TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #397: Nostr and Lightning Are The Real Web 3.0 with Myles Snider

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Join Marty as he sits down with Myles Snider for a very bullish discussion of Nostr and the Lightning Network. Check out Kollider 8:40 - Nostr's improved a lot 17:16 - The business opportunity of Nostr 19:46 - What makes a good relay? 24:15 - Nostr+LN is the real web 3.0 34:30 - Myles's background 37:35 - Proof of Stake is bad for the soul 44:28 - Finding LN 50:35 - Kollider 1:07:42 - Ordinals 1:18:37 - Bullish on lightning 1:35:46 - Nostr wishlist 1:42:53 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital River CrowdHealth Bitcoin Talent Co 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 great rip deep dive to all things noster lightning network touch on inscriptions and how bullish we are sat down with miles snyder from collider i think we're gonna do a lot of these episodes miles what'd you think logan did you like the conversation i did wait am i your mic's not on he's got it's unplugged it's unplugged you know you're not the way he liked it i've got to hop in the car here so we got to do a quick quick intro here i know you guys love listening to me for 10 minutes before each episode but i gotta make this one quick uncle marty's gotta go uh gonna read the top four boost grams from the last two episodes because i forgot to do it for the last one

rip 396 how to get hired in bitcoin with bitcoin talent co at mark c 5000 sats resume sent i wish you luck at loomer 2000 sats signal at dick rola 500 sats we're gonna win lightning bolt lightning bolt rocket ship emoji at get stalled 333 sats great rip any update on the design bounty uh yes there has been you can go to bitcoin talent co i believe it's at bitcoin talent co twitter page and the details to design bounty are there uh rip 395 how the jabs killed gut health with dr sabine hazan hazen excuse me at garth 20 000 sats prayer hands emoji at i am mr robot 8008 sats a nice boob boost uh jabs a booster's biggest perpetrated psyop in history it's definitely up there in my mind at blockchain bug 5000 sats pod fits nicely with the real

falchi book by bobby kennedy thank you doctor for being an independent thinker and following the data and not your ego at mark c 5000 sats found no agenda through you and decided not to poison myself because of them thanks let's just hope shedding isn't real you guys want to go listen to that episode a lot of jab talk can be getting here this was brought to you by our good friends at river river is a bitcoin company built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners the core of this company is an exchange if you want to buy bitcoin you're going to want to do it at river they build their own infrastructure they don't leverage any third parties like prime trust they built the exchange the right way they build it themselves if you

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and your company you should sign up for bitcoin talent co reach out to them they will create curated tracks for your individual company they will work to understand your needs and really find the best talent that you need and these guys are best suited to do it because they understand bitcoin and they have built bitcoin companies and they understand what each different company needs so go to bitcointalent.co tell them that tftc sent you and enjoy this rip with mile snyder you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free when you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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. Are we going to get Parker Lewis? Are we on? Yeah, we're on. Okay, cool. I think eventually we'll get him.

But I think it's useful to have voices like his right now. They're pushing back on it, you know? You know, what time is it? It's 10, 18. We just sat down with Parker for like half an hour trying to pitch Noster. He thinks it's a big distraction. And I think he he does have a fair point there. Like, I think that, you know, speaking as a Bitcoiner who's probably been pretty distracted by Nostra recently, I mean, it's not a full distraction because there's still so much Bitcoin crossover happening. but i do see his point with sort of shiny object syndrome and if there are people who are sort of

like building core lightning or bitcoin infrastructure that are now much more focused on building nostril infrastructure then maybe that does maybe bitcoin does lose out on something in the process yeah that's one thing i mentioned to him oh my god is bitcoin in the second layers obviously not fully fleshed out but fleshed out to a point where it's okay to go work on these shiny objects because it acts as an additive feature like we were saying yeah right before we hit record it seems like noster has been this trojan horse orange pill for a lot of people yeah and i think the question is like is maybe there's some uh attention that's being taken away from certain bitcoin development but on the whole is

noster net positive for bitcoin uh and i think it's definitely too early to say that but i think there's other ways in which it could be really good for bitcoin such as new people who have never been using lightning or bitcoin before who are being onboarded onto noster and are now orange build basically yeah yeah it's fast it's been fascinating to watch but like i also think you know parker had interesting points that i i think are important for people like us who are excited about noster to consider which is like thinking about you know what does it actually look like for people to be using Doster? Are people willing to pay for relays?

Like, does the end state of this actually look that decentralized or is it going to fall victim to a lot of the same centralization pressures that other kind of platforms and protocols have experienced? And I think all those are good questions. Very good questions. I'm not going to put words in Parker's mouth, but I do think he's discounting that that ability to let's say domus like he was using domus as an example becomes a centralized client and they create a relay on top of it that becomes hyper centralized

um that ability to exit via your private public key pairs is an extreme check on the balance of powers in that that arena of this communications protocol and the clients that'll be built on top of it so down the road if that situation does arise all it takes is somebody to spin up a new client in a different relay and you just port it over there yeah and there already are like there already are multiple clients thomas isn't the only client it's definitely the one that's most used but if you want to access the network you absolutely can access the network without touching thomas and the the kind of like example that i brought up was if you think about twitter right now if you say something that twitter doesn't like and it's whether jack's running it or elon's

running it like at the end of the day they can create the rules and if you say something they don't like they can ban you from the platform and that's that whereas like in this world it's almost like imagine that you controlled your account regardless and they could ban you from twitter but there's like twitter dark and there's twitter too and you can still access those and people who want to follow you can still follow you on those so it's sort of like that would actually be a much better situation than what we have with twitter right now yeah even if there were just a couple major clients that you could use but the core function of like banishing a user and making their existence disappear is taken away from any of those clients yeah no i think it's

important to really touch on the vernacular here like when you say like your followers can go follow you on those other clients there's no action needed they just need to access those other clients and if they're already following your pub key they'll be following you there they don't need to go find you yeah and actually it's really it's more likely i think in the master world that it wouldn't be the clients that would be banning you would be like the relays and so in theory a user could actually you know even if a relay bans you someone who's following you on some client can still use that same client and continue following you just making sure that they're connected to the new relay that you're connected to yeah that's funny now i'm thinking about it like they're not

following you in the sense that they're following your profile page yeah associated with your pub key they're like following you to that new relay yeah they're basically they're following a public key and they're telling a relay give me all the information you know about this public key and that relay needs to be one that you're writing to as well right because otherwise that relay is not going to have any information regarding your public key so it's like i've been spending a ton of time thinking about nostre recently and the simplest way i can describe it is that you basically have three components which is like the key pairs those are the users there's the clients that's how the users uh sort of like access the network those are the uis and then there's the relays which are

the servers and everything about noster comes down to the interaction between those three components and so a lot of i think figuring out one how to make this like usable just in general for everyday users um is a lot of thinking around how those components interact but then also i think even more importantly is like if this is going to be a very robust free speech protocol we need to make sure that there's ways in which users who have something to say who are followed by people can be banned by a client or by a relay and then the people who want to hear where they have to stay are still able to like find them and follow them and connect to the relays that they're connected to and right now a lot of that is kind of like technical and um a little bit like

you have to kind of understand these network components and figure them out but i think that there's ways that we could make that a lot more seamless yeah and i mean i was going back i thought i recorded my first episode with jb55 like a year ago but i went back looked through the tapes it was just six months ago yeah towards the end of the summer in 2022 and right after we recorded that episode i downloaded domus uh created my private public key pair my profile and sent out a few like hello world is this working uh messages on noster and seeing where domus particularly as client has come from that point to now like it's not hard to imagine that these experiences that you just described will will materialize at some point in the next 12 24 months absolutely i mean

i i only got onto domus like a month and a half ago when it finally was fully available in the app store um so prior to that i was just using web clients and even you know i basically was using like uh hamster snort social and iris switching between them and the amount of progress that has been made on just those three clients in like four months time is incredible and if you extrapolate that out i think that yeah there's a ton of improvements that can be made and these clients in some ways are sort of like competing with each other to offer the best user experience so that like forces them to to keep iterating and one thing that's been cool to see is that different clients handle these components we talked about in different ways you know some clients kind of

make relays really front and center and make that kind of a core part of you as a user figuring out how to use uh the platform is like selecting the relays some kind of abstract that and like the the competition between these uh clients i think will help us figure out which of those approaches actually make sense yeah and as we're finding it's important to connect to good relays yes i i actually uh i was gonna say i tweeted it but i didn't what's what's the proper word i posted it i posted a note on um on nostre about this which was basically in all my time using the network the biggest improvements that i had in ux didn't come from clients they came from selecting the right relays yeah and so what's your thought i mean we've been talking about this miles and i

