The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - utxo - Simplifying Bitcoin & Lightning Payments

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

FRIENDS AND ENEMIESThis week we welcome utxo to the show to discuss Nostr, Bitvora and more.As businesses look for ways to implement Bitcoin into their sales model, Bitvora is a potential quick and easy solution. Can Nostr somehow be added to the mix? 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.com⁠Discord:   / discord   A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetworkThis show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠www.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. Friends and enemies, sorry. We're back again. I'm Len. I am doing this one without Joey. It's been a while since I've done an episode. In fact, last week it was released, my episode with Tony, but that was recorded about a month ago.

So I haven't done this for quite some time. Either way, I'll be talking to, well, the founder of Bitvora, UTXO. In fact, he's doxing his real name. I don't want to, well, the founder of Bitvora, UTXO. In fact, he's doxing his real name. I don't want to dox it. I want him to dox it for himself

because we're not the kind of guys that like to give information on people. If people want to do it, it's up to them to do it. Either way, I got a couple of things I got to rip off my list of things to do. Number one, well, it's going to be a sponsorship. And number two is a sponsorship. Number one sponsor, we have EZDNS.

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whatever, if you're good to go with Bull Bitcoin. They're not custodial, this is what you want in exchange. When you want to buy or sell, you got to do it right away, you got to provide them an address. Also, if you're just doing anything with them, maybe you want to buy sell, you could do on-chain and lightning. On-chain, why would you do it? Well, when fees are cheap, this is the way to do it.

But when fees are high, what do you do? You'd be scrambling, how am I going to buy Bitcoin? Well, use lightning, that's another way to do it. And Bull Bitcoin, they provide you the way to do it. But when fees are high, what do you do? You'd be scrambling, how am I going to buy Bitcoin? Well, use Lightning. That's another way to do it. And Bull Bitcoin, they provide you those opportunities to do that. Also, you could buy gift cards with them. And so you can spend your Bitcoin indirectly in a real world by using the gift cards you buy from them. Also, you could pay your bills, right? So you might have some outstanding bills you got to pay and they're knocking on your door saying, we want your money. Well, you know what you could do? You could use your Bitcoin to

pay for those bills so check them out if you haven't opened up an account with bull Bitcoin do so with a referral code below and if you do that $21 will be added to your account so with that being said I'm gonna bring on the man UTXO I don't want to say his real name I'll let him be the person that provides that information how are you buddy? I'm doing well, Len. Thanks for having me. Yes, my name is Barry.

Everyone on GitHub knows it's not new news. Okay, I didn't know that. Well, Barry, thanks for coming on the show. Again, last time you were on, you were on as a NIM. At least you showed your face, but this time you're giving me a little bit more information. And I hope that's all we're gonna get from you moving forward. We don't want any more information from you aside from what

you've provided right now, which is great. So yeah, it's great to have you on again. So like what's new with you for the past few months? I'm curious, is anything's changed with you? That anything that's come up with you? Because we have a lot that's going on in Canada with the United States with tariffs and shit like that. So like, what do you think is going on these days?

Yeah, well, I mean, for me, I'm just mostly keeping my head down, pumping out a lot of code. So, you know, over the past few months, everyone on Nostr has probably seen, you know, released a lot of new relays. Really excited about the Algo relay, which is one of the first,

it is the first algorithmic relay on Nostr. So finally, like users can truly control their own algorithms, like they can log into a relay, set what's important, like are Zaps important, reactions, that kind of thing. So yeah, I mean, I've been really head down on open source Nostr development, but also building out some really cool Bitcoin commerce solutions as well.

And I want to dive really deep into Bitvora, which is essentially the commerce solutions. But you touched upon the new NOS or algo relay. Now before we even go any further, for people who are unaware, what the heck is NOS or Before we even go any further for people who are unaware, what the heck is Nostr? So Nostr at its core, it's just a way to pass messages around that are cryptographically signed

and very tough to sensor because all these nodes live on people's personal computers and what we call relays, which is just another word for a server. Right now it's big use case is like doing social media, like censorship resistant social media. So we see like, you know, a lot of Bitcoin has been getting hacked recently on Twitter. And a big part of this is because Twitter is custodying your account basically. So with Nostr, you take custody of your own social

media profile with your public and private key pairs just like Bitcoin. So at a high level that's what Nostr is. It's a decentralized protocol for sharing communications. Have you been noticing there's been an uptick in people signing up and using Nostr because I've been I've been on and off for the past year but you have your foot you know so you have your thumb in the footprint or the the pulse of this like what's going on in Nostr in terms of people signing up and using it Nostr is definitely growing now um you know the last time the last time we talked, it was kind of like, you know, looking steady, slash not growing. But just based on like my perception of the timeline, how many new users I'm seeing, it's definitely growing now. Why? What would you say is the reason for that?

You know, like it's not exploding. Okay. But I think it's just, you know, things, it needs time and it needs to prove itself. I think, you know, when these Bitcoiners get hacked and stuff, they all, the first thing they do is turn to Nostr. Because Nostr is like one of the only ways you can actually prove that you own the account. But I think it's just, you know, it's getting better

and a lot of people, they kind of like jump in and out. You know, maybe they tried NOS there, it was a little bit clunky and then they try again in six months and now our clients are better, our relays are better. So, I mean, I don't know, I don't think there's any like single factor other than, you know, we're just,

it's getting a lot better from a UX perspective. Yeah, that's probably the main reason I would say. Have you noticed that Lin Alden's account, you mentioned people getting hacked on Twitter, Lin's account was recently compromised and you heard about that? Yep, yep, Lin Alden and Lawrence as well. Yes, Lawrence LePard, yeah. And Alden and Lawrence. Yes, the part. Yeah. And

there there will be more. It's it's not the end. You know, when you just when your account can just be hacked in some central database and you're like your two FAs like email or phone or something like this never gonna work. So many more people will get hacked. That's too bad. That's happened to those people. I heard that each of those two individuals, Larry and Lynn are having a terrible time trying to regain their account for whatever reason. There's been a lot of pushback or whatever.

The ex people just aren't giving them whatever service they have. Like think of all the people they brought on in terms of engagement and shit like that, and they're just treating them like, you know, like me, right? Like, I'm just nobody in Twitter land. But it's too bad. They're doing it to these two folks, which you know, I think they think they take better care of the bigger accounts, but they don't really especially consider like, that's how Twitter makes all their money, you know, like, putting ads next to Lynn Alden's feed

is how they make money. But they'll just let her accounts sit there hacked. I don't know, it doesn't make sense to me, but you know, such is life. Talked about this new algo relay. For people that are unaware, and I'm just actually learning about it right now, the way Nostra worked, at least still does in my application, is it's done by timelines.

So it's getting all the people I follow and all the posts that they put in chronological order for the newest being at the top and going from there. So who's done this Algorillet? Is this something that you're doing or is it something you're helping out? I wanna know more about this. Sure. Yep. So algor relay is my project, or it's a Bitbora project. And it is very generously supported by OpenSATS. So thank you,

OpenSATS and the team there. But yeah, like you mentioned, the majority of Nostr clients right now fall into like a very monolithic sort of paradigm where it's, you follow a bunch of people and then you have one feed, which is a chronological order of posts from people you follow. And that's basically your feed. But we see that like basically no social media feeds work this way. They're all algorithmically based.

And it's like that for a reason, like that's because that's what users want. Now it's not to say that a chronological feed is bad, but we need lots of different types of feeds, you know? Like the one major problem with a chronological feed is if, let's say you don't check it for a day, you just missed all the good content. Yeah. You know, if you want to come in, you just missed all the good content. Yeah.

You know, if you wanna come in, you wanna come in and see like what's popular in your network, at the very least. But at the same time, we don't want to fall into like the Twitter trap, which is like having a rage bait algorithm and the way that you farm engagement and get eyes on your client is to just piss people off all the time and show them content they hate. So we're trying to take like, I

guess the the absolute opposite approach is like with Algorilay, the big idea behind it is we surface the best content of the authors that you love best, and the content in their network that they love best. So it helps you discover new content from people that you don't follow and the people you do follow, it ensures that you don't miss their content. If you heaven forbid, take a day off of Nostr.

So that's the big idea behind Algor Relay. And we just had a really substantial launch of version 0.2, which really puts users in control. You know, like if you go on Twitter, you don't have any control over the algorithm. You can't say that you don't like RageBait and you like, you know, only Bitcoin stuff or whatever.

But in Algorilay, you can actually log into it and modify how your algorithm works and have full control over it Which is really cool. You know, I don't I don't see any other services or social media that gives users that level of control and transparency so Pretty excited about it. I think this is the future of social media right here, but time will tell That's fucking amazing now in terms of people that want to take advantage of it, is there one particular relay or is this a code that you could run on your own relay

and that you're able then to connect to it and use it like that? So Algorile is fully open source. So anybody can run this relay if they want. It does need a bit of a bigger server than your typical relay. But yeah, anyone can run it. Right now, you know, my relay is the main one. There's plenty of others out there though.

People can access it by going to algo.utxo.one. So that's the homepage where you can log in and like change your settings and whatnot. And then it also has a couple of clients that currently support it. So if you use jumble or coracle right now, and there are a few others, you can actually browse the relay and get those feeds right in your client, but not all clients support it yet. But I see that

I see that changing pretty soon. So it's algo.utx0.one, O-N-E, correct? Yeah, O and E. Okay, so if for say I'm using Amethyst, does it work with that? Does it work? What are some other big ones? Primal? No, primal, primal, amethyst, damas, damas, no strudel. Most of the like the biggest clients are not currently supporting it. But I think that they will. So like right now you can use Jumble or Coracle. I mean, Coracle is pretty OG,

pretty big. And Jumble is definitely a really nice up and coming project made by a guy named Cody, who's a very talented developer. So yeah, currently in those, but I think the reason why clients haven't typically been supporting it is because when we started Nostr, most of the relays are pretty much just dumb. Like it's just anyone can post to it. And it does, there's no like theme to the relay. There's nothing special about why you would want to browse one particular relay in the early days. But now we've developed, especially at Bivora,

we've developed a lot of different types of like smart relays. So we have like Web of Trust, we have Algo relay, we have simple white listing ones. Like one example is the Bitcoin Park relay. So you know, Bitcoin Park Bitcoin Park is like a members only grassroots community in Nashville. Very high signal Bitcoiners are members of that group. So as an example, if a client would allow you, you could browse the Bitcoin Park relay and just see what members of that relay are saying.

