{ "episodeId": "SLP136", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "alex_leishman": { "name": "Alex Leishman", "role": "guest", "tag": "ALEX" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.51, "text": "Welcome to the Stephan Livera podcast focused on Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today we've got an episode about Bitcoin and Socratic seminars, but first let me introduce the sponsors of the show. So firstly, Kraken, one of the world's leading Bitcoin exchanges. You've gotta check them out, they have a high quality platform, they offer high trading volume, they offer twenty four seven support. They've got best-in-class accounting, reconciliation, reporting. They're renowned for their focus on security, and they've got Kraken Pro mobile app. Kraken Pro delivers all the security and features you love about the Kraken exchange in a beautiful mobile-first design for advanced Bitcoin trading on the go. Don't forget this Kraken OTC desk for those seeking a more private, personalized service for large block trades, and Kraken just recently acquired Circle Trade. Kraken also offer margin trading up to five times long and short. Kraken offer- Futures up to fifty times leverage, and they've also got the Crypto Watch platform where you can manage and use it as a dashboard for your trading as well. So go to Kraken dot com to sign up. Next up is Unchained Capital. Unchained Capital is a Bitcoin financial services company empowering customers with unprecedented financial freedom and control. All their products and services are built on the foundation of multi-sig, so they've got an approach to collaborative custody giving users control over their private keys. Unchained offer two of three multi-signature vaults, and these are a great option if you're thinking about how to best secure your Bitcoin for the long term, and if you ever need to access liquidity without selling your Bitcoin, if you need a loan, Unchained offer collateralized loans. You can put up Bitcoin, it's stored on chain, they've got dedicated multisig addresses, and the Bitcoin is never re-hypothecated, and you can share in the security, you can actually hold one of three keys. I'm really impressed with Unchained, they offer excellent services, they've got awesome content, check With Drew and Parker, they offer Caravan and Hermit. I think you'll enjoy partnering with them for your Bitcoin financial services. Go to Unchained Dash Capital dot com. Hey, check out GiveBitcoin dot io, the easiest and safest way to get your friends and family into Bitcoin. Take it from me, I've given Bitcoin to people before and they lost it. They didn't know what they were receiving. That's why I saw huge value in GiveBitcoin. You can buy Bitcoin for your friends and family with just their email address, and here's the twist, your gift is time locked with a U. S. Custodian for one year, during which GiveBitcoin delivers twelve monthly lessons to your recipient to speed them through the learning curve of becoming a hodler. GiveBitcoin has input from many well-known Bitcoiners including Safteen, Matt O'Dell, CitizenBitcoin, and others, and Jan Pritzker just recently joined as the CTO. I'm also an advisor with a small equity stake, and I'm assisting with the curriculum also. Keep an eye out for more exciting announcements coming from GiveBitcoin dot io. The aim is to have a really positive impact on Bitcoin adoption and understanding, so I'm excited to have them as a sponsor. Last but not least, CypherSafe, they are producing the CypherWheel product. Are you keeping your Bitcoin bip39 seed backed up? Is it fireproof, waterproof, rustproof, petproof, and tamper evident? If not, check out CypherWheel. It's a new product, it's compact, it comes in a wheel shape, it masks the actual words of your seed, and it's got a tamper evident seal as well. Make sure you've got your seed backed up in case your paper seed goes, Make sure your loved ones have access to your bitcoins if an accident occurs. The product is available for pre-order, go to ciphersafe dot io. My guest today is Alex Leishman. He is a co-organizer of San Francisco Bitcoin Devs and also founder and CEO of River. So he joins me and we talk about this meet-up style known as the Bitcoin Socratic Seminar, and I found it really fantastic, the one that I attended, and I thought it would be good to get some discussion in on this and potentially people around the world. The world can leverage this Meetup style as their own way to help people upskill and build their own knowledge from a technical point of view about Bitcoin. And while we've got Alex here, we also talk about his company, River Financial. So here is the interview. Alex, welcome to the show." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "04:18", "start": 257.9, "text": "Thanks for having me." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:20", "start": 259.91, "text": "So Alex, I know your reputation precedes you, I know you have a reputation for being a good moderator and host of the Socratic seminar, and you've done, you know, a lot of work around community building and, you know, been, been around the space for a while. I'd love to hear a little bit of your story on how you got into all this and Bitcoin and Austrian economics." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "04:42", "start": 281.92, "text": "Yeah, well, that's very flattering, thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you've, I'm glad you've heard good things. so yeah, I guess I can start from the, start from the beginning. I think it's a pretty interesting story, but it, it has a lot in common with how a lot of other people found themselves in this industry. so when I was, I was an undergrad, I grew up in Maryland, went to the University of Maryland, College Park, and studied aerospace engineering, actually. But in my free time, I was kind of, you know, as kind of a young person in college, being exposed to new ideas. you know, I started being exposed to the ideas of like libertarianism, reading economists, starting with, you know, Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, started discovering then, kind of going further down the rabbit hole, learning about Mises and Hayek and, and all that, and I spent a lot of my time, outside of, you know, my, my engineering classes, reading about this stuff. And, I remember, you know, sophomore year, I, I was going between, you know, my, e-e-some of my engineering classes, and I had this thick, like, human action book in my backpack, and all my friends thought I was, I was really weird. Yeah, and so, you know, that, this idea of kind of this like first principles economics, you know, like starting from like the, you know, defining what a rational human is and trying to construct what the kind of emergent, the emergent phenomena that, that come from that are, was, you know, fascinating, but kind of You know, fast forward to my senior year, I, I got around to reading Friedrich Hayek's, Denationalization of Money, like a lot of people, you know, in Bitcoin have read. And this, I still didn't know about Bitcoin at this point, actually. And, I read that, and I, you know, kind of everything just clicked. I was like, \"Wow, you know, this idea of competing money, that, that wasn't completely controlled by the government, was super fascinating to me.\" And I had kind of made up my point in my life, I wanted to kind of be part of building a financial institution or company that offered people access to money that the Federal Reserve didn't control. And I know that sounds really weird, but like that was kind of like what I kind of had decided my dream was in college. And I didn't, had no idea how to do that. I thought it would look like something, like, you know, I played around with ideas, you know, I looked at what Liberty Dollar had done, and I saw that didn't end too well for them. I, I, I thought about, you know, maybe offering currency, my own, my own money backed by commodities or something like that that sat in a vault or, you know, some ideas related to that. And then, you know, I kind of shelved that idea while I had my first job out of college. And it was a management consul-consulting job, you know, it wasn't, I wasn't, and I wasn't having that much fun. I missed engineering. I, I didn't enjoy, you know, making all the power And that kind of job, but I, I didn't really know what I wanted to do at that point, right out of college. And then, because I was kind of bored in my job, I started taking programming classes online, and I took this one Coursera class called Startup Engineering, and one of the assignments was to build a Bitcoin donation web, website. And I was like, \"Well, what is, you know, what is, like, what is Bitcoin?