Join me today for Episode 955 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Introducing Alby Hub
- Uncle Jim Capability
- Podhome Integration
- Alby nostr Integration
- Alby iOS App
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
Find Tomek K:
Discord: https://discord.getalby.com
Alby Support: https://cal.com/getalby
Twitter: https://x.com/itstomekk
Zap Him!: [email protected]
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find me on nostr
npub1vwymuey3u7mf860ndrkw3r7dz30s0srg6tqmhtjzg7umtm6rn5eq2qzugd (npub)
6389be6491e7b693e9f368ece88fcd145f07c068d2c1bbae4247b9b5ef439d32 (Hex)
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DavidB84567
StackerNews:
stacker.news/NunyaBidness
Podcasting 2.0:
fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
Apple Podcasts:
tinyurl.com/unm35bjh
Mastodon:
https://noauthority.social/@NunyaBidness
Support Bitcoin And . . . on Patreon:
patreon.com/BitcoinAndPodcast
Find Lightning Network Channel partners here:
https://t.me/+bj-7w_ePsANlOGEx (Nodestrich)
https://t.me/plebnet (Plebnet)
Music by:
Flutey Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
[00:00:00]
David Bennett:
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:0:5 am Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 17th day of September 2024.
And this is episode 955 of Bitcoin. And I am bringing you a gentleman by the name of Tomek. We sat down for an interview. This would be our second interview, in fact. However, you never got to hear the first one because the audio died and I didn't know it. It was well, actually, I knew it when I wasn't able to get the file down from the platform that I was using. It just it was stuck. It wasn't going to come down. It happens. You know, you do a really good interview and you sit down for an hour I think we talked for at least an hour and a half that particular day and all of it was just gone. So, when I delivered the bad news to Tomac, him being the good sport that he is, said that he would do it again.
And this time I had backup recording, I had all kinds of stuff, and everything worked fine. Tomec is from the Alby team. Just so you know what we're gonna be talking about today, it's the Albie extension in my browser that I always use to do at least one of three things. I use it to log in to every Nostr platform that will take a Nostr ID you know, an N2nd and NPUB. So it handles my Nostr private and public key pair. I use it to zap and receive zaps on any of the Nostr clients that I have. And it is the receiving end for well, it's it's part of the receiving end for anybody that boosts my podcast episodes or streams satoshis to it. I always set out set up get albie or my extension as, getting 1% of all the Satoshis streamed to it and boosted to it. And then I set up on my, in my podcast, I use pothome dot fm as my hosting company and they allow me to set up multiple addresses to, have percentages go to. So I've got that other 99% actually streams directly to my wallet. And the reason that I use, Albie to do that is so that I can just use Alby to get a good feel of is anybody boosting.
I'll only see 1% as the number of satoshis that I've gotten from that. But I know immediately that I've gotten something through the podcast because the way that they do their memos it does a lot of things if you are not using Albie I highly recommend that you at least try it out because they've got all kinds of stuff that that works very very well on multiple platforms and me and Tomek get into all of that. We're gonna talk about the old Albie the way it was with the custodial wallet and now they don't do that anymore. They've transitioned to the second part that we'll talk about is Albi Hub. That's what they've migrated to. Right?
They also have a mobile wallet that is now well, it's because it's in beta and I'm one of the beta testers. It should be live any day now or well any week now. I don't know. 2 weeks. TM. You go figure. Right? I'm using it and it works like a charm. And it's just this wonderful ecosystem of being able to combine Nostr and Podcasting 2.0 and Zaps and have a lightning wallet and have it connect to my own node or you can have it connect to a cloud node that you rent. It is amazing. I cannot recommend this product enough. And, it was one of the reasons why I really needed wanted and needed to get one of the team members from Albie onto the show so that we could discuss this. So I'm gonna drop you in right now to that interview with Tomek from the Albie team. It's freaking weird, but we're not here to talk about all of that. We are here to talk about Albie.
So Yes, sir. I got Tomek. And, Tomek, you are with Alby. What what do you do for them?
[00:05:10] Tomek K:
I'm like user facing interface of the company. You can call it marketing and promo and social media and going to sometimes podcast events and making sure that, our team knows what to build, what people want, and there is communication in 2 ways. You you people out there know what is that'll be and how to use it.
[00:05:34] David Bennett:
Well, how long have you been working for them? I mean, how or rather, how when did you fall into, getting hired on with the guys over at Albi?
[00:05:48] Tomek K:
I joined the team a year ago. I think it is a year. Yeah. Now and yeah. I mean, I've been, like, getting ready to transition to a Bitcoin job as for many of us who did follow this that fall this rabbit hole. It's like the thing that we kind of aspire to, and eventually, I want to get on Bitcoin standard also in terms of, where do I work? And that's also it's a pleasant experience. Right? Work somewhere where your passion is. So I was, like, preparing for this kind of transition and not, like, kind of actively looking for for a job there. But, yes, somehow we got it in touch. We would Albie was partnering and sponsoring one of the sponsors of our film festival that we did 2 years ago, a year ago, the next edition. Right? So we got in touch with the team, got on a few calls, and I was, happy to join them.
[00:06:49] David Bennett:
Yeah. You're definitely one of the lucky ones. There's so many of us that that have been flirting with Bitcoin standard, Bitcoin jobs, and, you know, some have had better luck than others. I imagine there is not that many. Right? There is not that many, like, places,
[00:07:04] Tomek K:
spots for people to work on. Right? And most of these companies are still not making money, but they still live off investments and they live on hopes. But the scope hopes have some rational basis. And even if the startups like Albidi eventually will not, I don't know, succeed business wise. There is a great legacy that, not only Albie, but these companies, like, companies, groups like LNBs, BTCPay, that they already built. And there are other people, groups, companies that build on top of the this legacy, this protocols that this, people organized open source contributors, delivered.
[00:07:45] David Bennett:
Yeah. And, you know, one of the, you know, one of the things that I think really holds I don't know. What what holds me back and I think what holds a lot of other people back is that when you say that there's a, you know, few companies that you can actually go do this for, there's even fewer that hold the amount, like a really good, have a really good eye to the ethics of what's going on. Like finding a company that doesn't shit coin that you can go work for automatically cuts out like 50% off the top. And then there's other issues that you have to work, you know, work through. Like, people will say that they're a Bitcoin company, and then you get into the weeds of it, and you find out that there's shit coinery going on in the background. They're not overtly shit coiners, but then you'd like to start digging under the sheets and you find out They're trade. They're trading other these other tokens And it's really kind of heartbreaking in a lot of ways because you have a lot of respect for there's, you know, a couple instances I can think of where there's a lot of respect for a person that got a company that hired Bitcoin or the Bitcoin or wants to actually just do Bitcoin and come to find out there's all kinds of weird extra bear or, well, extramural activities when it comes to that that kind of thing. And so that makes it that makes the amount of companies in this space that are actually good high quality ethical companies, it makes it it makes them even less. And I I think that that's a that's a real fight because we got a whole bunch of hardcore Bitcoiners out there that really wanna go work for these companies. And when you finally peel back all the layers and you find out who they actually are, the real ones, if they're even less than you thought.
[00:09:33] Tomek K:
I wonder whether, one of the solutions would be either to have more of such companies, some projects that either get their investment or or or make money somehow in this business, that there is opportunity to make business or to orange peel existing companies businesses. Right? I guess, kind of I don't know what comes to your mind. Tidal by or other companies like Jack Dorsey. I I don't think they are, like, orange peel on or top down or MicroStrategy. Right? I don't I doubt, like, people, on a lower level, they are being hired because of, like, some Bitcoin Ethos. So it will take time, and probably both solutions,
[00:10:19] David Bennett:
will somehow appear, but it will take time. Yeah. And there will probably be a couple of more solutions that come up. But getting back to Albie, I just kinda wanna go back to to the, bit like, in in as far back in your memory, because you didn't start with the company, like, right up front. You came in a little bit later. But can you tell us about, like, the why the the people that that got together to start Alby, why they did it? What what was the problem they were trying to solve?
[00:10:54] Tomek K:
Hard for me to speak for them for their personal motivations. I believe they were honest and the mission that we are still kind of pursuing with Alby to make lightning network truly decentralized and accessible to everyone. It was already their motivation, and it happened, if I if I read the chronicles of Albi properly, it happened at some the lightning hackathon in Istanbul where, there was this jewel lightning extension and kind of trying to improve this idea of jewel. These 3 guys, Reneb, Boomi, Moritz. They built a a lightning browser extension. And from this, letter of the derivation actually comes alb, lightning browser extension.
And it was just a tool to make it easier to operate with Bitcoin lightning on the web and, make also use of LND nodes, easy because LND was the most popular back then. I'm not sure if if you just know. And then, also, I'll be figured that, it's not that easy also to run that node. Right? It's it's obvious. It's it's still kind of challenging. So they started offering those Albi accounts where, you can call it like custodial wallet, right, of Albi where, Albi LND node was shared among its users. We don't do it anymore. The solution now is fully, self custodial, right, with the latest release of Albi Hub. So among the in the meantime, since because it was the first code was on I'll be GitHub was, I think, submitted, 3 years ago. I think it almost exactly 3 years ago.
But since then, I'll be, built few interesting tools and libraries for developers that, that make use of lightning on the web. And also today, Nostril and few other tricks, like signings signing, messages or transactions or events with your Anoster keys, but also Bitcoin keys, on chain keys, liquid keys. Those are quite interesting features that, will still still, I guess, are looking for their, market fit.
[00:13:29] David Bennett:
Yeah. Well, because I started using Albie, I don't know, not not terribly long after it started. And, you know, it was just for me, it's just a wallet that, I could use that was it was integrated to my web browser, and it was and I I was using Albie god, I was using Albie before I was using Nostr. And I honestly, now that I've used it with Nostr so much and, Podcasting 2.0 so much, I kinda can't remember what what it was that I was using it for when I first got it. That's that's how long I've been using this thing. Right? So but now, you know And it's still not boring for you or you didn't get tired. That's good. Oh, god. No. No. No. No. It just it gets better and better and better. See, that that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have some of the guys from from Albie on on the show to talk about this, because I don't think people are I don't think people are really aware of how important the the Albie extension actually is.
Because when it like I said, when it first started, it was simply a lightning wallet embedded in your browser. And then I started using I started using the Albie address as podcast where I was receiving Satoshis for by, podcasting 2.0 stuff. And that way I could keep a track on what was going on. But then we got in, Albie integrated with Noster. And so these it's like it just keeps expanding and expanding and expanding. And it's and and worst and you're you're still expanding, and we'll get into that here in a second. But when when the Noster expanding, and we'll get into that here in a second. But when when the Noster integration came in, that made Alby my go to wallet for zapping people on Noster. And for those people that don't know or haven't tried Noster, I don't know why you haven't. It doesn't cost you anything. And you really need to claim your name space before, TikTok and Facebook and all the rest of the crap meltdown. But it made it incredibly easy to integrate my interactions with other people. And it incredibly easy to integrate my interactions with other people.
And it was almost as if it it was so fluid. It was almost as if I I wonder, and I know you can't speak to this because you're not one of the developers, but either they either they did it so well out of the gate when they built, when they started integrating Noster, or it was a happy accident that it turned out to be such a fluid experience when it came to just here's my Noster address or here's my Albie address, and I give that to Noster. And all of a sudden, my my zaps were enabled instantly. I didn't have to do anything. And the wallet acts as a, a goat like a a place where I can shoot zaps from and receive that zaps too. And all it was was just embedding my Albie address into my nostril profile. That was it. It was and like I said, it was like it's almost as if that kind of integration has to be worked over by so many developers that it's insane, or it just happened to be that I'll be in Nostra just magically fit together as happenstance.