i'm sitting out mile snyder by the way everyone um we've been hanging out in the comments talking about this i've caught the nostril bug pretty hard and just thinking of ways because i mean yes the user experience uh has gotten a lot better and there's a lot of potential there on the experience side and design side but the business minded part of me is like holy crap there's like an opportunity here especially early on if you can figure out how to create a beefy relay that does indexing and filtering correctly like there's a there's a very profitable business opportunity here yeah and i think that like right now 90 probably of users on noster also have a Lightning wallet, just because there's such a crossover there. And so what you've seen is people

who have introduced paid services on Doster have found willing sets of customers like immediately who are willing to pay them over the Lightning network for those services. And I think the first paid relay that I saw was, I think the Zebedee guys did. And it was like 2000 sats to access the relay. And it was a no brainer for me and a ton of other people just immediately paid because the um having a good relay can like really change your user experience and so right now you've seen there's a website called relay.exchange that lists all the different paid relays and they're between a thousand and two hundred thousand sats to enter um and i think that there is a big opportunity there because basically what you have right now is you have all these paid relays that

cost different amounts of money and they don't really tell you anything about like what their relay does better or worse than others. So I think for me, I was kind of like, for some of them, I'm like, should I just buy the most expensive one and assume that that's the best one? But I don't think that's necessarily the case. But I think a good relay that explains its value proposition and it tells you exactly what it's going to give you above and beyond a free relay, I would pay far more than 2000 sats for that. And not only would I pay a one time fee, but i'd pay a recurring fee and i think that's i think there's a lot of people just like me yeah and so i think you're further into the weeds than i am on the the relay side of things

what makes a good relay in your mind so i think right now the paid relays that are on the like lower tier of of cost it's just a sort of spam prevention mechanism because with noster you know the ability to just spin up a key pair means that anyone can access the network for a very low cost. So it was very easy to like send a bunch of spam to the network. So being on a relay there requires an admission fee paid over lightning, just kind of like prevent is, is the most basic prevention measure you can take.

So that helps a lot. And it also means that the relays themselves aren't inundated with all this information and thus they can like store and index and serve the information that you want to see better. um what i think i would like to see in more paid relays is them giving me information about sort of their like performance um like i said there if you go on relay.exchange you can see this list of of paid relays that exist on the network but as far as i've seen none of them are really saying like hey this is sort of like the infrastructure stack we're operating or this is how we're running

the relay um i would like to compare relays based on like latency and performance and how fast they can serve things and all that um because yeah that ultimately makes the nostril user experience what it is well i joined my first paid relay yesterday and which one did you join um i think it was like bitcoin maxillus maximalist at master but it wasn't because it was bitcoin maximalist there was a relay exchange site similar to that it wasn't that site but it had the latency oh really oh yeah there is one that does show i think latency so i picked i picked the the relay with the lowest latency yeah um and decided i paid 10 000 sats for yeah one-time entry fee um and i think the one-time entry fee right now is just because that's the easiest thing to

implement but like one of the things that so uh yeah like so i'm i work at collider uh which is a lightning network company um we're also building on noster and one of the things we did recently was in our lightning wallet we made it so you can get a notification to your noster dms anytime you get a deposit to your lightning wallet and it's just kind of a cool feature that we're playing around with to see how you could bridge this like decentralized messaging protocol with lightning but one of the things that you could do with that as well is like just make a recurring uh payment for um for a relay you know you could make it so that every month you get a dm to your um you know to your nostril profile goes directly to a client and you know some clients are now going to be

integrating wallets and you could just like pay an invoice right from there and then you get access to that relay again for a month well even within like i imagine you guys could build it out in the collider wallet extension which allows you to store your nostril private public key pair like you can make it so they can go into your settings of collider wall and say hey if this relay pings me and asked me to pay an invoice just automatically pay it up to a certain limit totally yeah um and that would be i mean that could be handled entirely on the collider wallet end but if you wanted to make it more sort of like decentralized you could use the the nostrum messages which i think is like a an interesting thing that we're seeing emerge like um so uh there's this conference

It's happening in Costa Rica, all around Nostra. And like every communication you get about the conference just happens through Nostra DMs. You know, you don't even have to sign up with like an email to get notifications. And that's pretty cool just from like a privacy perspective, you know? Like you can now communicate with people

over these encrypted DMs without even having to give an email address, like no identifiable information. Yeah. That's Nostrica. Nostrica. um no i've uh i've experienced that flow because i think i'm going to get down to nastrika yeah you pull the trigger as well yeah yeah it's fascinating it's i feel like it it's i haven't

experienced this kind of like grassroots excitement about a technology since i like first discovered bitcoin um and i just kind of feel like this first conference is going to be special and i feel like i have to be there yeah it's definitely it definitely feels like all right if you're there you're going to be at the ground floor or something pretty miraculous and going back to like the paid relay thing many people may hear this like oh like you're just trying to exploit uh this open protocol to make a profit and yeah it's true but that's sort of the beauty of the incentive system it's very similar to bitcoin where you're incentivized to plug in miners to reap the rewards of the block reward uh similar with nostre you're incentivized to

build good services that can get you a profit because people want it there is this economic incentive to provide a good experience on top of this protocol yeah and there's an there's not only an economic incentive but like imagine if bitcoin didn't exist and you were trying to build nostre right and you're like all right i'm gonna set up a paid relay but you have to you know i got to go through stripe and you got to plug in your credit card like it just it wouldn't work in the same way not only would it create a bunch more hurdles but it's also going to create these like choke points all around the network based on kind of like centralized payments providers and I think the beauty of Nostra is that we all recognize that Nostra can be made a lot better through

paid services and there's this natural money layer for Nostra that has emerged that is decentralized happens at the speed of light no barriers to entry and that's lightning network and it's like it feels almost um like there's like it's something special that these things like happened and merged in the way that they did yeah that really validates the thesis that many bitcoiners have been talking about for many years is maybe i'll just talk about me particularly in the newsletter like when web 3.0 became a huge meme during the last bull cycle i was like this is completely stupid like it doesn't make any sense to spin up blockchains for these particular web applications that have tokens attached to them that have a floating value uh dependent on who's

flowing uh trying to trade that token at a given point in time like i wrote newsletters two years ago they were like the real web 3.0 is not blockchains everywhere it's combining open source protocols and just injecting bitcoin into them yeah which noster is a perfect example of that it is a perfect example of it and i think that um there for for so long there's been this idea that the only way to do decentralized social media was to do it on a blockchain and so i think there were all these different approaches that were tried and like i i i generally have an interest in free speech so i've kind of played around with all these platforms you know like steam deso bitcloud farcaster like i've used all of them just

because i'm kind of curious um and there there are maybe certain small advantages to putting everything on a blockchain which we can get into and how those differ from um from nostre but i think what's cool about noster is you know fiat joff when he created this like very simple protocol it was an aha moment for a lot of people myself included where we said oh you could actually do this the equivalent of decentralized social media without having any blockchain involved and it can still be decentralized and kind of the core idea was there was instead of having the the database be the blockchain you create these things called relays and have multiple databases that people can choose from and that kind of optionality is what gives you the decentralization rather than having

everything on chain yeah yeah never it always came back to like the energy for me like it never would have made sense to have like proof-of-work chains like expending a shit ton of energy just to secure these social media apps yeah bitcoin does that with the money just create these distributed protocols for communications which Nostra is notes and other stuff relayed. Notes and other stuff transmitted by relays.

