The Pomp Podcast - #625 Overview of the Lightning Network with Kevin Rooke

Episode Date: August 6, 2021

Kevin Rooke is a technology investor. He recently wrote a great analysis of the Lightning Network, which is what we discuss today. You can read it here: https://www.kevinrooke.blog/the-lightning-network-is-bigger-than-you-think/ ======================= Gemini is a leading regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy, sell, store, and earn bitcoin, ether, and over 40 other cryptocurrencies. Offering industry-leading security, insurance and uptime, Gemini is the go-to trusted platform for beginner and sophisticated investors alike. Open a free account in under 3 minutes at gemini.com/pomp and get $20 of bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within 30 days. ======================= Do you have a business idea you’ve been dreaming about, but don’t know how to actually start building it? Use Bubble’s drag-and-drop tool to develop custom, interactive, multi-user web apps in hours. Go to Bubble.io to build, launch, and scale real ideas and products without engineers or code! Bubble is the go-to no-code platform for over 1 million builders, and has recently closed a $100M funding round to continue supporting startups like yours, from MVP to IPO. Go to Bubble.io/pomp and the first 500 listeners will get their first month free on any of Bubble’s paid plans.  ======================= Polymarket is the world’s leading information markets platform where you can trade on the most pressing global questions and see unbiased, real-time data on what the market thinks will happen – all on the blockchain. For a limited time, sign up with referral code “Pomp” to get your first trade reimbursed up to $100. Click on the link to get started: polymarket.co/pomppod

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Kevin Rook is a technology investor. He recently wrote a great analysis of the Lightning Network, which is what we discussed today. You can read it by clicking on the link in the description. I really enjoyed this conversation with Kevin, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Gemini. Gemini is a leading regulated cryptocurrency exchange, a wallet, and a custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy, sell, store, and earn Bitcoin, Ether, and over 40 other cryptocurrencies.

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free on any of the paid plans for Bubble. They are the go-to no-code platform for over a million builders, and I think you'll like it. So head on over to bubble.io slash Pomp. First 500 people, free month. Thank me later. All right, let's get into this episode with Kevin. I hope that you enjoy it. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, let's get Kevin on here

and let's talk Lightning Network. Kevin, what's going on? Hey. How are you? Good. Good to be on the show. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Looking forward to chatting Lightning. Let's let's start with just give everyone kind of a quick uh overview of your background and then what you do uh kind of day-to-day right now just so people understand your perspective yeah um so i've been in crypto for three or four years um have kind of watched the growth of lightning from the early days not really uh paying too much attention to it early on but um around earlier this year i really got into it and um started doing a lot of research on it and and that's a lot of what I do today is research and investing in crypto. And I started to notice

in April and May, when this El Salvador news came out, and all of a sudden, the lightning network is going to have this real use case. I started to notice the growth of the network. And I started to follow along with it and really dove down that rabbit hole. And yeah, started studying it, Got myself set up on a Lightning node, started routing payments, and started realizing that not only is this like a much better user experience for moving money around on the Bitcoin network, it's really misunderstood. And so that was kind of the piece I wrote earlier this week was about why we are not really thinking of Lightning in the correct lens. we're looking at it through the wrong lens. And because of that, we think it's a smaller protocol than it actually is. There's a lot more activity happening on it than people realize. And this is really just what gets me going. I think I'm really excited about

how big this network is today and how big it can be tomorrow. Yeah. I think I share the excitement and passion for this as you do. Let's start with just a high level. What is the Lightning Network? People probably heard about it. They know it has something to do with bitcoin but they may not actually understand just at a high level like what is the lightning network supposed to be yeah so super high level protocol for making instant and nearly free payments on bitcoin right and so there are right now uh well over 10 000 active nodes running on this like layer two that's lightning we've got a layer two technology and what is what's really happening is um people are on the bitcoin network entering into an

agreement between two two nodes so let's say you and i uh decide that we want to set up a channel on the lightning network we can enter into an agreement on the bitcoin network we can open up a channel on this layer two and all of a sudden you and i can send that send funds back and forth between each other or between other nodes on the network without making an on-chain transaction. So the idea is that anyone can pay anyone for basically no cost and permissionless. And it has all the same properties as the base Bitcoin blockchain does, just it's optimized for payments. Got it. And so you wrote this piece recently. And what you basically did was you broke down how folks evaluate the lightning network, and then where you felt like that evaluation was

fair and accurate, and then where you thought that it could be a little misleading. And so if we start just maybe with this idea of value locked in the network, that's a term or concept that became very popular in the decentralized finance space, usually on the smart contract platforms. But walk us through kind of where we are from a value locked in the lightning network, and then why you think that that might not be an accurate kind of way to measure this specific network yeah so right now the way it's often framed is that the lightning network has this has people look at like the network capacity which is the amount of bitcoin uh that every kind of node has on the network um they look at that and they say well this is total value locked and they

compare it instinctively to uh a lot of the defy protocols so maker compound ave uniswap they all use the same TVL, total value locked metric, to measure their growth against each other. But TVL, it helps DeFi protocols overestimate their size. There's a lot of incentive. DeFi protocols have inflation often built into their tokens. There's yield farming that goes on that incentivizes capital to move on to those platforms. And that kind of overestimates their actual demand for TVL. People are just kind of going there for yield farming or for earning interest rates on something. But Lightning underestimates it. Lightning has a few different reasons why TVL is not actually value locked in the lightning protocol um the first is that some of the

channels on lightning are private so uh that's not visible on the network graph there's no way of seeing um what what capacity all these channels have um so there's there's always going to be a uh the the metric that people use as tvl is always going to be underestimating the actual size of the complete lightning network. We just don't know entirely how much bigger it is, but it is going to be always bigger because there's private channels that aren't advertising their capacity. And furthermore, TVL itself is a metric about like locking value and putting it like amassing capital and lightning isn't really about that. that. Lightning is about making payments, right? So this is not an AMM. This is not a borrowing

protocol. This is not like, we're not trying to collect a bunch of funds on this protocol. We're trying to move funds between people. And payment volume is one of those metrics that can't be tracked. Lightning is private by design. So that is actually probably one of the more important metrics, but it gets, it gets overshadowed. It gets, um, you know, there's no way to actually measure it. So people go with the next best thing, which is they look at network capacity and they call that TVL, um, which is kind of misleading, but that's, um, it's the most available metrics. So that's what people tend to gravitate to. So it seems like what people are basically doing is they're trying to use, uh, a couple of different frameworks to evaluate,

where is Lightning Network today? What is the total kind of opportunity set at the given moment? And then try to use that as a way to establish where it's going. The first is they're using metrics or frameworks that have been used in other parts of the industry and then applying it here. But the difference being this is a payment system versus those other systems where actually locking value for liquidity or market making is important. Here it is not because it's a true kind of payment system. So that sounds like one piece of this. The second piece is that with the data that you can query around nodes, et cetera, there's public and private components to it. And so people can only cite the public. They can't get the private data. And so they just run

with the public data. But it's actually a bigger number when you add public and private. We don't know what that private number is. Is that a fair characterization of where we are? Yeah, I think so. And then the payment volume itself is just something that no one has any real insight into. You and I can send funds back and forth in the Lightning Network. we could send 100 transactions a minute back and forth. And that doesn't appear anywhere. There's no Lightning Explorer that is going to show the actual value of funds being moved across the Lightning Network. So one example would be Strike using Lightning as the backend of their app. It's like they aren't showing any of their payment volume to Lightning Explorers.

That's not visible. So we actually don't know how much bigger it is than their total capacity. But chances are they're moving those funds over quite frequently. In the piece that you wrote, you used a couple of examples, specifically Lightning Network Markets or LN Network, or I'm sorry, LN Markets or Bitteroo. And LN Markets is a derivatives platform that's built on top of the Lightning Network. Bitteroo is an Australian Bitcoin exchange that offers customers the ability to deposit and withdraw with the Lightning Network. And what you highlighted was, given that this information is private, we had to wait for these organizations to basically publish the information. And so Ellen Markets said that they've done $200

million of volume on the platform since March 2020. And then you showed that Bitteroo did $54 million of payment volume through the Lightning Network in the last nine months or so. And so your point here was basically that if 50 to 200 million dollars is being done with platforms that are not you know the most popular uh in the industry or or kind of well known uh your estimation is that the payment volume is somewhere in the billions to tens of billions of dollars on annual basis yeah i think i mean you if you see uh bitteroo and ln markets doing 50 to 200 million dollars in annual volume um bitteroo is the like 800th largest node on the network uh there are a lot of uh apps and other nodes that are doing far more volume um you you know bitfinex has uh two

nodes and a total combined capacity of 300 bitcoin on their two on their two nodes and so you start to think like bitfinex is one of the you know largest crypto exchanges out there it's got 300 Bitcoin that they decided to put on Lightning. They're not doing that for fun. They're doing that to move funds back and forth. And they've been able to withdrawals and deposits through Lightning. And so the network is far larger when you take a look at payment volume versus node capacity, because you can move payments back and forth so quickly. And it's so cheap. There's no cost really to making these payments. They're, they're far, I mean, they're like a fraction of a penny. Sometimes if you have to, if you have to route a payment, if you make a direct payment,

it's free. Um, and so when you lower the barriers to making these payments, all of a sudden payment velocity can go up. So I think, I think the actual payment figure is higher than a lot of people realize or think it is. Um, but you know, as you said, we, we don't have a complete picture of how big payment volume is, because not all this information is being published. So we kind of have to rely on clues from companies that choose to publish it themselves. And then Alex Bosworth is a lightning infrastructure engineer at Lightning Labs. He leads that part of their work. And in your piece, you highlighted some of his recent comments around how much money

he's making from actually routing transactions. So before we talk about maybe the math around what he's doing, just help people understand, People always ask, how do I participate in the Lightning Network? Is there a way that I could mine or route transactions or buy things? What's the financial opportunity? And I think that routing transactions ends up being where many people settle. So how does that work? And then how do people get paid for doing it? Yeah. So the easiest way, and this is in the last month or so, I set up a node using something called Umbral. And I think it's getumbral.org or .com. And that's probably the easiest solution out there for a lot of people. It's $100 or $200. You get six or seven computer parts. You get a little Raspberry Pi. And there's instructions on how to connect all parts and sync to the... You run a Bitcoin node and a Lightning node. And Umbral has their software

and that interfaces with your computer that you just built. So for $100 or $200, you can get a Lightning node. Then you have a wallet. And all of a sudden, you can move funds from the Bitcoin base chain to Lightning. And you can start routing payments right away. So one of the things that I saw once I started to move funds onto Lightning... So I woke up one morning and there was just, and funds had moved across. I had put a certain amount of funds in one channel. Um, and I had a, I had an amount of inbound liquidity and outbound liquidity that proportion changed as funds, uh, moved across the network. And so it happens right away. If you're a routing node, um, you can, you can set fees on how much, how much you want to

earn for passing a payment through. And so this is kind of getting to Alex Bosworth's node. He's a routing node and he's earning when a payment comes in through one of his channels and goes out through another one of his channels. And we don't know which party is sending the payment and which party is receiving the payment. All we know is that it's using his channels and the liquidity in those channels to get the payment across the network. So he's earning a fee for that. His fee is about 25 basis points, which is probably on the higher end, but he's a very well-connected node. He's got a lot of capital in there. I think roughly 25, 30 Bitcoin of capital in his channels on his two different nodes. And so he's earning quite a

bit of money from routing those payments because he's well-connected. So if I'm trying to send a transaction to someone I've never met before, I may not be connected to that person. I may be using Alex's node because he has a connection to someone else who has a connection to someone else who has a connection to that person. And yeah, that's kind of the basics of routing. And you can genuinely make money, but it's a competitive market in the same way that Bitcoin mining is a competitive market. It's permissionless. Anyone can do it. Anyone can join. And so naturally, that means like everyone's trying to undercut each other. Everyone with Bitcoin money, everyone's trying to find cheaper energy. On Lightning, everyone's trying to find better channels to

open and better nodes to connect to and better paths to route through. So it's always going to be this really competitive market. I imagine margins are going to be pretty slim, but you absolutely can earn money routing on Lightning. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. I think that you know, when you take all of this into consideration, it's very obvious that this is headed in the right direction. One of the reasons why I've been so bullish in the lightning network, both just in terms of conceptually what they're trying to accomplish, but also with investments in strike and other types of businesses like that is it feels like lightning is taking the organic growth path. It doesn't have some sort of airdrop mechanism or yield

farming or something that can kind of short circuit the growth. And so what it does is it will have much more steady growth kind of in the beginning, and kind of slower growth. But those people end up being really, really sticky, high retention users of the product, right? They stay on the network, they don't leave, they don't jump to the next network that shows up just with, you know, better returns on some sort of airdrop or yield farming or whatever. And so when you start to look at growth in general, what initially kind of pulled me to the piece that you wrote was the growth has been kind of what I'd consider slow and steady. So a positive organic growth, exactly what you would want to see, but it's starting to pick up now. And so you highlighted

a couple of different numbers in April, May, June, and into July that just shows like we may be hitting a little bit of an inflection point here to kind of walk us through, you know, what those statistics are and how you think about this growth and kind of what it means for lightning in general. Yeah, absolutely. So that's, that's one of the things that also drew me in, in the last few months has been watching these numbers grow not only not only grow not only grow from in an absolute way like the network capacity is month to month the number of bitcoin being added in network capacity grows but also in a percentage so from a higher base all every month the percentage of Bitcoin added to total Lightning network capacity is growing.

So as an example, I put in the piece, during April, in the beginning of April, there was 1,169 Bitcoin of public network capacity on Lightning. At the end of the month, there was 1,231. And so that was a 5% growth in the month of April. The month of May went from 1231 to about 1400, that was a 14% growth from a higher base. Then the month of June went from 1400 to 1650 Bitcoin. And that again, it's a bigger growth. It was 18% growth from another higher base. And then July was 1650 up to 2100 Bitcoin. And now we're pushing 2200 Bitcoin locked on the network. And that is 27% in that last month. And so it's not only growing. It's not only growing from an absolute basis, but it's growing as a percentage, which is really,

really rare. And it doesn't take much imagination to see how quickly this can continue to grow. If the next month it grows by 30%, 40%, 50%, it's not long before you've got 10,000 Bitcoin, 15,000 Bitcoin, 20,000 Bitcoin unleashed on the Lightning Network. You mentioned El Salvador, Twitter, Square, etc. I think that definitely in the Bitcoin community, I've been saying for a while, Twitter, Square should merge, embrace Bitcoin, game over. One of the most powerful companies in the world, one of the most important, valuable companies in the world. I don't think we're there yet. But what is the relationship between companies like Twitter or a Square or a country like El Salvador and the Lightning Network?

Well, when I look at that, I just think there are two or three catalysts that have the potential to onboard millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users, right? And that would be... So El Salvador is probably the short-term catalyst where I think it's September 7th, their Bitcoin bill goes into effect and every citizen is going to be airdropped $30 of bitcoin on lightning every merchant will will uh be required to accept it as payment all of a sudden you have everyone with everyone in el salvador has a lightning wallet everyone in el salvador has bitcoin um their relatives who are sending money through remittance channels 24 of el salvador's gdp's remittances um they can now send uh money through lightning and now all of a sudden they're

onboarded too. So you can quickly see how the 6 million people in El Salvador can branch out into this larger network that is sending and receiving funds. And 6 million can turn into 10, 12 million when you take into account the relatives of people in El Salvador. Then all of a sudden, a neighboring country decides to do the same. There's really, really compelling network effects that are being built right now. And I think that's the short-term catalyst to watch out for is how quickly is El Salvador going to kind of adopt this and how important is lightning going to be in their day-to-day lives. We've seen some good examples already with Bitcoin Beach, but it'll be really interesting to see in September what

happens across the country once everyone is on lightning. And I think the same, you know, Twitter actually, I think is a really, I don't know if you remember this, but there was a product called Tipin on Twitter. I guess a couple of years ago, it had a moment and it basically enabled anyone to send lightning payments to a Twitter account. And I thought that was like a great integration. It was someone unrelated to Twitter that built it, but it enabled anyone to move money directly to a Twitter account. And I remember getting a few sats from some people online and I was just like, that's really cool, but I don't know what to do with it. and so that was kind of like a first aha moment i had a little bit of an aha moment i was like i

can i can receive money through my twitter account it's just like i just think this is like the most obvious next step for twitter to make this a native integration um make it possible to like withdraw funds and move them uh to different wallets and i think that's like another you Twitter's got 206 million daily active users, I think. That is an enormous pool of people that you can pull from. If you enable some tip jar feature with Lightning or a super follow, instead of paying $5 a month through PayPal and getting charged $0.40 for a transaction, all of a sudden, you can tip someone $0.40.

You can tip someone $0.04. There's no limit to how small these payments can be. And I think that really opens up a lot of possibilities. And yeah, I hope I hope Twitter and Square both kind of release some lightning integrations in the near future. What are you most excited about? Is it individual users? Is it companies, nation states, the totality of everyone using it? Like when you think of lightning, what gets you the most excited? I think, I don't think it's any of those things. I think the thing that gets me the most excited is that this is a, it's like a radical decrease in the cost of making a transaction. It's like, we don't have any platform in the world where you can make a permissionless transfer to or from anyone for basically free and instantly. We have some silos. We have Cash App. If you're a US user,

maybe you can make a free transaction, but you're trusting Square, you're trusting some of the banking system. You can't use it internationally. Like I can't use it in Canada. There's, you know, PayPal is going to charge you a fee, there may be a time delay. There's Lightning is the first implementation of this idea that you can move value to or from anyone instantly and for free. And it can scale to the world, which is, I think is really incredible. And I start to think about, you know past innovations past like networks and even just radical cost declines in certain technologies um i think back to like the early uh 1900s in america when when homes all across the country were being um outfitted with with a few different networks so one was electricity

um sewage water all these like all these systems that radically decreased the cost of getting fresh water, turning on a light, it makes it instant, right? As soon as you have Thomas Edison set up his Pearl Street station, people all of a sudden have free and instant access to light. As soon as you have an air conditioner come on, you have free and instant access to manipulate temperature. These things have really, really wide-ranging impacts. i was actually studying the kind of history of the air conditioner and um some of the like wide-ranging impacts are like it people live longer when they have air conditioning it caused a mass migration in the u.s towards the the south uh half of the country in the uh latter half of

the 20th century and um hollywood's golden age coincided with the time that air conditioners started to be put into movie theaters, there's really dramatic wide-ranging effects for what you otherwise would think is just like, oh, I can make the room cooler. It changes refrigeration. You can now move food across the country, across the world. You can access foods that you never could before. It changes so many things when you can decrease the cost and make it instant. You can instantly access a colder temperature if you want. And lightning is the same way. You can instantly send money in any denomination you want. And so I think there's a lot of these low value kind of transactions that have never been able to be spent. Things like play to earn games,

like there's a Thunder Games is a app that, or it's a studio that they built a couple of Bitcoin games. You can earn sats for playing a video game every day. They give out sats to thousands of people um in small small denominations that wouldn't be possible on chain um streaming podcasts you can tip creators for uh you know every minute of a podcast that you listen to people come and tune into the show and watch five minutes of it they can tip you for the exact amount of time that they're watching um messaging platforms you can all of a sudden build groups where people have to pay to send a message all of a sudden you reduce a lot of spam And you open up some new possibilities for what these platforms could be.

And so I think there's a lot to, yeah, there's a lot of possibilities. We don't know what the second order effects are going to be of lightning. But I know that when, in the past, when we have seen innovations that radically decrease the cost and make something instant, you know, faster, cheaper, anything like that has often come with really wide ranging effects. And so I think that's going to be the same for Lightning. John, what questions do you have? Yeah, Kevin, thank you for doing this. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with everyone. I kind of have a two-part question.

So first, like, what are the disadvantages, if any, to the Lightning Network? Like, why would someone not want to use it? And then also, like, what's going to drive further adoption of the Lightning Network for people to use it and so on? So I think the disadvantage right now, it is not easy to use. it is you know even even setting up a node on umbral which i think was a relatively easy experience you have to buy hardware you have to you know i get a shipment from amazon i have to build this little computer uh set up a node takes a few days to sync um there's a there's a bit of a learning curve and uh i'm not i'm not fully up to speed on like all the technology risks and

security risks um but i think it's initially like that that's what kept me from the lightning network for the last couple of years, and it was only about a month ago that I set up my own node, was that it just seemed like it was a very difficult network to be a part of. I didn't really know why I should be a part of it. As you start to see more apps, though, pop up. So you have users, you have capital, you have now countries that are using Lightning to settle payments. All of a sudden, this opens the doors for developers to come in and say, I'm going to build an incredible app on lightning because there's 10 million people in El Salvador and their relatives.

