TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #686: Living on a Bitcoin Standard in 2026 with Steve Lee

Episode Date: November 22, 2025

Marty sits down with Steve Lee to discuss Bitcoin's path to becoming everyday money through Lightning infrastructure development, the importance of daily usage for strengthening Bitcoin's resilience, and why spending Bitcoin while remaining a long-term holder isn't contradictory. Steve Lee on Twitter: https://x.com/moneyball Spiral: https://spiral.xyz/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.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/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ 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 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 And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Thank you for having me in your studio, sir. Great to be here.

As we were just saying, this is the first time I've been interviewed in the studio. So I'm excited for it. I am too. I mean, this is a long time coming. We've been talking behind the scenes for many years now. Yeah, I've never been on the show. I know. I'm sorry it took so long.

I mean, it's been a big week for the block organization. Yeah, the past week extended into this week. there's a there's even more more announced on well yesterday the dc policy stuff oh yeah like the de minimis tax so there's been a good week and week and a half of uh really great stuff from block and extended to the whole bitcoin community i think um i finally i got through the whole miles suitor episode of yours so i i'm up i'm up to speed on that he did a great job I'm talking about all the efforts. And then today's the investor day for Block,

which only happens... There was one like three years ago. That was COVID era. So it was like remote. This one will be in person. Well, better for two reasons. One, there's a ton of exciting stuff to share. And then just being in person is more intimate

and better feel to it. Well, the reason I bring up the week that was for Block is because a lot of the products that were launched revolve around using Bitcoin as everyday money, obviously payments and merchant adoption. And it aligns very well with, correct me if I'm wrong, but based off our conversations over the last few years with something that you're worried about,

which is if Bitcoin doesn't become everyday money, it's not going to attain the full potential that you think it can. well that's definitely that's definitely true that it would not attain uh full potential and then the question is can it can it just be digital gold and sustain with all the properties we that make it valuable as store value i think that's a really interesting question to get into we can we can certainly talk about it um but there's no doubt it doesn't reach its full potential and i also feel strongly that um even for people that are into bitcoin you know everyone's in you know there's different reasons people are into bitcoin right but for the for the group of people who are

just in it for number goes up they believe in store of value and that's it that's completely completely fine but even for that um group of bitcoin users they should care my opinion they should care about daily usage it makes bitcoin more resilient it gets more people involved using it more people um will care about it so like in terms of like a political force and voting voting segment it grows like imagine if millions of small businesses around the world depend on their for their business that's a strong voting block um it also helps distribute the pricing of price discovery of bitcoin because instead of just a few global exchanges as the primary points of discovering the price of bitcoin um you'd have millions of touch points around the

world where people are exchanging value i come to your store you give me you know i buy fish from the from you or whatever bread or whatever and i give you bitcoin and we're establishing a price right there and that one single instance isn't going to really move the needle but billions of those data points on a right you know on a daily or weekly basis or whatever absolutely helps establish the price steve why would you spend your bitcoin there's only 21 million and it's going to that's another thing i feel pretty strongly about a multi-hundred trillion dollar market cap potential and it's only two trillion dollars why would you spend your bitcoin you should absolutely spend your bitcoin here it's definitely a common thought process to

you know i mean people who own bitcoin most like believe it's going to keep going up a lot right uh including me probably including you um so why would you you spend it well so multiple reasons one um humans are already accustomed to like the concept of a spent like checking account saving of the calendar, like spending money in your wallet or purse, and then like your IRA or something. So that mental construct is very normal for folks. So sure, if you have your stack that is your Bitcoin savings, don't touch that. Don't spend from that.

Don't touch it. Like cold storage, secure it, and don't mess with it. But, you know, if that's like tens of thousands of dollars or more, whatever, great. your spending wall is like you know 20 bucks 50 bucks 100 bucks whatever you'd have in like your your billful maybe a couple hundred bucks but just spending amounts of money um for that just spend and replace spend and replace uh and i mean for super hardcore bitcoiners who are just like throughout gresham's law at you or whatever um if you feel that strongly that fiat is crap money and bitcoin strong then go all in on bitcoin have all of your money in bitcoin hold no dollars

or fiat. And then you have to spend Bitcoin because that's the only money you have. So I think people can still be strong hodlers and still spend Bitcoin. Then there's the reason I just mentioned, which is even if you care about your stack that you're saving, by spending it, it actually strengthens Bitcoin overall, the network, the resilience, and it protects it as a store of value yeah the distribution and when it comes to spending bitcoin building on what you're just saying about living on a bitcoin center i mean parker our good friend parker lewis has run the numbers i forget the exact name of the the post that he that he wrote earlier this year but it was basically the logic of spending bitcoin and if you actually run the numbers over many

years views bitcoin as your long long-term savings account and actually spend it as well on top of of that on a Bitcoin standard and you can run the numbers that you're still making money you're ending up with more purchasing power which is actually my personal situation like block pays me and folks on the spiral team in Bitcoin so I

receive it as Bitcoin I keep it in Bitcoin and then I only convert it to dollars you know when I need if I have to make still sadly but you know most realistically most of my payments are still are still are denominated in dollars so then I would convert sort of on demand

it's the uh it's the way i do it as well it's it's great living on a bitcoin center it's hard it has been hard historically from a ux perspective but it's getting easier i mean the products that are making it very fluid to switch from bitcoin to fiat to bill pay features and strike cash app and talk to well certainly like with cash apps announcements and new features uh from the past week it definitely helps right because now all four combinations work you can i can have bitcoin pay you as a merchant you know i can pay you in bitcoin you receive it as bitcoin or bitcoin to dollars or dollars to dollars dollars to bitcoin so sort of each party in that two-party transaction uses whatever they're comfortable with and what they want to do today and i i think

some some bitcoin some hardcore beginners might like say that's fake or not really embracing bitcoin it's a it's a baby it is it's absolutely a meaningful baby step um and everyone has their journey with bitcoin not everyone starts as like hardcore fully embracing and understanding self-sovereignty and privacy and all these important properties of bitcoin so um meeting people where they're at today whether they be the small business or the consumer uh gets them started on that journey yeah preference optionality is is how i would describe it but to get to all this many people sort of gloss over or simply don't understand particularly the masses that there is technology needed to be built to enable people to live on a bitcoin standard and use it