Do you have y'all ever talked about that? I mean, was it was this hard to get this integration with master going or or did it just was it just magic?
[00:17:03] Tomek K:
For, like, maintain building and maintaining such extension is, is not easy job. And our developers, I also, hats off to them, are doing incredible job incredible job with it. From what I've heard, it wasn't that difficult to to do Nost integration. And it was, you know, all of us. We are Maxi Bitcoiners who are also looking at the new technologies that are popping up, and we are fans of open source and decentralization. So Nostra, everybody is on Nostra much more than on Twitter or everywhere anywhere. What's a good thing about it is that you can, I guess, you can track, right, that you can track these discussions on GitHub when who was it that suggested first this improvement, to the code, and who was it that, accepted it and merged the PR? And you can see the change log who was behind which feature. And that's also beautiful about Albie because it's not only Albie team, people that are actually paid for building this stuff, delivered it. But also there is plenty of, you know, volunteers, open source contributors who just want to make these tools better and the use of lightning easier.
And they also bring quite a lot of, you know, ideas and features. Albie is also open for, you know, we are running this open hours. We're running feedback boards. We are constantly in con in touch with, with users on to what features do they want. And I wonder whether it made me think when you were asking this question, and, I feel like in name of Alibi, I can only say I feel honored by that that, you are appreciating it that much. But that made me think what would be next such step for at least extension. Right? Because for Albi, we recently, like, released this hub. Now there is AlbiGo, a mobile wallet. But, I wonder whether there is something yeah. And we are sometimes think about these features in the extension, what it will be that could be so natural, right, to, what our users want. If you have suggestions or any of your users, hit us up, there is there is always, room to improve.
[00:19:20] David Bennett:
Yeah. Well, you brought up AlbyHub, but first, in case any of the listeners don't know is that, you know, Alby used to be a custodial wallet. Y'all took custody of the of the funds, and I never had a problem with it and nobody I ever knew had a problem with it. But everybody, you know, like there was always this chatter about how custodial is always bad, which I don't agree with up to a certain point. If I wouldn't want somebody else to custody $5,000. I get nervous when somebody else is custodying 500. But 50, $50, you know, $25, I don't care. It's not that big of a deal for me.
But it something happened in in Albie's history that y'all decided to move from the custodial model. And some people were asking why, you know, and and they don't go and read the they don't go and read the all the blogs because it's all kind of explained in there. But a few a couple of months back, I'll be made the move to say, look, we're doing away with the custodial wallet. We're going to do it in stages, but essentially we're going to introduce this new system. We're going to introduce Alby hub and you're going to take self custody, but you're going to run on our rails, the Alby rails to do it.
So before I ask you to kind of break down what Albie Hub is, I'm wondering or I wanna make it I I definitely wanna say the following. When I said, I'll be Hub up the way that you guys, you know, the way, and it was very easy, but the way that you guys kind of the technical documents said, Hey, do this and then do this and do this. And I was like, it was like a minute and a half. It took me a minute and a half to do this thing. It was not that big of a deal. I'm not a programmer. I didn't need to be one. I have seen absolutely no change in the ease of use for using my Albie extension. It's like nothing changed.
And I I wanna I want that to be upfront because, generally speaking, people hate change. Believe me. I know. I can't stand it. I hate I one of these people that I hate change. Right? And it it made no difference to me whatsoever, but I have my own node. It was a little bit different that way. So what at this point, could you tell us what Albie Hub is as the is it is it a full blown replacement for the custodial wallet? Or in your view, is it something even more than that?
[00:22:00] Tomek K:
In terms of products that Albi offers, yes, it's a replacement and slowly it will replace, the cost of the solution that we are slowly sunsetting. It's also, a challenge to educate, convince people. Like you said, they don't like change to, use because it it it requires a bit of effort. Right? You need to either install app, RBH app on on some of your devices or you need to pay someone to host it for you. You need to open channels. Like, the self custody doesn't come that easy yet, but I'll be happy. I guess it's a good step in making that easier.
So it's a it's a node and wallet in one with a sleek interface that, as I said, you can install almost anywhere. And it integrates very well with, with Albi products because it's powered with Nest WalletConnect. And, Nest WalletConnect was kind of a in between product for what we had because as you said, as you mentioned, like, few months back, we made this decision and announced that, okay, we are not opening anymore, custodial accounts and we will be delivering self custodial wallet. So it was it it was not only the history of Alby, but a history, I guess, of, Lightning Ecosystem, and it all exists in some context. And, it's not only us that at some point, had to kind of step out of offering services to the US.
It's also, some changes in, interest, in Bitcoin and certain, adjusting technologies with some NFT waves that there was a small wave of kind of spammy, activity on our node. It's challenging to share, node with thousands of users who don't know how, what will be the inflow, offsets, what type of money is it, is it is it your responsibility or not. So it's a whole context at eventually building Nest WalletConnect. It was a great kind of realization for all of us that, okay. In this situation, maybe we we should release our own self custody wallet that will be powered with this Nest WalletConnect that we released a few months earlier and worked hard to, drive its adoption.
So realizing, hey. Let's build node because it didn't have a name yet. Then But AlbieHub was the earliest name, I think, we we gave to this project. Was kind of, like, Eureka. Yes. This is the mission. This is this is the way we wanna go, and actually it's it's actually follows all of our all of us vision into what lightning, I guess, should be as a scaling solution to Bitcoin, to be resilient and to actually give, like, financial power to the people, it needs to be decentralized. And decentralization is not when there is, you know, big Albi node and big Blink and big wallet of Satoshi node and there is 3 or 4 nodes in the network and majority of Bitcoiners are transferring SaaS, but some, or maybe not necessarily even SaaS, between accounts of those three projects. Right? So we we are happy to go this sovereign and self custodial way even if, it maybe doesn't come with, certain business benefits, but that that's also, you know, who knows?
Right. Well, I mean believe that it was a good move. Right? Yeah. I I I do.
[00:26:01] David Bennett:
And the the reason that I do, and some people don't understand my my vehement stance on the long arm of the United States judicial system, but a lot of people are in the crosshairs of somehow or another, even if you're outside a sovereign nation, a sovereign citizen outside of the United States, apparently we can just protect our project, our power anywhere to someplace that we think is doing something, you know, like the wallet is Toshiba guys. They got out of the us market altogether because they just didn't want to deal with it. I don't blame them. I absolutely don't blame them.
Samurai tornado cash. I, the list goes on and on and on. I think that, I honestly think that it was a really good move for Albie to just say, you know what, we're not doing custody anymore with there. There's other ways to be able to do this without us actually managing your funds and which I think is is a I think that that is an emergent property of what we see in Bitcoin lightning, e cash, Fedimans, the Noster, these kinds of things is that we're starting to see these systems attached to each other in ways that are, that are surprising, at least for me. So like for instance, you guys, over at Alby said no to custodial and then gave me the option to use the the the Albee all the the the all the good stuff, all the front end neat stuff that I can do with Albee, except I'm powering it from my lightning node. But there's a lot of people that don't have lightning nodes. They they can't attach their own sovereign lightning node to Albie because they don't have one. But you guys came up with a, well, the ability to either is it host your own node or or get liquidity from another node? Do y'all have both services?
I can't remember because I know there's something called Nodonna, which is hosting for AlbiHub. So you can host AlbiHub somewhere on Nodonna. Right?
[00:28:20] Tomek K:
Yeah. Like, in this model, I guess, you can find people or companies that host for you an NIMBY instance or BTCPay instant, and the same with Albi. It's an open source software. And, we are actually happy to see that, you know, there is already a kind of competition for us because, Albi business model now is based on selling this cloud infrastructure for a code that is open source. And we know how this code looks and works like, so it's, it's also probably the stickiest way to use Albi hub today. And it it's, I I think it's something positive to see that, there is this guy, Tom, I guess, I believe, he was guest of our, Albie community calls, and I invite anyone who is listening to this. We are hosting those every other Thursday.
I'll be community calls where you could meet our team, users, and fantastic different projects. And one of them visiting us was, Tom who runs Sintra, and he runs Nodana. And he does, hosting for LB Hub and for, I believe, 3 other apps that you could, like you know, you you buy hosting and you can maybe install WordPress somewhere or install some other app. Tom does it with, some Bitcoin apps, which is cool. You can compare prices. I think it's also his version is a bit if I'm not mistaken, it's a bit cheaper, but, it's charged per minute. So it's it's also a bit different business model.
Anyway, you know, they've it's also it's not that that much super innovative that we did it because, there is, already users have options to run their nodes, which maybe are, you know, for some users, not that easy or, other people are more browser browser based or there are more mobile phone based, so they use Phoenix. There are great teams like Mutiny or Umbra or StartKnight that 9 that give us already, and projects like Raspiblitz that give users, if you want to, you can run your node, and it's it's not that difficult. Right? And without behalf, it's even easier. So, yeah, we are happy that we are following this path of, other little giants and all of us together with, podcaster podcasters like you, I guess, build this for the much bigger and a much brighter, hopefully, future of Bitcoin.
And maybe it's good. I don't know. I got this thought when you were speaking that maybe it's good that we got this disruption, and I don't know, hunting for some activity from US government as, as as you mentioned. It's maybe good that it happens so early so we have more time to to see that the direction, and we noticed that the direction to to be away as much resilient from any, I know, governmental or, any other organized force agencies that we might face. So, because otherwise, maybe if, US would let, Wallet of Satoshi to exist, or Phoenix so easily within the US, maybe, there wouldn't be that much innovation in self custody. Right?
[00:31:51] David Bennett:
Right. Which well
[00:31:53] Tomek K:
and Creative disruption.
[00:31:56] David Bennett:
This kind of brings me to this notion of and we for those of you who don't know, me and Tomek tried to do this a couple of weeks ago, and the entire audio file just fell apart. It it I wasn't able to capture it. So we did do these questions before, but I wanna I don't have this feeling of, like, you know,
[00:32:15] Tomek K:
repeating. We still have kind of, same discussion, kind of following the same topics, but, I'm getting a bit different, insights, from talking with you. So Yeah. Well, yeah. It's Glad glad we are redoing it. Yeah. It's it's Not much happened in the practice run. We had a practice run. Oh, yeah. We were training. Okay. So this one is supposed to be we have now we have cameras. Right? Right. But the so but
[00:32:41] David Bennett:
you're talking about that, like, if if it hadn't have been for this long arm of the United States justice department cracking down, then we would might find ourselves where we're getting lax on innovation. And here here's the thing, is that this was I think that this particular example is kind of poignant because right at the time that Albie was making the switch was exactly the week that I did an interview in Colorado, with one of my neighbors. Who's like, he's like an 18 year old kid. He built his first business when he was 14. He had a second business by the time he was 15. And we're talking like, you know, they're not huge businesses, lawn mowing, snow removal, excavation, and now he's doing like septic tank installs.
All right. This is, you know, it's all blue collar work, but he's a, he's a burgeoning Bitcoin or he's like me and him started talking about Bitcoin a couple of years ago. He's never stopped thinking about it. And now he's kind of into it. And when I got him on the show, I told him, well, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to, I'm going to set you up with, you know, you're going to have to do a couple of things, but I'm going to set you up with an Albi account. You're going to give me your, when you're done, you're going to give me your address. I'm going to throw it into the splits on my podcast. And you're going to get half of all the sat sent to me. He's like, man, this sounds great. This is going to be awesome. And I go, yeah, you're going to be able to see what it looks like to use Bitcoin off chain because he had only ever done any, like his only, his only experience was non lightning experience was only on chain Bitcoin.
