TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #58: André Neves

Episode Date: February 19, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with André Neves, Co-Founder and Co-CTO of Koala Studio, to discuss everything from BTC/LN adoption via gaming, what it's like to live in the UAE, the Surveillance State, and much more. Follow André on Twitter: www.twitter.com/andreneves Follow Marty on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martybent Check out Koala Studio: koalastud.io Thanks to our sponsors: BlockFi, head over to www.blockfi.com/talesfromthecrypt to see how you can avoid selling your BTC this tax season. Lolli, head over to lolli.com/ref/tftc and download Lolli today so you can begin earning up to 30% cash back in BTC!

Well, hey there, freaks. Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy, Marty Bent. We've got an incredible episode for you today. Sat down with Andre Neves from Koala Studios, and we had a long-ranging conversation over some beers. Did not get as inebriated, this conversation, as I did with Alex Adelman of Lolly. Sorry if I was a little bit too intoxicated by the end of the episode there. Sometimes you get lost in the sauce. It happens. It happens every once in a while. jesus forgives um so i'm asking for forgiveness if i was a little too intoxicated there speaking of getting lost in the sauce don't get lost in the sauce this tax season

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blockfi.com slash talesfromthecrypt to check that out as well. I was mentioning the episode with the CEO of Lolly earlier, and Lolly is actually our second sponsor today. So Lolly is an extension that you download. You go to the extension store, whatever your browser is, and Lolly lets you earn up to 30% back in Bitcoin when you shop online.

They have partnerships with 500-plus merchants, like Overstock, SeatGeek, Priceline, Hotwire, Walmart, CVS, Jet, Best Buy, Gap, Macy's, Hilton, Marriott. The names just keep on rolling. They've worked out these relationships for you to help you get cashback deals in the form of Bitcoin. It's safe and easy. Head over to lolly.com slash ref slash tftc. That's lolly.com slash ref slash tftc. We'll put all these links in the bio of this episode, and I hope you freaks enjoy it. I had a really fun time with Andre, really excited what he's building with Lightning Koala at Koala Studio, and I think you freaks are going to love this conversation.

Enjoy. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. We find ourselves here on a Wednesday night, another night in the relegation studio, a different studio than the studio I recorded with Alex Adelman last night. I had a little tipsy last night, drinking a lot of whiskey. We switched over to beer for tonight. We're drinking some Brooklyn Pilsner. My mother's calling me, Mom.

I'll call you back later. Hope you're listening. And I'm very excited to have this conversation. This is actually a follow-up conversation of an earlier episode of Tales from the Crypt I had with Lightning Koala. I have this co-founder and co-CTO of Koala Studios in the studio with me. I'd like you freaks to meet Andre Neves. Excuse me.

Andre, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, man. Excited to be here. Thanks for coming on, dude. Yeah. So, had a good conversation with Lightning Koala, probably about like when the Chain Code Residence was. When was that?

Late October. Late October. Yeah, so about four months ago, Koala Studios was just an idea, an incepted idea. That's correct. At that point in time, and was it last week? Last week you guys lost your... Last Tuesday. Last Tuesday you launched your first game in Lightning Chess.

I was happy to play and tweet about it. It was very fun. Before we get into the nitty gritty of what's been going on with Koala Studios, let's learn more about you. How the hell did you get here? How the hell did you find Bitcoin? Oh, man. Long story. Let's see. I had a roommate. We'll name him Ben for now. What's up, Ben? And he was an ETH head, right? Let's call him that. He was a dev like myself, a software engineer. And he was really, really interested in Ethereum. This was early 2015.

um his you know i think his best friend is an early maker dao uh team member and so he was preaching to the choir about ease and maker and die and so forth um as an engineer you you figure that you know onboarding into crypto is quite complicated but ethereum one thing i think they did well is you know they abstracted a lot of the blockchain specific things um and they had development tooling and so someone who was brand new to it it just made sense for me to you know essentially check it out and it just made sense it was like EVMs and and I've you know I've worked with lots of containers and virtual machines and so forth and so it was all there I think it took me two weeks to

get a node running and that was early days and and and then it kind of made me a little sad what implementation I think it was guess I don't remember specifically what year is this early 2015 so I don't even think blockchain bloat was an issue but it was just a little complicated at the time yeah and then I went down the rabbit hole you know shout out to the rabbit hole but I went down that rabbit hole and and found Bitcoin and found all the out coins and and took me you know six months seven months to realize that majority of it is is crap um and and bitcoin is the real deal um but there was no lightning right and and so bitcoin

is still really really low level complicated protocol stuff uh so it was a little hard to get into um and then late 2016 um i read about lightning and i said oh this is interesting it's still really early on i remember spinning up a node in testnet um you know in the early like early 2017 mid 2017 um and then it just it just progressed from then on i think lightning specifically opens a lot of doors for engineers into bitcoin because you know bitcoin is pretty complicated yeah yeah so is there anything like in your previous life uh pre bitcoin uh which there should be like a bc equivalent for a pre-bitcoin pb like pre-bitcoin Was there anything like beyond like engineering, anything philosophical or sort of economic philosophy that drove you towards Bitcoin?

Right. So I've always had this little itch in the back of my throat when it comes to libertarian ideology. really just privacy security not necessarily anonymity to that level but privacy security you know not being a product if you will and so it kind of clicked something after I read about it and read the white paper like everyone does and you know realized that it's much bigger than than just a couple people doing some online development it's really really big and then it just it just made sense it clicked onto that that nature the philosophy that i had in the back of my mind and i feel that because of my introduction to bitcoin i'm now much farther along into that time into that you know thought of of preserving your privacy preserving your your

you know yourself against this wave of development that's happening on on the facebooks of the world you know yeah do you think there's a great awakening happening do you think people are starting to realize the need for privacy because i we talked about matt matt marad mamadav and i on rabbit hole recap a couple weeks ago talked about it marad and i sort of agree there's like a bit of apathy out there people right don't give a fuck like there's been so many hacks equifax target facebook you name it yeah your data all kinds of data all the data that you that is near and dear to your heart has probably been taken by hackers somewhere but it seems like nobody cares Do you think that's true or do you think people are waking up?

I think it goes hand in hand with any world change, regardless if it's political or not. If it affects you directly, you will have very strong thoughts and you'll want to change it or you'll want to modify it, whatever it is. If it does not affect you directly, chances are you're not going to give a crap. yeah um so i think you know a couple people have been affected directly and and they're starting to pay attention to where the data is and am i the product for this platform um but i think it's still really early on for us to say that there's a great awakening i think it still needs another you know maybe three bull runs for people to realize that oh okay facebook really is an evil e-corp yeah no it's um that's crazy like the avenues through which like bitcoin can provide

like individual sovereignty like we're talking about our data being used and sold by these corporations these right silos of data that we openly give our web traffic information to on a daily basis myself included um but then it's also providing like financial sovereignty in like places like venezuela so there's i mean it also provides data privacy as well at the blockchain but the probably driving use case there is either to preserve their wealth or convert it to u.s dollars in some some way or fashion and a remittance play um some i don't know where i'm going with is what i'm starting to say maybe people recognize the sort of financial sovereignty provides before the privacy and maybe the financial is a trojan horse to figuring out that you can use

this like maybe uh like using a lightning node to to travel the web like uh web lm right they're talking and you can sort of hold your data there correct people will come to it for sound money maybe i'm just fucking spitballing here yeah i think there's a if you imagine a spectrum where privacy is in one side and user experience is in the other it's it's very clear that um you know the average joe and jane are on the very far end of that spectrum into user experience it seems that users will give up any sort of rights and control of of their data and so on if they can get that experience that they want um and because of that i think that great awakening in relation to privacy will take a little longer until we can bring some of

that user experience into the privacy sector I think it's still very hard to be a private internet citizen you need to have lots of tools you need to have lots of you know experience I feel like the future will require people to be really good internet citizens and that will mean a lot of education and into how that actually works and how to secure your data and be a good a good participant yeah right we uh we've talked about this a few times on this podcast um people are gonna need to sort of go through a learning process uh similar to the way we did when we first got industrialized plumbing and like people didn't know how to shower or like

wash their hands or wash their ass and literally had to learn how to be clean luckily they did because it uh it helped increase life expectancy and overall health and cleanliness of the world but it was a process like people had to learn how to do that and and like that gets the point i'm getting to like will the ux for bitcoin and uh basically taking your wealth into your own hands becoming your own bank uh will ever be as seamless as like opening the bank of america app and i i think maybe not especially if you're talking about handling uh private keys and stuff like that yeah i think key management is very very important it's a problem that i don't know that we have a solution yet yeah yeah um but in general i i tend to think that if you give it

enough time the ux will help and it will get there it's just a matter of will bitcoin become too big to the point or it will become something else it'll go in a different direction uh you know state actors will affect it and and shift it its direction um to the point where it's it's no longer something that developers like myself uh and and others are trying to create experiences on top of um it you know if it goes the way it's it's been going i think you know give it a couple more years and we'll be able to automatically whip up your phone connect it to your home node whatever that is um i read a tweet today i think you retweeted it about putting notes in the ps3s and xboxes every every kid has one of those right right you plug in a node in there and and as long

as it's quote-unquote self-manageable it's not very hard to deal with it's it's very you know low level you just leave it and it just runs for you um that's genius always plugged in always on the internet yeah like no it is genius and i think actually this is a perfect segue and like talking about koala studios and what you're you're talking about like the big topic and marty's bent and on uh this podcast rabbit hole recap in particular has been like gaming as like a killer use case And that actually leads to another point, like gaming, using Lightning Network as sort of a bet and wager and microtransaction layer and the potential to onboard people via the Lightning Network first instead of on-chain first is also enticing. i'm not uh fully abreast to the ux around that um so i guess what we can dive down here is like let's just explain let's dive back into like catch up where we left off with koala four months ago

