TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #101: Jack Mallers - Olympus Announcement

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Jack Mallers to discuss the launch of Olympus, a non-custodial way to buy bitcoin and immediately receive it on the Lightning Network. Link to Jack's Medium post on the launch: https://medium.com/@JimmyMow/announcing-olympus-lightning-enabled-fiat-ramps-by-zap-1f5349a96ee9 Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdbWsnfA08KhSUO4amVLaQ?view_as=subscriber Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

This episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by the Cash App. You freaks already know all about them. And if you don't, let me tell you about them. The Cash App is allowing you to stack sats. So you can buy and sell Bitcoin on the Cash App. You can send Bitcoin from the Cash App to a personal wallet, from a personal wallet to the Cash App. And then on top of that, you get the ability to use the Cash App

at other places with their boost program. So you get a specialized debit card. You get to put your signature on it, Bitcoin symbol, lightning, whatever you see fit. And then you go to partner merchants, whether it be Whole Foods, Chick-fil-A, DoorDash, local coffee shops, and you save money when you shop with your boost card, with your boosts enabled. Use the code STACKINGSATS. That's one word, S-T-A-C-K-I-N-G-S-A-T-S. If you're going to get $5, then $5 is going to go to Alves La Crosse, a charity very near and dear to our heart.

Again, if you haven't downloaded it yet and you're in the U.S. and you're looking to buy Bitcoin, what the hell are you waiting for? Use the code STACKINGSATS. Download the Cash app from your local app store today. Tales from the Crypt. Take two. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boar, your boy Marty here on a rainy Friday afternoon.

In the studio, we've got Matt O'Dell sitting to my right. What's up, freaks? And a very special reoccurring guest. Happy to have him back in the studio. So, take two, reintroducing for the second time. Cut! Welcome back to the podcast, Jack Mallers. Jack, what is it good?

A lot's good, man. Thanks for having me. Sorry we had to repeat the first two minutes of the first recording. No, lay up lines, man. Get warm. Stretch. It's, no, yeah. We were talking about the last time we spoke was around Consensus Week in May.

At that point, we got an update on Zap. What have you been working on in building there? and what you've been working on in the futures derivatives markets as well for miners um but it seems like you have some updates some exciting updates what the hell has gone on this summer yeah um well so i'm a by the time this podcast is out i will have announced what is a year-long effort of trying to get users from fiat currency to lightning instantly so zap will allow you to buy bitcoin inside of the wallet non-custodial deliver it instantly over lightning and you can go from money in your bank account to making a lightning payment in about five seconds it's

pretty insane sounds pretty insane yeah it's a new type of onboarding mechanism that i haven't uh experienced yet yeah dude there's a lot to unpack in that announcement there's a lot of uh stories i have but yeah i mean there's a general onboarding problem everyone's taking their hack at it of zap was for the community by the community how can we build a new relationship with bitcoin users how can we get a million lightning nodes on a million cell phones and it was very obvious to me a year ago that this feature has to be built i really don't want to leave it up to coinbase um and so kind of took it upon myself so i'm really proud of it um to be honest with you uh and yeah i'm excited we'll see if it works well i would be extremely proud of

myself too and i'm proud of you as a as an outsider looking in thank you buddy i'm proud of you too so let's talk about like the mechanics of how this work and what you've been working on it's been dealing with regulators um trying to explain the lightning network to them what's that process been like how the mechanics of this uh on-ramp look once it's released yeah so there's probably like a chapters of a book the first chapter would be licensing obviously um that i'm selling bitcoin which requires in the united states is the toughest so that requires a licensing program and that was easily the most interesting part um was first understanding what regulators know about bitcoin like what do you guys know what lightning is or do you know what a blockchain is

uh right because i think the motivation for me was trying to really hack at the knees of what is the fraternities of the bitcoin space you've got bitpay coinbase these are the guys they're frat brothers that they set the dress code they set the rules they spike the drinks and have the girls passed out on the couch right and it's fucked up and they're like oh yeah no did we do that that's you know i'm sorry like fuck you fuck you're sorry sorry that's someone's daughter lying on the couch that was someone's hard-earned savings that was sitting on a blockchain and you tried to manipulate them into something that didn't work strong arm you're a liar roger ver's a fraud um so i i wanted our the good guys to have the licenses yeah like so what now i now i got

regulatory approval approval so let's play ball pawn to e4 man your move and so getting that was really tough is um yeah the first time i said like what is it going to take for me to pull this off someone's like well that's coinbase's job you know you're gonna have to talk to regulators and write a big check for that and like i don't give a shit who do i who do i gotta call um who do i have to explain lightning to so yeah took me about a year what uh what regulators in particular you've been working with um so the way it works at least in the united states is what's most important is uh state by state regulation so finsen is the lowest hanging fruit you're almost granted half of the country on application um it gets really complicated when you get the difference

between a money transmitter and a money service business and i've had to re-architect the infrastructure the actual technology to pull this off an array of times just to kind of tiptoe myself around into being able to be an agent of another desk to be a money service business to be able to partner with others um so yeah that whole process um and you gotta require the thumbs up from all 50 states type of deal uh the way that we'll roll it out initially is i want the community to really be a part of this i don't want it to be mine i can't that's the whole point of this project is i want to be ours so you'll be able to private test it with me if you want and you work really closely with me,

I don't want to unleash this beast and get a million users with nasty bugs or anything like that. And then we'll probably go state by state slowly or half the country first. And yeah. Well, it's fucking beautiful to see how impassioned you are about this.

I am, man. Thank you for putting the team on your back. You know what? Shoot or shoot. You know what I mean? Kick it to me. Three ball in the corner. um bitcoin's appreciated since my family started buying it um open source project

turned out to be a popular one yeah i'm taking my shot fuck it so how do you see this changing the the on-ramp game or the way people approach bitcoin for the first time should we talk about like how it looks like how the user looks yeah that's what i was getting into yeah it's gonna change i navigating unpacking all of this is probably going to be a messy one there's so much so what do you want to do ui or to your point the general the intention here is that onboarding users onto bitcoin lightning specific but bitcoin generally is largely an unsolved problem how do you tell someone hey buy some bitcoin and and we'll send money between each other or you can blow through a paywall a one penny paywall or do something cool that you

have an experience with the dollar what does that user look like today i don't know go to coinbase or cash app and then send it to a trezor or read this article or something it'd be really cool download this app there's a node running on your phone enter your debit card swipe it for 10 bucks and then blow through a paywall instantly that'd be baller and a lot of the lightning onboardings today is a lot of them are like growth hacks um and i don't think that any of them today can scale to millions of users that's our goal i think a lot of the cypherpunk ones like buy a casa or buy a nodal and hook it up to your wallet is cool but how do i get a million people to to use this thing within the next 12 months i think that this is a realistic shot i think i can really help help pull

