Citadel Dispatch

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EPISODE: 71

BLOCK: 745126

PRICE: 4726 sats per dollar

TOPICS: bitcoin payments, lightning, liquid, fedimints, tradeoffs, merchant adoption, circular economy, building in bitcoin

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[00:00:31] Unknown:

Happy Bitcoin Friday, freaks.   It's your boy, Odell,   here from the studio for another Citadel Dispatch.   Got a great group of guests here. I'm really excited about it. But before we get there, I wanna thank all the freaks who continue to support the show. Keep it ad free and sponsor free. Focused purely on actionable discussion.   The show wouldn't be possible without you.   The easiest way to support the show is through podcasting 2 point o apps, like fountain podcast, Breeze,   and Podverse dotfm.   You simply   install the app. Podverse is actually a website that you can use in the browser, load it up with sats, search Siddle dispatch,   press subscribe,   pick how many sats per minute you think the show is worth, and then as you listen,   the sats stream directly to my node. It's pretty fucking cool.  

I see,   almost every minute of every day, I see sats streaming into my node, and it's extremely empowering, and   I just I love you all. Thank you.   I also wanna thank all the freaks who continue to join us in the live chat. Dispatch is broadcast via Twitter, Twitch,   YouTube, and Bitcoin TV.   If you use Twitter, Twitch, or YouTube, you can participate in the live chat from there. If you use Bitcoin TV, you can participate through our matrix chat, which you can find   at sildispatch.com.   It's been a long day. Sorry, freaks.   So,   also,   you can support the show via Pay NIM. My Pay NIM is Odell or the BTC pay server located at sill dispatch.com,   all through Bitcoin,   which makes this all possible.  

If you don't have Sats to spare, I know it is a bear market and potentially a global macro recession.   It really does help if you subscribe in your favorite podcast app, potentially leave a review.   And but I did forget,   there is another feature on podcasting 2.0 called boostograms.   And if you do a boostogram, it's a one time payment, and you're able to attach a message.   As always, I will read,   the 4 highest boostograms,   that we received on the last episode.   If   you don't hear yours read or you're curious on what other ones are there, you can actually look up all the Boostograms,   via fountain podcasts.  

The top one was from Mallard   Quackenbush.   40,000 sats. He says, these conversations about Bitcoin privacy make me nervous.   I wonder if perhaps there's some merit to Monero. I love it if you could get into the Bitcoin versus Monero debate one day. I'm finding Seth's unrebudded contentions   increasingly persuasive, to be honest.   Okay. Well, thank you for using lightning to show Monero on the show and support it.   We have Chad Farrow,   33,000   sats, saying keep up the great work.   We have   Nomad Joe with 4,000 sats saying quality content, and we have Kaz Peland   saying,   like the open source splits.  

Yes. That's a good reminder.   When you support dispatch,   you also support,   some of the the best open source projects in the space, including RaspiBlitz,   Robosats,   Seed Signer, Sparrow Wallet, and Zeus. They all get direct splits to their note as well as you support the show, which is pretty fucking cool.   And I've been told by a lot of the podcasting 2 point o devs that I added too many splits, but I like to push limits. So it is what it is. Seems like they're coming through.   Okay. So with all that said, we have a great group of people in the studio.   It's been a really fun,   week,   very special week at Bitcoin Park here in Nashville. So I got some of the guys in here,   for this rip.  

We're gonna be focusing on Bitcoin payments, but I think this is gonna be a more wide reaching discussion.   For starters, we have   UTXO   club here,   return guest on the show even though he changed his handle. Am I allowed to say what Oh, yeah.   Cohen joiner was the old one. Yeah. He's, he's the lead maintainer of Satsail. He was on,   our crowdfunding   dispatch, so dispatch 57.  

[00:04:47] Unknown:

Welcome to Nashville. It's good to have you here. Thank you very much. It's so awesome here. If anyone's thinking about checking out Bitcoin Park, I highly recommend it.   You can make a pilgrimage like I have from  

[00:04:57] Unknown:

all over the world, and it's, yeah, it's awesome. It's incredible to see what's going on here. So, yeah, thanks for having me, Freaks. I got to meet him for the first time, what, 2 days ago. I got very excited, but he surprised me. He didn't tell me.   Yeah.   We also have returned guest Wiz in the house.  

[00:05:14] Unknown:

We got one guy from Australia, one guy from Tokyo. How's it going, Wiz? Hey. What's up, Matt? Thanks for having me on the show again. It's a pleasure to be back here in Nashville at the world famous Bitcoin Park, which, of course, is much better than, any other   park.  

[00:05:32] Unknown:

Wow. Really huge endorsement. Thank you.   I guess everyone's a return guest. We have return guest,  

[00:05:39] Unknown:

Michael from Oshi. How's it going, Michael? This is going great. It's awesome to be back. This is, like, Nashville Bitcoin   community magnet here.  

[00:05:48] Unknown:

It kinda pulls me away every now and again. So Yeah. I love it. Very good. You and your ladies seem to be constant,   constant guests over here, and I I love to see it. I wanna see it more. That's right.   And we have,   the famous chain surveillance guy, Ben Decarment. How's it going, Ben? Ben?  

[00:06:06] Unknown:

Doing well. Just happy to be in the park and talk about chain surveillance.  

[00:06:10] Unknown:

Where'd you find your love for chain surveillance?  

[00:06:13] Unknown:

I started working with Sabi, like, 3 years ago.   It's been  

[00:06:18] Unknown:

a hell ever since. We started off spicy, but, the the joke is that Ben said he's gonna quit his job at the Bitcoin company if they add chain surveillance. So,   he's now the chain surveillance guy.   So, guys,   I don't know where we wanna start. We have a great crew here.   As always, freaks, feel free to put your questions in the chat,   your comments in the chat. We will,   bounce off of them and,   respond to them as they come.   I'd like to start with,   Wiz. Wiz,   you made some big announcements here. I don't know which ones you want to be public, but you wanna share the ones that that are to be public?  

[00:06:57] Unknown:

Oh, yeah.   So we had this really cool   meet up last night at Bitcoin Park about,   would you say, like, 200 people attended the Nashville Bitcoin? More than that. Maybe 250. It was packed and,   did a nice talk where we announced that, Menpell Space is going to be adding a lightning explorer   among other really cool features, which   we will, I guess, go into detail probably a little bit later in the in the show maybe if we have time. But, yeah. That's, lightning. I I mean, I I don't know. What what do you guys think? Is lightning cool? Do you use it for payments? Like  

[00:07:35] Unknown:

It's alright. Sorry. I thought there was an interesting thing that you said about,   how you view,   the mempool project,   where you said that it it's it's gonna cover all layers of of Bitcoin. So you have layer 0, which you consider mempools around the world, and then layer 1 is on chain,   and then layer 2 is lightning and liquid, and then potentially some kind of layer 3 support in the future. You add that as many layers as there are, mempool will be an explorer for.  

[00:08:07] Unknown:

Yeah. It's always been the stated mission of the mempool open source project   to help the Bitcoin community transition into this multilayer   ecosystem   and to   be able to implement a multilayer but, basically, the 1st multilayer explorer where, for example, if you're viewing a transaction on mempool space and it's identified as the funding channel or closing channel for a lightning explorer,   then you're gonna be able to just click on that and be taken to the   lightning explorer portion of the mental space website where you'll be able to see details on the   node or channels or   whatever else,   you wanna explore in that second layer. Yeah.  



[00:08:49] Unknown:

Fuck yes.  

[00:08:54] Unknown:

What yeah. Go on. Yeah. So with with, like, when you're adding that sort of lightning stuff that, like, anyone can see, what's a channel open or a channel close,   Do you have any, like, concerns   that that's sort of,   decreasing user privacy a little bit, or is it sort of like,   that privacy was already broken? It's just that you're sort of democratizing it and making it sort of,   understandable for everyone that their privacy might be bad in sec sense situations.  

[00:09:21] Unknown:

Oh, we're not visualizing anything that's not already public. Right? Right. That's a good question. It's just that maybe there aren't so many lightning explorers out there yet, and that's why people might think that lightning   is very, very private when actually most of it is entirely public. Right? Mhmm. For example, you can see the entire graph of the network. You can see all of the nodes. And if they're not   tour only nodes, you can also see their IP addresses, which you can then resolve to   geographical locations and city names and see what ISP or hosting providers that the nodes are on. And then you can, you know, just start to connect all of the information and   visualize it on a website for everyone to easily explore. And so it's not that everything   is,   suddenly not private anymore. We're just making a cool website where you can explore it on your own. And, of course,   you'll be able to you you already have all of this data inside your own Bitcoin node, inside your own lightning node. We're just giving you this,  

[00:10:22] Unknown:

web interface that indexes everything and presents it in a in a slick UI. So we could be good for users. They can check out their own privacy. Like, they can see that maybe their UTXOs might be linked to their IP address if they're running,   a clear net lightning node.   And then they can sort of, you know, see which transactions are linked to that IP and sort of make decisions and try and improve their setup based around that.  

[00:10:48] Unknown:

Absolutely. Of course, if you're going for a private node, then you probably wanna stick to Tor only.   I'm I mean, if you have a clear net node, then, yeah, you're gonna be connecting it to all of your on chain transactions  

[00:11:01] Unknown:

and see what city someone's in. What do you think, Ben? You're a chain analysis expert. I I think it's really smart because, like, like like, chain analysis has talked about how they're doing, like, lightning   analysis. So, like, we know they're doing it already.   But, like, there's no real tool to, like, show a user, like, this is what they can see. It's like you can it's easy to go to, like,   like, mental space and see, like, oh, look. I can just keep clicking on these transactions and go back and see your whole history. And, like, look. Now I see you have 3 Bitcoin or whatever. But, you can't really do that with Lightning today. You can maybe go on Amboss space and, like, kind of see it, but it's a little tricky. And it's not as clear versus like when you have a directly linked in multiple space. You're like, here's a transaction I can click. Here's your lightning note, and I see you have this much capacity and all this stuff. So it really lets you, like, break down to, like, a simpler user. Like, this is your, like, threat model and all that stuff. So I think it's smart. And, like, I know, like, personally,   I was I like I remember tweeting at you guys, like, we're gonna add a feature like this because it'd be cool. Because,   Dustin, who works on Core Lightning, was doing splicing and he was like he's like that. He's like, I did want to main that. And I saw you tweeted out the transaction, like, oh, I want to see the channel.  

Like, where's that on lightning? And, like, you know, I found the I had to, like, mainly calculate the channel ID and then type it into, like, one ml. And that's, you know, it's a nightmare versus, like, you have a one click button, which is super cool on mempool.  

[00:12:20] Unknown:

And I would just say perhaps kinda democratizing this would maybe hinder the chain analysis   chain analysis company themselves because it's like, hey. Like,   you're over here doing it   yourself. Like, they wouldn't have some sort of, like,   monopoly on that.  

[00:12:37] Unknown:

Is that is that fair to say? Right. I I mean, even further than that, I mean, the the cool thing about mempool to me is that it is this open source project. Right? So   you have mempool, the open source project, and then you have mempool.space,   which is Wiz's mempool that he hosts on his servers. Right? And the mempool open source project, you can actually run on all these different node projects relatively easy, even including, like, the really easy ones, like the umbrells and the start nones. And you just, like, press install, and then it just uses your own node, and you get all that data in an easy to visualize way. Like, that data,   like, Wizz didn't create that data. That data is already there. He's just providing you a tool that you can view it on your own terms and know what kind of data you're leaking.  

Because I actually had   a a similar   concern as the first thought I had when   when he was doing the presentation, which, by the way, was a fucking awesome presentation. I've seen a lot of your presentations. You're you're getting better. This is one of the best ones.   Was I was like, oh, shit. Like, it literally   because you have everything integrated there, you you can see the channel open. You can click into it. You can see the UTXO history. You can go through all the things. And the first thing is, obviously, you think of privacy. Right? But that information is already there, so it's good that users are able to actually visualize it and see what kind of data they're leaking. Because when you're talking about, specifically, digital privacy, the first step to improving your digital privacy is understanding what you're leaking, what data is out there in the first place so you can actually try and improve it. Right?  

[00:14:00] Unknown:

It's also really interesting to see that, project by Tony that actually doxes all of the private lightning channels, which are obviously not Yeah. Did you see he's in the comments saying that you should you should integrate his,  

[00:14:12] Unknown:

channel probing into,   Mempool?  

[00:14:15] Unknown:

Oh, yeah. We will. We totally will.  

[00:14:17] Unknown:

Is this a sly run of our way to starve chain analysis?  

[00:14:21] Unknown:

Could it be? I'm just stuck on that thought right now. I don't think so because I think chain analysis, like, the number one thing these chain surveillance firms offer regulated companies is basically to wash their hands of of different liabilities. So they they want to have, like, a company filled with suits that say, like, oh, we're we're watching for   for criminal activity, or we're watching for whatever.   So they they basically want that stamp of approval as one of the key things of of why chain surveillance companies have grown and and thrived in this space, I think. Would it be better for more of these companies to sprout up,   Like, maybe off the back of the work that you're doing? Or, I I mean No. We don't want more chain surveillance companies. I I will say, though, that chain surveillance companies are historically a massive black box, and we they don't let you use their tools. A lot of times, you can't even,   like, just pay for it on the website and use it. They actually want you to, like, call up their sales representative and fully docs yourself to them to to get access to those tools. So the more open source tools we have that allow us to visualize this data, I think, is a significant improvement.  