as a as a payments vehicle yeah and that's been a lot of your focus at spiral yeah particularly open source infrastructure around lightning network um and privacy as well and so how would you describe the progression of the technology layer of this payment stack over the last five years yeah so for people that don't know spiral has a full-time team and um most of that full-time team focuses on the lightning development kit uh project we also have a really robust grant program and fund over a dozen open source bitcoin projects as well so um our scope is bitcoin but we do fund and support many different projects in the space i'd say overall we we tend to fund protocol development and developer tools. Because six years ago, when we got started, that's where

a couple things. One, those were very weak areas in Bitcoin. And two, they're not really naturally money making opportunities. So like, it's not going to attract venture capital or angel investment or be able to generate quick cash flows for an entrepreneur to bootstrap. Yet they're really impactful, important things. So I felt like with Spiral's budget, But we have these magical dollars for Bitcoin to give to developers to work on high-impact projects that don't have a business model behind them. And that's our criteria with all our grants too. If you came to me with a great idea, but also one that could make money, I'd be like, that's awesome, but we're not going to give you a grant. And it's because you can go build it yourself, generate money, or get VC money.

And I totally support that. So we're looking for projects that are high-impact that aren't going to make money. And developer tools and protocol development are two categories that fit that. So yeah, but the full-time team has focused on Lightning Development Kit. Anyone who's followed along with Lightning at all knows it's a very complex protocol. It's a very ambitious protocol because it intends to scale Bitcoin and improve the user experience relative to on-chain in a dramatic way, but preserve as many properties of on-chain Bitcoin

as possible and it does a it does a i think a really good job at preserving those properties it's a little bit weaker security model different and weaker security model to on chain but it does a relative to all the other new protocols that have popped up it still is the king lightning's the king at preserving those properties um user experience has improved dramatically both for the developer and the user over the past six years it still is not it still has some rough edges um some of which are are fundamental and so we can talk about other payment protocols as well which choose different trade-offs yeah well important to bring up trade-offs you mentioned like not the same security assurances as on-chain but this is what happens when you move up layers

like you've got the trade-offs for ux usability but you can always fall back to the main chain and reap the benefits of all the benefits that exist there security um ability to self-custody which we'll talk about with lightning but before we go on to sort of the overall state of lightning and emerging second layer protocols as well what would you say to the haters to say it's a failed experiment it's centralized it can't scale and nobody uses it um well different answers to different points you made there but i mean overall to call it a failure i think is ridiculous um And I mean, I can certainly steal, man, why people are saying that. If you have certain expectations or you had a certain use case in mind,

like if your expectation was 8 billion people with a mobile wallet, each with like one or more lightning channels, if that was your expectation in a great UX, then it's failed at that. And no one ever expected it to scale to that point. I mean, it's simple math, because it's a function of the blockchain size. so it can't scale that much but has it failed outright absolutely not

because it definitely has won at being the glue between a bunch of different subsystems and those subsystems could be custodial like products like Coinbase or Cash App or all the other systems that have popped up like ARK and

Spark and Fetament and Cashew and these new Layer 2 programs Liquid as well yeah yeah liquid as well uh you know whether you want to call it you know let's call it later too or i'll call it a subsystem i hate the semantic i like subsystem i think that's a good system but these you know they all have trade-offs and and i can yeah i'm happy to go through each and every one of them if we want to i think they all have merit all the ones we just mentioned have merit

i'm not a hater on any of them in fact spiral supports almost almost all of them um but the If you live in the Ethereum world or Solana, if you're using stable coins there, it's a total nightmare in terms of UX and interoperability because I might have dollars on USDC base or something and you have USDT on Tron and they're not compatible. So then we have to, as the users, we have to bridge or swap or do crazy stuff

just to send dollars. But on Bitcoin, lightning is the protocol between all these subsystems. subsystem. So I simply am sending and receiving Bitcoin. As a user, that's all you need to know. I'm sending and receiving Bitcoin. You're sending and receiving Bitcoin. You might be on a Cashew wallet and I might be using custodial cash app. I don't have to know you're using a Cashew wallet. You don't even have to know you're using a Cashew wallet and we can send and receive Bitcoin. So what makes that tick? It's the Lightning Network and also the

payment protocol i mean right now bolt 11 but in the future it'll be bolt 12 so um that that glue is uh essential so it's it's absolutely one at that it'll keep winning at that the only way it's displaced is if one of those subsystems um ends up being subsumes subsumes in all all use cases and all payment work on through one of those subsystems or some future invented one and we'd all like to see that we'd all like whether it's lightning arc zero knowledge proof roll-ups or something no one's have thought never thought of before we'd love to have a technology that checks every box and scales to everyone and every ai and every machine and every possible use case we'd love that um that is not on the horizon right now it's it's there's will it ever be

and will it yeah so given what we know now there's no way in the next five years that's going to happen so in the best case scenario in the coming years something will emerge that is the silver bullet and then maybe in 10 years we're there but even that's i i would assign a low probability that given what we know even if that's what we all hope for so we're going to have different subsystems i'm quite confident in 10 years and beyond and because they have they have different trade-offs so your use case might arc might be the right solution in my use case cashew might be the right solution and that's totally fine but to to keep that great user experience between us so that we're sending and receiving bitcoin and keep it simple the lightning network is that

backbone so it's to me it's one there it's going to keep winning there and in 10 years it's going to be there for that purpose and it's actually a great technology fit for that now running a mobile phone in your wallet with lightning that's where it gets it's a lot more interesting discussion and debate i think um it clearly hasn't won there um we already know it won't scale to every use case in every person um but are there still some uh use cases and people that will benefit and that'll be the right technology i think absolutely for sure uh anyone who uses a phoenix wallet i mean people who criticize the lightning ux even for mobile i mean have you used phoenix i'm not saying it's you know i'm asking i get the audience right i mean you know have you

use Phoenix, we can certainly still find things to critique about Phoenix. It's not perfect, but it's a good user experience. So you can create a good user experience with Lightning. And the LDK, Phoenix is built on Async's own technology stack and Lightning implementation. But with the LDK ecosystem, it now has all the APIs and tools and SDKs and features

for anyone to build a wallet that matches and surpasses the Phoenix user experience as well. So I don't think it's... No one should have the expectation that every wallet on a phone is going to be running Lightning and have channels, but I think there will absolutely be... It has the capability and capacity to have tens of millions of users who benefit from that, and it's the right choice for them.

