{ "episodeId": "SLP132", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "christian_moss_mandelduck": { "name": "Christian Moss (Mandelduck)", "role": "guest", "tag": "CHRISTIAN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 8.41, "text": "Hi and welcome to the Stefan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. So today episode one hundred and thirty-two, \"Have you used Lightning Network yet and would you use it in Lightning gaming? \" Today's episode is with Christian Moss, but first a word for the sponsors of the show. So firstly, go and look into Kraken, one of the world's leading Bitcoin exchanges. changes. 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All their products are built on the foundation of multi-signature, and they've got a really cool approach with collaborative custody. Users control over their private keys, and you also get a financial partner and financial services. So Unchained offer two or three multi-signature vaults, and you can secure your Bitcoin for the long term with this. And if you ever need to access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin, Unchained's collateralized loans offer you a unique option. All Bitcoin is stored on chain, dedicated multi-sig addresses, it's never rehypothecated, and you can share in the security by holding one of three keys. I'm really impressed with Unchained, they're offering excellent services. Release valuable content and they've got open source tools such as Caravan and Hermit. I think you'll enjoy partnering with them, so go and look them up at unchained dash capital dot com. Next, it's Bitcoin Outlet just now rebranding to twenty one x dot io. 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Have you ever given Bitcoin to people before and then they've lost it? Sometimes they just don't know what they're receiving, and that's why there's a lot of value with GiveBitcoin because you can time lock that Bitcoin for one to five years, and every month for the first year, GiveBitcoin delivers a lesson from a world class curriculum with input from many well known Bitcoiners such as Safdean, Matt O'Dell, Jan Pritsker, and others. I'm also an advisor, I have a small equity stake, and I'm also As a present for birthdays, Christmas, graduation, weddings, put it on your wish list at GiveBitcoin.io. I really think GiveBitcoin.io can have a positive impact on Bitcoin adoption and understanding, so I'm excited to have them as a sponsor. So my guest today is Christian Moss, or if you're on Twitter, you'll know him as Mandelduck. Now, Christian's done a lot of work in terms of writing Bitcoin apps and games in particular, and he's got a lot of cool ideas, and as he is recently co-founding this new company, Zebity. I thought it'd be good to get him on and get his thoughts around Lightning as applied to gaming. I think this is a very exciting opportunity over the next few years, so I'm really excited to see where that goes. So here is the interview. Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks for" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "04:14", "start": 254.01, "text": "having me." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:15", "start": 254.75, "text": "Yeah, Chris, so I obviously had the chance to meet you earlier this year and a couple times actually in, Tokyo back then, and also, at some of the Bitcoin conferences, most recently the Lightning Conference. Obviously, I, I know you, but," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:30", "start": 269.58, "text": "take a Background in Bitcoin and, Bitcoin development." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "04:33", "start": 273.06, "text": "Yeah, sure. I actually started in, your neck of the woods. I was actually working in Sydney, Australia. I was working for like a kind of an app development company. Basically, they just, they built apps for anybody who walked, walked through the door and had like about, you know, fifty grand in cash and an idea, we'd build apps. So, most of my apps, I did all sorts. I did games, I did like more. Basically, I would build apps for people who wanted to be, Something, right? Little, all random stuff. And then one guy came in and said he wanted us to make like a Bitcoin app, and I had no idea what Bitcoin was. And, my coworker who sat next to me just, he swiveled round in his chair with a grin on his face. He was like the secret libertarian Bitcoiner in the room, and, you know, I spoke to him and he said, \"Okay, you know, sit down, let me teach you.\" And, that was kind of the first moment when I fell down the rabbit hole. Yeah Still around, but that's got me interested. And then at the time, I, I, there were no Bitcoin wallets on the iPhone. so just as a, a hobby, I just built a wallet for the iPhone. there were wallets, but they'd been taken down by Apple. Apple had this back in like 2013, I think, that they just got rid of all apps on the iPhone. but my job was basically I would submit apps to the Ice, to the iTunes Store, you know, I, I'd do like, like, you know, one every other week for the client, so I kinda knew how to get apps into the App Store, so I just thought I could get one in, I got one in, and that was my first introduction to it, so I made a, a Bitcoin wallet, wasn't very good wallet, but it was like two thousand and thirteen. Yeah, nice. Oh, yeah. And then, then after that, To us this new programming l-language that Apple brought out to replace their Objective C. And, I had to learn it, and they had this, some guy made a tutorial how to make a Flappy Bird. You remember that old game? popular game. It's like, yeah, yeah. He made it in Swift like overnight and made a tutorial. So I thought that was a, a fun way to learn, so I kind of made a game that was quite a, a little bit based on that. And I thought, hey, it'd be cool to put Bitcoin into this And, yeah, so that's, I, I, I tried to put Bitcoin into it, Apple didn't let me put Bitcoin into it for, for purchasing things. So I just thought, okay, well, they have this law, like this rule that you're not allowed to kind of purchase things with like cryptocurrencies or, or Bitcoin in the app store, but it had no Rule against sending people Bitcoin. So I thought, okay, I, I, I just wanted to get Bitcoin in the app anyway possible. So I just made this simple game that people could play, and as they played it, it would tip them Bitcoin, who just like throw like a few kind of like, you know, about a penny at them or something as they were playing the game. It was like early days, but that was kind of my first introduction into it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:30", "start": 449.56, "text": "Yeah. And, so how did that change over time, like Bitcoin in twenty thirteen to Bitcoin now in two thousand and nineteen? Shifts and changes in the way the culture is and the way Bitcoin is viewed. How, how, what, what was your view of that change? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "07:47", "start": 466.63, "text": "quite, quite a few changes, yeah. well, yeah, so I suppose when I first got into Bitcoin, I was ignorant like everybody else, you know? I was kind of, kind of hounded on like the, like Bitcoin talk and stuff, 'cause I was basically, I was, I was like, kind of spamming the blockchain. I was sending like I had this game that it wasn't popular in like the And, I didn't really notice it at the time, but, you know, but, yeah, a-apparently it caused a little bit of controversy. And, but at the time I was like, you know, I'm paying the fee, it's, you know, it's all good. yeah, so, That was kind of, I think at the, at the moment, I was, I, I wasn't, I wouldn't say I was, I wasn't like philosophically aligned with Bitcoin at the time. It was more just, it was a cool technology, and I wanted to do cool things with the technology. So as I built the game, I started to talk to the community, and I, I started to get an understanding about Why it doesn't make sense, for example, to build a game like on chain, you know? 