Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025

Hi, you're watching Stephan Livera podcast brought to you by Bold. American listeners, you can buy Bitcoin over at getbold.io. I just got back from the Tuscany Lightning Summit. This is a private developer focused and builder focused, Bitcoin and Lightning event, and I took a few interviews while I was there, but I guess- A few just high-level insights that I found is that we're seeing more conversation around the use of different models, but with Lightning Network as the common language. So as an example, things like ARK, eCash, Cashu, and Fedimint, and these kinds of things, sidechains, things, things like Liquid, RGB, as well as things like state chains, but all of them using Lightning as the common interface, on which things can work, as well as what can be done to make the user experience Experience even better and more slick and smooth, and what we're seeing is perhaps a lot more use of things like Liquid with certain trade-offs that Liquid has to provide a different experience for the end user. There was also some interesting stuff around what's happening with ARC as this virtual chain that allows an off-chain execution layer. I'll let you see my mini-interview with Thierry for discussion on that, as well as some interesting stuff on digital identity. So, in this episode, I'm stitching together a few little- Many interviews I did, I've got one with Jaka Mazuka where we're talking about what exactly constitutes spam, Anant on the latest with Keeper and Miniscript self custody, Andy Pitt from Egor Death Capital on investing in the ecosystem, as well as Alekos. So I hope you enjoy these interviews. Okay, guys, we're here at Tuscany Lightning Summit. I'm here with Tiago, aka Marco, from Ark Labs. I know you guys have a really, expansive vision, so, give us a, just a bit of an overview where you're at with Ark and, you know, what you're planning with, you know, the VTXs and what you're planning to achieve.

Yeah, absolutely. I think we have been, you know, trying to work and try to find what is the right proposition and the right, you know, setup for what,

So the moment you can lift the Bitcoin script execution to go from on-chain to off-chain, it really opens up a lot of design, possibilities. So I think currently we're really working hard to integrate the first partner, one of them both already completed the integration, we are working with them to make sure, you know, they can move the, all the part of rebalancing, lightning channel, but also having nodeless wallet to operate, not only with, a solution like using Liquid, but actually using Ark, which means Which means increasing the security for end user, so they don't need to trust a federation, but they can actually have an ARC model which is zero-attack, I mean, I don't like that.

Gotcha. And I think, as in your talk, you were, you were kind of alluding to this idea that it's not about, oh, when is an ARC wallet coming out? Can you just explain a bit about that? Like it's not about the wallet per se, it's more about what you can achieve with this layer, let's say.

Absolutely. I think

Like more complementary than we think, and actually, ARC, if will be successful, it means it will make Lightning cheaper and ideally more user friendly, and at the same time, ARC needs Lightning to connect various ARC, various implementation, so that, you know, you still, you're not vendor locking, but you can still be interoperable with the rest of the ecosystem. So we really think that, the idea is to try to rediscover also old use cases that, you know, people were using escrow Early days, so we're using, or even recently, people are being interested about DLCs, right? All these use cases are very nice, but are constrained by block space and block time, and ARC removed this barrier, right? So we move from, you know, an on-chain constraint of the block space to a virtual layer, and that will really opens up a lot of possibility, and we can leverage Bitcoin without changing, without a software already.

Gotcha. And, can you also explain-- I asked you a question earlier, I think it would be good if you can explain that around where You gave this example of, you know, imagine an exchange doing a batch withdraw, and they might have one input on their side and, you know, a hundred outputs, 'cause it's a hundred customers withdrawing. Could you explain the saving in the ARC context?

Yeah, I think fundamentally ARC is really simple in the sense that it's like transaction batching technology, and as you explained, you know, usually exchange already try to put many customer payouts in a single transaction, but this is limited by physical, you know, how much outputs a Bitcoin transaction can have Actually, ARK allows you to have a single, one single output and nest virtual, transaction in that, output so that everybody has a claim To a future utxo that we decide to not broadcast because we wanna stay off-chain, but at the same time having this like chain of transaction, you already have valid Bitcoin transaction that will allow you to exit. Of course, if we-- this is nice, you know, to batch and to have a single output, but if then user to move their funds to, you know, pay someone else, they will need to unilateral exit, we will just undo all the savings that, you know, the transaction batching is giving. So I think the other component of ARC that has been like the real breakthrough is Atomic swap between batches. So from one batch, we can atomically swap to a new batch, and this is like what the connector output comes in, so we allow us to do this, this approach so that, you know, we can operate and keep being off-chain as much as possible and use the chain only in case of really the operator isn't collaborative or is censoring you. Yeah. Or you really need

to come out to unilateral exit, right? So I guess the important in-innovation here is that you still retain a unilateral exit, so it's a true, quote unquote, L But it allows you to, I guess, start off-chain and stay off-chain a bit longer. And I guess in the context of, let's say you're a user withdrawing from the exchange, it maybe r- makes it really slick to withdraw, and then you can kind of stay off-chain longer. Whereas in a Lightning context, for somebody to open you a channel, that's like the LSP has to open you one channel for every person. So it's just a very different, model in terms of how it works, right?

Yeah. I think, I think the interesting part to think about To an on-chain user experience, we are used to get an address, you give your address to your friends or family, even if you're sleeping and you're not online, you just wake up and you will see a new payments coming in. It's not a UTXO, a spent transaction output, but it's like a virtual UTXO. And really, like the same developer experience and the same user experience is more akin to, you know, an on-chain wallet that people really love, the initial approach of the year, right? Because they just

copy-paste this address. So can you explain As well, like, are you gonna be able to have like a static address or is it more like it would change over time that you kind of-- Like, will you need a Lightning address or a Bolt 12 or like, how would that part work?

I think in practice, there is no necessity of an address, right? So in the end, it's just a public key. But we all also know, that the addresses are a lot of, you know, valid, use cases. For example, you can validate just by looking at the address if it's, Right? So I think this is just an implementation detail, it doesn't require any other ARC implementation to follow, but like we just-- we, we, we, we saw that there is like some value, to have a static address so that every wallet can just scan it and say, "Okay, this is like the right ARC, I can pay." At the same time, we, we really want to leverage what is already pretty widespread across exchange that are not pretty Bitcoin friendly, like BEP twenty-one. BEP twenty-one is basically implemented everywhere, and the beauty of BEP twenty-one can Maybe this kind of catch-all address, so if the-- you sending you is only on-chain address, fine, we'll just do an on-chain, payment. Gotcha. So it's kind of the first,

in the first case it'll try ARC, and if not, it falls back to on-chain, and then that user can still take a withdrawal, a deposit. Yeah. So we

can also have another field for Lightning wallet. So if you are a Lightning wallet, and then there is a Lightning w-invoice, you just pay that. I will pay that, and eventually in the back

It's kind of an interesting idea of abstracting away a lot of the complexity so that the user, the end user, just sees kind of a simple balance or whatever they're trying to do, whether it's DLT lending stuff or whatever. okay. and I know you've got, I think is it next week you're gonna, you're gonna be announcing more?