But the more black box chain surveillance companies we have is   you know, I I would like to see a world   where user privacy on Bitcoin becomes   so so easy, so accessible  

[00:15:40] Unknown:

that these $1,000,000,000 valuations for chain surveillance companies become like a laughing stock. Like, people are like, wow. How the fuck were they ever worth this much? Right? Yeah. That's I guess that's kind of the point. I'm I'm not a shit house to show. I'm like Yeah. We got 2 of them on the pod. Oh, I'm kinda I'm kinda just talking about, like, if there's more of them, there's less of a chance to have some massive one. Right. Maybe it'll all just, like, wash out because, like, it's open for everyone. It's like like what BTC pay did the bit pay you're trying to make that but with mempool. Yeah. I mean, that's this. But I don't think mempool space is related to chain analysis. Alright. I mean, it's it's a block explorer. It's not a chain analysis tool. It doesn't it it doesn't reach any conclusions. Right? We're not saying that something is  

[00:16:21] Unknown:

related to this or, you know, we're not doing clustering analysis. We're not we don't maintain our own centralized databases of, like, docs addresses or anything like that.   The only thing we actually identify is, like, mining pools, which is also public data. Mhmm. So I would consider mempool space a privacy tool or,   you know, chain analysis tool. It's just an explorer, and it's an open source self hosted explorer. That's the main goal. Right? It doesn't really   compete with any,   advanced,   tools out there that actually do clustering and and, you know, try to make these conclusions and and point fingers, basically. Right? You're not you're not tagging addresses as, like, this is possibly  

[00:17:03] Unknown:

this exchange. Even though it might be obvious in some cases, you're not putting that sort of, like I think some of the Shitcoin,   Block Explorers do that, like EtheScan.   They'll, like, label,   an address as, like, this belongs to this person or this this developer or this hacker or whatever it is,   which is dead, horrible for privacy.  

[00:17:23] Unknown:

Yeah. The only addresses we tag are the the public mining pool,   coinbase   tags and payout addresses. And the reason we, maintain the database of those is to   facilitate our mining dashboard and get statistics for the mining, which is directly related to the mempool and the blockchain. Right? So it's more of a part of the network explorer itself, not any chain analysis or anything like that.  

[00:17:48] Unknown:

I'm aware of the quality of the live chat has dropped tremendously in the studio, but I don't think that's the case for everyone watching.   If it is,   let us know in the chat,   if the quality just dropped significantly for you.   We are going through some growing pains here at the park. It is a very new project.   So as a result, we're learning as we go. It does look bad   on yours too, but you're on the same Wi Fi as me. Yeah. I'm on a LTE.   Oh, fuck. Okay. Well, that's not great. Well, Tony says information wants to be free. Oh, it looks like that. Yeah. Does it say ones?   Okay. So so   and, also, if your if your pattern if your name is pattern in the matrix chat, you have to uncheck,   the option,   that says only encrypt to verified   devices because, otherwise, no one can   no one can see what you're saying.  

Okay. So let's talk let's let's switch gears a little bit. Somehow,   chain surveillance became the main topic here.   Michael, you obviously are focused,   massively on on trying to create this circular economy for Bitcoin,   just, like, grassroots Bitcoin adoption where people spend Bitcoin rather than sell Bitcoin, and they earn Bitcoin rather than,   buy Bitcoin.   How how do you feel about, like, the current state of of that progress there? Do you because last time you were on, I felt like there was a lot of momentum. Do you feel like it stalled a little bit with the the price crash?  

[00:19:28] Unknown:

No. I I actually   I think Ibex kinda speak to this too. Like, we're we're kinda seeing, like, an increase in interest, oddly enough.   But also there's an increase in outreach by the Greater Bitcoin   community. Like, going to the farmers markets, like, going out and, like, talking to business owners, that's becoming,   like, a torch that, like, everybody's, like, carrying right now. And,   so, I mean, I I think that's really good. I'm not really seeing a slowdown.   I'm just seeing it as a great opportunity to, like, whether the business is looking at it as, like, a DCA   opportunity,   or to acquire some Bitcoin or just to acquire new customers. I   I think it's still moving forward. I don't think the wind is out of the sails in the slightest.  

And most,   most of these business owners, like, don't really pay attention to anything Bitcoin anyway. So, like, there's no bear market for them. It's like,   I don't know. So I was, like, hearing really about it for the first time anyway. So That's awesome. Yeah.  

[00:20:26] Unknown:

Yeah. So, I mean, the other day, we had,   during the meetup, when we had 250 people here, we had 3 different,   merchants on premise accepting Bitcoin.   We had a   family coffee operation. They were awesome.   We had a local burger place, and we had   cocktails out of an Airstream mobile bar.  

[00:20:49] Unknown:

I believe you offered Oshii rewards for for all the merchants or some of the merchants? Yeah. So Ibex actually, like, sponsors some of that. So, yeah, all of them. There's, like, 21% sets back or something just as an incentive for people to, like, spend Bitcoin. But for people, most of the people, like, there's a   solid Bitcoin community here in Nashville.   People, like,   the last month I was here, was it last month?  

[00:21:14] Unknown:

He's here so often he doesn't remember when. There were there were, like, double  

[00:21:18] Unknown:

I think double or triple the the lightning transactions   that there were the previous month for the the slide hustle. Right. That's right.   And this month, I think there is even more,   without even most people knowing about   at all. Yeah. Most people weren't even using those sheet. They had no idea it was even like, I was busy doing other stuff. I I'm not very good at shilling. But You're pretty good at it. Am I? Am I getting better? I mean, you're always selling all the time. Okay. Good. But we got some of them set up. But   with Ivex, some people were, like, just using their Lightning wallet. More and more people in the in the community are coming prepared to to pay with Lightning.  

So,   yeah, just really bullish on that.  

[00:22:00] Unknown:

The businesses really loved it too. Have you noticed, like, a lot of people   pay specifically from strike?   That's gotta be a phenomenon that's been increasing a lot lately, I think.  

[00:22:12] Unknown:

Yeah. And we're spoiled in the United States to have strike,   you know, like, in Australia or wherever. Like, we   don't have they don't have that.   So they have to download a lighting wallet, and they have to load it up with Bitcoin, and they have to go through that. But with Stripe, you know, you can give your personal   information,   and you can,   do this. But if you're already using debit or credit cards, you know, it's really no different, but you can now interface in the lighting   on the the Bitcoin economy.  

[00:22:44] Unknown:

Yeah. Yeah. Do you think when you, like, when you guys think about Outreach, like,   is   there's obviously a fundamental difference between using sovereign Bitcoin,   holding your own keys, using your own node, and paying with Bitcoin versus using a regulated product like Strike,   where you're essentially spending fiat on Bitcoin payment rails.   And a lot of times, I mean, the merchant might be receiving fiat on their side too.   Is is there   is it part of the same movement, or is it is there 2 different techniques when we think about that? Like, are we  

[00:23:21] Unknown:

I think it's a part of the same movement.   But I don't know. It's a blessing and a curse in Australia that we don't have strike. Like, it makes it harder for people to get on board it, but it also means that if they are gonna get onboarded, they're usually,   using one of these no KYC apps,   which is definitely the sort of a spectrum there. You can go from, like, you know, the full self custody, running your own node, and having, like, a lightning wallet on your phone   through the, sort of the intermediate ones, like,   World of Satoshi, where it's still custodial, but I think all you need to give them is an email address,   which is pretty awesome. And then it goes to,   the full custodial one, like, strike where you need to do KYC. Right?  



[00:24:00] Unknown:

Yeah. I I just look at it, like, everyone comes into Bitcoin. Most you know, I came into Bitcoin, like, from Coinbase.   I mean, like, I didn't know what the hell is going on, and I became progressively more self sovereign. And I think getting those early touch points and whatever means possible, but constantly, like, striving to make people more self sovereign and give the businesses and the consumers more options and making it easier for them to choose the more self sovereign option is I'm just really bullish on that. I'm, like, just really bullish on that. I think they're definitely part of the same movement too because, like, even if, like, you never use Stripe, if you hate Stripe, they still help you as a Bitcoin or they're increasing lightning liquidity. They're contributing to, like, LND and other open source projects. Like, you know, they're they're making lightning easier to use  

[00:24:44] Unknown:

even for non strike users. So, like, it's a net benefit to everyone. I think you can compare it to the, Chivo wallet in El Salvador. Right? I mean, it's totally backdoored by the it's operated by the government, not even backdoored by the it's, full KYC,   But it does   introduce people to using SATs as a unit of account and  

[00:25:03] Unknown:

the ability to send But strike doesn't use SATs as a unit of account.  

[00:25:08] Unknown:

Right. But, I mean, if if your merchant   displays the menu in SATs. Right, if you have the coffee is a 100000 sats or whatever, then   you'll get introduced to Bitcoin   using this new,   payment rails. So just because you're not necessarily,   you know, self hosting your own lightning node, you're using somebody else's node, that doesn't mean that you're still not getting onboarded onto the Bitcoin network. You're still not being educated about how lightning works. You're still   you know, you you everyone has to start somewhere. Right? And if you and if you start with strike, you can level up to your own lightning node later. But it's it's good to push people in that direction versus just using   American Express or a bank or something. Ask my favorite question.  



[00:25:52] Unknown:

Let's say the merchant is using IBEX, which is a custodial solution,   and the payee is using   strike, which is a custodial solution.   Is that a Bitcoin transaction?  

[00:26:06] Unknown:

Yes.  

[00:26:08] Unknown:

Does anyone disagree with that? It's a lightning payment.  

[00:26:12] Unknown:

It's a lightning transaction.  

[00:26:14] Unknown:

Okay. Are lightning transactions Bitcoin transactions? What is the they could be   usually, I get, like, a mixed bag on this answer.   It's sort of, like, abstracted  

[00:26:24] Unknown:

Bitcoin payment, I guess. Wizz rolled his eyes at me. I think, you asked me this the last time I was on. There you go. What was your answer?  

[00:26:32] Unknown:

I mean, we probably argued about it for 5 minutes. Okay. So I have another question. If you if you take Bitcoin   and you buy a Visa gift card with it and then spend the Visa gift card, are is that a Bitcoin transaction?  

[00:26:44] Unknown:

No.   Well, it's a Bitcoin transaction to buy the card, but, you know, when you shop at Starbucks or something. Are you spending Bitcoin, or are you selling Bitcoin and then spending fiat?   I would say you're selling.  

[00:26:57] Unknown:

This reminds me of Michael disagrees, I think.  

[00:27:00] Unknown:

So,   that this reminds me of the conversation that I had with the 6102 back in the day, about the website bitcoinonly.com.   Quite often, we had to   have very long discussions about what is or is not a Bitcoin transaction, what is a Bitcoin only transaction. And one of the questions came up, well, is liquid a Bitcoin transaction?   And 6102 would say No.   No.   It's an IOU. Of course.  

[00:27:25] Unknown:

I mean, Matt, you you know But I think I think 6102 would say strike is not a Bitcoin transaction, and you would also say gift cards aren't a Bitcoin transaction.  

[00:27:33] Unknown:

You know a lot about what 6102 would say. We're very like minded.   I agree.  

[00:27:39] Unknown:

I I think,   like, if the payment is being routed over the Lightning Network, whether it's going to an individual to a custodial service or a custodial service to a custodial service, I think that counts.   I think where it doesn't count if it's going from, like, let's say, we're not picking on strike, but, like, a strike consumer to a strike merchant.   And that is that is,   like, kind of an elephant in the room for me.   And I,   I I really, like, love what you're doing at Sadsel too because it's giving people more options. Because   let's say,   they have the absolute best intentions in the world, which I Jack Mallers does. I'm just saying yeah. He does. Right. I would I would back that too. Yeah. So let's assume that   getting, like, all of these major merchants with NCR on strike is wonderful.  

It's great for Bitcoin. You can use your Zeus, you know, wallet connected to your node over Tor. You can. Yes.   But the majority of people, that's a very, very small segment of the population that's gonna be doing that. The majority of people,   if there was incentives to use   Bitcoin at these NCR merchants,   would probably be using Stripe. So then that is literally just Stripe to Why would they probably be using Stripe? Because I I presume   deals with these merchants  

[00:28:59] Unknown:

that are using get more sats back if you use strike Yeah. Is what you're thinking? And so I think that's that's  

[00:29:06] Unknown:

that's gonna be challenging because now the consumers are gonna be incentivized to use strike above all other options because, theoretically, strike   in collaboration with, say,   you know, Blackhawk and and NCR merchants themselves will have the best deals because they are   strike to strike. And in which case,   why would why would the everyday user use anything else? And I that's not a lighting transaction. That's a Venmo. Well,   so that's a Venmo.  

[00:29:35] Unknown:

I mean, the current the current status quo, right, is like I mean, and you and you hear Jack talk about this a lot that he's he's competing with, like, the visas of the world. Right? He's competing with the the current payment rails.   If in the in the current in the current ecosystem, like, if if you're you have to use one of these approved,   payment providers,   to interact with the merchant terminal. Right? I think the big   change   with Stripe using, you know, this the Lightning Network and using this interoperable standard is that you can it doesn't matter that the merchant is a Strike merchant.   You can still pay from any wallet, any lightning support wallet. That could even be a Cash App wallet,   or it could be, you know, Moon or Zeus with your own node or something like that.  

That's amazing. Just Right. Which was never possible before,   in in the current payment rails.   I think there's probably a strong argument that they could could provide bigger incentives, at least soft incentives to use it.   I think there's also an argument, though, that on the sovereign side,   you get this privacy bonus   that Strike can never compete with. Right? So there is that incentive on the other side. There's also something that's kinda interesting, which is,   there's nothing to say that,   other wallets might not get Sats back as part of this process as well.   And if they do in that situation,   it   could turn into a monetization   scheme for wallets that aren't able to monetize currently. So, like, Moon, for instance,   is a wallet I talk about a lot. Zeus is a wallet I talk about a lot. Neither of them have clear monetization schemes right now.  

If they pay a merchant and that merchant gives them a kickback of of the processing fee, then all of a sudden those open source projects become sustainable and have a revenue stream that they never had before.  

[00:31:27] Unknown:

Just the only caveat there is because   Stripe has effectively,   I I presume, like, onboarded these merchants to their infrastructure, wouldn't they always have the advantage   of above all the other potential   wallets and everything? So therefore, Stripe would always have the higher incentives,   in which case, if if that is the play to get the masses and strike always had the highest incentives at the biggest merchants.  

[00:31:55] Unknown:

Well, you gotta you gotta think about incentives on both sides. Right? So it's not just incentives on the consumer side. What are strike's incentives? Right? And I Right. The way I kinda look at it is   strike is gonna make   the majority of the revenue on the merchant side.   So they want as much volume on the merchant side as possible, and they want as much volume not to use the Visa rails and the Apple Pay and all that shit. They want them to be using lightning so that volume goes   up. Right? So,   there is there is a decently strong incentive   for them to try and,   encourage Lightning payments across the board rather than just on their app. And you gotta remember, their app is is a KYC service.  

