TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #128: Jamal James

Episode Date: January 16, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Jamal James, creator of Polar - a productivity tool for Lightning Network developers, to discuss: - Building Polar - Jamal starting and running a successful business for 15+ years - How he originally got into Bitcoin - Deciding to build for Bitcoin + LN - Building for application devs - Why Bitcoin is inevitable - much more Follow Jamal on Twitter Check out Polar Shoutout to our sponsor: 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 $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: tftc.tv Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy, Marty Ben, here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt. Earlier this week, I sat down with Jamal James, the creator of Polar, a tool, a productivity tool for developers building on the Lightning Network. Had a killer time sitting down, shooting the shit with Jamal. We talked a lot about Polar, about Lightning, about why he's into Bitcoin, how he found it. It's a very interesting story. He still does run his own company to this day, and you're going to listen to it. You'll hear the story. It's a very interesting story of how he got into the space and how he came to decide to focus on Bitcoin and Lightning particularly. This episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by the Cash App. As you know, the Cash App is the simplest way to send and save money and to stack sats.

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and enjoy this episode with Jamal. It was an incredible time. Take care. Tales from the Crypt. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here. It's a Monday night.

Getting after it early this week on Tales from the Crypt. Very excited for this conversation. I've had the pleasure of getting to know tonight's guest more and more over the last few months, in particular, through the New York Bitcoin scene. It's an incredible scene we got here. I'd like to introduce you freaks to the creator of Polar, you just described it to me, a productivity tool for Lightning Network developers. I'd like to introduce you freaks to Jamal James.

Jamal, welcome to the podcast. What's up, Marty? What's up, man? Nothing much. very much enjoying this hennessey you brought oh you're very welcome man it's the best my favorite so what is the story behind it's the pure white pure white hennessey uh not sold in the states there's only two geographical locations in the world you can get it france cognac france and um in the caribbean bahamas barbados french french uh caribbean islands or yeah yeah pretty much yeah

well it's delicious i was saying i could chug this yeah yeah it's all yours man i had had the whiskey up and i'm very happy for the hennessy audible my drink of choice um no i'm very excited for this conversation i mean like i said i've been getting to know you uh more over the last couple weeks in the last few months actually we had a good conversation appears going away dinner you have a very interesting story um do i i think so i don't feel like i do well you software background and you found a little niche within bitcoin which a lot of people strive for um which i find very interesting so before we get into bitcoin yeah like what what were you doing before bitcoin and what brought you to it uh so i i would say

what brought me into bitcoin was well prior to bitcoin i kind of how far back do i want to go um actually i've only had two jobs my entire life um i'm middle age i'd say i'm not young anymore but i've got a few kids yeah i got a few kids um but uh so first out of college i worked at a company called computer associates at the time ca they're like a fortune 500 company build software for like mainframes and you know huge 25 000 employees all across the world globally um so i started my career there doing it work um went to school university for computer science uh but so learned how to write code and all that stuff there in very old languages and like what there's a language called modular three modular three is what i learned in stony brook they

switched the job on my senior year but um that was literally remoting into a mainframe terminal like a linux-based environment and doing all your programming in the terminal using what these hardcore crypto guys use today like vim uh emacs and uh some there's no user interface just black and white screen writing code i was gonna say sounds like a cypherpunk's wet dream it does definitely getting into crypto brought me back it brought me back but um So after that, I did IT work for a few years and then started a company back in 2006, 2006 started a company doing like websites originally, a partner of mine, my co-founder, was a restaurateur, had multiple delis, restaurants out in Long Island.

It was kind of his idea, oh, I want to build this website that people can just order online from me. And this is 05, 06. Pre-Grubhub. Yeah, pre-Grubhub. This was, I mean, at the time, it was pretty new. There was no one doing, like, food ordering online. It pretty much was eBay and Amazon was the only place people would trust enough to put their credit card. And it was pretty taboo to put your credit card online at those times.

um but he had the idea and you know we kind of connected through a mutual relationship like i said that when i was at ca his cousin was my manager at ca okay so that's how the introduction started and in 2006 um we decided to quit our jobs started giving away sites for free in the beginning and then first year um got you know about four employees or not including us So, like, two other employees, a designer and customer support person. And we just kind of grew the business from there. And so it's been actually this month made the 14-year anniversary of me building this company for two now over 50 employees and, you know, a few thousand customers all across the U.S. and Canada. It's, you know, a profitable company.

it's not like it's no uber um but it's definitely fulfilling no congrats if nassim talib would hear he'd be thanking you aggressively for being an entrepreneur building a company and sustaining it for 15 years seems like something that's very hard to do oh no it's definitely not easy the first few years it was surprisingly the first few years are the hardest my partner and i had this joke because you know when you're building a business you're the last to get paid like we literally had to make sure employees were paid before we got paid so the first few years was literally just blood sweat and tears like we used to we used to print paychecks for ourselves but we literally just thumbtack them to the wall so we we call our paychecks wallpaper because there was no taking

those to the bank was it ricky henderson who did that with the paycheck once right exactly yeah the i think it was the a's they were wondering why they're uh why they're um uh why their payroll was off by a few hundred thousand dollars they found out that ricky henderson never uh never cashed a couple checks he just framed it and put it on his wall there you go yeah that's that's how we lived for a few years but he was doing he was doing it but he was doing out of a out of vanity you guys are doing it out of necessity right we have no choice it was like if i could just get a hundred bucks to put some gas in the car and some groceries for the house i mean i mean 14 15 years you've been building technologies changed a lot the stacks changed a lot the interactions have

changed a lot what's it been like keeping up and adapting i mean to be honest with you it's been fun um you know i'm i'm myself i mean i have a great team that i work with um i was super excited about you know the latest in tech um so we're we're pretty uh forward thinking in terms of trying to keep up with what's going on like we originally when i originally built the stack it was in um c sharp and dot net on the back end a whole bunch of uh not much going on on the front end but then we saw this transition i'd say over the last six to eight years of these front end based applications with react javascript heavy what else yeah when i was selling software from like 2014 2016 software services yeah it was like react ember js was big at the time i think that

died out angular angular became big yeah yeah yeah we were we were actually pretty early um with react we were using react wow they were still small like it wasn't something you would put on your resume it literally was like i forget the version number it was like 0.14 or something like that but this was i don't know five years ago um but we were looking to build some software and we were evaluating what was available on the market in terms of frameworks and front end development started becoming really pretty popular and it was either that or it was Angular. This was before Vue.js. Angular and React were pretty much the only two that were out there. There were some other very small niche frameworks, but they weren't

And we didn't know how sustainable they'd, you know, how long they'd be around. So we kind of, after evaluating, chose React. And, yeah, we've been doing Reactor Element for a pretty long time. Well, it's a great example of sort of the network effects these frameworks have. And, like, some of the frameworks I was pitching when I was selling services four years ago aren't around anymore. They're just completely dead. So how, how did these like network effects going to be? And how does like one framework went out over another? Is it developer?

Yeah, I think it's developer mindshare, honestly. It's because that's what makes great frameworks is the developer community around it to be able to go to Stack Overflow and ask the question and get someone to answer it and be able to look up blog posts, you know, search for an issue and find blog posts to be able to contribute. If you find a bug to be able to get back and push it. So I think that's one of the great things about open source community is that it allows, you know, a community to foster around a certain project, which is kind of one of the reasons that got me into Bitcoin and crypto. You're providing a natural segue here.

I am. You're very welcome. Thank you. This is one of the hardest parts of the job is creating natural segues. You got into it because an investor asked you to look into how you would hire a developer. yeah yeah so um of uh an investor in my company early investor uh many years ago um he had began getting interested in cryptocurrencies uh much before i did he i remember like 2013 he mentioned it you know i didn't really pay much mind you know my i was head down buried in my business it was like nothing else mattered outside of making my company successful

so i was just uh sounds good but not interested and so um it was in 2017 where he approached me saying he's looking to start a company inside of the cryptocurrency industry uh he's heard some great things about this project called ethereum uh he says it's just like javascript you just need javascript developers and so he reached out to me and said hey we're looking to start a company I want to kind of put together or find some JavaScript developers or developers that can build on Ethereum. And he just said, Hey, could you help me out in terms of understanding like what the skill sets I'm looking for? Maybe help me put a job description together so I can post it online, you know, eventually help them out with interview and stuff like that. So I didn't

know anything about cryptocurrency at all. You know, like I said, I've been ignoring it for for many years and if you don't mind me asking what year is this this was 2017 okay so this was during the thing uh the mania phase which i had no idea was even happening what like what part of the years is like a spring summer summer yeah this was summer i think the first time i looked at it prices of bitcoin might have been around two thousand three thousand yeah yeah like 1500 to 3000 right somewhere around there yeah it's crazy how fast it ran up people forget i mean that's like we're sitting here at like around 8 000 right now and people like oh we're so far but we were only above 10 000 for like 14 days right exactly if that or

20 days i forget what the exact number is but you get the point freaks yeah um so what was your first thought when you did take it to be honest with you when i saw ethereum like i literally spent the first night I spent like just reading like what is it there and what does it do and you know at the time it was just like unstoppable applications world computer I was just mind-blowing is this real like holy crap I can't believe this actually exists understanding what a blockchain was and trying to wrap my head around it was uh it hit me it I look back and say if I I would have spent just a few hours looking into it back in 2013 or 2012, maybe even.