Well, we, we are already been, you know, announcing little bit of piece, in the, in the recent weeks, but for sure, I don't want to, you know, to, to overpromise, but yes, we are a very good point, and we are going to release definitely more, you know, implementation, more example, more use cases. So, yeah, stay tuned.

Okay, so keep an eye out, guys, and, where can people find you?

I think arclabs.xyz is our website. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing

what you come up with. Thank you, Tierra. Thank you. Hi guys, I'm here with Alekos from, Portal. And so some of you may know, Alekos and the guys, had come out with this, hardware device, which is NFC. but I know now you're now doing something a little more in the identity world. So just give us a quick overview, what are you doing now?

Yeah, so this is still, kind of a stealth project, so you're not gonna find

And hopefully it'll be resolved after a while. Yeah. this new portal app, we like to call it, Identity and Payment Provider App. So it's, it's basically gonna be an app that holds your private key and lets you use your private key to authenticate, online, authenticate in person via NFC, so you can like use it as a, as a badge, almost. and you can also use it to approve payments within the app. So you have one app where you manage all your logins, all your payments, so all your

Sort of, I guess it's kind of like a, sort of like a physical version of a YubiKey or a password manager, but with certain special features, right?

Yeah, it's, it's a bunch of things kind of mixed together. So I guess nothing new in a way, it's lots of, lots of existing things all being put together. So, yeah, in a way, it's, almost like a YubiKey, so you use lo- YubiKeys to log in into stuff, you can use that to log in into stuff, but there's also Logged in, I lo- I've logged in, I just get a payment request, I can approve it and I very quickly don't need to, you know, type credit card numbers or scan QR codes or all of that, it's, it's all kind of automated. So it's like UBI keys plus payments open protocol, open standard. So we are, we are gonna release, not released yet, the specification as a, as an open standard, and then on top of it, we're building our app, which is one, client to this protocol pretty much, and there's other, there's gonna be other clients integrating it as well.

So just to give us an idea of how it would work, is it sort of like there's a private key that lives on the hardware, but then you also have like a companion app, and then you might have like a master key and then

The device isn't a Bitcoin address wallet, on-chain address wallet, that's gonna keep working. So if existing customers are using it as a Bitcoin address wallet, they can keep doing that. we're gonna release a software update to integrate this new thing, which basically means we're gonna have a main secret living, on the device, like a permanent, forever living secret, and then you can export, sub-keys, we call them, so you can export like a secondary secret which is only valid maybe for a year. So there's like a, a very- Short, validity is not like the main key which is valid, forever. So you effectively export this into your companion app, and then you just use the app to confirm login. So you don't need a device to confirm every login, 'cause that would be impractical, yeah, yeah. So you just manage everything from the app, which has a secondary, lower security private key. If you lose your phone, you take the device, export a new one, and revoke the old one. So as long as you have the main key, you can still, you can always- get back to your accounts and everything. if you lose that, this is losing your identity, so you should also have a backup, paper backup as always, as with, like you would have with the Bitcoin, write down your 12 words kind

of thing, similar thing. Okay, gotcha. And then the other interesting thing I noticed is you mentioned the Nostra Wallet Connect. So I think maybe not everyone's familiar with that, so just kind of give a quick overview there because it's like people might know Nostra kind of like the decentralized social media kind of thing, but this is actually more like a connection, kind of like a different way of connecting your wallet to things. Can, can you explain that? Yeah, so

Nostra Wallet Connect, I, I didn't pick it, so n-not my fault. Yeah. But it's basically a way of connecting your wallet to something else, so giving access to your wallet to something else, through Nostr. So the communication itself happens via Nostr, so your wallet and the service would communicate via Nostr. Currently, it's used mostly to connect your wallet to your Nostr client. So when you zap Within the client, when you press the button to zap, funds are being drained from your wallet. So you can choose whichever wallet you want and just connect it to your Noster client. We are gonna, I juggle, we're gonna use the same protocol to connect your wallet to our app, so our app is not gonna be a wallet itself is just the app that you use to approve payments, but the actual payment is gonna be made by the wallet. So you can link whichever wallet you want. So different users are gonna pick, you know, some people are gonna prefer fully non-custodian, self-hosted wallets, right? Some people might have like

Alby Hub or something else. And the idea is it's kind of an interconnecting layer. So this isn't just on-chain, this could also be like your Lightning setup connected through Nostr wallet connection.

And this is gonna be Basically, our whole protocol is based on Lightning. So it's Lightning invoice, invoices that are exchanged. Obviously, you could have any cash wallet, bridge to Lightning, so you can still do that, or you can have a native Lightning wallet, or you can have a Breeze, SDK wallet, which is a liquid wallet. So you can have wh-whatever you want, as long as it can be bridged to Lightning, and as long as it supports Nostalgia Connect, you can link it to our app. And then you, you basically drain funds from that wallet whenever you

Gotcha. And so, I mean, we're talking about some technical things, but the idea is the user is hopefully gonna have the complex-- the complexity abstracted away, right? Like the idea is the end goal is that the user just has this physical thing, maybe they've got a physical backup of that, and then they've got the companion app, and then that is used to store, let's say, their identity and their certificates and also approve lightning payments. Yeah. That's kind of the vision?

Yeah, the vision is make it as easy as possible for the user And also as secure as possible. So currently, current system is, and we're not just thinking about the Bitcoin world, we're thinking about security in

general, right? In computer security kind of- So,

yeah, currently you have passwords which are insecure, 'cause they get leaked, they get, you-- people tend to reuse them and, and, they get hacked through that. Then you have credit cards, you need to type in credit card numbers, which is super annoying. So we wanna replace all that. You just have this app with one main key, you just need to backup Ideally, you just have both the device and the paper backup, but you just need to backup one thing, and as long as you have that, you can always recover your, your identity at least The wallet side is separate, so we delegate the wallet to wallets, 'cause there's plenty of existing great wallets. So then different users are gonna pick their trade-offs. We, at some point, we expect to see even, fully, Full fiat bank account being bridged to Lightning as well. So theoretically, a user could link their US-denominated, US dollar-denominated bank account to a portal, and they don't even know that there's a Lightning invoice or Bitcoin involved. So it's, it's very, very simple. They just get a payment request, they approve it, and funds are drained from their bank account to the merchant. To make payments and on the other side, on the merchant side as well, maybe they don't know about Bitcoin, they link- our protocol, our software, they link it to their bank account, so it's potentially fiat to fiat payments happening over Lightning, because Lightning is the universal kind of value layer, let's say, or the plumbing of, of the, of value transfer, And yeah, this is why we're building our protocol on Lightning, because we think that's, that's the only real, permissionless layer for payments that can be bridged to, to pretty much anything.

