TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #452: Zaprite Is Driving Bitcoin Merchant Adoption with John Magill

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Marty sits down with John Magill, founder of Zaprite, to discuss the current state of Ireland, what's changed for Zaprite in the last year, and what to build next. John on Twitter: https://twitter.com/john_zaprite Zaprite: https://zaprite.com/ 0:00 - Intro 5:04 - Irish shitcoinery and true Bitcoiners 9:51 - Irish government 18:39 - Irish economy 25:26 - Erasing Irish culture 32:35 - Strong communities and fiat world 38:42 - Merchant adoption 48:56 - Update on Zaprite, onboarding Will and Parker 54:44 - What to build next 1:12:04 - Bullish vibes 1:17:16 - Returning to roots 1:20:56 - Conferences and meetups Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠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, this is your boy Marty here to introduce this rip of TFTC. This rip was brought to you by our good friends at River. River is a company that's doing it the right way. They build their own infrastructure, they build their own wallets, they're getting their own MTLs, and they've got customer support. You can call River if you have a question, okay? and they've got a new onboarding plan. So if you go to river.com slash TFTC,

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the industry building out the bitcoin standard enjoy this rip you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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 there's blockchain and shit coinery in ireland there's blockchain blockchain and shit coinery in ireland yeah for sure um that was one of the things that when i because like i'd been here

obviously for like over a year and then i had to leave because i had to apply for my work visa but i had to do it from outside the country so i had to go back to ireland to do that so like i was going home for a few months and i figured all right i like there's got to be some like bitcoin meetups and i googled it and it was just like blockchain and crypto meetups like all day long it was like fuck there's nothing here at all so are they well attended meetups or they just i have no idea i have no idea i mean i didn't go to one but like it was just like when you google it it's just like there's tons of them like there's dozens of them just like every week there was just like so many and uh i was like there's got to be some good or some uh some bitcoin stuff

when nothing was coming up on google and i was kind of getting disillusioned but then in january of this year some random like twitter account just formed it was like dublin bitcoiner and he's just like oh i'm sick of the fact that there's no bitcoin meetups in ireland so i'm gonna start one and i was like oh yeah nice one okay like this is great so i immediately like dm them and i was like all right zap right's gonna sponsor it like let's get this going i'm gonna like send me an invoice login this app right send me an invoice and i'll send you like some bitcoin and we'll get it going like a few hundred euro like let's get you off the ground we can give some sats out and like help people and the guy said he was like sitting beside his wife on his

phone and he's like i think some guy's trying to scam me he's telling me he's gonna send me some bitcoin and like i don't know what's going on here um did you open it with hey sir how's your trade going yeah hey sir how's your trade i'll send you some bitcoin um but yeah no that was gary and he's like he's been doing an absolutely like phenomenal job he's basically not only is he running the meetups but he's like actively orange pilling a bunch of businesses getting them on board there's like you know a particular restaurant as well that we've got on board that we we go to regularly for meals and stuff where you can pay in bitcoin he's got just local local businesses and services and like carpenters and plumbers and painters and everybody

just like starting to accept it um but the meetups are amazing like it's really it's a lot of fun he's got these like really cool games he comes up with at the start of the meetup that are like tied to like bitcoin somehow so one of them was like you know we had some swag to give out so we basically just had everybody go around the room and like in a circle and guess a number between one and 50 and whoever guessed it like obviously got the got the swag and that was the kind of like you know we would take mining and stuff like that in a basic way but like it started from there and then it just like you just got more creative and more creative with with the with the games and the stuff at the start so like it's really cool but it's great because like you get between 20

30 people uh once a month to the meetups like which is which is great for and it's not in dublin city it's kind of like it'll like a little bit outside dublin city in his kind of like local area so to get that from the start like has been has been really good but it's good to see for sure are people grokking it in ireland obviously gary and people attending the meetups but bitcoin as big as a theme as it becomes i think definitely more and more for sure and there's now a because there's like a there's a bunch of bitcoin companies that are starting up in ireland as well like especially you got like skilling mining and those guys and stuff doing like really great stuff on the mining side you've got um there's another startup i met um a crew uh a

couple of weeks ago from uh sulu which is basically using the lightning network to monetize like apis for businesses and stuff like that um so there's definitely businesses that are that are like bitcoin specific and they're doing it but from the public perception it's still a bit you know it's still all the mainstream like media foot on like you know boiling the oceans and all that like kind of stuff but it's it's definitely people are like they're warming to it more and more put it that way it's um it's definitely there's a new um there's a new kind of like i don't know if lobby group is the right word but like bitcoin network ireland and they're basically set up to kind of be i don't want to say the spokespeople for bitcoin because that sounds

like kind of like cringe but like basically they want to be there whenever there's any like government policies or anything that are like being discussed or talked about they want to be there as like the voice of reason being like well actually no like here's the benefits of bitcoin and stuff because you know otherwise who's going to do that and um we are like ireland in general is just like completely going like way way way left i just like complete like wef country and it's like it that's one of the things i've noticed since being back is it's absolutely nuts like what direction that country is going in and i don't like it at all um and it kind of scares me because like i'm kind of in that mode of like all right do i settle down in ireland again i haven't lived

there for 14 years or do i like come back and live in austin now that i have my work visa and stuff like that so i'm trying to make that decision and at the same time like just like seeing what's happening in ireland is like kind of scares me like quite a lot yeah is it happening in spite of what many Irishmen want to happen or are people bought in on it? No, I don't think they're bought in on it. I think they just kind of, they're lazy and they don't really care.

It's just like apathy. But there's, you know, for example, there's like hate speech laws coming into Ireland where, you know, if you've got what the government considers to be hate speech, like let's say you've got a meme on your phone or something, you've got to be able to prove that like you weren't going to send that on to somebody else

and all you can be done for hate speech and all this kind of stuff and the government did like a little kind of uh i don't know what you call it but they basically just did a pre-polling of the population to see like if this is what they wanted and like 74 of irish people said like absolutely no way this is ridiculous we don't want hate speech laws and the government basically just said like oh well like we don't we just do that to like keep you guys happy but we're going to push it through anyway like so i don't think irish people want it it's just yeah it's just a lot of people are just they don't there's a lot of trust in the government still um and they just kind of like they just kind of let themselves get like walked over like there's a lot of issues with

like immigration and everything now as well like ireland is just being taken over and most people like there's there's rallies there's people giving out there's protests and stuff but for the most part people are just kind of they're too busy just getting on with their lives like they don't care but hate speech laws in ireland i mean i'm of irish descent yeah third generation american but my ancestors on both sides came from ireland and very sarcastic bunch yeah it's like this is the this is the crazy thing like it's the the irish humor is is you know it's hard to get used to it the best of times and now you're telling people that like they got to be politically correct in everything they say which you know i mean obviously times have to change there's some

things you can't say anymore but like that's just more people being decent people being like okay well like i want to be a good person so i'm not going to insult somebody but like having it brought into law is a completely different story being told like compelled speech what you can and cannot say it's just horrific by any standard if i bring my irish limerick book and distribute to somebody am i distributing hate speech probably probably yeah absolutely that's the big gift in our family grandmother started that tradition oh yeah when we graduate high school she gives us nice a book of irish limericks going back to like 1400. yeah yeah and some of those are pretty raunchy yeah yeah absolutely oh i can clearly yeah yeah incorrect yeah 100 i can imagine there's

probably stuff in there that you just can't like read out loud anymore oh that's the best part everybody gets a little wine drunk and pull out the limerick book around the table yeah yeah open up a random page read a limerick yeah yeah that's it it's great it's great but yeah there's probably a lot of stuff that in there that would be like censored and banned right now it's like you can't say that stuff anymore but yeah it's um i mean yeah it's like there's a you know it's not unique to ireland there's a lot of places that are heading in that direction but it's just when you've been away from the country for so long and you go back and you see it changing like that it's it's like anything it's like the frog in the boiling water right like you most people just