KYC just isn't only a privacy thing. It's also a friction point where you just have less users.   And then on top of that, even or you compare it to other KYC services, Cash App is,   you know, what? They have, like, 80,000,000 users or something like that,   significantly more than Stripe. They're the number one finance app in the app store.   There's a strong incentive for Strike to want to get that merchant adoption   through Cash App users. They're not gonna wanna alienate that.   But I I don't disagree with your concerns. I mean, that is obviously,   we we definitely don't want to see   a single provider,   becoming the dominant,   method for bet Bitcoin payments, because then it's more of the same. But I there's probably a soft incentive too on strike side   that they don't wanna see that either because it opens themselves. First of all, they might have decreased volume, but also it creates   their central point of failure. Right? Like, they have a bigger regulatory target on their back. And you kinda could see that on a smaller scale. I mean,   I still don't think people understand I know Michael does, but I I don't think people understand the significance   of   a one of the wealthiest countries in the world,   350,000,000 people having, you know, 40 to 60%   of of retail accepting Bitcoin,   compared to something like El Salvador, which is a country of 6,000,000 people.  

It's a developing country. They don't have as much wealth there.   But you saw the same thing kind   of looking from the outside in. My take on the the El Salvador thing is is there was an opportunity there for strike probably to be running the Chivo Wallet, to be running both sides for that transaction. Right? And why did they choose not to do that?   Right? Like, the direct short term incentive, the high time preference incentive would have been, oh, let's capture everything there. Right? Let's get as much revenue as possible.  

[00:34:37] Unknown:

Excellent counterpoint, which I fully subscribed to as well. Yeah. I'd  

[00:34:41] Unknown:

well, you mentioned I love talking Bitcoin with you. Really interesting. You said that,   an open source project like Moon Wallet implementing something like Satsback will give it a revenue stream and allow these,   open source projects to   essentially   monetize them   their their wallet code in an ethical way. And   that's a really interesting discussion. I for some reason, I thought Moon's business model was more about the Lightning Channel opening, closing. Maybe this is also similar to Phoenix Vault. Sure. I'm pretty sure Moon doesn't know what their business model is right now. And if on chain fees went up, they'd get wrecked.  

[00:35:16] Unknown:

Yeah. That's fair. But I know they're working really hard on v 2.  

[00:35:19] Unknown:

I think most Lightning Wallets are   trying to position themselves to get lots of users, and then,   they get all the liquidity. They get all the, demand for liquidity.   So when the user needs to open lightning channels, they get a cut of,   you know, Phoenix Wallet is probably the best example. Right. They're, like, routing fee, basically, model.  

[00:35:38] Unknown:

L the LSP model, liquids lightning  

[00:35:42] Unknown:

lightning service provider. Yeah. So if you send a 100,000 sats to your Phoenix Wallet, you get 99,000 sats, but it opened the channel. Right? And they kind of cover those fees. To be clear, that's moon with to use.  

[00:35:54] Unknown:

Thanks. Thanks, weird robot. I got to meet weird robot in person too, which was great.   He introduced me to himself to me with his government name, but I only know him by his nim. So just all the freaks out there, if you ever introduce yourself to me and we've interacted with your NIM and not your government name, that's the name you should introduce yourself with.   Because then I end up having, like, a 15 minute conversation with someone who I don't think I know, and then they tell me. She's just like feels like a rug pull. He's in the chat right now, actually. I know. That's why he said Moon with 2 o's. Just I think he was trolling me, but it's good to know that that it's, 2 u's there. Well, he's feeling you out. Yeah. Are you a true pleb or not?  

[00:36:34] Unknown:

On the, the panel at the meetup the other day, it was, feel the the finance guys are calling it man over and over, but   but they were doing an awesome job of orange filling people with it. The best is, meme pool dot space. Like,  

[00:36:47] Unknown:

I remember, listening to, I think it was Peter McCormick's podcast, and he had the Winklevoss twins on and they had just given us a grant and, Winklevoss twins. Like, oh, yeah. We just gave a grant to mempool.   And I was like,   oh, but I love those guys. But yeah.  

[00:37:02] Unknown:

On the,   open source wallet monetization stuff, like, you made a good point that LSPs are a good way, but there are other ways. Like, Breeze has, like, their little app store thing inside where you can go to, like, Bitrefill and a couple others, and I think they get kickbacks there. And as well as, like, Sparrow's monetizing now by implementing,   coin joint support with Samurai.   Like, there are other ways to do it without, like, hooking into these, like, KYC providers   and, like, you know, needing, like, volume. You can just, like, add services and stuff like that. So it is, like, possible to do it without these, you know, strikes of the world.  

[00:37:36] Unknown:

Yeah. I love the concept of the   these new monetization schemes that are are possible for open source projects,   because Bitcoin exists in the first place.   I think podcasting 2.0, which we obviously talk about all the time, is a perfect example of that where,   if I get   if I get streamed via Podcasting 2.0, not only,   does podcast index index.org,   which is a community project that competes with Apple's Podcast Index, get a cut, so they're sustainable.   But it actually opens up the door for open source   podcasting apps to to get revenue stream there without ads.   And the big one for me is antennapod, which is a project I absolutely love. It's it's the best FOSS open source,   podcasting app on on phones, and I know they're working on podcasting 2.0, but they've been in they've been developing that app for fucking years, and they've never made a cent. It's all been donations because   there was no way, no clear path to monetization there for them. And, obviously, the collaborative transaction services is another obvious one.  

I'm not necessarily sold on lightning routing fees being 1.   What about liquidity  

[00:38:47] Unknown:

routing? Meme. Yeah. You sold on   people providing liquidity  

[00:38:52] Unknown:

as as a It seems like a it's like a very   like,   like, it seems like something that gets driven down to near 0,   and I don't know   Well, sure. If the on chain transaction fee is only a few sats per v byte, how much are you gonna charge for a lightning routing payment? And I feel like part of it maybe is just how new everything is so that consumers are really educated.   But, like, I was I was standing next to Michael,   the other day. I mean, there's still a lot of pain points with lightning in general.   I was standing next to Michael the other day, and we were trying to,   he had set up a a tip jar, a static QR code, l and URL,   for the coffee shop. And first of all, not all wallets support lnurls, so, like, if you don't want them to use Stripe, they can't because it doesn't support lnurl.  

And I opened Breeze Wallet, and I paid with Breeze Wallet because   Breeze supported lnurl.   And remember, we looked at the fee, and the fee was that they charged me on it was, like, 1200 sets.   An on chain payment would have been cheaper for me in that situation.   And it was just,   I'm probably more of an educated consumer, but I imagine most are just paying higher fees, and they don't even realize they're paying higher fees. And the question is, okay, so when more wallets come out, more users are using it, they're more educated,   there's actually probably marketing focused around, you know,   not getting charged as much. Do those get driven down? And then we also have people like,   0 Fee Routing, whose whole routing node is is 0 fees,   and he makes money on liquidity providing. Right? Like, he'll he'll open a channel for you. So I'm not sure if, like, the business model of  

[00:40:34] Unknown:

Lightning liquidity and Lightning routing is necessarily fleshed out, and I feel like it's there's a lot of hype there in terms of I think it'll eventually go to 0 and then even, like, negative possibly, right, where people might pay you to use them for liquidity.   We saw this in many industries like the Internet now.   It used to be very expensive to connect to the Internet, but now you can literally go to any   cafe or restaurant and it's just free Wi Fi. And,   back in the day when   TV manufacturers used to have to pay web browser companies to put a web browser in the TV 1,000,000 of dollars,   it was all disrupted when one day Google just went to the TV companies and said, we will pay you to use Android, which contains a full web browser, which we already developed, because they want the default search engine to be Google or something. They want to surveil you. Exactly.  



[00:41:21] Unknown:

So Like, you you get Gmail for free because they read all your emails.   Right. And then what happens? Everyone uses Gmail. It works great. Yeah. And so maybe, Chainalysis  

[00:41:32] Unknown:

will start offering 0 fee lightning routing soon. Would you or actually, maybe they're already offering  

[00:41:37] Unknown:

it.  

[00:41:38] Unknown:

I feel like,   routing fees are gonna go down. I agree. But actually, I think that,   inbound liquidity is gonna stay at sort of something that's gonna cost,   especially due to the limited supply of Bitcoin.   There's all and you have to have real   unhypothenated   Bitcoin to have that inbound liquidity.   And if we expect lightning payments to sort of take over the world, then there's gonna be a huge surge in demand for that inbound liquidity.  

[00:42:08] Unknown:

But if you I mean, to to Wizz's point,   if my goal is to   sell your data   or spy on you,   there'd be an incentive for me to offer you   Discounted.   Discounted in inbound liquidity   to be able to see your whole payment flow.  

[00:42:26] Unknown:

Well, but, like, Lightning works in a way where you only know, like, the hops that you're routing. So   there's not much data you can concern like, discern from there. Like, Lightning does have problems, but   as a routing node, you don't have as much information as you do as, like,   someone who's, like, actually, like, you know, the receiving or sender kind of thing. I think there's a lot of, timing correlation attacks and,  

[00:42:49] Unknown:

you know, if your node peers with every other node and checks all of the potential,   routing capacity on every single node, you could see when it changes and then  

[00:42:58] Unknown:

kind of draw conclusions from that. Right? Well, I I mean, I had Tony on twice,   this past week because whenever Tony's in town, I try and have him on as much as possible.   And, you know, he's been attacking lightning notes, including my own privacy attacks.   And one thing he mentioned that was kinda interesting is that   there could become a market where okay. So   your payment goes through 2 routing nodes, and you control 1 routing node, and you wanna know the full payment flow. So you actually   pay stats.   There's, like, a business case that you pay stats to the other routing node to get more information,   which is kinda cool. I mean, dark, but cool.  



[00:43:35] Unknown:

Yeah. And,   I mean, from my perspective, right, like, again, I'm not gonna pick on Stryker Ibex because those are probably 2 of the products that I show the most for new consumers and new businesses.   Like, it it it is really great as an entry point. But   like you were saying, Wiz, I mean, I guess,   maybe,   like, I don't even think Ibex and Strike actually have a channel between one another, if I'm not mistaken.  

[00:43:59] Unknown:

Really? There's no way they don't. I  

[00:44:03] Unknown:

maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I misunderstood anyway, but we will get into it. But   but let's say They do. They just didn't tell Michael. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe there's a time correlation. So, like, Stripe could be like, hey. We know this user that paid this, and we know or, you know, whatever.   Maybe they don't know it went to Ibex. Right? Because they don't have a channel. Right? Let's see.   But   that data is valuable and Stripe could be like, yeah, this user, you know, hey. Do you have any matching, like, time stamps from here for this amount or whatever? And then they could basically sell each other data and figure out   things.  

You know, just food for thought.   What you're saying, I guess, with with Tony.   Right. You know, there's a there's a corporate level of that for sure, obviously.   So  

[00:44:48] Unknown:

Yeah. I mean, I think, specifically on the privacy side of Lightning, there's still a lot of work to be done. Tony was in the chat, earlier. You said, I thought your favorite question is,   are we even operating in an adversarial environment yet with lightning?   I would say to Tony,   I have many favorite questions.   Mhmm. So as as freaks know who listen to the podcast.  

[00:45:09] Unknown:

But Real quick. So we were talking about the tip jar thing. Yeah, hit us with the tip jar thing. Topher and Austin. Right. SATs4.tips.   It's really cool. There's a big SATs number 4. Number 4. Dot tips. Tips. Okay. And Another name that's hard to say on a podcast. Yeah. And and and just some clarification. Right? I think something went down on his end. But but,  

[00:45:31] Unknown:

and then he got it back up, and he had some channels open. Yeah. Just just to the freaks that are like, oh, Matt, you use Breeze to do it. Well, first of all, Breeze failed the first time.   Then we messaged him.   And I asked him if he needed inbound liquidity. So then I opened Zeus sent him inbound liquidity, but that channel failed. And I was, like, you should probably restart your node. Then he restarted his node, then I opened a channel to him, And then I paid for Breeze to make sure it still works. So just for the record there. Yeah. Still working things out. But like, he the beautiful thing about this is that there's some businesses in Austin  

[00:46:04] Unknown:

that are accepting Bitcoin. And the tip problem is a massive problem,   like the UX of it. Like, it's a big problem. And he just, like,   got to work,   and he just started doing it. And we're, like, collaborating on different things that we're we're all learning and, like so anyway, I just wanted to give, like, credit where credit's due to him. That's his product. Yeah. It's pretty cool. It's open source, I believe, as well. It it runs on the back of Alan Bits. Right? I believe so. Yeah. Which is also a great project.  

[00:46:30] Unknown:

And then just in general, like, so the Ibex payment terminals right now, they don't have a built in tipping. So, like, when you pay when you pay with a credit card, you're used to seeing   the constantly increasing percentages   that pop up, you know, like, oh, do you wanna keep   20, 25%, 30%. It's like they're always playing a mind game with you, I think. But Ibex doesn't have that, so it's just straight. And it's one of the biggest complaints I've seen with US merchants is it doesn't have that. And it kinda makes sense that it doesn't have it because in Latin America,   that tipping culture doesn't exist. Right? In the US, we decide that we're not gonna pay service people,   to live, so they have to rely on tips.  

So tips become almost required.   But I my understanding is the Ibex team is is releasing   a tip integration,   within the next couple of days, so that should probably at least make onboarding Ibex merchants interesting. And, also, the Ibex model is kinda interesting that it is custodial service, but their base level package, if you don't,   convert to USD, is no KYC, and they just   batch all your transactions and send it to you on chain at the end of the day and settle on chain,   which, you know, is maybe might be questionable from a regulatory perspective. We'll see. You know, you never know what the state wants to do. They kinda just do it.   But until then, like, that's a pretty pretty cool trade off balance, I feel like, for a merchant that doesn't wanna deal with inbound liquidity. Right? And Ibex just takes 0.75%   just off of every transaction in 7 5 now. It's 0.5.  

0.5.   As I said, the fees are just getting driven down and down and down.  

[00:47:59] Unknown:

Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty awesome. So, like, in theory, all you'd need to give them is an expub.   Right. They could you could do lightning payments and everything. Don't have to deal with liquidity. You don't have to deal with any of that. Pretty awesome. But, yeah, I think   I was thinking about doing something like that for, like,  

[00:48:13] Unknown:

a sat sale as a service, but I was yeah. It's kinda sketchy regulatory wise. I think, the Australian government would probably come after me at some point if I did that. Yeah. I mean, shout out to the people that just do things Yeah. And don't ask permission and just see what the fuck happens. It takes balls. I understand. So they definitely deserve some credit for that.  