that off and so this is one thing i'm always infinitely fascinated by uh the uh the approach to bitcoin when one uh is onboarded via on-chain utxos versus lightning like you think this type of onboarding will become more popular in the future i do man i told i was on a peter mccormick what bitcoin did podcast and he was asking me a similar question of does it really matter how beautiful zap's color scheme is because if i have to spend time waiting for confirmations and paying fees to get myself on the network then it's kind of a false start anyway and i it's always been intuitive to me that general mainstream users if bitcoin is used for uh retail payments or online commerce or something they'll never experience the chain they'll onboard themselves

right onto lightning and they'll spend and they'll just keep topping up i think it'll be if bitcoin becomes it's still speculative is lightning going to be valuable i saw your uh little jab session with ari paul who knows right um i don't know but if it is yeah i don't think users will spend much time with utxos is buy bitcoin here's your lightning channel have fun and when you when you run out to come top it up type of thing is that okay is bitcoin losing its principles do we want people on the second layer not the the protocol layer i'm fucking pumped i just i'm just kind of speechless right now so it's it's debit card to lightning 10 seconds that's what you're saying less yeah um bank account um i'm trying to do that zelle i'm

fucking i'm out here hustle trapping um yeah we use turbo channels which i can explain as well but uh i think the whole design principle is a fun story it comes from my parents at this point i feel like the bitcoin community knows me like a brother like no my parents know that i fucking have anxiety i was talking about that first family yeah bitcoin family so our dispensary in boulder um we give a 10 discount if you pay in bitcoin and we don't do that because we want to stack sats it's one of the reasons the other reason is because we have a seriously high security budget for the six figures of cash that sits in there giving me cash or making me use like a really janky cannabis terminal terminal that charges me five percent to process a payment is kind of

horse shit so people frequently walk in and they're like fuck i would love to get this weed 10 off what is bitcoin where do i get it and it's like all right dude go home do your cash app thing and then come back when you send it to us it depends if you're buying a ten dollar joint i'll do zero comp but realistically i can't do that so once you send the payment go get a beer across the street and come back and i i know realistically in that user store i got about five minutes to get this guy onto lightning right download zap from the app store enter your debit card put in 100 bucks and scan that qr code and you're done and it'll be a really mind-blowing experience and then what now what can we do can uh publishers put up paywalls knowing that users

can really onboard themselves frictionlessly and can call of duty require me to scan a qr code to get a gold tainted sniper rifle camo and in the one that's coming out in october i don't i hope that it starts to foster an economy that's accessible do you know what i mean yeah but That's kind of like the initial user story was the guy that walks into the cannabis store, wants his 10% off. How can I get that guy on the lightning and scanning QR code? I got five minutes max, realistically, like two. So what, again, you alluded to turbo channels earlier,

but what is happening after that initial debit card transaction? What are you guys doing on the back end? Yeah, so Zap right now is known as an open source project. And the way that we've architected this feature is it's a standalone component so first and foremost what asshole would i be to say that zap's gonna be cool forever this licensing stuff and this infrastructure is gonna be cool forever i'll be that asshole not the asshole that says zap's gonna be cool forever so it's a standalone component and what the zap open source repositories will be is like a reference implementation of this type of

api so i have a server there's a whole lot of market infrastructure that goes into pulling this off the lightning part was the easiest part but smart smart order routing ensuring pricing reducing slippage like how do i sell bitcoin and ensure that i'm not exposed to any market movements elsewhere scanning order books that type of stuff like we handle all of that and then the user gets a turbo channel open to them in return so if you buy a hundred dollars you get a hundred dollar turbo channel and then in the beginning i'll just match whatever you buy on the receiving side that you can receive as well um so you buy 100 bucks you got 100 bucks to spend on lightning you got 100 bucks to receive on lightning um and it's instant it's uh it's mind-blowing do you

you've been working with the regulators now what do you see any hiccups or maybe the biggest one so i was telling matt earlier um the regulators at this point aren't out to get us yet there that's kind of the narrative and i don't mind it because it's kind of a lock arms don't trust verify type of attitude but uh they're down to play ball as long as they understand so the hardest part for me was to get my counsel i got great counsel great lawyers great help in chicago and getting them to understand what the hell is going on they're like is bitcoin is has regulatory clarity but this lightning token we've never heard of it and i'm like oh fuck all right it's not a token let's get to the whiteboard um they also were very concerned on the fact that as soon as the user buys the

asset it is in their custody zap doesn't custody shit it's your custody instantly and there's no chain fingerprints so whatever you do on lightning can't really be spied on and that freaked them out originally a lot they're like well people can go from dollars into a privacy enhanced like bitcoin economy like what the fuck and so that one was a an arm wrestle too kyc requirements was a huge arm wrestle obviously i'm too young and too pretty to be going to jail anytime soon so as much as i love you guys i gotta comply with this law if you don't want to use the feature don't have to you can even compile and build zap without it it's a standalone component but if you want to buy bitcoin directly over lightning i had to work with them but originally

it was all right have them name social security number take a selfie send their passport to you and it was that was the other tug of war was i'm not doing that i'm really not if these people are just gonna be topping up their lightning wallets for 100 bucks i'm not that i'm you're not making us do that and so i got it all the way down to like name email and whatever information is on your debit card is plenty for them so yeah there's a few tug of wars that took me a really long time How did you win the tug-of-war about privacy on lighting? Well, it's like an interesting game theory generally. Like if you believe that nation-states compete,

there's this interesting game theory as the United States, they kind of understand that there's not a lot they can do. If you really want to oppose me on that one, I'm going to make it public. I'm definitely going to launch the feature in Europe. And then what? you've now officially declared that you are an opposer of the lightning network and for your citizens to use the lightning network in a way that declares privacy to them um and it's not

trivial to spy on them and it's not a position that any regulator right now is really comfortable making you know what i mean so yeah especially with the data that's coming out too we talked about this last week chain analysis came out with uh specifically with a analysis of coin joins and basically admitted that only 11% of UTXOs coming out of Coinjoins are being used for illicit activities, and most are people sending it from exchanges just to get privacy. That is sort of the nature of the system, too. I think facts like that actually work in our favor.