And I wanted to really blow his mind with what it was like to see sats come in real time. Just so happened when he got set up with all this, and he did get set up with an Albie account. He did give me his Albie address. I dropped it into the podcast. It didn't work. And that's when I realized that Albie had just that week moved over to Albie Hub. And I'm like, so I call I call him up early. I I I texted him and I go, hey, dude. This doesn't work for x y z reasons. Oh, sorry about that. It's it's it's okay because there's Broke your demo. Yeah. There's an oh, but there's an uncle Jim answer to this in Albi Hub.
[00:34:59] Tomek K:
And Like, anytime I show somebody and then I show somebody something you know, it's cool in Bitcoin. You know, somebody from outside. And, like, look at this. Oh, and it doesn't work now. Right? And it it's classic, and now it was kind of our fault. So sorry for that. But No. How did you solve it? You installed wallet of Satoshi.
[00:35:18] David Bennett:
It's yeah. I was just like, I go, look. I go, give me, you know, give me a few weeks. I will figure this one out because it needs to be figured out. But when me and you were talking the first time, we were talking about this and there's this this goes along with what you're saying about the innovation aspect of long arm of the United States law. And it kind of accidentally drives innovation. They don't want, they don't, I don't think the United States government really realizes the amount of mess that they've made for themselves every time they try to stomp on a little ant because it just sends 10,000 ants scurrying away in different directions. And that's what we got here because now I can with Albie Hub, now instead of instead of sending him to Albie and getting his own custodial wallet, which he can't because we've gone to Albie Hub, I can provide those services for him off of my lightning node out of Albi Hub.
And so now that puts that puts the pressure or if there is any pressure, that relocates the pressure from the company, Albi,
[00:36:32] Tomek K:
to the user. That was that was our motivation, to outsource risk on you. Right. And what which No. No. No. It's it's an outcome, I guess. Yes. It's it's more difficult to hunt
[00:36:45] David Bennett:
users when everybody can be a custodian now. Yeah. Because now I I make up the decentralized 10,000 ants that were generated when the United States government started stomping on Tornado Cash. They started stomping on samurai. They started stomping on Walter Stoshi. And 2 or 3 other companies decided to get out before they even got stomped on. All they all they did was generate, you know, a 100000 different people that now have the same ability that a single centralized company had. I don't think they understand what they did. And I don't think they understand the ramifications of what it is that's coming down the pipe for them. And when they try to figure out a way to stop that shit out, it's going to get even worse.
So when, I mean, uncle Jim, at this point, I just want to make a statement and I want you to, like, fill in the holes for me if you can. I can go back to Cody, which is the kid that I was, interviewing that started this whole discussion. And I can provide him a wallet off of my Albi Hub that uses my back end lightning node for liquidity in and liquidity out. And you have to have it both directions. Otherwise, you can you can only either send or only either receive or do nothing. You need both to be able to send and receive. However, he's not going to actually be while he might be using my liquidity, he doesn't get to own my liquidity. He just gets to leverage it.
And that way for him, his experience would be exactly like my experience was with Albie 4 months ago. Alright. Is there anything that I said that's not correct?
[00:38:29] Tomek K:
Everything you said, I believe is correct. Effectively, it's effectively this oncogene model model, which is powered also with Nostril WalletConnect, is enabling users to create subaccounts, kind of sub wallets on their node. Node still is restricted by its capacities of its channels. So the but the sub wallets are having separate balances with each other. So effectively, they use the same liquidity, but they have different balances. So, yes, you can, you can share it with Cody. Actually, Cody was the motivation to deliver this. You can tell him now, look. Sorry, bro. Like, send him, regards from us because, we failed with the demo. But now there is a solution, and he can actually go get albigo, get alb extension, or get albicom, the web account and, connect it with no storage connect either by scanning QR code or pasting this connection secret, and then he links to your node. And, yeah, you could him theoretically and practically as well. You could, as as, you know, any lightning custodian company also theoretically practically could.
[00:39:51] David Bennett:
Now it it's when me and you were talking about this this exact same thing before, I was able to do this through AlbiHub. But if I remember correctly, like, last week, Albi announced a new version of Albie Hub that's gonna make that even easier.
[00:40:08] Tomek K:
Is that right? It's already out. Yes. Yes. It's already out. And it's, it's basically the same thing, but, the user experience is user is more guided and I guess a lot of stuff about this node management and node running. We didn't fix anything in particular about lightning network. With the innovation is still being done by lots of great developers on this lower technical levels, but there is, RBHAP and lots of such tools. They need to innovate with the with the design, with the user flow, with how staff is communicated, and also, education is quite crucial. Right? It would it would be much easier.
Most of the users that come, they don't even, grasp yet what what exactly is channels, how and most of us, I guess, and many of us still do not and it's nothing bad in it, but, users need to be educated to to understand how it works, especially users at this this time in in history of lightning. So it's the same gratitude as to this open source developers. Go to podcasters like yourself that you guys do also job in communicating ideas and, talking about these tools. I hope that some of your listeners learned about Albie now. So we all kind of are in the early stage of this lighting adoption.
Happy that we do it together. Right? And, that Albie also connects with no threat connect with so many different tools that, we are not even competing even with, projects or companies that do the same job in this space because that's beautiful about Bitcoin that we are aligned on mission and, still, kind of, the market, the space is it has such big potential to grow that there is room only for collaboration.
[00:42:12] David Bennett:
Right. Ed, you'd mentioned, like you said, podcasters such as myself, which kind of brings me to this the news that I heard about a Pod Home integration with Albie. Is that did that happen? Was it podhome.fm? Happens to be my hosting company for this this podcast. And then, I had heard something about Albie integrating directly with Pod Home. Do you know anything about that, or am I just getting that wrong? Did I did I mishear that?
[00:42:41] Tomek K:
It might be I'm I'm not updated. It might be Pod Home or TrueFunds. Some some companies already, experiment with, RBHUB API. You can find it, in your I'll be hubs in the settings page. There is something like more about or something like this where, a little more than send, receive could be performed, but something like create account, create node, open channel, which is still super, like, experimental and kind of theoretical, but, I guess it would be also nice to see kind of more embedded within apps, you know, running node. Imagine you are, opening a node client and you need node and you're like you're not a Bitcoin or you don't have a lightning wallet and you come through and you need a lightning node. Maybe maybe it's it's an interesting area to explore whether such clients could automatically open a node for this person while it's still self custodial. And he maybe can use his own keys to generate keys to this node, and I believe some somebody will eventually come to some conclusions and start building. So it's still super early, and there is, like, so many features that, we dream about in hub or in general in lightning network.
But, yeah, it takes time to build them and and, it's also very often a technological challenge. Right?
[00:44:22] David Bennett:
Right. And then, of course, there's we'd already discussed the Albie integration with with Nostr. But you said you said twice a couple of times, that, NWC, also known as Noster Wallet Connect, is that was that made by Albie?
[00:44:45] Tomek K:
It was initiated by, our developers, by Victor from Amethyst and some other, contributors. And I guess, Alby is putting it's an open source protocol, and it originated on Alby's GitHub. While it's not, it's open source. Now it belongs to everyone. But, yes, Albie puts the biggest effort, I believe, in, maintaining it and, and promoting the protocol.
[00:45:11] David Bennett:
Oh, wow. See, I'm glad we got a chance to have this conversation a second time because I must have missed that the first time. I had no all this time, I thought Noster WalletConnect was a completely different separate and it is separate insofar that it's completely open source. Albie's not claiming it, but I had no idea that Albie initiated that particular
[00:45:34] Tomek K:
project. That's that's amazing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We we we run this discord for connect developers. We run the website landing page for the we we maintain the repository for the code. So so I believe, yes, you can call it an Albie product, but, we don't need to. It's, everyone's product now.
[00:45:54] David Bennett:
Okay. Well and there's another product that Albie has. You've mentioned it a couple of times, but I wanna get off I wanna get off into this. Back in the day, when I first started hooking up with Albie, the very first time that Albie's iPhone app was available in this in it was either on off a test flight or or directly in the store, I got it. And but y'all had y'all made the decision to take it down. What's funny is that I still have mine running on my phone, but you guys now have Albie Go. And what I bring it up now because it's a late it's a question that was supposed to be later on, but I had somebody asked me directly because I asked a couple of people, hey, what do you want me to ask, you know, Tomac when when they come on, to the show? And they're like, when iOS app.
And I told that guy, I go, well, he already had one. I, and he goes, I can't find it. And I'm like, well, it's because I don't update my iPhone. So because I don't update my iPhone, they can't strip off, you know, apps that I already have. So my, it still works. And then 2 days after that question was asked, or like, or 2 weeks after that question was asked, you guys start talking about Albie go. So you guys are what back in the Apple I store or whatever? Or or what's going on? No. I guess it it must be some weird situation with,
[00:47:28] Tomek K:
releasing such products officially to app stores, and it takes some review process, and then maybe you need to fix something. But for there can be variety of reason but reasons. But, in general, the end goal in probably when you release it very soon, it should be open. Albigo is, is an mobile wallet that we prepare for Android, for, Apple iPhones, while it's recommended also to use alternative stores like Zapstore or Optanium to install the install the the app. The code is also open source, and it's a simple the slickest, I guess, mobile Bitcoin wallet out there, which is self custodial, which is like a wallet interface to a node. And it use not uses not through wallet connect, so it's, like, super fast.
I I have it to with me as well. It's, but I guess you will also you put your hands on it. Right? I'm not sure which version now you have, but it's almost almost ready. We are preparing ourselves to launch it and announce to the public. But, yes, some people can install it. It just just it just it has just 2 buttons. It just 2 buttons, send, receive, and the transaction history, probably the simplest, Bitcoin lightning wallet in the world. While it's not a it's not a wallet that holds your funds, it's a wallet interface to an your node, which can be, in the cloud, on your device, or other NWC powered wallet or not because every user of start 9 and, Umbrel can do it.
Mutiny, I believe, still, works through connect. Now recently, there was a LeafPay, which is a custodial wallet, lightning wallet. It it enabled the, wallet collect connect server side, on their node. So you can also link your albigo to to to Liftpay. The same with Albie extension, you can link it to Blink and still use custodial sats, but with this non custodial tool. It's it's for some users, it might be a bit disappointing, because we like, probably it's the one of the most frequently asked questions when I'll be mobile, that this is, this is not the RB extension for the mobile, yet.
It it maybe come out at some point. Comes out if, if it's being built, but anyone is invited to, collaborate and help out with it. It it's just not just. That's a great, wallet interface. But, yes, me personally, and I know that many users dream about, having integrated, experience of signing, stuff with locally, with your keys, Nostra keys or Bitcoin keys on your mobile like you do with browser extension in desktop, but, it's just not yet there. You can do it with, on Firefox, but only on Firefox and Android. Apparently, this browser supports, having, having extensions on mobile, not from Firefox, not from the browser.
So I'll be go soon, soon you will you will put your hands on it. No wait lists, no much waiting. Very soon everyone can get it.
[00:50:52] David Bennett:
Yeah. See, now I've got the test flight version. And just if if you guys keep the onboarding process the same, it looked for the listeners out there, it looks something like this. I got I get Albie Go on my phone. I open it up and it says, do you wanna connect a wallet or do you wanna connect to your I can't remember exactly what it said. It said, do you wanna connect this wallet? I'm like, yeah, I sure do. And then I'm looking at it and I go, I don't know how to do this. I know I want to connect it to my Albie hub. I know.
So I go to my Albie hub on my start 9. I'm looking at the interface and then I look for anything that says connect. Sure enough, there's a little purple bar that says connect, you know, connect. I hit that thing and it says, do you want to connect a device? And I'm like, I certainly do. And then it reveals a QR code. And then on on this, on the I'll be go, it said, do you want to connect? And then it gives me, like, the, like, the little, camera say I'm about, you need to, like, scan a QR code. I'm like, I'll bet it wants this QR code that I got from Albie Hub. And, I mean, within within a second, I had my Albie Hub balance and I had send and receive capabilities on my phone.