Transmitted by relays. And similarly with RSS feed podcasting 2.0 like RSS open protocol boom lightning public address in the RSS feed now people can stream us sats as they listen to this episode. Ghost open source CMS. Thank you for

playing around with it. Shout out to Collider for pumping uh the bent paywall well it's i mean it's just like i feel like i have fun using things like that because i'm always looking for excuses to pay for things with lightning because it's a great experience and like doing it all from the web and just two clicks to access a uh basically a paywall is like a really cool user experience that i wish more uh i wish more publications had that option yeah wall street journal bloomberg yeah new york times i don't read your rags many much anymore but there are times when i particularly bloomberg it happens to me the

most because they have a lot of good coverage of economic activity in different parts of the world and if i reach my five article limit for the month i stop reading bloomberg i just wait till the next month and it's like they they'll ask you hey sign up for this five dollar month subscription which i don't want to do but i would actually pay like 50 cents to a dollar just to read the article you know um and i would probably end up you know i might do that a few times a month depending on the publication so i think that it actually it could be a good monetization route for them but really quickly i want to go back to sort of like the web3 approach versus the nostre approach and so having used a bunch of these protocols in the past i think the one advantage you have

to them is the the web three approach is basically to say we're gonna you know it like right now twitter is its own database right and everyone writes to that same database and reads from that same database the problem is it's owned by a company so they can shut you out and censor you the sort of web three approach is saying let's replace twitter the company with this on-chain database so it's not controlled by any one um you know company or individual the advantage that you get there is that like you can there's one canonical database that all these clients are looking at so it's really easy to like switch between clients and still access all of your information all of your followers everything right with noster it gets a little more complicated

because there's this like third component of which relays are you using so you might switch between clients but if your relay set's not the exact same you're not getting all the same information that you got with another client i think that ultimately that's a sort of like ux hurdle that can absolutely be solved and two i think it's it's ultimately a much better solution because it gives you sort of more optionality more redundancy and the idea of even doing all this stuff on chain i think is kind of inherently flawed because you either blowed up a chain that can't really handle all that information or you like spin up a new chain from scratch that's custom designed to do this and those chains end up being super centralized um they often have

their own token that doesn't really make sense um and you just create a lot of problems with that yeah you mentioned steam that brought back some memories that was the first iteration of this attempted yeah social media was blogging platform that it was like medium on on a blockchain yeah yeah shout out to uh dan larimer dan larimer the perennial scammer well and but i will say like the thing that steam at least was an aha moment for me was that you could switch between clients and still access like the same service um and so i think that like that idea is quite cool and quite useful but you do get that with noster um there's just this this added component of relays and making sure that that like relay selection is done well and that you are using the same relays

across clients basically what i'm saying is you can still get 100 of the user experience of any kind of like web 3 um social media platform on noster and there's there's no token and there's no blockchain and i think ultimately those two things are super important and will allow nostra to have more success in the long term yeah because with the on-chain web3 applications you just had this this forced tokenomics yeah this contrived like idea of like oh if we you need to produce content in this way and uh support content this way and then we'll make the value of the token go up and there's really like a forced attempted like a forced like monetization of these tokens that just never was going to work out at the end

of the day where noster yeah the optionality if you like a post like you're not forced to interact with it in a monetary fashion you don't have to zap a post you know you don't even have to hold bitcoin to use the network no you know um it just it's just like an added feature on top of it yeah it's not like core to the mechanical facilitation of the the platform yeah which is like tokenomics fucks up everything tokenomics does fuck up everything and it's like i think you in web3 you a lot of you have a lot of people kind of like philosophizing about how well it drives this incentive model and blah blah but like at the end of the day some of that may be true to some extent but the injection of a token creates like a speculative fervor around

these things whether you want it to or not and that it does fuck up everything because it it changes the way that people interact with it it creates these like big hype cycles around like the usage of the product um and it's not you don't get like an honest gauge of how interested people are in using these protocols because a lot of the users end up being there to like make money yeah yeah it fucks up everything it does it's and i i mean i i'm particularly interested and very excited to sit down with you today because i think your experience in this space sort of coming back road to bitcoin and lightning specifically i mean you've seen a lot of shit yeah i mean so yeah i guess as like background i first got interested in the space when i was

in college i was studying abroad in argentina and met some bitcoiners down there and this is like 2014 when there was much more interest in bitcoin in argentina than there was in the united states um just because of their economic situation the inflation that was happening there and i think the fact that so many people there uh did like bought dollars and held dollars made them more comfortable with the idea of like we need a money system that's outside of the control of our government and so then i came back to college my senior year i wrote my senior thesis all about like crypto and its use cases in developing economies um that was focused on bitcoin and stable coins and then kind of like just continued down the rabbit hole but definitely went the route

of being much more like crypto focused um i definitely didn't grasp the sort of like austrian side of of bitcoin um early on in the way that i grasp it now like bitcoin to me was really really cool and you know always had been interesting but i didn't understand this idea of like recreating money and the importance of that um and so i was very involved in a bunch of like crypto projects um ultimately i got a job at multi-coin capital which was what brought me here to austin so that was basically entirely web3 um you know journalist crypto focused and then i also worked for a small like product studio and proof of stake validator that was running um proof of stake uh mining i guess you could call it across a bunch of different

chains and so through all those experiences i think i got a very good view into the web world and especially the proof of stake world and how all of that functions and that experience really like solidified for me the value proposition of bitcoin um you know over the years as i learned more and more about bitcoin i came to understand it more deeply but then also seeing the inner workings of like various proof of stake protocols and how centralized they really are and how decision making really happens um and how they kind of pay lip service to decentralization but it's it's not actually the case um really just solidified for me why bitcoin is like so unique in this whole world and why like crypto and web3 are one thing and bitcoin is something entirely

different and so ultimately that led to me just really wanting to focus all of my attention on that and that's how i landed um kind of in this space and then working at collider yeah i mean let's let's jump in like what particularly did you see and that really drove home like oh there's there's a distinction here between what's going on in these proof of stake crypto world versus what's going on in bitcoin yeah i mean i think that in And the sad truth of the matter is that there's just like, there are very well-intentioned people in the crypto and Web3 space, but the incentives that drive that side of the industry are just horrifically broken at the end of the day. um like the fastest way to uh get wealthy in crypto is to create a token and it doesn't need to be something that is actually useful to anyone it doesn't need to be actually creating value it's

like this weird loophole where in if a bull market is frothy enough you can create something from scratch with no real like work or effort behind that um distribute it get paid for that cash out and make a ton of money and it's it's like the disgusting amount of money a disgusting amount of money and the uh human greed is is strong right like it's a that that part of it is very irresistible for a lot of people and it's screwed up that you have i think what is nice about bitcoin is that like if you want to build something in bitcoin it has to actually be useful and it's so it's harder to be building bitcoin companies right like there's fewer people who have made these life-changing amounts of wealth in just a couple of years in Bitcoin, because

in order to do so, you'd have to build like a real company with a real business model and profit and all that in web three, you just see a lot of people who are able to, um, kind of do that in this roundabout, like scammy way. And so that was definitely a big part of it. Like seeing that happen many times over in different ways um it just starts to like chip away at you and you know there's like you it it doesn't it doesn't align with like my ethics and my views on the world and kind of the what i want to be pouring my energy into um there's a surprising amount of people from that world who make a ton of money and become super depressed um because i think deep down they realized that they didn't make that in a way that was like deserving or they took advantage of

people in the process of making that um and so i just found in the bitcoin world there's there's like a much more honest and um like i feel so good about the work that we do in bitcoin it means a ton to me and i think it's like really net positive for the world um and i didn't feel that way working in the web through yeah i mentioned i uh didn't have a great night sleep last night but most nights i sleep fine don't wake up stressing out that i'm scamming people which is a good uh a good feeling to have it's not even a feeling you have it's just you don't have those feelings about shit yeah and like again i think that you know this isn't an i'm not talking about any like specific individuals or projects or people here because there are very well-intentioned

people in that world you know there was a time when i really just thought that that was like the best approach to creating this technology that's, that's better for the world. But I think when I was really honest with myself and took a step back and just looked at that side of the industry as a whole, you just see a lot of stuff that, that doesn't sit right with you. And that just kind of on the, like, I guess the like money-making side, but then there's also, you know, being involved in the proof of stake world, you just see a lot of people who, or you see a lot of these um like chains protocols whatever you want to call them that claim to be decentralized and it's like you know there's there's a bunch of people in a telegram chat that's like maybe