Interesting. Yeah. And I guess one other point that was interesting is the, the actual device itself is NFC only. So I'm showing this now on the screen just for the audio listeners, but it's NFC. So can you just explain that part of it?

Yeah. So this is, pretty weird. So this, this is, this has been out, for a the idea is, this is very similar to any other other wallets, like a ledger, trezor, bitbox, whatever. But the main difference is there's no battery, there's no cable, no ports, it's fully based on NFC. So we use NFC both to power the device itself, and to transfer data. So the way it works is you just tap it to your phone, and pretty much any phone nowadays have NFC 'cause, 'cause it's used for, Apple Pay, this kind of stuff, right? So just tap The sleep powers the device, so it powers on, it wakes up, and then through NFC, we can transfer the Bitcoin transaction. You approve the transaction by pressing the button next to the screen, and then the transaction is sent back. Gotcha. So again, right now it just works as a, as a Bitcoin address wallet. We are gonna release a software update to integrate all of these identity aspects that is coming, okay? Yeah,

great. Okay. And so where can people find you or find out more?

So it's gonna be some confusion right now, the company is, is called twenty two. So, if you look for us on Twitter, it's twenty two h w for hardware or the website is twenty dash two dot x y z. But as I mentioned, it's gonna be some, some rebranding. So, look for Portal. The key point. Keep an eye out for that. Portal is gonna be the, the new name for everything. We're gonna unify the company name and the product name because this has caused confusion until now, because twenty two is the company, Portal

Great,

yeah. So it's all right. All right, well, keep an eye out and, yeah, let's see. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. Back to the show in a moment. This show brought to you by CoinKite dot com, the creators of the best Bitcoin hardware security devices, such as the Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices to keep our keys offline, our private keys offline. Now, the way these work is you can do that setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on the Keep that secure. Now you can use this device to interact with the Bitcoin network using software such as Sparrow Wallet, Electrum, or Befiktor Desktop or Nunchuk as a few examples. Now you have a range of security features that you can use with these devices, such as passphrases. You can use seed x or, or my favorite is multi-signature. Now if you're starting in a basic way, just start with the device and the USB-C cable, plug it directly to the computer and use it that way, and then later improve your- Your setup, but I believe these devices are great at helping secure your coins, especially as you start to migrate up into multi-signature security. But don't be disheartened or don't be, scared away. They are accessible, and I think you actually do learn about Bitcoin in the process. So to get yours, go to coinkite dot com, use code Livera to get a discount on your cold card. This episode brought to you by Galloy. They are building banking software for the Bitcoin age. So if you are with a bank, a fintech, or a startup looking to To offer some kind of Bitcoin product, whether that is a Bitcoin collateralized loan, deposit accounts, or payments, Galloy can help you. Their latest product is called LANA. It is a loans management platform, and you can use this to come to market quickly and offer a loans or Bitcoin collateralized lending product for your customers. Now, Galloy have a lot of experience in the space. They started with Blink Wallet in twenty twenty, and they've since grown this to become a community favorite over time, and so they have a lot of experience making things work in a secure, reliable, and scalable way. So if you need assistance coming to market quickly with a Bitcoin banking product such as lending or deposits or payments, talk to the team at Galloy. You can email them, the email is biz at galloy dot io, or go to the website galloy dot io. And now back to the show. Okay, guys, I'm here with Anant from the Keeper team. Anant, what are you, what are you finding so far at, at the conference?

The, the conference is great, you get to- To meet a lot of, old friends and talk about really getting to, really get geeky with, Bitcoin stuff, talk about Bitcoin controversies. Yeah. So it's, it's a lot of fun. Yeah. And, yeah, you get to learn a lot of things as well. I got to learn about a few new projects that I didn't know about. So, so yeah, it's good. Yeah,

cool. Okay. And let's focus now, let's talk about Keeper. What's the latest there? I know you guys are focusing on minis

Yeah, so, if you look at the past six months, the team has been doing amazing work. we have, we have added so many new features to the, to the wallet that, it pretty much, pretty much satisfies most of the self-custody or long-term custody needs, with miniscript, with, with emergency key, with, inheritance key, there's a lot that is going on in Keeper. So what we've learned from our users, talking to us A lot of them is that, pretty much they have a lot of stuff that they would want in a typical, for a typical long-term storage. so that's why the team is now kind of trying to focus on, you know, getting more education out, more user acquisition, and that's why we have in the last couple of months we have focused more on Keeper rebranding, Keeper Private is something we have launched where we give, you know, high-end clients more like a hands-on white glove sort of thing, white glove service, Keeper Concierge, Content, Keeper Learn. So that's, that's really the focus right now for the team.

Yeah, gotcha. And so just quick overview, the idea is it's a phone app. I think you also have a de- desktop as well?

There is a desktop app, but that's only a like complimentary app right now. Gotcha. We are also building a full, full-fledged desktop app, which will take some time, but essentially, yeah, it's on the roadmap. Bright now Keeper is a full-fledged, full-fledged, In a very easy way on a mobile app and, keep your keys offline. There's also a key on the server, where you can have, you know, spending policies on it. So a combination of the server key, the keys that you have, and the miniscript based keys, it's really super powerful.

Gotcha. So let's w- just overview a few of the, like, so let's say a typical per-first person starting, d-does it have like a hot wallet version just in the phone? And then you can also add in like a hardware wallet, And then you can add in like, once you get more advanced, and like multisig, and then add in miniscript and recovery and things. So can you just walk us through like, what are some of the main styles of use here or setups

that are possible? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah

Download the app, turn on the testnet mode, get some free sats, you know, test sats, play around with it, then they get onto the real mainnet mode, they play with the hot wallet, get some, you know, hundred dollars worth of sats, see how it is going, then they would typically-- So these are guys who might already have a stack somewhere. So what they would do is, create a watch-only wallet from their cold card or ledger or whatever, see how that works in Keeper, so that's still a single sig,

Offline key, yeah, then they would, they would start liking Keeper and then they'll say, "You know what, I need to upgrade my security with the server, with the, with the multisig." So that's where they go on to create typically a two of three and in some cases a three of five multisig. They add a couple of more hardware wallets and maybe use one of the hot keys and maybe use one of the server keys, so they get comfortable with multisig. Now, this is where typically many of the users are, but if someone wants to go beyond that, we have, Two keys which are essentially giving you miniscript capabilities. So one is an inheritance key. So let's say you have set up a two of three wallet, which is great for you, you have, you know, geographical dis-distributed keys and all, but as soon as you start thinking about inheritance, you might want an additional key, that is like available either with your partner or with your, you know, some kind of a lawyer. So that's, that's, that's what we call an inheritance key, or it's called a reserve key. Basically, what it does is After a certain period of time, it makes your two of three into a two of four, so now one additional key is available to you, right? So that makes the job easier for, you know, whoever is- For your heirs to recover after you're gone, et cetera.