I could see myself getting interested in it, but just not having looked into it. Yeah, just you find it when you find it, right? Yeah, that's true. Sometimes you got to wait until the right moment to find it. And so it seems like you were enticed, right? Yeah, I was definitely very interested in it as soon as he mentioned it. And it was just like, as soon as I looked into it, and so, you know, over the next few weeks, I continued to help him out with what he was looking to help, looking for help for. So I, you know, obviously, at the same time, I'm looking at the prices and the prices are moving.

You know, I had, I've been in the stock market investing for a few years prior to that. So, you know, I had money in the stock market, dibble and dabble, definitely not trading or anything like that. but, you know, buy some. Oh, it seems like Apple's not moving. Let me do this or Microsoft's move this and with that. So nothing active, but, you know, seeing my portfolio move in the stock market. And by that time, I think I had put like,

let me just throw a thousand bucks at it. And it went up like 40% in a week or something like that. And I was just, what? I can't even get this in a year. Was this Ethereum or Bitcoin? this was uh i think it was bitcoin yeah i think i just bought bitcoin yeah i just yeah so i saw ethereum but my immediate reaction to the token ether was like i don't really see the monetary value of it immediately like to me it was like all right it's it's gas like that's

the interpretation i was receiving immediately um so i was like i can't really see any reason why someone would want to hold this for a long term interesting yeah so i had a little bit tangent of a backstory but i definitely had spent a little bit of time trying to understand money after the financial crisis i was you know um involved with my company at the time and we saw the impacts of the financial crisis it impacted our business um just because people weren't spending yeah you know people just clutch their purses and it's actually um my wife and i watched a funny movie that it revolves around the impact of the financial crisis hustlers with jennifer lopez and impacted the uh the uh stripper business as well yeah people just stopped spending

as much as they used to like if it wasn't an absolute necessity it was not you know they didn't want to let it go so so yeah we saw that impact you know there were times when we didn't even know if we were going to make it like oh this this might be it for us type of thing and so fast forward to when i'm looking at um ethereum and bitcoin um i had spent some time after the crisis just trying to understand what the hell happened because i'm not a wall street guy i don't know what's going on and with the banks and the finance guys um but you know you you watch some documentaries or some youtube videos and you kind of get an idea of you know what went wrong and just I had this eerie feeling that just something isn't right like there's something

broken here which I can't explain I don't know how to wrap my head around it you know I'm not a not a gold bug you know of sound money like I didn't even know what sound money was at the time and I think that whenever the powers that be all the politicians and central bankers in the world say hey we need two trillion dollars right now or the world's gonna implode right something goes off in people's minds like hey this something might be wrong right exactly and it's like you know the the too big to fail thing it's just like that doesn't seem like how an economy is supposed to function right like somebody if they're doing something they shouldn't be doing they should fail right these why are they the only industry that get bailed out and oh that's the thing we're

11 years out now and that's what is interesting right we're at this this point where it's out it seems like we're going to go back to qe i'm just going to revert to the policies that we instituted right after the financial crisis but back then when those policies were being instituted felt like there was like more of a like occupy wall street was around and people were viscerally angry and like on the streets but now it's just like oh it's uh it's just a normal thing yeah it's just a normal thing it's like people it's like they can they're persistent enough and uh able to band-aid over the the bullet wound for long enough people yeah people forget yeah that's very true short memories man but tangent back to back so you had this in the

back of your mind ether was gas right so to me there was gas on mine and bitcoin just felt like you know digital gold i can buy that it's uncontrolled you know originally a funny story too was i had when people said it was you know a fixed supply i'm like it's an open source project like i can go in and i see the line of code where it says it's a supply how is this not you know set in stone like how is this set in stone like how is this not changeable anyone can update this code and run it and it wasn't until months later i still was skeptical thinking like i'm not buying this 21 million cap like this this is so easy to change it i can go in and change it like how is this possible and then it wasn't until months later like after um so i came in

i started getting interested in bitcoin right around the bcash fork um and then i remember it was towards later on towards november there was like the 2x um 2x failed right the works was off by one right they were originally going to fork and then they called it off a few days earlier um but it was then that i really started to wrap my hand around the consensus protocol and the fact that even though it's in the code you know everyone has to run the code in order to make it yeah there's a social aspect right there's a social the shelling point like the shelling point what code base is the shelling point right exactly the one with the limit yeah so that's kind of when I was like oh wow this is no joke like this is the real deal the 21 million limit

is actually set in stone and no one can change that so so yeah that's kind of when I started like really focusing like primarily on Bitcoin originally it was like you know and at the time this is the ICO hype. So everyone, you know, had a total, a new, a new blockchain, everyone's new blockchain was going to be 10,000 TPS and, you know, much better than Bitcoin in all aspects of the word, much better than Ethereum. And, you know, so this was super confusing. Yeah. Someone just coming into this space.

I love Bitcoin, but buy my shit coin, please. Right. So that was, so this is like the end of 2017. So Lightning wasn't launched until January 2018, correct? Yes. I wasn't paying attention to Lightning at all at that time, but yes. So you're running your company, and how long did it take you to sort of coalesce on Bitcoin and then decide to actually contribute via Lightning, or did you start doing PRs for

Bitcoin Core? Yeah, so I would say my first contribution to Lightning was in the summer of 18. um i contributed to the zap wallet jack marlin shout out to him shout out jack awesome dude incredible dude yeah very incredible his whole family right um so prior to that i'd say the early 2018 was still just you know in the markets you know on the investing side of it so to speak and then you know once peak hit and it started coming down it's like all right it's not going up anymore excitement's kind of wearing off let me really get my head wrapped around the technicals you know and that's that's when i started diving deep into

kind of uh reading um andreas's book mastering bitcoin yeah that's from bitcoin so um read through that um actually i'm sorry no prior to that actually i had gone into lightning first I was interested in Lightning first prior to that because I think I did start hearing things about how Lightning Network is a scaling solution or a scaling solution for Bitcoin. Started looking into the L&D implementation, which had an API.

So I'll preface this by saying that most of my development has been all in the application level development, no protocol, low-level engineering type of stuff. Yeah, we'll get to what you're building. Yeah. So, you know, as an application level developer, approaching Bitcoin itself can seem a bit daunting. Like, you know, these things, these transactions are like an array of bytes, which in hexadecimal formats. And, you know, these are things you don't deal with as an application level developer.

you get json strings integers numbers it's clean it's human readable you're going back to what was called json no no the uh the first language something all modular modular right exactly all command line all terminal um yeah this was uh so bitcoin was a little um you know like spooky like oh that's that's low level stuff so um but then when i started looking into lightning that's when i was like oh this is lnd that's an awesome api rest api that's you know human readable is more along the lines of what you would expect as a person developing mobile application web applications desktop applications um so that's kind of what got me interested in like and i felt like at the time lightning was pretty wide open in terms of you know

what's available i felt like bitcoin you know close to 10 years of development a lot of the uh you know the low-hanging fruit has already been built yeah you know what i mean so it's like all right what's lightning there's like open greenfield that you know they call it in the development where I was like plenty of opportunity to contribute to the space and it's changed a lot since the first launch yeah it's been a lot of development I mean it's grown pretty big and also the you know the the community around it and uh the tooling and the the um features and functionality is just I'm like we'll go into this as well but I'm I'm super excited about AMP like that to me is like a huge leap forward being able to make a single payment for multiple

channels at once right exactly yeah yeah that's that's a huge leap forward because in terms of usability because now people don't really have to worry about how much is on this channel how much is on that channel um i think that's a burden you know that people shouldn't have to think about it's just like it's like my bank account if i have 50 in in my account why can't i send fifty dollars why is it max i could send fifteen dollars exactly doesn't make any sense to me yeah they don't realize it's separated between account or exactly two channels yeah and i'm trying to think how we should go from here because all right yeah let's just go naturally amp is amping you up because and that's the thing like all right here's how we go

i want it because i want to work this in because bitmax research posted over the weekend an update on lightning network they did a bunch of in-depth research and found that there were something like 90 000 forced close channels which is higher than expected and not that people are closing channels but it's like higher because they expected fewer channels to be open so it's alluding to the fact that there may be a lot of private channels that people don't can't see exist so it would also allude to the fact that maybe lightning networks uh getting a lot more uh usage than people people expect right now right right yeah definitely it's i mean and that's what we want ultimately like we want that's that's the privacy we're looking for

you know it's an it's an unfortunate side effect that we can't get visibility into the entire network to be able to you know scream to the mountaintops how great lightning is doing but at the same time that's exactly what we wanted the privacy of not being able to be seen yeah on the lightning network now it's very uh very underrated privacy provider right now in the cryptocurrency space everybody's focused on individual coins but again like i've been saying this forever like second layer solutions always seemed like the best way for me like stacking it and working in in that in that fashion so i guess before we get into what's exciting you know i think to help maybe other developers that may be listening to this podcast who are trying to get in

