TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #585: Has Bitcoin Successfully Scaled? with Lisa Neigut

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Marty sits down with Lisa Neigut to discuss the clearing of mempools, the state of Lightning, btc++ events, and more. Lisa on Twitter: https://x.com/niftynei Lisa on Nostr: https://primal.net/niftynei btc++: https://btcpp.dev/ 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Mempools cleared 6:35 - Making fixes without consensus change 13:38 - Fold & Bitkey 15:21 - Ark 19:35 - RHR bet, L2 is locked in 23:49 - Sats on nostr, onboarding 32:00 - Unchained 33:00 - AI tool hackathon and other upcoming events 41:24 - ZK proofs 47:57 - Timing of ideas 51:25 - Inscriptions, OP_CAT & ossification 58:23 - Impatience 1:03:08 - Nifty's focus on events 1:09:45 - Tactile advantage - bitcoin touches grass 1:17:28 - Marty's gonna win Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://tftc.io/fold Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Yeah, Mempool's cleared this weekend.

It's the first time in how long? Over a year, right? Two years. Two years. Two years. Damn. I feel like I want a little, I mean, I know the charts exist, right? Where it's like, times and Mempool's been clear.

You know? Merch probably has it. Merch has got to have it. I should get him to present it at Bitcoin++ this year. If he's got it, you know? yeah you're in austin well that's what we were just talking about before we hit record the austin btc plus plus that was really focused on scripts last year yeah and a lot of there was a lot of fervor coming out of that the great script restoration a lot of talk about opcat

opc tv got talked about um i think one of the like niche projects which you don't hear a lot about is this thing called matt just mergulize all the things um yeah i think gsr great script restoration was probably the biggest new thing that people talked about um yeah it's been kind of interesting to see where that conversation has gone in the last year i haven't really been kept up i haven't really kept up with it and this year we're going to focus not on script we're going to focus on mempools and mining pool stuff because there's a lot of really cool new things that have been have been worked on and shipped in bitcoin core in the last year i think as of version 28 they've now got this new ephemeral anchor stuff is coming out um and that's in i don't know i know

there are a couple stages of releases that they're adding it in i don't know where they are in the stages currently but um so they're going to come i've been talking to the optech guys about doing some workshops about all the new mempool stuff they're working on a brand new way of um working how the mempool actually works period called cluster mempool um yes this is a new project that peter willa and suhas dofter of um chain code came up with i want to say two years ago so it's kind of a like so one thing that's not really well that known and like i didn't really know it until I did a one day mempool workshop during Prague, like two years ago. And so I was doing a bunch of research in how mempools work because I was curious and I needed to be able to explain

it to people. And when you send a transaction into the mempool, it doesn't, the way that just a default Bitcoin core node would decide whether that transaction should be included in a block or not is it what you would expect it to be does that make sense um and probably the biggest example of this is like if you have a big transaction in a coin join right and you've got like let's say 500 people who all want that coin join transaction to go into the next block right you would expect that maybe like each of the 500 people could send another little transaction that would like kind of stand behind it and push it right like an rbf or like a child pays for parents what they call it like cpfp so basically if this big transaction then you send a another

smaller one with a higher fee rate right and so if you get the big one in you also get the smaller one in and so if you get 500 people to do that you'd think well surely you know you could take that one big one and all those small ones and that would make a lot of sense right but the current algorithm doesn't look at it that way it looks at each one of those 500 independently it doesn't group them together so it doesn't know that the individuals who want that coin join transaction to get confirmed with that child pays for parent the cumulative child pays for parent the mempool or nodes don't recognize that they're associated exactly okay so the cluster mempool is like instead of what if we're going like one at a time by like parent what if we look at him as a cluster

like a whole group well would you would the group just need like a flag in each of their cpfp transactions that signals that they're together so like so in theory just the fact you should be able to figure out they're all together just by based on what outputs you're spending but this algorithm doesn't exist in bitcoin core yet and this would be is that that wouldn't be a consensus change it'd be a p2p no it's just yeah it's just uh it's just a ship it changed like uh you know it's it's kind of this is why memble stuff i feel like is more fun to talk about i mean the stuff we did get last year about script was also very fun to talk about but definitely a lot more um you know contentious and consensus focus because he's like you have

to change what people agree about is like a valid bitcoin op code to move forward if that makes sense whereas like this stuff the mempool stuff this year it's um you know you just have to just have to add it to bitcoin core and if no one it's not consensus it's just like whoever's running whatever mempool policy they want to some extent well and it's funny they are loosely associated because last year the focus was scripts and i think a lot of the impetus behind the momentum of that particular conversation was because there was congestion in the mempools and people were very aggressive about positioning different covenant proposals to get them merged into bitcoin core as a way to ease congestion on the mempool now fast forward

one year mempools just cleared on saturday and now those same people not every one of those people but some of those people are saying bitcoin has failed there nobody's using bitcoin um oh well they should sell all their bitcoin then um you know look if you think that bitcoin has failed it's real simple just sell all your bitcoin and go buy whatever else it is you buy with money these days i don't know i hear real estate's taken off i don't know um you know well i guess that gets to the question of priorities and i'm interested to get your perspective on this like where do in your mind where what are the highest priority things to focus on like whether it's covenants to create efficiencies that lead to less congestion in the mempool and open up a new

sort of design landscape for what you can do with utxos or is it more boring what many would deem to be more boring sort of p2p algorithm fixes to make it more efficient without uh consensus change i think everyone has different perspectives here right like i definitely come from the lightning world so like when i want things in bitcoin it tends to be more related to like what's going to help lightning improve and that's like just my bias right because that's where i spent the most time working on protocol stuff um so a lot of the what will help lightning is a lot of this mempool updates right um there's also some consensus changes that make it easier to move to a different protocol for lightning called l2 which is um should maybe pave a way to where

you could have lightning with multi-parties etc and that's going to take some sort of consensus changes etc but um yeah i think i mean i think the mempool stuff is really exciting because it it has a more direct impact on how people use bitcoin if that makes sense so like when fees get higher how capable are you of being able to spend more money to get your transaction mind and actually like actively participate in block space auctions right with your transactions transactions i think there's some low-hanging fruit there in terms of updating you know what kind of algorithms make it possible for you to rebid your transaction that kind of thing um yeah so there's been a bunch of changes to try and make that a little bit more possible

um peter todd who's gonna come talk in austin i really like some of his proposals i know he tends to be quite controversial um so i that that doesn't always make me the most popular person like i think peter has a really good point about some of this stuff um but uh yeah so i think it's i think mumple stuff is really interesting and important especially because it has to do with usability of bitcoin just on chain right a lot of the new proposals that people want to put out with covenants is about moving people off chain you know like and all these new proposals all the new covenant stuff are going to have to get transactions mined at some point right so these like rails on chain matter for your ability to like you know if something usually

like when you go to a second layer you only need to go on chain if something bad happens right or yeah basically right like system doesn't fit starts failing you or you want to exit for some reason um and that point like it's enlightening is one thing that you really see your your ability to get your transaction into a block quickly is like really important, right? So, I mean, these mempool things like impact everyone and they impact everyone's security to some extent, especially when you start looking at moving your funds

into layer two projects, that kind of thing. Yeah, and I mean, tying it in with the other part of the focus at the Bitcoin++ event in Austin this year with the mining pools, that's one thing that's been talked about As well as the emergence of these out-of-band transactions and foregoing the mempool. Is that going to be a focus?

