TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #326: Understanding Taro with Olaoluwa Osuntokun

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Olaoluwa Osuntokun AKA @roasbeef, CTO at Lightning Labs, to discuss Taro - Taproot Asset Representation Overlay and what it means for the LNP/BP stack. Follow Olaoluwa on Twitter Contribute to his GitHub Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl

What is up freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this rip of TFTC, rip number 326, sat down with roast beef. Laloos is his real name, roast beef is his. Nim, it's not a nim, associated with his real name. CTO of Lightning Labs, we talked. Op CTV, this messy governance situation. it's not a situation it's just part of Bitcoin

rough consensus how do you get things merged we talked about that for a bit obviously we talked about Taro which is a taproot

asset representation overlay that Lalu announced right before Bitcoin 2022 and presented at Bitcoin 22

we went deep into that overlay protocol and what it can do for Bitcoin and the Lightning Network

and unique ways in which taproot and the Merkleize Asset Syntax Trees, Merkleized, it's not Asset, Abstract, Merkleized Abstract Syntax Trees, Mass, is used to bring Taro to fruition. I'm really excited, really bullish. We talked about LSAT too. You guys are going to listen to the episode. I don't have to tell you what we talked about. This report was brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital. Unchained Capital

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I understood him very well. I didn't think he, I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't too fast for me. Maybe, maybe my brain could just process things faster. Maybe that's what it is.

Maybe your Uncle Marty has the, the fast, fast processor brain waves. I don't know what it is. People are like, oh, you're going to put it on, I don't think you have to put it on one half speed.

I thought his, I thought his pace was fine. Enjoy it. Okay. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When 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 probably should be um lalo yo you just got out of a bolt meeting talking about specs we're talking about uh how you get things implemented in bitcoin it's very uh very hot topic right now and you were just describing what was it the trinity uh yeah like the you know the holy trinity or like the triumvirate uh you know which is basically like developers miners and then users right uh and i think depending like you know because like you know obviously

the ctv going around i think there's kind of like a bigger matter discussion basically like how things are done in the first place right i feel like some individuals don't want to define how things are done because they feel like the system is better to be a little bit murky basically and not necessarily give a blueprint maybe that's fine it's kind of a more rough thing people don't get well you know in times of you know a crisis or maybe kind of like some sort of existential evolutionary thing maybe like you know regulation to get too crazy we need better tools on chain maybe we should have like a framework right i think some of framework that i think you know people i know rusty rusty is where to block with us in the past i think ryan uh gentry

and also Buck have also written about this, kind of like this model of, okay, well, you know, what exactly are the roles, right? So, you know, it's something like, okay, developers basically propose. They write the code, they do the diligence, basically they make sure things aren't going to be, you know, super crazy, you know, at all, right?

At that point, right? You can say miners, like, ratify, as in, okay, they say, okay, well, everyone else is good, let's kind of, like, stamp the thing and put it in, and they say users, you know, basically have the control to basically, like, you know, like, veto or reject it, right? Now, for, like, certain individuals, maybe, like, couple the user,

I guess the other thing is a user is somewhat a problematic category because like, okay, well, who's a user? Mine is also a user. Developer user is kind of like how do you actually capture economic users as well too?

And also like, you know, how do you acknowledge that like, you know, many Bitcoin users don't even know this discussion is happening right now, you know, at all, right? And maybe they're depending on it for their livelihood

around the world. Basically, they're actually using it, you know, day to day. So exactly how do you define that itself, right? I think right now some discussion is kind of like, you know, assuming that developers

have a role in ratification, basically, right? And that being, okay, merge it into Bitcoin D or whatever other mutation right um so it's kind of a thing where it's like to me i think it should just be primarily a proposal but you can say in order to like have it happen then maybe all software activation needs to actually happen outside of the main line right because otherwise you know you know you can say

the maintainers and the coin d developers are kind of put in a weird position where it's like their inaction is maybe viewed as like a veto right uh and i think i've been that position myself in the past you know certain things now and you're in this paper something like that that's not the best place to have them in generally so it seems like things should move in that direction of like doing it outside, that's a little more difficult, obviously, because that increases the coordination cost, right? If it's in Bitcoin D, everyone updates, boom, everything's fine, it's rolled out, everything's cool.

But now it's like, okay, well, which client am I going towards over here? So it's definitely like a messy thing. And I think another part of it is like, okay, well, you know, is Bitcoin D Bitcoin, right? Some people will say yes, I myself say no, you know, I contribute to B2B, an alternative client, I think that's important. We're kind of like giving people an option and also just recognizing that like, you know, at the end of the day, like the social scalability of a Git repo is only so high. And I think people need that option to basically go elsewhere, basically.

But, you know, that's just kind of like my summarization of, like, I think the meta discussion right now. Obviously, it's kind of like the Covenants thing. I think that's been, you know, moved forward. I think in the past, we're kind of like, oh, Covenants are secure. But now it's like, okay, well, we want them. Maybe they disagree on how to get there. But I think there's also kind of like the meta discussion that was somewhat, you know, swooped away with Taproot as far as the way speed of trial things like that happened as well, too.

But it's kind of a thing where inevitably there isn't some sort of conclusion. It's going to be like this and be very murky and be difficult. And some people think that's a feature as well. so yeah yeah yeah we had our bit devs here in austin last week and jeremy was here putting forth the case uh for op ctv and his perspective in which he mentioned exactly that's like the maintainers aren't really giving any feedback so i don't know like how i would get it implemented in core and maybe that non-feedback is a slight nod towards hey maybe try it somewhere else and that and then after bit devs had a conversation with another dev who once op ctv

and he mentioned that too i think the maintainers specifically there's five on the planet that have commit access to bitcoin core that the way it was described to me from from this individual is yeah they're they're at a point where they think uh they want to stay out of it like they don't want to they don't want to signal either way and so everybody which is a reasonable thing because no one wants to be like feel like they're caught up in this weird thing and there's like external pressure you know on your things like that and i think another you know way jimmy's been in the past that like you know he kind of like views the um you know unspoken part about their users kind of like being in control is also kind of like a product management aspect as well too right where

it's like okay well developers have these are ways we can do it but it's kind of like a thing it's like a minute thing okay well should we wait longer should we go with this initial thing what's the market demand look like things like that are somewhat missing from the equation at times uh and obviously it's a very you know nuanced conversation no one i don't have the answer don't have the answers i think that's why that's why we're generally you know here in this period But generally, I think this is a very healthy discussion. And, you know, I think some people are sort of blowing it out that, oh, this big attack, whatever else. Well, it's like, I mean, you know, he feels like he's just putting it out there for people to go or not.

Like he thinks he's done his job as a developer to propose, and then it's up to whatever else from there. If people think they really need to, like, you know, directly oppose it by, like, trying to reject it, cool. To me, that's like someone against the spirit of Bitcoin is kind of like, okay, well, you know, my coins are still secure. I can still audit the supply, can run the numbers, basically. They can try something else. as long as it doesn't mess my stuff up, I don't necessarily need to like prevent them from doing something I don't like

as long as there's not some essential risk that people think there are. Yeah, I don't know. There's like five different sides of this thing. And obviously always just probably we have to like watch from the background and just see how things are flowing because obviously these are

very important computations, I think. Yeah, this new concept of a user rejected soft fork. Yeah, yeah. And the funny thing is, you know, Jeremy, like actually he wrote a script for that. So people want to do it. Like he has like this Python script that will look at, you know,

version bit signaling and just reject it if they really want to do that they can but it's uh you know i don't know if we're really at that point yet um and you know even if all this stuff doesn't go through i think it still like moves the conversation forward uh you know both as far as activation and also confidence right so you know if anything i think major problem generally for like getting us to this point basically and having people you know discuss this thing because they feel like that's something that's so depressing you know no matter like how they're interpreting it or kind of like looking at sides these are just like important conversations i think generally uh you know for

the system i agree and for me at least from my perspective the the the main hold up that i have is again speedy trial is speedy trial the best activation exactly right so yeah so some people are like okay well cool ct or whatever else but we don't really like this you know st aspect of it right uh and that's you know speaking to some of the activation stuff you know as well and i think it's interesting also that like you know originally we're in bits like you know bit 90s developed such that individuals can make sure you have like you know multiple concurrent softwares right so we have a bunch of bits, we can signal three or four of these things or referrals. And that I thought was a very laudable goal as far as profile design, but that hasn't really happened yet.

