy that we can listen to sets from 1974, and watch them and actually see how the people reacted and how they enjoyed it. To me, that is, like, that is fucking cool. And it's part of the reason why I do still dispatch, is because it's it's a time capsule. And now that we have Blossom, now that we have Noster, it's an immutable time time capsule where you know it's not changed by AI in the future, which is really cool. Guys, I got a great week planned for us. Well, tomorrow's a wrap up whole recap, which happens every week.
Very excited about it. I'm not very ex I'm I'm excited about it. Just generally excited about it. It'll be a good rip. And then next week, Wednesday, 1700 UTC, we have Hong Kim, CTO and cofounder of Bitwise, will be joining me live in the studio in Nashville, at Big Horn Park. So that'll be an in person rep, which are always extra fun. And then Friday well, Thursday, probably around 1800 UTC. I I haven't confirmed with Marty yet. We'll be a rapid recap. And then Friday, 1700 UTC, we'll be with Matt Hill of Start 9, and we'll be talking about Start 9, the company, and StartOS, the free and open source self hosting focused Linux distro, which I think, like, at this point, like, self hosting is more important than ever if you've been watching this regulatory environment.
And StartOS is one of the best ways for you to do self hosting regardless of what it is, whether that's Bitcoin or other things. So I know myself, I I'm running a StartOS box. You can buy a box from them, but I I'm actually I built my own It's like the Maserati of self hosted server boxes. It's running right next to me right now. Fans are whirring. But, yeah, that would be a good rip. So I'm pretty excited about the the next week of rips. But I just wanted to thank you, Freaks. You guys are awesome. You keep me going. You give me hope. You give me inspiration.
I can't do anything without you guys. Like, you guys are the the router, so thank you, and stay on plus tax ads. Peace.
Is 360%, so that's a metric to see how much time and energy people have borrowed from all of you, and they didn't make whole on it, they can't pay that back, but that loss has to be realized somewhere by someone. And so the question that everyone's trying to wrestle with, like, we could do a debt jubilee, where, you know, the the US government just says, we're defaulting, and then the people that would be paying it back are the bond holders. Right? So they don't do that because Jamie Dimon owns all the bonds. Right? So the theory is that everyone in the room pays it back via inflation. And so to me, buying bitcoin a lot of in this realm of conversation, buying bitcoin is exiting it and saying, I understand that debt to GDP is 360%, that there's an insane amount of human time and energy that has been stolen and has to be made whole on, it's not gonna be mine.
If you're in a financial asset, like like an ETF, you you're not out like, they they still have access to your time and energy.
[00:01:41] Unknown:
Happy Bitcoin Wednesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro clip was our boy, Jack Mallers, in Bedford, talking about how the suits are stealing our time, and they're stealing our money. And the only thing more scarce than Bitcoin is our time. I tried to get a CNBC clip for today's rip. But since we're ripping so often, and CNBC consistently fails to produce decent clips, you got Jack instead. You got a little you got a little bullish, bold juice, to to lead this rip.
We have a great conversation lined up for today. We're gonna be talking about open source design, specifically Bitcoin design. I think this is a relatively novel concept. Usually, open source projects have horrible design, which is why it's important. I have Daniel here. How's it going, Daniel? All good. Thank you. Nice to be here. Great. Thanks for joining us. And we have Christophe. How's it going, Christophe?
[00:02:55] Unknown:
Good. Thanks for having us on here. Awesome. It is. So,
[00:02:59] Unknown:
guys, I would be lying if I said that design is my strong suit. I like using products that work well, that are intuitive. But it's not necessarily something that, like, I've I've been intimately focused in on. Why why let let's let's start off let's start off with why design why design matters. Like, why should people even care?
[00:03:29] Unknown:
Can I, do the first one, Christophe? Go for it. Well, I mean, we're we're all we're all, users of various products. Right? And like you said, we want them to work well. And that, has a lot to do with what's under the hood clearly. Right? The tech is important. But if, people come to you and want to use your product, and they have no idea what to do, how it works, what they should be doing, then, you know, they're gonna turn around and go and turn around and leave. So, that's basically my my perspective on why design is important. And, you know, in in that, I include, not just how it looks. That's just the surface. But, you know, it it's how it works. Can we figure it out?
Is it intuitive? Is it safe? Do you feel trust when you see it? Those sort of things. So, yeah, like you said, that's been lacking in in in Bitcoin and other heavy tech, in general. So that's sort of why, you know, where the Bitcoin design community came from. Right? There's plenty of open source, developers working on great stuff. But, that concept is a lot less common when it comes to design and and, you know, the sort of usage side of of products. So, yeah, that's where we come in in the Bitcoin design community. Try to add that open source, skill set to the mix and make it easier for developers to build well designed product, as well as designers who want to get into, helping with Bitcoin products, also. So those 2 kind of, groups of people converging into hopefully being able to build better products faster.
[00:05:21] Unknown:
I love it. I see some freaks in the YouTube chat for the record. Just a reminder, the Nostrilive chat is at dispatch.com/stream. That's what you see on your, screen right now. Someone's saying the nostril chat is not working, which is a disappointment. I will ping Kieran right now because we are an incredibly small community. So I will just ping the project maintainer and see what's going on. But anyway, let's continue with the show. So, I mean, Daniel, I I think that was a good that was a good explanation of why design's important. The way I kinda look at it is we have a lot of talented developers that work on open source, that that that work on open source projects.
But a lot of times what they do is is they build for themselves, which is awesome. Like, I think some of the best projects are built for the people that are building it, and that's why they they know what they want. But as a result, what happens a lot of the times is oh, look. The nostril chat is alive. Let's fucking go. I didn't even have to ping Karen. What happens a lot is that, it's not intuitive. So so what we end up needing is we need, like, 3 hour BDC sessions videos or something like that for people to use it. Would you guys agree that, like, if we get to a good design point, it you shouldn't need as much tutorial videos if anything.
[00:07:11] Unknown:
Yeah. Totally. You know, it's still way too hard to to set up, like, a multi key wall. It's one of the first thing I wanted wanted to do is set up a improve how to set up multi sig moments 4 4 years ago when I first started getting into this stuff, and it's still too hard. So I see I see a lot of the stuff that we do here as a it's another layer of abstraction. So I think the the developers in a way, they're very comfortable with having a toolbox. So if you know exactly what you're building, if you know what every every single tool does, if you have a band saw, if you have a hammer, if you have your nails, you have your wood, you know what to build, you know how to work with everything. But a lot of people just want Ikea, you know, they just want to get the the prepared parts and they want to have an instruction manual and they don't really care about choosing the right type of wood and treating it and file folding all the they're getting all the pieces.
And so I I also think it's pretty crucial for Bitcoin adoption. I mean, we saw in the last few weeks with the Sabi, Samura, and all this stuff, Some things are just not great at, let's say, being companies. Right? Luckily, we have something like join market, web app, which is an open source variation where that cannot really be taken down. That's just peer to peer. So I think we need more tools like that that make this all this functionality that exists, but that's only good really usable right now for people who are comfortable with the toolbox and make that usable for more people. And I think that's an abstraction layer, and that's where user experience design comes in, where you don't need to read the anymore, but it just kinda guides you through everything.
[00:08:48] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, we've had a motto from the very beginning in the design community to to really try and reach, you know, mass market adoption for Bitcoin. And that requires different sense you know, sensibilities and different, approaches from the the the early days, you know, where where the tech is kind of the most important thing. But the the more that matures, and improves, you know, it sort of falls to the wayside, and you need to move on and compete on on on the next, level, which is usability. And then, you know, eventually when, when you have amazing product with amazing usability, then, you know, it it becomes more of maybe normal sort of consumer, app place where, okay, now it's a marketing game. Right? All the products are good.
We just need to reach more people. But, you know, we're somewhere in the, you know, stage 2 with most, self custodial open source product, at least. Right? So a lot of work to do, but, you know, it's definitely improving. You know, I can already see compared to 4 years ago, there are more alternatives, and, you know, they are better. So the curve is the curve is there.
[00:10:09] Unknown:
Yeah. That makes sense to me. I'm a little bit distracted because I don't have a producer, and, the master stream is broken. We are early days.
[00:10:20] Unknown:
The tech is confusing.
[00:10:22] Unknown:
The the actually, I think he does a good job with design. And I I mean, I don't know how familiar you guys are with the project. But, Carnage is, his main developer focused on design, and and they do prioritize it. So it it's it's I think it's still pretty even though it's only the chat's working and the video's not working. But I did ping Kieran, and we'll see if he he fixes it while we're live. But like I said, the chat is working at least. I mean, there's a couple things there to unpack. The first thing is I think I think is fundamental is this idea that design, should be user focused.
So that the user everything is intuitive to them. It's not, you know, a lot of us will and I just kind of I'm guilty of it. I just said it. Right? It's a lot of us say, like, oh, design. Like, oh, something should be pretty. That is just one small aspect of it. I think probably the bigger aspect is that it's actually intuitive and usable, and that the user doesn't have many questions on on what their flow is and how they should interact with it. And then the second piece is what Christophe said, which is, I think historically, like, private companies have had better design.
This whole idea of open source design is a relatively newer phenomenon. And you guys are kind of fighting the uphill battle being so focused on open source design. But, also, like, even though productized, you know, Bitcoin companies could use a lot of help on design. I think you guys are are you have a tangential focus on helping them. I mean, open source helps everybody, including private companies. But Christophe did make an interesting point, which is a point that I think should be very clear to users, stakeholders, founders, builders, everyone in the space, which is right now, like, the regulatory environment the way the regulatory environment feels is I think it's a little bit overplayed in terms of concerns to self custody users or the average Bitcoin user.