to the space and uh are weighing the opportunity costs of working on one project over the other what made you pick lightning and bitcoin over ethereum like isn't ethereum supposed to be easy to develop yeah so i mean it ultimately was it the monetary thing like yeah it was it was the uh just my outlook on what's going to be around in 10 years where do i invest my mental energy learning understanding researching building you know what's going to be what's going to be here in 10 20 years and you know like i said at the time i was uh you know i was seeing so much out there like there was a point in time where i was trying to keep up with not even the technical side just the um the names the names and the

announcements in this release and this partnerships oh my goodness the partnerships so many partnerships jack ma so many partnerships he never knew he engaged in yeah just trying to keep up with all this it was just like all right i'm never gonna get anything done if i try to do everything so i have to focus my attention somewhere and i mean ultimately the choice came down to focus on bitcoin primarily because i felt it had the most potential of longevity i mean to be honest with you i felt ethereum was still um i i worry about whether or not i mean scaling is obviously scaling is necessary like i understood to me i looked at it as scaling is an absolute necessity for an application level infrastructure. You can't do anything without scaling. You

have to scale it. And I mean, transaction per second, if you want to run, businesses are going to run their infrastructure on top of something like Ethereum, this unstoppable computer, it has to scale. Whether it's on chain or not. Contrary to that, I believe with the money monies you don't want to be moving around too much you want stability you want assured you know you want to be sure that it's not going to change underneath you like you don't want feature after feature after feature after feature for your money i don't want to know this dollar in my pockets i'm going to be able to spend it 20 years from now if i leave it under my mattress yeah because feature after feature after feature is also precedent after precedent after precedent

right president to change it in the future right yeah and and you want confidence i i think i've learned that for your money the less it changes the better you know it's i don't i don't want my money moving on me moving around on me so you know from that perspective and it just made sense to me in terms of um you know how conservative you know how very very strict and uh meticulous the development community is around bitcoin like you know there's multiple eyes looking at every single change that goes in and reviewed you know up and down and left and right before anything gets put into the protocol let alone into the consensus code yeah i mean we had a front row seat to a couple of mines working on that reviewing that last week at the 100th socratic

right exactly yeah and there's some um some incredible incredible talent working in the space i mean i i was blown away when i went to my first bit devs i literally sat there just what was that like oh my goodness i mean i literally i've told my first bit dev story on this podcast let's hear yours so um when was the first bit dev this was probably i think September or October 2018 I had already contributed to the zap wallet I remember going in there sitting down you know everyone's pretty nice I mean I didn't really speak to too many people but Jay when I walked in I was there pretty early so weren't that many people there he said what's up started talking you

know chitchat now I sat down and they start going over you know Jay starts going over all the you know papers that's been written the news and all this stuff and I'm like oh that's pretty digest well not you know I'm not grasping nothing but 10% of this stuff I don't think I've grasped more than like 5% anything I've consumed it like some of this stuff is like oh and then and And then John starts going into the PRs and the reviews. And I was just like, after, you know, two hours sitting in that room, I was literally like, I've never been in a room with this many, like,

intelligent developers, you know, engineers, you know, just people in general. And the conversations that were going on there, too, were just incredible. You know, seeing Matt just jump in and give some feedback of like, all right, that's not going to work. You know, do this or do that. And it was just, I've literally like never sat in a room. See, it's for me, and I've been kind of siloed, I'll admit, you know, in terms of like, I have definitely have a great team of developers that I work with that contribute great ideas. but it was like uh it was immediately obvious that these were like cream of the crop type of developers that were in here i'm always mentally exhausted from trying to keep up like literally

physically drained from because i mean it's a testament to jay and john and now andre who leads the lightning session of of the meetup they prepare like jay reads in a crazy amount of of papers and vulnerability uh reports that i don't think i could even do in a year let alone from month to month like a bit the amount of white papers he has to read and we talk about per per meetup is uh is impressive and then on top of that the whole format of it the socratic nature of it people throwing ideas out there and and battle testing those ideas in a very uh level-headed way most of the time yeah the discussions are just they're uh they're they're originally they're very intimidating i was i was like

uh i'm not sure if i belong in this room like these guys i don't know if i'm ever going to be able to contribute to these type of discussions well this is a great segue thank you again for more segues you got over your imposter syndrome and you created something that developers fucking love so let's talk about polar yeah man so you're talking about uh these things need to be scalable at the end of the day and it seems like lightning might be the network via which bitcoin scales at least to some capacity and that's what you're focusing on and then uh to scale the second layer to make that scalable you have to make make it possible to build on top of it and to do that you have to have tools that make it easy to build on top of it and that's what you build a tool

uh that helps with developer productivity and i've only seen one review and it's from somebody who else has been on this podcast and uh if she's giving this review your uh your product's definitely the creme de la creme carla kirk cohen saying oh yeah as soon as it came out she scrapped everything she was doing and started using your product right away yeah so what did you what the hell did you build so it's a developer tool i mean it's it's weird i know people here like why would you build something like that a tool for developers like you know that not for end users but it's essentially a developer tool that simplifies creating enlightenment creating a local lightning network so if you're not familiar as a developer building against any type of you know external

service you want to simulate you want to have some type of test environment that you can test with Um, Bitcoin does have a test net, but, um, and lightning, there's a lightning network around the test net. Um, but if you're building, um, towards, if you're building an application, you want, you know, immediate feedback. You want, you know, a very quick feedback loop. You know, you make a change to your code, you run it, you see what works, what doesn't work, it's broken, what you need to tweak, what commands not working, what errors you're

getting, how to handle them, you know, update your UI with this information. So you want that feedback loop to be as quick as possible. So in Bitcoin, there's this reg test mode that you can run your Bitcoin core node in, which if you're developing against Bitcoin and Lightning Network, you can, you know, LND, you can run in reg test mode as well. So you can basically have a local copy of a Bitcoin network with as many nodes as you want to create um essentially running on your laptop where you don't even need an internet connection to be running multiple nodes multiple bitcoin nodes multiple lightning nodes and then

you can interact have your application interact with those nodes in order to um be able to you know either create and destroy the network and or you know reset the network back to the beginning or deposit and transfer funds mine blocks you don't want to wait 10 minutes every time you make a change for a new block to be mine like it'll take you two weeks to get any feature done so when I began working on lightning network that was the first thing is like all right how do I how do I get started running this reg stats environment so went through there's a one lightning labs has a tutorial I remember first looking at that and walking through each step You know, download source code, compile it, install the dependencies, execute this command, update this config file, run your Bitcoin node, whether it be BTCD, which is a Go implementation of a Bitcoin client, or Bitcoin Core, which I don't know if you've ever, you probably haven't compiled Bitcoin Core from source code, but let's just say it's a daunting.

It's a pretty daunting task, and it's not simple, to say the least. So, you know, getting that environment set up could take you hours. Like, you know, there's a fair amount of commands to run. If you haven't done it, it's your first time ever doing it, it could certainly take you hours, possibly even days. I've heard stories of people saying it's taken them days just to get a local environment set up. So when I went through it, you know, I had it working, and it was great.

and if I wanted to add or change my nodes up it was a bit of work you know I had to change a bunch of configuration files it was a lot of command line a lot of configuration you know pretty much your nodes are running in the command line so you have to you know when I restart my computer I have to restart up the bitcoin node type in commands to start up if I have four lightning nodes running to start up each one and you know of course I can create aliases in order to make it quicker or script it a bit to make it quicker um but you know it's all command line there's no visual feedback or anything like that and were you um discovering these pain points when you were building on zap uh building on jewel actually when i really faced it yeah

because i spent after willow burn launched his project uh the lightning jewel browser plugin um i was really excited about that project because i felt like it needed to exist like said i had spent some time on the ethereum side so they had metamask so when he launched that it was just like oh this has to exist like this needs to exist for lightning to interact with the web so there was you know when he launched it there was definitely like um coming soon type of features like i think um it couldn't send um on-chain bitcoin transactions in the initial release and there was even helping with his project you know i'm my first couple pull requests were just like developer productivity improvements like all right let's tweak this you know I spent time with

React so React has this thing called hot reload where you get even faster feedback instead of having to refresh the browser or the plugin you know live updates whenever you make changes to your code so you know my first couple PRs was just like implementing those features in his project to make you know just that speed up that feedback loop of making changes to your code seeing an app and just the faster you can be iterating over your source code the more you'll get done in less time so I spent a bunch of time with Will or working on Will's project a few months

probably even more and that's where I basically got my environment set up and was spending a lot of time running those nodes and interacting with them so that's where I suffered the pain that uh that polar so it took the scenic route to get to why polar but um it's a good scenic route though yeah um with willow burn shout out to a fellow beefy boy willow burn yeah big shout will um so yeah so once um i got so going through that experience

it was literally like this is like i felt like i was going back to my college days in the modular the three era of building of developing software like that's what it reminded me of and i was like no not in 2018 there's gotta be a better way there's gotta be a better way like the world has come too far for this right it's just unacceptable like i'm better than this as a developer i deserve better um so yeah that was that was really the motivation there it was I spent some time looking for what was out there, and I found a few other tools to automate this experience. There's some tools, I can't forget the name, they're pretty not well known, they're pretty