\" I kind of heard, heard the word, but I didn't really know much about it. And I started digging into it from this assignment online, and I just, like, you know, I, I remember the moment it just like clicked. I was like, you know, I had that feeling that a lot of people have had, like, \"This fulfills the prophecy,\" you know? That, that's how I felt. Like I was like, \"This fulfills the prophecy,\" and I just knew, like, I just knew that like this was gonna be something, and I had to spend time working on it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:31", "start": 510.54, "text": "That's fantastic. And what time was this? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "08:34", "start": 514.07, "text": "This was mid-2013. So, Bitcoin had had some traction at that point. you know, Coinbase was up and running, I, I was using the Coinbase API to play around with Bitcoin stuff." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "08:50", "start": 530.23, "text": "and yeah, the course was actually taught by biology, Srini Vasan on, on Coursera, and also another professor at Stanford, Vijay Pande, I think I'm pronouncing his name right, but So then by, by the end of that year, I had decided to up and leave, Maryland and move to San Francisco to pursue a career as a software engineer working on Bitcoin stuff. And, And that was, yeah, that was at the end of 2013. And then, you know, after that, I, I did a-- so I landed in San Francisco, didn't have a job, I did a programming bootcamp, and it's been about two months, kind of just learning the fundamentals of web engineering and doing a lot of Bitcoin stuff on the side, going to the meetups out here. That, this was my first exposure to like real Bitcoin meetups. And, you know, I, I, I really loved them. I loved being able to be in a city with a community of people who just, you know, love Bitcoin, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I got a job shortly after that. at a company called MyCoin, which was, like a Bitcoin brokerage for, for Taiwan, but they had an office in Palo Alto at the time. And, did that for about a year and a half, helped build out that platform, that company, and they're still, they're still around today. And, then ended up going back to grad school, after that. So I, I ended up doing my master's in computer science at Stanford. I was lucky enough to kind of join at a time where Dan Boneh, who's the cryptography professor there, was teaching the first Bitcoin class, and as kind of coincidence would have it, Bologe was one of the, was teaching this kind of, add-on lab unit to that class as well. And, because of my experience with Bitcoin and kind of my, you know, time working in the industry at that point, I was well-positioned to actually be a teaching assistant for, for that class, which was really cool. And so that was actually my first job, in grad school was helping TA that class. class with Dan Benet and a few other, great guys. And, so yeah, so I spent two years in grad school focusing on computer security, Bitcoin stuff. I spent some time Researching, you know, the possibility of putting BLS signatures in the Bitcoin protocol, which I'm happy to talk about a little more. and, and after that, I'll, you know, I'll just kind of summarize up to now. So, I spent a little time working in security at Airbnb, but I, I quickly missed Bitcoin stuff and, ended up, leaving Airbnb, joining a, an investment fund to kind of focus on Bitcoin deals and also s-building out some of their technical infrastructure, and that fund was- called Polychain Capital. And so I spent a while there, did some cool stuff there, helped, helped lead some investments in, in, in some Bitcoin companies, and, ended up leaving to start my own company where I am now, called River Financial. while I was at Polychain, I h- I had the opportunity to go to New York to, I think I was out there for some conference, I can't really remember which one, and I went to one of the big devs meetups out there. And," }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "12:04", "start": 724.4, "text": "the guy who runs the Bitcoin, Bitcoin meetup out there, Jay, he, he is incredibly talented, and the, the, the event that he organizes there that's been going for years now, just kind of, it blew my mind how, how effective it was, what the community was like, how much people enjoyed this format of event he put on, and he calls, he calls it the Socratic seminar style. And basically what he does is, he collects, you know, 20, 30 topics and prepares to discuss them for each meetup once a month. And, you know, they range from anywhere from kind of news and events in Bitcoin, I mean, maybe some company being acquired or some mining news or statistics in the Bitcoin network to, to pull requests in the Bitcoin core repository or the c-lightning or lnd repositories. And so You know, he kickstarts a, a discussion one by one through each of these topics, and really the main kind of meat of the, of the event is the people in the audience who attend, who, many of whom are talented engineers or understand this stuff deeply and have, you know, conversations around each of these topics, and, Jay is more of just the moderator. And so I was, I was blown away by, you know, how great that event was, and I, you know, I thought to myself, \"Why don't we have that in San Francisco?\" And I knew we, we had a Bitcoin developer meetup that I, you know, been to for a while, but I decided, I, you know, what if I could partner up with the Bitcoin developer meetup in San Francisco and bring this style of event to San Francisco? And, and so that was a year and a half ago, and, you know, it's been a, been a big, been a big hit ever since." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:40", "start": 820.29, "text": "Yeah, that's awesome. I've, I've, had the pleasure of attending a Socratic seminar in Berlin with the Lightning conference, and I saw Jay and Ben Wozley also from San Francisco who did that role for the Socratic seminar, and I thought, this is In Sydney or just around the world, but, I suppose maybe it, it is, one factor is just having enough people with that level of knowledge, and I think in New York City and San Francisco, if there's two places in the world that have that kind of knowledge, it's those two, right? but let's, let's jump into this. I'd love to talk a little bit about how you do it and how other people around the world can replicate that model if they would like. so can you just give us a bit of a overview on what is format of the meetup and, what are some of the ground rules of the meetup?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "14:34", "start": 874.15, "text": "Yeah, so the nice thing about this meetup, in its format, is that it's quite easy to replicate and also to, adjust to your own specific city, or wherever you live. And so the, the main, the main way that this is structured Is that I spend about three hours at least, over the course of a month, before each meetup, collecting, collecting topics. And I would say a good half of these topics are pull requests, in, in GitHub, for Bitcoin Core, c-lightning or LND. I often, source a lot of these from the developers themselves, often the people who've actually written the code, for these pull requests, who, many of whom will potentially be in the audience to actually discuss it. And then, you know, I also find news, I also have a number of sites that I go to regularly, regularly for statistics. And then, the, the different kind of meetup organizers around the world, we all actually share a lot of content. So, you know, a lot of the meetups each have their own website or, or some sort of repository where they store the topics that they have in their topic list, and we'll kind of pull from each other's lists, which is really convenient and, kind of, we kind of share the work that way. so yeah, you know, for San Francisco, what I do is I put all