Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
It is pretty clear at this point that lightning will be a major part of the Bitcoin financial system. How can you use it? What is it useful for? And where can it be used right now? We talk about all this and a number of other items on this epiosode!
Cool use cases for lightning and how we use it…
El Salvador adoption https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/lightning-ballooned-since-el-salvador-bitcoin-bet
Use cases around the world:
- You can buy coffee directly from El Salvador! https://thegoodbeans.com
- Bitcoin ATMs in El Salvador support Lightning! https://decrypt.co/204933/lightning-network-hits-bitcoin-atms-in-el-salvador
- You can trade with Lightning, a non-kyc bitcoin futures trading platform! https://lnmarkets.com/
- Buy Bitcoin related books from Saifedean Ammous book shop! https://thesaifhouse.com/
- Chat with AI
- Frankie GPT
- Unleashed https://unleashed.chat/app/chat
- Pay for a domain
- Earn sats by listening to Podcasts on Fountain, v4v
- Read and boost news at Stacker news
- DCA with Strike
- Install android apps with zapstore and upport the developers
- Shopping https://getalby.com/discover#shopping
- Paying with Lightning in real life https://darth-coin.github.io/merchants/bitcoin-lightning-payments-irl-en.html
- Pay for VPN with Lightning https://getalby.com/discover#privacy
- LNVPN https://lnvpn.net
- Top up Mullvad https://vpn.sovereign.engineering
- Buy eSIM https://silent.link
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
February 5th, 2025: 97,500 USD | 93,600 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
882,448
News and Notes
Tether on Lightning
Trump Signs Executive Order for Soverign Wealth Fund
Discover apps:
https://getalby.com/discover
Discover local producers and services
https://btcmap.org
Technology details:
https://lightning-network.tech
Software Updates
SeedSigner v0.8.5
Sparrow Wallet v2.1.1
ZEUS v0.9.5
Damus Notedeck v0.3.0 (Alpha 2)
Rust-nostr v0.39.0
Episode Page
https://satoshis-plebs.com/episode-196
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Website
https://satoshis-plebs.com
Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info
McIntosh can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. His mastodon handle is @[email protected] and his Nostr. Kenshin can be reached on Twitter at @kenshin_ninja or on Nostr. Kenshin’s email is [email protected]. You can also follow the Satoshi’s Plebs podcast account on Nostr. We are looking forward to hearing from you!
We are looking forward to hearing from you!
[00:00:58]
McIntosh:
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is February. This is episode 196 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm Mcintosh.
[00:01:06] Kenshin:
I am Kenshin, and today's episode is lightning at your fingertips.
[00:01:11] McIntosh:
So before we go any further, I do wanna mention, we are at episode 196. Do you know what that means, Kenshin?
[00:01:20] Kenshin:
Four before the 200?
[00:01:22] McIntosh:
You read my mind. That is incredible. We have been working together so long. He now reads my mind. That is amazing. Yes. We are four episodes from February. I don't even I haven't even thought about it, to be honest. But, I guess I'll bring out my little, what is that? Like, a horn sound or whatever? Like, a celebration Right. For 200. It's four more weeks. Four more weeks. So early March, and, and we'll be there. But that's not really what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about Bitcoin. We're here to talk about very important things. So we will start with our price at time of recording. Why don't you grab that real quick?
[00:02:09] Kenshin:
I updated them two hours ago. So then Yeah. It's pretty close.
[00:02:15] McIntosh:
Must be close. Well, let me just go ahead. So as we record, we are at block we're at 97,000 a hundred and 38 for the US dollars.
[00:02:26] Kenshin:
Mhmm. And around 93,500 for the euro.
[00:02:30] McIntosh:
K. We got that at a block height of 882,448 , which, by the way, went to one of my nemesis foundry, but that's a story for another day. We're looking at a difficulty adjustment right now of about 4.53% up, and that's just in a couple of days on February. We are running hot down about nine point six minutes per block on average instead of ten. That's why the difficulty adjustment would be going up. Our previous difficulty adjustment was -2.12%. So we've had more hash rate come online, and it's pushing, you know, the it will push the difficulty up. How is Ocean actually been doing these days? Do you know offhand?
[00:03:16] Kenshin:
I've a few blocks here and there, it's a bit better than a couple of weeks ago.
[00:03:22] McIntosh:
They have oh, well, let's see. Our last one was seventeen hours ago, so less than a day. They were extremely lucky. January was extremely lucky. In fact, I think we ended up at almost 30 blocks Wow. For for Jan. It was crazy. Don't expect that anytime soon again, but,
[00:03:44] Kenshin:
we are all up
[00:03:45] McIntosh:
we showed up in the pie chart there with the other Yeah. Mining system for one second. And our hash rate did go up. It's people I don't understand. So it's actually gone back down. People are crazy. Like, they move their hash rate around. It's not hard. You can move. You can point your miners to different places, especially with ocean. It makes no sense to just be going back and forth. You gotta you gotta hang around, man. I don't know. Anyways, weird. Weird, but not me. That's not me. I've been plugged in the ocean for months now. I've got three miners down right now, by the way, and I I haven't talked about this, but it's it's when we were having our snowpocalypse, right after that, apparently, it was really cold out west, and there was some issues at the data center that my miners are at that those three are anyways. And so they had to move them, and now it's become a big thing. So, yay.
I love it when my hash rate is offline. Said no miner ever.
[00:04:55] Kenshin:
Alright. I was thinking to put one of mine to do this lottery mining.
[00:05:00] McIntosh:
Mhmm. Oh, man. So can I just go ahead and request if you win one? Can can you donate a little bit to the show? Yes. Absolutely. That's gonna be a big fat zap that day. Yeah.
[00:05:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. I was saying.
[00:05:17] McIntosh:
I don't know. I can't I cannot with a clear conscience counsel you to do that. I I I don't think that's a good idea, but it's a lottery, and you may win. And if you do, you would win big. So why don't you explain what you're talking about real quick, though? Yeah. What I'm talking about is that,
[00:05:35] Kenshin:
right now, our miners, yours and mine, we mine in a pool of other miners, so we all try together to find a block or solve the equation of a block and get rewarded. And when we get re if we find that block first, we we get rewarded with 3 point, $1.25 Bitcoin. And that is shared between all of us that are in the pool based on how much hash rate we each give. So it's very, fair in that sense. It's proportional. Right. Mhmm. And, there is a way to mine on your own. So you try on your own to find the block, and if you do, you get the full rewards at 3.125 Bitcoin. So I want to Sounds great. Yeah. But without the chances are Right.
[00:06:27] McIntosh:
Kenshin could mine for the rest of his life with that miner, and most likely, he would never hit a block.
[00:06:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's like one in a million years or something like that.
[00:06:38] McIntosh:
It has happened. It actually has happened a couple of times in the last few weeks. And so now everybody's pumped up and excited about it. But, man Yes. Slowing the look. You've who was it? Who did the Greek was it Aristotle? The tortoise and the hare. Right? The story?
[00:06:55] Kenshin:
You're right.
[00:06:57] McIntosh:
Was it who did those? Man, I'm completely drawing a blank. Anyways, tortoise one. Right? Just saying. Okay. Let's talk about mempool bees real quick. As we are recording, actually, the mempool is almost completely empty. Just a couple minutes ago, when I recorded the stats, we were at one, two, and two sats per vByte, meaning, for low, medium, and high priority, which means that basically for a a normal transaction, it would cost you about no. Not 27. It's less than that. Oh, it's changed. Like, 14¢, okay, to send a transaction, and that transaction could be thousands, millions, literally billions of dollars for 14¢. It's actually stunningly amazing.
And then, the mempool itself only had 4,978 transactions in it that were unprocessed. So the mempool in general has been quite low for the last, I don't know, less than a week, but a decent portion of that, I would say, five, six days. Right? And, I I personally have been taking advantage about that, but, we'll talk about that maybe next. So what have you been up to, Kenshin?
[00:08:20] Kenshin:
Right. A a small, note on the mempool. It came up a few times now, because a lot of people were talking about the mempool. And there is actually no central mempool, of course. There everybody who runs a node has their own mempool. Correct. And we look at the specific one called mempool .space. But Right. Assuming that, since that mempool,
[00:08:48] McIntosh:
it was empty and for a few days, it's safe to assume that all mempools Yeah. The whole network was It's so easy just to say the mempool. Thank you for correcting me. That is actually 100% true. So, yeah, that is something you should keep in mind. There's not a mempool, but there's this one that we kinda refer to that you can go to, mempool.space. I would highly recommend even if you have no interest in mining or anything like that, Go look. Go see what's going on because it is interesting. Anyways, so what has been going on with you, sir?
[00:09:26] Kenshin:
Yeah. And talking about Mempool, I took advantage of that. I did some transactions, move a few UTXOs around. I wanted to empty a ledger wallet that I I had done some experimenting with. So I thought I might as well empty it right now.
[00:09:44] McIntosh:
Right.
[00:09:45] Kenshin:
So I did that and then I then I thought, okay, I might as well open some lightning channels because it's a good opportunity again, to do those transactions. And I did that, mostly for redundancy purposes. Okay. So I had, two channels, so I made a third one now. So that's very cool. Yeah. Then I did so called Zapathon on, Nostr. I don't know if you saw it. I did. Yeah. So I actually made a note. Ladies and gentlemen,
[00:10:21] McIntosh:
he's being humble. This man spent 21,000 sats. Am I correct?
[00:10:27] Kenshin:
No. It was no?
[00:10:29] McIntosh:
That was the first hour. That was the first one?
[00:10:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. That that was the first hour or two. That was my target. But then people kept sending messages. Then I get something right on going. Yeah. So I did a 50, I think. Oh, lord, Kenshin. Really? So it went yeah. It must have been over 30,000
[00:10:51] McIntosh:
zaps then. Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. Sorry. Yeah. A 50 zaps. I thought you meant a 50,000 satoshis. I'm like, wait.
[00:11:02] Kenshin:
Yeah. Okay. No. Well, my note on how that go? Yeah. Good. I mean, my note on author said that I changed my Zaps to 210, sats per Zap. So I said Mhmm. Whoever wants, just leave a comment. And then I got, like, a lot. Now it's over 200 comments including mine. So it was at least a 50 people in there that got 210 sets each.
[00:11:30] McIntosh:
I couldn't convince him to say sponsored by Satoshi's Club podcast. I I I I we should do that next, but, my first one, I wanted to do completely. I was actually gonna talk to you about that. I think maybe we ought to take a little bit out of the, you know, the the wallet, and and let's do that. I'm I'm I'm up for that. But, yes, it will be from and we are gonna say that.