Exactly. Now, the trade-off with that, as I understand, is for now you need to do like a refresh or recycle like once a year or something. Does the app prompt you on that kind of thing? Yes,

yes. So the si- the, the timeline is typically two years you can configure it, You don't recycle it, it will become a two of four, but then as soon as you recycle it, it's back to a two of three. Back to a two

of three, gotcha. And then so that's the inheritance case. Now, any emergency case?

Yeah, so the emergency key is very, very powerful and therefore needs to be used very carefully. Now, emergency key is a key where, let's say after five years, you have lost all your keys. the emergency key is such that after the period of time that you have defined, the whole, So it's not an additional key, it's a unique, it's a, it's a unilateral key, but after a period of time. So we give a lot of message in the app about how to use this key, why this is very powerful. The trade-off here is you have to be really careful, because if this, that key becomes active, it has a, there's no multisig anymore. Yeah. There is multisig, but even this single key can control the funds. Yeah. So we try to educate the users that, okay, if you're really, you know, Like, like an option where every key is lost, you still have control over the funds.

I see. Yeah. So, what is the typical time around the emergency key?

I think, I, I need to check, but I think it is between two and five years. I see. And

so, who controls that emergency key? Is it your company or someone else? No, no,

emergency key is also with the user. Oh, I see. So the user can set his own emergency key. Yes, yes. Gotcha. So, let's say you have two of

three It's the last resort backup kind of thing.

That's, that's a good way to put it.

I see. The last

resort key, it's completely in your hands. We don't really want to have control of the funds at any point in time. so that's, that's really important. Gotcha. But then

even there, that's still, you still need to cycle the, the setup every once a year or so to kind of keep that time lock there. Yeah,

yeah. It's the same, if you have set up an expiry of two

years or To recycle the coins and go around and do a spend to kind of cycle it into the next round.

Exactly, exactly. So, so that is the trade-off where the user has to be slightly more active. Yeah. But what we have observed is it's not really, that bad a thing because you need to be checking on your keys anyway. Right. So we have a six-month reminder on your keys, and a good practice is, you know, once a year or once in a, to go like sign a message or something. Sign a message anyway, or maybe just do a transaction to,

You end up using your keys closer to, you know, in the last six months of the period. So then you, you just rotate it out as well. Yeah. So it's not that difficult, it's just about, having the discipline anyway to do health check on your keys and at certain times of, certain intervals. Right. And in some cases, it can kind of

do two things in one stone, right? Like do the health check and also the cycling in the one go kind of thing.

And what happens is when you do cycling, the app recognizes and actually health Right. So you have access to the key. So it's not two separate steps. Yeah. It's just one step, you do, recycling and that's health check also done. Gotcha. So you do like, let's say, six month health checks for three times, and then the fourth time you do a cycling and that is actually also the health check.

And then, I guess, one other question, in terms of Keeper and what you're focusing on, as I understand, is it mainly focused on the, let's say, the Deeper cold storage, long term stuff, and you're not as focused on, let's say, lightning and liquid and kind of, let's say, transactional stuff per se. Yes,

yes, absolutely. So we made that conscious decision to focus on this particular use case with Bitcoin Keeper. Bitcoin Tribe is different, but Bitcoin Keeper, it specifically focuses, and we don't want to have a trade-off where, you start off with something and then there is a hot wallet, but we don't want to, go away from the focus of actually, you know, It is used, it is used. Long term storage. You get lots of great wallets out there, including Bitcoin Tribe and, you know,

yeah,

Blue Wallet and a lot of amazing lightning wallets that we learn about. But we have made a conscious decision because there's so much of innovation we can do in this space anyway. Yeah. There's this, and also you're focusing

your efforts on where you think you can make the impact. Okay. Okay, gotcha. so, I guess anything else that you're seeing kind of hot topic? What, what are you seeing

in A lot of things are interesting, that's the problem. You have to really decide to sometimes, okay, this isn't what I'm gonna focus on, and I need to like, is execution is really difficult, right? Execution on daily basis. The Ben and the team are doing a great job, but still, every day is a struggle. Every day there's something new happening, there's something, more you could do, there, the best part is the, there are so many feedback. There, there, there's an inbuilt app concierge, so the users can actually just So on a daily basis, we get, we get obviously, you know, need for help kind of thing, but also suggestions. Oh, I love Keeper, why don't you do this? I love Keeper, but this would be great. So our focus is also listening to the users, getting more users on, but at the same time helping the existing users. Yeah. And just

give us an idea, in terms of fees, like what do, what do you charge? What's the fee for the user?

I think we have been revisiting it, but as far as I remember, I think it's a ten dollar month, for, for the hodler tier. So there's pleb hodler and diamond hands. Yeah. And then there's private, which is different. but I think it's ten dollars and twenty-five dollars for, diamond hands. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay.

And so, I mean, you can think of it like that's the fee for the assistance and the, yeah, assistance on the miniscript side of it and Help and that kind of thing.

Yeah. Even the server key that we host and we like take care of that infrastructure and even, so that's, that's a part of our cost and our service. there's also the recovery key, which is quite amazing, like you don't really need to know any metadata of your wallet, you don't need to have an account. So what recu- that is also a service kind of thing we provide with our infrastructure, you have a recovery key, which is like a twelve word mnemonic, and that's like the master key. What On the backend. Now we can make sense of it, so it's completely private and safe. But anytime you just take, take those twelve words and, you know, you lose your phone or something, you put in a new wallet, you can recreate the whole thing. So you, if you, let's say you have three hot wallets and like two cold wallets, then it just recreates the whole thing. And it's, it's the metadata, like your cold keys, it's like all the

output descriptors and all the other kind of metadata around it,

okay?

Gotcha. So that's,

that, that is a mechanism we have, we have built so that we-- you don't need to have an account with us. Yeah. We don't like the concept of, you trying to create an account with us because you're, anyway, it's going to store those twelve words. So we take the, take the hash of it as an identity and then encrypt it, encrypt your data as well. That's, that's quite a unique thing that a lot of our users like.

Interesting. Okay. Well, yeah, thanks. so, yeah, E. Pitt from Ego Death Capital, you're, you're a partner with them, right? Yeah. Yeah,

I co-- I co-founded it with Nico and Jeff in twenty twenty-two.

Excellent. Okay. so yeah, look, any initial reactions or let, let's say it this way, was there any, any interesting insight you've learned either from, you know, the panels or the talks or just talking with people?

I mean, I think one of the biggest questions that people are grappling is, is when, is when will Bitcoin become a means of payment?

What and, and if you think about it, like what are the use cases where it makes sense, where it's solving a problem for people on the ground? And I think that's sort of where we're at, with, with, with the, the big question here.

It's, and I think it's maybe it's evolved over time because maybe in the first few years it was people sort of spoke about it as like, "Oh, plebs, and we're gonna run our nodes," and then maybe in practice it was more like a B2B thing, and then now it's

Yeah, well, I think we've seen things like Zaps, on Noster become a big thing, so you're just seeing evolving use cases. Yeah.