[00:48:31] Unknown:

But yeah. Tony says, don't worry, Michael. A check of strike and IBEX have an unannounced channel. So this is why Tony's a very useful friend to have. Also,  

[00:48:39] Unknown:

if he's feeling very friendly, he'll add 30 gigs to your your DB file on lnd.   And you don't even have to ask him to do it. He just goes out of his way to do it for you, which is really nice.  

[00:48:51] Unknown:

I'll, I'll a circular economy thing that's come up quite recently. Shill it.   It's called SAT Spend, and it's, by Mission Bitcoin. It's a new,   it's like an Australian Bitcoin business list, and it's just a website.   It's open source. I think it's his first open source project,   and it's really sweet. It's like a,   just a simple list of the businesses, and it's got some, like,   JavaScript map that just, like, shows you the locations of these businesses.   And I think it'd be awesome if some other cities started forking it and, made a list of their cities, businesses that accept Bitcoin.  

[00:49:27] Unknown:

Michael's just nodding his head. He's like, damn. That's a competition.   Right.  

[00:49:31] Unknown:

Oh, it's so good. Pull in Austin. You just use the OSHA app and pull up the map to see which businesses accept Bitcoin because every business in,  

[00:49:38] Unknown:

Austin accepts Bitcoin through Oshi. So awesome. Yeah. Well, not still, Ben. Not not every business in Austin, but every business that does accept Bitcoin is on Oshi. But so here's something that I've, like, I've thought about this. Very good. Like okay. So it's open source. So there's gonna be an open source  

[00:49:59] Unknown:

list of businesses. So, like, is there some sort of moderation there? Like, it's moderated still, like because otherwise, it's a it's a Silk Road. Right? Right. Right. So it's yeah. At the moment, it's just a it's a GitHub page, and I think I think it's oh, it is online and in store. But, yeah, you'd have to make a pull request to add a business.   But, yeah, the cool thing is is you could just fork it, and you can make your own list, or you could fork it and make your own list for your own city,   or completely change it up depending on how you wanna do it. You could do, like, a lightning only one or yeah. And please do that. Yeah. Everybody should do this in every city. And, also, like, great. That's a good database  

[00:50:34] Unknown:

for Bitcoin companies to literally be like,   hey. Like, we like, let's level up on different things. Like, I I I view it as   a good for Oshi as well. You guys can just look at the list. Well, that's what I'm saying. There is no real like, there's very few lists. And if they're there, they're totally outdated.   I I think there's gonna be a reason There's so many outdated lists. Yeah. It's really bad. It's like a waste of time to look at most of them. It's like That was called sat spend dotcom? Spend.  

[00:51:01] Unknown:

I don't he's not on the website yet. Just go sat spend GitHub.   That'll come up. I think he's still in the GitHub dot io domain. And who made who made that? Mission Bitcoin. Mission Bitcoin. If you're listening, consider getting a vanity domain for that. I think he's got one. I think he's in process of migrating. It's very new, like, literally a few days ago. So that's awesome. Yeah. It's really cool. Yeah. I think what happens is the merchant will start accepting Bitcoin in the middle of a bull market when the merchant Yep. Interested in Bitcoin.  

[00:51:29] Unknown:

And maybe a few people will also   stop by and check it out. But as soon as the bear market hits,   nobody's,   spending their Bitcoin anymore. Right? They're whipping out that credit card.   So   they typically just don't have any Bitcoin transaction. I don't know about that, though, because  

[00:51:46] Unknown:

I've been spending. Yeah. Because when the price is going up,   you also feel like you don't have enough Bitcoin. I'm not I'd maybe I at this point, I've just been in Bitcoin   for too long that it's just   is it possible to be in Bitcoin for too long? I that it's just it doesn't even matter because in either direction, you have different pressures for why you might not spend Bitcoin.   But I kinda come up from the privacy perspective.   I would I I preferably, I'd like to pay cash. If I could pay cash, I'd pay cash.   But if it's between a credit card and Bitcoin,   I'd rather not have, you know, like, 45 different companies all know my purchase history.  

But I'm probably, like, a microcosm there. But, I mean, I could I could see a strong argument that,   the Bitcoin price is pumping.   There's people on Twitter tweeting out all caps 200 k by conference day, and you're like, I don't wanna buy this burger because, you know, the Bitcoin I spend could be worth   double by the time, you know, the month ends. So I feel like there could be an argument in both directions. I always felt Bitcoin was more of a savings technology and,  

[00:52:50] Unknown:

lightning or, you know, lightning was the the payments gateway.   But if fiat is the ultimate, like, shitcoin,  

[00:52:58] Unknown:

then I always wanna dump my fiat. Right? I don't I rarely wanna hold. Right. I mean, the conversation changes if you don't have fiat or you have a minimal amount of fiat. Right. I've gotta spend Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. If your income is coming in in Bitcoin,   true.   But if your income is coming in in fiat, then it's a whole different question. And that's probably just  

[00:53:18] Unknown:

a time thing. Right? Like, people aren't getting paid. Not that many people are getting paid in Bitcoin necessarily right now. I will say we saw a drop in transactions for sure. A significant drop? I think everybody fit it doesn't matter if you have, you know, this   is just your $500,000,000   worth of Bitcoin.  

[00:53:36] Unknown:

If it That'd be good. Cut in half, it hurts. Like, it doesn't matter. You know, I I we did see Yeah. But do you think people just reduce their spending across the board? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. They're just like, oh, I'm poor now, so I'm gonna spend less. Yeah. Very good point. Like, they probably spend less fiat too. Absolutely.   Absolutely. Because, like, I've so, like, the way I kinda look at it is, like,   it's all the same pool of money. Right? So, like, if you're spending fiat, you're not stacking with it.   It's   still you're still spending bitcoin. Like, when people say, like, oh, like,   Laszlo, like, spent 10,000 doll 10,000 bitcoin on on 2 pizzas. It's like, okay. Well, like, if you bought pizza that year too, like, you also spent 10,000 bitcoin on 2 pizzas.  

You just didn't even have the wherewithal to know bitcoin exist or invent GPU mining, but that's a whole different   It's not true. Right? Like, if I buy a burger for $10, or I buy a burger for,   what the fuck is it now?   Like, 40,000 sats. Right?   It's still the same 40,000 SATs opportunity cost that I'm spending.   But maybe it's still a psychology thing, and people don't really think about it that way. Yeah. Not yet. But,  

[00:54:43] Unknown:

you know, hey. We got more Sats revenue.  

[00:54:46] Unknown:

Now you also have to, make a similar evaluation when you spend fiat if you have, like,   Oh,   Oh, I'm pretty sure it is. Dollar's bullish right now.  

[00:55:04] Unknown:

Are you a USD maximalist? No. Not at all. Dollars are Bitcoin. But it's it's been pumping because of the dollar milkshake theory. It's turning into actually playing out in real time, which is that the dollar is the strongest shitcoin out of all the shitcoins. So as everyone's   fiat is,   as there's panic in all the other fiat markets, they're flooding into dollars. So dollars are gonna be the last,   to get hit hard, and you see the inflation rates in all the other currencies   Marty still hasn't read it. He he says, like, I might as well he might as well have read it because I bring it up so much. But,   Wiz, I have a question for you since, you know, you've been in Bitcoin since we've all were in diapers.  



[00:55:49] Unknown:

It's not true.  

[00:55:53] Unknown:

What do you think, like,   is are we just is this whole circular economy thing just,   there there's some resemblance to, like, the 2013 to 2015   era where   where merchants kept adding Bitcoin support, and they were just automatically dumping it for fiat,   through BitPay and other services.   And that kinda stalled, and it was like a big hype thing, and then it stalled and failed. Like, is this time different, or  

[00:56:21] Unknown:

are we just Well, of course, it's putting our wheels. I mean, now we have lightning. Right now we have all these other   payment rails, merchant processors, BTC payser. So you think Lightning is the is the game changer? Absolutely. Lightning is a game changer. It allows you to   make very minimal security trade offs   for instance.   Like, you're no longer waiting for, like, 0 comp stuff that could be double spent.   You know, you get that instant, how does Jack Mallers put it? Cash finality.  

[00:56:52] Unknown:

Cash finality. He's good. Cash finality on Open Monetary Network.  

[00:56:56] Unknown:

Exactly. And that is a game changer. Right? That's huge. And   there's I fucking love open monetary network as a term, by the way. I just use it in my day to day life. It's great. Yeah. Yeah. He's great as a hype machine. But but to answer your question, I mean, I remember in, like, the 2013   era,   there were a ton of merchants that would just accept 0Conf. Right? Everyone had, like, a wallet app somewhere and on an old iPad or something, and they were just   kind of trusting that the merchants weren't gonna run off, which is it was a reasonable thing. But, for example, one bar in Tokyo,   I think they were actually letting people like, they're, like, whatever cash they had in the register, they'd be like, oh, yeah. Just send us the Bitcoin, and we'll give you the cash. And, of course, they're probably taking, like, a 10% cut.  

And one day, when the mempool got full,   someone's transaction got purged out of the mempool   and this bar got screwed over for several $1,000. Yeah.   And, they learned really quick that 0Conf was not secure.   But now using lightning, they would be able to do such a transaction if they so desired and if the government   didn't, shut them down for doing such trades like this. But, I mean, it it is a huge game changer because you have this instant,   cash finality. Right?   Not to mention all the BTC pay servers, the new wallets, the everything we didn't have in 2013, basically.  

[00:58:15] Unknown:

Yeah. It used to be a lot of work to, like, you would have to, like, monitor the like, have implement implement your own wallet and do all that stuff. Now it's just like, oh, call Ibex API or, you know, or, like, even doing your your own lightning implementation. Like, looking to LND is extremely easy.   So it's not like a terribly hard thing anymore.  

[00:58:32] Unknown:

No. You do lighting only. We do lighting only. But inevitably,   like, there's gonna be transactions, which are, like, you're kinda gonna require   on Shane, but those can, like, be okay if it's a transaction where you can wait a while   for the confirmation   because it's not gonna be services aren't immediately rendered and, like, you know, I I almost look at how we aren't we get merchants, and it's, like, lightning only.   But there's some tools we're gonna have soon for, like, higher purchases where   unchained is gonna be an option if the lightning payment fails. We don't know if it failed, but it's like they're sitting on there for a while. Like, we'll know, like, alright. Hey. We try unchained. Like It's sometimes worth it as well. Right? If the payment's big enough, I think the fees on chain could be lower than the, like, the,  

[00:59:15] Unknown:

you know,   parts per million, whatever the the fees are in the on the,   on the channels. They can actually add up quite a lot if it's if you're paying, like, whatever it says, $1,000,   it might be, like, $10 as a fee. Whereas if you do it on chain, it might be, like, 10¢.   So sometimes it's actually still beneficial to use on chain at least at the moment. So, Wiz, I had you on the show,  

[00:59:37] Unknown:

a bit ago. I don't know how to keep track of time anymore. Yes. Few months. So it could have been no. No. But before that, when the when the fee market was pumping, and,   I said something that you agreed with, which was that,   transaction fees on chain are designed to pump forever.   Absolutely.   I mean, 1 zapper byte is is is been working pretty well lately. I feel like Catan dunked on us pretty hard on that one.   Do you do you still believe that or  

[01:00:06] Unknown:

Yeah. Of course. I mean, the I think I still believe it. The block subsidy reward will go to 0. We need transaction fees to pay for the mining. Well, that's not a good reason.   You're saying that,  

[01:00:19] Unknown:

that's like, the wrong that's the wrong,   Well, we're I think the better argument is, okay, so if Bitcoin becomes the money of the world, there's only a scarce amount of block space, so   more people are using it, and more money is being transferred on it. Fees should go up.  

[01:00:36] Unknown:

Right? But at the same time, though, people are also   creating more efficient ways to use the scarce space in the Bitcoin blockchain. And lightning is a good example of that. But even things like native SegWit addresses or tap root, which also can save a lot of space.   So while the demand is constantly rising, people are also   constantly optimizing and becoming more efficient. So there is some Nash equilibrium, right, where   the the market   demands and the scarce   supply will always kind of be   trying to find this this,   perfect balance.  

And up until,   I guess,   last year or, I guess, December of 2020,   we never really saw that high sustained high fee environment. I mean, it was a good 6 months or so   okay, maybe the the men pulled it and clear out for a day or 2, but it will clear out on the weekend most likely.  

[01:01:40] Unknown:

It's been pretty high lately. Look at it now. It's like, yeah, it's definitely up. I mean, one sapper bite, cleared in one block, next block last night. So Oh, wow. Nice. Because I actually,   like, I I we had this discussion drunk last night at, like, 11:11 PM, so I checked Wizz's mempool, and   that's what I'm gonna call mempool.space   for now, and it's just Wizz's mempool.   I'm gonna hop to do demo day real quick. Yeah. I'll be back in 10. Sounds good. Michael's gonna go upstairs to the event space to demo Oshi,   and then come back to the studio.  

Sven, you've been kinda quiet.   I mean, there was a lot of talk there about, basically, the big difference this time is is lightning.   And I have noticed that a lot of the circular economy pushes, a lot of the merchant pushes have been lightning focused this time.   Do you   is is the I   are most people that spend Bitcoin   in person going to be using Lightning going forward, or is there gonna be is there still gonna be on chain tran like, obviously, there's still gonna be on chain transactions, but, like, how much is that gonna be? Like,   is is that where we're going? Are we going to a lightning focused future  

[01:02:54] Unknown:

and payments? For the future, we we will have to just because of, like, the fee market and, like Well, let's say the fee market doesn't go up.  

[01:03:02] Unknown:

Is there still   a strong argument that lightning provides better UX?   Instant cash finality.  

[01:03:11] Unknown:

And yeah. So on the securities perspective, like, yeah. But the thing is also, it's like   99.9%   of users don't know if they wanted to double spend. They couldn't because they don't know how. Well, actually, now BlueWallet has a nice cancel feature. That's true. Yeah. So maybe you can with that. But I think,   lightning does have that little better UX where you get this invoice, you pay it, and it's not payable twice. You know, you can't have any of those Has the amount built into it? The amount's built in, all that stuff.  

[01:03:37] Unknown:

But like sender gets decent privacy improvement.  

