We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC046: Bitcoin Full Nodes & Instant Settlement on the Lightning Network w/ BTC Sessions (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the podcast where I'm talking about Bitcoin. If you've noticed that my voice sounds a little bit different, that's because this is what I sound like when I'm on vacation and forgot to record the intro to the show with my professional sound equipment. But hey, the show is recorded with the proper gear and the guest is an absolute beast of technical knowledge and competence when it comes to Bitcoin. My guest goes by the handle, BTC sessions, and he's going to break down the differences between Bitcoin mining and running a full node.

Starting point is 00:00:32 He'll also describe why many people listening in this show might want to run their own full node of their own. We get into what it means to be opening channels on the second layer of Bitcoin and how it enables immediate, permissionless transactions to anyone in the world. We cover these ideas and much, much more, and as a final note,

Starting point is 00:00:49 if this episode inspires you to run your own full node, please be sure to tag BTC sessions of myself in a Twitter post so we know you heard this discussion. So without further delay, Enjoy this awesome chat with the talented BTC Sessions. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. All right.

Starting point is 00:01:25 So like I said in the introduction, I'm here with BTC Sessions. Great to have you on. What you don't realize is I'm pretty much a stalker on your YouTube profile. I mean, I have a little bit of a tech understanding of like what's happening, but I mean, it's just, it's the basics, man. And your videos online are just incredibly professional. You go step by step and you frame them up for people like me that just don't have any clue what we're doing when we're building a full node, like literally like buying the different hardware components, putting them together, then running the software and like all this kind of stuff. Like you're going step by step and you're doing it in a way that's just so accessible. I mean, I'm a fan. I'm a huge fan. So welcome to the show. I'm glad to have you. Dude, thank you for having me. And I'm going to start off right away by telling you a secret. I, what you don't see is me doing it once and screwing up masterfully and then doing it one more time with gusto and a camera. So that's kind of the secret there. No, it just takes so much work. It's funny because when I started, people might not know this, but I

Starting point is 00:02:34 I started this website years ago, I mean, almost like a decade ago. The website taught people how to do value investing. It was all about like Warren Buffett's style of investing. And I had these online videos that were like instructional, kind of like what you do. And when I was doing this, I was like, oh my God, this is so much work. And then I discovered podcasting. And I was like, all right, so I can just like record conversations. I don't have to do like any video content or like moving like things around so people can

Starting point is 00:03:03 graphically understand what I'm talking about. Like, there's so much more value in the video base because you can, you can graphically see what's happening. But, like, creating content-wise, like, audio was just way easier and, like, just kind of fit my schedule better and whatnot. And so I just went into the podcasting space and kind of abandoned video. And so I just have such an appreciation for, like, what you're doing is so involved and require so much trial and air. So, bravo to you. And great to have you here. Well, thanks, man. It's been, it's been a work in progress, but I feel like I've been able to streamline it a little bit five years in. I'm, you know, I've had enough scrups and, and, and corrections that, uh, you know, you kind of

Starting point is 00:03:43 eventually get a handle on it. Tell us your story. Tell us, like, how did you find Bitcoin? Like, what got you into this? I had the typical number go up attraction early on. I had a few touchpoints through 2013 noticing it. You see it, oh, one day it's 10 bucks. And then, A few months later, you see it and it's $100 and you see it a few months later and it's a thousand bucks and you're like every step of the way you're thinking, oh, I missed the boat, I missed the boat. I missed the boat. And so I had very much that story right around that peak. I didn't immediately, this was 2013's peak of around $1,200. I didn't immediately say, oh, I'm going to, I'm going all in. I said, well, maybe there's something here. It's either

Starting point is 00:04:25 a massive Ponzi scheme or there's something more. And so I ended up spending two, three months trying to read and learn about it and everything. And then I got the guts to make my first purchase on a Canadian exchange and get it into a wallet. But I bought the same week that Mount Gawks collapsed. So it was like pandemonium. And like I was lucky enough that I took those few months of reading to kind of understand what the hell was going on. Because otherwise it would have just panicked and laugh. But I had a good enough understanding at that point to realize, well, hey,

Starting point is 00:05:01 this is just a poorly run company that didn't know how to secure people's money and nothing has changed with the protocol itself. So I just kind of, I kept going. I kept learning and, you know, I had friends kind of making fun of me at the time. And I spent a good two years just on my own trying to absorb whatever I could. I noticed that it was difficult to learn basic concepts. Like there was no, I learned visually. And so I was looking for videos of people saying, okay, do this, do this, plug this in, type this. And there was, there was very little, if any. Most of it was like people were nice enough to, you know, write blog posts or put stuff on message boards with instructions. But it was effectively trial and error for a long time.

Starting point is 00:05:47 And at about the two-year mark, I was like, well, I've done some basic video editing for vacations and stuff that I've gone on. I previously, I used to perform. So I sang an A cappella group and I used to teach little kids how to break dance for a decade. So that was my... I want to learn how to do a windmill. I'll teach you a backflip. How about that? But yeah, so that was kind of my background I had.

Starting point is 00:06:12 I guess there was the element of education there, right? I spent 10 years teaching, breaking down complex dance moves for school-age children, which is very, very similar to breaking down complex technology for adults. You know, as long as you understand what you're doing, you can then, if you have the ability to explain anything, then you can explain anything that you understand. And so I figured, hey, I'm going to start a channel. I'll make one video per week about whatever I feel like covering. And I literally have not stopped for five years. And I've opted the number of videos I'm doing. So here I am. The show's been around, yes, since June of 2016. There's been about 5 million views across my various tutorials and stuff.

Starting point is 00:07:00 So I'm just happy to be here. And I'm very happy to say that this is now what I do full time. I just do the channel and it's great. It's incredible. The thing that I'll tell you is it's not amateur hour. Like you're there. It is so professional. It's so easy to follow.