... A few people in the L&D Slack mentioned them when I had asked, but they were all command they're all terminal based and I felt like you know if we want to introduce a lot of the developers at least from my perspective and both you know being an application level developer as well as hiring application level developers you know their their expectations are different from a protocol engineer you know protocol engineers are they're looking at bits and bytes they're optimizing for speed you know they're keyboard junkies like these guys guys just keyboard shortcut kings um and so but the application level developers you know the people that i've spent a lot of time working with you know we want to go to a website download the

tool double click on it launch it and it just works and now i can start building my application you want to move fast and break things right right exactly well it's like and that's what lightning provides is like the way to figure out how to make leverage bitcoin in a not a wreck well maybe reckless it is reckless yes reckless is the is the meme that went around i mean as long as you're on reg test you're all set you can do reckless all day long on reg test yeah but no that's i mean well that's again getting back to polar so you you built that's what you were you did the chain code summer residency correct i did i did the seminar portion so i wasn't an official resident but i did get invited i guess based off of um i mean

i applied to the to the regency but they were focused on protocol developers um but they did invite me to come sit through the seminar portion which was two and a half weeks of presentations you know a little hack um um sessions um to to hack away at some either the bitcoin source code or lightning projects stuff like that small little sacks but a lot of it was presentations from a lot of the popular names in the bitcoin and lightning world um from the big companies blockstream you know lightning labs and async and um so yeah so spent the two weeks two and a half weeks there um and there was a lot of prep for that like actually i think there was about six weeks of weekly conversations reading assignments and weekly conversations about the

reading assignments you know went through a lot of Jimmy songs book at the time a lot of the lightning network specifications so that was you know where I was probably spent most of my time towards the spring and summer of 2018 mm-hmm prior to creating prola so it was kind of my transition from working on Jewel and then was focusing on the residency stuff and then once the residency was over then I got jumped into uh Polar um because I wanted to get back into lightning development but I was like you know what this something needs to exist to make this a little bit easier for developers to to to build on on the lightning network yeah and you launched Polar what three

four months um when did i launch in november november so two months two two and a half three months ago yeah yeah it was and how was it uh how was it received how have people been using it so far oh very good yeah it's surprising i i didn't think it would be received as well especially from non-developers like i didn't think you know non-developers would see the benefit at all because you don't if you don't feel the pain you don't really know like all right this this hurts like um but it's been received really well like i was i was pleasantly surprised that you know i thought to be honest with you a part of it was me selfishly building for me like i just was fed up it's 2018 better right i was just kind of fed up and just like i i need i need

to make my life a bit easier um so let me just spend a few months hacking something together and And when I put it out there, it was just like, you know, a lot of people were just out there tweeting or messaging me like, dude, this is amazing. It makes my life so much easier. And can we do this or can we make it do that? And, you know, it was just amazing feedback. Yeah, what's the interaction with your project been like? Has there been a lot of PRs? Oh, there's been a few.

I think there were about four contributors. A couple of just minor stuff. um willowburn i think you know he was circling back to me but he he made a pretty substantial contribution to it um some great feedback in terms of um feature requests um few issues posted um that got fixed so it's been it's been pretty uh interactive not you know it's no bitcoin core repository but it's no well you were saying some non-developers noticed it i noticed it i think i wrote about it like the day after you dropped it because you did yeah because it's a sign like you being interested enough to build this very specific niche tool for developers

so that they can build on this niche second layer scaling yeah technology it says something right like it says there's something there and the fact that you're you're out there building tools so that people can build other things too like if it's worth building the tools it might be worth it overall which is true which like which is what's fascinated me about like seeing you do that gives me more confidence in lightning the fact that you're that interested yeah i mean ultimately i'm i'm a big believer when you go into the economic side or too much into the philosophical side of why bitcoin oh let's go i mean i don't have much to contribute there but um i'm let's just say I'm a huge believer in the social economic benefits of Bitcoin in general, you

know, as it relates to our global society and improving human beings as we are to make us better. So, you know, I want to see Bitcoin win. I want to see Lightning win. And I just felt in order for us to build, for developers to build the next killer app, we need to attract a much wider audience of developers to the Lightning Network. And, you know, I just want to not let the onboarding tooling experience be, you know. A barrier to entry. A barrier to entry.

Exactly. Exactly. um you know because if i would i would say you know and and paula's not all that's needed there's definitely more tooling that can be done to improve the experience like what um i mean i think sdks i'm not sure if you're familiar with but basically software to all my kids there you go okay i forget i don't know who i'm talking to i had to sell software services at some point Yeah, I think discovery of these tools, one, like SDKs are definitely needed, like good polished SDKs that keep up with the implementations.

There's a lot of SDKs out there, some, but it's pretty fragmented, you know, because you need, you know, for multiple languages, whether it's JavaScript or Go or Python or, you know, you need, there's a fair amount, there's some good ones too, in terms of SDKs interacting with the frameworks, but I think there needs to be a little bit of organization around discovery and how people find them, because they're not easy to find. They're buried in GitHub unless you do some very surgical Google searching or spend time asking questions in the slacks and stuff. Yeah, so this is a problem I'm probably not well versed on.

It's hard to find these very specific libraries that interact with these certain implementations in specific ways. Yeah, it's not easy. I mean, I wouldn't even say that for Polar right now. I don't think it's easy to find Polar. Just having a repository on GitHub is not enough. How does that compare to other software projects? How would you find similar SDKs on, say, a WordPress thing or something like that?

a source like i i imagine it would be great to um have a source that most people are aware exists whether it be you know the lightning website for instance that's where people are going to go to start um and have that source kind of recommend somewhere to go for the sdks i know there's you You know, they don't want to recommend any specific thing, any one specific tool, because, you know, it's not built by them. But at the same time, I think that you need that in terms of onboarding developers. Like, you need, you know, somewhere to go that's, okay, here's a list of tooling that's available for building on top of Lightning. yeah no and it's we're seeing that play out like the protocol level too like it's it's i just had andrew chow and talking about psbts like that standard wasn't there until late last year earlier

this year and software was arguably made inefficiently because there was no standard everybody's off doing their own thing exactly because there's no standard yeah absolutely and i think you know i think we'd be more productive as a community if we work together towards that you know tooling for developers like if we had i imagine i don't know if this is possible but i imagine you know if we had you know a single organization on github that had sdks tooling website all built around building on lightning that's all open source so anyone can contribute um but it aggregates the the the effort that's being put out there you know i think people are very dispersed in in their efforts and it's probably a lot of duplication of the same thing

happening so it's kind of inefficient um so do you think this would be an opportunity for some somebody out there potentially a freak who's listening right now wants to contribute to bitcoin it's not a developer that may be able to do something maybe organizationally on github or something like that there yeah i mean i don't think it's any specific one person that can do it i think it's really a collaboration of many um that's going to bring it together so you know anyone can do it but if they don't get support from the rest of the community then it's kind of nothing yeah you know what i mean yeah so i think it's a combination of you know putting in the effort as well as getting the support of um the community members not just individuals but also

So maybe even, you know, the implementers of the Lightning Networks, like, you know, the big names that are in the Lightning Network to not even say they have to do it, but just say, okay, here, this is where you go type of thing. Yeah. That's fascinating because it's coming together, right? And these libraries and because, again, I'm just thinking of other guests I've had, like Alexander Leishman at River. He was talking about specific libraries they built for their product that they haven't opened source yet,

but plan on open sourcing and it made their processes within their company a lot easier with address management and reuse and stuff like that. Just simple things like that. And then you think of like Drew Mansell and Joe Kelly at Unchained Capital building Caravan, which is their open source desktop app for creating multi-sigs with different wallets and stuff like that. And then so they get the derivation path and everything right.

so the user it's an easier experience there and sort of automated and then you're working on polar it seems like everything's coming together like yeah i mean it's getting better like how how big how long is this timeline of bitcoin in your mind like in terms of in terms of it being successful it being sufficiently built out in a successful project like do you like do you think we're going to bear the fruits of bitcoin success in our lifetime will be our children or grandchildren like are we that's a great question like the stuff that's being built right now is very rudimentary it seems yeah um i definitely think we got a still a bit of maturing to do but i think we can probably i mean i it's hard to say if it's going to be like i don't ever think there's going

to be like a done for bitcoin like i think it's going to be just continued building on top of building on top of building learning you know adjusting based on the world around us moving forward the technologies that come about and improve um we'll have to keep up in the bitcoin space as well with you know right now you know smartphones weren't a thing you know how many a decade and a half ago like yeah like the world i got the iphone the same year uh my first iphone the same year bitcoin dropped right yeah i think that was the first time yeah somewhere around there yeah yeah so you know obviously the world is going to move forward so bitcoin is going to have to from a technical perspective move forward along with it react may not be the best application

framework 10 years from now so likely we're going to need better applications and tooling and stuff like that um so i don't think there's i don't think there's ever a done um i think there definitely is the goal of seeing it being usable by non-technical people like first day it should be as easy to use as signing up for instagram or you know downloading cash app or something like that do you think the limits of the system are such that that's possible i believe anything yeah i believe anything's possible yeah i believe i mean there's definitely certain constraints being that a high priority goal of the of the ecosystem in general is privacy and security that does add a bit constraints but i don't think it's it makes it impossible i think it just needs

a bit of extracting away and i think you know through developers building on it we discover um you know we build foundations it's like building a house totally speaks he's like all right first you lay the concrete foundation then you got to put up your studs then you got to put up the drywall then you put in your fixtures and flooring like you know what i mean it's like we have to build the the ecosystem itself yeah layer by layer yeah no and i think you're describing this better than my question was attempting to like we still feels like we're at the foundation phase where we're laying the cement right yeah it does still feel there's there's some small pieces that are like oh this this should have existed already like not that

it should have existed because of the timeline but we need this to exist like we need these fundamentals like all right you know you know tooling to make things easier and um you know like pbst you know psbt psbt i make this mistake all the time but yeah so let's jump into amp how does amp make more make bitcoin more usable i mean ultimately it's it's the without amp you're it's too confusing for the average person it's too much information so to speak you know I mean, it's like to have to mentally try to figure out where, and I, and I, and I know that this is not, that wasn't the original plan. Like this is just because you're an early adopter, you got to deal with, you know, there's

only a certain amount of time, a certain amount of developers that can get things done and you have to progress over time to build out and make things better. So I don't think anyone's intention was that we're going to expose channels forever. Like it's always been like, all right, we're going to figure out a way to do, to make it like magic payments. Right, exactly. To just make it work like a normal credit card transaction online. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think amp is just a great tool to hide the complexities of channels.

