TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #369: Bolt.Fun and Bitcoin's Inherent Social Network with Johns and Ed from Peakshift

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Johns and Ed from Peakshift to discuss Bolt.Fun. They dive into educational UX, ways to attracts new devs to Bitcoin, and the ways Bitcoin provides value beyond western countries. Follow Johns on Twitter Follow Ed on Twitter Check out Peakshift Check out Bolt.Fun Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Upstream Data TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc fun rip another design rip sat down with johns bahari and ed from bolt fun bolt.fun we're coordinating and hosting the legends of lightning tournament which runs from october 12th It's December 7th of this year, the next nine weeks or eight weeks now. It's a weekend, but you can still sign up. Many weeks to sign up. Very great initiative. Three Bitcoin worth of prizes on the line.

So if you guys are building on Lightning, they have two tracks, Global Adoption and an Afro Conference, Africa-specific track. There's going to be prizes for both tracks. The winner's going to get one Bitcoin. It's beautiful. We talk about a bunch of design stuff as well. I think you guys are going to enjoy it. It was brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital.

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Join CrowdHealth.com slash TFTC. Enjoy this rip with Johns and Ed. Fantastic one. Take care. 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 i'm sitting down with johnson ed from peak shift which is a bitcoin focused design agency also founders of bolt fun which are running the lightning legends how do you guys it's a tournament is it a design tournament a building tournament how would you guys describe this it's a building tournament yeah we kind of like try to move away from like the that like the hackathon narrative of things, because that tends to be very technical. So we're calling it a

tournament instead. And it's quite epic. I like it. There's three Bitcoin on the line. Three Bitcoin. Can you believe that? Bitcoins. As a designer, what do you guys prefer, Bitcoin or Bitcoins? Language is important for design. People don't recognize this. Probably more likely that they're going to be multiple UTXOs on the line. Maybe that's the easiest way to answer i don't know a lot of sets um a lot of sats we're hoping it's going to be around 60 000 but it kind of depends on the price of bitcoin on december 7th so we like put a little squiggle next to the the the dollar amount because we're like oh we can't

probably promise that it's going to be 60k so we're just about 60k yeah why so bearish it could be 120k by then you know we don't know true that true that true that let's go baby so what uh what was the intention behind starting bolt fun and this lightning legends tournament you all started with the bolt fun stuff then yeah uh so i mean i guess the bolt fund the origin stories started with johns and a couple of others when they were looking for uh if i'm right in saying it was a lot of resources that were sort of being put into the bitcoin design guide uh i'm not sure if you've heard of the bitcoin design community but um they're an awesome sort of bitcoin focused community they came up with this guide which is a a great way for designers

who are kind of looking to interact with bitcoin software uh wallets how to design wallets and applications and things like that and it was obviously very on-chain focused when we were kind of contributing to it um and there was a lot of lightning material that wasn't being written but wasn't really being used and that initially sort of started by putting that into a guide um the bitcoin design guide is now very lightning focused um i think maybe more so as default um but yeah we just had a bunch of extra docs and resources that we kind of wanted to put somewhere uh we knew that some people wanted to kind of experiment with lightning and build in the space um so it already started with the guide and then from there we kind of thought well hey there isn't

also really like a consolidated community for for bitcoins online i mean you have like you've got stacker news you've got pleb wiki um there's obviously github twitter is huge as well for people um but there wasn't really like a place where i can go as someone who's looking to build on bitcoin and lightning and say cool how do i implement ln url auth or um how do i get uh how do i open a lightning channel or how do i get liquidity to my web application uh how do i build using webln so um that's really what bolt fund aimed to be that's kind of why we started it because we wanted to see a lot more innovation and drive from builders in the space to kind of build on the application layer of bitcoin um so that's what we kind of aim to be and also uh importantly

try and be sort of fun and inclusive because i think with the uh maxi attitude sometimes comes this sort of level of certain level of toxicity which is fine but uh is sometimes quite disheartening for new people coming into the space um who don't really know where to get started and they're sometimes met with a bit of an attitude of figure it out yourself or dive deep into this super technical resource which some people can't even read so um we wanted there to be a slightly more like open arms friendly space for people to to get involved well that uh that connotation really comes through with the design of the bolt.funds site it's fun it's a fun site like i was telling you guys i just signed in using uh webln uh using albi i know that's controversial but like we said

they're they're the only ones who've enabled it right now and it is very easy two clicks and you're in yeah well actually um the login mechanism is using lnurl off so you can also scan with blue wallet breeze um blix as well right um so that's like the authentication part the voting, that's the WebLN part. We could probably do some WebLN based voting as well. Sorry, WebLN based login, because there's a sign message and verify message in there. So, it can be used technically for login. But yeah, that QR that you clicked on or clicked to connect, that was LNURL off, which Albie also incorporates. And I also want to hop on something that Ed said. So, you see, new people coming into the space

that want to learn about how to develop applications and stuff on Bitcoin, they got to read like Mastering Lightning or Mastering Bitcoin or something like this, right? and because that's like the you know like the like some of the big documentation that we have for people to understand the tech but it's it's it's pretty dense it's a pretty dense read you know it's uh um i read a couple chapters of it i'm not gonna lie i didn't read the whole thing um but you know sometimes um you have yeah you have those folks who want to like dive deep into like okay how does this entire system function and then they said yes then i'm gonna like design something or build something code something but then you have this other type of people

like me actually which like i like to build stuff to learn right um and for those people i think it's um it's very important to have uh examples tutorials just like like hey this is what it is to make a music app with Lightning or Bitcoin or some other app. So you just follow one tutorial on a weekend. This is how someone's done it. You followed all the steps. You could deviate if you want, but we need more of this. But here's the problem now. Within Bitcoin, we use a lot of chat groups. So whether it's Slack, Discord, Matrix, Telegram, none of that is searchable on the web, doctor go google whatever you're searching for those tutorials or those lessons or whatever they're not there right no you can't you can't find them you have to go so then you have to

find those groups right yeah now you have to know about the technology specifically right you have to know there's something called lnurl mafia that i'm going to go in there or noster or webln and i'm going to go into those groups but you don't know those things yet right so then well i was gonna say another thing too like when you're going back to like mastering bitcoin and mastering lightning those are a bit static where a lot of stuff is evolving like things like lnurl off the weblm probably aren't even in mastering lightning exactly so you guys have like a live ongoing evolving place where people can go to learn more about this stuff which I love.

Yeah. And like when we were building it up, I'm like, like, like as an agency, as a like web agency, there's this there's two things that you don't build. One is a project management app. The other one is a social network because every every every agency goes through the same thing. Hey, we could make a better project management app than what we're using now. 37 signals.

They did it as well. They did it quite well. and you know it's like a bajillion dollar company now but most people just end up failing and in essence we still ended up doing that with bold fun because it has this project management style uh tools and it's also a social network uh a bit but i think one of the reasons why we have to do this as well is because we're also learning what does it take to build uh application on top of bitcoin yeah for what it's worth it seems a bit more intuitive than base cap so um appreciate it yeah well i mean design has always been one of the most fascinating areas of

bitcoin to me because when i left finance i actually wound up taking a design boot camp just learning i wanted to learn about ux ui design and the psychology behind it and that was 10 years ago now at this point or eight years ago and as i've gone through my bitcoin journey that's always been lingering in the back of my mind is it's obvious that the UX for a lot of the products around Bitcoin, it's definitely getting better today, but historically has been subpar.