Starting point is 00:07:18 Talk to us about running a full node because this is the thing that I've really kind of grown to appreciate in a major way. My personal story, just to kind of tell you, I remember in 2017 when we were going through this big debate on the Segwit update, and the thing I remember, I was following Trace Mayer at the time really closely. Trace just kept beating this drum. You know, you need to run a full node. That's your vote. Your vote is the full node. And it just didn't really make sense to me at the moment because you're looking at the whole mining side of things. And this guy's ever here talking about a full node. I'm thinking, like, well, how is that different than a mining rig? Like, it just didn't make sense to me at the time. And so

Starting point is 00:08:02 explain some of those differences for people that are maybe new to the space. And then talk about your own, like, the first time you stood up a full node and just kind of like what it meant to you. I'll preface this by saying, if you own Bitcoin in a wallet, you know, even if it's not with a custodian, if it's sitting in your own Bitcoin wallet or your own hardware wallet, whatever the case may be, if you're also not currently running a node, you're trusting somebody else to run one for you. So you're referencing somebody else's node. So people have the question, well, what's the benefit of a node? Why might I do that? So a node basically hosts a copy of every Bitcoin transaction that has ever existed since the dawn of Bitcoin back in 2009 and a copy of

Starting point is 00:08:51 of the rules that effectively govern the protocol. So when you reference somebody else's copy of the node, you're trusting that the information they're feeding you is accurate rather than running and hosting that information yourself. And you're also kind of trading off some privacy there. So when you call to somebody else's node, they can effectively see your transactions, in some case, depending on the wallet, your IP address, therefore your location, all of the addresses associated with said wallet, what software you're running, all of those things, kind of get given up as you reference other people's nodes. And hopefully it's not a malicious one, right? Hopefully it's not chain analysis trying to track everything and keeping a record of it because that's a honeypot

Starting point is 00:09:37 as well. So you regain that privacy by owning and running and referencing your own node. There's a couple other things to consider too. You just referenced 2017. And those that are, have kind of come in since that time may not be privy to Segwit 2X and what was effectively an attempt to, whether altruistically or maliciously, it's irrelevant, overtake the protocol, right? It was 80% of the miners. It was the top 50 companies in the space, which was effectively everybody, all came together and said, hey, we're going to change the protocol in a non-backwards compatible way.

Starting point is 00:10:19 So everybody, if, you know, we're going to say that this is Bitcoin. If you don't upgrade, you're not using Bitcoin. And we're going to actually boot out the team of developers that has been voluntarily maintaining this protocol for years now. And we're going to install our own set of debts, which actually was just like one dude. And they said, okay, well, this is what it's going to be. The reason that that failed so spectacularly, apart from some financial, like, futures markets that were tracking what the value of said coin would be was also the fact that

Starting point is 00:10:55 people were running nodes. And in running a node, when you have what I consider an attack like that, where somebody wants to change the protocol, your node effectively ignores that. It ignores that change. You get to say, this is what I see Bitcoin as. This is the software I'm running. And if you try to change that protocol on me, my wallets are all referencing my own node and it will ignore anything that you try to do. So, in Trace Mare was the metaphor of that's your vote was kind of true, but it's better than a vote because in a vote, if you're in the minority, you can still lose with my node. it doesn't matter if 80% of the network wants to change. It's like voting for my favorite political party and them losing, and I still get to follow their policies moving forward.

Starting point is 00:11:50 That's a great way to frame it. That's what 2017 established was, hey, running a note is important because it prevents attacks of all kind, whether it be state or whether it be corporate or whatever the case may be, you get to decide what Bitcoin is, and it becomes kind of a, it is consensus. It's a consensus mechanism amongst everybody. My first foray into running a node was in 2017. It was much more difficult back then. I wasn't fully understanding what I was doing. I wasn't understanding that I needed to connect wallets. And that was hard to do. It has become incredibly easy in these past

Starting point is 00:12:29 couple of years. It is insane. And the innovation, which is still did. difficult for some of us. I'm sure we'll get into lightning later too, but it's the difference is night and day from the first time I tried lightning to today. And the same thing can be said of running a node. Like now I currently run a node called Umbrell. You can buy some cheap parts on Amazon. I think I put it together for like 200 bucks.

Starting point is 00:12:56 And then you put some software on an SD card and you plug it in. you're running a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain. Every transaction that's ever occurred, it's on a little device that takes next to no power. It takes a little bit of bandwidth initially when you're downloading the blockchain. But then after that, block size is minimal and you've got to re-upload to peers in the network. But it's really not that much bandwidth and cost to run. And then you can link all your wallets to it. So you're eliminating trust.

Starting point is 00:13:29 And for those that are just that just buy Bitcoin and they just hold it, I think it's such a great learning opportunity to actually truly understand what you own. Because you get to see, oh, I can run this thing. I can put it on a little computer for a couple hundred bucks and connect my wallets to it. And not only am I self-sovereign in holding the keys to my money, which if I store them properly, my wealth can't be confiscated. but people can't even screw with the protocol that I'm using. It's truly liberating. I got to tell you this story. So today on Twitter, you know, most of the people that are listening to this are listening

Starting point is 00:14:08 to this from the future. So Twitter just recently rolled out this tipping portion on their website where you can click the button and then you can provide a tip over Bitcoin to whoever has it enabled on their site. Well, the way that Twitter's rolling this out is it's only been enabled on a few people's computers, anybody who's stateside that can use the strike application on the receive side. So, like, the little icon's not showing up on just tons of people's accounts on Twitter. Most people, I would say 90% plus don't even have this. Well, I made a comment about, like, how powerful

Starting point is 00:14:44 this is, how it's instant settlement and finality and, you know, all that kind of stuff that we talk about. And I got a bunch of people in the comments that said, well, not here in lunch, or not here in New York where strikes not enabled and like all these comments from all over the planet. And so I made the comment. I said, well, how about this? Download your Munn wallet or download blue wallet on your smartphone and post the invoice. Take a screenshot of the invoice and post it here on Twitter. I'm going to show you that it works on Twitter. So these people who are posting, and I don't know how many I paid today, probably 30 or whatever. There's these people posting these $1

Starting point is 00:15:24 invoices with their wallet on their smartphone. And here's the beauty. I was just scanning it with my smartphone on my desktop computer. And I was pushing send, which was linked to my full node, where I'd opened however many channels based on all the videos that you taught me. The feeling to know,

Starting point is 00:15:46 and then the people were, when they were receiving it instantly, the $1 that I sent to wherever. It could have been $0. It could have been one penny. It could have been one penny. And then they're posting the receipt and they're like, oh my God, you just paid me a dollar. I'm in London.

Starting point is 00:16:00 Like, how did that happen? And in my mind, I'm thinking, this is coming off of the node. I need nobody's permission. Absolutely nobody. No bank. No bank of America. I have no idea what the bank is in Europe or wherever it even went. I mean, the person could be in China.

Starting point is 00:16:17 The person could be wherever. And they posted an invoice on Twitter in the comments section and I was able to pay it. It's crazy, crazy, which you're talking about when you say self-sovereign. It's unbelievable. And like you're saying, you know, as we're still kind of on that node idea, when you're running a full node, you can then also run all of these great applications alongside your full node, like you just referenced a lightning node, which allows for instant settlement for basically no fees or like very negligible fees.