Cause I think that's a detail that most people don't need to know about. Um, you know, it's, it's, I look at it as, it's no different from, you know, with email, No one knows there's an SMTP server happening underneath the covers. All they know is they type some words on the screen, hit send, and it somehow makes it to its recipient. You know, I look at channels as, like, the SMTP protocol type of thing. Right.

You should, yeah. Like, some services are, like, just straight up giving you liquidity right away and trying to make, like, breeze. They do that. Phoenix is doing something as well to try and help. but those are yeah they seem like weird workarounds that probably aren't sustainable in the long round but it does seem like things like amp make it more sustainable you can like loop in things like loop in loop out and right um using amp for submarine swaps where you just move your

liquidity to the other side of the channels and yeah all that stuff yeah and i think having those those type of services built in directly to the wallets just improve the user experience like it It definitely should be the case that if I'm a user and I deposit, you know, $50 into my Lightning wallet, I should just feel comfortable being able to spend $50 in my Lightning wallet, you know, barring some, you know, I know there's reserves, channel reserves that need to be met. So that might take a little bit of, I don't know if there are any techniques or ways around that.

I think blending your one blending your you know your channels so that there really is no such thing as channels yeah in your wallet just simplifies the experience drastically you know yeah and well I'm happy you mentioned like wallet software specifically that's one thing never really it took me a while to realize like how the wallet software is is probably one of the most important like the most important it's the hardest to monetize number one but it's also the most important um software being built on top of bitcoin because it's literally how you interact with your bitcoin right and um wallets in the future are going to be able to do so much stuff it's gonna be crazy yeah it's i mean the wallet's taking on a big responsibility in in in the bitcoin

world um they're gonna have to do a lot in the lightning world i mean a lightning wallet is a big undertaking just in the simple fact of um that's why i come in guys you know build my zap well i'm a huge fan of zap yeah i'm a very happy zap user yeah you know the the story about how that got started and what he did with that is just amazing well just and where it is today yeah well we're in a state it makes me a hardcore believer that like these wallet softwares are inevitably gonna have to be open source right yeah you definitely need it if you're touching bitcoin yeah it needs to be open source yeah and uh permissionless too yeah like it's um it's i'm trying to think about what i want to hone in on the wall software because like

again everybody's focused on like outside of bitcoin everybody's focused on like defy how do we create these weird crypto economic systems that put these digital assets to work and there's so many like we're talking about right now like mental costs that go into interacting with these technologies like i feel like a lot of these um projects outside of bitcoin completely don't think about mental cost at all they just completely don't acknowledge them and what i'm trying to get out here is like wallet builders soft wallet software that's like their main job is just take away as many decisions as possible so like we were talking about with chow like coin selection is a huge one join coin joining coin joining is another one yeah

easily coin joining easy coin selecting like but it's small stuff like that everybody thinks you need to create these unique crypto economic systems but it's like no you just need to make this technology more usable right you got to bring it to the humans that's ultimately what it is it's like more we're building for people that have crypto to me is a backwards you you're scoping your application is way too small like you need to build for human beings like this is majority of humans are not developers yeah they're not technical they're i mean they can navigate around a computer you know i mean these kids nowadays are growing up with iphones in their hands at one year old one years old so well you know this yeah i know this from experience

um so we've got a lot of good good advice from jamal last few weeks um yeah the these uh but at the same token it's like the technical details just have to be hidden and i think we have to spend um a good amount of time focusing on making a lot of the things that we know as technologists are the better things like coin joining like um um coin selection coin selection um channel management fee fee selection fee selection you know all of these things should just be like dust management batching dust yeah like all these things should just be best possible scenario owned by default that's just in my opinion the way it should be like you

should open up a wallet and i'm just imagining it should be doing all this for you like it should be coin joining in the background while your phone's on the charger at night you know like your iphone backs up every night all right let's just coin join whatever funds we got or received in today right at night every night um you know it should be uh you know selecting to optimize coins when it's spending it should be managing your channels and looping in looping out if necessary to balance your channels out at night so like that's why i say that the wallet software has got a a pretty tough um uphill battle it's got a it's got a lot of features that it needs to bring to market but with that being said like i'm always flabbergasted by how

the market's expectation of what bitcoin and other cryptocurrency should be able to to do today is compared to like how nation they are like as somebody who's built a company a software company over the last 15 years like how overblown are some people's expectations of what bitcoin should be able to do today and how how much do they not realize it takes time to build all this stuff yeah and to be honest with you is it's time and um you know you look at it and it's not like you don't have to vc's pouring money at you know people building for open source like there's a i mean there was a time in 2017 where you could just write a white paper and we should have been writing a lot of bitcoin white papers on coin joint and such at the time

but um yeah there's not a lot of like this is uh i mean to be honest with you i look at it as mostly uh uh pursuit you know a passion like you know people are just passionate about seeing bitcoin succeed and are spending their own energy their own time their own money in some cases to produce these things that's the other thing you are co-founder of a company a successful company has been around for 15 years and you're dedicating your free time to bitcoin i mean i want to see it succeed that's that's ultimately is were you doing this for anything outside of bitcoin before you found that no I was heads down uh in my business and that's the only thing that really other than like technology that my business can can use um I really didn't focus on anything

else it was I mean I fell down a rabbit hole I mean um today I mean it's it's it's even hard for me to to juggle the two because I find bitcoin so important you know it's one thing to build business to become profitable and to you know get security for your family and hopefully leave something behind for your children um but the impact that i feel that bitcoin can have on the world is a much larger um scale and the you know kind of the uh emotional like yeah right now i like the emotional like you get just thinking about the impact it can have and the small little bit that you can contribute to to seeing it coming true is it's uh it puts thing into like it put things into like like you know into perspective and sense that you know what

what's what do i find important you know and you know i just look at it like you know getting riches that's one thing that's sure that's that's great for you but you know what impact did you have on the world as a whole like you know what you came you don't want to be born come and gone and nothing into oblivion right because because you were here like you want something to have been changed because you existed on this earth so that's how i perceive bitcoin you know maybe i'm a big fan you know i'm living in a fantasy or something like no no you're not like i think that's what there's a gravity right like it it draws like and we talk and we talk we have this conversation comes up a lot on this podcast like it's there's just something about it like fuck

like a bit devs like it was easy to spark up a conversation with you and just like i feel like we had like a level of understanding of what we value and what we're working towards immediately when you meet bitcoiners and i feel like we hit it off right away and then on top of that like it is imperative like at this stage in our in human history right we're at a very pinnacle point yeah or not a pinnacle point a pivotal point excuse me the timing we're on our way to the pinnacle but yeah the pivotal point like we i mean that's the crazy thing you know better than i you're older than me like how like how much the internet and technology has changed our lives since we've been alive i know i lived for internet too like i i live right before aol

and i remember life before aol very very very uh short time of my life i remember very little of it but i do did have one toe in but you you've seen like you were yeah what was it um uh what's this fucking programming language i keep forgetting modular free modular free like for modular free to react like yeah yeah it's this this world of shame i lived in the dial-up era you know like i was in college during the dial-up era where to download a single mp3 took a half an hour you know imagine downloading all for napster music that takes an hour and you're tying up the phone line yeah so yeah it's just gonna take time And I think that's another thing, another reason why I feel the approach that Bitcoin takes to building a solution that will ultimately be scalable.

It's not going to be scalable tomorrow. No way. But if you look at how the approach was taken with the Internet and the layered approach and you see what's done today, like even when they were building the layers no one had any idea that you we'd be streaming 4k video down to our televisions how crazy of a thought would that have been years ago like they would have thought you were crazy you're thinking something like that back then we had when i was young we had 13 channels on tv that with antennas and you had yeah you had the youngest lay on the floor and they had to change the channel right exactly you had human beings that remote controls you know it's it's to me it's the most logical approach to

scaling the system and it's not gonna it's unfortunate but you know people expectations of what you know going back to the original question not you know a lot of people's expectations because we live in this world today of instant gratification and you know just urgency to get stuff done and built they it's It's unfortunate, but you have to understand that these things are going to take time. They're going to need to be flushed out very thoroughly. And it's not just like you're building the Internet. Now you're building, as Andreas would say, the Internet of money.

If money isn't the most important application on the Internet, I don't know what is. Money is one half of every transaction on Earth. Exactly. It is literally the most important technology, so to speak. one of the most important and one of the least understood that's so true man dude i didn't it i i couldn't even tell you anything about money until my mid to late 30s like it was what was it what do you mean like in terms of where money came from like simple picks like what made you care about the crisis or bitcoin the crisis started it and post-crisis i had lost hope there's nothing we can do like the banksters have taken over literally we each have

to just you know hope for or strive for happiness within your family and you know protect yourself put your head down take care of yourself exactly yes live the best life you can live seek happiness amongst your small social circle um and make the best of what you can do in the situation we're living in but i after yeah after the crisis it was just like what can you do like literally what can you do and this was the occupy wall street days you know people protesting they're fucking us over i actually this is pretty crazy i have this up right now i'm starting a a piece on bitcoin for somebody outside of tftc and i have this timothy geithner quote from february 10 2009 i want to be candid the strategy will cost money involve risk and take

time we will have to try things that we've never tried before we will make mistakes we will go through periods in which things get worse and progress is uneven or interrupted they told us that they were gonna like that they fucked up and that like timothy geithner said progress will be uneven like uh like looking back in retrospect like these the the solution to their problem was just extending the problem and that's why i want to start the piece with this quote and you guys are getting a sneak peek into this but um it like they were choreographing what they're what they were about to do and people just took it because but it goes back to the fact that people don't understand money or how it works they think that these people need to control the money correct

And that's intentional. I've had many conversations amongst friends in smaller circles of just how the lack of financial education in the public school system is absurd. It's almost intentional. Yeah, it is. I wouldn't say it's almost intentional. It is absolutely intentional. There's no other way to describe it.

That you don't teach people about how simple things, how to manage your credit, how to save, how to... Um, especially with the, the culture of, uh, of guilting everybody into going to college into going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt to go to college and then not teaching them how to manage that debt after when they get out, it's just like, Oh, six weeks after you graduate, the bills start coming. Yep. Don't have a job.

Yeah. You're fucked. I swear. And then you're like, wait, what, what, what? Right. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely have, you know, cousins and such that are coming out of college and literally can't find work or they were working in a different industry like that. It's, it's, and yet they're in mountains of death. It's, it's, it's in no, in my mind, it's no way this is just a natural cause of, no, this, this is certainly intentional to keep the masses, the majority of people just, you know, sheep. content in the herd content and i well i agree with it well that's the thing is it a nefarious

action that's what i go back for like so i think there is definitely intention uh behind keeping people ignorant and i wonder if it's nefarious in the fact that they uh they just want to control people or it's uh the fact that they fuck things up so bad that they don't have the the uh the the ability to to front uh to face the uh the reality of the situation so deep into a lie that there is exactly exactly oh too deep i can't i can't unwind myself because now it's too far gone that might just be well because it gets like and i talked about this with leashman a couple episodes ago i asked like being the bitcoin guy like my first my first and i'm that typical douchey bitcoin guy like my first question was like how does bitcoin work and i just go how does money

work what is money and like what is the u.s dollar backed by then eight times out of ten eighty percent okay it's backed by gold i'm like what the fuck right yeah i get that a lot too what is it backed by i find it um even interesting to think about like the whole concept of money being backed was created by fiat you know by fiat money right there was no reason for money to be back because it was the money like why would money need to be back until fiat system and then and most people don't know that these dollars aren't back yeah it's amazing it's like i mean the matrix analogies get thrown around but it's like you literally have to give you get to unplug people from the matrix be like this is not how it works everybody expects like this is the way the

world works but like it does not work this way yeah and there are better ways to have it work we think bitcoin is that like do you see bitcoiners winning over the masses in the long run like do you think our our pitch is good at this point i think it's inevitable you think i think so long as we can keep bitcoin chugging along and continuing to fight off all the attacks whether it be from within with the forks or you know outside coming in from the governments or state i think i mean because i mean if you look at the dollar the purchasing power of the dollar over the last hundred years it's it's inevitable like it just the dollar just has to keep being the shit coin that it is and bitcoin just has to keep doing what it's doing if we can maintain it and like i

said fight off the attacks from outside and obviously we're going to keep making it easier to use for more people to get on board i think it's in my opinion it's inevitable i don't again going back to all the other questions about timeline i think it could stretch past you know you know our lifetimes certainly i i don't i could it's because there is never an end like i don't think i think i'm not sure like the world reserve currency that i don't see happening in in our lifetimes will it could it happen i put a small percentage that it's possible it's not impossible i think you know if enough damage is done if enough corruption is exposed if enough um just wealth gets transferred eventually you're gonna have a

an uprising well that's the thing so look what i look what i highlighted here they they they told us timothy geithner told us i'm gonna take time it's gonna take time and progress is going to be uneven and when he said i'm going to take time people will probably take that as a hey this is going to take a long time it's going to take years but what they really did was take people's time this policy pushed people into the workplace it extended the the average age of the workforce participant from like uh or excuse me the average age on the older end from like low 60s to mid 60s like it took people's time like they ruined this system and they literally took time from people by forcing them back into the workforce because their purchasing power was

diminished and uh the people constructing and architecting the financial system fucked them over and then on top of that progress in the recovery is going to be uneven they printed money out of thin air and gave it to banks who then just put it in the assets that they owned to make their wealth even more right and then and then now you have 40 or i think 60 of your average american cannot afford an average excuse me uh an emergency expense of 400 right yeah nobody's saving money and if they are saving money they're they're they're saving money that's getting devalued year on year yeah and i mean how how could you save when you got so much debt that you're piling up like you're encouraged like you said before you come out of college and

you know one of the first things i remember when i went to college the first uh what do they call them like uh fairs with nothing but credit card companies and job fairs and job fairs like it's a whole bunch of credit card companies or you see them with a booth right outside the cafeteria or one of the restaurants and they're just you want a credit card here here's 5 000 bucks like we know you need you got no credit but no history of paying anyone back yeah i'm gonna give you 5 000 bucks because i know you're gonna spend it all and then i'm going to increase your limit and you're going to spend all that and so that you're going to come out of college also owing me twenty thousand dollars yeah and you're in the cycle yeah

and it's hard to get out of bed it's a hamster wheel dude i know this from experience man because i know i'll be open here i know i end up again this is well known on this podcast i've never told this particular story it was a an effect from uh this part of my life but i was unemployed for two years and i got to a point where i couldn't pay back my college loans i wound up defaulting and i had to pay them back in one foul swoop when i eventually got back on my feet and it was not easy or fun but like it felt like i was fucked over right to an extent like fuck like dude how much would you say college benefited what's college worth the money that you spent on college. If you look at it, every expense

or every purchase you make, you evaluate am I going to spend $100,000 on this car or am I going to spend $10,000 on this car? $100,000 on this car looks really nice but is it worth my $100,000? You can't really do that in college. Everything is inflated 10x or Because there's a psychology behind it too. Part of the American dream is socially and encouraging and going to college everybody's got to go to college right and it's i mean it's gotten to the point where it's the college system the university system america is

like laughable at this point because it's completely money driven you talk about the ncaa is like the shining example of of college corruption incarnated but then like you just get into the whole system of tenure and the the textbook racket that goes on within university systems and like i had to take i had mandatory classes that were sponsored by like corporate lobbyists that were like just teaching you how to be corporate drones like literally how to write an email that was acceptable for pr like i had to take them when like when i was in college a decade ago like that that is the type of classes that you're forced to pay for you're forced to go wanted that to pay to learn how to become a drone right yeah i mean that's i mean even

you know i i hear or i see or read you know a lot of stories about even how that's the public school system that like their intention is to produce mass produce while you know this comes from the um industrial age of you know every employee needed to go to the factory sit at a station all day long and just repeat the same process over and over and over again um and their children need somewhere to go they're out today so send them to this place that will call school and we'll try to teach them some things but ultimately um the things they'll learn will be how to walk in a straight line and take orders exactly exactly this is what they'll learn they'll learn how to listen to the authority in charge you know and there's plenty of studies that show that

no one can learn uh or or everyone learns at their own different pace and everyone has their own skill set and creativity and you know all these things that make us unique and different and they try to like force that out of you and structure you and what what makes you special they try to basically dampen into conformity into this robotic state of just you know alright we need you to just come out and be a worker you know for most people they've been pretty successful right do you say yeah for most

for a lot I mean there's a reason why a lot of our very successful entrepreneurs do not finish college if you look at it there's a pattern of very very successful entrepreneurs I think the tech industry is born of many entrepreneurs but even with that said even

as a millennial so I went through public school system and then went to private school for high school it's a crazy dichotomy night and day like the different styles I was lucky to go to the high school that I went to but

it just seems that the schooling system specifically this public schooling system has been this way in america for decades at this point um technology is at a certain point too that while even though people have conformed to uh sort of the the structure of the public school and university system that's been built in america here over the last five decades even so even having gone through that yes some people are uh caught hook line and sinker and will conform more and more people because of things like twitter are speaking back or speaking up and saying hey maybe we shouldn't go down this path like we probably should work actually against this type of uh mental conformity moving forward yeah and uh that's one thing that

