TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #320: Pushing the design limits of bitcoin with Super Testnet

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Super Testnet. Find everything Super creates on his Github Follow Super on Twitter Find out more about Lightning Escrow Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Bitcoin 2022 - use the code TFTC for 10% off Download Fountain Podcasts

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They're building an incredible product at HodlHodl. Shout out to his team there. Last but not least, this rip was brought to you by our good friends at the Bitcoin 2022 conference. It's a week away, literally one week away from today

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If you're in the industry and you want to elbow up with big hitters in the space, days two and three, seventh and the eighth, general conference days. Going to be a lot of talks. So for 400 speakers, many CEOs

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music fest comedy fest a lot of big acts trying to get cake thrown on you you like cake Steve Aoki's gonna be there gonna be throwing fucking cake on you guys i don't know why anybody would subject themselves to that's very degrading

but if you like that sort of stuff it's going to be available to you day four at the bitcoin conference use the code tftc if you haven't bought a ticket yet you're going to get 10 off go to b.tc slash conference and enjoy this rip you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. probably should be yeah i was saying car has been explaining the fact that you're just like this crazy builder you build a bunch of shit well i do try my best yeah what what made you start building like why is your name super test net let's start with that uh my name is super test net because i try to use different um different usernames on various social media platforms and when i was signing up for telegram i was trying to come up with what my name would be for that one and i went through a couple of ideas and one of them came to mind i didn't put

much thought into it i was thinking for like two minutes super testnet came to mind i was like oh that sounds kind of cool i use that that's that's where i got the name super testnet from telegram username it is kind of cool as is your shirt thank you for super is uh and then and then the short is because super people just call you super yeah yeah it's a cool first name people should use it more you're walking around awesomely hey what's up super we've run into each other like on the quarter here like at least three or four times we go to the same place for coffee or i get chocolate milk there but yeah chocolate milk yeah i don't i don't like coffee but i like chocolate milk i it's been a while since i've had chocolate milk but it is actually we just gave my son his first

glass of chocolate milk last week and he thoroughly enjoyed it there you go it's breakfast of champions it really is high protein i used to have milk chugging contests with my brother when uh when we get home from lacrosse practice back in the day that's the way to do it yes but car tells me a car i don't think mysterious is the word he says like yeah there's something about super he just builds just shows up and builds how long you've been building in the bitcoin space uh in the year 2018 i started uh experimenting with building a lightning wallet or not a lightning wallet a regular bitcoin wallet um and i wanted to do that so i could figure out how bitcoin works utxos and management and stuff like that um so that was the first thing i tried tried building

got to the point where it could receive money, but I couldn't send money out. So it's very, very dangerous to use. What happened there? I figured I understood how it worked then. And so the project was finished as far as I was concerned. I didn't need to continue on down that path. Wait, wait, why couldn't you send funds?

Well, I hadn't written the code for it. So they're just locked in there? I never sent any money to it. Oh, okay. All right. So yeah, I think I probably used it on the testnet. And so there's probably some testnet funds in there. Why do you want to learn about Bitcoin specifically?

Because Bitcoin's awesome, man. Bitcoin's the best money ever made, and I wanted to be a part of it. Did you realize it at that point when you started building? Yeah, yeah. I had gone all in on Bitcoin in 2017, so all of my money was in Bitcoin. And I had started to learn programming in 2017, and then wanted to apply that knowledge to Bitcoin. What were you doing before that? Before starting work on Bitcoin?

Before getting into programming. Oh, I was an Uber driver. So I was driving around in an Uber car and making money that way and trying to learn programming on the side. What programming language did you start with? I started with JavaScript. And largely I did that because I'd been making websites since before high school. And so I'd learned a little bit of JavaScript from that.

So I just kept learning what I already had a small foundation in. and then that was that that led into uh learning how to do bitcoin stuff holy shit you're doing some pretty cool bitcoin stuff these days yeah man it's good stuff i mean we're going some really i mean you're demoing next week at bitcoin 2022 for lightning escrow which you're working on with tristan um which is a really cool project yeah yeah that's one of my that's one of the cool things uh that i built that i built for me um so like when i started programming a lot of what i would get from clients was like i would tell people that i knew how to program i made a series of youtube videos on how to do some basic basic programming in bitcoin and then um some people

started paying me to make software for them uh so i like i made the voting page on bitcoin audible if you've ever seen that uh like you can vote up what you want to be his next topic yes yes you did that you did that for guy yeah oh yeah so i made that i did a few similar things like that for clients um and i all along i wanted to make escrow for the lightning network um because there's no way to do or there was at the time no way to do like a two of three multi-sig situation where you can like have you and a third have you alice and bob make a transaction between each other but if there's any disagreement you know carol can come in and arbitrate the dispute there was no way to do that without taking custody but but i knew a way to do it so uh i no no one asked me to do it

Like it wasn't something a client came to me and said, I want you to make this. I was like, I'm going to take some time and make this thing that would be really cool. And then now I have a company based around it. How does it work? So how you knew how to do it? You said you went and built it. What did you build? How does this escrow work?

Yeah. Lightning escrow works through these things called payment hashes. So when you send somebody a lightning payment, you put your payment or you put your money into a type of contract called an HTLC hash time lock contract. and the terms of this contract say that um like let's say alice is paying bob bob can withdraw the money immediately if he provides alice with something called a pre-image um which is like a random 32 byte string um but it serves as a receipt it's him saying all right i received the money um so he can withdraw the money if he provides that to her or she can wait two weeks

and then she can take it back if he doesn't give her a receipt um with this pre-image so what we