[00:11:59] Kenshin:
And that's called Zap Zapvertising.
[00:12:04] McIntosh:
Yeah. Well, it'll make it'll be worth their while. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Alright. So that was cool. And, yes, I did see that. I did not participate. It was essentially over after, when I saw it. So I did not join in. I did. And anything else?
[00:12:22] Kenshin:
What else? Oh, yes. I did, for the first time, I started the Nostril Relay, my own self hosted relay. I want to see how that works. Now are you doing that, like, on an Umbrel or is that on a VBS or something? Yeah. On a VPS, I Okay. I tried in the past on the start nine, and I couldn't figure out the config. And and on start nine, it's difficult to make it public. Right. So I wanted to test with a public domain Okay. That I own. And so I did it with just a Docker container, on a VPS. So after I figure out some, issues with the docker compose, then it run quite easily. It's very simple to to get it started, actually.
[00:13:09] McIntosh:
Alright. So very cool. Did you run into any real roadblocks with that, or is is that no. It's a some,
[00:13:18] Kenshin:
no. The only thing I actually learned that I didn't realize was that, when I published my first notes Mhmm. To to my relay, I could not see it on Amethyst, for example, which is expected, and I was very happy about that. When I added my relay on Amethyst, it showed up, and I was very happy again. And then I realized that everybody could see it. So then I realized, okay. So the relays are talking together
[00:13:47] McIntosh:
Yes. When they're on the same app. So that's what I learned, which was quite useful in that sense. Yeah. They get chatty. They talk back and forth. It's like it's kinda like a Bitcoin node. Right? You put it up there, and once it finds some nodes, it it's off and running. Very cool. So I did a number of things this week as well, maybe considering my workload probably, frankly, more than I should have. But I have been taking so because of the fees actually, Ken should I'm not trying to top you, but I can. Sorry. I had three ledger wallets.
So I'm uncle Jim to a couple of people in my family. And a number of years ago, we bought Ledger wallets for this kind of thing, and I took this opportunity to move to a seed signer setup. So we've talked about seed signer a number of times. It's the hardware signing device that I use, and it works really well. Plus, it lets you keep segregated accounts. So I use the combination of seed signer and Sparrow to manage my Bitcoin, and I moved from the ledger to SeedSigner. And, oh, gosh. Hey. Really important warning, ladies and gentlemen. Listen up. When I was messing with seatsider no. I not seatsider.
Ledger. I have not messed with Ledger in multiple years. Okay? And I went and booted it, and it said pin. And I just put in what kind of my normal pin. I mean, everybody has them. Right? So I put in my normal pin. Didn't work. And it says you have two tries left.
[00:15:34] Kenshin:
I saw this. I had the same
[00:15:36] McIntosh:
receipt. Screwed up. Listen. If I would have messed this up, that I it's from from what I understand, that would have been locked up. K. And I'm not sure I could have recovered it. I'm not sure. So I had the seed word, so I'm not sure if I could have reconstituted it maybe on a different ledger, but it would have been a huge hassle. Okay? Now I did have the pins because Macintosh is actually reasonably smart, And I had them written down with the seed phrases. I just didn't think about it. But one unit, I actually did it twice. And if I would have done it the third time, I would have been locked out.
So it got really scary right there, okay, for me personally. Because I'm like, I didn't know what was gonna happen, but I got through it all.
[00:16:31] Kenshin:
I got exactly the identical situation. Exact whatever everything you said exactly the same up to the pin on the seed phrase.
[00:16:39] McIntosh:
Mhmm. And then I got It's such a stupid design. Yeah. I would never recommend a ledger for anyone. Do not do it. For multiple reasons, that's just one of them. But I was able to successfully move the Bitcoin off the wallet into a seed signer setup. It's all verified. I can see it all in Sparrow. Hoorah. Okay. That's done. So that was one thing I did. That was last weekend. I did take a okay. Let me talk about this, and then I'll talk about that other. Sorry. Went back to my Bitcoin, not my Bitcoin, my VPS setup. I've been wanting to set up core Bitcoin Core node and lightning, again.
And in my day job, just a little tidbit, I use Ubuntu, which is a Linux distro. And I've used Ubuntu for years, up to and including twenty four zero four, which is kind of the latest stable release. So normally, when I spin up a server, I spin up a bunch and and move on with my life. I tried that with this. And the issue is with Bitcoin Core, they only release what's called a snap package for it, and I hate snap. It's it's so stupid. It's such a stupid package management system. And so I actually tried and failed to set up a Bitcoin core that I could use. So, the Bitcoin core node. And so I'm like, okay. Now what? So I'm gonna stay with Linux, of course, and I have fiddled off and on with NextOS, which is a different Linux distribution. It's actually not to get way down in the weeds. I'm not going to. It's a different Linux distribution.
I tried it again. I now have a Nix, desktop not desktop, server set up. I am setting up this Bitcoin collection called Fort Nix, and that's not actually what they call it, but that's the name on the repo, and it sticks with me. I don't know why. Hold on. It's nix dash bitcoin is the name of the collection. Okay? But it's it's literally Fort dash nix is the repo. It just they should've just called it that. I don't know why. But regardless, I'm in the process of setting that up. Now that is a little tricky, but I think I can pull it off, and it will give me a very solid reproducible setup. So I'm gonna set up Bitcoin Core is my goal, and then also set up once I get that done and syncing and everything, c lightning, which is blocks Blockstream.
It's there. Alright. It's also called Corelightning, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So their lightning setup I like the way they have plug ins. They tend to do things pretty early, which I think for lightning is very important. Like, they were one of the first to implement bolt 12, for example, this kind of thing. So I'm not done with that, but I'm hopefully at least halfway there. How about that? And I keep having to stop because it just gets too late, and I still have a job and, you know, things to do. So that's where I'm at. And then also the last thing I wanted to mention, you talked last week, I think, or maybe the week before about Plebeian market. Right? Right. Last week. Yeah.
I took a look at it, and I am super impressed. I am. So if you use something like Etsy, if you use something like even eBay, any of those kind of things where the end user is selling the product to someone else, you need to check this out. Okay? I know I have one listener who's a friend of mine who, needs to listen up. They sell honey, the honey that I get sometimes for my tea. Right? That's they have honeybees. They do a whole little thing. This would be a great place, for example, for them to sell their honey and earn Bitcoin at the same time for it completely anonymously if you wanna do it that way.
Okay? It is an incredible setup and it is so early. It's so early. Like, there's like and don't let that throw you off. You'll go look at it. There's like, I don't know, probably less than a hundred things listed on there. Do not sleep on this. If you do anything creative, if you're a photographer, a painter, if you sell product, like, even like dried foods or honey or something like that. I don't know. There's a billion different things. Anything Bitcoin based, you can sell it on there for Satoshis, and the prices are really not really good. Like, they how can I put this? In my opinion, they're tilted towards the seller. Does that make sense? Yeah. It's a free market, so there's no competition. Yeah. Well, we'll see how that all shakes out. But right now, you will get a premium. That's what it means. Okay?
Do not sleep on this. I'm actually thinking about posting some pictures like like I use I have for years taken different pictures. I I would in an alternate timeline, I would be like a photographer. I'm thinking about posting some of my better stuff up there as prints and seeing how it does, like a like a photographic print.
[00:22:38] Kenshin:
Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:22:39] McIntosh:
We'll see. I would love to have some business like that. Alright. That is enough. Sorry. I didn't well, no. I did wanna say all that, so I'm not gonna apologize. I think that's important. We need to help build these economies, and that is a great way for I know for some of our listeners to do that. And little green bee, I'm looking right at you. So I know when you hear this, you need to go look that up, and you can call me and we'll talk about it and whatever. We'll get you there. Okay? Because you're my friend. Alright. Let's move on to the topic.
Alright.
[00:23:20] Kenshin:
So the topic of today is about lightning. We thought that since we talked last week about creating a lightning wallet, the easiest way possible and getting an Oster and all these things, then we thought maybe it's interesting to talk a bit more about how to more ways to use Lightning
[00:23:39] McIntosh:
and what are cool ways out there. And there are a lot, and we're gonna talk about some of them. Before we jump into that, I wanna give a two minute overview of Lightning just so that we're all on the same page. Lightning is what they call a layer two on top of the Bitcoin main chain. It is a way for you to move micro amounts of Bitcoin, so a few Satoshis, for very, very little fees. Sometimes none at all. It is a way for you to carry around a wallet that you can do make very small purchases with very cheaply. It is extremely fast. It is nothing like the main chain where it takes ten minutes for a block.
It is extremely useful, and I believe it will be part of the long term future of Bitcoin. We will see it. There's things about it that I'm not necessarily it's kinda like mining. I mentioned that, mining pool earlier. That's a very large centralized mining pool. There's a lot of centralization going on in Bitcoin and in my opinion, not enough pleb usage. People running their own loads like what Kenshin does, but that's just that's part of it. It's something we can push back against. That's why I'm setting up a lightning node, one of the reasons. Okay?
But, it will become part of this Bitcoin infrastructure that's being built. It will be used to connect all kinds of things and not just lightning to lightning. It will be used for ARC. It will be used for, there's one that I'm always forgetting. It it'll have interoperability. I think it already does. I hope I'm not saying something incorrect. With Cashew, for example, with eCash, okay, that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. It's going to be part of this ecosystem, and I think it's going to be a very important part. And one last thing, I promise, it also brings a level of privacy that the Bitcoin main chain does not have.
Okay? Sorry. I wanted to get that out there.
[00:25:49] Kenshin:
No. That's very important. The introduction to lightning. And, there is so many resources, but I think we can talk about our favorites in some way that we have used before. Or even as an introduction, I can also mention El Salvador because El Salvador, they accept, Bitcoin as or they use accept it as legal tender. But Mhmm. Now that went away, but they still accept it, of course. So they're free to use any currency they want. And, there they have is it called a Bitcoin Beach or how is it called? Yes. Bitcoin Beach.
[00:26:32] McIntosh:
In El Salvador?
[00:26:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yes. So they have a lot of, small producers, let's say vegetables and other things like that. And people who couldn't accept, money before, they couldn't afford the bank account or these, credit card machines. Right. So it was really good for them. They could install a Bitcoin app, wallet. And especially now with Lightning, it's even easier to just accept an instant transaction. So I I we have a lot of examples from El Salvador. It's a very nice, place right now for for Bitcoin and Lightning.