[01:03:41] Unknown:

Yeah, yeah. Like you don't like  

[01:03:43] Unknown:

it's hard to tell what the UTXO was a paid it. Yeah. Yeah.  

[01:03:47] Unknown:

But and, like, today, like, I think the refill release that, like, 23% of their Bitcoin transactions are lightning. The other 77 are on chain. So, like, there still is a lot more   on chain use and, at least for payments in that regard.   So it is like a bigger thing today. And I I mean, I think for 1, it's just because, like,   most users go to Coinbase or, like, Gemini   or something like Blockchain.com.   Well, it just doesn't have Lightning support, so they just don't have the option. And   so, like, you know, like, a lot of these people aren't just using tools that have lightning yet and, like, they just want to,   you know, copy paste a thing or scan a QR code and pay it. And, so it's I think, like, lightning is will be the future, but, you know, we're just gotta get more of these, like, shitcoin tools to adopt it because that's honestly where most people start out. So, like, you're one of the cofounders of the Bitcoin company.  



[01:04:42] Unknown:

You guys only accept Lightning. Right?  

[01:04:45] Unknown:

And we have credit card payments, but it's in, like, heavy Wait. So you accept credit card payments at Lightning, but not on chain? Yeah. You will.   Why?   Because on chain is a whole host of issues where, like,   say they send the wrong amount. What do we do? Do we give them a gift card that's like the wrong amount? Right. Do we, like   we can't really send back the money because, like, if they withdrew it from, like, Coinbase, like or just depositing some random Coinbase address. Right.  

[01:05:11] Unknown:

Yep. Or if it doesn't confirm for ages and the price changes  

[01:05:15] Unknown:

and like Yeah. So, like and, like, what we could do is, like, you know, it goes out. We instantly hedged. But, like, you know, if it gets confirmed   2 weeks later, then maybe, you know, we could've gotten fucked,   or they double spend it, and then we hedged for no reason and we kinda lost money there. So, like, there's lots of problems, and it's like, you know, it's it's kind of a solvable problem, but it's just like, you know, we've been trying to build fast on other things and, like,   you know, the largest payment you can do with us is a $1,000, so   that's mostly fine with lightning. So, that's most of the reason we haven't decided it. But I have gotten, like, tons of requests to add in on chain support. It's just a,   you know, it's a lot to do.  

Do you think you guys will add on chain support at some point? Yeah. Eventually, we will. But it's like, you know, just we just gotta,   you know, we're finishing, like, obviously, our loyalty platform, then we'll just gonna have some free time. So that that'll probably be something we add in.   There's just some other stuff. Ben looks really tired thinking about it right now. It it's a lot to think of. Like and then, like, talking the price being like, oh, what you know, it comes up with all these edge cases and, like, you know, I don't think users know how to do that. But,  

[01:06:21] Unknown:

you know, it is something we need to worry about and stuff like that. I mean, presumably,  

[01:06:25] Unknown:

I   I wonder if anyone at this table disagrees with the concept that,   like, Bitcoin users in 10 years won't really   they won't   if if if things go right, they shouldn't know if they're using Lightning or Onchain or whatever thing gets invented between 9 10 years from now. There's some They're They're just paying Bitcoin. Right. Right. And there's actually some like, there's some 2 in one QR code. I think I don't know if it was a BIP or, like, you have a 21. BIP 21. It's like your lightning QR code and an on chain QR code sort of both combined in 1. But it's really an on chain QR code with the lightning payment Oh, is it? Built into it because it needs to be the whole point is that it's backwards compatible. So you can't have, like, a new it's like that meme where you have, like, oh, I'm gonna fix the standards problem by creating a new standard. The key is that old wallets,   if if they only support on chain, can scan it, and they don't even know the lightning part exists.  



[01:07:18] Unknown:

Yeah. It's weird too because we have that. We can also use a lightning invoice, which you can encode it a fallback on chain address then. So you can do, like But that's not backwards compatible. Yeah. That's the thing. But you you can do, like, the lightning first version versus,   bit 21 is the on chain first version.   But, yeah, no one I don't I don't think any wall supports the fallback address.  

[01:07:38] Unknown:

CBC does. I mean, that's, like, always that seems to be, like, the reoccurring issue. Right? Like, I was,   I'm a crazy person. So right before we jumped on this, I did a 2 hour podcast,   with NVK for his podcast.   And we were talking about BIP 47 reusable payment codes.   And, like, one of the biggest use cases for BIP 47 reusable payment codes to me is accepting donations,   because you can just post the static QR code, and you have reasonable privacy guarantees because you're not reusing addresses.   You don't have to worry about inbound liquidity or any of the things on Lightning.   But when it comes down to donations,   you   want as many you want as little friction as possible if someone's gonna send you money.  

Otherwise, they won't send you money. And then it comes down to wallet support, how many wallets support it. Right? And BIP 47, mine the 2 big wallets that support it right now are Samura and Sparrow.   And so, like, if the user doesn't have one of those wallets, like, their payment fails. Right? And you don't want payment failures.   So   I feel like when we think about a lot of these things,   it either cannot rely on getting these wallets to start supporting it. I mean, I I was talking to the guys from Bitrefill, and, like, some of the most common wallets that are used on Bitrefill are,   like, Trust Wallet from Binance, which no one should use, Exodus, which is closed source that no one should use,   Blockchain.com.  

Blockchain.com,   which is just a piece of shit wallet that nobody should use. Right? And, like, so if you're relying on like, the most popular wallets on Bitcoin Twitter are not the most popular wallets. So if you're relying on those wallets to support some new standard,   probably not gonna work out well for you. So then   you probably need some kind of incentives   that lead to  

[01:09:26] Unknown:

integration or not have the need for that integration on the sender side in the first place. Right. And that even shows up in Lightning. Like, that was one of the reasons that they gave for why,   Lightning payments, like Ben was saying, that,   Bitrefill only, like, I think 5% of their payments are lightning payments, which is actually super surprising to me. That's 22% of their Bitcoin payment. Right. But they got a whole bunch of old coins in there as well or shit coins. Yeah.   And that yeah. Their reason for that was that, like, if you go in the app store and you search Bitcoin wallet, like, it comes up with all those crazy ones, like trust wallet and, like, the blockchain.com,   and not the not the wallets that actual Bitcoin is sort of using and suggesting to each other. Did you  

[01:10:09] Unknown:

just did you just insinuate that you know what an actual Bitcoiner is?   No.  

[01:10:17] Unknown:

Not gonna try.  

[01:10:21] Unknown:

Yeah. I mean, I think there's gonna be a lot of pain points here. I'm curious too, like, if  

[01:10:25] Unknown:

because,   one thing that Bitrefill does accept is 0 comp Bitcoin payments and, like, they're Under a certain amount. Yeah. Yeah. And they're one of the only   people that do that. So I wonder, like, if they remove that, would the number of lightning payments increase? Well, they always say that the majority of their  

[01:10:41] Unknown:

transactions are 0 conf on chain Mhmm. Which is, always surprising here. Right? Well, they have some kind of, like, fraud detection algo. Right? Like, they do like, it depends on the amount. It depends on if the transaction is flagging RBF. It depends what the fee rate is. It depends what the state of the mempool is,   and they decide if they issue or not based on that is my understanding,  

[01:11:04] Unknown:

which is clever. Yeah. They they basically take the mempool space,   suggested fee. And if yours is, like, much lower than that, then they'll wait for a confirmation.   But if it's,   within the   you know, they have a high confidence that's gonna be confirmed in the next block or so. And I think they actually specify, like, if you want your gift card right now, you have to have RBF disabled. It has to use at least a 127   Sats provider or whatever the next block fee is.   And,   you know, a few other criteria can only be sent from certain wallets   that do this properly, but they will give you that gift card right away, yeah, if you check all the They will.  

But most wallets enable RBF by default. Right? So that's   Mhmm. You know?  

[01:11:48] Unknown:

Yeah. Well, I don't think, like,   does blockchain.com and, like, exodus, all those shit clean wallets? I don't think It works great on the the really shitty wallets. Yeah. Yeah. Like  

[01:11:56] Unknown:

blockchain.com,  

[01:11:57] Unknown:

like, no RBF support. Yeah. But that's their main volume. Right? Are those Overpays the fees like crazy.  

[01:12:03] Unknown:

That's their their bread and butter.  

[01:12:08] Unknown:

So, Ben,   we've been going for an hour and 12 minutes.   Forget Bitcoin payments for a second or think of Bitcoin payments. If you could talk about one thing right now, what do you would what would you wanna talk about?  

[01:12:20] Unknown:

I think lightning privacy is, like, what I think about most nowadays. It's,  

[01:12:24] Unknown:

you had Tony and Paul on last week and Yeah. And the and the freaks in the comments is, like, every time you talk about lightning privacy, I just get discouraged,   demoralized.   And I I don't want for I like I know we we like to dive deep here on on dispatch. I don't want people to get,   like, frustrated or disenfranchised about it.  

[01:12:43] Unknown:

Well, call to action. Yeah. And, like, you know, we talk about, like, all the problems with lightning privacy, but it's, like, your other options are on chain Bitcoin, which is worse, or a credit card payment, which is 10 times worse, or, like, cash, but, Which is great. Which is great. Yeah. But you can't, you know,   you can't buy a cold card with cash or something. So mean, you can at Bitcoin Park.   Right. From the Bitcoin Park. But, you know, you gotta fly here, fry gas.   Good luck.   But yeah. So I think, like like, lighting the humongous leap forward in privacy,   versus on chain Bitcoin. But, you know, there's,   like, there's lots of problems   that you guys covered last time with, like, time analysis and, you know, you can get their note ID and see if they're on chain UTXOs. And and Tony's finding everyone's private channels as well. So,   there's lots of problems, and we've been kinda just, like, going through different ways. Like, I like how that's just a bullet point. Like, Tony's finding everyone's private channels. It is. It's Presumably, there's other people doing it as well besides just Tony. And that's the real heroes. Right? It's because, you know, the chain analysis companies are probably running all the the routing hubs and, NSA is in all the all the choke points. But the real heroes are the ones that publish the open source tools or are totally transparent about this. And so you can get a small hint of what's actually going on in the background. Yeah. Like kind of like we were talking about earlier, where like mempool space will, like, you know, it'll have, like, a lot of the tools that these chain analysis companies are using, but I can now go see for myself, like, oh, this is how docs I am. I need to fix that.  

And,   I think that's, like, really gonna be powerful and, like,   with with, like, with lightning privacy, there's still lots of unsolved problems. Like Tony's calling out Vortex, which is   a project me and,   directs are mainly working on basically lets you, like, open lightning channels in a coin join.   And, like, that's gonna be like a   big step forward because it's like I I built this out of necessity for myself because   I run the service opportune bot, which lets you get an opportune transaction on chain.   And you can so you can just docs any of my on chain UTXOs by paying, like, 5,000 sats.   So,   my on chain privacy is fucked in that regard.  

So I was like, well, we need to fix it to make a tool to fix this. So,   that was my   attempt at that. And it's, you know, it's actually useful.   So,   hopefully getting that out soon. But the idea is, like, you know, it's   Taproot lets us have,   lightning channels and on chain transactions  

[01:15:08] Unknown:

look the exact same. So it's like build a tool that lets you actually, you know, hide them all together. And, I   don't know, coming soon, but start using Taproot now so that all your spends could may or may not be a channel open. And then when you do go and make a channel open,   you'll be able to spot the difference, and it helps dilute it's like an anonymity set  

[01:15:29] Unknown:

for, like, on chain, like, Taproot addresses. Yeah. But the anonymity set right now is, like, 12 people. Right. So So I'm saying get it up. You better be using Taproot address. Nick is Nick is just trying to increase his anonymity. He said he's very pushed to Taproot. Please help me.  

[01:15:42] Unknown:

Alright.   Yeah.   It is like, I really hope Tafuri can, take off because, like, it's a little scary because Segwit had this huge economic incentive to use it where,   you you save, like, 30% of fees, like, on average. So like, like, even Coinbase adopted it. But, it took them years. It took them years, but they, you know, they eventually needed they like money, so they did it. But there's not many   economic incentives for using Taproot.   Especially for these beasts like Coinbase, like Coinbase will probably never use something like like Schnorr and Musig because   Ethereum doesn't support it. So they want all their true all their shit coins to use the same sign mechanism. So there's gonna use, MPC.  

So they'll probably never use that. And then, you know, there's no economic incentive to switch over really.  

[01:16:30] Unknown:

It it like a multisig, like a mousig is def it should be smaller than, like, a traditional multisig, right, with, like Yeah. 5 or 6 signatures in there.   It is. But but  

[01:16:41] Unknown:

Coinbase uses a different kind of multisig. They use, like, the ECSA version of MuSig. Right. So they have, like it looks like one key, one signature, but there's many keys, many signatures in the background. Mhmm. It's just much fancier cryptography that, it's a mess. But it works with Bitcoin. It works with shit. That's the key. They want the the key to their stack. That's Bitcoin only companies do have that advantage Yeah. Is that they're actually able to do,  

[01:17:04] Unknown:

more Bitcoin native things because they're not focused on Chipcoins. Yeah. And, like,  

[01:17:09] Unknown:

it was a few months ago, but Binance, like, had a major vulnerability in their version of that. And,   not sure if they lost funds or not. But, like, you know, there's a price that they've paid there where, like, you know, they had a vulnerability in their multisix setup. So it is a problem. But, like, you know, Binance has ungodly amounts of money, so they don't care.  

[01:17:27] Unknown:

What about this question? Because I was thinking about this. This question from cryptopolis   via Twitch. He says, can you choose how many jumps or routing channels you want there to be between someone you're paying   or at least a number to help with privacy?   This is an interesting topic to me is this   is this path finding, this, like   usually, the lightning wallet is trying to find the shortest, lowest fee path, but that's not necessarily the best for privacy.  

[01:17:55] Unknown:

Yeah. Like, I mean, technically, you can like, you know, the thing is, how well does your wallet let you do that? Like, now you can like manually code like, I don't use this route to get this payment. To any wallets, let you manually specify, like, number of hops, like, in a UI, not, like, adjusting the fucking code. It'd be cool, though. Wouldn't it It'd be pretty awesome. Yeah. The thing is, like, you know, it's,  

[01:18:16] Unknown:

like, pathfinding is a hard problem normally. So you're not gonna manually do it. Right. It's, like, right or 2 hops. So, So, like, if you had, like, a slide out or it's We're, like, never less than 2 hops or something. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I think it's at least with this is based on tour. Right? And I think tour   started with, like, 3 hops is generally, like, good because,   like, at each stage,   people don't know if they're, like, the start or the end or the middle.  