kind of don't see it they're like oh it's just a little thing it's just hate speech we've got to stop people from saying bad things they're not going to prosecute us we're going to be okay and you know i don't have anything to hide so you know that old like chestnut but when you step into it after being away for 14 years you kind of see the radical change right like especially especially for ireland which is like you know we basically like fought the british and we kicked them out because we were like hell no you're not like taking over us like it's like it's just like easter rising in 1916 and all this stuff it was just like we didn't put up with any of this stuff and we're a very conservative catholic country now i know the catholic churches had like a lot

of crazy shit going on in ireland so that's a whole other story but we've come from this traditional background and now to see people just be like walked over and like run by the wef and they don't even care and all these like liberal ideas coming in and everyone's just like yeah well we have to be more tolerant so that's okay like let's just let it happen it's crazy to see it it's like a complete u-turn like you can understand if a country was maybe already left leaning and they just kind of got more left like canada for example like canada just seems like they've always been that way and now they're just getting like worse and worse and but ireland does hasn't really had that like attitude and now it's very prevalent yeah i'm bringing back to kicking

out the british i mean this is essentially copying the british hate hate speech law implementing it into your own country yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like it's just crazy it just feels like i mean ireland has always been that way in fairness like ever since even when i was growing up like we always just copied a lot of things particularly that the british did like whenever stuff came in there like we would copy it and like if ever like you know bills or laws were passed it would be like oh yeah well that seems good we'll do that too so it was very much like you know they're our closest neighbor we'll follow what they do um so it's a lot of that continuing um but it just seems to be taken to a whole other level now where the government they're

they're just brazen they just don't even care anymore like like i said like you know doing a poll of the people it's like 74 percent like absolutely no we don't want hate speech like yeah we're gonna do it anyway like that's just like you know do you even do you even have democracy anymore it's like it's just like nobody cares like no or maybe you do have democracy it's just played its out to its end state and this is what the end state of democracy is at the end of the day yeah well i think i mean definitely like i mean i always like i try to make that argument to like friends and family as well it's like look the higher you go up in the levels you're ceding your power to a higher and higher authority that is so far removed and with countries and

nation states you got to that natural conclusion of like king or prime minister or like whatever it might have been our president like and that seemed to be like the stop and even that was bad enough because these people in washington or in dublin or in london like they're so far removed from everyday life but now it's like we've ceded the power one step higher and now it's like the who and the wef and like the imf and like fatf and all these people like that completely unelected and so now i've been making the argument for years now that there hasn't been a functioning democracy anywhere in the world for decades when you really think about it but a lot of people are like oh you're crazy we still we can still go out and vote and like you know we fought for our right

to vote and we got to vote and all this stuff and it's like well what are you voting for like you're not you're voting for people you're voting for the person that you want to take orders from the wef that's what you're voting for yeah it's like oh well i want this person in because you know they'll they'll be nice when they're being ordered to do what they're told to do and it's like all right well like i mean if that's how you think then you know good luck yeah yeah here's the scissors you can cut your balls off right now yeah just do it yourself yeah exactly it's like yeah i don't know it's um it can be yeah i mean it can obviously be depressing if you let yourself like get like sucked into it too much but you know as you know as bitcoiners like we have this like

bright orange future that we're like very hopeful and we have this low time preference well we can see what's going on so we're going to make our lives better and we're going to go towards that instead but trying to trying to instill that in other people and friends and family and stuff is it's hard it's very hard like you said people are going along with their own lives they've got their own problems that they're dealing with on a day-to-day basis the economic situation globally is not uh good to put it plainly uh for many people people are under a lot of economic stress which leads to a lot of interpersonal stress in their own lives and the whole idea of having to think about dealing with the political structure and trying to fight back against that just becomes

too daunting it's like hey i gotta fucking build a pay let me figure this out first yeah yeah absolutely that's it it's like people's lives are just getting harder and harder they're getting busier and busier and they just have less time to think about this stuff and they just feel like oh if i just work a little bit harder and i get a little bit more money in and i then i can you know then i can be comfortable and i don't have to have these money issues or whatever but completely not realizing that like it's never going to end it's never going to end because they're i think it was was it jack mallers that said like most people are operating their life at a loss like and that's just going to continue because they're hard no matter how hard you work

if you're in the system you're never ever going to outpace it yeah you're working hard for soft money yeah you're working hard for soft money that's exactly it yeah um what's the economic situation like in ireland right now is inflation as bad as it is and yeah i mean inflation yeah i think i mean official numbers right got up to like eight nine ten percent whatever it was like in most places like similar obviously you know the the real inflation is a lot higher than that because energy prices were through the roof um you know i think i probably saw you tweeting about that at some stage like months ago as well you've probably seen it the people posting their like photos on twitter and stuff of their energy bills in ireland like you know 10 grand a month and stuff for bits

just like absolutely nuts so you know people have been noticing it but there's a general consensus in ireland that ireland is doing really really well because we have these supposed really good gdp numbers but it's all kind of fake because it's the foreign corporations that are generating this GDP but none of it is actually staying in the country or benefiting the country in in any way it's like and and there's been a plenty of economists even like Keynesian economists like who have written about this because they recognize that they're like yeah this is fake GDP this is not real like Ireland is not doing as well as people say it is but apparently we're the poster child for like you know oh we went through this really horrible recession because Ireland got

like hit really hard in like 08 09 but we seem to we seem to bounce back really quickly and now we have one of the strongest growing economies again apparently but again it's all just you know fake gdp numbers um but it's like it's obviously not sustainable and now of course we've got like massive immigration as well not just like ukraine but like like many many nations like african nations everything like they're all coming in and we as a eu country we have to i think by law except like immigration so we can't do anything about it and there's a massive massive housing crisis in dublin like people cannot like young people cannot even find a house and if even if they could they couldn't afford it like there's nothing on the market either to rent or buy

even if there was you can't afford it rents like house prices are just absolutely nuts there's more and more homeless people every single day and yet we're just taking in absolute record numbers in immigration which is like i mean now that i'm saying it it just seems so absurd that like the government would be taking in all these people and we can't even take care of our own but that's what's happening and then of course most people are cheering it on right they're just like waving the ukraine flags going yay we have to do this because we have to like you know we have to take these people in because they're like fleeing from a war and it's like well you know how come they get through like six countries to come to ireland like they're not

fleeing a war like you know what i mean like the most of ukraine is like still going out to restaurants and pubs and nightclubs and even if you're fleeing from the bad war part which is yeah it's terrible um you're you're not fleeing to get into ireland they're just coming because one we have one of the most welcoming countries and we give them like you know crap ton of social welfare and free houses we're building free modular homes for all the people that come in now as well so like why wouldn't we come but we like i said we have to by law take a certain amount as well so it just seems like we're heading in a very bad direction but again not not specific to ireland like it seems to be you know every seems to be every country but one of the stats

actually that came out recently was ireland is the i think it's the most expensive european country to live in with prices on average 46 percent higher than the eu average holy yeah so think about that like that's like 46 percent above the eu average and yet we have all of these immigrants coming into the country who are somehow able to be fed and sheltered in the most expensive eu country like how like how does that make sense like it it doesn't obviously but no it does not compute that's where we are and then when you bring it back to like the gdp numbers which i imagine are predominantly being driven by the apples of the world yeah like they're domiciled in ireland because of the tax benefits which yeah they're there because

taxes are low so taxes are low they're not going back to subsidize this influx of immigration and the welfare that comes with it so that doesn't seem like yeah nothing really computes here Nothing does, and it's just so bad on so many levels because I talked to somebody as well who's close to the rental markets, and they're saying that the likes of Google and Twitter and all these companies that are headquartered in Dublin, there might be an apartment that comes up

and it's like €3,000 a month to rent this apartment in Dublin city centre, and you've got a line-up of 100 people outside waiting to view it and try and get lucky, and rent it and then you've got like google that just comes in and says like yeah we'll give you four grand a month for that apartment but just you know let the people line up and you know make them pretend that they have a shot and so like none of these apartments are ever getting to market because of these big multinationals are just paying way over the odds to like sweep them