And I think it hasn't happened just because of the somewhat serial nature of people looking and reviewing and stuff and also getting things into Bitcoin D because they're like, okay, well, it's better if we all focus on one thing at a given time. But in theory, if someone wants to signal a feature for a software I don't really know about, the software actually has a built-in system to basically warn you if there's a software you don't really know about. It's in the logs, you can actually detect that as well too so i think that feature should somewhat be embraced uh just because otherwise like you know things may be somewhat surprising right maybe there is demand for this thing that you didn't really know about but you threw it out there because otherwise

there's this kind of like circular discussion around like what is or what isn't consensus it's kind of a thing where it's like you know it's like i know what you see aspect as well too but then there's kind of like you know the intermediate phases of okay well if we can't give it a shot how do we know that something does or does not have you know because you can say yes exactly that's the whole the whole rough consensus is this weird amorphous thing that cannot be perfectly defined and that bugs people but i i think there's certainly demand for these types of covenants i mean i've talked to people specifically that work at larger custodians and they have a very high demand for the type of functionality that opc tv would would enable

especially yeah yeah i mean so now i say that's like a big victory i think and something in germany kind of stuff on the back and they're like people are talking about covenants in like a non-scary way looking at utility looking at kind of like you know other possibilities and i will say you know one thing i think uh somewhat like deters from kind of like better more nuanced conversations i think sometimes people get overly caught up in particular solutions or instantiations of kind of like what's possible right we have like you know ctv enables covenants, right? But it also lets you just kind of do many other things as far as

having this compiled on-chain state machine that can be useful for a bunch of other things as well, too. So I definitely think it's useful to pitch a particular use case, but also understand some of the generalizability, right? For example, something like L2, no input, no input in tables like L2, but also it's just a very useful toolkit

in high-level protocol design generally, right? So for example, if you have something like no input, ignoring L2, we could do things like RBF the funding transaction, which isn't really possible today, right? Because if you RBF it, then the current transaction signature is invalidated because it's based on TXID versus the script itself with multi-we-don't-know changes, right? So there's kind of like that

balance of looking at the generalizability kind of application to other contexts versus that particular thing. Just because if you say something like a vault, people know in the abstract but it's also kind of like a very large design space, basically. What do you actually do you want in general? And I think like you were saying as well, anyone that's doing a lot of custody really wants something like that. And also, I think

it should be a thing where self-custody is one of the biggest things about Bitcoin itself and kind of like the main thing in it. You actually have an option, basically. So anything that makes that a lot easier and more widely applicable to people that aren't hardcore Electrum, PSBT users or whatever else. I think it should be a big thing going forward, generally. I think people are starting to emulate these in other ways. For example, the Block Wallet is looking at some things to basically make custody easier for larger, not super technical individuals.

So I think that's a big thing. And anything we can do to enable more non-custodial applications or just systems to build on top of the coin is plus-plus. That's essentially resistance, basically. And that's something that we definitely shouldn't lose sight of, I think. There's also kind of like a risk that like, you know, that's something I worry about at times. Like anytime there's like some like, you know, very big acceleration of like, you know, either attention or adoption or like regulatory energies. Okay, well, have we done enough to get to this point basically, right? And that, okay, you know, we're growing, but then all kind of like the environments also growing, also adversaries are growing themselves as well too. But like, you know, have we done enough to basically make sure we can get through that next boss? it's kind of a thing if you build like an rpg or something like that you go against a boss like did you grind enough you know or your stat points high enough do you have like the proper gear basically you're gonna get one-shotted right it's kind of a thing where it's like the one shot is a very you know dire existential thing because maybe we don't get another chance right uh it's like a

game where like you know when you die you lose all your stats right you lose everything or something right so it's like you know are we really ready for that uh and you know i think some people that like promote you can say maybe like premature ossification or something like that don't necessarily take that into account right it's okay well to me because i think there's kind of like a negative failure where if we like ossify prematurely basically and we can't really adapt and you know send the system in the future maybe we fail because you know our like intellect you know strength points or whatever else and it wasn't high enough to go to that next big boss uh and you know obviously i don't have all the answers they're just like a very fascinating

topic to think about and kind of like you know theorize on and just like you know watch because i think i've seen like you know many different accelerating uh you know events basically uh and definitely in the last few years there's been a bunch of them it's like okay whoa like you know we're on the global stage now necessarily people are talking about the utility of bitcoin you know beyond just like the whole scammer you know drug while they talk about people using for their livelihood and that's a massive thing and a massive opportunity as well and just to make sure we're ready to kind of like you know ride that wave and make sure we're ready for that next year we think about yeah in years past but obviously with the fork wars we found that

that market pressures the demand for either higher blocks or heavier blocks via segwit um sort of forced to change on the protocol like as you said like the bosses get bigger and the pressure gets greater will the network be able to adapt uh the way it was when it was smaller and it's and like you said he didn't say it directly but there is no response in bitcoin like we have yeah exactly there's not necessarily a respawn like right and i think it's the other thing as well it's like you know if it goes and goes down everything else does kind of it's kind of like you know uh they're like a cheap clone or something like that and they're still tethered to the root parent and if that dies everything else withers away um so but yeah it's definitely you know

interesting thing just consider as far as like you know crafting the system to make sure it's more resilient uh you know in the future uh and you know and i think it's another thing too where one thing one other positive i think i've seen kind of like people talking about more generalizability basically uh you know in terms of like okay well what's the simplicity looks like like? What's like some other kind of like, you know, you know, microcode language look like? What's like, you know, some zero and all stuff look like? Because at that point, you can say, okay, well, we have something that's somewhat more extensible and generalizable, that could be the change to end all changes, you know, other than some extensional, you know, quantum thing or

something like that, right? Or something that maybe is like, like a fragment of pornography. At that point, like, you know, it's less about like, needing to go to bat every single time you think of some new, you know, use case or application like that. Okay, well, let me just use what's here. And obviously, there's kind of like some care that needs to be done as far as like selecting that thing. So it's not too crazy. At the end of the day, because we have UTXOs, there's no like global you know account state you know things are just a lot simpler a lot more analyzable because it's more like a state machine that you can kind of draw out in some cases versus like you know this thing where anything can call anything else and that's where

a lot of like the craziness happens and that's why like people have all these multi-million dollar things like that yeah and how do you how do you think the best way to get there is this layered fashion does taro help with this at all oh good good question like i think um i think it's a combo of like certain incremental you know changes basically at the same time looking at that like big let's make the change so we don't really have to make as many changes in the future right uh and you know that definitely is very as something has been running for you know several years now as well too like i'm optimistic that we can get there uh and i think i think things like tarot kind of like you know help to like spur people's imaginations as far as like what

