Slashpay: Bitcoin Payment Negotiation

Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today for episode three hundred and sixty-two, John Carvalho of Synonym joins me and we're talking about this idea of slash pay and slash tags as well as tether on the Lightning Network. So what does this slash pay idea mean? Well, think about those times where you've tried To coordinate to receive payment and in some cases it's a Lightning payment, in other cases it's a Bitcoin on chain payment. How do you coordinate that for somebody else? And SlashPay and Slash tags are one way that we could dramatically smooth that process. So in this episode, we talk about that, as well as putting Tether USD on the Lightning Network. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. Swan Bitcoin is the easy way to buy Bitcoin and also learn about it. And with Swan Bitcoin, there's Also a service called Swan Private. This one is specially for high net worth investors and for entity investors as well. Swan Private was launched because we talked to so many people that had issues with the major exchanges. Some were having their accounts locked, customer service couldn't help them, and in some cases as entities, they couldn't easily onboard their accounts. They were stuck in a wait queue for weeks or even months, and many wanted to just talk to an actual human being who could answer their questions. Swan Private is a one-on-one Bitcoin advisory service, so you have direct access To your dedicated Bitcoin expert by text, email, and phone, so you also get access to Swan Private Insight, which is a monthly research report, and there are also webinar sessions on. If you're interested, go to swanprivate dot com. Do you need to borrow against your coins? Lend at HodlHodl is appear to be a Bitcoin backed lending platform to do just this, so you can lend or borrow stablecoins globally and anonymously. There's no KYC required. You can sign up in just thirty seconds and borrow. You deal directly with other people, you look through the offers there, and you select an offer, and the users control collateral together through the whole deal with all the interest paid at the end. This is using their two of three multi-signature technology. Now, if you have stablecoins, you can go and put up an offer and lend them out at high returns. This is issuing an over-collateralized loan with the full interest guaranteed. Lend at hoddle hoddle, lend and borrow stablecoins on your terms at your desired interest rates, and there are no hidden fees. The terms and Go to the website, it's lend dot h o d l h o d l dot com. Compass Mining is the world's first and largest online marketplace for Bitcoin mining hardware, hosting, and ASIC reselling. Bitcoin mining is getting bigger and bigger, and so is Compass Mining. Compass is adding over two hundred and eighty megawatts worth of hosting capacity this year. So with Compass, you can order a mining machine, have that shipped to your home if you're in the US, and use the at-home mining guide to get set up and mine from home. On the other hand, if you want to use Vetted facilities that have been vetted by the Compass Mining team. You can go and select an ASIC machine and have it sent there. They've got the options of new machines as well as second hand machines, which might be able to go online faster, so there's a trade off there. Now, go and check out the website, they've got material like a newsletter, they've got podcasts as well, so you can learn about mining. That website is compassmining.io. And now onto the show with John. John, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. So, John And, obviously interested to chat about what you're doing and your new startup, which is, you know, out there public now. so do you wanna just start off with a little bit of, you know, what it is and why you started it?

Sure. so about two years ago, almost exactly, I had left Bitrefill and kind of, arranged to do this new startup, you know, in, in stealth mode. And so for the first like three months, I basically tried to design a- A vision, I guess you could say, and my goal was basically to like prove the Bitcoin thesis, I guess, which is like to say, you know, if we actually get hyperbitcoinization or, you know, in any version of Bitcoin being like the primary storage of value, like on Earth, like what does it actually look like? How does it change the world? And what do we replace the things that it disrupts with? So like, you know, the, the three kind of pillars that I'm looking at is, you know, replacing big banks, replacing big government or Big regulation, and replacing big tech, and supposedly Bitcoin is going to, you know, affect these things greatly, you know, these major centralized dinosaurs, you hopefully could say. and so I wanted to think about, okay, all-- we always tell like shitcoiners, we always tell no coiners, like, don't do that, do this, but we just say use Bitcoin, we don't say like what we're actually gonna replace the government with, what we're actually gonna re-replace Twitter with and Facebook and, well, how we'll actually replace like modern finance And so I came up with this kind of minimum set of technologies and services that would need to be in place to kind of make sense, and, you know, decided on a few products that we would have to make to make this kind of minimum viable ecosystem for this post hyperbitcoinization society. And so that, that left us with, basically, you know, some typical things that you would expect, like some wallet software, some server software, et cetera, and also some platforms, you know, like the kind of, an honest attempt at doing what you might call dash Apps like locally formed applications, you know, based off of a more decentralized web of information. but we were kind of left with this gap of interactions that didn't really exist yet and, and kind of the glue that would make this all actually work. And what I could come up with, the closest thing I could come up with was basically to have some form of way that two people could, like, look at a, a digital anchor or, in, in what we landed on was a pub key and assign metadata to it in a mutual way, and this would allow people to kind of- Of move the algorithms and the curation and the reputation, you know, all of these kind of walled garden aspects from major entities to the user. And so the, the kind of more, original, risky thing that we're doing as a company is making a, a protocol called Slashpay, and Slashpay is basically a way of using key pairs, you know, the same kind of way that Bitcoin does, basically for everything. And so we don't use a blockchain for this at all, but it basically handles all of what you would- Might hear people say as Web three use cases or decentralized web use cases or self-sovereign web, self-sovereign identity, semantic web, any of these things that are relating to like mutual metadata about digital things, we're trying to address those with slash tags. And so, you know, within this set of products, we have-- we, we're trying to basically show how to use, how to apply Bitcoin, Lightning, tokens on Lightning, slash tags, and, you know, by extension, webs of trust to create this whole concept that we call the aton- Economy, which is basically the full vision of realizing like post hyperbitcoinization in a digital economy.

An ambitious goal certainly, and I love to see these big ambitious ideas, and as you were saying, this, slash tags and slash pay idea is a very interesting one because For years in Bitcoin, there has been all these different standards, and I think as you had in that thread, and it's a famous XKCD, it's like this idea of, "Oh, look, there's all these competing standards. Let me make a new one to unify them all," and then the end frame is, "Oh, now there's fifteen competing standards instead of fourteen." And so obviously, you're very self-aware in, in posting that. So do you wanna give us a bit of the historical context? What were some of the attempts that have come in the past,