20 people who are making really big decisions about um you know what happens with these projects like hard forks and um changes to the monetary policy and things like that that are happening in these very centralized ways. Yeah. That was during the ICO boom of 2017, 2018, the leaked Telegram chats, screenshots, getting onto Twitter of people being like, all right, we're going to game this system to pump the token.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it's like many people who are pretty well-known in the space in these Telegram chats, and it's just like, ah. Yeah. I don't think they sleep well, but. No. but i think it just it's just so easy for a lot of people to to fall into that because they are able to turn a profit and like yeah it's just really easy um and this if i understand correctly

like it jaded you from the industry for a couple years like you stepped away i was no i didn't uh ever fully step away i was working on the um the product studio and proof of stake validator um but i was i i was a lot less publicly involved in the industry um for that reason so like kind of when i um uh forget what year i think it was 2018 that i left uh multicoin and joined gray mass which was a product studio and that kind of also coincided with the the market yeah cooling down a lot um so i wasn't doing as much you know when i was at a multicoin i was doing a lot of like public writing um and and stuff like that very like active on twitter i think i used to go after you on twitter you might have uh yeah that that uh that's probably true i feel like

there's a there's a bunch of like bitcoin people um and it's funny too because like ryan gentry who he and i worked at uh multigoing together um it's cool to see him in in the lightning space now too but um yeah i just when i joined gray mass um i was much more in like a product kind of a role and so i just wasn't doing as much public facing work but i also just felt like i had a lot less to say because at that time i was still or i was kind of like wrestling with what side of the industry i wanted to to be in like um and trying to figure out whether there was something i could do that was much more focused on bitcoin that could be impactful and um yeah so i think i just like i i was still in the industry but i was less like involved for for a while

and then it was really sort of within the last like couple years that i started paying a lot more attention to lightning started using a lot more and got really really excited about like an area of bitcoin where i felt like i could um like contribute and be really excited about and do cool stuff that like advanced the ecosystem yeah so now you're at collider what what particularly about the lightning network excites you so i think that the first time that i used the the lightning network it was like this aha moment because i'd used all the other like fast blockchains and it was faster than all of them and it you know it was like oh wow you can make payments truly at the speed of light peer-to-peer um and you don't have to put any of it on chain you know

it like it makes solana look slow uh for doing these transfers so that was just exciting to me because i i think the idea of being able to to do things um in like a much faster way is is appealing um and so yeah i think it was like just the user experience of of using lightning for the first time in probably two years it had been since i'd used lightning prior and the experience was not good when i first used it uh and so i was like okay i think this is like really maturing um and then just thinking through the possibilities of what you could do when bitcoin went from being this like very very hard monetary asset that was really slow to transfer around to being this hard monetary asset that you could that became like 10 000 times more dynamic

overnight so thinking about like micro payments and streaming payments and um like little mini payments to prevent spam and things like that just when i thought through those possibilities um that lightning enabled i i just realized there was like so much to work on in that space that you know like for the next several years i i figured that would be probably like the most exciting part of bitcoin um however i also i kind of joked that when i was like spending a couple years just doing research i was looking at like the top of the stack which was lightning network and then the bottom of the stack which was mining because i also became very interested in the synthesis of like the energy world with the bitcoin mining world which i'm

still i still think it's fascinating but i don't know as much about it yeah i remember god it had to be like a year ago now at this point uh aj and drew from cathedral were telling me that they were talking here like you know you have to connect with miles yeah really into this well that all all happened because i listened to your podcast with them and i was like oh these guys like these guys think about the world in a very similar way uh as i do and um yeah i just i i still think that that side of things which is like how bitcoin mining and energy in general like come together is just this like massive massive massive part of things that is still feels very underrated extremely underrated i mean the whole every part of the stack is extremely underrated i mean that's

our core thesis at 1031 is that still even though we've gone through all these cycles we've had this most recent cycle of these epic blow-ups of monstrous proportion that still to this day people don't realize the opportunity that exists in bitcoin from a functionality utility perspective and then from like an investment perspective like like a bitcoin only bc fund is still viewed as like cute anomaly and contrarian in the allocation space and quote-unquote crypto which is like when you talk about lightning like all these applications that you just uh that you just listed off like peer-to-peer payments streaming payments paywalled content paywalled api calls like span prevention yep like we're just scratching the surface like there's many

more applications that we can't even fathom right now that will come to the fore via lightning and then mining and the intersection with the energy sector like mining is going to be part of the energy stack yeah like the biggest miners in the world will not be bitcoin first like people just buy asics find cheap electricity and plug them in just the way the economics and mining work it's going to be the energy producers they have the access to the cheapest forms of energy yeah since they're creating it yeah they're going to become bitcoiners as well bitcoin is going to be like michael tanguma 1031 he likes to say this all the time like we're in that period like in the 90s where people like oh you're going to be an internet company and like saying an internet

company today is like completely crazy every company is every every company is like in the future every company will be a bitcoin company like this whole concept of bitcoin companies will be laughed at yeah a decade or two from now because it's just like oh yeah everybody needs bitcoin everyone uses money yeah but yeah and i mean to your point you kind of briefly touched on this but like bitcoin has been very steady throughout all of these market cycles and like sure its price goes up and down but it doesn't the a lot of these other protocols just emerge out of nowhere and then blow up and then literally disappear um or you know basically disappear their zombies yeah and so for us at collider that that's been the motivation for um for building

on bitcoin is that like bitcoin is the strongest foundation to build upon in this industry you know and if you're if you're like thinking long term about building here it's the only place that you should be building everywhere else you're kind of taking this platform risk where it's like you're you're you're taking a double a double risk where you're saying like we have this product there's a risk in finding product market fit and all that but also we're building on you know whatever chain there's a risk that that chain like blows up has some major security flaw just like fades into irrelevance all that um with bitcoin we just feel so confident in bitcoin's long-term trajectory trajectory that that's where that's the only place where we're going to build yeah well let's

jump into collider because it's a really cool product that it's pretty versatile too yeah so collider is kind of a family of products built on top of lightning network and now to you know an increasing extent nostre um we're doing a lot of stuff at the intersection of of lightning and nostre and we're um we're trying to in the same way that we've worked on making the user experience of lightning better we're working on making the user experience of noster better but the core product of um collider is a descent or not essential a lightning native derivatives exchange so um and in the future we'll be building a lightning native spot exchange and kind of the idea behind that is that we have an exchange and it is a centralized exchange

but the money that moves onto and off the exchange happens entirely over lightning rails So what we want to do is change the idea of how consumers interact with exchanges. A lot of consumers use exchanges as wallets right now, like Bitfinex. At the last conference I was at, Paolo said that 50% of the funds on the exchange are just sitting there. They're not actively used in trades. So basically 50% of people on Bitfinex are using it as a wallet. We think that exchanges should be simply places where trades are executed. So the only time you should have money on an exchange is when it's in an active or open trade.

And the way that we do that is we use Lightning to move money on and off. So you can open a trade directly from your Lightning wallet, which you control. That money moves over Lightning onto the exchange, so it happens instantly. And then as soon as that trade is finished, and you can even have this happen automatically, uh those funds are withdrawn directly to your wallet also over lightning and so not only does this happen like incredibly fast but lightning gets you this added advantage of say you have like a margin position and you want to top that up you can do that literally in real time like sat by sat just adding just the amount that you need to keep that trade safe rather than having

to take the the route that a lot of existing um exchanges require you to do which is like make a big deposit because it takes a while it happens on chain have that kind of sitting in the um you know in the exchange waiting to be used like with collider you can use an exchange in such a way that your money is literally only on there when it actually needs to be on the exchange yeah you don't have like a bitmex situation where you're getting funds sent off the exchange every monday morning happens automatically i think one thing that people don't really appreciate of these lightning first exchanges i think it's just like you and lm markets is there anybody else in the landscape right now no i don't think so like for like if we're projecting

forward let's just say to the next bull market when uh traditional institutional investors see the volatility in the bitcoin price and they want to play the markets to take advantage of that volatility like going through the advantages of building an exchange on lightning compared to on-chain like something like a bitmex or bitfinex is extremely valuable for this type of investor where you use the example of topping up margin yeah being able to do that instantly is a massive benefit when you talk about the advantage that brings particularly investors moving large sums of money like you talk about arbitrage opportunities if more of these exchanges pop up but just being able to instantly make these trades yeah is a massive advantage it's a huge advantage um and

you know like i said we're building spot exchange functionality because with tara coming online and things like that we want to be able to support the trading of of other assets on there and yeah you extrapolate several years into the future and you have like a robust ecosystem of of um kind of assets on top of bitcoin then getting yeah getting into and out of these exchanges that much more quickly um and not having to hold money on there just it changes the security model substantially yeah like what what is the true added benefit like how would you i mean we just touched on it but like to this institutional class people moving and trading large sums of money yeah like maybe the light bulb hasn't gone off in their heads yet but you have to imagine

especially if you're like high frequency trading and you want to do it like actual with actual bitcoin and not paper exposure like you kind of have to do it over lightning yeah i think that right now these institutions basically use exchanges in the only way that's available to them which is like putting a lot of money onto an exchange and then doing their trades from there so kind of having a sitting balance and then using that to trade with because until kind of we came along there was no other option for them to do that what that does is expose them to huge amounts of counterparty risk obviously we saw this in a huge way with ftx this past fall where there was a number of funds that were holding huge amounts of money on that exchange and lost everything