I mean, this thing is this thing was under a minute and it, I didn't even have instructions. Now this is a user experience. And my wife is, is somebody who teaches technical communication and writing. And she talks in her classes about the importance of who your audience is. What kind of user experience are you going to provide them? Not not by not not by reading a paper that you wrote, but by the instructions that you wrote or better yet, like in this case, there are no instructions. It's like Lego instructions. There's no words. It's that intuitive.
And that's one of the reasons why I really like every single product that I've seen from Albie follows that that user experience, where it's damn near you don't even need to really write anything down. We're going to make this so simple that even if you can't read, you'll be able to use these products. So honestly, dude, applause for being able to have functionality without 10 sheets of white paper that you have to read to understand how to connect something like an app on my phone to my Sovereign lightning node using Albie Hub that I can also get to on my browser.
It's and I get I keep and I get the same balance on all this stuff. It's like I'm confirming my balance from, like, 3 different spots. And it's it's it's wonderful. So anybody who's thinking that this is hard, it's not. And when you get a chance to get this thing, I highly recommend that you do. But you said something that I wanna dive into just a little bit more is the ability to leverage something like Alby go to talk to my Alby hub that may, what are these days contain my noster private key? It'd be able to unlock on the go some kind of Nostril client without exposing my private key directly.
Do you think that that might actually be sooner than later?
[00:54:25] Tomek K:
Look. Your node also has the root of access to your wallet, to your node is this huge number, random number, and it's represented by these 12 words. And it's possible to do some magic with these 12 words because from such 12 words, you can also generate an aster key. And that's what RB extension does. And maybe necessarily holding your keys with the hub and there is also some other yet to be implemented in in such setup technologies like NSEC bunker that you might like, with RB also, what you were doing when you were logging with, logging to Stacker News or to Geyser with this using this ln URL auth, like with RB extension. It was basically signing the, authentication with the keys of your node and then paired with your user ID on this ln hub in simple terms.
So, yes, it's, this what you mentioned is, among kind of features that, yes, they are. Now now now we need to focus on, keeping this solution stable and even easier for for people to get onboarded to. But everybody is waiting for some spare time to actually discuss, new features that we could deliver there, remembering also that, RBH app needs to stay, lightweight, app. So maybe some of the models you could turn on and off, but, also, with this, everyone who dreams of such features is invited to come to the feedback board or the best if he goes to GitHub so, our developers could see, okay, this is this is what people want. Or even if somebody could you feel free to do a fork and implement something that you wanna see in this hub.
[00:56:33] David Bennett:
Okay. There's, one thing that I I do have a question about, and I guess I should probably end up I'll I'll end up directing this, to probably whatever the version of customer support is over at Alby. But I've noticed that because I use the start 9 as my as my go to node right now from a Bitcoin core lightning was where I keep Albie Hub, mempool, the whole ball of wax. So I side loaded, the, start 9 albihub package that I got off of y'all's GitHub repo. And I think if I'm if I It's not even on our GitHub repo. It's somebody's else. Oh, is it? Oh, it oh, that's right. It's on start nines, isn't it?
[00:57:18] Tomek K:
I think it's, no. It's not yet on start 9. It's on a whole horror logger. There is some other fork of it, but it's, not yet official. Okay. Yeah. It's in community store on start 9. It's definitely It it should be there. Right? But, I believe it didn't happen yet.
[00:57:35] David Bennett:
Yeah. Yeah. I've got okay. So here here's the thing. It's it's it's a little it's a little weird what because I've got Albi Hub running, and it's version 1.2.0. And you guys have actually upgraded quite a bit. But so if I click on on that and I go to, or if I if I click on if I get into my Albie hub, the UI, it will tell me that I have version 1.2.0. And then if I scroll over that, if I put my cursor on top of that, it says, Albie has Albie hub. 1.7.4 is available. So you guys have upgraded quite a bit, but here's what's so weird about it. And again, I'll probably end up going to, you know, having to go to somebody else to actually figure this one out. If I go and I click that, it wants to send me to get get albie.comforward/hub.uh, underscore deployment.
But if I actually that's what it says that it wants to go to. But if I actually click it, it takes me to get albie.comforward/subscriptionforward/new. So I can't actually get the update. Is that is there a reason for that? Is that, like, a safeguard to say, we don't really wanna do this just yet. We just wanna know that it's available. Or is this just some kind of weird URL chicanery going on? Do you know?
[00:59:11] Tomek K:
Do you really want to resolve it, over your podcast? No. Okay. Let me start let me start the terminal. Wait.
[00:59:18] David Bennett:
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. I just wanted to make sure that I was I think I I I I think that it's about
[00:59:26] Tomek K:
not having auto update feature totally rolled on self hosted RB hubs. Okay. There's right? And, there is a an another process, and I believe you you should be linked there. If not, I was like, we will put it in comments. We have guides on this also. Right? How to update on on self hosted, nodes. So, yeah, there is already 1.73, and, probably when we release it, there will be 1.8 and every, major no. Not even major. Every, like, decimal release is named after Cypherpunks. Soon, cypherpunks will finish. So you're thinking, okay. What how to name next releases?
So feel free to drop suggestions.
[01:00:15] David Bennett:
Okay. I just wanted to bring that up because I think it's important for I think it's important for us to understand that not just in the world of Albie and Albie Hub and Albie Go, but Bitcoin in general, lightning network, e cash, Fedimint, that we are not dealing with polished, perfect, out of the box stuff. We're not dealing with people that are high paid customer service representatives. We are not dealing with professional marketing teams. We are not dealing with any of the legacy world. Come on. No. We're not. No. Professional. We're well, we're all professional.
You know, we we want to we want to do the professional things, but you can be as professional as you want. But if you're climbing on a shoestring budget, it's hard to it's it's hard to do the things that Microsoft does where they roll out automatic updates. And it happens while you're sleeping and you don't even know it. And it's, like, almost like where it used to be smooth as glass before they screwed up that last one with the CloudFlare thing. But in either event, everybody, not everybody, but so many people get their underwear in a twist every time something doesn't work in the space.
And you can have the best product because Albie is one of the, is a top top of class product for me, as far as my, our, the arsenal of products that I use in this space. And yet, like we were just saying, it says it wants to update, but it doesn't update. I've gotten used to this type of thing in this space because everything here is new. All of us are doing the best that we can. And what I've never understood. And I kind of maybe get your thoughts to end this off because I do have to go get my kids from school. Otherwise you're going to freak out. But when you look at this space and the way that things are not polished, when I do when I look at it, I think that this is a good thing.
Do you agree or disagree with that?
[01:02:23] Tomek K:
I'm not sure if it's good or bad thing. It's a natural thing, and I think, yeah, we need to be understanding, when things don't work. I I still see that this space you know, everywhere there will be people complaining, and still in this space, I see very positive, ethos of appreciation. There will be toxic individuals everywhere there would be. But in general, feeling is, I'm very grateful to, like, meet feedback like yours, and it's not an exception. People rather tell us good things in general about things that are not polished, not not only from Albie, but anywhere.
And I guess it's, we also do a good job. Not not not we I'll be we the space ecosystem in, like, being honest, in in what you do, and I it's not a surprise, I guess, for me, and it's, people people would be complaining and things are not polished. But, well, polishing is also fun, and I I look right now with this Microsoft or Facebook. This is, like, so big, and it feels like too polished. And to me, it feels clunky and so many things not working. So I guess the rebuilding of Internet, I hope, I guess. I more hope that, this is the process of rebuilding the Internet, and it's only the start. So there will be not polished is, euphemism. It's something that we want to have not polished. Right?
At least it works. At least it's not, like, you know, broken and destroyed because, we can imagine, I don't know, a solar explosion and, all of the micro processors dying. I don't know if it's possible or or it's just some, you know, urban legend of what could happen. But, if this could happen, then I guess, we would miss for not foolish things.
[01:04:42] David Bennett:
Yeah. That I think we are rebuilding the web. I've I've I've said it a couple of times that it feels like we're we've gone back to 1991 and forked it, and we're rebuilding it from here. That's what it feels like to me.
[01:04:56] Tomek K:
91? Okay. I I I thought it's more like 98.
[01:05:00] David Bennett:
I I guess I got my first browser, like, an actual browser browser in 94. So let's let's split the difference and say we've we're forking it from 1995. Alright. Hey, Tomac. Alright. I've got I've got my kids, so I'm gonna let you go. I appreciate you being here, man. And if we get a chance to if if for whatever reason, Albie ever needs to make an announcement of anything, hit me up. I'll put you on the show. Okay?
[01:05:28] Tomek K:
Likewise. Thank you for, very appreciative words. I will pass them on to our team, and, thank you all who is listening to us because, this is, we are, you know, participating in something nice and big. So thank you for, fighting together.
[01:05:43] David Bennett:
Yeah. I can't think of a better place to end it. I'll talk to you later, Tomek. Cheers. Okay. Well, I hope you got a lot out of that. I hope it explains a little bit more about what Alby is, what it can do, and moreover, what it can do for you. It's it is not any skin off your nose to try this thing out. You can put in, like, and especially when it comes to the Nostr stuff, right? Because I can use my Get Albie extension to log into any Nostr based client that there is. I have I have yet to see one that does not have the ability to say, oh well you've got, you know, you can log you want to log in with an extension and every single one identifies my extension my get albie extension is something that I could log in with for a nostril client every single one I have yet to come across a single nostril client and I've been through I don't know I've probably tried 35 maybe even 40 of these things and I have yet to find one that will not allow me to use my get albie extension to log in So if you want to try it out, and I highly recommend that you do, you don't have to use your existing Inpub Insec.
You can you can spin up a fake one if you just want to try it out. But I really believe that Gitalb has been it has made my life in zapping, boosting, streaming Satoshis, and logging into Nostra clients so much easier than it used to be before that I'm finding myself basically using this particular product for almost every damn thing that I do now. And it looks to me like it's just gonna get better and better and better. So, if you have not tried out Albie or the Get Albie extension, you can hook it up to their Albie Go. You can hook this thing up to your own lightning node if you have one. If you want if you don't want your own lightning node you can spin 1 up on a cloud or you can use somebody else's, you can rent channels.
There is a whole ecosystem behind Alby that will support you in being as self sovereign as you possibly can using the lightning network. Right? And that so that means zapping. That means getting zaps. That means having a wallet that you can use lightning for. That means being able to interact with the podcasting 2.0. Fountain, it has it or, there's actually no. Pod home directly interacts with, Albie as far as I know. And there's a couple of other there's a couple of other either podcast apps or podcast hosting companies that allows you to use your Nostra identity rather than anything else to log in with.
This is this extension is going to become very important. It already is a major centerpiece of my day. So, again, if you need to go back and listen to this episode one more time so that you can understand all the stuff that we're getting to because there's a lot there then please do so and send this to your friends this episode you know share it out to your friends especially those people who are like man this lightning stuff is confusing I mean I forgot to mention if you didn't hear about it you can uncle Jim somebody else's lightning experience off of your own node or even if you've got a node hosted in the cloud right? And you don't have like a Raspberry Pi. You can Uncle Jim, which basically means that you can basically provide the liquidity and have your friend connect their Albie extension directly to your Albie hub and act sort of like a bank. I know you're gonna go, oh shit, I don't want to go to jail because I'm a money transmitter.