So there's more and more use cases like this popping up for relays and why we would want to have like particular relay feeds. And algo relay would fit right into that as well as a whole bunch of other types of relays. Is the algo relay a paid one because there have been some in the past that's paid paid to use it. But is this one that's just free to use for clients that are able to take advantage of it? Yep, it's it's free to use the one that are able to take advantage of it? Yep, it's free to use.

The one I'm running is currently free to use. We also, like Bitfora has developed premium relays as well that you could pay for. And the big advantage of paid relays is, you know, you have a certain level of service level agreement, like the relay operator is, you know, making guarantees about keeping your content. But also our premium relays also come with a Blossom server.

So this helps the decentralization of Nostr. So your files, you upload a meme or something with your note, you can self-host that note or pay a provider to host it for you and hopefully in a decentralized way. So lots of relay operators can offer these premium relays and file hosting through Blossom. In terms of the future of Nostr,

what do you see that's gonna be coming out in the future for something that maybe somebody's working on something that's just something very exciting or something groundbreaking, so to speak? Well, I think what Nostr does is like, Well, I think what NOSTER does is like, you know, like Big Tech did solve a lot of the like UX that people wanted that are proven to work, you know, like there wouldn't be a billion plus people using Facebook. They didn't get something right about the user experience.

So but I mean, what they all got wrong, and of course they did, is that there are centralized companies and governments can at any time tell them what to do and have done that. I mean, what they all got wrong, and of course they did, is that they're centralized companies and governments can at any time tell them what to do and have done that. Like there's plenty of proven cases where the government is manipulating what people see on social media. So what I see in Nostr, and we're seeing it more and more,

like just one example, Chateau Pablo, he made an application called O-Las, which is effectively an Instagram clone, but it has all the benefits of Nostr. One, it's censorship resistant, which is most important, and two, they have built-in Bitcoin wallets, which is another really cool thing happening on Nostr. I guess we could parlay into that is these new cashew wallets where the money is on the relays. So instead of using like

a big centralized custodian, you can keep your cashew ecash as Nostr notes on relays, which is really cool. So there's, you know, like a government can't really go after cashew the same way they could go after let's say wallet of Satoshi or even Bitvora, you know. So that's a really, really cool thing coming to Nostra will basically take the UX that Big Tech has solved and make it unstoppable and make it a way to go to the next level. And I think that's a really cool thing. I think that's a really cool thing. And I think that's a really cool thing. And I think that's a really cool thing.

And I think that's a really cool thing. And I think that's a really cool thing. And I think that's a really cool thing. decades and still haven't cracked it. So yeah, I'm pretty excited that Nostra will like will basically take the UX that Big Tech has solved and make it unstoppable and inject Bitcoin into it. You mentioned Pablo's Ola's I never heard of that project. Oh, LAS. Is that what it is? Yep. That's awesome. Because I talked to him in frequently. I got to reach out to him because I love to see this. I mean, and it's that them infrequently, I gotta reach out to them because I'd love to see this.

I mean, and is it that built on its own network or does it rely, does it tap into the Nostr network to make this work? Yeah, it's completely Nostr native. There's no other network or anything. It's just a different kind of note. So when you post the note on Nostr, that's called a kind one or like a text note.

So Pablo just made a new kind of note. It's called kind 20 or an image note. And it's just a note that lives on any other relay and it has a link to an image and then a caption. So it's just like, it's just like any other note. It works with every relay right out of the box. And that's what's beautiful about Nostra is anybody can do that. Like Pablo didn't need anyone's permission to like build that app or like, nobody had to agree. Okay, these are the kinds like he just he just built it. That's it. And anyone can do that, which is why Nostra is so good.

And one thing I think is lacking, maybe you could tell me that so many fill this void. Twitter spaces, I seem like, yeah, I'm sometimes I'm warm and cold to that. And when I'm warm to it, I always wonder why can't there be a Nostra equivalent, but maybe there is one, you know, of anything? Yeah, there's a few. So the probably the closest one is one called Nostra Nests. This is, this is headed up by Derek Ross is like the, the business founder of it. And a lot of NOSTER devs contributed to building it.

So that's one. There's another one called Corny Chat. It's also an open-sat supported project. And there's another one called HiveTalk.org. I like that name. Yeah, yeah, great name. Yeah, so there's at least three, but just again, like that's Nostra, right? Like just anybody can build these, you don't have to have one Twitter spaces, you know, you can have a competition, a free market of Twitter spaces on Nostra. Let's talk about something else that's being built. Let's talk about Bitvora. And if I recall correctly, this was built

from the ashes of nodalism, am I correct? Yep. Where nodalists, there may have been some encroachment, potential encroachment by authorities, you decided to cut bait with that and started something new that would provide you with no issues with anybody moving forward. Is that correct?

Is that like just a very high level? Hopefully no issues. Let's K, what is Bitvora? First, before we go into this. At the highest level, like Bitvora is a freedom tech company. So our goal is to just like advance human freedom through technology. And there are a few ways we're trying to achieve that.

So we have like a couple of moonshots, so to speak. So one is we wanna make Bitcoin the universal medium of exchange on planet earth, you know? So that's, you know, NodeList was a very small cog in that, but there were a lot of learnings, not just on the regulatory standpoint, but just like what businesses need, what consumers need to actually make Bitcoin truly viable.

So we have a bunch of exciting products that we're working on, on Bitfora, some are launched, some are not. We'll get into that as well. So that's like one arm is around Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. And then the other one is around freedom of speech. So Nostr. So a big part of what we do is building out open source Nostr relays. And the last I checked something about 20% of the relays on Nostr now are running Bitvora code.

Wow. Yeah, it's a lot. Almost pushing like over 100. The most popular like sovereign personal relay is the Nostra Haven Relay. So just a lot of exciting stuff, really trying to push the boundaries of how people think about relays.

Like I said, the initial paradigm was like smart client, dumb relay. But we're trying to really flip that on its head because to me, it doesn't make sense that you would want your phone to have to handle all the compute when you have these big servers and data centers that could do things like compute algorithms and handle massive amounts of data. So that's a big part of what we do as well is just building out these NOSTER relays. That's good. And there's an overlap when you're talking with the freedom of speech,

the NOSTER side and Bitcoin as the, you know, medium of exchange. There's a huge overlap between the two because there's no permission when you use Bitcoin. It's collective money. It's taking money away from the people that historically have controlled it. And so there's a huge overlap between the two. Have you ever reached out to Jack Dorsey at all? Because he is big on money of the internet, Bitcoin being one of the internet. So I'm wondering if you ever, ever reached out to him in the past before? Well, I mean, Nodeless would have never gained notoriety

if Jack Dorsey didn't show his support for it way back in the day. And I did ask him before, but now with Bivora, I haven't asked, I've already asked once, he supported me once. So I haven't asked, I hope to earn it though, you know? So maybe he will see our work and help us promote it. But to answer your question, no, I did not ask him on Bivora, you know, for any sort of support or anything like that yet.

And we're not quite ready. We have a few more pieces of the puzzle we need to build before we have something truly compelling. Maybe you want to spill the beans, or is it still yet to be? Yeah, I'm fine if you want to keep these cards close to the vest, but I'm good with it. I've shared some teasers on NOS there, so I'll share a little bit more. So basically what we started out doing at Bivora was trying to, it's like we know lightning is going to be a core part of medium of exchange, right? Like it's obviously not going to be on chain, everybody knows that. And even cashew, like the backbone is still lightning when you're trying to redeem these, of medium of exchange, right? Like it's obviously not gonna be on chain. Everybody knows that.

And even Cashew, like the backbone is still lightning when you're trying to redeem this Cashew eCash. So it's pretty much lightning. So our idea was, okay, most of the users are on crypto exchanges. So let's go after the exchanges and get lightning on all of them. You know, it seemed to make sense. But if many big problems with exchanges

that we came to learn over the last year or so is, one, lightning destroys many shitcoin narratives. And exchanges are in the business of selling you shitcoins. So if you come in with lightning, suddenly all these like fast blockchains are pointless. Right, that's all they are are is they're just a fast version of Bitcoin. Well, if lightning is, you know, 100 times faster than them, why would anybody buy a litecoin or

a Bitcoin cash or whatever. So exchanges don't really like that. The other thing is they they're not trying to be wallets. They're not trying to advance medium of exchange. That's not the goal of exchanges, right? Again, same thing. They're just, they're trying to get you to buy and sell shit coins and play in their casino. They're not interested in advancing, you know,

human freedom and medium of exchange. So it was like, it was not, you know, we had to learn that sort of the hard way. Of course, some exchanges are, but most of them are not. So that's like the number one reason but then two there's like their regulatory nightmare, like even if they were sort of excited. Because there is a use case for them around UTXO management. So if somebody wants to sell their Bitcoin, which is fine, you know, you live on Bitcoin standards, sometimes you need to sell your Bitcoin. you live on Bitcoin standards, sometimes you need to sell your Bitcoin. The exchanges wouldn't have to deal with on chain fees if they're taking deposits over lightning. So they would save a lot. So and to some of them, especially ones with heart with

large like UTXO volume, it is a compelling use case, but then suddenly, you know, now they need regulatory, everything, every kind of license under the sun, they need SOC 2 certification, they need custom features just for them. Like they just need all sorts of stuff for very low rewards. So basically we're, we're not really going after exchanges anymore. Like we do have an exchange product if they want to work with us, but where we're seeing the most traction is with small,

small businesses and indie developers. You know, we have, we have a lot of, they want to work with us, but where we're seeing the most traction is with small businesses and indie developers. We have tire companies and chiropractors and casinos and all sorts of other clients that are finding really cool use cases for the Bitvora platform. So initially we launched this thing that we call the Bitvora API, but the more time we spend in the market, I think the better word for it is it's a developer's wallet. So what's really cool about it versus other wallets out there is you can connect it to other

third-party apps, whether you want to use an API Nostra Wallet Connect, Webhooks. We have all sorts of ways to like connect this wallet to any other app that no other wallet does. So that's sort of like one core piece is that, these businesses, they can't run their own nodes. So they need sort of a wallet service. So that's the first piece of what we built. But the second, which is what we're working on now,

I've been teasing on Nostr, is basically what I believe is the final piece of the pie to make Bitcoin truly viable for merchants. And it's a product currently, we're currently calling it Bivouac Commerce. The name will change, but think of it as like Stripe for Bitcoin. We're the world's first platform where you can do Bitcoin subscriptions self-custodially from your own wallet.

So you can pay for a, it's pretty, it's pretty sweet. So you could, let's say you wanted to subscribe to, I don't know, your local rancher is going to send you 10 stakes a month, okay, and he wants 500,000 sats a month. You can create a Noster Wallet connection with your butcher, and automatically he can pull whatever you set as the budget. So you say, okay, my butcher can pull 500,000 a month from my node or from my bid borrower wallet or any wallet that supports NOS or Wallet Connect.

And now the merchant actually has the ability to process subscription payments, which is a huge missing piece for merchants. And if they wanna use self custody with their own NOS or Wallet Connect, great, they can do that. If they wanna use the BitVor developer wallet, great, they can do that. But where Nodeless BitVor developer wallet, great, they can do that.

But where Nodeless really fell short is we were doing that custody for everyone, where now we say, you need to bring your own NOS or wallet connection wallet to the platform. We never have to touch any funds and we can service everyone. So that product is launching soon.

It'll be 100% open source. Of course, we're gonna host a big free instance for everybody who doesn't want to self host. But if you do want to self host, run your own node, run your own stripe for your own Bitcoin payments, that's all going to be ready for you by the end of Q3. And in terms of the payments, is it all going to be done using lightning or there's also going to be the on chain portion as well? There is also on chain, on chain lightning, and there will eventually be Cashew. I don't know if we're launching with Cashew,

we're still trying to work that out, but it will have on chain and lightning. Bitvora, the Bitvora developer wallet is the first in the world to have Nostra Wallet Connect with on chain. So Bitvora myself, like we are the authors of the on chain spec for Nostra Wallet Connect and our wallet is the first one to implement it. And in

terms of the UX, people that are coders and creators like that actually people program, the Taurus, they're not the the best people to put forth a polished product. Do you have somebody that's going to be helping you with making it look pretty? Because that's really a big thing with Bitcoin is the UX is challenging and more so with lightning too. So do you have anybody that's going to be making it, you know, trying to help out you guys to just look pretty and easy to use?

I mean, I believe I have a designer and a front end person on our team, you know, I don't know if you checked out bidvora.com, I would love your feedback on it, but we seem to think we've put together something pretty sexy and easy to use. Well, the website is sleek. I've been on your website, it is sleek. I have to-

Just try the wallet. Ah, we'll have to check it out. But in terms of the commerce product, it's gonna be dead simple. You don't need to be a developer. If you're a developer, you could just use the developer's wallet and use the tools in there to like make your own apps. But you know, why Stripe is so

popular is because they made it so easy. You know, you can just create a payment link, this is one button and boom, you can like just paste this little thing onto your website and now you have checkouts and subscriptions. So we're trying to replicate pretty much the same thing. So just make it dead simple for non-developers to use the commerce product. If you are a developer, just use the developer wallet and you can build whatever you want on it. And here in Canada there is the requirement if you're gonna sell your Bitcoin to report that to our tax authorities because you

have to pay capital gains taxes on that. Is there going to be some sort of documentation record so it's going to be easy for merchants should they wish to sell their Bitcoin that they have a copy of how much it is that they've collected the Bitcoin for and how much you know, eventually they sell it for because that's going to be is a headache for a lot of folks here. So I'm wondering if you're going to make that process streamlined. It is a headache for a lot of folks here. So I'm wondering if you're gonna make that process streamlined. Yeah, so there's, I mean, there's no buying and selling

on any of our products. Like we're a Bitcoin native platform and company. Like we will never do a Fiat integration. But suppose you are a merchant and you've been collecting, you know, Bitcoin payments throughout the years and you wanna be a good boy, pay your taxes. We do have exports that give

you like the exchange rate every single time a transaction was made. So it is easy for you to like calculate your cost basis. And then you know, you would work with your exchange to figure out what the gain is, if any. So yes, we do make it easy, but you don't, there's no buying and selling on our platforms. In terms of the limitation make it easy, but you don't there's no buying and selling on our platforms. In terms of the limitation of lightning to it, is there some recommendation you give in terms of a dollar value for using lightning versus using on chain or you just say that whatever works for you go ahead with it.

For Bitvora, it's pretty ubiquitous, like you can, the amounts don't matter, like our channels are really big. So we can handle pretty big payments on Lightning. I would say like, you probably don't wanna do more than like 5 million Sats on Lightning. You might as well just take it on Chain because it's a lot of money and Chain is just safer than Lightning.

But I mean, if the fees are crazy, which sometimes they are, then yeah, I mean, you could take lightning. Probably the biggest payment we could process on lightning right now is probably like 30 million sets. So that's probably as high as it goes. But I mean, that's pretty high. You know, unless you're buying it, unless you're buying cars with lightning, you know,

we should be okay. I want that car right now. I want that processed. I don't want to wait 10 minutes on okay. I want that car right now. I want that processed. I don't want to wait 10 minutes on average. I want that thing. And then in terms of the scalability, I'm not sure if you could provide any insight into this, but I've read in the lightning white paper that the scalability just isn't there right now. But there are other alternatives or things that are being worked on along the side of it. Maybe not alternatives, but things like channel factories, for instance. Are you familiar with this?