can be built on the chain itself how to like you know approach certain design principles and also maybe how to like take some of like what's happening elsewhere in the space uh that like can actually be repurposed and, like, you know, used as, like, new design parameters as well, too. So I think that's, you know, something that I think is important to basically show people what's really possible there. And I think as we continue, I think we'll have, like, more application developers on Bitcoin, which will help to, like, you know, shape or inform what changes should be there

as well, right? Because some people, not everyone, like, necessarily, you know, designs kind of, like, other application protocol in Bitcoin. Maybe they're focused on, like, some more serial thing. But I think some of that, like, you know, input is super valuable. for example like people like uh working on the matrix stuff on liquid things like that where it's okay well that's you know they did a best shot with kind of like what was available we can use that to refine exactly how we can make those things more succinct or expressible uh in the

future and so let's talk about tar i mean that's why we uh we're here we uh you announced it at bitcoin 2022 yeah you gave a presentation the day before and then uh so taro uh taproot asset representation overlay is a how would you describe a new second layer solution to extend the uh functionality of bitcoin yeah yeah so it's you know it's basically a way to like you know uh add kind of like this overlay layer via like a set of like structured commitments basically it's kind of like a thing where it's like you know taro says hey you know your dog i heard you like merkle trees you know here's a whole bunch of other trees within the tree that like about the tree uh and that's just kind of like uh the principle of it where you embed certain kind

of like structured metadata uh in like the main taproot tree itself and it uses like a new tree structure and that tree structure um you know is important because it lets you do things like non-inclusion for example like let's say you know i was like swapping you know some like you know collectible or something like that i want to prove i want you to prove to me you don't know i'm committing to it also supports you know kind of like this merkle sum property which is useful for like you know verifying supply and just kind of like uh you know audibility as well too for For example, let's say I had 10 beef bucks and I was giving some to you. Well, I want you to prove to me you're no longer committing to all 10.

It should be seven and I get three. So it really just tries to put forth a lot of the considerations as far as safe transfers at the core of the protocol and doesn't try to hide them, basically. So now it's kind of like one of the main goals is trying to make things as simple as possible, basically. Because otherwise, it's very easy to get caught up in the massive design space of this stuff in general, basically. I think also just kind of training yourself purposely from the design perspective, you know, is a really good, you know, kind of like just trade because then it makes it easier to understand other individuals. They can also more easily analyze it as well, too. And it's very easy to kind of ask and respond to questions. And then most of all, it's also going to make the implementation very, very simple as well, too.

So I think once people see, once we drop, you know, this code, you know, coming out soon, soon, it's actually pretty compact, right? Once you look at kind of like the way everything is done, because as much as possible, it basically tries to reuse things from Bitcoin, right? It tries to, for example, for a VM, rather than making this entirely new virtual machine, which is kind of a big thing where you can do anything, last and referrals, basically it's like, well, let's just kind of map what we have into what looks like a Bitcoin transaction, basically, and then validate that with using the Bitcoin VM itself, which already saves a bunch of time, but at the same time, it gives us the opportunity in the future to add more advanced stuff once we actually know what that looks like and what the demand looks

like itself, right? Now, in this case, people can just say, okay, well, I'll take this thing, I'll map it to one input, one output transaction, validate it, boom, everything's fine there, right? So because of that, I think people will find once they really dig into it and we finalize some of the spec, it's pretty compact conversation-wise, which I think is great because that's going to make a lot of these people to adopt in the future. And also just analyze to make sure that it does what it says it actually does. Yeah. And so let's compare it to similar protocols that Bitcoin has tried to leverage via Bitcoin in the past. You have Counterparty, you have Omni, which both, I believe, Counterparty did. I know for sure Omni did, but they both leveraged op return.

Yeah, exactly. They both did. I'm still somewhat confused about the lineage there, even though I've corrected the BIP a few times, trying to say which one came first or something like that. But yeah, so those were very early on in the blockchain and Bitcoin. That was 2013, 2014, Counterparty had that big burn where they burned a few thousand BTC basically to get these other things on the side. And I think the main difference between something like Taro and those is that those effectively work by writing all the transaction data within the Bitcoin chain using an operative term.

So therefore, in order to kind of like, you know, realize exactly who owns all the assets or kind of like you do in the other operations, you basically need to actually scan the entire chain and then get every single op return in there basically that apply that to your update locally, right? So, you know, it resembles more of like an account model, right? You have like an account of all these other things

and you basically apply all these other updates, right? One of the reasons that that's a little bit more, you know, difficult, and I think why I didn't really, you know, get much adaptions, like number one, like it's not very like client-friendly, right? For example, for me to know what my balance is, I basically need to scan the entire chain

and do otherwise I basically delegate to another individual, right? but also it's actually you know pretty uh it also presents like a heavy share of bitcoin nodes themselves right because if you like basically you need something like an address index which basically lets you like you know look up uh the particular balance or certain address basically and that's the whole massive thing it's also very that could be maintained like that i think also like um you know it was somewhat hyper specialized or at least kind of party like those this whole like smart property thing you know back then like the doorknob all blah so if you look at

the protocol there's things like okay property id which is really just the asset but it was you know so it's kind of like you can say uh a little bit too hyper specific i think for the time but If you look at it now, it's just not very intuitive for a Bitcoin developer, right? It doesn't look like the tools we use elsewhere, like Taproot, inputting, outputting, or else. It's kind of like an entirely different world. So one of the goals for something like Tower is basically to make sure it's very familiar to that Bitcoin developer, basically, because it's just like a one-input, one-output. For example, because of this, let's say I wanted to do some type of swap thing on-chain,

kind of like a normal atomic swap, right? Okay, well, that's just a multi-input, multi-output, right? Maybe I have USET as an input over here, then I have Bitcoin as an input over here, and we swap that on the other side. Boom, it's fully atomic. that's done and we know how to do that pretty well and this also is going to leverage you know for example like it's going to leverage all these tools like psbt things like that i can like maybe send you like a partial offer or something like that we can move it around um so that was one of

the main you know design goes as far as making it simple also making a shirt set that was like a little more bitcoin friendly but at the same time kind of like you know showing where things could go in the future right as far as like sort of more personal properties and transactions whereas you can say okay in the future that could actually be the exact same way bitcoin transactions are done today where you basically have like one input one output basically and you can verify everything uh you know using that because you don't necessarily care about you know the outputs as long as the outputs you know aren't creating more bitcoin than the invoice and so you mentioned beef bucks another another first use case that many people go to stable coins like so how like what's like

as somebody there's a lot of bitcoiners out there who are very skeptical of these digital assets like are they necessary what do they do um and and do we even need them or what stats our unit of account why why do we need these assets when we can just exchange sats for the assets we want to we want to use do we need a plethora of digital assets uh associated to the bitcoin blockchain and like so how would you position i think it's definitely yeah it's definitely you know really good question uh and just kind of like you know in terms like you know motivation i guess like i'm at the point of view where it's like for me you know bitcoin is basically it as far as like you know kind of like the internet gold you know salmon use case itself

but like you know people are going to make a bunch of other you know random stuff on the side right and i think in the past it was the case where bitcoin was kind of like the main crossing pair right you know because you know before you know tether and things like that really blew up every single like altcoin or else was like dominated in btc family coin btc name coin btc whatever else didn't really matter everyone wanted more btc at the end of the day right i think you know uh as like things started to grow across more ecosystem that kind of like went away somewhere right i I think, you know, I think, because you can say in the past it was very difficult to use sort of like arbitrage opportunity, but stablecoin made that a lot easier, right?

Made it a lot easier to basically pop up new and change the different jurisdictions as well, too. But I think as that has kind of like, you know, moved away from Bitcoin, that kind of like has somewhat diminished that network. Bitcoin is kind of like that main crossing pair, basically, right? Because to me, at the end of the day, it's like, okay, well, stuff isn't going to exist. I just want to make sure that, you know, Bitcoin can actually power everything and be the main crossing for everything else in the future, right?

And I think this helps us to get there. Because now at this point, you can say, okay, well, you know, it doesn't really matter what doing at the end of the day if you want kind of like the most secure chain basically as far as like you know power and ownership things like thousand world two you can at least plug directly you know into the system uh here itself i think another thing that i think is related to that is you know something a little more long term mainly kind of like uh with respect to like demand for block space right so you know i think we're in somewhat like an anomalous state right now where you know these are these are super low right obviously for us you know it's great like one

side of the bike gets the next change but it's kind of like you know should it really be here and i think my some of my practice is that like i think some of the activity that like you know prior kind of like was really uh it's taking a lot like the actual demand uh inspired new blocks there's actually some of these other you know more trading uh arbitrage related use cases basically right but now if we're able to kind of like you know bring a lot of those back to bitcoin itself i think that's great for the miners it's great for users as well because that strengthens the network from bitcoin itself to make sure it's always that initial you know main processing pair right i think it also really shines when you look at something like the integration something

like lightning itself right so all of a sudden you know you have like lightning like the main bitcoin background itself but now we also okay well i can plug in any other thing you know on the sides, Lightning doesn't need to know about it. Lightning doesn't need to know about it itself, but now that's going to actually generate additional transactional activity and demand on the network itself, because now you can say, okay, more routing activity, more routing revenue, more supply, more demand to actually get into the network itself, too. I think that's a really interesting thing as far as letting Lightning also be this kind

of asset, or you can say currency backbone layer for the world as well, too, right? And I think it's an interesting thing because it's done in a way where everything is very firewalled from the edges, basically. I don't really need to know about it as me as a normal Bitcoin donor in the center, but if they're there, that's cool. But at the same time, it lets people kind of like have the option to basically plug and play, right? And if you combine this with something like some of the stuff that modelers announced at Bitcoin 22, as far as like a more important sale, things like that, that's really interesting. Now, I can in theory send Bitcoin, you know, on my normal wallet, basically, and the merchant receives USD, whatever else they receive, right?

And that's a pretty cool thing. Now, all of a sudden, like, okay, we have that more agnostic layer. So now we can just plug whatever we want into this thing itself. And because lighting is fully decentralized, I think that'd be like a really compelling thing for the world. and maybe i think it also helps to kind of like you know accelerate the transition over to just bitcoin generally right because now we've made the off-ramp a little bit smoother you know you just maybe seem to worry about you know changing whatever else at the other end but now it's a thing where it's okay well you know i received it i have it i can you know i can close the channel

i can move it or whatever else now at this point i can just say okay well let me just start holding more bitcoin right and i just continue to do that over time basically now you've converted so i think it's kind of like another tool as far as like you know looking at the global view of how we ease adoption basically and also get in some of these um you know countries that are needing it but maybe can't just go and flip the switch you know similar to someone like a sovereign or maybe they need to have a little bit more of a um you know like a gradual ramp so that's kind of like how i view like the world yeah need some uh some stepping stones to get over to the bitcoin stand exactly yeah like some people can go zero to 100 but like you know they're already somewhat

predisposed uh but you know otherwise it may take someone else a little bit longer well you mentioned the utility that Lightning provides, this type of overlay network. And so how does it get to Lightning, right? So you create these assets in a Merkle tree, but in a Tapper transaction. So I believe, if I understand correctly, you just take that UTXO,

you open a Lightning channel, and then because it's embedded in that transaction, the Lightning network can recognize that you have this data and can transfer that asset. Right. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so I think that's the other thing is that, like, you know, it's just it's very Bitcoin like, right. You make a transaction, basically. And one thing that, you know, we ended up like, you know, kind of solving is like, OK, well, you know, typically you need to have a unique asset ID. Right. And you look at other chains, they kind of like use this like, you know, global contract hash value as a proxy for that, basically. But because Bitcoin doesn't know it, we can't necessarily say, OK, well, you know, this is ID 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Right. So what we do instead, basically use the inputs to generate kind of like randomness, basically use that to drive an asset ID. right and because you know inputs never repeat that's double spin that's basically the whole thing about bitcoin basically we can't rely on bitcoin to handle that double spin and protection basically also give us that uniqueness of the projection id in order to create the assets but yeah so you're right it's like you know like before you can make an asset i make a special transaction where i have this commitment you know in my type of tree itself you know it had there's some rules as far as like how you generate the um the id exactly where you place things like that but at that point you say boom i have that asset itself right uh and then me funding is

basically similar to the current process right now where basically i'd open a channel along with someone. And like, you know, rather than me just having that single balance, I also have these other balances, right? But these balances are kind of like expressed within the main, you know, tap retreat itself, right? So our multisig, let's say we both had BFUX referrals, you know, I had five, you had five, it would commit to 10, basically, right? And just similar to Bitcoin, we basically pre-sign that commercial, basically let me exit at any given time to make sure that I'm delivering your five, my five, and you send that off as well, too. So, you know, it looks very Bitcoin lightning-like itself. The main difference there is that now that kind of like

extra balance, and also the way these HTLCs are constructed, right? And, you know, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, it's kind of like a setup in a way where you can actually, like, actually have what we call, like, assets at the edges, basically, right? So rather than actually, you know, modifying the entire core of the network, so in the past, I think some people looked at, like, you know, doing things like advertising figures in the core of the network, having, like, a special, you know, routing bit, say, okay, well, I'm going to Litecoin or whatever else or something like that.

In this case, we're saying, okay, right, you know, let's just, like, ignore all that, make it a lot simpler, and just actually have it at the edges, right? Now, the way this works is that you basically need that corresponding input, sorry, inbound that basically i can then send that along you know my first hop it goes to the bitcoin network that's you know all you know pure btc everyone's getting satoshi fees you know all the way through the entire hop then finally it exits off to you you know denominated in that particular value right so the cool thing about this is that like given that it doesn't really require like a large internal network change and i wouldn't want to do that anyway because we should kind of keep the

core network as simple as possible and focus on bitcoin uh this lesson kind of like deploy a little more quickly right so let's say theoretically uh you know crack in and then um you know um um, breeze update or something like that. Right. They can then use that to send amongst each other, you know, pretty quickly, uh, which is a really cool thing as far as like making sure like, you know, we can actually focus distribution, get this thing out there a little more quickly. Yeah. And so I get, you mentioned like Kraken and breeze there. So I imagine like the, one of the biggest hurdles is just getting wallets to recognize each individual asset as they're like, is there, or is there a way to make it easier on the wallet side?

Yeah, super good question. Yeah, so that's the thing where, you know, I think ultimately there will be like a handful of ones people really, really care about. And I think one other thing about the way we've kind of like constructed the initial architecture is like, you know, theoretically we could, you know, have an entirely new network for every single asset, right?

Which basically costs basically actually kind of like, you know, reconstructing the network from scratch. We have like over $300 million on Bitcoin today on the line network. That took a while to get up. How long is it going to take us on the launch, right? So we're able to kind of like, you know, reuse all the Bitcoin liquidity.