[01:18:42] Unknown:

Yeah. I think 3 is what Thor came up with. It's like a good sort of number. And I don't know if, like Everything is trade offs. Right? Like, I I was talking to Tony about this the other day,   and he was like, so then it's not just fees. Right? It's also payment reliability   because as you add hops, more likely to have a payment failure. And then the other thing is,   like, the time to make the transaction. Like, I fucking love Zeus,   but if I'm in front of an Ibex terminal trying to buy a beer,   and I open up my wallet, and it's not even it's not even, you know, Evan and the rest of his team's fault. It's just, like, the way it connects the node and everything. Like, there's so much time that goes there, and I always say my same joke while, like, the circle's going around around. I was like, this is the future payments.  

[01:19:25] Unknown:

I I literally did that the other day. I was like, it took forever, and I was like I was like, do you know why that took forever? She's like, no. I'm like, well, my phone talks my laptop that's under my bed in Texas. Like, isn't that cool? This is the future payment. She's like, that's so cool. I'm like, thanks. And then walked away, but, like, payment still she had wasted a minute of her time. I guess one advantage of that is, like, in this world where we've increasingly had less and less human  

[01:19:49] Unknown:

face to face interaction,   the payment is so slow that you're forced to have face to face   interactions with the merchant.  

[01:19:56] Unknown:

Keep the small talk going while your payments like spinning around in circles.  

[01:20:02] Unknown:

Yeah, that's one of the trade offs of lightning versus other layer 2 networks like liquid or something. Right? That actually just uses a blockchain, so it just works and instantly Wiz, why does nobody use liquid?  

[01:20:13] Unknown:

Because the empty? I use liquid.   Uses liquid, but one feature,   but it's the USDT, the Fiat, the shit coin.  

[01:20:22] Unknown:

So yeah. Yeah. I mean, liquid has a number of trade offs against lightning. Right? I think another important piece of infrastructure, which nobody has really made well yet, is a trustless swap between lightning sats and liquid sats  

[01:20:34] Unknown:

so that you could go between different layer 2 networks without touching the base chain. That would be cool. That would be cool. At the last At least trust minimized. Like, it doesn't have to be perfect. I mean, there there are some, like, centralized services, like all the new shape shifts that have popped up. Shape shift. Yeah. Yeah. There's a fixed float and stuff where you can do But it's fully trusted, right? Like, you said That's what I'm saying. But there's a middle ground between trustless and that. But it should be possible to do an atomic swap. Right? Yeah. Completely  

[01:21:03] Unknown:

possible. The cryptography. The Bitcoin plus plus, hackathon, someone built a thing where you, like, did a lightning payment. It did, like, a liquid contract, and it's subrune swapped it back out. So it's, like, fully trust us. And, that's cool. I don't think anyone's ever gonna use liquid. Yeah. I don't like, it's a  

[01:21:19] Unknown:

I'm a liquid bear. He's just trolling me now. I'm one of the best shills in the space, and I tried for a couple months to show liquid and it just didn't happen. Despite the I'm now I'm completely bearish. Just wait until the fee market gets established. Yeah. People will be using all kinds of layer twos. They'll be doing, Cash App, to PayPal, to Venmo. Like I could see it being bigger. Like and they're kinda going for that sort of, like, finance. Like, if you're, you know, doing arbitrages and stuff, you wanna pay lower fees, you want faster  

[01:21:44] Unknown:

what are the block times actually on the One minute. One minute. Yeah. So it's much faster. Yeah. And it's great because there's, like, one transaction in each block. And it's more private as well. So I'm always surprised no one's built, like, a coin joint thing on there because, like, you have the confidential So I have a theory on that.  

[01:21:59] Unknown:

What is it? I think,  

[01:22:01] Unknown:

I think the federation members are   concerned about upsetting the regulatory beast, and that's why there's no user focused privacy   tools on on liquid. I think it's actively discouraged.   No. Because it seems too obvious.  

[01:22:15] Unknown:

Wizz. It seems too obvious. First of all, the Federation members,   most of them are one of them is Wizz. Yes. I   am.   But, no. I mean, like, the anybody can make anything on liquid. And We have Corey in the chat saying he bought a best shirt with liquid ones. I that's true. I bought a Blockstream hat. There's dozens.  

[01:22:34] Unknown:

I remember. Thank you, Corey. Mhmm. I got I got a free p hat token from Blockstream, and I cashed it in for this hat, and it was awesome. Yeah. It's great spending shit coins. Right. You'd you'd rather get a p hat token on liquid than some ERC 20 or something, some shit coin.  

[01:22:51] Unknown:

So you don't think it's you don't think it's so why why don't we see like, confidential transactions are cool, but they're not,   you know without extra tooling, they're not enough in terms of privacy, especially if you don't have users using them.  

[01:23:07] Unknown:

Yeah. Obviously, you need a critical mass for the anonymity set if you were to do a coin joint on liquid or something like that. But I think We have seared salmon saying you bought a beef steak a beef steak ticket with, liquid.   No. It's it's it's not that the federation members don't want to have coin joints. They can't dictate what type of transactions happen on the network, just like, Bitcoin miners don't really know what's going on. And especially with confidential transactions,   the network functionaries don't even know what they're putting into the blocks, really. I mean, it could be, a shitcoin. It could be liquid Bitcoin. It could be anything. Right? One of the bigger issues I think with liquid is,  

[01:23:46] Unknown:

first of all, I think you kinda nailed it with it is hard to go back and forth in a in a trust minimized way, definitely in a privacy preserving way.   Particularly, that's like a chicken and egg thing because there's not that many users as well.   But the other thing is,   like, I think as Bitcarners, like, a key thing   that we should always be focused on is is aligned incentives. Like, I think a lot of the things   that are wrong with the world come down to flawed incentives.   And one of the reasons I'm so bullish on Bitcoin is because it has Bitcoin, the base layer, has such a strong incentive model, which is   literally everyone on the planet   should act as greedy as possible,   and as a result, Bitcoin will be robust and successful,   which is, like, the only clear assumption you can make about people.  

I I have a lot of friends and family that I love dearly, but the number one thing you can guarantee about people is that they're gonna act in their own self interest, and they're gonna be greedy. On Liquid,   if fee like, fees only go to Blockstream. There's no fees right now, basically.   But the way it's set up, they only go to Blockstream. To be a federation member,   you the the most risk is on the federation members. They're they're integral to the whole system,  

[01:24:58] Unknown:

and there's no real incentive on their side to be a federation member. Right? I think it's you're talking about the functionaries. Right? So there's, probably, like, 60, 65 members in the federation, but there's only 15 functionaries. And those are the actual,   miners or block producers, whatever you wanna call it. They're the ones who actually   control the keys to the 15 of or 11 or 15 multisig Right. Holdings of the federation. On their HSMs.  

[01:25:22] Unknown:

Exactly. So  

[01:25:24] Unknown:

you're right. The functionaries run the network.   And,   yeah, they control all the keys. What's this what's Seared Salmon saying? They're talking about fediments and yeah. This is about Our fediments  

[01:25:36] Unknown:

basically make liquid obsolete.  

[01:25:39] Unknown:

It's like liquid too. Yeah. I've been talking,  

[01:25:41] Unknown:

I've been hanging out with Justin Moon a bunch and, like, he's been working on a bunch, and that's kinda, like, how he pitches it. He's, like, this is, like, liquid done right where so I've having these one minute block times, and there's just this one federation and setting up a new one's a lot of heart, like, a lot hard. You just have this one that was, like, basically instant payments as lightning interoperable, like, natively, and you can do all these fancy stuff like, what I mean, just to be clear here on liquid, we only have a single  

[01:26:07] Unknown:

a single federation. But in Fedimint, it should be easy for there be many competing federations that are all interoperable  

[01:26:13] Unknown:

with each other. I mean, could you people could spin up their own liquid if they wanted to right now. I don't think so. Well, it's You could. It's just Isn't, like, the back end  

[01:26:22] Unknown:

not open source? Or, like, why aren't there more liquids? It's Why do we only have one liquid network? That's just So the yeah. That's a good question. Right? And that's actually how I joined the Liquid Federation to begin with is because I basically,   tweeted at Adam Back that I'm just gonna make my own, like, liquid like, Liquid Federation, call it something else. And then he said, well, why don't you just join us?   Regulatory capture.   But,   the functionary code is actually open source. I think it's just not shared outside of the federation, if that makes sense. So it's It's a closed source. It's open source. Like, it's g I think it's, even GPL. I said, like, I've I had the source code. It's just that not published anywhere maybe or something. Interesting. But yeah. Like, Matt's right in the sense that the back end code is not, like, available on GitHub easily,  

[01:27:09] Unknown:

but all of the It's not easy to run.   It it if if you want It requires specialist hardware. Right? Like, in my security model. In my head, there's, like, 2 things. Like, if you if you want   a federated model to work well in a post Bitcoin world, It should be first of all, it should be easy to spin up your own   federations. We should have competition among federations. And the second thing is they should all be easily interoperable with each other without, like,  

[01:27:35] Unknown:

calling someone on the phone or having them, like, come down and have a coffee with them or something. And I think that's probably the future of of all of these mints and and federation models is that you're gonna have   an organization of and either entities or individuals. Maybe Bisca is another good comparison, right, where you have a bunch of people who wanna operate something   as a federation,   but you you wanna spread the trust around. You wanna spread that risk around.   And   this community of users is is,   you know, they have their specialized use cases, whether that be opcodes or smart contracts, whatever they're doing. And the holdings would just be part of that federation. And then, like you said, mate, you want to, like, be able to just teleport those sats to another   layer 2 federation or something. It'll be really cool to see what the future brings when when all these mints and,   everything starts coming up. Liquid is just one of the first ones. Right? I've I've been getting a lot of shit because I'm pretty bullish on fetiments and the team that's working on fetiments,  

[01:28:34] Unknown:

Yeah. Which, rightfully so, I I love getting I love getting   I've been in a few hours. Critical feedback. That's good. But I would say I I think it's almost a distraction to compare it to Liquid. I think it should be more comparable to,   a fully custodial lightning wallet,   like Wallet of Satoshi,   which a lot of hardcore Bitcoiners use,   even though it's fully custodial and you have to trust them with both your funds and your privacy,   While Fedimint's offer a u and why do they do that? They do that because it's easy. They don't have to run their own node. They don't have to worry about liquidity management. They don't have to worry channels. They don't have to worry about any of that shit. They just press receive, and they press send, and it fucking works.   Right? With Fedimintz, you have all of a sudden, you have a a wallet that's as easy as Wallet at Satoshi, but you don't have to trust the custodians with your privacy. So it's strictly better. Your non set is basically how many people are using that wallet is your non set. And then on the custodial side, you have a reduced custodial risk because it's a multisig instead of a single sig.  

So so the the parties involved have to collude together or get forced together to to rug pull you. Right.   So it's just strictly a better wallet of Satoshi.  

[01:29:44] Unknown:

And and like you said, Matt,   it because it's so open source and, like, it should be easy to spin up your own federation, there should be, like, a a free market of of that was sort of competing against each other for   whether it's how secure their custodian is, what what, like, the,   the threshold on the multisignatures   to make transactions   or what the the how what the fees are or payment gateways.   That's why I'm super excited about it. So it could be a whole market of different federations competing against each other and sort of improving in all these different ways,  

[01:30:19] Unknown:

to make, yeah, really good federations, But it is still custodial. So It's definitely custodial. You have because custodial third party risk. We have Tony and   in the comments talking about mini simp, which is, I guess, the FEDIMENT idea with the simplicity,   language on top of that. Is that a real term? Because it sounds like something that someone would say to me if they're upset with me showing impediments that I'm a No. That's like a mini simp or a fedi simp. Those are hackathon project. They like Like all the devs out there, I appreciate you guys. I try and I try and   I try and help get you more contributors. I try and help get you more funding. I have try and get you more exposure. If you ever need help naming things,   just don't hesitate to reach out. I I will. It is so easy to name things better than you guys. Like, no disrespect. Like, there we should not there's impossible to get bullish on something called mini sim. I'm sorry.  



[01:31:12] Unknown:

Never gonna happen. I think the original name was simply meant if that's better. Not better.  

[01:31:19] Unknown:

So we have Michael back in the house. He's done with his demo. He's never stopped, so he came back down to the studio. I wanna transition this conversation for a second.   Stablecoins on lightning.   Why do we need that?  

[01:31:33] Unknown:

I think it's good. Like, the reason I would think it's, like, a good thing to have is because   some merchants, they're not ready to hold Bitcoin. They're not ready to receive Bitcoin and just hold it on their balance sheet.   Volatility is too much for them if they've got, like, fixed costs or things they need to buy. Well, I'm not asking why do stablecoins have demand. I'm asking why do we need stablecoins on lightning? Oh, sorry. On lightning. Right? But no one usually. So for example, on SatSale,   one feature we do have is that you can receive Bitcoin lightning payments and   with, like, an atomic swap to, like, lightning USDT   or something like that.  

Don't use liquid. Don't use liquid. But couldn't you still do, like,  

[01:32:28] Unknown:

an atomic swap to   liquid USDT or an atomic swap to, you know, probably what is the most common USDT chain, like Tron or some shit? Yeah.   Yeah. True. You can. And, like, when you talk about stablecoins,   like, the trust is the issuer. Like, I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure TRON could go down tomorrow,   and Tether would just be, like,   okay. If you had a Tron USD balance USDT balance, you can, you know, reboot it on Solana or whatever. And you could actually do that cryptographically.  

[01:33:05] Unknown:

I that's you could do that. Yeah. I guess there's nothing I see that makes it like it has to be on lightning, that it really needs to be on lightning. And and I there are some people who question, like, if I'm running a Lightning node and I I don't wanna be, you know, passing around all this gossip about   USDT channels,   I could see some complaints there being so legitimate for sure.  