But then the question is, what's monetizable? You know what I mean? Like, are these just kind of like hobby level things or what's actually out there that can be a profitable business

in terms of Bitcoin means of payment, like Lightning,

yeah, means of payment stuff? Honestly,

it's tricky right now. it's really tricky because the market isn't there yet, and so the question is, where will

A lot of businesses that we'll see that are for the Bitcoin payments market, but the market isn't there. So what we're looking for really is people who are creating a product that's solving a use case for a real person, a real customer, that they're going to pay for. So who, where are the businesses that are actually bringing it to market? but, you know, there are some places like Madeira, for instance, Andre, who was running Free Madeira was just on stage talking about how, there's so many merchants there that are receiving Bitcoin And it's become an everyday normal thing, including supermarkets, so certainly within certain communities where you have leadership and it's becoming normal, I think we are starting to see it, but from a business perspective You know, you can't-- it's sort of not necessarily the best business for you to be going to market and building these communities in different places. So it's a tricky, it's not an easy thing to navigate, I think.

Yeah. Okay. are, are you looking at investments anywhere else in the ecosystem, whether it's, I don't know, mining or, even like treasury company stuff or hodling kind of services? Is any of that interesting to you, or you, you kind of, you're looking at the payments aspect or what else?

Anything in Bitcoin,

We don't invest in any mining companies, so that's sort of a whole different ecosystem, different way of investing and thinking to, to us. So really anything that's using Bitcoin or for Bitcoin, that is generally software, we, we are open to hardware, but typically we're investing in software. So, that's completely across the range. So some companies which are focused on helping people buy Bitcoin, which is still not that easy, so something like a relay in Europe, which is helping Europeans buy Bitcoin in non-Custody Digital wallet, so straight to non-cust, self custody, which is, really great for a variety of reasons, to something like LN Markets, which is around trading, derivatives trading, to some of the, you know, Breeze, for instance, which is exactly Bitcoin Lightning as a means of payment, and integrating that. So we, we sort of have, we like to have a range and exposure to a variety of different, different products. Or

even, the lending use case seems kind of popular now as well.

Yeah, so it's been a huge, huge question over the past, I would say three to six months, it's really been heating up, certainly people have been building for a bit longer than that, and the big question is how you solve non-custodial lending and the fiat liquidity. Yeah. So that's been the big challenge, in a way that you're not, ideally, not rehypothecating the Bitcoin. So at the moment, if you wanna get fiat liquidity, they want to have direct security over the Bitcoin, and they don't necessarily understand, well, it's still early in terms of how a multi-signature or some sort of smart contract might work.

Right. And even there, there's different approaches, right? You see the, the hodl-hodl's and debi-fiers and unchaineds of the world who have this, you know, you hold one key in the multisig, and then you've got others like a, like a Lava or a LenderSat

But really it's a spectrum. You have kind of on one side of the spectrum is maybe the FTX approach, which is fully custodial.

Right. And that's even TradFi style, like just give us your stuff and trust me kind of thing. And

then, and they're doing a million other things, so it's just a total disaster. Then you have something like Letten, which is fully custodial, but they do, and they have, you know, great product, from what we understand, we're not invested in them,

but they, it,

Beryllium support, but I think that was based on, helping, I think some of the Blockfi or, Celsius people, something, something, there's a, there's a, yeah, their

business is lending, they're not doing trading and swaps and a million different things and donating to whatever political party, right? So, but, you know, there's still custodial risk there. And then you have, the fully non-custodial, which is maybe something like a DLT, so a discrete log contract, so a fully smart contract where the Lava, where it's fully automated.

Yeah.

And then somewhere, in the middle, which is interesting, is the multi-sig approach. So that's where basically the Bitcoin sits in a multi-sig, but for the lender to be able to, say the, the loan, the, the borrower defaults on the loan, the lender still needs to rely on the liquidate, on the, basically the trusted third party, the, the holder of that third key, to liquidate the Bitcoin, for them to be able to get their money back. So, and then the you know, theoretically there is the risk that that trusted third party would liquidate their Bitcoin. at the same time, you know, it-- That, that is an interesting approach because it doesn't mitigate some of the concerns and risks. It has sort of a trade-off approach that maybe both lenders and borrowers can get comfortable with. Yeah. versus, you know, but-- Yeah. And then the smart contract side is, say, the DLT approach is still new, DLTs are new, but they are really getting production ready now. Yeah. And I

guess you're also That's where the model, the security and the trust model of that is kind of in the oracle level, but you still have a, a strong assurance that you're not being rehypothekated. So that's good, at least from that perspective. And, you know, maybe people argue, "Look, the rates are kind of high on some of these now, but maybe it'll come down over time," so maybe that's just kind of as it gets more popular, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Providing the technologies and API to different companies who are sort of the consumer facing, or if you will have, you know, it's, so it's really interesting to think through, we're very early in that market, but it does solve a problem for a lot of people. And then, you know, there, there is the question of people who are saying, people saying, "Oh, well, Bitcoin-based lending is against the whole idea of Bitcoin, you know, they should, people should just be spending their Bitcoin, not lending against it." So there are lots of Use Bitcoin in a way, that avoids some of the regulatory issues around taxation and, so yeah, we, we think it's definitely a big market that's growing.

Awesome. And so, anything else that's kind of on your mind or, l- I guess, hot topics, in terms of what you're looking at?

Yeah. Another hot topic is Bitcoin based trading, so right. Trading financial and there's like,

markets sort of stuff or-

Yeah, and even broader, sale and markets is sort of the first, platform to do Bitcoin native Out of your Lightning or Bitcoin wallet, so that's really interesting. but thinking about, you know, Bitcoin as the base layer for the trading of financial instruments in a much broader perspective. So it's something that's been talked about, but no one's really kind of brought that to market. So can I buy US stocks? Can I buy European stocks? So really globalizing the entire financial make-- so at the moment, if you're in Brazil, it's really, really difficult for you to invest in US stocks, for instance, and US stocks, because of the- Technology, industry in the US are super outperforming, and so there's this big disadvantage in terms of people's ability to invest in different, different, financial instruments around the world. So that's an interesting topic as well.

Yeah. Now, one other reaction I have, and I'm curious to get your thought on this is If we think about where most of the money of the world today is, it's, you know, it's tradfi, right? It's boomers who have their money in like a stock broking platform or it's, you know, boomers who have property. But then on the other hand, you have these kinds of, you know, on-chain and these kind of, yeah, like the, like you were saying, these kinds of markets for trading, whether it's kind of stocker on liquid stuff or whether it's this LN markets thing or whether it's, you know, other forms.