So now any increased demand for transactional activity or capacity is going to correspond to like increased Bitcoin on the main network itself, right? So that's kind of like the flywheel network effect we have going on there. But, you know, as far as like the way wallets would handle it, it would kind of like be a thing where, you know, they would somewhat like select, you know, which ones they really wanted to care about, right? You could construct it where it's like an agnostic, you know, type of thing.

But similar to, you know, someone like hitting some API to like get their Bitcoin balance on the wall, they would need to kind of like know at least like what that asset actually is. So I'm sure like wallet authors are going to like, you know, be a little bit more, you sparing because they want things actually matter on there basically right and as long as the receiver has like the amount of liquidity i can send that for example you know let's say uh someone has like usc somewhere else i can actually just send bitcoin all the way onto that last hop and gets converted which is a really cool thing also the other way around right uh you know i could

like you know send uh you know uscc or t or whatever else on my initial hop and then receive bitcoin on the other end as well um so you know so i think walls will basically like pick which ones i think there'll be like a few ones people really care about maybe some like novelty things and of people like, you know, trading Pokemon cards directly or something like that. And I think that's really cool because like, you know, I think that also just gives wallet providers and authors just more creative freedom, you can say, as far as exploring other business models or maybe looking at different ways to like, you know, expand their wallet and like vertically integrate it as well.

So I think that's good because I think generally like, you know, more entrepreneurial like energy and Bitcoin is just better, I think, you know, giving people more options to basically continue to like, you know, make all these other companies look at different ways they can be, you know, organized given like the global nature as well. people maybe won't go to Silicon Valley and you know do that little thing maybe they have another option on the side I think that's kind of like an interesting thing as far as like you know enabling like a larger economy in terms of like companies on Bitcoin beyond kind of like the more fundamental stuff we can say you know custody multi-state whatever else kind of like going into

that other direction as far as what else is possible yeah no since this leverages taproot now I'm going down like a privacy is there a way you can privately issue like say you had like a group like a club like a solo house but you want it to be like secret and only people who had certain tarot assets for this associated with this

club could access them could get access to the party or the building whatever no I'm getting really like board a that's totally possible like because I hear saying it's kind of like

a selective reveal thing right yes and but like could since it's in a tab or like you can't like see basically see a taproot transaction on the chain and know that there's taro assets associated with it. You have to- Oh, totally.

Yeah, yeah. So I could give you like a random, you know, TX ID that's like pure taproot. And like, you know, if you don't have that information, you wouldn't, you don't know what's really going on, which is a cool thing, right? So, so I think certain use cases, like for example, I think someone like issuing the stablecoin referrals,

like, you know, there's an incentive because people want to basically like be able to like, you know, verify the total supply, right? So similarly, because like we have this Merkle something, you know, I'll be able to like find like an on-chain index basically and verify the integrity of that. So, okay, well, there's 2 billion USDT, you know, on the chain right now and at all times I know that, right? I think that's really cool because if you look at like the way it's done on other chains

and like that, like, you know, maybe sometimes there's like a Twitter bot. So, okay, things were issued or else you'd be able to kind of like, you know, actually see events that on-chain and obtain that data to basically make sure everything else, you know, adds up properly. So that's one of the things I wanted to make sure was kind of like at the forefront, you know, being able to audit the total supply of a particular thing and also just know when other issuer events are happening. But like you were saying,

if it's some other ticket or something like that, you don't necessarily need to get everyone else involved. It's kind of like the necessary parties revealing the proofs and verifying them as well.

And so I guess another cool thing as far as, okay, well, this doesn't necessarily need to be a public thing. Maybe I want some other thing on the side, basically, that's between a smaller group of participants.

This can be used for that as well. And you can ignore all of the audibility, public proofs, blah, blah, blah, because you don't really need to do that for maybe some certain use cases. yeah that's fascinating how far it can go on this rabbit hole and what these things can be used for

if again and that's like even if you're a skeptic when it comes to these digital assets i think from the lightning network perspective the increase in liquidity that this this could provide the lightning network is like a massive win whether you think these things should exist or not um you should be bullish on the fact that it's going to help lightning network exactly yeah it's like if i'm like a major not lightning operator like worst case okay it doesn't really happen whatever else i'm still here best case all of a sudden i text my volume i make more revenue i have like more realistic uh you know routing activity i'm making other decisions as far as like you know allocating my capital that becomes like a bigger you know um you know opportunity

for kind of general like yield generation on bitcoin generally as well so i think the network effects work out pretty well where you know things go well uh even if you're not directly interfacing with it like you'll benefit basically given that like it's not dumping a bunch later onto the chain itself and like any transaction is generating or just like normal transactions to miners anyway and they're verifying that as it goes but at the same time like certain with certain aspects of the way it's designed for example like you know let's say there was like a covenant uh that kind of like had more accessibility right or uh or was able to at least kind of like you know govern what an output looks like right you know because like the tarot

tree actually impacts the taproot tree which impacts the actual output key itself i could feasibly make a covenant such that it's like okay well you know i'm actually enforcing certain transitions or uh you know structure or kind of like details on the tower layer in the bitcoin layer without the coin layer necessarily knowing exactly what's happening there right so that's another cool thing as far as you know you being able to compose all these other tools it's probably other things you can do with maybe something like like a dlc or something like that kind of representing a position and like being able to move that position around uh you know things like that as well too so i think definitely some interesting things as far as like composing

what we already have given everything is already so bitcoin like so it's not like i need to learn entirely other system as far as like okay it's an account okay we use like somewhere to interface with an industry something else okay well that's the output this is the commitment the commitment affects the output uh therefore i know what i can do on that point i know how to interpret these fields and things are also acceptable it uses this like format uh that we uh created for lighting later it's called um you know tlb kind of the type of like value something like a portable thing we can basically kind of like you know have you know future extensibility in the actual asset uh you know itself as well too right so that's another cool trait for example people can add other stuff

in there you know i really don't know exactly what they do i have like you know some kind of like that use case, I think it's another thing as far as like, you know, if we want to evolve this system in the future, we can do so. For example, some things that like, you know, popped up in early design drafting is, for example, like right now the values are all public, you know, in the, you know, in the commitment itself, because I can use it for something feasibly, you could do some other kind of like in a blinded integer type of Pellier, you know, CC type of thing itself. Another thing as well is that like, right now we use SHA-256 for all the commitments basically, but you know, there's certain like hash frames that look more kind of

like you can say like snark friendly, right? So right now, like, you know, I'm showing you all the information, basically, you're verifying the proof and you're revealing it, but I can just give you a proof that this output is well formed. And if we use a snark-friendly hash function, that makes it a lot more efficient as well, too. So at the end of the day, it's all about revealing and verifying proofs, but I don't necessarily need to

explicitly give you all the information there, and there are ways to make it a lot more succinct. I think things are coming a long way now in the past few years. I think it's like the tooling and stuff that isn't quite there, but potentially that could be a thing where my entire proof to you is just zero-knowledge proof, basically, that goes back through the chain, and maybe

maybe it's a little more expensive to generate but maybe you know we're getting things like you know fpga accelerators gpu accelerators like as well too that make you know maybe a 10 or 100x difference in the proof generation because depending on what you're using the size is still pretty good and even if the size is like a kilobyte or two uh that's that's not that bad in the grand scheme of things also because it's all off chain that never actually goes with him we just commit to uh the proof itself nice this could be the base for something really yeah it's like one thing i really don't think bitcoiners appreciate i don't shouldn't say bitcoiners generally a lot of people don't appreciate is that we can't even fathom like the use cases and the applications