So in the context of Slashpay, like what I'll, what I'll say about the XKCD comic and really all popular memes is that I'm learning more and more that popular memes are basically like a great place for disruption. People get really comfortable with like a simplified idea and they, they kind of stop exploring and researching that idea, but it's really incomplete most of the time. It's just a shorthand for an idea. And XKCD, I've really learned is kind of like, it's a great place that That comic, I mean, is a great place to actually kind of disrupt and show how people are wrong about, you know, the way they look at that comic. Yes, it is, you know, kind of a meme or a joke to like always make a new standard, to always make a new tech that just replaces the old tech, but in, in a slightly different way or compiles it. But that's actually how tech works. Like, if you wanna evolve protocols, evolve standards, evolve technology, you're basically just compressing what existed before into something that, you know, compiles It all into something more useful and, and, you know, more convenient. And so making a standard of all the standards is, in my opinion, while a risky and hard thing to do, it's what we're supposed to be doing, and most of the time, when it comes to technology and protocols. And so slash tags is basically, as I mentioned, a way of using key pairs to identify, digital things. It could be a person, it could be a website, it could be a domain, it could be an API endpoint, whatever. It could be a movie, it could be Any kind of thing that could be addressable in a network, and we kind of are showing all these different use cases of how you can apply this to network in, in Bitcoin use cases. So the, the Slashpay example is basically showing that, you know, in Bitcoin, we've had all these progressing new standards for payments. Like we started with just, you know, we actually probably started with IP addresses way back in the beginning, and then that, that stopped being used very early on, and we had the pub keys that were, that people used for payment. The ones that, the legacy ones that start with the number one, and we had multisig that starts with the number three, and most nodes will support that. But then we started adding more soft fork, you know, payment options like SegWit and legacy SegWit, legacy SegWit versus, you know, native SegWit, which is the one that starts with a B. And then we have now Taproot addresses that are coming, which are the like B C one M, I believe. And so just Bitcoin on the base layer itself has all these separate ways of paying, and then you Like expressing these as QR codes, pay nims, et cetera. And so you have all these different ways of receiving and sending Bitcoin, and now Lightning is starting to have the same problem. We have like the Lightning Bolt eleven spec, which is how most, you know, people would create an invoice on Lightning, but then now we have LNURL as a new way of, you know, coordinating a payment, and we have now arguments about, you know, Lightning Labs' standard of AMP versus the proposed standard from Blockstream of Bolt twelve. the offers, spec. And so this is beginning, oh, and we also have, another one worth mentioning is p t l c channels, which are going to be incompatible, as far as I know, with h t l c channels. And so a lot of people think that the Lightning Network, like, there is one, the Lightning Network, and I think that's a big misconception. I don't think that's how Lightning works. I think Lightning is a method of stringing channels of Bitcoin transactions together, and whether or not somebody is compatible with your method and all of the Incorporate routing into that method is just whether they're in your Lightning network or not. And I think that there already are multiple Lightning networks, there will be many Lightning networks, and there will be some Lightning networks that are compatible and some that aren't. And whether they're compatible and whether they route together is basically whether your node supports this kind of multi-layered multi-network routing to be able to abstract these ideas. And so if you take all these payment problems on the base chain, the payment problems on Lightning, and then you also think about how Lightning is- Now going to be technically more than one network. You've got all this stuff of kind of that becomes not interoperable. And so Slashpay was a way to show that if you just abstract all of this away to just one pub key, that you can use that pub key as an anchor into, well, what we use in Slashpay is a DHT. And so basically, you just have a file that you can find within a network, sort of like you would find in BitTorrent. And the, it's-- there's a whole like, you know, cryptographic way of handling this and, and way A reliable way. and you can just tell people which payment methods that you support, and this way, when two peers using this method want to pay each other or, or, you know, create an invoice or create an address, you know, on the fly, they can basically look at their payment preferences, which payment methods they support, and choose and match them programmatically, automatically in the background. So this way, the user experience in an application would become, you know, I show you a QR code, you scan it, you-- and then automatically we're, we're, we're already Negotiating on how we're gonna pay each other, and you just say how much you wanna pay, and then your own, you know, servers or applications will handle this and just complete the payment, you know, both to, to both parties' preferences. So Slashpay is just a way of taking all of that complexity and making it interoperable on a new standard that is kind of, abstracted above everything.

Right. And so first question that comes to my mind is, now I'm sort of thinking back through Bitcoin and Lightning example, so as an- An example, there is say version checking in Bitcoin, like so they'll sort of say, "Oh, do you speak this? I, I speak that." And so especially in the Lightning Network, I think they will have this where it's like a feature bit or a version bit to sort of say, "Ah, yes, I speak this language and you speak that language." Now, of course, as you said, even there, there are differences there, right? So, y-you have LNURL, you have Bolt 12, you have like all these different ideas, you have Bolt 1

Aspects of it. So then the question that I'm asking is, how do we prioritize those different methods? Like, is it that, let's say you and I, we both have our slash tags, do you set a priority order so that when I reach out to you, I can look, okay, this is John's priority order, he would prefer Lightning, but if he doesn't, if you can't get that, he would like a Paymium or he would like some other thing?

That's exactly how it works. Basically, it's like, even LNURL, like LNURL-oth

That person is scanning the QR code and it, they don't support LN URL authen-LN URL authentication. You can have a fallback for a different type of authentication right inside the same QR. Well, we're taking that kind of idea and like intentionally putting it to a protocol of basically where you would rank, you know, you'd let, you'd basically dynamically every time somebody checked, and this means that you could hot swap out which payment methods you support, you could have like your, you could have multiple LN node-LN nodes and take one offline and swap it with another, like this, it's Because all they're using is your, your kind of top level pub key, and they're using that to contact you and see what you currently support. And so you'd be able to basically say, "Here are all the, here are all the payment methods I support. Here is the order of preference in, in, in which I support them. And then basically you show me yours, I show you mine, and we match. And if we don't match, we can't pay each other. And if we do match, we both, we choose the highest order preference. and this is basically All of these different technologies and payment methods to actually compete in the market.

Excellent. And so that brings up that question then, is there some kind of online requirement, right? So like in the Lightning Network, it's traditionally it's seen like you need to be online to be able to take a payment because you're signing a message and so on. So how would that work in the context of, let's say, a mobile user if they're not online at the time? Is it calling back to the DHT as you're saying, or how does that part work?

Sure. so this, The whole thing isn't fully complete yet. Basically, we, we have a very early stage version of SlashPay working, and there are gonna be a number of problems, problems to solve, and a number of user experience problems to kind of design for, and we're gonna be tackling those problems within our application. So we're basically trying to say that we not only will say, "This is how you could do it," we will also show you how you could apply these methods in our own application so you can either copy them or improve upon them. But as far as what you're saying, yes Like you have, Lightning and you pretty much have to be online to be able to receive a payment. There are some kind of like hacks that have, you know, been created to kind of mitigate that requirement, but in the end, like if you want it to be full service and have the full user experience of all of this kind of customization and automation, being online is a requirement. There are certain payment methods that you might be able to, be able to handle them in an offline way or even outsource the handling of them in a kind of trustless way, but dep- Depending on each payment type will depend on how much you can actually do that or not. Like for example, if I'm getting paid to, an xPub, then you know that you can generate, you know, a number of keys, you know, programmatically out of that xPub, and that, that's one way you could handle this kind of situation. But if I'm paying like a raw Lightning invoice, it needs to be online, right? Like, even the DHT, you also has to be online, but now you also have to have your node online to generate that invoice.