Like, hey, people just want to transact privately, and then you go to the U.S. government, and you're like, this is supposed to be the land of the free. You're not going to let people do this. That's good to see that they're open to this, at least. right and keep in mind that uh we're on their soil and we play by their rules so if in 12 months zap has 50 million users and everyone's fleeing the dollar they're gonna knock on my door and hold the handcuffs like all right you either comply or that pretty butt is going to jail

um so who knows right it's it's never a finalized deal but i was very pleased i'm so proud um zap has never taken a venture capital dollar this is a mallard's family owned effort to give back to the community and to help it was about i get choked up when i talk about this on my podcast it was about 12 months ago a bitcoin community member sent me to a head specialist and the doctor told me you might want to look into other careers because managing a lot of money and uh being an engineer is not guaranteed for you you your days may be limited and i'm a year later and i've pulled off what i'm so proud of so hell yeah i'm out here man i'm out here we're all rooting for you trying to just fucking sending it right you uh got some what some would perceive as bad news

i said fuck it i'm gonna get the most out of life that i can in this next year yeah what are you gonna do i'm i'm the best teammate and the worst enemy you know i'm a bulldog it's the chicago attitude the chicago sorry about the bears last night don't talk about it mitch trubisky is a shit coin i was at the game were you wasn't fun i wish i was not at the game but uh yeah depressing man three points and four quarters is not uh not ideal um not great so what other features are you rolling out so you're going to make this are you do you have partners on the merchant side lined up who are who are going to sort of help uh this process i do i wonder if i have the thumbs up from them to talk about it publicly like this what do you think because i

think you you may be aware of them as well point is i do have a lot of merchants partnered up there's probably some really cool things we can do assuming we can get a no-coiner onto lightning in five seconds what would a merchant partner look like um just so one of the other features that i'll be rolling out in tandem is uh it's called auto pay so right now there's some uh unneeded friction in making lightning payments sometimes on the internet so if i'm if i'm browsing online and i click on a y'all's.org article where they're requiring me to pay a penny to read the rest of the article your classic paywall bitcoin user story i click on the link do you want to open zap like no i don't i want to open itunes like yes i want to fucking open zap

and then zap loads it is like do you want to make this payment like no i clicked it on accident and then confirmed it on accident no thanks for asking but i'm good like yeah of course i want to make the payment so a type of marketplace where instead of the internet designing my experience i kind of get to design my internet experience where i can say hey i'm a frequent user of y'all's um as long as the payment's not a hundred dollars every time i click on a y'all's link zap would you mind just blowing it blown through it for me um so that i'm just kind of perusing through the internet blown through paywalls uh tipping people buying hoodies and then zap notifies me he's like yo buddy your balance is a little low great debit cards on file swipe it 100 bucks more topped up

and i'm cruising and so something like that a user experience like that is kind of what we've dreamed of for about a decade is this like internet money fantasy um so partnerships like that where the merchant is working with me on this auto pay stuff um yeah there's some details in there like the cool thing about the lightning network is that identity is through this public key you know it's not like social security number it's not a username password is that everyone is identified by a public key so i know who y'all's is because there's not another public key like that and so and lnd has a sign message feature where you can prove that you are the owner of a specific public key so a merchant can work with me on authenticating messages between the client

and the service on trusting each other and knowing right so a partnership like that of merchants that want to test out a ux like that it seems like the uh the idea of the quasi private digital passport has come to fruition um yeah or even like the brave browser type of thing right where you've kind of you've got a shit coin yeah you've got embedded money in your internet experience and you're just kind of doing your thing don't think twice about it and funny thing is when i explain this sometimes to like relatives at thanksgiving or something i don't even have to mention that it's bitcoin it's like you swipe your debit card and you get this really magical shiny orange looking token that just works on the internet and it does all

these cool things that the dollar doesn't they're like wow that's that's great if i were telling bitcoin they would got upset right but you don't even have to bring up bring up bitcoin at this point you're just onboarding yourself onto a really native internet digital currency that works in unique ways yeah it just works which is and going back to what you alluded to earlier which was the little tiff that Matt had with Ari Paul about what will the future use cases of the Lightning Network be. And a lot of people, I mean, this is the big debate in Bitcoin world. One of the big debates is,

will anybody ever use this medium of exchange as it's in this quote-unquote store value development phase? And yes, while I may not want to spend Satoshis every day, mainly because it's hard. It's not as easy as it could be. this seems like it would make it a lot easier. But even with that being said, the experience sort of driving the usage

makes a lot of sense to me. Like the experience of microtransactions, especially if you're making a fraction of a penny transactions, like that's sort of small enough where it wouldn't be too much of a mental cost to know that you're spending Bitcoin. But the experience is that good that it's worth it.

Yeah, yeah. Ari, if you're listening, I don't know what people are going to use it for. You're right. fuck me for trying buddy that's on me but yeah no i mean there's a lot of speculation involved if bitcoin becomes the best money ever and everyone that buys it now affords their wildest dreams in five years and why would you spend it i don't know but at the same argument can be made the other side there's an unlocked economy online that requires this type of infrastructure exactly

the unlocked economy like you'd even see like a top off and and go play type use case evolving where all right if i have zap and i want to go interact with these microtransactions across the web as they start to become more popular maybe i'll just get in the habit of topping it up with 100 bucks a month right and i mean that uh and not even thinking about cold storage bitcoin yeah and it it doesn't have to be zap too right like i i think zap's great i use it every day but maybe it's not great forever um but this infrastructure piece surely is really important to whoever does a kick-ass job lightning labs breeze the first thing i'm going to do is uh we're going to work with btc pay servers so merchants that want to accept bitcoin want to run their own full

node and they want to not have any slippage risk with accepting this currency auto sell 50 cents on the dollar or something like that right like um yeah so it doesn't even have to be zap but this is a huge piece um yeah like i said the good guys got the licenses now so the world's our oyster at this point so it does go both ways can the user sell too yeah we'll only originally roll out buy um but the licensing and all of that stuff has no bounds i could sell you a million dollars with the bitcoin right now with this with the licensing so i think there's so many cool things man like what about the otc space a majority of the volume in otc is crossing its spot are you familiar with that term uh familiar with the term but uh a little a little rusty let's go

through it yeah so freaks crossing its spot means that if marty were to be an otc broker and someone say marty i'd like to buy 50 btc and matt is also a broker and someone asked matt i'd like to sell what otc does typically do is they go between each other and say hey does anyone have the opposite flow that we can just cross with each other because going to the exchanges you've got fees you've got potential slippage the actual markets and order books are so thin that getting them off at market is usually a hassle so you end up crossing flow with all of these brokers now one of the problems with that is settlement obviously like waiting for confirmations or paying too much for fees and then having to price that back into the consumer like yeah i can settle

you in 10 minutes but it's going to be an expensive on-chain fee so now the bitcoin costs more where if we can just like do this like lightning wombo channels like 20 grand trades we're just like two bitcoin like zip and like uh maybe like there's applications for more institutional lightning use as well one day wombo chat yeah so what needs that that's what i'm curious like what needs what do you think needs to happen uh from a liquidity perspective on the lightning network like are you guys gonna be creating just huge channels with counterparties yeah i think um one of the cool things about this is there was this fallacy um like i don't know like the instagram model that's just all plastic right like it looks good but it's not real

is that once an exchange implements lightning we're game it's over and that's not the case right because if we were to execute all of these orders through one exchange order book one every trader in the world would know where consumer orders are going zap's got a million users and they're all executing a bit stamp perfect i know exactly who to front run i know exactly where to dry liquidity up i know exactly where to put a sell wall and you can't have that for regulatory you got to ensure best pricing to retail investors and then also just a product standpoint so zap almost acts as this buffer between the consumer and the exchanges and implements like smart order routing a lot of the market infrastructure that's required to pull this