And I just always been a champion of, hey, we need to get the designers here to focus on these problems because they're massive problems. And as designers, obviously Bitcoin probably wasn't the first thing you guys worked on as designers. What are the challenges with designing around Bitcoin specifically, particularly having to design for on-chain and then lightning and then letting users know what's actually happening when they're using different apps throughout the Bitcoin ecosystem?

I think if I can answer first, one thing which I've definitely thought about a lot is the level of abstraction that comes into applications. So, for example, take, for example, on-chain transactions where with every on-chain transaction, there needs to be some sort of coin selection where the application, it could be an automatic algorithm or it could be a manual one by the user where they have to select a certain number of UTXOs or UTXO that they want to use in that transaction, right? they have to like create these sort of transaction inputs and then there's one of the outputs and that's a very it's not too complicated but it's quite complex and it's sometimes too complex to maybe have that necessarily in the foreground for applications so a lot of wallets maybe result to having some sort of automatic coin selection instead and i think slowly over time some of those ux bumps have kind of been kinked out a little bit and people have move towards sort of certain best practices which is also one thing which the sort of bitcoin design

guide tries to do is sort of implement best ux principles and practices um but even with like the lightning stuff now um you know node management opening channels making sure you have inbound and outbound liquidity and stuff like it can be kind of difficult and i think that where good design is going to come in is where we can kind of keep a lot of the integrity of privacy preserving practices and what it might be whilst kind of abstracting it on a design layer so that the final user doesn't actually have to kind of push through this like heavy and quite burdensome UX just to do a simple action of sending a lightning transaction and I mean I've definitely come across people in the space who are actually like really adverse to good design like they don't they want

to kind of simplify everything back to this kind of like web one where it's just this really tacky interface uh you've or even just you're interacting with just pure code like there's not even really like an interface for you to interact with um and it's like oh well maybe we could maybe we can make this look a bit prettier and it's like no no i don't want people who like pretty things to be interacting with my application i want it to be like hardcore cypherpunks only and you're like well is that gonna get everyone involved like probably not so i think one thing which is just generally like i think a bit of a pushback is this you know people in bitcoin are sometimes adverse to good design i think we need to get better at wanting it um and being like hey we

can compete with some other platforms that have billions in design and why they're attracting a of talent and a lot of interest is because they do focus on design um and then yeah the second thing i would say is just as a designer who's maybe not super technical having to kind of digest and abstract a lot of information uh on what's actually happening in an application and then trying to put that forward to the user in the simple click of a button or a few buttons you know yeah yeah Sometimes the best design... There's a project, LNDG, it's in the Bitcoin Designathon and also in the Legends of Lightning tournament. They've got all this stuff to manage your node's liquidity and different configurations and all that. And we were on a call talking to them and we're like,

what is the best design of this look like? And it's like a single button, right? It's a single button that you press. But how do you get to that point where it's a single button, right? You have to understand all the different configurations and stuff. So we came up with like three other buttons, right? Optimized for cost, optimized for this, optimized for that. So it's like, okay, so now it's like four buttons. And then you have to explain to the person what each button does and what those presets mean and all this right so we're very much um at the point where um you know designers also are having to learn about um the different primitives that make up bitcoin and to what um ed was saying sometimes it gets like abstracted like way too far right

where it's like this is just automatic coin selection let's go but then what ends up happening is that you don't compensate for that or the designer may not understand that there is some compromise that happens with regards to privacy that you're now eroding from your user. And have you informed them of this? So and then we go to the other extreme, which is the manual selection.

But to understand how we get to the best solution, which is honest to bitcoin right because this is a new type of money that that we have to design for right so we have to you know it cannot look exactly like what preceded it you know it's it's not going to look exactly like the venmo app or the paypal app right we could get it to a familiar level to folks but there are some underlying things that you have to account for and reflecting the user interface. And I think that's sometimes like the difficult part. Of course, you have like some technical constraints

that are also difficult to deal with. Like on iOS, how do you run a lightning node in the background? Well, you can't, not so much. It has like five seconds and then it kills all background processes, right? So, you know, that's why you have to have the app open or like depending on like some external server in order to wake the app up in order um when you get

the um when you get the payment so there are some technical constraints that you sometimes you can't really design around because they're just so hard um you know but um but yeah i would say like some of them would be the technical constraints and um some of them is like understanding those are smaller primitives and constraints of the um of of the of the way bitcoin works yeah yeah yeah and you mentioned like the coin selection with privacy and letting users know that so like how much do you guys think need like how much can like better design improve the user experience like what's the balance between better design and user education because like you said we can get as close to vemo as possible but it's not vemo it's bitcoin you have utxos you have coin selection

you have all that like how much effort on the education side do you guys think is needed to make people aware of how they should be interacting with these apps i mean these are not uh new principles in designing for a set of users who don't know about your product or whatever right these are things that you know like you you open like quickbooks accounting or whatever you're There's guided tours. They progressively show you features or ask you to unlock things. So these aren't new things in the UX design, UI design

space, right? Typically, what we have, I think Moon does a very good job at the key backup portion of the app, especially. It's very simple. But they take you through these steps, and they have this checklist. And I like seeing that kind of stuff. we need it in like other places in the application as well.

Like, you know, when you're doing a spend, et cetera, et cetera. Or if you're going to receive, for instance, I'm generating addresses, I'm sharing it with like 10 different people, right? The same address, by the way, right? But now 10 people know this address, but they've not sent the funds.

So now, you know, so instead, maybe that should be something where I'm kind of like labeling my transaction, sorry, labeling an address like before it gets generated or something like this, you know? So it does, like, it is going to need education as with all interfaces. If I just drop you into, you know,

what we're using here, Ecamm, you know, without any instructions, you're gonna be like, hey, I don't know how to use this. You know, you want to, this company is gonna want to reach a audience audience of maybe older folks who aren't really used to live streaming or something. How do they do that? They're going to need to do some education, right? So I think the education for onboarding folks, it's just part of user acquisition, like retaining them, right? It's

not new. We've been doing this in product design for years. Yeah. Again, we need more designers to help educate you mentioned moon as a good example of a team that's doing design ux design specifically around backups correctly what other apps are you impressed by their design and their their ux both i think both fun has very good ux i just signed up in five seconds i definitely still room for improvement i mean i think one thing you definitely learn when you start developing applications is you start to look at them a little bit like you might other areas of your life where you're just like i wish that was a little bit better here or uh i wish we had i don't know i wish we had kind of like cornered off those radiuses on that card a little bit more or