And also merchants, too. I think it actually might be a better sweet spot for merchants versus individual users. where right now with the Square launch, that's awesome. We're going to onboard more merchants and kickstart that. Fast forward into the future, when there's tens of millions of small businesses around the world accepting Bitcoin, custodial is how most of them will start. But tens of millions. And then if 10% go through their journey and realize the value of self-custody to them and their business, or just the situation they're in, the environment they're in, the country or

the banking situation uh or what their what their commerce is um if 10 self-custody that'll be millions of small businesses who are looking you know who who are looking for like a lightning based solution for their for accepting money so freaks this rep is brought to you by good friends at silent silent creates everyday fair day gear that protects your hardware we're in bitcoin we have a lot of hardware that we need to secure your wallet amidst signals that can leave you vulnerable you want to pick up silence gear put your hardware in that i have a tap sign right here. I got the silent cardholder, replaced my wallet. I was using Ridge Wallet because it secured against RFID signal jacking. Silent, the cardholder does the same thing. It's much sleeker,

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integrates with unchained to protect your keys and your legacy bring your questions this conversation is designed to give you clarity on how to make it hard and seamless with real bitcoin not ious go to unchained.com slash tftc to sign up there's one more sort of steel man of lightning network or a refutation of a fud that's often thrown in it's like there's no activity look at the amount of bitcoin locked in the lightning network compared to the tbl of these defy protocols like it's a pittance and i think there's two things here like number one it's a mischaracterization of the it's it's a bad comparison because the way lightning channels work like it's actually bullish if you have less because it means you're doing more with less and

then on top of that lightning is so distributed it's i think lisa put it best when she was last on the show it's literally if you look at any quote-unquote l2 across any blockchain that's out there lightning is objectively the most distributed and that means that it's very hard to track what's actually happening there's a lot of unannounced channels that aren't that aren't you know so like the number of channels reported as a bad metric basically all the popular metrics that are reported are misleading or relatively poor metrics um so it doesn't really tell the story which is which is it's also lightning is relatively private too which is a good thing but then it's hard to do like data analysis and know is it healthy or not um but in terms of is it

growing um i i forget i forget exactly what my like miles suiter from block at the vegas conference gave a really great presentation on on cash app and and block and reported a bunch of juicy numbers i forget exactly what he revealed but definitely i can say that uh a couple years ago river came out with a report where they collected a lot of private data from companies and assembled it into a report. And I think it was like 1,212% growth of payment volume on Lightning Network over the past 18 months. And that was two years ago. What I can say is looking at Cash App and Lightning Node data from Block since then, the ensuing two years, that growth rate of on the order of 15% monthly has sustained so the data that we're seeing a block is very very strong for payment

growth so it's and and and you'll note that if you look at the capacity that the number of bitcoin locked into lightning does is does not reflect that it's sort of been constant roughly what four or five thousand bitcoin or something in that entire three or four year period so that I think that indicates how misleading that metric is. And it's what you said. I think the answer you might, then someone might ask, well, if it's growing so much,

why isn't that growing? I think it's what you said. Lightning operators are learning how to be more efficient and operate with more efficiency. So like River kept closing channels and closing channels. And then people are like, oh, are they getting out of this business or whatever? It's like, they're just making their operations more efficient.

Now, of course, once you reach sort of optimal efficiency, then if you still keep continuing to grow payment volume you're going to see that number go up and i think it did recently go up and i think we're going to we are going to see it it'll be a grind i think with square payments and people paying in bitcoin it's not we're not going to it's not going to like 10x from now to christmas or something but we're going to see a steady growth month to month to month with that as well and we will see that capacity grow well it's not happening right now but another thing to take into consideration is when the price of bitcoin goes up like prices denominate and stats goes down so you need less bitcoin to move through these channels

to actually purchase goods and services that's another good point yeah yeah so um yes i i think uh i think the easy simple metrics that are reported don't really tell the story or you certainly have to i mean i would agree that like 10 years from now the capacity of bitcoin and Lightning channels should go up a lot compared to... That metric, I think, is important to look at. If you zoom out in a four-year window, is it going up? And I think that is important. But if you zoom in more, right now, you have to have access to these private data sources and stuff.

But I think another thing, something that I thought of recently, a lot of my friends who aren't into Bitcoin, but they're techies, they're Silicon Valley people, not into Bitcoin. And they think Bitcoin, at least as everyday currency, it's failed, but also that it's over. It had its moment and it should have caught on. Their mentality is like back in 2013 or 2014, the first wave of excitement of Bitcoin payments, at least in Silicon Valley, that it didn't take off then. and it should you know and if it was a if it was as great of technology or promising of money as as everyone was talking about then that it would have taken off then and so they just write it off well there's a little more to it right and so um i think with the square launch and now there's going to be stickers and windows that show the bitcoin symbol next to visa mastercard and apple

pay and um even if no one's actually making bitcoin payments normal people will see that sticker in the window and they'll they will think oh it has arrived people are paying in bitcoin it is everyday money so i think it'll be this huge psychological shift uh with the narrative which we haven't really talked about the narrative but the narrative that dominates bitcoin is like etfs and number go up and store a value that narrative is hurting today and it yeah well right but i mean And that, again, that's, for my own experience in Bitcoin in the last eight years, the store of value, that was, to me, sort of obvious from the beginning and just inevitable. Preordained. Didn't really need much work.

I mean, it still needed work, but in terms of like software development and design and the kind of things where I'd want to contribute to, it's like, yeah, it's already done. uh but but everyday currency a lot of work needs to be done you know improving the tools and creating better products and new use cases blah blah um so i think uh i think it's a great use case but it's um it's really crowded out the everyday money uh narrative and so last week to me was awesome not just for block the company but for all of everyone who's into bitcoin for it as everyday money i think that's why it was easy for bitcoiners to cheer block on because of the alignment around that and hopefully it's not just a one week wonder in terms of narrative but it's the start of recreating this narrative and joining alongside the store the digital gold

narrative i don't think it needs to replace that like the digital gold narrative shouldn't go away it should just be we should be talking about everyday money way more yeah well i want to uh since we're in san francisco i'll say it because this is the nomenclature on it let's double click on your uh silicon valley friend saying that it failed yeah as payments technology that blows my mind like to me it highlights some sort of time preference uh mistakes that are being made in this part of the country and other parts as well there's how could you honestly expect something to be launched in 2009 and to take over the world be an everyday payment um in five years if this was happening in 2014 or if they expected that