it would be i don't know the exact numbers but for some of those funds it might be interesting to look at like what amount of what they were holding on FTX was in an open trade versus what was just sitting there. And I bet you a lot of it was just sitting there. And so with the collider model, you know, if the exchange goes like bust, you, you know, you would still lose what was in an open trade, but everything else would just be sitting in your wallet because you don't need to hold it on the exchange. And so I think as institutions start to realize that that option is there and they can eliminate their counterparty risk so significantly like that counterparty risk is just it's it's very quantifiable in a dollar cent so and it's very prevalent throughout this

space particularly yeah and has been for 15 years almost and i think what a lot of these institutions what happened with ftx was that so many of them saw ftx as this like very reputable company like they didn't worry about keeping their funds on there because it was funded by prominent vcs you know sam was meeting with congress like ftx was sponsoring um like tom brady and sports stadiums and all that and so for them i think it was this huge wake-up call of like even the exchanges that we consider the best of the best the blue chip we still are taking on massive risk by keeping our funds on there so to give them an option that says like you don't have to keep all your funds on there i think is powerful but it will take time for those institutions i think to like

understand that fully yeah slow uh slow moving institutions as we've come to find yeah the we're convinced that there was going to be an etf uh in 2014 here we are in 2023 still waiting yeah don't hold your breath for the etf freaks no but i guess that's the other i mean imagine the biggest hurdle for an exchange like collider is just creating liquidity on the book yeah what's what's that been like so we just officially launched collider this past fall so it's still very early um we're in the process of onboarding market makers right now which is probably like the first step um but i think it's gonna have to be kind of like a slow and steady process, you know, um, sort of like I've told people, you know, when you compare lightning

network to other kind of like web three protocols, it looks a lot different in that, um, you know, you look at like Olympus Dow or something that was really big in the last cycle, right? The, the chart looks like this, it goes up and then it comes crashing down. Um, whereas the lightning network chart, if you, you know, say you're just doing it by capacity, it kind of is this like very very slow rise but it doesn't come crashing down in the bear market um and so i think with like you are we are seeing the growth of lightning network we're seeing the onboarding of more users and um it's definitely happening but it's happening slowly and steadily and so we are just kind of focused on making sure that users of lightning understand that we exist understand the advantages

of using collider and then if they want to engage in trading activity they you know they have a venue to do that natively within lightning yeah and then you guys are added these value-added products again it's a family of products yeah and i think one thing that you guys are doing that is extremely creative to bring market makers to collider is this synthetic dollar product yeah so we have the exchange is kind of the core product and then we have some these synthetic stable coins and then we also have collider wallet which is a browser-based lightning wallet with a really easy to use and simple ux um that i should say it's now it's a lightning and noster sort of wallet but um so yeah i'm trying to think of which one makes sense to start with i guess

the wallet what we wanted to do was we just wanted to create a really easy to use experience for lightning users like make it very simple to onboard make it so that people didn't have to deal with like seed phrases or sort of the like really complex stuff collider wallet basically you onboard with the username and password and you're onto the lightning network um like that there's a really like good ui that makes it easy you can log into uh lightning apps you get a lightning address immediately um and you can hold bitcoin on there and then you can also hold balances in usd and euros and the way we do that is by creating what we call synthetic stablecoin so this was an idea that i think um i think arthur from bitmex was the first person to sort of

articulate this but basically the idea is that using derivatives you can hedge bitcoin and create uh synthetic fiat balances that are just you know it's not a stablecoin in like the token sense but it's a balance that's pegged to a fiat currency yeah you take a commensurate short position to hold in uh the u.s dollar value exactly that you'd like your sats to represent yeah so for collider wallet you can hold uh your balance in bitcoin you can hold sats and then you can also easily convert that to usd or euro and what happens on the back end is on the exchange we create a hedged position on those sats that um that then kind of shows up in your wallet as a as a dollar or euro stable coin and the idea behind this is that we you know the demand for stable

coins in the industry it's it's clearly been demonstrated right like regardless of how you feel about them and the fact that there's different centralization points like people want stable coins and they use them and so there aren't stable coins on lightning network right now um and so we wanted to create a way to do that and then kind of simultaneously as we were uh doing our synthetic stable coins galoy was working on stable sats which is the exact same thing and stable sats actually now plugs into collider but um you know galoy is very like boots on the ground in el salvador and they have bitcoin beach wallet which is um like one of the most widely used mobile wallets in that region and they basically from being down there and talking to people

realized that people wanted to hold balances in both bitcoin and dollars and so they created stable sats in order to serve that need um and so i think that's kind of how we think about it too which is that like we want to give people the optionality um like we can understand why someone would want to keep some portion of their balance in a stable coin especially for certain periods of time and so we just make that really simple yeah and again going back to the market making utility that this provides a great way to bootstrap liquidity for the derivatives exchange yeah absolutely i mean the the collider wallet is sort of this like top of funnel because it's it's any user of lightning could use collider wallet and find it really useful um but on the

uh like the the engine driving those stable coins happens on the exchange yeah yeah that's fascinating and again like it's it's weird almost saying stable coins right because it's like a stable position it's a yeah we call them like fiat balances or balances is probably what a better way to think about it yeah because like hedged positions yeah because like you mentioned earlier collider is fully centralized you guys are going to be regulatory compliant and all that you're providing this you know i don't think you're trying to portray anything different no no and i think that's important for people to realize i mean we have we do get a lot of questions about that which people are asking like oh what you know smart contract platform are you built on

or whatever and we say like we're not we're you know even saying we're built on top of lightning network is a little bit maybe not super accurate because it's like we're a centralized exchange that is built on lightning rails so we like to say we're lightning native because everything that happens on the exchange happens over lightning but yeah when you send money and do or when you execute a trade on collider like that is uh you know you you are losing possession of those funds for the duration of the open trade but what we do is we make it faster to get into and out of those things yeah um and i think like you know we've talked internally a lot about the long-term vision for like uh exchange on top of bitcoin and the different technologies that might present like

cool ways to further decentralize the stack and like we're definitely interested in them we're trying to pay attention to what's happening in that world as much as possible but none of those technologies are ready for like widespread adoption and so we kind of think that is like something that we'll consider more in the future what or something something like a fediment or um yeah fediment i guess i guess in some ways fediment could work but also like dlcs and i guess in my opinion there is no um kind of like smart contract layer for bitcoin that has emerged that like has consensus around being the the right approach you know like with lightning it's clear that that is the that is it's there's consensus that that's the layer

for like payments on bitcoin right but with smart contracts you have like rsk and you have liquid and then you have some like other stuff that's a lot more like peripheral um and so we don't think there's any like one layer that makes sense to build smart contracts on top of but if that emerged and you had the ability to to create turning complete smart contracts you could do an exchange in that way that would be more decentralized yeah that's fascinating but like going back to synthetic dollars versus stable coins what are the trade-offs there so the trade-off right now is that you don't have a a token that represents that stable coin so if we're on solana for example and i want to send you usdc i can hold it in my wallet and then just send it to you and you

receive that usdc with the the way that we're doing it i hold a fiat balance that's hedged bitcoin um if i want to send that to you the only way to do that is to close out that position that gets converted into sats and then i send sats over the network because right now you can only send sats over the lightning network now the the like conversion process of all that it's super seamless it happens on the back end it's it's very easy um the problem is like if i hold dollars and you want dollars that uh transfer still has to happen in sats over the network and so it requires both of our wallet providers to support that functionality of giving you the hedge position and so if you're using collider wall and i'm using collider wallet that's super

easy i can send it from my usd balance and you can receive it into yours but if you're using wallet of satoshi for example that's going to arrive as sats um and i think that like there are more wallets that are now supporting these functionalities so um that's one way to do it the other thing is like when taro comes online we could tokenize those hedged positions and allow people to just send those around and then kind of the exchange becomes more of like the mint for the stable coins um i'm not necessarily sure what the right approach is and then the other question is like once you have say like usdc and usdt on lightning network what are people going to prefer the the synthetic fiat balances or the sort of like classic centralized stable coins yeah

taro are you taro bull it's a very controversial topic in this space it's it is funny because i think that maybe you hang out in like like your uh bubble is a little bit more like hardcore maximalist than mine like i don't necessarily think of taro is that controversial i think for a lot of people who are building on lightning there's a general excitement around it um i'm excited about it but i i do see where like the hesitation comes from um there i think it's good to have skepticism about like does this introduce any vulnerabilities to the like security model of lightning and bitcoin um let's be hyper aware of those but then also you know i think people have hesitation around like just what the ability to mint tokens on lightning network does to