that's bitcoin generally and then something like taro more specifically could could bring to fruition in the future definitely yeah and i think that's to me that's like the exciting part about like you know looking at the pieces a little bit differently and like finding that like one accomplish that oh that's like a really new thing right so i think that's something that uh people just embrace a little bit more because i feel like at times we're talking about particular changes like you know we get caught up in a particular behavior or application or relative it's kind of a thing where it's like you know like inevitably it's going to enable things we don't necessarily fully know right if you look at something like you know what we figured out as far as like op

tactics from cyber involves that was existence for all people like oh we can restrict we can this thing this thing right so to me it's like something inevitable also kind of like the exciting part right and that's kind of like where you can say like the free energy or like you know uh protocol entrepreneur or kind of like uh ingenuity can come in it's like okay well someone looking at the pieces slightly different you know angle basically and saying well this is really possible for example like we've seen this with things like you know lightning uh general state change stuff dlc separate of ross so to me like you know i'm very bullish in just future ingenuity and i don't necessarily know everything is going to come some of you ask me like oh exactly what's

this particular thing i'm used for i'm like this seems kind of useful and it's kind of bounded so I think the future my future self is going to think of something but I don't necessarily want to restrict just because I can't think of something now

because otherwise I feel like I'm not necessarily I can't see into the future maybe I have instincts or something like that but I don't necessarily know what's possible

I think things hopefully show people exactly what's possible I think an interesting thing too is even just launching this thing we launched it right before Bitcoin 22

I had developers come up to me like yo I'm working on Solana I'm working on these other chains I want to come back now just because

that shit doesn't work it's down for 24 hours, basically. Bitcoin, you know, is always up. If I could do that little thing I need to do,

okay, cool. For me, it's like, okay, you know, I honestly don't know what it is, but they're going to pay change fees at the end of the day,

you know, and maybe generate some lightning writing revenue. So, cool. So, if we can bring it back, I think that was always kind of like,

you can say a, you know, kind of like the proverb, right? If it gets hot somewhere else, we'll bring it to Bitcoin, right?

Or I think it was more so like it will be brought to Bitcoin. I think that was like missing you can take some agency okay well who right okay the things are there basically i think this is okay well you know individuals that are motivated can package up the goodness basically remove a lot of the cruft you know make it uh you know nice and big on black and bring it over i think that's always like you know something that people somewhat take for granted that it will

be done but we need that agency basically okay well we're going to continue to improve the system basically doesn't guess really really hard elsewhere if you want more blockbuster or something else we can bring it back over to you know the main chain where it all started yeah and you're a man with a lot of agency you've taken the bull by the horns and build a lot of really cool shit so thank you for that um no definitely always fun what what would you describe as anything out of frames like i don't know if there's like trade-offs with tara but like so obviously these assets are being issued and they have a price attached and there's going to be some oracle risk there um if the if there's like large custodians issuing these assets

and and therefore they acquire uh a lion's share of the liquidity of the lightning network what does that mean for the distribution and censorship resistance at the lightning layer um how does how does that affect the build-out of lightning overall how would you uh yeah i guess yeah really good question i guess i answer that initial thing first is that like um you know i think because uh everything is like fully at the edges like things are somewhat firewall right for example let's say someone you know issued some crazy like credit token or something like that right you know because it's actually just at the final hop there's no like default risk that the current network is actually subject to right let's say we actually have that internal network basically and

like that thing we thought was a million dollars now it's zero all of a sudden someone accepted that and you know that kind of propagates like a lot of like you know weird risk right so i think because it's actually like you know i say things basically be fully at the edges and that's a lot of things like you know like a hot pin or a blind route you know type of contract basically things are a little bit more i would say like far away not to say there's no you know other thing going on that you know maybe we haven't thought about at least like that lets me see a little better or not. Okay. Well, someone doesn't want to know that they don't really know about it. And also it's actually, you know, fully at the edges of the system as well. But, you know, as far as you

can say, like other trade-offs, you know, the system makes, you know, there's certain trade-offs around kind of like, you know, like moving assets around, for example, like, you know, because we require kind of the commitment or that actually needs to be like concrete, like the out point itself, you know, you can't necessarily do things like issue an asset and then transfer the very same transaction, right? Because you need to reference that out point, but the out point isn't finalized until it's actually into the chain itself right you need to do things okay well i'm going to issue it maybe i can burn something but at the same time then i'll do another project so we have that like very stable identifier right and i think one of the other trade-offs makes like

you know because it relies on bitcoin a lot for um you know double spend prevention and kind of like you know non-relatiability of these outputs there's certain cases where if you don't do something properly the asset just may be burned right uh and that's because like okay well you didn't follow the rules so therefore you know everyone that's validating things assumes it's not valid. One case would be, let's say I have 10 beef bucks and then I make 15. That's invalid. And I just also just forfeited those 15 just because I spent the out point where it was being committed to and I can't recreate the out point because I can't undo Bitcoin itself. So that's another trade-off it makes. It's kind of like a thing around finality. I think there are ways to

get around that, but maybe they'll just introduce a lot more complexity into the system, which is something that we're trying to make a little bit simpler. And then maybe it's okay for now and the future. And I'd say the other, you know, large trade-off it makes as well is, you know, related to basically, like, the proof size, right? So, you know, as mentioned, like, things like, you know, a master kernel camera, in the past, you basically had to, like, you basically had to embed every single thing you wanted to verify the transaction to the chain itself, right? And that was, you know, pretty, you know, very unscalable and also, like, you know, difficult to work on by clients. In the case of Retiro or something like that, you know, my asset itself, like,

proves the provenance to you itself, right? Which necessarily means that, you know, you may need to go back and verify like that initial chain or link it right so you can say in the best case it's kind of like a you know a linear thing uh but you know in the worst case it can be you know it can be uh larger than that as well too right so in the future we have some ideas around kind of like doing things like compressing uh the proofs kind of like you know like burning and then reissuing an asset basically like you kind of have like a clean slate and then also the zero dollars proofs uh ask as well convince them to compress that compress that down a little bit more i think the other big thing is that like um you know because you have that lightning layer

anytime you open the channel you move it onto lighting itself we're not really expanding the of hops it took right after compressing it down i think another cool thing uh we composed for example things like um you know state chains some mercury water is doing as well too that could feasibly be used to also let people trade these things amongst themselves but keeping that same you know output there with those you know varying uh you know trade-offs as well too what are your thoughts on these charming mints they're coming like fediment mini mint have you looked into that at all because that that's actually throughout this conversation that's where my mind's been going like could you do like taro assets in these in these charming mints and

Because I think they can enable the free banking system that Hal Finney envisioned at the end of 2010 in his BitcoinTalk.org post. Yeah, I think it's definitely interesting. And like, you know, I was talking with Obi, who I think gave a talk at Bitcoin22 about kind of like, you know, his view is kind of like looking, OK, well, you know, maybe if you're in Africa, you know, not every individual is necessarily going to be able to do the full self-custody thing. but they at least trust there's some local leaders or something like that, or some people, you know, you know, the community, those are all, so they can help do that. I think this is definitely like, for example, you know, they could issue stuff on top of that, on top of tower and basically then use those within that local thing.

It could be something as well where like the issue, some local currency and people can use that outside, but what they want to come within kind of like this closed system, it's super beneficial. I think also generally, if we see kind of like, you know, more cases of things like Bitcoin beach pop up, things like that as well too. Well, okay. If they're already kind of like doing some share custody thing, might as well add some of the privacy benefits into that as well too.