[00:27:14] McIntosh:
So it also benefits the this small business market, I think, will be huge for Lightning. It benefits them because of ease of use, because of instant settlement effectively, and because they don't have to pay the transaction fees that they do on credit cards. The average fees are like two to 4% on a credit card. On Bitcoin, you can send a thousand Satoshis for just a couple of Satoshis. Okay? So it's it's and a thousand Satoshis right now is roughly a dollar and two Satoshis are I it's I don't even know. I can't how do you calculate that? It's far less than 1¢.
Yeah. Okay? It's a really good thing for these small vendors, for these small businesses in general.
[00:28:07] Kenshin:
Sorry. Mhmm. Thank you. No problem. And, actually, I found a website. It's called the good beans Com. It's about buying coffee beans from El Salvador, and they have international shipping. Yeah. And they yeah. I mean, there must be a lot like that. So they start to expand globally and accept Bitcoin and lightning transactions, and they ship globally products from El Salvador. So it's quite cool, actually. I don't know if we could have done that earlier without Bitcoin. I'm not sure.
[00:28:45] McIntosh:
What yeah. Who knows? It certainly makes it easier. Very cool.
[00:28:52] Kenshin:
They also had examples in El Salvador of the Bitcoin ATMs that they support lightning. So you can go very easily and deposit or withdraw money by just, scanning the QR code doing a lightning transaction.
[00:29:07] McIntosh:
I don't really have experience with Bitcoin ATMs. To be honest, I've never bought from one, but I have looked at them a few times. The ones that I've seen have had outrageously high fees. I wonder if it's the same with these. In theory, because they're operating over the Lightning Network, they really shouldn't need that. They can put whatever fees they want. I mean, that just may be, but at least in terms of a technical, like, you're not doing a main chain transaction, so you don't have to worry about, you know, when fees are super high or whatever.
[00:29:43] Kenshin:
Right. Mhmm. Yeah. I haven't tried them either. I I'm very curious, and I would like to try them next time I am in Greece. And I know they have there a few. But I don't I'm I'm a bit afraid of the KYC. I think they have camera, and right now they're obliged to KYC. You. So if that's the case, I will not try it actually.
[00:30:08] McIntosh:
No. You you're going to you should assume when you're using an ATM like that, it's going to have a camera. They may ask you for information upfront. I don't know. It may be a phone number. It may be I don't know. But you could assume that that's a surveilled situation, essentially. So another reason not to kinda use them. Right. But they are there.
[00:30:41] Kenshin:
Mhmm. What else? Well, some of my favorite use cases is right now, I'm paying AI chatbots with lightning. So I send a thousand sets, and I get some credits, and I can use. And those interface, one of them is Frankie GPT. It interfaces with, OpenAI's, Charge GPT, the four o. So it's same level of quality answers. And it's very easy to load with lightning, and I don't need to go to OpenAI's website and register an account, with an email and pay them $20 a month. So I find that very, very good use case, and it's very fast to do. And now I discover this unleashed, dot chat.
And it's very, very similar. You do exactly the same, but it also integrates more with Nostr. So I can actually ask the chat, who of my followers was the most popular in the last twenty four hours. And it knows my followers because I sign in essentially with my,
[00:31:56] McIntosh:
private followers on Noister? Noister. Yeah. Yeah. Run this by me again.
[00:32:03] Kenshin:
Sorry. You log in on this unleashed.chat. You can log in with your private key. Your Gnostr private key. Okay. So the chat just helps pulling stats out of the
[00:32:15] McIntosh:
Gnostr ecosystem. Okay. I got it. I've just never heard of that. That's interesting. That's an interesting use case.
[00:32:22] Kenshin:
Yeah. Exactly. Mhmm. So I like those. I, of course, we always talk about podcasting, two point o, value for value, fountain. You can earn such by listening, and you can boost us and other, creators. Mhmm. So that's also very, you know, good way of using Lightning. Slacker News is like Reddit, and we talked about that in the past. But if you have you can start a, what what is it called? A news item or a discussion, and they can boost you if they like the answers. And you can earn some slots there, and you can give back to creators that you like Mhmm. In a written form.
Yeah. And a big up for me now is Strike. Okay. I really like Strike, and it integrates Lightning very seamlessly.
[00:33:23] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:33:24] Kenshin:
So I DCA small amount every day, very easily, and sometimes I use it's a hot wallet, essentially. Mhmm. So until I move until a month has passed, let's say, and I move things to a cold storage, I can use it as a lightning wallet for small payments if I need to or to send, such to my other lightning wallets to use with Fountain or Nostr or whatever. So, I think Striker, they're doing incredible job, and they were one of the first ones, I think, to integrate. They were. Lightning. Yeah. I agree completely.
[00:34:03] McIntosh:
Jack Mahler's if you ever get the chance to listen to him, he's the CEO of Strike. He started that place out of his bedroom, when he was he was a kid. He he says he was a kid. I mean, he he's like I don't know what he is now, but he he's still very young. But that business that he has built on a Bitcoin foundation, maybe I don't agree with everything that they do, but, man, they have executed. And if it has a place for you, if you are okay with DCA ing with the KYC app, for example, there's no easier way of doing it. I mean, I do the same thing. I actually do it on a weekly basis because my wife gets mad because of all the pulling from the bank. You know? It's not the amount. It's the daily it shows up, and it it's just confusing.
It Uh-huh. Makes your transaction thing bigger, of course. But yeah. Anyways, really cool stuff with Strike. Sorry. Yeah. And Jack, by the way, does his own podcast. He curses a lot, but, man, he's a he's something he's he is not slowing down anytime soon as far as I can tell. So No.
[00:35:24] Kenshin:
No. And he's gonna implement,
[00:35:27] McIntosh:
Bitcoin backed loans, I think, soon. So it's some exciting stuff. Yeah. Mhmm. He mentioned that on his last podcast, actually, that I'm just now listening to. Yeah.
[00:35:38] Kenshin:
What else is interesting? There, the Zapstore we talked about, but that's Android based. If you want to install apps, you can use the Zapstore and it's apps signed by the, developers and you can zap them directly. So that's mostly to give give back to the developers. So I I find it quite quite a good app. Yeah. Pay for VPN. There are a few apps. Ln VPN is really easy. Very good interface to to zap some sats and and use the VPN settings from there. Completely anonymous. No registration or anything needed. And then Mullvad VPN that a lot of people like. They can also accept lightning, to top up the the Mullvad accounts.
And there are a lot more. I found a really nice list on Albiz, Get Alby website. It's on, getalbi.com/discover. Okay.
[00:36:47] McIntosh:
And We'll include that in the show notes for sure. I I'm thinking about actually just kinda copy pasting this whole. There's a lot of links in here. You've done a great job with this, and, I wanna make sure that people can get to these.
[00:37:01] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's an yeah. And there are some really cool apps. And even in that list on GetAlpi that I've never seen, and they have split them up by categories like AI, chats, entertainment, gaming, Nostra, of course, and a lot of other things. I mean, there is even casino type of games, card games that you pay in earning sets. Oh, and something I I never knew and I saw it actually today was that you you can buy can do trading, buy futures and stuff like that with lightning. So there are a few websites and online. Financial advice. Oh, no. Just kidding.
But Just kidding.
[00:37:46] McIntosh:
What was it? Okay. And you had one last one on here.
[00:37:51] Kenshin:
Yeah. Which one? The eSIM. Oh, the eSIM. Yeah. There is a silent dot link. It's about, buying eSIMs without any registration. No email required. So you you can actually buy any SIM and load it up with the essentially have an anonymous phone.
[00:38:09] McIntosh:
Yeah. It's not tied back to your name. I had a couple of things I wanted to add or expand on, at least, on this list, three different things. You already talked about podcasting two point o and Nostr. I did actually wanna mention this. After last week's thing, I have the Get Albi wallet hooked up to my Nostr setup. And I just randomly answered a question by somebody in the community called Gigi, who's actually fairly well known. He was asking about podcasting, and I'm like, oh, hey. We use, you know, PodHome, and I've had these experiences and whatever. Just kinda trying to help him out. Dude boosted me or zapped me. I'm sorry. I I mix up the terminology. On Nostra, it zaps kids.
He zapped me 2,100 sats, and I was like, wow. And I was not that's not why I did it. I wasn't expecting it, but that was really cool. As a way to show your support for other people in the community, like what Kenshin did earlier with the Zapathon, things like that. It's a it it helps build community, frankly. And podcasting two point o, even though we don't talk about it a whole lot on here other than to say, of course, we're a podcasting two point o podcast and so on, and you can boost and support us, and that's what keeps us going. You know, it's the exact same thing. We have built Bitcoin Lightning into that, and it's a very usable system.
Okay? The second thing I would wanna mention, circular economies. Now you mentioned, I think, Bitcoin Beach. There's some very famous ones, Bitcoin Jungle, Bitcoin Beach. There's a place in Africa. These are I hate to say it. I don't wanna denigrate them, but they're tourist destinations. Okay? Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador is on the coast. It's a beautiful place. It's great for surfing. And and these are places that we can start the Bitcoin economy. Yes. I would also mention there are other places. For example, I just saw yesterday some film, some video of a place in, like, the back corner of Peru, okay, up in the mountains, frankly, a dusty, dirty little village, and these people are using Bitcoin.
And they're using Bitcoin because it's better than their local currency. They don't have to worry about it devaluing. They can save it easily with the phones that they've already got. And it is empowering and building a better economy for them. You guys, I come on here, and I know I sound like a crazy lunatic sometimes, but these are the things that will help free the world. Bitcoin Beach, I'm glad that they're doing what they're doing. I would love to go see them, but these other things, frankly, are closer to my heart, if that makes sense. Okay? It's where it's getting used off in the bush of Africa rather than right on the coast in the what I think they have a Bitcoin beach there. I can't remember. It's Bitcoin something.
Okay? Those are the things that excite me because those are the things that truly set people free who who have no other opportunity. Anyways, I wanted to emphasize that. And then the final thing, somewhat along the same line, local businesses, and that can be businesses in your area. Okay. We can set up BTCPay, which is a, Java based application that that any small business owner can run. Okay. And it has lightning integration and they can start taking lightning. It handles invoices. It does the things that small business people need, and it opens up a new income stream for them. It reduces their reliance on credit cards, again, credit card fees, and so on and so forth.
Those are things that I find exciting as well, and we are seeing that input. This is frankly something I wished I was able to, to do in my local area. It's making an excuse, but I just don't have the time. I don't. But these things will happen as Bitcoin adoption grows. And it's exciting because local businesses, these small businesses, it's hard. I've been there and I've done that. It is it's hard stuff.