Like, I mean, there should be concerns. Like, people should constantly feel like they're in an adversarial environment because they are. But really what a lot of this recent regulatory action has shown me and other founders in the space is that, it's more of a war on founders, and it's more of a war on people that are that wanna monetize projects, monetize open source projects, even if they're self custody. And in that situation, all of a sudden, different foundations and initiatives, that are providing open source grants become even more important. Because maybe these contributors can't monetize the project directly, but at least they can pay their rent and and have some kind of financial security from grants.
And so both of you guys are Spiral grantees, I believe. Are you still Spiral grantees? Are you still receiving any kind of grant from Spiral?
[00:13:37] Unknown:
Yeah. It's been it's been a good, couple of grants, my for myself from them. The current one is running out. So that's an interesting transition, and we we, you know, we can talk more about the Bitcoin Design Foundation in a bit. But,
[00:13:58] Unknown:
Well, before we talk about that, let's talk about, like, what is your experience been relying an open source grant, period? Like, I just on the spiral grant, period. Like, how how has that been? I assume that was new for you guys. Like, that wasn't you haven't sustained your whole life based off of open source grants.
[00:14:21] Unknown:
Correct. You know? And, you know, I'll let Christophe tell his story in a second, but, you know, it's about 4 years ago that, I got chatting to Steve, over at, you know, what was then Square Crypto, now Spiral. And they were, you know, they were building a team. They were they were hiring design hiring developers, and they were also very early on aware that, you know, Bitcoin was not gonna succeed if the user experience, user experience wasn't better. So, you know, they were they were interested in building out that aspect as well. And, yeah, it was totally new to me, you know, to to have this idea that you could, you know, get paid or get a grant to work on on open source design because that it it's still a very unusual concept. But, you know, that's also what excited me about it because I, you know, way, way, way back in a previous, career. I I have worked in the public sector.
You know, and I think it's very noble, and it's a very good cause to work on stuff that benefits more than yourself and more than a company. So I like that aspect and, you know, jumped on it. And, they have, you know, been the strongest supporter so far, but, you know, we're we're definitely trying to to widen that circle and make more people aware of the need. Like, you know, if you're founding developers, and the more the more developers you found, eventually, you're gonna get to that quota where you where you you need one designer per, you know, 8, 10 developers like, many corporate companies figure out. Right? Like, to get optimal products, you can't just have a 100 developers going at it.
[00:16:08] Unknown:
Yeah. So I've never expected this to be a thing at all. I had no idea. I but I got my footing just doing freelance, not doing just for fun because I thought it was cool, doing open source design work for the, I designed the Monero GUI with that group for two and a half years. Oh, wow. Well, I didn't know that. Yeah. It's just I totally out of the blue, it just kinda happened. And I learned a ton about, about designing for a real open community, designing in the open, designing for privacy with in mind with, like, seriously everything at a really fundamental level. So I thought it was fascinating after spending many years to it working for agencies and freelancing big companies, small companies, everything. It was just really refreshing to me, but I never thought I would make any money with this. But then Square Crypto put this thing out. It's like, hey. We're looking for a designer. Why don't you why don't you apply? So I filled out the form and basically forgot about it. But eventually because I was like, it's, you know, it's not gonna work, but it's I'll just fill out the form. So but and then it ended up working out, and I thought it was just the most incredible opportunity. I just I just thought I'm gonna I'm gonna be on this. I'm gonna make the best out of this. This is such a cool challenge because I felt the the power of this technology and what it could do.
And I just saw this huge discrepancy about, like, just, yeah, like I said, the power of this technology and then my interactions with it, like, what I was presented to to actually use it. Right? And I felt like there was just this this this imbalance. And, you know, I've I've seen so many designers and they love working on, you know, these super fancy websites for magazines or so and that's great if they all want to do that but I mean how many 1000 designers do you need for a social app or for facebook or so? There are many, there are much more things where you can make a much bigger difference. So I found, I was very I was very excited about that and, I'm still very excited about it. And, I think we made some difference, and I think we can continue to do more.
[00:18:16] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm I'm kinda. So so both of you did I mean, let's let's just nail into that, Christophe. I mean, you you did a lot of private work previously. Like, how is it different? I mean, you said it's refreshing working on an open project. From a design perspective, like, how is that different than working on, like, a private company's design?
[00:18:48] Unknown:
Well, for for one, it was, you know, for for once, it was it was basically money. It's a completely new territory, something you could never touch and and you you can't really have this much freedom. They're like layers of corporate layers and they all wanted to look a certain way and through the process you kind of it all has to be slick and, you know, professional and all of this. But here you can really do whatever you want. There's ton of freedom there. There's lots of new territory. And then the the that insane focus on privacy.
At the same time, when I started with Monero, I had I was working with a startup that was VC funded, and they were just, like, hoarding any kind of data they could possibly get their fingers on. And I saw this really strong contrast here, this super principled contrast, about privacy. And I I didn't actually realize that that exists somewhere on the Internet. That's that it's possible that some people are just so disciplined. So I love that. And then another thing was simply that, I would do some designs. So I whenever it has a huge community on Reddit, it's 150,000 people or so at the time.
And, what I would design, I would just observe what the problems people have, what they talked about. And then I would come up with some designs. Sometimes I would show them to the developers, and they said, like, don't ask me. Ask the community. And then I would just try to present it to the community, and we would have these conversations. And it was just such a a personal, just open and friendly back and forth where which is very different when you're in a company and you kind of need to make your presentations, you know, the different different, executive suites or so, and you need to have sign off from the marketing team and all these things.
It it was just much more personal and community focused, and I thought it I really appreciated that. And that answers your question.
[00:20:43] Unknown:
Yeah. There's one piece there I wanna break down, because I think this is really difficult. Specifically for I mean, when we're talking about open source design, it's almost always a freedom focused project. Usually I mean, you can't have freedom without privacy. So usually there's an aspect of of of privacy built in there or expected their privacy expectation. And that's gotta be a key That's gotta be a key fundamental difference is that usually when you talk about user focused design, like this idea that I'm gonna build a product that users, that's intuitive to users. You do, like, a b test. You're, like, tracking their clicks. You're, like, doing all this stuff.
Then you guys kinda have to shoot from the hip. Right? If if privacy matters, like, you you're you're kind of like, how do you how do you battle with that aspect? Like, how do you know if the design is actually good or useful because you're not actually logging the information that would usually tell you that?
[00:21:44] Unknown:
I don't know. I feel like it's more honest this way. I I think in a in a in a company environment, you can kind of hide behind the data. You can you can you can you can gather so much data and you still don't really know what people are feeling or seeing or how they're going through things. But I think it's it's just much simpler. It forces you to talk to people, to to do interviews, to get them on a call or give them lots of options. And people are more eager to give you feedback because they they have this more communal relationship with the product, and you have much more direct contact. You're just everyone has a everyone has a telegram channel. Every product has 1. You have these open forums. It's it's all right there. In a way, it's it's more simple and more direct, and you get more honest
[00:22:28] Unknown:
feedback. You just ask the users.
[00:22:30] Unknown:
Yeah. You just you just design together.
[00:22:32] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:22:33] Unknown:
That's good. We should mention we should mention that a big part of the coin design community is actually a user research part as well. Moe, are kind of a third, partner in crime. Well, absolutely, not in crime, but, like, partner in work. It's important to make that clear nowadays. Very clear. Yeah. Yeah. Part partner in work, partner in community, very active. She is, she's a force of nature when it comes to user research, and it's kind of the the flag bearer in that aspect and has user research kit that she's created with the community. She works with the Bitcoin core, app team and, you know, really, really, represents and does what everybody says they should do, talk to users.
So that that is kind of the best way to to get real feedback on Bitcoin products. But because you're right. You know? No data is connect collected. You know, we have bitcoin dot design and and the the design guide there, but we don't collect any data on who go who goes there either. So
[00:23:45] Unknown:
To the website. Right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Because that would be no you don't wanna do that either.
[00:23:51] Unknown:
Oh.
[00:23:53] Unknown:
What okay. What the hell is the Bitcoin design community?
[00:23:58] Unknown:
Yeah. So it's, it's, it started out 4 years ago as literally just like an online place, a community started as a Slack Slack group, but is now on Discord. Just a place where, all these people that were working on Bitcoin design, whether they were a developer that had do the design or, you know, designers getting familiarized. We knew that there were many of those people, but we didn't know where to find them or that they didn't know where to go to talk about those subjects. So that was the first the first kind of place, that the community could call home.
And then from there, sprung various ideas of creating resources that, other people could use. Right? I think we've all had this feeling, like, when we first got into the game, or the or the the world of Bitcoin, you're like, you have to start from scratch. Right? You have to learn all these concepts, pick it up along the way. And that was the case for designers trying to work with Bitcoin products as well. So we we figured, well, why don't we try and create something that can, you know, speed up that journey? So that's where the Bitcoin design guide came into place, which is sort of a collection of thoughts around all the common flows from onboarding to kind of, what do you do with recovery phrases, how should it talk to users about what that even is, all of that kind of package of knowledge, and UX and UI. So examples, visuals.