We've got to gut up and just start doing the things and forget about this whole asking a permission stuff. We've got we've got to go into this new world and it's going to be painful for some of us. I don't have a problem Uncle Jimming somebody off of my system. If you do, I'm not going to make fun of you and I definitely understand it. But the fact that the potential for me to act as the liquidity provider for somebody else's Albi wallet is a compelling use case. So don't forget to if you didn't hit that in the in the interview, go back and listen to the interview again because we touch on, like, 4 or 5 different things about what Albie's doing. So with all that said, I will see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:0:5 am Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 17th day of September 2024.
And this is episode 955 of Bitcoin. And I am bringing you a gentleman by the name of Tomek. We sat down for an interview. This would be our second interview, in fact. However, you never got to hear the first one because the audio died and I didn't know it. It was well, actually, I knew it when I wasn't able to get the file down from the platform that I was using. It just it was stuck. It wasn't going to come down. It happens. You know, you do a really good interview and you sit down for an hour I think we talked for at least an hour and a half that particular day and all of it was just gone. So, when I delivered the bad news to Tomac, him being the good sport that he is, said that he would do it again.
And this time I had backup recording, I had all kinds of stuff, and everything worked fine. Tomec is from the Alby team. Just so you know what we're gonna be talking about today, it's the Albie extension in my browser that I always use to do at least one of three things. I use it to log in to every Nostr platform that will take a Nostr ID you know, an N2nd and NPUB. So it handles my Nostr private and public key pair. I use it to zap and receive zaps on any of the Nostr clients that I have. And it is the receiving end for well, it's it's part of the receiving end for anybody that boosts my podcast episodes or streams satoshis to it. I always set out set up get albie or my extension as, getting 1% of all the Satoshis streamed to it and boosted to it. And then I set up on my, in my podcast, I use pothome dot fm as my hosting company and they allow me to set up multiple addresses to, have percentages go to. So I've got that other 99% actually streams directly to my wallet. And the reason that I use, Albie to do that is so that I can just use Alby to get a good feel of is anybody boosting.
I'll only see 1% as the number of satoshis that I've gotten from that. But I know immediately that I've gotten something through the podcast because the way that they do their memos it does a lot of things if you are not using Albie I highly recommend that you at least try it out because they've got all kinds of stuff that that works very very well on multiple platforms and me and Tomek get into all of that. We're gonna talk about the old Albie the way it was with the custodial wallet and now they don't do that anymore. They've transitioned to the second part that we'll talk about is Albi Hub. That's what they've migrated to. Right?
They also have a mobile wallet that is now well, it's because it's in beta and I'm one of the beta testers. It should be live any day now or well any week now. I don't know. 2 weeks. TM. You go figure. Right? I'm using it and it works like a charm. And it's just this wonderful ecosystem of being able to combine Nostr and Podcasting 2.0 and Zaps and have a lightning wallet and have it connect to my own node or you can have it connect to a cloud node that you rent. It is amazing. I cannot recommend this product enough. And, it was one of the reasons why I really needed wanted and needed to get one of the team members from Albie onto the show so that we could discuss this. So I'm gonna drop you in right now to that interview with Tomek from the Albie team. It's freaking weird, but we're not here to talk about all of that. We are here to talk about Albie.
So Yes, sir. I got Tomek. And, Tomek, you are with Alby. What what do you do for them?
[00:05:10] Tomek K:
I'm like user facing interface of the company. You can call it marketing and promo and social media and going to sometimes podcast events and making sure that, our team knows what to build, what people want, and there is communication in 2 ways. You you people out there know what is that'll be and how to use it.
[00:05:34] David Bennett:
Well, how long have you been working for them? I mean, how or rather, how when did you fall into, getting hired on with the guys over at Albi?
[00:05:48] Tomek K:
I joined the team a year ago. I think it is a year. Yeah. Now and yeah. I mean, I've been, like, getting ready to transition to a Bitcoin job as for many of us who did follow this that fall this rabbit hole. It's like the thing that we kind of aspire to, and eventually, I want to get on Bitcoin standard also in terms of, where do I work? And that's also it's a pleasant experience. Right? Work somewhere where your passion is. So I was, like, preparing for this kind of transition and not, like, kind of actively looking for for a job there. But, yes, somehow we got it in touch. We would Albie was partnering and sponsoring one of the sponsors of our film festival that we did 2 years ago, a year ago, the next edition. Right? So we got in touch with the team, got on a few calls, and I was, happy to join them.
[00:06:49] David Bennett:
Yeah. You're definitely one of the lucky ones. There's so many of us that that have been flirting with Bitcoin standard, Bitcoin jobs, and, you know, some have had better luck than others. I imagine there is not that many. Right? There is not that many, like, places,
[00:07:04] Tomek K:
spots for people to work on. Right? And most of these companies are still not making money, but they still live off investments and they live on hopes. But the scope hopes have some rational basis. And even if the startups like Albidi eventually will not, I don't know, succeed business wise. There is a great legacy that, not only Albie, but these companies, like, companies, groups like LNBs, BTCPay, that they already built. And there are other people, groups, companies that build on top of the this legacy, this protocols that this, people organized open source contributors, delivered.
[00:07:45] David Bennett:
Yeah. And, you know, one of the, you know, one of the things that I think really holds I don't know. What what holds me back and I think what holds a lot of other people back is that when you say that there's a, you know, few companies that you can actually go do this for, there's even fewer that hold the amount, like a really good, have a really good eye to the ethics of what's going on. Like finding a company that doesn't shit coin that you can go work for automatically cuts out like 50% off the top. And then there's other issues that you have to work, you know, work through. Like, people will say that they're a Bitcoin company, and then you get into the weeds of it, and you find out that there's shit coinery going on in the background. They're not overtly shit coiners, but then you'd like to start digging under the sheets and you find out They're trade. They're trading other these other tokens And it's really kind of heartbreaking in a lot of ways because you have a lot of respect for there's, you know, a couple instances I can think of where there's a lot of respect for a person that got a company that hired Bitcoin or the Bitcoin or wants to actually just do Bitcoin and come to find out there's all kinds of weird extra bear or, well, extramural activities when it comes to that that kind of thing. And so that makes it that makes the amount of companies in this space that are actually good high quality ethical companies, it makes it it makes them even less. And I I think that that's a that's a real fight because we got a whole bunch of hardcore Bitcoiners out there that really wanna go work for these companies. And when you finally peel back all the layers and you find out who they actually are, the real ones, if they're even less than you thought.
[00:09:33] Tomek K:
I wonder whether, one of the solutions would be either to have more of such companies, some projects that either get their investment or or or make money somehow in this business, that there is opportunity to make business or to orange peel existing companies businesses. Right? I guess, kind of I don't know what comes to your mind. Tidal by or other companies like Jack Dorsey. I I don't think they are, like, orange peel on or top down or MicroStrategy. Right? I don't I doubt, like, people, on a lower level, they are being hired because of, like, some Bitcoin Ethos. So it will take time, and probably both solutions,
[00:10:19] David Bennett:
will somehow appear, but it will take time. Yeah. And there will probably be a couple of more solutions that come up. But getting back to Albie, I just kinda wanna go back to to the, bit like, in in as far back in your memory, because you didn't start with the company, like, right up front. You came in a little bit later. But can you tell us about, like, the why the the people that that got together to start Alby, why they did it? What what was the problem they were trying to solve?
[00:10:54] Tomek K:
Hard for me to speak for them for their personal motivations. I believe they were honest and the mission that we are still kind of pursuing with Alby to make lightning network truly decentralized and accessible to everyone. It was already their motivation, and it happened, if I if I read the chronicles of Albi properly, it happened at some the lightning hackathon in Istanbul where, there was this jewel lightning extension and kind of trying to improve this idea of jewel. These 3 guys, Reneb, Boomi, Moritz. They built a a lightning browser extension. And from this, letter of the derivation actually comes alb, lightning browser extension.
And it was just a tool to make it easier to operate with Bitcoin lightning on the web and, make also use of LND nodes, easy because LND was the most popular back then. I'm not sure if if you just know. And then, also, I'll be figured that, it's not that easy also to run that node. Right? It's it's obvious. It's it's still kind of challenging. So they started offering those Albi accounts where, you can call it like custodial wallet, right, of Albi where, Albi LND node was shared among its users. We don't do it anymore. The solution now is fully, self custodial, right, with the latest release of Albi Hub. So among the in the meantime, since because it was the first code was on I'll be GitHub was, I think, submitted, 3 years ago. I think it almost exactly 3 years ago.
But since then, I'll be, built few interesting tools and libraries for developers that, that make use of lightning on the web. And also today, Nostril and few other tricks, like signings signing, messages or transactions or events with your Anoster keys, but also Bitcoin keys, on chain keys, liquid keys. Those are quite interesting features that, will still still, I guess, are looking for their, market fit.
[00:13:29] David Bennett:
Yeah. Well, because I started using Albie, I don't know, not not terribly long after it started. And, you know, it was just for me, it's just a wallet that, I could use that was it was integrated to my web browser, and it was and I I was using Albie god, I was using Albie before I was using Nostr. And I honestly, now that I've used it with Nostr so much and, Podcasting 2.0 so much, I kinda can't remember what what it was that I was using it for when I first got it. That's that's how long I've been using this thing. Right? So but now, you know And it's still not boring for you or you didn't get tired. That's good. Oh, god. No. No. No. No. It just it gets better and better and better. See, that that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have some of the guys from from Albie on on the show to talk about this, because I don't think people are I don't think people are really aware of how important the the Albie extension actually is.
Because when it like I said, when it first started, it was simply a lightning wallet embedded in your browser. And then I started using I started using the Albie address as podcast where I was receiving Satoshis for by, podcasting 2.0 stuff. And that way I could keep a track on what was going on. But then we got in, Albie integrated with Noster. And so these it's like it just keeps expanding and expanding and expanding. And it's and and worst and you're you're still expanding, and we'll get into that here in a second. But when when the Noster expanding, and we'll get into that here in a second. But when when the Noster integration came in, that made Alby my go to wallet for zapping people on Noster. And for those people that don't know or haven't tried Noster, I don't know why you haven't. It doesn't cost you anything. And you really need to claim your name space before, TikTok and Facebook and all the rest of the crap meltdown. But it made it incredibly easy to integrate my interactions with other people. And it incredibly easy to integrate my interactions with other people.
And it was almost as if it it was so fluid. It was almost as if I I wonder, and I know you can't speak to this because you're not one of the developers, but either they either they did it so well out of the gate when they built, when they started integrating Noster, or it was a happy accident that it turned out to be such a fluid experience when it came to just here's my Noster address or here's my Albie address, and I give that to Noster. And all of a sudden, my my zaps were enabled instantly. I didn't have to do anything. And the wallet acts as a, a goat like a a place where I can shoot zaps from and receive that zaps too. And all it was was just embedding my Albie address into my nostril profile. That was it. It was and like I said, it was like it's almost as if that kind of integration has to be worked over by so many developers that it's insane, or it just happened to be that I'll be in Nostra just magically fit together as happenstance.
Do you have y'all ever talked about that? I mean, was it was this hard to get this integration with master going or or did it just was it just magic?
[00:17:03] Tomek K:
For, like, maintain building and maintaining such extension is, is not easy job. And our developers, I also, hats off to them, are doing incredible job incredible job with it. From what I've heard, it wasn't that difficult to to do Nost integration. And it was, you know, all of us. We are Maxi Bitcoiners who are also looking at the new technologies that are popping up, and we are fans of open source and decentralization. So Nostra, everybody is on Nostra much more than on Twitter or everywhere anywhere. What's a good thing about it is that you can, I guess, you can track, right, that you can track these discussions on GitHub when who was it that suggested first this improvement, to the code, and who was it that, accepted it and merged the PR? And you can see the change log who was behind which feature. And that's also beautiful about Albie because it's not only Albie team, people that are actually paid for building this stuff, delivered it. But also there is plenty of, you know, volunteers, open source contributors who just want to make these tools better and the use of lightning easier.