I think it's a really cool thing just because, like, you know, this can let you compose a bunch of other things together. For example, like, one limitation with the system is that, like, you know, you can route, like, regular assets, but you can't necessarily route, like, collectibles, right? And collectibles, like a baseball card or a charter card, something like that, right? But in theory, if I used something like a state change type contract, basically, I could move ownership of that off-chain itself, right? Which is a really cool thing because obviously now I can combine other divergences as well, too. I think that's the other interesting thing, like, you know, once you have more of these, like, protocol pieces, like, you know, you can say something like lightning, state change, DLC, you know, covenants, whatever else. The amount of things you can construct just really, really starts to blow up, basically. I think we'll be impressed.

Assuming things go as, in my ideal case, like the next five years, I think there'll be some really impressive stuff we can do on Bitcoin, which is the main thing is basically non-custodial relationship itself, more decentralization, also letting individuals make the protocol they want to without necessarily compromising. And compromising, to me, is like custodian or kind of like a weird multi-sig thing or something like that. If we can kind of encode more direct kind of constraints relationship into Bitcoin itself, that's very good.

but obviously there's some trade-offs as far as like complexity things like that but i think you know we've been thinking about this stuff for long enough and i think my current model like just the new textual model generally just because it's uh in the end it's like you know it's just a state machine on chain at the end of the day that really balanced a lot like kind of the scariness or kind of like some of the unexpected activities like elsewhere because like you know you know anytime i'm spending something i know exactly what's happening you know you know i basically have my entire world there i'm not worried about every single possible other you know contract that can interact and like the ordering guarantees blah blah blah so i think we have like a very solid

based on bitcoin that somewhat you know under recognized as far as like some more advanced use cases to make it a lot easier to just maintain and understand uh and just use generally so and what are some of the things that help is like something like moose sig um like the ux of issuing this s isn't is it music too or music that's involved uh well yes so like you know in theory you could combine you know music tune things like that to like you know uh have like different custody profiles that they ask themselves right so for example like you know there's like a particular key. So like, you know, let's say there's an asset that maybe you want to issue multiple times, right? It's like a trend. Maybe it's like, you know, a company issuing more equity or something

like that, right? There's a special key that needs to sign the future, you know, issue incidents, basically to link that to the same chain. That key can be used, that can be a Moosic 2 key, right? So that can be like a 3 of 3 or NMN or something like that as well, in order to, you know, give you a little more flexibility there. And also like, you know, goes all the way down to like the lowest layer as well too. You know, if I wanted to require, you know, like, you know, different signatures or something like that, or more trustability, for example, in the Lightning case we do a thing where we basically like we um embed the hclc at the tower layer as well too right so you also need to basically show me that pretty much things like that to basically make

sure that like if the asset is on chain we're not just trying to move it before things are actually valid or something like that right so you know it's a thing where definitely some other trade options are being made there i think we still need to think more about like you know exactly uh other areas that make sense but to me once again okay well i already thought of this one particular thing i think there's other cases that will be a lot more interesting as far as like you're doing more interesting things you know on that uh you know tarly with some of the caveats as far as like, you know, burning on the upper layer if you don't necessarily follow everything to a T.

Yeah. There's so many moving parts of this. And so you mentioned that Bitcoin 2022, you had people working on other chains coming up to you and saying, all right, I want to build this on Bitcoin. It's got uptime security. And now it seems the usability and ability to do what I'm trying to do.

Do you think this can be a driver to get developer talent working on the Bitcoin stack? Yeah, I definitely think so, right? Because I think, you know, there are some of these other people, like, you know, maybe they have a use case you don't necessarily care about, but like, they at least want to use Bitcoin in the beginning. And then because other, they didn't understand or they didn't really see these solutions out there, they went elsewhere, right?

And it's kind of a thing where it's like, we're talking like, some of them, they don't really want to be elsewhere, you know, like they, like, even if they bring it up, maybe they'll put lightning in it somehow and like, you know, cross it over, but like, if they can come back, I think it's a great thing. I think that just brings more developer attention. Also kind of like, you know, broadly, you can take the application layer of Bitcoin itself, right? So I think there's some developers that are very good at things like Bitcoin D-level stuff, kernel-level stuff, or some of the more security aspects.

Maybe they don't necessarily know what a protocol application in that layer would necessarily look like. I think more of those thinking invoices, for example, people have done a lot of work on that, or like Shek, I don't know what I'm saying, and also Jeremy, as far as certain other tooling, things like that. So I think over time, as we get more of those developers on board, the tooling will get more advanced as well, too. we have things like manuscript referrals whenever you're kind of designing a more kind of elaborate protocol

it needs to be more so kind of like the transaction level basically right okay well you know these are all the possibilities if I go here you can go there things like that as well too

I think we still need better tooling on that and things like Sapio you know are like you know probably some of the best things we have in that domain but I think that's

a very promising thing of basically like you know bringing back those developers basically strengthening that Bitcoin you know network effect itself and also like you know getting that knowledge

distributed a lot more broadly so that in the future people can just say okay well let me just go straight over here versus taking this very roundabout road and all of a sudden I have this token that I don't fucking want

and now I got to bring it back and things like that. So we can, you know, we can have the shortcut them now. And I think that was also just generally like just pretty good validation to the people coming elsewhere. It's like, yo, like I can do this now. Like, let me just come back. I don't want to learn this new random language or something. I just want to, I just want to do my thing basically

and not worry about like the platform risk or kind of like any other shakiness, you know, at that lower level. Yeah. Again, I go back, so I go back and forth. I'm one of those. I'm like yeah I don't really

care for any of those things but I do recognize like people do it's like why not build it here but it does help liquidity yeah I think it's really

I think it's really a reasonable take too where it's like you know I I don't necessarily know what they're doing is like the actual

I think I kind of like you know respect their freedom to experiment basically and that's always kind of like the whole commercial innovation thing about Bitcoin

it's like okay well they can do a thing as long as it doesn't infringe on my you know UTXOs or like supply whatever else you know they can do it

you know and if there are some cases where like you know it's just very uh has some weird negative incentives i think you know people will kind of like go out and like you know address those things but uh to me it's kind of a thing of like you know just growing the pie basically making bitcoin you know more uh you know prominently available and just kind of like on the mind of individuals to correct they're kind of like the fud of like the bitcoins the you know the ti-83 calculator or whatever like you know like no no it really isn't like you can do a lot

of stuff uh you just need to like you know look at it like in the proper way and also like you know prioritizes just security generally so i think it's kind of a thing where if you look at in some of these other ecosystems like people are very desensitized to like hacks right they call it rug pulls right it's like no no bro bro you lost your money you know what i mean you lost your fucking money it's not a rock ball right so it's just desensitized like you know people don't blink at these crazy hats right back in there you know bitcoin exchange got hacked for 10 million it's like oh my god that one's just secure it's done blah blah now we get 600 million and they're like oh our brain isn't gonna bail it out like you know it's like oh i don't know about that yes bf's gonna

to step in and bail us all out of the world. Let me just get this $2 billion out of nowhere. Where did it come from? Don't worry about it. We're just going to put it back in the system. Yeah, there's this weird masochistic enjoyment of the rug pull on Twitter, at least, for a lot of people.