Like I've got a bit of a perfectionist attitude when it comes to the UIs as John's knows. So I look at BoltFun, I'm like, Oh, it's, it's a great UX, but it can definitely be improved. And I think one thing I would say with regards to the UX is and I'll kind of circle it back around to your, your last point about the security is I think there's always this trade-off between there are different elements of UX, right? Like it's kind of all about human emotion as they travel through applications

and how they interact with it and how they can complete tasks and how quickly they complete tasks and whatever it might be. And when you start to make different trade-offs, for example, maybe it's slightly easier for me to go through and send this transaction. If you're trying to create like a Venmo-style application, maybe you have some sort of contacts extraction and it's done that way and maybe users have handles a bit like I think BottlePay have it where they integrated like bottle play handles and then as well like yeah there are some really

cool ones right but like what's happening on the background and i think as a user i'm i like those experiences but at the same time if i realize that that experience has just cost me a bit of privacy then maybe my user experience begins to change and i had that with uh when i first got into bitcoin and then kind of into crypto and stuff um maybe we can talk about how johnson i met sometime um that was my favorite wallet at the time was exodus and that was just because they had like a really big design team or maybe not a big design team but they had a very like skilled design team and it was the first wallet that i kind of interacted with this was kind of also before i had hardware it was the first wallet that i interacted with where i was

like wow i feel safe in this application and i feel like i know exactly what's happening and i know how to send a transaction and i had to receive bitcoin from my friend um and then i realized that they had address reuse and as soon as i figured that out i was like all right i'm no longer using exodus this does not feel like home anymore this this is not an application i want to use and obviously then kind of bought hardware and i've had different experiences with them but But all in all, I would say that Ledger, or sorry, Trezor is probably one of my favorites. It's well-funded. I've tried Kasa as well.

That was pretty cool, especially for like multi-sig, which can sometimes be a bit cumbersome with the UX. There are some really great ones out there. I think it's just a question of like weighing up what the user knows and how informed they are about the privacy and the security. and then trying to then make that as nice looking as possible and as easy to use as possible yeah yeah because that's the other thing good design could make you comfortable like exodus and then you find out one day holy i've been everybody is sending me bitcoin

notes how much bitcoin i have exactly dangerous as well right yeah yeah so it could potentially be dangerous because now you can't fix that. It's on the ledger. You can't do anything about the past. You can do some forward-facing stuff and preventative things. But by providing such interfaces and not informing people about it, you're kind of taking away their choice. and i think privacy is the choice to reveal or not reveal but if you don't communicate that say like hey by using this application or by you know sending this address or whatever this is what happens you know um but yeah with regards to um applications that um i feel are like really nice in the space i think you mentioned pine yeah um i i saw this one like a couple years ago when i was

doing some research on these contact-based abstractions and stuff. And they were one of the first wallets to implement like cloud backups and contacts and stuff. And I'm like, this is awesome, right? This is what all Bitcoin applications should look like as a base, just as a base, right? Now, of course, there's some decisions like where the contact list store, this is before ellen url um oh sorry ellen uh lightning address and stuff like this you know but so where this contact store this is local to my device i'm not exactly sure but um but just like on the visual side i like um what that guy's done on that project very much you know yeah visually it's it's pretty stunning beautyon's a big fan of pine wild he's the one who made me uh

aware of it dove into that yeah but yeah these these are these are exciting like so as designers let me know check me if i'm wrong because i've been putting this out there for many months now like if you're a designer and you want to make your mark on the world coming to the bitcoin lightning application space is probably the best place to come because it's such a wide open canvas And there's so much to be done that if you want to, again, make your mark on the world as a designer, this is a perfect place to begin working is in your mind. Is that a correct assertion? A hundred percent. Even if you're a developer, application developer, this is where it's happening.

You know, to that point, I think a lot of people think that, you know, developing on Bitcoin or designing on Bitcoin is a difficult endeavor. and one thing one of the reasons why it's called bolt.fun and why it has this cartoony look is to be a bit more welcoming and friendly to make something the bolt there isn't because of the bolt in the name isn't because of the lightning bolt right you know like for it's not that it's actually like basis of lightning technology that's like that's the acronym that we actually use it for it right of course we play with the name um the word a little bit so i think we're the only bitcoin project that does not use the lightning in their um uh like emojis and the buttons to vote and stuff like that um we use like nuts and bolts for builders but um yeah like

there's this perception that Bitcoin is slow, inflexible. You cannot build anything interesting on top of it. And now we have the Lightning Network, that narrative's like changing a bit because the rate of innovation is happening a lot faster there. And we're seeing some very cool developments being made on it and around it, right? that we that has taken quite a long time for those similar things to be done on chain so um so yeah i think um this kind of like a friendly environment and and and showing that it's a

uh ecosystem that's inclusive that can help you um uh get on boarded and stuff like that is like is is is super critical um and to do so we're gonna need to kind of like massage the language a little bit you know um it's it's uh it's secure not slow for instance you know yeah language is important exactly exactly so um so hopefully we get to change some of that narrative a bit and so how is the growth of bolt fun been uh since you guys launched it it seems pretty active i mean i was just uh perusing through the site all morning it seems like there's a lot going on i saw a peer tube integration that you guys are pumping obviously you guys have legends of lightning going on until december 7th all right yeah big up big up folga ventures as well because

a yeah they um they provided the majority of the um the prize money 2.5 bitcoin um for prizes and then we partnered up with the afro bitcoin conference um and it's i think that allowed this thing to get to the level where it is now because before that we were still in like building phase and ed could probably talk about the numbers and stuff um uh from before you wanna you wanna take it yeah i mean i think i've been involved in quite a few projects as an attempted entrepreneur and things like that and i think bolt fun's probably the first project where um it's gaining like the the traction and the feedback that i think um it's been the effort matches the effort that's being put into it and um i'm glad it's heading that way i think there's

still loads of growth to to go um with regards to the activity and stuff it's really great to see that especially i think it kind of comes around the time of these events uh there's money being floated around as prizes uh people have an incentive to be on the platform and to build in public and stuff. And that's actually kind of one of the reasons why we started these longer format tournaments as well was because we were running these hackathons, sort of more traditional style hackathons earlier in the year called Shock the Web. And they were really focused at lightning on web. So using technologies like WebLN, there was a bit of LNURL as well. But it was kind of a much more narrow scope of field. And those ran for like four days to a week. So they were still

slightly longer than your average hackathon format but really condensed and really intense and there were also some prizes um and we just saw these like huge spikes of kind of builder activity um people were joining our discord and people were kind of building applications and submitting projects and talking to people and it was kind of getting bustling and going but then right after these events we just had these huge drop-offs where people's projects and themselves were probably burning out they weren't really committing new designs new code and when you want the bitcoin and the lightning application layer and space to be kind of bustling and new people coming in because i think activity attracts new activity and i think that

it's this kind of snowball that needs to keep getting pushed and once you get it to a stage where people are kind of pushing it themselves that's really what you want to get to as a platform and as a community and i i hope that this tournament will kind of do that like we haven't we've been prompting people a little bit to carry on posting on the platform but people have also been doing it themselves and people have been taking the initiative to their own hands so um it's great to see the growth is coming there's still loads more to be done um but yeah it's it's really it's really been exciting to be involved in it so far yeah let's talk about the tournament more so what exactly are people building towards how are people going to win bitcoin

by contributing to this tournament or participating in it? Yeah, so the tournament runs for, I think it's nine weeks. So it started on October 12th. Yeah, so a week ago today. And it runs up until December 7th. If you haven't registered,

you can still register. It's not too late to take part. The project entries open and they'll basically stay open until November the 24th. And then we've got a pretty cool roster of judges who are going to come and they're going to, yeah, they're going to evaluate a bunch of the projects. We've got two tracks as well, which is worth mentioning.