That's kind of what we first started building, and is now a great resource. Got all these flows and also lots of, reference designs for, you know, self custody wallets, sort of daily spending wallets. It's got more advanced use cases where it's saving, you know, savings accounts and multisig. So, yeah, just a huge collection of stuff. So that that's sort of the core of it. And then maybe Christophe can add add the sort of more recent bits we've been working on as well or or, resources that people can just take and go?
[00:26:14] Unknown:
No thing. Yeah. That's one of the so, again, you kind of have this community aspect where just everyone's invited to to hang out who who cares about design and and building these products in an open source fashion. And we've seen all kinds of things. Like, one of the earliest projects in there was Alby when it was just came out of the lightning browser extension. And we had these sessions coming up with the name and the logo and and all of this stuff. The join market web app came out of it through, legends of lightning kinda came out of all kinds of projects, you know, kind of emerged from all of these different activity. And we had we had lots of, you know, design review calls with just dozens of different projects and companies, 1010.1 Finance or Hexa, which is now Keeper, and, Mutiny was on was it last week or a couple weeks ago? Just as this place to hang out.
And then we have these public resources, which is basically everyone's brain power, all the knowledge in one place so everyone else can benefit from it. Yeah. The 3rd part where where, like I already mentioned, all these collaborations that are going on right now, there's a design project with bitcoin layers happening, bitcoin core apps happening, saving Satoshi is in there. Alby still has a channel in the discord. What else have we going on? There's always a bunch of interesting projects happening. And, then I think the the 4th pillar now has become the foundation, which is about making this whole effort sustainable
[00:27:43] Unknown:
and having about that. What is the foundation? Where do we stand with the foundation? What's the goal? What is it?
[00:27:52] Unknown:
So it's like like drink or open sets. You can donate bitcoin money to it and it'll it'll go to designers and design, doing design related activities for open source bitcoin projects. That's what it is. And it's a very practical it's a very it's the smallest vehicle to achieve that that we could possibly come up with. 1st of all, because we're a small group of people. We try to be nimble. We try to start, get things going in a small way. But so far, Spiral has been, as we already talked about earlier, has been kind of the entity that pushed design in this space.
But the idea was always, it's been around for years, that this needs to become more sustainable. So there are multiple donors, you know, helping, keep this effort going. And that there's also it's it's a bit more decentralized. Right? Would be a shame if, you know, a spiral goes away, someone changes their mind, and then all of all of a sudden, you know, this whole thing will start come crashing down. And, it's great to have design representation in that whole circle, in that whole funding conversation happening because it does bring a bit of a different perspective, and it can support work that otherwise maybe does not find the right place. And we've already heard from several designers that said, you know, I saw there's a foundation now. Even before we did anything, when we established it, they they said there's a foundation now. I want to be more serious about doing open source bitcoin design work. We heard that from several people right away. So it does it is a signal for people, I think.
We're still very early on it. What did we have? We had our 1st quarterly update a few weeks ago. Awesome. So there's a ton, ton there still to do. What did I miss, Daniel?
[00:29:36] Unknown:
Have you actually received any donations or, like, sizable donations? Are you actually paying out grants? Or
[00:29:44] Unknown:
Yeah. So, we've been active for more or less at 1 quarter, and I think we're on our 3rd or so announced grant, with a bunch of them, being finalized now. So we're definitely active. And we, again, you know, sort of been immensely lucky to be supported by Spiral. And the idea I think they have is to instead of having to deal with individual designers, then instead funding us with with, with a bunch of money that we can then be closer to to this part of the ecosystem, and we have a kind of a, a better overview of who's actually already active, who's who's engaging, who's got skills, etcetera. So part of what they were contributing will sort of move over to the Bitcoin Design Foundation.
But, of course, we wanna grow the pie. Right? So we're talking to other people, because the idea is that over the next couple of years, which we wanna multiply, you know, what was available for designers, to give out more grants, to have more designers working with the increasing number of developers that are getting grants from from the open source, funding organizations.
[00:31:10] Unknown:
Yeah. And just to to add something to that, I see Open Source Justice Foundation also chiming in here. I chat a lot with, who did the design for the website recently. Also, recently. Also nice work there and what the team's doing. So everything we do is completely transparent. We are our fiscal host is Open Collective Europe and they have a platform. If you go to, was it opencollective.com, look for Bitcoin Design Foundation or go to bitcoindesignfoundation.org, all the information is there. So, any donation that comes in is publicly visible. All the expenses, any grant we give out is publicly visible. Of course, there's a certain anonymity level or pseudonymity level for grantees as they desire based on their preference.
But otherwise, everything can be completely completely, transparent, and we post updates there. We have, like, 6 updates, announcements lined up right now. We also just put more casual updates in our Discord channel, the foundation channel in the Bitcoin design Discord. So, yeah, trying to trying to be completely open about all of this.
[00:32:21] Unknown:
Awesome. You guys might have noticed I have not heard back from Kieran, and I've been trying to troubleshoot in the background. So our nostril stream right now is not working. It seems like we have some ride or dies in the YouTube chat. So I've pulled the YouTube chat up, for us all to see. And and also, Christophe was calling out the YouTube chat, so it felt like it it should be on screen. That is not an endorsement of Google. We will rely on them today. But in the future, we will go back to our Nostra chat. Bitcoin Design Foundation.
So first of all, cofounder of Open Sats. Gone through I mean, maybe it's been 4 years now. Open Sats has really been on people's radar for, like, 16 months, 18 months, or something. But there was a lot of, early work that had to be done. A lot a lot of work. It's a it's a thankless exhausting, job. But someone has to do it. And so, I'm grateful for our team in open sats. We have a 9 person board. I'm grateful for Gigi, our full time, leader of the ship who came on about a year ago. Grateful for the couple part time staff that helped Gigi out. But, having said that, a key a key problem that everyone that is, like, active in this ecosystem, in terms of open source grants, is intimately aware of is what I like to call, the Jack Dorsey problem, which is actually kind of poorly named because I am incredibly grateful for Jack, supporting so many of these initiatives.
But right now, it's mostly him. Whether that's through Spiral, whether that's through him donating to open sets, individually, whether that's him donating to Brink individually. I would say HRF probably has the most diverse donor base just because they came from the human rights angle and then branched into Bitcoin. So they do have, some other donors there. But I'm curious, like, what you guys are thinking in terms of, and and and specifically, like, this can be a problem. I I don't think you guys are a 501c3 yet. But, like, our biggest issue as a public 501c3 that offers nonprofit, tax deductible donations is we cannot have a single we cannot have a single party being the lion's share of our donations. We've and, like, we've gotten I'm I'm not trying to dismiss the plebs. The plebs have been amazing.
We've gotten, like, 2 1,000, 25100, 3000, something like that, individual donations, which is fucking cool. Right? Like, $50 here, a 1000000 sats here, like like, real donations. But if you size them up compared to Jack, it's it's not that much. And one day, maybe that'll surpass. So I'm curious. Like, obviously, you guys are, uphill battle, Bitcoin design, uphill battle, open source. How do you guys think about trying to, like, increase that donor pie? Like, how do you I I think the question is really twofold. Right? One is, how do you convince people that they should donate, period?
And then second of all, how do you convince people that, you know, maybe they shouldn't just solely be contributing to open source contributors. They should also specifically support design, not just necessarily building the tools.
[00:36:14] Unknown:
Yeah. Those are all great questions, that we are trying to learn about and get better. And, you know, starting off, I would just like to call out, the other donors that we have had, including the Human Rights Foundation, and a couple of individuals, and, the Bitbox team. So so we're very you know, so we are also already getting some other ones. And, but, clearly, the goal is to increase the, you know, the the amount that we have available for grants quite significantly, and that is normally done with, bigger organizations. Right? And we're learning as we go. We are, you know, talking to the people who are more experienced, like yourself, like like other teams that have built up these organizations for developers.
So, you know, we have we have applications out. We're not we're not proud. We're we're trying to to ask for money where where we know that, there exists some pots. But on top of It's hard it's hard asking for money. Right? Yes. Yeah. It's it's a skill. It's a skill. These are me me familiar. And, you know, on top of that, we're not just asking for money for Bitcoin developers. Right? Like, I think there's some sort of agreement or awareness that, like, oh, yeah. There's no no there's no company behind Bitcoin. We probably need to figure out a way to to make this work.
But design is still a layer beyond that. Right? Like, you you talk to people who have just gotten comfortable with donating to developers, and they're like, hang on a second. I thought I had fixed this. I thought they were giving to Bitcoin already. So, you know, there's another kind of education needed there sometimes for people who are who are not aware of, you know, the the need and the value of product actually being usable as well. You know, of course, the protocol has to work first before the products can work, but sooner or later, you get to that point. So, yeah, we all you know, we're aware this is a long game. Right? We're not expecting to to double, our pot in the 1st year. Right? That this is a 5 to 10 year journey.
Like you've said as well, it's you have to build up your awareness, and we're trying to do it with, you know, proof of work. There's a lot of stuff that's been done, and we continue to do. And I think that's the best way to do it, you know, and prove that you're actually adding value.
[00:39:01] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, that's kinda what I was trying to, like, hone in on. Like, I think it's an uphill battle on the open set side. And I think it's it's important to call out that, like, I think your battle is even like, you have a steeper hill than OpenSats does.
[00:39:21] Unknown:
What you're what you're saying is we have to be even more optimistic.