up um they're sweeping up to put their employees there or just uh yeah yeah yeah now that was happening up until i know they've put like a freeze on on um employees i know like in google and twitter and stuff they've laid off a bunch of stuff in in dublin as well over the last kind of six to twelve months so like that may not be happening in fairness as much now but it's what has contributed to the situation that we're in now is that there was just literally like nothing like if you go on one of the biggest uh housing rental sites in ireland you know like you could like there's a handful of like apartments and houses for rent like it's it's crazy like that there's just nothing available like the supply is just gone but at the same time we're just we're bringing

all these immigrants in and building the modular homes when our own like 20 year olds like coming out of college and stuff like can't afford anywhere to rent or live or families like young families trying to buy a house it's just it's backwards like if you were to explain it to somebody they would be like what the hell is going on better be careful john you're you're bordering on some racist hate speech here yes absolutely i'm i'm talking ill will of the government so that's got to be hate speech yeah for sure yeah yeah who are you to want uh your fellow countrymen to be able to go and rent a house after college yeah absolutely that's a absolute right wing uh that's a right-wing thought that i want irish people to be able to afford a nice comfortable

house and be prosperous and that's yeah that's a very right wing of me i apologize i hope uh i hope i haven't offended any of your listeners this is great i mean i saw a tick tock video going around a few months ago on twitter funnily enough but i believe it was galway or dublin it was one of those like men on the street interviews and asking the question what was the most popular name oh yeah i saw that in in gaul it was in galway yeah in galway last year and everybody was like sheamus or yeah kevin i was like no it was muhammad yeah yeah and people were like shocked yeah yeah yeah yeah it's it's like it's nuts um it feels like it feels like the irish identity is just being wiped out um it's it feels like and it's obviously like you know

now you're bordering on replacement theory conspiracy all that stuff yeah yeah i better be careful here but uh but yeah no it's like you see like i said it goes back to like when you haven't been there in 14 years and you just land yourself back in after being away for so long you can see all this stuff as clear as day um and that's just an observation like we don't have to get into like all this like you know what that means or who's behind it or what's happening but like it is an absolute fact that you know it's kind of and he can't even talk about this stuff anymore right if you try and say like well look they're wiping out like irish national identity then it's like oh are you racist you don't want these other identities in ireland and it's like

that's not what i'm saying i'm just saying like we're wiping out our irish history like it's well why is irish identity worth even protecting preserving yeah future yeah i mean that's that's the it seems like it's not most people just seem like oh why why would you like why do you care about that like you know what i mean it's like no but honestly let's make the case like why preserve irish identity and culture well i mean irish people have contributed so much to to the world that like it just feels like there's a legacy that needs to be remembered that's like you know that's at the core of it i mean if you think back of um think back to like what the what the irish monks have done in transcribing like a lot of the kind of like books and stuff through history that would

have been like lost like through the ages like in europe like they basically just kind of you know there's so much there even in the cultural aspect of like you know the poetry and the music and the writings and everything and and obviously like you know a lot of people have family connection like you know throughout the world because the irish have like spread so far across the world that like it feels like it feels like we're you know i don't get into the whole thing i'm like oh ireland's grateful like it feels like we were a nation that's punched above our weight for so long that we have contributed a lot and a lot of it comes from it comes from our it comes from our history and our heritage and so if you destroy that then maybe you destroy a very strong a very

strong part of a culture that has contributed so much to the world um and so it's not just a case of like you know it's not just a case of like you know being proud to be irish and stuff like that because i've never really never really bought into that as much it's just more it's just more like when a nation has a cultural history it's something that they they feel a very very strong connection to and it changes you in in like obviously like a good and powerful way but if don't have that then you know you're kind of drifting you don't have anything that you cling to then you've got nothing to fight for and you've got nothing to be you know again well like i said the pride aspect of it is not as much but yeah it's um maybe i'm waffling too much on

that point but like i it's every nation has things that need to be nurtured and cherished because it's what made them the nation that they were and obviously over time that like just gets stronger and stronger and that community like builds and builds and if you just like start fracturing that and and dismantling that culture and that heritage and introducing you know diversity so that you split all that up it's you're you're not doing anybody any good no when you take it to the extreme level obviously like you know bringing people of different cultures and backgrounds into into nations is great like it helps everybody learn and experience new things and then but when you just completely blow up a culture and and decimate it so that the culture doesn't exist

anymore that's obviously not going to be good for anybody not for the people coming in not for the people already there it's um but again we're getting down a whole other rabbit hole there but um it's not specific to to ireland it's more specific to like every nation needs to like retain that culture that made them the nation that they were yeah because at the end of the day if you don't there actually will not be any diversity and that seems like i'm trying to figure out like the correct word is a projection by the wef class like sort of trying to browbeat people for not wanting this to happen and calling them racists like you you don't like diversity it's like well actually it seems like the goal of these policies whether

they're direct or indirect um and these themes that are put forth by world economic forum world health organization financial action task force un whoever it may be like it seems like the end goal is to actually like you said destroy individual cultures which actually leads to true diversity to create this sort of um unitary uniform culture globally i mean yeah again people will say we're getting into like replacement theory conspiracy theories or new world order but again like you said somebody was detached from ireland for 14 years in return like it's an objective change that you've observed and yeah exactly and i and i think it's i mean again like it's a much bigger conversation to go down that rabbit hole and explain like the

why's and why nots but like you maybe part of the point i was making earlier where it's like just people have apathy now they just don't really care like the government is making decisions they're bringing in aids and most people are just like yeah whatever like i don't whereas like 20 or 30 years ago irish people may have reacted way stronger to that because they would have felt that like the irish way of life was being attacked whereas now the irish way of life is being decimated like daily so like most people are just like yeah well there is no nothing to defend anymore it's like we're all just like whatever like you know what i mean it's like if you chip away from what people felt strongly about then like in the future when governments come in to

like stamp all over the last little bit of heritage you have like most people are just gonna be oh it's gone anyway so like there's nothing left worth fighting for yeah no i mean and this is we talk about ireland we talk about where i grew up in northeast philly which was irish catholic part of the city my parents grew up there a very strong community in the northeast and um we began to see like things started to change in the 90s we moved to south carolina for four years and moved back to the philadelphia area but we settled in a suburb not where i grew up in the northeast and very strong tight-knit community culture for 30 years or longer than that way long in that decades many decades post world war ii um and now they don't even say mass in english

anymore or my parents got married where they went to school right and the neighborhoods completely gone to shit it's like crime ridden like there's no strong community yeah um yeah and it's weird it's yeah crime is one of the big things that like is a byproduct of you know splintering a society because you mean you know yourself you talk about um i keep going back to that episode you had with that guy from the the um small towns like chuck burrow like two years ago or something it was like I was like, yeah, that was really great because like it, it explains a lot. Like when you have a strong community of a lot of people with similar, similar, you know, outlooks on life and similar like cultural histories and norms, they want to protect that, right? Not necessarily that like they think it's superior than any other culture, but it's like they want to protect it because that's what, that's their way of life.

That's what they've, they've become used to. and when that gets fragmented and and broken apart it's it's very hard for people it like one of the things obviously that comes in is a lot of crime and stuff like that as well because people then really have nothing to protect there's no kind of sense of like well we need to like you know get rid of this crime because we need to protect that underlying culture but as the underlying culture has gone then people are more often likely to just like you know move out cities or move somewhere or go somewhere else because they just don't care anymore they're just like well you know what i had there was gone so i'm just gonna like move on which is sad

it's like i mean it's bad that people have to have to make those decisions because of what is being like forced on them um you know some people might say it's better to be moving out of cities anyway and i'd probably be one of those people i don't really like cities but that's beside the point the point is like that you know it's you when you're when you pull apart the fabric of what you know made a culture strong then just people kind of lose that attachment to that culture yeah and as it pertains to like mass immigration whether it be in the eu or here in the united states it's always something that's never really intuitively made sense to me is that the meme is like they're coming to like a better place and it's like and i think el salvador is a great

example of like a country that adopted a bitcoin standard but kaylee came in and whether you think it's a good thing or a bad thing in the way he did it he completely solved the crime problem within a matter of years they were the murder capital of the world san salvador was for many years and he came in and really cleaned it up and crime has fallen precipitously the economy is doing better now you have the situation where if you pull uh salvadorans who have left the country over the last two decades whether or not they would come back a large percentage of them were saying yes like i plan on moving back to el salvador it's finally safe and i want to move back there and again bring this back to immigration policies something really doesn't make sense to

me it's like oh we got to save all these people from these terrible countries and the focus is never on like all right how do we make these countries like a place where people don't want to leave in the first place yeah i can incentivize that culture in u.s foreign policy and the u.n foreign policy over the last five decades has just been completely destabilized and pushed people out yeah yeah yeah exactly but i feel like a lot of i feel like i feel like society in general has gone down that path of like let's not try and fix the underlying problem let's just like band-aid upon band-aid upon band-aid um and of course we see that in you know with central banks and fiat and as bitcoiners we know that well because it just seems to be like

you know money printing has caused all these issues and like oh damn we have problems how are we going to fix it all let's print more money like it's just you know it seems like we're just at the stage where it's like oh well we know things are completely broken let's just keep going as long as we can there's no like underlying like oh well let's just go back a little bit take take a couple of steps back and figure out how we can actually fix this from the example you gave like let's try and fix these countries so that people don't have to leave um and you know that's probably it's probably an easier job to do it definitely is like it's el salvador did it in four years that's what i mean it's like it's you know it just seems like it just seems like such

an easy fix it's like all right well let's just stop printing money stop printing money let's actually put criminals in jail yeah it's actually like clean up society let's actually do the right thing here but again it feels like i mean you know we can talk about california and all these places where it feels like it's just the opposite it's where like oh well like you know we can't really prosecute people anymore that's not fair so let's just let them steal up to a thousand dollars and then that's okay and we won't prosecute them it's like what like what like when did that ever make sense it makes sense to a government who is running out of money and can't afford to police like that's what happens you just end up being oh we're not going to police anymore yeah and that's

the particularly scary prospect of what's going on now where you have everybody flooding into these western countries as they're going broke and you're just going to get everybody in there like we broke the money yeah we don't know how to do anything good luck yeah yeah yeah but we're going to fix it we're going to win we are going to win yeah we're going to win i mean i mean coming back to the great orange future in bitcoin yeah and why we do what we do it's because it gives us an actionable avenue through which we can build a better future for ourselves and to do that we're going to need infrastructure particularly software infrastructure obviously there's physical infrastructure on the mining and full node side but the ability for people to access

bitcoin to receive bitcoin to send bitcoin in ways that are at parity with the incumbent financial system is important yeah that's what you're building it's up right yeah i see where you're going there with this um yeah i mean i mean we don't have to go too deep into the backstory because like i think i probably i probably you know talked about this last time i was on and most people hopefully kind of know the backstory but it zap right obviously started because i needed a way to accept bitcoin um and that was really kind of at the heart of what has been driving zap right from the very start is like you need to make it very very easy for people to accept bitcoin um and obviously you know with i mean we can talk about you know parker and will

joining as well but like just to mention that the recent essay that parker wrote about the pay me in bitcoin theory it's the same kind of thing like it's all about merchant adoption it's um you know we can't pay in bitcoin unless the merchant is accepting like that's just obvious right um and so that's one of the things we really need to do is like we really need to to have these tools in place that make it very easy for people to accept bitcoin and i probably talked about this last time i was on but like there's there's major things that have stopped people doing that in the past which is like you know volatility and the price of bitcoin and and tax affairs and accounting and all that kind of stuff so you know again it just goes back to what

we were we were doing like we just recognize the underlying problem and fix it and the underlying problem is okay if we don't have these tools then let's just build them and then that's the way it is and there's an amazing amount of things being built on bitcoin right now i mean the like this bear market i mean i know it's like cliche to say it but like the amount of the amount of work that's being done that i see being done in the bitcoin space is like absolutely phenomenal like i think you know once you know another another cycle or two like we're just gonna have like so many different services out there that are just gonna become like second nature to people they're They're just going to do things that, you know, were a problem before and are not a problem now.

And it's great to see. And of course, obviously, like that's the payment side of it is what we're trying to do at ZapRite. It's just make it easier for people to accept Bitcoin and understand how their business is performing on a Bitcoin standard. And then bring in tools that allow them to either spend that Bitcoin or, you know, convert it if they need to pay bills or whatever it might be. But really, it's all about like building that application there and making it easier for people to use Bitcoin. Yeah. And going back to Parker's piece and the whole idea of merchant adoption, Dan Held would not be happy with this part of the conversation, but it is important. And I do think Parker's piece was very, I think it could be like a pivotal piece in the history of the conversation around merchant adoption. has really reframed it in a way that is applicable where it's not like go get every merchant to accept bitcoin go get the bitcoiners who run businesses to accept bitcoin yeah like and one

at a time you don't have to turn it on for every square point of sale system at a moment and expect everybody to accept bitcoin what you really need is this base of hardened hobblers to eat their own dog food in a certain way if they're offering businesses and services to individuals just to have the option out there like i accept bitcoin not only that i prefer bitcoin i'll give you a discount for that yeah absolutely um and i mean again like one of the great examples was the the tweet you put out there recently about like the health care provider here in austin like that that was just like a really based move it was like you know i see the benefit of it i think you know doing stuff like that where you can reach individual merchants like one at a time

who really understand what it is that they're doing and why they're making this decision i mean again as as parker pull it it's a balance sheet decision right um at the end of the day you recognize the superior money you recognize the benefits of it um and if you can do that you know for specific merchants the bitcoin hodlers will then come and spend and that's one of the things that like i kind of like i've been banging this drum for a while now that like you know hodling is great at least it has been for like you know a decade or more to to get this store of value going and get us to where we are but like you have to spend bitcoin like you have to actually use it in the economy and spend it whether you're spending and replacing or whatever

it is you're doing you have to actually start using it and i know people will say like well hodling is using it is but it's not using it fully you have to use every aspect of it and some people might say oh well that will come in time you have to give like the store value more time and then things will go through natural evolution and then medium exchange and all and it's like well at what point do you like do you just sit around waiting like what what is the what is the point where it's like everybody's like okay now it's a medium exchange that doesn't happen unless you actually get merchants accepting it and you get um you get people like spending it and like you said that doesn't necessarily need to be like oh we need this on like you know a

million terminals like in a city or something it just needs to be like all right one merchant okay now we have a health care provider now we go get a lawyer now we get a plumber now we get like the local rancher all of these little things that all of a sudden we now have these outlets to spend our bitcoin yeah um and it all starts with the merchant yeah i mean health care is one of them one of the most high leverage important things and oh yeah when veronica sent that message out we were stoked and then i was even more stoked when i found out she was using zap right and so we received our first invoice earlier this week on monday this week paid it and it seemed nice she's happy we're happy excellent yeah yeah it's amazing and reading her reading her like um you

know short short i don't think it was a blog post i think she just put a page up on her website it's like this is why i'm accepting bitcoin um and you know obviously it it ties in a lot to health care like you just said it's like you know health care is one of the the the low prime time preference things in your life like you've got to look after your health or you won't have your future and the way she explained why it was that like you know her her ethos and thinking behind how she runs and her healthcare service and provides her healthcare services is it matches up and aligns exactly with with bitcoin you know she's all about like you know self-sovereignty and providing you with exactly the information that you need to make the best health decisions you can make

and then obviously like recognizing the fact that people are allowed to make the best financial decisions they can make i.e using the best money and so one thing she can do to help that is like okay well i'm going to accept that money and that's just the clearest indicator you can get that she's really thought about this and understands exactly why she needs to do this and why it's important for her business to do this and i think we just need more of that we just need more people recognizing the real reason behind it not just the like oh okay like i see all these fanatical bitcoiners and maybe i'll get one or two more customers if i do this it's like no like you you need to understand exactly why you're making this decision as a merchant and once you do like