And they also bring quite a lot of, you know, ideas and features. Albie is also open for, you know, we are running this open hours. We're running feedback boards. We are constantly in con in touch with, with users on to what features do they want. And I wonder whether it made me think when you were asking this question, and, I feel like in name of Alibi, I can only say I feel honored by that that, you are appreciating it that much. But that made me think what would be next such step for at least extension. Right? Because for Albi, we recently, like, released this hub. Now there is AlbiGo, a mobile wallet. But, I wonder whether there is something yeah. And we are sometimes think about these features in the extension, what it will be that could be so natural, right, to, what our users want. If you have suggestions or any of your users, hit us up, there is there is always, room to improve.
[00:19:20] David Bennett:
Yeah. Well, you brought up AlbyHub, but first, in case any of the listeners don't know is that, you know, Alby used to be a custodial wallet. Y'all took custody of the of the funds, and I never had a problem with it and nobody I ever knew had a problem with it. But everybody, you know, like there was always this chatter about how custodial is always bad, which I don't agree with up to a certain point. If I wouldn't want somebody else to custody $5,000. I get nervous when somebody else is custodying 500. But 50, $50, you know, $25, I don't care. It's not that big of a deal for me.
But it something happened in in Albie's history that y'all decided to move from the custodial model. And some people were asking why, you know, and and they don't go and read the they don't go and read the all the blogs because it's all kind of explained in there. But a few a couple of months back, I'll be made the move to say, look, we're doing away with the custodial wallet. We're going to do it in stages, but essentially we're going to introduce this new system. We're going to introduce Alby hub and you're going to take self custody, but you're going to run on our rails, the Alby rails to do it.
So before I ask you to kind of break down what Albie Hub is, I'm wondering or I wanna make it I I definitely wanna say the following. When I said, I'll be Hub up the way that you guys, you know, the way, and it was very easy, but the way that you guys kind of the technical documents said, Hey, do this and then do this and do this. And I was like, it was like a minute and a half. It took me a minute and a half to do this thing. It was not that big of a deal. I'm not a programmer. I didn't need to be one. I have seen absolutely no change in the ease of use for using my Albie extension. It's like nothing changed.
And I I wanna I want that to be upfront because, generally speaking, people hate change. Believe me. I know. I can't stand it. I hate I one of these people that I hate change. Right? And it it made no difference to me whatsoever, but I have my own node. It was a little bit different that way. So what at this point, could you tell us what Albie Hub is as the is it is it a full blown replacement for the custodial wallet? Or in your view, is it something even more than that?
[00:22:00] Tomek K:
In terms of products that Albi offers, yes, it's a replacement and slowly it will replace, the cost of the solution that we are slowly sunsetting. It's also, a challenge to educate, convince people. Like you said, they don't like change to, use because it it it requires a bit of effort. Right? You need to either install app, RBH app on on some of your devices or you need to pay someone to host it for you. You need to open channels. Like, the self custody doesn't come that easy yet, but I'll be happy. I guess it's a good step in making that easier.
So it's a it's a node and wallet in one with a sleek interface that, as I said, you can install almost anywhere. And it integrates very well with, with Albi products because it's powered with Nest WalletConnect. And, Nest WalletConnect was kind of a in between product for what we had because as you said, as you mentioned, like, few months back, we made this decision and announced that, okay, we are not opening anymore, custodial accounts and we will be delivering self custodial wallet. So it was it it was not only the history of Alby, but a history, I guess, of, Lightning Ecosystem, and it all exists in some context. And, it's not only us that at some point, had to kind of step out of offering services to the US.
It's also, some changes in, interest, in Bitcoin and certain, adjusting technologies with some NFT waves that there was a small wave of kind of spammy, activity on our node. It's challenging to share, node with thousands of users who don't know how, what will be the inflow, offsets, what type of money is it, is it is it your responsibility or not. So it's a whole context at eventually building Nest WalletConnect. It was a great kind of realization for all of us that, okay. In this situation, maybe we we should release our own self custody wallet that will be powered with this Nest WalletConnect that we released a few months earlier and worked hard to, drive its adoption.
So realizing, hey. Let's build node because it didn't have a name yet. Then But AlbieHub was the earliest name, I think, we we gave to this project. Was kind of, like, Eureka. Yes. This is the mission. This is this is the way we wanna go, and actually it's it's actually follows all of our all of us vision into what lightning, I guess, should be as a scaling solution to Bitcoin, to be resilient and to actually give, like, financial power to the people, it needs to be decentralized. And decentralization is not when there is, you know, big Albi node and big Blink and big wallet of Satoshi node and there is 3 or 4 nodes in the network and majority of Bitcoiners are transferring SaaS, but some, or maybe not necessarily even SaaS, between accounts of those three projects. Right? So we we are happy to go this sovereign and self custodial way even if, it maybe doesn't come with, certain business benefits, but that that's also, you know, who knows?
Right. Well, I mean believe that it was a good move. Right? Yeah. I I I do.
[00:26:01] David Bennett:
And the the reason that I do, and some people don't understand my my vehement stance on the long arm of the United States judicial system, but a lot of people are in the crosshairs of somehow or another, even if you're outside a sovereign nation, a sovereign citizen outside of the United States, apparently we can just protect our project, our power anywhere to someplace that we think is doing something, you know, like the wallet is Toshiba guys. They got out of the us market altogether because they just didn't want to deal with it. I don't blame them. I absolutely don't blame them.
Samurai tornado cash. I, the list goes on and on and on. I think that, I honestly think that it was a really good move for Albie to just say, you know what, we're not doing custody anymore with there. There's other ways to be able to do this without us actually managing your funds and which I think is is a I think that that is an emergent property of what we see in Bitcoin lightning, e cash, Fedimans, the Noster, these kinds of things is that we're starting to see these systems attached to each other in ways that are, that are surprising, at least for me. So like for instance, you guys, over at Alby said no to custodial and then gave me the option to use the the the Albee all the the the all the good stuff, all the front end neat stuff that I can do with Albee, except I'm powering it from my lightning node. But there's a lot of people that don't have lightning nodes. They they can't attach their own sovereign lightning node to Albie because they don't have one. But you guys came up with a, well, the ability to either is it host your own node or or get liquidity from another node? Do y'all have both services?
I can't remember because I know there's something called Nodonna, which is hosting for AlbiHub. So you can host AlbiHub somewhere on Nodonna. Right?
[00:28:20] Tomek K:
Yeah. Like, in this model, I guess, you can find people or companies that host for you an NIMBY instance or BTCPay instant, and the same with Albi. It's an open source software. And, we are actually happy to see that, you know, there is already a kind of competition for us because, Albi business model now is based on selling this cloud infrastructure for a code that is open source. And we know how this code looks and works like, so it's, it's also probably the stickiest way to use Albi hub today. And it it's, I I think it's something positive to see that, there is this guy, Tom, I guess, I believe, he was guest of our, Albie community calls, and I invite anyone who is listening to this. We are hosting those every other Thursday.
I'll be community calls where you could meet our team, users, and fantastic different projects. And one of them visiting us was, Tom who runs Sintra, and he runs Nodana. And he does, hosting for LB Hub and for, I believe, 3 other apps that you could, like you know, you you buy hosting and you can maybe install WordPress somewhere or install some other app. Tom does it with, some Bitcoin apps, which is cool. You can compare prices. I think it's also his version is a bit if I'm not mistaken, it's a bit cheaper, but, it's charged per minute. So it's it's also a bit different business model.
Anyway, you know, they've it's also it's not that that much super innovative that we did it because, there is, already users have options to run their nodes, which maybe are, you know, for some users, not that easy or, other people are more browser browser based or there are more mobile phone based, so they use Phoenix. There are great teams like Mutiny or Umbra or StartKnight that 9 that give us already, and projects like Raspiblitz that give users, if you want to, you can run your node, and it's it's not that difficult. Right? And without behalf, it's even easier. So, yeah, we are happy that we are following this path of, other little giants and all of us together with, podcaster podcasters like you, I guess, build this for the much bigger and a much brighter, hopefully, future of Bitcoin.
And maybe it's good. I don't know. I got this thought when you were speaking that maybe it's good that we got this disruption, and I don't know, hunting for some activity from US government as, as as you mentioned. It's maybe good that it happens so early so we have more time to to see that the direction, and we noticed that the direction to to be away as much resilient from any, I know, governmental or, any other organized force agencies that we might face. So, because otherwise, maybe if, US would let, Wallet of Satoshi to exist, or Phoenix so easily within the US, maybe, there wouldn't be that much innovation in self custody. Right?
[00:31:51] David Bennett:
Right. Which well
[00:31:53] Tomek K:
and Creative disruption.
[00:31:56] David Bennett:
This kind of brings me to this notion of and we for those of you who don't know, me and Tomek tried to do this a couple of weeks ago, and the entire audio file just fell apart. It it I wasn't able to capture it. So we did do these questions before, but I wanna I don't have this feeling of, like, you know,
[00:32:15] Tomek K:
repeating. We still have kind of, same discussion, kind of following the same topics, but, I'm getting a bit different, insights, from talking with you. So Yeah. Well, yeah. It's Glad glad we are redoing it. Yeah. It's it's Not much happened in the practice run. We had a practice run. Oh, yeah. We were training. Okay. So this one is supposed to be we have now we have cameras. Right? Right. But the so but
[00:32:41] David Bennett:
you're talking about that, like, if if it hadn't have been for this long arm of the United States justice department cracking down, then we would might find ourselves where we're getting lax on innovation. And here here's the thing, is that this was I think that this particular example is kind of poignant because right at the time that Albie was making the switch was exactly the week that I did an interview in Colorado, with one of my neighbors. Who's like, he's like an 18 year old kid. He built his first business when he was 14. He had a second business by the time he was 15. And we're talking like, you know, they're not huge businesses, lawn mowing, snow removal, excavation, and now he's doing like septic tank installs.
All right. This is, you know, it's all blue collar work, but he's a, he's a burgeoning Bitcoin or he's like me and him started talking about Bitcoin a couple of years ago. He's never stopped thinking about it. And now he's kind of into it. And when I got him on the show, I told him, well, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to, I'm going to set you up with, you know, you're going to have to do a couple of things, but I'm going to set you up with an Albi account. You're going to give me your, when you're done, you're going to give me your address. I'm going to throw it into the splits on my podcast. And you're going to get half of all the sat sent to me. He's like, man, this sounds great. This is going to be awesome. And I go, yeah, you're going to be able to see what it looks like to use Bitcoin off chain because he had only ever done any, like his only, his only experience was non lightning experience was only on chain Bitcoin.
And I wanted to really blow his mind with what it was like to see sats come in real time. Just so happened when he got set up with all this, and he did get set up with an Albie account. He did give me his Albie address. I dropped it into the podcast. It didn't work. And that's when I realized that Albie had just that week moved over to Albie Hub. And I'm like, so I call I call him up early. I I I texted him and I go, hey, dude. This doesn't work for x y z reasons. Oh, sorry about that. It's it's it's okay because there's Broke your demo. Yeah. There's an oh, but there's an uncle Jim answer to this in Albi Hub.
[00:34:59] Tomek K:
And Like, anytime I show somebody and then I show somebody something you know, it's cool in Bitcoin. You know, somebody from outside. And, like, look at this. Oh, and it doesn't work now. Right? And it it's classic, and now it was kind of our fault. So sorry for that. But No. How did you solve it? You installed wallet of Satoshi.