[00:39:24] Unknown:
Yeah. Even more yeah. Exactly. Productive optimism. Because for whatever reason, like, design does does take it is not usually in the, like there's not enough in from a private company perspective, it's usually not founders first priority. From an open source perspective, it's even less so. I I think there's something interesting there, though. There's something interesting there in what Christophe said, which is is something like Albie helping them with their design, in an open source fashion. It's like I there's I there's a compelling argument you can make to monetize private companies that build on FOSS.
That, like, oh, we'll help you with design. And then, like, you scratch your back afterwards. I don't know if that's, like, a active way you guys are thinking about it, but I'm just thinking out loud and that kinda makes sense to me.
[00:40:30] Unknown:
Yeah. I think that's that's where it's kind of good to to, you know, it's Daniel and myself and and Moe, we we help run the the foundation, which is just this tiny little thing. But the community is a wide open space. Anyone can do whatever they want in there, almost as long as it's bitcoin. So if there are individuals working for companies, that's great. If there are people working on, you know, freelance projects or open source projects, so that's all great. There's just this common mission around helping make bitcoin more usable.
And I I think the the the funding and the foundation activity that that is and that has to be for open source. There's just no way around that. But on an individual basis, you know, people can choose to engage as it works for them. Not everyone can or you know, it's I think it's a privilege to to be able to focus on fully on open source. And, you know Yeah. For many people, it's just not an option.
[00:41:27] Unknown:
So we have a question oh, go. Daniel, go.
[00:41:30] Unknown:
Yeah. Just saying that a very good scenario from our perspective as well is that if if projects, you know, start off as a hackathon thing and then become a company or a commercial project, that that's amazing. Right? That's sort of graduating from open source or ideas into something that can take off. And the same thing with people who might start off with a grant, designers and work with with open source projects. And then maybe they later, you know, land a job with a with a with a commercial Bitcoin company. That's also success, you know. We're growing the pie of people and projects sort of graduating up the stack.
[00:42:08] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean yeah. Go on.
[00:42:10] Unknown:
I was just gonna add there. There's also something that companies can benefit from is this these best practices that we're documenting with the guide. So how are people gonna interact with poll 12 or silent payments or what's the terminology around multi sig setups and all this tech that's emerging and and coming out. If all the wallets and everyone has different UIs, then, you know, it's just not going to work as smoothly as if there are some some UX standards that all these exchanges and all these other companies can simply take and build on top of. So I think there's kind of a moderating I don't know. What is it? Standard function interrupt really be function there for this design community around UX that is beneficial to everyone else in the ecosystem too. Just like developers create libraries and all these open source tools then that then other companies can simply plug in to their business.
[00:43:04] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I think at the core of a lot of this, at the core of of of this movement, whether that's Bitcoin, whether that's Nasr, or other Freedom Tech, is is oftentimes is is user choice and mobility. Right? And if if if you have some level of design standards that a lot of different projects implement, In practice, what that means is it's easier for a user to switch between projects, which I think is integral to the whole movement. Like, that's the core thing that keeps everyone as honest as possible is that that that user is not captured. They're not behind a walled garden. They can move.
And that's not just them moving their private key or their seed words or or whatnot. It's also them actually being able to use the thing they move to in an intuitive way. So that's, I think, a really good point you make, in terms of design standards, giving greater interoperability, giving greater user movement, user choice, competition. I would say that to Daniel's point, this has been something that I've been my goal with open sets and with everything else I do in the space is, like, grants are a bootstrap mechanism. And then, ultimately, the ideal situation is you find I mean, on my side, like, you find a developer like a Cali or a Craig Raw or something like one of these, like I guess they call them 10 x developers. Like, one of these people that are just in insanely good at what they do, And they just produce and they ship.
And and you bootstrap them with grants. And then ultimately, they they figure out a sustainable, independent funding mechanism that ideally revolves around capitalism, where they're able to make a profit from their project. I will say that I've been shook the last 2, 3 weeks in the this regulatory environment. And I don't know if that's necessarily a path that a lot of people can take. I I think, unfortunately, monetizing an open source project opens you up to more liability. That may be a grant, like a no strings attached grant does not necessarily open you up to that liability. So maybe people are gonna be on grants for longer. But I'm just kinda thinking out loud here. Like, that that was, like, a key narrative talking point objective that I had. I mean, in Sparro Wild, it's a perfect example.
Craig never took a grant. And he has one of the most powerful important Bitcoin open source projects in the world in Sparrow Wallet. Like, we literally could not run Open Sats as well as we run Open Sats, which still has a lot to be desired and we're gonna improve over time, without Sparrow Wallet existing. And but his sustainable funding mechanism, was Whirlpool. And, obviously, he's not getting any kind of revenue off of Whirlpool now. It it actually turned into a liability for him. So that's just something that I want the listeners to consider.
Like, maybe in this regulatory environment, open source grants are even more important than they ever were before. But with all that said, we do have a ride or die freak weirdo robot, who's so ride or die that he joined the YouTube chat when the Noster thing broke, when ZapStream broke. And he has he has a question for you guys. Is there a process, for him as a front end impaired moron to get the Bitcoin design team to look at and suggest improvements work on new projects?
[00:46:58] Unknown:
Yes. So we have so we we have a design reviews series of calls. Like I said, the last one was with Mutiny, Wallet where the team came in, presented their project, and we we talked about design. And usually, a bunch of people, also test the application beforehand, come up with pair it with screenshots and notes, and then we just talk about it. So that's, that's and that that is done on demand. So if you if you would like for some people to look at your project, just either hop in Discord in the design review channel and just ask. Doesn't have to be a call. You just start a conversation there. Usually, some people chip in. Or if you'd like to have a more focused 1 hour session, we can also, organize a call, there. And then you asked the second question where we drove out was when bitcoin design team component library.
So we have bitcoinuikit.comandbitcoinicons.com. Bitcoin icons are available as a, view, react, and some other note modules. So you just have all the icons that your Bitcoin app might need. And the Bitcoin UI kit is a Figma file, and, some people started building, including Daniel, started building UI libraries around it. There's one done in React Native by a summer of Bitcoin student 2 years ago. That was the first one, I think, and then there are a couple other ones.
[00:48:21] Unknown:
Yep. We have Swift and we have Flutter as well. So those are, you know, off the shelf. Just take it and use it, and now a extra plug for for the for the icons, which, Christophe has steward a lot. And, they've got lots of great icons in there that you won't find find in, you know, more general icon libraries, like, you know, mining related ones or, you know, block time related ones and, other great wallet stuff and some of the some of the hardware devices and stuff. So that's absolutely awesome. And, you know, again, I want to just double double click on the design reviews. You know? They are much more than just like, oh, let's have a look at your design you know, visual design. It's it's literally like, hey. Come and tell us about your product and what you're trying to achieve. And, you know, we often start out with, like, you know, why why what what does a user want to achieve when when they when they start using your product and, you know, help out also to sometimes clarify, you know, the the product offering sometimes. You know, you as a developer, you have all these ideas. They know it's gonna do x, y, and z, and and then it's actually confusing to the user that it does all 3 all 3 things at once. And, so we often have conversations around those things before we even start talking about the flow or the UI and stuff, which we which we Yeah.
[00:49:57] Unknown:
Yeah. I like that because it's it feels very actionable. It's like, here is, like, an actual functioning product that people are using. Maybe they're using poorly. And, like, how can we improve it? And even if you're not involved in that specific project, like, you can kinda look at it and take real world examples from it. It's not it's not theoretical bullshit. Right?
[00:50:22] Unknown:
And the and the ideal scenario is that during this this design review call, some designer actually gets interested and maybe starts contributing to the project. We all we all so we always try to talk ended with, you know, how how can we how can someone contribute to it? What are some what's some stuff that needs work?
[00:50:38] Unknown:
What do you guys think about, and I say this in in the most positive optimistic way possible. What do you guys think about, like, the complaint about designers that they give you, like, this gorgeous Figma breakdown on, you know, how your app should look. And then, you know, obviously, they don't have the code to back up, like, actually implementing the thing. Like, that disconnect because there is a real disconnect. Talking to to developers that are building these projects, like, there's a big disconnect between the guy who posts, you know, Figma files on Nostra or Twitter. And it's like, this is how this client should look, or this is how this wallet should look, but doesn't actually provide any work on on how to actually implement it into the project.
[00:51:37] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I'm a builder myself, and I I can see both sides. And you don't get anything good if you don't try and come at it from sort of both extremes. Right? Like, you know, sometimes you need to put your tech hat on and say, no. No. We absolutely can't compromise on on this part. Right? It has to has to be like this. And then some other times, you have to put on the other hand and say, like, well, why do I, as a user, even need to know about this little part? You know, that I don't care about that thing. And then somehow it's a back and forth until you you marry the two things so that the user feels great using it.
And, you know, great if it looks nice too. But like I I keep thinking about design as, like, getting the user to where they wanna be with with the least friction and confusion as possible while the tech being solid. Right? So I don't think there's there's no great product without the sort of, like, designer that is trying to reach a little bit too far, and, engineer that's trying to push a little bit too far on that side. Right? And then, ideally, they stand each other long enough to to to to have sort of 5 5 to 10 times back and forth, and that's where you get the great product from.
[00:53:01] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I'll I'll just I'll just chime in with my origin story here. So the reason why I got into Monero was that I didn't understand any of this stuff at all. I'd never used a wallet. And one evening, my wife and son were sleeping. I was like, I'm gonna try out a crypto wallet. What what am I even using? And on Twitter, someone said, well, Panera seems cool. So I thought, okay. I'll try that one. I downloaded and I it was downloading blocks. I had no idea what was going on. So I sat there and was just gonna wait until all the blocks are downloaded, whatever. There was 1 and a half 1000000 blocks or whatever it was where I I thought it was gonna take 2 minutes. Right? How long can it take?