would happen like how do they not recognize that rome wasn't built in the day and there's a process to this i think it's uh i mean i think there is a good explanation i mean it's it's wrong thinking but it's a there's a good explanation if you think about the success stories through in silicon valley over the past many decades and the patterns that people build up in their head here working on it being part of it or seeing these success stories things do happen fast um whether it be google or facebook or instagram or youtube like you go from like zero to high growth in users very quickly revenue quickly and acquisitions quickly or ipos like it's it does move fast so if it doesn't if things don't click in a few years or at least within the first four years

you usually just you write out yes you you you shut the thing down and you move on to the next idea that is the common pattern and so that's the pattern matching all the smart successful people here have so when you have something like bitcoin sure it was introduced in 2008 2009 and so by 2014 great oh great this emerging technology let's vc fund all these startups make a lot of money and then there's no one was making payments then it wasn't used none of these companies um i mean except for like Coinbase, which had to go way beyond Bitcoin. They had to create a gambling casino

to make a lot of money. There were no, there was just failure after failure from a venture capital and startup perspective. So I think that's why they wrote it off. Now we know, like the Bitcoin community knows that that's an absurd expectation.

I think another dynamic was people thought that like, they compared it to like PayPal or Visa as just this payments technology and they didn't have a deep appreciation for like, oh no, this is way bigger idea. This is not disrupting Visa. This is disrupting the US dollar.

And if you look at history, there's not that many things that have been money. We have a piece of artwork here at Presidio Bitcoin from Crypto Graffiti with a history of money. And there's like eight different symbols of representation going back to seashells and rocks and stuff like that. obviously gold um and you know depending on how you define things like a credit card or something but um but even that actually is a bit of a mistake to think of that as money right as dollars the

money behind it but there's not that many things in history that have been money and now bitcoiners are saying this is the new money that this is going to be the new money and then to your point that doesn't develop overnight especially if it's not fiat if it's not declared if it's not forced upon all of us from a from a high it has to be a grassroots effort it also happens to be like super complex and counterintuitive um from many different angles so it's very common whether you're a silicon valley person or wall street or just uh whatever your lot in life is you um it's it takes a leap of uh faith and late and then and it requires a journey of of learning to really see like, how does this work?

So I think Silicon Valley missed that this is not just displacing and competing with the payment layer, but actually the money layer. And once you appreciate that, then you realize, oh, this is obviously not going to happen in five years. This is like a 20 year or more process.

And then all the other disruption happens on top of that, sort of in parallel. Suffrakes Healthcare Open Enrollment has started. It will roll through the end of January. Opt out of traditional health insurance, which doesn't care about you. It's impersonal. It's expensive. They deny an increasing amount of claims. Premiums are going up. You don't have to live this way. You can opt out. I opted out four years ago and joined

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going to the gym more trying to get my swell on trying to be a good example for my young son to fit healthy dad but part of that is having a good regimen particularly staying hydrated making sure I have the right electrolytes and salts in my body. That is why I use salt of the earth. I drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt of the earth. I'm liking the pink lemonade right now. It's my flavor of choice. This is their creatine.

I've added this to my regimen. They have it in these packets as well. It makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling. You want to work out while you're traveling, but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through TSA. It's very, very nerve wracking at times. You have to explain hates. It's not what you think it is. It's creatine.

I'm trying to get my swell on. Make sure you're staying hydrated. I have become addicted to these. It's made my life a lot better. I can supplement this for coffee in the morning and be energized right away. I can supplement. I can bring the creatine wherever I need to. Just put a couple of packets in here before I head to the gym.

Bring this to the gym. Drink out of a glass bottle. make sure i'm not injecting any microplastics into my body go to drinksote.com use the code tftc and you'll get 15 off anything in the store that's drinksote.com code tftc using people are coming around to recognize ago we mischaracterized this a decade ago and sadly i don't think so um hopefully we'll talk a little bit about presidio bitcoin too on on on this episode but um one of the missions for presidio bitcoin is to help bridge that gap we're going to take advantage of the fact that we're here in silicon valley physically um and we've got a bunch

of people here who have ties to to silicon valley um and so be it through uh events we host here um we uh myself and max webster and david king do the presidio bitcoin jam podcast great show yeah thank you we're podcasters now watch out everybody becomes a podcast yeah big proponent But our intended audience for that show is Silicon Valley people. It's people who would not identify as a Bitcoiner. Now, of course, people who are into Bitcoin watch the show and I think like it. And that's great. But what we have in mind, we want to bridge that gap to Silicon Valley.

Well, I mean, we're just ourselves in that show. But I think we... You guys can talk the talk. Well, we come from... I mean, I worked at Google for a decade. as a product director. So I come from Silicon Valley. David King does as well.

We know that culture. We know that we come from that world. We're part of that world. We also happen to be hardcore Bitcoiners. So it's kind of rare to be in both camps. So we can speak both languages. So hopefully we can bridge that. Thank you for Google Maps, by the way.

You're welcome. I'm glad you said that instead of Google Glass because I worked on both. Google Maps is an unquestionable success. But yeah, Glass. Hey, Kyle, Samani liked it. Yeah, let's not go there. Everything's bad in that direction.

Well, I mean, we were just focusing on Silicon Valley, broader Silicon Valley's perspective on Bitcoin and how maybe the perception may be sort of misguided because they don't understand what's actually happening. The shift to the Bitcoiner, that's a Bitcoiner really dedicated to building out Bitcoin as everyday money. how would you grade Bitcoin's success up to this point

as everyday money or just like where it is understanding that Rome wasn't built in a day this is going to be a multi-decade process how would you I don't want to say grade how would you describe Bitcoin's progression up to this point

is it over exceeding where it should be underperforming given the way you framed it appreciating how long it takes to establish shit as money and stuff i'd say i'd give it a good grade overall like a high level very good because um we can easily nitpick and say like the everyday currency narrative is has been sort of squeezed out and obviously it's not like heavily used for that yet so we can say like oh it's kind of it's so far failed at that but but again uh appreciating how long realistically it's going to

take to do that i'd give it i give it a good grade a good grade to this point but like a lot of work ahead of us but i remain super optimistic about that future but it's but it's um to to attain like a sustainable good grade like we or like we've won we've succeeded that's going to take another 10 plus years but that doesn't mean um that doesn't mean meaningful progress is not going to happen every year right i mean so there should be a sense of urgency among all of us there needs to be intentionality um and not just assume other like oh you're you're gonna do it like no like each person who's into bitcoin find your own way to contribute and help wield this into action i i'm a strong believer in like the individual can make a real big difference and you don't have to

be like elon musk or something like any individual um can can um contribute value i mean like with The launch last week, in Spiral's small part, we created a Bitcoin marketing kit to help people go to their favorite merchant and help them, persuade them to turn on Bitcoin payments. And it's a laser sharp focused, save on fees, get rid of the 3% fees. And so we have a one-pager leave behind and plushies we've distributed to six different Bitcoin physical hubs around the country. And so that's our small part. But then like as an individual Bitcoiner, you don't have to be a Bitcoin core developer or like an engineer to just go to your local merchant and talk to them about Bitcoin and talk to them about saving. I mean, my recommendation, start with like, do you want to save fees? Like, don't the fees suck?