That, that payment method is available when you're trying to pay over SlashPay. So it could be something like where if my node is offline or my wallet isn't open at the moment, then you might see different payment options. And the idea, I guess, is for all the payment options that would require a third party to basically make the third party services that handle this as trustlessly as possible, and then even when it can't be done in a trustless way, to have payment services, you know, like payment processors or, or custodial temporary- custodians and things like this. In the end, we, we can't like deny physics, you know, and so there are gonna be certain limitations to like, if you're not there to pay, then I can't pay you, and that's just a physics problem in the end, and we can't make magic. And so I think that there are a lot, there's a lot we can handle, much more than we can, that we do, than we do currently, but I don't think it will ever be perfect. It's gonna be a moving

target

Failure. So as an example, let's say, you know, I scan your Slashpay and the first priority is Lightning, and then let's say, you know, I try to, I try to execute a Lightning payment, but that Lightning payment fails because maybe my node couldn't find the route or something like that. How would that work then?

Well, it would be pretty much the same, you know, y-y-the same as if your payment fails using Lightning, you know, you'd either make a new attempt. And Lightning right now isn't very reliable. I mean, many Fail. some of them fail and, and have errors and I don't even understand why they failed. Some of them they say payment in transit and then two minutes pass and I don't really know if it got paid or not, and you kinda have to like close the wallet and refresh it. Like, there's still a lot of, gaps to fill in the user experience and in the technology. So I would say it will do just as good a job as your lightning node could, except now you would have other fallback methods in addition to it. And, and this is a good

Looking at solving at the moment is removing the dependency on IP addresses for the Lightning Network, because we, we see some potential for censorship and, you know, future problems with that. So we're also looking at using SlashPay and, and kind of DHT methods and, and some other methods, we're not sure which one we'll, we'll go with yet, for basically abstracting away the IP address as well. So this way, when you're negotiating these payments, creating these communications to negotiate these payments, they're actually done within a file that can be routed as well. so this way You have to kind of put yourself in a situation where people know where you're located or which IP address you're using.

Another area that, my friend Russell from Blockstream loves to talk about is proof of payment. So is that something you are handling as part of Slash Tags and Slash Pay, or is that considered, that's, you know, that's out of band or that's not, that's not in the scope here?

I think it will become more and more within scope, let's put it that way. Already, we've figured out that like in order to do this in, in Interaction. And so now already you're like, pretend, it's acting just like an invoice layer, you know, a payment layer, not just negotiation. And so I could see over time where if slash tags and slash pay become popular, that maybe people will just start using protocols on that, on that layer instead of the, you know, just replacing the layer within Bitcoin and within, Lightning and just abstracting this away from, from the node altogether, because, again, you, you need that proof of payment. The proof of payment is useful for, for a certain purpose. We also have use cases we wanna do, like say for subscriptions and allowances by using slash tags. And the reason to do this all with slash tags is because you're using key pairs, you can always prove and authenticate everything as you do it and sign everything and attest everything. So it's, it's kind of a very sound method for negotiating these types of arrangements, like coordinating payments.

Right. And so one other idea, just with the key pairs and the, the DHT, this distributed hash table, right? How is it Amended or edited. So as an example, let's say you, you, you wanna say, "Oh, I've got this new technology now, and I wanna put that at the top of my priority." How does amending and editing at work, and who actually stores the table?

So that's, that's a good question and an interesting question, because the technology that we're using to serve the DHT is called Hypercore, and Hypercore is based on append-only logs. And so append-only logs basically enforce a sequence of events, much like a blockchain or a Merkle tree or these kinds Contain similar constructions within them, and so hypercores can have file systems inside, they can have, you know, a sequence that's enforced, they can be forked, they can have parts of the history totally deleted, and they can be deleted permanently to save space and still have integrity of the actual core itself. So it's a very, very flexible method for enforcing sequence and enforcing that sequence in that, in that data to be only accessible by specific keys. And so you can do things, for example, like have multiple writers for a core that can be Like assigned by key, and you can basically use this as a communication point. So the, the DHT ends up being, you know, this very flexible kind of decentralized storage solution where you can have other people storing things for you, but not able to manipulate them, only you can manipulate them.

Gotcha. Then is the idea that there'd be a lot of people who are running some kind of DHT storage node, and there's many, many people storing the same thing, kind of like a BitTorrent?

Very much like a BitTorrent. the, the longer term goal that we have in another product, you know, part of our stack that we've had to solve for and start designing is basically creating a monetized storage market, like so you can incentivize people to store cores for you. there will be many purposes for hypercores and many reasons to- To serve them as CDNs, as websites, as, you know, profiles, as Slashpay profiles, as, you know, your, your social media feeds. Like, there's, there's a lot of use cases that we can use to apply this to create a more decentralized kind of, wall-less garden, and you're gonna need to be able to pay people and incentivize people to do this. So one of the things we're also working on to kind of complete this vision is a competitive market that will basically show how you can apply Light webs of trust to, as, as to basically create a ranked oracle market, and oracles being, you know, abstracted to not just oracles for like the DLCs and contracts, but oracles for like, providing any type of service that has a reputation. And so you can basically choose what quality and what price range, and you can weight the metadata about any provider that is within the market, and you can choose how mu- how much redundancy you want for your core and basically purchase it, you know, on an automated way. Within our applications. This is the future, though. This is like, like we just started working on it, it's gonna take some time, but it is kind of a primitive that's required to do the kind of the full, full vision that we're going for.

Right. So as an example, for now, it's kind of everyone stores everything, and it's just a very simple-- Well, for now, it's,

it's, you don't know who, not everyone stores everything, that's not how it works. That would be a blockchain basically. only the people who want

Torrent, when they log onto BitTorrent, they, they, every torrent, they basically choose which ones they want to serve and choose which ones they want to download. And so you'll see that popular files will have a lot more people seeding them, and unpopular files will be very hard to find or, or gone forever in some cases.