I hope so. I hope we're going to have some really good conversations about it because I like having public data sources for where the transactions are coming from. I think that having private relays for mempool is difficult because it makes it, you know, if you're a Lightning node, you know, you're a sovereign Lightning node runner and you need to get your transaction mined

in the next, like, I don't know, 20 blocks, whatever, right? For reasons, otherwise you're going to start losing money because of the way the payment things work. You need to know how much to reasonably pay to get that transaction within the next 20 blocks, right? Right now you get that from public data sources, which is like blocks that have already been mined or the mempool, right?

If you start getting private relays where transaction fees are paid out of band so that the fee rate that's reflected publicly in the block no longer is a good representation of what it actually takes to get a transaction mined. All of a sudden you run into problems with like all these projects, like lightning algorithms, et cetera,

that, you know, need to know how much to pay to get your transaction mined. It's like, well, where do you get that data from now? Are you gonna have to pay a private data broker who knows that data? because you can't get it publicly anymore um you know so i think that's the sort of thing that um you know when you're designing protocols or like building new ways to get transactions mined or relayed you know um they have big big impacts on the other ability for people to build

on top of the decentralized protocols yeah and that's i mean that's what the mining pool area whether they're accepting payments out of band or just the way the businesses operate themselves right now i think it's very well known at least in people that are paying attention the space of people that are paying attention that the mining pool the dominant mining pool payout scheme of fpps these days is natural centralizing forces within the mining pool layer of bitcoin and that was cool in nashville i had a conversation not in nashville but earlier this year callie about one of the cooler projects on cashew that he highlighted and had the chance to meet the gentleman working on that in nashville this week which is the idea of e-hash using like a

cashew uh mint charming mint to basically monetize shares of a mining mining pool right away and then peg out with e-cash tokens that have privacy benefits and then also the added benefit of something that smaller bitcoin miners have wanted for quite some time which is the ability to redeem payouts via lightning yeah very quickly yeah it's hard though like i feel like there's a nice i feel like e-cash makes a really amazing bridge right between being able to like stack up shares in e-cash and then being able to use that e-cash balance to pay out with lightning um it's hard to get yeah lightning and mining i feel like is like a really difficult thing because most of the flows tend to be one way right and lightning doesn't work really great lightning starts

having problems when you need one-way only flows but ecash is kind of a nice like shim in the middle if that makes sense because you can hand out shares with ecash and then once it hits a certain balance and make it easier to pay out over lightning i don't know what's up freaks do you have a credit card are you getting cash back or airline points or points for some other service guess what those are shit coins you want to be stacking bitcoin i have some groundbreaking news for you the team at fold has finally released the bitcoin rewards credit card they have a wait list i'm going to be distributing the cards later this year so you want to get on the wait list full plus members are going to get unlimited two percent bitcoin back on this credit card if

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haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step. your first step to self-custody if you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off tell them to pick up a big key go to bigkey.world use the key tftc20 at checkout for 20 off your order that's bigkey.world code tftc20 what uh have you been paying attention to the intersection of arc and lightning could that help that one way um maybe arc's definitely interesting i haven't really been paying too much attention to it like i see them sort of like float

up on twitter every once in a while and talk about what they're up to i feel like i haven't really paid attention in a little bit but all those things are like you need things that are like more liquidity centralized if that makes sense and like ecash tends to be that arc definitely can be that you could swap ecash and arc out i feel like almost not like almost interchangeably not exactly arc gets complicated because you start getting carrying costs for your capital again i don't know if they talk about this much with arc but e-cash the idea is you just it's a custodial thing right yeah so the miners would still hold the bitcoin um in theory um they give you e-cash shares for it right and then at some point you just cash out the cash shares over

lightning or whatever um but with arc basically all that all that capital has to exist in like on chain in a way and my understanding is that if you're holding an arc like it's kind of like a certificate of deposit vtxo yeah yeah but you know like at a bank you get a cd and it's good for 12 months 36 months right and then when it ends you have to like roll it over and get a new one um my understanding is the vtxos work the exact same way they have like a period of time like two weeks or six months or whatever and then afterwards you have to basically pay to jump to the next one um so i don't know you have to like claim your vtxo before it expires exactly but it's got a rollover cost yeah and so i saw um alex berg who's working for arc labs now yeah he posted a

note on noster and twitter i believe they basically highlighted their they have a proof of concept where they're combining arc cashew and noster where they're essentially creating uh e-cash tokens or if you don't cash out your vtxo in time before the rollover you can claim a commensurate amount of e-cash tokens it falls to the custodial basically yeah yeah yeah but they have this like i think like arc is gonna i don't know if struggle is the right word but i think they're really gonna have a time with that expiration thing because people aren't used having money that expires no like you put it this is a nice thing about i mean one interesting thing about lightning light channel like lightning channels or like channels for payments i guess

they call them payment channels um had several designs that they went through and like the original one that i think christian decker came up with um his original proposal was like you could basically use it x number of times and then after like the hundredth time you'd have to close it open a new one and so it made the current design of lightning channels actually really useful and like revolutionarily good like the reason that everyone kind of condensed around this one single design that we use for lightning channels today is that they they're like infinite if that makes sense like you can make almost an infinite number of payments and then there's no time out like you can like they're good they're like open you can like do a bunch of payments

send them at some point in the future you can close it um there is a little counter in there that if like you reach the max counter but it's like a huge number right like it's not something you could reasonably hit in a lifetime i don't think um but yeah but like you know so some of the design early designs were like these um like kind of things that have counters etc you have to roll over after so many the problem with that is that rolling over incurs on-chain costs usually right and so it's like oh well like there's like a cost built like there's this like eternal cost built into carrying your capital that way in arc for example but nobody's using bitcoin it's i mean it's uh that's okay yeah so it's i mean like if no one's using bitcoin you can just hold it on

chain right you don't have to worry about these layer two things if you're never going to use your bitcoin put a utxl take the keys drop at the bottom of the lake like you know like uh well it's yours it's got your name on it it was a bit poetic is when the mempool cleared on saturday i know i've i haven't talked to him about this i've talked to him but not about this uh matt and i had an open bet on rhr going back probably like a year or two about mempool's clearing before the next having i was i said yes they're gonna clear and they did clear so i won the bet oh congrats thank you as of like two days ago as of two days ago but he paid out over lightning on noster like he's at me the the total amount of the bet and it was like a poetic like i'm