[00:42:58] Kenshin:
And to find local businesses, there is a really nice website called btcmap.org.
[00:43:05] McIntosh:
Okay. Do we have that on here? I don't I didn't see that. No. I can't. That for sure.
[00:43:10] Kenshin:
But it's a open source map. It use OpenStreetMap as a back end. And, yeah, it's in some countries, it's full of points about local producer selling whatever, as you said, honey, meats, or other produce. So btcmap.org,0rg.
[00:43:35] McIntosh:
Alright. Let's, we got a couple more things here to wrap this up, and let's let's get going. So well, we already talked okay. Actually, that does kinda we have some links for you. We already talked about the get albie, and then there's a technology type if you're interested in that. That would have more of the details behind running a lightning node, that kind of thing, that we'll include as well. It's actually that's a cool website name. Lightning-network.tech. I don't think I've ever seen a tech domain. Interesting.
[00:44:10] Kenshin:
I've bought I've bought one ten years ago.
[00:44:13] McIntosh:
Really? It's been around that long, and I've only seen one? Sometimes I'm such a boomer. Okay. I'm in my lane. That's that's that's my story. I'm in my lane. Okay. So we do have a question for everyone. This week, we would love to have you boost in and let us know what your favorite lightning use case is. I want to hear, and I want to hear here's something else I wanna hear. I would love to hear that some of you are looking to if you have a small business, be able to take sats for that for your product or your service. Okay?
So either one, would love to hear from you. Alright. Alright, Kenshin. We come to the sad part of the show. I'm gonna have to put up the puppy dog. Yep. I hate doing that.
[00:45:13] Kenshin:
I see.
[00:45:16] McIntosh:
The black lab with the sad eyes is coming out, guys. We didn't get any boost this week. I I don't know. I don't I we don't it's funny. We were talking before the show. Neither one well, I'm not a marketer. I'm not gonna make claims on Kenshin. I I don't know. I don't know how all this stuff works. I just put the stuff out there. We are a value for value podcast, and we do depend upon people like you to support the show because we're not I'm not gonna go out and get a ledger contract to pay me to show their crap because it's crap. Okay? Sorry.
If I ever do pick up anyone, it would be very specific, and it would be something that I could come to you and say without hesitation, you could use this product service device. And it's never gonna be a problem, and that just so limits what you can choose from, frankly. I want like, look, guys, I talk about SeedSigner all the time. If SeedSigner came to me, the guy's name behind the project is also SeedSigner, and said, hey, Macintosh. Appreciate what you're saying about us. We really wanna start paying you. I would look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, I'm sorry. I can't do that. Because then if there's ever a problem, I'm gonna be compelled to not talk about it or to make it sound better than it actually is. And I am not gonna do that because I do consider myself a journalist. Maybe I shouldn't, but I do.
And I'm going to bring you the news, and I'm gonna bring you our thoughts every week. And we're gonna do that unimpeded. So we did have some streaming. We do appreciate that. 500 sets. And and we do appreciate that. But, respectfully, I would just kinda throw this out there and say, we do depend on you guys. So I don't know. I would love to see our happy butterfly dog next week. I made the dog. Right? I think there's butterflies. Flowers, butterflies. I don't I don't know. Anyways, I don't like the black lab. Labs are cute, but alright. Moving on to the news and notes. I probably trampled that more than I should have. There was two things I thought this week that were very important. Why don't you go ahead and actually talk about the first one?
[00:47:42] Kenshin:
Yeah. So first news, Tether, the company that's behind the USDT, now they're based in El Salvador, actually. Right. And they came out and they announced that they were working on integrating USDT with lightning. So they will be able to transact much faster through the Lightning Network, but still be based on the Bitcoin, their one network.
[00:48:09] McIntosh:
So I wanna talk about this for just a minute. A lot of people are, you know, they're in a twist about this. What that this means is that you can basically use a dollar token on lightning. You can send USD dollars back and forth instead of Satoshis, or you can do both. I actually think this is a big deal, and it's not my place to stick my nose into people who want to use dollars instead of Bitcoin. I don't understand everyone's situation, and I'm not gonna play God. Somebody in Peru, for example, that I was just talking about, maybe they feel like right now, they either can't handle the volatility of Bitcoin at all or the majority of their whatever their net wealth or whatever that they have, they need to keep in US dollars, which is more stable than their local currency.
Okay? Yes. It's devaluing. We all know that. We all talk about it. But compared to their local trash, not well, I'm now I'm talking about Peru and then call them their currency trash. Maybe I shouldn't do that. But compared to their local currency, it it is much more stable. If they they can go do that on Tron or on some other platform. I think it's primarily Tron these days. Or now they can do it on Bitcoin. Okay? I'm not gonna tell them that they shouldn't be doing that. That is they're sovereign individuals. They should be able to make that choice.
Is it something that I'm going to use? Probably not ever, frankly. But there's the case. Now there's another argument about how this is funding treasury buys of the US government. I'm not gonna get into that. This would happen one way or the other. So Lightning Labs or whoever it is that's behind this along with the with the it's it's not Tether is not the name of the company, or is it? I guess it is. Tether. Yeah. Along with Tether, that's they're just responding to the market need. So I don't know. Maybe that's simplistic or maybe I'm actually looking at it from a different viewpoint of somebody who may actually have a need for that.
[00:50:40] Kenshin:
And and strikes, Jack Madler that we talked about, he he has implemented Tether in those countries that are not US or not Europe or not UK. All the rest of the countries, they have Bitcoin and Tether for that reason that you mentioned. So they can have access to another currency that is not their local currency Right. In those countries. So that's their strategy and that that was the need and that's exactly what, you know, Jack mentioned.
[00:51:14] McIntosh:
Not to beat this to death, but when Argentina was going through hyperinflation all through the nineties and all through the February, up until now, essentially. This type thing would have been very useful, frankly, for the people in Argentina who were forced to use the peso or were forced to use the black market where the bills where the dollars were marked up. I don't know. Just my thoughts. I'll stop. Coming dangerously close to Ranton. Alright. The second news item, I did wanna mention, it's kind of a big nothing burger as I would I would say, a big nothing.
Trump has ordered the creation of the US sovereign wealth fund as an executive order, and that came out last week. And it basically the price, if anything, went down. So this was signed on Monday, of this week. It's kinda bizarre. It's like we've all been waiting for it and then, whatever. I I don't know. I don't know if it's because it's not clear at this point what the sovereign fund is going to consist of. There's all this stuff going around. It could have ether. It could have have Solana. Yeah. It could have ripple, God forbid. You know? Or and it's going to have Bitcoin, but what percent or whatever?
But just to not harp on this, but it was signed. There is some time before this will take place. I don't think it's gonna happen immediately, but it has been done. So that would actually
[00:52:57] Kenshin:
Sorry. Someone on social media said, oh, it sounds like wealth fund is a synonym to, like, how do we say that? The glip coin fund. Maybe that's
[00:53:10] McIntosh:
that's why. Coin. Thank you. We call it casino coin. All coin. Coin. Yeah. Yeah. No. I doubt that's really gonna be the case. The person heading the committee actually is a very pro Bitcoin person. So I think at least the majority of it will be Bitcoin. And frankly, I just don't care about the rest of it. It's not important because I know that over time, whether it's Ripple, Ethereum, or whatever crap they put in there, that it's going to go away. If it's zero value, they're not gonna keep it, and they're gonna watch Bitcoin grow and grow and grow over the next, well, longer than twenty years, but twenty years is what we're talking about.
So, you know, is it perfect? No. But politics are not perfect. Politics are a are a mess. They always are. Anyways, I just I wanted to mention that because I think it is it's important to at least say it's been done. Software updates, sir. I wanna do the first two because they're my favorite. Can I do that? Can you do the others? Alright. So I mentioned SeedSigner earlier, my wallet signing device, my my key signing device, whatever you wanna call it. They've got a new version. The big thing here was actually they've made it bilingual now, so it's in English and in Spanish. And they've built the framework to continue to add new languages, and apparently, that's fairly easy. So I think you're gonna see kind of an explosion of languages, over the next few months in seed signer that are available if you're not a native English speaker. Okay?
And that sees, and that seed signer version zero dot eight, point five, and that is kind of the big thing about that. The rest of it was bug fixes and whatever. Okay. Not really worth noting. And then Sparrow wallet, which is kind of the other half of my setup, also came out with a new version. I'm not completely sure, to be honest, what this so the version number was two dot one dot one. And I I'll read this. This probably won't make a whole lot of sense. There are bug fixes, but it implements Lark, and there's a link to that. I would assume that's like a software wallet, a software library.
It is. It's a Java library. For USB hardware support, supports the loading of PSBT v two files. I wonder if that's partially signed Bitcoin transactions. I do not know. Multi sig wallet registration save functionality for ledger devices. God, just move off your ledger device, please. Jade plus USB support, restore table sort, and sizing a wallet load and more. I don't if you're running Sparrow, you should probably just update it for the bug fixes. Okay? The rest of this stuff re there's a lot of updates actually for bug fixes and things. I I would do it for that. I don't think most of you are really gonna have any need for these kinda new features.
Alright?
[00:56:44] Kenshin:
Alright. Then we have Zeus, version zero point nine point five. Mhmm. And they implemented an easier way to export the on chain, the Bitcoin on chain seed phrase into a file, I believe, that you can import to other applications like Spartan that you mentioned. So it's much easier than to export that, seed phrase and import it to other words instead of just writing down the the words. Right. They have done other optimizations. They have added the ability to use all the funds, to to open a channel, a lightning channel, and some other smaller stuff.
So that's Zeus. And then we have oh, that's that's exciting for me. DAMOS. DAMOS, they announced the note note deck.
[00:57:40] McIntosh:
Right. Are you familiar with this? I can talk about it if you're not. Yeah. I'm familiar with the tweet deck, and I see it's the same Yeah. Same type of interface. It is an entirely new app from DAMOS. It's not like the Domus client like you normally think of. Okay? Yeah. Yeah. So it's a web based application,
[00:57:59] Kenshin:
which I can then use myself because I didn't have any, Apple devices so far.
[00:58:06] McIntosh:
Oh, actually, we've got by the way. You should know just maybe use this as your daily driver. But, but, yeah, very cool looking, I will say. It's funny because I kinda came across this because somebody on was complaining to the guy who created Domus that Domus was not getting worked on because he's over there working on note deck. I'm like, man, I don't know. Crazy stuff. And then there's there's also the Rust Noster library got updated. So if you build in Noster, this might be something you wanna pay attention to. Version zero dot 30 nine dot zero. So
[00:58:49] Kenshin:
alright.