I mean, I think, look, in the long term, the existing trading systems are very antiquated. So, it, it, it does seem inevitable that at some point in time, you know, they'll be on some sort of different platform that is doesn't require people to send faxes to each other to settle trades, for instance. at the same time, that could take a very long time. There are certain use cases where today there is no platform that- Provides a service, for trading. So for instance, a company that might wanna trade, let's call it carbon credits, just as an idea, there is no platform today that can, someone can put the carbon credits on that has regular reporting the same way that, you would have on the stock exchange, like that just doesn't exist for anyone to be get-- for that to be a global platform. So there are really big gaps in the market. So that's, I think, where you think about the right go-to-market for these kind of real-world asset trading versus As you know, trying to take away something that works for the be-the boomers and the people with money, and that works, so let's not try and

tell them they should do

something when they're like, "But this works for me." So it's the sort of- It's, it's solving the problem with innovation, you can see, kind of see where the world should be.

Yeah.

But, so you, I, I, I use this analogy of like A to Z. Like, we know that it should get to Z, but you can't just go straight to Z, you have to like go A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And so what is like the use case that you, gets you from A to B, where you're solving a really big pain point for someone today or providing them 10x value where they

Yeah, listeners, check out Andy Pitt from Ego Death Capital. Thanks, Andy. The lead sponsor of this show is Bold, the best place to buy, sell, and save Bitcoin. For listeners in the US, Bold lets you secure your financial future with complete peace of mind by integrating a low fee Bitcoin only brokerage with next gen multisig vaults. With Bold, you can smash buy Bitcoin or set a DCA plan for only zero point nine nine percent fees and seamlessly deposit the Bitcoin direct to your Bold Vault. The Bold Vault is a two or three collaborative multisig where you hold Two keys and bold holds one as a redundant backup, protecting against loss or theft. You can use Trezor, Ledger or cold card hardware wallets to spin up a bold vault in just a few minutes, and the bold vault is the only collaborative custody vault available with zero monthly fees. They're also offering zero fees on your first ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin buys and twenty five dollars of free Bitcoin when you buy a hundred dollars of Bitcoin or more. Try bold today and upgrade your stacking experience over at getbold dot io. And now back to the show. I'm here with Giacomo Zucca. He is the director of Plan B Network, a Bitcoin and freedom technology education service. And, yeah, we're here at, the Principino, which is the venue for Tuscany Lightning Summit. So Giacomo, just give us a quick reaction, how's the Lightning Summit been this year so far?

It's great. We tried a new formula, which is a little bit closer to a non-conference. So there was a structured part, a curated part on stage with a marvelous speech by an initial speaker, Gi And a very, two very interesting pa-panels, and then we branched it off to an uncured part, which is more like an conference where people were discussing anything from, bull twelve to PTC, from, new services on Lightning to the problems of, mempool, competition for, closure, everything basically has been discussed, and I'm very, very happy of the, of the result.

Yeah. Okay. And of course, we've got to get the, just some discussion on the controversy of the day, which is This op-return issue in, and the Bitcoin Core versus the Knots guys and Luke Dasher and Mechanic versus, let's say, kind of the core devs, most of the core devs, not all the same. Yeah. I, I think it'd be interesting to chat about what exactly constitutes spam, because I think there's different things people, you know, maybe we should-- I guess what I'm trying to get to is, is OTS okay? Is OpenTimestamps okay? Or, is RGB okay? Or is Taproot assets okay? what about coin If we were to go through each of these, like, do you consider that spam on it? Let's start from

the easiest one, which is CoinJoin. CoinJoin is not spam by definition in the sense that when you join Bitcoin, you accept the fact that it's global consensus system and it's the only way you have to be able to spend that money is if, is if you keep a UTXO set in order to be, aware that what you receive is not double spend. So the CoinJoin will produce stuff in the UTXO set, and that stuff will be necessary Eventually. So if you want to participate in a monetary, ex-exchange, you need to keep track of that money. So a coinjoin is filling your node, but sadly, you need, you agree to participate to that kind of tracking, otherwise you can't be paid.

Yeah. While-- But I'm sure you know, even on this, like, you know, there was the example of, Samurai Whirlpool getting filtered out by Knots,

right? Well, that wasn't, that wasn't a coinjoin. That

was a, it's a TX That's right.

Well, it was a no-- a pre-coinjoin transaction that was using up return to signal to, to Samurai that you were paying a fee, so you don't-- we didn't, didn't have to pay it again. Yeah. So that was, that was not a tragic, tragic, tragic spam, because it was just a little bit more than what the initial up return limit of forty bytes was. So that's, that's something that, is different from coinjoin. Coinjoin is not spam, it's monetary transaction. The signaling

Fee to samurai that was considered spam by the old core nodes and by the knuts nodes. While with respect to OpenTimestamp RGB, the situation is slightly different. OpenTimestamps, in theory, there is no spam required to do that. You can commit to, an entire internet archive, merkelizing it into a single output of Bitcoin by tweaking a key with Taproot, and it doesn't require any open, open, open return, operator. The only reason that OpenTimestamps is Using operator now is simplicity of implementation. So it is spam, it's not super massive because the operator systems require one transaction per day to Peter's calendar server. So I think that, even if it's technically spam, I think that, everybody would agree that opening your mailbox once a week and finding one advertising for a service that everybody's using is prob-probably tolerable as opposed to having your mailbox exploding every day full of JPEGs or whatever. Okay. So let's do

the, the RGB case then.

RGB is a little bit, slightly worse than OpenTimestamps in the sense that even in RGB, you can hide the commitment and taproot asset, which is just an implementation of RGB, you can put the commitment to the off-chain, transfer of assets inside the tweaking of the public key with taproot, so it doesn't require by, by design any, kind of, blockchain spam, so that's good. but you can argue that with RGB, if you are, or taproot asset, if you are doing a new transaction Which will, you will not do just to transfer Bitcoin. Right. Which you wouldn't have otherwise done.

Exactly. That includes, even though it includes this tweaked public key, you're doing a transaction that you wouldn't have otherwise done. You wouldn't have done otherwise. So is that theoretically spam or, I don't know? That's,

I would say that that's basically a use case outside of Bitcoin that the Bitcoin node runners may consider spam because they say, "I, I agreed to, to join Bitcoin, and I know that if I join Bitcoin, I need to keep track of Bitcoin transaction, Only, only purpose is to transfer

a non-bitcoin asset.