what's been going on since october uh how why you guys decided to launch now how's it been for the last week and then we'll jump into like cosmic shit about uh about like how gaming can help Bitcoin adoption? Yeah. So it actually all started at the residency. So Koala was a speaker. Jack Mallers was there too. We had people like Alex Bosworth from Lightning Labs. We had Christian Decker from Blockstream, like amazing speakers and some amazing, you know, residents as well. We had the, you know, Pierre was there. I was there. We had people from Bitlum and ZigZag, the decentralized exchanges, you know, just lots of good people. And we kept on coming back to you know the idea of business models how do we create real business models now that we have the

ability to make instantaneous microtransactions you know you think that oh great microtransactions sure what's the use case right show me a use case that provides you that that magnitude increase in terms of user experience or or where's that improvement and one of the things that kept coming back was was gaming and it was you know there's two industries that always lead the pack it's it's porn and it's gaming um and and i think gaming specifically it's it tends to be a younger audience uh they're more you know native to the internet they're more into into the weeds and in these kinds of things um and you know they already have the idea of money a bunch of these games have so wow has you know gold and so forth league of legends we have fortnite and all of these kinds

of games. And so it just kind of made sense for us to do a proof of concept of can we create a business model that is stable, scalable, and so forth using microtransactions inside of the Lightning Network in a game that's familiar, right? So Koala and I started talking. We both speak Portuguese. And so, you know, instantly it kind of just hit it off. We have similar backgrounds. We're both full-stack engineers. He's slightly more on the back end side of things nowadays and I'm more on the front end side of things and so after leaving the residency it was a great experience learned a lot and I think it was four days later Koala reached out and said hey I'm all in in this gaming situation let's let's build it

and and from then on we've been I've been seeing his his face every you know every week sorry sorry to hear that yeah just kidding no qual is great um and and then from then on we just started building uh we we worked out what the plan was what the situation you know what game we're going to tackle and um we chose lightning chess really chess was jack was the one that positioned chess to us uh he's a he's a good chess show i don't even know he's a genius guy when it comes to chess um and you know we just we just went for it we built it uh we used a lot of you Like development, we used a lot of open source packages and so forth. But really, the goal with Koala Studio is twofold.

One is, can we provide the proof of concept for that new business model based on microtransactions? And then two, it's really early days into this, so the expectation that you'll have that people will just join and you'll get revenue simply based on the volume of Lightning Network enthusiasts isn't really there. the real play is the infrastructure play right similarly how you have um you know how do you provide the infrastructure so that users can come into lightning and subsequently developers can build their games into lightning uh you know you have indie game developers who have a hard really hard time monetizing their their games and now there's a really quick entry right soon enough you'll have a call a studio sdk or ldk which we're trying to come up with it's lightning

development kit and you know will it work i guess we'll have to see but that's an easy stream of of revenue that they can easily pipe into and they don't have to worry about securing the funds they don't have to worry about any of that and so yeah it's it's this is kind of where we're headed towards is there any uh other than what you guys are doing and a couple other competitors like satoshi games like is there any other like indie game developers that are into bitcoin like is there a crossover there uh do you think or have you experienced and yeah so we had a couple people reach out to us in telegram a lot of unity and c++ developers uh game developers and coming in with tons of feedback uh one guy specifically uh you know i don't actually remember his name he

he just gave us 20 bullet points about why we're doing something wrong and and you know how we can improve it and you know feedback's great um but but then we realized oh he's an actual unity game developer so his you know his games are very different than lightning chess what do you mean uh what's a unity game developer so unity is like a graphics engine uh so that's how you build you know it's one of the ways you would build a real full-fledged game like a halo or something like a halo or a fortnight of sorts um we we build chess and javascript right so it's you know there's no physics engine for chess yeah it's very different so he's thinking really in the gaming industry and we were really trying to make a proof of concept using games into lightning network

but we got a lot of of people reaching out to us and asking how would they incorporate that into their games and even people you know is this open source can i help i'm a game developer so i think there's some some you know that kind of kind of correlation there that people seem interested but it's like i said it's early days i think that if there's a standard and a de facto sdk that they can easily jump into i think that would kick start you know a revolution that people will jump into lightning network especially because it's it's bitcoin and the bitcoin brand is so strong everyone knows bitcoin so if you can all of a sudden earn bitcoin just by you know a couple lines of code into your already built game it's win-win situation

right and then again because i was actually tweeting about this like right before you got here um with jonathan libov shout out jonathan um like gaming is going to be the trojan horse to get bitcoin in the hands of like kids so imagine you know the opportunity to win v bucks or satoshi's like as soon as the kids realize that like bitcoin has uh an upward valuation potential unlike v bucks like they're it's going to be a no no brainer for them and like the collision of the gaming world which is one of the fastest growing industries in the world and bitcoin just seems so natural and almost almost like it's destiny uh at this point especially with lightning enabling all this stuff right so to your point earlier i think um you know

i have a nephew uh who's oh man i'm gonna get his age wrong i don't know really young four or five I actually don't know. It's okay. It happens. I'm an uncle too. He is, it's hard to explain, born into the internet. There's no version of the world without it. And using a smartphone was second, it was just part of his being, right?

He just knew how to swipe. He knew what to click. It was just natural. Now you're telling me that five years from now, newborns, five years later, won't be having this notion won't have the notion that money just flows right it's where you're saying bitcoin it's there's no barrier so let's say you make some money somewhere on bitcoin or you have some money it's it's no longer vbucks that's only used in that platform it's you can get it out and you can use it somewhere else you can you can eventually pay your coffee with it you can buy

some food you can so it there's no barriers between these platforms it's just it's in in the ether that doesn't sound good it's just around us right it'll just be this this network that's around similarly to the internet right and it's it's fascinating because we're like screaming like how are people going to adopt it how are people are adopted but once like with game again coming back to gaming like thinking about so let's talk about this like you were at bit devs and gave a presentation on monday night you're talking about the feedback you've gotten like the number one uh request is being able to watch games live and bet on them so like adding that aspect to gaming alone which doesn't exist now does it i mean we're twitch but it's

slightly different right yeah yeah well even with twitch you can you can send lightning uh invoices in twitch okay or just hold up a qr code on your screen right right right yeah it definitely opens uh the capabilities of interactions you know if you can essentially if you can spectate a game let's let's use lightning chest as an example let's assume jack is playing against marty and we can add some sort of customization personalization to the users then all of a sudden we have people from all over the world betting on you the outcome of this game or even betting on where jack will move the next piece right you can go as granular as that or as big as who's gonna win this game that's for the d gens it's true degenerate prop bet

and and gaming is just growing out of you know esports leading the pack of course you know we have these massive massive uh you know stadiums that are filled with people just watching other people play games and so blows my mind and and it's going to be a would you ever go to one of those i think i would to check it out you know i don't you're not going to judge a book by its cover yeah i i want to see it i want to i want to feel it i feel like it's more of an experience rather than just watching a game um it's kind of you know not to hate but i'm not a huge baseball fan but people go to baseball games to to get drunk right they they enjoy the company of people and and all of a sudden you're watching the game too but it's it's really the experience that you're

that you're looking for guilty um so you know bringing back to gaming it's you know 2020 there are studies that say you know year over year it continues to grow at an exorbitant you know percentages and at 2020 they're they're saying it's going to be a 125 billion dollar industry growing at 14 year after year you know 10 10 more years what is that going to be like 250 500 billion dollars so that's becoming one of the biggest industries in the world and you know can we carve a little space for lightning network to intrude to that industry right and i feel like it could be like throwing jet fuel on the fire though like with all the possibilities again so like we were talking uh last week about uh the ability like these rpg

games to as a spectator buy like zombies to send that the shooter or buy him lives or health or freeze him in in midair for like five seconds like the interaction is just going to be like i can see trolls hopping online just fucking with players like yeah spite i think it's it's similar to how, you know, you have services that bring these, you know, you think these celebrities are untouchable, right? They have these lives and it's great. And then you get a little glimpse into their inner lives, even if they're faking it in some sort of Instagram or Facebook lives or Snapchats. And so it's that interaction that, you know, real interaction between the two people. So if you can see you're the best gamer in the world and he's playing this

game and you can actually interact with him through a micro transaction you can say hey here's some lives you know you keep going man we love you or or you suck i'm gonna i'm gonna give you some you know whatever it is and so there's all of these new you know game theoretical scenarios that you have to that you can create and and then the interaction makes it personal and people really get into it right i mean you see like the uh the beginnings of this with like youtube super chat right i remember that like fans of particular youtube channels just like literally paying youtubers to read their comment um fuck youtube you should implement lightning network cut all those fees out you know that would be easier that way too like that's something you

can implement it too um but the it feels like again like we talk about podcasting and how it's like really early early uh early days for podcasting in general and then youtube youtube's probably a little bit more established but creating your own personality your own brand and being able to monetize that um it seems like people are starting to figure this out and And basically what you have to do is break down the barriers. And if you're able to set up a seamless onboarding UX for, like, the Lightning Network, which I think you guys have done, actually. So we'll get to that in a couple seconds here. But I think it's just going to be, like, a no-brainer.