off and then between our infrastructure and some of our lnd nodes and servers that are responsible with handling the consumer we'll do giant wombo channels with each other right like one of our infrastructure pieces is building up a large cash balance processing all of the fiat and the other building up a large Bitcoin balance, processing all of the slippage risk of acquiring coin elsewhere through smart order routing. And then we say, hey, listen, I'm in the Silvergate bank network. I want to instantly settle and give you fiat and then just Wumbo me over like three coins so that I can fill up my node because I'm getting dry. That's baller, right? And that's like a real use case of Wumbo channels, a more institutional lightning use case of instant settlement of

bitcoins um in an infrastructure level and then how it would affect the consumer and that and like now we're starting to see a lot of this stuff that we've been reading about like actually exist in the real life and deliver an experience that's really cool it seems like you're adding rocket fuel to the ship all right like it seems like it could be the impetus for like exponential growth yeah if you let me hold the mic long enough i'll try and convince everyone of that but who knows you know you got this mic we got 71 hours on this sd card yeah i hope it's helpful i know that the onboarding problem with lightning is super real so i really kyc and entering your bank info into an app is not everyone's flavor of tea and that's totally chill zap also allows you

to connect to remote nodes also allows you to be totally anonymous about to release tour support um so like what about that full node support you full node too yeah now at least everyone can now see like why i have been hesitant with like being on twitter or releasing things is because i've been working on this but yeah it's all it's all built just kind of tie the knot and uh so like the user could literally install zap they have a full bitcoin node they have a full lightning node and they get on board within 10 seconds or whatever yeah yeah are there limits to to how much they can purchase in the beginning i will impose a limit for sure but more because i just don't want to fuck anything up right so it'd probably be something like 100 bucks a day

something like that because even if i'm just the only engineer in the world that writes no bugs lightning itself i don't want people buying two grand and getting it all on lightning that's a little not chill so reckless yeah yeah so they'll definitely be be the limit um are you are you worried at all about like did this recent vulnerability that's about to be announced uh like in a couple weeks like future vulnerabilities like that possibly impacting i mean you're gonna have a lot of you're gonna have a lot of capacity on the lightning network mm-hmm sure i'm i'm worried that there's going to be a vulnerability in bitcoin and it's going to go to zero too that's a real risk so yeah um we all have abs of steel at this point you

got to stomach the risk reward typically directly reflects your risk profile and how well you manage it whether you're a trader or just someone in life if you have the balls to talk to the hot girl at the bar you get laid that's just because you were the man right like there's and there's ways that you could hedge this for us too by keeping some bitcoin on chain keeping a cash balance yeah there's plenty of clever ways i'd be the first to admit that i have pretty much nothing figured out so very much learning on the job a few things figured out a lot of figure out a few a few but um yeah no there's gonna be a lot to learn dude so much things are gonna go wrong um that's okay that's okay i really hope that this almost graduates lightning though

to uh yeah maybe someone like cash app will then get inspired and and do something even cooler you know what i mean i hope that gets us to that yeah i i hope i hope that uh coinbase reads the announcement it reaches their ears and now now you gotta do or else i'll i mean i'll take all your users but you gotta you gotta play ball at this point man i pressure's on no like i was alluding to earlier again like you're pouring rocket fuel on this and like if you bring this product when you bring this product to market it's gonna have to light a fire under everybody else's ass like this is the best it seems like it might be the best experience yeah i hope so i should get on the level especially for those humble stat sackers right yeah i have a shout

out to matt in the app to where the button says buy bitcoin unless you're viewing the application in sats then it says stack sats and that is a tftc rhr matt odell shout out that's the standard yeah you mentioned earlier the person doesn't even have to know they're using bitcoin yeah because they're using sats the whole time there you go ah but you were staying on the topic like hedging this risk you were alluding to uh uh on chain fee derivatives too yeah sometimes i listen to these podcasts i do and i get way too excited and i talk super fast and super long and i'm all over the place so i'm relying on you guys to help me manage that but yeah that's what we're here for Okay, cool. Yeah, so there is some really interesting risk profiles that Bitcoin market

participants take on that are super unique to this asset. And there's no way in human history anyone's had the same type of risk, one of which is on-chain fee costs, right? So a business like Zap, like Cash App, like Coinbase, Blockstream, they all use the blockchain and they pay to use the blockchain right block space is itself a digital commodity and it's got it's it's scarce in its own unique way and so the fee market is extremely volatile so all of these businesses are inherently short blockchain fees all that means is that if fees go up they're not happy right they're kind of assuming that they're not gonna 10x next month and that they're operating costs of opening channels or paying for users to withdraw or whatever their use case is is going

to be x amount and fees are going to be x amount now on the flip side of the market who marty is inherently long blockchain fees those miners securing the network a miner yeah so a miner the reward in a block is grinding its way quickly to zero and a miner is inherently long fees if fees don't pay for their stuff then bitcoin's going to not work or we'll have to introduce some form of inflation right so they're long so you've got miners who are inherently long you've got businesses who are inherently short and that's a really interesting risk market where it's natural a miner is going to take the other side of my risk i would like to pay a premium to where if a b cashers stuff the chain and drive fees to 50 bucks again and i'm out here paying

for users on chain fees that i'm going to get blown out my operating cost is going to go from 100 grand a month to a couple million a month and i'm going to go out of business whereas if a miner if there's some really advanced technical innovation like segwit that keeps fees low for the next two years and they're like well shit difficulty can't stop making new highs and fees aren't paying me either so i either have to be a rich chinese family office or i gotta shut down i would love to be able to hedge my risk there and if fees aren't meeting a certain requirement that i've got some some right so i'm working on that financial product one because it directly helps me i would love for zap to be able to hedge on chain risk and help users get onboarded pay for

withdrawals um channel opening stuff um but i can't directly expose myself to that type of balance sheet risk responsibly at too many users at this point and a lot of companies share that risk profile so how does he do it how does he do it ladies and gentlemen it's uh that's what i was asking you before we hit record like how do you stay focused on all these different balls in the air or do you having many balls in the air like help you focus even more being able to compartmentalize no man thing at a time i'm a genius marketer i'm actually stupid i'm actually stupid uh yeah well it's also how do you guys do what you do you just told me you recorded for six hours last night um podcast through the resume content everywhere now you've got a youtube channel

but it's natural right it's fun and so it's yeah it's just my preferred lifestyle i guess you know what i mean it's not a bad lifestyle no dude especially bitcoin number go up we're very lucky that's the beauty of number go up is you can actively uh assist number go up like you are by building shit that's the again like as we like all i can think about and this has been the theme of tales from the crypt this year bitcoin entering its second decade and maybe psychologically hitting the decade mark is uh beneficial for outside investors who may be wary of the investment class in particular but like with what you're rolling out and the the market formations that are starting to form the market dynamics that are starting to form it seems like it's really