[00:58:51] McIntosh:
Is there anything else you wanted to talk about before we wrap up? No. Sounds good. Okay. Well, let's wrap this up. I've already talked about the support, guys. I'm not gonna go through all this. Please tell other people about the podcast. We would love to have new listeners, and and you just turning around and and telling someone is probably the best way to make that happen. Oh, great. I just hit Siri on my computer. Yeah. Again, I commercialize the Internet, but never mind. So, yeah, that that would be the best way to to help us out. That's it. We're if you wanna reach us, go to satoshis-plebs.com/episode-196 for this one. And down at the bottom, there's, like, five different ways to reach us. Okay?
I'm on Twitter pretty regularly. We're both on Noster. There's email there. I don't know. There's probably three other ways. So you can you can check that out. And that's it. So thanks for being here. I do hope this has been helpful. I really do. We'd love to hear back from you. Of course, we asked our question earlier. We'd love to hear about that. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. We'll talk to you soon.
[01:00:19] Kenshin:
See you next week.
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is February. This is episode 196 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm Mcintosh.
[00:01:06] Kenshin:
I am Kenshin, and today's episode is lightning at your fingertips.
[00:01:11] McIntosh:
So before we go any further, I do wanna mention, we are at episode 196. Do you know what that means, Kenshin?
[00:01:20] Kenshin:
Four before the 200?
[00:01:22] McIntosh:
You read my mind. That is incredible. We have been working together so long. He now reads my mind. That is amazing. Yes. We are four episodes from February. I don't even I haven't even thought about it, to be honest. But, I guess I'll bring out my little, what is that? Like, a horn sound or whatever? Like, a celebration Right. For 200. It's four more weeks. Four more weeks. So early March, and, and we'll be there. But that's not really what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about Bitcoin. We're here to talk about very important things. So we will start with our price at time of recording. Why don't you grab that real quick?
[00:02:09] Kenshin:
I updated them two hours ago. So then Yeah. It's pretty close.
[00:02:15] McIntosh:
Must be close. Well, let me just go ahead. So as we record, we are at block we're at 97,000 a hundred and 38 for the US dollars.
[00:02:26] Kenshin:
Mhmm. And around 93,500 for the euro.
[00:02:30] McIntosh:
K. We got that at a block height of 882,448 , which, by the way, went to one of my nemesis foundry, but that's a story for another day. We're looking at a difficulty adjustment right now of about 4.53% up, and that's just in a couple of days on February. We are running hot down about nine point six minutes per block on average instead of ten. That's why the difficulty adjustment would be going up. Our previous difficulty adjustment was -2.12%. So we've had more hash rate come online, and it's pushing, you know, the it will push the difficulty up. How is Ocean actually been doing these days? Do you know offhand?
[00:03:16] Kenshin:
I've a few blocks here and there, it's a bit better than a couple of weeks ago.
[00:03:22] McIntosh:
They have oh, well, let's see. Our last one was seventeen hours ago, so less than a day. They were extremely lucky. January was extremely lucky. In fact, I think we ended up at almost 30 blocks Wow. For for Jan. It was crazy. Don't expect that anytime soon again, but,
[00:03:44] Kenshin:
we are all up
[00:03:45] McIntosh:
we showed up in the pie chart there with the other Yeah. Mining system for one second. And our hash rate did go up. It's people I don't understand. So it's actually gone back down. People are crazy. Like, they move their hash rate around. It's not hard. You can move. You can point your miners to different places, especially with ocean. It makes no sense to just be going back and forth. You gotta you gotta hang around, man. I don't know. Anyways, weird. Weird, but not me. That's not me. I've been plugged in the ocean for months now. I've got three miners down right now, by the way, and I I haven't talked about this, but it's it's when we were having our snowpocalypse, right after that, apparently, it was really cold out west, and there was some issues at the data center that my miners are at that those three are anyways. And so they had to move them, and now it's become a big thing. So, yay.
I love it when my hash rate is offline. Said no miner ever.
[00:04:55] Kenshin:
Alright. I was thinking to put one of mine to do this lottery mining.
[00:05:00] McIntosh:
Mhmm. Oh, man. So can I just go ahead and request if you win one? Can can you donate a little bit to the show? Yes. Absolutely. That's gonna be a big fat zap that day. Yeah.
[00:05:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. I was saying.
[00:05:17] McIntosh:
I don't know. I can't I cannot with a clear conscience counsel you to do that. I I I don't think that's a good idea, but it's a lottery, and you may win. And if you do, you would win big. So why don't you explain what you're talking about real quick, though? Yeah. What I'm talking about is that,
[00:05:35] Kenshin:
right now, our miners, yours and mine, we mine in a pool of other miners, so we all try together to find a block or solve the equation of a block and get rewarded. And when we get re if we find that block first, we we get rewarded with 3 point, $1.25 Bitcoin. And that is shared between all of us that are in the pool based on how much hash rate we each give. So it's very, fair in that sense. It's proportional. Right. Mhmm. And, there is a way to mine on your own. So you try on your own to find the block, and if you do, you get the full rewards at 3.125 Bitcoin. So I want to Sounds great. Yeah. But without the chances are Right.
[00:06:27] McIntosh:
Kenshin could mine for the rest of his life with that miner, and most likely, he would never hit a block.
[00:06:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's like one in a million years or something like that.
[00:06:38] McIntosh:
It has happened. It actually has happened a couple of times in the last few weeks. And so now everybody's pumped up and excited about it. But, man Yes. Slowing the look. You've who was it? Who did the Greek was it Aristotle? The tortoise and the hare. Right? The story?
[00:06:55] Kenshin:
You're right.
[00:06:57] McIntosh:
Was it who did those? Man, I'm completely drawing a blank. Anyways, tortoise one. Right? Just saying. Okay. Let's talk about mempool bees real quick. As we are recording, actually, the mempool is almost completely empty. Just a couple minutes ago, when I recorded the stats, we were at one, two, and two sats per vByte, meaning, for low, medium, and high priority, which means that basically for a a normal transaction, it would cost you about no. Not 27. It's less than that. Oh, it's changed. Like, 14¢, okay, to send a transaction, and that transaction could be thousands, millions, literally billions of dollars for 14¢. It's actually stunningly amazing.
And then, the mempool itself only had 4,978 transactions in it that were unprocessed. So the mempool in general has been quite low for the last, I don't know, less than a week, but a decent portion of that, I would say, five, six days. Right? And, I I personally have been taking advantage about that, but, we'll talk about that maybe next. So what have you been up to, Kenshin?
[00:08:20] Kenshin:
Right. A a small, note on the mempool. It came up a few times now, because a lot of people were talking about the mempool. And there is actually no central mempool, of course. There everybody who runs a node has their own mempool. Correct. And we look at the specific one called mempool .space. But Right. Assuming that, since that mempool,
[00:08:48] McIntosh:
it was empty and for a few days, it's safe to assume that all mempools Yeah. The whole network was It's so easy just to say the mempool. Thank you for correcting me. That is actually 100% true. So, yeah, that is something you should keep in mind. There's not a mempool, but there's this one that we kinda refer to that you can go to, mempool.space. I would highly recommend even if you have no interest in mining or anything like that, Go look. Go see what's going on because it is interesting. Anyways, so what has been going on with you, sir?
[00:09:26] Kenshin:
Yeah. And talking about Mempool, I took advantage of that. I did some transactions, move a few UTXOs around. I wanted to empty a ledger wallet that I I had done some experimenting with. So I thought I might as well empty it right now.
[00:09:44] McIntosh:
Right.
[00:09:45] Kenshin:
So I did that and then I then I thought, okay, I might as well open some lightning channels because it's a good opportunity again, to do those transactions. And I did that, mostly for redundancy purposes. Okay. So I had, two channels, so I made a third one now. So that's very cool. Yeah. Then I did so called Zapathon on, Nostr. I don't know if you saw it. I did. Yeah. So I actually made a note. Ladies and gentlemen,
[00:10:21] McIntosh:
he's being humble. This man spent 21,000 sats. Am I correct?
[00:10:27] Kenshin:
No. It was no?
[00:10:29] McIntosh:
That was the first hour. That was the first one?
[00:10:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. That that was the first hour or two. That was my target. But then people kept sending messages. Then I get something right on going. Yeah. So I did a 50, I think. Oh, lord, Kenshin. Really? So it went yeah. It must have been over 30,000
[00:10:51] McIntosh:
zaps then. Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. Sorry. Yeah. A 50 zaps. I thought you meant a 50,000 satoshis. I'm like, wait.
[00:11:02] Kenshin:
Yeah. Okay. No. Well, my note on how that go? Yeah. Good. I mean, my note on author said that I changed my Zaps to 210, sats per Zap. So I said Mhmm. Whoever wants, just leave a comment. And then I got, like, a lot. Now it's over 200 comments including mine. So it was at least a 50 people in there that got 210 sets each.
[00:11:30] McIntosh:
I couldn't convince him to say sponsored by Satoshi's Club podcast. I I I I we should do that next, but, my first one, I wanted to do completely. I was actually gonna talk to you about that. I think maybe we ought to take a little bit out of the, you know, the the wallet, and and let's do that. I'm I'm I'm up for that. But, yes, it will be from and we are gonna say that.
[00:11:59] Kenshin:
And that's called Zap Zapvertising.
[00:12:04] McIntosh:
Yeah. Well, it'll make it'll be worth their while. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Alright. So that was cool. And, yes, I did see that. I did not participate. It was essentially over after, when I saw it. So I did not join in. I did. And anything else?
[00:12:22] Kenshin:
What else? Oh, yes. I did, for the first time, I started the Nostril Relay, my own self hosted relay. I want to see how that works. Now are you doing that, like, on an Umbrel or is that on a VBS or something? Yeah. On a VPS, I Okay. I tried in the past on the start nine, and I couldn't figure out the config. And and on start nine, it's difficult to make it public. Right. So I wanted to test with a public domain Okay. That I own. And so I did it with just a Docker container, on a VPS. So after I figure out some, issues with the docker compose, then it run quite easily. It's very simple to to get it started, actually.
