The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - utxo - Bitcoin & Lightning Unified

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Joining the CBP this week is utxo. This is the gentleman who was behind the nodeless.io project but has since pivoted to something very similar called Bitvora (https://bitvora.com/). The goal of the new company to have every exchange in the world enable sending/receiving Bitcoin over the lightning network. You can find uxto on twitter at   / utxo_one   or on Nostr at npub1utx00neqgqln72j22kej3ux7803c2k986henvvha4thuwfkper4s7r50e8 From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com ⁠Discord: https://discord.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠https://easydns.com/⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

Friends and enemies, welcome to yet another edition of the Mighty CBP, and I'm Len. I'll be hosting this show today. Joey has a night off. He's been doing a number of shows lately, so it's a well-deserved day off for him because he needs to rest. Actually, he doesn't need it, but at least he earned it, so that's very good for him. But before we go any further, we have a show we'll be talking to UTXO. We're just waiting for him to hop on the backstage, and we'll bring him on. But I do have a couple of things, actually three things I got to take off, check off

my list of things to do. Ad reads. So number one, the company that has sponsored us the most, or at least the longest, has been EasyDNS. And Mark and his team have been absolutely wonderful to us and to you if you are a customer or if you're going to be a new customer for easy dns so if you want to register a domain name or renew a domain name they can cover you with that also if you have a business and you want to set up a website or you're maybe an individual want to set up a website they're the guys you want to talk to

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So make sure your first purchase is mighty large because, heck, you're getting 50% off if you use our promo code. So that's sponsor number one, and I want to thank EZDNS for sponsoring the show. Sponsor number two is Bull Bitcoin. And Bull, good place to buy Bitcoin, good place to sell Bitcoin. Look, the price of Bitcoin is now sitting just a hair under $65,000 US. Not sure if that's a good time to buy. I'm not sure if it's a good time to sell. Only you can make up that

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Good, and yourself? Wonderful. So I want to thank you. This is the first ad read we're doing for your company because you just hopped on board. You're part of the CBP family. And thank you for joining us. You know what? Talk about some of the services that you offer. So people that want to get access to what you guys offer, well, they can get it. So go ahead. The floor is yours. Sure. Well, first, I want to thank you, Len and Joey, to have me aboard the team. And definitely friends of Bull Bitcoin are friends of ours.

So just that is a quality voucher right there for us. So what we do at Decentral, for those that haven't heard last week, for instance, there was that Bitax that solo mined a block. So we are one of the main distributors and manufacturers of the Bitax. We really focus on pleb mining, right? So we look into many different avenues to have Plebs mining at home and support and decentralize the Bitcoin network. And that's what we're all about. This is what Decentral is about, right?

So we have products like the Bitax, which will help that to solo mining, loto mining. We have products like the Bitcoin Space Eaters, help that through solo mining, lotto mining. We have products like the Bitcoin Space Eaters which you can use here in Canada. You know, like me, that we need to pay for ETH expenses at least six months a year. Well you can turn those expenses into revenue now through Bitcoin mining. And we also have, you know, just the other products that will make it available for plebs to mine at home. So less noise. We have silent solutions.

We have 110-volt compatibility, which has been a big struggle for latest efficiency miners at home. So that's essentially what we do in a nutshell. And we have a bunch of different services to support you in your mining journey we want to make every listener every viewer of the cbp a bitax user if possible it's so easy to do it's it's non-intrusive doesn't take a lot of electricity it is wireless that's right it is wi-fi well wireless it's wi-fi you still have to plug it into power it's not going to get power power free. It's very easy to use and quiet. So you could have this if you want in your bedroom,

one of these devices, and it won't interrupt your sleep. So you'll be mining at home, man, somebody mind a solo block. Just, you mentioned that a second ago. That is so cool.

You can do the same thing. Be part of the revolution of Bitcoin. Start mining at home, use the bid X. and there's lots of different options that are available to you you have the hex you have the the individual one so it's going to be what is around uh 650 gigahash per second correct yeah the supra so there's lots of different options and soon it's going to be you're going to be using the s21 pro chips on a newer yeah well obviously uh the goal is to uh decentralize further and to get using the S21 Pro chips on a newer? Yeah, well, obviously, the goal is to decentralize further and to get all the different and latest

chips. So that latest Antminer chip, but there's also intentions, you know, to have Wattsminer chips, eventually Canon chips on there. So the Bitax family will grow considerably in the coming years. Well, the website is d-central.tech. Check it out there are lots of different options over there and we're still waiting on utxo so you know what jonathan you're going to stick around for a little bit longer if that's cool with you all right it's been a while since we last chat and you know we'll be chatting more in depth next month but you went to the bitcoin conference in Nashville or did you? No, I haven't. I didn't go.

So I followed, obviously, virtually and, you know, in spirit. So we were there, but physically we weren't there. And it's a shame because there's a few Bitaxers that we wish we could have met. You were at the Bitcoin conference, the Canadian Bitcoin conference. Correct. Yes. You gave a session on how to build your own mining. What is that? What type of equipment did you use to show people how to build their own?

So it's really awesome. The workshop, so, and thanks to the Canadian Bitcoin conference organizers for having us a second year now. So the first year we had 16 students. This edition, we had 24 students in two sessions of 12 and it's about a three-hour session so it's and it really like it's really interesting because most people never use soldering equipment they never did micro soldering never used the hot air station and those are the kind of tools you'll be using in our session you'll be using you know tweezers and very precise and and fine tools to normally that we'll use for repairs and for Bitax manufacturing.