Starting point is 00:16:52 You can send microtransactions. And the beautiful part about that, again, you're running the protocol yourself. You're holding your self-sovereign wealth, which is unconfiscatable. And you're sending it in a millisecond across the world with liquidity lines that you yourself established with tears and is doing a six degrees of Kevin Bacon and landing in London in an instant. It's insane. It's insane. So it's like, hey, Jack Dorsey has not rolled out the interface, right? But it's already plumbed.

Starting point is 00:17:28 It's all there. Like you don't need him to roll it out. Like you can do this right now with just screen capturing whatever, a QR code and posting it on Twitter. Like, it's crazy. Beautiful. It is. So talk to us about layer two. So what we're talking about is layer two Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:17:45 So people that are hearing this are thinking, okay, well, how is it happening instantly? I've heard it's 10 minutes, right? So talk to us just about the basics of layer two lightning. We call it lightning Bitcoin. What's going on here? I guess let's talk about what a lightning channel is. And then we'll kind of extrapolate out to how that then has liquidity around the planet. Effectively, if I were to create a lightning channel between myself and you, what I'm doing is I'm locking up capital.

Starting point is 00:18:15 I'm locking up Bitcoin between myself and you, real Bitcoin, stuck between the two of us in effectively what's a multi-sig. So two keys to unlock that money. But it's locked up. And every time I send you a payment, what I'm actually sending is a pre-approved transaction that could be executed at any time and settled to the Bitcoin blockchain. So you receive effectively, let's say, just for easy numbers, let's say this would be a massive channel, but we have a 10 Bitcoin channel between us and I send you a payment for one Bitcoin. What I'm doing is when we establish the channel, if I'm the one who opened it, I have 10 Bitcoin on my side and there's zero on your side.

Starting point is 00:18:59 And if we close the channel at any point, which either of us cannot do, that results in me getting my 10 Bitcoin back and you getting nothing back. But then when I pay you a Bitcoin, I'm sending you the pre-approved signed transaction saying, hey, if you want to at any point, you can now close this channel and have one of the 10 Bitcoin sitting here and I'll be left with nine. And either one of us can do that at any point. And so we're able to transact back and forth with these pre-approved signatures and transactions, these settlement transactions, without ever interacting with the Bitcoin blockchain beyond the initial setup of that channel. So it removes the need to constantly refer

Starting point is 00:19:44 to the main chain and put data on it and bog it down with all of that information if we're going to be transacting with each other regularly. You can extrapolate that out. So let's say you have a channel with somebody else with Jack Dorsey. You have a channel with Jack Dorsey. If I've got a 10 Bitcoin channel with you and you've got a 10 Bitcoin channel with him, if I wanted to send one Bitcoin to Jack Dorsey, we can effectively, again, in this case, not six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but the same idea.

Starting point is 00:20:13 I can plunk a Bitcoin over to your side of the channel and you do the same to Jack so that you end up with the same amount of Bitcoin. You still got 10 Bitcoin sitting there. But you've also pushed one of the other side of the other channel. So he gets one. So I'm using you as kind of a relay to reach Jack. And we're using these liquidity lines to bump Bitcoin down the line. In my video where I show how to set up a lightning node, there's a cool graphic. It kind of looks like beads on an abacus.

Starting point is 00:20:44 And you see it slide along and bump into the next node. And then the next Bitcoin slides along and bumps down to the next part in the line. So it kind of shows how you can have these lines of liquidity and find pathways to peers. Now, if you imagine that every person has multiple channels open to multiple other people, and you've got thousands and thousands of lightning nodes with, I think it's up to, I can't recall how many Bitcoin are now locked up in the Lightning Network, but it's a lot. And so you've now, instead of having these difficult to find pathways to people, it's just this giant pool of liquidity that can be kind of split up and can flow wherever it needs to flow.

Starting point is 00:21:29 And it's pretty amazing because you don't need to close channels as long as they're functioning and capital is flowing to and fro. You can leave them. You can earn small fees from doing it, although right now it's negligible. But you can effectively provide liquidity to other people in the network. It's pretty incredible what has been established there. And it prevents us from bogging down the base layer of Bitcoin and having too high of fees, or at least putting that off for the time being.

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Starting point is 00:26:13 The example in your video that just really made a click for me was the abacus example. It's like if you and I want to open a channel and I'm the one that initiates it, I set up an abacus between you and me. And basically all those balls that are sitting on the abacus. are over on my side, and as I spend to you, then they move over there. You could open a channel back to me for the same amount or even more or whatever, and then those are yours to spend. And so it's this whole network, if everybody just thinks of each node with a bunch of abacuses between them in order to settle this instantly, is for me, it just really kind of clicked

Starting point is 00:26:50 in my mind as to what was going on whenever I saw that visual representation that you had on your channel. And it's impossible to establish, it's impossible to have money on Lightning Network that does not exist on the base layer of Bitcoin. So that's important for people to realize this isn't like a representation or like a pegs token or anything. It is actual Bitcoin locked in channels between peers that is verifiable at all times on the base layer.

Starting point is 00:27:19 It's just locked up in a way where you can easily spend back and forth and be sure. that the capital is actually there. So the investor in me, when I hear locked up, gets very excited. And when you say it makes sense to keep a channel open forever, as long as the liquidity's kind of flowing back and forth, then I think about, you know, El Salvador, using Bitcoin as legal tender for transactions that require immediate settlement. Like, you're not doing layer one transactions when you go into a McDonald's or a Burger King in El Salvador right now.

Starting point is 00:28:01 You're using layer two lightning Bitcoin that's using this IOU abacus type thing that's immediately settling. So when we pull the thread on that idea and we think about, like, where is this going? As far as locking up coins, right? What if another country adopts it that's larger in doing more transactional throughput, Here's the one that just like really makes my mind explode. What if MasterCard Visa and whatever major credit card company out there says, you know what, we don't want to use the Rube Goldberg machine of clearing anymore that currently exists within

Starting point is 00:28:39 our confined networks. And we want to actually harness the power of this technology. And we want to open up a billion dollar channel with Amazon or we want to open up a whatever channel with, you name it, like other large cap billion dollar company. And in order to do that, based on what you just said, we have to lock up Bitcoin on layer one to open the channel. It pulls liquidity from exchanges, obviously. And it's interesting because they could do it, too, as the market cap of Bitcoin grows. Yeah, I could support that. But just in terms of infrastructure, like let's say the market cap supported them coming in. Like we hit such a point where

Starting point is 00:29:27 there was enough capital in it where they were like, yeah, we could just buy up and lock up a ton of Bitcoin and establish this. There would be no issue with them routing payments. Because the limitation on a transaction per second, which I love this because it eviscerates the altcoin, we're faster and, you know, faster and cheaper narrative. The only limitation on them using the network is bandwidth. Like it's effectively millions of transactions per second. It blows everything out of the water because you're using real Bitcoin. It's locked in these kind of liquidity swabs or these liquidity lines.