And so then, how do you deal with the question of, let's say spam? Let's say someone just wants to maliciously just generate, you know, billions and billions of keepers and make someone else store them. What's the answer there? Is it

Can't make someone else store them. That's, that's, that's the, the main primitive that, that prevents that is, there's no distribution mechanism that's automatic within the system. It's additive. So you decide what you want to do. When you create a web of trust, for example, you choose to add someone. You're not just listening to constantly add whoever talks to you. And one of the kind of basic functions that Slashpay is trying to provide is access control. And so basically it's a way of whitelisting and ranking and tiering, you know, any of the These that are part of your web of trust. So you create your own schema for waiting things, and we will, we will provide, you know, initial default schemas for each, for each use case, but, you know, you could basically customize them however you want, and you use these as ways of abstracting access control and permissioning. And so basically you say, okay, like Joe is my uncle, and that means he's tagged as family, and so when he tries to access my Hypercore, my database, that he gets access to this set of files. And so what we- When he is looking, you know, through whatever interface we've provided, looking, you know, perusing the files he has access to on the network, he will see whatever ones from me that he has permission for, and he won't see other ones. And if you, say, come in and you're not family, and I say, "Oh, this is just, you know, you know, podcaster," then I might say, "Okay, well, he, he can have access to like my media profile and my blog and whatever, you know, my, my public feed,

called slash tags, you can tag everything in this way to kind of use it as a permissioning and a curation system.

So in practice, is this going to be something that you see as like a feature bolted into a lot of different Bitcoin and Lightning wallets? Like in practice, how do you envision that looking?

I think that there'll be certain use cases that will be, you know, appropriate for certain applications and, you know, certain situations. So we'll, like I said before, it's a lot. I know what I'm saying. Sounds like, you know, like crazy in some, in some regards and like complicated or technical or stupid maybe, I don't know. But like, there's a lot here that we're trying to do, and we understand that like pretty much the only way to make it simple for people to consider and use is to just deploy it and, and show how it can be used. And so we'll do our best to show like the appropriate use cases for slash tags within a mobile wallet, and that will be the first way that we try to show these things. And so we'll- We'll, we'll collaborate with some websites for supporting slash tags and some other services, and we'll just show, "Here, here's how you can do it. " But you can come up with a lot of other methods. I'm sure there are a lot of other ways that you can apply this that we won't think of, and I hope other people do. And then we'll show how you can do it, say, in a web platform, like a publishing platform, something like, you know, WordPress or Medium or any type of, you know, content distribution platform that you wanna monetize

A great bed and a great foundation for how to actually solve, you know, decentralized social media in a way that like can prevent censorship, where you are the feed, your key owns everything, and you just decide which websites distribute it for you, basically which websites get access to your core so they can serve it to other people. And this kind of breaks apart the web into something that becomes local first. So we'll do our best to show how to apply this stuff ac-- in actual applications and platforms, but I do think that there's a lot of power behind And that people will come up with all kinds of crazy ways to use it.

Gotcha. So it's, show don't tell, as they say, right? With the commercial uses, so could you spell out some examples? I mean, here's a few ideas I'm just thinking. As an example, you wanna take donations, you say, "Hey, here's my slash tag." Or if you want to sign up with a service and they need to know where to pay you out, whether that's a exchange or some other thing, you'd be like, "Hey, here's my Or how are you seeing it in terms of commercial application there?

Sure. I, I don't know, I don't know if I would call that a commercial application because we're, we're talking about basically like tipping or, you know, peer-to-peer payments, but I would say that, yes, that actually is one of the first things that we'll try to demonstrate. So basically in the wallet, there'll be roughly three or four use cases for Slash Tags. One of them will be Slash Tags accounts, which is just basically showing how you can use this for a website account, and so kind of Or OAuth or other things like this, just logging in by scanning a QR code, the difference is here that both sides are authenticating. So it isn't just you proving you have a key, it's the website proving it still has the key that it purported to be last time you were at that website. So this way you can kind of prevent some man-in-the-middle attacks and phishing attacks like this. It also supports within that Slashpay accounts, feature, schemas, which allow you to basically assign the metadata to the user for their account in the website, which extends to the next- feature which is Slashpay's feeds. And so like within our wallet, you'll basically automatically authenticate to any websites that you have, that are using, that you are using with Slashpay, and it will pull your current account data, and you'll be able to view that within the wallet. So for example, like you might be able to see your current Bitfinex profit and loss within the wallet, or your current Bitfinex balance within the wallet, or you might be able to see like how many Bitrefill gift cards you have, or how much balance you have in open, unused gift cards, That website wants to provide in a kind of encrypted feed to your slash tag key, you'll be able to kind of pull that automatically into the wallet and just kind of get a, a broad view or a kind of bird's eye view of your account without actually visiting the website at all if you don't want to. that's, so that's, that's one use case is slash tags accounts with slash tags feeds, and then you have slash tag contacts, which is basically very, very similar, except it's like replacing the contacts user experience in your phone with, you know, this whole slash tag People. So again, the users will be able to prove they have both keys. This is kind of a way of like creating an actual user experience where people kind of try to do with PGP keys when they like do, like, when they meet in person and give each other their keys, like, this is a way to kind of automate and do this with, with, with key pairs so you can kind of authenticate with each other and then add that person as a contact. And when you do that, you're basically enabling the, the slash pay features as well, because now you have their information

In fact, you're not storing like an on-chain address, you're, you're storing a pub key that isn't, isn't a Bitcoin key, it's not for paying to directly, it's for, it's for contacting that person on the network to figure out how to pay them right now, and so you can coordinate the payment on the fly. So the user experience in the wallet for SlashPay, which is the final feature that will be there, integrated with, with SlashPay's contacts, will be basically if you're looking at your, your portfolio page, you know, your, your main

We'll show your QR code, your slash tag, and that QR code, you, you can show it to anybody, and if they scan it, they basically add you as a contact, and they have the information they need to be able to pay you anytime. And when they try to pay you, again, it won't be a static Bitcoin address that you're like using over and over, it will be like contacting you and asking you to generate a new payment method on current standards. So basically, if I try to pay you today, your preference might be, you know, a SegWit, legacy Payment preference might be a lightning invoice, and depending on what I support on my side, will depend on how I pay you every time I try to pay you, but I always know how to contact you to pay you.

Back to the show in a moment. Have you checked out the new Bitcoin security hardware wallet coming from CoinKite? This is the Coldcard MK4. So there are already some teaser videos that people are sharing online. It's got NFC features, which allows you to quickly share address information back and forth between your Coldcard wallet. It's like a little card. Later sized device, and you can use this in various configurations, whether you wanna have the NFC turned on or off. You can pre-order the Coldcard MK4 over at the site, and they've also got other material that you might be interested in, like metal seed backup plates, so you can stamp in the twenty-four words for your seed and help ensure you don't lose your coins if your house goes up on fire. So that website is coinkite dot com. A Bitcoin mining company through and through, Brains are producing unique and cutting-edge projects in the industry. They've got Brains OS Plus, this is firmware that you can install on your ASIC mining machine. It's custom firmware that allows you to stack more Sats, it's auto-tuning to make sure that you get more hash rate for your electricity bill. So make sure you go and check out the website to see which mining machine models are supported and check if yours is supported, because otherwise you're leaving Sats on the table. Go to brains dot com and they've got We've got a range of things there. They've also got this really cool Insights dashboard which I like to check out. It's got information around mining profitability calculations, as well as really cool mining statistics, so you can find that over on the website. And the Brains team are also hiring, so make sure you go and check out that website. That's brains dot com, it's Brains spelled with two I's. And finally, as the number is going up, everyone's seeing it going up, and it's time to think about your security. Are you comfortable with your security setup? Do, Gone and removed single points of failure. Unchained Capital can help you with this, you can bring two hardware wallets, it's set up for free on their website unchained dot com. Now, if you need guidance, they've got a concierge onboarding program, so they will ship you some hardware wallets if you need them, and they'll do a video call with you to teach you how to do this, even if you've never held your own private keys before. So this is the best time, get your keys off the exchange or think about upgrading from your single signature hardware wallet. With