makes me hopeful about bitcoin is it really forces people to to jump out of that that conforming mindset of how to think i think so too i i i would say bitcoin is one of the most liberating i don't want to call it just the technology because it's not just the technology it's it's more so much more it's it's you know it's social it's economical it's it's it's like lifestyle in a sense you know it's it's literally like once you get into bitcoin you just see the world through a very different lens you know once you understand bitcoin you know i wouldn't say once you get into it there's plenty of people in bitcoin that still think that you know i don't know you have people are in it for the money right right people that have you know

focused on the financial gains in it, you know, but once you understand the implications of what's actually achievable, it's mind-blowing. You know, the impacts, you know, like you said, they can impact not just the largest wealth transfer in human history, but, you know, the schooling system, our desires, you know reducing everyone's just urgent need for fast results it's fast food epidemic right it's nuts the food we eat is absolutely insane too that's a whole another rabbit hole right well let's jump no it's it's crazy well you talk about complex systems that's that's so that's one thing that bitcoin really drives home is is systems are complex bitcoin is a very complex system that

works right it's an emergent complex system that works and i would argue bitcoin and many other complex systems are just uh not replications but uh that's what i'm looking for not replications but uh they're similar to nature right and they put similar processes are playing out darwinian processes um and now i completely forget where i was going with that point um fuck what was i saying about the food we eat oh yes the food we eat yes so complex systems the food we eat is not like something we think about at all but like complex systems like starting with nutrition humans run on food that is exactly what we run on it uh it really balances out the chemicals balances or imbalances the chemicals in our body and how we react in certain social

situations and in america i can always speak for america most of the country's eating fucking shit yeah and we wonder why people are so pissed off stupid and out of shape and out of shape and you know all types of weird diseases that we can't explain and yeah and they're like where does it come from and it's like literally it's what you eat it's what you eat like you are what you eat like it's literally well you are what you eat you're the money you use you're the you're the people you hang out with it's it's like these complex systems these this complex person that you are today in the society that we are cumulatively today is complex and it starts with these building blocks money food uh education education yeah and a lot of it is broken well

that's a sad part yeah well that's one thing owls lacrosse if you listen to the podcast you know about owls lacrosse when i was working at owls lacrosse oh yes i have heard that's one thing i I was going to college in Chicago. I took the bus to the west and south side, and that's the first thing you realize is that the food deserts. A lot of the kids in these neighborhoods are eating honey buns and fucking Gatorades at noon, and they're all hyper and agitated during the school day,

and they need this lacrosse program to get all their energy. But food is a very, very important part of this process. Like, high fructose corn syrup, having kids eat these products for breakfast and then going to school and expecting them to perform at optimal levels is just asinine. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, ultimately, there's these social dependencies that we as humans rely on, like our food, our money, our education system. To me, privatizing is a big core of the problem.

When your motivation is profit-driven and not best product-driven, then you take shortcuts. You cut corners, yeah. Yeah, you cut corners. You do things to save a penny per apple. You know, something as simple as seedless grapes. Like, what the hell is a seedless grape, dude? It's just baffling how far we've come away from our natural, you know, lifestyles and habitats and way of living. Yeah.

Manufactured. Well, it's a trade-off, right? And it's a trade-off for lower cost and accessibility, or not accessibility, but, yeah, accessibility, easiness, like ease of acquisition, right? Right. Like, yeah. But, again, it's time preference. That's why I like that. It's time preference.

Yeah, that's the same thing I was thinking. Right? It's literally time preference. But it's hard to fight. It's because it's conditioning. It's conditioning from when you're in first grade. Yeah. It's literally.

Oh, I vividly remember every day in first grade buying, bringing 50 cents so I get my bag of munchies for the snack. It's conditioning. Or Cheetos or Funyuns. When you're young. Or, you know, my three-year-old, Happy Meal. It's literally like she's had a Happy Meal one time in her life, which I regret. I regret every single day. But it's literally like every time she sees a McDonald's, it's like.

It's that dopamine hit. Yeah. Did you see that video that was going around Twitter a couple months ago of a baby taking a sip of Coke at McDonald's for the first time? No, I haven't seen it. It has to be an 18 to 24-month-old baby. And its parent takes a video of it taking its first sip of Coke, fountain soda Coke, at this age.

And literally had a physical reaction unlike anything I've ever seen. The sugar rushed to its head. I was like, what the fuck is this? But that's like, yeah, sugar, man. that's like it's it's something i've tried to cut out more and more in my life but it's hard it's impossible i'm a fucking irish catholic who loves potatoes i love carbs it's tough it's something i mean that that's the problem though it's like you you live in this world of where it's almost impossible to do the right thing like you to go out of your way to to try to eat better

to exercise and you know to do the things that help you maintain and stay healthy to take possession of digital sound money right to hold your keys right um it's it's a strange world we live in but you know i i certainly believe that we we have plenty of problems but i certainly believe that bitcoin helps i wouldn't say it solves but it helps uh a lot on the financial side like you said half of every single transaction if we can make that a little fairer well that's what i was gonna ask to end it here so like overall are you optimistic or pessimistic about bitcoin about like no where we're going the world in general the world like we're we are we lived we are we live we were born in a weird time right and we're gonna live through very

tumultuous change in human history as technology yeah it is takes over is it going to be a good change for us i absolutely i believe so i believe that you know we'll we'll stray from the course of what should be but we'll correct you know i think bitcoin is a sign of correction i there was a time where i would say wish group it's it's every man for himself live your best life you know get a gun protect your family because if you know if all goes to hell we just got to do the best you can

with what you got but today I'm definitely more optimistic about the world that I'll leave to my kids so I'm yeah I believe the world will be a better place

so long as there's people like you and the many others in the bitcoin space that you know are pushing to see this thing come to fruition well it's people like you again give me hope that i'm not dumb because like again finding very smart people like yourself who've built successful businesses have raised families and have a lot of skin in in the traditional world throwing your your weight into bitcoin it's inspiring and again it's comforting i had not thought i would have that impact well that's one thing is uh some of you freaks may not know i'm an expecting father like how much uh

yeah how much thank you how many uh how much uh motivation does having children provide oh it changes your perspective drastically yeah yeah it changes your perspective from it definitely definitely lowers or increases your, no, lowers your time preference. Definitely lowers your time preference because you start thinking about the world after you and how the life they're going to live, the world they're going to live in after you're not here. So in every decision you make is, there's things that today probably for you are like high priority, like oh my shirt's not clean like my favorite shirts in the laundry or something like that that'll just be you won't even what is that shirt what shirt right it is it's like they they change

you substantially but i think i mean that's one of those again those natural factors that i believe you know that we're kind of from a spiritual level we're put here to do is to be fruitful multiply yeah it is that simple sometimes yeah that's that's how I tend to look at it it's like you know if there's anything we've been placed on this earth to do that is reproduces to me one of the most important things because not only do we like contribute to make the society global society as a whole better you know we definitely could measure and say that we are in a better place today than we were 200 years ago I would agree to that but yeah

we we continue to as long as we don't break the planet of course in the project that's the thing I don't think we could break the planet as long as we the planet will always recalibrate. That's true, too. As long as we don't make the planet uninhabitable. Is that a word? Inhabitable. Yeah, yeah.

Uninhabitable. We can always nuke ourselves, too. Yes. Well, Bitcoin fixes this. Bitcoin does fix this. Instead of nuking ourselves, we could use Bitcoin mining to prove that countries are denuclearizing. Ooh.

I've heard that one. elaine elaine oh put this out really on her blog a couple months ago so like and it was specifically about north korea like if we were really worried about north korean nuclear bombs uh and then winding down their nuclear um their nuclear program what we would do is make them make nuclear energy um uh nuclear energy or what am i like nuclear facilities not for making bombs but for consuming energy and then mine bitcoin with it and you would see like a yeah it's like an ashrate to prove that they're denuclearizing that's funny that's a good one right that's what i like drew bensal said when he came on we need we can't we shouldn't be using

nukes uh as rockets we should put be putting them on the bottom of rockets and pointing them at space like not at each other right exactly absolutely um so yeah you know i i'm pretty uh happy or optimistic i would say about the future you know definitely more optimistic than i were than i was 10 years ago i'd say i think i'd agree too we've been around all the topics i think we we came here to cover like what uh what do you think or excuse me how can people help you with polar like or or do you need help with anything are there any pressing issues there's um i mean there's a bunch i'd like to do um i mean i would love i gotta put up a website i think you know as i mentioned before discoverability i think is definitely something uh we have to do

better because I went through the experience myself of looking for tools to help make my life easier. And there's definitely, like I said, they're segmented out, there's a bunch of great tools out there to automate some of the processes, but I think discoverability is definitely something we can improve on. So for Polar, feedback, I mean, honestly, if you use it and you tell me it works excellent Or you tell me, hey, can we make this change or that change? I've gotten great feedback from some great people, specific feedback, use cases that I had not thought of.