So when you enter your project into the tournament, you can either enter the global adoption track or the building for Africa track. The global adoption one is sponsored by Folga and then the building for Africa is sponsored by the Africa Bitcoin conference. were going to host a hackathon as well kind of at the exact same time as us and we just thought let's just merge efforts um and just sort of pull the prize money um so the two tracks are going to get evaluated between the 24th and the 28th of november um and then we're going to announce a short list of finalists from so probably between eight to ten for each track um and then on

december 6th after a week of kind of refining their project adding to it getting their pictures together they're then going to be able to pitch them live and then we'll announce the winners the next day so uh both tracks will have ten thousand dollars in prizes and then uh additionally on top of that uh from those finalists we're gonna pick uh around about ten thousand did i say that wrong no no i'm always just like ten like like these numbers like what it's just it's crazy it's it's just absolutely crazy our first event our first two events it was like two thousand six hundred dollars in prizes we uh we funded the first one ourselves we got um max from hive mind and um oleg from fulger chipping in on the second one and then like now it's like 60k with two tracks

of 10k it's like what is what i like like what you're saying hey the price could pump between now and then this could be this could be 120 000 worth of prizes this is wow hey why stop why stop there man um but go ahead and say like no no i just i saw you hitting your head i was like man did i say something wrong uh no but there's gonna be an extra uh yeah so basically from those finalists there's also gonna be the legend who's gonna bag one whole bitcoin uh and then there are be two runners-ups as well who are going to take home half a bitcoin each so some pretty huge prizes uh we've got loads of different criteria for people to um take a look at uh that's going to be sort of product market fits uh execution of the idea design um build in public so that's

going to be that's going to be a big one essentially we're trying to kind of drive people to build their their products and applications out in the open again because there is a lack of consolidated resources in the space it's hard to kind of learn as well how to do these things so when people start building in public not only does it kind of follow that bitcoin ethos the open source ethos but um it also allows a lot of other people in the space to be like oh cool that's how they implemented the LNURL auth. Or which is an issue we're having at the moment is a few hackers are like, oh, I don't know how to implement LNURL auth. It's like, okay, well, has someone else done it? Yeah, they have. Cool. Well, let's just point you at their article that

they wrote on how to implement it. And where are you guys seeing, there's people from all over the world coming to focus on this. You guys have like a number countries or anything everywhere baby everywhere we got folks from india um coming in um uh there's uh there's quite a number um from africa uh us um i'm not sure if there's any south american teams or central american teams um all over europe um it was wild so i was um i was uh in bulgaria over the weekend for um a bitcoin conference there put on by plamen um really cool guy um and um uh someone reached out to me and said like uh hey could we meet for a coffee or whatever i'm like yeah sure no worries and apparently he was from the bold fun community and he's like yeah i'm

taking part in the hackathon i'm like wait what i didn't i didn't but like for me like my mind keeps getting blown when like this happens because i'm like you know we're doing these this digital thing right we're we're pushing pixels we're writing code we're doing live streams or whatever but it's all pixels right and then you like see someone irl you're like wait what like that's the i mean this is real like yeah it's a great thing about commerce like we met in riga uh it was funny to hear your story how you ended up in serbia uh yeah yeah it's just great getting to meet people in person that like for me riga is always an incredibly humbling experience because i get to meet people listen to the podcast from all over that part of the world and it's always crazy

to me like oh you're from serbia you're from finland you're from bulgaria you're listening to the show it's it it is really special what's going on here there's people all over the world saying hey this thing's important we need to make it happen it's just regular dudes like us three Yeah. You know, somebody described this, I can't remember who, so I can't cite them, but someone said Bitcoin's like a social network. I was thinking about that. I'm like, holy hell, it is, right? Because we're all part of this kind of Bitcoin community, right? And it doesn't matter where it is. It is technology-based in terms of the protocol itself, but our communication mechanisms are not on the protocol only it's like in real life at

conferences at events at meetups you know at co-working spaces and all that and it's it's very interesting to see like all of us with this aligned interest in bitcoin bitcoin adoption etc um just like uh interacting in various locations i've been at like a bunch of conferences this year and i'm meeting some of the same people in like different countries as well you know and i'm like oh yeah boomy i'm gonna see you in like two months now it's fine we didn't meet up you know it's like it's it's very interesting well it's fun it's exciting it's uh fun definitely feels like there's a purpose here and meeting people in real life really reinforces that no um there aren't oh no i was just gonna say there aren't too many other

even sort of areas of technology or finance where i don't know maybe maybe you would but if you ever heard someone at like a thanksgiving dinner some long-lost relative who's talking about credit default swaps you probably wouldn't go up to them and be like bro i'm also into credit default swaps like let's go let's go chat on the couch like no but if they're into bitcoin you're like cool this guy's also down the rabbit hole like i fuck with that so it's kind of like a really unique community in that sense yeah it is and so i mean as you mentioned it we should hear the story of how you two met what what's uh what's the origin story of the bolt fun team meeting um i was just i just kind of hung my boots up from another project i was working on

um which was also in the it was actually sort of in the ethereum space um i had done that for a couple of yeah yeah i had done that for a couple well wait till you hear it i was uh kind of came in through bitcoin went into ethereum was working in that space for a while and then kind of left this job and there was a hackathon that was organized it was kind of around it was like this was probably nearly three years ago and it was kind of when like eth2 nodes were about to get deployed or not get deployed and anyway i signed up for this hackathon and johns and i were put on the same team um and we ended up i think we can say we won the hackathon we were like the only project that actually finished a working prototype so i think by default we won

and then after that we were like yeah let's just work together johns was kind of like yeah i just want to work on bitcoin and i was also pretty interested to do that i kind of got a little bit disillusioned by the ethereum stuff so uh we kind of changed tack kind of a bitcoin only design agency peak shift um and then two and a half years later we actually met for the first time in real life which was cool like you're talking about being in the pixel space um had this like really close relationship with someone behind the screen for ages and then we finally met up in uh bulgaria and then we headed out to istanbul for the the former hack day which was really fun earlier this yeah what was it like meeting a person for the first time was it big hugs i think i think john's

was slightly shorter than i expected but oh man come on i'm i'm apparently like the shortest person you're not that short yeah i think you're taller than me i i thought i wasn't that short and then like everyone in the company that i meet i'm like holy hell why is everyone taller than me like i'm getting like napoleon complex now yeah no but um you know uh uh yeah yeah like just just being able to like meet and and and stuff it's uh like yeah that was really special and um we've we've been working together for yeah like you said like almost is it going up to four years now i think and um i know three years yeah going up to three years yeah and um i don't know it's it becomes kind of normal now doesn't it you know it becomes kind of normal where you like you know

how to interact with this person you know the jokes that this person likes you know you know these kind of things so it's like yeah it's uh we're in a metaverse right and we just took it to The meatspace meetups are always better, in my opinion. Exactly. Exactly. But hopefully we get to meet up more as a community. What I really like is that there's a bunch of different events, like satellite events that are popping up all over the world now, like Pleb Weekend a couple of weeks ago.