maturing at a pace that i wasn't expecting at this point yeah well what is i've seen you write this a few times it's uh like slowly then suddenly or what is it slowly but surely uh gradually than suddenly yeah gradually than suddenly there you go but i've been saying like slowly but surely like this stuff is getting built out and like it's one day we're going to look up it's all going to be turned on and workable and that's like another topic we touched on this week with the uh the hong kong protesters allegedly uh transitioning to a mesh network to communicate after the chinese government uh shut down the the internet and communication lines that the protesters had between each other and that was a mesh network that's been around for

a couple years now and had a very low adoption but when push came to shove and people needed to use it it had been built and was there and people could transition to it and that's where i find bitcoin may be now too is like it can be used today it's not used uh by most people but it feels like we're getting closer to a point when it does need to be used people are going to be able to get on board and actually get utility out of it rather quickly yeah we'll see i hope so we're on the same team and i mean not even just that right like so the main reason i don't spend bitcoin is because of number go up and because i think it'll be worth more so why i spend it now and i can spend fiat and then the the second reason is um is a ux right so

lightning solves a lot of the ux hurdles it's it just feels even the clunky way it is now it just feels way more like just a better user experience yeah it's so much more intuitive but the key here is it unlocks a lot of things that you can't pay fiat in to begin with right so the user isn't necessarily forced from you know like a hong kong perspective like out of like absolute like necessity uh for their way of lives but they're forced kind of like softly because they want this feature that they can't get anywhere else unless they spend exactly the experience driving the adoption yeah yeah and to be clear quickly hopefully it's clear but this is not a forced feature on anyone by the way like if this is not your flavor of tea and you don't want to enter

your debit card say no bueno you can even have the app without any of this stuff included um beautiful yeah i think though everyone in lightning knows in my opinion this is the only real shot we got at you know i'm at the bears tailgate yesterday i'm like yeah i bought the hot dogs but instead of cash apping me you want to just send me a lightning payment this is the only way we can really get normie no coiner mainstream millions of users the whole like submarine swap onboardings or loops and stuff i think they're fantastic zap will do them also but this is the our only real shot at non-custodial million lightning users with a node on their on their phone if not coinbase is just going to do it custodial in five years you

know yeah it's so exciting feels like we're winning are we winning yeah fuck yes of course everything's bullish for bitcoin i just i don't see why it just seems like the it would like if you're already buying fifty dollars worth of bitcoin today like that's the easiest best process of doing it yeah i mean i can't wait to test it out yeah so i what i'll probably do i bought a domain so context for the freaks is that i haven't released it yet i'm with marty and matt we'll release this uh once you announce it okay yeah um so i bought this url uh fiat to lightning.com i thought it was just hilarious and uh wow i can't we got that one you got a jealous uh that was pretty good how did i not think of that one

and um i'll just let people uh enter an email or something if they want to help me roll this out and test it so i'll probably do like a few thousand testers internally and then yeah so i'd love if you guys help me test it out we would love to test it yeah and then that over the next coming months plan is to get it fully through the united states uh western europe obviously and there's no excuse that this shouldn't be a globally accessible feature it's going to take a little bit of work but so what you know what is

the grandest imaginative vision you have of the future in which this is unleashed and running in the wild of bitcoin in general no this feature and what it enables and what another way to phrase that is like what unique ways

do you see people taking advantage of this sure i just hope that we can get some clarity on um what why bitcoin is valuable there's so much speculation inherently on this stuff not only the price but why it's important and uh i honestly don't know if we can build infrastructure like i'm working on to allow people to make micropayments online and between peers if that would if anyone would care so i hope that we kind of get to a point where we start to learn much more about bitcoin and why it's valuable to people and what we should be spending our time on because this should get us pretty darn close

over the next 12 months rolling this out building up more features on top of it we should get pretty close to the can use bitcoin for whatever you want and you can get onboarded super simply your grandma can download zap and buy bitcoin and send you a lightning transaction so that at least we'll get some clarity you know it won't be such speculation i hope and i don't want to i don't want to predict the future specifically of price but if you do launch this in the next month and people start using it and it gets not widely adopted but somewhat adopted and new years adopted by new users in particular who aren't really uh involved with bitcoin or understand bitcoin at all you can just see if we if that launches you have new users experiencing it and

then we launch it to a bull market too and they're topping it up with a hundred dollars a month and then come three months after the halving or whatever let's say we're considerably higher than when they first started using it after like holy crap i don't have to top this up as much like why is that happening and then it's like the lolly phenomenon almost yeah they're getting their rewards and the rewards are going up uh 300 in the meantime yeah exactly yeah i had a internal clock of mine was the having so i had to finish this project before the having because if the market runs away from me and i'm trying to launch this in the midst of fucking chaos like 50k 60k that's so true it would have been tough so yeah i agree with you dude you got to build it in the

bear yeah building the bear drink whiskey with matt marty in the bowl in the uh the bull markets that's uh if we do run into another ripping roaring bull market that's something i'm mentally trying to prepare myself is like just don't get caught up in those charts all day it's gonna happen i know you gotta stay humble though you gotta keep repeating yeah which so if i'm buying 50 a day through you you're opening up a turbo channel for me for 50 are you is that a new channel every time how would you handle that i don't know so it's a good question so that initially a null state where a user is first downloading they have no channel so i have to do the turbo right then i'll match your 50 on the receiving side so now you 50 receive 50 cent

um then let's say you spend all that 50 so now you're 100 receives zero spend didn't spend if i spent it then it's obvious you can just refill it yeah i think that that's a ux question that i don't know the answer to i assume no one else does is you buy 50 now you're 50 send 50 receive then you next day you wake up you buy 20 do i take the 20 from your receiving capacity and and give it to you directly over lightning do i open a new turbo channel the fact that amp uh so payments that can utilize capacity for multiple channels when is that landing in lnd right gotta call lalu not sure so there's like a lot of uh i don't know the answer i'll probably default to a new turbo channel every time and it'll probably get messy and users would be like

yo this shit doesn't work you're a scam and then i'll try something else but it's a really good question there's so many implementation details that uh it's tricky you can only learn by trying exactly you can't not launch something because of some perceived future flaw if i can launch it see how it works and it adapt accordingly yeah dude zap is uh forever available in response like the whole remote node feature was not my idea i was like just kind of waiting for neutrino to be ready and all the users could they someone opened a pull request and did that you know so just constantly react to the remote node features check our remote yeah it's cool hey we got uh 931 sats at 110 a.m this morning there you go yeah are they all going to be

private channels by default yeah that's another good question so we won't pump our capacity numbers no and that's a good thing um of course so here's the here's a few technical details that were fun to try and figure out is channels will be private but also lightning clients consumer clients so everyday users quote unquote they shouldn't be accepting inbound tcp connections i shouldn't be able to connect make an outgoing connection to them if they want to connect to me then they then they should be able to so then i have this really unique technical problem where a user wants to buy bitcoin which means they want me to open a channel to them with the bitcoin that they just bought but i can't open a channel to them because they're a consumer lockdown private