there's no going back right like it's just going to be it's just going to be obvious that this was the right decision that you needed to make yeah one at a time yeah emergent grassroots efforts it's not pretty yeah it's not fun at times but if this is going to be successful and we're going to have the circular economy that bitcoiners like to talk about this is how it has to happen one time one woman at a time yeah one health care provider one rancher one nation like this is it it's like oh el salvador is accepting bitcoin it's legal tender like okay great and everybody's just sitting there going who's gonna be the next who's gonna be the next like you know it's one at a time we're just doing on a smaller community level like that's that's how it happens you know we're not

going to all sit around and oh when it's like you know when is square going to integrate like you know bitcoin payments into their terminal or like when is this going to happen it's like well we have the tools like just go to the merchant and go yep here's zap right here's ibex here's like whatever it is like you want to use like we have the tools to do it like do it now stop waiting for these other bigger companies to come with like more streamlined like you know nice like you know oh well they have these like beautiful little terminals in the shop and stuff and it's no we can solve that without that we already have the tools to fix all that stuff so yeah if not you then hell yeah yeah it's uh it's exciting and it's exciting as like going back to like building in

the bear market but this adoption in the bear market is a very high signal event too yes it's one health care provider yeah yes matt her husband is tucker backs and he gets bitcoin but yeah that's that's the funny i'm not sure if you saw rabbit hole recap a couple weeks ago but i did i did i was laughing listening to that segment it was like i was just like yeah you almost fell off your chair i could i i it was uh like how else do you expect this to happen matt yeah push back on that because that was one thing where as well i was like matt what the hell like holy smokes dude like just like you know like be happy this is good like you know you can't just go oh well that was a bitcoin or so it doesn't matter it's like well that's the whole thing

saying is like who do you expect to start this i mean going back to this whole conversation we're having for the last five minutes it's like you can't sit around yeah and wait for other people to adopt bitcoin like bitcoiners have to implement it and lead by example yeah yeah yeah exactly that was yeah that was good that was that was a good conversation um that you guys had i'm still disgusted we'll discuss this next week in person but in terms of i mean it's been what over a year since we last talked yeah yeah it was it was a year and a half i think it was like around buddy's day it was like march yeah last year yeah yeah yeah yeah and you mentioned zap brice brought on parker and will to the team which has been massive and the products obviously

evolved a lot over the last 18 months so what have yeah yeah would have been the biggest like pain points and additions to the product um so okay so what are you doing since last march right so um last march i i wasn't too long in austin at that point um and i'd started to like raise a bit of money um 10 31 the first first check-in which was like amazing um and then a little bit more and then the bear market like just quickly hit in the middle of last year and it was like okay well you know it doesn't seem to be as much money going around so maybe like i have you know i have a good lot here i'll just go and build and do the things that i want to do um and so one of the first things i did which was around uh august really about august last year we started was i had

written the original version of zap right the mvp in in react and you know people tell me i'm a developer but i don't really think i am like the code was absolute garbage so we'd hired a developer to come in and kind of fix some stuff and he was just like no we got to rewrite this from scratch and i was like yeah okay great like let's go so that was like a very long process that took like you know over six months to really get it like you know done and done and dusted um and then we pushed that live in april of this year um and that was like a complete rewrite from the ground up we moved away from google firebase we have our own postgres now we've um we we did a lot of things like separating the the checkout away from the invoice so now we have a separate standalone

checkout that the invoice feeds into and that allowed us to do the things like payment links which we announced at bit block boom and stuff like that which we can get into as well the specifics of that if we if we need to but um there was a lot of a lot of work like a lot of bear market just like grinding from like basically august right through till april this year when we when we push that through and that's really like the the kind of foundation of everything we've we've we're building on right now is like that complete rewrite of the code base we have an amazing developer tom who's like leading all of that and it's still working like hardcore on that right now um so that was really great and that allowed us then obviously to kind of like

start accelerating roadmap items and um you know everything else that we had that we wanted to like get in there that was a really great foundation um and it was around that time in in you know april may of this year when um kind of started you know having conversations with with parker and will because i think they had they kind of stepped back from their full-time roles at unchained and like maybe like just the end of the year before like in november i think it was i can't remember but they were kind of looking for something to do as well um and they they were looking for something in the payment space and they had very very very similar um mindset on what needed to be built and done in the payment space um and they kind of like just kind of

realized that like all right logo john's got like a hell of a lot of this already done what's up right so like let's just go and talk to him so it kind of made sense um for them to kind of like join in and then just like accelerate the next uh step of of zap right so yeah i mean having those two guys on board is like i mean man i'm like completely humbled like i mean if you you asked me like when i kind of like ran out of canada in september 2021 if i'd be in this position right now with like you know parker lewis and wilco coming in to join zap right it'd be like you know you're crazy but here i am and it's happening and it's absolutely amazing because i think it's exactly what zap right needed at that point you know we were at that point where we kind of like

all right we've we've kind of we kind of proved there's a bit of a use case there still maybe searching for exact product market fit but like there's definitely use cases a growing user base the as we just talked about the payment space and the application space like needs to be built like more um and and these guys had like a very firm vision of where that needed to like what direction needed to go and it lined up exactly with what i was thinking so it was kind of the timing and everything as well was great was just like okay we've done this massive rewrite we have this solid code base we have this like loose roadmap that we need to kind of like focus where we're going next and having somebody like will to kind of step in with his background and

say like all right well you know this is where i think we need to go and then having parker come in with his business development background as well and going like okay well i know how we're going to like get users and i know how we're going to like you know push that past that path forward um so that's really been like a huge kind of a huge catalyst for zap right and a motivational aspect for me in particular as well just to be like okay like this is kind of like you know a little bit of validation like i know i've got something that i'm going in the right direction and having these two guys like on board to say like yeah we want to kind of help you with the next step has been has been huge so obviously like you know we announced that the the announcement

of those guys in uh joining in in end of august i got around bit block boom and then announced our like our payment links feature and our subscriptions features and stuff like that as well so that's all kind of rolled out now as well so now i think we're we're in um again like i said we're in a really great spot now where we can actually start like cracking out on all of those roadmap stuff that that we have for for the next kind of like year or two so what are the lowest hanging fruits on on the roadmap right now uh i mean there's a bunch of stuff like the the plug-in stuff is obviously like you know that's always ongoing we're always talking with like you know other um bitcoin partners like wallets exchanges and stuff like that and going okay how we can how

can we plug you guys in and how can we get like your users you know being able to like plug your wallets and everything seamlessly into zap right and and and help like users on both sides of that so we're always looking at adding more plugins in um even on the self-custody side as well like just we're you know lightning addresses getting lightning addresses in there and being able to hook them up to people's like lnd instances so they get self-custody lightning addresses things like that um all of the plugins and connection stuff is like huge um and then there's all like smaller little features that we can enhance the um the invoicing and the payment links as well because obviously the invoicing was um you know they're one-off payments you send them out they

get paid once and they're done so the payment links feature actually allows you to create um a hosted payment link that can just get be purchased multiple times right so sell a book or a t-shirt or whatever it might be so we gave that out to like jimmy song at bitblock boom and he was kind of like the first to to use it in in the in the in the wild like live um he was selling his new book um fiat ruins everything at bitblock boom and so that went like really well he was you know very impressed with it and everything kind of like you know worked as expected and it was great like you know to see that all you know working exactly as we we hoped it would and so there's a bunch of stuff we can add in there as well like you know adding variations on products

and multiple quantities and like all that kind of stuff so there's just like you know small little features we can add to that too and then obviously one of the big things that we really want to focus on as well is the accounting and reporting side of things right because as i mentioned before that's been one of the things that people always talk about as being one of the drawbacks and one of the feature requests as well that people like really really want um so that's you know that's where we can actually shine and start showing people exactly how their business is performing on a bitcoin standard um and and that's something that like you know we can um we can hopefully get a lot more of those features like built in there in the future not just our own kind of

dashboards and reporting for within zap right itself but also hooking into like quickbooks and sage and zero and all these things as well um will i think will be like huge for people yeah we were talking about this the other day in the commons like for tftc rhr like being able to hook into quickbooks yeah it would be massive because right now i have my bookkeeper who gets bitcoin but really doesn't understand it and then i need my bitcoin account shout out to joe at satoshi pacchioli yeah joe's awesome to sort of help manage the the bitcoin revenue side of the thing and then cross compute it with quickbooks that my bookkeeper's managing and it's just like a clunky process where zap right quickbooks integration just being able to do uh invoices

that can be paid in fiat or bitcoin via zap right hook right in the quickbooks would just be like holy crap this is yeah yeah that would be a nice seamless uh integration for sure and that that's exactly where we'll head um right now we've got like a really comprehensive csv export which like to be honest like most users are just like you know just give me a csv like i'm good i can deal with that i can give it to my accountant so we've kind of like tweaked that and revamped that and added in like a lot more stuff into that so we actually can give users exactly what they need right now so that kind of solves the first immediate like need to be able to give everybody exactly what they need for their accounting and then we can like i said just go and make that a

hell of a lot easier by doing direct integrations with quickbooks and things like that because like you said having that ability to have everything just sync immediately into quickbooks um is is ideal because the beauty of zap right is you've got this one unified checkout where you can you know your users can pay in like on chain or lightning or card and it all just goes into the into the one um into the one accounting software rather than what i think a lot of bitcoiners seem to be doing now is like oh well if you want to pay me in bitcoin like here's a link to like you know this place over here and if you want to pay me a credit card like here's a link over to my like stripe posted checkout or whatever it might be um so even just the ability to pull all that

into one checkout like hosted branded checkout where you don't have to run a server and you don't have to do any of that stuff you literally just connect your xpub or your lnd node or whatever it is or even if you want to just do custodial lightning with strike or something like that as well it just makes it super simple it's like you know a couple of clicks and you're immediately accepting bitcoin in a unified hosted branded checkout that you're not running any of the server infrastructure for yeah it's a beautiful it's a beautiful thing it's the and it's the funny thing is going back to like what needs to be built many people would view this as boring but somebody running a business it's it is boring to a certain extent but it's extremely important and it solves

it solves an absolute need i mean i was scratching my own itch when i was building it like i was freelancing and needed to to invoice and i i couldn't do it there was no proper invoicing software that allowed me to to do what i needed to do in a self-custodial manner um and so when you're building something for yourself you're obviously starting from a good place so there's obviously a a massive need for it there's and as we know now like you know a couple of years down the zap right journey there's obviously a whole bunch of people who felt that exact same pain point and we're like yeah like holy crap okay great like this is exactly what i needed um and so you know that's really that's really what's kind of driving zap right as this as i mentioned

before is like just making it so easy for people to accept bitcoin and so because we're wallet agnostic and because we're not a payment processor we don't touch the money it's like zero percent transaction fees you're completely in control of your own money whether you want to connect like a self-custodial wallet or you want to hook up to like you know uh like like i said strike or anybody else or like ibex who's like you know like kind of like a step in there as well if you want somebody to manage the liquidity for you you can do that you can hook up a voltage node through lnd or whatever it might be and you really kind of have the full gamut of of options um and having and just giving people those choices means it's just going to get easier and easier for people

to come to zap right and find exactly what they need yeah and parker and i talked about this a lot when he was talking to his about his payments idea before officially joining zap right and then just like this middleware software that just connects everything like this connective tissue yeah that anybody can plug into yes again most people would see it as boring but it's extremely important if we want to take this industry to the next level because everybody has their favorite wallet uh their preference on on-chain versus lightning uh their lsp providers whatever it may be and it's just creating a tool that any one of those user archetypes can plug into to to accept bitcoin yeah exactly and and even just the ability to like switch between them as well

um like with zapra you can customize each individual checkout for each payment link in each invoice like you can switch on and off whatever it is you want to have so you might have you know um you might have an lnd running on like an umbral or start nine or something like that um where you don't have a huge amount of liquidity but like it's enough for what you want to do so you're going to switch that on for one specific thing that you want to do but then you're like oh well i need to accept like you know i want to sell tickets for like an event so i need much more liquidity or i need to take a larger payment so i'm going to switch on my strike for this checkout or whatever it might be um and that's the beauty of it like you can actually switch lsps and switch

whatever it is you want to do you can customize that invoice not just for your preferred payment methods but for for each individual client you can be like well i have a client that i know is going to pay me in bitcoin so i'm going to switch off the credit card option i'm not even going to give them that option or maybe you have a a customer that that pays in in credit card but you've been trying to orange pill them and so you want to get this in front of them so you give them that unified zap right checkout which shows them the bitcoin the unchained lightning payments and then you can actually add like maybe you want to add like a 10 premium on the credit card option so now they see that and they're like oh damn okay maybe i need to go get to myself some bitcoins

i'm going to save 10 on these fees because they're charging me for for paying in dirty fiat yeah um well let's talk about that let's dive into that more that incentive mechanism to get people to spend bitcoin like yeah with that premium or discount like how you frame it like because parker and i talk about this a lot and he's yeah dead set on like no you frame the credit card as you're paying a premium as opposed to like getting a discount for bitcoin yeah exactly and that was his talk at bit block boom as well like at the end of it i think he kind of touched on it a couple of times and talked about the end of it i think uh somebody probably simon i think asked him a question and he's like well no you have to actually frame it as the premium on the bad money like

that's what you need to frame it as um you know why why should you give a discount just for accepting bitcoin and i mean you know either option is valid like right if you want to if you think that the only way you can get a customer to pay you in bitcoin is by offering maybe like a slight discount on the bitcoin payment then you know maybe that's what you have to do but you know long term the the proper way to do it is say like look i don't want this dirty fiat because i'm going to have to take it in and i'm going to have to bring it to like unchained and exchange it for bitcoin and put it in my like custody and in unchained because like that's what we do as a bitcoin company so i'm going to have to go through that process so i'm going to charge you a premium

for that and so that's kind of the way that you know you should be looking at it like long term but obviously like you know each individual um business and user is going to have a different way of looking at it but yeah how you frame it is is is important and you know framing it as dirty fiat is you know premium on the dirty fiat is a good way to do it could we customize the fiat line item like if you pay in fiat you're paying a dirty fiat like really really drive the framing home yeah maybe we'll have to add that feature and like customize the text in the button yeah do not click this uh no it's the payment links too because i used the payment link to pay uh veronica earlier this week and it was simple it took me 30 seconds from receiving the message

hitting the link paying the link and boom yeah health care costs covered for a month covered yeah and you get your nice little receipt and your pdf and everything in your email telling you exactly what you paid and your cost bases and everything and then she gets the same on her side and everybody's happy yeah yeah yeah and that uh drives home another interesting aspect to it bitcoin particularly since it's a push system like this whole idea of subscriptions and create this new user flow of instead of setting up my debit card or my bank account and having it pulled at the first of the month like i have been historically with ultra personal health care now it's just like new user flow of like all right here's a payment link again if

you're like on top of it it's not really that much of a difference yes you have to think about it and take some action clicking the link paying the invoice but is that a hurdle a ux hurdle you think could create barriers i don't see it as a hurdle um it's definitely not ideal it's definitely not what people are used to like you know putting in their credit card to stripe and just being auto paid it like every month um it's definitely different but you know it's not a massive it's not a massive hurdle i think you know the way we've built the subscriptions our own subscriptions so we just launched our subscriptions like 25 a month or you know 20 discount if you pay annually 240 annually um but the way we're doing that like we didn't want to use stripe or anything like that