They had like a Legends of Lightning-esque thing there. uh i think one in tel aviv israel popping off as well um uh bit bit miami i think they're called um uh there's there's some events that are happening there mentorship sessions etc um it's just really cool to see like people kind of like running with this i i like to say this um we're not trying to be like a centralizing uh event or whatever that takes everything and like we want to do everything ourselves we just want to coordinate the community to innovate and get together and help one another out to build cool and i think um uh in our first event roy roy put this really well he's like the thing that bit or like the lightning network needs is traffic

how do you get traffic right it's uh through use uses and use cases and stuff like that getting built on it right so i'm very interested in um uh very local solutions being made even if it's for like your own like you know your own your own problem that you're trying to solve or whether it's a problem for your local community like the community banking stuff whatever i'm very interested in like people applying bitcoin to like local problems or use cases where it kind matters or where it solves the problem for them and i want to see that happen like globally right and that i think is a good strategy for um onboarding people um getting people kind of like understanding because it can't be top down where like it's uh only english-speaking

people are producing content for like the whole world and telling them how to use bitcoin or whatever or this is this is how the ui should be and you shouldn't have xyz features because um you know that's not what the rest of the no maybe there's a certain feature that's very relevant to that local community right um there's a there's a talk going on on stable sets right now um uh from nicholas and galoi and we were talking about like do you need to have this uh like usd balance in a wallet for these local community banks and the thing is if you're not able to just be a hodler and you can't go to zero on fiat right because you have to pay for diapers you have to you know pay your rent and stuff

like that you know or you can't just be exposed to that volatility right then And yes, you do need that U.S. balance in your wallet, you know? No, I think that use case specifically is something that opened up my mind to break me free from like my Western view of how I approach Bitcoin because I used to have Matt Alborg on the show. He's up at Refill now, but a couple of years ago, he came on a few times to talk about stablecoin adoption in nigeria and venezuela and argentina and that really was like an aha moment for me like oh

people are using bitcoin as a rail but they do need that stability at the end day and like you said like with the community banks what fediment and fedi are trying to do there the way obi describes the specific problems and how trust is different in different parts of the world there's going to be many different experiences touching all the stacks or all the layers of stack in bitcoin and it's beautiful to see that you guys have created bolt fun to to get people from all over the world to to focus on this and with legends of lightning i really like the two tracks you have global adoption and then something that's africa specific so what what are are you guys able to disclose what people are building on both tracks to to sort of go after these two

specific problems yeah for sure i think there are some uh with regards to specific projects uh some people haven't uh specialized or at least kind of said what their track is going to be yet but i guess we can kind of assume um there are some really cool ones there's one uh dan gold's project no looking that looks really interesting it's on sort of opening lightning channels using a page line um there is one called light sets which is about kind of tipping people or sort of basically how to kind of onboard strangers without having to necessarily go into like download a wallet first and that type of stuff um there are a lot of projects in the bitcoin designathon which is kind of happening right now one which i'm particularly excited

about is the they're developing a game called saving satoshi which is kind of like an interactive um code engine type thing where they can kind of take you through a lot of the chapters in bitcoin's history and like solving certain bugs and seeing like kind of what went wrong which is great so for people who are kind of developers or maybe have some uh experience developing then they can kind of like take through that journey um there is uh i think i just saw tower wallet which is one of danny dz's projects uh he i think they're gonna enter that um i think galoy are trying to maybe issue a bounty with collider to try and get some people using stable sats on there um hopefully we'll see a whole bunch of tarot projects um

i hope i'm not missing too many like really obvious ones but well of course there's like like a whole bunch i think there's um last time i checked which was i think yesterday or so it There was like more than 20, a couple that kind of like could show some distinctions between global adoption and like local projects would be, for example, there's like gift cash. So yeah, I just pulled up here. It's an easy way for companies and individuals to create and send Bitcoin gift cards. And they're going to do some stuff with like LNURL withdraw, right? So you'd be able to create these gift cards, send them out or print them out or whatever.

And you scan it with your wallet and you'll be able to get the gift cards. Yeah, exactly. Then there's also one called Agriment, that's the guy I met in Bulgaria. They're doing, it's a bit, it seems like a lot, but they're doing this USD based mobile interface, USSD, this kind of like text message kind of a protocol. So they're using this for interacting with Bitcoin and the this agreement system there. The agreement system itself is using like Chowmian, Federated Chowmian Mint. So maybe something like Cashew or Feddy or something like that.

And they're going to have some kind of like lending component to it. And the idea is that they're giving like cashew farmers in Tanzania access to capital and loans and stuff like that for their farming stuff. That seems really cool. Yeah, exactly. Right. And the USSD part is very, this is the component that's, you know, very local, right? it's uh and and um especially in um east africa uh most of the payments are at least digital payments are being done through mobile money whether it's uh mtn or um oh i forget the other one um but yeah mtn and mpesa mpesa yes exactly all right um so uh that's like a very local one So if you integrate with a local community to get your stuff deployed, for example, this one I love as well, Bitcoin Mountain.

So Bitcoin Mountain is a new community banking initiative that's happening in Cameroon, I want to say. And what I love about that is that it doesn't have to be a fully technical thing to get started up on the hackathon. um sorry on the legends of lightning tournament right you could just be like okay i have an idea i want to start this initiative to um you know onboard my local community onto bitcoin and create the circular economy maybe eventually we get to the bank part of it but hey let me print out some flyers for merchants let me print out some qr codes of lightning addresses let me um do some uh workshops and stuff to educate people and how this could be useful etc etc and the different use cases and that doesn't necessarily have to touch anything besides a design tool right but

it's still going to count for local adoption which is what we need a global adoption or local adoption whichever but that's what we need we need people to from all parts of the stack all parts of um all skill levels and all roles we need them to come into bitcoin because there's a deficit of them you know companies like people are like the top talents are just moving between companies constantly right but like they need new talent to come in also right um and a lot of companies before this bear market were having a lot of issues hiring people finding people right so we need people in marketing growth this sales uh development of course design etc etc because it takes a diverse group of people to create great products right yeah different products

for different localities exactly no it was really cool to see bit knobs and pays a integration get launched a few weeks ago i think that's gonna be massive exactly for what they're doing and it's it feels like it's happening especially like the cliche trope of building in the bear mark but really does seem on lightning specifically everything that i'm seeing coming out right now is is mind-blowing it's hard to keep up with everything that's being built wait what's um did you see that video with like the bear clawing at this guy well what kind of projects uh like are you interested to see with this kind of like explosion on the application layer and stuff and bitcoin or what what do you yeah what kind of

