TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #47: Jack Mallers

Episode Date: October 31, 2018

Join Marty as he sits down with Jack Mallers, founder of Zap, to discuss Chicago, chess, Jack's path to Bitcoin, what draws him to Lightning, Bitcoin financial products, and much much more. Follow Jack on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JackMallers Follow Marty on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MartyBent Check out Zap: https://zap.jackmallers.com/

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt lightning week here in new york city has continued and we have yet another guest the excitement throughout the week just rises uh this is a guest i've been uh eagerly anticipating in the studio for a while I've been trying to get them for a minute now. Again, it's lightning week here in New York City. So my guest is here to imbue some knowledge onto the people participating in the Chain Code Labs lightning boot camp. I want to just introduce you freaks to Jack Mollers.

Jack, welcome to the pod. Yo, what's up, dude? I'm a big fan of yours and a friend, I can say. A friend, yes. You are my friend. We had a night. We had ourselves a night in Chicago over the summer. yeah so i'm happy to be in brooklyn uh check out your home territory hang out be on the podcast

it's gonna be a lot of fun yeah thanks man let's uh let's reminisce on that night a little bit so we did one of my one of my favorite nights in chicago is thursday night in lakeview in particular uh you do funk night at a live one uh in the back room there you pre-game uh with funk night and then you walk down the street to kingston mines and apparently i left kingston mines a bit too early there you said hannibal barris walked in he did but i don't think you can ever leave kingston mines too early you know what i mean so it's true yeah be careful what you wish for if you're there it's too late already yeah but you you showed me the way dude i'm much more of a like hip-hop chicago's like you know gang underground hip-hop drake guy so i walked into the to the live tunes

and the guitar i was head bobbing i was catching a groove but that was my first little rodeo of of that scene you're into the trap rap scene chicago's got a very interesting uh music scene i got i got a few friends that were in pop punk bands in the chicago area um went to lane tech and and and messed with the pop punk scene sure a lot of rap obviously we were just listening to kanye yeah setting the mood for jack coming with some kanye yeah yeah kanye of course everyone loves chance is is my generation's kanye uh but yeah dude i mean i grew up in evanston right outside chicago is on the basketball team like one of the only white kids so you're in the locker room and you get you get it all and you get the trickle from the south side comes all the way

north and uh i still listen to that shit today i might not be a popular crypto twitter uh playlist that i have in my pocket but it's my jam i'd love to uh i'd love to listen to it i've been uh a big rap kick lately i've been listening to astroworld on loop for some reason yeah okay we're drifting in the right direction yeah i like all music i'm a big fan big fan of it music's dope yeah every kind of music in the car we've been listening to classical music recently but uh in the office it's been trap rap yeah actually i wouldn't consider travis rap trap rap would you i don't know what it's called you just get your beats on open up zap blast that gang that gang banging dope slang and shit and you write some code that's how i live i love it i love it so

let's get into why the hell we're here a bitcoin and lightning network in particular as always on this podcast uh we need to know your tale how the hell did you find bitcoin and uh become so infatuated with it um so i've been involved in bitcoin involved meaning like i knew about it and was interested to follow it since early 2013 but uh i can't take responsibility for that it was all my dad so my dad is like the mastermind in the dark room with all the screens monitoring and pulling the strings very smart guy smartest guy i've ever met and uh he has my family has deep chicago finance history and he approached it from a market trading speculative aspect and I was dropping out of college at the time and it gave me a little direction and it turned out to

work out okay but uh that was my introduction it was not any genius hind like forward thinking on my part your dad pushed you into the deep end yeah it didn't push me but I was like man dad I'm allowed to curse right oh hell yeah okay I just want to make sure I wasn't you know ruin I think. So, uh, I was like, dad, I don't like college. I think I'm going to drop out. And he was like, fuck yeah, fuck that shit. Um, let's just figure out something that works and that you like, like that's so expensive anyway. I'm not going to pay all that money for you to not like French literature class. So, um, I left and he was like, I got a bunch of friends that are engineers and in the finance world, you should just learn to code. It's similar to chess,

which we talked about previous to the microphones and so that was my trickle into it and he was like oh you like this well here's this bitcoin thing i think it's interesting this was around the greek cyprus crisis okay and uh he started to explain it to me from a speculator you know he's finance and trading but uh i was learning to code at the same time so then i kind of married those worlds and and stuck with it that's uh that's awesome that's awesome that your dad was depression enough to be like hey you should focus on this you're young dude quitting college not only he's the coolest guy in the world i i was on the phone with him told him i didn't like it and it just got into it i was on scholarship at st john's so i lived in a suite of scholarship kids

so it wasn't one roommate i had seven roommates so i lived in a giant suite what was the scholarship for uh it was like accolade related i think that was under academic but i like pitched him that i was like really good at chess and wanted to be in new york this is like the chess capital of the world at the time and uh they were like dope like we'll have you here uh so i was living in a suite with all these people and we got in a fight over some stupid shit and i was like crying i was like 18 call my dad i was like i want to come home and he was like fuck it let's go like sent me to the airport no flights i had to sleep there it's like me a bunch of homeless people sleeping in the airport and i woke up at like 4 a.m got on a flight to chicago and never went back to new york

holy shit man years later build zap and whatever this is my first time back since uh since you left really it just hit me yeah well let's uh let's back up to before you left you were skipping class to play chess i was yeah so my saint john's campus was in queens before we even get to that how the hell did you get in the chess like how long have you been in the chess yeah for sure um i don't even remember how i got into it it's just one of those things when you're like a kid and you're good at something that's just like what you do that's the most fun thing in the world is to be good at something you know what i mean so it's like you play after school and you're beating everyone and you're like oh yeah i fucking love this game

so and i took it seriously like had a coach trained uh i had a couple state championships for my age group in illinois uh and then you play basketball you get into things like bitcoin and chess becomes a hobby but uh for a while i was really competitive player as a kid what uh what are like the biggest lessons in life that chess has taught you oh man this chess seems like one of the most incredibly cerebral games it is it is you can make anything that way if you want to draw a comparison to life. But I would say, I always tell people that chess is the most symbolic and closely replicated and that every move has pros and cons. Even the greatest chess moves reveal some weaknesses and it's more about managing your risk reward if you're trading

or managing the ups and downs or your overall value proposition and goals of the product if you're building something to serve to users um but understanding that nothing is so very binary and that it's more of finding your comfortable match in the middle and sliding that scale so depending on the chess position uh you can choose your pros and cons you can choose to be tactical or positional uh and i still apply that today damn sounds like a good sports people or game yeah it's a good game dude overall like intuition seeing yourself forward these are some of the things i pride myself in like building zap like i'm not the best cryptographer coder in the world but just you know building a product and the intuition uh and evolving and finding market

fit and stuff like that i still use which i learned to play chess yes i'm gonna pull up a tweet here talking about zap all right um wrong tweet i started building zap in my bedroom as a way for myself and my friends to test and experience lightning in a user-friendly way uh fast forward uh and you're watching elizabeth stark present your app on the tv true story so zap started in your bedroom like what is the origin story of zap like yeah uh so at the time i had a real job only real job i've ever had so far uh if you don't count working on zap and uh it was a side project i to be honest with you my approach to product i think all valuable products um and especially open source ones should start as a side project

like similar to what bitcoin was to satoshi it's an idea it has personal origins to you um but it ends up working because it's authentic because it's limited in scope because you're clear of its intentions the people that try and be super ambitious that are wild thinking that are loosely you know spaghetti tied it's really difficult to deliver something of value so zap was extremely authentic it was extremely limited in scope and its intention was to be really small it was like i love bitcoin i hold bitcoin i want bitcoin to work here's this lightning thing which has dream hopes and i wanted to humanize it for myself and i wanted to be able to use it and pass it on to my parents without them interacting at the command line and i i really wanted to take the protocol

and turn it into something that everyone can kind of recognize and understand and be excited about or motivate them or use it whatever the case was and that was it it was like after work in my bedroom or like even at work i used to go to work hours early knock off the issues that were on github and all that stuff and then by the time it was like lunch i was just like in slack rooms with stark and lalu and like coding on shit at my work job yeah absolutely people would come next to i'd have the bitcoin charts up trading and uh i would be in like bitcoin core slack groups and stuff because i had come in early and finished all my shit where were you at the time i was at a company called label insight okay uh so shout out label insight uh some friends over there still

but uh i was like leading product in a way so i was coding but also like designing shit it doesn't really matter but it was a normal job not bitcoin related so that's like i got my mind going a million different directions right now because there's so many angles through which we can go so here's what i want to get out so you were experimenting with lightning early number one building on an early uh with zap in particular then number two you have a very design focused mindset which i think is imperative i have i'm a ux nerd myself like when i was in chicago i did a ux boot camp at designation shout out designation actually just got bought by we work as a like design boot camp congrats to them um but yeah this like ux is imperative moving forward or

improving the ux of handling private keys sending bitcoin receiving bitcoin invoicing blah blah blah whatever it may be uh there's an immense amount of room for ux improvements and i think what you're building at zap is sort of a shining example of like a beacon of light to sort of guide people towards something to uh uh very very incredible example of what good ux should look like yeah um so i'm basically just trying to to uh bestow you with compliments without being like too complimentary but i mean i love the ux of the zap app and what you guys have built so uh number one what was it like building on lightning network when it was uh the beginning stages of lightning how has it gotten better throughout time then two what what do you what's your perspective on

the state of ux in the space and and how to improve it for sure for sure uh building on lightning early was a blast it's still a blast um i think that it goes unnoticed how generous uh this community really is a the toxic stuff seems to make headlines which is fine like whatever we'll get into that in a bit yeah whatever but um this community is fantastic lalu connor of lightning labs i've been mostly lnd focused but even like christian and all the guys that are working on lightning at the protocol level uh absolutely fantastic some of the smartest people i've ever had the pleasure of watching work and that's me being dead serious i repeat that everywhere i go so uh joining early and being able to test this stuff out and interact with

these guys um was a blast obviously didn't really work that well um but it's the way that you learn so obviously i wouldn't be in a position to come to something like the chain code residency and give any guidance on anything if it weren't for that experience so it was a learning experience taught me a lot about bitcoin its value propositions why lightning would work in parallel and support those and then i think the most important draw from what was that like feb 2017 to what is october 2018 today is the parabolic growth of the developers and overall resources devoted to lightning so we can get into technical details like yeah well we didn't have you know bip 158 merged into core yet and like so that's changed but like okay whatever

what really though is the overall attitude of lightning and a general belief like what you want out of this community is a united vision that we all kind of understand what we want to go after and what we're trying to solve and have some unified goal and then watching the community slowly unravel and and motivate and and uh move towards this kind of unified place which is devoting resources time uh money all of it to building has been that's been the biggest change is it used to be like me justin kimarena alex bosworth like stark and lalu and molly in the slack now there's like 5 000 people every day that's insane yeah and it's uh it's crazy like the enthusiasm like i spoke with lightning koala monday night and he's developing games on

top and wouldn't consider himself like a back-end developer just when it wants to build front-end apps that interact with lightning network and uh it's always been the knock on bitcoin it isn't as developer friendly especially at the protocol level so seeing lightning sort of uh bud and and grow slowly but surely over the last year year and a half it seems like uh it is that lore for developers to build on top of bitcoin because it seems like it's getting easier more practical and you can build cooler stuff with it obviously um yeah so i mean i can drag that in to answer your second question of like the ux type of approach that zap has and that i'd like to bring um i've been writing about this forever is that i think that lightning allows us a fresh start and ushers

in a new era of relationships that the end user has with bitcoin so uh if you think about the relationship a user has with bitcoin similar to a relationship someone has with their girlfriend um this but seriously i mean i i'm the clay christiansen approach uh that very famous study of harvard business uh went into a fast food restaurant and tried to help them sell more milkshakes and uh the restaurant had you know made them bigger made them smaller changes of flavors whatever and they weren't actually trying to understand why people were hiring the milkshake that's counterintuitive to how we think of products you know you buy a milkshake because you're thirsty yeah but why were they hiring it what job were they trying to and why was what is

this relationship they have with the milkshake and if you think of it like that people most milkshakes are actually bought in the morning what because commutes are so long banana you finish but before you even get on the highway and you're hungry by the time you get to work a bagel is a disaster if you're eating a bagel and you're driving you gotta switch lanes or you get a phone call you don't have four hands yeah uh so a milkshake and you you give a milkshake and you gotta suck it through the little straw it takes you an hour and it sits in your gut until lunch and you're full and it's cheap so they did things like make the straw smaller so it takes longer and it's harder to suck the thick milkshake through the straw in it which increased sales

because it was a better commute uh snack so anyway point being is i like to think of these things and these products in more relationship and why people would hire Bitcoin and how they look at Bitcoin and their relationship with it. And traditionally, it's been more or less a disaster, the end user relationship with Bitcoin. It's hard to understand. It's hard to use. There's a lot of hype around it and a lot of excitement, asymmetric upside as far as an investment. But just how people get to talk to Bitcoin has never been good. And Lightning gives us this new opportunity to reestablish that relationship it abstracts a lot of the complexity it offers new value props it increases this throughput increases privacy and from someone

who likes to think of products this way and i'm very passionate about building good ux and crafting products that help people i thought it was a perfect opportunity to come in set an example set a standard and say listen uh you guys coinbase or whoever you're not fucking this up this time um, let's get an open source project out there that has morals and that's really dedicated to establishing a good relationship with the end user and weeding by example. And so that is kind of like the overarching, one of the principles of zap and why I started it. It's incredible. No, no. And I think a little bit, you didn't really say it and I don't think you were trying to allude to the to this intentionally but what i think uh somebody can glean from that explanation

of of that you just gave is like the user's relationship with bitcoin i think that relationship up to this point the first deck or almost 10 years in has been somewhat bastardized by uh i don't say false narratives but uh misleading narratives like bitcoin using bitcoin as a medium of exchange obviously yes in the early days it was possible because nobody was using the network obviously we found out over the last two years uh pretty uh pretty hard lessons about scaling and bitcoin's uh capabilities when it comes to being a medium of exchange at the protocol level and i think uh parroting and evangel evangelizing bitcoin as like a medium of exchange at the protocol level in the early years has sort of hurt that user experience and and hurt bitcoin's

adoption in the short term obviously these are hurdles that can be overcome but with what you're building on on lightning but uh that's something that's been talked about a lot recently is like the narratives around bitcoin and and and how we should probably be more forthright and and up front with where bitcoin is right now um so i think like uh i read about it earlier this week bitcoin's probably still in that collectible phase if we're on like a nick zabe nick zabian uh route to money from collectible store value medium exchange to unit of account yeah um i don't know if you have any commentary on that or or i mean like the whole false narrative thing or just the fact that bitcoin seems to continuously get punched in the face like a punching bag uh i don't think though

that that'll ever end or that it's unexpected i guess you know i'm saying like um but what i'm trying to get at is like do you think there is like a better a better like marketing angle right now uh like it's it's safer to market bitcoin is like hey it's like experimental or not even it's experimental it's uh it's obviously not uh the the liquidity base is not such where it can be exchange it's sort of marketed like hey can grow into that over time uh if more and more people buy into the system but right now it's not perfect for that yeah well this is why we love people like andreas antonopoulos right as the master educator and that stuff is important um but at the same time like how we all individually try and act in a responsible manner in marketing bitcoin uh it's

still impossible to digest for a normal person right like if i go to someone and i'm like bitcoin as a asset class as treated as a commodity something that you can put derivative products on top of and there's tremendous value to get bitcoin onto wall street quote unquote whatever the fuck that means um that that space is totally different than like scanning qr codes with lightning but people then will go oh this thing has so much value there's so much money how can i be a part of it and some web developer in california is like i'll just build an exchange or i'll just be and and that's not their fault necessarily right like it's exciting it's hard to parse all this information and i think that this kind of trial and error type of approach um is just part of

natural education like we don't want any central authority telling people how to act with their financial sovereign right with bitcoin or how to develop and be an entrepreneur this is just kind of part of it like people are going to lose a lot of money in scams people are going to lose a lot of money storing this stuff starting businesses having them fail segway 2x no it doesn't work and it's just a property of this decentralized type of whatever you want to call it form of money protocol whatever it is to you um it's just a property of the system in my opinion yeah no it's uh i think that's a good point because people approach bitcoin from different paths and come to bitcoin in different ways and definitely yeah different first interactions with

it i was i was having types of aha moments if you will right i was having a debate about this at the residency today with someone uh and we were talking about custodial wallets and should we there be custodial lightning wallets and such and the trade-offs of centralized versus not and it's just not in anyone's right to tell anyone why bitcoin is important and why and how they need to act financially like their friends is like hey can you help me set up a coinbase account and there'll be people on crypto twitter they're like fuck that shit like get them to write their private key on their tattooed on their tongue and they're not like they can't answer to anyone but here's the thing dude like bitcoin to my buddy who works at jewel and if he has to turn

on his computer he starts sweating it's like come on like let's be realistic the guy wants to put money in some asset that has upside and that's his use case and that's it and that's fine yeah there's also people that rely on bitcoin to survive in venezuela that's fine too the beauty of bitcoin is that it offers you the freedom of choice that no asset has ever offered before but it is your choice to have and and i just firmly believe that like if you want to use a derivative product to diversify into bitcoin like a future fine whatever like it who cares like it's not my problem how you want to your relationship with bitcoin is your relationship with bitcoin it's many things and many people yeah bitcoin at the protocol level is agnostic to your use cases

doesn't give a shit yeah um i love that uh and like i guess we'll stay in that vein with like the the futures products that's something there's a lot of fun about like people are worried about rehypothec rehypothecation yeah i say that right i'm i'm glad you choked on it because i'm not sure it really fucking means anything but i'm glad you couldn't spit it out because people are worried about that so that people are worried about that and then people are fighting about the futures price um like the launch of the future yeah wall street is putting us on our knees yeah okay it's destroying uh and maybe will the etf be good or bad like i don't know but uh no there's i guess you and you've been vocal about this on twitter you have a very uh granular understanding of how

these financial products work so i guess let's talk about the cme product in particular like is that is that uh or is wall street manipulating that product to to destroy bitcoin oh no of course not but i i mean i love to highlight some of the specific uh like claims right because someone asked me like yo is wall street is the cme futures product gonna crush bitcoin and my answer is no like what what would possibly make you think that a derivative product is gonna crush bitcoin and like the idea that it would inflate it or like i don't know what people's claim is i think the general like conspiracy theorist and a lot of these like really heavy libertarian fuck the man type of people just have a general fear um but like a derivative product is not even pretending

to be bitcoin it's a separate product it's a product that settles against an index of spot trading so you're not inflating the supply of i can't buy a cme future and then go put it onto zap and buy a y'all's.org article it's not the asset right it right so here's here's the use case for the cme product i'll actually walk you through why it was created and why people wanted it i'm a money manager whatever that means family office hedge fund whoever i want diversification into this asset it's new the upside's way bigger than the downside the bigger loss would be to miss this opportunity than to get burned on it and that's kind of a universal fact at this point how do i get my foot in the water you're telling me i want to put 10 million 50 million 100 million

worth of client money onto a treasurer this is the thing that some 14 year old in london is exploiting every month via twitter posting like yo i found a fucking bug come on dude like let's be real. So what they go, this is what derivative product is for. It gives you exposure. It transfers professionally risk. So risk transfer to those who do it professionally. And it says, well, I'll just buy this product that settles against the index of the spot. I don't want to hold Bitcoin. I don't want to touch it. I don't understand it, but I know that I need to be involved. And it gives them that exposure from a portfolio management standpoint. And that's all it was. There was demand from people that said, if I want to click buy right now or short, I want

exposure to it but i don't want to touch it yet and they'll get there so now there's this wave of like custodial services like bitco and all these people that will now store it for them and eventually it's such a crowded common problem that there's no way someone like bitco is going to get away taxing one to five percent of billions of dollars for holding private keys it's such a crowded space that eventually there'll be self-serve solutions but this is kind of the evolution of in a derivative product is a perfect first step that's cash settled so that these people can get exposure to this market um and risk transfer without you know holding the asset and i think that that's totally valid it happens in all real markets and asset classes today and i see no issue

with it like you're more a conspiracy theorist if you say otherwise there's no like real backing to those statements uh bilderberg is trying to bring down bitcoin via the cme future swaps it's interesting is and that's uh that's another debate i've been getting into more recently is like i've been an advocate of cash app thanks for sponsoring the podcast shop uh been an advocate do they really yeah they do oh man good for you that's a dope sponsor thanks uh very uh very philosophically aligned i love what they did by open open sourcing their that was cool cold storage this week very cool um but obviously like the heart like you were saying the hardcore libertarians anarcho-capitalists like you can't support they're doing aml kyc kyc aml it's like listen uh i agree

it's bad that i don't i don't agree with uh kyc aml to the fullest but let's be practical here we live in a society most people are going to use the easiest path to get bitcoin if they're going to we might as well pick the best services uh but it's interesting uh hearing those narratives and then at the same time these people would be like bitcoin's going to be the reserve currency of the world it's like what the hell do you expect like if it's going to be the reserve currency of the world like this is how finance works this is how markets work like these people are going to build products around this asset like there's also this like sense of entitlement in the in bitcoin which i think is great i like the like i wear my full note on my chest and

fuck you to say otherwise i love that attitude and i think it should survive but there's also just the general fact that most of these people don't know what they're talking about people will be like yeah the cme future product is terrible derivatives stink and then go open a trade on bitmex it's like do you understand that bitmex is the bitcoin mercantile exchange it offers derivative products like has bitmex been inflating bitcoin this whole time no so that is people just don't understand my favorite now is the etf stuff people are like yeah etf's bad for bitcoin it's not going to make the price go up well you just well you just don't look at data then i mean if you look at any asset class that got an etf introduced and approved it spiked obviously

the fact that etf is going to somehow influence the protocol because of all the bitcoin they'll be holding i think that the accumulative holdings of the segwit 2x signees we're talking about barry silbert shit ton of bitcoin coinbase shit ton of bitcoin vorhees shit ton of all of these people if you want to accumulate them there's no way an etf is going to have that much bitcoin anytime soon they couldn't shove any protocol changes down our throat so what's the big deal come on like you conspiracy theorists like and this is the price isn't going to be like an etf mandates so you have to buy the underlying asset it's just it's just like a little bit i walk into so in chicago my family i told you is this deep chicago finance history so i'm hanging i hang out

with strictly uh hft firms traders uh you know tilly runs cboe a lot of turtles yeah and you i tell stories like this and it's just what we joke about it's like not nothing to even entertain seriously so i would to people that are on the fence and on the edge i would try and put them at ease like there's no threats to bitcoin coming from wall street and i'm being honest don't take my word for it go google and educate but like a lot of these things are just laughable at best it really like there's a lot of fear mongering it's a lot of ain't on accounts like trying to build a brand there's a lot of there's a lot of brand building on twitter in particular uh you gotta try to find the signal through the noise uh it's not always easy but one thing i

want to dive into you with in particular is something that always fascinated me having lived in chicago now new york is the dichotomy of like the finance scene in chicago like pit traders from chicago like cbot guys are just like salt of the earth like fucking some of the funniest like driest people i've ever met in my life most wholesome people i've ever met in my life and then new york is complete opposite like your yuppie yak and yak and fast talking fast walking let's go yeah i appreciate the chicago finance scene so much and it and it and it plays in their investment strategies too like chicago is very much like a futures trading like trend following long-term cta uh like very uh slow and steady trend following strategies like emanate from

chicago we're in like new york it's like quick ldos and shit like that yep yep yeah so for context my grandfather was the youngest chairman of the chicago board of trade and actually signed the funding check for the cboe um wow yeah and then my dad ran one of the biggest future brokerages uh in chicago for a long time sold it to man financials so uh the mallers family has been around chicago finance forever i think my grandfather actually ran out a trader a trader who's a family that cornered the wheat market i think it was kansas wheat and ran him ran him out um from market manipulation and that was always the chicago attitude it's like we have strong integrity with our products in our name uh new york is just whatever's hot is hot the wolf of

wall street story and chicago was much more salt of the earth brick by brick right um yeah and it still is that's why i remember when coinbase launched bcash and me and my dad freaked out and one of it was because fuck the bcash brian armstrong's an idiot the ninja launch so unprofessional yeah but the bigger thing is that coinbase was providing 25 of the cme's index oh yeah that they settle against and if what if you're going to be insider trading and manipulating price now all of a sudden you're affecting the derivatives market and the cme holds such strong integrity in their products that's a chicago exchange you're not you like you manipulate these web developer no js bitcoin exchanges that go down every second that are a joke or whatever but you're not going to

come in and spit in the chicago exchange's face we're gonna grab you by the collar and give you a warning and that's why we were so upset it was like brian armstrong really is going to launch bcash and crash the bitcoin price and pump that garbage and then the cme is going to settle against that like you're got to be fucking kidding me it's one thing to rip people off with your misleading garbage about ethereum and bitcoin cash but then it's another thing to have give the terrible name and reputation and branding to the sec to the cftc to people that we want to appeal to we want this to be a real asset class a reliable one and people spend their lives so far doing this and you're going to spit in our face like that that i mean that's very chicago attitude like me getting

fired up that he's so fired up that's a chicago attitude that's it right and i fucking love the chicago attitude uh having worked at a futures fund with a bunch of ex-seabot traders the way they talk about trading on the floor like makes me nostalgic i'd never been there but it's just like it sounds like being on the floor in the 80s in particular must have been a crazy time i'm sure your dad has some war stories yeah i can't attest to it um but yeah there's plenty of stories for sure the running of cards and all that it's actually funny my dad decided to sell first american as futures brokerage as soon as things started to go digital so he was like as soon as it started to fray away from the pit the pit you got sprinters on the floor filling orders he was

like i'm out i don't this is not my game like i i was born on the floor and i i'm out i'm done so it's funny yeah he's definitely had some stories if anyone ever catches him at a conference to ask him it'll be entertaining i'm definitely gonna i'm definitely gonna pick his brain about it if i ever meet him at a conference uh no it's it's it was always fascinating to me as like a 20 year old the cbot was basically servers by the time i had entered the market and uh the fondness with which the traders would talk about the floor it was it was always like damn i sort of wish i had that experience yeah but um yeah no chicago shout out chicago huge fan of chicago city my city underrated city in the country i would say by far i mean at least that i've traveled to and

i can't actually coming from me i'm not the most well-traveled american but uh in my opinion chicago has a very very special place we'll take the first place title as long as you're giving it to us no asterisks we'll take it yeah i would actually even consider like myself i'm like i'm like you said us i'm like yeah i'm a part of that us yeah chicago is uh it's philly philly than chicago it is very philly there's some similarities there for sure yeah very uh under under underdog blue collar says yeah if you replace a philly cheesesteak with a big deep dish slice we're basically the same exactly heavy heavy meals load up on carbs cold winters you know actually philly winter chicago winter shits on the philly winter i do not miss the winters at all yeah

winters aren't fun but it's the price you pay yeah what's the uh what's the bitcoin scene like in chicago bumping shit coiners that's my reply uh it's good man um i love a lot of people in chicago that do bitcoin stuff i also don't like a lot of people in chicago that do shit coin stuff so the bitcoin scene is dope it's not as big as like new york but there's some cool people out there um but it's heavy shit coin of course um like block is there too garzik and those i think garzik doesn't work in chicago but the other co-founder does so i don't know like there's a lot of people that i don't have you know aligned visions with so meetups sometimes get crowded with like ico pitches but it is what it is yeah that's the good thing about bitcoin and lightning in

particular is that you find a lot of the people that you mesh with the most on the internet so what's the what's the uh team at zap like like who's who's helping you out yeah so uh i'm a busy guy nowadays so i've been trying to bring on really talented people way better than me to kind of carry out this vision um so there's tom who works and manages the desktop application with me uh there's auto who uh does ios stuff and we collab on that and then ole uh helps take a lot of my like brainchild ideas where i look at the protocol and like this should exist and we collab on how that should look visually and so the four of us just like hang out online i've never met any of them in person not yet no they're all contributors that were active and i was very

impressed with their work and you know get to know them over slack and google hangouts um and i'm happy we even were funding someone who is contributing to bitcoin core for a little bit ben woosley okay uh so yeah i mean zap to me is just a vehicle for me and my family to give back to bitcoin a little bit and right now we like to exercise that through lightning as we see that's where we can make the biggest impact but uh yeah that's just we're just kind of happy to be funding smart people to contribute to to bitcoin in general yeah and you're building an ios app too right yeah yeah how's that been because apple's been particularly uh uh steadfast and not letting cryptocurrency apps uh especially that handle money transmission yeah no store no issue so far

so i know that lightning is not exposed to these uh money transmitter laws okay so we're safe there and uh i mean right now we're on test flight but uh i don't there are already lightning apps on the app store no issues so far okay so um the eclair well was the only one i think yeah there's like a few that tried to build on lnd but so it clears a little different than lnd what lnd ios app would look like because lnd would allow you to send and receive with a node on the phone so eclair doesn't let you receive this whole idea of like watch towers and lalu and the lightning labs team which are super talented shout out to them are trying to uh implement not trying pretty doing a damn good job at implementing their new light client idea which is they call

neutrino so all of that would go into a lnd ios app so they'll have one zap will have one and uh it's a bit more ambitious and packages more features uh than the clear one so it's just taking a little bit longer but uh it's coming what are uh what are the enhanced features uh just being able to receive first of all uh and this whole watchtower idea so the idea that you can outsource the responsibility of chain watching so that no one can breach and cheat you uh in a way that doesn't compromise your uh trust in anyone or privacy or anything like that uh and then this neutrino idea so this idea that i'm not responsible of storing tons of data to keep myself safe and that i can fetch filters and do what i want with them

yeah matt odell was explaining neutrino to me it's something between like an spv wild and a full node or yeah improvement on spv it's supposed to be a replacement for spv that's its intention is that like yeah it's supposed to be a replacement the current spv what was it like bit 37 i think off top my head uh was poor and uh neutrino increases privacy there's been some pushback that it's not perfect for privacy i don't think that it was pitched that way but it's definitely an improvement uh and then it also flips the script a little bit so not to get too technical but uh the full nodes are now serving the filters to the client and what's cool about that is that the client can then have the filters locally and do whatever

they want so the first implementation would be to make lightning work on my iphone but just in general is that if i have this data locally then any smart contract capability or advanced multi sig or whatever you want that requires like interacting with the chain watching the chain being able to get blocks that matter to me i have more flexibility now that i'm storing these locally and i'm handling these locally as opposed to like me outsourcing that to the full node and the full node then returning me data right so uh it allows more flexibility for more ambitious projects beyond lightning it should be like implemented widely as bitcoin projects go forward as they use like scripts advanced scripts and then uh privacy and performance improvements

too yeah it's crazy how fast all this shit is happening on lightning dude and like it was like vaporware less than 12 months ago and now we're talking about this complex like making it almost like a consumer viable app not almost but it's on the way the path is clear somewhat clear at least um oh yeah so your path for zap like right now you said you were starting small you just wanted to build an app that you and your friends could use yeah you're getting to the point you're messing with ios uh you're probably gonna launch in the app like yeah when when you guys gonna launch and you said you can't talk about every announcement that you have but what uh what can you tell us um so my answer for the launch stuff has just always been whenever it's

ready. And I know that sucks, but, uh, not only is that the truth, but it's also responsible to the people that are working on this, uh, every single day at the protocol level. You don't want to, um, you know, give falsified dates and have the community expecting. So it'll be ready when it's ready uh in the if you zoom out far enough in the context of things uh it could take tomorrow or it could take another year and that'd be plenty fast you know what i'm trying to say so we'll be ready when it's ready uh as far as other stuff we'll be launching and coming out with plenty of zap cool zap stuff uh and then i have some other projects that aren't necessarily tied to anything anyone knows publicly but uh more of my background in like trading and

finance and stuff like that uh we've been doing a lot of work on that end because i think that a lot of the work done up to date is really poor so that will all be coming to light when i'm allowed to talk about it i got a big mouth and i got a microphone i gotta be careful but uh but yeah work is being done you can quote me on that excited to see what you what you got dropping yeah yeah yeah yeah um that sounds dope i'm actually very excited because you're right like the trading and exchange aspect up to this point uh has been pretty slapdick yeah it's all bad and like hypothecation um not the what did what'd you try and re-hypothecation yeah hypothecation meaning like the uh lending and loaning of bitcoin is really important

and uh so i've been actually involved in that for a while i know silbert just pumped an article and they're doing a great job by the way um but he pumped an article which everyone was like yeah this is dope but that's been going on for a little while now um onboarding some institutions into bitcoin through that avenue so we've been doing some of that and uh yeah it'll come to light soon yeah no there's uh there are a few companies like i don't know if this is exactly what you're just mentioning but companies like unchained and block five that allow people to use bitcoin as collateral take out loans like those are very useful applications yeah there's also just the general use case of i'm a trading firm and i want the asset and i'm willing to pay

10 annually five percent annually depending on the size whatever it is to get my hands on a lot and i don't want to enter that lot through alongside so i don't want to borrow cash and then buy it because then i've entered a trade yeah and i don't want to have to manage around that trade i just want to enter the asset itself and these are hft firms quant firms these type of guys that are looking to take trades they've built for other markets and deployed into this new space the issue is that all the exchanges are such a joke that they can't at scale operate right like they're not at a bats level they're not at a flash boys level yet don't even get the sun is setting i don't know how much time we have don't get me started but uh yeah i mean seriously like

let's talk about that like so there is a divergence between traditional finance trading in particular and oh i don't crypto divergence is putting it politely like yes there's a there's a yeah a miles wide cavern between the two yes let me like is do you see bitcoin getting close to traditional trading anytime soon or yes because the demand is so high like the best use case of bitcoin right now is it's treated as an asset class as a commodity like as a safe haven uh as a different place to store your wealth and to speculate on the economy and markets at whole um lightning and all that stuff will get there i'm not excluding any other use cases but the one that exists today and that is in high demand in production today today you

know that's still presidente barstool that's how it says today uh that is the use case and a lot of these firms a lot of these portfolio managers uh large institutions they want in and and that's in production and we can make that happen so there just needs to be kind of like a clean sweep of infrastructure the trading stuff that we have today the fact so a little divergence was a very polite way to put it for you let me rephrase it in a more realistic way whenever anyone wants to make a trade they can't when everyone puts a stop position it doesn't get triggered like the fact that you can trade when books are thin and there's no volume and if you just wake up and you're like i'm tired i'm gonna 50x on some exchange you can but if there's a news event or you know the dow

starts to crash and you would like to reposition your exposure to bitcoin and everyone wants to get in a trade when you should want to trade when everyone's trading you can't so the servers are usually down whatever they all suck so um and i'm being really harsh on them they're they should be well listen like you should expect the best right but we're coming from carpellus right that was like huge step up huge step ups right you should always strive for yeah let me sprinkle i'll package the cupcake with a ton of disses and then i'll sprinkle the little frosting with some compliments i mean i'm ready for some frosting yeah they did a good job um bitmex has brought in a ton of liquidity it's everyone's go-to bitfinex is is fine right like there's nothing

catastrophically wrong like they're not insolvent or anything but yeah if you want institutional traders if you want these high frequency guys to port their trades over if you want real liquid liquidity if you want this to be treated as a real asset class you have you can't have no js exchanges you gotta have real infrastructure these exchanges live in the cloud too they're like hosted aws and stuff it's just like um it's time to step up a little bit if we get an etf i know don wilson is a chicago trader uh drw they're coming out with air sacks as an exchange backed will be good and we'll start to see a wave of real products being launched on real exchanges and hopefully put to bed not to say that these exchanges should go die but it's just time to

grow up a little bit and someone needs to bring that presence to the space yeah you have traditional trading firms uh moving their locations as close to the new york stock exchanges as possible so their fiber optic fiber optic uh cables can get their trades to the exchange as quickly as possible while we have uh crypto exchanges sending trades via node.js yeah over some shitty browser it's it's ridiculous bullshit the best traders in crypto today are directional traders or speculators and sometimes those are always the best traders sometimes the best trade to make is no trade and huddling bitcoin right that's the best trade i've ever made is not selling any bitcoin not trading it at all but come on like the best ones are doing technical analysis and directionally

trading and there's nothing against them but the whole trading industry went through a gigantic shift when things went digital and when hft got introduced and that's just missing in bitcoin so it will come and it will be a giant shift and a wake-up call for everyone hopefully soon how do you think it changes the market structure um well more efficient more obviously more liquidity yeah faster price discovery yeah i mean these like giant volatile swings well let's step back there faster price discovery what would you say is slow about price discovery right now uh i just think the market's generally inefficient moving bitcoin is slow and inefficient the people trading the market there aren't a lot comparatively yeah um filling orders

is tough i i had someone uh make whispers that they needed help filling a 50 000 bitcoin buy how the fuck am i supposed to broker that who's gonna fill that seriously come on right like books aren't thick enough getting bitcoin in and out is tough like liquid will help i think lightning will be a part of exchanges at some point um and there's just a general maturity of can we move this asset faster can we get more people involved and get these books more filled can people market make reliably with this thing there's just a lot of missing pieces that results in like someone wakes up and wants to sell 50 bitcoin and we drop 10 it's just like okay like will will just range between like six thousand and seven thousand depending on if someone needs

to offload a hundred lot it's just absolutely absurd um which is also okay i keep i'm being very pessimistic i'm not meaning to uh bitcoin's not even 10 years old yet that's what i was about to say it's like right for it being this young it's like very impressive very impressive i'm i'm being stern on it because if you look at it through a lens of other asset classes we just have lots of work to do i guess you know like pedal to the metal um we should be forward thinking always you don't want to ever pat your back back too much right so um but yeah i mean come on bitcoin not only is not only 10 not even 10 years old but it also has no ceo and no marketing team all of this stuff is 100 organic uh so yeah i mean bitcoin is one of the most fascinating things

that's ever existed so no knock on bitcoin of course but yeah um so that being said like it was fun being on the front lines of the fork wars last year with you on crypto twitter it's pretty cheesy to say but somewhat true like oh you were you were a lot more vocal last summer than you had you're you've been you've uh quiet a little bit quiet on on uh yeah social media yeah i used i used to really get into it with some folks yeah um i'm not on purpose that i've been quiet uh just like i don't know got things to do and i don't say anything unless i feel like i need to no yeah and i wasn't trying to marty's making fun of my twitter activity wasn't trying to call you out for twitter what i'm saying is like maybe like i'm just assuming there's an assumption

like do you think it's at a point where like bitcoin like it's it's like okay like where it is like i'm trying to get to like a state of the union question like where are you like where bitcoin is right now at the protocol level what's going on with lightning is extremely exciting like uh as opposed to this time last year which is pre-fork post-fork pre-segwit post-fork pre-segwit around this time last year uh are you more optimistic less optimistic oh more come on i'm bullish i'm bullish but uh well with a long-term view whether what it's going to be tomorrow god knows but uh i think the general change for me is today there's more to do than there is to say like that in august of 2017 there was more to say than there was to do i really like that yeah

that's how i would put it it's like today i wake up and there's lightning progress to be made um We need to figure out how this asset is going to mature and marry itself to the traditional finance infrastructure that exists. I got to talk to the guys at CBOE, at the CME. I got to talk to these firms, talk to them about their interests, what they don't know about Bitcoin, what they need to know, what we need to build, all of that stuff. And there's just a lot more to do and to work on than to say. Back during the UASF, what was really important is to educate, is to stand strong on your

value propositions what you believed in uh and it was less about like building a zap feature and more about making sure that the asset i signed up for uh didn't crumble and it was that's why we called it a war is it was that serious right but nowadays i don't see any real threats where anyone's voice is necessarily needed in fact crypto twitter is probably too noisy nowadays and it is helpful yeah so i've been trying to tweet less like i mean i don't know like it is what it is but i would say that for me personally that's the difference there's just more to do nowadays if someone tries to pull anything stupid don't you'd be afraid i'm gonna get the megaphone and i'll be shouting again no problem you heard it here first jack's ready to

grab his uh grab his bitcoin rifle whatever you'll say gets the front lines no but it is uh i would agree and it's actually funny how this period of boringness i would label it as is coinciding with like a very stable price like we've been pretty stable for the last month at least yeah encrypted twitter's been dying uh it's beginning you have like bitcoin maximalist turning on each other it's like all right this is boring i'm tuning out yeah it's just market cycles right it's any market anything really i mean there's a hype cycle people get excited everything you say should be quoted everything you do should be framed and then there's a time where market goes down and it's the direct opposite and that's just like human psychology markets act uh if bitcoin went up

into the right five bucks every day for the next 20 years i mean you know that doesn't exist that's not how markets work that's how people work so uh it's just it's not a surprise it is what it is yeah it is what it is um what else we could riff on like are you like how do you see bitcoin changing the world and let's get into that let's get heady yeah um you're so passionate about it you have to you have to believe you're changing the world in some way right it's one of those questions where you're just scared to answer because you know that it's not gonna like fulfill as much as you want like who's your favorite rapper you like oh come on you listen to rap you gotta have a favorite one you're like yeah but um i think that bitcoin and its censorship

resistant property and the value proposition that that offers to society is most important to me and that answer sucks because it's so high level and bland that like i might as well copy and paste that from some google quote machine but seriously i mean uh i think the potential it has to be a trillion dollar asset in a uncorrelated safe haven sense um and could back an economy uh and be a world reserve currency is tremendous and what pegs from that is yet to be seen you know like can we treated as a unit of exchange too with lightning derivative products etf you know are people going to speculate on it are people going to rush to it in a crash are people going to flee from it in a crash but that characteristic is the censorship resistant one and the fact that it is decentralized

enough where you don't require trust on anyone is the property um that gives it all its upside and it's excitement so yeah it's gonna be so do you do you follow like the view of like the sovereign individual uh type future have you read that no oh you don't have to get into that sure yeah because well the sovereign individual view is like uh things are gonna get so we were born at an inflection point where we have the internet and bitcoin and moving forward like especially in the next hundred years in particular uh this book talks about like 500 year super cycles and we're at the beginning of another one uh the first hundred years of these super cycles are pretty chaotic and so like technologies like bitcoin that are very privacy and sovereignty

enabling and protecting will sort of cause society to be a bit chaotic. Like for a little dissolved nation states, there will be chaos. People that have access to these, to Bitcoin basically, and these type of tools will have a much better head start than the rest of society. Sure. to get heavy here yeah i mean i don't i guess believe in the idea that like bitcoin is going to well let me rephrase that i don't think i'll be alive for the day where like the dollar doesn't

exist right and this these type of ideas i would concur really yeah i mean so here's the thing like i also i don't want to say i don't think as ambitiously but i don't like to look at that far when i'm like in the weeds and working on this stuff from more this comes from more my product view so like if i were to sit down at my laptop and be like okay close my eyes zap is going to be this world dominating thing that's going to introduce this world reserve currency that or allow people to pay like and then you sit down and you try and write your first line of code you can't and that's when people like well let's have a meeting let's and then you fill your time with shit that isn't helpful so to me like thinking of the day where no fiat exists and that like we're

just dominated by the sci-fi world i don't think it's like too unrealistic i don't think it's over ambitious i don't necessarily disagree but to me it's like what does the next year look like what's the next 10 years look like or else i'm just kind of like i might as well take an edible and and talk about this try to make proof of stake where i'm saying so i guess like my realistic point of view is i would like to see bitcoin established as a real asset class as a trillion dollar asset class as one that has direct influence on the economy and on markets and then from there we move on i don't think any of that stuff is over ambitious or anything i i don't try and knock it but i really fray from i don't i'm just not a daydreamer um there's

nothing wrong with daydreamers just not me no i appreciate that answer i'm a daydreamer we like to get cosmic here yeah i look see we we work in parallel man yeah that's fine you daydream i'll do but i like what you said you uh they like to think about the short term first like what's going on now in the next year and uh the one tweet i brought up earlier about you saying that you think uh i actually didn't bring it up earlier it's the other tweet i want to bring up is that you think uh the institutions are going to get in before retail you think it makes sense for them oh yeah first it was a good quote yeah i said that at crypto springs i think yes that's what it was yeah yeah so you i mean again this goes back to what we were discussing earlier with narratives

like how to market bitcoin now and i really like that quote because i think that's a good way to to market it like it is speculative like let's get these institutions in and then when it's i mean not that retail has to wait for it to get to this point but it makes more sense for institutions right now than a lot of retail yeah yeah okay so what i meant when i said that on stage was if you think about who's using lightning today these people are not using it out of necessity there's no one that's relying on lightning to solve a problem they're doing it because they are deeply passionate about this asset we have united vision and they're here to help they're here to participate and they are being very helpful but in order for bitcoin to people get

get paid in bitcoin merchants to reliably accept it uh there needs to be a lot of maturing with the asset itself it needs to be more liquid it needs to be more stable uh risk transfers to derivative products and exposure via etf mind you the etf itself has no direct influence on lightning of course but just the general confidence that a retailer has that the sec has blessed this and okay what role should the sec play in our lives i don't know i'm not trying to get all libertarian on people and i don't necessarily agree with the role they play today but my point is if you want to take a realistic approach to retail investors to normal people using this thing holding it on their cell phone saying hey i'll take 10 of my salary in bitcoin because i

know that this game i like to play accepts it and where i buy my video games takes it or whatever yeah i'll take 10 of my salary in bitcoin and then i'll put it on my zap app and i'll go spend it and they'll pay their employees in it that takes a lot of infrastructure and general confidence of a new asset class general stability of the market more efficient price discovery and that's what i meant I meant that the use case of institutional investors, ETFs, derivative products come first before you have a stable new asset form of money that can be held in confidence and used in confidence by retail investors and such, if that makes sense. No, it makes sense. Like that inflow of institutional money will enable the use cases that make it, that provide the utility for retail investors. It makes a lot of sense.

Right. Yeah. I mean like even the, so one of the, I also said on stage, I think I got quoted on that derivative products are going to help decentralize mining and, and to like crypto Twitter or whoever, you can take that and run with that in many directions. Derivative products are going to help decentralize mining. All right. How?

So the, the reason is that mining. I've got a very open mind. i'm very interested yeah for sure i i don't think otherwise so the reason is mining is such a cost intensive business you're risking a ton of capital up front to churn out an asset that then you sell at market and pay off uh your expenses now we're dealing with an asset that's extremely volatile if i wanted if i was a year ago in october i'm turning out a6 i'm ready to mine and i'm mining to reproduce an asset or produce an asset that is seventeen thousand dollars and a year later it's six thousand that's a serious like bitmain has such a one of the reasons bitmain has such

a strong hold on this market is whoever's first can bear hug and dominate right whoever has bigger pockets has a serious advantage too big of an advantage because there's no way to transfer risk there's no way to lock in price if what i can do is i can get on the short side of the cme future product and say i'm going to lock in myself at 17 or whatever if i'm building the next six months assuming that bitcoin is going to be in the 6500 range i'm going to lock that in off shell get in settle in cash and then that way if bitcoin goes to 50 000 i'm not necessarily exposed to that upside. But if it goes to $1,000, I'm not exposed to the downside. And now all of a sudden, being a miner, you're not a speculator, you're not a trader, and your actual business model is building

ASICs and producing this asset in an efficient way. And so a lot of the risk you can mitigate and transfer to professional speculators. And this idea of risk transfer, this applies to farmers who, wheat and corn, this is the same idea. A lot of these asset classes, derivative products are extremely helpful so one of the direct ways is a ton of more miners are coming online and if we can get liquid derivative products they can lock in prices business models become really cut clear in excel hey we offloaded this amount into future to hedge you know we can build out to this cost and now you can get back to your business of building fucking asics or whatever it is and you don't have to be such a speculator and hope that you're mining during a

bull run or else you out of business and one survives that's bitman you know i mean talk about a fucking positive externality holy shit i never even put that together but that makes a hundred percent sense like sweet i'm glad it enables more decentralized a more decentralized mining landscape by allowing smaller miners to hedge their pets which right you want to transfer risk yeah you don't as a miner you don't want to be exposed to those two together how come i've never heard that is that talked about i'm not tweeting man that's why but it's something as simple as like that simple as that derivative products help guys it's okay we're on the same team yeah wall street's not against us wow i can't believe i've never put that together but it makes

it makes a whole lot of sense and that's actually when you couple that with what matt corral talks about or there's actually my uh economies of this scale in the mining industry in particular because yes you may have the capital to buy enough miners to eat up 200 megawatts but you're not going to be able to find 200 megawatts in one geographic location very rarely you'll be able to do that uh so something like that where on top of the economies at this scale of not being able to find a large amount of energy in one location giving smaller miners a weapon which they can use as sort of some leverage against the BitMains of the world is incredible. Right, yeah.

I mean, I'm not pitching everyone to go be a miner and short sell the CME future. It's obviously more difficult than that. But yeah, the risk transfer idea is a common one. And again, the derivative product is a separate product. It's not Bitcoin. It is designed to fulfill certain value propositions. One of those is to give you exposure to the asset through a different avenue. And there's a use case right there that can be applied today.

and i think you know uh hash rate has been going up and to the right very fast more miners are coming on mining this is going to be competitive and uh i think that now that we have a more liquid derivatives market and it'll only get more liquid uh is just a very positive thing that will have direct influence on the industry almost immediately yeah mining something i've been getting more and more into the last six months in particular and it's a fascinating cutthroat industry yeah it's crazy how fast it moves i've never got too deep into it um but i'm glad that it's moving fast and in the right direction it seems fingers crossed uh the hash rate that's coming online and in the fall of the great bitmain has been fun to watch and i'm happy

yeah we actually had a it's a news item for you freaks out there we had a downward difficulty adjustment this week we uh for the first time since july and then before july was last november or august uh or no november uh after the four can't go up into the right forever no that's uh yeah the downward difficulty adjustments are are rare few and far between up to this point um it was interesting to see one this week just as a side note um all right we're about an hour and 15 in you got a steak dinner to get to tonight steak dinner i got my girlfriend out in new york city yeah what uh is there any pressing topics you want to get on like any anything you want anybody to know about zap about lightning in particular what's been going on this

week at chain code uh what the vibe's been like there oh man i don't think i have anything too pressing if there's something pressing that you want to know you can ask the chain code stuff is dope though as long as i have the platform to say it uh they're great john newberry put it together he's great uh i'm a big fan of all they've done for this space i think a lot of it goes unnoticed so shout out to them the residency has been a lot of fun i'm excited to see what these guys build uh come friday so any uh any exciting projects people are working on right now they're all exciting i mean the general excitement is that there are people willing to fly to new york from other countries to learn how to build stuff right like so yeah there's some cool projects

um i won't steal anyone's win i'm sure it'll be all over twitter and stuff and uh we'll be able to follow their github and all that fun stuff but yeah be on the lookout for it um but the general movement of people want to be a part of this and the more our army is growing of people that are willing to build so that's what i'm most excited about hell yeah um no it's been an incredible week the fact that you freaks uh you lightning freaks are willing to come to my apartment and i'm a lightning freak record a podcast is she's a very freaky girl you know that song she's a um super freak yeah super freak uh cocaine is one hell of a drug because how am i thinking of uh is it a young gz no i'm thinking

of like the hip-hop come on oh we talked about this chicago show i'm thinking of uh yeah dude Dude, I'm too young for that. What? You're my age, Elvis. How old are you? 27. Oh, I'm a little younger. A little younger.

24. 24. Yeah, you're my age, dude. You're my age, man. We're the same age. Why can't I think of this right now? I don't know. I'm not ending the podcast on it.

Rick James. There we go. Okay. I'll pretend like I know who you're talking about. Super Freak by Rick James. Got it. That's where we're going to end the podcast on that freak. sorry for that awkward ending good uh check out zap check it out check out zap yeah uh

jack mallers on and i'm butchering your last name is it mallers mallers mallers i said mallers it's my philly accent dude the funniest is uh basketball announcers when i used to play in high school would say mailers so they would say mailers with another nailer well that's that chicago accent for you hey hey how are you uh here there's a matthew here and we're gonna we're gonna play basketball yeah so you were close enough man and this is uh the craziest ending to tales from the crypt we've we've had to date check out uh zap find jack on twitter i'll put his link in the uh in the bio and peace and love freaks dope thanks for having me buddy thanks for coming bro