So now in this specific occasion, it was for the manufacturing of Bitax. And yeah, it's just been awesome to have non-initiated people to electronics in general, but even to Bitcoin mining, essentially learn the two altogether together and most of them would finish the session asking us for you know recommended products so they can do it again

at home so definitely a big success and with now a bitax blog that just confirmed you know the idea that those miners are relevant in producing value i think we can expect an even bigger session next year at the Canadian Bitcoin Conference, which will obviously be redoing again. And location to be disclosed, right? I don't think they disclosed where it's going to be taking place. Is that correct? Right, right. But we sure hope it's going to be in Montreal.

Yeah, I heard it was. I didn't go. I heard it was a great party. But yeah, you know what, Jonathan? Thanks so much for hopping in. This was short notice. So I want to appreciate, I want jonathan thanks so much for hopping in this was short notice so i want to appreciate i want to say i appreciate your time hopping in people that want to learn a little bit more about it thanks for having us d-central.tech d-central technologies we will put the information below on our description so if you need any more information feel free to reach out to us or jonathan and we'll go from there so with that thanks for coming on

and we'll make sure everybody's a bid X runner in the not too distant future. That's it. Okay. Thank you, man. Thank you, Julie.

Take care. So with that, we're going to come on, we're going to bring on the person that was originally scheduled for the program. You T X O and U T X O love the background. How are you buddy? Doing well,

man. Thanks for having me again. It's a pleasure. It's been a few months since youO. Love the background. How are you, buddy? Doing well, man. Thanks for having me again. It's a pleasure. It's been a few months since you last been on the show. I think it was February of this year, 2024, you were last here. So a lot's transpired since then. Well, before we even go any further, are you on PokerStars as of yet?

Because I know you were a poker player back in the day. Have you progressed in your poker journey? you now um are you now a professional poker player um no i'm not a professional um i haven't been i haven't been playing much and ever since poker stars changed it so like ontario only plays with other ontario players i haven't really been as interested in it. Got it. Well, I want to talk about you personally first because there's been a few things that transpired in your life. You were running the time

when you came on the show Notalist.io. And from what I understand, you were advised you should shut it down. And you did. And you walked away from that project. Could you just talk about why it is? Could you discuss it? Or is it something that's...

Yeah, I mean, I could discuss. It's pretty straightforward. I mean, so when we started Nolist.io, the idea was we wanted it to mirror self-custody as much as possible. While removing all of the lightning complexity. So in order to really replicate that, we wanted to go no KYC. And basically the government was like, no, you need a license to run this, to run this business. And since we had already made this promise to everyone that we were not going to do KYC, I didn't think that it was fair to do something like a shotgun KYC or something like this. So instead, what I did was I just released all of the code to NodeList. So

anyone who was running it could just run their own instance of it. Now I know that means they have to take the complexity on, but their apps don't necessarily have to go down and they could continue operating. And i just you know walk away from it so that that was basically um the play but you know along those lines while operating nodeless one thing that i noticed was that businesses didn't care about doing no kyc like businesses kind of want to do kyc they're not trying to be private. And like I can understand for consumers and everyday people, they want to protect their privacy, but businesses wanna promote themselves.

They're not trying to hide. So that was sort of the other learning from Node. Let's not only, hey, can you get in trouble with the government, but this whole feature that, I thought people would want, they actually don't want. So just to add some flavor here, it was the fact that the perception it was a money transmission business, and that may have been what was the real sticking point.

And it's not what was being done per se. It was just that, that soul like thing that that's the one that's a real problem. So you did the right thing especially given the time in which you've done it you shut it down the environment was a little bit you know it was you know challenging to work with what they did with um gosh i forget the the mixing service uh samurai was it samurai samurai came after but they were cracking down on others and you would have noticed it almost seemed coordinated but a lot of lightning companies at that time were starting to pull out

of the u.s like you'll notice it's actually kind of hard to get a lightning address in the u.s right now um because you know like phoenix pulled out and i think uh wallet of satoshi pulled out um so there was there was it what seemed like a crackdown at the time. And I felt it here in Canada. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. I don't know. Call me crazy. But it was all happening around the same time.

And you know what? The timing is perfect. Because with that, you were able to walk away from that project. Open source so people can run with it if they wish. That was a really good idea. And I want to thank you for doing that. A lot of people would say, you know what,

I'm going to keep this for myself and not release it to the world. So it's, it's rather nice. We still have people that care about the community and would like to give as much as possible to it. That's, you know, a lot of your work,

you're just basically free giving it for free to, for people to use. That's pretty cool. So, yeah, but you know know it's not entirely altruistic you know i've done a lot of open source work and the more bitcoin grows that's good for me you know i i'm invested in bitcoin so i'm i have incentive to work on it and to try to grow it you know that's fair well then through there what happened immediately after closing it because eventually you opened up this new business bitvora but between you closing nodelist.io and opening up bitvora maybe you could fill in the gap what happened with you sure i mean anything you know besides

a lot of sulking um and feeling sorry for myself because you know it was it hurt i besides a lot of sulking and feeling sorry for myself because, you know, it was it hurt. I put a lot of effort and a lot of money into building Nodeless. So it's not so easy to just walk away. But, you know, I still see that this opportunity, you know, it's a double edged sword, right? Because on one hand, the Bitcoin are in you. They want you want everybody to be like self custody and like run your own node and do all of this. But I like I know what it takes to run a node. I think anybody who has run one knows why the opportunity with something like Bitfora is so big because it's just too hard to run nodes.