to to manage our subscriptions even if we were accepting bitcoin payments and we didn't want to use stripe software to manage it so we actually built our own subscription system into zapride um which will eventually hopefully release out to zap right users as well so they can actually start running subscription system as well but what we're doing initially is we're just using you know cron on jobs to send emails it's basically seven days beforehand three days beforehand and on zero day like you'll get emails saying like you know hey reminder your subscription is coming up and here's a link to zap right payment link and then they go and pay it boom we extend their date and zap right and they get another month or another year or whatever it is they've paid um so if we can

actually start automating that in in some way with like bolt 12 or with like async payments or whatever it might be that like you know we can do in the future to automate that and take out some those like pain points yeah absolutely like we're going to do that we're like jumping at the bit to to be able to do some of that stuff um but for now yeah it's just like it's a little bit a little bit automated there's one or two manual steps but again i wouldn't describe it as like a hurdle i think it's just you know and people are kind of you know if they want to pay in bitcoin they're happy to pay in bitcoin as well right so they don't mind it it's like uh it's just an experience that like okay well maybe i have to click this link every month to like pay every month but it's

just a kind of reminder that like well yeah this is because it's self-sovereign money i get to decide when i pay right i'm not auto charged all the time no and then on top of that i think you mentioned it like user tendency with the incumbent fiat system is like all right i put my bank account or credit card information just pulls um but i think the first time that somebody forgets to pay the invoice and then they go to send a zapper at invoice and they can't because they haven't paid their subscription fee they're just gonna remind the guy to pay top up it's like it's not like they're going to stop using zap right they need to send invoices so yeah exactly basically what we do is if they haven't paid an invoice they've forgotten like i mean you know

realistically if somebody's just using it for invoicing they're not going to they may not be sending invoices every single day it might be once a week or maybe at the end of the month they log in and do it all maybe they forgot to pay you know when their subscription was due so when they log in they'll just see like you know a little message that says like you know they'll try and create a a new invoice it'll be like hey you need to pay your subscription you forgot to pay last time before you can create new invoice you need to pay and it'll take them to the payment page and they can pay so um you know we we downgrade them to a read-only access so they still have access to all of their data they can download their csvs they can you know look at everything download their

invoice pdfs any um any invoices that they have sent out can still be paid like we're not going to shut that off like if you don't pay like we'll still any open invoices we'll just allow be paid and come into your expo by your wallet or whatever it is but you just won't be able to create any new ones and you won't be able to create any payment links and push it there and you're like we'll disable your payment links temporarily until you've paid but your invoices will still like if you sent out invoices you can still get them paid and stuff yeah i i don't see this as being a big hurdle to adoption because again if the service is useful which is upright certainly is people like all right i gotta pay this 25 invoice to receive a thousand dollars that i'm gonna send

out yeah and receivables exactly yeah and i mean obviously that's one thing that we have to kind of think about as well is that how we actually charge and how we do that and you know what like how much per month we charge and what's what's a good rate to charge and you know there have been some people who've you know been like well it's kind of high i don't have that many bitcoin invoices and um you know we get that and and you know this is an evolving thing as well like we'll we'll start looking at tiers and how we can accommodate more users and different things but you know we had to to start somewhere and because we built the subscription service ourself we just kind of started with one simple 25 subscription because we just needed to make sure that it worked and

everything was like easy um but as we build out that internal subscription offering we can start to add more features to it where we can have more plans and tiers and different things and then we can release it to the public um but yeah i mean we we definitely opted for the value for value model right we're zero percent transaction fees because one because we're non-custodial right and we don't touch the money so we can't actually like you know take in 100 take one percent and give you 99 like we just can't do that because we don't ever have access to your money but two because i don't necessarily like like that model like i don't i personally don't like that percentage on the volume model if it can be avoided i think it should be some places you

know maybe for an exchange it makes sense because it's just you know it's it's easier way to do it but i much prefer the value for value model where it's like hey look we've built this software if you get value from it please pay us 25 bucks a month and you can continue to access it um if you don't see value in it then you're not going to pay like that's that's okay we got to do a better job in convincing you that there is value in it but i personally think that's a much better model than taking a percentage on volume that goes through i think we got to prove to our users that there is value in paying that money and if we're obviously not doing that and they're not paying then we gotta like look at why that is but it can't just

be a simple thing of like oh well it's free to use and like we'll just take percentage of whatever um so yeah i mean it's all of this stuff is kind of any startup kind of goes through all this stuff as well how to price and how to do different things but i think um personally as a bitcoiner like i just see this as a better way a better way to do it and like i said we'll like look at different tiers and for different offerings for like personal accounts and enterprise accounts and all that kind of stuff as well yeah yeah i think it's a good place to start what are you most excited about um i mean man i'm excited every day just working on zap right like i mean it's just it's amazing that i get to be in this position being the founder of a bitcoin company and working

on something that i'm extremely passionate about so like every day i just kind of like you know get excited about what has to be done like today because it's just obviously like a huge long list of of things that need to be discussed and planned and designed and like i'm still doing all the design work um still a very small team um but uh so i still do yeah i still do a lot of the design work there's less and less time to do that because the the ceo role starts to take up more and more time um of your of your daily time so eventually you will get a designer so but i still love doing design work so like it's great when every every now and again i can like jump in and roll up my sleeves and and design some like new ui or new feature that needs to be done um in general

i think i mentioned it before but i'm just really excited for everything that's happening in bitcoin right now like i said the amount of like the amount of the amount of building that's been happening in the last like 6 to 12 months has been phenomenal it's crazy like it's it's amazing to see it um and i think we're gonna start seeing a lot more of that pop up to the surface now um you know early next year as we start to you know slowly creep out of this bear market and we're gonna see uh the fruits of a lot of people's work um come to the forefront and i think it's um it's gonna be amazing i think we'll see a lot more of these applications that make bitcoin easier to use um and that's what kind of really excites me as a as a designer and ui ux guys like just all

these tools that just make it easier um it's it's something that it's something that i you know struggled a long time to to figure out where i could actually fit into the bitcoin ecosystem because i wasn't like a hardcore developer i couldn't review prs and look at like bitcoin core code and stuff like that so it took me a long time to actually figure out where i could fit in and i guess the the the community itself and bitcoin needed to mature a little bit so that we did get to the stage where we could start building applications on top of things and so now we finally have that and now i think there's space for there's the space for every profession in bitcoin now like whatever it is you do like marketer lawyer like you know social media like

whatever it is like you can be working for a bitcoin company now and that and that's amazing like that's that's really great to see that there are so many roles that are available even in the bear market there's some people who are laying off but there's a lot of people who are still hiring as well so um it's great to see it's great to see the ecosystem being being developed to such an extent that it's starting to get more and more mainstream um in terms of like the jobs offered and the applications that are being built and everything as well on top it's great to see yeah i think the the building that's happened in this bear market i've said it on many shows in recent months is far beyond anything i've experienced my first 10 years in bitcoin and

to your point like the companies that are working to make it easier to use bitcoin like zap right and other companies on the lightning network um and even down the hall unchained what they just launched with their keyless enterprise offer others come into market and it's just extremely exciting taking into consideration everything that's happening in the global macro world having on the horizon and the fact that the next hype cycle that comes i truly believe that the industry i mean this is a fact two ways it's mature mature than it's ever been because it's older than it's ever been but like the actual like tools that people can leverage like bitcoin's going to have a lot more to show off during the next hype cycle where it's not going to be people

going on coinbase and buying and following the charts they're gonna be able to go on an exchange send it to a wallet and then play with it on podcasting 2.0 or accepting bitcoin as payment for their business and all these other interactions that did not exist during the last cycle yeah absolutely yeah and i think that's that's key to it is is the ability for more people to integrate bitcoin into their daily lives whether it's a business or their personal lives i think it's just getting easier and easier um and it's great yeah i love to see it yeah are you happy to be back in austin yeah i definitely am it's um it's good yeah i don't i wasn't sure how i'd feel coming back because i came back in in june for a month and now i'm