like what i talked about with web3 right there's just a lot of um there's a big incentive to be greedy when that's available to you so i think we need to be aware of that but also like it's in the same way i feel about like ordinals which is that like it's going to happen that ability is going to be open to people eventually i don't want to be like the i don't think anyone can be the police of what happens on bitcoin so um we we just see it and try and contribute in the way that that we think like makes sense yeah i don't want to be the luddites i mean i wrote the newsletter last night had to do with i read inscriptions yeah i thought it was i thought it was a good take thank you yeah essentially like i may not think i don't think

that uh inscriptions are particularly interesting i don't think the nfts are really valuable at the end of the day but it is what it is like the activated segwit which increased the block size limit to four megabytes and then we activated taproot which made it cheaper to make certain types of transactions and enabled the ability for people to inscribe data into the chain like you have to live with the decisions that were made in the past and you can't there's nothing that you can do yeah to stop people from doing it like yeah i may not like it i may not find it interesting i don't think i'm going to be inscribing anything or trading nfts uh that were inscribed into the bitcoin blockchain but it's possible what is possible people will do

whether you like it or not yeah and i think that the i guess the outrage around it hasn't made a lot of sense to me because it's like the like i said there's no bitcoin police no one gets to decide what gets done on top of that if it's possible people can and will do it um and they like the the market is going to provide some guidance there right because they have to pay if they want to if they want to do this and like i trust the market a lot so there's sort of like short-term like crazy increase in fees or anything like that i just don't think it's It's not anything to worry about. Now, granted, I know probably a lot less about this stuff

than a lot of other people do because I'm not particularly interested in NFTs, but I don't see a lot to worry about there. No, neither do I. I mean, if anything, the whole inscription craze seems to be tampering a bit. Maybe it's just a lull in the overall fervor around it. But if anything, it just pulled forward full blocks

because if we believe Bitcoin is going to succeed in the way many of us believe it's going to succeed, which is massively. Eventually, the blocks are going to fill up anyway with just pure economic transactions as more people come on. So you're going to get four megablock, megablock, megabyte blocks at some point in the future. I mean, if anything, inscriptions pulled that forward a bit,

at least temporarily. Who knows if they'll continue to stay full moving forward. um and then you can argue like oh maybe like is there a trade-off of having fuller blocks sooner as opposed to later but at the end of the day i think it's inconsequential and again that's purely a market driven uh phenomenon right like no one no individual person is going to be able to say when and how full blocks happen so i think the market will decide and i mean like you're pretty involved in the mining industry so like are the companies you're involved in like how do they feel about this um we'd love more revenue right i mean yeah yeah so i've got i've got minors plugged in

i've been going into my brain spool and seeing the uh the average reward i've been getting over the last two weeks go up but i don't hate that yeah but yeah i think like that's interesting to to consider like from the miners perspective it seems like um yeah it's a good thing yeah that's one thing i and i get i mean this is a debate that's been raging in bitcoin for quite a bit i mean a lot of people were pissed to say we got activated because it did increase that that block size limit to four megabytes many people luke luke dasher most famously think we should have something like 363 kilobot uh kilobyte blocks i can't say why do i keep adding block to the data sizes here um and i i actually probably do lean towards more uh more towards the luke

dasher side of things where i actually think like smaller blocks are probably better for the long term longevity but again we made decisions that we made in the past we have to live with it and that's what i said last night in the newsletter like i think smaller blocks just decrease the probability of an eventual centralization event of full nodes yeah they also pull forward full blocks even further yes yeah in a fee market uh sooner as well you could argue um the other end of the spectrum four megabyte god damn it four megabyte blocks uh i don't think they make full node centralization uh a bit like a foregone conclusion but they they certainly do increase the probability

that you could have node centralization in the future. But then you couple in like bandwidth cost getting lower, high-speed internet getting more accessible. So there's like these trade-offs and you're never going to find a perfect block size. It's just whether or not four megabytes, set it right, is going to keep the probability of node centralization low enough that you can be comfortable as a user

yeah and company building on this in this space yeah for sure and which is why i just don't think like like you said these decisions have already been made and these changes are already live so like we have to live with what is live now and that's why i don't think there's that much use in like kind of moral grandstanding about inscriptions or this or that i think it's like the either you have faith that the market will figure this out or you don't um and i do i do as well yeah no it's actually somebody uh it's funny because i stayed out of the fray like i made it clear that i don't find jpegs on bitcoin particularly interesting but i didn't say like people shouldn't be doing this like you're corrupting the chains like i think early on with this

ordinals inscription crazy i was like all right it's possible people are doing it like yeah i think there was like an initial reaction like fuck this it was like it's possible people are gonna do it you just it's like surfing you just gotta like go with the wave totally there's nothing you can do about it yeah like you just gotta ragdoll let the market figure things out um and i completely forgot where i was going with this but i mean i think also like so it is hard for me to really like wrap my head around the excitement around nfts like both in the web3 world and the bitcoin world like it's just not something i'm like that keen on but like i know people who are super stoked about nfts right and i know people who can't you know

created their first crypto wallet and all that because of nfts and like artists who got into this world because of nft so even though it's not for me i know there's obviously something there that's really exciting to people and like i told you this but it's not a full-fledged theory but i'm seeing something happen right now with like ordinals noster lightning that's sort of like there's this equivalent of web3 ecosystem developing around bitcoin but it's done in a way that makes a lot more sense you know which is that like the sort of the social layer isn't on a blockchain it doesn't have to be but it just like integrates very seamlessly with uh lightning network the like kind of content layer around like value for value and podcasting 2.0 also not built

on chain in any way but like seamlessly integrates with the payments and then you have uh inscriptions which i know a lot less about but like i saw that dz did this thing where he was like you know you could buy the inscription using lightning and then uh like it gets connected to your noster account and and all that and like i just think it's cool to see that kind of stuff i think it's cool that like developers are really excited and they're playing around with these things and that you're getting more like organic activity that at its base layer has bitcoin as the money yes and i remember what i the point i was getting to when i lost my train of thought which was i've been putting this out there and i i won't take credit for um running with this thesis pierre

rochard was the first one introduced it to me uh which is that you can apply jevin's paradox to bitcoin utxos and i wrote a newsletter two years ago before taproot was even uh activated like taproot is going to confirm this jevin paradox because jevin's paradox is it's a paradox because you think uh it's typically applied to oil and gas if you have a commodity and you become more efficient with that commodity hydrocarbons uh you expect since you're efficient you can do more with less that you will use less but what you find is that it creates so much utility that you actually use more because it has this step function improvement of productivity that more and more people want to leverage you can apply that to a bitcoin utxo and like taproot did the

same thing we found a way to do things more efficiently yeah uh with the transaction space which is going to drive more activity which is what inscriptions are a product of and so even though i don't like nfts and i don't find much value in them i think the thesis that i put out there a couple years ago riding on the the shoulders of pierre bruchard is being validated totally by this yeah no that's really interesting and like i think that um you know like one of the things that excites me about what we're doing at collider and with the wallet is like we think about um lightning is sort of your like lightning is like your internet wallet you know it's like bitcoin is the native money of the internet lightning is how you move that around at the

speed of light and that's why we created this um like browser wallet because it means that you can kind of just like do your browser activity and have this very seamless lightning experience woven into it and lightning and noster so it's like you can log into applications using the extension so no usernames and passwords so lightning login or noster login and then you know you can like buy an article in just a couple of clicks you can uh send a zap to another user like directly from from your wallet you can send a payment to another user you can buy an nft if that's your thing you can sell an nft if you're an artist and like all of that happens you know with bitcoin as the money and like as someone who cares deeply about bitcoin and wants bitcoin to succeed like i just love

seeing that adoption and i love seeing it happen on lightning because the user experience is like awesome yeah it's getting better people are still sleeping on all this though they're definitely sleeping on it like what would you say to people out there still like bitcoin's cute lightning doesn't have any like we use the perfect example of bitcoin locked up on lightning versus like d5 protocols it's such an apples to orange comparison for i mean no one like does a better job than lynn alden of debunking that she wrote an article um i can't remember what the name of it is but she published it on on swan i think um where she talks about why that comparison doesn't make any sense i mean i think to the bitcoiners who aren't using lightning i would say get