So I sat there and I got bored and I just started out. I'll just put this in sketch at the time, just redesign it. Then it was like 2 AM and it still it still wasn't done. So I thought I need to go to bed. But what I'm gonna do with this, I'll post it on Reddit. And I thought, hey. I just made this. What do you think? It is literally the thing that you just described. Someone just decide to decide something. But then what happened was that, one of the developers reached out and said, hey. We wanna implement this. Come on IRC. And I, like, I didn't even know how to get on IRC. But, they basically helped me, and I thought this is cool. Like, let let's do it. If you if you if you wanna do this, I'm bound for it.
So it was really just reaching out, to make that connection and help me help get me on board. Like, I didn't understand what the addresses looked like, any of this. I knew how to style But you, like, straight up gave them, like, a Figma like, this is what it should look like. It was just it was just a restyling. It wasn't even don't know. I don't think it was that crazy. But the that it happened to be a time. So the timing happened to be great because there was a very talented, super nice front end developer who wanted to start contributing. He was looking for something, and it was the right time. He was eager. He pulled me in. I was ready to go, and then we started working on this together. But he really he brought me in, and he explained everything to me, and he was very patient with all my dumb questions.
So I think I think this can be a great starting point. Sometimes these things are just designers just love to express themselves just like developers do little tech demos and proof of concepts. Designers just just make stuff sometimes and it's a great way to express yourself and you can just just capture this and just say, like, yeah. I'd love this. It's just an idea. Right? You're not even you're not that invested on it, but it puts a stake in the ground. And it's a good con it's a conversation starter. And then it's up to it's up to whoever sees it to to, you know, laugh at it or think it's silly they can't build it or to say this is cool. Let's let's make it happen. How why don't you join us and and we'll make something. And it's might it's it's likely not gonna be the same thing that like, the first draft. Everything has to be get iterated, and there's a process.
And it has to be broken down over time into a tiny little pass. There's gonna be issues that people can do occasionally here and there. And that's something I learned too. I I designed stuff and created issues. And then, like, 3 years later, they they got implemented. Someone put it live. But I learned to appreciate that process too because it wasn't the state to day pressure. To do It's definitely a slower process, right, with open projects. Yeah.
[00:56:14] Unknown:
But I just think it's important to Yeah. Go ahead. It's important to not shut the conversation down. Right? Like, if if you're, if you're an engineer or developer working on a project and someone, you know, drops a redesign on on you, it's easy to feel like, what's going on here? Right? I'm not even gonna engage. But it's important to not shut it down because you are literally getting someone's, valuable feedback. You know, not all of it might be great, but, like, you can ask yourself, like, why? Why why did they feel that they wanted to, you know, spend time doing this is probably because because they care.
And then you can see beyond the actual, you know, flat Figma file and say, like, okay. What was the problem that they were trying to fix? And, you know, have I got a better idea, or is their idea better? And the same thing with designers. You know? If they come up with the design and the engineers sort of have, you know, ideas to improve that. You know, the designer shouldn't shut that down and say, nope. Design it. This is how it should be. Right? Like, it's normally, value to be had in that back and forth.
[00:57:36] Unknown:
I don't mean to break the conversation, but our nostril livestream is working again. Nice. There we go. There we go. We figured it out live. And we're back. I'm gonna leave the YouTube chat up for now while you guys transition over to the nostril stream because I appreciate you guys going on to Google and and and participating. It's this show is special because of our live chat. Okay. We have a couple things to break down there. First of all, I really like I I really like the framing by Daniel of extremes. I mean, you have, like, 2 extremes just, like, smash into each other. Right? You got, like, the engineer extreme, and you have the design extreme. And then hopefully like the product in the middle comes together.
And, it's it's like an iron sharpens iron. That's how a lot of amazing things are built. Right? That that that's how it happens. That's fucking awesome. I like that framing. I think that's really good framing. Very positive, optimistic framing. But I like that framing. And then what Christophe mentioned, I'm actually gonna hide the YouTube chat now because let's make this chat big so people can actually read what's going on. The what what Christophe mentioned, which is really interesting, is like, actually, like, understanding the the designers need to understand what they're building for.
And I I think with open sets, like, the dichotomy I obviously like, I keep coming back to, like, what I focus on, right, which is OpenSats. And with OpenSats, it was important for us that it's, like, it's Bitcoin for a better world. It's not necessarily Bitcoin specific. And we hold our treasury in Bitcoin. All grants are paid out in Bitcoin. But, presumably, like, if we actually pull this thing off, like, OpenSAT should support all open source contributors because I think all FreedomTech is complementary to each other. It doesn't matter if it's Bitcoin specific, as long as the grant recipient is willing to figure out how to receive Bitcoin because we're not gonna pay them in dollars.
So they they have to receive Bitcoin, but it doesn't necessarily have to be Bitcoin specific. And obviously, the carve out is look. We got Kieran in the live chat saying, wow. It works. He I I don't know if he did anything. And he just he's he's amazed his product is working. We, it it we have a carve out that's like no shitcoin projects, but like a tour. Right? Or a simplex. Right? Like a decentralized signal competitor for for encrypted messaging. Like, it doesn't have to necessarily have Bitcoin in it. We will still support it with Bitcoin.
Right? Which is why the name is Open Sats. It's not I mean, I'm not gonna the Bitcoin Foundation is a horrible fucking organization. We're trying to be like the anti Bitcoin Foundation. But my point is is, like, OpenSats is quite broad. Now with the Bitcoin Design Foundation, I think and correct me if I'm wrong based off of Christophe's comments. Like, I think there's something special here that it is very, focused. That that the idea is that the designers are actually Bitcoin users. They actually use these products. So, like, this whole idea of a mock up that is completely devoid of reality, that just looks pretty from a designer's point of view, is probably a lesser risk in your community because those users are Bitcoiners. They're actually holding their private keys. They're using multisig. They're they're they're playing with these things and and trying to make them work. And so they understand where the engineers are coming from. Would is that a correct assessment?
[01:01:53] Unknown:
Yeah. For sure. For sure. I mean, yeah, we you know, with the the thing is is these design explorations, they kinda make sense at a certain point in projects. Like when, what was it for like, for example, we helped create the the LDK logo. And right now with Bitcoin layers, there's there's a time where you're just gonna go broad or even with was it Zeus? Yeah. There was a Zeus logo, or branding session at the time when Bosch was around. He he worked a lot on the Zeus, design, the whole UX. There's a time when you just wanna go wild. There's a, like, this discovery phase, right, when you're just trying to establish a brand or a general look of something. But that's a that's just a small part. And once that's kind of settled, you know, you spend a lot more time when you're really down, you know, on the ground working with the specific functionality and trying to work through it and trying to make sure it all follows all the different, Bitcoin principles, self custody, and interoperability, and and all of those all of those security and privacy things as well.
So yeah, there's a there's a time for it, but I think it's a smallish part of the usually of all the activity.
[01:03:11] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's really cool that there it's like Bitcoin users trying to design better Bitcoin tools. Like, that is that is special. That is I mean, open source projects open source protocols do not usually have that kind of dedication and focus. There's there's something to be said there.
[01:03:33] Unknown:
Yeah. I think it it's very similar actually to the to the developer open source you know, the open source developers that work on Bitcoin things, often protocols or SDKs or toolkits, a bit lower down the stack, and then you have the sort of the wallet or the product layer. But, you know, a lot of them are users, obviously, of Bitcoin products, and we are just the the designers that also use those products and want them to be better and notice what's not there. You know, and I've part of me has also been building the one of the reference designs that we have in the in the Bitcoin design guide, the sort of daily spending wallet. I've been using LDK node, and building a mobile wallet for that. So, you know, I'm often in that as well asking stupid questions like, you know, how do I do this or how do I do that? And then, you know, sometimes the answer has been like, oh, yeah. You can't do that yet. And then I asked them, you know, can we please make that possible?
So I think, you know, having a different angle, and dipping into the to the developer chats is also valuable, you know, because I kind of think from the user action first. Right? Like, you know, I want to come into my wallet and see all my transactions both on chain and on lightning in the correct time order. It turns out that there's no there's no date stamp yet in the transaction, so I can't do it. You know, things like that that hopefully helps them also, you know, improve the tech stack.
[01:05:13] Unknown:
Yeah. And I wanted to also say that we we earlier this year so what we have this series called learning bitcoin and design where we try to take tech technical topics and just have very simple top level, you know, kind of intro calls for designers specifically. So earlier this year, we had, covenants, 2 calls on that one because it was quite complex, then time based recovery or these, recovery paths using mini script, silent payments, and frost. And those things are just to get kind of the general basic ideas and use cases and the potential things we will be able to do them if we just build the right products, right, just to get those out into designers and builders heads in a simple way with not necessarily about the technical details of exactly how it works, but more with an eye on, what uses it actually enables.
And then hopefully, you know, people can build on top of that and and start coming up with with ways like covenants was a huge discussion. I mean, no one even knows what scope with all these different proposals, what's going to be built. And then in the end, it sounds like, you know, biggest use case might actually just be, you know, lightning scaling through these, what are they called, payment channels? No. Channel factories. Channel factories. Yep. And and some things like that. So we we try to be pretty much on top of where the tech is going, and then just kind of facilitate and speed up the process to to getting to products that not just technically minded people who attend these calls can use, but to get them really to a broad audience. But I think that is that is a that is more longer perspective that will take months years for that to really play out until that's the case.