'Cause, I remember very early days of, you know, the, the whole, block size debate, I was thinking that if my tiny app, I'm just one person making a tiny app, is like causing all, all these Transactions, then, you know, say like just it'll just take another hundred indie game developers to have a similar app, let alone an, an app that, you know, would become as popular, say, as Flappy Bird to really cause an issue. So at the time then, this is like 2014, 15, I was trying to find off-chain solutions then, which short term I just had to do stuff like batching. So, I was trying to, you know, batch transactions, make it efficient. I also tried to do off, like, completely custodial off-chain transactions, but then I got a, a lot of stick from that side as well. And, and this was causing issues in the games, because the games were quite fun and the games Very early on that it wasn't really sustainable, and, it kind of, it kind of stopped me from pushing the game or, marketing the game because I knew that if, if the game just became s-super popular, like for example, it was like shown on the BBC or something like that, that I knew that the game, you know, it, you know, the network wouldn't be able to handle it per se. yeah, so at the time I, I think I- I noticed a lot of people at the time, my, similar, I guess, co-contemporaries who were also building games had the same issue. And everybody at that time, they seemed to go over to other chains. I remember thinking at the time, \"Well, this is very much just kicking the ball down the road, right?\" I kind of made a prediction at the time everybody, when I was there, they were going over to Ethereum at the time, which had just launched, and it was, you know, gonna solve all the problems. And, everybody was, I, I remember thinking at the time, \"Well, I bet you, give it two or three years, they'll be moving to something else.\" And now, a lot of those same people are moving to EOS or TRON or making their own game. So, I, I guess how it's evolved over time, I, I think we've really seen, in my opinion, when I first started in, it was, it was, well, it was all about trying to build on the base layer, at least for novices like myself, and now it seems that we Seems like it's, it's okay to make apps and games, but they need to be on like a, a second layer or an application layer. And that's how I feel, that's where we are at the moment." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:21", "start": 681.12, "text": "Right. And so it's, it took some years of experimentation, and then people are sort of coming around to this idea that, well, we need ways to either do batching or to use off-chain protocols such as, obviously, Lightning Network. And that's where we're, you know, gonna talk a bit about today with what you guys are doing with Zebedi, Before we get into that, you wrote a cool article, well, on the Zebedee Medium page, which is called \"Does Bitcoin in Gaming Make Sense?\". So, do you wanna just tell us a little bit about that article and w-why'd you write it?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "11:55", "start": 714.7, "text": "Yeah, I, I, I wrote it because personally, I'm, I'm not a big guy for hype. You know, I kind of, I'm quite-- I like to think I'm a bit of, quite skeptical, and I always like to kind of questions my, question the fundamental ass- assumptions, like I think there's a good argument that you really shouldn't, and, I think that's fine, but I just wanted to explore that argument, you know, does gaming, does Bitcoin in gaming make, make sense? So at the time I wrote the article, I wasn't a hundred percent sure to myself, it, it was more kind of, an essay. In a way, ju-just to kind of, e-explore for myself. But I, I just had this idea that, I, I kind of have two concepts when it comes to gaming and Bitcoin. one is that I think games, and I go in, into this in the article, games traditionally, were used for value transfer between people. it's obviously like, you know, people pla-play games for fun, but the earliest games were all kind of used, well, mainly for gambling, you know? but the games weren't specific for gambling, so people still played them for fun and people played them without money. But all these games kind of had a gambling mode where, you know, they could attach a value to it to be transferred peer-to-peer. And as I wrote the- The article, I did a bit of, research, and this was kind of true, and, most games had this, so most famously, cards, you know, i-is, i-is the most famous example. But then as I kind of looked how games evolved digitally, because we had digital games before we had digital payments. So the first digital games that we had, a lot of them tried to kind of, they still had the concept of money in them, and money was quite strong. So if you think of Mario, you're basically collecting coins, you know? well, all games have this concept of collecting coins and earning coins. And I kind of felt that that was kind of, you know, it was, It was embedded in, in the, the i-idea that people like to play games and they like to get some sort of value, but obviously they couldn't do that at the time because, you know, there were no digital payments. And the only digital payments that came were, you know, in-app purchases, credit cards. So then they tried to kind of, you know, put p-payments and values back in the game, but it didn't, it wasn't the same. It, it wasn't peer-to-peer, it's just this idea that, you know, you could buy a loot Quite right, and, and now I'm thinking, well, you know, now that we have something like the Lightning Network and this peer-to-peer network for transferring value, maybe that it, it's kind of its continuing kind of One aspect of how games were used in the past, we can actually like, people can play a game, and they can play it for fun. Probably most people will just play the game without money, but if they wanna kind of make the game a bit more fun, they can, you know, stream Bitcoin. Between themselves. And, and, and, and then it, it kind of reminds me when I was a kid, at Christmas, we'd, you know, we'd get a lot of candy and sweets as presents, and we always used to play Monopoly. And when we played Monopoly, when it wasn't Christmas, we'd just play, you know, with just the normal, paper money. But at Christmas, we would use the sweets and candy we got as the money, and it just made the game so much fun. So it wasn't necessarily about earning money, it wasn't strict gambling, but the idea that you'd have, you know, a little bit of- Value there to kind of make the game a bit more focused or give a, a bit more incentive. So I think the, like the lowest hanging fruit is just to get that back into gaming. You know, just this i-idea that people can play a game and not massive amounts, but maybe they can have a few bucks or something, and it just makes the game a bit more fun, right? You know, there's- Yeah, something to play for. Every single shot has a bit more meaning. So that was the kind of, one. Idea, I got, like, I think Bitcoin and gaming makes sense on an application layer. I'm still very much of the opinion the base layer is, you know, we kind of want, you know, sound money that's, you know, censorship resistant, but I think from an application layer, it, it kind of does make sense." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:12", "start": 971.6, "text": "Yeah, and so in the article, you talk a little bit about how, gaming evolved a little bit and, so, for example, the internet chain evolved and it, it took it away from being a peer- The peer aspect, can you touch on what was, what your thinking is there?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "16:28", "start": 988.49, "text": "Well, it's just, you know, over, well, not now, but, you know, when games and, and the internet first came out Mainly on mobile, there's no way to send money peer to peer, you know, that was just it, right? You know, I'm sure game companies would have liked to have done that, perhaps, I'm not saying that in-app purchases wouldn't exist, I d- you know, I just think they couldn't do peer-to-peer, and if, if they tried to do it in a custodial way, it gets complicated 'cause they need to have a license and the, the money transmitters, all, all these things. I think there were a few game companies who, who tried to do this. I think the Lyndon dollar in Second Life w-is a famous example. And a few people have gotten around it, but it's still a bit clunky. I-it's not like, you know, like each game has their own coin, so it's, you know, and these coins have to be traded on a kind of illegal exchange or something, so it's kind of clunky, So there were my thoughts. yeah, I, I just, I, I, and I, I think people just generally forgot about the, idea of, you know, that the games could even do that. When if you go back to playing cards, like it's, you know, you go back a hundred, two hundred years, it's, it's obvious, you know, that's what you did with games if you're an adult and you're down the pub, you know, you sweeten the deal a bit. But as we have digital games, it's kind of disappeared and people just forgotten about it. And if you even just say the concept to people, that it, you know, that, did you know that you can play a game and you can stream payments? They don't, they don't even know, don't even know what you're talking about, right? It's yeah, so that's kind of what I meant there." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "18:04", "start": 1083.5, "text": "I also have a, another kind of, in, like, I, I think it's interesting, but another angle about gaming and Bitcoin, which I, I think it's, It's still something I'm exploring, but, I kind of think that, like, for me still, the most important thing about Bitcoin is, you know, basically I can be my own bank, I don't have to trust any third parties. But I, I also find myself like in-- I also kind of find myself like living in, in a first world country. I don't really need to use Bitcoin day to day, but I want to use Bitcoin day to day, if you know what I mean? Yeah. When I go to supermarket, I can't use it, so I'm frustrated. I want to use it, but I can't. And I, I kinda think gaming, it, it could kinda be like martial arts or something, right? You know, people study martial arts because I guess they wanna feel like they can defend themselves in a fight, but they don't get into fights every day, so they kinda do sparring. I think gaming in a way, it helps the ecosystem. It, it's like we're sparring with Bitcoin, so we can develop these tools, we can use Bitcoin for casual things, and then say that we really need Bitcoin one day, we've got that skill because we've been practicing, and that infrastructure's been built. So I kind of think in a way, gaming is a great way to bootstrap and keep Bitcoin alive, you know, to give it an ecosystem. In the first world, because otherwise if we didn't do gaming, people maybe wouldn't have much of a reason to use Bitcoin every day apart from just hodling, right? And then pe-people might forget how to use it, they might forget to turn the node on, all the, all these kind of things. And then when they really need- To use it, they'll be rusty, as it were. so that's kind of another thought I had, you know, it's just a great way to onboard people, it's a great way to keep you kind of, get nimble with Bitcoin. That makes sense. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:48", "start": 1188.37, "text": "So people have to learn how to use Lightning, for example, they're gonna have to learn a little bit around, okay, how do I manage my channels? How do I, refill and refund the channels? Little things like that." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "20:00", "start": 1200.04, "text": "Yeah. that's what kind of games It's a fun way to train, so I think, you know, a similar argument could be made with, with Bitcoin and gaming." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:10", "start": 1210.39, "text": "yeah, potentially, yeah. And I think, so I guess let's get into what we think could be enabled then with Lightning that wasn't possible before." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "20:19", "start": 1219.25, "text": "Yeah, I guess my first answer there is, I like to say I don't know, 'cause I want just something, completely that, you know, we haven't thought of or we can't think of yet will, will appear in a few years. So I'm sure there are, Hidden gems out there that in a few years, once we've built some first prototype games, somebody go, \"Oh, hang on a minute, this is a really cool idea.\" but at the moment, I think the two things I'm quite interested in, one is just streaming payments between players like non-custodially, and, like w-w-working on a game At Zebedida does that, like a, a, a street fighter style game, where people punch each other, basically, you know, if they, a punch is like a Satoshi or ten Satoshi, whatever they set. And, you know, if player one punches player two, then player two gets a Satoshi from player one, completely non-custodially, and, vice versa. So I think that's really cool. Another thing which kind of came about from the Lightning conference itself was, the idea of audience participation and kind of, the idea that You can, because like, I think esports and people watching other people playing games is quite popular now. You, you know, yeah, yeah, people just go online on Twitch and just watch people play games, you know? You know, it's like watching, you know, football on, on, on TV. And I, I kind of think, you know, obviously people like to cheer, but people want to kind of interact with the player. So at, at the Lightning conference, we, we quickly put together this demo that when two people were playing, the other people were watching. And they could actually stream, they could send stats to the players to give them like a boost of health or, you know, to give them a power up or, you know, they can kind of interact and help them out. I think that's quite cool that you can kind of like break kind of the, the fourth wall or" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:04", "start": 1324.1, "text": "whatever wall. Yeah, break that barrier a bit, yeah. That's pretty cool." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "22:08", "start": 1327.57, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm quite interested in." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:10", "start": 1329.65, "text": "Yeah, so I, I guess tell us a little bit about that game as well, how that game came together." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "22:17", "start": 1337.15, "text": "Yeah Last year? No, this year. Anyway, it was about a, a year ago. I think there was a Lightning Hackath-- there was a virtual Lightning Hackathon last year. Yeah, it, it was, it, it was, it was last year. And, no, sorry, there was a Hackathon in New York. I wanted to attend it, but I couldn't. But I just thought, \"Why don't I just do the Hackathon at home and then just try and keep the same hours and just, you know, just-- It wasn't a virtual. Hackathon, but I thought, you know, whilst they're doing it, I've got a free weekend, I've had this idea before, you know, this idea of building like a street fighter type game. so yeah, I'll just try and- Make it over the weekend, and I, I made a demo and kind of got that working, it was a bit clunky. And then, then there was the Lightning Hackathon for Bitcoin 2019, where I kind of, got the old code out and I, I kind of completed that game. I also built a couple of other games. I, I made three games for the Lightning Hackathon there, and, I was lucky enough to, to win that, and the game got a little bit better. And then from, winning the Lightning, It kind of got me, potential to, start and join Zebedi, and now we've got the chance and the funding to develop the game, to like a fully production level. But yeah, I don't know, I, I think, I think it seemed like quite a simple, basic concept. I thought it was a good way to demonstrate Lightning. It's quite easy to explain, you know? You know, I punch you, you get a star. You punch me, you know, whatever. yeah, so that was kind of how it came about." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:03", "start": 1443.07, "text": "Yeah, that's awesome. Tell us a little bit actually how Zebity came together and some of the concepts around that." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "24:08", "start": 1448.25, "text": "Yeah, actually, Zebuddy was actually kind of, it was started by, my, co-founder Simon. And, I think he had this idea of, you know, he wanted to do, like, he thought that Lightning and gaming made sense. I don't put words into his mouth, but, yeah, I, like, this is the impression I got. You know, and he would, you know, he w- you know, he's not a developer himself, so he just wanted to find a couple of developers that could help him At the time, I was actually working for a Japanese company building something quite similar, but for various reasons that company didn't work out, and I was kind of free. And just as that company didn't work out, I got contacted by Simon, who just basically said, \"Hey, you know, he didn't know that I was doing it, but that thing that you were doing, do you want to continue it? It kind of sounded like to me, and, and you can come on board as a co-founder.\" So he contacted me, and I said, \"Yeah, I'm, Contacted, Andre Neves, who's, a, a great guy, and, and you should definitely try and get him on the podcast. And, you know, I kind of knew Andre from Twitter, so he seemed like a cool guy, you know? And I, yeah, I just said, \"Yeah, sure,\" you know, we were both on board. Simon managed to secure some funding, and, yeah, that's kind of how it, it came together, you know, quite- Lucky, and it all happened quite quickly, and, yeah, now we've started, and, we're building cool stuff." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:39", "start": 1538.61, "text": "Yeah, right. And, so at the Lightning conference, or rather, one or two days just before, Michael Ferguson from the London, Bitcoin devs group or organizer, he organized, like a presentation night where people came and presented, and I saw you guys obviously went up and did your presentation with, about Zebity, and okay, here's what we're doing, and you had a couple different prongs, so it was A bit interesting because it wasn't just, \"Hey, we're just making Lightning games, \"we're also gonna try and make it easier for other people to implement Lightning into their games. Tell us a little bit about some of those ideas you presented." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "26:13", "start": 1572.63, "text": "Yeah, so I guess it's probably important to clarify that Zebity isn't actually a gaming studio. We're actually, we wanna focus on making the tools and the SDKs for game developers to make games. We are making a game, and, you know, actually my sole job at- Zebedi is to make the game, along with a couple of other people. So we do plan to make a professional game, but we kind of understand that, making a, a game and maintaining a game, you really need to be a dedicated studio to do that, you know? So the idea is that we're gonna make kind of these flagship games to basically show what you can do with the SDK and the APIs and, and what you can do with Lightning, but we really want, other gaming studios who aren't non-Bitcoin But they really know how to make games and do games well and kind of, you know, get a game to market. And we, we, we want them to kind of be flagship Games of our, tools as well. I guess the main problem we see at the moment is it's, it's quite hard to convince, normal game developers to be interested in Bitcoin, 'cause most people have only ever heard of Bitcoin, they just-- It's, you know, I think most people probably never heard of the Lightning Network, they've heard of Bitcoin. Most gamers have heard of Bitcoin 'cause it made their graphics cards more expensive. Or not Bitcoin, that was like, I tell them that was something else. I suppose like Ethereum and stuff, but that's the kind of impression they have. And then the, their first idea of Bitcoin is, \"Well, in-app purchases work for me, why would I, you know, want to use Bitcoin?\" I guess you could say, \"Well, yeah, you could, you know, save thirty percent that you don't have to send to Apple or Steam,\" but it's not really enough to try and convince them. but they're not aware of the other cool- Innovative things that you can do with Bitcoin, such as kind of esports, audience participation, you know, streaming between players, sending the players Bitcoin, you know, as rewards. So the i-idea is that we are, are gonna build the games that kind of show that, and that's a good example for the other game dev, you know, the game developers to go, \"Hey, oh, okay, wow, that's pretty cool. I didn't know you could do that. Oh, it'd be cool if we could do that in our game.\" And so that's kind of, Yeah, that's cool. And" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:32", "start": 1712.33, "text": "I, I think it's also crucial to recognize that these games have to be good enough in their own right, because if these games are only played amongst Bitcoin and Lightning people, well, that's a very small audience, right? And so I, I think that's also part of it, that recognition that the game has to be really fun in its own right to sort of draw in non-Bitcoin people who then can learn about Bitcoin in that process." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "28:56", "start": 1735.61, "text": "Yeah, yeah. Well, that's kind of, yeah, that was kind of a decision on my part I made the game, like, you know, I, I could have called the game like Block Wars or Bitcoin Battle or something, which was, you know, but I kind of, we just kind of wanna make a game, you know, that obviously non-Bitcoiners would like, but they could, they could enjoy it, but they could easily see how Bitcoin is used. So, I think streaming payments is, is a little bit complicated at the moment to show newbies, but one thing that we plan to do in the game is that, and this is what I found successful in my Original games when I first got into Bitcoin like 2013, 14, which the ideas that people could play the game and they just got Bitcoin for free, which is, you know, a, a great way, you know, like they play a game, then they get this kind of like, they get Bitcoin free and, you know, there's no risk, okay, okay, what can- I do this Bitcoin now, I can s-use it in this other game or I can send it to somebody. It's a great onboarding mechanism, so that's, you know, another i-important feature of the game. yeah, but, but I, I do have to a-admit that, like, you know, we kind of understand at the moment, like, we don't expect our game to compete with like the triple A game studios, like, we're not gonna kind of, you know, just, w-we're not gonna replace Call of Duty anytime soon. but we just, you know, I think we wanna make good games that, you know, that people enjoy and, you know, that can be popular and just, they can get the, kind of get the, the ecosystem Rolling and, and get the attention of, you know, the kind of the smaller studios, and once the smaller studios start to use it, then maybe that gets the attention of the bigger studios. I've actually, in my previous consulting work, I've actually spoken, to l-l-larger gaming studios when I was in Japan, and, you know, I kind of did, I actually demoed Lightning at Tokyo Game Show and I spoke to some people, but like the, the larger game studios, they're not really interested in giving power back to the users at this point of time. They Things and, you know, they have legal restrictions and they're quite large, so they're not gonna do anything risky. but the smaller, the indie game studios were the ones that were more interested, and I kind of think that's where it probably has to come from." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:10", "start": 1870.1, "text": "Right. So it might be more like a way that a challenger brand can differentiate themselves and get new players in to say, \"Hey, look, we've got this new thing that the big players don't want, or they don't have a reason to put that in yet, but we do want" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "31:24", "start": 1884.35, "text": "to.\" Yeah. I think A scrappy startup comes out of nowhere and disrupts the big players. So yeah, I think that makes sense. Obviously, if Nintendo want to add Lightning Network short come to us, we're not gonna say no." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:41", "start": 1900.76, "text": "Yeah, that's cool. so then what's your thoughts, what are your thoughts around platform? So there are obviously PC games, console games, mobile games. What are you focusing on?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "31:51", "start": 1911.12, "text": "Everything. Well, so the games at the moment are built with, Unity, is, is kind of the technology used. It's kind of what ninety-five percent of indie game developers use. So we're building it with Unity, and Unity just lets you build to like many platforms. So there's not much, there's not a lot of work involved to kind of build for different platforms. Obviously, I, I kinda think mobile's important in this day of age, but obviously mobile can be more restrictive due to Apple's policies, you know, so My kind of view is that we're, we're definitely gonna get something working on mobile. I, it seems that through my past experience, and I've actually spoken to like the app review team a few times, I think like sending satoshis between players is fine. Obviously, there's gonna be some restrictions on countries that you, you're not allowed to do it, and, you know, it's gonna be targeted at different age, but that's okay. Sending Bitcoin to players is fine. the only thing you definitely can't do is purchasing with Bitcoin, 'cause obviously That is kind of, you know, it's replacing the app store or the in-app purchase mechanism, but to be honest, that's not that interesting anyway, I think, you know, it's, it's not something new, so I'm not too fussed about that. having said that, you know, Apple, it's Apple's rules, so Apple can always like change the rules at any time, which is why we're also building for, you know, just desktop, web as well. I'm quite interested in mobile web, I think that's-- Mobile web, you know, you kind of have the advantages of mobile but with no restrictions, but it's, you know, I think surprise, surprise, Apple on their Safari mobile Browser kind of accidentally make mobile web games difficult to run. I'm not sure they did it on purpose, but it's, it's kind of, it's, interesting. But, yeah. but yeah, I think we just, you know, we wanna target as, as many platforms as possible, but Yeah, mobile is, I think, is a, a, a good way to reach the most people in this day" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:57", "start": 2037.0, "text": "and age. Right. And, what about on the Google Play side? Are they restrictive there as well, similarly with the Apple side? Less restrictive than Apple." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "34:06", "start": 2045.54, "text": "In a way, Apple generally so, Apple they manually review your apps as you submit them, so you actually get a guy in a room who looks at them. so you kind of know when you first submit it, if it's gonna be rejected or not. Google, they tend-- it's, I And what you find with Google is that, you know, your game will just be taken down like a month later. but in my experience, Google are a lot less strict. But the good thing about Android is you don't have to go through, you know, the Google Play Store, you can go through like F-Droid or other, its option. Well, with Apple, you can't have-- There's, there's no other easy way for a person to install an app that Apple haven't approved, unfortunately. but I don't know, I kind of think, you Eventually they seem to tend to come around, they're a bit slow, but I think Apple just wants to do a lot of do-diligence and just, you know, their knee-jerk reaction is just to ban these games and these apps, and then once they've looked into it, they tend to, you know, add them back. I had this issue, a lot with Apple in these early days. It was quite funny, you know? I remember actually speaking to the app review team, they banned one of my apps, and she was explaining and, she was saying, \"Well, \" 'cause she obviously, she wasn't like, didn't know anything about Bitcoin or blockchain, but she was like reading from a sheet. So the approved currencies were allowed to approve, well, there's Litecoin, Bitcoin, Ethereum. And, the DAO token. Yeah. Well, at one point the DAO token was an Apple-approved virtual currency, and that was, and then I think a few days later the whole, the DAO hack happened. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:48", "start": 2148.28, "text": "Yeah, yeah, all over the place, guys. It's, yeah, funny. So I guess the other big one then, from a, like, maybe from the app store or maybe from a legal perspective, is all this kind of money transmission laws stuff. Do you have, do you see much of a burden or hurdle there?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "36:08", "start": 2168.26, "text": "sure. You know, it's, again, at the moment, everything's a gray zone, right? It's, you know, it's, I think, again, at the moment, it seems to be if it's player to player It all makes things a lot easier. So actually there's an incentive, it's quite interesting. So we were talking about this in our last team meet-up. Actually, there's a strong incentive for us to be non-custodial, which is actually good for For the ecosystem, because I think a lot of companies, if it, you know, if it was less strict about people being custodial, you'd probably get, I feel you'd get a lot more people doing custodial services, because in a way it's easier, especially with Lightning, you know, it makes things a lot easier to be custodial, but in a way we kind of, we don't want to be custodial because of the reg- you know, the, the regulation, so in a way it's forcing us to be more non-custodial. having said that, we actually will have a custodial kind of, kind of onboarding mechanism just to kind of help, you know, 'cause obviously we want to onboard people to, to Lightning, and obviously at the moment it's hard to kind of do that in a completely non-custodial way, so we ha-do have like a small custodial onboarding mechanism, but that's gonna be limited, you know, to very sm-small amounts and things like this. Yeah, but so just it goes to money transmitter license, you know, as long as you're not touching fiat and you're kind of non-custodial, it, it, it, it seems to be okay. But having said that, it is a gray area, so things can change." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:37", "start": 2256.98, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that's cool. And, I'd be, I'd love to hear a bit more about how you're going to configure that part of it in terms of custodial versus non-custodial. So how-- So obviously, I guess the easy" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:51", "start": 2271.25, "text": "And they've just got like a custodial amount just for a small amount, then how would they progress and how would they configure it to be non-custodial?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "37:59", "start": 2278.74, "text": "Yeah. so again, we are still kind of working out the details, so we're actually building the platform now. but I guess the simplest idea is that, you know, a user will download, the game and they'll download our- Wallet, and they can just get some sats, you know, like as they play the game, they can just get some sats free, and obviously that's gonna be custodial. It's gonna be a small amount, and then we're gonna have like a voucher system, you know, where, you know, players or people or we can give players a small amount of sats like through a voucher, system. At the moment, what we're planning to do to incentivize kind of the non-custodial route is, we, we, we wanna work-- so, another So we want to be the only wallet company that supports this. We kind of, we, we have to build this wallet at first just so we can like build the protocols for like streaming SATs between players and all the cool things we want to do, but we're actually working with a few other Wallets and want to work with some of the bigger wallets to kind of basically, we'd love them to do that more than us. So I think there are a few wallets out there like Breeze, for example, is a, is a great kind of non-custodial that seems to make kind of onboarding pretty easy, like, you know, they kind of open a nice channel to you and you don't have to worry about liquidity. So I kind of think there's a lightning Network evolves, I think the wallet companies are gonna solve this kind of, onboarding issue, you know, you know, basically make it easy for non-bitcoin savvy newbies to be able to use a non-custodial Lightning wallet, not have to worry about streaming. And then once you've got like Satoshi's in a custodial fashion, we can do, you know, we can do some cool things with, you know, with swaps and stuff, you know? Lightning loops where we can transfer the balance. Another thing is the, w- you know, I don't go into too much detail, but, the idea that you can charge higher fees, you know, for say custodial, where non-custodial, you can lower the fees, so you're kind of incentivizing- People to move to non-custodial. Another thing is you have like limits, you know, so if somebody wants to put like, you know, like, you know, I don't know, fifty bucks or something, then, you know, they've gotta like, go to like non-custodial mode or something. But if they just want, wanna get into it and just get a few like dollars, I think it's fine to be, you know, custodial, you know, and then if they want to get, get lower fees and larger amounts and, We're gonna give them an easy on-ramp to kind of, to use the non-custodial wallet. So that's kind of what we're thinking at the moment. obviously we're building this out, so, we're gonna, we're gonna work out the details, but it seems to be, it seems to be, I think it's Getting better, and I think it's a quite solvable problem. Awesome. And like I said, yeah, gone. We don't want to be custodial because it, it causes more work for us, you know, we have to obviously worry about the legal, you know, and the regulatory, aspect. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:05", "start": 2465.31, "text": "yeah, it sounds like there's a bit of a-- there's pros and cons, I guess. So it might be technologically more difficult to build non-custodial, but from a legal and regulatory point of view, it's better. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, Challenge, I can say that. Nice, well said. And, one other question around streaming versus batching for payments, i- and in, even on Lightning, for example, rather than, like sometimes when you wanna route a payment on Lightning, that might still take ten seconds or a bit more. What's your view there? Is it something like at the end of each round you would do a payment or, you know, during the fight or during the gameplay that you would literally be streaming payments?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "41:50", "start": 2510.35, "text": "Yeah, I think the, the main thing that-- well, kind of So you can stream payments, and if they're small amounts, you can kind of have, what's, what's the word I'm looking for here? in the UI of the game, you can kind of show the payments are streaming, a-and you can kind of show in the UI that it's streamed even if it hasn't confirmed, and then just assuming that it will confirm in a second, if it doesn't, you update it. I think this is what Twitter does with its likes. So obviously, like Twitter, you have all these likes going up. Twitter can't actually know how many" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "42:24", "start": 2544.28, "text": "So I think Twitter has this algorithm where it kind of shows likes, but a second later it kind of updates it to the real amount, so it might go lower but you don't really see it. The, the UI just kind of shows likes going. So that's kind of one way to show it on the UI point of view, you know, it'll look like it's streaming. So, you know, in the game it'll just say you've got a Satoshi, you've got a Satoshi, but really you've got a Satoshi, you've got a Satoshi. It's not a big deal, So I, I think it, it's acceptable. Another thing is that we are, as part of our S- a-API and tools, we basically, we're gonna have this kind of connectivity module, would that make sense? The idea that we're gonna have, make sure that our players are well connected to other players and developers that use our APIs and SDKs, they're also Well, connected to us and the other players, so that way, you know, there shouldn't be too many hops. And when you're streaming, the amounts are quite low that you don't really need to do that many hops, you know? If you're streaming like, if you, Satoshi's generally you find it runs pretty easy. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think in practice it's not a bigger problem. So the idea that, you know, like, we're gonna have like, as a game studio, we're gonna have, you know, make sure our node is Connected to the popular wallets and make sure the game developers who use our software unlink their, so our software will let them link their own node, and it'll also work with, BTC Pay as well, so, a game developer can link their BTC Pay to our API and SDK, and we'll kind of make sure, hey, you know? What, let's open a channel together, you know, so to make sure that your players are linked to us, so streaming should be quite smooth and, fast and, yeah, easy. So that's kind of how, how we're approaching it at the moment." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:19", "start": 2658.89, "text": "Yeah, that's awesome. So it's sort of like these- Relationships, if you will, it makes sense for people, for there to obviously have channels between these two parties, right? Like with you and Breeze or Zap or these other big providers. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "44:32", "start": 2672.09, "text": "And you kind of see that happening already. There's incentives for everybody to be, well, connected, just because as a merchant or, you know, a game developer, you want to give your, your players, you know, good kind of a good experience. So that one of the simplest things that you can do is make sure you're, you've got a few channels open To the, the larger wallets, you know? And, and, and that also kind of helps, kind of make this net mesh of, you know, nodes that kind of decentralizes it a bit more. So I think, I think all the incentives are in place just, just to kind of solve this problem." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:07", "start": 2706.8, "text": "Yeah. And what about finding developers for the cause and teammates, right? So you've got the three co-founders. How's the team expanded and are they also Bitcoiners or they, are they just developers who then learn about Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "45:20", "start": 2719.53, "text": "Yeah. So we've, we've got, A couple of, a few new hires, more than a couple. So we've got a designer, we've got, a couple developers, and another developer coming on shortly. I t- to be honest, because it's Lightning, and Lightning is kind of like the, the hot girl in the room, we've had, you know, it's not too hard to kind of find, like, we've had developers say, you know, hey, you know, like, you know, I was on This amount before, but I'm willing to work for this amount just to work on Lightning, you know? So I, I think obviously there is obviously there's a shortage of developers. You can't just go on like LinkedIn and like, you know, whatever, find Lightning people, but I think myself and Andre and Simon, the other two co-founders, we kind of know the good people in the space, so we've, you know, we've reached out to people that we know are good, and people have reached out to us, and people are quite excited to be on board, you know?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "46:15", "start": 2775.09, "text": "We, you know, we're still a startup, so we, you know, we're kind of being lean, so we don't, you know, we're not looking for like, you know, like twenty developers. I think as we grow, if we want to have, you know, ten or twenty, thirty developers, that way it'll become more challenging, I think, to find people. But at the moment, I think there's-- I think to be honest, a lot of Bitcoiners have- Been waiting for it to-- because, you know, there's not a lot of money in being a Bitcoin maximalist if you're looking for work, you know? I think a lot of Bitcoin developers will tell you this, you know, they've had, you know, if they've wanted to work on Bitcoin, but the only jobs they've got are on, like, you know, you know, other coins, for example. And now I think with, with-- and I think Bitcoin in a way, like, the only job you could really have was in exchange, because, you And, attempting to build, services and startups. So I think now there's gonna be a, you know, a, a wave of, you know, Lightning Base Companies were just gonna be sweeping up these Bitcoin developers who've been long waiting for some paid Bitcoin work." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:25", "start": 2845.14, "text": "Yeah, I think it's great to see the ecosystem starting to build and grow. let's talk a little bit about Lightning in general. So what are some of your favorite tools? what's your favorite implementation? What do you, what do you normally use?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "47:38", "start": 2857.81, "text": "Yeah, I, I, I don't really have a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:40", "start": 2859.59, "text": "favorite" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "47:40", "start": 2860.01, "text": "implementation per se. I think I, I start, I actually started with C-Lightning when it first came out, and I actually moved- I moved to LND because at the time, LND had a better API. See Lightning API was still a bit kind of, at the time, it was sparse, but I heard it's much better now. So I moved to LND and because I started working with LND, I just basically that's what I know, so that's kind of what I, I work with at the moment. But the other implementations also seem great, I'm quite interested in like Rust, Rust, Rust Lightning per se, but LND is quite good at the moment. it's quite easy to kind of, you know, to read the documentation, they've got a great Slack group, and, you know, if you've ever got an issue, you can go in there and like somebody will help you. Within minutes, sometime. So yeah, I quite like to use LND, it's, it's kind of my main stack. yeah, I guess wallets, I can wallets, I guess, I, I generally, I use the one I made myself to be honest." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:38", "start": 2918.09, "text": "So with the wallets, you previously did Pebble Wallet, right? And then I think there was also Neutum Wallet. Tell us a little bit about your experiences there." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "48:46", "start": 2925.7, "text": "Okay, so, well, this is one I, I, I worked for a company in Japan that, like I said, we, I was trying to build Lightning Gaming at that company, and the company itself was actually, it was actually more interested in, in tokens and stuff and other things. Which is why I, I kind of didn't work out, but, I started to build a wallet and I started to build games like, you know, similar games, you know, but lightning games on that. And, that kind of didn't work out, but I built the wallet and I'd got it out there, you know, and people were using it, they liked it. I think it, it was the, at the time, it was the only wallet that linked with BTC Pay Server. You know, on Android or something like that. So it was quite, I, I, I kind of built it for myself as well, because, you know, I wanted a wallet that could connect to my BTC, peso on Android, so I built that. So I built, and that was called Pebble, and that was actually open source. And then, because it didn't work out with the company, I actually do con-some consulting work for Na- Naiuta as well, which are, they are a Japanese company who made a, a lightning implementation, Tarmigan, and they wanted a wallet. So at the moment, I'm kind of consulting with them to work on it. So Naiuta wallet, it's changed quite a lot, but it was originally based on Pebble. And Naiuta wallet's actually pretty cool, and I think they're actually coming out with an announcement this week or, I'm not sure, when this podcast comes out, but it's actually the first mobile Lightning wallet that has a fully validating node in there as well. Right. Which, So you can actually, it's, you know, it's, it's quite, it's still experimental, but it's just, but it, it, it works. but it's, it's kind of like the, the HTC, that Exodus blockchain phone thing. Exodus. Yes, but it's only Bitcoin and it has a Lightning wallet in it linked to your LND. So in a way, it's, you know, it doesn't have like the secure hardware, but it uses your, your iPhones or, or your, sorry, it uses Secure kind of, enclave. So, yeah, it's, it's pretty cool. You, you can basically run a fully validating Lightning node on your phone, and it also has this, this Hybrid mode that the idea is that obviously running a full node all the time can be, you know, it can be quite heavy on your phone, so it has this h-hybrid mode where, where when you start to use it, it'll use Neutrino and the The full node will sync in the background when you're at home and charging. So when you go home, you plug your phone in and you're on WiFi, then the full node will start to run, it'll start to sync, and it will actually kind of do some checks on the blocks that the Neutrino has downloaded and just to make sure, you know, they are actually valid. So it's kind of got like this lazy detective mode. you know, it's still ex-experimental, but I think, you know, a lot of the work was done by the, the AB Core team, so we kind of, it was built on top of that. But that's kind of my favorite wallet at the moment because I'm, you know, I've got this full node, full, the fully validating node, I should say. It's not a full node because it doesn't, like- Have a full, it's, it's a prune node really, so, but yeah, I think that's quite powerful and, yeah, we're kind of, I think they're open sourcing that as well, so other wallets will be able to implement that as well. So that's kind of my favorite thing at, at the moment, I feel quite empowered, I've got this whole thing in my pocket, you know?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:13", "start": 3132.87, "text": "Yeah, that's really cool, because there are obviously different styles of wallet in the Lightning Network, right? You've got those that are They are, a lightning node in the, in, in the, on the phone, but then they might not be as good with routing, say, because, you know, they might not, you know, be as easy or they-- or you might have different channels, and then it's a bit of an awkward experience because you might have your LND back home with like your proper channels, and then you might have to have like a mobile, right? And then, now, then the other approach we're seeing is like the remote control your node back home approach, right? And then On." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "52:50", "start": 3170.35, "text": "Yeah. Well, the way I see it, actually personally, I quite like the approach of everybody just has this box you plug in at home, it's like a router that's like, you know, you plug it in and forget about it, and everybody links to that. I kinda like that approach. But what's actually cool about the full node that Naiuta have built with the Lightning node, it's actually, I think it can make a lot more sense that if you don't think about it, that you're running a full- Bitcoin and Lightning node on your phone, you're running it on Android, which that basically means that if anybody's got an Android TV or an Android box or just cheap Android hardware, you can basically download, you, you can basically install or run a full node as an app. So I think it just kind of makes the barrier to, you know, like literally, you just download an Android app and then just thing starts syncing. So you could kind of have that at home. You can get this like this, like I actually did it as a test. I don't recommend it, but I, I bought Forty bucks, Amazon Fire Stick, and I wanted to see what Naya to wallet run on that, you know, 'cause that's like forty bucks. It didn't have too much RAM, but I think it had just enough. So I, I plugged that in on my phone, I installed it, and, yeah, I just literally had a full node running on this forty-dollar stick, you know? the only reason I don't recommend it is 'cause I think the type of memory they use, if you kind of hit the database too much, it, it could burn out Easier to run a full node, and if you can get one running on Android, and, you know, these cheap Android devices come out. Another thing is that, you know, you might not need to use the full node on your phone, but say you're, you're traveling or, you know, something happens to your house, you've still got like, you know A valid UTXO state that you have validated on your phone, like in your pocket, so you know, yeah, and you didn't have to do any extra work to do that, it's just a thing that ran in the background. So I, I think it's all stuffed in the right direction, you know, I'm not saying that it's the most practical thing, but I think it just makes sense in just improving or making it easier to run a full node, and I think every bit of research in that direction is important." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:57", "start": 3296.81, "text": "Yeah, and what about, battery usage then? So If you're run- if we're running this node on our mobile, and the battery burn down, and bandwidth usage, is that manageable in your view?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "55:11", "start": 3310.62, "text": "Well, so that's why I say it's, it's hybrid mode. So what you can do is you can set it to only start syncing, when you're charging at home and on Wi-Fi. So that, that, that was the idea behind it. Obviously, yeah, if, if it's, I have it, so actually on my phone, I have kind of a flagship Android phone, and I actually just" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "55:32", "start": 3331.95, "text": "If, if I'm on battery or not. And actually, for me, it's not a big issue. When I'm like, when I'm going out day to day and I'm, you know, I'm not traveling, I'm just going out to the store or whatever, and, you know, i-it's fine. When I was traveling, I did have to turn it off because obviously, in between airports and things, I might not have battery, but it wasn't too big of an issue. so yeah, but that was the idea behind the, the hybrid mode is that you can kind of, a-and actually to be fair, so the Android OS at the moment, well, actually if it thinks you're using too much battery, it may turn it off itself, so I think Android also has some mechanisms around it, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:10", "start": 3369.75, "text": "So that's actually one thing as well, because, Android is getting more aggressive about shutting down background applications as well. So that's something that, Bitcoin or Lightning developers will have to consider that as well." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "56:24", "start": 3383.78, "text": "Yeah, yeah. so that's kind of, I think that's what the A B Core team also ran into and, and when we were working on it, with Naya, the same issue, I think they updated Android, which basically meant background worked a bit differently before Or you could basically say, \"Run in background,\" and it would do it. Now you basically have to s-go to the OS and say, \"Please run this in background when you think it's applicable.