Don't you know, aren't they like a significant part of your profit margin? Wouldn't you like to get rid of them? And then they're going to say yes. And that's the hook. And then you can say, well, here's how you can do it. um and that's a way for anyone to contribute and i don't another thing i like about marketing kit and i don't know if you guys actually made this or square merchant just put it on their door but a bitcoin preferred sticker i think that uh the preference signal from the merchant is very strong

too yep yeah um yeah i'm glad you noticed that i think that's great copy and the you know it's a multi-phased approach to get people to spend bitcoin i think um at least at like a retail outlet in america um i i used even two months ago i was actually bearish on this becoming popular compared to other wow other types of payment use cases because like an american buying coffee like it like i i just i use apple pay and i get two percent cash back it's like that and it's a super good user experience um so like why spend bitcoin right that but i've turned from uh bearish to bullish just in the past two months and um largely thinking through it through the lens of the merchant like the small business those fee card fees are very material to their business and most

small businesses are low margin and uh it's like a it's a passion pursuit for them and they just want to stay in business um and so being able to eliminate or significantly reduce that fee is an enormous value prop so but that's just step one like and and of course with the square product introduction that makes it so much easier for them because if they're using a payment solution whether it's toast or clover or square or whatever and then someone comes in with a like a bitcoin wallet as the pos and there's several of them out there and they're good they're good user experiences on the surface but it doesn't integrate with their with the small businesses like accounting system and back-end system and you have to be a pretty hardcore bitcoiner i think

it's a merchant to adopt that but now with square it it's integrated into the system you're already using for your whole business so that that's a much smaller lift but that's just step one getting them to turn it on because then they'll learn um early on they'll attract some rabid bitcoiners to come in and spend some bitcoin and attract new customers that's a marketing win they'll like that but it's not sustainable and it doesn't grow to a larger part of their consumer audience or you know customer base so then it's like well i love the pitch of saving fees but no one's coming in and spending bitcoin anymore um or only like you know my three percent of my customer base who are crazy bitcoiners do and it's saturated so how do you get everyone else

spending Bitcoin. And that's where like Pink Owl Coffee helped change my mind because they're like, we're going to give 21% discount. And I'm like,

wow, that's something that's going to wake up a normal person, right? 21% discount at your favorite merchant, then that's going to get

a lot of people over the hump to install a Bitcoin wallet and a spending wallet on their phone and get some and load it up

with some Bitcoin. $5 coffee becomes a $4 coffee. Yeah. Less than $4. Well, it adds up when you do that every day. So,

and I do think early adopter merchants who are hardcore Bitcoiners or see the value in changing consumer behavior to spend Bitcoin in order to eliminate the fees, early adopter merchants will come out with crazy promotions like that. And it's kind of a one-time thing because if you convert a consumer

to install a Bitcoin spending wallet, get some Bitcoin on it, then that costs to the consumer, they don't have to do it over again. It's only a one-time thing to get the wallet set up and just sort of change your behavior. So all other merchants in your local community will benefit from that one-time onboarding.

So it's not like every merchant has to offer 21% and has to do it indefinitely in order for Bitcoin payments to work. It's like a bootstrapping thing. So I think that'll be effective. And then I think... So another part of the spiral initiative is not just a Bitcoin marketing kit,

but we're going to come out with a merchant marketing kit as well. We also established a Facebook community. I haven't used Facebook for over 10 years. I've been off since 2016. A minor complaint to my team that I have to log into Facebook again, but it's a smart move. Darth Coin on Stacker News is critical of the choice of Facebook news because who uses Facebook?

But guess who uses Facebook? Merchants, small businesses around the globe are not on Twitter. They're on Instagram and Facebook. My mom runs a coffee shop in our hometown. I can confirm that. So we've created a Facebook community that is for merchants, by merchants, for merchants. So we've seeded it with some merchants who have been accepting Bitcoin

and know Bitcoin and can answer one-on-one questions. And then other merchants who are new to it can ask questions or look stuff up there. So we did that. And then the merchant marketing kit will include ideas like offering financial incentives or putting a Bitcoin plushie by your cash register.

I actually am pretty bullish on that. The plushie is sitting in front of you right now. Can I get one of these for my boys? You can grab one. Yeah, you can grab one after the show for sure. You can grab two and then you can also give your favorite merchant one of those.

And we've seen evidence of merchants actually not just taking it home and giving it to their kid, but actually putting it by the cash register because it's a great way to communicate okay, hey, we accept Bitcoin. You should pay in Bitcoin. And it does so in a silly, goofy way.

It's like non-confrontational, right? It's not like a... He's grimacing. Like, well, imagine like... Hey, give me Bitcoin. Well, look at most of the... Well, our one-page leave-behind tells the story of why he's grumpy

because he doesn't like 3% fees. So he's grimacing at the people paying with credit cards. Yes. But I think it's a really nice conversation starter at a local business where you have that human to human connection to just start talking about Bitcoin. And then so I do think there's a plausible story to convert people to consumers to have Bitcoin on their mobile wallet and start spending. Also, you know, another thing that greases the wheel is like cash apps now dollars and lightning. So you can have the 58 million, I know Miles talked to you about this on another episode, but 58 million active users in Cash App have dollar balances and all of them can now pay via Bitcoin, like via the Lightning and Bitcoin rails, say, cut out the card fees. But the Cash App customer doesn't have to have ever owned Bitcoin or be into Bitcoin at all.