channels no incoming connections so then you have this like type of infrastructure handshake where the user makes a connect peer call a tcp out outbound to the server the server receives it it's almost like a protocol within itself server receives it understands stashes the public key of the peer and then understands how much bitcoin it needs to deliver like things like that which were like super fun to try and and work out and build so yeah anyways rant but they're all the channels are private but i think that's important thing to mention here right because people keep watching this capacity number go down like the total known capacity on lightning uh but meanwhile like all the attempts to increase onboarding are all defaulting to private channels yours included

yeah so the explorer stuff for lightning is not only not helpful but likely extremely misleading and then if you do use it it should only be used like that's the amount of routing nodes on the network right but consumer clients unless someone who's developing one is irresponsible should always be private um so yeah those i one of the zap desktop releases we got a ton of downloads and someone was like you're lying like 1ml doesn't say that i was like oh shit you caught me like i was a liar like no dude of course not um you're not gonna be able to see the active user amount through a lightning explorer that's ridiculous that pisses a lot of people off sorry a lot of people because people like to look at the capacity i was like

i think a lot of people understand that element of the nuance but then choose to ignore it anyway because it's a nice little fun line yeah or just like the capacity going down thing it has probably a lot to do with users are migrating to these consumer clients where channels are private also has to do with the fact that someone put a million dollars in and then like took 250 grand out or whatever and everyone's like oh lightning's on the decline it was like if you hand me a 20 dollar bill just like man i really enjoyed the podcast and you take it back like actually just a ten dollar bill like oh fuck i just lost 10 bucks like no i didn't that's twitter's so funny man well that's actually something we were uh talking about last night

with our doubt is that some people just only want to see fud and only only want to fud it and do not want to take any of the nuance into consideration when the ethereum crew like really loves locking up ethereum publicly you know that's always the stats they always they've always pulled from so it kind of makes sense that they would gravitate to this you know publicly known locked up number it goes with their ethos yeah um yeah but that's that's another thing like what what does this future financial system look like where you don't even know how much economic activity is happening on this lightning layer yeah or like liquid is super cool right confidential transactions yeah have you tried it yet fuck no neither have i okay i go down on the ship with you we're in good camp

but i want to it does seem interesting it seems yeah well and also if we're going to combat like ethfud one of their big fud lines most recently is the fact that tether has become popular on ethereum and not bitcoin and uh regardless of whether or not it's a good app on bitcoin in the first place which it probably isn't just waste space um this might be a temporary victory for ethereum especially if uh tether uh liquid tether with confidential transactions takes over because that's a big thing like that people are assuming that dark pools are going to start on liquid tether because traders don't want whale reports showing that they're moving x amount of bitcoin from one exchange to the other yeah i would assume and anyone that we

just saw it this morning that dude who sent a billion dollars to huobi or was huobi moving it right it's something like that yeah but it was a billion dollar transaction yeah 700 fee and everyone on twitter not only saw it but was able to like comment on it and and make yeah yeah no i think liquid's gonna be cool and anyone that keeps frequent with the sea lightning repository it's very clear their plans um to patch those together so that you could do uh any type of asset swapping or lightning integrated to side chains i think i really enjoy blockstream's work big fan big fan as well uh it's crazy the different areas that they work on like the green wallet just do a multi-sigs security uh wallet custody they had the satellite allowing

people to send messages mining mining uh the block explorer is my favorite block explorer right now um and yeah this liquid i liquid's interesting because it's uh it's been almost like the the ugly stepdaughter of block streams product sweep but i think that's just a product of people not utilizing it correctly up to this point i think tether might be the first liquid killer use case yeah we'll see i have a few really close uh friends that are associated with blockstream ones like on the board or maybe that's not true some like really like flashy title and uh i keep getting upset with their like yo you gotta get someone over there who's been a trader and been in markets before because the fact that all these traders aren't using your

product already is a is criminal like um yeah i agree with you man i i really think uh once the cumberlands of the world uh drws kuna cmts understand the value of liquid and sea lightning and having exchanges and desks support it like everyone should sign up immediately why would you not yeah it's gonna be funny looking back in 10 20 years and see how uh our future selves and future onlookers think about how we utilize bitcoin in its first decade first 11 years what the fuck were you guys thinking doing all this you were showing that you're moving coins from one exchange to another and everybody could see it it's uh it's going to be interesting to see how uh people's interactions with bitcoin evolve

especially once you launch something uh like this yeah we'll see hopefully they're positive I bet they will be. What else do we got? You have anything else you want to touch on? Yeah, maybe. I don't know. How are you guys doing? Does anyone ever interview you back?

Sometimes. Sometimes. I'm doing good. We have unruly guests. Yeah. I'm happy that the summer's over. A lot less travel. That's weird.

Thank God. I mean, I'm not happy that the summer's over. I'm happy that I don't have to travel as much. Okay. i'm ready to to buckle down this fall and and yeah we're uh we're trying to blow up tftc here more content doing a good job so far man i mean i've been i told you this i've been a fan since summer 2017 because you wrote about me or something an event right yeah yeah we wouldn't exist if you didn't build things that i could write about we could talk about it's a it's a

mutually beneficial relationship yeah symbiotic relationship as of recent i mean my fandom has just skyrocketed the amount of times you guys are in my ear is i mean like borderline embarrassing but i love it feeling is mutual man the feeling is mutual it is really is um no i love that you've put your head down as last year and are actually getting shit done it's uh something that can't be said for a lot of people that are more vocal in the space i do miss shit posting i know you remember i was a grade a shit poster yeah i got some dog in me that likes to come out every now and then but i have been a little tamed i'm proud other thing the bitcoin community knows is i'm 25 so like i'm kind of aging with you guys i feel i feel a little more mature nowadays

back in the day i was just like calling vinnie lingham like a fucking loser yeah we've all matured a bit yeah i'll call vinnie ling i'm a loser right now vinnie you're yeah he's still listening dude he maybe he wants to make this bet again but he said something like lightning would never work and i responded like how much do you want to bet and he started avoiding it and then he said i'll give you one btc if zap gets 10 million users and i was so upset by that like first of all zap is not a reflection of lightning in the slightest matter of fact it's a self-funded open source project number two one btc which at the time was like not what it is now like bro like skin in the game fella aren't you like some rich silicon valley like tesla driving

suit one btc so vinny if you're listening man i'm right here i'll drop the pin i'm not going anywhere i'll take a real bet give me some a real quantifiable metric that encapsulates lightning and not my open source project and some real skin in the game and let's make a bet what would that metric be if you had your choice i don't know so the context was he didn't think lightning was going to work quote unquote it's already working though so it's working what does he know about the stuff working though like who is he to dude i think that zap probably has more active users than civic right now there's no doubt what is civic i don't even know if it even exists but they like i thought they disbanded it no it still exists didn't they get rid of the token or