Because, again, you know, it's building based off my experience building on Lightning. Like what? One is to be able to basically split Polar into kind of two different applications. like there's a library so there's an sdk a polar sdk so to speak that basically encapsulate all of the functionality to create networks create the docker files to start and stop the networks to add and remove nodes that type of thing so basically split polar in half and separate the ui from a library so that other applications can use just the library portion to do different things right that was a good idea um interesting yeah so you can basically have like just a polar sdk

that has the functionality to create local lightning networks but many people have different use cases that they want to address that may not need the ui let's just say they want to automate spinning up a network with 200 nodes open closed channels and do xyz and then shut it down real quickly and so that says a lot about you putting this out there like you had a problem that you wanted to solve and then somebody else has like a tangential problem it's not exactly the same it's like hey this might be able to help right but that's a testament to and what i'm trying to get out here is like not being afraid to put yourself out there in this space because that's what i think like a lot of people but i i have a lot of people my dms like how do i contribute i contribute

and i'm like i'm not a developer i can't like i guess the ending topic here could be like yeah like what what do you think what got you over that hump psychologically of putting yourself out there and not being worried about the feedback um I mean to be honest I guess it really was just like I want to help the desire to one I I learn by doing like that's the best way for me to learn is to try to do something stumble figure out a solution and it sticks like whenever I come across that it like it sticks with me because i faced that issue and i may have spent an hour two hours or two days trying to get past this hurdle and trying to build and so i learned more so much more by doing than by reading only you know or even doing um like practice exercises

like if you you know you'll watch a tutorial video on how to do something or you'll read a book on how to do something and they'll have sample code but it doesn't stick to me at least It's the way I learn. It doesn't stick as good as it does when I actually build on it. So that was the primary reason why, is I wanted to learn and contribute at the same time. So it's like, okay, I can... And I think finding projects that are leveraging the technical skills or the technologies that you have skills in are great ways to contribute.

If you know JavaScript, there's plenty of projects out there. pullers one of them typescript but same thing um and you know or if you know python or if you know go or if you know c plus plus you know i think it literally is just a matter of finding what skills you have already and applying them to an open source project and i think i don't think anyone would be turned off by you contributing to their project i think everyone in the bitcoin space is more than welcome of anyone willing to contribute yeah i think a lot of you'd be surprised with how many of them are begging for not begging right so to speak in their in their minds like i would love help on this right yeah absolutely absolutely i don't think anyone wants to be the

sole developer on any project you know I think we all want assistance because it gives you you know someone to bounce ideas off of someone to help you know you'll get more done if you had some assistance

any feedback is good feedback right absolutely Jamal I want to thank you for all that you do I appreciate it for trying to fix a problem that you had happen or didn't just so happen to fix a problem that a lot of other lightning developers had as well and making development easier and then again proving that bitcoin's worth it right like if if

you're building this tool for these very specific developers there's got to be something behind this like there's something driving us weirdos to this project for some reason we're not weirdos you're all weirdos i'm not weird at least i hope not no no that's like that's that's the other thing like yeah most of the bitcoiners i mean are just down-to-earth people who want to want to do good in the world right right i want the world to be a better place yeah for their kids yeah that's that's that's my overarching you know if i had to if i had to sum it up in a sentence you know i want the world to be a better place for my kids i was gonna ask you for a final thought but i don't think we can top that yeah that that's ultimately it you know bitcoin fixes it boss

where can we uh find out more about you what you're working on uh of course um twitter even though i'm not a big tweeter um you can definitely catch me on my dms jamal jsr on twitter um same on GitHub. Polar is a project there. You can definitely leave issues, feedback or feature requests or anything like that. And yeah, I'm definitely, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm around, I'm, I'm in bed dabs, try to be as often as possible. And, um, we, it's pretty much it. we didn't even get to your midlife crisis damn it what's the midlife crisis motorcycle oh we didn't even talk about the bike life do we have a minute for the bike life do we have a few minutes yeah of course you know what fuck it we're not ending it right now the bike life that's something

that fascinates me you're so you're your avatar on twitter is you dragging me dragging me on love it on a racing race track yeah so what is that with like it's got to be one of the most dangerous sports in the world correct uh i would say street riding is yeah yeah um i'm not a i'm definitely not a professional or not striving to be a professional your avatar makes it look like your profession i know that's why it's my avatar dude i wouldn't put the one of me falling and crashing and burning that's my avatar um yeah i just you know i was spent a few years I don't want to say a long time, but I spent a few years just riding a sport bike, motorcycle for those bikers. You know, it's the race rockets.

Riding on the street, it was, you know, kind of just a hobby. I got into it. A friend of mine actually sucked me into it. He was like, dude, let's get bikes, you know. Something about the speed? Is it the speed? Yeah, part of it's the speed, the adrenaline rush. um definitely i would say um but it's it's pretty it's it's not it's safer than you think

in terms of um controlling the bike i mean it's a lot to learn there's a lot of technicals to learn which you know if you just buy a bike from a dealer you know learn how to ride it taking a test or whatever and you just go on the street and ride very dangerous that i would say it's very dangerous so I spent a few years with my friends you know riding around New York City you know having fun riding our bikes and then began going upstate to track called New York safety track it's a good name for it because it's pretty safe where they make you suit up full head to toe leather suit boots gloves helmet and you get to ride around the track for a day two days

basically you can camp out at the track you know so it was kind of like a fun family like getaway with me and my friends and the families and we get out barbecue so it's like summer what's it what's it like when you're actually dragging me though and like um the first time you do it it's startling the first time you do it because it feels like because it's rubber it's just a hard rubber so it feels like an eraser dragging on the floor but the first time you do it it's pretty it's pretty shocking but after that it's you know it's pretty it's just normal like i mean you know you get used to it to the point where like most times i'm trying not to drag my knee it just happens naturally because of the way you position your body to get around the corner fast that's

always uh fascinating about like bike racing at that level like how how much on the edge are you when you're when you're dragging me like that like how in terms of how much wheel how much tires on the ground or yeah like how how like what's the margin of error for you sliding in oh it's very thin you got to have very good tires you got to make sure your tires are in good shape you can't wear your tires down to that ball so um but you get this probably close to about an inch three quarters of an inch of tire actually on the floor yeah it's pretty is the prettiest one you got to have really good tires um but the momentum is is what's keeping you going so you got to have good speed too you can't be going around the turn at 20 30 miles an

hour you got you got to be taking it yeah and i mean i think it's it was fascinating to me when i first got into like the first trip to the track and if you sit down and teach you about um you know all the things about the track you know where you need to be because your bike should be in a specific spot of the lane you want to start on the outside come in to the apex the peak of the turn and then shoot for the outside when you're exiting the turn so um you're you're you're the bike lane is what they call it um you have to learn about the bike lane you have to learn about body positioning because in order to drag your knee you need to shift you want to you want to shift the center of gravity over to your left if you're turning left and then push the bike up so

you're not pulling it down so it allows you to get more speed into a turn um it's like a physics lesson basically it is it is a lot of physics and so it's it's a lot of skill that actually helped me become a better street rider you know more comfortable street rider i used to you know when i'm coming up on the turn i used to slow down you know to as slow as possible because i'm scared these things are gonna lean over but now you know i come into a turn and i can maneuver around like dangerous situations and stuff like that so it definitely makes you a better street rider and it's a lot more fun it's safer like you know people go down at the track a few times a day like it's normal common occurrence no one goes to the hospital everyone's suited up you know

there's a cleanup cruise for your bike parts if something like that and a lot of times there's repairmen that with parts that you can have your bike fixed same day and right back on the track yeah it's a really great experience um is it cathartic for you yeah definitely it definitely like like it's just like an escape like you know what i mean just for the moment to just have just me and the bike you know you don't think about anything else yeah that's one thing yeah i'm looking for i'm looking for that escape too i think yeah as uh i can't play basketball anymore because of my knees um bitcoin's more of a job than escape these days not more of a job than it is an escape fighting off the trolls yeah luckily i don't have as much as of a troll

problem as a lot of people out there do i try to keep a low profile on twitter really outside the post that's surprising i've been trying to i've been trying to reel back my twitter uh uh twitter activity if you will i'm probably doing a bad job i'm addicted to that as anybody what is that it's a crazy place dude it is as is this world it's very true as well this is bitcoin bitcoin has introduced me to many incredible people like jamal jamal appreciate that i can't thank you uh dude i can't thank you for building what you built and coming to talk to me about about it and all this shit dude it's a pleasure to be i'm honored to be here it's an honor like you know i read your emails i've been reading emails since 2018 like somewhere around

that time summer winter somewhere around that time oh thank you for providing some fodder to write about not fodder good news to write about right well i have you what i do like very very below what you're working on you're actually making Bitcoin extendable trust me it falls down the same way for me to the protocol developer everyone's got the same thing

what you're doing is just as important by far who knows I wouldn't I wouldn't understand Bitcoin as well as I understand Bitcoin without people like yourself putting out content that's invaluable

well i wouldn't be putting out this content if you weren't building shit so the feeling is mutual brother again thank you for all you do thank you for coming driving and thank you for the i'm gonna enjoy this i don't know we're almost like halfway done this bottle this might be the fastest uh gifted uh bottle liquor that i go through on tells from the crowds take one more sip before we go all right let me pour you up all right we're gonna uh we're gonna end it on that freak so we're gonna end it on a uh a top up of the hennessy here peace and love