[00:35:18] David Bennett:
It's yeah. I was just like, I go, look. I go, give me, you know, give me a few weeks. I will figure this one out because it needs to be figured out. But when me and you were talking the first time, we were talking about this and there's this this goes along with what you're saying about the innovation aspect of long arm of the United States law. And it kind of accidentally drives innovation. They don't want, they don't, I don't think the United States government really realizes the amount of mess that they've made for themselves every time they try to stomp on a little ant because it just sends 10,000 ants scurrying away in different directions. And that's what we got here because now I can with Albie Hub, now instead of instead of sending him to Albie and getting his own custodial wallet, which he can't because we've gone to Albie Hub, I can provide those services for him off of my lightning node out of Albi Hub.
And so now that puts that puts the pressure or if there is any pressure, that relocates the pressure from the company, Albi,
[00:36:32] Tomek K:
to the user. That was that was our motivation, to outsource risk on you. Right. And what which No. No. No. It's it's an outcome, I guess. Yes. It's it's more difficult to hunt
[00:36:45] David Bennett:
users when everybody can be a custodian now. Yeah. Because now I I make up the decentralized 10,000 ants that were generated when the United States government started stomping on Tornado Cash. They started stomping on samurai. They started stomping on Walter Stoshi. And 2 or 3 other companies decided to get out before they even got stomped on. All they all they did was generate, you know, a 100000 different people that now have the same ability that a single centralized company had. I don't think they understand what they did. And I don't think they understand the ramifications of what it is that's coming down the pipe for them. And when they try to figure out a way to stop that shit out, it's going to get even worse.
So when, I mean, uncle Jim, at this point, I just want to make a statement and I want you to, like, fill in the holes for me if you can. I can go back to Cody, which is the kid that I was, interviewing that started this whole discussion. And I can provide him a wallet off of my Albi Hub that uses my back end lightning node for liquidity in and liquidity out. And you have to have it both directions. Otherwise, you can you can only either send or only either receive or do nothing. You need both to be able to send and receive. However, he's not going to actually be while he might be using my liquidity, he doesn't get to own my liquidity. He just gets to leverage it.
And that way for him, his experience would be exactly like my experience was with Albie 4 months ago. Alright. Is there anything that I said that's not correct?
[00:38:29] Tomek K:
Everything you said, I believe is correct. Effectively, it's effectively this oncogene model model, which is powered also with Nostril WalletConnect, is enabling users to create subaccounts, kind of sub wallets on their node. Node still is restricted by its capacities of its channels. So the but the sub wallets are having separate balances with each other. So effectively, they use the same liquidity, but they have different balances. So, yes, you can, you can share it with Cody. Actually, Cody was the motivation to deliver this. You can tell him now, look. Sorry, bro. Like, send him, regards from us because, we failed with the demo. But now there is a solution, and he can actually go get albigo, get alb extension, or get albicom, the web account and, connect it with no storage connect either by scanning QR code or pasting this connection secret, and then he links to your node. And, yeah, you could him theoretically and practically as well. You could, as as, you know, any lightning custodian company also theoretically practically could.
[00:39:51] David Bennett:
Now it it's when me and you were talking about this this exact same thing before, I was able to do this through AlbiHub. But if I remember correctly, like, last week, Albi announced a new version of Albie Hub that's gonna make that even easier.
[00:40:08] Tomek K:
Is that right? It's already out. Yes. Yes. It's already out. And it's, it's basically the same thing, but, the user experience is user is more guided and I guess a lot of stuff about this node management and node running. We didn't fix anything in particular about lightning network. With the innovation is still being done by lots of great developers on this lower technical levels, but there is, RBHAP and lots of such tools. They need to innovate with the with the design, with the user flow, with how staff is communicated, and also, education is quite crucial. Right? It would it would be much easier.
Most of the users that come, they don't even, grasp yet what what exactly is channels, how and most of us, I guess, and many of us still do not and it's nothing bad in it, but, users need to be educated to to understand how it works, especially users at this this time in in history of lightning. So it's the same gratitude as to this open source developers. Go to podcasters like yourself that you guys do also job in communicating ideas and, talking about these tools. I hope that some of your listeners learned about Albie now. So we all kind of are in the early stage of this lighting adoption.
Happy that we do it together. Right? And, that Albie also connects with no threat connect with so many different tools that, we are not even competing even with, projects or companies that do the same job in this space because that's beautiful about Bitcoin that we are aligned on mission and, still, kind of, the market, the space is it has such big potential to grow that there is room only for collaboration.
[00:42:12] David Bennett:
Right. Ed, you'd mentioned, like you said, podcasters such as myself, which kind of brings me to this the news that I heard about a Pod Home integration with Albie. Is that did that happen? Was it podhome.fm? Happens to be my hosting company for this this podcast. And then, I had heard something about Albie integrating directly with Pod Home. Do you know anything about that, or am I just getting that wrong? Did I did I mishear that?
[00:42:41] Tomek K:
It might be I'm I'm not updated. It might be Pod Home or TrueFunds. Some some companies already, experiment with, RBHUB API. You can find it, in your I'll be hubs in the settings page. There is something like more about or something like this where, a little more than send, receive could be performed, but something like create account, create node, open channel, which is still super, like, experimental and kind of theoretical, but, I guess it would be also nice to see kind of more embedded within apps, you know, running node. Imagine you are, opening a node client and you need node and you're like you're not a Bitcoin or you don't have a lightning wallet and you come through and you need a lightning node. Maybe maybe it's it's an interesting area to explore whether such clients could automatically open a node for this person while it's still self custodial. And he maybe can use his own keys to generate keys to this node, and I believe some somebody will eventually come to some conclusions and start building. So it's still super early, and there is, like, so many features that, we dream about in hub or in general in lightning network.
But, yeah, it takes time to build them and and, it's also very often a technological challenge. Right?
[00:44:22] David Bennett:
Right. And then, of course, there's we'd already discussed the Albie integration with with Nostr. But you said you said twice a couple of times, that, NWC, also known as Noster Wallet Connect, is that was that made by Albie?
[00:44:45] Tomek K:
It was initiated by, our developers, by Victor from Amethyst and some other, contributors. And I guess, Alby is putting it's an open source protocol, and it originated on Alby's GitHub. While it's not, it's open source. Now it belongs to everyone. But, yes, Albie puts the biggest effort, I believe, in, maintaining it and, and promoting the protocol.
[00:45:11] David Bennett:
Oh, wow. See, I'm glad we got a chance to have this conversation a second time because I must have missed that the first time. I had no all this time, I thought Noster WalletConnect was a completely different separate and it is separate insofar that it's completely open source. Albie's not claiming it, but I had no idea that Albie initiated that particular
[00:45:34] Tomek K:
project. That's that's amazing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We we we run this discord for connect developers. We run the website landing page for the we we maintain the repository for the code. So so I believe, yes, you can call it an Albie product, but, we don't need to. It's, everyone's product now.
[00:45:54] David Bennett:
Okay. Well and there's another product that Albie has. You've mentioned it a couple of times, but I wanna get off I wanna get off into this. Back in the day, when I first started hooking up with Albie, the very first time that Albie's iPhone app was available in this in it was either on off a test flight or or directly in the store, I got it. And but y'all had y'all made the decision to take it down. What's funny is that I still have mine running on my phone, but you guys now have Albie Go. And what I bring it up now because it's a late it's a question that was supposed to be later on, but I had somebody asked me directly because I asked a couple of people, hey, what do you want me to ask, you know, Tomac when when they come on, to the show? And they're like, when iOS app.
And I told that guy, I go, well, he already had one. I, and he goes, I can't find it. And I'm like, well, it's because I don't update my iPhone. So because I don't update my iPhone, they can't strip off, you know, apps that I already have. So my, it still works. And then 2 days after that question was asked, or like, or 2 weeks after that question was asked, you guys start talking about Albie go. So you guys are what back in the Apple I store or whatever? Or or what's going on? No. I guess it it must be some weird situation with,
[00:47:28] Tomek K:
releasing such products officially to app stores, and it takes some review process, and then maybe you need to fix something. But for there can be variety of reason but reasons. But, in general, the end goal in probably when you release it very soon, it should be open. Albigo is, is an mobile wallet that we prepare for Android, for, Apple iPhones, while it's recommended also to use alternative stores like Zapstore or Optanium to install the install the the app. The code is also open source, and it's a simple the slickest, I guess, mobile Bitcoin wallet out there, which is self custodial, which is like a wallet interface to a node. And it use not uses not through wallet connect, so it's, like, super fast.
I I have it to with me as well. It's, but I guess you will also you put your hands on it. Right? I'm not sure which version now you have, but it's almost almost ready. We are preparing ourselves to launch it and announce to the public. But, yes, some people can install it. It just just it just it has just 2 buttons. It just 2 buttons, send, receive, and the transaction history, probably the simplest, Bitcoin lightning wallet in the world. While it's not a it's not a wallet that holds your funds, it's a wallet interface to an your node, which can be, in the cloud, on your device, or other NWC powered wallet or not because every user of start 9 and, Umbrel can do it.
Mutiny, I believe, still, works through connect. Now recently, there was a LeafPay, which is a custodial wallet, lightning wallet. It it enabled the, wallet collect connect server side, on their node. So you can also link your albigo to to to Liftpay. The same with Albie extension, you can link it to Blink and still use custodial sats, but with this non custodial tool. It's it's for some users, it might be a bit disappointing, because we like, probably it's the one of the most frequently asked questions when I'll be mobile, that this is, this is not the RB extension for the mobile, yet.
It it maybe come out at some point. Comes out if, if it's being built, but anyone is invited to, collaborate and help out with it. It it's just not just. That's a great, wallet interface. But, yes, me personally, and I know that many users dream about, having integrated, experience of signing, stuff with locally, with your keys, Nostra keys or Bitcoin keys on your mobile like you do with browser extension in desktop, but, it's just not yet there. You can do it with, on Firefox, but only on Firefox and Android. Apparently, this browser supports, having, having extensions on mobile, not from Firefox, not from the browser.
So I'll be go soon, soon you will you will put your hands on it. No wait lists, no much waiting. Very soon everyone can get it.
[00:50:52] David Bennett:
Yeah. See, now I've got the test flight version. And just if if you guys keep the onboarding process the same, it looked for the listeners out there, it looks something like this. I got I get Albie Go on my phone. I open it up and it says, do you wanna connect a wallet or do you wanna connect to your I can't remember exactly what it said. It said, do you wanna connect this wallet? I'm like, yeah, I sure do. And then I'm looking at it and I go, I don't know how to do this. I know I want to connect it to my Albie hub. I know.
So I go to my Albie hub on my start 9. I'm looking at the interface and then I look for anything that says connect. Sure enough, there's a little purple bar that says connect, you know, connect. I hit that thing and it says, do you want to connect a device? And I'm like, I certainly do. And then it reveals a QR code. And then on on this, on the I'll be go, it said, do you want to connect? And then it gives me, like, the, like, the little, camera say I'm about, you need to, like, scan a QR code. I'm like, I'll bet it wants this QR code that I got from Albie Hub. And, I mean, within within a second, I had my Albie Hub balance and I had send and receive capabilities on my phone.
I mean, this thing is this thing was under a minute and it, I didn't even have instructions. Now this is a user experience. And my wife is, is somebody who teaches technical communication and writing. And she talks in her classes about the importance of who your audience is. What kind of user experience are you going to provide them? Not not by not not by reading a paper that you wrote, but by the instructions that you wrote or better yet, like in this case, there are no instructions. It's like Lego instructions. There's no words. It's that intuitive.