[00:13:09] McIntosh:
Alright. So very cool. Did you run into any real roadblocks with that, or is is that no. It's a some,
[00:13:18] Kenshin:
no. The only thing I actually learned that I didn't realize was that, when I published my first notes Mhmm. To to my relay, I could not see it on Amethyst, for example, which is expected, and I was very happy about that. When I added my relay on Amethyst, it showed up, and I was very happy again. And then I realized that everybody could see it. So then I realized, okay. So the relays are talking together
[00:13:47] McIntosh:
Yes. When they're on the same app. So that's what I learned, which was quite useful in that sense. Yeah. They get chatty. They talk back and forth. It's like it's kinda like a Bitcoin node. Right? You put it up there, and once it finds some nodes, it it's off and running. Very cool. So I did a number of things this week as well, maybe considering my workload probably, frankly, more than I should have. But I have been taking so because of the fees actually, Ken should I'm not trying to top you, but I can. Sorry. I had three ledger wallets.
So I'm uncle Jim to a couple of people in my family. And a number of years ago, we bought Ledger wallets for this kind of thing, and I took this opportunity to move to a seed signer setup. So we've talked about seed signer a number of times. It's the hardware signing device that I use, and it works really well. Plus, it lets you keep segregated accounts. So I use the combination of seed signer and Sparrow to manage my Bitcoin, and I moved from the ledger to SeedSigner. And, oh, gosh. Hey. Really important warning, ladies and gentlemen. Listen up. When I was messing with seatsider no. I not seatsider.
Ledger. I have not messed with Ledger in multiple years. Okay? And I went and booted it, and it said pin. And I just put in what kind of my normal pin. I mean, everybody has them. Right? So I put in my normal pin. Didn't work. And it says you have two tries left.
[00:15:34] Kenshin:
I saw this. I had the same
[00:15:36] McIntosh:
receipt. Screwed up. Listen. If I would have messed this up, that I it's from from what I understand, that would have been locked up. K. And I'm not sure I could have recovered it. I'm not sure. So I had the seed word, so I'm not sure if I could have reconstituted it maybe on a different ledger, but it would have been a huge hassle. Okay? Now I did have the pins because Macintosh is actually reasonably smart, And I had them written down with the seed phrases. I just didn't think about it. But one unit, I actually did it twice. And if I would have done it the third time, I would have been locked out.
So it got really scary right there, okay, for me personally. Because I'm like, I didn't know what was gonna happen, but I got through it all.
[00:16:31] Kenshin:
I got exactly the identical situation. Exact whatever everything you said exactly the same up to the pin on the seed phrase.
[00:16:39] McIntosh:
Mhmm. And then I got It's such a stupid design. Yeah. I would never recommend a ledger for anyone. Do not do it. For multiple reasons, that's just one of them. But I was able to successfully move the Bitcoin off the wallet into a seed signer setup. It's all verified. I can see it all in Sparrow. Hoorah. Okay. That's done. So that was one thing I did. That was last weekend. I did take a okay. Let me talk about this, and then I'll talk about that other. Sorry. Went back to my Bitcoin, not my Bitcoin, my VPS setup. I've been wanting to set up core Bitcoin Core node and lightning, again.
And in my day job, just a little tidbit, I use Ubuntu, which is a Linux distro. And I've used Ubuntu for years, up to and including twenty four zero four, which is kind of the latest stable release. So normally, when I spin up a server, I spin up a bunch and and move on with my life. I tried that with this. And the issue is with Bitcoin Core, they only release what's called a snap package for it, and I hate snap. It's it's so stupid. It's such a stupid package management system. And so I actually tried and failed to set up a Bitcoin core that I could use. So, the Bitcoin core node. And so I'm like, okay. Now what? So I'm gonna stay with Linux, of course, and I have fiddled off and on with NextOS, which is a different Linux distribution. It's actually not to get way down in the weeds. I'm not going to. It's a different Linux distribution.
I tried it again. I now have a Nix, desktop not desktop, server set up. I am setting up this Bitcoin collection called Fort Nix, and that's not actually what they call it, but that's the name on the repo, and it sticks with me. I don't know why. Hold on. It's nix dash bitcoin is the name of the collection. Okay? But it's it's literally Fort dash nix is the repo. It just they should've just called it that. I don't know why. But regardless, I'm in the process of setting that up. Now that is a little tricky, but I think I can pull it off, and it will give me a very solid reproducible setup. So I'm gonna set up Bitcoin Core is my goal, and then also set up once I get that done and syncing and everything, c lightning, which is blocks Blockstream.
It's there. Alright. It's also called Corelightning, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So their lightning setup I like the way they have plug ins. They tend to do things pretty early, which I think for lightning is very important. Like, they were one of the first to implement bolt 12, for example, this kind of thing. So I'm not done with that, but I'm hopefully at least halfway there. How about that? And I keep having to stop because it just gets too late, and I still have a job and, you know, things to do. So that's where I'm at. And then also the last thing I wanted to mention, you talked last week, I think, or maybe the week before about Plebeian market. Right? Right. Last week. Yeah.
I took a look at it, and I am super impressed. I am. So if you use something like Etsy, if you use something like even eBay, any of those kind of things where the end user is selling the product to someone else, you need to check this out. Okay? I know I have one listener who's a friend of mine who, needs to listen up. They sell honey, the honey that I get sometimes for my tea. Right? That's they have honeybees. They do a whole little thing. This would be a great place, for example, for them to sell their honey and earn Bitcoin at the same time for it completely anonymously if you wanna do it that way.
Okay? It is an incredible setup and it is so early. It's so early. Like, there's like and don't let that throw you off. You'll go look at it. There's like, I don't know, probably less than a hundred things listed on there. Do not sleep on this. If you do anything creative, if you're a photographer, a painter, if you sell product, like, even like dried foods or honey or something like that. I don't know. There's a billion different things. Anything Bitcoin based, you can sell it on there for Satoshis, and the prices are really not really good. Like, they how can I put this? In my opinion, they're tilted towards the seller. Does that make sense? Yeah. It's a free market, so there's no competition. Yeah. Well, we'll see how that all shakes out. But right now, you will get a premium. That's what it means. Okay?
Do not sleep on this. I'm actually thinking about posting some pictures like like I use I have for years taken different pictures. I I would in an alternate timeline, I would be like a photographer. I'm thinking about posting some of my better stuff up there as prints and seeing how it does, like a like a photographic print.
[00:22:38] Kenshin:
Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:22:39] McIntosh:
We'll see. I would love to have some business like that. Alright. That is enough. Sorry. I didn't well, no. I did wanna say all that, so I'm not gonna apologize. I think that's important. We need to help build these economies, and that is a great way for I know for some of our listeners to do that. And little green bee, I'm looking right at you. So I know when you hear this, you need to go look that up, and you can call me and we'll talk about it and whatever. We'll get you there. Okay? Because you're my friend. Alright. Let's move on to the topic.
Alright.
[00:23:20] Kenshin:
So the topic of today is about lightning. We thought that since we talked last week about creating a lightning wallet, the easiest way possible and getting an Oster and all these things, then we thought maybe it's interesting to talk a bit more about how to more ways to use Lightning
[00:23:39] McIntosh:
and what are cool ways out there. And there are a lot, and we're gonna talk about some of them. Before we jump into that, I wanna give a two minute overview of Lightning just so that we're all on the same page. Lightning is what they call a layer two on top of the Bitcoin main chain. It is a way for you to move micro amounts of Bitcoin, so a few Satoshis, for very, very little fees. Sometimes none at all. It is a way for you to carry around a wallet that you can do make very small purchases with very cheaply. It is extremely fast. It is nothing like the main chain where it takes ten minutes for a block.
It is extremely useful, and I believe it will be part of the long term future of Bitcoin. We will see it. There's things about it that I'm not necessarily it's kinda like mining. I mentioned that, mining pool earlier. That's a very large centralized mining pool. There's a lot of centralization going on in Bitcoin and in my opinion, not enough pleb usage. People running their own loads like what Kenshin does, but that's just that's part of it. It's something we can push back against. That's why I'm setting up a lightning node, one of the reasons. Okay?
But, it will become part of this Bitcoin infrastructure that's being built. It will be used to connect all kinds of things and not just lightning to lightning. It will be used for ARC. It will be used for, there's one that I'm always forgetting. It it'll have interoperability. I think it already does. I hope I'm not saying something incorrect. With Cashew, for example, with eCash, okay, that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. It's going to be part of this ecosystem, and I think it's going to be a very important part. And one last thing, I promise, it also brings a level of privacy that the Bitcoin main chain does not have.
Okay? Sorry. I wanted to get that out there.
[00:25:49] Kenshin:
No. That's very important. The introduction to lightning. And, there is so many resources, but I think we can talk about our favorites in some way that we have used before. Or even as an introduction, I can also mention El Salvador because El Salvador, they accept, Bitcoin as or they use accept it as legal tender. But Mhmm. Now that went away, but they still accept it, of course. So they're free to use any currency they want. And, there they have is it called a Bitcoin Beach or how is it called? Yes. Bitcoin Beach.
[00:26:32] McIntosh:
In El Salvador?
[00:26:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yes. So they have a lot of, small producers, let's say vegetables and other things like that. And people who couldn't accept, money before, they couldn't afford the bank account or these, credit card machines. Right. So it was really good for them. They could install a Bitcoin app, wallet. And especially now with Lightning, it's even easier to just accept an instant transaction. So I I we have a lot of examples from El Salvador. It's a very nice, place right now for for Bitcoin and Lightning.
[00:27:14] McIntosh:
So it also benefits the this small business market, I think, will be huge for Lightning. It benefits them because of ease of use, because of instant settlement effectively, and because they don't have to pay the transaction fees that they do on credit cards. The average fees are like two to 4% on a credit card. On Bitcoin, you can send a thousand Satoshis for just a couple of Satoshis. Okay? So it's it's and a thousand Satoshis right now is roughly a dollar and two Satoshis are I it's I don't even know. I can't how do you calculate that? It's far less than 1¢.
Yeah. Okay? It's a really good thing for these small vendors, for these small businesses in general.
[00:28:07] Kenshin:
Sorry. Mhmm. Thank you. No problem. And, actually, I found a website. It's called the good beans Com. It's about buying coffee beans from El Salvador, and they have international shipping. Yeah. And they yeah. I mean, there must be a lot like that. So they start to expand globally and accept Bitcoin and lightning transactions, and they ship globally products from El Salvador. So it's quite cool, actually. I don't know if we could have done that earlier without Bitcoin. I'm not sure.
[00:28:45] McIntosh:
What yeah. Who knows? It certainly makes it easier. Very cool.