[01:07:07] Unknown:
First of all, shout out to wartime psychopath, for getting his zap in while the while the Nazir stream worked. I'm just troubleshooting on the fly. Because that's we're in open source land. We're in Freedom Tech land. We're gonna make it work. But there's always usually the major trade off is 1, personal responsibility. 2, rough around the edges compared to the slave take slave tech alternatives. Christophe, don't focus too much of your time on soft fork required designs. Like, I mean, maybe we'll get covenants. But maybe we won't.
You know? I mean, I I I will say as someone who is has focused a lot of his time on education. I focused a shit ton of fucking time in education. I just until something gets merged, you will get nothing from me. Like, I am not, I try not even to talk about covenants. I I it's a potential. You know, I will talk about it in a potential sense. But it's you know, time is scarce and
[01:08:28] Unknown:
who the fuck knows? Like Yeah. You know, earlier this year so there's obviously all this discussion around fees that that started happening, or that became more urgent than everyone's mind. So I I was trying to and I asked a lot of people at different con conferences earlier this year. So first of all, you know, the idea of scaling to 8,000,000,000 people. Like, what do we mean by scaling? Some people say, well, scaling Bitcoin means, like, we improve the tech, we enable more stuff, But then you're asking, well, what are we enabling and who for and what are they gonna do? Are we enabling the wrong thing or things that no one cares about? So what are we shooting for? So if you mean by scaling, do we mean 8,000,000,000 people?
Probably not because only 5,300,000,000 are people so actually have an Internet connection. And then 26% of people are under 14, I think. So a 3 year old doesn't need a UTXO. So what are we at? 3,000,000,000 people or something like that. Like, you can whittle it down to some reasonable number. I didn't really Sorry?
[01:09:26] Unknown:
I didn't realize that many people were under 14.
[01:09:29] Unknown:
Yeah. I think it's 24, 20 like, I I have a whole Google doc here or using Google product. But, I need a Nostra doc. Where are my Nostra I saw Nostra spreadsheets are a thing now. The Google Docs are fine. I just look at this. It's not private information. Yeah. Well, I tried to to think to think through this because I wanted to know, like, if if we need we if we if we're in the foundation, if we're working on projects, I would like to have an informed opinion about what we actually need to focus our time on, like you said, because time is precious. And, so I try to figure out from both perspectives, like, what what where is the tech heading and what are we trying to achieve?
What use cases do we wanna achieve? Like, how many UTXOs do we need? Or is it gonna be, you know, unchained lightning and e cash? Or what about all this layer 2 stuff, which who knows what that's gonna be? But I I'd like to have a an opinion and to just kind of feel that there's like a tree of options that can unfold in front of us with all kind of different scenarios. And there are some some twigs that you can probably just cut off because they're nonsense. And then there's a range of things that are more likely to happen than others. And I would just I just kinda wanna have a sense for that. So I do think having understanding some of the tech that might be coming up is kind of important, but also have this other perspective of what are we actually trying to
[01:10:54] Unknown:
achieve, what are we How many people are under 14?
[01:10:59] Unknown:
Let me pull up my my Google doc here. And,
[01:11:03] Unknown:
because I like big numbers, so I always say we're building for 8,000,000,000.
[01:11:07] Unknown:
Yeah. And while Christophe pulls up the actual number, I mean, I can, you know, we we in the community or at least sort of the the me personally, I've always been very focused on, like, you know, the individual and having any individual on on the planet that that wants to use Bitcoin should be able to use it and ideally in a self custodial way with fees not being prohibitive. Right? And I think that's that's a discussion we've had a lot in the last 6 months or so, like, where we thought, oh, you know, self custodial lightning nodes is the way forward. It's gonna solve everything. And then we realized, like, oh, yeah. Opening channels and whatnot, even if you can do it with just in time channels and stuff, that's a huge fee, which is, you know, you can feel it a little bit if you're you live in the US or Europe. But if you, you know, if you live in Africa, it's just like, why would I do that? It doesn't make any sense.
So that opens another, you know, aspect to the scaling scaling discussion.
[01:12:12] Unknown:
It's not even where where it is. It's not even necessarily the cost of the fee. I mean, you wanna talk about one of the biggest UX hurdles in Bitcoin. It's grokking. It's understanding, like, how on chain fees work. Because everything in our lives is based on amount and a percent of the amount, which is how lightning fees are based, which are are relatively easy, I think, for pre corners to understand. You know, I send $1,000 and I pay a 1% fee. And that fee scales with the amount I send. But with on chain fees, it's the data sent. So I can send $10,000,000 or I can send $50, and it could be the same fee.
And what should my fee choice be? What, you know, what like, how how should I even think about it is a incredibly instrumental, foundational, unsolved problem of Bitcoin design, I think, for apps. It's like, I I don't I have no no fucking idea how to explain that to pre corners, Except for the fact, like, I go into, like, a long diatribe about, like, UTXOs and inputs and outputs and future fee burden and all this shit. It's like, oh, you could have spent $20 to send that transaction into your wallet. And then when you wanna send it out, who knows what that fee is? Because that's gonna be based on a free market. It's like it's a crazy it's a crazy problem to solve.
[01:13:51] Unknown:
I'm fairly optimistic that we can, you know, with with well designed products, I think people can get over that hurdle. It's like, okay. You know, I have money. I wanna send money. It costs a little bit. Sometimes it costs more or less. But if you if you communicate that well in the product, I think that's solvable. But if you then move on to a world where, like, you tell someone, like, okay. I want I wanna send you money, but you gotta pay first before you can receive the money. That that's a lot harder, in most people's view and that they you know, the answer to most of that would be like, why would I do that? That sounds like a scam. So you're talking about, like, inbound liquidity. Right? Like Yeah. It's you know, without without on self solving. Getting into technical stuff, people, like, you know, get the Nigerian prince email and say, you know, I got $10,000 for you, but you gotta send me 2,000 first.
[01:14:50] Unknown:
Anyway, Christophe, what did you find inside the numbers? Well, I was just gonna say Jeremy here had a comment about how his, what is it for and what is it? 7 year olds have UTXOs?
[01:15:01] Unknown:
Isn't it so great, by the way, the Nostril live chat? Like, it the show really gets hurt when Kieran drops the ball. I love you, Kieran.
[01:15:10] Unknown:
So my son also has gotten his allowance in Bitcoin for Yeah. Why are you discriminating,
[01:15:17] Unknown:
14 and under? Like, I think a 12 year old should be able to hold a UTXO. Like, what what the fuck, Christophe?
[01:15:22] Unknown:
K. Well, cool. Alright. Then, you know, we just use okay. So 8,000,000,000 people, 26% under 15. There are 5,920,000,000 adults that are 15 plus. So 5,300,000,000 Internet users. So you just use whichever number you feel is appropriate to talk about scaling.
[01:15:42] Unknown:
And, one other thing that I actually wanna do in here Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. So what do we have? We have 5,900,000,000 Internet users. Yep. Okay. So that's probably 55,300,000,000
[01:15:53] Unknown:
Internet users. 5,900,000,000
[01:15:55] Unknown:
adults. Okay. So 5,300,000,000 Internet users is the, like, the top end number.
[01:16:02] Unknown:
That is if you don't include AI agents, which apparently are all gonna use, Bitcoin as well, aren't they?
[01:16:09] Unknown:
Tabith, they're not people. True. They don't need good design. They just need, like, good command line interface, and they're good.
[01:16:20] Unknown:
Yep. So another question I had in here, I was actually thinking about, well, what's the ultimate goal? And then I was thinking about what is the minimum viable scale. Like, what percentage do we need for Bitcoin to remain its properties of being decentralized, permissionless, all of the stuff where people have their exit route, unilateral exit up to and, you know, like, what's the minimum need for Bitcoin to remain Bitcoin? Is it 5% of the population? Is it 3% in self custody? Is it amount? Like, what is that? And maybe if we can define that at least then we know, like, you know, it are we at least on the minimum track we need to achieve in terms of adoption and scaling?
[01:17:07] Unknown:
Yeah. I don't know. We have So I'm actually reading the YouTube chat, which I usually don't, Matthew d. So if you really want your comment to be answered, it should be in the nostril chat. Acyl dispatch dotcom/stream since it works now. But Matthew says people saying everyone needs to own the UTXO are projecting the fiat reality onto bitcoin. First of all, I wanna push back on bitcoiners using fiat as a term to denigrate other bitcoiners. You're welcome to do it and there's free speech. But, like, fuck you. Like, I I I do not have a fiat mindset.
I think it's important. I think I think it's structurally important for as many Bitcoiners as as many people as possible to use Bitcoin in a self sovereign way. I think that is your focus as a foundation. I think it's one of our focuses at Open Sats. I think it's one of my focuses as an individual. As the good Lord, Satoshi said, trusted third parties are security holes. And I don't wanna necessarily worship Satoshi. I think he was wrong about a lot of things. Not a perfect person. Quite amazing person, but not a perfect person. But trusted third parties are, in fact, security holes. And we see this time and time again. We've seen this in this current regulatory environment.
That it's very clear that that is the case. And as a result, the things that we should be building are should be as sovereign as possible. And that does come down to the UTXO level. Because it doesn't matter what you build on top If that UTXO level doesn't enable people to have sovereignty and freedom, they will never get it. They will just onboard to custodians, and then they will get rugged eventually. As every custodian has shown will eventually rug, even if it's not malicious. But anyway, I it's a long winded thing. But but I think, like, the UTXO model does, in general, add complications to design elements.