sending this over lightning not on chain even though i could right and uh probably would have been cheaper depending on how he sent the payment yeah it was uh it was a zap on noster so depending on what his setup is yeah but every you know lightning charges per sets moved generally not by like you know an on-chain is like number of bytes it takes to make it yeah so depending on how big the payment was and which route he sent it you know which route the zap goes to get to your wallet it might it might have been more expensive for him to do that yeah that's the cost of being poetic you know yeah yeah there you go yeah yeah yeah artist you know artistic costs like are separate things but that is funny bitcoin it was funny watching all the the hoopla over

mempool's clearing and people being like bitcoin's dead it's like yeah i use lightning every day like i think there has been a material shift at least by power users two second layers which i think is ultimately good at the end of the day well i mean this is the whole this is what i love about lightning is it's so underground in some ways it's like really hard to get stats on no one no one actually knows how many users lightning has right like there's no central authority you can go knock on the door and be like how many users you got you know um i mean you can go ask different people how many users they got like wallet of satoshi river's got stats remember used to do this they used to go knock on everyone's doors and be like i think they still i think they do like an annual

report yes they're still doing their annual report but i like to joke that's like the last true journalism is like trying to figure out how many like users are on lightning um because the only way you can figure it out is like actually doing gumshoe reporting like talking to everybody and like you know because there is like it literally is like it's not like on chain where you can see how full the mempool is like yeah i don't know you can literally audit the utx's and know how much how many exist and what public addresses and last time they moved like you know how many addresses are there like all these things right um how many taproot versus whatever with lightning it's just like yeah who knows yeah which brings up like right we're getting to like a

lot of unanswered questions here and i think that's a lot of what your focus is is equipping people with knowledge to go out and answer those questions trying to yeah as much as possible at least cluing them in until like hey there's something interesting going on over here like you know maybe this is worth paying attention to yeah i don't know i mean yeah it's like you know it is kind of interesting like it's like did bitcoin scale maybe the fact that the mempool is empty is proof that bitcoin has scaled yeah i'm like i don't know hard to say like who's to say right yeah are more people like i don't know yeah i don't know i mean you can look at the on the on-chain data alone they get settled i believe last year 19 trillion dollars jesus seriously

the transactions that was that's not even half of what it did in 2021 which was 42 trillion so i would say that's that's scaling and that's on-chain and how much as you mentioned we don't know how many lightning users there are uh yeah like how many how much activity has been pushed to that layer you can sort of get some rough estimates and then we've had the emergence of these ecash mints and a noster with nip 60 i believe like the that's a good point implementation of uh mpub.cash i don't know i i would be shocked if adoption was material but it seems to be increasing i would be real careful about using noster to store your ecash balances you don't to store uh bitcoin and master relays no no no i don't actually now that you mention it like

and for those of you who aren't aware of why i would say that it's because there's no there's no guarantees of persistence on master relays like you you basically you send you know you can send them all the like little notes and say how much e-cash you have but unless you're running your own relay that's just saving all that data for you like i don't know i wouldn't yeah i think they're doing a good job of saying don't put a lot of like don't hold a lot of money in here but it is but it may get too easy i don't think people may not hear that you know what i mean well that gets back to the question is like whether you're complaining about the lack of on-chain activity or calling lightning centralized people have these idealistic visions of how people

should interact with bitcoin and that's true i mean i don't i just don't want people to lose their money no neither do i yeah i mean it'd be terrible for you to think that like that's a good place to have it and then find out it's not which is probably what's gonna happen to people you know yeah it's just like that's more more likely cases you think it's okay and then i don't know some six month old note that says you have like i don't know a hundred thousand satoshis or whatever gets like disappeared yeah no one remembers to keep it and that would be just like the eternal september because that's how people uh exactly people like sent bitcoin to wallets in the past and realized they needed to save their wallet dot that file or something like that yeah exactly

exactly they're scouring um trash dumps in england looking for looking for servers i mean how do you go find old nostril notes like where do you look for them right that's above my archival we need the what is it we basically need like the what's that web internet archive the internet archive for noster i don't know if that way back machine yeah exactly go hunt for like missing e-cash notes yeah for your in pub it's uh it's very raw um yeah i guess that's the the crux of what we're getting at here is like what in terms of the risk curve of experimentation like yeah how far should repush and figure out where faults lie and fix them it was like but you already know where that fault is i'm like don't trip over it i just like don't fall down that one like i can see that one

like mile away i don't know um this will be clipped in like a year or two from now when something happens uh lisa warned you it's like there's a big big hole there i don't know y'all just like watch out for that one yeah i mean yeah i mean like look lightning has its edges too it's like a lot harder to onboard people that whole thing whole thing whole thing of onboarding like who does that though okay well that's are people too impatient do you think with all these discussions whether i think we're i don't know i mean i think people make i think people make good points i do think sometimes that like so i was on a podcast earlier this year with isabel uh fox and duke talk about lightning stuff um and i was like you know i think people tend to hate on lightning

and I'm not really sure why they call it centralized and you sit there and you're like okay but lightning is literally the most decentralized layer two in existence period like find me another l2 that has as many independent parties running independent servers that process payments for it like there isn't one base no i was like wait i was like i thought that's just coinbase yeah that's a comparison like is it this is news to me i mean like this is like that's like the most popular l2 and if we're yeah but it's like kyc centralized like you gotta like have a coinbase account to get out of it right like it's anyway yeah but like late and everyone and then people always like oh but

lightning central i'm like in what way like please explain to me how how where you're getting this information about lightning being centralized like it's an open protocol you don't like where your payments are going open a channel and send them somewhere else like well now we got tether on lightning could that be a centralizing force i mean only if like the way that that would be centralizing is if there's only like three places you can channels that accept the tether payments and so you have to go to one of those and even then it's like the bitcoin flowing through channels is not beholden to that no yeah not at all yeah like not in any way shape or form like i mean we talk about centralization it's like where the liquidity is and it's like well if you don't

like it go put some more liquidity on it somewhere else like yeah do you envision that liquidity issue leading to more centralization are we in a happy sort of honeymoon stage i mean i think i think that it's definitely going to be i think liquidity is definitely going to be a thing that shapes the network if that makes sense like and if there's not liquidity in the right places hopefully there will be enough of a it's like um the hard thing is like getting signals of where to put more liquidity on lightning because of how private it is but i mean the liquidity is going to flow where the money where the money is going to flow where the liquidity is right and so if you mean centrality in terms centralization in terms of

well there's only one way to get from point a to point b and it's through these three channels and yeah the money's gonna flow through those three channels right but ideally in like a free market system someone would see well oh i could make money if i like put liquidity in this place right and there's ideally a bunch of people competing to earn as many sats as possible on lightning and that competition was that competition i feel like the only thing that's gonna prevent it for becoming like centralized right what you're saying is the free market will build the roads on the lightning network i mean that's the hope like that's literally the hope yeah and my free market it's not a free market so much as like the ability to earn returns right like people i think

like bitcoiners in particular and like a subset of them i will say are like motivated to earn more sats with their sats right i think i don't know if lightning is like works correctly i think it should be competitive well i think we're at the point where i can say lightning works correctly lightning definitely works where are we seven eight years in it's almost a decade yeah i mean i think the main net launched in 2018 i thought it was 2018 might have been 27 late it was 2018 it's 2018 okay yeah that's when i started okay yeah yeah i started after main net launch but yeah oh wow okay that's we're seven almost seven years in i think it was like february march of 2018 if i recall correctly slow growth yeah yeah problem with decentralized networks is they take

a long time to take off right that's getting back to my question of impatience that's what i that's the frustrating thing for me as an observer as a user as somebody investing in the space is like people these great ideas exist and people expect them to just materialize like oh the idea exists uh it should work tomorrow so that's not how things work i mean how long did it take us to get the internet it's kind of a fun thing right like arpanet started in the 60s and it wasn't until like the 90s that we got the eternal september situation going yeah and even then it was like a janky form of the internet where we had to get aol cds and download it onto our computer yeah we would you say that the internet hit like a point in a return uh i think yeah late

90s early 2000s like i think ebay amazon that's like 40 years after it was invented yeah maybe 50 even right we're being like super generous so lightning's at like what eight years nine yeah Bitcoin at 16. Seven years. Yeah. So all things considered, we're like even light speeds. This rep was brought to you by our great friends at Unchained. As Bitcoin's role in the global financial landscape evolves, understanding its potential impact on your wealth becomes increasingly crucial. Whether we see measured adoption or accelerated hyper Bitcoinization, being prepared for various scenarios can make the difference between merely participating and truly optimizing your position. This is important, freaks.

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unchained go to unchained.com slash tftc and that's are you seeing any through what you're doing at bitcoin plus plus more uh invigorated attention from a broader developer community is bitcoin a cool place to build these days feels like it's cool again yes i haven't not started to see inflows of new devs yet but i feel like that's mostly just a marketing thing on our side like whether to market i think there's definitely some real competition from um ai stuff that makes sense stuff ai stuff um but it's it's interesting i think people are really interested in building using ai or on the ai side um it's been really impressive to see how fast those tools have like gotten to where you can build things using ai coding like so quickly i mean there's some

people in this office so i just i'll check in with once a week like what are you doing like i just talked to whisper it connects the cursor it writes me up something and then i go and lightly edit and boom able to push a production yeah it's insane to me is like a old school at this point i think it's fair to call myself an old school dad like i had to hand code it you know xyz or whatever like hand pull it from stack overflow you know um well is that an area that you think bitcoin developers should be focused on like should we be leveraging these ai tools to i think i don't think it's a bad idea i think so like you know if you want to reach the younger developers i like figuring out how they to show them that they can use ai tools to make

bitcoin things happen probably isn't the worst idea i'm currently working on trying to get a little hackathon going for south by southwest week that'll be a bitcoin plus plus still figuring out exactly who we're going to partner with for it but do like a two-hour bitcoin hackathon that's like turbo hackathon who would your ideal sponsor be uh replit i think at this point um so i'm talking to some people there they haven't they're gonna we're figuring out like if they're gonna support it or not but i reached out to a couple other coding tool people um like something called lovable and there's one i think called bolt.new i used uh the replit agent to build an sec combination of replete agent and cursor to build an sec scraping tool and

it i think replete is the perfect amjad obviously the founder ceo is very um he gets bitcoin he's been on the show before and i think he's down for the cause and obviously they're very forward when it comes to ai and yeah i know i mean i don't know but like it feels natural to me particularly if the agents take off they're going to need to be able to do things with bitcoin they're going to need to spend money and bitcoin is the perfect uh medium the monetary good exchange to uh to facilitate that that could be spicy in the right circles yeah already you know yeah no that's like the uh yeah don't spend your bitcoin nobody's using it it's so funny it's you get just a confluence of idiotic contradictory statements from many people but back to replet

i think um amjad like we're lucky we have amjad as the founder and ceo of that company because i think it will be from do you use replica people that use replet here in the commons they rave about it all the base 58 classes like exercises are on replit so um i've used it in the past i haven't used it recently i've been doing a lot of coding recently but um i think it's every like i have a friend who's not really a dev she uses replit for everything like yeah i think it's definitely an amazing tool that is makes it super accessible maybe maybe this is how you get replit a sponsor you uh you focus the hackathon on making it easy for replet bounties to get paid out in bitcoin oh there we go okay all right replet if you're listening i don't know um no i've been

talking to them they're gonna yeah i need to figure that one out exactly but um hopefully that'll be it so if you're in southwest if you're in austin for south by southwest bitcoin plus plus is doing a two-hour hackathon and we're gonna do two hours two hour yeah what can you build in two hours exactly that's the thing it's like what can't you build what can't you build in two hours you know but the idea is that you use the ai like tools coding tools to do your best in two hours and that's the whole thing is like how much can you literally get done with these ai tools and is it just a broad i don't want to say mandate but like a broad sort of uh built with bitcoin is like the idea yeah yeah just do something with bitcoin in two

hours yeah yeah using any AI tool you want damn right yeah seems like it like it's that's like a real challenge right yeah because you have to think all right two hours I guess you'd have to limit the scope of what you ultimately want to accomplish exactly yeah and like and I think it takes some like practice with knowing what these tools these new AI coding tools are good at right because if you're going to be successful you're going to want to do something that like they can actually accomplish in two hours yeah wow that's just a hard product what would i prompt all these ai tools to build right we had two hours but hopefully i think the fun thing is like you could come and participate like you don't have to be a dev like you can come and work using your

ai tools and if you've got a great idea and you can like talk to the ai faster than anyone else can get your idea out yeah it took me six hours to build that sec scraping tool so i need to really okay so you know all right so but you know what the like yeah and i'm i've never written a line of code in my life outside of my myspace page and a little html css and now you've written a whole tool yeah all right maybe i will join yeah come hang out i think there's like but this thing i think this is one of the really this is one of the things that excites me about these tools and these kinds of little events is that hopefully it makes the bar to getting into trying to make tools with bitcoin for yourself like that much more accessible right yeah when is the um what

day is that i'm hoping to make it wednesday we're still kind of in the early planning stages that'd be the 12th or i think so yeah okay yeah it'd be like the 12th of march um hoping to do it the commons yeah uh yeah yeah that's gonna be it free ticket i think the winning we're definitely giving away tickets to bitcoin plus plus in may will be like probably one of the prizes maybe some sats in there we'll see we can get like a sat sponsor the uh the growth of bitcoin plus plus and the amount of traveling that you do is extremely impressive thanks so we have austin are you doing berlin again or yeah so we actually i did three events last year and i had so much fun i decided to do six this year which is insane i don't hopefully we'll see how it goes trying it

out um we got brazil this month so in two and a half weeks i'm gonna be down in brazil i'm so behind on getting that oh my god just stressed about this one hopefully it'll be fine it'll be fine yeah um that was just this is our first one where it's mostly hacking and hanging out and like working on stuff so worst comes to worst everyone has to buy themselves lunch i think it'll be fine um well the one in berlin last year looked really cool i had only had pictures of the space but everybody was like sitting on that platform that's super two-tiered platform giving talks yeah that was really good yeah that was really fun that was unplanned but it worked out great um yeah so we'll be we'll be in austin in may doing the mining and mempool stuff um that's

gonna be may 7th to 9th i'm gonna take some of summer off and then we're gonna have a run in the winter we're gonna have um we'll be i don't know if it's been like currently announced yet but we're planning one for Bitcoin++ right ahead of Baltic Honey Badger in Riga. So if you're going to the Riga event, come a few days early and we'll be doing one focused on privacy and freedom stuff because you can't have freedom without privacy.