It's weird. Yeah, I don't want to be in that position. And hopefully, nothing we make ever puts me in that position as well. And that's always a big thing as far as understanding it, making sure self-custody is a big part of it. I'm not going to say it whenever it's possible.

just like educating people generally too yeah and more generally zooming in on there's a thing things that you've built that i'm excited about like the assets is cool like i want more liquidity on the lighting network it feels like lighting network has hit an inflection point what i'm really excited uh to see like on the back end of what could be a potential inflection it seems like just from a liquidity uh um mind share and a branding perspective lightning network is here it seems like it's not going anywhere anytime soon it's only going to get stronger from here but stuff like ellen you are url off and lsats like once that people start building on those protocols and injecting lightning network into the internet stack that's exactly that's what really gets me

excited oh no totally totally and that's always been the thing where it's like you know i got this like master plan in the background, some of the other components, but I feel like now, like many of those components there as far as like, you know, making, you know, Lightning and Bitcoin

like a more integral part of the web into the browser experience, we're so close, right? You know, and I think this is like, you know, this is what people should be calling Web3, though that's a horrible name, what does that mean at all?

It's like, you know, call it new, new internet, call it, you know, like the Bitcoin native internet or something like that. I think it's really cool, for example, like, so LSAT, people that don't know,

is something based on something called HTTP 402, right? So the idea is like, okay, well, in the back of the day, there's kind of like this error code, and error codes are kind of like, okay, you go to a website, it's not there, 4FO, 200 means everything's okay,

300 is redirecting to 1,000 or 2. This says, oh, payment required, right? And it's always been a peak thing. It's like, okay, well, if no one really uses it, they're kind of like some very just organizational kind of like work moves created around it that nothing really happened, right? So what this does is it goes like,

okay, well, we'll use a thing called a macro, which is kind of like this API token in a sense. The API token kind of like has certain like structure capabilities that can maybe expire after a day or whatever else, decision by its given party. What we'll do, we'll basically embed an invoice in the header response of 402, basically.

You pay that invoice. Once you pay the invoice, you get the pre-image from the invoice, and you can basically combine this LSAT and the Macro and basically the pre-image and have this full authentication. That's a really cool thing, right? So all of a sudden, now I can basically do a button click and then the browser or the JSON or whatever, I have it automatically.

This can let you do things like paper APIs. I can do login. I can do the upvote for payment. I can get rid of all these spam bots on twitter also like the spam bots got worse what happened like i don't know every single thing i look at there's 20 of these things and the other thing is well i've never been impersonated so maybe is that good about i don't know if i'm not big enough yet to like to get my own spam bot like cool but you know this would let you kind of like you know destroy things like that the spam it's

something happened the last three months specifically where someone shut something off someone someone turned something on i don't know but it's it's a different it's a different place well like let's explain how like because the idea of again lsat like the one killer use case is like pay per api call like over the lightning network like that blows my mind thinking about like how definitely how it will affect and make markets extremely efficient because you're paying for exactly what you're getting right and nothing else or nothing less yeah and then you get really cool combinations for example like someone was running it before but basically it was kind of of like they were um you know doing lsat stuff to basically let you pay per minute for like bps

access basically they're kind of like a virtualized to give you a little thing that's really cool because i like you know let's say i just want to like do some like basic analysis boom do i want to like do the aws subscription do i want to like you know look at the billing model whatever else i can just like get in and out very very quickly i think it's also cool for kind of like other companies looking at like different um you know pricing models typically there's kind of like the like the uh freemium okay it's free then you need to pay there's not kind of like subscription but that kind of like gray area was okay let me just do like what i need to do uh you know particularly at that point too,

that's maybe also more resource efficient for them because they know they can kind of resell that particular resource somewhere else. So I think that's definitely a big enabling thing. People ask me a lot of times, why hasn't it fully caught on? What's really going on? But I think one missing component in the past

was kind of like two things. One is basically the proper client-side interface, right? So we use LSAT today in a lot of our services and you kind of pay a small amount of satoshi and you basically get an API key, you use it for that, and you do a bunch of other things alongside of it as well too.

But there wasn't a very easy way of allowing a developer to basically hook into that API itself, right? So there were things in the past like WebEleven or something called now Albi, which I'm a big fan of, which is basically working to make that interface a lot more streamlined, basically. And that's going to be a really cool thing because now this is what you need as far as being able to click reply and then it sends one sap to Twitter or whatever else, or two sap. Because otherwise, it's kind of like, okay, here's the QR code. Let me scan it. Okay, what's going on?

I'm waiting, whatever else. Once you push that a lot more to the background, there's going to be a new wave of people on the internet that say, okay, well, this is how it just works. How could it work anywhere else? What was it like when you had to input a credit card and get this piece of thing out of your pocket? And then where is it? Who's storing the credit card information? Is it them?

Are they going to get hacked? Is it on the browser? It's a lot of weird things around that. So I think that's definitely coming. And it's something that I'm super excited about. I think the other component that's missing is additional tools on the web development side. Actually, Buck made a bunch of really cool things in this area as far as being able to

have a decent web framework and make that outside of the web. I don't know if people know something like Flask, which is a very popular Python framework. on framework, but I can do something like add like an annotation that says, okay, lsat amount equals 10 sat or something like that. Boom. Right. And then I know, you know, the web server basically handles, you know, all the negotiation referrals. When it comes to my site, everything is good at that point too. Right. So I think we have that first component now, second component is coming up. And I think the big thing that's kind of really true for the first component was also there's something we work on in the background and hopefully soon we can restart over now is

also like, you know, actually getting, you know, Neutrino basically into the browser. Right. So this is a really cool thing. Cause if you look at something like the MetaMask, it kind of like, gives you a similar UX experience is basically hitting one centralized API, right? That thing goes out all the time. We've got what's going on. They're getting a lot of data. It's probably a honeypot. Like, you know, who knows what's going to happen with all that stuff. They know everyone's balanced. They know what you're doing. They can find your stuff. Let's not do that. Let's actually just like move everything directly into the browser itself. So I would have like LND and Neutrino in the browser. You know, one cool thing about Neutrino is that because the protocol is

actually fully stateless, I can fetch block headers, filters, and blocks from like a CDN or something like that, right? That's going to be very, very fast. And also I can verify everything that's going on there so I don't need to worry about additional issues there. One of the things happening in Lightning protocol right now

is people are adding a way to basically advertise like a WebSockets address, right? So then at that point I can basically use Bitcoin, get the Bitcoin protocol

via HTTP and then talk WebSockets about Lightning as well too. All of a sudden I basically have the exact same experience.

Developers are going to love it but at the same time everything is still fully non-custodial basically and also I'm relying on anyone else

to basically gather all this data and just tell me what things are active or not because of the way the protocol is now. So I think at that point, it's going to be, okay, someone's going to basically download an extension and then get onboarding to Lightning itself.

And then, you know, we'll have things like, for example, you know, getting a zero-comp channel or something like pool or whatever else, basically have that bootstrapping be, you know, as tight as possible. So it could be a thing where it's, okay, like, you know, download this thing within a minute or two right out of my seat, all of a sudden I'm on the internet. Obviously, you don't want to put, you know, 100 BTC in this thing. It should be like a smaller amount. It's like another wallet, you know, kind of like a square change. I think at that point, you know, distribution, in my opinion, will kind of like be solved as far as like how do you actually make sure, you know, people are able to interact with this stuff. at that point it's more on the hands of

kind of like upkeep developers also businesses as well take advantage of that thing right one cool thing I saw I think it was maybe last year people kind of like

integrated Ghost or they integrated Lightning into something in Ghost which is kind of like another way to do a sub stack because it's an open source thing

yes when I saw that I was like okay this is dope this has been like on my list people are looking at it there's that demand

there as well too once we fix the client side tooling and the server side as well too like there would be like everything else is going to look dumb as an alternative right

yeah I'm going to so I'm just going to