stuff are you hoping to see i really like that that mountain bitcoin idea again it's just education it's getting people aware of it like hey this is something that you should be paying attention to probably playing around with at least bit hopefully adopting at some point in the near to medium term i'm actually really excited and i'm interested to get your guys thoughts on this has actually been lingering in the back of my mind to bring up is uh adding an nfc component to the design landscape like you see coin corner with their with their card uh coin kite with their sats card and their tap signer adding this ability to either sweep funds via nfc pay with nfc or sign uh a key with nfc that's uh an area of the design space that i'm really excited about have you guys

explore that at all yeah i'm i'm also really excited about that i actually haven't really tried it out myself i think uh they've kind of been i saw quite a few coin corner cards floating around bitcoin amsterdam and stuff like that but um there was actually a guy who and i guess uh shout out i think it's this saturday evening in lone tree colorado he organized this uh crypto beer kings event like a satellite event for legends of lightning um and they're actually using i think nfc tech in like inside of kind of event wristbands so people who maybe have no experience using lightning or whatever it is maybe they just like beer and they want to go for a couple drinks um yeah they'll they'll get like an event ticket which is kind of this a little bit

like a festival wristband you'd usually get and they can just basically go around and sweep and pay for things and stuff using their wristband which is like that's crazy like that's actually really cool to to think about that yeah i think coin corner just teased like a ring that they have too that's nfc enabled you can uh oh man who needs an apple watch when you put nfc right i i go i go one finger missing one ring missing there yeah i'll definitely get that stuff excites me um i've really been excited about fedements chamiaments um and how they're going to be adopted uh obviously there's a lot of controversy over the custody trade-off but i think it's worthwhile particularly in certain parts of the world where trust models are different than they are here in

the west and so i'm really excited to see that get launched in the next few months here and see people experimenting with that because i think just within those mints by themselves the the design landscape in there you can be a bit more creative and really excited to see how creative people get with designing on within these mints yeah um i think um earlier this week um leo from lightning labs did uh talk on um tyro as well um i think that's gonna uh i i find it quite interesting and i'm i'm also interested to see how um the narratives around these things um kind of form as well um because it's like uh so we have this series called tokens on bitcoin um uh some people say it's assets or whatever but in reality we know what it is um i'm very interested to see

see what comes out of that, but also, yeah, what that does to the kind of like the ecosystem. We were talking about it as well that, you know, we have to, all right, so let me back up a little bit. So there's tokens that are going to be on Bitcoin. That's going to open up a new like design space, but it's also space that, you know, these folks in the Web free land in the crypto ethereum solana land um they might start developing an interest now right because if you're if your blockchain quote unquote blockchain is shutting down it's down for four hours a week it's freaking insane right now so they have like this um kind of like speculative or um whatever incentive to um to to to come over to build bitcoin now

Um, what is that going to do? And are we able as a community to instill some of the principles and philosophies that we developed and, uh, uh, uh, you know, um, uh, maintained over these years, are we able to kind of like instill them in those projects now? Because in inviting new people in, right. We also have to kind of like, we can't really control what gets built, what people do with it. Right.

That's the whole idea about Bitcoin. And for me, I just want to see everything come to Bitcoin. That's my philosophy, right? But like, yeah, yeah. How do we kind of like instill those principles so we don't see like a ton of like absolute crap come in? Right? Like that series could have been called

shit coins are coming to Bitcoin as well, right? They're being very particular with the language. Yeah, but it's true. So it's going to be interesting over the next year. And so what starts to happen and that's like on Bitcoin, on Lightning and with things like Taro as well. Yeah. I mean, I've never been more bullish. And another thing while it's on top of my mind, I mean, Ed, you mentioned it earlier, like communicating, particularly around the Lightning Network liquidity. That's another area of design that I think needs a lot of work. Like how do you get users to conceptualize the idea of two-sided channels and balancing those channels and being aware of it on the go and understanding what's happening when they can't send a transaction due to a channel imbalance or something like that.

yeah yeah absolutely and i was having a conversation with uh alan from lightning network plus last night as well and he was we were kind of saying oh yeah if there could be a tool that you would build for the legends of lightning or if you could see it being built like what would you do and he was talking about uh having an application that lets him know when his channel is basically being depleted or all sorts of things and it's like wow this this is someone who's super technical and can probably access a lot of this information and they're actually still asking for this thing to be built um i'm i don't operate my own node um so i feel very hypocritical when i talk about obviously that type of stuff but i have been really interested in doing it for a really long

time um i think uh i haven't tried it yet again myself but i want to run a node at home uh and i think i'd probably maybe go for an option like umrel uh there is a lot of really cool stuff with like cloud sort of node infrastructure with voltage uh particularly uh ellen bits um i think there are loads of resources that people can kind of pick up and use if if they don't have that like reliable sort of home connection then maybe that's the better option um but it's there's still so much to be done and i think it kind of reminds me of probably what the on-chain space was quite a few years ago where you had a very small handful of people that were kind of experimenting with this and now the pool is really growing especially in lightning um but it's still quite

manual and it's still quite sort of unobstructed from what it actually kind of not necessarily should be but at least you know my grandmother is not gonna set up a lightning node i fucking wish she would, but she's probably not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. Right. Um, but if I can see her before, before she kicks the can, if I can ever see her send a lightning payment, that would be sweet. So, um, I know, uh, like, like Breeze is a full node running on a mobile device, right?

So like, how do we define node? Do we define node as a Raspberry Pi, right? When the majority of people are running, like, are using this, right? what most people have yeah it's another i mean that's another thing thinking about design and breaking free from like the western view of the world like most of the world is going to be mobile first probably using an android device yeah yeah and and and um even obi talks about this you know like uh you're doing hardware wallets and stuff like that not even a node or hardware wallet um shipping stuff to like uh some places like they never arrive right um then there's a whole

whole bunch of taxes that you have to pay on top of it if you're like buying it for yourself or whatever um and uh sometimes like if they like uh we have this problem in saint lucia they'll classify something um incorrectly because they don't know what it is and give you like a um a higher um uh charge on taxes and not everyone's able to pay um pay this so then they don't get their products right um so and that that's one issue but then the other issue is that you um uh uh the things just don't show up right you order it and it gets lost in the shipment you know or never delivered it's lost at heathrow airport exactly exactly so um well actually like on the docks usually it arrives on the docks then it disappears you know so so yeah um so not

yeah not everyone is going to be able to like have hardware devices or get raspberry price i heard even the prices of Raspberry Pi devices are like skyrocketing as well because um chip shortage and all that chip shortage but also a bunch of Bitcoiners are wearing Raspberry Pis yeah it's uh there's so much to think about oh yeah going back to like low-hanging fruit I mean we're talking about lightning and Ed you said on-chain is pretty developed but even on-chain like I'd like to see as somebody runs a business accepting Bitcoin on-chain and lightning But for on-chain, running through my BTC Pay server, there's some low-hanging fruit there that could really, well, it's a combination of the hardware while it's at BTC Pay server. I think Trezor in their suite, they need to automatically increase their gap limit or make it easier for business owners using BTC Pay server like myself to increase the gap limit when I go into Trezor suite.

because people will create invoices, not pay them, and then Trezor won't recognize the paid invoices, which are like 100 addresses down. The gap limit isn't that big. So I plug it in, and it's like, oh, the Bitcoin's not there. It is there. I just got to plug it into Sparrow or something like that and increase the gap limit using that.

So that's like an easy UX fix. I think it's low-hanging fruit. Again, BTC Pay server receiving on-chain payments that range anywhere from like $5 to $100. I would like little reminders like, hey, you have X amount of UTXOs that are equal to Y amount of Bitcoin. You should probably consolidate these so that you can spend them in the future, too. So we don't have like dust, like the problem that Coinbase, I mean, Coinbase had this problem in 2017 where they had something like $20 million worth of UTXOs they couldn't spend because fees were too high because they didn't consolidate UTXOs smartly. Yeah. I mean, that whole fees are too high thing is also a bunch of yes.

Why do you say that? No, because one, it's difficult to do an algorithm to do a fee calculation, right? To say, this is the estimated fee for... Fee estimation, it's a difficult thing to do, because now you have to predict what the market price is going to be, right? And you're going to have to drive that down optimally. Now, if your code has a bug or if you just don't pay attention to these things and then you're like, yeah, if you don't pay attention to it and you have some wrong configurations, then people are definitely overpaying, right? And the algorithm should be being optimized downwards and so i don't know like uh uh also like in the like uh uh like the fees

too large um space uh what unlike uh on ethereum the fees were like what 100 bucks 200 bucks or whatever you know i mean like the current fees are cheap oh i know that yeah i had a uh i don't know know if you guys ever tried out the argent wallet uh it was like on ethereum a few years ago they they had these things called they use smart contracts and you have these things called like guardians where so instead of taking down a seed phrase i can just i can get my mom to download a wallet and my dad or whatever and i can create make them guardians so then they kind of become these like multi-signature guardians of my account whatever it is guardians of the galaxy anyway the uh they i think i staked maybe like a couple hundred bucks of uh what is it some

crappy coin just to try and get some yield when that was kind of happening and i then try to cash it out because i remember i was like oh fuck i had this argent wallet it's probably got a few hundred bucks in it i think eth had spiked at the time so i was like great i'm definitely going to get this out probably pay for my holiday or something and i think i had like over 500 in this wallet but the transaction fee was higher for extracting the funds the transaction fee from getting it out of that smart contract was higher than the actual funds itself and i was like well this is just lost like this is dead money like what am i gonna do try to contact argent they're like yeah we're gonna deploy version two sorry to any of the argent guys i'm sure you're doing a

great job but like it's like that's crazy like people are slamming bitcoin for having these huge fees when i was about to pay like 400 for extracting some shit coin out of a smart contract like that's that's not right and you know we talk about like high transaction fees it's like well it's not really a high fee you're probably just like john said check the mempool like do it on a sunday morning uh even like even in europe you should do it in the morning before the u.s wakes up um know when to do it because i have sent bitcoin before where i've been sweating because it's been like stuck stuck in some long queue because i put i try to be smart and put like too low of a transaction fee on it but but yeah when you come back to ux and you think why am i

paying 10 bucks for a transaction it's like well actually i don't have to be paying that um maybe some wallet is trying to make a bit of a run on me or trying to abstract a little bit too much where they think that that's going to be safe enough to push it through in the next 10 minutes and get a confirmation. But you could definitely lowball it as long as it's not too low and get stuck there. But yeah.

It'd be like Catan, just one set per byte every transaction. That's cool. Okay, so a couple of things Ed mentioned here that I think we as a community need to kind of like, again, this was language, right? That we need to kind of like maybe build some campaigns and stuff around um so he's talking about like a multi-sig that you create like some smart contract

and stuff with uh whatever right here's the thing multi-sigs are inherent in bitcoin right you and you do it off chain you don't need to pay a transaction fee for a multi-sig to deploy a multi-sig smart contract and here's the beautiful thing that smart contract thing as well it exists on bitcoin on chain we have smart contracts already the whole transaction that you look at right it has like a whole like it doesn't like it's not Turing complete but also we don't need that right we don't need a Turing complete thing because we're seeing all the shit that's happening also so we need to do a good job and saying like instead of yeah we need to look at what we have in Bitcoin and yes we do have smart contracts right and what's an example of a smart contract

it's a multisig and you know how great it is you can pay four bucks right in transaction fees and get a thousand people right you can break btcd and lnd at the same time okay well relax come on relax come on we're trying to evangelize here come on but anyway you can have a thousand people on a multi-sig, right? And it costs 400, uh, uh, four bucks. Yeah. So that's 490 cents. That's less than half a penny per person. Boom. Let's go. Yeah. Right. That seems pretty fast and cheap to me. Yeah. That seems very flexible. Yeah. That seems very flexible. And what's even crazier with taproot and and stuff like that those um 998 uh uh keys or whatever could also be like branches of other keys right yeah so it's like what yeah we're just scratching the surface and

that's again i'm not trying to blow smoke up your guys ass but i'm extremely happy that we have designers of your caliber focusing on these problems because they need they need attention and they need like design thinking brought to them like ed you mentioned like a lot of the bitcoin developers want people to interact with cli it's like that's not going to happen people aren't going to be hopping in the command line and running cli commands to to send transactions some people will with a very small majority or minority excuse me yeah it's um it's yeah like thanks for um the the the kudos and stuff like that but it's not going to be us solving all of these problems. There's too many things, different pieces of Bitcoin that we need to work through

under whether it's user experience or to put to use. We need to put these things to use because we have smart contract, we have multi-sig. I want to see thousands of wallets, local wallets, solving multi-sig things, taproot things, smart contract things, et cetera. We need people to do that and i really hope that um we could be inviting for people to come in uh for me personally again it's just um whatever you do it should be on bitcoin right um and uh yeah come in build um make stuff help out with the ux help the adoption because this is the strongest money the the the hardest money and uh the best foundation that there is to build on right and it's exciting and it's fun it's flexible it's fast payments are lightning fast right now so you know let's

get more people to be hyped up about this hyped up about building in bitcoin hyped up to to to design stuff and want to be part of the space yeah no i'm all for it let's make it happen Are you guys seeing anybody from your design circles begin to be like, all right, I'm ready to become focused on this and begin working on these problems? Do you see more interest from the design side of things? I spoke, I'll just touch on this one. I spoke to, so I have a friend, he's like skeptical

about anything Bitcoin related, anything crypto, all this. He's like, oh, shut up, it's going to get regulated away. but I put him in contact with this agreement project and I'm like hey check this project out they're doing some really cool stuff in Africa there he focused on the use case

he's like oh that's interesting okay I want to help this project out you know he's still not a Bitcoiner he's still not a Bitcoiner but I think that's a good strategy to get people in as well right? A particular use case hey we want to help farmers finance their

operations you know can abstract bitcoin away like okay i can get down with it exactly and then he's going to learn about it learn about its impact etc then oh maybe uh this bitcoin thing ed what do you got uh i think there's definitely a lot more interest around it i think one thing that i would say or that at least i've found is that it's it's a really exciting space to be in because it's still like we're still so early i think people struggle to wrap their heads around that sometimes like there needs to be more design and more developers in the space but there's also loads of room for growth um as john said it's fast it's flexible uh there are new ways that you can use it there are old ways that you can repurpose things um i think it's just a question