Non-bitcoin asset, but is that's really a kind of undetectable spam. RGB is designed in a way that it's impossible to prevent that anyway. So the discussion is moot. Yes, it's bad, you should feel maybe a little bit sorry for using RGB that way if you're using RGB only for non-bitcoin transfer. So you heard

it from Jack Ma, RGB is spam? Well, well, let's, let's,

let's clarify this. The reason I work on RGB, the reason I invented

A future experiment of RGBTC. So RGB is an experiment for a future client-side validated Bitcoin. It's still far from that because you need a, basically a two-way peg mechanism that can bring the Bitcoin to RGB and back. But the real excitement about RGB is that eventually that could be a layer of Bitcoin to transmit. Right. So you

think it could be lifted off-chain eventually? If that's the

case, it's not spam anymore because now you are just, seeing a transaction that can actually improve the Bitcoin scalability because in one RGB transaction- In one on chain transaction, there may be millions of RGB. Yeah, I mean, I,

I'm sort of-- Some areas I feel like we're being a bit inconsistent, but let me explain. So, yeah. As an example, okay, so before we get to the inconsistency part, we can also talk about falling back on chain. So as an example, whether you're in RGB or in, is it Taproot assets? As an example, even if you're doing Taproot assets over Lightning and you're doing it off chain, there may be circumstances where the channel breaks down

Exit case, you kinda have to do end up going back on chain, and then we're back to the, okay, is it spam or is it not spam, 'cause it's a non-bitcoin asset.

I don't think it's, it's so, difficult to decide. Basically, when you join a system, you join a set of rules. Yeah. You join some ex- you have some expectation, and if somebody is willingly going outside of this, this expectation for something which isn't about the system, but is about another thing that you didn't agree upon, that's Philosophical clarity isn't difficult to achieve. That doesn't mean we can stop it or we should stop it every time. It's just a little bit like, you remember the discussion with Bitcoin Cash, where people were saying, "Ah, Bitcoin is digital cash, and that means they should be cheap and fast to transfer." Right. Yeah. And then we were pointing out, "Guys, nobody uses this definition of cash or SebiCon ever." In all the sane world, cash always meant something finally settled, which is harder and ch- and slower and more expensive to send around the world is, is basically more expensive than sending credit around. So it's the other way around the way Roger Ver is using it. So we are in a similar situation in which spam is, is very clear to everybody outside Bitcoin, outside Bitcoin, if you receive a spam email, oh, this spam, just like I didn't want it in my mailbox, it's very clear. In Bitcoin, suddenly it's, it becomes philosophically hard, why? Because, because Bitcoin developers, which are heroes and young heroes and usually the most brilliant people ever, made a mistake during the Taproot implementation. Implementation that broke a spam filter that was implemented in Core since always, with the data carrier size. And instead of admitting that there was a bug in the implementation and just fixing it or deciding that the, the philosophy of spam filtering was going to change, we started a crazy discussion about, "Oh, yeah, but what is spam really?" Well, spam is when you open your mailbox and you don't want the stuff, and you think, "This isn't why I, I gave people my, my mailbox. This isn't something that I would..." I want, and the sender knows this is not something I want. So it's, it's basically very, crystal clear. I think that we can, well, like everywhere, we can go in very specific edge cases. But the main point is, is the node runner expecting that, and is the sender knowing that the node runner doesn't expect that and doesn't want that. I think that we can easily differentiate between a fallback from a Taproot asset, the fallback of a Taproot asset is basically an, unwanted situation in which, well, that's also applied to Sicilia, by the way. Right. Well, because then

it kind of gets to this efficiency question, right? Is the question like, "Oh, but if they're doing it in an efficient way or an unstoppable way, then it's okay. " Is that--

No, I would just say that is, well, this is, there are two different-- I, I think that you made a very good decision to start from the definition, because that's what bothers me the most. I think that when we start from clear, reasonable definition, which are compatible to the way that we use complain, which can critics, we can criticize. We can to some level maybe filter, we can't filter, we can decide that, there, we are, we do harm reduction, for example, because some way is more efficient and, and less. But I think that, at least to start from a clarity instead of, from the rationalization of some kind of impotence. So if we think that contrasting spam with mempool policies was possible before, because there was not the strong, economic incentives to spam, and now it's not possible anymore, Say that, okay, we are now impotent against spam, if that's true, and we just go along with it while starting to try to redefine the, the minimum spam into something that isn't, I think that's the, the, the wrong start because at this point, we can even, we can even, go, gotcha,

yeah. I mean, I think there are lots of core developers who, I mean, they don't, it's not that they like the JPEGs or whatever. I think it's, with the exception of, let's say Peter Good people, but I think genuinely, if you look at most of the core developers, it's not that they, it's not that they like.

Sorry. Yeah. Okay. Let's try to do this again. I don't know why this is happening.

You got an alarm on or something?

Yeah, but I tried to deactivate it before.

Okay. Yeah. Okay, sorry. So, I guess to be fair, I think it's- It seems like the, yeah, I mean, I think that kind of comes down to, are, are we being honest about what we, you know, what is spam and what's not, and what do we do about it? I guess I've got a couple other examples. So let's say, DLCs. Let's say you and I enter into a Bitcoin DLC and, we're doing stable value, USD channel or something like this. it's a non-Bitcoin asset. Is that, like, do we, do we call it or doing Transfer in Bitcoin and yeah,

we are transferring Bitcoin with an amount conditioning to some kind of external oracle that will decide the amount. But the point is that we are using Bitcoin to transfer value from one person to the other. So that's, that not just to use it as a data storage, because if we use Bitcoin, the, the point is not that we, we want to be, unpolite with people that want a database. The point is that if we really go to the route to use Bitcoin's database, a totally replicated database where everybody has to replicate the data for everybody else It's just impossible to use at any scale for any relevant thing. So that direction isn't that we don't want to give it to people because we are evil. It's just that it's impossible to use. We can't-- not even FreeNet like system like FreeNet, the centralized data storage where everybody is, is keeping some chunk of everybody else's data. You don't have total replication. You don't have every FreeNet node replicating entirely every other FreeNet node forever. That will never scale and never work. So if you want something impossible, which is replicating your data forever in every Other node, we are just sorry, but that's not, not feasible. So trying to use Bitcoin, which can work, for something that can't work is what is bad. Well, DLT is not bad. And also, by the way, again, I think there is a very important distinction between obvious spam, explicit overt spam, and hidden spam, steganographic spam, even if it pollutes the UTIC society maybe or something.

Right. The BLC twenty and SRC twenty and whatever.

Well, but let, let me start first, let me start first from a DLT under Even if you consider it spam, it's undetectable by definition, and many of the steganographic way to tweak, to use a public key to, to encode something are undetectable. Stopping that kind of spam, whether it's not spam like in the SEC case or it's an intentional spam, it's by defi- by definition almost impossible. We will have to change the protocol in a way that you have to do a signature every bar, on, on top of everything. So it will be crazy basically. But, the point is that we are discussing obvious over on, on the internet to basically say, "Guys, I'm taking Luke Dashier's words and I'm putting into the blockchain to piss off the people running those." So it's not even something like- I mean,

nobody's doubting that that's spam, personally, but, or at least I don't. I think most reasonable people are saying, "Yeah, that's spam." It's,

it's the, it's the, like it's overt. It's like people are, the spammers are clearly saying they are spamming, and we are just doing philosophical debates about

That's pretty clear. Okay, what about liquid peg in and peg out? say that we are actually,

we can argue that, I like DLCs and I like to coin join, where the, the benefit of using Bitcoin as intended, so transferring money, is privacy or, or some kind of flexibility in the contract. In the case of liquid, if liquid is used, with success, you can actually remove a lot of possible alternative transaction on Bitcoin. So a liquid peg in and peg out, if used properly, is intended as an an- Anti-spam mechanism. You're basically going

off-chain.