Starting point is 00:30:07 And it can be settled at any time. Provably, one for one, it's not like debt-based. It's amazing. I love it. And yes, you're right that if they're using that as capital just to lock up back, and forth, yeah, there's less on the open market for people to purchase. I just can't imagine, because when you're looking at, these are 2018, 2019 numbers, you're looking at how much, how many transactions in a day are going through the Visa,

Starting point is 00:30:38 union pay master card and the rest. In 2018, the number was 368.9 billion on an annualized basis. So that's almost a billion a day in liquidity that's flowing through the pipes for micro small transactions. And then when you think about the fees that are on top of that, the fees are, they're out of this universe relative to Bitcoin, which is pretty much free. There's a fee, but it's so small. It's way less than like a tenth of a penny or something like that, right? So like, it's meaningless. You don't see it. There's an interesting dynamic here to contrasting base layer and lightning as to how the fees are equated because on the base layer, the scarce resource is data, is how much data are you using

Starting point is 00:31:27 in a particular block of transactions. There's only so much data that can be put through the network every 10 minutes on average. And so that's the scarce resource. If you're doing a lot of stuff on the base layer, it's not how much economic value are you transmitting, because we've seen billion dollar transactions for a dollar. So we've seen that happen. It's how many transactions are you putting? How much data are those transactions taking up? With lightning, it's the opposite. It's the scarce resource is liquidity. And so if somebody, like you said, is locking up their Bitcoin to provide these liquidity lines and you're draining channels in one direction or the other so they need to go and tinker and rebalance and do things with that liquidity,

Starting point is 00:32:15 there's a cost associated with that. So on the smaller side of transactions, it's very, very cheap to do tiny, tiny transactions on the Lightning Network. And then if you want to do very, very large transactions, right now, it's still not bad, but that's where the fees come in there is if you're going to drain a billion-dollar channel in the future, then, yeah, there'll be a fee associated with that. And at that point, it may make more sense to transact on chain. And so there'll be this tradeoff back and forth of, okay, are we going to be utilizing more liquidity or are we going to be utilizing more data and what makes more sense on which layer to transact?

Starting point is 00:32:59 Talk to us a little bit about how you think about opening up channels. So for a person who's listening to this, let's say they just downloaded an umbrella full node. They've got it set up and they're like, okay, I'm going to open a channel. how much value should they open? How many channels should they open for your common person who's just wanting to tinker around with this? Yeah. So it depends on what your goal is with the node. If you're looking to make payments, then your main use case is, oh, I want to go and pay for things. And this is kind of like my spending cash that I'm going to be using from my node. Well, then you're probably going to be looking at just opening a, you know, I,

Starting point is 00:33:40 a good handful of channels probably with larger nodes, like larger merchant type nodes, things like that, and not having a lot of inbound people connecting to you to bring in liquidity. The reason being is your use case is I want to spend money. It's going to be mostly outgoing. If you're looking to be routing payments, it's triggered. And I'm still learning around this. I should be clear. I don't take me as gospel at this.

Starting point is 00:34:10 I've been tinkering for a while now. There are incredible people out there that are way better versed than me at this. I just happen to be an in-between explaining some of the stuff. But the tricky part is finding out where you can place channels and liquidity that are most useful. Connecting nodes and pools of liquidity that weren't previously connected or that were more difficult to route through. And so if you can find those areas, well, okay. The connection is needed here clearly because I see money flowing to and fro after opening that channel.

Starting point is 00:34:46 Then you're finding those sweet spots of where people needed routing. And so it's not typically in your best interest if you want to be routing payments to just connect to a whole bunch of big nodes. Because those channels, if you've got people connecting to you, if you got inbound people that have made channels to you, inbound liquidity, so you can receive payments. If you've got large channels with large nodes that are very, very well connected, those ones are going to drain super fast because anybody that's connected to you, and this is one of my tough lessons as I set up my node is,

Starting point is 00:35:27 I make this tutorial that's like, hey, if you're a newcomer, here's how to set up a node. And if you want to, you can open a channel with me. And so I basically got like a noob factory on my hands where I've got a ton of people, which is super awesome. I've got a ton of people that connect to my node just because they saw it in the video and they're like, okay, I'll try this. I'll open up a channel.

Starting point is 00:35:48 And then any channel that I had with like some of the bigger players like wallet of Satoshi, bit refill, async, all of those straight through. It just drains. It drains. So there's a few things you can do there. You can look and you can say, well, I'm going to try and find more mid-tier nodes that have a good number of connections with various people, but they're not like, it's not wallet of Satoshi that I'm connected to.

Starting point is 00:36:14 Okay, that's one aspect. The other thing that you can do is you can say, hey, this channel to this giant node, because there's a lot of inbound liquidity in my instance to my node, I'm looking, I'm going, okay, well, Wallet of Satoshi, it's like a six million sat channel, and it just drains. like within a day or two every time. So I'm like, okay, well, let's start tinkering with the fees. Typically, you see they're set very, very low, effectively nothing. And then you can tinker and play with them.

Starting point is 00:36:44 And so I start lifting the fees on that more and more. And I'm, okay, so I'm making some fees on my note as people utilize that channel. And then you try to find that sweet spot where people are like, I still want to use this. It doesn't matter. I'm willing to pay the fee. And you just keep eking up until you see the amount of routing start to dip. and you reach that equilibrium where you're making optimal fees for that particular channel. So that's the game that you're playing of like, I don't want my channels to drain,

Starting point is 00:37:12 but I want to keep them established. I want routing to happen through my node. And I want to make a little bit of fees while I'm at it. That's the game that you play the whole time. So I would say for people just starting, there's a few things you can do, but establish a few, a few notes. Here's one of the things I did at first, and this was my wallet of Satoshi channel that I made. I made a big channel with wallet of Satoshi, and I said, I want inbound as well.

Starting point is 00:37:40 I want to be able to receive payments right off the bat. There's a service called Loop. And what Loop does, yeah, you can basically, Loop is from Lightning Labs. And what they say is, hey, if you send us, and you can do this vice versa, if you send us a lightning transaction, we'll send you an on-chain. transaction back. So what I did is I made a six million SAT channel with wallet of Satoshi. Then I went over to loop and I said, hey, can you send me three million SATs back on chain if I send you three million SATs via Lightning Network and you get charged a fee for that? It's like it might be 1% or a little bit less or a little bit more depending.

Starting point is 00:38:25 But what that ended up doing is that channel half drained. So 3 million SATs was on the wallet of Satoshi side and three million on my side so I can now easily send and receive payments through that channel and I got back the three million sats on chain so that I can then use that liquidity to open different channels. So I basically set a balanced channel in one go, got back sats. I balanced it myself through loop and then I have the leftover sats, the three million to go, okay, I'm going to go open another channel here and I'm going to, there's a lot of good ways to do it. And the other one I would say is the website. So going back to just to conclude what you were saying there, the fact that Lightning Labs inserts themselves to basically

Starting point is 00:39:11 complete as a closed loop system between you, Wallet of Satoshi Lightning Labs, your liquidity never runs dry. Is that what you're getting at with that? Channel never gets completely set. All the sats are pushed over to Wallet of Satoshi. It's constantly balancing itself in that closed loop system. It's not constantly balancing itself, but what it's establishing is a lot of people initially, the toughest part is getting inbound liquidity. Yeah. Convincing somebody to open a channel with you so you can receive payments.

Starting point is 00:39:44 And so, you know, when you start up a lightning node, you have no channels, you have some Bitcoin. And so then you start opening channels with other people. Great. You can now make payments, but you can't receive anything. And so what I did is I said, well, I want half of this channel to go over to wallet of Satoshi's side, and I want, basically, I'm spending three million sats to get back just about three million sats to open other channels, but I can now receive payments as well with that single channel that I opened. You got inbound liquidity at that point. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 00:40:17 And so you can establish it that way. There are services that will open inbound liquidity for you for a set period of time that you can pay for. So like if you're a business and you're like, I just need some open channels. It's going to be worth it for me to pay a fraction of a percent to have this open. Great. I'll take it. Or you can do it with Pierce. And so this is where websites, like the one that you've been tinkering with called Lightning Network Plus is effectively people can, use yourself or other people can say, hey, we're going to create a liquidity swap, a channel swap where we're going to get three, four, or five people to link all together with channels of X number of Satoshi's, and we're going to lock it up and we're going to create like a circular

Starting point is 00:41:06 economy amongst us. And what that does is rather than just having a singular channel between you and one other peer is you now have access to the liquidity of the five people, potentially in that loop of liquidity and all of the connections that every single person in that loop has. So you get just this massive pool of liquidity all at once by only opening a single channel and each other individual opening a channel. I can honestly say when you pointed this source to me, I mean, you just pointed me to this source a couple days ago. It's been insane.

Starting point is 00:41:43 You've been hitting it hard. I keep unseen. I'm doing another one. It's been crazy how much inbound liquidity I've received and how much, how much, how well it's balanced with my outbound liquidity. And the node is, I mean, it's, it's crazy. It's just, it's crushing it. Now, what I want to emphasize for people that are listening to this, so if no one's ever had their own node, they don't even know what we're talking about or this just sounds very techy, they might be listening to this and saying, all right, I don't think

Starting point is 00:42:14 anybody, I don't think there's any way this scales for the common person to have to go through all this. That's what they're thinking. Like, if you have a newbie that's listening, they're just shaking their head and they're saying, there's no way your 40-year-old person who knows nothing about finance is going to be setting up this node at their house and doing all these activities and everything else. And obviously, this is true. Talk to us about, like, what does this look like five years from now for the common person who's not going to set up their full node at their house and they're just going to trust something, some other person in order.

Starting point is 00:42:49 order to just use Bitcoin. What does that world look like? And then talk us through the mechanics of like how that's enabled. Yeah. So, I mean, number one is you don't have to run your own node. I highly encourage people to. The important thing is that you're able to. That should you decide to, you have the option, because that's what keeps Bitcoin decentralized and resistant to attack. It keeps you, it's running a node is a selfish action, right? It's a self-interested action of protecting you and your own capital from attack. So that should be established out the gate. But let's say you're an individual five years from now and you have no interest in running a node.

Starting point is 00:43:32 You just want to use Bitcoin. Well, you can still use a wallet. Let's talk base layer. You can still use a Bitcoin wallet and hold your own keys. your wealth is still unconfiscatable. There's a degree of trust pushed off for somebody else to host a copy of the blockchain, verify the transactions, and enforce the rules of the network. And will you be okay in that situation?

Starting point is 00:43:56 Odds are probably. And if really started to hit the fan, you could always dive into running a note. That could be a possibility. There's videos on that. Yeah, exactly. I heard there's a guy that makes a bunch of videos on this kind of stuff. But what about lightning? Can you do that in a non-custodial manner?

Starting point is 00:44:15 And the answer is absolutely yes. Now, there's, again, there's some trade-offs, degrees of trust there. But what effectively happens is when you're running a non-custodial lightning wallet on your phone, and it depends on the wallet, but they can use things called trampoline nodes, where the wallet provider effectively, you're running an actual lightning node on your phone, but they establish a channel, a liquidity channel with you, and you front the cost of the on-chain transaction to set that up when you receive your first transaction. And then after that, you get all the advantages of the Lightning Network.

Starting point is 00:45:00 And effectively, you've got a channel between you and that wallet provider, and then their node has tons of liquidity going to and fro. So you're really well connected via proxy. Through them, you've got all of the liquidity that they do. And they just open up channels with you and you just front those costs. So you can do it. You just don't have the fine-tuning if you wanted to set up your own liquidity and take those fees and so on and so forth. But you're still using it in a non-custodial way.

Starting point is 00:45:32 You're still able to get all of the advantages of the low-fee instant settlement environment of the Lightning Network, and that's just fine. You can even, as an in-between, if you didn't want to, and this is some of the stuff that's coming down the pipeline, if you still wanted to host your own node for some of the abilities and features that that gives to you, you're starting to see hosted Lightning nodes where you can have a service that hosts a Lightning Node for you. Voltage Cloud comes to mind. Blockstream is starting to do that. They're starting to dowling that space. So you can, can, there's going to be service providers where, yeah, you basically have a cloud-based lightning

Starting point is 00:46:14 node where you, you have final say in everything, you have the keys to the money, the liquidity allocated to it. But whenever like Blockstream, when they talk about it, they would on their end be looking at liquidity and best actions for opening and closing channels. And then you would get a recommendation. And then you would have to approve that with your keys. and say, yes, I approve closing this channel and opening a new one. That's fine by me. So there's going to be in-between. There's going to be people that say, no, just hands off.