And what are your thoughts on the scalability of lightning to 8 billion people in the world? I am. It's a very important distinction is it's not scalable if every person needed their own node and their own channel. That is not scalable, but most people are not going to do it. They're going to use a custodial service. And in which case it absolutely is scalable to 8 billion people. If we use custodians. And the same thing would be true with channel factories as well, or hosted channels. Like it does help somewhat, but we have to, It's very hard for Bitcoiners to believe this, but most people are not cypherpunks and node runners or cryptographers, and they don't want to know...

They just want to download the app and just click send. Yeah. That's what they... They want to use a cache app. They don't want to run their own nodes or know any of this stuff. So from that perspective, in terms of scalability, you know, like, yeah, that's not, that's not scaling Bitcoin. If you want to be like very precise that Bitcoin, the underlying network and technology is scalable to 8 billion people. No, it's not. But the ability for people, for 8 billion people to use Bitcoin with custodians is already here.

And Lightning can already deliver that. I want to hear your thoughts about the recently the fees on chain have been very cheap. What's your theory behind this? Because it's been cheap for a long period of time in my eyes. I mean, I'd love to hear your insight into this. Yeah, a couple of things. Well, for one, the reason why they went up so much was because of these NFTs like Ordinals and Runes and stuff. And when everybody lost all their money, which of course they were gonna like, believe it or not, a picture of a frog's wiener on the blockchain is not valuable.

Okay. So people have to learn that the hard way. So all of that is done, like people are basically not doing that anymore. There's a little bit I'm not gonna say it's zero, but there's very little compared to like the peak mania of that. So we have that to work not at the peak of the bull market yet. So like the mempool is a great way to tell that we're not in bull market territory. Every single bull market we saw huge spikes in fees except for this one. So that means it's not over yet. I think to a certain extent, lightning is cannibalizing it, but I don't think that much. That's basically just intuition.

I don't really have anything to like sort of back that. But you know, if we take like the type of transactions that are happening on Nostr, you know, people sending 21 sats or whatever, that would have never been happening on chain anyway. Not that that's lightning's full use case, but I don't really see most of lightning like sort of taking away from on chain.

If anything, I would say it's, you know, a lot of people and trading like sort of taking away from on chain. If anything, I would say it's, you know, a lot of people and trading is sort of just happening on ETFs now. So whereas people may have been withdrawing from exchanges, they're just saying, oh, screw it, I'll just trade in my, you know, my 401k or RSP or whatever government account. So I think it's a combination of all of these things. But just most importantly, is like, we're nowhere near the peak of the bull market. So and just a lot of people are just not using Bitcoin. Yeah. And and boomdust even says kind of hinting at what you're saying there that ETFs and MSTR maybe keeping foes fees low and in this market because people they want to take advantage of these tax free saving account or just some tax efficient vehicles and they're not converting

their fiat directly into Bitcoin, you're getting some derivative of Bitcoin. And yeah, for better or for worse, I think that there is something to say about the ETFs and MSG are taking away some of the pressure off the on chain fees. So I will say in general, my opinion is that this is bad. You know, low, empty mempools and cheap fees means people are not using Bitcoin. And miners are losing incentives to secure the network. So it's, in general, it's not good. I'm not happy about it, even though my fees went down. I don't think we're at a point yet. I know you're trying to

bring commerce into the mix as much as possible. But I don't think people are at a point yet. I know you're trying to bring commerce into the mix as much as possible But I don't think people are at the stage. They want to start spending their Bitcoin You're looking at more of a store of value rather than a medium of exchange The the properties of being a medium of exchange is certainly there and I'm not trying to downplay it But I just think because of restrict not restrictions on Requirements with reporting with the tax authorities and so forth I just think there it just creates more friction when you're trying to go ahead and use it as a medium exchange. That's just my opinion. Maybe I'm wrong but you're not wrong.

That's that's absolutely correct for you know the majority of people but just like we're seeing with Twitter's getting hacked and what we saw in Canada with bank accounts being frozen and stuff like people are going to have to learn the hard way that, you know, maybe some of that friction is worth it. But also, hopefully with tools like Bitvora, that friction will go away and it will just actually be super easy. And you will use it because you can collect money all year and not have your margins eroded by inflation. Maybe you actually increase your profit margins because you're dealing with real money for once.

So hopefully we can like tell that story and sell it. Certainly that's what I've seen in my own businesses. Like I didn't have to upgrade my products or make a bunch of investments to increase my profit margins. I just needed to accept Bitcoin and that was enough. So hopefully we could tell that story and just make it super easy for everyone and this

will continue to grow and we can kind of fight that. Because the other thing too is a lot of influencers are out there talking about the same thing, you know, going on CNBC, you know, sailor as one saying that, oh, like Bitcoin is not money and stuff like this. So there's lots of lots of fake Bitcoiners, lots of people don't know what they're talking about going out there spewing a bunch of nonsense, which isn't helping. It's just too bad because a lot of people look at some of these

quote unquote, influence influencers like sailor, so to speak. And when you mentioned something like this, it doesn't help the whole I mean, doesn't hurt it, but certainly not helping it. So it's just too bad. He's saying that I mean, I don't even want I don't want to talk about him anymore. We've talked about him too much in the past. It is it is just too bad people listen to someone who doesn't hold his own keys as a bunch of coinbase IOUs and everyone listens like he knows what he's talking about. 100% now I don't want to steer away from before too much. We'll come back to it. Are you

familiar with Arc? So yes, you know, Arc Labs, I haven't personally played with the tech yet. And actually, my buddy from BTC pay server, he's just joined Arc, and he's been sending me stuff to play around with I'm a little late on it. So to answer your question, yes, I do know of it. I am excited about it, but I don't, my technical knowledge is pretty limited on it. Got it. So let's steer back to Bitfora then. Now in terms of the types of businesses that are taking advantage of the services, I would assume they're mostly small to medium sized,

am I correct? And probably, yeah, so like maybe you could give some examples without giving names of businesses that have used your services. And I just run out of the mill businesses, you know? One cool story is, so we onboarded, they're a GTA rim and tire shop, one of the biggest in the GTA. They started accepting

it as payments. We put it out on Nostra. Hey, this is this, you know, great place that now accepts Bitcoin. And then we had their name. If you said it on Nostra, it's other than open. So feel free to give the name if you have it off the top of your head. Yeah, it's automotive import market, automotive import market. Yeah, anybody's watching or listening, they want to pay with Bitcoin. Here's your opportunity. Yep. Check them out. Great rims, great tires, the best. So, so yeah, you know, we just we onboard a new client, put it out there on Noster.

And then a couple of days later, the owner is calling me. They're like, you know, what's Noster? Like this person just came in, so they want to pay Bitcoins, they heard about us on Nostr, which is like super cool to see. You know, we have a chiropractor, Dr. Kazemi, here in the GTA. He's like one of the top like Taekwondo,

he like does the world, what's the, I don't want to get the names, but like the big Taekwondo, like organization of the world. He's like one of the like lead chiropractors does all the athletes. He's now accepting Bitcoin in his clinic. So that's a couple examples, you know, we have a casino and a bunch of a bunch of also just like small indie developers, you know, maybe they they're not a big business yet, but they're they have big dreams of building these like new SaaS companies with Bitcoin built in developers, you know, maybe they they're not a big business yet, but they're, they have big dreams of building these like new SaaS companies

with Bitcoin built in and, you know, Bivore just makes it super easy for them to get started. They don't have to like spin up a node and get liquidity and, you know, maybe they built it wrong and their node gets hacked, you know, they don't have to worry about any of that with Bivore. They just get started right away. See, a lot of people, I don't think they truly comprehend, like we have to people like you have to build these tools for when the time comes when Bitcoin is a medium exchange is ready to be used, then you're able to tap into use them. So it's almost like you're building them long before there is a huge demand for

them. So like eventually it will come, but right now it's still very much in the growing pains. People are not only using Bitcoin as a medium exchange. Few people are doing that. But few people are even understanding what the heck is Bitcoin. So we're still very much at the education stage more than anything. And we could go from there. So do you provide any education in house in terms of what is Bitcoin, how it's used, so forth?

So that's sort of been part of our sales cycle. But now that we're not really targeting exchanges, we're going after, we're sort of trying to like attract developers inbound. We're gonna be developing a lot more educational resources, but more just about why Bitcoin is better for commerce. There's plenty of content out there about what is Bitcoin. How many Bitcoin podcasts are out there

people can learn about Bitcoin, you know, but there's very little about like, why is Bitcoin better in business? How will it help your business? What problems does it solve? There's very little of that. So we are going to be developing a lot of those resources as well, for sure. There you go. Take a question from the audience. Boomdust. How are you guys onboarding? Are you getting people coming to you or are you proactively reaching out to them? It's a mix of both. So, you know, we promote BitVora on Nostr,

LinkedIn, on Twitter. We also have like internal salespeople that will reach out to people on LinkedIn, just reach out to existing networks. So sort of, sort of like all over the place right now, but where we're moving towards is just being very much inbound. So we want, we want to rank really high on SEO. We want to make sure that these AI LLMs are familiar with all our documentation. So if somebody just like goes to chat GBT, like, how do I make a Bitcoin

wallet or whatever that they will recommend BitVora. So trying to like just get in front of the LLMs and just like having that content out there when they're pre training is like all part of our inbound strategy for onboarding. And realistically, in a year from now, where do you guys see yourself at? Well, hopefully we have a ton more developers and a ton more interest. I think when the, what happens every cycle is, you know, Bitcoin goes up a lot and a

ton of people suddenly get interested that all of those developers that are suddenly interested in Bitcoin will discover us. But like many Bitcoin businesses, you have to ride the cycles. You know, a lot of people think that there won't be cycles anymore. I don't know. I'm not personally sure. But basically, that's, that's our plan is we're just, we're trying to stay for the long run to be like a very stable name in the, in the industry and just be completely like tied together with open source and development. Um, that's another reason why, like, as an example, we didn't take any VC money. Um, because if you take VC money, you sort of need to produce results like

every quarter or at least yearly or whatever. And we can't, we know that we can't rush Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin is going to happen when it happens and we just want to basically go along for the ride. So we need to be able to survive. We need to be lean. And we need to just, you know, be able to survive the long haul. So that's sort of like the entire strategy of Bitvora is like sort of this,

like open source Bitcoin only, you know, no stable coins. Everyone's getting really excited about stable coins and AI and all this kind of stuff. Like, we just have a very simple, simple goal. And we just want Bitcoin to be the world money. So we're just sticking to that. And if we can make a little bit of progress in one year and a little bit after that, that's great. That's what we're looking for. I'm curious, how would anybody implement AI into this? I mean, granted, I can't see the whole picture, but has somebody even come up with an idea how and come up with some reasonable,

I'd love to know if there is something that AI could be included into this. I just, I don't know how though. Well, there is a lot of hype about agents being able to make, like an AI agent being able to make payments, or two agents even being able to pay each other. But to me, it's a lot of hype.