of like sort of spiking people's curiosity and and getting them involved and and realizing that they can have a voice kind of in this space and i think that sometimes it's quite intimidating when you go to slightly larger spaces and you're like god this is such a diluted pool of talent how is my nft platform going to stand out from everyone else's and it's like well Well, it's somewhat overcrowded. And I think that one of the benefits of Bitcoin is that it attracts really like a high caliber of talent. And I think that it's surprising how once you're in the space,

it actually doesn't feel as big as you might think it is. And it's, you know, you two meeting in Serbia or um meeting people at meetups who you've been kind of like because i think sometimes you sort of evangelize people behind screens and behind pixels and you're like oh wow they've got like 50 000 followers on twitter maybe they're like really successful and stuff and then you meet them in real life and you're like oh they're just a normal person and i can do that too and and that was that was kind of my initial reaction when i got involved in the bitcoin design community i remember going to johnson being like god there are so many like really talented

designers in here like do i do i need a qualification to be in here or something it's like no you don't it's just just get involved just do your thing and i think people are really receptive like jump in people's discords like uh jump in the telegram groups get reach out to them on twitter like people are super friendly and i think that they're really welcoming and everyone like everyone i've met in this space kind of extends an olive branch of some sort um and i would just suggest kind of taking advantage of that and coming in whilst it's early like it's fun to be early to a space um you're going to get a slightly bigger voice you're going to get more influence you're going to have more projects that you can work on um that really what is what

interests me like i'm probably not gonna be able to go into the fintech space and work on an application where i'm like wow i feel like i really developed some ux principle for fintech so no but i can probably do that in bitcoin and for me that's that's what i want at this this point in my life and in my career and i feel like that's what bitcoin is giving me so eternally grateful yeah no it's incredible thank you guys for doing what you're doing um again i don't want to belabor the point but i think design is extremely important and the efforts you guys are doing of a bold fun and legends of lightning is definitely going to push the ball forward and you mentioned tal wallet and danny actually recorded with him yesterday but you guys are

going to leapfrog his episode i'm going to post this on friday just for the timely nature of the tournament and everything going on yeah i just want to say um yeah with the legends and lightning tournament um uh the registration stuff is still open um if you have a project that you want to work on like jump in there just register as a maker um there's a list of other people that you could um link up with um it's going like several more weeks so it like you could you could jump in at any time um we do ask you to do kind of like be transparent with your building but that doesn't mean that you have to be like it doesn't have to be an open source project um and it doesn't have to be an ex um a new project it could be an existing project that

significantly update and what building in public means and like being transparent it's just uh sharing your wins your losses the problems that you have and your plans we use this for like um figuring out uh what kind of updates that you made uh during the time of the event and um uh there's like a bunch of like mentorship sessions a bunch of people in the space they want to help you there's a big big shout out to folga ventures like without them this wouldn't have been possible shout out a leg shout out like seriously shout out to all the judges there's like 20 something judges some top people in the freaking industry stacked yo i don't know how we pull this off it's really no idea it's quite impressive it's like it's crazy and don't think

of it as like a competition so much it is a tournament yes don't think of it like that Think about it like an accelerator or an incubator, because we want to help all those projects be successful. We want to help you be sustainable. So for example, if you're not looking for investment funding for a business venture or something, you might want to do open source crowdfunding. We linked up with Geyser, geyser.fund.

We linked up with OpenSats. and they're going to be doing some presentations to help you create your campaigns and stuff, right? So if you wanna get some advice on that. Of course, if you wanna talk to investors, this is a great platform. We got Max from Hivemind. We got Mike from Lightning Ventures.

We got Oleg, the beast, the dog, Oleg in there from Folger. from fulgur um we got who else uh still mark in there as well um so we got some top players um so if you're a project and you want to be um like be in front of these people um you know hop in you know and again it's about helping you be sustainable helping you build bitcoin projects that are everlasting and um and can help with adoption yeah and you can do this at bolt you sign up via bolt.fun correct bolt.fun that's it fun is mandatory fun is in the name yeah you can either go to bolt.fun which is kind of our parent domain or you can just go straight to makers.bolt.fun uh which is kind of like the the makers portal it's kind of like the web app

where people can interact and write stories and join up tournaments and team up and things like that so uh yeah we're actually going to be also releasing a feature probably um pretty soon um it's kind of already out it's a sleeping beast but uh we're going to announce it later today but people can yeah start adding their projects to our directory and stuff which has probably been one of our biggest use cases but it's taken a while to get around to it and shout out to a lot of the developers last week who um yeah we we had to put out a lot of back-end fires last week so But that was great. That was also another reason why we need this community, right?

Because we had this issue with our API and our back end. And we were like, wow, we don't know how to fix this. So we just posted in our Discord with like 350 devs. And then immediately we got like five responses being like, yeah, this is how you can optimize your queries. You should switch your server locations. All of these things that we couldn't really think about by ourselves. And we're like, wow, we should lean on our community a bit more. They're really good.

Yeah. I mean, that's going to be great for you guys. Just like, hey, can you help us with our site? Yeah. Well, this has been fascinating. John, thanks for reaching out. I'm happy that we were able to get this done so quickly because I think, again, this is an important initiative. And I'm really excited to see what gets built from the Legends of Lightning tournament.

and hopefully this is just one of many to come in the future. I really appreciate it. Yeah, definitely. We want to do like one every quarter, lasting for two months each. So that's the goal. We'll see if we could make that feasible. You know, we've been self-funded.

Oh, shit. I guess I haven't like properly announced it, but we got a grant from OKCoin. So big up to them as well. i have to give thanks because since uh uh believe it or not we've been self-funding this for the entire time yeah yeah yeah in a bear market as well so shout out to okay yeah but um you know the lights are gonna be still on let's go um but yeah we're hoping to um be able to get this um uh uh once every quarter and um yeah a big shout out to the community um

uh the different communities where it's bit um bit miami um uh uh the plebs in austin a whole bunch of them um uh total goes uh in el salvador all the different galoi all the companies that are helping us because my like dude like we don't have like that those media contacts and stuff like that we like we're product people right so um the kind of love that we've been getting from people like you um the rest of the community it's like it goes like such a long way you know we don't have marketing budgets or anything like that you know so it goes such a long way and we believe in this as something as a net good for bitcoin to help onboard people to help people with their projects and yeah all those people have been helping us out you've been helping us out by

giving you this as this platform so thank you so much for that really appreciate it no need to thank me i love what you guys are doing so it's a it's a natural fit to to talk about this so um yeah freaks go to bolt.fun if you're building something join the legends of lightning tournament and again this is the first of many so be on the lookout if you've got an idea in the back of your head and you're not ready to launch next quarter, maybe. What should we leave the freaks with? What should we end this on? I think that was a good way to end it.

All right. Gentlemen, go forth and keep crushing. Thank you so much. I appreciate it, man. Thank you very much for having us. Peace and love, freaks. Peaky!