collateral wallet you can do an on-chain deposit so you can take you know uh bitcoin that you have on chain and immediately get sats on lightning and then you know we created like a lightning onboarding guide with a bunch of like applications you can use and it's like if you're a bitcoiner who hasn't yet used lightning get on there give it a try play around with some of these applications and see what you can do with lightning um that's step one if you're someone who's kind of like outside of that whole system and you think like you know you're you're still skeptical about bitcoin generally um and lightning as well i guess my my suggestion would be the same is like use it you know um like if you're excited about web 3 and you've used some of those

applications but you haven't tried out lightning yet you're you're missing out on what i think is like some of the most exciting stuff happening signal yeah and like real um like there's a lot of really incredible user experiences and it's not to say that lightning doesn't still have issues and there's more to be solved noster has a ton of issues but these things are are getting better and better and they're now at the point where depending on how you access the network but like i'd feel pretty comfortable onboarding you know like i don't know one of my siblings who isn't into crypto directly onto Lightning using ColliderWallet and I feel

confident that they could use it and have a good experience. Yeah. That's pretty cool because you guys have a suite. Like not only do you make it easy to sign in using your Noster private key or to automatically pay Lightning paywalls when they populate on

a particular webpage like TFTC every once in a while. But you have the suite of apps too that you can connect to. Bit Refills Integrated. Stacker News. There was this one called micropay.ai, which is like allowing you to access some of these like AI services, just paying like per individual query, podcasting 2.0 apps, you know, all sorts of things. And then I think the other thing is like, if you're really interested in like free speech and decentralized communications, then like you could also just access Nostor. You don't have to hold any Bitcoin to use it, but probably eventually you're going to want to get some Bitcoin.

Or if you start using Nostor and start posting good stuff, people are going to send you Bitcoin and eventually you're just going to have some. And so I think that's a lot of what excites me about Nostr. It's like people are just going to be brought into the Bitcoin ecosystem by virtue of just using Nostr. I've been zapped 500,000 sats in the last week. No way. Yeah. That's insane.

Half a million sats freaks. You must have the Damas test flight version, right? No, I've got the iOS version. no that but the uh the regular ios version i don't think has zaps yet no i can't zap from domus people zapping me got it okay so i just uh put my ellen address into my profile yeah so people can can zap me yeah i have to go on like nostagram to zap others yeah using collider wall yeah or like uh yeah snort but yeah i mean it's like again like collider wall it makes it so that it's just like it's it's literally like two clicks um i think i want to zap and confirm yeah yeah and

this is actually interesting so i feel like when i was uh several years ago in the industry when i first got exposed to like a lot of nick sabo's writing there was a very famous piece he wrote about micropayments do you know what i'm talking about mental transactions are too much yeah and i don't i don't want to say i'm i don't want to say i disagree with nick zaba on one of the biggest bitcoin podcasts but like maybe in this one area because my personal experience is that it doesn't like my personal experience is that the seamlessness of lightning makes it so that i don't even think about it i'm just like boom great easy um and i think like i saw you see that on stacker news you're seeing that with zaps you know i'm seeing it with like the tftc paywalled

content but i've found that to me lightning has created the first experience where the um the usability is so clean and quick that micropayments actually make sense so i guess i wanted to ask you like what are your thoughts on that no i think again i don't want to disagree with the example of my podcast either but i was like that was like the biggest pushback with the uh the paywall on on the band was like, nobody's going to use it. Last, uh,

last Friday's article is the most paid for article. And like more and more people are beginning to interact with actually think Nostra is playing a big part in that where people are on Nostra set up a lighting wallets. And if I syndicated there, they're more likely to go through the process of actually paying the invoice. But yeah, no,

I think podcasting 2.0 too. Like if you can set it and forget it, like I can pull up my Zeus node right now and it can almost guarantee you, you'll see a bunch of transactions like eight sets 10 sets two sets 20 sets like those are fractions of a penny that people are just streaming to my node every minute of every day like maybe it is niche and maybe the zabez thesis will be proven right in the long run but as of right now people are certainly sending micro transactions yeah i guess like when i think about like even before noster you know when i had like i had collider wallet set up i had sats in there

and i pull up a tftc article and it says like 25 cents like maybe there is some little like transaction um like mental transaction that goes into that but generally i'm going somewhere to read an article that from the headline or whatever else i've seen i know i want to read and like if the cost was five dollars i'd probably weigh that a lot but like for 25 cents when i know it's going to take me two clicks it's there's very little mental transaction costs yeah if it was 25 cents and i had to enter a credit card different story so it's like do you what do you think has changed that because for me it feels like lightning itself with how quick and how cheap and how fast it is well so for tftc for our paywall i actually bumped it i 3x the price of 75 cents a few weeks

ago just to see if people would pay that much for it um and they have we've obviously we've got more sats but most importantly we've had the same amount if not more people actually paying the paywall interesting great to see like that like trying to figure out what is that price point that people are willing to pay and as right now 75 cents seems to be a nice um a nice area for us particularly but uh originally when it was 25 cents i had this idea of a gumball machine like going back to like when you're a kid you put a quarter in the gumball machine like i just wanted to create that experience on the web yeah it was just easy like you're at the barber shop there's a gumball machine in the corner like dad give me a quarter yeah he's like yeah here take a quarter

put it in yeah like you even have the little the little uh confetti that pops up yeah so like that was that's why i set it at 25 cents originally it was just to recreate that gumball machine experience with content on the web and it seems where you get that instant gratification you turn the knob the gumball starts swirling around here you click two buttons and boom the content's there yeah and like i think that how much makes sense to do in those situations is going to depend a lot on the publication right like you've built a lot of trust with your audience we know that you're writing that article we've seen a bunch of the free ones and we're like yeah this makes sense to pay for right if it was a random article on new york times where i don't know who the author

is but the headline looks kind of interesting like maybe i'm maybe there's a little bit less of an investment but i don't know i i feel like it's like i've started to suspect more and more that like micro payments really could be a thing enabled by the lightning network yeah and even if it's not like person to person uh i want to be clear not person to person i'm using person to person um intentionally instead of peer-to-peer like micropayments for like automatic api calls like peer-to-peer api calls makes a lot of sense like that's something api uh services are obviously very useful to people and monetizing those as granularly as possible with you just pay for what you call makes a lot of sense and you can automate that and pay half a penny per api hit like that

makes a lot of sense to me yeah i agree um so even maybe there's like this peer or person to person mental transaction that happens but when it comes to like the direct utility of an api call and paying for that like having the person who created that api and operates that api setting the price you just knowing like all right every time i hit this i gotta pay for it yeah it's so useful to me that yeah obviously it's worth paying for it yeah and i think like setting like being able to have settings in the background that allow you to just set limits and stuff like that like one idea that we were playing around with early on with um noser was like right now in order to like you can't just put an image on noster you have to host that image somewhere

um and so we were thinking about like oh what if we made it really easy to just like host images uh on noster via collider wallet but we required people to pay in order to do that you know pay some small fraction so it doesn't get spammed or whatever um and like we we didn't end up building it because we were focused on other things but like i still think something like that could be interesting especially if it's like you know you have a bunch say damas creates an in-app wallet you've got a bunch of stats loaded up in there and you set a setting that says like yeah pay five sats every time i upload a picture uh don't go over 100 sats in a day or something i don't know um and then you don't even have to think about it on a individual basis but you

could still play around with different models yeah totally i think um one thing we've recently integrated at tftc is we're using mid journey and to create our thumbnails and i pay i don't even know what i pay per month um for the subscription the mid journey to be able to create these images but i'd much rather pay per image created totally like just have direct connection with mid journey with my lightning wallet set those limits that you described per month um and just pay per image i generate yeah lightning network and it's like whether you're talking about the new york times subscription or mid journey it's basically all it's like it's coming back to the same thing which is saying that right now the internet monetization models and the payments providers

that exist kind of force this um subscription model yeah but for most users the preference will be to pay per usage yeah pay for what i consume yeah and like and then yeah maybe this where like zabo was getting at like at scale like pricing these products where there'd be an api call an image from mid journey an article from new york times like on the business side of things like pricing that like there's maybe that becomes too much of a burden for them where maybe they don't even offer the service because it's like hard but i could also see the other side of the coin where it's actually extremely profitable particularly like paywall that's always been my thesis with with the paywall content it's like new york times bloomberg wall street journal you're going to make