We'll be in Istanbul the month after in September focusing on all the new, hopefully I'm calling it like the scaling one where maybe we'll bring back kind of that conversation about opcode stuff that we had here in Austin last May as well as really focusing in on how zero knowledge proofs can scale bitcoin i think that'll be really fun yeah there's some really interesting really wild ideas about how we can zero knowledge proofs to scale what what excites you most about that because i um met abdul from

stark net and he was the first one where i was like all right the ek proof has always been this i don't say hand wavy but this play in the sky thing i'm gonna go off okay i know i'm not okay um the uh i think the zero knowledge proof stuff i'm also really skeptical about i'm just gonna say it but it's one of those things i don't know a bunch about i've talked to a couple really smart people and when they talk about it i think it's this idea that you just need way less data to get way more stuff provably into the blockchain is my understanding and so it makes it such that you can do kind of almost any sort of script project like you could do any sort of script program around bitcoin and it doesn't really have to be my understanding is you don't really have to like

upgrade bitcoin to do that you know because you have these zero knowledge proofs and so you just need zero knowledge proofs and then you get access to a lot of computation sort of stuff but as a burden on the network you'd have really complex programs that no one has to actually run and so you can use really complex arbitrary logic to safeguard your bitcoin um but the cost of that doesn't get born by node runners the node runners anymore which is kind of seductive i i i don't know it's very seductive but then it goes back to what we're talking about earlier like oh is it gonna be so efficient that there's no fees on the main chain yeah i don't know i don't i don't know this is a good questions right do we need to lower the block size limit oh this is a

fun one isn't it yeah maybe i was talking to someone who i'm i'm trying to convince them to write a bit to launch in austin this year about wasn't lowering the block size but increasing the time between blocks and the reason for that is so that we can get mining happening on mars well yeah that's the uh i mean drew from unchains written about this the uh must coin yeah exactly the center of hash so that i guess extending the block time let's say we just double it from 10 to 20 minutes would push the center of hash out further into the solar system yeah exactly possible for right so instead of you don't have to make the block smaller you could just extend the time and you could do it based on like interplanetary communication uh like delays right um and that

would effectively be the same as a block size decrease right yeah um uh yeah so you do that you add zero knowledge proofs and bitcoin looks quite different than it does currently one of the problems with zero knowledge proofs right now though is that they're big so like a proof is big so those are currently handled by centralized validators correct so right now you can't do any zero knowledge proof stuff on bitcoin itself yeah but i'm the applications on like aetherium and other yeah this is why i'm having a conference about it i don't know i don't actually know how these things work the small things that people have told me about them sound very compelling and interesting so like hopefully we can get all these people

together and we'll do a bunch of talks and come out with like uh in istanbul here's the idea about how the stuff works yeah maybe here's what the roadmap for bitcoin's future looks like no i'm kidding but you know stark net and then uh was it apin labs there was open labs open labs they've been talking about shielded csv which is uh um is that really zero knowledge proofs i don't this is where i get confused about exactly what is your knowledge proof i think it's quite different but it's a different way of doing shielded transactions with client-side validation yeah yeah um so trey is the one i'm talking with like pretty partnering with them to do the event in istanbul because they're based in istanbul okay i mean i feel like they've been

doing bit vm stuff to get this i think you can use bit vm to do zero knowledge proof things where does zero knowledge proof make bit vm more scalable yeah maybe one of the others because that's the thing with bit vm doesn't take a lot of data on chain it takes a lot of data on chain yeah but i think it's arbitrary computation so you could build a zk like prover in it hand wave these are all good questions yeah i i default to like do you think we need all this stuff this is where i get back to like keep it simple stupid yeah you know i'm like do we need arbitrary computation on bitcoin whether it's like powered by zk or not like how much you know are our public private keys not enough you know like it's uh it i think that's like a taste

question to some extent which isn't you know and taste is like i wouldn't say slightly arbitrary but you know like subjective it's yeah i think it's slightly subjective like you know when you look at like what all these computation things are trying to get away from it's like you know what's wrong with like liquid everyone's like well you're you're relying on this set of signers to sign off on it right and it's like well okay if you get rid of the signers now you've got logic how confident are you that you wrote the right logic into the contract and it's not hackable right what is the history of launching these systems purely depend on the logic of actually being secure it doesn't seem like it's super high if i was being completely honest um so you know i

think there's a real trade-off there uh you know it's like an author like the key system is an off system right so you got to go ask 12 people or however many if they agree and they have to look at it and independently verify whatever hand wave and there's some logic there is let's not be like there is logic written into those contracts right now like that kind of thing so it's not like we're currently not a logic based thing whatever you want to call it but um yeah i don't know i don't know is one better than the other depends who you ask yeah no i'm going back to the timing thing too like so many of these ideas at least on paper seem very exciting and preferable to have access to however like is the market there yet and yeah are we going to have

a conversation two decades from now similar to like e-cash coming back on bitcoin after it was tried in the 80s and 90s where um we'll be in the 2040s and zk roll-ups whatever we get implemented somewhere bitcoin it's like oh this actually is great but the timing's better now right yeah i mean timing matters right like yeah we have less block space maybe all these things make more sense right well that's i mean that that was the uh the big debate after men pool is cleared it's like oh who's gonna mine yeah who's gonna mine do we need to add tail emissions it's like uh it isn't eternal september it's hilarious hell depending on it's completely inversely correlated to men pool congestion you know how much people want to talk about it i mean

or what the problem is like there's too much activity or not enough activity or spam on the network or nobody's using it it's like uh did you see how like uh who is it alex leichman of river recently tweeted a post from ethereum ecosystem so they recently recently like a few years ago updated their emission schedule so that um make it ultrasound money yeah that's what they were calling it they're the captains of memes over there i don't i don't know but like what does that mean i think it's like the way it works though is when there's a lot of congestion you burn it and when not a lot of people using your chain you produce more ith right yeah and at the same time they pushed everything to l2 so yeah there's no activity on chain so now the supply

is going back up the supply is going back up right which in theory which i'm like you sit there going like okay so what was this supposed to be like incentivizing like it creates now there's more so the e-supply is as big as it's been since like the merge right it's back up that's right at par where it was yeah uh because people haven't been using the chain they burned it all away now they've reprinted it all but okay so you've printed a lot more east so that means everyone who owns these east is worth less now right so all the bag holders i can't can't be making them too happy i don't know a big dump last night oh i didn't see that yeah price went down it's it's down like i think like 10 against bitcoin 20 usd oh wow okay so it's it's hurting okay it's like