So like a lightning channel, we were discussing light-lightning settlement, and RGB may become that in the future. Gotcha. So you, you use the system as intended, but in a way that you also remove some competitive use of the scarce resources. Gotcha. Because people

can use LBTC inside the liquid chain, or, I mean, to be fair, if they wanna do other assets, they can do liquid Tether or whatever other things are on Liquid.

Yeah, that may-- I understand that may create more contention if you are using the If you are using the, the Bitcoin resources to do something which is fiat credit, like USDT, somebody will say, "Well, you are basically using fiat by consuming Bitcoin resources." That may be something that I could understand would be, yeah. So

that's kind of maybe a bit more gray, but okay, so, but then if the idea is, okay, taking things off-chain, I guess I wanna get your view on, let's say, the new, this kind of class of BitVM, ZK rollups, you know, things like Citra, things like Al

It was kind of driven more, you know, ideologically. But how should we view those? Do you view them as like an honest effort to take, you know, to do monetary scaling, to take transactions off the chain, or do you view them as, are they spamming because they're gonna create these, you know, UTXO blurb in the fraud challenge case and things like this? No,

I think it's, it's a debatably inferior, way to scale of chain. The roll-up idea is coming from the Ethereum ecosystem, and there are many, many Decentralized it is in terms of, publication of the proof data viability. So there is a lot of debate about the actual security of this model, actual, like, compatibility with decentralization, but, these are attempts to actually do something of chain, especially if you can bridge Bitcoin in and out. So I won't consider that as malicious per se. And also, as you said, the actual use case of writing on, of return and the output in case, what, was like a very fringe use case that was like an edge case. Like an edge case in Fraud

challenge, which is most of the time not gonna happen, not even gonna happen.

And so the, it's not really about Citra. The point, again, I think that this whole discussion is not really about the problem that we're facing. Right. It's more zooming out the broader kind of- It's about philosophy, and I think that what, in my view, what happened is there was a bug, and a group of developers instead of saying there was a bug and then, bringing over a separate discussion that was ongoing since years about maybe we shouldn't even filter incentive compatible We should just have the mempool equal to the blocks. That's a, a reasonable philosophical debate. So Satoshi started to use aggressive filtering in the mempool, and some people said maybe this, namely Peter Todd, especially also with RBF, Satoshi was trying to prevent, like a zero, basically the, the, the, the kind of RBF situation with, with some other workarounds, and, and people are saying, no, actually, in order to be incentive competitive, we should have the mempool equal to the blocks. That's a philosophical debate Which I think is completely legit. On the other side, there was a bug, and a group of developer decided that they weren't taking responsibility to the bug, and they were changing the documentation of Bitcoin Core to pretend that the bug was intentional, and then they are basically using the, the, this kind of debate over operation to establish an in-group versus out-group kind of governance rights and kind of intellectual superiority against everybody else. So for example, in this debate was really triggers me and other people is that there is this kind of assumption, if you read the- That of the current core maintainer, they are saying, "Oh, this is sad because people are so ignorant that they don't even understand the trade-off, and so that's why they are opposed." Nobody who is competent on Bitcoin could ever oppose the decision, but sadly, we are the enlightened one, and the unwashed plebs aren't understanding. So it's not like we could make-- we should discuss with the user to understand what they want. No, no, we should explain to the user that they are obviously ignorant, and only people who are ignorant or in bad faith could This new innovation about making the mempool equal to the blocks. That's a dishonest framing, and I think it's coming from a power struggle, a soft social phenomenon, not really a technical debate. It's a sociology thing, not even a spam discussion. The, it's a group of people that are basically detaching more and more from their user bases, and they are basically pretending to themselves that any disagreement is coming from, ignorance because it's coming from outside the small group. There is one person inside The group actually two, core developers that disagree, and they just pretend they don't exist. One is Luke, and they say, "Yeah, but it's just crazy. Doesn't matter. He's, like, longest, living contributor right now." And the other, Daniela, is-- she was just ignored, like, like her knack as a core contributor doesn't exist, and they just pretend she doesn't exist.

Gotcha. Okay, so, yeah, and I think certainly, I think it's fair to argue there were errors in the GitHub moderation. I think I would agree with that. I think, there was in a particularly kind of egregious moment where it was like they locked the thread, then they opened it, let, let, let one guy put an act through, and then locked it again, like it just clearly was a- Which

also, by the way, just like in the, you know, the Hong Kong agreement with the miners, much of our good guys like Adam were

criticizing that harshly because you don't do Bitcoin under closed doors. The fact of that request is, is a mistake per se, but also means that there was an completely off-the-record meeting where somebody said, "I'm going to act, so unlock me." "Yes, I do unlock you." "Okay, I did." "Yes, I can lock it up." You need people in a chain code office somewhere meeting in a way that is completely non-transparent to take decision about the moderator, the moderation of the GitHub repository of the most important software. Of the history or the monetary history of mankind. So this is, is, is this legit? Like, is there a repo they can do whatever they want, they ended up to being governors? But the point is that it seems, non-fitting, not fitting for the most-- for the management of the one of the most important assets for one of the most important projects. Yeah, we

don't have long before we head in, 'cause, well, we got the first session and I'm in it. But anyway, just quickly, any predictions on where this goes? Do And BTCD, Floresta, whatever else, do you think there'll be more use of those or where are you seeing this going?

Yeah, I, I'm not sure, but sadly it seems like we're going the direction in which core will be cut into this kind of, sociologically motivated, impasse. Maybe they will change something, but not exactly in the direction Peter would suggest. Peter will push a Libra relay that will do, no, mempool equal blocks, which is a reasonable thing to do. Knots will, as going to

Not, like Lightning Network is already using BTCDA at scale, which isn't good because it crashes all the time, but that's happening. And miners aren't using Core anyway, they're patching Core, which is just like using Knots, is using another implementation without the review. So we're basically going away from Core monopoly, and sadly, because that will make very hard to do a soft fork without the push from Bitcoin Core, which, still, people ignore Bitcoin Core during the, the, the fork wars. So maybe we can push Core Even without Bitcoin Core or cross-input signature aggregation, but my fear is that by leaving the monopoly of Core right now, we give up a strong coordination power to do a good soft fork, one of the last that we can do.

Yeah. Okay. Well, let's see where it goes. anyway, guys, follow Giacomo and, I'll put your links in the show notes. Thanks, Giacomo. Thank

you, thank you.