[01:33:28] Unknown:

Well, I love that I have the devs trolling me in my live chat right now. We got Corey, dude called the show sit Odell dispatch.   But I do usually sit while we're while we're while we're recording.   Yeah. I just yeah. I don't   like, so so there everything has trade offs. Right?   With Lightning, we make certain trade offs to reduce trust   and to use native Bitcoin.   It is it is straight up native Bitcoin locked in a payment channel.   At at the core, lightning is batch Bitcoin transactions.   Right? Yeah. And the trade off we make is a UX trade off, which is you have to deal with liquidity.   You have to have your keys always online   to make transactions and receive transactions. And you could potentially lose the channel funds if you're unable to publish the Exactly. Backups are difficult. You have to be watching you have to be watching for for malicious actors that might be broadcasting old channel states. Like, we make all of those trade offs   for reduced trust   and to use native Bitcoin.  

Why would we make those trade offs to use a centralized stable coin?  

[01:34:37] Unknown:

Right. I think, like, the it's really just, like, why not? Like, people are using this.   Like, today, people wanna use Tether. Like, it has, like, a $80,000,000,000   market cap or something. Like, there's high demand for it, and people are going to, like, shit coins to use it. It's like, why like, when it people are gonna give liquidity somewhere. So these are gonna be Tron or Bitcoin. Why not it be Bitcoin?  

[01:34:57] Unknown:

Mhmm. I wholeheartedly agree. I don't think it's a why. I think it's a why not. And I know, especially in places that don't have access to the dollar at all. Right? Like, that's why these stable coins came up, you know, and and,   in a lot of countries that don't have the dollar, they're using, like, just straight up Binance.   You know? They use Binance and, like, the Binance.  

[01:35:18] Unknown:

You know Well, the Binance has their own stablecoin too. It's a centralized issuer with the stablecoin. Yeah. So you'll see is a crazy story. I reckon it's sketchy as, like, I'm pretty   sure Binance just bought, like, the naming rights   from some other custodian. Like, they're not even holding the dollars. Like, there's some other company that finance is, like, paid off and and made it labeled BUSD.   I feel like they, haven't got enough attention compared to all the other stable coins. So maybe there's something dodgy going on there.  

[01:35:46] Unknown:

You you think that,  

[01:35:47] Unknown:

why do we need, shitcoins,   argument quite a lot in the liquid federation too? Because   if It seems like the main value prop of liquid is is easy shitcoin creation. Well, that's, like, that's the topic of great debate. Right? I mean, you'll have someone like Francis from full bit crumble Bitcoin. He's just, like, the most extreme toxic maximalist.   Like, he just wants liquid for layer 2 payments,  

[01:36:10] Unknown:

and then you'll have someone else in the federation. Well, he also has, like I I feel like a lot of people that are anti shitcoin make an exception for stablecoins. Right? Like, it doesn't like LCAD, which  

[01:36:20] Unknown:

is, like, liquid Canadian dollar? And and then it's but you know what you're getting into. Right? It's a fully custodial. Like you said, you're trusting the issuer.   And you make that very clear   where, okay, LCAD is issued by Bull Bitcoin and, you know, you're trusting them. If they disappear, then then your token is worthless.   But,   the, the other, you know, the other side of liquid is, like, yeah, why do we need all these shit coins on there? Right? If if it's just a layer 2 payment network for Bitcoin,   great. Let's do that. And then like like you said, it's it's not a question of why. It's like, why not? Why not do shit coins? Right? Why not? And that's always, like, the slippery slope to the scams and everything.  

Oh, we need it for Tether. We need it for some legitimate  

[01:37:01] Unknown:

spaceship. This is a Totally. Question I like asking people. Like, would you   want the scams and the rug pulls and the shit coins to move onto a Bitcoin layer if they could? Or would you rather that just Bitcoin is just, like,   strictly  

[01:37:16] Unknown:

no, like, no other assets and just Bitcoin related things? But I think liquid kinda proved that they won't. Right? It's there's all of these, shitcoin   platforms out there that have optimized themselves for the scamming,   like, pump and dumps, and they've also built all And low fees. For sure. Like, low fees and   and share coins. But it's But they've optimized all this infrastructure, like, you know, you you connect your MetaMask to this token. I don't even know, but it it's all interoperable so that you can lose your money as fast as possible. Right? Whereas liquid, it's just a bunch of, cypherpunks writing actual But someone could do it on liquid if they wanted to. Right? They could make, like, a it's all open  

[01:37:58] Unknown:

relatively, so they could make their own liquid MetaMask. They could make their own liquid, like, shitcoin, Uniswap. I feel like the most recent one that is, like, a good example is, like, the NFT craze or whatever, because, like, the liquid guys tried to make NFTs on liquid a thing,   but instead people just use you know, they were using ETH, and then ETH fees went up, so they chose a more centralized cheaper chain, and they went to Solana or they went to whatever. Right. And that's what they were using for NFTs, and they weren't using liquid for NFTs. And even, like, where NFTs originally started was counterparty, which is built on top of Bitcoin as well. And, like,  

[01:38:32] Unknown:

same thing where, like, they went up a bit, but nowhere near as much as, like, 4 day, the op club, or any other shitcoin ones.  

[01:38:39] Unknown:

Could one say that the reason why most of these shitcoin projects are built on the shitcoin blockchains is because they're   heavily DC backed, and there's that. I mean, if   I I,   I Yeah. They have, like, ecosystem funds. They have their shitcoin that's pumping. I mean, I I agree with Wiz. It's like, well, you know, very good point. It's like, well, is it a slippery slope? And at the same time, I wonder, like, what is it would it be, like, better would it be the path to, like, realizing that Bitcoin is   the the only blockchain?  

Like,   and and   is that the path it's gonna take where, like like, you have this,   the lightning fund by, like, David Marcus or whatever. And   so now we have, like, VC backing, like, looking at lightning. Is that gonna bring all this shit? A fund. He has a project that got funded about, like, a 16 z. Okay. Is that is that We don't know what the project is yet. Right. Yeah. I have no idea. I'm pretty sure shit coins on lightning. Right. So is that is with that sort of, like, backing behind it going to then bring more of the VCs in there, and then we're gonna have all these shit coins on lightning.   Is that is that, like  

[01:39:47] Unknown:

yeah. I mean, the question is, is it better than them being on another channel? Right. Right. It's an interesting question, I think. It's like, would you want them to be on Bitcoin, or do you, like if you, like, want everything to be on Bitcoin, is you does that include the scams, or, like,   do you do you just really just want   bare basic Bitcoin payments and maybe stable coins as, like, an exception?  

[01:40:07] Unknown:

I think the best situation is probably on liquid where you have confidential transactions. So you can't actually know if it's a Bitcoin or a shitcoin transaction. Right? And then   it feels much more ethical. Right? Like, it's not up to me to decide that because I can't know. Oh, true. That's a good point. With with Taro, which is, like, how they're gonna do the the shitcoins on lightning,  

[01:40:26] Unknown:

you kinda can't tell, like, it's if you know, like, this is a Tether ad like, this is a Tether issue where you can see, like, what they do.   But, like, tracking it across the Lightning Network is gonna be pretty hard.   But, you know, it's like I mean, it'll be this won't be as good as liquid privacy, but it's still there. So you're not gonna be like, oh, this is a 1,000 USDT payment, but you're still getting, like, you know, this is a Tether payment probably.   Mhmm. But,   yeah. I I think it's just like, you know,   this there's people want this. Like, people love being scammed,   you know. And,   if they're gonna do it, like, may as well, like, selfishly, like, increase Bitcoin liquidity with it. Don't promote this other like, don't scam on top of a scam. Scam on top of Bitcoin,   because that increases Bitcoin liquidity.  



[01:41:14] Unknown:

I kinda like that. That's what I'm leaning for. I like that quote.  

[01:41:17] Unknown:

Yeah.   I'm gonna put that one on the soundboard.   I don't think I agree with that, but   I and why don't just use, like why don't just let the centralized shitcoins   be centralized shitcoins and have them run the stablecoins? But who are we to decide what people use Bitcoin for? Right? So, like, we I will go back to Strike again. So Strike launched in Argentina. They didn't have any bank account access. They had, like, similar   concern that Nick had with SatSale,   which people wanted USD exposure,   so they used Tether.   And   I presumably, they started on ETH. Fees went up on ETH. They use TRON now. It doesn't change the trust model at all for their users. Their users have no idea what chain it's on. Right.  

They're just switching. Why does it need to be on Lightning? It just makes it to me to me, there's all like, once again, there's all these trade offs we make with Lightning, and I we have to accept these trade offs Thank you. Because we want we want, you know, improved, you know, Bitcoin payments,   and we want fast, we want cash finality.   Right? We want interoperability,   we want the ability   to actually verify what's going on there with native Bitcoin, so we make all these trade offs, liquidity, and stuff. We were talking earlier about the liquidity challenge. Right? You're a new merchant.   You don't wanna use a centralized service. You wanna spin up the DCPA. You wanna spin up SatSale. All of a sudden, you need to get liquidity.  

If you're just accepting USDT,   which there's some people that say people are more likely to spend with stablecoins than they are with Bitcoin because of volatility risk, which I don't necessarily agree with, but there's there's a decently strong argument there, at least in the beginning, that people prefer to spend directly with stable coins.   Why would that merchant   go out of their way to take the trade offs of Lightning and get liquidity if they could   just accept it via fucking Tron or Swan or some shit. Right. Okay. Like, take, like,  

[01:43:10] Unknown:

you're an El Salvadorian   merchant,   and, Bitcoin is legal tender, but you don't wanna be exposed to price volatility.   So you wanna hold dollars. You can either use Chivo Wallet, which has a conversion for you, but, you know, it's government ran. So you're, like, you're just fucked.   So the alternative is, like, yeah, you can go to, like, Tron and use USDT. But now I need to acquire Tron to pay transaction fees   and use the shit coin, you know, maybe even try to run a Tron node and, you know, spend 1,000 of dollars on hardware. Well, you don't have to run a Tron node to accept USDT. No. You don't. But you wanna, you know, you're already trusting. That's fair. You're already trusting Tether.   So, okay, throughout the note part, So you need to own some trying to be able to spend it and move it and all that stuff.  

Alternatively,   you could use it on Bitcoin where you already have Bitcoin.   You don't need to download a shitcoin wallet. You just, you know, l and d or whatever while it supports it automatically.   And, you know, you're just using now dollars and Bitcoin, not having to touch anything else, learn about anything else. I guess you did kinda touch on a good argument there, and I dismissed you for a second,  

[01:44:13] Unknown:

that if you are using one of these, you know, very centralized shitcoin chains, you can't really verify the transaction yourself because you're not gonna be able to use your own node.   Even if you're already trusting Tether, you still wanna know if you actually got a real Tron transaction or not. It's not easy to run a node. Mhmm.  

[01:44:30] Unknown:

So I guess that there is a there's an there's an argument there. That's kind of like, do you wanna let them scam on a scam chain or let them scam on Bitcoin? And, also, it's it's not even up to us. It's, like, it's it's probably it's gonna happen. It's happening. But but but I guess then the argument could be there though that  

[01:44:47] Unknown:

to a degree liquid USDT   solves that because on liquid, it's it's it's relatively   it's not resource intensive to run your own liquid node.  

[01:44:56] Unknown:

It's pretty like, it take doesn't take up tons of data, but, like, syncing a node takes forever.  

[01:45:02] Unknown:

Yeah. There's trade offs like anything, I guess. Compute computationally expensive versus, disk space expensive.   But, I mean, it's a hell of a lot better than,  

[01:45:12] Unknown:

there's no Ethereum. No. I'm like, at the end of the day, like,   the cool part about Lightning, the cool part about Bitcoin is that people can build whatever the fuck they want. They can use it however they fuck they want.   I'm not trying to, like,   tell people not to do something,   and I can't tell people not to do something.   It's just it can be frustrating as a Bitcoiner   when you see dev cycles presumably getting wasted or resources getting wasted. And I use the word wasted, but, like, like, poor priorities.   Right. Right? And I just feel like stable coins on lightning,   not a big priority, but maybe I'm just completely misplaced. That's why I like talking about it. It sounds like the typical case of  

[01:45:57] Unknown:

people trying to monetize an open source project, right?   Maybe if you're somebody like Lightning Labs and you're developing LND for free or all of these other technologies and just shipping it as free open source software,   you want to make some business around it.   And maybe,   these,   Fiat   stable coin tokens or whatever on your technologies   is part of your bigger business case,   which you might have not even revealed to the public yet. Right? So,   yeah, does it need to be on lightning? No. But maybe it's someone's business case to do that. And and who are we to say that you can't use lightning for this or that? I mean, you can scam people with Bitcoin without any shit coins. Right? Hey. Send me one Bitcoin. I'll send you 2 back. Right? Like, you don't need anything. People get scammed on Bitcoin all the time. Exactly. Right? So   if you have,   good privacy,   then you can't censor people. And that's kind of like the whole liquids,   goal is with the confidential transactions is that   you can't really tell what's going on. So the functionaries can't really censor transactions, which is why it's a lot less,   you know, censorship risk on Liquid than even,   you know, some some Bitcoin miners. If you have, miners that are censoring,   a group of miners that are censoring   blocks. You know, you're trusting the majority of Bitcoin miners are gonna   be honest, right, or or not evil. So there's there's there's trade offs to using everything.  



[01:47:20] Unknown:

I think on the on the dev resources part too, like, if this could be, like, the best thing that ever happened to dev resources where today, like, you know, there's millions of, like, shitcoin devs because they skip all this PC funding to go and scam people.   And, you know, not only are they working on their scam, but, you know, they need to improve, like, either, like, the Solana ecosystem to, like, have their wallet support this and all that stuff. All those people then came and now we're working on lightning. You know, they they first implement their scam token on top of lightning, but, you know, say they have, like, routing failures, and I'll need you to go and Right. Routing payments and, you know, improve just the Bitcoin ecosystem. Yeah.  

[01:47:53] Unknown:

Yeah. Yeah. That's, like, I was exactly thinking the exact same thing. It's, like, yeah, if you have these,   even if they're shitty projects at first, at least you're getting them in the ecosystem,   and then maybe they realize what they're doing is stupid or scammy.   But they're there's they're working on Bitcoin. They've got some foundations in it, and maybe they can start building something better. Like, there is mild precedent  

[01:48:15] Unknown:

for this. Like, the inflation bug was found by a b cash dev because they're building an on top of a fork of Bitcoin cat of, Bitcoin core. So, like, you know, if they're, like, working on top of our software, they're gonna find things that either that'll they'll push fixes or find vulnerabilities and bugs. Like, it's it could be a net benefit.  