okay but now like so does that mean like are people more incentivized to use it now that it's like worth less in theory and so is that supposed to like increase the amount of chain usage because it's cheap now like i don't know you know some of those things that sounded maybe good in theory when they were at the whiteboard drawing it out but now that it's actually happening it's like well this almost seems like a negative feedback loop which might actually lead to like a spiral exodus like a death spiral right it seems like it's happening like this is but these are the sorts of things where people are like okay well let's like add these ekp things and then everything's gonna move over here and it's like well like that sounds good on paper but these things are hard to

design with like long-term impacts in mind you know you just go back to bitcoin with segment and taproot i didn't foresee the possibility of inscriptions and ordinals and i don't think anyone's thinking about that yeah you didn't i don't think you technically needed taproot to get the inscription stuff it just it made it economically viable or something like that no it was a it was before segway really yeah i mean my whole like i'm like you know what look guys like let's just get rid of the the discount let's just like figure out how i think it the reason i was tweeting about this i was like look let's just make it so that inscription data costs full price instead of a discount right now you pay a quarter price right for all those bites

just get them pay full price for it and i think peter todd was the one this is why i like peter todd because he like calls me out on my bullshit occasionally um that he was the one who was like look you can't do that lisa like the reason why is because that would be a hard fork and whatever like reason whatever thing that they managed to shim in was a soft work and if you make them pay full price that'll be a block that will actually be a block size increase and that'll be a hard fork i don't know i'm kind of like all right then let's hard fork it in like let's just whoa let's just pay for let's just pay for it like let's just make everyone pay full price every bite in a block costs the same like no discounts like i don't know make him pay for it like at

least like does this fix the like it makes sense like why should you get a discount for some arbitrary use case what means that people who spend stuff yeah it means that so opcat is actually equally opcat is very expensive way to do covenants i don't think this gets enough as a thing about opcat is people don't really take me a hard minute to figure out exactly what opcat is going to do how it works to do covenants but one of the results is that it also requires a lot of data in the in signature block like same as an inscription and so if you think that getting opcat level covenants is going to help you scale the blockchain well there's a lot of data that goes into making those work and then what's the argument for opcat is like you only need to make

one of those signatures and then once the transaction's in the blockchain you can sort of extend it from there i don't know this is where i get very confused about what people are proposing with it i don't i don't want to lie at least i'm becoming a more of an ossifier as the days go by i'm just like just don't touch it that's fine we'll figure it out let's just make it more expensive just make it like right maybe i'm also becoming like an old fuddy-duddy like conservative bitcoiner like uh no guys let's just you know like you can have the fun stuff but you gotta pay for it like full price like none of this like okay do we need the fun stuff 75 off i don't know that we do yo like i like boring old bitcoin's good money like bitcoin is good money i mean i

like lightning i love lightning lightning's great lightning is pretty boring though i think this is why it gets fun this is not very exciting it's like i'm this exciting thing after lighting like two years like we got tether on it now and i was like yeah whatever i'm i'm curious to see how this other thing works out my question about it and i asked a friend about it i was like how is it from a user perspective how is this any different than having it on like liquid or something you can like swap that for you can swap that with lightning i've always mad has been making this argument for years was when tap s first came to be and people were talking about the potential for stable coins on lightning via tempered assets a couple years ago three years

ago maybe now at this point and it's like the value and i tend to agree with this and i think matt's onto something here the value of stable coins and their current implementation is the centralized nature of them like they run on tron because tron's very centralized and very cheap yeah and pushing that to the distributed lightning network which has all these liquidity um restraints yeah it's like why are you gonna make it maybe not less efficient but more of a headache in terms of coordinating uh sending a stable coin from point a to point b where it works fine um in its current implementation on tron or whatever it may be i this is a great question and the stablecoin issuer is centralized at the end of the day so even if you put it on

lightning like it doesn't prevent the centralized issuer from it doesn't i mean you still kind of need a centralized issuer yeah and like i mean i can hear ryan being like well actually uh in the back of my head right now ryan if you're listening we'll come talk about it yeah he definitely i would love to hear what they have to say about it i mean i like yeah i don't i don't i think this is where like and this is kind of what you get like a lot of the people that are pushing the opcat stuff i feel like kind of come from a similar place but like well it's just not worth anything if it's not directly on bitcoin you know because i was that they could launch the opcat stuff it all exists on liquid like you could do all these sidechain whatever you want go crazy with it on

liquid today because it's got all the covenant opcodes you could possibly desire already over there and i was talking to one of the starkware guys at um chain code research day last and the last year and he's like but there's no there's no users there it's basically it wasn't like we could do it but we want to be on bitcoin yeah for whatever reason and i kind of feel like this this usdt thing is similar it's like no no it's just not the same if it's not on bitcoin yeah it's like well i mean all right now you got on bitcoin now what like yeah well it's funny isn't it being positioned as full circle tether started on bitcoin via omni layer okay that ran into constraints like because like on-chain fees and stuff like that to mint the tokens i believe

that's what happened i got pushed to so it's cheaper and more centralized right because that's more centralized it's cheaper yeah i mean i kind of see this as an experiment and i'm interested to see where it i am too ends up and what they build with it and what gets built on it but i mean lightning has like lightning has a lot of sharp edges i think is is the fact that it's got tether on it gonna make it less sharp i don't know i don't think so no i guess one argument that could be made is like it finds those edges faster as people if the demand materializes to use it um i mean people have also been telling me that we have to have stable coins otherwise bitcoin's not going to scale and grow or something

or i feel like for a long time so i'm like all right great now you got your stable coin like now prove it you know yeah it proves this is the thing you needed to make the use cases you are saying that we're missing out on happen like i'm happy to have other people working on that proving it out you know yeah yeah stable coin thing is always it's always recognized that there is an obvious product market fit for particular users in particular situations but um ultimately i think bitcoin's goal is to replace the things that stable coins are tethered to which is the dollar and yeah it could be viewed as this bridge vehicle to get people familiar with the the practices of receiving and sending cryptocurrencies that make some more tune to

bitcoin once the dollar um i think it goes back to what you're saying earlier though about people just not being happy content with the level of growth that we have you know that sounds awful but it's like two trillion dollar market cap it's like it's pretty impressive yeah i look but i i do think it really does come down to like people just feeling impatient yeah and i don't i don't know man i'm just like i guess i don't really care for that you know i'm like no it's it's a many bitcoin i cannot paint a broad stroke and just define anybody uses bitcoin as a bitcoin but there's many like once you see it and this is whether you're working on the tech or you're in it solely because you think the dollar's failing and we need an alternative and i think

the latter is this uh phenomena is felt more acutely where it's like you see it you can't unsee it you can't unsee the u.s debt situation the sovereign debt crisis um the inability to pay that back and then recognize bitcoin as an alternative and at some point once you see it and you're at the point you can't unsee it you're down the rabbit hole you've transitioned a bunch of your net worth in the bitcoin you're using as your savings vehicle you just expect that everybody else is coming to the same conclusion at a similar pace and that's just simply not the case so there's this inherent there's this inherent just uh blind spot where it's like oh i saw it like so everybody else has to see it and it's just so not the case no it's insane how