more money if i think so because i'd i'd pay like a much i'd pay like an inflated price to read a single article if it prevented me from having to enter my credit card information know that i have a subscription know that then i have to go back and cancel that subscription etc right so like i said if the subscription is five dollars a month i'll pay a dollar for an article yeah and i might even do that more than five times a month i just don't want to be locked into a subscription no No. And you can even back that, like back the value of that article into like the value of your time. Like how much is an hour of your time worth? Like if it takes three minutes to do the onboarding process and another five minutes to cancel, it's eight minutes. Like what is eight

minutes? Is it worth more than 75 cents for you? I would imagine so. Totally. On like an hourly wage basis. Yes. Yeah. So you're saving that time and yeah, 75 cents a dollar even is probably worth it totally um fuck man i'm so fucking bullish right now yeah i uh yeah i i maybe like parker said i've been like distracted by noster recently but the the noster bitcoin crossover is just like like i think about them having a very symbiotic relationship so it's like i'm thinking about both and that's what gets me so excited about them well that's like that's the other thing too is that particularly like noster and lightning network and integrated like this is what bitcoiners should want to see yeah it's like bitcoin has gotten to such a point where the

utility of the layered stack is such that it's so easy to integrate into these other protocols not only that but it enhances the experience it makes it better like bitcoin has inherent utility that is being validated in real time yeah by something like noster like yeah it's like wouldn't it be great if social media internet commerce and content were all powered by a bitcoin standard like any bitcoin is going to say yes like that's what's happening yeah in real time yeah like that's the thing like we can just discount zaps just like throw zaps out the window which who knows it could be a fact maybe people realize like six months from now that maybe i shouldn't like zapping all these sets like yeah i'd rather save this bitcoin uh paid relays like you only

make the experience such that you can do it in a much more private fashion and much quicker fashion over the lightning network like that is inherent utility 100 that makes the experience on master better that is only enabled via the lightning network yeah which i mean parker can't hear me me because the door's shut but you should be bullish i do see the like oh it's a distraction like people should be focused on like hardening these things i would take the other side like i think things yes obviously they need to be improved particularly on the lightning network but i don't um i don't see a problem with beginning to implement bitcoin in the other things in fact i think it's incredibly encouraging uh and and bullish for the overall use case again going back

to like institutional investors family offices looking at the space and like being like oh bitcoin's cute like there's nothing happening i think integrations like noster and lightning could set off light bulbs like oh there is actually something happening it's not really just cute yeah i agree i have one question for you which is what is the thing that you want to see on noster that's most exciting to you that's not like a twitter client or twitter like a client well a couple bounties

got distributed over the weekend like I love like I want to figure out

a way to get the bent RSS feed just directly injected into Nostra clients

where I don't have to go and post the bent every day like it automatically

like there's a client that pulls each article from my RSS feed and just post it

on my behalf I give a credential somehow post on my behalf i don't have to do anything it's like you know article title here syndicated like a like a reader would do in the old days um well they still do them but on noster uh similarly with the podcast like boom rss feeds out syndicated directly to noster i give it credentials

comes out on my behalf yeah it's there i don't have to like go click and do anything yeah um as for my business and my content in the media arm of what we're doing here that's that would be a massive value add for me yeah yeah i think i i definitely agree with that um i think what jack has talked about with these like different micro apps is pretty exciting like the idea that there could be kind of like these that every app doesn't have to be a super app you know it doesn't have to be twitter with like messages and profiles and all that that you could kind of take these smaller specific things but because you control your identity on nostre you can log into any of them and and keep your data um that's very exciting to me and i think that what's an example of one of

these micro apps i mean like i think they're something that i think could exist today is like basically all the clients are are trying to create this twitter like experience like it would be cool to have a client that was just focused on dms so it's basically just a messaging client right so that you know and it just provided a really clean and easy to use uh like noster dm experience kind of like email but on noster yeah yeah that makes a lot of sense like it should replace signal yeah should replace telegram yeah the i don't think you can do group chats on noster yet not yet no um but yeah i mean i think like there's so many of these things that it's just the uh the the amount of interest and the amount of like smart people who i'm seeing

who are like tackling these problems in such a short period of time is is crazy and if that trend continues like i'm just incredibly bullish on what's going to happen in the ecosystem there's there's so many people working on interesting ideas there's this guy i think his name is mike digler who's working on like a new protocol for for how relays are selected and like it's pretty above my head but from what i can't understand about it it would it would improve things substantially and like this is just one guy who came in with a really good idea about how to improve it he's building it and like that's probably going to go live soon it's really the dark tickler

i'm sure you get that a lot mike do you know him no you'll have to have him on the podcast i will i will no but yeah no i feel like especially when you consider today's environment around social media twitter files elon taking over twitter facebook twitter all these other social media companies being proven to have like state actors embedded in their companies censoring individuals it seems like the last six months i've been like a state of despair in the social media sphere specifically and yeah i sent this note over noster i still don't know what they got tweet note whatever it is uh over the weekend like i truly think noster is like a black swan where people have this narrow view set of like oh like

we need to fix social media like somebody like elon needs to take over twitter and just like bring back free speech it's like no like it's not gonna happen like it's been corrupted beyond repair you need to build a buckminster fuller you don't fix it from within you need to build a whole new system that is completely separate from the one you're trying to fix and i think that's what noster brings and again social media is just one application it's communications protocol i do think it is going to enable a landscape where we build these experiences whether it be social media messaging uh syndication of content that look completely different than the landscape that exists today yeah and i think that i think that people self-censor on existing platforms

more than they probably even themselves are willing to acknowledge i think that the like overarching rule set weighs on people in all in like a lot of ways yeah oh i certainly do yeah i mean even like like you know you're like should i talk about noster because i don't know if that's gonna get me shout out right i think i might be shut up and for a dog my mouth yeah or people just aren't like my tweets anymore but no i mean we experience it with youtube i can't put half the episodes on youtube because susan mozuki even though she's stepping down does not like some of the conversations we have and like that's a crazy thing when you think about it yeah like it's it's ridiculous and so yeah i that that i think is why i feel that this project is so important

um and like it's you know the most important technology project on earth is bitcoin fixing the money that's the most important thing we can do but i think free speech would be the next thing in my opinion well that's why we fucking have it outside the studio fix the money fix the world like i don't think nostre would be as i would be as hopeful for nostre if bitcoin didn't exist because again going back to like this incentive like you always had this bootstrapping problem with these distributed systems whether it be bit torrent uh podcasting uh and now social media how do you fucking monetize yeah you have this literal protocol layer that just fits right in it's like oh this is how you do it yeah it's like you i think everyone is questioning like all right

what is the incentive system to get people to run relays to get people to provide this infrastructure and all that and it's like the incentive system is that you just create a market for it and we're actually able to do that on noster from day one because we have bitcoin in the lightning network if that weren't there the frictions to being able to exchange money within this system would be too high to allow a real market to develop around these things so that i think is why i feel like very um uh positive about the trajectory that the noster is going to go because i think it allows these market dynamics to just take place from day one yeah it's a beautiful thing it is a beautiful thing what should we what should we leave the freaks with

i think that if i i mean this is obviously a podcast that a ton of bitcoiners listen to and i think i'm sometimes surprised by the amount of bitcoiners i meet who like haven't used lightning at all yet um and or and now probably haven't used noser so if you're a bitcoiner and you care deeply about bitcoin then i think give lightning a try give noser a try you know you don't have to stick around and keep using it if you don't like it but i think it's uh it's cool to see this stuff that's out there and like we we're all long-term hodlers and all that but like there's some really cool stuff happening that is like bitcoin being used as money in these real digital economies um and i think more people should experience that i seen it i seen it i have

it's like to create like when people are like lightning sucks i'm like dude i haven't implemented in every part of my business like it works yeah i use it every day yeah like i haven't had a payment fail completely in a long time neither have i yeah i i i think via podcasting 2.0 i think i use lightning every minute of every day literally yeah like it's allowed me to stack a lot more sets then that's the other thing too like if you can set up your business in a way or you're compatible to lightning network and you're implementing these business models podcasting 2.0 uh you put your ellen address on noster so people can zap you like you can accumulate more sets absolutely and at the very least like you can have some stats that you can

then go like spend um and send to other users or like like i can't tell you the number of people who i've onboarded now where i'm like give them access to collider wall and i'm like let me send you some stats to get started you know just to like kickstart their ability to participate in the lightning economy yeah yeah you do that you send them a link to like a paywall banner like pay for this and like wow i need to go buy bitcoin that is one of the first things i usually do oh thank you sir miles it's been a pleasure thanks for having me we gotta do this much more often especially since you're right here at the comments absolutely all right that's all we got today that's all we have today freaks peace and love

Thank you.