\" And on, but on, on, on my phone, it kind of runs eighty percent of the day, so, but my phone's got plenty of RAM, so I think if you run a decent phone, and phones are getting cheaper, I think you can get a really kind of powerful Android phone for not too expensive nowadays. but it's not, I found the actually, it Isn't really that heavy, you know? Yeah. It's coming down" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:13", "start": 3433.09, "text": "now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And from a Lightning, point of view, what else are you looking at? one example that comes to my mind is LNURL, which, is a really easy way to withdraw as well. So do you wanna just talk a bit about that and if you see applications there? Definitely, that's something we're definitely adding into the game and adding into our-- Sorry, would you mind actually just for the listeners who don't know, can you just explain what that" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "57:40", "start": 3459.55, "text": "URL. It's basically a, a protocol that, actually it's-- there's a few things in the protocol that it can do, but it's just, I, I would explain it as a way, LNURL is a protocol that just lets wallets and applications talk and communicate a bit more in depth. So before the only way an application and a- Wallet could talk was basically you would scan an invoice that the application made on, on Lightning, and that's all you-- basically the only thing you could do was pay an invoice. but as people made applications, they wanted to do stuff like they wanted, you know, an application to say, \"Open a channel to the, to the user's wallet,\" or they wanted to request an invoice from the wallet that the application paid, and there was no Mechanism to make that, actually with another Japanese company, we actually built something before LNURL with a project called Denvu, which we did something similar, but LNURL has become the standard. It's just kind of, you know, just, The protocol for applications to talk to wallets. So one of the aspects that, we're quite interested in for gaming is the idea that if you want the game to send your wallet a tip or some, Bitcoin, the game can basically, request the wallet to make an invoice, and then it can-- the wallet will send the invoice to the game, and the game can pay it, and it, it, it, it, and it's such a smooth way that the user doesn't have to do anything. They just press a button, you know, \"Give me a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:15", "start": 3554.69, "text": "Yeah, I might, I might just explain that. So one example there might be, right now if you wanted to withdraw from some service without LNURL, it might ask you, \"Hey, go and generate an invoice, paste it in, right?\" Whereas now with, with the use of LNURL, it can literally, they can just show a QR, your wallet, you pull it out and you scan that, and then it will do a withdrawal that way, not just you paying, but you can now withdraw using LNURL in a smooth way, right?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "59:41", "start": 3580.51, "text": "Even smoother than that, so what we wanna Your wallet and a game on the phone, you press, press button on, on the game and it basically just kinda does it all behind you, you don't have to actually scan anything. So yeah. But as, you said, Stephan, you, you know, for like web applications, you can just scan it and it'll send you a tip. So it just makes that a bit, bit easier. It's also, I think the protocol has room for growth, so actually we're proposing, we're gonna propose some protocols to allow, like streaming between players non Into LN URL so other wallets could implement it as well and other game developers and game SDKs can implement it as well. So it's just, yeah, it's a really cool protocol just to add new features, to Lightning." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:29", "start": 3629.04, "text": "Yeah. Anything else in Lightning that you're excited for in the, let's say, short to medium term?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "01:00:35", "start": 3635.04, "text": "Oh, it's so much, you know? It's like, yeah. The thing, like, from a technical point of view, I'm just, I'm, I'm quite in, in, interested in it. You know, it's, people say it's a lot, but, L2 and, you know, if SegWit no input gets added, I think that'll, not, won't necessarily affect us too much from a gaming point of view, but I just think it's gonna make the Lightning, software a bit safer and a bit more economical." }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "01:01:04", "start": 3664.72, "text": "Lightning Labs, and he's quite hyped about channel batteries in gaming, and there's a lot of cool stuff that you could do. it just basically would make like streaming between players even more efficient and cheaper, and, you could also, Rose Pfeiffer's explaining a lot of stuff to me that went over my head sometimes, as it happens. But I think channel batteries are gonna be pretty important for gaming because you could have this You know, a channel factory, like if you think of like an MMO, and in MMO you have guilds and clans where players get together, like the clan could open a channel factory together, and everybody in the guild could control like this channel factory, so you know There's definitely some cool stuff with that. I, I, to be honest, I'm quite inter-- it sounds a bit kind of a-arrogant, but the most thing I'm interested in is like getting my games out there and like adding streaming and doing the esports, you know? We're actually gonna hold, an esports event, advancing Bitcoin in London. It's gonna be, I think it'll be the first Lightning esports event where we're gonna have two, you know, known Bitcoiners that are gonna battle each other in the game. So we're gonna Their characters in the game, so they'll fight each other, and the audience can like stream them stats to like give them power-ups. Oh, that's awesome. Like Mario Kart power-ups, some could help them, some could add health, and some could like hurt them, you know? There could be some Wild cards there, so that's what we're building, that's gonna be exciting. yeah, and we're also, we're gonna have a workshop at Advancing Bitcoin as well that we, we really- Wanna get other game developers out there and like get them using Lightning. So we're gonna run a workshop. So those are the kind of the things I'm, I'm quite looking forward to." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:43", "start": 3763.58, "text": "Yeah, that's awesome. I'm actually gonna be at Advancing Bitcoin, so I'll definitely see you there and I'll, definitely try and, have to get you to be battling" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "01:02:50", "start": 3770.54, "text": "somebody." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:51", "start": 3771.18, "text": "Yeah, sure, sure. okay, cool. So look, I think we're just about coming to time, but, maybe just let the listeners know, are you looking for Are you, you, are you hiring? Who do you wanna hear from? Anything like that?" }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "01:03:06", "start": 3786.47, "text": "Yeah, well, I think the simplest thing is to go to, just to follow us on Twitter and, I'm sure it'll be in the show notes, probably be a little link there, and you can also visit our website at zebuddy.io, and the best thing to do is to subscribe to our mailing list, and that'll keep people up to date. At the moment, we're actually building out the tools, so I think the," }, { "speaker": "christian_moss_mandelduck", "time": "01:03:33", "start": 3813.39, "text": "The main thing we're looking for at the moment is actually other games, like indie developers, you know, you don't have to be a big studio or a small studio, you could just be an individual. We just wanna get, w-w-we'd like to talk to developers who are interested, in using our APIs and SDK so we'd like to work with them and help them, you know, add lightning to the game. So if they, if anybody wants to reach out to us, just send us a message on Twitter or, email us from the link on our website. We'd love to talk to you." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:04", "start": 3844.85, "text": "Fantastic. Well, look, I think, it's really exciting. I'm really excited to see where this all goes. So, thanks for joining me, Chris. Any money is gonna be crazy. Hope you enjoyed the show, guys. My website has the show notes and transcript. Go to stephanolivera dot com. This is episode one hundred and thirty-two. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }