TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #94: Fabian Jahr

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Fabian Jahr, current Summer resident at Chaincode Labs, to discuss the RPC call Fabian has been working on this Summer, the Chaincode residency experience, the Bitcoin scene in Berlin, Fabian's experience with the Lightning Network, and much more. Follow Fabian on Twitter: https://twitter.com/fjahr Follow Marty on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MartyBent Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtdbWsnfA08KhSUO4amVLaQ?view_as=subscriber Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

What is up freaks, it's your boy Marty Bent here, sitting in a village by the sea to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt with Fabian Jahr, an incredible young man who has been participating in the Chaincode Labs summer residency. We had a great conversation about his experience in Bitcoin, the German Bitcoin scene, Berlin in particular, his experience with Lightning and a bunch of other cool stuff, including what he's been working on uh this summer uh this episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by the cash app you freaks already know all about them they're a favorite they're a favorite app our favorite p2p payments app because they're allowing us stacks to excuse me they're allowing

us to stack sats right you can buy bitcoin on the app you can sell bitcoin on the app you can send bitcoin from the app to a personal wallet or from a personal wallet to the app they're really building out their bitcoin functionalities on top of that they have an incredible boost program this is one of my favorite things of the cash app you get a personalized debit card it's accepted anywhere that visa is and then they partner with merchants that allow you uh to initiate boost and you're able to save a little bit of money when you go to those merchants using those boost uh these merchants include things like whole foods uh chick-fil-a taco bell your local coffee shop and a bunch of other stuff.

They're always adding boosts and adding functionalities to the app. So use the code. If you haven't downloaded it yet, if you were late to the Cash App game and you were just downloading it now, make sure you use the code STACKINGSATS. That's one word. S-T-A-C-I-N-G. Excuse me.

I just spelled that wrong. S-T-A-C-K-I-N-G-S-A-T-S. One word. You're going to get $5, and then $5 is going to go to Owls Lacrosse out of Chicago, an incredible charity helping young boys and girls in the west and south side of Chicago develop leadership skills via the sport of lacrosse. So go download the Cash App today, use the promo code STACKINGSATS, get that $5,

feel good about yourself for sending $5 to Alves, and then enjoy this episode with Fabian. I know I did. Take care. Take care. what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt that your boy marty been here on a monday night sitting down with another member of the chain code boot camp very excited for this i saw this gentleman early in the summer when he first came uh to the states to embark on the chain code

uh boot camp we met after a bit devs i believe it was the first day that you guys were doing it for the second it was the first one yeah i'd like to introduce you freaks to fabian yar fabian welcome to the podcast thank you very much how's your summer been since we first met awesome awesome it's uh so great to be a chain code and uh yeah i'm i'm learning a lot uh meeting lots of great people working a lot of great people um yeah it's awesome um so before we dip into like the nitty-gritty of your tail and stuff i just think it's a lot not hilarious i think it's awesome because i've done a boot camp before too and i know how invigorating that just that environment was like i did 16 no not 16 weeks it was 12 weeks a 12-week digital design

boot camp was quite as intense as the one you're going through but it was an intense exposure to uh ux and ui design and front-end development but you're like hanging out with a group a very small group of dedicated people for sometimes 12 hours a day six days a week what's the experience been like for you because i remember uh the first night you guys were in the city after chain code excuse me after bit devs um just like the vibes were hives like every all the new uh residents or boot campers whatever you want to call them we're we're meeting each other and spit balling ideas what you guys wanted to work on so how's it been since that first night um i mean first of all we had like this on-ramp phase uh that took like two and a half weeks or so uh where we had um

yeah like planned out schedule basically of presentations lots of people coming in to visit us and talk about interesting topics some some of the presenters from chain code but some of them also also visiting like touch for example and julia fanti and a couple of other people that i'm forgetting and yeah so that there was we didn't really have much time to think about like what we were going to build or so i think in the first uh in the first few days um so it was really just a firehouse of information um and yeah we were we were kind of dealing with that in the first uh in the first few days um of course it was awesome uh and meeting all these people and talking about ideas with them um and then afterwards um there was like i would say

like a transition week which was fourth of july week which meant there was not that much going on like we were also um some people they actually went camping in the woods uh oh yeah to take a break uh and uh yeah i um i also explored the city a bit um over that weekend um and since then yeah we we're kind of free to to explore our ideas and but of course we get help um with with whatever want to do and there's really not any pressure um for us to to um really deliver specifics or so um or or directing us into something that we really want to do but um yeah we we get help with like to work on something that actually makes sense that that where there's a high chance that it's actually going to get merged at some point um yeah and that's that's what we're working on now

Yeah, so you decided to work on an RPC call that indexes the UTXO set, correct? Yeah, exactly. So it's getTxOutsetInfo, which is a RPC call. I feel like it's not really getting much attention. And I think also the reason for that is that it takes several minutes. The thing that takes several minutes is that it calculates the hash of the whole UTXO set.

and yeah that's just a pretty inefficient hash function that is running over the whole UTXO set and just takes a couple of minutes on mainnet on testnet on my computer takes like almost two minutes so yeah it's for me not really surprising that it's not really getting used so the main use case where I've seen it actually being used in the wild is FastSync from BTC pay server where you can get, like, a UTXO set from Nicolai Dorier, basically, and then you can compare the hash of that UTXO set with somebody else's hash to make sure that you've got the right UTXO set. But aside from that, it's not really getting used.

So you're sort of depending on that BTC pay server model for somebody else to run it as well and cross-check against that? I mean you don't like you depend on getting the UTXO set from them because nobody else is probably going to going to give it to you in that package basically but you yeah then you basically have by hand to ask someone for for the hash from from the UTXO set and yeah but it's it's it's also not exposed on the p2p layer of course because it would be a huge vulnerability of the US attack and so actually what I'm working on now is something that was proposed two years ago by

SIPA Peter Willer who proposed to use a rolling hash function that is updating with every block and that you could basically get instantly a hash. And the nice thing about such a rolling homomorphic hash function is you can just add hashes of new UTXOs on the fly. As new blocks get accepted, you can also subtract them as blocks get rolled back. And so, yeah, that's a much more efficient solution for that kind of problem.

The concept of rolling back hashes is something that, or if the chain rolls back, you can subtract that. All right, that makes sense. Yeah, actually, not rolling back to hash. So how did you come to the site? It seems like it's a pretty blank slate that Chaincode throws at you, and like you said, they let you sort of figure out

what you want to work on, how... And I know you said this is something you think should be fixed, but how exactly did you contemplate working on anything else and sort of thought, this is probably where my time best spent? Yeah, well, I mean, I should also say

that when they interview you to get accepted to the program, they already ask you what you want to work on. And they already know that probably you might not be working on exactly what you're presenting there. But it's kind of a requirement, I think, to get accepted to already have ideas and to kind of see some things in Bitcoin or Lightning that you want to fix or improve.

So basically, every one of us came in with some ideas. But yeah, especially for me, they changed a lot. So the one year or so before the residency, I had mostly been concerned with Lightning. That was just a big motivator for me to, yeah, like a new way of using Bitcoin, basically, that motivated me to build applications on top of it. and yeah I basically wanted to work on lightning stuff

but then we had the introductory phase that I talked about where we were talking about lots of issues and things around Bitcoin in the first part of that time and yeah that kind of got me back into or got me back to being very excited about working on Bitcoin um and uh yeah i just just had several ideas that i also wanted to work on bitcoin core um and uh yeah while i'm still very excited about lightning um i just decided in the end to to work on a issue with bitcoin core so were you predominantly focused on lightning

uh like your whole uh developing on bitcoin career quote unquote if you said that your career but like the whole time you've been building on bitcoin has it been on the lightning layer and this is your first exposure to core were you sort of reviewing uh core uh before you got fast enabled lightning yeah but um i would say that was uh not comparable like uh i haven't really built a functional application or so at at the scale of the stuff that i've built on lightning like um my understanding of bitcoin was was much lower back then um before like like 2016 2017 or So, like, I think I have a kind of good picture of how Bitcoin works, but it just was lacking ideas, basically, I would say,

that motivated me to really, like, build applications on top of it. Like, it seemed like lots of the ideas that I found compelling, there were already projects out there, and then I kind of didn't have the time, I guess, to really get into them and contribute. At least that's what it felt like. And then Lightning was kind of something new, where it felt like there were many people

not really knowing what was going on basically but still building stuff on top of it. And then the community in Berlin also played a huge role because lots of your listeners will probably have heard of this but we've had several lightning hack days and there was also one here in New York. FOMO hack days, correct? Yeah, exactly.

FOMO are the guys that are organizing it. and so yeah they are they are connected to several people from the Berlin community they were interested in in Lightning and yeah that kind of drew me into into that community of Bitcoin in Berlin and and Lightning and yeah that that really motivated me to kind of take my understanding and and yeah my understanding to the next level but also then yeah actually build stuff on top of it you know it's actually I feel like we're both spoiled because behind New York I think Berlin is probably one of the hottest spots for for Bitcoin and and all these other projects that are proliferating as well do you feel spoiled in Berlin like with the people that

are there yes and no so I would say definitely yes for the community of people so also in the statistics I mean nobody knows how much they are worth but in the statistics of full nodes being run. Germany is usually pretty high in the ranking and in Berlin there are lots of people that are building projects on top of it. The only thing that we are maybe missing is larger companies that are employing people to work on Bitcoin open source or like bigger Bitcoin projects I would say but the community is great uh meetups are great if you're around then uh please come visit us yeah and what were you um what were you doing before uh bitcoin um before bitcoin i was just working as a software

developer um yeah well i i was um what kind of systems were you working on uh just web stuff so So I had some experience with larger companies, but mostly when I was a student. And yeah, that got me very demotivated about working at a large company. So basically, that was also the reason why I moved to Berlin was I wanted to work for startups. And so I worked for startups as an employee first, and then I became a freelancer. So I could switch around even more and see more companies, help even more companies. But these are mostly internet startups. So different tech stacks, but mostly web stuff.

And how did you stumble into Bitcoin? I think you have a pretty typical story, but who knows? Well, so I first got a mail by a friend. And yeah, let's say not super early, but yeah, probably 2013, 2014. And it was like sometime around when the price had gone up and he was in Japan at the time. And he had, of course, because of Mt. Gox, some exposure. Like, I think that's how he heard about it. And he told me like, how about you check this out?

And I checked it out, but I unfortunately approached it from the wrong angle. so as I said I was very much thinking about startups and also always had in the back of my mind the possibility to start my own project and so I thought about Bitcoin as something that would enable some some new things as a technology that would enable some new things but I was kind of thinking about it in different way that I see it now so it just just I would say I guess I saw it as a tool for existing corporations and not as this like whole new playground of like possibilities I completely underestimated I would say so

what do you mean as a tool for incoming companies like you could just accept Bitcoin and yeah so I guess I would say that the way I I looked at it would be appropriate for machine learning stuff now so as a way to optimize like certain parts of a company and and optimize business operations or so and yeah didn't didn't really see the bigger picture or I mean I cannot really remember the stuff the only reason I know that I was thinking about it this early is because they still have some notes on my computer I really otherwise I wouldn't really I wouldn't really know that anymore but yeah that's just

brainstorming about some ideas you know it's like okay gambling but then it's it's you have these headaches with with laws and you have to go to some to some shady country or whatever and you know you can do an exchange but it's probably going to be very small and there's already one exchange out there that is working so yeah no so yeah it seems very crazy from today's perspective What led you to your epiphany or your aha moment? Was it lightning or? No, no, it came a bit earlier. So oddly something that, like, I think there are other people that had this experience as well,

is that Ethereum also played a role in it. So when Ethereum came around, and Berlin is very much also Ethereum country, so they have hackerspace there, parity is based there. so there was a big Ethereum community and especially before the DAO came around there were lots of presentations so that kind of got me more interested in the space again because I saw, okay, there's something else out there

they made large presentations and it seemed more approachable at the time and so I spent some time looking at that then I saw what came of the DAO and that kind of drew me in even more because I saw okay this is like it showed

me how low my understanding was of the whole space basically So the DAO turned you off of Ethereum or I cannot really say that it was like I saw it as something that was kind of interesting but I hadn't really

looked into it deeply enough to form a real opinion on it like i'm very um i really don't want to commit to any opinions usually unless i have very good uh understanding of something um and uh with this it was like that but i was i was looking at it pretty curiously and went to some meetups and and so it it sounded um like something that could be interesting and uh but then you know like that there was there was a bucket that that like made the whole thing crash and I was like for me as somebody who was usually when when I when I go to a new company and I do that routinely as a freelancer I go deep and I understand the systems and like I mean

it could be potentially part of my job to prevent something at this it was very interesting to me that there were so many people at these meetups and and watching these presentations and apparently working on it and everyone seemed super smart but still this this happened and like and how much money was was was disappearing um yeah it was just uh very interesting to follow and and that made me to uh have a desire to to understand it from a much deeper deeper perspective so you've obviously wound up working on bitcoin what what uh sort of led you to have a deeper understanding of both ethereum and bitcoin like what was your course of direction did you start spinning up solidity or excuse me uh like a parity

node and writing and solidity were you jumping into the core code base and sort of figuring out how it worked or were you looking more at development uh mentalities if you will um yeah i i i mean i've spent quite a bit of time to think about like does ethereum make sense or not like like the the uh what they what they pitch um does it actually make sense and then like like many people that are in bitcoin now i just at some point realized like i cannot come up with something that uh is a use case that that really makes sense to me and then um at the same time i i just understood more and more that um the use case of bitcoin um as it really becomes a store of value and like it's growing in size it's it's uh it's every year that it survives basically um it becomes

like more likely to survive into the future that it's much more relevant and that's like the only real use case for using blockchain right now so it's like by

I don't know how you say it but via negativa basically yeah it's how most people come to do it I'm the same way actually I was I was very bullish Ethereum

until the DAO hack as well as soon as the DAO hack I was like this is this is not not this is not right

it's not okay we should not be pumping this stuff and then you dig deeper and so what what

sort of excites you about Bitcoin in particular from like a technical perspective from a from an engineer's perspective

like do you do you admire the conservative nature of the the team and the review process the team uh the contributing like bitcoin core that process in particular do you like uh working

with the engineers who like to work on bitcoin um in particular or do you feel like you learn more i mean the the the guys the the people that i've met that are working on bitcoin are all great um i'm i'm very happy that i can work with specifically the people at chaincode but also other people that i've met online and at some conferences um but also i i really i really cannot like name one specific thing i just i would like to say that bitcoin is like the most interesting software project in the world right now is this or not not just right now probably forever um because yes there's nothing else out there that is that is that like can have the impact of of bitcoin and uh like the story how it comes about the the fact that it survived 10 years

like this is all so so incredible it's like a freak of nature that's uh right crazy the fact that the incentives have have stayed aligned for the last decade for at least a decade is is crazy i forget somebody was tweeting about that today but it is i think it was eric lombroso actually who was uh saying the fact that the incentives have have been aligned for for a decade is insane for a project uh as ambitious as bitcoin so i guess that's like where we can take this like how do you see bitcoin changing the world is there anything uh that you would consider um maybe not an unpopular opinion but maybe a lesser known opinion that uh the way you see bitcoin changing the world or um how or and how you just see it changing the world in general

um i'm i'm very much a hands-on guy so uh i'm not really thinking that much about like visions of the next 50 or 100 years so i i don't really yeah i i would say that's kind of a waste of time to think about that because I'm trying to understand the code base right now and I'm thinking about short term, of course. I would not be excited about it if I

wouldn't see it as something that is solving people's problems. On the one hand, one thing that I always like to name is that it's fascinating that we had the refugee crisis in Europe

and so just to just to imagine that somebody at least in theory um coming from africa and and crossing the border to to europe um on foot or so um that they if they had the ability and i'm not saying that it's easy but if they had the ability to change uh some of their wealth to bitcoin and they could basically memorize the phrase and and just walk across the border basically like naked um but they could still have all their worth with them or at least like some fraction of their wealth that is just extremely fascinating and there was like definitely one of the things that also motivated me to to look into a deeper one when the refugee crisis was was coming about

and then yeah for for states that are experiencing that are experiencing inflation hyperinflation bitcoin doesn't even have to become like this this huge world currency or so it just needs to be something that is that is an alternative for people that um even if it's just the the the um wealthiest 10 000 or so of the country that that get to change some of their their wealth and like keep the state from from from diluting it uh um but yeah that already can have an impact it's so crazy how how powerful it is and the fact that like most people obviously most people because bitcoin isn't widespread don't grasp the power of this and i guess that's why i do this podcast and the newsletter and why you code is to make you code to make the system stronger i would imagine

i'm doing this podcast to help people uh sort of try to grasp the the magnitude of this like it's a big innovation and like so do you find yourself explaining bitcoin to to people a lot at home or are you more of a i work on some code i'm a tech guy yeah yeah the um i'm i don't find myself explaining it to that many people i am so um one thing is like like funnily the the the the people that i would like to explain it the most are my two younger brothers and unfortunately they uh they sort of say it's boring why do they say that well um they uh they are into robotics and they want to work on software it moves the robot's arms and so they think that that's more exciting and so I haven't been

successful in making them interested in Bitcoin. How much younger than you are there? They're 10 years younger. They're in college right now. Oh nice. They'll come around. Maybe they'll need to know the importance. They'll come to notice the importance of sound money in the digital age and yeah um but robotics is pretty cool they're working on like drones and stuff or uh not drones um like um the the older one is working on like some innovative robot arm that can kind of like sense so it's um built so like when you're very old um that you that it can help you basically get off the toilet um without uh like if it malfunctions or so like breaking ama stuff like that i saw i was perusing twitter today and i saw a video of a team in japan is

working on building like a quasi tail for elderly people to help them with their balance like when they're walking like self-corrects it like mimics the towel like a uh a mccall monkey not a mccall monkey or like some some monkey and just like is trying to help uh the elderly with balance for like when they or the disabled to like if they're about to fall over or like a balance for you and it's crazy like do you believe in like a cyborg future do you think we're gonna become cyborgs i actually just interviewed uh brian bishop last weekend um and he got big in the transhumanism and i've never been introduced to transhumanism and this is all that a lot of this stuff was new to me but like to think the tech is getting there where we can like combine with this stuff is is

crazy i mean your brother's working on it so yeah i mean like that's inevitable i mean like this already we we can already see that out there right like there's these like suits that that enhance your strength for for lifting up things for warehouse workers um and like you get um what's it heart rate monitors um and and like hearing aids and stuff like that and um um i there's no reason why even if you cannot imagine it like you're probably just underestimating it like there will be something for for everything that that you need in your body that that can be replaced by by some kind of machine probably in the future yeah yeah that's like the one question i asked and they said it was brian had a friend on who's huge transhumanist i thought we were

gonna turn into a transhumanism podcast for the rest of the rest of our tenure here but um now they were big on like it's inevitable and and we're gonna merge with machines it's crazy to think it's crazy to think how much our life or the world has changed during our lifetimes i think we're about the same age um yeah and just like i remember when we got as i've said this on this podcast many times i remember when we got caller id at our house and i thought that was fucking insane it's like oh my god at least we can see it but uh like now we're like supercomputers in our pockets bitcoin exists like how how much more drastic of changes do you think we'll see in our lifetime like wow um i i i honestly the best answer i can give is i've

accepted that i that i cannot uh i cannot yeah i i cannot imagine it like this is uh like i just i just uh try to remind myself all the time that i'm probably if if i would think of something that is uh um like what that future would look like in like 50 years or so um then i would probably totally underestimate it um so um yeah i mean it's it's uh the only thing where where i've looked into it deeper where i've maybe like been too optimistic was self-driving cars i mean like to what's that self-driving cars oh self-driving cars yeah yeah so like there i i saw them almost like driving around like around this time when when when we saw like uh bigger leaps in the past couple of years um that was a big that was uh when i was like early in my

bitcoin career shilling it to to others that was one of my i remember there was a huge post about self-driving cars and they're gonna like drive around uh with bitcoin wallets and like they're you're gonna own a self-driving car and then that would be able to uh while you're at work or school go to work and like be like an uber like service where you send it around and it has a bitcoin wallet that accepts bitcoin payments and it's just like autonomous after your while you're at work and then when you're done work it'll come pick you up and give you a free ride home that was like how i'd pitch you something like this is gonna be here in like 10 years but i don't think we're we're that close as yeah yeah but also what's i mean what what you

also have to realize is like um what's even more exciting i think then it's like how it's going to change the whole like our whole life then like not just that the car is driving by itself but also that um we probably won't even own a car anymore i mean that's that's not a new insight um but like then um there's just can be like one let's just say uber fleet or whatever um that is driving everyone around and you just own a fraction of that um not on the blockchain but um and you just use it whenever you need to and then people also don't need to live in in in manhattan anymore they can live more outside because that everything is going to be optimized and and you know people So people will move outside of the city and...

I hear Stephen Toole is bringing SlotKit back from the dead and they're going to bring this car, the blockchain future to the future. To us, excuse me. Yeah, that's what... There's been a lot of talk about a Ethereum project in particular the last couple of days. Udi, Udi Werthmeyer.

That must be very entertaining. Yeah, it is very entertaining. Udi is very smart and very witty as well. So go check out his profile. if you're looking to see the inconsistencies of ETH narrative get called out. It's interesting. I met Uri actually at Riga last year.

Yeah, that's where I met him as well. I'm surprised we didn't. Did we meet officially last year? I don't think so. I don't think so. Neither do I. But I'm happy to meet you now. I'm happy you're here.

So let's dive more into the summer. What have you learned about Bitcoin Core this summer? What's been the most challenging thing for you? um probably um most challenging thing overall was that i wasn't a professional c++ programmer and i still am not but uh i definitely have learned a lot of c++ also um and uh so have you have you worked with it at all in the past or yeah i mean like you know i've learned lots of different languages and at some point like you kind of adapt pretty quickly to just being able to skim the code I mean I'm not saying that that it's super easy and they just pick up C++ on the

fly but you've you've seen kind of the different different schemes and paradigms at some point and and so you kind of can can figure out sometimes you look into the reference and but I definitely was struggling a bit in the beginning to to kind of use my tools efficiently but I kind of tackled that with building my own reference so especially debugging and how to debug bitcoin that is aside from my project that I'm working on what you talked already is the other thing that I'm pretty proud of that I've done over the summer is I've built basically a reference of how to block and and debug efficiently from Bitcoin. So it's like a, yeah, I would say a good starter reference

for people that want to get into Bitcoin but haven't had much experience with C++ or in general with Bitcoin code base. And so, yeah, actually I have given a presentation on that also at the meetup. And I will also talk about that in Tel Aviv at Dev++. loss so what uh what are the benefits of creating a debugger and a logger that help you learn like what do you have to architect it in a certain way that just forces you to read through the code or

um it's not really creating one it's just using them efficiently and so it's what what confused me in beginning is um you have these different contexts in bitcoin of running your own bitcoin d or running unit tests or running the functional tests and then you may want to log from within the test or you may want to log from within the c++ or from the bitcoin d and so then you have to use different functions and the other things that you have to that you have to pay attention to and so especially if you want to run a functional test and have the function test basically drive the bitcoin d instance to the point where you want to inspect it that is kind of hard to then set a break point in the bitcoin d instance and then be able to inspect it because you don't

really have access to that bitcoin d instance naturally so that's like that that took me a while to figure out and of course i asked several chain coders to to describe it to me like three times or so but now I've written it down and and yeah several people have used it so I mean I can briefly describe it it's it's actually not that hard but you have to start the functional test you stop the function test with PDB and just the Python debugger and then you have to find the pit of the Bitcoin D process that is running in the background that the function test has spun up and then Then you have to attach to that using a debugger like GDB or LLDB.

Then you can set your breakpoint there and let that continue. Then you let the PDB breakpoint that you've set before in the functional test continue and then the Bitcoin instance is going to run into that breakpoint that you've set. It seems like you've memorized this process in the back of your hand. I have a photo presentation on it, and I had all the slides drawn out, and then John Newberry had the idea that I demonstrated live. Oh. And I had it all perfectly memorized.

I had successful live demos five times before the actual presentation, and then the actual presentation, of course, it didn't work. That's the way it works. That's always the biggest joke a bit, Debs. That's what you get when you do a live presentation or a live demo. Yeah, then I could still figure it out. But that was really great that I was talking about this topic because it was something that I thought about so much.

And now I'm using it every day. And basically right now when I work on my project, really today I was probably 50% of the time I was just in the debugger stepping through the code. and I think that's also why I wrote this stuff down because it's a very effective way to learn because when you're in the debugger and you can inspect the variables

and just try out calls, you have a much different view than when you just read the code and it's just a great way to learn and understand everything. And do you think being in the environment at Chaincode it would help bootstrap your knowledge quicker than would have happened outside.

Absolutely. Absolute game changer. Yeah. Like, what's, again, like, what's the environment? Like, that was my favorite part of the bootcamp, just you have people, like-minded people, coming from different backgrounds with different expertise and just being able to congregate in a corner. Like, yeah, walk me through this.

And, like, for Bitcoin developers, I got to imagine it's pretty, like, even more intense because there's so many areas on Bitcoin that one individual can be working on? Yeah, yeah. I mean, so first of all, it's amazing that there are that many people present that are serious contributors to Bitcoin.

I mean, there are just not that many in the world, basically. And they are all there. And yeah, what's great is like you, I mean, you don't want to disturb them all the time, right? You don't want to tap on their shoulders all the time when they are focused. but what we have done is we have office hours in the afternoon so that's basically one of them just gives like an hour

of the time or so that they're approachable and you can ask them anything you like and I definitely have used that and other people have too and then over lunch you just have discussions quite a bit and yeah other things that we've done also is we are encouraged to to of course review each other's code um and john newberry also does the pr review club um uh which is a great initiative i also encourage uh everyone uh to to participate in that as well um and uh yeah almost everyone in the office is viewing that also so pr review club to

to anyone who doesn't know is an irc meetup basically um where uh every every week one PR on Bitcoin Core is reviewed together and people can ask questions and John directs the discussion a bit into interesting views on it and yeah. What's an IRC code review

like that's I feel like it's got to be very thorough number one because you have to write everything out but like doing a code review over chat is fascinating to me. Yeah it's I mean you can you can look at the logs I wouldn't have thought that it works

that well but it works very well I mean like I think it's not so great if you're a very slow typer it encourages you to change that but Brian Bishop giving lessons to everybody

yeah exactly Brian Bishop coding typing camp it's fast the pleasure of seeing me in action over the weekend it's very impressive um ah what was i just gonna say i had something lined up to ask you um sorry i see review oh yes this is what it was uh i forget who told me maybe it was brian bishop who told me i forget who told

me exactly but apparently andrew chow's doing twitch code reviews now yeah yeah yeah over yeah it's it's pretty funny like uh so uh i mean he's uh mostly uh just complaining about uh um big wallet guy forgetting to recompile but uh no no seriously it's i mean it's great that he does that definitely um it's uh but it's what would be even better or like somebody just needs to do that is uh like a compressed uh view like you know with the nfl games they take like four hours but then there's like compressed uh games like where they just throw the actual plays um yeah i mean like for lots large parts of the time he's just like you know copying code blocks and running recompilation.

But other than that, especially if you're into wallet code and want to understand hardware, wallet, HWI stuff better, I think that's... And he's working on pre-signed transactions too, right? Sorry? He's working on some of the pre-signed transactions too, right? Yeah, PSPT, yeah, it's that code

and the stuff that I've seen that he has done was a very large pull request that he has and i think there was 70 commits which is crazy why is that crazy it's a typical i mean there's no typical thing i mean i haven't really seen the commits i haven't reviewed it um but something that that you just know as a developer is just then if the if there's like a huge number of commits let's say more than 10 like just the number of people that are going to review it is just decreasing because it's just so huge yeah that people are just probably they're saying like i'm not going to do this today i'm going to do it tomorrow or whatever and but that

just keeps happening um and so like for that video he was trying to get it down to like 30 or 40 i think um yeah i mean the um pull requests that i've seen for example for uh block filters or so which is something that was recently merged like there were three pull requests of 7 to 12 commits or so I mean that was already a big

a bigger thing right pretty big feature that is coming to Bitcoin and so like if you then put that into relation that's just 70 commits in one PR that's pretty crazy. And are they all like

contingent on another like you have like a domino effect like everyone messes up it could mess up other commits so you probably want to reduce your attack surface via the number of commits as well is that correct am i correct in assuming that or uh i'm not sure i've understood like is there a for the 70 commits is like one like do they need to happen in a certain order um you mean one is like number 70 is contingent on number 69 which is contingent on number 68 um for all of its work or would they all get... Yeah, probably. I mean, I haven't looked into it that deeply.

So, yeah. And also, I haven't followed that video. He had one four-hour session and I just kept it on for some time in the background and it was kind of entertaining. Now I remember who told us this. It was Rodolfo who told us this. My bet is because he was paying attention

because he's working on a hardware wallet. But that is a fascinating idea. Like, code reviewed via Twitch. It's crazy how many avenues through which you can learn. Like, the IRC, like, if you want to type it out, you can do that. I mean, obviously, it's only Andrew Chow doing a Twitch right now. I think also Lisa Nygood from Sea Lightning was doing it. I just, I haven't seen recordings of that, but I think she also did that.

Yeah. It makes sense, right? It's a great avenue. And so, what's your favorite way to learn? Like, hands-on, video, visual learner? Yeah, I'm definitely visual in the beginning, I have issues with keeping my focus on text for a very long time, but then also quickly jumping into just applying it yourself. But for that it's also important that it's a project that is kind of interesting and

good if I have like something that I can they can look at as like a guideline or so but I feel like that's that's the best way for me to learn yeah now I'm a very visual learner as well I learned that in college I use the Khan Academy a lot to help teach myself economics and other resources but yeah so what uh what's what's the next 11 days looking like for you like you have or 12 or 11 days it's march 20th yeah 11 days left of the residency or was is it the residency or the bootcamp i'm getting confused it's a residence residency yeah yeah the residency um what are you are you like sprinting right now um trying to get everything in or is this is this something

like you're just gonna get it to a certain point and then keep working on it after yeah definitely gonna keep working on it after um so the expectations um for i think most of us are not that or already were weeks ago that we it wouldn't wasn't going to get in but rather that we maybe could open a pr or um get feedback at least on on something that could become a pr soon and so that that's what it looks like for me right now so um i'm really trying in this week to get something ready that is that that can get through the first prs um to the first reviews um and also i'm probably going to make a gist that is going to describe um just broadly what i've done um the different approaches that i've looked at and um hopefully also some benchmarks which i still have

to do um and then i'm going to propose that to uh bitcoin developers uh meetup um that is also on IRC and try to get some feedback. So far, this is the best idea that I have to get it out there, get feedback from the people where I need to get some involvement in order to actually get it into the code base. I mean, it's something that you just need to think about if you have something that was already proposed once by SIPA and the people didn't really pay much attention to it and then now you come as somebody pretty new and uh yeah so and i kind of have to play it a bit strategically yeah and if you play it strategically it all goes well and the pr does get merged what does this mean for bitcoin like what what are uh devs working

on or users using it you're going to be able to leverage well definitely the the get tx outset info call is going to match quicker. That potentially can be used then for definitely fast BTC pay server which may or may not be obsolete when assume UTXO comes around but still the getTxOutsetInfo hash can be used for other quick checks of comparing the UTXO set and that can even even potentially be done then through the peer-to-peer layer because it's not going to be a DOS vector anymore because it's just a value that is cached.

And so, yeah, there potentially can be more use cases on it that I haven't thought about yet. So, yeah, it's something that I can see other people using it where I just haven't had any idea about it. It's so fascinating, like, little things like this RPC call could consume like your summer and but it all contributes to the bigger thing so like if you were to be successful in this endeavor if even unsuccessful or unsuccessful after a certain period of time or the PR just sits there what what else uh would you want to work on at Encore or

Lightning Network what would you want to build um it's hard to say like I don't or I mean I have things that I find more interesting than other things but I also look at the code base especially of core and I still see a lot of things that can be improved

even if they're just smaller things but when I you know I've been a freelancer for a couple of years and I've seen lots of different code bases from lots of different startups and I always approached it with kind of like how do you say

the mentality where you leave it better than you than you found it boy scout mentality what's what's that boy scout rule the boy scout boy scout rule boy scout rule yes that is boy scout rule yeah eagle scout rule yeah okay boy scout yeah yeah um so um and uh yeah just just smaller things like i'm i don't have to work on on a huge feature right now unless like i something jumps at me and and I say that's right like I see that that's necessary and I'm the right person to work on it then then I'm going to do that but otherwise I can also see myself just improving helping improve the test coverage helping with with separation of processes which is which is a huge

project that is being worked on just refactorings fixing smaller bugs so yeah Yeah, I'm just happy to improve it, make Bitcoin more stable and usable for everyone and don't need to work on a huge feature. Well, thank you. Thank you for helping out Bitcoin and working on it. It's crazy. That's what blows my mind,

especially the developers contributing to core. There's nobody there to pay you. Obviously, Chaincode's brought you in this summer, but after the residency, you're sort of on your own. yeah you're gonna have to to make money like how do you plan on like having a full-time job and work on bitcoin on the side or you're gonna try to go full-time i definitely get a full-time job working on bitcoin yeah yeah no i'm i mean like that would be great um of course uh would be awesome to get paid to to work on bitcoin on open source stuff um but uh i mean i i'm i don't have

that lined up yet so um i mean i'm looking into that uh into the possibilities and and chain code is also helping with that um but um yeah i don't know yet um i only know that i'm going to keep working on bitcoin yeah i mean the chain code model seems to work i mean it does a great job of finding talented devs and then uh nurturing them if you will and like how like do you see that across your classmates as well? Like people have grown a lot this summer and developed as developers and their understanding of Bitcoin

has developed as well? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I was already very impressed on the first day when I met all these guys. They were already impressive at that point. Some of them already had contributed to open source projects and others just had very deep knowledge.

so yeah they're very impressive but I think what everyone definitely profited from a lot was just the access to the Chaincode team and yeah getting full-time commitment to work on Bitcoin and or whatever other projects they chose and I think that made everyone much more comfortable in in working in that environment and, and yeah. Yeah. No, the pleasure of sitting now with James Chang last week and what he's

working on taproot for like a test net for taproot basically is really cool. And what is, what is like the coolest thing outside of what you're working on that, that you see being built at the residency or worked on? I'm not really sure. I have to say I don't have so deep insights into what they actually build, not for everyone.

So that's why there's some bias there. I don't have a big insight into what everyone's doing. Like somebody definitely I have to highlight is a person that likes to value his privacy, but he goes by Ariad on GitHub. and he's kind of contributing to Rust projects but also Bitcoin Core and yes, has a huge output there and is very productive

and is achieving a lot and somebody else where I have some deeper insight is Richard Myers and he's working on L2 demo basically. Yeah, LaF-49. yeah like lot 49 is uh the the project that he's working on before like the concept um and for the residency he's building like a l2 uh demo basically so his lot 49 builds on l2

but l2 is not there yet um so he is basically building like an l2 demo yeah so far was was just a paper and he's putting it into code yeah no l2 elto we actually had richard on a few weeks ago to talk about that he's now he he's another one who did the residency and seems invigorated almost right but he said it was daunting right or not daunting but like tiring like it's long days you're a lot of pressure you're you're with a a group of very talented individuals and um yeah no it just seems like a great

environment um so i'm happy for you i'm pumped because again i remember the the smiles on your guys faces like the first time you guys came to town and to see that that summer has been been worthwhile uh i'm pumped for you guys yeah we just like i mean when uh when i get stuck on a on an issue for half a day or so you know it's like i i sometimes also feel stressed uh you know because i want to get progress and it's just two weeks left but on the other hand um you know we just have to remind ourselves how privileged we are to to have this summer and have access to the resources and and sit in this awesome office and um yeah then then you know we we uh have reason to smile again

have you been like in new york city outside of uh outside of the residency uh great i have to say it's not my first time in new york so um i didn't really do that much um touristy things um but yeah still still enjoying it great to to live here and um yeah experience that part of it i think it just feels different when you when you live for an extensive time and not just a tourist looking at museums or whatever yeah once you get used to like the the smelly hot summer days become a real new yorker have the uh the rat scared you at all you got any rat problems no i mean we also have rats in berlin so it's uh it's not that not that different we need to find a chain code in berlin that's what we that's what like i'm happy to see like square crypto come obviously chain code

block stream before it like do you do you think it is imperative for bitcoin's long-term success not imperative but beneficial for bitcoin's long-term success for more and more of these initiatives to pop up yeah yes and no um i mean yes definitely but uh it doesn't have to be Berlin necessarily I think trend overall but also in Bitcoin development is like people work remote and so lots of people that contribute a lot I think or that could be potential very good contributors still have issues to to make it somewhere there were also issues with some people that would be would have been participants in residency that had issues with the visa um so um i mean maybe

setting something up that is remote um can help people too i mean there's there's definitely huge benefits to getting everyone in the same place and kind of get this um get this squad mentality but uh yeah it's it's just harder if you have a family or so not not everyone can can can do that Luke Dash Jr. is being supported now by like a crowd fund out of China I believe is that correct? I think Carl Dong was telling me about that

I actually don't know who he's supported by I just heard that he's supported by someone but I don't really know I think that's the case, I think it's a bunch of like well-off Bitcoiners in China and East Asia that had the Telegram group, I think Dovi Wan was a part of it too It just makes

huge sense for anyone who has a lot of bitcoin to to support the core contributor it's uh it's just you're incentivized to do so right you're not a security you're number one securing number two making it a bigger a better investment uh yeah um so i guess that's a good a good segue question is like what worries you about bitcoin like what uh is there anything uh you find is is is pressing and worrying from an engineering perspective that would maybe hinder Bitcoin's long-term success? Not really.

I mean, I think Bitcoin is in a pretty good place right now. I mean, there can always be things improved, of course, but nothing really comes to mind right now that is absolutely necessary. I mean, we are talking a lot about taproot and and stuff like that this is um not something that is that that we really need necessarily you know like bitcoin bitcoin is working fine without it right now um so i think that shows that we don't have like a like a huge thing that we need to fix um sort of like like segway did as segway

did yeah it's very comforting to hear no that's um no at the conference over the weekend so a bit block boom um mike schmidt gave a great presentation on tap root and snore and it would be so cool the things that it would enable if it was implemented but like you said it's not not imperative but it would be pretty dope if we could get it definitely definitely yeah but yeah it's i mean on the other hand we we still have time right i would be the first one to to see these things in in bitcoin this year but uh i mean on the other hand i'm gonna put the pressure on you right now okay Fabian for BipTapRoot

how do we get it how do we get it merged what is the two weeks typically what what would you propose as a signaling method

or a soft fork agreement to get that implemented because that's like the big question right now is like this proposal SIPA proposed it

what like a month two months ago now maybe even three months ago now at this point and it seems like everybody's like yeah we want Schnorr

we want TapRoot and all that other stuff that's in there but it's like how do you get a signaling mechanism to get the network to vote on whether not vote but to reach consensus on whether or not it should be implemented

wow I think I have to pass on that because I really haven't thought about that it's really yeah it's a difficult question and I just really haven't thought about it no and it's also

it's a hard question to answer after Segwit right because it was a very messy messy signaling process and obviously getting it passed or you had Segwit 2x what do we have so we have BIP 9 which was the

BIP used for miners to signal which is version bits basically binary option you single one way or the other but you found like Wang Chung from F2 pool was messing with the version bits and was basically messing with the signaling and on top of that you had all different bips from bit 91 bit 148 bit 149 bit 90 which are all part of it and it was all a mess trying to get segwit uh merged and implemented

um so like i think there's a lot of battle scars still from from that and i think that's why i asked you because that's like i've asked john newberry before bit devs um that's it's been asked before too and it's sort of a question nobody wants to even approach right now it's like I don't want to be the one to recommend how we signal this, which is fascinating, right? Yeah, I mean, like comparing to Segwit so far, and also I think there's not really, or I don't tend to see like groups forming

that are really fighting over it. But that might still develop. I mean, like what I said before, I think Bitcoin is in kind of a good place right now. and so if it ain't broke don't fix it type mentality yeah if we if we don't need to if we if we don't really need it like we don't have i mean use cases are cool but we don't really need them so um if you if you have a lot of bitcoin and uh you don't want them to go away um it is kind of rational to say you don't want to introduce any big changes unless they either

like triple your money or um well what about privacy so i think like chenor that's why i think snort and tap root i would put them more leaning towards uh not good to haves but probably need to haves because of the privacy issue like i think p2ep would be huge if you could just have every transaction be pay to end point basically every transaction be a coin joint and it would really obscure the chain analysis companies and their their ability to track transactions throughout the chain so that is my and this is my personal belief i don't and i am adult anybody who listens to this podcast knows i am adult um but it would seem to me that once you have a very strong plausible deniability and privacy assurances at the protocol level level

enabled by snore and taproot um then we can sort of hit escape velocity and be like there's no way you can throttle this but you could also have you can also have the the the chain stay as it is a perpetuity and have your transactions somewhat known at the protocol level and then gain obscurity on levels like lightning network and stuff like that but i think yeah yeah but in like unfortunately um unfortunately from from our perspective um i think there are also quite a few players that that have possession of a lot of bitcoin that don't really care about privacy right and so i mean like every exchange that does kyc doesn't care about privacy improvements um so yeah so that's it's a very good point and they have a lot of the bitcoin yeah yeah and so

that's um something that yeah we have to keep in mind like that's that's potentially where where conflict could come from that's where it came from last time i don't want to start it now Bobby let's come on just do it pull the trigger just send it the privacy was I mean that's I've been saying this for a year

that's going to be the next big battle it's just when's it going to start that's the question that's actually a very good point I haven't thought of the exchange is trying to hold it up because maybe they won't quote unquote be compliant at that point in their eyes um but again they they only have so many full nodes right

it could also be just somebody like again i don't want to be the one to now encourage someone to do that but i mean like shall and fry well just like see it as an opportunity to just do a fork like even if you don't believe in it um you could just do a fork that doesn't do it and and just uh i mean it's gonna have some value and and like you you probably can make some money from it yeah it is uh and of course it's not hard to do i bet that'll be rat creighton um who does rat creighton um bitcoin privacy and in that hole he was a he was a serial forker for for gain uh bitcoin private was the was the big one that he he forked off and didn't know there was an inflation bug and i think they printed like two million more bitcoin than they

should have um ah that was uh that was an interesting time in bitcoin when all those when like all the bitcoin forks were yeah we're hot bitcoin gold bitcoin private bitcoin cash obviously it's interesting to see where they've add up did you see bitcoin.com or excuse me the at bitcoin handle on twitter started deleting all their bcash support really i don't know yeah i don't follow that yeah you're not big on twitter that was actually so if you freeze out there a lot of the research i do is based off of tweets and twitter and you only have 100 you only have 116 tweets so it was uh it was like your github and that and and the conversation we had in the beginning of the summer that i that i had to go off yeah i mean but but i think it's going well

so it's going great man um yeah i mean like it's uh like forks uh it's it's crazy when people just tell me that these people actually exist like um i i still have a hard time believing that like the The only thing I can go off is like when I go on meetup and I search for Bitcoin meetup on the page, like there's a Bcash meetup where 100 people are members of that group. And then the other thing was that I found kind of amusing was that right in front of my house, there's a supermarket in Berlin. And in front of that supermarket, there are a couple of steel pillars. um and just one day they were just all of these steel pillars were full of bcash stickers

and i was like did they did they find me or something like this i get really paranoid the bcashers are taunting you at work really i mean like you there was like in total like eight bcash stickers so what would you say if like on on the street down here there would be like eight B-cash stickers like right in front of your entrance door like on every corner. I'd move. I'd move out.

Too many bad neighbors. You can't trust them at that point. Too many B-cashers. That's what I'm actually looking to see. I would love to see a mining, like a 51% attack. I said it, whatever. Like the stuff's possible,

like a proof of work. Like that's the next thing I'm interested to see if pools or dark pools start attacking chains just because you look at it like, that's the crazy thing about Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV in particular. And even though a lot of their proponents

are extremely loud, if you look at the hash rate, Bitcoin has 97% of the SHA-256 hash rate and those two are fighting for the last three. And you only need what, like five to six percent of current bitcoin hashrate to completely school both those chains and that's actually something that surprised me 10 years in is that uh 51 attacks by dominant chains or dominant uh yeah dominant chains has not been uh not been executed at all do you do you

see uh proof of work warfare heating up in the future i don't really know i mean like it would So it's actually surprising that there are not more attacks, I think. That has been one of the topics of our residency, of presentations that we've had in this ramp-up phase, but also now later on. And there's going to be some interesting new research also going to be released soon. But, yeah, like I said, it's actually surprising

that there's not more going on. I mean, like, so many people just want to see the world burn. And this, yeah, it's actually weird that there's not more going on, sort of. Right. Are you allowed to give us a sneak peek of the research that's going to come out? I don't really know if I'm allowed to. It's a private presentation, so. All right.

I'm not going to force you to do that, then. But, yeah, it's also going to be interesting. like right now obviously the market has gone gone down for a long time now it has gone up and also from macroeconomic perspective right now the markets are like it feels like also for a long time Germany in particular man Deutsche Bank at all-time lows and all your treasury yields negative right now which is so weird although you can you can you can give me your money and give you back less in 10 years i mean i'm german so it's uh do you want 100 now or 90 cents later it's that is i mean it's coming from traditional markets it is scary where it is right now and

that's actually something that worries me like with bitcoin in particular as a safe haven like do you think it's ready to to be an escape boat for if there is like a an economic downturn and there is a lot of people trying to uh come on to the network like how do we how do we onboard not even a billion people like even if it's the next 100 million people because we saw in 2017 when the price was going crazy then like the exchanges were going down obviously fees went up that's not fees going up it's not necessarily a bad thing but blocks started slowing down a little bit because there was a lot of congestion obviously segwit proliferating since then has helped and um other things have helped since then become more efficient but like do you think we're

we're ready to scale to like 100 million people 200 million people and if so how like do you think more people will be on board of via lightning or uh the protocol layer um uh also one of the questions that i don't concern myself with that much because let's not kid ourselves like if if 100 million people come into bitcoin uh 95 of them at least are going to be on exchanges and And it's just going to be depending on how efficient these exchanges then handle what they actually put on the blockchain. And since we had these huge congestions in 2017, I feel like it has gone a lot better.

And also, obviously, to share something else from Chaincode, Optech also is contributing by educating exchanges about how to improve even more. um so yeah it's i mean of course we we can see we can see um full mempools um high fees again um but um if as you say lots of people try to use bitcoin as a as a safe haven um i think that doesn't mean that a lot of people will spin up full notes um because that's not what these people are looking for um they're just looking for a store of value um but exposure to it they don't need yeah yeah so um especially if if like the the markets are going to crash and actually

bitcoin turns out to be the the asset that they that they that they go to um i think it wouldn't really have that much of an impact um in terms of like the number of full nodes that are being run and and um the number of transactions that that get into the block i mean it's it's also unfortunate uh for as somebody who's running a full node and and would like to see more people doing that but um yeah that's the reality i think very uh very honest of you like i think no everybody would like i'd like to envision people running their own full nodes soon actually might work out in our favor where people just gain access via the exchanges and yes hopefully optech has done an incredible job of educating and and making people aware of batching uh using

back 32 trend or addresses and and being as efficient as possible um when transacting on the blockchain but maybe that could also work in our favor where people aren't comfortable running their own full nodes and maybe over time they come to realize that's what i think happens like it's an education process like yeah no one's ever had to take self-sovereignty of their financials before um in custody it's like we're on a gold standard but even when we're on a gold standard like it was in exchanges or or banks and um i think bitcoin sort of incentivizes people to learn uh and and take extreme ownership over their being so that people can get it on exchanges and slowly but surely move it yeah to their own private keys which which yeah maybe that's maybe

that's the way you you onboard the next 100 million people slowly one step at a time stepping stones yeah you need like typical marketing thing you need lots of different touch points sort of my first touch point was somebody sending me an email because it went up to an x and then my next touch point was thinking about it in terms of startup ideas and then at some point i i understood what it's really about um and so yeah like people will will see it as as maybe just a way to to conserve their wealth for some time through proxy of some company but then maybe when the economy goes down and and like states where they are they fear some scrutiny or they are not sure that the funds are going to be safe at the

exchange that they have chosen and then they are going to look at hardware wallets or whatever is going to be around at the time as a way to as a way to save the funds in a safe way that is convenient for them. And I think then they are going to own their own keys eventually. I'd agree. Yeah, the world had learned to clean itself

when we got fresh plumbing. We had to learn how to wipe our butts, take showers, brush our teeth. It'll take time to learn how to take custody of your private keys and do sort of data sanitation, if you will. um now it's uh what was i gonna say the second time i've lost my train of thought here um taking shower no i was thinking like into the future like

so let's get cosmic here like do you do you see bitcoin taking us to space i've been i've been i've been reading uh i've been reading uh first i mean i prefer and prefer it i've read over a draft of a good friend of the podcast drew brunsal is writing writing a piece about bitcoin in space and he seems to think that bitcoin finally creates the incentive for us to go to space and explore space um do you agree with that uh i think i've already said like five times or so that uh i don't concern myself with things that are too far away um yeah and and space is pretty far away yeah so i'm a romantic i like to i like to daydream i'm sorry for for trying to force you to too that's okay that's okay um yeah we're almost like an hour and 20 minutes in here like

what uh is there anything like that we didn't touch on that you'd like to touch on before we anything any messages you want to want to impart um i mean we um i thought you wanted to talk maybe a little about lightning um we can do that um yeah i can like what is the state yeah what is what are your current thoughts on lightning like we just got watchtowers added an lnd um after speaking to the noddle guys a couple months ago uh michael in particular seems to think like channel routing like is it isn't ideal right now like what after building on it you've built on it a bunch like let's start there so you you work with renee pickhart on um that's the one tweet i found is you interacting with renee in a in a thread about like bar 77 room 77 room 77 room 77

room 77 it's the the bitcoin bar in berlin correct yeah exactly exactly so what's the vibe like there yeah it's it's awesome there i love it um i mean that's that's where the the monthly bitcoin meetup is happening um and uh yeah anyone who is uh visiting berlin and into bitcoin definitely has to has to stop by there um i don't i don't remember when they started accepting bitcoin as payment but it was probably like 2011 or so um so they are they're as as og as as it can get um I think at some point, like, somebody said also they are the first bar to actually, like, accept Bitcoin on a regular basis. I mean, like, they didn't sell the pizza, but, I mean, that was a one-time thing. But they have been around for a very long time.

And, yeah, it's a great place. You probably don't even have to be there for the meetup. you um if you just if you just sit at the couch and and ask someone at any given night if they are into bitcoin uh and you'd probably find someone in the bar yeah so what part of berlin is this bar in kreuzberg kreuzberg klaus yeah that's uh yeah you just uh it's easy to find so you worked on something on lightning to help create like an invoicing system for them it was like um i mean this particular was uh that you're referencing is a was a hack day project um that was Rene's idea and there was a system that had just come out I'm just blanking on the name now

but it was built there was just a UI project on top of sea lightning that you could also run container and he basically wanted to build a system with that where you could offer that as a service just a custodial lightning service basically I mean this is this is almost a year ago now or one year ago so there were not really that many apps out there and so yeah we just spun that up over over these one and a half days and I mean like it wasn't a huge project we we also attended some presentation Rene even gave a presentation at the lightning hack day there but at the end of it yeah room 77 was using it to receive payments with lightning and yeah it was the first

I guess we haven't heard of anyone else accepting a mainnet payment lightning payment for a beer prior to that so that actually room 77 had been the place also where Lalu had demoed lightning also but there was testnet okay and yeah but they are taking that further and further. I've seen now on Twitter just one or two days ago that at the last meetup they have demoed like a hardware version, so it's based on the M5 stack. If you've heard of that, it's like a stackable hardware set that is based on ESP32 where you can can have like a small display and like some buttons and they basically can generate an invoice on that it's connected to to a lightning node and they're using that now to accept payments

oh nice there's like there's a video on twitter it's pretty cool that's not what mortise is working on is it sorry is that that's not what that guy mortise is working on is it no uh he's working on like a hardware wallet slash lightning node i believe um no i mean there's there's uh the guy who i know is a btc socialist um whoa well he's he's from london but he's in berlin quite frequently um and he likes to hack on hardware stuff and he collaborates also with promo guys on on on events and and on hacking on hardware um and i think definitely he was involved in that like he has There's a couple of YouTube videos on that, on how to build hardware projects with Lightning. Definitely something worth checking out.

And yeah, they're just taking that further and further. And also I want to give a shout out now to these guys. They're going to the Hacker Congress camp right now around Berlin and demoing some of the stuff. And when this episode is coming out, it's probably already over. But, yeah, they are demoing this stuff live there for the CCC camp. Interesting. Shout out to you guys.

Thanks for working on it. When is that over? I don't know. But it's over before the end of August, like 25th or so. This will be out before then. Okay. We can speed it up. No, 21st is like two days.

So this will be out next week. 25th. 25th. it'll be a few days after a few days yeah yeah i'm very proud they took uh like i built a lightning vending machine uh which is like just a wooden box uh with some uh something that can spit something out basically and uh it was like my yeah probably the coolest project i've built with lightning and and uh yeah they they're taking that with them and and demoing that there so um yeah that's gonna thank them that's fucking huge congrats man people building on your work

how's that feel it's great it's great yeah i was very proud that they like i mean i wasn't i wasn't i wasn't at home anymore but they uh they picked it up and uh yeah taking it with them um i mean i didn't i didn't have to beg them for it they they they really wanted to take it with them and and show it off um there's also um guys there that have built awesome stuff like a e-bike that you can rent with lightning and uh e-scooter that you can rent with lightning um and so the original slokic dream yeah basically yeah it's uh it's it's really that yeah this is uh it's awesome oh yeah i mean and this is what a lot of people were saying back during the slok it and ico boom was just wait like bitcoin's going to enable these use cases on different

layers and microtransactions are able to to enable stuff like running a scooter and stuff like that now it just took some time like what excites you most about lightning from a use case perspective like streaming transactions microtransactions just the the ability to transact a little bit more privately and for less fees um what in particular excites you um i've i've thought about it quite a bit and um so i mean the that was the reason also why i built a vending machine was really that um i like that use case in particular as something that uh is very like very easily comes to mind when you think of what you pay for with money but it was just not possible with bitcoin on chain before um even if you like are at room 77 and you and you want to pay like you

you have some time and you know if you if you know that you um i mean mostly they they they trust the people that they know but they're gonna go zero comp for you um i i yeah if they know you they they will do that but um you can you can wait like like 10 20 minutes and you know after one two confirmations unless you've drunk the whole bar um they will definitely let you go and And you can do that. That's still practical. But, like, a vending machine, if you're running to the train, and I'm doing that a lot, like, and you want to just grab a can of Coke or whatever on the way, like, it needs to go quickly.

Or if you're at the checkout and, you know, there's a line behind you, you know, every second counts. And so I really wanted to just build something that builds on that use case. So, um, yeah, that's why, um, I've actually built a vending machine, um, like several things of like streaming money and so on. Um, I've thought about them a lot, but, um, I, um, don't think they're super practical. Um, so there's a paper by Nick Szabo, um, that's come out a long time ago. I don't know, 2011, 2012, um, on, uh, the, uh, mental, mental load, uh, yeah, the, uh, the, the mental cost.

yeah mental costs of like stream like paying for video uh streaming for example by the second um and and i'm a huge believer in that like it's even if you would enable that um i don't i just don't see it being used in in the wild that much like you have netflix and people are even if they don't use it for a month or for three months like they they are happy to just pay one fixed fee and and and not have to think about it again when they want to turn it on um but then if you if we watch a shitty movie and and you know it's am i gonna watch finishing it and it's gonna cost me 15 cent or do i turn it off now it's it's just not a situation that people want to be in no i agree that's a that's a very good point like too many too many mental costs uh is a bad user experience

at the end of the day right yeah um mental accounting yes mental accounting yeah um no that's like what blows my mind about like drc20 world like especially like with like make or down die and like all these obscure defi projects like the mental cost of going into thinking about everything you need to take into consideration uh with these projects in particular it's like no like and that's my favorite thing to do when thinking about the future of bitcoin the future of all this stuff is like we are in our bubble where we meet and speak with mainly people who are interested in bitcoin and that's where we spend a lot of our time and a lot of our focus and this is very apparent like obviously not excuse me not um

not like a hidden secret to anybody we're in a bubble like we're very interested in this niche nation technology and so like when i'm on the street and like that's i like to have a lot of walking conversations with bitcoiners and use of particularly when the the uh topic of usability comes up i'm like look at all these people on the street you think they're like they don't if they know about bitcoin it's just because they've heard about on the news and and like do you think like all these people are gonna and picking on defy in particular like adopt defy and start using ethereum as collateral for die with other assets they can add to it but they also have to think of the price of ethereum at any point in time and whether their their loans

collateralized enough or not like no that's too many mental accounting yeah decisions that come into to individuals uh everyday lives yeah i mean like you can also make the argument that there are going to be layers built on top of that as well just like are going to be with bitcoin i mean all of these people are probably also not gonna choose their own fees and stuff like that But, yeah, I looked at this for quite a while and just didn't really see use cases that made sense to me. And, I mean, let's say Wikileaks. So, yeah, that could be a dApp. Okay, I understand that.

But there's just not that many Wikileaks. so yeah it's just not that many people that have or companies or whatever that have really a use case that requires a decentralized application. The sat nodes are proven to be a good WikiLeaks if you wanted to do it too

right? Have you been following the Blockstream satellite? Like you can send messages from lightning? Yeah Should we send a message right now? Like this is like the new WikiLeaks you don't even need, let me find it you don't even need

adapt to do this. You can just use Bitcoin, the Lightning Network in particular. Let me find... I've got to signal my beat down here. This is when you do demos live. You don't have Wi-Fi. Let me find... Come on.

Let's see. A lot of... There it is, lntx bot. App satellite 50. Have you never seen this? No. I am, for you freaks at home, I am using the sat node. What should our message say? So I'm using this telegram bot to make an app call, call to the satellite.

I want to pay 50 satoshis. And now our message. What should we say? Hey, from TFTC with Fabian. Yeah. To CCC camp. What was that? To CCC camp.

What is your handle? At what? F-J-A-H-R. To CCC, capital C's, camp. All right. So boom, sent. Nice. live demos boom sent don't go over to twitter we'll see if it picked it up yet

so this is uh yeah so for you freaks at home that are just listening to me uh demo this to fabi fabian we're um we're sending a message to the sat node you'll be able to find this in retrospect maybe you're seeing it right now and yeah i see it but it's not i mean we know that i sent it but like the idea is that you don't know who sent it and it's just a random message sent to the satellite um nice yeah uh so that's like a decentralized wikileaks you don't even need df for that right you just need telegram and the lightning network and the satellite yeah which is crazy like this is uh again like we were we were touching on the beginning of the episode like i don't feel like people grasp the gravity of this technology like

it's it's a pretty big change in in the way that people people are going to view money and then actually like freedom in the digital age yeah do you realize that is somebody building on this um i mean yeah i mean i feel like everyone who's building something on it is is kind of building on that right uh but it's uh yeah it's uh you still have to remind yourself every time uh you think about it that's that that's how big it is yeah it's crazy um yeah i feel i feel very honored to be uh to be here speaking with you a kindred spirit as well working working on bitcoin we're an hour and a half in here now um to end it on lightning like where do you see it going do you see it improving drastically and and and be getting to the point where people can go to

vending machines and and make fast and easy payments because sometimes i'll go to make a lightning transaction it'll take a little bit to find her out and the payment will take like 10 to 30 seconds like do you think that gets cut down to it's almost instantaneous over time yeah um i don't see that like happening drastically um but uh i think it's like um short term um you know you you you overestimate but then long term you underestimate so it it's going to be the matter of not weeks or months, I think, until it's like very, very user-friendly. But in, I would say, a few years,

I definitely see it going to something that we can just use like credit card payment or so with the same ease and yeah. Yeah. Bang, bang. It's been an incredible conversation. Thank you for coming by again on this Monday night. Thank you for having me.

Well, it's really awesome. Yeah. Again, any last comments you want to make? Any words of advice to somebody who may be approaching Bitcoin Core or approaching Bitcoin development or who may be on the fringe, not knowing where to jump in from a developer's perspective? um i mean first of all if you're listening to this maybe a year from now or or nine months from now and you're thinking about applying to another residency or so just go ahead don't don't think about it too much uh just you know answer the questions and uh i don't know if there's a coding challenge or not but yeah just uh um just definitely do it i think every one of the participants uh was like feeling like they they didn't belong for whatever reason or so like a lot of imposter syndrome yeah yeah so um really don't worry about that too much um and uh in the

meantime if you just want to jump in yeah um uh just look around for the resources um don't be afraid to um approach people on irc if you're if you have questions about anything like people are much more approachable than you might think. Like, I'm still amazed by that. I definitely don't even use it enough right now. I mean, like, right now I have face-to-face access to people directly, but the channels are basically open to lots of people.

And, yeah, just jump in. Just look around on GitHub or whatever for some kind of small open issue or something that you observed that could be improved by just a little bit and just get started. I think that's great advice. Don't be afraid.

I think imposter syndrome is something to be overcome and you'll find that a lot of people are nicer than you expect out there. Exactly. Fabian, it's been a pleasure. I wish you well in the last 11 days of the residency. Looking forward to seeing what you put out there and what you continue to build.

And thank you for contributing to Bitcoin. Seriously. We need more people like you. It's a very important project. I believe imperative for the future of humanity. So thank you again for working on it, trying to make it better. Thank you. And thank you for talking about it a lot and promoting it.

Well, again, I wouldn't have anything to talk about if there weren't people like you building it. So with that, I bear you farewell, freaks. Peace and love. Bye-bye.