something like that i think they tried to tokenomics it a little bit more or something they added like a staking element hey you need to be able to check ideas of beer vending machines yeah you need a token to do it you know that was the last update i got is that it was making sure you were 21 or something like that it still pops up on twitter every once in a while like in my mentions someone mentions it like they just had facebook just had the leak the phone number leak uh like 419 million records and and someone like unironically in my comments was like this is exactly why we need things like civic it's like i can't believe i can't believe that's still happening like two days ago uh yeah i haven't heard much about it recently who knows what's

going on there vinny's been very quiet about do you think he's even like focused on it at all he sold all of he like proudly sold a bunch of his uh civic yeah like a bunch of the ico returns a charlie lee said it's the only responsible thing to do as the manager of a project yeah we had the charlie lee move the charlie lee uh sell the top move i don't know if any sold the top but i love his uh business partner i only recognize him by his greasy twitter profile picture but i don't know his name but he's always tweeting like take so hot that if you touch him you're gonna burn your finger yeah the hottest takes in the world like 30 of bitcoin's market cap is because ethereum like introduced the ico yeah that's kyle that's kyle yeah dude i start

sweating when i stand too close to his takes they're just fumingly hot i started stamping his bnb takes and i like got to like the fourth one and i just got blocked i was going through the search and just stamping them well it is i mean that's who we're up against charlotte i'm comfortable saying charlatans like up against charlatans like that who have been wrong consistently for at least two years now at least my observation um yet they're still around he was forbes 30 under 30 yeah who was kyle samani wow that's uh forbes 30 on under 30 is a heuristic anybody on that list is a loser it's a top indicator yeah i mean it's i think lalu was on it was he yeah we like we like we like forbes 30 yeah yo if you're on that you're just

from what i understand it's a pretty gameable list you can uh i don't know use pr firms to get on it if uh if you so i don't know if jack got if jack got on 30 under 30 i would show the shit out of it that's true yeah all right let's not use that heuristic anymore i'm sorry but it is ridiculous that he was chosen for it um you know what's crazy is uh when you guys do a pod and you're like yeah uh the first few hours like we weren't recording actually doing one and understanding that that has happened like how like i don't know if i would have the energy right now if you were like yeah dude this shit hasn't been on you're gonna have to re-explain like why you hate coinbase so much worst thing ever and it never comes out it's only happened twice it's

only happened with bitcoin sign guy and then last week when we were recording remotely no and then you had the time where you were on the wire and the whole thing afterwards was yeah that was another yeah sorry i wasn't meaning to criticize you buddy no no no i just can't imagine it happens shit does happen but that's that last week i thought matt was recording locally and we were recording i thought he was recording remotely yeah and we got we literally finished the whole episode we were like that was great you know we were doing our wrap-up and then marty was like you're recording locally right fuck i was like okay well we'll regroup in a half hour and we'll bang this thing out we got we got some topics out to the list in the second take yeah that was good

at least yeah but it's really painful doing the three because you miss it you you always it's never the same as the first time i think no yeah i mean you find yourself just repeating yourself and it feels more scripted that way and that's why he's wearing the headphones now too because he hears it live coming through your two mics baller so he knows if it's you know it's sounding weird it has been sounding a little sorry freaks we're getting new mic lines this weekend i'm going to best buy tomorrow um yeah it's uh it's weird the content game it's crazy how we just sit here in this living room and just blast this out

to the masses and people listen to it. Thank you for listening, freaks. I love freaks, man. I am a freak. I love freaks. We're all freaks. That's the whole nature

of freaks. Freaks nation. We're all a little weird. I should have... I have my sup freaks hat turned my brain on one time. I can't believe

I didn't wear it. What was I thinking? Matt already gave his away. I gave mine to Francis in a fit of love. That is not a bad giveaway. Anyway, Francis is the man. Shout out, old Bitcoin and Francis.

By the time this pod comes out, we should have new hats out. Different style. Yeah, we'll have new hats out on Monday. What about a Stay Humble Stack Sats tee? We have something in store. We have something in store. Well, I guess it will be known at this point. We can tell Jack.

Yeah, I mean, we have a stacking. I mean, we can show him. Yeah, by the time this episode launches, they'll finally be stacking Sats merch. i can buy bitcoin over lightning and scan qr code and buy one uh we have a janky dj seeds in this bitch we have djc shout out dj is a fucking legend um we have a janky shopify bitcoin integration you can pay through lightning yes but it is a bit of a journey on checkout you have to click uh pick a different payment method then click bitcoin then a ptc pay server uh invoice pops up for you yeah the hard part is like the shipping addresses and everything yeah yeah that's the one thing

that's the one thing btc pay hasn't solved yet um that we would be full bitcoin store if we could figure out the shipping on the back end but shopify helps us with that such a dope way to stack sats uh it's great it's a great feeling stacking sats for work working working for sats we hold most of our like most of the revenue we bring in we just hold it in bitcoin yeah why not yeah number go up number go up no that's it again it's i mean you freak listen out there it's why you keep your day job so you don't have to it's so clutch it really is the odd job day jobs are clutch they are when you're trying to stack sats bottom of the ninth two outs cop a day job sports center top 10 it just seems too simple to people you know i had someone uh i had a doctor reach out to me and

my dms he's like i'm a doctor i like really love bitcoin i've been down this rabbit hole for like a year now like what can i do to like combine the two and i was like well you could like be a doctor and stack sats and i just like felt like an asshole responding that that's what vake does vakes a doctor yeah just be a doctor and stack sats yeah vakes awesome vake if you're listening i'm sorry i missed you the other weekend when you're in new york city i was away too me too um what's the american hodl what's his is that that's his name yeah that guy is awesome cracks me up he's gonna come on he'll be here in two weeks oh that's great recording with him two weeks from next wednesday the dca king man where's it a week from next wednesday yeah big teddy

bitches sure we'll be talking about that i have like i have a bittersweet relationship with him because i'm like telling people to stay humble and he's just dropping dough on twitter yeah shopping fat stacks on twitter um he's hilarious though he's gone through like what 15 twitter handles now yeah what's up with that someone like stole he was going like american huddle one american huddle two and then someone stole like four yeah he had to skip um shout out to american huddle if you're listening it's because he doesn't verify his phone number so um there's only so many tweets where you can tweet out uh everlasting riches and big titty bitches and not get forced into phone number kyc fair enough by burner by burner i told him he's

got a he's hopefully by the time this pod releases he will have verified his account through keybase so that in the future you can just do the keybase thing that's pretty that's a good idea that's allowed well no because on keybase you know you link it you link it with your pgp key so then in the future any new accounts he has he can just sign up easily with his pgp key got it and we'll know it's it's the actual american huddle yeah yeah yeah i thought you meant like twitter because you could have like a kevin fam situation you remember kevin fam at the top there was all the forks of kevin fam yeah yeah cash yeah i wonder what the kevin fam forks are thinking these days of kevin fam kevin fam caster is my favorite it still is my favorite here's a solid fork i like

the jihan who account that one's good that's tricked me a couple times even though i know it exists yeah it's got me too there's some that there's some that uh they get me every time i can't pick one off the top of my head but there's some uh satire accounts that i fall for every once in a while i think asc was one of them there's like an asc satire account it's always i always when someone like re retweets one of the fake accounts or something i always just shake your head like ah they got you they got me i i am not allowed to tweet on uh april fool's day anymore i got got so bad this year really yeah i forget exactly what but i remember like five minutes after retweeting it like being like rereading it being like fuck at least you

didn't write a whole bent on it like that would be pretty bad uh damn so what should we do should we when you release this maybe we can set it up where i clip out this audio and you can link it uh in your announcement i don't want to force you to do this or anything but if you want like stop pressuring me marty if you want people to uh to get like a more thorough explanation maybe that's what we can do yeah yeah this one will this one will be in the vault until you release so baller just let us know i have a good topic that i'd be interested in your opinion on yeah um if you were gonna fud lightning like how would you what would you know what do you think is the biggest weaknesses of lightning as it stands right

now i think that a lot of people are using lightning in irresponsible ways and there's a lot of people that could get burned bad right now and haven't yet so i'm a little bit concerned on the brand hit lightning is inevitably going to take when some of these people get burned just by using it irresponsibly but i guess like if i were to try and hack it or something like is that the question no no that was the first answer is you mean get burned by like poor channel management or yeah or just like the way people some of the architecture i was i was speaking to matt about it before and i and i'm i'm not trying to like put people on the spot but there's just like some expectations that are being set and like things people are doing where it's

pretty trivial to like um drain funds or yeah i don't know i'm i have some concerns on lightning scaling to the people working on it um in the sense that education and understanding how everything works and how to be responsible about it like ensuring i don't know if that is is that a satisfactory answer i guess a lot of the builders on lightning seem in my opinion are making some mistakes and i'm a little bit concerned on the fact that be more user focused what's up need to be more end user focused yeah or just like how they use the actual network itself like some of it is irresponsible and i'd be super concerned if i woke up and saw on twitter that like they were exploited and then having to deal with the fud of like you know what i mean it

wasn't it's not bitcoin it was mount gox it's like you know what i mean like reputational stuff and growing pains i think that inevitably are going to be pretty hard there will be losses right yeah yeah i think lightning even today has a really interesting brand where it's like the silver bullet that solves everything um and it's like lightning labs in the beginning and even to this day maybe markets it as chain agnostic right so it's not for bitcoin it scales blockchains and So a lot of these, just general branding, which Bitcoin does the same thing. It's for drug dealers, for child porn, and just natural growing pains. I'm just wary of having to go through them, I guess, is my big concern.

It's good to mentally prep for them and expect them. What about, so we had a conversation with Eric Voskul, that'll drop probably sometime before this podcast. yeah um and his big thing was transaction fees increasing so the dust limit increases so then we only you know you can't economically have small channel like you can't settle up small channels does that is that something that concerns you i didn't have like a great answer for him no absolutely i think um the fees becoming increasingly more relevant there's so many unknowns you've got right like your typical bitcoin's gonna need forever inflation to

actually work and even more nuanced detailed uh unknowns of yeah like what is the dust limit gonna be um is there gonna be like minimum lightning channel like can a general consumer get on lightning with five bucks and use it or you know i don't yeah of course that's a concern absolutely it's gonna have to take him head on as these uh problems roll in yeah i mean i that's what i was i'm so i've been that's my whole that's my whole thing about the the conversation over future inflation and fees is like you we can't know until we actually run into the problem we'll address it then well not even address it then like innovation is the creature of necessity right we're going to need to adapt surely there are like a lot of hacks though so for example the

turbo channels that zap opens right like i can hard code the fee to one sat per byte and the reason is because the user doesn't have to wait for that channel to confirm like just through the natural game theory of how turbo channels work so like um that is like a really clever protocol hack to try and rapidly onboard someone it has to confirm eventually of course it will confirm eventually and if the user wants like pay to bump the fee or something but anyway my my general point was you never really know what kind of stopgap services right um they'll they'll evolve naturally like channel factories or you know splicing like people were really big on dual funded channels once upon a time not so much anymore there's just programmable money there's

so much that can happen um but yeah to eric's point i think he's got a good one there's no answer in my opinion today at least yeah we'll find out we'll see yeah i mean and like having a high dust limit isn't like the worst thing in the world anyway honestly a lot of action fees are high right a lot of the nodes on the network today implement a minimum channel size because as a routing node for someone like zap or like breeze right you that's inevitable you're going to have consumer channels to you mean that's just the target user you're dealing with but like bit refills minimum channel size is the max you can't open a channel it's 10 it's 10 million sats do they increase it yeah i last time i tried to open a channel it was 16 million so maybe we're

grandfathered in maybe yeah but um yeah i know this is a griefing attack vector right like you can just open little channels and then send all your money through lightning and i can't settle it out yeah you know yeah it'll cost me a lot to settle that yep i i think like dual funded channels had all this hype of like well right now onboarding is tough and you can do this like hack of opening a channel to your user and having them swap in and like all this fancy stuff but wait for dual funded channels and it's like that is a horrible idea in my opinion so my node at any point can just have liquidity drawn from it when someone wants like yo fam we're doing a right 10 million sat channel right now what if i don't want to like you know what i mean like that's just an

attack vector like someone could be like damn zap's killing it let's dry up all their liquidity so that when someone tries to buy bitcoin over lightning that they get an error i'm like no dude i can't have that feature bit enabled on my node like i'm not chill with that so no that does not seem advantageous at all yeah but at there's one point in time where it was like all the rave and like the protocol discussions on irc and like and then in when you handle these things in production and for me i'm like what would dual funded channels look like the protocol level for zap would be horrible dos vector so you just kind of yeah roll with the punches i guess you come and to understand these problems as they arise and you cannot claim to fully understand them now

when they don't exist um so that's my whole point like especially with the inflation conversation and fees it just pissed me off because i think it's just some pandering bullshit that you really can't grasp until the problem is here yeah we i mean we've talked about it so many times i mean especially since bitcoin is so resistant to change to begin with so like if you need to actually have some kind of change it needs to hit like a critical mass before you'll ever get the yeah so it's just premature to even yeah and i think products like the one that you're launching now are going to help us come discover these pain points quicker and heal them quicker as well so thank you for doing what you're doing uh thank you for doing what you're doing yeah it's a big

love fest thank you both guys for doing what you're doing um yeah do you have any parting notes anywhere we should send people at this moment oh no um read the there'll probably be some media that covers this feature this is a pretty big one but uh i'll always write a blog post that starts with yo and and is a heart to heart so read the announcement let me know if you want to help internal test directly with me as we roll it out throughout the united states and uh yeah i guess my one parting note is i am so appreciative of this community and the support that you guys have given me and my family i really almost died a year ago and uh no one's wavered on me um i love you guys i love the freak so much um i really get emotional thinking about

it so just thanks for supporting me this is a big milestone for me personally we love you too jack thank you for doing what you do and just big thank fest here at the end matt anything you want to say so much love so much love stay humble stack sets peace and love freaks That's great.