[00:28:52] Kenshin:
They also had examples in El Salvador of the Bitcoin ATMs that they support lightning. So you can go very easily and deposit or withdraw money by just, scanning the QR code doing a lightning transaction.
[00:29:07] McIntosh:
I don't really have experience with Bitcoin ATMs. To be honest, I've never bought from one, but I have looked at them a few times. The ones that I've seen have had outrageously high fees. I wonder if it's the same with these. In theory, because they're operating over the Lightning Network, they really shouldn't need that. They can put whatever fees they want. I mean, that just may be, but at least in terms of a technical, like, you're not doing a main chain transaction, so you don't have to worry about, you know, when fees are super high or whatever.
[00:29:43] Kenshin:
Right. Mhmm. Yeah. I haven't tried them either. I I'm very curious, and I would like to try them next time I am in Greece. And I know they have there a few. But I don't I'm I'm a bit afraid of the KYC. I think they have camera, and right now they're obliged to KYC. You. So if that's the case, I will not try it actually.
[00:30:08] McIntosh:
No. You you're going to you should assume when you're using an ATM like that, it's going to have a camera. They may ask you for information upfront. I don't know. It may be a phone number. It may be I don't know. But you could assume that that's a surveilled situation, essentially. So another reason not to kinda use them. Right. But they are there.
[00:30:41] Kenshin:
Mhmm. What else? Well, some of my favorite use cases is right now, I'm paying AI chatbots with lightning. So I send a thousand sets, and I get some credits, and I can use. And those interface, one of them is Frankie GPT. It interfaces with, OpenAI's, Charge GPT, the four o. So it's same level of quality answers. And it's very easy to load with lightning, and I don't need to go to OpenAI's website and register an account, with an email and pay them $20 a month. So I find that very, very good use case, and it's very fast to do. And now I discover this unleashed, dot chat.
And it's very, very similar. You do exactly the same, but it also integrates more with Nostr. So I can actually ask the chat, who of my followers was the most popular in the last twenty four hours. And it knows my followers because I sign in essentially with my,
[00:31:56] McIntosh:
private followers on Noister? Noister. Yeah. Yeah. Run this by me again.
[00:32:03] Kenshin:
Sorry. You log in on this unleashed.chat. You can log in with your private key. Your Gnostr private key. Okay. So the chat just helps pulling stats out of the
[00:32:15] McIntosh:
Gnostr ecosystem. Okay. I got it. I've just never heard of that. That's interesting. That's an interesting use case.
[00:32:22] Kenshin:
Yeah. Exactly. Mhmm. So I like those. I, of course, we always talk about podcasting, two point o, value for value, fountain. You can earn such by listening, and you can boost us and other, creators. Mhmm. So that's also very, you know, good way of using Lightning. Slacker News is like Reddit, and we talked about that in the past. But if you have you can start a, what what is it called? A news item or a discussion, and they can boost you if they like the answers. And you can earn some slots there, and you can give back to creators that you like Mhmm. In a written form.
Yeah. And a big up for me now is Strike. Okay. I really like Strike, and it integrates Lightning very seamlessly.
[00:33:23] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:33:24] Kenshin:
So I DCA small amount every day, very easily, and sometimes I use it's a hot wallet, essentially. Mhmm. So until I move until a month has passed, let's say, and I move things to a cold storage, I can use it as a lightning wallet for small payments if I need to or to send, such to my other lightning wallets to use with Fountain or Nostr or whatever. So, I think Striker, they're doing incredible job, and they were one of the first ones, I think, to integrate. They were. Lightning. Yeah. I agree completely.
[00:34:03] McIntosh:
Jack Mahler's if you ever get the chance to listen to him, he's the CEO of Strike. He started that place out of his bedroom, when he was he was a kid. He he says he was a kid. I mean, he he's like I don't know what he is now, but he he's still very young. But that business that he has built on a Bitcoin foundation, maybe I don't agree with everything that they do, but, man, they have executed. And if it has a place for you, if you are okay with DCA ing with the KYC app, for example, there's no easier way of doing it. I mean, I do the same thing. I actually do it on a weekly basis because my wife gets mad because of all the pulling from the bank. You know? It's not the amount. It's the daily it shows up, and it it's just confusing.
It Uh-huh. Makes your transaction thing bigger, of course. But yeah. Anyways, really cool stuff with Strike. Sorry. Yeah. And Jack, by the way, does his own podcast. He curses a lot, but, man, he's a he's something he's he is not slowing down anytime soon as far as I can tell. So No.
[00:35:24] Kenshin:
No. And he's gonna implement,
[00:35:27] McIntosh:
Bitcoin backed loans, I think, soon. So it's some exciting stuff. Yeah. Mhmm. He mentioned that on his last podcast, actually, that I'm just now listening to. Yeah.
[00:35:38] Kenshin:
What else is interesting? There, the Zapstore we talked about, but that's Android based. If you want to install apps, you can use the Zapstore and it's apps signed by the, developers and you can zap them directly. So that's mostly to give give back to the developers. So I I find it quite quite a good app. Yeah. Pay for VPN. There are a few apps. Ln VPN is really easy. Very good interface to to zap some sats and and use the VPN settings from there. Completely anonymous. No registration or anything needed. And then Mullvad VPN that a lot of people like. They can also accept lightning, to top up the the Mullvad accounts.
And there are a lot more. I found a really nice list on Albiz, Get Alby website. It's on, getalbi.com/discover. Okay.
[00:36:47] McIntosh:
And We'll include that in the show notes for sure. I I'm thinking about actually just kinda copy pasting this whole. There's a lot of links in here. You've done a great job with this, and, I wanna make sure that people can get to these.
[00:37:01] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's an yeah. And there are some really cool apps. And even in that list on GetAlpi that I've never seen, and they have split them up by categories like AI, chats, entertainment, gaming, Nostra, of course, and a lot of other things. I mean, there is even casino type of games, card games that you pay in earning sets. Oh, and something I I never knew and I saw it actually today was that you you can buy can do trading, buy futures and stuff like that with lightning. So there are a few websites and online. Financial advice. Oh, no. Just kidding.
But Just kidding.
[00:37:46] McIntosh:
What was it? Okay. And you had one last one on here.
[00:37:51] Kenshin:
Yeah. Which one? The eSIM. Oh, the eSIM. Yeah. There is a silent dot link. It's about, buying eSIMs without any registration. No email required. So you you can actually buy any SIM and load it up with the essentially have an anonymous phone.
[00:38:09] McIntosh:
Yeah. It's not tied back to your name. I had a couple of things I wanted to add or expand on, at least, on this list, three different things. You already talked about podcasting two point o and Nostr. I did actually wanna mention this. After last week's thing, I have the Get Albi wallet hooked up to my Nostr setup. And I just randomly answered a question by somebody in the community called Gigi, who's actually fairly well known. He was asking about podcasting, and I'm like, oh, hey. We use, you know, PodHome, and I've had these experiences and whatever. Just kinda trying to help him out. Dude boosted me or zapped me. I'm sorry. I I mix up the terminology. On Nostra, it zaps kids.
He zapped me 2,100 sats, and I was like, wow. And I was not that's not why I did it. I wasn't expecting it, but that was really cool. As a way to show your support for other people in the community, like what Kenshin did earlier with the Zapathon, things like that. It's a it it helps build community, frankly. And podcasting two point o, even though we don't talk about it a whole lot on here other than to say, of course, we're a podcasting two point o podcast and so on, and you can boost and support us, and that's what keeps us going. You know, it's the exact same thing. We have built Bitcoin Lightning into that, and it's a very usable system.
Okay? The second thing I would wanna mention, circular economies. Now you mentioned, I think, Bitcoin Beach. There's some very famous ones, Bitcoin Jungle, Bitcoin Beach. There's a place in Africa. These are I hate to say it. I don't wanna denigrate them, but they're tourist destinations. Okay? Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador is on the coast. It's a beautiful place. It's great for surfing. And and these are places that we can start the Bitcoin economy. Yes. I would also mention there are other places. For example, I just saw yesterday some film, some video of a place in, like, the back corner of Peru, okay, up in the mountains, frankly, a dusty, dirty little village, and these people are using Bitcoin.
And they're using Bitcoin because it's better than their local currency. They don't have to worry about it devaluing. They can save it easily with the phones that they've already got. And it is empowering and building a better economy for them. You guys, I come on here, and I know I sound like a crazy lunatic sometimes, but these are the things that will help free the world. Bitcoin Beach, I'm glad that they're doing what they're doing. I would love to go see them, but these other things, frankly, are closer to my heart, if that makes sense. Okay? It's where it's getting used off in the bush of Africa rather than right on the coast in the what I think they have a Bitcoin beach there. I can't remember. It's Bitcoin something.
Okay? Those are the things that excite me because those are the things that truly set people free who who have no other opportunity. Anyways, I wanted to emphasize that. And then the final thing, somewhat along the same line, local businesses, and that can be businesses in your area. Okay. We can set up BTCPay, which is a, Java based application that that any small business owner can run. Okay. And it has lightning integration and they can start taking lightning. It handles invoices. It does the things that small business people need, and it opens up a new income stream for them. It reduces their reliance on credit cards, again, credit card fees, and so on and so forth.
Those are things that I find exciting as well, and we are seeing that input. This is frankly something I wished I was able to, to do in my local area. It's making an excuse, but I just don't have the time. I don't. But these things will happen as Bitcoin adoption grows. And it's exciting because local businesses, these small businesses, it's hard. I've been there and I've done that. It is it's hard stuff.
[00:42:58] Kenshin:
And to find local businesses, there is a really nice website called btcmap.org.
[00:43:05] McIntosh:
Okay. Do we have that on here? I don't I didn't see that. No. I can't. That for sure.
[00:43:10] Kenshin:
But it's a open source map. It use OpenStreetMap as a back end. And, yeah, it's in some countries, it's full of points about local producer selling whatever, as you said, honey, meats, or other produce. So btcmap.org,0rg.
[00:43:35] McIntosh:
Alright. Let's, we got a couple more things here to wrap this up, and let's let's get going. So well, we already talked okay. Actually, that does kinda we have some links for you. We already talked about the get albie, and then there's a technology type if you're interested in that. That would have more of the details behind running a lightning node, that kind of thing, that we'll include as well. It's actually that's a cool website name. Lightning-network.tech. I don't think I've ever seen a tech domain. Interesting.
[00:44:10] Kenshin:
I've bought I've bought one ten years ago.