Like I've seen certain demos where people are like, look, my AI agent just like bought a domain with Bitcoin. And it's like, was buying domains really like a very hard task that humans needed to solve? I don't know. And it only works in a perfectly like closed off environment. You can't just like prompt chat GBT be like, Hey, go buy a domain for me. It just doesn't like. So I, if I had to guess what's happening is, you know, BC money is flooding into AI, you know,

we saw this 2017, you just put blockchain in your in your name, and then suddenly your stock went up. So it's the same thing here people just like you just add AI and then suddenly just booming or you know buy Bitcoin on your balance sheet and your stock goes up you know so there's to me there's a lot of nonsense going on you know not that AI isn't real of course it's real but like how it works together with Bitcoin right now I'm not seeing anything that's like particularly truly exciting and like solving real problems that humans have. But I don't know, maybe somebody else will change my mind. I haven't seen it.

Yeah. Well, it's certainly very exciting. And there's a lot of opportunities, a lot of unknown moving forward with AI. But yeah, I will see how it works out. With respect to developers that want to come in and want wanna build, is there any skillset like specific that you're looking for, like Rust, Go, C, like, is there anything that you're looking at when you're encouraging developers to come in

and help build what you're doing? No, we're completely language agnostic and we have software development kits for pretty much every popular language out there. So it doesn't matter if you're a lowly JavaScript developer or a giga Chad rust, um, you know, you can, you can work on bedbora. Um, so we're just, we're trying to attract primarily developers who. They're not hardcore Bitcoiners, you know, maybe they're open to it.

They just, oh my God, Bitcoin is, it was a million dollars. Maybe they're open to it. They just say, oh my God, Bitcoin is a million dollars. Maybe I should look into this. And then they have an easy way to get started without this like huge daunting, like spin up a node, this whole kind of thing. So that's really who we're trying to target is like the pre-Orange Pill developers. If you're already a Bitcoin developer,

you don't need them or you already know how to run a node and do all this fanciness. But what about everyone else? The other like hundreds of millions of developers. That's who we're trying to reach. Favorite node software? I mean, I'm no maximalist by any by any stretch, no matter what. They all have their pros and cons. I primarily run LND, but I'm not like enthusiastic, like, yeah, LND is way better than CLN. Like I actually highly doubt it's better. I just so happen to use it,

because I'm comfortable with it and I've used it for a long time. But, you know, I've met plenty of Bitcoiners who are way more advanced than me say that CLN is better. So, I don't know. LND works just fine for me though. There was a some fight going around very recently about LND. They were saying any version below, I think it was 0.8, 18.5. I can't remember exactly. And it turned out that that computer itself,

that the hardware was compromised somehow and said, and so I was being drained. And you know what, there seems to be a huge battle between the two camps and there was a bug maybe a couple of years ago, and I forget what it was that was found out against L&D that the sea lighting camp found and they used that to expose. It's just funny to see that they're both trying to achieve the same goal, but in a way they're fighting against each other. I find it to be almost counterproductive in a way, the fact that there's hatred amongst the two camps.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know them, so I'm not going to say whether or not it's hatred. I would put a brighter spin and just be like, you know, they're being competitive and that's how you get great products. And you know, L&D is better if it got, if this exploit got highlighted in patch, that's good. So, I mean, I don't know if there is bad blood, or even if they have the same goals, you know, like, you know, L&D has been really focused on these tarot

shitcoins and, you know, stable coins coins and stuff cln was more on like bolt 12 and blinded paths and stuff that i would consider like more on mission but you know lnd has done a lot of great stuff too and the majority of people are using lnd um you know and there's plenty of others coming out there too you know like people like people can use Eclare, you know, or you can use PhoenixD. Does PhoenixD use Eclare? I actually don't know, probably does. So there's plenty out there, but just, you know,

overall I'm not a maximalist and LND, you know, you mentioned two bugs. There have been many bugs, okay? Yeah, for sure. I can probably count over 20, like really bad ones that we've had over the last like five years or so. So, and I'm sure there'll be more.

And are you a Russ Maxey? No, I'm more of a go Maxey. Oh, okay. Very cool. Anything else do we missed on from before that you want to bring up? Because I just, I want to make sure we exhaust that topic totality. No, I mean, that's that's really the big one. I just can't stress how exciting it is that we're

going to have Bitcoin subscriptions in an open protocol way. You know, like, people have tried before to like have a closed system of subscriptions, like, maybe just your Coinbase wallet only works or something. But now it's like any Nostra Wallet Connect can now subscribe to merchant services. I think this is gonna be absolutely massive. And we haven't had anything like that. This will be a world's first. Awesome.

I wish you the best of luck. Now in terms of the relay, I'm very excited about that. I'm gonna post it in notes below the relay link, so you can add that to your client once it's available to be added to your client. If you're using one of the ones that are already using it, that's able to use it fine. So I'm waiting for Amethyst for me.

So hopefully that's done soon. Yeah, any last thoughts, any last words before we sign off? No, I think we covered it all, man. Awesome. So with that, we're done and we'll be back at this again on Monday, so with that, take care.