not the case it is yeah it's just yeah man this has to be obvious to everybody and i feel like on the technical side where all these um whether it's a covenant zk roll-ups uh just your knowledge proofs generally or anything else that we've been discussing it's a similar sort of phenomena where it's like you have a dev who has identified um a way in which to leverage bitcoin to do something cool and they just assume like oh everybody has to get this and think it's cool too i was like yeah maybe that's not the case it's not always the case man i mean i guess my whole thing is why help the government stay relevant why help the government yeah particularly with stable coins yeah like why are you doing the work to make sure that their their asset gets in the hands of more

people yeah i mean you could like people can do that and like they're doing it um it's usually because they think it's going to help themselves or their own incentives you know to some extent i mean we've seen i mean i've seen it too where and jack mallers of strike came out when they um when they enabled tether in their global wallet and it was driven by like their users being like we need stablecoin so i do see that like gray middle area where there is like the again going back to the former phenomena of people seeing bitcoin and be like everybody has to get it like there's a subsect of users who haven't come to that conclusion yet or maybe don't have the luxury to come to that conclusion because they don't have enough savings they're like i just

need to get out the shitty currency and the dollar works and this is the easy way easiest so it's like currency arbitrage yeah i can see it but agree i would agree like i tend to focus my efforts on making sure the bitcoin's successful so that we can yeah i mean i think like singularity of focus is a really difficult thing to have in these modern times right oh yeah it's like i think it's totally okay to be interested and focused on bitcoin and bitcoin adoption right yes and you know i think it's also okay for other people to have other focuses so you know like launching usdt on lightning it was i think is something that i know the lightning labs team has been working on for a very long time right uh so it's exciting

you know i'm excited for them that they managed to get what they hope to get you know if they've been building towards that and they have accomplished that so you know congrats to them for that i think they deserve it um but i you know i think to me it still feels outside of what i'm focused on you know yeah um what would you say is the core of what you're focused on this is a great question uh these days it seems to be throwing events for all the coolest bitcoin developers all over the world um which you know like i started bitcoin plus plus in 2022 here in austin and i i wish it was not as much of my focus as it is i would say that because i have lots of other stuff i would like to be spending time on mostly like building out more bitcoin education

bitcoin protocol education for base 58 but um some reason i keep doubling down on events um why is that i think they're just you know i think it's my personality i am a little bit um i i really struggle to get stuff done and having deadlines and having social pressure seems to be the thing that i will like yeah do it and events are the most deadline driven event person like person oriented thing you can produce to some extent and so those are easy to get easy to like ship for me um and it's hard for me to tell it's saying you know the reason that i have bitcoin plus plus started because i wanted to bring together all the smart people working on bitcoin and showcase how cool working on bitcoin is and all the cool really smart engineers

that are building really cool engineering solutions in bitcoin right like so bitcoin focused um and i figured out really quickly that there's engineers all over the world not just in austin surprisingly i don't know why they're not all in austin yet but um not yet yeah but we're gonna work on that one that um so yes i i started you know and i wanted to see my friends that work in bitcoin on cool projects and i wanted them to come to a bitcoin plus plus and present their stuff and hang out and make connections um and be like be accessible i feel like bitcoin plus plus is about making these ideas and these people in particular accessible right so there's so i needed to have it all over the world and i have it definitely well it certainly has been

cool to uh to watch grow and i and i think you're on the right track there because for me personally like my journey like just being able to have this conversation we're having now like i know enough to be dangerous to talk about covenants and mempools and the p2p layer verse consensus and that's because i went to bit devs in new york um starting in 2015 and was able to have access to people like peter willa and peter todd and yeah many other like merch like jay runs the bit like bit devs like just being able to be there as somebody who was a silent observer for two to three years at that point um going uh maybe not talking for the first few but eventually building up the courage to approach the people that i've been following on twitter and who i thought were

doing really cool stuff and ask some questions and for me that gave me the confidence and then go out and write and have conversations about bitcoin exactly yeah and the truth is not everyone not every bitcoin dev can afford a plane ticket to get to new york or where all the fun bit of places are right so by bringing the events to all the different corners it's like hopefully there'll be one close enough that you can't afford whatever that plane ticket is you know you don't have to get a visa to the u.s to come hang out with i don't know these like whatever brilliant bitcoin devs are is the thought yeah no no and i think i think it's been a massive success anytime you throw an event people talk about it for oh that's great to hear yeah quite some time they're like

throwing events is i would not i would not wish it on my worst of enemies um they're stressful yeah i mean we do very um low lift live events it's just a live podcast and even those which we probably do like two or three times a year it's like i can't imagine throwing a conference or anything like that yeah i mean my conferences aren't even that big i don't know i just yeah yeah yeah i think the worst part is when it ends and you're just like wait that's it you know like hopefully everyone had a good time i don't know i don't do exit surveys i'm one of those weirdos who like doesn't believe in surveys i don't like surveys either i just don't yeah yeah and there's always i think the thing that plays in your benefit too as you may be able to

tell if you're watching or listening is still there's never nothing to talk about bitcoin so you can literally design a specific bitcoin plus plus event around some obscure topic to the broader public but something that a subsect of bitcoiners are definitely maniacally focused on yeah and that's one of the fun things though about it it's like i'm really excited about the istanbul event because well i'm excited about all the events this year but istanbul i need to get the website updated too so these aren't on the website yet maybe they will be by the time this goes live hopefully um but uh it's really amazing to um get to pick topics that i don't know as much about like the covenants one last year i was like i don't know what people are talking about

i don't know how opcat works let's just get everybody together and then they can explain to me it's selfish actually in a way yeah i mean it's really yeah i mean most projects are right at the end of the day like most projects are really kind of selfish and all these people are like trying to scale bitcoin for the greater good i'm like yeah but you're the one standing in the middle of that you know like it stands to do well for yourself if everyone uses your protocol you know to some extent yeah i feel like lightning in some senses is one of the few protocols that isn't centralized enough to like earn the people working on it like tons of money that's a good sign that should be a kpi if you're truly building an open yeah how hard is it to make money

fuck she was getting mad at me no i'm kidding no they know they know how hard it is to monetize light and decentralize again it's a timing thing i think um yeah as i think we've had this discussion on the show we were talking about um channel ads first time you came on here oh yeah liquidity ads yeah those are real close to being launched yeah i just need to do a little bit of work to make it timing that was what two years the studio was still white and we had the conversation in that corner yeah and that was the first time logan was in this room it's uh yeah yeah it's like a time like i think people severely discount the lack not the lack of it out there's been a great