So that's what we were talking about last night with Alex. Even, like, we were talking about retailers and how they're trying to compete with Amazon. Like, it's going to get to a point when Lightning is fleshed out, if it does become as successful as we think it could become. and is working seamlessly like it is going to be irresponsible as a business not to utilize it especially in a payments layer yeah two two points there one is uh is you know the twitter uh you know the lightning torch and all of that and jack getting in the middle of it um people were discussing you know oh they're going to add lightning to to you know twitter or and or square cash and people are and because he said it's it's a matter of of when rather than if um

So to that point, it's it's really early. So, you know, you still have routing issues. You still have capacity issues. When when it's all fleshed out, you know, two years down the line and we don't have any of these bugs and issues in the Lightning Network, it's the same way that an investment advisor would tell the PM and say, hey, it's probably not a bad idea for you to invest one percent in Bitcoin because it's an asymmetrical risk. and you know there's countless studies that if you if you just get some exposure to it so it will be it's what you're saying it would be a bad move for an investment advisor or for game developers or application developers to not use bitcoin and lightning network yeah it's getting to a point where it's riskier not to have a little skin in the game than it is to um which is interesting like the i don't know i think i think the decade hit bitcoin hitting a decade old was a big mile marker i think that's just psychologically like huge in people's minds yeah it's like breaking the the 20k or the 10ks or 5ks and and prices and well in that same vein too i'm like

also a big believer like biggest or bitcoin's biggest price hurdle is going from zero to one dollar everything above that is like it's smooth it's just waiting right right right so yeah it's crazy i fucking love this shit um but yeah let's talk about your onboarding process onboard so like Hypothetically, especially with your voucher program, somebody could get onboarded to Lightning and Bitcoin via Koala Studios. Absolutely. So I'll describe my UX experience.

So I got the email last Tuesday when you guys launched Lightning Chess, and I was literally set up with an account in five minutes. Like, I wrote down my... So what you do is you hit create account, and you get a key, basically similar to a Bitcoin private key, but this key gives you access to your Koala Studios account. You write it down.

I wrote it down on pen and paper like a freak. Probably could have just copied and pasted it. So that took me like two minutes. Should have taken me like two seconds. And then, yeah, I hit next. There was a voucher code in the email, so I used that. Got 100 Satoshis. And then I played Jack Mallers in chess right away.

Beat his ass. Sure. And then I won a little bit. So hypothetically, if you get on with a voucher at 100 Satoshis, you could maneuver your way to maybe 1,000 Satoshis. Yeah, so the onboarding was something that we paid a lot of attention to. So Koala and I come from a background in application development and me primarily on the front end. And so I'm very used to, you know, how do we create a seamless, you know, frictionless onboarding to this brand new and complicated system? And so we wanted to make it very easy.

We wanted to make it seamless. And the easiest way is, you know, very familiar to people is this private key scenario. So what we do is, you know, in the server we create a key and we hash that key and we show that to you. So what you have is essentially a recovery key that allows you to recover your funds from your account. If you lose that, we actually can't help you. Your funds are stuck until you're able to prove it, and there's really no way to prove it. So really, you get these vouchers,

you enter them into Koala Studio after onboarding, and right off the bat, you're able to play. But one thing that we wanted to do is make sure that we're not just limiting the Lightning Network enthusiasts to use the platform. We want to make sure that everyone could use it. So Lightning Chess is entirely free. You can actually go, create an account.

you don't need to fund it you don't need satoshis you can play chess against whoever and your friends and so forth but if you want to use the premium features that's where the monetize monetization comes in and that's when you need this the satoshis um yeah so it's it's pretty pretty smooth we've gotten a lot of feedback and people seem to like it a lot yeah and then it's crazy how all these things are coming together too because i eventually did it end up topping up my account with some of my own satoshis and i had my casa node extension in the browser and literally got the, like, said I want to send 10,000 stoshies, put that in, I got an invoice request from you guys,

hit my CASA extension, boom, 10 seconds. Not even, probably less than five seconds. Yeah, and if the infrastructure is there, technically there shouldn't be any routing issues, there shouldn't be any capacity issues. So, you know, you had a perfect experience because your node was already pre-connected to, you know, to good channels um the assumption is down the line everyone will always be really connected to

all channels yeah um i want to jump into the future koala studios but i also want to talk about chain codes residency more we can we can talk about it all we got plenty of time let's go back to the residency and like sure what the hell like so we've been talking pretty high level about how you're um like implementing lightning but like what about lightning specifically as like a is like what is it a messaging layer a messaging system is that what it's would be defined as or we have a what is like the gossip network yeah the gossip network that's what i'm thinking of so like as a gossip never like like because there's a lot of lightning fud out there too but like as a solution uh as a second layer solution like what excites you most about it like

as a developer i think and was this talk to you like chain codes residency or sure uh so a little bit of of the residency we we were there for a full week with the mentors and we had the full week to learn throughout the mornings and the days and then in the afternoons we would build something so i built a task board for questions actually which i'm aiming to open source because Qualys 2D took all of my time and I didn't get to finish it. But essentially, I think lightning, I think it validates the ideas behind easy, instantaneous value transfer on the internet. I think it really, for the first time, we see a system that actually lives up to what it's meant to be. We think of Bitcoin that way, but there's all the criticisms for Bitcoin. It's slow,

it's x transactions per second and so forth and i think lightning actually puts all of the ifs and buts to question and and it lives up to that dream so specifically on the protocol um you know i'm not a protocol developer so i don't know that i would know all the specifics of it but it's a it's a it's a gossip network uh a large part of it is the gossip network that you know nodes talk to each other and it's more or less fully automated you you still need to uh we're still creating the abstractions on top of the nodes so that users actually don't need to manage channel funds and incoming capacity and so forth but it's it's you know something that excites me is you know it's really those models it's how can you use microtransactions it's a brand new scenario

that's never been available and it's it's bringing the simult uh the instant instantaneity of you know the information impressive that was an impressive pronunciation instantaneity right that's right yeah um so it it just it just lives up to the dream honestly and and ever since the very beginnings of it when i spun up my testnet node it just worked that was like it clicked and and all of a sudden i said okay this is real it works i'm trans transacting you know testnet bitcoin with people in china and japan and so forth um i remember when i received my first you know someone random person paid my testnet invoice uh and all of a sudden i said oh this is great i don't even know where it came from but but i got paid you know so it it really excites me that it's

it's real yeah yeah no i'm talking about like testnets like people have been using the testnet to test the uh satellite api and that dude right eastern europe who's just sending messages at grubles was that it was like receiving them and and dissect them like nobody knows where that dudes from could have been adam back at like blockchain headquarters making a story up but there's a someone did a blog on on the satellite right they started putting a bunch of yeah it's daily journal yeah daily journals yeah and then the torch uh from samson mal he yeah he said oh the next person needs to send me a torch through the satellite and you know it's it's it's fascinating i i can't wait until it's fully fledged and everyone has nodes and it's just

going to be like the internet value and wealth will just be transferred instantaneously anywhere you want so what uh exactly needs to happen uh in regards to lightning network development to get it to a point where it is fully fleshed out is there is the roadmap sort of again fleshed out is there any unknowns that that we sort of need to identify and and fix or is it like a seven stage uh transition to proof of stake that he's doing or is it a little bit more cut and dry so i think it's a little more complicated because it's a decentralized you know network built on top of another decentralized network so as much as there are bigger players that are trying to you know work the protocols and make sure that we're following the best practices you know we

have companies like blockstream we have lightning labs we have async we have you know many others that are trying to drive that protocol development. I think it's really early days, and so for it to reach this stage that we're talking about, a lot of abstractions need to be introduced. It's what I was saying earlier. The average Joe doesn't want to know anything about this. He doesn't want to manage his channels.

He doesn't want to know. He just wants to use it. Yeah, I'm going to raise my hand here. I suck at managing my channels. Yeah. I fucked it up, set up a bunch of autopilot channels, and i got the torch and had to like fucking close down on my autopilot channels like send bitcoin to my node up and other channels to get it working and that's because i'm an ignorant ignorant rube

like and and then you think about it right if if you could so um you can't yet increase your channel capacities right there's this new um availability called splicing which will be introduced in in 1.1 and splicing uh essentially allows you to increase or decrease your channel capacity one way or another um without having to do a closing transaction so if i have a channel with you for x numbers of switches and i want to you know increase that channel i can't do that we need to close the channel so means wait 10 minutes or whatever block time for bitcoin to to you know that transaction to go on chain and then we need to create a new funding transaction to go on chain so it's still really early um but it you know once it's once it's abstracted um you know alex

Bosworth is very vocal on Twitter about how to manage his channels and he actually did a really good presentation on the Chinko residency about it but it's it's a full-time job it's still a full-time job you gotta like send satoshis between channels like to show that you're uh you're a good you're a good node you're a good node good routing node yeah yeah he he definitely explained to us that uh if you're trying to be a routing node then it's a full-time job you need to be a full full-time routing node and usually people would have two nodes because you definitely need incoming capacity so you can use your second node to create incoming liquidity for you and then once that liquidity is gone you would create a new channel back to the other node and it it's a lot of work

and i think autopilot is getting there but it's again early stages for it to say that it's you know anyone could do it yeah but how how rapid is the development compared to like the protocol level of bitcoin the development of the protocol oh compared to bitcoin development yeah so bitcoin development is definitely uh to the outside world it's much slower and i think it should be i think it has to it should be something that's really hard to change uh if it was easy to change i don't think it would have lived 10 years you know to this date i tend to agree sorry i said i tend to agree yeah yeah yeah i think it's it's what people say it's not a bug it's a feature right it's that situation and there's a lot of criticism on that but i i think if if it can become the word that

everyone uses is ossified if it can become ossified in the future i think it would be great and it's what you want i mean if we're coming to it from an economic sound money perspective if it is going to be a store of value you want to know that it's not going to change yeah you want to have that certainty in your mind like hey this is it's going to produce blocks roughly every 10 minutes in this fashion maybe in the future we'll use schnorr signatures or something like that but certain point in time it's like all right this is it this is all we need yeah i think the improvements need to be worth it right and and to be worth it it needs to be worth to the greater population using bitcoin which just grows day after day and so it's it's hard to you know see

you know the block size discussion that's arising twitter now about decreasing it that's a whole other thing that put me out of my misery i'm done we just finished the other fight against you know big blockers now we want to go lower blockers small blockers the crabs in a fucking bucket right now dude nobody can fucking chill out they're always bored as fuck it's the world of bitcoin it's it's always fighting um but in terms of lightning development i think back to the point it's it's really can we create the abstractions to create the user experience that that will drive the adoption i think sdks is one way i think better lightning wallets is another um i think better work in creating non-custodial um sorry in a way to create

non-custodial so you you're you're essentially you're you run your own nodes um if we can abstract the difficulties of it so that like we were saying put it on a ps4 put it on an xbox and then your phone just connects to it automatically right there's definitely a future there where there's a company who will sell you bitcoin slash lightning network nodes that you just put you know one or two nodes in your house and your phone and all your devices automatically connect to it and there's some little password exchange there and all of a sudden your money is just available everywhere you want um so really it's it's the same way bitcoin is layer one we have lightning layer two i don't know what other layers will exist uh and if there

don't even be layers or if it's just applications or abstractions that will you know top it off so that the average person on the street will be able to use it yeah now it's another thing i'm fascinated by and i think you can definitely provide more color on is like ethereum like you said you got into it because it was easy to develop on and sort of drew you as a developer in that aspect do you think lightning provides the same sort of experience for developers and opens the opportunity for like i guess the question i'm trying to get at is do you think lightning maturing will provide a tipping point of developer interest that has previously not existed in bitcoin per se yeah i want to say that it's it's almost better um to a certain extent i

think if you have you know we we're grateful that we have great protocol developers building the great clients so we have awesome people building lnd we have awesome people building c lightning and you know specifically me i i'm more familiar with lnd and they provide all of the APIs that you would expect on a modern, you know, application stack. So there's a RESTful API and they're even using gRPCs, which essentially allows you to connect to any sort of, you know, language, if you will. So they already abstracted a lot for us. And so as, you know, any application developer, modern application developer, you know, writing any sort of React or Node or whatever can easily integrate with a Lightning Node because they're using the, you know, de facto standards

for modern applications. Whereas Bitcoin is a little bit more lower level and requires you to connect to other nodes and so forth. So it was a little harder to get into Bitcoin. It's much, much easier for an application developer to get into Lightning and therefore into Bitcoin. Yeah. Have you noticed any conversions recently?

So I don't know about conversions, but my friends definitely know I'm into Bitcoin and I'm into Lightning. And I have a large network of, you know, developers that I know, regardless of where they are in the world. And I've definitely seen an increase in, hey, Andre, how's it going? Can we chat a little bit about this lightning thing or this Bitcoin thing? It seems interesting. I just read about this API and it just works.

It's great. So there's definitely a little bit of a wave that people are definitely seeing some change there. And I hope, you know, I think it's what we were saying earlier. You need to be good citizens to the platform. And so one of my goals is to every time I talk to someone about it is try and find out how to make that person turn, how to make them say, oh, it clicked. I get it. And just do your best to educate. Right.

Because it's still really new. It's still really early days. And so if you educate the next person, they will educate the next one and the next one and so forth. What's your what's your favorite pitch? Do you have multiple? It depends on the person. I think if it's a really, I actually have a funny one where he's a protocol dev and not in Bitcoin or Lightning, but really low level, you know, Rust and C++. And I tried explaining to him the benefits and, you know, the pros and cons of Lightning.

And all of the questions that he asked were really deep protocol questions and I didn't have answers for. And I was like, you know, let me get you in touch with someone else. I don't really know. uh but the usual pitch is is really the um you know omnipresence of it i think it's omnipresent omnipresence big words today um it's it's really the how is it omnipresent that's what i'm curious technically speaking uh we've done bitcoin transactions over radio right yeah today ham radio wrote about in the bed yeah so novak sent ham radio to adam carrey shout out to the pod the godfather podcasting adam carry from mtv news back in the day and he's um oh gosh this

is embarrassing what is his podcast name oh give me one second i'm gonna think of it i'm gonna think of it five come on marty four three no agenda podcast there we go um but he apparently he's been getting into bitcoin so he's like a podcasting og like he's literally known for starting the first ever podcast and really sort of blowing up this space and more recently last six months in particular he's like been growing a liking to bitcoin awesome and uh he's also just so happens to be a ham radio enthusiast apparently so novak uh ceo founder of open dime and the cold card wallet up in canada shout out novak huge fan of what you're doing uh basically tested a ham radio wave transaction yesterday with sam patterson i believe i'm not sure where sam yeah

i don't remember the names um but somebody tagged adam carrey and i was like hey look at this and then adam carrey's like i want to get a transaction and fucking godfather podcasting received a bitcoin transaction via ham radio wave which is it's fascinating it's it's it's really what i was saying it's it's just everywhere it's only radio waves are omnipresent radio waves you know Technically speaking, you can get any device and connect it to the Internet, right? You don't see the Internet. You don't think about it. It's just there.

That's really one of the pitches is, first of all, you need to explain to them the hardness of Bitcoin, the sound money ideology behind it, the monetary policy. I know exactly how many Bitcoins are mined every day and when the next half-day is coming. But the fact that it's extremely secure, you know, backed by all this hash rate, backed by the microtransactions of Lightning Network, you know, put two and two together, it seems to click to most people, most smart folks. And so it's just everywhere and it'll be more reliable and better and more secure and more present day after day. And so it's, there's really no future, um, where I, I see, uh, Bitcoin, uh, having hard time in terms of adoption. Uh, if we continue on this trend of, you know, more development, more abstractions, more user-friendly interfaces, uh, you know, it's just, it's just how the internet worked and, and it's how Bitcoin is going to work. All right. I'm two beers in. I'm a two. I need, I need to catch up. I'm a, uh, two beer lightweight.

Let's get cosmic with it. Like, so beyond gaming, like, how do you think Bitcoin, if it's omnipresent like that, how does it change the world? Are you an optimist or a pessimistic? I tend to be too optimistic sometimes. Why is that? You know, ever since I was 10, I think I was, you know, computers, computers, computers. And when I think back to it, it's, it was a very different, you know, time of computers

and internet. uh we had dial-ups and and so forth and that was you know 15 years ago to 20 years ago so you know 20 years ago we didn't have facebook we didn't have we barely had google i think and you know the technology advancements uh the speed of technology advancement is just so large and so fast that it's what i was saying i don't really see a scenario where the many people working on bitcoin around the world don't make it work around whatever limitations regulations whatever it is that come that try and stop it right yeah and then to me it's like it just makes sense right it just makes sense man like right like it if we're gonna transition into the information age

and age build on the internet like the internet should have a native currency absolutely and it's the oh we we don't know how much money the fed prints but it's okay we'll continue living our lives and accept that people just print money and make you know and it's yeah it's the first time that i think it it clicks and i gave the the bitcoin standard to my my parents boss um and i also gave them a an open dime boss yeah it was great and they loved listening to me blabber about bitcoin and lightning for two two like two full hours i think and and then at the end they said okay we get it how do we buy satoshi's and i was like check mark how do we buy satoshi's already You're nominating them in Satoshis.

Let's go. Same thing when we launched Koala Studio. My mom was, I need to get more Satoshis. It's coming. They're getting it. They're getting it. You're teaching your parents to use it. Are they using it?

Have they played? They've played. I don't know that they've used it to the extent of using it. They definitely played Lightning Chess, right? but it still needs a little bit of an education onboarding. I think I did that part. My dad has a Trezor, and he knows how to use it. But apart from that, it's still early,

and we need to continue on the educational side of it. I feel like a bad son. Mom and dad, I'm going to get you an open dime soon. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's about time. Yeah, the more I was speaking to a— My dad—shout out—actually, sorry.

I want to shout out my dad. He said he downloaded the Cash App. He's been buying Bitcoin every day, a little bit. Hey, shout out Cash App. They're great. Shout out Cash App. Jack, coming for that asset in a couple weeks. Hope you're ready.

Oh, yeah. Congrats on that, by the way. Thanks, dude. Yeah. Should be a fun one. Yeah, I hope I don't puke on myself. No, it'll be fine. You've done bigger interviews.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I interviewed Lightning Quall a couple months, a few months ago. Yeah, who is that? I don't know who that is. Is he a big deal? He's a big deal. Pretty big deal.

Yeah. He made that Satoshi's Place thing? I don't know. PBD. Satoshi's Place. My favorite internet graffiti site in the world. Yeah. A couple weeks ago, someone did the whole painting of it again.

Like, they, you know, you know how you can actually get the whole board? No. Well, he gave, I don't know how to use the, like, super user interact with the command line. Right. I'm too dumb. Yeah. It was right away. They launched, and I think one week later, someone reversed engineered the API and created

a tool that would just you know instantly put a bunch of satoshis together and um i know the chain code people were the first one to put the fbi notice on it plus yeah it was pretty awesome um and at the time i think it was it costs like 70 bucks to do it because of the price of bitcoin it's actually the cheapest advertisement for tales from the crypt out like i haven't done it in the last couple weeks but for like a month there i was going on satoshi place every day and like cleaning up a tales from the crypt billboard it's very cheap it was like 50 cents for a billboard and you're getting the right audience right exactly it's perfect hey you satoshi's place freaks i love you shout out to all of you oh man let's get heady here we were talking earlier

you lived all around the world man i have uh well i've been to a lot of a lot more countries than i lived but yeah so you're don't mind me doxing you we can cut this out if you're not fine with it but dad was an oil industry guy uh he was yeah yeah um so we moved early on from from brazil where i'm from to um to the uae uh so i lived in in abu dhabi for a while uh it was an interesting experience um what was it like being a brazilian in abu dhabi it was great people people definitely loved that you come from the land down under uh they's like hey where are you from south america oh brazil because i don't know why there's this you know there's this notion of of brazil being the fun yes what is it america's life liberty in the pursuit of happiness and brazil is the

pursuit of happiness liberty in life right i mean maybe not now with the new president but uh we can talk about that later and um so it's yeah we will i want to talk about what the hell's going on there we'll figure it out okay yeah let me let me go to into the the uae side so it was it was great living there I think it was one of the best decisions I didn't make in my life I didn't I wasn't at a position to say no my whole family moved and you know I didn't speak any English till then and it definitely changed my life I ended up moving to New York after that where had I been in Brazil moving to New York would not have been an option right and so a little a little surreal a little bit of too good and too big and they need the biggest mall they

have the biggest you know building they have the biggest yeah what's life there it feels like they like to flex a lot um it's a very excuse me excuse me like sure abu dhabi likes to flex a lot it's a very uh western westernized society as much as it's still you know muslim and arabic but they're very open uh to foreigners at while we were there i don't know if the stats are the same but while we were there uh for the for that period of time 80 i believe 83 percent of the people in the country were expats and really yeah it was 83 it was an absurd number um interesting really the the what we we call them locals right the local emiratis uh were few very very few i have i actually have only three friends who are you know from there everyone else was uh either

you know they're they're they're lebanese or they're syrian or they're you know moroccan they're nearby and then everyone else was you know hong kong or china or american and european and but really the the ones you know emirati friends are you know three maybe maybe three damn so they're not interesting in building walls there in saudi arabia i mean it it's it's really uh I think they did something really right where it's a, geographically speaking, it's in a very favorable location, right? It's right next, it's essentially the Singapore of the Middle East, right? Singapore is that little Asian hub. I need to travel more, man.

I'm fucking. Yeah, Singapore is a little Asian hub that everyone connects to and it's super safe, really secure. Everything works well. It's super efficient. And I think Abu Dhabi and Dubai, essentially the UAE, were trying to be that face. you can go there it's extremely safe um you know you're not going to face any issues uh they're very friendly to the outside world uh whereas you know saudi arabia might be more closed off um and so i think they're trying to to be that that player in in the middle eastern space and

it was uh you know living there definitely gave me the ability and my family in general gave me the ability to travel around there so i've been to to lots and lots of countries and definitely opened my eyes to how the world works i'm jealous yeah i would be too what uh thanks for thanks for flexing strong flex um no what was the most eye-opening experience of traveling that much for you so we did a um have you heard of habitat for humanity yeah actually in high school we had to do a lot of community we were forced to do not forced i mean yes we weren't forced to do community service but i liked it a lot of my community service hours were habitat nice yeah we we got the opportunity to through our school to go to you know specific places to essentially

help so i actually went to the southern parts of india where i you know you see the level of poverty and access to basic needs is absurd right we were staying in a rather fancy hotel and if you walk half a block you would see someone you know essentially shitting on the floor and it definitely opens your eyes where talking about india or san francisco those are bird scooters man bird scooters it's it's really close to ship it's bird scooters i'm sorry that was inconsiderate of me i'm sorry it's called my sf friends um no it's it's it definitely opens your eyes to you know people actually uh don't really have the large majority of the world don't have access to the basic aspects of life you know water sanitation and so

forth and living in such a contrast which was the uae where they have the biggest malls and the biggest buildings and the biggest you know it definitely opens your eyes and i was rather young then it was it was high school time so it's um it definitely opened my eyes to you know the world is not the bubble we live in it's much much bigger you know it's an interesting juxtaposition helping from uh uae to like southern india and and even more uh sorry to cut you but even more it was i was really young boy in brazil where you go to the beach and everyone's in bikinis and i moved to the ue where i go to the mall and everyone's wearing kanduras and burkas right and it's it's cultural shock man cultural shock yeah yeah i think it's important though um

again i keep harping back to last night's episode that i recorded but that's like we talked about like how i moved from philly to south carolina back to philly to chicago and out of new york and even in this country alone like there's so many people in different situations with different mindsets and it's like you need to travel to like open your mind to this stuff and i do want to travel a lot more japan's on my list to get to next going to japan um later this year planning it and uh trying to do two weeks trying to hit tokyo osaka and uh kyoto at least boss yeah it's just i'm really really into sushi omakases and things like that and so it i worked at an izakaya in uh in college awesome yeah yeah i have yet to go there but it's it's it sounds

pretty good yeah i mean in izakaya in chicago but okay yeah okay do they have one in new york i don't know if they have uh they do there's an izakaya mu on shout out free ad uh on 35th between fifth and sixth that i believe are between madison and fifth awesome very good um some ramen yeah i need to check it out yeah um my brother was just in japan too he went skiing out there i was talking to him yesterday about he said it was fucking dope yeah and it it's just so much bigger we started doing research on you know how where to go and and how to get around and it's much much much bigger than you think it is and it yeah too many islands to be honest really well if you look the map and it's it's much bigger than i personally imagined it before um i didn't get to while in

uae i didn't get to go that far east uh the farthest i went was um actually i don't know how far i went east but i didn't get to go to japan um my my sister went to china and and i believe i'm not sure she went to japan but uh it's it's definitely a place that i think uh you know i would like to see myself living there in the future possibly really yeah i don't know that the future is united states why is that i mean it i would like to believe the peak of the united states was after the future is female andre you think you think uh us is post peak in the grand scheme of of history i would i would say so yes and you know the way the world is moving i i tend to think that the Eastern world has been moving at a faster pace of adoption, specifically

of new technologies, you know, with Seoul, you know, and Taiwan and, and, you know, Hong Kong and, you know, people use crypto, you know, and that's really, really bleeding edge. It's legal tender in Japan, right? I'm sorry? It's legal tender in Japan. Yes. And of course it's really early days in crypto and Bitcoin specifically, but they are already at the forefront of it all right so what is it going to look like in 10 years where you know

in china you have wechat where they do everything in wechat you pay bills you you talk to people you buy everything in wechat let's let's say the the wechat version of something in in like the eastern world in japan and so forth what does that look like if there's you know if they use bitcoin and is it going to take 10 years to get to get around to being adopted by everyone i don't think So it's much quicker than it is here. Well, China certainly won't be adopting that. So let's get into this. Let's get into privacy and dystopian futures and the fight against the surveillance state.

I would say I'm more bullish on the U.S. just because I think the United States as an idea, America as an idea, the American dream as an idea, not necessarily the government that we live under and the system that we live under, but the idea of fucking go out there and make something of yourself still exists and is pretty strong today. And the idea of freedom and liberty, I believe it's still deep down there

even though it's slipping away. Yeah, I tend to agree. I don't know. I just, I think we have an opportunity. I think people are starting to see what's going on in China with the social credit thing in particular. Oh, man.

And I hope, I know people I talk to, like my parents, my wife, this is fucked. I don't want this. And I think there may be sort of a pivot here in America where people are like, all right, let's not have this. Actually, I can't say that for a fact. I'm probably in the bubble. A lot of people are pushing socialism right now and stuff like that.

So that was just a ramble. I don't know where I went. Yeah, I don't know that I definitely don't see the United States taking the same stance as China. The extremely different, you know, societies in every way, shape or form. um you know xi jinping just essentially is now ruler right let's call it that and there's no terms anymore so he rules um they can make any calls and you know i i agree i tend to agree that the freedom you know the ideologies of freedom and american dream are still rooted in the united states and american and specifically but um with the way the world is going i tend to think there's

more opportunities um out you know out east and you know the the i think the the brexit issues on on europe i think the populist movements that have been happening all over the world i think these are all factors that have been you know slowly tinkering and and and you know there will be a breaking point um will will it be another economic crash will it be another i don't know whatever. There's too many disasters that can happen. And I don't know that the United States in 10, 15, 20 years will be the same United States that it is, that it was 20 years ago, that it is today. And, and maybe it's a more opportune time to be elsewhere for whether it's personal growth, whether it's, you know, if we want to go into the Bitcoin development side,

whether it's just, you know, better lifestyles, I think there's definitely some, you know, having lived outside, it's definitely something that I would like to do again. No. I'm somebody who hasn't traveled that far outside. I'm going to take your advice to heart. Before we get forward, I got to pause and check the sound because I just noticed my mic was unplugged. I hope it was only for like 10 seconds. I'm hoping it was.

We'll see, though. We'll be right back, freaks. All right. We're back, freaks. Luckily, I did not fuck up. That sounds good. Safe and sound. Andre, we're back.

Beautiful. A little detour there. Sorry about that. It's poor form. That's what you get here at Tales from the Crypt, though. Tales from the Crypt difference. It's all the beers. I blame the beers.

Yeah. You need another one, by the way. I do need another one. While I open you another one, we were just chit-chatting about what we're going to jump into next. I think let's stay on the surveillance state. We're heavily surveilled right now, even in the freest countries in the world. How do you think this changed?

What do you think the main problem is, and how do you see it changing? Or if it doesn't change, how do you see it getting worse? So, it started, I think it started because of my interest in Bitcoin and so forth, and it just kind of bled into that libertarian ideology and, you know, keeping your data private, making sure that this whole notion of, you know, if you don't have anything to hide, you know, you don't have to hide anything. If you don't have anything, essentially, it's basically saying, if you don't have anything to say, then there's no need for free speech, right? It's so bullshit. Yeah, it's not how that works. right? The products should not need to use your data in order for you to use them. And I think people fail to see that each and every device and product and platform created is to use people as

a means to an end. It's to make money by selling to advertising and so forth. So we got a Amazon Echo as a gift and I threw it out right away. My girlfriend was, oh, what about this? And I was, nope i'm not getting that in my house i already have a samsung tv that could easily be bugged and we'll never know i have you know three computers um you know the chances that those can be hacked and easily you know so i'm very very conscious uh i i don't use uh the phone 2fa approach the sms approach for everything that i can i have uh ub keys for everything really yeah it again it's not as user friendly you need to be slightly more technical to use it but i definitely know that if I'm logging into an account, it's 110% me.

It's no one else. That piece of mind worth it? Absolutely. Yeah. Whether it's my computer, my emails, anything that I'm able to, I use my YubiKey for all of it. And so please don't steal my YubiKey. That's why you have backups, right?

So, you know, the surveillance state, I think it's interesting because people fail to see that it's everywhere and everything is geared towards it. So, any new product like the Amazon Echoes of the World, people love it because, hey, Alexa, do this and this. But people fail to realize that if it's able to realize that you're saying the word Alexa, then it needs to be listening to you at all times. At all times, yeah. Right? And then it's your word and his word.

It's like she says, he says. So, Amazon can say that they don't record it. but then just a couple months ago there was a the court case where they had to release the recordings of it the murder right and the murder and and right away it's it's available right so someone is storing those and and now let's say the amazon is let's even say that they're securely storing those and it's safe how safe is it what about hackers who can you know come in and steal that data and all of a sudden there's recordings of you saying xyz thing and you're a politician or you are a ceo of some company or you're running for some other thing and you're like

the hottest podcast host of the bitcoin podcast exactly like that you know there's so much that could happen no and it's and like so the amazon or the echo yeah the amazon echo or the alexa are they the same alexa's the google's the echo no no amazon echoes is is the little pod thing okay and alexa alexa's the woman alexa lives in the echo right um but beyond that like the Did you see the story about Nest? Like, the cameras and, like, the fucking hacker got into some people's hack. Like, Nest account was talking to their baby and put the heat in the baby's room up to, like, 90 degrees. The internet of shit is a real thing, people.

Right. And there was a case where, I don't even know if it's a case yet, but essentially Amazon is trying to do the Amazon lock. Have you heard of that? I have. Essentially, there's a little camera in front, and you can essentially register people based on their faces. So if, you know, Marty comes in and sees in my little Amazon lock sees you, it'll unlock automatically. Sure, maybe the facial recognition is up to par. Let's assume that.

But it's also used for FBI because they can essentially get that data and say, if the camera has seen such person and it matches the facial recognition, I can place that person at that time of the day. And so imagine a suburban neighborhood where all of the locks are Amazon locks. all of a sudden every street front is being recorded at all times and people fail to really recognize that you know right now right here where we're standing there could be recordings and we have no idea oh there's a camera right here there's a camera looking at us hello what's up you know where's that going sure that's a cctv and maybe no one's looking at it but you know we said a couple things here that i don't know that it couldn't be used against you in the future and so you know you never know what's gonna happen you claimed you were the

hottest podcast host in the bitcoin space this episode we found that not to be true no yeah can be used against you and it's like so and i like it's weird how some movies like perfectly describe this like minority report like we're getting close to a minority report world where like people are trying to predict crime and then like black mirror perfectly predicting china's social credit thing right these dystopian futures have been played out like novella and movies throughout time like we just like seem to be barreling towards it like are you hopeful that we'll avoid it or do you think i'm hopeful that there will be um you know big players in the space that will help turn the wheel around or slow it down but it doesn't seem

to be happening as fast as i would expect and it's what i was saying earlier about bitcoin too is you need to teach people you need to teach so my family we've moved to signal right we don't use whatsapp anymore and then especially people can say that whatsapp is end-to-end encrypted i need proofs i don't i don't see them right trust zuck yeah i definitely don't trust zuck and his you know chairman power of all over facebook instagram and whatsapp and now they want to merge all the infrastructure but hey no we're not going to gather all the data involved and sell you things so you know the more you can do to to be private um you know i i don't use gmail anymore only only for work right so i'm still stuck in my gmail ways user experience right i

will say that i will say moving away from gmail my email experience is not as nice i don't have a great calendar right away i don't have all of these integrations right away as an engineer and as a developer it's perfectly fine my you know cousins who are not probably would you know people say oh do you have a gmail as if gmail is email and then when i say i don't have a gmail it's like who i even talk to you how do you receive emails and i say well email is a it's a protocol almost it's it's not gmail um so it's it's uh it's definitely something i keep in mind and i try my best to uh teach people without annoying them because it's also a topic that a lot of people just don't care and don't want to listen to yeah being that bitcoin friend's a burden

so it's i wouldn't recommend it to you freaks it's been a long long six years seven years almost you've been that early i mean i've been i don't i forget when i first bought exactly it wasn't when i first found it but like i found it and started shilling it right away i was like yo this stuff's dope yeah i mean i i used to think my friend was was an odd one out when he started talking about it and now look at me you know yeah um no but going back to like people getting stuck on gmail like i think for me personally the reason why i'm still on gmail fucking doxing myself always uh is just mental switching costs like so maybe that's something i mean this is applicable to both like securing your email and then fucking switching your email

providers and then switching your currencies like the mental switching cost of of doing something like changing your email and then the i would argue increased mental cost of switching your fucking money like how do we overcome that so i think email is really interesting because it's almost like your identity online nowadays so switching your email is not something that you do one day to the next it's you need to forward all the emails you need to let your friends and family know that this new email that they might be receiving from this new address is really you um you know there's all the reputations because it's a brand new email so it might go to spam there's all of these things and so i don't it's it's really mental and it's also it ties in its

user experience it's really mental burden because you now have to it you don't have an app you need to go into a website and it might not be as friendly it's not as pretty and it's not as useful and um you know i i have a hard time with lazy people who see the problem and don't want to act on to on it they call me lazy andre a little bit but it's okay but most most people are lazy but my thing is i'm really big on efficiency um i think most most of my close peers will tell you that um and so if if i can achieve the same level of efficiency in terms of getting in terms of email getting communication across from you know two people it doesn't matter to me if it's gmail or something extremely more secure and and something that won't sell my

data to some other providers um so you know it just makes sense to me and i think if if you see the issue and you you don't do anything about it how are you a good you know citizen how can you justify it yeah it's like be the change you want to see in the world right and and don't get me wrong you don't need to go above and beyond you don't need to be the guy or to go jameson lopp on everybody exactly you don't need to you don't need to be the you know liberator but uh do a little bit you know teach someone talk to someone learn some more and and then step by step it's not it's a there's eight seven eight billion people in the world and there will be in the next couple years and so it's it's one by one you know we need to it's like the marginal cost of onboarding

someone else like how do we decrease that marginal cost so that it's easy for people who just got onboarded to onboard others right right no i think this bear market's actually producing like a lot of quality information and quality evangelist if you will i don't want to get too like religious it's not even a religious term per se but like there's a lot of people shilling right now there's a lot of bitcoin podcasts there's a lot of newsletters there's a lot of developers sharing what they're building and again going back to like tipping points like where's the mind share tipping point where it sort of hits a contagion and that's another part about this bear market too is a lot of people have been working on refining the narrative and trying not to feed

people false up like we probably fucked it up the first half of the first decade of bitcoin pitching bitcoin at the protocol level is fast easy and cheap right so it's trying to recalibrate and reset the message and it's like you're trying to reset the message as a amoebas fucking decentralized quote-unquote community or bitcoin users yeah i think i don't personally love the idea that just because we're in a bear market we build more i think it's just there's less noise right it's it's the reason why we say belt bear market bull market is based on the price i'm not really interested in sure of course the price will drive adoption and it will drive all the other things but it it's the the monetary policy the technological advancements all of

the things put together that drive me and and my you know my interest to it it's not really whether it's 5 10 or 20k it's can we provide better solutions and build better products and build better you know user experiences that take society to the next level where wealth is shared yeah but you have to admit during some of these face ripping bull runs it's hard to concentrate on work absolutely it's like what the fuck is going on it's all time like oh refresh refresh refresh refresh you know 50 up in one day is that possible yeah i feel like these days i swear to god scout sonner and my scout sonner pose up right now like i only check the price when we do rabbit hole recap like i haven't even been like once a week like on it that's very healthy uh there was you know

during the last peak there was i checked a lot oh yeah so did i it was impossible not to you had like thousand dollar daily candles like how could you not like hawk it and it wasn't just bitcoin i think if it was just bitcoin i think we would check less but there were thousands everything was going up vertically parabolically so and every day i would hear someone tell me something new about some other thing that would and then exploded the next one chain bro one chain's taking over man oh my god it's not iota anymore it's one chain what's the iota is the one that rolled their own crypto right they roll their own crypto that's what's the first rule of crypto don't roll your own crypto the douchiest like head dev team in the world yeah it's just like a huge

douche and i remember people people gave feedback on it and found the bugs and they said fuck you fuck you you're wrong we're awesome it's not true bro yo dude are they still top 10 they're top 10 i don't know i don't know but i heard nano is coming for the throne wasn't that called something else before blocks our our chain or something like that our blocks our blocks our blocks maybe Ray Blocks. Ray Blocks. There we go. That's teamwork makes the dream work.

We figured that one out together. A little spitball in there. What a name. Ray Blocks. Ray Blocks. I don't even know. And where are we going? Let's pivot back to Lightning Games.

Yeah. We should wrap it up here probably in the next, we're only like an hour and 15 minutes in. We've got some time. What, so I guess this is great, like because you presented this on Monday at BitDev's, like what have you guys learned? Yeah, so I can actually give you some numbers.

I actually shared those in BitDevs. So Lightning Network now, we're roughly at 6,000 nodes. I think that's a very good metric to have. We, as a Lightning Chess platform... Sorry to interject, but like 6,000 nodes, like if you're comparing all cryptocurrencies and not just like second layers, I think like that's third, right?

Third, yeah. It's like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and then Lightning. I think Ethereum is 7,000 or 8,000. Bitcoin has many, many, many more that are just listening nodes. Um, actual, you know, routing, uh, sorry, not routing nodes, like full nodes that, you know, actually route, um, you know, uh, messages are, I think up in the ten thousands, but I believe there's, you know, 50, 60,000 nodes, you know, not listening. Yeah. Um, and so just the fact that it's two years old and there's 6,000 nodes, it's absurd. And it's a good metric to have because, you know, you think that, you know, Lightning Network, that's one field, and then chess, that's a whole other field, and specifically online chess, right? It's a very small niche market, and yet we were able to get upwards of 1,500 accounts in Qualys Studio, which, you know, if you use the 6,000 nodes as a base metric, it's really, really bullish, right?

People actually took the time, created their accounts. Yeah, and they seem interested, right? So whether it's the convergence of the two industries, you know, chess, online gaming, and lightning, or if it's just all the lightning people who are really enthusiastic about it. We had upwards of close to 500 accounts funded, so people are actually using the funding mechanism.

We had someone play lightning chess for Shurdbits, Chris at Shurdbits. Yeah, Chris Stewart. He was at the residency as well. He played lightning chess for their For Sure Bits happy hour, which is awesome. I saw Justin Moon was playing with it, too. Yeah, Justin Moon and Koala were in London and advancing Bitcoin where we had like 10 people playing against each other. So in terms of numbers, it's actually quite, you know, it was actually a really good launch.

And it's funny seeing your Telegram where people are just like randomly throughout the day, like here's a link who wants to play me. Yeah, I had to mute it, you know, because it's really, it's really distracting to see, you know, hundreds of messages like, hey, who wants to play? Hey, I'm in, let's play. Good game. GG, you know, and it's really awesome to see people excited about it. But one thing people ask a lot is, is what's next, right? Chess is great, but what's coming next? so so far the feedback has been really positive a couple of things that we need to change in the ui and the process of how betting works and be you know clearer for the user but i think so far it's been a very successful launch and uh you know people throwing people were putting you know someone deposited a hundred dollars uh in in in sats and i said why why first of all and and who you're gonna bet a hundred dollars with but hey be my guest you know the lightning network supports it you may do whatever you want reckless that sounds reckless yes you want to hear a reckless

i put i put 0.2 in my casa node and then it broke because it was over the limit no it the the node so it just died just died but you have a backup right yes but you know channels and so the way ellen works is technically speaking um the my peers on these channels could technically after a given amount of time force close on the on me because my nodes offline and we don't have watchtowers yet which essentially would you know forbid that from happening and so it's essentially burned or not yet the channel get it no yeah i'm reaching out to the casa people they're they're helping me out next week but you know it's it's been a little while i'm not very very hopeful for it and i think it's a learning it's like hey don't do that yet well thank you

for your contribution to making bitcoin a little bit more deflationary i know and you know every every bitcoin helps and so now we have what it's people talk about 17 million these days so it's what is it 16 now i feel like with the with the quadriga um quadriga yeah it's 190 million dollars with a quote-unquote crypto i'm not sure exactly how much bitcoin that i heard it was hundreds of of actual bitcoins so you know 200 of them 600k and now it's it's 16 million and some change you know it's it's more scarce than people realize rest in peace to the quadriga cx uh founder if he's actually dead actually i'm not gonna speculate on that but um what's it gonna get back to um yeah uh this is what i wanted to get to the features of lightning chess let's talk about

in particular we have not talked about them like the yeah we talked about hypothetical things in the future but let's talk about exactly what you can do on lightning chess sure so uh many variables to take into consideration yeah so what we want to do is create incentive structures so that the game was uh an experience for everyone involved so for us as game developers you know we take a little percentage of the monitor of the premium features that's the revenue model the players themselves there's two ways of using it so one is when you're playing a game you can actually wage money and so you can wage bets and at the end of it you know the the pot goes to the winner so that's one flow the other flow is we created the ability for users to extend timers

and undo moves and these are essentially proposals that a user would would do to the other user proposed to the other user it's like hey um here's 100 satoshis i need 100 seconds more and then it creates this this you know cool theory this gaming theory where um you can essentially refuse to accept it and in the chat say hey i need you know one bitcoin and and then you can say well i don't have one and then they say well then you're going to lose the pot um so it's actually interesting in the telegram group people talk about it it's like hey why didn't you accept my extension of time and it said well i i didn't feel like the money was enough and i didn't have i didn't have to uh so it's it's creating this cool environment where people

are incentivized to do certain plays and create certain you know you know i heard people using 10 000 satoshi to extend a time for 10 seconds which is you know it's crazy but but it's it's where the opponent will accept it and therefore the game will continue what if this changes the game of chess like does this exist in like the north like you can't bet you can't control a chess game like this i don't think so yeah so what if like new chess strategies come out of this like i think this coupled with spectating would be massive i think if we can see marty playing against i'm gonna kick jack mauler's ass again yeah and and we can bet on the outcome we can bet on the moves the same way nowadays in the uk you can bet on who's going to score the next

goal in the football match that's super super specific but your odds are insane right you know I definitely believe there's a scenario where we will create that and spectating on on lightning chess wouldn't be too hard to implement so we're we're actually you know trying to fit that in all right that's good segue into the next point like so what is on the roadmap here like you're obviously taking feedback and recalibrating from there like are you going to add more games refine lightning chess in particular um go out into the world and try to have them implement what you guys built at an infrastructure level right so there was a lot of interest in the sdk aspect of it i think that's really the the business model driver there is is the you know create infrastructure for

game developers to onboard into lightning and we've been talking about this the whole the whole talk is abstractions can we abstract the lightning network to make it super easy for someone to create revenue stream from it i think that's the big the big pillar we're trying to we're trying to tackle next we definitely uh have received a lot of feedback on lightning chest specifically and we want to introduce you know the ability to spectate on games we want to flesh out a little bit more of the mobile interface there's a couple bugs here and there one one piece that is interesting that people asked a lot is in terms of identity because the onboarding flow is so seamless technically speaking you're just another user there's nothing identifying no idea you're

playing like yeah i say i beat jack mauler's ass like i just assume i was playing him i have no idea right and i and actually went on a technicality because he ran out of time so you probably would have beat me if it was uh based on checkmate right and so that's that's something that we're trying to do i we have an implementation where lightning jewel um it's able to sign a message so you can sign the message that essentially signs you in with your alias right and so uh we want to add aliases we want to add you know optional recovery processes through email and passwords if people want to do that but one that's really interesting is can we use your node as your identity yeah side note uh bitcoin will have made it when lightning jewel uh is the first jewel that

comes to mind in people's uh in people's minds yeah not that not that uh nicotine stick that that the kids are smoking these days once uh once it's the the lightning jewel extension and we'll know Bitcoin's made it. Yeah, and there's quite a few more coming out, right? Casa has one. I know there's a couple others in the works. I just want to give a shout-out to my fellow beefy Bitcoin boy, Willow Byrne. Yeah, I was going to shout-out him as well.

Love the Joule extension and everything you're building. Keep it up, bro. Yeah, I think Casa actually reached out to him to try and come up with a unified way because he created the standard for WebLN, and it doesn't seem like it works with their APIs, and so they went a different route yeah i'm gonna uh i've done this on another podcast when i pat myself on the back i introduced jeremy and will the night after you were there the night after he

uh presented demoed lightning jewel at bit devs like three months ago nice i had a casa node and i couldn't use a lightning jewel because i wasn't able to like uh expose my macaroons to it with the casa setup so i was like jeremy help me will please talk about this i want to use it yeah he's an he's an awesome dev yeah shipping shipping a lot shipping a lot talk about somebody else who started ethereum and transitioned into lightning yeah i forget that he started ethereum yeah will will and james the brothers of burn fellow beefy bitcoin boys uh this is just a reminder putting this on the record right now we need to meet up and like do another episode sorry for interrupting our episode andre for that mental reminder in mid episode i would love to to listen to that

episode for sure yeah um so you were you had the pleasure of being at chain code labs with both the brothers of burn during the residency yeah and uh basically after your week you came out with a sick guide on how to basically get set up and start developing on lightning um so let's talk about that a little bit like what is the best flow for a developer to go from zero to starting to write code for this shit. Sure, so my advice to incoming devs into Lightning is to try and learn the basics first before jumping into an abstraction.

So you can definitely run your BTC pay server that connects to your Lightning node and all of a sudden you have a Lightning wallet and it's fine, but you kind of missed on a lot because it's completely abstracted and I think it's really valuable to understand a little bit more of the nuances. So one of the things that we did there

was during the Lightning residencies, we needed to run essentially two Lightning nodes to talk to each other because we needed to test micropayments and microtransactions. So how did you go about doing that? And I remember the only person, well, I'm sure the mentors knew how to do it, but the only person that really was giving me some notes was Alex Bosworth. And he said, well, you can actually just do X, Y, and Z. And while a couple of people were having a lot of trouble doing that including myself i i said look i'm gonna solve this eventually and it's it's quite hard so i'm just gonna write about it and so after the residency i put out this this really extensive guide on how to create uh run a reg test bitcoin network so reg test is essentially a blank slate

blockchain that's super lightweight that you essentially mine fake blocks so it's it's better than testnet because you don't need to sync your testnet um and then lnd allows you to run two consecutive you know simultaneous um nodes you can actually run as many as you want as long as you give it the correct configuration and um that took me you know an hour and a half to figure out um yeah it's a good book it's a lot of the uh lightning demonstrations of somebody on one computer screen running two nodes right setting it between each other and and never thought about that and it's really it's weird to develop so i guess the web development and application development is something that you do there's usually like a development environment which is

local yeah there's a development environment local and then you have a staging environment somewhere in the cloud and you have your production environment uh it's it's quite uh cumbersome to run a local development environment for bitcoin like you need your bitcoin node running on reg test or or testnet and then you need your lightning node but then you want to test against that lightning node so you need a counterparty lightning node so you need to run two nodes and so forth uh, it was definitely a big barrier to entry. And I said, I'm just going to make notes as I do it. And as I solve it, and I'm just going to write, you know, an extensive guide on it. Uh, I think it was actually really helpful for me. I tend to believe that if you're able to teach someone

something, you definitely have a really good grasp on it. And I was able to turn it into words and, and, and screenshots, um, into, into this medium guide. So I thought it was a really good, you know useful you know it's definitely something that people have given me feedback on it's like hey really great you know you know tutorial it definitely helped me get started and that's the goal it's you get started and right away you see oh this tutorial only goes so far it only gets me started so where do I go next right and so right after that I think two weeks after I was doing decoding of lightning invoices so lightning invoices have the bolt 11 spec and it's a it's So essentially a way to do those Lightning, you know, LN, BC, and then it's the string of characters.

That actually means something. And so you can take that string and go to lightningdecoder.com, which is a tool that I built for myself internally to say, let me learn about these invoices. And then I realized, hey, this might be useful. Let me put it out there. So I actually launched it, and it, you know, Google Analytics says that people use it. So that's really exciting, too. um my goal after the lightning residency was can i provide some of the teachings that i learned to others in in a written format or in an application format and you know so far so good

i think so yeah thanks for doing your part man yeah man i good citizen of the network i guess it's uh it's you gotta have that if not me then who mentality sort of what the bent came out of in this podcast as well but uh going back to like your guide on how to get started development is something like pierre's node launcher help make this easier or more understandable out of the box absolutely um pierre's node launcher is great it abstracts uh you know so i'm not even sure if it allows you to run reg test um or whether it allows you to run two two lightning nodes um i don't want to you know wrongly say it one way or another um i think if you needed to it would be able to um in terms of the capabilities but uh you know it's if you're trying to get started with

bitcoin and lightning and you're not a very you know tech savvy person um definitely the node launcher is great if you're a developer trying to get involved in actually building applications using whether it's low level bitcoin protocol or higher level layer 2 lightning network um my guide tends to actually explain a couple things you know why do you need x y and z before doing this configuration flow um and so that's really the audience i was trying to get it's the development audience not really the mom and pop who are trying to get into the network yeah no but it's i mean staying on the topic of like teaching others that's like the beauty of fucking bitcoin is so that's one thing pierre has been doing with his node launchers if people make a pull request and

it gets merged or they hit a problem uh with the node launcher launcher in particular and then they solve it he's like not forcing people but encouraging people to write blog posts similar the one that you wrote like explaining the problem they hit and how they fix it didn't uh bitstein yeah yeah i love that uh one of the tutorials michael goldstein i always call him michael bitstein right one of the tutorials i laughed and i even called i even tweeted at him and i said you do know that people are actually going to use it so he aliased his um bitcoin d command as bitstein d or something of that nature and i said look i get it it's great and it's really funny but a new dev is going to use bitstein and it from now on there will just be a handful of people

out in the world who will be using you know how do you start your node oh it's bitstein d and that's how you get started and that's just it's too good it's too good he might be michael if you're listening i'm not sure if you are you are uh the snark like you had the best snark in the industry it's incredible that's great uh your your learn to code tweet at the developer the journalist who was looking to block people and he said if you if you could learn to code you could you could use twitter's api to auto block poetic poetic yeah what what is with that people are getting blocked with the learn to code thing it's man these these twitter jack jack listen man jack i'll come out that's what i had to figure out how to broach that subject lately yeah yeah

you need to pick those questions well yeah i only got 30 minutes i gotta get in and out nice yeah you know i've been asked about it a bunch of times since i told people i'm gonna do it and people are like you gotta you gotta ask good questions good questions not tough questions right yeah i'm sure you're fine yeah yeah and that was talking a future jack podcast on this episode of tales from the crypt but i'm trying to think what we can end it on here um we're about an hour 45 minutes in yeah i guess i can do a little closing remarks on the network and kind of like the things i'm excited you want to talk about uh lightning one one right yeah so um earlier this year a bunch of the protocol devs went to adelaide adelaide adelaide adelaide australia

Australia, yeah, and essentially working through a bunch of the kinks of the network and coming up with what the 1.1 spec is. And I think ever since then, there's been, you know, if you follow the Lightning mailing list, tons of back and forth of how to approach it. You know, all of the different clients use different languages, and therefore it's different implementations. But there's a couple of things that I think are really, really, you know, key for the adoption space. So number one that I think is really awesome is the idea of splicing. This notion that you have to create new channels or closed channels and then recreate channels with larger capacity, I think that will cease to exist once you can splice in and out. So splicing in will essentially say, hey, I'm creating a new on-chain transaction, and I'm essentially adding these funds into the same channel. or similarly vice versa you can remove capacity from the channel. So it would mean less hops

onto the main chain and it would be just the funds are continuously usable in the network even though you're waiting for confirmation from the chain. So that's something I'm excited about. I think if we're able to move, well sorry before that, dual funded channels is great. Big problem is you're into the lightning network you have no incoming capacity when you open channels to people because people need to open channels to you so if instead of me putting five bitcoin and you putting zero we can both put five then we have liquidity right away so uh dual funded channels is definitely

something yeah it's been a hiccup for me like when i open up a channel it's assuming it'll be like again idiot here like i was thinking like it would somehow divvy that up automatically yeah it's it's it's pretty hard to understand why that is and then once you get it's like oh that that seems like a problem not it's not a feature it seems like a problem because as soon as i get onboarded i need people to connect to me not just me connecting to others and uh another one is amp or or multi-path um you know payments so if your channel is is a hundred thousand satoshis and you need to pay with you for example and then i have another channel with $300,000, but I need to pay $300,000, you know, whatever it is.

So I can actually, the software can split it. So I can send a payment through you, I can send a payment through another channel, and then they will all meet, you know, at the end destination. Which, if you think about a mesh network that uses sort of this onion router that's similar to Tor, it just makes perfect sense, right? So, you know, all of that put together, I think the only other bit that I'm really excited about is the possible change of the penalty.

Do you understand the penalty mechanism? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so if you try and publish a past state of your channel, you get penalized and then your funds get taken by your peer. And that can be a problem. That's a feature,

but it can be a problem if your node goes offline and there's a channel update and then once you come back online, you're essentially publishing an old state and you get penalized um so the l2 is something that was published um by christian decker lalu from from christian and rusty from blockstream and lalu from lightning uh labs and uh it's really interesting but it does require a bitcoin soft fork i believe oh really because it needs a new

opcode and that's my understanding of it i don't believe i'm wrong but i could be wrong and that's where the discussion happens where you know is it worth it is lightning part of bitcoin to the point where it will drive the soft forks i don't know how i feel about that andre i don't i don't know either and and if it's a tipping point right if it starts it's a slippery slope yeah because then it'll be oh lightning needs x y and z and then we're now pressuring bitcoin developers to try and introduce it even though it's not for bitcoin and we were just talking about ossifying the protocol right yeah like it shouldn't change so changes to layer two should it affect layer one you know that's the i would argue i would probably hope not again i am an ignorant rube but yeah that

does seem i mean that is like a lot of the fun against lightning yes like the urban arsons desantis's of the world who i a lot of respect for but i'm saying that like lightning could sort of bastardize the the purity of the protocol level which i would like to avoid i i agree and i think i would argue that most lightning developers and people building that protocol would as well i think the interests are aligned yeah it's just a matter of will they remain aligned as time moves on because lightning does tend to move faster and so if it's a blocker for lightning you know improvements that we need a soft fork of bitcoin will it be enough adoption enlightening that now there's a pressure on the protocol and then consensus is no longer met and now we have this

you know back and forth of how do we saddle it you know it's a problem i think yeah and so maybe this is a good parting though slightly depressing note like or question talk about like what if bitcoin fails in the long run i think it's getting to a point where it may not uh especially if it has like another decade under its belt but i think there's still a real possibility that lightning could fail right it could prove to not be what we thought it would be right i think it it probably won't fail in the sense that it wouldn't work i think if anything a i would like to say a better alternative right so i would like to think bitcoin is here to stay and it won't change and it'll remain as the native digital currency but we don't really know the future and and you know the same

way satoshi came up with this you know when is the next satoshi coming out that comes up with something brand new that's different that's better and has uses test battle tested technologies you know put them together and it's a better solution you know we don't know and so i would like to think lightning will remain but who are we to know the best we can do is teach develop build and and see how it how it works yeah i guess the better question is how could you see it failing like what uh what would be the avenues for which it you just you as a developer decide hey this actually is not what i thought it was from a development standpoint i think it's it's doing really well i think if there's a scenario where tools development tooling doesn't get quite as

friendly so from a development standpoint that would be the only big hurdle there i think for adoption we've been discussing this the whole time there's many many hurdles to to go through you know all of these 1.1 updates need to happen in order for your average joe have a phone that connects to the lightning network and better wallets you know better ux flows there's there's a lot that needs to be done for adoption i would agree but i'm optimistic i think the pace that things are going at now is remarkable and again i write this in the newsletter at least once a week slowly but surely bitcoin is creeping further and further to the psyches of the masses and it's clinging its roots i don't think it's going anywhere now that the brain is too strong your

Your hairdresser, your cab driver, your cook, everyone knows of it. It's just they might not know it, but they know of it. And at this point, the turning point is already gone, I think. There's no turning back. There's no turning back. All hope is gone. Bitcoin forever. Yeah.

So this has been a fascinating conversation. Pleasure that you decided to join me tonight. That didn't even make sense. I'm happy you decided to join me tonight do you have a parting note for the frees out there Andre? learn about lightning it's the new wave it's miles better in terms of use cases

I think people really see it once they understand it and get messy run your node, run your full node, run your LND nodes I'm here to help, tons of people are here to help get messy and learn it and you'll start to see the light And from then on, I think it's just fun and games. Play Lightning Chess. And hello, Koala Studio, everyone.

Koala Studio, koalastud.io. Best, best domain ever. It's a money domain. Andre, I love what you and the Koala are doing. Very big fan of Lightning Chess in particular. Thank you for coming by. Yeah, thanks for having me. This was awesome.

Great discussion. I'm sorry I drank four beers in front of you. I just chugged, and I feel like I took most of six back here. I'm two down. That's good. It's all good. Yeah. Freaks, thanks for hanging out.

If you're still here, peace and love. Take care.