[01:48:30] Unknown:

Seared salmon thinks that's a fire take, Ben.  

[01:48:33] Unknown:

Good.  

[01:48:37] Unknown:

I'll do that. Wiz, is there anything you wanna talk about?  

[01:48:42] Unknown:

I mean, I could talk about Bitcoin for hours. I could talk about I've got something. For hours.  

[01:48:49] Unknown:

Different pathways   for new engineers and developers to getting into Bitcoin. So I'd be really curious to go around the table   and to hear what your backgrounds are. Like, did you guys study computer science? Did you study in the adjacent field? Did you just pick it up after college?  

[01:49:05] Unknown:

What about you is, like to hear from you? Oh, I quit school when I was like 14 years old to go work at an ISP.  

[01:49:11] Unknown:

Awesome.   Yeah. Yeah. I didn't go to school at all. And so how did you get into Bitcoin, like, development itself?  

[01:49:19] Unknown:

I'm not sure. I'm even in Bitcoin development. Right. Man, cool. Man, cool. I get be building on Bitcoin as well. I just run the servers. Like,   my partner, Soft Simon, and our Mhmm. Shadow super coders and all of our external contributors and everything. You know, it's a it's a community project. We have lots of really cool people working on it. I just kinda coordinate or or organize some things here and there and and just run the servers.   It's not you know, I'm not writing the mempool code. But you're still,  

[01:49:49] Unknown:

managing the GitHub and stuff?  

[01:49:51] Unknown:

I just go on GitHub and push the merge button. But I don't know what's going on. Is it when it turns green, I just push the button. So  

[01:49:58] Unknown:

The only other developer at the table here is Carmen.   But Yeah. What's your answer, Carmen?  

[01:50:04] Unknown:

I was in the middle of college,   and,   my girlfriend just broke up with me. And I was like, what am I doing with my life?   And then,   got like just started selling Bitcoin really hard and then just kind of stopped doing all schoolwork and only Bitcoin.   Later dropped out and, joined Shirt Bits. I guess I started with Wasabi while I was in college and then later joined Shirt Bits for, like, 2 years.   Now I'm here at the Bitcoin company.   But yeah. I mean, it's a lot of just, like, you know, just being, like, frustrated with college. Like, I felt like I was learning nothing. Mhmm. And, like, within a one week of, like, talking to Bitcoin devs, I learned, like, 10 times and much more as I did in college.  

[01:50:40] Unknown:

So the hard part is you first have to get a girlfriend, but then once once you have her, you just lose it. Breaking up is probably the easier part. Yeah. You know, do something stupid. Let her break up with you. Get depressed, and then, you know, go go crazy on Bitcoin development.  

[01:50:54] Unknown:

So I feel like I've heard,   like, some misconception from people who wanna start building in Bitcoin.   They think they need to go do computer science or something for, like, 4 years and, like, you know, get a whole foundational thing from scratch and figure out how a computer works from the absolute basics. But I I really think,   it's getting heaps and heaps easier to just pick it up yourself,   like   like the voltage APIs and all these APIs that are coming out. You can just sort of pull things together, a lot of tutorials online,   which, yeah, I think is is interesting, different different ways that people can get into it. No. Yeah. I my parents always get mad at me because,  

[01:51:33] Unknown:

I always tell them college is a scam.   They're like, no. It's not. And, like, we have, like, neighbors who are, like, you know, they're like and they're like 8, like, 18 year olds. I got looking to, like they're like, kind of some of them want to be coders and, like, do not go to college. I like, that's the worst idea you could do. Like, learn like like there's so many free online resources or go to a boot camp, something like that. And they always get mad. Like, you're gonna be a failure without college. I'm like, okay. But,   yeah. Like, it's a,   I think, like, coding, like, you know, the Internet made information free and, like, coding is, like, one of the most well, like,   probably the the most, like, easiest thing to, like, learn online.  

And,   the beauty is to, like, open source work is just, like, you don't need, like, a 4 year degree saying, like, I know how to do surgery. You just like, here's my GitHub. Here's, you know, thousands of contributions I've given, you know? And   it's just like you have proof of work, like, automatically. So it's  

[01:52:26] Unknown:

a. It's a beautiful way that, like, to learn something. It's kind of unique with coding. Yeah. You're right. I think picking up coding now is probably easier than ever. We even have a special keyboard for one of our developers. It's got 3 buttons on it. The first button is a Stack Overflow button. It just opens the website and browser, and the other two buttons are copy and paste.   He's, our best developer.  

[01:52:49] Unknown:

So I'm not an engineer, and I got absolutely scammed in college.   Big yeah. So I I went to school for business.   That was fun.   And then I was like, okay. I'm not gonna work in a cubicle. I have no idea what I'm gonna do. I'm like, let me just let me just get a degree in nursing.   So so I got scammed twice.   And then I was like, well, I'm gonna figure this out and travel nurse. I was an ICU nurse. I'm gonna be like, alright, let's,   I'm gonna find something that I that I real that gets me going. Alright. Gets me passionate about it. And then I stumbled across Bitcoin.   And then   I scanned my co founder and to help him build this product.  

You know, so I do like you can find a co founder.   And and they're the engineer, they're the developer,   and   you just work on Bitcoin, like, you know, so, yeah, just a little different take there. Like, I think there's a lot more people now because   it's getting easier and easier to   maybe get some sort of indication, at least, like, a year ahead, like, what it might look like.   And so we're having a lot more, like, any  

[01:54:00] Unknown:

business focused people hop in and try things out. Right. That's super interesting as well as I've seen more of those kind of people. Like, they don't they're not really, like, the programming, coding, computer types,   but they're more, like, sort of business people, and they they wanna get into sort of doing, like, project management on Bitcoin. Like, how would you sort of suggest those people sort of you know, do you say you go to meetups and just meet engineers? Or His advice is to get scammed a couple times.  

[01:54:25] Unknown:

You'll get scammed in college then because you know how you got scammed, then you find an engineer to scam and build a project for you.   No. I mean, my cofounder, like, that was I I've had people talk about an engineer. Like, how did you build this? I'm like, I'm not an engineer either. I just had, like, an idea of what this might look like in the future. This is, you know, in, like, 2018.   And, you know, honestly, one of the first things he said to me is, like, why don't we build this on Ethereum? And I'm like, oh, don't worry. Don't worry. Let me, let me get you let me get you in. We're like, no. We're gonna do some lightning. Here's why. And then, of course, like, he is a fully orange pill.   And over time, like, you know, you just have to that's the first pitch I made. We haven't we still haven't raised money.  

And   and we're, like, you know, the first pitch I made was to my cofounder to the engineer, and I'm like, hey. Like, what do you think about this? And he was totally sold, and then we just we just built it together. I can go on that too because I was kind of the flip side of that where,  

[01:55:21] Unknown:

Ben Price pitched me the Bitcoin company. Like, I'd known him for, like, I met him in, like, the their big chat, and then we met a bitbuckle in person. I went to visit him in Mexico. And then, like,   basically, just, like, pitched me for a week. I was like, this is a cool idea. I think we could build it.   And,   by the end of the week, I was like, alright. Fuck it. We'll do it. And then, like,   6 months later or something, I was part of the company. Like, you know, it's just like you don't need to be a like, you need like, most things kinda need devs nowadays, but, like, there's an only developer jobs. There's lots much more ways to do it if you have ideas. You know, if they're good, people will listen. You know, something everyone can do. The the thing about the new new people joining the space now is, like you said, there's more business people showing up and people wanna do Bitcoin businesses. Mhmm. But it's extremely hard to build a rent extraction business in Bitcoin. Right?  

[01:56:10] Unknown:

There's not a lot of ways to   just, you know, be like a credit card company and take a percentage off of everything. You actually have to make a real contribution to the space. You have to have a real   proof of work, something that's genuinely useful and   improves the overall experience for everyone.   And then maybe   you can build a ethical business to monetize your project on top of that. Right?   Absolutely.  

[01:56:36] Unknown:

I mean, I think one of the key things as a   non dev   key piece of advice just in general life, not only in Bitcoin, is to keep showing up. You gotta keep showing up. You gotta keep wanting to improve yourself, and and be humble enough to realize that you don't know fucking jack shit, and that you can improve. Right?   Time and time again in this space, you see the people that are successful are the ones that just keep showing up.   Yeah. Showing up is half of success. Right? 100%, maybe more.   And,   and you also have to have the confidence. Right? Yeah. Like, don't get demoralized   about it. Like, your the power's in your hands. The power's in everyone. One of the cool things about Bitcoin, one of the cool things about open source projects in general and the open source movement is that it empowers individuals   to help themselves. Right?  

And,   to pick themselves up by their bootstraps,   so to speak, and that's that's extremely powerful. It's extremely cool to watch so many people in the space   be successful, and watch them go on their journey. I remember when I met Carmen the first time, it was, like, in a hallway at Bitblock. Boom. He was just, like, a little fucking kid. He had no idea what the fuck he was doing. Right? And now everyone knows he's the chain surveillance   guy. Guys, this has been a fucking fire conversation. It's been an honor to have you all here at Bitcoin Park for for this week. It's just been really fucking special.  

[01:58:03] Unknown:

It's awesome here. It's so sick. Like, I'm so glad I came. It's it's incredible to set up. You guys are going here, and same as Austin as well. It's really, like, it's it's mind blowing. It's nice to be out of Australia. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, yeah, there's more people at the meetup, like, few days ago than there was, like, I've ever met in, like, Bitcoin. It's in Australia. So it's crazy. It's funny, like, there there was some Bitcoin conferences back in the day that would not have 100 of people, but it's just an ordinary Nashville  

[01:58:32] Unknown:

point meet up. There's hundreds of people. It's in in a bear market too, which is the most impressive. Right? It's insane. It's pretty crazy how much Bitcoin has grown. Like, I moved to Austin in 2020 for the bitcoin scene. It was like a major part. And I mean, it was 20 people.   And now we get 50 people and we're like, wow. This is fucking like, no one's here.   And, you know, 250 is, like, oh, average. Like   so it's, it's it's definitely weird how crazy things have grown in the last few years. Yeah.  

[01:59:00] Unknown:

I would say,   yeah, there's a bunch of meetups in Austin,   Austin Bitcoin Club, just   I keep asking people,   like, how many people are here for the first time.   And it seems like it's half the room every time even though the total attendance keeps going up. And again, it's like bear market. Or maybe who did Jack say, like, is it a bear market or is it a trip cover session?  

[01:59:23] Unknown:

That one really hit me. I was, like, I had trouble sleeping.  

[01:59:28] Unknown:

But so, you know, people are showing up and,   you know, we need to keep showing up and keep   spreading the good word is Satoshi and keep building cool things and keep trying new things  

[01:59:40] Unknown:

on Bitcoin. Yeah. It's definitely true. Like, the people that, like, like the people that show up to the the bear market meetups and, like, the ones that don't, it's like you you remember, like, oh, you were here.  

[01:59:50] Unknown:

No. Every every good meme is based in reality. And like the bear markets are for building meme. Like that makes sense. Like you see, like people who keep  

[01:59:57] Unknown:

keep going when the price is up. Oh, yeah. And the the bull market, that's when you get all the shit coin or scammers showing up at the meetups trying to   scam people. And and during the bear market, it's just pure signal. All the noise fades away.  

[02:00:10] Unknown:

It's awesome. Yeah. It's really cool.  

[02:00:13] Unknown:

So I I know you guys do not wanna stop talking,   but I did a 2 hour podcast before this for a very long week. We just hit the 2 hour mark.   We're gonna be chilling after this.   So I would like to wrap up the show. I hope the freaks found it very helpful. But before we wrap up, let's do some final thoughts,   and we'll start with you, Ben.  

[02:00:35] Unknown:

Fuck chain surveillance.  

[02:00:37] Unknown:

Thanks, Ben.   Final thoughts, Michael. Are you   censoring us right now? We're gonna keep talking. I mean, you can keep talking. I was just like, I've go get some food and just walk out and just leave you guys here if you want.  

[02:00:49] Unknown:

No.   Yeah.   My message to the freaks is, like,   freaking start a Bitcoin meeting if you already have 1,   talk with people in your community,   assume they don't know shit about Bitcoin because most of them don't, and just start the conversation and   expand outside of Twitter, and   we're gonna win.  

[02:01:12] Unknown:

Fuck yeah. Thanks, Michael. And, you know, you're always welcome. You're always welcome to come here and talk.   Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure. It's a true pleasure and honor. Invite. Yeah. Nick, final thoughts.  

[02:01:23] Unknown:

Final thoughts.   Don't just go to your local meetup. Go experience some other meetups around the world if you can. If you have the opportunities, it is really incredible, the connections you make.   And and my second final thought would be,   if you're a new Bitcoiner, like, wanting to start doing Bitcoin development,   I've just started, like, a I've got a website, utx0.club.   Posting some, like, Bitcoin resources on there for, like, getting into   Bitcoin developments and tutorials,   some, guides and stuff.   And gonna start at Discord, I think, and see how that goes. Yeah. Check that out. Thanks, Nick.  

[02:01:59] Unknown:

Final thoughts, Wiz.  

[02:02:00] Unknown:

I think if you wanna be successful in Bitcoin, you need to lower your time preference, build relationships   with   other Bitcoiners,   surround yourself with winners,   ignore the say, ignore the noise, focus on the signal, ignore the haters, haters gonna hate, just   keep showing up, keep working hard, build something that you wanna use yourself   and be the person that you   would like everyone to   become and,   travel the world.  

[02:02:33] Unknown:

Yeah.   Go to all the meet ups. Go to all the meet ups. Tony says fuck the Benz.  

[02:02:38] Unknown:

Yeah. Tony Tony's final thought is fuck the Benz, and, future Paul's final thought is he's becoming a huge fan of Nick. Hey. Who is it? Guys, this has been an absolute pleasure.   Thank you for joining us.   I truly did enjoy it. I hope the freaks found this conversation helpful.   There'll be many more solo dispatches in the future,   probably many more with all the guys that are here at this table right now.   And,   thank you all for supporting the show, whether that's coming into the comments, whether that's subscribing on your favorite platform. It's basically on every platform now, including all the podcast apps, or, well, whether that's   joining us in the live chat.  

I really do appreciate you all. I couldn't do it without you,   and, stay on bone stack sets. Oops.