If you're doing the concierge onboarding program, and there is some ongoing support, there's webinars and support time also, so go to Unchained dot com to take advantage of that program. Back to the show with John. So one question is around the current, let's say, PGP, like if I'm thinking of the PGP web of trust sort of model, there's this idea of key revocation. If, let's say, I lost that key or it got destroyed or it, I got hacked or something like that, similar concept exists here with slash tags, like you can

This isn't globally enforced. Revocation is kind of more, you know, about like propagating new information. And I actually believe that all revocation works this way, and, and you'll get some identity or PKI solutions trying to argue otherwise, and I, I think it's kind of bullshit. I think the problem is that once you have one key compromised, you're better off assuming all the keys that you know of that person are compromised than assuming that there's some master key that is somehow more protected than the key that was compromised. Because you don't know if it was the master that was compromised in the first place. So revocation is tricky because revocation is mostly about reputation, and this is why we choose the web of trust model instead of, say, like for example, like Ion is using the blockchain as a broadcast mechanism. But that creates an assumption that the blockchain is always the authority, and that's not true. You, you can lose your master key as well. And so while we will do our best to have, you know, good key management methods within the applications and promote good key management methods to users through the user experience, there's just always the chance that their master key has been compromised. And so thus, using Web of Trust instead, you can basically say, okay, hey, Stefan, John is behaving weirdly, like, what's your current key for him? You know, like, who, who is, who is John Carvalho to you right now? Because anybody could be me if my key is compromised, right? And you might happen to have met me in person that day and say, oh, John met me in person, he said he lost his key, and Because I trust you, I'll say, okay, and then I'll start considering that this key is John. But basically, the safest way to do a key revocation is to contact that user in a non-digital way or basically out of band from the way that they became compromised. And so we, we, we would rather have that primitive be honest and say, look, if John's key isn't behaving normally, you need to contact John. You need to find some other more confident way of contacting John and finding out what his new key is, or you need to start trusting other people to give you John currently is, because this is a digital realm, you just can't assume that there's some sort of like deterministic way to know which key is me just because I, you, you, you got a message that I did a, did a revocation.

Yeah, fair enough. And the other question that came to my mind, or at least the idea, is that if you think about the modern surveillance world of super apps, that the, these apps that try to do everything and be all and all, right? The, the WeChat of the world, they try to have your payments and your contacts and It's like what you're trying to build is almost like a, a more open version of that, but the idea is you're trying to replace the hierarchy of, you know, making the consumer, the, the user have a little bit more sovereignty. At least that's how I'm seeing it. Obviously, this is an ambitious vision for sure, but, at least that's how I'm, I'm seeing it. Am, am I characterizing that correctly, though?

You are characterizing it exactly correctly, literally in the original, like, like, we didn't make a pitch deck because And so I didn't have to do a pitch deck, but I did have to do basically like a vision deck where I explained what the hell my plan, what, what, what the hell we were gonna do as a company to like the accountants, to the legal team, to, you know, to everybody involved. And within that pitch deck, there's literally a section talking about, you know, like how the kind of dream right now in the tech world is the, is creating a walled ga-garden and creating basically the WeChat experience. Facebook wants to do it, everybody wants to do this their, their Libra and all, you know, having their own currency, it's why they bought WhatsApp. They were trying to recreate this total walled garden where everybody used them for everything. And in our deck, we basically are saying, "This is what we're trying to destroy. We're trying to make basically an unwalled garden where instead of the centralized controller having, you know, total kind of walls put around you and you're unable to leave without abandoning everything, you can now, Flip it on its head and say, now the users own everything, and they decide which distribution mechanisms they want to use. And so we've taken this kind of platform and just made it interoperable. So you can have all the same things we have today, you can even trust entirely, you can just keep using Twitter the way you want. But if Twitter, for example, started using slash tags as an account mechanism instead, you could also leave Twitter whenever you wanted, keep your feed, keep your followers, keep everything, and just use a different website for distri-for distribution. Now, I doubt Twitter Will actually do that because they have shareholders and this walled garden is very valuable to them. But in a world where slash tags exist and is becoming more and more popular over time, you won't be able to run such a thing and compete. The only way will basically be by providing it for free, because people will be willing to use better, more interoperable methods, and the only way you'll be able to trick them into using your walled method will be to give it to them for free and so making them the product like, like it is today.

Yeah, fascinating stuff. And so the The project and the, the company as it is now, so some, some of the main products that customers are gonna use, I guess most of them are gonna start with, say, the mobile wallet, right? So do you wanna tell us a little bit about that and is it gonna be called like Synonym Wallet or what's the planning there?

so the first product we're actually gonna release is, the Blocktank LSP, which is basically a server API product for allowing people to be able to purchase Lightning channels, manage, you know, the information about their channels, and automate channels within platforms and, and apps and things like this. So that's actually the first thing, the formal product that we'll release, we'll release that within probably, probably gonna release it during the Bitcoin 2022 conference days, just to kind of be a part of all of that, you know, party. But that's ready already. we actually did a sneak preview of it to-- there's currently a hackathon going on, from the Bolt Fun community called Shock the Web, and so we're letting the hackers play with it right now and kind of give us a little early test on it. But, that is how we're going to basically create better user experiences in our own wallet and in, in Bitfinex actually as well to like give people ways to kind of automate and, and abstract away the complexities of Lightning and withdrawing instantly from platforms like Bitfinex. that's- That's the first thing we release, and it'll also be how we end up bootstrapping when we start introducing tokens to the Lightning Network. So when we wanna do instant tether channels, we'll be having Blocktank as a way for you to acquire liquidity to kind of bootstrap that network as well, and that's, that will be in tandem paired with our wallet. the wallet won't be called Synonym Wallet. I'm not sure if I can actually-- We have a name for the wallet. I'm very happy with the name. It took us a long time. We I landed on one, but I think they're still filing the trademark, so I don't think I can actually say it yet. But it's nice, it's, it's short, it's catchy, and, and I am happy with it. It will have its own brand and its own name. All of our products will have their own brand and their own name. This way, people can kind of enter our ecosystem through whatever door they prefer. They don't have to like care what Synonym is. Synonym is just kind of like the, the, the top level umbrella company, and all of