And that's one of the reasons why I really like every single product that I've seen from Albie follows that that user experience, where it's damn near you don't even need to really write anything down. We're going to make this so simple that even if you can't read, you'll be able to use these products. So honestly, dude, applause for being able to have functionality without 10 sheets of white paper that you have to read to understand how to connect something like an app on my phone to my Sovereign lightning node using Albie Hub that I can also get to on my browser.
It's and I get I keep and I get the same balance on all this stuff. It's like I'm confirming my balance from, like, 3 different spots. And it's it's it's wonderful. So anybody who's thinking that this is hard, it's not. And when you get a chance to get this thing, I highly recommend that you do. But you said something that I wanna dive into just a little bit more is the ability to leverage something like Alby go to talk to my Alby hub that may, what are these days contain my noster private key? It'd be able to unlock on the go some kind of Nostril client without exposing my private key directly.
Do you think that that might actually be sooner than later?
[00:54:25] Tomek K:
Look. Your node also has the root of access to your wallet, to your node is this huge number, random number, and it's represented by these 12 words. And it's possible to do some magic with these 12 words because from such 12 words, you can also generate an aster key. And that's what RB extension does. And maybe necessarily holding your keys with the hub and there is also some other yet to be implemented in in such setup technologies like NSEC bunker that you might like, with RB also, what you were doing when you were logging with, logging to Stacker News or to Geyser with this using this ln URL auth, like with RB extension. It was basically signing the, authentication with the keys of your node and then paired with your user ID on this ln hub in simple terms.
So, yes, it's, this what you mentioned is, among kind of features that, yes, they are. Now now now we need to focus on, keeping this solution stable and even easier for for people to get onboarded to. But everybody is waiting for some spare time to actually discuss, new features that we could deliver there, remembering also that, RBH app needs to stay, lightweight, app. So maybe some of the models you could turn on and off, but, also, with this, everyone who dreams of such features is invited to come to the feedback board or the best if he goes to GitHub so, our developers could see, okay, this is this is what people want. Or even if somebody could you feel free to do a fork and implement something that you wanna see in this hub.
[00:56:33] David Bennett:
Okay. There's, one thing that I I do have a question about, and I guess I should probably end up I'll I'll end up directing this, to probably whatever the version of customer support is over at Alby. But I've noticed that because I use the start 9 as my as my go to node right now from a Bitcoin core lightning was where I keep Albie Hub, mempool, the whole ball of wax. So I side loaded, the, start 9 albihub package that I got off of y'all's GitHub repo. And I think if I'm if I It's not even on our GitHub repo. It's somebody's else. Oh, is it? Oh, it oh, that's right. It's on start nines, isn't it?
[00:57:18] Tomek K:
I think it's, no. It's not yet on start 9. It's on a whole horror logger. There is some other fork of it, but it's, not yet official. Okay. Yeah. It's in community store on start 9. It's definitely It it should be there. Right? But, I believe it didn't happen yet.
[00:57:35] David Bennett:
Yeah. Yeah. I've got okay. So here here's the thing. It's it's it's a little it's a little weird what because I've got Albi Hub running, and it's version 1.2.0. And you guys have actually upgraded quite a bit. But so if I click on on that and I go to, or if I if I click on if I get into my Albie hub, the UI, it will tell me that I have version 1.2.0. And then if I scroll over that, if I put my cursor on top of that, it says, Albie has Albie hub. 1.7.4 is available. So you guys have upgraded quite a bit, but here's what's so weird about it. And again, I'll probably end up going to, you know, having to go to somebody else to actually figure this one out. If I go and I click that, it wants to send me to get get albie.comforward/hub.uh, underscore deployment.
But if I actually that's what it says that it wants to go to. But if I actually click it, it takes me to get albie.comforward/subscriptionforward/new. So I can't actually get the update. Is that is there a reason for that? Is that, like, a safeguard to say, we don't really wanna do this just yet. We just wanna know that it's available. Or is this just some kind of weird URL chicanery going on? Do you know?
[00:59:11] Tomek K:
Do you really want to resolve it, over your podcast? No. Okay. Let me start let me start the terminal. Wait.
[00:59:18] David Bennett:
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. I just wanted to make sure that I was I think I I I I think that it's about
[00:59:26] Tomek K:
not having auto update feature totally rolled on self hosted RB hubs. Okay. There's right? And, there is a an another process, and I believe you you should be linked there. If not, I was like, we will put it in comments. We have guides on this also. Right? How to update on on self hosted, nodes. So, yeah, there is already 1.73, and, probably when we release it, there will be 1.8 and every, major no. Not even major. Every, like, decimal release is named after Cypherpunks. Soon, cypherpunks will finish. So you're thinking, okay. What how to name next releases?
So feel free to drop suggestions.
[01:00:15] David Bennett:
Okay. I just wanted to bring that up because I think it's important for I think it's important for us to understand that not just in the world of Albie and Albie Hub and Albie Go, but Bitcoin in general, lightning network, e cash, Fedimint, that we are not dealing with polished, perfect, out of the box stuff. We're not dealing with people that are high paid customer service representatives. We are not dealing with professional marketing teams. We are not dealing with any of the legacy world. Come on. No. We're not. No. Professional. We're well, we're all professional.
You know, we we want to we want to do the professional things, but you can be as professional as you want. But if you're climbing on a shoestring budget, it's hard to it's it's hard to do the things that Microsoft does where they roll out automatic updates. And it happens while you're sleeping and you don't even know it. And it's, like, almost like where it used to be smooth as glass before they screwed up that last one with the CloudFlare thing. But in either event, everybody, not everybody, but so many people get their underwear in a twist every time something doesn't work in the space.
And you can have the best product because Albie is one of the, is a top top of class product for me, as far as my, our, the arsenal of products that I use in this space. And yet, like we were just saying, it says it wants to update, but it doesn't update. I've gotten used to this type of thing in this space because everything here is new. All of us are doing the best that we can. And what I've never understood. And I kind of maybe get your thoughts to end this off because I do have to go get my kids from school. Otherwise you're going to freak out. But when you look at this space and the way that things are not polished, when I do when I look at it, I think that this is a good thing.
Do you agree or disagree with that?
[01:02:23] Tomek K:
I'm not sure if it's good or bad thing. It's a natural thing, and I think, yeah, we need to be understanding, when things don't work. I I still see that this space you know, everywhere there will be people complaining, and still in this space, I see very positive, ethos of appreciation. There will be toxic individuals everywhere there would be. But in general, feeling is, I'm very grateful to, like, meet feedback like yours, and it's not an exception. People rather tell us good things in general about things that are not polished, not not only from Albie, but anywhere.
And I guess it's, we also do a good job. Not not not we I'll be we the space ecosystem in, like, being honest, in in what you do, and I it's not a surprise, I guess, for me, and it's, people people would be complaining and things are not polished. But, well, polishing is also fun, and I I look right now with this Microsoft or Facebook. This is, like, so big, and it feels like too polished. And to me, it feels clunky and so many things not working. So I guess the rebuilding of Internet, I hope, I guess. I more hope that, this is the process of rebuilding the Internet, and it's only the start. So there will be not polished is, euphemism. It's something that we want to have not polished. Right?
At least it works. At least it's not, like, you know, broken and destroyed because, we can imagine, I don't know, a solar explosion and, all of the micro processors dying. I don't know if it's possible or or it's just some, you know, urban legend of what could happen. But, if this could happen, then I guess, we would miss for not foolish things.
[01:04:42] David Bennett:
Yeah. That I think we are rebuilding the web. I've I've I've said it a couple of times that it feels like we're we've gone back to 1991 and forked it, and we're rebuilding it from here. That's what it feels like to me.
[01:04:56] Tomek K:
91? Okay. I I I thought it's more like 98.
[01:05:00] David Bennett:
I I guess I got my first browser, like, an actual browser browser in 94. So let's let's split the difference and say we've we're forking it from 1995. Alright. Hey, Tomac. Alright. I've got I've got my kids, so I'm gonna let you go. I appreciate you being here, man. And if we get a chance to if if for whatever reason, Albie ever needs to make an announcement of anything, hit me up. I'll put you on the show. Okay?
[01:05:28] Tomek K:
Likewise. Thank you for, very appreciative words. I will pass them on to our team, and, thank you all who is listening to us because, this is, we are, you know, participating in something nice and big. So thank you for, fighting together.
[01:05:43] David Bennett:
Yeah. I can't think of a better place to end it. I'll talk to you later, Tomek. Cheers. Okay. Well, I hope you got a lot out of that. I hope it explains a little bit more about what Alby is, what it can do, and moreover, what it can do for you. It's it is not any skin off your nose to try this thing out. You can put in, like, and especially when it comes to the Nostr stuff, right? Because I can use my Get Albie extension to log into any Nostr based client that there is. I have I have yet to see one that does not have the ability to say, oh well you've got, you know, you can log you want to log in with an extension and every single one identifies my extension my get albie extension is something that I could log in with for a nostril client every single one I have yet to come across a single nostril client and I've been through I don't know I've probably tried 35 maybe even 40 of these things and I have yet to find one that will not allow me to use my get albie extension to log in So if you want to try it out, and I highly recommend that you do, you don't have to use your existing Inpub Insec.
You can you can spin up a fake one if you just want to try it out. But I really believe that Gitalb has been it has made my life in zapping, boosting, streaming Satoshis, and logging into Nostra clients so much easier than it used to be before that I'm finding myself basically using this particular product for almost every damn thing that I do now. And it looks to me like it's just gonna get better and better and better. So, if you have not tried out Albie or the Get Albie extension, you can hook it up to their Albie Go. You can hook this thing up to your own lightning node if you have one. If you want if you don't want your own lightning node you can spin 1 up on a cloud or you can use somebody else's, you can rent channels.
There is a whole ecosystem behind Alby that will support you in being as self sovereign as you possibly can using the lightning network. Right? And that so that means zapping. That means getting zaps. That means having a wallet that you can use lightning for. That means being able to interact with the podcasting 2.0. Fountain, it has it or, there's actually no. Pod home directly interacts with, Albie as far as I know. And there's a couple of other there's a couple of other either podcast apps or podcast hosting companies that allows you to use your Nostra identity rather than anything else to log in with.
This is this extension is going to become very important. It already is a major centerpiece of my day. So, again, if you need to go back and listen to this episode one more time so that you can understand all the stuff that we're getting to because there's a lot there then please do so and send this to your friends this episode you know share it out to your friends especially those people who are like man this lightning stuff is confusing I mean I forgot to mention if you didn't hear about it you can uncle Jim somebody else's lightning experience off of your own node or even if you've got a node hosted in the cloud right? And you don't have like a Raspberry Pi. You can Uncle Jim, which basically means that you can basically provide the liquidity and have your friend connect their Albie extension directly to your Albie hub and act sort of like a bank. I know you're gonna go, oh shit, I don't want to go to jail because I'm a money transmitter.
We've got to gut up and just start doing the things and forget about this whole asking a permission stuff. We've got we've got to go into this new world and it's going to be painful for some of us. I don't have a problem Uncle Jimming somebody off of my system. If you do, I'm not going to make fun of you and I definitely understand it. But the fact that the potential for me to act as the liquidity provider for somebody else's Albi wallet is a compelling use case. So don't forget to if you didn't hit that in the in the interview, go back and listen to the interview again because we touch on, like, 4 or 5 different things about what Albie's doing. So with all that said, I will see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Interview with Tomek from Alby
Understanding the Alby Extension
Tomek's Role and Journey with Alby
Challenges in the Bitcoin Job Market
Alby's Integration with Nostr
Transition from Custodial to Self-Custodial Wallet
Alby Hub and Self-Custody
Uncle Jim Model and Alby Hub
Pod Home Integration and Future Features
Alby Go Mobile Wallet
Nostr Wallet Connect and Future Innovations
Challenges and Opportunities in Bitcoin Development