And is that the full experience we're hoping for long term? no but it's baby step it allows the merchant to save fees it allows the merchant to uh save in bitcoin if they want to and then um and eventually those those uh cash up some of those cash up customers will keep converting over to using bitcoin yeah yeah i'm very bullish somebody who's been spending bitcoin using the lightning network for years now and certainly and as i talked to this with miles and talked with many other people like merchant adopter i think there an apprehension to really lean into bitcoin payments and merchant adoption specifically due to the sort of failed attempts at it previously most famously back in like 2014 to 2016 era

and then i written that i think that was a big push but like roger burr and that early bitcoiner crew i haven't really seen it since until now a decade later yeah it makes sense and i thought miles point was really good which is like hey today's the best day tomorrow will will be the best thing let's just get it out there and it's time yep well like i mentioned i think it'll be it'll be a grind it'll be a lot of work but i do think we'll see steady growth and that's just like square in america but then like the world's big place so i think square will also light a fire under like other payment providers too i mean i would hope that toast and clover in the u.s and other um established payment providers around the world will be seeking out

a bitcoin solution too um but that's just one type of bitcoin payment solution i think or like use case or category and one i mentioned i sort of went from bearish to bullish in the last few months but others that i'm very excited about um one is just like new new applications and new ways to integrate bitcoin and like nostre's apps is the canonical example or stacker news apps but like micro payments within these social media experiences or community forums people's showering us with sats as they listen to this podcast. Yeah, it's podcasting 2.0.

Yeah, that as well. So we have these real-world examples that we see, they're not scaled yet, but we do see retention and usage. And anyone who's done it, I think, I love zapping people's posts.

It makes me feel good. I mean, getting back to also another reason about spending my Bitcoin or whatever, it's like, okay, well, I've got my savings account, my spending account. And the spending account,

I mean, I'm zapping sats, but what is it? a few dollars a month or I don't know what it is but it's not that much money but it makes me feel good to do it and then obviously on the receiving end my zaps alone don't move the needle but

hundreds of people doing it then it's kind of a nice amount. It's at least like having a dinner paid for you because of your work or whatever. It's like a nice gesture. I was talking about this last night with somebody because they were asking about

podcasting 2.0 like ah is it is it actually working i mean we i think tftc was literally like one of the first five podcasts in the world to ever put a lightning address in our rss feed to begin receiving sats over the lightning network um that was 2018 2019 2019 because lightning launched it was definitely before i left new york so it was like 2019 so it's been six years and i think a lot of people think it's a dead model but you can i found makes it very easy to look at the data like the number has been going up i mean it's not enough to run the business but it's consistently up and to the right in terms of revenue from people streaming and boosting and commenting on the show via podcasting 2.0 and noster um and then we'll

live stream rabbit hole recap every thursday friday to noster and we've sort of gamified the zapping there if you zap us more than 21 000 stats we'll read your comment and uh have a brief discussion around it and that went to your point of like spending bitcoin like i have my fountain app i found wallet my primal wallet and when i those are my main spending wallets and i it's all bitcoin that's been sent to me from the content i've been using that's great that's great yeah so i'm all the all the bitcoin veins around micro range stuff is still still niche but like i'm i'm optimistic about that anytime you can see uh usage and repeated behavior even if it's on a small scale if you see that repeated behavior uh in retention i think that that's a

very good sign and it's just a matter of scaling it now um i think another really positive trend is vibe coding and just the development tools that opens up access to new product development to literally 100 times more people, or 1,000, or an order of magnitude more people who you no longer have to be a coder to take an idea in your head and manifest that into an application

or a mobile app and allow people to use it. Vibe coding is incredible for that. Where English is a language to program, anyone can create an application now one that is good enough to realize your vision or at least mostly and get it out to like a hundred people or a thousand people to use and that's really all you need to like for most things to to prove out is this actually useful to people is it something people come back and do a second time a third time make it a recurring habit and if they do it's hard to do that by the way so um it's like law of large numbers so if we

but if all of a sudden we have a thousand times more attempts at creating the right recipe we're going to see way more at the end of that funnel we're going to see a lot more compelling applications ones that do have a thousand users who are using it constantly and love it and then maybe vibe coding isn't then you actually need real human engineers still to create something that's secure, scales, and checks all the boxes from an engineering stability standpoint. But you don't have to do that until that point in time.

And so 999 out of 1,000 ideas fail by that point. So don't invest the hardcore expensive engineering resources until you reach that point. I think we're going to see that happening right now. And that's going to lead to thousands of applications being developed that people wouldn't call Bitcoin applications, but they just integrate Bitcoin. Because the second trend

is that the tools around Bitcoin are much easier. You can now take Lexi or Spark or Liquid or all these and literally one-shot Vibecode an application that has Bitcoin payments integrated into it. Integrate this API or something like that. Or use this development kit too.

Matt Belez did a one-shot into Replit and was able to create a Bitcoin tipping app circa 2014 or whatever. But in 2014, the people creating a Bitcoin tipping app was like two developers for a year. They spent that much time and highly skilled engineers to build a Bitcoin tipping app. Now you have literally a one sentence or paragraph prompt that you can speak to the computer and then nine minutes later have the same Bitcoin tipping application that existed 10 years ago from two person years of engineering effort. That's amazing, right?

So I think we're going to see thousands of quality applications created over the coming years that integrate Bitcoin in ways that we couldn't have thought of or imagined, or I'm certainly not thinking of them right now. And that is going to yield some home runs and then payment growth. So I think I'm very, very bullish on that. Um, and then the, and then AI, um, I'm still not super articulate on exactly what this looks like, but it just, I mean, obviously AI is explosive right now. AI agents, um, you can imagine a world with payments between agents and you can imagine like AI agents don't have an identity, like they're not going to be able to KYC or onboard. So like permissionless systems just to me make intuitive sense for this world.