accounts, contacts, and Slashpay, and it will basically show how you can tie all of this into one mobile wallet experience. after that, or maybe close to the same time as that, we'll release a version of the, of the wallet for, as a Chrome extension. it will have similar but different use cases, more appropriate to, you know, actually surfing the web, and that will be one way that we'll show now how you can use Slash tags in ways while you're surfing the web as well, you know, a little bit differently. so, so The team that's working on the Web LN spec, we're creating a kind of unified spec to handle both on-chain and off-chain transactions and kind of integrations within web pages, like adding things like, adding the ability to have markup language that's Bitcoin specific within web pages, this kind of thing. but yeah, those, those are the next few products, Blocktank, the, the mobile wallet and the, the Chrome extension wallet. after that, we're, we're just starting now on doing some of the more storage related product Products, probably what we'll release is something like a competitor to Google Drive or Dropbox, where it'll be like more of a decentralized marketplace for cloud storage, and that will be a primitive that we use ultimately for our publishing platform, which will be a way to use slash tags and hypercore for just publishing any type of content and monetizing it. that was what The Biz website was meant to be a teaser for, that we released The Biz, my podcast, The Biz Dot Pro, we released this maybe, I don't know, early on. A year and a half ago, and I do a podcast once in a while, and we kind of show how you can monetize this in different creative ways. we have a crowdwall feature in there to kind of unlock the podcast, and we'll do a lot more things like that with publishing and slash tags to show how you can use all of this to do subscriptions, permissions, you know, tiers, VIP, basically gamification and, and access kind of methods.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I'm excited to see what happens there. And also, the team has been sharing a little So, do you wanna tell us a little bit about this? Like, it's such a wacky and out there idea, right? Because, most people are thinking of it just as like, "Oh, I'll just do my Bitcoin payments on the Lightning Network," and of course, as you were saying, it's, maybe a little bit more permissionless than that. So, do you wanna give us an overview, what's going on here with Tether in Lightning channels?

Sure. So as I mentioned earlier, you know, when I tried to like model this post-hyperbitcoinization future, one of the questions I had to ask myself was like, how do we do finance? And what is basically, what is finance after Bitcoin? And what I came to is a conclusion that most finance is actually fucking bullshit, man. Like, it is all lies, bullshit, and mostly just arbitrage on the Cantillon effect. It's just trying to figure out how to deal with inflation and kind of game inflation. And that's it. And the-- and most finance is just not what it used to be. And what I determined and decided the kind of minimum form of finance that an economy actually needed was just the ability to use other people's money for something, you know, just to use credit basically. You need credit to be able to say, "Accelerate the growth of your business." You need other people's money. That's ju-just the, the minimum requirement to do any type of finance is financing. and so if that's true, I thought to myself, "Okay, what is You know, self-sovereign way to express credit in, in a future economy. And I, I looked at Tether and I said, okay, well, that's interesting. And at the time when I came up with this idea, I was actually working at Bitrefill, and I said, well, wait, we could do gift cards as tokens instead, and they would be much, much more useful. It would basically be like gift cards two point oh. And that's why I started working on trying to find a way to get tokens onto Lightning, was because I wanted to find a way to And have this have an aftermarket that was safe for users to be able to kind of sell back or resell this credit if they didn't want it anymore at any price they wanted, which isn't something that's very safe to do right now. Like for example, Paxful is a very popular platform where you can kind of sell your gift cards, but you have to trust, there's a lot of scamming that's possible, there's a lot of, you know, There's a lot of trust in that you have to like share basically a private key to sell these things. And so I thought, okay, well, if we, if we change gift cards to be tokens, we kind of get rid of a lot of the trust issues with how this works, and you can kind of make a, an improved way of doing gift cards. And I thought, and then I thought, okay, well, why are we even caring about dollars anymore? Like What is the best way to decentralize this kind of thing that we're trying to kill in the first place? And then at first I thought, okay, well, we just need more people issuing dollars. In other words, instead of just trusting one bank or two or three banks like Tether and USDC and now we have this USDT, I mean, UST thing, which really seems like a scam to me, if you ask my opinion, but, instead of having these huge mega-banks that are distributing dollars, why wouldn't you just want credit, like gift cards, from

In your day to day use. Why not have like a synergistic relationship with the businesses you rely on? And if you're gonna use credit, use credit from them instead of from the bank, of, of whatever name that is most popular. And I thought, okay, well, if we're gonna distribute the credit, why are we gonna distribute it in dollars? Why are we gonna keep promoting this dollar, you know, imperialism everywhere? It's, it's crazy. Then I thought, okay, well, why don't we have, so people can, you know, denominate these

Lightning tokens, is all of these things, is to distribute so you can have more issues of dollars, to distribute so you can kind of upgrade credit for merchants to be more like gift tokens, but then finally, hopefully, to show people that you don't even need to denominate these things in dollars anymore, you can denominate them in the product. So instead of like, you know, Starbucks creating a one dollar token, they could create a large coffee token or a croissant token or whatever token for each of their products, and they can have an open market marketplace of people that decide what the aftermarket prices of these tokens, in, and based off of the reputation of Starbucks to redeem them, what they get for those tokens when they do redeem them, and whether or not competitors want to try to compete and accept those tokens as well. So basically, like, Dunkin' Donuts or any coffee shop could say, "Sure, we accept a Starbucks large coffee token for one of our large coffees. Here you go." And then they could sell that token on an order book in the open marketplace to kind of get whatever form- form of money they prefer. So this allows total flexibility. It's almost like a, a granularized localized, relative futures market, for every product. And so if you kind of tokenize all the products and tokenize kind of sections of services like one month subscriptions, you know, one month of Netflix or cell phone minutes or airline miles, you can basically create these whole markets to actually decide what the current value of these things is, are in an open market instead of- denominated in dollars, where that can be manipulated by the government.

Right. And so I'm seeing it like, that's gonna be a really complicated sort of thing where if, like, the Dunkin' Donuts manager is like, "Do I accept the Starbucks voucher?" But I, I get the broader idea, though.

Well, it's only as complicated as if you don't automate it. And because it's all digital, you can, and because it's all digital bearer instrument, you can. You couldn't do this with actual gift cards because you have to trust whoever's holding them

All this stuff, and you can price it however you want on the fly digitally.

Right. And in, in many cases in practice, I mean, it could even be genuine you wanted to give fifty dollars and not a specific item, but even that, you could have that. Well, I guess the question then is, how is that being done in terms of lightning channels? And obviously, these are separate to the standard lightning channels, right?