I think it's I think it's a reason why Ethereum didn't do it. Right? Like, I think, the account model has a horrible trade off balance on the privacy side. But I I think the UTXO model in general is like a hard thing for people to grok. And it is one of, like, the big things you guys have to, like, push uphill against in terms of actually, like, designing good product. Right?
[01:20:03] Unknown:
There's a lot of good It is. And, you know, I like to think of most people, should be in a position where they never have to think about that. Right? That's that's the product world I want to live in that most people, my family and friends included, if I introduce them to a Bitcoin product, the the word UTXO should ideally never have to enter the conversation. They should have no fucking idea what a UTXO is. Right?
[01:20:35] Unknown:
Because they're fucked. They say no.
[01:20:38] Unknown:
Yeah. I think, obviously, there are very there are many situations where that is important, but I hope with time, it becomes less important for most people to to know about that and care about that. And I just wanted to agree with you on the self custodial part. I mean, the that's the kind of product I'm here to build and want to make easier to build and support, and that's why I'm really curious about what form should those products take to reach all those people, because on chain has its challenges with these. Lightning has many benefits, and and LDK node that that I mentioned earlier has made it so much easier to build, lightning products and especially mobile.
But, yeah, I'm discovering I'm discovering challenges that I wasn't aware of. You know? When you try to build products, then you realize what's what's stopping you from providing a great experience. And so now I'm wondering, okay. How can we move beyond those? And a lot of them has to do with fees and and the cost of you know, I want to be able to recommend a product that someone can download and immediately receive money. Right? That that's sort of a basic,
[01:21:53] Unknown:
a basic function that I want to And you you talk to end users and you start to realize once you talk to end users, you realize the pain points. Like, there's so there's so many pain points. And it really is a cheat code. Like, the the regulated custodial products, like, they have a cheat code on design. Because they just socialize all those costs, and they just hide it from the user. Like, 1031, my venture firm, is largest investor in strike. Like, Strike has great design, but it's easier, much easier than a self custody product because it's all hidden behind the surface. And they they can hide it because it's a custodial wallet, and you're not holding your own keys.
That that whole app and and this is why I think it's so it's so imperative that we have a organization focused specifically on open source Bitcoin design. Because if we don't, like, you can't do the like, it's a hard problem. It's a really hard problem that doesn't have a pure easy solution. And but if you don't understand how Bitcoin works, we're completely fucked. Like, there's no there's no shot in hell that we're gonna make. And I think I think the the solution is probably not even and I'm kinda curious. I mean, this is a hard question, I guess. But, like, I think that self sovereign Bitcoin will never have better design than non self sovereign Bitcoin. I think our our our best our best result is something that's close, not necessarily something that's better.
Do you guys have more optimism than me that you think, like, self sovereign lightning or self sovereign Bitcoin could ever rival regular regulated captured custodial Bitcoin?
[01:23:56] Unknown:
So I would I would I don't think that's the right comparison. And I would I would also say, you know, if if you look at, you know, version 0.1 of bitcoin, you double click it. It starts. It works. Like, try to sign up for a bank account. Try to sign up for Stripe or Revolut. Like, you have to go through all of this stuff, then someone has to call you. You have to, like, you know, do the the face ID, hold up your your passport or something like that. That's not necessarily easy either. Right? You you just can't make any mistakes because they made it so you can't you can't. Right? You're just you're just gonna get through it.
Well, in in in bitcoin land, you just have to work with this toolbox and have to figure things out. But I mean, how much easier can it get than version 0.1 of bitcoin? You just double click and it works and it connects to the network and and that's it, you know? So but I I would I I think the there's a saying that the org chart of a of a company reflects the product. It's like who builds it changes what you're building. So I think we're building something that can feel different, that can be different, that can act different, that does not compete on the same level.
If we try to make all of our, apps look exactly like, you know, what what, you know, Bank of America does or whatever, then I feel like we're we're totally doing going the wrong route. We can build these really unique open source things that because open source works differently, different people show up there with different time horizon, with different goals. We don't we're not gonna have tracking in there. There are just so many things that a company cannot do or will not do because it is a company, because it has to do as a business and all of these things. And open source has a lot more freedom in that respect. So I feel like we can there there there's, of course, some overlap, but there's also a difference. And I think we can lean into that difference. And it's not it's not exactly fighting the same battle, I would say. That's a good argument. I mean, the argument being
[01:25:55] Unknown:
that, like, regulatory burden, KYC, all that stuff adds all a shit ton of friction that self sovereign Bitcoin doesn't have.
[01:26:04] Unknown:
I'm I'm I'm much more optimistic than you than, Matt, I think, because I think we can absolutely build I'm an old man.
[01:26:13] Unknown:
I'm an old man in a young person's body.
[01:26:16] Unknown:
I think we can absolutely build, as good as, and if not better, self custodial products, actually. And I I've seen many things already that is approaching that. And I think it just takes again, you know, you have to not just have the, you know, the world's most brilliant minds when it comes to development and engineering and code involved. You have to bring the people that has the product sensitivity and the design skills and all of those, abilities that have benefited the custodial, companies. Right? They've been, that that's an evolution, over decades, in web 2 and what have you. Right? Like, super smooth and these kind of mega scale social products. You know?
And if you apply the same skills and, you know, pluck out some of the best people, and those that are passionate about the self custodial way, I think we can absolutely do it. It comes down to, obviously, product choices. And that's why I think it's really important to have many, many more builders and many, many more products in the space because that's that's the way you get better things, right, more competition, and that can also lead to more, specialized products. You know, we have so many wallets that are what I call generalized wallets. It's like it's it's like the the, you know, the bank that can do everything or or nothing well. Right? I think in in sort of Fintech, in TradFi Fintech these days, you have so many specialized products, and we haven't seen that yet in Bitcoin. Right? It's it's very much still it's like, oh, you know, you can you can use this wallet for storing $10 of Bitcoin or 10,000, which normally would be very different products. And I think we haven't quite seen that yet. And the more specialized you get, the more precise you can be in your product design choices, you know, the way it works, and you can make some trade offs that works better. So I I I'm I'm much more optimistic. I think we can definitely get there. And the whole, you know, not having to do KYC on the way in is so nice.
You can literally have the wallet ready to go, you know, in seconds. And then you have to spend more time maybe on education and and those sort of things. But in terms of the complications in setting up an account, it's already better. So I think we'll get there. I think we'll get there. We just need more people, more brilliant minds working on this.
[01:29:01] Unknown:
Let's fucking go. Well, I appreciate your optimism. I, guys, this has been a great rep. Before we get to final thoughts, like, what is the best way for people to support Bitcoin Design Community, Bitcoin Design Foundation?
[01:29:20] Unknown:
Also, as of a few days ago, we actually also accept Bitcoin. So there we go. It wasn't it wasn't possible for some time. So bitcoin designer foundation.org.
[01:29:28] Unknown:
Fucking time, Christophe.
[01:29:31] Unknown:
Yeah. Because we we do use open collectives, so we kinda rely on them, but they found a way to do it. So bigkindesignfoundation.org is the place to find the foundation, and in there, there should be a link to donate. So check that out. And we have not we actually have an announcement for the bitcoin donation stuff. It's so new. We haven't even announced it, quite yet. Awesome. Follow the Twitter and Nostra accounts for the Bitcoin design community, and
[01:30:03] Unknown:
you'll you'll see that. What if what if what if you're a designer that wants to contribute?
[01:30:11] Unknown:
What wanna take that one?
[01:30:13] Unknown:
The best thing is to, hop in your browser, go to bitcoin.design. That's the sort of web home of the community. You you got the link to to join the Discord there, which is a great place. Just come in there and say hi. Say what you're interested in, and we'll we'll we'll guide you to something. Every week, there are calls going on, so you can just join one of those, see what it's about, you know, lurk around, listen, ask questions. We have a calendar you can sign up to to to see what calls are coming up. And then, of course, there's there's the guide, which is bitcoin.design/guide. You know, if you're interested in just getting into designing products or see what what flows are are are there or, you know, the reference wallets, which we encourage everybody to just take and improve and, you know, build upon. It's it's, they're meant as a starting point, not just like, you know, you have to do x. Right? Like, it's take this, and this is your new zero instead of you starting where everybody else had to start, you know, 4 years ago.
And Bitcoin Design is the best
[01:31:20] Unknown:
place. And I'll add 2 two events that are coming up. So in 8 days, May 16th is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Most Bitcoin applications do not have great accessibility. So we're organizing a workshop where people can learn how to test applications for accessibility and file these issues. For developers, there's also a bit of a talk there about how to work on it, fix this stuff. We had it last year. It got great reception. Mostly developers actually showed up, which was awesome. So we're gonna do that again. That's May 16. Tried to take that day, Do something about accessibility. You know, people are gonna appreciate it. Those quiet people who who have problems with these things. Well, if you're blind, you're fucked. Right? Like, how do you use Bitcoin if you're blind?
You know, most applications are actually the accessibility features of smartphones are actually really good, but they're usually not implemented in the right way. Speak the commands? Correct. Yeah. It's like you you use a very it's it's almost like an API that you make available to the code where you can just navigate through each of the elements 1 by 1 and it the screen reader reads out what it is that you're looking at. And if, let's say, you have an icon in there that doesn't have a label, then it just says button. Right? And you don't know what it is or what it does. Right? So there's a lot of very simple stuff.