But I still don't know exactly what it looks like. And it's important to compare like, okay, where do stable coins fail? And where can Bitcoin succeed in that use case? So that's still like a learning process for me. And I think for most of us trying to figure that out. But I'm generally bullish in that area as well. And one thing I'd sum up for that category, for the micropayments and sort of new application categories uh what's really important for those is no kyc and so let's talk about that a little

bit because i think most bitcoiners when they um think of no kyc the reason they think it's important is like government shouldn't have my data or privacy focused and that's completely legitimate and a very very good point but i think that's sort of it's my impression a lot of bitcoiners that's the start and end of that argument and i think there's other arguments too it improves the user experience like if i have to fill out a bunch of forms if i have to upload selfies holding my passport and like all that like so ridiculous it's it's a horror i just stop like like something has to be in a really important to me like buying bitcoin or whatever i mean you know um it has to it's a really high bar to go through that effort totally independent of the

privacy. Even if you don't even care about it or you're ignorant about it, you don't even think about the ramifications of that. Just the friction of onboarding is horrible with KYC. So getting back to the zapping stuff, let's say Nostra takes off in a big way and actually starts scaling to other people. That's going to be the first introduction point to most people for Bitcoin, at least Bitcoin payments. They'll have never done a Bitcoin payment before. they probably don't even hold have any bitcoin so that's going to be their first introduction to bitcoin if and let's say i'm that person i'm new to this but new this but i'm i love uh you know primal or domus or whatever new application gets built in us or i love that and i'm really

interacting with that and then all of a sudden people start zapping my posts and i get this bitcoin if i have to like upload my passport and go through all this onboarding friction i'm unlikely to do that because i'm not i i don't have a strong enough reason yet in my head to do that so i'll just opt out but if it's like frictionless and it just accumulates because there's like no onboarding cost really then sure and then once it then once that that um stash grows big enough then it's all of a sudden it's like oh and you mean i can spend it here or i can use it here or i can zap people back so i think no kyc is like um very important for that application And then like for the AI agents, it's super important again, because if they don't have identity, it's just impossible. It's just fundamentally they need no KYC. So to me, there are many important reasons for no KYC and not just sort of down to the state privacy reasons.

um and and that's why it really and it it just scales to everyone like everyone people don't walk around thinking oh i need no kyc in my life but like it it impacts everyone it's important um and and then that leads to why are trust minimized systems very important which this gets all the way back to like why do we work on lightning and ldk at spiral um because it's a very trust minimized system um if you know if you're running a lightning node i'm running a lightning node i don't have to trust you um uh you can't you can't steal my money i mean there's a few few areas like if i'm offline and then maybe then you could you could try to steal but it like overall it's a very trust minimized system um and so that's why i think it's worth continuing to

invest in lightning or any technology that minimizes trust. Some of the other newer payment protocols, I really like them as a recipe. They make smart trade-offs and I think they're valuable for the ecosystem, but they are more trusted. And some of them are going with the no KYC approach now. And I think that's great. I'm glad they're doing that. How long will it last? I don't know. When will the state crack down on some of these outdoor ecosystems? And I think it's a matter of time. I mean, I think it's like three to five years away.

It won't really be an issue until they become really popular or there's a lot of illegal activity through it. That's when it gets the attention of regulators. But ultimately, I think it will fail at that. It will then require KYC. And then all of a sudden, all these cool, interesting, valuable application categories we just mentioned won't be possible with them anymore. So it's very important from a developer

and protocol perspective to keep investing in trust-minimized systems, even if people are saying things are dead, failed, or whatever, we've got to keep working at it. Yeah. I mean, I had a conversation recorded

with Kyle Olney in here yesterday. It was really on the tip of the spear in terms of Save Our Wallets campaign ensuring that we get the ability to developers like yourself and everybody working at Spiral and other open source projects across space have the ability to write open

source code and not be held liable for what their end users do. And it just gets like, and I completely agree, based off the trade-off some of these other secondary solutions are making, or sub-network solutions are making. Subsystem. Subsystem,

excuse me, are making the state will eventually be like, hey, you got a KYC and we've seen it with the fincen treasury coming out with guidelines like hey they want to sort of connect pii with bitcoin addresses and try to make it so wallets are doing the job of the state collecting this information it's just like it's so demoralizing number one but two it's infuriating because it's like are we free are we free do we even live in a free country but broader point being once if and

When manifesting positivity here, we get the Blockchain Regulatory Clarity Act in the market structure bill, and it's the way we need it to be, which protects individual developers and individual users and their ability to self-custody. Next battle has to be repeal the Bank Secrecy Act. It is insane that we have to have this conversation and go through these mental cycles, go through all the costs, go through the UX hurdles, just because they want to force this ineffective um sort of data aggregation system on us since you brought that up i'll i'll uh um i've tweeted this before but like spiral will offer a grant to someone who wants like and this would probably be

like a um like a lawyer or policy type person so it's it's not we have not given a grant to a lawyer or policy person before but we would totally would with the project being something like imagine the world without the bsa so imagine a world where it is repealed but also imagine like the real world where there there are like legitimate policy issues that need to be addressed somehow like you know anti-terrorism and aml type stuff so let's say we have to address those but we we get to start from scratch and let's learn what have we learned the past 50 years with the bsa what have we learned with new technologies and like incorporate the fact that bitcoin exists and that there'll be an ai exists in in these technologies and just start

from scratch and and um develop a new policy that would that's credible i think that would be a really awesome project because it also gives bitcoiners more credibility if you are in dc talking to regulators or politicians whatever because if you just if you just go in there and rant then they're not going to listen to you um even if that's even if that's your view and that's what you want you're not going to win that argument but if um i think it does two things one in the somewhat remote possibility that the bsa would be revealed well then okay here's a credible alternative that we've thought about and would be pro um you know pro society pro-american um and ultimately like everyone in the world and pro-technology etc um but secondly um even for

the nitty-gritty like we're debating the clarity act or whatever like incremental changes we're either wanting to see happen in legislation or things we don't want to see happen if we have this body of work to fall back on it can influence i think these other more you know smaller year-to-year decisions so this is in any case this needs to happen so you're out there spiral would give a grant for anyone who wants to work in something in that vein i know there's many esteemed lawyers in the audience okay please do your do your duty to bitcoin in your nation yes it is it is insane i mean number one how much friction it adds to any interaction you have with financial applications and then number two how completely ineffective it is it's not stopping

Well, we briefly mentioned at the beginning of the show the de minimis tax and Block's doing a marketing campaign in DC right now around that. And we're talking about spending Bitcoin. Well, I mean, right now in the US and I think many other countries, but certainly the US, it's treated as a capital gains when you buy a coffee. And it's kind of ridiculous, right? So the proposal is like a $600 de minima. So if your payment is under $600, you don't have to pay taxes. It's too low. Sorry? It's too low. You should eliminate the capital gains. So a little bit of insight.

Let's think big. Yeah, I agree. But so a little bit of context. Senator Lama's original bill, I think, was $300. um there uh are other cryptocurrency stakeholders that i've heard are pushing for 50 dollars it's come back which is completely ridiculous but to the degree to the degree that's true i i've got to think that is like uh companies that have a vested interest in stable coins and so that's really just that's throwing bitcoin into the bus to do a 50 dollar

to Minimus. So in that context, $600 is a lot better than $300 or $50. But I agree that it should be ideally a lot higher. We're taking the wins that we can get.