[00:44:13] McIntosh:
Really? It's been around that long, and I've only seen one? Sometimes I'm such a boomer. Okay. I'm in my lane. That's that's that's my story. I'm in my lane. Okay. So we do have a question for everyone. This week, we would love to have you boost in and let us know what your favorite lightning use case is. I want to hear, and I want to hear here's something else I wanna hear. I would love to hear that some of you are looking to if you have a small business, be able to take sats for that for your product or your service. Okay?
So either one, would love to hear from you. Alright. Alright, Kenshin. We come to the sad part of the show. I'm gonna have to put up the puppy dog. Yep. I hate doing that.
[00:45:13] Kenshin:
I see.
[00:45:16] McIntosh:
The black lab with the sad eyes is coming out, guys. We didn't get any boost this week. I I don't know. I don't I we don't it's funny. We were talking before the show. Neither one well, I'm not a marketer. I'm not gonna make claims on Kenshin. I I don't know. I don't know how all this stuff works. I just put the stuff out there. We are a value for value podcast, and we do depend upon people like you to support the show because we're not I'm not gonna go out and get a ledger contract to pay me to show their crap because it's crap. Okay? Sorry.
If I ever do pick up anyone, it would be very specific, and it would be something that I could come to you and say without hesitation, you could use this product service device. And it's never gonna be a problem, and that just so limits what you can choose from, frankly. I want like, look, guys, I talk about SeedSigner all the time. If SeedSigner came to me, the guy's name behind the project is also SeedSigner, and said, hey, Macintosh. Appreciate what you're saying about us. We really wanna start paying you. I would look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, I'm sorry. I can't do that. Because then if there's ever a problem, I'm gonna be compelled to not talk about it or to make it sound better than it actually is. And I am not gonna do that because I do consider myself a journalist. Maybe I shouldn't, but I do.
And I'm going to bring you the news, and I'm gonna bring you our thoughts every week. And we're gonna do that unimpeded. So we did have some streaming. We do appreciate that. 500 sets. And and we do appreciate that. But, respectfully, I would just kinda throw this out there and say, we do depend on you guys. So I don't know. I would love to see our happy butterfly dog next week. I made the dog. Right? I think there's butterflies. Flowers, butterflies. I don't I don't know. Anyways, I don't like the black lab. Labs are cute, but alright. Moving on to the news and notes. I probably trampled that more than I should have. There was two things I thought this week that were very important. Why don't you go ahead and actually talk about the first one?
[00:47:42] Kenshin:
Yeah. So first news, Tether, the company that's behind the USDT, now they're based in El Salvador, actually. Right. And they came out and they announced that they were working on integrating USDT with lightning. So they will be able to transact much faster through the Lightning Network, but still be based on the Bitcoin, their one network.
[00:48:09] McIntosh:
So I wanna talk about this for just a minute. A lot of people are, you know, they're in a twist about this. What that this means is that you can basically use a dollar token on lightning. You can send USD dollars back and forth instead of Satoshis, or you can do both. I actually think this is a big deal, and it's not my place to stick my nose into people who want to use dollars instead of Bitcoin. I don't understand everyone's situation, and I'm not gonna play God. Somebody in Peru, for example, that I was just talking about, maybe they feel like right now, they either can't handle the volatility of Bitcoin at all or the majority of their whatever their net wealth or whatever that they have, they need to keep in US dollars, which is more stable than their local currency.
Okay? Yes. It's devaluing. We all know that. We all talk about it. But compared to their local trash, not well, I'm now I'm talking about Peru and then call them their currency trash. Maybe I shouldn't do that. But compared to their local currency, it it is much more stable. If they they can go do that on Tron or on some other platform. I think it's primarily Tron these days. Or now they can do it on Bitcoin. Okay? I'm not gonna tell them that they shouldn't be doing that. That is they're sovereign individuals. They should be able to make that choice.
Is it something that I'm going to use? Probably not ever, frankly. But there's the case. Now there's another argument about how this is funding treasury buys of the US government. I'm not gonna get into that. This would happen one way or the other. So Lightning Labs or whoever it is that's behind this along with the with the it's it's not Tether is not the name of the company, or is it? I guess it is. Tether. Yeah. Along with Tether, that's they're just responding to the market need. So I don't know. Maybe that's simplistic or maybe I'm actually looking at it from a different viewpoint of somebody who may actually have a need for that.
[00:50:40] Kenshin:
And and strikes, Jack Madler that we talked about, he he has implemented Tether in those countries that are not US or not Europe or not UK. All the rest of the countries, they have Bitcoin and Tether for that reason that you mentioned. So they can have access to another currency that is not their local currency Right. In those countries. So that's their strategy and that that was the need and that's exactly what, you know, Jack mentioned.
[00:51:14] McIntosh:
Not to beat this to death, but when Argentina was going through hyperinflation all through the nineties and all through the February, up until now, essentially. This type thing would have been very useful, frankly, for the people in Argentina who were forced to use the peso or were forced to use the black market where the bills where the dollars were marked up. I don't know. Just my thoughts. I'll stop. Coming dangerously close to Ranton. Alright. The second news item, I did wanna mention, it's kind of a big nothing burger as I would I would say, a big nothing.
Trump has ordered the creation of the US sovereign wealth fund as an executive order, and that came out last week. And it basically the price, if anything, went down. So this was signed on Monday, of this week. It's kinda bizarre. It's like we've all been waiting for it and then, whatever. I I don't know. I don't know if it's because it's not clear at this point what the sovereign fund is going to consist of. There's all this stuff going around. It could have ether. It could have have Solana. Yeah. It could have ripple, God forbid. You know? Or and it's going to have Bitcoin, but what percent or whatever?
But just to not harp on this, but it was signed. There is some time before this will take place. I don't think it's gonna happen immediately, but it has been done. So that would actually
[00:52:57] Kenshin:
Sorry. Someone on social media said, oh, it sounds like wealth fund is a synonym to, like, how do we say that? The glip coin fund. Maybe that's
[00:53:10] McIntosh:
that's why. Coin. Thank you. We call it casino coin. All coin. Coin. Yeah. Yeah. No. I doubt that's really gonna be the case. The person heading the committee actually is a very pro Bitcoin person. So I think at least the majority of it will be Bitcoin. And frankly, I just don't care about the rest of it. It's not important because I know that over time, whether it's Ripple, Ethereum, or whatever crap they put in there, that it's going to go away. If it's zero value, they're not gonna keep it, and they're gonna watch Bitcoin grow and grow and grow over the next, well, longer than twenty years, but twenty years is what we're talking about.
So, you know, is it perfect? No. But politics are not perfect. Politics are a are a mess. They always are. Anyways, I just I wanted to mention that because I think it is it's important to at least say it's been done. Software updates, sir. I wanna do the first two because they're my favorite. Can I do that? Can you do the others? Alright. So I mentioned SeedSigner earlier, my wallet signing device, my my key signing device, whatever you wanna call it. They've got a new version. The big thing here was actually they've made it bilingual now, so it's in English and in Spanish. And they've built the framework to continue to add new languages, and apparently, that's fairly easy. So I think you're gonna see kind of an explosion of languages, over the next few months in seed signer that are available if you're not a native English speaker. Okay?
And that sees, and that seed signer version zero dot eight, point five, and that is kind of the big thing about that. The rest of it was bug fixes and whatever. Okay. Not really worth noting. And then Sparrow wallet, which is kind of the other half of my setup, also came out with a new version. I'm not completely sure, to be honest, what this so the version number was two dot one dot one. And I I'll read this. This probably won't make a whole lot of sense. There are bug fixes, but it implements Lark, and there's a link to that. I would assume that's like a software wallet, a software library.
It is. It's a Java library. For USB hardware support, supports the loading of PSBT v two files. I wonder if that's partially signed Bitcoin transactions. I do not know. Multi sig wallet registration save functionality for ledger devices. God, just move off your ledger device, please. Jade plus USB support, restore table sort, and sizing a wallet load and more. I don't if you're running Sparrow, you should probably just update it for the bug fixes. Okay? The rest of this stuff re there's a lot of updates actually for bug fixes and things. I I would do it for that. I don't think most of you are really gonna have any need for these kinda new features.
Alright?
[00:56:44] Kenshin:
Alright. Then we have Zeus, version zero point nine point five. Mhmm. And they implemented an easier way to export the on chain, the Bitcoin on chain seed phrase into a file, I believe, that you can import to other applications like Spartan that you mentioned. So it's much easier than to export that, seed phrase and import it to other words instead of just writing down the the words. Right. They have done other optimizations. They have added the ability to use all the funds, to to open a channel, a lightning channel, and some other smaller stuff.
So that's Zeus. And then we have oh, that's that's exciting for me. DAMOS. DAMOS, they announced the note note deck.
[00:57:40] McIntosh:
Right. Are you familiar with this? I can talk about it if you're not. Yeah. I'm familiar with the tweet deck, and I see it's the same Yeah. Same type of interface. It is an entirely new app from DAMOS. It's not like the Domus client like you normally think of. Okay? Yeah. Yeah. So it's a web based application,
[00:57:59] Kenshin:
which I can then use myself because I didn't have any, Apple devices so far.
[00:58:06] McIntosh:
Oh, actually, we've got by the way. You should know just maybe use this as your daily driver. But, but, yeah, very cool looking, I will say. It's funny because I kinda came across this because somebody on was complaining to the guy who created Domus that Domus was not getting worked on because he's over there working on note deck. I'm like, man, I don't know. Crazy stuff. And then there's there's also the Rust Noster library got updated. So if you build in Noster, this might be something you wanna pay attention to. Version zero dot 30 nine dot zero. So
[00:58:49] Kenshin:
alright.
[00:58:51] McIntosh:
Is there anything else you wanted to talk about before we wrap up? No. Sounds good. Okay. Well, let's wrap this up. I've already talked about the support, guys. I'm not gonna go through all this. Please tell other people about the podcast. We would love to have new listeners, and and you just turning around and and telling someone is probably the best way to make that happen. Oh, great. I just hit Siri on my computer. Yeah. Again, I commercialize the Internet, but never mind. So, yeah, that that would be the best way to to help us out. That's it. We're if you wanna reach us, go to satoshis-plebs.com/episode-196 for this one. And down at the bottom, there's, like, five different ways to reach us. Okay?
I'm on Twitter pretty regularly. We're both on Noster. There's email there. I don't know. There's probably three other ways. So you can you can check that out. And that's it. So thanks for being here. I do hope this has been helpful. I really do. We'd love to hear back from you. Of course, we asked our question earlier. We'd love to hear about that. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. We'll talk to you soon.
[01:00:19] Kenshin:
See you next week.