And there's people on Twitter that are using this and now there's an addressable market. And so I think that's kind of going to be a catalyst for growth. It's a flywheel, right? Like you have users and capital that start to accumulate on the network tracks developers. These developers attract more users and more capital. So it's, it's organic. And you know, this is something we chatted about earlier is this is like an organic demand driving and uh it's yeah i think i think that flywheel is really starting to churn

and um i've started to see a lot more lightning startups being built and um the ecosystem's flourishing i think definitely what is your favorite uh application right now or uh or kind of um you know software interface to light networks or anything that you use on a daily or weekly basis uh i started using ellen markets a lot um that's so bitcoin derivatives platform I truly think it is the fastest trading platform in the entire crypto industry. There's no KYC, no verification. You can send funds directly from your node. They arrive instantly.

You can open a position in a single click. You can close a position in a single click. You can withdraw funds in a second. It's just like an incredibly fast experience. And it just makes me cringe to think about how much time I had wasted in previous years going through. KYC process verification, waiting a few days, figuring out how to send funds from a bank to buy some Bitcoin. They make it really seamless. You got to get on Lightning to use it. But once you're on there, it's really a magical kind of experience. Where can we send people to learn

more about Lightning? I know you've written a couple of pieces on your blog. Should we send people there? Are there other resources that you usually suggest to folks? Yeah. So one, this one's a little more technical, um, but the first few chapters are pretty good for anyone trying to learn more about it. Uh, there's a book called mastering the lightning network and it's available on GitHub right now. I don't think the, uh, hardcover kind of final polished book has been released yet, but, uh, you can, you can read a lot of it on GitHub for free. Um, and that is written by Andreas Antonopoulos. Uh, I think, uh, I think someone at lightning labs is also a coauthor. And, um, can't remember there's three, there's three, uh, authors. Um,

but that's, those, those are like the OGs of like, like they really truly understand the protocol. And, uh, there's a lot of like foundational knowledge to learn there. Um, if you want to learn more about like the ecosystem and all the apps being built on it, uh, Jameson Lopp has some really good resources on his site. I think it's lopp.net and, uh, forward slash lightning information. Uh, great stuff. There's like 40 or 50 apps that I had never heard of that are already, uh, in action and you can, you can use them to either earn sats or send sats. Um, so that's really good resource to start with. Love it. Uh, and then where, uh, where can people follow you on Twitter?

Yeah, I'm at Katie Rook on Twitter and, uh, I write a lot of long form research on Kevin rook.blog um yeah i uh i think you're doing a fantastic job and i always enjoy finding uh kind of the corners of the internet where it's like oh wait a minute there's like a whole i could read about this all day long this is a pretty high quality so i appreciate you uh uh jumping on here and kind of explain it to everyone as i was saying to folks in the comments i think lightning is probably one of the most misunderstood and mispriced opportunities right now and so obviously in things like Strike, there will be opportunities to invest in companies, but also just the usage of it, the adoption, and kind of what it'll do for Bitcoin and the network on a global basis

is pretty powerful, as you've outlined. So I appreciate you taking the time to do it. Yeah, of course. And I think one other thing is, I think there's an additional, a couple more additional effects because Lightning is built on Bitcoin. The only way to access it directly is to buy Bitcoin. I think that's another advantage it has over some of the... When you think about how it's positioned compared to DeFi protocols and stuff like that, where if you're investing in the DeFi space, you don't know, should you buy a compound Aave? Should you buy Ether? Should you buy... There's a bunch of different tokens you can purchase lightning to kind of uh if you're investing in that if you're kind of uh

betting on the network's success the only way to do it is through bitcoin directly um and so i think that's another kind of compelling advantage it has it's very focused on you know this this resilient network that has already proven itself and um yeah there's no there's no distractions associated with it uh yeah i tend to think that you are more right than wrong and you're onto something so keep banging the drum that is uh that is what we need so i appreciate you taking time to jump on and we'll definitely do together the future sounds good thanks for having me on thanks kevin thanks