here again for like you know best part of a month and it's uh it's great there's this there's a special vibe in austin it's um you know it's amazing just like you know walking back into the comments here and just seeing you know just you know seeing everybody just like doing their thing and and you know really creating um is amazing and then we had abc last night as well so it's good to be back for these meetups and we'll have bit devs and stuff like a couple of weeks down the line and it's um yeah it's definitely special special place to be and i love i love being here yeah i'll have to come back full time yeah well that's i was just going to go into i feel like we're in similar positions where i feel this vibe in austin where things are

happening it's very strong but i also feel that pull from my family up in the northeast and like getting yeah my roots and it's like ah yeah family's huge and that's kind of that's kind of what i've gone through in the last while as well as uh i mean i kind of mentioned it earlier where i had to leave and go back to ireland while i was waiting on the visa and obviously i hadn't lived there for 14 years and just going back and you know just meeting new people and hanging around with like family you know my parents are there they're not getting any younger being able to spend like months with them is like it's amazing you don't like you kind of you don't realize it but like it took took me a while to get there like it took i was out for dinner with some friends

one night and they basically just said like you know i was chomping at the bit to get my work visa and get back over to austin and get going again and i was kind of getting fed up that it was taking so long and i was waiting on the u.s embassy in dublin and like they was just getting frustrated and my friends kind of just looked at me and said john like your visa will come forget about it just enjoy the time that you're spending with your parents and your family here because like you know i've got nieces and nephews and stuff that like i haven't obviously seen in you know a long time i met like a three-year-old niece that i hadn't met before when i went back like in november and everything so it was like you know it's great and then obviously like this

the bitcoin startup scene that's happening in ireland as well like a kind of like when i went over there after being there for like you know seven eight nine months it's like you start to feel this pull and this draw and it's like oh damn okay like this is a feeling that i haven't had in ireland for like a long time and family is a huge like strong part of that as well um but it feels like i have a kind of family here in austin as well and that's like kind of hard like you know when i had to leave in november it's like i felt like i'd made such amazing friends and met some such amazing people that leaving them like it was tough and then you go back and you get that same thing with your family he's like oh man i gotta leave my family and go back over

to us and it's like i mean look i mean we're talking about like first world problems right like it's i i i am blessed to be able to bounce between these countries like i have a canadian passport i'm obviously irish i have a work visa for the us like there's not a lot of people who can who can say that so i know the position i am in but again like it's you know it's it's decision time yeah decision time now i feel too i mean we make our pilgrimage to the shore every summer we're there for two or three months with our families like literally three generations one house ten of us and then my cousins my extended families on the island my kids are hanging out my cousin's kids my mom my brother and sister and then we come back here and it's like oh god

we missed that but then we're in the commons and the vibes are high people are working and there's all this energy here yeah yeah it's just this weird thing like going back to what we were saying earlier it's like and i'd toil with it internally too like parker sold me pretty hard you got to fall back to austin build bitcoin and then go back to where he came from and sort of build it up there well maybe that's it maybe it's just like you know bouncing between the two yeah you can have the best of both worlds and then that's kind of where i am right now it's like i'm kind of looking at this idea of like okay maybe do i put some roots down in ireland and then just like keep traveling over to the us for like you know a month or two at a time and doing some work in austin and

then going back to ireland hanging out like i mean it's a valid option but at the same time like the older you get like you kind of get tired you get tired of traveling like man it's just like those those eight or nine hour flights like over the atlantic are killer like it's i don't even like traveling to bitcoin conferences in the united states yeah i kind of it's people like how come you aren't going to this conference there's just too many goddamn conferences number one number two yeah like i don't like traveling i don't like sleeping in hotels i don't like any of that yeah i'm kind of getting i mean it seems weird to say i'm kind of getting jaded of conference because i haven't been to too many but it took me a long time to go to my first bitcoin conference like

i've been in bitcoin since like you know 2013 and it was 20 22 miami was my first bitcoin conference and i kind of got disillusioned with that because that was like a little bit coinery and like there was too many people there and i was like okay like and i i've been recently been to baltic honey badger that was amazing like riga's great that's a great conference like a lot smaller more intimate like amazing people like and that would that was good and it was you know it was a lot closer to ireland and stuff as well so i was able to go um but i am getting to the stage where i'm just like i don't know like these just going away for like three or four days these conferences like it's exhausting hanging out with the same people it's like we need to go out well yeah this is one of

the thing as well i think why i might have been so disillusioned with miami is that like i was living in austin at the time and then there was like about 50 of us that just went from austin to miami and i just hung around with the same people i was just like like what's this all i just create like paid thousands of dollars to stay in miami in this accommodation like to hang around with the same people it didn't make any sense but you know it's good to experience a few of them and then um but yeah you kind of get like a little bit jaded after a while it's like it's like how do you how do all these people get this work done you're gonna yeah like every conference is like hey wait second yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean there you know you can i've heard matt talk about this as well

it's like you got to be more selective and you've said it before you got to pick and choose the ones that you go to and you got to kind of scale back a little bit because you know after a while there's there's not as much benefit to be had from doing the the circuit the circuit yeah yeah now i definitely have my short list baltic honey badger being one of them i had to miss this year for the the first time but that's have you been to the mall so far except this year yeah i think except two i don't think i went to the first ever nice but after that yeah i've been to three or four i think there's been five or six yeah yeah it's been a few yeah that was the first one i was up but yeah really really impressed shout out to max and yeah yeah yeah the rest of the team at

huddle huddle yeah they did a great job yeah yeah um it's been awesome it's great to catch up man yeah it is thanks for having me on it's been uh it's been amazing to be to be back in austin and back on the show so thanks for having me here oh you've got the open invite whenever you want to come we can talk appreciate that we can talk immigration policy uh irish heritage whatever whatever yeah yeah whatever we fancy we don't have to talk about that quite all the time yeah yeah maybe we can get deeper on some other topics but uh yeah no it's been good it's been good to be uh it's been it's been good to you know at least to kind of touch on some of that stuff because uh i think there's a strong bitcoin community growing in ireland right now and uh

it's great to see like the effort of like gary and other folks over there who are doing like really really solid work and like i said meeting a couple of founders from like new irish bitcoin startups and stuff is really really promising so fingers crossed that's you know that's gonna just keep getting better and better yeah i mean that's one of the beauties of rhr particularly like the shout outs and the boosts that we read is develop this culture of people like pimping their local meetups if you're out there and you don't have a meetup go start one oh yeah man i'm like i'm banging that drum all the time like there's like i say it to everybody who listen to me every podcast i go on and everything it's like you cannot overestimate

the the the benefits of getting together face to face as as bitcoiners and discussing all this stuff um whether it's a local meetup or a hackathon or like a community event or whatever it might be if there's no if there's no meetup in your area start one like even if it's just like three guys who go for a beer or three girls or whatever like just like just start it and get some people together and like it will it will grow from there um and and i think there's there's huge opportunities to be had when you start attending these meetings and meeting different people and networking and stuff it's uh i mean it's it it's how zap right got to be where it is was me moving down from canada moving to austin and going to the like bit devs and abc and everything like

month after month hanging out at pleb lab and commons and stuff like that that's how i got my start and i i just can't like you know overstate it it's been it's been absolutely amazing so oh yeah highly recommend like meetups start one for sure yeah and then going back to what we're talking about earlier like it's got to be bitcoiners driving this adoption at the grassroots its level and you can argue that even before that like point of going to merchants and getting them to accept bitcoin or having bitcoiners accept uh bitcoin as merchants themselves like you need these meetups where people can go learn how to actually do it yeah yeah absolutely yeah like huge amounts uh huge amount of knowledge out there that bitcoiners are willing to share

so yeah just just get in there and learn it absorb it all right john it's a pleasure should be a fun week next week yeah looking forward to it yeah it's going to be good to see some uh amazing folks again uh it's last year was great looking forward to it yeah well uh i think i might have a beer it's 4 30 on a friday i think this is episode number four or five we've done this week yeah you deserve podcasts in totality yeah let's go have a beer let's yeah let's go grab a pint of guinness yeah absolutely all right peace and love freaks