Like, there's one wallet where the there's one button to access your transaction history. That button is not selectable. No blind user can access your transaction history in that wallet. I'm not gonna say what it is, but very easy stuff to fix. So let's take May 16, find this stuff, maybe fix a few things. That'd be great. And then we're organizing a design track at the BTC Prague Hack Day on June 12th. So join us there. It's gonna be we're gonna have a design lounge. We're gonna do all kinds of fun hacky design.
[01:33:06] Unknown:
Chris, Doug, do you have the number of blind adults?
[01:33:11] Unknown:
I do not.
[01:33:12] Unknown:
No. Okay. So you just discriminate under 14, but not blind people?
[01:33:17] Unknown:
Correct.
[01:33:19] Unknown:
Because they should be able to use it. I had to ask They they should have a UTXO.
[01:33:23] Unknown:
A a 12 year old blind child should be able to use Bitcoin, in my opinion. That's our goal. I agree. Yep. We're gonna I'm and and I'm not trying to discriminate against 11 year olds. They should also I don't know. There's always a number. Okay. And then one last thing. Okay. So you're a developer. You have no design skills whatsoever. How does the develop how should the developer get, involved?
[01:33:52] Unknown:
Pretty much same thing. So, bitcoin dot design is a good start. If you just wanna kind of, you know, sneak on some designs, you know, compare your onboarding flow with with what's in there, you can do that. Just take what what what you what you seem appropriate. And if you have questions that don't seem to be answered, you know, jump in the Discord again with a question or or join one of the calls or even set up a design review for your product. Right? Free feedback. It's, friendly. It's, you know, no no expectations really. Like, if if you if you're open to to feedback, you'll get it. And it's it's normally enlightening, I think. You know? Even, you know, doesn't matter how much you think you've honed it, or, you know, figured it out. It's there's always it's always good to meet people for the first time that encounter your product and and try to kind of reason about it. So, yeah, that's what I would recommend.
[01:34:56] Unknown:
And I would say we're trying to to break that there are no there's no wall between design and development. There's also project managers and illustrators and animators and illustrators and animators and translators and QA testing and all kinds of people and just people who review code and make sure everything's clean and and and solid of this stuff. Like, we're all in this together. You know? It's called the Bitcoin Design Community because it has a focus,
[01:35:19] Unknown:
but that doesn't mean it's it's exclusive. We're all trying to achieve the same thing, I think. I agree. We're all in this together. I will say also that COVID kinda ruined that phrase for me. But I'd I fundamentally, we are all in this together. And if we want our grandkids to live in a world of freedom, and we want future generations to live in a world of freedom, then it comes down to people actually fucking doing things. So freaks keep doing things. Get the shit done. Because if not you, who the fuck's gonna do it? Guys, this has been great.
I wanna do a huge shout out to Moe, your partner in work. I met her in Costa Rica at a Human Rights Foundation retreat, and she really made sure to get across to me how important design was. I like to think that I was already, I I was already it was already near and dear to me. Like, I already realized design was important, but she really knocked some sense to me and was like, you gotta really care about this. And, you guys are lucky to have her as part of the community and and your partner in work. And, unfortunately, she couldn't join us today. But, it's important to shout her out.
And then also, I want to shout out the Rider Die Freaks who went through the difficulties of the live chat today. Going between Noster and Google and YouTube and and just and just literally going through the hoops with us, live on air. You guys do make the show unique. Without you, dispatch is just not dispatch. It's not it's not the same show. So thank you for participating with us. And huge shout out to the freaks who supported the show because we do not have ads. We do not have sponsors. Our top supporters this week was Nat Gas Immersion with a 100,000 sats. I wanna be clear. He gave a 100,000 sats last week, and then he gave a 100,000 sats this week. Massive, massive contribution. Appreciate it. Then we have guns at Gunson with a 121,000 stats.
Thank you, sir. We appreciate it. And then we have Kieran with 10,000 stats. He gave that yesterday before his site broke. It's completely unrelated to his site breaking. But, he does care. And if you haven't listened to the dispatch with Kieran, you should. Guys, before we wrap, I'd like to end it with final thoughts. Daniel, final thoughts.
[01:37:55] Unknown:
Optimism. I think, this is, endlessly exciting and unique and a good course and just fun. So I I I think, that's that's my final thought. You know, I'm I feel really happy to be working in this community and in this space. I think it's it's, you know, it's a kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity. So keep keep trying to build that, self custodial Bitcoin wallet product for for everybody in the world. That's sort of
[01:38:29] Unknown:
that's sort of my final thought. Damn right. Thank you, Daniel. Christophe, final thoughts. I've not much to add. Join the Bitcoin design community. Let's let's get hands on. Let's make it happen today, tomorrow.
[01:38:41] Unknown:
Let's fucking go. Thank you, Christophe. I wanna say to both of you guys, I appreciate what you guys do. It's important. Don't get, trodden down too much. And, if if there's anything I can do to help, don't hesitate to reach out. You guys both have my private contact info. I will specifically say I really like what the Bitwise ETF did in terms of, their donation structure, which was a 10 year donation structure. 10% of profits. Split between 3 orgs. HRF, Brink, and OpenSets. And I would love, you know, for us to have these kind of long term reoccurring things that also include the Bitcoin Design Foundation. I think that would be awesome for everyone involved. I think it's absolutely integral. I think design is one of those things that, people don't find sexy. They don't find spicy. They don't think it's necessarily that important.
But it it is it is absolutely, integral to it, to what we're building towards, which is easy to use, freedom focused product, and projects. That would not be possible without good design. So thank you guys for focusing so much on that and, consider me an asset and a friend.
[01:40:03] Unknown:
Well, thanks for everything you do. I know you're you're you're you're fighting every day. You're doing a 1000000 different things. Yeah. Well, thank you guys for joining. And, I would like to make this reoccurring. Can we make this like a reoccurring,
[01:40:15] Unknown:
maybe quarterly or something? It's like, what's going on in design? Like, we need to talk about it. Can we do that? Awesome. Totally. Sounds good. Fuck, yeah. And we'll maybe we'll bring we should try and bring Moe in next time. Like, that would be fucking awesome. Yep. Okay. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Freaks. You guys are all the best. Peace.
[01:41:09] Unknown:
Again. They've always been so kind, but now they've brought you away from here. Like this before. We don't talk about it. Dance up, I'll kill the boogie all night long. Stone and
[01:45:50] Unknown:
Love you freaks. That track was Stolen Dance by Moki Chance. It just felt relevant with the time thieves among us. Stop stealing our money. Stop stealing our wealth. Stop stealing our time. We see you. We're noticing. Don't do that. Freaks. I, remembered, yesterday's end track. Yesterday's music track, which is Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young at Wembley Stadium doing Ohio, in 1974. That was their encore track. That was the last track they played of the whole set. It's on YouTube. The full set's on YouTube. I have it now downloaded. I cut out Ohio.
Listen to it. It's a great set. It's pretty crazy that we can listen to sets from 1974, and watch them and actually see how the people reacted and how they enjoyed it. To me, that is, like, that is fucking cool. And it's part of the reason why I do still dispatch, is because it's it's a time capsule. And now that we have Blossom, now that we have Noster, it's an immutable time time capsule where you know it's not changed by AI in the future, which is really cool. Guys, I got a great week planned for us. Well, tomorrow's a wrap up whole recap, which happens every week.
Very excited about it. I'm not very ex I'm I'm excited about it. Just generally excited about it. It'll be a good rip. And then next week, Wednesday, 1700 UTC, we have Hong Kim, CTO and cofounder of Bitwise, will be joining me live in the studio in Nashville, at Big Horn Park. So that'll be an in person rep, which are always extra fun. And then Friday well, Thursday, probably around 1800 UTC. I I haven't confirmed with Marty yet. We'll be a rapid recap. And then Friday, 1700 UTC, we'll be with Matt Hill of Start 9, and we'll be talking about Start 9, the company, and StartOS, the free and open source self hosting focused Linux distro, which I think, like, at this point, like, self hosting is more important than ever if you've been watching this regulatory environment.
And StartOS is one of the best ways for you to do self hosting regardless of what it is, whether that's Bitcoin or other things. So I know myself, I I'm running a StartOS box. You can buy a box from them, but I I'm actually I built my own It's like the Maserati of self hosted server boxes. It's running right next to me right now. Fans are whirring. But, yeah, that would be a good rip. So I'm pretty excited about the the next week of rips. But I just wanted to thank you, Freaks. You guys are awesome. You keep me going. You give me hope. You give me inspiration.
I can't do anything without you guys. Like, you guys are the the router, so thank you, and stay on plus tax ads. Peace.
Mallers Intro
Introduction to Bitcoin Wednesday and Citadel Dispatch
Conversation on open source design, specifically Bitcoin design
Importance of user experience design in Bitcoin adoption
Discussion on the Bitcoin Design Foundation and its goals
Challenges and importance of design standards for Bitcoin projects
Impact of privacy-focused design in open source projects
Discussion on increasing donor support for Bitcoin design projects
Process for project review and improvement suggestions by the Bitcoin design team
Encouraging designers to contribute to projects
Discussing the disconnect between designers and developers in project implementation
Importance of collaboration between designers and engineers for product development
Importance of unity and collective action during challenging times like COVID
Acknowledgment and appreciation for the contribution of Mo to the community
Recognition and gratitude towards dedicated supporters of the show