these topics, it's basically each topic is effectively a link, and I create a list of links and put it on sfbitcoindevs dot org, and I put a new list up each month. I try to get it done at least a few days before the meetup, but sometimes it's the day of or just the day before, depending on how busy I've been. And, I just, you know, before each meetup, what I do is I open every topic in a tab. And, and I learned this from Jay, by the way. this is totally, you know, he started this and it's, so I actually learned from him, and, you know, modified a little bit to, to the San Francisco flavor, but, there's also kind of, so, so I go through each tab and highlight, you know, bits of the page that, you know, I wanna pop out and, and cover, when we each have a discussion, when we have a discussion about it. And, and yeah, and then, you We have pizza and beer, anyone's welcome. Digital Garage is, is our host actually there? if you, if you know Digital Garage, they're a big Japanese firm, they have a co-working space in San Francisco and, have been very gracious and supportive, allowing us to use that space for free, for to host the event. And, yeah, so we start around seven o'clock and, spend two hours just going through each of these topics, and I'm lucky enough that we have so many talented and intelligent, knowledgeable people Cisco that my job's actually pretty easy because, the people in the audience can carry on the discussion. The, my job is just to keep things on time, keep things from going too far off the rails or off track. you know, every now and then, you know, you get people bringing up topics that, you know, may not be appropriate, so you just have to be willing, willing to kind of keep everyone in line. So So yeah, in, in other cities, so, so we, we-- there are a lot of these now around the world. It's totally spread like wildfire. As, as you mentioned, there's one in Berlin, there's one in Seattle now, there's one in, Chris Stewart's running one in Chicago, And I think there's, there's one in Austin, London, and it, it's great to see." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:00", "start": 1080.1, "text": "Yeah, that's awesome. and what about the rules of the meetup? Typically, as I understand, it's normally Chatham House rules. Are there any other, what, what, what, what is-- First of all, what is that, and what, if there are any other rules, can you just outline those?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "18:12", "start": 1092.15, "text": "Yeah, so I would say it's, it's largely Chatham House rules. So basically, you can talk about what's been Things, and the biggest rule is no photos or videos, and that's the, you know, that has some pros and cons actually. The big benefit to no, no photos or videos is that it helps people maintain their privacy, it helps people, in, who are there, feel like they can, you know, really be themselves and they don't have to worry about something being taken out of context and putting on the internet and being put on the internet. the downside is, and I see this a lot on Twitter and even on our, our meetup pages, because- We're in San Francisco, and we have all these incredibly well-respected people, at our meetups, you know, the rest of the world really wants to see them, and they, and they wanna hear them, and they wanna see what everyone's saying in San Francisco. And so, you know, we've tried to kind of balance that desire with kind of two types of meetups, so we have these monthly Socratics, and then every now and then we have a special presentation that is public that we film and that goes on YouTube. So just la- just this" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "19:24", "start": 1163.8, "text": "gave a great presentation about updates to Bitcoin Taproot. And so, we try to make sure that there is content that the rest of the world can see from San Francisco." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:32", "start": 1172.45, "text": "Yeah, that's, one struggle that many of us who are, let's just say, in places that don't have the same level of Bitcoin knowledge and talent, we struggle with that. I think the other thing is you really need a moderator who has a good level of knowledge themselves, right? Like I saw, from the one I saw with Jay and, Ben Wiese I saw Jay did a great job at just basically having a, a good level of knowledge about each of these little topics. How do you go about doing that?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "20:03", "start": 1202.85, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the, the nice thing about this is that my career is in Bitcoin already. I spend all day working on Bitcoin stuff, more or less, and, I've spent the last, you know, six years effectively spending most of my time paying attention to Bitcoin, so it's not like that much extra work to try to keep in touch With all the developments, but I will say, over the last year, as the Lightning Network stuff has picked up and more, more also protocol level, improvements or updates are being considered and more just more development activity in general, it is getting harder and harder to keep, keep, abreast of all the developments, but luckily I'm able to lean on people That attend, to kind of handle the bulk of the discussion for topics that I'm not able to effectively discuss. So every meetup there's at least a handful of topics that I kinda have a high level understanding of, but, you know, I definitely don't have the, the depth or, or have spent the time on understanding it to be, to able, to be able to really speak intelligently about it. So, You know, I, I kind of delegate that stuff." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:15", "start": 1275.07, "text": "Gotcha. And in terms of getting a location sponsorship, do you have any tips for Bitcoin meetup organizers out there?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "21:24", "start": 1283.84, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I would say that in terms of finding a location, I, I think that, that you can actually sell a meetup to a coworking space as, as kind of a benefit, mutually beneficial. A lot of coworking spaces wanna host meetups because it gets people in the door, learning about the space, and a lot of these people are technical people, engineers, who will go and have their own startups. So I would say, you know, look for those spaces in your city, It, you know, I think you shouldn't have to, I don't think you should have to like pay to have a meetup. I think the actual, the, you're, you're putting, pulling together a bunch of talented, intelligent people who are, many of whom are probably entrepreneurial, and that's really valuable to many spaces to wanna have those people there. and then kind of, you do need money though to, to, you know, basically pay for pizza, beer, maybe some equipment, and for that, you know, I think, It, there's always money somewhere, and it doesn't require that much. I mean, San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and, and, you know, our budget is, you know, pretty, pretty modest, and so- Finding a company to sponsor it, or maybe even, just having individuals who attend, if you're in a smaller city or town, just chip in, it might be the most feasible thing to do until you can grow it to the point where maybe a company is really interested in supporting it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:51", "start": 1370.66, "text": "Yeah, that's great." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "22:51", "start": 1371.4, "text": "My own company supports the one. Yeah, and, sorry, in, in, San Francisco, the sponsors are Digital Garage and, and my company, River Financial, and also Square Crypto." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:01", "start": 1380.64, "text": "Nice. Yeah. So maybe, meetup organizers out there, if Some kind of Bitcoin company in your city, then you can try and lean on them to maybe help provide the meet up room or to maybe put up some money for the pizzas and beers, and get a shout out during the, you know, the meeting for that. One, I guess, personal experience that I've seen in Sydney is that there'll be, obviously, not everyone is into the development and the technical side of it, right? So there are some people who just sort of come and they're into, you know, silly things like TA and stuff. Stuff like that, but, I'm really hoping to build more of a scene where people actually care more about the technical components of it and, you know, potentially even the economic aspects of it as well. Let's talk a little bit about some of how you, you know, break some of these down. So I'm just looking at the SFBitcoinDevs dot org page and the most recent one, you've got Socratic seventeen reading list, and this is basically the stack of links that you've got, so- Talk us through, what would you normally do when you talk through, say, the news item? So, for example, the ransom attack on the cold card or the Bitcoin mining in North America. What would you sort of mention for, those?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "24:12", "start": 1452.4, "text": "Yeah, so, you know, typically what I'll do is, you know, b-before the meetup, I'll read through the article, get a sense of what the vulnerability was, and, and then kind of reach out to the audience and see, you know, has anyone, is anyone using cold cards or has had experience with this? does anyone have-- You know, sometimes the people in the audience are the ones who maybe even wrote the article. So if it's something like that, I'll just defer directly to them. But for this one specifically, you know" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "24:42", "start": 1482.04, "text": "And in the audience, the discussion kind of centered around the fact that, you know, these types of attacks, you know, are important to think about, but, you know, they're very difficult to completely mitigate because of just kind of the nature of hardware wallets and that they really just don't know that much about kind of the state of the chain and, you know, they don't keep a lot of state around. So, you know, there was a pretty deep technical discussion about that actually." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:07", "start": 1506.96, "text": "Right, yeah. and then you, you sort of might bring up some totally Mining, okay, we've got Stratum v2, and then you'll sort of bring up a little bit of the high level, here's what the, here's what's changing with that, and then maybe you've got an expert in the room who is Very good with Bitcoin mining, and they can speak to that a little bit further, right?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "25:28", "start": 1527.88, "text": "Yeah, exactly. So like, you know, I brought up this last time, I kind of brought up the fact that there seems to be this trend of increasing mining in North America, you know, some of the discussions center around, well, you know, maybe this is just, it's still potentially a rounding error compared to the amount in China, but, you know, it is growing. there was some investor there who had done a lot of, you know, mining or He was pretty bullish on, on, on mining in North America, so there was some pretty, pretty interesting discussion around that. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:57", "start": 1557.46, "text": "And then in terms of statistics, what sort of stuff do you normally bring up?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "26:02", "start": 1562.3, "text": "Yeah, so typically what I look for, is anomalies in the network, and these are kind of some things that we kind of shared between the meetup organizers. So specifically, a lot, we spent a lot of time looking at some of the dashboards that people have built with, with good charts, so like for example, the Bitcoin Optech dashboard that looks at, you know, the, the UTXO set size, you know, were there any big UTXO set consolidations? what about like pay-to-script hash or, or sorry, SegWit adoption are there any, you know, anomalous behavior, you know, behaviors happening in the Bitcoin network? so, you know, if there's ever like, you know, you know, for example, if there were, you know, an increased number of orphan blocks, right? You know, would that be something we discuss? Why is that happening? If there was a spike in, pay to script, sorry, segwit outputs and, you know, native segwit adoption, you know, why is that happening? For example, the next And we might see that, we see a significant increase there, so there might be some interesting discussion around that, things like that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:09", "start": 1628.52, "text": "I guess you're really leveraging just the crowd's knowledge as well, because hopefully at least one person out there has, maybe they've got some insight or they can hypothesize, oh, okay, this new wallet just came online and a lot of people are using that one and it's got bech32 or whatever, and that might be the driver behind more use of native SegWit, for example." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "27:29", "start": 1648.8, "text": "Yeah, absolutely. you know Francisco, a lot of people in the audience have firsthand knowledge of a lot of the events because they, they work for the companies or they have friends who do, who have, you know, made changes that caused, caused these network, network statistic anomalies." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:44", "start": 1664.11, "text": "Yeah. And then next up, you've got new work and research, so can you just give us an overview what you might talk about there?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "27:51", "start": 1671.04, "text": "Yeah, so, So kind of the next thing we go into, once we kind of warmed up our brains a little bit with some news and updates and, and network statistics, is kind of more technical in depth, work that's been done. For example, this could be like some in depth blog posts that people have done. For example, BitMEX did a really good, really interesting experiment recently, testing every major Bitcoin version's initial block download time, and, they ran some numbers around that and, and presented that data. And so we spent some time discussing that and why the numbers were what they were. some core devs were in the audience and could give insights into the spec-specific changes for each Bitcoin release and, in, in the im- the, the implications of each we'll discuss new, new, BIP, new BIPs. So a lot of stuff, basically to the mailing list, new papers. you know, one, a, a, a very, in, in recent months or in the last year, actually, a regular guest, feature in our new work section has been Z-man, who's very famous for his very, in-depth, well-written emails, and he always has a lot of very interesting new ideas, so I'll include a lot of stuff from him in there. and yeah, so basically anything like that, papers, new things, ideas to the mailing list." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:10", "start": 1750.39, "text": "and then you've got Bitcoin PRs, so this is really getting into this very, into the detail. What do you talk about with the, the PRs?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "29:19", "start": 1758.94, "text": "Yeah, so this is my favorite section actually, and it's what I spend the most time kind of digging into, because I think it actually is pretty like novel in the sense that there isn't a lot of, there aren't a lot of other places for people to discover a quick summary of development happening in Bitcoin Core, unless they're following the IRC channel or, or the GitHub repo. But, what I do is I typically go through the GitHub repo and I have, you know, I have some filters that I normally set and, and look through the various pull requests that are to core devs themselves and ask for any suggestions for interesting pull requests to review, and so I'll collect all these and put them in the, in this list, and they range from anything, anything from really meaty, big changes, potentially even like a soft fork, proposal or something like that. To very small things, for example, last month there was a change where, someone changed one keyword in, in Bitcoin Core, change-changing slightly the how a data structure was declared in, in the repository, and that ended up leading to a pretty non-negligible increase in performance for initial block download time, or because, it, it, it significantly reduced the amount of memory that the, That the data structures were, were using. And so, you know, even just like these little things that seem trivial if you look at it, are, are pretty interesting. There's a lot of interesting discussion around it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:48", "start": 1847.82, "text": "Yeah, that's really cool. And then you've obviously got the Lightning stuff as well. So how do you manage that with, you know, there are some meetups that are specifically Lightning, and, you still cover it at some level in the Bitcoin devs meetup, right?