incredible amount of adoption but the uh the amount of adoption we have between now and like 15 years it's gonna be orders of magnitude higher than the first 16 years he's so insane i mean look like lightning is so effing successful right now compared to like when i started in 2018 it's insane it just works like it's so insane it works and people use it like all over all over the globe people are using this like protocol that i worked at you know like it's like insane to me and like i don't know that's like you can't take i think i think the thing about lightning is like people kind of take it for granted in some way not granted but like there was nothing inevitable about lightning you know no like a lot of people worked on it we were being reckless for a period

of time we're being real reckless for a real period yeah and yeah but now it's a thing and it exists yeah no you go back and you're taking a walk down memory lane you can remember like casa launched their node and like it was thought like that's how we're gonna get lightning to spread and it was a good attempt i bought one tested it out loaded up some stats but ultimately proved that like all right maybe this is the best form factor for this and you iterate and yeah you get to the point where we are now that was probably six years ago or it's like all right we've figured out how to do it uh you have companies like voltage uh and boss others and then you know start nine which makes it easy to run at home if you want to and the market is sort of

figured out all right how are we going to make this work yeah but it takes a lot of iteration free markets too you know competition yeah the green light yeah like green light to that green light project that breeze is building on top of yeah the breeze stuff yeah it's all it's all really cool are you still excited i don't know i've got your brain to pick uh vls vls whatever i'm still excited about that yeah i've been a little disappointed like i think this is a general complaint with block stream projects in general though jade being like one of the big exceptions is like how long it seems to take them to like get things into consumer hands um and i kind of disappointed i don't know you know it's like

it's always interesting how much like i think adoption sort of follows leadership that sounds weird but like i don't really feel like there was like the right leadership personality that picked up vls and like was like here's the little box you can buy and plug in at home and that's your lightning node keys you know what i mean and like have it attached to green light in the background and like yeah well like think about except for anybody at home vls validating lightning signer yeah that's it uh basically separates the keys from the node so you can run the node in the cloud and sign remotely from yeah a hardware device and you could just have like it's but i think i mean it's such a cool vision that you could have this little

like box that you plug in and that's like your lightning keys you know um you get back whatever you know i think it has nice like a backup stuff or like you could do it on your phone but i don't know i like the idea of having like a little box but no one's made a box you know like i don't know that i could like go buy a box the same way i can go buy a block stream jade yeah and it's like why doesn't that like what what piece of was missing in the puzzle where that hasn't been created yet yeah and think about what that would unlock from like a decentralized decentralization like we're talking lightning is already the most decentralized l2 out there like if you i think be huge had something like this it would just increase you know it's like i i did this

base 58 used to call it the larp we just renamed it to the workshop but like this game right it's all about being able to touch the bitcoin stuff it's like you can make bitcoin work but you you touch all the paper and like the miners are little boxes you punch numbers into like it's all very like touchable tangible yeah i think that having a little box that's like this is your lightning keys plug it in it'll do the right thing i think that would really change the game for some people you know because people like i think people like touching stuff yeah imagine like you had maybe this voltage gram if you're listening or maybe this is like a product you guys launched it's like we'll run everything in the cloud here's some hardware device we're going to send you

and you actually control the keys but we'll manage the node for you i think people would really like that yeah i think people like knowing where their box is you know i certainly do yeah i do too i mean i think this is why a hardware wallet i think hardware wallets are like amazing for this because it's like you're like here it's here like this is it that's i mean that's what produces the best aha moments is when you walk somebody who's new to bitcoins you're setting up the first hardware wallet you get them right down their seed they if you're hand holding them you get them to send a little bit of bitcoin to a public address uh associated with the hardware wallet then you're like all right wipe the device yeah like what you're like wipe the device trust

me and then you recover from seed and the bitcoin's still there like holy crap this is how it works yeah it's cool huh yeah it's really cool i gotta be able to touch it you know like yeah i don't know yeah that's why i like mining i can talk about another like mining's its own rabbit hole that's what initially drew me to mining was that touch sea feel yeah the connection with the electricity the asics and sending the hashes to the pool um that always that that physical sort of that transmution of physical energy into hashes into bitcoin always it was so visible it was like ah this is something that gives me more confidence in bitcoin i mean but that's what made bitcoin so revolutionary is that it does touch grass so to speak right it's like the first like protocol

that touches grass like it's the first grass touching protocol you know like this is this is a meme is that means bitcoin touches grass this is uh the first digital protocol to actually touch yeah like through burning energy but yeah like yeah you like have to burn energy in order to get bitcoin touching burnt grass but well you know there's grass somewhere in the loop i don't know yeah the cows edit that produce the methane no i don't know i think we're onto something here again the bitcoin touches grass yeah but i think that's i you know i mean this is literally what made it a successful but not only successful at all so i think just um yeah i don't know like uh it makes it it gives that real world connection i don't know yeah you're building bitcoin stuff

More real-world connections, I think, like real objects. People like real things. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's like one of the first killer use cases of Lightning was paying for beer at conferences, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't think my conferences have really been on the forefront of that, but it's been really cool to see. I think there's a, maybe the documentary they did with the BTC pay servers, I feel like really kind of helps show how these conferences where you can pay with Lightning. Yeah, I mean, that's the sweetest thing about Riga, about baltic honey badgers they they've been at the forefront of implementing those btc pay server point of sales and it's cool like you you can literally pay for everything at the conference

with bitcoin yeah and i think that's kind of what some conference like that is kind of what the conference experience for bitcoiners should be aimed for i say this knowing that we're not going to have any of that and like you know people want to bring it in and make it happen that's great but kicks kicks make it happen come to brazil you have two weeks now um cool yeah where um where should we send anybody who wants to participate in a hackathon in the next bitcoin plus plus yeah go to btc plus plus dot dev check out our events i've got the two of the ones for the year we're having six i'm gonna update the website hopefully soon with the rest the events you'll be able to see them get some tickets come hang out we're still looking for

sponsors for events especially for people that want to help sponsor the hackathon and give stats to builders to make cool stuff so um yeah hit us up on we're also on twitter i guess it's called x now and noster and youtube um hope to see a bunch of people in brazil or if not there definitely come to austin and check out the more mining focus event it's gonna be it's gonna be i think it's gonna be our biggest one yet it's gonna be good yeah yeah well lisa you're crushing it thank you for doing all that you do i know uh many many people in your position uh often um think it's thankless work but i think um i want to give you your props because it's been awesome to see and uh i think it's gonna be very important particularly as bitcoin becomes cooler

uh throughout time that you're throwing these events and educating people about what they could be focusing on in Bitcoin from a developer's perspective. Yeah, me too. Cool. Well, thanks for having me on to talk about it too. All right. We'll do it again.

Maybe even during the hackathon we'll do something. Hell yeah, let's go. Yeah. That'd be great. Yeah. I'm going to win the hackathon. I'm going to practice on cursor. All right, you guys heard it first here.

Marty Bent is winning the Bitcoin++ hackathon during South by Southwest. That would be so funny if I actually do. I got to think of some ideas. Come compete him. You can't let him win. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, come on.

i like it i like a healthy competition come on kamal austin texas week of march 12th march 10th it's to the 14th yeah it's gonna be that week get here peace and love freaks