TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #131: Matt Corallo + Valentine Wallace

Episode Date: January 27, 2020

Join Marty and Matt as they sit down with Matt Corallo and Val Wallace from the Square Crypto team to discuss: - How Val came to work on LN - How the Square Crypto team honed in on a Lightning Development Kit - What a Lightning Development Kit would do for developers building on LN - Having a team able to focus on a singular open source project - Are we pawns? - Bitcoin fee elasticity - Dev funding - Stratum v2 - Matt gives an updated probability of Bitcoin's success - much more Check out the LDK announcement Follow Matt on Twitter Follow Val on Twitter 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

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with Matt O'Dell and two members of the Square Crypto team. MonsterPod here. Two hours, 20 minutes. We sat down with Matt Corallo, who you freaks know if you've been listening to this podcast for quite some time. He's been on many times. This is his fourth appearance, I believe. And he was joined by Val Wallace, who was formerly at Lightning Labs and is now working at Square Crypto to help build out their lightning development kit, which they announced last week.

If you guys checked out Stefan Levera's episode with Steve Lee over the weekend, this was a great follow-up episode to that. We expand on a lot of the same topics that they talked about as well as some other things like Stratum B2, dev incentives, and a bunch of other nebulous topics in the Bitcoin world. I think you guys are really going to like this,

especially if you remember Matt's first appearance on the podcast i'm going to give bitcoin a five percent chance of succeeding uh in the future again that was two years ago we get an update on that probability in this episode and i'm very interested to see how you freaks react to that this episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by the cash app as you know cash app is the simplest way to send and save money and now it's the simplest way to try to grow your money introducing cash app investing you freaks already know all about this if you've been listening to this podcast all right uh they're letting you stack stocks now okay and not only that they're letting you stack slivers of stocks if you don't

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that's one word, S-T-A-C-K-I-N-G-S-A-T-S, STACKINGSATS, you're going to get $10, and Cash App is going to send $10 to Owls Lacrosse in Chicago, our great friends at Owls Lacrosse. So download the Cash App from the App Store or Google Play Store today and enjoy this episode. it was a banger two hours 20 minutes friday night beers great times great people great conversation enjoy

what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent we're here on a friday night big crew four-person podcast we've got a lot to talk about we've got somebody who's been on the most tenured guests on the podcast mackerala what's going on not much you are number four for you you're you're you're climbing the stat board we've got uh val wallace as well hi welcome two members of square crypto team big announcement this week for you guys and of course we got matt odell what's up freaks um we already know about mackerala we already know about matt odell we don't know much about val wallets val how the hell did you find bitcoin and find yourself at square crypto uh very good question um i got into bitcoin my senior year of college um a little bit late and i was just

looking for something cool to do i had already accepted a job at microsoft but like i thought that was kind of lame so so yeah so then i found lightning labs applied to them pretty much started working there right after I graduated so I was working on their app at first and then I switched to more back-end stuff some L&D I did a monitoring project for them and then a few months ago I started at Square Crypto and yeah here we are. So for you personally you're more interested in just the tech of it all or the the revolutionary aspect of it? Definitely both but I'd say I don't know as much about the econ of it and i'm super into the tech of it which is um what initially inspired me that combined with the whole permissionless and everything um i got into it initially through

andre santanopoulos so as you can imagine that's a very inspiring visionary way of getting into it one could say so that's the route there as youtube videos are very big bullporn indeed all jacked up um yeah so square we should get those broadcasts time square oh pump up the price uh yeah we what can we like they had tron they had tron advertisements they had eos and time squared yes it was eos yeah um and then uh yeah we could uh i think matt we're gonna switch to you now because you uh have a very unique experience you've been at blockstream you've uh chain code and now you're at square crypto you've been through them all just trying to make sure that the conspiracy about controlling bitcoin continues to follow any group of developers that

exists anywhere it's very important uh bcashers are kind of losing their salt this week so we got to make sure that we give them lots of conspiracy to focus on you don't think the 12 and a half percent dev tax is uh it's is that the uh yeah the conspiracy chain is not going to include that is it no i don't think so i don't think i don't think we're gonna oh this is well staying on this though like what is are you very like hopping from team to team to team like are you encouraged that uh unchained or excuse me uh chain code came after blockstream and now square has risen from the abyss as well is this a good sign about bitcoin funding dev funding in particular yeah definitely over the last maybe two three years we've seen a big uptick in the ability

of people working on projects like bitcoin core and more kind of back-end low-level stuff in bitcoin to get funding uh it's not just the big names uh that you hit um it's also a number of smaller one-offs there's a number of exchanges that do one-off grants there's a number of individuals that have uh granted just one individual um to work on bitcoin core either full-time or temporarily so we've seen a big uptake and that's been really good really good momentum there yeah no it's it's very encouraging why do you think why does square uh why has square amass this team right i think we're a little different right we're not necessarily just trying to focus on bitcoin core uh kind of maintaining the ecosystem which is really

critical work uh our mandates a little more grow the ability of kind of consumer level bitcoin adoption grow kind of how easy it is to get into that how big the pie is there so that hopefully when the pie gets large enough square can kind of do more than just tipping its toe in the water and, you know, really support Bitcoin through a lot of its products. Not a short-term goal, but certainly, you know, if we do our job right, Bitcoin consumer-level adoption is going to be, at least the UX is going to be way better. It's going to be much easier to get consumers onboarded and for people to really use this stuff. And then hopefully that'll make it easier also for Square as a company to use this stuff.

Yeah. So our mandate's very different in that sense. Yeah. And so this is a big week for you guys. you guys announced what you're going to be working on the lightning development kit uh before we get to why or not why you picked that before we get to what that is why did you pick it is so the um the team was announced what in the fall and you guys have been together for a few months now what what was the few months leading up to this announcement like well it was val's idea i'm

gonna let val take that one okay don't blame this on me matt um you get all the blame okay But I hope it goes well right Well the first week we started off with a retreat and then after that we basically spent the following few months doing a combination of trying to pick a project and just kind of Contributing to open source like Jeff was doing a bunch of Bitcoin core work I was kind of ramping up on Russ lightning and that was doing like all of his various projects, etc so and then we kind of ultimately settled on the LDK project and then and we've been spending a little bit of time since the new year

just kind of preparing to announce, I feel like. So is that fair to say? Yeah, pretty much, yeah. I mean, we explored a few other projects as well. Certainly Jeff spent a bunch of time with some of the folks who do more privacy-related, like CoinJoin and that kind of work, and tried to investigate, like, you know, can we make a big difference here if we add some real development resources?

can we get kind of broader uptake and you know we had some ideas of where to go with that but i think we decided that that might not have been as big an impact as say trying to make lightning way easier to embed uh in more interesting ways right so not just take lnd and run it but like actually making it easy to embed both in existing wallets and kind of cross more interesting wallets um Um, you know, it, it took a bunch of, like, we spent a bunch of time looking at a bunch of, a few other things, but ultimately I think we decided that that might've been bigger impact or might be bigger impact in the longterm. Right.

Like we looked at snicker in a lot of detail, but there were a lot of weird difficulties there that you kind of wouldn't expect. Like it doesn't work with watch only wallets because somehow the coin join transactions just aren't apparent for whatever reason. Yeah, you have to have the private key to kind of detect it as yours. So Snicker, like, it's great, but there's just a lot more meat there than it looks like. Like, the idea is really simple and straightforward, and then you dig into it, and there's a lot of meat there that I think we just didn't want to dive into. Snicker's Adam Gibson's thing, right?

Yeah. And you broadcast a transaction that you want to coin join with somebody else, and they can accept that and coin join with you, right? Essentially, right, yeah. You literally just look at the UTXO set. You say, hey, this UTXO looks good. I want to coin join with that UTXO. But the pub key needs to be exposed, right? Yeah, the pub key needs it.

Well, hopefully with Schnoy's app route, we'll get that soon. But the theory is you look at the UTXO set. You say, oh, that UTXO looks great. And you maybe pay them a small fee, but you broadcast a pre-signed transaction. And if they want to take that small fee, they can just broadcast it, sign their half, and broadcast it. Yeah. right so in theory you can make some money and get more privacy um yeah sounds like it would win yeah so that seems it needs like a gooey or something right right we were looking at it more

in the angle of you know especially for something like that you need really really broad adoption uh so we were looking at it more in the angle kind of the way we've been looking at ldk of you know building a library and trying to get it integrated across wallets um you can see how we ended up on similar thinking on both of those but yeah yeah we also looked at pay join which i think we still think is cool but then we're considering it more as like a potential dev grant type thing rather than our entire project i guess i'm yeah there's a lot of resources going into it already um but it it's another thing where there's surprisingly more meat than you think and we didn't necessarily know that we as a small team could have an

outsized impact yeah i feel like pay join is very necessary especially giving uh bitcoin's current uh restraints as a fungibility restraints if you will yeah absolutely yeah i mean like we really we ended up looking at kind of two avenues lightning and privacy and then we still feel very strongly in favor of building privacy stuff but just harder to have an outsized impact in the short term well could uh could building out lightning and making lightning easier to use help privacy in the roundabout way right well that was certainly one of the reasons we ended up working on ldk yeah all right so let's talk about ldk what does the lightning development kit look like what are what are the parts what are you guys looking to build

um yeah so the intention is really build you know really a development kit right so existing ways you integrate lightning with a wallet either you have the ability to connect to a remote c lightning or lnd node or you rent lnd on the device but it's like you know here's the entire wallet and everything full stack you run it as is there's just not a lot of flexibility there c lightning has a little more flexibility with its plugin architecture which you can do a lot with but you're still stuck in kind of a very, well, you're going to run the whole thing as a series of daemons on your server. The thing's just not really targeted at much else. Eclair's a little different.

The async thing is a little more library-focused, but has other restrictions. So even still, you know, all of these things are very monolithic. here's the thing you take it you run it as is and the options that are exposed to the ones you can customize and nothing else so our intention is flip that on its head and say well we're just going to expose little pieces and they're all going to work together great and you can kind of take them all and plug them all into each other and run and you'll have a simple lightning node and that's fine if you're going to do that you probably just want to run lnd or c lightning or whatever, but if you want to do something crazy, if you want to run your entire Lightning

stack on a hardware wallet, if you want to run your Lightning stack in a web browser with access to your hardware wallet who has the keys, if you want to run your Lightning stack and synchronize across multiple devices where you open the same wallet on multiple devices um and they just synchronize the state and no problem uh all of these things are like things that it's not trivial to do today and i think is going to be very much required going forward if we want to see real usable interesting creative lightning wallets that get built says the keyword here interoperable interoperability is that even a word Did I just say a word?

Interruptibility. Flexibility. Flexibility? I think the key word is flexibility. Flexibility. All right. So how do you guys start on this? We have multiple different focuses, kind of.

We want to have a big emphasis on encouraging external contributors so that the project can kind of live beyond us. So we're kind of doing a lot of work right now to kind of refactor and make it very friendly for new contributors, improving documentation. I'm working on integrating a formatter, which Matt is not a big fan of, but the rest of the team is a fan of. What's your beef with formatters? If you can't format your own code while you write it, what are you doing writing code?

That sounds like an elitist coder right there. Oh, yeah. I'm a curmudgeon, if you haven't noticed. Oh, I know. I know. Right, but then we also obviously want to, like Matt said, double down on what makes us unique. We don't want to be just another repeat of the other implementations, because then what are we adding? So what's kind of cool about being a library is, like he said, these two cool use cases

fall out of it, which is a big one is integrating into existing Bitcoin wallets, which is not really possible with the other implementations, at least as far as I know. And also, the way Rust Lightning is architected, kind of the channel management is separated from what you need to monitor on chain, which is kind of cool. Because like you said, you can run a bunch of channel management on a hardware wallet, but then have a bunch of different servers monitoring your channels to make sure that you're not getting screwed over, basically. So you can have different levels of security that way as well.

More granularity. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Right. right and it makes a big difference on mobile too yeah but yeah so i mean our focus in the immediate term is uh we started with with res lightning which is a project that's been around for a while but just kind of always been beta like kind of a hobby project um and a building it out uh getting it you know really super up to snuff um but then also building out examples and language binding so it's easy to integrate in any platform you want and you know all that good stuff so

there's a lot of a lot more to it than just that it's a lot of kind of working with potential users of it to help them integrate it and help them kind of get started with lightning or with rust lightning um yeah so when lightning first launched and probably still today people say it's reckless to use like uh it seems like a pretty big commitment to be focusing on lightning uh specifically as a lot of people will say it's still an experiment may not work out in the future uh it seems like you guys deciding to focus on it uh means you're pretty confident in the future of lightning and its success do you think it is uh the second layer solution that people will use for quick, fast transactions?

That was kind of my big pitch when I, because I wanted to work on something Lightning related, and that was basically the argument. Like, if we all agree that Lightning is going to be the scaling solution and that scaling is the big thing for Bitcoin adoption and we want Bitcoin adoption, then kind of anything we do for Lightning would be really good for Bitcoin.

Yeah. and especially the instant transaction solution yeah i mean i think there are open questions as to how far lightning scales but it's clear it scales better than bitcoin today than like on-chain transactions and in my mind possibly more importantly the instant transactions ux and feel is just you know especially when our mandate is very consumer focused like build consumer ability to use bitcoin instant payments that just work is really the name of the game well that's like one thing we talk a lot about like a lot of people shit on lightning but i'm an avid lightning user just because we have our site we accept lightning payments and set up a

btc pay and uh zap and therefore i could send lightning payments too and via the business like I bought a book for $60 a couple of weeks ago and it took less than a second and it works. A lot of people like to shit on lightning and say it doesn't work. It's nobody's using it. A lot of people like to say nobody's using it. I use it. Obviously I'm probably a more advanced than your average user,

but to me at least it seems like the vision is coming together and it is becoming useful. You do have to put the sunk cost of setting your note up and doing your channel management. but once you have that like it's been cruise control for me for like six to eight months right now right and that's part of the part of what we want to get rid of is you know all of the onboarding pain and and also you know a lot of people have bitcoin wallets a lot of people aren't you know gonna go install a second lightning wallet that's a whole separate wallet

a lot of people have cryptocurrency wallets that aren't just bitcoin and those don't support lightning and probably are never going to um there's just a lot of ux hurdles that exist today in terms of getting into lightning um you know we've spoken to a bunch of uh various wallets who are trying to who have lightning wallets um who are playing around with the kind of risk scoring of unconfirmed transactions to allow people to start sending and receiving payments instantly before the initial transaction confirms, which, you know, it's risk scoring. It's not 100% safe, but if you can do appropriate risk scoring, maybe it makes sense. And, you know, stuff like this is really hard to do with the existing lightning nodes.

You know, we were speaking to some of them who were talking about, yeah, we have patches for existing lightning nodes that we've been maintaining for a year or two. Like, it's just kind of a pain in the ass, right? And part of the goal of having something more flexible is to enable people who want to build interesting wallets, to enable people who want to build interesting user experiences on Bitcoin to do it on Lightning in a really easy way that handles a lot of the complexity for them, but also exposes enough complexity that they can choose to do things that are, you know, otherwise, quote unquote, unsafe. but maybe if they require that it's installed on a system that they have some remote attestation that it's quote-unquote a safe system you know maybe that's perfectly fine yeah well and another thing too is like going back to like people saying lightning's not fleshed out right like obviously it's not fleshed out as developers building this out like how do you help temper

non-developer expectations? People want everything out of the box. Do you think where Lightning is today has surpassed or come up short of your expectations when it launched? Are you happy with the development that's been going on, the pace of development?

And how do you get through to people that this is going to take time? That's a tough question. I'm always really tempted to just shill, shill, shill. Talk about what's coming. as if it's coming soon.

But I feel like the people that really get it aren't saying those types of things. And a lot of people were saying that Lightning was total vaporware that was never going to happen. And now there are thousands of nodes on the network. And I guess I also just never really interact with those people.

Like I'm just going to Bitcoin meetups where they're showing the number of Lightning nodes increasing like practically linearly or exponentially. So... And we've been following, we're almost at 40% of Tor nodes. Tor notes. It's Tor capacity, actually.

Tor capacity. Percentage of Tor capacity. Yeah. On Lightning? Yeah. Yeah. Where at least one side is a Tor note. Yeah.

Asterix. I have a question. So Rust Lightning, that was an interesting choice. We're going to, right now, I guess we have five implementations of Lightning, if you include what Electrum's doing with their Python implementation. Has that been released yet? I mean, it's beta, I think, right? I think it's in the wall.

You can turn it on, but you have to opt into it with a command line flag or something crazy. That's not going to last, right? I don't know. Not Electrum specifically. The fact that we have five implementations. Do you see one implementation? Right now, L&D is dominating, right?

They have like 70% or something of the network. I pulled that out of my ass, but it's somewhere around there. I mean, I don't know. but there's room for different types of implementations. Whether there's room for different implementations that are kind of the same quote-unquote category, I don't know, right? So implementation like ResLightning-LDK is way more flexible. It's a very different model of a Lightning node.

I don't think that's at all in competition with LND, CLightning, um nor do we want to be you know certainly if we square crypto have like an open budget to go work on something useful for bitcoin competing with other companies is not right an interesting thing for us to do um so i don't think it's at all in competition now whether c lightning and lnd are in competition i think might be a little bit of a different question uh and we'll see how they develop certainly having multiple lightning implementations that don't each have their niche is probably not sustainable because why if only because developers will get bored because they're not like providing real value yeah yeah the only case i could see is like when we've been talking

to a lot of wallet developers and some of them just really have not in-house mentalities where they only want to use software that basically they wrote themselves so i could i could sort of see like maybe if a wallet was extremely picky about that they just are the only ones using their own implementation like electrum yeah like yeah i didn't want to say it but well i think in hindsight electrum maybe is not happy like ultimately electrum might be a good example of why rust lightning or ldk should exist is because here's electrum they would love to have integrated something right uh thomas said so as much said as much but there was nothing that was integratable like c lightning lnd async none of these were really practical to take off the shelf

integrate an electrum in a way that didn't create a whole second wallet beside the user's regular wallet which is a terrible user experience yeah so this is something i'm still like a little confused about like why why is that like why at this point just because there's multiple implementations like it's hard to form fit lightning on already existing wallet or well none of the existing lightning implementations were written to support that use case and it's super hard to take something that was not written that way and kind of redo it unless you kind of stop other development and just are like well we're going to focus on completely rewriting all of the internals and make it support kind of external wallets and external

whatever and running on hardware wallets and mobile and whatever the hell and that's just not something that any of the lightning implementations have kind of time to do right now because they have a lot of features coming on the pipeline they've got a lot of user experience you know issues here and there to fix so yeah it's just hard to kind of of take something that wasn't written for that and rewrite it for that yeah yeah that's fascinating how like building all this stuff on the go like how much how much tech debt is there uh to overcome though arguably i feel like it could be on some of their roadmaps probably um so that could be a thing it's just difficult i think kind of backporting it in that way all right all right

let's shift to um like how your team works so you guys got um you two obviously you have uh steve and you've got somebody uh in a certain time zone we don't know uh where he or she is and a couple of others working on this like what is what is the you guys have stand-ups every week like how does this work so we me arik jeff matt and steve have a stand-up every week but then the People that we've given developer grants to, like ZM and XCPSJ. How do you have that memorized? I could be one character off. No, I think you're right.

Yeah, I think I'm right, too. How do you take a word for it? I don't know. Or Z-Man, whatever you want. Z-Man, I like that. That's easy to remember. Yeah, that's easier. They aren't part of the meetings because they kind of just work independently,

and we're not going to meet with the whole BTC Pay server team every week. So there you go. Right. The grants are independent. So there's kind of two wholly separate parts of Square Crypto. So you guys have sort of what you guys are doing with Steve and who else did you say?

Jeff and Arik. Jeff and Arik. But we all are kind of allergic to meetings, I feel like. So we try to keep it to a bit of a minimum, I guess. What's it like working with Steve? Steve's great. Steve is a fucking beast. steve actually helped me uh fact check something in the newsletter today money ball yes yeah no he

he that guy has so much shit going on and just like mostly gets through it he's underwater a little bit most of the time uh but he no he's great uh he's went and hit the road and spoke to everyone he could find who was in the lightning space about like, hey, you know, we're thinking about this LDK thing. Does it make sense? Do you think we should focus on it? Should we do something else? I got a lot of positive feedback. He's been trying to deal with the influx of grant people who want grant money. He's trying to keep OpTec going, helping out with that. it's not just him a few other folks but he's helping out with that he's also trying to hire a designer we're trying to hire somebody to kind of just help improve design across especially

open source bitcoin wallets um casually ran like an 80 person schnor taproot workshop for eight weeks just on the side in his spare time oh well that was very very productive projects very productive yeah that guy's a fucking beast yeah he's insane um not like the um you mentioned snort tapper i'm just pumped at those bib scott numbers this week um what do you think who's gonna who's gonna present the activation path is it gonna be you matt i think we decided there's an activation path no one complained too loudly wasn't that for your other that was for the consensus cleanup right no no no that was that was for whatever but largely motivated by schnoi taproot all right so let's talk about it you so you wrote on the

dev mailing list what was it two weeks ago at this point three about then yeah so bip nine if that doesn't work six month waiting period in the bip eight essentially um there's a lot of detail there that's worth reading uh if people are into this kind of thing there's kind of a list of the goals which i think is important to keep in mind here because there's a lot of kind of discussions that lose that but yeah the the intention is really look bit bait checks all the boxes on goals except for the kind of obvious one of like well what if the miners are like screw you even though literally everyone else is like yeah but kind of this is good that'll never happen though no that's never happened in the past ever never happened uh anyway so the you know so

it checks all the boxes in that category and so there's kind of like a let's just do that first because if we can then let's do it and then if that doesn't work we'll stop we'll use that process the process of releasing the fork with bit nine parameters and watching the community's response to as feedback for yeah really that's what's going on and then we'll move forward and say all right look bit bait sucks it has a lot of risks to it ecosystem wise but if we really do it over a long period of time we de-risk that a lot so let's just go for it uh and take a really conservative timeline but if we have to you know that's your conservative timeline was what 42 months uh two years after the six month time horizon plus a year for bip nine so yeah total

42 yeah 42 it's perfect yeah it's flawless so for the freaks out there can we uh define bip nine and bit bait and how they're different right don't forget to bring a towel though he's cracking himself up so bit nine is uh the old school softwork activation method that was used for segwit that was used for i think two other softworks before that And it defines a period of time as a number of technical details, but at a high level it defines a period of time, suggested a year, during which if in any roughly two-week period during that one-year time period, you have 95% of blocks that were accepted on the network signaling that the miners who are creating the blocks are ready to go and enforcing the rule set, then it activates. So we all know how that ended with SegWit, just a little bit of a mess.

And out of SegWit's activation process came this BIP-8 proposal, which is to say, essentially the same thing but instead of at the end of a year you time out and just don't activate uh you just turn it on anyway and say screw you miners we're gonna do it anyway um right so so really like the obviously no fork makes any damn sense if you don't have a strong majority of kind of economic active nodes enforcing the rules because look no one wants to store their money in rules that are enforced only by minors that seems like a very bad idea for many many different reasons we're finding that out this week uh yeah um because they can all get together and decide that they're gonna take a chunk of that money for a while um anyway

so with that in mind you know bib 9 kind of intends to say look we use the 95 mining threshold purely as a way to say we just don't want there to be a lot of forks for old nodes right if someone forgot to upgrade was lazy forgot these other parts of these other nodes that they you know just forgot to upgrade um because they forgot about them it happens then you don't want those nodes to get like completely screwed and end up getting reorged and switched back and forth across chains like it's just really a mess right so you use the 95 threshold 95 has nothing to do with kind of like activation whatever it's purely a like how much hash rate and how much network security do we want to lose in this process right so that's five percent of hash rate of this key

network security parameter lost during the process of the software and five percent seems reasonable more than that starts to get sketchy um bib eight so you know bib eight is just kind of a like this really sucks to do it that way with flag day like we're just gonna kick off a bunch of hash rate and potentially cause damage uh so that's kind of the reasoning for this like really long timeline for BIP-8 is to say, look, we're going to kick off some hash rate and we want to make sure, absolutely sure, that

everyone running a node that's kind of economically important will have upgraded by then. And that's also the reason for the six-month waiting period and the one year before that is to say, let's make sure that everyone will do it and there's no

objections and holdouts and whatever of people who are going to say no. should we explain to the freaks why bitcoin core doesn't have auto updates enabled because developers don't decide yeah exactly that's why we have to deal with this process yeah no it's a necessary evil no that's what this week again there's a week of bips bips a lot of bips got numbers we got bip 340 341 342 and 119 um bip tap group got broken up into three bips and peter then he does an incredible job of explaining like hey the proposals here people seem to like it we think this is a good form of the proposal we're just

going to propose it and it's up to you guys our hands are our hands are clean now like uh start discussing it so how do we just do we have to start discussion me and you i guess so yeah are we starting it here you have to go out into the streets start asking everyone who's getting on the subway in the morning how do you feel about schnoyd taproot activation how does it make you feel our doubt already has a hat design i saw that it's a bit 119 bit 340 341 342 oh my god i love that i want one that's a key aspect of bitcoin consensus yes that and uh yeah so that's like that's actually a good conversation to jump into like so segwit that was very heavily driven via social media like how does this consensus uh outside of core develop going forward do you think

it's another social media campaign mailing list campaign um do people have to start changing their their twitter app their twitter names to signal they want these bips dear god i hope not right i mean hopefully we just get 95 minor signaling right and we're good yeah well i mean i think it's it's one of those things you know minors aside it there's just really not been any objection right so because we lost all the other chains right they just they're really loud complainers have quit yes that and then segwit too like with covert asic boost there was a reason why like an economic reason why some of them want to would would have want to withhold this yeah potentially i mean remember that the vast majority of objection

to segwit was not in fact an objection to segwit it was an objection to doing anything other than increasing the block size as is and setting a but you know certain precedent right so it really wasn't a this is bad it was a shut up do this other thing yeah um and with that in mind you You know, that's kind of part of the model that I look to for soft forks and any fork is, you know, we shouldn't be making those kinds of technical compromises on the basis of, but I want this other thing. And, you know, we shouldn't, you know, and AJ had a good response email on the mailing list that talked about, like, look, we shouldn't be in a situation where we're kind of playing political horse trading and making trade offs to make everyone just happy enough. It should be here's a freestanding thing. Is it better than what we had before for some people and worse than what we had before for no people? and if it is let's fucking do it that's what it seems like bip taproot is right right and i think

bip taproot very clearly falls into that category and and segwit only you know every soft fork every fork before segwit was pretty straightforward went through occasionally with technical hiccups but never kind of consensus objection hiccups um at least by the time inactivated in recent times let's asterisk there do you have any issues with Taproot no

why would I have issues with Taproot just curious no it feels like a lot of people are scarred from the Segwit battles

and they're expecting a similar arduous battle right moving forward but why scars baby

war battle scars man they scare people PTSD gotta heal somehow yeah could that soft fork

theoretically be combined with the consensus cleanup or are they totally separate yeah but like why just for efficiency like if we're already doing one soft fork it's mentally easier maybe to shove in another one i don't know i think it's mentally harder yeah i don't want to do too much at once it's too much mental thinking right right yeah true i don't know

if we are in a world where we can't if we're in a world where like soft forks by themselves are that much of a burden that we can't like do them independently and kind of have a pipeline then well some might argue we're in a great world some might argue we're in a bad world but i don't think that's the world we're in so it's more of a social limitation of developers and people's interests than kind of a practical limitation of like, could we actually do more forks and have kind of a robust pipeline? Certainly not like one every few months,

but could we have a more robust pipeline? We absolutely could. Yeah, Bitcoin Core is stagnant. It's stagnant. You guys aren't developing shit compared to all the other chains. We're working on LDK. It's not us.

But sticking on BipTapRoot, if they get implemented, let's talk about the benefits of that and how uh it would excuse me affect lightning uh particularly with like channel opens and closes and stuff like that that um helps with not being able to tell a transaction is a lightning channel open right yeah or channel close as well right so there's several big privacy wins right so there's that um there's also just having snore signatures on chain means you can do what's called, I forget what it's called, the payment hop de-correlation. So that's not, so right now when you send a lightning payment, every node on the route

sees the payment hash and sees that same information for everyone, for every hop. Like every hop sees the same information. And with any kind of Schnorr signatures on-chain, you could remove that and you could make it So that every node only sees who it came from, a hash that's unique to that node, the value, which does potentially allow for a number of attacks, and where to send it on to. But you get much more into the realm of kind of traditional MixNet privacy analysis versus the privacy analysis of Lightning today is much, much weaker. um and there's you know whatever 30 years of 40 years of mixnet privacy analysis research papers that we can draw from once we have a little more uh robust decorrelation across the path yeah that's what like that's what one thing matt really likes to say is that lightning

potentially could be like the privacy solution for bitcoin right or at least one or a huge improvement at least i don't want to put words in your mouth you can speak for yourself solution solution is a strong word no it feels like i mean just like little things right like the fact that you don't have toxic change you don't have um every transaction literally recorded on the chain forever uh it seems like it's got to be a sizable improvement at least going forward in the future you mean lightning in general yeah yeah for privacy in terms of like the actual end user spending at that point because that's where a lot of information leaks is when you actually spend it yeah i mean any kind of second layer solution by nature of you know the goal is let's improve

scalability and the solution to improving scalability is make sure that not every change action hits the fucking chain and once you're not telling everyone about everything you're doing all of a sudden it's very easy to accidentally improve privacy right it's a low bar it's a low bar but uh it's um no it's exciting though and again going back to like the battle scars of segwit like it i am very interested to see like when uh when the activation starts like when when will it like like when can we start uh downloading the software it's itching i am itching i am itching when it's ready it's not ready yet when it's ready so it's not ready yet so i always assumed when it gets enough so it's ready now have you got a number when it when it's

ready soon tm i hate this soon tm right two weeks two weeks like these are the kinds of things that like they activate and then do we need a shallon for you to come out and be like all right bitches this is what we're doing i i mean look it'll happen it's it's gotta go there's a lot of technical review left to go through just in terms of code level now less kind of high level it takes time uh and why rush uh this isn't the kind of thing that's opening up foundational new user experiences on bitcoin we're not talking about covenants we're not talking about uh you know something crazy we're talking about improving iterative improvement on a number of different fronts which users hopefully won't see very much of now they will see the lack of privacy breaking

stuff once they start adopting lightning and we see you know better uh privacy there and like you might see the lack of certain privacy breaking attacks in the future but certainly users aren't gonna like see some great new user experience in their wallet just by updating yeah no rush especially there's no there's no like fee problem right now either or there's no because that's what it felt like a segway to a lot of that battle was predicated around fees and the fee crisis quote-unquote fee crisis if you want to define it as a crisis or not is depending on how you There is a fee crisis coming, right? But it's the opposite.

Right? Where are them damn fees? We need fees to pay miners, y'all. That's another thing Clark Moody's dashboard has. I think the fee or the block subsidy to fee ratio is like 1% right now. People will be complaining about high fees before you know it. I don't think it's really. Looking forward to it.

I don't think we'll have to worry about low fees, at least in the near future. That would put pressure on pushing through scalability solutions, right? like more people on lightning more pressure on taproot so we should spin up a satoshi dice again what really uh southern district of new york district attorney might have something to say about that but in theory i'm very supportive of someone else doing it what really worries me is the effect of fees on like potential privacy improvements because like pretty much every privacy improvement we see involves using more transactions you have to do more transactions i mean you guys said so z-man is separate right his work is not really connected to you guys but

did you see what he just announced pay swap i think he called it pay swap or pay cash he did call it pay swap i haven't dug into it yet yeah and and the idea there is is that you're literally doubling the transaction amounts because alice sends a transaction and bob sends a transaction back so it should be interesting like as fees rise um there's like a negative incentive there to use bitcoin privately there's your it's cheaper to combine all your utxos and send as few transactions as possible right potentially uh well i think this is kind of the argument for cross input signature aggregation which is not a thing that exists materially currently but potentially in the future

Schnorr signatures as they exist in Bitcoin could be adapted to support that, which would in fact make, if you are not creating additional transactions, but instead just directly spending your transactions with a CoinJoin transaction, would in fact be cheaper than...

Because you aggregate all the signatures. But that's not included in the current proposal. That would be a future change. I thought there was signature aggregation just inherently with Schnorr there is but the so the signature aggregation in Schnorr that exists in taproot does not anymore discourage you from using multisig right multisig appears larger on the chain today which is a discouragement if you assume fees are going up but it does not allow you to have a signal signature for two different inputs so it only allows you to have a signal

signature for a multi-sig input which is great but not for two different inputs gotcha um yeah so let's talk about the specifics about how schnor would get implemented right so bit 30 340 excuse me uh that is to get schnor in right and that's to enable schnor you would still have ecdsa and schnor working uh at the same time correct right we're not going to take everyone's money and force them to that's actually i ate a new i miss i messed that up in the bent in the email i fixed it in on the website today i said it would replace it's just going to enable it replace nice i said i know i know i'm mad at myself matt i'm mad you and craig raid both just trying to take everybody's money that's a burn but uh and so the way snore gets implemented

right is segwit version one gets uh so segwit has 16 versions that i can go through we're on version zero right now right yeah 16 with one bite yeah yeah and so what pip 340 says we're going to go to segwit version one which enables snore signatures correct is that correct and then explanation right well enables taproot directly at the root and then snore below that so taproot so taproot's kind of so currently right if you are spending to a witness script right you have some complicated policy maybe it's a lightning output maybe it's multi-sig whatever um you take the witness script you take kind of your your policy your script and you hash it and you put that in the output with taproot you take the witness script and you hash it and then you

add it to a public key and you put that public key in the output so this is a neat trick that I believe is due to Greg, Greg Maxwell, where you can then say, well, that public key that I added it to, that is just a multi-signature of everyone involved. And we can just spend it with that signature, with that one signature from everyone. It's a single signature. It shows up on the chain as a single signature. It doesn't even appear on chain that we have any complicated policy. and so that you have schnor signatures there kind of directly on the witness version one right witness version one is just spending to this public key that has the the complicated script hashed in and then if you want to enforce the complicated script because say matt odell over

here kind of screwed us and disappeared and was like classic i don't want to i don't want to sign your crap just leave me alone i just don't want to deal with that then we can publish our more complicated multi-sync policy and there's both schnorz signatures available there but also easy dsa and whatever else you want uh kind of traditional bitcoin script features available there damn that's so much to take in like at what point do you think uh like so right now it seems like as a bitcoiner again i'm not a developer i just feel like i need to um stay on top of all these developments and these new uh these new features that may get added to bitcoin you see us getting to a point where

your average user doesn't even have to worry about this stuff. Your average user doesn't even have to worry about any of this stuff now, I hope. It feels like we do. Well, you're not the average user. Right? I feel like the average user these days is an enthusiast.

Is that wrong? If the average user is an enthusiast, we are fucked. If you have to be an enthusiast in order to use cryptocurrency, we are fucked. Like, the average Bitcoin Twitter user is, like, an enthusiast. That's true. But there's millions of Bitcoiners that are just, they don't, you never see them.

You never talk to them. They just have, like, I don't even want to say, like, bread wallet on their phone. They have cash app. They're buying Bitcoin. Exactly. Prepaid debit cards. They're sending it to Nigeria. You know, like, the average Bitcoin user has never read crypto Twitter, ever.

and if that's not the case that we're in if that's not the world we're in then we're screwed because bitcoin like if we're building bitcoin only for other enthusiasts like look the average person doesn't have time to give a shit about what you care about it's not that they're stupid you know a lot of people are like ah you're stupid you don't get this no they don't have fucking time they have two kids two jobs three jobs they're really excited about something who the fuck knows they're really excited about hiking and they're doing that all their time they're not reading crypto twitter they're not reading about bitcoin they don't give a fuck and if we can't bridge the gap into look bitcoin is going to provide utility for you even though you know almost nothing about

it then we're screwed right they should just they should just use it not have to think about it right if we were to distill taproot down at its core to an average bitcoin user it's cheaper multisig right yeah i mean i would generally pitch it as better privacy in a number of better privacy for multisig for lightning for multisig for uh i mean look if you're anything like a foundational way to measure privacy is what's your anonymity set right so who else looks like you do and would be confused for you uh and if you improve privacy of multisig such that multisig outputs look like any other output even if you're not using multi-sig outputs potentially this might improve your privacy because it might potentially also increase your anonymity set right it would

right because even if you're a single sig you're well there's still among the 20 other issues but but yeah so you know i think the the clear pitch is this is a foundational step for a bunch of other stuff and especially it means adding other stuff in the future doesn't hurt your privacy and it does some small things today to help your privacy privacy that's the biggest worry right now it's uh it seems to be a problem like do you think with schnor tapper it'll be sufficient enough do we have to go a little bit further after that at least at the protocol level you mean add more features add more yeah more features that enable people to find privacy in easier ways

i would flip that on its head a little bit and say that schnor taproot enables us to add new features without compromising privacy right because an existing issue is like okay i want to use this really awesome new wallet that's has this super weird multi-sig policy because you know it's the new hotness is what friends and family back up so uncle jim uncle jim uncle jim is gonna help me out if i ever get forget my keys um right so it enables us to do that to it enables me to like go use that without hurting my privacy because today if i use that i'm going to be one of whatever five people with this weird-ass multisig policy, and anyone who looks at the chain is going to be like,

oh yeah, you're one of five people who uses this weird-ass multisig policy. That's not going to be the case with Taproot, because hopefully in kind of a default scenario, I'm able to just have everything look the same, and then I don't have to ruin my privacy if I want to opt into something more innovative.

Yeah. Fuck, man. And then it helps Lightning because Lightning open and closes our multisig. It helps Lightning both in that way, and an additional, just because it enables Schnorr for instead of

HTLCs, instead of hash locked contracts, it's point locked or Schnorr signature locked or Schnorr private key locked. Oh, interesting. So it wouldn't be an HTCL anymore? HTLC, excuse me? Yeah, technically.

I'm so bad. PBSD. I'm so bad. You got PTSD right there. You went somewhere in between HT it went somewhere in between that and like html and like lightning in the web i don't i don't know what the fuck you did there you know this is why this i'm podcaster this is why i'm not writing code and i'm speaking to you guys you need a formatter just too many tls um fuck i had something to go to it i completely missed it when i messed up that acronym and fls for that matter

yeah um oh god what was i gonna say matt saved me what are your thoughts on liquid oh and now i remember what i was gonna say oh yeah yeah i have some idea he waits for a few beers uh no i look i was a i was a block stream when liquid was first being created um and it's a really cool product for the original intention of it which being cross exchange liquidity pool right building a liquidity pool between exchanges by enabling much faster transactions uh in a way where those exchanges aren't for example using something like lightning which especially at the time did not exist but also at the time had like kind of a long time horizon before it was available especially for high volume amounts because

exchanges have to deal with large flows sometimes um and so that you know that was the original intent behind it which is a really cool product now it kind of as an individual user it makes a little less sense just because you know it is here's a custodial product essentially it's custodial across the exchanges you're talking to and it's also custodial in the sense that you can't withdraw without kind of working with one of the exchanges who are a member of liquid um that's not you know custodial products are great if they're providing you a lot of other value like instant transactions well liquid's not quite instant uh still has uh has still some block time i think it's like a minute or something uh or at least it was originally um it has some privacy

benefits but only arguably because getting into the system has you know one of these exchanges where you're probably going to have to KYC yourself to get in and out. So it's kind of weird to propose it for consumers outside of when you're interacting with one of these exchanges. If you were otherwise going to interact with one of these exchanges, using liquid doesn't really change that because it's custodial either way. Whereas suggesting consumers use it for consumer to non-liquid business uh transactions is just it's not providing value and it has clear drawbacks yeah it doesn't make

any sense for a user outside of a large trader to me somebody wants to move funds between exchanges without the whale alert seeing it or something like that right and and also just you know anyone who's trying to arb exchanges uh if you're looking at the arbs not only do you trigger a whale alert but also you're dealing with long confirmation times and all that good stuff. You know, Liquid has a fixed confirmation time and potentially exchanges could give each other a little bit of float.

You can also, for exchanges that use Tether and stuff like that, you can trade Tether across it. Of course, these days, Silvergate competes and has their instant USD. What's Silvergate? Silvergate Bank is one of the banks that deals with... They bank everybody. they bank you know profitable bitcoin business they bank all the bitcoin exchanges but they

have a product uh for bitcoin bank or for bitcoin exchanges who are on their platform uh to do instant usd transactions across exchanges and they just hired a blockstream guy right ben richmond yeah ben yeah he joined that's correct yeah i just met ben so they might add liquid over at silvergate yeah i mean right in the target market right so we don't think like people aren't going to be spending like tether gold through liquid at their local btc pay merchant right that would be weird dear god i hope not i don't get tether gold like the future peter schiff wants yeah no peter schiff wants you to be weighing out gold and measuring the purity for every transaction let's be clear hey he forgot his pin not his password he uh he he found his

bitcoin he got it right no no he lost it still anyway he just admitted that it was his fault oh all right that's his fault thank you for the burn honestly the user experience blockchain oh it was horrible yeah people give him shit like he used the wrong wallet yeah and the wallet's user experience was gone and also eric vorhees recommended it to him too so yeah and that was my that was my response to that situation i didn't come at peter i just subtweeted blockchain i was like don't use their products i didn't i tried it out for the first time it doesn't even tell you to back up your seat you have to like go into settings to like figure out it doesn't even prompt you what so it's all the way buried i mean if you freaks

are listening out there blockchain is a woefully incompetent company uh they their their block explorer doesn't even work correctly they don't even have segwit yet they don't have segwit but like they they're like their transaction counter like it messed up the the they largely pivoted right like they were they like started with a block explorer and a wallet um that didn't get a lot of love and now they've created an exchange and they do a bunch of like consulting for private blockchain stuff so i just don't think their wallet gets any love and it needs a lot of love a lot of don't use it don't use it but it's like blockchain.com the goddamn domain names man so fucked right um right get all of your bitcoin information from bitcoin.ninja

not bitcoin.com oh i've never heard that one where's where's that sent where's that send you just not very much information i remember my question about uh lightning scaling into a high fee regime that's one one of the biggest knocks on lightning right as fees goes up on the protocol level opening and closing channels become too arduous and make lightning unusable at a certain point. Is this FUD? Is it something you guys worry about?

Is it something we shouldn't worry about or something that can creatively be worked around? Couldn't they just be priced out by people with lower fees? What do you mean? Miners are going to take the higher fees, right? Oh, I thought you meant within lightning, like routing fees. no like opening and closing channels on lightning in a higher fee regime on the protocol level like say fees get to where they were in december 2017 is it going to be advantageous to open up a

lightning channel you know that's a good question but at the same time there's a strong argument to So stepping back a tiny bit, one thing that I really like about a lot of second layer systems and also, you know, I think needs to happen in the Bitcoin space is we need to increase the elasticity of demand for block space. so you know when fees are high demand needs to fucking go down and when fees are low like they are now there needs to be way more demand than there is and one nice thing about layer two systems is that they kind of intuitively do that a little bit right so if you have some on-chain funds and you have some you have a channel open you're not too worried about getting those funds, opening a new channel immediately. The user isn't actively transacting. You know, you can wait till Sunday afternoon to get some of those channels open. Maybe you can wait longer.

You can rebalance these kinds of things in the background and you're not as worried about kind of immediate term transaction confirmation. So that's really nice and de-risks that a lot. In addition, you know, we were talking a little earlier about LDK and some of the folks that we've been talking to who are doing kind of risk scoring, accepting channels before they're fully confirmed, that kind of work. you know again here's an area where if you see real fee spike you see a ton of traders hitting the chain with a high fee because they want to arb some large volume across exchanges whatever you can de-risk that a little bit for the user and say like look the transaction's coming it'll confirm on sunday whatever now that doesn't fully answer your question it partially answers your question in the sense that like if transactions spike if transaction fees spike that might not

be as bad for lightning as i might immediately see because you know we always see currently demand for block space is super inelastic and we see fee spikes and we see fees drop to zero an hour later like it's kind of an absurd market right now um but if you see the kind of what year was it 2018 or whatever um 2017 2017 um v spike that's a little different for lightning and i don't know that we have a super compelling answer for low value lightning use no certainly that just also means you know you can still use lightning if it has slightly higher value channels you know going forward hopefully we'll see you know people who are using bitcoin on a day-to-day basis and have real money in Bitcoin, we'll also have some of that enlightening

because if you're going to transact in any meaningful fashion, why wouldn't you want your transactions to be instant? But in terms of real small value, the prevailing minimum fee rate over the course of a month changing only changes the kind of what is the minimum amount of money you need to kind of get on the chain and use Bitcoin in that way. there's already a minimum right now, right? If you're talking about, like, 300 sats, if you're talking about 1,000 sats,

if you're talking about 5,000 sats, it probably doesn't make sense for you to have anything on-chain. You should just have it in a custodial product because that's the only option you have right now. And so in the long term, in the long, long term, we need to be looking at what are other things we can do, right? Lightning scales down a lot, but it doesn't scale down to zero. and there is a zero and there are users who are going to be in that area how do we make sure that

we as a bitcoin community support them and support them without telling them like and just go use cash app and just go use one of these right go use a credit card i mean but how do we especially since a lot of these users are people who probably don't even have bank accounts what was the statistic from uh the city the other day is it's like one in 10 new yorkers don't have a bank account but like that's in new york well that's what that's what they did this week they said they went to new york city merchants said you can't be cashless yeah you can't ban cash yeah which i which you can't i'm a big not accept cash yes i'm a big fan of that too philly i don't know if i love the government stepping in to do it

cash is you know what that's one instance where i'm okay with it no but like if you don't like that they don't accept cash you go shop go shop somewhere else it's like the coffee store that you just bought coffee from i hate that i did i saw actually i was there yesterday morning i had to go get coffee it was freaks i've been making my coffee mostly every day we ran out of beans yesterday i went to go buy coffee and a woman tried to pay in dollars and she couldn't they were like it's we're cashless and the cashier had to pay with his card and she gave him cash like i mean going back to andreas like we're here to bank the unbanked right like that's we all watch those videos at least i watched those videos when i was starting too like that was just i would

mainline andreas videos but i mean i have two points i think are important to mention here in terms of matt's comments um we'll have things like you mentioned custodial but we have like non-custodial straight onto lightning kind of onboarding situations where like spark swap or like jack mauler's olympus that's coming um so maybe they could onboard with 5 000 sets they're still creating a i think my point was more how do you onboard users where it's uneconomical for them to have a utxo yeah and then the other thing i was going to say is like in a fee spike situation like maybe that encourages more people to like you know open new channels with one sat per byte or 10 sats per byte or something because they see the value all of a sudden having the

already established lightning channel right so they see the fee spike they're like in pain because of it and they you see like a rush of lower transaction fees set that don't confirm for months or whatever weeks right my mind immediately went to wallet should develop tools to say something like i want a lightning channel in the next week and then the wallet can optimize for when the fees are lowest or something like that that or i don't know if people have talked about this, but ways for multiple people to use the same Lightning channel without fully sharing all private keys, if we could develop some kind of maybe layer three solution around that or something.

Right. To some extent, there's channel factories, which do allow you to have multiple users per UTXO, but they only go so far and they have a lot of blowup when you go to close the channel, potentially. If there's like a non-cooperative close, you have a lot of on-chain volume in response. So looking kind of in the long, long term, how do we make that kind of system more efficient? How do we build like, if you remember Tumbled Bit, but things like Tumbled Bit potentially pseudo-custodial but uh have a temple bit was for those who don't recall it it it does have

on-chain transactions involved but was a way to do xiaomi and ecash using bitcoin script as it exists today uh xiaomi and ecash being kind of a model old school model from kind of the 80s 90s where you have tokens at this bank but the toke the the bank does not have any ability to figure out who the token came from it just knows that it's a valid token right it's completely private but still fully custodial um and how do we play around with models like that but maybe make them slightly less custodial uh so so kind of playing around in that space i think in the long long term yeah i don't think we should discount um things we can't even see coming to the fore either right like do you that's another question i want to ask like up to this point bitcoin's history 11 years

And like, was there something that was consensus very early on and something came out of the blue that sort of blew that consensus up, right? Like right now, assuming that if fees rise, opening channels will be hard and arduous. Maybe there's something we don't see right now that comes in the future that could change that narrative or something like that or change that reality more importantly. Yeah, maybe. And there's, you know, I bring this up because there are designs for this. Like, there are people thinking about how do you have shared ownership of a UTXO? How do you have, you know, the ability to have a bank that's private, but at the same time, if the bank decides to censor you,

you can take your money and go home, but everyone else doesn't have to. You know, how do you design these systems? And there are designs for them. It's not like they don't exist. so like everything in bitcoin's history and cryptocurrency in general it's how long do we have to actually build these things we've been thinking about them for years let's go you know find the resources find the users build it yeah fascinating that's one of the things i really love with lightning is that it's moving so much quicker have you noticed that do you do you feel it's just

like a little bit of a breath of fresh air especially after we had the whole scaling debate that it's moving quick but it's still moving at an engineering pace right it's how long have these things as long as sea lightning and lnd been available for people and yet the the feature set is still the feature set that was there right right right they still have user experience glitches here and there it still happens they're not completely robust you know engineering low level systems takes years to iron out all the kinks yeah it's going to take time people it's going to take time i get so triggered by people want everything out of the box right now it's like what do you expect especially with a distributed project like how how much harder is it with the

distributed system to enact these changes and and and bring these features to to the to the users right something people don't think about right plus maintaining the whole culture of don't pressure people to upgrade so you know no need yeah which is which is not normal right i get my update your ios once a day like do it do it that's something that i noticed that was different with lightning as well is like with bitcoin core i'm almost i have an incentive to be slow with my updates um but with lightning like if i was slow with my updates like i might have lost funds like i need to be you need to be on top of it and actually update really quickly um i don't even i don't have a question related to that i just it's an interesting dichotomy

i think you're allowed to make points without questions yeah yeah that's what this is for you got a little round table here i think this is this is our first four-person pod it's literally a round table yeah it's not our first four-person pod speaking the round table are you going to round table no not spending 3k to go hang out with bruce like 6 000 all sudden done 6k now well no because it's like 3k for the ticket and then you have to stay at their specific hotel oh it's like another 3k yeah so now what are you most most excited for uh like with square crypto's initiative like do you think it sets a precedent to light a fire under anybody's ass?

Do you think what you guys are doing will enable other engineers in the future? Yeah, I'm definitely excited for our niche and our lane, for sure. Yeah, for the whole external signing thing, just the flexibility. I think once we iron out all the kinks, people could do some crazy shit with it,

with how pluggable it is. like stick in your own routing algorithm just whatever you're feeling yeah well matt you mentioned earlier like you do this ldk stack in a hardware wallet like how would that work what does that look like right um just all the channel management would be in there like one cool thing uh design goal of rust lightning is don't make any sys calls so you know there's no assumptions made about what will be available from the underlying hardware that's kind of totally up to

the user which is pretty cool so yeah it could totally be channel management and RNG on the hardware wallet but everything related to making sure you don't get breached running on a million different servers that are keeping a super close watch

on everything so yeah and then there's also like I'm excited for the multi device sync application which is also not currently possible so lightning wallet on my phone lightning wallet on my computer and everything's still secure how's it still secure in that in that way like if you have it well the current idea is like uh like to be fair i would have to fully close the wallet on my phone and be like okay i'm signing off the phone and then i can use it on the computer

so it's kind of like a clear like okay get everything synced now i can use it on the other device you only have one permission at a time i think that's the current right i mean you can you can always like if your other wallet is open the wallets can communicate with each other and say like hey i'm also open please send money right so there's not like it's not like you have to like log out but it would kind of at a technical level like val was saying like you know i would open one of them and it would say is anybody else open no all right good now i'm gonna load the data and run with it and run with it. But specifically, the APIs exposed

allow you to make hard guarantees about the state of the synchronization, the state synchronization across all of your wallets. Whereas, again, existing systems like LND, c-lightning, to some extent, although they're working on other back ends right now, but even still today, you know, they write their data, and you don't have any kind of, like, you can check if one is running, probably,

but you have to make sure it closed cleanly before you can open it, whereas Rust Lightning, like, you can actually go sit down and say, ah, this channel didn't close cleanly, I'm just going to close it out, or maybe I won't reopen that channel, or what have you. And the issue is because if the states are, if you fuck that up, you lose money, right? Yeah, you don't want to fuck up your state synchronization. Bad enough. Right.

So that's one thing, like state backups too. Is that being improved as well via an LDK? That's pretty related, isn't it? Like you fully sync your state before opening it on the other device. So kind of implicit in that is that you A, wrote it to disk, and or B, backed it up to some cloud service maybe or some other backup service. right and there's there's a flexible api for it right so you can decide how you as an app

developer using ldk back up the state and not only how you do it but how the app responds to it right so if the server is down there's support for freezing a channel not allowing any further updates but keeping it open which no other client supports because they don't have to right they just store it to disk they write it to this they're done and if the disk write fails they can just crash or something. Cause like, eh, disk rates don't ever really fail that often. So it's fine to just shut down and then hope the user fixes their disk versus, you know, if you're on some mobile and you want to open it in two phones, like you have to actually be really paying attention to this and saying, or like, especially if you're on a hardware wallet, you know, here's

a state update. I need to make sure the watchtower on the other side of the world has the state update before i do anything that might allow the counterparty to broadcast something on chain right so this is just not a model that's considered in the current lightning implementations because there are daemon that runs on a server and it's great but not the only potential use case for lightning yeah right and one other thing i thought was cool was like kind of because we're a library we can have higher levels of fuzz testing more than other demonized implement. What is fuzz testing?

Basically, fuzz testing is where, say you have a function in your code, right? The fuzzer will just throw a bunch of random bytes at it and just like throw shit at it and just try to get your program to crash or segfault or buffer overflow or something like that. It can be language specific. But because we're a library, when you write tests,

you don't have to spin up a whole node. Everything is just functions, basically. You can just write four lines of code and you have a quote unquote node. But it's much more flexible in terms of what you can fuzz. Like in other implementations, you can pretty much always fuzz message serialization. But in Rust Lightning, what's kind of unique is you can fuzz any message that one node would send to another node. I can spin up a Rust Lightning node and just throw

like anything you can think of at it and just try to get it to crash. So that's really helpful when you're doing super tricky stuff like trying to pause a channel so you can make sure all the various channel monitors say like okay, everything's good. Yeah, you can forward this HTLC or

whatever. That's my understanding, not having built it. Did I see you fuzz testing recently? Was that something you were tweeting about or wrote to a dev list? I mean, the fuzz tests in Rust Lightning continue to be really, really valuable, like Val was describing. But what you might be thinking of is Marco has spent some time doing fuzzing of the Bitcoin Core validation engine. That's what I'm thinking of.

Lately, over the last kind of few weeks, months, and has had really good success. Despite Bitcoin Core really not being designed for this, it has slowly migrated in that way. and with some with some you know the fuzzing is not fast which certainly when your your goal of the fuzzer is to just throw random shit at the program until it crashes you have to be fast so that you can try a lot of random shit um but he still had had really good success with it just because the the kind of validation of bitcoin core is ultimately not that con there's not like that much stuff there uh whereas in lightning there's a lot of meat in the kind of state machine of just going back and forth and dealing with channels and htlcs and what's the current

state of that htlc but this other htlc is in a different state and how does that affect things so much to think about so much to think about how do you guys approach this uh like does it have to be a collaborative effort or obviously it does but like individually how do you approach this stuff and then uh and then sort of ask your teammates or other people working on lightning uh whether or not what you're thinking is like worthwhile or valid yeah it definitely helps being on a team although um we've been sending a lot of messages on team chat and one thing that we've been talking about is how we need to basically shift all of our communication to irc so that it kind of opens it up to the wider community so

steve was basically saying like okay you guys have like four to six weeks to get comfortable and then i want to see you guys only messaging on irc so driver steve over here well that was uh we just had jeremy rubin on last week and that's what one thing he was saying about specifically about uh developing for core you could be working on a pr and then somebody gets something merged and it fucks up your pr is it a similar situation of lightning um developing there Is it a little bit more fluid? RESTlating, we're definitely trying to keep up the pace, so moving a little faster, in part

because we have a better ability to test things. Just because of the way the library is structured, it's much easier to write tests, which means it's also much easier to make sure that the code changes are correct, which also means we can move faster. And with that comes a little less stepping on each other's toes. But we'll see how it goes scaling up.

You know, it's still fairly new having this many resources on that project, but... So, Matt, you personally, do you prefer writing code for the protocol level or for Lightning? They're different. Yeah. Do you get more excitement on one over the other, or...?

i enjoy writing stuff with rest lightning because we can do more innovative things and testing which is just really exciting in terms of like look here we're building software that handles people's money like we have to be really careful and take this really seriously let's not joke around let's not you know do something that's like a little bit half-assed no like this deals with people's money our users are putting real money in this software that we're writing take it fucking seriously um and you know the way bitcoin core bitcoin core has come a long way in the last several years um the last many years but it still has a ways to go versus rest lightning starting fresh as something written cleanly as a library that doesn't have you know

it doesn't sit there and write to disk during tests just makes it so much easier to do innovative and interesting testing approaches which is really interesting having you know spent so much time in bitcoin core we're really conservative and don't have something like that to fall back on as much here we have that way more to fall back on which is really nice yeah no that was one thing working on bitcoin core seems like it seems like a lot of people could easily get uh what's the word i'm looking for distraught like working on a pr something gets merged it fucks up their pr they have to take a step back rethink everything because it seems like a very frustrating process for some people it's also a very slow moving prize and it over the last few

years it's become increasingly slow moving um some parts of it a little less so the wallet keeps good momentum uh but certainly kind of the net and validation core bits have just been so slow moving over the past few years and it's you know in large part that's because a lot of folks who worked on that area went off you know especially post segwit like there was a lot of focus during that time period everyone was like gotta gotta work on core gotta work on segwit gotta work on whatever um and then kind of after that went through everyone was like well here's these other four projects that i want to work on that i've been interested in for a while but felt like couldn't spend time on and then they went off and did those and so that just resulted in everything

slowing down um and that's starting to turn around a good bit um but it still is what it is uh and so how's uh how's russ's uh endeavors separating the the wallet and the node going i haven't been tracking it uh i've been busy with ldk building yeah i can imagine um that's a so do you do you see working on ldk uh rust lightning as sort of a reprieve from bitcoin core or just an extension of what you've been doing to some extent i mean there's certainly no question that uh certainly everyone at square crypto has freedom to go spend 20 of their time or whatever reasonable number on bitcoin core other bitcoin open source projects and it's encouraged and i know jeff has a lot of aspirations to improve process around prs and bitcoin core

and also kind of improve code health and code structure um and you know that's something that i'm eyeing and trying to spend more time on but just don't currently have the bandwidth for it but but going forward it'll be more of a thing yeah that's um that's fascinating it's fascinating you ready to drink scotch tonight matt i'm super excited to drink scotch tonight did you guys know it's the it's an irish holiday tomorrow is tomorrow is yeah but i'll drink some scotch tonight too what the fuck is the holiday it's burns day burns day yeah it's a scottish poet celebrating the australian fires it's a scottish poet he's a little fucked up yeah you got to drink scotch to celebrate fire no there's a poet who is i guess a little bit

of an alcoholic so everyone drinks scotch once a year for celebration of him seems fitting for a poet it's a great holiday yeah it's like a great holiday irish know how to live yo we really do we do i uh i'm an irishman myself uh via heritage i'm an american yeah by birth yeah um yeah so i guess what uh what are you guys thoughts on i don't know if you guys want to talk about or want to talk about in person? What do you think about Jack Dorsey starting Square Crypto

and what's it been like working with him in particular? Do you think was he very open to the ideas you guys put forth? Was he very hands-off with this stuff when you guys did that retreat? Yeah, he's super open to whatever and really

encouraging and open-minded. I was kind of surprised by how much he was informed about the crypto space as well like seemed like he pretty much knew what was up like knew the good word you know more than I expected um yeah I feel like he he didn't just start it on a whim it seemed like a pretty like well thought out project on his part like yeah just the fact that he came out and hiked with us was also really cool so possibly a little star struck there but hey yeah what was that like it was insane i don't yeah yeah he's a super chill guy he really gets it um you know i he's

super busy he's got a lot going on twitter has all kinds of fun shit to deal with uh he's going to africa he's going to live in africa for whatever six months whatever the fuck um but especially for someone that busy like just echoing val's comments like he you know he puts the time in to understand cryptocurrency is best someone who is that busy you could possibly expect them to uh which was impressive to me um but but yeah i mean he he really wants to see this stuff succeed and personally i think um and you know square is a good place to fund it because if in five years Bitcoin is just a daily use thing

for some part of the world, maybe not even the Western world, but maybe some part of the world, then if Square has, then Square as a business has the ability to run with that. And also, you know, hopefully we can share

some of our knowledge within Square so that other engineers at Square are in a good position to run with that as well. um so you know he definitely like he's very forward looking on this um and you know certainly bitcoin needs a lot of love to get there but yeah did you see the patent they released is there like conflict there between square crypto's mission and um pad software patents in general yeah i i saw the

patent i wasn't aware of it until i saw it in the media like everybody else um but certainly you'll know that there's a conflict when everyone who currently works on square crypto quits so that's what i like to hear and will you quit probably a good indication but so far none of us have quit so it's a good indication that no one has told us what the fuck to do will you quit will you quit if you're uh fuck yeah yeah move on to his fourth company find somebody else to pay my bills no but no and that's one thing that like yeah like speaking to him too and seeing seeing his eyes like i like i feel like speaking to him in person i feel like he's down for the cause too and like i like we need more allies like that obviously people are inherently skeptical

and apprehensive to be like oh he's a billionaire he's owned the biggest social media company one of the biggest social media companies in the world and one of the biggest fine new financial companies in the world like does he have ulterior motives it seems like he's down for the cause and we need more people to put their necks out there right like i feel like right i mean elon tweeted bitcoin but we need a little more than that i feel right well you said bitcoin isn't my safe word right he's already tweeted i think he might have had a few i thought he just tweeted bitcoin just tweeted bitcoin once it's just a single tweet that just yeah he brings bitcoin up every once i love that that was definitely he was drinking with someone he was like do you think i can move the

price five percent if i just bitcoin elon tends to be good at that the sec is not a fan but but security so cftc doesn't seem to give a shit so but go like going back to to try to quell people's fears like you said you would quit if your your um if your principles were ever compromised via square crypto like how do you help settle people's nerves who are nervous that somebody uh with that stature who some people think uh given the history of twitter and censorship and stuff like that um uh like what can we say to people to be like all right yes there's history here but uh given the effort put forward to date in regards to bitcoin it seems like he's genuine right right i mean he gave us no direction pretty much very seemingly very long

leash um we had that whole 500 bitcoin headlines project that was pretty damn uncensored i feel like which was by ken that was ken what was that what was this i was like well that's news i didn't know that was you guys it was on twitter i mean yeah it was great so a guy who works on cash app um did this rather independently he was on like a flight and he was bored at some point um and he wrote up a long list of like just tagline like little short i mean probably most of them fit in 140 characters let alone 280 like there's no self-care without self-banking there's all like clickbaity kind of had right but there's like what a thousand of them or something stupid more than 500 yeah 500 yeah there's 500 like stop using the same tired memes go read the list

scroll through pick out a few random ones start running with those yeah it's 500 of them now no disclosure disclosure this podcast is sponsored by jack dorsey company as well everyone knows everyone knows we're so many times we're all we're all compromised we need to switch to taking money from the bcash hong kong company run by jihan yeah that's we could just clearly the we'll have the bcash dev fund sponsor it's so there we go it's so funny though like people do like try to stamp that on you though like you're compromised you're compromised but it's like yeah and i mean but like it's at the end of the day it's about people right and yeah i mean you look at like this is the the famous linus torvalds like linux maintainer model it's like well look uh somebody

is deputized to maintain some part of the linux kernel and then they get hired by some company who might have a motive and linus's response you know sometimes linus is a little too cavalier but in this case i'm right there with him he's like look fuck you like the at the end of the day i trust people and i trust people to make reasonable decisions and if their employer wants to pay them to do something that's good for the ecosystem great like what the fuck is wrong with that and if their employer wants them to do something that's bad for everyone else i trust those individuals enough to know that those people are going to tell them to go fuck themselves yeah i mean i i would add that i think that people should be skeptical they should be nervous but

they should also be open-minded yes they should watch see see what happens no and i and i think again going back to individuals like you said you would walk away i think same like we would walk away too if anything's ever compromised yeah we'll stop all development on lightning that we're doing um no we'd walk away from the sponsorship no i agree i uh i mean and the other thing i would add is that jack is an investor personally in lightning labs um and square crypto is not working on lnd right you're working on rust lightning so right yeah i mean yeah exactly we don't don't you know we're not in it to compete with existing companies we're not in it to own some part of the market that other you know we like we want to build the pie our mandate like like

val was saying like jack gave us a really long like he came out to our offsite and he said what are you guys gonna work on he didn't say like uh you know you guys should think about working on this because that would no he showed up and said like hey what do you guys think about where the spaces what do you guys think would be valuable for you to work on i want to see something where you guys are making a positive impact and growing the pie that is bitcoin yeah that's all that's all you know that was it and that's the incentives of bitcoin right the only winning move is the play all right this will work out for square if their first mover in the space and right you know they have in-house people who get it like that's a big that if cryptocurrency is a big thing

in five ten years that's a big win for square even if we're out funding btc pay server who's on paper competing with one of square's main business models like if you look at that you're like hmm that's weird right like yeah no i love that i do too no that was that was shocking when they gave that grant out i was like whoa they don't really compete though i feel like the merchant it's no the merchant who is running their own btc pay is not a merchant who would be using square today well today 50 50 they're running both i mean what's the one in palo alto backyard brew is they've got a square terminal set up and right beside it they got btc pay so like right you know today they're running both but you know in the long term maybe and certainly

you know i hope they're not competing in the sense that btc pay server i hope it's existing to serve a niche for people who don't have access to financial infrastructure you know cash app and and square square at the end of the day square has always been about improving access to financial infrastructure whether it's card swiping for food trucks who had to take cash or whether it's people using cash app who've never had a different bank account like that's their game and that's also bitcoin's game but you know if there's something else like cash app that has a better ux that isn't you know exposed the volatility of bitcoin all the other ux problems great but that's not gonna be available for everyone but that's why and being able to serve the last

10 is never something square is going to be able to do without bitcoin right that's a very good point very good point that's why i don't think they compete because i think btc pay is like a fully sovereign stack that you run yourself and then square is going to be the ease of use you You know, it's just easy and it'll be custodial and you'll KYC and you'll have easy access to Fiat and you can... Right, no porn stars or gun shops will ever be able to use it. Yeah, exactly.

That's what it is. Again, disclosure, Cash App's the sponsor. But like when they first launched, like they catered to inner city users, right? There's how many rap songs that mention Cash App? This is, I don't know. For some reason, people at Square love this statistic. They've never sponsored any of them,

but there's like i don't know 50 rap songs that mention cash app they're all like yeah yeah the biggest song in the world right now um mentions as they should be as they should look that's that's a statistic to be proud of because you're really providing service for people who otherwise don't have it yeah they don't mention bitcoin though right no they don't mention bitcoin we need to every time a rapper mentions bitcoin we have to like shower them with twitter engagement that's my rule of thumb just like we'll propel them into the spotlight and they're We're going to just keep coming out with more. Action Bronson might have been the first one in 2013.

We had that other guy that Miles sent us. Big Roy's, Bitcoins. Val, the first time Matt was on this podcast, he said Bitcoin has a 5% chance of succeeding in the future. What do you put it at? Matt, what the fuck? This was pre-Segwit, I think. It's hard enough as it is.

Por qué? Please explain. Oh, no, no, no. Before he explains, I'm going to ask him what his percentage is at now. I think it was post-segwit. Also, Matt gives us a lot of this crap on a day-to-day. Well, I don't want to say crap, but Steve will be like, right? Like resident skeptic type of stuff, basically.

I'm a fucking curmudgeon. Get off my lawn. Get the fuck off my lawn. Steve will be like, oh, okay, guys. What are we thinking for the L2 timeline or something like that? a few years or so and Matt will just hit us with the seven years or something like that.

Get off my lawn. He's not afraid. Not surprised. It's good to temper expectations. Right. Do you have any more optimism than you did two years ago? I want to hear a balance percentage first. Dude, 100. Don't give her the 100.

I love it. 100, the only right answer. I love it. where are you at now matt i mean i'm really inspired you know i don't know i assume uh i assume it's come up before on the podcast um but i assume most of your readers have seen useful tulips.org um that's you know a great attempt at researching kind of real bitcoin usage by people who not only don't go on crypto twitter but don't go on crypto twitter because they're busy and have lives that are really hard but also don't go on crypto twitter because they

don't want their government to know that they're like using bitcoin because they're like getting black market rate for their currency in nigeria it's not okay um so i'm really inspired by that that's you know being exposed to some of the folks who who play in in some of those markets on the sending side of the remittances in new york um you know those things are real people where bitcoin's providing real utility today uh not to say that hedging the u.s dollar hyper inflating isn't real utility it is hopefully that's not the only position you have hopefully that's not 90 of your net worth but like that is real utility but also providing real humanitarian utility in the sense that you know here's people who are using bitcoin because they don't have

anything else um so i'm really inspired by bitcoin really starting to feel fill these niches and filling the gaps because that's that's where bitcoin starts and maybe bitcoin doesn't go any further than that i don't know probably won't go any further than that in my working lifetime maybe i've heard i'm retired i don't know uh in the western world that's the western world are you gonna retire at 35 aren't we all well if bitcoin does fill other niches and it goes to a million then of course i retire so it might it might in fact be a self-fulfilling prophecy that might be circular um but but so yeah i mean i'm i'm really excited about stuff like that where more excited than you were the first time you came on the podcast so we'll be at like seven

percent now or something 6.5 6.15 6.15 percent no i'm i'm more optimistic um the you know there's real people using it the community seems to not be falling down the but bitcoin needs to change for me rabbit hole at all um we'll see what happens when fees go up again um we'll also see what happens say something a bit heretical but we'll see what happens with some of the defy infrastructure not the defy infrastructure that's built

around weird derivative products to create US dollars with who the fuck cares I mean you know people building people building apps that just used tether right people building apps that use mostly tether because it's sketchy as fuck and allows people to not kyc and use dollars which is blatantly illegal in so many ways but you know people in being enabled to use these kinds of systems which are gonna have a better ux right they have they already have brands like mindshare right someone in burma knows what the fuck a

dollar bill looks like they know what a greenback looks like and they want to use a greenback and if someone says like here's greenback in an app form you know is that you know i don't think that's competitive with bitcoin in the sense that it's illegal and tether sketchy as fuck and like centralized being backed by like probably somebody's cashier's check and like maybe cash in a closet somewhere like who the fuck knows what's behind tether at this point like there's probably some money there it's probably mostly in like dirty dollar bills somebody's wiping their ass with i don't fucking know right they could have a bunch of it in bitcoin um but you know it's not competitive in the sense that it is like a worst trust model but it is competitive in the

sense that you can build a good ux around it um and so i think you know going forward that's going to be an interesting game to play of how do we the cryptocurrency community explain to users what the trust model is that they're opting into i mean shit crypto twitter can't even agree on what the fuck the trust model of these things is how do we explain that to users in a way where they can make an informed decision and say like yeah you know i work three jobs and have two kids and have about 30 seconds to spend thinking about your app and i'm gonna choose to use bitcoin or i'm gonna choose to use tether or i'm gonna choose to use whatever the fuck die i don't know how do we make that a thing and i think that's concerning given it's easier to

cut corners and build good ux's and people good ux speaks to people um so i think that's concerning but but at a high level bitcoin has real momentum the only question is if the momentum stalls as it kind of has been the last year or so last two years if that momentum stalls and doesn't go anywhere what does that turn into what do you mean by stall doesn't feel like it's stalled the momentum developer wise hasn't stalled but the momentum kind of user-based growth and mind-share growth has definitely stalled. Well, this is indicative of waves. Western world.

Boomba cycle. Yeah, it's indicative of the Boomba cycle. But what if the next one doesn't come? That's a good question. It'll be here. I wouldn't depend on that. Look, I think it'll be here is an absurd like absurdism, right?

What's a self-fulfilling prophecy a little bit like you said earlier? Yeah, to some extent, but at the same time you know, if the momentum stalls the momentum can stall and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and if it doesn't kind of like the a lot of the interest in bitcoin has been price-based and for better or for worse that means we're hinged on the price right that means if the price goes up we're going to see more momentum but if the price doesn't go up we might not see more momentum and

we might not see more adoption. Filling those niches is something, you know, once you reach a certain amount of good user experience and availability of these things and local liquidity pools, I think is really critical. So this is maybe one of the other big questions I have going forward is like, how do we make it so that there's a local liquidity pool in Nigeria and Lebanon? and these places where they're like lebanon does not have a local liquidity pool nigeria i hear has a little bit better but lebanon does not why do the liquidity pools need to be local why can't people provide liquidity from outside these areas you need cash right you need local you need local currency you need local bread like i need to be able to get some fucking bread in lebanon

with bitcoin right how do i do that the fiat side's a hard problem everywhere yeah well that's what it's easy in the west right the west has solid at this point solid local liquidity for as long as you kyc yeah you have to kyc well you have to kyc or pay a heavy premium 20 30 but you can do it you can do it without kyc you go to a bitcoin atm it's 20 steep well most of the atms have kyc here some of them yeah i guess most of them do now i think the one on second half you can just put cash in and get you definitely put a phone number in and it definitely filters burner numbers does it i didn't realize that val what are your thoughts on this um i could see it turning into some kind of

intolerant minority thing where some populations in the world can only take bitcoin for whatever reason like their local currency is shitty and then because of that it kind of snowballs into something that everyone just has to accept um and that's kind of like the hinge but i also feel like we just need to work on like basically lightning ux like i don't think people should have to know what a channel is and i think that's that could also just be a big tipping point right there like is that possible though like well i think it's possible yeah yeah come on we already see it kind of in phoenix have you played around with phoenix yet async's new wallet i haven't spent too much time with it it makes some pretty big trade-offs um but but yeah i mean look that's

the future is where do you make the trade-offs and how do you how do you play with these things and i think it's really it's not just them there are several others doing it as well but it's really exciting to see people really trying to play with the trade-offs like phoenix gives up a lot of routing privacy uh has kind of your remote your next top nodes probably run by eclair uh do a lot of your routing for you which you know if that's the trade-off they have to make to get you good ux because they have the real on the ground experience they have the real world they know what the ux issues are because they have one of the most popular mobile apps if that's the trade-off they're going to make that they is a

well-informed decision great and you use you use their electrum server too oh okay yeah that's a big trade-off but if you go to their website and you go to the faqs they're like this is not private at all we can see everything you're doing and like that's super important like you mentioned that earlier how do we educate on the trade-offs and the shit coin model up until this point has been you completely disregard the trade-offs and you hide them right and that is not the route like the eth dns thing people should be taking mine there yeah tying your your entire stash someone explained that to me like i couldn't like domain names are fucking like who has a problem with domain names right now you're talking to a domain name hoarder right here so like you

probably better kind of be fine like no one really has no i only have like a few uh you definitely i have like 10 maybe 15 come on that's hoarder status that's not hoarder status people have like hundreds of domains i have like 70 or something there you go see that's like almost hoarder status i have like 20 ethereum proof of stake domains and they're never going to switch to proof of stage and they're just sitting there just being worthless but like what like what current domains are fine they work like if if there were like real probably domains were getting seized and censored left and right like all right yeah let's fucking go to whatever the fuck but the pirate bay still has a domain name you do you have any fucking clue how many global political

resources were invested in getting the pirate bay to not have a fucking domain name and they still have the piratebay.org like for fuck's sake they haven't lost their main domain name like why are we worried about this well with with with this ens or whatever ethereum name service like it's not actually a domain name the idea is like a human readable address basically right um which it has its own issues especially in terms of privacy because like then they're linking it to their twitter and stuff and you see all of their payments um why did no one ever build i mean there were attempts to build but no one ever integrated um just using normal domain names to expose bitcoin addresses yeah like via dns dns sex signs records how would that work yeah

you just make the like well the the trivial way that some people proposed which has all the ssl pki issues associated with it um which you literally just have like a well-known domain name like if if you want to send money to bitcoin.ninja you would look up like uh your your wallet would automatically load like bitcoin address dot bitcoin.ninja it would look at the website the website would just be an address and it would pay the address it wouldn't be an expo it would just be a static address yeah maybe i don't know but like i mean the nice thing if it's if it's a website it could give a different address every time you request but um like these things there were attempts at it but no one ever really integrated it there's technical issues but

Not that many technical names. Yeah, and that was, like, the first shitcoin, right? Namecoin. Isn't that what they were trying to do? The very first. Yeah. That was the first. But they were doing the ENS style.

It was on the blockchain. It wasn't, like, just literally look up, like, I have a domain name. I have an email address. You just look up what the emails associated publicly is. Well, we've seen moves like Kasa and other proprietary apps try and add, like, human-readable names. Yeah, via their own proprietary database, though. Yeah. We already have domain names.

They're great. Are these human-readable addresses essential for the success of these systems? It's pretty great. Although, you know, especially outside the U.S. QR codes. That's one thing I brought up. Everyone uses fucking QR codes for everything. that's one thing i brought this up two episodes ago i brought on a an old co-worker from barstool sports donnie does he lives in china and shanghai he was explaining like the qr

ux experience over there he's like yeah it's fucking incredible and i was like how is it not here yet i was fucking paying someone the other day i was like you know what would be nice if venmo had like qr code support and then i opened the venmo app and like it's right and fucking funny you there's a fucking qr code in venmo it's just no one uses it right that's that's the one thing i love about lightning is just pointing and paying like it's so easy well the other thing about lightning is that a lot of these schemes and stuff involve interactivity and your lightning nodes already always on right so maybe we will see more come forward in that regard because because of that you know so let's not rely on that let's not build more on always

online like this whole like i love look well didn't you just suggest an option no i mean you could have you could do it via for example dns records where it's an xpub or a lightning node public key where you could send a payment without necessarily having an online counterparty with lightning you would have to but there's there's other issues a whole lot like look i love the folks i love the whole idea of running your own home node look i run i don't know 20 servers no the last count i had like 40 something servers i i have too many goddamn servers i have a problem but like no one's gonna do that like not you just need uncle jim to do it and then you connect to uncle jim's node what why not why not the whole like i'm gonna find someone who's running a server

like especially in lightning oh my internet's down i got breached and i lost my money that sucks like come on these things like the whole idea of like everyone's gonna have some kind of home server like look we already have a computer in our pockets everyone has a fucking computer in their pocket some people have a computer on their wrist use that stop like the whole like oh i'm gonna have an always online computer at home most people are never gonna do that most people don't even know a family member who's gonna do that so you bullish on things like ab core i'd know about running a full node on your phone but yeah in in like the in principle they'll like run it on your fucking phone yeah i just don't want to be at the mercy of apple killing my process randomly

when i'm supposed to be or moving from the app store yeah i mean like we're gonna have to find a way to like approach those kinds of issues um removing from the app store i'm a little less concerned about but i don't know killing your process yeah i mean that's that's like a real that is the issue ultimately like the technical issue is like process gets killed left and right but like we can figure out how to build systems around that i just don't buy that we have to like uh everyone has to buy additional hardware just to use bitcoin you don't remember when like bitcoiners were like shooting shooting their phones with guns and filming the videos or whatever because the app store like i i went through a phase there in like 2015 where i just i thought

that apple was never going to add bitcoin wallets to the app store but they did i know i'm still i'm still in shock and remember a lot of people in the world don't have a home internet connection fair right i don't just mean in the world i mean like most double digit percent of manhattan new yorkers not manhattan new yorkers people in new york city not new york state new york city don't have a home broadband connection they have mobile internet and that's it but they could use mobile internet for their home node no they fucking won't what the hell no no because it's on their phone and they're not gonna pay an extra add-on to their bill to run a bitcoin node at home i just really like the uncle jim idea i've like been all about it lately

i just don't that's and that's been one of my theses too is that like this is gonna be a hardware revolution as much as it is a software revolution like i think you need to change human tendency right it's already becoming one in the sense that availability of secure elements is better but it's not purely a hardware revolution in terms of people running things at home it's also you know look at the htc phone it has problems that don't necessarily recommend putting your money in it but like here is a real hardware company saying this is a legitimate market we're going to address it and we're going to build something targeted at this yeah like a failure built into the rest of your phone yeah so this is like our adversarial money

she sees market position so it's like our adversarial mindset uh closing us off to companies actually wanting to help bitcoin right like if you're coming at it from phone should have built-in super native bitcoin support i can get behind that tentatively yeah yeah i mean i guess we have to draw it's really healthy that we have a large part of the community who's really vocal about super 110 self-sovereign running everything yourself whatever i appreciate that i love that that's me it speaks to me i do that that's great and i appreciate that we should get as many people as possible doing that but it's never going to be everyone and we're never going to reach the

world doing that and we're never going to grow beyond the size we are now doing that yeah there's a reason why blue wallet is the most popular lightning wallet right and it's custodial so like how do we build everyone forwarding the torch was using blue wallet left and right yeah yeah oh god i forgot another question what was i gonna go into god damn it You're just off your game today, Marty. No, no. You guys are having such an interesting conversation while I'm trying to remember my question. When you take notes?

When you take notes while we're recording podcasts? I don't take notes. Is it about how you're worried about Ellen Big having 50% of the network still? Does he? Yeah. He does? Yeah. I didn't know that.

It's not mining power. Do you know who Ellen Big is? No. Who the fuck cares, though? We'll talk about it off air. It doesn't matter, though. I don't know who Ellen Big is, either. it does not matter who the fuck ellen big is or do they are they min cut right like if you take

all of the ellen big nodes offline can people all of a sudden not reach each other maybe not yeah that's not true so who the fuck cares i mean pierre not to fud but pierre moved to texas and people were having payment failure errors okay and and our node our node got way more payments that day than any other day and it was because pierre moved we didn't talk about that but yeah this is the first time we talked about on air because i was waiting for him to get his note back set up before i look i mean this is the kind of thing that like resolves itself over time as as lightning gets bigger you get more of these nodes the min cut like there's all the research is pointing at the min cut keeps growing like the number of nodes you have to cut offline in order

to have payment failures keeps growing great i remember my question going back to aj towns his you you're going like you're going way back in time at this point marty no no just forgot that question for too long at some point there's a statute of limitations on questions no the statute of limitations is not over yet it's about adoption is his blog post on adoption like his funnel did you read that oh it was great yeah so what do you think about like do you think what was like one and a half percent would be running full nodes at the bottom of that funnel?

I don't remember the numbers. Yeah, look, I mean... Is that sufficient? Is his funnel sufficient to be completely distributed or sufficiently distributed? I don't know, but... Look, we can only do the best we can

and it is important that people are pushed to run a full node, but at the same time, human like humans have lives most of them and we're all living so we all have lives they're busy like doing things and if we can't serve a world where 90 something percent of bitcoiners pay only marginal attention 90 of people who use bitcoin like use bitcoin cryptocurrency for some utility that they're driving on a day-to-day basis if we can't support 95 of those users not knowing shit about crypto twitter not knowing any of the latest drama not knowing

anything about a soft fork happening not knowing anything about anything any of this then we're fucked we're not going to grow well no but that's not bad like that's like five percent is huge two and a half percent's huge for most things yeah that's what it says that's efficient do you think uh like luke luke would say it maybe is not sufficient no he would say it's absolutely not sufficient yes is what luke would say right look if it's the best we're gonna do it's the best we're gonna do let's build a is it good enough i don't care if it's the best we're gonna do is it good i don't give a shit i give a shit about building a system that's real and providing real utility for real humans i don't give a shit about like i think the way we do like how do we

maximize utility for people using bitcoin i think an important part of that is resistance to change like difficulty of like overhauling the system out from under user all these things are like really critical in that but at the end of the day my goal is providing utility and so if we end up in a world where like ah but we can't have more users because we need more users running nodes then like we're not providing the utility that's a good point i think there's like a middle ground here like there's like little things that can be done that lessen the effect of not that many people running uh full sovereign stack so like stuff like btc pay like i could see a future where we have like a bunch of hosted btc pays that are run by a bunch of different companies

so instead of just like one bit pay we have like competition in that space and then like uh ridolfo right now the cold card they're going to come out with this like hsm firmware um where basically like people can be bitco and you can be like bitco for a small like you have like 100 companies and you're their bit go that's just your signing transactions for people yeah exactly you're like the the cosigner on their transactions um and then we can have competition there so you don't have like these these big ass entities like bit pay just like breaking bitcoin yeah that makes sense too that's crazy we're discovering this as it goes on right and it's an it's an emergent system right like as it emerges uh as more data and more use cases

emerges we're we're finding more about the limitations of the system what do you think well yeah i kind of agree with matt and also i i feel like we could have a world where like pretty much everyone's anonymously using bitcoin no one knows what you're transacting about everything's totally private but still only like aj town says 1.5 percent of people are running a full node but i feel like that's yes right but i feel like that's also i think i agree that's a cool part about bitcoin though is that the incentives align so that even if say like i'm connecting to someone who's running a full node the incentives are such that they'll keep running an honest full node and basically all it takes is one like false transaction for me to find out

about and then i'll just switch to someone else who's using a full node and who's running the servers right now though well hopefully you're running them yourself i'm happy you said that i'd be like to go back in bitcoin's history a little bit and point to an instance where it's not full node or full node concentration or concentration of full node aspect but a mining pool aspect with GHash we saw when they got

over 51% and individual miners leaving that and GHash come out and be like hey, we're going to make sure we're below 40% and obviously it died because it got too powerful but there are precedents. They were a little not the most competent. And they double spent a couple transactions.

I didn't know that. They did. They appeared to have done it on accident just because they were actually incompetent but that is somewhat unrelated but is that a good example of the system sort of routing around a centralization aspect maybe really it's a long time ago what would have happened with stratum v2 would not have happened with stratum v2 what are we about to go into a whole stratum v2 conversation why not are we we're two hours two hours in let's start a whole new topic here we go what's going on with that do they have specs is it just the Yeah, there's specs there.

No, the proposal was very much most of a spec. I admittedly have been a little heads down on LDK and have not been working too hard on it, but I know the Slushable folks are still hammering it out. You spit something out last week, I think, right? Or two weeks ago. Yeah, yeah. I know they're working towards...

They keep working towards it in terms of implementing it on their firmware and on their pool. um it's it's a lot of work it's a lot of redoing stuff um so i don't know what their timeline is i haven't spoken with them in a bit um but i understand at least loosely that there's things coming on the immediate horizon what was that conversation like making compromise between better hash and strategy 2 oh great i mean look at the end of the day uh jan and pavel their their ceo and cto uh at slush pool are technologists who care deeply about bitcoin um

who you know super smart guys a little bit of a language barrier whole english check thing took a little bit of uh technical language barriers harder than language like their english is great uh certainly my check is um well non-existent so if anyone is to blame it's me but uh you know technical language barrier is doubly hard um but you know there are technologists who care a lot about it who are really smart guys um so it was all about like just making sure everyone understood where everyone was coming from and then i think the decisions were usually pretty either it was like flip a coin because everyone knows that both decisions are good or bad or everyone was kind of like oh yeah okay i see what's going on all right let's let's just do

that but the better hash parts of stratum v2 are like optional parts of the spec right yeah largely i mean they were they were largely optional and better hash too um look at the end of the day this goes back to the immediately prior discussion most miners are not going to on a full node it's fucking hard they're not gonna do it they're technically only well no they're technically fucking incompetent they don't have anyone there who knows shit about tech they like but like hey that's fine like most miners are business people who negotiated a deal for good power they paid someone to set up a farm the farm now sits there and runs right they don't know shit about the technology but we just maybe they should have to but they don't they don't know

shit hey i will i'll come out on a limb here and say i think the the learning curve of the minors is or not the learning curve the the uh understanding of bitcoin by the minor communities leveling up a little bit it is it's gotten a lot better than it was 10 years ago five years ago but it's still on average pretty low yes there's there's outliers of some large miners who really fucking get it but that's the minority yeah most of them are just plugging machines in to get bitcoin but if we get like 20 of miners to run their own nodes and like use better stratum v2 but like the better hash aspects of stratum v2 like that's a significant improvement right we don't need all of them huge compared to that massive and they have a fine like a strict

financial incentive to actually get their shit together as opposed to someone who's you know in nigeria whether or not they're going to run a note or not is is less of a financial incentive they have like the privacy incentive maybe it's an indirect incentive right it's kind of a like well bitcoin is better off if you do this so your investment in bitcoin is better off if you do this so you should do this but that's like a really for someone who does not have a deep understanding of bitcoin that's not an obvious argument well like if if let me let me rephrase it like if uh if pool operators started to act out of line um i think it'd become pretty obvious to the miners uh the individual miners like oh shit like i need i i have this tool where i can put a gun to this

guy's head like i should do that for example the pool operators were to get together and sign an agreement where they were gonna have 12 of the mining reward get stolen from the miners and handed to an opaque entity in hong kong that's gonna pay who the fuck knows who then yeah they would probably learn up real quick agreed and that's what we saw with ghash not not not the specific use case but the pool they were in uh would not be in their long-term interest if they not if they did not leave or act now people can act within that pool yeah i mean look at the end of the day they're like the the argument that people make about pools all the time which has some validity to it around like look miners can just move on to a new pool like it's that's true

that is a thing that they can do um you know stratum v2 is obviously way way way better than that if miners are running their own full nodes but like that exists and that's true and like you can move on to a new pool and especially if you're actually paying at least half a bit of attention to the business you're in then hopefully you'll be aware enough to do something like that well gh was a little different because there's a lot of cloud mining involved there where you couldn't move like you own contracts with you own you bought the hash through gh and then you couldn't was way before that people was cloud mining ghash was like gh.io yeah that was like it was cloud years ago yeah it's been long no it was cloud money they had cloud money because you could

trade the contracts no you p2p not p2p but you they had an exchange on gh.io where you can change trade the contract seven years ago yeah they were like the best not the best but they were the the most successful cloud mining operation that's ever existed what the fuck how did i miss this But people did move out quickly. Like Peter Todd. You don't remember when Peter Todd freaked the fuck out about this? He's like, I sold 50% of my Bitcoin. Look, I remember when GHash had 50-something percent of hash power.

I did not fucking realize they had cloud mining. Yeah, cloud mining was like their main part of their operation. Probably the majority of their pool was cloud mining. And then they had no fee for the miners outside to join them so that they were able to swell their hash rate. Were they just hemorrhaging money, though? were they the key was they not only were they selling the cloud mining contracts at like unprofitable rates but they had this exchange where you could then resell your

contract to other people and then they took a commission on the on the trade and and you couldn't obviously you can't trade that contract outside of ghash so they had a monopoly on those trades between it so they just double dipped so i think they actually did pretty well until they didn't yeah yeah yeah they they dissolved pretty quickly after that it's just like it was like disappeared zero to 60 and then nothing yeah that's kind of respect making cloud mining work like i thought that was just not a thing under any circumstances no one should ever cloud mine don't ever cloud mine don't buy those fucking guys just a fucking scam no but that's actually testament to slush too the fact that they've survived for as long as they have first mining

pool ever and they're still here today and it's a testament to them being yeah and pure mining pool too they're not like you know a lot of the other mining pools who have a dominant market position or like have a dominant market position because they have a dominant market position and for example selling hardware and are really like no no no you want to buy our hardware yes you you mind on our pool too and they're able to use slush doesn't fucking sell hardware yeah and they're sitting there like no we get this we're just gonna provide a good product we're gonna you know get on them yeah shout out to slush um i'm about to get yelled at by my wife we gotta get going here do we have any final

thoughts on LDK what you guys are working on the state of Bitcoin what was that what was that Matt say it not related contribute to rest lightning yeah I mean look we're

yeah we want to make it a really welcoming experience in terms of one of the easier Bitcoin project open source projects to contribute to um and we're really serious about that so you know what's the irc channel gonna be called uh you can join pound rust dash bitcoin on free node uh there's not always a lot of rust lightning discussion but it it'll always be on topic there um and go to github.com slash rust dash bitcoin slash rust dash lightning we'll link that for you freaks out there

Val what about you Any final thoughts on this conversation Besides contribute to rest lightning Thanks for having us This is super fun It's always fun Matt's again the most tenured guest On this podcast

Look as long as you keep giving me free beer I don't ask questions Pilsners will be flowing don't worry I have a final thought Motherfucker never gave us a percentage What is it Damn it, I thought I got away with that one. I hummed and hawed for so long,

I thought you totally forgot. I bought that. 40. Holy shit. An 8x improvement from two years ago. 40% we're going to win, not lose. I like that. I like that too.

It's not over 50 yet. We're providing real utility right now. Very bullish. And we're going to end it on that great note. Peace and love, freaks. Peek-a-boo!