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "31:02", "start": 1862.13, "text": "Yeah. So, you know, big shout out to L People requests, he sends me a good chunk of, interesting LND stuff every month to include, and I also like to include Sea Lightning, 'cause I think it's a very well engineered, piece of software, and I'm a big fan of Rusty. I actually listened to your podcast with Rusty recently, and, so I, I really like, you know, in-including this. Also, Lisa, one of the maintainers, of Sea Lightning, has a, has a Twitter account where- She tweets the interesting commits, of, into Sea Lightning, and so I, I like following that and including some of that stuff. Yeah, so there are some Lightning specific meetups, I'd say those meetups are more typically geared towards More project, like a lot of project level kind of discussion, things people have built, whereas our meetup is gets into the weeds of, of a lot of deep, deep protocol stuff, and typically there's a lot of lightning developers at the meetup as well who I mostly lean on to talk about this stuff." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:04", "start": 1924.04, "text": "Yeah, that's really cool. I, yeah, I just, I, I just keep thinking back to my experience, at the-- I've only been to one, right? I've been to the one in Berlin, but it was at this time when, so Jay" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:17", "start": 1936.95, "text": "Basically there were a lot of the Lightning Labs team there and, you know, some C-Lightning team there, and just everyone was there, so it was just crazy to see all these people who could literally speak to it, in their own-- because from their own experience, or they were the person who was, doing that work. So that was really cool. I'd love to see, more of that, in, you know, else-elsewhere around the world. can you tell us a little bit about your experience in trying to build a community over" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:47", "start": 1967.29, "text": "That's where a lot of the early Bitcoin stuff was." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "32:50", "start": 1969.89, "text": "Yeah, well, you know, I would say that, you know, most of the credit for San Francisco Bitcoin devs actually really needs to go to Denice Terry. She's been really organizing and running the, you know, doing the hard part of the, this meetup for years, and has just been, you know, you know, the hero we don't deserve out here, there's-- and so she's kind of done a lot of the groundwork, setting up the legal entity for the, the meetup, handling all organization around it, and that's kind of really what keeps it all running. I kind of, I think, have contributed to the community by bringing this, this BitDev's event along and the BitDev Socratic style event to the meetup, and I think this has attracted a, a regular group That monthly comes to these and really wants to come and discuss ideas. I think before what we had, which was really great, was, you know, these one-off presentations that were sporadic and weren't always, you know, at more of a fixed cadence. And it was, it still attracted a, a good community, but it wasn't something where people could come every month and they knew what, you know, they were gonna get and they knew, that they'd be able to come and discuss a-and really collaborate. So I think- Basically, the, the nice thing about this, the Socratic style has been, it attracts people who kind of wanna come and contribute ideas or hear people talk about ideas. And, you know, like you mentioned, you know, our job is pretty easy because in San Francisco, this is kind of the center of it all, so I don't have to go advertise this meetup really. I don't go and, try to convince people to show up, that, like, we're, we're lucky in that regard. If I was in a smaller town, I think I would have to People involved, maybe reaching out. A lot of, a lot of times the people who find this most interesting are people who aren't engineers who kind of really can follow technical discussion, but just don't know much about Bitcoin, right? And so they'll be a, they're a software engineer, they wanna learn more, and they come, they come to these sort of events to really kind of learn what to even look into, right? And I think that's a big value of these sort of events for people who aren't deep in the weeds of Bitcoin engineering, is they can show up, they You know, you know, potentially even seventy-five percent of what, what's being discussed, but they'll be exposed to kind of what they need to look into, what there even is to know about, and, and to learn about, and I think that's the biggest value for a large fraction of the people who come. I'd say most of the people who show up at these events don't understand everything that's being discussed, and that's totally okay, but they like that, right? And because that means that there's, they're seeing this whole, this, this Which that, that's new to them. And so I think that's a pretty easy sell to a lot of people who, who want to learn. And then the other kind of real valuable part of a meetup like this, especially in somewhere like San Francisco or New York, is seeing the, the people who really do contribute a lot to these protocols share ideas in the event and seeing these ideas being cross-pollinated between people who, you know, who are influential and who are, you know, writing, writing the code we all use day to day. And so So, so yeah, kind of long-winded way of saying, you know, San Francisco is special, but I think, you know, this is-- it's, it's doable to build a fun community in other places." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:16", "start": 2175.63, "text": "Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me, and I'd definitely love to see that. with the topics of discussion and the theme of the meetup, do you-- Did you ever get a bunch of people who just weren't interested to get into the whole technical side of it, and they would-- they just wanted to sort of talk more about other aspects of Bitcoin? Or do they, you-- or is it more like selection bias? You just don't hear about them or hear from them because they just don't turn up?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "36:44", "start": 2204.09, "text": "So I would say that, you know, you know, this is something I've been thinking about a lot actually. You know, there are every now and then people who don't know what they're getting into when they come to this, and They kind of end up wanting to talk about price or something, you know, or more political stuff, and I think what we found is like this event is technical, and we just try to maintain the technical purity of it and You know, in San Francisco, there are plenty of other options, there are plenty of other forums to discuss the higher level stuff, there's, there's more, there's more social events. However, like, like, like you mentioned, the economic stuff, that's where like there actually is really interesting intellectual conversation to be had, but, you know, it's hard to figure out how to- How to, include it in a, in a, in a, in an event that's technical focused, so, you know, it's something that I've been thinking about, and I'm not sure like the right answer. I think that also just depends on the crowd in the community. I think that in, in most other places outside of San Francisco, we aren't gonna have this This, concentration of deep technical people, it might make sense to, you know, expand, expand the list of discussed topics to more accessible things like economics and potentially political things." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:13", "start": 2292.75, "text": "Yeah, I guess so. but I think the other thing that I've personally found even from the Bitcoin City meetup is, over time people do naturally wanna learn more of the technical components of it. It just, I think it, it, it has- has, bended and shifted over the times, right? So in, you know, twenty seventeen and so on with all the, the shitcoin era and trading and so on was a thing, but then now this year, at least speaking from a Sydney meetup perspective, we have slowly but surely been able to get people to more start thinking about the technical components of it, although not at the same level that you guys are covering it, obviously. Yeah. So, do you have any tips then in terms of, for the-- imagine a meetup organizer is listening or they are looking to start a meetup, do you have any tips for them in terms of organizing presentations to sort of mix in with the Socratic seminar style?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "39:12", "start": 2351.57, "text": "Yeah, I mean, you know, it's common, I know they do this a lot in the- New York is, often one of these meetups will have kind of short presentations that a special guest will give. A few months ago, we did this with an engineer who wanted to give a presentation on a bit he was working on, and so, you know, I had him send me some slides over, and he gave a quick, you know, five, ten minute, presentation o-uh, of what he's working on. Now I try to avoid anything longer than five or ten minutes, for, for our meetup, because I think one of the things that a lot of people value is that they don't have to sit through one person talking about the same thing for a long time. But I do think that it's a great way to, add more potential depth to a meetup if you have something at, like, if you have, someone who's been working on some really cool stuff and you think people find them interesting, just preparing them, making sure that they come ready to kind of keep it short and sweet, give them ten, fifteen minutes to, to help fill some time, Especially guests, like if you have someone in town, right, who's visiting, who, who, i-is a core developer or has done really cool work in the space or works at one of these cool Bitcoin companies, that's a great thing, I think, to bring to a meetup because it's like, \"Hey, this person's visiting from, San Francisco or London, and, you know, they're in town, they're gonna talk for fifteen minutes, twenty minutes about something they're working on.\" I think people really love that stuff." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:37", "start": 2436.88, "text": "Yeah, absolutely. So that's something we're trying to do as well. But yeah, def- definitely that's something Bitcoin meetup organizers can look to do. do you-- What's your view of the, at least in San Francisco, how many other Bitcoin meetups are there? Like, y- I presume yours is the more technical one, but I presume there are other ones also." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "40:57", "start": 2457.28, "text": "yeah, there's a-- there are basically two that I know of, ours and there's a Bitcoin social meetup, which is, which meets at a bar, and I actually haven't been in a Time, so I'm, I'm, I'm not exactly sure what it's like, but I assume they, you know, spend time just talking about Bitcoin, maybe, I don't know if they have presentations, but I think it's just more for the general, more, more just general interest, so it's not specifically technical." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:26", "start": 2486.34, "text": "Yeah, yeah. And I think the other thing that I've s-seen and heard of is sometimes people- More experienced Bitcoiners might get frustrated of explaining the same thing to new Bitcoiners over and over, so, sometimes there's a, there's a role there for bifurcation or splitting of that, so maybe you would have Yeah, somebody who's helping beginners and then another area where kind of more experienced Bitcoiners can just chat about whatever. Have you noticed anything like that?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "41:54", "start": 2514.38, "text": "Yeah, I think that the tone that we set at San Francisco Bitcoin Devs is that Beginners are more than welcome, and we encourage beginners to come, but it's not gonna be hand-holding them through it. And if they want something like that, they're better off reaching out individually to people to help find resources to learn the basics, going to, you know, the social meetups, or basically spending more time doing their own, their own reading. I think one thing actually that is lacking in San Francisco that I'd love to figure out, you know, how to do better, unfortunately I don't have the time right now, is to kind of Have these, this sort of middle ground event, right? Teaching people who aren't intimidated, you know, about Bitcoin from, from the, from the ground up and some of the basics. I actually do think there, that's, that is a gap we have in San Francisco. We have the social stuff, we have the advanced technical meetup, but we don't really have that in between like you're talking about. And the brave people who are okay kind of jumping in the deep end head first just show up at ours and, and they're fine, right? but if, you know, it It's intimidating, and I do try to, you know, encourage beginners who are in our meetup and, in, in our feeling intimidated to, you know, ask questions if they have any. but I, I really do think we could do a better job in San Francisco at, Teaching new people about Bitcoin technically." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:18", "start": 2597.84, "text": "Yeah, and I think you're, you're right that, honestly, I think these, these sort of meetups are probably a good way to learn themselves. Like if you just go and ask those questions, that's really a massive learning opportunity, or even you can just listen to the discussion and you can just soak that up. So I think, for listeners out there who might be a bit more intimidated, just definitely do try and go to these meetups, at least you can soak up some knowledge out of them where you might have otherwise- Had to spend a lot of time reading, you can quickly condense some of that down if you can speak to people about it." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "43:51", "start": 2631.08, "text": "Absolutely. I mean, you can read about the basics of how Bitcoin works online, and that's probably actually the fastest way to learn the fundamentals. But what you're, you're gonna struggle to, to learn is how do, how do the people who've been building Bitcoin stuff for a long time think about this? You know, what goes through their thought processes when they're proposing this bit or commenting on this, and why do they think X or Y or Z? And that This. You, you get to hear the people who work on this day in and day out, kind of talking about how they think about it, and I don't think there's anything that is more valuable in understanding the ins and outs of Bitcoin development than that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:29", "start": 2668.9, "text": "That's great. Alright, look, let's, let's change topics now. Let's talk a little bit about your startup, River. So high level, what is it? Why did it get started?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "44:39", "start": 2679.21, "text": "Yeah, so, you know, going back to the beginning of, of our conversation. I had mentioned my dream was to build this financial institution, when I was younger, when I was a senior in college, giving people access to money that, you know, the government didn't control or that, you know, was, Kind of what I would, you know, what I like to call sound money. And I didn't know how I would do that in Bitcoin, I realized was how I could do that. And so basically River is the realization of this company, this idea that I've been wanting to build, for about eight years now, and I've been working towards that goal, and finally able to do it. So, I, I mentioned that, you know, the last job I had was at this investment fund. When I left that, I told them, you know, hey, I really, I really loved working here, I really love you guys, but I just really need to start this company and now is the time to do it. I wanted to build, you know, this Bitcoin financial institution. I thought that there, that a number of companies who've been around in the space for a while, were gonna build what I had wanted to build. And then in twenty seventeen, I kinda realized as these companies expanded across supporting