So sort of in that time while I'm licking my wounds, I'm still just thinking about, you know you know like how can i still help solve this and then also noticing that you know while all these companies and wallets are pulling out of the us like this is bad for lightning like our our view of having bitcoin as a medium of exchange around the world is sort of fading because we're like so obsessed with this self-custody when really it's like you know people are people are keeping 50 bucks, 100 bucks or whatever in their lightning wallets. Like maybe it is okay to just do that, you know, with a license or at least like with your exchange, like pretty much everybody's buying Bitcoin with their exchanges. Why did the exchanges not have lightning? Again, it comes down to the same

thing. It's too hard. You don't, you don't want to hire a full-time Bitcoin node runner for like hundreds of thousands of dollars just to run your node. So like a service that all these exchanges can wrap around and easily add lightning into their wallets, I think is a really important thing that the market needs. So I think we're jumping a little further ahead. So talk about Bitfora then, exactly what type of service it provides, who are your target audience? Because I want to educate the people that are listening and watching what it is Bitfora is all about. Sure. I mean, like it is that next evolution of node list, you can say, but, you know,

we've grown up and matured. So we are a, we're a lightning infrastructure API is like the simplest way to explain it. So if you are an exchange and you want to send and receive Bitcoin over the Lightning network, but you don't want to run your own node, you can use a service like Bitvora to just plug right into your app and we will do the sending and receiving. We will run the nodes and infrastructure and liquidity and backups and high availability and just everything that it takes to run production nodes, we will take care of that on their behalf. And then we work directly with the exchanges. So if you're a regular, you know, customer and you want a lightning wallet,

you don't work with Bitvora, but maybe you work with, I don't know, ShakePay. Hopefully I don't get in trouble for saying that, but I would love if they worked with us and they could easily have lightning by just doing a couple of API calls. So that's sort of like what we're trying to do. Have you been able to capture any exchanges as of yet? And if so, could you name any? So we have not.

We are in closed beta and we just launched the closed beta at the Bitcoin conference. We're talking like a week old. We do have closed beta and we just launched the closed beta at the Bitcoin conference. We're talking like a week old. We do have like beta testers and some people who have been like eagerly waiting for this, but we like we don't have any production clients yet. No. Have you had a number of people sign up for the beta testing since the Bitcoin conference?

Yes, we do have a number. I don't wanna say the exact amount, but we have a lot of, so right now our main target is sort of these companies that already have Lightning. So, but they're not, that's not like the core focus of their business. Like maybe they're doing something like loyalty

or e-commerce or some, they're like selling some kind of product and they're running their own BTC pay server or, you know, they do have their own like L&D running. And just the founder is running around trying his best to run it. So really, those like lightning native companies are a lot of the people that we're in a beta test with right now. Got it. And from what I gather, I don't want to go back to Nolis too much, but at least then the only thing you had to provide was an email address, an on-chain address, and a lightning address to get running. But for this endeavor, you have to provide name, company name, email address. anything, anything I'm missing here? Um, I see it was a,

well, if you want to be a production client with Bitbora, we do full KYC on your business. So we need like your corporate documents. We do like, you know, exposed persons check. Like we do like a real KYC, um, on your business, on your corporation. So like if you're ShakePay, you're, you're happy, you know, ShakePay can probably only work with companies that are regulated, you know? Right. So like we do everything by the book according to Canadian law.

So then hypothetically, if you were to hook up with ShakePay, then people could start using Lightning to somehow fund or like you could sell Lightning, sorry, sell bitcoin through lightning through a shake pay if you're connected with them or in some instances you'd be able to transfer uh bitcoin and lightning to fiat or even vice versa and it'd be all done through your api that you have established with say shake pay or whatever business is that correct yeah that's

exactly right so they you know if you're an exchange and people are depositing on chain, you now have all these UTXOs and it's costing you like thousands of dollars to consolidate them on chain, especially when fees are high. They're low now, but when they're high, it's very expensive. So like all your clients could be depositing Bitcoin with Lightning and you have no fees for that basically um and so you're receiving your bitcoin on lightning and then if they want to do their withdrawals so now if you're shake but you don't have to pay um on chain fees um so like in addition to that they we also like let people do unlimited lightning addresses so you know if you wanted to provide your users with their very own lightning address like that's just a plug and play API that we offer as well. So basically, anything you could think of Lightning, we just make it super simple for businesses to implement that into their apps. Yeah, the way you spin it before was people running businesses, they don't want to deal with the headache of running a lightning node because realistically the customer base that would be using um selling with for bitcoin or buying with bitcoin is rather small

then lightning would be even smaller because it's a smaller segment so they don't want to spend that much energy and effort setting up and maintaining a lightning node and that's where you step in you provide the back end to make it easy they they just simply get payments and everything is done without a lot of the headaches. That's correct? That's exactly right. So in terms of managing the Lightning Node, you've mastered it. People out there, I mean, let's be honest. I've run a Lightning Node and it was a challenge.

And the maintaining balance of liquidity and making sure that their channels don't force close for whatever reason, you know, sometimes somebody forces energy. You're wondering what the heck just happened. Like maybe you could give some tips for a pleb out there that's running a lightning. Now,

what would you suggest is the best thing or some tips you can write to them to that? They could maximize their efficiency for their own note. Sure. So a lot of them the first one i would say is make sure you're doing your channel backups properly because uh you know nodes go down and a lot of people will sort of like overlook this but make sure every single time you have a channel change that you have a new channel backup and you've tested that you have the latest um don't run it over Tor because Tor is pretty unreliable

and you'll get failed payments and more likely for like a payment to get stuck and then that would lead to a foreclosure. So don't do that. Make sure you're only partnering with nodes that you know, ideally ones that are really well connected and actually try to have the fewest amount of channels because like having a whole bunch of channels,

you think you're like decentralizing it or you're helping things, but really you're just like, you're taking more risks. Those are more channels that might close. Those are more paths that might be unreliable. So only pick like a handful of channels that are well connected or a handful of partners that are like well-connected

and just rely on their connections. Because, you know, someone like Wallet of Satoshi is gonna have a way better connected node than you ever will so there's no point um and then like make sure that your node is within is within reason you know a lot of people they put way too many coins on their nodes thinking they're going to be like this lightning node um earning all this yield and stuff like that's probably not what's going to happen. And what you're going to lose channels, you're going to you're basically taking a risk. All of those sats are now on a hot wallet instead of tucked safe nicely in your in your cold card or whatever.

So I would say just keep a reasonable amount for your for your spending. Don't try to do this to earn money and, you know, connect to those, to those good peers. What's the minimum size in terms of, uh, sats for a channel would you recommend? Uh, I mean, right off the bat, I would say nothing below, um, 1 million sats for sure is like pretty much useless. Um, like at Bitvora, I'm pretty sure we're not going to have any channels less than 20 million sets wow um but i mean we're we're for business right we're not making payments to like buy coffee or whatever sure um but like it has you want it to be economical so like let's say half of your balance is gone and then your your channel partner closes the channel that your utxo is not so small

that the fees start being crazy, right? Like you don't want like 100,000 set UTXO when the fees go up. So that's sort of like how I would judge it and why I just like pick a million as the right number. Am I able to find your node? I forget the website, but there's a way to search for nodes by name.

And if I type in Bitfora, would I be able to find your node and see how many channels you have open and how many stats you have allocated to it or is that uh still you know not being disclosed so when we open it when we leave beta then you will see all the nodes but right now we don't want to because like let's just say heaven forbid because we're only a week old We find out that like hey, there's a bug and you can steal coins from us like we Don't want people to know which nodes we have and like what we what we have and stuff, right? So that's sort of like where we're at But yes, you will be able to go on to amboss or mempool.space or 4ml Like there's lots of sites that have these these lightning explorers and you'll be able to

see our channels, our nodes. Unlike what a lot of our competitors do, which is having unannounced channels where you can't verify it. For us, you will be able to verify that we have the liquidity that we claim we do. So how much longer before you exit beta? So I'm very optimistic. You know, if you talk to people on my team who are a lot more reasonable than me, they'll probably tell you like maybe six weeks or so. But I think maybe in three weeks we'll be ready. So before September, that's your goal.

I mean, I would love that. But of course, it takes a lot of time to polish things and i am a just a lot more optimistic than i should be you know that's why i have a great team that sort of keeps me in check so i'd rather say six weeks how big is the team how many people are involved in it um so we have uh let's say we have like five core members right now. And we also have a pretty large advisory network as well, which is part of like, I guess, to just circle back on like when you run your own node. You know, one thing that gives us a huge advantage is not necessarily that we're good at running nodes, even though we are. Is like, suppose we ever ran into a situation

where, I don't know, something comes up. Like we have a huge network of the people who have like built Lightning to help us pretty much solve any issue. Whereas just like, you know, your everyday pleb might not have access to that same network. So that's still like part of the value that you get when you work with a company like Bitvora.

But if I could just give like a quick shout out to my team, you know, Pavel is our COO right now. He was the founder of the very first lightning exchange in Canada, Graph.One. We have Sean Yeager, who's our head of business development. A lot of people know him on Noster. He was at NYDIG and AMBOSS. You know, we get advice from Fiat Jeff, for example. I have to give a huge shout out. He's helped me so much figuring out how to do these partially signed Bitcoin transactions, all this really hardcore Bitcoin stuff. The guy is a genius at it. So huge shout out. So, I mean, we have a team of like really hardcore Bitcoiners

and advisors that are working on this. So I'm really pumped about that. And this is your full-time job. You're putting 24 seven into this. Is that correct? Yep. Yep. For me, it is like the advisors, obviously they have their own thing and, you know, but yeah, for me, this is 24 seven. Did you hear about, I mean, don't want it to switch gears too much, but there was, I think maybe a competing product. Jack Moller's released some API that works with BTC pay server. And did you hear about this at all?

Did you, maybe could you comment on this and how maybe it compares to what you're offering? Yeah, it, it, it is a competitor service and there are several competitors in the space. So, you know, just to name a few, there's River RLS, there's ZBD, there's LightSpark, there's us, IBEX, OpenNode. Pretty much all of us are building these APIs. And I think that's a really good thing. Like there isn't any competitors in Canada with a Canadian license that I know of. Now, but all of us,

we can work in lots of jurisdictions. You don't necessarily have to have a license everywhere. But there are a lot of competitors. Some are Lightning only. Some are doing both. We do both Chain and lightning. But for sure. And like, this is part of at least sort of how I see lightning going is you're going to have fewer and fewer plebs like running their own nodes. And there's just going to be like really solid custodians, you know, you'll use strike or river

or shake pay or, and really it will be all powered by this network of companies running APIs and stuff. So it'll be like APIs, not Raspberry Pis. Right. That's an interesting way of framing it. Then I'm questioning then, how do you compare yourself to your competitors? How do you differentiate yourself? How do you present yourself as a better alternative to them? I'd like to know, if I'm a customer,

why would I choose your, why would I choose Bitvora versus say what Strike is doing? So there's two really key areas where we stand out. One is that we don't do any fiat integrations at all. And what that translates into, practically speaking, is lower costs and faster development speed, right? So if you need some feature from a larger company that has all sorts of like fiat rails and approvals and compliance that they need to jump through, we'll be able to ship your features, you know, much quicker because we only ever deal with Bitcoin. So that's sort of like the first one. And the second one is that we are going to be lower cost for those same reasons. We don't have an army of lawyers and compliance people and banking and all of this

sort of thing that we have to spend money on because we don't touch fiat rails at all. So that translates into lower costs for our customers and what sort of costs are they going to be experiencing if they sign up with your service because i believe the in notice was a hundred sats per transactions plus a percentage if i recall correctly how does a bit for a compare to that So Bitfora right now, and this pricing is subject to change, but our initial release is we'll have developer slash hobbyist accounts that are free. There's no monthly fee or anything like that.

And there's a very low amount of KYC, so you just have to give your phone number. And as long as you have a valid phone number, then you can use it. But there are monthly transaction limits so right now it's like for a developer account you can't do more than a hundred bucks a month in transactions so that's like the free account and then every transaction is a half a percent but no base fee so you know you can send two sets if you want that's fine unlike nodeless that sort of prevented that so that's like our account. And then we have sort of like the startup account. So this is 300 bucks a month that you pay as like your software as a service fee. And then every transaction is 0.4%. And that gets you up to 100,000 a month of transaction volume. So that should handle a lot of use cases

for those medium companies. And then for the big companies, if you're a ShakePay or something, then you're looking at something like $3,000 a month and an even lower transaction fee, so 0.3%. So in terms of doing transactions with Lightning, do you notice that over time, through the years, months, and even what you see right now it's gotten a lot better in terms of having it be executed rather than failed

because i like i noticed lightning over time has gotten so much better and i'm sure you must be noticing that as well do you still notice the odd transaction just not going through or is it just not the case these days? I will experience it from time to time when I see people using Lightning invoices from their own like umbrals or whatnot. Like sometimes I have a hard time reaching those nodes when I try to make those payments. But generally, no, because at least like the vast majority of lightning that I'm seeing is all happening on Noster and everybody on Noster is pretty much using custodians and like the custodian payments are just not going to fail. You know,

like we just, we all have big fat channels with each other. There's just no way, you know, like a 10,000 set invoice is going to fail when you have like one Bitcoin of liquidity. Yeah. So, so what is the typically would you recommend the largest transaction for a lightning transaction because

it's always been said that it can't handle really large transactions but i want to hear your thoughts and what would you think is maybe on the cusp of being too large for a transaction? Well, it depends because like, let's say, like, for example, I have friends that do trading, right? And even I've dabbled here and there, but there's a website out there called lnmarkets.com where you can trade Bitcoin over the Lightning Network. Now, if you're making a lot of transactions with them and you want to do really big payments,

like let's say 20 million sets, as long as you open the channel with their node, there's really no limit on how big you can make those transactions. It's all just going to be dictated by your own channel. Now, but what I will say is if you are, let's say you don't have a connection, you don't have any channels and you just like hope the network can handle your payments um my just my just guess is like probably around four to five million stats you're gonna start seeing failures or just like ridiculously high fees you would be way better off just using on chain um that's roughly what i would say maybe even a little bit lower maybe like three million sets something like this do you think that's something that's holding back lightning in a way because eventually we're going to have to migrate off chain to something i'll say on chain to something else and i want to talk

like in a little while the ability of lightning to scale before i go there do you think that is something that could be a hindrance moving forward with Lightning or you don't think that it's really a big thing, especially since the price of Bitcoin goes up. A few million sats becomes very expensive. Who the heck is going to start spending that on Lightning? But I'm still wondering, could that be something that people look at and say, Lightning is just not ready for primetime?

Well, it's definitely improving over time. It is getting better sort of year after year. And, you know, a lot of people are like, probably not going to want to hear this, but lightning is centralizing. And the more it centralizes, the more reliable it's becoming. Unpack that.

I want to hear why you believe that's the case. I want to just expand on that. It's centralizing because for two reasons one is just because it's too hard to do self-custody right so people are just leaving it up to like the albies and the wallet of satoshi's and and stuff to manage the wallets and like that sort of you're not supposed to store your life savings on your lightning wallet you know this is like for buying mcdonald's or whatever You know, you keep 50 bucks on there, a hundred bucks or whatever. Now with that said, a little bit of me talking right there is like coming from a North

American perspective, you know, in some countries, a hundred bucks could be a whole month savings or maybe even a whole year or something. And you know, we can't have them just like getting rugged for their whole life saving so i'm just talking like from the north american perspective um that as long as as long as it's basically like custodian settlement which is more and more of what lightning is looking like it's it's becoming um then you will see tremendous reliability because as long as all the custodians are working together and cooperating, then those large payments and liquidity are like always going to be professionally managed just based on how large the block size is how large the block size is for bitcoin and because of that it's limiting how many channels

could potentially be opened and like if you look at the white paper of the lightning network one of the last pages talks about this that it just it won't be able to scale to the globe based on what it is right now um not self custodial not self custodially so not everybody will be able to have their own channel but if you had let's say let's say there's just like 50 huge custodians just like you know in canada we have eight huge banks right so call it that for lightning and they all work together it actually pretty much does have unlimited scaling okay yeah and that goes into your theory about it being more centralized in terms of having them manage the the funds rather than maybe you running your own node and that may be causing so i can see where you're getting with that but in terms of like because

i'm looking at options moving forward like channel factories for instance is that's one way that could potentially help alleviate the concern of maybe people even running their own node and opening channels i mean could you comment on channel factories at all i know this is still very much in the drawing room board right now but yeah and like there's interesting i mean there are a lot of theoretical ideas out there you know until there's something in my hands that i can play with like in lnd and stuff i don't like to say whether these things will work or not but what i will say is fundamentally blockchains do not scale so if you if you rely on the bitcoin blockchain in any way to like you know hold your funds then that will just

ultimately not work for a huge amount of people who just won't be able to afford the utxo or there just clearly is not enough block space um so i can't i don't have an opinion one way or the other on channel factories like maybe if if i had some software i could play with i could comment but i don't uh i don't think that's going to to solve it and i fundamentally don't believe that lightning is like this self-custodial type of solution for people i see it as like a payments network sort of like visa you know visa is not your bank account it's just like you're spending and then you pay your visa off it's like something very akin to that and a way for custodians to settle with each other. That's a good analogy. In terms of other layer two options out there, are you keen or bullish on any other ones aside from Lightning that may help scale out Bitcoin to the masses?

Well, I mean, I always, every time somebody announces something or like has a little demo, I get really excited. But, you know, until there's actually software that you can use, I try to just, you know, temper my expectations, you know, like there is ARC. I think that was announced at last conference. I think I've seen a little bit of activity on GitHub, but I haven't seen anybody run an ARC node or anything like that. I haven't seen anything happen. There's drive chains that

people have been talking about for a long time. I don't know too much about it, but my friend Fiat Jeff thinks they're a really good idea. And I tend to just think he knows what he's talking about on that. So that could potentially be a solution. I've seen other things like like Mercury and like state chains. So, like, I know there are smart people thinking about different ideas, different ways we can do things. But just in terms of like what people can actually use, there's really just Bitcoin, lightning and then more and more like some like e-cash cashew fediments which is really just

like lightning based end of the day um so yeah i think that's where we're at with the layers right now i've come to a point in my bitcoin journey every time i hear and something new some new idea or new new layer two i'm very skeptical right from the onset and i almost stay in that state for perpetuity because i fear there's some hidden motive behind what they're trying to produce what you're trying to propose to people and like drive chain i talked negatively about that in the past i don't want to get into but like that's one for instance it just i i'm happy more so with what we have. I know it may not be perfect, and there's still lots of work to be done.

But in terms of people getting rugged, in terms of ulterior motives for presenting a new product, I'm very skeptical right now. I hate it. It's a time where there's going to be a lot of people just trying to make gains because a lot of people coming in and you could scam people you could so many different things out there it just pisses me off but that's no sorry i had to write it's true and you know like having custodians and lightning there's definitely that possibility too i'm sure there must be some lightning wall instead of rugged at this point if you didn't get rugged by force closures or anything like that already. Um, but you know, there is a legitimate gap in the market, which is for low, low value self-custody transactions.

You know, like if you are from a developing country and you're, you know, you do want to just save something like $2 a day and you want to have your own keys, there is no solution for you right now in Bitcoin. That is the truth. You can't have your own node, you can't have your own lightning channels, and you can't have your own on-chain wallet. So what do we do? We don't have an answer for that right now. At least not as far as I can tell. so then what's the thing that's really stopping lightning from being used at least on a bigger scale like is there any stumbling block just the immediate that you could see that is uh preventing people from using it as using bitcoin as a medium of exchange i mean our our bet with bitvora is that like most people's touchpoint with Bitcoin, I know like people on Noster don't believe this, but this is the truth that most people interact with Bitcoin do it through their exchange.

Right. And they have other cryptos and stuff like this. Right. all the apps that they use every day don't have lightning, then for sure they're not going to go out there and like, you know, make a node. So I think it's, it's basically that there are a lack of services like Bitvora that just make it easy and straightforward for any app or service or exchange to integrate lightning. Right now, we've just been so much focused on self-custody that we're sort of like missing the bigger picture. We're like, there's this 0.5% of people like with Lightning and we just keep making services for each other instead of being like, hey, what about these other people?

You know, we don't know anything about Bitcoin. What about them? So that's sort of my thesis on it, at least, is that we haven't made it easy and we're just too obsessed with self-custody, you know, which is fine. That's what I use, but most people don't want that. No, there's going to come a point in time

you're going to have to use it to transact. HODLing is good, but HODLing for, you know, till the end of your days doesn't make sense. Eventually, you're going to have to spend it on something, maybe not trade it for Fiat, but spend it on some good or service and lightning may be the answer for, in order to facilitate that. But I'm looking at why people,

I guess are using their exchanges and using on-chain fees are still stupidly low. If you look at it and we had instances in the past year and a half or so when they spiked quite high when the ordinals crowd first learned about that crap and then the brc20 folks ditto so we had at least an inkling of what happens during high fee environment people they were looking for alternatives like lightning and this we're not going to stay in these cheap fees forever. Eventually, they're going to have to go up. Blocks, like, block space is limited.

And it's very, I'm surprised it's, it is low as it is right now. We got to find some, we got to use some solution. Lightning is it, right? Like, it's, it's ready. And it has to be because even if your fees are low on chain, the 10-minute block time just completely destroys a payment UX.

No one's going to sit around and wait 10 minutes for confirmation. That's on average. Sometimes it could take an hour and change. Whenever you need to make your transaction, it's always an hour. And then after that, it's always like one minute. How did you know that? It's always the case. I that motherfuckers out there it's like they turn off the asics when they have to make that it's true it's true man is there anything else i mean bitful uh sorry bitful

bitvora the name i where did it come from bitvora is it i can see the bit but vorah like so let me uh let me move so you see vorah in latin vorah in latin means to devour and as we all know bitcoin is this giant black hole just sucking monetary premium out of the world you know we we had a discussion earlier with a potential client who's looking at maybe like as an example, we'll pay you sats for all the steps you take every day and insurance companies will pay for it because that reduces the medical bills they have to pay. So sats are a way to lower insurance premiums like Bitcoin is devouring so many things. We just thought that that was so fitting. Then it flowed. We got the

black hole. That's where the name Bitvora comes from. We want lightning to just be devouring the infrastructure, just infiltrating everywhere. You can check it out. B-I-T-V-O-R-A.com Also on X slash Twitter, same name, Bitvora. You can check them out bitvora.com also on x slash twitter and same name bitvora you can check

them on their nostre as well i'm not sure sometimes just searching by name and nostre is a bit of a challenge but i'll in the show notes i'll put your nostre address not just yourself utxo but also bitvora as well but you're also a big proponent of Nostra. You're heavily on there. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your experience on there. Has it improved in the past few months since a lot of people jumped on board since Jack decided to promote it? Yeah, Nostra is, it's a mixed bag. So the apps and the infrastructure are getting better. But as far as I can tell, it's not really growing in the way that we would have expected by now. But I do think that once the clients get a little bit better, once we've solved a couple like technical problems that we're sort of like as an open source community are fighting about, just like how we connect to relays and different things like that. It'll sort of like the UX will improve. You know,

there are a lot of people on Nostra that are like, you know, Oh, we, we should just keep it small. You know, why even bother growing? I am not in that camp. I think Nostra will take over the world. Not just in social media, but in all sorts of other things um but i mean i i really love it those my people are there my friends are there and that's sort of what i'm interested in in social media i'm not really interested in just like having a big account and getting all these likes and this sort of thing so all the people that i want to talk to and interact are pretty much on nosterra. So that's why I use it.

You have a fairly big following. So don't discount the fact that you're, you know, you're not trying to fight for followers. People just follow you because of who you are and you're very active on there. You present a good art or good viewpoints. So people like myself follow you.

That's how I came across you. The student Nostra and just, you know, just by happenstance, it was the case. If you could change something on Nostra and just you know just by happenstance it was the case if you could change something on Nostra to improve it what would you do I would um I would really get I would get all these clients to use something called the gossip model so basically what's happening right now is if you use Domus or amethyst or any of these clients really all that's happening is everyone's connecting to the domus relay and that's where you get all your

notes and if somebody doesn't post the domus or like a couple other big relays basically nobody sees your notes right so it should work and it was designed like fia jeff's idea behind it and a lot of us agree is that it should be like i can run my own relay and your client like amethyst or domus or whatever should be smart enough to say hey utx always posts to his own relay so when you want to see his notes grab it from there not from domus and then that way you're more likely to discover everybody's notes and not just like centralize around a couple of big relays. So that's how I would change it. Now, you can't like stop this from happening. It's open source.

People can do whatever the heck they want. So, you know, I guess along those lines, what I would do is I would really encourage people to run their own relays and only post their own relays. So if people want your content, they have to get it. I should practice what I preach. I don't do that. But if I could wave a magic wand, that's what I would do. And EasyDNS, our sponsor, you could use them to help you set it up. If you don't want to run it on yourself, they could set up an instance for you. In terms of relays then, what is the magic number of how many relays one should have on nostrum uh since you know you're a wily veteran of that service what's your

recommendation more or less is there a happy middle so like this is one of those examples a regular user shouldn't have to know what a relay is or like configure it or have to worry about questions like this like an optimal like you would never go on like Facebook and Twitter and be like, how many servers should be on my load balancer today? Like that's ridiculous to ask the users for that. Like the clients should be smart enough to handle all of this for you in the background. So that's like sort of my gripe, but they answer your question directly because it's not like that right now. Right. Exactly. Cause it's not like that right now. I would say like under 10. So probably like somewhere between 5 and 10. More is not better, usually, because a lot of these clients, the more you add, the slower and more unstable they become.

So while on one hand, I'm telling you, I wish everybody ran their own relay. On the other hand, my best advice is like just connect to the big relays. And that's how you have the best experience. Do you have any opinion of the paid relays um yeah like in general you probably should be using a paid relay especially if you don't want your notes to disappear like a lot of these and i'm guilty of this too you know i've spun up just like fun relays hey you want to connect to this and then later i just deleted it because you know i, I didn't want to. And who cares, right? Your notes are on all these other relays.

But like, if it's really important that you don't lose your notes, and especially as we're starting to move towards like having e-cash on Noster, where that money is stored on the notes, you probably want to pay for storage, pay for your relay. A great one that I use and I recommend is Nostr.line.

That's probably the best in the business right now. Could you unpack that? People that have the e-cash associated with their notes on Nostr for people that are unaware? Yeah, so of course, Pablo, who builds everything on Nostr, built like 9,000 apps in the last two hours. He's been working on this way where built like 9,000 apps in the last two hours. Um, he's been working on this way where all of your, you can basically like store your e-cash, your cashew e-cash, um, inside of Nostr

notes. So you don't actually like have to have your own keys or your login. Like as long as you have your Nostr pub keys, you can log in anywhere and get your money off of relays, which is kind of crazy. But like, you know, now we're talking about money. So it's, if you're, if you have a decent amount of money in there, you might want to have your own relay and make sure, you know, somebody doesn't just turn off your money. Right. That's very good suggestion. And I guess one last question to do with Noster, any client recommendations that you would give a user for both desktop and for handheld devices? Um, man,

I don't want to get in trouble. Cause I'm like, I'm friends with all of these devs, right? You know, you can just say, I like them all or, okay, I'll tell you which, what are good for like different all of these devs. You can just say I like them all. I'll tell you what are good

for different types of people. If you know absolutely nothing about Nostra, it's your very first time, you just want the smoothest, simplest experience, it's probably Primal. For both desktop and for phone? Honestly, yeah, for both desktop and phone and browser.

Like just, you know, as far as you're concerned, Primal is Noster. Maybe if you're a little bit more advanced, a little bit more technically inclined on a mobile device, I would say, and you're using Android, you should probably use Amethyst. Even though it's very crashy. Vidor, if you're listening to this, it's still crashing, man. Not for me. It's been great for me lately. Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know what's going on with my Amethyst, but it just always crashes. Okay, maybe it's because I have too many notes or something.

I use it too much. I'm too addicted, and that's my sign. But it does have the most features on Android. So I still think it's the best client. And I still love Vidor and donate to him, you know. So that's on Android. Probably Damus for iOS if you want. Because, like, I would say that Primal is sort of like a Layer 2 client in a way. You know, it's not a raw Nostra client in the same way. Cause it like,

they have their own cash and, you know, they have their own algorithms and this kind of thing to, so it's not quite the same. Um, and then on desktop, um, no strudel. I'll say that because I've been, uh, I've been working on that a little bit. So it's a great desktop client or like a browser client. Okay. say a random pleb. I hear about Nostr. It sounds interesting. I'm a primarily or only an X user or Twitter user. What's the draw for somebody to try out Nostr?

Maybe what's the selling point? What would you say? What's the reason somebody should try it out? There's a lot of them. Probably the first one is that your social graph you can never lose it right so all these people they build up followings on twitter or whatever and then they get banned or shadow banned or you know suppressed or whatever the case is um so that's the first one you can like never lose your followers they go with you no matter

where no matter what and no matter what client you use you don't like one client switch to the other you don't lose your following um so that's a big one two is it's bitcoin native so instead of your personal data being stolen to make mark zuckerberg rich you get sats directly to your own wallet i mean that that's huge and even most people on Twitter don't make money from being on Twitter but most Noster users are collecting sets just for being on Noster so it's modest of course but still better than Twitter and there's no ads there's no algorithms uh there's no um and frankly at least right now know, it is it is mostly Bitcoiners or at least that's, you know, how my feed is right now. I wish that wasn't the case, but that is currently the case.

But if I go on my like Twitter Bitcoin and the type of Bitcoiners that are there, like the blue checks and the number go up and the politicians and all of this, like it's a different vibe on Noster. It's definitely a lot more like my feel and like why i'm into bitcoin it's like more around the community that's on noster is before getting more traction on noster or twitter or is it kind of the same so it's not um it's not on either like we're not i don't think social media is really going to be our like how we get a lot of traction um so you know we work just by like having lots of connections in the in the industry we sort of do face-to-face meetings and sales and you know the the good old way to build a b2b business is sort of how we're doing

it well i hope you a lot get a lot of success from this because this is a great way to transition people that may not be using Bitcoin to start using Bitcoin. If businesses start giving this option to customers and people start using it as a medium of exchange, well, it then solidifies Bitcoin as a currency. Right now, it's more so just a commodity, something you kind of just hold on to more than anything. There's going to be a transition in the not-too-distant future to it being a medium of exchange. And people like you are going to help do it. So thank you so much for all your efforts with that. Bitvora, I wish you great success there. With that, is there any last things you want to touch on with Bitvora? Anything that I missed that you want to just bring to the attention of people watching or listening? Because

I don't want to gloss over anything. I want to make sure we cover everything with that topic. Yeah, I think we did cover. Thank you very much for your kind words. Just to summarize what Bitvora does, we make it easy to send and receive Bitcoin on-chain or over the Lightning Network without having to worry about any node management. So if anyone out there is like working at an exchange or at a company that wants to integrate Bitcoin and the node management is either currently driving you nuts or it's too scary that you just never took on the project, you know, please reach out. We'd love to talk to you and show you how Bitbora can help with that.

Very cool. And I guess for last words, I'll pass over the baton to you. Where can people find you? People can reach out to you. Like any last words for you before we sign off from the show? Yeah, sure. If you want to reach me personally, go to get me,

find me on Nostr. So just go like primal.net slash UTXO and you'll find me on Nostr. If you want to follow what Bitbora is doing, we're also on Twitter. So you can go to twitter.com slash Bitbora or try to find us on Nostr as well. But good luck with that. It is a challenge at times. UTXO, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. It's been six months since your last.

Maybe we'll have you again in six more months. It'll go from there. So with that, I want to just wish everybody a happy weekend. We'll be back at this on Monday. So take care. Thank you. Bye.