Starting point is 00:46:48 Maybe I'll just use a non-custodial phone wallet or a custodial phone wallet, if you so choose. There's going to be different levels to it. And there's going to be people that run full nodes and establish liquidity. And it's, yeah, it's beautiful. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance,

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Starting point is 00:50:39 here. Name what you want your wallet to be called, and then click Lightning and then create, and then it creates. And I said, okay, well, type in a thousand SATs, invoice, create the invoice, and then I reach over with my phone, and I scan the little QR code that's there, and I push send, and they get it. And it's like, it happened in like a minute. And it's like, okay, now you got Bitcoin on your phone. And like, there you go. You're up and running, right? Let's up that ante though, because you know what's coming down the pipeline is there's a new spec called Bolt 12. And what this is going to do is instead of saying, okay, create an invoice so that I can scan it and send you money. There's some extra steps in there. You say, what's your lightning address?

Starting point is 00:51:23 And you say, oh, it's Preston at Investorspodcast.com. And they're like, okay, great. And that's basically, that's your email address for money. And that's it. You type it in and you say how much you want to send. That is it. That's where this is going. And that's, you know, five years from now.

Starting point is 00:51:45 You won't be looking at invoices or anything like that. You might have QR codes that are easily scannable that have all kinds of different features, There's recurring payments. You can scan a QR code and actually have it be a withdrawal to your own wallet. There's all these crazy things. And then you'll just have lightning addresses as well where you can just say, yeah, here's my address. You can send me money anytime. And it's non-custodial.

Starting point is 00:52:11 It's literally just go straight to your own node. So that's the future that we're looking at. And it's going to be amazing because people still look at lightning. and say, okay, so what I got, I get a wallet, and then I create, as easy as it is, comparatively to what it was like in, to the, even 2018, it's going to be even easier. It's going to be so easy. I think in 10 years, you'll have younger generations. It's just going to work, right?

Starting point is 00:52:41 They're just going to be used to it. They're going to hear stories of like vendors having to pay a 2.9% fee just to receive a payment. And they're just going to be like, what? Like how, how? How was that possible? This is wild. Talk to me about lightning pool. So we talked about lightning labs and them looping and opening a channel inbound

Starting point is 00:53:05 to you, but talk to us about lightning pool. What is this? What could it be used for? Yeah, so lightning pool, and I want to have it in front of me just so I'm not kind of misquoting. But effectively, it's, you have a marketplace for, for, channels. And we were talking a little bit about this before, where again, you're locking up liquidity to somebody for a certain period of time to provide them inbound capacity at a fee.

Starting point is 00:53:36 And so you can say, hey, you can make an offer that you're willing to give away liquidity and set your own fee for that, or somebody can make an offer of, hey, I'm requesting liquidity, or if you need liquidity, you can go to this marketplace. And effective, say, I need this or I'm offering this. And there's a free and open market of, will you lock up capital so that I have access to incoming payments? And so it's, there's, it's a double edge sword because the early people right now are probably looking and going, okay, well, this is pretty niche and there's not a lot of people doing it. I could probably get some, decent fees out of this. But it becomes so accessible to anybody who has Bitcoin that, you know,

Starting point is 00:54:21 if you're starting to establish connections and you're starting to get a decent looking node, then all of a sudden, it's anybody's game, right? Anybody can dive into this and say, hey, I want to provide liquidity for people that don't have it. And it's such a departure from the world that we live in right now. We're just somebody, for people that are watching the video, is listening to the pod right now. Literally, I've got it right behind me over my left shoulder. I've got a tiny little computer lit up. And that would be like I could be establishing and renting out liquidity

Starting point is 00:54:59 to anybody from that tiny little thing just whirring behind me on the shelf. It's like a little Raspberry Pi computer. So yeah, that's what Lightning Pool is. You're basically, it's a marketplace for lightning channels that anybody can partake in. It's amazing. What's missing in the education space for Bitcoin right now? What I'll say, I'm going to start this with, man, it's so much better than it used to be. Like diving in in 2014, it was difficult, both from a perspective of just learning the basics, but even just podcasts and information and stuff to read. And now it's, you could listen to and walk.

Starting point is 00:55:45 things 24-7 and not even scratch the surface of all the great content that's coming. It would be all quality stuff to watch and listen to. What's missing, that's tough because I'd say lightning right now, the nitty-gritty of lightning, that was a whole, and I put off doing those lightning videos for so long. I had people bugging me. They're so good. I'm telling you they're so good. They're so useful.

Starting point is 00:56:13 So useful. Lightning needs more. Lightning definitely needs more explanation. Just the basics of how do I use this? And I'm talking about the back end, running a node, liquidity, how to use loop. I would love, and again, this is one that I put off for way too long with BTC Pay server. I would love to do a video on that. But it needs more of that hands-on, very simplistic. And, and Derek I say, because it's the opposite of what I do, very short form, easy to digest tutorial stuff. It just really needs that. It needs, how do I do this? And somebody clicks and there's like a five minute thing. Okay, do this, do this, do this. You're good. I think that's key.

Starting point is 00:57:00 And also, I think in the education space, there's something to be said for just having the user experience and the user interface be easy enough to just open it and go, oh, I get it. Because it's still, especially with lightning stuff, even wallets, even general Bitcoin wallets that have like Bitcoin and lightning in them or back and forth, it's just, it's not quite there in terms of being intuitive enough to be like, what am I doing? Even like Moon is a beautiful wallet. It has Bitcoin and Lightning Network. It's one cohesive balance the entire time. But there's just enough friction on the receiving side where it's a little bit like somebody needs to know the difference between Bitcoin and Lightning and they need to designate which one they want to receive on. And then there's all of these little things in between if you go to Lightning, you're creating an invoice and everything.

Starting point is 00:57:58 It needs to be receive and that's it. receive and then it just, it, you scan and it just knows what you want. It knows what you want to do. That's where we need to get to. That largely makes the tutorials and the education front irrelevant. When UI gets to the point, like, I can't wait to be, it'll be a little bit sad, but I can't wait to be obsolete because it means that Bitcoin is so good and so easy. I agree with that.

Starting point is 00:58:31 Hey, I'm ready to hang it up. Well, we'll visit each other's citadel, I'm sure. What apps or hardware are you excited about most right now? Okay, so there's some really cool stuff. Again, we've been on the node thing a lot, but all the node stuff coming down the pipe is amazing. Umbril is knocking out of the park in terms of user experience. It's amazing. It's amazing.

Starting point is 00:58:59 what they did is just, in my opinion, so far unparalleled. That said, there's so many other great options out there, too. There's Mynode, there's Nodel, there's Start9 Labs, there's like Ronan Dojo. There's so many different options out there, and it's amazing, which is great. I love seeing that. All the lightning apps and stuff, there's one that I was testing out the other day, Zebody Wallet, which it is a custodial thing, but it works, you get a plugin in Chrome, and it's just like in the browser. And you can tip with that.

Starting point is 00:59:36 And that means that it actually, so you were talking about tips on Twitter, it integrates with Twitter. So if you have the Zebedy plugin on Chrome, then there's a little lightning icon at the bottom of every one of your tweets for anybody else who also has Zebity. And you click it and it'll automatically bring up a send payment to this person on Zebity. And it's just, it's instant. Oh, my love. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot of that.

Starting point is 00:59:59 And I love that everything is just interoperable once you jump on lightning. Like you don't already, you don't need to have certain things. You can just do it. You know, you don't need Twitter to necessarily turn on your tipping function to use it as you quickly discovered. Right. There's always workarounds. The other thing that I'm excited about is the hardware wallet space. And man, do I have a collection?

Starting point is 01:00:24 I've got everything under the sun. I've got a little like, I've got this little box behind me on my shelf that's just full of test devices. And, you know, I've got the treasers and the ledgers and the cold cards and the keystones and the bit boxes and the foundation passports and all of those. But one that I just got that I'm going to do a video on soon is the Seed Siner. And this is a do it yourself, build your own hardware. wallet and you can put it together with 30 bucks worth of parts. It's crazy. It's like a little Raspberry Pi Zero. You buy the you buy the little Raspberry Pi camera and then you buy a little LCD screen that goes on the front and then you get a little case for it. You put it all together

Starting point is 01:01:10 is both 30 bucks. And then you flash, you get a little SD card and you flash just like you would with Umbrol, the software on it and you're off to the races. And then you can use that. alongside all of the awesome software that you have on your node or like any Bitcoin wallet that is any good. You can get like Sparrow wallet or Spector or whatever, you know, and you can plug this in and use it as a hardware wallet with that. And you've built it yourself from easy to access and easy to get parts for next to nothing. And you can verify the software release.

Starting point is 01:01:50 It's incredible. It's amazing. I just want to kind of do it for the fun of it. It sounds like a blast. Yeah, I'm headed to Miami this week for the Oslo Freedom Forum. And Alex Glassien is putting this on. And one of the things, the people from Seed Signer are going to be there. And they're giving out a bunch of these things saying, hey, you can build these things yourself.

Starting point is 01:02:14 And again, just kind of like the ethos of that self-sovereignty, like don't trust verify. Like, I don't trust you sending me the parts. I'm going to buy my own parts. I'm going to build it. I'm going to make sure nobody tinkered with this. I'm going to verify the software release. I'm going to install it myself. So it's, again, and it's not that everybody has to do this.

Starting point is 01:02:32 It's just important that they can. I love that point. It's not that everybody has to do it. It's that everybody can do it from the hardware to making the hardware, to running the software, to all of it. I don't know what it was, but there was just such a feeling of self-sovereignty and just, like, release from the, from the old system just today for me for whatever reason. Like just sending people, here's a dollar. Here's, I sent Luke Grumman.

Starting point is 01:03:00 Five cents, right? All five cents went to him and it came from my full node. And I don't know what, it was just, it was just this feeling of just like, wow, this is the future instantly with no one's permission. Yeah. It's insane, man. It's beyond exciting. So you as a content creator, you'll, you're probably,

Starting point is 01:03:22 probably appreciate this bit here. But let's talk about like some of the stack that I've got going on of different pieces of software, hardware and everything. And then how they've benefited me as an individual as a content creator. So I've got, first off, anybody listening to this that isn't familiar, I live on Bitcoin. My income is Bitcoin. And so do I, yes, I have a bank account, but all of my income comes in as Bitcoin. I convert whatever I need for bills the moment I get it at the beginning of the month. And then the rest sits in Bitcoin unless something comes up where I need to convert later. Is that a nightmare for taxes?

Starting point is 01:04:02 Oh, yeah, you bet. But if you're getting hit with taxes, it's because the value of the money that you've been holding has gone up instead of inevitably gone down and purchasing power. So, you know, I'll take the headache. But I digress. So I'm making my money in Bitcoin. I've got my full Bitcoin node that sits at home. It runs a full copy of the Bitcoin blockchain. I've got my software and hardware wallets all pointing at that node.

Starting point is 01:04:30 So they're all verifying the blockchain, my own copy of the blockchain, not having to trust anybody. And that's from anywhere, right? So I can put in my nodes information on a software wallet on my phone and be anywhere and know that I'm verifying from my own node remotely. Okay? I also have my Lightning node running. My Lightning Node has all of the liquidity that I've taken my own Bitcoin and locked up in channels and it can route payments and receive payments and send payments

Starting point is 01:04:59 and all of that. Now, pull in podcasting 2.0. 3.0? I can't remember what point O they're on. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's podcasting, but way more awesome. And so for, I do like a news show once a week and I do a panel show, which you've been on.

Starting point is 01:05:19 Why are we bullish? And so those shows, because they lend themselves to audio only, which I agree with you, is so much easier than video content. So I'll pull the audio from the video after the fact and I upload those to podcasting platforms just via anchor. Okay, great. Well, you can register with a podcast index, the podcast. podcast index or podcaster index.

Starting point is 01:05:43 I can't remember what it's called. And what this does is you can link your, you can claim your show. You can link it up with the podcast index on there and link it up to something called podcast or wallet. At this point, you can then link podcaster wallet to your lightning node. Once that is established and you've claimed your podcast and linked it to your lightning note, it gets blasted out to a ton of different platforms. A couple off the top of my head that come out, that are top of mind for this use case. One is Breeze wallet. And yes, Breeze wallet,

Starting point is 01:06:22 it goes to because Breeze wallet is a lightning, a Bitcoin lightning wallet, but it also doubles as a podcast app. And when you open it up and you go to the podcast section of it, you have the option to listen to podcasts, and you have the option to set a number of of sats per minute that you're willing to pay to listen to the podcast. And so somebody can now listen to my show and say, oh, I'm willing to pay 20 sats a minute. That's about a penny a minute. Okay, that's for somebody to pay that negligible, right? Or maybe they say even less. Maybe they say 10 sats a minute, half a cent, whatever they may say. Penny a minute, just for argument's sake. Okay, great. They listen to the show. They pay me 60 cents. Great. But the thing is, I see,

Starting point is 01:07:08 that, and this is, I was recently on a trip, I was in Greece, I had an app linked up to my node where I could monitor my lightning nodes, liquidity, and any payments. And I could see streams of 20s, 20s, 20sss, 20sss, minute to minute as people listened to the podcast and paid every minute a penny as they're listening. And this previously would be impossible. And not only can I see it, I have access to that liquidity. I can immediately spend it from this wallet, which is remotely referencing my lightning node on the other side of the planet. I'm getting paid a penny a minute, and I can immediately spend that anywhere that I like.