Well, the, the thing about lightning is it's a liquidity network, and so no matter what you do, no matter what technology you invent for adding a new asset A new network, and the only way a node will support it is if it also supports that abstraction at the same time as Bitcoin. And so what we're really talking about, like I mentioned earlier, like there isn't such thing as the Lightning Network. It's just method of stringing compatible channels together. And now if you start having more multiple types of channels, say HLC, PTLC, Omni, Bolt tokens, and there will probably be other people that do different token formats on Lightning, it'll just be a matter of which assets you support and which networks those are. Assets live on. And then you can start, you know, complicating the routing process and creating like atomic swapping be- to make all of these different types of channels interoperable. and I think you're arg- you are going to see things like this within compatible channel types, not just incompatible because of the asset, but in- incompatible because of technology. There'll be more channel types as we go, as new technologies arise, like maybe CTV will have different channel types and L2 and, you know, PTL, C, HLC, like I mentioned. And so you can You know, abstract them into routing, you know, tables that include multiple networks and, and just to, you know, having channels advertise exchange rates to provide this service and route anything, but it'll always only be and extend as far as which nodes in your network, in your lightning network, support what. And so when you're trying to send Bitcoin, you might have a much broader network that you can route through, but when you're trying to send Tether, you might have a more limited network. and then the more on- popular the asset is, and the more unpopular the method of, of, transmitting the asset, the, the smaller that network will be. And so you really need to have a very economically incentivized and, and relevant system for anything that you're trying to bootstrap into the Lightning Network or a Lightning Network or trying to have like interoperability across Lightning networks. And so the way that we're doing this is we're basically saying, okay, we'll, we'll make a wallet for it, we'll make an LSP server for it, and we'll basically- Create the minimum set of, of peers that you would need to estab-- to bootstrap this network. So you'll have the wallet, you'll have a server where you can purchase and manage getting channels to bootstrap liquidity, and then you'll have Bifanex supporting it as an exchange. So you basically have all of the things, the minimum requirements that you would need to kind of use this asset, but you will still need more people to use this wallet, more people to open these kinds of channels, and you'll still need to be using nodes that understand multiple different asset types and multiple different... Protocol types to be able to kind of route across them. OmniBolt does support atomic, atomic swapping as a concept, so you will be able to route in the future, at least, not right away, in, in the beginning, we're just trying to bootstrap a straight up tether network, but you'll be able to later do, you know, atomic swapping across different assets across Bitcoin, so you can kind of link channels of incompatible assets together to create a broader network. But that's only as necessary as, as there's demand for it really.

Right, I It's not that there's gonna be this, dramatically massive multi-hop channel network for Tether. I mean, it's possible in the future, maybe.

It literally could just be everybody connected to Bitfinex, everybody connected to Blocktank, and everybody using our wallet. It could be fine that way for a year, but I don't think it will, it will stay that way for a year. I think then you'll get another wallet that supports it, and they'll start running a node, and you get another exchange that supports it, they'll start running a node, you'll start getting And it will just grow as the way the Lightning Network is growing now. It might even grow faster than the Lightning Network is growing now and cause Lightning to get adopted even faster because now there's more use cases for technology that supports it.

Right. And, as you commented on Twitter, I think you were saying, "Oh, yeah, it's nothing much," and you were showing, "Hey, the stablecoin volume." So I think this is one of those questions that's hard for-- 'cause obviously we see it like the world is transitioning to Bitcoin, but at the same time we see, There's a ne- there's a lot of people who really want stablecoins, and so I guess that's, that's probably the point you were driving to there, right?

It is, I'm just trying to keep the narrative not about promoting the dollar and fiat, but promoting credit and digital bearer instruments as a concept. I think that's where the utility is coming from. Because Tether is anchored to blockchains, it is now able to be delivered as a bearer instrument, which means that the only person you need to trust in the equation is Tether. You don't have to trust your The purchasing, and you can have this, the same Bitcoin trust mechanism in place because it's actually a digital bearer instrument, whereas, you know, if you're using like dollars that are digital, otherwise, they're in an account, and so now you have to trust the government, you have to trust whoever's holding the account, and there's, there's usually two or three people in the chain that you have to trust just to have a digital dollar at minimum, and sometimes even more, 'cause you're using payment processors, et cetera. And so if you're using, say, for example

Cents, dollars, is, is entirely digital and entirely custodial. although, no, they, they are using Tether on Ethereum in Argent-- I mean, in Argentina in their latest implementation. But like just, just as an example, like that's, it's no less different. You know, you can choose to trust Tether or Strike, and I have no issue with somebody saying they trust Strike more than Tether, but it's the same thing. Like, if, if you're trusting Strike to use Tether, now you're trusting Tether and Strike and whatever blockchain that And instead, what we're saying is, you can just do this all on Bitcoin and keep the minimum amount of trust required, which is the trust from the issuer. And then all you have to do is enforce your, your place on the Lightning Network, you know, making sure you're online to enforce, you know, any, any sort of malicious channel closures. That's, that's the trade-off with Lightning. as long as you're, you're willing to take the same trade-offs Lightning has for Bitcoin, now all you really have to trust is the issuer, and that makes things a lot

It's because they want to be able to have these, the, the dollar kind of volatility profile in a digital bearer instrument.

I see. And also, you are a little more, let's say, bearish on the idea, or maybe you're more anti the idea of, let's say, stable channels or DLC, you know, stable channels as opposed to using Tether. So is that for a similar reason like you were saying around who you're trusting and what you're trusting?