It's arguably a big win over or it is a big win over what we have now and arguably is maybe the best that can be achieved. And we haven't achieved it yet either, so we'll see. But it also, I mean, a problem with the BSA and everything since then is that the way they're written into either law or regulations is a fixed amount of dollars. Well, as certainly all Bitcoiners know, like inflation, right?

So what a $3,000 limit in the 70s was is way different than today. Like $3,000 in the 70s was like a substantial amount of money. so it might have seemed like you're reasonable or whatever the limits, when you have to report certain transactions or whatever. And now all of a sudden it's like, well, that's like a... It's pretty common.

That's like a nice bicycle or something. I mean, it's not like buying a house. So that de minimis tax will be... Yeah. So some Bitcoiners want it denominated in Bitcoin as well, which again, I philosophically agree with. I mean, I agree with that. It's just like, is that practical?

Practical. I know we got to get going here soon, but I mean, on this note too, BSA privacy, like on-chain privacy too, I think everybody's like, oh, that's a big narrative. There's a bunch of people in Silicon Valley

trying to pump Zcash right now. Looking at Unival, Balaji, we see it. They're like, Bitcoin's not private enough. It certainly has its pitfalls on-chain when it comes to privacy, but it's not impossible. and one thing i want to make sure i ask you about is pay join development kit like making the case for pay join at a large level particularly at exchanges because it'll improve

on-chain uh privacy by messing with the the chain surveillance heuristics that exist but just as importantly maybe more importantly for these exchanges creates efficiencies in terms of being able to batch transfer. And so it can be positioned that way too. Yes. Depending, I think how you position that technology and project, you want to know your audience.

But I've always liked PageJoin and big credit to Dan Gold, who's like carried that torch for many years now. Dankless torch carrying. Dankless torch carrying. And like no one else is really working on it, despite the, I like the, like when it was first, I forget when it was even like

originally like thought of but um i like the trade-offs from the get-go but then yeah no one was working on it but he he started working on it and now there's a really healthy set of developers working on it spiral funds it in a big way we're big believers in it um you know starting with like well why is it attractive i think it's like there's a couple different versions of payjoin now too so i'll start with like the one that is implemented today and integrated into some wallets i feel like it's a very practical and pragmatic solution um it's not overly complex it also it doesn't require like the whole ecosystem to adopt it for everyone to benefit because you only need i don't know what the threshold is but if as long as there's just like a nominal amount of usage of

it it benefits everyone because it destroys the common input heuristic which chain analysis heavily depends upon and is very successful at right now because pretty much it's a good heuristic right now to identify help identify everyone's coins into

all these coins which are disparate are actually all from your wallet if you can break that common input heuristic it really destroys that level of analysis and PayJoin does that and as you mentioned PayJoin also has a benefit of batching.

And if I'm the receiver, if I'm a merchant and you're paying me, I'm incentivized to do it because I actually get to consolidate my UTXOs as part of that transaction. So I think it has a number of attractive properties. It improves. It's not a silver bullet for privacy,

but it definitely improves privacy. You don't need the whole ecosystem to adopt it. So I think it's very promising. Then there's PayJoin V3, which is like a much more advanced version of it. Yuval Kogman, he goes by nothing much on most of his online handles. He's a full-time member of the Spiral team

and super sharp guy, really passionate about privacy. And he used to contribute to Wasabi. He's sort of the architect behind that. So he has a lot of experience from that. And he learned a lot of things from that too and things he didn't really like about what was created at the time. And so he has a lot of ideas

on how to improve it. That ultimately... So he's working on a project called Fungi, which was that. And it's really multi-party coin joins. But he worked with Dan Gold and other PayJoin contributors in that project to fold it into the PayJoin project.

So now PayJoin v3 is that vision because PayJoin is just two-party. Like you're paying me and we both put UTXOs as inputs into the transaction. But with PayJoin v3, it can be more than two. Is this similar to what Dusty Damon was? I talked to him at Bitcoin++ earlier this year and he was saying like a PayJoin protocol

where you could sort of have a gossip network looking at lightning channels and what they're rebalancing. Probably. I don't know exactly what he is referring to. I think it was an idea. I don't think he implemented anything, but in the context of like splicing

it's like yeah page one can be implemented but it's similar to that where it sounds similar so that's still R&D mode but that'll be

that'll be coming and then that that takes the privacy to another level it's a lot more challenging for that to be successful but if it is successful

there has to be a very high volume amount of payments willing to do that so that you don't have too much latency with your with your payments

like channel rebalancing is like a perfect thing yeah put into that right right Yep. So, in any case, but back to what you're saying, like getting people to adopt it. I think getting mobile wallets to adopt it is relatively easy. I mean, it's always a prioritization game.

Yep. And a cake wallet as well. Getting exchanges too. I think, you know, most likely to succeed, you have to go in with the save efficiency, save transaction fees angle. And we're looking out for shareholders here. Yeah. Yeah. We're looking out for shareholders. Yeah.

And it's definitely worth the effort to make that sales pitch and get it to happen. So that sales pitch will happen within Block, but within other companies too. And we'll see. I mean, these companies have compliance departments, so unclear how they'll respond to it. Just using the Bitcoin protocol in a more efficient way.

Why don't you want to do that? Yeah. There is power. My observation for speaking with lots of compliance teams, not just Block, but many others, is that the more something is part of the open protocol, everyone's doing as part of the open protocol, that does help.

That does help. I've been on this pay join journey for years. Dan, thank you for your work. Exchanges, seriously consider it. I think this is one of the lowest hanging fruits, highest leverage. sort of tech implementations at the protocol level that everybody can make in the space.

Yeah. Steve, we got to get going. Any final thoughts, parting notes for the audience out there? No, thanks for having me on. I'd say that people should remain optimistic on Bitcoin, even the price is going down. Even if they're not happy with their lightnings out on mobile phones, there's just a lot of promising stuff ahead.

So everyone keep their spirits up. We're going to win. We're going to win. Peace and love. Yeah. That's like, that's your email signature. I just noticed. Some people, some people don't,

some people don't think it's a signature after the first email and they think I'm just writing it and get a thread. They're like, oh, that's your, that's your signature. That's great. We're going to win.

You're going to have that irrational optimism. We're going to win. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family.

We're looking to get the word out there. also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives you incredible value so please consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time