Starting point is 01:07:50 And so I'm looking at this going, first of all, the speed at which I'm able to access this liquidity and the size of transactions that we're dealing with is insane. But think about the consequences of the rent-seeking platforms, Like, I'm still on YouTube and, you know, you can't survive on YouTube revenue. YouTube, it's laughable when they slash and hack away the revenue that comes in from ads. So you're reliant on sponsors, right? But let's just spitball an amount. Let's say you enjoy some degree of success and it's a sat streaming world.

Starting point is 01:08:32 And everybody's cool with like, yeah, I'll spend a penny a minute to listen. to something. If you have a degree of success and 10,000 people listen to an episode, that's six grand for one episode. Yeah. For 10,000 people to drop a penny a minute. So that's 60 cents for a person. Who cares? But for you, as a content creator, nobody scrapes that away. It goes direct to your lightning node. Nobody is in between. And that is groundbreaking. It's incredible. Well, and it's also important that if a person, person's listening and they stop listening five minutes in, right? Because the content was terrible. The content creator is not going to make any money and they're going to be incentivized to stop

Starting point is 01:09:17 doing what they're doing. Yeah. I made a little blog post about this and I think I phrased it, the sats stop streaming when you start to suck, right? Like, it's literally like the person shuts off the money the moment you suck. And so it's like it holds content to a higher bar because You're not just trying to the model of, okay, I'll get sponsors. And if somebody listens to like five minutes of the show, it counts as a view, whatever, now you're directly incentivized to get somebody's attention and hold it for the entirety of an episode. Imagine paying for like the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg or something like that based on your dwell time. Like if you could set up a rate that you would stream stats for the dwell time of like reviewing the page.

Starting point is 01:10:05 Yeah. I mean, because there's many pages on that. there for maybe a second. I'm like, oh, this is crap. Well, and how often do you get something that pops up and says, okay, well, you read the first few sentences, but you got to subscribe for 10, 20 bucks a month. For a year, for a year. Yeah, for a year. Yeah, for a year. And you're like, there's no way in hell I'm doing that, but I would pay 10 cents to read this. Exactly. Right. Like, that's, and that's a revenue model where most people would not, like, if they're already reading it, and they're like, oh, this is

Starting point is 01:10:37 interesting. And they see, oh, it's funny. I'm not paying 20 bucks to subscribe and locked in. But if they see, okay, can you click the button in your browser to approve a 10 cent transaction to read this? I'll be like, okay, I'm interested. I'll do that. Dude, I mean, it's all going in this direction. This is, it's just fascinating to be able to stream pennies to people. Yeah. The whole idea, even just of a two-week pay period. is going to be out the window. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:04 Right? Because you can, you can now, why do we have those pay periods? Well, because it makes more economic sense to split it into two weeks and pay somebody after certain intervals, whereas like, if they're doing menial work on a computer, you can set a timer. And as long as there's activity happening, there's a constant flow, there's a stream of SATs going to them as they work. Pay periods are done.

Starting point is 01:11:27 Are you currently working? Are you currently doing something? Great. Okay. You got a stream of money. step away that the flow stops. Dude, give people a handoff to your YouTube channel. Anything else you want to highlight.

Starting point is 01:11:41 I'm telling you right now, like, I'm a stalker on your YouTube channel. I'm like watching everything you put out there. I'm building. I'm there doing it right there with you. I mean, literally, here on my desk, here I'll just show you. Sitting on my desk is a shell with a, you know, a little fan for me to run my The second raspberry pie. What are you going to run?

Starting point is 01:12:03 Are you going to run? So you got an umbrella going right now? I have an umbrella running right now. I'm going to stand up another one. And so this is the case that I got that is going to go in. It looks great, man. That's beautiful. I love seeing the notes pop up.

Starting point is 01:12:16 You can find me a few different places. Obviously on YouTube, you can just search BTC sessions. Really easy. On Twitter, I'm just at BTC sessions. And I've started doing some short form content. where I'll get people to ask me a question every week and I'll do like a quick two minute answer. And I also do clips of my Why Are We Bullish panel shows where we just all get together and talk about things that we're excited about each week. And so I have content going out to Instagram and TikTok as well under the same ad BTC sessions.

Starting point is 01:12:48 So you can find me all those places. And I guess my parting thought would be I really, I can't coax people enough into the idea of just getting over the. initial fear of trying new things like running a node or trying the lightning network for the first time, even just using an app on your phone like Moon Wallet, just try new things. I challenge everybody that's listening that has only just bought Bitcoin as an investment and is sitting on it and has no real understanding of how it works under the hood. You'll gain a whole new level of conviction when you dive in and you actually hands on run a node and you see, oh my God, nobody can screw with me because I've got a cheap computer sitting on a desk.

Starting point is 01:13:37 It's unbelievable. And so if you want to get started with that, I highly recommend check out. I've got a video on Umbrell and just go. And as a little weekend project, it'll take you a day to set up and then it'll take you a few days for it to sync the Bitcoin blockchain. And then you'll be off for the races. And you can just play. And it's not a scary thing.

Starting point is 01:13:58 I find most people, they just need a tiny little push and a little bit of hand holding along the way somebody to nod and say, you're doing it, right? Don't worry. Keep going. And that's it. That's all you need. And everybody's so helpful, too. Yes, 100%.

Starting point is 01:14:12 I mean, just so helpful. I can't agree with you more. Your conviction will go through the roof after you. And you start using the applications. You're seeing the mempool. I mean, you're like, you're totally in, man. It's a little hard to unsee some of this. Sessions, thank you for coming on.

Starting point is 01:14:27 Thank you for making time. And thank you for teaching me so many different concepts and ideas. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin-specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular

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We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC046: Bitcoin Full Nodes & Instant Settlement on the Lightning Network w/ BTC Sessions (Bitcoin Podcast)

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