It's similar. I, I don't know if I would-- I haven't thought this deeply, but I Those ideas. I'm against promoting those ideas as, as like solutions for Tether. In other words, in other words, let's replace stablecoins of the, of the traditional sense, which are just trusted credit, let's replace those with these things. I don't think that is the proper way to look at those things. I think those things are useful financial mechanisms that anybody should be, have every right to create and every right to use without being, you know, you know, disparaged. But I think when you promote them as something that is somehow all- Obviously better than an issued credit, I think you're making a big mistake. because the problem is now, if I wanna make, like, say, a, a wallet, for example, and put that in there and say, instead of using Tether and trusting this company that makes this product, I now want you to trust this mechanism and enter this bet. And communicating to that user in the f- to the user in a, in a very transparent way isn't very easy in the first place. and then they're probably gonna ignore you anyway. And so you're really making a decision Vision for the user to put them in a, in a new risk situation. They don't only have to trust anymore, they also have to basically put themselves at risk that the mechanism could somehow- Break in a way that's not in their favor or basically, essentially, effectively liquidate them. that's not a, a, a possibility with Tether. Tether could take the money and run, I suppose, like they could, you know, disappear and not do redemption anymore. but the odds of that happening are, are less likely than I think people think. and I also think that, like, that's what reputation is for. And so in a, in a stable construction like a DLT or, or a stable channel or any method that is using kind of a versus a short or some kind of betting mechanism, you still have to trust somebody, you have to trust the oracle. And then people just keep moving the goalposts and saying, "Well, you can have multiple oracles," but they don't actually think about that, that doesn't exist yet. And so all oracle sys- systems right now are very centralized, and even the oracle is getting their data from a very centralized data point. And so they're extremely, you know, incentivized to collude against the people in these stable constructions because they don't have much incentive not to, like they, they The reason they're not making a lot of money off of being an oracle, there isn't a lot of money in that. And if you start decentralizing oracles and creating like many oracles and trying to, assemble a set of oracles to prevent collusion, now they're even less incentivized to even provide the service at all in a reliable way because there's no money in that. Like, if you're one of a hundred oracles, what, what, what, what do you think your, your fee is going to be on providing that price? It's gonna be minusc You have to like deal with situations like, what if there's one oracle pretending to be many? Like, there's, there's all kinds of weird problems in game theory that you're gonna have to solve for multiple oracle systems, which I wanna mention is something we're trying to solve with webs of trust with slash tags, but we're the only ones that are focused on actually like granularly making that something measurable and definable by the user, and we're still very early in that. And so I don't see anybody else trying to solve that problem, they're just talking about that it could be solved Multiple, but multiple don't exist. And so you're trusting the oracle just as much, if not more, than you're trusting Tether, because Tether has a reputation to hold where they actually hold these assets, and they've been held accountable repeatedly by governments and, you know, stressful situations where they've had to prove this. And they try to over collateralize. Your oracle has no dollars. He just has some small incentive to give you an accurate price and maybe get a little interest rate depending on how the thing is constructed, and then you're having to trust your oracle, and you're maybe also Also having to trust a platform that's taking the counter side of the bet, like there's all kinds of things in there that could go wrong, and it is a trade, and so now you have tax implications, you have other complications, like it's just nothing like the simplicity of attaching metadata to a Bitcoin transaction and having a bearer instrument issued by a trusted issuer. It's just not the same thing. So I don't think people should be arguing that it's a replacement, and that it somehow fixes the problem. It's just a new design that might have specific useful use cases for people, and

Interesting argument there. Now, I'm also thinking of the reason behind people using, say, a stable channel or maybe some other mechanism where they're trusting somebody else. It could also be for regulatory reasons, like maybe they see, in their mind, they could see it like, "I'm doing this because I believe the US government is gonna clamp down harder on Tether or stable coins, or that governments are going to outlaw some of these stable coins, and that's why we need mechanisms that are theoretically, let's say, theoretically more censor-resistant or..." Government resistant.

What would you say to that? I would say, "Why do, why do you think that if the government is going to clamp down on issued credit, 'cause that's what it is, that they won't clamp down on oracles that are facilitating the same use case? Like, an oracle is no more difficult to censor than Tether is. It's, they're, they're an entity, you can find them. In order for them to gain a reputation, they have to identify themselves more and more to become more and more like Tether. So you can either trust something that, To rug pull you at some point, or you can trust a like physically known, identifiable entity made out of real people, and that's gonna be true about issued tokens and about oracles. They're this, like, look, look at it this way, token issuers, they are oracles. They're the same thing. They're just providing you a price peg, they're telling you the information about it, and they're distributing it as tokens instead of as information. Oracles are the same thing as an issuer, but they don't have any assets, they only are giving you information, and that You have, you have to pay them to provide that information, much like you have to pay Tether to deposit and withdraw and redeem your tokens, but they have no assets and, and they have no reason to, like, not rug pull you at some point. So why, why would you trust them more? In, in, in the, in the, in the context of using them as a dollar substitute at least, I could see trusting any of these things momentarily. In other words, like, for a merchant who wants to, like, hedge accepting Bitcoin for thirty minutes, why not? Yeah, if Hedging by either owning some Tether for a while or shorting some Bitcoin for a while through a construction. Yeah, I, I can see use cases for that, but to hold it as your, as your savings or to use it as your money on a day-to-day basis, it doesn't seem practical to me.

Right. Yeah, yeah. Alright, well, a very, certainly very, interesting ideas and an ambitious project overall with Synonym and with Slashpay and with, Lightning, Tether. So, do you have any thoughts you wanna leave the listeners with? And of course, as we close out, where can they find you online and where can they find Synonym?

Sure. I, I would say, you know, I understand that what we're doing is ambitious and maybe not the typical narratives that are popular in some regards for some of these things. But I would encourage people to just extend us the benefit of the doubt first and try these things on, because we have put a lot of thought and a lot of rationale and a lot of, you know, just sincere desire to actually solve for Bitcoin, and like that's all we're trying to do. Like, I work for Bitcoin, I work for no one else. I will, I will drop anything I'm doing ever to make, to do the right Bitcoin thing. That's, that's my motive here. And so I'm just trying to make sure Bitcoin wins as fast as possible, as, as Please keep that in mind when you're considering our designs, why we're doing the things we're doing, why we're making the choices we're making. There is motive behind them, there is rationale behind them, and I would love for you just to, to give us your consideration and to try the things we do as we release them, because I think you'll find that with an open mind, they do make sense and they will hopefully be very useful alternatives to what you have today. As far as where you can find us, a number of places. We've got a website at Synonym dot

Underscore T O. I'm on Twitter as Bitcoin Aerolog. we have the Blocktank product coming out soon. I have a, a podcast called The Biz Dot Pro. we're gonna start doing a monthly spaces, from the Synonym team where we talk about different topics and products and, and, use cases related to our, our kind of vision. that first, the first one will be, tonight actually. I don't know when this podcast is airing, but, the, the actual-

Probably in a day or

so Friday is when we're do-- when recording this now, and so tonight we'll have, we'll be doing spaces with Paulo from, from Bitfinex and Tether about the, the, the instant Tether, lightning channel that we did as a demonstration. but yeah, you know, check us out on Twitter, check us out, check out our website, look, look for our wallet sometime in June, hopefully, as far as like at least an alpha version. and then throughout the year, we're just gonna keep releasing more demos and more

Looking forward to checking it out myself. I'm looking forward to seeing you in Miami and also, giving the Synonym Wallet, or go-- wha--whatever the correct name is there in June. So, thanks for joining me, John.

Thanks for having me, man. See you later.

So let me know what you think about SlashPay and SlashTags. And one quick note before we finish up, I'm also speaking at an upcoming conference called LibertyCon that's in Europe, that's in Prague, in Czech Republic. It's on the

23rd and 24 This is going to be a libertarian focused conference in Europe, and they've also got a code Stefan Livera for a discount if you're interested on getting tickets there. So looking forward to seeing some listeners and people out there. And to get the show notes, Stefan Livera dot com slash three six two for this episode. Thanks for listening, and I will see you in the citadels.