a lot of different assets and what I would call very questionable- Cryptocurrencies, I realized they're not really building what I wanted to build, and there's still an opportunity to build this thing. And so, you know, so I started what used to be called Alto Financial, with my, with my cousin Andrew Benson, my co-founder, in February. And the, the goal, you know, of our company is to build, long term this bit-- this, this financial institution that's built around Bitcoin that we believe is going to be this widely used money and store of value a-around the world and sit there up, alongside or challenge directly fiat currencies, Initially, what we're building is a Bitcoin-only Bitcoin brokerage that is a US dollar on and off-ramp and provides all of the kind of cutting-edge, cutting-edge functionality that, people in the Bitcoin world want. So we launched a few weeks ago, we rebranded to River dot com. And we're up, live, and running. what you can do on River is, connect your bank account, buy or sell Bitcoin, deposit and withdraw to your account on-chain or via the Lightning Network, set up automated recurring buys with discounted fees, and, as we expand over the next few years, we're gonna be building out more and more functionality to look more like a financial institution, in-including things like, you know, institutional accounts, more financial services, potentially around lending, payroll, et cetera. So I think that, you know, the long-term vision for River is kind of this, this place where, you know, you can keep your Bitcoin or you can buy your Bitcoin and get it off, You know, eventually I'd like to be able to offer some sort of pseudo-custodial services for people who run lightning nodes and we can route for them, but they keep their own keys. there's all sorts of, all sorts of ways we could take this, but today we're focused on just building the best Bitcoin brokerage out there in the United States." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:00", "start": 2879.6, "text": "Yeah, that's fantastic. And, tell us a little bit about how, your-- I noticed you saw, you were talking about self-hosting. Tell us a bit about that." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "48:09", "start": 2889.41, "text": "Yeah, so I'm, I mean, I love our technology. So, you know, we, we've spent about eight months building out the tech for this, for this company, and we made a, a few key decisions early on. And one of the big decisions that we made was that we're not gonna put anything important in the cloud. So, we run all of our stuff, our, our, our web application, our database, e-everything critical to our company is hosted, on, on On-prem at, in, in a server cluster that we own. That server cluster sits in a two thousand pound vault that is built for the military. It's called an IPS container actually. It is a ventilated safe, effectively, for, built for, you know, military servers. They often have these on bases. And, so our servers live in that, and we thought the reason that we made that decision was because, you know, it really doesn't make sense for any startup to do that, unless they're a Bitcoin bank and they're, they have, and they need to know 100% their attack surface, you know, and it's inexcusable to Be on shared computers. And so for any other sort of startup, this wouldn't make sense to do, it's a lot of work and it, it, it's a lot of maintenance. But for us, you know, we, we were looking at, if we were in G Cloud or AWS, can we answer this fundamental question? Who has access to this computer? And, if you're in AWS or Google Cloud, you can't answer that question. You can't answer how many people, 'cause Google or AWS wouldn't tell you, right? You just hope that no one inside, has access. And the thing about Bitcoin is you know, for your hot funds, someone just has to steal two hundred and fifty-six bits of information and they have your money. And if our bi- if we were hosting our hot wallet in AWS and our, and our, and our, funds disappeared someday We would have no idea necessarily why, right? It could have been an insider. so we wanted to basically eliminate any risk of an insider at some other company, being a threat to our infrastructure. And on top of just losing keys, there's, there's our user data and privacy, which is another reason that we're, we're self-hosted, is we take that very, very seriously, and we don't want, We want as little of our users' data in someone else's cloud as possible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:38", "start": 3037.63, "text": "Awesome. And, as I was looking through your website, I noticed you have a focus on recurring buys, which is, becoming a new thing, the, DCA style investing. Tell us about your philosophy on that." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "50:51", "start": 3051.33, "text": "Yeah, so, you know, our- Our company is focused on helping long-term Bitcoin investors build wealth. So we wanted-- we're not an institution for the person day trading, trying to short the market and, and, and, and, you know, play derivatives, a-a-and play that game. W-we're, we're, we're interested in attracting the type of person who wants to accumulate Bitcoin over time. And we think that the best way to do that is with a dollar cost average technique, and so effectively a recurring automated buy, completely removing your own emotions, from your investment decision, and just, just kind of set it and forget it. So we, our focus is making it really easy for people to just sign up, press buy once, and make it a recurring buy, and then They'll continue to, you know, accumulate over time, whether it's weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, depending on their own financial situation. And then to encourage that, actually, we, we discount your fees if you have a recurring purchase set up. And then, another feature we're actually working on on top of that, that, I, I hope we can roll out in the next few months here. Is the option to even auto withdraw, after a recurring purchase. So you can imagine the flow for that would be, you can register a hardware wallet with our ser-with our service. we basically get your, get a, get your xPub or generate a fresh xPub on a, on a ledger or trezor if possible, so we, we don't, we can't see your existing coins. And then every recurring purchase, once the order settles, we send that, we send those transactions off to your- own wallet, so you can really set it and forget it and self custody. and we, since we built our infrastructure to be Bitcoin first and Bitcoin only, we actually can do all this really cool stuff because, you know, our own Bitcoin wallet that we built ourselves on the backend is, is modularized in, in the way that we can basically like create all these little sub-wallets for all of our users and, you know, send coins to them easily, keep track of, keep track- track of those xpubs, so, yeah, we have some pretty st-cool stuff going on there. And then there's also the whole lightning aspect to all this as well. So, you know, it'd be cool someday if we could automatically push via lightning to people's, to people's nodes after they purchased." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:13", "start": 3193.43, "text": "Yeah, there's a lot, there's some ideas that just jumped to my mind straight away there. So, I guess, one idea there is that if the customer has to give you their xpubs, or again, that's their privacy, is there any that kind of approach where there's like a one-time setup and then every other address is kind of shared between, say, River and the customer, but then River doesn't have the like xPub of that customer, or maybe they could use like an xPub on a different derivation path or something like that so that, you know, River doesn't have everything." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "53:49", "start": 3228.94, "text": "Exactly. I mean, one, one of the problems with stealth addresses is just like the- The adoption and kind of, the complexity of it and people's-- people aren't necessarily gonna have the hard, hardware wallets that support any of those standards, I think w-with the xPub actually, what we can do is we can create like a sibling xPub, right? So we don't get your-- we have, we have like basically exactly what you said, you know, either a completely separate xPub from any xPub they've used for their other coins or something along the path that still allows us to know, you know, to not learn about any- any of their other coins, right? This is a fresh xPub, or a fresh path that we exclusively use, and none of their other coins go there, and, you know, so their, their privacy wouldn't be impacted. That's the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:36", "start": 3275.69, "text": "goal. Gotcha. And then, yeah, you also mentioned Lightning as well, so that'd be really cool to have Lightning withdrawal. Now, I guess the concern there would be more like managing the channel size and so on, and doing the looping in and out or submarine swapping in and out, and I guess for- Or some customers, it may make sense that they just take their deposits on chain instead of lightning, and also, there is that, key send idea. So what are some of your thoughts around that?" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "55:04", "start": 3304.03, "text": "Yeah, so I think for the foreseeable future, most people will be withdrawing on chain, especially if it's like an automated withdrawal. But we already do support lightning withdrawals, via the vanilla kind of lightning flow. So we already support lightning deposits and withdrawals to your account. And, so basically, you know, what you see with us is you have a Balance on River dot com, and you can add to that balance by buying or depositing Bitcoin on chain or via Lightning, and you can subtract from that balance by withdrawing on chain or withdrawing via Lightning or selling. And but, like as you mentioned, there's a lot of better, like a-as the Lightning protocol evolves speci-specifically, there's a lot of like cooler things we could do. So the key send idea where, you know, the ideal is right now the flow where our user has to- Enter an amount for how much they wanna receive on Lightning, generate an invoice, copy that invoice and send it to someone paying. It's kinda clunky, right? It'd be great if our users could each just get an identifier, a pub key or something like that that they can give to someone and, and that person can just pay them wh-whatever amount that needs to be paid, right? So that's kinda what I see the next iteration, the next kinda stage of our Lightning infrastructure supporting as the protocol matures. I can't wait for that to be, to be usable 'cause I think" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "56:22", "start": 3381.91, "text": "The u-usability of Lightning." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:24", "start": 3383.69, "text": "Right, yeah. So, even here I'm thinking of things like LNURL where the customer can just scan at one time and then their wallet just does it all in the background, or even this idea of maybe, again, I'm not as, familiar with the technical details of it, but you might have some kind of key send idea, and then if, if it fails, and there's like an on-chain fallback address that it sends to for the customer to receive on-chain if they don't have the capacity or there's no route, for" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "56:52", "start": 3411.91, "text": "Yeah, exactly. you know, one of the challenges here will be, you know, because we're a custodial institution, kind of being able to have these identifiers for each user and have them be unique without having to run a node for each user. so there is some work that we need to figure out there. we need to make sure that, you know, we know who a deposit's going to when it comes in if it's kind of a keysend thing. So, there are some things to think through there, but overall, I'm Go. I think there's a lot of opportunity as well with this kind of, like I mentioned, the pseudo-custodial use case where users trust, kind of trust us, right? They trust us to, buy Bitcoin and they trust us to not, you know, they trust us to deliver the Bitcoin to them, but they don't trust us to like hold the Bitcoin for a long time, you know? So for example, you know, Stephan, if you have a, a lightning node and you have a channel open with us you can, you know, bu- buy Bitcoin from us and we just deposit to your node, and then whenever you wanna send a payment, you don't need to worry about channel management yourself, you can just pay through us, if you're okay, you know, you know, with that trust model of like trusting your privacy with us for routing, because we'll be a well-connected node. Now, the nice thing about Bitcoin, and I think what the fundamental kind of value add of Bitcoin to any financial institution is, is like you can always opt out, right? And you can always Lightning and Bitcoin in general, and that's why I think it's the next, you know, it's gonna be the core money of our next monetary system." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:24", "start": 3503.56, "text": "Yeah, right. And so in that example, I might have a channel open with River, but then I might also have other channels open, and I can route through those as well, so I'm not kind of stuck or beholden to one particular channel or, channel partner in that scenario. and also on that topic, I've heard of this idea of trampoline routing, and so then there's like this idea It's not in place now, and I know the Async guys are talking about it with their app Phoenix, where the idea is, right now, you are basically giving off your privacy to, Async when you route that way, but the plan is in future that with trampoline routing, then you can actually make it so that the channel partner doesn't actually know" }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "59:12", "start": 3552.12, "text": "Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's something that I find very interesting. I think, you know, one of the challenges in Lightning is going to be the privacy aspect of it, and there's gonna be an interesting-- a, a, as Lightning grows, i-it's gonna be very interesting to see how institutions like ours You have to, have to handle it from both a regulatory and a privacy perspective. Obviously, one of the biggest differences between Bitcoin, you know, Layer One and, and Lightning is in, in Lightning you kind of have these long lived identities, and like you said, you know, these, these node identities live around and- You know, if you're paying an invoice from, from River, we see this identity you're paying to, right? Trampoline payments might be able to kind of fix some of those privacy leaks, and I'm really excited to see what, what teams like Ascent come up with there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:03", "start": 3603.07, "text": "Alright, look, so we're coming to time, so maybe if you could just let the listeners know, where they can follow you online and where they can find out more." }, { "speaker": "alex_leishman", "time": "01:00:12", "start": 3612.14, "text": "Yeah, sure. So my, my Twitter handle is at Leishman, L E I S H M A N. And you can also learn more about River at River dot com, it's a pretty easy domain to remember. And, yeah, if you have any questions about, if you're interested in starting your own, Bitcoin meetup in your city, you're interested in learning more about, kind of my company, you know, or just, just Bitcoin in general, don't hesitate to reach out, send me a, a DM request or, or, you know, at me on Twitter, you know, I'm, I'm pretty responsive. So, yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:47", "start": 3647.66, "text": "Well, thank you very much for joining me, Alex. Thanks for having me, Stefan. So hopefully you got some useful tips out of that, I know I definitely did in terms of how I'm helping organize some of the meetups around the Bitcoin Sydney scene, but those of you in the rest of the world definitely try and take some tips there, either start attending your local Bitcoin meetup or if you don't have one, start one, and you can slowly use some of these tips to build the scene and build your own knowledge of Bitcoin. So don't be afraid to reach out for help or leverage some of Already existing material from SF Bitcoin devs or New York City Bitcoin devs. Lastly, the show notes, the transcript, the link to subscribe, you can find all that on my website stephanlevera dot com. This is episode one hundred and thirty-six. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }